Abrabanel: Musings on the Jewish condition

The “radical peace camp,” for lack of a better term, continues to baffle us. It seems utterly committed to remaining in the ridiculed sidelines of a complicated conflict. Its latest anti-Israel act comes in the form of a statement calling for IDF troops to refuse to fight in Gaza.

Nothing surprising in the text:

We refuse to remain silent while Israeli leaders force Israeli soldiers to commit war crimes: crimes against humanity for which they will one day be called to account. Israeli soldiers of conscience can, and must, stop this dangerous, illegal, and immoral war.

Etc., etc., etc.

A member of one of the sponsoring organizations brought this petition to our notice, noting with pride that it has nearly 700 signatures from 37 countries. We agreed with her that 700 names was remarkable, but in the other direction: the vast majority of Jews are not against the Gaza operation.

But the question of popularity aside, what about the sheer inanity of the text? It’s hard to see as a serious part of the discussion someone who comes out for peace and quiet only now when Israel is shooting back.

Also, isn’t it just a bit intellectually lazy to label Israeli actions “war crimes?” International agreements clearly stipulate that the party that drags the civilians into the battlefield, or takes the battle to the civilian population, is the criminal. A statement that fails to deal with that is both misleading as to the meaning of “war crime” and irrelevant to any conversation about the realities on the ground.

How do they countenance a statement that calls only Israel to account? We fancy ourselves peace-loving liberals yearning for Palestinian statehood, but we still marvel at the glaring lacuna in the peace statement: where is the recognition that the opponent here is Hamas, not Mohandas Gandhi?

Things look bad in the run-up to Durban II in April. A new text by the Asian bloc accuses Israel of “a new kind of apartheid, a crime against humanity, a form of genocide.”

UN Watch warns:

“French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the U.K., the Netherlands and other states have expressly warned that a repeat of the 2001 hateful rhetoric would force them to walk out of the April 2009 conference, and so the 53 Asian states who did this now bear full responsibility for the consequences of their provocation. Those who will suffer, however, will be the world’s millions of victims of racism and ethnic intolerance, from Darfur to Chechnya to Tibet.”

Not for robbing a bag of chickpeas, mind you. No, the Lebanese government and the country’s industrialists association are planning to sue Israel for stealing the food itself, the recipe.

The Jerusalem Post brings an AP report:

A Lebanese official says his country is preparing to file an international lawsuit against Israel for claiming ownership of traditional dishes it believes were originally Lebanese.

The president of the Lebanese Industrialists Association, Fadi Abboud, accuses Israel of “stealing” its northern neighbor’s cuisine by marketing dishes such as hummus – found across the Middle East – as its own.

Abboud says that while Lebanon is partly to blame because it has never registered its main food trademarks, Israel’s adoption of these dishes causes it major losses.

One Israeli Arab hummus purveyor in Ramle even told the Post:

“It is the right thing to do. The Israeli people are taking a product that does not officially belong to them. It originates among the Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese people,” he said.

The Post did a poor job giving the Jewish side of the story. They quote a food writer saying “people use the ingredients available in their area.” The food writer then admits that “the Arabs made it long before there was Israel. … It’s for sure not a Jewish invention.”

Come again? 60% of Israeli Jewish blood comes from the Arab and Muslim world, particularly Iraq, Morocco, Yemen and Egypt. Israeli Jews have sabih from Yemen and kubeh from Iraq – and they are their indigenous foods. These Jews have been Middle Eastern – or at least Iraqi, Moroccan, etc. – longer than the Arabs themselves.

Granted we prefer the Lebanese version of the ubiquitous dish – every Israeli supermarket carries “Lebanese hummus” alongside other varieties – but we’ve been dipping Jewish kubeh in Iraqi hummus since before there was an Iraq.

Of course, this isn’t actually about hummus. This is about denying Israelis a legitimate stake in the region, this time by denying the authenticity of Israel’s hummus-centered cuisine.

Maybe we should be demanding royalties for, oh, monotheism.