Jacques Barzun, Intellectual Giant, 1907-2012

When Jacques Barzun was born, there was a Habsburg on the throne, and a Hohenzollern, and a Romanov. (And a Windsor). He first began teaching during World War One (then known as The Geat War). He started teaching at Columbia University before the Geat Recession. In 1956 he was pictured on the cover of Time Magazine as the representative of America's finest intellectuals. In those days, Time Magazine's cover interested many people. By the time of the student riots of 1968 he was an important university administrator approaching retirement; his rioting students are now retiring. He died yesterday, apparently lucid and creative until the end.

He was of the class of public figures for whom newpapers prepare obituaries in advance - the New York Times one is unusually long and detailed, to fit his unusually long and creative life.

He wrote shelves of books. I've read only one of them, some years back, but it remains in my mind as an unusually important book - and also, a bit startling for an author who was in his 90s at the time - an innovative book: From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present, published in 2000. Here's how it begins:

It takes only a look at the numbers to see that the 20th century is coming to an end. A wider and deeper scrutiny is needed to see that in the West the culture of the last 500 years is ending at the same time. Beliving this to be true, I have thought it the right moment to review in sequence the great achievements and the sorry failures of our half millenium.

A few pages later he present the outlines of the half millenium:

[I]t could be said that the first period - 1500-1660 - was dominated by the issue of what to believe in religion; the second - 1661-1798 - by what to do about the status of the individual and the model of government; the third - 1790-1920 - by what means to achieve social and econmic equality. The rest is the mixed consequence of all these efforts.

Read it. It's a very fine book, and it tells important things about our world.

The Failure of the Modern State

Against the backdrop of the American elections, and the broader backdrop of Eurzone chaos and American sluggish recovery, the Economist and Walther Russell Mead each offer interesting thoughts on the failure of governments to deal with the economc realities and social failures of the age. Both thesis are actually similar: neither politcal left nor political right has realistic suggestions on how to fix things, though their criticism of the policies of the left are marginally harsher. It should be the task of government to put in place polices which improve the lives of citizens, but governments aren't doing that, nor do they seem poised to do so anytime soon.

The Economist article leads, by the way, to a long multi-sectioned report, which is also recommended reading.

Al Ghazali St. in Jerusalem

A while back Mondoweiss had a post about the evil Israeli occupation forces which are forcing Jewish names on streets in East Jerusalem so as to drive home to the locals who's the boss. (Jerusalem's municipality to sart 'judaizing' street names in East Jerusalem). Mondoweiss lifted this report with nary any questioning from a Palestinian propaganda site called The Voice of Palestine, and this source also knew to tell that the project "was initiated by the occupation's mayor of Jerusalem, the extremist right winger, Nir Barakat".

If you know anything about Israel, and also regularly read Mondoweiss, you get a reasonably good feel for their lack of accuracy and credibility, but this item stood out for its outlandishness. Anway, a while later Twitter told me to read this item, in which you can see a picture of Mayor Nir Barkat participating in a small ceremony at which a street is named after Umm Kulthum, hardly a Zionist name. So I sent off a tweet to the Mondoweiss account wondering if they'd like to comment, but they didn't.

Yesterday I was busying myself sending off greetings to some Muslim (and Palestinian) friends for their Id el-Adha holiday, which starts this evening. One of them is an activist in East Jerusalem, and it occured to me to ask him about the conflicting stories. His response was illuminating:

 - Well, Yaacov, since I was on the committe in our neighborhood which was to choose the names, of course I can tell you about it. We chose names from the Muslim tradition and history, as well as names of important places and so on. I can say that the list was accepted in its entirety, and there was no pressure whatsoever to change anything.

- I'm glad to hear it. Care to tell me what's the name of the street you live on, and the street your business is on? [Since I've been there it would put a name to a place, so to speak].

- My street is named after Ghazali, and the second street is called Medina street, after the city in Saudi Arabia where Mohammed is buried.

As a life-long resident of Jerusalem, I'm proud we've now got a street named after Ghazali; the idea that there's a Medina street in jerusalem tickles me no end.

Bloodlands and Europe's Awful History

Over the past year or so I've read two small series of books. One, five or six books on Jerusalem, I may write about separately. Parallel to reading about Jerusalem I've been dabbling in books about Europe's bloodier chapters. First I read Peter H Wilson's The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy, about the ghastly 17th century war which significantly impacted the history of Germany (which didn't exist as a country at the time) and thereby Europe, into the 20th century. It was a fiendishly complicated war, and Wilson's book tries valiantly to make sense of it but doesn't fully succeed. I came away with a general understanding of the war's outline, some of its major stages and famous protagonists, and an appreciation of how horrible it must have been, but could I now give a lecture about it? Not remotely.

I also learned that there were other wars going on before, during and after the 30 Years War. Europe in the 17th century was a nasty sort of place.

Then I read about a chapter of major violence Europe exported elsewhere, with King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, in which Adam Hochschild tells of the large-scale mass murders in the Congo from the late 19th century. Where Wilson was too pedantic and factual for someone like myself who isn't well versed in the historical context, Hochschild is not careful enough. He writes as a journalist, with a fine eye for drama and memorable anecdotes, but his (justified) anger at the story he's telling takes too much of center stage and made me wonder if perhaps the story was more complicated than he made it out to be. In his telling, Leopold King of Belgium sort of single-handedly set in motion an operation of exploiting the treasures of the Congo (especially rubber) while causing the deaths of millions of locals; he was able to do this because he was merely an extreme case of European colonial exploitation; on the other hand, his excesses were so terrible they spawned the first successful case of public relations activism against a malign policy.

Just this afternoon I finished reading Timothy Snyder's magesterial Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, about what he convincingly calls the central event of European history in the first half of the 20th century: the murder by two governments of 14 million people in the area between the Baltic and Black Seas between 1933 and 1945.

His is not the first book I've read on the subject. Hannah Arendt famously wrote about the two totatitarian regimes of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in The Origins of Totalitarianism (HBK) in the early 1950s: a powerful and memorable book, but perhaps not all that convincing. There was too much theory in it (this is the way totalitarian systems work) and not enough history (this is what they did). George Orwell wrote the same book in a quarter of the length in Nineteen Eighty-Four (Penguin Modern Classics); yet I noticed as far back as the 1980s that my students couldn't relate to it seriously. It was simply too outlandish. Eventually it occured to me that perhaps they were right, and it really was too exagerated to be helpful, especially as the actual 1984 had passed, and while the world was still flawed, it wasn't flawed in Orwell's way. Alan Bullock's Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives also failed to deliver: it really did tell two parallel tales, without fusing them in any meaningful way. R. J. Rummel's Death by Government made it clear there was a tale that cried out to be addressed, when he compiled endless horrendous statistics, but he didn't tell it.

It's been a number of years since I checked out of the guild of Holocaust historians, and I make no pretensions to stay updated. Still, when Snyder's book came out in 2010 I heard various voices of discontent: that he had submerged the Nazi murder of the Jews in a broader context and thereby muddied a necessary clarity. Then last year I had a conversation with Yehuda Bauer, who assured me it was an important read even if Snyder's grasp of some of the finer details of the Holocaust wasn't always perfect.

Bauer is right. Some of the details are a bit shaky here and there. Actually, I expect one could quibble about an ocasional detail about the other parts of the story, too, and, more significantly, about some editorial decisions: no 500-page book could cover all the horrendous events, but I had the feeling some chapters and events were covered more exhaustively than others. But it doesn't make any difference. Snyder has written an original book of high-quality scholarship on a topic which already has tens of thousands of books, and he says things that need to be heard.

The story of the bloodlands is about a part of Europe in which two regimes set out to kill millions of people who were in the way. First it was millions of Ukrainians who were starved to death because Stalin's attempt to force the Soviet Union to industrialize had failed and they were cast as the culprits. There were large numbers of Poles who were murdered because they were in the wrong place and Stalin perhaps thought Poland might threaten him. The Nazis intended to starve tens of millions of Slavs, but ended up mostly killing the Jews. The Soviets and the Germans alternated in conquering large tracts of the bloodlands, massacring millions as they went: in a few days in 1944 the Germans killed significantly more Poles and also Belarusians than Bashar Assad has slaughtered his citizens in 18 months, and if you're not Polish or Belarusian you've never even heard of it. For all I know, if you're one you haven't heard of the other.

The mass killing tapered off after the end of WW2, but slowly. Americans danced in Times Square the summer of 1945, but in Eastern Europe a massive series of ethnic cleansings were just getting started. The Nazis had been moving large groups of people all over the map since 1940, in an attempt to clear the area for German settlers. In 1944 the Soviets began a similar process on their own citizens in the Caucasus. In early 1945, however, the largest movements began, in which the Poles were evicted from what was to become Soviet Belarus and Ukraine, and the Germans were evicted from what was to become western Poland and German-free Czechoslovakia. the ethnic cleansing went on for three years, until by the end of 1947 they had run their course and achieved their goals. About half a million civilians died in the process. America and Britain, it seems, colluded in the policy by accepting many of the 7.6 million Germans who were forced into shrunken Germany; at one point Snyder seems to be saying the collusion inclded coordination.

In a riveting chapter near the end of the book Snyder shows how Soviet memory had to eradicate the murder of the Jews so as to maintain a myth of Russian suffering in the Great Patriotic War, even though Russia was mostly beyond the bloodlands, and the myth required subsuming millions of Jews, Poles, Belarusians and Ukrainians into the Soviet narrative and from there into a Russian one.

The book, however, is not simply a litany of boundless human suffering. Snyder suggets we take a second look at all sorts of accepted wisdom. The Holocaust was mostly not about concentration camps, and essentially all its major death sites were in the blood lands, which no Western forces liberated nor even saw; thus, its true symbols should have been Babi Yar and Treblinka, not Bergen Belsen or even Auschwitz. Furthermore, in both the Soviet and the Nazi worlds, being sent to a camp actually held out the possibility of survival, and was the better alternative on offer; since people survived the camps we recoil in horror at their tales, but since people didn't survive the death pits we've largely forgotten.

The Nazis did most of their killing in the context of war - though the civilians being slaughtered were not fighting - but the Soviets mostly killed in times of peace; so the conditioning of war isn't an explanation. Snyder doesn't say the Nazis or Soviets were necessarily responding to the others' murderousness, as Ernst Nolte and other German revisionists did in the 1980s. Rather, he shows how the policies intertwined and enhanced each other, and how they effected the decisions of individuals caught in the malestrom. He also then points out that after 1950, the Soviet system moved on so that Stalin, with all his paranoias, wasn't able to launch yet another Great Terror, this time against the Jews, or at least not with ease, and not before his death put an end to the attempt.

Snyder doesn't minimize the Holocaust. Yet he's quite convincing in saying that the murder of the Jews is better understood in the context of pervasive violence and slaughter than on its own. In November 1944 the Nazis murdered some 42,000 Jews in Operation Erntefest near Lublin. In the first days of the Polish uprising in Warsaw in August 1944 they killed a similar number of Polish civilians by systematically shooting everyone they could find in parts of the town. Is any purpose served by pretending either part of the story didn't happen, or that the one is "more important"?

In Tony Judt's otherwise fine book Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 he writes that after WW1 borders were changed, but after WW2 they weren't, except in Eastern Europe. Well, yes, perhaps, but Snyder's book makes clear that Eastern Europe is where almost the entire war had taken place. Things were bad in France and even in Britain, but both were side-shows. Where most of the war happened, most of the borders were also changed, and to a horrifying degree, the populations too. The idea that borders may not be changed by war was not accepted wisdom in 1945.

Did the ethnic and political clarity reached in 1947 cause the cessation of mega-violence? Snyder never explains how the mass killing could have humanly happened, and he doesn't explain its disappearence, either. He sees his job in uncovering the story. Yet clearly we live in a gentler era, for all its problems. Not a gentle era, but a gentler one. The 18th and 19th centuries were gentler than the 17th, though in faraway Africa things were getting pretty bad by the 1890s. The 20th century was worse than them all, and now we're back in quieter times. It would be nice to be sure that violence doesn't rise and fall on schedules of its own, but Snyder's story isn't reassuring. How was it possible for leaders to order the murder of millions and for large number of their henchmen to commit them, to an extent we can no longer even comprehend; and then desist, to the extent we can no longer even remember? Is not remembering a good thing? A bad thing?

The final pages of any serious book is where the author, having completed his thesis and finished his presentation, will often turn to a reflection or mediation. Snyder's final pages include these searing sentences:

So within the Holocaust, it is perhaps easier to think of 780,863 different people who died at Treblinka: where the three at the end might be Tamara and Itta Willenberg, whose clothes clung together after they were gassed, and Ruth Dorfmann, who was able to cry with the man who cut her hair before she entered the gas chamber. Ot it might be easier to imagine the one person at the end of the 33,761 Jews shot at Babi Yar: Dina Pronicheva's mother, let us say, though in fact every single Jew killed there could be that one, must be that one, is that one.

Each of the 681,692 people shot in Stalin's Great Terror of 1937-1938 had a different life story: the two at the end might be Maria Juriewicz and Stanislaw Wyganowski, the wife and husband reunited "under the ground". Each of the Polish prisoners of war shot by the NKVD in 1940 was in the midst of life. The two at the end might be Dobieslaw Jakubowicz, the father who deamed about his daughter, and Adam Solski, the husband who wrote of his wedding ring on the day that the bullet entered his brain.

The End of Israel?

It's Tisha b'Av, the fast day of mourning for the destroyed Temple in Jerusalem. Three years ago, in 2009, when this blog was still active, I wrote an essay wondering if Israel could be ended. I just went back and re-read it, and it's still as relevant and essentially up to date as it was three years ago. So I'm re-posting.

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The End of Israel?

Tisha'a be'Av, the Ninth day of Av, 2009. Today we mark 1,939 years since the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by mourning and fasting, but also, from noon onwards, with acts of construction such as fixing something around the house. It's hot, we haven't had a sip of water since yesterday, but we're puttering about with a hammer looking for something to fix. Mourning, in Jewish tradition, is as much about looking forward as backward.

There's a growing constituency for the idea that Israel's time is limited. Between 1949 and the early 1970s, Israel's right to exist was openly denied by most of the Arab world, but largely unquestioned elsewhere. Then the narrative changed, and for the next quarter century the growing consensus in the West and in Israel itself was that the existential threat had passed, and if only Israel would accept the Palestinians alongside it, peace would flourish. The Green Line of 1967: if only Israel would retreat to it!

Since summer 2000 this narrative has been steadily losing ground. Most Israelis and their elected leaders have accepted the fundamental thesis if not all its details, but the Palestinians have made clear their claims begin with 1948, not 1967.

So Israel's enemies and harsh critics are dropping the pretence of seeking partition; they are ever more openly striving for an abolition of Zionism. The Jews should have no separate state of their own, say the enemies; the Jews may end up with no state of their own, say the unconfident friends, and all call for Israeli actions which may bring this about.

Here are three random examples, all from the past 24 hours. First, the rabid antisemites at the Guardian's Comment is Free, ranting about the urgent need for a world without Israel. Second, Andrew Sullivan, muddled thinker but very popular blogger, telling A.Jay Adler he can't see Israel reaching its 60th anniversary (which happened back in 2008, but no matter). Finally, Jeffrey Goldberg, journalist and blogger at The Atlantic and a staunch supporter of Israel, fearing that wrong Israeli policies might cause it not to survive. The antisemites hope for Israel's end, Sullivan is beginning to wonder, and Goldberg is beginning to fear; they all agree it's possible.

Is it? How?

*****

There are some seven and a half million people in Israel. 20% are Arabs or Arabic-speaking Druze, with a slowing birthrate. A few percent are Christian non-Arabs, most but not all from the former Soviet Union; culturally they are part of the Hebrew-speaking Jewish society. The rest are Jews; their birthrate is slowly rising, even the non-religious among them. The Jewish community in Israel is the world's largest; at some point soon they will become the majority of the world's Jews, though this will not immediately be obvious because the rest of the Jews are not easy to define nor count. The number of Jews in Israel is roughly the same as the number of Jews murdered during the Shoah. That would be one way to end Israel: by violence.

In December 2001 Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, often touted in the media as a moderate among the Iranian leaders, said in a public speech that Muslims should not fear from a nuclear confrontation with Israel: Israel is small and can be destroyed, the Muslim world is large, and can't. (Translated by MEMRI, but also posted on the website of the Iran Press Service). Of course, such a nuclear conflagration would also kill millions of others – Palestinians, Iranians, Jordanians, Lebanese and Syrians, but some people are willing to pay a steep price to rid the world of Jews. History proves that, just as it proves that when people repeatedly announce their intention to rid the world of Jews, they may actually mean it.

I cannot say how near the Iranians are to being able to destroy Israel with nuclear weapons, nor how many of their leaders agree with Rafsanjani, but a nuclear war could indeed end Israel; moreover, it could be launched by a very small number of people. Should a group of Israel's haters have the nuclear ability, they would not need to hold a national referendum. A few hundred willing technicians and a handful of committed mass murderers would suffice. So it must be prevented.

Sometimes I wonder if perhaps Israel shouldn't warn, that if the day ever comes when the last of her people in some nuclear submarine realize that all is lost, their orders will be to shoot off their remaining missiles at Berlin, London, Paris and Moscow. Simply to focus minds on the cost of having a world without Israel to the nations whose forefathers often gleefully persecuted Jews.

Nuclear Armageddon is logically possible; personally I have decided to live as if it's not going to happen. Elected leaders and a small number of specialists must spend their lives bearing the burden of preparing for the worst; the rest of us can't be expected to do so while living normal lives.

Interestingly, the haters of Israel yearning for its destruction don't believe in the nuclear danger. Should Israel ever take pre-emptive military action the Guardian and its ilk will shrilly denounce Israel for its paranoia; I expect the Andrew Sullivans to join them. There's a tension at the heart of the anti-Israeli discourse, which postulates that Israel should or may go down for its crimes against the Palestinians, while denying the existence of any real danger to it from anyone else. This is the Western corollary of the tension common among many Muslims of denying the Holocaust while regretting that Hitler didn't complete the job.

Short of nuclear war, is there any danger to Israel's existence?

But of course, say those who fear it or yearn for it. Their favorite scenario is that someday America will turn its back on Israel, and Israel will cave in. There are other scenarios, in which British academics and politically enthusiastic activists manage to set in movement a boycott that devastates Israel's economy and brings it to its knees, but without the active encouragement of America it's hard to see how this might work.

For such a scenario a number of things must happen.

First, a significant proportion of American society must greatly sour on Israel. Disliking a particular Israeli leader or policy won't be enough to make them enact anti-Israeli legislation. For that masses of Americans must decide Israel is uniquely evil, to the extent they'd be willing to take highly unusual measures. Since Israel isn't uniquely evil, and actually is far better than many players on the international stage, this means someone will have to inculcate in masses of Americans a dislike of Israel that is irrational – in effect, they'll need to inculcate antisemitism in a society which is largely free of it. If you assume there's a reason America is the first large Western society to cure itself of the malaise of Jew Hatred, this means that reason must be turned back.

For all my affinity to America, I don’t live there and can't say such a thing could never happen. I doubt it, but perhaps I'm naïve. It's certainly a likely scenario in Europe, indeed, it's already happening – though of course, no large European society was ever really free of Jew Hatred.

For the sake of the argument, let's assume America participates in placing sanctions against Israel, demanding Israeli measures Israel otherwise refuses to take – i.e not dismantle settlements, for which an Israeli majority could easily be found, but accept half a million descendants of Palestinian refugees, say, or dismantle the homes of hundreds of thousands of Jews in Jerusalem. That sort of thing. Would international sanctions against Israel succeed, on an issue a majority of Israelis regard as existential?

Sanctions, as a general rule, don't work. The world economy is too porous. People, companies and states will always be found to circumvent them for profit. Lots of European companies are past masters at the deception, but the Chinese don't even pretend. Furthermore, while it's just conceivable that America might roll back its history and re-acquire the taste for Jew Hatred, the Chinese and Indians never had the taste to begin with. The sole example of successful sanctions I'm aware of, against South Africa, never made a dent until the world was suddenly unipolar, in the early 1990s. It's less unipolar now than then, which is why the various sanction schemes now running aren't making much difference.

What if, improbable as it seems, there were to be universal sanctions against Israel, on a matter Israel felt it couldn't compromise on. What then?

I know I wouldn't cave in. I've gone to war, three weeks after my wedding, hoping to be back but knowing I might not. I went anyway, and some of my friends indeed didn't return. I've lived through a period where busses and supermarkets were life threatening environments. I've sent my children off to war – that was probably the hardest. Why would anyone expect me to give in on something essential faced merely with, what, economic hardship? So far as I can tell, I'm no different than most people around me. We would love to have peace with our neighbors, we have absolutely no joy from our war with them, but we're not going to relinquish the essentials we've acquired at tremendous cost these past few generations.

****

It's Tisha beAv. The fast will be over in a few hours, and we'll go back to our normal routines. For today, however, we're mourning the time, two millennia ago, when our forefathers were crushed by the mightiest military power in the world. Bad things can happen to Jews, and do, with consistent regularity. Sanguinity, as in "we've got a vibrant society here, nothing can ever beat us" is not warranted by history. We actually often do get beaten, and perhaps will again. Yet it's late afternoon of Tisha Be'Av, and I suppose I should take out my tools and find something around the house that needs fixing. After all, the generation of Jews who were pulverized by the Romans were also the greatest generation of Jews ever, along with their children and grandchildren. They were the ones who got up from the rubble and re-defined their world so as to get along without the Temple; they created the Mishna; they lay the foundations for the ability to survive millennia of homelessness and disenfranchisement. Why, they even managed to launch a second, even more furious revolt against the Romans. And then they got out from under Hadrian's genocide and kept on going, until the Roman Empire was long since gone, and its successor, and its…

I'm sorry – no, I'm not sorry at all – but whoever is planning our near demise doesn't get it. We're not here because the Colonialists sent us and forgot to take us back.  We're not here as revenge for the Shoah the Europeans enabled the Germans to commit on us. We're not here on the sufferance of the Americans. We're here because we've decided to be here. Short of divine plans, which I don't pretend to be able to explain, our decisions are the most important part of the story, as they always have been.

Yaacov Lozowick
Jerusalem, July 30, 2009

The maps of disappearing Palestine

Anyone who deals with the Israel-Palestine conflict will probably have come across the nasty four-map series purporting to show how Israel is eliminating Palestine step by step. Recently some fellow in the NY area hired space on local billboards to expose them to commuters. I contacted him and asked if he'd be willing to listen to a critique; when he said he would I sent him the following analysis. You can see his brief response - and mine - at the end.

According to what I've read on Mondoweiss, you seem to be of the opinion that the series of four maps showing the disappearing Palestinian presence in what was once Mandatory Palestine are factually accurate. I suggest we take a closer look.

There are various problems with the series, the most obvious being that it compares apples with oranges and also with screwdrivers, meaning that the different maps present different data-sets. Some of the data-sets themselves are inaccurate.

Judging by the picture above, your version of the maps is even more problematic than some of the other versions which are out there. I'll relate to your version as presented on Mondoweiss.

First, the map from 1946. Even standing alone without the series, it's misleading in that it contains two distinct types of information. The outline is of the territory controlled by the British, commonly known as Palestine. Being a map of a political entity, however, the whole thing should be the same color, green in this case, since the entire territory was ruled by the British, the white parts and the green. If one wished to show privately owned land under the sovereignty of the British according to ethnic identity, the green would have been replaced by a hodgepodge of colors. Some of the land was owned by Jews, some by Arabs (today we would call them Palestinians), some by Arab absentee landlords of other nationalities (Lebanese, Syrians, Egyptians and so on), some by European churches – Catholic Protestant, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox and others, and finally, the largest section by far would have been land registered by no-one and thus belonging to the government, i.e the British.

As far as I can see, your version has omitted the Jewish ownership of property in Jerusalem (where there was a majority of Jews), and in various pockets such as the Etzion Block, Neve Yaacov, settlements on the Dead Sea, Hebron, Safed, Naharia and its hinterland, Kfar Darom in Gaza, and so on. But the main problem with this map isn't its omissions of Jewish property, but rather the implication that any land not owned by Jews was "Palestine". Not true. If it's land ownership you're trying to depict then most of the territory was owned by the British government; if it's political sovereignty then the entire area was British.

The second map drops the issue of land ownership, and the series never returns to it. This map is a reasonably accurate depiction of the partition plan adopted by the United Nations on November 29^th 1947, with one glaring omission: the Jerusalem-Bethlehem area, which was very clearly not allocated to either side, but designated as a Corpus Separandum. I emphasize: Jerusalem and Bethlehem. So the cartographer has allocated to a notional Palestine a very important piece of territory which it never had.

Of course, this map never depicted a reality. At the time it was rejected by all the Arab states which had a vote, and also by the local Arabs themselves who did not generally call themselves Palestinians at the time, but we can agree to call them that now. I'm not going to get into the question of who foiled the UN partition plan, but I think we can agree that all sides played their roles; the Jewish Yishuv, Husseini's Palestinian forces, Kaukji's forces, and the Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian, Iraqi and Lebanese forces which participated in fighting in territory which had previously been under British rule.

The third map (1949-1967) is misleading in its own way. It depicts Israel in white, and two other un-named territories in uniform green, the same green the first two maps implied had been Palestinian territory. Of course, this does not conform to the historical reality. The Gaza section was controlled by Egypt, not the Palestinians, and rightfully should be defined as Egyptian-occupied Gaza. The larger green section was controlled by Jordan. Jordan annexed it and gave its population Jordanian citizenship, so I don't know if it was legally occupied or not: if so, it's status was probably similar to its status under Israeli rule after 1967: occupied, with settlers from the occupying country. If it wasn't occupied, then it was part of Jordan. (That's the source of the name "West Bank: the western half of Jordan). Either way, it can't be depicted as Palestine.

You'll also note that this map shies away from dealing with private ownership, which was the theme of the first map. Had it shown private ownership it would have had to note that some of the territory inside Israel was owned by Palestinians, of course, but that no land inside Jordan was accepted as being owned by Jews, even though in some places their ownership had never been rescinded in anything that might resemble due process.

Finally, the fourth map. For the first time in the series, there is now a type of Palestinian rule – in all of Gaza, and on the West Bank. Let's set aside the distinction between Hamas rule in Gaza and PA rule on the West Bank. Less explicable is the cartographer's decision to pretend that the Palestinian writ runs only in Area A, with nary any mention of the larger Area B sections. As far as I understand the history, this map doesn't show a rump area of Palestinian rule, but on the contrary, it shows the emergence, for the first time ever, of a new entity, of and for Palestinians. Not a disappearing Palestine, but an emerging one!

I suppose you may say I'm quibbling, and that in a territory which had a minority of Jews 150 years ago, there has emerged a state of foreigners which has thwarted the emergence of a state of the original population. This, of course, is true. The tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that both sides are right, and both have legitimate claims on the same tiny piece of land. Most of us think that the only way to resolve the conflict is for each side to reconcile itself to the loss of important parts of the territory so that the other side will have room for their national state. As to why this hasn't yet happened, you and I probably disagree. We may also not agree on the details of how the partition ought to be done. Yet those are legitimate issues which need to be resolved in negotiations.

The maps you've published, on the other hand, tell a different story: that Israel is purposefully pushing out the Palestinians so as to have the entire land for itself. This is not true, which explains why in order to make the claim the maps need to be so sloppy with the facts.

Finally, a note on projection. I never cease to be surprised by Americans, Canadians, Australians or New Zealanders who feel they have a moral right to condemn the Jews for migrating to another land and pushing aside the natives. Surely the Jewish case for moving to the land of their history is vastly better than the case of Europeans moving to continents they had no history in. Over time, however, I've begun to notice that such critics of the Jews assume, perhaps subconsciously, that the behavior of the Jews must by necessity follow the pattern of their own forebears: total dismissal of their common humanity with the natives they're pushing aside, followed by near-total dispossession. This, however, is a complex of the critics, and has very little to do with the Jews.

Sincerely,

Yaacov

HC's response:

In any format the bottom line is irrefutable - the Palestinian people have lost most of their homeland.

My response (and the end of our conversation)

And equally irrefutable: the Jews finally have it back.

Now, either they find a way to partition it, or one side will be without. Partition seems to me vastly better, but the possibility that the Jews need to do without is unacceptable

Over at the other place

If you're visiting this blog, you're at the wrong place. This one is mostly dormant, while over here is the one which is sort of active. There's also one here, but I admit that for the moment it's hardly more than a place-holder, sadly.

David Brummer, RIP

David Brummer, author of the Seattle-based Brumspeak blog, has passed away. His most recent post was about Ari Shavit's recent interesting interview with Moshe (Bogie) Yaalon, just two weeks ago.

I never met David in the flesh, but we knew each other thru the blogosphere. If memory serves he first made contact to assure me one could live in the Jewish community in Seattle and have no knowledge of the existence of that town's most famous anti-Zionist blogger. His profile contains this explanation for his blogging:

The genesis for this project stems from my own efforts to reconcile a social worker’s worldview with a post 9/11 world. While dialogue,conciliation,and compromise continue to be necessary ingredients to any long-term resolution,it has become clear that a new paradigm is needed in the battle for decency,pluralism,and basic human rights for all. As a social worker and psychotherapist,I know that the only way to effect real change is to start with an unsparing assessment of where we find ourselves at the starting gate and why. In recent years, there has been an assault on truth which has diminished our ability to understand and define what we are struggling to achieve. These new battles must be fought in the realm of ideas as much as on any battlefield. It is my hope that this Blog can be a vehicle to explore and more fully articulate some of those ideas and worldviews that so preoccupy us today.

His photo fits the image: one of these kind folks who expected the world could be fixed if everyone had enough goodwill, who then came to understand over time that either they wouldn't (all have the goodwill) or couldn't, perhaps because of conflicting agendas. Indeed, that's essentially what his final post says. In politics, at least, he lived long enough to reach maturity; in all other respects, he obviously didn't live long enough.

As the traditional sephardi condolence greeting goes: may his family find solace in the rebuilding of Zion.

As for everybody else, I suggest paying respect by reading his final post.

The blogs of the Israel State Archives

M colleagues and I at the Israel State Archives (ISA) have launched two new blogs, one in English and the other in Hebrew. Once we get into stride we may also start an Arab-language one. The purpose of the blogs is to present interesting documents, many of which will be declassified as we post them.

Any requests for specific documents, or for documents on particular topics? Drop us a note.

Rabbi Eliezer wasn't like Cleopatra

There's a poignant story early in the Nidda tractate we're working our way through these days. Rabbi Eliezer had a big disagreement with some of his peers about an arcane matter of ritual purity. Rabbi Yehoshua forced through his position and it was generally adopted. After the death of Rabbi Eliezer, however, Rabbi Yehoshua changed the ruling to the position of Eliezer. So far, the Mishna. The Gemara, maybe 200 years later or more, picks up the story and asks for an explanation. The one given is that R. Eliezer was too close to the Sadducies ("Shmuti" is the term used), and R. Yehoshua felt that giving him any ground would give credibility to his other positions and that couldn't be allowed. Once he was dead there was no danger, so his positions where correct could now be acknowledged.

Nidda 7b.

Later in the tractate there's another discussion about sources of authority for knowledge and determining Halacha. The duscussion turns on a factual question about how far a feotus develops in its first 40 days. Rabbi Yishmael outlines his position, at which point someone (unnamed) tells him of a case where Cleopatra queen of Alexandria (that's how she's described) carried out an experiment on two of her slaves whom she had sentenced to death. She had them both inseminated, and then executed on the 41st day; on opening their wombs it was fond that both the male and female feotus had recognizable form. R. Yishmael responded sharply: I'm proving my point with a passage from the Bible,and you're bringing proof from the fools?!?

That's a pretty clear position, you'd think: that scholastic investigation trumps empiric investigation. It's also what you'd expect from large swathes of pre-modern scientific investigation. Except that the Gemara then offers a series of possible empiric explanations for Cleopatra's findings: perhaps one of the women was pregnant before she was convicted and inseminated? Or perhaps the guard had a bit of fun of his own, and the true insemination wasn't 41 days before the execution but less? The subtext being that empiric experimentation can be convincing - if your methodology is watertight. A very modern idea, that.

Nidda 30b

This thread is introduced and explained here. And then here's an item from Tablet Magazine which explains why I don't blog anymore.

19th June 1967: Israel's Peace Plan

At the end of the Six Day War Israel controlled wide tracts of territory, and someone had to decide what to do with them. Israel's Cabinet first discussed the question at length on June 18-19^th, a week after the war. The minsters decided the Sinai and Golan would be returned to Egypt and Syria for peace. Jerusalem would not be re-divided. The deliberations about the West Bank were not concluded.

On the 45^th anniversary of the discussion the Israel State Archives has put online the declassified transcript. Some 200 pages long and in Hebrew, the document shows that on many points there was unanimity among Israel's political leaders, while on other matters the differences of opinion were so significant that agreement was not possible. (There is also a five-page English extract, here).

I have summarized the outlines of the discussion for the benefit of hebraically-challenged readers. Non-Hebraically challenged readers are urged to read the document itself, which is rich in drama and nuance.

The immediate context: There were intense post-war diplomatic maneuvers going on at the United Nations. Abba Eban, Israel's Foreign Minister, needed orders.  The deliberations in Jerusalem were not intended as a fundamental policy statement, but rather as a hurried set of directives to Eban. Many of the ministers feared that showing cards or appearing conciliatory would harm Israel's ability to negotiate. Although their deliberations were classified as Top Secret, any number of times they stopped short and refused to say how far they might be willing to go, for fear their positions might leak. (They seem mostly not to have, which is what makes the document so interesting).

The broader context: The ministers had spent the previous five weeks under intense pressure, frantic preparations for war, even more frantic attempts to stave it off by diplomatic means, and – crucial for understanding the present document – the collapse of the internationally sanctioned framework for Israeli-Egyptian co-existence put in place in 1956 when Israel had been forced hurriedly out of the Sinai. Then there had been the week of war itself. Rather than suffering destruction Israel had won an astonishing victory. Yet the ministers seem to have expected the great powers to re-apply the pressure of 1956. The BBC, as they repeatedly mentioned, had already begun to report about harsh Israeli measures in Jerusalem's Old City, and they expected growing international impatience. Most of them thought Israel's forces would be back behind the previous lines within two months.   

Ideologically they were a diverse bunch: this was a National Unity government, with representatives from four socialist parties, two liberal ones, one orthodox party and a nationalist one. They were all Zionists. They were all men. (Golda Meir, their next leader, was not in the government). None were young: Moshe Dayan, at 52, and Yigal Allon at 49 were the only ones not born before WW1. Some had been adults before that war, and all were adults before WW2. All had lived their lives in a world where wars changed borders and moved populations. None had ever met an NGO – the very concept lay decades in the future – and they had no trust in the United Nations even as they recognized it as an important international forum.

Yet while their perspective was different than ours, the positions they staked were mostly cool-headed – the parts they agreed on, and the parts they didn't. They all hoped there would be no more wars. They intended the new conditions to be leveraged into a stable and just coexistence with the Arab world. They assumed the fate of the Arab refugees from 1948 was the irritant that was motivating the conflict and that it could now be resolved.

They implicitly accepted that land could not permanently be taken from sovereign nations by act of war. So they all accepted that the Egyptian Sinai and Syrian Golan would eventually be returned to their owners. Syrian-born Eliyahu Sasson, one of only two non-Ashkenazi ministers and the only one who explicitly grounded his position in a life-long acquaintance with Arab culture, insisted that since no Arab government would make peace with Israel, the Golan and Sinai should be returned for something less than full diplomatic peace. Stringent demilitarization and freedom of Israeli shipping should be enough. Most of his colleagues didn't want to be so pessimistic, but interestingly, Menachem Begin agreed. When in 1978 he agreed to evacuate Israeli forces from the entire Sinai, pundits the world over hailed his flexibility and willingness to change course. Well: read the transcript and you'll see that Begin actually got more in 1978 than he had expected in 1967. In 1967 he was willing to evacuate the Sinai for less than full diplomatic recognition and peace.

In the event, the resolution at the end of the meeting was that both areas would be held until peace was agreed. The West Bank and Gaza were another matter, however.

Sometime in the 1980s the general perception of the conflict changed. No longer seen as Arab rejection of a Jewish State, the conflict was understood as a conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, which the Arab world would maintain only until the two central protagonists reached an accommodation. Since the Israelis and Palestinians have not yet reached accommodation this proposition has never been tested, a fact which contributes to its explanatory power. 1967, however, was before the 1980s, and participants and observers the world over saw the conflict as an Arab-Jewish conflict, with the local Arabs playing a subordinate role; they were not generally referred to as Palestinians.

I know this is hard to believe, but it's true.

This dissonance of historical perspectives is essential to understanding the discussion about the future of the territories. Israel's entire Cabinet in 1967 agreed that Egypt and Jordan had no more claim to Gaza and the West Bank than Israel did, as all three had conquered them through war; since Israel was now in possession it had superior claim. There were serious disagreements, however, as to what that meant. Many ministers were wary of returning the area to King Hussein, assuming that his long-term chances of survival were not good and whoever overthrew him wouldn't respect his commitments. (Hussein died on the throne in 1999 and his son is still there. Forecasting the future is tricky).

Many of the speakers felt the previous 20 years had shown there had to be Israeli forces on the River Jordan, but refused to countenance Israeli control over the large number of Arabs on the West Bank. Minister of Justice Ya'acov Shimshon Shapira was implacable on the matter of citizenship. Israel can give citizenship to the Arabs it controls or it can stop controlling them, but there's no third way. Most of his colleagues accepted this. Some thought the entire area should be handed back to Hussein, while a few  thought it could be split along demographic lines, with the sparsely populated Jordan valley under Israeli control but the crowded mountain area to Hussein. A number of speakers so disliked the thought of handing territories to Hussein, that they suggested finding some local Arabs to hand it over to – what would later be called the two-state solution. Menachem Begin was the only speaker who demanded the entire area remain part of Israel, but even he didn't know what to do with the local Arabs, suggesting merely that the question be revisited in "6 or 7 years". Yigal Allon presented the first outline of the plan that would later bear his name: the Jordan Valley and the Hebron area should be annexed to Israel while the populous northern part of the West Bank should be either returned to Hussein or somehow handed to the locals. He was the only speaker who explicitly recommended creating Israeli settlements; even Begin didn't go that far. Levi Eshkol sardonically summed up the diversity of opinions: You do realize you're playing chess with yourselves, don't you?

Jerusalem: everyone in the room agreed Jerusalem must remain united in Israeli hands, even if this meant Hussein would refuse to reach an agreement which would take the Arab population off Israel's hands in return for some sort of peace. The lines of the city had not yet been drawn, and the official decision would be taken later that month, but those were (important) technicalities. Left to right, atheists to believers, no-one had any doubts. If there was any apprehension regarding Jerusalem, it was that the Christian world would refuse to countenance Jewish control of the city and would relaunch the demand for internationalizing the city.

Gaza: Seen from our perspective, the deliberations about Gaza were the strangest. As with the West Bank, no-one regarded Gaza as Egyptian. Yet nor did anyone see it as part of a future Palestinian State, since no-one, anywhere, including at the UN, had such a State in mind. So everyone agreed that Gaza must be annexed to Israel. Many of the speakers accepted this to mean the Gazan populace would be given Israeli citizenship, but others thought those among them living in refugee camps could perhaps be resettled: to the West Bank (and thus handed to Hussein or whoever); to the El Arish area of the northern Sinai, or perhaps even to other Arab countries. Eshkol shot down all these proposals. Why do we need Gaza and its population, he asked. There's no water in El Arish, you can't settle them in the mostly empty Jordan Valley and dream of holding on to it simultaneously, no far-flung Arab country will even give you the time of day. He speculated, rather wistfully, that if a general agreement with the Arab world could be achieved perhaps the Lebanese might be willing to pipe water down to the West Bank to help settle the refugees, but by the time the meeting moved to concrete proposals he had dropped that idea. No better one appeared, and the Gaza part of the discussion sort of petered out.

The Americans were informed of Israel's positions. It is not known if they relayed them to any Arab leaders. In September the Arab leaders convened in Khartoum and rejected any possibility of peace with Israel. The paradigm Israel's leaders thought they were operating in was irrelevant, and the reality developed in directions they hadn't foreseen. But that's a story for another day.

Thank God I don't blog anymore!

Because if I did still blog, I'd have to spend this entire morning deleting everything I'd written this past month, and hacking into any other blogs or websites which had quoted me to scrub any mention they'd made; and I'd be hoping no-one read a word I'd said, and that the few who had, would be struck by a miraculous bolt of amnesia that would erase any memory of all the wise and learned nonesense I had pronounced. Because every single word of what I would have written is now demonstrably false.

Whew!!!

Vindication for (mostly) desisting from blogging

As I wrote last summer, I stopped blogging when I was appointed Israel's State Archivist. Being a high civil servant is not compatible with running a political blog, and I had decided the potential value of confronting the challenges of documenting the activities of Israel's government was the more important of the two.

Eight months into the new job, this decision is being vindicated. Two weeks ago the government decided to adopt our proposal for a basic reform in the way the administration manages its digital documentation, which is to say, all its documentation. In essence, this will mean re-inventing the State Archives, with significant implications further afield.

When I came to the job I found that for various reasons, the Finance Ministry had taken upon itself to set up a large and very professional storage center for paper documentation, near the northern Negev town of Arad. Alas, the project was going to cost more than the original plan had foreseen. This give me an opening, in which my staff and I indicated that there were parts of the project which could be reduced (and thus made cheaper) if in return funds would be freed to deal with digital aspects which had not been addressed; dealing with the digital aspects would allow us to make the trade offs in the Negev storage installation. It may come as a surprise, but apparently when one makes sensible suggestions within the government, reasonable people will listen and perhaps be convinced.

The proposal adopted by the government calls for a number of major changes.
1. We're going to join other government agencies in creating document-management systems in the government agencies so that their documentation will be tagged before creation according to the span of time until it can be deleted - or sent to the archives for permanent storage.
2. We're going to scan very large quantities of existing paper documentation, so as to make it digitally accessible.
3. We're going to figure out how to salvage what can be salvaged from the servers of the government agencies;
4. We're going to have to figure out how to fundamentally accelerate the de-classification of the country's documentation, most of which is still classified;
5. And we're expected to develop a range of tools to make the documentation easily accessible and useful to anyone with an interest in the story of the State of Israel, not just professional researchers.

And we're going to build that storage installation in Arad and move the paper documentation down there. And a few other things, along the way: once we're busy, why not add another few tasks?

So now I'm going offline again, and the blogging will mostly stop, with a rare exception here or there. I remind you that in the upper left corner I"ve made three pages with collections of stuff I recommend reading, about Jerusalem, war and peace in the Mideast, and Jewish life and life in Israel.

Mondoweiss: A Vipers' Nest of Antisemites

While not blogging anymore, I still do dabble in some of the old observation of the online pro-and-con Israel scene. Mondoweiss has been of particular interest. Set up about 8 years ago by two American Jews, Philip Wiess and Adam Horowitz, to object to the policies of the Bush Administration, it has transformed over time to one of the main homes of the stridently anti-Israel camp.

By my lights, the Jews have the right (like everyone else) to define themselves and their needs, and they've defined themselves as a nation with the need for a nation-state in Israel. Not all Jews, of course, but a very large majority, and that's enough. Ergo, anyone who rejects the Jews' rights to define themselves and to insist on having a nation-state, is antisemitic (though I'm willing to quibble about the possibility of the Palestinians rejecting Israel without being antisemitic - but only they). Seen that way, Mondoweiss is clearly antisemitic, since its tone and over-arching theme is rejection of Zionism and Israel. The more one looks, however, the worse the picture becomes. Someday, a century or two from now, when someone sits down to write the history of Jew-hatred in the early 21st century, Mondoweiss will be a fine case study, worthy of a full section.

The site offers six or ten posts a day. Weiss writes often, Horowitz rarely (he apparently runs their Twitter account which I don't follow). There's a clutch of other regular writers, and a larger group of people who will appear there occasionally; some of them run their own sites or publish elsewhere and are cross-posted at Mondoweiss. The total number of people who have ever posted there is probably a few hundred. There are many dozens of active commenters. Interestingly, many of those who've offered any information about themselves are retirees; the number of students seems much smaller than you'd expect. There are some Canadians Germans and Aussies, but most commenters seem to be Americans. Ah, and then there are the Israelis: some anarchists and extreme far-left ones, and some mainstream Israelis who try to argue with the locals. The latter tend not to stay too long, since their mission is wholly futile: no-one is in the Mondoweiss community to discuss. Their goal is quite different.

The point of Mondoweiss is to get rid of Israel. The site is of course an avid supporter of BDS. While occasional lip-service is given to the two-state solution as a way to resolve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, any regular reader will understand this is not something to strive for, as it won't resolve the basic injustice of Israel's existence. Moreover, the conceit of the blog is that it is actively promoting its goal, by spreading the truth about Israel, and slowly chipping away at the stranglehold the Zionists have on the media and public discourse. Weiss writes regularly with considerable excitement about how the public discourse is changing; he's always on the outlook for new converts to his positions or anything near them, and to read him you'd think there's a sea-change underway so that soon Israel will lose its support in America, and soon thereafter, shorn of its only ally, it will crumble away. The Israelis, aware of the precariousness of their enterprise, are eternally bolstering their control of the discourse, because without it they're lost; but they're losing it anyway because the only decent way to understand the Middle East is to hate Israel and this decency is already proving itself more powerful than the Zionist tricks to keep it at bay.

You recognize the old-fashioned antisemitic trope about the Jews who pull the strings behind the facade which hides reality. Even as I write this Weiss has posted about the 35-year friendship between Mitt Romney and Binyamin Netanyahu; I don't see how his piece can be read except as part of a conspiracy theory. Truly frightening, those Zionists, surrounding a future potential American president with their agents when he was only in his 20s.

Being against the existence of Israel isn't particularly exceptional. One of the interesting things about Mondoweiss is the tremendous amount of work they invest in their animosity. I happen to think the Saudi regime is ghastly, but I'd never spend hours every day digging up dirt on it. The Mondoweiss people do that, first by avidly seeking any remotely negative story about Israel, then by seeking the ones which aren't true, then by damning anyone who casts doubt with terms such as hasbarists, Ziobots (I assume these are part Zionists and part robots), and of course genocidists. In order to collect all that dirt they've got to pass by the occasional positive story too, but these never get linked to or even alluded to unless to demonstrate how yet another journalist has succumbed to the threat of Zionist censorship. The result is a depiction of reality which has at best a glancing relationship with the real world, but these folks aren't interested in the real world. In their world, Zionists are easily the worst group of humans, they purportedly hate all Palestinians, they enforce the most cruel policies possibly on them, they steal from-, degrade and kill Palestinians, on a daily basis. You read Mondoweiss regularly and the force of hatred towards Zionists becomes overpowering: no normal decent person could have anything but the deepest contempt for such a gang of deceitful violent criminals. As a commentor named "American" recently wrote:

The thing about the zionist is they attack even those who help them. They turned on England, calling it “worse than Hitler’ because England tried to uphold the immigration quotas agreed to. They demonize the UN that created their state for them.
Everyone, without exception, who has ever had anything to do them has regretted it….the US will too in the end. They are vipers who need to be decapitated.

Comments at Mondoweiss are moderated, so that one could have been deleted - but wasn't. And why would it be? It merely states what is obvious to the locals. Any attempt to argue with them will either be blocked by the same moderators, or derisively laughed off the screen. If a sane commenter has made a reasonable point which gets past the moderators, the locals will dig up a dozen spurious links to disprove it: the value of links being not their veracity, or the trustworthiness of their sources, but their usefulness to the party line. Links which are not useful - you guessed it: they're written off as hasbara lies.

Interestingly, the Mondoweiss community not only has no interest in the lives of real Israelis, it also has no interest in the lives of real Palestinians. Their point is to hate Israel and damn it, no matter what; the possibility that there are Palestinians who live alongside Israelis, interact with them, and even could imagine living with them in peace, is a thought never contemplated. I have Palestinian staff members, colleagues and friends; none of them could remotely fit into the Mondoweiss world. The methodology also has the odd result that according to Mondoweiss, Israelis and Palestinians are all boring cardboard figures, with none of the complexities, complications, shades of grey, frustrations and successes of real people. The very parts of the human story which make it worth following are all dropped, to be replaced by detestation (towards Israelis) and patronizing pity (towards Palestinians).

I'll complete this very partial list of malicious methodology with two links from the Resources page of the website, the part where the editors have collected the basics about their topic. Obviously, they've got a paragraph about the so-called Dalet Plan, which in the mythology of Israel's enemies was the 1948 plan to expel the Palestinians, and which serious scholarship has long since demonstrated was a limited tactical military move formulated in March 1948 in response to developments in an ongoing war which the Arabs had launched:

Khalidi, Walid, "Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies p14.
Drafted by members of the Haganah under the guidance of David Ben-Gurion, and carried out by Israeli para-military groups during 1947-8, Plan Dalet is a military blueprint for the Palestinian Nakba. The document emphasizes the need to secure territory both inside and outside of the 1947 Partition Plan, and provides detailed instructions for the forcible transfer of the Palestinian population, establishing the conditions for a Jewish national state.

You'd expect a resource section explaining a basic Israeli document to link, you know, to an Israeli document, but if you follow the link behind that explanation you'll reach an Arab website with an English version; I searched in vain for anything at all about the Dalet Plan, dishonest or honest.

Then there's an item on their list of resources called "Creating 'unrecognized' villages and home demolitions":

Planning and Building Law 1965, 5725—1965." Knesset 14 July 1965.
The 1965 Planning and Building Law is a set of codes, including legal restrictions to Palestinians on building permits, and land use. The law allows for the Israeli government to transfer privately owned Palestinian land to the state, and requires any unpermitted building to be demolished at the owners’ expense.   All current home demolitions in both Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories are carried out under the tenets of this law.

This paragraph actually does have a link to an (English version) of an Israeli law, so it looks convincing. Unless you actually look at the law, as I did. It's 67 pages long, and never remotely says what Mondoweiss says it does. As a matter of fact, the very word Palestinian never appears, nor does the word Arab, nor Minority (terms the sneaky Israeli legislators might have used to hide their true intentions). The word Palestine appears only in the footnotes, citing some British laws from before 1948.

Summary: There may be tens of thousands of loyal Mondoweiss readers - an unimportant demographic, but an interesting sociological and historical group. There is no possibility for discourse between them and us, only invective from their side, and head-shaking from ours. Yet they fit comfortably into ancient traditions of Jew-hatred, and thus their potential significance shouldn't be shrugged off. It's important to keep in mind that the free and pluralistic society of the West also harbors such ugly forms of thought.

A Land of Brutal Beauty, Humanity and Brutality

The other day the Guardian published a long, wandering, and not particularly interesting article about what they call "non-monogamus marriage", or what used to be called "open marriage". You know the Guardian approves of something when it doesn't lace its paragraphs with spurious references to "observers say this is an awful thing", as they always do when writing about Israel - so clearly the editorial line is that non-monogamus-thingies are Good Things.

When writing about faraway places like Pakistan and Afghanistan, however, the Guardian generally prefers the noble savages to the soldiers from America (or Britain). Which is a bit odd, if you ever ask yourself what the noble savages might have to say about a culture which spawns open partnerships. If you're having trouble with your pondering, I warmly recommend a short and powerful new book, The Wandering Falcon, by Jamil Ahmad.


It's actually not such a new book. Mr. Ahmad, born in 1930, was a high-ish Pakistani civil servant who spent much of his time in the less tamed parts of Pakistan, before ending up at the Pakistani embassy in Kabul. At some point he wrote a series of short stories about the people among whom he was spending his life, and put them in his drawer. Only recently someone convinced him they were worthy of being published - and how very right they were.

Have you ever read Frank Herbert's  Dune books? Well, Ahmad's is a book about the real, original. A society which ekes out a subsistence existence in a harsh desert world. Its members live by a harsh code of honor, which for all I know may help them cope with the severity of life, though I rather doubt it. You read the codes of the Torah, writen thousands of years ago for a society which also had its harsh elements, and you understand that violence is something which needs to be tamed, not only channelled. Still, the power of Ahmad's book is that he describes his wandering tribespeople, without judging them, and he does so from their own persepctive or something close to it. Some parts of his book, the first chapter in particular, are very poignant, and they're all deeply human.

Read it, and see if you can find any connection to the world of the Guardian. I wasn't able to.

Israel at the End of 2011: Better than Ever

No, this blog is still dormant, as explained here. However, I still post every now and then, so the Google overlords won't delete the entire blog for having gone entirely silent. The end of 2011 is a good moment to reflect on Israel's condition, which, if you believe much of the media, is catastrophic. Growing numbers of folks dislike us, we're told, our isolation is growing ever more dire, our democracy is crumbling, we're forcing women into second-class status, America's Jews are turning away in growing disgust, and so on and on and on...

Well, no.

Back in my blogging days I used to propose three criteria for measuring the long-term robustness of Israel. So let's start with them:

Economics: While the European economy enters recession if not worse, and the American economy is in a protracted funk, the Israeli economy continutes to boom. Here, check it out at the Economist website, which tells that GDP is growing higher in Israel than in any European country, the US, and lots of other places too. Unemployment, you might be interested to hear, at 5.6%, is not only lower than in most countries, it's at its lowest in Israel for decades and by some estiamtes, the lowest ever. If things stay this way until the next elections there will be no need to speculate on how crazy the Israeli voters have become to re-elect that supposedly universally hated government: any government running for re-election with an economy like this would stand a fine chance of re-election.

The BDS campaign to destroy Israel is not obviously working, apparently.

Culture: is Jewish culture thriving, stagnating or declining in Israel? This is a rhetorical question. There's no measure I can think of by which to claim there's any stagnation or decline. It has been thousands of years since the Jews have had such a broad-based cultural creativity, which isn't surprising if you remind yourself that for the first time in millennia there are millions of Jews living in their language in their own society (and their own land).

How does cultural creativity fit into disappearing freedom of thought, you ask? It doesn't. The disappearing freedom and democracy exist only in the minds of a certain section of Israeli society and the multitudes of ignorant foreign reporters and politicians who avidly agree with them whenever they criticise Israel. Apart from them, it's not happening. There's a racuous debate about all sorts of things, of course, but in other countries that would be called democracy, not facism.

Demography: here the question is simple: are there more Jews in Israel today than a year ago. Of course there are. In an aside, there are growing indications that the demographic pendulum has peaked and is swinging back in favor of the Jews over Palestinians, whose birthrate is either declining or tumbling, depending on the data-sets one uses. (Here, for example).

Terrorism is mostly dormant, by Israeli standards. 2011 was one of the most peaceful years Israel has had since 1947. (The Palestinians had a rather peaceful year, too, since there's some correlation between the two).

The internal clash with the Haredi sections of society seems to be moving in two contradictory directions. The crazies are growing ever more crazy; but there's a long-term trend in which ever-growing numbers of Haredi are slowly acquiring modern education and entering the labor market; some thousands of young Haredi men are even finding their way into special programs in the IDF. I can't say which trend will ultimately be more important, but I feel confident in hoping for the better outcome.

The Arab revolutions seem likely to create ever more outlandish-looking societies. I don't see how normal Westerners (as distinct from the chattering classes) will look at them in 5, 10, or 15 years, and then look at us, and not prefer us.

You'll hear endless punditry about how bad off Israel's Arab citizens are. Well. The reality I see is that growing numbers of them are integrating into mainstream society. I have Israeli Arabs working under me, as well as alongside me, and they are just regular folks and treated as such. I see Arabs - Israeli citizens or East-Jerusalem permanent residents - everywhere: in markets, at the university, in professional groups, in hospitals, at universitities, and so on. Also in the hallways of the government ministries and even in classified installations.

Whinch brings me to my final point. I stopped blogging when I joined the civil service, and went behind a wall of security clearance and the need to shut up about it. Indeed, I won't report on what cannot be reported. But I will say that what I find there is very heartening. Alongside the usual, and universal, red-tape and mediocracy, there are large numbers of highly talented Israelis purposefully going about their jobs of making this a better country, stronger, more successful, better able to withstand whatever gets thrown at it.

Yes, there are lots of folks out there who dislike us, but that's always been so. These days we don't have to give them too much attention. Seen historically, 2011 was probably one of the best years in millennia of Jewish history.