The Scotts are voting today to separate or not from the English (and, I suppose, from the Welsh, tho I doubt that's the issue). I have no expertize in the matter, and no position, either. It's not my business. Yet as I've followed the story from afar, it has been rather clear that the vote isn't about rational arguments. If folks all based their decisions exclusively on calm rational considerations based on cold figures and data, I don't see how today's vote could ever even have been mooted, much less enacted. If the Scots decide to go their own way they'll have to surmount countless obstacles, from the identity of their currency to their unclear membership in the EU along with 30,000 matters. If never the less they decide to do so it will be for for what are ultimately emotional reasons.
This is important. Much of the political discussion about how the world works assumes that people are ultimately rational or at least easy to understand: give them a good life and they'll behave nicely. The entire world of contemporary diplomacy is predicated on this: talking is better than killing, and there's almost always something to be talked about. Hence one engages with Iran, for example, and seeks leverage of soft power, and insists that implacable enemies must talk to each other until they've addressed the only real - i.e. rational - issues, and then agree on them and have peace. (Until the mid-20th century diplomacy wasn't like this, as the term gun-boat diplomacy tells. But that was then).
The interesting thing about the Scottish story, then, is that even in one of the oldest of democracies, in one of the wealthier countries in the world, a place with centuries of tradition of enlightened civilization, rationality will take you only so far. There comes a moment when other motivations for human action proves stronger. If that's so in the United Kingdom, it's even truer elsewhere.
Thursday, September 18, 2014
Monday, September 1, 2014
A comment on new settlement activity
I'm writing this post very very gingerly. Being a civil servant I'm strictly forbidden to publicly pontificate on political issues. I've decided that defending issues of Israeli consensus at time of war is alright, hence the recent few posts, but Israel's settlement policy isn't that in any way, so I need to stay far from it as long as I remain a public servant. (On which matter, by the way, I posted an announcement earlier today, over here).
And yet.
The issue of settlements is characterized by large dollops of inaccurate information. I'm toying with the idea of doing what an archivist can do, namely publish the full documented record of the story. Significant parts of such a story would differ enough from "accepted wisdom" as to be an important public service. So: someday, perhaps.
Today I'd like to point out a few facts about settlements which seem not to be widely known, starting with an item in today's paper relating to a decision made yesterday, to appropriate some 1,000 acres of land near Guh Etzion. Whether this is good or bad, wise or foolish, is not for me to say. The head of Peace Now, however, doesn't like it, and one of the things he has to say about it is
If he's correct about the fact, and I think he may be, what's going on? Many of the arguments pro and con the settlements are about how they're taking over ever more land on the West Bank. How are they doing so if land isn't being appropriated?
To which I'd like to add another few facts. To the best of my knowledge, no new settlements have been created since 2003, which is 13 years ago. If someone knows otherwise I'd be interested in what they know.
No settlements exist in Area A, which was transferred to the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the 1990s, and there has been no settlement activity there ever since.
So far as I know, there are no settlements and has been no settlement activity in Area B, either, since it was transferred to civilian control of the PA in the 1990s. Area A and B together make up something like 40% of the West Bank.
So if I'm right and there are no new settlements at all, and very little appropriation of land (says Oppenheimer), what is going on? The answer, so far as I can tell, is that most of the construction which is happening is taking place inside existing settlements, and most but not all of that is in settlements in areas Israel expects to hold onto in any peace agreement, perhaps in exchange for other areas and perhaps not.
That's as much as I feel comfortable in saying right now.
And yet.
The issue of settlements is characterized by large dollops of inaccurate information. I'm toying with the idea of doing what an archivist can do, namely publish the full documented record of the story. Significant parts of such a story would differ enough from "accepted wisdom" as to be an important public service. So: someday, perhaps.
Today I'd like to point out a few facts about settlements which seem not to be widely known, starting with an item in today's paper relating to a decision made yesterday, to appropriate some 1,000 acres of land near Guh Etzion. Whether this is good or bad, wise or foolish, is not for me to say. The head of Peace Now, however, doesn't like it, and one of the things he has to say about it is
The decision to appropriate 4,000 dunams (1,000 acres) and make them state land is unprecedented and changes the reality in the region of the Etzion Bloc,” Oppenheimer said, adding that there has not been such a large land seizure since the 1980s.
If he's correct about the fact, and I think he may be, what's going on? Many of the arguments pro and con the settlements are about how they're taking over ever more land on the West Bank. How are they doing so if land isn't being appropriated?
To which I'd like to add another few facts. To the best of my knowledge, no new settlements have been created since 2003, which is 13 years ago. If someone knows otherwise I'd be interested in what they know.
No settlements exist in Area A, which was transferred to the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the 1990s, and there has been no settlement activity there ever since.
So far as I know, there are no settlements and has been no settlement activity in Area B, either, since it was transferred to civilian control of the PA in the 1990s. Area A and B together make up something like 40% of the West Bank.
So if I'm right and there are no new settlements at all, and very little appropriation of land (says Oppenheimer), what is going on? The answer, so far as I can tell, is that most of the construction which is happening is taking place inside existing settlements, and most but not all of that is in settlements in areas Israel expects to hold onto in any peace agreement, perhaps in exchange for other areas and perhaps not.
That's as much as I feel comfortable in saying right now.
Friday, August 29, 2014
Israeli Bullshit
Here's a true story about Israeli bullshit and why it's blogworthy. I've been hearing rumors of it for months, and not long ago its essential facts even appeared in a local newspaper (Hebrew, no online linkable version), at which point I enquired with a fellow I know who is closely enough involved to be able to confirm the news item and embellish on it.
Like all stories you've got to decide where, actually, is the beginning. One place to start might be in the Talmudic assertion that Israel, unlike Egypt, depends on the immediate good will of God since it has no reliable river, and all its water comes from the heavens, a fact which has been true since the Six Days of Creation - until a few years ago, 10 or 15 of them, when the Israelis decided they didn't like being dependant on the whims of the weather for their water. (This was a policy decision, and so far as I know it had nothing to do with theology). The policy-makers of the day may also have been dimly aware of the 1930s research of Walter Laudermilk, a British scientist who wrote about our environment, was deeply impressed by the early efforts of Zionist pioneers to drain marshes and create modern agriculture, but was also of the opinion the maximal population of Mandatory Palestine couldn't rise above 10 million, a number we passed a while ago. One way or the other, the decision was made to reach water independence through two strategic programs. One, to build as many desalination plants as needed, and the second, to purify as much of the potable water and to pot it again.
Both programs have already succeeded, and they're both still progressing. We're well on the way to the point where all of the urban-use water comes from desalination plants and not natural sources; and while I don't have the exact number, much of the sewage water goes through purification plants and is then re-used, tho often not as drinking water but for industry or types of agriculture where this is safe (cotton being an obvious example. You don't eat cotton, you wear it, so the quality of the water used to irrigate it is less important than with watermelons. In both fields - desalination and re-use of water - Israel is the world leader.
The past winter was unusually dry, and yet this summer there's no shortage of water. I cannot begin to tell you how momentous this is, but am reasonably certain that a century from now this summer will be remembered for that, not for the events in Gaza.
As usually happens with technological progress, once you arrive at a new place you see new needs and challenges. No-one understood why an iPad needed improvement until they'd used the iPad 1.
It turns out that water used in cattle farming can't be purified. The bullshit is too potent. So long as no-one was systematically purifying all their water, this may not have been known and certainly wasn't interesting. Once the water is all directed to purification, however, it did become important; once some government agency took it into their mind to regulate the quality of water before its purification, that little fact became a matter of economic life-and-death for the cattle industry.
Enter the Sidon family brothers, one with a PhD in chemistry, one with a background in the feverish world of the hi-tech Startup Nation, and one an engineer, who spotted the opportunity to make gold out of bullshit. Together they invented a contraption which separates reasonably clean water from the rest of the bullshit, so that farmers can meet the requirements of that regulator, and apparently also sell the hard-core part of the bullshit for other purposes. They have just implemented the first industrial-size model of their contraption, and now expecct to sell it to cattle farmers all over Israel.
It has also crossed their mind that there are cattle farmers in other countries, too. Who said Israeli technological innovation can't be bullshit.
Like all stories you've got to decide where, actually, is the beginning. One place to start might be in the Talmudic assertion that Israel, unlike Egypt, depends on the immediate good will of God since it has no reliable river, and all its water comes from the heavens, a fact which has been true since the Six Days of Creation - until a few years ago, 10 or 15 of them, when the Israelis decided they didn't like being dependant on the whims of the weather for their water. (This was a policy decision, and so far as I know it had nothing to do with theology). The policy-makers of the day may also have been dimly aware of the 1930s research of Walter Laudermilk, a British scientist who wrote about our environment, was deeply impressed by the early efforts of Zionist pioneers to drain marshes and create modern agriculture, but was also of the opinion the maximal population of Mandatory Palestine couldn't rise above 10 million, a number we passed a while ago. One way or the other, the decision was made to reach water independence through two strategic programs. One, to build as many desalination plants as needed, and the second, to purify as much of the potable water and to pot it again.
Both programs have already succeeded, and they're both still progressing. We're well on the way to the point where all of the urban-use water comes from desalination plants and not natural sources; and while I don't have the exact number, much of the sewage water goes through purification plants and is then re-used, tho often not as drinking water but for industry or types of agriculture where this is safe (cotton being an obvious example. You don't eat cotton, you wear it, so the quality of the water used to irrigate it is less important than with watermelons. In both fields - desalination and re-use of water - Israel is the world leader.
The past winter was unusually dry, and yet this summer there's no shortage of water. I cannot begin to tell you how momentous this is, but am reasonably certain that a century from now this summer will be remembered for that, not for the events in Gaza.
As usually happens with technological progress, once you arrive at a new place you see new needs and challenges. No-one understood why an iPad needed improvement until they'd used the iPad 1.
It turns out that water used in cattle farming can't be purified. The bullshit is too potent. So long as no-one was systematically purifying all their water, this may not have been known and certainly wasn't interesting. Once the water is all directed to purification, however, it did become important; once some government agency took it into their mind to regulate the quality of water before its purification, that little fact became a matter of economic life-and-death for the cattle industry.
Enter the Sidon family brothers, one with a PhD in chemistry, one with a background in the feverish world of the hi-tech Startup Nation, and one an engineer, who spotted the opportunity to make gold out of bullshit. Together they invented a contraption which separates reasonably clean water from the rest of the bullshit, so that farmers can meet the requirements of that regulator, and apparently also sell the hard-core part of the bullshit for other purposes. They have just implemented the first industrial-size model of their contraption, and now expecct to sell it to cattle farmers all over Israel.
It has also crossed their mind that there are cattle farmers in other countries, too. Who said Israeli technological innovation can't be bullshit.
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
Israel has nothing to fear from a fair investigation
At some point our government will have to determine its positions towards various avenues of investigation into the events of the Gaza war. Fortunately I'm not in the government, and won't have to be part of that discussion. I have no doubt that the people who will be, will take into account all the relevant considerations.
I'm here today simply to re-iterate that on the level of simple evidence, Israel seems to have collected mounds of it. Assuming, as I do and explained here, that we prepared adequately, and then collected the evidence we've obviously collected, we have nothing to fear from a professional investigation of impartial investigators.
The IDF yesterday put online an example of this: it's a map of Gaza,created by the UN, depicting all the spots where damage was caused. To which the IDF responded with films of how the damage was caused. As I"ve explained in the past, this ability, while demonstrated in only 4-5 cases in this short film, is apparently pervasive. The IDF seems to have documentation of just about everything it did, from go-pro cameras on soldiers' helmets, through data from Iron Dome radar, to drone-based films of everything going on below.
To the extent any non-Israeli professionals investigate these events with open minds, the wealth of evidence the IDF has amassed seem to assure the investigators won't find any major problem with Israeli conduct. Since even Israel doesn't rule out that mistakes were made here or there, we seem to be fine.
I'm here today simply to re-iterate that on the level of simple evidence, Israel seems to have collected mounds of it. Assuming, as I do and explained here, that we prepared adequately, and then collected the evidence we've obviously collected, we have nothing to fear from a professional investigation of impartial investigators.
The IDF yesterday put online an example of this: it's a map of Gaza,created by the UN, depicting all the spots where damage was caused. To which the IDF responded with films of how the damage was caused. As I"ve explained in the past, this ability, while demonstrated in only 4-5 cases in this short film, is apparently pervasive. The IDF seems to have documentation of just about everything it did, from go-pro cameras on soldiers' helmets, through data from Iron Dome radar, to drone-based films of everything going on below.
To the extent any non-Israeli professionals investigate these events with open minds, the wealth of evidence the IDF has amassed seem to assure the investigators won't find any major problem with Israeli conduct. Since even Israel doesn't rule out that mistakes were made here or there, we seem to be fine.
Thursday, August 21, 2014
The end of the Enlightenment?
A funny thing happened to me this week, but its implications are anything but funny.
My occasional pen-pal Phil Weiss, he of the Mondoweiss website, that lair of American-hating Antisemites, wrote to tell me he was troubled by a short message I posted a few weeks ago on Twitter. This may be the time to admit that contrary to what you might think given our rather different public personas, Phil and I are cautiously civil with one another in private. We're not close buddies, and many months can go by with nary any contact between us, but when we are in contact it's usually civil, and sometimes even almost friendly. If it weren't for his absolutely totally inexcusably repulsive website. i.e. in another life, he and I might even be friends. Anyway, as I say, he was troubled by that message and wished me to explain. So I did. Next thing I knew he had posted our exchange on his website (perhaps he thought I knew he was going to do this though in the past he hadn't and he didn't say he would).
As of this writing, 24 hours later, 136 of his readers have commented on the post. I used to follow his commenters regularly, so I can say that the comments were rather subdued compared to standard viciousness at Mondoweiss. They mostly agreed that I'm a Nazi, and Israel's being a Nazi state is a given at that website, but not a single one of them made any intellectually interesting challenge to my note.
(The reason I used to follow them by the way, was to learn about contemporary anti-Semitism. When I was researching my doctorate many years ago the Nazis I was following were mostly dead and I learned about them from documents. The Mondoweiss hordes are alive and active, and I can provoke them and learn how they respond).
A few hours later, Elder of Ziyon copied the entire exchange onto his fine website, perhaps as a public service so people might read it without giving Mondoweiss the traffic. And here's the point I'm meandering towards: that the precise same set of arguments, actually, a cut-and-paste copy, is comfortable at two diametrically opposing websites. Phil put my mail online to demonstrate to his gang how far gone those Israelis are; Elder put it online to demonstrate how defensible Israel's actions at war are. Both readerships came away with the conviction they're right. Let it be clear: there's no moral equivalence between the two groups. Phil himself isn't quite an antisemite, but the crowd he travels with and hosts are indistinguishable from the swamp of European Jew-haters at the turn of the 20th century, plus Twitter. Elder's readers are the profoundly despised Jews themselves (and many comrades in spirit). Yet most of the people in both groups live in the US, and just about all of them, I suppose, live in Western countries which were formed by the Enlightened philosophers of the 18th century.
Those Enlightenment philosohers were complex fellows who had many thoughts (some of them hated Jews, for example). Yet one of the most fundamental thoughts they had was about the power of reason. They were convinced that humans could use words to understand reality in universal ways, which is to say, in compelling explanations and concepts which would make sense to any thinking person irrespective of their ethnicity, gender or social status (none of those terms existed in the 18th century).
They were wrong, it appears. Words don’t have the power to create anything resembling universal mutual comprehension. Since the Enlightenment is the fundament of the democratic West, this is a problem.
Anyway, here's the Mondoweiss link; here's the Elder of Ziyon one, and here's the entire text, up now also at my own place.
------------------------------
The original tweet:
Phil's mail to me:
This strikes me as a somewhat crude slogan– given that you’re an intellectual at the highest level.
And secondly, you omit me in your declaration of what “The Jews” do. I’m a Jew and I don’t want to be part of a collective that makes these types of determinations. And I feel great concern about having anyone — even the distinguished state archivist of a “warring nation” — announce to my non Jewish neighbors how many children I need to kill to keep my nation going. It’s actually a kind of blood libel– again from a distinguished state archivist.
Also: what does it mean to be a “warring nation”? Really, is that a category that any citizen would embrace? The history of “warring nations” doesn’t offer a lot of hope. It seems to me you are making Israel a Sparta [cribbing Hannah Arendt]. Or as my friend Golda once said to me in Rehavia, We’re going to have one war after another after another, till they accept us. It’s not a vision for a future. Yet 95 percent of Israeli Jews have embraced the Gaza onslaught out of this understanding. Which only increases the responsibility of American Jews to say, Not in my name!
And my response:
1. The Jews: It is an objective and implacable fact that Zionism is the largest and most significant Jewish project in at least 2,000 years, probably more. There are non-Jews who are Israeli citizens, there are Jews who intensely dislike Zionism, there are even a handful of anti-Zionist Jews in Israel. None of these facts can change the fundamental truth: in Zionism the Jews set out to re-create a national existence on the political playing field, in their ancestral homeland, and Israel is its expression, or outcome, or whatever you wish to call it. The fact that about 50% of the world’s Jews live in Israel strengthens this, (the proportion will soon tip over to more than 50%), and the fact that a majority of self-identifying Jews among the non-Israelis are Zionists, bolsters its strength, but doesn’t change it. You can’t have Jews pining for Israel over millennia and then going there, and not have it be the most important development in all those millennia.
You can rail against this for every remaining day of your life (until 120, as we Jews say), and it still won’t make the slightest difference, not even if you gather around you thousands or tens of thousands of like-minded American Jews. I think it was Abe Lincoln who once said in court something about the strength of a fart in a blizzard or some such. Live with it, Phil, because there’s nothing you can do to change it. Nothing.
(Apropos numbers: there were more Jews at the funeral of Max Steinberg last month, which I blogged a bit about, than all the committed Mondoweiss Jews together, and it was just one funeral).
2. Will defend themselves: Look, I know you’re convinced Israel is the once and always, perpetual aggressor. Of course this doesn’t explain how if we’re such aggressors the Palestinians keep multiplying and acquiring new assets such as the PA, parts of WB, all of Gaza, international standing etc etc. We must be really really bad at getting our job done. But as we both know, you and I can’t agree on the basic facts of this point, so let’s leave it as I said: A majority of the Jews worldwide and a total majority in Israel know we’re defending ourselves from enemies who would eagerly destroy us if they had the power, just as happened in the past. (Lots of non-Jews agree with us, by the way, either because we’ve got them under our thumb as you see it, or because it’s a simple fact, as I see it).
3. Even if it means killing: My PhD was about Nazis, and I know more about them than most people, so Godwin’s Law doesn’t apply to me. I can speak about Nazis as a scholar, not a demagogue. So here’s a thought experiment. Say that in order to end Nazism you had to kill 70,000 (not a few hundred) innocent, non-German civilians, Frenchmen, say. Would that be defensible? 70,000 dead French civilians, all innocent, many children, to end Nazism and as a by-product also end the Holocaust? Would that be moral? Permissible? Defensible in some later discussion? I ask because it’s not a thought experiment, it’s what the USA and UK did in 1944 as they went through France so as to destroy Nazism in Germany. Some goals, my friend, justify even horrible side effects, or collateral damage, or whatever you wish to call it. The reason being that the alternative, of allowing Nazism to stay in place, would have been far worse.
So If Israel has to chose between its own safety or refusing to kill any innocent bystanders whatsoever, we’ll choose to defend ourselves. You bet. Of course, we can seek shades of gray, alternatives of greater or lesser destruction, and we can argue about those and indeed, we must seek them and argue about them. But the basic framework remains solid. Our safety is to be assured even if there’s a price to it, even if some innocents die. As few as possible, hopefully, but the inevitably some, yes.
4. Just like every warring nation in history: Simple. Every single nation in human history, including in the 21st century, which finds itself at war, has one of two options regarding the moral dilemma in the preceding paragraph. Either it accepts that it will kill some innocents in order to protect ts goals, or it doesn’t care. The Syrian don’t care. ISIS certainly doesn’t care. The North Vietnamese probably didn’t care, so far as I can tell. I don’t think the North in your Civil War much cared. The US in WWII didn’t care at all when it came to German civilians in bombable towns. Hamas certainly doesn’t care – well, actually it does. It regrets it doesn’t manage to kill more Jews and Arabs who live among them.
Americans nowadays do care, as do the British, and a small handful of other mostly enlightened nations, Israel among them. Yet whenever they chose to go to war, they also accept they’ll be killing at least some innocent bystanders – and they then do. In Serbia in the 1990s, in Kuwait in the 1990s, in Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s, and yes, I’m sad to tell you, against ISIS in 2014 (and 2015? 2016? 2025?). No-one has existentially threatened the US since the 19th century, or maybe even ever. Which isn’t to say the US hasn’t fought just wars. But they were never about its very existence. And in every one of them they have killed civilians. Tragic, but true. And as long as the US continues to be at war, for whatever reasons, it will continue to kill civilians. As few as possible, one hopes, and one assumes they’ll take great efforts to limit the numbers, but to pretend you can go to war and not kill civilians is being willfully blind.
Israel, unlike the US, faces enemies who proudly broadcast their intention to destroy it, in the most basic meaning of the word “destroy”. So Israel must choose: will it defend itself even if thereby some number of innocent civilians die, or will it not defend itself, and thereby large numbers of its own civilians will die.
The answer is clear. Any other answer would be immoral.
So, that’s it. I know your methodology, and that of your fans. You’ll now turn to all sorts of other objections and whatabouttery. But I’ve responded to the questions as you posed them, and that’s enough. The whatabouttery is, by definition, about other matters.
My occasional pen-pal Phil Weiss, he of the Mondoweiss website, that lair of American-hating Antisemites, wrote to tell me he was troubled by a short message I posted a few weeks ago on Twitter. This may be the time to admit that contrary to what you might think given our rather different public personas, Phil and I are cautiously civil with one another in private. We're not close buddies, and many months can go by with nary any contact between us, but when we are in contact it's usually civil, and sometimes even almost friendly. If it weren't for his absolutely totally inexcusably repulsive website. i.e. in another life, he and I might even be friends. Anyway, as I say, he was troubled by that message and wished me to explain. So I did. Next thing I knew he had posted our exchange on his website (perhaps he thought I knew he was going to do this though in the past he hadn't and he didn't say he would).
As of this writing, 24 hours later, 136 of his readers have commented on the post. I used to follow his commenters regularly, so I can say that the comments were rather subdued compared to standard viciousness at Mondoweiss. They mostly agreed that I'm a Nazi, and Israel's being a Nazi state is a given at that website, but not a single one of them made any intellectually interesting challenge to my note.
(The reason I used to follow them by the way, was to learn about contemporary anti-Semitism. When I was researching my doctorate many years ago the Nazis I was following were mostly dead and I learned about them from documents. The Mondoweiss hordes are alive and active, and I can provoke them and learn how they respond).
A few hours later, Elder of Ziyon copied the entire exchange onto his fine website, perhaps as a public service so people might read it without giving Mondoweiss the traffic. And here's the point I'm meandering towards: that the precise same set of arguments, actually, a cut-and-paste copy, is comfortable at two diametrically opposing websites. Phil put my mail online to demonstrate to his gang how far gone those Israelis are; Elder put it online to demonstrate how defensible Israel's actions at war are. Both readerships came away with the conviction they're right. Let it be clear: there's no moral equivalence between the two groups. Phil himself isn't quite an antisemite, but the crowd he travels with and hosts are indistinguishable from the swamp of European Jew-haters at the turn of the 20th century, plus Twitter. Elder's readers are the profoundly despised Jews themselves (and many comrades in spirit). Yet most of the people in both groups live in the US, and just about all of them, I suppose, live in Western countries which were formed by the Enlightened philosophers of the 18th century.
Those Enlightenment philosohers were complex fellows who had many thoughts (some of them hated Jews, for example). Yet one of the most fundamental thoughts they had was about the power of reason. They were convinced that humans could use words to understand reality in universal ways, which is to say, in compelling explanations and concepts which would make sense to any thinking person irrespective of their ethnicity, gender or social status (none of those terms existed in the 18th century).
They were wrong, it appears. Words don’t have the power to create anything resembling universal mutual comprehension. Since the Enlightenment is the fundament of the democratic West, this is a problem.
Anyway, here's the Mondoweiss link; here's the Elder of Ziyon one, and here's the entire text, up now also at my own place.
------------------------------
The original tweet:
Lesson of this war: The Jews will defend themselves even if it means killing children.Just like every warring nation in history.
— yaacov lozowick (@yaacovlozowick) August 4, 2014
Phil's mail to me:
This strikes me as a somewhat crude slogan– given that you’re an intellectual at the highest level.
And secondly, you omit me in your declaration of what “The Jews” do. I’m a Jew and I don’t want to be part of a collective that makes these types of determinations. And I feel great concern about having anyone — even the distinguished state archivist of a “warring nation” — announce to my non Jewish neighbors how many children I need to kill to keep my nation going. It’s actually a kind of blood libel– again from a distinguished state archivist.
Also: what does it mean to be a “warring nation”? Really, is that a category that any citizen would embrace? The history of “warring nations” doesn’t offer a lot of hope. It seems to me you are making Israel a Sparta [cribbing Hannah Arendt]. Or as my friend Golda once said to me in Rehavia, We’re going to have one war after another after another, till they accept us. It’s not a vision for a future. Yet 95 percent of Israeli Jews have embraced the Gaza onslaught out of this understanding. Which only increases the responsibility of American Jews to say, Not in my name!
And my response:
1. The Jews: It is an objective and implacable fact that Zionism is the largest and most significant Jewish project in at least 2,000 years, probably more. There are non-Jews who are Israeli citizens, there are Jews who intensely dislike Zionism, there are even a handful of anti-Zionist Jews in Israel. None of these facts can change the fundamental truth: in Zionism the Jews set out to re-create a national existence on the political playing field, in their ancestral homeland, and Israel is its expression, or outcome, or whatever you wish to call it. The fact that about 50% of the world’s Jews live in Israel strengthens this, (the proportion will soon tip over to more than 50%), and the fact that a majority of self-identifying Jews among the non-Israelis are Zionists, bolsters its strength, but doesn’t change it. You can’t have Jews pining for Israel over millennia and then going there, and not have it be the most important development in all those millennia.
You can rail against this for every remaining day of your life (until 120, as we Jews say), and it still won’t make the slightest difference, not even if you gather around you thousands or tens of thousands of like-minded American Jews. I think it was Abe Lincoln who once said in court something about the strength of a fart in a blizzard or some such. Live with it, Phil, because there’s nothing you can do to change it. Nothing.
(Apropos numbers: there were more Jews at the funeral of Max Steinberg last month, which I blogged a bit about, than all the committed Mondoweiss Jews together, and it was just one funeral).
2. Will defend themselves: Look, I know you’re convinced Israel is the once and always, perpetual aggressor. Of course this doesn’t explain how if we’re such aggressors the Palestinians keep multiplying and acquiring new assets such as the PA, parts of WB, all of Gaza, international standing etc etc. We must be really really bad at getting our job done. But as we both know, you and I can’t agree on the basic facts of this point, so let’s leave it as I said: A majority of the Jews worldwide and a total majority in Israel know we’re defending ourselves from enemies who would eagerly destroy us if they had the power, just as happened in the past. (Lots of non-Jews agree with us, by the way, either because we’ve got them under our thumb as you see it, or because it’s a simple fact, as I see it).
3. Even if it means killing: My PhD was about Nazis, and I know more about them than most people, so Godwin’s Law doesn’t apply to me. I can speak about Nazis as a scholar, not a demagogue. So here’s a thought experiment. Say that in order to end Nazism you had to kill 70,000 (not a few hundred) innocent, non-German civilians, Frenchmen, say. Would that be defensible? 70,000 dead French civilians, all innocent, many children, to end Nazism and as a by-product also end the Holocaust? Would that be moral? Permissible? Defensible in some later discussion? I ask because it’s not a thought experiment, it’s what the USA and UK did in 1944 as they went through France so as to destroy Nazism in Germany. Some goals, my friend, justify even horrible side effects, or collateral damage, or whatever you wish to call it. The reason being that the alternative, of allowing Nazism to stay in place, would have been far worse.
So If Israel has to chose between its own safety or refusing to kill any innocent bystanders whatsoever, we’ll choose to defend ourselves. You bet. Of course, we can seek shades of gray, alternatives of greater or lesser destruction, and we can argue about those and indeed, we must seek them and argue about them. But the basic framework remains solid. Our safety is to be assured even if there’s a price to it, even if some innocents die. As few as possible, hopefully, but the inevitably some, yes.
4. Just like every warring nation in history: Simple. Every single nation in human history, including in the 21st century, which finds itself at war, has one of two options regarding the moral dilemma in the preceding paragraph. Either it accepts that it will kill some innocents in order to protect ts goals, or it doesn’t care. The Syrian don’t care. ISIS certainly doesn’t care. The North Vietnamese probably didn’t care, so far as I can tell. I don’t think the North in your Civil War much cared. The US in WWII didn’t care at all when it came to German civilians in bombable towns. Hamas certainly doesn’t care – well, actually it does. It regrets it doesn’t manage to kill more Jews and Arabs who live among them.
Americans nowadays do care, as do the British, and a small handful of other mostly enlightened nations, Israel among them. Yet whenever they chose to go to war, they also accept they’ll be killing at least some innocent bystanders – and they then do. In Serbia in the 1990s, in Kuwait in the 1990s, in Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s, and yes, I’m sad to tell you, against ISIS in 2014 (and 2015? 2016? 2025?). No-one has existentially threatened the US since the 19th century, or maybe even ever. Which isn’t to say the US hasn’t fought just wars. But they were never about its very existence. And in every one of them they have killed civilians. Tragic, but true. And as long as the US continues to be at war, for whatever reasons, it will continue to kill civilians. As few as possible, one hopes, and one assumes they’ll take great efforts to limit the numbers, but to pretend you can go to war and not kill civilians is being willfully blind.
Israel, unlike the US, faces enemies who proudly broadcast their intention to destroy it, in the most basic meaning of the word “destroy”. So Israel must choose: will it defend itself even if thereby some number of innocent civilians die, or will it not defend itself, and thereby large numbers of its own civilians will die.
The answer is clear. Any other answer would be immoral.
So, that’s it. I know your methodology, and that of your fans. You’ll now turn to all sorts of other objections and whatabouttery. But I’ve responded to the questions as you posed them, and that’s enough. The whatabouttery is, by definition, about other matters.
Sunday, August 17, 2014
IDF and the Laws of Warfare
A couple of weeks ago I posted a short item about the data being collected by the IDF during the war and the implications this might have when the time comes to investigate it. Most of my comment was based simply upon observing the capabilities of the IDF spokesperson.
In the Friday edition of Yedioth Acharonont there was a much longer and more detailed description. It's not online, and it's only in Hebrew, so far as I can see, so as a public service here's a quick summary.
The IDF takes international law very seriously. Over the past decade it has considerably expanded the part of the military prosecution which deals with the laws of war, and there is now an entire team of officers, many at the colonel level, whose entire profession is to ensure the IDF functions within the law. I'll stray from the Yedioth article for a moment to add that I've come across these folks in recent years, in professional discussions, and they're knowledgeable, committed and professional. I expect that they know more about the laws of war than just about any media type or pundit who pontificates on the matter, except of course the other professionals. It seems safe to me to say that if anyone who doesn't have a full and updated education in the laws of war informs you about how what the IDF does is illegal etc, they are probably talking through their hat comfortable that you, too, don't know enough to call them out. The laws of war, like any branch of law, is a professional field, and it takes training and practice to be good at it.
That's the first stage.
The second stage is that these officers spend a significant chunk of their time training other IDF troops in the basics. Clearly a corporal in the infantry won't go through a full course of training, but the higher the officer, the more exposure they will have had to the principles and concepts of the laws of war, and the more occasions on which they'll have been required to think about applying them. The training of an IDF soldier includes the understanding that the IDF respects the laws of war; the training of an officer includes applying these laws.
The third stage is that the legal types participate in the planning of all operations. I'm not going to detai the many levels of preparation an IDF operation goes through from conception to execution, but there are lots of them; the legal experts are part of the process. According to Yedioth, this results in some operations never being authorized in the first place, and others are adapted to stay within the law.
The fourth stage of preparation is that there's a legal expert in every division, and there are channels of communication down to at least the level of battalions; since companies and platoons don't generally execute their own operations, that more or less covers everyone.
Fifth stage: Ariel and artillery actions. Ariel and artillery actions are not necessarily susceptible to heat of battle situations. Both pilots and artillery officers are less likely than infantry, tank or engineering soldiers to need to respond immediately to fire from an unidentified source in the confusion of a battlefield. The article in Yedioth claimed that every single shell shot by those two branches was thought about in advance, and targets were vetted in advance, after they were visually identified by one or more of the layers of eyes the IDF had over Gaza - drones, other drones, radar and other stuff.
Sixth stage: heat of battle situations. Once the ground forces were engaged in close-hand battle, all of he above is nice to have, and the stream of digital data coming in to the grunts and their officers is impressive, but at the end of the day it's split-second decisions made under threat of immediate death which form the outcome. There are no legal advisers who can ponder the alternatives. You do your best in training, secure in the knowledge that training is different from battle. Always has been, always will be. Still, training does have a significant impact on the result of battle.
Seventh stage: post-battle investigation. The upshot of all this is that the IDF has the data to examine just about every single move or piece of action that happened in the Gaza war, and most of the time has the documentation to prove whatever results its investigators reach. The Goldstone Report was chock full of inferring, since its members had no access to the documentation. Whoever investigates this recent war without full access to all that documentation and evidence the IDF has amassed, will essentially be talking nonsense, no matter what their conclusions are. Sort of like trying to figure out how an American presidency functioned based only on contemporary newspaper reports from the Russian media.
Were mistakes made? I have no doubt. It's inevitable. Were crimes committed? On this point the legal officers being interviewed by Yedioth were admirably careful in answering: they wouldn't say no, they were only willing to say that every case would be investigated.
I recognize this entire story is completely, totally and irrevocably incompatible with roughly 100% of the international media reports over the past month. But you see, the thing about truth is that it isn't effected by media reports one way or the other. People's understanding of reality is; their ideologies and Weltanschaungen can be, but hard facts aren't.
It's also yet another example of how it happens that Israelis understand the world differently than everyone else. This is often used against them: if everyone says you are X, you must be X, and if you insist you aren't X you're not only wrong, you're fools. But of course, the entire surroundings has been telling itself falsities about Jews for millennia (literally). This didn't make it true then, and doesn't make it true now.
Ah,I forgot to add: feel free to show me one other military in the annals of war which can tell a similar story.
In the Friday edition of Yedioth Acharonont there was a much longer and more detailed description. It's not online, and it's only in Hebrew, so far as I can see, so as a public service here's a quick summary.
The IDF takes international law very seriously. Over the past decade it has considerably expanded the part of the military prosecution which deals with the laws of war, and there is now an entire team of officers, many at the colonel level, whose entire profession is to ensure the IDF functions within the law. I'll stray from the Yedioth article for a moment to add that I've come across these folks in recent years, in professional discussions, and they're knowledgeable, committed and professional. I expect that they know more about the laws of war than just about any media type or pundit who pontificates on the matter, except of course the other professionals. It seems safe to me to say that if anyone who doesn't have a full and updated education in the laws of war informs you about how what the IDF does is illegal etc, they are probably talking through their hat comfortable that you, too, don't know enough to call them out. The laws of war, like any branch of law, is a professional field, and it takes training and practice to be good at it.
That's the first stage.
The second stage is that these officers spend a significant chunk of their time training other IDF troops in the basics. Clearly a corporal in the infantry won't go through a full course of training, but the higher the officer, the more exposure they will have had to the principles and concepts of the laws of war, and the more occasions on which they'll have been required to think about applying them. The training of an IDF soldier includes the understanding that the IDF respects the laws of war; the training of an officer includes applying these laws.
The third stage is that the legal types participate in the planning of all operations. I'm not going to detai the many levels of preparation an IDF operation goes through from conception to execution, but there are lots of them; the legal experts are part of the process. According to Yedioth, this results in some operations never being authorized in the first place, and others are adapted to stay within the law.
The fourth stage of preparation is that there's a legal expert in every division, and there are channels of communication down to at least the level of battalions; since companies and platoons don't generally execute their own operations, that more or less covers everyone.
Fifth stage: Ariel and artillery actions. Ariel and artillery actions are not necessarily susceptible to heat of battle situations. Both pilots and artillery officers are less likely than infantry, tank or engineering soldiers to need to respond immediately to fire from an unidentified source in the confusion of a battlefield. The article in Yedioth claimed that every single shell shot by those two branches was thought about in advance, and targets were vetted in advance, after they were visually identified by one or more of the layers of eyes the IDF had over Gaza - drones, other drones, radar and other stuff.
Sixth stage: heat of battle situations. Once the ground forces were engaged in close-hand battle, all of he above is nice to have, and the stream of digital data coming in to the grunts and their officers is impressive, but at the end of the day it's split-second decisions made under threat of immediate death which form the outcome. There are no legal advisers who can ponder the alternatives. You do your best in training, secure in the knowledge that training is different from battle. Always has been, always will be. Still, training does have a significant impact on the result of battle.
Seventh stage: post-battle investigation. The upshot of all this is that the IDF has the data to examine just about every single move or piece of action that happened in the Gaza war, and most of the time has the documentation to prove whatever results its investigators reach. The Goldstone Report was chock full of inferring, since its members had no access to the documentation. Whoever investigates this recent war without full access to all that documentation and evidence the IDF has amassed, will essentially be talking nonsense, no matter what their conclusions are. Sort of like trying to figure out how an American presidency functioned based only on contemporary newspaper reports from the Russian media.
Were mistakes made? I have no doubt. It's inevitable. Were crimes committed? On this point the legal officers being interviewed by Yedioth were admirably careful in answering: they wouldn't say no, they were only willing to say that every case would be investigated.
I recognize this entire story is completely, totally and irrevocably incompatible with roughly 100% of the international media reports over the past month. But you see, the thing about truth is that it isn't effected by media reports one way or the other. People's understanding of reality is; their ideologies and Weltanschaungen can be, but hard facts aren't.
It's also yet another example of how it happens that Israelis understand the world differently than everyone else. This is often used against them: if everyone says you are X, you must be X, and if you insist you aren't X you're not only wrong, you're fools. But of course, the entire surroundings has been telling itself falsities about Jews for millennia (literally). This didn't make it true then, and doesn't make it true now.
Ah,I forgot to add: feel free to show me one other military in the annals of war which can tell a similar story.
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
Yet another military funeral
I've been going to military funerals for more than 40 years. This says more about my age than anything else: people old enough have been going to funerals for 60, or 70, or 90 years. Though the funerals before 1948 weren't military, technically. So there's that. The young soldiers at the entrance to the cemetery handing out fliers explaining how to behave in the case of a rocket attack, however, are an innovation.
This was the second funeral I've joined in a week. The first was of Max Steinberg, a young American Jew who came here alone to defend us, so 30,000 of us came to thank him. Today it was 21-year-old Barkai Shorr, whose father, Yaron, I have known for 46 years. And that was the first thing I noticed about the crowd. There were thousands of us, not tens of thousands, from widely diverse social circles: People who went to grade school with Yaron, high school with Barkai, the synagogue of Barkai's grandmother, neighbors neighbors neighbors, professional colleagues of Yaron but also professional colleagues of Barkai, and on and on. Yet it was clear that people from different circles also knew each other. Maybe we really are just one big circle.
Yaron spoke on his son's grave in a clear and steady voice. He told us about his family, which has been living in Jerusalem for 180 years. He told about Barkai, whose single most important characteristic was his constant volunteering (I noted the large number of Magen David Adom staff, where he's been a volunteer for six years). He told about his name,which is a bit unusual; it's a mishnaic word for dawn, and he was born at dawn. Yaron quoted a Mishna which uses the word barkai: on the morning of Yom Kippur the High Priest started working when the barkai was bright enough to see down to Hebron. He told about Barkai's years at a yeshiva in Hebron. He told us that for the coming 180 years his family's clan in this land will have lots of descendants named Barkai. Finally, he told us all, the thousands of us, to volunteer, to commit acts of service for others, and each time to say to ourselves: Barkai. Barkai. Barkai.
That was the only time his own voice cracked.
The military cemetery sits on a high hill above Jerusalem, and as we were burying Barkai you could see the magic gold of Jerusalem at sunset, Jerusalem of Gold.
As the crowds were dispersing Hamas rockets from Gaza were being shot down over the hills to the west and one could hear the explosions.
* * *
Every family is different, and each funeral is unique even within the structure of a military ceremony. Five years ago I was at a military funeral, that of Nitai Stern. I went there in the name of our son Achikam, Nitai's friend, since Achikam himself was fighting in Gaza. Here's what I wrote that day, about that funeral. I can hope there won't be any further ones.
This was the second funeral I've joined in a week. The first was of Max Steinberg, a young American Jew who came here alone to defend us, so 30,000 of us came to thank him. Today it was 21-year-old Barkai Shorr, whose father, Yaron, I have known for 46 years. And that was the first thing I noticed about the crowd. There were thousands of us, not tens of thousands, from widely diverse social circles: People who went to grade school with Yaron, high school with Barkai, the synagogue of Barkai's grandmother, neighbors neighbors neighbors, professional colleagues of Yaron but also professional colleagues of Barkai, and on and on. Yet it was clear that people from different circles also knew each other. Maybe we really are just one big circle.
Yaron spoke on his son's grave in a clear and steady voice. He told us about his family, which has been living in Jerusalem for 180 years. He told about Barkai, whose single most important characteristic was his constant volunteering (I noted the large number of Magen David Adom staff, where he's been a volunteer for six years). He told about his name,which is a bit unusual; it's a mishnaic word for dawn, and he was born at dawn. Yaron quoted a Mishna which uses the word barkai: on the morning of Yom Kippur the High Priest started working when the barkai was bright enough to see down to Hebron. He told about Barkai's years at a yeshiva in Hebron. He told us that for the coming 180 years his family's clan in this land will have lots of descendants named Barkai. Finally, he told us all, the thousands of us, to volunteer, to commit acts of service for others, and each time to say to ourselves: Barkai. Barkai. Barkai.
That was the only time his own voice cracked.
The military cemetery sits on a high hill above Jerusalem, and as we were burying Barkai you could see the magic gold of Jerusalem at sunset, Jerusalem of Gold.
As the crowds were dispersing Hamas rockets from Gaza were being shot down over the hills to the west and one could hear the explosions.
* * *
Every family is different, and each funeral is unique even within the structure of a military ceremony. Five years ago I was at a military funeral, that of Nitai Stern. I went there in the name of our son Achikam, Nitai's friend, since Achikam himself was fighting in Gaza. Here's what I wrote that day, about that funeral. I can hope there won't be any further ones.
Monday, July 28, 2014
A comment on military abilities on display in Gaza
A few days ago the media was full of allegations that the IDF had shelled a school in Beit Hanoun, Gaza. 15 civilians were allegedly killed. In an improvement over past practice, the IDF didn't respond with a quick apology. Instead, it came out with an immediate response that essentially said "we don't think it was us, we certainly weren't aiming at the school, we think Hamas forces were active there, and we'll check and get back to you."
In a world of Twitter and its like, news needs to be less than four minutes old to be of interest; saying you'll investigate and come back isn't compelling. So all the usual suspects had a field day lambasting Israel for its inhumane cruelty (CiFWatch has a roundup of the UK culprits).
A few days passed and the IDF came back with their results. Yes, there had been fighting in the area. Yes, one errant IDF shell had even hit the schoolyard. But No, it hadn't killed anyone, because the yard was empty at the time, and here's the video of the event to prove our position, with a link to the Youtube segment. In a move that surprised no-one, the media wasn't interested in this IDF version. (CiFWatch tried to catch their attention but to no avail).
My point is about the documentation of reality, not the distortions of malicious media outlets. How is it that Israel just happened to have an aerial film of that particular building? If it has, why wait 3 days to show it? Is there more?
The full answer will go to the archives once the war is over, and will be declassified only in decades. No army in history would throw open its raw military intelligence data, for multiple obvious reasons. Yet even the little the IDF does show demonstrates that it's collecting an awesome amount if it, and is using it to direct its actions with as much care as the battlefield allows. There have been reports in the media that every shell shot by the IDF is tracked to ascertain it does what it was meant to do. I don't know if that's true, but the ability to procure a film of a random event the media is interested indicates it may be.
This capacity puts most of the immediate reporting of events in an interesting position: reporters tell what they see, through the lens of how they understand the world. But there's a second, documented version they know nothing about. A collapsed building, for example, is clearly collapsed, but how it came to be collapsed, at the hands of whom: these can be at best a matter of speculation for the cameraman who chances by a week or a month later; all the while, the IDF may well have full documentation of the event.
In the immediate term, the media has all the advantages except for the truth. Having extensive data, however, is important. It indicates that the IDF decision makers, local and tactical ones, generals and political leaders, are informed actors. They may not show us all their information, but we pretend they're mindless atavistic or blinded, at our own peril.
It is also of profound importance for Israelis, soon to round off their first entire century at war, to know that their side is doing its best. If Israelis had to understand their reality through the sole lens of the international media, they would probably long since have been demoralized into submission, as many of their erstwhile supporters abroad are. The first- or second-hand information about what's really going on, even if it never makes its way into the media, coupled by the understanding of the distance between strident media reports and reality, these are a source of long-term resilience which can't be bettered as a weapon of war.
In a world of Twitter and its like, news needs to be less than four minutes old to be of interest; saying you'll investigate and come back isn't compelling. So all the usual suspects had a field day lambasting Israel for its inhumane cruelty (CiFWatch has a roundup of the UK culprits).
A few days passed and the IDF came back with their results. Yes, there had been fighting in the area. Yes, one errant IDF shell had even hit the schoolyard. But No, it hadn't killed anyone, because the yard was empty at the time, and here's the video of the event to prove our position, with a link to the Youtube segment. In a move that surprised no-one, the media wasn't interested in this IDF version. (CiFWatch tried to catch their attention but to no avail).
My point is about the documentation of reality, not the distortions of malicious media outlets. How is it that Israel just happened to have an aerial film of that particular building? If it has, why wait 3 days to show it? Is there more?
The full answer will go to the archives once the war is over, and will be declassified only in decades. No army in history would throw open its raw military intelligence data, for multiple obvious reasons. Yet even the little the IDF does show demonstrates that it's collecting an awesome amount if it, and is using it to direct its actions with as much care as the battlefield allows. There have been reports in the media that every shell shot by the IDF is tracked to ascertain it does what it was meant to do. I don't know if that's true, but the ability to procure a film of a random event the media is interested indicates it may be.
This capacity puts most of the immediate reporting of events in an interesting position: reporters tell what they see, through the lens of how they understand the world. But there's a second, documented version they know nothing about. A collapsed building, for example, is clearly collapsed, but how it came to be collapsed, at the hands of whom: these can be at best a matter of speculation for the cameraman who chances by a week or a month later; all the while, the IDF may well have full documentation of the event.
In the immediate term, the media has all the advantages except for the truth. Having extensive data, however, is important. It indicates that the IDF decision makers, local and tactical ones, generals and political leaders, are informed actors. They may not show us all their information, but we pretend they're mindless atavistic or blinded, at our own peril.
It is also of profound importance for Israelis, soon to round off their first entire century at war, to know that their side is doing its best. If Israelis had to understand their reality through the sole lens of the international media, they would probably long since have been demoralized into submission, as many of their erstwhile supporters abroad are. The first- or second-hand information about what's really going on, even if it never makes its way into the media, coupled by the understanding of the distance between strident media reports and reality, these are a source of long-term resilience which can't be bettered as a weapon of war.
Friday, July 11, 2014
A response to that nasty East Jerusalem op-ed in the New York Times
I'm riding out this round of Israeli-Gaza violence without blogging, as a good civil servant should. In the midst of it, however,the New York Times saw fit to publish a problematic op-ed by one Rula Salameh, a Palestinian woman from Beit Haninah, which is in north Jerusalem but for purposes of political correctness is called East Jerusalem. Since Jerusalem is one of my pet interests, and this op-ed has been causing quite a bit of excitement on Twitter, here's a quick rebuttal.
Salameh makes three points. One, Israeli immigration policy sucks. Two, she's afraid for her 17-year-old son Memo, ever since that ghastly murder of their neighbor, 17-year-old Muhammad Abu Khdeir. Third, Israeli policy in Jerusalem is geared to harm Palestinians.
I see no need to relate to the immigration issue. The New York Times has twice endorsed President Obama, and his administration has deported more than 2 million folks from the US for not being citizens, including people who have lived there for decades and have no potential center of life elsewhere; hundreds of Africans have died just this month in futile attempts to get in to Europe. Immigration policies are tricky everywhere.
I can emphasize with Salameh's fear for her son. I was once in Washington DC with three children just about the time a crazy sniper was shooting down people at gas stations, and it wasn't fun, even tho the statistical chances of being hit were small. More important, all my three children went thru their adolescence in a Jerusalem where people were routinely blown to death on buses, in supermarkets, sitting in cafes or walking down the street. We did our best to shuttle them everywhere by car, but being teenagers they weren't keen on that so mostly we lived thru the lethal roulette Salameh's countrymen were playing with us, and we hoped for the best and went to the ocasional funeral. It was trying, so I can empathize with her fear.
Tho, come to think of it, she was raising her kid at the exact same time about two miles away, and there was never any danger, absolutely none, in her neighborhood. Only had she taken him into the Jewish parts of town would she have had anything to fear... from her own people, not from us, who were blowing up whoever was there.
Which brings me to the enormous element of the story she somehow forgot to tell. Since the end of the 2nd Intifada, Jerusalem has become ever more a place that Arabs walk in free of fear. Thousands of them have moved into the Jewish neighborhoods, and tens of thousands enter the Jewish parts daily: they work there, study there, play there, consume there, freely mingling amongst the Jews, noticed only if they choose to wear recognizably Muslim garb - which many do, unmolested. The city hasn't yet grown together, but it's clearly on the way, with one major exception: the Jews still mostly don't go into the Arab neighborhoods. The Old city, yes, along the edges, yes, but you won't find many Jewish teenagers rambling thru the Arab neighborhoods. Whether it's too dangerous, or they only fear it's too dangerous, is an interesting question I don't fully know the answer to.
Finally, Salameh's third point, about Israeli policies. They've been a mixed bag these past 47 years. Indeed, Israel has not invested adequate public resources in the Arab parts of Jerusalem. This is a fact, though the present mayor, Nir Barkat, is trying to rectify things, and this didn't interfere with his re-election bid last year. (The Arabs didn't vote for him). On the other hand, the Palestinians in Jerusalem enjoy a higher standard of living, including national health insurance, Jerusalem's high level medical infrastructure, social security, full access to colleges and the university, and so on and on. Israeli policy in Jerusalem is a mixed bag. It wold have been honest of Salameh to mention this.
Yes, there was one ghastly murder of a Palestinian teenager, and his murderers are already under arrest (three of them, the other three having been sent home for not having been involved). In response, Arab youth torched the light-rail train that goes thru Beit Haninah (Salameh forgot to mention this) and violently rioted for a few days before calming down. Soon the rails will be fixed and the evil Israeli tram line will return to Beit Haninnah. I have no doubt Salameh's son is already back in the Jewish parts of town, returneg safely home each evening. He needs to be careful, however, if the sirens go off, bacause the Hamas rockets from Gaza don't ask for identity cards.
Salameh makes three points. One, Israeli immigration policy sucks. Two, she's afraid for her 17-year-old son Memo, ever since that ghastly murder of their neighbor, 17-year-old Muhammad Abu Khdeir. Third, Israeli policy in Jerusalem is geared to harm Palestinians.
I see no need to relate to the immigration issue. The New York Times has twice endorsed President Obama, and his administration has deported more than 2 million folks from the US for not being citizens, including people who have lived there for decades and have no potential center of life elsewhere; hundreds of Africans have died just this month in futile attempts to get in to Europe. Immigration policies are tricky everywhere.
I can emphasize with Salameh's fear for her son. I was once in Washington DC with three children just about the time a crazy sniper was shooting down people at gas stations, and it wasn't fun, even tho the statistical chances of being hit were small. More important, all my three children went thru their adolescence in a Jerusalem where people were routinely blown to death on buses, in supermarkets, sitting in cafes or walking down the street. We did our best to shuttle them everywhere by car, but being teenagers they weren't keen on that so mostly we lived thru the lethal roulette Salameh's countrymen were playing with us, and we hoped for the best and went to the ocasional funeral. It was trying, so I can empathize with her fear.
Tho, come to think of it, she was raising her kid at the exact same time about two miles away, and there was never any danger, absolutely none, in her neighborhood. Only had she taken him into the Jewish parts of town would she have had anything to fear... from her own people, not from us, who were blowing up whoever was there.
Which brings me to the enormous element of the story she somehow forgot to tell. Since the end of the 2nd Intifada, Jerusalem has become ever more a place that Arabs walk in free of fear. Thousands of them have moved into the Jewish neighborhoods, and tens of thousands enter the Jewish parts daily: they work there, study there, play there, consume there, freely mingling amongst the Jews, noticed only if they choose to wear recognizably Muslim garb - which many do, unmolested. The city hasn't yet grown together, but it's clearly on the way, with one major exception: the Jews still mostly don't go into the Arab neighborhoods. The Old city, yes, along the edges, yes, but you won't find many Jewish teenagers rambling thru the Arab neighborhoods. Whether it's too dangerous, or they only fear it's too dangerous, is an interesting question I don't fully know the answer to.
Finally, Salameh's third point, about Israeli policies. They've been a mixed bag these past 47 years. Indeed, Israel has not invested adequate public resources in the Arab parts of Jerusalem. This is a fact, though the present mayor, Nir Barkat, is trying to rectify things, and this didn't interfere with his re-election bid last year. (The Arabs didn't vote for him). On the other hand, the Palestinians in Jerusalem enjoy a higher standard of living, including national health insurance, Jerusalem's high level medical infrastructure, social security, full access to colleges and the university, and so on and on. Israeli policy in Jerusalem is a mixed bag. It wold have been honest of Salameh to mention this.
Yes, there was one ghastly murder of a Palestinian teenager, and his murderers are already under arrest (three of them, the other three having been sent home for not having been involved). In response, Arab youth torched the light-rail train that goes thru Beit Haninah (Salameh forgot to mention this) and violently rioted for a few days before calming down. Soon the rails will be fixed and the evil Israeli tram line will return to Beit Haninnah. I have no doubt Salameh's son is already back in the Jewish parts of town, returneg safely home each evening. He needs to be careful, however, if the sirens go off, bacause the Hamas rockets from Gaza don't ask for identity cards.
Friday, July 4, 2014
On Jewish political murderers and chauvinist bullies
I had an interesting e-mail exchange the other day with a fellow, on the topic of Jewish politically-motivated murderers and other chauvinists. It occurs to me that part of my side of the discussion might be of more general interest, while falling deep enough into consensus-territory that I need not be inhibited to express it in public in spite of my vocational need to stay away from politics. So here's what I wrote:
1. The Internet in general, all over the world, encourages some types of people to express ugly hatreds: racism, misogyny, etc. Just yesterday I was reading vile stomach churning comments on the website of The Economist! A respectable, cool-headed and rational publication if there ever was one. Armed with hatred, enabled by the ease of use, and under cover of anonymity, dozens of readers piled on with comments that you'd be hard-pressed to hear in a pub at midnight after everyone has had too many pints. Is this hatred and barbarism new? I doubt it. It's been there forever. But it's easier to find it, to express it, and to join virtual crowds of like-minded bullies.
2. There have always been chauvinist Jews who were willing, under some conditions, to commit serious crimes in the service of their extreme agenda. Most of the time they mutter and rant in the darkness of their souls or perhaps among narrow circles of like-minded extremists, and no more. Every now and then, however, they take criminal action. This has happened in every single decade since the 1930s - tho probably not in every year, and certainly not at any given month. I"m talking about violence and murder, much worse than mere ugly facebook campaigns. The facebook campaigns are happening for the reasons I mentioned in (1).
3. As a general rule, Jewish society since the 1930s condemns its murderers and thugs and restrains them. Not always with full success, sadly. But our overall track record is pretty good, as good as any other free society, and in a completely different league than our enemies - and this has been the case all along. Not connected to the "occupation".
Friday, May 30, 2014
Living and Dying in in Divided Jerusalem
Jewish cemeteries are fascinating places. I was in one this morning, and noticed this gravestone.
It's the final resting place of Chaya Sarah Safra, who died in the winter of 1957, nine years after Jerusalem had been divided. In all those years she had not been able to visit the grave of her husband, Noah Safra, who had died ten years (to the day!) earlier. He was buried on the Mount of Olives, which in 1957 was in Jordan. Her family buried her in the main cemetery of West Jerusalem, Israel.
Resting in one city but two hostile countries, her gravestone contains all the information from his, so that visiting her might be a bit like visiting them both; and resting separately might be a bit like resting together.
It's the final resting place of Chaya Sarah Safra, who died in the winter of 1957, nine years after Jerusalem had been divided. In all those years she had not been able to visit the grave of her husband, Noah Safra, who had died ten years (to the day!) earlier. He was buried on the Mount of Olives, which in 1957 was in Jordan. Her family buried her in the main cemetery of West Jerusalem, Israel.
Resting in one city but two hostile countries, her gravestone contains all the information from his, so that visiting her might be a bit like visiting them both; and resting separately might be a bit like resting together.
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Celebrating (in) Jerusalem
The Jews have been around for quite a while now - 3,000 years, give or take half a millennum and depending upon whom you ask and what criteria you use for "Jews" and "around". If you tried to list the Top Ten events in their history, the list you'd end up with might say more about you than about them. Torah at Sinai? Disliking that Jesus fellow back on Passover that year? Rebbi orally editing an oral tradition? Lobbying Cyrus? David penning Psalms? The Baal Shem Tov shaking things up? Abraham haggling with God about Justice? Spinoza laying philosophical foundations for the Enlightenment?
When you get into recent history - say, 1750 onwards - things get even trickier. The emergence of secular German-speaking Jewish thinkers is probably on the list; should Refael Lemkin convincing the UN to outlaw genocide be on it? For that matter, is the Holocaust a Jewish event, and will it look as important in 2045 as it did in 1995?
The top event on my list for the Common Era is easy: the 28th day of Iyar, or June 7th 1967, the day Israel gained control of the entire city of Jerusalem including all of the Old City. It's not a normal event when a group of people spend 1,897 years vocally waiting for an event, which then happens. I'm not aware of anything remotely similar having ever happened anywhere, anytime, with any other group.
This evening is the 28th of Iyar, Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day. We celebrated it at our shul in an unusual way, by celebrating Baruch's 90th birthday, which also happens today.
I wrote about Baruch back when he was a young 85. At 90 he still identifies primarily as the grandson of Rav David W, the chief rabbi of their Slovakian community. A Holocaust survivor, who fought in Israel's War of Independence and then spent 10 months as a POW in a Jordanian camp. One of the speakers this evening recollected stories about his service as a tank crewman in the Sinai War of 1956. Much of the congregation came to celebrate with him this evening, as he is universally regarded as second in importance only to the Rabbi, and he's the more obviously beloved of the two. (Rabbis inevitably have critics because they take positions on matters).
He was surrounded by his family: children, lots of grandchildren, lots and lots of great-grandchildren. It was the most natural and miraculous event imaginable. One of two survivors of a death march on which 2,000 people perished, celebrating his 90th birthday in Jerusalem. Geopolitics, world history, wars, national interests and international cynicism, statesmanship and diplomacy, terrorism and hatred, law, international law, justice, injustice, propaganda, public relations, politics - these and many others are all part of the contemporary story of the Jews and their City. At times, however, a simple birthday party will trump them all with the force of its truth.
When you get into recent history - say, 1750 onwards - things get even trickier. The emergence of secular German-speaking Jewish thinkers is probably on the list; should Refael Lemkin convincing the UN to outlaw genocide be on it? For that matter, is the Holocaust a Jewish event, and will it look as important in 2045 as it did in 1995?
The top event on my list for the Common Era is easy: the 28th day of Iyar, or June 7th 1967, the day Israel gained control of the entire city of Jerusalem including all of the Old City. It's not a normal event when a group of people spend 1,897 years vocally waiting for an event, which then happens. I'm not aware of anything remotely similar having ever happened anywhere, anytime, with any other group.
This evening is the 28th of Iyar, Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day. We celebrated it at our shul in an unusual way, by celebrating Baruch's 90th birthday, which also happens today.
I wrote about Baruch back when he was a young 85. At 90 he still identifies primarily as the grandson of Rav David W, the chief rabbi of their Slovakian community. A Holocaust survivor, who fought in Israel's War of Independence and then spent 10 months as a POW in a Jordanian camp. One of the speakers this evening recollected stories about his service as a tank crewman in the Sinai War of 1956. Much of the congregation came to celebrate with him this evening, as he is universally regarded as second in importance only to the Rabbi, and he's the more obviously beloved of the two. (Rabbis inevitably have critics because they take positions on matters).
He was surrounded by his family: children, lots of grandchildren, lots and lots of great-grandchildren. It was the most natural and miraculous event imaginable. One of two survivors of a death march on which 2,000 people perished, celebrating his 90th birthday in Jerusalem. Geopolitics, world history, wars, national interests and international cynicism, statesmanship and diplomacy, terrorism and hatred, law, international law, justice, injustice, propaganda, public relations, politics - these and many others are all part of the contemporary story of the Jews and their City. At times, however, a simple birthday party will trump them all with the force of its truth.
Thursday, May 15, 2014
More Jewish-Arab integration in Jerusalem
I took this snapshot recently near the Israel State Archives (you can see a sign pointing to us in the upper left). It shows the sign on a truck advertising the driving school from which it hails: Hanan's Driving School.
In Hebrew and in Arabic. Hanan is an equal opportunity fellow. He'll teach whoever pays him to learn how to drive a truck. There are lots of folks in Jerusalem who speak lots of languages, but he advertises only in the languages of those who are likely to want to drives trucks. Hebrew and Arabic fit that bill, so those are his languages. Not Russian (they speak Hebrew by now), not French or English (they probably don't speak Hebrew well, but nor do they drive trucks), not Yiddish ('bal-agulehs' are an extinct breed). Hebrew and Arabic.
Apartheid my foot.
Oh by the way: the sign directing traffic to the Israel State Archives is in three languages: Hebrew, Arabic and English, in that order.
In Hebrew and in Arabic. Hanan is an equal opportunity fellow. He'll teach whoever pays him to learn how to drive a truck. There are lots of folks in Jerusalem who speak lots of languages, but he advertises only in the languages of those who are likely to want to drives trucks. Hebrew and Arabic fit that bill, so those are his languages. Not Russian (they speak Hebrew by now), not French or English (they probably don't speak Hebrew well, but nor do they drive trucks), not Yiddish ('bal-agulehs' are an extinct breed). Hebrew and Arabic.
Apartheid my foot.
Oh by the way: the sign directing traffic to the Israel State Archives is in three languages: Hebrew, Arabic and English, in that order.
Wednesday, May 14, 2014
Jewish-Arab integration in Jerusalem
The neighborhood pool just happens also to be the only full-sized Olympic pool in Jerusalem, and we've got some active swim-teams. Yesterday evening as I was preparing for my swim, there was a gang of teenagers from the team who were showering and dressing. Most of them happened to be Arab teenagers, tho some were Jews. At one point three or four of them were standing near me and I eavesdropped. Only one of them was Jewish, and they were talking about the matriculation exams they'll all be taking in the next few weeks, as they finish high school. The Jew, it turned out, had chosen to take the easiest version of math, and his chief interlocutor was poking gentle fun at him. "Of course it depends on what you intend to do afterwards, but don't you think you should at least try for the intermediate level, not just the easiest?" Two of the others launched into their own discussion, in Arabic, about which math credentials it's best to strive for.
This banal discussion would have been inconceivable in the first decade after Israel annexed Jordanian Jerusalem in 1967. As recently as 10 years ago it would have been conceivable, but not possible. Things are changing in Jerusalem, under our noses but also under the media radar.
After my swim and shower, there were two fellows in their mid-30s chatting as they dressed. They were discussing the hardship of living a mostly sedentary modern work-life, and then going off for three weeks in the infantry and being called upon to make physical exertions that were easy 15 years ago but not anymore.
This banal discussion would have been inconceivable in the first decade after Israel annexed Jordanian Jerusalem in 1967. As recently as 10 years ago it would have been conceivable, but not possible. Things are changing in Jerusalem, under our noses but also under the media radar.
After my swim and shower, there were two fellows in their mid-30s chatting as they dressed. They were discussing the hardship of living a mostly sedentary modern work-life, and then going off for three weeks in the infantry and being called upon to make physical exertions that were easy 15 years ago but not anymore.
Sunday, May 4, 2014
Reflections on Jewish Law, the Jewish Nation, and a Database
So are the Jews a religious community or a nation? And if a religion, how can secular folks call themselves Jews? And if a nation, how come all members must profess a particular religion? And why can’t the Jews just be simple and clear about these matters, like everybody else?
Far be it from me to resolve these weighty questions. Yet a magnificent book I’ve just completed made me look at them from a new perspective. It’s a 1,600-page book in Hebrew, with hundreds of quotations in Mediaeval Hebrew or Talmudic Aramaic-with-Hebrew, and it was first published in 1973; the copy I own has been sitting patiently on a shelf for more than 30 years, waiting for me to find the opportune time; when I finally did one of my considerations was to pay respect to the author during the first year after his death: Menachem Elon, once the 2nd highest justice in our Supreme Court. The book is his magnum opus, Hamishpat Haivri, Jewish Law.
His thesis, presented in the first of the book’s three sections, is that between the end of Jewish sovereignty in the Roman era, and the end of Jewish cultural autonomy at the beginning of the 19th century, the Jews maintained a national legal system, and lived according to its rules and practice.
This was no mean feat. With Jewish communities spread from Persia in the east to Iberia and England in the west, and from Yemen in the south northwards all the way to the Baltic, throughout the entire 2,000-year period no travel or communications ever went faster than walking, or perhaps rarely horse-riding. Legal decisions routinely took a year to arrive. Then there was the matter of varying political jurisdictions: the Jews shared one among themselves, but were spread over many different external ones. Language was an issue, since for most of the period Jews didn’t share one spoken language, nor did they maintain one language over the entire period in single communities, so their legal system used Hebrew, a language all knew and few spoke. Finally, there was the matter of the form of writing: for most of the period the only ways to record an idea and transmit it was by memory or handwriting. The printing press wasn’t around yet, and an author had to write his treatise by hand, and have it laboriously copied by someone else’s hand. A student interested in reading two items deciphered two handwritings; a student interested in, say, 500 items, read 500 handwritings.
By the time the printing press did get invented, there were thousands of items, some of them very lengthy books, which a scholar needed to have read, in thousands of handwritings. Assuming he could get his hand on all of them, an unlikely assumption, and assuming a dramatic relevant new one hadn’t been written in the past decade but without having yet reached his town, a likely assumption.
There was also the matter of persecution. It’s admirable to see how Elon never puts the persecution up front, yet it keeps on intruding, when scholars had to flee to other countries, or centers of learning were disbanded or ancient communities destroyed. The low-key, matter of fact mention, usually in passing, of an intruding calamity, underlines the extent to which the Jews never allowed persecution to serve as an excuse for collapse or retreat into disorder or even to halt their creativity in its shadow.
So in the first section of the book the author, a law professor at the time, lays out his case that the Jews had their own commonly-held and communally-run legal system in which they lived their lives, and they did so for two millennia, growing the system and adapting it as needed along the way.
The second section deals with what law professors apparently call the legal sources of the system, the legal tools the system uses. Imagine, for a moment, that it’s the 45th century, or the 50th, and you’re living in a United States which still regards the 18th century’s Constitution as its founding legal document. The legal tools are the modes of operation which enabled your forefathers to take that ancient document seriously all along: interpretation, legislation, jurisprudence and so on.
As Elon tells it, the Torah is of course the founding document, the source of authority, and being divine, not a letter of it can be amended. Yet amended it had to be for the system to grow with history. And so there were early tools such as Midrash (hermeneutics) which enabled the early legal scholars to derive their legal needs from the immutable text. Elon gives a very fine description of the various forms of Midrash, of which there were quite a few. Interestingly, however, these tools were mostly used by the Tanaim, the scholars who created that tanaitic literature which was then, in the 2nd century CE edited into (or out of) the Mishna. These Tanaim lived mostly in Israel, indeed, mostly in the Galilee, and held their discussions mostly in Hebrew.
They were followed by the Amoraim, the creators of the Gemara between in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th centuries. They tended to be in Babylonia (present day Iraq) except when they were in the Galilee or elsewhere, and they tended to work in Aramaic, except when they used Hebrew. They used much less Midrash then the Tanaim, and indeed, they related much less directly to the Torah, focusing mostly on the Tanaitic literature, in the Mishna and beyond it. They were followed by Savoraim and then Gaonim, which takes us till about the 10th century. The later in time, the greater the likelihood not to use Midrash, but to prefer decrees (a type of legislation – did I mention that the Jews never had a legislature throughout this 2,000-year period), then local decrees, binding traditions, precedents, and some forms of deduction. As the 2nd millennium began, the center in Iraq lost its luster and its hegemonic power, never to be replaced (until the 20th century?) From then on there were a series of centers, sometime even more than one at once; they all seem to have known of them all at any given moment, and communicated to the extent it was practical. As time went on, the local decrees and traditions took on greater significance – but as the persecution went on, local practices became less likely to be helpful in new communities of Jews from diverse old ones. None of which ever threatened to destroy the system, astonishingly.
A significant reason for this startling cohesiveness can be found in the third section of the book, where Elon describes the documentary sources of the Jewish legal system: the texts.
He harks quickly back to the Torah, Bible and Talmud, but spends most of his time on what came next, from the 9th century on. The central theme of the story is the codifiers vs the interpreters. The interpreters came in a number of flavours, those who saw their task in explaining the earlier texts, and those who worked through all the earlier texts to provide a legal ruling on particular matters. (Rashi being the single most important interpreter, and the Tosafot providing rulings – though neither of those examples is clear-cut). Then there were the codifiers, the scholars who saw the immense (and growing) literature and its extreme complexity, and tried to force order and simplicity on it all in one fell swoop, so to say.
Actually, there was only one scholar who tried to impose complete order on the complete corpus and in one fell swoop so s to serve as the final word on the matter, and that was the Rambam, Maimonides, in the 12th century (who also happened to wander the entire length of the Mediterranean as he tried to sidestep his persecutors). He was so gigantic a figure, so totally a genius, so far ahead of everyone else, that he felt he could carry off the trick; and no sooner had he done it, in his 14-volume Mishneh Torah codex, than a choir of his contemporaries and their disciples for the next few generations all tore into him for his arrogance and presumption, recognizing his intellectual superiority over them as they did so.
Then, over the next four centuries the battle between interpreters and codifiers raged back and forth, eventually ending in the victory of the codifiers with Rabbi Yosef Caro in the 16 century, who wrote the Shulchan Aruch but not until he’d completed the Beit Yosef, a gigantic work of interpretation. (Caro, it should be noted, was back in the Galilee, for those who think there was no significant Jewish presence in Israel for 2,000 years.)
Or did the codifiers really win? I’m not so sure. One of the oddest parts of the story is that while the cutting edge of the system of Jewish law kept on moving forward, as cutting edges tend to do, the single most important layer was and remained the Talmud, until this very day. The Rambam’s presumption to have his work enable the complicated Talmud to be superseded may have happened on the level of legal ruling; but there are 100,000 students of Daf Yomi today, not of the Daily Rambam program (which does exist, but is a pale shadow of the main show).
Where does all this lead us? Beyond being a fascinating yarn and a crucial insight into what made Jews tick? Near the end I found myself with a number of reflections. First, there’s the miraculous mystery of Zionism. Just as the legal and social and cultural tools which maintained the Jews for 2,000 years were being broken down by the modern conception of the individual facing the State without an autonomic community in the middle, as well as by the tidal wave of secularism which detached a majority of Jews from the traditional ways and texts, along came Zionism and replaced the magnificent-but-worn old tools with a whole new set. Just as the intellectual ferment which lasted millennia was finally (largely) exhausting itself, along came Zionism with a whole new context in which to live full Jewish individual and communal lives. (I’m writing this on the evening of Yom Hazikaron, Memorial Day, so I’ll add that Zionism also gave, and demanded, a new set of reasons and contexts in which Jews lay down their lives for the nation).
Even on a less grand scale, Elon’s book itself demonstrates how the Jews have developed alternative ways of studying their rich cultural heritage: no one prior to the 19th century would ever have thought to write a history of the Jews through the history of their legal development.
Finally, the archivist and information-professional in me looks at technology. Just about the exact moment when Elon was publishing his book, a group of scholarly computer-scientist types were banding together to put the entire gigantic sprawling Jewish legal library into a database, now known as the Bar Ilan project – an invention the Rambam and his fellow codifiers would greatly have appreciated if had they ever been able to conceive of it, which they of course weren’t.
Far be it from me to resolve these weighty questions. Yet a magnificent book I’ve just completed made me look at them from a new perspective. It’s a 1,600-page book in Hebrew, with hundreds of quotations in Mediaeval Hebrew or Talmudic Aramaic-with-Hebrew, and it was first published in 1973; the copy I own has been sitting patiently on a shelf for more than 30 years, waiting for me to find the opportune time; when I finally did one of my considerations was to pay respect to the author during the first year after his death: Menachem Elon, once the 2nd highest justice in our Supreme Court. The book is his magnum opus, Hamishpat Haivri, Jewish Law.
His thesis, presented in the first of the book’s three sections, is that between the end of Jewish sovereignty in the Roman era, and the end of Jewish cultural autonomy at the beginning of the 19th century, the Jews maintained a national legal system, and lived according to its rules and practice.
This was no mean feat. With Jewish communities spread from Persia in the east to Iberia and England in the west, and from Yemen in the south northwards all the way to the Baltic, throughout the entire 2,000-year period no travel or communications ever went faster than walking, or perhaps rarely horse-riding. Legal decisions routinely took a year to arrive. Then there was the matter of varying political jurisdictions: the Jews shared one among themselves, but were spread over many different external ones. Language was an issue, since for most of the period Jews didn’t share one spoken language, nor did they maintain one language over the entire period in single communities, so their legal system used Hebrew, a language all knew and few spoke. Finally, there was the matter of the form of writing: for most of the period the only ways to record an idea and transmit it was by memory or handwriting. The printing press wasn’t around yet, and an author had to write his treatise by hand, and have it laboriously copied by someone else’s hand. A student interested in reading two items deciphered two handwritings; a student interested in, say, 500 items, read 500 handwritings.
By the time the printing press did get invented, there were thousands of items, some of them very lengthy books, which a scholar needed to have read, in thousands of handwritings. Assuming he could get his hand on all of them, an unlikely assumption, and assuming a dramatic relevant new one hadn’t been written in the past decade but without having yet reached his town, a likely assumption.
There was also the matter of persecution. It’s admirable to see how Elon never puts the persecution up front, yet it keeps on intruding, when scholars had to flee to other countries, or centers of learning were disbanded or ancient communities destroyed. The low-key, matter of fact mention, usually in passing, of an intruding calamity, underlines the extent to which the Jews never allowed persecution to serve as an excuse for collapse or retreat into disorder or even to halt their creativity in its shadow.
So in the first section of the book the author, a law professor at the time, lays out his case that the Jews had their own commonly-held and communally-run legal system in which they lived their lives, and they did so for two millennia, growing the system and adapting it as needed along the way.
The second section deals with what law professors apparently call the legal sources of the system, the legal tools the system uses. Imagine, for a moment, that it’s the 45th century, or the 50th, and you’re living in a United States which still regards the 18th century’s Constitution as its founding legal document. The legal tools are the modes of operation which enabled your forefathers to take that ancient document seriously all along: interpretation, legislation, jurisprudence and so on.
As Elon tells it, the Torah is of course the founding document, the source of authority, and being divine, not a letter of it can be amended. Yet amended it had to be for the system to grow with history. And so there were early tools such as Midrash (hermeneutics) which enabled the early legal scholars to derive their legal needs from the immutable text. Elon gives a very fine description of the various forms of Midrash, of which there were quite a few. Interestingly, however, these tools were mostly used by the Tanaim, the scholars who created that tanaitic literature which was then, in the 2nd century CE edited into (or out of) the Mishna. These Tanaim lived mostly in Israel, indeed, mostly in the Galilee, and held their discussions mostly in Hebrew.
They were followed by the Amoraim, the creators of the Gemara between in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th centuries. They tended to be in Babylonia (present day Iraq) except when they were in the Galilee or elsewhere, and they tended to work in Aramaic, except when they used Hebrew. They used much less Midrash then the Tanaim, and indeed, they related much less directly to the Torah, focusing mostly on the Tanaitic literature, in the Mishna and beyond it. They were followed by Savoraim and then Gaonim, which takes us till about the 10th century. The later in time, the greater the likelihood not to use Midrash, but to prefer decrees (a type of legislation – did I mention that the Jews never had a legislature throughout this 2,000-year period), then local decrees, binding traditions, precedents, and some forms of deduction. As the 2nd millennium began, the center in Iraq lost its luster and its hegemonic power, never to be replaced (until the 20th century?) From then on there were a series of centers, sometime even more than one at once; they all seem to have known of them all at any given moment, and communicated to the extent it was practical. As time went on, the local decrees and traditions took on greater significance – but as the persecution went on, local practices became less likely to be helpful in new communities of Jews from diverse old ones. None of which ever threatened to destroy the system, astonishingly.
A significant reason for this startling cohesiveness can be found in the third section of the book, where Elon describes the documentary sources of the Jewish legal system: the texts.
He harks quickly back to the Torah, Bible and Talmud, but spends most of his time on what came next, from the 9th century on. The central theme of the story is the codifiers vs the interpreters. The interpreters came in a number of flavours, those who saw their task in explaining the earlier texts, and those who worked through all the earlier texts to provide a legal ruling on particular matters. (Rashi being the single most important interpreter, and the Tosafot providing rulings – though neither of those examples is clear-cut). Then there were the codifiers, the scholars who saw the immense (and growing) literature and its extreme complexity, and tried to force order and simplicity on it all in one fell swoop, so to say.
Actually, there was only one scholar who tried to impose complete order on the complete corpus and in one fell swoop so s to serve as the final word on the matter, and that was the Rambam, Maimonides, in the 12th century (who also happened to wander the entire length of the Mediterranean as he tried to sidestep his persecutors). He was so gigantic a figure, so totally a genius, so far ahead of everyone else, that he felt he could carry off the trick; and no sooner had he done it, in his 14-volume Mishneh Torah codex, than a choir of his contemporaries and their disciples for the next few generations all tore into him for his arrogance and presumption, recognizing his intellectual superiority over them as they did so.
Then, over the next four centuries the battle between interpreters and codifiers raged back and forth, eventually ending in the victory of the codifiers with Rabbi Yosef Caro in the 16 century, who wrote the Shulchan Aruch but not until he’d completed the Beit Yosef, a gigantic work of interpretation. (Caro, it should be noted, was back in the Galilee, for those who think there was no significant Jewish presence in Israel for 2,000 years.)
Or did the codifiers really win? I’m not so sure. One of the oddest parts of the story is that while the cutting edge of the system of Jewish law kept on moving forward, as cutting edges tend to do, the single most important layer was and remained the Talmud, until this very day. The Rambam’s presumption to have his work enable the complicated Talmud to be superseded may have happened on the level of legal ruling; but there are 100,000 students of Daf Yomi today, not of the Daily Rambam program (which does exist, but is a pale shadow of the main show).
Where does all this lead us? Beyond being a fascinating yarn and a crucial insight into what made Jews tick? Near the end I found myself with a number of reflections. First, there’s the miraculous mystery of Zionism. Just as the legal and social and cultural tools which maintained the Jews for 2,000 years were being broken down by the modern conception of the individual facing the State without an autonomic community in the middle, as well as by the tidal wave of secularism which detached a majority of Jews from the traditional ways and texts, along came Zionism and replaced the magnificent-but-worn old tools with a whole new set. Just as the intellectual ferment which lasted millennia was finally (largely) exhausting itself, along came Zionism with a whole new context in which to live full Jewish individual and communal lives. (I’m writing this on the evening of Yom Hazikaron, Memorial Day, so I’ll add that Zionism also gave, and demanded, a new set of reasons and contexts in which Jews lay down their lives for the nation).
Even on a less grand scale, Elon’s book itself demonstrates how the Jews have developed alternative ways of studying their rich cultural heritage: no one prior to the 19th century would ever have thought to write a history of the Jews through the history of their legal development.
Finally, the archivist and information-professional in me looks at technology. Just about the exact moment when Elon was publishing his book, a group of scholarly computer-scientist types were banding together to put the entire gigantic sprawling Jewish legal library into a database, now known as the Bar Ilan project – an invention the Rambam and his fellow codifiers would greatly have appreciated if had they ever been able to conceive of it, which they of course weren’t.
Friday, May 2, 2014
Interim Report from the Israel State Archives
For whatever reason I seem to have a spot of time for blogging (see yesterday's post, and today's. I also recommend this older post, as we approach Memorial Day). So perhaps I ought to use the moment to tell about what's happening at the Israel State Archives (ISA), since my move there was what caused me to (mostly) stop blogging.
In the past few years the Cabinet has passed a series of resolutions about the ISA. The most significant was last November, when Cabinet Resolution 911 essentially redefined the goals of the ISA to fit the needs of the 21st century, while also allocating a significantly enhanced budget to be able to reach them. This is a long-term project, starting in 2015 and scheduled to last 15 years, i.e long after the end of my term (senior officials have term limits in Israel). Until the advent of 2015, we're already up ramping up via the previous resolutions, which began allocating new funds in late 2012.
Almost none of what we're doing will be visible to the general public before summer 2015 at the earliest, and some of it will require many years. Fundamental change on the scale we're enacting takes years and years to work its way towards fruition. So if you go visit our website, for example, you'll see the same 18-century version that's been there all along; even if you visit our reading room, the most that will happen is that you'll hear rumors about rumbles.
The first project we started was scanning the existing paper collection. The reason we started there is that, contrary to what folks think, a scanning project is a low-tech operation, 95% of which is logistics, and 4% of which is purely technical. In 2013 we scanned close to 20 million pages plus ten of thousands of photos; at that rate we should complete the entire scanning project in about 40 years, give or take a few.
We also began planning and developing a new main software system, to replace the existing one which was developed in the 1990s. This is very much a high-tech operation, at which many of us are working very hard. Once completed, perhaps in January 2015, we'll have abilities that will be far advanced over what we currently have, but it will still be entirely invisible to the general public. Also, such projects are never "completed"; development goes on for as long as the system can contain it. Eventually the patches required grow larger and more complex than the system itself, and then it's time to move to the next new system - but hopefully that doesn't happen more than once in 15 years.
We're working on revamping the method (and also a bit of the legal context) of how declassification is done. There's an embarrassing backlog in that field, and I'm happy to say that the Cabinet agreed that it had to be dealt with. Again, right now we're planning, developing methodologies and capabilities; the real breakthrough can't happen before those new systems are in place (see previous paragraph) in early 2015. The public won't begin to benefit until a later date - but that could be late 2015, maybe - not that long from now.
We're just about to begin deploying some new ideas and capabilities about how we transfer digital data from government ministries to the ISA. Since documentation doesn't get opened to the public for 15 years, this won't make a difference anyone notices for quite a while - but once that while comes, it will make all the difference. So it needs to be worked on now.
If everything goes according to plan, we should take down the 18-century website in about a year from now, and replace it with its great-great-great-grandchild. On the other hand, nothing ever goes according to plan, so don't hold your breath.
So those are some of the more obvious things that are happening. There are also a couple of smaller tracks we're moving on, such as writing a new draft Law of Archives to send to the Knesset, and a new system of knowledge management to accompany the collections of documents and make them more generally accessible. Our staff is training itself to do most things differently than they used to, and it's encouraging to see them do so with commitment and determination. We're going to expand the staff, too, once we find the 5 minutes to write up the new job descriptions.
Our intention is to have a revamped ISA public presence later this decade, with the documents of the State of Israel easily accessible online. We're on track, but it will take time.
In the past few years the Cabinet has passed a series of resolutions about the ISA. The most significant was last November, when Cabinet Resolution 911 essentially redefined the goals of the ISA to fit the needs of the 21st century, while also allocating a significantly enhanced budget to be able to reach them. This is a long-term project, starting in 2015 and scheduled to last 15 years, i.e long after the end of my term (senior officials have term limits in Israel). Until the advent of 2015, we're already up ramping up via the previous resolutions, which began allocating new funds in late 2012.
Almost none of what we're doing will be visible to the general public before summer 2015 at the earliest, and some of it will require many years. Fundamental change on the scale we're enacting takes years and years to work its way towards fruition. So if you go visit our website, for example, you'll see the same 18-century version that's been there all along; even if you visit our reading room, the most that will happen is that you'll hear rumors about rumbles.
The first project we started was scanning the existing paper collection. The reason we started there is that, contrary to what folks think, a scanning project is a low-tech operation, 95% of which is logistics, and 4% of which is purely technical. In 2013 we scanned close to 20 million pages plus ten of thousands of photos; at that rate we should complete the entire scanning project in about 40 years, give or take a few.
We also began planning and developing a new main software system, to replace the existing one which was developed in the 1990s. This is very much a high-tech operation, at which many of us are working very hard. Once completed, perhaps in January 2015, we'll have abilities that will be far advanced over what we currently have, but it will still be entirely invisible to the general public. Also, such projects are never "completed"; development goes on for as long as the system can contain it. Eventually the patches required grow larger and more complex than the system itself, and then it's time to move to the next new system - but hopefully that doesn't happen more than once in 15 years.
We're working on revamping the method (and also a bit of the legal context) of how declassification is done. There's an embarrassing backlog in that field, and I'm happy to say that the Cabinet agreed that it had to be dealt with. Again, right now we're planning, developing methodologies and capabilities; the real breakthrough can't happen before those new systems are in place (see previous paragraph) in early 2015. The public won't begin to benefit until a later date - but that could be late 2015, maybe - not that long from now.
We're just about to begin deploying some new ideas and capabilities about how we transfer digital data from government ministries to the ISA. Since documentation doesn't get opened to the public for 15 years, this won't make a difference anyone notices for quite a while - but once that while comes, it will make all the difference. So it needs to be worked on now.
If everything goes according to plan, we should take down the 18-century website in about a year from now, and replace it with its great-great-great-grandchild. On the other hand, nothing ever goes according to plan, so don't hold your breath.
So those are some of the more obvious things that are happening. There are also a couple of smaller tracks we're moving on, such as writing a new draft Law of Archives to send to the Knesset, and a new system of knowledge management to accompany the collections of documents and make them more generally accessible. Our staff is training itself to do most things differently than they used to, and it's encouraging to see them do so with commitment and determination. We're going to expand the staff, too, once we find the 5 minutes to write up the new job descriptions.
Our intention is to have a revamped ISA public presence later this decade, with the documents of the State of Israel easily accessible online. We're on track, but it will take time.
Review: Undaunted Courage and a Timeline of Hypocricy
The United States is by now one of the oldest democracies in the world, and still using its original constitution. Yet it actually hasn't been around very long. This point was impressed upon me recently while reading Stephen Ambrose's last book, the excellent Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West
. In the tone of a master storyteller, Ambrose relates a story everyone knows something about, and makes of it a page-turner. It's the story of how President Jefferson prepared his aide Meriwether Lewis to go and find out what lay to the west of the Mississippi River, all the way to the Pacific Ocean, and to bring back as much diverse knowledge as possible: about geography, botany, zoology, about the Indians, about the English, the French and Spanish presence in the area if there was any, and anything else of interest. Since no white man had ever been in the area and reported back, everything was interesting. So Lewis recruited his friend William Clark, and together they created a unit of soldiers and others, never more than a few dozen in all, and off they went.
They set out in May 1804, and got back in September 1806. Ambrose wrote his book a few years before the bicentennial anniversary, and even today we're only 210 years behind them. And that's the first startling thing about the story. As recently as 200 years ago, if you floated down the Ohio River west towards the Mississippi, you were surrounded by hundreds of miles of pristine forest, with, here and there and at great distance from one another, a rough stockade or a one-street trading station with maybe a few hundred locals, all of whom had arrived there in recent years. Cincinnati was a really big city (but did it have more than a thousand people? The book doesn't tell), and it had been founded 15 years earlier.
And the area east of the Mississippi was mapped, known, and part of the United States. Seen from the perspective of where Lewis and Clark were going, it was civilised and tamed. Pretty soon it would even be boring and unattractive for the pioneering spirits who were escaping the stifling civilization of the Eastern seaboard into the unknown and untamed frontier.
They didn't have Whatsapp in those days, and Facebook was unreliable. As a matter of fact, as Ambrose reminds us early on, the the only type of communication anyone had ever dreamed of which was faster than a man's pace of walking, was if he was on horseback. Which means that from the day in May 1804 when Lewis and Clark started upstream from St. Louis (pop. 1000), they were out of contact. Once or twice in the coming years they sent back a few messengers, whom they never saw again and could only hope would arrive back in civilization; they themselves heard nothing from civilization until they appeared one fine September day back in St. Louis, two and a half years later.
In the interval they lived off the provisions they'd acquired in advance, and mostly, they lived off their wits and off the land, essentially reverting to hunter-gatherers. They were very good at being hunter-gatherers, but they'd also chosen a good place. The descriptions of the bountiful land they were moving through are, simply, astonishing. Much of the area is still bountiful, indeed, it's the breadbasket of the world, but it's tamed and controlled by humans. It was different 200 years ago.
So they made their way all the way to Oregon (which wasn't yet called Oregon), took a selfie on the coast of the Pacific, and walked back, proving that it was all there, that area, that there wasn't a combination of big navigable rivers that crossed it, and discovered a few hundred species of plants and critters previously unknown to the taxonomists.
Not part of mapped civilization, perhaps, but not empty of people. There were various tribes of Indians (that was the word used then, and until recently). Each time Lewis and Clark encountered a new group, they gave them a version of their standard stump speech, which needed to be translated through six or eight people, in the probably vain hope that the original English version would come out at the other end in some vaguely recognizable form. Here's the description of the first time Lewis gave it:
That passage made me stop and think for a moment. In 1804, more than 90% of recorded Jewish history (so far) had already happened. More than 1,500 years of the interval between the collapse of the (western) Roman Empire and the rise of United Europe (such as it is) had already happened. The French Revolution was already history, and Napoleon was wandering around Europe causing uproar. Shakespeare had been dead almost 200 years. Jerusalem, considerably older than Cincinnati or even Virginia, was at one of its many lowest points, but had only a few decades left before it would begin growing beyond its walls, and with a Jewish majority.
210 years is a long time if you're building a family tree, but in terms of history, it's just yesterday. And just yesterday, the first organized white man ever to reach Iowa was preaching at the locals in terms that no kindergarten teacher would use today without blushing. All he was doing was preaching; the really bad stuff was yet to come. As Ambrose notes later in the book, the entire process of the western-moving pioneers regarding the Indians was simple: move out of our way or be killed. Since being in the way meant being on the continent, that left only the option of being killed - and indeed, they're effectively all gone.
Everything I read, I read with an Israeli perspective. Sorry, that's just who I am. The earliest proto-Zionist settlements were started in 1878, and they picked up speed in 1882. The distance in time between Lewis and Clark, first explorers of the western half of the United States, and the advent of Zionism, was 80 years. The final subduing of the American West (sometimes called the Closing of the Frontier) and early Zionism were, quite literally, simultaneous events. The original population of the United States are gone - gone from Massachusetts these past four centuries, but gone from the western half of the country all of, what, 150 years? Less even than that? Meanwhile, in Israel alone there are more Arabs today than there were in the whole country in the late 19th century.
Next time you hear an American enemy of Israel speechifying about the evils of invading someones land and then stealing it, too, ask them what their opinion is of Missouri. Or Oregon. Because it's the same time frame.
Or, if you'd prefer to simply read a book with a great yarn about a world that's gone, read this book.
. In the tone of a master storyteller, Ambrose relates a story everyone knows something about, and makes of it a page-turner. It's the story of how President Jefferson prepared his aide Meriwether Lewis to go and find out what lay to the west of the Mississippi River, all the way to the Pacific Ocean, and to bring back as much diverse knowledge as possible: about geography, botany, zoology, about the Indians, about the English, the French and Spanish presence in the area if there was any, and anything else of interest. Since no white man had ever been in the area and reported back, everything was interesting. So Lewis recruited his friend William Clark, and together they created a unit of soldiers and others, never more than a few dozen in all, and off they went.They set out in May 1804, and got back in September 1806. Ambrose wrote his book a few years before the bicentennial anniversary, and even today we're only 210 years behind them. And that's the first startling thing about the story. As recently as 200 years ago, if you floated down the Ohio River west towards the Mississippi, you were surrounded by hundreds of miles of pristine forest, with, here and there and at great distance from one another, a rough stockade or a one-street trading station with maybe a few hundred locals, all of whom had arrived there in recent years. Cincinnati was a really big city (but did it have more than a thousand people? The book doesn't tell), and it had been founded 15 years earlier.
And the area east of the Mississippi was mapped, known, and part of the United States. Seen from the perspective of where Lewis and Clark were going, it was civilised and tamed. Pretty soon it would even be boring and unattractive for the pioneering spirits who were escaping the stifling civilization of the Eastern seaboard into the unknown and untamed frontier.
They didn't have Whatsapp in those days, and Facebook was unreliable. As a matter of fact, as Ambrose reminds us early on, the the only type of communication anyone had ever dreamed of which was faster than a man's pace of walking, was if he was on horseback. Which means that from the day in May 1804 when Lewis and Clark started upstream from St. Louis (pop. 1000), they were out of contact. Once or twice in the coming years they sent back a few messengers, whom they never saw again and could only hope would arrive back in civilization; they themselves heard nothing from civilization until they appeared one fine September day back in St. Louis, two and a half years later.
In the interval they lived off the provisions they'd acquired in advance, and mostly, they lived off their wits and off the land, essentially reverting to hunter-gatherers. They were very good at being hunter-gatherers, but they'd also chosen a good place. The descriptions of the bountiful land they were moving through are, simply, astonishing. Much of the area is still bountiful, indeed, it's the breadbasket of the world, but it's tamed and controlled by humans. It was different 200 years ago.
So they made their way all the way to Oregon (which wasn't yet called Oregon), took a selfie on the coast of the Pacific, and walked back, proving that it was all there, that area, that there wasn't a combination of big navigable rivers that crossed it, and discovered a few hundred species of plants and critters previously unknown to the taxonomists.
Not part of mapped civilization, perhaps, but not empty of people. There were various tribes of Indians (that was the word used then, and until recently). Each time Lewis and Clark encountered a new group, they gave them a version of their standard stump speech, which needed to be translated through six or eight people, in the probably vain hope that the original English version would come out at the other end in some vaguely recognizable form. Here's the description of the first time Lewis gave it:
Lewis opened by advising the warriors to be wise and look to the true interests of their people. "Children", he continued, as Clark recorded his speech, "we have been sent by the Great Chief of the Seventeen great nations of America to inform you... that a great council was lately held between the great chief and your old fathers, the French and Spaniards". There it was decided that the Missouri River country now belonged to the United States, so that all those who lived in that country, whether white or red "are bound to obey the commands of their Great Chief the President who is now your only great father". (P. 156).And from there on the speech got worse.
That passage made me stop and think for a moment. In 1804, more than 90% of recorded Jewish history (so far) had already happened. More than 1,500 years of the interval between the collapse of the (western) Roman Empire and the rise of United Europe (such as it is) had already happened. The French Revolution was already history, and Napoleon was wandering around Europe causing uproar. Shakespeare had been dead almost 200 years. Jerusalem, considerably older than Cincinnati or even Virginia, was at one of its many lowest points, but had only a few decades left before it would begin growing beyond its walls, and with a Jewish majority.
210 years is a long time if you're building a family tree, but in terms of history, it's just yesterday. And just yesterday, the first organized white man ever to reach Iowa was preaching at the locals in terms that no kindergarten teacher would use today without blushing. All he was doing was preaching; the really bad stuff was yet to come. As Ambrose notes later in the book, the entire process of the western-moving pioneers regarding the Indians was simple: move out of our way or be killed. Since being in the way meant being on the continent, that left only the option of being killed - and indeed, they're effectively all gone.
Everything I read, I read with an Israeli perspective. Sorry, that's just who I am. The earliest proto-Zionist settlements were started in 1878, and they picked up speed in 1882. The distance in time between Lewis and Clark, first explorers of the western half of the United States, and the advent of Zionism, was 80 years. The final subduing of the American West (sometimes called the Closing of the Frontier) and early Zionism were, quite literally, simultaneous events. The original population of the United States are gone - gone from Massachusetts these past four centuries, but gone from the western half of the country all of, what, 150 years? Less even than that? Meanwhile, in Israel alone there are more Arabs today than there were in the whole country in the late 19th century.
Next time you hear an American enemy of Israel speechifying about the evils of invading someones land and then stealing it, too, ask them what their opinion is of Missouri. Or Oregon. Because it's the same time frame.
Or, if you'd prefer to simply read a book with a great yarn about a world that's gone, read this book.
Thursday, May 1, 2014
Library of the Dead
Next week is our double-whammy Day of Commemoration (Yom Hazikaron) and Day of Independence (Yom Haatzmaut). So I'm putting up a story I once posted elsewhere, on Yom Hazikaron of 2008. It's still just as true.
70 years ago, 50, even merely 30 years ago, youth movements played a significant role in the lives of Israeli teenagers. Somewhere along the way, perhaps in the 1980s or 1990s, most of them disappeared. Here and there you can still find remnants of the phenomenon, but they’re rather few and far between. The single exception of any significance, so far as I can tell, is the Bnei Akiva youth movement of the national religious strand of Israeli society – roughly the Israeli counterpart of Modern Orthodoxy in the US.
I don’t think I’ve been in there for something like 30 years, though I’ve gone by it thousands of times. One morning a week or so ago, as I walked by, the gate was open and no one was there, so on the spur of the moment I went in.
Decades of teenagers haven’t added to its appearance. None of the doors seemed to close. The walls were covered with colorful murals that must have been an inch deep; if someone could figure out how to remove paint layer by layer it could be a fascinating exercise. It looked just like you’d expect a building to look where nobody’s mother has come to check on the maintenance in living memory: ramshackle, worn, chaotic, but also comfy in a way that would appeal to kids in “their own place”. It has a “lived in” look.
At the end of the corridor there’s a stairwell. I remembered that on the second floor there used to be a reading room dedicated to our friend Zvika, who was killed in a hiking accident in the Judean desert when we were 16; on the wall there was a large and dramatic picture taken from the top of a high cliff and in its corner, as if gazing out over the wide vista, a portrait of Zvika. So I went up to see what had happened to the room.
Zvika’s picture is still there. Apparently the kids, none of whom could possibly have any memory of anything about him, have a healthy respect for commemoration. Then I noticed the far end of the room, where the entire wall was covered with pictures of young men, and a long shelf offered a series of publications – books, pamphlets, albums. I didn’t remember this exhibition, and I approached it with a queasy feeling that turned into something bordering on awe. In this house of teenagers with a memory span that can’t exceed 15 years, someone had collected pictures, information, and publications about 60 years of fallen soldiers who had been active at the Sneef when they were of that age. There were more than 30 pictures, the earliest were of two young men killed in 1948.
I followed the pictures. Here’s a young paratrooper who was killed a few months before I was born. Here’s one killed in the early 1960s, a decade remembered as peaceful. Meir R. was killed in 1968. I came to know his father about that time when we moved into this neighborhood. Every year he would lead our congregation during the Ne’ilah service at the end of Yom Kippur, the single most powerful service in the entire year. He never managed to get through the service without weeping, not in all the years I heard him, and no doubt in the many years thereafter until his death, a little old man walking the streets of Jerusalem with his battered leather briefcase. I’d never seen a picture of his son: he was a strikingly handsome young man.
Yakov F. was killed in the summer of 1970, a week before the Roger’s Plan brought the end of the War of Attrition between Israel and Egypt. I hadn’t known him, but I remember how that week our madrich – councilor – told us that maybe Yakov would be the last soldier killed.
Sariel was killed on the Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur war. He was two or three years older than I, his sister was in my sister’s class. Moshe T. was killed a few weeks later, on the last day of that war. He had been our madrich, and a few months before the war he had married Yaffa, also one of our staff. I remembered them as two exceptionally good looking people; the picture on the wall confirms this.
Moshe K. was a paratrooper, killed a few months after the Yom Kippur war. He was Yaffa’s little brother, so she lost a husband and a brother within six months. The synagogue I go to has a mantle on its podium donated by their parents in Moshe’s memory; his mother passed away last year.
Avi Greenwald was a friend of mine from the moment I joined his school in 6th grade. I wrote about him briefly in Right to Exist. Ram M. was the younger brother of one of my best friends; he used to hang out with us sometimes, and although he was younger than us we welcomed him into the circle for being such a serious kid. Avi and Ram were both killed in 1982 in Lebanon.
Boaz was killed in 1988. Shlomo C. was killed in 1989. I remember his face, but don’t think I knew him.
Here's a picture of Noam, killed in 1992. I taught him history when he was in high school; he was one of those students who fit into the background at school, and then excelled and stood out once they reached the army. He was a highly respected young officer; on occasion I still hear people talking about him with admiration and regret.
Aviad was killed in 2001. I've vaguely known his father since the late 1970s. The past few years we have been studying together in a Talmud study group that convenes every Saturday afternoon.He always comes well prepared, and he never smiles.
Dani C. was killed fighting terrorists in 2002.
Facing the wall was like following an inverted cycle of life, from young men killed before I was born all the way to young men whose parents are my friends. The library, however, is in a building used only by teenagers, who don’t even yet know there is a cycle of life. Somehow, they understand the need to relate to these young men, some of whom were contemporaries of their grandfathers. So in the middle of a building run wholly by teenagers is a dignified section dedicated to young men only marginally older, who never grew old.
70 years ago, 50, even merely 30 years ago, youth movements played a significant role in the lives of Israeli teenagers. Somewhere along the way, perhaps in the 1980s or 1990s, most of them disappeared. Here and there you can still find remnants of the phenomenon, but they’re rather few and far between. The single exception of any significance, so far as I can tell, is the Bnei Akiva youth movement of the national religious strand of Israeli society – roughly the Israeli counterpart of Modern Orthodoxy in the US.
.
A couple of weeks ago I chanced by the building that houses the “Central Jerusalem” branch of the movement, one of the larger branches in the country. When I was a teenager the branch – called “Sneef Merkaz,” or simply the “Sneef” – was downtown, at least half an hour away; the more gung ho of us easily spent more time in the sneef than at home between the ages of 8-18. (I wasn’t gung ho). About the time we enlisted, it moved to a spanking new building near where most of us lived, and dozens of us used it as our meeting point Saturday mornings whenever we got home for a weekend. We would converge there for Shabbat morning services, and afterward we’d hang out for half an hour or more, exchanging yarns and tall tales, and hoping the girls were noticing. Though, truth be told, putting on the airs of combat soldiers in front of the girls wasn’t all that useful, since essentially all the guys were in, and it was hard to appear special. We also didn’t get home often enough to create continuity. But we did keep updated about all the other guys: who’s in which course, who’s been sent where, and so on.I don’t think I’ve been in there for something like 30 years, though I’ve gone by it thousands of times. One morning a week or so ago, as I walked by, the gate was open and no one was there, so on the spur of the moment I went in.
Decades of teenagers haven’t added to its appearance. None of the doors seemed to close. The walls were covered with colorful murals that must have been an inch deep; if someone could figure out how to remove paint layer by layer it could be a fascinating exercise. It looked just like you’d expect a building to look where nobody’s mother has come to check on the maintenance in living memory: ramshackle, worn, chaotic, but also comfy in a way that would appeal to kids in “their own place”. It has a “lived in” look.
At the end of the corridor there’s a stairwell. I remembered that on the second floor there used to be a reading room dedicated to our friend Zvika, who was killed in a hiking accident in the Judean desert when we were 16; on the wall there was a large and dramatic picture taken from the top of a high cliff and in its corner, as if gazing out over the wide vista, a portrait of Zvika. So I went up to see what had happened to the room.
Zvika’s picture is still there. Apparently the kids, none of whom could possibly have any memory of anything about him, have a healthy respect for commemoration. Then I noticed the far end of the room, where the entire wall was covered with pictures of young men, and a long shelf offered a series of publications – books, pamphlets, albums. I didn’t remember this exhibition, and I approached it with a queasy feeling that turned into something bordering on awe. In this house of teenagers with a memory span that can’t exceed 15 years, someone had collected pictures, information, and publications about 60 years of fallen soldiers who had been active at the Sneef when they were of that age. There were more than 30 pictures, the earliest were of two young men killed in 1948.
I followed the pictures. Here’s a young paratrooper who was killed a few months before I was born. Here’s one killed in the early 1960s, a decade remembered as peaceful. Meir R. was killed in 1968. I came to know his father about that time when we moved into this neighborhood. Every year he would lead our congregation during the Ne’ilah service at the end of Yom Kippur, the single most powerful service in the entire year. He never managed to get through the service without weeping, not in all the years I heard him, and no doubt in the many years thereafter until his death, a little old man walking the streets of Jerusalem with his battered leather briefcase. I’d never seen a picture of his son: he was a strikingly handsome young man.
Yakov F. was killed in the summer of 1970, a week before the Roger’s Plan brought the end of the War of Attrition between Israel and Egypt. I hadn’t known him, but I remember how that week our madrich – councilor – told us that maybe Yakov would be the last soldier killed.
Sariel was killed on the Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur war. He was two or three years older than I, his sister was in my sister’s class. Moshe T. was killed a few weeks later, on the last day of that war. He had been our madrich, and a few months before the war he had married Yaffa, also one of our staff. I remembered them as two exceptionally good looking people; the picture on the wall confirms this.
Moshe K. was a paratrooper, killed a few months after the Yom Kippur war. He was Yaffa’s little brother, so she lost a husband and a brother within six months. The synagogue I go to has a mantle on its podium donated by their parents in Moshe’s memory; his mother passed away last year.
Avi Greenwald was a friend of mine from the moment I joined his school in 6th grade. I wrote about him briefly in Right to Exist. Ram M. was the younger brother of one of my best friends; he used to hang out with us sometimes, and although he was younger than us we welcomed him into the circle for being such a serious kid. Avi and Ram were both killed in 1982 in Lebanon.
Boaz was killed in 1988. Shlomo C. was killed in 1989. I remember his face, but don’t think I knew him.
Here's a picture of Noam, killed in 1992. I taught him history when he was in high school; he was one of those students who fit into the background at school, and then excelled and stood out once they reached the army. He was a highly respected young officer; on occasion I still hear people talking about him with admiration and regret.
Aviad was killed in 2001. I've vaguely known his father since the late 1970s. The past few years we have been studying together in a Talmud study group that convenes every Saturday afternoon.He always comes well prepared, and he never smiles.
Dani C. was killed fighting terrorists in 2002.
Facing the wall was like following an inverted cycle of life, from young men killed before I was born all the way to young men whose parents are my friends. The library, however, is in a building used only by teenagers, who don’t even yet know there is a cycle of life. Somehow, they understand the need to relate to these young men, some of whom were contemporaries of their grandfathers. So in the middle of a building run wholly by teenagers is a dignified section dedicated to young men only marginally older, who never grew old.
Sunday, April 20, 2014
Re-learning to Read
In recent months I've been teaching myself to read - or perhaps, re-teaching, since I used to know but forgot. By reading I don't mean the technical ability to recognize letters and the sounds they represent, and thereby to construct conversations, ideas, or whatever nonsense people write. That ability I never lost. The one I did, however, was the ability to take a book and sit and read it, page after page, perhaps even hour after hour. That art I lost sometime during the past decade or two, as I put all my reading abilities into reading stuff on glass screens, and then reading shorter stuff on smaller glass screens, and then skimming over stuff on other glass screens.
Blogs, say. Or Tweets. At least I never started using Facebook.
So it hasn't been easy, re-learning what I used to know. Back in the Old Times I used to read all the time, everywhere. I'd take two books onto an airplane, and six or eight of them to the first week of reserve duty. I would stand in lines in official ministries, reading. Buses? Reading. banks? Reading. I often read three or four books simultaneously. And then I lost the ability, and for a while didn't even notice. Then I did notice but brushed it aside. Until eventually I realized that reading from glass screens - unless perhaps it be Kindle type screens which I never tried - was a form of making oneself dumb. True, just about everyone else was doing the same, but that didn't mean I wasn't getting dumber, even if it was a communal project.
So I tried to reverse the tide. It wasn't easy. For a while it was a physical effort. But eventually the effort began paying dividends, as efforts often do. Recently it has even been getting easier, and of course, worthier.
So here's a quick list of some books I've read recently:
The Book Thief
by Markus Zusak. I don't read enough literature to do literary criticism, but this book about a girl in Nazi Germany wasn't what I'd expected. It was, however, a fine read, and I sort of didn't put it down until I'd finished it.
Paul Preston's The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution, and Revenge (Revised and Expanded Edition)
was recommended to me by my son who is currently working in Spain for an international technology company. I hadn't actually ever read a systematic description of the Spanish Civil War, and this book taught me that it had been much worse than I had been led to think ("the pilot project of WW2), and Franco was considerably more ghastly than I'd thought, in spite of the fact that during WW2 he enabled safe haven to many of the Jews who managed to cross over from France.
Bill Bryson actually convinced me that my secret aspiration to walk the Appalachian Trail from end to end is probably not worth the considerable effort (compounded by the fact that I live more than 6,000 miles away). Though I do hope to do additional sections of it to the few I've already done. Another really fun book: A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail
.
Then I read Paul Berman's Power and the Idealists: Or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer, and its Aftermath
. This is the third or fourth of Berman's books I've read. His shtick is that he's an old 68er who has grown up, but is still attached to the idealism that fuelled his young political passions. It's an interesting and worthy perspective, especially the grown up parts of it, though I admit that I weary, slowly, of his built-in and underlying assumption that one needs those roots in the Left to be a compassionate person.
And then I read Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West - but that's a book which deserves its own post. Someday.
Blogs, say. Or Tweets. At least I never started using Facebook.
So it hasn't been easy, re-learning what I used to know. Back in the Old Times I used to read all the time, everywhere. I'd take two books onto an airplane, and six or eight of them to the first week of reserve duty. I would stand in lines in official ministries, reading. Buses? Reading. banks? Reading. I often read three or four books simultaneously. And then I lost the ability, and for a while didn't even notice. Then I did notice but brushed it aside. Until eventually I realized that reading from glass screens - unless perhaps it be Kindle type screens which I never tried - was a form of making oneself dumb. True, just about everyone else was doing the same, but that didn't mean I wasn't getting dumber, even if it was a communal project.
So I tried to reverse the tide. It wasn't easy. For a while it was a physical effort. But eventually the effort began paying dividends, as efforts often do. Recently it has even been getting easier, and of course, worthier.
So here's a quick list of some books I've read recently:
The Book Thief
by Markus Zusak. I don't read enough literature to do literary criticism, but this book about a girl in Nazi Germany wasn't what I'd expected. It was, however, a fine read, and I sort of didn't put it down until I'd finished it.Paul Preston's The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution, and Revenge (Revised and Expanded Edition)
was recommended to me by my son who is currently working in Spain for an international technology company. I hadn't actually ever read a systematic description of the Spanish Civil War, and this book taught me that it had been much worse than I had been led to think ("the pilot project of WW2), and Franco was considerably more ghastly than I'd thought, in spite of the fact that during WW2 he enabled safe haven to many of the Jews who managed to cross over from France.Bill Bryson actually convinced me that my secret aspiration to walk the Appalachian Trail from end to end is probably not worth the considerable effort (compounded by the fact that I live more than 6,000 miles away). Though I do hope to do additional sections of it to the few I've already done. Another really fun book: A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail
.Then I read Paul Berman's Power and the Idealists: Or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer, and its Aftermath
. This is the third or fourth of Berman's books I've read. His shtick is that he's an old 68er who has grown up, but is still attached to the idealism that fuelled his young political passions. It's an interesting and worthy perspective, especially the grown up parts of it, though I admit that I weary, slowly, of his built-in and underlying assumption that one needs those roots in the Left to be a compassionate person.And then I read Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West
- but that's a book which deserves its own post. Someday.
Monday, April 14, 2014
Freedom isn't Free: A Sad Rumination on the Eve of Pessach
In the 1950s the CIA put a pile of time and money into disseminating Boris Pasternak's novel Dr. Zhivago in the Soviet Union. The assumption apparently was that words can be a powerful weapon, if used well - and, of course, if deployed as one weapon among many against the enemy. Of course, in those days the concept of enemy was different than it is today.
A common meaning of the word "enemy" today is anything that causes distress to nice folks like us. We haven't yet reached the middle of April this year, and here's a collection of people who've been silenced since the beginning of the month for fear their words might hurt someone:
76-year-old Barbara Driver used an unfortunate phrase while making a political point in her local municipal council, which ended her career.
Cambridge University Press, an august institution which has been disseminating ideas for centuries, nixed the publication of a book which might have offended Vladimir Putin. (Honestly).
Mozila, the company which produces the web-browser you may be using as you read this, fired its CEO because back in 2008 he donated money to a political campaign in California which went on to win, but which has since been overturned by a court; the hapless CEO had the temerity to hold on to his belief that same-sex marriage is not a good thing. (To his credit, same-sex activist Andrew Sullivan castigated the lunacy of the decision).
Brandeis University disinvited Ayaan Hisi Aly from speaking on campus because it was expected her appearance might offend some folks who disagree with her politics. (An abridged version of her talk is online here, and any decent person should read it no-matter what their political opinion, simply to demonstrate their decency).
I have no doubt there are other recent examples I've missed. Sadly, Voltaire's sentiment about dying in defense of opinions he disagreed with to ensure freedom of expression is long since done with. In the liberal democracies which would never have been invented were it not for his ideas, it is hardly conceivable that citizens would die for anything; freedom of expression and thus freedom of thought has been canceled so as not to hurt anyone's feelings, should their thoughts turn out to be hurtful to someone. Hurt feelings, we are to accept, are the worst thing that can happen to a person.
(Voltaire, by the way, was a committed hater of Jews; he used his distaste to castigate the powerful Church of his day in the roundabout manner of bashing the Jews. Had he lived in the 21st century he would have been drummed out of town. Fortunately, he lived in 18th-century France, so that worked out). (Then again, hurting the feeling of Jews is actually rather acceptable, even in 2014: an exception to the rule).
Steven Pinker writes about this onslaught of gentleness in his magisterial The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
. He puts it into the context of the end of violence, so that while it's a bit silly, it's also basically a fine thing. The problem is, of course, that the world isn't that gentle a place yet, nor are large swathes of it obviously on their way. This was the gist of my review of Pinker's book. The murderers in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, CAR, Nigeria and so on, don't live in a world where anyone cares a whit about anyone's feelings.
Nor does Putin. Or Khamenai and his sidekicks. Assad. Nor any of their henchmen and, truth be told, any of their enemies. None of them would recognize a hurtful sentiment if they saw it in full daylight, nor are any of them likely to fathom the sentiment. Voltaire would recognize their world, though.
The problem with ending free speech so as not to offend is that it portends the end of fee thought. Having lived for decades in an imaginary world where people forbid themselves hurtful thoughts, they have now lost the ability to see the world as others do, to recognize real enemies, and to deploy weapons that might impress those enemies. And so, having trained themselves not to be hurtful, the intellectual leaders of the free world and the political ones too have lost the concept of enemy. Sadly, their enemies haven't.
Back in the 1950s the CIA - even the CIA - knew the importance of freedom of thought.
A common meaning of the word "enemy" today is anything that causes distress to nice folks like us. We haven't yet reached the middle of April this year, and here's a collection of people who've been silenced since the beginning of the month for fear their words might hurt someone:
76-year-old Barbara Driver used an unfortunate phrase while making a political point in her local municipal council, which ended her career.
Cambridge University Press, an august institution which has been disseminating ideas for centuries, nixed the publication of a book which might have offended Vladimir Putin. (Honestly).
Mozila, the company which produces the web-browser you may be using as you read this, fired its CEO because back in 2008 he donated money to a political campaign in California which went on to win, but which has since been overturned by a court; the hapless CEO had the temerity to hold on to his belief that same-sex marriage is not a good thing. (To his credit, same-sex activist Andrew Sullivan castigated the lunacy of the decision).
Brandeis University disinvited Ayaan Hisi Aly from speaking on campus because it was expected her appearance might offend some folks who disagree with her politics. (An abridged version of her talk is online here, and any decent person should read it no-matter what their political opinion, simply to demonstrate their decency).
I have no doubt there are other recent examples I've missed. Sadly, Voltaire's sentiment about dying in defense of opinions he disagreed with to ensure freedom of expression is long since done with. In the liberal democracies which would never have been invented were it not for his ideas, it is hardly conceivable that citizens would die for anything; freedom of expression and thus freedom of thought has been canceled so as not to hurt anyone's feelings, should their thoughts turn out to be hurtful to someone. Hurt feelings, we are to accept, are the worst thing that can happen to a person.
(Voltaire, by the way, was a committed hater of Jews; he used his distaste to castigate the powerful Church of his day in the roundabout manner of bashing the Jews. Had he lived in the 21st century he would have been drummed out of town. Fortunately, he lived in 18th-century France, so that worked out). (Then again, hurting the feeling of Jews is actually rather acceptable, even in 2014: an exception to the rule).
Steven Pinker writes about this onslaught of gentleness in his magisterial The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
. He puts it into the context of the end of violence, so that while it's a bit silly, it's also basically a fine thing. The problem is, of course, that the world isn't that gentle a place yet, nor are large swathes of it obviously on their way. This was the gist of my review of Pinker's book. The murderers in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, CAR, Nigeria and so on, don't live in a world where anyone cares a whit about anyone's feelings.Nor does Putin. Or Khamenai and his sidekicks. Assad. Nor any of their henchmen and, truth be told, any of their enemies. None of them would recognize a hurtful sentiment if they saw it in full daylight, nor are any of them likely to fathom the sentiment. Voltaire would recognize their world, though.
The problem with ending free speech so as not to offend is that it portends the end of fee thought. Having lived for decades in an imaginary world where people forbid themselves hurtful thoughts, they have now lost the ability to see the world as others do, to recognize real enemies, and to deploy weapons that might impress those enemies. And so, having trained themselves not to be hurtful, the intellectual leaders of the free world and the political ones too have lost the concept of enemy. Sadly, their enemies haven't.
Back in the 1950s the CIA - even the CIA - knew the importance of freedom of thought.
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