The Seattle Times commemorated Kristallnacht [1] this year by printing a bizarre screed by Avraham Burg, a leader of Israel's opposition Labor Party.

"The Israeli nation today rests on a scaffolding of corruption and on foundations of oppression and injustice. As such, the end of the Zionist enterprise is already on our doorstep. There is a real chance that ours will be the last Zionist generation. There may yet be a Jewish state here, but it will be a different sort, strange and ugly."

Why the Times chose to print Burg's three-month old essay on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, of all days, is beyond me.

Burg's polemic, which, among other things apologizes for suicide bombing as a natural response to poverty will undoubtedly reinforce the worldview of those who, for various reasons, can't stand the thought of a Jewish nation defending itself.

"They spill their own blood in our restaurants in order to ruin our appetites because they have children and parents at home who are hungry and humiliated."

The Times could at the very least have put Burg's op-ed in context by reminding its readers that Avraham Burg failed in his quest to lead his party, which in turn failed in its quest to lead the nation. Burg claims that

The opposition does not exist."

But of course the opposition does exist, and Burg is part of it. The real problem is that the solutions offered by Burg and his opposition colleagues have little public support. Having failed to persuade the voters of Israel, Burg takes his message around the world looking for anybody who will listen:

"What is needed is a new vision of a just society and the political will to implement it. Nor is this merely an internal Israeli affair. Diaspora Jews, for whom Israel is a central pillar of their identity, must pay heed and speak out."

To give an American analogy, Avraham Burg complaining in American newspapers about the winner of last year's Israeli election would be like Jeanette Rankin [2] tirading in the overseas press in 1943 against Roosevelt and American involvement in World War II.

Based on the response in the Times Letters to the Editor pages, Burg's message resonates with two groups of people: Palestinians who want Israel to disappear and self-absorbed American Jews for whom Israel is a form of moral recreation and who presume to know more about how to deal with the threats facing Israel than do the people who actually live and vote in Israel.

To the Times' credit, they also published Dr. Chaya Siegelbaum's well-written response to Burg, "A shocking slap at Israel," which is archived at http:// seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2001788558_chaya12.html It concludes:

"May next year's Kristallnacht be recognized with more-balanced coverage."

A private e-mail from someone at the Seattle Times, in response to my observation that the anniversary of Kristallnacht was not a good day to publish Avraham Burg's self-flagellatory op-ed:

"Nobody had the foggiest notion that it was the anniversary of Kristallnacht, because Kristallnacht is not date we keep track of. Nor was the piece by Burg about Kristallnacht. It was about Israel in 2003. It is beyond me how you, or that woman we printed the next day [presumably, Chaya Siegelbaum], to assume that we were 'commemorating' or commenting on an event in Germany in 1938."

Another comment: "I don't think anything that happened in Germany in 1938 creates a moral claim on Palestinian territory in 2003."

I have no reason to believe that the anniversary of Kristallnacht was deliberately or even consciously chosen as the date to publish the Burg piece. But, "we didn't know" is no excuse for a newspaper to make. It's the newspaper's job to know. In particular, it is the job of the opinion section to place current events in their broader context. When the opinion editors select an op-ed for publication, it's their job to know whether the piece has a sound factual basis, whether the analysis is sensible, what the author's agenda is, and how the piece intersects with the rest of the day's news. As for the connection between Kristallnacht and the Burg piece, Chaya Siegelbaum's op-ed piece explained it flawlessly, but here it is in my own words:

Of course, the crimes of Germany in 1938 do not create a "moral claim on Palestinian territory". But there are historical parallels between the plight of the German Jews in 1938 and today's Israeli Jews and there are lessons to be learned from the experience of 1938.

Burg's essay, which was first published in an Israeli daily newspaper, is a perfectly valid contribution to Israel's own internal debate over its security policy. That Israel engages in such a debate and that a diverse spectrum of voices are heard is one of Israel's greatest sources of strength versus its rigidly censored tyrannical adversaries. But in isolation, as a window into current Israeli thinking, it is utterly without balance.

The essence of Burg's argument is that Palestinian violence is caused by Israeli injustice and that if, and only if, Israel behaves differently toward the Palestinians will the two peoples co-exist in peace.

But that argument seems to ignore the long experience of Jews and Arabs living in the Levant and the dynamic of the conflict. Before the 20th century, Palestine was merely a sparsely populated backwater of an Ottoman province that had both Jewish and Arab communities and a lot of vacant land. Jews started immigrating to Palestine in larger numbers in Ottoman days, as did Arabs. The Jewish intention was to form a homeland, while the Arab animus was to prevent the formation of any Jewish entity. (Jews were only ever tolerated in the Arab world as second class citizens under Muslim rule). At every successive stage in the conflict - 1930s, 1948, 1967, 2000 - there is a Jewish/Israeli offer to share the land, an Arab rejection of sharing, followed by Arab violence, an Israeli military victory which leaves the Arabs with even less land than they had earlier, and then an Arab vow to continue the struggle until final victory, condemnation of Israel by the "international community" and offers from the Israeli peace camp to make the Arabs whole for Israel's sins.

Anybody who doubts that the Arab intention is not just to end the "occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza but to eliminate Israel as a sovereign Jewish entity should consider at the very least the following: (1) The fundamental documents of the Palestinian national movement, e.g. the Palestinian National Charter and the Hamas Charter, which spell out the intentions in the most explicit detail; (2) the fact that Arabs act on these intentions by attacking not only installations in the disputed territories of the West Bank and Gaza, but by murdering civilians inside Israel. This can only be regarded as an attempt at ethnic cleansing (There is also the fact that Arab terror attacks against Jewish civilians pre-date Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by several decades).

Still, there seems always to be a faction in any Jewish community that responds to external threats with the questions: "What are we doing to make them hate us? And what can we surrender to prevent them from attacking us?" Avraham Burg and the Israeli peace camp are doing that today. There were also many Jewish Germans who were asking the same questions about the Nazis back in the 1930s. (An excellent book on the subject is John Van Houten Dippel's Bound upon a Wheel of Fire). In spite of Hitler's unambiguous anti-Semitic rhetoric, followed by the Nuremberg Laws, the boycott of Jewish businesses and the elimination of Jews from the schools and the professions, the response of many German Jews was to try to placate and accommodate the Nazis and to make concessions. Kristallnacht and the events that followed illustrated the foolishness of such a course of appeasement.

Again, Burg has every right to try to persuade his fellow Israelis of the soundness of his proposals. In fact, he has taken advantage of his many opportunities to do that and his message has largely been rejected. I commend the Seattle Times for taking an interest in Israel and attempting to inform its readers about Israel. But to publish a discredited, minority opinion in isolation and without a broader context does less to inform than to mislead. And especially on a day when many are remembering Kristallnacht, it is particularly klutzy to feature a leader of a Jewish community calling for the appeasement of those who seek to destroy it.

Publishing the Avraham Burg op-ed on Kristallnacht isn't the only sign of a clue deficit on the Seattle Times editorial page this week. Today we read Floyd McKay's error-filled celebration of the so-called Geneva Accord: "Voice of Hope in the Middle East." Among McKay's more creative interpretations were that:

The Geneva Accord, announced Oct. 14, was negotiated by what remains of Israel's peace movement and moderate Palestinians.

In fact, the Palestinians behind the Geneva Accord included solid members of the terrorism infrastructure, such as leaders of the murderous Tanzim militia and current and former PA officials acting with Arafat's blessing. If these guys are "moderates" then the word "moderate" has no meaning.

Palestinians would surrender a "right of return" to former homes within Israel.

In fact, the published text of the Accord leaves open the details of the "refugee" question and the number of "refugees" that Israel will be compelled to accept as part of a final settlement.

The Geneva Accord process also gained an endorsement from United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan.

If anything, the endorsement of a reflexively anti-Israel body such as the UN should be a red flag to anybody with a stake in Israel's existence.

Until the settlements - or certainly most of them - are removed, the West Bank will be occupied territory, and militants will continue to violently oppose the occupiers.

The "militants" were murdering Israeli Jews well before Israel found itself in possession of the West Bank.

In the ensuing period, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the intifada, Palestinian suicide bombers and Israeli tanks and bulldozers have made dialogue difficult and even dangerous. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin, who shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Arafat, was assassinated for engaging in dialogue.

Oh sure, Israeli self-defense is morally equivalent to the deliberate and indiscriminate murder of civilians. But Rabin was not assassinated for "engaging in dialogue". He was murdered by an extremist who felt he was "acting on the orders of God". Every Israeli leader before and since Rabin, including Netanyahu and Sharon, have engaged in dialogue.

Negotiators Abbo [sic] and Beilin are veterans of the conflict, and perhaps part of a new wave of leadership in the region

New wave of leadership? Rabbo (not Abbo) is nothing new, he has been working with Arafat for decades. As for the likelihood that Beilin will ever lead Israel, this recent poll indicates that Beilin is one of the least popular even among the widely unpopular opposition figures.

Because of our sponsorship of Israel, we have little credibility with Arab governments.

It might be more useful to point out that most Arab governments have little credibility with either the American or the Israeli public.

The Geneva Accord was financed by Britain, Japan, Switzerland, Sweden and Norway, and could help balance America's pro-Israel tilt.

The Geneva Accord has been rejected by the vast majority of the Israeli public, who understand it better and have more at stake in the process than, say, the terrorism appeasers over in Norway. The Geneva Accord doesn't seem to be a big hit with enough Palestinians to matter, either. Presumably because it permits some shred of a Jewish state in the final stage of the process.

In spite of, or perhaps because of, his chronic ignorance and moral obtuseness, Floyd McKay's column appears in the Seattle Times every week. Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at 12:51 PM

FOOTNOTES

[1] From the Jewish Virtual Library (http://www.us-israel.org): Almost immediately upon assuming the Chancellorship of Germany in 1933, Hitler began promulgating legal actions against Germany's Jews. By 1935, the Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of German citizenship. On the nights of November 9 and 10, 1938, rampaging mobs throughout Germany and the newly acquired territories of Austria and Sudetenland freely attacked Jews in the street, in their homes and at their places of work and worship. At least 96 Jews were killed and hundreds more injured, more than 1,000 synagogues were burned (and possibly as many as 2,000), almost 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed, cemeteries and schools were vandalized, and 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps [added by Mitchell Bard from his book The Complete Idiot's Guide to World War II. NY: MacMillan, 1998, pp. 59-60]. This pogrom has come to be called Kristallnacht, "the Night of Broken Glass."

[2] In 1916, at age 36, Jeanette Rankin became the first woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. She engaged in social work for the next three decades, and was re-elected to the House in 1940. In her later years she was a rancher, a lecturer, and a lobbyist for peace and women's rights. She voted against America's entry into World Wars I and II, and she was the only member of Congress to oppose the declaration of war on Japan.

Stefan Sharkansky runs the shark blogsite, whose address is http://www.usefulwork.com/shark This article appeared appeared as three posting on the Shark Blog November 12, 2003. They are archived as http//www.usefulwork.com/shark/archives/001229.html, www.usefulwork.com/shark/archives/001237.html and www.usefulwork.com/shark/archives/001230.html.

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