Can the New York Times Count till Ten?

If you read this correspondence between Isable Kershner (NYT) and Lenny Ben David, the answer seems to be: No, the NYT isn't good at counting up to ten.

Incoming Train

I'm offline most of the time these days, hence no blogging. Still, things can happen even in the real world out there. The other day, for example, I heard a short presentation from a fellow who's involved in the very large project of building a new train line up to Jerusalem. Much of it will be underground; occasionally it will cross high above valleys; travel time from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, once it's completed, will be about half an hour, and the final station will be deep underneath Jerusalem.The whole thing will be quite dramatic.

The fellow started his presentation by showing a black and white postcard. (Note to readers born after 1980: Postcards were smallish pieces of cardboard with a picture on one side and a couple of square inches on the other side on which folks used to write a short message and then send through the mail. Real mail. Oh, forget it). The message said that the sender had just arrived in Paris, and was planning to take the train to Frankfurt, which he would reach at 10:37am.

"The writer was my grandfather, it was 1959, and although he's no longer alive, I have no doubt he indeed reached Frankfurt at 10:37 the next morning. Half a century later, here I am beavering away on this project, and I have no idea what year it will be when the train finally reaches Jerusalem".

Nails from the Cross

Don't get cross with me, but this story seems to me less than iron-clad.

NGOs Need Not Stake Responsible Positions

I spent a large chunk of the day with a very old friend - we went to school together when Richard Nixon was president - who grew up to be an important fellow in the field of nature preservation in Israel. He used to be an official of the Nature Preservation Society, before moving, some years back, to the Nature and Parks Authority. As I've hinted more than once, I'm trying to figure out what's the contemporary story of Jerusalem, and this fellow has a very interesting perch from which to see things. As you'd expect, the stories he tells don't fit any of the narratives you read about in the media, but it would be surprising if they did, and anyway, that's not the point of this post.

We hiked along the Sorek valley to the west and northwest of Jerusalem. This is an area which contains everything from archeological remains from most of the past 40 centuries or so, tons of infrastructure of all types and forms, a whole series of gigantic projects such as new roads, train tunnels and bridges and others undertakings, agriculture, tourism, and oodles of politics. Ah, and a nature reserve. My friend talked at length about the intricate and delicate process of making sure everybody can do their thing, without anyone trodding unduly on the needs of anyone else. (For example, the highway will sidestep a crusader ranch, even though this will entail hanging it off the edge of the hill).

It was an opportunity to peer into the bowels of decision-making in a democratic system.

Late in the afternoon he then made an enlightening comment. "The fine people in the Nature Preservation Society, being an NGO, can say whatever they want, and can stake purist positions. If anyone asks them how to resolve the problems they raise, they don't need to answer. They can respond that their job is to protect nature, period. How the train will cross the valley is not their business, so long as it doesn't cut across the nature. We in the Nature and Parks Authority, however, can't talk that way. We're part of the government. The part that needs to preserve nature, of course, but since we're part of the government we've got to be part of the solution, not of the external criticism. We've got to participate in the process of balancing diverse needs, multiple interests, conflicting political limitations, and so on".

He was talking about preserving nature, of course, not human rights or similar NGOs,but you see how the comment readily fits into other fields of discourse and execution, too.

Hamas War Crimes

Sometimes a picture really is better than 100,000 words. Especially when it's a typical picture, which cannot be put into any context except the most simple one in the picture, and the rest of the 99,989 words are intended to obfuscate, distort, lie and malign.

Slow Blogging

Blogging is likely to be a bit slow here for the next few days. Too many other things going on. You can always read Haaretz to keep your spirits up.

The Inability of the Radical Left to Deal with Reality

I"m dedicating this column to The Guardian, Andrew Sullivan, Mondoweiss, and Didi Remez and his handful of like-minded Israeli loonies. Ah, and also To Alberto, the Argentine lefty with no Arab blood but at least one Jewish grandparent who likes to call himself Ibrahim and sometimes visits this blog.

The murder of a peace hero by Palestinians has no place on the left's emotional and ideological map. The murder of a freedom hero by Palestinians is a dogma-undermining, paradigm-subverting event for the left. Mer-Khamis' murder by Palestinians is a murder doomed for repression.
This is a deep, broad issue that goes beyond just the Israeli left. One of the outstanding characteristics of Western enlightenment in the 21st century is its inability to denounce forces of evil in the Arab-Muslim world. Western enlightenment likes to criticize the West. It especially likes to criticize the West's allies in the East. But when it runs into evil originating in the East, it falls silent.

UN-Supported Unilateral Palestinian Independence Will Mean War

I'm still trying to figure out what a September 2011 UN-Supported declaration of Palestinian independence would mean, and will write about this sometime soon. In the meantime, here's Yoel Meltzer's scenario. I don't find it convincing, but it's worth the read.

Shooting a Schoolbus

There is only one way an anti-tank missile can hit a bright yellow school bus about a mile away: the shooter must take aim directly at it. This might not be the case on a crowded battlefield with multiple potential targets and the extreme tension of being shot at by the other side. But since that's not what happened near Gaza this afternoon, the only possible explanation is that a Palestinian gunman purposefully shot a tank-destroying missile at a school bus. The fact that the bus was mostly empty was a coincidence the gunman couldn't have known; it wasn't almost empty a few minutes earlier.

Layers of Jerusalem

The Davidsohn Center is a tourist center to the immediate south of the Temple Mount. It was opened a few years ago, and there's a funny story about that. As the American State Department refuses to learn, building in Jerusalem is an arduous and multi-stage project, which takes years to cross. The folks behind the center didn't want to wait all those years and deal with all the bureaucracy, so they made the case that they weren't actually bulding anything new, merely refurbishing the basement of an Umayyad palace. The palace was built in the 8th century and then forgotten from history until it was rediscovered in the 1970s by Israeli archeologists, who uncovered a series of monumental Arab structures no-one had known were there. Refurbishing is a shorter process than building, and so the center opened at least five years earlier than otherwise. The Haredi guide we were with said - tongue in cheek - that when the time comes to build the Third Temple the same argumentation should be made: it's a reconstruction, not a new building.

Anyway, the reason the center is a tourist attraction is that it sits on the main road from the oldest parts of Jerusalem into the Temple, and throughout the two temple eras, all the way up to the destruction of the 2nd Temple in 70 CE, this was the main thoroughfare for pilgrims (the Talmud mentions this in detail, which is the kind of thing you learn when you've got a haredi guide). In the center there's a 10-minute film, in which a fellow acts the part of a modern researcher and also a 2nd-Temple pilgrim, wandering through the area then and now. It's a cute sort of thing.

Since the majority of tourists to Jerusalem are not Jews, the film depicts a Jewish pilgrim from the early 1st century CE, a youngish man with a beard, who just so happens to come from the Galilee, and not, say, from anywhere else Jewish pilgrims would have come from. In case any of us weren't getting the hint, our Haredi guide spelled it out for us.

The actor, depicting a contemporary Israeli and a Jesus-era Jew, is one Juliano Mer-Chamis, an Israeli mix-up who had a Jewish mother, a Palestinian father, founded and ran a theatre in Jenin, and lived on a hill above Jenin from which he could see Haifa, where he was born, and Jenin, where he made his life. He was murdered earlier this week by some Palestinian thug who apparently was angry, among other things, at Mer-Chamis' eagerness to have Israeli and Palestinian theatre troupes collaborate.

Independent Palestine in September 2011: Does it Make Any Difference?

The New York Times seems to think it does, and that the possibility of a UN recognition of an independent Palestine in September this year will dramatically change the dynamics of the conflict. As anyone who frequents this blog knows, the fact that the NYT is convinced of anything doesn't much impress me, as doesn't the fact that they've dug up various Israelis to bolster their thesis. So far I haven't much written about this matter, since I'm still trying to figure out what it means, but if anyone wishes to pitch in with informed insights, be my guest.

Review of Michael Totten's "The Road to Fatima Gate"

It's April 5th, and Michael Totten's The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel is hitting the bookstores. Since Michael and I are friends, I managed to read the book before it was published, and warmly recommend it.

The book is the story of Lebanon between the Beirut Spring of 2005 and the aftermath of Hizballah's takeover of Beirut in 2008. Michael tells it with his unique voice and perspective, which have already made his blog into one of the best on the blogosphere. First and foremost, he travels to the places he writes about, and lives there. Rather than hanging out in the hotel where all the journalists converge and reinforce their prejudices, he rents an apartment and goes talking to ordinary people. He listens to them, and respects their narratives even when not agreeing. Then he listens to other people, well informed by what he has already heard.

It's depressing how unusual this is.

Yet the book isn't like the blog. The book looks back and sums up. Blogs respond with immediacy to ongoing events; their authors can hope to report on events through a prism of informed context, but they don't know what will happen the day after they respond. A book can take a series of events and fashion a story out of them with a beginning, a middle, and an end, or at least an arbitrary end which can be justified in the context of the specific story being told. When the story is about recent events there's always the chance that future events will upend it. The story of Israel's peace with Egypt, signed in 1979, may prove to be dramatically upended if in 2012 or 2015 Egypt undergoes anything remotely similar to Lebanon; in that case it will turn out that four decades were not long enough to have a stable perspective. In addition, Michael - obviously - had no access to the documents created by the actors, nor to any reports by others who have had such access. No one has yet seen the correspondence between Hizballah and Iranian leaders or officers; between Maronite politicians and Syrian officials; or the deliberations of Israeli officials managing the war with Hisballah in 2006. Michael has written a first draft of history, not a definitive summary or interpretation.

It's a valuable first draft, however. Given the cautious euphoria surrounding the Arab Spring of 2011, it's sadly a very necessary and timely first draft, because the Arab Spring could be impacted by some of the same phenomena. Lebanon is, after all, part of the Arab world.

In March 2005 it looked like democracy was coming to Lebanon. In a dizzying sequence of events, Rafik Hariri was assassinated to prevent his re-election to prime minister, Hisballah sent half a million demonstrators to support the Syrian occupation of the country, a new coalition of all the other Lebanese responded with a demonstration more than twice as big, and international pressure forced the Syrians out of the country. It looked as if decades of strife were over, and Lebanon was poised to become a liberal democracy with a vibrant economy. What could be better? Just then Michael flew in and set up camp in Beirut, to report on the wonderful transition.

A transition which never happened. The short explanation being that Iran and Hisballah didn't want it to happen, and had the power to thwart it. The longer explanation being that the forces against liberal democracy were far stronger than the ones in favor, and included, as Michael demonstrates repeatedly, many of the very people and groups who demonstrated in favor of it on March 14th 2005.

This was the main insight I gleaned from Michael's book: that the hard men and their cold calculations purposefully aborted the naive, idealistic but unrealistic aspirations of the nice folks we were all cheering.

It wasn't only the hard men of Hisballah or their overlords in Teheran. Actually, in some of the best sections of the book Michael wanders around in Hisballah territory and talks to regular folks, who turn out to be, well, regular. At one point he joins a pack of teenagers in a Hisballah camp in central Beirut, and learns that their jumbled understanding of the world includes, alongside other emotions, some rather positive feelings towards the United States. Yet this is ultimately immaterial to the developing events. Hisballah runs its areas with harsh police-state measures, brooks no opposition, allows no independent thought, and achieves whatever goals it sets for itself -and they aren't liberal or democratic.

Hisballah has allies, other hard men with cold calculations. In a chilling section Michael has coffee with a couple of Maronite supporters of Michel Auon, a Hisballah ally, and they calmly explain their position. Then he interviews powerful leaders of what had once been the March 14th camp, and they explain why they've jettisoned their aspirations for liberal democracy in the face of Hisballah reactionary moves, preferring a lack of bloodshed over a lack of freedom. By the end of the book it's clear there's no-one who will stand up for liberal democracy, and given the implacability of its enemies and the proven horror of civil war, who's to blame them?

The thing is, hard men who fear liberal democracy, detest America and hate Jews and Israel, are thick on the ground in the Middle East. An exuberant moment of popular expression of freedom is all very well and nice, but unless they've got their own hard men and are willing to confront their adversaries with cold determination, including a willingness to fight for the society they aspire to, it's hard to see how they'll get what they wish.

In a deeply ironic twist, that seems to be the role of Israel in Michael's book. A thriving country and liberal democracy, surrounded by many thugs, and imbued with the cold calculating hardness necessary to protect itself. I'm not certain that's what Michael intended to be saying, but it's what I read: the only way to live the aspirations for freedom and democracy is by being hard enough to achieve them and then maintain them. The Lebanese forces who had the right aspirations lacked the determination; the forces with a different set of aspirations never lacked the determination, so they won, and will continue to win until forced down. They won't go away of their own accord, and they won't go away because of exuberant demonstrations in public squares cheered on by the rest of the world's media. They won't.

As I said, however, that's my reading of Michael's book, and he may not have intended that to be its thesis at all. So I encourage you to read it and decide for yourself.

The State Department & J Street Welcome Goldstone's Retraction

In light of my previous post poking fun at the State Department, and my dissatisfaction with J Street, it's only fair to note that both august organizations think Richard Goldstone's recent retraction of parts of his own UN report are to be welcomed. Or in other words, they're not buying into the arguments being offered by the anti-Israeli blogosphere such as Mondoweiss or Andrew Sullivan, about how Goldstone's retraction doesn't mean anything and he got it all wrong. In the case of the State Department, this isn't surprising, since the American position was always that the Goldstone Report was hopelessly biased. J Street, however, had a bit of a problem at the time, when it did or didn't assist in arranging meetings for Goldstone with members of Congress. So it's nice that this time Jeremy Ben Ami seems to be clearly on the correct side of the discussion.

The State Department Condemns the Status Quo

Well, that certainly didn't take long. Two days ago, drawing on my awesome prophetic powers, I deemed that the American Administration would be irked by Jews discussing the possibility of building apartments in Jerusalem. Sure enough, while this time it wasn't The Man himself, the State Department has expressed "its deep concern yada yada yada".

Not only about the construction in Jerusalem, however - which, by they way, was apparently merely discussed yesterday in some committee; no bulldozers will be swinging into operation anytime soon, more's the pity. No; the State Departement fogies are also deeply concerned by an intent of the Defense Minster to authorize building in some settlements - even though that ministry says the report is mostly not true, and in any case

The plans set to be signed will in fact perpetuate the status quo in these settlements, disallowing any new legal construction, making the planned signing more of a symbolic achievement. 

In other words, the State Department is condemning an Israeli bureaucratic tweak which may not be about to happen but if it is will result in no additional building on some settlements. Get that? All clear? Me neither.

Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch Responds to Peter Beinart

Reform Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, co author of One People, Two Worlds: A Reform Rabbi and an Orthodox Rabbi Explore the Issues That Divide Them, recently told Peter Beinart why he's wrong on all the important accounts which have created Beinart's recent (in)famy. Hirsch is Reform, lives and works in New York, and so far as I can see is as representative of a segment of American Jewry as anyone else - except for the fact that he served in the IDF.

The transcript of his talk needs to be read in its entirety, which can be found over here (h/t Marek).

Sadly, we aren't told how Beinart responded. I expect Ammiel's words effected him like water off the back of a duck, with the added value that being a duck is proving very lucrative for Beinart.

Construction Beyond the Green Line in Jerusalem

Danny Seidman's Twitter account informs me that the Jerusalem municipality is expected to authorize the construction of more than 900 apartments in Gilo tomorrow. This can be expected to be portrayed as a Very Bad Thing, a new blow to the defunct peace process and so on. If past experience is a reliable guide Hillary Clinton will bemoan the decision, and her boss will ponitifacte that it's not helpful.

Danny himself is against such construction projects, and has helpfully posted a map showing where it is. Now compare his map, if you will, with the map of the same area as portrayed by the Geneva Initiative, in their series which suggests how to divide Jerusalem. Will it surprise anyone to learn that the construction project is within the area Israel is expected to retain in any case? I.e an area the Palestinians already ceded, according to the Palestine Papers? So what's the fuss about?

As for the project itself: it will create apartments for something like 5,000 people. Not enough to lower the rapidly rising prices of apartments in Jerusalem, but better than nothing. Ah, and if similar projects in other parts of town are anything to go by, some of the apartments will be bought by Palestinians from East Jerusalem.

BBC Tells about Jerusalem as it Isn't

CAMERA has prepared a 15-minute film about a longer BBC film which told about Jerusalem as it isn't, and then refused to correct itself.

The idea that the BBC would air an inaccurate report about Israel is not surprising: one expects no better from the BBC, and is pleasantly surprised when they depart from their biased line. (I wrote about such a case here)

The really ironic part about the false BBC report is that while it attempts to show Palestinian suffering under rapacious Israeli rulers, the reality is that growing numbers of Palestinians in East Jerusalem are acquiring Israeli citizenship as insurance against the day when Israel might leave and they'll be stranded in Palestine. Don't expect the BBC to report on this, however. It wouldn't fit the meta-narrative.

Update: The BBC won't tell the story, but Ynet (English) coincidentally has it today.

Goldstone Sort of Recants

Richard Goldstone now admits that the worst parts about the report that bears his name weren't true. Above all, the absolutely infuriating accusation which stood at the center of the report, that Israel purposefully and intentionally harmed civilians. Well, actually, no, he says.

Too late. The damage has been done, and no retraction now will alleviate it, not unless, perhaps, the judge spends the rest of his days trudging from TV station to TV station, from newspaper to newspaper, from campus to campus, and insists that the original reports was an abomination. I doubt he intends to do that. On the contrary, his retraction is still calibrated to harm Israel: the reason he got it wrong, he now tells us, is that Israel reused to cooperate with him; had they been honest and open he'd have written a different account. Since Israel wasn't, however, he had no choice but to write a report which even he now admits was wrong.

This is of course all wrong. There were as many flaws with the report as flies on a dung heap on a hot day (I chose this metaphor advisedly), and they were all obvious at the time.

Melaine Phillips sums up the sorry tale of the insincere recantation here. Meanwhile, in an article published the day before the judge changed his mind, Peter Berkowitz explains why the report was always harmful to the ideas of international law:

Indeed, memory of the Goldstone Report should be preserved, but not for the reasons that the editors intend. The report should serve as a potent reminder that, like other actors, international human rights lawyers and international bodies have passions and interests, biases and blind spots; they are capable of manipulating the facts and distorting the law; they often lack the expertise in military affairs that is necessary to responsibly apply international humanitarian law to the complex circumstances of asymmetric warfare; and their judgment is unconstrained by the discipline of democratic accountability and national security responsibility.
The international law governing armed conflict — in Article 2 of the un Charter, Article 146 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 17 of the Rome Statute creating the International Criminal Court — assigns to states with functioning judicial systems, which in particular means liberal democracies, the right and primary responsibility to investigate allegations of war crimes. The many and varied failings of the Goldstone Report illuminate the wisdom of this critical feature of international law.

One final comment, which I'm not seeing in the discussion this weekend, is that Goldstone now seems to accept that the IDF's casualty figures of combatants versus civilians were right.

Does the judge now have to give back the various prizes he got for his attacks against Israel?

J Street Defends Palestinian Authority's Right to Incite

Joe Mowbray reporting at Powerline has an incredible story I haven't seen anywhere else:

J-Street suffered a humiliating defeat yesterday on Capitol Hill -- which means Israel scored an important victory. The George Soros-funded "pro-Israel" group inexplicably mobilized its machinery to oppose a bipartisan letter that merely called on President Obama to pressure the Palestinian Authority to end its longstanding practice of inciting its people to commit terrorism against the Jewish state. Even in a town where tin-eared stupidity is commonplace, essentially protecting the PA's ability to encourage violence against its Jewish neighbors is jaw-dropping.

Read the whole thing and you'll see it gets even weirder.

Since I know there are a few J Street supporters among the readers of this blog, I encourage them to speak up if they've got a different version of the story.

Father Olivier and the IDF

The background to this story is the St Mary of the Resurrection Abbey, where there stands a church built between 1141-1170, when the Crusaders ruled the area. Unlikely as it may sound, the church was never destroyed, and although it probably served as a warehouse or barn for many centuries, it was cleaned out in the late 19th century, and in the 20th the original paintings on its walls were uncovered and restored, as much as possible after 800 years. There aren't many cities in the world with fully standing 12th century churches in them, but the Muslim village of Abu Ghosh, West of Jerusalem, has one.

When entering a church in Israel there's always the question of uncovering ones head. You're supposed to do that in churches, but religious Jews aren't supposed to do so at all. I always take off my hat, but sometime I don't take off my Kippa. This time there was a novelty, since our group included a young Muslim woman with her head covered, which she didn't remove, so the church accepted not only the sovereignty of the Jews, so to speak, but also the traditions of the neighbors.

Father Olivier heads the Abbey. He's French, but speaks fine Hebrew. Astonishingly fine, actually, since many of his sentences contain up-to-date IDF slang. So eventually we asked him about it, and he grinned. Back in the early 1980s he was discovered by some women serving in the IDF education corps, and ever since then they've been using him as their in-house expert for Church matters (Ani mashak hinuch be-inyanei Notzrim). Whenever there's an IDF unit spending a week learning about Jerusalem, they call in Father Olivier to explain all the different kinds of Christians there are in town.

Jerusalem never ceases to surprise.