Sacrifying to be Jewish

Veteran readers may have noted that it's been quite a while since I blogged in the Daf Yomi series. (Recent readers can find the introduction and explanation of this thread here). The main reason has been that about three months ago we finished the Nezikim order, which deals with commonplace things such as legal transactions, courts and contracts, which are as relevant today as they were 1,800 years ago, and started the Kodashim order, which concentrates (mostly) on holy ritual, some of which is rather outlandish from a modern perspective. The first tractate, which we finished today, was Zevachim, Sacrifices (120 pages).

How outlandish? Quite, to be honest. The Bible commands four types of sacrifices, which are then divided into sub-groups. Each sacrificial act is divided into a series of actions, which need to be done in very specific places, mostly but not always by priests (cohens) of varying degrees of purity, with specific tools, in specific order, and with specific intentions. The time of day (or night) is also important, as are lots of very detailed aspects of the alter (blood from sacrifice A has to be splattered above the red line on the left side of the alter, or below the line in a different context). Then the accidents have to be taken into account: what happens if something falls, onto what, and is then replaced. Or not. Also, was the priest wearing the correct uniform when it happened, and does it need to be laundered immediately, or later, or not at all? Quantities are important, sometimes. Or is it always, but in different ways? Did I mention the problem of scarifying an animal which is in the wrong section of the Temple Mount but it's throat was in the right place, or was it the other way around, the animal was in the right place but it's throat reached out over the line but then turned back just in time not to be too late, if it isn't already irrevocably too late because the intention to eat it by whomever changed in the meanwhile?

It's not the arcane details which make all this so strange. Observe any present day insurance company lawyer doing her best to prove her client actually doesn't owe you anything, and it will rapidly become just as arcane. What makes it so strange is the content. We can't imagine sacrifices, and only dimly can we appreciate matters of purity and impurity, or even religious tithes and all that goes with them.

The thing that's historically so interesting about the tractate is that the rabbis can't really imagine it, either. The Temple was destroyed in the early mishnaic era, which means only the earliest generations of the Mishnaic rabbis, the Tana'im, had any personal knowledge of the matter; the latter Tanaim and all the Amoraim, i.e the large majority of the Talmudic rabbis, had never seen any of this, nor had it been happening in living memory. Occasionally the tractate cites a Zkan Hacohanim, which seems to mean the last of the cohanim still alive to tell how things were, but even then their authority isn't clear. At one point the tractate spends many pages discussing the dimensions of the alter and Temple plaza; the entire section is scholasticism, meaning it's based upon interpreting the verses of the Bible, not reconstructing the physical place (which, having been razed, can't be done) or looking for someone who might have preserved or recorded real memory.

Actually, scholasticism plays an unusually large part in the tractate, even more than usual. Many of the detailed arguments aren't about how things were supposed to work, but rather how they can be learned from which words in which verses. Some of the discussions in Nezikin  move so far away from the original Biblical verses it's obvious the rabbis have enacted laws which relate to their social reality, not the one of Deuteronomy. (The laws of inheritance, for example, which are developed well beyond the rudimentary commandments in the Pentateuch). Not so in Zevachim, which goes on endlessly about who learns which arcane detail from which confluence of words in two separate verses, but has no reason - obviously - to adapt the practice to the real world of the rabbis.

At one point the tractate even says this explicitly. An Amora has pronounced on halacha: the law is that it's done this way, not that, and the tractate basically says "Huh? Who cares? No-one does any of this anyway? We're studying so as not to forget". Yet the deeper we got into it, the more it became clear to me that even that wasn't the case. Keep in mind that the Tamud is the central creation of the Pharisees, rabbinical Judaism, who were often at war - sometimes even violent war - with the Sadducees .The Saducees were the ones running the Temple, and they decidedly didn't use the rabbinical form of learning, which means that even if we could invent a time machine and go back to the Temple, we wouldn't see the practices described in great length in the Talmud. There must have been some resemblance, but it would have been limited.

The Talmudic scholars spent centuries discussing the most arcane minutiae of the practice of the Temple so as not to forget it, and never to loosen the Jewish ties to a physical place which had been gone for centuries, and they did so by describing a reality which never existed in the form they created for it.

Yet it worked. Judaism became a religion which could exist without its concrete, physical heart, because the imagination of that heart had become central to Jewish civilization.

Ironically, almost everyone I talked to about the tractate these past few months has agreed that it's very outlandish, and we're not particularly enjoying it; it's too foreign. But that's part of the greater irony of Zionism, which arose and succeeded in a historical era when the old forms of preservation were losing their potency. Either Zionism arrived at the last possible moment, as the civilizational binds that held the Jews together were about to slip off, or it arose because the old forms were weakening and there was no option but to go back to the basics of land, language and national political life. Choose whichever explanation you prefer.

Either way, the slowly widening gap between the Jews of Israel and America is very serious. For most of America's Jews, not only Zvachim is outlandish, the entire Talmud is also, as is the prayer book, the Jewish calender, and of course Jewish rituals of all kinds. It may not be urgent, but after a while one does need to ask what holds Jews together when the traditional ties are gone, and the more common national-political ones aren't compelling either. I come by this theme from time to time, it's not new. Shmuel Rosner has apparently just written a book about it (in Hebrew), and has an interesting chapter (in English) here. What happens, he asks, when the political agenda of the Israelis is different from the political agenda of American Jews, on American subjects, not on Israel's security or well-being. Say, if Israeli Jews admire an American president the American Jews despise. Well, when it was George Bush II, the resounding answer was that America's Jews split from Israel. Yet not because of any major argument. It was simply that the Israeli position didn't interest America's Jews, and this itself was a sign of the growing indifference large numbers of American Jews display towards Israel.

Which brings me back to Zvachim. You can find it outlandish, and look forward to the time when the Daf Yomi series will return to less far-fetched topics. That's qualitatively different than having a Judaism which is indifferent both to the cultural and also the geographical center. A Judaism which focuses mainly on its local agenda and not on the ones which unify all Jews, will someday have to explain to itself what makes it Jewish, and why the rest of the Jews should care.

Update: Yehuda Mirsky has thoughts on Jewish identity in America today, here. Some of it (not all: don't jump on me) doesn't much look like Judaism at all to me.

David Grossman and Yehuda Poliker: Short Spring

David Grossman has written a poem about his son Uri, who was killed in Lebanon in 2006. Yehuda Poliker, son of two Holocaust survivors who has written and recorded songs about his nephew Kobi, who was killed as an IDF soldier, put Grossmans poem to music and recorded it. Here it is, along with the lyrics. (Hebrew). The title: Spring is so Short Around Here

There's a short moment of Spring between Winter and summer when everything blooms, but the signs of its end are written into it.

Books Books Books

As a general thing, reading worthy books is a better pastime than reading blogs. Trust me. So here are some links about some books.

Hadar Sela reviews Michael Totten's new book, The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel. The review is here, and if you live in the US, you've got till the end of this week to order the book directly from Michael himself, as he explains here. I haven't read it yet but do intend to.

One reason I have yet to read Michael's book is that I'm reading Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore. Here, if you're in the US you've actually got a problem, since you can only buy the Kindle version of the book; the dead tree version will only come out later this year. I acquired a UK copy, and am very much enjoying the read. I'm also concurrently reading Albert Hourani's A History of the Arab Peoples which is also very interesting.

David Brooks, a semi-conservative who writes as a fig leaf at the New York Times, has recently published The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, in which he apparently makes the argument that people are not as rational as they're supposed to be, and also that cultural conditionig can, well, condition us. The Economist reviews the book favorably, and in spite of themselves make a list of two kinds of countries, on which Israel ranks very well, apparently even better than the UK:

Culture and the community in which a child is raised help to build the way the conscious and unconscious intertwine. Mr Brooks recounts a survey of diplomats who failed to pay parking fines in New York. By far the worst non-payers came from countries where corruption is endemic: Egypt, Pakistan, Nigeria and so on. By contrast, diplomats from Sweden, Denmark, Japan, Israel, Norway and Canada had no unpaid fines at all. “Thousands of miles away from home,” Mr Brooks writes, “diplomats still carried their domestic cultural norms inside their heads.”

Finally, we've got the new book by Mark Malloch Brown,  The Unfinished Global Revolution: The Pursuit of a New International Politics. Personally, I would never buy a used car from someone with the name Malloch, and certainly not after having been reminded by Sebag Motefiore about what used to be done in his name (more or less) in a valley to the south of Jerusalem. But that's just me. The greater problem with the book is that Mr. Brown seems to think it would be a good thing to have some sort of universal government for all of humanity, which of course isn't going to happen, but even having to deal with the people who think it should is a major pain in the neck. Which means, this actually may be a book worth perusing, in a "know the enemy" sort of vein. The Economist reviews it here.

Well, that should keep you busy for a bit.

Antisemitism is Invisible

The Economist has a column on the spate of celebrities who have recently been caught making antisemitic comments. The columnist makes no pretense the comments weren't antisemitic, and of course has no patience for their content, nor any empathy for the people who made them. However, he (she? You never know with the Economist) then goes looking for explanations, mostly economic explanations, for the stupid utterances of some cultural celebrities, and for the swift responses of their employers who fire them. It's an interesting column, and there's no particular reason to argue with any of what it says.

I do have a problem with what it doesn't say. Or rather, with the question it doesn't pose, and then the answer it doesn't give.The un-posed question is of course, why are there so many people with the need to make antisemitic statements? And the answer which is not investigated has to do with the possibility that they're not only spoiled brats, these celebrities, they also truly don't like Jews.

I'm not seeing antisemites under every rock. On the contrary, the swiftness with which these ranters get punished is admirable, sometimes even too swift - after all, in a democracy one should be allowed to say ugly things. Yet I can't help but notice that the Economist can't entertain the concept that hatred of Jews can be a very real thing, an extremely deep-seated urge.

In the long run, this inability to imagine authentic hatred of Jews is a problem.

Hitch on Revolutions

I continue not to know where Arab democracy is going this week, this month, this year. Just like everybody else doesn't know. Hitch, however, brings a perspective I haven't much seen in all the verbiage, so you might be interested in reading it.

New Website With Blogs

I'm seriously looking into changing the format of this blog into something richer and more useful. The idea will be to have different sections that do different things, one of which might or might not be a blog. So I started looking into Wordpress (Blogger isn't relevant). So far as I can see, however, doing this the right way will require more technical skill than I've got. So if there's anyone out there who lives in my vicinity, and has experience in setting up a website using Wordpress, and wishes to announce themselves to me, it's yaacov dot lozowick at yahoo dot com. Until I change that, too.

Roger Waters is A Fool; Rashad Bayoumi Isn't; Obama?

Roger Waters of the Pink Floyd band has announced his support of BDS, although not until a few years after doing a large concert in Israel which probably generated a spot of income, so the practical aspect of boycotting dosen't mean much. In this article he explains his decision.

I don't much follow such matters, but I expect Waters is a talented musician. His grasp on the facts of the Israel-Palestine conflict is very shaky; here's a man who can be fed contradictory lies and swallows them all unthinkingly. I was especially impressed by the fact that he returns again and again to the wall Israel has built (well, that would make sense, given Water's history of walls), without ever reflecting on the fact that the wall is actually an expression of ending the occupation: the sense of having a border is that the Palestinians will end up on one side, and the Israelis on the other, and there will be a border separating them. The wall, and partition, also contradict the right of return he supports, but no matter. The important thing is that a man with no grasp of the reality feels it's an honorable thing to make idiotic and counter-factual statements about the Jewish state, and he'll be applauded for doing so by large numbers of other malicious fools. That's the important heart of the matter.

Rashad Bayoumi isn't a fool. He's a hard-core antisemite, of the boilerplate opinion that Jews rule America and America wishes to destroy Islam, and Israel is the tool they use to attack the Muslim world from its geographic center. He's also a top fellow in the Muslim brotherhood. Just like everyone else, I don't know how influential he and his evil comrades will be in the new Arab world that will rise from the present turmoil, but it certainly needs careful monitoring at the least, and lots of careful planing: what if he turns out to be very influential? What then? Here, for starters, is a translated interview with him from last week. Listen, and shudder.


In a recent meeting between President Obama and a bunch of prominent American Jews, reports on which are conflicting because it was off the record and no official transcript has been produced, Obama seems to have

reportedly urged Jewish communal leaders to speak to their friends and colleagues in Israel and to “search your souls” over Israel's seriousness about making peace.

Furthermore, some (but perhaps not all) participants felt Obama was singling out Israel:

[T]he president also implied that Israel bears primary responsibility for advancing the peace process. They interpreted the president’s comments either as hostile, naive or unsurprising. Obama said Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is eager to secure his legacy by establishing a Palestinian state and would accept a decent offer if one were on the table, according to participants. “The Palestinians don't feel confident that the Netanyahu government is serious about territorial concessions,” the president reportedly said.

I wasn't there, and don't know exactly what he said. The idea, however, that the American president thinks Israelis need to be lectured at by him or by American Jews about the threats that face them is, to my mind, extremely distasteful. The idea that the Palestinians will accept any offer the Israelis can viably make so as to end up with a small state on a fragment of the territory they feel they deserve has, alas, been repeatedly tested and has repeatedly led to disaster. Disaster in which Israelis (and Palestinians) pay a price in blood. No-one needs to expect a faraway musician to know about this, or to care; the American president, however, ought to.

Jaffa Street: Pedestrian Zone

No real time for blogging today, so here's a bit of information about Jerusalem which is actually almost two months old, but still nice: Jaffa Road isn't anymore. I mean, it's still there, but it's not a road, if by that you mean an artery through a city used to move traffic, with pedestrians crammed like sardines on the edge. As of early 2011, the traffic is gone, and the entire length of the street is given over to sleek modern streetcars which don't carry passengers yet (this summer, they promise us), and pedestrians. The first time I walked the length of the street (and took the pictures below) I was astonished: it was possible to hear people talking. The streetcars sort of swish, but they aren't anything like the din of incessant buses, trucks, cabs, blaring traffic horns and overall din. Moreover, the 15-year process of  tearing up the street and generally causing chaos, now that it's almost over, has changed the proportions of the space between the buildings on either side. It used to be that one had to weave among people in order to get anywhere; now there are broad sidewalks on each side of the narrow part given over to the streetcar tracks.

If indeed the streetcars start serving the public sometime soon, I expect capitalism to kick in again. Over the past 20 years or so the opening of large malls on the edge of town, and the perpetual tearing up of the center of town have meant the only businesses still viable sell cheap trinkets or bolts of cloth. Not what the largest city in the country is supposed to look like. Already, however, some of them are shutting down, and new To Rent signs are appearing on their windowpanes; here and there a smart-looking establishment is hesitantly appearing. If the gamble works, by 2013 the center of Jerusalem could be a delightful area of open-air cafes and fashionable stores. It could happen, you know.

Progressive Israel-Scolds Inadvertantly Support Conflict

I was a bit surprised when a number of readers responded earlier this week to a post on J-Street by apparently saying that J-Street doesn't entertain the positions it entertains. I may have played into their hands, however, by focusing on marginal issues such as the number of participants at the J-Street conference. In a week where yet another poll of American public opinion found that 60-plus% of Americans (most of whom can't be Jewish) support Israel, and fewer than 20% support the Palestinians, it doesn't make much difference if the radical wing of American Jewry can convene 1,000 people or 5,000. You get the feeling, these past two years, that even the Obama White House has understood that the votes aren't in that particular political camp - though the chattering classes in Europe agree wholeheartedly with the J-Street agenda.

What is the agenda? As David Suissa has put it, there are two planks to the platform: It is really, really, really, really important that Israel reach a peace agreement with the Palestinians... [and] the underlying assumption is always that the major obstacle to peace is Israel. Israel Matzav dug up a short video in which some participants at the conference said predictable things such as that Hamas isn't as bad as the IDF. It's the usual Mondoweiss fare.

This week also saw the publication of an 11,000-word article by the New Yorker's David Remnick, fawning over Haaretz and describing it as the best of Israel. I mention it here because Remnick's piece is a fine demonstration of how the J-Streeters see Israel; along the way it also shows why they're irrelevant for almost all Israelis. According to Remnick, Haaretz is alone in Israeli society in its willingness to face the reality of Israel's wars, its conflict with the Palestinians, its occupation of them, and all the things that are wrong with Israel's politics in matters of war and peace. Alas, he continues, not only are Israelis not willing to listen, but even most of the political left cannot abide with Haaretz, because, as he repeatedly tells, it lacks empathy with the Israeli side of the story, and refuses to offer any sort of consolation for their suffering at times of terror attacks. It's position is principled, and the principles cannot change merely because people are frightened, say, or bereaved.

The arrogance of Haaretz, of Remnick, and of the many non-Israelis who allow themselves this train of thought is always aggravating, but hardly unusual. Only once in the entire article does Remnick very briefly allude to a different dynamic:

Since the talks between Arafat and Barak collapsed, a decade ago, mainstream public opinion in Israel has become a paradox: majority support for the idea of a two-state solution, but a generalized distrust of Palestinian intentions. Middle Israel feels that it left Lebanon, in 2000, and got rockets from Hezbollah; left Gaza, in 2005, and got rockets from Hamas. The peace camp, despite occasional demonstrations and displays of vitality, is depleted.

Let's see. What parts of the story does that little paragraph overlook, even though every Israeli can reel them off in her sleep? The steep rise in Palestinian terror from September 1993 and the beginning of the Oslo process, so that in each of the years 1994, 1995, and 1996 there was more terror than in any previous year of the conflict since 1948. Then there was the offer by an Israeli prime minster of ceding all of Gaza and at least 89% of the West Bank, along with division of Jerusalem, so as to enable the Palestinians to have a sovereign state with no Jews in it. The Palestinians responded to that one by launching the 2nd Intifada. There was the one about how Israel built a defensive fence that proved its value in saved lives but also drew a line on the ground that Israel was willing to retreat to even without peace, which caused the Palestinians to launch their "apartheid wall" lie. There was the time Israel moved out of southern Lebanon in return for a promise from the international community as expressed by the UN Security Council that Hizballah wouldn't be allowed to re-arm. That didn't work so well, did it. And so on.

My ever-repeated point being that the reason a very large majority of the Israeli electorate has given up on any chance for peace with the Palestinians is that the Palestinians and their supporters have been working long and hard to convince us there's no peace to be had.

There won't be peace because the Palestinians' national aspiration isn't to have a small state divided into two sections alongside a larger Israel, thus in effect affirming the historical victory of Zionism. The Palestinian national aspiration is to roll back Zionism, to rectify its injustice as they define it, and to have their state on the entirety of their land. Not to mention the aspirations of hundreds of millions of Muslims beyond the Palestinians, who are also an irremovable part of the equation.

The really pernicious thing about the position that Israel is the prime culprit for the lack of peace is that it re-affirms the fundamental position of the Palestinians and apparently most Arabs. This is that Zionism is a crime against the Arabs and against the Palestinians. Zionism was a crime in 1897, it was a crime in 1917, it was a crime in 1947, and in 1967, and remains a crime till this very day. I don't know if people like David Remnick, or the leaders and public of J-Street, or Barack Obama, or all the millions of others who insist the Israelis are the reason there's no peace intend to be saying this, but the reality is that the message they're sending to the Palestinians is that Zionism remains the culprit, the criminal, the aggressor who caused the entire conflict by being so cruel to the victimized Palestinians.

The fact that thousands of Jews in America say this about Zionism isn't frightening - they don't make much difference - but it is depressing.

The ICC Rides to the Rescue in Libya. Or Perhaps Not.

HRW has the story, along with lots of FAQs. The essentials are that while Qaddafi is busy killing thousands of people, the international community (whoever they are) have swiftly passed a UNSC resolution, and in its aftermath, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court will now open an investigation. How soon, if ever, will this make a difference?

There are many steps between the opening of an investigation and the eventual trial of a case.
It is important to understand that investigations by the ICC prosecutor may not necessarily lead to prosecutions. While the initial decision to open an investigation is based on information available to the prosecutor at that time, the prosecutor must then conduct an independent investigation. On the basis of this investigation, the prosecutor may determine that there is insufficient evidence that crimes committed within the court's jurisdiction have taken place. Or the prosecutor may determine that there are proceedings at the national level that would make any case before the ICC inadmissible or that a prosecution is not in the interests of justice. If the prosecutor decides not to proceed with prosecutions following investigations, this decision can be reviewed by ICC judges sitting in a pre-trial chamber.
If, based on the investigation, the prosecutor wishes to pursue prosecutions, he will need to ask ICC judges to issue arrest warrants for individuals on the basis of specific charges. The prosecutor must establish to the satisfaction of the pre-trial chamber that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the individual named in the request has committed a crime within the jurisdiction of the court and that an arrest is necessary to ensure that the person will appear at trial or that the person will not obstruct or endanger the investigation or the court proceedings, or that a warrant is needed to prevent ongoing crimes. The prosecutor can also request a voluntary summons to appear if he considers that a summons is sufficient to ensure the individual's appearance before the court.
It is difficult to predict how long it might be between the beginning of an investigation and the issuance of arrest warrants or summonses. To date, the court's investigations have lasted between 10 and 20 months before the first arrest warrants have been issued. Most recently, the ICC prosecutor conducted an investigation in the situation in Kenya for eight months before asking the pre-trial chamber to issue summonses for six people on charges of crimes against humanity. A decision on those requests is pending.
In addition, because the ICC does not have its own police force and must rely on governments and the United Nations to enforce the warrants and effect arrests, some of its warrants have been outstanding for more than five years. 
When an individual appears before the Court, following either an arrest or a summons, pre-trial proceedings known as the "confirmation of charges" take place to determine whether the available evidence establishes substantial grounds to believe that the person committed each of the crimes charged in the indictment.  When and if a charge or charges are confirmed, a trial date is set.
The ICC's first trial- of Thomas Lubanga -- began in January 2009, nearly five years after the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo was referred by its government to the ICC prosecutor and three years after Lubanga was transferred to ICC custody. The trial has yet to reach completion. While the start of Lubanga's trial was delayed for reasons that are unlikely to recur and the two other trials ongoing at the ICC have moved more quickly, the ICC's unique pre-trial proceedings and the complicated nature of cases tried by the court mean that proceedings are likely to last two to three years from arrest to verdict.

My translation of all the legalese gobbledygook: The only way to bring Qaddafi and his top goons to justice is to have them long since out of power. There's no other way. Of course, if some day there's a free Libya, they'll try the man themselves: in that case who will need the ICC? If there isn't, how will he ever get there? One way or the other, the ICC is irrelevant if you wish to prevent the present mass murders from getting any more numerous.

According to our media, one of the things the Libyan rebels are saying about Qaddafi is that his mother was Jewish. On our news this evening a grinning armed rebel explained to the camera that they are going to "kill that Zionist". I see no particular reason to believe that either side in the Libyan conflict like Jews. No matter. My heart aches when I hear about how Qaddafi and his side are apparently slaughtering civilians for the crime of wishing him gone. I can't offhand think of another recent conflict where there's so obviously a good side and a bad one. Moreover, unlike in complicated places with jungles, like the Congo, or primitive places where genocide is done by men with machetes or horse-riders with automatic riles, in Libya the murdering side is using easily identified equipment such as airplanes and perhaps artillery. Throughout almost all of history outsiders rarely involved themselves in faraway conflicts they had no interests in, and certainly not for simple humanitarian reasons. These days, however, such considerations are deemed worthy of consideration, at the very least. Well, if someone wishes to save Libyan lives now, not later once lots of them will have been lost, the way to do so is by sending in the airforce now, not the ICC prosecutor someday.

If, on the other hand, there's no budget for saving Libyan lives, or the shadow of an irrelevant colonial past is too deep, or the distaste for any use of military might is too great, or the fear that Qaddafi might in the end not be beaten and there are too many financial considerations at stake - fine. But then don't babble on about the UNSC, and shut up with the chatter about the ICC. Admit that Libyan civilians aren't worth the only kind of effort that might save their lives, and get on with life. There are Olympic Games to prepare, after all, where the world community will convene next year to demonstrate our common human aspirations.

This ICC track is beyond pathetic. I'm open to arguments telling why I'm wrong, but they'll have to be very compelling, since the arguments supporting my position look overwhelming.

Sonya Levy, RIP

Sonya Levy was an archivist at Yad Vashem. I gave her a job when she made aliya from Bulgaria in 1996, and from then until shortly before her death she was in charge of the Bulgarian collection, which she also considerably expanded by bringing in additional microfilmed collections. I didn't have much daily contact with her. There were 150 people on the archives staff, Sonya was competent and needed no interventions from me, and my focus was on other things.

A few months ago she passed away, 57 years old. Her friends have now put up a tribute to her on YouTube - in Hebrew, the language she (and they) adopted. May she rest in peace.

Arab Spring? Could it Happen?

A number of people who I know aren't naive, and also are generally knowledgeable, are suggesting the Arab Spring actually could happen. It isn't clear it will, but it isn't clear it won't, either. So here's hoping. Max Boot, for starters, but more significant, for his greater scholarship, Daniel Pipes. 

Ongoing Murkiness in Jaffa

A while back I wrote about a demonstration in Jaffa where Israeli Arabs chanted about destroying Jews, and Israeli radical-left Jews squirmed a bit but didn't leave the ranks of the demonstrators. This set off a bit of discussion among readers, some of whom thought I was slanting the story.

Yesterday the story took a different direction, since now it's the municipality of Tel Aviv-Jafa which is setting out to construct housing meant only for Arabs, and this irks some and satisfy others, all in the opposite directions. To be honest I'm not certain what's really going on, and the few efforts I made today to find out weren't very helpful, so we'll mark this as an ongoing, not yet clear story.

Trophy Anti-Anti-Tank System and Context

Yesterday somebody in Gaza attacked an IDF tank in Israel with an RPG-anti-tank missile. The tank's newly mounted Trophy system responded immediately and destroyed the RPG. This caused great satisfaction in Israel since it was the first battleground proof that the Trophy system does what it was designed to do. In the endless cycle of development and counter development the Israeli Armored Corps is now the only one in the world which has (alas, temporarily) beaten whatever the competition has on offer.

The Trophy was being considered for years; its development was greatly accelerated by the anti-tank abilities demonstrated in 2006 by Hisballah. So in a roundabout way, some of the credit goes to Hassan Nassrallah, the fellow who was convinced Israeli was a spider web that could easily be torn.

It's also worth noting that there are forces in Gaza trying to destroy IDF tanks on the Israeli side of the border. And that this isn't being reported in the general media. And that someday, when the next large showdown happens, the ability of Israel's enemies to destroy IDF armor is even more limited now than before, and the ratio of casualties between the sides may demonstrate this - a fact that will be universally cited to prove Israeli cruelty.

George Patton is reported to have said that the job of soldiers is not to die for their country but to make sure the other guys die for their country. This is as true now as it always was, but isn't as obvious as it once was, or anyway, not to folks who know next to nothing about war.

Politics and International Law

Robin Shepherd last week wrote a delightful article at the Jewish Chronicle about how Obama has weakened the notion that Israeli settlements are illegal. His thesis is that if the UN Security Council is an important legislator of International law, and it just refrained from declaring the settlements to be illegal, apparently they aren't, or at least the case is murky.

Of course, anyone committed to the idea that the settlements are illegal will brush this aside by saying that the American veto which forged that outcome was pure politics, not legality, but that's precisely the point. If you operate in purely legal mode, you've got to accept the manner in which decisions are made and the tools defined for making them. If the decisions aren't to your liking or the tools malfunction according to your lights, you can go back to the sovereign (the electorate) and try to change things until you get to the result you'd like, and you may or may not succeed. Until then, however, you can't say the law is illegal, or the legal situation is illegal, or what have you. In the realm of international law there is no sovereign, which is an enormous problem, but there are rules and the position of the Security Council is pretty strong; there's no legal methodology to say that when the UNSC makes "wrong" decisions, they don't apply. Can't do that.

Of course, some of us find the entire discussion proves its own futility. International conflicts can only be resolved through politics (or war, a continuation of politics). There will be cases where the parties to the conflict agree, for political reasons, to arbitration by legal entities of rules. That's fine for them. (Israel and Egypt disagreeing over Taba, in the early 1980s, is a local example). There will be cases when they won't agree that way, but some other way - say, by ethnically cleansing respective regions until they can bridge the remaining gaps by negotiation, as in the former Yugoslavia. Or they may resolve the matter by one side winning and the other side losing, as between Tibet and China, for example. (In the Sakhalin Islands, the side that won didn't even do anything, except take advantage of the loss of the other side). Sooner or later conflicts end, when the parties decide they're over; international law and institutions can be useful tools, or not, but they aren't the reason the conflicts end.

Normblog, who probably has a higher opinion than mine of the role of international law, notes that the crimes of Gaddafi are rapidly re-awakening the humanitarian interventionist instincts which supposedly died out forever after the invasion of Iraq, a mere 8 years ago. Words like "forever" and "never" rarely mean what they're supposed to mean.

Finally, since I'm on the topic, Human Rights Watch yesterday published two admonishments to Israel and Hamas. Hamas, they pontificated, must stop firing rockets at Israeli civilians, because it's a crime. In a show of perfect balance, they also pontificated that Israel must investigate why when it responds to Hamas fire, civilians sometimes get hit. Now of course, no-one on either side decides what its interests are according to the lights of HRW, nor should they. Governments should be accountable to their electorates (this many not be the case in Gaza, it's hard to know), not to unelected and unaccountable individuals in New York. Yet the imbalance not mentioned in HRW's fake act of impartiality is that when Hamas tries to kill Israeli civilians this is a fundamental element of what Hamas is all about; when IDF actions cause civilian causalities among Palestinians, the Israelis investigate. They don't always investigate with alacrity, and often the results of the investigations indicate greater caring for Israelis and the troops that defend them than for the civilians of the enemy, and sometimes they need to be prodded, but that's the thing about legal systems: they are flexible enough to take account of political considerations, and the sovereign has to ensure they don't stray too far.

Just like international law can't. There's no sovereign, but also no such thing as fully objective impartial truth to be applied in advance to any situation.

Oh, and by the way, the HRW declaration about the bad things Israel does includes that ridiculous canard about how the 300-meter security zone Israel is enforcing along the border of Gaza covers one third of the arable land in Gaza. Some anti-Jewish libels never die, and they don't fade away, either.

Update: in January 2011 the United Nations Human Rights Council announced it was about to adopt a resolution praising Libya for its human rights record. I spoof you not.

J-Street, and the Popular Art of Not Seeing Israelis

J-Street has just had its second annual shindig. Most of the observers saw it through the lens of their expectations. Compare, for example, right-wing Jennifer Rubin with Haaretz reporter Natasha Mozgovaya. They were both in the same room, listening to the same speech, and we don't even know if the audience responded warmly when Dennis Ross told of America's steadfast support for Israel. Mozgovaya says the response was warm, Rubin says it was actually cold. This may well be representative of journalism in general these days; as regular readers of this blog will be only too aware by now, I don't often feel we're really being told reliable facts; the problem being that there's no obvious alternative to consuming media reports if we're interested in the world, short of traveling all the time and knowing all the languages and informing ourselves.

I've been at AIPAC shindigs before, and some differences are so obvious they can't be obfuscated away. First, the big ones are big. I was at one with 6,000 participants, and I'm told they're still growing. I was once at a smallish one, open only to major donors (and Israeli types) - even that one probably wasn't much smaller than this one seems to have been, but AIPAC would never have allowed themselves the mistake of holding a conference in a venue with room to spare for other parallel events. You organize whatever event you have in a location which makes it appear crowded. Elementary.

A second difference seems to be that AIPAC, being a lobby, puts the politicians very much in the center. They're paraded, lauded, honored - so that their constituents who like AIPAC will know they're on the right side. In all the descriptions I read this week about J-Street (I admit, I didn't read that many), no-one seems clear which politicians were there, if at all. On the contrary, some of the reporters seem to be saying J-Street isn't really a lobby, it's a Jewish organization where certain sorts of Jews find like-minded folks. Is this what's really happening?

A third difference, either a tiny detail or the entire story, depending on how you understand the world, is that the J-Street conference apparently either offered no kosher food, or people had to go looking for it (again, who do you believe?). At the AIPAC ceremonial dinners everyone, including the top-level national politicians such as senators or cabinet officers, all eat kosher because that's the only option on the menu.

Before explaining why I think the kosher thing is central, here's a rather fawning article about J-Street published by the NYT way back in September 2009, when the world was younger and different. How different? This different:

During the July meeting, held in the Roosevelt Room, Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, told Obama that “public disharmony between Israel and the U.S. is beneficial to neither” and that differences “should be dealt with directly by the parties.” The president, according to Hoenlein, leaned back in his chair and said: “I disagree. We had eight years of no daylight” — between George W. Bush and successive Israeli governments — “and no progress.”

Uhh huh. Meanwhile, we've had two years of daylight, and no progress. Arguably, we've had quite a bit of backsliding though. Anyway, the article held out all sorts of promise for the young J-Street, partly because it was going to address a new constituency among America's Jews:

The average age of the dozen or so staff members is about 30. Ben-Ami speaks for, and to, this post-Holocaust generation. “They’re all intermarried,” he says. “They’re all doing Buddhist seders.” They are, he adds, baffled by the notion of “Israel as the place you can always count on when they come to get you.” 

As an aside: if you're trying to attract non-Jews to supporting Israel, why not start with the tens of millions of them who already have very strong feelings on the matter?

The feeling "they might come to get you" is actually not a one-timer generated by the Nazis. The genius of the Jews is that though many of them lived under persecution far greater than most people today can imagine, or its plausible threat, they generally didn't allow themselves to wallow in self pity, nor be distracted by useless acts of revenge or histrionics, preferring instead to get on with things, including creating a magnificently rich culture. Although the Haredi rabbis today won't admit it, many of them also did what one might call "Buddhist seders", in the meaning that they incorporated all sorts of things into Judaism along the way - tho they kept the seders kosher at all times, indicating they had no feelings of Jewish inadequacy, merely honest curiosity.

It's the lack of respect, perhaps even the embarrassment of things Jewish. Mozgovaya starts her reportage with a fine example, though she imbues it with the wrong significance:

Aaron Weinberg, a 20-year-old freshman at Brandeis, stood up Saturday night with others to clap for Peter Beinart, one of the three people honored at J Street's national conference in Washington, when Beinart remarked that "Israel cannot be holy in the days of Bibi, Lieberman and Rabbi Ovadia." "There is no kedusha in Netanyahu's and Lieberman's conduct with peace process, and there is no kedusha in Rabbi Ovadia's monopoly on who is a Jew and his lack of engagement", agreed Weinberg, using the Hebrew word for holiness.
"When I was in high school, everyday I was coming home and telling my mom that I wanted to go to the airport, to make aliyah. I was making friends only with those who spoke Hebrew. But frankly, I feel very disenfranchised by the Israeli government and Israeli public voting for such a government. I think I would feel pretty uncomfortable to live with a group that holds such views," he said, explaining why he is still today in the U.S. 

There's much in Israel with which to disagree, but being uncomfortable with an entire electorate for "holding such views" is a bit beyond reasonable. It may, however, be standard fare for J-Street and its supporters. In everything we read about them, they seem in thrall of the double thesis that Israel's democracy is declining, and that there's no peace with the Palestinians because Israel prefers the occupation. An Arab journalist called on the audience to encourage revolution in Israel, and the public gave her a 20-second standing ovation.

Of some six million Jews in Israel, there are perhaps three thousand who subscribe to these positions. You can respect Israeli democracy for what it is. You can wonder why it makes the decisions it makes, and try to find out - to inquire, to empathize, to try to see the world from an Israeli perspective. Or you can bemoan the bad things that are happening to Israelis, because of their evil politicians, or some inexplicable madness that has descended upon them, or even worse, because they've willfully allowed themselves to become evil. The J-Streeters seem to prefer the last option, which has the added advantage of making them feel real good about themselves.

Which brings me to the article in this week's New Yorker which a number of readers have called to my intention. I'll respond to it tomorrow, Insha'allah.

Gaddafi Benficiaries Boycott Israel

I've been a bit lax with blogging recently. I expect I'll return by and by. In the meantime, you might be tickled to learn that along with the various English academic institutions who overlooked the entire truth about Saif al-Islam's identity as the son of a dictator in their haste to accept his money (or rather, the money his family has stolen), there are also some prominent boycotters of Israel. Israel being such a uniquely horrendous place, you see.

Ernest Sternberg: Purifying the World

Today has been an offline day for me. However, I did find time to have a peek at a link suggested by Y.Ben David, who mentioned an article by Ernest Sternberg titled "Purifying the World: What the New Radical Ideology Stands For". I haven't yet had time to read it carefully, but at first glance Sternberg may have succeeded in tying together the many disparate strands of general nastiness that emanate these days from various parts of what we rather incorrectly call the "far Left". Whether they're Left or not, what they've got in common is a yearning for a pure, post-history world. Predictably, the two main enemies are the United States and Israel (previously known as the Big Satan and the Little Satan, if you remember your Iranian mythology).

There's a short online Sternberg lecture on the topic here.

Interestingly, Sternberg is a professor of geography, or urban planning, or something like that. You may remember that I wrote about his German predecessors of a century ago, just a few days ago. Apparently, some academic disciplines eventually redeem themselves totally.

Antisemitism in the UK, 2011

Normblog offers a description and demonstration of the Azzajew phenomenon.

One Toby Green - whom non-Brits have never heard of - has resigned from the Green Party - something else the non-Brits didn't know existed. His reason? The party has been taken over by Trotskyite antisemites. (Some of them commented on his post). Some of his explanation is too detailed and insider-ish for the rest of us to follow, but the general outlines are very clear, very convincing, and rather worrying. They can't do anything to Israel or the majority of Jews worldwide who support it, but rising antisemitism can't be a good thing.

How not to Stop Genocide

A few years back Samantha Power wrote an excellent book titled A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. A quick summary of the book would go like this. After WW2 Rephael Lemkin managed to convince the brand new United Nations to define Genocide, and to commit to take action against it. Ironically, the result was not an international willingness to stop genocide, but rather the opposite: a firm international determination never to recognize an event as genocide, not matter how horrible, since such recognition would require intervention, and no-one wants to intervene when faraway folks are being massacred (unless of course there's an obvious and immediate set of interests that do recommend intervention, but in that case the intervention is because of the interests, not the slaughter). Having set up the framework, Power then preceded to show how whichever American administration happened to be in power at the time of a genocide did everything in its power, including bending over backwards, not to recognize it as a genocide, so as not to have to intervene.

And the Americans, as a general rule, were better than anyone else, because they sometimes sort of did eventually do something, as in the Balkans in 1999 after years of European inaction. No-one ever intervened in the Congo, of course, which has had the worst slaughter anywhere in the world since the 1940s. No one had enough interests to care.

David Rieff has a thoughtful (if rather sardonic) article about a new American attempt to think through the issue of genocide prevention. He focuses on the United States Institute for Peace’s task force on genocide, chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Secretary of Defense William Cohen - two people, incidentally, who have track records of failing to deal with genocide in real time, in the days when they were powerful. Although a bit long, the article is worth the time it takes to read. The central insight I came away with is that there's a lot of chatter about multinational efforts, international law, and other fine words, but that the dynamic Samantha Power described is still with us and not about to change anytime soon. (I expect Rieff and Power may not be in the same political camp in American politics, but they're saying similar things).

Jackson Diehl, over at the Washington Post, asks why the Obama administration isn't doing much and certainly isn't being effective as governing Libyans kill civilians in the hundreds. Whats happening in Libya (at least so far) is not genocide, but it is mass murder. Diehl seems to understand the cynical aspects of intervention, which is why he asks what are the American interests that are informing the administration's policy, if any.

Seen from the perspective of a Jew, born after the Holocaust, and an Israeli, this all need not be a moral issue. Foreign countries generally don't intervene when large-scale violence happens, and only rarely do they do anything effective. This isn't because of an innate hatred of Libyans, Bosnians, Congolese, Cambodians and so on. It's because all those folks and many others are, well, ultimately not worth the effort. That's the way of the world. Only those who can take care of themselves will be taken care of.

Which is one reason among many why the endless international chatter and preaching about how Israel (or anyone else) must do this that or the other because the chatterers say so, must be resolutely shut out, not listened to, and never ever taken seriously.

"Europe is Worried about Israel"

Yesterday, February 22nd, some European diplomats published an announcement telling how worried they are by Israel's deteriorating democracy:

According to the statement, issued yesterday in Brussels after the meetings with Lieberman, the EU said it “recalls the importance of a vibrant NGO sector and civil society in general and the vital role they play in open and democratic societies.”
The statement also called on Israel to “promote its active NGO sector and to refrain from actions which may significantly curtail its freedoms. In this context, the EU is concerned about the proposed parliamentary inquiry committee to investigate NGO funding and the draft law on recipients of financial support from foreign political entities,” the statement said.
The EU statement touched on another issue Lieberman has focused on: Israel’s attitude toward its Arab citizens.
“The EU encourages Israel to increase efforts to address the economic and social situation of the Arab minority, to enhance their integration in Israeli society and protect their rights,” it read.

Let's see. The parliamentary investigation into NGOs, which indeed was a bad idea, was killed the day before the EU announcement was made, and this was widely publicized.

The idea that "the active NGO sector in Israel" needs "promoting" is quaint, seeing as there are more than 32,000 NGOs in Israel. (Yup. That's thirty two thousand, in a country with fewer than 8 million people.)

There is indeed need to address the economic and social conditions of Israel's Arab citizens, though their conditions are certainly better than those of the Roma in most European countries, and probably better than that of many of the 2nd generation immigrants, too. There isn't much need to protect their rights, however, as they enjoy the same ones as all Israeli citizens.

There seems to be intense European funding of a very tiny number of Israeli NGOs, many of which have in common that they represent a certain sort of political agenda which the Israeli electorate consistently democratically rejects. It's not clear why democratic Europe can't respect democratic Israel.

Of course, unelected EU bureaucrats in Brussels aren't actually important, but even knowing that no-one much listens to their verbiage, it's regrettable they feel the need to preach to us.

Start -Up Nation

Last year Dan Senor and Saul Singer published Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle. It's a great read, and doesn't require more than a few hours of pleasurable effort. The starting point for the book is that Israel is a world-class center of innovation, second only to Silicon Valley. There's more technological innovation happening here than on entire continents elsewhere, and the political and military turmoil of the past decade has never dented this. The authors set out to explain this.

First, they state their case, which turns out to be even more compelling than often recognized, since they look not only at the very long list of successful or wildly successful Israeli start-up companies, but also at the centrality of Israeli innovators to the development efforts of some of the world's largest technology companies - Intel, say, or Microsoft. The also show how it's not only high-technology, it's lots of other things, too, such as drip irrigation - not to mention the once famous and now defunct kibbutz movement, which was magnificent in its time, before the world moved on.

They compare Israel's economy to other economies, by way of attempting to identify what's unique about Israel. Since you ought to read the book I won't go through all its arguments, but the bottom line is that Israelis are anti-hierarchical, even in the army; they have no respect for accepted wisdom and even less for its representatives; they're brazen questioners of everything and everyone; but also they've got motivations to succeed that come from being proud of what they are and what they're doing. The Arab boycott and Charles De Gaulle's abrupt ban on military supplies days before the Six Day War, say the authors, must be given credit for at least part of Israel's prowess, since they shut the easy avenues to success, and forced the Israelis to forge new ones, and then, once they had the culture, to keep on forging them.

They also describe how early Israeli innovation was steered by the government, until that lost steam in the early 1970s; they are honest and clear-eyed about the wasted decades between the early 1970s and the early 1990s.

As I said, it's a fun book, and presents an Israel which is much more interesting - and real - than the one which the world's media obsesses about most days of the year (as does this blog). I do however have one significant quibble.

The technology sector of Israel may well be the economy's main motor, and the cultural characteristics which underpin it are all really there, very much thriving. Not all of Israel participates, however. The army really is a crucially important part of the story - but there are other parts of the army which do the exact opposite of encouraging innovation. Many Israelis really do fit the descriptions presented in the book - but more don't. Or at any rate, many don't: I wouldn't know how to quantify it. There are as many conservative and unimaginative plodders in Israel as anywhere else. Thankfully, they don't hamper the mad scientists and iconoclasts out to turn the world on its head; there are enough of them, however, to make Israel a place of growing inequality and considerable waste.

Finally, two minor comments: some of Israel's homegrown detractors, the folks I regularly dislike on this blog, have the same all-around gumption as their engineer cousins. It really is a cultural thing. Also, as anyone who has ever seriously studied the Talmud will attest, some of this ability comes from there. Spend 2,000 years studying Talmud, and it will be astonishing if you don't obsessively see things from novel perspectives and insanely unlikely vantages. 

Israel's FARA, Not a Threat to Democracy

America's FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act), passed in the late 1930s, regulates how non-American entities are allowed to fund political activities in the United States. You can read about it and see how it works at the official FRA Act website.

Yesterday the Knesset passed an Israeli version. Note that we got by without it for 62 years, until the foreign agents became so bold in their interventions in Israeli politics that some regulation became essential. Note that the Israeli law was consciously based on the American one. Note that the proposed law was watered down as it made its way through the legislative process.

Above all, note the it's a reasonable law, not a threat to Israeli democracy. Keep that in mind when you're told otherwise.

Pro-Israel Blog-Off

This blog is being voted on this week at Israellycool's site. The point is to have lots of people introduced to useful blogs they hadn't previously known about, so go, click on the various links, and vote as you will. Do the same next week, and thereafter.

Journalists and HRW got Libya Wrong

Omri Ceren, writing yesterday at the Commentary blog, told how Human Rights Watch Middle East and North Africa Director Sarah Leah Whitson was all agog back in 2009 about how things in Libya were getting better. Her article appeared in Foreign Policy, and is now behind a paywall. Apparently, however, it contained the following paragraph:

What Fathi al-Jahmi died for is starting to spread in the country. For the first time in memory, change is in the air in Libya. The brittle atmosphere of repression has started to fracture, giving way to expanded space for discussion and debate [and] proposals for legislative reform… I left more than one meeting stunned at the sudden openness of ordinary citizens, who criticized the government and challenged the status quo with newfound frankness. A group of journalists we met with in Tripoli complained about censorship… [b]ut that hadn’t stopped their newspapers… Quryna, one of two new semi private newspapers in Tripoli, features page after page of editorials criticizing bureaucratic misconduct and corruption… The spirit of reform, however slowly, has spread to the bureaucracy as well… the real impetus for the transformation rests squarely with a quasi-governmental organization, the Qaddafi Foundation for International Charities and Development.

At about the same time, Libyan expatriate Mohamed Eljahmi, whose borther Fathi had recently died, wrote an anguished column about his death and the indifference of the American government, but also about Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch:

It's not just politicians who should reflect on how they handled Fathi's case. My brother's death should give prominent human rights organizations pause. For nearly a year, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch hesitated to advocate publicly for Fathi's case, because they feared their case workers might lose access to Libyan visas.
Only on the day of Fathi's death did Human Rights Watch issue a press release that announced what we had known for two months: That Fathi appeared frail and emaciated, could barely speak and could not lift his arms or head. When the researchers asked him on April 25 and 26 if he was free to leave prison, he said no. When they asked him if he wanted to go home, he said yes.
It's not just politicians who should reflect on how they handled Fathi's case. My brother's death should give prominent human rights organizations pause. For nearly a year, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch hesitated to advocate publicly for Fathi's case, because they feared their case workers might lose access to Libyan visas.
Only on the day of Fathi's death did Human Rights Watch issue a press release that announced what we had known for two months: That Fathi appeared frail and emaciated, could barely speak and could not lift his arms or head. When the researchers asked him on April 25 and 26 if he was free to leave prison, he said no. When they asked him if he wanted to go home, he said yes.
Perhaps because they still fear antagonizing Gaddafi, in their May 21 statement Human Rights Watch didn't call for an independent investigation and stopped short of holding the Libyan regime responsible for Fathi's death.
Amnesty International also compromised. They moved an April 2009 demonstration originally slated to occur in front of Libya's U.N. mission to the U.S. mission instead so as not to antagonize Gaddafi. For the same reason, they ignored pleas for a public statement about Fathi's deterioration. While an Amnesty delegation was in Libya when Fathi died, the Libyan regime refused it permission to travel to Libya's second largest city.
Experience has shown me that country researchers in marquee human rights organizations are vulnerable to the regime's manipulation. Sarah Leah Whitson is one of the Human Rights Watch researchers who last saw Fathi before he was rushed to Jordan. She wrote an article for Foreign Policy upon her return from Libya, where she described efforts by the Gaddafi Foundation for International Charities and Development, which is headed by the Libyan leader's son, Saif al-Islam, as a "spring." The organization is actively menacing my brother's family. Some family members continue to endure interrogation, denial of citizenship papers and passports, round the clock surveillance and threats of rape and physical liquidation.
Not all organizations compromised their principles. Physicians for Human Rights didn't compromise with the Gaddafi regime and called for an independent medical investigation after Fathi's death. One day, when free media penetrates Libya, my brother's friends and admirers will learn how the American Jewish Committee sought to rally world leaders to Fathi's cause.

When the American Jewish Committee is more active than Human Rights Watch in trying to save the life of an Arab human rights activist being killed by his government, you know the world is a strange place.

Anyways, all that was long ago, in 2009. Now it's 2011, and people look at Libya differently than they used to. Or rather, uninformed people do - journalists at CNN, Reuters, the Washington Post, Financial Times, the New York Times and others. Michael Totten, on the other hand, got it right all along. Omri has done the research for us, in an absolutely devastating post which should be taught at all journalism schools the world over, but never will be.

Maybe that's why Michael Totten was the only one who got it right; he didn't go to journalism school. Nor did he train as a human rights activist.

Israel's Robust Democracy

As I've often written, one of the characteristics of Israeli politics is that politicians seek to climb out of their anonymity by proposing outlandish laws, knowing full well they'll garner attention but the laws will never pass. Meanwhile, the opposition likewise garners attention and publicity from the same proposal, so everyone wins, and the dynamic never goes away. These days the government is notionally right-wing (as if the term means anything in Israel), so the squawking is being done by the lefties. All well and fine, so long as everyone understands those to be the rules of the game, and doesn't take seriously the sound-bites about how Israel is descending into fascism etc etc.

Two examples for today.

The proposal to make it hard for artists to receive public financing if they didn't serve in the IDF has been shot down... by the government. It never even made its way to discussion by the Knesset.

The proposal to have a panel of inquiry into the activities of radical left-wing NGOs has apparently been killed... because Likud MKs joined the opposition in rejecting it.

Don't expect the numerous media outlets who reported prominently on the inception of these proposals to report also on their demise, nor on the players who did the demising. (I know, there is no such word). That's not how it works. Still, as Jeffrey Goldberg once said in this context, Israeli democracy seems quite capable of defending itself from the viruses that sometimes attack it.

Policy: Get Rid of Surplus People

In the years leading up to the First World War, German society was infused with the idea that diverse problems such as unemployment, urban planning and food supply would be best resolved by getting rid of spare people. This was not a Nazi idea - the Nazis hadn't been invented yet - nor was it particularly controversial; people of most political persuasions agreed on the principle. It was only many years later, in the 1990s, that a generation of young German historians looked back at the documentation and discovered that there had been a widely accepted conceptual infrastructure which was then used by the Nazis; since most people had accepted the idea, the Nazi policies encountered less resistance than they otherwise might have, and found more willing accomplices than they should have. The single best book on this was by Goetz Aly and Susanne Heim, Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction, originally published in German as Vordenker der Vernichtung..

Exactly a century later, there is a different rising power which is using similar ideas in formulating policies: China. See for example the idea that if there's congestion or pollution in Beijing the solution must be to deport hundreds of thousands of people.

Now I'm not saying the Chinese are proto-Nazis, though the mainstream German intellectuals of 1911 would mostly have been horrified to hear where they were headed. History never precisely repeats itself, anyway. But nor does it end, or have permanent happy endings, or learn from the past.

Hawara Checkpoint Abandoned; Gideon Levy Can't Give Up

Gideon Levy may be the most prominent of Israel's radical lefties, because he's a regular columnist at Haaretz, which gives him a wide and international audience. He's also so antagonistic to his country that even most left-leaning Israelis wouldn't get anywhere near him.

Among other things, he writes a weekly column called "The Twilight Zone", in which he wanders around the Palestinian territories and repeats the stories he hears through translators (he doesn't speak Arabic). His trustworthiness is mooted: he claims no-one has ever refuted any of his facts, but there actually have been quite a number of such refutations; in a spat with Ben Dror Yemini last year, Yemini posted a list of alleged untruths Levy had published.

This week's Twilight Zone column told of the IDF checkpoints around Nablus, which have been fully open since 2009, and now are being dismantled. In the days when these checkpoints were operative, however, they saved many lives, including of course Palestinians lives. As recently as October 2008 the soldiers manning the checkpoint apprehended a teenager carrying a bomb. Back in 2004 a number of Palestinian teenagers were apprehended at the checkpoint wearing suicide bombs; one was shot. Here's a CBS report, and here are some YouTube videos:

Notice this isn't the first case, according to the report. Here's the second event of the same month, which ended without anyone getting killed:

So although the checkpoint was never a nice place, and there may have been unfortunate things that happened there, it was put there for a reason, and the reason was justified.

It was always Gideon Levy's right to choose to tell the story only from the perspective of the Palestinians who suffered at the checkpoint, just as it's our right not to take him seriously for doing so. It is however a wee bit strange that this week, when the only event happening at the long-defunct checkpoint is that Israel is dismantling it, he writes an entire column about all the evils the IDF committed there, never mentions the lives saved because of its existence, and also manages not to mention that only new part of the story, which is that it's being dismantled. This does take the art of propagandist writing to a new height.