Bernie Sanders never made much sense. He may have had appealing ideas about some of the wrongs of American society, but the rational numbers of his proposals never added up, and you didn't need to be an economist to know it. Yet he racked up, what, 12 million votes? Quite a number.
Trump doesn't make any rational sense, not if you keep in mind the extreme complexity of running the United States and being the single top figure in international politics. Yet here he is, the presumptive nominee of the Republican party, which, like it or not, is one of the most important political parties in the world and in history, along with the Democrats. Observed rationally, there's no contest between Trump and Hillary Clinton. Yet given the numbers of votes cast, clearly there is.
The idea of Brexit is ridiculous. There's more or less total unanimity among economists that the UK leaving the EU would be a bad idea, one no sensible person would entertain for more than 3-4 minutes if it was early morning and they were still a bit groggy. Yet so far as we know, the voters of Britain are about to vote to leave, just next week, a prospect the polls are now giving more than an even chance of happening. (UK polls, as in other countries, can be seriously wrong).
Most people don't vote because of the numbers. Not on the Left, not on the Right. They vote mostly for emotional reasons of one sort or the other. That's in the venerable and functional democracies, of which the UK and USA are the two sizable oldest. So they can't be swayed by rational arguments, either. Marketing 101 will teach you that, and if it doesn't, go to sales 101.
All of which is generally forgotten when people discuss the Arab-Israeli conflict. Then, suddenly, the calm and rational outsiders look at the warring locals, tut-tut, and admonish them to be reasonable and rational just as they, the observers, are; and to make calm and rational decisions, since those are the only kind possible. Whenever we, the locals, try pointing out that the conflict we're embroiled in isn't about rational matters at all, it's about other and much more powerful issues, the observers roll their eyes and proclaim that we don't understand how reality works.
Tuesday, June 14, 2016
Monday, June 6, 2016
Neveh Dror - the town of the datlashim
The crazy kaleidoscope that is Israel is about to become just a bit crazier, with the creation of Neveh Dror, a new town which is being marketed to the datlashim.
No, datlashim wasn't a word you missed in Sunday School or when you were learning just enough Hebrew to squeak by your bat mizva. It's not really a word at all, or wasn't until quite recently. It's the initials of DATiyim LeSHe'avar, formerly religious. By which is mostly not meant people who grew up Haredi and became secular. Datlashim are the children of national religious (i.e. the Israeli version of Modern Orthodox) who have become, well, secular, sort of, in a way. Had they become fully secular, they would be secular. And they sort of are, secular, but with the added twist that their orthodox background still plays a significant role in their secular lives. Hence they need a moniker; one I think they themselves invented. It's not pejorative, and not even particularly judgmental, at last not in the way Israelis like to be judgmental.
How do they know they're it? Or how do the rest of us know? It's hard to say, but it's not at all insignificant. I think of two of my colleagues, one roughly my age and thus technically too old to be a datlash, a term invented over the past 10-15 years. Yet even today, probably 40 years after he left the fold, every now and then he'll refer to "us", meaning not us but those of you whom I used to resemble and still have a special affinity for and whom I rather resemble every now and then, when we all look askance at the secular Israelis who don't have our cultural baggage. Even tho he doesn't carry the baggage most days of the year. The other is about a decade his junior and thus a decade less into the secular fold, but she really has left all the baggage behind: she's not a datlash because she'd never regard herself as part of the old world she left behind, and she seems to have acquired some of the cultural ignorance she didn't grow up with.
So now that's all crystal clear, right?
Anyway, the forces of the market being the very delicate and perceptive mechanism that they sometimes are, someone has figured out there's money to be made by developing a real estate project aimed specifically at the datlashim, promising them a community where they'll feel just like everyone else: confused in their special way, which is recognizable, shareable, and distinctive. People with other confusions should go live in other communities.
I have no idea if this is a Good Thing. But clearly, it's a Thing.
No, datlashim wasn't a word you missed in Sunday School or when you were learning just enough Hebrew to squeak by your bat mizva. It's not really a word at all, or wasn't until quite recently. It's the initials of DATiyim LeSHe'avar, formerly religious. By which is mostly not meant people who grew up Haredi and became secular. Datlashim are the children of national religious (i.e. the Israeli version of Modern Orthodox) who have become, well, secular, sort of, in a way. Had they become fully secular, they would be secular. And they sort of are, secular, but with the added twist that their orthodox background still plays a significant role in their secular lives. Hence they need a moniker; one I think they themselves invented. It's not pejorative, and not even particularly judgmental, at last not in the way Israelis like to be judgmental.
How do they know they're it? Or how do the rest of us know? It's hard to say, but it's not at all insignificant. I think of two of my colleagues, one roughly my age and thus technically too old to be a datlash, a term invented over the past 10-15 years. Yet even today, probably 40 years after he left the fold, every now and then he'll refer to "us", meaning not us but those of you whom I used to resemble and still have a special affinity for and whom I rather resemble every now and then, when we all look askance at the secular Israelis who don't have our cultural baggage. Even tho he doesn't carry the baggage most days of the year. The other is about a decade his junior and thus a decade less into the secular fold, but she really has left all the baggage behind: she's not a datlash because she'd never regard herself as part of the old world she left behind, and she seems to have acquired some of the cultural ignorance she didn't grow up with.
So now that's all crystal clear, right?
Anyway, the forces of the market being the very delicate and perceptive mechanism that they sometimes are, someone has figured out there's money to be made by developing a real estate project aimed specifically at the datlashim, promising them a community where they'll feel just like everyone else: confused in their special way, which is recognizable, shareable, and distinctive. People with other confusions should go live in other communities.
I have no idea if this is a Good Thing. But clearly, it's a Thing.
Saturday, June 4, 2016
Jerusalem Day and Yoga
It's Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day. According to the Jewish calendar, 49 years since Israeli troops took East Jerusalem, including the Old City and the Temple Mount.
Someday someone needs to write the story of Jerusalem in the past half century. Who knows, perhaps I'll even do so myself if I find the time. One of the most complicated parts of the story is the relations between Jews and Arabs. They've never been particularly good, yet as I've repeatedly written, beneath the headlines about terror and inequality, animosity and enmity, the past 10-15 years have also seen a growing sort of partial and halting and mostly undeclared integration.
For example: The proprietor of the Yoga institute I go to recently mentioned that the assistant who runs the administration is an Arab woman, and though her efforts there is a growing number of Arab Yogi at the center, to the extent that next year they may even open an Arab-language group; in the meantime she's about to launch a marketing campaign, which will be tri-lingual.
Of such materials are larger, historical developments made.
Someday someone needs to write the story of Jerusalem in the past half century. Who knows, perhaps I'll even do so myself if I find the time. One of the most complicated parts of the story is the relations between Jews and Arabs. They've never been particularly good, yet as I've repeatedly written, beneath the headlines about terror and inequality, animosity and enmity, the past 10-15 years have also seen a growing sort of partial and halting and mostly undeclared integration.
For example: The proprietor of the Yoga institute I go to recently mentioned that the assistant who runs the administration is an Arab woman, and though her efforts there is a growing number of Arab Yogi at the center, to the extent that next year they may even open an Arab-language group; in the meantime she's about to launch a marketing campaign, which will be tri-lingual.
Of such materials are larger, historical developments made.
Saturday, May 28, 2016
Israel's lost souls of the sixties
Here's a story I'd never heard before about Israel in the 1960s, which this week I heard independently from two people who don't know each other.
I first heard it from Prof. Oded Heilbronner, a historian at the Hebrew University, who gave a lecture at a conference last week. Heilbronner is a social historian who has written about Weimar Germans, the Beatles and other similar topics. In his lecture he told how he had decided to take a look at Israel's second decade (1958-1967), commonly described as Israel heyday of normality: after the tremendous dramas of the creation of the state, and before the Six Day War and the beginning of the occupation. A time, you would think, and he had been told, of near normality, when Israel was like other countries.
Or not. His findings are that Israel was awash with tension, tense people, and - the focus of his study - crazies. People who barked at the full moon. People who screamed on hot summer nights and whose neighbors were endlessly calling the police to shut them up. People who walked the streets like zombies. "I grew up in Jerusalem, and often passed Pauipeleh and Roizeleh, the two crazies who lived on the corner in front of the Yeshurun synagogue" - at which some of the people in the audience nodded in agreement. "Only many years later, actually rather recently, did it occur to me that they must have been camp survivors unable to create new lives".
This afternoon, skimming over the weekend newspaper I came across an interview with Emuna Allon, an orthodox author who lives in a settlement and is married to Benny Allon, formerly a prominent right-wing politician. She's the same age as Heilbronner, and grew up in the same little town of Jerusalem, and she's recently written a novel about the Shoah. In the interview she tells how although her family were here before the Second World War and there were no survivor stories in the home she grew up in, still "there were all those crazies in Jerusalem, such as Pauipeleh and Roizele, the two lost souls who lived on the street with empty eyes".
Helbronner went on to present statistics, about how the largest number of Israelis with identified and recorded mental health problems came from Eastern Europe, followed by the Sabras; the Mizrachi Israelis were much healthier, it appears. It was the generation of the 1940s, as he calls them; the cohort who went through the traumas of the 1940s when they were young and impressionable, then held on during the crises years of the 1950s, when they had no other choice, and started to fall apart in the 1960s, when Israeli society seemed to be getting on track.
I first heard it from Prof. Oded Heilbronner, a historian at the Hebrew University, who gave a lecture at a conference last week. Heilbronner is a social historian who has written about Weimar Germans, the Beatles and other similar topics. In his lecture he told how he had decided to take a look at Israel's second decade (1958-1967), commonly described as Israel heyday of normality: after the tremendous dramas of the creation of the state, and before the Six Day War and the beginning of the occupation. A time, you would think, and he had been told, of near normality, when Israel was like other countries.
Or not. His findings are that Israel was awash with tension, tense people, and - the focus of his study - crazies. People who barked at the full moon. People who screamed on hot summer nights and whose neighbors were endlessly calling the police to shut them up. People who walked the streets like zombies. "I grew up in Jerusalem, and often passed Pauipeleh and Roizeleh, the two crazies who lived on the corner in front of the Yeshurun synagogue" - at which some of the people in the audience nodded in agreement. "Only many years later, actually rather recently, did it occur to me that they must have been camp survivors unable to create new lives".
This afternoon, skimming over the weekend newspaper I came across an interview with Emuna Allon, an orthodox author who lives in a settlement and is married to Benny Allon, formerly a prominent right-wing politician. She's the same age as Heilbronner, and grew up in the same little town of Jerusalem, and she's recently written a novel about the Shoah. In the interview she tells how although her family were here before the Second World War and there were no survivor stories in the home she grew up in, still "there were all those crazies in Jerusalem, such as Pauipeleh and Roizele, the two lost souls who lived on the street with empty eyes".
Helbronner went on to present statistics, about how the largest number of Israelis with identified and recorded mental health problems came from Eastern Europe, followed by the Sabras; the Mizrachi Israelis were much healthier, it appears. It was the generation of the 1940s, as he calls them; the cohort who went through the traumas of the 1940s when they were young and impressionable, then held on during the crises years of the 1950s, when they had no other choice, and started to fall apart in the 1960s, when Israeli society seemed to be getting on track.
Tuesday, May 24, 2016
Michael Burlingame on Abraham Lincoln: the transcendent political hack (1)
I just finished reading Michael Burlingame's magisterial 1,600-page biography of Abraham Lincoln. It's been on my reading list ever since a review described it as the single most important Lincoln biography, and I can see why. Burlingame has spent decades on this project, he's apparently seen just about all the documentation and has read mountains of secondary literature, and so far as I can tell his work needs to be the starting point and constant reference for any serious student of Lincoln - which I'm not. I've read a bit here and there, and of course I once wrote, on this very blog, about Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals. In choosing to read this door stopper, I was looking for a really good biography which would enable me to know enough about the man and his time so as not to have to read another twenty books. I'm not certain I've achieved that, and may yet have to read the William Lee Miller biography, which I'm told deals well with the single most intriguing part of Lincoln's story, his morality.
Burlingame mostly stays away from overt interpretation or philosophizing. He tells the story in detail, to the extent that at times the book reads almost like a catalog, or a who's-who of 19th century American politics - not something a casual reader such as myself needs. He stops to read at least eight editorials of different long-forgotten newspapers at each juncture in the tale, so as to tell what the various parts of American society thought about Lincoln as he went along. (Most of them didn't much like him - more on that below). This makes for slow reading, and if you've lost the ability to do slow reading of long books, don't try. (But you should try to regain that lost ability. Trust me).
Yet the slow reading isn't actually a drawback. It's a lifetime we're trying to understand; spending lots of hours over a few months (that's how I did it) has the advantage of forcing us into at least a vague semblance of taking our time to follow what took the man himself a lifetime.
As a final introductory thought: Burlingame is no Robert Caro. His subject will remain with the reader not for the Shakespearean ability of the biographer, but for the startling greatness of the subject.
Instead of writing a structured review of the book, here are things I noticed as I went on, in the order of their appearance, and thus, the chronology of Lincoln's life.
First, there was the fact of his childhood of extreme poverty. Once upon a time I lived in Chicago, and remember its winters. The mere thought of a child living in a three-sided shack in an Illinois forest, with only a fire serving as the fourth wall between "inside" and the elements, makes me shiver with horror. Add the near total intellectual poverty: school was a remote shack children sometimes visited, while books and ideas were things other folks might have had use for.
As America undergoes yet another electoral season and the raising of billions to pay for it, it's nice to read on page 238 how Lincoln used the $200 his supporters raised for him the one and only time he ran for Congress (and won):
"I did not need the money," [he] said as he returned the balance of the cash. "I made the canvass on my own horse; my entertainment, being at the houses of friends, cost nothing; and my only outlay was 75 cents for a barrel of cider which some farm-hands insisted I should treat them to".They did things differently in 1843.
A bit further on, Burlingame spends pages 241-247 on the poetry Lincoln loved, sometimes composed, and often repeated in front of friends and colleagues. The themes he returned to time and again dealt with the many loved ones who had died, and the irretrievable past. One of his favorite poems was by Oliver Wendel Holmes, "The Last Leaf":
The mossy marbles restHe would have been thinking, among others, of his mother, his sister, various friends and relatives, the young woman who appears to have been the most important love of his life Ann Rutledge, and in later years, the two of his sons who died before him. Death was still a common part of life in the mid 19th century.
On lips that he has pressed
In their bloom;
And the names he loved to hear
Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb.
For most of his career Lincoln was a small-time lawyer in frontier Illinois. How good was he? As with every single point of his life, there were varying opinions; I chose this description, from a newspaper in Danville:
When examining witnesses "he displays a masterly ingenuity and a legal tact that baffles concealment and defies deceit. And in addressing a jury, there is no false glitter, no sickly sentimentalism to be displayed.... Bold, forcible and energetic, he forces conviction upon the mind, and by his clearness and conciseness stamps it there, not to be erased... [Lincoln] may have his equal, but it would be no easy task to find his superior."Reentering politics in the mid-1850s, Lincoln showed a profound sense of fairness towards people whose positions he abhorred. By this time he made no secret of his compete rejection of slavery; yet pondering on how it might be ended:
I think I have no prejudice against the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist among them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist among us, we should not instantly give it up... Some southern men do free their slaves, go north, and become tip-top abolitionists; while some northern ones go south and become most cruel slave-masters. [When southerners state that] they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we, then I acknowledge that fact. When it is said that the institution exists, and that it is very difficult to get rid of it in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. (p.321)It is nigh inconceivable, even in our day and age of cynical talk of subjective narratives and insistence on the right of each perspective to its own legitimacy, to imagine any politician or pundit of any stripe using such scrupulously empathetic language to describe sworn adversaries. Go ahead: try to find one. Representatives of mildly different political viewpoints aren't even allowed to speak on campuses these days.
In 1858 Lincoln first came to national attention by debating Senator Stephan Douglas (a very prominent figure of his day who lives on in history only because of these debates). Douglas had a standard stump speech; Lincoln gave a different two-hour speech each day. Asked how and why, he explained:
He could not repeat today what he had said yesterday. The subject kept enlarging and widening in his mind as he went on, and it was much easier to make a new speech than to repeat and old one. (p.481)Just imagine. A politician who listens to what he's saying, thinks about what it means, and works on improving his thoughts.
Towards the end of 1858, having lost his bid for the Senate, Lincoln wrote about politicians striving for or against an end to slavery, and consoled himself with the story of the British movement to end the African slave trade:
I have not allowed myself to forget that the abolition of the slave trade by Great Britain was agitated a hundred years before its final success... Remembering these things I cannot but regard it as possible that the higher object of this contest may not be completely attained within the term of my natural life. But I cannot doubt either that it will come in due time. Even in this view, I am proud, in my passing speck of time, to contribute an humble mite to that glorious consummation, which my own poor eyes may not last to see. (p. 551)As of this writing, it appears that in spite of some conjecture over recent months, neither the Democratic nor the Republican conventions of 2016 will be contested. Burlingame's chapter on the decidedly contested Republican convention of May 1860 reads like satire. Lincoln himself was an honest man, but his henchmen at the convention shied away from none of the dirty tricks in the book. At one point he sent them a brief message that they must make no deals in his name. His chief operator, David Davis, laughed out loud: "Lincoln ain't here, and don't know what we have to meet, so we'll go ahead as if we hadn't heard from him, and he must ratify it". A supporter acquired an entrance permit to the Wigwam, the large structure built specially for the convention; he had a printer make 5,000 copies and by early morning most of the seats had been taken, forcing supporters of other candidates to remain outside, permits or no permits. Seating arrangements were calculated to give Lincoln's supporters the appearance of outnumbering everyone. There were procedural shenanigans galore. Just before the voting began there was a shouting match between supporters of front-runner William H Seward and Lincoln. An observer described the outcome:
Imagine all the hogs ever slaughtered in Cincinnati giving their death squeals together, a score of big steam whistles going together, and you can conceive something of the same nature. A Seward man pessimistically remarked "We may easily guess the result". (p.624)Lincoln may have been the most noble of American presidents, but he didn't get there by being saintly.
The first volume of the biography ends with Lincoln parting from his neighbors in Springfield:
My friends - No one not in my situation can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place and the kindness of its people, I owe every thing. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I leave now, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being, who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail. Trusting in Him, who can go with me, and remain with you and be every where for good let us confidentially hope that all will be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell. (p.759).The second installment of this review is here.
Michael Burlingame on Abraham Lincoln: the transcendent political hack (2)
(The first installment of this review is here.)
One of the main themes of the second volume of Michael Burlingame's biography of Lincoln is the consistent contradictory ways his contemporaries saw him. So far as I noticed, there was not a single occasion of his presidency where all his observers saw the same thing. No matter how unified posterity's memory of him or his actions may have been, some of his contemporaries damned, disdained or pitied him at every single moment. Arriving at Congress (where he had once been a member), here's how some saw him:
Henry L Dawes, (R MA): "Never did a God come tumbling down more suddenly and completely than did mine.. as the unkempt, ill-formed, lose-jointed and disproportionate figure of Mr. Lincoln appeared at the door". Alexander Doniphan of Missouri thought it was "very humiliating for an American to know that the present and future of his country is in the hands of one man, and that such a man as Lincoln - a man of no intelligence - no enlargement of views - as ridiculously vain and fantastic as a country boy with his first red Morocco hat - easily flattered into a belief that he is King Canute and can say to the waves of revolution "Thus far shalt though come and no further". (p.45)In May 1861 Lincoln called up more troops than he was constitutionally permitted, explaining that:
he did not know of any law to authorize some things he had done; but he thought there was a necessity for them, and to save the constitution and the laws generally, it might be better to do some illegal acts, rather than suffer all to be overthrown. (p.150)Try that in Washington DC in the early 21 century.
In October 1861 Lincoln dismissed Major General John Fremont, who had run too fast ahead of him towards emancipating slaves, thus endangering Lincoln's determination to do things only when society was ready for them. He later explained that Fremont may have been like Moses, who needed his successor, Joshua, to complete the entrance into the promised land:
It looks as if the first reformer of a thing has to meet such a hard opposition, and gets so battered and bespattered, that afterwards, when people find they have to accept his reform, they will accept it more easily from another man. (P.210).(I took that comment personally, but that's for another post, someday. Or not.)
He tried not to read too much of what was written against him, nor to refute it:
If I were to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for all other business. I do the very best I know how - the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the very end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference (p.288)Lincoln's critics came from many political camps. Here's a small roundup of vituperation directed at him in the summer of 1862 by abolitionists who didn't see much chance that any good would ever come from his administration:
An administration without a policy is an administration without brains... Lincoln and his cabinet have fought the rebels with the olive branch. The people must teach them to fight with the sword. (Frederick Douglass).
The President is a first rate second rate man... No mind whatsoever. He may be honest - nobody cares whether the tortoise is honest or not; he has neither insight, nor prevision, nor decision. (Wendell Phillips).
A rather slow intellect, with slow powers of perception... has no experience of men and events and no knowledge of the past (Adam Gurowski).
Has no spark of genius, element of leadership, or particle of heroic enthusiasm (Henry Ward Beecher) (p.397)
This defamation went on incessantly until April 15th 1865, though the identity of the critics often changed.
Throughout the Spring and Summer of 1862 Lincoln waited for a military victory, so as to announce his determination to free the slaves. He understood that the announcement must come as a reflection of military strength, and although he was viciously castigated for doing nothing he bode his time giving no sign of the coming event; the timing had to be right else the move would fail to garner sufficient public support. In September the time came. He convened his cabinet and asked their opinion on the form, not the content, of the proclamation of emancipation. He also spoke of the responsibility, and of destiny:
Many others might, in this matter as in others, do better than I can; and if I were satisfied that the public confidence was more fully possessed by any one of them than by me, and knew of any Constitutional way in which he could be put in my place, he should have it. I would gladly yield it to him. But although I believe that I have not so much of the confidence of the people as I had some time since, I do not know that, all things considered, any other person has more; and, however this may be, there is no way in which I can have any other man put where I am. I am here. I must do the best I can, and bear the responsibility of taking the course which I feel I ought to take. (p.408)
Did the abolitionists praise him for the historic proclamation? Well, sort of, in a miserly sort of way. By way of example, here's Lydia Maria Child:
The ugly fact cannot be concealed that it was done reluctantly and stintedly, and that even the degree that was accomplished was done selfishly; was merely a war measure, to which we were forced by our own perils and necessities; and that no recognition of principles of justice or humanity surrounded the politic act with a halo of moral glory. (p.410)
Keep that in mind for future use: some folks will never be satisfied, and some people hold their theoretical principles so high that no grubby politician can ever reach their level, and no mundane consideration will ever be legitimate. Springing forward so as not to soil the end of the story, it's noteworthy that some radicals found satisfaction even in Lincoln's death: he had done his part and freed the slaves, but now a firmer man would lead the reconstruction without a surfeit of mercy. (p. 820).
Lots of folks didn't like the Gettysburg Address at the time, before it was recognized as perhaps the single most important speech in American history. For example, a local Gettysburg newspaper wrote
We pass over the silly remarks of the President. For the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them, and they shall be no more repeated or thought of. (p.576).
I'll let the veil of oblivion drop over the name of the newspaper.
Burlingame tells repeatedly that Lincoln was an extraordinarily magnanimous man. Here's an example from a little speech he made right after his reelection in 1864:
While I am deeply sensible to the high compliment of re-election; and duly grateful, as I trust, to Almighty God for having directed my countrymen to a right conclusion, as I think, for their own good, it adds nothing to my satisfaction that any other man be disappointed or pained by the result. May I ask those who have not differed with me, to join with me, in this same spirit towards those who have? (p.725).
I, for one, certainly don't claim to be able to think that way.
The second Inaugural Address (March 1865) contained the idea that the war was divine punishment for the whites of both North and South for having allowed slavery to continue so long. As Burlingame notes, coming from a pastor this would have been fine, but for the serving president it was startling, at the very least. Lincoln then summed up the reasons for the war in a few words:
During the last days of the war Lincoln went to visit the army; he spent one morning visiting the beds of wounded soldiers and greeting each and every one of them. An observer wrote:
The second Inaugural Address (March 1865) contained the idea that the war was divine punishment for the whites of both North and South for having allowed slavery to continue so long. As Burlingame notes, coming from a pastor this would have been fine, but for the serving president it was startling, at the very least. Lincoln then summed up the reasons for the war in a few words:
Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came. (p. 769).A distinction many present day pundits seem incapable of grasping.
During the last days of the war Lincoln went to visit the army; he spent one morning visiting the beds of wounded soldiers and greeting each and every one of them. An observer wrote:
Mr. Lincoln presides over millions of people, and each individual share of his attention must necessarily be very small, and yet he wouldn't slight the humblest of them... The men not only reverence and admire him Mr. Lincoln, but they love him.Another observer managed to capture the crushing burden and the vital resilience which seemed, combined, to epitomize the man:
It was rare to converse with him a while without feeling something poignant... Mr. Lincoln was quite humorous, although one could always detect a bit of irony in his humor. He would relate anecdotes, seeking always to bring out the point clearly. He willingly laughed either at what was being said, or at what he himself had said. But all of a sudden he would retire within himself; then he would close his eyes and all his features would at once bespeak a kind of sadness as indescribable as it was deep. After a while, as though it were by an effort of his will, he would shake off this mysterious weight under which he seemed bowed; his generous and open disposition would again reappear. In one evening I happened to count over twenty of these alternations and contrasts. (P.797).There's an eerie neatness about the date of the assassination, which may even be part of its lasting impact on communal memory. One can count the hours between the successful end of Lincoln's gigantic historic mission and his felling. He was granted the gift of briefly savoring his success, then died before any post-war events had time to intervene and destroy the perfectness of the day:
Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch "Never saw Mr. Lincoln so cheerful and happy as he was on the day of his death. The burden which had been laying upon him for four long years, and which he had borne with heroic fortitude, had been lifted; the war had been practically ended; The Union was safe. The weary look which his face had worn for so long and which could be observed by those who knew him well even when he was telling humorous stories, had disappeared. It was bright and cheerful." James Harlan saw that his customary expression of "indescribable sadness" had abruptly become "an equally indescribable expression of serene joy, as if conscious that the great purpose of his life had been achieved" (p.806).It will not be original of me, yet nonetheless fitting, to summarize his story with an epitaph written by The Bard 250 years earlier:
He was a man, take him for all in all
I shall not look at his like again.
Saturday, May 21, 2016
On not divvying up political spoils
Back in the 1990s during one of our rounds of negotiations to set up a governing coalition it transpired that Moshe Shachal, a prominent MK in the Labor Party, was going to be left holding the Ministry of Police, a relatively minor portfolio. The minster oversees the police, but doesn't command it. Shachal was miffed, so Shimon Peres repackaged the position as Minister of Internal Defense, which sounds almost like the much more powerful Minister of Defense. And so it's called until this very day.
Back in April 1948 things were different, according to an anecdote I came across this afternoon. The Yishuv was gearing up to declaring independence, and this included delineating spheres of authority for the soon-to-be ministries, and appointing ministers. Yitzhak Greunbaum (1879-1970) was slated to be Minister of the Interior - but he had an objection. The ministry was intended to include overseeing the police, but he had a spot of aversion to police forces: "In [Czarist] Russia I didn't much like the police. In [post WWI] Independent Poland, I didn't much like the police. Here in Palestine, I haven't much liked the British police - and I certainly wouldn't want to be identified with the undercover police!" (Greunbaum was among the leaders of the Yishuv who was arrested by the British in 1946).
So they hived off the police from Interior, and that's how the police ended up with a minister of their own.
Though, as a tragic postscript, there may have been an additional, even darker reason for this aversion. Gruenbaum's son, Eliezer, had been in Poland when WWII broke out, and eventually survived the camps. After the war he was identified as a kapo in Auschwitz, and was arrested and investigated by the French police; the case was eventually closed. A few weeks after his father refused to be in charge of the police, Eliezer was killed fighting in Jerusalem, apparently by friendly fire.
Back in April 1948 things were different, according to an anecdote I came across this afternoon. The Yishuv was gearing up to declaring independence, and this included delineating spheres of authority for the soon-to-be ministries, and appointing ministers. Yitzhak Greunbaum (1879-1970) was slated to be Minister of the Interior - but he had an objection. The ministry was intended to include overseeing the police, but he had a spot of aversion to police forces: "In [Czarist] Russia I didn't much like the police. In [post WWI] Independent Poland, I didn't much like the police. Here in Palestine, I haven't much liked the British police - and I certainly wouldn't want to be identified with the undercover police!" (Greunbaum was among the leaders of the Yishuv who was arrested by the British in 1946).
So they hived off the police from Interior, and that's how the police ended up with a minister of their own.
Though, as a tragic postscript, there may have been an additional, even darker reason for this aversion. Gruenbaum's son, Eliezer, had been in Poland when WWII broke out, and eventually survived the camps. After the war he was identified as a kapo in Auschwitz, and was arrested and investigated by the French police; the case was eventually closed. A few weeks after his father refused to be in charge of the police, Eliezer was killed fighting in Jerusalem, apparently by friendly fire.
Tuesday, May 17, 2016
Sovereignty means being sovereign to decide: two decisions Israel makes differently
The New York Times has two very different but equally troubling stories. One is about Donald Trump and his relationships with women ; the other is about Hart Island, where the city of New York has dumped more than a million (!) dead people over the past 150 years.
Well, maybe they aren't equally troubling. The one about Trump has a bit more to redeem it than the one about the island. But they're both mighty troubling. Together, they tell something significant about how Israeli and American societies go about their business in very different ways.
Trump first. It turns out that he's quite the womanizer and always has been, no surprise there; that many women he's encountered over the years have come away hurt or mortified and sometimes scarred; that his memories differ significantly from those of the women; and also, perhaps a bit more surprisingly, that he has repeatedly promoted women, launched their careers, and supported them in important ways. None of these outcomes are mutually exclusive. Sometimes it was "all of the above".
As an Israeli, you look at this story with disbelief. Over the past 25-30 years Israeli society has put in place a series of stringent laws about sexual harassment, and powerful Israeli men who act the way Trump does go to jail. Itzik Mordechi, retired general, minister of defense, then a viable candidate for prime minister. Moshe Katzav, previously Israel's president. Nowadays there isn't even the need for due process: Yinon Magal, a charismatic young-ish MK, was banished from politics after a young journalist wrote on Facebook that he'd made a lewd comment to her; Silvan Shalom, one of Likud's top figures, was recently ejected from politics when a number of his erstwhile staffers alleged to the media that he'd made passes at them... poof, he was gone. And these are just prominent politicians who come to mind; were I to start naming the generals and police commissioners whose careers have ended abruptly this would be a long and repetitious post indeed.
The story of Hart Island is more depressing, and many shades darker. Over the past 150 years New York has dumped more than a million people in its trenches. Almost 7,000 a year, almost 20 people a day, decade after decade, generation after generation. Who are the people are buried there? The poor who can't afford a proper burial. The rich who have lost contact with their families. People with burial insurance who sink into dementia and are allocated by a court to the tender care of lawyers whose primary interest is to collect their fees. Regular folks who are sent to a medical school to serve as teaching props for future physicians, until there's no use in them any longer and they're cast into a trench, three boxes deep. If these are the dregs of society, you must have a very wide definition of dregs.
And even if dregs, what kind of a society treats its dregs thusly?
It's easy, as an Israeli, to read these two articles and feel smug. In Israel, powerful men who abuse the women around them cease to be powerful, they don't launch political campaigns and garner millions of votes. In Israel, the basic funeral service, paid for by the state, is good enough that almost everyone uses it, it being dignified enough; cadavers are treated with dignity and undertakers apologize to the deceased before covering their graves for any inadvertent indignity they may have caused. Most important of all, people don't slip through the cracks of society and vanish with no trace, not before they die, and not afterwards.
Better to refrain from the sensation of superiority, so as to make a more important point, which is that the single most important reason to have and maintain sovereignty is to make sovereign decisions. Israelis make different ones than Americans. Israelis care less about political correctness, they raise their children to be respectful of concepts such as enemies and using violence as a legitimate tool when others don't suffice; they don't think same-sex marriages are something they wish to have (civil unions have been legal for many years), and they live - while kvetching - with interventions by clerics in marriages and divorces in a way Americans cannot begin to accept. Ah, and the concept of gender-free public bathroom seems as ridiculous to them today as it did to Americans a decade ago. We're told that Israel is distancing itself from the Liberal values many American Jews hold dearly, and this may be true. Yet this doesn't mean they don't have values. It means they've chosen different ones. Not to abandon anyone to limbo; not to accept sexual harassment at least in public figures and hopefully nowhere else, either; not to cast lost souls into trenches on remote islands within the view of a teeming city of millions.
Different values, not lack of them.
Well, maybe they aren't equally troubling. The one about Trump has a bit more to redeem it than the one about the island. But they're both mighty troubling. Together, they tell something significant about how Israeli and American societies go about their business in very different ways.
Trump first. It turns out that he's quite the womanizer and always has been, no surprise there; that many women he's encountered over the years have come away hurt or mortified and sometimes scarred; that his memories differ significantly from those of the women; and also, perhaps a bit more surprisingly, that he has repeatedly promoted women, launched their careers, and supported them in important ways. None of these outcomes are mutually exclusive. Sometimes it was "all of the above".
As an Israeli, you look at this story with disbelief. Over the past 25-30 years Israeli society has put in place a series of stringent laws about sexual harassment, and powerful Israeli men who act the way Trump does go to jail. Itzik Mordechi, retired general, minister of defense, then a viable candidate for prime minister. Moshe Katzav, previously Israel's president. Nowadays there isn't even the need for due process: Yinon Magal, a charismatic young-ish MK, was banished from politics after a young journalist wrote on Facebook that he'd made a lewd comment to her; Silvan Shalom, one of Likud's top figures, was recently ejected from politics when a number of his erstwhile staffers alleged to the media that he'd made passes at them... poof, he was gone. And these are just prominent politicians who come to mind; were I to start naming the generals and police commissioners whose careers have ended abruptly this would be a long and repetitious post indeed.
The story of Hart Island is more depressing, and many shades darker. Over the past 150 years New York has dumped more than a million people in its trenches. Almost 7,000 a year, almost 20 people a day, decade after decade, generation after generation. Who are the people are buried there? The poor who can't afford a proper burial. The rich who have lost contact with their families. People with burial insurance who sink into dementia and are allocated by a court to the tender care of lawyers whose primary interest is to collect their fees. Regular folks who are sent to a medical school to serve as teaching props for future physicians, until there's no use in them any longer and they're cast into a trench, three boxes deep. If these are the dregs of society, you must have a very wide definition of dregs.
And even if dregs, what kind of a society treats its dregs thusly?
It's easy, as an Israeli, to read these two articles and feel smug. In Israel, powerful men who abuse the women around them cease to be powerful, they don't launch political campaigns and garner millions of votes. In Israel, the basic funeral service, paid for by the state, is good enough that almost everyone uses it, it being dignified enough; cadavers are treated with dignity and undertakers apologize to the deceased before covering their graves for any inadvertent indignity they may have caused. Most important of all, people don't slip through the cracks of society and vanish with no trace, not before they die, and not afterwards.
Better to refrain from the sensation of superiority, so as to make a more important point, which is that the single most important reason to have and maintain sovereignty is to make sovereign decisions. Israelis make different ones than Americans. Israelis care less about political correctness, they raise their children to be respectful of concepts such as enemies and using violence as a legitimate tool when others don't suffice; they don't think same-sex marriages are something they wish to have (civil unions have been legal for many years), and they live - while kvetching - with interventions by clerics in marriages and divorces in a way Americans cannot begin to accept. Ah, and the concept of gender-free public bathroom seems as ridiculous to them today as it did to Americans a decade ago. We're told that Israel is distancing itself from the Liberal values many American Jews hold dearly, and this may be true. Yet this doesn't mean they don't have values. It means they've chosen different ones. Not to abandon anyone to limbo; not to accept sexual harassment at least in public figures and hopefully nowhere else, either; not to cast lost souls into trenches on remote islands within the view of a teeming city of millions.
Different values, not lack of them.
Wednesday, May 11, 2016
Yom Hazikaron, 43 years later
A colleague told me the following story earlier this week:
I'm of the cohort that joined the IDF in 1973. We bore the brunt of the war that year. Literally dozens of my friends were killed; and six or seven of my close friends; and the best friend I ever had. Every year since then I spend most of Yom Hazikaron at the various military cemeteries. Visiting graves, talking with family members as we all grow older, one year at a time. No, I'd never come to work on Yom Hazikaron, no matter what.
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
Yom Hazikaron - commemorating Israel's fallen
It's Yom Hazikaron again. The second holiest day of the year, in my book, second only to Yom Kippur. Independence Day, tomorrow evening, is perhaps more important for its historical stature, but Yom Hazikaron is easily holier.
I'm reading Yuval Noah Harrari's fun book Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind, about which I may write sometime soon. One of his central ideas is that humankind is what it is because of its ability to tell itself stories and thereby create imagined realities which have no objective existence, such as the Catholic Church or the United Nations, and compelling ideas such as banks and human rights. He's a compelling storyteller himself, is Yuval. Having grown up in Israel, he would immediately recognize the power of Yom Hazikaron and everything it connects to, and would appreciate its centrality in organizing the world for Israelis.
The second most popular post I ever wrote here on this blog was the introduction to the Shirim Ivri'im series. (The most popular of all, sadly, was my dissection of that idiotic series of four maps which lies about the history of Israel and Palestine).
On this Yom Hazikaron I'm offering a random but chronological series of the songs with which Israelis come together and mourn.
Fania Bergman, Nigunim (Melodies). Bergman was born in what is now Poland in 1908, and spent her childhood dodging the calamities of the early 20th century in Eastern Europe. In 1930 she made aliya and joined a recently founded kibbutz, Gvat. She worked on the kibbutz as long as her failing health allowed, dying in 1950. She left behind a son, Giora, and many children songs which are taught to schoolchildren till this day. Nigunim, however, isn't for children, it's more about being a child. Written in 1944 and directed to her parents (who by then were already dead in the Holocaust), she tells how, try as she may to be a new sort of Jew in a new sort of life, the melodies they inculcated in her can never be erased, and indeed, they create a bridge from her to them over the impassable chasm.
Fania's only son Giora was killed in the Six Day War.
Speaking of the Six Day War, here's one of its quirkier songs: Jerusalem of Iron and of Lead and of Bereavement. It was written by one of the paratroopers, right after the battle for Jerusalem, who went on to become one of Israel's most original and unusual songwriters, Meir Ariel. The melody and structure are a copy of Naomi Shemer's Jerusalem of Gold, except that, as Ariel says in his song, Jerusalem is only mostly of gold.
40 years after the Six Day War Erez Stark wrote a poem for himself: Nothing Will harm Me. Stark was a soldier, and in his poem he promises that nothing will happen to him, he's promised his brother, his sister, his parents, his father keeps on saying "if anything happens to you what reason will I have to live" so he's promised nothing will ever happen to him, and if you're all standing around my grave I guess I didn't keep my promise and I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Erez was killed in 1997 in Southern Lebanon.
Finally, here's Ariel Horowitz's "20,000 brothers", from 2014. Sean Carmeli was killed in Gaza that summer, and when word went out that he had made aliya alone and didn't have family in Israel, the soccer team he'd been a fan of called on all the other fans to come to his funeral. His two sisters flew in from Texas, and thus the refrain "two sisters and 20,000 brothers, and you're in front". I suppose it's not great music, and the lyrics are spontaneous, not poetry, but you need to listen to them while watching the film. That will do it for you.
I'm reading Yuval Noah Harrari's fun book Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind, about which I may write sometime soon. One of his central ideas is that humankind is what it is because of its ability to tell itself stories and thereby create imagined realities which have no objective existence, such as the Catholic Church or the United Nations, and compelling ideas such as banks and human rights. He's a compelling storyteller himself, is Yuval. Having grown up in Israel, he would immediately recognize the power of Yom Hazikaron and everything it connects to, and would appreciate its centrality in organizing the world for Israelis.
The second most popular post I ever wrote here on this blog was the introduction to the Shirim Ivri'im series. (The most popular of all, sadly, was my dissection of that idiotic series of four maps which lies about the history of Israel and Palestine).
On this Yom Hazikaron I'm offering a random but chronological series of the songs with which Israelis come together and mourn.
Fania Bergman, Nigunim (Melodies). Bergman was born in what is now Poland in 1908, and spent her childhood dodging the calamities of the early 20th century in Eastern Europe. In 1930 she made aliya and joined a recently founded kibbutz, Gvat. She worked on the kibbutz as long as her failing health allowed, dying in 1950. She left behind a son, Giora, and many children songs which are taught to schoolchildren till this day. Nigunim, however, isn't for children, it's more about being a child. Written in 1944 and directed to her parents (who by then were already dead in the Holocaust), she tells how, try as she may to be a new sort of Jew in a new sort of life, the melodies they inculcated in her can never be erased, and indeed, they create a bridge from her to them over the impassable chasm.
Fania's only son Giora was killed in the Six Day War.
Speaking of the Six Day War, here's one of its quirkier songs: Jerusalem of Iron and of Lead and of Bereavement. It was written by one of the paratroopers, right after the battle for Jerusalem, who went on to become one of Israel's most original and unusual songwriters, Meir Ariel. The melody and structure are a copy of Naomi Shemer's Jerusalem of Gold, except that, as Ariel says in his song, Jerusalem is only mostly of gold.
40 years after the Six Day War Erez Stark wrote a poem for himself: Nothing Will harm Me. Stark was a soldier, and in his poem he promises that nothing will happen to him, he's promised his brother, his sister, his parents, his father keeps on saying "if anything happens to you what reason will I have to live" so he's promised nothing will ever happen to him, and if you're all standing around my grave I guess I didn't keep my promise and I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Erez was killed in 1997 in Southern Lebanon.
Finally, here's Ariel Horowitz's "20,000 brothers", from 2014. Sean Carmeli was killed in Gaza that summer, and when word went out that he had made aliya alone and didn't have family in Israel, the soccer team he'd been a fan of called on all the other fans to come to his funeral. His two sisters flew in from Texas, and thus the refrain "two sisters and 20,000 brothers, and you're in front". I suppose it's not great music, and the lyrics are spontaneous, not poetry, but you need to listen to them while watching the film. That will do it for you.
Monday, May 9, 2016
Burying Kitsch
Kitsch died on Shabbat. A week or two ago he told his daughter he wished for silence, and she understood he didn't mean the silence of the small house he had lived in alone since his wife died. One day last week when his neighbor came to visit he suddenly managed to get out of bed and stand, straight, on his own two legs; wordless, offering no explanation. Just standing. Until his dying day he responded to all queries about his condition with a laconic "yehiye beseder". It will be OK.
I only met him once, during the shiva for his wife, which was also the shiva for the mother of a fellow on my staff. He told us interesting stories about the village they had founded back in the 1950s, and how his children had all been raised there but eventually left for the big city. He wasn't bitter, and he was clearly proud of them.
In the most recent war his son told me how much trouble Kitsch was causing, refusing to follow any orders or take any security precautions. "I had to go down there and drag him into the shelter; he had been driving in the fields next to the fence, quite oblivious of the shells flying around. Bring him out of there to us? Never a chance".
The old-time kibutzniks stood in front of the microphone on the edge of the grave, one after another, and told tall tales about Kitsch. How he had loved working with the goats, and how he had fought the decision to shut down that part of the business. He ran the "Economia", a word never used anymore which means, I think, he was in charge of distributing stuff - which would explain how two of the stories turned on the fact he held the keys to the ice cream refrigerator. He had been a doting grandfather, a talented gardener; he had demonstrated the full measure of love during the years he nursed his dying wife. "Saraleh-and-Kitsch", mused one of the old-timers, had been a single, 5-vowel word describing a single, two-soul entity; "and now you're together again".
The kibbutz archivist dug up an old document recording the explanations for the nicknames by which the founders were mostly known; we all perked up, expecting an explanation for the strange moniker: "The origin of the name Kitsch is not known. It must have been tacked onto him during his childhood".
He was born, grew up, founded the kibbutz with his friends, married his girl-friend and fellow founder, raised four children, worked at whatever the kibbutz needed him to work at, was loved and respected by his neighbors, nursed his wife, enjoyed his grandchildren, died, and was buried in the cemetery at the edge of the kibbutz. Banal, heroic, just right.
We walked back on a dirt road between the graveyard and a broad field of golden wheat. At the other end of the field was the fence of Gaza, and beyond it, the towers of Gaza city.
I only met him once, during the shiva for his wife, which was also the shiva for the mother of a fellow on my staff. He told us interesting stories about the village they had founded back in the 1950s, and how his children had all been raised there but eventually left for the big city. He wasn't bitter, and he was clearly proud of them.
In the most recent war his son told me how much trouble Kitsch was causing, refusing to follow any orders or take any security precautions. "I had to go down there and drag him into the shelter; he had been driving in the fields next to the fence, quite oblivious of the shells flying around. Bring him out of there to us? Never a chance".
The old-time kibutzniks stood in front of the microphone on the edge of the grave, one after another, and told tall tales about Kitsch. How he had loved working with the goats, and how he had fought the decision to shut down that part of the business. He ran the "Economia", a word never used anymore which means, I think, he was in charge of distributing stuff - which would explain how two of the stories turned on the fact he held the keys to the ice cream refrigerator. He had been a doting grandfather, a talented gardener; he had demonstrated the full measure of love during the years he nursed his dying wife. "Saraleh-and-Kitsch", mused one of the old-timers, had been a single, 5-vowel word describing a single, two-soul entity; "and now you're together again".
The kibbutz archivist dug up an old document recording the explanations for the nicknames by which the founders were mostly known; we all perked up, expecting an explanation for the strange moniker: "The origin of the name Kitsch is not known. It must have been tacked onto him during his childhood".
He was born, grew up, founded the kibbutz with his friends, married his girl-friend and fellow founder, raised four children, worked at whatever the kibbutz needed him to work at, was loved and respected by his neighbors, nursed his wife, enjoyed his grandchildren, died, and was buried in the cemetery at the edge of the kibbutz. Banal, heroic, just right.
We walked back on a dirt road between the graveyard and a broad field of golden wheat. At the other end of the field was the fence of Gaza, and beyond it, the towers of Gaza city.
Monday, April 25, 2016
Left-wing activists pile onto the Israel State Archives
Prequel: I warmly recommend reading my previous post, from a month ago, before reading this one. (Clearly, I don't blog often). That one was about how a left-wing NGO called Breaking the Silence and its defenders claimed that its working relationship with Israel's censor proved there couldn't possibly be anything wrong with BtS. A delicious irony to keep in mind as you follow today's installment.
A while ago I read William Doyle's The Oxford History of the French Revolution. Besides the good overview it gave of the events, I came away with an interesting thought he presented near the end of his tale, about the motivations of the Jacobins. Once people shed their allegiance to traditional modes of thought and belief, and began to pride themselves on their pure rationalism, they often came to believe that their own understanding of the world, being rational, was the only possible one, and eventually, the only legitimate one.
Which means replacing the old systems with a new one made no-one any more tolerant. Instead of burning heretics at the stake, they guillotined them; the progress was in the decreased amount of pain inflicted upon the non-believers as they died.
Recently I've seen an example of the righteous indication of some of our own Jacobins from close up (no executions were involved, thankfully). It began when I announced, in February, that the approaching launch of our new website would mean the end of ordering paper files to the reading room. The catalog would be online, along with millions of pages of the scanned files; readers interested in seeing files we hadn't yet scanned would order them online and we'd upload them as quickly as possible.
The response, I admit, surprised me. There are any number of serious problems to the way the Israel State Archives (ISA) has functioned over the past 60 years, with the result that access to the documents is limited. No one ever took me to task for most of these deficiencies, and the staff and I have been laboring to correct things not as a result of public pressure but because we see tremendous room for improvement; we have been fortunate in convincing the powers that be in the relevant ministries that although the correction will require significant funds, it must be done. Launching the new website was to be the first time the general public would begin to see the improvements we've been laboring on for a number of years.
Well, within a week of announcing the imminent changes I was inundated by complaints from researchers, perturbed that those of them who regularly come to the reading room in Jerusalem would soon be required instead to remain at home and use the Internet. Assuming it was all a comic misunderstanding, I invited anyone who was worried to come to a meeting where I'd present the new website and answer any questions. (The website was already online at an unmarked URL). We spent a number of hours discussing the issues, at the end of which one of the researchers announced that he'd been convinced: it's a magnificent project you people are doing, he said.
Well, no. The campaign of letters of complaint grew, and soon was spearheaded by some of our NGOs. One sent me a six-page legal letter admonishing us, then wasted no time waiting for our response and leaked the document to the media. The thrust of the argument: 1. Nothing can replace the value of paper ind if we try we're effectively hampering historical research in Israel; 2. The fact that some security-related documents will be submitted to the censor will likewise be the end of free inquiry (never mind that this is the law, and isn't actually new). 3. The authorities will inevitably use this new ability to control who sees what to ensure the "wrong" people don't see the "wrong" documents.
No recognition that most of the documentation isn't open, and the entire effect of our actions is to open some of it immediately online, and the rest of it ASAP, while prioritizing the materials requested by readers.
On the day the new website limped online (I expect the teething problems to continue for another few weeks - this isn't a simple operation) the media swung into action. Haaretz went first. Then came 972 Magazine, online home for Israelis who really don't like most things their country does. Both writers had requested to talk to me, and neither had waited until the bureaucracy authorized me to respond. Once I did, the fellow at 972 found we're actually not as evil as he'd first reported, though interestingly his Hebrew-language report on our conversation was subtly more positive than its English-language version.
The kerfuffle soon attracted the attention of non-Israelis. Dan Williams of Reuters demonstrated the difference between journalism and activism, carefully talking to people and assuring he had the facts right. His report was considerably more balanced; he didn't find a tale of the Israeli authorities out to muzzle free inquiry but rather a tempest in a tea-cup.
The prize for Jacobinism went to a group of notionally professional and cool-headed American academics: the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). I saw no indication that anyone there reads Hebrew, nor made any attempt to contact me to learn what was going on. I don't think they even visited the website they were so robustly damning. They must have been contacted by some of our locals who cannot be bothered by nuance in their dash to damn us, and from these informants they gleaned a hodgepodge of data to draw the most damning indictment on what we're doing which they then publicly castigated us for.
The benefit to their intervention was their willingness to publish my response. So now there's an online, English language description of what we're doing, at the MESA website, and also on the ISA blog.
Ah yes - and the website itself, warts and all, is here. From now on, things will only improve.
A while ago I read William Doyle's The Oxford History of the French Revolution. Besides the good overview it gave of the events, I came away with an interesting thought he presented near the end of his tale, about the motivations of the Jacobins. Once people shed their allegiance to traditional modes of thought and belief, and began to pride themselves on their pure rationalism, they often came to believe that their own understanding of the world, being rational, was the only possible one, and eventually, the only legitimate one.
Which means replacing the old systems with a new one made no-one any more tolerant. Instead of burning heretics at the stake, they guillotined them; the progress was in the decreased amount of pain inflicted upon the non-believers as they died.
Recently I've seen an example of the righteous indication of some of our own Jacobins from close up (no executions were involved, thankfully). It began when I announced, in February, that the approaching launch of our new website would mean the end of ordering paper files to the reading room. The catalog would be online, along with millions of pages of the scanned files; readers interested in seeing files we hadn't yet scanned would order them online and we'd upload them as quickly as possible.
The response, I admit, surprised me. There are any number of serious problems to the way the Israel State Archives (ISA) has functioned over the past 60 years, with the result that access to the documents is limited. No one ever took me to task for most of these deficiencies, and the staff and I have been laboring to correct things not as a result of public pressure but because we see tremendous room for improvement; we have been fortunate in convincing the powers that be in the relevant ministries that although the correction will require significant funds, it must be done. Launching the new website was to be the first time the general public would begin to see the improvements we've been laboring on for a number of years.
Well, within a week of announcing the imminent changes I was inundated by complaints from researchers, perturbed that those of them who regularly come to the reading room in Jerusalem would soon be required instead to remain at home and use the Internet. Assuming it was all a comic misunderstanding, I invited anyone who was worried to come to a meeting where I'd present the new website and answer any questions. (The website was already online at an unmarked URL). We spent a number of hours discussing the issues, at the end of which one of the researchers announced that he'd been convinced: it's a magnificent project you people are doing, he said.
Well, no. The campaign of letters of complaint grew, and soon was spearheaded by some of our NGOs. One sent me a six-page legal letter admonishing us, then wasted no time waiting for our response and leaked the document to the media. The thrust of the argument: 1. Nothing can replace the value of paper ind if we try we're effectively hampering historical research in Israel; 2. The fact that some security-related documents will be submitted to the censor will likewise be the end of free inquiry (never mind that this is the law, and isn't actually new). 3. The authorities will inevitably use this new ability to control who sees what to ensure the "wrong" people don't see the "wrong" documents.
No recognition that most of the documentation isn't open, and the entire effect of our actions is to open some of it immediately online, and the rest of it ASAP, while prioritizing the materials requested by readers.
On the day the new website limped online (I expect the teething problems to continue for another few weeks - this isn't a simple operation) the media swung into action. Haaretz went first. Then came 972 Magazine, online home for Israelis who really don't like most things their country does. Both writers had requested to talk to me, and neither had waited until the bureaucracy authorized me to respond. Once I did, the fellow at 972 found we're actually not as evil as he'd first reported, though interestingly his Hebrew-language report on our conversation was subtly more positive than its English-language version.
The kerfuffle soon attracted the attention of non-Israelis. Dan Williams of Reuters demonstrated the difference between journalism and activism, carefully talking to people and assuring he had the facts right. His report was considerably more balanced; he didn't find a tale of the Israeli authorities out to muzzle free inquiry but rather a tempest in a tea-cup.
The prize for Jacobinism went to a group of notionally professional and cool-headed American academics: the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). I saw no indication that anyone there reads Hebrew, nor made any attempt to contact me to learn what was going on. I don't think they even visited the website they were so robustly damning. They must have been contacted by some of our locals who cannot be bothered by nuance in their dash to damn us, and from these informants they gleaned a hodgepodge of data to draw the most damning indictment on what we're doing which they then publicly castigated us for.
The benefit to their intervention was their willingness to publish my response. So now there's an online, English language description of what we're doing, at the MESA website, and also on the ISA blog.
Ah yes - and the website itself, warts and all, is here. From now on, things will only improve.
Saturday, March 26, 2016
A comment on Breaking the Silence
About 10 days ago Channel 2 TV, Israel's most popular channel, aired a longish report claiming Breaking the Silence (BtS) investigators are not limiting themselves to collecting stories from IDF veterans about ugly IDF behavior, but have branched out into what looks suspiciously like gathering general military intelligence. Following the ensuing uproar Minister of Defense Moshe Yaalon tasked the relevant agencies to investigate. At some future date - easily weeks from now, perhaps many months - we'll hear either that the investigators found nothing worth criminal process, or that they did.
Lots of folks aren't waiting for either scenario to happen, and are using what we already know to bash their political foes, one way or the other. Much of this is predictable, and lacks any real value while convincing only the convinced.
One strand of the argument, however, has been a bit startling, and to my mind, noteworthy. This is the claim made by BtS defenders that the organization can't be doing anything wrong since all its publications go through the censor. (Here's an example of the genre). It's an odd line of defense, as the allegations were that BtS is collecting classified information, not publishing it; the mere collection, if proven, might be criminal - a matter I'll leave firmly for the experts.
The reason I'm blogging on this however, in spite of my obligation to stay firmly away from political matters, is that it shines a fascinating light on the IDF, on BtS, and on Israeli society.
In a better world, Israel wouldn't have a censor at all. In that world, Israel would be at peace. In the world we're in, Israel has never been at peace, and does have a censor. The censor's activities, however, are closely observed by the Supreme Court, and it's staff do their best to leave as light a footprint as possible, and to block as little information as possible.
Breaking the Silence, meanwhile, presents itself as a brave organization which stands up to Israel's establishment, especially it's military establishment, so as to tell its citizens (and the rest of the world) about the moral price its soldiers pay to maintain the occupation.
Or perhaps it's not so brave? For it turns out that everything it tells, it tells after it has gone to the censor (a military outfit), and the censor permits. One assumes (I haven't tried to check) that occasionally BtS goes to the censor with an item which for whatever reason can't be made public, and then BtS remains silent.
So where, pray tell, is the bravery? What silence exactly is being broken? Whatever BtS tells, it's not things the IDF wants kept secret, since the IDF could use the censor to keep it so; or conversely, even when BtS has an unpleasant story to tell, the IDF doesn't silence it. Rather than brave dissidents, perhaps we're seeing a military establishment which is open to public scrutiny to an admirable degree, and a society which supports the IDF, supplies occasional soldiers who dislike what they see, and enables them to publicly tell their tale and even take it on international roadshows?
That would mean it's not a tale of the moral damage occupation inflicts on Israeli society, but rather one of many methods Israeli society uses to try and preserve its moral standards.
Lots of folks aren't waiting for either scenario to happen, and are using what we already know to bash their political foes, one way or the other. Much of this is predictable, and lacks any real value while convincing only the convinced.
One strand of the argument, however, has been a bit startling, and to my mind, noteworthy. This is the claim made by BtS defenders that the organization can't be doing anything wrong since all its publications go through the censor. (Here's an example of the genre). It's an odd line of defense, as the allegations were that BtS is collecting classified information, not publishing it; the mere collection, if proven, might be criminal - a matter I'll leave firmly for the experts.
The reason I'm blogging on this however, in spite of my obligation to stay firmly away from political matters, is that it shines a fascinating light on the IDF, on BtS, and on Israeli society.
In a better world, Israel wouldn't have a censor at all. In that world, Israel would be at peace. In the world we're in, Israel has never been at peace, and does have a censor. The censor's activities, however, are closely observed by the Supreme Court, and it's staff do their best to leave as light a footprint as possible, and to block as little information as possible.
Breaking the Silence, meanwhile, presents itself as a brave organization which stands up to Israel's establishment, especially it's military establishment, so as to tell its citizens (and the rest of the world) about the moral price its soldiers pay to maintain the occupation.
Or perhaps it's not so brave? For it turns out that everything it tells, it tells after it has gone to the censor (a military outfit), and the censor permits. One assumes (I haven't tried to check) that occasionally BtS goes to the censor with an item which for whatever reason can't be made public, and then BtS remains silent.
So where, pray tell, is the bravery? What silence exactly is being broken? Whatever BtS tells, it's not things the IDF wants kept secret, since the IDF could use the censor to keep it so; or conversely, even when BtS has an unpleasant story to tell, the IDF doesn't silence it. Rather than brave dissidents, perhaps we're seeing a military establishment which is open to public scrutiny to an admirable degree, and a society which supports the IDF, supplies occasional soldiers who dislike what they see, and enables them to publicly tell their tale and even take it on international roadshows?
That would mean it's not a tale of the moral damage occupation inflicts on Israeli society, but rather one of many methods Israeli society uses to try and preserve its moral standards.
Sunday, March 13, 2016
On Jeffrey Goldberg on Barack Obama
If Twitter is to be believed, there's been a bit of interest in Jeffrey Goldberg's 70-page article in The Atlantic on President Obama's foreign policy doctrine. Since I expect lots of better informed folks are having their say about it, I'd like to come at it from what I fear may be an unusual angle: the importance of story-telling.
On the simplest level, Goldberg's piece contains a story about his unusual access to this president. There can't be many others who repeatedly interview the president one-on-one, and then are given the chance to spend six hours over an extended period and in various places so as to write one article. Goldberg's not going to have that kind of access with President Trump or even President Clinton - tho for a while there he seemed to be laying the ground to create it with President Christie. Wasted effort, that.
In a nutshell, the story Goldberg tells about Obama, and probably the story Obama wished Goldberg to tell, is that whatever he once was, nowadays Obama is a cerebral and calculating Realist, who will do what it takes to protect America but won't use military force for anything less - and whose definition of what threatens America is quite narrow; he also takes care not to be swayed by emotions or by public opinion trends, preferring to concentrate on rational interests - America's, and everyone else's.
This ends up highly unsatisfactory, to my mind. Start with the ideas Obama himself is influenced by, according to this article. He and Goldberg have both read Hobbes. They've probably both read Samantha Powers on genocide. They both allude to, and perhaps have both read, Huntington's Clash of Civilizations. Yet when they turn to formative stories from which to draw wisdom, their metaphors all seem to come from Hollywood. The Godfather. Batman! And of course, Star Trek, from which Goldberg draws the concept that Obama is Spokian, while too many voters may be Kirkian.
Surveying their philosophical reading list, there's no indication they've read Huntington's student, Francis Fukuyama. Which is regrettable, as Fukuyama could have explained to them that tribalism isn't a retreat from rationalism by frightened and benighted folks who can't clearly see their own best interests, which seems to be how Obama and Goldberg both understand it. Rather, tribalism is an ancient, venerable, and very powerful principle of organizing society, with a far more compelling attraction than modern enlightened humanism or democracy; in many societies it's the default, not some cheap populist escapism.
The Hollywood part is more troubling. It wasn't always so. The other day I spent some time watching Robert F Kennedy speeches, and was struck by the ease and naturalness with which he quoted Classical writers. Here, watch him doing it in an unscripted speech when announcing Martin Luther King had just been assassinated. Educated men throughout the West could do that for many centuries, up until just recently. Obama and Goldberg are of the first generation who can't, and their substitutes are pale, a thin gruel indeed.
Yet the deeper significance of the replacement of ancient story-tellers with ephemeral ones from Tinseltown is that no matter how rational we tell ourselves we are, how coolly analytical of interests and dismissive of emotions, it's ultimately stories we turn to, when called upon to understand the world around us.
And that, to my mind, is the profound flaw in the Obama Doctrine as Goldberg so ably describes it. That it overlooks the true power of stories to trump cool analysis (pardon the pun).
If you've been following the current chapter of violence in Israel, you'll be acutely aware of how it's all about a clash of stories, with Israelis and Palestinians seeing quite different stories when watching the exact same news reports. The 30-years-war currently engulfing the Arab world is about stories, not interests. The collapse of European smugness in the face of refugees with radically different stories is itself because of stories. The rise of Putinism is all about a story, not calculated interests at all. Does anyone think the Iranians are listening to the same stories the Americans are?
Anyone who has ever watched an advertisement on TV should be aware of this.
On the simplest level, Goldberg's piece contains a story about his unusual access to this president. There can't be many others who repeatedly interview the president one-on-one, and then are given the chance to spend six hours over an extended period and in various places so as to write one article. Goldberg's not going to have that kind of access with President Trump or even President Clinton - tho for a while there he seemed to be laying the ground to create it with President Christie. Wasted effort, that.
In a nutshell, the story Goldberg tells about Obama, and probably the story Obama wished Goldberg to tell, is that whatever he once was, nowadays Obama is a cerebral and calculating Realist, who will do what it takes to protect America but won't use military force for anything less - and whose definition of what threatens America is quite narrow; he also takes care not to be swayed by emotions or by public opinion trends, preferring to concentrate on rational interests - America's, and everyone else's.
This ends up highly unsatisfactory, to my mind. Start with the ideas Obama himself is influenced by, according to this article. He and Goldberg have both read Hobbes. They've probably both read Samantha Powers on genocide. They both allude to, and perhaps have both read, Huntington's Clash of Civilizations. Yet when they turn to formative stories from which to draw wisdom, their metaphors all seem to come from Hollywood. The Godfather. Batman! And of course, Star Trek, from which Goldberg draws the concept that Obama is Spokian, while too many voters may be Kirkian.
Surveying their philosophical reading list, there's no indication they've read Huntington's student, Francis Fukuyama. Which is regrettable, as Fukuyama could have explained to them that tribalism isn't a retreat from rationalism by frightened and benighted folks who can't clearly see their own best interests, which seems to be how Obama and Goldberg both understand it. Rather, tribalism is an ancient, venerable, and very powerful principle of organizing society, with a far more compelling attraction than modern enlightened humanism or democracy; in many societies it's the default, not some cheap populist escapism.
The Hollywood part is more troubling. It wasn't always so. The other day I spent some time watching Robert F Kennedy speeches, and was struck by the ease and naturalness with which he quoted Classical writers. Here, watch him doing it in an unscripted speech when announcing Martin Luther King had just been assassinated. Educated men throughout the West could do that for many centuries, up until just recently. Obama and Goldberg are of the first generation who can't, and their substitutes are pale, a thin gruel indeed.
Yet the deeper significance of the replacement of ancient story-tellers with ephemeral ones from Tinseltown is that no matter how rational we tell ourselves we are, how coolly analytical of interests and dismissive of emotions, it's ultimately stories we turn to, when called upon to understand the world around us.
And that, to my mind, is the profound flaw in the Obama Doctrine as Goldberg so ably describes it. That it overlooks the true power of stories to trump cool analysis (pardon the pun).
If you've been following the current chapter of violence in Israel, you'll be acutely aware of how it's all about a clash of stories, with Israelis and Palestinians seeing quite different stories when watching the exact same news reports. The 30-years-war currently engulfing the Arab world is about stories, not interests. The collapse of European smugness in the face of refugees with radically different stories is itself because of stories. The rise of Putinism is all about a story, not calculated interests at all. Does anyone think the Iranians are listening to the same stories the Americans are?
Anyone who has ever watched an advertisement on TV should be aware of this.
Thursday, February 11, 2016
The lack of proof of Israel's crimes proves the crimes
Last week I was e-mailing back and forth with Prof. Donna Robinson Divine of Smith College about an upcoming academic event. Along the way we detoured into a discussion of the sorts of things one can hear these days at academic conferences. Prof. Divine has given me permission to post the relevant segments of our correspondence for public consumption:
The archives in Israel have lots of problems. I spend all my professional hours on trying to fix them. (Watch this place to see some interesting and significant reports in early May). The claims made by the unnamed panelist are simply not true. But Israel's detractors don't care about facts, They care about hitting Israel. Which means that they aren't engaged in "legitimate criticism of Israeli policies", to use the standard phrase, but rather in something quite else. Antisemitism springs to mind.
Update: Dr. Divine sends in a comment on the aftermath of her encounter with researchers who blame Israel in spite of, or even because, there isn't any evidence for their thesis. It gets even worse:
So, to summarize: it is now acceptable for a panelist at a prestigious academic conference to claim that the lack of documentation of Israeli crimes proves not only that Israel committed the crimes, but that it's being devious and hiding the documentation. This, at a time when the archives are open, the documents in them have been searched exhaustively, and they do not support the thesis the academics wish they would support.
DRD:
The panel on Israeli Archives at the American Historical Association meetings placed a great deal of emphasis on Yishuv period and on the War of Independence with one panelist actually stating that if she and others had access to the documents, they might be able to show that policymakers planned the displacement of Palestinians. Then, she added that if they could prove that a so-called policy of elimination [of the indigenous read Palestinians], they could secure the return of all the refugees in accordance with international law.
YL:
Whoever the panelist was, she was not adhering to the truth. By and large, the documentation of that period is open. All she needs to do is come and use it. And if there's a specific file which has been sealed – here and there, there are such files – she should request of the State Archivist that he look into the matter so as to open it.
The documentation shows very clearly that there was no such policy. Since that's the case, she's reverting to falsehoods. In essence what she's saying is that although the record shows that what she wishes were historically true isn't historically true, she's claiming that the record must be wrong; and the reason the record must be wrong is that the evil Zionists are falsifying it.
DRD:
I summarized the view of one of the panelists, but alas, she was not the only person in the room or on the panel expressing that view. Some of us in the audience--through q and a--tried to restore the balance [...] The American Historical Review devoted one of its recent issues to an exchange of views on archives and that was the theoretical framework deployed by the chair of the panel. From my reading of the field of Middle East Politics [US, England, Canada] the people who embrace this kind of so-called intellectual perspective are the ones gaining tenure and academic prestige. It is probably worse for the academy than for Israel but I am committed to do what I can try to reverse the course.
The archives in Israel have lots of problems. I spend all my professional hours on trying to fix them. (Watch this place to see some interesting and significant reports in early May). The claims made by the unnamed panelist are simply not true. But Israel's detractors don't care about facts, They care about hitting Israel. Which means that they aren't engaged in "legitimate criticism of Israeli policies", to use the standard phrase, but rather in something quite else. Antisemitism springs to mind.
Update: Dr. Divine sends in a comment on the aftermath of her encounter with researchers who blame Israel in spite of, or even because, there isn't any evidence for their thesis. It gets even worse:
DRD: After completing the Archives Panel, I turned to finish another of the panels I developed on the topic of the 'settler colonialist perspective'. I asked some of the very people who embrace this view of Israel--and who charge Israel with denying them or those adopting this view access to relevant archives--to participate in a panel that would interrogate this approach. In fact, with one particular person, I pointed out that there would be archivists at the conference holding out the possibility of determining whether or not Israeli archives are indeed 'open'. The academician who already has charged Israel with denying access to those challenging the country's legitimacy refused my offer because of a strong commitment to the boycott movement. Charge Israel with denying access and then prove it by ever refusing to gain access. Wonderful!
Bereavement
Today was the 19 anniversary of Israel's most lethal military accident, when two large transport helicopters flying troops into Lebanon collided, killing all 79 personnel aboard both. This morning I listened to a radio interview with a bereaved mother, talking about her beautiful son who should have been 40, but died at 21. As happens in Israel, she's still in touch with many of her son's mates (that's the closest thing English has to the Hebrew word Chevreh). Yes, it can be very painful to watch them go through life, but in a strange way it's also comforting: this is what Avi might have been; this is the stage he would be going through; these are the things he would have been doing, or thinking, or saying.
Asked if it ever still happens that she'll see a stranger on the street who resembles Avi, she stumbled for a moment. Once, she said, as I was driving, suddenly in the back seat of the car in front of me there was a young man who seemed just like Avi. I never arrived at wherever it was I was driving to; I just kept on driving behind that car.
Asked if it ever still happens that she'll see a stranger on the street who resembles Avi, she stumbled for a moment. Once, she said, as I was driving, suddenly in the back seat of the car in front of me there was a young man who seemed just like Avi. I never arrived at wherever it was I was driving to; I just kept on driving behind that car.
Wednesday, February 10, 2016
תפקיד בכיר בארכיון המדינה
אני מעלה פוסט זה לכמה ימים בלבד, עד שתוקפו יפוג בעוד שבוע.
ארכיון המדינה מחפש כרגע מנהל אגף ציבור, תפקיד מקביל למנהל אגף ממשל שאוייש לפני כחודש. מדובר בתפקיד חדש, שהוקם במסגרת רה-ארגון כללי שבוצע בעקבות שתי החלטות ממשלה שהגדירו מחדש את תפקידי ארכיון המדינה על-מנת שיתאים למאה העשרים ואחת.
מנהל אשכול ציבור ינהל את כל פעילות הארכיון הקשורה בהוצאה של תיעוד מן האוספים אל הציבור, כולל חשיפה של תיקים רגישים, קיטלוג בשיטה חדשנית, הפעלת אתר אינטרנט חדש שתוכנן כך שכל חומרי הארכיון יוכלו להיות מוצגים בו, שירות קהל עדכני למצב החדש, ועוד כמה פרוייקטים גדולים. על מנהל האשכול להיות איש (או אשת) תוכן, אבל גם בעל יכולת ניהול מוכחת. עליו או עליה להיות מסוגלים לנהל תהליכי שינויי מורכבים, עם צוות מגוון מאוד של עובדים.
מדובר באתגר גדול, מסובך, ומאתגר מאוד, עם רמת עניין גבוהה ביותר.
פרטים אפשר למצוא באתר המכרזים של נציבות שירות המדינה. על המועמדים להגיש את מועמדותם בתוך שבוע.
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
This is what long-term education to hatred will do (Update)
We're about two weeks into a period of intense Palestinian attacks against Israelis. Just today three Israelis have been murdered. The names haven't been published yet, but they were all killed in civillian contexts: taking a bus, walking down the street. Yesterday the victims included a 13-year-old riding his bike near his home. He was stabbed by two cousins, one of whom was 13 years old himself.
Palestinain society sends itself into spasms of bloody and murderous irrationality from time to time; at the moment the present case doesn't seem the worst of them. Yet what's striking about this time is the age of the culprits. If in the second Intifada there were hundreds of suicide muderers and would-be-murderers, most of them were young adults, and they mostly had some sort of organization behind them. Someone had to give them an explosive belt and drive them to their target inside Israel. This time many of the attackers are teenagers, some even young teenagers; and since they're using kitchen knives, all they need is access to their mothers' kitchens.
The pundits will pontificate on their motivations. Israel's critics will say it's all about the occupation. Israel's enemeis will say it's about Israeli brutality and general evil. The historians wil probably not have unravelled it many decades from now, and they, like the pundits, will find comfortable pat explanations.
The part that impresses me is the public atmosphere forming the minds of Palestinian teenagers. In order for significant numbers of them to be willing to be killed for the chance to stab an Israeli, they must be steeped in hatred to a degree most Western pundits can't even recognize. Many westerners don't even accept the reality, let alone the legitimacy, of the concept "enemy". These young Palestinians seem unable to accept the reality, let alone the legitimacy, of their common humanity with Israelis. For this, blame their parents and grandparents and society at large.
Spend decades telling yourself, your children and your grandchildren that Jews have no legitimate reason to be here, and that now they're here they spend their days cooking up nasty ideas about how to be cruel to Palestinians and destructive towards Islam, and eventually this is the result you'll end up with.
Thought experiment. Imagine you're a typical teenager. (Most of us were, once upon a time). If you don't know Arabic, spend a solid month reading only Mondoweiss commentaries and its comments section. Don't expose yourself to any other source of information. At the end of the month, see how you feel about Israel and Jews. (They're by and large interchangeable even at Mondoweiss). Now, once you're well-disposed to feel negative, imagine it hasn't been a month, it's been every day since your birth, and the birth of your grandparents. The echo chamber isn't limited to a website, it's your entire world. And you yourself either know people who've been harmed by Israelis, who are always and exclusively motivated by the urge to harm Palestinians, or at the very least you know people who know of them. And you've been trained never to ask what the Israelis were responding to, because Israelis don't respond. They always initiate persecution of Palestinians.
And now, imagine that recently your whole world has been telling that the Jews are about to destroy the most sacred spot there is, and they've upped their malice and are shooting people on your side because that's the way they are.
End of experiment.
Update: Avi Issacharoff, one of the few journalists who really knows what he's talking about and also has something interesting to say, thinks the current violence is mostly the result of incitement about the Temple Mount. The Palestinian leadership and media have been convincing themselves Israel is about to harm the mosques, and their followers are convinced they must defend it. Assuming he's right, or even if he's only partially right, it begs the question How stabbing Israeli civilians might possibly be a way to defend Al-Aksa Mosque. More significant, to my mind, it's a perfect example of irrational hatred. Israel isn't about to harm the mosques. Simply: Not. No question about it. Which means that a pile of Palestinian public figures and their followers are lying to themselves and each other, convincing themselves and each other, and then setting off to to kill Jews because of the lie.
Which has of course always been standard antisemitic behavior, centuries before Israel began building settlements. Centuries before there even was an Israel, for that matter.
Palestinain society sends itself into spasms of bloody and murderous irrationality from time to time; at the moment the present case doesn't seem the worst of them. Yet what's striking about this time is the age of the culprits. If in the second Intifada there were hundreds of suicide muderers and would-be-murderers, most of them were young adults, and they mostly had some sort of organization behind them. Someone had to give them an explosive belt and drive them to their target inside Israel. This time many of the attackers are teenagers, some even young teenagers; and since they're using kitchen knives, all they need is access to their mothers' kitchens.
The pundits will pontificate on their motivations. Israel's critics will say it's all about the occupation. Israel's enemeis will say it's about Israeli brutality and general evil. The historians wil probably not have unravelled it many decades from now, and they, like the pundits, will find comfortable pat explanations.
The part that impresses me is the public atmosphere forming the minds of Palestinian teenagers. In order for significant numbers of them to be willing to be killed for the chance to stab an Israeli, they must be steeped in hatred to a degree most Western pundits can't even recognize. Many westerners don't even accept the reality, let alone the legitimacy, of the concept "enemy". These young Palestinians seem unable to accept the reality, let alone the legitimacy, of their common humanity with Israelis. For this, blame their parents and grandparents and society at large.
Spend decades telling yourself, your children and your grandchildren that Jews have no legitimate reason to be here, and that now they're here they spend their days cooking up nasty ideas about how to be cruel to Palestinians and destructive towards Islam, and eventually this is the result you'll end up with.
Thought experiment. Imagine you're a typical teenager. (Most of us were, once upon a time). If you don't know Arabic, spend a solid month reading only Mondoweiss commentaries and its comments section. Don't expose yourself to any other source of information. At the end of the month, see how you feel about Israel and Jews. (They're by and large interchangeable even at Mondoweiss). Now, once you're well-disposed to feel negative, imagine it hasn't been a month, it's been every day since your birth, and the birth of your grandparents. The echo chamber isn't limited to a website, it's your entire world. And you yourself either know people who've been harmed by Israelis, who are always and exclusively motivated by the urge to harm Palestinians, or at the very least you know people who know of them. And you've been trained never to ask what the Israelis were responding to, because Israelis don't respond. They always initiate persecution of Palestinians.
And now, imagine that recently your whole world has been telling that the Jews are about to destroy the most sacred spot there is, and they've upped their malice and are shooting people on your side because that's the way they are.
End of experiment.
Update: Avi Issacharoff, one of the few journalists who really knows what he's talking about and also has something interesting to say, thinks the current violence is mostly the result of incitement about the Temple Mount. The Palestinian leadership and media have been convincing themselves Israel is about to harm the mosques, and their followers are convinced they must defend it. Assuming he's right, or even if he's only partially right, it begs the question How stabbing Israeli civilians might possibly be a way to defend Al-Aksa Mosque. More significant, to my mind, it's a perfect example of irrational hatred. Israel isn't about to harm the mosques. Simply: Not. No question about it. Which means that a pile of Palestinian public figures and their followers are lying to themselves and each other, convincing themselves and each other, and then setting off to to kill Jews because of the lie.
Which has of course always been standard antisemitic behavior, centuries before Israel began building settlements. Centuries before there even was an Israel, for that matter.
Sunday, October 4, 2015
Tova Herzl's Madame Ambassador
Tova Herzl's fun new memoir Madame Ambassador - Behind the Scenes with a Candid Israeli Diplomat, intended to answer three questions. What do diplomats do when they go to the office (explicit question), Are Israeli diplomats any different (explicit), and What did she do (implied question). Along the way she also answered two questions of mine (one explicit, the other implied).
Full disclosure: Tova and I have known each other since we trained as tourist guides together, many years ago. How many? Lots. Neither of us had launched our professional careers at the time, and look, Tova has already written a fine memoir about hers. At one point in her memoir, however, she talks about how being a transient diplomat means loosing contact with many second-tier friends, which is kind of generous of her, since the losing of social ties can be a mutual activity, even when one doesn't keep changing countries. Still, for all our travels and travails, we're still in touch, and I watched Tova struggle to find her voice in writing this book, and occasionally made what were probably unhelpful comments about this section or that. All the more reason, then, to tell of my delight when I finally sat down and read it, cover to cover.
So what do diplomats do? They work hard, apparently, and none of us ever give them much thought. They apparently need to know just about everything on the land they serve in, and the land they serve, and make as many useful connections as possible. They're required to smooth all interactions between both sides, so that a crass but acceptable joke made by one non-diplomat doesn't ruffle too may feathers of the other side. They need to ascertain the visiting politician doesn't get stuck in traffic, and that their own elected leaders understand how their actions will be seen by the locals they're interacting with. They need to know which idiotic local journalists need to be slapped on the wrist and which should be shrugged off. How to dress for which social event, and what needs to be achieved there (and what not). How to relate to all the other diplomats in town, some who are friendly and supportive, others anything but. They deal with economics, trade, and development, culture, politics, sport and science.
They need to do this intensively, then pick up and move elsewhere and start all over again in a new context. Moves which carry with them much promise and new opportunities, but also the jettisoning of significant baggage from the previous chapter. Unlike software coders or social media marketers, ultra-sound operators or bloggers, none of whom existed 50 years ago (OK, a handful of coders calling themselves programmers did already exist), diplomats have been around for centuries. All the more startling, then, that such a Diplomacy for Dummies handbook hasn't been written until now; if you read it, it's reasonable the knowledge you'll acquire will still be up to date after you complete the reading.
Are Israeli diplomats different? Any universal story must be grounded in the particular before it can be of general interest; any diplomat must represent some country in some other country. Yet Tova's story does have particular Jewish and Israeli and Arab parts. Being the daughter of Holocaust survivors representing Israel in the Baltic states, for example. Burying Michal Franklin, a beloved niece murdered by a Palestinian suicide murderer in 2002, while representing Israel to an overtly pro-Palestinian South African regime and society. Balancing the positions of the Jewish State and the local Jews. Visiting an Arab ambassador of Israel in a nearby country, however, was a welcome respite, as he kept kosher, as part of his understanding of his job. So there was that.
The book is organized in a series of short topical chapters: presenting credentials, working the media, life with a bodyguard, using the diplomatic post and so on. (Interestingly, there's nary a word about any sort of intelligence matters. Maybe there weren't any). Yet as we progress, it's also a memoir, giving us Tova's personal story, which is interesting as any Israeli active in the first century of the Jewish return to history.
Then there were my two questions. Right before the end of the book, Tova tells of her friend Yaacov who wondered if an Israeli who knew the language and closely followed all the electronic media couldn't know as much about the country without having to be an ambassador; perhaps the entire profession has become an anachronism? Tova's specific response is unconvincing: she tells how much she knows about Israel which a distant Hebrew-speaking observer would miss out on: that wasn't my question. There are many non-Hebrew-speaking diplomats in Israel who are no better educated about us than distant Hebrew-speakers. Yet coming as it does at the tail-end of the book, her specific response isn't necessary. The entire book has by that stage refuted the assumption of my question. It turns out that diplomats do a real job, and if you're interested, this book will demonstrate what it is.
It has also answered a question I've been toying with for a number of years - first formulated, by the way, by Tova herself: Might I wish to be an ambassador? Some ambassadorial posts go not to career diplomats but to others. There are about two of them which I might, at least conceivably, have a shot at if I really wished, given my rank, qualifications and connections.
It would mean doing the job she has described so well, parts of which I would like and parts, not at all. Just like real life. It would also mean additional years of not speaking my own mind, and of representing the system. This is hard enough where I'm currently at, and would be too tedious to try anew anywhere else. That' however, is a subject for another day.
Full disclosure: Tova and I have known each other since we trained as tourist guides together, many years ago. How many? Lots. Neither of us had launched our professional careers at the time, and look, Tova has already written a fine memoir about hers. At one point in her memoir, however, she talks about how being a transient diplomat means loosing contact with many second-tier friends, which is kind of generous of her, since the losing of social ties can be a mutual activity, even when one doesn't keep changing countries. Still, for all our travels and travails, we're still in touch, and I watched Tova struggle to find her voice in writing this book, and occasionally made what were probably unhelpful comments about this section or that. All the more reason, then, to tell of my delight when I finally sat down and read it, cover to cover.
So what do diplomats do? They work hard, apparently, and none of us ever give them much thought. They apparently need to know just about everything on the land they serve in, and the land they serve, and make as many useful connections as possible. They're required to smooth all interactions between both sides, so that a crass but acceptable joke made by one non-diplomat doesn't ruffle too may feathers of the other side. They need to ascertain the visiting politician doesn't get stuck in traffic, and that their own elected leaders understand how their actions will be seen by the locals they're interacting with. They need to know which idiotic local journalists need to be slapped on the wrist and which should be shrugged off. How to dress for which social event, and what needs to be achieved there (and what not). How to relate to all the other diplomats in town, some who are friendly and supportive, others anything but. They deal with economics, trade, and development, culture, politics, sport and science.
They need to do this intensively, then pick up and move elsewhere and start all over again in a new context. Moves which carry with them much promise and new opportunities, but also the jettisoning of significant baggage from the previous chapter. Unlike software coders or social media marketers, ultra-sound operators or bloggers, none of whom existed 50 years ago (OK, a handful of coders calling themselves programmers did already exist), diplomats have been around for centuries. All the more startling, then, that such a Diplomacy for Dummies handbook hasn't been written until now; if you read it, it's reasonable the knowledge you'll acquire will still be up to date after you complete the reading.
Are Israeli diplomats different? Any universal story must be grounded in the particular before it can be of general interest; any diplomat must represent some country in some other country. Yet Tova's story does have particular Jewish and Israeli and Arab parts. Being the daughter of Holocaust survivors representing Israel in the Baltic states, for example. Burying Michal Franklin, a beloved niece murdered by a Palestinian suicide murderer in 2002, while representing Israel to an overtly pro-Palestinian South African regime and society. Balancing the positions of the Jewish State and the local Jews. Visiting an Arab ambassador of Israel in a nearby country, however, was a welcome respite, as he kept kosher, as part of his understanding of his job. So there was that.
The book is organized in a series of short topical chapters: presenting credentials, working the media, life with a bodyguard, using the diplomatic post and so on. (Interestingly, there's nary a word about any sort of intelligence matters. Maybe there weren't any). Yet as we progress, it's also a memoir, giving us Tova's personal story, which is interesting as any Israeli active in the first century of the Jewish return to history.
Then there were my two questions. Right before the end of the book, Tova tells of her friend Yaacov who wondered if an Israeli who knew the language and closely followed all the electronic media couldn't know as much about the country without having to be an ambassador; perhaps the entire profession has become an anachronism? Tova's specific response is unconvincing: she tells how much she knows about Israel which a distant Hebrew-speaking observer would miss out on: that wasn't my question. There are many non-Hebrew-speaking diplomats in Israel who are no better educated about us than distant Hebrew-speakers. Yet coming as it does at the tail-end of the book, her specific response isn't necessary. The entire book has by that stage refuted the assumption of my question. It turns out that diplomats do a real job, and if you're interested, this book will demonstrate what it is.
It has also answered a question I've been toying with for a number of years - first formulated, by the way, by Tova herself: Might I wish to be an ambassador? Some ambassadorial posts go not to career diplomats but to others. There are about two of them which I might, at least conceivably, have a shot at if I really wished, given my rank, qualifications and connections.
It would mean doing the job she has described so well, parts of which I would like and parts, not at all. Just like real life. It would also mean additional years of not speaking my own mind, and of representing the system. This is hard enough where I'm currently at, and would be too tedious to try anew anywhere else. That' however, is a subject for another day.
Monday, August 17, 2015
The passage of forty years
I first arrived in Israel late in the afternoon of July 16th 1967. I knew enough about the country not to expect camels and desert everywhere, but it did seem fitting that our first view from the windows of the plane was of sand dunes. By the time we exited the terminal it was dark, and we climbed aboard a taxi which had no air conditioning so the warm evening wind blew in through the open windows. The road up to Jerusalem was probably two lanes, but it wasn't crowded. Most Israelis didn't own cars in those days. I remember it snaked up down and around, hugging the contours of the Judean hills; I also remember that we passed though a number of towns, and there were lots of people out on the streets, enjoying the respite from the heat of the day. Eventually we reached Jerusalem, and the cab driver had to ask directions to our destination, a hostel-like place in Kiryat Hayovel.
I especially remember the feeling of exuberance in the air. A few blocks from our destination the cabbie pulled up in front of a group of people sitting around a camp fire; a young boy rushed up to us and shouted in excitement "We won! We won!" Two blocks down a young woman also expressed delight in the victory, before directing us around the corner.
It was a month after the Six Day War.
I flew into Israel on the 16th of July this year, too, late in the afternoon. The sand dunes are all gone, covered by housing projects of 15- or 20-story residential towers. (There probably weren't more than two such buildings in all of Israel in 1967). The towns are crisscrossed by broad multi-lane highways, all of them clogged with vehicles. On the road up to Jerusalem we didn't enter a single town; the highway stays out of them all. Arriving in Jerusalem we saw no dancing groups of celebrators. People don't do public celebrations on hot summer evenings anymore.
48 years have seen a lot of change.
Forty years ago today, on August 17th 1975, I enlisted in the IDF.
The IDF in those days was still reeling from the Yom Kippur War. A year earlier recruits were reportedly given three choices upon enlistment: they could join the tanks, or the tanks, or the tanks. By the time I arrived people were volunteering to the paratroopers and being sent to the one or two other infantry units, but most people went into the armoured corps. Most of the army seemed to be there in those days; once there they served either on the Golan or in the Sinai. The enemy was Egypt, or Syria; I never had a single military encounter with Palestinians in my entire three-year stint - or for that matter, in my subsequent 30-40 months of reserve duty spread over the next 25 years. I had an officer who was certified as being shell-shocked, and a company commander who wasn't certified but should have been.
The first evening in the recruitment depot Evyatar and I crawled out under a fence and went to find a public telephone to call home. Being 18, we weren't afraid of fighting or dying; but we were apprehensive about sharing tents and training with the loud and rough-looking soldiers from parts of society we'd never interacted with. I suppose they may have been prickly about us, too, but we didn't see this at the time. Doing first rounds of kitchen duty was frightening: we were ordered around by soldiers who seemed to delight in our sense of apprehension and disorientation.
It was hot. It was strange. It was radically different. We had boarded the bus in Jerusalem cocky with the sensation that we were joining something big and important; now it looked mostly foreign and disconcerting. And l-o-o-o-n-g! Three whole years! In this?! Three. Whole. Years. Would we ever return to a normal civilian life, such as the one we'd just left so blithely behind?
Yes and no, in retrospect. We did, of course, because three years isn't, actually, very long. We didn't, in many ways, because by the time we got out we ourselves were very different.
That first evening, in a hot tent on a prickly blanket on a steel-frame cot was one of the most important points of my life. The thing is, I knew it at the time, too - and yet I didn't. Donning the ugly and uncomfortable olive uniform and clunky boots gave us the feeling of now being adults, citizens, contributors to society, lords of our destiny. And also hopelessly young and inexperienced, rookies, untested and insignificant cogs in a large machine which didn't at all care about who we'd been so far. We knew we were on the cusp of one of life's biggest adventures; we didn't have the slightest inkling of what we were facing. We knew we were setting out on a rite of passage; we didn't comprehend the rite or where we'd pass to. The system was reeling after war, and it looked solid and impregnable; we were over-confident and exuberant; ignorant of what we'd be called upon to deal with and what growth we'd be required to perform.
Evyatar eventually made it all the way to full Colonel. I climbed up to first sergeant. Yet each of us and all of us really did acquire a personal confidence based on achievement and the satisfaction of successfully coping, functioning in the system, and mastering its requirements. By the time we walked out, we really were adults, citizens, contributors to society and, oh yes, lords of our destiny to the degree this is granted to mere mortals.
And a good thing, too, because the country was changing. From two-lane roads across sand dunes, to highways between hi-tech development centers; from the simplicity of singing around a campfire on a hot summer evening to the complexity of a multilayered, multifaceted society smack in the middle of one of the world's most volatile regions. There is more than one path we can take in life, and more than one direction society can move in. Our ability to participate in the way we have, to contribute in the ways we've managed, to own our society for better and for worse, were profoundly forged by what followed when we woke, for the first time, in those hot ugly tents on the morning of August 18th 1975 to face our first full day in the army.
I especially remember the feeling of exuberance in the air. A few blocks from our destination the cabbie pulled up in front of a group of people sitting around a camp fire; a young boy rushed up to us and shouted in excitement "We won! We won!" Two blocks down a young woman also expressed delight in the victory, before directing us around the corner.
It was a month after the Six Day War.
I flew into Israel on the 16th of July this year, too, late in the afternoon. The sand dunes are all gone, covered by housing projects of 15- or 20-story residential towers. (There probably weren't more than two such buildings in all of Israel in 1967). The towns are crisscrossed by broad multi-lane highways, all of them clogged with vehicles. On the road up to Jerusalem we didn't enter a single town; the highway stays out of them all. Arriving in Jerusalem we saw no dancing groups of celebrators. People don't do public celebrations on hot summer evenings anymore.
48 years have seen a lot of change.
Forty years ago today, on August 17th 1975, I enlisted in the IDF.
The IDF in those days was still reeling from the Yom Kippur War. A year earlier recruits were reportedly given three choices upon enlistment: they could join the tanks, or the tanks, or the tanks. By the time I arrived people were volunteering to the paratroopers and being sent to the one or two other infantry units, but most people went into the armoured corps. Most of the army seemed to be there in those days; once there they served either on the Golan or in the Sinai. The enemy was Egypt, or Syria; I never had a single military encounter with Palestinians in my entire three-year stint - or for that matter, in my subsequent 30-40 months of reserve duty spread over the next 25 years. I had an officer who was certified as being shell-shocked, and a company commander who wasn't certified but should have been.
The first evening in the recruitment depot Evyatar and I crawled out under a fence and went to find a public telephone to call home. Being 18, we weren't afraid of fighting or dying; but we were apprehensive about sharing tents and training with the loud and rough-looking soldiers from parts of society we'd never interacted with. I suppose they may have been prickly about us, too, but we didn't see this at the time. Doing first rounds of kitchen duty was frightening: we were ordered around by soldiers who seemed to delight in our sense of apprehension and disorientation.
It was hot. It was strange. It was radically different. We had boarded the bus in Jerusalem cocky with the sensation that we were joining something big and important; now it looked mostly foreign and disconcerting. And l-o-o-o-n-g! Three whole years! In this?! Three. Whole. Years. Would we ever return to a normal civilian life, such as the one we'd just left so blithely behind?
Yes and no, in retrospect. We did, of course, because three years isn't, actually, very long. We didn't, in many ways, because by the time we got out we ourselves were very different.
That first evening, in a hot tent on a prickly blanket on a steel-frame cot was one of the most important points of my life. The thing is, I knew it at the time, too - and yet I didn't. Donning the ugly and uncomfortable olive uniform and clunky boots gave us the feeling of now being adults, citizens, contributors to society, lords of our destiny. And also hopelessly young and inexperienced, rookies, untested and insignificant cogs in a large machine which didn't at all care about who we'd been so far. We knew we were on the cusp of one of life's biggest adventures; we didn't have the slightest inkling of what we were facing. We knew we were setting out on a rite of passage; we didn't comprehend the rite or where we'd pass to. The system was reeling after war, and it looked solid and impregnable; we were over-confident and exuberant; ignorant of what we'd be called upon to deal with and what growth we'd be required to perform.
Evyatar eventually made it all the way to full Colonel. I climbed up to first sergeant. Yet each of us and all of us really did acquire a personal confidence based on achievement and the satisfaction of successfully coping, functioning in the system, and mastering its requirements. By the time we walked out, we really were adults, citizens, contributors to society and, oh yes, lords of our destiny to the degree this is granted to mere mortals.
And a good thing, too, because the country was changing. From two-lane roads across sand dunes, to highways between hi-tech development centers; from the simplicity of singing around a campfire on a hot summer evening to the complexity of a multilayered, multifaceted society smack in the middle of one of the world's most volatile regions. There is more than one path we can take in life, and more than one direction society can move in. Our ability to participate in the way we have, to contribute in the ways we've managed, to own our society for better and for worse, were profoundly forged by what followed when we woke, for the first time, in those hot ugly tents on the morning of August 18th 1975 to face our first full day in the army.
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