On Nobility

From a David Ohana piece, responding to an attack on Talmon and Leibowitz:-

...[Israel] Harel and his settler friends are in fact anti-Zionists who have abandoned the classic religious Zionism...The rabbis and the settlers have taken control of the Bnei Akiva youth movement, and instead of theological humility they have displayed a metaphysical arrogance. Instead of religious Zionists connected to the reality of Israeli society, they have become exploiters living in a bubble of alienation, an intellectual wilderness.

They have not internalized the Zionist revolution that made us sovereign in our own land, preferring to be victims. They have forsaken the nobility of a sovereign who is self-confident enough to be willing to compromise, choosing instead to be the hypocritical bully. They have ignored everyone around them, the secular Israelis and the Palestinians, the poor and the migrant workers, so they have never taken part in a struggle for social justice.

Besides that libelous claim of not taking part in acts of social justice, that bit of nobility reminded me of the Betar Oath, especially one verse of the Oath Poem containing this by Jabotinsky:-

הדר: מדם גדעון נזרעתי, לכמוני
הדר ניני מלכות בלב, בגו, בכל:
יהיר בפני שרים, ענו עומת בן – עני,
גובר – כדי למחול.

My translation:

Hadar: I am begotten of the seed from Gideon's blood, and as I am, my nobility is of generations of royalty - in my heart, my stature and my all;
Proud before princes, humble to the poor,
Powerful so I can forgive.

To be noble doesn't mean to be self-confident so to be able to compromise. And sovereignty is not to be yielded for otherwise you harm your own people.

That is Ohana's warped misrepresentation of our needs as Zionists.

Off Goes a Letter to the Washington Post

Hady Amr and Joel H. Samuels claim that "Palestinian negotiators also acknowledged the corollary Israeli need for sovereignty over not only the Wailing Wall, but also the Jewish Temple Mount" ("For Jerusalem, Shared Sovereignty", July 21). But this is false. No neogtiator for the Palestinian Authority has ever offered shared sovereignty nor "recognized" it. Some have bemoaned Yassir Arafat's faux paus at the 2000 Camp David Conference, when he told President Clinton that no Temple ever existed on the Temple Mount but nothing more has been forthcoming.

There has been a suggestion of a "divine sovereignty" but no practical benchmarks for that concept exist. When the Muslim Waqf will allow a group of 10 Jews to pray in a corner of the esplanade on Mount Moriah and thus religiously share the holy site, or will allow archeological exacvations there to discover its Jewish past and halt its destruction of the same, then we will know a change has been made.

And these kooks add:-

American leadership on "shared" sovereignty in Jerusalem can help bring peace to Israelis and Palestinians. Equally important is the implicit message this will send to the Muslim world: that "shared" solutions for "shared" U.S. and Muslim world security can be found and that Americans are committed to making that happen.

Sometimes and in some places, conflict is so intractable that all but the most unlikely solutions are fated to fail. In those times and places, we need to try methods that have not been considered in the hopes that unconventional solutions will offer opportunities not available through line-drawing. This is such a time; Jerusalem is such a place; shared sovereignty is such a solution. And the benefits can be global.

Since when have the Pals. shared anything?