I just returned from a visit to London and the annual Limmud conference. It was a great networking and educational opportunity and you’d be surprised at who shows up to these things. The cream of the crop of the next generation of Jewish leadership comes from around the world to be there and it is an intelligent and suffers-no-fools bunch. It leaves me optimistic but a bit hungry (very few Frenchies show up and it is probably because the food is so reputedly lousy). Think camp food all vegetarian. But seriously, it is an intensely engaged and well-connected group and the perpetrators of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion don’t know the half of it. But readers of GlobalThoughts do get a pretty good read on what’s going on out there, if for no other reason than so many of these leaders and their friends are reading GlobalThoughts and even acting on these suggestions to a point I was not previously aware.
Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Class has an arrival lounge in Heathrow just after passing customs offering an assortment of facial treatments as well as showers and breakfast. On the way back, their brand-new A340-600 offers personal DVD players built into the seat with about 100 selections, teletext messaging on-board and to the ground, and you can start, pause, fast-forward or rewind any of the selections at your own pace. These advances have finally made trans-Atlantic travel rather less boring. What’s also good on Virgin is they have a big menu onboard and you just order what you want when you want it.
Savoy Hotel: Great theater district location; get newly renovated rooms on top floor as older rooms get cigarette smoke via the ventilation system. The bathtubs need safety rails. There are no chocolates in your room late at night; they force you to go to the minibar if you haven’t bought stuff elsewhere. However, it can be cheaper and wiser to use the minibar than to go out at 11 at night looking for a snack. There are some specials out there for this hotel (check the hotel’s internet site) but remember to add 22.5% to the quoted price for VAT and service fees. In the River Room, there was high tea with a Christmas choir and at night a Big Band with a feel right out of the 1940’s. The piano bar found a full room of people singing along. It is a happening place even though it appears as an old grande dame hotel.
I’d like to start a rock group called Mind the Gap. Signs are everywhere in the Tube about this and on one ride I sat next to two old ladies who for 10 minutes did nothing but repeat to each other “Mind the Gap.”
Saw the show “Art” which is closing soon. Very good script that was funny and profound; it is more a show about friendship and people’s feelings than about art. Also saw Chitty Chitty Bang Bang; the car flies over the audience’s heads with several people inside the car. The audience, lots of families, claps along with the songs and hisses at the villain. Lots of fun. Cabinet War Rooms — interesting to see how the British ran much of World War II from these bunkers underneath the government ministry buildings. Also a good deal of insight about the life of Winston Churchill. Imperial War Museum: Very big impressive museum which took me 2 hours. We don’t have such a museum in the US. Worthwhile thinking about the ramifications of war just as we are about to go into one. Think about this though: Close to 2 of the 5 floors are about the Holocaust; the top floor is very small and has a temporary slide show exhibition about genocide and crimes against humanity. The numbers of people killed in the past 25 years this way around the world dwarfs the Holocaust, but nobody really cares. If the Holocaust didn’t involve white people in Europe whom their neighbors couldn’t deny, would anyone care?
Other museums I still haven’t seen that are next on the list: British Museum (metro stop Holburn/ Russell Square) and Victoria & Albert at South Kensington. Museums tend to be open daily till about 6. The War museum is at Lambeth North.
Lots of Christmas shopping going on. I looked at ties in Harrods and bought across the street at the Tie Rack. Four ties there for the price of 1 low-priced tie at Harrods. Don’t knock it — several salespeople at Harrods were wearing ties they bought across the street too.
Pret a Manger is a chain of sandwich shops; now opened in New York. They offered a Veggie Christmas Lunch sandwich with cranberries and all sorts of veggies inside. Met an amigo at a sushi bar where the food comes around on a revolving table and you take what you want. I took water and let him eat all the rest. I like my fish cooked.
Lorenzo has a company that supplies technology services to big companies and he says that businesses are cautiously spending in stages this year; a few years ago they were just spending without reason. A year ago they stopped spending completely. Now they spend but demand that objectives be met before they will spend more. This is a pretty rational situation and probably healthy for the long run.
Lots of rain but about 5 degrees centigrade warmer than New York at this time of year.
BBC Radio now has an Asian service to serve immigrants from Asian countries which helps to integrate them into the British system. This is a good idea and it is too bad that America doesn’t allow the public broadcasting services leeway to do such things.
Observation: Lots of posters asking for volunteers with information about things (ie: subway incident, traffic accident) to come forth and rat on the evildoers. In the USA, nobody would even bother to put up a sign. Brits don’t go out of their way to talk to people they don’t know in public spaces, but they obviously have a history of staying alert and cooperating with the authorities.
Strange but true: 12,000 of London’s 25,000 black-cab taxi drivers are Jewish. To drive a black cab, you have to have a 3 year degree and taxi driving is a profession. My driver’s daughter was also going to the Limmud Conference!
Selected Notes from Limmud Speakers that I thought were interesting (and a few potshots of my own at the end of one speaker I thought deserved them.)
Emanuele Ottolenghi (Italian poli-sci professor at Oxford)
No more talk in Arab world about getting rid of Assad or Mubarak; just demonization of US and Israel, the Satans of Temptation. They are prisoners of this rhetoric; how do you just shut it off one day and say “Oh, by the way, we just negotiated a peace agreement with the Satans?”
Must make the conflict territorial and not about identity (ie: refugees or Jerusalem). Or else it will be unsolvable. Israel is imposing solutions over time as Arabs keep losing pace on the ground. Each year there is less to negotiate about.
Not one martyr in the Palestinian movement comes from an aristocratic family. They are all sitting in universities or elsewhere, but not at all interested in anything but words for Palestine.
Sadat vs. Nasser: Nasser lost the war and bankrupted Egypt and is viewed as a hero. Sadat got the country significant US aid and got back the Sinai; he was despised and assassinated.
Hagai Segal (lecturer, London School Economics)
1st person shot in October 2000 intifadah was chief of police in Gaza in his Mercedes in the refugee camp.
Problem with Camp David: Unless all is agreed, nothing is agreed. They had agreed on 80% of the matters.
Nobody will stop the violence. Many people exist who won’t stop it.
Watch Dahlan — not Barghouti. He will stay in jail, doesn’t have the experience, temperament or contacts to be the new leader.
Camp David: Hagai says he has spoken face to face with leading negotiators on both sides and that he is fairly sure what happened and that all sides are lying publicly and privately because no official records were kept by mutual agreement. They had agreed on refugees and borders but not on Jerusalem. The Camp David agreement was to extend Gaza, bring in some refugees to Israel, issue a statement of regret without admitting liability, and put up billions of dollars to pay restitution and build up a Palestinian state. Even the Arab League summit in March 2002 agreed on a “just” settlement as an alternative to right of return, meaning money and not the return of refugees to Israel. He says that Arafat and the rest of the Arab leaders have decided for years they know the Palestinian refugees will not go back to Israel. He says that Arafat had agreed but then backtracked when he saw that his street was freaking out because they couldn’t believe they were being sold out on refugees because they’ve always been told otherwise. If this is true, the Palestinians have no idea to what extent they’ve been lied to by their leaders and by the rest of the Arab leadership.
Something I heard lately: Saudis are so convinced their army (and even their civil guard which is the one domestic armed force that is supposed to be capable) is so inept that they’ve stopped awarding contracts to US companies meant to build up these institutions. They are now giving the contracts to Saudi companies, even though they know it is a joke, because they figure that as long as they are wasting money, they may as well waste it on their Saudi colleagues.
Daniel Taub — Negotiator and Diplomat, Israel Foreign Ministry
Having a mediator confuses and distracts negotiations; people become more interested in pleasing the mediator and proving the other side to be the bad boy than in coming to an agreement. People at the table can’t decide anything when they are just a team representing people behind them back home. But it is a mistake to bring heads of state too early into the negotiation because if they make mistakes they can’t backtrack. Interests vs. Demands — Important to know what your interests are, because your demands should reflect your interests. If you are fixated on splitting an orange and one person wants to eat it while another wants to make arts and crafts from the peel, it is stupid to waste the effort of splitting the orange in half. In the negotiations, it wasn’t always clear that the parties differentiated between demands and interests.
In the beginning, the Palestinian side was very chaotic; Arafat kept switching advisors and every counteroffer came back with a position paper that had no relation to the original counteroffer. This has improved in recent years. The academics from the US and UK advising the Palestinians were the hardest constituency to deal with because they stood on principles and dreams without any bearing on the reality; the Palestinians from the territories were the most reasonable.
People in negotiations should leave room for creativity in terms of linking issues for creative solutions rather than linear thinking which requires every issue to be solved by itself.
Official Sign I saw at the Conference: “This sign has no informational purpose whatsoever.” Then someone wrote on the bottom, “Recycle this sign.” Then someone wrote “Now it does.”
Roundtable on Ethics of Fighting Terror
Rights of suspects vs. rights of the society to life. Can’t get so caught up in the rights of suspects that we lose sight of the overall responsibility to protect the lives of people in the community.
Avi Weiss (right-wing activist; religious leader)
The destiny of fate shared by all Jews today matches that of the free world. We are all targeted whether or not we are religiously observant, liberal, right-wing or whatever. The terrorists view us all as one, so we must be united as well. Shouldn’t criticize Israel since it is fighting for survival.
His advertised topic was Should Jews live in Hebron? He spoke for half an hour and never mentioned it. I asked him about it after an hour and while everyone was muttering, he quietly said “I think Jews should live in Hebron.” and went on to the next questioner. I hope I can someday be so famous that I can get several hundred people to pack a room, speak nothing about the topic I am supposed to speak about, and hope nobody cares.
Here’s what happens at an Avi Weiss speech and why I am taking offense.
He starts by saying “I feel much more comfortable learning Bible than talking politics.” Lets sing a song of unity. The song has one word “Unity” and lots of la, la, la. Then he talks about the paragraph I mentioned above, then invites the audience to recite the Shema (Jewish creed) with him “Hear O’ Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.” Then he asks for questions. Who is going to ask him a serious question at this point? The whole room has been sprinkled with pixie dust by the Good Fairy Godmother.
OK, so someone from the Left asks a question and some right-winger hisses. Enters Weiss: Obviously, this liberal person loves Israel and the Jewish people. He cares about Israel as much as you do. We must love this person. We disagree. I would rather talk about Torah and not politics. We will have to make some sort of compromise. I don’t know what it should be, and I don’t know what we will do, but we should all just be Unified. Let’s sing that song again…
Actually, this is the UK and the audience does not consist of fools and I am not making this garbage up. (It would be much easier to make up GlobalThoughts than to try and report all this stuff.) I turned to one person and said Well, what did you think? “I thought he was rather glib.” So you’re saying it was a bunch of BS, huh? “Yes,” said another 2 people. “He’s full of BS.” You can get away with this in the US, but not in the UK, which is why I like coming here. Here, audiences listen and then ask questions based on informed opinion. In the US, they don’t listen and then they make statements based on ignorance. Other speakers agree with this assessment.
In an overall sense, Weiss represents my problem today with the Right. They have no ideas, demand Unity and a refrain from criticism, call anyone who does criticize Israel (even Jews) anti-semites, and meanwhile have no ideas. This is not a political program. Sharon has 80% support but everyone knows he has no ideas of what to do other than to hold the fort. Sharon has managed to convince everyone that there are no good ideas, nothing is possible, everything is the other side’s fault, and that anything the Israelis do in return is reasonable. I think it is a prescription for a life of hell with no future. And then come people like Weiss who are considered Moderates and who appear to be reasonable but it is fluff at the core.
You can say the Left’s ideas are not good ideas, but at least they are making suggestions. Mitznah will lose the elections but 60% of Israelis agree with his proposals; they just won’t vote for him as long as Arafat is on the other side and any idea seems improbable as long as this is so. I personally wouldn’t want to join 5 million Jews in Israel who can’t do better than sit around paralyzed because they say that’s the best they can do as long as the Arabs around them don’t take any initiative. I don’t believe there’s nothing that can be done to solve this problem and I feel that people’s lives, money and assets are being wasted because of a lack of leadership and particularly the lack of willingness of leadership to face their people and tell them the truth.
The Avi Weiss’s of this world do Jews a disservice. They offer no ideas, attempt to stifle any debate or creativity, sugarcoat it with false humility, and retreat into a crutch using common religious principles as a pretext. What’s worse, they just say “I’m a rightwinger and lovingly disagree with you brother” but will do anything possible to actually avoid stating a position or debating an issue. There is nothing constructive in this for the future except that is cute and nice for the present and makes people think that their concerns are being dealt with by the kind and peaceful rabbi.
