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Nov. 23, 2009
JWisdom.com: Actually, it really is all about you with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff
Nov. 20, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: How to make every second of your life come first
Caroline B. Glick: Whither American Jewry
Nov. 19, 2009
Binyamin L. Jolkovsky: Please Listen to this Godcast (5 minutes)
Jonathan Tobin: ADL Crosses the Line with Report Bashing Obama Critics
Nov. 18, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: What Judaism has to say about the secret of the Mona Lisa's smile
JWisdom.com: The (Jewish) Dating Game with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (8 minutes)
Nov. 17, 2009
Steven Emerson: How Does the 4th Amendment Impact Terror Finance Investigations?
JWisdom.com: If Frank Sinatra married Edith Piaf with Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein (2 minutes) Life lessons from what would be regarded as the most inappropriate lyrics ever sung
Nov. 16, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : When borrowing is stealing
JWisdom.com: Deconstructing faith with Rabbi Warren Goldstein (9 minutes)
Nov. 13, 2009
JWisdom.com Sarah's subjective reality with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 6 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick: Obama's failure, Netanyahu's opportunity
Nov. 12, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet By Marialisa Calta : A sweet sweet potato treat
JWisdom.com Does God get tired? with Rabbi Harvey Belovski ( 5 minutes)
Nov. 11, 2009
Rabbi Avi Shafran: Jews and money: When anti-Semitism isn't
JWisdom.com Marriages are not made in Heaven with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (VERY fast 15 minutes)
Nov. 10, 2009
Michael Doyle: Author of book exposing CAIR ordered to remove supporting documents from Web
JWisdom.com If the creation so loudly shouts the existence of the Creator, why aren't more people believers? with Rabbi Naftali Brawer (9 minutes)
Nov. 9, 2009
Mark Steyn: Shooter exposes hole in U.S. terror strategy
JWisdom.com It's never too late to have a happy childhood with Sarah Chana Radcliffe (5 minutes)
Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review Nov. 18, 2004 / 5 Kislev, 5765

No seeds for Middle East peace

By Suzanne Fields


http://www.jewishworldreview.com | When my father died a decade ago an American friend planted 100 trees in Israel as a memorial: "For life, for hope, in honor, in memory." Even before Israel became a modern state in 1948, Jews from all over the world contributed money to plant trees in Israel as a gesture both practical and sacramental.


As a little girl, I urged my parents' friends to drop coins in a blue and white box that sat in our foyer for contributions to plant trees in Israel. "We can make the desert green," I told them with the earnestness of a child. At our synagogue we were told that every planted tree was touched by human hands. That was important after 6 million Jews had died in the Holocaust. The trees symbolized fertility, growth and replacement. Tradition told us that trees were originally planted in ancient days as commemoration of the first temple in Jerusalem.


Seen from the air, Israel is a plaid of fields and forests of green, claiming a promise for the future. What a pity that Muslims have no such promise for the state of Palestine. With the death of Yasser Arafat, the world is reminded of how his ideology of hate was as dry and as barren as the infertile desert. He delivered only terror, suicide bombers, death and destruction, soaking the land with blood. No flowers bloomed.

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Mr. Arafat professed that what he wanted to plant were seeds of peace, and gullible if well-meaning judges gave him the Nobel Peace Prize, a gesture of hope in the face of bitter experience. His deathbed became a scene of farce, with speculation not on what the Palestinians could do with the money he had collected over the years but how much his spoiled wife could spend in the shops of Paris. The estimates of the money Mr. Arafat had put away in Swiss and Caribbean bank accounts ran to the hundreds of millions of dollars.


The Palestinians stuck in the miserable refugee camps were always instruments only of Mr. Arafat's power. Better for him that the Palestinians should live in poverty than in a state where they could flourish and prosper. Palestinian poverty became a public-relations weapon.


The generous offer made at Camp David in 2000, the best his people could ever expect — 97 percent of what he had asked, by one estimate — was turned down in an exercise of breathtaking cynicism. Cruel though he was to the Israelis, his abuse of power was even more hurtful to his own people. He deprived them of a peace delivered through politics unaccompanied by death and destruction. He nevertheless manipulated world opinion with a boffo performance before a world eager to be manipulated.

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"The very fact of his longevity gives the lie to Arafat's contrived image of noble weakness," observes Mario Loyola in the Weekly Standard. "He survived in a political landscape of thugs and murderers because they all knew that he was one of them. A weak man would not have survived." When leftist students here and in Europe were left as rebels without a cause with the end of the Vietnam War, the Palestinians replaced the Viet Cong as romantic revolutionaries. Hatred is a powerful narcotic for intellectuals, particularly those who live comfortably in the embrace of the campuses. Anti-Semitism lost its cachet at the end of World War II, but anti-Zionism neatly replaced it beneath what Bernard Lewis, the Middle Eastern scholar, called "the veil of respectability." Although anti-Zionism is not always the equivalent of anti-Semitism, sometimes it is. Mr. Arafat manipulated that, too. In 1975, a year after he addressed the United Nations with a pistol strapped ostentatiously to his hip, the delegates adopted a resolution declaring that "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination." In 2001, 3,000 non-governmental organizations at the United Nations World Conference on Racism declared Israel to be a "racist apartheid state" and guilty of "war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing," deleting all clauses that opposed anti-Semitism.


At Mr. Arafat's death Jacques Chirac, the president of France, celebrated him as "a man of courage and conviction," showing no shame in a country where Frenchmen are still being exposed as having willingly participated in the Holocaust.


The man of "courage and conviction" planted no trees, but poisoned a generation deprived of a hope for peace.

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© 2004, Suzanne Fields. TMS