The Power and Denial of Biblical Stories

At one point this afternoon we were standing on the top of the hill where Sokoh once stood. Sokoh was a village in the bronze and iron ages, meaning before the arrival of the tribes of Israel, and then into the period of the First Temple. It's main claim to fame is that according to chapter 17 of the First Book of Samuel, in the section of the valley of Ela between Sokoh and Azeka there was once the most famous duel in history, between young David and very large Goliath.

No, not that Valley of Ela. The real one. The thing is, while Sokoh has been identified with certainty, Azekah hasn't; part of the story we heard today was about new archeological findings, some of them very significant, which may indicate that Azekah was on a hill about a mile to the east of where it was thought to have been until recently. So we peered at the various hills, speculated about lines of vision and ancient borders, heard about new evidence which probably bolsters the Biblical tale of King David's reign, and then clambered down to the bus in the parking lot at the bottom of the hill.

A few minutes later I noticed a fellow reading the sports section of today's paper. The title of the story, splashed over half the width of the page, was "The Battle Between David and Goliath!!!".

This immediacy of the Biblical stories, their automatic presence at the heart of Western culture, ensures that the Palestinian efforts to criminalize Israeli archeology won't succeed. Or could they? As Alex Joffe asks in Jewish Ideas Daily,

How long will it be before Israeli archeologists are unable to get off a plane in London lest they be served with a subpoena initiated by a Palestinian NGO?

Masada: Myths, Archeology and Significance

Last week I joined a tour pf Masada given by Dr. Guy Stibel, an archeologist who has been digging there for many years.

Israel long ago got over its fascination with archeology, and Masada has lost much of its national glamor. IDF units no longer hold ceremonies there, no-one uses slogans such as "Masada will not fall again", and the national frenzy which accompanied the excavations there in the 1960s is, quite simply, inconceivable. Even the memory of those years is largely gone, though a faint bad taste lingers, for the way archeology was used for the creation of a national myth..Why, until the tour last week I had never given and thought to the fact that the excavation is still ongoing: who knew?

So there wasn't anything surprising that Stibel spent the whole day talking about specific findings rather than meta-historical narratives. This area is where some Essenes lived; over here seems to have been the administrative center during the uprising against the Romans; most of the Jews on the mountain were Pharisees, lots of them simply refugees from the sacking of Jerusalem. The Roman siege lasted three months at the most. The artificial ramp was built on a natural outcropping, so it wasn't that hard to build. The pottery shards Yadin found with 11 names were probably not used for deciding who would be the last to commit suicide, since in recent years archeologists have found many additional such shards, which probably served some administrative purpose. And so on.

Only on the way back to Jerusalem did he sum it up, and relate to the myth-making parts of the story. Did the defenders of Masada really commit mass suicide during the night before the final Roman attack? Well, probably yes. The general outline of the story also still stands: the mountain was essentially empty until Herod built his palaces there in the first century BCE. The Sacarii launched the revolt against the Romans by attacking the small garrison and taking over its armory. After the destruction of Jerusalem many hundreds of refugees converged there. In 73 CE Lucius Flavius Sylva and his legion X Fretensis laid siege and within a few months conquered it. With the exception of some Christian monks in the 5th century, no-one ever lived there again; indeed, the place never interested anyone until the 20th century.

All of which I found rather comforting. It has always seemed to me that the most important part of the story is not if there was a mass suicide or not, but rather that nowadays it's Jews (and tourists to Israel) who stand atop the mountain and look down at the dusty remains of those Roman armies. The Roman victors dropped out of history 1,500 years ago but the Jews are still here to look at their remains. This is as true today as it was at the height of the myth-making years.

David: King. But of What?

Here's a fine, accessible description for regular folks of the archeologist controversy about Kings David, Solomon, and Western Civilization.

Desert Monastaries in the Suburbs

In the 1930's an American agronomist and proto-environmentalist bythe name of Walter Lowdermilk visited Mandatory Palestine as part of a world-wide survey he was doing for the American Department of Agriculture. He was deeply impressed by the efforts of the Zionist pioneers to roll back the desert and rejuvenate agricultural practices. In a subsequent book he postulated that were the land to be treated correctly it might possibly be able to support 8-10 million inhabitants someday.

There are about 12 million today, and growing.


Many years earlier - almost 1,600, to be precise - a movement had begun in which Christian monks and hermits began to settle in the desert to the east of Jerusalem. They were following in the footsteps of earlier monks in Egypt and elsewhere; the ones in the Judean desert wished to live far from the cities and bustle of civilization, but also close enough as to be able to interact with pilgrims and other potential benefactors. At the peak of the phenomenon there were more than a hundred monasteries of varying sizes in the Judean desert. Most of them were destroyed by the Persians in 614, and then were not rebuilt because of the Muslim invasion of 634. Some of them were rebuilt during the Crusader kingdoms of the 12-13th centuries, but then fell into disuse. Today there are six such monasteries, most of them with a single monk or a handful of them at most.

Of course, having 12 million people in a land that used to host a million or two at the best of times, along with the technology to pipe water out into the desert, means the settled areas are a bit larger than they once were.

How much larger? Well, take the large and famous monastery of Euthymius the Great (died in 473).

Today the remnants of the monastery lie inside the industry park of Maaleh Adumim, at the eastern edge of Greater Jerusalem.

When Euthymus looked around he saw only desert - which still works if you look north south or east. But not West:

On the hilltop a mile away is Maaleh Adumim. You can rail against it if you wish, but it's there. Martyrius (died 486) would have been even more surprised by the changes to his surroundings:

Although the records tell that the monastery of Martyrius was one of the larger ones around, no-one born after 620 or thereabouts knew where it was, until in 1979 Israel began building Maaleh Adumim, and the bulldozers came across it. So there it is, in the middle of town.

 The metal ring above the trough is from the 6th century. Since even back then the Judean desert was an oft-disputed territory, and the monks knew that not all the neighbors liked them,  they built their monastery with only one entrance and even that could be blocked by a large round rock that was rolled across the entrance.

When shove came to push, however, this didn't help. In 614 the Persians broke in, killed the monks, forgot they'd ever been there, and no-one found them for the next 1,365 years or so.

Can one imagine what these monasteries looked like in real life, before they were destroyed? Well, yes. Because to the east of Jericho there's one that's still there (or perhaps, is there again): the monastery of Gerasimus (died 475):

Outside, in the parking lot, you can see, side by side, cars with Palestinian Authority license plates and Israeli ones. Not peace, perhaps, but peaceful.

Should you be interested in learning more about this ancient chapter of history, it will come as no surprise that the single best book was written rather a while ago: The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestian Monasticism Under the Christian Empire, by Derwas Chitty.

King in the Desert

I spent most of the day wandering around, on, and under the Herodion, a partially artificial mountain built about 2,040 years ago by King Herod, and the place he was buried. The day supplied all sorts of interesting insights.

Herodion seen from the south. There was always a hill there, somewhat higher than its surroundings; the cone part is artificial, and was built, in two separate stages, by Herod.


 The story of the mountain, in brief, begins when Herod was a young man and once had need to escape Jerusalem with his entourage. Guarding the rear of the escapees, he turned on their pursuers and forced them to fall back. This was near a hill in the desert, some 10 miles south-east of Jerusalem, and he marked the point as significant for him. Later, as king of Judea, he launched on one of the ancient world's largest construction binges, building fortresses, palaces, a port, the Temple Mount, Massada, and also the mountain of Herodion, named after himself. Since it was out in the desert in the middle of no-where (literally), he forced it into prominence by pouring money into it; by the time he was an old man it had a fortress, a palace, a small artificial lake (an early model of the Bellagio, perhaps), a theater, assorted Roman baths, some more palaces and so on. As death approached he undertook the final construction project there, raising the mountaintop so it would be visible from Jerusalem, indeed, impossible to overlook, sticking out as it does over the landscape, and prepared an imposing mausoleum in which to be buried.

70 years later, as the Jews battled Roman legions during the first revolt against Rome, some of the insurgents holed up on the mountain, destroying Herod's mausoleum, smashing his coffin, and adapting his underground system of cisterns for defense during siege. This didn't help them much. Another seventy years on, during the Bar Kochva revolt, the insurgents added an intricate system of tunnels under the mountain, so as to be able to emerge unexpectedly, kill a Roman or three and disappear back underground. Yet again, this didn't much help them, as the Roman's were known to slaughter insurgents until they were all gone.

During the Byzantine era (that's the Roman Empire once it was Christian), the area became a monastic region, with individual and group monasteries way out in the desert a mere day's walk from civilization. The Byzantines, as Christians, had no love for Herod, and they may have constructed a church or two on his mountain as a sign of their victory over him.

Then the area emptied, and between 600 and 1900, more or less, no-one lived there except the occasional transient Beduin tribe: there's no water, not much rain, it's too dry for crops, and without the engineering prowess and funds of Herod, no way to pipe water from elsewhere.

Still, stand anywhere along the south-eastern rim of Jerusalem today and look out over the desert, and you can't miss Herod's mountain. Assuming his point was to gain immortality, he seems to have done so better than most.

So what insights did I bring back? The first is about archeology. Nowadays archeology has become yet another battlefield on which Jews Palestinians and antisemites clash. Yet archeology is an extremely imprecise tool for such purposes. How imprecise?

This picture is taken from near the top of the hill (it isn't really a mountain), looking down and west. In the center of the picture, beneath the small village, there's a large excavated square. That was the Bellagio-style pool. To its lower right is an excavation of a monumental building, one of the palaces, I suppose. The rest of the hillside has not been excavated so we've got no idea what's there. We do know however that ever since the late 19th century, and rather intensely since 1972, archeologist have been looking for Herod's grave. Englishmen, Frenchmen, a German (I think), and of course Israelis. The looked and they looked and they never found. Sooner or later, it was inevitable that someone would come along and say: well, if you look for a century and you don't find something, it must never have existed; yet another myth about the Jews in Palestine, huh?


Then, in 2007 (!), they found it.

Or rather, they found the pedestal on which it had been between 4BCE, when Herod was interred there, and about 68 or 70 CE, when the Jewish insurgents smashed it as systematically as they could. It had been there all along, near the top of the hillside, at a place no-one had ever dug. Had there been peace between Israel and Palestine in 2000, it's unlikely that Israeli archeologists would still have been allowed to be digging here in 2007, and it might never have been found. So flimsy can be truth and evidence when you're digging for things that were purposefully destroyed 2,000 years ago:they can be hard to find, and their absence is only as convincing as that.

(Peace, by the way, would have been preferable, but that's a different subject).

Evil Israeli roads: You've all heard about the nasty roads Israel builds in the West Bank, to connect their settlements, demonstrate their dominance, humiliate Palestinians, destroy the natural terrain and generally be obnoxious. Anybody who follows the media's discourse about the conflict has heard these themes repeatedly.

The upper road of the two that cross the picture from left to right is dubbed the Lieberman Road by those Israelis who know about it and dislike it (I was first introduced to it by Dror Etkes in 2004, when it was still under construction, and he told me solemnly that it was an Israeli effort to dominate this area). Most Israelis have never heard of it much less used it; on the other hand, the local Palestinians use it, and if Israel ever hands over this area to Palestine, as may well happen, the road will connect the area to El Quds and shorten the ride by about 80%.

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you've also heard the Palestinian contention, accepted by the Economist and other important Europeans, that the Israeli settlements are hideous, they destroy the view, while Palestinian villages are beautiful and natural. 

The cluster of homes in the foreground is a Palestinian hamlet; the one on the next hill is Tekoa, a settlement. Next time you're in the area, go out to Herodion and have a see for yourself: don't take my word that both places look equally right or wrong. But they do.


Which brings me to the next insight: It's a desert. Until modern water systems were invented in the 20th century, nobody lived out here in permanent residences, and hardly in tents, either. Which means, the Palestinian villages are as recent as the Jewish ones in this area.

I personally remember that Herodion was out in the desert; nowadays its north and west sides are lapped by Palestinian villages and olive groves. But note that they're young olive groves, trees which have been there a decade or two, mostly. They haven't been there from time immemorial. The Palestinian population on the West Bank is growing rapidly (though less rapidly than 20 years ago), they can pipe water out to the desert, so they're moving deeper into it. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this, but it is a fact.

Actually, Herodion is on the outer limit of the advance into the desert; to its east, i.e. further into the desert, it's still mostly empty. Mostly:

This picture is to the south east from the mountain. In the background is Nokdim, whee Avigdor Lieberman lives (hence the cynical moniker for the road), and all around it is...empty. I'm not saying this means it shouldn't someday be part of a Palestinian state at peace with Israel; it should. But no-one's being forced off their land or hemmed in by Nokdim. It's in the desert. Otherwise empty.

The place in the foreground is Sdeh Bar, seen from Herodion. Sdeh Bar is a settlement, sort of, but not really. It is however a place that breaks all your glib stereotypes about settlements and settlers. So we went to visit it, and looked back up at the Herodion:

Remember: in all the history of mankind, no-one has ever lived permanently on this hillside. The people who do so now are two bunches of folks: a group of severely troubled teenager boys, who have been thrown out of every conceivable institution and mostly also out of their families; some have already been in jail; and their hosts, a handful of idealists who have decided this hilltop in the desert is the place to give them a last chance at a normal life. They take in the boys, tell them this is home so they need to take care of it and participate in its upkeep, and move them from a track to career criminality back to normal society. They've been there 13 years, and have mostly been very successful, saving, by now, probably a few hundred young men.

They do so by putting them to work. Some work with the goat herd. Others produce goat-milk products, including fine cheese and yogurt. Others produce "gefet". Gefet is an ersatz wood, used for heating, charcoal or even production of soap, produced from the waste left over when you turn olives into olive oil. The waste is a pollutant, and burning wood to heat wood ovens means cutting down trees. So these folks have figured out a way to make the olive waste useful, and save trees.

They're green, or cleantech, or whatever the word is. The type of folks the Guardian should be enthusiastic about - but isn't.

Imagine you're a deeply troubled 15-year-old. Estranged from your family, full of rage at society, scarred and tainted by a history of violence or craziness. You've washed up, somehow, in this lonely outpost at the edge of the desert, where they're calming you and soothing you by tending to goats, farming, and producing environmentally friendly fuel. You rise each morning and look out at the emptiness -

... and you don't give much thought to the endless chatter about how evil the Israeli settlements are, and how they oppress the poor Palestinians.

Reflections on Palestinian Walks

David asked me a while ago if I'd perhaps read Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape, by Raja Shehadeh. I hadn't. David is a bit of a lapsed Zionist, or a disappointed one or something, and he and I disagree regularly about Israel's policies. He was of the opinion that it would be healthy for me to read Shehadeh's book, and perhaps go one day to visit him: David lives very far away, but Shehadeh lives a mere 15 miles from here. I'm not certain David is aware that it's much easier for both Shehadeh and myself to visit him than each other. Anyway, he sent me the book for my improvement.

Alas, I fear I haven't been improved. It's a very interesting book, but I expect I read it differently than David hoped.

Shehadeh is a Ramallah lawyer in his late 50s, so he's only a few years older than I. He loves walking in the hills and the idea of the book is that he describes a series of walks he's taken from the late 1970s until earlier this decade, each more hemmed in than the previous one by the Israelis, who are literally stealing his land; indeed, the power of the book is that we see how there's ever less land for him to walk on. No-one should be surprised that it was widely acclaimed, well reviewed, and was awarded the George Orwell Prize.

The book starts out badly.

When I began hill walking in Palestine a quarter of a century ago, I was not aware that I was traveling through a vanishing landscape. For centuries the central highland hills of Palestine, which slope on one side towards the sea and on the other towards the desert, had remained relatively unchanged. As I grew up in Ramallah, the land from my city to the northern city of Nablus might, with a small stretch of the imagination, have seemed familiar to a contemporary of Christ.(p.xi)

Oops. And who, pray tell, was Christ? Of what group? Assuming his contemporaries might have recognized the hills - a plausible assumption - why choose him and not, say, King David, or Jeremiah, or Isaiah? A couple pages later we're told that

In Palestine every wadi, spring, hillock, escarpement and cliff has a name, usually with a particular meaning. Some of the names are Arabic, others Canaanite or Aramaic, evidence of how ancient the land is and how it has been continuously inhabited over many centuries(p. xviii).

Oops again.

The first chapter describes a walk in Spring 1978, and here I warmed towards Shehadeh. Not only because his love for the hills is palpable and a-political, but because he describes things I've also often seen and enjoyed. Indeed, the years between 1974-1982 were the heyday of my own hill-walking times, as my friends and I explored the hills, wadis and, as we gained confidence and experience, went out in lengthening arcs to the deserts; I've taken some of the same walks he has. Not since many years, though: it would be too dangerous.

In spite of the book's title, the walks rather recede into the background, as the double themes of Israelis stealing land and desecrating it move ever to the foreground. So let's think about them.

There is truth to the first theme: indeed, Israeli settlements have been taking over land. If you read carefully you'll note that no Palestinians are losing their homes in the process, and certainly not their lives; the Israeli occupation is far less brutal than many such exercises worldwide. The settlements are on the hill-tops, which were previously empty, yet they and the land confiscated for road-building often belonged to Palestinian individuals, who lost them in the process. Shehadeh represented many Palestinian land owners, and his descriptions of the legal machinations which have enabled Israel to set up settlements are, sadly, true. He is of course correct in saying that the settlement project has been engineered to dominate the terrain and cut the Palestinian territories into segments.

It's also hard to argue with his perspective that identifies settlements as a long-term Israeli policy. I think it isn't, not only because many Israelis such as myself have been consistently against if for decades, but also because my reading of the story is that after the mid-1980s at the very latest there was never any strategic government project of settlement. Yet this doesn't convince Shehadeh, who sees the settlements growing, and correctly understands from close up that this couldn't be happening without the connivance of many government agencies. To my mind, this demonstrates how adept the settlers have become at manipulating the system - but perhaps it's a moot discussion. The settlements are growing, in spite of the fact that it has been decades since they enjoyed broad public support.

The story of the disappearing countryside as Shehadeh tells it is wrong. He would have us believe that it was pristine and untouched, along came the Israelis with their bulldozers and constructions companies, then with their fences and walls, and now the hills are effectively gone. Not so.

Shehadeh was born on a Jordanian-controlled West Bank that had about 500,000 people. By the time the Israelis arrived, in 1967, it had something like 700,000. Today there are maybe 2,500,000 Palestinians, and 300,000 Israelis. Do the maths: it's a vastly more crowded place than it used to be, most of the added population are Palestinians, and the picturesque but primitive little villages he and I both remember from our youth are gone forever, with or without Israeli settlers. As for the roads, not long ago I was driving along Route 60, the main north-south artery of the West Bank, which in its present form has been paved by Israel. About 90% of the vehicles had Palestinian license plates, and I doubt their drivers were complaining that the road is much better than the original one paved by the British in the 1920s. If ever both sides manage to agree on partition, the Israelis will leave the infrastructures for the Palestinians, and probably also the settlements.

At one point he bemoans the ugly growth of Jerusalem, no longer a picturesque town in his mind. In 1967 there were 250,000 people there, 70,000 Palestinians; today there are 670,000, 270,000 of them Palestinians. Again, do the maths.

Also, I might add, the statement that settlements of Jews are always esthetically uglier than Arab towns is racist. No author could get away with making such a statement unless it be about Jews.

Then there's the matter of the violence. The meta-narrative, the atmosphere of the book, is all about the violence Israel is committing on the Palestinians.Yet when you read the book, the actual violence - shooting at the author, threatening to arrest him or kill his companion - those incidents are all committed by Palestinians, never by Israelis. Israelis use those legal machinations to take land, but they don't shoot or arrest hikers. That's done by Palestinians: the author implies they've been brutalized by Israel, but it's an unconvincing implication. Even odder, there are repeated cases in the book in which the author encounters settlers. Close up, they turn out to be just as human as anyone else. Shehadeh doesn't like their presence, but he's honest enough to admit that they're just people.

Finally, there's the context. If you know how to look - I did, but most English-speaking readers won't - you'll find that even Shehadeh alludes to Palestinian violence against Israeli hikers. But it's only an allusion or two. Nowhere in the book will you come across any of the following pertinent ideas: There has been a mutually waged war going on between Palestinians and Israelis for almost a century, a war in which both sides are actors, and both sides bear responsibility. This war has carved borders, and borders have consequences. Reaching peace will not make the borders go away, on the contrary, it will mean that they're permanent and mutually recognized. Most of the present security measures - walls, armed settlers, mutual suspicion when meeting - were never an Israeli policy but evolved as responses. The fact that most non-settler Israelis haven't been walking the hills of the West Bank since the late 1980s is because they're afraid (and consequently, they've written off the entire area and wish the Palestinians would take it already). Nor will the reader find any mention in this book of Israeli offers to dismantle most settlements, of their dismantling of settlements in Sinai and Gaza, and of repeated offers to partition the land between both peoples, nor of Palestinian violence that has followed such Israeli moves. (The book was first published in 2007; the Israelis left Gaza in 2005, and Hamas won the elections in 2006).

Ultimately it's a depressing book. Shehadeh comes across as a moderate, reasonable man, non-violent and rational. Yet there's no acceptance anywhere in his book - not that I could see, and I looked for it - that this very small place is the homeland of both our nations, each with legitimate claims to all of it, each with an urgent need to reconcile themselves to the loss of parts of it. He accepts that Israel is powerful and implicitly here to say, but gives no inkling of recognition that there's justice in that. The Israelis are aggressors, the Palestinians are victims, and that's the whole story.

It's hard to see how any of this will lead to reconciliation and peace.

Jews are Palestinians are Jews

There's been quite a bit of ridicule of this article in the Guardian which refers to the people who lived in the Holy Land in the days of Jesus as "early Palestinians". CiFWatch was on the story here and here, Daled Amos was on it here, Mellanie Phillips here. Some of them talk about how this is no coincidence, rather the result of the concentrated efforts of Replacement Theology Christian thinkers and Palestinian ideologues. Fair enough.

These days, however, I'm in the middle of Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People, which I hope to review in depth sometime. Sand isn't a Christian theologian, nor a Palestinian ideologue. He's a Jewish professor at Tel Aviv University. Yet his book, profoundly wrong as it is, is part of a clear effort to re-write history so that the Jews were not here 2000 years ago, and certainly not 3000. That slip-of-tongue in the Guardian probably wasn't, which is why it slipped past the editor. There are ever more people out there who actually do think Jesus' compatriots were early Palestinians, whatever that might mean.

Something about the Northwest

Michael Totten has a report from the Golan Heights you ought to read. The thing about Michael is that he lets folks tell you about their world, in their words, without editing them so as to fit the template he wants you to think in. Ironically, this rather simplistic way of doing things - no self-respecting journalist or newspaper editor would be caught dead doing it that way - results in a complex picture of reality that's much better than the one the professionals would foist on us.

Meanwhile, a bit further to the north of Michael (he's in Oregon), David Brumer seems to be organizing the locals to confront their BDS neighbors. So if there are any readers of this blog from the Seattle area, this is for you. Ah, and if you wish, you can send my regards to Richard Silverstein, too. I'd do it myself but he's banned me from any channels of communications an account of my disagreeing with him on stuff.

Roaming with Dror Etkes

Michael Totten and I spent the day driving around the West Bank with Dror Etkes. Michael is in Israel for a month, collecting stuff to write about, so if you aren't a regular reader of his already, I suggest you make a point of following him now, and see what he has to tell.

Who's Dror Etkes, you ask? Well, that depends whom you ask. The Magnes Zionist says Dror is a hero of his. Yisrael Medad, from the opposite end of Israel's political spectrum, recently wrote about the Dror Etkes he doesn't like. The fact is that Dror, who set up and for many years ran the settlement monitor project at Peace Now before going on to Yesh Din, is a more complex person than most people think. Yes, he's one of the fiercest adversaries of the settler movement, and he likes to give the appearance of a profound skeptic of the Zionist project, but me, I don't buy it. Regular readers will know that I'm not a fan of our radical left, but Dror - whom I've known off and on for 25 years - doesn't fit into their pigeon holes. A Hebrew-speaking Jew who knows every inch of the Biblical heartland like the back of his hand, who cris-crosses it constantly even at times of high security tension; who does his best to know the intricacies of Israel's corridors of power and law so as to insist they live up to their own standards, and who explains his motivation by citing Leviticus 19 verse 16: "neither shalt thou stand against the blood of thy neighbour; I am the LORD" - that's not someone I'd thoughtlessly brush aside. Spend the day with him and you'll learn that he knows more about the settlers and the many gradations of identity and motivation among them, and is generally much fairer about them, than any of the journalists he's shown around over the years. He'll also describe the Palestinians in plausible, non-starry-eyed terms.

I'm not going to try to describe the tour - maybe Michael will - but here are various observations I had during the day.

Set aside Dror's affectation of using the terminology of the Post-Colonial-gang - a patina which adds nothing to explain what's happening on the West Bank - and it's surprising how much his positions and mine overlap.
1. We agree that the conflict with the Palestinians isn't about the borders of 1967, it's about 1947, meaning Israel's existence as a Jewish state.
2. Neither of us thinks removing the settlements will bring peace, though Dror does see this as a necessary condition, and I tend to agree.
3. Both of us mostly agree on which settlements won't ever be removed (Dror may be more expansionist than I, since he sees them all the time).
4. We broadly agree about the motivations of the various strands among the settlers, including that most of them - the Haredis in Modi'im Illit, say, the Russian immigrants in Ariel or the regular folks from Jerusalem who live in Maaleh Edomim - are not primarily ideological. They aren't there to colonize Palestinian territories.
5. While Dror is more stern about it than I - because of what he does and knows - I agree with his analysis of the hard core of settlers who mostly live in the ideological settlements along the top of the hills: they are there to ensure Jewish control of the Biblical heartland.
6. We agree that a large majority of Israelis don't support the settler's project; Dror is persuasive, however, in demonstrating that the majority fears a clash with them more than letting them have their way.
7. We disagree - but not vehemently - about the responsibility the Palestinians bear for the situation. For example, Dror sees a roadblock which has been emptied of IDF troops as a threat to Palestinian freedom of movement that can be re-created at short notice; I see it as a roadblock that will never be manned again if the Palestinian violence doesn't return. We both tend to agree the violence may well return.
8. I agree with Dror that the majority of Israelis neither knows nor cares what goes on on the West Bank. This wasn't always to, but it has been for at least 20 years. Non-settler Israeli civilians never go to the West Bank; even I, who do every now and then, am not aware of most of the details of the story. This means that Israelis sincerely don't understand the extent to which Palestinians regard the settler project as the Israeli project, and distrust us for it.
9. Dror agreed with me that since the Palestinians - effectively all of them - no longer go to Israel, they've lost touch with our reality at least as much as we no longer see theirs. The fact that a solid majority of Israelis wishes to be rid of the occupation, has no interest in the Palestinian areas, and yearns to partition the land and move on to other things, is probably not recognized at all on the Palestinian side.
10. This cognitive disconnect, we both agreed, is a result of the misnamed peace process.

Finally, a point we didn't discuss, and may or may not agree on: It is the Biblical heartland, the West Bank is. I've been advocating an Israeli departure from it since the 1970s - a long time ago. Yet it's the place we come from. You wander its hills and read the Bible, and each hill is in there; each story is on one of them. We've been reading the stories and commenting about them, uninterrupted, since before the Athenians quarreled with the Spartans, a thousand years before the Roman Empire, two thousand years before the major cities of Europe began growing out of unimportant villages. They're not as dramatically beautiful as Norway or Montana, but if you've been participating in the Jewish discussion for the past few thousand years, they're home. You can't roam them and remain unmoved.

Freedom of Movement in Palestine?

Today, for the first time since the year 2000, a group of Israeli tour guides were allowed into Bethlehem. Not on their own, of course, in a special bus. This is in preparation to perhaps allowing them in with their groups - perhaps.

Bethlehem is about four miles from where I live, near the center of Jerusalem. At this rate, it's just possible that by 2025 Jews will have freedom of movement throughout the territories of their ancestral homeland, and there will be no Apartheid. But don't get your hopes up.

Roots in the Backyard

We spent the weekend at Mitch and Suzi Pilcer's Zippori Village. If you're into the Israeli B&B scene, you've probably heard of them, and if not, you should. They've been offering their fine hospitality since 1997, and they're constantly upgrading the facilities and the services. We've been going there from time to time for about ten years. (Another place we've returned to more than once is this place in Klil, but it's a very different sort of place. Smaller, and more rugged). The Pilcer's place is unusual on the B&B scene for the amount of thought they've given to make certain you get comfort, beauty, privacy, and quiet, yet it's also the kind of place you could easily come to with the enlarged family or a group of friends, since by now they've got 7 units on offer, and some of the units can accommodate entire clans.

So that's the advertising for today. More interesting to me, you won't be surprised, is the history. Mitch once told me his father was a Holocaust Survivor from Lodz. Since Lodz is a newish city, maybe 150 years old, his family must have come from elsewhere a generation or two earlier; like most Ashkenzi Jews, we didn't stay anywhere too long. (The Jews of Yemen or Baghdad were stable for more than a thousand years, until they were thrown out in 1948). Mitch himself was born in New York, came to Jerusalem as a young man and for a while even wrote in one of our local newspapers, then about 15 years ago finally settled with his young wife in a ramshackle farmhouse on the edge of Zippori.

Zippori - Sephorias - was an important Jewish town in the 2nd Temple era. A Christian tradition says it was town where Mary's parents lived, (It's about six miles north of Nazareth) and the crusaders built a castle in their honor which still stands on the top of a hill till this day. Archeologists have been digging there since the 1930s, and have found a wealth of fascinating structures, artifacts and mosaics.

In the 2nd and 3rd century CE Zippori was the seat of many of the Tanaim, the scholars of the mishnaic era; the most important of them was Rabbi Yehuda Hanassi, also simply called Rebbi, the scholar who collected all the sayings of his forbears and and edited them into the corpus we know ever since as the Mishna.

The archeologists say there were Jews in Zippori for at least 1,300 years. After the Crusaders none were left, and in the 16th century it was settled by Arabs, who retained the Jewish name of the place.

In the war of 1948 the Arabs left. I don't know the details, and their neighbors in nearby Kfar Kana, not to mention Nazareth, didn't leave and are still there to this day. In 1949 two groups of Jews from Turkey and Bulgaria settled in the village; Mitch has a plaque honoring the Jewish family from Turkey who first settled on his farm. About a mile away there's a plaque commemorating two settlers who were murdered on the eve of the Seder in 1951. Within a few years most of these settlers left, to be replaced by Jews from Romania, some of whom are still there.

Mitch also has a small memorial on the grounds of his little village commemorating Yaniv Temerson, a local boy who used to work summers at his place, before going off to the army; in the summer of 2006 he was killed commanding a tank in Lebanon.

Then, a year or two ago, while digging around on the grounds in preparation for some new development, Mitch came across a large stone with an ancient inscription - which however he was able to read, since it was in Hebrew. It told that this was the resting place of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levy. Rabbi Yehoshua isn't as famous as Rabbi Yehuda, but he's pretty well known if you're familiar with the Talmud, where he is often cited. Mitch called in the professionals, who identified six graves in the cave, before taking the inscribed stone off to be analyzed. Mitch told me he's confident it will be brought back soon, and put back where it belongs and has stood for almost two thousand years (where the white frame is in the picture).
Zippori, it turns out, really is more "home" than anything Poland ever had to offer, in spite of the price.

Surviving Adversity

Many of Israel's enemies, including some home-grown ones, seem to feel that if enough pressure is brought to bear on the Jews, they'll give up on their national project and move "back" to where-ever, so long as it's far away. This is an odd preposition, with no evidence to back it up, but it seems to keep the Palestinians and many other Arabs hoping, and they undoubtedly garner satisfaction from Westerners and Jews who tell them eventually it'll work.

In week or two the Daf Yomi folks will pass this story, about obstinate perseverance in the face of the military might of the most powerful empire of the day, Rome. Many Jews grew up on the story, but in these days of limited Jewish education, perhaps many others haven't. I'm reasonably certain many of Israel's enemies don't know the story or the tradition it fits into, which is regrettable since they clearly underestimate how obstinate we can be. The story took place in the decade of 135-145 CE, most likely.

The Gemarah is discussing how judges are appointed, and they're examining the rule that only judges who have been accredited by three previously accredited judges may set fines.

-Really? So how to explain the story told by Rav Yehuda in the name of Rav? [Here's the story]
Blessed is the memory of Rabbi Yehuda ben Bava, for if not him, the laws of fines would have been forgotten.
- How forgotten? They could have been re-learned?
- Rather, the authority to apply them would have been abolished. Once the Roman rulers decreed that anyone who accredited judges [the word is smicha] would be killed, and anyone who received smicha would be killed, and any town where smicha was done would be destroyed, and any county were smicha happened would be razed. What did Rabbi Yehuda ben Bava do? He went to an empty spot between two mountains, between two towns between two counties in the area between Usha and Shfar'am, and there he did smicha for five scholars: Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Yehuda and Rabbi Shimon and Rabbi Yossi and Rabbi ELiezer ben Shamua. Rav Avaya adds Rabbi Nechemia to the list. When they realized they'd been seen by the enemy, he said to them, Run, my sons! What will happen to you, they cried. He told them, I'm here like an unturned stone [perhaps this means I won't run, and they'll kill me but I won't feel it, as a stone feels no pain]. The Roman soldiers didn't let up until they had stabbed him with 300 spears.

The Gemarah isn't convinced: there were two additional judges there, but the story doesn't mention them because they were less important than Rabbi Yehuda ben Bava [so the story doesn't prove that a single judge can give smicha]

Another problem with the story:
Was Rabbi Meir accredited by Rabbi Yehuda ben Bava? Didn't Raba bar bar Hana teach us in the name of Rabbi Yochanan: Anyone who says Rabbi Meir wasn't given smicha by Rabbi Akiva, has it all wrong!
The Gemarah explains: Rabbi Akiva did give Rabbi Meir smicha, but he was too young at the time and it wasn't recognized, so he had to be given smicha again, this time by Rabbi Yehuda ben Bava.

The spot where this took place is still empty; you cross it when you take Route 6 north of the Barkai junction. Shfaram is an Arab-Druze town by the same name; Usha is a Jewish village.

[The daf Yomi thread starts and is explained here]

Water

Blogging may be light for a bit, as I've got some deadlines to meet. On the other hand, it's a bad habit that's hard to buck, so who knows...

Last October Amnesty International published a report about how Israel is drinking all the Palestinian water. (Here's the summary, and here's the 112-page report). Only this morning, while looking for something else, did I see that Israel's Water Authority posted a reply back in November, which in turn relies on a report posted back in March 2009, here. I skimmed over the summary of the Amnesty report, and read the 9-page November response; the two longer documents I'll need more time for - whenever. Especially as the little reading I've done convinces me that it's a complex topic. You have to know lots of stuff in order to be able to make sense of the different positions. Merely bandying numbers around won't fly. Not if you're serious. There are hydrology issues, there are legal issues, there are diplomatic issues (who signed what and what does it mean), there are economic issues, there are political issues - and without a reasonable grasp of the essentials, the so-called human rights issues can't be seriously addressed.

I'm posting merely as a public service. If anyone wishes to read the documents and tell us what's in them, great. I'll even go further: if anyone wishes to write a serious article about what's going on, I'll gladly host them here (tho there are vastly more popular venues elsewhere).

Miflas HaKinneret

Among the many important things about Israel you'll never learn by following the media is the matter of the surface level of the Sea of Galilee. About a third of Israel's water is stored in the lake, but since the rest is in underwater aquifers they can't be seen; the Sea of Galilee (the Kinneret) is right out there where we all see it. And boy do we watch: Nachum Barnea, the country's top journalist, once remarked that being an Israeli means getting up each morning and checking how high (or low) the surface level of the Kinneret is. So much so, that the Hebrew word miflas (surface level) has been loaned to other existential worries: miflas ha-harada, for example, means the level of national dread - a term which doesn't even exist in any other language I'm aware of. (That miflas is actually rather low these days: defeating the 2nd Intifada, building the barrier, hitting Hamas in Gaza so hard that it stopped rocketing; all these things for which much of the world detests us have made life much less stressful, at least for the time being).

The surface of the Kinneret reaches its highpoint each year in May, then sinks until the rains of the following winter begin re-filling it, usually sometime in December. This summer it went lower than ever, which was very bad; the winter rains in the Galilee, however, have been plentiful this year.... But we couldn't know how much this was raising the sea surface, because the Water Authority staff was on strike since early December.

This week they resolved it, and we can now follow our Kinneret again. Here, even if you don't read Hebrew, I think you'll be able to figure it out. (Keep in mind that the Sea of Galilee is beneath Sea Level - 213.38 meters, as of this morning). Check it each day, to give yourself the feeling.

Tony Strikes Again!

A while ago we debated the existence or spoofness of one Rabbi Tony Jutner, a fellow who posts outlandish comments on articles of The Forward. One of the editors later told me he's convinced the fellow doesn't exist, and he deletes his comments when he sees them.

Well, he's back, is Tony, and this time he's clearly here for the fun. David Hazony has written a column about the need to preserve archeological findings in what will probably one day become Palestinian territory. His article is reasonable, though some of the subsequent comments add complexity to the issue. Then there's Tony:

I say give them the scrolls. It would be a goodwill gesture where it is badly needed. The scrolls dont inform my daily existence. However, if the Palestinians insisted on Portnoys Complaint, I woould resist this with all my soul

And I say, Forward People, please don't delete this one. It's an interesting attempt at deflating the seriousness of some of our discussions, and spoofs can also be part of the debate, why not?

The Mother of All Floods

Yossie Fatael, managing Director, Israel Travel Agents Associations, back from the Negev with pictures and films from last week's floods.

Legalites and Niceties

Earlier this week I fortified myself with a large stiff drink, gritted my teeth, and set out to defend the right of our wrongs to have their say.

Well, that opened a floodgate of discussion. Much of it focused on legality, the universal application of the law and nearby important topics. This is not a field I'm that well versed in, but let's see if we can't disentangle some of the threads.

Within the borders of what was once Mandatory Palestine there are a number of legal systems. In Israel proper there's Israeli law, which applies equally to all Israelis and usually to most other people within the jurisdiction, too. In what's called Area A territories, that's areas under full Palestinian control, the law is what the Palestinians have legislated. Jews aren't allowed into those areas, so there's no question of applying Palestinian law to Jews. There are Area B territories, where Palestinian law applies but the IDF is allowed to be active and has certain remnants of legal authority. There's Gaza, which is 100% Palestinian; I have no idea how Hamas deals with the PA legal system, nor am I particularly interested. There are Area C territories, mostly rural areas on the West Bank, which were not yet transferred to the PA when the Palestinians decided to destroy the Oslo process in late 2000. These areas have a mixture of legal systems, partly PA, partly Jordanian, partly Israeli military law - and, to make the picture even murkier, in the settlements there's a big dose of Israeli law, but in a limited way. Mostly this means Israeli law is applied to the Israeli citizens in the West Bank, but not to the territory, and not fully. No Israeli government ever applied Israeli law to the West Bank.

Except in one way: Israel has what I'm told is a unique institution called Bagatz, the High Court of Justice. The justices are the members of the Supreme Court, and the chambers are the same chambers, but unlike the Supreme Court which is the instance of final adjudication for cases coming up from lower courts, Bagatz is a place where an individual can go directly for immediate protection from the authorities. In summer 1967 the Israeli government granted access to the people of the newly controlled territories. This momentous decision was made so that the Arabs might defend themselves from the Israelis. Yes. Over the years Bagatz has dismantled an entire Jewish settlement built on Arab property (Elon Moreh, 1978) and forbidden the construction of others; it forced Rabin's government to take back 400 Hamas leaders deported in 1994 (after a year); it forced Sharon's government to redraw the line of the Barrier in 2004-6, and various other such events.

Before continuing let's note that a very large number of Palestinians - probably 85-90% of them - live under Palestinian law, in Gaza and areas A and B. Israeli law doesn't effect them at all. In Gaza, since there's no occupation at all anymore, even Bagatz is no longer relevant: as good a sign as any that the Palestinians of Gaza recognize they're no longer being occupied being the fact that they don't turn to Bagatz anymore, and how could they? They're not under Israeli jurisdiction in any way.

Then there's Jerusalem. In June 1967 Israel applied its law to an area - mostly empty hilltops - around Jerusalem; thus was born "East Jerusalem", an entity that had never previously existed in that form. It had something like 70,000 Arabs, many of whom didn't think they lived in Jerusalem at all but rather in villages near the city.

If you wish, it's legitimate to add the many Arab and Eastern European states where Jews once lived but left without their property, and they can't get it back because since they're not citizens anymore they've lost their legal standing. But I'm not getting into that: those issues are all clearly political, not legal.

Prior to 1948 there was Jewish property in what became the West Bank, and there was Palestinian property in what became Israel. No Jews became Jordanian citizens. Some Palestinians became Israeli citizens, and by and large they retained their property, though not always. Some Israeli Palestinians lost title to their property in various cases, as did some Jews, too, and there are even a few ugly cases such as Ikrit and Bir'am where it's hard to justify how the Arab property was taken over. In the large picture, however, these were minor lapses.

(There was Jewish property in Kfar Darom, in Gaza, but after a long and convoluted story, it doesn't belong to Jews anymore.)

After 1967 some efforts were made by Jews to re-acquire their property in what had been Jordanian controlled areas. I'm not acquainted with each case, but 42 years later we're talking about a small part of the Gush Etzion settlements, five buildings in Hebron - and that's it. As a general statement, Israeli's who have acquired land or property on the West Bank needed either to get it from the government if it didn't previously belong to any individual (most of the settlements), or they had to buy it.

Non-Israeli Palestinians can't get their pre-1948 property back, just like the Jewish Iraqis or Poles can't.

Jerusalem is the trickiest part of the story. The Palestinians of East Jerusalem are either citizens or permanent residents, so the applicable law is Israeli law, which makes no distinction between Jews or Arabs. I don't know the percentages, but I'd guess that about 99.9% of what is now Jewish property in East Jerusalem was acquired through government action. Some of it was confiscated from Jews, more was confiscated from Arabs, and most wasn't confiscated because it didn't belong to individuals. The story of Sheikh Jarrah, where individual Jews are trying to re-acquire pre-1948 property is very rare, and it's mostly not working. In places like Siluan-Shiloach (the City of David area), the Muslim quarter of the Old City, the Mount of Olives, and even Sheikh Jarrah, most of the Jews moving in have bought the properties they're moving into. The most recent case, in Sheihk Jarrah, is unusual because a few families refused to pay rent and were eventually evicted. Their neighbors who did pay rent are still there and will probably remain.

Arabs living in homes they owned were not evicted even when fields around them were being confiscated, which is why there are Palestinians living in their homes inside Jews neighborhoods such as Gilo, East Talpiot, Pisgat Zeev and French Hill.

Even Wetter Desert

Dr. Benny Shalmon, an ecologist in Eilat, explains: This is the first large storm in the southern third of the Negev since the late 1990s. Some years there's no rain at all, often there's a drizzle here or there. It takes a good storm, that fills the gullies and the waterholes and thoroughly wets everything, to give the desert ecosystem a push to last for another few years.

Those with any choice in the matter might want to schedule a hike to the southern Negev this spring. It will be washed and green, as much as a desert can be.

(It's also an area where no Palestinians lived, ever, and there's no bi-national conflict to be seen. Just desert, with all the harsh beauty that entails.)

A Wet Desert

For those of you who lived in dryness-challenged environments, here's how it works with deserts. There's very little rain, so there's very little vegetation. Very little of those means there's very little good topsoil. Very little good topsoil and vegetation means that when it does rain, there's very little capture or absorption of the water. Ergo, when it rains, it floods. When it rains hard, like it has been since yesterday evening, the floods are powerful. How powerful? Well, they can tear away a paved road in minutes, and can flip over a heavy vehicle and send it downstream in seconds.

That's more or less the whole theory. Not complicated, if you think about it for a moment. The thing is, rain storms such as this one don't happen very often (it's a desert), maybe once or twice a decade, depending on size. This one may yet turn out to be even rarer than that: sometimes there are storms of a once-or-twice-in-a-century magnitude. Statistically, by the time a large one rolls in, some folks will have acquired their new SUV in the interval, or they'll be driving a truck they didn't have last time around. Inevitably, some fool will puff up his chest and drive across the roaring water. After all, it's only, what, a few hundred feet? You can see the other side, and it doesn't even look deep. What do you want me to do, sit here and wait 24 hours? I'm a busy man.

Every time there's a storm in the desert, some fool needs the air force to get out of the trouble a six-year-old could have told him not to get into in the first place. If he gets out. In this case, one fellow did, one is dead, and the third is missing. (The video gives only a vague hint of the power, but it's still impressive).

Interactions With Arabs

Heard the one about how the Zionists were European colonialists determined to screw the poor Palestinians? And how by now, they're the only colonialists still standing, but even they will sooner or later succumb to the inexorable logic of history? I have no doubt you have.

Of course, there were always a few scratches on the neatness of the story. The Jewish language, for example, is not only Semitic, it's Western-Semitic, meaning it originated at the east edge of the Mediterranean. There's the single most widespread best-seller in the annals of Man, the Bible, which rather clearly puts the Jews in the land no-one was then calling Palestine. There are the many archeological finds, some of them very old even by the standards of archeology, in the Jewish language, confirming the Jewish story. There's the fact that most Zionists didn't come from European colonial states, there was no home state they could rely on and be colonials from... in short, Zionism looks exactly like an elephant except it doesn't have four legs, no trunk, no floppy ears, no thick gray skin, isn't the right size, isn't an animal at all, and doesn't have tusks. Other than that the resemblance is striking.

Every now and then there's another little gem. If the Jews were here so long ago, you might ask, didn't they ever interact with Arabs? Not, obviously, 3,000 years ago when there were no Arabs here to interact with. But later, perhaps?

I refer you to Bava Batra. The discussion is about farmers who neglect to clear their vineyards from other crops, thus transgressing on the prohibition of mixing crops. Rabbi Eliezer takes this so far as to forbid the use of a vineyard where thistles haven't been removed. The Gemarah asks in what way can thistles be construed as a second crop, alongside the vines? Rabbi Hannina explains that Rabbi Eliezer saw how Arabs ("arvaya" in the Aramaic) collected thistles to feed their camels.

Bava Batra156b.

This thread started and is explained here.