The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs

2009. december 6 13:06

The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs is an independent non-profit institute for policy research and education.
 


The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs 

 

The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs is an independent non-profit institute for policy research and education.
 
Israel’s growth and survival are dependent on its winning the war of ideas. The challenges that Israel faces today are not only military. They extend to the United Nations, the mass media, foreign universities, and non-governmental organizations. In many cases, the assault on Israel is aimed at its very legitimacy as a Jewish state. A direct by-product of the attacks on Israel is a clearly detectable rise in anti-Semitism, especially in Europe. In this environment, what is needed is not just better public relations, but also a rigorous analysis of the issues being exploited by Israel’s adversaries who question Israel’s legal rights. In response, the Jerusalem Center seeks to present Israel’s case and to highlight the challenges of Islamic extremism and global anti-Semitism.
 
The mission of the Jerusalem Center cannot be assumed by governmental bodies that frequently must focus on solutions to more short-term problems. Moreover, the campaign that Israel faces today does not come from governmental sources alone, but from a variety of private institutions as well. Given this reality, think tanks have a vital role to play by providing a platform for in-depth research and public discourse on the main issues affecting the security and well-being of Israel, the Jewish people, and the Western alliance as a whole. The rich agenda of the Jerusalem Center demonstrates its determination to illuminate the truth regarding many of today’s most pressing matters and to disseminate this truth to significant audiences abroad.
 
Dr. Dore Gold, former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations, has served since 2000 as President of the Jerusalem Center. Under his direction, the Center has continued to emphasize in-depth research and analysis while revolutionizing its dissemination through the use of the latest Internet-based technology. We understand that the survival of the Jewish people and the State of Israel are dependent on winning the war of ideas. The Jerusalem Center is committed to this struggle.
 

The Jerusalem Center has a thirty-year record of achievement in service to the Jewish world, of anticipating the key problems and bringing together the best minds in Israel and abroad to work on solutions. As an independent institution, the Jerusalem Center is uniquely situated to approach its work without preconceptions, and to generate new ideas which may prove vital in Israel’s fight for survival.   
 

A Record of Foresight on Security Issues 

Here are some examples of how an independent policy institute with foresight, vision, and clarity can make an important contribution to the public debate on Israeli security issues.

  • Iran‘s Race for Regional Supremacy

    The Jerusalem Center prepared and published Iran‘s Race for Regional Supremacy: Strategic Implications for the Middle East, which proposes that the Arab-Israeli conflict and the ongoing attempts to resolve it must be considered within a broader assessment of the Iranian regime’s stated policy and current capabilities to destroy Israel and subvert Arab governments across the Middle East.

    The monograph was written by eight leading Israeli and American security experts including former IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Moshe Yaalon; former Israeli Ambassador to the UN Dr. Dore Gold; former Head of IDF Intelligence Maj.-Gen. (res.) Aharon Zeevi Farkash; Brig.-Gen. (ret.) Dr. Shimon Shapira, former Military Secretary to the Prime Minister; Daniel Diker, Director of Institute for Contemporary Affairs at the Jerusalem Center; Uzi Rubin, former head of Israel’s Arrow Anti-Missile Defense Program; Dr. Martin Kramer, Senior Fellow at the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies at the Shalem Center; and former IDF Intelligence officer Lt.-Col. (ret.) Jonathan D. Halevi.

    The large-format, 85-page, printed color monograph includes specially commissioned maps which graphically document rocket threats on Israel emanating from Lebanon and the Gaza Strip; Iranian political-military involvement across the Middle East and South Asia; the global reach of Iranian-sponsored terrorism; Shiite populations in the Middle East; and Iran’s growing missile capabilities.

    In addition, an Internet version of the monograph in pdf format was posted on the Jerusalem Center website, while the Center’s Internet marketing unit spread word of the report to selected target audiences via email and postings on relevant forums and news sites. As a result, between June and October 2008, our website received nearly 19,000 requests to download the full report.

    This publication was also distributed to U.S. Senators and Congressmen and parliamentarians in Europe, while meetings with high-echelon officials were held in Washington to present its thesis. Abbreviated versions of this publication were translated into French and German and posted on the Jerusalem Center’s European websites.

  • Combatting Incitement to Genocide

    Over the past several years, Iranian leaders have made numerous statements calling for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people. In 2006, Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel joined Israeli legal scholars and public personalities at the Jerusalem Center to propose the initiation of legal proceedings against Iranian President Ahmadinejad for incitement to commit genocide and participate in genocide against Israel.

    To document the case against Ahmadinejad and disperse any doubts in the minds of leaders and the general public regarding the true intentions of Iran, the Center commissioned Dr. Joshua Teitelbaum, Senior Research Fellow at the Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University, to prepare a detailed study, What Iranian Leaders Really Say about Doing Away with Israel: A Refutation of the Campaign to Excuse Ahmadinejad’s Incitement to Genocide. With assistance from Persian language scholar Dr. Denis MacEoin, the study carefully analyzes the statements of Ahmadinejad and others to show that the speakers are indeed calling for the actual physical destruction of the State of Israel, rather than merely expressing dissatisfwith the current Israeli government and its policies. Between June and October 2008, our website received over 41,000 requests to download the report.

    A conference on „State-Sanctioned Incitement to Genocide: What Can Be Done?” took place  in Washington on September 23, 2008, the same day that Iranian President Ahmadinejad addressed the UN General Assembly in New York. The event was organized by the Jerusalem Center, in cooperation with Genocide Watch, Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Legacy Heritage Fund, International Association of Genocide Scholars, and Yale University’s Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism. It brought together an unprecedented coalition of victims of genocide, including representatives from Darfur and Rwanda, who spoke out against the dangers of state-sanctioned incitement to genocide.

    Speakers at the conference included: Amb. Richard Holbrooke (architect of Dayton Accord on Bosnia), Salih Mahmud Osman (Member of Parliament-Sudan, human-rights advocate on Darfur), Esther Mujawayo (Survivor of the Rwanda genocide in 1994), Prof. Gregory Stanton (founder Genocide Watch and the Cambodian Genocide Project at Yale University), Prof. Irwin Cotler (former Canadian Attorney General and Minister of Justice), Prof. Gregory Gordon (former Legal Officer, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda), Amb. Dore Gold (former Israeli Ambassador to the UN), and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (Ranking Member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs).

    The conference was broadcast live on the Internet, and the videos are available for viewing on the Jerusalem Center website.

  • Israel’s Right to Defensible Borders

    To more precisely define the meaning of „defensible borders,” the Jerusalem Center produced a study entitled Defensible Borders for a Lasting Peace, which was revised and updated in 2008. The authors include Dr. Yuval Steinitz, former chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee; Maj.-Gen. (res.) Yaakov Amidror, former Head of Assessment for Israeli Military Intelligence; Dr. Meir Rosenne, former Ambassador of Israel to the U.S. and France; and Dr. Dore Gold. The complete study, with maps, is available at its own website in English (defensibleborders.org), and has been published in Hebrew, French, and German.

    Today, after an extensive, multi-year campaign initiated by the Jerusalem Center, Israel’s insistence on „defensible borders” has become part of the vocabulary of leaders of major political streams in Israel and abroad, and we continue to hold meetings with senior officials on this topic. On March 26, 2008, the Jerusalem Center organized a conference entitled „Israel at 60: Its Historical and Legal Rights Still Challenged?” in cooperation with the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung in Israel, which also included discussions of Israel’s right to defensible borders.

  • The Fight for Jerusalem
     
    The Jerusalem Center has been a leading voice in the campaign to maintain Israel’s capital, Jerusalem, as a united city under Israeli sovereignty. In his 2007 best-seller, The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City, former Israeli UN ambassador and Jerusalem Center president Dore Gold argues that if Jerusalem is to be a free city where all faiths can be practiced, it will have to remain under Israeli sovereignty. (A Hebrew edition is available as of December 2008.)
     
    Furthermore, any peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians must take into account not only the Palestinians’ need for self-rule but also the needs and rights of Israelis to live in peace and security. In light of the very real possibility that Hamas and extensions of Iran will seek to take control of the West Bank and the Arab part of the Jerusalem area, Israel must maintain control and sovereignty over its capital, as well as the lands that dominate the access routes to the city. Without controlling these areas, Israel will find it extremely difficult to defend Jerusalem against an external enemy.
     
    During the terror war initiated by the Palestinians in 2000, Jerusalem was at the center of terror attacks against Israeli citizens and suffered 20 percent of all fatalities, mainly as a result of suicide terror. This record must be a central consideration in any political plan for the Jerusalem area because the city is likely to be a preferred future target if its minimum security requirements are not upheld.       
     
    While there has been some discussion of dividing Jerusalem, a 2008 Jerusalem Center study, Jerusalem: The Dangers of Division – An Alternative to Separation from the Arab Neighborhoods by veteran Ha’aretz reporter Nadav Shragai, documents the risks involved in any such division of the city. Should Jerusalem be physically divided, the separation line would become the border between the State of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, or a future Palestinian state, as distinct from the current situation where the border is farther away from most of the city’s Jewish residents.
     
    The distances between many Jewish neighborhoods in the city and Arab neighborhoods slated for “separation” are within light-weapon range. It is instructive to recall what happened with the outbreak of Palestinian violence in September 2000, when firing began from the Palestinian Authority town of Beit Jalla toward the homes of Jewish residents in Jerusalem’s nearby Gilo neighborhood, and continued intermittently until 2005. For over three decades, Israelis believed that everything should be done to unify Jerusalem and avoid dividing the city again. In that spirit, new neighborhoods were built in eastern Jerusalem that today house some 190,000 Jews and contain official state institutions built on land that was annexed to the city in 1967.  Implementing a division of the city would turn numerous Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem into border neighborhoods. Based upon past experience with the Palestinians, Israel cannot risk any such division of Jerusalem unless responsibility for security remains solely under Israeli control.
     
    The Jerusalem Center will continue its work to preserve Israel’s control of its capital and oppose efforts which seek to divide Jerusalem.

These are just a few examples of how an independent policy institute with foresight, vision, and clarity can make an important contribution to the public debate on issues of Israeli security. 
 

Providing a Voice for Israel’s Experts 

Some of the leading experts who have been featured in Jerusalem Center publications and briefings in recent years include:

  • Lt.-Gen. Moshe Ya’alon, former IDF Chief of Staff
  • Maj.-Gen. (res.) Amos Gilad, Director of Policy and Political-Military Affairs at the Israel Ministry of Defense
  • Maj.-Gen. Aharon Zeevi Farkash, former head of IDF Intelligence
  • Maj.-Gen. Benny Gantz, head of IDF Northern Command
  • Maj.-Gen. Yair Naveh, head of IDF Central Command
  • Brig.-Gen. (res.) Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, Minister of National Infrastructures
  • Maj.-Gen. (Res.) Giora Eiland, head of Israel’s National Security Council and responsible for designing the disengagement
  • Brig.-Gen. (res.) Shalom Harari, a senior advisor on Palestinian affairs for Israel’s Defense Ministry
  • Col. (Res.) Danny Tirza, the IDF’s chief architect for the security fence
  • Ambassador Uri Lubrani, Advisor to the Minister of Defense, former Israeli Ambassador to Iran, and Advisor on Arab Affairs to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion
  • Prof. Shlomo Avineri of Hebrew University, former director general of the Foreign Ministry
  • Professor Bernard Lewis, Princeton University historian and expert on Islam
  • Dr. Uzi Arad, Director of the Institute of Policy and Strategy, Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya
  • Dr. Ephraim Kam, Deputy Head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University
  • Professor Mordechai Abir, Professor Emeritus of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  • Professor Gerald M. Steinberg, Director of the Program on Conflict Management and Negotiation at Bar-Ilan University
  • Ambassador Zvi Mazel, former Israeli Ambassador to Egypt and Sweden
  • Dr. Robbie Sabel, former legal adviser to the Israel Foreign Ministry
  • Journalist Khaled Abu Toameh, who has been reporting on Palestinian affairs since 1989

Sharing Key Information with Those Who Need to Know 

The Daily Alert Internet newsletter, produced for the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center, offers 100 hyperlinked excerpts each week from mainstream English and Hebrew media sources. This highly acclaimed newsletter, filled with fact nuggets, direct quotes, intelligence reports, and a broad perspective on security issues, has been distributed Monday through Friday since May 2002 to the North American Jewish leadership and a wide array of opinion-makers.

Jerusalem Issue Briefs are concise reports of briefings for the diplomatic corps and the foreign press in Israel by top-level political and military experts, brought together in the framework of the Jerusalem Center’s Institute for Contemporary Affairs, founded jointly with the Wechsler Family Foundation. 

The Jerusalem Viewpoints series has been providing in-depth reports on a range of issues since 1979.

Every day, 5,800 unique visitors view an average of 18,500 articles at the Jerusalem Center’s website – www.jcpa.org – which offers an ever-expanding list of over 1,000 on-line essays and reports.   
 

Other Key Issues – 

Perspectives on Jewish Security in a Post-Holocaust World

The Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism program, initiated and directed by Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld, includes conferences, seminars, research, lectures, interviews, and essays in English and French, focusing on anti-Semitism after the Holocaust and up to the present day – its origins and lessons, manifestations and mutations. This program has proven only too prescient with the return of anti-Semitism as a major issue of public concern. 

Israel-Europe Project

Under the supervision of Ambassador Freddy Eytan, a former Foreign Ministry senior advisor, this project presents Israel’s case in Europe in cooperation with European research institutions through conferences and publications in French, German, and other European languages. The Israel-Europe project currently features websites in German and French as well as an English website geared toward the British public. The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs seeks to address the European community in their own languages. The production of these three editions covers nearly all of Europe, where one of these languages is either primary or secondary. Information products in the local language are the only way to make these ideas accessible to most of those in the specific target audiences.  

Global Law Forum

The Global Law Forum at the Jerusalem Center of Public Affairs was established to revitalize public discourse concerning Israel and the Middle East by producing up-to-date materials explaining international law dimensions of current regional controversies, and to enrich the study of international law by reconsidering and re-analyzing the fundamental principles and applications of international law, particularly regarding issues of concern to Israel and the Middle East.

The Forum supports scholarly conferences, position papers, articles and books that create, promote and expose the public and academy to cutting edge scholarship in the Forum’s areas of concern.

The Forum is committed to the development of a new generation of international law scholars engaged in innovative and evidence-based scholarship, and to countering selection bias in issues currently addressed by the international law community as well as inconsistent application of legal standards, particularly regarding Israel and the Middle East.

The Israeli Economy

The Jerusalem Center has been focusing on economic growth and privatization in Israel for more than a decade. This project has produced a unique series of publications in Hebrew on a variety of issues including capital markets, funding urban growth, and environmental projects. 

 

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