Perhaps Not Easing the Blockade of Gaza

Israel decided yesterday to ease the blockade of Gaza. Or not. It depends which media outlets you imbibe.

Haaretz tells that the easing is dramatic, and adds gloatingly that the Turks did it.

The New York Times says Israel bowed to pressure following the Mavi Marmara incident, and the American administration is pleased.

The Washington Post reports that Israel is switching from a short list of permitted items to a list of forbidden ones, and speculates that this may be a good thing - the administration thinks so - or may not. We'll have to see, is the tone.

The London Times starts with Tony Blair, and continues with him: their evaluation of the decision is whatever he says, i.e. it's dramatic, it could of course have been even better but it's still good, and of course the Israelis must implement it as decided.

The BBC has a long report, mostly devoid of snark: they tell what changes Israel is making, cite American approval, underline that Tony Blair was instrumental in the decision, and end with a quote from unidentified Palestinians who say the whole thing is a sham. Ah, and they mistakenly tell that the blockade began in 2005 (which is when Israel left Gaza), when in reality it began only in 2006, after Hamas won the Palestinian elections.

The Guardian is greatly impressed by how the pressure on Israel worked, after its "deadly interception" of the flotilla. They explain what Israel proposes to do, but also explain that it's not clear what this really means, and then give space for various critics of Israel to explain why it's either not significant or not really going to happen. Unnamed "aid agencies", a top Hamas fellow, an Israeli radical NGO, those sort of people. Still, they add, the White House is pleased. Of course, the main reason must have been to foil the arrival of additional ships.

UNRWA says nothing less than Israel fully throwing open its border is acceptable, so this move isn't.

Juan Cole, whom I rarely read these days, starts with an article from the LA Times about how the Israeli decision is only marginally significant, and may well not really change anything. Cole then goes on to poke fun at Israel's security agencies, who don't understand the Arab world and are ridiculous.

Richard Silverstein manages not to notice the matter at all, so I don't have to link to him and you don't need to check - which is good, because he's inordinately sensitive to his page hits. Mondoweiss also hasn't noticed: odd, that. Those folks never miss a report about how ghastly Israel is, but this one seems to have escaped their attention. At least Andrew Sullivan noticed. He agrees with other bloggers that it's a scandal that Israel may wriggle out of an international investigation of the flotilla incident in return for easing the blockade, but admits the easing itself is a good thing.

The IDF announced it is expanding supplies into Gaza by 30% immediately, with more to come.

Meanwhile, watch the market: prices in Gaza are tumbling since yesterday. Not because shortages will now disappear, but because goods brought in from Israel are of higher quality than those smuggled in through the Rafah tunnels, and are also cheaper.

We're not talking about learned scholars disagreeing about an event from, say, 500 years ago. This all happened last night.

Field Hospital in Haiti

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silverstein Responds

Richard Silverstein e-mails an explanation on why it took so long to allow my comment to appear on his blog: it could have contained a death threat. Lest he accuse me of cherry picking his words, here's the full text:

Your comment was moderated as all first time comments are because very
often first time comments at my blog contain death threats & other
abuse. When comments dispute my views I sometimes hold off on publishing
them until I have time to write a reply, which is what happened to yr
comment. So you might want to add to yr dyspeptic post the fact that I
haven't censored yr comment at all & intend to publish it.If you weren't so
snarky & merely wrote asking when the comment would be published you might
actually have gotten a respectful reply. Richard

True to his word, he indeed posted my comment and his response. I leave to you to decide if his response was so weighty as to require the pondering period he apparently needed before penning it. (I know. No-one pens anything anymore).

In fact, I doubt YOU have read the rpt. There are actual elements in the rpt
which can legitimately be criticized. But you haven’t found one. But arguing
about whether Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination dealt the peace process a fatal blow
or not is a silly point to use as your primary basis for arguing the Report is
wrong. Can’t you do any better than that?
And then writing an entire blog
post because I didn’t get around to approving yr moderated comment is even
sillier. But hey, knock yrself out.

There will probably be future installments to this story, but not now. Too many other things on my plate - such as completing the reading of the Goldstone report; I'm about half way through, and it's a fascinating document.

Richard Silverstein: Courageous Coward?

I can't tell you much about Richard Silverstein. He's a figure of some prominence in the small corner of American Jewry which actively dislikes Israel as the Israelis understand it - though he might say he's against AIPAC, not Israel. He's probably in his late 50s, and I'm not clear if he's ever held a real job, with real responsibilites and the need to make decisions that are inevitably less optimal than you'd like; on the other hand, he's got three children, and raising children is a reality-based occupation. So who knows.

He runs a blog called Tikkun Olam; Make the World a Better Place. Yes, that Tikkun Olam. With a vengeance. As long-time readers will remember, from time to time I choose a blog from part of the spectrum I sorely disagree with, and follow it for a while to see if I can figure out what makes its author tick. I followed Juan Cole for quite a while; Glenn Greenwald swiftly turned boring and predictable, and Mondoweiss - well, they're so full of hatred there wasn't much of a handle on which to hang a rational reading. The good people at CiF Watch are doing a fine job so I don't need to, though I do follow the Guardian in general, not only CiF, as a long-term proposition.

At the moment I lack the time to adopt Mr. Silverstein and his blog, but maybe later.

I did however have an interesting introduction to him this week. I was sent to a post on his blog with a report on a large conference call some 150 progressive rabbis had with Richard Goldstone. Having read it, I left a comment, only to learn that Silverstein doesn't just let folks leave comments on his blog: you've got to earn it by hewing to the party line, apparently. That was yesterday; in the meantime he has published a comment that was submitted since I submitted mine, so he's clearly decided to block me.

Google being what it is, I can leave record of the blocked comment by writing this post on my blog, which contains all the words connected to the matter, so even if it's not at his blog, it is on the record. Again, here's Silverstein's post, and here's what I posted:

October 19, 2009 at 5:29 AM
I wonder how many of the 150 rabbis have actually read the report. The bias in it is so profound and counter-factual that I have my sincere doubts if Judge Goldstone himself read it carefully. Take, as a simple example, the statement in para 179: “The assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by an Israeli extremist in 1995 dealt a lethal blow to the peace process.” There are indeed many people who believe this, but they’re all in a particular and easily identifiable camp of observers of the Israeli-Palestinian confllict; it is also easy to find numerous factual problems with the statement. In any case, the issue isn’t relevant to the mission of the fact finders; it was only inserted as part of a clumsy attempt to frame the Gaza operation in an a-priori anti-Israeli narrative.
Judge Goldstone signed on it. He owns it.

So that's done.

If you're into comedy, by the way, you might be tickled by this post Silverstein put up today, in which he bemoans the fact the CiF didn't publish enough of his columns, so he quit.