ELKAN’S VIEW FROM RADLETT 5^th August 2015

It’s getting nasty. Obama, trying to leave some sort of acceptable legacy behind him, has crafted the agreement with Iran in an attempt to achieve immortality as one of the great peacemakers, while he is actually more likely to be remembered as among the worst of American presidents. There is no shortage of non-Jewish non-partisan Americans who are saying clearly and loudly that this is a bad deal. There is insufficient inspection; one commentator said that a restaurant in New York was subject to more inspection than Iranian atomic installations. There is a rumour, not yet proved wrong, that the samples for examination by independent inspectors will be supplied by the Iranians themselves! There are certainly at least two side agreements with Teheran which have not been disclosed to Congress. If, as the president’s supporters claim, this is one of the most important agreements of the century, why cannot everything be revealed?

If anything goes wrong with this agreement, and the chances are that it will, then the Israelis will be in the front line. In an attempt to scare them in the time honoured and old-fashioned anti-Semitic way, Obama this week met with leaders of the American Jewish community and warned them that if Congress kills the Iran deal then rockets will fall on Tel Aviv. The logic of this American statement is that if the deal doesn’t go through then America will have to attack Iranian nuclear installations. If that was even remotely true, then why (as the Israelis have shown) did the Americans give in on every important point, and why didn’t they seriously threaten military action years ago? This seems to be another one of Obama’s “red lines” which are actually written in white flags.

Despite this, Netanyahu’s continuing to publicly attack the president of the United States and his policies is doing no good to Israel’s position with its largest and best ally. With a bit of sense he could translate what remains of America’s desire to placate Israel into real military and financial advantages. What he seems to be doing is just irritating everybody, including an increasing number of his own supporters in both Washington and Israel.

ELKAN’S VIEW FROM RADLETT 29^TH JULY 2015

One of the things about being Jewish is that we spend a great deal of time complaining. This is not a new thing; Moses suffered it when the children of Israel came out of Egypt. After 3000 years this particular tendency has if anything becomes stronger, and it is therefore not a bad thing from time to time to actually count up our achievements.

Seventy years ago we were beginning to understand the enormity of what had happened in the Holocaust. We had no army to defend ourselves, no state that would take us in without quibble or argument, no one who was prepared to stand up and speak for the Jewish people.

Since however that period is ancient history for many of us, the world since 1984 is a concept with which we can all grapple. In the last 30 years the population of Israel has doubled, living conditions have improved markedly, and the number of cars has gone from 157 to 364 per thousand inhabitants (and don’t we know it in the rush-hour). Gross national product has gone up by 900%, while the national debt has fallen from 280% of the GNP to 66%, a figure that might please George Osborne. Exports have gone up 860% and high-tech exports 3600%. Israel ranks higher than the UK in terms of health wealth and personal security, while life expectancy is very high and the country is reckoned to be the fifth happiest in the whole world.

Of course there are problems. Poverty is much greater than it ought to be, the cost of living is too high, the political system is chaotic, the religious parties have too much influence, bureaucracy is a national disease and fairly frequently the Israeli government speaks first and thinks long after. But occasionally we need to lift up our eyes and see how very much better off we are than the generations that came before us. Israel is nothing short of a miracle, and we are fortunate to be privileged to see and experience it.

ELKAN’S VIEW FROM NETANYA 23^RD JULY 2015

On Saturday night and Sunday we will observe the fast of Tisha B’Av which this year actually falls on Shabbat. Since the only fast observed on Shabbat is Yom Kippur, “the Sabbath of Sabbaths” as it is described in the Torah, Ninth Av is ”nidche – pushed forward” to Sunday 10^th Av. On Saturday night we read “Megillat Eichah – the Book of Lamentations” which tells of the capture and sack of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. Disturbingly, many of its details have echoes in the Holocaust.

On Saturday night restaurants and cafes in Israel are closed, and it is a strange and slightly eerie experience to go through streets that are normally thronged with people, but are echoingly empty.

Originally the fast marked the anniversary of the destruction of both the First and Second Temples, which by ghastly coincidence occurred on the same day. The inability of the Jewish people to offer up sacrifices, and the growth of a Jewish Diaspora with the consequent difficulty of travelling to Jerusalem, required a non-sacrificial style of service and led to the development of the synagogue. It is only in our day, with the growth of mass air travel, that it is again possible for Jews from all over the world to regularly spend Chagim in the land of Israel.

Tisha B’Av continued to be a day of disasters for our people. The expulsion from England in 1290 and from Spain in 1492 both happened on this day, as did the outbreak of the First World War. We commemorate also many of the other disasters that have befallen our people, and there are two moving Kinot – Poems of Lamentation, which describe the massacre at York in 1190. The author of one of them clearly knew many of the people involved and describes them by name.

Tisha B’Av commemorates the disasters of our history, but the Jewish people has always survived with hope, and there is a deep belief that one day the fast will become a festival of joy.

ELKAN’S VIEW 8^th July 2015

Towards the end of last week the Chofesh Hagadol, the great long summer holidays, began in Israeli schools, and with the majority of parents working, a whole industry of Kaytanot, summer schemes or “camps” as they are often called, has begun. Many of these will take place in the same buildings as the pupils go to school anyway, so they have the strange experience of going back to school to do totally non-school things with totally non-school discipline!

Not that discipline is particularly obvious in Israeli schools at the best of times. To those of us brought up in the UK in older and more ordered times, the idea that all the pupils from the first form upwards call their teachers by their first names is extremely strange until you get used to it, and begin to understand that the educational results are extremely good nonetheless.

My grandchildren have been involved in a wide range of things these holidays, ranging from computer courses to intensive chess playing and instruction, while the youngest one who is football mad trains at the practice ground of the Hapoel Tel Aviv club.

Grandparents are involved as well and I expect to have the chance to spend quality time with them and go out for (exhausting) days which is not possible in a system where children go to school six days a week as they do in Israel.

Israel cherishes its children and has quite a high birth rate among both the Arabs and the Charedim, although other sections of society are not backward in this either. There was much comment recently at the suggestion that the world Jewish population has now climbed back almost to where it was before the Holocaust. This is both heartening and sobering; sobering because it has taken us 70 years to repair the damage, and heartening because “Am Yisrael Chai – the People of Israel lives”. Whatever the political problems in the Middle East, no one in Israel is downhearted. The country was recently reckoned to be the fifth happiest place to live in the world and being here is a daily honour and privilege.

ELKAN’S VIEW 1^st July 2015

The boycott of Israel, so widely trumpeted, does possibly have a pernicious moral effect but in practice it is difficult to view it as a serious threat. Indeed, an examination of what is actually going on leads to the conclusion that trade relations between Israel and the outside world are constantly improving.

The UK Ambassador to Israel, the charismatic and very competent Matthew Gould, reported that in the last year bilateral trade between Britain and Israel increased by 26%, eight Israeli companies have gone public on the UK stock exchange, and the Israeli pharmaceutical company Teva now produces one out of every six pills sold in the UK.

Indeed Sajid Javid the Secretary of State for Business Innovation and Skills recently hailed the last few years as “a golden era for Anglo Israeli business”. He went on to say that as a “proud British-born Muslim” he “shared Israel’s love for freedom and democracy.”

Airline links between Israel and the UK at the moment include ten flights a day between London and Tel Aviv, while easyJet flies between eight other European capitals and BenGurion airport. British Airways is about to introduce its latest 787 Dreamliner aircraft onto the Tel Aviv route.

In so far as the BDS movement is concerned, the truth is that without Israeli support and investment Palestinian economy is non-existent. Even the electricity and water that Gaza received during last summer’s war came from Israel. Agitation against businesses in the West Bank is not good news for the Palestinians many of whom want to improve ties with Israel and work towards coexistence and peace. Boycotts of West Bank products only hurt Palestinians because they work in Israeli enterprises that are situated there.

But the greatest Israeli export story concerns a balloon bearing a Chabad poster that drifted into Lebanon and was seized by Hezbollah. No doubt regarding it as pernicious propaganda, they proudly displayed to the world the famous slogan “We Want Moshiach Now”!

NB I want to acknowledge much of the help for this article from my friend Michael Ordman whose websites www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com and http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now are invaluable sources for the truth about Israel.