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Dry Bones

Plowshares Or Swords?

heodor Herzl could not have imagined it!
The country whose establishment he urged
as a sanctuary is now the world's fifth-largest
exporter of weapons systems, with annual sales of
$30 billion. That's quite a change from the unarmed
Jewish peasants in the Pale of Settlement who were
constantly brutalized by Cossack pogroms.
But the century since Herzl has witnessed the
Jewish people devastated by the Holocaust, and Israel
today remains threatened by Arab and Islamic fanat-
ics. It has been forced to develop a defense industry
that allows no room for failure. It is a testament to
Israeli engineers that their designs, in some cases, are
proving to be even better than those of America's
armaments makers.
As a recent report by the Jewish
Telegraphic Agency makes clear, Israel's
superior weaponry is a side effect of its exis-
tential perils. To survive amid its hostile Arab neigh-
bors, it relied at first on military help from allies, pri-
marily America. But as the wars continued, it devel-
oped even more effective defenses suited to dealing
with nearby states.
Unlike America, which had to plan for warfare
halfway around the world, Israel had to worry about
Scuds from Iraq or artillery from Syria. So it concen-
trated on systems like the Arrow that can intercept
short-range missiles, unmanned spotter planes that
monitor battlefields, another sophisticated system for
analyzing air battles and very high-tech electronics
systems for fighter planes.
It now turns out that those systems .are much in
demand from countries who fear their neighbors
more than they feared the old USSR. On Sunday,
the Sharon government approved selling three
Phalcon airborne early-warning systems to India for
$1.1 billion, Israel's single biggest export deal to date.
It probably didn't hurt that India's toughest enemy is
its neighbor, Pakistan, a state with an Islamic majori-
tT
The weapons sales help Israel directly with its

T .

PURIM IS A
JOKE THAT
COMES

economy, which is slowly beginning
to recover from the devastation of
the 3-year-old Palestinian uprising,
the intifada. The sales also help the
state recoup some of its weapons
development costs, giving it new
capital to sustain additional research
and development of what may
straight-facedly be called cutting-
edge weapons.
But they also pose some long-
range dangers. America has become
alarmingly over-invested in what
former President Dwight D.
Eisenhower called the
"military-industrial com-
plex." A Pentagon budget
that is bloated without
even figuring in the costs of the war
in Iraq clings to buying weapons
systems for wars it will never fight
simply because it doesn't want to
take the political hit for closing
defense factory lines or military
bases it doesn't need. Israel is a long
way from that status, but uncritical
reliance on weapons sales sets it on
a slippery slope.
A moral question also arises, as it
does for the four larger weapons-
sellers, the United States, the
European Union, Russia and Japan:
Are they promoting warfare?
The standard answer is that the
arms go to countries for self-defense and actually pre-
vent war by showing would-be aggressors that they
could not prevail. In a less-than-ideal world, we want
the good guys to be able to out-gun the bad guys.
America was able to force the former Soviet Union
into an arms race that led directly to busting the
superpower into much weaker and less-threatening
individual states.

EDIT ORIAL

V

MILE
ARAFA r SEEMS
DESTINED...

Still, it is disconcerting. The Israel of our ideals,
the one with the lofty biblical role among the nations
of the world, sells high-tech computer gear and the
know-how for desalination plants or hydroponic
tomatoes — not radar systems and anti-tank missiles.
It is somewhat disappointing, but a cruel fact of life
in a very dangerous neighborhood, that Israel's light
onto other nations relies on night-vision goggles.

❑

`Passion' Poses Challenge

R

abbis and other Jewish community leaders
attended a private screening of Mel
Gibson's The Passion of the Christ on Feb.
24. But we viewed much more than a movie.
What was before us for more than two hours was
what might set back about four decades of
advances in interreligious dialogue.
In 1965, at the beginning of my rabbinical edu-
cation at the Jewish Theological Seminary of
America, a great advance in interfaith dialogue
took place. With Vatican II, came an emerging
Jewish self-confidence and acceptance of Judaism

Rabbi Herbert Yoskowitz is a spiritual leader at Adat
Shalom Synagogue in Farmington Hills.

as a worthy religion in the eyes of •
The results were prejudice removed,
Christians.
responsibilities acknowledged and an
Rabbi Louis Finkelstein, then JTS chan-
affirmation that God is one. That achieve-
cellor, encouraged us to participate in
ment at Ft. Riley was possible only
Jewish/Christian dialogue with theological
because of Vatican II.
students of Protestant and Catholic per-
My colleagues of other faiths affirmed
suasion.
that the changes brought about by
Having partaken of the Jewish/Christian
Vatican II needed to be translated into
dialogue program as an undergraduate at
everyday reality. The acknowledgment of
RABBI
Brooklyn College, I eagerly plunged into
the authenticity and value of different
HERBERT
this dialogue. It became a commitment of YOSKOWITZ paths to God was practiced, not merely
mine to learn about another's faith and to
preached at Ft. Riley. The Fifth Army
Community
share my understanding of Judaism with
made our interfaith dialogue an example
Perspective
clergy and lay people of other faiths.
for all the troops under its command.
At Ft. Riley as a U.S. Army chaplain, I
All that we accomplished then and all
was privileged to initiate an interfaith dialogue.
RABBI YOSKOWITZ on page 32

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