Israeli settlements are not an obstacle to peace

Harry in 2009

My dad would have turned 95 today. To commemorate his birthday, he surely would have chosen to post an article he wrote about Israel – so strong in his heart. Harry’s Israel-themed newsletter articles from years past are absolutely still relevant. He wrote this one in 2009. Feel free to share and discuss it with your family and friends. 


Are the Israeli settlements an obstacle to peace? Are they illegal, that is, in the sense that they violate international law as stated in the Geneva Convention? You don’t have to be an expert in international law or a “Philadelphia” lawyer to know that the answer is no. It is only in a world in which the United Nations contains a majority of nations with majority Muslim populations who, together with the 22 Arab countries of the Middle East and Africa, are virulently anti-Semitic, that they are considered illegal. But this is a question that lawyers and judges can argue over ad infinitum. The world consensus will always come out against Israel and it is futile to counter with logic and precedent against hatred and bigotry.

The provisions of the Geneva Convention adopted after WWII prohibit the forcible transfer of any part of the population of one state to the territory of another state which has been occupied as a result of war. This is the principle on which the critics of Israel denounce the settlements as illegal. But this principle was intended to protect local populations from displacement, as the Soviets and Germans had done with forced transfers of Poles, Czechs and Hungarians during the war. The Geneva Convention does not prohibit individuals and groups from moving to land which is not and was not part of a “state” and is not privately owned by any individual. In that sense, Israelis moving to and establishing settlements is voluntary, not forced, and those settlements are not meant to displace anyone living there – and they don’t.

The charge that the settlements are illegal cannot be justified legally and can only be regarded as political, but, as with any lie, it has been repeated so often and so widely that it has come to be accepted as truth. What is true is that the so-called occupied territories, which is the West Bank, is not part of any other state but is simply land over which there are competing claims. Jordan occupied it for a while but never claimed it or annexed it, and it came under Israeli control as a result of a war of self-defense. Israel has a valid claim to this land and, if the Arabs of that area feel they have a valid claim, too, these claims can be resolved by negotiation. Throughout the world, competing territorial claims have been resolved by war, with the victor making the final decision. Israel is the only country in history which, having won the war, must negotiate with the defeated enemy to resolve a land dispute. The problem is that there is no international court of law and justice that can be described as fair and impartial to hear the legal arguments.  

The question remains: Are the settlements an obstacle to peace between the Israelis and the Arabs? There is no evidence to support the claim that they are. In fact, all the evidence refutes it. Before the settlements existed, the Arabs were unwilling to make peace with Israel. It is the very existence of the state of Israel that is the obstacle to peace. Even before the state of Israel existed, the Arabs were unwilling to live in peace with the Jewish residents of the British Mandate in Palestine. We can go into that history in another article, but for now, let’s stick to the present.

The President of the Palestinian National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, has stated that any new peace negotiations can only be conducted if the Israelis stop building settlements in the Palestinian territories. But what exactly are the Palestinian territories? They claim all the land, every inch of what the Unite Nations set aside for them when it partitioned one quarter of the Palestine Mandate into two parts, the smaller part for the Jews and the larger part for the Arabs. (Three quarters of the Mandate area had already been given to the Arabs for their own state, now known as Jordan.) The Arabs immediately went to war to eliminate the Jewish state, and lost part of their original parcel in their defeat. Now they want it back, despite their defeat in the war they started, and they still refuse to recognize the state of Israel. Can anyone seriously believe that the settlements have anything to do with it? In any case, in various agreements between Arabs and Jews, the question of the settlements was to be left for discussion in the final status negotiations. It was also agreed that the Arabs would have no jurisdiction regarding the settlements until the conclusion of a permanent Status agreement. It is important to note that all the settlements in the Sinai were uprooted and their residents relocated when Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel.  

Even if the Israelis were to stop building or even adding on to settlements, what do the Arabs offer in return? Would they recognize Israel’s right to exist? Sign a peace treaty? They have offered nothing. Meanwhile, Arab building continues and accelerates. For example, a new housing project is proceeding in Ramallah, which is planned to house some 10,000 people. And thousands of Arabs are moving into Jewish sections of Jerusalem, though the Arabs object strenuously when the Jews move into the Arab sections. There are more than a million Arabs living in Israel, some 20 percent of the population, enjoying all the rights and benefits of citizenship. It is a cliche, but it is also true, that the Israeli Arabs enjoy greater freedom and opportunity than they have in any of the Arab countries of the Middle East. The Arabs of Palestine, on the other hand, want no Jews in their territories and condemn the settlements as intruding on their land.

In Gaza, for example, the Israelis decided not only to stop building new settlements but to remove their existing settlements entirely, forcibly removing all the settlers and relocating them in other parts of the country. Did peace ensue? Hardly. Instead, an unceasing rain of rocket and mortar fire followed from Gaza into the cities and towns of southern Israel – more than 12,000 over an eight-year period, before Israel finally decided to retaliate. Did the UN condemn the ceaseless rocket fire from Gaza into civilian communities in Israel? No. But it condemned Israel for finally fighting back in an effort to stop the bombardment. In the face of this evidence, how can anyone seriously claim that the settlements are an obstacle to peace?

Also on the topic of Israeli settlement and building is his article “The Jerusalem Affair”, posted here in April 2016.

Copyright 2016
Elaine Blackman

Harry recalls the 'life of the party' (plus '50s photos of a community's labor of love)

Harry outlived many of his friends, and now I appreciate the stories he wrote in their memory. We've seen several on this blog -- each eulogy features the very heart of the person Harry remembered, and together they tell stories of a bygone generation of friends. Below you'll see another tribute for a man he befriended in Greenbelt, MD, the planned city built by President Roosevelt's New Deal. It's where Harry and Jerry Pines were among the founders of the Jewish Community Center -- built not by the government, but the residents themselves -- in the early 1950s. Below the tribute, I posted a few of the photos Harry saved from their do-it-yourself construction project.

Harry and Jerry Pines posed with friends on a trip in the 1970s. All were part of a large community of activists who remained friends for life, even though most moved out of Greenbelt in the '60s.

Those of us who have known Jerry Pines through a good part of our adult lives don’t have to be told what kind of man he was. But every person is viewed differently by the people he knows – his wife, his children, his grandchildren, his colleagues at work, his friends and his neighbors – each of them views a person from his own perspectives. I want to say a few words about him today from the perspective of a couple of his friends, Jack Sanders and myself, to show you how we looked at Jerry and to add a little understanding of that view to the storehouse of memories that his family will cherish in the years to come.

Whenever I think of Jerry Pines, one thing immediately comes to mind. He was always the life of the party. We’ve had a lot of parties over the past thirty-five or forty years in our circle of friends, and at every one of them, without fail, Jerry would sooner or later take center stage. When we needed a master of ceremonies, we’d call on Jerry. When we needed someone to say a few words about this or that, about almost anything, we’d call on Jerry. Not only did he have a sort of stage presence, as real as that of a professional entertainer, he also had the most delightful sense of humor.

He knew how to take the most ordinary incidents, the most routine of daily circumstances, and tell about them in such a way as to transform them into the most hilarious misadventures. The mishaps that befell him were unbelievable and, the way he told about them, unimaginable, as well. If you ever heard him tell about the things that happened to him when, for example, he would take a new car back to the dealer to get some simple little things fixed, you’ll know what I mean. Whenever he told a story like that, he would have us gasping for breath because we laughed so hard.

In these more recent years, he had more than his share of physical discomfort and pain, but even when talking was a great effort for him, he never lost that sense of humor and that knack for bringing out the bizarre aspects of any situation. I recall vividly when a few of us were all together last year, not long after he got that new gadget that made it possible for him to talk. Boy, did he talk! The effort required for him to talk didn’t faze him or inhibit him at all. He had us all in stitches.

There are a lot of other things we remember about Jerry Pines – his kindness, his generosity, his willingness to share, his genuine interest in others – these qualities are legendary among his friends. He had a great many virtues. He had an unwavering morality. He knew what was morally right and practiced it throughout his life. You could say that all of us know the difference between right and wrong, but we frequently look the other way when someone does something wrong. Not Jerry. He could not abide duplicity or dishonesty in others, and never hesitated to point it out when he encountered it. He played it straight all his life and he expected others to do the same, but he was not so naïve as to believe that they always would. One of the last things he told Jack Sanders, who saw him just before he went in for surgery last month, was that his wish for his grandchildren was that they would grow up to be honest, forthright citizens of high moral character. Jerry talked that way, and he meant it.

He was a keen observer of the world around him and deplored injustice wherever he saw it. He could never understand, for example, how in this great country of ours there was so much poverty and disadvantage, despite all of our national wealth and resources, and he championed the cause of the ill-fed, the ill-housed and the underprivileged. He wanted everyone to have a better life, not just here, but everywhere. Maybe that’s why he liked so much to travel, to visit other countries and to see other lifestyles, not just to say that he had been there, but to see things for himself and to gain a better understanding of other peoples and other cultures. Every trip he took was a learning experience for him and he always came back with some very cogent observations about the things he had seen.

Jerry Pines led his life with grace and style, with humor and wit, always looking at the bright side, never giving in to despair. He was a friend, and his friendship brightened our lives.

A complicated labor of love

The Washington Star news clipping (above) from March 20, 1955, and construction photos (below)
 

The project to build a Jewish Community Center in Greenbelt was an icon of community spirit among neighbors and friends. But it wasn't easy. In an article in The Washington Star Pictorial Magazine on March 20, 1955, Harry described several barriers:

"Often we had the heartbreaking job of tearing down work that took us weeks because a construction expert would tell us it wouldn't do." 

"Most of our people didn't know the front end of a trowel from the back of a wheel-barrow when we started." 

"One of our problems was the old saying, 'A little learning is a dangerous thing'. Too often we had 15 self-elected foremen all telling one another what they had learned from books and how to do the job."

I'd recognize my dad's jacket anywhere. Is he inspecting the wall?

Harry, Jerry and the others attended the building dedication on March 20, 1955 (above and below).

I was thrilled to find these '50s photos. (I have to wonder how long they could sit in those chairs.)

Yom Kippur reflections on our place in the world

Here (and below) is Harry on a day in 2011

A friend of Harry’s said she knew he was an intellectual and Zionist from his columns on Israel and Judaism in their synagogue newsletter. But she didn't know the other facets of Harry's life revealed in his writings on this blog. On the other hand, some of you knew Harry as the sweet family man and friend who sent you surprise packages, or the community activist, or the military news analyst. But you didn’t know that Harry wrote articles about Judaism. 

So, here’s a look at the latter – Harry the writer about Judaism and Israel, or as I like to think, “My dad, the authority on Israel.” Since most of us didn't see the article below in his October 2011 synagogue newsletter, it may give us thoughts to ponder on this Yom Kippur.

No, this was not on the day of Yom Kippur.

The introspection and meditation during the Yom Kippur period in October gave us a chance to reflect once again on the truly remarkable achievements of the Jewish people and their contributions to humanity. One of the primary goals of Judaism is to help “repair the world” following the principle of Tikun Olam, and in this sense the Jewish people have tried throughout history to fulfill their destiny. Thus, it came as no great surprise that of seven new winners of Nobel prizes recently awarded, five were Jewish. The statistics are worth reviewing once again.

On the world scene right now, Jews account for 0.2 percent of the total world population. That’s two tenths of 1 percent. They amount to only 2 percent of the US population. Yet, between 1901 and 2010, 22 percent of all Nobel prize winners worldwide were Jewish and 38 percent of all US prize winners were Jewish.

In some disciplines the statistics are even more impressive. In the field of economics, for example, 42 percent of the world total was Jewish, as was 55 percent of the US total. In physics, 26 percent of the world total and 37 percent of the US total were Jewish. In chemistry, 20 percent of the world total and 27 percent of the US total; in medicine 28 percent of the world total and 41 percent of the US total.

Jewish women are also well represented among prize winners in these various disciplines, accounting for 38 percent of the world total and fully 50 percent of the US total. Such achievements by so small a segment of the world’s population are more than noteworthy, they are positively miraculous and in keeping with the words of Isaiah: “You shall be a light unto the nations.”

The latest group of Nobel Laureates announced shortly before Yom Kippur included Adam Ross and Saul Pelmutter, American Jews, in the field of physics; Daniel Shechtman, an Israeli, in the field of chemistry; Ralph Steinman (posthumously) and Bruce Beutler in the field of medicine. Now, as more and more intellectual and technological marvels emerge from Israeli scientific institutions such as Technion and the Weizman Institue, the Jewish contribution to mankind's well-being can only multiply. 

In view of all this, it is difficult to understand the kind of anti-Semitic fervor that would motivate a group of Swedish academics to call for an academic boycott of Israeli institutions. They would actually boycott a number of Israeli scientific advancements that would benefit all mankind, a number of which are on display right now at the Bloomfield Science Museum in Jerusalem.


Harry wrote about the Bloomfield Science Museum in a post on this blog titled Inventions on Display. And, can anyone name the Jewish Nobel Laureates for the years since 2011?

The weekly card game, a tribute

Now I understand why Harry gave so many eulogies. Eloquent and relatable stories -- that's how I would describe the eulogies and tributes I discovered among Harry’s writings. Let me know if you agree. I’ll give you several samples in this blog, starting here. Harry wrote “We Remember Ben” in August 1993, for the Mishkan Torah Synagogue newsletter in Greenbelt, MD. 

A few of the poker players gather, in April 1961, with others outside of the Jewish Community Center, later renamed Mishkan Torah, in Greenbelt. These and dozens more Greenbelters pitched in their time and labor to build the synagogue. I'm sure I'll come across Harry's writing about this construction project -- the epitome of community spirit. 

Ben Herman left Greenbelt some fifteen years ago and not too many of us are left who were here during the three and a half decades that he lived among us. It is, after all, a half generation since he left and almost two full generations since he first came to live in Greenbelt. But those of us who count ourselves as the first generation of Greenbelters, those who settled here between the late 1930s and the late 1940s, remember him well. Ben was the original quiet man, soft-spoken, gentle, self-effacing, almost shy, and yet, at the same time, genial, sometimes even jovial, always friendly.

A group of us played poker with Ben once a week for more than 30 years; that’s 3 or 4 hours of intense camaraderie each week, 150 to 200 hours a year, between 4,500 and 6,000 hours over a 30-year period.

Social poker, as opposed to cutthroat or professional poker, is a game that inevitably exposes any person’s character traits to friendly scrutiny. A poker club is something like a carpool, a small group of people brought into close proximity on a regular basis to share a common experience. Inevitably, the individuals involved begin to share with each other their concerns, their fears, their triumphs and their tragedies. They confide in each other, they consult with one another, they seek each other’s advice and counsel on many of the problems that vex us all in our daily lives.

You want to build an addition on your house? Consult the poker club or the carpool. You want to invest in a particular stock? Consult the poker club. You want to buy new furniture? Buy a new car? Move to a new house? Join a golf club or a country club or a book club? You got it – consult the poker club. Not only do they share their problems, they share their experiences so that no one will make the mistakes that someone else has made before.

In a very real way, it’s almost like therapy, this close and intimate sharing experience. In today’s vernacular, it’s like belonging to a support group.

In all those thousands of hours of close and continuing contact, Ben was never once heard to raise his voice in anger. Unlike the rest of us, you see, he was the consummate listener. He was always the confidee, not the confider, the giver of advice and counsel, not the seeker. In his quiet and unassuming way, he often came up with the wisest comments, the sagest advice. And, frequently, delivered with a devastating sense of humor, a sardonic wit, a wry twist of phrase that would invariably evoke a deep, hearty chuckle from all of us.

We Americans are a nation of gripers. We gripe about everything. It doesn’t matter whether our circumstances are good or bad – there is always something to gripe about. But those of us who happen to be Jewish have refined griping to an art form, only we call it complaining, and complaining is just another manifestation of worrying, which is something we do very well. We complain about everything. Your child got all straight A’s on his report card? You complain (worry) that the schoolwork was not challenging enough, too easy for him. You pass your annual physical with flying colors? You complain (worry) that the doctor didn’t give you all the possible diagnostic tests. In the best Jewish tradition, as the sages would put it, “So long as you complain, you know you’re alive.”

And so it is with all of us. We constantly complain about problems, real or imagined. But not Ben Herman. He had problems, real ones, some serious ones about the state of his health, among other things, but never, never once, did we hear him complain. He just went quietly about handling things as best he could and stoically shrugged off the things that were beyond his control. He took our finest Jewish tradition and turned it completely around. “So long as you’re alive,” he would say, “don’t complain.” In a way, that sums him up. A man of infinite patience, of quiet strength, and above all, a good and trusted friend who left this world last month but who will always be alive in our memories.


As more of Harry's friends passed away, and he moved to more suitable apartment communities, he continued to play poker with other groups of friends. The last few years, as the players' eyesight declined, he bought large-faced decks of cards whenever he saw them (and family members kept an eagle eye out for them in stores, too) because each weekly card game required two fresh decks. When Harry died in 2014, we donated about 100 new decks he'd accumulated to his final poker group, and I believe they appreciated the inheritance.

In these 1953 photos, pioneer families of Greenbelt, MD, were developing lifelong friendships through socializing, community activism, and of course, poker. Stay tuned for more of Harry's eulogies for his Greenbelt friends. But first, Harry had something else on his mind in 1953 -- a case of "McCarthyism" that hit this young Greenbelt community. Read his reflections next week on this blog.

'If I tell you, they’ll kill me'

Harry Zubkoff was a true storyteller, but he never would tell us one story in particular. We knew that he hunted down Nazi criminals during his stint in the Army Counter Intelligence Corps after World War II ended. However, even in his old age, and of superbly sound mind, he wouldn’t divulge many details.

“Zadie, you’re 92, you can tell us, no one will find you,” his granddaughter insisted during a hospital visit in 2013. 

But he stuck to his story:  “If I tell you, they’ll kill me.” He did, however, encourage friends who showed an interest in his military experience to read “The Brigade” by Howard Blum.

The following excerpts (slightly paraphrased in spots) from Harry’s recorded interview with the U.S. Veterans History Project, give us some insight. 


The basic job of counter intelligence was to investigate cases of sabotage, espionage, subversive activities. … We were being used to trace down Nazi war criminals to get what they could use in war crimes trials, and to help build a network of people who could help us get information.

Harry's ID card

We were worried at the time about the increasing hostility with Russia. … In the intelligence business we were taught so much about the Nazi paramilitary organizations and their political organizations, and we started taking lessons in the same things with regard to the Russians and Communists. We were working on both figuring out what the communists were doing and the Nazi war criminals.

I was sent on several missions, and spent some time in DP, displaced persons camps. … We set up DP camps for Jewish people, and I had a lot of interaction with them. … They thought the American Jewish soldiers were a breed apart from the other soldiers. They didn’t know that Jewish people could be in the Army.

Now, did you ever hear of the Jewish Brigade from Palestine? Some of the guys wrote a book. They were also chasing Nazi war criminals, and finding them, and killing them. … There was a period of time when my superiors were wondering if I was one of the guys who was finding them and killing them. … Other officers (not mine) were not sure about Jewish soldiers. They did things the intelligence community really wasn’t happy with. They brought over the Nazi scientists to the U.S. … We were against that.  … We found out that many Nazis were being placed in responsible government jobs.


More on "The Brigade"
In Harry’s old boxes, we found some disturbing Nazi photos of a concentration camp, postcards with German notes on them, and posters of Hitler, etc. We also found news clippings Harry saved over the years about WWII veterans and then-secret missions. I learned more about the book "The Brigade" from the following note we found on his computer.

The Brigade is the story—the true story—of how the Jews of Palestine formed a Brigade of some 5,000 men to fight as part of the British forces in WWII. In part it is the story, through the eyes of three men, of fighting against the Nazis, of seeking out Nazi war criminals, and of organizing a massive effort to spirit the remnants of Jews out of Europe and into Palestine. I spent a year and a half in Germany after the war ended in May 1945, hunting down war criminals who had gone to great lengths to hide their identities and their whereabouts. So, a part of this story is closely related to a part of my story.

But, the best part of this account is the brilliant efforts of the Palestinians (in those days, the Palestinians were the Jews, not the Arabs) to smuggle the survivors out of Europe under the eyes of the British, and to get them into Palestine. Too few Americans know the story of this Brigade. And almost nobody of the current generation, the young Jewish families of today, knows about this period of Jewish history.

So, if you will bear with this old man, I keep doing my best to inform everybody I can reach with this story. This story of the Brigade is as important as the story of the Exodus, which became such an inspiring movie a generation ago. I hope you will read it and treasure it as a part of your history as Jews, no matter how far removed it is from your own personal experience.

 Harry with older brother Hymie in Hartford, CT, 1945

Does Harry's essay make you want to read “The Brigade” or learn about the 970th Counter Intelligence Corps missions? FYI, the Library of Congress' Veterans History Project has a page on stories from the Jewish Veterans of World War II.

Harry and his younger cousin Harvey Rogers were thrilled 
to run into each other in a hotel in Germany, 1946.

(This post is the first published by Harry's daughter, Elaine, in 2015. Harry wrote and published all previous posts in 2011.)