SPOTLIGHT ON
THE EXTREMISTS
..."Revisionist" historian Norman Finkelstein has authored a new book, Image and Reality of the Israeli-Arab Conflict, in which he alleges, among other things, that Israel initiated the 1967 and 1973 wars. Finkelstein's extremism is too much even for leftwing reviewer Bennett Muraskin, writing in P.S., who charged that Finkelstein's "perspective is so anti-Zionist that it will offend all but the most tolerant Jewish readers...His one-sidedness frequently mars his judgments...Finkelstein's mission is to prove that Zionism and Israel are irredeemable"...
...Writing in a recent issue of Christian Century, Rosemary Ruether, a veteran leftwing Christian critic of Israel, raised a novel argument as to why Israel should make concessions on Jerusalem: "In 1831, Jerusalem contained 4,000 Muslims, 3,000 Christians and 2,000 Jews." She had to go all the way back to 1831 to find a Muslim majority in the city, because every census taken in Jerusalem from the late 1800s until today has found a Jewish majority...
...In a recent op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, leftwing Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi conceded that the Temple Mount "is Judaism's holiest place -- not, as is commonly assumed, the Western Wall, which abuts it." Nevertheless, Halevi declares, "Israel should defer its claim to the Temple Mount until Messianic times," and "should transfer full authority [there] to the Arab world." No clear explanation from Halevi as to why the Arab world should not postpone its claim until Messianic times and accept that in the meantime, full authority should be in the hands of the Jewish world...
...Earlier this year, Noa Ben Artzi-Pelossof, granddaughter of Yitzhak Rabin, did the book-circuit tour of Europe and the United States to promote her million-dollar memoir, In the Name of Sorrow and Hope. In the book, and in interviews, Pelossof repeatedly made extreme statements blaming the entire Israeli right for the Rabin assassination. The New York Times now reports that the Pelossof book was one of the big flops of the publishing season...Meanwhile, the "other granddaughter," Michelle Walden, granddaughter of Shimon Peres, who made a brief splash not long ago with a few of her own political declarations, has "moved to Hollywood in search of fame," the Washington Post reports. Her first role is as a cigarette girl in a '50s gangster movie...
...Jonathan Jacoby, formerly a New Jewish Agenda activist and then president of Americans for Peace Now, continues his elusive search for mainstream credibility. A recent letter to the Washington Post mentioned that Jacoby's new group, the Israel Policy Forum, is connected to the Israeli Labor Party. Jacoby fired off an angry letter, insisting that the Forum "has no
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affiliation with the Israeli Labor Party." Really? When Labor was in power not long ago, Jacoby certainly enjoyed the respectability of being associated with it. There were no letters of protest from Jacoby when the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported (in December 1992) that Jacoby was leaving Peace Now "to head a new organization aimed at building U.S. support for Israel's Labor Party" and (in April 1993) that "the Labor Party tapped [Jacoby] to create an American organization to support the party's ideas...the decision to put Jacoby on the payroll speaks to the perceived need in Jerusalem to do more to gain American Jewish support." Nor did he complain when syndicated columnist James Besser reported (in October 1993) that Jacoby's Israel Policy Forum "was created at the behest of the Labor government"...
...Peace Now spokesman Mossi Raz has confirmed that he and several of his associates recently broke through an Israeli Army roadblock in order to visit the Arab residents of Hebron. Raz defended his illegal action on the grounds that "the military orders closing the area might have been forged" and "the soldiers on duty at the roadblock had extreme rightwing opinions"...
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