Charles Krauthammer on Israel at 60

He goes to the fundamentals, and is of course right. Sometimes, it's refreshing to step back from the endless fixation on the complexities of the story and to look at the big picture.

I liked his quotation:

As historian Barbara Tuchman once wrote, Israel is "the only nation in the world that is governing itself in the same territory, under the same name, and with the same religion and same language as it did 3,000 years ago."

Forgiving in Rwanda

A fascinating story about how Rwandans are trying to put the genocide behind them. Apparently low-level murderers, i.e. the ones following orders and brutally slaughtering their neighbors with machetes and axes, can in some cases come before their community, including the survivors, and if they tell the truth about what they did and beg forgiveness, it is granted. Even by the survivors themselves.

The item gives no numbers or general context (well, it's CNN, after all), so we don't know if the forgiving is widespread, total, or rare, nor what happens when someone doesn't play their "alloted" role. Still, it is interesting that this avenue exists, and it least in some cases also works. We already knew from the survivors of the Shoah that the endless talk about how people with grievances will be bitter, violent, and seek revenge was not the only human option, and that people can make moral decisions no matter how much they have suffered. Some variation of this seems to be operating also in Rwanda.

Playing the Bad Guys Against One Another

Most of the time there isn't all that much difference between the politics of the Guardian and those of the New York Review of Books. A pox on both their houses, as the Bard concisely put it. Sometimes, however, there are differences, and this week has given me the opportunity to play the one off the other on two related yet separate issues.

First, what makes the Islamists tick, or perhaps, why don't we get rid of the Israel problem so we'll have world peace.

The insufferable Seamus Milne, of the Guardian of course, dedicates his column this time to how bad Israel is for the world. Seamus is so ideological and predictable, along with being consistently easy with his facts, that you really needn't read him. He's a waste of your time. His main theme in life is that Colonialism is the greatest crime ever, more or less, and he dedicates much of this column to reminding us that Israel is a creation of British colonialism and is itself colonial. The introductory paragraph ot the column, however, as well as it's final shot, explain how Israel is so especially bad:

The commitment to Palestinian rights should first of all be a question of justice. But, given the toxicity this conflict brings to the entire relationship with the Muslim world, it is also a matter of obvious western self-interest.

Israel is the reason for the ill-will between Islamists and humanity.

Well, no, says Malise Ruthven at the NYRB, who has just taken the time to read nine (9) new books about Islamism, and has come to report. There is the obligatory dig or two at Bush and even one at Kissinger, but all in all, it appears that Islamist terror is a complex thing, building on a variety of impulses, some of them centuries old.

Conventional wisdom generally holds that a resolution of the problems of Palestine and Jerusalem is the sine qua non for addressing wider geopolitical issues afflicting relations between the Islamic and Western worlds. By removing images of Palestinian persecution from Muslim television screens, a peace settlement would take the sting out of an issue that carries a formidable symbolic charge. But the Israeli occupation, though a constant source of pain and humiliation, is only one of many issues the global jihadists have in their sights.

(In an aside, and for the record, allow me to state unequivocally that "Conventional Wisdom" is a fool.)

Seamus is not worth reading; Ruthven actually is, if you have the time.

The second theme where the NYRB beats the Guardian this week, is the possibility of an Obama presidency ending the war in Iraq. Both of the following articles agree that an Obama presidency is what we all want (tho the NYRB one pretends Hillary is still in the running). They also both agree on the bottom line. It's their different lines of reasoning that make the comparison interesting.

Jonathan Steele (Guardian) really likes Obama, first and foremost because as a six year old in Indonesia, young Barack came to understand how evil an imperial power the United States really is. (I assure you, this is the essence of what he says. It doesn't seem to occur to him that if this was an accurate description, no American electorate would ever send him to the White House). On the other hand, Steele is already bracing himself for disappointments, because - you guessed - Obama is already failing on Israel. In a fine demonstration of how obsessed people like him are with Israel, Steel dedicates about a third of his article to how awful we are. Bottom line: Since Obama has failed on the "Israel test", he will probably also fail on the "Iraq test".

Thomas Powers at the NYRB agrees that the US won't leave Iraq anytime soon, but his article is at least interesting. He read ten (10!) books, and parts of what he tells isn't even so well known. The degree to which a mind-set from on-high seems to have blinded American decision-makers on all levels, comes as a mild surprise. Not a total surprise, mind you. There really is something disconcerting about the way the present administration decides what reality is and acts accordingly no matter what: in the belief that Islam is a Religion of Peace, for example, or in the inability to see how awful the Saudis are. And I don't think any reasonable person can commend the Americans for the events in Iraq those first years after the invasion, no matter which side of the divide you started out on.

At the end of his review, however, Powers describes what he expects will happen after January 2009 - ad it's not what Conventional Wisdom says.

The Labor Union Wishes Well

The power of organized labor in Israel is considerably less than it used to be (and most workers, though not all, make a better living). Some unions however are still quite strong, and none other than the union of workers of the electricity company (a monopoly). Since they have the power to shut down the country, and in the past have demonstrated their willingness to use it, they are largely unbeatable and untouched. The rest of us pay the price.

So there's a new boss at the electricity company, and yesterday he announced a new efficiency plan. This morning the union published its initial reaction, before settling down to learn the details and formulate their response: "We wish the boss well, and hope he'll stay at his job long enough for us to negotiate this with him".

BBC on Israel at 60

Their website has (or at least, had) a very large banner with the optimistic headline Israel at 60. When you click on it, it leads here, to a full page of menus and features relating to Israel.

Or not.

I expect one could spend an hour or two going through all the materials collected on this section. Some of it, no doubt, must be balanced, fair, and informative. But it's the BBC, remember, the place where the favorite newspaper among the staff is The Guardian. So all you really have to do is take a good look at this introductory screen, and you'll be left with no doubt about the BBC's line on Israel.

Top bar: "Israel at 60". And two images, one of Israel's flag,the other of the Palestinian one.

Next line. A picture of Ben Gurion, perhaps declaring the creation of the state, and a title: "60 Years of Middle East Division". Not, say, 60 years of creation in the face of adversity, or 100 years of Middle East Division (90 would probably be the most accurate number). The main theme, you see, is the conflict with the Palestinians.

Next is a bar with 3 items. A brief history of Israel, statistics, and maps. I peeked. The maps are reasonable. The statistics start all right but then veer sharply into the Israel-Palestinian issue, with lots of purportedly accurate but actually misleading data from - inevitably - Be'tselem. After all, there's no one else around, is there? The link to the history of Israel is actually a link to the history of the conflict. After all, what is Israel if not its wars.

Next line, three links with pictures. The story of a Palestinian refugee, the story of a Palestinian camp, and the story of a mixed city in Israel. No, not mixed Russians-Moroccans-Yemenites-Americans-French-Algerians-Ethiopians. What were you thinking? Jaffa. Mixed Jews-Palestinians, of course. Again, I peeked. Jaffa is the site of Yehuda Poliker's powerful song about starting a new life in a foreign country, based on a letter by his father. No mention of the Bulgarians on the BBC's story, alas.

Next line: A title that indicates Israelis are weary. Then one about the issues that fuel the conflict. Finally, off to the right of the screen, a series of pictures of Palestinians.

Bottom row, three links with images: A British soldier remembers; a Christian Palestinian remembers; and finally, an Arab Israeli has problems.

You don't image there's a pattern here, do you?

Asia Times on Israel at 60

Asia Times Online is an English and Chinese online newspaper that look at the world form Asia, not the West. This week they have a very interesting piece on why Israel is such a successful place. A recommended antidote to the Guardian et.al, even if only for the few minutes it will take you to read it.

It is fashionable these days to speculate about the end of Israel, and Israel's strategic position presents scant cause for optimism, as I contended recently. Israel's future depends on the Israelis. During 2,000 years of exile, Jews remained Jews despite forceful and often violent efforts to make them into Christians or Muslims. One has to suppose that they did not abandon Judaism because they liked being Jewish. With utmost sincerity, the Jews prayed thrice daily, "It is our duty to praise the Master of all, to acclaim the greatness of the One who forms all creation, for God did not make us like the nations of other lands, and did not make us the same as other families of the Earth. God did not place us in the same situations as others, and our destiny is not the same as anyone else's."

If the Israelis are the happiest country on Earth, as the numbers indicate, it seems possible that they will do what is required to keep their country, despite the odds against them.

What a novel thought: the Israelis will not fail because they are determined not to fail. Who would have ever thought of such a thing.

The Funniest Picture Ever

Miriam Zur at 16, posing for the camera on the beach of Tel Aviv, June 22, 1948.

Her grandaughter found the snapshot in a shoe box a few years ago, and sent it to Haaretz recently in response to their call for pictures of ordinary Israelis in the national epic. (I can't find the link on www.haaretz.com, which says something about their website and its user-unfriendliness).

The commotion in the background, distracting us from how pretty Miriam is? Oh, that's the Altalena burning. One of the most dramatic events in Israel's endless series of dramas. One of the most formative events in more than a century of Zionism. A day on which Israeli soldiers fought Israeli irregulars with casualties on both sides, with the five-week-old state of Israel as the undisputed victor. A day such as the lack of which has damned the Palestinians to generations of suffering, and the Lebanese too.

It was also the day Miriam managed to get her picture taken on the beach.

Zahar: Black is White

Mahmoud a-Zahar yesterday held a press conference in which he related to the prospects of a cease fire in and around Gaza. Parts of it were repeatedly broadcast on our radio, but I can't find any mention of it anywhere online, except in this garbled rendition in Haaretz (3rd paragraph from the bottom). What he said (in English!) was that if Israel didn't agree to the terms of Hamas, Hamas has ample possibilities "to continue the defense against the Israeli settlements and cities around Gaza".

The Stench of Evil

While significant chunks of world opinion endlessly tells itself that America is the world's worst calamity and that Israel is even worse, every now and then a report seeps through to make your blood run cold. The Observer (at the Guardian's website) offers a long report about the sub-human situation of the women of Yemen (with grim comparisons to other parts of the Arab world).

It's horrifying. And it's sanctioned by somebody's God. And the only hope offered by the article is that Oxfam is sort of trying to perhaps make things a wee bit better at the edges of the issue.

It's a sick world we live in. Twisted.

The Fog of War

A few weeks back I commented on how hard it is really to know what's going on in wars, and in Iraq in particular. Today's NYT offers another example.

Remember how late in March, all of 7 weeks ago, everyone was talking about the Iraqi government's disastrous attempt to gain control of Basra? (Some of the pundits were crowing and gloating as if this was the best thing they could imagine). Well, perhaps the contemporaries didn't know what was really going on, or perhaps they did but it changed after their attention turned elsewhere, or perhaps they were right and the NYT is now wrong, or perhaps there are other explanations. What's clear is that the report filed this morning by two NYT fellows in Basra is anything but what we were led to believe (or had stuffed down our throats) less than two months ago.

What's the moral of the story? I dunno. That the media can't ever be fully trusted. That pundits should be trusted even less. That wars are complicated events. That most of us, most of the time, see the reality we wish to see, not the one that's there. All of the above and some. I report, you scratch your heads.

Parsing a Survey in the Economist

The Economist is perhaps the best weekly magazine in the world. It is clearly a front runner for the title of most informative source of reportage on the entire world, in the world. It’s a serious paper, not like the Guardian or its ilk. It commands a wide readership of well over a million, many of them influential and powerful.

Its coverage of Israel can be reasonable – and it can be infantile and ridiculous. Here is a 2800-word survey of the Palestinians, published this May of 2008, which is never overtly anti-Israel, but is never-the-less twisted, warped, and nasty.

My response is here.

Contra Naqba

Efraim Karsh takes a second look at heaps of British documents from the end of their control over Mandatory Palestine, and learns that most Palestinians would have been willing to live alongside Israel, had it not been for an aggressive leadership that pushed towards war with the Jews, and forced its own people to get out of the way and come back once the Jews were gone.

Meanwhile, Shlomo Avineri takes a look at the Palestinian story from a different perspective, sees a different process, but essentially the same result. Avineri is further to the left than Karsh, and he's a political scientist to Karsh's historian. The way Avineri sees things, the Palestinian's problem is that they never managed to cobble together a responsible national leadership that would offer their people institutions whereby to execute any sort of national policy.

I liked his comparison of the Palestinian failure with the Algerian success: surely the Algerians faced a far more brutal foe than the Palestinians ever did, but the Algerians created a national structure that brought them ultimate victory. On second thought, however, before going agog about how successful the Algerian national movement has been it's worth keeping in mind that the numbers of Algerians butchered by other Algerians is significantly larger than the total numbers of Palestinians and Israelis together who have been killed these past hundred years or so.

Neither Karsh nor Avineri use the most important documentation: that of the Palestinians. Though I'm not aware of anyone else who has, either. Assuming it exists in any accessible form, which it may not, or certainly not fully.

Contra Haredim

Rav Benny Lau (of our community) chose the 60th Anniversary as the moment to launch an attack on the Haredi control of the rabbinate.

Most of what he writes is not particularly new, though some of the recent examples of Haredi meddling, most notably their attempt to revoke thousands of conversions not done by them, have indeed been particularly aggravating. Not many people outside the Haredi community would disagree with him.

The weakest part of his argument is that the religious Zionist camp is ever less unified itself. Some parts of it are drifting towards the Haredis, or away from Zionism because a majority of the Zionists disagree with them about the Divine command to control the West Bank; on the other end of their spectrum, a significant minority of their children are leaving the fold as they reach adulthood. It appears, unfortunately, that their own message could use some tinkering or re-evaluation.

Which is too bad, since one of their main ideas: that one can and should be orthodox and fully modern simultaneously, offers a better balance than most of the alternatives.

Meanwhile, my erstwhile teacher Menahem Ben Sasson, currently an important member of Knesset, looks at the issue of the Haredi moves from a more constitutional perspective. His argument, however, is not all that different from Benny Lau's.

Juan Cole's Fine Appraisal of Israel at 60

I'm not being facetious. Cole's post, titled "Happy 60th to Israel", really is a startlingly positive description of some of the ways Israel is making the world a better place (he concentrates on technology and medicine). I've linked to it for a number of reasons:
1. Seeing as I tend to castigate him almost every time he's wrong about Israel, it would be dishonest of me (and churlish) not to praise him when he's right.
2. The Popperian in me forbids me to overlook this unevenness in the pattern; even if it makes Cole's criticism of Israel just a bit more serious for coming from a man who can be complex rather than simplistic.
3. When it comes to Israel, Cole's voice is one of the more aggravating ones on the American scene. Yet occasionally he has these "lapses" which remind us that the public sphere in the US is fundamentally different from the scene in Europe. Whoever his counterparts are in Europe, they have fewer such "lapses", and their hostility is harsher.
4. Yet even the hostility in Europe can at times be tinged by the results of a few centuries of enlightened thought. Posts such as this one from Cole, or this one from the Guardian, remind us that for all the differences in positions, there remains at least some residue of rational thinking and modes of discussing in which most of the political discourse in the democracies is still embedded. (Though see my "Rational Discourse" label for examples of how this is weakening). This is not true when dealing with most of Israel's shooting enemies. Hamas, Hezbulllah, Iran, but also large chunks of the so-called "moderate" part of the Arab world are not committed at all, on any level, to the rationality that is still largely accepted in the West.

Israel's First Century: A Rumination on the 60th Independance Day

200 hundred years from now, or 500, or a thousand, long after the travails of the present have been resolved, our descendants will look back at Israel's first century with awe, seeing us as the larger than life generations who grasped the already ancient history of the Jews and forced it into new channels. How we rose like ashes after the Shoah and reached achievements unequaled for the previous two millenia. How we faced multitudes of enemies for generations and didn't flinch. How practically alone among the nations created after WWII we preserved democracy and created affluence to compare with those of Europe and North America. How we wrestled a tradition of millenia from its limited domain in the houses of religious learning to vibrant creativity at the service of a sovereign nation. How we reignited the vitality of a battered people and set it on a healthier and richer path. How we made endless idiotic mistakes but created the possibility to correct them. How we bequeathed to our descendants a renewed and exuberant heritage, at the precise moment in history when this was the least likely outcome.

How we came home, and it was good.

Israel at 60: Two Reevaluations

Shimon Peres has been on Israel's public scene for as long as there has been one; hopefully someday he'll have a biographer worthy of his fascinating story. Now in his mid-80s, he's having some second thoughts about positions he defended with true fury as recently as last decade.

I believed the separation between the West Bank and Gaza would make things easier, not harder. I did not imagine that we would leave Gaza and they would fire Qassams from there; I did not imagine that Hamas would show so strongly in the elections.

Meanwhile, over at the Guardian someone is willing to reexamine some of their pet beliefs about the evil Israelis. Admittedly, Jonathan Freedland was never the most hostile voice at the Guardian (that dubius distinction might go to Seamus Milne - or of course, to many of their guest authors). Freedland isn't much more critical than many of the voices at Haaretz, with the one crucial distinction that the Haaretz people live here and pay for their mistakes like the rest of us, while Freedland need bear no responsibility for his thoughts. Having said that, however, his reflections on Israel at 60 are interesting and reasonable, all the more so for appearing in the Guardian.

Yom Hazikaron 2008: A Story

Posted over here.

Judeo-Arab Conspiracy: Shut Down

I have just posted the following over at Judeo-Arab Conspiracy, explaining why the exercise won't work:

Judeo-Arab Conspiracy has been active less than two weeks, but we're shutting down. The reason for this is that I (Yaacov) raised doubts about Ibrahim's identity, and Ibrahim did not allay them.

I explained my motivation for inviting Ibrahim to join me in this exercise here. Already then we had a built-in problem, in that my identity is clear and transparent, and Google will tell you all about me, while Ibrahim ibn Yusuf is not the person's real name. I was willing to accept this, since I know from experience how hard it is, perhaps even impossible, to find an Arab willing to engage an Israeli in dialogue between equals. Israelis who start by beating their breasts are alright, but not the ones who are comfortable with their country. Apparently, Arabs who talk to that sort put themselves in danger in their own communities.

In my eagerness to engage in this dialogue I was obviously not careful enough. I asked Ibrahim some questions, and decided to accept his word when he responded. Perhaps this was a leftover from my "peace camp" years: we like to assume that the folks facing us are like us, their motivations are similar to ours, the only difference being that they're on the other side of the argument. Anyway, I didn't see any real danger in setting off on this joint project, so set off we did.

The next thing that happened was what anyone who understands the Internet could have foreseen: I began to get responses from readers who thought they knew who Ibrahim really is, readers whom I otherwise would never have encountered. Some of them supplied me with telephone numbers, creating a deeper level of contact than mere e-mails.

When I confronted Ibrahim with the information I was getting, he refrained from disproving it. Faced with the likelihood that there is nothing particularly Arab about him, I don't see how we can continue blogging at a place that defines itself as "A joint blog of a Jewish Zionist and an Arab Anti-Zionist".

The Challenge:

I continue to believe that Israel's positions (though not every single action) are generally defensible, and am willing to stand up to anyone who feels otherwise. Should there be anyone out there who wishes to continue where Ibrahim was not, they know where to find me. They will, of course, need to be google-able, if there is such a word.

Until then, it is my intention to desist from responding to anyone who is not willing to stand forth and identify themselves with their positions.

Yaacov Lozowick

I-Pod of Books

As I blog this evening, I'm sitting with my back to a wall of books. Facing me, across the room, is another wall of books. The very lighting of the room consists (partly) of two series of spots glancing down the shelves towards the hardwood floor, highlighting the books. My favorite corner is the red-upholstered armchair under the 90-year-old reading light. On the shelf next to this desk are a pile of books I've read over the past few months which I'd like to summarize here on Ruminations before I put them in permanent positions on the shelves.

I cannot imagine my life without books.

Today I probably spent two hours reading about Amazon's new gadget, the Kindle, watching the films they've put up on their website, and so on. It's fascinating, in many ways. The way they've thought through the process of defining what it is they wanted, how to go about achieving it, and what they tell us about it. I'm greatly impressed by the way Jeff Bezos, the boss, tells in the plural about their efforts. After all, he didn't do the research, the designing, the manufacturing, any of it. His many underlings did. Yet by telling with great excitement about what "we wanted to do", and "how we did it", he most likely encouraged all those subordinates to strive ever more to succeed at the common goal. (Not all of my bosses were always like that, and I probably wasn't so perfect at it myself as a boss).

Will it make the difference he says it will? Will it all prove to be costly ephemeral hype? Will it add another fortune to Bezos' bank account, but be forgotten by next year? Only time will tell, won't it. Even if it does everything he says it might, I don't expect the books on the bookshelves to disappear in my lifetime. But perhaps future generations will see things differently.

Public Commemoration

For most Israelis, the eight days between Yom Hashoah (commemorating the Holocaust), Yom Hazikaron (commemorating the fallen soldiers and victims of terror attacks) and Yom Haatzmaut (Independence Day) are a charged period. For some more than for others, obviously, and for each of us in our own individual way, with our own particular emphases. Much of it, however, is communal, at least as much as private.

On the mornings of Yom Hashoah and Yom Hazikaron sirens go off all across the land, and everyone stops whatever they're doing and stands at attention for the two minutes. I expect this isn't the case in the towns of the Israeli Arabs, and the Ultra orthodox (Haredim) dislike the gesture for its "non-Jewish" origins, but elsewhere, everyone goes along with the gesture, mostly sincerely, often with great earnestness. The two pictures here show how even motorized traffic halts, as the drivers get out of their vehicles - even in the middle of an intersection - and stand solemnly.
(Agrippa St. in Jerusalem, last Thursday, photos taken by Nava Silvera).

Of course, since we're a democracy, we obviously have our scoffers, and some of them inevitably get published, where they tell us that we're totalitarian bolshies who force unthinking conformity on ourselves; the fact that they get published underlining how unserious they are.