EDITOR: A good week for god!
After a really week, with rain, sleet and miserable stuff on television, god has at last had a good turn – most Israelis believe in him (Her?)… Of course, he had to choose them first, before they will deign to believe, but that was along time ago, anyway. Strangely enough, more people believe in god than in being the ‘chosen people’. The way I understand this, is the fact that some believers are not stupid, realise the propaganda is somewhat embarrassing…
But, of course Israelis are well below the Americans, even in this crucial field. If you wish to learn about this fascinating topic, go to Gallup: More Than 90 Percent of Americans Believe in God – the title gives it away… the highest measured belief-in-god percentages in the Land of the Brave was 96%, so not all is lost – it can still climb higher, in both countries. Should atheism not be made illegal? I think it is about time, don’t you think?
Survey: Record number of Israeli Jews believe in God: Haaretz
First comprehensive study in a decade also shows that 70 percent of Israelis believe the Jews are the ‘Chosen People.’
By Nir Hasson
Fully 80 percent of Israeli Jews believe that God exists – the highest figure found by the Guttman-Avi Chai survey since this review of Israeli-Jewish beliefs began two decades ago.
The latest survey of the “Beliefs, Observance and Values among Israeli Jews” was conducted in 2009 but the results were released only on Thursday, after a detailed analysis had been completed. The two previous surveys were in 1999 and 1991.
The study also found that 70 percent of respondents believe the Jews are the “Chosen People,” 65 percent believe the Torah and mitzvot (religious commandments ) are God-given, and 56 percent believe in life after death.
Overall, the survey found an increase in attachment to Jewish religion and tradition from 1999 to 2009, following a decrease from 1991 to 1999, which was the decade of mass immigration from the former Soviet Union. Among other things, it found that less than half of Israeli Jews think that, in a clash between Jewish law and democracy, democratic values should always prevail.
The study, conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute’s Guttman Center for Surveys and the Avi Chai Foundation, is based on interviews with 2,803 Israeli Jews.
It found that only 46 percent of Israeli Jews now define themselves as secular, down from 52 percent in 1999, while 22 percent define themselves as either Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox, up from 16 percent in 1999. The remaining 32 percent term themselves traditional, virtually unchanged from 1999.
This change in self-identification was also reflected in the proportion of those subscribing to traditional Jewish beliefs. For instance, 55 percent said they believe in the coming of the Messiah, up from 45 percent in 1999 but similar to 53 percent in 1991, while 37 percent said that “a Jew who does not observe the religious precepts endangers the entire Jewish people,” up from 30 percent in 1999 but again similar to the 1991 figure of 35 percent.
The study’s authors cited two reasons for the rise in religiosity. One is that immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who contributed to the drop in religiosity from 1991 to 1999, have now assimilated into Israeli society. Various studies have found that this process of assimilation has resulted in Soviet immigrants becoming more traditional. The second reason is the demographic change caused by the higher Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox birthrates.
The survey found that, even when individuals were asked about how their own attitudes had changed over the previous decade, the number of those that said they felt more religious and were more careful about observing the Sabbath and kashrut was higher than the number of those who said they had become more secular.
The rise in religiosity was also reflected in attitudes toward other issues. For instance, only 44 percent said that if Jewish law and democratic values clashed, the latter should always be preferred, while 20 percent said Jewish law should always be preferred and 36 percent said “sometimes one and sometimes the other.”
The study also found an upswing in religious practice. For instance, 85 percent of respondents said that “celebrating the Jewish holidays as prescribed by religious tradition” was “important” or “very important,” up from 63 percent in 1999, while 70 percent said they “always” or “frequently” refrained from eating hametz (leavened bread ) on Passover, up from 67 percent in 1999.
Fully 61 percent of respondents said the state should “ensure that public life is conducted according to Jewish religious tradition,” up dramatically from 44 percent in 1991. But respondents also insisted on preserving their freedom of choice. For instance, between 58 and 68 percent said that shopping centers, public transportation, sporting events, cafes, restaurants and movie theaters should be allowed to operate on Shabbat (exact figures ranged from 58 percent for shopping centers to 68 percent for cafes, restaurants and movie theaters ).
Moreover, 51 percent responded “yes,” “absolutely yes” or “perhaps yes” when asked if they favored the introduction of civil marriage in Israel. Those in the first two categories, at 48 percent, were down from 54 percent in 1999 but up from 39 percent in 1991.
God rules all in 2012 Israel, even the state: Haaretz
Israel: Not what you thought, not what the world thought, not what Israelis imagine themselves to think. Israeli society isn’t secular, it isn’t liberal and it isn’t enlightened.
You have to give it to the pollsters. They let the cat out of the bag. To paraphrase the Haaretz advertising slogan from the 1990s – Israel: Not what you thought. Not what the world thought, not what Israelis imagine themselves to think. Israeli society isn’t secular, it isn’t liberal and it isn’t enlightened. Were they permitted to respond freely, it’s doubtful that 80 percent of Iranians would say they believed in God; it’s doubtful there is any other free nation on the planet, with the possible exception of the Americans, that would produce the same results. But there surely is no other nation on the planet that is so secure in its arrogant certainty that it was selected from all the other nations and raised above them.
The findings of this powerful poll are the most important key to understanding Israeli society and the conduct of its governments. It is the only prism through which it is possible to comprehend the occupation, the racism, the Haredization and the capitulation to the settlers. In our hearts, we think: This is our destiny. If in any enlightened society settlers and the ultra-Orthodox would be treated as marginal, eccentric, messianic groups, the attitude toward them in Israel comes from a very deep place within the “secular” society. If in any enlightened society the occupation stirs protest and revulsion, the attitude to it here is based in a religious belief that justifies all its iniquities.
The survey proves that we are all “hilltop youth,” and that most of us are Sicarii. Expressions of racism toward Arabs and foreigners, Israel’s arrogant attitude toward international opinion – these too can be explained by the benighted, primeval belief of the majority of Israelis (70 percent ) that we enjoy complete license because You chose us. Even the religious character of the state, which is much less secular than we tend to think – no buses or El Al flights during Shabbat, no civil marriage, no unkosher hotels, a mezuzah on the doorjamb of nearly every home and a rising number of people who kiss it each time they enter or exit – all this can be explained by the survey data.
There is much less religious coercion than it would appear, much more willing dedication to the caprices of Jewish fundamentalism. From now on, it can no longer be claimed that the secular majority has acquiesced to the religious minority; there is no secular majority, only a negligible minority.
In contrast to most European states today, in Israel “atheist” is a derogatory term that few people even dare to say, much less use to identify themselves. In such a country, it is impossible to speak seriously about secularism. We should admit the truth, which is that we are an almost religious society and a state that is almost based on religious law. There’s no need to keep counting the number of people wearing kippot, headscarves or shtreimels. Bareheaded people are in the same camp: They accept the character of their state, where the religion is the state and the state is the religion, all mixed together. There’s no need to keep being shocked by religious extremism – being religious, whether moderate or extreme, is all the same, and it’s the majority here.
From Jenin to Hebron, we are in the West Bank above all because the majority of Israelis believe that it is not only the land of the patriarchs, but that this fact gives us a patrimonial right to sovereignty, to cruelty, to abuse and to occupation – and to hell with the position of the international community and the principles of international law, because, after all, we were chosen from among all other peoples. From Bnei Brak to Mea She’arim, these Haredim are, to a large extent, us, just with different dress and languages – more extreme versions of the same belief.
Perhaps it was inevitable. A state that arose on a certain territory and conquered another territory and has remained there nearly forever, all on the basis of Bible stories; a population that never decided whether it was a nation or a religion; and a state that purports to be a “Jewish state,” even if no one has any idea what that means. All these cannot exist with no foundation – a chosen people that believes in its God. That is Israel, circa 2012. God have mercy on us.
Left Zionism exposed: CPGB
Leandros Fischer reviews ‘False prophets of peace: liberal Zionism and the struggle’, Tikva Honig-Parnassfor, Palestine Haymarket Books, 2011, pp264
Zionism, the movement for an exclusivist Jewish state in Palestine, is today the last active project of colonisation. Its domination over the area from the Mediterranean to the Jordan is intertwined with the dispossession of the indigenous Palestinians. Not just the dispossession of those living in the West Bank and Gaza, but also that practised on the Palestinian citizens of Israel. It is a historical process that until this day ranges from institutional discrimination to blockades, land seizures and outright massacres.
Yet a great deal of Zionism’s success in gaining legitimacy among western public opinion has historically stemmed from its ability to project a certain image abroad: that of a vulnerable liberal democracy with socialist leanings, in the midst of an Arab world ruled by authoritarian nationalist or religious dictatorships. This myth was carefully constructed, not by today’s dominant right and far right, but by liberal Zionism in the form of the once hegemonic labour Zionist movement, which laid the infrastructure of Israel’s legal system, including, among others, the law of return and the land laws. Despite being politically irrelevant today, its ideological premises have survived and constitute an essential part of Israel’s political culture, as well as propaganda machine, otherwise known as hasbarah. They also form the backbone of Israeli academia; the role of left Zionist intellectuals has been instrumental in conferring legitimacy – at home and abroad – on a series of left Zionist policies, from the Oslo process to the rampant neoliberalism dominating the Israeli economy. More critically, these myths are also used to stifle, hijack and divert leftwing or even liberal criticism of Israeli policies, away from the increasingly successful BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) campaign and towards a watered-down discourse which views the conflict as being merely about peace between two symmetrical opponents.
This makes a reading of Tikva Honig-Parnass’s new book all the more important. It is not only an academically brilliant work, backed up by a thorough description of contemporary left Zionist and post-Zionist discourse in Israel, but also an accessible and useful handbook for activists engaged in the struggle for Palestinian rights. Moreover, it is written by a former insider: Honig-Parnass, a radical sociologist and socialist activist, was actively involved with the Mapam, the most leftwing Zionist party, during the formative year of 1948, and also served as the party’s Knesset secretary in the 50s before breaking with Zionism in the early 60s.
‘Democratic’
For starters, Honig-Parnass points to the evident contradiction in Israel’s self-definition as a ‘Jewish and democratic’ state, a definition coined by the labour Zionist movement and which has prevailed since then in the discourse of most progressive intellectuals and publicists. This definition postulates the concept of the ‘Jewish majority’ as a condition for preserving the ‘Jewishness’ of the state. She hints at the sinister connotation of this formula, which does not point to the right of self-determination of Israeli Jews, but rather to the Zionist ‘right’ to the ongoing colonisation of Palestinian lands, while denying the legitimacy of Palestinian rights – both their collective rights as a national minority within Israel, and their right of self-determination in the 1967 occupied territories.
Not only has the Zionist left not resisted the prevalent racist discourse of a “demographic danger” to the Jewish character of Israel due to higher Arab birth rates, but it has actively fostered it as its main thrust of justifying a two-state solution. For the Zionist left this solution includes the annexation of important blocks of settlements to Israel, a fragmented Palestinian state of limited sovereignty, as well as a rejection of any debate about the fate of those Palestinians expelled by Zionist militias in 1948. Whereas Netanyahu, Lieberman and the ethno-religious settler movement do not feel compelled to present any progressive credentials to liberal world opinion, Zionist left intellectuals have in the recent years being engaged in a series of semantic acrobatics, aimed at diluting the inherent contradiction of having an ethnocratic liberal democracy. All this is ably demonstrated in the book.
Especially affected by the discourse and practice of the Zionist left are Israel’s Palestinian citizens, those who survived the 1948 ethnic cleansing. They make up almost one fifth of Israel’s population within the Green Line. Whereas the state of Israel grants some civic rights to its Palestinian citizens, its refusal to recognise their status as a national minority renders those rights ineffective, as Honig-Parnass shows through a series of facts and legal precedents. Also, the historical emphasis of the Zionist left on land means that most of what is defined as “state lands” were confiscated from Palestinian’s owners – refugees and citizens alike – under the rule of Labour-predecessor Mapai and the more leftwing Mapam (largely constituted today by Meretz) in the first years of the state. Even today, 93% of the land in Israel is reserved for exclusive Jewish use. This has led to a suffocation of Arab towns and communities, given their inability to grow naturally. Finally, the law of return, which grants automatic citizenship to Jewish newcomers and which was put into effect by Mapai and Mapam, is not only about “full citizenship” as such: it confers a wide range of benefits like access to land, education and housing.
The book also examines the love-hate relationship of secular, liberal and leftwing trends of Zionism with religion. While claiming to stand for a humanist and secular vision, the Zionist left never questioned the religious criteria for entering the Jewish national collective and never hesitated to close ranks with the most extreme rightwing brands of Zionism, secular and religious. The Zionist left’s inability to answer the question, ‘Why precisely here?’ (Palestine) rendered it captive to religion and thus receptive to a series of capitulations and compromises with the religious establishment, like the ‘status-quo agreement’ signed between Ben Gurion and the orthodox establishment before the creation of the state, which guarantees a rabbinate monopoly on matters of birth and marriage, for instance.
Ultimately, the Zionist left has from its inception steadily moved to the right, abandoning every trace of progressive pretence and reducing the meaning of ‘left’ in Israel to a slightly more conciliatory attitude towards US-sponsored initiatives. The socioeconomic dimensions of the term ‘left’ have also largely remained dormant, since left Zionism’s main two parties endorsed – and initiated in the case of Labour – the neoliberal restructuring of the Israeli economy since 1985. Their electoral results are today meagre, with Labour being a junior partner of the current right-extreme right government.
Not only the Zionist left, but also the post-Zionist current, comes under scrutiny in the book. Post-Zionism refers loosely to a point of view among parts of Israeli academia, according to which the age of Zionism has come to an end, thus making an ethnocratic Jewish state obsolete. According to Honig-Parnass, this liberal attempt at a departure from Zionist discourse has failed to rise to the challenge. Being influenced by the post-structuralist stream of the early 90s that focussed on identity politics, it has repeatedly evaded the entire issue of Zionism’s ongoing discrimination against Palestinians and ignored their special status as the dominant Other from a Zionist point of view. Post-Zionists have never questioned the legitimacy of neoliberalism and Israel’s status as the US’s main enforcer in the region, and their proposals for an ‘inclusive’ set-up deny in practice the validity of Palestinian national rights – for example, by accepting the legitimacy of West Bank settlements.
Zionist left influence
Given this current state of affairs, it is easy to ask why all of this matters. It does, in the sense that the Zionist left positions have been adopted by the right and far right. All Zionist parties have in principle accepted that the continuation of Zionist colonisation must be conditioned on the granting of some form of self-rule, however meaningless, to the Palestinians in the occupied territories in order to placate their resistance. This also includes an acceptance of “mutually agreed land swaps” with the Palestinian Authority in order to curb the “demographic peril”. This is a far cry from the irredentist claim of Menachem Begin to the east bank of the Jordan river as part of “Greater Israel”. But this process constitutes just a part of a wider trade-off: whereas the Zionist right has adopted those principles, as well as the Zionist left’s aversion to employing Arab labour (today Israel prefers to employ migrants from Asia and eastern Europe for the most unskilled jobs than possibly cheaper Arab labour), the Zionist left has disturbingly adopted the most militarist aspects of the right.
This seemingly led to a mass conversion of Zionist left intellectuals after the failure of the Camp David talks in 2000. From advocating ‘peace’, they suddenly adopted the slogan, ‘There is no partner for peace’, and gave legitimacy to Ariel Sharon’s subsequent onslaught on the Palestinian Authority. And in recent years, they have trailed behind rightwing governments in supporting the 2006 war on Lebanon and the 2009 Gaza massacre.
But for progressive people outside Israel/Palestine, an analysis of Zionist left discourse and practice, as provided in this book, has a far deeper meaning. It begs the question of what a left is all about. In Israel, the once dominant Zionist left has never been about fighting for workers’ rights (not even in a mildly social democratic manner) or the rights of oppressed minorities, first and foremost the indigenous Palestinians. Instead, the Zionist left, even after losing its monopoly in government in 1977, has traditionally formed the backbone of Israeli political, economic and military elites. Its intellectuals and publicists like Amos Oz are still considered to be the ‘consciousness of the nation’ and have a great impact on today’s proponents of the vegetating two-state solution. Zionist left figures like Yossi Beilin have played a critical role in fermenting a veil of equality regarding the highly unequal terms of the Oslo agreement and the more recent Geneva initiative.
And herein lies the Zionist left’s main international success: namely the framing of the conflict as being about war and peace between two equal parties, ‘two peoples who fight for the same territory’, rather than that involving colonisers and colonised, as clearly shown around the end of the book. Included in this success is also the spreading of the idea of a conflict starting in 1967, with its fictitious semantic differentiation between ‘Israel proper’ and the ‘occupied territories’. These premises have for years succeeded in banishing the Israel-Palestine conflict to a completely different moral universe than other conflicts like Algeria, Vietnam or South Africa under apartheid.
These are also premises accepted at first glance by many people in the west sincerely appalled by Israel’s brutalisation of the Palestinians. They are today not just propagated by Labour and Meretz, but also by far more principled members of the Israeli ‘peace camp’. Despite their courageous resistance against the 1967 occupation, they have stopped short of addressing the connection between Zionism’s main premises and the regime discriminating against Israel’s Palestinian citizens. Equally problematically, this trend, which did not capitulate to the open warmongering after 2000, has uncritically lent its support to the corrupt and collaborative Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas and the ‘reformer’ Salam Fayyad, effectively condoning the authoritarian neoliberal regime imposed by the PA in the West Bank.
Understanding the philosophy of liberal Zionism is essential to formulating an alternative path, possibly leading to resolving a conflict which claims the lives of many ordinary Israelis. In her critique, Honig-Parnass also succeeds in mentioning past instances of principled Israeli-Jewish resistance to Zionist policies. This includes the Israeli Black Panthers of the early 1970s, a group of disaffected Mizrahim (Jews from north Africa and the Middle East), who linked their socioeconomic grievances to solidarity with the Palestinians. It also includes the now defunct Matzpen, the socialist organisation with its pioneering class analysis of Zionism as an active colonisation project and wider regional context of the Middle East, of which Honig-Parnass was a member. Given the essentialist quagmire of identity politics, the futility of a just two-state solution, the Arab revolts, as well as the all-encompassing global crisis of capitalism, a recourse to this alternative vision presented in the book may well offer the reader an inspiring new approach to understanding the conflict.
Finally, at a time when the hasbarah is working overtime to present Israel as a place where liberal democratic values, individualism and LGBT rights thrive amidst a sea of fundamentalist obscurantism, False prophets of peace is essential reading for winning the debate against those keen to smear solidarity with Palestinian rights as employing double standards and engaging in the demonisation of the ‘only democracy in the Middle East.
Israel is using Iran to sidestep Mideast peace talks: Haaretz Editorial
It’s hard to understand how a society that has so impressively brought social injustice to the top of the agenda has fallen victim to our nationalist-religious leaders’ criminal ploy and the irresponsible opposition’s helplessness.
The deadline the Quartet gave Israel and the Palestinians for submitting their positions on security and borders – Thursday, January 26 – flew by. It’s as if it never existed.
The Quartet’s plan, which was to bring the parties from the UN struggle to the negotiating table, is about to be relegated to history’s graveyard of missed opportunities. The general positions that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu submitted last week through his envoy Isaac Molho during talks in Jordan are a blatant attempt to saddle the Palestinians with responsibility for the negotiations’ failure.
Netanyahu might know that his refusal to present a map based on the June 4, 1967 borders and a realistic land-swap proposal is a surefire recipe for a continued freeze in the negotiations. Any rational person understands that a territorial plan of lesser scope and quality than the one the two previous prime ministers, Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, presented the Palestinians is doomed to diplomatic failure and deteriorating security. But worryingly, the diplomatic process, whose purpose is to ensure Israel’s very existence as a Jewish and democratic state, is being shunted to the sidelines of the political and media discourse.
Netanyahu, with Barak’s help, has turned the Iranian nuclear threat into an impressive ploy to distract attention from settlement policy and the perpetuation of the occupation. He has taken advantage of President Barack Obama’s preoccupation with the U.S. presidential elections and Obama’s fear of the Jewish right.
Rival parties on Israel’s center and left have adopted a policy of unilateral disengagement from Palestinian issues. Kadima is busy with infighting, the Labor Party prefers to focus on social issues, and Yair Lapid, the new immigrant to the political arena, has decided that peace is for dreamers.
The death certificate of negotiations based on the two-state solution is a badge of shame for Israeli society. It’s hard to understand how a society that has so impressively brought social injustice to the top of the agenda has fallen victim to our nationalist-religious leaders’ criminal ploy and the irresponsible opposition’s helplessness.
EDITOR: Nothing like good friends…
Like Olmert before him, Netanyahu keeps good company… So let us wait, not with baited breath, to the unsurprising results of this new inquiry. Olmert has not yet been tried for the crimes of 20 years ago… Israeli justice is very slow, and so it is in the US, when it comes to multi-billionaires. He can afford to smile in the photo… Read below about this shady character.
Report: Adelson under criminal investigation for alleged bribery of foreign officials: Haaretz
American billionaire, close ally of Netanyahu, and main donor to Gingrich’s campaign has been under federal investigation for his casino empire’s alleged involvement in a corruption scandal in China, ABC reports.
The casino company owned by American billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a close ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been under federal investigation for the last year for alleged bribery of foreign officials, ABC News reported over the weekend.
Adelson, the main donor to U.S. presidential candidate Newt Gingrich and the owner of the Israeli daily Israel Hayom, holds 49% of the Sands casino company, and according to reports, is directly involved in the company’s operations. The casino that the company set up in the Chinese island of Macau turned it into the largest gambling company in the world.
Last year, the Department of Justice and the Securities Exchange Commission launched an investigation into Adelson’s alleged bribery of Chinese officials.
According to ABC, Sands casinos was allegedly cooperating with Chinese organized crime groups, known as triads, who allegedly organized high stakes gambling and sex junkets.
Chinese press reported at the time that more than 100 prostitues were found in the casino, during a raid by local authorities. A former manager at the casino, Steven C. Jacobs, sued Sands, claiming that Adelson told him to remain silent regarding investigation taking place against the company.
Adelson reportedly instructed Jacobs to refrain from reporting to the corporate board of Sands about the company’s ties to the local crime organizations. Jacobs also claimed that Adelson wanted to investigate high-ranking officials in Macau to provide him “leverage” over any attempts to hurt the company.
Last year, Adelson commented on Jacobs’ lawsuit and said that it is merely an attempt at blackmail and that Jacobs is trying to take revenge upon the country using a lies after he was fired.
Several months ago, Adelson contributed $5 million to Winning Our Future, a pro-Gingrich super PAC. More recently, Adelson’s wife gave another $5 million to the same super PAC, providing a major lift to the former House Speaker’s campaign.
What Sheldon’s Money Buys: Forward
By Gal Beckerman
Published January 26, 2012, issue of February 03, 2012.
It is safe to say that without multi-billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s help the chances of Newt Gingrich becoming the Republican nominee for president would be zero — and consequently the race itself, going into Florida at the moment, would not be the competitive, drag-out fight it has become. Adelson, the hotel and casino magnate, has kept Gingrich alive, first through an infusion of $5 million into a super PAC, which allowed the former speaker to defend himself against attacks by Mitt Romney and led to Gingrich’s thumping victory in South Carolina. And now we know that Adelson’s wife, Miriam, has committed another $5 million to the cause of Newt.
One of Adelson’s passions — and a reason for his desire to play such a big role in American politics — is undoubtedly Israel. And his positions are unambiguously right-wing and hawkish to the extreme. When it comes to the Palestinians, there is no one to be trusted. The New Yorker quotes him as calling Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister widely respected in the West, as being one of the “terrorists” running the Palestinian Authoriy. Even AIPAC was not far enough to the right for him. After being a diehard supporter — funding a new building in Washington, D.C. — he split with the group in 2007 when it decided to support a congressional initiative, backed by the Israelis, to increase economic aid to the Palestinians. “I don’t continue to support organizations that help friends committing suicide just because they want to jump,” he said at the time by way of explanation. He had the same reaction when Ehud Olmert, whom Adelson had once befriended, came to the conclusion that he had to pursue negotiations with the Palestinian leadership.
What does it mean to have someone with these views have such an outsized influence on a candidate and the race he is in? Well, for Gingrich it seems this has translated into him tripping over himself to prove his pro-Israel bona fides, to the point where he was willing to say, this past December in an interview with the Jewish Channel, that the Palestinians were an “invented” people who “had the chance to go many places.’’ No Palestinians, no need to negotiate a state. And Adelson clearly showed his satisfaction with Gingrich’s line. As he told a group of Birthright participants at a Hanukkah party a few weeks later, “Read the history of those who call themselves Palestinians, and you will hear why Gingrich said recently that the Palestinians are an invented people.”
As Wayne Barrett recently reported in The Daily Beast, there has been a marked turn in Gingrich’s positions on Israel since his political life began depending on Adelson. Not that long ago, in a 2005 Middle East Quarterly article, Gingrich urged the “Palestinian diaspora” to invest in “their ancestral lands,” and even proposed that Congress “establish a program of economic aid for the Palestinians to match the aid the U.S. government provides Israel.”
You will not hear anything like this from Gingrich again any time soon.
But the greater concern is that because of his influence on Gingrich, Adelson has turned the Republican contest into a competition of extreme rhetoric, in which there is no room for compromise or diplomacy, and the only answer to any international problem is unmitigated toughness. No one wants to be outflanked by the right when it comes to foreign policy (no one, I should say, besides Ron Paul) and so Gingrich’s apparent parroting of Adelson’s hardline attitudes about Israel — and, I should add, Iran — means that the whole tone of the race is affected.
So in a recent debate in Florida, Gingrich advocated a covert war with Cuba to deal with the problem of Fidel Castro. Romney, at a number of the now mind-numbingly frequent candidate gatherings, answered that he would not be negotiating with the Taliban. When asked by Brian Williams, “Governor, how do you end the war in Afghanistan without talking to the Taliban?” Romney simply said, “By beating them.” Isn’t this what we’ve been trying to do without much success for a decade now?
And then there is Iran. The only tool in the toolbox for these candidates is belligerence. Rick Santorum might present the most extreme example, advocating preemptive action, telling David Gregory on Meet the Press recently that he would demand the Iranians open up their nuclear facilities, “or we will degrade those facilities through air strikes — and make it very public that we are doing that.” This is, of course, one of the implicit last options in the president’s repeated threat that “all options are on the table.” But for Santorum there seems to be no other method but the threat itself, no carrots, no sticks, nothing besides a bomb. Nor do Romney or Gingrich have any other ideas. They don’t talk of a preemptive strike, but they speak about war as an inevitability. Romney says that “if you elect Mitt Romney, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon,” and calls for regime change as well as “covert and overt” actions. Gingrich says he would “break the Iranian regime” within a year by “cutting off the gasoline supply to Iran and then, frankly, sabotaging the only refinery they have.”
Regardless of what you believe needs to be done to avoid a nuclear Iran — and something surely has to be done — this is just toughness for toughness sake, without much thought to its implications for the United States and the world or the realities of actual leadership.
Can one man’s predilections and attitudes — his worldview — have an effect on an entire election? If he’s willing to spend enough money, the answer is, apparently, yes.
EDITOR: Millions are behind me…
The famous poster by Heartfield needs updating – now many billions are behind Gingrich, not just millions… And all this money is looking for even greater power than Adelson already has… The Palestinians will move from being merely ‘invented’ to being invisible, if this guy gets his way.
The Man Behind Gingrich’s Money: NYTimes
By MIKE McINTIRE and MICHAEL LUO
Published: January 28, 2012
Sheldon Adelson, left, met with President Shimon Peres of Israel after giving the charity Birthright Israel nearly $30 million in 2007.
The guide was Sheldon Adelson, a Las Vegas casino magnate who helped underwrite trips to the Middle East to win support for Israel in Congress. On this occasion in 1999, as the lawmakers enjoyed a reception at the Royal Palace in Amman, Mr. Adelson and an aide retreated to a private room with the king.
There, the king listened politely as Mr. Adelson sat on a sofa and paged through his proposal for a gambling resort on the Jordan-Israel border to be called the Red Sea Kingdom.
“This was shortly after his father, King Hussein, died, and he was grateful to me,” Mr. Adelson explained later in court testimony, recalling that he had lent his plane when the ailing monarch sought treatment in the United States. “So they remembered.”
The proposal never went anywhere — Mr. Adelson later said he had feared that a Jewish-owned casino on Arab land “would have been blown to smithereens.” But his impromptu pitch to the Jordanian king highlights the boldness, if not audacity, that has propelled Mr. Adelson into the ranks of the world’s richest men and transformed him into a powerful behind-the-scenes player in American and international politics.
Those qualities may also help explain why Mr. Adelson, 78, has decided to throw his wealth behind what had once seemed to be the unlikely presidential aspirations of Newt Gingrich. Now, in no small measure because of Mr. Adelson’s deep pockets, Mr. Gingrich is locked in a struggle with Mitt Romney heading into Florida’s Republican primary on Tuesday.
Mr. Adelson, by some estimates worth as much as $22 billion, presides over a global empire of casinos, hotels and convention centers whose centerpiece is the Venetian in Las Vegas, an exuberant monument to excess with canals, singing gondoliers and acres of slot machines. That fortune is a wellspring of financial support for Mr. Gingrich, who has benefited from $17 million in political contributions from Mr. Adelson and his wife, Miriam, in recent years, including $10 million in the last few weeks that went to a “super PAC” supporting him.
The question of what motivates Mr. Adelson’s singular generosity toward the former House speaker has emerged front and center in the campaign. People who know him say his affinity for Mr. Gingrich stems from a devotion to Israel as well as loyalty to a friend. A fervent Zionist who opposes any territorial compromise to make way for a Palestinian state, Mr. Adelson has long been enamored of Mr. Gingrich’s full-throated defense of Israel.
In December at an event in Israel for a charity he supports, Mr. Adelson made a point of endorsing Mr. Gingrich’s assertion that the Palestinians have no historic claim to a homeland.
“Read the history of those who call themselves Palestinians and you will hear why Gingrich said recently that the Palestinians are an invented people,” Mr. Adelson said at the event for Birthright Israel, which takes young Jews on trips there.
Mr. Adelson is hardly a household name. He avoids the limelight and rarely speaks to the press, remaining something of an enigma. He declined to be interviewed for this article, but he and his wife issued a statement saying friendship and loyalty are “our motivation for helping Newt.”
Through interviews and a review of Mr. Adelson’s testimony in legal disputes with former associates, a portrait emerges of a formidable and determined striver who lifted himself out of childhood penury in working-class Boston. He has a sentimental streak — on one of his first trips to Israel, he wore the shoes of his late father, a cabdriver from Lithuania who was never able to visit there — and he has given hundreds of millions of dollars to Jewish causes, medical research and injured veterans.
But his rise has not been without controversy. The Justice Department is investigating accusations by a former casino executive that Mr. Adelson’s operations in Macao may have violated federal laws banning corrupt payments to foreign officials. Also, a Chinese businessman accused Mr. Adelson of reneging on an agreement to share profits from the Macao project.
Mr. Adelson also has a reputation for irascibility and has left a trail of angry former business associates. Even his two sons sued him at one point, accusing him of cheating them, though they lost. He filed a libel suit against a Las Vegas newspaper columnist, John L. Smith, who eventually had to declare bankruptcy, and he waged a bitter court battle with a former employee whom he accused of spreading lies about him.
Nevertheless, his concern for his image was apparent in a deposition he gave in a court case, which also hints at the risk for Mr. Gingrich in accepting so much financial help from Mr. Adelson.
Complaining that negative things said about him were winding up in news articles, Mr. Adelson said his charitable donations had “been rejected a couple of times” because of the bad publicity: “Nobody ever says in such an article: ‘Oh, he’s a very nice guy. He helps old ladies across the street. He pets dogs behind the ears. He’s a hugely charitable person. He gives away hundreds of millions of dollars.’ ”
Early Ambition
Mr. Adelson likes to recount how his first business breakthrough came when, at age 12, he bought a newsstand in downtown Boston, eventually parlaying his earnings into a brief teenage career operating candy machines.
After high school, he had stints working as a mortgage banker, running a business packaging toiletries for hotels and operating a charter travel company. But he hit the jackpot with a computer trade show, Comdex, which he started in Las Vegas in 1979. Comdex became the signature annual event for the computer industry, attracting more than 200,000 visitors at its peak.
Jason Chudnofsky, who knew Mr. Adelson growing up in Dorchester, Mass., and became chief executive at Comdex, said his friend always had outsize ambition. He recalled Mr. Adelson’s telling him decades ago that one day they would be “talking to ministers” and heads of state.
“He was thinking big even back then,” Mr. Chudnofsky said.
Big thinking led Mr. Adelson to set his sights on a project that would transform both the Las Vegas casino trade and his own life in ways that seem to have surprised everybody but him.
In 1988, Mr. Adelson and his partners bought the historic Sands Hotel and Casino and built a convention center to accommodate their thriving trade show. Eight years later, after they sold Comdex for $862 million, Mr. Adelson used his profits on a risky new venture: tearing down the aging Sands and spending $1.5 billion to develop a lavish hotel and casino modeled after Venice.
Accepted wisdom had it that building both a hotel-casino and a convention center was a money loser. Mr. Adelson proved otherwise. As his reputation as a successful developer grew, he explored opportunities for overseas expansion. But his attempts to build a casino in Israel met resistance despite his connections, according to court records.
“I went to see the chief rabbi,” Mr. Adelson testified in 2009 in a lawsuit he brought against a former employee. “There was no chance the religious bodies were going to allow a casino in Israel.”
He turned his attention to Asia. China in 1999 reclaimed the former Portuguese colony of Macao, and a few years later ended a casino monopoly that had existed for many years. Mr. Adelson’s company, the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, bid for one of the licenses offered by the Chinese and won, leading to the opening of the $240 million Macao Sands in 2004.
The resort was so successful that its first-year profits exceeded the cost of the project, according to industry analysts. Mr. Adelson, who was also building a casino in Singapore, was riding high. But with so much money on the line, disputes arose with former associates looking for a share of the profits.
He was sued by a Hong Kong businessman, Richard Suen, who said he had been promised a “success fee” for introducing Mr. Adelson and his team to Chinese officials. A jury awarded Mr. Suen $44 million, but the award was overturned on appeal and the case sent back for a retrial, which is still pending.
In his suit, Mr. Suen asserted that while visiting Beijing in 2001, Mr. Adelson had been asked to use his influence in Congress to derail a human rights resolution that Chinese officials feared could complicate their bid to host the Olympic Games. Mr. Adelson acknowledged calling several congressmen, including Tom DeLay, who was the House majority whip at the time, but he and Mr. DeLay denied undermining the bill, which died in committee.
Still, a Sands executive testified that he had relayed a message to the Chinese taking credit for it.
The most damaging accusations have been made by a former Sands executive, Steve Jacobs, who sued after being fired in 2010. He alleges that he was pressed to exert “improper leverage” with Macao government officials to get approvals needed by the company, which Sands officials have denied. His assertions are now the subject of the federal investigation.
Passion for Israel
When Mr. Adelson appeared at the Birthright event in December and spoke approvingly of Mr. Gingrich, he had earned his place on the stage by virtue of his donations to the organization — more than $100 million in all.
He is also the single largest donor to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and museum, with gifts totaling $50 million. Mr. Adelson’s generosity to Jewish causes is especially striking given that for most of his life he was relatively uninvolved in that world.
Mr. Adelson’s business partners in his early days at Comdex were all much more active in Jewish affairs. But friends say Mr. Adelson experienced something of an awakening after his first visit to Israel in 1988, when he was in his mid-50s.
“He fell in love with the country,” said Ted Cutler, an early business partner.
This coincided with his divorce from his first wife, Sandra. Not long after his trip, he encountered a friend, Sara Aronson, at a Boston restaurant. Mr. Adelson talked excitedly of Israel and mentioned that he was interested in meeting Israeli women, Ms. Aronson recalled.
Ms. Aronson introduced him to her best friend, Dr. Miriam Ochshorn, a divorced physician from Israel in her 40s who was completing a fellowship in addiction medicine at Rockefeller University in New York. As it turned out, Mr. Adelson’s two sons from his previous marriage both struggled with drugs. One would die in 2005.
After the couple married in 1991, Mr. Adelson’s visits to Israel became so frequent that he told friends he was contemplating settling there. His increasing wealth gave him the means to make a lasting imprint on causes important to him and his wife, including the establishment of drug treatment centers in the United States and Israel.
He also became one of the biggest donors to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful pro-Israel lobby, and joined its executive committee.
Friends point out that his staunch Zionist beliefs are consistent with his take-no-prisoners personality. They also said the views of his wife, who had lived through so much tumult in Israel, including the 1967 war, undoubtedly helped shape his.
Over time, Mr. Adelson made his conservative views felt not only within the committee, but also in Israel. He started a free daily newspaper in 2007, Israel Hayom, that is widely viewed as supportive of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a close friend who shares his hawkish outlook.
Ehud Olmert, who was prime minister from 2006 to 2009, got a taste of the newspaper’s treatment of politicians who fall short of Mr. Adelson’s expectations. He and Mr. Adelson had been friendly, he said, but grew distant after Mr. Olmert tried to negotiate a two-state solution with Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority.
“Once, after I was already prime minister, he asked to come see me with his wife, Miri,” Mr. Olmert recalled in a telephone interview. “He already had his newspaper, and every day it attacked me viciously.
“Toward the end of our meeting, I asked him, ‘Aren’t you ashamed of what your paper is doing to the prime minister?’ ” Mr. Olmert said, referring to himself. “He said, ‘I don’t read Hebrew.’ And Miri said, ‘I do, and I must tell you that we are very aggressive against him.’ ”
Mr. Olmert added that he had heard from senior American officials that Mr. Adelson had advocated firing Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state and getting rid of Mr. Olmert because both were “betraying Israel.”
Shared Conservatism
As Mr. Adelson was experiencing his awakening on Israel, Mr. Gingrich was ascending the Republican ranks. He was also endearing himself to stalwart supporters of Israel.
In early 1995, newly elected as speaker of the House, Mr. Gingrich caused a stir when he called for moving the United States Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He later backed legislation endorsing the move. It was at a reception celebrating the measure that Mr. Gingrich first met Mr. Adelson, according to an associate of Mr. Adelson.
From then on, Mr. Adelson was among a cadre of pro-Israel advocates with whom Mr. Gingrich had regular interactions. The casino magnate also frequently lent his Gulfstream jet to Mr. Gingrich for cross-country trips, a former Gingrich adviser recalled.
Beyond Israel, the two men shared a conservative philosophy on matters important to Mr. Adelson’s businesses, including limiting the ability of labor unions to deduct money from members’ paychecks for political activities.
Mr. Gingrich also backed legislation sought by casino owners in 1998 to preserve tax deductions beneficial to the industry. That same year, Mr. Adelson hosted a Republican fund-raiser at one of his Las Vegas venues, headlined by Mr. Gingrich, and donated $300,000 to the party for the midterm elections.
Getting Involved
In 2006, when Mr. Gingrich began laying the groundwork for a possible run for the presidency, Mr. Adelson provided $1 million in seed money for his political committee, American Solutions for Winning the Future. Mr. Adelson donated an additional $2 million the next year; his contributions to the group have totaled more than $7 million.
During the 2008 election cycle, Mr. Adelson became recognized as a top-tier donor to the right and a moneyed villain to the left. He was the primary financier of a conservative nonprofit group, Freedom’s Watch, which trumpeted plans to spend as much as $200 million on the presidential election. Those plans, however, fizzled as internal problems paralyzed the organization, with Mr. Adelson micromanaging the group’s efforts, Republican operatives familiar with the organization said at the time. The group still spent about $30 million through early 2008, almost all of which came from Mr. Adelson, according to the operatives.
Today, the Venetian and the adjoining Sands Convention Center have become default destinations for Republican events in Las Vegas.
“I call it the Republican headquarters on the Strip,” said Jon Ralston, the political columnist for The Las Vegas Sun.
The Venetian will also be the official headquarters hotel for Saturday’s Nevada presidential caucuses. And in deference to observant Jews, the Clark County Republican Committee has scheduled a special caucus on Saturday night at the Adelson Educational Campus, a Jewish school financed by the Adelsons, six hours after the rest of the state is done caucusing.
When it came time to picking sides for this year’s Republican presidential nomination, Mr. Adelson made clear to friends early on that if Mr. Gingrich decided to run, he would back him. When Mr. Gingrich’s campaign faltered, friends who supported other candidates put pressure on Mr. Adelson to stay out of the race.
Nevertheless, Mr. Adelson made an initial $5 million contribution to Winning Our Future, a pro-Gingrich super PAC, before the South Carolina primary, which proved pivotal in Mr. Gingrich’s victory there.
Fred Zeidman, a Texas energy executive active in Jewish and Republican circles, said he talked to Mr. Adelson early last week, before it became public that Mrs. Adelson, 66, had also donated $5 million to the super PAC. Mr. Adelson told his friend that he was going to give more money and seemed to signal that he was willing to keep it flowing.
“I think what he’s trying to say is, ‘Newt ain’t going away, and I’m going to make sure of it,’ ” Mr. Zeidman said.
Reporting was contributed by Adam Nagourney from Las Vegas, Ethan Bronner and Isabel Kershner from Israel, and Keith Bradsher from Hong Kong.