Settlements in Jerusalem: Listing the Myths

As I've said, being a high-ranking civl servant means not publicly writing on political matters. Yet the intensity of misinformation being peddled these days about Jerusalem, along with the fact that there doesn't seem to be a large Israeli consistuency supporting the division of the city, have encouraged me to write this post.

My position on settlements in general on the West Bank is well-known to anyone who has followed my writing, online or other, and I'm not going to talk about it. Before focusing on Jerusalem, however, here's a comment about E1, which is beyond the line Israel annexed in 1967. About 10 years ago I heard a lecture by Daniel Seidmann, founder of Terrestrial Jerusalem. I expect Danny may regret I was listening carefully that day, but I was, and he made an interesting point: When it comes to E1, he said, the Israelis and Palestinians are competing to see who gets the balloon and who gets the string. Jewish West Jerusalem, Maaleh Adumim, Rammallah and Bethlehem are all there to stay. Whoever ends up controlling E1 will have a comfortable land corridor between their two balloons while the other side will be left with a road through the other's territory: a string. If Israel controls E1, the Palestinians will have a north-south road through it; if the Palestinians own E1, the Israelis will have an east-west road through it.

The claim whereby Israeli ownership of E1 would make for a truncated and thus non-viable Palestinian state on the West Bank ought to be about as convincing as saying a physical barrier between Manhattan and Brooklyn and New Jersey makes Manhattan non-viable.

To be clear: I'm not arguing for or against Israeli construction on E1. I'm merely pointing out that much of the verbiage on the topic is misleading.

So let's focus on Jerusalem, and on the internationally accepted demand that it be divided.

1. It won't work. Or perhaps I should say: It. Will. Never. Work. I've written about this exhaustively, with examples, maps, pictures, films and data.

2. There's a profound fallacy at the heart of the case for division. As governments pundits activists and ignoramusi are all busy telling us this week, without a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem there can be no independent Palestine. I'm not going to get into the epistomological reasons for their saying so, but it does seem worthwhile to ask: How do you know? And why should it be so? There are more than 4 million Palestinians on the WB and in Gaza, and about 300,000 in East Jerusalem. The 90-plus percent can't be sovereign if the 8 percent don't join them?

3. True, the Palestinians say they'll never accept a state which doesn't include Jerusalem. But then it should be clear: the issue is not that the Israelis refuse to allow a Palestinian State to be created, but rather that the Palestinians aren't willing to accept it unless on their terms.

4. Suppose both sides had agreed on all other matters, and peace or war depended solely on the question of Jerusalem. How is it logical to say that an Israeli refusal to accept a division of the city prevents peace, while a Palestinian refusal to forgo a division doesn't equally prevent peace? The expectation is that Israel can be sovereign without the heart of Jerusalem, the so-called Holy Basin, but Palestine can't? How so?

5. Finally, let's assume for a moment, against all logic, that Israeli construction in Jerusalem really will forever prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. At the moment the construction isn't yet happening. It may begin in a year, or more, and it may be completed and people will move into their new homes in, say, three years. Doesn't that mean that all Israel is doing now is to define a future date, three years hence, when Israeli construction will have thwarted the creation of Palestine? There will be no bulldozers moving in January 2013, nor in June, nor, I expect, in January 2014. So if the Palestinians are so desperate for a state, what they need to do is come to the negotiating table RIGHT NOW and stay there until an agreement is reached. If in two solid years of intensive negotiations peace cannot be achieved, then that failure will be the reason there's no peace, not any bureaucratic decision to enable the future construction of homes for Jews in Jerusalem.

It's even conceivable that the prevention of peace might have something to do with Palestinian positions and actions, not only Israeli ones.

Home-made Rockets

Yesterday I wrote that I'm back to blogging-retirement, but as a parting image: next time someone tells you about the home-made rockets Hamas shoots at Israel, show them this image, made by Israeli photographar Matanya Chakhmon in Ofakim this week.

Thanksgiving

Operation Pillar of  Cloud, as it was called in Hebrew, is over. At the end of this blogpost I'll shut down once more. Before signing off, however, here's an immediate summary of what I saw. I'm not going to say what will happen next because I don't know, and, being the civil servant I am, I'll do my best to stay away from Israeli politics.

So far as I can tell, many Israelis are angry today. They saw the IDF inflicting considerable pain and damage on Hamas without destroying it, and they wished us to unleash the power of the ground forces to break Hamas and leave no doubt who won. I've repeatedly heard the refrain, since yesterday afternoon, "What have we achieved? In a year or two or three we'll just be back in the exact same situation? So why not break Hamas now? Why Wait?"

This may well prove true; it's at least as plausible as not that the next round really isn't more than a few years off. On the other hand, it's hard to see the scenario in which our being more destructive now would prevent the exact same next round. The urge to harm us isn't going away, and where there's a will there's a way. The question What the Gazans think they're doing, what they possibly hope to achieve by their actions, isn't easy to answer, and I don't pretend to know. It certainly doesn't look like anything rational. It's not as if anything they might throw at us will make us go away.

Yet - with all the care I need to take in pronouncing on internal political matters -  I don't think the operation was a failure at all. Not miltarily, not morally, not in the media or international relations, and not in leadership.

First, the military and moral issues.

1. Iron Dome is magnificant! Not perfect, sadly, but very very good. And it will get better. And we owe thanks to the Americans who have been financing much of it.

2. Preparedness: The number of layers of society which need to be prepared for such an onslaught on civilians is large, from the police and health services to the kindergaten teachers and the baby-sitters, not to mention the civilians themselves. Israel has just demonstrated that it has this preparedness, and the resilience and determination which underly it.

3. The air force (IAF) carried out more than 1,500 attacks, in what is often described, with a bit of hyperbole, as one of the world's most crowded areas. (Hyperbole because it's crowded, yes, but Manhattan and Mumbai are both more crowded. Cairo, too). In 1,500 sorties, something like 150 Gazans were killed. Some, tragically, were innocent bystanders, but many weren't. One way or another, the numbers mean one person killed for every ten attacks. At most, since some of the casualties were probably killed by more than 100 Hamas rockets which fell on Hamas civilians.

This is a mind-boggling statistic. I dare anyone to find another army in the world which can do that. As a matter of fact, any army in the history of mankind.

4. The extremely limited amount of collateral damage wasn't happenstance. It was the result of lots of hard work:
4.1. Detailled intelligence gathering and data-crunching.
4.2. Aquisition of weapons systems and ordinance that fit the decision.
4.3. Training. Lots of it.
4.4. Developing and honing procedures. The fact that the operator of a drone has the technical ability to stop an imminent attack because a civilians just wandered into the frame doesn't mean the attack will indeed be aborted. There have to be procedures, worked out and practiced in advance.

The heart of the matter is that there needs to be a decision, and it needs to be understood and accepted by everyone in the system, from the bean-counters authorising the significant expense to the young woman with her finger on the button. The decision has to be made from top to bottom. Or, to put this into more precise language: Israel killed so few Gazans in spite of weilding such awesome power, because Israeli society decided to do it that way. Is Israel the most moral society ever to be at war? I don't know. But it's very high in a very small league.

(I can hear the haters screaming: "So few!??! Palestinian lives aren't important for you!!! You're a racist, and a monster!" Let them froth at the mouth. Facts remain facts even if you really don't like them).

Second, the media. Look, the BBC can't help itself, and the Guardian neither. Their animosity towards Israel is so deap-seated and partially even subconscious they can't tell the story in a balanced way. Not capable.

Yet much of the media actually told it essentially as it is. The howls of rage over at Mondoweiss, a top purveyor of Jew-hatred, as they saw Jodi Rudoren of the New York Times trying to be professional, was a pleasure to see. So far as I could see Rudoren hasn't yet picked up her Elders of Zion membership card, but to hear the invective hurled at her was a fine demonstration of how far gone the true haters are, and how reasonable a professional journalist will be if allowed to see the events and report on them. Hamas was exerting itself with all its sinews to kill Israeli civilians, and Israeli soldiers were exerting themselves not to kill Palestinian civilians. This stark reality often did come accross in much of the reportage. (Not all, of course).

Then there were the social media. Israel seems to have grasped the concept of talking to people directly, not through the media. A week ago the IDF had 70,000 followers on twitter; by last night there were more than 200,000. Some will now wander away, but there will remain a large number who don't need the BBC to hear Israel's version of events (which will never be supplied by the BBC anyway). Having suceeded once, Israel will now put thought, effort and funds into improving its capabilites on this battlefield, too. Contrary to the moans of many despairing supporters, Israel isn't obviously losing the ability to tell its version of events.

International relations: they played out well, don't you think? If there was any light between the Israeli and American governments, I didn't see it. William Hague, a British fellow not know for giving pro-Zionist speeches, was supportive. His German counterpart traveled over to say Israel has a right to defend itself and Hamas has no right to be shooting at Israeli civilains. The UN passed no resolutions - and now won't set up any new version of the Goldstone Commission, either.

None of this happened by accident. Israel doesn't get international support by default, and certainly not at time of war. Just as with the the military and media aspects, someone worked hard in advance to achieve the result. Syrian bestiality helped, as did blatant Hamas ciminality, but the diplomats have apparently been earning their upkeep by the sweat of their luggage.

Egyptian President Morsi: now there's a pleasant surprise! I doubt he's about to join Likud, but no-one's asking him to. (Update: Hours after I wrote this Morsi annointed hiself Dictator of Egypt. It's an odd world).

One final comment in this section: Yes, violence works. No, violence can't solve many of the world's problems. But faced with a gang of armed thugs suh as rules Gaza, the careful appliance of violence is not only legitimate, it can be an important tool for making things better, even if only as one tool among others, and even if only for a while.

Leadership: We've got an election coming up so I"m going to be very sparse in words. Yet one must say that all the above are the result, along other things, of leadership. I do recommend people go back and read what's been said about Israel's leaders in recent years, and then see if the descriptions fit the actions we've just seen; if these actions were predictable given the descriptions.

One more comment about leadership. Important Israeli pundits and activists said, in 2006 and 2009, that Israel's initial air attacks against Hezballah and Hamas were legitimate, but the subsequent decision to keep on going and throw in ground forces was wrong. OK. So this time we listened to their advice. One hopes this will be duly noted, though it probably won't. More important: the theses has been put to test. Now we'll see if it proves itself.

Enough. As I expalined last year when I stopped blogging, I have made a decision to desist from public punditry about Israel in return for the opportunity to make some changes real changes. To do, rather than to talk. In the past year my colleages and I have set out on the road to dramatially altering the way Israel deals with it's documentation. If we succeed at what we're currently beginning, by the end of the decade Israel will be a world leader in proccessing its documentation: in creating it, appraising it, preserving it, cataloguing and declassifying it, and offering it to its owners, the public. Given the size and complexity of the challenge, I don't expect this to be visible before 2015 at the earliest, but - rather like preparing for war, actually - impressive results require years of hard preparatory work. So I thank the thousands of readers who have come by this past week, and this blog will now return to it's semi-dormant condition, with perhaps a post once every month or three. Although, come to think of it, you're welcome to follow the archives' blogs (Hebrew, and English). We're a bit proud of them and feel they're worth taking a peek. They're active most days of the week but not on the weekends.

Finally, I wish a happy Thanksgiving to those of you who'll be celebrating this evening. I can easily empathize with a nation giving thanks for all that is worthy of celebration.

Keeping Track

A few days ago Raphael Magarick wrote a piece at Open Zion about seeing Israel's conflict with the Palestinians from Israel and from America. Apparently he's here right now (or was last week), and it's his first war here, and as he ran to take shelter in Tel Aviv one day he pondered wether the experience placed him better than previously to have an opinion. Not surprisingly he answered himself that no, it didn't. On the contrary, for all the immediacy of being here and not seven time-zones away, he felt the experience was more likely to befuddle his clarity of thought; thus, having an opnion about the conflict from New York is actually more useful and clear-sighted than having one from the place the opinions are all about.

It's an old argument, and isn't going to go away anytime soon.

The obvious response is of course that it's not a matter of distance-induced clarity, but rather of proximity-induced destiny: Bad decisions will cost the lives of the subjective locals, not the cool-headed foreigners. But that's also a worn argument (for all that it's also true).

It seems to me the more significant consideration is that given peoples' natural dispensation to follow events or not, the average Israeli keeps track of them better. This has been very clear to me this past week as I've had to listen (or read) pontifications from all sorts of people who mostly haven't been paying all that much attention. The admonitions to reach out to the moderates better than we've been doing: there's been all sorts of reaching over the past decade, but so far as most of us can see, there hasn't been much serious reciprocity. A number of people who regard themselves as serious observers have told us this week, in what appears to be complete sincerity, that if only we'd stop building settlements the moderate Palestinians would eagerly reach an agreement with us; and if not, we should try a spot of unilateral disengagement, becasue that would certainly work. (Gaza, anyone?) I won't go over the entire list of all these statements, but there are lots of them, they are always offered in the spirit of Mr. Magirick: We're fundamentally on your side, but since we're untroubled by the local dust we can see whith clarity that you're not managing things very well, so if you'd only listen to us you'd see that everyting will work out.

I will tarry for a moment on the single most problematic thing that folks with clarity can see, while the locals should know better: the settlements. In spite of my return to blogging this week I'm still a civil servant, and I'd trying to stick to the Israeli consensus. So I'm not saying whether settlements are good or bad or irrelevant or the eye of the storm. I'd just like to remind readers of some dry facts:

1. The last time a settlement was set up was in 1997. The last time an unofficial outpost was set up which then became a settlement was in 2003. Almost a decade.

2. There is no settlement activity in Area A.

3. There is very little settlement activity in Area B, though in a number of places along the edges of Area B there are some local cases of overstepping the line. Which means that for all the failure of the Oslo process, Israel is still respecting its transfer of control to the PA.

This is not to say there's no construction going on in any settlements, Of course there is, and it's the official policy of the current government. Yet the stereotypic view from afar, about how the settlers are gobbling up the West Bank and thereby preventing peace, looks a bit different when you carefully look from close up. As do many things about this conflict.

The Private Thoughts of a BBC Fellow

I don't pretend to understand all the minutiae of Twitter, this post notwithstanding. A few minutes ago I stumbled upn an oddity I hadn't been aware of. A British journalist named Hugh Naylor tweeted something about Oxfam, and I responded. When you respond to a tweet and others have responded before you, you see the entire conversation; in this case, part of what had gone on there before my arrival was that a second British journalist, Roland Hughs, had been chatting with Naylor about how dangerous it is in Gaza. Hughs signed off with a comment about how he, unlike Naylor, wasn't in an area where Israeli warships are firing at random in Naylor's direction.

I responded sharply (There aren't Israeli warships firing randomly in anyone's direction, anywhere. Get a hold of yourself). Then, when I came to retweet Hugh's tweet so people could see the lazy comments of a BBC reporter, Twitter blocked me. It seems Hugh's Twitter account is protected, perhaps to give him the ability to chat without being listened in on. Except that I hadn't been listening in; as a matter of fact, until half an hour ago I didn't know Roland Hugh even exists.

But now that I know, I find it instructive that a BBC World News journalist, when he's got his guard down and is chatting with a friend, describes IDF actions in language not much different than Hamas does. Or, in the ranking I posited here, he's a category two antagonist.

Update: a number of readers have sent me screenshots of Roland's tweet. Here, for example.

Three Ways to be Against Israel

It's an interesting thing, is Twitter. Whoever cooked it up must have been either a genius or extraordinarily lucky, because although it sounds like an absolutely whacky idea, the fact is that it creates value. The thing I've noticed this past week, as I've been using it quite intensively because of the operation in Gaza, is that it easily beats other media outlets in its speed of supplying news of immediate developments, but even more interestingly, it enables conversations with people from walks of life I would otherwise never come across. In spite of its highly limiting format, conversations with some of these people can be highly informative.

First, there are the Hamas terrorists themselves, to be found at their own Twitter account, @AlqassamBrigade. Their view of the world is very simple: What we do is heroic, what the Israelis do is the epitome of criminal. Thus they crow about all the rockets they shoot at various Israeli targets (and they name them specifically: no random shooting in a general direction), and they scream about all the awful Israeli atrocities. In the reality their achievements are less impressive than they'd have us believe, which means their intention to harm is greater than their ability to harm, while with the Israelis it's the other way around. Their ability to harm, if they only wished to, is greater by many magnitudes than what they're doing in reality. Such a consideration, however, belonging as it does to the realm of moral deliberation, would be utterly lost on the Hamas people for whom morality is a subjective reflection of their own bestial urges.

Then there are the deniers of time. These are people who look at the present and assume that whatever they see must be self-explanatory. If there's an Israeli blockade of Gaza, there must have always been an Israeli blockade of Gaza. If the blockade doesn't go back all the way to 1967 (some of them say it does), then only because Israel periodically replaces one form of persecution with another; the constant being that Israel always does its worst against the Palestinians. Confronted with past Israeli actions that are so well documented they can't be brushed aside, the explanation will always be that Israel is continually refining its methods of persecution, true, but the persecution never disappears, and the Israelis never intend it to. The events of September 2005-February 2006, for example, were not indicative of an Israeli willingness to have the Gazans demonstrate their ability to be constructive following an Israeli departure; no, they were merely a prelude to a new period in which Israel would persecute Palestinians from afar and at reduced cost.

Similar to the moral imbecility of Hamas, these people cannot think in terms of historical causation, and thus they, too, remove morality from the discussion. Israel cannot be understood as navigating its way through the moral and practical complexity of life, because Israel always intends to harm the Palestinians, and any modifications to its actions are merely tactical tweaks, not human deliberation. Of course, the Palestinians are the mirror image of the Israelis, and while some of their actions are sometimes not nice, they are always the victim, they are powerless, and as ultimate victims they cannot be required to make moral decisions. They're too busy trying, and only just succeeding, to survive.

Hamas makes no pretense of recognizing universal morality. Their knee-jerk apologists use the opposite tactic, and clothe their entire argumentation in the terminology of universal human rights. Yet since they refuse to perceive Israel as human, insisting on its a-historical and inherent and immutable evil and the Palestinians automatic justness, both groups end up in the same position: whatever the Palestinians do is good, whatever Israel does is evil, and moral thought is banished from the entire discussion.

Finally, in an entire different category, there are the well intentioned rationally-minded observers. These tend to be liberal in the American meaning, or left-leaning in the European political vocabulary. Their problem is not a deficiency of moral thinking, nor a disability to apply it to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Their problem is the inability to accept the degree to which people can be immoral. They cannot accept that some people are so different from them as to be unrecognizable. The implication being, that if only everyone seeks hard enough it will be possible to resolve most differences. As a number of them have said to me in recent days: if your pessimism were to be justified, Yaacov, then there's no hope. There needs to be a resolution to the conflict. There must be a resolution to the conflict. If you're not seeing it it's because you're not truly seeking it – and this laziness is unacceptable; ultimately, it’s a moral weakness, since you're willing to remain in a state of war when it's possible to leave it.

Faced with the possibility that what "needs" to be, what "must" be, actually isn't necessarily so, they retreat into a form of speechlessness, of cognitive paralysis, from which they soon emerge by denial. How often have I heard the sentence "But if you're right, Yaacov, then there's no hope, and I refuse to accept that there's no hope".

The refusal to accept reality is sometimes highly admirable, as it motivates us ever to strive for something better; this determination is probably one of history's most beneficial motivating forces. Yet it needs to be tempered by humility: in spite of our determination to make the world a better place, ultimately it won't be anywhere near as nice as we'd like. Faced with terminal illness we can rail against fate but eventually the time will come for other sentiments. Faced with historical conditions beyond our power to change, there likewise comes a time when adaptation is more useful than millenarianism. Or, to return to Israelis and Palestinians: striving for a just peace is extremely admirable. Failing to reach it, however, since inevitable, cannot break the determination to live correctly.

And to think that all this can be found on Twitter…..

What's a Ceasefire For?

There are rumours a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas is near. I have no idea how serious they are. What I do know, having spent a chunk of time today looking for a what might resemble reliable information, is that there isn't much of it out there. Someday, decades from now, my professional descendants in the archives will publish the documents being created as we sit here, and their readers will be offered a nuanced, detailed look into the minds of the decision-makers and the sources they had to inform them - but that's not much help this afternoon. What I have managed to glean from here and there sounds like a total collossal waste of time.

Not a waste of time in that a ceasefire can't be achieved. It probably can, or will be achievable in a few days or a week or shortly thereafter. No. The waste, even in the best of scenarios, will have been of the years since 2005.

According to the rumours I'm hearing, Hamas is demanding that Israel lift its blckade (or what's left of it), and desist from targeted killings; and Israel is demanding some sort of guarantee that there will be absolutely no rocket-fire from Gaza, and no attacks on Israeli troops in our side of the border. In other words, Hamas is demanding... what Israel already gave in 2005.

2005 was a very very long time ago. So long ago that almost nobody old enough to use twitter or otherwise be able to express an opinion on Israel and Palestine can be expected to remember it. Still, the fact is that in September 2005 Israel pulled its very last soldier out of Gaza, after having pulled its last settlers out in August. Ariel Sharon, the prime minister and architect of the unilateral withdrawal, had intended to leave IDF forces on the Phladelphi line, the Gaza-Egypt border, to ensure that the Gazans not smuggle nasty things in, but the Bush adminstration had forced him to drop that idea: You're leaving? Then all the way. True, back in April 2004 the president seemd to accept some sort of Israeli military presence in Gaza, but that was then and now was now. so what was eventually worked out was that Israel really left, and some EU inspecters were sent over to inspect stuff. (They're long departed, obviously, since the inspecting proved to be unpleasant).

The significance of this is that between September 2005 and early 2006, there was no Israeli blockade of Gaza. The Gazans were in an eiree sort of diplomatic limbo, unlike anywhere else in the world, with no internationally recognized sovereign, but with lots of internationally recognized clout, and could have reasonably expected the Palestinian Authority to move towards an upgrade of its status. There can be little doubt that had the Gazans done in 2005 what the Jewish Agency did in 1947, namely purposefully go about the mundane but crucial task of nation building, Israel wouldn't have interfered. On the contrary: a majority of Israelis were hoping - fervently or dubiously - they'd do exactly that, which is why Sharon, then followed after his illnes by Ehud Olmert, built the election strategy of their brand new party Kadima on the idea of continuing the disengagement process on the West Bank. (Hitkansut, Olmert called it).

The reason none of this ever happened is that the Palestinians made their choices, and their choices were not what Israel had hoped. And thus began the downward spiral to where we're at now.

Is Hamas is now negotiating for what already existed in 2005, after having spent the intervening years pounding into the collective Israeli psyche that the gamble of 2005 was idiotic?

Missiles on Tel Aviv aren't New

As I breifly explain at the other blog.

The Pernicious BBC

This evening, November 17th 2012, the top story on the BBC's news website is about the conflict between Israel and Hamas. The story itself is annodyne. The noteworthy thing is the series of six images which adorn the top section of the webpage. Since it will probably be taken down later this evening or tomorrow at the latest, I've recorded it.

Picture number one: an Iron Dome rocket streaking into the skies:

The second picture is of the reason Iron Dome is in action: Missiles being shot from the middle of a residential area in Gaza.

The next photo is of a large explosion in the middle of the city of Gaza.

The next picture is of a damaged building, it could be on either side:

Next comes a picture of massing IDF tanks. Threatening.

So far, so good. Each of these images was probably taken yesterday or today. I'm not confident all the readers of the BBS website will be able to identify each of the pictures, and I haven't seen any mention on the website of how even the BBC is documenting the Hamas war crime of shooting from residential areas, but at least they're putting the images out there and we can use them. The final picture, however, wasn't taken today, and isn't part of the story, since at the moemnt there is no physical contact between the IDF and the population of Gaza. So it was inserted not to show us the news - since it's not news - but for some other reason completely. On the immediate level, it serves to balance the picture of the IDF tanks; on a more fundamental level, it offers an image to frame the entire conflict.

(Goliath, as history would have it, came from the vicinity of Gaza. And he's entered Western culture through a book written by Jews).

A Counter Intuitive Comment on IDF Capabilities

The IDF operation in Gaza - Defensive Shield, or in its better, Hebrew version, Amud Anan - has been on for about 70 hours. According to the twitter feed of the IDF, as of this morning more than 500 targets had been hit from the air in Gaza, many of them underground storage installations of weapons.

We don't know how many people in Gaza have been killed so far. The highest number I've seen is 18. Of them, how many are civilians? We don't know that, either. Some of them. The death of any non-combatant is always tragic (The deaths of terrorists is tragic for their families, but they made the choice to be terrorists and their possible death was part of that choice).

Nor do we know what lies in the future. It's sadly possible that an hour from now, or a day, or next week, an Israeli piece of ordinance will kill a large number of Palestinian civilians. This happens all too often in wartime. Yet even if that happens, the fact of the operation's first three day will be unchanged. Israel attacked hundreds of military installations in the middle of densely populated parts of Gaza because that's where Hamas was positioning them; Israel knew precisely where they are even when they were carefully hidden underground; and Israel managed to destroy them with the loss of perhaps ten Palestinian civilians, perhaps fewer.

All of which goes to disprove the entire narrative about the blood-thirsty Israelis callously (gleefully) slaughtering innocent Palestinians etc. etc. etc.

One Gaza Picture is Worth Which 1,000 Words?

Here's a powerful AP picture from Gaza, yesterday afternoon:

Now the question is, which 1,000 words does it replace? When we look at the picture, who are we seeing? Since it clearly depicts an act of violence, who shoud we recoil from, and who should we identify with?

Is it a picture of evil Israeli aggression against the helpless civilian population of Gaza, who are under attack and can't defend themselves? Or is it perhaps a picture of the cynical strongmen who control Gaza, and store their long-range Fajr misslies in the middle of a residential neighborhood, so that if Israel ever tries to destroy them, this will be the resulting picture?

Both interpretations can't be simultaneously true. Yet the picture, in spite of its powerful image, is quite useless in giving us a thousand words of context or even simply of clarification.

Israelis and Palestinians in Jerusalem and Gaza

This afternoon I was on the road up from Tel Aviv. There were three of us, on our way back from a day-long meeting. R was driving. Her mobile phone rang and she said to her husband
 - Hi P, I've got passengers.
- No problem,We just killed a Hamas biggie and I"m on my way to Ashdod to pull out your [80-year-old] mother.
 - OK. I'll talk to you later.
  Five minutes later her sister was on the line:
- The authorities are shutting down schools and markets here in Ashdod. There are immediate threats about Jerusalem, so make sure none of your kids are in crowded public places.
- P is on his way down to take Mom up to Jerusalem.
- Too late. They're shutting down the town. She'll stay at my place.

20 minutes later we were in Jerusalem. I got off near the large mall, and went through it on a quick errand. It was packed, as usual, with Jews and Palestinians intermingled, as usual. from there I crossed town and went to the supermarket. It, too, was packed, with Jews and Palestinians, shoppers and staff, all going about their normal lives.

On the History of Jerusalem

Back in the days when I still blogged with regularity, and wasn't yet a civil servant who needs to keep his opinions to himself, I began to research a book about Jerusalem. A year or two later, I've begun to take advantage of the perks of the job, such as access to mountains of classified materials, coupled with the ability to get them de-clasified when possible. I've been posting some of my findings on the ISA English-language blog, so everyone can see what I"m seeing. At the present rate of research I expect the book will be easily completed by, oh, 2030.

Anyway, at one point I read a small pile of books about Jerusalem, but never got around to posting about them. So here goes.

The most famous book about Jerusalem is of course the Bible (both the Jewish and the Christian versions). A couple lightyears behind however, probably the best known book of the past half century is O Jerusalem by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre. Written in the aftermath of the Six Day War, it tells the story of the war of 1947-48 in and around Jerusalem. It's a cracking tale, and the authors invested lots of effort in meeting and interviewing a whole range of people who had been involved in the events from all sides. So far as I could tell, however, they saw no documentary evidence at all, and didn't do much reading, either. The result has the immediacy and excitement of personal memory, and also all its many drawbacks. Lots of compelling drama, not much in the way of historical clarity or depth.

James Carroll's Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World is the work of a scholar, but not exactly a historian. Carroll, a lapsed priest, has written extensively about Christian and Jewish matters. This book however, despite its title, is actually more about America than about Jerusalem. It's essentially a description of ways in which the concept of Jerusalem has been and remains central to Western Civilisation and especially the story of the United States. A plausible idea, almost banal though worthy of description, but there's not much in there to tell about the history of Jerusalem the specific place, in contrast to Jerusalem the concept.

One interesting tidbit I'd never noticed before reading Carroll's book is that England's almost-national-anthem is a song called Jerusalem, sung at events such as this:


Which must go a way towards explaining the complexes of all those English intellectual types who so detest Israel. There is no way that people who grow up with that song can then regard today's Jewish presence in Jerusalem with the indifference they have towards, say, the Rohingya (Google it).

This evidentially apllies also to Karen Armstrong, another lapsed Catholic clergyperson (an English nun, in her case), and author of Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths. Armstrong looks at the religious history of Jerusalem, or the way religion expressed itself in the city's long history; she is especially interested in which religious rulers were most tolerant or not (the Crusaders were the worst in her telling). It's an interesting and informative book, though the earlier arts of the story, about which historians can know less, are the most interesting; by and by her tale slips out of religious reflection and ever closer to politics, where here analytical tools are less useful. By the time she reaches Israel's control of the city it's quite clear she doesn't like it.

I also must say that 18 months after having read her book,very little of it remains fresh in my mind. A weakness of mine, I suppose.

Simon Sebag Montefiore's Jerusalem - The Biography does remain in my mind, however, though I read it at about the same time; as a matter of fact, I recommended it a number of times here, on this blog, though I didn't review it. It's main weakness was that it isn't quite a history of Jerusalem, rather of Jerusalem's leaders. In most of the chapters we hear next to nothing about the Jerusalemites, and lots about their rulers. This is probably mostly the result of the documentation which has survived, but had Sebag-Montefiore wished, there's enough that has survived to enable him to balance the story. This focus of his also caused a second problem with his story: it's a horrifyingly violent tale. Thousands of years of mostly uninterrupted bloodshed, often applied in the most gruesome ways. Eventually I had to wonder why he was doing this; it seemed a bit odd for a city whose townspeople have repeatedly produced some of the most durable ideas and powerful texts in the history of mankind.

Back in March 2011 I once counted all the times Jerusalem was conquered, according to Sebag, and reached 60 or 61. I doubt Rome can hold a candle to that. Damascus, perhaps.

One overarching impression the book left me with was the sheer weight of time. Jerusalem was old when Babylonians Egyptians and Persians used to swap it back and forth. When the Helenic Greeks were having a spot of bother with it, it was ancient, probably older than Paris and London are now. The Romans obliberated it a couple of times before disappearing under the sands of time. The Byzantines permanently formed it into a Christian city, and it stayed that way for centuries (Armstrong makes the point that it remained mostly Christian for a few centuries after the Muslim conquest). That permanence, however, though it lasted far far beyond human memory, turned out not to be very permanent after all, as didn't what replaced it, and what replaced it, and it. The contemporary conceit that there is an end to history, and that we need to make one more effort and create one more reality in Jerusalem, and then it will remain "fixed" forever is merely that. A conceit.

Another point that Sebag-Montefiore makes without ever mentioning is that there's no justice. History washes back and forth, and either might makes right, or right is irrelevant and might prevails. As a Jew and a Zionist I can see the profundity of renewed Jewish control of the city, just as I can see why this control angers Mslims and Palestinians; and I can choose to rejoice in the Jewish return while hoping for better services and quality of life for the Palestinians; but it doesn't make any sense to think we're in some final chapter. Life will go on, and if in 500 years, or better, 1,000, Jerusalem will still be the capital of Israel, well, that will be a fine thing but it still won't be the end of the story. Anyway, I doubt I'll be around to see it.

At the very end of his book, starting at page 517, Sebag Montefiore veers away from history, and sums it all up through the story of the men of various religions who start each day before the crack of dawn, at 4 or 4:30 AM, each with their respective ritual. Each ritual has been going on for centuries, and each of them relates to the religious identity of the city they live in, and somehow they all live here together. It's a powerful, and beautiful, description.

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?

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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.

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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