American Council For World Jewry

Domestic upheaval, for a change

Wednesday, 04 January 2012

Published in Washington Jewish Week

By JACK ROSEN

Israel surely needs another crisis like a hole in the head. The U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff recently said Iran was on pace to achieve nuclear weapons capacity within one year. The vital Egypt-Israel peace treaty is being monitored closely to see what Egypt's new Islamic rulers mean when they talk about a "reassessment" of the relationship.

On its northern border, Israel watches Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad hang on to his dictatorship by murdering thousands of his own citizens. And intelligence experts worry that the biggest problem may lie next door, where Lebanon's de facto rulers, the Iranian terror-client Hezbollah, may be the beneficiary of an Assad handoff of chemical weapons that would make its 60,000 missiles massed at the border an even greater threat to Israel.

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A Private Citizen in North Korea

Wednesday, 04 January 2012

Published in The Huffington Post

By JACK ROSEN

As North Koreans mourn the death of Kim Jong Il, and the world wonders what the future holds with his 20-something untested youngest son set to take control of a nuclear nation, my thoughts return to a somewhat unlikely visit to a country like no other.

Four years ago, North Korea invited me to bring a small delegation of members of the American Council for World Jewry to Pyongyang. Admittedly, I was not sure what we could accomplish, or even if the trip was such a good idea, given that the small, secretive nation was best known as a proliferator of nuclear weapons and for rampant malnutrition and even starvation of its own citizens.

No one in our delegation had been to North Korea before, and while there was some trepidation about the unknown, we were determined to talk about several important issues, such as the very troubling matter of North Korea's material support for Israel's sworn enemies, the spread of weapons of mass destruction and their struggling economy. We were hopeful their leadership had come to the conclusion that at the people-to-people level, something positive could be achieved.

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