Germans, Jews, Smart-Alecs

Tanya Gold, undoubtedly a Jew herself, writes in the Guardian about Germans who have converted to Judaism and moved to Israel. It's an interesting phenomenon, larger in scale than her description might lead you to think. One of the interesting things about it is that once they become Israeli Jews, these former Germans do just what the rest of us do: they spread all over the political landscape, from far Left to far Right, and they pop up in some of the less obvious corners of Israeli society, especially when they marry native Israelis from those corners. So the briefest glance will inform you that if they're all part of the same phenomenon, it's a mighty complex one. If, perhaps.

So that's the first part of the story.

The second part of the story is about Tanya Gold and her newspaper. Start with this sentence, depicting her first encounter with one of the four people she tells us about.

He opens the door and looks like every other rabbi I have ever met - a black suit, a beard, a questioning shrug.

Umm, Tanya?

OK, a spot of caricature doesn't really hurt. But a few paragraphs later she's showing her innate arrogance in a more obvious way:

I walk through the Old City, pondering my encounter with this strange, kindly man. Something seems to be missing from his story. To stand in front of a rabbi whose father was in the SS and to hear he became a Jew because he doubted the Trinity is absurd.

I can see how the encounter would be startling, even unsatisfying. People don't always fully explain themselves to themselves; baring everything before a journalist (from the Guardian!) isn't inevitable. That doesn't mean their portrayal is absurd, nor that a professor at some university can do so better. Due disclosure: I know and respect Dan Bar-On, heavily cited in the article as Gold's oracle. But when it comes to understanding religion, and Judaism in particular, he's not much more of an expert than Tanya Gold herself, and the fact that she asked him to make sense of the issue tells you more about her than about it.

Gold's description of Yad Vashem is mostly factually wrong, but why quibble when she offers us bloopers like this:

I call Bar-On again. I feel the converts are giving me half-answers, scraps of answers. They talk about despising the Trinity and the terrible things that the Germans did to the Jews, but it seems like they are talking a genocide that doesn't exist, even in their memories. I can't escape the feeling that it is all about something else.

I tell Bar-On they talk obsessively about the Trinity. But is incredulity really a reason for abandoning a religion with a three-in-one god for one that still believes bushes talk and that waves are parted by the will of God? "That is another way of saying what I have already told you," he says. "They want to join the community of the victim. They may have their own way of rationalising it."

Yes, I can see how if you think Judaism is about believing in talking bushes and such, you might indeed feel smug and superior when faced with people who have chosen to join it. Gold is merely being your usual Guardianista here: embarrassingly ignorant and unaware of it at the same time.

Then there's the far-Left convert,who gives Gold one of the lines you always know you'll ifnd in an article in the Guardian that gets anywhere near these subjects:

"I felt that I was being told that to be a good Jew, you had to hate Arabs." So she stands at West Bank checkpoints to observe the behaviour of Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians.

Well, if you think rabbis all have beards and base their lives on talking bushes, why not believe that statement, too?

Finally, there is the meta-text, so typical of the Guardian, so disconnected from how human beings are: the idea that people want to belong to a victim group, because being a victim carries moral weight. I suppose if you believe that circumstances make of us what we are and human choice is at best of secondary importance, it's better to be weak and incapable of bettering your condition, than strong and perhaps responsible for your deeds. After all, the end result is that people are flawed, and realilty is never perfect, so the less responsibility you have, the more you can shove onto some others who are stronger, the better.

But that's a long discussion for another day.

Kosher for the Goyim

Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld has an op-ed at the NYT about a scandal in America's largest kosher meat-packing factory.

The substance of the story isn't that surprising. The people running the factory, catering to a reliegious clientele and probably orthodox Jews themselves, should be expected to have high ethical standards, yet it appears they don't. The leaders of the community can be expected to be the public guardians of these ethical standards, yet faced with the scandal, they're either trying to fix it behind the scenes or they're not even doing that; their public stance, in any case, leaves much to lament, if Herzfeld's depiction is accurate. I wouldn't know: this is the first I've heard of the matter.

And there-in lies the true tale. The willingness of an orthodox rabbi to air grievances from inside the community in the most important newspaper in the land bespeaks a level of comfort, of being at home, of self-confidence in his identity as an orthodox Jew who is fully a part of American society as such, not in spite of it. These all really are taken for granted in the United States, to the extent that some of you will be wondering what this post is even about. A situation inconceivable for thousands of years is, quite simply, boringly banal.

Applebaum on Solzhenitzyn

Anne Appelbaum knows a thing or two about the Soviet Union, so her's in the kind of obituary you go looking for this week.

In the end, she writes, although Solzhenitsyn the man was flawed, it's his words that were important. Very important.

In the week of his death, though, what stands out is not who Solzhenitsyn was but what he wrote. It is very easy, in a world where news is instant and photographs travel as quickly as they are taken, to forget how powerful, still, are written words. And Solzhenitsyn was, in the end, a writer: A man who gathered facts, sorted through them, tested them against his own experience, composed them into paragraphs and chapters. It was not his personality but his language that forced people to think more deeply about their values, their assumptions, their societies. It was not his television appearances that affected history but his words.

His manuscripts were read and pondered in silence, and the thought he put into them provoked his readers to think, too. In the end, his books mattered not because he was famous or notorious but because millions of Soviet citizens recognized themselves in his work: They read his books because they already knew that they were true.

They knew that they were true. How many authors, or any one else for that matter, say the truth?

On the Sanctity of Internationally Sanctioned Borders

Well intentioned folks (and also some not so well intentioned ones) have been telling us for years, indeed decades, that internationally recognized borders between nations must be respected at all costs, and in cases of differences of opinion about them, old maps drawn by whomever are the only thing that count. Anything else would be unacceptable, and acquiring territory by violence would be the most unacceptable of all. Thus spake International Law.

This was always not convincing. First, because every border in human history drawn prior to a few decades ago was either created by God (see the borders of the UK, for example), or by men backed by the power to do the drawing. When you look at Israel's borders you'll find that respectable countries such as the US of A, the UK, and others, were still hatching plans to cede Israeli territory in the promotion of their interests, at least until late in the 1950s and probably all the way up to the Six Day War in 1967. (Michael Oren has some details in his excellent Six Days of War). The moment in time at which Israel's borders were sanctified and consecrated was the moment after they changed, and the old ones took on holiness to prevent the new ones ever being accepted.

Be that as it may, when it comes to the borders with Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan, the lines drawn by some English sahibs in 1906 or 1918 or 1920 are generally regarded as sacred, and in each case Israel has been required to respect them down to the last inch (see: Taba) so as to have peace (or, in the case of Lebanon, so as not to have peace). The lines with the Palestinians that are regarded as sacred are the armistice lines of 1949; this is the line Israel accepts with Gaza, and doesn't accept on the West Bank. This non-acceptance generates endless opprobrium from most of the so-called "International Community", though in recent years some American presidents such as Bill Clinton and his successor have stated that perhaps some other line, should both sides agree, might also be acceptable if only agreement could be reached. The folks over at the Geneva Accord, by the way, also accept this. (Some prominent Palestinians among them, and no Likudniks).

And then there are the Syrians. They don't accept the internationally sanctioned lines, nor the lines they themselves agreed to in Rhodes in 1949. The only line they're willing to accept is the one they held on June 4th 1967, after they had used post-armistice force to take territory from Israel. Shlomo Avineri has a short but excellent article outlining the issues. Syria can't accept a line drawn by imperialist Europeans after WW1, only a line drawn by its own military; it can't even compromise for peace. And the entire concept of Lebanon is likewise unacceptable, since Lebanon was invented by the French.

The implication for Israel is that borders are determined by European imperialists when that's convenient for Egypt Jordan and Lebanon, by the 1949 armistice lines when that's convenient for the Palestinians, and by the force of arms and violence when that's convenient for the Syrians. I'm not necessarily saying these lines shouldn't be acceptable, but let's be clear about the total lack of consistency of it all.

Pot Calls Tablecloth Black

Haaretz TV has an item which is either hilarious or frightening, and I suggest we prefer the hilarious option.

Apparently the Israeli franchise of Nissan has a TV ad with a spoof on Saudi sheiks who are furious at the new model which doesn't guzzle much fuel (says Nissan). A Saudi TV newscast is truly furious at this racist depiction of the poor Saudis, and also threatens Nissan with a boycott for their cheek. But the Israelis are the worst, racist foreigners that they are. Bit rich, coming from the Saudis.

The whole thing, by they way, is a demonstration of what Rattling the Kettle and I have been saying all along, that weaning us of fossil fuels needs to be done to cut down the Saudis, global warming or not.

Persecution, Revenge, and Morality

Jonathan Freedland has apparently written a novel based upon the story of those Jews who tried to punish Nazis after the Shoah; his paper has helpfully given him space to write about the subject, here.

You can quibble with his contention that almost no-one was punished for murdering Jews. The Soviets hung quite a large number of Nazis, though not in Western-style trials. In the 1960s the (West) Germans began a process of identifying Nazi criminals and investigating their crimes with an eye towards bringing them to justice. Well over 130,000 pf them were investigated, and in the process the documentary evidence was vastly expanded; most serious historical research of Nazism would be far poorer if it hadn't been for those efforts. Sadly, somewhere on the road from investigations to convictions almost all of the suspects managed to get off and wander back home, where they died in their beds.

The (East) Germans occasionally meted out justice to an old Nazi, but mostly they didn't.

Freedland's story, however, is about the survivors and some British-uniformed Jews from Mandatory Palestine who tracked down specific Nazis and executed them. Probably hundreds, though the documentation, obviously, is sparse, and the executioners themselves mostly never told.

Critics of Israel and apologists of Arab terror love to tell about the suffering that preceded the terror, thereby explaining it and in many tales even justifying it. They also love to tell that Israel's actions are equally evil, except that since they're state-sanctioned, they're worse. The poor Arab terrorists don't have a government and a big army, you see, so they engage in the poor man's version of violence, while the Israelis get to engage in the rich man's version. Finally, they tend to add, the Israelis insist on talking about the Holocaust all the time because they are trying to monopolize the victim status, since - as the previous two points demonstrate - being a victim is a higher moral status than anything else, and even lets you engage in all sorts of horrible actions without being fully tainted by them.

The real story of the Jewish avengers, somewhat unmentioned by Freedland, is that it disproves all those themes.

1. Over the past 1500 years or so the Jews were persecuted more than any other group (not all the time, mind you, but again and again and again). Yet they never resorted to violence against their oppressors. (OK, I can't vouch for "never", but if it happened it was extremely rare and isn't in the history books).

2. Until very recently, the Jews didn't have armies or governments or other vehicles of letting off steam as such, and they still didn't engage in violence.

3. The previous comments were true for at least 1500 years, long before the Nazis. The Nazi persecution, however, dwarfed anything that preceded it - but even it did not call forth Jewish revenge in the primary use of the term, not under the Nazis before 1945, and not in Germany after 1945. The stories that Freedland has uncovered were of rough justice and were aimed at specific German men. In one case they were aimed at a camp of captured SS men. They were never committed against the general German populace - even though the general German populace had heartily supported the Nazis, and mostly knew that the Jews were being horribly tormented by them.

All of which demonstrates that the decision to murder or not is a decision, not an irresistible and uncontrollable urge. Jews who were persecuted over the centuries figured out ways to get on with life. If they did, anyone could; if others don't, it's because of their decisions, not their circumstances.

Primaries: The Black Man vs. the Woman

Amnon Levy compares the primaries in the Democratic Pary and those in Kadima: The first real black candidate (meaning, in this case, Mizrachi, i.e. non Ashkenazi), vs. almost the first woman candidate (Golda, he reminds us, wasn't really much of a woman).

Actually, Mofaz, should he win in Kadima, would be the fourth Mizrachi to go to elections as the head of a large party. Itzchak Mordechai was the first, in 1999, though his party evaporated during the campaign, Fuad Ben-Eliezer was the head of Labor, though they threw him out as the elections approached, but Amir Perez, flagrantly non-Ashkenazi, led Labor into the elections of 2006.

Levy's piece is largely tongue-in-cheek, but not completely. His bottom line is actually serious: There are no worthy candidates in the upcoming elections, but Livni's advantage over Mofaz, Netanyahu and Barak (Ehud) is that she has no proven fiascoes to her name.

I'm rooting for her - though not enough to join Kadima so as to vote for her in the primaries, where it's apparently a close call. There are limits to political loyalty, don't you think?

"Solzhenitsyn, Dominant Writer of the 20th Century"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has died.

The NYT has a fine, long obituary, that captures much of the complexity of the man. (The Guardian has a brief, perfunctory obit, the barest courtesy. Perhaps they didn't like him. I'm not even going to link to it).

Solzhenitsyn was one of the formative figures of my life. As a child and teenager I heard of him, obviously, but hadn't read any of his books. I eventually did so during my university years. The final push came when I read Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor. The Survivor is near or at the top of the shortlist of best books I've ever read about the Shoah; it's an attempt to understand how people survived the camps. As worthy of a book seeking the fundamental truth rather than the froth, Des Pres began his disquisition with a reading of the more important literary efforts about the camps, and Solzhenitsyn was cited heavily.

Once I'd read Des Pres I spent most of a summer reading Solzhenitsyn's books, one after another. He talked about cruelty and suffering, malice and hope, callousness and friendship. Without elaborating on the word, he described evil. His books inured me forever - had I ever been so inclined - of the ability to relativize, to excuse away, to engage in foolish comparisons between mundane wrong doing and strategic large scale destruction.

As the NYT obit tells:

By this time, Mr. Solzhenitsyn had completed his own massive attempt at truthfulness, “The Gulag Archipelago.” In more than 300,000 words, he told the history of the Gulag prison camps, whose operations and rationale and even existence were subjects long considered taboo.

Publishers in Paris and New York had secretly received the manuscript on microfilm. But wanting the book to appear first in the Soviet Union, Mr. Solzhenitsyn asked them to put off publishing it. Then, in September 1973, he changed his mind. He had learned that the Soviet spy agency, the KGB, had unearthed a buried copy of the book after interrogating his typist, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, and that she had hung herself soon afterward.

In some countries, people were interrogated until suicide for telling the truth. In others, they get bad-mouthed in the literary circles. Long live the difference.

A Conservative Chronicle

As a young academic-in-training, I partook in the political ethos of the group that considered itself Israel's elite - an ethos resembling European social-democracy, more or less, in the broadest meaning of the term including many components beyond daily politics. In retrospect my doctoral dissertation, which argued that the Nazi program of murder was less a result of circumstances and more a result of purposeful decision-making, was a fundamental departure from this ethos, though at the time it didn't effect the way I voted in elections. That departure had been a painful intellectual process, and happened over 3-4 years in which the large amounts of documents I was reading demanded of me that I recognize their content was different from what my expectations had been. I eventually published all this in Hitler's Bureaucrats.

The change in my voting habits came very abruptly, within the three months of November 2000-January 2001. This abruptness was caused by the Palestinians, as I described in Right to Exist. It was about then, say, in 2001, that I became aware of what Americans would call the conservative intellectual tradition.

Among Israelis there had always been a large number of highly and extremely highly intelligent and educated people who stood outside, even against, the reigning intellectual mainstream. Most of them, however, belonged to one of the various orthodox strands of Judaism, and they mostly didn't engage the secular thinkers at all: they were indifferent to them. The academia-media-secular elites had their shticks, the orthodox had theirs, and the two never touched (and each group observed the others mostly with disdain). As I looked around the new political scenery in early 2001, however, I needed secular intellectual voices on my new part of the field, and I remember my surprise and relief that in the US there were large numbers of them. Not everything they were saying was convincing to me, of course. I was, and remained, a graft between a centrist and a Querdenker (someone who holds opinions for their value, not for their political hue). Still, it was comforting to know they were there.

Anyway, what was novel for me was stale news for many people in the US. One of them, it seems, was Adam Bellow, whom I met in 2002 when he took upon himself to be the editor of Right to Exist. (He was a terrific editor). He recently published an article - or perhaps it's something of an intellectual memoir - about his life on the front lines of the American intellectual culture wars. You don't have to agree with all of his positions, but it's an interesting story.

Dwindling numbers of Arab Christians

From time to time nice people blame Israel for the dwindling number of Christian Arabs in Israel and the PA. This is spite of the fact that the number of Christian Arabs all over the Mideast has been sinking dramatically for generations and is now close to zero in most countries. Apparently, Christian Arabs have an easier time getting out and into Europe, or North or South America, and they're taking advantage of it. Anyway, here's an article about the single large Christian Arab community that seemed, at least until recently, still mostly to be hanging on: the Copts in Egypt. Apparently, even though there are millions of them, it's getting harder and harder for them to remain amongst the majority Muslims.

By the way, it's interesting to note that the number of non-Arab Christians in Israel is actually rising, what with the influx from the ex-Soviet Union, and foreign laborers.

The Lesser of Two Evils

Hamas is shooting Fatah men in Gaza again. So what are the out gunned Fatah men doing? Asking the Israelis to save them. Who'd have thunk.

Update: Hamas forces shot mortars at the area in Israel where they thought their fellow Palestinians were concentrating after escaping Gaza.

Summary of the day: Fatah men trust Israel with their safety more than their fellow Palestinians of the Hamas version, and Hamas breaks the ceasefire with Israel in order to try and kill the Fatah fellows. You couldn't make up this stuff.

Raising the Stakes, or: From Tragedy to Farce

Remember the long defunct Kyoto agreement, that was crafted to save the world? This was about ten years ago, and at the time the expectation was that the catastrophe would come slowly and make itself felt in the second half of the 21st century. No longer. A panel of experts now tells us we have a mere 100 months left (such a pleasing clean number).

If I believed mankind had all of four years left to save the world (which I don't, not for a moment), I wouldn't be writing the article Andrew Simms has just given us. In essence, what he says is that the UK must take drastic and painful measures, and then the Chinese, Indians, Saudis, Brazilians and everyone else will be shamed into following, or inspired into following, or something. A more arrogant and simultaneously naive thought is hardly conceivable.

So how will the UK achieve this act? By emulating the sacrifices of WW2.

The challenge is rapid transition of the economy in order to live within our environmental means, while preserving and enhancing our general wellbeing. In some important ways, we've been here before, and can learn lessons from history. Under different circumstances, Britain achieved astonishing things while preparing for, fighting and recovering from the second world war. In the six years between 1938 and 1944, the economy was re-engineered and there were dramatic cuts in resource use and household consumption. These coincided with rising life expectancy and falling infant mortality. We consumed less of almost everything, but ate more healthily and used our disposable income on what, today, we might call "low-carbon good times".

A National Savings Movement held marches, processions and displays in every city, town and village in the country. There were campaigns to Holiday at Home and endless festivities such as dances, concerts, boxing displays, swimming galas, and open-air theatre - all organised by local authorities with the express purpose of saving fuel by discouraging unnecessary travel. To lead by example, very public energy restrictions were introduced in government and local authority buildings, shops and railway stations. This was so successful that the results beat cuts previously planned in an over-complex rationing scheme. The public largely assented to measures to curb consumption because they understood that they were to ensure "the fairest possible distribution of the necessities and comforts of daily life".

Well, no. There were bombs falling on London, and though Simms doesn't mention them, I'll bet they were more effective at causing change than all those marches. And it's a wee stretch of the imagination to call those years "low carbon good times". How obtuse can a person be?

Anyway, it's telling that throughout the article, chock-filled with alarmist gobbledygook, there is no suggestion of pouring the zillions of $ (or Sterling) all this will cost, into finding the technologies that will enable us to get on with our good lives while freeing ourselves from the yoke of Chaves and the Saudis. That would be the wrong agenda, you understand.

Sheesh.

Obama and Israel

Last week while he was here, I never got around to commenting on Obama's visit.

The most important thing to note is that the evening he left his cavalcade interrupted my evening walk. Or rather, I was walking along interfering with no-one, and a gaggle of security types blocked the road and I had to wait until the cavalcade had sped off into the night before I could keep on walking. So I guess he lost my vote. (He was off to have supper at Olmert's house, so I theoretically could aim my electoral ire at Olmert, but it doesn't look like there will be any opportunities anytime soon).

Shmuel Rosner sums up the visit quite well over here. (Did I ever tell you Rosner was a student of mine when he was an unruly teenager? No? Well anyway, he obviously turned out alright in the end). His thesis is that Israel's Left, just like America's, is pinning all sorts of unrealistic hopes on an Obama Administration; inthe case of the Israeli Left, the fallacy is doubled because Obama isn't even running for the job of President of Israel, meaning that at the end of the day, Israel decides, not the White House.

Any American president, certainly including Obama, will be a friend of Israel because of fundamental ways in how Americans understand the world. There's some leeway - Clinton was a friend differently than Bush 2 was, while Bush 1 was arguably less friendly than either of them, but no American president will treat Israel as, say, some French presidents do.

The Israeli response to Obama was interesting. His great appeal and the reason he's come so far and may go further is that he's a magnificent speaker, and that he's Black while (partially) transcending his skin color. The first part is not relevant to the Israeli public at this moment, as the Israeli public doesn't know his speeches and hasn't been queuing up in front of YouTube to see them.

The second aspect - well, any Israeli with the slightest education knows that the Americans had black slaves, and there was a war about that, and Lincoln was shot, and all this happened long before television, and if pressed, it probably happened long before the Turks left our part of the world.... and that's about it. It's a rare Israeli who can tell you about how slavery was the Original Sin of the United States, and how that has played out over the past few centuries and still does today, and all that stuff. All of which goes to say that Israelis don't see how Obama's road towards the White House is revolutionary for the Americans. They don't see what all the excitement is about. As Ayala Hason, one of our more prominent and less impressive TV reporters said: he's kind of bland. What's the big deal about him?"

On the other hand, to the extent Israelis follow American politics (and they mostly do), I'd say Obama's recent ideological zig zaging has been noted with approval by many Israelis. Clearly, the fellow is a canny politician, meaning he's a cynical ego-maniac who says whatever needs to be said for the political purposes of the moment. We've got lots of those, and feel comfortable with them even while purporting to despise them, so if Obama's just another one of the same breed, he'll be alright and we'll be alright with him.

Olmert's not Leaving

Just a quick note here: Given the fiendishly complicated rules of Israeli parliamentary politics, the soonest conceivable date at which Olmert will leave his job is near the end of October. November or early December are a bit more plausible, January, February and probably most of March 2009 are not possible dates at all for replacing him with someone else, and the scenarios in which Olmert remains prime minister until April 2009 are perfectly reasonable.

We could even see him traveling to Washington in February or March 2009 to discuss matters with the new fellow in the White House.

Dealing with Hamas

Remember last year when Israel arrested some high Hamas officials in the West Bank? Everyone condemned that action, of course. Well, according to this article, Abbas is now warning that if Israel sets the men free, he'll disband the PA, no less.

Again: if Israel deals with this group of Palestinians, that group will do its utmost to block the effort. Keep this in mind the next time you read one of those calls for negotiations with Hamas.

IDF Violence in Context

As a general statement, critics of Israel can be divided into two groups: those who see the flaws and criticize so they'll be corrected, and those who see the flaws and deduce they're so serious Israel's sovereignty must be curtailed or worse. The very large second group can likewise be divided roughly into two groups: the ones who don't know what they're talking about, and the ones who willfully look away from what they know. That second group is made up mostly of Israelis themselves, because in order to know what's going on you need to know Hebrew, and you need to see the full context, and those two are hard to do from far away - so we're talking about the Amira Hasses and the Gideon Levys and a large chunk of the so-called "human rights" mafia. The first group is everybody else, and as we all know, it's a very large group.

Here's an example of what context means.

Yesterday a Palestinian child, 11-year-old Ahmen Moussa, was killed by a shot to the head. The IDF concedes that the shot came from our side, so this isn't one of those cases where responsibility for the death is contested. The full circumstances are not clear, and could range anywhere from the intentional and cold-blooded shooting of a child to a stray bullet accidentally shot from an IDF weapon as its bearer was ducking Palestinian projectiles (one of which took out the eye of one of the IDF troops at the same event yesterday).

So far so bad. Even once the immediate context is clarified, however, there's still the broader context. For example, the fact that this article appeared on the front page of Haaretz this morning: Amos Harel (a serious and knowledgeable reporter), "Israeli security forces losing control in the West Bank".

Recent protests around the village of Na'alin in opposition to the separation fence seem to show a loss of control... However, a series of events - the shooting of a bound Palestinian protester; two Military Police probes; and as of Tuesday the suspension of a battalion commander - show a worrying and dangerous downward spiral. The fact that these happenings are taking place under increased scrutiny by the international media encourages the opponents of the fence to ratchet up the conflict. Apparently, it also increases pressure on IDF officers, who are having difficulty keeping events in check.

No mincing words there. The situation is bad, and seems to be getting worse. And indeed, at the end of the article Harel calls for changes to be made:

The situation in Na'alin is the kind of problem that requires the personal attention of Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, as well as of GOC Central Command Gad Shamni. In an interview in 2004, Ashkenazi, then deputy chief of staff, said: "My greatest concern is that the IDF will lose its humanity because of the continued fighting." That has not happened to the extent Ashkenazi feared, but neither does the chief of staff's campaign to restore discipline to the IDF after the Second Lebanon War seem to have been a great success in view of the events in Na'alin.

So, the most important newspaper in the country is using its front page to demand of the head of the army that he get his act together. So far so reasonable. What I found particularly interesting, however, was this short passage:

According to IDF statistics, the boy who was shot Tuesday was the first Palestinian citizen to be killed in the West Bank this year, after the killing of 34 terrorists (the Palestinians count a number of civilians killed, but they, too, concede that the number is low). That figure reflects more care in this matter than in previous years, along with a lessening of friction with the Palestinian population. The control by PA security forces in the West Bank, as well as security coordination with the IDF, are improving.

34 dead fighters and one innocent civilian. That's one too many, of course, but it's also the sign of an army that's waging a low-level war with significant care not to harm anyone but the armed fighters facing it. During the same period 11 Israeli civilians have been murdered in Jerusalem, which ought to remind us that the IDF isn't waging a campaign against an imaginary foe; earlier this week they killed a terrorist who had dispatched a murderer into Israel some months ago and would have done so again if he'd been able to. The lessening of friction with the Palestinian populace: doesn't sound like a brutal and callous army to me, rather an army trying to figure out how to do things with as little damage as possible. The growing coordination with the PA indicates that there are another positive aspects to the story, too.

And did you see the comment about the small number of dead civilians the Palestinians claim dead at the IDF's hands, while the IDF refuses to take responsibility? Interesting, isn't it? Sometimes IDF troops kill innocent Palestinians and set up inquiries; other-times Palestinians try to blame Israel for deaths Israel didn't commit. How are you going to know who's right? If you automatically believe either side, you're potentially putting your preferences before truth. If you try to follow past experience you'll have to agree that the IDF officials don't generally lie, but that doesn't automatically mean they'll never screw up. Especially as in some cases the truth simply isn't knowable, as for example when the corpse is hurriedly buried and there's no possibility to do an autopsy to determine the type of bullet that did the killing.

Then of course you have the unquantifiables, such as how the general Israeli populace sees the whole story and its parts. If you want to damn Israel, surely you need to know that, too? Well, I can't tell you, because I don't really know - which in itself is an interesting finding.

Juan Cole on AIPAC

Here's a tidbit from Informed Content:

Russia just defeated the US in the race for Central Asian gas. The US bet on a gas pipeline through Taliban territory in Afghanistan and Pakistan to India while trying to sideline Russia and Iran! Putin is rivalling the emir of Kuwait as a fossil fuel master of the universe. The only question is when some big power will get hungry enough for natural gas to defy AIPAC's congressional boycott on developing Iran's oil and gas fields. It is likely that future historians will date the end of America's superpower status from that date.

I admit I'm not certain what his point is. The obvious statement is that AIPAC is hurting American interests, but the broader one seems to be saying that it's AIPAC that's shoring up America's superpower status, since when someday someone defies them, that will be the beginning of the end etc. But surely Cole can't be saying that, can he? I mean, AIPAC may be an effective lobby, but it doesn't have the power to determine world history; that's the kind of thing the more fervent antisemites believe in. Or is he assuming that AIPAC controls lots of countries, and the first of them to break its grasp and build oil fields in Iran will topple America?

Very curious. If any of you can explain it to me I'd be obliged.

PS. As I've been saying, global warming or not, someone needs to wean us of our dependency on fossil fuels. And, yes, better Americans or Israelis or both, than Russian Chinese or Arabs.

Jews Expelled from Arab Countires

The Guardian (!!!) has an article about the fact that the Jewish-Arab conflict created two groups of people forced out of their homes, without their property, into a new land. Though, of course, that's where the similarities end.

I especially like this sentence:

The Jewish state, which struggled to take in 600,000, many of them stateless, is both a response to Arab antisemitism, and the legitimate political expression of an indigenous Middle Eastern people. Half Israel's Jewish population is descended from refugees from Arab and Muslim lands.

Sort of puts a dent into the Zionism=Colonialism thesis, if half the Israeli Jews are local Mideasterners. (And most of the other half were refugees from Europe, or, more recently, escapees from the Soviet block).

Prison, Interrogations, Torture: Israel and Palestine

There are various ways to figure out how a society does things, and what it does about things that go wrong. One way is to look at the legislation and compare it with the reality. You can measure the reality through systematic monitoring efforts, or you can look for the exceptions and assume they tell the greater truth. You can see if funds are invested in the monitoring or if the monitors are endangered by their very activities. You might benefit from following the long-term trajectories: does the society try to do better, or is it indifferent? Of course, the very essence of what are regarded as infractions are illuminative. Are powerful men who build palaces from public funds the norm, or do capable elected leaders get booted out for delinquencies in the funding of their campaigns?

The system used by many of Israel's critics has none of this sophistication. Faux-Lawrence, to give one rather insignificant example, never aims at context, he merely collects tidbits that fit his template. Sometimes he uses Haaretz, while disregarding what any reasonable reader knows, namely that Haaretz - like any media outlet - reports the exceptions, not the norm. It's the "man bites dog" principle: a dog biting a man doesn't get into the paper, but a man biting a dog does (or, if you want to take that one further: when a bulldog mauls a child it does get into the paper, but the entire lives of thousands of bulldogs that never bite anyone will never be reported). Our own in-house skeptic, here on this blog, faux-Ibrahim, uses the same methods, which is perhaps forgivable given that he knows nothing about Israel beyond what he can find in English (or Spanish) on the web.

Israel has armies of critics, many of them homegrown, whose entire professional careers are dedicated to finding the exceptions and damning us for them. The finding is actually a reasonable occupation, one we should welcome, since by telling us where we're going wrong we know what needs to be corrected. The damning, mostly done in English for the benefit of foreigners, is a bit more problematic, but we live with it. Given the extent of the effort to show us how wrong we are, the findings, while regrettable in themselves, are not fundamentally awful.

Anyway, here is a link to an official government document, researched and written by employees of the state, submitted to the relevant officials and then put on the web so that anyone can see, right next to the reports from previous years so that readers can compare. The document is a report on how our prisons are run, and it's uncomfortable reading. Even if your position is that prisoners aren't supposed to have a good life - a reasonable position - the gap between what should be and what is, is greater than we should be allowing, no matter what the objective reasons for it might be.

Now, compare this to two reports about our neighbors the Palestinians. With them, it transpires, torture is the routine, not an exception. Pretty much as you'd expect from a society that regards the murder of innocents as a legitimate way of war. And it's not being monitored by the PA, either, and certainly not by the Hamas officials in Gaza.

Palestinian Students at Israeli Universities

The Committee of Heads of Universities in Israel has sent a sharp letter to Minister of Defense Barak disputing a document put out by his ministry specifying the conditions in which Palestinian students may study in Israel. (The article is in Hebrew. Here is a PDF of the letter itself). The need for the limitations arose after the court struck down a more general decree forbidding Palestinians to study at Israeli universities; the court put academic freedom above security considerations. (Can Iranian and North Korean students freely study at American universities? I have no idea).

The heads of the universities are supported by the Minister of Education, so the argument is between two government ministries; actually, given the hierarchy of government ministries, the argument is between minister number 1 from Labor vs. minister number 2 from Labor.

The issues a society argues over can tell you a lot about the larger picture. In this case, for example, note that the Palestinian students under discussion are not Israeli citizens who happen to be Arabs: those can study whatever they want, obviously, if their grades are good enough. The question is if Israeli universities must offer training to Palestinians who are effectively at war with us, in fields that will give them improved tools to damage us; and the second question, irrespective of the field of study, is if Palestinians who otherwise would not be allowed into Israel, must be let in merely because they've managed to be accepted to a university.

I'm not certain which side of this argument I'm on. Somewhere in the middle, probably: there certainly need to be categories and limitations: studying at an Israeli university isn't a fundamental human right (Someone very close to me was recently rejected); on the other hand, ensuring that our security fellows don't go overboard is a reasonable demand.

The Ultimate Pole (or...?)

The Economist has an obituary for Bronislaw Geremek, "Polish historian and politician", one of the handful of people who formulated Polish history in the second half of the 20th century, and thereby also European history.

He was also a Holocaust survivor.

Capitalists to the Rescue

It's no coincidence that the high priests of the Church of Global Warming tend to come from the political Left: these are the people who simultaneously want to revolutionize the world, while controlling the masses, meaning the people who live in it.

Meanwhile, some top-tier capitalists have taken it into their heads to rid us of the curse of fossil fuels by appealing to our selfish interests: our spare cash. Thomas Friedman tells the story of two of the more prominent of them, but there are growing numbers of their lesser colleagues in greed, all of whom wish to vastly enrich themselves by having the rest of us save a bit here and there. Even worse, look at their identities: an Israeli and a Texan. Hard to think of less likely places to look for world-savers if you're a progressive Nation reader or a Guardianista. Oy.

The Descent of Man (or, some Jewish men)

Most of you will be familiar with this, but it's cute:

Moses: Law is everything (head)
Jesus: Love is everything (heart)
Marx: Money is everything (stomach)
Freud: Sex is everything (lower)

Einstein: Everything is relative

The Guardian on Obama on Israel

The Guardian, like many other organs of the Far Left/Progressives, has sorrowfully accepted that a President Obama won't pursue all the policies they'd like him to. No one who tried to do that could ever be elected president of the United States (or prime minister of the UK, for that matter, but that's another story. Hint: After hounding Tony Blair out of office and installing a "better man", here's what they have to say about the new one. But I digress).

So, Obama, even if elected, probably won't try to impose an international boycott on Israel, even the Guardian understands that. But they haven't quite lost hope that perhaps he'll do something, anything, that they might be able to cheer, even as they admit that the auspices aren't so good. Just in case someone on his staff reads their leaders, however, they spelled out for him what's needed:

To deliver a two-state solution, Mr Obama will have to persuade Israel to halt all settlement construction, before handing back a viable West Bank - not one fragmented by settlements, exclusive roads for cars with Israeli number plates, nature reserves, military restricted areas and over 600 checkpoints, barriers and other closures.

What makes this statement so truly and authentically idiotic is that had the Palestinians agreed to the dictated terms of President Bill Clinton from December 24th 2000, which Israel agreed to, they would have been in the seventh year of their independence already, the settlements would have been gone, there would have been no exclusive roads for Israelis or any of the other things on that list... not to mention that as recently as September 2000 there weren't any roadblocks and barriers, because they are measures implemented by Israel after the Palestinians chose violence over statehood.

No one expects the Guardianistas to remember things that happened 2000 years ago: that's a trick of the Jews. But 2000 days ago? Is that really so hard?

Presedent Obama, President McCain, President Chomsky - whoever. The Israeli electorate has repeatedly said, most recently in the elections of 2006, that it's ready for the two-state solution, including the disbanding of most of the settlements etc etc.

So what does the Guardian say the Palestinians must do?

A genuine negotiator has to say unpalatable things to them as well, especially about the need to control militant groups. Israel is never going to accept a Palestinian state unless it can guarantee the security of the Israeli state first.

Yes, this is true. But it's hardly enough. There are those two sticky issues of Jerusalem, and the Palestinian demand for an Israeli acceptance of their Right of Return. Small things, not worthy of being mentioned in a Guardian leader, but still relevant to the matter, don't you think? And since there will be no peace until they are resolved, and there's nothing an American president can do to make them go away no matter what his name is or hers, it's hard to see why anyone expects his identity will change much around here.

Good vs. Evil in the Middle East

A Kuwaiti newspaper comments on how it's better to have Israel as your enemy than it was to have Saddam's Iraq. The murderer Samir Kuntar went home fat and with a university degree, while the (mostly innocent) Kuwaitis arrested by the Iraqis went home in little plastic bags of bones.

Meanwhile, the NYT has yet another story in its lengthening series of stories about how the right side is slowly winning in the long struggle to move Iraq from one of the world's most malign dictatorships to a functioning democracy; this time the story is from Sadr city: yes, even in Sadr city, where Moktada al-Sadr reigned supreme only last year.

It is a remarkable change from years past, when the militia, led by the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr, controlled a broad swath of Baghdad, including local governments and police forces. But its use of extortion and violence began alienating much of the Shiite population to the point that many quietly supported American military sweeps against the group. (My italics).

It appears that when given a real choice between a rule of brutal thugs and a rule of civilized government, many people prefer the latter. Since in spite of everything said to the contrary, the Americans in Iraq represent the rule of law while their enemies are bloody thugs, over time the American vision of how life could be will prevail.

Someday this will happen in other parts of the Arab world as well. Perhaps even with the Palestinians, one hopes.

On Being Grownups

Anyone who looks forward to a day when Israelis and Palestinians will live alongside one another with civility - and any reasonable person should be looking forward to such a time - will be disheartened by the new round of internal Palestinian bloodletting in Gaza.

The Hamas people hate the Fatah people, the Fatah people hate the Hamas ones, and they all hate the Israelis. Fine. Hatred is an emotion, and it's not always easy to determine which emotions one harbors. It's a sign of adulthood, however, that you're able to subordinate your emotions to your coldly calculated interests. Wouldn't it be nice if for once the Palestinians would shelve their hatreds for long enough to begin building a better future for themselves? I even have a sneaking suspicion that if they were to do so, the Israelis might take notice and try to help, given that our lives would be easier and more pleasant if the Palestinians behaved as adults. But even if there were no Israeli recognition of the fact: wouldn't it be worth the Palestinians' effort simply to improve things in their society to the limited extent they can do so on their own?

Echoes of distant horrors

The final Mishna of the 6th chapter of the Bava Batra tractate deals with the construction of burial graves in Judea and the Galilee, which is where the Mishna was created. The following Gemarah is somewhat unreal, since so far as I know there weren't any comparable burial graves where it was created, in Babylon, which is today's Iraq - a flat and muddy place, with no rocky hills into which to dig burial caves. Yet these pre-Iraqi rabbis deliberated the elaborate details of the caves as if they were a part of their everyday experience. In a way, they were: Erez Yisrael always appears in Jewish literature with an immediacy not accorded to the actual environment of the scholars.

The whole section is rather morbid, yet a page or so into it it take on some even darker hues, when the rabbis discuss what happens when an orderly burial cave is found to have a disorderly pile of hastily buried bodies in its anteroom. The rabbis deliberate this matter for a page or so, and then move on to other matters.... But wait, what is it they're talking about? Why would a society with a clear burial tradition suddenly deviate from it into chaotic behavior? Unless, perhaps, the chaos is far more extensive than mere burial customs? Perhaps these dry discussions are skirting around an historical period of widespread violence, mass death, and hurried burials of mounds of corpses in old cemeteries?

Such as the Judean wars against the Romans, at the time of the Great Revolt in the 1st Century, and even more so the Bar Kochva revolt of 135 when the Romans committed an effective genocide of the Jews in Judea, killing perhaps 900,000 of them. Events of that magnitude can't be swept out of the communal consciousness, and tend to pop up in all sorts of unexpected spots.

And there they remain for as long as the communal memory keeps going. In the case of the Jews, almost two millenia and going strong.

Bava Babtra tractate, pages 101-102.

As always, I note for the benefit of readers who don't understand what I'm talking about, that this thread began here.

Randy Pausch, RIP

Prof. Randy Pausch has died. He was a brave man.

More on the Church of Global Warming

Last year the British Channel Four broadcast a film (which I haven't seen) called The Great Global Warming Swindle. Apparently it touched an extraordinarily sensitive nerve, because the other day the Guardian's Bishop of Global Warming, George Monbiot, wrote yet another column against the program, titled Global Warming is a Brutal Truth. It's worth reading, as it gives a good perspective into the sanctimonious mindset of the high priesthood of the Church of Global Warming.

It is not just because The Great Global Warming Swindle is at odds with the entire body of scientific knowledge on this subject that I have bothered to contest it. It is also because it is consonant with the entire body of human self-deception. We want to be misled, we crave it; and we will bend our minds into whatever shape they need to take in order not to face our brutal truths.

Speak for yourself, George.

You can also go to the Wikipedia article about Monbiot, and read the sorts of things he advocates:

Monbiot asserts that climate change is the "moral question of the 21st century" and that there is little time for debate or objections to a raft of emergency action he believes will stop climate change, including: setting targets on greenhouse emissions using the latest science; issuing every citizen with a 'personal carbon ration'; new building regulations with houses built to German passivhaus standard; banning incandescent lightbulbs, patio heaters, garden floodlights and other inefficient technologies; constructing large offshore wind farms, replacing the national gas grid with a hydrogen pipe network; a new national coach network to make journeys using public transport faster than using a car; all petrol stations to supply leasable electric car batteries with stations equipped with a crane service to replace depleted batteries; scrap road-building and road-widening programmes, redirecting their budgets to tackle climate change; reduce UK airport capacity by 90%; closing down all out-of-town superstores and replace them with warehouses and a delivery system.

Reduce UK airport capacity by 90%: that'll do the trick. Though, truth be told, there are elected governments out there who are already diligently beavering away in their attempt to have us all live by the precepts of the Church. Those of you who have been in Norway know that it's one of the most beautiful places on earth. As recently as 80 years ago the entire area was blighted by deep poverty and everything that went with it, but now it's inhabited by wealthy healthy people, thanks to oil offshore and the tourists who stream through in their cars. The locals also drive a lot, because, sort of like Los Angeles only far more so, you can't go anywhere unless you have a car. Well, the local politicians have decreed that driving is a luxury that people shouldn't indulge in.

"At a time when climate change is beginning to seriously impact the planet, and when Norway's carbon dioxide emissions are increasing, we politicians must take steps to meet these challenges," Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen said

Those of you who are old enough to remember the 1990s may be able dimly to recollect an era when none of this had ever been dreamed up yet. Moreover, it's beginning to seem possible that the unborn children of today - say, the ones who will reach school in the 2030s - will also not be familiar with any of this, because by then we'll have forgotten it because it will have been proven wrong. Here, for example, is an article by an Australian scientist that's been making the internet rounds this week. He says that the globe was getting warmer last decade, it isn't now, and fossil fuels probably aren't relevant one way or the other.

PS. I've said before and I'll say it again: in my opinion, pumping millions of tons of gook into the air is probably a poor idea. Since the Saudis and their ilk, supported by the Russians and Chaves, control most of the reserves of the stuff, there is a terrific incentive to wean us of it. However, the way to go is to invent better alternatives, not to wreck the rather comfortable world we live in.

Play with human nature, not against it.

Why Do They Kill Jews?

Khaled Abu Toameh has been talking to various Palestinians, and has heard that all three Palestinian men who committed attacks in Jerusalem so far this year had a similar motivation: they had been in trouble for something, they had become a source of embarrassment, and they had to redeem their honor and that of their families. What better a way to do so than to murder Jews, and if they died in the process (as they all did) they'd have the further honor of being Shahids.

I've said this before and I'll continue to say it until it changes: Palestinian society is severely sick. Not every Palestinian, of course, and it doesn't have to be permanent, but right now, that's the situation.

(Hat tip: Kai).

Freedom of Speech, Academic Freedom, and Nadia Abu el-Haj

A friend sent me a cutting from The New Yorker with the story of the attempt to block Nadia Abu el Haj from getting tenure at Barnard. The story isn't online, but the detailed abstract is here. My friend wanted my opinion, which I dutifully wrote down - and here it is:

I especially enjoyed – if that’s the word – the long article on Ms. Prof. Nadia Abu el-Haj. I haven’t read her book, I must say, so my ability to have an informed opinion on the matter is a bit cramped – though it doesn’t seem that most of the people in the story felt impaired by such considerations. Still, the story as told in the article raises interesting questions.

Generally speaking, I’m in favor of freedom of speech – one reason I tend to dislike the whole concept of political correctness is my heartfelt conviction that freedom of speech includes the freedom to be nasty, offensive, and to lie with a gusto. Has Ms el-Haj done any or all of these? I don’t know, but she may well have. More serious, to my mind, is that her basic assumptions – Zionism as a colonial project – seem silly to me, so that I could imagine that her entire argument is flawed from its start. But that’s clearly not a reason to shut her up. If we locked up all our fools, who would run our governments for us?

So trying to block her for talking nonsense sounds wrong to me.

On the other hand, there was a position clearly expressed by some of her allies in the controversy, whereby the public – taxpayers and philanthropists – must pay for the upkeep of the university, but dare not have any opinion about what’s taught there. This I find strange. Freedom of speech doesn’t necessarily have to mean freedom to live off the public purse. You want to talk nonsense and make a living from it too? Find a publisher, sell your books, go on the lecture tour, sell tickets, get employed by a think tank that’s expressly there for fools of your ilk and funded by the folks who like you. The distance between getting locked up for your opinion and having to make a living on your own steam so that you can express your opinions, seems to me rather significant.

Finally, a word about content – not the content of this book, which I haven’t read, but the content of some of what goes on at some universities, and much of which being influenced by the malign shadow of Edward Said, some of whose stuff I have read. There is, these days, a pernicious set of ideas being propagated by some people at some universities and in some media outlets, which is deeply offensive and threatening to liberal and rational humanism; and since liberal rational humanism is the least worst system man has so far devised for organizing society, undermining it is a bad idea. The propagators of these ideas need to be branded for what they are. They shouldn’t be locked up, they shouldn’t be shut up, but there is no harm and probably much good in setting them up for public shame and ridicule. Especially as they so love to mete out the same to whomever they don’t like.

A Place of Very Little Hope

Barack Obama was at Yad Vashem earlier today. At the end of his visit he commented that "ultimately, this is a place of hope".

Which of course it isn't, or shouldn't be.

Israel is ultimately a place of hope. The ability of the survivors of the Shoah to forge positive lives for themselves, many hundreds of thousands of them, is not only a place of hope, it's a deafening rebuke for all the fools who like to excuse victims or perceived victims for their consequent weaknesses. And yes, the designers of Yad Vashem's museum and grounds succumbed to the temptation and allowed their story to be caught up in the inspirational power of Israel, and at times they are carried away by the justified triumphalism of some survivors; by doing so, they diminish the story they're supposed to be telling.

But Obama, we're told, is extraordinarily intelligent, and sees farther and clearer than most of us. He should have been able to see through the distractions that were set in his path, and he should have been able to set aside the innate optimism of a liberal politician and of the black man who is poised to break the ultimate glass ceiling, and he should have recognized that Yad Vashem is anything but a place of hope. If there is hope for humanity it is in spite of that story, not as a result of it.

Teaching Hatred

Anne Applebaum has an interesting story about how the Saudi education authorities are inculcating hatred in children, and disseminating it as far and as wide as they can.

Now remember: there are no Israeli occupiers in Saudi Arabia. For that matter, there was never much of a European colonial domination of the area, either. You can hardly regard the Saudis as being part of an impoverished "South", can you. All in all, none of the standard templates for explaining away unpleasant non-Western behavior are much use when dealing with the Saudis. What you're left with is that they may simply believe in what they say, from choice, not necessity.

If you can live with that concept, the next thing will be to ask if there might be any connection between what the Saudis say and do, and what others in the Arab world say and do. Especially do.

The BBC on "Terror"

A few blocks away from here another Palestinian has decided to kill Jews at random in the name of his people's rights, or some such idiocy. I walked across that intersection about two hours earlier; my wife drives that route every day. George Bush stayed at the hotel one block away twice this year; Barack Obama will be there tonight.

The attacker was shot within seconds, which shows that while Palestinians learn from one another how to kill Jews, the Jews learn from one another how to kill killers, in this case even before he managed to kill. (Update: the 2nd shooter, an officer, is not Jewish. He's probably Druze, or an Arab Israeli).

And the BBC? They never learn anything. As you see when you follow that link, according to them it was an "attack", not an attack, and also:

Israeli police called it a "terror attack", although there was no immediate claim of responsibility by any Palestinian militant organisation.

Maybe the poor driver's foot got stuck on the gas pedal, and if only someone had been nice to him he would have found a way to lift it and we would have been able to commiserate with him how hard it is to live under Israeli occupation and also be racially profiled.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Here's an interesting experiment. Nicholas Carr, writing in The Atlantic, wonders if the Internet isn't damaging our brains. His thesis: as we read ever less and skim ever more, the circuitry of our brains is changing, making the damage real and irreversible.

Well, here's the challenge: The article, at 4,200 words, isn't particularly long, but it's far longer than your standard Internet item. So, set aside some time - 10-15 minutes should suffice - and see if you can read it from beginning to end without stopping, and without doing anything else at the same time. Just sit and read (and hopefully, think about what you're reading). You might want to click on the "printer format" link first, so that your screen will be clean of distractions. Or maybe you'll want to really print it out, and read from some dead trees.

I managed to do it, but it wasn't easy. This is one of the reasons I'm seriously considering shutting down this blog sometime soon: to win back some time to read books. (The fact that I've been reading books at the rate of approximately one every three weeks this year is only because I've taken too many airplane flights, where my wifi doesn't work).

IDF Excessive Violence - 2

The story of the soldier who shot a rubber bullet near the foot of an arrested Palestinian continues to be near the top of our media's agenda for the third day straight. You can see items about it, mostly op-ed pieces, here, here, here, here, and here. I have no doubt that had I looked longer I would have found more, and I haven't even tried to link to the talk radio programs where the case is being flogged.

Remember: serious as the case was - and I think it's quite serious - we're talking about excessive violence which caused no damage beyond - perhaps - a blue toe. That's the extent of the damage. And that's what Israel is agonizing over. Rightfully so, because by our standards such things are unacceptable, but the fundamental situation can't be very bad if, in this violent world we live in, a story like this manages to survive news cycle after news cycle. If ever the rest of the world reaches a similar level of moral deliberation, you'll know we're on the verge of the messianic era.

PS. some of those links lead to Hebrew language items. No apologies, rather the opposite: if you really want to understand the Israelis, you've got no choice but to listen to them in their language.

IDF Excessive Violence

I'm on the record, most famously in Right to Exist, as stating that the IDF is the most moral army anywhere. I stand by this statement. Indeed, at the moment there are only two other candidates for the title, and stories like this, about multiple accidental deaths at the hands of NATO forces, indicate that the Americans and the British aren't up to Israel's results, though all of them share the same standards. Having said that, however, Israel doesn't always reach its own standards, either. In the 2nd Lebanon war, in 2006, there was a lowering of standards, as I talked about at the time, and this story about an incident a few days ago is an indication that some troops aren't adhering to the standards. Indeed, the claims in the article that such cases are not so unusual, and this one merely happened to be caught on tape, is unfortunately probably true. Not that such incidents happen all the time and everywhere, but that this isn't an isolated incident.

The morality of a fighting army needs to be evaluated on various levels. The single most important, obviously, are the results. However, given the complexity of warfare and its extreme nature on the scale of human behavior, other things need also to be evaluated, such as the training given to troops and the extent of inculcation of moral standards, the alternatives weighed on the field, how widespread infractions are in comparison to the extent of operations, what efforts are made to limit damage to bystanders, what dangers are accepted to one's own forces in order to limit danger to bystanders, how does the society treat culprits, and so on.

The Economist on Al-Qaeda

Anton La Guardia has written a long report for The Economist titled "Al-Qaeda: Winning or Losing?" (The link is to the first section; note that each successive section is linked to from the bottom of the page). La Guardia has been around the Middle East for quite some time, and his report is interesting and informative. It's not profound - the fellow is a journalist, not a wise scholar - but given the way most people see the matter through the prism of what they want to believe, it's a worthwhile read.

The Arrogance of the Ignoramusi and their Followers

Judaism is based upon books. It's a highly intellectual culture. As a general statement, the most important Jews have mostly been scholars. The most important of all Jewish political figures, King David, is mostly remembered for his literary output, not for his military escapades. For millenia, Jews were more literate than their surrounding society.

Of course, not all Jews were scholars, that wouldn't have been possible. Until about 250 years ago, the non-scholars,however, fit into the second aspect of Jewish culture, namely its communal form. In a tiny nutshell, the Jews were the people who remembered the Jewish story; moreover, they remembered it in a Jewish way, encapsulated in the sentence "In every generation everyone must regard themselves as if they themselves had left Egypt".

This statement appears in the Hagadah of Pessach, the text used to commemorate Exodus every Spring. Most likely it was an early version of the Hagadah that served Jesus and his Disciples at the Last Supper, which was the Seder evening; the present form of the Hagada is probably at least 1700 years old, although the oldest full version I'm aware of comes from Rav Saadia Gaon in the 10th century - so, a mere thousand years ago. The same text also enumerates four "types" of Jewish men: the scholar, the simpleton, the one who doesn't know to ask.. and the wicked one. The wicked one is clearly educated, but he distances himself from his community with the arrogant question "What are these customs you people use?"

And why am I mentioning all this, you ask? Mostly to point out that the concept of what makes a wicked Jew is at least a thousand years old, and it's quite clear: Not being analytic and posing hard questions, which is after all the main occupation of the scholars, and not being ignorant. A wicked Jew is scornful, derisive, and mocking.

Having set him up, unfortunately I can't give you Benny Ziper's mockery in English because this time, for whatever reason, the folks at Haaretz didn't translate it. It's over here in Hebrew, if that's any help. So I'll give you some of the highlights:

The thing this people like most are corpses. Give them corpses and they'll dance around them, singing and crying, like a tribe of Indians.

To say that the dead sons of someone else are also my sons, is a form of fascism, because to think that a nation is a group of people with blood connections is a fascist concept.

This is a people who are so insane that their obsession with death has enslaved them.

We're back in the frame of mind of the victims of the pogroms, which is rather strange since unlike them we're pretty powerful, but we refuse to give up the status of victims and to cry Oy Vey and Gewald all the time.

Just like with the Orientals. They love mass spectacles of death....

And so on and so on. You get the general idea. In this particular piece, Ziper went all the way overboard, which may be why his editors thought it better not to translate him, but anyone who follows Haaretz and other platforms of the Israeli far left will recognize the sentiments immediately. The themes are quite banal. No one who knows anything about what Judaism is would take them seriously, but then, most critics of the Jewish State really don't have the faintest idea about Judaism, and for them, the Zipers of this world must be the real thing, and since they're saying what the critics want to hear, they're held up as shining examples of the "good Israelis" who give us such valuable insights into the dark recesses of the Israeli mind and psyche.

A dynamic which was recognized for what it is before Islam was invented, in the days when the Roman empire had not yet succumbed to the (European) Barbarians.

The Survivors

Here's a paragraph from the introduction to Right to Exist:

From 1975 I spent three years in the armored corps. The army I was in was still reeling from the ferocity of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which people I knew had been killed; we spent most of our time in the Sinai desert, training to stop and rout another Egyptian attack, should it come. To listen to Israel’s critics today, we were already a decade into the brutal occupation of the Palestinians, but neither I nor anyone I knew had any military encounters with occupied Palestinians. We served on the borders, and faced Arab armies, or Palestinian forces in Lebanon; the Palestinians under our occupation went to work in Israel, and while undoubtedly intensely disliking us, they did very little that called for brutal oppression. On vacations we would roam freely wherever we wished, at times taking Palestinian buses between Palestinian towns. One image stands out: eight or nine of us standing in a Palestinian town, and Avi Greenwald cracking jokes in Yiddish, to the tremendous amusement of the young Palestinians grouped around us. Avi was killed a few years later, fighting the Syrians; I have no doubt that some of those young Palestinians were later killed fighting us. That simple scene is hard to conceive of today.

Avi was killed in June 1982. His widowed wife was pregnant at the time, and when his son was born she named him Avichai - "my father lives". Over the next few years eight children were named after Avi, a sign of how much he was missed.

In 2002 many of us convened to mark the 20th anniversary of his death. Dudi, the organizer of the evening, brought his daughter Avia to hear about the man she was named after. I can't say if this was the moment Avia and Avichai found each other, as the legends say, or if they'd already noticed each other earlier, but not long afterwards they married.

This morning at synagogue Eliezer, Avi's father, a Holocaust survivor and lone member of his family still alive in 1945, celebrated the birth of Avichai's third child, Eliezer's third great-grandchild. Avi, were he alive, would have been celebrating the birth of his third grandson.

Utopians vs. Realists

Here's a thought.

At this moment in time, people of Left persuasions are more likely to bear animosities towards Zionism and Israel than others.

It can also be said, as a general, over-arching and thus not precise statement, that Left-persuasion people are more likely to think the world can be perfected, while Right-persuasion people are dubious.

Zionism is inherently messy. It has set itself the totally legitimate and defensible goal of creating - and now, maintaining - a Jewish state; yet this inevitably has an impact on the local Arabs; the best one can hope for is a rather messy compromise. Starry-eyed Utopians don't like messiness, so they either detest the Zionists for the past crime of having messed up the area, or for being messy with the way they do their thing, or for ensuring by their very existence that the future reality will continue to be messy.

Of course, this tells us nothing about why some Left-persuasion people single out Israel for their ire. The Chinese also make the world rather messy, after all.

An over simplification, I know, but worth mentioning.

Reflections at the End of a Day

We had two national funerals today, of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. They were sad and dignified, and we all participated, to a degree. These are the days that remind us how strong our communal bonds are. The family members gave moving, memorable eulogies. A nation that raises men to be eulogized so powerfully, so simply, so authentically - we must be doing something right.

This afternoon I had another meeting, one in a growing series I've been having since I set out in this new career of mine, with another member of Israel's growing class of high-tech entrepreneurs. Hugely talented and highly successful people who look at the world around them, set themselves world-class audacious goals, and then reach them and start all over again.

They're the same people in both stories, and they're the reason none of the chatter about how we're weakening or deserve to weaken has any real significance.

Torture at Guantanamo

It's now official and even up on You-Tube: being a prisoner at Guantanamo isn't fun. I'm not in the position to say anything new about its legality, but this week someone gave us a peek into the interrogations there, when lawyers of a Canadian-Afghan teenager received and broadcasted a tape from one of the interrogation cells. Suzanne Goldenberg and friends from the human rights' brigade will interpret the tape for you:

"The tapes do not show a dangerous terrorist, but instead a frightened, wounded Canadian boy pleading for help form Canadian officials," Whitling told reporters.

The video was condemned by human rights organizations and detainee lawyers. "Rather than seeking to ensure that a Canadian citizen - and a child into the bargain - is offered the opportunity to put forward his case in a proper way, Canadian officials are shown interrogating a boy who says he has been tortured," Amnesty International said.

Another prisoner told of the humiliating methods of interrogation he was subjected:

Salim Ahmed Hamdan, accused of being a driver for Osama bin Laden, told a military court that he was held in long and repeated periods of solitary confinement and subjected to humiliation, with a woman interrogator brushing up against his thigh.

Oh, the horror of it all.

Torture is when someone's body is torn and mangled. Torture is when someone refrains for years from allowing a mother or a wife to know what he knows, that their beloved is dead. It's keeping a son captive for years with never any contact with anyone from his world. Such things are standard in the Arab world, and the perpetrators or often celebrated and feted.

Torture is a horrendous thing, and should be used, if at all, only in those cases where using it will immediately save the lives of innocent people - and even then, if there are alternatives they should always be preferred. Our abhorrence of torture, however, must not blind us to the fact that there are people out there who need to be interrogated so that our way of life can survive, and also so that justice can be done.

Mazel Tov!

At the pool this morning I bumped into an elderly man I vaguely know, who is much closer to 90 than to 80, but swims regularly.

Good morning Rabbi Peretz! How are you?
I'm fine, thank you, and you?
I'm also fine. I saw your son last week, and he told me you've just gotten married?
Yes I have.
Well, that's great! Mazel Tov!

The Evil Culture of Hezbollah

[I accidentally posted this elsewhere yesterday. Now it's where it was meant to be]

It has been a hard day in Israel, one of those days where we all unite in mourning. For better or worse, Israelis are good at that.

The swap this morning of five live Lebanese prisoners, one of them a cold blooded murderer, for the dead bodies of Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, tells you all sorts of fundamental things about Israel, but I'm not going to repeat what has been said endlessly all day long. If you didn't follow the Israeli media, there are two good summaries in the New York Times, here and here.

In the early afternoon of July 12th 2006, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah knew that all he was holding were two dead bodies. I don't know what international law has to say about such things, nor am I much a fan of international law in any case. I do know that international custom dictates rules of behaviour regarding POWs, and no-where is there even the slightest possibility of justifying Nassrallah's two-year refusal to give any indication about the conditions of his "prisoners". Even when everyone knew the two men were no longer alive, even when the agreement on the exchange had been signed, even then he and his spokesmen still did their utmost to torture the family members with hints that perhaps, just maybe, who knows...

Despicable. As are the celebrations in Lebanon this evening of the return of the hero, Samir Kuntar, whose heroism consisted of murdering a young man in front of his daughter, and then smashing her head on a rock. Worse than despicable, he and everyone who celebrated this "liberation".

But it has occurred to me this afternoon that Nassrallah's actions should have been despicable even by the weird moral standards or lack of them in his own society. As the IDF began pounding the Dahiya, the Hezbollah section of Beirut that evening of July 12th, and it was becoming clear that those crazy Israelis were going to inflict lots of pain, why didn't he call in a representative of some third party - the Turks, say, or the Norwegians - and tell them that since all he had were two dead bodies, the Israelis should call off their fury and their attempts to retrieve the two kidnapped men. He would have saved the lives of lots of Lebanese, including many hundreds of his own loyal men.

As if that was ever a consideration for him.

... But Which 1000 Words?

An Op-Ed at the NYT ruminates about photos and falsification of them for political purposes.

I used to be the director of an archive that contained a photo archive, and we gave thought to matters of authentication, verification, and uses of photographs. I always claimed that while indeed one picture can be worth one thousand words, it's never clear which thousand words, since pictures, contrary to common wisdom, as a general rule tell us very little about anything, unless we know their context.

This is a serious issue when dealing with people seeking to discredit Israel. Take, for example, this recent item at Lawrence of Cyberia.

The caption given by faux-Lawrence is "An Israeli settler boy prevents a Palestinian woman from passing in the street as Israeli troops stand and watch."

Well, no, not really.

Remember, this is a snapshot, which means a specific instant, frozen. Had the picture been made 10, or 5, or even one single second earlier, or later, the scene would have been different. So while we don't have the full series, only this single instant, let's look at it carefully and see if we can imagine.

Both the woman and the boy are in motion. They are approaching one another. A second earlier they were further apart, and perhaps three seconds earlier they may not even have been on colliding trajectories. By this instant the Arab woman is clearly already aware of the boy, as her eyes, focussed on him, indicate; however, the positioning of her legs indicates she's still in full stride, and if the boy intends to block her, she doesn't seem aware of it. In any case, she hasn't stopped yet.

What about a second later, and three? Perhaps she simply continued walking, and the boy moved aside, or he didn't but she brushed him aside, or perhaps he did manage to stop her even though this isn't yet visible, and at that point one of the soldiers intervened and told him to desist, or arrested the women, or opened fire at the cameraman... all sorts of things could have happened, and the one described in the caption is no more plausible than any of the others. What is somewhat implausible is that the soldiers merely looked on. In this particular snapshot, the entire incident - if it's an incident at all - is about 1-2 seconds old, and the soldiers have not yet taken it in nor done anything. But that says exactly nothing about what they did once the incident did register - if it developed into an incident at all.

Here's another part of the story that faux-Lawrence doesn't tell us, and most likely doesn't know, and certainly doesn't care. Those very soldiers got up early that morning, and patrolled all day long until late in the evening, dealing throughout the day with many incidents, real ones, not like this hypothetical one. Hebron in 2004 was an extraordinarily tense place, with armed men on both sides, and people getting killed on both sides. After long, tense and exhausting days, the soldiers got back to base, but rather than showering and going to sleep because the following day would require their full attention again, they trooped into a big room and talked with their captain. Every evening, for about an hour around midnight, they'd go over everything that had happened during the day; they'd recount what they had faced, how they had responded, and they'd evaluate their actions. Had they been too harsh? Not firm enough? Had they endangered themselves, or perhaps inflicted unnecessary damage? One evening, for example, they decided, following an analysis of the specific events of that day, that while being stoned was not dangerous enough to justify their shooting, when someone had tried to throw a metal bed frame onto them from a roof in a narrow alley, that was life threatening, and it was justified that they used live fire to make him stop.

How do I know all this, you ask? Because Meir, my son, was there at the time. No, he's not in this picture, and actually he didn't arrive in Hebron until somewhat later that year, but I remember discussing it with him at the time. The actions of that captain, cutting his soldier's sleep each night to train them in the reality of waging a moral war while not losing it, made a deep impression on me. On Meir too, so far as I could tell.

Now take those facts - for facts they are, not interpretations - and superimpose them on the photo, and see if you think faux-Lawrence knows what he's talking about, or if he cares.

Clear Thinkers

The British government has decided that someday, when the time comes, Lady Thatcher will be given the rare honor of a State funeral. So far so good.

The staff and readership of The Guardian never liked the Iron Lady, and even her eventual death won't change this. More significantly, hindsight won't change their minds, either, as you can see from the report on the government's decision ( Bold is mine):

The first since Sir Winston Churchill's in 1965, the funeral would acknowledge the exceptional impact of her 11-year premiership in reversing the decline in Britain's postwar fortunes.

As such, it would be certain to prove controversial among the many people who lost their jobs during the "Thatcher revolution" which reintroduced market forces into many fields of activity and for which she has not been forgiven by some.

Animosities are forever.

I once had the honor of meeting Lady Thatcher for an hour or so, when she visited Yad Vashem about ten years ago. In my capacity at Yad Vashem I had occasion to meet many world-famous people. Lady Thatcher was far and away the most striking of them. I've encountered charismatic people, but she had an aura of intelligence, nay: brilliance, such as I've never seen.

Update: the decision has been put to poll on the Guardian's website. As I write, 81.4% of the website's voters feel such an honor for the "Iron Lady" (their formulation) is wrong. Of course, the decision has already been made, and anyway, we wish Lady Thatcher many long years; perhaps if she dies at 120 even the Guardian gang of 2045 won't remember why their grandparents were so churlish.

Inventing Reality

Not long ago the man who hides behind the deceptive name Ibrahim ibn Yussuf stated in a comment that "according to the UN, Israel broke the truce seven times before the first Palestinian breach". This puzzled me a bit, because it was the first I'd heard of it. But then again, I was in Australia at the time, mostly not connected to cyberspace, so perhaps I'd missed something? I challenged Ibrahim in the comments to cite his source. He didn't, so I sent him an e-mail about this and other matters. He responded about the other matters but not this, so I asked again. He never responded. Eventually I informed him I'd write about his failure to substantiate his own serious allegation, but he was silent. So I went looking myself, and think I've identified his source: a person who hides behind the name Lawrence of Cyberia, here. I know that faux-Ibrahim regards faux-Lawrence as a reliable source because he's told me so in the past. I also admit that I'm becoming ever more baffled by what is apparently a widespread phenomenon of people who engage in intensive criticism of Israel while insisting on remaining anonymous. But that's a subject for another day.

Faux Lawrence offers no more substantiation for his statement than faux-Ibrahim does, which is interesting because his blog gives the appearance of being well footnoted. It's also a strange statement on its own: what does it mean, "according to the UN"? That's sort of like saying "according to the British government", except that the UN is far more diffuse than the British government. Who in the UN said? When? If there were precisely seven Israeli infractions, what were they? When? Where? Who did the counting? How do we know they're really infractions and not something else, such as, perhaps, Palestinian men approaching the border fence, being warned away and eventually being shot at when they refuse to stop their menacing maneuver?

So I went to the source: the UN website. Sure enough, there is a document there in which "the UN", or rather an official of the UN, tells what she thinks is going on:

But while calm had prevailed for several days, Palestinian militants fired one mortar and three rockets at southern Israel on 24 June, with the Islamic Jihad claiming responsibility for the rocket fire in response to the Israel Defense Forces killing of one of its members in the West Bank. A Palestinian farmer had been injured in Gaza by the Israel Defense Forces on 23 June, and in a separate incident another farmer had been reportedly injured by Israel Defense Forces fire on 25 June. Another rocket had been fired from Gaza into Israel on the same day, and today, two mortar shells were fired. In response, Israel closed the border crossings for the past three days.

Let's look at that paragraph (and you're welcome to follow the link and read the entire document. I don't think I engaged in any cherry picking).

First, note that she puts the Palestinian infractions first. Then she adds two Israeli actions, one the day before the Palestinian quadruple breach of the calm, and the other, "reportedly" happening the day after the Palestinian breach. The single Israeli breach is depicted quite sparsely: A Palestinian farmer had been injured in Gaza by IDF forces. How? In what context? We're not told. So perhaps it was an Israeli breach, and perhaps it wasn't. Something must have caused the UN person to put it after the Palestinian breaches in her report.

The other six Israeli breaches of the calm? Well, according to this UN report, which deals with an entire month, they didn't happen.

So what does this tell us about faux-Ibrahim and faux-Lawrence? That they're gullible? That they pass on hearsay they picked up somewhere without checking it, because if it's detrimental to Israeli it must be true and certainly is valuable?

Reeling to Strength

I spent my three-year military service in the mid-1970s in an IDF that was still reeling from the failures of the Yom Kippur War. I remember how in my first year or so the failures permeated everything we did, from the form our training took to the less than minimal number of hours we slept under the command of a traumatized company commander to the ethos of our sergeants who had seen the war as fresh recruits in a dazed army. The entire structure around us was committed to getting over the trauma, learning from the mistakes, and returning to the confidence of an army that knew what it was doing.

(And no, we had nothing to do with the Palestinians. In those days the Palestinian men worked in Israel and the IDF wasn't called upon to dominate them in any active way. The first Intifada was more than a decade away, and the "brutal Israeli occupation" some people so love to speak about was not yet a figment of anyone's imagination. Seen through the perspective of the present decade, it was a time of peace, or at least, a time of calm).

The stories Achikam tells me about his service often remind me of that period. He went in a year after the debacle of the 2nd Lebanon War, and joined a reeling army - but one committed to getting over it. As this article demonstrates, the reeling is over, and the recuperation is in full swing.

The changes are, of course, much deeper than merely the number of days each unit now dedicates to training. The 1990s were the decade of complacency: peace was on its way, and the need for such an expensive army had passed, we foolishly told ourselves as we slashed the military budget year after year. The beginning of this decade was the Palestinian era of the IDF: faced with an entire nation committed to terror tactics, Israel had to forge a method of beating waves of terrorists eager to die killing Jews. The pundits all told us it couldn't be done, and the pundits were all wrong, but the price was that we forgot the other enemies, and the IDF forgot how to operate as an army and concentrated (brilliantly) on counter guerrilla warfare. The war against Hezbullah served as a waking call.