Go Yea, and Read

I seem not to have much time for blogging at the moment. Victor, on the other hand, has recently roared back into action after being absent for a while, so I encourage you to go visit him. Divest This has a useful looking boycott-busting guide. Richard Millet has been visiting the zoo, and took his camera along. JHate trudges along, cataloging the nasties. OYvaGoy is giving a speech. Soccerdad seems to be handing out prizes. Richard Silverstein is... oh, forget it. Normblog did a spot of flying. Bataween tilts at the usual windmills; she deserves a vastly broader readership. Well, Solomonia reads her. As well as watching dance contests.

Israel and India

Here's an interesting description of the burgeoning relationship between Israel and India. If you assume the Indians will get their act together sooner or later, by sometime in the second half of the century India will be the world's largest power after the US, with more people than China, a functioning democracy, and endless potential.

Israel: 15th in the Human Development Ranking

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) just published its 20th Human Development Report, which includes its Human Development Index (HDI) rankings. That third link is the one that shows Israel as 15th of 169 countries; there is only one country which isn't English-speaking or European, South Korea, which is higher at 12th place. The Economist has a brief description of what it's all about, here.

Israel is the only one of the top 25, with the exception of the US, which is at war or has been at war in any significant way since 1954. It is the only one with almost 20% of its population being Arabs (the highest Arab country, the United Arab Emirates, is ranked at 32). I'd add that it's also the only one among the top 25 in which something like 20% of the population arrived as impoverished immigrants within the past 20 years, but actually I think it's the only one anywhere, world-wide, with that particular distinction.

Dialogue: Impossible

About seven years ago, not long after I'd completed the writing of Right to Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel's Wars, an idea for the next book began germinating. Jerusalem, it occurred to me, hosts either the headquarters or a branch of just about any significant grouping within the Jewish world; a book that would describe these many threads would effectively present the full tapestry that is the Jewish people in our generation. It would also demonstrate that Jerusalem has become the true capital of the Jews, to a degree unprecedented since 2,000 years ago.

Yet about one third of the people of Jerusalem are Palestinians. Clearly, it would be intellectually dishonest to tell the story of the city and not relate to them. So I set out to find a Palestinian partner. There already are books written together by Palestinians and Israelis, but the Israelis always seem to be apologizing for everything their country does wrong. The book I had in mind would be different: I'm a proud Zionist with no intention to beg forgiveness of the Palestinians for the fact of our existence, nor for our insistence on regarding Jerusalem as the center of our world. Yet I was (am) quite open to hearing the Palestinian side of the story; indeed, I was eager to co-author a bi-national book, and thus sign onto and and take responsibility for all of its content, the pleasant and the less pleasant parts, both.

The act of sharing, I mused, might itself be a demonstration of both sides seeking a way towards some sort of mutually respecting resolution. Indeed, all I requested of the Palestinian partner was that he (or she) respect my side of the story as I was offering to respect his.

Ah, well. No-one ever volunteered to join me. I turned to all sorts of people I know who've got strong connections with Palestinians and requested assistance in finding the right partner. Some of them told me there'd be no chance, others told me there'd be no problem; none of them ever got back to me with any potential partners. None. So much for the usefulness of our so-called peace activists.

About three months ago I found the man on my own. Abed - I'll call him that because it isn't his name nor does it resemble his name - was eager to talk, and very open to collaborating. We set off on a series of meetings and tours, all of which we found mutually fascinating; we also became good friends.

As the moment of truth approached, however, Abed began having doubts. He remained eager to continue our dialogue, and we continue to regard each other as friends, as well as valuable sources of information. Yet he began to fear that his society would not accept his co-authoring a book with an unrepentant Zionist, even one who was willing to present the Palestinian narrative in a book with his name. Abed never detailed precisely what he was afraid of, but then the details weren't particularly important. The principle was: A Palestinian cannot participate in a joint project that recognizes the Jewish claim to Jerusalem, even if the project also presents the Palestinian claims in an equally legitimate manner. Can't.

As things stand, I'm accepting failure. I may still attempt to write a book about Jerusalem, a city which becomes ever more fascinating the more I look; Abed assures me he'll find the way to help me understand the viewpoint of his people, and I expect he'll introduce me to others whenever I wish, but it can't be a joint project.

If anyone out there can think of someone I don't know of who would be willing, I'll be eager to meet them. Alas, I fear - as I've been told all along - that such a person doesn't exist.

Putting Babylon back into the Babylonian Talmud

Yehuda Mirsky  reports on efforts to study the Persian context of the Babylonian Talmud, and tells that it's a promising line of inquiry.There's even a book about it, though it's a bit pricey and isn't readily available anyway: Talmud in Its Iranian Context (Texts & Studies in Ancient Judaism).

Unilateral Palestinian Independence

Over the weekend, while I was seriously enjoying a long weekend without Internet access, David Horovitz, editor of the Jerusalem Post, published a long editorial about Salam Fayad's intention to declare unilateral independence in the summer of 2011. Horovitz sees this as a threatening development, and wonders why Israel's government isn't preparing itself adequately. Robin Shepherd, one of the clearest voices out there, agrees with Horovitz.

I also agree that if the Palestinians try it, they'll most likely succeed. I'd take it further: they'll undoubtedly succeed. I also recognize that such a unilateral declaration - and achievement - of independence will cause no small measure of chaos.

Once it's over, however, I don't see why it would necessarily be a bad thing. Israel might well be forced to evacuate its presence beyond the barrier, which most Israelis don't support anyway.The IDF would have to figure out how to live with the new situation. Beyond that, however, it seems to me the advantages to Israel are considerable:

1. The occupation would be over. It would be hard to damn Israel for occupying the Palestinians and preventing their independence when they're recognized as being independent. Since the Israeli occupation of them has proven to be their most potent weapon against us by far, having them lose it would be great.

2. There would be an ongoing Palestinian demand for the slivers of land between the barrier and the Green Line, which the Palestinians would claim as their own. Israel would be called upon to evacuate these territories, but given the large numbers of Israelis in them, and the small numbers of Palestinians, it would be clear that this demand would have to be negotiated, with Israel holding the physical cards, meaning that the Palestinians would be expected to pay something. That's what negotiations are for, and declaring independence won't change that.

3. The two most important issues on which the Palestinians and Israelis cannot agree at the moment are the right of return, and Jerusalem. The right of return demand will lose much of its potency if there are two sovereign nations living side be side: who ever heard of a demand by a country that millions of people from third countries must move into a second country? As for Jerusalem, I've been clear for years that the city can't be divided. The Palestinians will demand it, but they will no longer be able to demand it as part of the terms of their independence - since they'll already be independent, and the occupation will be over.

Will there be a peace treaty? Probably not anytime soon. Will there be effective peace between two neighbor states? Possibly. And if so, why complain?

Contextualizing Olive Trees

An anonymous reader wonders if I'd care to contextualize a story that appeared yesterday on Mondoweiss. I'm not particularly impressed by snide anonymous comments, but in this case it may be possible to create what President Obama might call a Teachable Moment. So here goes.

The cast:

Taayush. This is a Jewish-Arab organization, created in 2000 just when the Palestinians were launching their war against the Israelis who had just offered them a sovereign state. They are so deeply invested in the Israel-is-always-wrong-and-the-Palestinians-are-always-right narrative, that so far as I know even the NIF refuses to fund them, and that's saying something. I haven't spent much time following them, but my impression is that they're against Zionsim, meaning they'd prefer the Jews not to have a nation state. Also, from what I know of them, they're not interested in facts unless they serve their agenda. This is true of many folks, of course, but is never praiseworthy and always casts a shadow over any statement they make.

IDF troops: The film shows some IDF troops enforcing the law in the hills south of Hebron. There are about 8-10 enlisted men, a major and a lieutenant colonel. I assume the two officers are the CO of an armoured battalion and his deputy, but I could be wrong about this. The video was filmed last Saturday, October 30th; normally, on weekends either the CO or his deputy will be at home with his family; since both of them were on duty that day, the battalion seems to have known there was trouble coming, and both officers decided to stay with the unit.

An order declaring a closed security zone: Israel is the occupying power in this area (the hills south of Hebron), for better and for worse. International law decrees that this entails keeping order. One tool the military government has is to declare certain areas as temporary security zones, which allows them to limit activities which are normally not the government's business, such as freedom of movement. These decrees are used for all sorts of purposes, including keeping Israelis out of certain areas. In the film before us, such a decree has been signed and is introduced in the first scene; it relates to a clearly defined geographic area, and forbids people from walking off the roads; normally such orders last hours or a day or two.

Olive trees: the story in the film is that the IDF troops prevent some Palestinian farmers from harvesting olives, while some Jews from Taayush do their best to obstruct the army and two of them are eventually arrested. The insinuation is that the trees belong to the farmers, but this is actually never clearly said. Which is puzzling, because if it was clearly the case the makers of the film would have said so, either to the IDF troops, or to the viewers of the film, or both. They never do. Moreover, if you look at the trees, they're clearly young. Olive trees can live for many centuries; these trees look to be no older than a decade or two. Which means, they weren't there when Israel occupied the area in 1967. This doesn't prove anything about the ownership, but it does raise the question: who owns the trees, and who owns the land on which they're planted, and is it conceivable that these matters are disputed? Might it be that there are conflicting claims, and the farmers are not innocently harvesting their olives but rather participating in a dispute over ownership? Indeed, is it conceivable that Taayush, Mondoweiss, and the farmers are all trying to prejudice a legal dispute by casting it as a cruel anti-Palestinian policy of the evil Israelis?

I don't know this to be the case - but there's no indication in the film that it's wrong, and as I've said, given their record, there's no other explanation for the lack of a declaration of ownership from the Taayush people. There are two additional circumstantial pieces of evidence. The first is that there is no Israeli policy of preventing Palestinian farmers from harvesting their crops. On the contrary. The present Israeli government has taken a series of active steps to encourage Palestinian economic activity since it came to power. The second is that in previous years there indeed have been cases where extreme settlers did their best to prevent Palestinian farmers from harvesting their crops, and specifically olives; this year the IDF has made a significant effort to defend the Palestinian farmers. IDF troops have been guarding Palestinian farmers from Israeli settlers. If that's the policy, why is the policy in this particular case so different? Might it be because the farmers don't, actually, own the trees or the land they're on?

The plot:


The film opens with the deputy battalion commander, a major, explaining calmly that a specific area, defined on the map he shows, has been declared a sealed military zone. This means, he explains, that road travel is unhampered, but anyone walking off the roads will be arrested. In the next scene (after a shot of ants, which must have some poetic meaning), the Palestinians and Taayush Israelis are harvesting olives. The troops arrive, but contrary to what they said they'd do, no-one is arrested. The lieutenant colonel tells the farmers to stop working, and his deputy signs a specific order pertaining to that orchard: it's 12:07 pm, and he then announces that anyone harvesting after that time will be arrested.

A few minutes later two soldiers and the major are slowly escorting a Palestinian woman out of the orchard. No-one touches her at any point. Eliyahu Nawi, a well-known Israeli supporter of Palestinian farmers, intervenes; after some discussion the officer loses his patience with Nawi, who is arrested. The rest of the Taayush team has all along been taunting the soldiers, insulting them, and obstructing their operation. Eventually a second Taayush Israeli activist is also arrested. No Palestinians are arrested, and there is no violence throughout.

The Mondoweiss blurb that accompanies the film tells that "every detail of Palestinian life requires a permit which is unattainable." This is of course nonsense, as Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian Prime Minster of the West Bank will readily tell; indeed, his entire policy these past two years is predicated on the reality that this isn't the case and that the Palestinians can build a state of their own under Israeli occupation. Also, Palestinian farmers don't need permits to farm their own lands, unless there are specific over-riding reasons. Farming doesn't require permits.

I've said in the past, and I'll say it again: by the standards of military occupations of the modern era, these IDF troops are gentle, kid-gloved and harmless. If this is brutal, what word in the English language remains for the real thing? 

Some critics of Israel like to complain when Israelis compare themselves favorably to Arab states in matters of law, human rights and so on. My question here is if it's conceivable that citizens of a Western democracy would be allowed to verbally assault their own soldiers and obstruct them as they do their jobs within a war zone. Thankfully, there are no war zones within the borders of Western democracies; but there are Western soldiers active in war zones: can anyone imagine some anti-war protesters ranting at American, British or German troops in, say, Afghanistan, or Kossovo, or Iraq?

Counting the Dead

According to Kaleej Times, an English-language paper published in the United Arab Emirates,

Hamas interior minister Fathi Hammad told the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat that between 200 and 300 Hamas fighters were killed during the 22-day onslaught in addition to hundreds of civilians.

“They say the people suffered from this war, but is Hamas not part of the people? On the first day of the war Israel targeted police stations and 250 martyrs were killed, from Hamas and other factions,” he told the paper.

“In addition to them, between 200 and 300 fighters from the Al-Qassam Brigades (Hamas’s armed wing) and another 150 security forces were martyred.”

His numbers roughly match the 709 “terror operatives” the Israeli military said it had killed during the fighting, which included members of the Hamas-run police force that has patrolled Gaza since the group seized power in 2007. 

(h/t Norm).

CAMERA has gone back to read the sections of the Goldstone Report that discussed numbers of casualties. It won't be any surprise to learn that the Report, once again, positioned itself on the counter-factual side of the argument.

This is too old a story to appear in the media; still, those of you who comment on blogs are invited to cite this UEA report whenever the still oft-quoted false numbers of casualties are cited.

Shutting Down

I'll be offline until Tuesday. German readers from Hessen may want to come by and say hello here, Sunday afternoon. Everyone else should take the time to read a book. If you then don't come back to the blogosphere, and decide to stay with the books, even better.

Books and Ideas

Yehuda Mirsky reviews two rather different books. First, Michael Brenner's  Prophets of the Past: Interpreters of Jewish History. If you're perturbed by Shlomo Sand's book about the invention of the Jews, this book may set you at ease. According to the review, Brenner read all the same historians Sand did, only with greater seriousness, and came away with different insights. If, on the other hand, you're not losing any sleep over Sand's silliness, and you're not concerned which the ways different generations of historians see things, then you may find the review will suffice and you don't need to read the book. I leave that to you.

The second review is of Gal Beckerman's new (first?) book, When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry. For Jews of a certain age, much of this will be like wandering down memory lane; if you're younger than that, however, it may well be receding history with vague outlines. I'll bet none of my children know much about all this, in spite of their many friends who moved to Israel because of it. Come to think of it, the friends may not know much about the matter, either. So without having read it myself, this is a story I recommend.

Then there's the idea I promised in the caption, above. It's by Eamonn McDonagh, and it's about the idea that nations have been where they are since time immemorial. Further I won't say: go, all, and pump up his viewer's stats.

A Thesis about Peace

Amira Hass has an article up about how if only Israel would be nice to the Gazans, Hamas would disappear. I wouldn't even know how to begin arguing with her, but perhaps I don't even have to. Go back and read everything she has written in her career (25 years?) and you'll see that at any given moment she was always advocating that Israel should be nice and whatever problem was acute would go away. Some people find such thoughts comforting, which is why they persist.

Most Israelis, however, assume the conflict can't be ended, only managed. Yet managing is a delicate art, not easily given to evaluation let alone perfection. It's a never-ending on-going process of multi-level trial and error, in the hope the errors won't cause too much damage, and can be learned from as you go along.

Just in the past few days we've heard how Iran and Syria are moving missiles into Hezbullah's Lebanon (so much for United Nations Resolution 1701), and the Nigerians (!) have intercepted a shipment of Iranian armaments towards Gaza. Yossi Melman, meanwhile, Haaretz' expert on intelligence matters, explains how having the data and understanding it are two separate things, neither of which is easy to do. Martin Kramer, via Michael Totten, shows how this works also in the opposite direction: the more Israel contemplates the growing Iranian threat, the more of its strategic command centers and such it puts underneath Jerusalem, daring the Iranians to even think of attacking the holy city of al-Quds.

(I would tell you more about these excavation projects, but The Economist this week explained that blogging in the Middle East is becoming ever more hazardous, so I'll stay on the safe side and not tell).

The upshot of all this is not, as you might expect, an ever intensifying arming and bolstering of Fortress Israel. On the contrary. Long term conflict management means forever gauging what the precise correct balance is, including trying conflicting measures simultaneously. See, for example, the story from earlier this week about how the PA is beginning to ask the IDF to stop arresting terror suspects in the Palestinians cities since this limits Palestinian sovereignty; the IDF seems willing to acquiesce and is preparing for the day it happens. Another facet of the exact same story is that the IDF and the PA together are looking into ways to enable exports from Hamas-controlled Gaza in ways which will benefit the Gazans, the Israelis and the PA, but not Hamas. There will be folks out there - the Mondoweiss gang comes to mind - who will spin this into a story of Israeli perfidy and PA servility, but it seems me that if you've got an Amria-Hass frame of mind, anything that makes the lives of ordinary Palestinians more pleasant must be a key to peace and thus worthy of trying.

And so, in an unexpected turnaround, at the end of this post I'm going to suggest a Hass-ian thesis of my own.

A negotiated peace between Israel and the Palestinians is not achievable at the moment. On the other hand, in the past few years, and especially since the IDF operation in Gaza succeeded in mostly putting an end to rocket fire from there, a calm has settled upon Israel and the Palestinian territories that is good for almost everyone. The longer it goes on, the more it can be reinforced, by opening roadblocks, collaborating in combating terrorists, growing economies in all three political units. So here's my suggestion: let's stop trying to negotiate what can't be negotiated, and let's strengthen the processes that are already happening. If we could prolong the present 20-month calm by ten years, we might all discover, to our great surprise, that renewed final-status negotiations actually could lead somewhere.

True, no-one wold get any Nobel Peace Prizes for the time being - but ordinary people might lead better lives.

Will Amnesty International Apologize?

On May 12th AI published a strong condemnation of Israel for arresting Ameer Makhoul. The condemnation included a written communique and some oral statements by one Philip Luther, Deputy Director of Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa Programme.

Yesterday Makhoul admitted in court to spying for Hezbullah; he faces 7-10 years in jail.

I have sent an e-mail to AI, and tweeted them, too. Feel free to join, if you wish. They're not likely to apologize, but maybe they'll be a teeny bit more careful next time round.

Innocents Abroad

Fouad Ajami describes the war in Afghanistan in very bleak terms. Karzai is even more of a scoundrel than many unseemly past American clients; and he's faced by an American administration particularly unsuited to deal with him.

Many years ago, when I was young and impressionable, there was this idea about how if America let the Communists overrun South Vietnam, there would be a domino effect and the whole region would fall, probably to be followed by worse. Then Kissinger let South Vietnam fall (Kissinger was not anybody's pansy), and lo and behold: there was no domino effect. (But there was a genocide in Cambodia, which was stopped eventually... by the Communist Vietnamese. The world is a complicated place).

Can the world afford America to retreat, effectively vanquished, from Afghanistan? No-one talks anymore about domino effects, but might there be one anyway? I don't know.

BDS Stories

The efforts of the BDS gang in Quebec seem not to be succeeding. They managed to convene 100 people in Montreal, some of whom must have been the non-local instigators.

Remember the disaster in Haiti? It's still there, getting worse again. The Israelis are also still there, doing their best.

A while back I wrote here about a team of researchers at Haifa University who are making some impressive advances in the war on cancer. Well, apparently they've got some local competition; this story seems to be about a totally different research team. Technion, not Haifa University. Same city, different school. Same war on cancer, though.

No-One Listens to Scholars

Yesterday I kvetched about how journalists who often know very little about their subject matter natter on as if they do, and the rest of us take it is as if they do, too. Today I came across the opposite phenomenon. Haaretz carried a story about how a new, 900-page report commissioned by ex-German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer has documented that during the Nazi era the ministry contributed to the Holocaust: "German foreign ministry more involved in Holocaust than previously thought".

Previously thought by whom, pray tell? The reason I'm asking is that there's an excellent book by Christopher Browning about this precise subject, Final Solution and the German Foreign Office: A Study of Referat D III of Abteilung Deutschland 1940-1943. The book is widely quoted by anyone who has published anything on the matter since its publication, it was as influential as such a book can be, and it launched Browning's illustrious career; if you ask me he's the most important scholar of the Holocaust in America.

Ah, and it was published... in 1978. I sent Chris a congratulatory e-mail this morning, about how someone has now uncovered the story he told 32 years ago; he says that a German publisher quickly had it translated just recently, to coincide with the publishing of the report that Haaretz refers to.

Sadly, I don't think this is an unusual case. Last week the Economist had a glowing review of a troubling book by Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Now I haven't read it yet, mind you, though I hope I will, but the excitement of the reviewer seems odd to me. The thesis of the book, about how Stalin and Hitler both engaged in mass murder on enormous scales in Eastern Europe, surely that can't be news to anyone, can it?

Did I ever mention that lots of people died in the Black Death? Just saying.

Don't Let Any Palestinians In!

Elder of Ziyon yesterday ran a story according to which Arabs can immigrate without impediment between Arab states... unless they're Palestinians. Palestinians are not allowed to be naturalized in other Arab states, according to a policy agreed upon by the Arab League “to avoid dissolution of their identity and protect their right to return to their homeland.” (says this fellow).

Elder speculates that large numbers of Palestinians would move if only they could; I'm more interested in the hypocrisy. Think of all the people in the West and in the Arab world who castigate Israel for impeding Palestinian immigration (mostly since 2003), while somehow overlooking the fact that they're not allowed into most of the Arab world, either.

If anyone has additional information about the matter, feel free to enlighten us in the comments.

Who, He, She?

I know this is supposed to be a serious blog with a mostly clear focus, so I apologize for not being able to resist a quick skip elsewhere. If you read yourself this article out loud, it's title will be "She who must be obeyed". Parts of it, especially the 4th paragraph, sound like they were lifted directly from this old chestnut

Too Many Russians and Brazilians

There are too many tourists in Israel this month.

Isn't that a nice problem to have?

The other day an acquaintance of mine who lives in Haifa and gives day-tours to passengers of docking cruise ships kvetched that he's so busy he hasn't slept one normal night for six weeks. "The Indians", he was complaining, "insist on being shown everything, but refuse to walk quickly. A nightmare".

Although the article doesn't mention the matter, this is good also for the Palestinians (in Jerusalem and on the West Bank, not in Gaza). It's a very small place, and when "problems" like this happen, we're impacted together. Many of the service providers are Palestinians, and the salesmen of those olive-wood camels, and bus drivers, and cab drivers....

Millyon Sinim

A typical discussion in Israel about efficiency and getting projects done on time will sooner or later contain a comment about millyon Sinim, which translates, literally, as a million China-men. (I use China-men advisedly, not "Chinese"). The concept being that if we could apply millyon Sinim to the problem it would go away, or since we can't, it won't. You get the idea.

Well, it turns out that the concept is grounded in reality!

In May 2007, employees of the Chinese company CCECC arrived in Israel and unloaded their equipment at Haifa Port. The firm had been chosen to dig the Carmel Tunnels - one in each direction - which open next month. The director of the project, Haim Barak, and the main architect, Walter Wittke from Germany, were shocked. "Prof. Wittke said he couldn't believe his eyes; this was equipment they used in Europe 40 years ago," says Barak.
The Chinese equipment was mostly intended for manual labor - manual drills, small cement mixers and hand cement sprayers for covering walls - the exact opposite of the Europeans' computerized systems operated remotely. "Prof. Wittke didn't think they would be able to complete the job on time," says Barak. The Chinese finished the work on Israel's longest tunnel five months ahead of the deadline. 

Who knew?

How Bad is the Media, Summary

I thank all the participants who chipped in to the discussion about how bad the media really is or isn't. Here's my response.

First, I accept that my frustrations show through, and that this isn't helpful. I don't promise I'll be able to restrain myself forever, but I'll try for a while.


Second, Dukas Horunt unwittingly demonstrated a fundamental problem, when he demanded that I cite online newspaper articles to prove my theses about Israel (he then went off onto a series of theses of his own, many of which I've dealt with over the years on this blog, and will undoubtedly return to).

The fundamental problem is the assumption that complex reality can be known by reading online newspapers. It can't, of course. If you wish to understand a society and gauge its potential policies, following the media is perhaps better than nothing but that doesn't say much. You need to know the language, and the codes in the language, and the body language (which can't be reproduced in the media at all, not even on television, unless you already know how to read it). You need to read the literature (as in novels, not professional literature), stand in line at the bank, interact with officials and medical personnel, and go to some weddings and funerals. In other words, you need to live there, as part of the society you're trying to understand; and you need to keep in mind that other people around you who are doing the same may well understand the same society in different ways, depending on who they are and where they're coming from.

Or, if you can't do that, perhaps because you've got your own life to live where you are, or perhaps because the society you're trying to understand is dead and gone, then you'll have to work long and hard, and accept that your success will be limited.

Once upon a time I really wished to understand why the Germans did what they did to the Jews. It took me 15 years to learn enough to be satisfied, during which I learned the language, lived there for a while, read perhaps hundreds of thousands of pages of books and documents, interacted in German with hundreds of people on many levels of discussion - the large majority of whom were born after Nazism, and were themselves not Nazis in any way...

Did I really have the answer, after all the effort? Not in any final way. But eventually I did feel the working hypotheses I was using were reasonable. No more than that.

Is it reasonable to expect that the media have that level of understanding about the material it presents? Perhaps not, when it tells us the dramatic tales such as rescuing Chilean miners. But for the basic stuff: why not, actually? Is it too much to expect that a journalist who explains the economic stories have a good grasp of economics? That the military correspondents be well grounded in the practice of war? That the diplomatic correspondents have a reasonable grasp of how diplomacy works, and how so? Is it too much to demand, that the reporters who tell us about matters we don't have the time to delve deeply in ourselves, themselves be experts?

Though of course, even if the reporters were experts, newspaper articles won't tell the full story, nor can they be expected to. Most of life isn't reflected in newspaper stories. My original thesis, however, by which I still stand, is that most of the reportage about Israel not only doesn't reflect the full story, but it doesn't even offer a proximate abridged version. Individual pieces may be better or worse, but the cumulative effect is a profound distortion.

On being pro-Israel or telling the Palestinians' side. Of course I'm pro-Israel. I never suggested otherwise. That's the whole point of the effort. As to telling the Palestinian side: how could I? Honestly? I don't speak Arabic, I don't do those things described above, I don't know much about the Palestinians. Sometimes I respond to specific moves made by their leaders, or spokesmen, or their armed men, but I never claimed to be able to represent their side of the story. The media feeds me it's opinions on the matter all the time, but since most of the journalists who do so know even less about the matter than I do, well, I do allow myself to dispute their tales.

Actually, I've been working on a way to rectify this ignorance of mine, but I'm not yet able to tell about it. By and by, I hope.