On Changing the Dynamics of the Conflict

Aluf Benn at Haaretz comments on the Obama-Netanyahu spectacle:

Obama believes Israel will have trouble surviving if it keeps holding on to the territories, expanding settlements and suppressing the Palestinians. Ultimately, Israel will find itself facing a Palestinian majority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, weapons that can crack its defensive shields and the harsh hatred of the Arab masses. That threatening combination will vanquish the Jewish state.
That is hard talk. Obama reiterated this scenario in his two speeches - at the State Department last Thursday and at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference this past Sunday. No other U.S. president has expressed more concern for Israel's future. Get out of the territories and you will gain life, Obama is saying.
Netanyahu sees this as nonsense; he believes Obama does not understand the Middle East. The prime minister is convinced Israel will be destroyed if it withdraws from the territories. He believes his mission is to face the international pressure and foil the plot to remove the Israel Defense Forces and the settlers from the West Bank and replace them with a Palestinian state.
[...]

The Arab revolutions have only deepened the dispute between Netanyahu and Obama. The demonstrators in Egypt, Yemen and Syria remind Obama of the American civil rights movement. He believes history is on their side, that the Middle East masses will smash the tyrannies and win political power and civil rights. America will set an example for them and be a beacon of liberty and democracy.
To Israeli ears, this vision sounds like an aging hippie's drug-riddled hallucination. Every Israeli cabinet minister, official, expert and intelligence authority who visited Washington in recent months has warned his or her American interlocutors that Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood are lurking behind the demonstrators. Israel is being suffocated by the Islamic octopus, which is closing in on it from all sides. Turkey is already lost. Egypt, Syria and Jordan shortly will become Iranian clones. Netanyahu believes that in the face of this threat the only recourse is entrenchment, and that any concession will bring the whole wall tumbling down. Israel must batten down the hatches and wait for the ugly wave to pass. 

Both men are partially right and partially wrong, I suspect. Obama is right that holding onto the West Bank is bad for Israel. Netanyahu is right that the Arab revolutions have almost nothing to do with the American Civil Rights Movement, or with the end of Communism in Europe. (Obama yesterday said Poland should be the model for the Arabs; the nicest thing I can say about that is that perhaps he was trying to be real nice to his Polish hosts). They join each other in being wrong, however, when they both assume Israel's existence is in danger because of this decision or that.

I've been reading a lot about Jerusalem recently, as an early stage to writing a book of my own on the subject. Since Jerusalem is a very old city, reading its history tends to give a bit of perspective. The world has changed fundamentally 7 or 8 or 9 times since the city first gained any significance beyond its own walls (it existed for about 2,000 years before that, unnoticed). The people living in each of the eras probably regarded their own age as permanent, and they were always wrong, even if sometimes the change didn't come until a few centuries later. So I'm wary of anyone who warns that not heeding him will lead to destruction, but following his advice will lead to permanent stability and peace. Some forces are beyond our ability to bend to our will (or even to foresee); on the other hand, willpower and determination are the only human agents that ensure survival no matter what the surrounding turmoil - which explains why there have been Jews in Jerusalem with very few interruptions no matter how dramatic the upheavals.

In my reading, the determination of the Jews to have their own state in this chapter of the human saga, is what will ensure it. Not this specific political decision nor that. Retaining control of the West Bank will not cause Israel's destruction, just as relinquishing control won't; in both cases the determination to persist will be more important, and will enable Israel to deal with whatever threats develop. So let's tone things down a bit. Contra both Obama and Netanyahu, Israel is not about to be overwhelmed one way or the other.

Of course, there will still be scenarios less catastrophic than the end of Israel which will play out better or worse, so there's lots of room for idiotic decisions, mistakes which later seem wise, and other internationally acclaimed events which will prove disastrous. Which is why I rather liked the interpretation suggested by David Samuels, writing in Tablet (h/ Michael).

Samuels thinks highly of Obama, and thinks his recent moves demonstrate sky-high political abilities. I'm not there yet, but am willing to accept that Obama may be moving towards a practical position which is actually quite promising: defusing the conflict of its worst excess, then hunkering down. This to be achieved by getting Israel out of most of the West Bank, enabling the Palestinians to build a state there (and in Gaza), redoubling Israel's security capabilities - and dealing with Jerusalem and the Right of Return many years later. In which context Samuels tells that the Palestinians are not going to relinquish their demand for a return. Not:

The question, then, is whether Obama believes that Jerusalem and the right of return are real issues—the core of the crisis—or not.
Having spoken with most of the leading figures in Fatah over the past decade, it is my sense that the real fantasy here is the arrogant assumption that the Palestinian leadership will abandon its most deeply held principles in exchange for what even moderates see as a shriveled slice of historic Palestine. Indeed, reviewing my notes of conversations with all of Arafat’s key political advisers and security chiefs, including Mahmoud Abbas, I can’t identify a single one who expressed any clear willingness to abandon the right of return, or recognize Israel as a Jewish state. At best, these were framed as issues for future negotiations that would need to be submitted to a vote of the entire Palestinian people—including an estimated 4 to 6 million refugees and their descendants. No Palestinian leader I’ve ever spoken with—secular moderates included—imagined Israel as a permanent feature of the political landscape in the Middle East. All saw it as a more or less unnatural creation that would be subsumed, peacefully or not, by the resurgence of Arab Palestine in 20, 50, or 100 years.

Samuels thinks Obama knows this:

What Obama has very cleverly done therefore is to appropriate the Israeli proposal to establish a Palestinian state with interim borders—albeit on terms that the Israelis don’t particularly like. Yet each side stands to gain something very real from an interim arrangement that they would be unlikely to gain from an actual peace deal: The Palestinians would receive almost all of the territory they claim for an interim state—except Jerusalem—while holding on to their national dream of one day reclaiming all of Palestine from the Zionists. The Israelis, meanwhile, get a U.S.-sponsored end to the tar-baby of occupation and boatloads of shiny new weapons while holding on to major settlement blocs and an undivided Jerusalem. Hamas doesn’t have to sign a peace deal with the Israelis, and the Israelis don’t have to sign a peace deal with Hamas. America will benefit by having followed through on its promise—made by George W. Bush and repeated by Obama—to establish a Palestinian state. The millstone of Israeli occupation will be removed from around the necks of America and Israel, both of which will presumably find it easier to make friends in the Middle East.

This scenario doesn't relate very well to the near certainty that there will be violence from the West Bank directed at Israel, and that Israel will be damned if and when it then responds with violence. Yet the story of the past decade shows that when Israel disregards the international opprobrium and does what it has to do, its neighbors - on the West Bank, in Southern Lebanon, and in Gaza (2002/4, 2006, 2009) do back down, at least for a while; the Syrian example of 1973/4 demonstrates that sometimes getting hit hard enough by Israel can convince Arab enemies to refrain from violence for quite a long time. The idea that ending Israeli control of the lives of most Palestinians might convince them to move along, is not obviously foolish.

The way I see it, the structure of the conflict is that the Palestinians reject the Jews right to a nation state, and will not accept peace unless it comes in a form which will enable them to keep striving for the end of Jewish Israel. This is why they've never agreed to anything offered to them. Israel, in the meantime, mostly does accept the Palestinians' right to a nation state, so long as it's permanently limited to the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinians see a peace treaty as a step on the longer road to Israel's disappearance as the Jewish nation state; the Israelis will allow a Palestinian nation state only if it's the final stage of the conflict. These positions are irreconcilable.

What Israel needs to do - and what Obama may indeed be offering - is to break the stalemate by giving the Palestinians less than they could achieve in negotiations, i.e a state without Jerusalem. The assumption since Bill Clinton was president is that someday Israel would agree to divide Jerusalem if the Palestinians agreed to relinquish their demand for return. But they won't, so why should Israel? Better to remove the occupation - by far the most potent weapon the Palestinians have against Israel - and then continue the conflict from a position in which Israel holds all the main cards: It controls Jerusalem, and it prevents a Palestinian return. If the Palestinians can ever think of something to entice Israel to change its positions, good for them, but until then they won't be able to say that Israel must relinquish its most important positions in return for a Palestinian willingness to have sovereignty. They'll have sovereignty already. And they'll be judged - not in the court of world opinion but in the court of real life - by what they do with it.

Seen this way, the Egyptian decision to open the border with Gaza yesterday, is good for Israel, not bad. It is another step on the road to separating Israel from the Palestinians, in this case by reducing Israel's ability to intervene in Palestinian lives. If you read carefully, you'll see there are serious voices in Israel who agree on this.

Gender Separation on Public Transit

Chances are, if you read this blog you're something of a news junkie, with a focus on Israel. In which case you'll most likely have heard all about how Jim Crow is coming to Israel, as demonstrated by the Black Buses on which Haredi men sit up front, and Haredi women are segregated to the back. Of course, the Supreme Court has ruled against the practice, twice - which shows that the problem isn't about to go away, since some sections of the Haredi community feel it's important, and no court can force men and women to sit together if they choose to sit apart.

I've got no words of defense for the practice. Nor do I buy into any of the chatter about how it's a reflection of a tradition and needs to be preserved or respected or that sort of thing. It isn't. It's a brand new invention of people who are too engaged in fending off modernity to notice they've gone off the cliff, and it's a sad story about how a fervent minority can dictate to the surrounding majority: so far as I understand it, the innovation comes from the Gur Hassids, and the rest of the Haredi community is being swept along becuase they don't care enough to resist.

Still, I was interested to learn, the other day, that in Egypt they've got special compartments in the subway for women only, because women traveling in normal compartments are routinely harassed, and the authorities felt it better to segregate the women than to convince the men to respect them. I don't think I'd heard this before, in spite of all the reports about how great Egypt is about to be.   

The 1967 Line

There's been a lot of talk recently about the lines of 1967, most of it not helpful, and some of it vague. Politicians, journalists, pundits, bloggers and most everyone else much prefer generalities to particulars. Here's an attempt to be specific and grounded.

(Map taken from the CIA World Factbook)

The original line was drawn in 1949 during the armistice talks between Israel and Jordan. They mostly reflected the reality of military positions at the end of the war of 1948, but with one major change. The Israelis, fearing that the extreme narrowness of their country would repeatedly entice their neighbors to attack it, demanded that a strip of land along the northwestern edge of the Jordanian-held West Bank be handed over to them, in return for an area to the west of Hebron. The area, known till this day in Israel as The Triangle, contained a series of Arab villages, from Um el-Fachem at its north-east down to Kfar Kassem at the south-west. The Americans demanded that Israel promise not to force any of the villagers out of their homes, and Israel agreed, and today there are hundreds of thousands of their descendents, Israeli citizens all, living in the area. A very detailed map of the region can be found here, put up by the University of Texas, but since it's so detailed it is a bit cumbersome to navigate. It's worth the effort, however.

At the time, in 1949, the line, along with the rest of Israel's borders, was explicitly and contractually defined as an armistice line, not as a border, since the Arab states were not willing to officially recognize Israel's existence, and perhaps they wished to have legal grounds for changing the lines later on. For all I know, Israel may have had the same thought. The importance of the matter, however, is that all sides agreed the line was not permanent.

This line is variously referred to as the Green Line, the 1949 line, and the 1967 line (meaning June 4th 1967).

At its narrowest point, the distance between Kalkilya on the West Bank and Israel's coast north of Kfar Shemaryahu is 8.54 miles, according to the ruler function of Google Earth. Israeli politicians of all stripes like to talk about Israel's narrow waist, even those among them who propose to relinquish control of most of the West Bank. On the other side, Palestinians and their myriad supporters demand that Maale Adumim, a very large settlement east of Jerusalem, must be dismantled, since it cuts the West Bank in two; the distance between the town of Maale Adumim and the Dead Sea is 9.69 miles if you use the definition of the Geneva Initiative folks, and 8.82 miles if you measure from the easternmost structure in the industrial area to the east of town. There is however a significant difference in that Israel has repeatedly indicated that there will be a north-south road under Palestinian control to the west of Maale Adumin, under or over the Jerusalem-Maale Adumim road, so that Palestinians will not need to go all the way around Maale Adumim when traveling from Ramallah to Bethlehem. Actually, quite a bit of its length is already paved.

(Pardon my rather clumsy cartographic additions, but you get the idea).

My apologies in advance to all friends of Israel for the myth-busting I'm about to engage in, but honesty forces me to it: Nowadays there is no serious Israeli politician who suggests Israel annex the Palestinian town of Kalkilya and its tens of thousands of people; indeed, the security barrier, commonly accepted in Israel as an approximation of the line Israel is comfortable with moving back to, follows the Green Line here. This means that Israel essentially accepts it will return to that narrow waistline of 8.54 miles.

This is not to say the entire argument is farcical. It isn't. Israel has serious threats to worry about should it relinquish military control of the West Bank; but that particular, eye-catching slogan, so convenient for sound bites, isn't one of them.

The dangers of relinquishing military control of the West Bank are as follows:

An Arab army will attempt to sever Israel at its narrow waist along the coastal plain.

Palestinian forces - regular or irregular - will infiltrate along the line, and given the tiny distances they'll be able to reach Israel's main cities within minutes and wreak havoc.

Palestinians will be able to shoot directly at numerous targets in Israel's populous heartland.

Palestinians will be able to shoot mortars and short-range rockets at numerous targets in Israel's populous heartland.

Israel will lose its ability to collect human intelligence about terror cells in the West Bank.

Rather than controlling the West Bank, Israel will have to defend itself along a long and twisted border much of it in hilly terrain.

Israel will lose most of its control over the aquifer that supplies much of the water to the coastal wells.
The Palestinians will have the legal right to demand some of the water of the Jordan Basin.

These threats are of varying quality. The first, regarding an Arab army, can be fended off through two measures. First, the Palestinians will not be allowed to have a full-fledged army. If they ask the Europeans, this will be a blessing for them, since armies are extremely expensive things to have, but if they insist having an army is essential to sovereignty they should be reminded that Germany (both of it) was allowed only a limited military between 1945 and 1991, and got along quite well, and Japan's military was also limited post 1945. So no, having an army is not an essential prerequisite for sovereignty.

Second, Israel demands a military presence along the Jordan River, to the east of the West Bank. This presence is directed at anyone to the east of Palestine who might be tempted to use it as a launching pad for an invasion of Israel. There is total unanimity among all Israel's security types that this presence is essential, though Netanyahu has recently been hinting it need not require Israeli sovereignty. Perhaps the Jordan Valley will be sovereign Palestinian territory in which Israel has contractual rights to a military presence. I admit I'm personally skeptical. Modern armies being the cumbersome things they are, I don't see how one could arrive on the West Bank suddenly, unannounced, and launch an attack on Israel. Not to mention that no Arab army has tried the full-fronted assault method since 1973, probably for the good reason that it's a harmful exercise. In any scenario Israel will need a powerful and threatening military for the first three or five generations after making peace with all its neighbors, but I don't see why a few thousand troops along the Jordan make much difference. There's a major road down there from Jerusalem, and another can be built from the north, and if there's to be a war IDF forces will be there long before Iraqi or Iranian or Emirati divisions arrive.

Water: this is a serious matter, but ever less so. At the moment we're preparing to lay the fifth major pipeline from the coast up to Jerusalem (if I'm not mistaken), which will be unusual in that for the first time it will draw its water not from coastal springs but from desalination stations. There isn't enough natural water in Israel/Palestine for the 12 million people who already live here, and there's not going to be any more, either. Israel already operates major desalination plants, while holding the world record for recycling water; this trend will have to continue no matter what. I don't have the exact numbers at hand, but Israel already supplies some of the water the Palestinians use, and will probably supply more as their numbers grow, no matter who controls them politically. This means water will be a Palestinian weakness, not a threat against Israel. Anyway, the entire subject is one that can be resolved with money, and need not cost human lives.

Which leaves us with the various threats of low-level Palestinian violence. These are serious. In 2002-2004 Israel needed to reoccupy the entire West Bank, re-build its intelligence sources and networks, and also construct the security barrier; only then was the bloody 2nd Intifada defeated. Its ongoing control is the reason no kassam rockets or mortars are shot from the West Bank, while many thousands have been shot from Gaza. Moreover, only a fool, or perhaps a Swedish foreign minister, would believe that by signing a peace agreement with some Palestinians, there will remain no Palestinian individuals or groups willing to shoot at Israeli civilians from the shelter of civilians towns and villages; those Swedes and other EU fellows will conspicuously not fly into Ben Gurion airport if they ever remotely fear that their plane could be shot down as it comes in to land at the airport which is within range of Palestinian gunmen with easily portable shoulder missiles. Until someone comes up with a way to assure Israel this danger is not acute, I don't see how it will relinquish military control of some sort over the West Bank. Which is not to say that Israel might not move all its civilians back to a line, say that of the barrier. Which brings us to the matter of the settlers.

The real reason Israel insists it cannot go back to the Green line is a combination of security to the east of the airport, and the existence of large settlements, most of them quite close to the Green Line. No official maps have ever been made public, obviously, since the negotiations have never reached completion, but here are a number of plausible approximations. First, the Taba negotiations of January 2001:

 

This comes from Le Monde, and refrains from showing that Israel apparently offered some ground inside the Green Line in return for some of the areas it demanded in the West Bank. In any case, since most of the 2nd Intifada happened after the talks at Taba, it clearly didn't happen because Israel was unwilling to dismantle most of its settlements. In case the map isn't clear, everything in either hue of green was to be Palestine.

Here we've got a projection of what Ehud Olmert apparently offered the Palestinians in September 2008, a proposal they never even responded to. The triangles are settlements to be dismantled. (source)

A cursory glance tells us Olmert wasn't trying to create "defensible borders", since the crazy lines reaching up to Kdumim and Ariel, deep into the West Bank, can't really be defended. But we can see how he wanted the line away from the airport (to the west of Jerusalem), and he wished to uproot as few settlers as possible and was willing to pay with territory from within the Green Line. Some of that territory would have made the Gaza Strip noticeably larger, which may have been one reason Abbas never responded: Gaza is Hamas-land, and why would he want them to gain anything?

Finally, here's the line proposed by the Israelis and Palestinians from the Geneva Initiative.

There are no security considerations here at all, with the possible exception that Israel retains its half of the no-man's land east of the airport. The only consideration is to leave Israeli settlers in their place, if they are within a very few miles of the Green Line; in return, the Palestinians get equal territories from Israel. If you compare their map with that of Olmert inch by inch, as I have, there are the obvious differences of Ariel and Kdumim, but there are also less obvious ones such as dismantling Efrat (15,000 people) because it's to the east of Route 60 from Bethlehem to Hebron, dismantling the industrial zone of Maale Adumim, and other things like that. Even in the Geneva Initiative map, however, a majority of Israeli settlers don't move.

No matter which map you use, from Taba onwards, the Palestinians get all of the Gaza strip (they've already got it), and just about all of the West Bank, with compensation for what they don't get. I think this demonstrates quite clearly that the inability to reach an agreement isn't about Palestinian sovereignty, which the Israelis have long since agreed to, nor about the size of Palestine. Ariel and Kdumim may still be a noticeable sticking point, but they're not the reason for the lack of a peace treaty. Those would be Jerusalem and the right of return or its corollary, Israel's demand to be recognized as the Jewish State. This has been the case for at least 11 years, if not 45, or 63, or 100.

A personal comment: if I had my druthers, I wouldn't have Israel offering empty areas in the foothills west of Hebron or along the Gaza Strip. I would undo the mistake of 1949, when Israel took over the villages of The Triangle, which in the meantime have turned into cities. If the sense of partition is to divide the land along ethnic lines, then that should be what is done. The Palestinians with Israeli citizenship in the Galilee, the Negev, Haifa and Jaffa all live too far from any line to be transferred to Palestine, and they are welcome to remain Israelis. Yet by moving the populace of the Triangle from Israel to Palestine, without ever physically moving any of them a single inch, the Palestinian minority inside Israel will drop significantly from its current 20.5%. Since the Palestinians will not allow there to be any Jews at all in Palestine, this seems a reasonable proposition. The reality, however, is that in the occasional case where Israeli politicians moot this idea (Sharon in 2004, for example, and Lieberman since then) they are always received with howls of protest, and marked as fascists, racists,  brutes and evil. The Palestinian Israelis, you see, are eager for their nation to have its own state, but they don't want to live there. They want to live in Israel.

Which isn't surprising, if you think about it. Given the choice, who would prefer otherwise? Would you?

Arab Israeli Democracy Collaboration

An anonymous reader suggests this story and recording, about right-wing Amir Benayoun who has recorded a song in Arabic for the Syrian democracy demonstrators, at their request. What can I say? Hee hee sort of sums it up.

Antisemitism among British Academics

Eve Garrard, writing on Normblog, says it's time for union members to recognize their passivity equals complicity with the antisemitism of their union's leadership. The trigger of her piece is the attempt by the UCU to redefine antisemitism so that their actions aren't it; by the current definitions, they certainly are.

Timing

Netanyahu mostly said the right things yesterday in his speech to the American Congress; he mostly said them with the wrong timing; and many of the reports on the speech are unreasonable or uninformed or both.

First, an historical fact which is not open to interpretation. Netanyahu broke substantial new ground in his speech. No Israeli prime minster before Ehud Barak spoke openly about Israel recognizing Palestinian sovereignty. Not because they couldn't imagine such a thing, but because it was assumed such Israeli recognition was an important negotiating chip, to be played at the right time. Barak played it at Camp David in July 2000, and in return got praise from President Clinton which no-one remembered half a year later. At the time, however, Barak pretended nothing he had offered was real unless an agreement was reached, as if he could take back what he had offered. So Barak never gave an official speech recognizing Palestine. Nor did Sharon. Olmert may have: it was certainly his position, and since he was prime minster later than Barak, the reluctance to speak openly was gone. Yet Olmert presided over a center-left Israeli government. Netanyahu spoke yesterday about Israel's being the first to recognize a sovereign Palestine, if only the Palestinians reach an agreement with us. He said this in a speech watched by millions, as the head of a right-wing Israeli coalition.

We've come a long way from Golda Meir saying "there is no Palestinian nation", and indeed, we've come a long way from the positions of Yitzchak Rabin, remembered worldwide as a brave Israeli leader seeking peace: Rabin never said there'd be a sovereign Palestine, he never intended to move back to the lines of 1967, and he never would have dreamed of dividing Jerusalem. On the first two, Netanyahu, for all his verbal gymnastics, is to Rabin's left. Moreover, the assumption all over Israel's media today is that he enjoys broad support in the Israeli electorate for his positions.

Not that you'll find any of this in the international media's reports. Here's the New York Times:

His speech broke no new ground concerning the peace process, but it was not expected to. Israeli officials said that Mr. Netanyahu could hardly lay out new proposals to an American audience without telling his own people first.
Palestinian officials were dismissive of Mr. Netanyahu’s message, saying it included no new concessions along with the new demands.  

The Economist will appear in print only on Friday, but their first web response is that

Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, addresses a joint session of Congress with a speech that was big on hype but short on substance

Haaretz, far to the left of either the NYT or The Economist, thunders that

Netanyahu wasted the generous credit he got from his American hosts to cast accusations at the Palestinians and impose endless obstacles in connection with the core issues. Instead of accepting the principle that the border between Israel and the Palestinian state would be based on the 1967 lines, Netanyahu declared that the Jewish people are not foreign occupiers in Judea and Samaria.
He couched his readiness to make far-reaching concessions within endless conditions that have no relation to reality.

What are Netanyahu's conditions which are so far from reality, pray tell? First, there's his demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the nation state of the Jews, as Palestine will be that of the Palestinians. It seems a perfectly reasonable requirement, unless both sides agree on an end to the conflict and relinquishing of all future demands in an agreement which contains no right of return. Essentially, the two demands are the same thing: if there's no right of return and there is an end of conflict, then the Palestinians indeed don't need to proclaim their recognition of Israel being the Jewish State. So far no Palestinian leader has ever said openly that he will relinquish the demand for a right of return, or even hinted that he might recognize Israel as the Jewish state. Until a democratically elected Palestinian leadership which can deliver on its words does this, there will be no peace.

Netanyahu then said Israel would never move back to the lines of 1967. This is also a fact. No Israeli government ever will. The question is what happens to the 5%, give or take, which won't be relinquished, and what will be given in return. This has been the topic of much discussion between negotiators over the past 18 years, and will continue for a while yet. What would Haaretz have expected? That Netanyahu say he'll dismantle Modi'in Illit?

Finally, there are Netanyahu's demands that Palestine be demilitarized, a demand any sane (and electable) Israeli leader will always make; and the demand for a military presence along the Jordan River. I'm not enough of a military man to know how extremely essential this really is, especially if Palestine itself is demilitarized; it's aimed against Jordan and Iraq, not the Palestinians.

Then there's Jerusalem. Netanyahu says it can't be divided, and of course he's right. Barak and Olmert offered to divide it, but fortunately the Palestinians weren't interested. I certainly hope that Netanyahu's position will be that of all future prime minsters, since the reality of dividing Jerusalem will never bring peace.

The summary of all this is that Netanyahu is now staking roughly the same positions his predecessors took, from 2000 onwards, and is well to the left of Rabin and Peres in the 1990s. He - and they - enjoyed a broad consensual support among Israel's voters, now bolstered by a prime minster of the political right. The Israeli electorate is willing - some are eager - to live alongside a sovereign Palestine, but on conditions the Palestinians cannot remotely accept. So there will be no peace anytime soon, as all reasonable observers know, and have known for years.

The main thing to regret is that Netanyahu didn't give this speech two years ago. Had he spoken this way when he and Obama were both new in their jobs, the chemistry between them would have been much better, and the positions Obama would have taken would have been different. Look how close they are right now, in spite of all the smoke and mirrors about profound disagreements. Precisely because peace between Israelis and Palestinians is not possible in our generation, it is crucial that Israel's leaders always position themselves as wisely as possible. This means doing everything reasonable to maintain active good will between Israel and the US, and giving Israel's dwindling friends in Europe something to work with. Had yesterday's speech been the official position of Netanyahu's government all along, as it has been the position of most of the electorate, this would have been easier to do.

Demographics and the Long-Term Israeli Victory

Not long ago I read an article about some Israeli legislation in the 1950s. It was sobering to see that I'd never heard of almost any of the legislators involved in the matter; even the high-ranking cabinet member who had been presiding over the circus was a fellow I'd never come across before, and in the interval have once again forgotten. Fame is fleeting, it seems.

This is one of the main drawbacks to blogging, as I've noted before. It's extremely contemporary, which means, it's of the most fleeting importance. No one reads blogposts from two months ago, and why would they? No-one remembers that Bill Clinton and Yitzchak Rabin got off to a cold and stony start, as did Bush II and Sharon, not to mention Reagan and Begin, or Carter and Begin; Bush I contributed significantly to the downfall of Yitzchak Shamir in 2002: Nu, so what? Did it make any real and lasting difference, the kind that anyone will remember in 50 years? (Shamir who? Or, let's see who can arrange the following presidents in correct chronological order: Taft, Roosevelt, Hoover, Wilson, and the other Roosevelt).

Barry Meislin has uncovered an article in the Asia Times (of Hong Kong) that takes a very long look. So long, as a matter of fact, that none of us will be alive to test his full thesis, which deals with the year 2100. Yet the demographic trends he discusses will be felt - or not, if he's wrong - well before the end of the century, demographic developments being what they are.

Like the vanishing point in a perspective painting, long-term projections help us order our perceptions of what we see in front of us today. Here's one to think about, fresh from the just-released update of the United Nations' population forecasts: At constant fertility, Israel will have more young people by the end of this century than either Turkey or Iran, and more than German, Italy or Spain.

With a total fertility rate of three children per woman, Israel's total population will rise to 24 million by the end of the present century. Iran's fertility is around 1.7 and falling, while the fertility for ethnic Turks is only 1.5 (the Kurdish minority has a fertility rate of around 4.5).

Not that the size of land armies matters much in an era of high-tech warfare, but if present trends continue, Israel will be able to field the largest land army in the Middle East. That startling data point, though, should alert analysts to a more relevant problem: among the military powers in the Middle East, Israel will be the only one with a viable population structure by the middle of this century.

That is why it is in America's interest to keep Israel as an ally. Israel is not only the strongest power in the region; in a generation or two it will be the only power in the region, the last man standing among ruined neighbors. The demographic time bomb in the region is not the Palestinian Arabs on the West Bank, as the Israeli peace party wrongly believed, but rather Israel itself.

The key part of the article is this:

The right way to read this projection is backwards: Israelis love children and have lots of them because they are happy, optimistic and prosperous. Most of Israel's population increase comes from so-called "secular" Israelis, who have 2.6 children on average, more than any other people in the industrial world. The ultra-Orthodox have seven or eight, bringing total fertility to three children.

Europeans, Turks and Iranians, by contrast, have very few children because they are grumpy, alienated and pessimistic. It's not so much the projection of the demographic future cranked out by the United Nations computers that counts, but rather the implicit vision of the future in the minds of today's prospective parents.

And then this:

This, I believe, explains the implacable hostility of Israel's neighbors, as well as the Europeans. It is the unquenchable envy of the dying towards the living. Having failed at Christianity, and afterward failed at neo-pagan nationalism, Europe has reconciled itself to a quiet passage into oblivion.

Israel's success is a horrible reminder of European failure; its bumptious nationalism grates against Europe's determination to forget its own ugly embrace of nationalism; and its implicitly religious raison d'etre provokes post-Christian rage. Above all, it offends Europe that Israel brims with life. Some of Europe's great nations may not survive the present century. At constant fertility, Israel will have more citizens than any of the Eastern European countries where large numbers of Jews resided prior to the Holocaust. 

From there on it gets better. Read the whole thing, if only to raise your spirits. By the time he gets disproved we won't be here to notice anyway.

American-Israeli Defense Technology Collaboration

Eli Lake at the Washington Times tells how the relations between the Pentagon and Israel's arm's industry soured between 2000-2005, and then very much got back on track. The crucial turning point was that Israel needed to make up its mind to prefer American needs over Chinese ones. This was clearly the better decision for Israel, though it's good that we had choices to choose from. As China - and India, another burgeoning trade partner of Israel - continue to rise, the alternatives will still be there.

In the meantime, the relations don't harm American interests in any way, either:

Rep. Steven R. Rothman, a New Jersey Democrat who serves on the appropriation subcommittees that fund foreign aid and defense budgets, said during a seminar at the AIPAC conference that the $3 billion in annual military financing for Israel was a sound investment.
“We gave them $3 billion, they have to use 75 percent of it to buy our stuff, and then they give us improvements on all the stuff we sell them, plus all the intelligence network,” he said. “The prepositioning of our supplies in Israeli territory, the safe port for U.S. troops in time of war and peace, and many many other ways. Such a bargain.”

This story is worth keeping in mind as folks get all roiled over the Obama-Netanyahu spat. Relations between nations are based on interests, and shared values, and other imponderables; they rarely stand or fall because of two particular individuals, especially ephemeral ones such as elected leaders.

Ir Amim is Forging World Opinion

Here's a longish report on the lefty Israeli NGO Ir Amim, which shows how the organization is successfully inserting its message into the international discussion about Jerusalem. It's in Hebrew, and I'm linking for future reference. 

Colonel Kemp and the Antisemitic Scots

Here's a fine speech by Colonel Richard Kemp against the slanderers of Israel, which starts from an unusual point of departure, but then turns to the depressing intensity of the hate regularly spewed at Israel. Then, as if on cue, here's an example he doesn't give: public libraries in Scotland are banning books by Israelis.

In a recent discussion I had we were looking at antisemitism in Western civilization. I posited that hatred of the Jews is hardwired into it - this doesn't mean that all westerners are Jew-haters, rather that the potential is there and needs to be fought off. One of the other discussants asked if I was also saying that hatred of Jews is in the DNA of Western civilization, and it occurred to me that the two metaphors are actually instructive. DNA can't be changed, at least in the present stage of technology, so saying that antisemitism is in the DNA of Western civilization would mean there's no hope for change, but also no responsibility to try. DNA is what we're born with, and we can't choose it or control it. Hard wiring, on the other hand, can be changed by the engineers, at the very least, so the moral requirement is there: will people make the effort to re-engineer the wiring, or won't they? Because if they won't, that's their decision. Some people and societies are quite advanced in re-wiring. Lot's of folks, in Scotland and elsewhere, haven't even begun.

Haim on Niot z"l

Haim Watzman has begun writing about his dead son Niot.

In Hebrew, the word that means “pastures” (or “oasis” or any green place) is “Niot.” But there’s a small problem. The word is in construct form, a declension that never stands alone. It requires completion.

“He’ll complete it himself, in his life,” Ilana says.

Don't Divide Jerusalem: The Curious Case of Beit Safafa

A century ago Beit Safafa was a village in the hills north of Bethlehem and south of Jerusalem. By the time the British Mandate ended, in 1948, the southern neighborhoods of Jerusalem could be seen on the slopes to the north of the village. When the war of 1948 was over, there was an armistice line running straight through the village, the northern part lying in Israel, the southern part in Jordan. Over the next decade or so, the fields between the village and Jerusalem filled with the neighborhoods of Katamonim, populated mostly by Jewish refugees from Arab countries; eventually the Jewish homes of Pat were erected right next to the Arab homes of northern Beit Safafa.

Pat on the right, Beit Safafa on the left.

During this period the border was sealed. Family members living a stone's throw apart could shout to each other, but never meet, never break bread together, never share family events.

In 1967 the Israelis occupied the West Bank and annexed East Jerusalem. Beit Safafa was united. The villagers were united, too, and over the coming years they multiplied and moved, some crossing the old and forgotten line into the Israeli part, some building larger homes on the hill to the south, which, I remember, used to be mostly empty and now no longer is.

Of course, if you know Jerusalem, you'll recognize that the neighborhood on the top of the hill is Gilo, which much of the world calls a settlement since it was populated by Israeli citizens beyond the line of 1949-67. The odd thing is that in all the endless verbiage on the matter, no-one (NO ONE) ever calls the Israeli Arabs from Beit Safafa who moved in the same direction, settlers. Yet it can't be that Jewish Israeli citizens who crossed the Green Line to settle are illegally forbidden settlers, while the Arab Israeli citizens who did the exact same thing are not. That would make international law explicitly racist and antisemitic, and for all its silliness, it isn't those.

(If we're splitting logic, by the way, it would be interesting to know how American or Russian or French citizens who moved to the area after 1967 can be regarded as internationally forbidden. Merely because many of them took on Israeli citizenship along the way? And if they didn't? Say some of them retained their original citizenship and never acquired Israeli citizenship: are they also forbidden by international law? There are such people, you know. I recognize this sounds silly, but so does the entire construct if you think about it long enough or observe its details close up).

In the decades since 1967 thousands of Israeli Arabs from elsewhere - Nazerath, Jaffa, Sachnin and so on - have moved to Jerusalem. It's a big city, it's got the country's largest university, it's got hospitals, government ministries, and all sorts of other things to encourage migration. Some of them have moved to Beit Hakerem or Rehavia, and that's all right. Others have moved to Beit Hanina, a wealthy area on the city's north side, so they're clearly legally forbidden settlers. Some have moved to Beit Safafa, because it's the one part of town that already had a community of Israeli Arabs and it felt hospitable. Of course, if they moved to the northern part of the neighborhood (it has long since ceased to be a separate village), no problem. If they moved to the southern part however, they're illegal settlers, as we've already seen. The thing is, when you walk through the neighborhood, there's no way of recognizing which it is, unless you happen to be old enough or savvy enough to remember where the long-defunct line ran. Most people aren't. Most people, that is, except for the teeming millions who know that Jerusalem must be divided.

 So let's get this straight. According to conventional wisdom, the buildings in the forefront of the picture below remain in Israel no mater what, since their denizens are inside the Green line and they're Israeli citizens anyway, except for the ones who aren't. The buildings in the center of the picture must become part of Palestine, since their denizens are outside the Green Line and they're not Israeli citizens, except for the ones who are. Then the buildings on the top of the hill, at the back of the picture, they will remain in Israel since they're part of the Jewish neighborhoods constructed since 1967 which will not be dismantled since there are more than 200,000 people living in them. Of course, the line between the two parts of Beit Safafa doesn't exist on the ground, and in some cases runs through homes constructed since 1967, and the line between Jews and Arabs near the top of the hill runs along garden fences and between parking places on common roads, but hey, don't confuse us with such minutiae.

So now we've got the following situation. There are about 16,000 people in Beit Safafa. Some have been Israeli citizens since 1948, but they'll move or stay depending upon where they live now. Some have become Israeli citizens since 1967, but that's immaterial. If they're Arab (they are), and they live south of the Green Line (many do), they obviously yearn to live in a free Palestine, not Israel. No? Some are not Israeli citizens, merely permanent residents, but if they live north of the line, they can stay put, or move to Haifa, or move 25 feet to the south, and thus choose to live in whichever country they prefer. And then of course there are the non-Israeli citizens who moved in 1974, or 1983, or 1992, or 2001, or whenever it was, to Haifa or Kfar Kassem or elsewhere in Israel, and they won't be affected in any case, since they're inside the Green Line and thus impervious to the entire discussion. It's only Jews who are on the wrong side of the line who need to do any explaining or accommodating.

In case you're skeptical that anyone would really consider drawing all those lines, here's the map as it appears on the website of the Geneva Initiative. I'm not making up any of this.

Post script: My friend Sami (false name), who lives elsewhere in East Jerusalem, tells me many of his neighbors are envious of the Beit Safafians: "They or their cousins have been in Israel since 1948, and they know how to navigate the system in a way the rest of us don't always know."

I completed this series of articles about how Jerusalem can't be divided with two posts relating to the question if the city's Palestinians even want to be divided away from Israel. Here I explained why they may actually not want to be divided, and here I showed a little snapshot showing the same.

Hamas is from Mars, the EU is in La La Land

Hamas responds to Obama's speeches:

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri was quoted by Ma'an news agency as saying that Obama's speech showed the U.S. government will continue "to support the occupation at the expense of the freedom of the Palestinian people."Moreover, Abu Zuhri emphasized that the U.S. "will fail" in forcing Hamas "to recognize the occupation." 

 Occupation, in the Hamas vocabulary, means anything and everything in what was once British Mandatory Palestine, a fact they never try to hide.

Meanwhile, at a meeting of EU bigwigs, the suits competed with one another in their haste to praise Obama and castigate Netanyhu for his obstruction of peace. The Swedish Foreign Minster, for example, thundered that Netanyahu's positions are indefensible, and "the only defense possible is peace". The only solution to poverty, I expect, is money, and the only response to illness is health.

I wish I knew how to inculcate such terminal childishness in adults elsewhere. Imagine if we could reduce Hamas folks to the blathering idiocy of "the only conceivable way to live is in peace". Or "Fatah functionaries have our peoples' best interests at heart, and we must  work with them to realize our common goals." Or "Christian Palestinians are just like us, and we must embrace them as our brothers." Or "Jews have needs just like we do and the only way to reconcile them is to talk about things until we all accept our differences."  Or "women are half of our nation, and only by ensuring they can realize their full potential will we achieve a just society."

Book Review: The Hustle

Crisscrossing Germany by train last week gave me more time than I usually have to read. So I read Doug Merlino's new book, The Hustle: One Team and Ten Lives in Black and White. It's a wonderful book, and I warmly recommend it, even though it has totally nothing to do with the usual topics of this blog - actually, that's an additional reason to read it.

The book is presented as the story of a black and white basketball team: a black basketball coach and a wealthy white businessman came together to create a team of 8th-graders half of whom can from wealthy families in white Seattle in the mid 1980s, and the other half came from the black parts of town. They learned to play ball together, they became friends, they eventually even won a championship, and then they got on with life. 20 years later Doug Merlino, one of the white boys, set out to find what had happened to them all and if playing ball together had changed anything, and he found precious little to celebrate. The cultural conditioning on each side was too strong, playing basketball never dented it, the white boys grew into successful white professionals, and the black boys went back to their neighborhoods to be stunted. Sad.

This description doesn't do justice to the book, nor to the reality, for that matter. First, because the racial divide isn't so clear-cut. At least one of the white boys has grappled with serious emotional issues and lives on the edge of society, holding his own but far from being a pillar of anyone's community; meanwhile, a number of the black men have climbed out of their childhood circumstances, by dint of the strength of their character, while one or two others, having lived long enough to survive the drug wars and gain perspective on the potential of life, are on the path to offer their children more than their parents offered them.

Moreover the description doesn't do justice to the book because it's actually not about a baseball team at all. It's a cultural cross-cut of American society as seen by the men of Doug's generation. He has sections about hi-tech (Seattle!) and drug wars; prep-schools and ghetto schools, churches and welfare policies. He repeatedly talks about the power of movies to depict American society and also inform it. He discusses trends in music.While perched mostly in Seattle, he watches the ebbs and flows of American migration over the past half century. Immigration, too: not all the white boys came over on the Mayflower; some are newcomers finding acceptance. He tells how once black neighborhoods are being gentrified, and how that's playing out, and who's moving where. Even the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc make a couple of appearances, once as the backdrop for the murder of one of the boys, once as a place to escape to. America is a gigantic and complicated place, not to be encapsulated in any single short description, but Merlino does an admirable job of depicting its complexity and diversity. Some of the diversity isn't even remotely regrettable: society needs money managers, wine technicians, grade school teachers, attorneys, journalists, janitors and church laypeople. All of them.

Most profoundly, however, it isn't a book about a black and white basketball team, because it's a story about universal growth. Doug's voice is what makes this happen. He's got an unusually strong sense of self-deprecation, though without any apologies or cringing. Simply: he wasn't a very good basketball player (neither was Myron, though); he wasn't that good at school, and didn't manage to hold out at the top-notch prep-school (neither did Eric or Damian, though), as a young adult it took him time to find his place (the same went for Maitland, and JT). He set off on the journey that eventually led to writing this book because he missed the old team, and was searching for some sort of closure for Tyler's death. The story begins with a pile of rambunctious pre-teens, then describes a game; after a few hundreds of pages with essentially no group scenes or sport descriptions, it ends with a reunion of thoughtful early mid-aged adults who get together once again and play basketball. When we first met them it was impossible to follow the characters; by the time we leave them, we not only can, we have. Each of them has made his own way through the same moment in history, bolstered or hampered by his own relations to it - which means, its a deeply human story.

Final note: English is a rich language. There are more than one way to say things. I was tickled by the extent to which Merlino uses a vocabulary I'm not familiar with, and not only because some of it comes from the black parts of town. He's got capping and peanut galleries, beat-boxing, cutting a line through fog, "I'll hit you" as an invitation to talk, and so on and on. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that, so far as I could tell, the entire cast of the book, heroes supporters and one-line interlopers, doesn't contain one single Jew. Not surprising, of course, given how few of them there really are in America, but quite refreshing for me.

Anyway, it's May. Order the book and take it with you to the beach this summer.

Back to 1948

I was blissfully offline last week, as large groups of notionally "Palestinians" tried to break through Israel's borders with Syria and Lebanon. So a week later I'm adding the obvious comment, whereby the demonstrators were not decrying Israeli settlements on the West Bank. They were demonstrating against the existence of the Jewish State. They were demanding that descendants of people who once lived in British Mandatory Palestine be allowed to move back. Israel could dismantle all settlements, move back to the Green Line, divide Jerusalem, set up an embassy on the Palestinian side of town, and apologize for decades of being not nice to the Palestinians, and these demonstrators wouldn't dream of being satisfied. And all the Western media that didn't explain this, or even condemned Israel for defending itself, are effectively lining up on the side of the Palestinian demand for a right of return.

I'm not certain why this needs to be pointed out, but sadly, it probably does.

Don't Divide Jerusalem: Roundup

I've collected my various posts on the idiocy of dividing Jerusalem and put them all in one place.

I've been telling people about this little project, in which I walk along the putative line of division and see what it looks like. Most people are quite startled: first, by the idea; then, upon reflection, by the fact that it's novel. You'd think there would be thousands of reports like this, that every new journalist coming to town would wish to report on what the line is supposed to look like, and that politicians who are so enamored by the idea would be shoving each other sideways in their haste to be photo-opped on the line. But no.

Dwindling Room for Optimism

Wherever I went in Germany, people assumed I joined them in welcoming the new democracy and freedom in the Arab world. In each case, I had to explain that I hoped for the best, but saw no particular reason to expect it. Now the New York Times has begun to backtrack:

The revolutions and revolts in the Arab world, playing out over just a few months across two continents, have proved so inspirational to so many because they offer a new sense of national identity built on the idea of citizenship.
But in the past weeks, the specter of divisions — religion in Egypt, fundamentalism in Tunisia, sect in Syria and Bahrain, clan in Libya — has threatened uprisings that once seemed to promise to resolve questions that have vexed the Arab world since the colonialism era. 

Actually, the specter of divisions and other bothersome matters were there all the time, of course. So there's nothing happening so far which is particularly surprising, and certainly nothing that couldn't have been foreseen at the height of the popular demonstrations. This isn't to say that the revolutions were always doomed to fail, nor that they're now certain to fail. Rather, anyone with a modest sense of history and human nature should never have been carried away in the first place, has little to be surprised about now, and should hope for a positive outcome. In any case, there's precious little any outsiders can do.

Nature is Stronger

Nature is stronger than Man, as these photos demonstrate.

Stuff from a Trip

The folks who invited me to Hamburg put the entire event on YouTube. The talk at Hamburg wasn't the best of the series - that would have been Weiden or Freiburg - but since the reason to travel was to get the word out, I'm linking. It will be useless, however, for readers who don't know German, which is the language generally spoken in Hamburg. The still photo from the video is ridiculous, I agree.

Along the way I met various journalists. The ones in Weiden put a summary of our talk online, tho they quite misunderstood my point about Egypt. Or maybe I wasn't clear.

Obama on the Middle East, Again

My initial reading of Obama's speech this afternoon is that he is learning.

The first two thirds, where he rattled on about the Arab Spring and so on, had all the right words, most of which he forgot to use in Cairo two years ago, and very little substance.

The section about Israel and Palestine seemed pretty good to me. On the clearly bright side, he ticked the following boxes: Israel as a Jewish state (twice), Israel's need for security, a demilitarized Palestine, and the silliness of the forthcoming September Spectacle which will do no-one any good. He also seemed to be saying, at least once, that the descendents of the Palestinian refugees will move to Palestine, implying they won't move to Israel.

On the dark side, he claimed once again that the present situation is unsustainable. Since it's been sustained, one way or the other, for 44 years, or 63, depending upon how you define it, it's hard to know what he means. Had he said it shouldn't be sustained, that would be different: that would be setting a goal. But can't be sustained? How so? He also castigated the ongoing construction in the settlements, which is disappointing because you'd think the president of the United States would have someone around him to explain that there's almost no construction going on. People who read the NYT can be fooled all the time, but isn't the President supposed to be briefed each morning by an assortment of spooks, analysts other types who get paid to really know what they're talking about?

Then there were the gray parts, where different Israelis would have differing interpretations as to whether his speech was positive or negative. He said the partition would be based on the line of 1949-67. Many of us recognize that this may not be historically, legally or morally the case, but practically, it is. Like it or not, that's the line the negotiations have been focusing on for years, and as the man said, there will be adaptation of it, but it does serve as the base of the negotiations.

His direct contradiction of Netanyahu's position of let's wait and wait some more, will trouble Netanyahu and his fans, but is actually plausible. We should hurry up, because there's nothing to be gained by waiting. Or is there anything to be gained by being passive while the world around us is active.

Most significant of all in my mind was that Obama did not repeat the universally silly line about how peace can be achieved anytime soon. On the contrary, he resoundingly forgot to mention Jerusalem, except to say that it will need to be talked about some other time, as will the Right of Return. In effect, his speech adopted the position of Avigdor Lieberman (and most Israelis) about moving towards a partial resolution of the conflict rather than a final resolution.

Update: It occurs to me he also seemed to say the Palestinians have some explaining to do about their new unity government with Hamas. Tick that box, too.

He has learned something these past two years. Good for him.

The B'Tselem Witch Trials

I continue to be offline, sorry for the inconvenience. In the meantime, here's an interesting article about a subject I often write about. Noah Pollak takes a long hard look at B'Tselem.

Israel at 63

We're approaching 8 million people: ten times the population in 1948, but still one of the world's smaller countries, not that you'd know it from all the noise about us.

Yad Vashem generally estimates the number of Jews murdered in the Shoah as close to 5.8 million. The number of Jews in Israel today is 5,837,000. Most of the 322,000 non-Jewish immigrants are culturally Jewish, and their definition has more to do with the politics of religion than with reality.

For a demonstration of how committed Israelis are to their national project, I recommend Alex Stein's blogpost yesterday. Alex is decidedly to the left of most of us, but not in a loony way. He's description of Israel and his feelings about it are easily echoed by almost all of us, and the disagreements we'd have with him are much less important than the agreement.

I posted my own thoughts on the matter in a concise way on Independence Day three years ago; the words are exactly right today still. Israel's First Century.

Lectures in Germany

For whatever reason there seem to be many German readers of this blog. If any of them are interested in introducing themselves, starting Thursday I'll  be lecturing in Berlin, Erfurt, Bremen, Hamburg, Weiden (yup) and Freiburg. In Berlin it's the Mideast Freedom Forum Berlin, in most other places the local DIG will have the details.

Blogging may well be slow over the next week or so.

Eliezer's Handshake

We're not close friends, Eliezer and I. He's almost a decade older than my father would have been, were he still alive. Born in a small town in Eastern Europe, he was a teenager when his father sent him off to Budapest in the hope things would be better there, which in a way they probably were, since Eliezer survived and the rest of his family didn't. I think about that sometimes: The teenager sent off by his father; the survivor now twice as old as his father ever was.

After the war he came to Israel, and in the 1950s started a family, but it wasn't a happy ending. His second son has disabilites, and today, in his early 50s, you can still see this pains Eliezer. His wife, the mother of his three children, died of cancer in about 1970; I remember how her slow death was whispered at school, and can only imagine how horrible it was for her, and for him. Their oldest son, Avi, about whom I've written here and elsewhere, was scarred by his mother's death, to an extent that even we, teenager boys, could recognize. Then in 1982 he was killed in battle, landing Eliezer yet another body blow.

He's not a cheerful man, Eliezer, but he's very much alive. At our synagogue he's one of the stalwarts of the conservative branch of the congregation, the ones who are wary of some of the more liberal innovations which sometimes are mooted, yet he's always respectful of the liberalizers who could be his grandchildren, and they treat him with courtesy and accept that some changes can't be done so long as he and his group are still with us. A few years ago he was seriously ill, and it would have been reasonable to suppose he'd reached the tipping point beyond which old men fade away, but no. He lay at home for a few weeks, then determinedly made his way to synagogue with a walker, then a cane, and now he's back to normal; I often see him at the pool.

We're not close friends, Eliezer and I, but he knows I preserve Avi's memory, and this has created a bond between us. "Your husband knew my son Avi", he once said to my wife, who responded "I know". "You do? How?" "They were friends, Avi and Yaacov, and Yaacov remembers, and talks about him".

It's memorial day, and last week was Yom Hashoah, and tomorrow evening we'll begin celebrating Israel's 63rd Independence Day, and Eliezer is part of all these days. I usually make a point of going over to him after services to shake his hand. His grip is the steeliest handshake I've ever experienced.

Early Summer Reading List

Here are some books I've heard good things about, in no particular order.

Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, has written a memoir. Apparently he really doesn't like the other co-founder, watzizname, but other than that it's a fine book. Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft.

Michael Korda has written a very good biography of Lawrence of Arabia, Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia. Given that the things Lawrence dealt with are very much still with us, it's probably worth the time.

Having mentioned those two books, it occurs to me that a while ago a reader asked what sort of books are on my wish list. Well, it's a long list, it continually gets longer, and life is not going to be long enough for all of it, so there's no actual danger that by sharing it will disappear, is there. So here are a handful of the specimens:

Norman Geras, Crimes against Humanity: Birth of a Concept

Edward Dolnick, The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World

Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams, by Charles King

The Koran: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Michael Cook

A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles by Thomas Sowell

Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism (Columbia/Hurst) by John Calvert

The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain by Benzion Netanyahu (Bibi's dad)

As Meat Loves Salt (Harvest Original) by Maria McCann

I dare anyone to come up with a common thread, except for the fact that they're all available on Amazon.

The Never Noticed War

For all that I've tried once or twice, I've never quite managed to figure out what the 1st World War was all about. Something about balance of powers, or retraining German militarism, or something. Yet this vagueness is as nothing when compared to what was probably the third worst war in the 20th century, and by far the worst since the 2nd World War: the war in Congo. Perhaps five million people perished, the killing never really ended, and yet the international community, the UN, the world's media, and everyone else, basically didn't notice; in the rare cases when they did, no-one ever tried seriously to explain what was going on.

Now there's a book which tries to explain, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa, by Jason Stearns. The Economist reviews it approvingly here. I don't know if everyone interested in world politics needs to read it, but I can't think why not.

The Hubris of the International Lawmongers

Here's a very short and necessarily superficial summary of the theory of lawmaking in modern democratic societies.

The people are sovereign, or rather the broad section of the people which comprises the electorate. The electorate periodically chooses its representatives and sends them to the legislature. The legislature legislates: it debates, formulates and passes laws, which thus express a rough approximation of the people's will. The laws are sent out into the real world, where they are tested, refined, and elaborated through a complex process of decrees, practice, litigation and adjudication, and general public discussion, not in any particular order. On the contrary, this is a permanent multi-layered process. Decrees are promulgated by the executive, which is itself subordinate to the sovereign people; adjudication is done, obviously, by judges, and they too are subordinate to the electorate either because they must deal with the law as legislated, or through the mode of their appointment, or through whatever channels each democratic society chooses to control its judges. Ultimately much of the ongoing creation of the law and its application reflect moral values as they're defined by each society. Does it prefer to encourage risk taking over security, say, or how it chooses to allocate its limited resources. Successfully functioning democratic societies strive towards a common ground, a rough consensus around which most members can coalesce, and they navigate inevitable changes in social mores, technology, and all the myriad other things that change and evolve over time, in an approximation of general agreement. Societies which cannot roughly agree, because they're too diverse or haven't agreed on principles of managing legislation and its evolution, run the danger of disintegration or worse.

Telegraphic summary of the summary: the sovereign people figure out how they wish to organize their particular society and how they wish it to evolve, and their institutions strive to express this agreement.

International law doesn't have a sovereign, and worse, it doesn't have a universally accepted notion of priorities, mores, or institutions to express them. True, there are valiant attempts to pretend otherwise, and over the past half century or so they've grown ever more valiant. These include the creation of international institutions with a cursory appearance of democratic institutions such as a parliament, an executive and courts. There is a conceit whereby there's a set of fundamental documents which define universal mores, and these documents enjoy democratic legitimacy since they've been ratified by national institutions such as parliaments or governments. Yet the obvious fact that most of the parliaments or governments which did the ratifying were themselves not democratic should give us pause; the lack of credible accountable institutions for applying and evolving the old fundamental documents ought to convince that the entire system may be a noble and well-intentioned attempt, but it's not remotely possibly successful. Nor can it be: the idea of having a sovereign electorate is to preserve its power to change its mind. Almost by definition different societies will change their minds in different directions: because they're different.

An interesting example rarely mentioned in such discussions but which I have seen close up many times is the availability of archival documentation. Roughly speaking, American archivists reflect the will of their society by assuming documentation should be thrown open to public scrutiny as much as possible. Europeans, meanwhile, and especially Germans, are far more wary. Neither side is "right", and both sides have reached their present positions through an understanding of their respective histories; since the histories are very different, so is the legislation. Anyone who reads newspapers perceptively can easily put together their own long list of other examples. This is inevitable, it reflects the human condition, and it should be celebrated not bemoaned.

Unless you're of the opinion that there's a set of universal rules in which one size fits all. To an extent, the European Union project sort of takes this position - but the extreme reluctance to let in the Muslim Turks or the impoverished and hardly democratic Ukrainians demonstrates loud and clear that the EU project isn't universal, it's merely European, and can include only those societies who can be trusted to agree to the same broad consensus. I expect it will take another century or three to know if this can work even in Europe. Imagine trying to incorporate the US and you see how silly the conceit of universality is; then think of China or Russia. Heh.

None of which stops folks from pretending. The German Der Spiegel magazine, for example:

What is just about killing a feared terrorist in his home in the middle of Pakistan? For the families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks, and for patriotic Americans who saw their grand nation challenged by a band of criminals, the answer might be simple. But international law experts, who have been grappling with the question of the legal status of the US-led war on terror for years, find Obama's pithy words on Sunday night more problematic. Claus Kress, an international law professor at the University of Cologne, argues that achieving retributive justice for crimes, difficult as that may be, is "not achieved through summary executions, but through a punishment that is meted out at the end of a trial." Kress says the normal way of handling a man who is sought globally for commissioning murder would be to arrest him, put him on trial and ultimately convict him. In the context of international law, military force can be used in the arrest of a suspect, and this may entail gun fire or situations of self-defense that, in the end, leave no other possibility than to kill a highly dangerous and highly suspicious person. These developments can also lead to tragic and inevitable escalations of the justice process.[my emphasis]

Translation: Claus Kress and other unnamed self-appointed legal experts trump the sovereign will of the American people. It's not historical fact that punishment can be meted out only via trials, so Kress can't be talking history. He's talking law, or anyway he thinks he is. Except that of course he's not, since he allows no room for an adaptation of law to new circumstances. Nor does he grant the American people the right or legitimacy to fashion their own response to a new situation. If the murder of 3000 people in New York is hiding in Pakistan, America may not chose the manner it will deal with him, rather it must do what Claus Kress says, since he represents a higher justice than the mere will of the American people. Moreover, his interpretation trumps theirs, since he knows he's right. And of course, Claus Kress is against capital punishment, as most Europeans are, and the international court he's referring to has no capital punishment on its books, so there's no way in which the Americans could have legally caused the death of Osama Bin Laden unless he was shooting at American policemen with a legal arrest warrant.

Kress isn't important as an individual. I'm criticizing him because he represents a widely accepted Weltanschauung.

Kenneth Roth agrees, but takes the hubris a very important step forward. Roth is an American, so on one level he, unlike Kress, is a legitimate participant in the American discussion of how America should deal with its enemies. Yet Roth doesn't refer to American law, rather to international law; actually, he doesn't refer to law at all, rather to a philosophical principle which he adheres to and demands that all the rest of us do, too:

It's not "justice" for him to be killed even if justified; no trial, conviction.

What makes this statement positively comic is that it came in a tweet in which he rebutted the Secretary General of - are you sitting? - The United Nations! Ban ki Moon, you see, had just announced his satisfaction at the death of Osama bin Laden. Roth then turned to the American government and demanded:

White House still hasn't clarified: OBL "resisted" but how did he pose lethal threat to US forces on scene? Need facts

It's a fine thing that individual citizens can place demands on their government. It's an essential part of democracy. What's so repulsive is the strident demand that a democratically elected government justify its actions - pronto! - to an unelected, and very much unelectable private individual who sees himself as superior to the democratic process of his country, in the name of an undemocratic system which lacks all the elements of a living legal system.

It's tempting simply to write people like Kress and Roth off as kooks. Sadly, Kress represents a widely accepted theology in Europe, and Roth has an impressive cachet in some circles in America; they are supported by many very cynical governments who have very limited patience with their sentiments when it comes to their own societies, but find the appeal of intervening on the sovereignty of other lands irresistible Feeling superior at the expense of America is fun; garnering points from the large Muslim contingent at the UN by rigorously applying these notions to Israel is painless. On that level, it's hard to know if Roth is a knave or a dupe. Knave for propagating a crooked and anti-democratic system, dupe for being the tool of hard, undemocratic and unscrupulous regimes. I expect he's both.

Update: Apropos theology, the Archbishop of Canterbury joins the chorus.

Bin Laden Still Popular in Israel's Neighborhood

Yesterday I linked to the story about the Hamas Prime Minster, no less, who condemned America's killing of Bin Laden. Meanwhile he has been joined by others. The Al-Aqsa martyrs Brigades - that's Fatah, if you keep track of such matters, not Hamas; Fatah as in Mahmoud Abbas - published a long statement condemning the killing and calling it a catastrophe. And no, the explanation that it's Fatah's military wing, not its political wing, is not helpful. These people are claiming the right to a sovereign state, for crying out loud; would we brush off a separate foreign policy of the Syrians, say? The Russians? Karl Vick, a journalist not known for Zionist inclinations, wandered around Ramallah yesterday and found some support for Bin Laden even after his death, though of course Vick allows the supporters to explain it's Israel's fault. An imam in El Aksa mosque told Obama he'd soon be hanged for his crime of killing Bin Laden. The Economist, a bit more cool-headed, reports that support for Bin Laden among Palestinians has declined over recent years from 70% in 2003 to a mere third not long before he was killed. How reassuring.

Over in Egypt, the Muslim Brothers have also lined up on the wrong side of the current discussion. Something to keep in mind the next time a clueless media type assures us the Brotherhood is eager to be an Egyptian version of a European Christian Democratic party or some such silliness.

Of course, the Europeans weren't all unanimously overjoyed by the killing either, though not because they liked Bin Laden; rather, it seems there's a significant constituency in Europe for the idea that extra-judicial killings are always wrong, no matter what the circumstances. This is not at all the same as Muslim support for Bin Laden, but it does help explain why too many Europeans can't get their heads around the facts of Islamism. There are other facts they can't comprehend, either, because they don't fit the paradigm of how the world ought to be, which makes explaining Israel's positions largely impossible to such people. Personally, I think the sentiment that there's an international system of law which overrides anything else and must dictate everyone's behavior, is quaint at best on the day after the world's most powerful nation has just demonstrated it doesn't accept the idea: if not the US, and certainly not many others, what might be the source of authority for such talk except wistful thinking?

But I digress.

Too many Palestinians and others in Israel's neighborhood are firmly on the wrong side in the war between the Islamists and humanity. They are the enemy. This has to be clear, and the myriad attempts to obfuscate it must be countered. At the same time, the fact that too many Palestinians support humanity's enemies is not a justification for building more settlements on the West Bank, nor must it inevitably dictate that Israel needs to assist the Palestinians in their war against us by sitting on them and granting them perpetual propaganda victories for their victimhood. It doesn't even mean that the Palestinians can't have a state, such as everybody else has.

Thinking adults in a democracy can be - must be - expected to be capable of holding contradictory thoughts simultaneously.

(Short addendum: the strange people who inhabit the Mondoweiss universe are deeply troubled by the killing of Bin Laden. The reason this is significant is that it demonstrates how far from any type of American normality these folks are; this probably means their extreme aversion to Israel is just as far removed, and just as unlikely ever to have a politically significant public).

Hamas Mourns Bin Laden, Condemns his Killers

I suppose it's not surprising that Ismail Haniya, the Hamas prime minister in Gaza, responded to the killing by stating that

the operation is "the continuation of the American oppression and shedding of blood of Muslims and Arabs."

Still, surprising or not, from now on whenever someone tells us Israel must accommodate itself to Hamas, we need to put on a puzzled face and say something along the lines of "Hamas? Weren't they the ones who condemned the Americans for killing Bin Laden? That Hamas?"  If needed, one can add that Haniya is often described as a moderate Hamas fellow, not one of your militant types at all actually.

Killing Bin Laden

The killing of Osama Bin Laden is an unalloyed good thing. Congratulation to all the American officials who contributed, and to any others who assisted.