Things People Talk About

Over Yom Haatzmaut, Independence Day, I spent time talking to people in a number of social events. Here are some of the things I heard:

A friend who runs a company that produces high-class tools for the creation of other tools ("our equipment is the Rolls-Royce of the field: expensive but the best") told me they've been selling to unfriendly countries such as Indonesia, and in recent weeks they've been approached by a potential client in Pakistan. A second friend who was standing with us told of other Israeli companies who sell to the Arab world, mostly via Jordan and often in Jordanian packaging to hide the Israeli provenance. Someone ought to tell the boycott folks.

A North-American journalist who has been reporting on the MidEast for a generation tells me the lack of a peace process enables all sides to live in practical peace; once negotiations start again they'll have to re-start the violence.

A Canadian who lives in Israel these past 30 years remarks, apropos Obama's plans to regulate American banks: Canada has strict bank regulations and sailed through the recent turmoil mostly unharmed. Israel has strict bank regulations, and sailed through likewise unscathed. America has light bank regulations, and look where they are.

The cutting edge in military technology is robots: drones, jeeps, and science fiction spy tools all operated from afar by highly trained soldiers who can't be harmed by the battlefield conditions. Israel is in the forefront of this technology, alongside the US.

Three if not four people separately remarked on the 20th of April as Hitler's birthday. Two of them are children of Holocaust survivors, so that's where that complex comes from; one came from Russia, and one was a thirty-something from North Africa. Jews are a screwed up bunch.

Volcanoes make humans look very small. Everyone agreed on that one.

Mother of all Shirim

Naftali Herz Imber, a Romanian Jew, wrote Hatikva, The Hope, following a visit to Eretz Israel in 1878. It was popular among the early settlers of what eventually was called the first aliya, 1882-1904. Seen in historical perspective, it was an expression of the sea-change in Jewish history that was beginning at the time: the sentiments of Jewish aspirations to rebuild a national center in the historical homeland was not new - on the contrary, it was banal. Yet articulating it in a secular poem, putting it to music and singing it by people who took the concept as a practical guideline to be enacted by secular Jews, that was novel, and soon proved to be profoundly revolutionary.

Interestingly, Hatikva first took on the status of a quasi-anthem at the sixth Zionist Conference in 1903. Herzl had tabled a suggestion that the movement consider a British proposal to move European Jews to eastern Africa (the Uganda Plan), and the majority of delegates, who unlike him understood what Judaism was about, were horrified; they resoundingly sang Hatikva to make clear their point that their aspirations were about the national homeland, not some African backwater. Thereafter the song became the de-facto anthem of the Zionist movement, being officially adopted in 1933.

The melody derives from the same Romanian folksong which inspired Smetana when he composed Moldau.

Interestingly, while the song was always the national anthem of Israel, this was explicitly enacted only in 2004. The song in its present form is a slightly modified and shortened version of the original.

A German colleague who once happened to be visiting Israel during the week of Yom Hashoah-Yom Hazikaron-Independence Day pointed told me the Israeli national anthem is the only national anthem he's aware of which is a sad song: mostly they tend to be triumphant or martial or both.

כָּל עוֹד בַּלֵּבָב פְּנִימָה
נֶפֶשׁ יְהוּדִי הוֹמִיָּה
וּלְפַאֲתֵי מִזְרָח, קָדִימָה
עַיִן לְצִיּוֹן צוֹפִיָּה -

עוֹד לֹא אָבְדָה תִּקְוָתֵנוּ
הַתִּקְוָה בַּת שְׁנוֹת אַלְפַּיִם
לִהְיוֹת עַם חָפְשִׁי בְּאַרְצֵנוּ
אֶרֶץ צִיּוֹן וִירוּשָׁלַיִם

As long as deep within the heart
A Jewish soul stirs,
And forward, to the ends of the East
An eye looks out, towards Zion.

Our hope is not yet lost,
The hope of two thousand years,
To be a free people in our land
The land of Zion and Jerusalem

Here's a recording without words, and a recording sung by Rivka Zohar.

How Shall I Bless

Eldad Krock was a young reservist in a parachute brigade who was killed in Jerusalem on Givat Hatachmoshet, Ammunition Hill, in the Six Day War; the next morning the brigade was of the forces who took the Old City and the Western Wall. The battle itself was one of the fiercest in Israel's long history of wars.

Rachel Shapira had been in his class at school, at Kibbutz Shfayim, where they both grew up. She wrote a poem commemorating him and inserted it in the kibbutz internal news sheet.

Yair Rosenblum was staying at the Shefayim guesthouse, and came across the poem. He set it to music, and gave it to the Navy Band with which he was working at the time (1969).

The recording was the first major exposure of the soloist, Rivka Zohar.

Ma Avarech, How Shall I Bless Him, is one of the most important shirim ever, and will undoubtedly remain so until some future generation of Israelis forgets we were once at war.

I'm offering a 1969 version with the Navy Band, and a recent recording by Amir Benayun, who turns it into a sepharidi prayer.

Hebrew words
English translation
What blessings can I give this child, what can he be blessed with?
Asked the angel
What blessings can I give this child, what can he be blessed with?
Asked the angel

And he blessed him with a smile, bright as light
And he blessed him with big observing eyes
With them to catch every flower, every living creature or bird
And with a heart to feel what he sees.

What blessings can I give this adolesence , what can he be blessed with?
Asked the angel
What blessings can I give this adolesence, what can he be blessed with?
Asked the angel

And he blessed him with legs to dance for ever
And a soul to remeber all tunes
And a hand to collect shells on the beach
And a ear attentive to old and young

What blessings can I give this man , what can he be blessed with?
Asked the angel
What blessings can I give this man, what can he be blessed with?
Asked the angel

And he blessed that his hands which are used to flowers
Will succed in learning the might of the steel
And his legs to dance the roads journey
And lips to sing the command pace

What blessings can I give him , what can he be blessed with?
This child this young adult
What blessings can I give him, what can he be blessed with?
This child this young adult

I gave him all I could give
A song a smile and legs to dance
And a delicate hand and a trembling heart
What else can I bless you with?

This boy is now an angel
No one will bless him, he will never be blessed
God God God
If only you blessed him with life.

The Lost Jews of the West

Just completed the reading of a small book with a large thesis. It's the joint project of two local scholars, Arye Edrei (Law, Tel Aviv University) and Doron Mendels (History, Hebrew University). Because of the vagaries of academe, they both live in Hebrew, their research is based on sources in Hebrew Aramaic Greek and Latin, they published their findings in two articles in English, but the book which contains the fullest presentation of their findings exists only in German, Zweierlei Diaspora, Zur Spaltung der antiken juedischen Volk. The two earlier articles appeared in the Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha, 2007 and 2008.

The reason I'm getting into all the bibliographic stuff is because of my frustration that such a ground-breaking and fascinating study is hidden in such remote nooks and crannies as to ensure that no-one ever finds them, except for some dusty old eggheads.

The thesis: About 2,200 years ago the Jews split into two language groups. The Western half forgot Hebrew, and in spite of its size was eventually lost to Jewish history.

The Jewish world from the 3rd century BCE onwards was split between the western communities which spoke Greek, and the eastern ones which spoke Aramaic. The Aramaic-speaking ones knew Hebrew, read the Bible in it, created the Mishna in it, and then developed the Talmud and its auxiliary creations in Aramaic interspersed with Hebrew. In the west, meanwhile, the Bible was translated into Greek (the Septuagint), so the Greek-speakers no longer needed Hebrew and forgot it.

In the Land of Israel itself there were Jews of both camps. Moreover, until the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70CE the division was not necessarily troubling because everyone accepted the utter centrality of Jerusalem, and Jewish practice focused on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The destruction of the Temple and of Jerusalem removed the center of Judaism. The pharisees, who had already begun developing an oral law, managed to forge a new form of Judaism, rabbinic Judaism; the Jews of the west, not having any of the languages, were simply not part of it. They did not contribute to it, and there are only rare indications that they even knew it existed. Nor, as time went on, is it clear that the Jews of the east remembered that the Jews of the west were still there.

There was also the matter of Christianity: the Septuagint enabled anyone to read the Bible, and now ever growing numbers of non-Jews were claiming themselves to be Israel; this caused the rabbis to insist that their Talmudic tradition never be written: an oral tradition of immense complexity in languages most Christians didn't know would be impossible to translate and expropriate. In practice this meant dropping the Jews who couldn't participate.

Prior to the late 18th century rabbinic Judaism was the only sort there was (though within its limits it was of course extraordinarily rich and variegated). The Jews of Asia Minor, North Africa and Europe simply didn't know about it.

So how did they live? As what? Initially, they lived according to the Biblical precepts, meaning the basic laws of Kashrut and the Sabbath and holidays. Yet Edrei and Mendels speculate that many of them may have joined the early Christians, who were not obviously all that different from them initially. By and by they stopped sending money to the center, because it wasn't there anymore, and thus they lost another form of connection. And then?

In the 9th or 10th century rabbinic Judaism appears in Europe; by the 11th it is stronger there than in the east. How did this happen? The book offers no clear answer, and when I pressed Arye Edrei he said he doesn't know, because the sources are too weak. He seems to incline to the explanation that rabbinic Jews traveled to the west and settled there. Did they find remnants of the local Jews and teach them the rabbinic tradition? Was there anyone left to teach?

Which leads to the obvious question: in the long run (centuries), can Jews exist as Jews without Hebrew?

A Forgotten War

It would be easy to go into overdrive on Memorial Day, and post 25 appropriate shirim, or 250. Instead, I'll post a lesser one this evening, and one major one tomorrow, and that's it. If there's no attempt at comprehensiveness, no one will be slighted at the ones I left out.

Between 1968-1970 there was a small and forgotten war along the Jordan River, which was now the border between the Kingdom of Jordan on the East Bank, and the Israeli-occupied West Bank. (In those days no-one considered the West Bank to belong to the Palestinians; rather it was contested by the Jordanians who had conquered it in 1948 and the Israelis who had conquered it in 1967).

Yasser Arafat's PLO was encamped on the East Bank, and was doing its best to send squads of terrorists across the river, up the gorges into the hills, and from there into Israeli towns where they were to kill civilians. Throughout their century-long war with the Jews the Palestinians have always aimed intentionally at civilians. The IDF tried two tactics to thwart this, one to stop the PLO squads on the newly constructed fence along the river, or at latest to track them down and kill them in the gorges leading up from the Jordan valley. The second tactic was to hit Jordanian targets, with the rationale that Jordan was responsible for attacks coming from its territory even though the attackers were not Jordanian troops.

Both tactics, involving armed men willing to kill, were dangerous; in any number of those hunts in the gorges IDF troops were killed, though almost no terrorist squads survived. The attacks on Jordanian territory eventually provoked King Hussein to notice that his PLO guests were severely compromising his sovereignty; in September 1970, after they hijacked three airliners into his territory he cracked down. His forces killed thousands of Palestinians; the Syrians invaded Jordan to get him to desist; the Americans asked the Israelis to prepare to stop the Syrians; the IDF amassed troops near the meeting point of the three borders; the Syrians withdrew; and the defeated PLO fled to Lebanon, where it later precipitated a civil war that lasted 15 years and killed many tens of thousands.

If you've never heard any of this, it's nonetheless true.

Our shir of the day is Mirdaf, Chase (or Pursuit), and it's about those chases in the canyons and their price. It's part of the canon of shirim in which Israelis told themselves that war was not going to cease anytime soon, though it still ends with the hope that eventually it will. It was written by Yaron London, then a rising young journalist star, and today a smug thickset elder journalist of secondary importance. The music is by Nachum Heiman, an important music-writer, and the singer is Chava Alberstein, whom we've met and will meet again.

Hebrew lyrics
English translation
A good land with honey running in her veins
While blood flows through her rivers like water.

A land with mountains of copper
But with nerves of steel.

A land marked by a history of pursuit
Two thousand pages plus one more,
Until soon
All the oxygen in her lungs is consumed
In the heat of the chase.

A land that will be pursued by her foes
And she in turn will give them pursuit.

Although she will catch her enemies, they
Shall not entrap her in the palm of their hands.

A person on the sidelines observing her life,
Suspended like a leaf quivering in the wind,

Shall be fearful.
But, as if not in the least unconcerned,
She'll wait for the end of the chase.

The end of the chase is hiding in a crevice
Secreting its face in a hideaway hole,

But in the end it will come, like the sun
That ascends in the East.

Then no more will mothers lament
Nor will fathers their sons mourn,
Yes it will come;
Our feet shall not tire until then
From pursuit of the paths of hope.

Three Differences

My friend Shlomo was killed in the first week of the 1982 war in Lebanon (nowadays we call it the First Lebanon War). We had known each other since age ten or eleven; during the war we were in the same regiment, though I was further to the south and only heard of his death a few days later. The following story happened during the shiva, the week of mourning: I distinctly remember that I somehow managed to get home for that, but the exchange was by then already the stuff of legend, and all these years later I'm no longer certain I've got it exactly as said.

The Rav Gustman lost his family in the Shoah, fought in the partisans, and then set up a yeshiva in Jerusalem; it was a haredi yeshiva in the secular neighborhood of Rechavia that didn't fit into any pigeonhole and attracted all sorts of people you wouldn't have expected. Shlomo's father, a famous professor, went to services at the Yeshiva. So it was natural that the Rav would come for a condolence visit, and here's what he told the bereaved parents.

Your son Shlomo and my son Meir are together now, and just as we're talking, so are they. Meir is telling Shlomo that he envies him three things. First, he envies him his death. I was shot like a sack of potatoes near Vilna; you, Shlomo, died in battle. Second, he envies him the reason of his death. I died for no reason, Shlomo, simply because they hate us, while you, you were fighting to defend the Jewish state. Finally, Shlomo, I envy you the life you led while you were alive. You lived in Jerusalem, in Israel.

----------------
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Israel's most important strength is the totally unwavering determination of its people. Memorial day, which started a few hours ago, is about the price of the determination, but it's also an expression of the determination itself.

Elie Wiesel on Jerusalem

CiFWatch recently alerted me to this story, about some British officials who banned an advertisement encouraging tourists to visit Israel because it carried a picture of the Western Wall, which is apparently not in Israel. (Funny: I was there earlier this morning, and no-one asked me for a passport.)

(Of course, these days no-one can travel from the UK, so perhaps it's a good thing the ad isn't running).

Someday I ought to write about where the contortions of the Lawfare folks and their supporters are taking them. A publication in what used to be a Christian society denying Jews the right to identify themselves with the single most important place in their world: this actually isn't really a new phenomenon, is it now?

I mention this in the context of the full-page ad Elie Wiesel just published in various important American newspapers, calling on everyone (or mostly: on a specific few, powerful ones) to keep in mind that Jerusalem isn't just any old place:

Its presence In Jewish history is overwhelming. There is no more moving prayer in Jewish history than the one expressing our yearning to return to Jerusalem. To many theologians, it IS Jewish history, to many poets, a source of inspiration. It belongs to the Jewish people and is much more than a city, it is what binds one Jew to another in a way that remains hard to explain. When a Jew visits Jerusalem for the first time, it is not the first time it is a homecoming. The first song I heard was my mother's lullaby about and for Jerusalem. Its sadness and its its joy are part of our collective memory.

Simply saying it as it is has become something that calls for expensive ads in important newspapers. Elie Wiesel is probably the most important moral voice in American Jewry; it remains to be seen if saying the obvious will enhance his stature or reduce it. That will be a moral test for America's Jews.

First Adsence, now Twitter

The other day I explained that because of my real job I need to experiment with stuff, and am using this blog as the laboratory. That was when I imported Adsense to this page. Now I've launched a twitter account. I'm not certain how to use it, and see no reason why any regular reader of this blog would be interested: you already know your way here, and seem to come by more or less regularly, so why would you need need twitter updates? Especially as I have absolutely no intention of twittering about what I eat for breakfast or each e-mail exchange I have with Rahm Emanuel. Still, if you believe the hype - or, in my case, trying to understand the reality behind the hype - the claim is made that twitter can enhance the readership of this blog by reaching new folks. Or not.

So I'm at twitter, at @yaacovlozowick (original, huh?).

Facebook? I'm leary of that one for the time being.

Even the Greatest of Them

There's been a flurry of condemnation of some South African Jews who disapprove of Richard Goldstone to the extent that he won't be joining the synagogue services of his grandson's bar mitzva. JTA says he has been barred; the Jerusalem Post offers a fudged version of the story, in which some of the protagonists seem to be backing away from the appearance of their decision without changing it. J.J. Goldberg at The Forward notes the story, and many of his readers think it's disgraceful.

The story emphasizes an aspect of the story of the Goldstone report not often directly mentioned: that Jews are a community, and always have been; that the community has its own internal dynamics; and that Richard Goldstone dealt his community a grievous blow by adding his stature to a nasty defamation of it. (I'm not going into the issue of the report here, because I've already done so here, but having read the entire 575 pages of it I have no problem in calling it a nasty defamation).

The tool of nidui (roughly similar to the Greek practice of ostracism) has been one of the most powerful methods of sanction and censure in Jewish communal life. During the millennia in which the Jews had no state power to wield, it was perhaps the most powerful tool in their arsenal, but it predates even those times.

Perhaps the most famous nidui ever was the casting out of rabbi Eliezer in the 2nd century CE. Rabbi Eliezer was one of the greatest of the tanaim, the scholars who created the Mishna; indeed, he is one of fountainheads of the Mishna; he appears thousands of times in the Talmud and his impact was enormous. He also seems to have been a stubborn pedant, unwavering in his puristic interpretations, a fact that eventually led to his clash with the other scholars of his generation. In one of the most fascinating discussions in the history of religion (any religion), R. Eliezer took the side of God against the scholars but lost, and when he refused to accept this he was cast out.

As he lay on his deathbed a group of his disciples came to visit him, among them rabbis Akiva and Yehoshua. First they loitered outside his chamber, as R. Eliezer rebuked his son for putting care of him above preparations for the approaching Shabbat. The disciples then entered, while sitting across the room because of the nidui order.
- R. Eliezer: Why did you come?
- We came to learn.
- Where were you up till now?
- We were busy [they didn't want to pain him by saying they had been respecting the order]
- We'll see how you die
- R. Akiva: What will my death be like?
- Yours will be the worst of them all [R. Akiva was later tortured to death by the Romans, in an emblematic act of martyrdom]

R. Eliezer then crossed his arms across his chest: Oh, what will be lost when I go. I studied much Torah from my teachers, but what I took from them was like a dog lapping at the sea [so great was what I didn't have time to learn]; I taught much Torah to my students, but they didn't take more than a drop from a vessel. I have studied 300 rules about the affliction of leprosy that no-one ever asked me; I've studied 300 rules of the farming of squash that no-one ever asked me except R. Akiva once [These are arcane matters; his passing would mean the loss of such details that are not common knowledge].

The disciples and R. Eliezer got into a detailed discussion of holiness and impurity; to one of the questions he added that a leather item if treated in a particular manner is pure - and on the word Pure he died.
Rabbi Yehoshua stood up and said The nidui is over, the nidui is over [otherwise it could also have affected the burial arrangements].

Richard Goldstone is not an important Jew, not in any Jewish context; ostracizing him may make him feel sorry for himself, but it's no great matter in a Jewish context.

Sanhedrin 68a; the Daf Yomi thread is presented and explained here.

Not Even at Berkeley

The story of the divestment attempt at Berkeley has been confusing, but apparently the side that should have, lost. Divest this! has been on the story all along, and explains here that in spite of the obfuscations, the divestors really did lose. This would explain why the many reports at Mondoweiss have all been along the lines of "we won by being there". Tom Lehrer once quipped about the Spanish Civil War that "they won all the battles, but we had all the good songs".

Not that there's much about the present topic that resembles the Spanish Civil War, mind you. The naive folks who flocked to Spain to fight on the losing side at least had the decency to be willing to die for their convictions, even as they overlooked the fact that both sides were pretty awful. Compare that to, say, Cecilie Surasky at Mondoweiss: true, she's ecstatically convinced she's part of Something Big, but her gushing makes me think of a 14-year-old.

Little Brother

Ehud Manor passed away, aged 60, five years ago this week. Manor probably wrote lyrics for more Israeli songs than anyone else - more than 1,000 by some counts, between the early 1960s and the day of his death. Many are part of the canon, though it must be said that they were generally not high poetry. The Hebrew Songs website I've been using to give English translations of shirim has more than 150 by Manor, of a grand total of 4,600.

Since we're in the week we're in, here's perhaps his most memorable song of bereavement. Achi Hatzair Yehuda, My Younger Brother Yehuda is about life after the death of his younger brother Yehuda, who was killed in 1968, in the War of Attrition that spanned the years of 1968-1970. Manor wrote a number of songs about his brother, including Ben Yaffe Nolad, A Handsome Boy Was Born; this one however isn't about Yehuda, it's about life without him.

Hebrew lyrics
English translation
My young brother Yehudah,
do you hear?
do you know?
The sun still rises every morning
and its light is white,
and in the evening the wind scatters
the leaves of the garden.
The first rain
came down two days ago
on Tuesday evening,
and the sky is visible again,
in the puddle on the main road.

My young brother Yehudah,
do you hear?
do you know?
Your kids are in the garden,
they're learning a new song already,
and in high school the students
are again training on the field,
winds of sunset
howl on the balcony
the songs of autumn,
and Mom secretly waits
that maybe a letter will arrive.

My young brother Yehudah,
do you hear?
do you know?
All your good friends
carry your image with them,
and in all the tanks on the border lines
you are with them.
My good brother,
I remember your eyes,
and they solve riddles.
And my baby son is handsome like you,
I will name him in your name, Yehudah.

Manor's youngest son, by the way, really is named Yehuda (b.1974).

There have been many recordings of this song; I've chosen one sung by Manor himself, who recorded songs only rarely.

Winter of '73

The story of shirim ivri'im and Israeli society, were one to tell it in a coherent manner and not in the lazy all-over-the-place anecdotal form I'm using here, would grapple with the question When did Israeli society realize how permanent war was going to be.

Late 1973 was an important milestone. Between 1967 and 1973 Israel was in a weird cognitive hiatus. There was a war going on much of the time along the Suez Canal; there were terrorist attacks of growing severity; and there seemed no serious chance for peace anytime soon. Yet Israelis arrogantly told themselves that after the humiliating defeat they'd inflicted on Egypt Jordan and Syria, there wouldn't be full-fledged war, either.

And then there was. The trauma of late 1973 reverberated loudly for 20 years, informing almost every public discussion and action for a generation. Its first chapter was the simple shock at the number of casualties in the 1973 war, at the price paid to stop and then throw back the attacking Arab armies.

If you're following this thread you'll not be surprised that those dark months called forth some important and memorable shirim. Yet as we approach Memorial Day next week, here's perhaps the most bleak and uplifting of them, even though it was written twenty years later.

Shmuel Haspari was born in 1954: he was precisely of the generation that fought in 1973, and came home to mourn their friends and get on with life. He is one of our most important playwrights, screen writer, and occasional writer of lyrics. He's also one of the few but prominent public intellectuals of the Zionist Left who are still trying valiantly to make their political camp relevant by recognizing reality but also offering a left-wing way forward. (Not many people are following, and the radical left of course despises him).

This shir is about him, though it's written and sung from the perspective of his children. It says, in essence: war is permanent in our country, but we're strong.

I'm embedding two films. The first has two recordings of the song by the team of soldiers that sang it, the second of the two recorded in the heady early days of the Oslo process, when we thought maybe it would prove too pessimistic. The second film has the same recording, overlaid with slides that speak for themselves, most of them from the past decade: so they're also part of the story.

Hebrew lyrics
English translation
We are the children of winter 1973
You dreamt us first at dawn at the end of the battles
You were tired men that thanked their good luck
You were worried young women and you wanted so much to love
When you conceived us with love in winter 1973
You wanted to fill up with your bodies that what the war finished
And we were born the country was wounded and sad
You looked at us you hugged us you were trying to find comfort
When we were born the elders blessed with tears in their eyes
They said:" we wish those kids will not have to go to the army"
And your faces in the old picture prove
That you said it form the bottom of your hearts
When you promised to do every thing for us
To make an enemy into a loved one

You promised a dove,
an olive tree leaf,
you promised peace
You promised spring at home and blossoms
You promised to fulfill promises, you promised a dove

We are the children of winter 1973
We grew up and now in the army
with our weapon and helmet on our heads
We know how to make love to laugh and cry
We are men we are women
and we too dream about babies
This is why we will not pressure you we will demand of you
And we will not threaten you
When we were young you said promises need to be kept
We will give you strength if that is what you need
We will not hold back
We just wanted to whisper
We are the children of that winter in the year 1973

You promised a dove,
an olive tree leaf,
you promised peace
You promised spring at home and blossoms
You promised to fulfill promises,
you promised a dove

Don't Divide Jerusalem

Just about everyone who makes utterances on the topic assures everyone else that an essential part of reaching peace between Israel and Palestine must include the division of Jerusalem.

I am convinced a division of Jerusalem will lead to war, for reasons I have described elsewhere. Yet no matter how optimistic or starry eyed one chooses to be, decision makers have the responsibility to prepare for negative outcomes of their actions. Telling yourself everything will work out fine is OK for a story-teller, a rejected lover, or investment bankers. Political leaders must relate to the possibility their actions might not have the hoped-for result. Dividers of Jerusalem are welcome to hope for the best, but must also prepare for less than the best. They must explain what will happen if their rosier expectations prove misguided. Put more bluntly, they must explain what will happen if the line of division deteriorates into a hostile border.

In this new series of blogposts it is my intention to show pictures and short films from the city, demonstrating what it looks like right now, with a call to explain what will happen if that hostile border is inserted into it.

Here are two films from the area of the Jaffa Gate. Once you've finished with them, the next segment in this series is here. If you've started here for some reason, the enite series is introduced here.

Adsense

In the previous post I retracted a statement; now I'm going to apologize.

This blog generates no revenue: which is fine, I hadn't intended it to. However, alongside it I've got a real job, or something sort of like one, and in that part of my life I need to experiment with various Internet features such as Twitter and Google advertising. So I've just inserted Adsense to this blog, as part of my testing process. I'm likely to tweak it this way or that, and I apologize in advance for any aggravation.

Blood Libel Correction

Following the ferocious response by Alex Stein and Did Remez to my previous post, I'm issuing a correction.

The lie about Israel gearing up to deport tens of thousands of Palestinians, repulsive as it is, probably isn't extreme enough to justify the title I gave it, "blood libel". A blood libel is when enemies of the Jews propagate a story about how Jews are murdering innocents. While there is no dearth of such stories in the reportage on Israel, this particular lie is not that serious. Its propagators are reporting on an Israeli policy which doesn't exist, but they're not saying Jews are murdering anyone.

So, here's my retraction of that terminology.

As for placing some of Israel's own radicals in the camp of its enemies, that unfortunately is something they have done. I'm merely reporting on it, though with great reluctance and some real pain.

Blood Libel

A few days ago Haaretz splashed a new story across the top of its front page, knowing perfectly well that it would spread like wildfire all over the world: Israel is gearing up to deport tens of thousands of Palestinians. And of course, it did. The fools and the knaves all hugged the story to their hearts and ran with it as far and as fast as they could.

Nothing about this is surprising: not the willingness of Haaretz to harm the country by spreading lies, not the eagerness of our enemies to wield them.

If there's anything at all about the story that's remotely surprising, it's the ease with which it can be disproved. Any reasonable observer of Israel knew immediately that the story couldn't be true as told; the fact that its originators were one of our radical Left NGOs (Hamoked) reinforced this gut feeling. Elder of Ziyon, an anonymous blogger with no public position, sent an e-mail to the appropriate official, who explained that the reality is more or less the opposite of that reported by Haaretz. Here's the full response, though I recommend following the link to read Elder's important comments about the case:

1. The new military order was signed 6 months ago.

2. There are no changes to the repatriation system or the authority/means to repatriate illegal residents in Judea and Samaria. The only difference is that now the process includes a judiciary review.

3. The decision to establish a judiciary committee to review the administrative process of repatriation was taken in response to the Israeli High Court of Justice (בג"ץ) decision that there should be judicial oversight.

4. Any illegal resident who stands to be repatriated will be brought before the judicial committee within 8 days of receiving the order, they will have the right to legal council, and will be able to appeal the judicial decision to the high court.

5. When making decisions about whether or not to repatriate an individual, the administrative and the judicial committees consider family ties.

6. Currently there are very few illegal Palestinian residents in Judea and Samaria - over the past several years, as a goodwill gesture to the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli government has approved an amnesty for nearly all of the 32,000 illegal residents whose names were submitted to the population registry by the Palestinian authorities.

7. Since the beginning of 2010, there have only been 5 Gazans who have been repatriated to Gaza.

8. The current system allows Israeli authorities to arrest, detain and deport illegal residents (specifically those who came in on a tourist visa and decided to stay) - these are the same powers that every sovereign nation in the world possess. The establishment of the Judicial Committee to oversee the process is the only change. (Bold: Elder; italics: me)

So what are we to make of all this:

1. A lie about Israel will cross the world in minutes, the truth won't travel at all.
2. Fringe elements in Israel are eager to lie.
3. Haaretz is courting the fringes (and hundreds of its subscribers have canceled their subscriptions this week. We don't know how many hundreds, it may be many, and their pool of subscribers was not large to begin with).
4. While loudly trumpeting the importance of a free press in a democracy and its own centrality in it, the level of journalism at Haaretz is lower than that of one private blogger.
5. The official agencies who might have confronted this lie, didn't. They waited for a blogger to ask them. Hamoked and Haaretz are malicious; officialdom is incompetent; the country gets by in spite of them all.

Consistently lying about Jews eventually gets people killed. This has been the pattern for millennia; the difference is that now the casualties come from both sides of the lies. You'd think this might matter to the people who propagate the lies, but you'd be wrong.

Update: I'm retracting the title of this post, tho not its content, here.

The Second Banned Song

In 1969 the military band of the Nachal brigade was at the peak of its creativity and fame. The story of shirim ivri'im in the 1960s and 1970s is unimaginable without the military bands, and the Nachal band was the best of them all. Any new creation of theirs was bound to catch everyone's attention.

No-one saw this one coming, however: Shir Lashalom, Song for Peace, with Miri Aloni as the lead.

First, the music. It was of a type the military bands had never used. Electrifying.

Second, the content: while it was a full-throated call for peace, and that was fine, it contained an enigmatic line: al tabitu leachor, hanichu lanoflim. Don't look back, leave the fallen behind.

It was an immediate smash, and almost as swiftly it was banned. As I noted when presenting Hasela HaAdom of 1954, songs can't be banned in Israel, but in 1969 the state control of the radio was still significant enough that an order not to play the song there was largely effective. But not fully: if the 1954 ban created mystery, the 1969 one aggravated, and never really succeeded. Everyone knew the song, and it was sung all over, accompanied by arguments (Israelis love to argue). I don't remember how long the official ban stood, but it couldn't have been very long.

No-one ever said so out loud, but there is reason to believe the unorthodox music was an added aggravation for the old codgers who felt it was their job to protect the purity of Israeli music. It was only five years since they had forbidden the Beatles to visit Israel (damaging cultural influence, they had called it).

In the 1970s the national disagreement about the price of peace versus controlling the occupied territories got worse, and shir lashalom became the anthem of the peace camp; in those years it definately wasn't part of the consensual canon of shirim. Miri Aloni never really took off as an important singer, either.

On Saturday night, November 4th 1995, middle-aged Miri Aloni was brought out of semi-retirement to sing shir lashalom at the end of a massive demonstration in Tel Aviv, called to bolster the declining political standing of the Rabin government in the face of rising Palestinian terror and broadening Israeli public dissatisfaction with what was then called the peace process. She was flanked by Rabin to her right, Peres to her left, and assorted apparatchiks on either side, and they fervently sang for peace. (Well, Rabin didn't really sing. But he tried).

A few minutes later Rabin was dead, shot by Yigal Amir. Rabin had folded the sheet with the song's words into his pocket, and at his funeral Eitan Haber, his top aide, presented the blood-stained page. Israel was plunged into deepest shock... and shir lashalom was elevated to the pinnacle of consensus, where it remained for a number of years.

After 2000 and the Palestinian determination to terrorize Israel into positions it wouldn't take, the song lost luster. Today it's solidly part of the canon, and everyone knows its words and melody, but it isn't a religious article anymore. It's a nice song, with lots of historical baggage if you care to reflect on it.

Hebrew words
English translation
Let the sun rise
light up the morning
The purest of prayers
will not bring us back

He whose candle was snuffed out
and was buried in the dust
bitter crying won't wake him up
and won't bring him back

Nobody will bring us back
from a dead and darkened pit
here,
neither the victory cheer
nor songs of praise will help

So just sing a song for peace
don't whisper a prayer
Just sing a song for peace
in a loud shout

Allow the sun to penetrate
through the flowers
don't look back
let go of those departed

Lift your eyes with hope
not through the rifles' sights
sing a song for love
and not for wars

Don't say the day will come
bring on that day -
because it is not a dream -
and in all the city squares
cheer only for peace!

The first video has pictures of Rabin, with the original, 1969 version of the shir. The second has a segment of the Nov. 4th 1995 performance.

Even Wikileaks are Propagandists

Andrew Sullivan, of all possible sources of information, sends us (in a slightly roundabout way) to a fascinating interview of Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, by Stephen Colbert. Colbert seems uncharacteristically serious. He gets Assange to admit that 90% of the viewers of his leaked tape of American pilots shooting Iraqis didn't watch most of the tape; the title (Collateral Murder) was enough for most of them; he himself wrote that title, and if it was a bit high-handed, well, he promises his sources he'll get their leaks wide public attention, so he's got to be creative with the way he present the materials.

He also claims that the story about a fire-fight near the event that was filmed is not true, or mostly not true, but by the time he gets to that part of the story there's not much left of his credibility: the man has admitted he edits sources and sets them up to be inflammatory, then earnestly assures us he's trustworthy. Not in my book.

Assange, by the way, has yet to leak anything about Israel; I expect there's too much competition so he stays away from such a crowded field. I would however deeply appreciate if he'd start leaking documents about the operation and decision-making process in places such as the UN and its subsidiaries, or the IAEA, or those guys. Not that he'd gain trustworthiness thereby, but at least for the propaganda value.

Palestinian Opinion Poll Data

Noah Pollak cites a recent poll. Palestinians, it appears, are ever less enthusiastic about Hamas. That's good. They're also not particularly interested in peace alongside Israel. Not surprising.

I continue to say it's not my job to tell about what the Palestinians think: I don't speak their language, and am not closely familiar with their culture. I may be better informed than, oh, 94% of Western media types who regularly pontificate on the matter, but that's not saying much. These numbers, however, come from a Palestinian pollster, and they fit into other long-term findings that Israelis can disregard only by making an effort.

Report on Dead Civilians

If even the Guardian feels the need to report, it must be serious.

At least 71 civilians were killed by a misdirected air strike in Pakistan's tribal zone against suspected extremists, locals claimed today, as thousands of people flee a western-backed military offensive against Taliban and al-Qaida fighters in the area.

Moreover, they're even willing to admit that the story isn't really interesting most days of the year

Separately, the UN warned this week that aid groups were running out of funds for Pakistan's internally displaced people, with 1.3 million still homeless as a result of military operations, including the offensive in Orakzai which escalated a month ago and has pushed around 200,000 out of their houses.

"This situation is not only forgotten by the international community but by Pakistanis too," said Kilian Kleinschmidt, the deputy director of the United Nations refugee agency in Pakistan. "The crisis here is not over."

International interest in the internal refugee crisis in Pakistan had dried up since the 1.6 million displaced people from Swat returned home last year, he said, with an emergency UN appeal this year only 20% funded.

Never Use Violence Except When You Should

Mohamed elBaradei has been in the international public eye for many years, as the boss of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). In that capacity he has always been a moderating voice, sometimes perhaps even too moderate for the successful securing of international interests.

Now he's seeking a new job, president of Egypt, and he's singing a new tune:

Former IAEA Chief Mohamed ElBaradei, who is considering contending in Egypt's presidential elections next year, expressed his support for the "Palestinian resistance" while slamming Israel. In a report published Tuesday, the experienced diplomat said that Palestinian violence was the only path open to the Palestinian people, because "the Israeli occupation only understands the language of violence."

Nice.

Update: Elder of Ziyon followed the sources of this story and thinks it's not true. Some Palestinian source simply invented it, out of thin air.

Rescuing Lust from Extinction

The following story appears at least twice in the Talmud, the more detailed version (if memory serves) near the end of the Yoma tracate. However, having recently passed it in Sanhedrin, I'm posting from there.

The context is a discussion of the laws of idolatry. As is standard practice in the Talmud, there's lots of extremely detailed discussion of hypothetical matters that don't happen in the real lives of the scholars doing the discussing. Sometimes (tho often not) these discussions eventually mention the fact that they're religious and intellectual exercises, not practical discourses. So in this case. Having spent days on the minutiae of idolatry, the Gemara wonders how it came to be that the Jews lost their interest in the practice. After all, it was clearly a major issue in the early biblical times, yet the scholars of the Talmudic era apparently had never heard of Jews engaging in it for many centuries.

If you're into modern historical analysis of documents as a primary way to decipher the events of the past, the Gemara's answer won't satisfy you, because it's a fable (or myth, or metaphor, or allegory, or something. The literary folks will better know which term it is). According to this fable, the Great Sanhedrin in Jerusalem once managed to capture the flaming lion cub of idolatry which had emerged from the Holy of Holies in the Temple. Its roars were terrible to hear, but the prophet Zachariya told them to force it into a cage and pore molten lead over it; lead apparently having special sealing properties, as any reader of Superman comics will confirm.

(If you're less than 40-some years of age and don't know what I'm talking about with the Superman allusion, forget it. Not important).

Since they were having such a good day (Et ratzon) the Sanhedrin decided also to do away with lust. They prayed that the beast of lust be handed over, and when it was they caged it for three days, waiting to see the implications. (They realized the danger of their actions, and were being careful). As they had feared, the absence of lust in the world wreaked havoc; as the Gemara describes it, during those three days even the hens stopped laying eggs. Wondering if they might request that Lust be so limited than men would have it only for their rightful wife, the Sanhedrin recognized that this would not be granted. So they blinded the Beast of Lust but then let it free; as a result, men no longer lust after their immediate female relatives, and incest became rare.

Sanhedrin 64a

This thread is introduced and explained here.

A Window to Hope and Despair

One more day with Yehuda Poliker's 1988 Holocaust record and we'll move on.

The Jewish calender has cycles. One ancient one is from Pessach, signifying liberation from bondage, until Shavuot (Pentacost), seven weeks later, signifying liberation to live as Jews. There has always been a tension to the period, in which the nation is free but still lacks positive content for its freedom. About 1,800 years ago an additional layer was added, when it was decreed that a month of those seven weeks were a period of mourning for the destruction of Judea by Hadrian (143CE), and the end of any hope for political renewal following the earlier destruction of the temple (70 CE). Weddings are forbidden, men don't shave, music isn't played and so on.

Then, in the 1950s, a new cycle was inserted into the double-layer ancient one. The date of the independence of the State of Israel was decided by the British who left on May 14th 1948. After the ensuing war, however, the Knesset decided (twice, in 1953 and again in 1959) that the day before Independence day would be Yom HaZikaron, the day of commemoration for the fallen soldiers; the day one week before that was designated to remember the Shoah. These decisions were the result of political horse-trading, but sometimes even politicians get it right, even beyond their wildest dreams, and without intending it they had added modern depth to the traditional cycle. (I once read the record of their deliberations: they really didn't intend anything so profound)

So now we're in the week of trepidation. It's a week of palpable sensitivity, even as everyone goes about their normal business. What better a way to introduce it, I tell myself, than with Poliker's Chalon el hayam hatichon, a Window to the Mediterranean Sea.

The lyrics were written by Poliker's partner Yaacov Gil'ad, but the story is that of Poliker's father. A man who had lost his entire family including his children at the hands of the Nazis. His wife, likewise. Now, in December 1950, he has traveled to Israel without his new wife and son, to scout for a better future. He has found a one-room apartment in Jaffa, and he writes her (no iPhones in those days) to tell that perhaps, perhaps (ve-ulay) there's a chance, one in a million, that they can still somehow forge a new, better life. Maybe there's a slim hope, climbing in the window.

To add to the poignancy, the window faces west, back to Europe, to where there's no hope only despair. On that level, the window is false; the hope, if it's there, is climbing in from the street of Jaffa, the local reality, not from beyond the view. But that's just my reading.

Hebrew lyrics
English translation
I promised to write when I left you
but I didn't write for a long time
now I miss you so much
such a pity you are not here
after I arrived in Jaffa
hopes were born out of despair
I found my self a room and a half
on the roof of a deserted house
I have a folding bed here
if the three of us want to sleep
you the kid and I
against a window looking out
to the Mediteranean Sea

And maybe from afar
there is a one in a million chance
and maybe from afar
some joy is sneaking up to the window

The end of December 1950
outside there is war between the winds
suddenly we had snow fall
so white and reminds me what I already forgot
The wound is still open
if only you were here with me
I would have simply told you
what ever a letter will not say
If you want you have a home here
and you will have me
much kid's laughter coming to the house
and a window looking out
to the Mediterranean Sea

And maybe...

The Story Keeps Coming

The Anat Kamm story continues to supply interesting insights, so I'm still on it; apologies if I'm boring you.

A friend told me today that during a recent visit to Tel Aviv she saw graffiti from the gag-order period,encouraging pedestrians to "Google Anat Kamm": a way to spread the word as widely as possible. Yet it's becoming increasingly clear that the original story was false: long long ago, say, early last week, the line was that the entire story was well known outside Israel but gagged at home. By now it's clear that what was widely known abroad was a selective, carefully tailored story disseminated by Kamm's ideological fans, who were feeding foreign sources with the story they wished everyone to believe; once the authorities began releasing their version the story changed significantly.

Yesterday we saw the publishing of a court decision from February, when Kamm was sent to house arrest. This document contains various points of interest. Kamm is under mere house arrest, for example, not because the allegations aren't serious but because the assumption is that shorn of her special access to secret documents she isn't dangerous. If she's eventually convicted, she'll go to jail. She made two disks of copied documents, one of which she lost, and the other someone else lost (we aren't told who). The security measures in the general's office were so shabby as to be criminal; after having copied thousands of documents in a folder, Kamm simply asked a colleague to burn them onto disks, and it was done.

On the matter of her intent, it seems I was wrong. My initial reading was that she was out to promote her investigative abilities; apparently, she really did see herself as a whistle-blower - though on this point the story still seems to support both versions.

Regarding the prosecution's contention that Kamm intended to harm state security, the judge wrote that a high probability of harm to state security was enough to attribute such intent.

This is an interesting comment: when the probability of an outcome is plausible, the law sees action towards it as intent. Ponder that for a moment, because it isn't obviously so; one could easily argue that a plausible outcome is not enough to tell of intent to reach it; nor is the matter trivial. Any criminal proceeding that requires intent for conviction - and there are many such - will be influenced by it.

On the other hand, the judge cites Kamm's own words telling about her intent to uncover wrong-doing:

Hammer also referred to Kam's testimony regarding her motives to give material to Blau. He quoted her as saying, "there were aspects of the [Israel Defense Forces'] activity in the territories that I thought should be brought to the knowledge of the public."

"[When] I copied the materials I thought that as far as history is concerned, people who have warned of war crimes, they are forgiven .... I hadn't managed to sufficiently change enough of the things that were important to me at the time of my army service, and I thought exposing them would bring about change, so it was important to me to bring the IDF's policy in the territories to the knowledge of the public."

She said she contacted Israeli journalists because she assumed the military censor "would not allow publication of any material that was especially highly classified or [involved] danger in their publication." The judge noted that under questioning, Kamm had admitted that she knew of the practice of Israeli journalists to circumvent censorship by leaking information to the foreign media. (My italics: so she gave it to an Israeli journalist, knowing full well it might not go through the censor. So much for that argument).

From Kamm's perspective, the tragic part of the story is that she broke the law to warn Israelis their generals were breaking the law, when they weren't, but she was. She was so immersed in the lefty political narrative whereby Israel's military authorities are mostly wrong when dealing with Palestinians, that she was incapable of understanding that the actions she was warning about were in no way illegal. On the contrary. She was merely supplying documentation that the IDF indeed is acting within the law. She's now facing jail for bravely warning us from a danger that was invented by her friends and political colleagues, but which was never there at all.

Talmudic Cows

I don't know if Norm ever studied Talmud; I haven't thought of asking him. Whether he has or not, he certainly has the knack of it: he's a natural, one might say, assuming one might agree what constitutes being a natural.

Every Man Has a Name

Not long ago I read an article which made the distinction between songs and poetry: that poetry stands on its own, while a song needs music to have value.

Many shirim are songs, but some are poetry (and I'm not certain where to draw the line). The creations of Zelda are poetry, even though some have become famous shirim, with music.

Zelda was born in what is now Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, in 1914, to a family of important Lubavitcher rabbis; she was a cousin of the last Rebbe. She came to Jerusalem with her parents in 1926, and died here in 1984. There is a touching description of her in Amos Oz' masterpiece A Tale of Love and Darkness (If you still haven't read it, forget all these blogs and read it). Zelda was his teacher, and apparently an influential one; she also lived in the same hard-working neighborhood he grew up in and describes so well. She and her husband never had children.

I don't know when she started writing; her first book of poetry appeared many years after she began, in the 1960s. So I can't tell if she wrote Lechol Ish Yesh Shem, Every Man has a Name, before or after the Shoah. The poem itself never mentions the Holocaust, never even alludes to it, yet sometime in the 1980s it became the single most important Shoah song; perhaps even the emblematic one.

Hebrew original
English translation
Every person has a name
that God gave him
and which his father and mother gave him

Every person has a name
which his height
and the style of his smile gave him
and which his tapestry gave him

Every person has a name
which the mountains gave him
and which his walls gave him.

Every person has a name
which the star signs gave him
and which his neighbours gave him.

Every person has a name
which his sins gave him,
and which his longing gave him.

Every person has a name
which his enemies gave him
and his love gave him.

Every person has a name
which his festivals gave him,
and which his work gave him.

Every person has a name
which the seasons gave him,
and which his blindness gave him.

Every person has a name
which the sea gave him,
and which his death gave him.

Chanan Yovel (born 1946) composed the music and sings it in the first recording; the second recording is by Chava Alberstein; she's a better singer.

Deporting Out of Context

Alex Stein asked me yesterday if Haaretz is lying about their new story, whereby a military order is about to launch the deportation of tens of thousands of Palestinians. The story was published by Amira Haas, here; it is based, apparently, on a story from Hamoked, an Israeli far-left ogranization, here; and today's editorial of Haaretz deplores it here.

I don't know if Haaretz is lying. Probably not: there's a limit to the amount of dishonesty a newspaper can engage in at once, and Haaretz is already in trouble on other matters. On the other hand, it may well be that they're not telling the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Were there to be an Israeli policy to deport tens of thousands of Palestinians - or even only hundreds, if they were innocent civilians, or even any innocent civilians at all - this would be wrong. I'll state that unambiguously, lest there be any misinterpretation. In the context of achieving peace I'm in favour of uprooting tens of thousands of Israeli Jews who have settled in the West Bank over the past 40 years. Not because of international law, which isn't relevant, but because a significant section of the Israeli political body always told them very clearly that given the appropriate context they would have to move. I do not however see a scenario in which Israel deports Palestinians by group. An individual delinquent, yes; many delinquents if they acted illegally, yes, but not a group arbitrarily defined by someone they have no control over. That's the important distinction: that the Israeli settlers participate in a political decision which will effect them; the Palestinians don't participate in the Israeli political discussions. (Well, not directly).

Yet in spite of the heat coming out of Haaretz on this new story, I doubt the events they are warning of are poised to happen. I'm going to wait a day or three before commenting further, so as to give the agencies who know, time to explain; later on I'll either return to the story or not, depending upon whether there is a story at all.

On Following Orders

Yom Hashoah seems as as good as any to re-visit the issue of soldiers following orders. The other day a reader posted a comment asking if perhaps Anat Kamm might not be protected under the concept of soldiers who must think of the morality of their actions and may not hide behind the mere fact that they're ordered.

Set aside the matter that stealing cabinets of documents cannot easily be construed as a refusal to be immoral. Set aside also the fact that even with the documents as published by Haaretz, it's hard to see what illegal actions might have happened on which she was allegedly reporting. Set aside the fact that the Attorney General looked into the matter, just in case, and found that the "crimes" Uri Blau was alleging didn't happen, and the army acted according to the law. (Link here, relevant paragraph only in Hebrew: interesting, isn't it).

Setting aside all that, there's still the principle whereby a soldier must obey orders, but sometimes a soldier may not obey orders. Israel worked out this conundrum back in the 1950s. I wrote about this in Right to Exsit, and am reproducing the relevant page or two here (p. 123-124):

Israel’s second war, the Sinai Campaign, began on October 29, 1956. On the first afternoon, fearing that the war might spill over to the Jordanian front, an order was given to harshly enforce a curfew in the Israeli-Arab towns along the Jordanian border. The commander of one of the units of the Border Police, stationed at the town of Kfar Kassem, interpreted this in an extreme manner, and his troops shot 47 villagers in cold blood – workers returning from work without having heard about the curfew. It was a cold-blooded murder of innocent villagers, with no alleviating circumstances.

This time the killers were put on trial; two of the commanding officers were sentenced to many years prison, although they were later pardoned, and this pardon was a blot on Israel’s record. The long-term significance of the case, however, was in its legal and educational import. Henceforth Israeli soldiers were told that it was their legally binding duty to disobey what were called “categorically illegal orders.”

Categorically illegal orders are a modern version of the sixth commandment, “Thou shalt not murder.” Soldiers are expressly forbidden to murder, even if ordered to do so on the field of battle; if they do, they will be court-martialled. The order they were given will not be relevant to their defense, since their moral duty as human beings supercedes their duty as soldiers. Such a ruling can be applied only rarely: a merely “illegal order” must be obeyed; the “categorically illegal orders” must be disobeyed. The definition given by the court was hardly helpful, unless you came from a tradition that had been using the distinction between killing and murder for three thousand years: a categorically illegal act is one above which a black flag flutters.

With such a literary metaphor, 18 and 20-year-old youths are armed and sent to battle. They must obey the orders of their commanders, under threat of court-martial, because otherwise an army cannot function; but they must not obey when they see the black flag, under threat of court-martial, because otherwise the society they defend with their lives may not be worthy of the sacrifice. This is the Israeli definition of Jus in Bello. It is not a philosophical construct for academic seminars but a component of training for battle. Israel’s record prior to the murders at Kfar Kassem hadn’t been bad; it was generally to improve from here on. The cold-blooded lining up of civilians to be shot has never repeated itself.

Purveyor of Secret Documents

Shamai Liebowitz, extreme-left-wing Israeli who moved to the US because he no longer felt comfortable being in Israel, found work translating Hebrew documents for the FBI. Not documents of the FBI, mind you: for the FBI. At some point he leaked five of them (5) to an unnamed blogger, who talked about them on his blog. Liebowitz is now looking at 20 months in jail. No-one seems to be claiming he was merely bolstering American democracy, as any good citizen ought.

(How far extreme, I hear you asking? Well, in 2002, when he was serving as Marwan Barghouti's lawyer, he told a court his client compared favorably to Moses, the fellow from the Bible. The judge wasn't amused).

Ministry of Truth

Yuval Elbashan is a lawyer by training. I dare you to find even the remotest vestige of respect for the law in his op-ed today, in which he castigates any and all journalists who didn't line up to support Uri Blau, possessor of illegally stolen documents, and perhaps obstructor of a criminal investigation. On the contrary: everything that has been written or said that does not support Haaretz, is cited as evidence of the failure of reporters and pundits to do their job.

An outsider scrutinizing their conduct in this affair will not be able to avoid feeling shame. Of all people, they are the ones who took on the role of spokesmen for the establishment, as if they were still conscripts. With enthusiasm they reiterated the claim that the material held by Blau has the potential to cause harm. They are the ones who disseminated the claim - without being able to check or verify it - that the case involves hundreds of documents that constitute state secrets. And they are the ones who volunteered the claim that the quantity of documents held by Blau is what makes him qualitatively different from them and their documents, and hence justifies his persecution.

- When did you last beat your wife?
- But I'm not married and never beat anyone!
- Aha! So you're also a liar, not only a wife beater!

Elbashan isn't on the payroll of Haaretz, so his position may be a sincere expression of a worldview. Back in the early days of this blog I created a tag called "Rational Discourse?", which I use to flag cases when such discourse is not possible. Maybe I now need to add a tag "Rational Discourse Not Possible!" Not because Elbashan isn't entitled to his own opinions or those of this groupthink colleagues; rather for his thought process. If anyone agrees with us, he's right. If they don't, it's further proof, not only that we're right, but also that the others are dominated by the Evil Ones.

The Evil Ones being the authorities of the State of Israel.

In a related matter, Anat Kamm's lawyers seem to have come to their senses. Rather than sacrifice their client for an ideal, they're bending over backwards to assist the authorities (or, as Elbashan might put it, the dangerous authorities). They have announced that Kamm revokes any claim she might have had to Uri Blau's protection of her as a source. On the contrary: her/their position is that he should return immediately to Israel and hand over to the authorities whatever documents he received from her. It will be interesting to see what happens next. Interesting, and instructive.