Alisa Doctoroff and Alon Pinkas | 
Ismar Schorsch | SCHECHTER INSTITUTE
Consul General Pinkas Says
Not Legal To Call Him Counsel By Tim Boxer  ON’T call Alon Pinkas Israel’s general counsel in New York. Alisa Doctoroff introduced him that way at a gathering of supporters of the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies gathering at the Upper West Side brownstone she shares with her husband, Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff.
“I’m the consul general,” Pinkas said. “General counsel is a lawyer – that I will not be!” He quickly apologized to the sprinkling of attorneys in the audience, including high powered lawyer Robert Rifkind, Schechter’s chairman of the board, who was grinning ear to ear. Some 40 people applauded an upbeat report from Ismar Schorsch, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary. The Schechter Institute, which grants ordination for Conservative rabbis in Israel, is no longer only an extension of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, the chancellor said. It just received full Israeli accreditation as an educational institution, so it is now a wholly independent entity. Its degrees will be Israeli degrees, no longer JTS degrees. After calling for importing the American ideal of pluralism into Israeli society, Pinkas switched to the political maelstrom in the Middle East where, he said, he feels more comfortable. “I’m from the Camp David school,” he said. “We are the only country in the world without borders. Until you have borders, you won’t know where Israel is and you won’t have stability. 
Alon Pinkas and Robert Rifkind | “The first thing we should have done is kick Arafat out. He is an impediment to Arab progress. Send him to some retirement home in Boca. He’s a corrupt good-for-nothing anti-statesman idiot. Look at the tragedies he has brought to both people.” Pinkas warned that a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must be found before it is too late. “If I were a Palestinian I’d say forget about two states. Let’s live together in one state.” That would mark the end of Israel, he explained, because in 10 years the Palestinians will be a majority in the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, thus effectively dooming the Zionist vision of a Jewish state. | 
