January 22, 2018: U.S. announcement was recognition of the obvious: Jerusalem is Israel’s capital

By Michael Regenstreif

The Ottawa Jewish Bulletin only publishes one print edition per month in December and January and the December issue comes out early in the month while the January issue comes late in the month. That production schedule was set up years ago to allow the Bulletin staff to take vacations in what is usually one of the quietest times of the year for news.

Perhaps the biggest news to break in the Jewish world during our production break was U.S. President Donald Trump’s announcement recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital city and that the U.S. embassy in Israel would eventually be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

In fact, a law recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and providing for the embassy to be moved to Jerusalem was passed by the United States Congress in 1995. So, Trump’s announcement was really an acknowledgement of what has been American law for more than two decades. By the way, the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support: 93-5 in the U.S. Senate and 374-37 in the House of Representatives.

One of the provisions in the law provides for a waiver to enable the president of the United States to delay moving the embassy to Jerusalem for six months. Since 1995, every U.S. president – Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Trump – has signed the waiver every six months.

Indeed, after making the announcement, Trump signed a waiver keeping the embassy in Tel Aviv for another six months and it remains to be seen if or when he will stop signing them.

In many ways, Trump’s announcement was recognition of the obvious. Jerusalem has been the capital of the modern State of Israel for almost 70 years. The Knesset – Israel’s parliament – is in Jerusalem. So are the Israeli Supreme Court and other important institutions and offices of government.

And although no country currently locates its embassy in Jerusalem – ambassadors from all countries present their credentials at the Jerusalem residence of the Israeli president.

But the status of Jerusalem – a holy city for Judaism, Christianity and Islam – has been in dispute for as long as Israel has been a modern state. Recall that the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, passed in 1947, called for the creation of two states: one Jewish and one Arab. But partition was rejected by the Arabs and the new State of Israel was invaded by the surrounding Arab countries when the Jewish state declared independence in 1948. When the War of Independence ended, Israel held West Jerusalem and Jordan held East Jerusalem along with the West Bank.

Under Jordanian rule, Jews were not allowed to live in East Jerusalem or the West Bank, or to have access to such holy sites as the Western Wall. That was the status quo until 1967 when East Jerusalem and the West Bank were captured by Israel in the Six Day War. Jordan had renounced any claims it had to East Jerusalem and the West Bank long before signing a peace treaty with Israel in 1994.

Palestinians now claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state and the policy of the Canadian government, like that of many democracies, is that the final status of Jerusalem should be resolved in the context of settling Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians – a policy that has been long unchanged by both Conservative and Liberal federal governments.

Trump’s announcement, while recognizing the obvious fact that Jerusalem is, indeed, Israel’s capital, did not preclude an eventual shared sovereignty for the city (a shared sovereignty that Israel offered the Palestinians in peace negotiations as recently as 2008 – negotiations the Palestinians walked away from).

I believe that a two-state solution will be the best possible outcome for Israel’s future and for the future of the Palestinian people. But settling the conflict, and creating a Palestinian state, will take serious negotiations. While many – me included – question how serious Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is about settling the conflict, at least he insists he’s ready to negotiate.

Unfortunately, the Palestinians continue to seize on any excuse – including Trump’s announcement – to refuse to even come to the table.

October 14, 2013: Documentary offers an enthralling look at the Holy City

By Michael Regenstreif

The remarkable documentary film Jerusalem, now playing at the IMAX theatre at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, is a visually stunning and compelling portrait of the city. The movie gracefully captures and explains the central religious and historic importance of the city to Jews, to Christians and to Muslims.

Director Daniel Ferguson and his team negotiated unprecedented access from government and religious authorities to take their state-of-the-art cameras into the streets and markets, to the skies in what is normally a no-fly zone, and to holy sites such as the Western Wall, the Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Seeing the sights so vividly captured in ultra-high definition on the IMAX domed screen is simply breathtaking.

Almost all of the short film – it flies by in less than 45 minutes – takes place in the very small area of the Old City. Using the narration of British actor Benedict Cumberbatch and commentary by American archeologist Jodi Magness, the film summarizes and explains Jerusalem’s rich biblical-era history and the hows and whys of its centrality to each of the three monotheistic religions.

We see Jews praying at the Kotel, Christians re-enacting Jesus’ final journey along the Via Dolorosa on Good Friday, and Muslims at prayer at the Dome of the Rock. To experience the marketplace with its Arab merchants and backgammon players via the film is as vivid as it can be without actually being there.

At the heart of Jerusalem are the people and the very distinct communities who live there, and we meet them through three articulate teenage girls who have lived in Jerusalem all of their lives and whose families have deep roots in the city: Revital Zacharie, a Jewish Israeli; Nadia Tadros, a Christian; and Farah Ammouri, a Muslim Arab.

Each of the girls – who, on the surface, seem so much alike – offers a tour of her Jerusalem, her Old City. They take us to some of the same places and introduce us to their families, and to some of the traditions that define their lives. They talk passionately and poignantly, and one never gets the sense that their individual visions of Jerusalem would exclude the other two.

But the fact emerges that these three girls – each eminently likable – are strangers to each other.

Each of them understands the importance of Jerusalem to her own religious narrative, and to her own community, but none of them knows very much about why Jerusalem is so important to the others. Each of the three has spent her life walking the same streets and living so close to the others without the opportunity to meet.

It would seem the kind of exchanges we see in Ottawa, when Grade 6 students at the Ottawa Jewish Community School have fun and share educational experiences with their Muslim and Christian counterparts at Charles H. Hulse Public School, or when Temple Israel invites Christians and Muslims to an interfaith Sukkot celebration, don’t happen in Jerusalem.

As much as I loved, and was inspired, watching Jerusalem – I highly recommend it and plan to see it again while it’s here at the Museum over the next six months – I felt sad as the movie ended and one of the girls says, “I hope, one day, we can have the courage to meet the people who are living right next to us.”

After the lights came up at the press screening, I asked Daniel Ferguson if the three girls had a chance to meet and interact during the filming. He told me they were brought together at one point, but that each felt too bound up in the history of her own narrative to interact successfully with the others.

Perhaps, now that the film has been completed, they will have the chance to see it, to glimpse inside each other’s worlds – in such close proximity to their own – and begin to find out how much they have in common. That was Ferguson’s hope. And mine, too.

March 24, 2008: There can be no excuse for revenge terrorism

By Michael Regenstreif

The massacre, earlier this month, of eight students at the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva in Jerusalem was a heinous act. The students – all but one were just teenagers – were slaughtered as they studied Torah. The lone terrorist, a Palestinian from East Jerusalem, was killed on the scene by an off-duty Israeli soldier.

News reports from Israel after the massacre said the family of the murderer, Ala Abu Dhaim, claimed he was not a member of any terrorist organization. Hamas, the supposedly religious terrorist organization that controls Gaza, denied involvement in the attack, all the while celebrating the killings, just as they celebrate any attack on Jewish Israelis. There were parties in the streets of Gaza with celebratory gunfire and the passing out of sweet treats to children.

What a lesson to teach their children. Go out and kill some Jews and we’ll dance in the streets and eat some chocolate.

In the absence of late-breaking evidence that may have come out in the days between the deadline for writing this column and when you’ll have the opportunity to read it, it doesn’t appear that Hamas was directly involved in the attack.

While sickeningly overjoyed at the result of the act, Hamas probably wasn’t directly involved as they’ve never been particularly shy about claiming credit for the terrorist acts they have perpetrated over the years.

In fact, there have been no credible reports of any real terrorist group’s involvement in the terrible crime. Maybe he was just a delusional, hate-filled individual with a stockpile of guns.

When delusional, hate-filled individuals have access to guns, innocent people die. We’ve seen it time and again. Think of Baruch Goldstein, a delusional, Orthodox Jew who hated Arabs and murdered 29 of them and wounded 150 more as they prayed at a mosque in Hebron in 1994.

Closer to home, there was Mark Lepine, yet another hate-filled, delusional individual with a gun. Lepine hated women and killed 14 female engineering students in 1989 at the École Polytechnique in Montreal. How many other such senseless school shootings have we witnessed in recent years in Canada, in the United States? All committed by hate-filled, delusional individuals with access to guns.

Given the realities of the Middle East, we’re quick to assume that every attack against Israeli Jews is the work of an organized terrorist group. An assumption that comes easily because we know there have been so many terrorist attacks perpetrated by such groups.

But maybe this one was just the work of a delusional individual who lost it like Baruch Goldstein lost it, like Mark Lepine lost it, like so many others have lost it.

I fear that as long as hate-filled, delusional individuals have access to guns, we will see senseless massacres of innocent people.

I’m sure Dhaim’s attack was well-planned. There are reports that he had stockpiled weapons and had been to the yeshiva as part of his work as a delivery driver in Jerusalem. Whether he acted alone, or was following the orders of puppet masters, he was a terrorist.

Dhaim is dead. In the absence of any evidence that he was part of an organized terrorist group, there is no one to bring to justice for his terrible crime.

However, Israel’s Channel One television has reported on March 11 that three alumni of Mercaz Harav secretly met with an unnamed rabbi from the yeshiva who encouraged them to seek revenge. The report said two others rabbis endorsed the call to revenge as religiously sound.

A day later, leaflets signed by several rabbis were posted in Jerusalem that called on Jews to extract revenge for the murders at Mercaz Harav by matching them “measure for measure.” An Agence France-Presse report said one of the rabbis signing the leaflet was Uzi Sharvaf, “a rabbi who received a presidential pardon in 1985 after being convicted for a 1983 attack on a West Bank university that left three students dead.”

Vigilante Jewish terrorists, under the direction or blessing of rabbis, killing innocent Arabs in revenge for the killing of innocent Jews: the thought sickens.

Israel has a democratically-elected government, intelligence services, army, police force and justice system to deal with terrorism and terrorists. Given the magnitude of the constant threats, they do a remarkable job. Just as there is no excuse for terrorist attacks against Jews, there can be no excuse for terrorist attacks by Jews.