How Air Berlin consciously, purposefully and cynically screwed its passengers - three times in a row

About a month ago I apologized to my readers for branching off into a bit of consumerism, and told how Air Berlin had intentionally lost the luggage of a few hundred passengers. Since then the story has gotten worse, so I'm posting a quick summary.

On July 5th 2015 Air Berlin sent off flight  AB3546  from Tegel airport in Berlin to Reykjavik in Iceland with about 250 passengers, and perhaps 50 pieces of luggage. This was not an oversight, nor the accidental misdirecting of a suitcase. You can't misplace 200 pieces of luggage without noticing what you're doing. Later, in Reykjavik, someone told us Air Berlin preferred some other cargo over our luggage. I don't know if this is true, but it seems plausible. Someone at Tegel decided that Air Berlin had more to gain by harming its passengers than by treating them as they expected when they bought their tickets.

So that was the first time Air Berlin  purposefully screwed us.

We spent the next 12 days in Iceland, having a wonderful time hiking in the mountains. Iceland really is spectacular!

Some time soon I'll post on Iceland and JRR Tolkien, but not today.

During our entire time in Iceland, Air Berlin never made any attempt to contact us, much less offer information about what we might expect. The night of the flight they uttered nary a word, though of course they knew even before taking off that they were about to inflict harm on us. We arrived in Reykjavik at about 3am, and were left to figure out on our own what was going on; there was no Air Berlin representative in sight. The next morning we had to decide if and what to purchase to replace or not replace the lost luggage. No word from Air Berlin. Actually, we never managed to be in contact with an Air Berlin representative throughout our entire stay. Any updates and eventual retrieval of our luggage was all organized by the The Icelandic tourist company giving us logistic support for our hike. (Icelandic Mountain Guides, if you're interested. They were excellent. The diametric opposite of Air Berlin). So that was the second time Air Berlin harmed us.

Our luggage trickled in over the next 12 days. The first pieces reached our group on Friday, on the 5th day after the flight; mine arrived on the following Wednesday, just as we were on our way back to the airport to fly out of Iceland.

Since returning home we've all lodged complaints on the Air Berlin website. Interestingly, this website does not dwell on the possibility that the airline sometimes purposefully harms its passengers.  Air Berlin's responses to our claims are exactly what you'd expect of a company which holds its clients in contempt. Most of us have been offered small rebates the next time we fly with Air Berlin! As if any of us ever will! The sums seem to be totally random, except that they're all small. One or two of us got other offers, equally unacceptable. I was initially told to re-submit my claim, at a section of their website which refused to accept the claim.

So the third unacceptable treatment Air Berlin has meted out is its cynical ignoring of us, and its intentional disregard of all our attempts to obtain some sort of reimbursement for the costs we incurred through their direct actions. Clearly someone in Air Berlin has thought about the matter and decided that they're a big company, and we're small individuals, and that's simply a fact. Big companies can aford to despise small individuals secure in the knowledge that they'll get away with it.

And the source of their smug impunity? It's the fact they've done it before. In 2013 they lost all the luggage of an entire flight, didn't own up, disdainfully screwed the passengers, and lived to tell the tale. A mere two years later all the members of our group blithely bought tickets on an Air Berlin flight without any inkling how atrocious the airline is. Since July 5th lots of other folks have bought Air Berlin tickets, ignorant of the pernicious record of this airline. So why should Air Berlin give a hoot how much damage they inflicted on us?

Unless of course it eventually occurs to the leaders of Air Berlin that one nasty story, and another, and another, and another, will eventually dent their reputation and begin to have a cost. Perhaps even a higher cost than reimbursing their passengers in a fair manner.

Legalese postscript: There's a thing called the Montreal Convention which details what an Airline such as Air Berlin owes its passengers when it causes them harm. Article 22 details what happens when luggage is detained. Paragraph 5 is particularly interesting, and unambiguously describes the behavior of Air Berlin in our case:

The foregoing provisions of paragraphs 1 and 2 of this Article shall not apply if it is proved that the damage resulted from an act or omission of the carrier, its servants or agents, done with intent to cause damage or recklessly and with knowledge that damage would probably result; provided that, in the case of such act or omission of a servant or agent, it is also proved that such servant or agent was acting within the scope of its employment.

Interestingly, if you look long enough you'll find a document on the Air Berlin website which rather grudgingly admits (in passing, on page 15) that Air Berlin is, actually, aware of the Montreal Convention.

What have we learned from this? That NO ONE SHOULD EVER EVER FLY AIR BERLIN!

Pass it on.

Addendum: Here's a story by some other fellow who's really really angry at Air Berlin.

Never fly with Air Berlin

I don't generally post about consumer issues, but there's always a first time.

Last night we (a group of 14) flew from Berlin to Iceland with Air Berlin. We now know that the airline simply refrained from loading our luggage, not that they said anything about it. They left us to stand for an hour at the baggage claim area along with dozens of other passengers to eventually figure it out.

Today there was no-one to talk to. No representative, no phone number to call, no office where somebody will tell tall tales. Simply nothing. An email I sent they responded to with a standard form. Will our kit ever arrive, in Iceland or back home? Will we be reimbursed in any way? Can we expect someday, even if only weeks from now, to see the personal items in those bags? Your guess is as good as mine. Air Berlin, at any rate, ain't sayin.

Never fly Air Berlin.

How Israel avoided its Grexit moment

30 years ago today, on June 30th 1985, Prime Minister Shimon Peres convened the Cabinet for a dramatic meeting. Israel had been living with monthly double-digit inflation for a number of years; now, less noticed by the populace but more dangerous, the money had run out. Within days the economy was expected to collapse. It was essentially the last possible moment to avert catastrophe. For weeks Labor PM Peres, and Likud Finance Minster Yitzchak Modai, had been overseeing the formulation of a complex package of measures, some of them quite harsh and most of them politically explosive or worse, and now the Cabinet was called to adopt them.

The meeting went on, almost unbroken, for 20 hours until the early morning of July 1st, at which point the ministers, most of them visibly exhausted, narrowly voted to adopt the plan.

On the anniversary of the event the Israel State Archives has declassified and published the transcript of the meeting (300-some pages). We have also put online recordings of some of the meeting, so you can hear the deliberations, not only read them. And we've asked two economic historians to write their impressions of the documents. If you know Hebrew it's worth your time to peruse some of this.

I've put all the links here.

Henryk Gorecki, Catholic

I don't write much on this blog anymore; when I do it tends to be about impersonal matters. Israel, books, stuff. This post is very personal, but it's important enough for to put somewhere.

Earlier today I stumbled upon a Youtube link to Henryk Gorecki's Symphony nr. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs).



It is overpowering. Overwhelming.

While I think I've encountered parts of it in the past, this was the first time I ever listened to it. Now that I'm consciously aware of it, if it's ever played at a Jerusalem theater I won't go. Who could sit in a hall full of people and publicly listen to such a piece of music?  The danger of losing emotional control in the presence of all those strangers would be too great.

So I did a spot of googling, and came upon this website. And on the website I found this picture:

Where I grew up, Polish people were suspect of having been nasty to Jews. Crucifixes were not suspect, they were known with certainty to have been wielded with fury by pogromists or with hatred by inquisitionists. Poles with crucifixes were, at best, to be avoided.

That was half a century ago, but childhood rumours are generally more powerful and rooted than much of what we pick up later.

Yet listening to that soul-arresting music, looking at the Pole sitting in his room full of Catholicism was profoundly comforting. There's a connection between his religion and his soul and his ability to create music that touches my soul. In a world awash in rampant soulless secularism, arrogant ignorance, rabid relativism and all-conquering vacuity, here's a man who sat under a wall of crucifixes and achieved transcendent beauty which touches eternity.

Update: It turns out that Gorecki explicitly tied his symphony to the Polish history of the 20th century in general, but also to Auschwitz in particular; and that the three sorrowful songs are between a mother and her son and daughter, perishing in the maelstrom. Here's a recording of the symphony interspersed with takes of Gorecki himself, wearing a heavy homey sweater.

On completing Creation: on the 48th anniversary of liberating Jerusalem

It's the evening of 28th of Iyar, the Hebrew date of the Battle of Jerusalem in June 1967 on which the IDF captured the Old City of Jerusalem from the Jordanians (June 7th 1967).

In my study of the Bible I recently passed the chapters in the Book of Kings relating the story of King Solomon, and how he built the (first) Temple in Jerusalem. After a long and detailed description of the construction, and just before telling about Solomon's prayer to God upon opening the Temple, there's one of those many verses which contain more in the original Hebrew than in the translations: ותשלם כל המלאכה, Vatishlam kol hamelacha, When all the work was finished. (Kings 1 chapter 7 verse 49). The modern Daat Mikrah interpretation of the Bible points out the relationship between the word Vatishlam and shalem - became complete and complete, and the name Shlomo (the original of Solomon). It then brings an interesting Tana'itic comment, according to which it was not the construction of the Temple which was completed, but ALL the work. By completing the construction of the Temple, Shomo had completed the divine project of creation.

Historian that I am, I found this commentary particularly poignant. The Tanaim lived after the destruction not only of Solomon's Temple, but also after the destruction of the 2nd one; actually, they lived shortly after that second destruction, and in the world created by the wars against the Romans. Their world was anything but complete. Yet there it is, a theological statement that completion of the construction of Solomon's Temple had completed Creation.

This interpretation came to mind when I then read Yossie Klein Halevi's
Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation. Klein Halevi tells the story of the group of young reserve paratroopers who fought in Jerusalem in June 1967, and were the first to reach the Temple Mount and then the Kotel, the Western Wall. In a typical Israeli twist, it turns out that the small group of a few hundred young men included figures that were to be household names in Israel for decades, but were spread all over the map. Left-wing kibbutzniks such as Arik Achmon and Avital Geva, who grew up to be a founder of Israel's free-market economy and a kibbutznik artist, and both members of the peace camp; Yoel Bin Nun, Hanan Porat and Yisrael Harel, three very different leaders of the settler movement, Udi Adiv, a kibbutznik who spent years in an Israeli jail after being convicted of spying for Syria, and Meir Ariel, a maverick songwriter who fit into no-one's pigeonhole at any time until his death in 1999.

Following Yoel Bin Nun onto the Temple Mount on that historic morning after a night of battle, Klein Halevi tells how the event seemed to be the end of history, the culmination of Jewish history. As close as one can imagine to a Vatishlam kol hamelacha moment. Yet the book itself was published in 2013, and most of it is a recounting of the complications the young men lived through since that historic moment. If the morning of June 7th 1967 could have seemed like the happy ending to Jewish history, it certainly doesn't look like it today, 48 years later. History continues with a vengeance.

Unless you take the perspective of those post-destruction Tanaim looking back 1,200 years, not a mere 48.

Mishehu Pa'am, Someone Once

In the coming months you'll be hearing even more than previously about nationalist, chauvinist, nigh-fascist and of course extreme far-right Israel and its ghastly government and policies. Since I'm forbidden to deal with overtly poitical issues, I won't be required to pontificate about any or it. To be honest, I don't even expect to spend much time listening to the cacaphony, nor worrying about it. I'm too busy, at work and in life, and am slowly weaning myself from decades of political junkie-ism. It's not that I no longer care, but I'm learning to control my need for a permanent stream of poitical data. Better to wait a bit and think, rather than inbibe limitless quantities.

(Followers of my Twitter account will have noticed that I'm much less active than previously. About two months ago I experimentally deleted it from by mobile phone, and have never looked back.)

So here's an installment in the Shirim Ivri'im thread that was once popular on this blog. (Explanation here and here). I present it because it's an interesting shir, but mostly because it's from one of the many parts of Israeli life which aren't about the stuff you get from the media.

Ivri Lider Is a talented and popular writer and preformer of Hebrew songs. Here's his website. The piece is called Mishehu Pa'am, Someone once. It has nine stanzas, eight of which begin with the line Mishehu pa'am ahav oti kacha, which seems a straightforward sentence until you look closely. It means someone once loved me this way. Or perhaps loved me as I am. Or loved me in the way I'm about to tell. Or even, possibly, someone once loved me in spite of (our difference in age, or our incompatability, or the sheer recklesness of it all, or...)

Not a bad trick, to have more than seven or eight possible meanings to a three-word half-sentence. Upon reflection, even the first unequivoal two words, Mishehu paam, aren't that unequivocal. They mean a man once loved me, a woman (the gender formultion is clear). Or do they? Lider is unabashed about his homosexuality, and his voice is a bit feminine. So who is he really talking about?

The first seven stanzas describe the evolving relationship they once had, in which the un-named Someone pursued Me intensely and in spite of all obstacles, and it was nice, and powerful, and wonderful, and complicated, and painful. The eighth stanza says "so somone once left me kacha and got on a plane and went to live his full life elsewhere". Which brings us to the final, subdued and sad stanza, about someone who once loved me kacha and played me Mozart from old records, but I wasn't listening to the music...

Now watch the official Youtube version. It has been watched two and a half million times, mostly by Hebrew spearkers I assume, so the number is all the more impressive, though it really does speak for itself in a universal language. And remind yourself how silly those media reports are, how narrow-minded and blinkered.

The grandchildren of '73

Yom Hazikaron, Memorial Day for more than 23,000 Israelis killed in the wars. One of the most meaningful days of the year. A central part of it is listening to hours of Shirim Ivri'im in minor keys which flood all the media channels.

One of the most important shirim (songs is an inadequate translation) is "The Children of '73". It is sung by a group of soldiers who were conceived in the dark months after the Yom Kippur War ("the winter of '73") to shellshocked fathers and relieved mothers clinging to each other in mourning. You promised us no more wars, sing the soldiers, and you promised us peace. You promised we'd not need to be soldiers. Well, we're young men and women ourselves now, and we're soldiers, and you needn't worry. We're strong, and we can shoulder the burden.




Do the maths. Those soldiers concieved in the winter of '73 are the parents of today's soldiers. The ones who were killed in last year's war.

This is what a Jewish state can be for

Various folks have been kvetching recently about the growing incompatibility of nice American Jews and perhaps less-nice Israeli voters. Kvetching is a time-honored Jewish pastime, and you wouldn't want to deprive anyone of its pleasures.

Earlier today I participated, mostly as an observer, in a discussion about policy and the implementation of it in an (Israeli) government agency. Those present were disagreeing about technology, change, adaptation of the bureaucracy and the bureaucrats to new conditions, rate of change, hierarchies and decision making, consultation with stakeholders and participants... the works. Organizational consultants make a fine living from this sort of stuff.

Except that at one point the top bureaucrat present branched off into a discussion of Biblical exegesis. When Moses headed off into the desert, did he ask the Israelites if they liked the idea? One of the people disagreeing with him about the present day issue also disagreed about his interpretation of Exodus, but he shot down her interpretation, then someone else suggested a different reading.

After four or five minutes they all trooped back to the 21st century and the desirability  of using machine intelligence in the processing of large bodes of data.

There are many reasons why the Jews need a state, but this, to my mind, is one of the top ones. That Hebrew-speaking secular officials use their cultural heritage as it should be used: as part of everyday life.

Tarek Abu Hamed appointed to a senior position

Tarek Abu Hamed was appointed today to the position of Deputy Chief Scientist in the Ministry of Science. This is big news. Not gigantic, not an historic event to be recorded in the annals of the Levant, but significant nonetheless. In order to understand why, I need to tell a bit about Israel's Civil Service.

The Civil Service is a formidable place. Over the years it has acquired layers of complexity far beyond what non-civil servants recognize, making it much harder than necessary to get things done. Cabinet ministers, for example, usually have only very little long-lasting influence. They're not in the system long enough to figure it out, and even when they're experienced operators the system is geared to slow them down and limit their ability to do things. (There are some exceptions). The folks who have real power are the ones who are high in the system, but not so high they'll be moved within a year or three. The ones who are high enough to be in regular contact with many others of their general rank, as well as with the really top figures when they have the need.

The job Dr. Abu Hamed has just landed, therefore, is potentially a powerful behind-the-scenes mover, in a corner of the bureaucracy which itself has real significance: the allocation of funds and apportioning of government support in developing scientific and technological programs. Not anything to be sniffy about.

Dr. Abu Hamed is Arab, as his name indicates, but that's not the surprising part. There are higher ranking Arab civil servants, including some in positions which require high security clearance. The thing about Dr. Abu Hamed is that he's not an Israeli citizen. He's a Palestinian of East Jerusalem, a permanent resident by legal status, but not a citizen. Yet look what job he has just won.

Noteworthy. I certainly wish him the best.

The convoluted process of electing an Israeli government

Being a civil servant I'm not allowed publicly to express political opinions. But I don't see why that should stop me from explaining how the political process happens. So, just a few hours before voting begins, here goes:

All citizens from the age of 18 can vote. Each citizen has one vote, which is cast for a party list. Not for an individual. There's no mandatory process to construct the list. It used to be that each party appointed a team of power-brokers who met in a smoke-filled room, and a list emerged from the room. In the 1980s some parties began experimenting with ways to appear more receptive to public opinion or at least to aspire to some sort of transparency, and they replaced the Vaada hamesaderet, the organizing committee, with elections in a large central committee, or eventually even with a primary election by all card-carrying party members. Nowadays some parties have primary elections (Likud and Labor, Meretz and Beit Yehudi), others have rabbis who choose for them (the various ultra-orthodox parties), lots of backroom deals (the Arab list, I think), or simply powerful leaders who decide between their two ears (Lapid, Liberman, Kahlon, Livni).

The lists are submitted to the Central Election Committee a month or six weeks before the elections, and then locked until the next election. If at any point from then on someone drops out for whatever reason - boredom, say, or death - they're replaced by the top candidate from the list who is not yet in the Knesset. This means there are no by-elections or special appointments to the Knesset. In the past there have been cases of MKs who resigned days before the elections and were thus replaced for those remaining days; in this election Uri Orbach passed away a few days after the lists were submitted, and everyone below him (he was 5th in Bayit Yehudi) moved up one notch.

This system means MKs are responsible to various constituents or political strongmen, but not directly to voters in a national election.

There are 120 seats in the Knesset. Until not long ago the threshold for entering the Knesset was 1% of the votes, which means not much more than the 1/120th required in any case. In recent elections the threshold has been rising (well, the Knesset keeps passing laws to raise it, it doesn't happen of its own accord), and this time it stands at 3.25%, which means a list must have enough votes to garner four seats, or else it doesn't enter the Knesset and all its votes are regarded as disqualified. The first result of this change is that the three Arab lists, none of which were certain they'd pass the threshold on their own, created a joint list which may end up the third largest party.

The actual act of voting is done by inserting a small rectangular piece of paper into a blank envelope. There are no hanging chads in Israeli elections. The funny thing about these ballots is that each of them bears a letter or combinatoin of letters which are not the name of their party. This goes back to the early years of the state, when large numbers of new immigrants couldn't be counted on to be able to read the names of parties in Hebrew. This was resolved by allocating a letter to each party. By an astonishing coincidence the top political party of the day, Ben Gurion's Mapai, ended up with the letter A (aleph). The National religious party got B (bet), the ultra-orthdox got C (gimel) and so on. There have since been about 1,456 permutations of parties, and today the only party which still has its original latter is the Gimel party, which has however changed its name from Agudat Yisrael to Yahadut Hatorah (more than once, I think). The distant descendant of Mapai, which in this election calls itself the Zionist Camp, somehow acquired the letters aleph-mem-tav back in the 1960s; since these letters spell the word Emet, Truth, the party changes its name just about each electoral cycle but always holds on to its letters. A matter of superstition, perhaps.

The polls are open from 7am to 10pm, tho in cases where people arrived before 10pm the voting sometimes goes on for another bit. At 10pm sharp the various TV stations publish their exit polls, based on something like 25 voting stations of thousands. These exit polls are rarely precise, and tend to differ from each other by one or three seats, and also from what will eventually be the official results. This makes for fine and nail-biting drama for many hours into the night, but doesn't effect the real results.

The bulk of the ballots are counted by early next morning. There are still no final results, however, since the soldiers of the IDF, many tens of thousands of them, have voted on their bases in what are called double envelopes, because they're double. Each anonymous vote goes into a blank envelope. Each envelope then goes into a second envelope on which the soldier writes his or her full name and ID number. These envelopes are all sent to the Knesset, where large teams of folks check each name against the names of people who voted in the polling stations. Having identified the voter and ascertained they didn't vote twice the outer envelopes are discarded and the real envelopes then sent to a different table where they're counted. This takes a few days, so the final results are unknown. Even then there can be last-moment changes, since there are elaborate mechanisms to divide the final portions of MK seats which are left hanging - say, between a party with 5.6 seats and another one with 38.4. The larger party will probably get the entire seat, but not always. Don't ask.

When results are close it can happen that the outcome of the election remains hanging for almost a week after polling day. Which isn't as bad as it sounds, since in any case elections are merely a milestone along the road to creating a new government, not a final outcome.

Once the official results are in, and then another few days pass for the central election committee to prepare a letter to the president containing the information everyone already knows, the next stage of the process can begin.

In theory, the president chooses an MK - any one of the 120 new MKs - and tasks him or her (should I say "it"?) with creating a government which will receive 61 votes of support from the 120-member Knesset. If only it were remotely so simple!

No party has ever won 61 seats, so every Israeli government ever has been a coalition. (And this will most likely remain so for the next few centuries, opinionated and argumentative Jews being opinionated and argumentative Jews). The thing is, it used to be a mildly predictictable coalition of three parties, say, or four. These days it's rather more challenging. I'll write about the present alignments in a follow-up post; here I'm simply describing the mechanism.

The president invites each party in the Knesset to send him a delegation which will recommend whom he should task with building a coalition. Often the outcome of these deliberations is clear in advance, when there's a large party and a reasonably plausible set of parties to build a coalition from. Sometimes this isn't the case. Two elections ago Zipi Livni "won" the elections with 28 seats, but Netanyahu, having "lost" with 27 seats, set up a coalition and ruled because he had more potential partners, and they recommended him to President Peres.

This time all polls suggest this stage will be nightmarish. Which means the results of the elections may prove to be no more than general guidelines, or vague recommendations; the real result will be hammered out much later.

Once the president (his name has recently changed from Peres to Rivlin) tasks someone with building a coalition, that someone has about 5 weeks to get the job done. This ensures that it won't happen in less than five weeks: what politician would agree to finalize such fun negotiations before the end of the allotted time?

Having convinced at least 61 MKs to support him, the fellow goes to the Knesset, presents his new cabinet and is voted in, thereby becoming Prime Minister. All the while until then the previous one is still on the job. There was one case in the late 1980s when Shimon Peres (he who was later president) found out he lacked 61 votes only at the very last minute, when he was already in the Knesset building. Zipi Livni in 2009 was tasked with creating a coalition but failed. So it ain't finished till it's finished.

I think that more or less covers it all, except for the intricacies and crucial minutiae. In the next post I'll try and talk about who's running this time and who they'll never join in forming a coalition. All the while without indicating where my own preferences might lie, which I'm not allowed to tell.

Pot of gold at the end of the rainbow

Look, I know everyone is all worked up about the Netanyahu speech in Congress, scheduled for a couple of hours from now. But as I've said, what with being a senior civil servant and all I'm not allowed to talk about live political matters, so I'm not going to say anything about that today.

Instead, here's a picture I took recently of a rainbow over Jerusalem.

As we all know, at the end of every rainbow sits a pot of gold. Care to have a second look as to where that might be?

I understand the perspective is a wee bit unusual, but I assure you that tallish building at the end of the rainbow is... the Holyland tower.

I report. You figure out the significance.

Aharon Appelfeld, The Story of a Life

I just read Aahron Appelfeld's biographical book The Story of a Life, published in Hebrew in 1999. It's an interesting book, in some ways a very moving book - but it's not, in any obvious way, the story of a life. Or at least, not in the way a historian such as myself would recognize it.

For me, the story of a ilfe starts with dates (birth, for example), place, key events in a chronological order, and some biographical principle of organization. I once read a biography of Sigmund Freud, and the biographer had two or three pages about events when Sigi was 3 years old hand had problems with wetting his pants. Most biographers wouldn't include that sort of data, but you can see what organizing principle had that biographer include that data in that particular biography. (Or not. It actually added nothing to the story, But it could have, I suppose).

I digress.

Appelfeld has a different organizing principle than you'd normally expect in a biography. The central event of his story is the Shoah, which began for him when he was seven years old and ended six years later. He was a child throughout, and a pretty young one when it began. He didn't have biographical concepts as it was happening: he didn't know dates, he probably had only a childish concept of time, and no intellectual tools whatsoever to make sense of the events. (Adults don't have the intellectual tool to make sense of the Shoah, either, not even today, if they're honest with themselves). His mother was murdered at the beginning of the war, in an event he didn't see but did hear. He was with his father for a while (we aren't told how long the while was, and at the time he must not have known it himself) then he was alone. He was in forests and villages, but there's no reason to believe he could have named them at the time - or later. After the war he made it to Italy and from there to Israel, but having a clear conceptual or historical grasp of the events he was living through may not have been the most urgent need even then.

What he did have were memories which settled in his very bones. At one point a Ukrainian peasant woman started beating him and he needed to escape: the memory of this, he tells us, has remained in his ankles till this very day, more than 50 years later. Other physical sensations cause other memories to rise. Sometimes it's not even physical sensations, it's social ones, such as the dread before the Six Days War in 1967 calling forth physical dread from 25 years earlier.

So it's not a chronological story, it's the piecing together of many sensations and snippets of memory which are attached to them, eventually giving us what he promised in the title: the story of a life. But the story of a life felt, more than of a life remembered. Or perhaps, the story remembered through the sensations of feeling it.

An unusual book, but compelling. Different, perhaps, but in its way, very convincingly true.

Robert Caro on Lyndon B Johnson

I recently summed up my reading over the past few months, and signed off by mentioning I'd write separately about Robert Caro's magnificent biography of LBJ. So here we go.

A publishing-world fellow once told me there are two kinds of biographies. There's the kind where the author spends a decade immersing himself (or herself) in the life of their subject, reading everything they can find, listening to every recording and so on, and then tries to tell the full story of a life. The other way to write a biography is to single out an interesting aspect and write a short book focusing on that.

Robert Caro has taken a third track. He has dedicated a lifetime to telling about a life.

His first volume of what he then intended to be a 3-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson,   The Path to Power, was first published in 1981. I assume Caro had already been working on it at the very least five or six years, so he was no more than 40 when he started. 34 years later, approaching 80, he is still working on the fifth and final volume; so far, he's been publishing a volume each decade: Means of Ascent in 1990, Master Of The Senate in 2002, and The Passage of Power in 2012. (He wrote an earlier biography, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, which I'm told is excellent, but I haven't yet read).

I fervently wish Caro many years of fine health and additional creativity, and I admit I admit I hope he's got a plan for the plausible case that as he enters his 9th decade his output slows down, but no matter what happens next, he has already spent about 40 years learning and telling about Johnson - which is about the time-span between Johnson's early adulthood and the end of his presidency. In other words, Caro is spending almost as many years on Johnson's life, as Johnson spent living it. To the best of my knowledge, this is unprecedented.

Fortunately, the result is well worth the effort.

Those of us who remember as children or teenagers how utterly reviled Lydon Bains Johnson was, may have had a sneaking suspicion over the years that President Johnson was actually a more important, and more positive president than our early memories indicate. Kennedy was Camelot and all that, and his sudden death was a trauma we can personally remember as an emotional peak of our childhood, but seen from the growing distance, the drab successor who derailed America into Vietnam may have been considerably more important. While Caro has not yet published the volume on the presidency, it's clear from the story so far that Johnson was not only more important than Kennedy, he has one of the greatest presidents of the 20th century.

And, perhaps, also one of the worst. The glory of Caro's biography is that he convincingly tells the story of one of America's greatest and most deeply flawed leaders; that he brings to life a giant of a man who combined unusual size ( almost 6ft 4), unusual intelligence, unusual cunning, unusual callousness, unusual political brutality, and a very unusual ability to wield the power of government for the benefit of society's downtrodden and weak. Ah, and corruption, cheating, cussedness, meanness, dishonesty and greatness of spirit. Those too.

Caro does all this with a style of writing which is breathtaking. There are sections of the books which are gripping page-turners of the highest order. The 100-pages or so in which he describes the machinations by which Johnson stole his election to the Senate in 1948 are easily as good as any legal yarn I've ever read. The description of LBJ taking control of the government in the hours and days after the assassination of JFK, even as the entire world was engrossed in the pageantry of the mourning and funeral, is riveting.

The title of the full biography is "The Years of Lyndon Johnson", and Caro often spends big chunks of his books to tell tangential stories. The first volume has a potted history of Texas, but a poignant detailed story of the Hill Country, the area which lured Johnson's forbears and then trapped them in back-breaking poverty. It also has a long and loving chapter about Sam Rayburn, the Texan who enabled Johnson's rise more than any other. The section about Johnson's earliest years in Washington, as the secretary of newly-elected Congressman Richard Kleberg, offer an understanding of the mechanics of the capitol which is both fascinating, essential to a political biography, and starts a strand of the tale which then explodes into view with the story of how in January 1964 LBJ knew how to pass legislation from the White House as none of his predecessors ever had.

There's an almost hagiographic chapter about Coke Stevenson, the governor of Texas who won the election to the Senate in 1948 which Johnson then stole; Caro contrasts the white knight from the past, with the dark political operator who portends the future in ways far greater than either of the two men personally. Senator Richard Russel of Georgia gets a biographical section of his own. There's a long section with a history of the Senate which needs to be mandatory reading for anyone who wishes to understand American politics. Actually, the entire third volume, the Master of the Senate, needs to be mandatory reading.

All of it leads to the cliff-hanging tension of the fourth volume. Johnson's weaknesses block him from doing his best to become president, and as Kennedy's vice president he slips ever deeper into irrelevance; in November 1963 the uglier aspects of his public life are combining to burst into public view in a manner which will certainly destroy him politically forever. Then, with a single fatal gunshot, his decades of preparations enable him to forge the presidency in the shape of his greatness with seven short weeks.

Read it. It may be the best political biography you'll read.

Recent readings of various value

Last April I told here about the effort I was making to re-learn to read books. I have been more successful than I feared, and less successful than I'd hoped - sort of like most things in life.

Here and in the the posts below are comments about the books I've read since then. Feel free to tell me about important books I"m missing!

The single most important and rewarding read of the year has been... the Bible. Last year I completed one complete 7.5-year round of Daf Yomi, and decided to dedicate the daily time slot to other traditional Jewish stuff. I read Menachem Elon's magisterial "Jewish Law" and reviewed it here, Then I read volumes 1,2 & 3 of Rav Benny Lau's "Sages" series (here's the 1st volume in English). Lau writes a light and entertaining introduction to the men (and rare women) who created the Talmud. I don't know how the English translations are; the Hebrew original is informative but not deeply scholarly. Elon and Lau, to mention the two scholars cited in this paragraph, are not similar. Elon is a serious slow read, but richly rewarding. Lau is a quick read, full of interesting anecdotes and sketches of the sages, but not deep.

Having spent time reading "about", I turned back to reading an original source - and nothing is more original than the Bible. So far I've read Judges, the 1st Book of Samuel, and the first quarter of the 2nd Book of Samuel. I'm using the Daat Mikra interpretation, which is a combination of modern and also a compendium of the main traditional interpretations. I aim to do a chapter each day - sometime this works, sometimes it's too much - which means a quick read of the entire chapter, then a careful, sentence by sentence, study of the text.

I've read this part of the Bible repeatedly in the past, but this is the first time since high school where I've studied it, and the first time ever that I've done so on my own volition, simply to learn. It is, how to put this, as rewarding as can be. The Hebrew is so packed and powerful; so many everyday word combinations turn out to be Biblical; there is so much in there. Fortunately there are lots of books left (30  of them), so I'll be busy at this great task for a while, I hope.

OK, so that's the top of the list.

Then there are books I ran past and will merely mention here. Greame Simson's The Rosie Project: A Novel was a very enjoyable quick read, which gives what seemed to me a convincing look into the mind a highly functioning man with Aspergers.

Gary Shteyngart''s Little Failure: A Memoir came highly recommended, perhaps too highly recommended, as my expectations were accordingly high. Shteyngart tells the story of how his Russian Jewish parents and he moved from Leningrad to New York in the 1970s, and the twisted path he then followed before becoming a successful New York author. Interesting, but a bit too harsh on his parents for my taste, and the self censure became a bit tedious after a while. Which proves, I suppose, that I wouldn't fit comfortably into New York literary intellectual circles. (I never read a full Phillip Roth book, either, nor even Saul Bellow. We all have our defects).

Daniel Gordis' Menachem Begin: The Battle for Israel's Soul is interesting, but not, I suspect, really directed at someone like myself who grew up as an Israeli teenager convinced of Begin's infallibility, then a young adult gearing up to vote against him. But if you were further from the man than that, and you're interested in a readable biography of one of Israel's more important leaders, this one may well work for you.

I read Haim Be'er's newest novel, Their New Dreams (I read it in Hebrew and can't tell about the quality of the translation), which I liked. Be'er, now in his early 70s, tells the story of an Israeli man in his early 70s who is trying to write his first novel. Be'er himself has written 6 or 7 or 8 of them so that part isn't autobiographical; on the other hand, some of the mechanics of inventing a story and writing a novel may well be.

Then there are the books I reviewed in separate posts, below:

Kate Atkinson in Life After Life: A Novel and Jenny Erpeneck in The End of Days both wrote the same story from very different perspectives, and ended up with two various different books: see my review here.

Thomas Carlyle wrote one book twice, and the result is the astonishing The French Revolution: A History which I reviewed here.

And finally, I read all four volumes of Robert Caro's simply magnificent biography of Lyndon Johnson, which I will review when I find the time. Don't wait for me to do so, however, by any means: go and read them! Now! Robert A. Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power; Means of Ascent; Master of the Senate; The Passage of Power

Thomas Carlyle on the French Revolution

In 1834, 39-year-old Thomas Carlyle sat down to write the history of the French Revolution. Eventually he had a a single full copy of the entire book, which he lent to his friend John Stewart Mill for comments. Someone in Mill's household, apparently an uneducated boor, mistook the manuscript for trash and put the whole thing into an oven, where it gave off a few minutes of heat. At which point Carlyle re-wrote the entire book. It has been in print ever since: Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History

I admit I've never read a book anything like this one. More's the pity.

The language is, well, different. It's English, it's early 19th century, and English is a rapidly transforming language (remember the word "gay"?). I haven't read much early-19th century English, but I have read enough to think that Carlyle's language was his own even at the time. There are almost 800 pages in the edition I read, and I easily needed the first 100 if not more to figure out what he was doing and how: slow reading, since there were so many words I'd either never seen before or had never seen them in the way he was using.

Once I'd figured it out, however, and began to get the hang of his vocabulary, I began to figure out his unique method. Basically, he tells the story in present tense, and changes the perspective whenever the whim takes him. At one moment it's the perspective of a young Parisian woman who is about to be lynched by a mob. Or it can be the perspective of a hapless prime minister trying to balance the French budget before the revolution. The pensive populace of Paris in the tense few days before the storming of the Bastille. The Royal soldier waiting in vain for the enormous yellow Royal carriage trying to escape revolutionary Paris to loyalist Metz. No historian today would dare do anything remotely like this - but once you've got the hand of it, it's very compelling. The figures leap to life!

Which of these six Hundred individuals in plain white cravat, that have come up to regenerate France, might one guess would become their king? For a king or leader they, as all bodies of men, must have: be their work what it may be, there is one man who, by character, faculty, position, is fittest of all to do it; that man, as future not yet elected king, walks there among the rest. He with the thick black locks, will it be? with the hure, as he himself calls it, or black boar's head, fit it be shaken as a senatorial portent? Through whose shaggy beetle-brows, and rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled face, there look natural ugliness, small-pox, incontinence, bankruptcy - and burning fire of genious, like comet-fire glaring fuliginous through murkier confusions? It is Gabriel Honore Riquetti de Mirabeau, the world-compeller; man-ruling deputy of Aix! According to the Baroness de Stael, he steps proudly along,though looked at askance here; and shakes his black chevelure, of lion's-mane, as if prophetic of great deeds. (p.116)

I admit I referred often to Google to figure out who various actors were: writing 30 years after the events, Carlyle assumed his readers would recognize folks I had never heard of 150 years later. The challenge of the language and vocabulary, the slippery perspective which is never announced, merely is, and the wealth of information made this book a striking read. Compelling, memorable - wonderful. Immortal, too, at least as of 180 years later.

And so here, O Reader, has come the time for us to part. Toilsome was our journeying together, not without offense; but it is done. To me thou wert as a beloved shade, the disembodied or not yet embodied spirit of a Brother. To thee I was but as a voice. Yet was our relation a kind of sacred thing, doubt not that! For whatsoever once sacred things become hollow jargon, yet while the Voice of Man speaks with Man, hast thou not there the living fountain out of which all sacredness sprang, and will yet spring? man, by nature of him, is definable as "an incarnated word". Ill stands it with me if I have spoken falsely: thine also it was to hear truly. farewell. (p.775).

Living again and again: Kate Atkinson and Jenny Erpenbeck

Imagine a novel about a woman who is reborn each time she dies, until eventually she manages to live a long and "correct" life. That's the premise of two recent novels, Kate Atkinson's Life After Life: A Novel, and Jenny Erpenbeck The End of Days. (I read Erpenbeck in it's original German, but Amazon tells me it's available also in English).

Atkinson's is the more famous and popular of the two. It tells the story of Ursula, born in 1910 to a comfortable upper middle class English family, who dies at birth, is straightaway reborn, and keeps at it for decades. The first few times are accidents which are then corrected next time round; along the way there's a growing awareness. Among the mishaps which are corrected in repeat versions of her life are various accidents, a couple of rapes, a couple of badly mismatched marriages - one of which can't be terminated until her daughter dies in Berlin in 1945 thus freeing her to start again - and as time goes on, eventually also the lives of others. There are parts of the story which are constant in all versions, and characters with immutable traits which overcome all repeat versions of Ursula's life, while others change from version to version.

The heart of the book, and by far its most powerful section, deals with the London Blitz, which she sometimes survives and other times doesn't; there's one dramatic night which she lives through (or not) again and again, from three or four different vantage points.

Imperceptibly there's the encroaching understanding of how to operate her unique ability, to keep at it until the story is lined up "correctly"; at the very end we understand that perhaps she's not even the only character in the story who knows about her ability and appreciates it.

I expect this is a book one might wish to read a second time, to pick apart the strands of the story and see its twists and turns.

Erpenbeck's book is by far the deeper of the two. It tells the story of an unnamed woman born in a Polish shtetl before World War One, who eventually lives to be 90 in post-unification Germany. Each section of the book tells the story of her family up to or a bit beyond her death; the next section then assumes she didn't die and tells the story of how things worked out in that case. She dies as an infant, or doesn't, in Poland. As a teenager, or not, in Vienna. As a German communist in Moscow, or not, under Stalin. As a famous poet, or not, in East Germany. As an old woman, in unified Germany.

We meet 7 generations of her family, from her great-grandparents, orthodox Jews in the shtetl, to the rumour of her grandchildren, German teenagers ignorant of any family history in the present, There's a motif of a set of volumes of German poetry which bump into the story throughout the generations; but the thing is that we're the only ones who know it. The profound irony of the book is the inability of the family to maintain its memory. Those contemporary German teenagers don't have the foggiest notion of their Jewish forbears; the woman herself never knows significant parts of her own story. At one point, the only way to transmit a very important piece of identity is by having her die so her son can bump into it; when she doesn't, he doesn't, and so it is lost.

It's an elegiac book, and it stays with you, even as it shows how the history doesn't stay in the family.

I have no reason to think Atkinson and Erpenbeck knew of each other as they wrote to so very different novels based on the same impossible premise.

identity trumps rationality

The Enlightenment concept of rationality and rational discourse, whereby all people should notionally be capable of participating in a common conversation about reality (or just about anything else) has been one of the most powerful ideas in history. Democracy in its modern form is based on it, because of the assumption that the citizenry can have that common conversation about how to arrange their society. It's the basis of modern diplomacy, assuming that people with differing interests will still be capable of finding enough common ground to work out some sort of compromise. It's at the foundation of modern economics, with the assumption that people have a generally common form of rationality which guides their actions. Not to mention the entire apparatus of the UN, international law, and international organizations in general, which all assume that with a spot of patience and good-will, different groups can cooperate for the general good, because that's the rational thing to do.

Sometimes there are indications this isn't all as sewed-up and finished as that, such as when enemies can't be cajoled out of being enemies, though the customary practice in such cases is to admonish one or both sides for being non-rational.

Sometime even really rational types have to admit that living the reality of what they're so convinced of is hard. The folks negotiating with the Iranians, for example, would have reached an agreement long ago if it were only a matter of a calm and patient rational discussion - which of course it isn't and probably never really was.

The events in Ferguson underline how shaky the entire philosophical underpinning of our modern assumptions are. Take this article from the NYT, simply as en example, not for its specifics. Most Americans are Americans. They speak English, and even though their vocabularies, accents and syntax can differ, it's all one language when you compare it with French, or Arabic. They're citizens of the same country. They all have the same president, the same foreign relations, and the same dollar. Yet they don't see the world in the same way. Their ethnic identity trumps the other ones. If that's the case among citizens of the same country, why would one ever assume that any conflict between folks of differing ethnic, cultural, historical or religious groupings, will by necessity be susceptible to working out commonalities?

The Prime Minister and the Soldiers. A true story.

We went to present Prime Minster Netanyahu a commemorative volume of documents dedicated to Menachem Begin. With us was professor Arye Naor, who had been Begin’s Cabinet Secretary, and the prime minister was interested in hearing from him how Begin and managed the war in Lebanon, and to compare notes with his own methods in Protective Edge. From there it was but a short and natural step to a discussion about Begin’s agony at the deaths of IDF soldiers, and Netanyhau’s own difficulties in sending men to die.

It proved harder than he had expected. “I thought a lot about Begin this summer, and I understood him better”

.

“I spoke to each of the parents [of fallen soldiers]. If there were divorced, I spoke to each of them separately. It was very hard”.

There is a profound difference between hearing about bereaved families, and actually being in one: he knows about that difference, and understands it from personal experience. But to his surprise – this was my impression – sending soldiers to their death turned out also to be hard to a degree that one cannot appreciate in advance.

We had expected to spend ten minutes in his office. The ten minutes became fifteen, then twenty; the twenty minutes became thirty, and the prime minster spoke of the horrible price of war, and of the difficulty in deciding to pay it.

“The soldiers fear death. They try to strengthen each other, and try together to be strong as a group, but they are afraid.” He knows they are afraid, and that some of them will be killed, and he sends them. A ground operation, he knows what awaits them, what preparations the enemy has made: “Some of them will die. It is inevitable.”

“They must be sent only when there is no other choice left. They must be brought back at the very first possible moment, as soon as the immediate goal has been achieved. Later, once they’re out, we’ll see what happens, but first, get them out, out, out.”

“And every night I’d get home in the wee hours, and my wife would be awake, waiting for me. She spent the days visiting the bereaved families. I only spoke to them on the phone, with each and every one of them, but she sat at their side, and at night she would tell me about them. We must send them, and we must bring them back, and I didn’t appreciate how hard it would be. A leader who loses the understanding of how difficult it is, ought to lose his job.”

“I thought a lot about Begin this Summer.”

Beyond the window it was dark, gray, and raining.

A comment on the fate of the three kidnapped youths

On June 12th 2014 three Israeli youths - Gilad Shaar, Naftali Frenkel and Eyal Yifrach - were kidnapped on their way home from school on the West Bank. Their bodies were discovered buried in a field 18 days later. In between Israel carried out a massive search for them, which included the arrest of some 400 Palestinians, most of them affiliated with Hamas. This operation was the backdrop for an escalation of rocket firing from Gaza. After the discovery of the bodies three Israelis allegedly kidnapped and murdered Muhamad alKhdeir of Jerusalem (they have been indicted and await trial).

Once the bodies were found it was clear they had been murdered almost immediately after the kidnapping. Since the event proceeded the Gaza war of this summer, many of Israel's usual enemies have made the claim that Israel knew the boys were dead all along, and cynically hid this fact to justify its broad action against Hamas on the West Bank, thus provoking Hamas to retaliate from Gaza, thus enabling Israel to kill lots of Palestinians, as is it likes to do.

Not every idiotic claim made by Israel's enemies needs to be responded to, and this one was never particularly convincing. Any kidnapping anywhere in the world could cause a manhunt - that's why the English language has a word for it - and certainly one in which the kidnappers belong to an organization known to engage in lethal kidnappings. Even had the Israelis known with certainty that the three youths wee dead, they still would have needed to find the bodies, and, at least as important, to apprehend the perpetrators before they acted again. Or even not before they acted again: simply as a matter of law and order. Isreal's enemies would have us accept that the correct response to a triple murder which is no longer a kidnapping, is to go home and go to sleep.

The other day, however, there was an interview in Makor Rishon with Brigadier General Tamir Yedaya, the ranking IDF officer in charge of the search. Makor Rishon, in case you've never heard of it, is the main newspaper of the settlers. It is published only in Hebrew, and only on paper. There's no online version. This is an interesting phenomenon, which I'm not going to get into today, but it should be said that it's a high-quality publication, easily the intellectual counterpart of the only other Israeli newspaper which aims at the intelligence of its public, Haaretz. And Makor Rishon is no more driven by its ideology than Haaretz is, so that it can be fun to read both.

Anyway. Since most readers won't have the ability to read Makor Rishon, here's a synopsis of that interview with the General. He was repeatedly asked what he knew, and when. He repeatedly explained that by the morning after the kidnapping he knew there was a high likelihood at least one of the youths was dead. Indeed, many of the efforts made by the searchers were in places only a dead body could be found in, such as the bottom of water reservoirs. And yet, he said, one is not three. And a high likelihood is not certainty. And into that crack of uncertainty you can insert large doses of hope. Throughout the days of the search, he says, he repeatedly had dreams of bringing home one, or perhaps two, of the youths. Even once the bodies had been discovered, he said, even as they were being exhumed, he still had a last sliver of hope that it wouldn't turn out to be three bodies they were exhuming, but fewer.

So what's the moral of the story? That human beings, and hence their actions, are complex. That we can operate on conflicting assumptions simultaneously. That knowledge and hope aren't always compatible, and yet they can co-exist. 

That Israel's enemies like to pretend that we're malicious cardboard figures, not real people. But then, that part you knew all along.

Civilian casualties in the war on the Islamists

Last night the US launched a new chapter in the war on the Islamists. This is a war which has been underway for many years, but on 9/11 2001 it leapfrogged to great prominence, and for the past 5 years or so folks have been pretending it isn't really happening. I have no reason to think it will be over anytime before the 2040s, but that's a topic for a different post.

I dislike war, and unlike most Western interlocutors my dislike comes from personal acquaintance, not theoretical articulation of lofty principles. Yet I recognize that war is not the worst thing that can happen. Allowing evil people to dominate helpless people is worse. Since the supply of evil people eager to harm the helpless is not running out, the use of violence against them, in self defense or otherwise, will continue to be necessary for quite a while. Centuries, probably, or longer.

So I'm not one to damn the Americans for bombing Islamist targets, in whatever country they need to be bombed in. (Simon Jenkins at The Guardian penned just such a damnation first thing after breakfast this morning). But I am interested in the way such wars are understood. Just recently for example, Israel had a small war with avowed and accredited Islamists with a long track record of murdering Israelis over a quarter of a century. In what was perhaps the single most important article of the summer, former AP journalist Matti Friedman described how the Western media always gets the Israel-Palestine story wrong. His main thesis is that the media sees the Israel-Palestine story as being almost exclusively about how powerful Israel harms weak Palestinians. Thus, reports on Israeli military action always include description of Palestinian suffering, and of course detailed enumeration of Palestinian civilians casualties, whether the reports are true or not,credible or not, likely or not.

America has been bombing Islamists this summer, too. I've seen hardly no reports on civilians casualties these attacks are causing, and certainly no detailed enumerations. But forget this summer. Lets look at today's reports about lest night's US attacks:

In the NYT, the only mention of possible civilian casualties is in the 21st (twenty first) paragraph of their report:

In addition to Islamic State bases in the provinces of Raqqa, Hasaka, Deir al-Zour and Aleppo, strikes also hit bases belonging to the Nusra Front further west, killing at least seven Nusra fighter and eight civilians, according to the Observatory, which tracks the conflict from Britain through a network of contacts in Syria.

(Paragraphs 24-25 in the item about US attacks tell of how Israel has shot down a Syrian plane).

The BBC says the US strikes killed 70 Islamists (1st paragraph), and mentions the same 8 dead civilians in the 20th paragraph.

The top item in the Washington Post, which is long and meandering, doesn't mention numbers of people killed in the attacks at all. Not fighters, not civilians.

CNN has a long report, with nothing about casualties except a laconic note in the 11th paragraph that numbers are not known.

The Guardian's top report doesn't mention casualties of any sort.

I think these examples are sufficient to make my point. The media's knee-jerk response to Israeli force against Islamists is different than its knee-jerk response to American violence.