The Rob Simone Talk Show

Former Israel Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef to followers, quoting a traditional Rosh Hashana table blessing before alluding to the resumption of U.S.-brokered Israeli-Palestinian peace talks between Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen):

May our enemies and those who hate us be put to an end, Abu Mazen and all these evil people, may they be made gone from the world. The Holy One, Blessed be He, should smite them with plague, they and these Palestinians, the evil Israel-baiters.

A tradition from the Talmud holds that the things you do to begin a New Year will have a profound effect on the entire year you’re about to have. The foods you eat, how you sleep, and, especially, words spoken in anger.

It says much about our times, that Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, a man who has several times held veto power over the course of peace negotiations, chose just this period and just this tradition, to unlock and unload on the Palestinians.

Much has been said, and rightly so, in condemnation of the remarks, and of the pallid defenses mounted by followers.

However, Rosh Hashanah may be exactly the occasion to learn from Maran HaRav’s’s words, and, no less, his timing.

The run-up to Rosh Hashana is meant to be a month of hard looks at oneself and hard apologies to others. That is where HaRav Ovadia comes in.

His words teach us, before all else, that we should thank the Lord for creating extremists. Because the tight focus of their vision, not to say blindness, often, if unintentionally, shines a light for the rest of us.

HaRav Ovadia’s words remind us that Rosh Hashanah is precisely the time to question our accustomed, unchallenged, most self-satisfied assumptions about ourselves. To reconsider the belief that we were right this year and those who took issue with us, wrong.

Especially this year. History may recall this as the year when Israel’s war posture turned inward, when the most direct and unrelenting threat to the survival of the state as we know it, was a multi-faceted effort, often behind the scenes and funded abroad, to clamp down on human rights for non-Jews and the left within Israel and in the West Bank.

Of late, there has been a mounting tendency within a newly-ascendant rightist intelligentsia — and a shady, gleefully disingenuous, young-ish underground anchored by the vengeful nerds of Im Tirzu — to equate self-criticism with treason, and self-congratulation with patriotism. Not Israel, Right or Wrong, but Israel Is Right, and Europe, the Western World as a whole, the Muslim World, the UN, and Barack Obama are all, sadly, wrong.

The words of Maran HaRav bring us crashing back to the purpose of Rosh Hashonah, which is, at root, dissatisfaction. Rosh Hashanah is a test. It is, as Israelis say of their intimidating high school finals, a bagrut — literally, a coming of age.

So, as adults who owe it to themselves to continue the process of coming of age at any age — which is the same as learning — HaRav Ovadia’s words could inspire us to take a fresh look at the Rosh Hashanah tradition he invoked, and at ourselves.

Guided by that table, and by the marvelous ritual called Simna Milta, or Significant Omens, we can choose, at the dawn of a New Year, the kind of year we set our sights on.

Thanks to a horrible year past and the firm and constant guidance of my teachers Im Tirzu, the Shalem Center, Avigdor Lieberman, Eli Yishai, Michael Ben-Ari, and The NGO Monitor, my resolution for this holiday is to celebrate a New Year of De-Occupation

May good deeds only increase: work toward the lessening of violence and the widening of diplomacy, toward the lessening of settlement and the widening of contacts with Palestinians, toward easing of restrictions on Palestinian civilians and the lifting of persecution over Israeli Bedouin, toward fairness and care for refugees and foreign workers, and a new relationship between the Jewish state and the Muslim world.

These, then, are the blessings and the foods of the Rosh Hashanah mini-seder called Significant Omens. They begin with blessings for the God Who created the fruits of trees and Who renews for us a sweet and new year, blessings over apples and honey.

The following blessings all begin Ye’hi Ratzohn Milfanecha, Adonai Eloheinu V’elohei Avoteinu — May it be Your will, Lord our God and Lord of our ancestors …

Symbol 1: Carrots [a play on the Yiddish word mehren, to increase], or Fenugreek [Hilbe in Arabic, or Rubiyeh in Hebrew], or in the Syrian and Southern U.S. Jewish traditions, Black Eyed Peas.

… She’yirbu zch’uyo’teinu. … Often cryptically translated as “…that our merits increase.” These days, however, it would seem much more fitting to go with a more literal translation, embracing two meanings of the word z’chuyoteinu

“… that the rights of all increase, and our good deeds as well.”

Symbol 2: Leek or cabbage

… Sh’yikartu soneinu – “That those who hate us be cut off.”

In every case of relations with enemies, the traditional wording is ambiguous, suggesting that how we choose to relate to our enemies and those who hate us, and whether we continue to occupy them, could affect whether they remain enemies.

Symbol 3. Beets

… Shyistalku Oy’veinu – “That our enemies be gone.”

Symbol 4. Dates

… Sh’yitamu so’neinu – “That those who hate us be finished.”

Symbol 5. Pumpkin or Gourd

… Sh’yikra g’zar dinenu v’yi’kreh’u L’fanecha Zchuyoteinu

A prayer for the possibility of change, resisting the sense that all is foreordained, and doomed to misery.

“That the harsh verdict of our sentence be torn up, and the rights of all be proclaimed before You.”

Symbol 6. Pomegranate

… Sh’nirbeh zchuyot k’rimon.

“… That rights increase as [the seeds of] a pomegranate.

Symbol 7 – Fish [Vegetarians may choose goldfish crackers or similar stand-ins.]

… Sh’nifreh v’nirbeh k’dagim.

” … That we grow and increase and flourish like fish.”

Symbol 8 – Head of a fish [Substitution: Garlic]

The blessing that can affect all the others:

… Sh’niyeh l’rohsh v’loh l’zanav.

” … that we should be like the head and not like the tail.

Rosh Hashana is at the door. A time for looking at ourselves with fresh honesty, and at others with new compassion. A time of vulnerability, and therefore, in theory, a time of risk, of danger, of weakness. In fact, of course, should we acknowledge it, a time of rare power.

Occupation is the deprivation of rights. The task of Rosh Hashanah is to help us find our way back to a moral path we have lost. That may be why De-Occupation starts at home.

Written for Haaretz.com

Read more: Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Mahmoud Abbas, Rosh Hashana, Occupation, Haaretz, Peace Talks, Middle East, Israel, Palestine, Bradley Burston, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Shas, Middle East Peace, Barack Obama, Religion News

On September 1st the dolphin hunts in Taiji, Japan were scheduled to resume despite unrelenting tsunamis of publicity around the world highlighting this brutal slaughter. In addition the village of Futo, just southeast of Tokyo, has announced it will resume dolphin hunts, mainly to secure dolphins for captivity. Dolphin hunting in Japan continues uninterrupted.

The resumption of the dolphin hunts follows a weekend, August 27 – 29, during which Animal Planet aired the two-hour season finale to Whale Wars, the fight by Sea Shepherd to stop whaling by Japan in the Antarctic, a two-hour presentation of The Cove, the academy award winning film by Louis Psoyhos featuring Ric O’Barry; and the premier of O’Barry’s own three-part film series Blood Dolphins.

While issues of cruelty are a highly important part of the argument against these hunts there is another compelling reason why dolphins and whales not only should not be hunted but instead demand greater protection than ever.

Growing evidence suggests that dolphins are becoming so contaminated by marine toxins that eating them constitutes a genuine threat to human health. Health officials in Denmark and the Faroe Islands have already recommended that consumption of pilot whale meat taken in the notorious “grinds” not be eaten due to high levels of contaminants in the meat.

The issue of heavy metal contamination in large predatory fish and marine mammals is becoming well known. Less widely known are the high levels of organic pollutants such as PCBs, PBDEs, DDT, and other chemicals that suppress mammalian immune systems and disrupt normal endocrine function. Some of these chemicals are known to be estrogen imitators that act to feminize men and superfeminize women; in some cases raising the percentage of females babies born over male babies significantly.

Dolphins are already severely threatened by anthropogenic forces. During the last year numerous peer-reviewed scientific papers have been published documenting a worldwide surge in incidence of diseases heretofore unknown in dolphins.

A team of researchers and veterinarians from the Marine Animal Disease Lab at the University of Florida have discovered at least fifty new viruses in dolphins, the majority of which have yet to be reported in any other marine mammal species.

Thirty new diseases have developed simultaneously worldwide resulting from what Dr. Gregory Bossart, Chief Veterinary Officer at the Georgia Aquarium, describes as profound immunosuppression leading to environmental distress syndrome resulting from chemical intoxication.

In addition, resistance to antibiotics has been found in dolphins in numerous locations around the world. Obviously antibiotics do not occur in nature. They come from people who take antibiotics and introduce them into the ecosystem through bodily elimination or simply throwing unused pills away. After they reach the watershed plankton ingest them and they bio-accumulate up the food web to concentrate in top predators such as dolphins. The dolphins then have the potential for breeding antibiotic resistant super bugs that may pass back to humans. The transmission of disease from one species to another is called zoonosis and is of great concern to the CDC. AIDS is one example of zoonotic transmission.

I first went to Japan to stop the dolphin slaughter at Iki Island in 1979. In 1980 cameraman Howard Hall and I filmed a barbaric slaughter of scores of bottlenose dolphins. Airing of the footage around the globe caused massive worldwide protest.

In that case exposure of the brutal footage of dolphins being hacked and stabbed to death essentially brought an end to the dolphin hunt at Iki. But such publicity has not produced a similar result since.

Today I believe that sticking Japan’s nose in it may be making it all but impossible for Tokyo to withdraw from whaling or dolphin hunting. A proud sovereign nation cannot allow small groups of environmentalists to be seen to make it kow-tow. If Japan stopped whaling and dolphin hunting now it would appear environmentalists had forced them to back down. But the knowledge that diseases such as brucellosis and papillomavirus are being found ever more frequently in dolphins may, ironically be what forces the end of eating dolphin meat. And if that isn’t enough thirteen additional RNA-based viruses that cause intestinal disease and encephalitis in humans have also recently been discovered in dolphins

It baffles me that whaling and dolphin killing can persist in the 21st century. We know so much about these magnificent animals. Whale and dolphin watching generate over US$2.1 billion per year around the world, vastly more than whale and dolphin killing.

But human self-interest on the part of entrenched bureaucratic elites is a powerful force molding individual ethics and shaping short sighted policies. So in Japan and elsewhere whaling and dolphin hunting persist.

In the light of emerging threats to the marine ecosystem, dolphins and whales in particular, the deliberate killing of these curious, intelligent, sentient animals is tragic and will only hasten the extirpation of whole populations of these magnificent sentinels of the sea.

Read more: Organic Pollutants, Disease in Dolphins, Whaling, Dolphin Slaughter, Japan, Heavy Metals, Dolphin Hunting, Green News

President Barack Obama is continuing to reorient U.S. foreign policy in general, and in the Middle East in particular, along the lines of the internationalist/neo-realist approach pursued in the pre-9/11 years of Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Obama’s Tuesday’s televised address marking the end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq — coupled with his earlier decision to escalate U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan — and this week’s start of a new round of U.S. orchestrated Israeli-Palestinian talks in Washington fit very much into his effort to reducing the costs of — as opposed to doing away with a policy based on the assumption that Washington will continue setting the agenda and determining the policy outcomes in the Broader Middle East — in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Israel-Palestine.

That should not have come as a major surprise to those of us who have been calling for long-term structural changes in American global strategy, starting with the necessary reassessment of the U.S. goal of maintaining a hegemonic position in the Middle East. After all, much of presidential candidate Obama’s criticism of President George W. Bush’s foreign policies as well as his proposals for changes in those policies sounded like the kind of the assessments that were being made by President Bush I’s former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft who not unlike Obama was opposed to decision to invade Iraq and to oust Saddam Hussein and who was calling for a diplomatic engagement with Iran.

Indeed, contrary to the hopes raised by some of Obama’s admirers in the anti-war movement — or the fears stirred up in his neoconservative bashers — Obama was not a closet peacenik, an isolationist, a “third worldist” or an “Arabist;” and his positions on Arab-Israeli issues reflected a view shared by most of his predecessors in office. Moreover, compare Obama’s phony “confrontation” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the issue of the Jewish settlements with the Bush pèreway challenged former Israeli PM Yitzchak Shamir over the same question (threatening to withhold loan guarantees to Jerusalem, among other things), and the notion promoted by neoconservative pundits and others that Obama is the most “anti-Israeli” U.S. President seems laughable.

By trying to improve U.S. standing in the Arab and Muslim worlds, to engage Iran in the diplomatic arena, to begin a process of military disengagement from Iraq and to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process by emphasizing the U.S. role as an honest broker, Obama has not been attempting to transform traditional U.S. policy in the Middle East (or elsewhere). Instead Obama has been playing the role of a counter-revolutionary, turning back the radical foreign policy approach pursued by Bush the Second and his neoconservative advisors (the policy of preemption; regime change; diplomatic unilateralism; the Democracy Agendawhile embracing the more realist strategies pursued by Clinton and Bush the First.

That Obama has discarded the Bush era’s stand of treating Israel as Washington’s sheriff in the Middle East may explain why after eight years of having uninterrupted access to a U.S. diplomatic blank cheque some Israelis and their American supporters may have reacted with so much animosity towards the new president. Similarly, by treating the threat of international terrorism as a manageable national security challenge — as opposed to a part of a new global war against Islamofascism — Obama has helped protect the moral and strategic principles of U.S. foreign policy. It is President Bush and his advisors who had been violating those same principles.

From that perspective, the prose of Obama’s televised address on Iraq on Tuesday seemed to reflect his goal of “de-neoconizing” U.S. foreign policy. There was no talk about democratizing Iraq and the Middle East, confronting an Axis of Evil or defeating Islamofascism. “The United States has paid a huge price to put the future of Iraq in the hands of its people,” Obama said in the address from the Oval Office. “Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility,” he concludes. “Now, it is time to turn the page.” Indeed.

At the same time, the decision by Obama Administration to invite President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington on September 2nd to resume direct negotiations to resolve all final status issues — including Jerusalem, the Jewish settlements, and the Palestinian refugees, within a year — seems to send a signal to Arabs and Israelis that unlike his predecessor, President Obama was placing the Israel-Palestine issue on the top of his foreign policy agenda and was preparing to invest more time and energy – and involves paying huge political costs — in trying to resolve the Mideast conflict. Or so it seems.

On one level, Obama may be trying to recapture some of the elements of the strategic status-quo that had existed in the Middle East before 9/11 and the ensuing invasion of Iraq — and in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War and Gulf War I — during which the U.S. could maintain a relatively cost-free hegemony in the region. It could do so by pursuing a strategy of offshore balancing, by keeping U.S. military forces “over the horizon,” through the “dual containment” of Iraq and Iran (and by playing the one against the other), and by sustaining the momentum of a perpetual Arab-Israeli peace process. While Bush and his advisors have contended that their radical foreign policy agenda – including the invasion of Iraq — was the proper U.S. response to 9/11, a realist strategy aimed at preserving U.S. status in the Middle East at weakening Arab and Muslim radicals would have been to topple the Taliban, destroy Al Qaeda and its satellites and reviving the Israeli-Arab peace process (and not to oust Saddam Hussein and transform the Middle East). So it is not surprising that that is exactly what the Obama Administration is trying to do now by trying to close the Iraq chapter, getting the peace process moving and “finishing the job” in Afghanistan.

The reason why this strategy is probably not going to work now is that the Bush Administration’s policies may have already changed the balance of power in the Middle East as well as the political balance of power at home in a way that makes it difficult — if not impossible — to “de-neoconize” U.S. foreign policy and turn back the strategic clock and re-establish the pre-9/11 status quo.

Indeed, announcing the end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq and convening an Israeli-Palestinian summit in Washington do not change the depressing realities on the ground. They amount to not a lot more than media events. Iraq’s Pandora Box of ethnic and religious rivalries remains wide open and a more powerful and assertive Iran and its Shiite allies there (and in Lebanon) are perceived as posing a major threat to the interests of the mostly unstable Arab-Sunni regimes in the region (Saudi Arabia; Jordan; Egypt). At the same time, Turkey is very concerned about the objectives of the Kurds in the North of Iraq and is ready to take action to protect its interests there. A huge powder keg is ready to blow up.

In the Holy Land, the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships are divided and the national consensus on both sides has been radicalized since the second Intifadah, 9/11, and the continuing Israeli occupation and settlements buildup, making it less likely that the Israelis and the Palestinians could resolve any of the major final status issues within a year. They could not achieve that goal in 2000 when Yasser Arafat was ruling over a unified Palestinian camp, when a relatively moderate political figure was serving as Israel’s PM — and at a time when the U.S. was at the peak of its so-called unipolar moment and Iran, Hizbollah and Hamas were having great difficulties in trying to exert their influence. So why exactly will the peace process lead to the promised land of peace now?

Hence even if one presupposes a best-case scenario under which the issue of Iran’s nuclear ambitions are resolved or being placed on the policy backburner in a way that averts a military conflagration involving Israel, the U.S. and Iran, it is still very difficult to envision a state of affairs that could bring about peace and stability in Iraq and in Israel/Palestine in the near future. To paraphrase what Oscar Wilde has said about marriage and second marriage, pursuing policies based on these assumptions would make would mark the triumph of intelligence and hope over intelligence and experience. But then many marriages and second marriages do work.

It is possible to imagine an alternate universe in which the U.S. has not endured the triple blows of 9/11, the war in Iraq and the Great Recession and was ready to use its enormous military and economic power to make peace and bring stability into the Middle East. But one does not have to be great geo-strategic thinker to conclude that in the real universe of post-Iraq war and the current economic mess coupled with the mood of the American public, the U.S. not going to have the needed economic and military resources and the political will to use them in order prevent he likely explosions in Mesopotamia and the Levant and to impose its own agenda there as it also tries to fight Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere and when, as Obama put it on Tuesday, “Our most urgent task is to restore our economy and put the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs back to work.” Something gotta give, and it will probably be Obama’s Mideast policy that will be the first to lose ground.

Read more: Egypt, Al Qaeda, Mahmoud Abbas, Democracy Agenda, Somalia, Over the Horizon, George W. Bush, Brent Scowcroft, Lebanon, Iraq, Realism, Iran, Benjamin Netanyahu, Kurds, Jordan, Bill Clinton, Saudi QArabia, Turkey, Sunnis, Yemen, Palestine, Hamas, Barack Obama, Offshore Balancing, Yasser Arafat, Saddam Hussein, Shiites, Neoconservatives, Israel, Hizbollah, Taliban, George H. W. Bush, Afghanistan, Islamofascism, World News