Discussing Israel's Actions - 1

A rabbi from Sderot traveled to the US to tell people about life under fire. Not everyone was interested:

When I welcomed the custom of a question and answer period following my presentation, the very right of free speech that I welcomed to the audience of now over 100 people was thrown in my face and denied to me. First, an audience member verbally attacked me, expressed his support for the firing of rockets into Israel, and ended his anti-Semitic rhetoric filled rant with a question irrelevant to anything in my presentation. I then pointed out to the audience the same fact I want to point out in this article, that this person was not simply criticizing Israel but was clearly expressing his support for a terrorist organization.

Yet before I could finish answering the question, I was interrupted and silenced by the overwhelming Hamas supporters. Next, another audience member stood up and screamed out, calling me a “dirty whore” in Arabic and proceeding to grab his crotch and scream “Here’s your Qassam!” in Arabic.

The critics of Israel used to assure us they were friends worried about some of our actions; then they dropped the friends part but insisted their valid unease at our actions need be heard; there is a growing group out there who don't care in the slightest what our actions are; their problem is our existence.

Which of course isn't new at all.

Concert for Peace, Or Not

Last week the NYT carried this nice fluffy story about a youth orchestra from Jenin that preformed for a public of Holocaust survivors in Holon, Israel. It was the idea of the orchestra's Israeli Arab director, Wafaa Younis, (no idea if she's fluffy) and funded by Shari Arison, Israel's wealthiest woman, who no doubt is fluffy headed (but means well). I briefly toyed with the idea of linking to the story, but seem not to have. It was too fluffy for me, and didn't seem to have much significance beyond the good-feeling markup.

Apparently I was wrong. Some influential group in Jenin has fired Ms. Younis, forbidden her to enter town, and put an end to her harmful escapades.

Adnan al-Hindi, the leader of the camp’s Popular Committee, a grass-roots group representing the Palestine Liberation Organization, said the young musicians had been exploited by the orchestra director, Wafaa Younis, for the purpose of “normalizing” ties with Israel. He said by telephone that the children had been “deceived” and dragged unwittingly into a political situation that “served enemy interests” and aimed to “destroy the Palestinian national spirit in the camp.”

“It was a shock and a surprise to the children and their relatives,” he said, adding that Ms. Younis had told the young musicians’ families only that the trip to Holon was an opportunity for artistic self-expression.

Ms. Younis, from central Israel, has been traveling to Jenin every week for several years to teach music in the camp. Mr. Hindi said that the house she rented as a studio had been sealed, and that she was barred by the Popular Committee from all activity in the camp.

Depressing, isn't it. And note that al-Hindi is Fatah, not Hamas.

A Warm Community in the Cold

This post has nothing to do with my usual themes, simply with the human condition.

Via Powerline I reached a dramatic slideshow at Boston.com about the floods in North Dakota. Or, more accurately, about the communities in and around Fargo, as they face the icy rising waters. It's a dramatic series of pictures, and it tells an impressive tale of an entire community facing adversity with determination, lots of hard work, and also, it's important to add, formidable logistic abilities. Everybody seems to be working hard, the pictures show no panic, but the efforts seems to be achieving things, complicated as this must be. Someone must be directing the effort, allocating volunteers, organizing empty sandbags, mounds of sand, heavy equipment, and so on and on.

Moving, and highly impressive.

An Ethos of Success

As some of you know, after decades of doing one sort of thing, a year or two ago I set off to do something quite different, and am acting like a hi-tech entrepreneur as if I was 20 years younger. Yet old habits refuse to die, and at times I revert to them: When in need of understanding a new situation, read a book or three.

So I just read Guy Kawasaki's The Art of the Start. Lots of fun, and I warmly recommend it, even if you're not starting anything but appreciate a wry and self deprecating take on how the world works. Actually, while this blog deals mostly with my old persona, not with the entrepreneur me, I'm blogging about it because on a level Kawasaki probably didn't have in mind, his manual for getting up and running is also a commentary on a specific but very important way of life, and it addresses some of the themes of this blog.

The world of innovators is about people adding value to the world, he tells between pages 3-215 (that's the whole book). It's also a world where getting bruised is merely a way of figuring out how to do your thing better. While he has an entire chapter on "Being a Mensch", he isn't into feeling sorry for oneself. The whole victim thing, surely one of the most powerful emotions around and perhaps the single most potent one in international politics, is summed up on page 117:

Your goal shouldn't be to 'retain control' and 'avoid getting ousted'. Your goal should be to build a great organization. There may come a time when you should be ousted. Deal with it. Would you rather have an inferior organization that failed, but that you were in control of until the better end?

Deal with it. Make the best of what you have, and pick up and move on when necessary. The world would be a better place if everyone lived that way; it's no coincidence the folks who do often seem to control the world, or at least their segments of it. It's not a conspiracy, a cabal, nor even the machinations of the hegemonic power brokers. It's a way of life that optimizes the possible rather than bemoaning the world's imperfections and injustices. Simple, isn't it?

At the Center of the Storm

Martin Ivens of the London Times has a somewhat rambling article written in Tel Aviv about the upcoming G20 meeting in London. His subject: the G20 is a talkshop. Obama's real legacy will be forged in the Middle East.

The underlying themes: Reality is stronger than politicians' ability to spin it, even hugely talented politicians. Even the President of the United States is rather limited in his ability to forge reality. And finally, the Jews are at the center of it. Again, I might note: they've been there or nearby for most of the past 2,000 years, give or take five centuries.

It would be nice to be comfortable and irrelevant, in a New Zealandish sort of way. Sigh.

Cool Rationalism vs. Atavistic Fanatics

Last week Uri Dromi published another column at the Guardian's CiF. Dromi is one of the Guardian's fig leaves, enabling them to say they can't be antisemites because look at the range of their authors.

The reason I'm linking is because there's an interesting dynamic there. Dromi is looking for facts, trying to sift evidence and evaluate it. The kind of thing an educated enlightened person should do. Many of the responders haven't the slightest interest in facts; for them, the story is crystal clear and shouldn't be muddied:

These days, I find it hard to find the will to comment on blogs that seeks to deny or minimise violence against the Palestinians in the hands of Israel state. I cry for our collective failure to defend the Palestinians. We know what needs to be done- boycott Israel until the state of Israel violence oppression against the Palestinians comes to an end. Thank you the Guardian and other media outlets and their brave journalists do informing us the truth of this not secret inhumanity.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/23/israel-gaza-war-crimes-guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2009/mar/23/israel-gaza-drones

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2009/mar/23/israel-gaza-medical-workers

Or this one:

This is all just nonsense anyway. The fact is that no matter what either side do. Palestinians have the moral authority because they have a moral right to resist occupation and being forced to live in the largest open air prison in the world.

One of the many reasons enlightened people the world over need to confront antisemitism is this: the antisemites are a throwback to the darker moments of history, and they dismantle the tools crafted over centuries by which society climbed up out of barbarity.

NYT Corrective

Somewhat to my surprise, I admit, the New York Times continues to follow the story of the IDF behavior in Gaza; this time they've got a story that mostly tells it as it is. So unlike some media outlets, at least the NYT is being professional.

(Silke in comments to the previous post fumes over the editorial choice to caption the story with a picture showing devastation in Gaza, but I can live with that. There really was lots of devastation; I'm willing to own it, war being what it always is, and the Palestinians insisting on war over peace. The slander was in depicting the IDF as a raging brutal horde, which of course it never remotely was.)

Media on IDF Brutality in Gaza

Alex Safian at CAMERA sums up what's now known about the allegations made by Danny Zamir's soldiers: the two worst allegations, about IDF snipers gunning down Palestinian women and children, simply never happened.

Two central incidents that came up in the testimony, which Danny Zamir, the head of the Rabin pre-military academy presented to Chief of Staff Gaby Ashkenazi, focus on one infantry brigade. The brigade’s commander today will present to Brigadier General Eyal Eisenberg, commander of the Gaza division, the findings of his personal investigation about the matter which he undertook in the last few days, and after approval, he will present his findings to the head of the Southern Command, Major General Yoav Gallant. Regarding the incident in which it was claimed that a sniper fired at a Palestinian woman and her two daughters, the brigade commander’s investigation cites the sniper: “I saw the woman and her daughters and I shot warning shots. The section commander came up to the roof and shouted at me, 'Why did you shoot at them?’ I explained that I did not shoot at them, but I fired warning shots.” Officers from the brigade surmise that fighters that stayed in the bottom floor of the Palestinian house thought that he hit them, and from here the rumor that a sniper killed a mother and her two daughters spread.

Regarding the second incident, in which it was claimed that soldiers went up to the roof to entertain themselves with firing and killed an elderly Palestinian woman, the brigade commander investigation found that there was no such incident.

I admit, this is not particularly surprising. It is not easy to figure out the facts of a simple killing in a civilian setting, as any police officer will tell you; peering backwards through the fog of war is even harder. Not impossible, mind you; the shelves with history books that do it are long and laden; but rushing to prove the bestiality of IDF troops is often a fool's errand, motivated more by the determination to convict Israel of immorality than by painstaking respect of facts.

As I wrote a few days ago, Israelis routinely and publicly examine their actions at war, as it should be; in this case, the full investigation tells the opposite story from the first one: The Palestinian family had been held in a house alongside the IDF troops, and now they were being directed out of harm's way. A woman with two children didn't follow the directions given her. A sniper indeed identified a woman and two children in a place they shouldn't have been in; he fired warning shots meant to frighten, not harm. His officer shouted at him for firing in the direction of civilians, since even the officer thought he was shooting at them. The sniper - the only person in this story who was looking through the sights and doing the shooting - reassured his commander he wasn't about to harm anyone. Other soldiers, within sound range but not eye contact, thought the sniper had killed civilians, and were so disturbed by the incident that it eventually reached Haaretz, triggering an investigation that unraveled the facts of the case and refuted the allegations.

Sounds like a moral army to me, and a moral citizenry too. Commendable, wouldn't you say? Conduct to be proud of.

But don't expect anyone to do any commending. The initial allegations were quoted - very literally - worldwide. Their refutation won't be. There are banal reasons for this, having to do with the profound unseriousness of the business of media and news as entertainment. Yet that is not a satisfactory explanation. The act of slandering Jews is one of the most fundamental in Western society, and has been for millennia, often with lethal results. When educated and respected stalwarts of their societies engage in the pastime, they bear full moral responsibility for their acts. They may or may not be antisemites (shorthand: the Guardian is, the NYT isn't), but their actions are.

How about Haaretz? Had they published the allegations in Hebrew alone, thus enabling the crucial internal discussion without translating it for the rest of the world to gloat over, would that have been better? Anshel Pfeffer, one of their columnists, agonizes over the issue. I tend to agree with him. The Israelis need to have their discussions; the observers will disseminate the incriminating parts no matter what, and won't disseminate the exoneration no matter what; Haaretz bears some responsibility for this dynamic, but not much.

The opprobrium belongs fully to those engaged in antisemitic acts.

And Still Counting in Gaza

I'm not certain why we have two items on this on two consecutive days, but perhaps Haaretz was simply being sloppy yesterday. Knowing them, it's certainly possible. Anyway, Y-net cites an official announcement from the IDF today.

The IDF said Thursday that an internal inquiry found that 1,166 people were killed in the three-week offensive that ended in January. It said 709 were Hamas militants, and just under 300 people, including 89 children aged 16 and 49 women, were civilians.
According to the military, it is unclear clear whether an additional 162 men who died were militants or civilians.

These numbers are rather different from the Palestinian ones that were quoted world-wide and are by now etched in stone and won't be dislodged.

It's possible they're both wrong; it's not possible they're both right. You might perhaps expect respectable media outlets to try to get to the bottom of the matter, and figure out what the truth is - but I can't say why you might expect that.

The Rot Reaches the Washington Post

I don't know much about Pat Oliphant, a Washington Post cartoonist. Abe Greenwald at Contentions intimates he's a fellow with a record, tho Greenwald doesn't think that exonerates anyone. Personally, I'm more interested in the top editors of the Washington Post, perhaps the second most influential newspaper in the United States, for allowing this on the pages of their paper:
As Meryl Yourish adds, it's a version of the Israeli flag. Do you suppose Ari Roth would say that means it's art, and thus not to be evaluated for its truth?

They're not good days, these ones. Sure, our descendants will dance on the graves of these hate mongers, if they can find them in the dust, unless they're distracted by the antisemites of their own generation, but knowing your enemies will fail doesn't make them more palatable.

Israel and Innovation

From time to time - with rising frequency these days - I ponder on how it must have been to be a Jew in the 1930s, with antisemitism the official policy of some of the world's greatest powers, with antisemitic parties in most countries, and with loud antisemitic cries from all sides. It must have been very frightening. Not like these days, when the rising tide of Jew-hatred is very aggravating, certainly, but not really frightening.

Less often, I think about how the world must have looked to the dazed survivors in Europe of summer 1945, or to their grim relatives elsewhere. Their story is not told that often, and very rarely is it dwelt upon. As a general statement, Israel's critics and enemies, both, detest it when Jews in general and Israelis in particular talk too much (or at all) about the Shoah. Israel hasn't learned the lessons of the Jews' own past, they'll tell you. Israel has learned the lessons too well, and is now copying its tormentors, they'll tell you. Israel, of all nations, should understand better, they'll tell you. Israel is trying to wield the ultimate victim-weapon to as to stifle thought, discussion or recognition of what's really going on, they'll tell you. And so on.

I expect a more profound reason for all the shrieking is a dim awareness that actually, the multi-stranded story of those dark days has the potential to disrupt almost all the pat templates they use to explain the world - so they ward it off.

Take, for example, the multiple-tiered explanations about how when people suffer, they aren't nice in return. They must be assuaged, their needs addressed, their woes removed, their grievances respected, acknowledged, and rectified. You know the line; it's one of the top meta-narratives of our age. It's also all wrong, fundamentally wrong, and quite pernicious. Those Shoah survivors disprove it by the simple fact of how they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps (after they acquired boots) in a mostly indifferent and partially hostile world.

Some fifty years later, on February 20th 1999, the Economist published a Special Report titled Innovation in Industry. It was a fun read, so much so that I made myself a copy, which was fortunate because I can't find it now on their website. They talked endlessly about Silicon Valley, of course, but also had this:

Apart from its genius for networking, Silicon Valley seems to have an abundance of two other ingredients that other places lack. One is a culture that rewards risk, handsomely, but does not punish failure. The other is simply chutzpah—that upbeat sense of self-confidence that says anything is possible, go for it, and never be too shy to ask for help. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the place emerging as California’s most likely rival in innovation is Israel, with its close-knit society that networks ceaselessly, deals daily with risk, reveres learning, and is blessed with a torrent of well-educated immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Natan Sharansky, a physicist and former gulag prisoner who is now Israel’s trade and industry minister, points out that a fifth of his new country’s population arrived in the past five years, doubling the number of technicians, engineers and scientists there. Israel has 135 engineers and technicians for every 10,000 people, compared with America’s 18. This abundance of talent shows up in the success rate of new ventures in Israel. No surprise that Israel trails only America and Canada in its number of new listings on the innovation-driven Nasdaq stockmarket each year. With such stellar results, the amount of venture capital chasing Israeli innovations has been increasing by around 35% a year. Last year more than $4 billion of high-risk money found its way into innovative start-ups there, not far off the figure that venture capitalists invested in Silicon Valley. If it can keep this up, Israel is set to become the innovation centre of the world.

That was then, and now is now. The Dotcom bubble exploded, the "Peace Process" did too, the Palestinian culture of death attacked Israel with its full potency while the world media looked on and tut-tutted; more recently the entire world economy is staggering. And on March 12th 2009, a decade and a week after the previous report, the Economist came back with another (it starts here). "Global heroes. A special report on entrepreneurship".

For me personally this one was even more fun that the previous one, since - contrary to any reasonable expectation I ever had - I'm deep in the entrepreneurship world myself, in spite of my advanced age and encroaching senility. More pertinent, however, after the first few conceptual chapters about the phenomenon in general, the reports turns to discuss who's doing what, and why. Sure enough, as if the decade never happened, Israel gets mentioned, again, and again, singled out beyond all others. Here, for example:

DOV MORAN’S desk is littered with the carcasses of dismembered phones. Mr Moran has already had one big breakthrough: inventing the now ubiquitous memory stick. But he dreams of another one: he wants to separate the “brains” of the various gizmos that dominate our lives from the “bodies” to enable people to carry around tiny devices that they will be able to plug into anything from phones to cameras to computers. Mr Moran sold his memory-stick business to SanDisk for $1.6 billion, creating a thriving technology cluster near his office. This time he wants to build an Israeli business that will last, challenging the giants of the camera and phone businesses.

Israel is full of would-be Dov Morans. It is home to 4,000 high-tech companies, more than 100 venture-capital funds and a growing health-care industry. Innovations developed in the country include the Pentium chip (Intel), voicemail (Comverse), instant messaging (Mirabilis, Ubique), firewalls (Checkpoint) and the “video pill”, which allows doctors to study your insides without the need for invasive surgery.

Even more than other countries, Israel has America to thank for its entrepreneurial take-off. A brigade of American high-tech companies, including Intel and Microsoft, have established research arms there. And a host of Israelis who once emigrated to America in search of education and opportunity have returned home, bringing American assumptions with them. Many Israeli entrepreneurs yo-yo between Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv; almost 70 Israeli companies are traded on NASDAQ.

The Israeli government helped by providing a ready supply of both human and physical capital. Israel has the world’s highest ratio of PhDs per person, the highest ratio of engineers and scientists and some of the world’s best research universities, notably Technion. The country’s native talent was supplemented by the arrival of 400,000 well-educated Jewish refugees from the former Soviet empire.

However, Israel’s main qualification for entrepreneurialism is its status as an embattled Jewish state in a sea of Arab hostility. The Israeli army not only works hard to keep the country at the cutting edge of technology, it also trains young Israelis (who are conscripted at 18) in the virtues of teamwork and improvisation. It is strikingly common for young Israelis to start businesses with friends that they met in the army. Add to that a high tolerance of risk, born of a long history and an ever-present danger of attack, and you have the makings of an entrepreneurial firecracker.

Eat your hearts out, Guardianistas and boycotters.

Look What Everyone Missed

Last Friday Haaretz had an article about the nauseating T-shirts some IDF units print. The worst, according to the article, emanate from the sharpshooter units, and they include depictions of the wrong Palestinians in the cross-hairs: a child, a pregnant woman, a fleeing teenager who is taunted with the slogan "run faster before we get you".

True, the soldiers themselves admitted they'd never wear these T-shirts in public because of the total opprobrium they'd be greeted with; and also true the sharpshooters are carefully controlled and have strict guidelines for their operation and I can't remember a single case where it was alleged that even one of them ever did such a thing as is depicted on these shirts; but still, it's an ugly tale, and someone clearly needs to add some common sense to that course of training. Make no mistake: I'm condemning the shirts.

And yet. Achikam got home last night, and at about 1PM he got up to eat breakfast, wearing a T-shirt prepared recently by his unit depicting a hand shooting lightning over Gaza. He read the article, and agreed with me that it's an ugly story, but pointed out something I, and everyone else, had overlooked. In most of the cases where the drawing showed Palestinian civilians in the cross hairs... they weren't civilians. The pregnant woman shown behind the above link is brandishing a rifle, as is the child ("when they're smaller they're harder to hit"), while the teenager being exhorted to run has the full set of drawn knife, grenade, and suicide belt (these picture aren't online, they're in the paper version).

Bottom line: we've got ugly T-shirts,worn by sharpshooters whose actual combat behavior belies the message, while the message itself is much more complex than anyone gives credit for. Including the sophisticated journalist at the sophisticated newspaper whose main marketing line is that it's "a newspaper for thinking readers".

Hatred Trumps Facts (Always...)

A Palestinian who writes for an Israeli newspaper wanders around America talking at campuses. He repeatedly encounters a vocal minority who aren't even slightly interested in what he has to say, unless he castigates Israel. When he doesn't always, they turn on him with fury, and attack him for not being attuned to the circumstances of the Palestinians; when he cites facts he is threatened:

I never imagined that I would need police protection while speaking at a university in the U.S. I have been on many Palestinian campuses in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and I cannot recall one case where I felt intimidated or where someone shouted abuse at me.

Nice, isn't it?

Aesthetic Trumps Moral

Jeffry Goldberg has posted a fascinating conversation he had with Ari Roth (yes, of course he's Jewish, with that name). Roth is playing Caryl Churchill's antisemitic screed "Seven Jewish Children" at the Jewish theatre he runs in Washington, DC. Goldberg thinks that's a horrible idea. They argue past each other at great length; it's the transcript of an argument, not an edited article.

Roth's main justification for playing the screed is that it was written by a master, and is an accomplished work of art.

AR: I read this play and I said, "My God, she's been listening really, really closely to how Jews speak." She's not Jewish. She's gone to a shitload of cocktail parties, she's memorized every play that David Hare ever wrote about Israel. You know, her referencing the swimming pools is a reference to David Hare's "Via Dolorosa" when he talks about something fundamentally un-Jewish about Jews is Gaza sitting by their swimming pools and watching a Palestinian walk two kilometers with a jerry can for two liters of water. That's a direct reference to that. Every fucking line there comes from something else she's overheard or watched or said. And who the hell knows if she's ever been to Israel or not. I have no idea. But she is smart. She is a smart writer. And each one of these lines is doing something that is more sophisticated than you're giving her credit. And then --

JG: Oh, I'm not saying that she's not sophisticated. I'm just saying that she's using her skills and her shrewdness in order to paint a picture of Israel's that's a caricature. And she knows that Jews, because of their self-flagellating nature, will just go along with this to an extraordinary degree. I mean if she were brave, she would write about the Qu'ran, about Islamic fundamentalism...

AR: If it was written by a halfway decent writer and somebody wrote a play about the so-called pernicious Jewish lobby that's affecting the way the make our decisions. So listen to this. Here's why we're doing it. The fact that, over eight pages, so many of the lines resonate not with the language of hate, but with the language of perception. Meaning she has overheard, she has seen, she has captured the language that Jews speak to each other with and that is astonishing.

JG: It's astonishing that she overheard the ways Jews talk at cocktail parties?

AR: Because that makes her a ten-times better theatrical reporter than anybody I've ever seen. This is play written with extraordinary precision. She wrote a play that arrested my attention. And it has a problem title. I hate the title. It is a problem place where it ends, but it is subject to an incredible amount of interpretation. It's written with multiple characters. People argue with each other. It's not written as a diatribe. And so you have to allow for the art form of theater to have its way with her text. That is what's going to happen, that's what's happening in this rehearsal room. I struggle with the play. God bless me. I'm a struggling Jew. You know?

JG: You can't decontextualize it. I'm sorry. It comes out of a certain moment and it comes out of a culture that has demonized Israel. It comes out of a particular theater subculture in Great Britain that demonizes Israel...

AR: Okay, just stop for a second. Let's pretend we're not talking about a play but we're talking about a painting. Let's pretend Picasso. Picasso was going to paint, à la Chagall, the story of Gaza, like in "Guernica" -- he's outraged by the killing of children in Gaza. So let's say Picasso does with simple brush strokes, little artful renderings of who his friends, the Jews, used to be; who they were in the '60s; how they were in the '90s; and what he sees today. And he does them with little stokes, little hints of this. And they just happen to be the strokes of a master artist, as opposed to an idiot. And they end with a horse braying and an electric light bulb going off and bombs falling. And that is his cry from the soul.

JG: Are you saying Caryl Churchill is Picasso?

AR: I'm saying it's Caryl Churchill's "Guernica." Come and debate this. And how did Franco feel about "Guernica?" Who knows? He was angry too. I'm angry. I don't think this is a great work of art, but I think there's a great artist doing something interesting here...

AR: I want your very, very smart blog readers to understand that the way to discuss this play is not to lift lines from the last page and a half of it. That is not how to fully experience and understand the meaning of any drama. I can't cede this to journalists who don't love theater enough to understand what's going on here. That is not a sophisticated way to regard art, by picking out a sentence here and then going apeshit over it!...

AR: There's a lot at stake here. There are big intellectual and political questions. And to boycott this and to just turn away and say "We don't hear Caryl Churchill. We don't hear this criticism," that's wrong. You asked why I said yes to this. I said yes to this because it's disarmingly, and maybe even unfortunately, so well-written.

Morality and truth are subordinate to art, says Roth. Goldberg could have taken the argument even further, of course, and pointed out that loud and consistent antisemitism has this nasty propensity to end up with dead Jews: this is one of the few constants in Western history these past thousand years or more. By aiding and abetting it, you ultimately have to own its outcomes. Yet my understanding of Roth's position is that he's not interested. If it's high art, it's valuable, and real-world outcomes be damned.

Which, taken one step further, means that aesthetics are superior to morality, and even to human life. Read George Mosse's books on the cultural environment that fascism originated in: they're full of such ideas. Though Ari Roth would be deeply deeply offended if he heard me saying so.

The King of Vodka

This is the title of a recently published book. I haven't read it yet (here's why), but it's on my list. It sounds like a good read, but also - due disclosure - I know the author, Linda Himelstein, and I've been following her efforts as she's worked on it. She's a serious person. As regular readers know, I generally have a low opinion of journalists, but Linda spent years working at knowing what she's talking about, without losing the main advantage journalists often do have, the ability to tell an interesting tale. Here, for example, she tells about some of her adventures in writing the book. Once you read them, you'll just have to read the book itself.

If you buy it now, Amazon will still deliver it before Pessach. Since Vodka isn't chametz, there's no fear in reading it once the cleaning is over and you want to take a break.

Still Counting in Gaza

The IDF is still collecting information on the people it killed in Gaza. It's touching, their belief that a careful accumulation of verifiable facts will sway anyone's mind.

So far, close to half of the names are of dead Hamas men. A quarter are of civilians. 14 are of Fatah men killed by Hamas. The rest - many of them identified by name - are still being investigated, apparently most of them were young men, who may or may not have been Hamas fighters.

The IDF also has some indications the Hamas list of victims is not fully reliable:

The fatality list presented by the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza has numerous inaccuracies and contradictions, the IDF says. For example, Tawfiq Ja'abari, the commander of the Hamas police, and Mohammed Shakshak, a personal assistant to the head of Hamas' military wing, Ahmed Ja'abari, are both described as dead children on the Palestinian list.

Gaza Food Blockade Over

The government decided yesterday to allow as much food into Gaza as anyone wants to send in. If you see this mentioned in your local media, feel free to tell me. Even more interesting will be to see if any media outlets continue to talk about the hungry Gazans being starved by Israel: If they say so, we'll know they're lying. If they don't, we'll know they know, and we'll also know they didn't tell what they know.

Israeli Brutality in Gaza?

The media is all agog about the stories emanating from Israel's internal deliberations about the recent Gaza operation. As regular readers will not be surprised to know, there is scant connection between the media narrative and the reality, though at least some of this could be rectified merely by reading the English translation of the discussion. Since my take is a bit long, and includes significant quotes from the discussion to demonstrate my points, I've posted it in article form, here.

I don't normally engage in promotion, but given the pervasive coverage and its perversity, feel free to send this article on to others if you think it's convincing.

On Bringing Back Gilad Shalit

My wife, that's Achikam's mother, has published an eloquent op-ed in Haaretz about the obligation of our government not to allow any soldiers to languish in the captivity of Hamas monsters. Haaretz didn't translate it into English, but perhaps we can fix that later on.

Update: David Boxenhorn was extraordinarily helpful, and posted a translation in the comments section. Thank you, David!

Someone else also prepared a translation, which my wife then worked on a bit, and I'm posting it here.

Iranians with a Clenched Fist

There are mounting indications Barack Obama's hope the world will join him in being civilized nice and pleasant may not happen, at least not yet. The top Iranian fellow, Ayatollah Ali Khamenai, that's the boss of Ahmed Ahmedinajad, mind you, gave a feisty speech before a crowd of tens of thousands of Iranians, who responded by chanting Death for America.

This is one reason I'm generally in favor of enemies talking to one another: in the good scenario, they talk, find agreement, and cease being enemies. In other cases, they talk, re-affirm for themselves that the other side really needs to be confronted, and carry on with the enmity with new resolve. A win-win situation.

The NYT, however, sees it differently. Their response to the Iranian clarity is to call for America to be even nicer, lest the Iranians haven't yet understood this is the Obama administration, not that horrible Bush fellow. They've dug up an Iranian economist named Saeed Leilaz, dubbed him "a prominent political analyst" - which for all I know he may be, but he certainly isn't the only one around - and he urges the NYT readership not to take Khamenai seriously:

Prominent political analyst Saeed Leilaz said Khamenei's comments did not amount to a rejection of better ties with the Obama administration. Rather, Iran's current hard-line leaders need to publicly maintain some degree of anti-U.S. rhetoric to bolster their own position, especially with their conservative base, he said.

''Iran's ruling Islamic establishment needs to lessen tensions with the U.S. and at the same time maintain a controlled animosity with Washington,'' he said. ''Iran can't praise Obama all of a sudden.''

Khamenei will also likely stand his ground as long as he remains concerned about the United States' ability to destabilize Iran, he said.

For its part, the Obama administration must take practical steps such as lifting a ban on selling Iran spare parts for passenger aircraft or considering unfreezing Iranian assets in the U.S., Leilaz said.

You tell 'em, Leilaz.

Update: Juan Cole explains how Khamenai is actually engaging in constructive dialog. The part about the chanting mob seems to have been dropped in his depiction.