A clandestine undertaking on behalf of Israel, the Jets and the Jews.

 
Columns of the Week

1. David Ellenson, president of the Reform movement's rabbinical school, has a column in this week's Jewish Week that perfectly demonstrates why Orthodox Jews must reject Reform views on religious issues as illegitimate.

Ellenson argues that Judaism supports same sex marriage. His argument boils down to:

A tradition that demands "You shall do that which is upright and good" can surely be construed in such a way that the ethos of Jewish tradition can be said to trump a single statement in Leviticus 18:22 that condemns homosexual behavior as an abomination...

At the time when the biblical prohibition regarding homosexuality was written and in subsequent classical rabbinic commentaries on that passage, the rabbis could not imagine a monogamous, procreative same-sex relationship. This is surely part of the rationale behind the condemnation contained in Leviticus.

Putting aside Ellenson's claim that doing "that which is upright and good" somehow must include gay marriage, from the Orthodox perspective, the Torah is divine and an explicit law in the Torah cannot simply be ignored. There is no alternative but to completely reject all of Ellenson's argument that Judaism supports gay marriage. Ellenson sees the Torah is having written by "rabbis" and therefore subject to alteration by other rabbis, but it is impossible for observant Jews to accept that.

2. I've criticized his work in the past, but while Steven Plaut gets carried away a few times in his latest Jewish Press cover piece, overall the column is a fine one. Here are some excerpts:

It has become vogue in many circles to represent Middle East savagery as part of some sort of "war of civilizations." It is not. In fact, it is simply a war by barbarism against all civilization...

It has been repeated so endlessly and so mindlessly that Palestinian terror is a consequence of Israeli "occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza that the most glaring and obvious fact of all is being gnored: the Palestinian terrorism of these past eleven years was not caused by Israeli occupation but by its removal.

As a result of Israel's offering to allow the PLO control over the West Bank and Gaza, and Israel's willingness to acquiesce in Palestinian statehood in the medium run, the PLO and its affiliates have murdered 1,300 Israelis, most of them civilians and many of them children, since foreswearing the use of violence.

The notion that the terror is coming from "renegade" organizations outside the PLO and which the PLO cannot control is little more than an insult to the world's collective intelligence. In recent months the bulk of the violence (including many of the suicide bombings) has come from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, from Fatah, and from the Tanzim. All of these are under the direct personal command and control of Yasir Arafat...

The world media largely ignore the fact that the PLO operates a large military-industrial complex, many from out of North-Vietnamese-style underground tunnels. These have produced large numbers of ground-to-ground rockets...

Part of the world's problem in understanding the Middle East is that most people have no idea of how small Israel really is. Without the West Bank, Israel is at its waist about as wide as the length of the San Francisco Bay Bridge. All of the West Bank is smaller than the New York City borough of Queens.

If Israel were to turn the West Bank over to complete PLO control, many of the landing routes into Tel Aviv would pass unavoidably over the Palestinian territories, making every flight vulnerable to the very same terrorists who have made those nine recent attempts at firing shoulder-held missiles at landing jetliners...

The fact of the matter is that the West Bank and Gaza are hardly "Palestinian lands," and even if they were, why should Israel not build its fence on such lands? The same people insisting that these are Palestinian lands never quite seem to come to terms with the notion that it is Palestinian terrorism that Israel is fighting. Were it not for the terrorism, there would be no need for any fence...

Even if one is inclined to the notion that the Palestinians might at some point have had some legitimate claim to statehood, the Palestinians themselves forfeited any right to sovereignty over those territories as a result of their decades-long war of atrocity and terror. True, Israeli governments in the 1990`s were, naively and foolishly, willing to grant the PLO control over these territories in exchange for peace. But rather than peace, Israel got war and mass murder of its civilians in exchange...

While I have my strategic doubts about the fence, if Israel is going to build it at all, it should definitely not follow the lines of Israel's pre-1967 Green Line border. That would only reward the terrorists by signaling that Israel is acquiescing in acknowledging everything on the other side of the wall as somehow "Palestinian." If the past decade has taught us anything, it is that appeasement of terror simply
breeds more terror...

Palestinian "suffering"? If the Palestinians are unhappy with Israeli fences and checkpoints and military incursions, let them stop the terror and desist from murdering Israelis...

The endless post-Oslo Middle East violence and terror was triggered because Israel indicated that it was on the run, exhausted, unwilling to fight, and ready to capitulate. It will end only when Israel gets back its determination to end the terror through military victory and force of arms. The United States, which has understood that there is only a military option for dealing with terror in Iraq and Afghanistan, must back up such a return by Israel to pre-Oslo sanity.
posted on 3/11/2004