Antony Loewenstein

Gideon Levy, Haaretz, February 17:

It was like an especially wild orgy: First the great intoxication of the senses, then the bitter sobering up the next morning. Within a few hours, Israel went from celebrating the assassination of Imad Mughniyah to the fear of what would follow. The “great feat of intelligence,” the “perfect execution,” the “humiliation of Bashar Assad” were replaced in the blink of an eye with a spate of fear-inducing “travel advisories” by the Counterterrorism Office - don’t travel, don’t identify yourself, don’t congregate, be careful, take every precaution - and with states of high alert on the northern border, and at all of Israel’s embassies and consulates, and Jewish community centers worldwide. If these are the dangers that lie in wait for us, one has to ask: What did we need this assassination for?

Whoever killed Mughniyah was once again playing with the most dangerous fire of all: He undermined Israel’s security. If it was Israel, one has to ask whether there was any shred of sense in this move. If it was not Israel, our famed intelligence agencies would do well to prove this quickly, before the next disaster. Was the security of Israel’s citizens improved? Was terror dealt a permanent blow? History, with its multitude of previous assassinations, teaches that the answer is no. The chain of “terrorist chieftains” liquidated by Israel, from Ali Salameh and Abu Jihad through Abbas Mussawi and Yihyeh Ayash to Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi - all “operations” that we celebrated with great pomp and circumstance for one sweet and intoxicating moment - have thus far brought only harsh and painful revenge attacks against Israel and Jews throughout the world, as well as infinite replacements no less effective than their predecessors, and sometimes more so. From assassination to assassination, terror has only increased and become more sophisticated.

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Saree Makdisi, Seattle Post Intelligencer, October 16:

“Academic colleagues, get used to it,” warned the pro-Israel activist Martin Kramer in March 2004. “Yes, you are being watched. Those obscure articles in campus newspapers are now available on the Internet, and they will be harvested. Your syllabi, which you’ve also posted, will be scrutinized. Your Web sites will be visited late at night.”

Kramer’s warning inaugurated an attack on intellectual freedom in the U.S. that has grown more aggressive in recent months.

This attack, intended to shield Israel from criticism, not only threatens academic privileges on college campuses, it jeopardizes our capacity to evaluate our foreign policy. With a potentially catastrophic clash with Iran on the horizon and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict spiraling out of control, Americans urgently need to be able to think clearly about our commitments and intentions in the Middle East. And yet we are being prevented from doing so by a longstanding campaign of intimidation that has terminated careers, stymied debate and shut down dialogue.

Over the past few years, Israel’s U.S. defenders have stepped up their campaign by establishing a network of institutions (such as Campus Watch, Stand With Us, the David Project, the Israel on Campus Coalition, and the disingenuously named Scholars for Peace in the Middle East) dedicated to the task of monitoring our campuses and bringing pressure to bear on those critical of Israeli policies. By orchestrating letter-writing and petitioning campaigns, falsely raising fears of anti-Semitism, mobilizing often grossly distorted media coverage and recruiting local and national politicians to their cause, they have severely disrupted academic processes, the free function of which once made American universities the envy of the world.

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News coming out of Palestine is relentlessly bad (the latest Amira Hass column rightly describes the situation in Gaza as akin to a “zoo.”)

For a piece of rare good news, I was recently told about an interesting project called the Ein Bustan kindergarten:

The Ein Bustan kindergarten is the first Jewish/ArabWaldorf Kindergarten in Israel, and is situated in the small Arab village of Hilf, near Kiryat Tivon. The kindergarten, which is based on the principles of the Waldorf educational method, accepts both Arab and Jewish cultures equally. The 15 children of “Ein Bustan” (meaning “spring in the garden”) come from Kiryat Tivon, (a Jewish town) and the surrounding Bedouin (Arab) villages Hilf and Bosmat Tab’un.

The founders of Ein Bustan share a vision of a society in which Jews and Arabs live together peacefully in equality and understanding. In order to create this reality, there must be education that fosters true friendship, trust and shared culture and language. An educational system that separates children by their religion and nationality fails to take into consideration the widening gap between the two communities, which will take years to bridge and generations to mend.

We believe that children deserve to grow up in an environment enriched with the religious and ethnic folklore and traditions surrounding them, and feel that incorporation of a humanistic and Waldorf approach with a multicultural genre is the way to prepare children for the complex world in which they live.

Amen to that.

Their latest news release provides an insight into the important work they are doing:

A year has past and in our kindergarten, “Ein Bustan”, two new groups have opened: “the “little kindergarten” and the “big kindergarten”. I suspect these are but temporary names and with the formation of an additional group these names will become more formalised as well.

The younger group, which operates five days a week, has 10 children between the ages of two and half & three and half. Culturally, six of these children speak Hebrew, and four Arabic, though they are yet to master their mother tongue, which makes their play-time less dependent on words. Their teachers are Eshel, a resident of Tivon and Amana, a resident of Ka’abiya.

The second group, “the big kindergarten”, is largely based on the children from last year, (apart from those that were older and went on to other frameworks). Currently we remain with those between the ages of four and five, with several younger children aged three and half who recently joined them. Recently, Ibtisam, a resident of Zubidat has joined this group as teacher alongside Gidi. Sultana continues to work as a replacement teacher, as this kindergarten operates 6 days a week. This group has 14 children, out of whom eight are Arabic speaking and six Hebrew speaking. Please note, that since there are more vacancies, we would be more than happy to fill them.

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