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JERUSALEM by GIL HOFFMAN, HERB KEINON & NINA GILBERT
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Fear of hugging (too tight)

Soon after last Saturday’s blast at two Istanbul Synagogues, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon issued a statement extending his condolences to the families of the victims, the Turkish government and the Turkish people.

Sharon also said Israel has complete confidence in the Turkish authorities, and is certain they will find the perpetrators and bring them to justice. In case anyone didn’t hear it on Saturday, Sharon repeated the same message in his opening remarks at Sunday’s cabinet meeting.

The statement was carefully worded and reflected Israel’s sensitivity to Turkey’s sensitivities.

With Israel sending Zaka workers and security experts to help investigate the blasts, and with Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom making a lightning visit to Istanbul a day after the blast to show support and solidarity with the Jewish community, Sharon wanted to let the Turks know Israel does not see it as a second-rate country without the ability to deal with this type of attack on its own.

In addition, while Shalom spoke after the blast with his counterpoint, Abdullah Gul, Sharon did not speak — as one might have expected — with his counterpart, Tayyip Erdogan. Or, at least, such a conversation — if it was held — was not made public.

This too, according to senior diplomatic sources, was out of consideration for the dilemma Erdogan — head of the Islamic-based AKP party — was placed in as a result of the blast.

With the attacks widely seen not only as an outrage aimed at Jews but also a serious challenge by Islamic extremists to Erdogan’s government, Sharon — according to these officials — did not want to make matters even more difficult for the Turkish prime minister by giving him too tight a public hug.

And the answer is… aliya
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s words delivered to a Jewish audience in a ballroom in a posh Rome hotel Monday night were translated into Italian and meant for an Italian audience. But not only.

His words on the need for aliya, words he has spoken innumerable times before but which seemed to have been delivered this time with much more passion, could just as easily have been spoken in Turkish. Or French. Or Greek.

Sharon stressed the connection between Israel and Diaspora Jewry, and said a strong, secure Israel is not only necessary for Israelis, but also for Jews around the world if they are to continue living as they are accustomed.

"If, God forbid, Israel would be weakened, Jews around the world would not be able to live life as they do now," Sharon stated. Therefore, he stressed, keeping Israel strong is the responsibility not only of Israel, but of world Jewry.

Diaspora Jews, he said, also must raise their voice in the struggle against anti-Semitism.

"What do we expect from you?" he asked the crowd of some 100 Italian Jewish leaders and activists.

"The first thing is aliya. The best solution to anti-Semitism is to immigrate to Israel. Israel is the only place in the world where Jews can live as Jews."

Sharon said he knows this is not easy, and said he used to thank his immigrant parents that he did not have to move to another land. But, he said, aliya is imperative.

If parents find it hard, they should send their children, he said.

"Send them to study there, send them for a year, anything that could bring more Jews to Israel."

Then, in a statement that seemed directed at demographic trends showing that within a few years there will be as many Arabs as Jews between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, Sharon said "the future of Israel is dependent on aliya."

In order for there to be a pool of potential immigrants, Sharon continued, and in order to ensure Jewish existence, Zionist, Jewish education needs to be provided.

"This is what needs to be done,‘ Sharon said. ’They need to learn Hebrew, the Bible, the history of the Jewish people, the history of Eretz Yisrael — that Jews never left it, even when they were dispersed. There were always Jews who clung with their fingernails to their homeland."

Sharon said the syllabus he outlined needs to be taught not only in the Diaspora, but in Israel as well.

Viva l’Italia
When Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi visited Israel three years ago as head of Italy’s opposition, he told then-prime minister Ehud Barak and then-regional cooperation minister Shimon Peres that if he were elected prime minister, Israeli-Italian relations would soar to new heights.

He wasn’t lying. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s trip to Rome this week underlined that we are living in the Golden Age of Israeli-Italian relations.

Israel’s trade with Italy last year stood at some $2.2 billion, and — because of a new strategic memorandum of understanding that will enable military industrial cooperation between the two countries — this figure is sure to be even higher next year.

Italy is the third largest supplier of material to Israeli industry. And there are only three other countries in the world with whom Israel has a strategic memorandum of understanding — a clear sign of very close ties — the US, India and Russia.

Sharon spared no words in lavishing praise on Berlusconi and his government, saying Italy is Israel’s best European friend, and that Israel has never had a more sympathetic country in the role of EU president. The personal relations between the two, Sharon said, are also "very friendly."

Israel’s regret is obvious — that Italy will have to relinquish the rotating EU presidency in January to Ireland, a country with which Israel’s ties are as chilly as they are warm with Italy.

Bibi’s finances
Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was paid only NIS 5,600 for his hard work in October, including efforts to persuade the Knesset to approve more cuts to the budget as a means of spurring growth in the economy.

Netanyahu therefore might just have to wait before he feels an end to the recession, despite declaring it over after the Central Bureau of Statistics reported that the economy grew by 2.7 percent in the third quarter.

While in the Knesset on Wednesday, Netanyahu revealed that his wife, Sara, had just noticed that his October salary, paid on November 1, was much lower than it should be for his NIS 31,000 salary.

"There was apparently some kind of mistake made,‘ Netanyahu told Knesset reporters. ’I have spent all day working to correct the problem." According to Netanyahu’s ministerial paycheck, he should have had some NIS 15,000 in the bank instead of NIS 5,600.

English, not enough
Israel is said to be plagued by a shortage of people in positions of power who can express themselves in clear, coherent English. The shortage is reflected in the number of times the same elite cadre of English-speaking politicians addressed this week’s United Jewish Communities General Assembly and the many Federation missions surrounding it.

Opposition leader Shimon Peres, Diaspora Affairs Minister Natan Sharansky, Tourism Minister Benny Elon, and Labor-Meimad MK Michael Melchior spoke to dozens of groups one after another until their throats were dry. They struggled to keep pace going from one Federation to another, each repeating more or less the same speech.

The GA participants, who barely got any sleep with their jam-packed schedules, received nearly all their speakers with great enthusiasm, listening intently, and giving the speakers standing ovations.

But sometimes, knowing English is not enough. Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yonah Metzger, for instance, speaks unaccented English with a surprisingly strong vocabulary, but he clearly doesn’t know what Diaspora groups want to hear.

Addressing an RCA meeting honoring the MetroWest New Jersey Federation at the King David Hotel on Monday, Metzger spoke for half an hour about his recent trips to New York, Kazakhstan, and the Ukraine. He didn’t even mention his audience from one of America’s top Federations that has a budget of some $24 million.

A youthful face at the top in Labor?
Labor Secretary-General Ophir Pines-Paz is looking to leave what may be the most thankless post in Israeli politics in the near future after a tumultuous year and a half on the job.

Pines-Paz said that his main accomplishment in the position was keeping the party together when it hit rock bottom last year and came very close to breaking in two. Ahead of January’s election, Labor lost only Yossi Beilin and Yael Dayan to Meretz, when it could have very easily lost its entire left flank if Binyamin Ben-Eliezer would have been re-elected the party’s chairman.

Pines-Paz also presided over the beginning of the party’s recovery from financial devastation and a municipal election that the party considers the first step in the right direction toward becoming a real alternative to the Likud.

After some time to relax and heal his wounds, Pines-Paz will start thinking about whether to add his name to the list of potential Labor Party chairmen. Many Laborites are pressuring Pines-Paz to give the Labor party a youthful face at the top who would certainly offer a contrast if the Likud’s candidate in the next election is Ariel Sharon.

But the crowded field of Labor leaders a generation ahead of Pines-Paz is unlikely to allow a younger candidate to leap over them in Labor’s pecking order and would undoubtedly put up a fight if Pines-Paz decides to run.

If Pines-Paz does end up succeeding Peres, the Labor chairman would become nearly half as old, from Peres’s 80 to Pines-Paz’s 42.

Ra’anana as a model
Jerusalem residents are used to seeing their tax money taken for granted but apparently the residents of Ra’anana are more fortunate.

In Jerusalem, Mayor Uri Lupoliansky resisted Interior Ministry orders to cut the number of salaried deputy mayors down to three and appointed six in a homogeneous religious coalition. In Ra’anana, Mayor Ze’ev Bielski formed a coalition with 17 out of the 19 members of the city council and still managed to appoint only one salaried deputy mayor — the infamous Uzi Cohen of the Likud.

Each of Jerusalem’s deputy mayors costs the taxpayers NIS 500,000.

What makes Bielski’s accomplishment more formidable is that the Interior Ministry allowed Ra’anana to appoint two deputies, and he still appointed only one.

"I felt obligated to express the will of the voter in Ra’anana and establish the widest possible coalition, so that the City Council would reflect the views of the majority of voters in the city,‘ Bielski said. ’I am pleased that most of the factions answered my appeal and I am sure that we will all work together for the benefit of the city and its residents."

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WASHINGTON by JANINE ZACHARIA
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Candidate Dean calls on Clinton
Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean said this week that he has already asked former president Bill Clinton to become his Middle East mediator if Dean is elected president. In an interview with National Public Radio on Monday, the former Vermont governor said, "We need president Clinton back in the Middle East as the representative of the president of the United States."

Dean was reluctant to characterize the chat the men had, but said, "I think it would be fair to say that he would likely be willing to play a role." Asked if envoy Clinton would be charged to speak with PA leader Yasser Arafat, Dean said probably not.

"I think it’s unlikely. I think Arafat has been correctly identified by the president as someone who is not going to have peace,‘ Dean said in a rare compliment to the president. ’I think direct discussions with Yasser Arafat are not likely to lead to peace."

Syrian opposition?
Farid Ghadry, the Aleppo-born co-founder of the Reform Party of Syria (RPS), a two-year-old movement of Syrian-Americans dedicated to bringing democratic reform to Syria through grass-roots efforts, initiated a conference of opposition leaders in Washington last weekend. At a luncheon hosted by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy last Friday, Ghadry said only about a dozen would be attending.

Ghadry has been referred to as the Syrian version of Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi-American exile leader who helped persuade Washington to carry out regime change in Iraq. Asked if he agreed with that assessment, Ghadry said, "No I don’t. I’m not interested in anything beyond the pure goal of bringing democracy to Syria. I am not an Ahmed Chalabi."

Ghadry has yet to meet with US officials.

Another leak
Another memo leak is generating controversy in Washington, this one a catalogue of pre-Iraq war intelligence on possible Iraqi-al-Qaida connections that made its way into the Weekly Standard and the Drudge Report. The memo was a classified annex attached to a letter Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith submitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee on October 27. Feith had been asked in earlier testimony to produce intelligence that he referred to regarding the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida.

On Tuesday, senators asked the Justice Department to look into the leak. The Pentagon said the leak of classified information is "doing serious harm to national security." Based on the memo, the Weekly Standard concluded that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that included training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction. The primary go-between through the early stages was Hassan al-Turabi, a Sudanese leader of the al-Qaida affiliated National Islamic Front.

Memorial for Turkish dead
A Washington synagogue, Adas Israel, hosted a memorial service Thursday for victims of the Istanbul bombings. Representatives of the Turkish and Israeli embassies and the local Jewish community delivered remarks.

Jewish survival conference
Georgetown University’s new Program in Jewish Civilization hosted a two-day conference this week to examine definitions of who is a Jew, who speaks for the Jews, and Israel among the nations.

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NEW YORK by MELISSA RADLER
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Geneva meets Turtle Bay
Stumping for the Geneva Initiative at the World Council of Churches and the UN Correspondents’ Association last week, Avraham Burg, the Labor MK who recently eulogized the end of Zionism in the press, outlined his own path toward world peace: an international conference where democratic and theocratic nations can work out their differences.

"There is a clash of civilizations,‘ said Burg, ripping off the title of Samuel Huntington’s 1997 book. Unlike Huntington, however, Burg’s clash of civilizations is ’not exactly the Judeo-Christian civilization versus the Islamic one"; the Jewish ultra-Orthodox and Christian fundamentalists can be just as contrary as Islamic terrorists, he noted.

Meanwhile, Burg’s fellow Geneva backer at the two events, Jerusalem spiritual leader Bishop Riah abu El-Assal, described the document as a benign version of the 1974 Stages Plan.

"I would prefer a two-state solution as a step in the right direction; then, as I keep saying, we can be as good as the Swiss if not better," he told the four UN correspondents who turned out for the Turtle Bay event.

El-Assal also defended Yasser Arafat against renewed charges of corruption that were made public just 48 hours earlier on CBS’s 60 Minutes by the PA’s own Finance Minister, Saalam Fayad.

"This is not the first time they accused Arafat or the PLO of some form of mishandling monies," he said. Once, when similar allegations were printed in the Israeli press, El-Assal said he asked several PA leaders for feedback.

"I was told this was one other attempt to delegitimize the authority of President Arafat."

As for the 60 Minutes episode, "I’m not aware of this to say the least," he said.

High school in Israel
As Jewish leaders attending the United Jewish Communities General Assembly departed for Jerusalem this week, an entire US high school was slated to land at Ben-Gurion airport for a 10-day solidarity mission. According to Rabbi William Altshul, headmaster at the Melvin J. Berman Hebrew Academy in Rockville, Maryland, more than 180 students, out of 211, plus 45 teachers and parents are participating in the school-wide program, which combines Jewish learning with visits to Jerusalem, Safed, Masada, the Golan Heights and Zichron Ya’acov. Students are paying just $300 each, with the rest subsidized by private donors, and Altshul is hoping other schools emulate the idea.

"We believe in this case that imitation is the highest form of flattery," he said.

Jewish awards circuit
When House Majority Leader Tom DeLay enjoyed the view of Greater Israel during a recent visit to the Golan Heights, "I didn’t see any occupied territory. I only saw Israel," he told 700 guests at the Zionist Organization of America’s annual dinner this week. DeLay, the keynote speaker at the November 16 event, was awarded the Defender of Israel award by ZOA president Mort Klein.

The Ben Hecht Award for Outstanding Journalism went to Arab-American columnist Joseph Farah, who, according to his introducer, "looks like Omar Sharif and writes like David Bar-Illan."

In other Jewish awards, philanthropists and Holocaust survivors Ulka and Julius Sommer and IDT founder Howard Jonas were honored at the Religious Zionists of America’s gala dinner last Tuesday. Proceeds from the dinner went toward funding winter trips to Israel for students in the Bnei Akiva youth movement.