Gaza Flotilla

I've been offline most of the day, and anyway don't feel the need to respond to last night's events off the cuff. Later, perhaps tonight, I'll get to it.

Against the Haredim Before Being for Them, then Against

Here's a fine example of why Israel is so exasperating, and nigh impossible for outsiders truly to follow. Let's see if we can unravel the tangled strands.

Ron Huldai used to be a general in our air-force. When he finished that, he went to run the Herzliya high-school in Tel Aviv - admittedly a high-profile school but still only a high-school. Most generals aim higher (or lower, when they become arms-dealers in Africa, or BMW's boss in Israel). So that was admirable. A few years later he ran for mayor, and since he keeps on getting re-elected he must be doing something right. I'm often in Tel Aviv these days, and grudgingly admit that it's not a bad-looking town; I'm even beginning to like it, in a wary sort of way. Tel Aviv is a very secular town (though Rishon Leziyon is even more so), and many Israelis from elsewhere will tell you it's a bit detached from the rest of the country. Or not, as this story indicates.

Huldai recently spoke out against the refusal of some Haredi schools to teach what's called the Core Program. This is defined as the utter minimum of modern studies that school children in Israel must have, and includes mostly some Maths and English. If parents wish their children to spend all their time studying religious things (Jewish, Arab, whatever), that's their right, so long as the children get the Core Program. Some Haredi schools object even to that, and Huldai correctly came out against them. His position is relevant because elementary schools get much of their funding through municipalities. (This paragraph has been a simplification, but it will have to do).

So far so good.

In recent years there have been a small but noticeable number of young Haredi families who have moved into Ramat Aviv, an expensive and very secular area in the north of Tel Aviv. I drove through a couple months ago and was startled to see how visible they were - well, they do rather stand out in their uniforms against the backdrop of the Ramat Aviv mall. The locals don't like them there, and especially don't like the local Chabad House - though if they understood Haredi society they'd know that Chabad isn't exactly Haredi, it's Chabad. But when dealing with stereotypes, who's counting. They're apparently especially worried about the influence Chabad is having on local teenagers, though if you ask me it would be better to offer some sort of counter influence if you're all worried about your children being enticed by something. As Cat Stevens once said, it's a wild world out there (and look what happened to him... hmmn. Maybe I shouldn't have brought that up).

Anyway, some of the locals are getting organized to stop the influx of unwanted Haredi into their neighborhood, and it appears they're demanding of their mayor that he back their position:

Huldai appears to have won substantial support from Tel Aviv's secular public after coming out against the haredi study program last month. His statements will be put to the test this week in a city council debate on the "haredization" of northern Tel Aviv.

Why the one position is connected to the other, I can't say; the statement that his previous position will be tested by his position on this one is baffling. Why? It should be possible to demand that Haredi children learn maths, even when they live in Ramat Aviv - or have I missed something?

Then there's the matter of segregated buses, which somehow slips into the report:

Since the residents' campaign was launched two years ago the mayor avoided making explicit statements endorsing any one side. On Monday he will be forced to comment on a motion filed by Councilman and Attorney Reuven Ladiansky from the Let Live faction. "I intend to mention the fact that the Municipality is funding a bus line which maintains separation between male and female students in Ramat Hahayal," Ladiansky told Ynet.

These segregated buses are not about the Core Program, and are not about who lives where, but they are, as the French would say, a shande. Everybody should be against them. As a matter of fact, if Tel Aviv is in any way like Jerusalem (perish the thought), the Haredi moving out of their neighborhoods and into secular areas are probably the saner ones, those who'd like their children to grow up knowing that not everyone is Haredi, and that most people get along just fine on regular buses. The secular folks who correctly think the segregation of buses is a mishegass ought to be encouraging young Haredi couples to move into secular neighborhoods.

Have I made it all clear now? No? Well, at least I don't need to get elected to anything. Think about poor Huldai, and how he can ever extract himself from this one...

Necessary Secrets

Alan Dershowitz (a law professor) reviews Gabriel Schoenfeld's new book Necessary Secrets: National Security, the Media, and the Rule of Law at the New York Times, which is interesting because Schoenfeld apparently takes some close looks at the NYT in his book. Dershowitz mostly but not completely likes the book. It just came out and I haven't read it yet, but it sure could have informed our recent discussion of the Anat Kamm case, where the assumption was that any limitation of the media's total freedom do whatever they wanted was anti-democratic heresy.

Here's Deshowitz agreeing with Schoenfeld, and also saying what should be obvious, but isn't:

It has become an article of faith among some civil liberty absolutists to deny that there are any costs associated with disclosing secrets like the National Security Agency’s high-tech program. This is part of a more general mantra of denial that covers other contentious issues as well: torture never produces actionable intelligence; capital punishment never deters; censorship never prevents harm; and a national identification system would never stop any terrorist. Each of these claims is highly questionable.

Anyone with an iota of historical knowledge must concede that torture sometimes works, as it did when Nazis tortured members of the French resistance into leading them to the hiding places of family members and friends. Recent studies suggest that capital punishment deters at least some criminals, as evidenced by the apparently higher costs of hiring a hit man in a state that executes than in one that doesn’t. Racist, sexist and homophobic speech can sometimes, as we have seen, incite violence against vulnerable victims. And a national identification system would almost certainly make it more difficult for some foreign terrorists to hide among our citizens. Constitutional rights are not cost-free.

To be sure, the arguments against torture, capital punishment, censorship and a national identification system are powerful. Still, honesty demands that the benefits of absolute adherence to a maximalist view of rights be weighed against their costs. Schoenfeld simply but persuasively demands an honest accounting by those who would make the case for publishing national security secrets in real time.

I have asked Schoenfeld if he'd like to write something about the principles impacted by the Kamm case. He said might, so here's hoping.

Eli Cohen on Radio Damascus

Eli Cohen has iconic status in Israel, in spite of being dead 45 years already.

Cohen was an Israeli spy planted in Damascus in 1961, purportedly as a returning emigre from South America. He successfully penetrated government circles, eventually being mooted for a position as deputy secretary of defense. In 1965 he was identified, arrested, tortured and tried, before being publicly hanged in the center of Damascus.

His activity apparently contributed significantly to Israel's ability to beat the Syrian defenses on the Golan in 1967.

His remains have never been returned, in spite of Israeli attempts to include them in exchanges of prisoners following the three wars we've had with Syria since his hanging.

Someone has now dug up a recording of an interview he gave Radio Damascus not long before his arrest. You can't be an Israeli and not listen to this voice from the past with fascination.

Flotilla of the Vanities

Avi Issacharoff and Amos Harel point out that no-one involved in the story of the flotilla approaching Gaza today has much interest in the people of Gaza.

It is highly doubtful that the convoy's organizers have the well being of Gaza's residents as their top priority. The cargo on the ships, even if it does reach Gaza, will not effect the average Gazan's condition - we have learned over the three years since the revolution in Gaza (12 June 2007) that the Hamas government isn’t very different from its predecessors regarding its citizens' welfare. In the days of severe fuel shortage, Hamas leaders' vehicles were the only cars that traveled feely. The taxes the government placed on Gazan residents were not meant to improve their lives, but rather to make sure the Hamas rule does not crumble. Freeing Gilad Shalit would have most likely ended the siege, but the organization is in no hurry to do that - again, due to the political accounts it wishes to close.

The flotilla is meant to serve the organization on the international front and depict Israel as a cruel country that harms innocent Palestinians.

Sadly, however, Israel looks likely to play into their hands, since someone on our side has also decided to assign great importance to what is no more than a publicity stunt:

The problem is, as stated, that that Israeli government helped glorify the flotilla. It is difficult to understand why an alternative solution was not fully considered, such as stopping the ships, searching them, and then letting them through. Even if hundreds of Muslim and European activists enter Gaza accompanied by an Israeli MK, it will be incomparable to the damage to Israel's image from the media coverage of a confrontation between its Navy's commando and unarmed citizens. But it's too late now: Stopping the flotilla has become a test of Israel's power of deterrence.

Isn't it great we have such wise leaders?

Killing Afghan Civilians in Nevada

OK, that's a misleading title, I admit. The killing of 23 Afghan civilians was done in Afghanistan, of course, when they were rocketed from a helicopter in February this year. Yet a key role in the identifying of the target, three vehicles driving along some dusty road not near any American troops, was done by some drone operators sitting in a facility in Nevada; they watched the three cars for three hours before directing the attack.

Once the extent of the mistake became clear there was a serious investigation, and four American officers were reprimanded. The whole story is summed up in the New York Times, here. I recommend reading it.

As I never tire of saying, I'm in favor of the American war in Afghanistan. It's a just war, being waged mostly with just means, and when mistakes are inevitably made, the Americans seem to be doing their best to learn from them and not repeat them. Still, reading the report does raise a number of points.

1. The deaths of 23 Afghan civilians is truly tragic. No ifs and buts.

2. It is now commonplace for deaths in combat zones to be the result of actions taken by well-fed, well-clothed professionals sitting in air-conditioned facilities literally half way around the world from the events. These professionals have probably never heard shots fired in anger, if they've heard shots fired at all; they are in no personal danger at any time, cannot plead to have operated under the stress of battle conditions nor emotional turmoil caused by, say, violence threatening their families. Nor do they have any personal experience of the land they're attacking: it's appearance, smells and sounds, nor, bizarre as it ought to sound but probably no longer does, any personal encounters with any of the people of the nation their actions are impacting upon.

3. The investigation seems to have been done entirely by military investigatory outfits. No so-called "independent investigations" were involved.

4. The identity of the investigators and their institutional proximity to the targets of the investigation raise no eyebrows. No-one is demanding that civilians investigate the military, and no-one's dreaming of bring in the United Nations, or any other international outfit.

5. No-one assumes that if civilians died, it must be that civilians were intended to die.

6. All of this in spite of the fact that the killings apparently took place in a sparsely populated rural area, and even according to the report, there were indications that not all was well, and that women and children might have been present, even before the attack; the attack happened some seven miles from the nearest American ground forces, if I'm reading the story correctly.

One of the reasons I read the entire 575-page Goldstone report, as well as many other shorter documents, was to understand how Israel's enemies operate. The modes of thought and speech they routinely use against Israel are totally lacking in this report: not surprising, of course, but important to keep in mind. There are various wars going on these days, but Israel is judged by uniquely harsh and negative standards.

South African Documents

I've been having less and less time for blogging, as you may have noticed, and decided not to get into the story of the new book about Israeli-South African collaboration in the 1970s. I haven't read the book, I have no doubt that particular chapter of Israel's history is not its most glorious, I doubt Israel was less cynical than France, the UK or the USA, and I'm not convinced today's critics come to the discussion with clean hands. Realpolitik is often an ugly thing to observe, but one of the finest things about Zionism is that it enabled the Jews to engage in it as a nation, rather than be shoved around by others with realpolitik reasons not to come to our aid. That's what having power means, and it's definitely better to have it than not to have it. Ask the Darfuri.

The folks at CiFWatch however have been working hard on the matter, as you can see here, here and here, and apparently with more to come. I like the way they're going at it: by carefully and precisely reading the documents. When I was younger I once wrote a doctoral thesis, which contained an entire chapter about the art of figuring out what documents really say, not what folks carelessly say they say; it was eventually published in one of those books over on the left of the blog. A careful reading of documents, it turns out, often results with a different understanding than a careless one.

We See Our World Through Our Cultur

Victor has an amusing post about how folks from Russia see a particular event: it's apparently done differently than in Berkeley.

The Plumbing of Israeli Democracy: FARA

In recent months we have been warned repeatedly about the erosion of democratic freedoms in Israel. One of the top alleged dangers is a proposed law requiring transparency about foreign sources of funding. The New York Times recently gave the NGOs a platform to explain the danger:

Perhaps the most alarming sign to rights advocates was a preliminary vote in Parliament supporting a bill that called for groups that received support from foreign governments to register with Israel’s political parties’ registrar, which could change their tax status and hamper their ability to raise money abroad. It swept a preliminary vote in the 120-seat Parliament in February with 58 in favor and 11 against. Proponents say the bill is needed to improve transparency. “Up until now they have enjoyed a halo effect as highly regarded human rights watchdogs,” said Gerald Steinberg, an Israeli political scientist and president of NGO Monitor, a conservative watchdog group financed by American Jewish philanthropists. “They were not seen as political organizations with biases and prone to false claims. Now, they are coming under some kind of scrutiny.”But rights organizations say that they are already required to list publicly the sources of their funding, and that the bill is actually intended to stifle dissent.

Asher Fredman, an aide involved in the legislative process, reports:

While ignoring the issues of transparency and foreign interests, the NGOs have focused most of their attacks on a clause that was dropped in the early negotiations over the bill. The clause would have removed tax-exempt status, intended for organizations "promoting the public good," from organizations heavily engaged in Israel's most contentious political debates. Whatever the merits of the clause, its fate demonstrates the robustness of Israel's admittedly imperfect parliamentary democracy.

Sound reasonable to me. The process of legislation in a democracy is structured to enable changes so that the final result reflect the positions of different groups. This doesn't mean that everyone gets everything they want; some players will be called upon to adapt, even if they'd prefer not. Feldman describes how the NGOs expressed their dislike of this aspect:

The bill, largely modeled on longstanding US legislation known as the FARA Act, was first discussed at a Knesset conference on foreign government funding. The organizers, in the spirit of democratic discussion, offered the leaders of five of the most powerful NGOs, the NIF, B'Tselem, ACRI, Adalah and Gisha, an open platform. All refused to take part. The NGOs then contacted MKs from the Left and warned them against participating. The proposed legislation would expand the funding information that NGOs must report, require timelier reporting, and ensure that this information is readily available to the public. Some NGOs already meet these standards of transparency; most do not.

What's not clear is how this legislation came to be portrayed as anti-democratic. After all, it's apparently based on the FARA Act, and American law. Here is the relevant section from the website of the United States Department of Justice:

FARA is short for the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, as amended, 22 U.S.C. § 611 et seq
The purpose of FARA is to insure that the U.S. Government and the people of the United States are informed of the source of information (propaganda) and the identity of persons attempting to influence U.S. public opinion, policy, and laws. In 1938, FARA was Congress' response to the large number of German propaganda agents in the pre-WWII U.S..

The term also includes foreign political parties, a person or organization outside the United States, except U. S. citizens, and any entity organized under the laws of a foreign country or having its principal place of business in a foreign country.

1. The Act requires every agent of a foreign principal, not otherwise exempt, to register with the Department of Justice and file forms outlining its agreements with, income from, and expenditures on behalf of the foreign principal. These forms are public records and must be supplemented every six months.
2. The Act also requires that informational materials (formerly propaganda) be labeled with a conspicuous statement that the information is disseminated by the agents on behalf of the foreign principal. The agent must provide copies of such materials to the Attorney General.
3. Any agent testifying before a committee of Congress must furnish the committee with a copy of his most recent registration statement.
4. The agent must keep records of all his activities and permit the Attorney General to inspect them.

One must register within ten days of agreeing to become an agent and before performing any activities for the foreign principal.

A cursory scanning seems to indicate that the Israeli version will be less intrusive and narrower than the American original. Interesting how the NYT missed that angle of the story.

Amnesty International and Israel's Court System

You may perhaps recollect how Amnesty International was displeased with Israel, some two weeks back, for arresting Ameer Makhoul. Israel was harassing him for his activities as the boss of an NGO, and AI was threatening to describe him as a prisoner of conscience, no less. They also called upon Israel, in the unlikely case it had evidence against him, to bring him to trial in accordance with international fair trial standards. (For the full text of their position, see here).

The Israeli police has completed its investigation, the prosecution has written up an indictment and presented it to court, and it turns out he's being accused of rather serious crimes. Here's a summary of them.

Of course, we don't know if he's guilty. That's what trials are for. Nor do we know if he's innocent, even though AI made up its mind long ago, apparently, otherwise their communique of May 13th would be malicious and unprofessional.

I am sending this to my old acquaintance Neil Durkin, who works in the press department of AI; perhaps he'll be able to clarify matters for us.

(h/t Yair)

The Universal Significance of Sri Lanka

Did the Nazi attempt to kill all the Jews warn mankind against ever trying again, or does it serve as a pilot project, to be improved upon next time? Must it even be an either-or thing? Maybe the Germans learned one thing, and the Islamists - the other? The one things that's certain is that mankind did not learn from the Holocaust to desist from genocide.

The Economist reports that a growing club of countries is sending its strongmen to Sri Lanka to learn how to destroy a terrorist threat. Inevitably they've got Israel on the list, but if you set that aside, it's an important but depressing development.

Many of us wish the trajectory of the human story was away from warfare and violence. Too many people, however, also believe this is reality, not merely a wish. Similar to the question about killing all the Jews, it may even be both: certainly in non-Balkan Europe, violence and warfare are utterly out of fashion - but not in the rest of the world, Not at all. This is probably not a blip, or an aberration, but a reflection of age-old human nature.

Preparedness Takes Lots of Preparation

We're having a week-long nationwide Home Front defense drill. Granted, the entire nation is a bit small, about the size of New Jersey with fewer people, but it's hard to overestimate the importance of such preparations. A drill such as this is planned for an entire year, and thousands of people are involved in the process. Should a missile land on a water station it's not obvious that the water company's teams will know, and will know what to do about it, and will know how to equip themselves, and will know how to get there; if the phone system, the electric system and the mobile phone system have all crashed, and the roads are jammed with vehicles trying to reach the hospitals, how does that water company team come together and fix the problem? And if the problem can't be fixed today, how will water be distributed and who announces it how?

This is merely one scenario, for one municipal water company. Multiply it by all the other things that can go wrong all over the country, and throw in the need to fight and win a war as quickly as possible because the enemy has more rockets and will keep on shooting them for as long as it can unless it's stopped.

If and when it happens (I tend, alas, to the When camp) there will inevitably be mass chaos. Having thousands of people in all the relevant agencies who have at least thought about it, have tried to imagine all the scenarios, have mooted solutions, and perhaps even experimented with the ones that will inevitably be not what happens - all this is crucial. It will be the difference between life and death for people who at the moment are simply going about their ordinary lives.

It will also mean that when the war comes, our preparations will be vastly better than those of the other side, so that the televised chaos over there will look worse, the ability to recuperate will be held up as proof the danger wasn't so dramatic, and the "proportionality brigade" of self anointed legal experts will swing into action, followed by the world's media, then the UN, and eventually even some of America's anguished Jews. This is all inevitable, but quite irrelevant. Should we refrain from trying to prepare for the worst so as to win some world opinion brownie points for our suffering? Of course not.

A Case of Antisemitism

Adam Kirsch reviews Antony Julius' new book on English antisemitism. In passing, he links to Harold Bloom's previous review, in the NYT, which I already linked to here. Kirsch, however, also noticed the readers' responses to Bloom's review, as published in the Letters section. Five letters were published, each one of them critical in one way or the other of.... Bloom. Well, none of the writers had read the book, so they criticized the messenger. I haven't read the book either, yet, but I'm struck by how shallow the criticism seems to be. One letter writer trots out the fact that there are lots of prominent Jews in today's UK politics, so there can't be much antisemitism around, can there. Most interesting, however, was the response of Prof. James Wood of the department of literary criticism at Harvard.

...In place of this precise slander and imprecise imputation, Bloom might have noted that some of the most robust left-wing discussion of Israeli policy has come from members of the British literary and academic establishment who are also Jewish (Tony Judt, Harold Pinter, Mike Leigh, Jacqueline Rose). If there is more political discussion of this order in Britain than in America it is not necessarily because the English are so anti-Semitic — or at least, I certainly hope not —­ but more likely (as Judt has pointed out) because most Americans live in almost complete ignorance of the “fierce relevance” of certain political realities and facts.

Yep.

Reflections about the Edge of the Jewish World

There's been too much excitement around here recently about matters that may well not be remembered six months from now, not to say six years. Time to take a longer look at things that have survived all tests of time.

The late Second Temple era saw the greatest diversity of cultural and religious creation in the Jewish world, to an extent not replicated until the 20th century. In spite of considerable political turmoil and occasional wars, Jews allowed themselves to express their Jewishness in all sorts of ways, some of them hardly mutually compatible. Not everyone liked it that way, and at times the arguments turned violent. Still, so long as there was a temple in Jerusalem which everyone could accept as the center, everyone muddled along.

Immediately after the destruction the rabbinic authorities focused like a laser (they wouldn't have recognized my term): if you're with us, this is how we do Judaism; if you don't, you're out. Good-by, and good riddance. Quite a gamble, if you stop to think about it, but they were uncompromising. Nor was this a temporary measure: it went on for centuries - arguably, more than a millennium. A long time indeed.

The story of Ben Sira can demonstrate this - sort of.

Ben Sira is a book written in Hebrew around 200 BCE, give or take a generation. Its author probably thought he was writing a treatise about ethical behaviour, and had someone told him that later on some such treatises would be canonized into the Bible, he might have expected his to be included. In any case, it was regarded as a religious tome.

It was also translated to Greek, apparently by the author's grandson, which was a good thing because when the laser started cutting things out, 200 years later, Ben Sira was out. The practical implication was that it wasn't copied and recopied in Hebrew, nor learned by heart as the oral tradition was, and so was lost; the Greek version, however, having entered the Septuagint, waspreserved; in some traditions it is even part of the New Testament (in Greek it's called Sirach). Only in the 20th century were largish sections of the original Hebrew discovered, in the Cairo Geniza and on Massada. (More on the book, here).

One of the operators of that laser was rabbi Akiva, and there's a Mishna in Sanhedrin where he rules that Jews who read the wrong books (Sefarim Hitzoni'im, external books) won't go to heaven. On page 100b there is then a fascinating discussion among Amora'im, another few centuries on, about Ben Sira: the rabbis agree that rabbi Akiva had it on his list of forbidden books, but they're not quite certain why. The entire page is a series of quotations from the book (by now 500 years old, and say 250 years since the casting out) which are evaluated: this saying is OK, that one isn't and must have been what generated rabbi Akiva's ire, oh come on that's harmless, maybe it was this section.

You get my point: it's forbidden literature, but the rabbis know it by heart, even as they shudder over it's content (or not). Did the general Jewish public also know it? I expect not, but I doubt anyone really knows. It's hard enough figuring out what people think right now; reconstructing popular literacy at a distance of 1700 years is impossible.

That was my first story about the edge of Jewish identity. Here's a second, which appears on page 102b in Sanhedrin.

The Mishna lists three Biblical kings who were not allowed into heaven: Yerovam, Ahab and Menashe. Rav Ashi (later 4th century CE) once told his students in the yeshiva that their next day's lesson would deal with "our friends" or perhaps "our collegues" (haverin), those three kings (he was saying they were scholars before they were sinners) - and note how the Gemara observes itself in action: rav Ashi is teaching it and is in it, simultaneously. That's what you get when you spend 700 years creating one book.

That night Menashe appeared to rav Ashi in his dream:

- You dare call us your colleagues? (who do you think you are, little upstart). If you think you know so much, tell me from what part of the loaf are you to eat first upon blessing over the bread?
- I don't know.
- Such a simple thing, you don't know it, and you dare call yourself our colleague?
- So tell me, and I'll teach it tomorrow in class, in your name.
- You eat first from right under the crust.
- If you know so much (if you're such a scholar, this is rav Ashi asking the terrible sinner Menashe), how come you (and the other sinners) succumbed to idolatry?
- Ah, what do you know. Had you been alive in those days, you'd have raised the hem of your garment so as to run faster to worship those idols, so great was their attraction.
Then next morning, the Gemara tells us, rav Ashi opened his lecture by saying: Today we'll learn from our rabbis (our betters, not our colleagues).

Defining the edges seems to have been problematic, even in the days when doing it was an existential imperative.

[This thread started and is explained here]

Peering Through the Fog

I had lunch today with a fellow who knows way more than I do about American Jewry (his alias is Goldblog, but I'm not authorized to disclose his real name). I learned all sorts of interesting things, but came away mostly with an enhanced recognition of how little I really know about the subject. This, in spite of having lived some of my years in the US and among its Jews; speaking their language; following some of their writings; visiting about once a year; and knowing some of them personally (cousins, nephews, colleagues, neighbors who split their time between both countries, etc.) It wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say that some of my best friends are American Jews. (I also have friends who aren't American, or aren't Jews, or aren't any of all that - but that's a different story).

Seen from here, it's hard to know which of the following reports is more representative:

Fifth Avenue Salutes Israel, about a mass event in Manhattan that was deemed important enough to attract just about every New York politician who needs to be elected:

Hundreds of thousands of people took part in the Salute to Israel Parade on New York City's Fifth Avenue Sunday. Participants danced to the tunes of Hebrew music, waved Israeli and American flags, and carried heart warming posters in support of the Jewish state across the ocean.

Or perhaps this, from The Tablet:

...I am deeply ambivalent about Israel. Modern-day Israel, as opposed to historical Israel, is a subject I avoid with my children. Yes, of course I believe the state should exist, but the word “Zionist” makes me skittish. (I understand that I may be the Jewish equivalent of all the twentysomething women I want to smack for saying, “I’m not a feminist, but I believe in equal rights.”) I shy away from conversations about Israeli politics. I feel no stirring in my heart when I see the Israeli flag. I would no sooner attend an Israel Day parade than a Justin Bieber concert. Neither Abe Foxman nor AIPAC speaks for me. I am a liberal, and I am deeply troubled by the Matzav, Israeli shorthand for tension with the Palestinians, and I do not have answers, and I do not know what to do about it, and I do not know what to tell my children. So, it was with a huge sense of identification and relief that I read Peter Beinart’s controversial essay in the New York Review of Books last week.

The two are not, of course, mutually exclusive, and there's nothing wrong with a large Jewish community having diverse and even contradictory positions or trends. Knowing the Jews, it would be impossible otherwise. My point is that seen from here, it's essentially impossible to figure out what's going on, who's got the upper hand, who is the face of the future and who not, and so on.

All of which is to wish that Peter Beinart and his many comrades in ignorance would pontificate a wee bit less about all the things that are wrong about Israel, even as his very choice of sources, not to mention his outlandish conclusions, speak volumes mostly to his lack of information.

Yesterday he followed up his previous piece with one called Why Israel has to do Better, which mostly left me scratching my head in perplexity. It contains ideas such as that the Palestinian leaders since Arafat are eager to reach a two-state solution but Israel isn't (Ehud Olmert, anyone?); settlements are ever encroaching on Palestinian land and pulling them out will cause civil war (Gaza, anyone? - Not to mention that the myth of the encroaching is true only if you cast the facts in a very specific way); Hamas and Fatah would have created a unity government amenable to negotiating with Israel in 2007, but Israel and America thwarted them (How, exactly, did they manage, and how come it was never reported in any knowledgeable media outlet I've seen, not even Haaretz?); Israel is at least partially to blame for the Hamas rockets from Gaza - he actually does say that. And so on. He has also allowed Edit Zertal and Akiva Eldar to convince him that the settlers are a cancer in the Israeli polity, and someone has convinced him that the Haredim have taken over Jerusalem (Nir Barkat, anyone?).

I'll allow him a pass about the cancer in the polity one. It's conceivable he's simply ignorant about the heritage and provenance of that term, though it's not an ignorance to be proud of.

At the end of his litany of myths, distortions, inventions and shabby propaganda, he gives us an insight about his motives, and they aren't a deep need to understand what Israel is about:

One last point. Leon, Jeff, Jon, Jamie, David and I are all Jews. In some sense, therefore, Israel’s crimes—unlike those of Hamas or Ahmedinejad—are committed in our name. We have a special obligation to expose and confront them. And we have a special obligation not to use the crimes of Israel’s enemies to excuse behavior that dishonors a Jewish state, and the Jewish ethical tradition that we all consider precious.

He's apologetic; Israel besmirches his name.

I bow to no one in matters of morality, which is a stronger word than ethics, but when Beinart cites our common tradition I'm not certain it really is. His version doesn't look all that much like the one I know about.

The Plumbing of Israeli Democracy: Rubi Rivlin

Since so many people out there are so busy assuring us that Israeli democracy has gone off the tracks - and yes, they're aided and abetted by a tiny minority of Israelis who certainly know better - it occurs to me there may be value in an occasional series looking into the plumbing of Israeli democracy. Here's the first installment.

According to Israeli law, members of Knesset enjoy legal immunity from prosecution. Unfortunately, over the years there have been cases of MKs engaging in criminal acts: this is a fact, regrettable as it may be. In order to enable MKs to be tried, a Knesset committee must first hear some of the evidence and revoke the immunity of the MK on that specific matter (or, rarely, not revoke it. That has also happened). This morning there was a discussion in the relevant committee on a proposal to revoke the immunity of some Arab MKs who recently visited Libya.

The proposal was authored by Dr. Michael ben Ari, the most extreme right-wing MK of the present Knesset, who is in the opposition. He didn't garner the votes he needed, but some of the MKs felt they'd like to use the subject for a spot of additional grandstanding before quashing it, so they delayed the vote until next week. Interestingly, Rubi Rivlin, the Speaker of the House, took the highly unusual step of participating in the discussion, because he felt strongly about it: against, obviously:

The Knesset speaker said, "Limiting the freedom of expression and narrowing the Knesset members' steps is a dangerous, slippery slope, which will end in tyranny and the nullification of the minority." Rivlin added that revoking the MKs immunity could serve as a double-edged sword and equally harm the other end of the political spectrum. "Today, it is the Arab minority, and tomorrow it will be another minority. Such things have happened in the past.

Rivlin, as all of us know, is from the right wing of Likud. He's not a lefty, nor even a centrist. He's staunchly and proudly right-wing. Which of course doesn't preclude his taking a clear position in favor of freedom of speech, be it of people of his persuasion or a very different persuasion.

Which is the way it should be, and also just what you'd expect.

The Invention of Life

Here's a layman's guide to what the scientists are up to. It's complicated. It's fascinating. It's profoundly frightening. It's wildly exciting.

It will change the world. It won't change human nature.

Limiting Freedom of Speech, Eroding Democracy

If you believe the NIF, Israel's radicals, Peter Beinart or many others, Israel is going through a crises of democracy, freedom of speech is under attack, oppositional organizations are being persecuted and things are generally going downhill in Israel. It's ugly.

It's also nonsense, as I've been describing relentlessly for quite a while.

Here's a description from a faraway land. It tells not about grandstanding and mooted ideas about changes to the laws that will never happen, but rather about laws that are already on the books, laws that limit the ability to organize freely, draconian requirements for total transparency about sources of funds for political purposes - and as a freebie, one of the matters that has sparked the discussion is the intention of the government to demolish homes of poor people to make way for rich folks.

I dare anyone to find Israeli laws that look anything like this, the ones currently on the book or the ones being discussed that will never be enacted.

The faraway land, you ask? The state of Washington. And Alabama. And 34 others.

Don't Divide Jerusalem: Mamila

People who look forward to the division of Jerusalem between Israel and Palestine assume and hope the division will lead to peaceful coexistence and good will to replace a century of hatred bloodshed war and suffering. A noble hope. Yet they must also take into account the possibility it won't. Dividing Jerusalem will inevitably be a gamble.

In this installation of the series of thinking about what dividing Jerusalem will really look like, on the ground, I'm returning to Mamila.

Mamila is the neighborhood directly outside the Jaffa Gate. It was founded in the late 19th century. In 1920, when the local Arabs launched their first-ever large-scale attack on their Jewish neighbors, looting raping and murdering six Jews, Mamila was one of the places they assaulted. Between 1948 and 1967 the eastern edge of the neighborhood was in no-man's-land between Jordan and Israel; Mamila street was blocked by a high concrete wall to allow the locals to walk on it without being shot by Jordanian snipers of the wall of the Old City. (There were many cases of sniping in those bad days).
Here's a picture of the wall, unfortunately scanned with a low resolution so you can't see the details, but the photographer (David Krojanker) was on the Israeli side looking across the line to the Old City.
In the 1980s a project began to rebuild the neighborhood. The southern part of it is now the Mezudat David hotel and the David's Village luxury apartment project. North of Mamila Road (the part I outlined on the aerial photo above) is the Mamila shopping center, one of the more popular and tasteful shopping areas in town. It sits a literal stone's throw from the Old City; should the division of Jerusalem ever go wrong for whatever reason, there will be no need for Kassams. A simple handgun will be enough to chase all civilians out of Mamila. Here are some films I recently made there.



The previous installment of this series of posts was here, the next one is here, and here is a collection of the entire series prior to it.

Destroying Palestinian Homes

Hamas is razing Palestinian homes. 20 so far, another 180 planned.

I don't expect the usual suspects will make much of a fuss, but that's obvious. I do however wonder if the Palestinian propaganda machine will ever fess up to the fact the house demolitions are not an Israeli monopoly.