I keep talking about Sheldon Adelson, America’s third-richest man, whose pro-Israel activities the Times all but ignored last week. Turns out his foundation shells out for a birthright-style happy tour of Israel, this one for Harvard law students that some non-Jews can go on, too on spring-break. Student Andrew Friedman describes a day that begins at Yad Vashem then
continued with a tour of the security fence that provoked substantive
debate on the tour bus about Israel’s rights and obligations in
erecting this barrier, then on to the fashionable seaside city of
Herzliya. There, we participated in a class Alan Dershowitz was
teaching to Israeli law students, and the evening ended with a banquet
dinner during which Professor Dershowitz sang the Yiddish song "Tum
Balalaika," accompanied by a klezmer band.
Get down, Alan! The dude is everywhere!
In Tel Aviv, the group toured the ancient port of Jaffa, a hillside
artists’ enclave of steep and winding stone pathways just south of the
modern city…
Chris Varley also just got back from Israel. He’s been passing around
maps of the ’47 Partition plan, which was far more equitable to Arabs, at
56-44, than the current proposed 78-22. Note on that map that Jaffa, an Arab city, was left Arab. But that was in ’47. In ’48 Jaffa was ethnically-cleansed.
