Widow Confirms Arafat Pre-Planned ‘Al-Aqsa Intifada’ Lori Lowenthal Marcus 12-31-12

In an interview on Dubai Television on December 16, Yassir Arafat's widow, Suha Arafat, confirmed what so many who have imbibed the Arab Palestinian narrative refuse to believe: the "al Aqsa Intifada" was not a spontaneous uprising ignited by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's walk on the Temple Mount on September 28, 2000.

The outbreak of violence that claimed the lives of more than 3000 Arabs and 1000 Israelis, was a calculated decision by Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat.  Arafat responded to U.S. President Clinton's efforts to forge peace between Arabs and Israelis at Camp David with his calculated plan to unleash brutal, organized mass killings and destruction because he viewed a positive response to those efforts  to be a betrayal of the Arab Palestinian cause.

Suha Arafat told the Dubai interviewer:

Yasser Arafat had made a decision to launch the intifada.  Immediately after the failure of the Camp David [negotiations], I met him in Paris upon his return, in July, 2001 [sic]. Camp David has failed, and he said to me: "You should remain in Paris." I asked him why, and he said: Because I am going to start an Intifada. They want me to betray the Palestinian cause.  They want me to give up on our principles, and I will not do so.

The fact that the uprising had nothing to do with Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount was admitted by  Arab Palestinian leadership as early as 2001.  Marwan Bharghouti, the head of the Tanzim Arab Palestinian terrorist group admitted, "whoever thinks that this started as a result of Sharon's despicable visit to Al Aksa [mosque on the Temple Mount] is in error.  It was planned since Arafat's return from Camp David [where he] firmly stood up to Clinton and rejected the U.S. terms."

Despite the admission by many Arab leaders and those with knowledge over the course of more than a dozen years that the 2000 uprising was planned as early as July, 2000 and was not the result of incitement by Ariel Sharon, most major news sources still endorse the blatantly false narrative.  For example, the BBC  provides its audience with this description of how the al-Aqsa Intifada began:

Ariel Sharon, then the leader of Israel's opposition, paid a visit to the site in East Jerusalem known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, and to Jews as Temple Mount, which houses the al-Aqsa mosque - and frustration boiled over into violence.

Not surprisingly, al Jazeera also explains the outbreak of the 2000 Arab Palestinian uprising as resulting from Sharon's visit, as does the Middle East organization, Adalah, "the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel." For some organizations ostensibly dedicated to truth telling and legal rights, a false truth, no matter how many times it has been exposed, no matter how long it has been exposed, and no matter by whom it has been exposed, if it fits the false Arab Palestinian narrative of victimization at the hands of Israel, it will continue to be told.

An Israeli state of mind  Yoram Ettinger  12-28-12 On the eve of the January 22, 2013 Israeli election, the Israeli public demonstrates more realism than its politicians. Israelis highlight security imperatives when responding to reality-driven polls, which pose questions based on the stormy Arab Winter and not on the mirage of the Arab Spring. Increasingly, Israelis recognize that — in the Middle East — bolstered security constitutes a solid base for survival and for the pursuit of peace. They realize that the pursuit of peace, by lowering the threshold of security, could jeopardize survival, as well as the slim chance for peace. Notwithstanding the overwhelmingly dovish Israeli media and academia, most Israelis — Right, Center and Left — have concluded that security-driven peace supersedes peace-driven security. In December 2012, a most thorough and detailed poll was conducted by one of the deans of Israeli pollsters, Mina Tzemach, on behalf of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. The poll demonstrates that Israelis respond to real local and regional developments — more than to wishful thinking — when shaping positions on the peace process, security requirements, land for peace, the two-state-solution and Iran. Such positions are directly impacted by the 20-year track record of the 1993 Oslo Accords: an unprecedented Israeli gesture met by unprecedented Palestinian hate education, terrorism and noncompliance. Israeli opinions are also influenced by the current turbulence, unpredictability, unreliability, treachery and instability on the Arab street. The Israeli state of mind is also shaped by the violent Palestinian response (thousands of missiles launched at Israel) to the 2005 Israeli disengagement from the Gaza Strip — a tormenting, painful concession of uprooting 25 thriving Jewish communities. According to the December Mina Tzemach (Dahaf Polling Institute) poll, most Israelis assume that Palestinians are concerned about the existence — and not the size — of Israel, and therefore are very skeptical about the land-for-peace formula. Most Israelis do not trust Palestinian compliance with agreements, and therefore are dubious about the two-state solution, which they increasingly consider a two-state delusion. For instance, 76% (83% among Israeli Jews) believe that an Israeli retreat to the pre-1967 sliver along the Mediterranean would not satisfy the Palestinians or other Arabs. Only 22% (15% among Israeli Jews) assume that such a concession would produce an end to the conflict. About 74% of Israelis are convinced that strategic depth — a code word for Judea and Samaria — is pertinent to Israel’s national security. Only 21% discount the importance of strategic depth. Fully 66% disapprove (and 29% approve) a withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines in return for a peace accord with the Palestinians and all Arab countries. About 63% are against a withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines with minor modifications. A ratio of 65:33 opposes the repartitioning of Jerusalem in the context of a peace accord; 65:31 reject a withdrawal from the Jordan Valley; 68:28 refuse evacuation of Ariel and western Samaria; 72:22 insist on retaining control over the blocs of Jewish settlements; 73:18 disapprove relinquishing control over the Judea and Samaria mountains that dominate Ben-Gurion International Airport; 67:22 insist that Israel retains control of Highway 443, which connects Jerusalem to the coastal plain via the West Bank. Only 20% of the Israeli public assumes that the recent developments on the Arab street are irrelevant to the Arab/Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Only 21% maintains that these events warrant an acceleration of the peace process. About 52% — compared with 49% in 2005 — consider secure boundaries superior to peace, compared with 36% who view peace as the prerequisite to security. Most Israelis trust only the Israel Defense Forces to protect the country. For example, only 39% assume that Israel can rely on the U.S. military during an emergency. About 68% oppose the stationing of foreign troops — including U.S. troops — in the Jordan Valley. Only 26% would support such a deployment. About 68% do not believe that sanctions constitute an effective option against Iran; 53% presume that the U.S. will not resort to the military option to prevent Iran’s nuclearization; 53% support an Israeli military pre-emption against Iran if the U.S. fails to pre-empt. This most comprehensive Mina Tzemach poll highlights the Israeli public as top heavy on realism and low on wishful-thinking. Most Israelis do not indulge in the New Middle East Delusion, March of Democracy or the Facebook and Youth Revolution; they brace themselves for the Real Middle East and its clear and present threats. It is a rare state of mind among Western democracies, enhancing Israel’s power-projection and Israel’s role as the beachhead of the Free World in the economically and militarily critical Middle East. It is a source of optimism.

HOW IRAN ARMS ITS ALLIES.  SMUGGLERS GALORE  LEE SMITH  12-31-12 An explosion in southern Lebanon last week destroyed what is believed to have been a Hezbollah weapons depot. This latest in a series of mysterious “accidents” in Hezbollah-controlled precincts proved, as one Israeli official wryly remarked, that those who “sleep with rockets and amass large stockpiles of weapons are in a very unsafe place.” With the Party of God’s overland supply route through Syria choked off by the 22-month-long uprising against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and Israel virtually in total control of the maritime route, Hezbollah’s stockpile is being systematically degraded. HAMAS MILITANT WITH A BELGIAN FN F2000 PHOTOS COURTESY OF HAMAS Yet the arsenal of Iran’s other regional proxy force, Hamas, is growing. The Israeli Defense Forces’ campaign against Hamas last month in Gaza targeted Iranian missiles, including the Fajr-5, capable of reaching Tel Aviv and other points north, and destroyed most of them within the first hours of the conflict. But Hamas is already rearming, and it’s not clear that Israel or even Muslim Brotherhood-governed Egypt, which is ostensibly capable of controlling the Sinai tunnel networks through which Hamas receives its arms, can do much about it. Israel’s next war with Hamas—a further confrontation is almost inevitable—may well feature not only Iranian missiles smuggled through Sudan, but NATO-quality small arms and shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles that come by way of Hamas’s most recent weapons supplier, post-Qaddafi Libya. Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense also zeroed in on Hamas commanders, most notably Ahmed al-Jabari, Hamas’s chief of staff, responsible for the group’s military operations. It was Jabari who replaced Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, assassinated in a Dubai hotel room almost three years ago in an operation usually attributed to Israel. In a sense, then, Pillar of Defense began back in January 2010 in that most profligate of the United Arab Emirates—which is also a veritable weapons bazaar. “It’s the Casablanca of the Middle East, with all sorts of shady characters, money laundering, and arms deals,” says Michael Ross, a former Mossad operations officer. “With the Mabhouh assassination, the UAE authorities had all this video feed of what were allegedly Mossad operatives moving in and out of Dubai, but what they didn’t show was footage of Mabhouh meeting with a banker, then with his contact from the IRGC [Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps].” According to Ross, Mabhouh’s briefcase was a treasure trove of information detailing what items Hamas procured from the Iranians and the logistics of getting them to Gaza. Arms smuggling was a problem in Gaza long before Hamas took control, says Major (Res.) Aviv Oreg, formerly in charge of the al Qaeda and global jihad desk in Israel’s military intelligence service and now head of a private consulting firm specializing in terrorism, CeifiT. “In the past, there was a maritime route via Syria or Lebanon, and when the smugglers approached the location they’d put the weapons in large flotation devices with the hope that the current would take it ashore,” says Oreg. “Sometimes it got tangled up in fishermen’s nets.” When the Israeli Navy interdicted the Karine A freighter in 2002 and stopped a large cache of Iranian-made weapons from reaching Gaza, it not only turned George W. Bush against Yasser Arafat for good, it also signaled that Israel had closed Iran’s maritime route to Gaza once and for all. And yet as Israel’s 2005 disengagement from Gaza cleared the way for Hamas’s 2007 takeover, the outfit sought more sophisticated weapons, and Iran’s support. The question for Tehran was how to get arms to their Palestinian clients. “The ships usually start in the port of Bandar Abbas,” says Oreg. “They come through the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea, around the Arabian Peninsula, and crossing through the Bab el-Mandeb strait, docking in Port Sudan.” Occasionally the Iranians will dock in Eritrea, “just to mix things up,” but their preferred point of entry is Sudan. Sudan is critical, agrees Michael Ross. “This is where the parts for Iranian weapons are assembled. The guys in Gaza aren’t too swift in putting together complicated systems like the Fajr-5. Some assembly may be required when it hits Gaza, but the more complicated, high-tech aspects of the weapons systems are assembled in Sudan by Iranians, who have a large presence in Khartoum, at places like the al-Yarmouk factory.” In October, an operation widely credited to Israel destroyed this key Iranian weapons depot. Other attacks on Sudanese soil attributed to Israel, such as the spring 2009 series of strikes on weapons convoys, have left some wondering what the government in Khartoum has to gain from painting a big target on its head for the IDF. Money is part of it, says Matthew Levitt, director of the Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who points to extensive economic cooperation between Iran and Sudan. “But there are also ideological reasons. These are radical Islamists, they’ve been angry at the world since their president, Omar al-Bashir, was indicted for war crimes, and they don’t like Israel.” Even if it were possible to convince Khartoum to sever ties with Tehran, says Oreg, “the Iranians would find a replacement without too much difficulty, Eritrea or Somalia, both places where the central government is incapable of extending control over its territory.” In any case, the real problem is Egypt. Sudanese smugglers, mostly from the Rashaida tribe, transport the weapons from Port Sudan in trucks across the Nubian Desert to the Egyptian border, all the way through Egypt’s Eastern Desert along the Red Sea, and through the Suez Canal deep into the Sinai Peninsula. “The easiest way to cut off Hamas’s weapons supply,” says Ross, “would be to shut down the shipments coming out of Sudan, at the source, rather than in Sinai. The routes are limited, and this could easily be accomplished if the Egyptian military made an effort. But the army has always been the problem. While Mubarak was president, it was the intelligence service under Omar Suleiman that stopped shipments, kept radical elements at bay, and cooperated very closely with Israel. The military looks the other way and just doesn’t care.” In fact, since the August jihadist attack in the Sinai that killed 16 Egyptian border guards, the army has been more vigilant, recognizing that its own security, and not merely Israel’s, is at stake. The proliferation of foreign fighters in the Sinai, some of them aligned with Egypt’s Salafist movement, moreover, poses a big political risk for Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi. Judging by his actions during Pillar of Defense, Morsi believes that keeping the peace with Israel is in the national interest. That still leaves plenty of room for him to be outflanked on his right by the Salafists and armed fighters whose prestige rests precisely on the fact that they are fighting Israel. The problem, then, is that if Morsi closes the tunnels, affecting both Hamas and the Sinai jihadists, the latter will turn on him; if he doesn’t, the jihadists will eventually come for him anyway. In any case, he has an excuse for the United States and Israel ready at hand: Practically speaking, it’s almost impossible to shut down the entire network of tunnels between Sinai and Gaza—and for that, he can lay some of the blame at Mubarak’s feet. “The nomadic tribes in the Sinai were neglected by the government for years,” says Oreg. “There are no roads, no employment, and their main source of income became smuggling—not only weapons into Gaza, but routes into Israel also, smuggling drugs and women.” The Tarabin tribe, he explains, is the most dominant—and the wealthiest. “In Sinai, the biggest and most expensive houses belong to smugglers. For one AK-47, a smuggler gets $1,000.” Besides the profit motive for smuggling, there are also geographical issues that make it difficult to close the industry. “With the high mountains in the Sinai,” says Oreg, “it’s easy for the smugglers to move around, and not even the Egyptian Army can do much about it.” The Gaza side of the border is even more economically dependent on the tunnel networks that, since Hamas took over, have become highly regulated. “After the blockade of Gaza,” says Oreg, “everything went through tunnels. All of Gaza’s international trade is conducted through the tunnels, thousands of them. Hamas has basically institutionalized the tunnel industry, requiring registration for tunnels and imposing taxes on them. You can make up to $50,000 a month on a tunnel.” Not surprisingly, Libyan entrepreneurs now want a piece of the action. The supply line, according to Oreg, is the same—via Sudan. “But eventually,” says Oreg, “they will likely build smuggling networks through the Libyan desert into Egypt.” What’s different, says Ross, is the materiel. “For instance,  they’ve got FN F2000s, a Belgian-manufactured military assault rifle. The Europeans, in their infinite wisdom, treated Qaddafi like just another client. And so after Qaddafi, people found warehouses full of munitions, and if you’re sitting on a stockpile, it’s not too tough to make contacts with middlemen and facilitators. What a wild west that’s become.”  Israeli officials might be worried about the Sinai turning into an Afghanistan on their border, but with Hamas, they’re looking at a garrison equipped with Iranian missiles and European small arms. “We saw how much Hamas had at its disposal with Operation Pillar of Defense,” notes Ross. “There was no ground incursion this time around, but you’d have seen them breaking out all sorts of stuff, like NATO-quality small arms. We’ve come a long way from the First Intifada and 8-year-olds throwing rocks.” Lee Smith is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard

• Iran’s Thin Man Gun-type,Plutonium, Nuclear Dirty-Bomb
• Mark Langfan 12-25-12

The gun-type plutonium bomb mechanism is a small, cylindrical, and very physically robust technology; the manners of delivery of such a nuclear device are infinite. Iran has the technology.

On December 5th, 2012, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published an article entitled “From Bushehr to the Bomb.”  The blockbuster WSJ article reported that Iran had removed, from its supposedly “proliferation-proof” Russian-built Bushehr Reactor in the Northern Persian Gulf, up to “220 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium.”

And, the WSJ article further relates that “experts tell us that the rapid extraction of weapons-useable plutonium from spent rods is a straightforward process that can be performed in a fairly small (and easily secreted) space.”  And, “as many as 24 Nagasaki-type bombs could be produced with 220 pounds of plutonium.”

However, the real, immediate danger of the 220 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium in Iran’s hands is not that they would build a technologically-complicated “Nagasaki” “Fat Man” implosion nuclear bomb, but that they could build a technological-no-brainer “Thin Man” gun-type nuclear “dirty” bomb.

Given Iran’s unexpected and unmonitored Bushehr plutonium diversion, and Assad’s imminent fall, it is vital that the public and the decision-makers clearly understand the difference between the two types of plutonium nuclear bombs.

Firstly, a gun-type plutonium nuclear bomb is not only feasible, it’s an established fact.  The United States Department of Defense Defense Treaty Inspection Readiness Program currently states on its website:

“It is impossible to achieve a large nuclear explosion by using plutonium in a gun-type device. Nonetheless, a plutonium gun-type bomb could release as much energy as a few tons of TNT, which could conceivably cause many casualties. Moreover, this kind of bomb would release large amounts of plutonium and other radioactive materials, thereby making it a potent radiation dispersal device, or "dirty bomb."”

Additionally, the United Nations recently translated a book entitled "Nuclear Weapon Design" as follows:

“Such an assembly [plutonium gun-type] designed by terrorists using reactor-grade plutonium would have an expected yield of a few times the fizzle yield, amounting to 1 kiloton or more and having catastrophic consequences.  A mere fizzle yield would still be a very damaging explosion, with effects of blast, heat, and prompt radiation extending out to a radius of at least one-third of a mile.”
 

How did this type of nuclear weapon come about?  Is it new?

During the Manhattan Project in the early 1940’s, the nuclear scientists focused on two elements as suitable for nuclear bombs: uranium and plutonium.  Each has advantages and disadvantages.

Uranium was hard to enrich in quantities necessary to build a bomb.  But, the actual nuclear bomb technology was a simple linear gun-type mechanism, code-named “Little Boy,” where a uranium “bullet” was fired down a cylindrical “gun barrel” into a uranium slug, and “bang.”  Hiroshima,was a 16 kiloton TNT-equivalent explosion. (This means 16 thousand tons of a conventional TNT explosion.)  US scientists were so confident in the "Little Boy" gun-type design that they, unbelievably, didn’t even test the uranium bomb before the US dropped it on Hiroshima.

On the other hand, plutonium (Pu) was very easy to make in large quantities.  But, early on, the Manhattan Project scientists concluded that given plutonium’s particular nuclear properties of “pre-detonation,” they couldn’t use plutonium in the uranium analog cylindrical, simple gun-type bomb which they code-named “Thin Man” (named after the Dashiell Hammett detective character whose dog was named Asta).

Consequently, the nuclear scientists were forced to devise a totally different new bomb structure with a fantastically complicated and “fat” spherical shaped necklace of explosives, code-named “Fat Man” (named after another Hammett “Maltese Falcon” character played by Sidney Greenstreet, who was literally "fat.").  The spherically placed explosives had to explode simultaneously - perfectly - and implode the plutonium core inwards, and then, “bang.”  Nagasaki,was  a 21 kiloton TNT explosion.  US scientists weren’t so sure of the Fat Man design, so they first tested it at Alamogordo, New Mexico, code-named “Trinity."

Plutonium’s particular nuclear property of “pre-detonation”, requiring a special Fat Man device to effectively explode the plutonium to a high-yield of TNT, is the key to how the Thin Man gun-type plutonium device is a modern-day nuclear “dirty bomb.”

Nuclear-reactor plutonium, like that of Bushehr, is generally composed of two isotopes Pu-239 and Pu-240 where Pu-240 has one more neutron in its nucleus than Pu-239.  Pu-240 is a touch more unstable than its cousin Pu-239 isotope, and chain-reacts faster than Pu-239.  So, when plutonium containing both Pu-240 and Pu-239 isotopes is exploded in a gun-type device, the pace of the Pu-240 nuclear reaction is faster than the Pu-239 reaction, and literally “pre-detonates” and explodes out the Pu-239 atoms away from each other before the Pu-239 can properly chain-react.

Consequently, you get a low-yield compared to a TNT explosion, and a wide dispersion of the highly radioactive and deadly Pu-239 atoms, and other nuclear fission residue.  The plutonium gun-type reaction is called a “fizzle” when there is only a small Pu-240 nuclear reaction with a very highly radioactive Pu-239 fallout dispersion.  Unfortunately, Pu-239, while extremely radioactively poisonous, is very elementally stable, and has a half-life of 24,100 years.

With the “help” of the nuclear power industry, nuclear proliferation efforts have mostly focused on uranium proliferation.  This approach was based on the dubious theory that since you “need” an extremely complex spherical technology to build a “high yield” bomb out of plutonium, “one need only worry about uranium bombs.”  The nuclear proliferation-minders seem to have generally ignored the catastrophic possibility of a desperate, rogue nation building a gun-type plutonium device which could be used in numerous, monstrously evil ways.

With the Russian-built Iranian Bushehr nuclear reactor, Putin thought he was smarter than Joseph Stalin, who from August 1939 to June 1941 (as part of the economic protocol to the 23 August 1939 Hitler/Stalin “Non-aggression” Pact) sold Hitler the crude oil fuel he needed for his Nazi war machine.  I.G. Farben then refined the crude to power the Nazi tanks and planes that then proceeded to annihilate the Soviet Union in June 1941 with Stalin’s “crude” oil (having earlier obliterated London).

Like Stalin, Putin originally didn't realize that by supplying nuclear fuel to Bushehr, he would be arming Iran with 24 plutonium dirty "fizzler" nukes that could make Hitler's Barbarossa look like a game of tiddlywinks.

Putin asked his Russian scientists (who were used to building 160 kilo-ton hydrogen fusion nuclear bombs, and who would have been shot dead by Putin's buddies pushing the Iranian nuke deal), if Bushehr plutonium reactor-grade plutonium was dangerous.  Well, compared to a 160 kiloton hydrogen fusion bomb, a one kiloton plutonium gun-type device isn't really a big deal.

Anyway, Putin forgot to ask those same scientists whether Iran, with readily available off-the-shelf technology, could build a crude gun-type bomb, using only 8-kilograms of Bushehr reactor-grade plutonium, that was capable of achieving a one-kiloton nuclear "fizzle" event which could irradiate Moscow for 62,642.6 years. (Pause.)

How do you translate "Oy gevalt" into Russian?  Putin will go down in history as making Stalin look like a genius.  That is, if there's a 'history' after Iran "fizzles" Moscow.

Given that the gun-type plutonium bomb mechanism is a small, cylindrical, and very physically robust technology, the manners of delivery of such a nuclear device are infinite.

Imagine use against a US aircraft carrier battle group massing in battle formation in the Arabian Sea - via an Iranian kamikaze mini-submarine with about a minimum of 1/3 mile to a full mile guaranteed kill radius (Think, nuclear-sea-mine US carrier group killer!).

Or, a secreted weapon could be loaded onto a cargo ship, and the device could be exploded in New York harbor close to the new World Trade Center.

Or perhaps, an Iranian-supplied Chechen Black Widow armed with one of these 1-kiloton weapons could light up the Kremlin brighter than Chernobyl.

It is also important to draw the difference between a gun-type plutonium nuclear “dirty” bomb, and the technologically trivial conventional radiological “dirty” bomb.

In the plutonium gun-type bomb, there is an actual small nuclear Pu-240 fission event that disperses both the radioactive Pu-239, and the radioactive nuclear fission residue of the highly fissile Pu-240 (Note: highly radioactive fission residue is the components left after the Pu-240 nucleus has broken up in a nuclear event).

In a conventional “dirty” bomb, conventional explosives, packed with radiological materials. explode, dispersing the radiological materials without any fissile product residue because there is no actual “nuclear” fission event.

The bottom line is that with Syrian President Assad on a fast trajectory to political “implosion,” Iran has become desperate to acquire “gun-type” nuclear capability as fast as possible.

Diverting the Bushehr plutonium to build 24 small easily transportable, widely dispersed, hidden, gun-type plutonium nuclear “dirty” bombs may be Iran’s shortest, surest, and ugliest ticket to Nuclear Bomb capability, and the actualization of their belief in the re-emergence of the 12th and final Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi.

Israeli and Palestinian visions of a two-state solution collide when it comes to construction in the E1 corridor.  Analysis: In the eye of the beholder

TOVAH LAZAROFF 12-24-12

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“Consensus” is a popular word in the Ma’aleh Adumim settlement.

It describes West Bank settlement blocs that, like the city of 36,000 people, “everyone knows” will one day be included within the nation’s final borders.

Perched on a hilltop overlooking Route 1 as it stretches toward the Dead Sea, Ma’aleh Adumim has large apartment buildings, wide paved streets, a mall with brand-name chain stores and an industrial park.

With its sandy colored buildings, red rooftops and palm trees, it looks like many other mid-size Israeli cities.

If anything, residents – who are as likely to wear a sleeveless top as they are to don a kippa – prefer to think of themselves as living in an outlying neighborhood of Jerusalem.

Since the city was created in 1975, every prime minister has promised Ma’aleh Adumim residents their city’s future is as secure as the nation’s capital, which they help safeguard.

So it seems to its residents almost as if an accident of politics and geography had erroneously confused their city with a settlement.

Every Israeli map of a future two-state solution – including Camp David in 2000, Taba in 2001 and Annapolis in 2008 – has included the built-up area of Ma’aleh Adumim and a large 12,000- dunam tract of land within the city’s municipal boundaries, commonly known as E1. The municipality calls it Mevaseret Adumim.

True, the international community has pressured Israel not to develop E1 for years, ever since plans were first drawn up for 3,500 homes there in 1994 during the tenure of former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Still, Israelis have been assuaged by reports of tacit American and Palestinian understandings that Ma’aleh Adumim and E1 would be within Israel’s final borders.

So, the deluge of harsh international condemnation that followed Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s decision to advance plans to develop E1 has surprised residents of the city, as well as many centrist and right-wing Israelis.

Angry Palestinians have stated that such construction was a “red line,” because without E1, a Palestinian state within the context of a two-state solution would not possible.

Left-wing activist Daniel Seidemann has dramatically called it “the fatal heart attack of the two-state solution.”

The EU, in a statement issued to the UN Security Council on Wednesday, said such a move would risk cutting off east Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank.

Israelis who believe that Palestinians can have territorial integrity from Ramallah to Jericho, rather than from Jerusalem, have been puzzled by the dramatic phrasing and what they consider to be inaccurate statements on the part of those opposing construction in E1.

Netanyahu has dismissed claims regarding the negative impact of Israeli development on E1 as untrue.

“Unfortunately, if you repeat a falsehood endlessly, it assumes the cache of truth,” he told the foreign press during a Hanukka celebration earlier this month.

The issue is less a geographical one, because anyone can open a map or drive through the area to observe the reality.

Rather, the division lies much deeper and gets at the heart of the stalled negotiations.

The Palestinians want a two-state solution based on the pre-1967 lines. That line is implied, even when they do not specifically state it.

They might agree to minor territorial adjustments with land swaps for some of the settlement blocs. But according to the Palestinians, such changes to the pre-1967 lines do not include leaving Israeli settlements such as Ma’aleh Adumim in the heart of territory they consider theirs.

In the informal Geneva Initiative of 2001, Palestinians did agree that Ma’aleh Adumim could remain as a small island, connected by an artery to Jerusalem. But this did not include E1.

Palestinian officials have been quick to point out that the Geneva Initiative was not an official document and had never been accepted as such.

When Palestinians say that Israeli actions endanger a two-state solution, they mean, again, along the pre- 1967 lines.

When Palestinians speak of contiguous territory, they are not satisfied with a transportation route, linking two areas, even if it is a quick and efficient one, absent any checkpoints or barriers.

They dismiss Israeli plans, now underway, to build a 4- km. bypass road running between E1 and Jerusalem that will allow for straight, speedy travel from Ramallah to Bethlehem.

What Palestinians want is physically contiguous territory beyond that of a transportation corridor, on which they can build and develop their communities.

In contrast, when Israelis speak of two states, few believe that the exact pre- 1967 lines will be the ones dividing them. Netanyahu has refused to even state that a two-state solution would be based on those lines.

Israelis point to past statements by the US, including in documents, saying that they have a right to retain the settlement blocs, even if those areas have never been defined.

Netanyahu, like most Israelis, includes Ma’aleh Adumim in his definition of a settlement bloc.

He has also insisted that in any future agreement, a united Jerusalem will remain under Israeli sovereignty.

Most Israeli construction of Jewish homes in east Jerusalem as well as in Ma’aleh Adumim, both in the past and now, is designed to ensure that the capital remains in Israel’s hands.

But Ma’aleh Adumim is so ingrained in the Israeli concept of a two-state solution, that even those who are willing to cede Israeli-Arab neighborhoods in east Jerusalem to the Palestinians often believe that in such a solution, Israel will retain control of the city along with other settlement blocs.

Given the geographical reality, most Israelis, when they think about it, understand that Palestinian enclaves, and even maybe some Israeli ones, would have to be linked only by a transportation route.

Israeli Ambassador to the UN Ron Prosor was quick to point out last week that if the Palestinians deserved contiguity in a two-state solution, then so did Israelis.

Speaking to reporters at the UN headquarters in New York, he held up a map showing that the only way to give Palestinians contiguous territory between the West Bank and Gaza, was to divide Israel in two, thereby depriving it of the very thing the Palestinians sought.

Palestinian maps from Taba and Annapolis claim all the land over the pre-1967 lines running from east Jerusalem down to the Dead Sea, thereby eliminating all Israeli settlement in that area, including Ma’aleh Adumim.

The Palestinian vision of the two-state solution based on the pre-1967 lines involves developing the area from the Palestinian neighborhoods of east Jerusalem down to Jericho and beyond to the Dead Sea.

Similarly, the Palestinians want to contiguously develop the area from Ramallah around that end of Jerusalem, enveloping Jericho and heading in the direction of Bethlehem.

Even without E1, when one looks at a map of Jerusalem down to the Dead Sea, at present, one can see that unless the Palestinians change their concept or the Israelis agree to evacuate built-up Jewish areas, it is already impossible to carry out that Palestinian vision without evacuating Israelis and/or changing the landscape of the developed areas.

The map is almost a checkerboard of Israeli and Palestinian communities.

There is west Jerusalem, then east Jerusalem with its Israeli and Palestinian neighborhoods, then Palestinian neighborhoods outside of the city, then Ma’aleh Adumim, and the unbuilt area of E1, followed by more settlements, and then the Palestinian city of Jericho.

Physically, the area is cut in half by a highway, Route 1, which travelers to the Dead Sea know well.

Outside Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries, Palestinians and Israelis use Route 1 to connect to their communities, or other regions in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

There is also the issue of the security barrier, which, like the road, physically divides Palestinian neighborhoods in east Jerusalem from those located just outside the municipal boundaries.

At present, it would be impossible to walk in a direct line because the area is so cluttered by Palestinian and Israeli enclaves.

But Israelis and Palestinians can traverse it through a system of roads that are not always so direct.

The most obvious Palestinian enclaves are divided into four parts, two Israeli-Arab neighborhoods inside Jerusalem’s municipal lines and another two outside, making for an almost foursquare pattern.

In the first enclave inside Jerusalem are Israeli-Arab neighborhoods such Silwan, Ras el-Amud, Wadi Joz and Ash Shyyah.

In the second enclave outside of Jerusalem lie the Palestinian areas of Abu Dis and Eizariya. Both of them are on one side of Route 1, followed immediately by Ma’aleh Adumim and a small section of E1.

In the third enclave, on the other side of the road, inside Jerusalem, next to French Hill and Mount Scopus, is the Palestinian neighborhood of Isawiya, which also extends outside the city limits.

After that, in almost a small bubble between the wall, Route 1 and E1, is the Palestinian area of Az Za-Ayem.

When the Palestinians speak of east Jerusalem as their capital, they imagine developing those enclaves, and expanding them by building in a straight line through E1, including areas beyond it, which now host settlements such as Kfar Adumim, and into Jericho.

For Palestinians to enact that vision and to leave Ma’aleh Adumim where it is, would make the Jewish city a small island in a Palestinian state.

Developing E1 would make such a Palestinian development line impossible, and have the opposite effect.

It would transform the Israeli-Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem and the Palestinian areas outside it into a bubble within the larger Israeli communities.

When Israelis talk of keeping Ma’aleh Adumim with E1 and joining it with Jerusalem, they envision both areas as linking directly with the capital in a plan that would keep those Israeli-Arab neighborhoods as part of Jerusalem.

Palestinian development, they argue, can happen on either side of the enclave, and can be attached by a transportation system that would be faster than what exists now.

But Palestinians argue that the best tract of land for development is E1, which is held by the Israelis.

When the Palestinians turned to the UN last month and asked that it upgrade their status, it was part of their strategy to force the Israelis to the pre-1967 lines.

When Netanyahu announces building in E1, and other key areas in and outside of Jerusalem, it is part of his strategy to ensure that Israel holds onto territory over those lines, which it considers vital.

How to become an authentic Jewish Republic

Prof Paul Eidelberg makes the point that Israel needs A Distinctively Judaic National Goal. Then he lays out what Israel should do to achieve it.

He writes “Israel needs an entirely new system of governance, one that will:”

1. (1) Enact a law that affirms Israel’s raison d’être as a Jewish Republic, one that rejects multicultural moral relativism.
   (2) Enact, as a legal qualification for voting in Israeli elections, an oath of loyalty to Israel as a Jewish Republic.
   
   (3) Enforce the 1952 Citizenship Law which empowers the Minister of Interior “to revoke the citizenship of any Israel national that commits an act of disloyalty to the State.” (The term “act” should be defined in such a way as to safeguard freedom of speech and press.)
   (4) Enforce Basic Law: The Knesset, which prohibits any party that rejects Israel as a Jewish Republic.
   (5) Consistent with the example of Japan, which restricts citizenship to children born of Japanese parents, amend the “grandfather clause” of the Law of Return to curtail the flow of immigrants into Israel whose parents are not Jewish if they have not converted. (The money saved should be used to strengthen the bond between Jewish and non-Jewish citizens already in Israel.)
   (6) Require all public-supported schools, including those attended by non–Jews, to include Jewish studies in their curricula.
   (7) Revise the parliamentary electoral laws to make Members of the Knesset individually accountable to the voters in geographic/constituency elections, and, in the process, replace the inept and corrupting system of multiparty cabinet government with a unitary Executive or Presidential system accompanied by candidate vetting including political experience, education, military service, and financial holdings.
   (8) Change Basic Law: The Judiciary, by empowering the President, advised by a council learned in Jewish and secular law, to nominate Supreme Court judges, subject to confirmation by the Knesset in open public inquiry.
   (9) Require the Supreme Court to abide by the Foundations of Law Act 1981, which was intended by the Knesset to make Jewish law “first among equals” vis-à-vis the various systems of jurisprudence used by the court. 

The effect of which will advance our national goal.

1. If these measures are carried out, the people of Israel would actually see their country making yearly progress toward the goal of an authentic Jewish Republic. A Constitution would follow as the culmination of a Judaic National Goal.
   Notice that the achievement of this goal, unlike the pursuit of peace, does not depend on the vainly sought benevolence of other nations. In her quest for peace, Israel has been pursuing a mirage. Her political and intellectual leaders do not understand that it is not within the power of any nation or group of nations to give Israel peace. Israel must take its future into her own hands.
   In the final analysis, to achieve genuine and abiding peace, Israel will have to recognize the purpose for which it was created some 3,300 years ago, and that is to sanctify the Name of the Creator. That is precisely what the Hebraic Republic of antiquity did, and that is why Christian Hebraists deemed the laws and institutions of this Republic as superior even to those recommended by Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero with whom these learned Hebraists were quite familiar. They extolled Jewish Exceptionalism.

Paul Eidelberg heads the Israel-America Renaissance Institute. He is a recognized expert on the American constitution.

Antisemitism and Jewish Survival

Foundations of Holocaust: American Insecurity/ American Zionism    David Turner    12-17-12

About This Blog

David Turner was the first director of the organization Justice for the Pollards; he created Jews United to Defend the Auschwitz Cemetery (JUDAC) in 1988; and served in the past as the JNF Regional Director.

Foundations of Holocaust: American Insecurity/ American Zionism

“When Zionism first appeared on the American scene, the Jewish establishment… [viewed it] an offence to Americanism… [an] obstacle to Jewish adjustment in [the Diaspora].”

Introduction: The Anti-defamation League (ADL) definition of Zionism, generally accepted in both the Diaspora and Israel since the Holocaust is, 

“the Jewish national movement of rebirth and renewal in the land of Israel… [that] emerged in the late 19th century in response to the violent persecution of Jews in Eastern Europe, anti-Semitism in Western Europe.” 

And while Pinsker and Herzl would have accepted this as a part of Zionism’s mission, they would never have accepted the implication that the danger applies only to the European subcontinent, that security exists, or is even possible, in other parts of the Diaspora. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, while addressing Polish Jews in 1937 actually issued the universal warning, 

“Eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will surely eliminate you!”  

But America was not Russia, and pogroms were not an Amer

ican tradition. By European standards American Jews could legitimately say that, although antisemitism was present, it was genteel, not a physical threat. Consoled by that fact they concluded America “exceptional.” Zionism challenged that consolation, was a threat to their need for exceptionality:

“When Zionism first appeared on the American scene, the Jewish establishment reacted like their liberal co-religionists in western Europe. It was… a movement arresting the march of progress and tolerance… an offence to Americanism… [an] obstacle to Jewish adjustment in a democratic environment. As in Germany feelings ran high…” (Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism, pps. 402-3). 

Supporters of Zionism mostly consisted of recent immigrants from Eastern Europe and Russia. They tended to speak Yiddish, kept Kosher and Shabbos. Jewish National Fund pushkas were commonplace on the kitchen table (I recall the blue JNF pushka from my own childhood).Opponents of Zionism for the most past came from the Orthodox and Reform communities. An example that appears describes a young Zionist with a pushka approaching an elderly Jew: “If [God] wanted us to have Zion again,[berated the elder Jew] He would restore it again without the help of the so-called Zionists.” But organized political opposition was centered among the wealthier and more assimilated:  

“Opposition to a Jewish homeland in what was then Palestine came from many corners. One source was the highly assimilated American Jews, mostly from German-Jewish backgrounds, associated with the Reform movement and the American Jewish Committee. These individuals believed that if American Jews called openly for a homeland in Palestine, they would be accused of divided loyalty or, even worse, disloyalty to the United States. American Jewry, they argued, had found its promised land in the United States. They rallied to the cry, “America is our Zion.”” 

American Jewish opposition to Zionism only began to soften following the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The American Jewish Committee approved of Palestine, 

“for only a part of the Jewish people, [but not American Jewry who] owed unqualified allegiance to their country… Reform rabbis passed [a] resolution to the effect that Israel was not a nation, Palestine not the homeland of the Jewish people – the whole world was its home.” 

Zionist recognition that all Jews everywhere were at risk, that Jews constitute a “nation-apart,” was appalling to American Jewish leaders who considered the idea “an offence to Americanism.” To find acceptance among American Jewry Zionism had to redefine itself from “ingathering of the exiles [all Jews],” to “refuge” for less fortunate Jews “over there,” allowing American Jewry to retain its tenuous “exceptionality.”  

I will address the issue of “America-the-exceptional” in more detail in the future. For present purposes, a brief introduction to the subject will do. 

Centuries of prejudice, persecution and expulsion have created a deep-rooted sense of insecurity and impermanence to Jews living in the Diaspora. This was represented by the character Tevye in the play, Fiddler on the Roof. Why, Tevye asked the shtetl rabbi, do we always wear our hats (kippa)? Because, the rabbi responded, we never know when we’ll have to leave quickly. American “exceptionality” is how we modern Jews reassure ourselves that, despite 2000 years evidence to the contrary, we have finally found acceptance and a secure home in the Diaspora. Zionism as the “national liberation movement of the Jewish people” threatens that identity, our faith in exceptionality. American Jewry has to believe that the Diaspora, our “Diaspora,” is recognized as an alternative homeland to Israel. Zionism-as-refuge, born of 19th century pogrom is, even following the Holocaust, Zionism-as-national-renewal, is refuge for “them,” not for “us.” 

But not even “American exceptionality” was sufficient to reassure in the years before, during and after Auschwitz. The reason is that Antisemitism was as intense in the United States as in Europe, in Germany. According to historian Walter Laquer the arguments by American opponents of Zionism, “were identical with those formulated by the German liberals forty years earlier,” (p. 404) which, for some, continued even during the years of the Holocaust. In 1943, for example, the American Council for Judaism (ACJ announced, “we oppose the effort to establish a national Jewish state in Palestine or anywhere [as] defeatism” (p. 404). This was the same logic used by German Jewish leaders, that leaving would confirm Nazi claims that Jews were “foreigners.” Even Martin Buber maintained that to leave Germany in the wake of Hitler’s 1932 victory would constitute “defeatism” on the part of German Jewry. In the United States, the ACJ objected to anything suggesting Jews were not “at home” in the Diaspora, that Jews were a “nation.” ACJ opposition would remain throughout the Holocaust years and after.  

  

A recruitment poster for the Zionist Organization of America Manhattan branch. Date unknown, but circa 1900-1947. (Wikipedia)

The Provisional Executive Committee for Zionist Affairs was created in 1913, one year after a young Jew was arrested for the murder of a Christian girl in Atlanta. One task that was before it was to provide an identity for Zionism acceptable to American “exceptionality.” Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis was named leader and inherited also leadership of American Zionism. He would soon become leader also of of the World Zionist Organization as Chaim Weizmann, head of WZO, in the midst of a European war pitting Jew against Jew in opposing armies decided to relocate movement headquarters “temporarily” to then still neutral America: 

“Brandeis was approached to serve as a sort of figure-head Herzl: a wealthy and assimilated Jewish brahmin who, it was hoped, would grant the movement access to the pocketbooks of his peers. What the Zionists got was, in today's jargon, a new paradigm: a Zionism for the Jew who would never live in Palestine,… a sharp contrast with the visceral yiddishkeit and messianic overtones of Zionism in Europe... Brandeis made Zionism acceptable to American Jewry by… de-emphasizing Jewish nationalism and a distinctive Jewish culture in favor of concentrating on rebuilding Palestine.” 

The WZO, still headquartered in the United States, would meet thirty years later in New York and pass the Biltmore Declaration advocating, “the establishment of an independent Jewish state.” But a state in the future did not address the desperate situation faced by Europe’s Jews in May, 1942.

Responding to timidity by “establishment” Jewish leadership, its unwillingness to confront forcefully administration passivity responding to the slaughter of European Jewry, a small group of young Palestinians led by Hillel Kook (aka “Peter Bergson”) took the protest to America’s streets. 

“Bergson used direct--and often bombastic--appeals to the American public and to members of Congress to demand the creation of a Jewish army (between 1940 and 1942), to rescue Jews from Nazi terror by any means (between 1942 and 1944), and finally for the creation of a Hebrew state (between 1944 and 1948).” 

  

We Will Never Die, Madison Square Garden (Wikipedia), was performed “before an audience of 40,000 at Madison Square Garden on March 9, 1943 to raise public awareness of the ongoing mass murder of Europe's Jews.” 

But in the end even an assertive Jewish response proved unable to impact America and Mandatory Britain and within two years the murdered two million of 1943 soared to six million by the end of the war in mid-1945. 

American Zionism may be faulted as too submissive, its leadership a 20th century carry-over of the centuries-long and mostly ineffective European “court Jew” tradition in back-door appeal to President Roosevelt’s inaction during the unfolding tragedy of European Jewry. In hindsight, with the enormity of the Holocaust as backdrop, it is easy to overlook that before and during the years of the Holocaust the threat to American Jewry from American antisemitism was also great. The 1915 lynching of Leo Frank, a child of the German establishment, came as a bolt from the blue. And denial of that threat both maintained faith in the faith in American exceptionality, and dependency on the president for protection. Given the intensity of popular antisemitism raging in the streets; of government and bureaucratic antisemitism inspiring Congress’s 1924 antisemitic legislation slamming shut the gates of American refuge to Jews; by the Roosevelt Administration’s policy of hiding behind that legislation and effectively condemning European Jewry to Auschwitz: it is unlikely that a braver and more forceful Zionist leadership would have proved more successful. 

Where American Zionism was successful was, even in the face of continuing antisemitism following the war was in remaining committed to the Biltmore Declaration and its call for a Jewish refuge in Palestine. If American Zionism was unable to impact the unfolding Holocaust, it maintained the vision and commitment to a state for the survivors. And despite unrelenting opposition by US government bureaucrats to a Jewish state, the unrepentant antisemitism of the US State Department, when partition came to a vote in the United Nations in November, 1947, President Truman, supported the creation of a state for the Jews. 

Recent writings in this Series: 

1. Foundations of Holocaust: Zionism as Jewish response

2. Foundations of Holocaust: American antisemitism and the lynching of Leo Max Frank

3. Political antisemitism in the United States, 1873-1932

4. Foundations of Holocaust: “the Jew” as secular stereotype

For Israel the situation has become especially grave.  

Morsi, who can barely bring himself to utter its name, was lauded by the U.S. government, shortly before his coup, for his handling of the Israel-Gaza conflict.  He may face hundreds of thousands of internal protestors, but there is little to restrain him while there is no American financial pressure or Egyptian army opposition. The Brotherhood’s Islamization of Egypt continues, transforming schools, courts, and mosques down to the local level.  

When Mohammad Badie, “Supreme Guide” of the Brotherhood states that “jihad is obligatory” for Muslims and calls peace agreements with Israel a “game of grand deception,” it behooves all parties to listen.

America and the Muslim Brotherhood: A Romance

By Alex Joffe • Thursday, December 20, 2012

One of the most consistent and depressing aspects of U.S.-Middle Eastern relations is the determination of our intellectuals and officials to defend Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.  When Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi made his recent power grab, for example, immunizing his decrees from judicial review, Yale law professor Noah Feldman, said that Morsi merely “overreached”—and did so “in the service of preserving electoral democracy.”  State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland lamely characterized Morsi’s actions as a “far cry from an autocrat just saying my way or the highway.”

This indulgence, though, is merely the culmination of a more-than-60-year relationship, mostly hidden from view.  There has long been an on-again-off-again American romance with the Brotherhood.    

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna as a puritanical, reactionary pan-Islamic movement.  It developed as a state within a state, including a network of social welfare organs like hospitals, and an underground party apparatus that quickly spread to other countries.  Al-Banna had already met with the Mufti of Jerusalem in 1927; in 1945, he sent his son-in-law, Sa’id Ramadan, to set up a branch of the Brotherhood in Palestine.  Hamas, established in 1987, is the Brotherhood’s most recent Palestinian branch.

The Brotherhood collaborated with the Nazis before and during World War II.  In 1948 it murdered an Egyptian Prime Minister and in 1954 tried but failed to assassinate Gamal Abdel Nasser.  There followed a violent Egyptian crackdown on the organization.  The Brotherhood went underground, spawning more radical groups.  In the 1970s, while those groups picked up guns, the Brotherhood disavowed violence and, despite periodic bouts of suppression, re-entered Egyptian politics and, more important, Egyptian society.  When Mubarak was overthrown, it was well-positioned as the only organized and funded opposition group.  Little of this was foreseen or correctly understood in the West.

This lack of understanding has a history.  In the wake of World War II, the U.S. government’s perceptions of the Middle East were filtered through a single lens: the threat of Communism.  The threat was hardly just theoretical.  Moving into the vacuum created by Britain’s retreat from its colonies, the Soviet Union abrogated a treaty with Turkey in 1945 and demanded large chunks of Turkish territory.  It continued its wartime occupation of northern Iran until 1946 and attempted to set up puppet regimes in Azerbaijan and Kurdistan.  The entire “Northern Tier” seemed poised to fall to Communism, taking oil supplies with it.

The United States countered with proposals for NATO-like security alliances and ever-larger development schemes, like the Aswan Dam, designed to revolutionize standards of living across vast swaths of the Middle East and lessen the appeal of Communism.  The U.S. government also tried to make Islam itself into an American partner.  During the 1940s American officials met regularly with the Brotherhood, seeing it as a perfectly useful anti-communist tool.  What they knew about the Brotherhood’s violently anti-modern, anti-Semitic ideology is uncertain.

In 1953, the American Embassy in Cairo asked the State Department to invite Sa’id Ramadan, son-in-law of the Brotherhood’s founder, at U.S. government expense, to a “Colloquium on Islamic Culture” organized by Princeton University and the Library of Congress.  The colloquium was a cover for American efforts to enlist the aid of Muslim scholars and notables.  During the colloquium, Ramadan even met President Eisenhower.  When Egypt cracked down on the Brotherhood in 1954, Ramadan escaped, fleeing to Switzerland.  In Geneva he founded an Islamic Center and Al Taqwa Bank, both of which, with ample Saudi funding, have spread the Brotherhood throughout Europe and beyond.  Ramadan traveled widely, in part at American expense and perhaps on a CIA-supplied official Jordanian passport.  He spoke out against Communism—and promoted the Brotherhood.

Today, one of Ramadan’s sons, Hani, runs the Geneva center.  Another, Tariq, is a public intellectual who, as Paul Berman and others have noted, has mastered the art of appearing to be a liberal Islamic modernizer when in fact he is steadfast Islamist.  He is, of course, widely lauded in academia.

But U.S. involvement in the Brotherhood during the 1950s was more than anti-Communism.  As Ian Johnson shows in A Mosque in Munich, it also appealed, with its overtones of an “authentically” Arab and Muslim Middle East, to State Department Arabists and their academic counterparts who regarded Israel as an impediment to American friendship with the Arabs and an aberration that ruined an otherwise romantically pristine region.

The Cold War was a bonanza for Middle Eastern studies—which, as Martin Kramer has shown, rapidly moved away from analysis of history, religion, and texts toward models of “modernization” and “development” aimed at providing practical, relevant knowledge.  Study of religion and ideology played reduced roles.  Thus prepared, the field’s academics and the policy-makers they trained failed to predict the rise and fall of Arab nationalism, the emergence of Islamic fundamentalisms, and various revolutions from Iran to Egypt.  One might do better to examine what these experts confidently predict, then expect the opposite.

America’s fundamental inability to take religion and ideology seriously persists.  Senator John Kerry, likely the next Secretary of State, stated confidently after meeting Morsi in Cairo in June, 2012 that the Egyptian president was “committed to protecting fundamental freedoms” and “said he understood the importance of Egypt’s post-revolutionary relationships with America and Israel.”

The delusional quality of such thinking was exposed by Eric Trager of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in a recent piece tartly titled “Shame on Anyone Who Ever Though Mohammad Morsi was a Moderate.”  Trager, who has had first-hand experience with the Brotherhood, details its rigid ideological worldview and cell-like structure and laments the fact that such religious totalitarians could ever be mistaken for democrats.  But Trager’s remains a minority view inside and outside government. Believing what people say about the religious foundations of their politics cuts against the grain for overwhelmingly secular and politically liberal academics, who believe that materialism must be the true prime mover.  In this view, radical-sounding leaders, once in power, become “responsible” and “pragmatic;” “moderates” can be separated from “extremists” and “military wings” from “political wings.”  Suggestions to the contrary are crude prejudice.

For its part, the U.S. government has long displayed what historian Fawaz Gerges approvingly called an “accomodationist” approach, predicated on the belief that Islamic groups like the Brotherhood have sworn off violence.  But the Obama administration has shown even more willingness than its predecessors to look the other way in the face of Brotherhood abuses of power—and of women and religious minorities—in pursuit of an “authentic” Egyptian democracy.  It has not taken the Brotherhood’s credo to heart: “Allah is our objective; the Quran is our law; the Prophet is our leader; jihad is our way; and death for the sake of Allah is the highest of our aspirations.”