Links fixed

Apparently a few hundred people visit this blog daily, even tho I only post to it rarely. Most visitors seem to be looking at old stuff. Some of the things they're looking for are the long-ish essays I wrote from time to time, stored on Google Docs, and linked to from the blog. Then, sometime last year, perhaps when Google moved us from Docs to Drive, the links were all broken. For months now I've been getting e-mails with requests to see a file I thought I'd posted years ago.

So today I went back and changed the status of all those essays in Google Drive, from private (which was never my intention), to public (which is what they all used to be). I hope this will fix the problem, and if not, please write in and tell me.

Most important, of course: thank you to all the folks who are reading my back-copies! Who'd have thunk?

Have Israeli Archives been Hiding Files?

Over the weekend Shai Hazkani published a long article in Haaretz about Israeli crimes in 1948 and attempts to cover them up, first by David Ben Gurion and now, in recent years, by the archives. I'm not going to deal with the content of the article itself. However, I was perturbed by Hazkani's claim that unpleasant files which had been opened in the 1990s have recently been re-sealed, even though in the meantime historians had seen them and quoted from them. Given that I"m the State Archivist, I received a number of enquiries from various folks: "Tell us it ain't so, Yaacov!"

So I looked into the matter by contacting Haaretz and eventually talking to Hazkani so as to understand what he was describing. The answer is troubling.

First, it's not the censor. There is a censor in Israel, but she and her team don't deal with influencing historical narratives, only with stopping publications which contain an immediate danger to Israeli security, and they're watched closely by various agencies, chief of them being the Supreme Court. They have a very narrow mandate, and they stay within it.

It's not the State Archives, at least not as a policy of blocking uncomfortable or unpleasant documentation. The readers of our blog may have noticed this. However, it turns out there have been cases where declassifiers have re-sealed files, when their directives have been sharpened. Finally, there are the declassifiers at the IDF Archives: when I asked them they confirmed that indeed, some files have been re-sealed because of their content.

So Hazkani at Haaretz was right.

Now what? Since I stopped being a blogger and became a civil servant, I acquired authority and responsibility, but lost the luxury of simply speaking out on whatever topic crossed my mind. (I also mostly stopped bogging). On this matter, also: I can no longer simply say how I think things need to be without much chance of influencing them to be that way. I need to address the full complexity of the matter, and deal with all the stakeholders. I can hope to change things within my sphere of authority, but I must use the tools the system has given me, not those I used to use. It's trade-off: I may be able to change things (and I many not), but I can't simply spout opinions.

So on that note I'll have to end this report, at least until - and if - there's something else to report on.

Review: My Father was a Freedom Fighter

A few months ago a twitter correspondent suggested I should read Ramzy Baruod's book My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story. If memory serves, the suggestion was something of a taunt, or a dare, along the lines of "let's see if you've got the guts to read such an important book, and if you can deal with it honestly". So the next time I was at Amazon I purchased a copy, and have now finished reading it. As could have been predicted, my reading is a bit different from that of my correspondent, so here's a quick review.

Baroud's book is not particularly well written, as, say, Raja Shehadeh's is. Yet it is interesting and I'm glad I read it. I discerned three major levels in it, the personal, the historical and the political.

The personal is the poignant story of the author's father, Mohammed Baroud, along with lesser strands about his grandfather and his mother, all of whom were born in the town of Beit Daras before 1948, and all of whom eventually died in the Nuseirat camp in the Gaza strip. One can - indeed, should - be careful when telling the story of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, even when inevitably taking sides, but Israelis should be able to accept that the personal stories of Palestinian individuals whose lives were harshly changed by the events of 1948 are tales of woe, misfortune and yearning for an earlier time. Was there a river that flowed near Beit Daras in whose pools Muhammad swam "endlessly" as a boy? Of course not. Were the battles of 1948 which emptied the town naked Israeli aggression with the gunning down of large numbers of women and children? No, and no. Were the ensuing decades of misery in Gaza the inevitable result of intentional Israeli policies? Of course not. Yet for all the disagreements about simple facts and complex interpretations, the fundamental outlines of the personal story are true, and tragic. His grandparents and parents were uprooted from their ancestral home, and life never went back to being normal for them. Many many millions of people in Europe and Asia were likewise uprooted in the 1940s, including Jews, and some built new lives and others didn't, but the general shouldn't hide the specific; we as Israelis can afford to accept that the lives of many Palestinians were ruined by their conflict with us, especially in the 1940s.

We can also accept that life for Palestinians during the 1st Intifada was most unpleasant, and their interactions with the IDF often extremely negative. Why this was so is a different question, but that it was so, seems to me beyond argument.

The historical level of Baroud's book is, simply, silly. His depiction of Israel and Israelis lacks any factual plausibility; his repeated claim that Israel succeeds at what it does because of American interventions is odd given that he has chosen to make his own life in America (Seattle, apparently). His chronology is often manipulative; one example among many is when he tells of Netanyahu's electoral victory in 1996 first, and then only recounting the fact that Hamas was blowing up Israeli citizens by the dozens a few pages later, so the ignorant reader can't see any possible connection. He often confuses his chronology in such a way, to the extent it's hard to maintain that he's merely confused. His footnotes (as an archivist I often take note of footnotes) are abysmal as historical sources. Even his over-arching thesis - that his father was a freedom fighter - is true only in a metaphorical way, in that his father despised Israel all his life, even as his best commercial enterprises seem to have been conducted with Israelis. His treatment of the history of Palestinians as subjects of history, as actors rather than passive objects, is extremely confused at its best, and disingenuous as a general rule. Which brings us to the third level of the book, the political.

The politics of the book are probably their most valuable, and focus mostly on the period since the beginning of the Oslo process in 1993 until the present (the book was published in 2010). This is the section diplomats, pundits, journalists and observers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict need to read. The way Baroud sees it, and he presents his position as being mainstream and representative, the entire Oslo process was a conspiracy to harm the Palestinians; it was a machination by Israel, America, and a corrupt PLO leadership to screw the Palestinians, prevent their attaining their rights, and defeat their honorable struggle. True, his appraisal of Yasser Arafat is complex, but his disdain for the rest of the PA leadership is palpable. At one point, speaking  of his father, he makes it very clear that the only possible just outcome of any peaceful resolution of the conflict must of course include his return to Beit Daras. Any Palestinian political leadership which accepts anything less than that is illegitimate, and probably made up of lackeys of Israel and America.

I'm on record as having accepted the need for Palestinian independence alongside Israel since the 1970s. There's nothing in this book to suggest there's a significant group of Palestinians who agree with me, while there is much in it to suggest that Palestinian figures who negotiate with Israelis lack legitimacy among their own people. It's one book, by one man, and there may be other voices among the Palestinians, but it's no less depressing for all that.

Joseph Brodsky, Watermark

I recently read Joseph Brodsky's little book Watermark. I enjoyed it thoroughly, though I can't tell you what it's about. I mean, well, of course I can: it's about Venice, and Brodsky's annual visits to the city over many years, always in the middle of winter. So it's sort of a memoir, and a bit of a travel book, and of course it's a reflection on life and beauty , but having said all that, I still can't tell you what it's about. Since it's only 135 pages long, and the typeset is large with big spaces, you could probably read the whole thing in an hour or two at the most - but that would be a shame. Better to read a few pages each time, then set it aside and come back later. That way you'll enjoy it over a few weeks, if you pace yourself well enough.

Some wonderful friends sent me the book when they heard we were going to Venice, but by the time it arrived we'd already been there and were back. That was, oh, three years ago I think, and it was pure coincidence that I noticed it on the shelf last month. Reading it wasn't as good as being there, but as memory lanes go, it was surprisingly effective. So I'd say, if you're planning to go to Venice, read the book first. If you've already been, read it now. If you don't know why you might wish to go there, read it and you'll know. And if you're determined never to go to Venice (why would anybody do that?), read Brodsky's strange but compelling book and regret your decision.

At sunset all cities look wonderful, but some more so than others. Reliefs become suppler, columns more rotund, capitals curlier, cornices more resolute, spires starker, niches deeper, disciples more draped, angels airborne. In the streets it gets dark, but it is still daytime for the Fondamenta and that gigantic liquid mirror where motorboats, vaporetti, gondolas, dinghies, and barges "like scattered old shoes" zealously trample Baroque and Gothic facades, not sparing your own or a passing cloud's reflection either. "Depict it", whispers the winter light, stopped flat by the brick wall of a hospital, or arriving home at the paradise of San Zaccaria's frontone after its long passage through the cosmos. And you sense this light's fatigue as it rests in Zaccaria's marble shells for another hour or so, while the earth is turning its other cheek to the luminary. This is the winter light at its purest. It carries no warmth or energy, having shed them and left them behind somewhere in the universe, or in the nearby cumulus. Its particles' only ambition is to reach an object and make it, big or small, visible. It's a private light, the light of Giorgione or Bellini, not the light of Tiepolo or Tintoretto. And the city lingers in it, savoring its touch, the caress of the infinity whence it came. An object, after all, is what makes infinity private. (p.80)

Hannah Arendt in a false Jerusalem

The other day we went to see the new film about Hannah Arendt, directed by Margarethe von Trotta (2012). If you're into Batman films or other Christopher Nolan intelligent flics, this one isn't for you. It's slow, thoughtful, in two languages, and very well made. There is no action of the sort that Hollywood would recognize. It's about Arendt's trip to Jerusalem for Adolf Eichmann's trial in 1961 and the book she wrote about it, Eichmann in Jerusalem (Penguin Classics) - a book with one of the most important subtitles ever: a Report on the Banality of Evil.

Arendt was once a serious presence in my life. It turns out that shortly before she traveled to Jerusalem she spent an evening at our home in Chicago, though given my young age I was probably sent to bed before she arrived. As an undergraduate I read her magnificent The Origins of Totalitarianism (HBK) - easily one of the most intellectually exciting books I'd read. When I submitted my doctoral proposal for research into the decision-making process in the SS, using Eichmann's office as a case study, I noted that a side affect of the investigation would be to bolster Arendt's Banality thesis with solid historical documentation.

Well, that didn't work out. As I ploughed my way through tens of thousands of pages of Nazi documents and secondary sources about it, I was forced to recognize that she had got it all wrong. There was no banality there whatsoever, but there was personal brutality and viciousness, in the context of a profound and all-pervasive hatred of Jews. I eventually published my findings, in Hitler's Bureaucrats: The Nazi Security Police and the Banality of Evil, which had a pretty good run as turgid history books go, and was published in four languages, but never made the tiniest dent in the popularity of Arendt's thesis. Which is OK, given her stature and my lack of one.

Von Trotta's film tells the story of the creation of the Banality of Evil book and its initial reception; the fun in watching it is that we all know the end of the story: while some folks didn't initially like it, eventually it became one of the more famous books of the 20th century, so that there was a happy ending, even if it took a while to arrive - after the end of the film.

I'm not going to argue with her anymore - I've moved on from that. It's a fine film, and I recommend it.

The point I'd like to make is about one of the most minor scenes in the film. In early 1961 Arendt arrives in Jerusalem. The film puts her in St Andrew's Scottish Church, which I think didn't happen but could have, I suppose. From the balcony there's a great view of the western wall of the Old City, and when she first arrives she meets an old friend, a fellow German-born Jew, and they briefly enjoy the view, while commenting "So this is your Jerusalem!"; the camera pans along the wall of the Old City.

Which is of course nonsense. In 1961 anyone sitting on that balcony looking at the view would have noticed that there was a harsh border running right down the middle of it, with hostile snipers occasionally shooting at each other across it. No one would have celebrated "their Jerusalem"; any sane person would have mourned the tragic tearing apart of one of the world's oldest and most famous cities. Indeed, a visitor to the city would have sought out such vantage points so as to see the extent of the travesty, and the imbecility of dividing a city.

A German film director born in 1942 and thus old enough to remember the division of Berlin and Jerusalem, of all people, could be expected not to be so silly. Or maybe not: maybe that's too much to expect.

Review: The Better Angels of our Nature

In spite of the fact that this blog is mostly dormant and its once thriving comments section is dry, not long ago a reader responded to something I wrote with a warm recommendation that I read Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. You keep on wondering about violence in military contexts, Yaacov, and about Israel's wielding of it; you really need to read Pinker, who'll tell you lots and lots of really pertinent stuff. So I did. And yes, it is a very interesting book; and yes, it is very very well written; and yes, it is very informative in that once you finish reading it you'll know lots of things you didn't know before.

Sadly, however, it didn't do for me what it apparently did for that reader. It wasn't much of an eye opener; in some ways, it wasn't even particularly convincing.

Before I explain, however, a short diversion. A year or two ago I read Simon Sebag Montefiore's Jerusalem: The Biography (Vintage), and even referred to it once or twice here on the blog, but then I never got around to reviewing it, the new job came along, I stopped blogging, and then Pinker's book offered a way of reading Sebag Montefiore's book which I hadn't noticed - so here goes. A three-sentence review within a review.

Jerusalem's story, in Sebag Montefiore's telling, is one of ancient and unrelenting violence and horror. Mass crucifixions, eye-gouging, beheadings, disembowlings, assassinations: century after century, millennium after millennium (Jerusalem really is a very old place). Only quite recently, in the 17th or 18th century, did things calm down, and while the wars went on and still go on, much of the gore was toned down. And that, says Pinker, is the story of humanity. Had he read Sebag Montefiore's book, he would simply have noted that it's a typical instance of the general rule. The history of human violence is the tale of a steep and mostly consistent decline of violence, from all pervasive in pre-history, through pervasive in early history, common and repulsive until a few centuries ago, ever more tamed in recent centuries, mostly tamed and perhaps even an endangered phenomenon in our day and age. And yes, he's heard of Nazism and Communism, thank you for mentioning them.

To sum up his historical presentation, the first 500-odd pages of the book, humans in the wild were violent by nature; civilization enabled ever larger groups to work together while being violent towards other groups and anyone who peeved them; Leviathan reduced the violence within society without ever reducing it between groups or from the hegemon to the individual; the Civilizing Process (he capitalizes it) created an ever growing sphere in which violence was forced aside; there was a Humanitarian Revolution in the 18th century which abolished torture and vicious executions; and then in the latter 19th century, and in full force in the second half of the 20th, individual homicides and communal and international wars took a nosedive; today, even rough games among boys are forbidden by boards of educational curmudgeons.

He demonstrates this all with dozens and dozens of charts, all of which show lines of violence which begin in the upper left corner and end in the lower right corner.

Charts are a good thing, by the way. Historians don't use enough of them, and literature professors probably never use them. They demonstrate an ability and willingness to bring quantifying discipline to prose narratives which is refreshing and useful. Pinker even has a section on this near the end of the book, when he tells that people are vastly more intelligent today than they used to be, which is of course nonsense unless you qualify the statement to mean that contemporary folks are much better, in general, at scientific and numeric argumentation. That's probably true.

Having spent 500-odd pages doing the history, his final 200 look at the science. If nothing else, here he displays an impressive cross-disciplinary erudition. Not only has he read a lot about violence, he also knows about diverse fields of scientific scholarship, from philosophy (which is what science used to be) through lots of psychology, statistics, neurology and more. Not only does he write better than almost all academics, he's also got much broader horizons. So in this section he tells all about how scientists like to watch people's brain scans while provoking them into all sorts of behaviour, so as to identify the parts of the brain that light up when we do natural things such as be angry, sad or bad. Then, having demonstrated that being bad has neurological existence, he tells how other social behaviours - or shall we call them conditions? - also have neurological existence. The idea being that if we could strengthen the positive urges we could change our individual and communal chemistry, and reinforce us in being gentle and reasonable.

One of the notable sections in this part of the book, for me, was his discussion of empathy. Those of you who were boys roughly at the time Pinker and I were (he's a few years older than me but we both grew up on Tom Lehrer satires), must have read and remember Clifford D. Simak's magnificent City (Sf Masterworks), published in 1952 and still in print. In that book Simak has an invention which enables people effortlessly to understand the perspective of other people - and it's the end of squabbling humankind as we know it. Well, 60 years later, according to Pinker and the researchers he cites, the Age of Empathy is upon us, and it isn't the end of history, it's the beginning of a better one.

Near the very end he talks about rationalism as a force for improvement of the human story, and his discussion also passes the topic of classical liberalism versus contemporary American-style liberalism. It was around then that it became clear to me that Pinker seems to be arguing with a type of left-wing American liberalism which would have us accept that human history was mostly benign until the Europeans came along and screwed up, the Enlightenment spawned Communism and Fascism, and the US was horrendous to lots of colored folks abroad while its white elites were nasty to the minorities at home. (My formulation). The whole enterprise of his book, in an over-simplification, was to show those believers that actually, no. It was always a lot worse, it has gotten much better, and rationalism is the keystone to making it ever better. And the funny thing is that that's the thesis, more or less, of J.B. Bury's 1920 classic The Idea of Progress (which is also still in print, I'm pleasantly surprised to report). (Or anyway, I think that's the thesis of the book. I read it when I was much younger and foolish).

So that's the first reason I was disappointed by the book: it states the obvious, even if many people today would prefer not to accept the obvious because of all sorts of political fashions. The cumulative actions of centuries of dead white European men, most of them Christians though with a strong influence of Jewish ideas and a smattering of Jewish men among them, have made the human story vastly better than it was. They didn't do it alone, and in the past few generations they have been joined by lots of all the rest - women, non-whites, non-Christians - but the facts remain, and accepting them is no shame. (And yes; there are facts. Really. They aren't constructs of confused thinking. But that's a different book).

The second reason I was disappointed is Pinker's preference for scientific universalism over historical specific knowledge. Scientist seek overarching laws of nature, and they think in categories of replicable demonstrations of phenomena. Historians (or at least the good ones) know that in the human story, unlike in the world of physics, nothing can ever be replicated, because each specific situation, event and condition is the result of a fiendishly complicated chain of unique vectors and actors. The task of the historian isn't to identify universal rules; at its most daring, the best it can hope to do is demonstrate viable potentials. If it can even do that, since the conditions which brought about the earlier results aren't replicable.

Pinker's eagerness to find the laws irked most when he dealt with the single biggest problem with the theory of consistent decline of violence: Nazism and Communism and their many dozens of millions of dead. If the inertia of history is so strongly active in one direction, how to explain the first half of the 20th century, even if things went back on track thereafter. (Assuming they did). His explanation, which boils down to a statistical fluke, is simply too silly to argue with, even if he spends an entire section on it, replete with more charts and an otherwise interesting disquisition on the nature of statistics and flukes.

Then there was the annoying underlying political agenda. It was underlying, in that Pinker pokes fun at political spinmeisters of all stripes; but his own preferences, of a mildly-left-leaning Liberal Democrat such as densely populates the Boston area where he lives, were woven into the text as if they are obviously true - when they're not. They're merely one political persuasion amongst many. To cite one random example from dozens: The American reaction to 9/11 to go to war in Afghanistan could perhaps have been an emotional response motivated by fear or revenge or whatever; then again, it could have been the cool and calculating result of a reading of the facts. There a big difference between the two, and someday the historians may reach agreement which it was (or what the combination was), but then again, they may not, because too many of the relevant facts are hard to get at, such as the internal frame of mind of many of the individuals who formulated the response.

Did I mention that I was wearied by the insistence on explaining every form of human behaviour in terms of its Darwinian justification? As in, people do this sort of thing because their ur-ancient ancestors found it useful for survival in those caves? Enough already! It's all speculation, I don't see how it could be seriously proven (or disproven, which is a requirement for proof), and why should those speculations be so important anyways? Might not the immediate, historical, motivations and explanations be more important? Similarly, I'm unimpressed by all those lightings sighted in folks' brains. Clearly, humans have a very wide range of emotional and cognitive options; the fact that some of them light up this section of the brain while others light up a different section, while it may well be true, doesn't seem to explain why some unique individuals have this section light up one way while other nearby unique individuals set off different sections. And is it irrevocably proven that the lighting up of some switches causes the behaviour, and not the other way around?

Finally, I had my problems as a Jewish reader, and as an Israeli. The Talmud has repeated discussions about the sanctity of human life, the eternal unacceptability of torture, and the abolishment of capital punishment, more than a thousand years before those great enlightened Christian white men stumbled across the ideas (and some of them were antisemites even as they enlightened the world). The talmudists - thousands of men over a span of some four or five centuries, and their followers in later centuries - had a power of reasoning, some of it abstract, which is non-existent today. They even seem to have lived according to their ideals, more or less. None of this fits into those charts, and it didn't much influence them either, but if the sentiments are so modern, where did they come from ten centuries before modernity?

Then there's Pinker's need to overstate his case. At one point he goes out onto a branch: "Oh all right. How likely is it that there will be a massacre of 100,000 people in a year, or a war with a million casualties? 9.7%. Why that number? Because it is conceivable, but it's highly unlikely." (I'm paraphrasing, but that's what he wrote). Well, in spite of the media's insistence these past three months that there have been 70,000 casualties in Syria over the past two years, a stable and unmoving number even as hundreds are killed daily, we all know that Syria is quite close to 100,000 casualties in little more than a year. And getting worse. My point being that all the talk about the disappearance of war, and the dwindling of violence, and the disappearance of torture, and the acceptance of rationality and universal norms and so on and on and on: well, seen from Jerusalem they look like a wistful pipe dream. Something you'd love to have, and some other folks maybe even do have so long as they don't look around them, but a pipe dream nonetheless. Hatred of the Jews in civilized cultivated gentle Europe is alive and growing, it's roaring across the Muslim world, the Arab Spring is getting colder by the week as some of us expected it would even as it was being feted by fools worldwide - Sorry. The end of warfare and violence and torture and pain and man-inflicted pain and suffering is not here, and it's not near, either.

Which brings me back to that history of Jerusalem with which I started. In the long history of this ancient city there have repeatedly been permanent, multi-century-long chapters of stability, in which the order of things was clear and immutable and seemingly final. And then there was another, different one. And then another. And another. And another....

Independence Day Flags

It's Yom Hazikaron today, the mournful day of commemoration for the 25-thousand-plus Israelis who have died in our century-long conflict with the Arabs. In a few hours it will morph abruptly from one of the two most solemn days of the year (the other is Yom Kippur) to Independence Day, one of the more joyous.

Israelis appreciate their country, and are proud of its flag. Earlier today I wandered around a bit and took some snapshots of flags.

OOPS!

Margaret Thatcher, RIP

Margaret Thatcher has died at the age of 87, and the world's media will be full of obituaries. No-one needs this mostly-dormant blog to chip in.

Yet chipping in I am, to tell of the one time I met her, and in honor of the impression she made. She had already left Downing 10, and was in Israel for some sort of event, and she came by Yad Vashem. In those days I used to meet all sorts of prominent folks and give them tours; I met presidents, prime ministers, and many lesser luminaries. None of them left the impression she did. Her intelligence was so fierce and unusual it was like a physical force, knocking over whatever wasn't solid enough to withstand it. I don't remember exactly what it was I showed her - it must have been assorted interesting documents, some Nazi, some Jewish, that was the sort of thing I normally showed in such cases. She saw the essential significance in each of them well before I had finished explaining what they were, and tied them into her understanding of the world. I vividly remember thinking at the time that being one of her aides or ministers must have been unusually demanding, since if you didn't have total control of whatever it was you were presenting to her she'd have made you feel like an idiot.

Lost of people didn't like her, I know - though enough did to elect her repeatedly. Never having been one of her constituents, I never had to trouble myself with the question of how I might have evaluated her going into elections. After that one meeting, however, it was clear to me that she was no run-of-the-mill world leader.

Eshter Golan, RIP

Esther Golan passed away peacefully in her sleep early this morning. She was 89.

I wrote about Esther in Right to Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel's Wars, where I recounted how she was called out of a talk she was giving to a group of young people at Yad Vashem about her Holocaust experiences, to be told that her grandson had been killed that morning. 29-year-old Eyal Yoel had been fighting with his reserve unit in Jenin; it was April 2002. Nine years ago tomorrow. The date of his death, Yom Hashoah, is one day later than the date of her death, the evening of Yom Hashoah.

The story that Esther always told those groups was about how her parents sent her off with her little sister in 1939, from their hometown of Glogau to England; and how the girls and their mother managed to correspond for a while, until their father, and then their mother, were murdered by the Nazis. She would always read a section or two of her mother's last letter, which exhorted them to find their way to "our homeland", the Land of Israel.

Yet the way Esther told it, it was mostly an optimistic story, about how the two of them eventually did make their way here, and how they were reuinted with their older brother who had been here the whole time, and how she raised a family, and completed her education, and went to university, and had a long and fulfilling life. Maybe it was because of the optimism that she was invited, over and over, to travel to Germany and talk to scholchildren who could have been her grandchildren, or later, her great-grandchildren. And maybe it was the optimism which enabled her to learn how to use all the new-fangled contraptions such as e-mail and photoshop; she prepared a presentation with her mother's letter in Powerpoint.

She even had a blog. Her last post, from a few months ago, was about the blessings of having all those descendants. Who knows what their great-great-grandmother would have made of all this; of all her descendants and distant descendants "living in our land".

Or dying there.

Here's a bit from a recent post she wrote:

It is so easy to fall into the trap of being served. But then comes the question "Who am I?" And as long as I can, I hope to be able to conduct my life as best as I can and remain a useful person within my locality, help others where I can and accept help when and where needed. All this is part of growing old. This my present motto. I hope I can live up to it.

Book Review: The Allepo Codex

In my capacity as Israel's State Archivist, late last year I wrote and published a quasi-legal decision in the matter of the archives of the pre-Shoah Jewish community of Vienna. The pre-war Jewish community of Vienna was Europe's second largest (after Warsaw); after the war it was only a shadow of its former self, and in the early 1950s its leaders began shipping various cultural possessions to Israel; among them was the 250-year archives of the community.

A few years ago the current community leaders demanded it be sent back. The case wandered through the legal system for a while, and eventually it was sent to the state archivist. Having done my best to study the matter in a dispassionate and professional manner, my eventual decision was that the collection should remain in Jerusalem. (We blogged on this at the ISA blog here, here, here and here; the decision itself is online here, in Hebrew). The case is currently pending at the Supreme Court.

Shortly after I had completed my part of the story, my wife bought me a copy of The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible by Matti Friedman. The story of the Codex itself is one of those fantastic-yet-true stories that Jewish history sometimes throws up. Written in Tiberias more than a thousand years ago to be the definitive copy of the Bible, it was captured in 1099 in Jerusalem by the Crusaders, ransomed by the Jews of Cairo, and then came into the possission of the most famous Jew ever to live in Cairo, the Rambam (Maimonides). A couple centuries later a direct descendant of his (a great-great-grandson, if I'm not mistaken) moved to Aleppo and took the Codex with him. Ever since, from the 14th to the 20th centuries, it remained in Aleppo, the most prized possession of the ancient Aleppo community. For the entire time since its creation, it has always been the single most acurate copy of the Hebrew Bible.

Given what's been happening in Aleppo the past year, it's very fortunate the book isn't there anymore, but rather in Jerusalem. Yet as Friedman's story shows, that last chapter wasn't as straightforward as one might wish. The story that was given to be understood from its arrival in Jerusalem in 1958 was heroic and satisfying: The day after the UN adopted the plan to partition mandatory Palestine between a Jewish and an Arab state, in November 1947, there were riots in Aleppo, the central synagogue was attacked, and part of the Codex was burned. The rest was saved, smuggled to Jerusalem, and now resides in a very safe vault at the Israel Museum (I've seen it there); part of it is on public display in the Shrine of the Book.

Friedman's story is murkier. He suggests that the Codex was smuggled out of Syria with the help of the Mossad, and was brought to Yitzchak Ben Zvi, then President of Israel. Once the remnants of the Aleppo community in Israel heard it had been saved, they demanded it be returned to their possession. The State of Israel, however, had no intention of handing it over, and the case went to court, where it was decided that it belonged to the State but with Aleppo representatives on the board of a steering committee to determine its treatment. After Ben Zvi died, however, no-one was particularly interested in it anymore, and it spent the next years in a cabinet at the Hebrew University. Only in the 1980s was public interest re-kindled, the Codex was sent for a six-year treatment in the laboratories of the Israel Museum, and later also scanned and made public.

Ah - and there was the matter of the missing 40 percent, which includes the entire Pentatuch and other parts. Friedman shows that it wasn't burned in 1947, and that it was probably saved almost in its entirety; the 40% went missing sometime between 1957 and the end of the 1970s - which is a glum thing to reflect on, since it means Jews who should have appreciated it better did the destruction, not a Syrian lynch-mob.

While Friedman doesn't have full proof for this, he does tell a compelling tale. I recommend it.

Jerusalem: a functioning city or a political resolution: choose one

Matti Friedman has an interesting article at Time of Israel about how Jerusalem is becoming ever more integrated in the reality, even as "everyone knows" that it must be divided - and that the division contradicts this reality.

What he describes fits into my experience, too. Having lived in Jerusalem since 1967, the past few years have been characterized by a level of cohabitation between Jews and Palestinians and Haredi and secular which didn't previously exist. If anything, Friedman's description understates the reality: it isn't just three commercial areas, for example, where Jews and Arabs intermingle; it's dozens of them. Walk into any large supermarket (not the neighborhood ones) and see if you can disentangle the locals - customers and staff - according to ethnic lines. Nor is it a result of the train, which most Jerusalemites don't use because there's only one (long) line.

My unscientific guess? The fact that the Palestinians of Jerusalem by and large didn't join the 2nd Intifada; then their separation from the West Bank (which hasn't been total), then the mayorship of Nir Barkat, a right-winger hi-tech millionaire who's committed to serving all residents, and various other factors.

Deciding to Have Enough Water

Here's a fascinating article about how Israel solved its shortage of water. The short answer: lots of smart investments in all the right things. The deeper answer: determination. The leaders of the country and its water systems decided the problem of shortages had to be solved - so they did.

Dr. Ruth Kalderon's Maiden Speech in the Knesset

Since becoming a civil servant in 2011, with the obligation to stay away from public expression of political opinions, I've mostly stopped blogging. Even when I still do blog from time to time, I try to stay away from politics. I'm not about to change that.

And yet. We recently had an election, you may have noticed, and following the election a new crop of Members of Knesset took their place in the legislature. The negotiations towards creating a coalition are still underway, and we don't know, at this stage, who'll be in the government and who not, nor which positions in the Knesset will be filled by whom. We're still waiting.

In the meantime, however, the new MKs have been making their maiden speeches. The one by Dr. Ruth Kalderon, a new MK from Yair Lapid's Yesh Atid party, stands out above all others. Actually, it stands out above all other speeches given by anyone to the Knesset, for quite a number of years. Its you-tube version has gone viral, and by now, less than two weeks after it was given, I don't seem to know anyone left who hasn't seen it; most people agree that it's an unusually fine speech.

I"m posting it with English subtitles. It's about 15 minutes long, and if you're interested in one of the most exciting cultural phenomena in Israel these days, take the time.

Update: and here's an interesting article explaining why some people are so excited about her.

Photos from Jerusalem

I assure you, improbable as it may seem, that the following photos were all taken just the other day, within the municipal lines of Jerusalem. I know, because I was there, taking them.

Free books

Barry Rubin has put 13 of his books online, and you can download them for free, right here.

FRUS, which means Foreign Relations of the United States, has put dozens and dozens of its books online for e-book downloading - also for free. Here.

So go yee, and partake. Honest: I get no cut from the profits.

No-one Remembers the Machtergreifung

Hitler came to power 80 years ago today. I've just posted a brief rumination on this over at the other blog.

Europe's Obsession with Israel

Election day in Israel is a day off for most people. We took advantage of it to see Michael Haneke's magnificant new film, Amour. It's easily one of the best films I've ever seen, though - a word of caution - it's not the kind of film you watch with popcorn.

I'm blogging about it for a profound marginal reason. The entire film takes place in one apartment in Paris; indeed, most of the film is about two people, with one significant guest actor and 4-5 others who each get less than 60 seconds. The outside world is occasionally glimpsed through the windows, but even then, there are light curtains across them. The theme of the story and its power draw from the relentless narrowness of the story, from which there's no way out.

Except for one brief scene, in which George is reading the newspaper to Anne: an item about a visit by Binyamin Netanyahu to Washington.

Of all the story of humanity, the single time the outside world penetrates it's about Israel. The audience in the theater all burst into laughter, which is probably not the effect Haneke had in mind. I don't think it's funny, however. Nor do I think it's really and truly merely a coincidence.

After the Snow

I suppose I should start a photo-blog at Tumblr. But that would be yet another demand on my time. So here are a few pictures from the day after the big snowstorm of January 10th 2013; being Jerusalem and not, say, Chicago, the snow mostly melts within a day or two.

Snow in Jerusalem

This morning I woke up and decided I've been working too hard, so I'd take the day off. I spent the morning walking around, taking banal pictures of Jerusalem on a typical Thursdy morning:

Review: Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?

I do hope to get more reading done in 2013 than in 2012. The best way to do this would be to stop wasting time on the Internet, of course: so here's a book review on the Internet.

Last night, a few hours before the end of 2012, I finished reading Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?: The Transformation of Modern Europe by James J. Sheehan. Sheehan looks at the disappearance of armies and soldiers from the lives of Europeans, and wonders where they all went. Indeed an important and intriguing question, along with its cousin: are other nations following suit? Is Europe, in other words, a harbinger or an outlier?

Unfortunately, the book demonstrates all too well the reasons historians need to stay away from journalism. Their tools need perspective to work correctly, and without it they (we) are little better than journalists but without the flair for vivid descriptions. His book is divided inot three sections: 19th century until 1914; the interwar period, and post 1945. The first is easily the best.

Sheehan's thesis in the first section of his book is that the modern nation-state was based on the military. Some nations were forged in war, quite simply, but even those that weren't had strong military strains embedded in their basic structure, from the ubiquitious memorial to the fallen soldiers in the center of each town or village, to the enormous expenditure neccessary for the upkeep of an army, to the logistical, administrative and legal structures developed by society to be able to field their military machines. These capabilities were what made a modern nation state.

Yet parallel to the rise of the militarized nation, there was also a rise of political pacifism. This did not include the relations to imperially-controlled colonial populations, but within the polite society of Europe pacifism was a growing trend around the turn of the century; the Hague Conventions are a creation of this seemingly universal wish for peace.

The pacifism didn't survive the beginning of war in 1914 - if it had lasted even until then, given the series of skirmishes which preceeded the Great War.

My main reflection upon reading this section was that even then it was a mostly European phenomenon. Europeans of the time speaking different languages, indeed, but sharing Christianity and a broad cultural similarity. A farmer in Ohio and a farmer in Afghanistan have precious little in common; Europeans of the early 20th century, for all their differences, had quite a bit. Unremarked, perhaps, the pacifism was already then predicated on a broad cultural and political and religious commonality.

The second section deals with two world wars, though in brief - about 60 pages in total. Not enough to learn much about the wars, and rather a bit too long for to say that the wars were ghastly, the first much so, the second very much so.

At the begining of the third section Sheehan makes an interesting point. Post-war Europe was divided between the domination of two external systems, Soviet inspired (and often directed and ruled) Eastern Europe, and American subsidised West Europe. Improbably perhaps, the European nation states, having been intermittanly at war since their inception, were now unable to wage war or even to prepare for it in an independant way. So they unlearned the art and let the super-powers get on with it; the super-powers, however, now having both acquired the capability of destroying the world, eventually began to unlearn the habit themselves.

Personally I had expected to read more about European exhaustion after the 20th century's 30-Year-War, and perhaps how it has played out in other spheres of life, too. Yet as I said, this section lacks a broad perspective, and instead focuses on specific negotiations within the EU, which resulted in documents which may be held to highest esteeem in 500 years, and may be forgotten forever by next week. It's too soon to know.

Inevitably, I won't finish this review without mentioning Israel (which seems never to be mentoned in the book). Sheehan shows how first Western Europeans relinquished their colonial empires because they were no longer worth the hassle, and then later the Soviets did the same. Which suggested to me how very odd, then, in the eyes of such populaces, must the warring societies of the Middle East seem, and how totally outlandish; this said in a derisory tone, not in curiosity, say. Arabs are one thing, not ever having been part of the European world; but the Jews? What do they possibly think they're doing, what with all that determination to use force to defend goals. Such old-fashioned behavior, don't you think? No self respecting European would behave that way.

Update: then again, maybe I'm being churlish about the Europeans.