Breathless Report About... What, Exactly?

In Israel, the most important day of the week for newspapers is Friday. So yesterday (Friday) Haaretz had this headline, top of the front page, large letters:

Obama wants Israel to hold parallel talks with Palestinians and Syria

(The Hebrew was more dramatic). As a general rule, Haaretz isn't too good at separating news from comment, but then who is these days? So this news item, put together by a group of their reporters, starts with a breathless report by Akiva Eldar, an old-timer who really knows his beat, but can't separate what he knows from what he preaches.

The Obama administration is preparing a Middle East peace process that will include simultaneous bilateral talks between Israel and the Palestinians, and between Israel and Syria. The plan is based on the Arab peace initiative that offers establishing normal relations between Israel and Arab League states in exchange for withdrawing from the occupied territories and establishing a Palestinian state.

The United States will put together a "security package," including demilitarization of the territories from which Israel will withdraw and the option of stationing a multinational force in them for years.

The Obama administration believes that a breakthrough in the peace process between Israel and the Arab states would restrain Tehran's influence and contribute to the diplomatic effort to block Iran's nuclearization.

The questions are
1. Is this news?
2. Is it the full story?
3. Is it important?

First, is it news. Not really. American policy since the summer of 2000, or December that year at the very latest, has officially been something like this; unofficially it has been so for far longer. Israel needs to retreat from just about all the territories taken in 1967, those territories will be demilitarized, there will be an independent Palestinian state, and peace will reign forever after. There's a slight twist in Eldar's report in that someone thinks once this happens the Iranians will also join the swords-into-plowshares brigade, but he doesn't give a source for this so let's let it pass. Actually, this is more or less the position of most Israelis, too - assuming, of course, that moving out of those territories can bring all that bounty. It can't.

Which brings us to the second question, is it the full story? At this stage of the game I'm still giving the Obama administration the benefit of the doubt, and that includes the assumption their experts are serious people, not bloggers or journalists. In which case they recognize some of the pieces Eldar left out of the picture. Right of Return, for example, meaning what happens to lots of ethnic Palestinians who are never going to move back to what is now Israel, no matter that their grandparents left here, and the fact this presents a wee stumbling block (in the Saudi plan, too). Or the fact that the elected majority of Palestinian lawmakers come from a party that wants a world without Jews, and so far that group is unable to reach an agreement with the other large Palestinian party. There's the small question of Jerusalem, the one about Israel's defining itself a Jewish state (with legal equality for minorities), the issue of how Syria defines peace, and various other nit-picking matters. I'm not saying peace is a theoretical impossibility - that would be depressing - but I haven't yet seen an indication the Obama administration knows how to create it any more than anyone else.

Is any of this important? No, not really. Even if it really and truly were soon to be the official Obama policy, and included suggestions also about all those other matters, reality has this nasty propensity of not reading newspapers (or blogs, or official memorandums, or diplomatic non-papers and all that stuff). Reality is extremely complex and ultimately unpredictable, it certainly isn't anything that can be neatly planned by some new folks at Foggy Bottom or even at the White House. As (Bill) Clinton once learned, the most powerful man in the world can glower at an unshaven old revolutionary with shifty eyes, and the unshaven fellow can pretend to be looking out the window and hum, and there's nothing the President of the United States of American can do about it. And even if he could, and the unshaven fellow had decided to humor him, it wouldn't make much difference if enough young men back at home were to feel they'd been sold down the river - which is why the unshaven one didn't cave in in the first place.

My point being that some day, I hope, the Israelis and the Arabs will be willing to live in peace, but it won't happen because someone declares it to be a fine idea or a rational thing to do.

Everybody's Brother-in-Law

David Brooks, just back from a trip to Israel, describes Israelis in a reasonably accurate column:

Israel is a country held together by argument. Public culture is one long cacophony of criticism. The politicians go at each other with a fury we can’t even fathom in the U.S. At news conferences, Israeli journalists ridicule and abuse their national leaders. Subordinates in companies feel free to correct their superiors. People who move here from Britain or the States talk about going through a period of adjustment as they learn to toughen up and talk back.

Susan Boyle's Dream

I shall be shutting down soon for yet another installment of Pessach; after the holiday I expect to be very busy with a number of concurrent projects and probably will cut down blogging for a while (I know, I've said this in the past, too). So I'm leaving with a magnificent story, quite off topic, for which I got permission from the editorial board.

Last night we saw the 2006 German film Four Minutes (Vier Minuten). It's a powerful film about a deeply troubled young woman with a troubling story, a troubling old passive Nazi, and a troubled country. The young woman has the gift of magnificent music, though its true measure becomes clear only in the final four minutes of the film.

Still, it's a film. Fiction. Susan Boyle's story, which exploded onto the Internet this week, is true. A few elements must have been contrived, television being what it is, but the fundamentals can't have been. The woman was set up as a fool to be laughed at but didn't lose her dignity; once she blew us all away she didn't, either. So set aside 8 minutes and watch (the embedding has been disabled, so follow the link). And then watch again.

A Right War, Wrongly Waged

According to the NYT, an airstrike by NATO forces - that would mean Americans, since who else has air power - yesterday killed six Afghani civilians. NATO officials denied killing civilians, in the face of confirmation from the local governor - keep in mind that NATO and the local government are on the same side, or supposed to be.

The bottom of the item tells of an unrelated Taliban atrocity elsewhere. The Times wants us to remember who the Good Guys are, and which the Bad Ones.

They are right of course, but wrong. The Taliban are a blot on the face of humanity, and they and their ilk are the mortal enemies of any reasonable person, including many of their own people and just about all their own women. Yet being at war with monsters doesn't mean you needn't think about how you're waging it; the two are quite separate levels of morality and have been recognized as such for centuries. The distinction is being removed by Useful Idiots and pacifists who would condemn all wars, the just with the criminal, because of their inevitable human price; losing the will and ability to wage just wars means condemning far greater numbers of innocents to far worse. By blurring the discussion the NYT strengthens those who would appease, obstruct, apologize and look away.

It is a sign of the weakness of the American public discussion that we need Juan Cole to call our attention to an article on a Pakistani website tallying the figures from American air strikes in Pakistan (not Afghanistan), and they're not pretty: 14 dead al-Qaida to 687 innocent Pakistani civilians. 14 to 687.

I can think of a theoretical scenario in which killing 14 exceptionally potent mass murderers might justify killing 687 innocents, if by killing the 14 one were saving a million. Is that what the Americans are claiming? Then they should say so and the public should have the discussion. Personally I'd be skeptical: the Islamist murderers are part of a deeply sick culture, and I doubt any specific 14 of them are irreplaceable. So far as I can see, however, that's not what anyone is claiming; rather, no-one is having the discussion at all. I don't even know if the numbers are correct, but there again, you need an open, public discussion to reveal if someone is systematically disseminating bald lies about casualties (a not unheard of phenomenon).

Of course I'm holding this up as a demonstration of the fundamental hypocrisy with which Israel is consistently treated. Yet I'm also calling for a real discussion on the merits of the discussion itself, not only so as to level some rhetoric field. The war against the Islamists is the most important war of our day because of the dimensions of the threat; it's necessary and moral. It must be waged morally, too.

Finally, back to Israel: Israelis are often castigated by their detractors for claiming to be morally superior to anyone else in waging war. Some antisemites pretend this claim is the root of their hatred - an unconvincing pretense. Yet this is precisely what we mean. The Danny Zamirs of Israel are not the Juan Coles of America, and IDF spokesmen generally wait until their fellow officers really have investigated before denying false allegations - or trying to learn from authentic ones.

Thought Processes of a Hamas Apologist

Paul McGeough of the Sydney Morning Herald, a popular Australian Guardian-lite newspaper, has an op-ed up at the New York Times. I have the impression that since the NYT bureau chief in Israel is the reasonable Ethan Bronner, the editors back in New York are trying to balance him with ever more foolish commentators.

I don't normally fisk people, but this one cries out for it, starting with his title, "Hamas Comes Out of Hiding", where it has busily been killing Palestinians and doing its best to kill Israelis.

JUST a year and a half ago, visiting Khalid Mishal, the supreme leader of Hamas, was a cloak-and-dagger affair. In September 2007, I climbed into the back of a curtained Mercedes to make the dash from central Damascus to the southern suburbs, where the Palestinian group operated from a high-security enclave reserved for senior officials of the Syrian government...

So Mishal doesn't only reside in Damascus, he lives in the top security area where the apparatchiks are protected from their people. Nice regime, the Syrian one.

As I was subjected to a thorough physical search, one of Mr. Mishal’s aides told me that there was a battery of antiaircraft guns buried deep in a nearby hillside. All my possessions were confiscated, and I gained access to Mr. Mishal’s grand reception room through an airport-style security scanner.

Actually, I rather doubt the antiaircraft batter is deep underground, where it wouldn't do much good, would it. But Mishal obviously lives in style, with his grand reception room.

Today the mood has become much lighter in the Hamas hideout. Mr. Mishal’s calendar is so full that he might soon need a parking lot for the vehicles bringing foreign delegations to visit. My most recent appointment with him, on March 18, was pushed far into the night because Mr. Mishal was busy greeting a group of Greek lawmakers, who were then followed by an Italian delegation. In the preceding days, visitors had come from the British and European Parliaments.

Of course, none of those many European delegations is even remotely connected with any past present or future negotiations between Israel and Palestinians. They're not American officials, after all, or Egyptians. They're malicious fools, probably of the Left, who que up on pilgrimage to the top Jew-killer they can find, so as to express their adoration. So long as we're clear about they dynamics here.

In our discussion last month, Mr. Mishal spoke for the first time of the challenges confronting Hamas in the post-Bush era: Barack Obama’s presidential victory; Mr. Netanyahu’s return; the Gaza war; and Washington’s new drive for “dialogue” with Hamas’s regional sponsors — Syria and Iran.

Mr. Mishal rejected the notion that Hamas could get squeezed in any nascent power plays in the region. He interpreted Washington’s pitch to Syria and Iran as an admission of past errors, an acceptance that the United States had to deal with “parties that have proved themselves.”

Proved themselves as what, exactly? As brutal thugs eager to kill whoever's in their way, and to set up their own civilians to be killed when they manage to provoke Israel? Mr. McGeough, clearly enamored of Mishal, never does get around to mentioning any of this nor explaining.

“Hamas is not a card in anyone’s hand,” he insisted. But at the same time, he warned that Washington should not seek to “isolate certain parties at the expense of other parties."

So now he's threatening America, unchallenged by his fawning interviewer.

Pressed on policy changes that Hamas might make as a gesture to any new order, Mr. Mishal argued that the organization has already shifted on several key points: “Hamas has already changed — we accepted the national accords for a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders, and we took part in the 2006 Palestinian elections.”

That's change, for sure: rather than sulk in the corner, Hamas is willing to participate in Palestinian elections. Whether they'll ever allow future elections to remove them from power is not a question this interviewer might ask. As for the matter of recognizing Israel, McGeough engages in some clumsy acrobatics:

On the crucial question of rewriting the Hamas charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel, he was unbending: “Not a chance.” Khalid Mishal is not Yasir Arafat — he is not looking for a Nobel Peace Prize. Among the Hamas articles of faith is a belief that in renouncing violence and in recognizing Israel’s right to exist in 1993, Mr. Arafat sinned against his people. (Nonetheless, others to whom he speaks have told me that Mr. Mishal has said that “when the time comes,” Hamas will make some of the moves demanded of it by the West.)

Let's see: the charter calls for the death of all Jews. Removing Israel is merely a sub-set of that. Still, the interviewer couldn't say Mishal will agree to Israel's existence since Mishal told him the opposite and he want's to maintain his access to the man; so he admits Mishal told him Hamas would never recognize Israel, but then turns around and reassures us that other people told him the opposite, or at any rate, the told him Mishal has allowed them to have the impression that he might perhaps do something demanded by the West, so long as it doesn't impinge upon his fundamental antisemitism and determination to destroy Israel. Which of course raises the question why travel from Syndey all the way to Damascus, if you're going to believe unidentified people anyway. Those, you can invent in the comfort of your kitchen.

Curiously, amid rising calls from politicians and policy makers around the world for Hamas to be given a seat at the Middle East negotiating table, Mr. Mishal made clear that he was willing to bide his time. His message is, “Watch what we do, not what we say.”

I suppose there's a connection between the beginning of the paragraph and its end, a full sentence later, but I can't see what it might be.

While it is impossible for many in the West to grasp the calculus in the Hamas strategy of war and terror, the movement has demonstrated that it is disciplined in holding its fire, as it did in the summer and fall of 2008. Likewise, it has proved itself capable of negotiating with Israel — albeit through third parties.

Yes, it's quite inscrutable, isn't it. Hamas can't possibly really mean they want a Judenrein world, yet they keep on saying they do, and insist on killing Jews - ah, but then, when it suits them they refrain... it's so complicated.

Over the long term, Hamas accepts the concept of two states in the Levant, which arguably puts Mr. Mishal’s terrorist movement closer to Washington than Netanyahu is — he now proposes only “economic peace” between Jews and Palestinians.

Did you see that? While there's literally no evidence whatsoever for the idea Hamas accepts Israel's existence, and if there were rest assured McGeough would be trumpeting it, at the end of the day it's enough to say they have (long term, mind you), and then turn on Netanyahu as the greater evil, the one whose positions are more war-like and conflicting with American policies than those of Hamas. Hey, I met the man, in Damascus, right after those Italian folks; trust me on this one, otherwise I wouldn't be a journalist.

As for finding himself at center stage with the man who ordered him killed, Mr. Mishal insisted that in the broad scheme of things, Mr. Netanyahu is just one more in a succession of prime ministers. “It’s fate, God’s destiny, but we can’t set policy on the basis of personal grudges,” he told me.

True. Were Israel to elect Gideon Levy its prime minister, with Amira Hass as minister of defense, Mishal still wouldn't change his mind about the need for an end to Israel and the Jews. It's nothing personal.

Perhaps. But not since the personal bitterness between Mr. Arafat and the former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon have Palestinians and Israelis faced such a leadership dynamic. Once again, personal enmity could swamp the more pressing complexities of the Middle East crisis.

Remember those two, Arafat and Sharon? They really really disliked each other, which is why they refused to make peace at Camp David that time in 2000 when (Bill) Clinton almost thought he might salvage his mediocre reputation and land a Nobel peace prize. Why do Israelis keep on electing folks for whom authentic Palestinian leaders have personal grudges, what with all the pressing complexities in that area?

Iron Dome: Folly or Brilliance?

The Iron Dome anti-missile system being developed by Refael, an Israeli military-systems organization, is chugging along. It passed an important milestone last month, is expected to be finally tested sometime soon, and if it passes, full-scale production and deployment will begin. By next summer it may be operative, protecting Sderot and Ashkelon from Hamas rockets, and later on protecting the Galilee from Hezbullah's tender attentions. Add this to the Arrow long-range anti-missile system which is already operative and being upgraded all the time, and Israel is on its way to being protected from what-ever its neighbors will be able to throw at it except mortars and artillery. Mortars either have a very short range (about a mile) or they're large and cumbersome enough, as is all artillery, that drones can identify and destroy them; it's hard to set them up in a school-yard, shoot them off and disappear so quickly the UN personnel can pretend they were never there.

All of which means that each day that passes without rocket attacks brings us closer to the end of that chapter of our relations with our neighbors. They will of course find other ways to attack us, and we'll have to figure out an adequate response etc etc etc. The Palestinians and Hezbullah are very resourceful in such matters; it's in participating in the modern world that they're so dismally inept.

The Arrow anti-ballistic system is a fine thing. If we assume that sometime soon Iran will have nuclear weapons - a reasonable assumption, it seems to me - it will still be useful that they won't know if they have the ability to deliver through our defense systems, while they themselves have no such systems and our nuclear punch is harder. Who knows, maybe five or ten years from now we'll offer our defensive capabilities to the Saudis or the Egyptians or the Germans, heh.

The Iron Dome thing, however, isn't obviously such a fine thing. According to that article, each missile will cost $50,000m, or perhaps less in some scenarios - say, $49,800. A Kassam rocket probably costs $500, and a Katyusha, I'd guess, $2,500. Do the math and you'll see it will be worth the Palestinian's effort simply to get us to shoot Dome missiles in large numbers, for the financial burden. I'm also leery about a defensive strategy that relies completely on technology (I know about technology) rather than deterrence or, even better, the ability to disarm ones' enemies. (The option of making peace doesn't exist).

On the other hand, at the moment it's not obvious what the alternative is. I was in Sderot yesterday, and they've got these concrete mini-shelters strewn all over town; that's clearly not acceptable. Moreover, the law of unexpected consequences could kick in here, too. The Palestinian's most potent weapon agains Israel is the occupation, which is why most Israelis have long since decided to end it. Yet it can't be ended if every time we relinquish control over some territory it immediately becomes a launching pad for missiles against our civilians. Should the Iron Dome system put an end to that tactic, we could go back to the strategy most of us had already agreed upon, of dismantling most settlements and moving back to the barrier. The Palestinians, the Guardian, and Haaretz will continue to squawk that the occupation goes on, but most sensible people will disregard them, and Israel's position will be strengthened in many ways.

Learning to Wage War?

You've got to feel for these fellows, the Juan Coles and Glen Greenwalds of the world. Back in 2001, when the Islamists finally managed to catch the attention of the Americans after years of unsuccessful attempts, it just so happened there was a Republican in the White House. How much difference this made to thousands of professionals in the various security and legal branches of the American government I have no way of knowing, but since the Cole-Greenwald brigade disliked many of their actions, they attributed them to the Bad Man at the top. (As did Andrew Sullivan, after a while). Their delirious expectations of Obama were fired partly by his different rhetoric on such matters as waging wars, and interrogating and jailing Islamists.

Alas, it appears the professionals had reasons for doing what they did, irrespective of whether an election had been stolen in 2000; now that Obama is at the top, they're still doing them. So you have Cole who can't understand why American forces are killing civilians in Pakistan, and Greenwald is getting ever more strident about the incarceration issues.

Personally, I can empathize with both of them. Killing innocents is awful, though in some contexts it is inevitable; jailing people without due process seems wrong to me, no matter who's in the White House. Yet they're refusing to see the threat to which those professionals are responding. The enemies of the West these days play by different rules than the enemies of previous generations; while the fundamental rules shouldn't change, applying them is a constant, never-ending deliberation. Israelis have known this for decades, as we've been facing the same enemies for that long; the derision that has been meted out to us for trying to find the correct balance looks ever more hypocritical.

Actually, it seems to me the Americans have not yet found the correct balance - a point on which I may say more later; but at least they're trying. Lots of others aren't, probably secure in the knowledge the Americans are.

Learning to Wage War

Haaretz has an interview with three Duvdevan soldiers recently awarded medals of bravery for... sparing civilians. It's quite a story.

The fundamental challenge is that Palestinian murderers and planners of mass murder aren't identified as soldiers, as international law requires, nor do they act from military installations. They act from within the civilian society all around them. Which means, either you kill them with some civilians near them, or you don't harm them for fear of doing so, or you figure out how to pinpoint them in their kitchen, say, and nab them while sparing the other family members in the same kitchen. This is the policy Israeli chose for the West Bank, though it's the hardest of the three. A special unit, Duvdevan, was set up to do just that. Since no other army in the world knows how to do this, there weren't any international manuals or training camps, so Duvdevan had to learn on its own, by trial and error; initially, back in the first Intifada, there were too many errors. But the determination to succeed (understandable, given the alternatives), combined with an ever-rising level of professionalism, has forged a unit unparalleled anywhere, that in most cases succeeds:

A.: "There was an alley in the marketplace - all the stores were open and you hurry through the passageway, in order to maintain surprise and not to be 'burned' [identified] along the way. We broke into the house. He didn't understand where we had come from. Mabruk was sitting on the floor. He immediately jumped on his wife, using her as a shield."

R.: "Half a meter away was an M-16 with a magazine of ammunition inside. Ostensibly we had full legitimization to shoot him, because he was endangering us. But his wife was near him and he wasn't holding the weapon in his hand, so we didn't fire. There was a room there of two to three square meters, with his wife and a lot of children inside. He's an older man, but nobody's fool. He only had to roll over to reach the weapon. All he had to do was turn around with the weapon on automatic and mow down three or four soldiers. A less experienced soldier, who has not been trained for this mission, would have opened fire and killed several children."

A.: "The guys remained calm. The weapon was on the floor. One of us took it from Mabruk. We attacked. He went wild, but we handcuffed him. In the end, the trick was to use selective firing. The fighters identified a woman and children and didn't shoot. It's a matter of a momentary decision. Now another complicated stage begins - leaving the refugee camp with him. It's already 10 A.M. Lots of people are outside. All the punks in the neighborhood had already heard that we came. He had collaborators and friends who would have fired on us as we were leaving. We got out of there very cautiously with the guy."

Sometimes the wanted men escape:

When they broke into the house, the man's wife was inside. "Although the house looked terrible afterward, the woman was not hurt," says A. "Her only injury was from being punched by the wanted man before he escaped. He apparently suspected her of informing on him."

Inevitably, sometimes people get killed - Israeli soldiers, for example:

In another operation, in February 2008, the same fighters arrested Majdi Mabruk, the head of the Popular Front in the Ein Beit Ilma refugee camp in Nablus. Among other things, Mabruk managed to smuggle an explosive belt into Tel Aviv, to be used to launch an attack on Yom Kippur in 2007; the device was confiscated by security forces. During the manhunt, another terrorist, his partner, killed Paratroops commando fighter Ben Zion Henman. In another incident, while trying to arrest Mabruk, an officer from the Givati commando unit was shot in the neck.

At the time, I wrote about Hanemann's death here.

Interestingly, according to the article, the IDF doesn't generally want to kill these murderers, preferring to arrest them and interrogate them for further information, even though this means that sometime in the future they'll probably be freed, either as part of that bogus peace project we keep hoping will lead somewhere (I certainly do), or in return for a kidnapped IDF soldier at the rate of 1:1000. I was also tickled to see that an important impetus for developing the methods of Duvdevan came from that well-know IDF consultant, Amira Hass:

About five years ago, Maj. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot was serving as the commander of the IDF forces in the West Bank. Eisenkot, now the head of Northern Command, then called the military approach in the West Bank "an M-16 instead of an F-16." The ability of the IDF to reach the operatives everywhere, to pull them out of their hiding places by the hair, he claimed, is a far greater deterrent to the terror organizations and the Palestinian population than mass shows of Israeli strength.

The West Bank commander based himself on a surprising source: articles by Amira Hass in Haaretz, in which senior Palestinian operatives said that they felt a certain "professional respect" for the enemy only when the soldiers engaged in face-to-face combat with them. The Palestinians considered the use of tanks and helicopters as a demonstration of cowardice on the part of an enemy that surpasses them in its military capability.

"This I (don't really) believe"

Judith Warner has a reflection up at her NYT blog, titled "This I believe", in which she describes her hodge-podge of varying religious or hardly-religious inspirations, which include some residual Jewish fragments.

The result isn't malign, you've got to grant that; in a human history chock-full of religions people were willing to kill for, that's no small achievement. Yet along the way, whatever it is she's describing, it's not something she'd be likely to lay down her life to preserve, either. Actually, the theme of her post is that she has no idea how to pass on a significant religious inheritance to her daughter.

About six months ago, I asked Julia and Emilie if they’d consider trying out a Unitarian service one day with me.

“No way,” Emilie, then eight, declared, before I could even finish the sentence.

“I think that enough harm has been done in the name of religion,” said Julia, who had not long before studied the conquest of the Incas and had moved on to the colonization of Africa. “I don’t want to be a part of it.”

8-year-olds don't have original ideas, they reflect the adults around them (as do too many 18, 28, and 78-year-olds). Apparently none of the adults in Emilie's world have ever thought to explain to her that in the fundamentally flawed world we live in, religion, when done right, can be the richest source of human dignity, consolation, hope, and belonging she'll ever have. Sad.

"The other end of these traditions"

Still making my way through Paula Fredriksen's fine book, Augustine and the Jews. A while ago Paula commented to me that my work is at "the other end of these traditions", and here's an example. On page 81, she's discussing how internal Jewish discussions became fodder for something far more sinister:

The evangelists, in short, present a fairly typical portrait of Jewish interactions both in Jesus' day and in their own. All the noise, all the argument over scripture, all the fraternal name calling, is one of the most unmistakably things about the Jesus movement and about its earliest literature. Within a first-century intra-Jewish context, such arguments would and did sound like conflicting ideas about the right way to be Jewish. That way would be the way urged by the writer of the text. The gospels, when we regard them as sectarian Jewish literature, deny any legitimacy to "Israel" or as "the people of God" or of "those from above" at odds with their authors' own self understanding...

Do the sectarian texts of these earliest Christians promote negative stereotypes about fellow Jews? Unquestionably. But that is what Jewish sectarian texts do, and that is what polemical rhetoric does. Further, all Jewish texts, beginning with Genesis, include warts-and-all presentations of some of their Jewish characters. In this sense, the gospels are no more intrinsically "anti-Jewish" than is the Bible itself. But again like the Bible itself, the gospels, once they drifted out of their communities of origin into a wider gentile world, were read as a standing indictment and perpetual condemnation of Jews and Judaism as such, rather than as a narrative exhortation to change from the wrong kind of Judaism to the right kind of Judaism (that is, to the author's kind of Judaism). Jewish sectarian rhetoric, shorn of its native context, eventually becomes anti-Jewish rhetoric.

I think you can reasonably say that's a constant dynamic of Jew-hatred from the 2nd century until the Danny Zamir episode of last month, and it's not going to change anytime soon. Jews argue among themselves loudly and stridently, while their haters listen in, indifferent to any context, and choose the choicest quotations with which to damn the Jews.

Though I'd note this describes a dynamic, but doesn't explain the decision to use it. The determination to hate the Jews precedes listening in to their conversations. The reason Haaretz' website is world-famous while the Irish Times' isn't, has to do with the fodder for Jew-hatred one can cherry-pick from Haaretz.

Kosher CDOs

In a few hours it will be Pessach (Passover). We've been cleaning for weeks, hunting and destroying all vestiges of chametz (bread, yeast, etc), in the Jewish version of Spring Cleaning. Thank God that's behind us!

A thousand years ago or more, a sack of legumes in Europe was found to contain - horror of horrors! a few grains of wheat. Immediately, the local rabbis added legumes to the list of forbidden food for Pessach. The Sephardi rabbis, meanwhile, didn't loose their cool, and moved on to the next sack. Thus was born one of the more significant differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews: that the Ashkenazi ones eat very little over Pessach, while the Sephardi ones do without bread but mostly get on with life.

A thousand years later, the divide has broadened far beyond what anyone could ever have imagined. The Sephardi Jews (about half of the Israelis), are busy using modern food technology to invent yeast-less alternatives for just about every food product you can think of except whole wheat bread, to the extent that Pessach for them is no more bothersome than a mild itch.

The Ashkenazi folks, meanwhile, have taken the opposite track. Legumes, you see, have derivatives. Vegetable oil, for example. So any food with vegetable oil must be prohibited, obviously. Vegetable oil has its derivatives: sardines, for example, which are canned in it. OUT! CHAMETZ! Modern food processing being what it is, the danger of legume derivatives is, however, far worse even than that. Many types of cheese, for example, are processed in factories within sight of roads on which drivers may travel with sardine sandwiches in their glove compartments: HA! NO CHEESE!

I spoof you not. The art of derivatives of derivatives of derivatives which recently brought down the world economy could easily have been foreseen, had anyone given it any thought, by observing the sheer idiocy with which we Ashkenazi folks root out any shades of memories of that unfortunately poorly packed sack of Humus somewhere along the Upper Rhine in the year 867 Anno Domini.

Chag Sameach - Have a fine holiday. Easter, too.

Is Europe Dying?

The Economist reviews a new book by Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age; A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare. The central device of the book is the assumption that by knowing more about England in Shakespeare's day, we can better understand him.

Of course, with great writers it often goes the opposite way: their perception about their time is so clear it becomes prescience. The problem, of course, is figuring out in real time which of them has it right, and should be heeded, and which are merely bloviating; most of us resolve the matter by projecting prophetic significance on the artists who say what we think, while decrying the blindness or obtuseness of everybody who doesn't agree with us and our preferred artists.

So, in that spirit, you might want to go read Adam Kirsch, Life on Venus: Europe's Last Man, at World Affairs Journal. His article has a decidedly 2003-ish tone to it, with echoes of the Old-Europe-New-America argument: Europe is dying, America is vibrant. Yet it's an interesting read because while two of his exhibits were written in the 1990s, his central exhibit, Ian McEwan's Saturday, would probably be tagged as more American than European in the parameters of that argument. Kirsch's reading, however, is that McEwan is fundamentally European, and moreover, dying European, in the way he resolves the tension between the barbarians and the civilized with a poem, the beauty of which mesmerizes the barbarian. Bollocks, says Kirsch (well, not with that word).

Maybe it's not such a 2003-ish topic. Earlier this week I poked fun at the Guardian for deceiving itself about Obama's intentions for Afghanistan; since it was the Guardian-wing of America that propelled Obama forward in the initial Democratic primary race (though not all the way into the White House: they don't have that power), the issue may soon surface again; if Kirsch is right, it's the meta-narrative of our generation.

Obama's Rabbi

Last week Gavin asked me how Jews define themselves. Since I didn't see how I could reasonably clarify that one with less than a small book, I put it aside to wait for a plausible hook to hang it on. Sure enough, one came along, in the surprising story of Michelle Obama's rabbi cousin. Not, as you might think, the story of a Jew who married into her clan, which wouldn't have been all that surprising. No. This is the story of a tradition started late in the 19th century of American blacks identifying with Judaism to the extent they proclaimed themselves Jews; the cousin, Rabbi Capers Funnye, is part of an offshoot of the tradition which actually seems to be serious about their Judaism.

I admit I've never heard of the entire phenomenon. Just goes to show you how varied the Jewish world is, I suppose. Assuming they're Jews. Are they? And how do you know? More importantly, who decides?

One of the books I'm reading, Paula Fredriksen's Augustine and the Jews, tells about many non-Jews who attached themselves to Jewish communities in the pre-Christian period of the Roman Empire. Judaism was different in those days, but the book makes clear that the gentiles remained gentiles, even when supporting the Jewish communities with funds and participating in their communal activities.

And that was probably the last time Judaism was potentially appealing to large numbers of non-Jews for 18-19 centuries. In the interval, you were lucky if you got through a century with your community intact. There must have been movement on the edges, so there was a definition of being Jewish: anyone with a Jewish mother, or who had been converted halachically - which meant, by a rabbi.

In the second half of the 20th century this changed... twice, and in very different ways. It changed in the US, and it changed in Israel.

It changed in the US because, as touched upon in the previous post, for the first time ever it was possible to be an integral part of mainstream society and Jewish society simultaneously; yet Jewish society was taking on a plethora of new forms that would not have been recognizable as Jewish until recently. This meant a significant number of non-Jews were willing to consider joining the Jews, and intermarriage with non-jews while retaining Jewish identity meant the matriarchal definition appeared too narrow. The Jews lost their consensus on what they were, and then on who they were; today's American Jewry is characterized by a diversity and breadth of expression far greater than any previous Jewish community, including the fractured and disparate one of the final generations of the Second Temple Era. American Jews agree, in a general way, that they have a common history, the kingpin of which is the Holocaust; they sort of agree that being Jewish means having a communal or societal conscience, and they more or less sort of agree that Israel is important. The single most important space for Jewish expression is the liturgical area: American Jews tend to identify by belonging to a temple/synagogue/shul congregation.

Meanwhile, in Israel, it all works differently. Jews are the mainstream society. They speak the ancestral language, Hebrew, as their native tongue, and the national calender is Jewish. The state of war we live in is intrinsically tied up with being Jewish, too. Which means being Jewish in Israel is essentially automatic unless you're an Arab or Druze, and need have nothing to do with liturgy, belonging to a congregation, or any of the fundamental aspects of being Jewish in America; on the other hand, since it's the kind of thing you need the willingness to lay your life down for, it's far more serious than it is for many American Jews. The non-Jews in Israel, and halachically there are hundreds of thousands of them, mostly from the former Soviet Union, are in many ways more actively Jewish than most American Jews, even if they have absolutely no connection with a synagogue.

Which leaves the halachically minded orthodox with two separate battles to lose. In America they've lost the argument about conversion, and are retreating into their own enclaves. In Israel, they're losing the argument, too, though it's a very different argument, and their ability to retreat into enclaves is limited; on the other hand, the demographic dynamic means that within a few generations the problem (if it is one) will largely disappear: The Jews in Israel will be Jews, even if some of their forbears were Slavic non-Jews. I won't hazard a guess as to what will happen in America. Perhaps most American Jews will be African Americans who decided they were Jewish.

50 Influential Rabbis

Newsweek has published its annual list of the 50 most influential American rabbis (and Jeffrey Goldberg nitpicks it here). I can't nitpick it, but I can make some comments, snide or otherwise.

1. What an American idea! You've got Fortune lists of rich folks, halls of fame of the best baseball players, so why not have a list of top rabbis?

2. Only in America, of all diasporas Jews have ever lived in, have they been so at home and part of the surrounding society that it's even vaguely conceivable that a top general publication would think to include them in its remit to such an extent. And even that, only since the 1960s. Where else? Australia, perhaps? Canada? Surely nowhere else, and never before. If you wish, we can argue about this, but don't expect to convince me.

3. As Israelis go, I'm rather well informed about America in general and its Jews, too. At a stretch, I've heard of ten of these 50. I have the ability to string together two sentences about, at most, four. In a Jewish world with two centers, American and Israeli Jews are slowly but inexorably drifting apart; the rest are slowly orbiting around the one or the other.

4. Tho, now that I think of it, I bet 75% of America's Jews don't recognize ten of these 5o, either.

5. The list was put together

by Sony Pictures Entertainment Chairman & CEO Michael Lynton, News Corporation Executive Vice President Gary Ginsberg and JTN Productions CEO Jay Sanderson

Huh?

6. The criteria used were

• Are they known nationally/internationally?
• Do they have political/social influence?
• Do they have a media presence?
• Are they leaders within their communities?
• Are they considered leaders in Judaism or their movements?
• Size of their constituency
• Have they made an impact on Judaism in their career?
• Have they made a "greater" impact?

Which is a telling list of criteria. It seems to me there are only one and a half criteria for the significance of a rabbi.
1. Has he made a lasting contribution to the Jewish discussion that has been going on for millennia? (A sub-set of this would be, is he an important Posek, articulator of Halacha)
2. Is he important to his community (but often this, too, is a subset of the previous one).

We're talking about rabbis, after all. Arguably, David Ben Gurion was the most important Jew of the 20th century, which demonstrates that Jews can be important to the Jewish world, at least the modern Jewish world, without being a rabbi. But that would be a different list.

PS. Don't jump down my throat for using the masculine. I actually expect women to get there, by and by, but that's a different subject.

Talk to Hamas

Shlomo Avineri gets it right:

According to Hamas, the Jews are responsible for all the ills of modern society - the French Revolution; the Communist revolution; the establishment of secret associations (Freemasons, Rotary and Lions clubs, B'nai B'rith) designed to help them gain control of the world by secret means. They control the economy, press and television; they are responsible for the outbreak of World War I, which they initiated in order to destroy the Muslim caliphates (the Ottoman empire), to get the Balfour Declaration and set up the League of Nations with the aim of establishing their state. They also initiated World War II in order to make a fortune from selling war materials; they use both capitalism and communism as their agents...

But perhaps it is nevertheless worthwhile talking to Hamas - not about its contribution to peace but rather about what is stated in its covenant. Perhaps those who espouse the view that we must talk with Hamas will first talk with it about these subjects? Who knows, perhaps it will change its principles? I do not expect this to happen exactly, but I am certainly curious to know what those who think Hamas is the key to peace in the Middle East will say about these things.

And perhaps they are actually correct, perhaps Hamas is the key. If that's the case, it's difficult to expect that peace can be established in our region.

Genocide with Yoghurt

Here's a book review that shows how history has the ability to reach out of the past and rattle us, no matter how much we pretend to be forward-looking.

Last month, while I was visiting my father in Florida, we had dinner one night with my aunt. We were discussing the way Jim Jones had poisoned 900 of his followers with cyanide-laced Flavor Aid in 1978, and suddenly my aunt was explaining that another way to poison someone is with a yogurt smoothie. "That's how the Turks poisoned your grandmother's classmates in Constantinople in 1915," she said. "They poisoned the tahn."

This story was new to me, and I am 47. But as a second-generation Armenian American, I've found that it's not uncommon for one of these UFO horror stories to materialize out of nowhere over coffee.

Thus begins Chris Bohjalian's review of Armenian Golgotha, by Grigory Balakian. It hardly sounds like a pleasant read, but well may be a necessary one, especially if you're of the persuasion that knowing history and engaging with it is preferable to having it spring on you unawares.

Hitler, by the way, knew his history. He repeatedly told that what he learned from the Armenian genocide was that no-one cared at the time, and no-one remebered afterwards.

Using International Law in Vain

A law professor named George Bisharat yesterday published a pseudo-learned op-ed about how criminal Israel is. Since his terminology was legalese, and I'm not a legal expert, I decided not to comment on his screed. Fortunately, the folks over at Powerline are all attorneys, and John Hinderaker decided to have a look. His verdict:

There was once a time when it would have made sense to wonder why the New York Times would publish such drivel. Now, publishing left-wing drivel is the paper's business plan. Bankruptcy impends.

Racism, Apartheid, T-Shirts and General Confusion

Remember those horrendous IDF T-Shirts? And it's common knowledge that Israel treats its Arab citizens abominably. So here's a story from Haaretz this morning that demonstrates it all. An Arab professor at Haifa University was thrown out of a restaurant when he complained that a bartender was wearing a shirt encouraging the killing of Palestinian children. Ha! Gotcha.

Though if Israeli Jim Crow is that bad, how is he a professor at Haifa University? No matter.

Until you read beyond the headline, where all the damage is, into the article itself. The proprietor of the restaurant is himself an Arab, and he was the one arguing with the client. He insists he threw no-one out, rather the professor stalked out. The (Arab) restaurateur may have said to the (Arab) professor "IF you're a Palestinian, go to Palestine", implying that he, the (Arab) restaurateur prefers to remain an Israeli. And then there's this:

Hajaj said the bartender had never served in the army and was unaware of the message his shirt conveyed. As a result of the incident, the bartender is no longer working at the restaurant.

Now I'm really confused. If the bartender never served in the IDF, where did he get the T shirt? If he can't read its message, who is he? A Phillipino, perhaps? And if he's blameless, why has he been fired? Could it be that Hajaj, the restaurateur, didn't want the attention of the authorities to his practice of employing illegal residents?

I'm speculating, of course. But that's the issue. Something happened at Hajaj's restaurant over the weekend, but what it was we don't know. Haaretz has cherry-picked enough of the facts to make Israel look bad, put them in its headline, added a partial description in the item itself, and demonstrated that it cares not at all about its level of journalism.

Boycott Israel... At Any Price!

Even if it means not diagnosing skin cancer. After all, Israel itself is a cancer of sorts, and must be broken. Anyway, this particular discovery is not yet a certainty, so let's hurry up and divest from research projects with Israeli academics. That way the project will fail, and we'll never know if any good might have come from it, so won't need to have any pangs of regrets for our righteousness.

Iranians and Fools

Jefferey Goldberg has helpfully posted 19 (nineteen) quotes from Iran's president Ahmedinejad in less than four years in which he talks about Israel disappearing. His reason for doing so is that his fellow Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan is casting doubt.

Andrew has made an interesting personal journey over the past few years, from an unusual and interesting conservative blogger to boring and predictable left-wing one. Which is fine: many people don't have the intellectual courage to re-examine their fundamental positions anytime after age 22. I personally stopped reading Andrew's blog quite a while ago. Anyone who regards Juan Cole as an authoritative source for information can't be very serious himself. (On which topic, I recommend the comment left here by someone who took the time to listen to some Cole lectures. If Sullivan can't see the dynamic, it's only because he chooses not to). A. Jay Adler, however, has some more informed comments about Andrew, and the sad direction he is now conforming to. He tells that after Goldberg did his research and posted his findings, Andrew read them and pronounced that

Reading them all, it becomes quite clear to me that Ahmadinejad does indeed want Israel to cease to exist, but equally clear that he is not speaking of dropping a nuke on it.

Well, that's certainly comforting, isn't it? Andrew knows the Iranian fellow is merely talking through his hat, and we have nothing to worry about.

I hope no national leaders, in any country, glean their information from the blogosphere. I write this as a (part-time) blogger.