I’ve Got Friends in Low-lying Places . . .

The recent UN General Assembly vote granting observer nation status to Palestine was 138 in favor, 41 abstentions, and nine opposed.  In addition to the United States, along with Canada, Panama, and the Czech Republic, the few nations that supported Israel’s opposition to the resolution were Palau, Micronesia, Nauru, and the Marshall Islands.  It would be tragic if Israel were to lose the vote of any of its few reliable supporters at the United Nations, but that is just what might happen over the next few years—not due to any political intrigue but on account of global warming!  At the moment, the endangered ally is the island republic of Palau, and just this summer PBS aired a report, titled Paradise Lost, calling attention to the potential of climate change to inundate and eliminate Palau and its Pacific neighbors.

An archipelago of 300 islands lying in the Philippine Sea north of Australia, with a total area of only 459 square miles (Israel, by comparison, has 21,000 square miles) and a population of only 21,000, Palau more than makes up for its diminutive size with its consistent support of Israel in world forums.  Although all of Palau cannot scrape up even a minyan (a quorum of 10 Jews), its ambassador to the United Nations since 2004, Stuart Beck, is Jewish, as is Larry Miller, who served for 14 years as an associate justice of Palau's Supreme Court.  Somehow, Palau also produced two cyclists who competed in the 2009 Maccabiah Games.

Palauans, grateful for American support in rebuilding the country after the ravages of World War II and in establishing an independent constitutional government, voted in 1984 to adopt a Compact of Free Association with the United States.  They have exercised their vote on behalf of Israel’s interests without fail—and without obvious recompense.  In a word, they have acted altruistically, as genuine friends.

Nothing in its national profile would mark Palau as an obvious backer of the Jewish state.  Nearly 75 percent of its people are Christian, mostly Roman Catholic; an additional 10 percent follow Modekngei, a hybrid of Christianity and the ancient Palauan religion.  The island’s economic mainstay, apart from subsistence farming and fishing, is tourism; but, in spite of its tropical climate and its world renown as a diving destination, it has never been a port of call for Jewish midwinter cruises or Passover vacations.

Perhaps Palau’s unusually high literacy rate of 92 percent contributes to its open-mindedness?  Perhaps its geographical isolation frees it from restrictive diplomatic alliances or affiliations?  Perhaps its legacy of American largesse inclines it to a more Western and liberal political stance?  Perhaps, like other Asian cultures, it shares an affinity for millennia-old traditions?

Or perhaps it is reciprocal?  After Palau formally declared its independence in 1994, Israel hastened to afford the new country its first non-Pacific diplomatic recognition.

In January, 2005 a group of students from Yeshiva University High School, organized by then-high school senior Avram Sand, was appreciative enough of Palau’s foursquare support of Israel, and curious enough about the motives for its support, to pay a courtesy visit to the island to check it out.  They visited with Palauan students at their schools, met with government officials, and kept a most unusual Shabbat—which, on account of halakhic vicissitudes surrounding the International Date Line, was observed on Sunday.  "We represented a segment of the Jewish community that was grateful for the support that Palau provides Israel on a regular basis." said Sand.  "I was very interested in why these places halfway around the world had any interest in Israel whatsoever."

One of the events the students attended was a 20-minute meeting with the president of Palau, Tommy Remengesau Jr.  The students thanked him for hosting them and expressed their gratitude for Palau's firm support of Israel in the UN.  Shalom Sokolow, another YU High School senior, recited a special prayer for the people of Palau, including a passage from the Book of Isaiah that was chosen to honor Palau’s extraordinary attributes:

Those yonder lift up their voice, they sing for joy;
For the majesty of the LORD
they shout from the sea.
Therefore glorify ye the LORD in the regions of light;
Even the name of the LORD,
the God of Israel,
in the islands of the sea. (29:14-15)

It was reported that the students made quite an impression on their Palauan hosts.  Soon after they left, a Palauan high school student named Maungil Leoncio wrote an e-mail to the Forward saying, "They're the first Jewish people I met.  At first I was judging them by their cover but when I started talking to them, I started to like them a lot.  Their presentation was one of the coolest we've had."

For a geographically insular nation, Palau has a record of rather singular broad-mindedness, of which the State of Israel and the Jewish people are currently beneficiaries.  Palau supports Israel’s existential concerns, and perhaps the time is right to repay the Palauans by supporting one of their existential concerns: the gradually increasing erosion of their coastlands, the contamination of their farmlands by seawater, and growing threats to their vital barrier reefs.  The Palauans, in a novel and highly controversial legal maneuver, have asked the World Court and the UN Security Council to determine the extent to which all nations share a responsibility to insure that their greenhouse gases do not damage other nations.  Israel might well take note.

With the havoc wreaked by Sandy still so fresh in our minds, we should be particularly aware that our interests and the Palauans’ coincide.  To help them is to help ourselves—and vice versa—in more ways than one.

Moshe Sokolow, professor of Jewish education at the Azrieli Graduate School of Yeshiva University, is the author of Studies in the Weekly Parashah Based on the Lessons of Nehama Leibowitz (2008).

DS on December 6, 2012 at 3:01 pm (Reply)
Are you high? There hasn't been a cooler-than-average month in 28 years.
http://grist.org/news/if-youre-27-or-younger-youve-never-experienced-a-colder-than-average-month/

avi barzel on December 9, 2012 at 7:02 pm (Reply)
Hmmm. I guess if one is a raving neo-Marxist, a stunted Maoist, a Canadian NDP or Green party radical or someone totally ignorant about Canadian political parties, the federal Conservatives may look like an "extremist right wing." To most normal people, though, and to those who are sober, it's a centre-right government which has been fairly moderate and very popular. Will it be tossed? I doubt it; Canadians enjoy a break from years of oppressive, elitist and left-leaning Liberal rule. They're proud of healthy economy, a restored military, an independent energy policy and frienship with Israel and other truly democratic and worthwhile countries, even as the Obamamessiah and the UN punished Canada by replacing its seat in the Security Council with that of ....get this: Portugal.

DS on December 7, 2012 at 9:27 am (Reply)
Perhaps, Avi, had you put aside your ever-so-scholarly conspiracy theories about NPR being in cahoots with climate scientists to fill U.S. tax coffers, you would have clicked through to the linked-to peer-reviewed study therein, which explains that, in fact, the IPCC is intentionally low-balling their estimates precisely because the UN's member nations have no genuine desire to restrict their economic growth by imposing caps on carbon output.

"The rate of sea-level rise in the past decades is greater than projected by the latest assessments of the IPCC, while global temperature increases in good agreement with its best estimates. This is shown by a study now published in the journal Environmental Research Letters. Stefan Rahmstorf from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and his colleagues compare climate projections to actual observations from 1990 up to 2011. That sea level is rising faster than expected could mean that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) sea-level rise projections for the future may be biased low as well, their results suggest."

http://www.pik-potsdam.de/news/press-releases/projektionen-zum-meeresspiegelanstieg-koennten-unterschaetzt-worden-sein
avi barzel on December 9, 2012 at 2:17 pm (Reply)
Hahahaha! Can't resist this one. In other words, DS, the UN-IPCC is up to its old tricks by again "adjusting" data, this time by "low-balling," to suit its political agenda? Lies on top lies? In any case, station data hardly provides fuel for worry...or confidence in precise ocean level measurments when we are dealing with fractions of milimetres. See:

http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/MSL_global_trendtable.html


Why is no one laughing at their attempt to scare the world with the demonstrably beneficial warming periods, the historic climate optima, such as the Minoan, Roman and the Medieval? Or, what of the charlattan's sleight-of-hand with turning "catastrophic global warming" into "climate change," then into "catastrophic weather" and when these shenanigans lost traction, attempts to reach the goal of a UN-administered global taxation scheme with its latest manufactured panic over a "sustainability crisis"? Won't wash either. Might as well get those black choppers you go on about, point the gatling guns at us and mug our wallets from us as we stand.

avi barzel on December 12, 2012 at 1:21 pm (Reply)
What a silly Archie you are.


Item. Thousands of radical Islamists with dubious backgrounds and associations have become "new Canadians" and citizens-of-convenience....and they all have Canadian passports! It takes a quick application review by an immigration officer and 3 years staying clear of jail and presto! You too can be a "Canadian." These folks live in Canada, travel to the US and the Middle East at will under Canadian identities. That worries me a lot more than a few Mossad agents hunting terrorists. But that's just me.



Item. Kaptain Von Krudener was killed while stuck in a UN outpost near a Hizbullah missile launch site. The responsibility is with the UN forces for not attempting to disarm the illegal site or to get its personnel out and away, rather than using it to protect Hizbullah. Israel, was not targetting a Canadian it didn't even know about; it was protecting its population from missile barrages. Why don't you just announce that Israel has no right to self-defense?


Item. Gerald Bull got hired to develop a long-distance cannon by a genocidal maniac, Saddam Hussain. This canon was to be used against Kurds and Israel. Good riddance.


Item. The Conservative party in Canada was elected by a majority and is seen by everyone, except for a minority of fashists, commies and eco-freaks, as a centrist and moderately conservative government.


All in all a pathetic try to paint Israel as Canada's enemy and Canada's goverment as rightist and extreme. Of course, you can just go ahead and keep on repeating it and hope that it'll stick with someone.

avi barzel on December 13, 2012 at 8:51 am (Reply)
Lame, Archie, lame. Stormfront and the usual neo-Nazi sites are a poor source of info and will only make you look worse, as hard as that may seem.

Item: The presence of numerous Muslim terror cells hiding in Canada, especially in Montreal, has been reported far and wide and is one of the reasons the US now demands passports at border crossings, rather than just a driver's license or a birth certificate as in the past. Prominent characters include Ahmed Ressam, now serving a 20-year sentence in the US; Mohammad Momin Khawaja, the first "Canadian" charged under the nations anti-terrorism act; and in 2006, Canadian security foiled a Mumbai-style terrorist attempt to bomb the Parliament, storm the national radio offices in Toronto, take numerous hostages, and even behead the Prime Minister. So, yes, Canada's problem with atual and potential misuse of its passports is not Israeli anti-terrorism teams, but jihadi "citizens."


Item: The charge that Israel deliberately bombed a UN post snuggled up to a Hezbollah missile launch site is sheer idiocy. The sole Canadian observer there, by the way, was Major Paeta Derek Hess-von Kruedener, not "Kaptain" Krudener. The Ottawa Citizen reported that in an email to Maj. General MacKenzie, Kruedener wrote, "the closest artillery has landed within 2 meters of our position and the closest 1000 lb aerial bomb has landed 100 meters from our patrol base. This has not been deliberate targeting, but rather due to tactical necessity." General MacKenzie concluded, "those words, particularly the last sentence, are not-so-veiled language indicating Israeli strikes were aimed at Hezbollah targets near the post." said Maj.-Gen. MacKenzie. "What that means is, in plain English, 'We've got Hezbollah fighters running around in our positions, taking our positions here and then using us for shields and then engaging the (Israeli Defence Forces)," he said. So, even if Israel knew of the UN post, its primary responsibility is to its citizens and to destroy or disable the launch site, regardless of risks to other military personnel who should have either disabled the terrorists as per their mandate or if unable to do so, refused to act as a shield by immediately evacuating the UN post.


Item: Gerald Bull was concurrently assisting Iraq in improving its Scud missiles which were launched at Israel, as everyone knows. That made him a legitimate target for snuffing and his "passing" is to be celebrated. Nevertheless, your conviction that Israeli intelligence assassinated Bull is sheer bull. According to Wiki: "Although it was in Iran and Israel's immediate interest that Bull would discontinue his co-operation with Saddam Hussein, he had worked for many different parties in many critical defense projects that he became an asset and a liability for several powerful groups at the same time. It has been speculated that besides Iran or Israel, the CIA, MI6, Chilean, Iraqi, or South African governments could have been behind the assassination due to Bull's past ventures."


So much for your pathetic antisemitic disinformation and agitprop riffs, Archie. As others of your ilk, you rely on fellow Jew-haters who just echo each others' errors and never update or correct their lies. Don't go and imagine you have "transferable skills" to make it in political advocacy or marketing; you'll lose your shirt. Stick to HAARP and "chem-trail" conspiracies, Mayan calendars, pyramid power and UFO "research" instead.