Essays and viewpoints

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for openers

L’fl eur V’dor

CAROLE MALTZMAN

My sister Olivia Ross and I, as well as our families, look forward to spring each year and the arrival of my mom’s peonies. My mother, Rose Hack, loved to garden and had the most gorgeous peonies. After she died in 1984, we sisters transplanted the peony bushes to our gardens. Over the years, I have has taken peony cuttings to each of my children living in three different time zones: Jon in Redwood City, Calif., Michelle in Chicago and Alicia in Boulder, Colo. We wait all year to see whose will bloom first and remember grandma. We watch them grow tall, get buds, pray for the ants to open them, all the while texting the peonies’ progress with photos and remembrances of Grandma Rosie. Jon’s puppy dug his up a few years ago, so he got new cuttings this year; Michelle’s always blooms first; and Alicia’s, transplanted to her new house on a sunny 2020 winter’s day, are last. Olivia’s peonies moved from one house to another, from sun to shade, and this year have been re-transplanted to get more sun. Her sons Jeremy and Matt are waiting for their cuttings. The peonies connect the generations and serve to keep a special grandmother alive in our thoughts and hearts.

Jon’s peony cutting from California Rose Hack Michelle’s peonies in Chicago

COURTESY OF CAROLE MALTZMAN

Alicia’s peonies in Boulder Olivia Ross and Carole Maltzman

Carole Maltzman lives in West Bloomfield.

essay One Generation Departs, Another Steps Up

Sometimes when a torch is passed, it’s an actual flame handed off from runner to runner in a torch-lighting ceremony. It’s thrilling to see the athlete sprint with confidence and purpose, torch thrust high. The next runner awaits, ready to take the flame forward. A quick handoff and the torch advances toward the next outstretched hand.

We see the exhilaration on each runner’s face; we can only imagine the responsibility the runner feels to keep the flame moving ahead. Don’t drop the torch. Don’t fall. Don’t fail.

As the first of our grandchildren headed to Jewish overnight camp this week, a torch has passed to me. A torch whose warmth comes not from fire but from memory. The torch was handed off to me by my parents and in-laws and the parents of so many dear friends, devoted grandparents who never missed the Jewish summer camp sendoff.

They stood in the hot, crowded, chaotic synagogue parking lot, bestowing their kids and grandkids with hugs, kisses and words of encouragement. No matter how long it took to load the buses, they stayed. When the

air brakes released with a huff and the buses at last lurched forward, they waved until the buses were out of sight. Sure, some of that was simple devotion, the boundless love that connects grandparents and grandchildren. But these grandparents also understood the essential role Jewish overnight camp plays in Sally Abrams building Jewish identity. Not

JTA only is camp joyful and fun, camp makes being Jewish

continued from page 4

joyful and fun. Something you’re proud to be. These camps create experiences that connect kids powerfully with Judaism, enabling them to embrace the heritage that is their birthright.

So, those grandparents showed their enthusiastic support with a big farewell. They wrote letters and sent care packages. On Visitors Day or Visitors Weekend, there they were again, lugging picnic baskets and stepping carefully over the uneven ground.

They loved the vibrancy of Jewish life at camp, and they said so again and again. Some of these grandparents may have helped pay for camp, too. Their support, in ways large and small, delivered two powerful messages to their grandchildren: You matter. And this matters.

With a few exceptions, those beloved elders have passed from the scene. But their example remains.

It’s the example I’ve had in mind this week, as the next generation of our family heads to Jewish overnight camp. Now, it’s my turn, our turn, to carry the torch forward.

SCHOLARSHIPS HELP

It also makes me think about the ways a Jewish community shows all its children that they matter, and this matters. Jewish summer camp is a bigticket item. Scholarship funds will always be needed.

That’s how I was able to go to Jewish summer camp so long ago. The cost was a fraction of the cost today, but it was still totally out of reach for my blue-collar parents. Thanks to the generosity of someone I never knew, maybe someone else’s grandparents, I was able to go. Twice. It changed my life forever.

Years ago, I established a modest camp scholarship fund at our Jewish Federation in memory of my parents. The parents who needed a helping hand to get me to camp are benefactors for other children now. I always ask the scholarship coordinators to convey a parallel message to the recipients: Sometimes one who needs a boost today will be in a position later to help someone else.

There are many ways to be a “grandparent.”

It’s time to dash off a message to my little campers. No more “snail mail”; now the camp prints out email messages and delivers them to the kids.

Times change, but one thing will never change. The sound of the air brakes releasing, and the lurch of the buses moving ahead will always fill my eyes with tears.

It’s the poignant sound of time passing; one generation departs, another steps up in its place, and the children, the sweet children, move ever forward.

CAMP TAMARACK

Sally Abrams co-directs the Speakers Bureau of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas. Visit: sallygabrams.com.

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PURELY COMMENTARY

essay

Arak’s IR-40 Heavy water reactor in Iran

Iran’s Nuclear Secrets Have Been Exposed

Spies steal secrets. Sometimes, those secrets must be carefully studied and analyzed by experts to turn them into products useful to policymakers. The spies I’ll be talking about here worked for the Mossad. The expert who has painstakingly transformed the secrets they collected into actionable intelligence is David Albright.

And the policymaker who should be revising his policies in response to a clearer picture of reality is President Joe Biden.

The story begins on a cold night in January 2018, when Israeli agents stealthily broke into a warehouse in southern Tehran where Iran’s rulers had stored an archive of their nuclear weapons program.

In an interview recently broadcast on Israeli television, former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen revealed new details of the operation. Planning required two years and included the construction of a replica of the warehouse. Twenty agents were trained for the mission. None of them were Israelis. They had less than seven hours to carry out their risky mission.

“In the morning, trucks, guards and workers arrive, and there’s a crowd and you can’t just jump over fences and break through walls,” said Cohen. “Only when they broke into the formidable safes and began to go through the images and Farsi descriptions did we realize that we had what we wanted on the Iranian military nuclear program.”

The agents quickly spirited the materials — more than 55,000 pages of documentation and nearly 200 computer disks — out of the country. None of the agents was captured but, Cohen said, some had to be rescued from Iran.

Three months later, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a press conference. He said the materials proved that Tehran had a “program to design, build and test nuclear weapons … to use at a time of its choice to develop nuclear weapons.”

That meant that the nuclear deal President Barack Obama had concluded in 2015, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was predicated on lies told by Iran’s rulers, and that the JCPOA did not, as claimed, block their path to a nuclear weapons capability.

Proponents of the JCPOA insisted there was nothing earth-shattering in the materials, and that Obama had concluded as good a deal as could be expected. President Donald Trump, long mistrustful of the deal, soon formally withdrew.

David Albright, a physicist and the founder and president of the Institute for Science and International Security,

also known as “the good ISIS,” persuaded the Israeli government to allow him access to the materials. Since then, he and his team have conducted a comprehensive forensic analClifford D. May ysis.

JNS.org

THE TRUTH COMES OUT

The result is a new book: Iran’s Perilous Pursuit of Nuclear Weapons, co-authored with Sarah Burkhard. In it, Albright points out that the very “existence and maintenance of a secret archive containing nuclear weapon design and manufacturing data is not compatible with Iran’s legally binding nuclear non-proliferation commitments” under the NonProliferation Treaty (NPT), the fundamental international agreement for preventing the spread of nuclear weapons.

Albright notes that by “secretly storing and curating an extensive archive focused on developing and building missile-deliverable nuclear weapons,” Iran’s rulers also violated their “JCPOA pledge that ‘under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.’”

The Islamic Republic’s secret nuclear weapons development program, the Amad Plan, was suspended in 2003, after the U.S. military toppled regimes in both Afghanistan and Iraq, causing Iran’s rulers to fear they might be next. But that was a “tactical retreat, not an abandonment” of the regime’s “nuclear weapons ambitions or activities,” writes Albright.

“The post-Amad goals are among the most critical revelations of the archive,” he continues. Over the past decade, an Iranian Ministry of Defense entity known as SPND has been responsible for developing various nuclear capabilities. “Iran’s lack of cooperation with the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] up until today has increased concerns that a subset of SPND’s activities have remained focused on preserving or carrying forward the activities of the Amad Plan.”

The archive also reveals that Iran’s rulers have “a host of undeclared nuclear sites and activities, all previously dedicated to a covert, and illegal, nuclear weapons program.” What activities are taking place at those sites now is unknown because IAEA inspectors have been barred from visiting most of them.

Under the flawed JCPOA, the IAEA also is not permitted to inspect military facilities where nuclear weapons research has been conducted in the past and

NANKING2012, WIKIMEDIA

PURELY COMMENTARY

guest column

Hope Against Hope: The New Israeli Government

On Sunday, June 13, a new Israeli government was sworn in, and for the first time in 12 years, Benjamin Netanyahu was not the prime minister. Having served for 15 of the last 25 years, Netanyahu has been Israel’s longest serving prime minister. A charismatic communicator and a master politician, Netanyahu can be credited for forging relations with the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan, as well as improving relations with countries such as India.

However, Netanyahu also inflicted great harm to the country, weakening Israel’s democracy, further polarizing its society, weakening U.S. bipartisan support for Israel and undermining prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Going into this last election, Netanyahu faced obstacles: For months, thousands of Israelis demonstrated every week against him, and he was already on trial for breach of trust, bribery and fraud. But it was his own lack of emotional intelligence that ultimately caused his defeat.

Netanyahu does not have many long-lasting political friendships; he expects his advisers to be a revolving set of yesmen; and his extreme suspicion of others created a self-fulfilling prophecy by turning allies into enemies. That is why rather than joining him, the leaders of right-wing parties who would otherwise have been his natural ideological allies — and all of whom had already worked with Netanyahu in the past — preferred to join a coalition of parties with whom they would seem to have less in common: two Zionist centrist parties, two left-of- center Zionist parties and an Arab Islamist party.

Netanyahu has broken so many promises to and alienated so many potential allies, that no one trusted the promises he made to lure them into a coalition. This paved the way for Naftali Bennett, whose Yamina party is to the right of Netanyahu’s Likud party, to become prime minister of Israel, even though his party only secured six seats in the Knesset. Bennett served as Netanyahu’s chief of staff from 2006-2008, but Netanyahu’s propensity to undermine those loyal to him for fear of them

Yael Aronoff

becoming rivals became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It is fitting that this article on the new Israeli government begin with several paragraphs devoted to Netanyahu, because a rejection of Netanyahu is the glue that holds the ideologically diverse parties of that government together. Bennett will serve as prime minister for the first two years, with Yair Lapid — whose centrist party earned almost three times more votes than Bennett’s — serving as alternate prime minister and foreign minister. Lapid will transition to prime minister for the latter two years of the government; during the four years, each can veto the other’s policies.

On one hand, this will significantly limit any real change in several crucial areas around which the

Naftali Bennett

continued from page 8

may be ongoing in the present.

Albright deduces that Iran’s rulers currently have “a robust capability to make weapon-grade uranium, a capability that will eventually grow more than tenfold” as restrictions in the JCPOA “sunset”— expire according to calendar dates and regardless of Tehran’s conduct.

BUILDING A WEAPON?

“At a minimum, Iran has a coordinated set of activities related to building a nuclear weapon,” writes Albright. “At worst, the weaponization team has already conducted a cold test, fulfilled its post-Amad goal of building an industrial prototype, and is regularly practicing and improving their nuclear weaponization craft under various covers or in clandestine locations.”

Which leads to this conclusion: “A reinstated JCPOA combined with less-than-vigorous IAEA verification of Iran’s military sites, of the type that existed from 2015 until 2018, appears particularly unstable and dangerous.”

Spies risked their lives to steal secrets from an Islamist police state. An esteemed American expert has detailed what those secrets reveal. President Joe Biden can adjust his policies to reflect the reality that has been exposed.

Or he can gift militant theocrats whose rallying cry is “Death to America!” billions of dollars and let them develop a nuclear weapons capability over the years ahead. That is almost certain to lead to runaway nuclear proliferation and devastating conflicts. This should not be a tough call.

Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), and a columnist for The Washington Times.

PURELY COMMENTARY

continued from page 10

parties disagree. However, there is also some hope that the government will begin to heal some of the country’s intense polarization, starkly exhibited by the intercommunal violence this past month between very small segments of the Jewish and Arab citizens.

NEW FACES

The new government has a record nine women ministers; it includes an Arab Israeli Party in the ruling coalition, the United Arab List Ra’am. It includes government ministers born in Ethiopia and the Soviet Union; an Arab Israeli minister; and Israel’s first openly gay party leader. There are plans for a record $16 billion to go to the Israeli Arab sector, which will help move the country toward greater equality; these might be accompanied by a freeze on home demolition in unrecognized Bedouin villages in the Negev.

In addition, it will be the first government since 2015 that does not include ultra-Orthodox parties, making it possible for the reinstatement of one of Netanyahu’s broken promises: to dedicate a space at the Western Wall for egalitarian prayer. The first Reform rabbi, Labor party member Gilad Kariv, along with the new Diaspora Affairs minister Nachman Shai (also of the Labor party) pledge to further equality for all Jewish denominations, with hopes for relative greater flexibility on conversions to Judaism.

In foreign policy issues, the centrist Lapid will work to strengthen relations with Jordan (he has excellent relations with Jordanian King Abdullah II) and other Arab states in the region, including Saudi Arabia, as well as with the Palestinian Authority. He will also try to repair relations with the U.S. Democratic Party.

Prime Minister Bennett’s oft-stated opposition to a Palestinian state and his support for annexation in the West Bank and expansion of settlements are a threat to the legitimacy of a two-state solution, and a threat to Israel’s existence as a state that is both democratic and Jewishmajority, to Palestinian rights of self-determination, and to strengthening ties with Europe, the U.S. and the region.

However, there is reason for some hope: Bennett is regarded by some as, in the end, pragmatic, and he will be constrained from annexation and settlement expansion by Lapid’s veto and the need to keep Meretz, Labor and Ra’am in the coalition.

Keeping the door open to a two-state solution during this period will require the encouragement of regional actors and the U.S. as well as coalition partners, to restore dialogue and make some improvements on the ground. When Lapid becomes prime minister, that progress might be built upon.

MSU CONNECTION

While eventually Israel will need to be able to make significant changes to reach a peace agreement with the Palestinian Authority, perhaps this coming period will begin some healing from the wounds inflicted by Netanyahu’s desperate lashing out in these last weeks.

There are Knesset members with integrity, experience and talent who can help make a positive difference for the country — MK’s like Professor Alon Tal, longtime Serling Visiting Israeli Scholar to Michigan State University, who will be one of the representatives of the Blue and White Party in the Knesset. He will focus on environmental protection, religious pluralism, gender equality and on leaving the door open to a two-state solution.

With Knesset members like Alon Tal, we can hope against hope that the country will move in a positive direction.

Professor Alon Tal

Yael Aronoff is the director of Serling Institute for Jewish Studies and Modern Israel, Serling Chair of Israel Studies and professor of international relations at the James Madison College and the Serling Institute at Michigan State University. She is the author of The Political Psychology of Israeli Prime Ministers: When Hard-Liners Opt for Peace and co-editor of Continuity and Change in Political Culture, Israel and Beyond.

letters

No Hatikvah?

We attended the rally on antisemitism on June 6. Several speeches were made, many uplifting Hebrew songs were sung as was the “Star Spangled Banner.” Conspicuous by its absence was the singing of “Hatikvah,” Israel’s national anthem. When we inquired as to why, we were told one of the sponsoring organizations objected to singing it, and therefore it was removed from the agenda.

If Jewish groups sponsoring a rally on antisemitism object to the singing of Hatikvah, “hope” is put on hold. Put aside the terrorists for a minute; we are our own worst enemy.

Margo and Doug Woll West Bloomfield

Remembering Geli

I knew Allan Gelfond’s daughter Gila during the late-1978-to early-1979 timeframe. So, very willingly, do I offer condolences to Gila, her mother Harriet and others in the Gelfond family, and all who worked with him. May Geli’s memory always be a blessing. Regards for all the Jewish News does.

Alex Kovnat Via the web

Corrections

In “Fighting Back” (June 10, page 14), some of the statistics stated on antisemitism were inaccurate. According to the latest data from the ADL, there was a 115% rise in antisemitic incidents in May, compared to the same dates last year.

In “Jewish Attorneys Honor Their Own” (June 17, page 28), the law student scholarship winner from UD-Mercy should have been identified as Chase Yarber.