Is this picture a fraud?

Is this picture a fraud?

or should Jacques Rogge immediately be dismissed as the IOC President responsible for denying the request of the families of the Munich 11, the petition of more than 105,000 people, and the support for a moment of silence by world leaders. This picture would suggest that rather than wait for Jacques Rogge to resign - he should be fired immediately.

http://israelisoldiersmother.blogspot.com/2012/07/is-this-picture-fraud.html

Danny Ayalon on the IOC

Danny Ayalon on the IOC


Danny Ayalon, Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister has released this statement: 




We were deeply disappointed that the IOC did not see fit to remember during the Opening Ceremony the eleven Israeli athletes murdered during the Munich Olympic Games 40 years ago. Only a few days we were told by IOC President Jacques Rogge that "the opening ceremony is an atmosphere that is not fit to remember such a tragic incident". However, the Opening Ceremony did include moments of silence and respect for those British citizens who died during terror attacks. We can only conclude that Rogge meant that the opening ceremony was not fit to remember a tragic incident involving Israelis. 


On Friday night, Rogge finally ran out of excuses. He said a minute silence was not part of the protocol, yet many previous Olympic Games Opening Ceremonies held a minute silence. It was claimed that it was too political, yet many political causes have been remembered and utilized during opening ceremonies. Finally, he used this his card, that it was not an atmosphere fit to remember such a tragic incident, yet other tragic incidents were remembered. 


On Friday night, Rogge lost our respect and lost his ability to legitimately represent the Olympic ideal that all are equal in the international family of nations. He was exposed as a hypocrite and as someone who was led by political interests and not the interests of the Olympic Games whose darkest moment saw eleven Israeli athletes tortured and murdered in the Olympic Village, during the Olympic Games under the auspices and supposed protection of the IOC.

http://israelisoldiersmother.blogspot.com/2012/07/danny-ayalon-on-ioc.html

The ugly face of New York Times readers

The ugly face of New York Times readers


Carol Brown


Good grief, the readership of the NYT are outright frightening.  Looking through the comments on its coverage of Romney's speech in Jerusalem is an eye opener. A sample:


 - It is more than deplorable to see AIPAC's control of Congress and the WH. In countries that do not have an AIPAC-equivalent , the legislatures are free to use critical thinking to reflect on history. The rest of the world needs only common sense to see & understand who are the foreigners, colonizers, land stealers , ethnic cleansers and brutal occupiers versus who are the indigenous people who have been forced from THEIR land (750,000 from 425 villages &12 urban centers in 1948 alone, all against the tenets of the UN Res #181) or to live gasping under the oppressive Zionist boot....


 - Romney is an empty vessel, currently being filled with sludge by the same group of neo-cons who got us into Iraq: same fears, same rhetoric, same tactics ...and, potentially, the same result.


 - Sheldon Adelson's money is working, at the detriment of American interests. Next will be Americans dying for Israel. If Romney is elected Iran bombing is guaranteed.


 - The US should not ever lift a finger to help Israel for reasons well known to all.


 - The speech must have been written by Bibi and edited by Sheldon Adelson. This rhetoric will only serve to further Israel's isolation at a time when it should be reaching out to its neighbors.


 - Our support for Israel is the reason Al Qaeda and other Extremists have targeted America and Americans , so what do Politicians do vow even more support for Israel .


 - Just what we need, a pip-squeak, unstable middle east nation running our foreign policy. Israel has managed to alienate all its neighbors and half its own population. There are much better nations to follow if we feel we cannot lead. On foreign policy Romney is nothing less than a menace.


 - I can't believe I'm writing this but I'm beginning to sympathize with Ahmadinejad and the mullahs. Willard: next time you decide to go abroad please remember to take your ventriloquist with you.


 - Iran will eventually build or acquire a nuclear weapon (if they haven't already) and oh my god here's what will happen: NOTHING.


This is what liberalism has wrought. Fools who think themselves informed. Useful idiots, indeed. It's impossible to read too many comments as they are just so terrifying.


 http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/07/the_ugly_face_of_new_york_times_readers.html

Romney under Palestinian fire for unflattering remarks, but UN research backs him up

Romney under Palestinian fire for unflattering remarks, but UN research backs him up


Leo Rennert


Before leaving Israel and heading to Poland, Mitt Romney threw diplomatic caution to the wind with remarks that prompted outrage from Palestinian leaders.


First, by declaring that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, Romney put himself at odds with President Obama, whose White House spokesman Jay Carney had no answer when reporters asked him to name the capital of the Jewish state.  Obama wants to leave his options open to push for a division of Jerusalem.  Romney flatly rejected any such option.


Not surprisingly, Romney's acknowledgment of Jerusalem as Israel's capital immediately drew vehement attacks from the Palestinian side.  Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian Authority's chief negotiator and its de facto propaganda minister, let fly with such epithets as "racist, extremist, lacking in vision."


But Romney wasn't through yet in throwing a pro-Israel gauntlet into his diplomatic brew.  At a political donors' breakfast, he offered his take on "dramatically stark differences in economic vitality" between Israel and the Palestinian territories.  Cultural differences, he opined, are at least part of the reason.


This also drew predictable Bronx cheers from the Palestinians, who again leveled "racist" accusations against the presumptive GOP presidential contender.


Mainstream media promptly pounced on what they described as  another Romney foreign policy gaffe.  But was it a gaffe, a misstep -- or did Romney hit the nail on the head with his comment about cultural differences between Israel and the Palestinians?


Ironically, a series of UN reports on lagging living standards in the Arab world backs up Romney's observation.  Over the last 10 years, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has issued a series of studies on why Arabs face critical challenges in removing stubborn barriers that impede human development.  Incidentally, these studies were conducted by independent researchers and scholars from the Arab world.


Their findings blame poor governance, lack of individual freedom and gender inequality -- the very elements that Romney summarized as "cultural" deficiencies among Palestinians.  While the UN reports range across the entire Arab world, their  findings are equally applicable to the poor performance of Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party in the West Bank and, in spades, of Hamas rule in Gaza.


Under the criteria of the UN reports, good governance in Arab societies is impeded by "political and social flaws and constraints" on human freedom and individual sense of personal security.  These are commodities  in rare supply in the Fatah-governed West Bank and in Hamas-ruled Gaza.


As for gender inequality, the UN reports tag it as a "main obstacle" to full human development.  More than half of Arab women were found to be illiterate.  The ratio may be less high in the West Bank, but Islamist repression in Gaza more than makes up for it.  The UN reports call for empowerment of women as key to prosperous societies.  As between Israel and the Palestinians, this is an area where Palestinian women still have a way to go before getting on a par with most Israeli women.


Bottom line: Far from having committed a gaffe, Romney may have been on to something significant.

Leo Rennert is a former White House correspondent and Washington bureau chief of McClatchy Newspapers


http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/07/romney_under_palestinian_fire_for_unflattering_remarks_but_un_research_backs_him_up.html 

Timeline Palestine: "Is The British Museum Rewriting History?" (with update)

Timeline Palestine: "Is The British Museum Rewriting History?" (with update)

That's the question posed by one of my much valued Christian readers, Ian G, who earlier today visited the Birmingham (UK) Museum to see a British Museum touring exhibition about the Pharoahs.


He wrote on its blogsite:

"I have just visited the exhibition in Birmingham. I was exceedingly disappointed with an overpriced and dull waste of an hour. Furthermore, there was a gross inaccuracy that would appear to be supporting the bogus Arab claim that Palestine pre-existed Israel. On the time-line you state that one of the Pharoahs conducted campaigns against Nubia and Palestine in 2055 BC.  It was, at that point, Canaan. The Sea People, later the Philistines, did not occupy what we now call the Gaza Strip until the 12th Century BC.

The name of Palestine was not commonly given to the whole of the land until the Romans ethnically cleansed Israel in 70 AD. Palestine was never an independent Kingdom and did not include any Arabs until after the Islamic conquests. Finally, it was part of the British Mandate and Israel was re-established by the League of Nations and then by the UN in 1947. The Gaza Strip was taken by Egypt and Samaria (West Bank) by Jordan and it has been Arab occupied land since then.  Yasser Arafat created the notion of an Arab Palestine after the Arab defeat in 1967.

It seems that you are colluding in the rewriting of history in order to give an Arab Palestine a bogus history and to deny Israel's legitimacy. Using Palestine as a substitute for Canaan is disingenuous as you do not explain where Nubia was.

Will this egregious mistake be corrected or will you continue misleading the public over this politically sensitive issue?"

Update:

The British Museum has replied to Ian:

"I am sorry to hear that you did not find the exhibition engaging. In archaeological and Egyptological discourse, ‘Palestine’ (and ‘Syro-Palestine’) refers to an area (broadly from the north of Sinai to Kadesh, and from the Mediterranean to the current Jordan border), not a present or past state. Similarly ‘Nubia’ is an area that overlaps the boundaries of several historic polities, including today. “Israel” is generally used to refer to the modern state, and “Israelites” as the group of people first mentioned in ancient texts on the stela of Merenptah in the 13th century BC. There is no reference to Arab peoples, or the Palestinian Authority in the exhibition, which would of course be inappropriate given the timeframe covered. Please accept our apologies if the wording has caused any offence. Neal Spencer, British Museum"

And Ian has responded:

"I agree that Nubia needs explanation which isn’t given on the timeline. Clearly, Palestine also needs explanation. It is a politically charged term and gives rise to the misconception that Palestine pre-dates Israel.

You claim that the term is part of archaeological and Egyptological discourse. G.W. Anderson some-time Professor of Hebrew and O.T. Studies at Edinburgh in his book ‘A Critical Introduction to the Old Testament’ ( published 1959 and revised several times till 1972) never refers to the Land as Palestine. Similarly, ‘Bernhard W. Anderson Living World of the Old Testament (2nd Edition 1967)’ which has even more archaeological content that his namesake. Also John Bright ‘A History of Israel’ only uses the term on maps and then not until the Maccabees. By then, some Greek writings were using the term. Hardly surprising, considering the origins of the Philistines. More recently, the Illustrated Bible Dictionary IVP 1980 has an extensive entry for Palestine, but only for geology, geography, agriculture and the like. For history, it cross-refers to Canaan, Israel, Judah and the Philistines. For archaeology, it refers to individual sites. Some entries do use the term Palestine rather loosely but the current revisionism was not really underway in 1980.

The use of Palestine and Syro-Palestine date from Roman times. This latter term, along with period of Syrian occupation well before the Romans, provide the basis for modern day Syria’s claims to Israel as a province of Syria. These terms are loaded.

Nubia, was at various times and with various borders, an independent, self-ruling, political entity. Palestine has never been an independent, self-ruling, political entity. Nubia existed in 2055 BC. Palestine did not. To use both words in the same sentence and in the same way must lead to the inference that they are similar entities.

Currently, the Palestinian Authority, the Waqf and various other ‘scholars’ are promulgating a version of history which eradicates Israel from the Land altogether. Although to any rational scholar this is ridiculous, many people now believe it.

In Theology, the term ‘myth’ has a precise meaning and does not, necessarily, imply that an event is unhistorical. Most people think it means ‘fairy tale’. When educating the general public one needs to be aware of this sort of misunderstanding.

I don’t accept that Palestine is a scholarly term, in common scholastic use and (especially since 1947), referring to a particular or general area. You draw its border at the Jordan, but the British Mandate included Trans-Jordan (now the Kingdom of Jordan) and I have maps that include what is now part of Syria. In other words, the term you are using as a general scholarly term is, in fact, politically defined.

On the time-line Palestine is used to refer to Canaan in 2055 BC. The area you define as Palestine would not include parts of Canaan!

It’s just too confusing.

Which is my point. It would have been simple to include a foot-note explaining where Nubia and Canaan were. In the case of Canaan; Israel, the disputed territories and part of Jordan. In the case of Nubia; parts of Southern Egypt and Northern Sudan.

In the meantime, your exhibition states that Palestine existed in 2055 BC. At best, this is poor scholarship, bad teaching and dangerously ignorant of politics. At worst, it is collusion with those who seek to eradicate Israel ‘from the River to the Sea’. ” (broadly from the north of Sinai to Kadesh, and from the Mediterranean to the current Jordan border) “.

It is not a matter of offense to me. I am not a Jew or an Israeli. It is a matter of scholarly accuracy and, also, sensitivity to the current and volatile situation in the Land."

Palestine – Jews and Arabs, the Mandate and the Law

 by David Singer

Read on for article

The Levy Commission’s resurrection of the Mandate for Palestine as the legal title deed establishing Israel’s entitlement to claim sovereignty in the West Bank has come 48 years after the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) first tried to bury it…writes David Singer.

A member of the Levy Commission – Alan Baker – stated this week that the three Commissioners were:

“legal experts examining a legal situation and making legally oriented recommendations.”

Two short statements made by the PLO in 1964 and 1968 had attempted to negate the unanimous decision of the League of Nations in 1922 to grant the Mandate for Palestine to Great Britain to enable the Jewish people to reconstitute the Jewish National Home in any part of former Palestine.

Those statements also became the opening shots in an ongoing and concerted Arab campaign of misinformation and disinformation to denigrate and vilify  the Jewish People’s entitlement to its own state in its ancient and biblical homeland.  They provide potent evidence to explain why the conflict between Arabs and Jews still remains unresolved in 2012.

The first statement – in 1964 – appeared in Article 18 of the Palestinian National Covenant :

“The Balfour  Declaration, the Mandate system  and all that have been based upon them are considered fraud”

 The second – in 1968 – followed the loss of the West Bank by Jordan to Israel in the 1967 Six Day War.

Article 18  was replaced by Article 20 in a revamped document – the Palestinian National Charter – to declare:

“The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine and everything that has been based on them are deemed null and void.”

 The change – from  the “Mandate system” being “fraud” – to the “Mandate for Palestine” being “null and void” – was deliberate.

The “Mandate system “- in the form of the Mandates for Syria and Lebanon and Mesopotamia (Iraq)  - had delivered self-determination for the Arabs and the creation of three sovereign Arab states. To continue to declare the Mandate system a “fraud”  would undermine the sovereign integrity of those Arab states.

The Mandate for Palestine was solely targeted. It was no longer a “fraud” – it was “null and void”.

In one fell swoop the Arabs had dismissed as “null and void” not only the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate for Palestine – but also the resolutions of the San Remo Conference and the Treaty of Sevres in 1920, article 80 of the United Nations Charter in 1945 and Security Council resolution 242 in 1967.

Such double standards and hypocrisy seem to have escaped the international community or to have been deliberately overlooked by it.

The Arabs were perfectly entitled to ignore this body of international law if they wished  - but they should have been forced to pay a high price for doing so in the form of suspension from membership of the United Nations and its other organs – until they acknowledged and agreed to accept the rule of law in the conduct of international relations between member states of the UN.

Instead – the international community pandered to the whim of these serial law-deniers for a variety of  reasons – mainly oil, terrorism and geopolitical jockeying for influence in the Arab world.

Ignoring Israel’s legal rights under the Mandate at the United Nations has proved disastrous for the cause of peace in the Middle East – has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews and Arabs – and has wreaked untold suffering and trauma on millions of others.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in its 2004 decision on the legality of Israel‘s security barrier – gave an air of legal respectability to the irrelevance of the Mandate – referring to it only once in the following statement.

“Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire. At the end of the First World War, a class A. Mandate for Palestine was entrusted to Great Britain by the League of Nations,pursuant to paragraph 4 of Article 22 of the Covenant, which provided that:

 “Certain communities, formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone.’”

 That this statement was demonstrably wrong was made clear by the following statement in the Palestine Royal Commission Report of 1937 – following its exhaustive consideration of the Mandate for Palestine:

 “The Mandate is of a different type from the Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon and the draft Mandate for ‘Iraq. These latter, which were called for convenience “ A ” Mandates, accorded with the fourth paragraph of Article 22. Thus the Syrian Mandate provided that the government should be based on an organic law which should take into account the rights,interests and wishes of all the inhabitants,and that measures should be enacted ”to facilitate the progressive development of Syria and the Lebanon as independent States“. The corresponding sentences of the draft Mandate for ‘Iraq’ were the same. In compliance with them National Legislatures were established in due course on an elective basis.

Article I of the Palestine Mandate, on the other hand, vests “full powers of legislation and of administration“, within the limits of the Mandate, in the Mandatory.”

The Commission further asserted:

“Jews were admitted to be in Palestine by right. The little Jewish minority was to be helped to grow by immigration. To facilitate the establishment of the Jewish National Home was a binding international obligation on the Mandatory. “

It also made clear:

“The Mandate also imposed specific obligations towards the Arabs.Their civil and religious rights and their position as affected by immigration and land-settlement were not to be prejudiced.”

Notably absent in the Mandate was there any mention of the Arabs in Palestine having any political rights.

For the ICJ to summarily dismiss the Mandate and make the fundamental error it did in just one sentence – shows how successful the campaign begun by the Arabs 40 years earlier had become.

The ICJ decision has since been used as a whipping post at the United Nations to deny that Israel has any rights in international law to be and remain in the West Bank.

The Levy Committee has reversed that downward spiral and identified the Mandate for Palestine as the legal basis for any decisions taken by Israel aimed at resolving the allocation of sovereignty in the West Bank between Jews and Arabs.

Hopefully the nations of the world will now sit up and take notice.

David Singer is a Sydney Lawyer and Foundation Member of the International Analysts Network

http://www.jwire.com.au/featured-articles/palestine-jews-and-arabs-the-mandate-and-the-law/26818

Mitt Romney Captures Jerusalem

Mitt Romney Captures Jerusalem

by Barry Rubin

 

Speaking to an often-cheering group of about 400 people in Jerusalem, Governor Mitt Romney gave a speech less notable for what he said than for the fact that the audience believed he was sincere in saying it.

At a beautiful outdoor setting with the Old City in the background, Romney declared his strong support for Israel, using phrases often heard from American presidents. He also proclaimed his view that Jerusalem is Israel’s eternal capital. The difference between the two presidential candidates, of course, is that those Israelis listening to both of them are less inclined to think that when President Barack Obama said similar things to AIPAC meetings he was describing what he thinks and intends to do.

Clearly, Romney was restrained by the American principle that partisan politics stops at the water’s edge, the view that no politician should criticize a president or U.S. government while abroad. Thus, Obama’s name—or even his specific policies—was never explicitly mentioned.

What Romney did do, however, was to scatter among the assertions of U.S. support for Israel’s security and a strong belief in a U.S.-Israel alliance some subtle references that many viewers and much of the mass media are likely to miss. Here are the key ones, which give some hints about Romney’s future campaign and possibly his presidency:

–Not allergic to Israel’s center-right. Romney quoted former Prime Minister Menahem Begin twice and referred to “my friend, Bibi Netanyahu.” Obama wouldn’t have cited either man and is known to loathe Netanyahu. Romney and Netanyahu have known each other for years. The Begin quotes were significant: that Israel will never again let its independence be destroyed (a reference perhaps to Israel’s need not to be completely subservient to America’s current president) and that if people say they want to destroy you then believe them (an explicit reference to Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons).

On the other hand, however, Romney should have quoted Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, or someone else to balance things off. Romney should not mirror Obama’s approach of choosing one sector of Israeli politics to cultivate. And since there is a broad Israeli national consensus on “foreign policy” this would not be at all hard to do.

–“The reality of hate.” This phrase used by Romney struck me as very significant. It occurred in the context of speaking about how many Arab and Muslim forces feel about Israel. It shows that he is aware that the desire to destroy and injure Israel goes beyond pragmatic considerations and is not something people will be talked out of trying to do. It is enormously important for an American president to understand that there are those in the Middle East who hate the United States and Israel and that it is impossible to appease or befriend them.

–He also said that Israel “faces enemies that deny past crimes against the Jewish people and intend to commit new ones.” This was a reference to Iran but also reflects his understanding about the depth of the conflict and the incredible difficulty of resolving it, a contrast to Obama’s at-least-initial stance.

–A real comprehension of terrorism, not mitigated by attempts at “balance” or rationalization. Romney referred both to the Munich Olympics attack—significant given the ongoing Olympics and his own experience running the Games—and the tenth anniversary of a bombing at Hebrew University that, he noted, killed both Israeli and American students.

– While spending much of the speech declaring his commitment to stopping Iran from getting nuclear weapons—a position that Obama also takes in his rhetoric—Romney also mentioned Iranian dissidents, recalling their repression by the regime. A knowledgeable listener would recall that Obama refused to help the dissidents. “The threat to Israel comes not from the Iranian people but from a regime that oppresses them,” Romney said.

–Of tremendous importance was Romney’s hint that the weakness of the Obama administration has encouraged extremists to become more aggressive and Iran to be bolder. He never said this directly but mentioned “the ayatollahs in Tehran testing our moral defenses” to see if the West would abandon Israel. Perhaps the speech’s most important line was this one:

“We cannot stand silent as those who seek to undermine Israel, voice their criticisms. And we certainly should not join in that criticism.”

This is a critique of Obama’s argument that he would persuade the Arabs to end the conflict by distancing the United States from Israel.

–On one point, Romney seemed to echo Obama by saying that the United States should be on the “right side of history.” Yet he added that the United States must make strong arguments to shape the values and systems that prevail in the Arab world. In contrast, Obama’s policy seems more passive, merely accepting whatever prevails in those countries. One could go even further and point to Obama’s backing for Muslim Brotherhood forces on a number of occasions.

References to the Arab world were relatively limited. On Egypt he said that hopefully the new government there understands the importance of respecting minority rights and keeping the peace agreement with Israel. Syria, Romney said, in an outdated phrase, was on the verge of civil war. The civil war has already arrived.

Much of the rest of the speech discussed the threats to Israel, the common interests of the two countries, and other staples of such occasions. Israel, Romney stated, exports technology, not tyranny and terrorism.

What was especially interesting was Romney’s list of five factors that brought together the United States and Israel: democracy, the rule of law, a belief in universal rights granted by our Creator (a reference to the Declaration of Independence and a subtle rebuke to Obama’s frequent omission of that divine attribution), free enterprise, and freedom of expression.

And then Romney added something that might become one of his most important lines in the months to come: Capitalism was the only economic system in history to raise people from poverty and create a huge middle class.

For full text and video see here.

http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/2012/07/29/presidential-candidate-mitt-romney-captures-jerusalem/?singlepage=true

Understanding Real Israeli Politics

Understanding Real Israeli Politics


“Can’t anybody here play this game?”  --Casey Stengel, great baseball coach


By Barry Rubin


Stengel’s complaint is the precise description of Israeli politics nowadays. To a remarkable extent—and this has nothing to do with his views or policies—Bibi Netanyahu is the only functioning politician in Israel today. No wonder he is prime minister, will finish his current term, and will almost certainly be reelected in 2013.


Consider the alternatives. The number one such option is Shaul Mofaz who is head of Kadima. Mofaz was a competent general but is a dreadful politician. He may be the least charismatic man I’ve ever met. Tsippi Livni, his predecessor, was a disaster as leader of the self-described centrist party. Here is a list of her major failures:


--She did not take the opportunity to oust the smarmy party leader Prime Minister Ehud Olmert when the corruption charges against him piled up.




--She did a poor job in the dealing with the  end-game in the Gaza war in January 2009.


--She mishandled the coalition negotiations when she did become acting prime minister, leading to the government’s fall.


--She barely beat Mofaz in the 2008 party primary.


--Although her party had one seat more than Netanyahu’s in the 2009 election, Livni bungled the chance for some kind of coalition or rotation agreement. True, Netanyahu held the upper hand and had no incentive to give up much but that was all the more reason for her to offer him a good enough deal so she wouldn't be thrown into fruitless opposition. 


--As leader of the opposition Livni was a total failure, never providing a good counter to Netanyahu’s positions and showing signs of personal panic that shocked people. Even the anti-Netanyahu media couldn’t rally behind her.


So Livni was a catastrophe; Kadima, itself a merger of ex-Likud and ex-Labor party people, developed no personality of its own.



Mofaz’s record is quite bad, too. In fact, as one Israeli joke puts it, Mofaz in the party leadership accomplished as much self-inflicted damage in three months as Livni had in eighteen months. Previously, he said he would never leave Likud for Kadima, and then did so a few hours later. In 2012 he said he wouldn’t join Netanyahu’s coalition, then did, and then announced he was leaving within a few days  over the issue of drafting yeshiva (Orthodox religious studies) students.


Everyone knows that if an election is held, Kadima will collapse. Where will most of its voters go? Almost certainly to Netanyahu. So Mofaz is bluffing and everybody knows it. He cannot afford to have elections. So there’s another joke in Israel that the country will have “early elections” when Netanyahu’s term comes to an end, just after the end of 2013.


Then there’s the left. The Labor Party has split, with the smaller, more national security-oriented faction led by Defense Minister Ehud Barak sticking with Netanyahu’s coalition. That group should also disappear in the next election.


The remaining part of the Labor party has veered to the left and makes domestic social issues its priority. That might well revive the party—especially with the defection of lots of Kadima voters but it won’t win them an election. The party is now led by Shelly Yachimovich whose career experience consists of having been a radio journalist and has never been a cabinet member.


Of course, there were social protests in Israel last year about high prices for some consumer goods and for apartments. There are genuine problems. But these are the result of economic policies that also brought Israel one of the best records of any developed country in the world during the international recession.


And the fall-out from the “Arab Spring” puts national security issues once again front and center.
Alongside of this has been the collapse of the social protests. Last year the movement could mobilize hundreds of thousands—though the media exaggerated its size—and had broad public sympathy across the political spectrum.


Now it is reduced to hundreds or a few thousands at most. Why? Because the loony leftists ousted the moderate leadership which had some realistic proposed solutions.  


Yachimovich has no monopoly on picking up this support of the discontented. Israelis are realists and know that, unfortunately, a lot of the money intended to be used for social benefits now has to go to build a fence along the border with Egypt and build up Israel’s defensive forces there.
Then there are various centrist good-government style parties that are likely to take votes from Labor and from each other, notably the new party of Yair Lapid, whose father was also a journalist who also started a failed centrist, good-government and secularist party.  


 As I’ve often remarked, there is no country in the world about which people think they know more and that they actually know less. We often focus on bias but ignorance is equally important.


There are three key factors necessary to understand contemporary Israeli politics.


First, Netanyahu is not seen by the electorate generally as being right-wing and hawkish but as being centrist. He has successfully been developing this posture now for about fifteen years without much of the Western media appearing to notice.


Second, Israelis don’t really see the likelihood that different policies are going to make lots of Arabs and Muslims love Israel, or bring peace with the Palestinians, or end the vilification of Israel by the left. All of those things were tried by means of Israel taking high risks and making big concessions during the 1992-2000 period. Israelis remember, even if others don’t, that this strategy doesn’t work.


Third, there is no other politician who is attractive as an alternative prime minister.


We now know that President Barack Obama’s administration thought that he was going to overturn Netanyahu and bring Livni to power on a platform of giving up a lot more to the Palestinians on the hope that this would bring peace. The editorial pages of American newspapers and alleged experts still advocate this basic strategy. They couldn’t possibly be less connected to reality.

http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/2012/07/understanding-real-israeli-politics.html

About That Special Relationship

About That Special Relationship


Romney has landed in Jerusalem and Obama is threatening to visit Israel in his second term. This seems like good news for Americans, but presidential and pre-presidential visits are often bad news for Israelis. 




Romney's trip itinerary covering the UK, Israel and Poland is a clever road map critique of Obama's foreign policy. Kerry and Obama both campaigned on a promise to fix America's broken relations with its allies. Romney is subtly doing the same thing, paying a visit to allies alienated by the last three years.


When Obama first visited Israel the contentious Democratic primaries had just wrapped up and Jewish voters and organizations had thrown their support to Hillary Clinton. Obama had Jewish leftists, but he didn't have more middle-of-the-road Jewish Democrats. And additionally paying a visit to the home of the Little Satan was a way of dispelling suspicions about his Muslim roots.


Obama hasn't bothered with a visit to Israel, but he hasn't bothered appearing in person at the NAACP either. And that's all for the best. Israel needs a visit from Obama about as much as it needs more of the "mysterious fires" being set as part of the Arson Jihad.


A presidential visit to most other countries is a formality while a presidential visit to Israel is an unpleasantness. Presidents who visit Israel must also stop off for a visit with the terrorist leaders. Presidents don't just stop by, have a pita, smell the flowers and do some handshakes. Instead they arrive tasked with peacemaking duties and then they task everyone else with their peacemaking.


There is something intriguing, though little good, about Putin's visit to Israel, because it at least has the air of unpredictability. Presidential visits to Israel however are painfully predictable. There is never anything new that comes out of those trips and nothing good either. They are a lot like family reunions, pleasant in theory, but uncomfortable in practice. Both have a special relationship that they can never quite define and the visits always carry with them an aura of disappointment. 


A Presidential visit has the air of a boss coming downstairs to check up on a lazy employee. On arrival, there are the customary expressions of a hope for peace. In private whatever Prime Minister is in office will be upbraided for still not having achieved peace. At a joint press conference in a capital that the United States still doesn't recognize,  after the usual formalities about the special relationship and the commitment to Israel's security, the President will tell reporters that more sacrifices are needed for peace.


"And next time I talk to you there had better be peace," is the unspoken message always left hanging in the air.


The pre-presidential visits are less of a chore, but no more significant. Candidates stop by Israel the way that they do any other state. They visit a few significant places, have their picture taken there, get a brief tour from local officials and fly over the narrowest point in Israel's border as a demonstration of just how strategically precarious the situation is.


Like all practiced politicians they are very understanding of the problems that their hosts have, whatever those problems might be. They emphasize that unlike the last guy from the other party, they will not pressure Israel to make more concessions. And then a few years later they are disembarking from an airplane and frowning at the lack of peace on the airport tarmac. "Where is that damn peace already? I ordered it last week."


Israel would be best served if the next American President forgot that Israel even existed or decided that it was a small country like Slovenia or Fiji, and need not be bothered with. A great month would be a month that passed without any State Department statements on Israel or a single question or answer from the White House Press Secretary about that small country wedged in between much bigger countries where frankly more interesting things are going on right now.


Instead no one ever forgets Israel. It's the one country that the Western world and the Muslim world are equally obsessed with. Asia is mystified by that obsession and has been ever since the days when it was being flooded by Nazi propaganda about the Jews controlling the world, even while penniless Jewish refugees were showing up in China and Japan.




The Jews not only don't control the world, they don't even control their own borders or get to name their own capital. And not a day passes by without some pundit putting paws to iPad and pounding out some turgid prose about the hopes for peace that can only be realized when the warmongering Israelis get over the Holocaust and help the terrorist gangs of Fatah and Hamas have their own state.


Other countries have art, science, historical marvels and gleaming beaches. Israel has those things but they don't exist in the official narrative. The backbreaking labor of nearly a century is nothing more than a minor mention in yet another news story about Israeli checkpoints preventing pregnant women and suicide bombers from reaching Jerusalem quickly enough.


The dark cloud of the eternal peace process overshadows everything that Israel is and does. And it defines its relationship with American leaders who on their initial visits may see Israel as a place but on their succeeding visits see it as a problem in need of a Two-State Solution.


The American-Israeli relationship began when the United States began running out of Muslim allies in the Middle East. It began to decline when the United States pulled Egypt out of the Soviet camp. It has gone up and down each time administrations have gone looking for long term relationships in the Muslim world. The American and Israeli governments have been like a couple that had to settle for each other because they have no one else.


Israel lost its French paramour and the United States never found a Muslim Middle Eastern country that was reliably friendly and whose leaders didn't need the US Marines to protect them from their own people. Despite its best diplomatic efforts, the United States has never found anyone else, but that doesn't stop it from constantly lecturing Israel on its shortcomings and reminding it how their special relationship is preventing the United States from getting any of the gorgeous Muslim states it could have had.


Obama was the best bid for landing a special relationship with the Muslim world, but despite his best efforts, no such relationship has materialized. But the blame for that, as usual, doesn't go to Obama, it goes to the Israelis for scaring away all the potential dates. In Washington D.C. the diplomats brood over their latest plans for landing Iran or fixing Egypt so that they can dump Israel for good, and the Israelis try to flirt with China or Russia; but in the end they all have to go home together because there is no one else.


Israel and America are stuck with each other. America needs a reliable partner in the Middle East whose government won't suddenly fall and be replaced by Jihadist maniacs and Israel needs a friend whose leaders don't openly talk about how much they hate it. It's not exactly a match made in heaven, but for two democracies with a certain amount of shared history and shared problems, it's all they have.


There's not much special about the visits back and forth by American and Israeli leaders. Mostly they sound like an old married couple having the same argument for the thousandth time  "Make peace with the Palestinians!" "Do something about Iran or I will." And then with nothing accomplished everyone goes home with gritted teeth.


There are high hopes that a new president will be different and that this time the cycle will be broken but then a few years later we are right back where we started and usually worse off. After a while all the headlines run together in smears of ink, the broadcasts full of earnest reporters standing against some dark background somberly reporting about another blow to the hopes of peace all seem the same no matter how many fashions have changed and how many decades have passed.




The United States expects Israel to fix its problems with the Muslim world by completing the peace process. But the problem with this Two-State Solution is that Israel isn't the source of the problems in the Muslim world. America's problems with Islam come from the same place as Russia's problems with Islam and as everyone else's problems with Islam.


Nevertheless the thinking goes that when Israel finally builds its own special relationship with the Muslim world, the United States will be able to build its special relationship with the Muslim world too. And when every president sits down at the table and is given his briefings, those briefings place Muslim violence in the context of Israel. And Israel becomes the Zionist Knot that has to be cut to untangle the hostility of 1 billion Muslims.


It's easier to cut up Israel than it is to deal with the possibility that Islam's internal conflicts and external hostilities might not be solvable. That they are something that we have to deal with without any easy short cuts through Jerusalem. And politicians are nothing if not fans of the easy way out. Presidential candidates may come and go, they may fly over and look at how narrow Israel is, meet with generals and soldiers in the field, and farmers and ranchers in their own fields, but when they leave then the Jewish State, that small elongated strip of land, becomes the knot that must be cut to make the Muslim world stop the killing and love America.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2012/07/about-that-special-relationship.html

A High Holy Whodunit

A High Holy Whodunit

By RONEN BERGMAN

One day this spring, on the condition that I not reveal any details of its location nor the stringent security measures in place to protect its contents, I entered a hidden vault at the Israel Museum and gazed upon the Aleppo Codex — the oldest, most complete, most accurate text of the Hebrew Bible. The story of how it arrived here, in Jerusalem, is a tale of ancient fears and modern prejudices, one that touches on one of the rawest nerves in Israeli society: the clash of cultures between Jews from Arab countries and the European Jews, or Ashkenazim, who controlled the country during its formative years. And the story of how some 200 pages of the codex went missing — and to this day remain the object of searches carried out around the globe by biblical scholars, private investigators, shadowy businessmen and the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency — is one of the great mysteries in Jewish history.

As a small group of us stood in a circle inside the vault in which the codex now resides, Michael Maggen, the head of the museum’s paper-conservation lab, donned a pair of gloves and carefully lifted one of its unbound pages, covered with three columns of beautiful calligraphy, for us to see. The pages were made from animal hides that were stretched and bleached and cut to make parchment; the scribe’s ink was made of powdered tree galls mixed with iron sulfate and black soot. “Considering the difficult conditions that the manuscript suffered over a great many years,” James Snyder, the museum’s director, said, “it is in remarkably excellent condition.” Snyder was happy to talk about how fortunate the museum was to be able to display the codex alongside the 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls and about the painstaking restoration that has taken place. But he refused to speculate on the sensitive question of where the missing pages, which constitute about 40 percent of the codex and whose value is estimated to be in the many millions of dollars, might be and how they might have disappeared.

To talk to the many individuals who are obsessed with finding the missing portions of the codex or solving the mystery of who stole them, or whose histories are somehow bound up with the story of the book, is to get a glimpse of the power it has held over people for more than a thousand years. In Aleppo, Syria, where the codex was safeguarded for six centuries, it was believed to possess magical properties. It was said that women who looked upon it would become pregnant, that those who held the keys to its safe were blessed, that anyone who stole or sold the codex was cursed and that a terrible plague would wipe out the Jewish community if it were removed from their synagogue. At the tops of some of the pages, the Aleppo elders inscribed a warning to would-be thieves: “Sacred to Yahweh, not to be sold or defiled.” And elsewhere: “Cursed be he who steals it, and cursed be he who sells it.” Among some parties, those fears persist even today.

For a thousand years after the Dead Sea Scrolls were written, the Jewish holy scriptures — the five parts of the Torah and 19 other holy books — were copied and passed down in the various Jewish communities from generation to generation. Some of these texts, according to Jewish faith, were handed down directly by God and included signs, messages and codes that pertained directly to the essence of existence. The multiplicity of manuscripts and the worry that any change or inaccurate transcription would lead to the loss of vital esoteric knowledge created the need for a single, authoritative text. And beyond its mystical significance, a unified text was also necessary to maintain Jewish unity after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Roman Empire. As Adolfo Roitman, the head of the Shrine of the Book, where the Dead Sea Scrolls and parts of the codex are displayed, said: “One can regard the thousand years between the scrolls and the codex, the millennium during which the standardization of the text was carried out, as a metaphor for the effort of the Jewish people to create national unity. One text, one people, even if it is scattered to the four ends of the earth.”

According to tradition, early in the sixth century, a group of sages led by the Ben-Asher family in Tiberias, on the Sea of Galilee, undertook the task of creating a formal and final text. The use of codex technology — a method that made it possible to record information on both sides of a page, in book form, as a cheaper alternative to scrolls — had already evolved in Rome. Around A.D. 930, the sages in Tiberias assembled all 24 holy books and completed the writing of the codex, the first definitive Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible. From Tiberias, the codex was taken to Jerusalem. But Crusaders laid waste to the city in 1099, slaughtering its inhabitants and taking the codex. The prosperous Jewish community of Fustat, near Cairo, paid a huge ransom for it. Later, in the 12th century, it served Maimonides, who referred to it as the most accurate holy text, as a reference for his major work, the Mishneh Torah. In the 14th century, the great-great-great-grandson of Maimonides migrated to Aleppo, bringing the codex with him. There it was kept, for the next 600 years, in a safe within a small crypt hewed in the rock beneath Aleppo’s great synagogue.

The story of what happened next — how the codex came to Israel and where the missing pages might have gone — is a murky and often contradictory one, told by many self-serving or unreliable narrators. In his book, “The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible,” published in May by Algonquin Books, the Canadian-Israeli journalist Matti Friedman presents a compelling and thoroughly researched account of the story, some of which served as the catalyst for additional reporting here.

Before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Jewish leaders were intent on discovering and laying claim to their heritage in the region. They took an intense interest in archaeology, embarking on quests to bring significant items of Judaica to Palestine. The Aleppo Codex was one of their top priorities, but numerous attempts to retrieve it were thwarted, which for many Jews hailing from Aleppo was further proof of the myths surrounding the book. At the head of these ill-fated efforts was a leader of the Zionist movement, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, a prominent politician and a scholar of some renown, with a special interest in Jewish communities in Arab lands. (He was also among the first members of the armed nucleus of Jews in Palestine and was involved in the assassination of an ultra-Orthodox opponent of the Zionist mission.)

In 1935, Ben-Zvi traveled to Aleppo, where the elders of the Jewish community allowed him only a glimpse of the case in which the codex was kept. When he tried to convince them that the volume belonged in Jerusalem, they rejected his entreaties as the manipulations of an outsider intent on taking what was theirs to protect. Eight years later, in the midst of World War II, Ben-Zvi and other scholars tried again to win over the Aleppo community, fearing that the codex, contained as it was in an Arab state during wartime, was in danger. In 1943, they dispatched a Hebrew University lecturer named Yitzhak Shamosh, who was a native of Aleppo, to try to extricate the codex. Shamosh endangered his life by crossing the border into Syria, but once there, he, too, was rebuffed by the Aleppo leaders. Some of the younger members of the community, however, sharing Ben-Zvi’s fear that the codex was in danger, offered to help Shamosh steal it from the elders.

This spring, I spoke with his brother Amnon, who met Shamosh immediately upon his return to Jerusalem. “He was aware of the curses surrounding the book,” Amnon recalled. “ ‘Cursed be its seller, cursed be its defiler and cursed be the community of Aram Tzova [the biblical Hebrew name for Aleppo] if it were to depart from there.’ All of that would have been on his conscience. Ben-Zvi and the other superiors from the university were pressing him to take that upon himself, that he should wreck the Aleppo community. He just couldn’t do it.”

When Shamosh reported back to Ben-Zvi about his failure to retrieve the codex, Ben-Zvi responded, “It’s a pity we sent an honest man.”

Amnon said, “I saw him when he came back from that meeting with his fallen face.”

Ben-Zvi’s fears about the codex proved correct. On Nov. 30, 1947, the morning after the U.N. General Assembly voted in favor of the establishment of a Jewish state, a mob stormed the Jewish quarter of Aleppo, attacking the Jews and demolishing their businesses and setting fire to the synagogues. Professor Yom Tov Assis, an Aleppo native who today heads the Ben-Zvi Institute, formed in 1948 for the purpose of studying Jewish communities under Islam and in the Arab world, was 5 years old at the time. “I saw the mob kicking one of the rabbis and setting fire to the Jewish club,” he said. “The demonstrations and the yelling and the rioting went on for many days.”

News that the codex had been destroyed spread quickly across the globe. Because the elders in Aleppo forbade photographing the manuscript, the invaluable information that it contained was thought to have been lost forever. In Jerusalem, Yitzhak Shamosh grieved inconsolably at having let his fear of the curse prevent him from recovering it.

A few days after the riots began, a small group of community leaders learned that the reports of the destruction of the codex were premature. There are at least 10 accounts of how it was saved, but the true heroes appear to be the synagogue’s sexton, Asher Baghdadi, and his son, who returned to the ashes of the synagogue and gathered the scattered pages.

The Syrian government took an interest in the codex after an American antiquities merchant offered $20 million for it, and so the leaders of the Aleppo synagogue went to great lengths to persuade Syrian intelligence that the book had been burned. For 10 years, even after word got out that the codex had not been destroyed, they kept it hidden in secret locations and refused to contemplate moving it from Aleppo.

Yitzhak Ben-Zvi became Israel’s second president in 1952. Shortly after, he obtained a rabbinical ruling from the chief rabbi of Israel effectively annulling all curses connected to the codex and intensifying pressure on the Aleppo Jews to send it to Jerusalem. By this time, many Aleppo Jews had immigrated to New York, and some had become very wealthy. Ben-Zvi asked them to help sway the rabbis who remained in Syria, and he appealed to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (an organization whose financial aid was necessary for the survival of the remaining community in Aleppo), to cut the flow of funds if the codex was not transferred to Israel.

In 1957, two Aleppo rabbis, fearing their community was approaching its demise, decided to take advantage of a chance to smuggle the codex to Aleppo Jews now living in Israel. Murad Faham, an Aleppo Jewish merchant who had been expelled from Syria, was chosen for the mission. “Just before I left,” Faham, who died in 1982, would later relate, “Rabbi Moshe Tawil said to me, ‘I want to tell you something, but I fear for your well-being, because this thing is a danger to your life, and whoever is caught doing it will be executed by hanging.’ ” Faham, who would take every opportunity later to trumpet his own courage, recounted that he told the rabbi: “With the help of God, I will take it out. Don’t worry about my life, because if the Creator of the Universe has decreed that the book be taken out by me, it will be a great miracle that the Creator of the Universe is performing for my sake.”

A man in charge of looking after the codex arrived at Faham’s residence carrying a sack that contained the precious cargo. According to a report based on an investigation conducted later, Faham’s wife “was aware of the importance of the contents of the sack and of the risks involved, and without opening it, she wrapped it up in sheets of cheesecloth” — the family earned its living making cheese — “and blankets and hid it in a washing machine.”

According to the official story told by the Ben-Zvi Institute, the head rabbis of Aleppo employed Faham to deliver the codex to President Ben-Zvi, and through him to the institute. But a number of documents, examined by Matti Friedman and discussed in his book, reveal an entirely different story. The rabbis in Aleppo did not enlist Faham to deliver the codex to the president or his institute, but rather to the chief rabbi of the Aleppo Jews. What the rabbis never suspected was that Israeli agents from the Mossad and the Jewish Agency (which was in charge of the Jewish diaspora and of immigration to Israel) had been in touch with Faham and that he would receive special treatment upon immigration to Israel.

Officials from the Jewish Agency met Faham in Turkey and informed authorities in Jerusalem of all his movements. When Faham arrived safely at the port in Haifa, instead of handing the codex to a representative of the Aleppo community, he handed it to a member of the Jewish Agency’s immigration department, who passed it on to President Ben-Zvi.

“The official version of the story, the one I knew at the outset, states that the Aleppo Codex was given willingly to the State of Israel,” Friedman told me. “But that never happened. It was taken. The state authorities believed they were representatives of the entire Jewish people and that they were thus the book’s rightful owners, and also, perhaps, that they could care for it better. But those considerations don’t change the mechanics of the true story — government officials engineered a sophisticated, international maneuver in which the codex was seized from the Jews of Aleppo, and then arranged a remarkably successful cover-up of the fascinating and unpleasant details of the affair.”

In February 1958, leaders of the Aleppo Jews petitioned the rabbinical court to order Ben-Zvi to return the codex to them. During the course of the trial, the two Aleppo rabbis who gave the book to Faham testified angrily that they had instructed him to hand it to the chief rabbi of the community in Israel, not to anyone else. Faham claimed that they left it to him to decide what should be done with it. Ben-Zvi’s counsel asked that the details of the trial be kept secret, which remained so for 50 years.

Ezra Kassin, the head of the organization of Aleppo Jews in Israel today, has investigated the story of the codex and the fate of its missing pages for many years. He recently managed to obtain the secret trial transcripts. According to the lawyer for the plaintiffs, Faham’s testimony was full of contradictions. On March 27, the counsel for the state reported to President Ben-Zvi that Faham’s cross-examination “reached very high tension; but Mr. Faham stuck to his story.” During the trial, representatives of the Aleppo Jewish community accused Faham of accepting perks from the Israeli establishment and Ben-Zvi’s associates in exchange for handing the codex over to them, a charge that Faham denied. This month, I had a long conversation with his son at a shopping mall near Tel Aviv. He claimed that, first, it was his father and not the synagogue’s sexton who rescued the codex after the synagogue was attacked (in his story, Faham went into the flames to rescue the book); and second, that Faham smuggled it out of Syria because he believed that it belonged to the Jewish people and not to one community. Everything else, the son asserted, was a pack of lies. “My father never gave the codex to the [Aleppo] rabbis in Israel because he feared they would sell it,” he said. “He never received any perks from anyone.”

The trial dealt not only with the question of ownership of the codex but also touched on a far more profound issue: who represented Jewry, now that the State of Israel had been founded? It also forced a direct confrontation between the Zionist establishment, mostly Eastern European and secular in its makeup, and the community of Jews from Arab lands, who did not want to give up their cultural treasures. The trial ended when a secret compromise was agreed upon: the codex would continue to be housed at the Ben-Zvi Institute, but representatives of the Aleppo Jews would serve in a council overseeing the manuscript, along with Ben-Zvi and Faham.

The conflict with Israel’s Aleppo community, combined with financial troubles, led Faham to emigrate to New York. From there, he went to great efforts to get Ben-Zvi to acknowledge that he had risked his life to recover the codex. After Faham requested his name be added to the codex in tribute to his efforts, Ben-Zvi eventually replied in May 1960, “I am prepared to add a note to the bound edition of the codex that will say that it was brought to Israel by you.” Almost a year later, waiting to see his request fulfilled, Faham wrote again: “Without a shadow of a doubt, matters of supreme importance have kept you too occupied to deal with my petty request. Nevertheless, I have written once more to remind you that the matter should not be doomed to the dust of forgetfulness, for it is more important to me than all the money in the world.”

Faham, who seemed to know a secret about the codex that the Israeli establishment was trying fervidly to conceal, was clearly not placated by Ben-Zvi’s words. Shlomo Zalman Shragai, the head of the Jewish Agency (and whose colleague was the one who took the codex from Faham at the Haifa port), tried to calm him but to no avail. “The man who delivered [the codex] and who is in the United States cannot control himself any longer,” Shragai wrote in a 1964 letter copied to Zalman Shazar, who had succeeded Ben-Zvi as president of Israel after his death a year earlier. “I am very apprehensive that the matter will become public and turn into worldwide scandal.”

What did Faham know that would cause such a worldwide scandal? Most likely it was that the codex had arrived in Israel nearly whole. Yet only after its arrival did nearly 200 pages disappear. And perhaps it was this secret that led the codex, the most important Jewish book in existence, to not be restored and put on careful display but instead be stored in an iron case in the offices of the Ben-Zvi Institute at Hebrew University.

The man who fought most forcefully on behalf of the neglected codex was Amnon Shamosh, brother of Yitzhak, the “honest” emissary who was unwilling to steal the manuscript in 1943 when he had the chance. Amnon is one of Israel’s best-known authors, achieving fame when his novel “Michel Ezra Safra & Sons” was adapted as a television series that nearly everyone in the country watched in the early 1980s, on what was then the only TV station in Israel. It told the tale of a family of bankers from Aleppo who lost everything and were forced to flee to Israel after the establishment of the state. Early in the story, the family patriarch rescues the Aleppo Codex from a fire and takes it to Nice, France.

Shamosh’s book and the TV series imbued the “Arab” Jews with newfound pride, illustrating to the Ashkenazim that they too came from a rich cultural tradition. “Suddenly they discovered that the Jews from the Arab lands were not primitive,” Shamosh told me. “That there were Jews here who were educated, shrewd and rich.”

Today, Shamosh lives in the Maayan Barukh kibbutz, near the Lebanese and Syrian borders. He is nearly blind; his thick glasses and a special electronic magnifying glass enable him to read, little by little, from the books that line his living-room walls. “A short while after the novel came out,” he told me, “I got a call from Edmond Safra, who asked me to come and see him at his office in Geneva.” Safra, a billionaire in the finance industry whose family came from Aleppo, was a great believer in metaphysical forces, and when he learned of Shamosh’s novel — and that his family’s name had been mentioned in connection with the removal of the codex — he was gripped with terror. In Geneva, he was waiting for Shamosh with an open checkbook. “Here,” Safra told him. “It’s yours. Write in it any amount that you want. I’ll buy all the books that are out there, and then you can print as many as you want with a different name.”

Shamosh said: “I tried to explain to him that it was all fictional, but I couldn’t get through to him. Safra said to me: ‘I don’t want to provoke the evil eye. This thing is going to bring about my death in terrible circumstances.’ ”

The Ben-Zvi Institute commissioned Shamosh, because of the success of his novel, to write a scholarly work on the codex. He submitted a manuscript containing the findings of his research, which included severe criticism of Murad Faham’s conduct and of the institute itself, for dereliction in their handling of the volume. Shamosh smiled when he recounted what happened when the institute received his manuscript: “There was a chapter on the conduct of the institute they wanted me to remove.”

He said he told them he was prepared to expunge his criticism of Faham, but he would not remove his findings on the neglect of the codex until he saw with his own eyes that restoration was being done on it. Later, a philanthropist from the Aleppo community in New York donated money for the restoration of the book, and it was transferred in an armored van to the conservation laboratory of the Israel Museum.

During the course of the work, which took six years, Maggen, the head of the museum’s paper-conservation lab, discovered something of major significance: Until then, the story that had been officially told was that the missing pages were destroyed in the blaze at the Aleppo synagogue, a theory supported by the purple signs of charring that existed on the edges of the rescued pages. But Maggen found that the purple markings were not caused by fire at all, but rather by a mold that discolored the pages. If these pages weren’t damaged by fire, then how could the others have been destroyed?

For quite some time, suspicion was directed at the members of the Aleppo community — that one or several of its members had taken the missing pages from the synagogue after the fire, or that those who had hidden the codex for 10 years before it was smuggled out of Syria had helped themselves to souvenirs. These theories made sense given the common belief that even a fraction of the codex had the power to protect its owner.

Rafi Sutton, who played a leading role in Israeli intelligence agencies, was born in Aleppo and lived there throughout his childhood. He is 80 now and lives in a small city outside Jerusalem. When I visited him at his home in May, he recalled the day of his bar mitzvah in 1945. “They gathered us, 15 children, stood us in a line, a few meters from the safe, and opened it with two keys,” he said. “Many of us were gripped by a powerful trembling, because since we were babies, we’d been taught that a plague would kill whoever didn’t relate to the book with suitable respect.”

A few days after the attack on the Aleppo synagogue, Sutton and his friend, Leon Tawil, went to examine the smoldering ruins. Tawil found a page with scripture on it and put it in his pocket. Later, at home, his father told him that he believed the leaf came from the codex. Tawil took it with him when he fled from Syria to Lebanon in 1950, and from there boarded a ship that took him to the United States, where he joined the Aleppo congregation in Brooklyn. He gave the page to his aunt, and when she died, her daughter Renee inherited it and gave it to her niece, whose son, Aryeh Romanoff, is today a judge in the Jerusalem District Court. Romanoff told me that an aunt from America — Renee — once came to visit and “brought with her this page and said she’d been told that it belonged to some sacred book.” He added: “My mother didn’t know what it was and ended up calling in an expert from the National Library. He came, opened the package and was out of his mind with happiness. ‘It’s the Aleppo Codex! It’s the Aleppo Codex!’ He was almost jumping with joy.”

In 1988, Menahem Ben-Sasson, deputy director of the Ben-Zvi Institute, located another fragment of a page, jealously guarded by an elderly man named Shmuel Sebbagh, who lived in Brooklyn. It was part of the Book of Exodus, which relates how, after the Nile turned to blood, Aaron stretched forth his staff, causing a plague of frogs to descend on Egypt. “I called him and introduced myself,” Ben-Sasson told me earlier this month in Tel Aviv. “He didn’t say hello or ask me what I wanted. He just told me firmly: ‘Forget about it. I do not intend to give it to you.’ ” Sebbagh wouldn’t say where he obtained the fragment, which he had laminated and kept in his pocket at all times. Only after his death, and in exchange for a large and undisclosed sum of money, did the Sebbagh family agree to hand it over to the Ben-Zvi Institute. It was put on display in the Shrine of the Book for the first time last month.

These are the only missing parts of the codex that have been located to date, yet the efforts to discover more persist. In the mid-1990s, Mossad, with some involvement from the C.I.A. and the U.S. State Department, conducted a large-scale secret operation to get the last Jews out of Syria, including the devastated Aleppo community, many of whose members believed that the curse of the codex had befallen them. As part of that operation, the Mossad managed to smuggle Torah scrolls and other sacred books back to Israel, but efforts to locate the missing codex pages led only to dead ends.

Amnon Shamosh told me that an anonymous source promised to pay for the acquisition of any codex pages. With this promise in hand, Shamosh turned to Vartan Gregorian, who was then the president of the New York Public Library. Gregorian agreed to place a notice in a journal for collectors of Judaica announcing that he would purchase pages from the codex. Shamosh, along with other scholars, made the rounds of wealthy communities of Aleppo Jews in Panama, São Paulo, Buenos Aires and New York, and were permitted to address congregations at Friday-night services. “Someone here may be in the possession of a piece of parchment without knowing of its great value for the Jewish people,” they would say. “Perhaps someone here has heard a story told by a grandfather from Aleppo. Please help us.” One of those emissaries was Ben-Sasson, who obtained a special judicial ruling from the chief rabbi of Israel reinstating the curses associated with the codex, only now they worked the other way: against anyone who was secretly holding on to it. “The holy manuscript must be returned to Jerusalem,” he pleaded, but he soon realized that there was no point to his efforts. “The members of the community explained to me that, with all due respect to the chief rabbi and the power of his ruling, the faith of the Jews of Aleppo in the power of the codex is greater by far, and they believe that even a tiny fragment from it bestows great strength of health and well-being upon them.”

Several people I interviewed for this article claimed that they had seen parts of the codex hidden away by former Aleppo residents or in the hands of collectors, but to date, all efforts to investigate such leads have been unsuccessful.

In 1989, Israel Television appointed Sutton to investigate the whereabouts of the missing pages. Sutton, after immigrating from Aleppo, served as an intelligence officer and a Mossad operative with considerable distinction. He even had experience rescuing precious documents: On June 6, 1967, in the midst of the Six Day War, Sutton, who was responsible for running agents in enemy territory, received an urgent cable instructing him to find an antiquities dealer named Dino, whom they suspected was in possession of one of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Sutton and other officers arrested the man and his son, who both emphatically denied the allegation, but after learning that a conversation they had in their jail cell about the scroll in question had been recorded, they confessed. “He realized that the game was up and began cooperating,” Sutton told me when we met in his home near Jerusalem in late May. “He took us to his home and began counting floor tiles. Five this way, four that way. Then he finds it and brings a plunger for clearing drains, uses it to lift two tiles, under which there’s a layer of straw. I tell him, ‘Pick it up yourself,’ because it may be booby-trapped. He picks up the straw, and under it there’s a shoe box. I go, ‘Lift it.’ So he lifts it. I go, ‘Open it.’ Inside, there’s more straw and two cylinders wrapped in cellophane and tied with red ribbon.” They turned out to be the Temple Scroll, the longest of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

It seemed fitting, then, that Sutton should lead a worldwide investigation into the mystery of the missing codex pages, and the conclusions of his inquiry were groundbreaking. A number of testimonies indicated that the codex survived the fire intact, or almost intact, and that it had also reached Israel intact. The suspicion now shifted from the Aleppo Jews to whoever held it in their possession after Murad Faham brought it to Israel. Shortly before he died, Shlomo Zalman Shragai, whose colleague took the codex from Faham at the port in Haifa, told Sutton that the manuscript reached him almost intact. Earlier this month, Shragai’s son told Ezra Kassin, as part of Kassin’s ongoing investigation, that he was present when the codex was brought to their home and that he definitely saw that “only a few pages were missing, three or four, all the rest were intact.”

Meir Benayahu, who was Ben-Zvi’s personal secretary when the codex reached him and who was also the first director of the Ben-Zvi Institute, had drawn up a memo upon receipt of the codex. Given Benayahu’s scholarly background and the historical significance of the codex, you would assume that there would be precise notes detailing its condition and the number of pages it contained, and yet apart from the name Keter Aram Tzova — the manuscript’s Hebrew name — no further details were provided. Furthermore, shortly after the codex was delivered, Ben-Zvi supplied the editors of the Hebrew Encyclopedia with incorrect information, which he had been given by Benayahu, regarding the number of pages. Only after some time was it discovered that almost half of the codex was missing.

Which leads us to Shlomo Moussaieff, a London jewelry mogul and one of the biggest collectors of Judaica in the world. Moussaieff, who refused to respond to my queries, told officials from the Ben-Zvi Institute, as well as Ezra Kassin, who is now the head of the Aleppo Jews in Israel, and Matti Friedman, the author, that in the mid-1980s two ultra-Orthodox Jews approached him in the lobby of the Jerusalem Hilton. One of them, Haim Schneebalg, was well known to him. Schneebalg was a shrewd dealer in ancient Jewish manuscripts and happened to be an acquaintance of Meir Benayahu. He was considered to be one of the most expert and reliable dealers in the field, who handled only highly valuable finds. When he and his partner approached Moussaieff, Schneebalg was carrying a briefcase. Moussaieff recalled the following exchange, which appears in Friedman’s book.

“Shlomo, come quick, we have something for you,” Schneebalg told him.

“What do you have?” Moussaieff asked.

“Quiet. We know that you’ll be quiet and won’t tell anyone,” Schneebalg said. The three men went up to a hotel room, where Schneebalg opened the briefcase.

In an interview shown in 1993 on Israel national TV, Moussaieff recalled: “They put the suitcase on the bed, opened it, opened a silky paper that was covering it. All of a sudden, my eyes popped out. I saw between 70 and 100 parchment pages lying on top of each other, inscribed with black ink that because of time had reddened slightly. In large letters, about double the size of a Torah scroll’s letters, with vowels. The handwriting was a little like a dancing handwriting. . . . I have no doubt that what I saw was part of the Aleppo Codex.”

The two argued over the price, and Moussaieff finally offered to buy only part of the manuscript, to which Schneebalg replied that it was all or nothing. In retrospect, Moussaieff would admit that he made a huge mistake. As he told a reporter from an Israeli newspaper in 1993: “I was greedy. I tried to make a lower offer, thinking perhaps they would agree to take less. The price they were asking wasn’t sky-high, but I tried to bargain with them. That’s how I lost the codex. Another buyer paid $100,000 more than I was ready to pay. . . . It’s with an ultra-Orthodox Jew in London. I have no intention of revealing his name.”

Ben-Zvi Institute officials say they tried to persuade Moussaieff to give them his name. “He did not admit anything,” Yom Tov Assis, the current director of the institute, told me. “I asked him to help me, but he kept mum, wouldn’t answer and seemed very hostile.”

Nor will Schneebalg ever reveal who bought the codex from him. On Aug. 16, 1989, in a room at the Plaza Hotel in Jerusalem, his body was discovered with blood dripping out of his nose. The person who rented the room, under the name Dan Cohen, had vanished, and the details he gave when checking in turned out to be false. Schneebalg’s ultra-Orthodox family refused to have a forensic autopsy carried out because of religious precepts, and the cause of death was never conclusively established. Many in the world of Judaica believe that he was murdered because of his involvement with the codex.

During his investigation, Sutton came to the conclusion that the theft was perpetrated after the codex arrived in Israel, and he said he had identified the thief. He devised an international sting operation to retrieve the missing pages, which would need financing, beyond what the TV station that had commissioned the investigation could supply.

In the early 1990s, Sutton happened to meet Edmond Safra in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel. Sutton promised him that if Safra would finance the sting operation to hunt for the missing pages, he would alleviate Safra’s anxiety by making it known on live television that his family had no connection to the codex. “And indeed, just as I had promised,” Sutton told me, “I declared to the entire nation on live TV that the codex was not in the hands of the Safras. Amnon Shamosh was sitting in the studio, and I turned to him and said, ‘Right, Amnon?’ and he nodded his head and said: ‘Right, right. It’s all fiction.’ After that I never heard a word from dear Edmond again. He disappeared, gone, and the operation was called off.”

Edmond Safra, whose fear of the evil eye had haunted him all his life, died in a terrible fire in his penthouse in Monaco in December 1999.

By virtue of the standing and prestige of President Ben-Zvi, some 3,000 manuscripts originating from Arab lands, some of them of major significance, have been deposited at the Ben-Zvi Institute. In contrast to the Aleppo Codex, most of these documents were donated willingly, in the confidence that the institute would protect and preserve them. It has now emerged, however, that throughout the 1950s and 1960s, a systematic plundering of ancient books and manuscripts not related to the codex took place there.

In 1970, Meir Benayahu ceased working as director of the institute for reasons that are unclear. Benayahu was the son of Yitzhak Nissim, the Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel in the 1960s, and the brother of Moshe Nissim, a politician who served in several cabinets. Benayahu, who died in 2009, was a leading collector of sacred books, and it was he who wrote the uncharacteristic memo for the receipt of the Aleppo Codex.

Moshe Nissim told me that his brother terminated his employment at the institute of his own volition. Benayahu left amid a power struggle over the leadership and location of the institute. Around the same time, sources there say, there was growing suspicion that he had been stealing manuscripts. It was Benayahu, in fact, who was the target of Sutton’s sting operation. “We used to call him the ‘Thief of Baghdad,’ ” a source told me.

Benayahu never left an orderly catalog of incoming books and manuscripts, so it is difficult to ascertain exactly what went missing, except from various scattered notes and requests by donors to view the documents they had donated. Such a request was recently submitted by the Silvera family of New York, in the form of a sharp complaint to the Israeli State Comptroller. In 1961, David Silvera, a banker and merchant, donated a rare manuscript of the Hebrew Bible from Corfu. Ben-Zvi himself signed one of the receipts for the manuscript on May 15, 1961. Meir Benayahu signed another on the same date. The book has vanished.

The institute has taken an inconsistent stand on Benayahu. On the one hand, Assis, the director, refuses to allow access to Benayahu’s personal dossiers. He keeps them in his safe and has said for months that he has “not managed to look at them.” On the other hand, he also said: “We have done all we can within the law to retrieve the books that have disappeared. Do you imagine that if we knew where a certain book was located, we wouldn’t try to get it back?”

In an emotional telephone conversation with me, Moshe Nissim said: “For 40 years, my brother was considered the most honest of men, the most righteous, a man who gave his life to the study of the culture and who put at the disposal of scholars his entire private collection. Forty years, and no one complained. Everyone just heaped prizes and praise on him. And now, all of a sudden, some scoundrels are trying to smear his good name.”

Where then is the missing section of the Aleppo Codex? Sutton says the subject has become so sensitive that even if the person now in possession of it wanted to sell it, he would not do so for fear of his own safety.

Menahem Ben-Sasson, today the president of Hebrew University, told me: “The codex has become so important that anyone who’s holding it, if anyone is, may never agree to take it out of hiding, not for all the money in the world. It may be that generations will go by before his sons or his sons’ sons will be free of the sense of guilt for holding on to it and will deliver it to its natural resting place, the Shrine of the Book in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.”

Responding to the charge that Ben-Zvi stole the codex from the Aleppo Jewish community, Assis said: “I know of no community and no synagogue that could have looked after the codex better than we do at the Ben-Zvi Institute. And the question arises, of course, who here represents the Jews of Aleppo? Me, an Aleppo-born head of the Ben-Zvi Institute. I belong to them, and I belong to the institute. After all, if the book had not reached Israel, it would probably be sitting right now in some museum being shelled by the guns of Bashar al-Assad.”

Ronen Bergman is an analyst for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth and a contributing writer for the magazine.