The story about how Eric Holder, America's Attorney General, refused to name radical Islam as a culprit for the three recent attacks on the US has been rocketing around the Internet. (I first came across it via Powerline, where they've got the video and a transcript). Holder was at a House hearing, Rep. Lamar Smith asked him if radical Islam might be relevant to what's going on, and Holder refused to entertain the possibility until the congressman essentially put the words in his mouth.
The part I found most interesting was how Holder tried to explain that it's not Islam it's a false interpretation of it. Which of course begs the question: How does he know? You can't be the Attorney General unless you're an intelligent and educated person, of that I have no doubt, but in order to be able to make the statement Holder was trying to make you'd have to have a particular sort of education. You'd have to know Arabic, for starters, and have spent lots of time learning about Islam, either by living it or by studying its books or - preferably - both. None of which Holder has ever done.
Had he wished to say that Islam is many things and radical Islam is but one of them, that would have been fine. But to preach about what it isn't, and what's a false interpretation of it?
The reluctance, not to say refusal, of some people to accept that ideology can be a prime motivator of actions is not new; it has been around for generations, perhaps even longer; it predates the current radicalization of Islam. It was the same with Nazism ("they can't really mean what they say about the Jews, or the Slavs, or any of that stuff"), and undoubtedly many others. A serious analysis of this phenomenon would likely start with an examination of a frame of mind, not the particular historical context. Not the kind of thing a blog is likely to be able to do.
SMUGGLERS complain that Egypt hampers three things imported through the blockade-busting tunnels that supply Gaza: weapons, dishwashers (their timers can double as detonators), and books. Of the three, the last may be the most regulated. One smuggler complained that the Egyptian authorities confiscated a delivery of 10,000 books, the bulk of them a classical commentary on the Koran. In the eyes of the impounders, the people of Gaza, who are governed by the Islamists of Hamas, are quite Islamic enough already.
It's a sad state of affairs, however, when the rather nasty Egyptian police (who are mostly Muslims) understand the world considerably better than a powerful and important American official who's job it is to know better.
We've had a spot of discussion here the past few days about the King James Bible, and how well the translation has withstood the tides of time (my position was that it has done so very well).
Obviously, King James didn't do the translating himself. So who did? Ever wondered? Most of it, it turns out, was the work of a fellow named William Tyndale - but that's only the briefest synopsis of the tale. It's worth digging deeper.
The putative dividers of Jerusalem - the sincere ones, at any rate - don't really have much idea about what the place looks like. That's the only explanation I can think of for their breathtaking disregard of what the division will mean in reality. This is true for many parts of town, but nowhere more than in the Old City.
When historians tell that there has been a Jewish majority in Jerusalem since the mid 19th century at the latest, they mean the Old City: that was all there was in those days. From the 1870s the Jews seemed to have left the Old city in larger numbers than the Arabs, building new and less cramped neighborhoods outside the walls, so that eventually there probably was an Arab majority inside the walls. After the Arab riots of 1929 the British ethnically cleansed the Jews from most of the old city, leaving them only in the historical Jewish quarter so as to reduce tensions. Green: Muslim Quarter, with no Jews after 1929. Red: Christian Quarter. There seem to have been few Jews there if at all. Blue: Armenian Quarter, with Jews populating its eastern area, adjacent to the Jewish Quarter, in violet.
The Clinton parameters of December 24th 2000 foresaw the re-enacting the British move: moving Jews out of the Muslim Quarter, where they're a minority, and drawing a border around the Jewish Quarter. The Geneva Accord website offers an aerial photo with the division superimposed: I've added six colored spots to their map, each signifying a short video I've made recently, i.e. April and May 2010. I hope each of them explains itself.
I've described the nine logical scenarios of dividing Jerusalem, here. In most of them the border will have to be real, not a notional line on a map. As these videos show, in the old city there are many places where such a border will run down narrow allies, through buildings, and in some cases (e.g. on Chain Gate street) it will require ground floors to be in Palestine, and upper floors of the same buildings in Israel.
This would be idiotic if it wasn't tragic.
Bikkur Cholim st, on the edge of the Armenian-Jewish quarter, red dot on the map:
This one is from a point where the Armenian and Jewish quarters are all jumbled together (green dot on the map):
Another film from the Western edge of the Jewish Quarter, on Chabad street as it descends to the Arab Market (light blue dot on the map):
This one is on the roof of a point where the Muslim and Jewish Quarters touch. (Dark blue dot on the map):
Finally, here are two films from Chain Gate street in the Muslim Quarter, where the upper stories, including a rooftop version of the same street, are slated to be in Israel, while the ground floors are to be in Palestine. (Dark and pale violet dots on the map):
My Father died 25 years ago today. My father-in-law died 19 years ago today. Both were impressive men, respected by their peers and successful at what they did. Both died before the advent of the World Wide Web, and neither of them left much trace on it, if at all. So the purpose of this telling is to create at least some record of their lives that Google will be able to find.
Avraham (Bumi) Tessler was born in a small town in a remote corner of the Habsburg Empire. He was the sixth, I think, of 13 children, two of whom were stillborn. His father, Eliezer, was a wealthy man by the standards of Eastern European Jews of the time; he died before the Nazis could reach him. Avraham's mother, Dvora, lived longer, and was murdered at Auschwitz along with some of her children and grandchildren, in 1944. Bumi, as everyone in the family called him, went to cheder at age three, but also insisted on gong to the secular school. He never told me much about WW1, but he had been impressed by the death of the Kaiser, Franz Josef, when he was eight. After the war it turned out they were living in Romania. He later learned and was ordained at the famous Sphinka yeshiva, married and started a family, and when the Second World War began their town was moved into Hungary. He was sent to the Hungarian slave labor battalions, a fact which eventually saved his life as the Hungarians didn't hand those men over to be murdered. He lost all of his family, however, and most of his siblings. (Four of them survived the war, and one had been in Mandatory Palestine all the while).
Finding himself in post-war Budapest, he started all over. In 1949, as the Communist takeover of Hungary was reaching completion, he, his second wife, and her parents, escaped destitute to Vienna. They started all over yet again. The vagaries of life left them in Vienna; he eventually had a retail business smack in the middle of town, and new children of the ages his grandchildren should have been.
He knew six languages (He taught himself English after the war assuming it would be useful). He visited Israel for the first time in 1960; today, all of his grandchildren live here. Although he lived a long life, that stolen generation meant that he didn't see them grow beyond grade school. He spoke with them in an archaic Hebrew, a language he knew from the prayerbook, the Yeshiva, the Bible.
He loved gadgets, and in his late 70s would eagerly engage 20-year-old salesmen of electrical equipment in discussion of the capabilities of their wares. I haven't the faintest idea how they fit this knowledgeable old codger with the antiquated suits and the strange accent into their picture of the world and its types of clients, but they were always courteous and eager to be helpful.
He would have loved the Internet; had he lived to be 99 he would have been an early adapter of iPhones, though I doubt he'd have been able to text his grandchildren at a pace they'd have thought reasonable. None of which interfered with the fact that in the dingy little synagogue next to the train-track where he regularly convened with other men from his world, he was held in high esteem for the wealth and depth of his Jewish learning, and his dignified manner.
He was probably killed by Saddam Hussein. In early 1991 the thought that his grandchildren in Israel were about to face chemically armed missiles was too much for him, and he began the descent that lead to his death.
Avraham Lozowick was born a generation later than Avraham Tessler, in a blessed land. The son of parents who had escaped Eastern Europe on time, he grew up on the west side of Chicago, in an area where everyone was either Polish or Jewish; there may have been some Irish, I expect, but no WASPs. Al Capone's mom lived nearby, so they say, and his father once turned down an offer to buy a sizable chunk of stocks in an obscure company with the unconvincing name International Business Machines. But I won't vouch for the truth of those tales. He was a staunch Roosevelt Democrat and a precinct captain, was Phil Lozowick. Avraham couldn't be sent out into the world with such a Jewish name, so he was named Arnold (as if that was less Jewish). Like most Jewish boys of his time, he was as successful as could be. He started studying at Yale at age 16, and finished Harvard law school, 6th of a class of 600, by 23. He went to the army and signed on an extra year so as to be sent, along with his wife, to Germany: what an adventure that must have been in the 1950s, when international travel was still something reserved for the rich, not for young Jewish children of immigrants.
Germany in the 1950s had no Jews - and their eerie absence resonated in a way that their crowded presence back in Chicago never had. Less than a decade after his military service, we all packed up and moved to Israel. The name Arnold was tucked away in a shoe box, and Avraham was proudly brought forth.
30 years later, or 40, American attorneys moving to Israel work in the hi-tech sector; in the 1960s Israel exported Jaffa oranges and diamonds, and the few Americans coming worked for the government. Avraham set up and ran the legal department at the central bank. He never really figured out how to deal with the standard Israeli hurly-burly of commerce, government and culture; somehow resembling the immigrants of Germany a generation earlier, who had always expected things to be done correctly even though they never were, he recognized that his codes were different. Yet he was so committed to them, so obviously qualified to be insisting on the right way to do things, that most people around him would at least sometimes accept that when dealing with him, they had to use his rules (which were, after all, the book's rules). When he died suddenly, one day, his funeral was mobbed by hundreds of people from the top of the economy, and passersby stopped to ask what important person had died.
Amnesty International, alongside Human Rights Watch the top so-called human rights organization in the world, yesterday published a piece of blatant slander of the State of Israel. The document is online here, but I'll cite it in its entirety, from the title down.
Israel must stop harassment of human rights defender
Black and white, cut and dried, no nuance or ambiguity. Israel must desist from the harassment it's engaging in.
Amnesty International has called on the Israeli authorities to end their harassment of a human rights activist whose week-long detention by the Israeli authorities was extended today.
Ditto. Israel is doing it, and must desist.
Ameer Makhoul, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, was arrested in a dawn raid at his home in Haifa, northern Israel, by the Israeli security services and police on 6 May. He has been charged with "contact with a foreign agent" on the basis of “secret evidence”.
The form the harassment is taking is in the parenthesis. Their content doesn't express truth, or even potential truth, merely a form of mockery of a judicial process.
"Ameer Makhoul is a key human rights defender, well-known for his civil society activism on behalf of the Palestinian citizens of Israel," said Philip Luther, Deputy Director of Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa Programme. "His arrest and continued detention smacks of pure harassment, designed to hinder his human rights work. If this is the case, we would regard him as a prisoner of conscience call for his immediate and unconditional release.”
We know him. He's of our club, a human rights defender. People like us are expected to be harassed, and secret evidence about espionage is standard harassment. Do note, however, that Mr Luther (what a delicious name for a potential antisemite) is less certain of himself than the anonymous writer of the communique. True, the detention smacks of pure harassment, a form which is worse than impure harassment, and we'll regard him as a prisoner of conscience - but only if we're certain the allegations are true. Mr Luther isn't totally sure, he's hedging his bets, obfuscating. He's convinced enough t0 broadcast censure of Israel, but not enough to stand behind the allegation.
Ameer Makhoul has been denied legal advice throughout his detention. The doctor at the prison where he is held has informed his lawyer that he is suffering from pains in his head. On the morning of his arrest, Ameer Makhoul was taken to Petah Tikva interrogation centre and, at a hearing the same day, his detention was authorized for six days. Today it was extended until 17 May.
He saw a judge the morning of his arrest, and again six days later (the day before the AI communique). He also saw a doctor, and no-one is alleging that he's not receiving treatment for his head pains. He has yet to have time with his lawyer, but that's the law of his country. Similar laws exist in other democracies, perhaps even in the UK though I haven't checked.
According to Ameer's wife, Janan Makhoul, during the raid on their home, security forces confiscated mobile phones, laptops, a camera, and documents. The same morning, members of the Israeli security forces also raided the office of the association Ittijah in Haifa, where Ameer Makhoul works.
The man is suspected of having contact with foreign agents, perhaps even agents of countries which are at war with his own. Mobile phones, laptops, a camera and documents would all seem to be the sort of things investigators should be interested in. The laptop of a suspected rapist might not be interesting to the police, but a spy? What investigators wouldn't be looking precisely at these items?
Ameer Makhoul had already been banned from travelling for two months on 21 April by the Israeli Minister of the Interior Eli Yishai, who said at the time that Ameer Makhoul’s exit from the country “poses a serious threat to the security of the state”. The Palestinian activist was only made aware of the ban when he attempted to leave Israel on 22 April, where he was scheduled to begin a series of meetings with civil society activists in Jordan.
The man was warned that he was being investigated three weeks before he was arrested. True, he was banned from travel but only informed of the ban the next day, when he tried, but the ban was signed by the minster of the Interior himself. Not a sleepy fourth-tier duty judge at 3am. It was the minster himself.
When Amnesty International spoke to Ameer Makhoul in late April he expressed his concern that the travel ban was part of a broader pattern of state repression against the peaceful political activities of Palestinian citizens of Israel, justified under "security concerns".
AI appears not to have discussed the matter with the Israeli authorities. They spoke to the suspect, after he had been warned that he was under investigation, and in a time-honored method of creating himself an alibi, he informed them that if anything happened to him it would be proof of his innocence and his accuser's duplicity.
In January 2009, the Israeli Central Election Committee banned the National Democratic Assembly (NDA), a party which currently holds three seats in the Israeli parliament and calls for Israel to be "a state for all its citizens", and the United Arab List, which has four parliamentary representatives, from standing in Israel’s general elections under the claim that the parties supported terrorism and "did not recognize Israel's existence as a Jewish and democratic state". The Committee’s ban on the two parties was subsequently overturned by the Israeli High Court.
The relevance of this section is not clear. Is it meant to give context? If so, why not explain that a standard ritual of Israeli elections is that the politicians try to block the fringe parties of far left and far right, secure in the recognition that the Supreme Court will strike down the move; and that since the 1980s only one ban was allowed to stand, and that was against the racist Kahana party (Jews, not Arabs). Additional context for the espionage allegations might be that Israel is legally and practically at war with most its neighbors, and belligerents routinely engage in espionage against each other. (In the UK this is done by MI6).
On 24 April, Omar Said, an activist with the NDA was detained by the Israeli authorities. Initially a gagging order was imposed on the Israeli press to prevent reporting of Ameer Makhoul’s and Omar Said’s detentions. The lifting of the order led to reports in the Israeli media on Monday that the arrests of both men related to accusations of spying and contact with a foreign agent from Lebanese group Hizbullah.
This is all true, but there must be five million additional facts that are also true and somehow related. Why were these particular items deemed noteworthy, and no others? Say, the fact that in the past people have been convicted of espionage for Hezbullah? Isn't that equally relevant or equally irrelevant?
Ameer Makhoul has been the General Director of Ittijah, which works on behalf of the Palestinian community in Israel, since its foundation in 1995. He is also the chair of the Public Committee for the Defence of Political Freedom within the Arab Higher Monitoring Committee in Israel.
The roster of Israeli citizens who have been convicted of espionage over the years have included colonels in the career army, scientists with top-secret clearance, businessmen, and sundry others. Is there any particular reason to think that NGO activists are immune to the various motivations which occasionally lead people to betray their country?
"In the unlikely event that there are genuine grounds to prosecute Ameer Makhoul he should be charged with recognizable criminal offences and brought promptly to trial in full conformity with international fair trial standards," said Philip Luther.
Unless Mr.Luther is himself engaging in espionage, there is no way at this stage of the investigation for him to know if there are or aren't genuine grounds for a prosecution. His comment about such grounds being unlikely is spite, no more - though I'm tempted to characterize it as pure spite. The demand that the proceeding be swift is simply rude. Israel is a sovereign state, with laws that dictate how long which stage of which legal proceedings may be and under which conditions. No one has said these laws are being infringed upon, so Mr. Luther's demand is baseless. His parting shot, about international fair trial standards, is slander. As any student of the matter knows, the legal standards of the Israeli system compare favorably with those of any other country. His comment therefore is not of the "when did you stop beating your wife?" class, but worse. It's more like asking a well-known widow why he doesn't stop beating his wife.
It's also odd. After all, the top of the communique said so clearly that Makhoul has no case to answer, since the whole thing is, how to put it, pure harassment.
On a related matter: Anatoly Scharansky was a prisoner of conscience, for nine long years. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a prisoner of conscience, until he was hanged. Nelson Mandela was a prisoner of conscience, for decades. At the moment there isn't a shred of evidence that Ameer Makhoul belongs to this illustrious club, nor that Israel belongs to the infamous club of countries that confines prisoners of conscience. True, there's a sleight of hand, whereby Amnesty International alleges that Israel does, and then damns it for doing so, but that's slander, not rational discussion based upon empiric evidence that can be tested against independent criteria and proved or disproved.
At the moment the only thing that can be said with certainly is that Amnesty International is destroying the moral power of the terminology of true human rights by using it as propaganda. The only people who will be harmed are the real victims in the many places where human rights are actually being trampled.
I'll be watching AI as this story unfolds, to see how they report on it.
As I've often said, what's significant about the many mentions of Jerusalem in the Bible isn't how many of them there are, but how the Jews never stopped reading them (except when they already knew them by heart). Sometime this plays out in interesting ways. Take the 137th Psalm, for example:
1By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
2We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
3For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
4How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?
5If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
6If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
7Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.
8O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
9Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones
(King James translation. The best).
The first passages have become cultural icons; the last two are rarely recited - and it's better so.
Here's a modern shir forged from the 5-6th verses, performed by Yaacov Shweiki
Here's another version, being applied to a very profane context: a victorious Beitar Yerusahlayim, our magnificent hometown team. But that's part of the point, isn't it: Beitar's fans sing a psalm to celebrate their team. I'll bet Manchester United fans can't do that.
Then, in this one film, we've got the opposite application. From time immemorial Jews have crowned perhaps their greatest celebration, the wedding, with an act of mourning for the destroyed city of Jerusalem, by breaking a glass. The counterpart is that they console the bereaved with the wish that they'll find consolation in the rebuilding of Jerusalem. Here you can see a fellow singing the psalm at his own wedding, just before he breaks the glass.
Quite some years ago, when I was a junior in high-school and not at all interested in academic learning, a young man walked into our class of arrogant teenagers and introduced himself as our new history teacher. He wasn't that much older than we were, and we looked at him a bit skeptically. Then he launched into his subject matter (I vaguely remember it had something to do with the American revolution, but perhaps not) and he shocked the socks off us. The fellow was a really good teacher.
Six years later, after the army boiled my brain and all I wanted to do was start using it again, I went to study history at the university, mostly because Menachem had showed us it could be interesting.
Last night he did it again. In the meantime Prof. Menachem Ben Sasson has become the president of the Hebrew University, but he still knows how to spin a fine yarn; I'm probably too far gone to be salvaged, but the story he told is worth sharing in brief.
In the old days before cloud computing and even before the printing press there was a major challenge in preserving the precise wording of important books, so people developed elaborate methods to do so. At the heart of the method was the master-copy, a text that was acknowledged to be so reliable and clear that it was never used as a book itself, but others would travel far and wide or pay the appropriate price to have a copy that was written from it. The Ramban (Maimonides - 1138-1204) wrote about his top-special master copy of the Bible, and there are documents showing how even after his death people made a point of having their Bible written from the Rambam's.
Ben Sasson showed us that the master copy owned by the Rambam was written in Tiberius around 930 CE by Shlomo Ben Boya'a, and edited by the best scribe of them all, Aharon Ben Asher. It remained in Tiberius for perhaps a century, then was taken to Jerusalem, where it was part of the largest Jewish library in the land, and probably one of the largest in the Jewish world - about 450 books. (By the 22nd century, with everything on gadgets, 450 real books will again look impressive).
In 1099 the Crusaders conquered and ransacked Jerusalem, but some canny fellow recognized that lots of Jewish books might be worth money to rich Jews, so they were auctioned and eventually reached Egypt, which is where the Keter, as it's now known, met up with the Rambam.
In 1375, or perhaps 1410, the book moved from Egypt to Allepo in present-day northern Syria, brought there perhaps by a seventh-generation descendant of the Rambam. (To recap: the Rambam had this old book, written more than a two centuries before his birth, and 200 years later his descendants were still treasuring it. It must have been quite a book).
In November 1943 the Hebrew University sent one of its top scholars, Moshe David Kassuto, to Aleppo to research the Keter, and record as much about it as possible. Kassuto was in Aleppo for all of 12 days; during those 12 days his two sons and a daughter-in-law were rounded up in their home town of Florence and sent to Auschwitz. (So we were told last night by a grandson of his who's a member of our congregation).
The book remained in Aleppo from about 1400 until November 29th 1947, during which time Columbus discovered America and Harry Truman became president; Martin Luther ignited the Wars of Religion and the Nazi heathens did their best to destroy the world. A long time for a book which was almost 500 years old when it first reached town.
On that night in November the UN decided to set up two states, one Palestinian and the second Jewish, and the citizenry of Aleppo went berserk. The told their Jews not to leave their homes on pain of death, then went around town systematically burning anything Jews including the cemetery. (Ben Sasson didn't say if they also burned Palestinian institutions). The next morning, the Keter was gone.
A large chunk of it reappeared in Jerusalem in1958, and another fragment arrived a few years ago. Ben Sasson assumes there are other fragments in the possession of Jews who escaped Aleppo after 1947, or their descendants.
Written in Tiberius more than a thousand years ago, it came to Jerusalem about a thousand years ago, may have traveled through Jerusalem 600 years ago on its way from Egypt to Aleppo, and arrived in Jerusalem again fifty years ago. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem. Not the semi-forgotten backwater we often think of when surveying Jewish history between the destruction and recent renewal.
The full version of the story is here, and there's lots to see on the adjacent web-pages.
Does the neighborhood we grew up in define our identity forever after? Probably not. But here's a NYT article that says that growing up in New York makes you a particular sort of Supreme Court justice:
“Kagan is so Manhattan, Scalia is so Queens, Ginsburg is so Brooklyn and Sotomayor is so Bronx,” said Joan Biskupic, the author of a biography of Justice Antonin Scalia. “They adopted in their identities the whole New York sensibility.”
And also:
“For most New Yorkers, they will look at the liberal minority and say, ‘That’s us, that’s our America,’ ” Professor Bonventre said, “and so when the court renders liberal decisions and you have all of those four, the three women and the Jewish guy, it will make complete sense to New Yorkers, whereas for the South and the Bible Belt, people are going to say, ‘They don’t understand the rest of America.’
I expect the item is a bit tongue in cheek, but it's still cheeky.
According to the Jewish calender, tomorrow will be the 43rd anniversary of the unification of Jerusalem. Which means that tonight is the 43rd anniversary of the battle on Givat Hatachmoshet, Ammunition Hill.
Between 1949 and 1967, while Jerusalem was divided between Israel and Jordan, there was an Israeli enclave about a mile to the east of the border, in the Jordanian part of town. This was Mount Scopus, with the campus of the Hebrew university and Haddassh hospital. There was an agreement whereby every two weeks 200 Israelis would cross Jordanian territory to the enclave, and sit there until the next group replaced them two weeks later.
Throughout the whole period everyone knew that sooner or later the war would resume, and that when that happened Israel would try to reconnect the mountain with the city. To prevent this the Jordanians built a series of fortifications in that mile, and its centerpiece was Amunition Hill, an apt name borrowed from the days after the British conquered the city in 1917 and General Allenby stored his army's ammunition there.
The picture shows the 1949 lines, to which I've marked Ammunition Hill in red, and just for the context, Shaikh Jarrah in green. From the one to the other would be a four minute walk if it weren't for the highway of route 1 which takes some time to cross.
On the night between June 5th and 6th 1967 the paratroopers, backed by a few tanks, made their attack, directly on the Jordanian fortifications. The section of the battle on Ammunition Hill raged from about 2am to 5:30, early next morning. It was face to face combat, between the best forces each side had. 71 Jordanians were killed, and 35 Israelis: most of the defenders died, as did a quarter of the attackers.
A story I heard not long afterward told that in the early morning the IDF troops gathered the fallen Jordanians into a pit and covered it, with a makeshift sign that read "Here lie 71 brave Jordanian soldiers".
A few hours later the paratroopers were at the Kotel.
In 1968 the military band of Central Command (Pikud Merkaz) recorded a song about the battle. It's not the best music we've got, and the lyrics are more dramatic than profound, but it has stuck in the communal memory and everyone can sing its refrain and snatches of the story. The final narrative line: "I don't know why I was given a medal, all I wanted to do was to get home in one piece" has acquired mythical stature, though often overlaid with irony and irreverence.
Hebrew lyrics English translation "It was then the morning of the second day of the war in Jerusalem. The horizon paled in the east. We were at the climax of the battle on Ammunition Hill. We'd been fighting there for three hours. A fierce battle was under way. Fatal. The Jordanians fought stubbornly. It was a position fortified in an exceptional manner. At a certain point in the fight there remained next to me only four soldiers. We went up there with a force of two platoons. I didn't know where the others were because the connection with Dudik, the platoon commander, was cut off still at the beginning of the battle. At that moment I thought that everyone had been killed."
At two, two-thirty We entered through the stony terrain To the field of fire and mines Of Ammunition Hill
Against bunkers which were fortified And 120mm mortars A hundred and some boys On Ammunition Hill
The pillar of dawn had not yet risen Half a platoon lay in blood But we were already there at least On Ammunition Hill
Among the walls and the mines We left only the medics And we ran ahead without our senses Towards Ammunition Hill
"At that same moment a grenade was thrown from outside. Miraculously we weren't hit. I was afraid the Jordanians would throw more grenades. Someone had to run from above and cover. I didn't have time to ask who would volunteer. I sent Eitan. Eitan didn't hesitate for a moment. He climbed up and began to fire his machine gun. Sometimes he would overtake me and I'd have to yell to him to remain in line with me. That's how we crossed some 30 meters. Eitan would cover from above and we would clear the bunkers from within, until he was hit in the head and fell inside."
We went down into the trenches Into the pits and channels And towards the death in the tunnels Of Ammunition Hill
And no one asked where to Whoever went first fell One needed lots of luck On Ammunition Hill
Whoever fell was dragged to the back In order not to disrupt the movement forward Until fell the next in line On Ammunition Hill
Perhaps we were lions But whoever wanted still to live Should not have been On Ammunition Hill
"We decided to try blowing up their bunker with a bazooka. The bazooka made a few scratches in the concrete. We decided to try with explosive material. I waited above them until the guy came back with the explosives. He would throw me package after package, and I would lay them one by one at the entrance of their bunker. They had a system of their own: first they threw a grenade, afterwards they fired a volley, and then they rested. Between volley and grenade, I would approach the entrance of their bunker and place the explosives. I triggered the explosives and moved away as far as I could. I had four meters in which to move because also behind me were [Arab] Legionnaires. I don't know why I received a commendation, I simply wanted to get home safely."
At seven, seven-twenty To the police school Were gathered all those who remained From Ammunition Hill
Smoke arose from the hill The sun in the east rose higher We returned to the city, seven From Ammunition Hill
We returned to the city, seven Smoke arose from the hill The sun in the east rose higher On Ammunition Hill
On fortified bunkers And on our brothers, men Who remained there aged 20 On Ammunition Hill
The You Tube video I've embedded was taken on the hill, which stands still as it did that morning, a memorial to the soldiers who died taking Jerusalem.
It's a story of a professor and his student, of a Nazi and a persecuted Jew, of forgiveness that shouldn't have been offered - or perhaps, it's merely about hormones. Even if it was the hormones of Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. Richard Cohen has some interesting thoughts:
Taken together, this is a thoroughly frightening couple -- two of the 20th century's great philosophers, their genius contradicted by their inexplicably appalling lives: One embraced Nazism, the other excused him for doing so. In one critical area, they were no different than a goon and his gal. By way of caution, there ought to be statues of them in every city square, and billboards of them looking down on the naive who think, as Alan Greenspan once romantically did of financial markets, that man is rational.
There are much worse problems in the world than hung parliaments in the UK, rioting tax evaders in Greece, nasty Israelis and their frightening neighbors, and even polluted marshes in Louisiana. Problems to make you weep.
I seem to be getting a spot of push-back on my previous post about generalization - which is fine; readers responses are the educative part of blogging.
Here's a generalization none of you will object to: What makes the English so spectacularly important and beneficial to the story of man is their invention of modern democracy. It took them the better part of a millennium to do it, the initial idea came from elsewhere, and there were lots of wrong turns along the way. But they did it, and as a result of their doing it, they were prepared as a society to stand alone against the Nazis; they also inculcated the concept and practice in many corners of the world, even if their colonial project was also shot through with cynicism, cruelty, and general bad faith.
Here's a little thought experiment to demonstrate the idea. There's a hung parliament in the UK this week, and another one in Iraq, but there's not much similarity, is there. Now, try to imagine any moment in the past 300 years where the situation could have been reversed, with the Iraqis muddling past a fleeting awkward moment and the Brits hovering above massive catastrophe. Preposterous idea, isn't it: that's the power of generalization.
Were it not for the English, the world would be a vastly bleaker place. None of which contradicts the generalizations about the English and the Jews. The fundamental decency which enabled the development of democracy, nurtured it and drew sustenance from it, caused even the antisemitism of the English to be significantly more benign that that of other societies, at least in the past four centuries. This, even as this antisemitism sat deep in the roots of English culture, and high in the upper reaches of English society. Jew-hatred in England is not peripheral to the story, not an afterthought. Of course it's not the whole story - it never is - but it's an integral part of it. Perhaps a minor integral part, if you insist.
I recognize that talking this way is frowned upon in our Zeitgeist. People are people, they're complicated, and attributing group characteristics to them has the whiff of all sorts of unpleasant connotations. I know. But I insist, and won't back down. Everything I've learned and observed in the past 30 years reinforces my conviction that our society and its past powerfully impact on who we are and where we'll go. This is not meant to be deterministic, but it's not trivial, either.
Finally, to respond to Rob's comments about the person of Anthony Julius: that he has made a fine living in the UK, and in spite of the Jew hatred there, he's not about to leave. It seems to me that strengthens my point, rather than weaken it. Alongside the animosity against Jews, the UK has long offered the Jews the possibility of unlimited growth and success; it also holds out the hope that those Jews will be able to make their society better, to weaken the demons and limit their force. Try saying the same thing about Russia; and once you've done that, say it with a straight face about any Muslim society.
Rob isn't happy with the reviews of the Anthony Julius book I linked to yesterday. (Goldblog has even read the book, and speaks highly of it today). He makes three comments, one aimed at me:
3. Yaacov, please try not to make big sweeping comments about the UK. There is something childish about looking at the world through a prism of we-win-you-lose, we're-up-you're-down.
He could be right about me, of course, but I think not. Here are some thoughts abut the matter of culture, personal actions and responsibility, and generalizations.
1. The decisions of the individual are always that: decisions of an individual. Living in a society infused with hatred, or love, or indifference or whatever can never be a justification or condemnation of what a person does. If everyone thinks a certain way, the individual still has the obligation to think for themselves and to do what's right. This is a moral position, but also a description of history. No matter what the situation, there are always some people who can think for themselves, even if they're a small minority, and their existence proves that others could have thought similarly. Even in deeply antisemitic societies there are always some who don't succumb.
2. Culture matters. It's no coincidence that antisemitism insists on re-appearing (or never disappearing) in some cultures, while other have always been immune or grow so over time. (Europe, China and the USA respectively). The culture we live in informs us in myriad ways, and it's not easy to see through those influences. We don't need the new Julius book to know that detestation of the Jews is deeply embedded in much of European culture, including of course in England (though the book apparently describes this exceptionally well).
3. Cultures are not monolithic. At the precise moment in the late 19th century when antisemitism was taking off in Germany, there was a group of Germans who set themselves the goal of combating it with all rational tools. (They failed). Societies are complicated things. This doesn't negate the previous point about how culture informs and forms us, it merely adds that sometime this can go in more than one direction simultaneously.
4. Antisemitism is an emotion, not a rational thought system. Cultures are good at inculcating emotions.
Victor has been having a discussion withHussein Ibish about Israeli settlers remaining in Palestine once there is such a state. (If there is, might be more accurate, though I'm certainly in favor if it can be done). Surprisingly, or perhaps not, Ibish and Victor both seem to agree that leaving settlers to be citizens of the Palestinians state would be a fine thing.
I'm theoretically agnostic, but practically against. Were there ever to be a free and democratic Palestine that operated along, say, Belgian lines, or Danish ones: fine, let there be some Jews there, too. But there's no chance of there being such a state anytime this century, as far as I can see, so it's not relevant. Bar that possibility, what's much more likely is just another Arab state. Can anyone imagine Jews living freely in an Arab state, as they can in the UK, or even post-junta Argentina? No? I didn't think so.
The gag order was lifted (it wasn't in place very long anyway, this time), and we now know that the police say they're investigating suspicions that Ameer Makhoul and Dr. Omar Said, two Israeli citizens, have been spying for Hezbollah.
Since the gag order gave our enemies a few days in which to spew bile, let's see what to make of this story.
1. There is nothing to say about the specific case. The investigation is underway, and the only people who see the entire picture are the investigators - and they' aren't telling. So of everything you'll be hearing in the next few days about the mens' innocence or guilt or the motives of the authorities in investigating, roughly 100% (give or take) will be hot air, speculation, malice, disinformation and similar unseemly phenomenon. The politicians, the journalists, even the bloggers: none of them know what they're talking about. Which of course won't stop them from talking. They already are (linked above)
Makhoul's brother Assam, a former MK for Hadash, said the family had no details of the investigation but they suspected authorities had singled out the activist because of his campaigns against the government's "racist and discriminatory polices" against Israeli Arabs.
2. There is one flimsy indicator about the allegations, and it comes from a lawyer
Hussein Abu Hasin, a lawyer who has handled several cases of spying charges, told Haaretz that espionage laws in Israel were so wide-ranging that an internet chat or telephone conversation with anyone in an 'enemy state' could lead to prosecution.
I don't know if this fellow has any information or not, but his line of defense is interesting: not that the suspects didn't do anything, but rather that they did but the law is pernicious. Well, yes: but it's still the law, and most people manage to live their lives without breaking it.
3. Since we don't know about this case, are there any precedents to inform us? Yes. Israel is a country at war, and its enemies try to collect information about it, and over the years there have been quite a number of Israeli citizens who helped them do so. These have included career officers (Jews and Arabs), scientists spying for the USSR, a Jewish officer who spied for the Syrians, a fellow who spied for Iran, and various others who spied for Hamas and Hezbollah. This is no indicator of the present case, but it does disprove the knee-jerk responses about how if an Arab has been arrested it must be ethnic persecution and a threat to democracy.
4. The Shabak, the police and anyone else involved in these investigations have a proven record of mostly doing their job well. Countless Israelis owe their lives to their proven ability to thwart conspiracies to harm people. That doesn't prove they've got it right in this case, but it does tell us something about anyone using the "If it's the Shin Bet they must be evil" line. Coming from people who live far away this line is ridiculous. Coming from people who live here, it's also ungrateful.
5. This morning we were repeatedly told that this evening there would be a mass demonstration against the gag order and the anti-Arab machinations of the Israelis. (See the Haaretz article above). Well, no. When the time came, there were all of 300 demonstrators (the demonstration was on Zionism Boulevard in Haifa). I'm not certain what this means, such a small demonstration, but it could be an indication that: a. Once the story was out, many Palestinian Israelis decided the story might have enough truth to it to limit their anger and need to demonstrate; b. Perhaps the "Israeli Arab street" isn't as radical as its representatives and the media wish us to believe; C. Haaretz got it wrong (again), and the demonstration was never going to be large.
The 31 members of the OECD today voted today to accept Estonia, Israel and Slovenia, which will thus become country members 32, 33 and 34. (The list of the other 31 is here).
The Economist often characterizes the OECD as "a rich-country think tank". While I doubt Israel's accession will make any difference in anyone's immediate day-to-day life, it's a nice club to belong to, and being inside is nicer than being outside.
The Palestinians did their best to prevent Israel being accepted, on the principle that anything that's good for Israel must be very bad. It seems however that the decision reflected actions and their expression in numbers, not ideology, so the Palestinian efforts didn't make any difference. The OECD press release announcing the decision (linked above) notes that "Israel’s scientific and technological policies have produced outstanding outcomes on a world scale."
The police have arrested a prominent Israeli Arab named Ameer Makhoul, and have cast a gag order over the entire story. The Israeli media is doing its best to report without reporting. (If this blog goes offline, well, bye bye....).
I have nothing to say about the matter itself at the moment, since there's no real information out there, not in Israel and not abroad. Oodles of speculation, however: which is why I wish our security agencies would take a course in Media 101, and figure out if these gag orders are worth the damage they do. For days on end they leave the media to speculate about how awful and anti-democratic and fascist and totalitarian we are; eventually the gag order will be lifted and it may well turn out that there are very real allegations behind the arrest. That's what happened last time, in the Anat kamm case. So why be so inept on the media side of the story?
This week we'll be celebrating 43 years since the reunification of Jerusalem, on the 2nd day of the Six Day War. So I'll be posting some of the shirim of those days.
Ofra Chaza (1957-2000) was born in Tel Aviv to a family of Yemenite Jews. She was one of our most important singers, and straddled various genres. When I presented Shirim Mizrachi'im last week a number of readers admonished me for not presenting Ofra, since she was an important performer of them. Yet she didn't start there, nor was she ever only a singer of mizrachi music. Since I'm bringing songs about Jerusalem this week, I've chosen one she sang.
Hakotel - the Western Wall - was written in the flush of victory after June 1967. Given that an event had just transpired which had been fervently anticipated for 1897 years, it would have been forgivable if the shirim of those days had been triumphant songs of victory. They weren't, not in the simple meaning of the words. Here, judge for yourselves: the words in Hebrew, English and transliteration are all on the You Tube page; if you look carefully you'll see Teddy Kollek, mythological mayor of Jerusalem, in the final frames of the film; the recording was probably made sometime in the 1980s, and the venue is the open-air auditorium below the wall of the Old City.
Ever wondered where the Guardian draws its hatred of the Jews from? Well, there was Shakespeare, of course, and Dickens, and Marlow, and Defoe, and HG Wells, and Chesteron.... and lots more were that came from. Take a course in English Literature 101, and you'll have the list.
This, and much more, in a book that probably needs to be read: Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England. Assuming you wish to spend a chunk of time being educated about Jews haters, that is. If you don't, I suppose you can be forgiven.
Yair Nitzani is a talented Israeli comedian. I'm not certain if he's talking Hebrew here but thinks he's talking English, or if he's talking English but thinks he's talking Hebrew, but if you understand both it's hilarious; I expect if you understand only one of the two you still may find it amusing. Since it touches upon a subject I've been dancing around for a while, I'll let him do the explaining.
We spent the weekend at Mitch and Suzi Pilcer's Zippori Village. If you're into the Israeli B&B scene, you've probably heard of them, and if not, you should. They've been offering their fine hospitality since 1997, and they're constantly upgrading the facilities and the services. We've been going there from time to time for about ten years. (Another place we've returned to more than once is this place in Klil, but it's a very different sort of place. Smaller, and more rugged). The Pilcer's place is unusual on the B&B scene for the amount of thought they've given to make certain you get comfort, beauty, privacy, and quiet, yet it's also the kind of place you could easily come to with the enlarged family or a group of friends, since by now they've got 7 units on offer, and some of the units can accommodate entire clans.
So that's the advertising for today. More interesting to me, you won't be surprised, is the history. Mitch once told me his father was a Holocaust Survivor from Lodz. Since Lodz is a newish city, maybe 150 years old, his family must have come from elsewhere a generation or two earlier; like most Ashkenzi Jews, we didn't stay anywhere too long. (The Jews of Yemen or Baghdad were stable for more than a thousand years, until they were thrown out in 1948). Mitch himself was born in New York, came to Jerusalem as a young man and for a while even wrote in one of our local newspapers, then about 15 years ago finally settled with his young wife in a ramshackle farmhouse on the edge of Zippori.
Zippori - Sephorias - was an important Jewish town in the 2nd Temple era. A Christian tradition says it was town where Mary's parents lived, (It's about six miles north of Nazareth) and the crusaders built a castle in their honor which still stands on the top of a hill till this day. Archeologists have been digging there since the 1930s, and have found a wealth of fascinating structures, artifacts and mosaics.
In the 2nd and 3rd century CE Zippori was the seat of many of the Tanaim, the scholars of the mishnaic era; the most important of them was Rabbi Yehuda Hanassi, also simply called Rebbi, the scholar who collected all the sayings of his forbears and and edited them into the corpus we know ever since as the Mishna.
The archeologists say there were Jews in Zippori for at least 1,300 years. After the Crusaders none were left, and in the 16th century it was settled by Arabs, who retained the Jewish name of the place.
In the war of 1948 the Arabs left. I don't know the details, and their neighbors in nearby Kfar Kana, not to mention Nazareth, didn't leave and are still there to this day. In 1949 two groups of Jews from Turkey and Bulgaria settled in the village; Mitch has a plaque honoring the Jewish family from Turkey who first settled on his farm. About a mile away there's a plaque commemorating two settlers who were murdered on the eve of the Seder in 1951. Within a few years most of these settlers left, to be replaced by Jews from Romania, some of whom are still there.
Mitch also has a small memorial on the grounds of his little village commemorating Yaniv Temerson, a local boy who used to work summers at his place, before going off to the army; in the summer of 2006 he was killed commanding a tank in Lebanon.
Then, a year or two ago, while digging around on the grounds in preparation for some new development, Mitch came across a large stone with an ancient inscription - which however he was able to read, since it was in Hebrew. It told that this was the resting place of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levy. Rabbi Yehoshua isn't as famous as Rabbi Yehuda, but he's pretty well known if you're familiar with the Talmud, where he is often cited. Mitch called in the professionals, who identified six graves in the cave, before taking the inscribed stone off to be analyzed. Mitch told me he's confident it will be brought back soon, and put back where it belongs and has stood for almost two thousand years (where the white frame is in the picture). Zippori, it turns out, really is more "home" than anything Poland ever had to offer, in spite of the price.
A short version of my position is online at The Forward, here.
The longer version is in the Post below this one. (Here)
A discussion of the possible lines of division is here.
Next week I'll start posting a series of short video films I've been taking on the putative line, demonstrating how hellish it really will be. There's a preview of that series, here.
I am now going offline for a few days. I've left enough stuff to keep you all busy, I think; feel free to slog it out in the comments, but I won't be reading them until next week.
Due disclosure: I have been an active advocate of the two-state solution since the 1970s, years before the leaderships of Israel or the Palestinians were willing to entertain the thought. I would have Israel disband as many of the West Bank settlements as possible, including Ariel. But I'm against dividing Jerusalem.
Dividing Jerusalem, we are universally assured, is an essential condition for peace. Tellingly, most of the exhorters do not live in the city, and will not be harmed if their prescriptions prove wrong, as predictions about the future sometimes are. Yet the approaching disaster of dividing Jerusalem is easy to foresee. It's merely a matter of logic.
Here's a series of logical scenarios.
1. Schengen. Peace between Jews and all Muslims.
Following a peace treaty between Israel and Palestine, including a division of Jerusalem, the entire Middle East will swiftly come to look like Europe. Israel and its neighbors will live in peace, and no Muslim terrorists will take advantage of the open borders to infiltrate Palestine and attack Israelis. With everyone mutually respectful and committed to peace and well-being, it will be possible to do away with hard borders, so their precise position won't be important. Think Saarbruecken: a small German town nestled in the hills, far from other German towns but on the French border. People commute regularly and the public transportation signs are bi-lingual. The police on both sides cooperate, their laws are similar, and there is no nearby jurisdiction where a criminal could hide.
It's surprising how many people believe it's possible. Solve the Israel-Palestine conflict and peace will reign throughout the Middle East. Far more people implicitly believe, and they include some of the world's most powerful people. We know this because it's the only scenario in which the division of Jerusalem really could work, and advocates of division are so numerous.
2. Austria & Slovenia. Peace between all Israelis and all Palestinians.
The Cold War frontier used to run along what is now the Austrian-Slovenian border. In the 1990s Slovenia detached itself from Yugoslavia and joined the EU including Schengen. There is now no effective border between Slovenia and Austria, but there's a hard one between Slovenia and Croatia, both of which used to be Yugoslavia. Schengen indeed has no internal borders, but its external ones are patrolled in the name of the entire club - otherwise humanity would pour in, and the Europeans can't have that.
Applied to Israel-Palestine, this logical scenario means Israelis and Palestinians rely on each other to keep out the rest of the neighborhood. There is complete trust between them, and intruders are blocked on either border for both. Ethnic Palestinians in Jordan, say, cannot cross into Palestine unless Israel is willing to have them on its streets. Should this fail, and unwanted people enter Israel through the Palestinian side of Jerusalem, Israel will have to erect a fence through the middle of town. More on this below.
3. Island Jerusalem (1). Peace between Israel and most – but not all – Palestinians.
In this logical scenario we imagine an uneasy peace between Israel and Palestine, with a hard mutual border. Since dividing Jerusalem isn't meant to entail walls and barbed wires, and many Palestinian Jerusalemites will wish to continue working and playing on the richer Israeli side, the mutual border envelopes the entire city, with the rest of Israel and the rest of Palestine outside it. Island Jerusalem, divided by a mere line, but walled off from everywhere else.
In practice people will be checked whenever they go from Beit Shemesh to Jerusalem, and from Ramallah to alQuds. Moreover, the hard border will be patrolled by joint police forces, with Israeli policemen at the checkpoint on the road from Ramallah… perhaps where the current one is, at Qalandia? The sovereign Palestinian police at Qalandia will be required to check the Palestinians on their way to their own capital, so as to protect the Israelis. How long will it take for the Palestinian police to be lax at their distasteful job, and for the Israelis to begin building a fence through the divided city?
4. Island Jerusalem (2). Peace between Israel and most – but not all – Jerusalem Palestinians
The assumption that the rejectionist Palestinian elements will all live outside Jerusalem is plausible only as part of an exercise of logic. What if some live inside, with no border between them and hundreds of thousands of Israelis? And no: this is not the present situation, because currently, while the Palestinians of East Jerusalem do enjoy freedom of movement throughout the city and throughout Israel, they all live under Israeli law, enforced by the Israeli police (some of whose officers are Arab, of course). The Palestinians of Jerusalem mostly didn't participate in the second Intifada, but a few did. Those few murdered many civilians, before the Israeli authorities tracked them down. That won't happen if the Palestinian parts of Jerusalem are beyond the jurisdiction of those Israeli authorities. So this scenario also leads to a fence through the city.
5. Island Jerusalem (3). Peace between rich and poor Jerusalem
To the best of my knowledge, there is not a single place in the world where a rich and developed nation has an open border with a poor nation. Israel is a rich, developed country. With peace it will shoot to the top of the worlds' charts and breathe down the necks of the Scandinavians. The Palestinians won't be in the same class for a long time. There are lots of cities with rich areas abutting on poor ones, but they're always policed by one police force operating under the same set of laws. Having a separate police force, with separate laws, has never been tried, for all the obvious reasons, not even in places where there isn't a century of bad blood. Yet we're assured that in Jerusalem it will be the harbinger of peace and tranquility.
6. Gorizia. A Cold War peace. At the end of WWII the hinterland of Trieste was transferred from Italy to Yugoslavia. The line was drawn, as usual, by distant officials, and it went straight through the Italian town of Gorizia. What had once been a single town now straddled the Iron Curtain; the Yugoslavian side was named Nove Gorice, New Gorizia. The Jewish synagogue was in Italy, the Jewish cemetery was across the border.
Yet Gorizia isn't Jerusalem. With the exception of the locals, no-one has ever heard of it. It ignites no passions, and offers no historic or religious symbols. The border ran in a straight line, leaving no untidy intertwining enclaves. The people on both sides probably regretted not being able to cross, but they soon went about their business and forgot about life on the other side.
None of this can happen in Jerusalem. The town is too central for all the actors, the populaces of both sides too invested in the single city. The Israeli side offers the Palestinians a university, several colleges, the large commercial centers, parks, all the real hospitals, and of course most of the employment and income. The Palestinian side contains the most important places on earth for the Jews. Shutting everyone out will mean disaster, not peace.
7. Beit Jalla. The peace unravels.
The events of autumn 2000 have seared an irreversible scar on Israeli memory. There are contradictory versions of what really happened, so let's use the Palestinian narrative. Summer 2000 saw Yasser Arafat heroically resist an Israeli-American attempt to foist unacceptable peace terms on the Palestinians. A few weeks later the talks were renewed, and late in September Arafat visited Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at his home; they made a joint phone call to President Clinton to assure him of their commitment to reaching peace. Later that week Ariel Sharon took his walk on the Haram elShariff and all hell broke loose; the El-Aqsa Intifada had begun.
According to this narrative, the violence wasn't premeditated nor centrally steered. It was the expression of popular anger. Within hours Israeli and Palestinian gunmen were killing each other. By the third day Palestinians were machine-gunning the Jewish neighborhood of Gilo from the nearby town of Beit Jallah.
What if someday, a month or a decade after peace is declared, popular Palestinian frustration again expresses itself in violence? Beit Jallah is a mile from Gilo; Palestinian Abu Tor is – literally – five feet from Jewish Abu Tor. It took the IDF months of military action which included destroying homes in Beit Jallah before the Palestinians desisted from their attacks. Given the terrain in AbuTor, or Beit Safafa and Pat, or Beit Yisrael and Bab el-Zahara – all on the Green Line – the only way to force angry Palestinians to desist from violence would be to conquer the Palestinian part of the city, in brutal house to house combat. Smack in the center of Jerusalem, one of the most sensitive spots on the globe.
There is every reason to expect that this Israeli gesture or that expression will infuriate some Palestinians someday. The leaders may sign a peace document, but the grievances won't be forgotten, and the refusal to accept the Jews' fundamental right to a state in their ancestral homeland is axiomatic for the Palestinians. They may grudgingly accept the fact of Israel's existence, but they will continue to feel it was wrongly foisted upon them; the resulting animosity will not dissipate anytime soon.
8. Sarajevo.
Blithely dividing Jerusalem will eventually create a replication of Sarajevo in the early 1990s. A hell-hole where civilians were shot down in the streets, and an Olympic stadium was turned into a cemetery for thousands. Except that a battlefield in Jerusalem will incite and inflame one billion Muslims, as the slaughter of Sarajevo never did.
9. Jerusalem. An uneasy but beneficial status quo.
No-one, but no-one, ever says what most Jerusalemites from both sides know: That the Palestinians among them are ambivalent about division. They wish to be citizens in the capital of their own state. They don't want to lose the many concrete advantages that Israel offers them: a higher standard of living than their brothers on the West Bank have; social security and national health insurance; free world-class medical care unparalleled anywhere in the Arab world; access to Israel's universities; unhampered access to its markets; freedom of movement throughout Israel. If it's the simple lives of people you're interested in, rather than grand principles, it may well be that the current status quo in Jerusalem is better than any other viable option at this time.
If it's truly peace one seeks, Jerusalem must be tampered with only when the tampering will not ignite a fireball. Later, not now. Find a creative way to reassure the Palestinians that it will be discussed, once both sides have had a generation of peace and real trust building.
(I published a shorter verion of this essay in The Forward.)
. Assuming you wish to spend a chunk of time being educated about Jews haters, that is. If you don't, I suppose you can be forgiven.