Jew Hatred in Egypt, Europe, and America

I continue not to know where Egypt is headed, just as President Obama and probably President Mubarak don't know. So I'm in fine company.

There's the story of Wael Ghonim, until this week an anonymous young man who has been catapulted to the front ranks of the revolution, if a revolution it is. History can do that sometimes to people: they get their 15 minutes of fame and are never heard of again, or they get their 15 minutes and stay at center stage for the rest of their lives and beyond. It's hard to know. Should Mr. Ghonim turn out to be representative of the revolution, the world may well end up a better place - or at least it would be plausible to hope. (The funny thing is that I am separated from this fellow by only 2, or at most 3, degrees of separation.)

On the other hand, John Rosenthal has been looking at pictures from A-Tahrir square, including pictures culled from mainstream Western media outlets, and is troubled by the antisemitic imagery which seems quite common there. (There's more here). We outsiders have no real way of knowing how representative this is, and how significant. What we can know is that the Western media is displaying some of these images with no comment, and seems to be editing out the more blatant ones, also without reporting that they're there. It's troubling.

Judith Miller is reporting from the Herzliya conference, day by day. It's quite interesting, and depressing: apparently the Israeli establishment really is worried by the potential for mischief in Egypt. On the other hand, as Jonathan Spyer pointed out so convincingly (see my review here), the type of Israelis who convene at such conferences are not particularly representative.

Finally, just to tie together the troubling news from Egypt with the troubling news from Europe (and America), here's Tariq Ramadan pontificating on the Muslim Brotherhood at the New York Times. Of course Ramadan is a scion of the Brotherhood, so to speak, but he's also a wildly popular European intellectual; the top of polite society, you might say.

The Muslim Brothers began in the 1930s as a legalist, anti-colonialist and nonviolent movement that claimed legitimacy for armed resistance in Palestine against Zionist expansionism during the period before World War II. The writings from between 1930 and 1945 of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Brotherhood, show that he opposed colonialism and strongly criticized the fascist governments in Germany and Italy. He rejected use of violence in Egypt, even though he considered it legitimate in Palestine, in resistance to the Zionist Stern and Irgun terror gangs. He believed that the British parliamentary model represented the kind closest to Islamic principles.

Pretty grim, isn't it.  The Zionist expansionism he so glibly castigates as being a worthy target of violence were, at the time, the small numbers of European Jews who were managing to escape, many of them destitute, as the Nazi boot ground their necks ever harder, and antisemites throughout the continent cheered them on and tried to emulate them, except in places like Poland where the local anti-Jewish policies were worse at that moment than in Germany. This was obvious at the time, and should be quite common knowledge since then, if there was ever any meaning to the refrain "never again". Yet Ramadan puts it on the pages of the New York times, and the editors encourage him to do so, as if history never happened.

Books on Genocide

A reader recently asked if I'd tell about books which are on my reading list. Here are two which have been mentioned online this week.

Daniel Blatman, a friend and colleague, author of The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide
is reviewed in Der Spiegel (in English). Blatman is a solid researcher, and he worked on this book for many years. I'll hazard the guess his is the most scholarly and serious book on the Holocaust to come out this year, and I look forward to its generating a lot of discussion. As the review shows, it offers lots to discuss, about how ordinary Germans participated in mass murder, at the very end of the 2nd WW, when there was a world of incentive not to. (h/t Silke and Norm, both)

Adam Hochschild is the author of the most important book about the first genocide in Belgium, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. (That was the genocide that inspired Heart of Darkness). This week Hochschild has published a story on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. He doesn't say the assassination led directly to the second genocide in the Congo, the one that may still be happening, because that wouldn't be a sufficient explanation, but he is bleak about the whole thing.

Books and articles to keep things in proportion. These are stories about men and women at their very worst.

Claude Lanzmann's Shoah

Claude Lanzmann's nine-hour film Shoah is by far the best film ever made about the Holocaust, and it's better than most of the books on the subject, too. I used to screen it regularly to courses I taught, and no matter how many times I saw it, I always learned something new from each screening. Apparently it is now being re-screened in various American venues, so if you have the chance, go see it. If you've got to make the choice, see the second half. If you're looking for some other trade-off to make the time, cut 18 hours of blog reading, including this one.

No-One Listens to Scholars

Yesterday I kvetched about how journalists who often know very little about their subject matter natter on as if they do, and the rest of us take it is as if they do, too. Today I came across the opposite phenomenon. Haaretz carried a story about how a new, 900-page report commissioned by ex-German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer has documented that during the Nazi era the ministry contributed to the Holocaust: "German foreign ministry more involved in Holocaust than previously thought".

Previously thought by whom, pray tell? The reason I'm asking is that there's an excellent book by Christopher Browning about this precise subject, Final Solution and the German Foreign Office: A Study of Referat D III of Abteilung Deutschland 1940-1943. The book is widely quoted by anyone who has published anything on the matter since its publication, it was as influential as such a book can be, and it launched Browning's illustrious career; if you ask me he's the most important scholar of the Holocaust in America.

Ah, and it was published... in 1978. I sent Chris a congratulatory e-mail this morning, about how someone has now uncovered the story he told 32 years ago; he says that a German publisher quickly had it translated just recently, to coincide with the publishing of the report that Haaretz refers to.

Sadly, I don't think this is an unusual case. Last week the Economist had a glowing review of a troubling book by Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Now I haven't read it yet, mind you, though I hope I will, but the excitement of the reviewer seems odd to me. The thesis of the book, about how Stalin and Hitler both engaged in mass murder on enormous scales in Eastern Europe, surely that can't be news to anyone, can it?

Did I ever mention that lots of people died in the Black Death? Just saying.

Limits of My Comprehension

Matthew Yglesias, in spite of his name, is a young Jewish liberal blogger. He's not as bad a Glenn Greenwald, and I don't know which of them is more popular. I don't read either of them regularly, but I go by from time to time, or I follow links when they say something particularly outlandish about Israel. The other things they write about don't much interest me.

Surprisingly, it turns out Yglesias has never been to Israel - until this week. Now he's here, studiously not seeing the 90-some percent of Israel that's not directly connected to the conflict with the Palestinians, but tweeting and blogging (a bit) about what he's seeing - so I'm a regular reader for the duration. It's odd how much he doesn't know, given the statements he occasionally makes. In one of his tweets today he told us that

As best I can tell, 99% of the clichés you've heard about Israel and Palestine are accurate.

and also

Hebron is the strangest thing I've ever seen

Personally, I have a sneaking suspicion he went to Hebron with Btselem or someone like them, so the chances he understood what they were showing him were, how to put it, slim.

In the meantime, however, he continues to blog about other subjects,and this afternoon he dabbled in an argument between two other bloggers (who seems to be professors) about the outcome of WWII. I've read Yglesias and the two others, and for the life of me I can't figure out what it is they're talking about. The discussion seems to be about how bad things were in post-1945 Europe, and how WWII couldn't plausibly have been said to have ended well until one had the perspective of, say, 1990:

There’s definitely a sense in which it all worked out for the best in the end, but the conclusion of the war in Europe was both very harsh on the Germans and also a spectacular failure in terms of cosmic justice. You can see this by contemplating the fact that a war France and Britain nominally launched for the sake of saving Czechoslovak and Polish independence concluded by sentencing Poland and Czechoslovakia and a great many other countries to decades of Soviet domination.

Soviet domination was a very bad thing, on balance. Still, compared to Nazi domination it was great. Not to mention millions of Eastern Europeans who were slated to die for being in the way of the Germans, and all the remaining Jews. I look at this exchange of opinions between these three fellows, rub my eyes, and ask if it's the same 20th century we're talking about.

Meanwhile, ideological enemies of mankind are still with us, though they use different terminology these days. Barry Rubin notices that the Muslim Brotherhood, an important movement, has essentially declared war on the West... and no-one is noticing. Of course, no-one would expect someone like Matthew Yglesias to make an issue of this sort of thing, but perhaps the New York Times? The Economist? Someone? Anyone?

Finally, since I'm listing odd things, Lizas Welt, an iconoclastic German blog, who follows Henryk Broder in telling the story of one Edith Lutz. Ms Lutz, it appears, has figured out that merely attacking Israel won't get her the media attention she wishes for, so she has decided to tell everyone she's Jewish. A Jew who says awful things about Israel: now that's just what the German media needs. The problem, in Liza's formulation, is that her conversion to Judaism seems to have been very private. So private that no-one in the Jewish community knows about it.

All of this is getting too complicated for poor old me. I guess I'm losing it.

Arafat at the Holocaust Museum

Aaron Miller revisits the idea of inviting Arafat to visit the USHMM, the Holocaust museum in Washington:

How I could have believed such an invitation would head any way but south is beyond me. Yes, the museum was a living memorial to combating racism, hatred and genocide. But did I fully grasp that I was using hallowed memory and narrative for purposes that could affront the very people I was trying to persuade? For millions, the museum was a positive and powerful symbol of not forgetting -- just as, for so many, Arafat was a symbol of anti-Semitism, violence and insensitivity. The potential conflict and misunderstanding overwhelmed any opportunity for dialogue and understanding.

And even if the visit had taken place, what would Arafat have said afterward? That he better understood the Israeli and Jewish sensibility but that they would have to understood Palestinian dispossession and suffering, too? That Israelis were perpetuating a genocide against Palestinians and demand equal time and space? The possibilities for disaster were too numerous to identify.

At the time he saw none of these obstacles. Full of best intentions, he and his bosses ran headlong into a fiasco. Not because they were stupid, but because the world is a complicated place. Making predictions is always hard, but especially about the future.

The Propelling Force of Nazism

Sergio in the comments called my attention to the fact that Michael Wildt's important book about the central cadre of the SS is now available in English: An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office (George L. Mosse Series). Wildt is one of the most important historians of Nazism. This book, probably his most important so far though the others are, too, is about the 300 or so young men (only one woman among them) who formed the single most important group you've never heard of: the people who made Nazism into what it was.

Soon after the book was published in German I wrote a longish review of it for Yad Vashem Studies, an important journal even if I'm biased in saying so. Apparently I wrote the review in Hebrew (YVS is bi-lingual), so the English review is a translation. Still, it's 14 pages, not 592, so if I can't talk you into reading Wildt's book you might be interested in my summary of it. (The top of the first page is in Hebrew but the article is in English).

Claude Lanzmann, Still Creative

Claude Lanzmann is the creator of the 9-hour film Shoah, a work of pure genius. I've watched it seven or ten times, and never plumbed its full depths. Each and every viewing revealed something new.

The man himself is, how to put it, a challenge. I remember when we once brought him to meet a group of ours, and all he was interested in was the drink he needed to be able to talk. A friend of mine who had seen the film as often as I commented that there was much to compare between Lanzmann and Richard Wagner - I'll let you figure that one out for yourself.

None of which detracts in the slightest from his creative genius.

The nine hours of Shoah were culled from about 200 hours; he has now taken 50 minutes that didn't make it in, and turned them into a new film, focusing on Jan Karski's meeting with Roosevelt. I haven't seen the film, but can't imagine any reason not to recommend it strongly: Roosevelt, Karski, Lanzmann: what could go wrong? That was even before reading this oh-so-typical interview:

Lanzmann notes that he does not object to fictionalized literature based on historical facts, but "on condition that it adds to the historical truth and does not limit or distort it. Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' created a fictionalized account on the basis of the Napoleonic wars, but it enriched the historical memory and did not limit it. Young authors such as Haenel think that with fiction it is possible to tell all. They write about history without having historical perspective and the result, which presumes to be history, is completely ahistorical."
...
"This is utter nonsense," says Lanzmann, "it was not possible to save the Jews of Europe. Do you think it was possible to save the Jews of Europe?" He turns to me with what he feels is a clearly rhetorical question. "No, it was not possible to save the Jews of Europe." Lanzmann agrees with my claim that "The Karski Report" is more than just a response to Haenel's book. At one of the most powerful moments in the film, Karski relates how after he told the Jewish judge Felix Frankfurter - who was then serving on the Supreme Court and was one of the president's closest confidantes - what was happening in Poland, the judge rose in utter shock and told him: "I don't believe it! I don't believe that you are lying, but I don't believe what you are telling me."
...
"I have sharp criticism for all those institutions and events that seek to preserve the memory of the Shoah, such as Yad Vashem, which has undergone a process of Americanization, or the Holocaust Museum in Washington. I also oppose the youth trips to the extermination camps in Poland, which I think contribute nothing to the preservation of the memory of the Shoah in a serious and responsible manner. I have a lot of criticism inside me and I would like to be able to express this criticism to all, but it's impossible to be everyone's critic," he says, letting out a sigh.

Dancing at Auschwitz?

An Australian woman took her Holocuast survivor father and three children to Poland and they filmed themselves dancing at the sites of the Shoah.

It it art, as she says? Not that I can see, but I'm not an expert. Is it good taste? I don't know. Is it worthy of condemnation? I don't think so. It's a bit loopy, but a Holocasut survivor dancing with his grandchildren at Auschwitz, to my mind, is overall more positive than negative.

Singling Out Jews (Or Israel)

The other day I met a group of folks from Serbia. I had been asked to give them a lecture about the Final Solution, while relating to their context, namely the centrality of the murder of hundreds of thousands of Serbs by Croats during the war (perhaps as many as 800,000 Serbs were murdered).

Casting about for a way of explaining the fundamental difference between inter-ethnic hatreds in Yugoslavia and hatred of the Jews, I mentioned that a traveler in Europe of the1930s would have found groups dedicated to hatred of the Jews in any and every European country; hatred of Serbs, on the other hand, was virulent in Croatia, but non-existent outside the area of conflict. This also meant that Serbs in Yugoslavia were in grave danger, but Serbs in Paris were not; Jews were in grave danger everywhere.

This hasn't changed, I added. In any and every Western country today there are people who are fervently committed to hating Israel. In spite of some rather ugly Serbian policies these past two decades, the same is not true about Serbs - not remotely.

They nodded thoughtfully, and accepted my thesis. I'm telling the story as background to this bitter little song. You could easily see it as an example of self-righteous Israeli self-pity and propaganda - except that unfortunately it's a reflection of a dismal reality:

There was another interesting thing about that group of Serbs. During the discussion they described themselves as human rights activists- which initially put me on guard. Then, however, as the discussion progressed, it became clear that they really are human rights activists, in the old, anti-police-state and pro-democracy meaning of the term, the one it was invented for in a previous era. They hail from a place where democracy is brand new, and until very recently they didn't have the freedoms the rest of us take for granted. For them, human rights is about human rights, and defending democracy is an urgent mission which could still fail. How startling.

(Update: I fixed the spelling of Croatia, thanks.)

Hitler's Emprie

Late in 2009 I reviewed Mark Mazower's Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe, for Azure. Azure being a serious journal, not a blog, had reasonable editorial comments, which I took upon myself to address. Then we were at war in Gaza, my son was sent in with his unit, and I didn't have the state of mind for fixing the review, which was set aside and forgotten.

So now, with the permission of Azure, I'm posting the review in its original form, here.

Ministry of Truth

George Orwell must be dancing in his grave.

Glenn Greenwald today compared the Nazi invasion of Austria, the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia, with the American invasion of Iraq. By the end of the same post he hedges his bets, and adds that he's not really making the comparison, unless he is but he isn't. Having seen the firestorm of protest he ignited, he than adds three times that he didn't make the comparison.

Joe Klein tears into him here,and the whole thing started with an argument with Jeffrey Goldberg.

Here's my input, on a point no-one else seems to be noticing: There was no Nazi invasion of the Sudetenland, no invasion of Slovakia, hardly one of Austria and even less of Bohemia. Nazi Germany brutally invaded many countries, but those weren't among them. Go check the history books and see if I know what I'm talking about. Glenn Greenwald surely doesn't.

Update: somewhere down in the comments I've responded with additional facts.

Bad Taste at Auschwitz

A group of Knesset members participated in the two-day March of the Living program at Auschwitz a few weeks ago, and complained bitterly about the food. According to the Hebrew-language original of the article, they also complained about having to fly tourist class.

Sheesh.

Things People Talk About

Over Yom Haatzmaut, Independence Day, I spent time talking to people in a number of social events. Here are some of the things I heard:

A friend who runs a company that produces high-class tools for the creation of other tools ("our equipment is the Rolls-Royce of the field: expensive but the best") told me they've been selling to unfriendly countries such as Indonesia, and in recent weeks they've been approached by a potential client in Pakistan. A second friend who was standing with us told of other Israeli companies who sell to the Arab world, mostly via Jordan and often in Jordanian packaging to hide the Israeli provenance. Someone ought to tell the boycott folks.

A North-American journalist who has been reporting on the MidEast for a generation tells me the lack of a peace process enables all sides to live in practical peace; once negotiations start again they'll have to re-start the violence.

A Canadian who lives in Israel these past 30 years remarks, apropos Obama's plans to regulate American banks: Canada has strict bank regulations and sailed through the recent turmoil mostly unharmed. Israel has strict bank regulations, and sailed through likewise unscathed. America has light bank regulations, and look where they are.

The cutting edge in military technology is robots: drones, jeeps, and science fiction spy tools all operated from afar by highly trained soldiers who can't be harmed by the battlefield conditions. Israel is in the forefront of this technology, alongside the US.

Three if not four people separately remarked on the 20th of April as Hitler's birthday. Two of them are children of Holocaust survivors, so that's where that complex comes from; one came from Russia, and one was a thirty-something from North Africa. Jews are a screwed up bunch.

Volcanoes make humans look very small. Everyone agreed on that one.

Every Man Has a Name

Not long ago I read an article which made the distinction between songs and poetry: that poetry stands on its own, while a song needs music to have value.

Many shirim are songs, but some are poetry (and I'm not certain where to draw the line). The creations of Zelda are poetry, even though some have become famous shirim, with music.

Zelda was born in what is now Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, in 1914, to a family of important Lubavitcher rabbis; she was a cousin of the last Rebbe. She came to Jerusalem with her parents in 1926, and died here in 1984. There is a touching description of her in Amos Oz' masterpiece A Tale of Love and Darkness (If you still haven't read it, forget all these blogs and read it). Zelda was his teacher, and apparently an influential one; she also lived in the same hard-working neighborhood he grew up in and describes so well. She and her husband never had children.

I don't know when she started writing; her first book of poetry appeared many years after she began, in the 1960s. So I can't tell if she wrote Lechol Ish Yesh Shem, Every Man has a Name, before or after the Shoah. The poem itself never mentions the Holocaust, never even alludes to it, yet sometime in the 1980s it became the single most important Shoah song; perhaps even the emblematic one.

Hebrew original
English translation
Every person has a name
that God gave him
and which his father and mother gave him

Every person has a name
which his height
and the style of his smile gave him
and which his tapestry gave him

Every person has a name
which the mountains gave him
and which his walls gave him.

Every person has a name
which the star signs gave him
and which his neighbours gave him.

Every person has a name
which his sins gave him,
and which his longing gave him.

Every person has a name
which his enemies gave him
and his love gave him.

Every person has a name
which his festivals gave him,
and which his work gave him.

Every person has a name
which the seasons gave him,
and which his blindness gave him.

Every person has a name
which the sea gave him,
and which his death gave him.

Chanan Yovel (born 1946) composed the music and sings it in the first recording; the second recording is by Chava Alberstein; she's a better singer.

Banality of Banality of Evil

Norm Geras has a thoughtful post on the ease with which too many folks assume we're all potential genocidaires, and wonders why we're not also commonly assumed to be potential rapists, say.

Norm is a nicer and more moderate chap than I, and much better at English understatement. Me, I'm of the opinion that much of the banality-is-evil chatter is bunk. This opinion of mine is based on years of close investigation of the worst genocidaires of all: the men of Adolf Eichmann's office in the SS. Yes, the very group about whom Hannah Arendt postulated the banality concept while willfully not listening to the proceedings at Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem. I don't much deal with the matter anymore, but once wrote a book about it which you can read in a variety of languages (see the link somewhere over to the left).

The closest one can reasonably come to a blanket condemnation of man's potential for evil is that it's not easy to know in advance who is capable of it, and who isn't, not ever. That's a far cry from the silliness traded in so mindlessly by the "Anyone might do it" brigades. And also - here I'll unmask how unpolitically correct I really am - cultural conditioning is part of the story. Some cultures more easily allow people to engage in mass murder than others.

Chaim K. RIP

Chaim K. passed away late Saturday afternoon. He was 87 - not that you'd know it by watching the callers making condolence calls at his Shiva this week, some of whom are quite some years younger than his older grandchildren. "You don't know us", they tell his children, "but we were friends of your father. Such a luminous man!"

Chaim was born in a small Polish town no-one has ever heard of. He was 17 when the Nazis invaded, and his entire immediate family fled East, eventually washing up in what is today Kazakhstan. They spent the war years in what were combination refugee-and-labor camps. His father starved to death, but the rest of them survived. In later years his sister (who died a few years ago at 91) reminisced that Chaim would combat his hunger by reading whatever he could get his hands on until he fell asleep from exhaustion, thereby managing to do without a meal.

Also in the camps he met his future wife, "she didn't even own a pair of shoes". Chaim was good at cobbling things together, and managed to help her survive the hardships.

After the war they went back to Poland. None of her family had survived; there was no point in trying to rebuild lives in Poland, and by 1948 they were in Israel.

Arriving in war-torn Jerusalem in 1948 they found accommodations with a cousin who lived in Batei Ungarn, near Mea Shearim. The cousin had seven children in two rooms, but since it was crowded anyway, why not take in the newcomers? No long afterward Chaim found an abandoned two-room house on the wrong side of the barbed-wire fences which marked the new border that ran through the city. A block or two from Sheikh Jarrah, if you insist on details. The building was functionally in No-Man's Land between Israel and Jordan, but there was an IDF position on its roof; the troops reached the second floor through a trapdoor from one of the rooms. Still, it was better than the place in Batei Ungarn, so Chaim, his sister and their spouses moved in. No-one ever came to visit them at their house beyond the border, and the troops on the roof occasionally had fire-fights with Jordanian troops, but worse things can happen. Chaim and Gittl had three children there.

In 1960 they moved. Chaim was making a good living as an accountant, and they were able to afford a brand new 2-1/2 room apartment in the Katamon area. When they first moved in the 70-square meter place looked so impossibly spacious that they considered renting one room, or perhaps simply sealing it off for visitors. They remained for the rest of their lives (Gittl died two years ago this week). They had three children, 11 grandchildren, and right now there are 16 great grandchildren, with the 17th expected in two months. The youngest two grandsons, at 19, are hardly older than the oldest of the great grandchildren (17).

20-some years ago, as Chaim should have been about to retire, he was offered the challenge of setting up the financial department in one of the large settlements. He thought about it for a day or two, and took the job, which he held until he was in his late 70s. Even then he retained his position as one of the stalwarts of his synagogue, and as the accountant of a local charity; two days before he died he transferred all the details of the charity to his son. In recent weeks he has no longer been able to participate in his daf yomi study group (9:30 am, the "old codgers' group") so one of the others came to him each day to learn, all the way until the end.

Have I mentioned he was a nice man? Always smiling, often with a Yiddish joke, relating to people as equals. His son is the boss of one of our public utilities. A few weeks ago I met the two of them, the son supporting his father on the way to the synagogue; the father dressed, as usual, in his suit, tie and fedora even though he could walk only with the greatest effort. I pointed to the street we were standing on, where the son's company has been digging these past two months: "Chaim, can you please tell the boss of the company they really ought to fix this street already?!" He beamed and said he'd try.

Yesterday they paved the street and it looks spanking new. "He did it", I told his son. "He got it fixed".

Fifty years in a single neighborhood is quite a while, and alongside the unexpected mourners I told of above, the surviving old-timers are coming to pay their respects. The neighborhood was originally built by rich (mostly Christian) Arabs in the 1920s, when Chaim was a boy in that forgotten Polish town; it was sparsely populated, with large detached houses. In the 40s, as he fought his hunger, lots of important British officers and officials moved in. Once the Arabs and British were gone, it was filled with the Jews who had been deported from the Old City, two miles to the north, after the Jordanians took it over. Then in the 1950s, the mostly empty hillsides were built up with apartment buildings for the large numbers of refugees and immigrants pouring into Israel and living mostly in tents. Only in the 1990s did it begin to change again, so that today there's a large population of wealthy British and French Jews moving away from the rising antisemitism in their countries, and rich Americans not fleeing from anyone - and upper middle class Israelis, too.

Sit in the tiny apartment Chaim died in the other day, however, and you'll be reminded of the people who dominated the area for 40 years. The Lithuanian Holocaust survivor; the Polish one; the two Moroccans, the Iraqi; the man from the Old City whose father and brother-in-law fell in its battle; the 68-year-old Yekke (German Jew) who's father disagreed with Chaim about what sort of synagogue they needed, 50 years ago, so each built his own, and each sometime came to the other's.

You can see a lot of history in 87 years.

65 Years

Auschwitz was liberated by Red Army troops (who didn't know it was there to be liberated until they stumbled upon it) 65 years ago today.

A few twins held by Mengele for his experiments survived as children. Other than them, the youngest survivors were in their mid-teens; most were in their twenties.

Living memory of Auschwitz is to be found, today, only in the minds of octogenarians. Not many of them left, either. The living memory is slipping away.

Yet Another Tenth of Tevet

Yesterday was the Tenth of Tevet, an ancient day of mourning which is still unbearably contemporary. Since the Jewish and Gregorian calenders are not fully aligned, last year this day fell on January 6th, two weeks into the Gaza Operation. It was a grim day, as I described then.

As last year so also this year, our synagogue had one of the old-timers tell how he survived the Holocaust. Concurrently, however, in a different room, there was a commemoration event for Nitai Stern - the same Nitai whose funeral I wrote about last year. His grandfather is a member of our congregation. Before going to the main event I chatted briefly with Reuven, Nitai's father. "Let next year be better for you than the last one".

The Holocaust survivor telling his tale this year was Baruch. Baruch, a simple 85-year-old man, has been the chief gabai at this synagogue for decades. The direct translation of gabai is deacon, but my minimal familiarity with church matters doesn't let me say if the translation works. A gabai such as Baruch, at any rate, is the person who makes the synagogue run, the all-purpose-fellow without whom the congregation would grind to a halt. Not only has he been at it for decades, Baruch manages also never to fight with anyone, a feat which is theoretically impossible. So the hall he was speaking in was packed, with hundreds of people from 8-year-olds to sages in their mid-90s.

Baruch has never told his story in public. As the rabbi explained: "Everyone knows Baruch. Whenever I'd ask him to tell, he'd say 'what for. Everything's alright, and we need to keep on going'". What made this year different was that one of Baruch's granddaughters, a woman in her 20s, refused to accept his stubbornness, sat him down in front of a camera and forced him to talk. People in the field will tell you it's often so: Holocaust survivors who refused to talk for generations open up when their grandchildren demand it. So the evening was based on the film, and Baruch himself sat in the front row, surrounded by his children and grandchildren (the great-grandchildren stayed at home).

It started out a simple tale, in simple language. Baruch really isn't a talker. Much of the tale was punctuated by ever-repeated comments that "well, we had to keep on going". Yet it grew ever more riveting, eventually centering on two events. The first, a death march in April 1945, when 2,000 people left Buchenwald, and two (two) were liberated in May by the Russians. Baruch was half of the one tenth of one percent who survived.

The second event was the battle for Gush Etzion in April-May 1948. Baruch had made his way to Mandatory Palestine, found his way to the Gush, and participated in the bloody battles which resulted in the destruction of the Gush on May 14th 1948, at which point he fell into Jordanian captivity and remained there for 10 months. "When we returned to Jerusalem in March 1949 we were received by Ben Gurion who told us our battle had saved Jerusalem by holding off the Arab Legion for those two weeks. Well, and then it was time to keep on going". So he did. And still does.

We all do, as we have been for millennia, pausing each Tenth of Tevet but then continuing. According to Haaretz, in 2009 the number of new immigrants to Israel was 16,244. It's not a very big number, but it's up from 13,859 last year. Sasa, a left-wing kibbutz a few miles south of the Lebanese border, has inched into first place worldwide in supplying armoured vehicles that can withstand anything the Islamists throw at American troops. I recommend the item behind that link: it has some interesting observations in it.

Good Neighbors

I have no words of defense, exoneration or even merely words of explanation which then segue in a back-handed sort of way into justification, for the recent attack on a mosque in Yasuf. Islamists routinely attack mosques and massacre worshipers. Palestinian terrorists regularly use houses of worship, be it the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem or mosques in Gaza, as places to hole up in or store weapons. Civilized people don't see houses of worship as military targets unless they really are, and they never desecrate them with the intent to insult. If they do, it's proof they've ceased to be civilized.

No "but"s.

That doesn't mean the responses to such a despicable attack can't be educative.

A delegation of Jewish religious leaders and activists, including some from West Bank settlements, tried to reach the village to express their abhorrence of the attack. But the Israeli Army prevented the group from entering Yasuf for security reasons as enraged villagers proclaimed that the visitors would not be welcome. “The people will not allow it,” said Wasfi Hassan, a local farmer. “It is like killing a man, then going to his funeral.”

No, actually it isn't like that at all. First, because no-one was killed or even injured. Second, because it wasn't the perpetrators who wished to come to Yasuf with new copies of the Koran, it was other Jews, some settlers, some not. The determination to see all Israeli Jews as if they were criminal thugs may be satisfying, but it's neither factually true nor remotely helpful to moving forward.

Mr. Abbushi rejected the notion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could turn into a religious struggle. “It is a national conflict. We want an independent state, without settlers,” he said. But Palestinian schoolchildren brought to demonstrate in Yasuf on Sunday shouted, “Khaibar, Khaibar ya Yahud,” evoking a legendary battle between the Prophet Muhammad and the Jews of the Khaibar oasis, who were forced to surrender.

So who's got it right? The PA governor speaking to the foreign press and telling them what they wish to hear, or the locals, perhaps teachers, priming the school children on what to chant? Even if it's the governor, why does an independent state have to be free of Jews?

In Yasuf, villagers recounted years of problems with settlers in the area, blaming them for a range of ills, including what they said was the poisoning of a spring and the theft of sheep.

Really? The settlers poisoned the spring? How did they manage to do that, pray tell? Given the geological structure of the West Bank, which determines how local springs work, I'll go out on a branch and say such an action cannot be done. Or rather, it probably could, but it would require a large-scale, sustained, industrial-scope effort. This never happened, not at Yasuf and not anywhere else in the area. Sounds to me more like the result of a sustained and society-wide policy by the Palestinians to poison their own minds and those of their children, many of whom have in the meantime grown to become parents, educators, and retired frail and elderly great-grandparents.

Also on Sunday, the Israeli cabinet approved a plan to change Israel’s map of national priority areas to include several isolated West Bank settlements, along with large areas populated by Jews and Arabs in the country’s north and south. The plan has been sharply criticized by the Israeli left because of the inclusion of the settlements, which will now be entitled to additional government financing. Many Israelis saw the adjusted map as an attempt by the government to appease the settlers, who are furious about the building halt.

Looks to me more like standard if unseemly politics. The government is about to disburse large sums of money to lots of people, including many Arab Israelis, and they're throwing a sop also to a troublesome constituent. Not nice, but no different from any other democratically elected politicians.

Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said in a statement that the new map “serves as a blueprint for future settlement expansion.”He continued: “It reveals the extent to which Israel’s ‘settlement moratorium’ is a sham.”

Really, Mr. Erekat? Try us. Go on, call our bluff. Make us a serious offer and see what we do. Or better, simply agree to return to the negotiating table you fled from on September 16th 2008, when yet another Israeli offer to disband most of the settlements was on the table, and see what you can achieve. Come on, face us with a challenge, instead of moaning about how horrific we are. That's what running a country is all about: dealing with reality, not with wishful dreams.

Update: Chief Rabbi Yonah Metsger came to the village to express his solidarity. He was accompanied by the PA governor and dozens of PA body-guards, but the villagers wouldn't let him into the desecrated mosque. Interestingly, he told the villagers that the Jewish memory of the Holocaust "begins with the desecration of synagogues", one reason why such a desecration is such an outrage to Jews. This is an interesting anecdote for those of Israel's many enemies who insist the Holocaust is routinely instrumentalized to justify anti-Palestinian actions.