Petraeus Clarifies

General Petraeus called Gabi Ashkenazi, his Israeli counterpart, to deny the reports of his blaming Israel or Israeli policies for endangering Americans.

"But I think people inferred from what that said and then repeated it a couple of times and bloggers picked it up and spun it," he added. "And I think that has been unhelpful, frankly."

Petraeus was referring to blogging activity surrounding his comments on Israel, and apparently it was important for the general not to be seen as hostile to Israel, for Israeli consumption but also for the American public.

The two decisions Petraeus made, to call Ashkenazi and publicize the conversation, are important. CENTCOM is responsible for all the Arab states east of Egypt, and tends to shy away from making public its contacts with the IDF. Petraeus told the press that he did not seek to bring the West Bank and the Gaza Strip into the realm of CENTCOM responsibility, as they, along with Israel, fall under the responsibility of the European Command.

Hmmm. Bloggers.Who might he have in mind, do you think?

No Water? Let Them Drink Wine

Something like 98% of the interest in Israel focuses on its relations with the Arabs, mostly the Palestinians. The remaining 2% focus on the weirdos, such as the odder part of the Haredi community. For those of us who live here, however, there are other parts of life, too. The water we drink, for example. It's no secret, and hasn't been ever, that while our national water management systems may well be better than those of many other folks, seen on their own they're wasteful, inefficient, and act on the basic assumption that disaster simply won't happen and need not be prevented; better to get on with an endless method of patches, band-aides, rubber bands and crossed fingers.

This week a committee submitted a comprehensive - and devastating - report. So now it's official, not merely common knowledge.

There are two options for the next step. One is the time honored treatment for most committee reports: it will be filed away, and someday, many years from now, it will be dug up by somebody for a spot of "I told you so!" fun. (Or it will get lost in the archives... another topic one might write about...).

The second option is that someone will set about fixing things in a sensible and intelligent manner.

Part of Israel's great strength is that the second option does exist, and is reasonably plausible. Not certain, no. Not obviously inevitable, alas. But it is plausible. Those of us who have been watching this place for a long time know that there is constant improvement on many fronts. Go back and read the old Efraim Kishon stories, for example, which poke fun at the strange ways things get done in Israel: they're still funny, but many of them are no longer true in any recognizable form. (Some still are).

So here's hoping.

PS. The wine-drinking option is no joke. In Medieval Europe the water sources were often so filthy that people drank wine as the only option. Cheap wine, I expect, but not water.

An Israeli Perspective on Obama

Quite a number of people, including readers of this blog, feel Obama is an antisemite and hates Israel. I don't. He clearly isn't enamored of us, that's true, but his problem is broader than animosity towards Israel: the man doesn't understand the world. Being the president of the United States means he can call in whatever experts he wishes, and his lack of understanding of the world is so comprehensive he doesn't recognize that the folks feeding him data and interpretations are inept. As I've repeatedly said, it takes two years to learn the job of president of the US, so perhaps he may yet learn - though time is running out, and he's making things worse as he goes (not only on our subject).

Here's an article in Hebrew about how he's screwing up Israel-Palestine. There's nothing particularly new in it, and the reason I'm linking is the identity of the author: prof. Eitan Gilboa, perhaps Israel's most prominent scholar on the US and on Israeli-American relations. He's a centrist, like most of us, not a firebrand. When he writes a column flatly declaring "Obama is tripping-up Netanyahu" (whom Gilboa probably didn't vote for), and it appears on Y-net, it reinforces the commonly accepted version around here in a way that an op-ed in Haaretz never will.

I fail to see how forging an Israeli consensus that America is not to be trusted can remotely promote peace. Someday, should an agreement ever be reached, Israel will be required to take enormous, life-endangering risks. We won't take the risks because of our love and trust in the Palestinians; if we can't trust the Americans, it will be all that harder to convince us. This may not be just, but it's the real world.

Screw-up, Second Round

Jackson Diehl at the Washington Post describes how Obama is running his Israel-Palestine act all wrong. Worse: he's refusing to learn from his mistakes, preferring to repeat them.

The facts of the case are not complicated. When Obama was elected there was a significant Israeli proposal on the table, which the Palestinians were studiously averting their faces from, pretending not to see. 15 months into Obama's term, the animosity on all sides is stratospheric, and the Palestinians and Israelis can't even find their way into the same room. Not all of this is because of American missteps - but most of it is.

Way to go!

Christopher Columbus Wasn't

You'd think that after the public rebuke by The Economist, Juan Cole would tread carefully for a while. You'd be wrong. Yesterday he explained to his readership that the Jews' connection to Jerusalem is largely myth (and of course, that Israel's politics on the matter are illegal, harmful and so on).

Bill Clinton apparently once told Yasser Arafat that in his insistence on denying a Jewish connection to Jerusalem he was offending Clinton's sensibilities as a Christian. To which one might add that when revisionist history goes so far as simply to deny inconvenient chapters of the past while trampling on the entire methodology of knowing about it, they offend anyone invested in the attempt to think rationally about what cannot be known through immediate experience. Once you're ready to do that you're in Orwell's 1984: you can't prove the French Revolution ever happened; George Washington never lived; Martin Luther was a fable; Thermopylae was invented by the sports equipment companies, and of course Alexander the Great is the brain-child of cynical Greek politicians unhappy with the disintegration of Yugoslavia. (Need I mention that the Nazis never killed Jews?)

I'm not going to fisk Cole's silliness. He's not important enough, and if his followers accept nonsense such as this that mostly tells us about them. I will however briefly note that his entire edifice is based on two hugely controversial books. One by Shlomo Sand, and the other a collection of articles from the Copenhagen School of Thought. Like Cole, this is not my specialty, so I won't go so far as to say that the Copenhagen scholars are truly as unprofessional as the Holocaust deniers; I will however say that they are at the extreme edge of what the scholarly community has to offer. Ah, and they first appeared a year or so after the Six Day War.

Propounding a historical thesis based on these folks alone, as if their argumentation is accepted knowledge and given truth is, how to put it, not serious.

PS: Remember this?

One More on Obamacare

I finally had a conversation this afternoon with a fellow who knows what he's talking about. An American who lives in Israel; a scholar whose entire career is about public health policies and that sort of thing; a Lefty-bleeding-heart-liberal chap bereft of the starry-eyed ability of uninformed folks to pretend the world is nicer than it is and ever can be (which is to say: a rather common type of Israeli).

"So tell me", I inquired, "what's the story of this Obamacare thingy? Is it good for the world or bad?"

He launched into a learned speech... and then stopped. "You know what? Go read David Brooks in the NYT today. He's got it right".

I did.

Those Pesky Zionists

Before traveling to Italy I did a spot of reading. The usual guide books are fine if you wish to know that museums are closed on Mondays in Florence, or that the taxis in Venice are as expensive as a college education at Harvard (and they only go on water anyway). If you wish to know anything significant about the places you're about to visit, however, guide books are a poor bet.

For Venice I found an old book, published 50 years ago by an Englishman who lived there for a while and wrote a mildly eccentric book about the place. James Morris, Venice. It was lots of fun. A bit dated, true, but all the important parts of the story happened long ago anyway, and the last 50 years haven't added anything of significance and for the updated part I had those guide books.

So far so fine. Being a professional navel-gazer, I couldn't help but noticing the (very few) parts of the plot that deal with... us, of course. So how's this:

In Venice you can enjoy the pleasures of the Orient without suffering its torments. Flies are few, mosquitoes are decreasing, beggars are unpersistent, water is wholesome, nationalism is restrained, nobody is going to knife you, or talk about Zionism, or blame you for Kashmir.... (p.196)

1960, I remind you. There were no illegal Jewish settlements upsetting American presidents back in 1960. Osama B. was three years old. Why, even Arafat hadn't invented the PLO yet. Englishmen in the "Orient", however, were being blamed for Zionism and Kashmir. Then and now.

Passover?

I know what the Hebrew says. I don't know what the Arabic says (I'd ask Ibrahim, but being a fake, he's unlikely to know). To be honest, I don't know what the English says, either.

(Thanks for the gags, P)

Schadenfreude

The Economist, no less, takes on the silliness of Juan Cole and Andrew Sullivan, who've been touting this Ministry of Truth map of a faraway land they know nothing about. Ouch!

H/t Judeosphere

UNI=United Nations Idiocy

Barry Rubin has a fine example of how utterly idiotic the United Nations can be. It has nothing to do with Israel this time (though lots of the neighbors are involved); I'm posting because if not for Barry's noticing, it's a story none of us would likely ever to have come across.

Three Periphal Comments to Obamacare

Over the past few weeks we've had the need for a number of medical interventions a notch more serious than sniffles and sore throats. Nothing major, thankfully, but the sort of things that happen in life. In each case we were struck by the degree to which the level of service is improving over time. The intelligent application of technology to health service in a universal system makes life better, it's that simple.

Over the past 18 months or so I've made the mistake, three or four times, of putting a toenail in the general proximity of the American health care discussion. I was pleased to see that there are readers of this blog from both sides of the Great Political Divide of American politics, so in each case I was treated to torrents of - well, it wasn't abuse, but it certainly was reprimands for having got it all wrong. I should probably simply shut up this morning, the day after Obama passed a health insurance law, or Congress did at his behest, or something. But we bloggers, we talk too much by definition, else we wouldn't blog.... so here goes.

1. A rich society - and America is - should be able to protect its members from the harm of not having reliable health insurance. There are different ways of reaching that goal, but since I'm an firm believer in democracy, my fundamental belief is that democratic societies mostly figure out reasonably correct means to achieve the common goals. So if the United States is now a bit closer to being a good society (no society is ever near perfection), in the long run this should make America stronger. Given the alternatives, a strong America based on a healthy American society is good for the world (and good for Israel). So yesterday's legislation, I hope, is more a good thing than a bad thing.

2. It is hugely ironic that on the day of his historic achievement, Obama is being compared favorably to Lyndon Johnson. I'm old enough to remember how LBJ was literally drummed out of town by the political forebears - indeed, in many cases, by the very same individuals - who today are crowing over Obama's political victory. What can I say? Hee hee hee.

3. World history and the Jewish question. After all, at the end of the day we all ask ourselves what world history does for us. There can be no doubt that when Netanyahu meets Obama tomorrow, the meeting will be different for the outcome of yesterday's vote. Perhaps even dramatically so. Yet if there was one irrevocable thing I learned from the disintegration of my worldview in late 2000, when the political positions I had believed in and preached for my entire adult life came crashing down about me, it was that reality is stronger than any conceivable spin machine. The president has just had a political victory at home. This doesn't make his ineptitude in the Middle East any different than it was last week. Many Americans may or may not be impressed by his ability; the rest of the world is still the same complicated world.

Remember the Goldstone Report?

Professor Richard Landes,who blogs at The Augean Stables, has carefully read the Goldstone Report. The first part of his findings is here, the second here. I've only had the time to skim over it, and recognize that rational discussion of the report hardly has any value in any case, but if you're interested in an intelligent reading of this famous anti-Israeli screed, you'll find Landes' comments valuable.

Illegal Settlements

Veteran reader David Sigeti wonders if I'd like to comment on this article, in which former US ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer writes about the illegality of the West Bank settlements. Kurtzer's thesis is that much of the settlement activity is illegal - and has been throughout - even by the standards of Israel's legal system.

It's an interesting read, mostly for the quick and truncated glimpse it gives us behind the scenes of the American-Israeli relationship; on one level, the American ambassador has routine access to top-level Israeli officials to a degree unmatched by most regular Israeli citizens. (There's also an amusing anecdote, when Kurtzer and some Israelis are trying to agree on where the settlements end, and Kurtzer has relevant secret American intelligence data he's not able to share with the Israelis: because it came from satellites? From Palestinian farmers? From American moles in Israel's officialdom? He doesn't say, alas).

The most interesting thing I come away from the article with is how fiendishly complex the matter really is, with almost no ability to reach agreements about the simplest facts of almost any part of the story. What is the legal case? Who owns which land? How does anyone know? When is a legal document "right", if at all, ever? If an attorney states a legal position, how do you decide if it's law, or politics, or both, or neither?

For a number of years I've been idly telling myself that once Israel leaves the West Bank, I'd like to write a book about the settlement project and Israeli society. The book can't be a book of history until after the story is over, of course, which is one reason I never started working on it; Kurtzer's article indicates that long before writing about the project and Israeli society, it will first be necessary to figure out what the project was. The simple facts. Because something like 90% of what people think they know to be facts, are actually little more than ideologically-driven hearsay.

Take the fundamental question: who owns the land. I don't know the answer, which in any case would differ according to whichever plot of it you're standing on. I do know, however, that contrary to everything the media ever tells you, most of the West Bank is barren hill-sides or dessert, and has been forever. It's not fertile farmland, not olive groves nor vineyards, and certainly not towns and villages. Thorny hillsides, dry and dusty ravines. Before you determine who owns pieces of it, you're going to have to figure out how they may have come to claim that ownership.

Back to Kurtzer's thesis, however: I expect he's roughly right. Much of the settlement project happened in murky gray zones on the edge of legality, some of it on the outside parts of it. This is not the reason the settlements need eventually to be disbanded, most of them: that's a matter of politics. As regular readers will recognize, I'm of the opinion that in matters of international relations politics, power relations and national interests generally trump legality. When they don't, it's often because the power brokers managed to have the law written to fit their purposes. Sorry if that makes me sound like a cynic.

Blog-reading Computers

I spoof you not. Apparently there's a group out there diligently teaching their computers to read (and enjoy?) blogs.

While recording their words for posterity and obsessively checking their hit counters to see if anyone is reading them, today’s blog authors can console themselves with the thought that computers, at least, find their work fascinating.

More in Anger than in Sorrow

The Economist ponders the motivations for Obama's anger at Israel:

One school of thought holds that Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton escalated their reaction to the Biden insult in order to make Mr Netanyahu abandon his rightist allies and tread the American path to peace; some say the president was waiting for a chance to destabilise him to force his replacement by someone more emollient. A rival theory is that there is no plan: Ramat Shlomo simply ignited the rage that has smouldered in Mr Obama’s breast since Mr Netanyahu refused his call last year for a total freeze on settlements, forcing Mr Mitchell to waste nearly a year niggling for a temporary compromise.

Forgive me if I've gotten my narratives mixed here, but wasn't unflappability one of the many things that had people so swooning about Obama? He's never ruffled, the gushing pundits told us, a rational fellow who stands above the weaknesses of mere mortals who are controlled by their emotions, their prejudices and their animosities.

So were they wrong? Or were they right, but there's something uniquely aggravating about Jews living in their homeland which makes otherwise stoic Obama lose his cool? Wouldn't that be odd?

The report then concludes with this parting shot:

In testimony to a Senate committee this week, General David Petraeus, hero of Iraq and America’s commander in the wider Middle East, said the unsolved conflict in Palestine was fomenting anti-Americanism in the wider region. An obvious point, perhaps; but yet another reason why the love is draining out of a special relationship.

Set aside the question as to the love which is or isn't draining. The fundamental point is the contention that since the "wider region" (the Muslim world, perhaps?) isn't willing to live with a Jewish state, America's interests would best be served by jettisoning Israel. Now I know that's not what Petraeus said, but it is a logical oversimplification of what he reportedly did say. If the Muslims really really don't like having a Jewish state in their midst, perhaps America ought to try harder to mollify them.

Interesting, isn't it.

Lost in Translation

Hard to argue with the idea that the current Israeli government is pretty crappy at diplomacy. Or worse.

Is this because they're all so ghastly right-wing, fanatic nationalists and so on? Perhaps. And perhaps not. The diplomatic stupidities will blow over sooner or later; given that the Palestinians aren't ready to make peace with Israel one way or the other, there's no long-term significance to the fact that the negotiations aren't about to succeed. What could be significant, however, would be a righting of the social and economic imbalance between Israel's Jews and Arabs. Which, it appears, may be something Netanyahu's government is seriously trying to do.

Inexplicably, the English version of the story dropped 100,000,000 NIS from the sum reported in the Hebrew version. I have no explanation for the discrepancy.

Jerusalem in the News

The events in Jerusalem this week demonstrate the insignificance of blogging. Had I been here I would have spluttered and fumed; this way, all I have to do is point you to Yossi Klein Halevy's fine article, which says it all.

On a related point, I heard a comment yesterday about how at the moment, Israel is more popular in the United States than Obama. Walter Russel Mead tries to take a long view on this, to the extent a contemporary can: it's the Christian Jacksonians who are supporting Israel, more than the (numerically insignificant) Liberal Jews; this underlying structure of American politics is not going to change anytime soon, though it may well add its two bits to shorten the political career of Barack Obama.

And note Mead's article on the Jacksonian tradition, here.

Perspective

Back from Italy.

We started in Venice. A place like no other I've ever seen. Created after the fall of the Roman Empire, the town flourished for a thousand years as a republic while the rest of Europe went through the Middle Ages. It was easily one of Europe's largest towns, doing a roaring business sitting astride the lines of commerce between Europe and the East. It was a hard-nosed and stern place, not to say cruel, and it's goal was to be rich. The accidental discovery of America was partly the result of the search to find a way around Venice as the middle-man of trade with the East; it worked, though not in the way anyone foresaw, and Venice spent the 17th and 18th centuries magnificently living off its accumulated wealth. Napoleon ended it in the 1790s, and ever since it has been essentially a tourist attraction, no more.

For all its longevity, splendor and uniqueness, it's hard to think of anything of lasting value that it created, except for the city itself.

From Venice we went to Florence. Technically older than Venice by many centuries, Florence compressed its historical role into a few centuries, most famously the Fifteenth. Yet what a role it was: a small town that would fit easily into southern Manhattan took human history and diverted its direction. Not in one field - say, the ability to represent reality in art - but in many. The Florentines redirected literature, and art, and science, and philosophy, and the art of governing - and banking, too, though the bankers are a bit unpopular lately. They invented the Renaissance, those Florentines, and that lead to the Enlightenment, and to Capitalism, and Democracy, and Socialism, and Fascism, and Communism and Nazism... and if you think the present war between parts of the Islamic world and humankind isn't a direct result of the fact that some folks followed Florence and others didn't, well, I don't know why you come to this blog.

Yet today Florence is a mere tourist attraction. The Venetians still do pretty glass trinkets, and the Florentines are world leaders in leather and fashion - but that's proof of the matter: trinkets.

Maybe. We lack the perspective, you see, to know how this part of the story will work out. Are Venice and Florence (and Paris, Berlin, Stockholm and Brussels) the vanguard of the benign, gentle affluent and peaceful period of history, in which everyone lives well and long, and rationality and good sense rule over irrationality and human nature? Perhaps. Many Europeans certainly think so. Some of us doubt it.

Jerusalem is one of the few places in the world that can look Florence in the eye as an equal. Lots of the art of Florence is about Jerusalem, after all. Jerusalem is of course vastly older - and these days, much younger. That explosion of creativity has a familiar air about it. I'm not saying that Jerusalem today is as crucial to Man's story as 15th century Florence. No. But the creative purposefulness, the eagerness and ability to innovate, the assumption that just because things are done the way they're done is itself justification to figure out a better way to do them, the community of people banging ideas off one another and jointly changing the paradigms: there's a spot of deja vu about it.

All of which is to say that I ought to blog less. Blogging is so intensely a matter of the moment, so irrelevant two days later, that it has to be a waste of time. I'm not saying I'll stop, but I ought to.

Gone

I'm going offline for a week. OFFLINE. Totally. Just like in the 17th century.

In my absence, feel free to visit Fake Ibrahim's place. He'd be really tickled if you all show up suddenly and tell him how persuasive you find him, and how you intend to stick around. I assure you I won't be offended.

Will Biden be Offended?

By this, I mean.

My bet: no, he won't. Not one chance in a million it will even get mentioned in any reportage on his visit.

Tony Judt's "Postwar"

Trying to clear my desk this afternoon before going off to other climes, I recognize I'll never find the time to write the review of Postwar it so richly deserves. That would be Tony Judt's Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945.

I've said this before but I'll say it again. This is one of the best history books published in recent years, certainly one of the best I've read in years. First, there's the language. Often reviewers praise the language of a book when they've not got much better to say. In this case, I'm praising the language because it's clear, understated, but always a pleasure to read. Judt has the ability to wander over his terrain, looking at things from a changing perspective and through diverse lens, all without our being aware of his mechanics. It's like listening to a particularly compelling teacher roam over terrain he knows better than the back of his hand.

There's the breadth of knowledge. It is, quite simply, inspiring. Wow.

There's the author's perspective, and his professionalism. True, he really doesn't like Margaret Thatcher, and doesn't manage to hide it. Yet he's also a man with strong political convictions and a well-known writer on contemporary political issues. This never stops him from pointing out the weaknesses, cynicism or other foibles of the actors he's describing, even if you suspect he mostly agrees with some of them - and he does this all in a calm, British understatement tone.

It must be said that the historical depth shallows out as he goes, but that's the way it has to be. We have far more perspective on the late 1940s and even the 1970s than on the 1990s. Eventually, his final chapters are not much more than exceptionally good Economist reports - but The Economist is, after all, the best news magazine out there, so that's not so bad. And all the previous chapters were much better.

The content: he says at the beginning that he doesn't have a grand thesis. His story, however, is the story of how present-day Europe came to be: and it's a very different place than it was. His first section, titled Post-War, deals with 1945-1953, and it starts with a litany of how awful things were in the various corners of Europe in 1945, and how the different countries went about their first attempts of climbing out of the mess. So it's a story of many strands. Then there's a section on Prosperity and Its Discontents: 1953-1971, then Recessional: 1971-1989. Without trumpeting the fact, his narrative loses strands and begins to coalesce: South joins West, West is different than East in uniform ways. The poignant part is how West Europeans essentially wrote off the East, while the East pined after the West. (A friend who read the book summed up it's 900-some pages in one sentence: It was because of the different quality of the refrigerators produced in East and West Germany).

The final chronological section is called After the Fall: 1989-2005. By now Judt is describing the world we're in, there's only one major strand, yet he has shown that it wasn't planned, wasn't even contemplated in its present form, rather it grew out of a long serious of events and decisions and compromises. A sobering thought for those who see the European Model as humanity's future (Judt may; many of us don't).

He then finishes with thoughts on the role of memory and history.

It's a long book, but also a long pleasure to read.

Of course, Judt isn't just anyone. From the perspective of this blog and its themes, he's part of the problem: a Jew with a weighty voice who takes anti-Israeli positions and is widely recognized for them. How does this fit with the magnificent historian, I hear you wondering?

I don't know. People are complex, and the author of this intelligent a book can also be the writer of profoundly wrong and wrong-headed columns about the Jews, their identity, and their place in the world. Fact.

Yet as is publicly known, he is suffering from a horrible and incurable sickness. That's not a justification for anything, but I choose to regard it as cause for reconciliation. I have no will to criticize him anymore. On the contrary: I hope, for him, that in the future he will be remembered as a fine and important historian, and his other writings will fade into oblivion.

Comments and Spam

I've been getting lots of spam comments recently, so I've had to change the comment policy so as to block automatic spammers. Real people will continue not to be censored, obviously, only machines which send out automatic comments.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

Jerusalem in the Crosshairs

Hard to imagine an act of greater diplomatic idiocy than yesterday's decision to build 1,600 new apartments in East Jerusalem smack in the middle of Joe Biden's visit.

Haaretz wraps up the story here. It's not clear who the precise idiots were: Netanyahu apparently saw it coming and warned Eli Yishai, the relevant cabinet minster, not to screw up during Biden's visit; Yishai now claims the officials under him didn't inform him about the pending decision - which is a lame excuse at best; probably a dishonest excuse; and if true, shows that Yishai is an abysmal manager. Which he isn't, so I expect his apology is dishonest.

So we created an opportunity for everyone from the American Vice President down through the EU suits all the way to the boss of the UN to condemn us - and for what? What was gained? Nothing. (Though come to think of it, how do we know who's lower on the totem pole, the UN or the EU? Just asking).

That's one side of the story.

The more important side of the story is that it demonstrates how warped the dynamic has become. Some bureaucrats pushed some papers on the way to eventually building housing for some 10,000 haredi Jews in Jerusalem, and there's world-wide condemnation? What? Huh?

I'll be uncustomarily blunt. Jerusalem was invented by Jews. It is known worldwide because of Jews. It's significance for Jews is greater - far, far greater - than the significance of London for the English, Washington or New York for the Americans, or Mecca for the Muslims (that last one is probably the closest example, however). There have been Jews living in Jerusalem for most of the past 3,000 years, often as the majority, and when not as the majority, often because they were expelled or slaughtered or both. A plausible case could be made that if the Jews could choose between owning Jerusalem with war, or not owning Jerusalem with peace, the former would be preferable - and keep in mind that for the Palestinians there's no question at all that they prefer war with a dream of Jerusalem over peace without it.

At the moment, however, no-one is offering the Jews peace for giving up ownership of Jerusalem. Not, not, not. The current narrative beloved by the international community is a simple lie. It's not true. Here's another piece by an Israeli centrist expert on the Mideast, to continue yesterday's thread - Barry Rubin, this time.

The best way to stop building on, and even fully remove, settlements on the West Bank would be to make a peace treaty in which all settlements would be removed from the territory of a Palestinian state. (Though, with Palestinian agreement, some could be incorporated into Israel as part of territory swaps. Indeed, the Obama Administration has accepted this idea.)

The Palestinians want all Israeli settlement activity to cease? That's easy. Agree to make peace with Israel, and there will be no more "illegal" settlements. it's that simple. Really.

In the meantime, while everyone tells us we're so awful and horrendous, the Jews are strengthening their presence in Jerusalem. Seen from the perspective of any arbitrary moment in the past 2,000 years, that's awesome.

Postscript: Here are two articles such as you'll never read in non-Israeli media, examining the issues from the opposite perspective. One, two.

No to the Two State Solution

American Vice President Joe Biden is in town today, mostly to make sure Netanyahu doesn't order a pre-emptive attack on Iran anytime soon, but along the way also to pretend things are moving forward on the Israel-Palestine negotiation track:

"I think we are at a moment of real opportunity, and I think that the interests of the Israeli and Palestinian people, if everybody stops and takes a deep breath, are actually more in line than they are opposites," he added.

Why do respectable people make such silly statements? I can't answer that. I mean, the man is the number 2 person in the American administration; there's a reasonable chance he's being recorded, and someone might even be watching; who knows, if you stretch your imagination a wee bit it's even (just) imaginable that someone will still remember long enough to know how unrealistic he was being.

Ehud Yaari recently published an important article in Foreign Affairs, and a quick summary of it in The Forward. Sadly, the full article is not accessible, and neither of those two links lead to the parts that - to my mind - are most important, namely, the description of how the Palestinians are not interested in a two state resolution to the conflict. Yaari is one of our top experts on the Arab world and the Palestinians in particular; he has spent his entire professional career of over 40 years listening to things Arabs say (in Arabic, of course). His analysis is obvious to those of us who stake our lives on knowing what's going on around us, but needs to be said from the perspective of someone who really listens, directly. So I've cut and pasted a snippet, in the hope the Foreign Affairs people won't sue me for copyright infringement. Its a long and interesting article, and I've only cited three paragraphs.

A small sovereign state within the pre-1967 boundaries has never
been the fundamental goal of Palestinian nationalism; instead, Palestinian
national consciousness has historically focused on avenging the
loss of Arab lands. As the prominent Palestinian academic Ahmad
Khalidi has argued, “Today, the Palestinian state is largely a punitive
construct devised by the Palestinians’ worst historical enemies.” Furthermore,
he contends, “The intention behind the state today is to
limit and constrain Palestinian aspirations territorially, to force them
to give up their moral rights.” Indeed, in a private conversation in
2001, then pa President Yasir Arafat told me that he believed statehood
could potentially become a “sovereign cage.”

Many Palestinians now feel that by denying Israel an “end of conflict, end of claims” deal, they are increasing their chances of gaining
a state for which they are not required to make political concessions.
Within a few years, the scant support for the two-state formula that currently exists will likely erode, and new concepts will begin to
compete as alternatives. In other words, the Palestinian community
will accelerate its collapse into Israel’s unwilling arms, in effect accomplishing
by stealth the sort of Arab demographic dominance that
Israeli leaders have for decades sought to avoid by occupying, rather
than annexing, the Palestinian territories. Such an annexation in reverse
would leave Israel no choice but to coexist alongside an Arab
majority within the whole of Palestine as it existed under the British
Mandate.

Khalidi has illustrated what many Israelis and Americans refuse to
see: the Palestinian general public instinctively distinguishes between
“independence” (the end of occupation) and “sovereignty” (statehood).
Most Palestinians wish to get rid of Israeli control but do not
necessarily strive to see the land divided. More and more Palestinians
are therefore considering options other than statehood. One option
proposed by Abdel Mohsin al-Qattan, former chair of the Palestinian
National Council, would be to maintain the territorial integrity
of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea and
govern it through a weak joint central government and two strong autonomous
governments—without necessarily demarcating geographic
borders between them. Another popular solution among
Palestinian leaders is a unitary state, which, for purely demographic
reasons, would eventually be controlled by an Arab majority.

Update: Soccerdad points me to what seems to be the Yaari article in its entirety here.

Michael Oren in Action

Regular readers will know that I'm a great fan of our ambassador in the US, Michael Oren. Recently he was shouted down by rowdies at the University of California, Irvine

On that occasion he won the discussion simply by maintaining his composure in the face of uncouth behavior. And especially note his final sentence in the YouTube film.

This week he's back on the attack, with a letter to the Irvine community suggesting he'd be glad to come back and talk.

Assuming our enemies - at Irvine or elsewhere, are interested in talking, of course.

The Fall of a Belief?

Those of you with very long memories may be able to go back to the previous millennium and reconstruct the scientific-moralistic doom-theory of the day. This was before a series of unusually hot summers convinced everyone humans were cooking the planet; the Armageddon of the time was genetically modified crops: they were going to wreak havoc on nature, destroy the future, and anyway they were an American conspiracy of hegemony, so they had to be bad.

Then the world was distracted, GM crops fell off the radar, and more fashionable reasons were invented for the world to end. GM crops, however, are still out there - and mostly doing good, as a matter of fact. True, they're still banned in Europe, but Europe isn't a very important place anymore, and this is yet another indication of why.

It may be that we're now seeing the demise of the Church of Global Warming. The Weekly Standard - never a stalwart of the Church to begin with - has a long article about how the entire edifice seems to be crashing these past few months. So far, so unconvincing: that's what the Weekly Standard is supposed to say. Now if the Guardian were to say the same, that might get our attention... Over here. George Monbiot himself, the High Priest of the Church at the Guardian, trying to explain why no-one's listening anymore: it must be because people are stupid (he uses different words, but that's the thesis). Of course, if they're stupid now, how were they less stupid two years ago as they crammed the pews of his Church and clamored for the airlines to shut down? He doesn't get into this. Nor does he mention the possibility that rather than being plain stupid, people may look out the window from time to time: in the late 1990s it really was hot for a couple of summers; recently, it really has been quite cool for a number of winters.

I recommend reading the comments below his article, in which some seemingly educated folks engage with Monbiot, who to his credit engages back. This is what the demise of an entrenched intellectual fad looks like, and it's fascinating.

For what it's worth, here in the Holy Land we've just had the warmest winter in decades, so if Monbiot wishes to turn Zionist this is his opportunity.

Anyway, as I never tire of saying, I'm agnostic on the science of the matter, which is totally beyond me, but I'm convinced that paying the Saudis and the Iranians quadzillions of $ so we can pour gook into the air can't be a good thing; the sooner someone invents cheaper and cleaner options, the better. If it's cheaper, everyone will go for it, because whether folks are all stupid or not, they tend to look out for their private interests.

Mesmerizing

Aaron Koblin, a fellow who likes to take large data-sets and express them visually, shows the flight patterns of American commuters. I especially liked watching the red-eye flights.


There's a more artsy version here, but I prefer the simpler one



And then there's another one, here

What does all this have to do with the usual topics of this blog, you ask? Not much. But believe me or not, it actually does have to do with my real job, which is keeping me away from blogging these days, so the least I can do is share the cooler aspects.

The Language of the Jews

If you've ever studied the stories of the Jews you'll know a source of Jewish cohesiveness was their cross-border language: a Jew from Baghdad and a Jew from Marakesh both prayed in Hebrew and spoke Aramaic, and this facilitated commerce. Later, the Jew from Trier and the Jew from Krakow and the Jew from Tiberius, they all prayed in Hebrew, knew enough Aramaic to navigate the Talmud, and spoke Yiddish, and this, too, facilitated commerce. Still later, much later, Soviet officers liberating Nazi camps identified themselves to emaciated survivors with code words in Yiddish, though the Aramiac and Hebrew had mostly been lost in the turmoil of emancipation then Bolshevism. (The main problem the early Zionists had with the non-European Jews was that they didn't speak Yiddish).

One morning in the summer of 1981 I saw the end of this world. I was studying in Vienna at the time, and three young students from Belgium suddenly appeared at our shul for the morning service. The rabbi, an elderly man from Israel, greeted the new comers in the time-honored tradition, asking them in Yiddish where they were from and if they needed anything. They looked discomfited, and responded in Hebrew.

That was thirty years ago. The elderly rabbi has long-since passed on, as has his generation and the remnants of his world; the students of that morning are middle-aged men. Earlier today I called the Chabad (Lubavitch) house in an Italian town where I'll be spending next weekend, to ask about some arrangements. The fellow who picked up the phone spoke perfect Hebrew, the obvious language for Jews of different lands to communicate in.

Dumb Antisemitism?

Walter Russel Mead keeps writing interesting things (I've cited him previously here and here). I have the sneaking suspicion he's not a Zionist, but when it comes to America, he seems to be what they used to call a realist. This includes realizing that most Americans support Israel and have done for a long time. In this article he comments that the reasons for this support can't be Jewish influence, manipulation or chicanery: there simply aren't enough Jews around to be having the effect they're having on so many people, and anyway, most of the Americans who so support Israel do so more fervently than many American Jews do. (Phil Wiess comes to mind, and Richard Silverstein, not to mention Norman Finkelstein or Noam Chomsky - but he's actually referring to the J-Street sort of Jews, not the nut-jobs). (h/t Goldblog)

Meanwhile, the Divest This! fellow, who obviously is a business-and-numbers chap, looks at the matter from a different direction. Not political belief or religious persuasion, but what people do to make their buck go furthest: in many cases, it appears, they do business with Israel. Heartwarming.

More on Elias Khoury

Last week I wrote about the translation to Arabic of Amos Oz' book A Tale of Love and Darkness. The translation, remember, was commissioned by Elias Khoury, an Israeli Palestinian lawyer, after his son was murdered by Palestinians who thought he was Jewish. Now we read that Khoury's father was likewise murdered, not many years after he managed to climb out from under years of Shin Bet persecution. After all that, he can still say

“This book tells the history of the rebirth of the Jewish people,” he said as he sat in his law office. “We can learn from it how a people like the Jewish people emerged from the tragedy of the Holocaust and were able to reorganize themselves and build their country and become an independent people. If we can’t learn from that, we will not be able to do anything for our independence.”

Awe inspiring. If there were more such people around, on all sides, the world would be a better place.

Still Left Left

Following the Meretz report on their electoral failure, we're having a spate of op-eds on the demise of Israel's Left. Ari Shavit, once the Chairman of the Association of Civil Rights in Israel, now a persona non-grata in those circles for his apostasy, makes a reasonable point: The Israeli Left had the correct ideas, to the extent that they eventually were adopted by Israel's mainstream, at which point they were tested against reality and found sorely lacking. Now, he says, the only way for the Left to recuperate is to adapt their messages to recognize reality - specifically, they must figure out how Israel can end the occupation of the Palestinians while retaining its ability to defend itself from the Palestinians who wish Israel gone, not peace alongside it.

So far, so reasonable. Except for one thing: why is it the task of the Left to come up with the resolution? Might it not be the Center, or the Right, or the association of pet owners? Why must the answer come from the Left?

The Things Jew Haters May Dream Of

Shaul Rosenfeld has an article about the Left which betrays its principles to hate Israel. Not much there you don't already know. Still, his first paragraph did give me a moment's pause:

The events of “Israel Apartheid Week” in the world opened this year with “freedom fighter” Leila Khaled’s emotional plea to “continue the armed struggle against Israel.” Khaled, a certified airplane hijacker and a well-known favorite of the radical Left in Western European delivered her words of “reconciliation, peace, and brotherly love” in a videotape shown to participants of a Mideast studies convention held at University of London last weekend.

Times were, the most a Jew hater could openly hope for was that the Jews would stop being Jews, or that they'd stop looking like Jews, or that they'd move far away. The Nazis of course wished for far worse and did their best to achieve it, but they were a bit extreme. Nowadays, however, you can sit in the comfort of your leafy town and openly yearn for the destruction of the main Jewish project, a destruction which will of course include mass suffering. Not that the Jew hater would do the action themselves, but they support the folks who will. Loudly, openly, brazenly.

Fine Men Gone

My friend Elly Dlin has died, suddenly. As did another friend, David Bankier, less than a week ago. We buried David on Friday, in the middle of one of the worst rainstorms I can remember; Elly, it seems, is to be buried in Edmonton, which is touching since there probably wasn't anywhere he would have fully called home,so he'll rest where he was born and grew up.

I need to write about them both; but I need to find the time. As you've noticed, I've been blogging less of late: too many other things going on, in other parts of life. In the meantime, if any of you are in Dallas or Edmonton, you might want to give Elly what we call chesed shel emet: the true charity, for it cannot be repaid.

All Knowing

I don't think I've ever written directly about my religious beliefs, one way or the other. In all the verbiage I spout, I challenge anyone to find any clear endorsement of a position on a transcendent deity. Mostly, this is because it's my business, not of interest to the world; but there's something very Jewish (I think) in discussing the issues I focus on without dragging divinity into it.

This post will be no different. The point I'm about to make is about logic, not belief.

The earliest computers were invented in the 1930s, I think. As a child in the early 1960s I heard the grownups talk about machines that were learning to think, though I doubt I'd ever met anyone who had actually seen such a machine (and they still haven't figured out how to think). If you can believe it, I completed my undergraduate studies on a portable typewriter, and never considered acquiring a PC until I was doing an MA. When in 1994 I stood in front of an audience of hundreds of researchers and said that the goal of the Yad Vashem archives was to put everything we had on the Internet, the startled audience erupted in applause. (Only later did I begin to think about the practicalities. Ouch).

70-some years after the first invention, The Economist has a special report on the super-abundance of data we're creating. (The report begins here; a single-page introduction is here). The thesis: Everything is being recorded, and the world is dramatically changing. The Onion spoofs the reality here.

If we allow our thoughts to run forward a few decades, to, say, the first centenary of the invention of the earliest computer, it's reasonable to expect there will be digital images of every inch of the globe viewable from any direction; there will be mountains of data on every human and much of their activities; every human thought which has ever been put into writing and survived until the late 1990s will be available somewhere in digital form; any and every human interaction which takes place in any format other than face-to-face talk will be recorded... and probably much more.

Whether you like it or not.

Now, assume a deity which has been around for longer than the first century of human digital recording. Is there any logical reason to assume that this deity doesn't have the abilities Man has so recently acquired? What's so implausible about a deity knowing everything about us all, always? We're well on our way there on our own, and just starting...

We Were All Wrong on This, Too...

The other day I linked to a story about how the archeologists may have got it all wrong. The Onion now takes the idea further.

A Tale in Arabic

If you've not yet read Amos Oz A Tale of Love and Darkness, do so. Stop reading this blog if you don't have time for both. It's the best book published in Israel last decade, period.

If you can't read the Hebrew original, you can now read an Arabic translation, published in Beirut.

The translation, by Israeli Arab Jamal Gnaim, was funded by the Khoury family of East Jerusalem in memory of their son George Khoury. Khoury was a promising Hebrew University law student when he was killed in a 2004 shooting attack while jogging on the university's Mt. Scopus campus.

(His killers thought he was a Jew).

Oz himself, musing on the success of the book, makes a profound point:

"Apparently the more a book is provincial, the more it is universal. When I wrote the book, I thought it would be read only by Jerusalemites from my neighborhood - I was sure that they wouldn't understand it in Tel Aviv," Oz said. "Now they're reading it in Beirut, Albania, Bulgaria and Korea. In China, for example, it was chosen as one of the best books of 2007."

Universal values are all well and fine, but they must start with real people, who live in real places, with real contexts. The power of universally significant stories or ideas is that people worldwide recognize our common humanity in diversity.

Israel's Arabs: Time to Fix their Economy

The Marker, the financial sister-paper of Haaretz, has been closely following the story of the growing attempts to integrate Israel's Arabs in the upper reaches of the economy rather than the lower ones. Some of the reportage is about interesting efforts being launched by government and establishment agencies; some is carping on how great the need and how little being done. The whole thing is beginning to look like what could be a significant change for the better, which would benefit everyone involved.

(Mostly in Hebrew, of course. Such stories don't often get published in English). Here, and follow the previous links.

Also, relating to my previous post, note that Meretz and our radical Left have very little to do with the whole matter. The correctives are coming from a center-Right government, and free-market financial players. Just like you'd expect if you recognized our far Left for what they are.

Meretz: Wrong for the Wrong Reasons

In last year's elections Meretz, Israel's farthest-Left Zionist party, barely squeaked into the Knesset with three MKs. Being a party of upright burghers, they set up a commission of inquiry to honestly look into the causes of their near demise, and to suggest how to avert full demise next time. Unsurprisingly, the commission was headed by a professor: probably part of the problem.

The commission made lots of scatter-shot recommendations, from disbanding into some other party (three were suggested), to figuring out what it stands for, to sending up younger representatives (as if age poses a problem in other parties).

Here's a quick thesis: the problem with Meretz isn't its positions, many of which are applied sooner or later by the parties in government, but it's tone. The folks at Meretz are profoundly convinced they're better than the rest of us, the rest of us are ghastly, and they have very little acquaintance with or empathy for the cognitive, cultural or emotional moorings the rest of us share. This is not a good way to win elections.

Wee Scottish Laddie

For reasons which are irrelevant to this blog I was just looking at a web-page of the University of Edinburgh. The page instructs wee Scottish students how to use an American software which students sometimes use, stage by weary stage. Instruction line number 9 states, and I quote in unabridged form:

On the wee window labelled PubMed (NLM) which pops up, select Yes to save changes.

Oddessa South

Clifford J. Levy - sounds like a Jewish name to me - is the NYT head of bureau in Moscow. Feeling something was somehow missing in Russia, he found it... in Ashdod.

As a resident of Russia, I found something poignant in the world of these immigrants. In their tumultuous history in the Soviet Union and in the Russian empire before it, Jews were subjected to brutal prejudice yet often flourished. And so their exodus has left a gap in these societies. Of course, Jews have remained, and communities are reviving. But in Israel, you can catch a refracted glimpse of what once was.

It's a fun article, and mostly accurate.

Although Levy, a one-day visitor, does miss another part of the story, which is that the richest folks in Ashdod, the ones who own the luxury apartments in the spanking new extravagant towers on the shore front, are mostly French. Or rather, North African Jews who left in the 1950s when Jewish life in the Muslim world ceased to be viable, made lots of money in France, and have been moving to Israel in droves these past few years as Jewish life in France becomes less viable.

Meanwhile, off in Beit Shemesh (and Raanana, and Efrat) another group of immigrants is moving in - the Americans. Jewish Life in the US remains viable, very, but for some folks it's getting very expensive (if you want your children to have a Jewish education), or less appealing (if your job is in danger): the Israeli economy is stronger these days, a development no Israeli planner ever expected.

Of course, all these groups also converge in Jerusalem, but that's a story for another day.

Wot, no War Crimes?

Just Journalism takes a look at how the British media reports on the killings of Afghan civilians, and looks back at the same media reporting on killings of Palestinian civilians. Nothing surprising,but worthy of documentation. Of course, it's not only the media, its also the endless observers whom the media quotes: politicians, self-anointed human rights talkers and so on.

Costumes and Lightbulbs

Purim is the day of the year when Israelis dress up in costumes, like Halloween in the US. The children I saw were in the usual: policemen, Queen Esther, that sort of thing. Among the adults, however, the most popular costume by far was something with a wig/three passports/tennis gear. Ive never seen so many Mossad agents out on the street in my life.

And then there was this variation on the "how many XXX to fix a light-bulb" joke:

- How many Mossad agents to fix a light-bulb?

- Light-bulb? There wasn't any light-bulb.

Temples Before Cities?

Via one of Andrew Sullivan's assistants, here's an article about an archeological finding poised to change the story of the rise of Man. It about the dig at Gobekli Tepe, in Turkey, where an extravagant complex of temples was constructed 11,500 years ago, centuries before the earliest know city, and with no city anywhere in sight. Klaus Schmidt, the chief archeologist, claims the need to have a temple ignited civilization rather than vice versa, the rise of civilization called forth religion.

Schmidt (55) has been digging there for 15 years, and expects to stay the rest of his life, yet he understood the full significance of the site in the first 60 seconds of his first visit.

The site is such an outlier that an American archeologist who stumbled on it in the 1960s simply walked away, unable to interpret what he saw. On a hunch, Schmidt followed the American's notes to the hilltop 15 years ago, a day he still recalls with a huge grin. He saw carved flint everywhere, and recognized a Neolithic quarry on an adjacent hill, with unfinished slabs of limestone hinting at some monument buried nearby. "In one minute—in one second—it was clear," the bearded, sun-browned archeologist recalls. He too considered walking away, he says, knowing that if he stayed, he would have to spend the rest of his life digging on the hill.

The human mind is even more complex than its past.

Compulsive Antisemitism Syndrome

Do Jew haters recognize their affliction? Are they purposeful about hating Jews, or do they think their ideas are the only possible way to understand the world? This is an important question, with serious implications, and I'm far too busy in the non-blogging world these days to engage in it. Still, Hawkeye at CiFWatch brings some interesting documentation to bolster the second explanation: systematic deleting of totally innocuous comments on a silly Guardian article. The only reasonable explanation I can think of is that these people are so totally detached from rational thought that they've, well, lost the ability to think rationally, and truly believe that disagreements with them must be expunged.

The problem, however, is that there are people around who do disagree with them. CiFWatch, for example. Which means the Guardianistas can't be unaware of dissenting positions, which in turn means they've made a conscious decision...

A Very Long Tale

Yesterday was Purim (in Jerusalem it's today). Purim, Judaism's jolliest holiday, starts from the story of Esther, queen to Ahasveros who may or may not have been Artaxerxes, and tells of a foiled plot to kill all the Jews in the Persian Empire. There are various morals to the story, but the historical one is that the Jews and Persians go back a l-o-o-on-g way even if nowadays the Persians call themselves Iranians. Centuries before the Europeans ever met their first Jews, and more than a thousand years before the Arabs burst out of Arabia onto the world stage, the Jews and Persians were deep into their ups-and-down relationship.

Also yesterday, Purim, Ahmadinejad announced (again) that the Jews are the source of all evil:

"Supporters of the Zionist regime who are shouting slogans of human rights and anti-terrorism support systematic crimes of the occupying regime," Ahmadinejad said, adding that "everybody knows that the regime is seeking hegemony over the world." Israel is the "origin of all the wars, genocide, terror and crimes against humanity," he said, and a "racist group not respecting the human principles," IRNA reported. "With God's grace and thanks to the Palestinian resistance, the occupying Zionist regime has lost its raison d'etre," Ahmadinejad said. "The only way to confront them is through the Palestinian youths' resistance, and that of the regional nations."

Look's like we're in a "down" right now.

Another Complicated Jew

Here's a story about an Orthodox Jew who used to be a neo-Nazi: actually two of them, if you can believe it. (It's in the newspaper, so it's got to be true, right?)

Beyond the individual oddity is a story about Poland, which my own anecdotal experience indicates is about right: the antisemitism is down, the support for Israel is palpable, and history takes strange twists and turns sometimes, doesn't it.

A Complicated Jew on Complicated Jews

Imagine a Catholic orphaned from murdered Jewish parents who thought they were Catholic, who narrowly survives and becomes a priest, spends a long career on the fault-line where Christians and Jews gingerly investigate the historical basis of their differences of opinions, then becomes a Jew and writes about it all in a calm, intelligent and balanced manner. Ah, and his subject matter is the single most important archeological finding of the 20th century, which itself shed some light, but not enough, on one of the strangest groups of Jews ever, if Jews they were; perhaps they were proto-Christians, or outcasts who served as an inspiration for someone, or perhaps they weren't at all. You might be likely to read his book, wouldn't you?

Geza Vermes, The Story of the Scrolls. The Miraculous Discovery and True Significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Not on sale in America, it seems, but you can buy it on Amazon.uk. If you need more prodding, here's a review that should do the job.

Guardian of the Falklands

The British and Argentinians are bickering about the Falklands, again. While no one expects them to start shooting, they are serious, not because of 2,500 Englishmen who live on the islands, nor because the islands are closer to Argentina than to the UK, but because there's oil nearby.

The historical claims of both sides stem from colonial pasts. The British have been coming and going since the late 16th century, perhaps, and the Spanish were in the picture since sometime in the late 18th century. The Argentinian claim flows from the Spanish one, apparently; no-one says they've been there from time immemorial or anything. If you're into damning colonialism - as some are - you're best bet is to wish for a pox on both their houses.

The Guardian is vehemently into damning colonialism. It's one of their favorite themes. On this one, however, they're a bit choosy: The British claim, they say, is a colonial vestige, so it should be dropped. (In favor of the Spanish colonial claim). Heh.

Ethan Bronner on Jerusalem

Remember the recent spat about how Ethan Bronner, the top NYT fellow in Israel and Palestine, must or must not be removed since his son has joined the IDF?

Today he's got an article about the development plans our mayor, Nir Barket, is trying to implement in a corner of East Jerusalem you've never heard of, al-Bustan. So far as I can see, Bronner's report is what's called balanced. He talked to the mayor, he talked to some Palestinian residents who will be affected if the plan goes through, he doesn't state an opinion of his own and so far as I can see, he doesn't imply one, either. Here's an issue; here's what one side says, here's what the other side says. I report, you decide.

Professional journalism.

There's only one problem: since you've never heard of al-Bustan before, you come away from this report with exactly no more understanding than before you read it. If you don't believe me, here's an intellectual exercise: Pretend you can be beamed over to this al-Bustan place, along with a group of intelligent folks who know nothing about the matter, and while standing in the middle of it you've got to explain to them what's going on, and answer their follow-up questions. You won't be able to, will you. Of course not.

That's professional journalism for you.

Jewish Review of Books

Hardly had Queen Victoria been laid to rest, some Englishmen started publishing a review of books at The Times. This was 1902. A few years later the publication became independent, as the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), though these days its Web presence is back at the Times. Along the way (1979, perhaps?) there was a fracas which gave birth to the London Review of Books. I don't dabble in all this enough to know which is the more important of the two.

Meanwhile, across the pond in New York, a group of rebels took advantage of a fracas of their own, and while the New York Times was temporarily shut down for strikers or some such, they launched a new review of their own: the New York Review of Books. This was in the early 1960s, and if you're into gossip about such matters it might tickle you to hear that the early editions of the LondonRB came out as a supplement to the NewYorkRB (I don't know how they justified calling it London, but perhaps literary types needn't be over-much bothered by earthly details.)

I sometimes read the NYRB and even cite articles here on Ruminations; I very rarely look at the London ones. I expect most all of them don't much like Israel and Zionism, but I'm not certain how much they like America, either, so I don't take much offense.

The Jews ("the Jews"?) have now decided they, too, need a Review of Books. I always thought the NYRB was a Jewish publication of course, but now there's an explicitly Jewish one; it's even called the Jewish Review of Books.

The first issue is just out, and online (I don't know how the publisher expects to make money), and has some interesting items. Yair Rosenberg, a student at Harvard who obviously gets all the insider jokes reviews Srugim, the popular Israeli non-response to Sex in the City. It's a different Harvard than it used to be. Shlomo Avineri, who could easily be the first reviewer's grandfather, reports on Dennis Ross and David Makovski's Myths, Illusions, and Peace: Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East. Avineri liked the book, but my synopsis of his synopsis is: There isn't much America can do about the Middle East, though it could make matters worse.

And then there's a review by one Azzan Yadin about a new English translation of the Bible, or rather, of the Mikraot Gedolot version of the Pentateuch. Yadin isn't gentle. He says the translation tries to make the texts simple and accessible to modern English readers, but they aren't: not simple, and not easily accessible. They need to be worked at to be appreciated. I recommend his review for the information it gives, but if you'd like to deal with the texts themselves, I'm sorry to report you'll have to read them in Hebrew, and you'll have to work at them.

Tikkun Olam, Zionism, History, and the Jewish Problem

A reader ("nycerbarb") sent me to this fine article by one Rabbi Jill Jacobs. Jacobs tells the history of the Tikkun Olam idea from its earliest appearance in Second Temple times - i.e, post-Biblical - and shows how it has meant different things at different times. She is unabashed in saying the present term stands for an American ideal, first used in the 1950s. She likes this usage, and shows that the four main earlier meanings can, if you wish, be understood as contributing to the present one.

Her history is fine, so far as I can judge. Her reasoning is, well, reasonable. A bit contrived at times, for my taste, but most peoples' reasoning is a bit contrived from time to time. Having Googled a bit I get the feeling Rabbi Jacobs and I might not agree on some things, including some rather important things, but I have real respect for her ability to make her case from a position of serious learning and knowing.

Then there's the matter of universality. American Jews - like European Jews a century earlier - are into it. They'd like to do things that may make the world fixed. Some of the prophets looked forward to the world one day being all fixed, and their formulations count as the most rousing ever, though their avenue to perfection ran along a religious path quite different from their modern disciples'. Since then, however, Jews have mostly concentrated on the same things other people focused on: doing their best in the world they lived in. Sometime in the 18th century some Jews began setting aside the communal and national frameworks (the prophets had never done that) so as to focus mainly on the universal. Moses Mendelsohn was an early proponent, Rosa Luxemburg was an extreme one, and Leon (Bronstein) Trotsky was an extreme example of how wishing to force the matter leads to mass death.

Still, for all the examples we'd prefer to forget, American Jewry can be said, by in large, to be informed by a version of this impetus, this wish to fix the world; nor is there anything intrinsically wrong with it. Israel is informed by a different vision, the one that recognized in the late 19th century that new world orders were all well and fine but the Jews wouldn't be allowed to fit into them, or in the case of the early socialist Zionists, the Jews might be allowed, but only if they came to the table as a viable nation, like everybody else.

As a committed Zionist myself, I can see that both visions of society have roots in Jewish history and thought; it seems to me that the one that aims at the Jews being actors in history is more compelling than the one that would have history become something else. This seems to me closer to the essence of Judaism, but also to the reality of the human condition. Jill Jacobs might think otherwise, and we could have a good argument about it - nothing is more Jewish than that, after all.

Damned if You Do, Damned if You Do Otherwise

It's easy to get the impression that Israel's critics will castigate it no matter what it does (short of disbanding: there would be muted satisfaction if that happened. For at least two days).

Remember how not long ago Richard Goldstone explained that although everything Israel had done in Gaza was awful, commando units taking out individual Hamas commanders would have been alright. Well, perhaps that's what recently happened to that fellow with the false identity in Dubai.

If Goldstone did any applauding, I didn't hear of it.

Mitchell Cohen has some thoughts on the matter here. Cohen, I'm told, has impeccable credentials on the (sane) American Left. I've decided to tag this as yet another indication that reasonable people often do see the fundamental structures of reality. (h/t Michael)

Let's assume for the sake of argument that the Israelis did it. But let's also bracket howls by those who would find a way to blame the "Zionist entity" if Mars swerved off orbit and crashed into Jupiter. Hamas and Israel are at war. Both say so. Al-Mabhouh was a founder of the military wing of Hamas, was responsible for the deaths of Israelis, wanted deaths of many more of them, and was a key intermediary between Hamas and Iran. Tehran supplies Gaza's fundamentalist rulers with weapons like longer range missiles; its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, inveighs regularly that the Jewish state should vanish from the earth (like the Holocaust, which never happened anyway, should disappear from memory). Exactly why is a holy warrior like al-Mahbouh not a legitimate target?

Subtlety at CiF

Much of the antisemtism at the Guardian isn't very subtle. Yesterday, however, one of the CiFWatch team called my attention to this example: all the moderator did was to remove the link to MEMRI (which, by the way, is www.memri.org, and an important website it is). One little snip, one reduced chance that anyone will stumble across a resource the Guardian doesn't want people looking at.

www.memri.org. Visit them often. www.guardian.co.uk. Visit them less.

Can ALS be Stopped?

ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, is a horrible way to die, as Tony Judt has been describing with harrowing detail in the New York Review of Books. Were someone to find a way to stop it, or possibly even to cure it, the world would be a better place.

Some Israeli scientists, entrepreneurs and doctors are trying. Here's hoping.

A Dynasty that Still Lives

The Davidian dynasty can be traced, generation by generation, for about 1,500 years, from Boaz and Ruth in the 11 century BCE all the way to the leaders of the Jewish community in Babylon in the fourth century CE.

How much of it can be scientifically demonstrated, I do not know. The existence of King David himself was proven by an archeological finding at Tel Dan just a few years ago. Here's a new story, in which Eilat Mazar, an archeologist digging in Jerusalem, says she has found a wall of the city that was constructed by Solomon.

The item notes that not all archeologists will welcome this interpretation of the finding, since some of them regard the Biblical stories of the Davidian kingdom as unreliable. It's an argument which has been raging in the academic journals for the past 20 years, perhaps more. My impression is that the conservatives, the ones who credit the Bible with greater reliability, are slowly gaining ground (no pun intended), but then again, that's also where my preferences would naturally lie, and I'm not reading all the academic stuff, so who knows.

Disagreeing about the House of David is not a new pastime. Just this morning I passed a section in the Sanhedrin tractate in which rabbis from the second and fourth centuries CE tired to agree on how it could have been that David wedded both Meirav and Michal, two daughters of Saul: wedding sisters is forbidden. (Yes, I've heard of Leah and Rachel, but that's a different story). One possibility is that Meirav died before Michal was wedded, another possibility is that there was a legal screw up in which Meirav ended up never wedding David, and the Gemarah hacks away at it for about a page. The axiom of the discussion is that these ancient Biblical figures were organizing their lives according to the very detailed rules being formulated in the Mishnaic era - an improbable assumption. Yet the attempt to look back 1,400 years and fit old events into a contemporary legal framework is ultimately no more silly than peering back 3,000 years so as to fit them into a contemporary political one, is it?

(Sanhedrin 19b)

Good News, Too

My English is reasonable, I travel to the US once a year if not more often, some of my best friends are Americans and I often spend time with Americans who visit Israel. I also spend time almost daily reading American websites. Having said all that, it's almost impossible for me to gauge what the proverbial "man on the street" thinks about most matters, including what people really think about Israel. Are the loonies on Mondoweis gaining traction, as they continuously crow? Was the war in Gaza a crucial and negative turning point, as Andrew says? Are thugs who shout down Israeli public figures at universities marginal, or is the silent majority willing to let them do their thing out of a lazy agreement with their sentiments? These things are not easy to know from afar, just as well-meaning American Jews can't easily know that criticism of the NIF has nothing to do with McCarthyism, and everything to do with Israeli society turning on its home-grown enemies.

In this spirit of uncertainly, here are a couple of indicators of the nice kind.

Americans rather like Israel.

The Jewish community of San Fransisco (San Francisco!) is more clear-minded about Israel than some of the locals might have you believe (h/t David B).

Sloppy Logic at the NIF

Here's an addendum to the NIF story we wasted too much time on a couple weeks ago.

Eventually the NIF got around to publishing a rebuttal to the Im Tirzu report. You can download the full report here, but it's in Hebrew only - which is odd, since these organizations publish almost all their documents in English.

It's important that the NIF responded, because their initial reaction was to use legal measures to shut down the Im Tirzu campaign, hardly an honorable response that, and then to concentrate their ire on the form of the criticism against them, not its substance. Yet their responses now are hardly satisfying.

I haven't read the entire 112-page ImTirzu report. My understanding of their thesis, however, was never "absent NIF there'd have been no Goldstone Report", which would have been a silly idea. What they were claiming was that the NIF-NGOs, unlike the other Israeli entities cited by the Goldstone Report, set themselves firmly in the critical-of-Israel camp. This claim is so obviously true it's hard to see why anyone would even try to refute it; may I remind us all that back in June 2009, as the Goldstone team was just beginning to operate, a coalition of these Israeli NGOs essentially said this themselves in a document they submitted to Goldstone and put on their websites (here's the ACRI version, and here's my reading of that document, from August).

The English version of the NIF response is here, and a synopsis of the 29-page rebuttal report is here. It just so happens that I responded to the synopsis on February 10th, the very day it was posted, and my response is still there, so I don't need to repeat it here. As for the NIF response, it seems to me mostly irrelevant. No-one is claiming the NIF does nothing of any value in Israel, rather that they do good and bad simultaneously; enumerating the good is therefore besides the point. Except here:

We challenge Im Tirtzu, NGO Monitor and other NIF critics to demonstrate the value of their contributions to Sderot.

Why are the actions of their critics relevant? It's the NIF that needs to respond, not their critics.

Since the NIF response enumerates fine things they've done in and around Sderot, however, they do open themselves to an additional line of questioning: Have any of their NGOs ever, at any point since 2001 when the attacks on Sderot began, demanded of the Israeli government that it protect the Sderotians from the infractions of their human rights? The NGOs under attack produce an endless stream of reports, court petitions, demonstrations and so on demanding that Israel treat the Palestinians better; have they ever taken similar action so that the Israeli government protect Israeli citizens?

Journalism: Inventing a Story from Whole Cloth

Amira Hass has a story about how the Israeli authorities are building roads and roadblocks that will sever East Jerusalem from the West Bank. Set aside the matter that the evidence she offers doesn't lead to the conclusion, even if it were all true, she offers no demonstration of its truth. On the contrary. The entire article is based upon conjecture by Palestinians about Israeli actions. Only at the end of the item does Hass quickly tell that the few Israeli officials she has asked all deny the allegations; her answer to that is to wink and snicker: after all, we wouldn't want to believe Israeli officials, would we.

That's Amira Hass, and her audience will lap it up, as is their wont. What about the paper's editors, you ask? After all, if a government ministry (transportation or defense) or the municipality (Jerusalem) are engaged in spending public money on highly visible construction projects, you'd think a reporter for the country's (purportedly) best newspaper might be able to find some official record about what's going on; perhaps even insist upon it before publishing a story.

You'd be wrong.

Lots of Kids

Yitta Schwartz, Holocaust survivor, has passed away in New York leaving some 2,000 (two thousand) living descendants.

The vagueness about the precise number is, I expect, the result of a superstition some Jews have about not counting one's grandchildren (or in this case, great grandchildren and great great grandchildren). Still, if you do the maths, in a society with an average of 9 children per family, a woman who has 15 who live into adulthood wouldn't have much problem of reaching 200 grandchildren, and from there on, adding another 1,800 is easy.

To Refute, not to Silence

The Andrew Sullivan-Leon Wieseltier spat is not particularly important, for all its going on for an entire week. However, Wieseltier's second installment contains some valuable linguistic distinctions that need to be understood and employed when Israel's enemies do their "offended, threatened and martyred act":

To the best of my recollection, I have never characterized Mearsheimer and Walt, or anybody else, as “the modern equivalent of Der Sturmer.” And of course AIPAC “has massive influence in Congress”--but that is hardly all that Mearsheimer and Walt claim! Anyway, they, and Sullivan, have the right to say any damn thing they want about AIPAC, and Israel, and Jews. And I have the right to respond as strictly and as definitively as I can. I do not wish to silence them, I wish to refute them. I also do not wish to allow them to enjoy the sanctuary of the piously skinless. People who give offense will get offense. I appreciate the delicacy, or rather the indelicacy, of my allegation about Sullivan. I did not propose that he is an anti-Semite. I did propose that the scorn and the fury that characterizes his discussion of Israel and some of its Jewish supporters is wholly unwarranted by the requirements of a critical analysis of the settlements or the Gaza war, and that it may therefore be mistaken for bigotry. (There are conservative opponents of what they virulently call “the gay agenda” who should not be surprised if they have to defend themselves against the charge of homophobia, even if they are not homophobic.) If I should be more careful about the question of anti-Semitism, so should Sullivan. He complacently says that on this score “I did my best.” No, he did not. There is a lot of this prejudice in the world right now, and this is really no time to be sloppy, or South Parky, about it. Sullivan is correct that there is not much difference between our views about the settlements and Israeli brutality in Gaza and the ideological orientation of the Likud--but there is all the difference in the world, because I have labored to provide an example of what Michael Walzer has described as “connected criticism,” of criticism that cannot be mistaken for enmity. (This does not mean that enmity is not allowed. It does mean that enmity cannot pose as friendship.)

Fixing the World

I'm largely offline for a spot. However, you might want to have a glance at this item at the Forward. It's a list of 10 rising Jewish-American politicians to watch in the November elections. A majority of them say their motivation is Tikkun Olam. Now as I've said repeatedly in the past, Tikkun Olam in Jewish tradition didn't mostly mean what these folks think it means; theirs is largely am American sentiment dressed up to look like a traditional Jewish tradition.

I'm not saying it isn't a fine sentiment, the wish to fix the world, and it does, of course, have Jewish roots; still, it's interesting, this direction American Jewry seems to be taking.

Ungovernable. Perhaps.

After WW2 France seemed ungovernable. After fiddling with various things, the French re-tooled their form of government (and some other things, too), and things got vastly better.

In the 1980s Israel seemed ungovernable. We fiddled with various things, re-tooled our electoral system, the result was even worse than before, we went back to the original system - and things got better. Or rather, they got lots worse on other fronts (the 2nd Intifada started, for example) but it turned out the old-new system was working fine.

Sometimes changing the system fixes things. Sometimes not. It depends what the original problem had been.

The Economist discusses the political system in America, and wonders if it needs fixing or perhaps not.

Broad Understanding of War

One Melanie Ried, whom I've never heard of before, thinks well of the Israelis for serving their own interests.

It is an unfashionable thing to say, but I have a considerable admiration for the Israeli way of doing things. They want something, they get it. They perceive someone as their deadly enemy, they kill them. They get hit, they hit back. They don’t waste time explaining or justifying or agonising; nor do they allow their detractors to enter their country and then afford them generous welfare payments. They just act. No messing. No scruples. Not even a shrug and a denial, just a rather magnificent refusal to debate anything.

This absolutism, based on their history, carries its own moral weight; one that is rather electrifying in a Western world grown flabby with niceties. Clearly, the Israelis could defend their policies if they wanted to, but they quite simply can’t be bothered. It’s a waste of breath. One admires them for that, too.

She goes a bit overboard, alas, but it's nice when a Scottish lady from another world gushes about us: unusual, too. Equally interesting are the comments. Quite a number of them are by the kind of reasonable folks who recognize that war is an unsavory phenomenon that calls for actions you otherwise wouldn't do, but if you're forced to be at war, there's no choice. From my perch here in Jerusalem it's hard to know how common such sentiments are or aren't.

Then there's this description (from the Guardian!), about the enemies of the West in Afghanistan, and how they're not nice and don't play fair. As I've said, the more such descriptions become common in Western media, the more reasonable people will begin to make the connection to Israel's enemies and challenges. Good.