The passage of forty years

I first arrived in Israel late in the afternoon of July 16th 1967. I knew enough about the country not to expect camels and desert everywhere, but it did seem fitting that our first view from the windows of the plane was of sand dunes. By the time we exited the terminal it was dark, and we climbed aboard a taxi which had no air conditioning so the warm evening wind blew in through the open windows. The road up to Jerusalem was probably two lanes, but it wasn't crowded. Most Israelis  didn't own cars in those days. I remember it snaked up down and around, hugging the contours of the Judean hills; I also remember that we passed though a number of towns, and there were lots of people out on the streets, enjoying the respite from the heat of the day. Eventually we reached Jerusalem, and the cab driver had to ask directions to our destination, a hostel-like place in Kiryat Hayovel.

I especially remember the feeling of exuberance in the air. A few blocks from our destination the cabbie pulled up in front of a group of people sitting around a camp fire; a young boy rushed up to us and shouted in excitement "We won! We won!" Two blocks down a young woman also expressed delight in the victory, before directing us around the corner.

It was a month after the Six Day War.

I flew into Israel on the 16th of July this year, too, late in the afternoon. The sand dunes are all gone, covered by housing projects of 15- or 20-story residential towers. (There probably weren't more than two such buildings in all of Israel in 1967). The towns are crisscrossed by broad multi-lane highways, all of them clogged with vehicles. On the road up to Jerusalem we didn't enter a single town; the highway stays out of them all. Arriving in Jerusalem we saw no dancing groups of celebrators. People don't do public celebrations on hot summer evenings anymore.

48 years have seen a lot of change.

Forty years ago today, on August 17th 1975, I enlisted in the IDF.

The IDF in those days was still reeling from the Yom Kippur War. A year earlier recruits were reportedly given three choices upon enlistment: they could join the tanks, or the tanks, or the tanks. By the time I arrived people were volunteering to the paratroopers and being sent to the one or two other infantry units, but most people went into the armoured corps. Most of the army seemed to be there in those days; once there they served either on the Golan or in the Sinai. The enemy was Egypt, or Syria; I never had a single military encounter with Palestinians in my entire three-year stint - or for that matter, in my subsequent 30-40 months of reserve duty spread over the next 25 years. I had an officer who was certified as being shell-shocked, and a company commander who wasn't certified but should have been.

The first evening in the recruitment depot Evyatar and I crawled out under a fence and went to find a public telephone to call home. Being 18, we weren't afraid of fighting or dying; but we were apprehensive about sharing tents and training with the loud and rough-looking soldiers from parts of society we'd never interacted with. I suppose they may have been prickly about us, too, but we didn't see this at the time. Doing first rounds of kitchen duty was frightening: we were ordered around by soldiers who seemed to delight in our sense of apprehension and disorientation.

It was hot. It was strange. It was radically different. We had boarded the bus in Jerusalem cocky with the sensation that we were joining something big and important; now it looked mostly foreign and disconcerting. And l-o-o-o-n-g! Three whole years! In this?! Three. Whole. Years. Would we ever return to a normal civilian life, such as the one we'd just left so blithely behind?

Yes and no, in retrospect. We did, of course, because three years isn't, actually, very long. We didn't, in many ways, because by the time we got out we ourselves were very different.

That first evening, in a hot tent on a prickly blanket on a steel-frame cot was one of the most important points of my life. The thing is, I knew it at the time, too - and yet I didn't. Donning the ugly and uncomfortable olive uniform and clunky boots gave us the feeling of now being adults, citizens, contributors to society, lords of our destiny. And also hopelessly young and inexperienced, rookies, untested and insignificant cogs in a large machine which didn't at all care about who we'd been so far. We knew we were on the cusp of one of life's biggest adventures; we didn't have the slightest inkling of what we were facing. We knew we were setting out on a rite of passage; we didn't comprehend the rite or where we'd pass to. The system was reeling after war, and it looked solid and impregnable; we were over-confident and exuberant; ignorant of what we'd be called upon to deal with and what growth we'd be required to perform.

Evyatar eventually made it all the way to full Colonel. I climbed up to first sergeant. Yet each of us and all of us really did acquire a personal confidence based on achievement and the satisfaction of successfully coping, functioning in the system, and mastering its requirements. By the time we walked out, we really were adults, citizens, contributors to society and, oh yes, lords of our destiny to the degree this is granted to mere mortals.

And a good thing, too, because the country was changing. From two-lane roads across sand dunes, to highways between hi-tech development centers; from the simplicity of singing around a campfire on a hot summer evening to the complexity of a multilayered, multifaceted society smack in the middle of one of the world's most volatile regions. There is more than one path we can take in life, and more than one direction society can move in. Our ability to participate in the way we have, to contribute in the ways we've managed, to own our society for better and for worse, were profoundly forged by what followed when we woke, for the first time, in those hot ugly tents on the morning of August 18th 1975 to face our first full day in the army.

A comment on the fate of the three kidnapped youths

On June 12th 2014 three Israeli youths - Gilad Shaar, Naftali Frenkel and Eyal Yifrach - were kidnapped on their way home from school on the West Bank. Their bodies were discovered buried in a field 18 days later. In between Israel carried out a massive search for them, which included the arrest of some 400 Palestinians, most of them affiliated with Hamas. This operation was the backdrop for an escalation of rocket firing from Gaza. After the discovery of the bodies three Israelis allegedly kidnapped and murdered Muhamad alKhdeir of Jerusalem (they have been indicted and await trial).

Once the bodies were found it was clear they had been murdered almost immediately after the kidnapping. Since the event proceeded the Gaza war of this summer, many of Israel's usual enemies have made the claim that Israel knew the boys were dead all along, and cynically hid this fact to justify its broad action against Hamas on the West Bank, thus provoking Hamas to retaliate from Gaza, thus enabling Israel to kill lots of Palestinians, as is it likes to do.

Not every idiotic claim made by Israel's enemies needs to be responded to, and this one was never particularly convincing. Any kidnapping anywhere in the world could cause a manhunt - that's why the English language has a word for it - and certainly one in which the kidnappers belong to an organization known to engage in lethal kidnappings. Even had the Israelis known with certainty that the three youths wee dead, they still would have needed to find the bodies, and, at least as important, to apprehend the perpetrators before they acted again. Or even not before they acted again: simply as a matter of law and order. Isreal's enemies would have us accept that the correct response to a triple murder which is no longer a kidnapping, is to go home and go to sleep.

The other day, however, there was an interview in Makor Rishon with Brigadier General Tamir Yedaya, the ranking IDF officer in charge of the search. Makor Rishon, in case you've never heard of it, is the main newspaper of the settlers. It is published only in Hebrew, and only on paper. There's no online version. This is an interesting phenomenon, which I'm not going to get into today, but it should be said that it's a high-quality publication, easily the intellectual counterpart of the only other Israeli newspaper which aims at the intelligence of its public, Haaretz. And Makor Rishon is no more driven by its ideology than Haaretz is, so that it can be fun to read both.

Anyway. Since most readers won't have the ability to read Makor Rishon, here's a synopsis of that interview with the General. He was repeatedly asked what he knew, and when. He repeatedly explained that by the morning after the kidnapping he knew there was a high likelihood at least one of the youths was dead. Indeed, many of the efforts made by the searchers were in places only a dead body could be found in, such as the bottom of water reservoirs. And yet, he said, one is not three. And a high likelihood is not certainty. And into that crack of uncertainty you can insert large doses of hope. Throughout the days of the search, he says, he repeatedly had dreams of bringing home one, or perhaps two, of the youths. Even once the bodies had been discovered, he said, even as they were being exhumed, he still had a last sliver of hope that it wouldn't turn out to be three bodies they were exhuming, but fewer.

So what's the moral of the story? That human beings, and hence their actions, are complex. That we can operate on conflicting assumptions simultaneously. That knowledge and hope aren't always compatible, and yet they can co-exist. 

That Israel's enemies like to pretend that we're malicious cardboard figures, not real people. But then, that part you knew all along.

Father Olivier and the IDF

The background to this story is the St Mary of the Resurrection Abbey, where there stands a church built between 1141-1170, when the Crusaders ruled the area. Unlikely as it may sound, the church was never destroyed, and although it probably served as a warehouse or barn for many centuries, it was cleaned out in the late 19th century, and in the 20th the original paintings on its walls were uncovered and restored, as much as possible after 800 years. There aren't many cities in the world with fully standing 12th century churches in them, but the Muslim village of Abu Ghosh, West of Jerusalem, has one.

When entering a church in Israel there's always the question of uncovering ones head. You're supposed to do that in churches, but religious Jews aren't supposed to do so at all. I always take off my hat, but sometime I don't take off my Kippa. This time there was a novelty, since our group included a young Muslim woman with her head covered, which she didn't remove, so the church accepted not only the sovereignty of the Jews, so to speak, but also the traditions of the neighbors.

Father Olivier heads the Abbey. He's French, but speaks fine Hebrew. Astonishingly fine, actually, since many of his sentences contain up-to-date IDF slang. So eventually we asked him about it, and he grinned. Back in the early 1980s he was discovered by some women serving in the IDF education corps, and ever since then they've been using him as their in-house expert for Church matters (Ani mashak hinuch be-inyanei Notzrim). Whenever there's an IDF unit spending a week learning about Jerusalem, they call in Father Olivier to explain all the different kinds of Christians there are in town.

Jerusalem never ceases to surprise.

Bil'in on You-Tube

Balfour St. has been watching Palestinian videos from Bil'in. As you'd expect, the only way to see them as evidence for any Israeli wrongdoing, not to mention brutality, is if you've decided in advance that's what you're going to see, irrespective of reality. If you're impartial, neutral, or have any understanding of police work, riots, military occupations or other relevant matters, they show an IDF that's doing just fine.

My favorite snippet is near the end of the first video: a Palestinian demonstrator on a wheelchair has been overtaken by the Israeli troops, and he sits among them (embeded, might we say?) as they shoot tear-gas canisters at his folks. A few seconds later the troops have stopped at the line they wished to reach, and they're flanked by a handful of Palestinian men who for whatever reason haven't fallen back. So there's a line of IDF troops and Palestinian men, facing a second line of Palestinian demonstrators and photographers.

You couldn't make this up.

Contextualizing Olive Trees

An anonymous reader wonders if I'd care to contextualize a story that appeared yesterday on Mondoweiss. I'm not particularly impressed by snide anonymous comments, but in this case it may be possible to create what President Obama might call a Teachable Moment. So here goes.

The cast:

Taayush. This is a Jewish-Arab organization, created in 2000 just when the Palestinians were launching their war against the Israelis who had just offered them a sovereign state. They are so deeply invested in the Israel-is-always-wrong-and-the-Palestinians-are-always-right narrative, that so far as I know even the NIF refuses to fund them, and that's saying something. I haven't spent much time following them, but my impression is that they're against Zionsim, meaning they'd prefer the Jews not to have a nation state. Also, from what I know of them, they're not interested in facts unless they serve their agenda. This is true of many folks, of course, but is never praiseworthy and always casts a shadow over any statement they make.

IDF troops: The film shows some IDF troops enforcing the law in the hills south of Hebron. There are about 8-10 enlisted men, a major and a lieutenant colonel. I assume the two officers are the CO of an armoured battalion and his deputy, but I could be wrong about this. The video was filmed last Saturday, October 30th; normally, on weekends either the CO or his deputy will be at home with his family; since both of them were on duty that day, the battalion seems to have known there was trouble coming, and both officers decided to stay with the unit.

An order declaring a closed security zone: Israel is the occupying power in this area (the hills south of Hebron), for better and for worse. International law decrees that this entails keeping order. One tool the military government has is to declare certain areas as temporary security zones, which allows them to limit activities which are normally not the government's business, such as freedom of movement. These decrees are used for all sorts of purposes, including keeping Israelis out of certain areas. In the film before us, such a decree has been signed and is introduced in the first scene; it relates to a clearly defined geographic area, and forbids people from walking off the roads; normally such orders last hours or a day or two.

Olive trees: the story in the film is that the IDF troops prevent some Palestinian farmers from harvesting olives, while some Jews from Taayush do their best to obstruct the army and two of them are eventually arrested. The insinuation is that the trees belong to the farmers, but this is actually never clearly said. Which is puzzling, because if it was clearly the case the makers of the film would have said so, either to the IDF troops, or to the viewers of the film, or both. They never do. Moreover, if you look at the trees, they're clearly young. Olive trees can live for many centuries; these trees look to be no older than a decade or two. Which means, they weren't there when Israel occupied the area in 1967. This doesn't prove anything about the ownership, but it does raise the question: who owns the trees, and who owns the land on which they're planted, and is it conceivable that these matters are disputed? Might it be that there are conflicting claims, and the farmers are not innocently harvesting their olives but rather participating in a dispute over ownership? Indeed, is it conceivable that Taayush, Mondoweiss, and the farmers are all trying to prejudice a legal dispute by casting it as a cruel anti-Palestinian policy of the evil Israelis?

I don't know this to be the case - but there's no indication in the film that it's wrong, and as I've said, given their record, there's no other explanation for the lack of a declaration of ownership from the Taayush people. There are two additional circumstantial pieces of evidence. The first is that there is no Israeli policy of preventing Palestinian farmers from harvesting their crops. On the contrary. The present Israeli government has taken a series of active steps to encourage Palestinian economic activity since it came to power. The second is that in previous years there indeed have been cases where extreme settlers did their best to prevent Palestinian farmers from harvesting their crops, and specifically olives; this year the IDF has made a significant effort to defend the Palestinian farmers. IDF troops have been guarding Palestinian farmers from Israeli settlers. If that's the policy, why is the policy in this particular case so different? Might it be because the farmers don't, actually, own the trees or the land they're on?

The plot:


The film opens with the deputy battalion commander, a major, explaining calmly that a specific area, defined on the map he shows, has been declared a sealed military zone. This means, he explains, that road travel is unhampered, but anyone walking off the roads will be arrested. In the next scene (after a shot of ants, which must have some poetic meaning), the Palestinians and Taayush Israelis are harvesting olives. The troops arrive, but contrary to what they said they'd do, no-one is arrested. The lieutenant colonel tells the farmers to stop working, and his deputy signs a specific order pertaining to that orchard: it's 12:07 pm, and he then announces that anyone harvesting after that time will be arrested.

A few minutes later two soldiers and the major are slowly escorting a Palestinian woman out of the orchard. No-one touches her at any point. Eliyahu Nawi, a well-known Israeli supporter of Palestinian farmers, intervenes; after some discussion the officer loses his patience with Nawi, who is arrested. The rest of the Taayush team has all along been taunting the soldiers, insulting them, and obstructing their operation. Eventually a second Taayush Israeli activist is also arrested. No Palestinians are arrested, and there is no violence throughout.

The Mondoweiss blurb that accompanies the film tells that "every detail of Palestinian life requires a permit which is unattainable." This is of course nonsense, as Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian Prime Minster of the West Bank will readily tell; indeed, his entire policy these past two years is predicated on the reality that this isn't the case and that the Palestinians can build a state of their own under Israeli occupation. Also, Palestinian farmers don't need permits to farm their own lands, unless there are specific over-riding reasons. Farming doesn't require permits.

I've said in the past, and I'll say it again: by the standards of military occupations of the modern era, these IDF troops are gentle, kid-gloved and harmless. If this is brutal, what word in the English language remains for the real thing? 

Some critics of Israel like to complain when Israelis compare themselves favorably to Arab states in matters of law, human rights and so on. My question here is if it's conceivable that citizens of a Western democracy would be allowed to verbally assault their own soldiers and obstruct them as they do their jobs within a war zone. Thankfully, there are no war zones within the borders of Western democracies; but there are Western soldiers active in war zones: can anyone imagine some anti-war protesters ranting at American, British or German troops in, say, Afghanistan, or Kossovo, or Iraq?

Elinor Joseph's Nice Story

Lots of important things to think and write about today, no time to do the thinking and writing, however. So instead, here's a very nice story to warm some cockles. It's propaganda, yes, and a puff story, most very definitely, but it's also true - not something one can say with confidence about much of what gets published in the media these days.

Soldiers at Dance

Apparently American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken to making videos of themselves dancing in all sorts of places. Here's an example:

And here's one with an American soldier manning a roadblock and asking a local driver to tell the insurgents to please come and fight within the next hour, before he has his shower

Here's some more, and there's lots more where that came from

So you'll appreciate why I'm not deeply anguished, mortified, or even mildly peeved by this clip of six Israeli troops doing the same in Hebron, which has lots of folks all agog these past few days:

It's not that they're only kids: they aren't. A troop of six IDF infantry soldiers, at least one of whom must be a non-commissioned officer, are not a group of adolescents. They're adults; they and their friends bear the responsibility for our lives on their shoulders; they repeatedly prove they're willing to put their own lives on the line to protect us - and they're far more mature, as a general statement, than most civilian young adults in the rich world. So this isn't an act of childishness.

It's good-natured goofiness. No one was harmed by it, no-one was humiliated, no harm was done at all. Yes, I can see why their CO probably got worked up about it, and I expect they'll pay some minor price for that, but that's all it is. Anyone who insists this is some callous expression of a brutal occupation etc etc needs to have their head examined. Then again, irrational hatred probably doesn't show in most head examinations. Alas.

PS. My son the soldier is home for the week. We watched this together, laughed heartily (it is quite funny), and he told me that the 50th Battalion - that's what it is - is known for being goofy.

After Haiti

The IDF field hospital in Haiti will be shut down on Thursday. The staff will come home; the equipment will be donated to a local hospital. The arrival of the Americans in full force has made the field hospital unnecessary:

Israel's main accomplishment was in the quick deployment of the field hospital in Haiti. "For five critical days, it was the best hospital in Port-au-Prince," said the officer. "We provided timely medical care to about 1,000 people, we conducted 300 operations and delivered 16 babies. In the past few days the Americans arrived and then you can put things in proportion and become more modest in the face of their airlift and the scope of their aid. You need to understand that those who will continue to treat the main suffering there are the Americans," he added.

Recruiting the Wrong People

Siblings or children of people killed in the IDF serve in combat units only with parental consent. You'd think this would be a good thing, enabling bereaved families to avoid losing a second family member. The problem is that in many cases, the young man (it's usually men) insists on serving in a combat unit, and sees his mother (if she's the widow) or his parents (if his brother was killed) as blameworthy for not allowing him to serve as he "ought". Sometimes the parents give in; and sometimes after they do, the young man is killed, leaving the twice bereaved parent with the additional grief of having allowed it to happen.

I don't know why the IDF doesn't simply refuse to recruit bereaved young men to combat units. Back in Israel's early years there may have been a serious dearth of qualified young men to serve in some units, but there's hardly such a problem these days; moreover, there's no lack of important jobs that need to be done which don't involve combat. The poor mother shouldn't be the one who decides, and the one to face the reproach of her young son who doesn't understand mortality, even after having lost a brother or father.

Apparently the army is finally recognizing the problem, though according to Tzachi Hanegbi, they've still not reached the position they should be in.

Field Hospital in Haiti

Jeffrey Goldberg is kvelling about Israel's field hospital in Haiti, here and here. (He also has a fine expose of the under-reporting of Egypt's brutal siege of Gaza, here, but that's not my present topic). Indeed, if you believe CNN or CBS, it's an impressive story.

I once asked Richard Silverstein why he only ever had bad things to say about Israel, and what that told us about him, but he rejected my insinuation: there's precious little about Israel that's positive, but in the rare cases there is, he's glad to report it. OK, fair enough (just barely). A team of Israelis saving lives at the other end of the world: moderately positive, don't you think? Not if you're Richard Silverstein. He has found a grumpy Israeli who has nasty things to say, and he gleefully amplifies his kvetches. The bottom line: Israelis saving lives in Haiti is a Bad Thing. (His blog, you'll recollect, is called Tikkun Olam).

Mondoweiss would prefer not to talk about the topic, but does mention it: why are Jews so great for everyone but the Palestinians? (Why, indeed. Let's see if we can think of any reasons).

As of yesterday, a week after the catastrophe, there were two field hospitals in Haiti. One was Israeli (the better equipped one, apparently). I looked for this fact on the Guardian's website, but was unable to find it. If any of you do manage to find it, feel free to correct me. Sometimes a lack of reporting can be as damning as a false report.

The interesting question, to my mind, is how come. OK, so Israelis are cynical and will bend over backwards to garner a positive mention on CNN, even if they have to cross the world and save lives to do so. This doesn't explain how they manage to do so, ahead of everyone else (or anyway, ahead of those who try at all). The answer to that, it seems to me, is that they think about such matters, and constantly try to improve. A fundamental aspect of the IDF (and of some other sections of Israeli society) is the commitment to learn as you go. Every event is analyzed. Participants, from the junior grunts up, are encouraged to think, and then to tell what they see and what their opinion about it is and how things could be done better. There are frameworks for learning from experience and not repeating the same mistakes (hafakat lekachim) - though there will always be new mistakes to be made, life being what it is.

Israelis go through more life threatening events than most people; they've got a culture that accepts and tolerates first-time mistakes, while encouraging everyone to think about how to avoid them the second time; and given their neighborhood, the potentials for future scenarios is great so at least some of them are thought about in advance. All this makes for abilities to respond which are greater than those of some other places. Yesterday, for example, they held a big exercise enacting a mass bio-terrorism attack on Tel Aviv by terrorists from Europe. Experts from 30 other countries decided not to boycott Israel but rather to come to Tel Aviv and observe the exercise.

Don't get me wrong: there is as much stupidity in Israel as anywhere else, and it hurts just as much. But not all the time, everywhere, and sometimes, mostly where it's most important, the stupidity gets sidelined. This can be a matter of life or death for Haitians.

Democracy, Power, War, Peace, Law etc. etc.

I've been offline most of the day, and have time right now only for a quick roundup.

Meny Mazuz, Israel's Attorney General, has decided not to prosecute Israeli filmmaker Muhammed Bakri for his slanderous film "Jenin Jenin". The film contains outright lies about the actions of IDF troops during the battle of Jenin in 2002, when the whole world was convinced Israel had massacred large numbers of Palestinian civilians, until it turned out they weren't dead. A group of troops, mostly reservists, has been trying ever since to have Bakri punished for the lies he disseminated in his film.

The story is not unsimilar to the one I mentioned yesterday, where some creep in the UK wishes to defame dead soldiers as part of a political stunt. Except that in the British case, the national consensus from the Prime Minster down is that the defamation cannot be allowed; in Israel meanwhile, where 13 IDF troops died in Jenin precisely because Israel refused to fight the way her detractors accused her of fighting, the government isn't willing to block the defamer's right of free speech. The most the Attorney General is willing to do is support the reservists if they take their case to a civil court - a support which has no legal standing and hardly any moral significance. In essence what Mazuz is saying to the soldiers is "I agree with you but freedom of speech is more important, no matter how infuriating the lies it enables."

He's right, of course. Yet another case where Israeli democracy is at least as robust as that of our detractors.

In another corner of the internal Israeli discussion about legality at war (not to be mistaken for morality at war, of course), the previous head of the Supreme Court, Aharon Barak, insists Israel must fight its wars within the strictures of international law - nor does he think this should be particularly hard to do. As a matter of fact, he advocates Israel's joining the International Criminal Court. (The Chinese, Russians and Americans haven't, among others. Powerful nations don't, it seems). I don't know about joining the ICC, but General Ashkenazi, the top general of the army is moving towards an ever-greater integration of legal advisers into the units of the IDF.

Will such a measure help Israel in the future? Well, yes and no. On the purely legal level, yes: the more robust Israel's legal system is, the less case there is for action against it in the international legal venues (that's why Barak is sanguine: he sees the legal implications). On the level of international discourse, of course such a measure won't help. Israel isn't castigated for what it does; it's castigated for what it is. Shimon Stein explains how Europeans and Israelis live in different universes; the only way this can be resolved is for Israel to have European-style peace with its neighbors.

Most Israelis would love to have European-style peace with their neighbors. Who wouldn't? Well, the neighbors aren't interested, for starters. Aluf Benn, a lefty but well informed columnist at Haaretz, knows fully well that peace can't be had anytime soon; he agrees on this point with our outspoken foreign minster Avigdor Lieberman. Where he disagrees, however, is the implications. Benn thinks we need to do our best and always seek peace, and take care not to poke external observers in the eye all the time.

If peace can't be had, and the Europeans won't see things our way in any case, how bad is the situation? Perhaps not so bad. The British Attorney General, whose name - Baroness Scotland - is far more imposing than Meni Mazuz, explained yesterday in a public lecture in Jerusalem that

"The government is looking urgently at ways in which the UK system might be changed to avoid this situation arising again," Scotland said. "Israel's leaders should always be able to travel freely to the UK."

Here's a suggestion: arrest warrants might be decided upon by the public prosecution (i.e. the Attorney General's office), not by some judge in some obscure English town. That can't be construed as anti-democratic, I'd think.

Yet why is it so important for the British that Israeli officials be able to travel to London? There are all sorts of reasons, but they boil down to power and the wielding of it. The Europeans can protest otherwise as much as they will, the fact is that the world is, always has been, and will always continue to be run by people who wage situations and make decisions about them with the understanding that these decisions will inevitably have implications. The ability to make that kind of decision is called power; and the wielders of it bear the responsibility of using it to further the interests of a constituency. That's one of the differences between them and, say, university professors, activists, and bloggers. What does Baroness Scotland know that we don't?

Scotland's assurance comes as the Guardian learned that the Israeli military had cancelled a visit by a team of its officers to Britain after fears they risked arrest on possible war crimes charges.

What sort of implications might result by not having Israeli officials ever come to the UK? Well, here's a possible one. Apparently the Israelis are about to activate a new security system for airports; one even better, cheaper, and more efficient than the one they've already got, which is already the world's best. You need to read the item behind that link with care, however: the new system will not replace the human intervention which is the hallmark of the present system; it will merely pare off Israeli citizens (Jews and Arabs equally, of course), who clearly don't need to be interviewed; this will leave more time to focus on all the others.

Unfortunately, Israel is very good at such things as combating terrorists and protecting civilians. Or rather, it's not unfortunate at all; it's the need for the expertize that's unfortunate - but lately, the British have the same need. As do the Germans, French, Spaniards, and the American's have an urgent need for it. If you bore responsibility and power, would you want to be in a situation where you couldn't talk to some of the world's top experts, out of some sort of spite or other childish sentiment? No? Baroness Scotland neither, apparently.

Nor will you allow a boycott of those experts to go too far, either.

The Jews had millennia of powerlessness, and were not loved for it nor was it an especially pleasant exercise. Now they've got power, and they're intensely disliked for it by some. Given the alternative, it's better to have the power.

Serving the Nation

Gabi Ashkenazi, Israel's top general, yesterday suggested having a national service system that would draft all Israelis, including Haredi and Arabs; the IDF would recruit the people it needs, but groups and individuals who wouldn't fit into the IDF would still do their part.

On the one hand, a no-brainer. Most young Israelis serve in the IDF for two to four years; having entire groups who don't is unfair and socially unhealthy. (Those who serve are conscripted, not volunteers). There are some legal benefits, in eligibility to subsidized morgatages, for example, which are granted only to people who served; having everybody serve would make that distinction go away. It's possible to think of many civilian tracks and programs on which young people could both contribute and acquire valuable experience, beyond the military.

On the other hand, it's worth noting that almost no other democratic societies expect of their young adults to set aside any time at all for engagement in a national service format. The idea that society would legislate a requirement to serve it is contrary to the Zeitgeist.

Perhaps that's a problem with the Zeitgeist, however.

Meanwhile, there is a small but growing number of Haredi young men who are breaking ranks with the norms of their part of society and joining the IDF. The most recent story is of dozens, and perhaps soon hundreds, who are joining the military intelligence. These are different from the HDDH-type Haredi 18-year-olds who can't sit in the yeshiva, don't fit into their environment, and have been joining the IDF in small numbers for some years now. This new group is the opposite: men in their late 20s from the best yeshivot. Someone who has spent years at, say the Hebron Yeshiva (which is in Jerusalem, not Hebron), easily has the intellectual prowess of a Harvard grad student. The army is now finding ways to fit them into those of its units that can best make use of such people.

It's a good idea for the army, and for the young men, and for their society and the general society. I can't find anything in the story to kvetch about, tho I love to kvetch. There's even the added benefit that some of these young men are going into 8200, the technological branch of the military intelligence; and over the past 20 years the old-boys-(and-girls)-network of 8200 has been one of the central engines of Israel's high-tech revolution. Having some Haredi men in that network will be very interesting.

Analyzing Warstuff

Where do you go if you're an American general, say, or a British one, and your troops in Iraq or Afghanistan are encountering a new type of homemade but lethal weapon, and you need some advice on what it's made from so as the better to defend yourself?

To Israel, of course. The Israelis have this unit, run by a mad scientist, who collects bit of ordnance, learns everything possible about it, and makes useful recommendations.

Recently, the American military began studying the IDF experience. "They never imagined IEDs like that. They're still back in the 1980s, fighting the Soviets. They're making this huge review and came to us to learn everything about the materials and how to take the things apart," says Tuval.

Delegates from other armies fighting in Afghanistan, including the British, Italians and Germans, have also visited the lab to study the threats ahead. British experts, this time from Scotland Yard, also visited the lab in 2005 to learn the types of explosives used in the 2005 London bombings, which were different from bombs they knew from the IRA.

So far, so not surprising. The part I found of special interest, however, was this one:

In other cases, the lab is requested to produce results in real time. During Operation Cast Lead the lab deduced from shrapnel embedded in a paratroop officer's helmet that he was not injured by an IED but by a sniper's bullet, thus making the army aware a sniper was operating in that area.

Interesting, isn't it? The troops in the field and their commanders weren't sure what was going on, so the forensic fellows back near Tel Aviv figured out there must be a Palestinian sniper hidden nearby. Just the kind of thing the foreign observers and bearers of human rights in vain always know better about than the professionals who are there at the time.

The Most Typically Israeli Picture

The other day I linked to the short-list of pictures competing at Y-net for the slot of "Most typically Israeli picture, 2009", a competition between snapshots sent in by regular Israelis, and chosen by the regular folks at Y-net. Here's the picture that was chosen:Should we talk about it a bit?

First, this was a popular choice, vox populi - not the choice of a small group of self anointed pompous cultural experts or celebrities or what have you.

Second, if you don't know what it's about, it's hardly self explanatory - which is probably the reason it was chosen. The voters in this competition were looking for a typically Israeli picture, and they chose one they felt to be specifically Israeli, unique to us. Fundamentally unfathomable to outsiders, actually, as Roni Shaked commented in his column, which was not translated. (Y-net isn't Haaretz - all the more regrettable).

Where's the picture from? It was taken by 21-year-old Yonnie Kot, a recently demobilized tank commander. He snapped the shot from his position in the turret of his tank, in one of two scenarios. Either he'd just parked the tank after a run of maneuvers, as his unit reached a resting point, or they were preparing to continue and the van appeared. I've been in that picture hundreds of times, as have most of us; Achikam, home for Independence Day, glanced at it and said "Classic! And I've been in that field!"

What's it a picture of? Of a gazlan, of course. What's a gazlan? Well, the etymology is pretty clear. GazLAN is the Hebrew word for a thief who steals in bright daylight. GAZlan is the fellow, mostly uneducated and with imperfect syntax, who does a roaring business selling hot dogs and ice cream to military units on maneuvers. Each maneuvering area has one or two of them, and they always know in advance exactly which unit will be where when and how to get there. The commanders of the unit may have spent the entire night navigating the desert so as to assault a specific dusty hill at dawn, peering at their maps (or GPS screens). Once they've shot their payloads and churned up the dust, they lead their unit over the crest of the hill to regroup before moving on... and there's the gazlan fellow, with no specially-fangled military maps and satellite navigating equipment, waiting with his over-priced merchandise to fleece the troops. And boy, are the troops glad to see him.

Yossie Beilin once told in an interview of a life-changing insight he had many years ago while on the field of battle with casualties not yet evacuated, standing in line at the window of the gazlan. Even accepting it really happened that way, he was presenting his all-Israeli credentials while suggesting his hardly-all-Israeli perspectives.

If Yossie Beilin so, certainly all the rest of us less enlightened proles.

Yet this isn't the full story. Roni Shaked notes that thousands of snapshots were sent in, so it must have been a far larger number who did the choosing. They could have chosen all sorts of pictures to celebrate their communal identity - heroic ones, aesthetic ones, national ones, even simply more interesting ones. The aggregate voice that chose this particular picture was saying something. That this is a situation we all recognize, and recognize as being uniquely us. That the army is an essential part of our communal and personal lives, but the civilian gazlan is a central part of it. That the military planners pore over their preparations, but the uneducated gazlan will always see through them. That we'd never pay gazlan-prices for a hotdog at home, but in the army we'll gladly fork out the money rather than survive off the fare supplied for free by the system.

On a profound level, the gazlan is an expression of cynical humor in a crazy situation that isn't humorous; his elevation to national icon reflects the combination of grim determination and irreverence about it, all rolled together. He's precisely not Brecht's Mutter Courage, trudging after the marauding armies, making a living off the destruction they wreak while losing everything to its maws. The gazlan as a metaphor isn't separate from the troops, a parasite off them: he's the better side of them, the reminder that soon they'll be on his side of the equation, the civilians making the best of a wacky situation - but then again, they won't, because soon enough they'll be back in uniform as reservists, paying outrageous prices for his wares.

PS. I've noticed my exhortations to know Hebrew if you want to understand Israel have become regular fare on this blog. It's not a mandatory requirement, of course, but if I can convince you, here's a rather painless venue - no travel required, so you're even saving the planet!

"What are the Israelis Thinking?"

The formulation is Andrew Sullivan's, a few days ago, and he added that

It is hard to find any solid strategic argument for entering Gaza and occupying parts of it for an unspecified amount of time.

Yesterday he was already partially retracting, in a fine demonstration of how the immediacy of blogging doesn't always contribute to educated discussion of issues - just as with the rightfully reviled mainstream media. Sullivan was merely saying what most pundits were saying, of course, in varying degrees of vehemence.

As the events unfold, some brave voices are beginning to break ranks, though it grieves me to note the predictability with which they come from the political Right. I'd prefer if clear thinking was evenly distributed all over.

So what is Israel doing? I think the strategy is slowly coming into focus, and it's just possible that the pundits might have acted wisely to wait a moment before pontificating.

First, Israel's decision makers at all levels and in many organizations seem carefully to have read the Vinograd reports. Since no Israeli in any position of authority can afford to assume there won't be another war, they all had to do their best to ensure the next one would be executed better.

Second, the possibility of the next round happening in Hamas controlled Gaza had to have been clear since the beginning of 2006 at the latest, when Hamas won the Palestinian elections; actually, since armies must have plans for all possibilities, they'd better have plans for other places and scenarios, too; but the Gazan one has been growing obvious for quite a while, and must have been near or at the top of the list of the planners since the Hamas victory in the Palestinian civil war of summer 2007.

Gaza isn't Lebanon. It's hard to say which is a "better" place to fight in. What makes Gaza so daunting as a military arena is the very high number of civilians, and their density. The proverbial "can't throw a brick without hitting" is mostly an accurate description, certainly in the towns of Gaza. Of course, some armies wouldn't bat an eyelash at such a situation or see it as a problem: the Russians, for example, and various Arab formations in Sudan and Iraq; in the 1970s the Jordanians weren't bothered by killing lots of Palestinians, while in the 1980s the Syrians slaughtered tens of thousands of their own people. I mentioned the Lebanese in the previous post; the Hezbullah part of Lebanon remains true to form. The Palestinians have been aiming at civilians as a matter of principle, be it Lebanese, other Palestinians, or best of all, Israelis, ever since they defined themselves as a nation.

But Israel does care, which is one reason the IDF reconquered the West Bank in 2002 and then again in 2003, but never reconquered Gaza and eventually fully left, in 2005.

As recently as ten days ago many of us didn't see how we could use force in Gaza, in spite of the fact it was also growing obvious we didn't have much choice.

Third, Hamas recognizes Israel's qualms, and "played to their strengths" by embedding most of their forces and infrastructures within the civilian population, setting up a win-win situation: should Israel attack there will be large numbers of dead civilians which Hamas intended to use for promotion of its goals; should the Israelis refrain from attacking, even better: Hamas would be seen as the only force around that faces Evil Israel, hitting Israel's civilians with impunity and growing lethality, courtesy of Iran.

Israel's leadership had no choice, that has been clear for a while, but how would they create the means? Being right doesn't mean you can act upon it; waging a just war with unjust methods undermines the original justification.

Where there's a need there has to be a way, especially in situations where throwing up your hands in despair will result in innocents getting killed and entire communities being terrorized. The way that seems to have been devised was what I'll call accelerated inching attrition.

First, you think a lot. You probably start with defining your goal: what is it you wish to achieve; perhaps you list various possible goals. Then you look at every possible component of the problem, you try to imagine every possible thing that can go wrong, and you ask yourself what it would take to overcome the problems and avoid the pitfalls. I have no doubt the IDF and its civilian surroundings have articulated every single objection currently being screeched by the Guardian and everyone else, and gone looking for a response. (The arrogance of the pundits who are so cock-sure they've got anything novel to say is comic, but not my subject at the moment).

The more you think (an activity that never ends), the more you can begin making preparations. You train your troops for the tasks they'll need to face, as well as for all the things you can think of that might go wrong. And then you train them some more. Reserve units, too, of course.

You collect information. Mountains of it, and sift it through, and organize it in ways that will be useful. You then use the emerging picture to calibrate your plans, hone them, and also figure out what parts of the picture need more details, and you go get them. This is all a self-enriching cycle.

You prepare the civilian formations: municipalities, water companies, medical systems and organizations, communications, etc etc. Whenever you think you've exhausted the list of preparations, you go looking for more. There's no such thing as completing all preparations, as Achikam told me an hour before they went in, after yet another day of completing all the preparations.

Finally, the time came, ten days ago.

The first stages were done by the air force, in a pattern first used by the Americans in Iraq in January 1991, but adapted to the conditions of Gaza. The first stage was to kill as many Hamas men as possible, in as many sites as possible. The goal was to throw Hamas into immediate confusion and never allow it to recuperate. Hundreds of dead and many hundreds of wounded - the majority not innocent bystanders, of course - taxing the hospitals, sowing panic and demoralization or at least its potential, disrupting any type of public order, forcing the leadership underground, hopefully severing some of their command and control capabilities.

On the second day we also destroyed some of their tunnels, effectively cutting off, or at least significantly reducing, their logistic hinterland.

By the third day the initial wave of airborne successes had been achieved, and David Grossman, assuming we were still in 2006, called for a halt: the air force had done its best, and from here on there wasn't much left for it to do other than rearrange the rubble and kill civilians. Better to call it a victory and stop. In hindsight, arguably this may have been true by the end of the first week, but it wasn't true on the third day. On days 3 through 7, the air force did something many of us hadn't thought of: it pulverized the middle level of the Hamas fighting machine. The head had been confused frightened and forced underground on day one; the fighting units, to the extent Hamas has them, and the 15,000-some armed men, were mostly unscathed. During those days, however, their immediate hinterland was targeted and apparently seriously hit. These were the dozens of homes of senior Haman figures pulverized, mostly while they were empty of people but still full of weapons. And tunnels. By destroying them, the IDF seriously crimped the ability of the Hamas units to function except where they already were. They couldn't be moved or regrouped. They can't be resupplied. They are where they are, armed as they are, period. They cannot be relieved. They probably have intermittent connections with their commanders at best.

This was achieved with limited loss of Hamas lives, and very few of civilians. True, someday the international media will enter Gaza freely, and they'll show endless footage of destroyed buildings, but by then it won't make much difference, will it. They'll be preaching to the believers, and anyway there will be a new story, somewhere else.

The next stage of the attrition focused on the barriers to a land invasion. The myths told about this stage were endless, even in Israel, and I'm not going to repeat them, but the general idea was that Hamas had created a series of fortifications, barriers and impediments to the advance of IDF ground forces. The Hamas leadership seems to have believed this, too, witness their proclamations as recently as three days ago that the ground forces will never come because the cowardly Israelis know they'll be cut down if they ever try.

In spite of the total fog of war that first evening, it was clear within about three hours that this probably wasn't what had happened. On the contrary: the IDF forces sailed through those lines of defense with very little action, few casualties, and, one might add, not very many dead Hamas fighters, either. My explanation for this is that for an army to slow down an invader on a fortified line, it has to be an army: with training, weaponry, command and control systems, reinforcements on their way, and so on. (The Israeli failures on the Golan and Suez on October 6-7th 1973 demonstrate this, and that IDF was always much more formidable than Hamas). Hamas would never have been able to stop a concerted effort of the IDF to get in, but it expected to bloody them. The attrition of days 3-7 prevented that.

By noon after the invasion Gaza had been bisected, with powerful forces sitting on the hilltops (such as there are in Gaza), or tall rooftops, and lines of supply back to their rear echelons. Casualties can be evacuated, supplies can get in; in the rear, meanwhile, new brigades are carefully and purposefully preparing themselves for battle: the reservists. Experienced veterans of previous campaigns, who flocked to their units when called up two nights ago, irrespective of how inconvenient it was in their regular lives.

Where are we now? The next line of Hamas defense, and its main one, was always the inevitable weakness of an attacking army in an urban environment. Even the most brutal and ruthless armies invade cities at their extreme peril: think Red Army in Berlin, April 1945, taking more than 100,000 casualties (the number of dead Berliners was, of course, much higher). Keep in mind, however, that the commanders of the IDF know that; they don't need to be informed by the media. Keep in mind also that Hamas has to be hit, as explained above. Ergo, a way had to be found, and prepared, trained and prepared for.

I'm no more informed than the rest of you, but allow me to suggest what may be happening (this is pure conjecture). As described above, at this stage of attrition the Hamas men are almost on their own, perhaps in small groups. They're tired and frightened, or at least, tired and very tense. They've been under fire for ten days, most of which were filled with frustrated anticipation: even assuming they've been raring for a fight the whole time, it has been slow in coming and doesn't appear all that imminent even now. Their leaders are out of sight, their closer commanders may also be gone. They realize that the tunnel they intended to use to resupply has been bombed, nor are many reinforcements likely to come. All this would still be alright if only the IDF infantry would walk into their carefully prepared traps. But the IDF isn't doing that. Instead, it's inching forward. Its infantry seems to have excellent intelligence about each building; instead of racing forward like an elephant into a booby-mined trap, it fights for a building, kills some of the defenders but captures others, interrogates them about the other buildings on the street and only then moves forward to the next one.

Is it possible for an army to take a hostile city chock full of armed defenders without mass death on both sides? I don't know. I don't think it has ever been done before. But given the evidence, I say there's a chance, yes. Obviously, all sorts of things could go wrong. Two mis-fired bombs could land on a tall building killing 100 civilians, calling forth real diplomatic fury where so far there has been mostly only protocol displeasure. A unit of troops might indeed walk into one of those traps, with a number of casualties that would give our government pause. These dangers are real and immediate - but also clearly foreseeable, so perhaps the preparations will make them not happen.

What's the end game? It could be weeks of sifting through the city of Gaza until Hamas has effectively been disarmed. I expect, however, that it's more likely that Israel itself will now speed up the diplomatic process, starting with the visit this evening of Sarkozy: You want a cease fire, all you folks out there? You want to avert weeks of slow house-by-house searches as the populace suffers? So do we. So let's all agree on the mechanisms that will ensure that Hamas never regains its military capacities, and you, the international community, will help ensure the mechanisms stay in place; once that's been arranged we'll leave Gaza and hope never to return again. Sometime in the next 12 months elections need to take place, and perhaps the Palestinian voters will choose peace over strife this time. Ironically, all this violence is making it likely the next Israeli government will be eager to cooperate with the Obama administration on seeking ways towards a just peace.

In three days or weeks I may come to regret this post, of course. That's the problem with blogging versus writing history.

Waging War the Israeli Way

Hamas has been stockpiling weapons in civilian homes. This is against international law, but since I'm no great fan of international law I mention it only to note all the media outlets who aren't mentioning it - the folks who cannot formulate a sentence about Israel's policies without telling about whatever Israel is doing which is illegal. Those hypocrites, you know. But I digress.

According to the laws of war, placing military ordinance in civilian settings is forbidden because it erases the line between civilians and soldiers, and since getting at the soldiers so as to kill them is permitted, civilians will inevitably also be killed. Hezbullah, Hamas, and the Fatah-based Palestinian terrorists never put any store in any of that just-war theory or practice, since in their self understanding they are victims, period, and no matter what they do will always be justified. Their useful idiots in the West parrot this alongside them, thus demonstrating their rejection of the noble heritage of the Enlightenment.

The practice has booby-trapped Israel, of course. If we hit the terrorists along with their civilian shields, we're damned for waging war on civilians. If we refrain, so as not to be damned, the terrorists are safe, and sooner or later they'll kill Israelis.

The advance of technology, however, has created new possibilities. In the week of air-attacks, the IDF proved it had excellent intelligence, and in many cases targets hit from the air kept on exploding for a number of minutes after they were hit, as the ordinance stored there exploded. More significant, the IDF has figured out how to separate the civilians from the weapons: call the neighbors and give them ten minutes warning. The numbers prove how efficient this has been: prior to the ground invasion, more than 600 targets had been destroyed, fewer than 500 Palestinians killed, and fewer than 100 of those were civilians even by Palestinian and UN reckoning. Of course, there remain the pictures of civilians surrounded by devastation, but they're alive, and it wasn't Israel that stacked bombs in their cellars.

Apparently, by Friday Israel had made at least 9,000 (nine thousand) such phone calls.

Here's an American website touching upon the same story.

Alongside the thousands of civilians whose lives have been spared there are hundreds, at least, of armed Hamas fighters, the people who put the explosives in the cellars in the first place: by warning their neighbors, Israel has warned them, too, thus giving them the chance to escape and fight another day: say, tonight, or tomorrow, when they'll still be alive to fight the IDF troops, instead of lying dead under the rubble, as would have been possible had we hit their explosive stashes without prior warning, as any normal army wold have done.

So far this post hasn't said anything new: you knew it all already. Well, in my professional life I deal with complex IT systems, and I've given a bit of thought t this issue seen from that perspective:

First, Israel clearly has created a sophisticated GIS (geographic information system). A system that records tens of thousands of buildings, their location, and their distance from each other. Then there's a database with the names of the tens of thousands of families who live in the buildings, and the phone number of each family. The system has the ability to identify all the families and phone numbers that could be affected by an attack on any given building. Finally, given the numbers involved, there must be a system that automatically makes concurrent phone calls to dozens of families, since everybody has to have the same ten-minute warning.

Ah, and someone put tens of thousands of piece of information into that database.

Such a system costs real money, takes time to set up, and since it is obviously operating close to flawlessly, it was tested, fiddled with, tested, fiddled with, and tested again. The purpose, I remind you, is to save the lives of thousands of Palestinians who happen to have murderous neighbors.

From time to time I claim that the IDF is the most moral army in the world. This drives some people bonkers, and they often go ballistic. Alas for them, and fortunately for many Palestinians, it happens to be the simple truth.

Things you Can Learn from Aerial Photos

The IDF website has a series of aerial photos of targets hit yesterday by the Israeli Air Force. Now I know, many people won't believe the IDF website, sight unseen and no matter what, as it just has to be a propaganda tool of the bad guys. Still, it's instructive. The aerial photos demonstrate that, contrary to the impression hammered home by Israel's mostly uninformed critics, the targets yesterday were mostly NOT situated in densely populated areas, and it would have been possible to take careful aim at them and reasonably expect not to harm innocent civilians.

Of course, collecting factual evidence and trying to understand what it means is much less fun than knee-jerk ideological rants. I can appreciate that, of course. But it's sort of what participants in rational discussions in the democratic tradition are encouraged to do, as part of what differentiates them from believers of voodoo cults, medieval throngs, and fascist mobs.

(hat tip: Noah Pollack)

Open Archives - and Sealed Ones

Our comic commentator from Rosario, Faux-Ibrahim, has outdone himself today. As regular readers know, I never interfere with Faux-Ibrahim's right to be silly on this blog, but I mostly don't respond to him (nor, for that matter, do I generally respond to the other regular anti-Zionist contributor, the so-called Andrew R. Back in the Middle Ages, when I was taught manners, it was regarded as cowardly and low to express oneself anonymously, and in spite of all the generally beneficial changes wrought by the Internet, I still feel the same way). Sometimes, however, Ibrahim or Andrew unintentionally serve as a useful foil, convenient vehicles on which to make significant points. When that happens, I don't hold back merely because they're fakers.

Down in the comments to my recent post about the unaccessable Vatican archives, Faux-Ibrahim has posted the following:

Here's a suggestion for the Israeli democracy: open the archives of the Israel Defense Forces where the photographs of Deir Yassin on the day of the massacre are stored.

In fact you should be campaigning for them to be opened, because (a) you believe in open democracies, (b) you're a former archivist, and (c) you believe Israel is morally right.

He has additional thoughts, and you're all invited to go read them and judge their seriousness for yourselves. I'd like to concentrate on the archives issue.

1. Contrary to what Faux-Ibrahim seems to think he knows, the archives of the IDF, while not fully open for obvious reasons, generally do try to give access to researchers. All he needs to do is pick up any serious book of research on the relevant subjects and see how many footnotes can be found from the IDF archives - including, of course, in books whose authors are known to be critical of Israel. The degree of openness compares reasonably to other democratic countries.

2. I don't know if the IDF archives has secret pictures of Deir Yassin, nor if they're hidden there, but if so it would be rather surprising, given that the massacre at Deir Yassin happened before the State of Israel existed; it was committed by Irgun units; and even the Haganah forces nearby have their documents stored in the Haganah archives, not the IDF archives. Contrary to what Faux-Ibrahim seems to think, the leaders of the Yishuv didn't try to hide the massacre at Deir Yassin; they actually saw an advantage to besmirching the reputation of the Irgun and therefore played up the story.

3. As a general statement, Israel's archives are open. Don't take my word for it. Let's listen to Benny Morris:

There is a built-in imbalance in scholarly treatments of the conflict; this study is no exception. The Zionist side tends to be illuminated more thoroughly and with greater precision than the Arab side, and this applies to both political and military aspects. In part this stems from the fact that Zionist and Israeli archives, civil and military, local and national, are relatively well organized and have been open to researchers for many years. By in large, the documents contained in them were written by Zionists, in a Zionist context and from a Zionist perspective. This has almost inevitably affected the historiography based on these documents.

There has been no such access on the Arab side. There are no comparable Palestinian archives, and whatever exists in the archives of the Arab states has been and remains closed to researchers, save for the occasional and usually inconsequential document. Hence "the Arab side", more often than not, has also to be illuminated on the basis of Zionist-Israel and Western documentation.

Second, historiography, in the modern sense, has been far more developed on the Jewish-Zionist side than among the Arabs. Indeed, only in recent years have Arab historians - usually living in the West -begun to publish serious historical work connected with the conflict. Unfortunately most Arab historians still labor under the yoke of severe political-ideological restrictions that are characteristic of non-democratic societies. The same types of censorship and self-censorship have affected the writings of Arab memoirists. Though Jewish officials, generals, and politicians have often also been self-serving and subjective in their published recollections, and past generations of Zionist-Israeli historians have been less than objective, they have been substantially more accurate and informative than their Arab counterparts.

Lastly, there has been a marked quantitative gap between the two sides. The Arabs have simply produced far less historiography and related published materials (autobiographies, collections of documents, and the like) than the Jews.

Righteous Victims, New York 1999, p. XIV

Despicable Jewish Thugs

I am too busy for much blogging at the moment, but this story needs to be related to. It's about the turmoil near Yitzhar yesterday. In this particular case the violence was started by a Palestinian would-be murderer, but that doesn't change the fundamental structure of the story. There are a small number of well-known Jewish settlements on the West Bank - Yitzhar, Tapuach and the Jewish Quarter of Hebron spring to mind as the most obvious, but there are a few more, only slightly less malicious places - which are dominated by violent evil men, thugs of the worst degree. These thugs terrorize their Palestinian neighbors, and do so mostly unrestrained by the Israeli security forces who are in charge of those areas. The thugs are a blemish on our face and defilers of our honor, but the long-standing inability or unwillingness of our security forces to stop them is even worse, as they have the power to do so, but don't use it.

In future posts I'll go back to facing down our detractors for their indefensible depictions of us, but for today I'm setting aside whatever they may make of this story, and telling it as it is.

IDF Violence in Context

As a general statement, critics of Israel can be divided into two groups: those who see the flaws and criticize so they'll be corrected, and those who see the flaws and deduce they're so serious Israel's sovereignty must be curtailed or worse. The very large second group can likewise be divided roughly into two groups: the ones who don't know what they're talking about, and the ones who willfully look away from what they know. That second group is made up mostly of Israelis themselves, because in order to know what's going on you need to know Hebrew, and you need to see the full context, and those two are hard to do from far away - so we're talking about the Amira Hasses and the Gideon Levys and a large chunk of the so-called "human rights" mafia. The first group is everybody else, and as we all know, it's a very large group.

Here's an example of what context means.

Yesterday a Palestinian child, 11-year-old Ahmen Moussa, was killed by a shot to the head. The IDF concedes that the shot came from our side, so this isn't one of those cases where responsibility for the death is contested. The full circumstances are not clear, and could range anywhere from the intentional and cold-blooded shooting of a child to a stray bullet accidentally shot from an IDF weapon as its bearer was ducking Palestinian projectiles (one of which took out the eye of one of the IDF troops at the same event yesterday).

So far so bad. Even once the immediate context is clarified, however, there's still the broader context. For example, the fact that this article appeared on the front page of Haaretz this morning: Amos Harel (a serious and knowledgeable reporter), "Israeli security forces losing control in the West Bank".

Recent protests around the village of Na'alin in opposition to the separation fence seem to show a loss of control... However, a series of events - the shooting of a bound Palestinian protester; two Military Police probes; and as of Tuesday the suspension of a battalion commander - show a worrying and dangerous downward spiral. The fact that these happenings are taking place under increased scrutiny by the international media encourages the opponents of the fence to ratchet up the conflict. Apparently, it also increases pressure on IDF officers, who are having difficulty keeping events in check.

No mincing words there. The situation is bad, and seems to be getting worse. And indeed, at the end of the article Harel calls for changes to be made:

The situation in Na'alin is the kind of problem that requires the personal attention of Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, as well as of GOC Central Command Gad Shamni. In an interview in 2004, Ashkenazi, then deputy chief of staff, said: "My greatest concern is that the IDF will lose its humanity because of the continued fighting." That has not happened to the extent Ashkenazi feared, but neither does the chief of staff's campaign to restore discipline to the IDF after the Second Lebanon War seem to have been a great success in view of the events in Na'alin.

So, the most important newspaper in the country is using its front page to demand of the head of the army that he get his act together. So far so reasonable. What I found particularly interesting, however, was this short passage:

According to IDF statistics, the boy who was shot Tuesday was the first Palestinian citizen to be killed in the West Bank this year, after the killing of 34 terrorists (the Palestinians count a number of civilians killed, but they, too, concede that the number is low). That figure reflects more care in this matter than in previous years, along with a lessening of friction with the Palestinian population. The control by PA security forces in the West Bank, as well as security coordination with the IDF, are improving.

34 dead fighters and one innocent civilian. That's one too many, of course, but it's also the sign of an army that's waging a low-level war with significant care not to harm anyone but the armed fighters facing it. During the same period 11 Israeli civilians have been murdered in Jerusalem, which ought to remind us that the IDF isn't waging a campaign against an imaginary foe; earlier this week they killed a terrorist who had dispatched a murderer into Israel some months ago and would have done so again if he'd been able to. The lessening of friction with the Palestinian populace: doesn't sound like a brutal and callous army to me, rather an army trying to figure out how to do things with as little damage as possible. The growing coordination with the PA indicates that there are another positive aspects to the story, too.

And did you see the comment about the small number of dead civilians the Palestinians claim dead at the IDF's hands, while the IDF refuses to take responsibility? Interesting, isn't it? Sometimes IDF troops kill innocent Palestinians and set up inquiries; other-times Palestinians try to blame Israel for deaths Israel didn't commit. How are you going to know who's right? If you automatically believe either side, you're potentially putting your preferences before truth. If you try to follow past experience you'll have to agree that the IDF officials don't generally lie, but that doesn't automatically mean they'll never screw up. Especially as in some cases the truth simply isn't knowable, as for example when the corpse is hurriedly buried and there's no possibility to do an autopsy to determine the type of bullet that did the killing.

Then of course you have the unquantifiables, such as how the general Israeli populace sees the whole story and its parts. If you want to damn Israel, surely you need to know that, too? Well, I can't tell you, because I don't really know - which in itself is an interesting finding.