Why Does it Matter Who Killed Them?

The IDF has published video footage from an unmanned aerial vehicle which they say proves that the Palestinian family killed last week were hit by the blast from the explosives being carried by Palestinian fighters, not by Israeli ordnance. (I wrote about this here).

Why does it matter? Even according to the Israeli version, IDF forces were shooting in the area; if you shoot deadly weapons in a place that has lots of innocent civilians in it, sometimes you'll kill them. It is your decision to shoot there in the first place that means you bear responsibility for the outcome, no matter what the minutiae of the technicalities are, doesn't it? For the dead and their families it certainly doesn't matter: they're dead. Had the Israelis not been shooting into their front yard, they'd still be alive.

Well, no.

First, note that it took most of the week for the IDF to come up with the full results of their investigation. Conspiracy theorists will read this to prove that the Israelis cooked the evidence. The rest of us ought to note that apparently someone in the IDF thinks the real facts are important, and wanted carefully to evaluate the evidence to sift them out.

Beyond that however, what we have here is an army doing its best to limit collateral damage. The choice to defend its citizens means it must hit their attackers, and the attackers chose to operate where their own civilians are. So the IDF has no choice but to operate where Palestinian civilians are, since that's where Palestinian fighters intent on killing Israeli civilians are. The IDF, however, unlike their enemy, is intent on not killing the Palestinian civilians, and as the article linked here shows, they use all sorts of methods to achieve this. When the methods fail, they then meticulously try to piece together what went wrong. Over time, these meticulous attempts to follow the evidence will continue to narrow down what the Americans call collateral damage, but the Israelis, even their Prime Minister, call tragic deaths.

This is the way one wages a moral war.

Zionism is Inconsistent

The secret of Zionism—the resilience of Zionism—is its ideological agility. Zionism has been driven by… ideas that are inconsistent with each other. So Zionism has been and remains a balancing act.

Jeffrey Goldberg talks to Gidi Grinstein. A fine and fun read. (And short).

Yom HaShoah

Today is Yom Hashoah, the day of remembrance of the Holocaust. The topic of the day this year is the contribution of the Holocaust survivors to the creation of the State of Israel - and a vast contribution it is. Essentially, Holocaust survivors brought great blessings to just about every single walk of life or undertaking they touched. There is much that is miraculous about this country, and the survivors wrought more than their shares of the miracles.

Which in itself is miraculous. It is extraordinarily fashionable in this age to garner the benefits of victimhood, to inherit loss, and of course to blame the culprits for each and every weakness we are blighted with, and for all the flaws in our world. The survivors of the Shoah were victimized beyond all others. They didn't wallow in their victimhood. Nor did they pick themselves up and get on with their lives, which would have been the admirable thing to do. Instead, they hauled themselves up by their torn shoestrings, and then created a world, one immeasurably better than the one they came from. Still flawed, of course, because they are human, but astonishing none the less.

No Peace with Hamas

Yesterday I responded to Ibrahim's post of last week; now I've posted my first challenge to him.

Dead Children in Gaza

Yesterday morning a young Palestinian mother and four of her children were killed in the northern Gaza strip during an Israeli incursion. That's undisputed, and tragic.

From there on, truth is captive to ideology.

The NYT offers the best of the descriptions in this quick roundup. The tone is set in the very first sentence:

A Palestinian mother and her four young children were killed in northern Gaza on Monday during an Israeli operation against militants there, and a dispute quickly arose over exactly how they had died.

Faced with five dead innocents, does it really matter? Well, yes, it does. Which is why many news outlets are more sparing with the attempt to tell the truth, and more eager to let you know which side you're expected to side with.

If you read far enough into the report offered by the BBC you'll eventually find parts of the Israeli version in the 16th paragraph. The first section offers the Palestinian version as fact:

At least seven Palestinians, including a mother and her four young children, have been killed during an Israeli raid in northern Gaza, medics say.

The family members were killed when a missile hit their home in Beit Hanoun. In separate incidents, a militant and a farmer were killed.

And it also offers one sentence from an Israeli source, but as corroboration of the Palestinian version:

The Israeli military said its aircraft had attacked a group of gunmen who had fired at an army patrol in the area.

The Independent initially simply used Reuters:

Israeli fire hit a house in the Gaza Strip today while a family was eating breakfast, killing six Palestinians, including four children and their mother, residents and medical officials said.

Later, the paper had their own man write a report, and he was a bit more balanced, slightly contradicting the report that was still up on their own website, and still is. In this report the Palestinian version comes first, but the Israeli one does appear in the second paragraph:

A mother and four of her young children under seven were killed in their home yesterday by what Palestinian sources said were Israeli missiles which landed at their door during an armoured incursion into northern Gaza.

The Israeli military said it had been targeting nearby gunmen and suggested the deaths had been caused when explosives it said were being carried by two militants blew up. The children were about to eat breakfast when they were killed.

The Guardian, ever reliable if you like anti-Israeli reportage, waited a day before posting a report, so they had time to gather information and think it through. Their report has 10 paragraphs; the Israeli version appears in paragraph 9.

The United Nations posted a response of the Secretary General on its website. It's better than the Guardian, if that's comforting. The title and first two paragraphs call directly upon Israel to mend its way, but the third does address Palestinian misdemeanors.

Condemning today’s loss of civilian life in the Gaza Strip – including the “tragic” deaths of a mother and four of her children – Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appealed to Israel to exercise maximum care and restraint.

In a statement issued by his spokesperson, Mr. Ban reminded the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) “of its responsibility to protect civilians under international humanitarian law during its military operations.”

The Secretary-General spoke out against the continuing attacks and rockets fired by Hamas today against Israel, calling on it and other militant groups to end such acts of terrorism. He also noted that they should not use Gaza as a base of operations.

Most blatant of all, however, was the response of some Arab members of Israel's Knesset. They compared the IDF to Nazis. On the day an elected Jewish member of an Arab parliament can criticize the crimes of his state, you'll know the Messiah is just around the corner. But to be more realistic: in the day any freely elected Arab member of an Arab parliament harshly criticizes the crimes of his state, you'll be able to start dreaming of peace.

Judeo-Arab Conspiracy

My response to Ibrahim on caricatures and antisemitism is up.

Bill Gates Needs a Top Manager

[My apologies to those readers who will inevitably miss the heart of this joke, but the truth at its heart is too basic for me to pass]:

Bill Gate announces he needs a new manager for Microsoft Europe, and 5,000 applicants convene at a large hall. Bill thanks them all for coming, and asks for a show of hands of those who can't program in Java. 2,000 hands are raised, and he requests that all of their owners leave the hall, thank you for coming. Morris Cohen, a Tunisian Jew living in Paris says to himself "I don't know anything about this Java language, but what do I stand to gain by leaving? I'll remain seated".

Gates then asks for all those who have never managed a staff of 100 or more to identify themselves and leave, thank you for coming; 2,000 leave. Morris hasn't ever managed such a staff, but asks himself what he might possibly endanger by staying put, decides there's no real danger, and stays.

Bill's next question seeks to know who didn't graduate from a top university with excellent grades. 500 folks head for the exit. Morris left school at 15, "but what could I lose by staying here? Nothing. So I'll stay".

Bill now wants to know who doesn't speak Serbo-Croatian. 498 of the remaining 500 don't, and they leave to join the other 4,500. Morris hasn't left yet; why leave now?

Gates walks over to the two remaining chaps. "Well, fellows, you seem to be the only qualified candidates who also speak Serbo-Croatian. If you don't mind, I'd like to hear the two of you conversing a bit in Serbo-Croatian, alright?"

Without batting an eylash, Morris Cohen turns to the other guy and says "Ma nishtana ha-laeila haze mikol halaeilot?". The second fellow responds: "Shebechol halailot any ochlm hametz umaza, halaila haze kulo matza".

On Tony Judt

Niall Ferguson reviews a book of book reviews that Tony Judt has written. It's a mildly favorable review, until near the end, when he presents us with a fascinating insight:

The discrepancy between these and the many straight alpha essays is easily explained. When Judt writes about generals, politicians and statesmen, he is playing away from home, far from his familiar bohemian haunts. Try as he may, he simply cannot empathise with the men of action who actually make history.

It is only as a reviewer of those who themselves review – the denizens of the cafés, not the situation rooms – that the intellectuals’ intellectual excels.

This can go a very long way in explaining Judt's total inability to understand what Israel is all about: The fundamental essence of Zionism is the Jewish resolve to be players in the world of power, or as Yehuda Bauer once titled one of his books on the topic, the Jewish emergence from powerlessness. If you will, the Zionist insistence on making history, rather than merely trying to survive it while kvetching about it, alienates them from Judt and his ilk more than anything specific Israel does or refrains from doing.

People in Jerusalem

Three old codgers playing cards just off Mahane Yehuda, earlier this afternoon. If I had to decide, I'd say two of them are North African, while the taller one facing the camera is Iraqi: something about their accents and body language. But I could easily be wrong.

IAEA and the Ketchup Question

Quite some time ago, when I was a wee lad, there was a gag line in our family that some meat dishes we were served weren't good enough because you couldn't taste the ketchup.

International Atomic Energy Agency Head, Dr. Muhamad elBaradei, had he been invited to our house, might well not have understood the joke. Else how to explain that while he's peeved at the Syrians for perhaps not being fully honest with his staff over the past few years, he's equally agitated by the Israelis, and even the Americans:

The IAEA head chided Israel for attacking the installation because it "destroyed evidence" and would hamper his group's efforts to gather information on the facility.

The IAEA head lamented the decision by Israel and the U.S. not to convey information about the facility to his organization before the strike.

He said that in that event the IAEA could have initiated a proper investigation into the allegations.

The IAEA communique said the Israeli decision undermined "the due process of verification that is at the heart of the non-proliferation regime."

Checking What "Everyone Knows"

An interesting item in the New York Times tells that the method our teachers used to teach us arithmetic may not have been as useful as everyone thought:

One train leaves Station A at 6 p.m. traveling at 40 miles per hour toward Station B. A second train leaves Station B at 7 p.m. traveling on parallel tracks at 50 m.p.h. toward Station A. The stations are 400 miles apart. When do the trains pass each other?

Entranced, perhaps, by those infamous hypothetical trains, many educators in recent years have incorporated more and more examples from the real world to teach abstract concepts. The idea is that making math more relevant makes it easier to learn.

That idea may be wrong.

I liked this one for various reasons.
1. The idea that when "everyone knows" something it's also true, was never very convincing to me. My reading of the story of humanity is that when "everyone knows", it may be true, and it may not - no more than that.
2. Kudos for the researchers who decided that accepted wisdom ought be questioned.
3. The honorable researchers seem to have discovered something I could have told them more than 40 years ago: That when faced by questions about trains in the night, at least some students are distracted from the maths into more important questions: Who was on the trains? Where were they going? What was the hurry? Why didn't they fly? Were they tense? Relaxed? Could they even have noticed the other train, or were they too involved in their own thoughts?

Deciphering a War

One of the characteristics of wars, or at least many of them, is that they are won by the side that reaches breaking point a day or two after the other side has already broken. This is one of the many reasons it's so hard to really know what's going on in a war, until after it's over. Often, it takes years to piece together the evidence and figure out what really happened.

I can reel off a rather good concise description of the stages of WW2 (tho not WW1, which for all my attempts I've never managed to understand). I can do the same for the first Israeli-Arab war, in 1947-49, though of course the magnitude is totally different in that case. But there were four stages, each with its own characteristics, and so on. Since much of the drivel presented these days about the Israeli-Arab conflict could benefit from a dose of simple facts, this ability of mine comes in useful from time to time.

It wouldn't occur to me to claim to understand the war in Iraq. It was more or less simple for a few weeks in Spring 2003, but never again since. To be honest, I don't even try too hard to follow the various warring parties, political parties, partial and impartial pundits, and all the rest. Don't get me wrong. It's not that I'm a total ignoramus. I'm a reasonably intelligent consumer of media reports, blogs, and so on, and I'll bet I could hold my own in discussion with most people. But I don't read Arabic, I don't know how to evaluate the various reports, and I do know that most of the reporters, of all groups, don't know much either... war being what war is.

Still, there are patterns. In 2006 the violence was horrendous by any reasonable criteria; sometime in 2007 the surge, or something totally different that happened at the same time, or perhaps it was the lineup of Jupiter with Pluto behind Mars or some such - whatever it was, the violence partially subsided. It's still horrendous, but there's apparently less of it. In recent weeks, I've been seeing more and more reports like this one: the Economist telling about political progress.

Is there a pattern? Will future historians include it in their two-minute synapses of the 2nd American War in Iraq?

Juan Cole is a Fool

I'm sorry to have to put it in such a direct and unambiguous way, but his response to the story that the American Administration has put out that what the Israelis bombed in Syria last year was a nascent nuclear reactor, is an embarrassment for academia. Cole isn't just any old young fellow with a blog, who can say whatever he feels like with nary any responsibility for his words other than that they sound right to him. Cole really is a professor, he has spent years studying relevant things, unlike more than 90% of the pundits, he even knows some of the relevant languages (though not Hebrew); he writes with the aura of an expert. When it comes to Pakistan or Iraq, he may even be one: I don't have the expertize to say otherwise.

Whenever he gets to Israel, however, he consistently talks such nonsense, including often on the level of elementary fact checking, that it casts quite a doubt over everything else he says.

His response to the present story is typical.

We would have to know exactly what kind of reactor it was to know if it was suitable to help in a weapons program. [...] Even the high confidence that the building was a reactor cannot be just accepted without question. They had high confidence that Saddam had a nuclear weapons program in the early zeros, which was not true. We should be skeptical about these sorts of stories until we see the proof.

Unlike Prof. Cole, I admit that I'm unable to recognize convincing or unconvincing facts about nuclear reactors even when they're thrust in front of my face, and I have no choice but to listen to intermediaries. I estimate that more than 99% of people are more like me than like him in this matter. Even the fact that experts were once wrong is not a reliable indication that they'll always be wrong.

I have been disappointed that more nuclear engineers in the US do not express themselves publicly on what is likely and unlikely.

Neat, isn't it? The fact that apparently this time many experts are concurring, or at least remaining silent, proves nothing; it is merely a matter for chiding: why aren't they saying what the professor would like them to be saying?

This story seems to me fishy. Syria is a poor state. Where would it have gotten the money for a reactor? Why exactly are there doubts that North Korea was involved? How much of the intelligence is from US sources and how much from Israeli? The latter are highly politicized. The head of Mossad in 2002 expressed confidence that Saddam was close to getting nukes.

Now he's down to whining. How could this be? Syria is poor! It doesn't fit my pet theories!? It's interesting, isn't it, that while Cole is up to his acrobatics to defend the Syrians, the Syrians themselves don't seem to be doing much denying, do they. Maybe because they know the facts.

Read the whole thing, if you want, or don't. I've linked to it mostly for future use.

Update: I was wrong about the Syrians not denying, of course. But it appears that the IAEA feel Syria does have a need to explain.

Jerusalem German Colony: A Story

Cemeteries are temporary matters in Germany. Or rather, the graves in them are; the cemeteries themselves are businesses. Since it’s poor business to store items forever, the administrators of German cemeteries sell plots for limited periods – 10 years, or 25 if the family wishes to pay for the extra years. Then the graves are dug up, the remains are dumped somewhere, and the plots return to the market. My impression is that there can also be a period of grace, in which the cemetery administration leaves messages on the gravestones requesting the families to make contact to renegotiate, should they wish to pay again. This assumes the families come to visit.

There are exceptions: Bishops, dukes and other nobility are allowed to stay, as are important statesman. Soldiers who fell fighting for the Fatherland are buried in permanent graves. And Jews. Since Jewish law forbids disturbing graves, even thousands of years later, and contemporary Germans are very leery of aggravating Jews since in the past they weren’t at all (leery), Jewish cemeteries remain inviolate. But most places that used to have Jewish communities no longer do; military cemeteries also no-longer do much growing in Germany, nor are there any nobles left. Anyone wandering around Germany with a perceptive eye could be forgiven for thinking that the only people who used to live and die in Germany were bishops, dukes, soldiers, and Jews.

The venerable old churchyard with its concise history of the community 400 years back can be found in England, New England, Norway, or in a Harry Potter tale, but not in Germany. Yet what happens when the Germans were buried far from Germany?

* * *

In the mid 1850s a German theologian by the name of Christian Hoffmann began developing a radical set of ideas about the Protestant churches in his day. He eventually quarreled with the local authorities in the Stuttgart area and in 1859 set up his own church; eventually the group registered themselves as Templers (no connection with the mediaeval order of the same name). Some years later they began moving to the Holy Land, mostly for religious reasons, though their efforts did dovetail nicely with the German imperial aspirations of the time. A few thousands of his followers came with him, settling in what a generation or two later would become Tel Aviv and Haifa; Hoffmann himself and hundreds of his flock came to Jerusalem.

Or actually, they came near Jerusalem. At the time the empty fields they purchased were out of town and even out of sight, since there was (and is) a low crest of a hill between them and the Old City; even the first Jewish neighborhoods outside the walls were visible only if one walked a few minutes from the northern edge of the new colony. It was 1873, and they called their settlement Kolonie Rephaim, because it was situated in a shallow valley which has been called Emek Refaim since the days of Joshua, who used it to demarcate the border between Judea and Benjamin.

The story of the German Colony in Jerusalem is fascinating, with lots of twists and turns, and I’m not going to tell it here. The basic outline is that it existed for more than 60 years; three generations of settlers lived there; in the 1930s many of them were proud, even flagrant Nazis; at the beginning of the Second World War those still here were rounded up by the British; some were eventually exchanged during the war for Jews and non-Jews with British Palestinian passports who had been caught in wartime Europe. The last Templers left the country in 1948.

In Haifa and in Jerusalem (I don’t know about Tel Aviv) they left their cemeteries behind. The neighborhood of Jerusalem where they had once lived changed its population a number of times, and these days it’s one of the more expensive, high-brow areas of town. Emek Refaim street has over the past decade or two become the single most important eatery thoroughfare in town. The corner of Emek Refaim and Rachel Immenu is its center.

To the east of the intersection is a long high stone wall, with two metal gates. One is sometimes open, and behind it lies a Christian cemetery for people of all sorts who didn’t fit easily in during their lives, and needed an unusual place to be buried. Jews who converted to Christianity, American or British eccentrics, and so on. A fascinating place, and a tale for another day. Because this tale is about the mysterious place beyond the green gate on the right, the one that has a bronze plaque that announces in German that this is the Templerfriedhof, the Templar cemetery, and offers a cell phone number one can call if there’s a need to get in. I don’t know of anyone who ever has, and until yesterday morning, I’d never seen it open.

I was on an errand, and needed to be somewhere, but errands are commonplace, while this gate – I have most likely walked by it thousands of times since I was a child, and I’ve never seen it opened. So I went in.

One of the first grave stones on the right was that of Dr. med. Samuel Hoffmann, born in Ludwigsburg, which today is a suburb of Stuttgart; since he was born in 1849, I’ve chosen to assume he was a son or grandson of the theologian Christian Hoffmann, both for the name they share as for the fact that most people didn’t have university degrees in those days, and if the Hoffmanns did they were probably related.

Deeper into the cemetery, partially hidden under a very large bush, nestles the headstone of Christian Rohrer, who was the Head of the Community, probably in the period of its second generation.
Maria Dyck, previously Kraiss, was born in America in 1889. Mina and Else, family name not specified, were born in 1890 and 1891; along with Maria Frick, who was 16 years old, they all perishedwhen disembarking in Jaffa. The sea never gave back the body of the mother (no name? Whose mother?). What were the relationships between these 4 children with the various surnames?
Marie Fast nee Frank is pretty straightforward. Born near Stuttgart she must have been the daughter of followers of Christian Hoffmann, and as a young woman she was of the first wave of settlers to arrive. We know this because already in 1872, when she got married (aged 23) she was in Jaffa. But how are we to understand the story of her husband, Abraham Fast, who was born in Liebenau? If you can’t find Liebenau in Google Earth (and you can’t, not this one), it’s because the place no longer exists. It used to be a village or town of Ethnic Germans in southern Russia, which means that before Abraham came to the Holy Land and married his German sweetheart, he was a descendant of Germans who had moved east in the middle ages to colonize the Slavs. They were married for 52 years, here in Jerusalem, until her death at age 72. He lived on to be 85, and he died a subject of the English King. Or did he?
About a third of the way in there’s this large memorial, the largest in the cemetery. It tells of the sons who fell in the Great War.

The column on the left (not in this picture) enumerates the names of those who left the land of their birth and traveled to the land of their fathers, there to be killed. The column on the right (pictured) lists hose who managed to fight for the faraway homeland in their personal homeland: Hugo Wieland, for example, was born in Jerusalem in 1890 and died in 1918 in Baalbek (now Lebanon). I assume he was fighting the British. Daniel Groezinger was born in Hohenhasslach, but we assume he moved to the Holy Land, else why is his name on this plaque? He was killed, almost certainly in battle with the British, at Nazareth, in 1918. The list indicates that these men, some of whom may never have set foot in Germany before the war, regarded the distant land as the homeland, and the place they had been raised in as a home in a land. When after the Great War they found themselves under British control, this only reinforced their national pride. This memorial plaque was set up under British dominion. (There is a British military cemetery about five miles to the North, also from WWI).

As I was wandering around, two middle-aged American women, orthodox Jews from New York by their accents, wandered into the cemetery plopped themselves down on a shaded bench (it was a very hot day), and in very animated tones compared notes about some third woman. After a few minutes they got up and walked on, the long-dead Germans having offered them a sheltered spot for their chat. At no point did they seem to notice that they were anywhere but on a bench in a park.

Had they looked behind them, to the point of convergence of the paths at the head of the grounds, they might have been startled. I certainly was:

A memorial crafted as a cross: nothing wrong with that, certainly in a Christian cemetery. Until you look closer, and see that it commemorates “more than 450 Dead of the three villages who died in the two wars”.

Keep in mind that once that second war was over, there were no Germans left in the German Colony – hundreds of the young men had returned in 1939 to fight for the Fatherland, and the rest were removed by the British. Which means that this memorial, unlike the other one, was not put up by a living local community. As a matter of fact, there’s an explanatory plaque at its foot that tells that is was put here in 1970, when the area was Jewish, and I personally can name quite a number of Holocaust survivors who lived within a radius of a mile. You begin to understand why that green door is locked all the time.

All the while I’d been wandering around, I had noticed the five or six middle age Germans caring for the headstones, clearing weeds, fiddling with the sprinklers. The ones who had opened that gate, obviously. So I asked them who they are.

- We’re Templers.

And how does one become a Templer, I asked? The first answer was typically German:

- One registers.

Seeing the skepticism on my face, the elderly man told the woman who had answered that he didn’t think that was what I had meant, so they both explained that being a Templer meant living according to a specific set of beliefs.
- How many Templers are there?
- We’re about 150 in Germany, and there are about 600 in Australia.
- Australia?!
- Australia. But we’re from Germany.

Given that the British deported many of those Templers to Australia, I decided not to pursue the subject with these ones. They weren’t telling, so I wouldn’t ask.

- And you see it as a duty to come and maintain this cemetery, as part of being Templers?
- Yes. We come one a year, or once in two years.
- Is this a religious thing, or are you perhaps descendants?
Silence. But then, after a moment:
- Well, it just so happens that that’s my great grandmother, the one over there.
- And that one, over there, he was my ancestor:

- So it’s actually more than a religious community. It’s a clan you’re born into?
- Well, yes, I suppose you could say that.
- Fascinating. Do you mind if I take your picture?
- Um, well, no of course not!

Judeo-Arab Conspiracy

For a number of years now I have been looking for a Palestinian partner with whom to co-author a book about Jerusalem. I've put out all sorts of feelers, using various well-placed connections I have. Some of them told me to forget it, no Palestinian would ever agree to the plan; others told me there would be no problem in finding such Palestinians, and then they sheepishly never got back to me with any names. Some were quite clear about the whole idea: No Palestinian will dare co-author a book with an Israeli whose basic premise is not that the Israelis bear full responsibility for whatever has gone wrong here; a book that would try to share two contradictory narratives, respecting one another within the same two book covers, would mean a death sentence for the Palestinian author.

So the book waits.

In the meantime an Arab reader of this blog, Ibrahim ibn Yusuf of Argentina, has agreed to a second-best scheme. This scheme is that we share a blog. It has rather elaborate rules of engagement, but I hope it will be interesting. You're invited to go visit, here.

Ruminations will continue to broadcast as usual, so you're welcome to stay here, also.

Hamas Less Sophisticated than Assad First

Bill Clinton spent most of the year 2000 in a frantic attempt to get into the history books for something more admirable than That Woman. Since he'd already spent 7 years doing nothing on the domestic front that was particularly history-book worthy, he put his money on the Mideast, and tried to make peace. His first attempt was to make peace between Syria and Israel, and if memory serves, he had two meetings with Assad. At one of them he tried to put on a brave face, and told the media that Assad was willing to make peace with Israel. Assad was standing about three feet away, and you could have expected him to confirm that yes, what the President of the United States just said in my name is true - but alas, Assad didn't. He merely stood there silently.

Now compare that with Jimmy Carter, who already has a Nobel Prize and probably will be a bit higher than Clinton on the "Remembered by History" charts, though neither of them will be remembered by school children in the 22 century. Carter went to talk to some Hamas leaders, and after doing so

Former President Jimmy Carter said Monday that Hamas — the Islamic militant group that has called for the destruction of Israel — is prepared to accept the right of the Jewish state to "live as a neighbor next door in peace."

Now if true, that would be pretty dramatic news. Assad 1 in a mildly similar scenario was clever enough to keep his mouth shut, allowing people to infer that maybe he'd changed his positions. Not so with Hamas, who don't even have the sense to shut up when it would be advisable:

Carter said Hamas promised it wouldn't undermine Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' efforts to reach a peace deal with Israel, as long as the Palestinian people approved it in a referendum. In such a scenario, he said Hamas would not oppose a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri in Gaza said Hamas' readiness to put a peace deal to a referendum "does not mean that Hamas is going to accept the result of the referendum."

To Tell or Not To Tell?

Rather like in the case of The Washington Post of yesterday (previous post), deliberating whether to publicize the thought of that Hamas leader or not, so also the case of the discussion in the Gemarah which I came across the other day, in which a long and detailed list of ways of cheating in commerce is being presented and forbidden. Eventually Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakai, one of the more illustrious among the scholars of that age wonders:

Bad if I enumerate, bad if I don't. If I do, the crooks will learn. If I don't, the crooks will believe we aren't aware of their schemes.

Human nature never changes.

Bava Batra, 89b
This thread began here.

Note: It's the weekend of Pessach, and this blog is shutting down for a few days. See you next week.

Hamas, Carter, Washington Post and Others

The Washington Post has published an op-ed signed by Mahmoud al-Zahar. Next to it they've published an editorial of their own.

They certainly don't need me to send them readers; I expect this will reverberate quite loudly over the next day or two (you can't ask for more in today's news cycles). One reason I'm linking is simply as a bookmark. Sooner or later I'll have occasion to parse the al-Zahar article, for its clarity of intent alongside its deft use of propagandistic tools.

A "peace process" with Palestinians cannot take even its first tiny step until Israel first withdraws to the borders of 1967; dismantles all settlements; removes all soldiers from Gaza and the West Bank; repudiates its illegal annexation of Jerusalem; releases all prisoners; and ends its blockade of our international borders, our coastline and our airspace permanently. This would provide the starting point for just negotiations and would lay the groundwork for the return of millions of refugees. Given what we have lost, it is the only basis by which we can start to be whole again.

The editorial is interesting for its clear-eyed and and no-nonsense assessment of al-Zahar's words and positions. It's also interesting for the very sharp tone it uses to castigate President Carter for his insistence on meeting with a clutch of high Hamas figures as he wanders around the Mideast, meddling.

Most interesting for the purposes of this post, however, is to note that the editors of the WaPo asked themselves if they should publish the incendiary thoughts of al-Zahar:

We believe Mr. Zahar's words are worth publishing because they provide some clarity about the group he helps to lead, a group that Mr. Carter contends is worthy of being included in the Middle East peace process.

They then leave no room for any subtlety or ambiguity as to how they read the text and Carter's actions.

Then you go and read the comments to the two articles. There are dozens of them, out of what must be at least tens of thousands of readers, and as always you need to wonder what significance to attach to them - never an easy question - but it is striking that most of the responders came to the opposite conclusion from what the editors of the paper intended.

Self Fulfilling Reality

If you read this BBC article from the end to the beginning, what it says is that Khaled Mashaal, top leader of Hamas, is threatening a major explosion if the Israelis and Egyptians don't lift the siege from Gaza, and this on the same day that a unit of his (Hamas) fighters initiated a battle at the fuel terminal at Nahal Oz. I remind you, tho you probably don't need the reminding, that the Nahal Oz border crossing serves the Palestinians, not the Israelis, and that it has been closed since the previous Palestinian attack, last week. You really couldn't make this stuff up, it's so blatantly idiotic.

Then again, maybe it's not idiotic at all, if you're willing to suspend normal rational belief systems, and switch over to one like this. To hark back to my Karl Popper post a few weeks ago, when the facts fit a thesis it doesn't prove more than that you've got to keep looking for other facts that will disprove it; still, when you have two alternate explanations of reality, and the facts contradict one and don't contradict the other, you can reasonably abandon the one contradicted by the facts, even if you can't yet prove the veracity of the other one.

Intellectuals and Conflict

There's an interesting new publication on the Web called World Affairs Journal. It's actually a venerable publication, but it came online only recently, as a quarterly. I already cited George Packer's Iraq the Place vs. Iraq the abstraction article from this website; here are another two.

Peter Collier tells about an altercation between Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash, on the one hand, and Paul Berman on the other, regarding the essence of the Islamist threat in Europe. The former are too sanguine, says Berman, and Collier agrees. Yet ultimately, you can ask what Collier added to Berman's ideas. Or put otherwise, if you've read Berman, why read Collier, and if you haven't why not?

Jacob Heilbrunn describes how most intellectuals who are on the ideological barricades these days are more like celebrities than intellectuals: they write op-eds and such, not carefully reasoned books, and their discussions deal with unimportant matters, not with ideas. His exception is Paul Berman.

As a blogger myself, I'm growing ever more convinced he's right. We run around so much, and need to say things all the time and every day, that we're losing the ability to think slowly, seriously, and in depth. It's a real problem.