Greewald: Ad Hominem as The Method

There's this story going on about Chas Freeman, who has been appointed to some highfalutin advisory position somewhere within the Obama Administration. Lot's of people are cheering, others are groaning and kvetching. I haven't been following it too closely. My understanding is that it's not an executive position, nor is it top-tier. If here and there in the Administration there are people with nutty viewpoints, the United States of America is a big enough place to contain them. If the fellow challenges any potential groupthink, that can't be bad, either.

One of the advantages in being deeply and fundamentally right is that you can afford to be questioned by skeptics, contrarians, fools and snakes, all. So long as the the decision makers themselves are rational, there isn't much to be fearful of. In the long run, the skeptics may make some legitimate criticisms here and there, but they won't be able to cast serious doubt on a position that's fundamentally correct.

So far so good. Now you might want to cast a glance at Glenn Greeenwald's thoughts on the matter. They're long and wordy: Greenwald's like that. My understanding is that the central objective problem with Freeman is that he has been in the pay of the Saudis, who have a record of knowing why they pay nice sums to former American diplomats. In spite of everything Greenwald and others will imply, the vocal friends of Israel in Washington haven't been on Israel's payroll. They've made up their minds for whatever nefarious reasons, but being paid for them wasn't one. Greenwald, however, has this revealing comment to make:

There is, by design, definitely a chilling effect to these smear campaigns. Freeman is being dragged through the mud by the standard cast of accusatory Israel-centric neocons (Marty Peretz, Jon Chait, Jeffrey Goldberg, Commentary, The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb, etc. etc., etc.), subjected to every standard, baseless smear, as a warning to others who think about challenging U.S. policy towards Israel in a similar way...
Ultimately, the greatest weapon to defeat these campaigns is to highlight the identity and behavior of their perpetrators. Just consider who is behind the attack on Freeman; how ugly and discredited are their tactics and ideology; and, most importantly, how absurd it is, given their disgraceful history, that they -- of all people -- would parade around as arbiters of "ideological extremism" and, more audaciously still, as credible judges of intelligence assessment.

The argument, in other words, must be resolved by "highlighting the identity" of the discussants saying things we don't like. Not "let's refute their claims", but "let's paint them in garish colors".

PS. And no, I hope I don't do the same. Follow the tags and you'll see that when the Guardian or Juan Cole (rarely) say thoughtful or valuable things, I've taken note. They don't do it often, true, but it can happen. What's wrong with them is how they use their cognitive facilities, not the fact that they are who they are.

Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick

Roger Cohen, a columnist at the New York Times, has a political agenda. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, of course. I've got a political agenda; most people who care about the unfolding story of humanity do. Being open about it is important, of course; holding up your positions and sources to scrutiny is even better.

Recently, Cohen visited some Jews in Iran, and deduced all sorts of far-reaching things from his visit. Jeffery Goldberg facilitated a visit for him with a community of Jews from Iran, now in Los Angeles; one assumes the narrative he'll hear in LA will be mildly different than the one he heard in Teheran, and we hope Cohen will tell us about this in a reasonable manner. You can follow this story as it unfolds either at the New York Times or at Goldberg's place, whichever.

Yesterday, Cohen published what he called a "reality check" about things in the Mideast.

The United States should follow the British example. It should initiate diplomatic contacts with the political wing of Hezbollah. The Obama administration should also look carefully at how to reach moderate Hamas elements and engineer a Hamas-Fatah reconciliation.

A rapprochement between the two wings of the Palestinian movement was briefly achieved at Mecca in 2007. The best form of payback from America’s expensive and authoritarian allies — Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan — would be help in reconciling Gaza Palestinians loyal to Hamas with West Bank Palestinians loyal to the more moderate Fatah of Mahmoud Abbas.

Now, I'm going to surprise some of you, or perhaps not, by being in favor of talks with Hamas. I don't think enemies need to pretend they aren't there, and if they can find anything to talk about: by all means, why not. Perhaps they'll stop being enemies, which would be great. If not, there's always the possibility one can wrangle some practical benefit from talking. The Zionists wrung some interesting concessions from the Nazis in the mid-1930s Haavara agreement; in 1944 and 1945 there were some marginal things that could have been achieved from talking to the SS, and even were achieved in April 1945.

No talking to the Nazis, however, would have prevented the Shoah. The Nazis murdered millions of Jews because they wanted to, not because the Jews weren't talking to them or weren't being nice.

I've got some arguments with Cohen about his facts, but my real argument with him is about this:

Israel, from the time of Ben Gurion, built its state by creating facts on the ground, not through semantics. Many of its leaders, including Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni, have been on wondrous political odysseys from absolutist rejection of division of the land to acceptance of a two-state solution. Yet they try to paint Hamas as irrevocably absolutist. Why should Arabs be any less pragmatic than Jews? (my italics)

Why indeed? That's the fundemental question, indeed, one of the most important questions facing mankind in the early 21st century. Cohen believes the answer is that Arabs aren't any different from Jews (or Americans, or Brits, or even Chinese far that matter). Since they're just like us, yet some of them behave so nastily, it must be because we're doing things to them that make them nasty; since we're responsible, we need to be better.

I, on the other hand, am stuck with the question. Why is it, indeed, that Arabs (or at any rate, many of them, and many of their regimes), are less pragmatic than Jews (or Americans, or Brits, or even Chinese, for that matter)?

So, while I'm in favor of talking to whomever is willing to talk to us, I insist on keeping the big stick within easy reach. Some of the people we'll be willing to talk to, after all, won't be willing to talk back. With others, there's nothing we can talk about. What could the Cambodians with eyeglasses have talked about with their Khmer Rouge murderers? (Yes, wearing eyeglasses was a capital offense). What could the Armenians have talked about with their Turk murderers 90 years ago? What could millions of Ukrainians have talked about with their Soviet murderers 8 decades ago?

Speak softly, but carry a big stick, as Teddy said.

Vatican Archives

Yad Vashem, my erstwhile employer, is hosting a meeting of Vatican and Israeli historians. I'm not at Yad Vashem anymore, and I neither know the details nor am I asking. If anything good comes of the meeting, great. In the meantime, however, I'm holding back on gushing good feelings:

Israel has encouraged the Vatican to open its wartime archives to allow researchers to look for concrete examples of Pius' actions. But the Vatican has denied access to major parts of its archives, including wartime papers.

Shalev said Sunday he was pleased to learn that Benedict instructed the archive to speed up the process of cataloging the material and hoped it could now be completed in three to four years.

Yad Vashem said Shalev was informed of the development by Vatican archive officials and people who were in direct contact with the pope.

I've been in archives before, and know a thing or two about how they think. Blocking access to documents until the cataloging is completed is the archival corollary of a government setting up a committee. It could lead to something someday. Hypothetically. Maybe. Perhaps.

An archives that wants people to know what in its collections can always find plausible ways around the lack of a catalog.

Divine Justice!

Football (soccer) fans in Israeli stadiums famously have a vocabulary of five (Hebrew) words: The Umpire's a SOB, when things are going bad, and God Exists, when their team is winning.

Well, here's the proof that God exists.

Though it does make one wonder. Israeli sports folk are pretty crappy. Could it be that antisemitism is God's way of improving them?

Aharon Karov, Still Getting Better

A while ago I wrote about the miraculous survival of Aharon Karov, who went to war the morning after his wedding, was critically wounded when a Hamas booby-trapped building collapsed on him, and then didn't die. Apparently he's still getting better. Reading between the lines you'll see he still has far to go, but he's going there. Looks like he's likely to have great grandchildren who will perhaps learn in school about the antisemitism of the early 21st century (see previous post).

Random Antisemitism Roundup

I once had a discussion with a fellow from the Guardian (this must have been, oh, six or seven years ago at least), in which I pointed out that one way of knowing if the Guardian was being antisemitic or not would be to wait a few decades or a century, and then see if the books being written in 2080 about antisemitism in 2000 would dedicate chapters to the Guardian. The problem with this method, of course, being that one must defer the satisfaction of being proven right by a rather long time.

My interlocutor, of course, was of the opinion that I was over-reacting to criticism of Israel, and there was no antisemitism involved. What would you expect him to think?

Unfortunately we didn't need to wait three generations; we didn't even have to wait until the end of that very decade. Here's a totally random roundup of antisemitism culled from the online reports on this Sunday, March 8th, 2009, in about 10 minutes of online rambling: I didn't even go googling.

Israeli tennis player Andy Ram responding to the violent demonstrations against an Israeli tennis team in Sweden.

Students at Oxford (Britains' top university) throwing anti-Jewish parties. I'm not really into worrying too much about sophomoric students and their drunken antics, but when their drunken antics reflect the Zeitgeist it's time to take notice. Also, my youngest son is their age, and is actually quite able to take life-and-death responsibilities upon himself as these kids never will have to - as did his older siblings at the same age. Being 20 does not inevitably mean being asinine.

Israel Apartheid Week, in New York. In which context look at this recent quote from Prof Cole:

you are a little unlikely to be denied a high government post in the US because you once criticized Milosevic or Bashir. But if we leave aside the question of how many people, exactly, they have killed, and just examine the mindset and the shape of the policy they advocate, Binyamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman are also ultra-nationalists.

See that one? Some people are mass murderers, other merely talk nasty (assuming they really do, which is moot), but essentially they're all the same if we don't like them.

Guy Bechor comes back from Europe to report. I can attest to having the same experiences.

Economist Roundup

The Economist offers its subscribers the option of downloading a podcast version of the entire magazine (non-subscribers can purchase copies). This is a fine thing, since who has time to read the whole thing? Listening to it while doing other things, on the other hand, is an economic use of time, if you'll pardon the pun. I haven't yet figured out how to use my iPod while swimming, but I do a lot of walking (and almost no sitting in traffic jams, which was probably the original idea at the Economist).

So here's a roundup of some interesting stuff they offered this week.

Two very disturbing articles about the chaos that is Somalia, here and here. Somalia's an important place. Not because it's the world's worst basket case, even more than the Congo, Sudan, North Korea and of course Gaza - basket cases often don't bother the rest of the world. Somalia's important because it's a strategically situated basket case, which is being taken over by the Islamists; and the Islamist have already proven they know how to use far off countires we've never heard about to launch mischief in the ones we live in. Disturbingly, it's not only the Guardian that doesn't care about Somalia. Look at the list of special envoys appointed by the new Obama administration who are to deal with problematic parts of the world, and tell me which one has the Horn of Africa brief.

The UK has yet to figure out how to deal with its Muslim minority. There's no small amount of irony in this story, or Schadenfreude if you prefer.

There's a long Special Report on rubbish (that's really what it's about). This chapter of it explains how Mumbai is better at recycling than San Francisco, if you can believe it. Heh.

The Autonomy software company is doing just fine, in spite of the recession, thank you. They're doing fascinating things, too, or maybe I think it's so interesting because of my professional occupation and the rest of you will tell me it's b-o-r-i-n-g. Over here's a story about some folks who are giving Google a run for their money.

Ayn Rand is selling far better than stocks, these days. There may even be a connection. A bit of a pity, all those sales, because she's dead and can't appreciate her popularity, while lot's of deserving live authors don't have it (the popularity) but could enjoy it if they did.

Talking about books, we've all read the ones that tell how crowds and masses are bad, unthinking, stupid and so on. Apparently not, says this report. Crowds actually often police themselves and calm potential violent clashes. Apropos crowds, it turns out Facebook doesn't make for more friends, because our brain is wired to be able to deal with a limited number of human relationships, and technology can't change that. There's a profound moral to this tale, but I'm not going to get into it today.

Ronald Reagan, it seems, had very fine intuition - but ultimately it didn't make much difference.

Finally, an obituary for Christopher Nolan, a very brave man.

Rebbegeld

Rebbegeld is what one pays the rebbe for teaching the kids; figuratively it means the costs we bear to learn life's lessons.

Herb Kenion thinks he's sees a pattern of the Obama administration learning curve in matters of foreign affairs. First, assume Bush had it all wrong, and we'll do it better. Second, send some representatives to listen to the putative Bad Guys, to find a way of engaging them. Third, recognize that they really are problamatic, and revert to a stance that's quite similar to the previous one. (Fourth, he doesn't say, never ever admit that the previous gang more or less knew what it was doing).

So it was with Durban 2, with Iraq, now with Syria, soon to be with Iran... I can live with it. If it makes more Americans happy for having tried to play nice, while enough of their adminsitration are capable of admitting failure, I have no problem with the rebbegeld.

Arabs in Israel

Yesterday I received a letter from the local court in a minor matter that has essentially no impact on my life except as a very minor distraction. Anyway, the letter announced a change of date of some session. Since I don't normally get such letters I had to peer at it closely for about 18 seconds to figure out what they wanted, during which time I noted that it was a bilingual document, Hebrew and Arabic. Now this isn't all that surprising, given that Israel has two official languages, but it occurred to me to glance at other documents regularly sent by the authorities, which I normally don't even see, tho I do look at them. The water bill, for example: bilingual. A recent letter from the National Insurance (Bituach Leumi): Hebrew, with some Arabic at the bottom which includes various contact data. And that's as far as I investigated the matter; the other old bills are at the accountant's.

The Jerusalem Post this morning has an interview with Haneen Zoubi, the first Arab woman ever to have been elected to Knesset by Israel's Arabs. There have been other Arab women elected to the Knesset, but as representatives of Zionist parties such as Labor and Meretz. In 60 years no Israeli Arab party has ever sent a woman to the Knesset, until Ms. Zoubi, now. (The Jewish Orthodox parties often send women to the Knesset; the Haredi including Shas, never).

Ms. Zoubi doesn't much like us, as you'd expect with a representative of the Balad party of Arab nationalists. The founder of her party, Azmi Bishara, exiled himself a year or two ago when the police began investigating charges of treason against him. The allegations were that he had assisted Hezbullah in its war against Israel, the country in which he was a member of parliament; during the war Hezbullah's indiscriminate shelling of northern Israel had killed 10-15 Israeli Arabs, I don't remember the exact number. Rather than prove his innocence Bishara removed himself from Israeli jurisdiction, though apparently he still draws an Israeli pension.

It seems to me some of Ms. Zoubi's declarations are contradicted by her own story:

"In Israel, Arabs - men and women - are virtually excluded from government positions. They don't go to the army so entire areas of post-military jobs, such as the field of high-tech, are closed to them. There are numerous examples."

Born and raised in predominantly Arab Nazareth, the northern city which serves as the unofficial capital for Israel's Arab citizens, Zoubi, a Muslim, grew up amid a large, well-known family. Some members of her extended family have been part of Israel's establishment, including cousin Abd-El-Aziz E-Zoubi, a one-time mayor of Nazareth who, as a representative of the Labor Party, was the Knesset's first minority minister (deputy minister of Health from 1971-1974 ), and Nazareth District Court judge Abd El- Rahman Zuabi, who served as a temporary Chief Justice for nine months, but was not appointed permanently to the bench.

Just for the clarification: being temporarily on the Supreme Court is standard for the worthiest of district court judges as the customary prerequisite for a permanent appointment; many temporary appointments, however, don't turn into permanent ones; there have, of course, been Arabs with permanent appointments to the top bench.

Ms. Zoubi's statement about hi-tech being closed to Israeli Arabs is of course wrong. Hi-tech in Israel is mostly private sector, not public, and entrepreneurs can do whatever they manage to raise money for. Here, for example, is the website of an entire hi-tech enterprise predicated on Arab technicians in the Galilee being cheaper than the ones near Tel Aviv. They're a business, not a charity or NGO; I myself have had a bit to do with them and they seem quite good.

The bottom line, however, is that Ms Zoubi and her rather distasteful party ran in the elections, in spite of a pathetic attempt by some politicians to thwart them, they didn't do very well because not that many voters like them, and now she's in; she's a member of Israel's Knesset.

Pathologies about Israel

The BBC has a story about an Israeli admiral who was sighted in a den of iniquity. Not admirable, indeed, but is it newsworthy? Personally, I doubt this needs to be in the Israeli press. But the BBC? I mean, if it were the British Deputy Undersecretary of Fisheries and Salt-Mining from the Tory party, I can see why it would get into the Sun. If it were the very top American General, it would perhaps get into the National Enquirer. But the BBC? Can you see them reporting on the sexual escapades of, say, the French Minister of Finance, assuming they know his name? The top admiral in the Russian Navy? What's going on?

Then we've got this one, also at the BBC today, on the traumatized children of Gaza. I asked the BBC's search engine of it could tell me about anyone traumatized in Israel, and it had to go all the way back to August 2001, where it quoted a British woman whose Israeli grandson was traumatized - says the grandmother, mind you, not the reporter - after both his parents and some of his siblings were shot, and I quote:

It is not yet known why they were attacked but Israeli radio were reporting they were the victims of a "terrorist cell".

So I asked for trauma in Somalia, and got a story from 2005 about Somali refugees in the UK who are having a hard time. Trauma in Sri Lanka (there's this real brutal war going on there, with lots of civilians in the middle): to be fair to the BBC, they did have a recent story on that. Trauma in Georgia? One item which just barely makes the grade.

Handing Out Water

Until about ten days ago we were having the driest winter in decades, if not since measuring began late in the 19th century. You might chalk this up to global warming, I suppose, if it weren't for Europe having a rather cool winter, and North America being buried under snow down into Mexico or somewhere. About ten days ago, at the tail end of winter, it started raining seriously, and it now looks like the winter of 2009 won't be a record-breaking catastrophe, merely a decidedly dry year. Bad, not awful.

In which context, someone at Y-net went to look at the subject of water we supply to our neighbors. (In Hebrew). This is a toxic topic, on which most people know very little though many think they know lots. Remember, for example, how until 2005 the "accepted wisdom" was that those evil Israeli settlements in Gaza were drinking 25% of the local water? This, at a time when Israel was piping water in for the Palestinians, while a Palestinian inability to construct better pipelines was limiting the quantities Israel was prepared to supply. As they say: Lies, damn lies, and accepted wisdom about Israel.

I'm not going to do justice to the topic in a blog post. But the figures in the Y-net news item are interesting. Israel's treaty with Jordan stipulates that Israel must give Jordan 35 mcm (million cubic meters) of water annually. In addition, Israel may pump water out of the Yarmouk river upwards into the Sea of Galilee, but the Jordanians may request 20 mcm of that water for itself since it borders on the Yarmouk. In reality, Israel supplies those 20 mcm even in years such as 2005 and 2007 in which there was little rainfall and the Syrians, further up the Yarmouk, essentially pumped it dry. Meaning Israel supplies Jordan with the extra 20 mcm at its own expense, or from its own (dwindling) reserves.

Israel and Jordan are at peace, so maybe this makes sense (and maybe not). The policy of supplying water to the Palestinians is stranger, given the rather tortured relationships which, whatever they are, are not peace. Until a final-status agreement is reached, Israel must supply the Palestinians with 28.5 mcm water annually, 5 mcm of them to Gaza. In reality, Israel has been supplying the Palestinians with 65 mcm (some of it through authorizing new Palestinian well-drilling from the common underground reservoirs).

In total, Israel's contracts mandate it to supply 80 mcm to its neighbors, but in reality it supplies 120 mcm. In 2009 there is a projected 80 mcm shortfall of water for Israel itself, which of course raises the question if perhaps we should revert to the letter of the treaties and stop the gestures, and save half of our own shortfall.

If we do so, prepare yourself for the reports on the new Israeli crime against humanity of drying up Palestinian faucets.

The Wrong Government

The Israeli government that nobody wants, even the man forming it. Yossie Klein Halevy, in The New Republic. He's VERY good, Klein Halevy, normally and also today. You should read him regularly if you're interested in Israel.

The Good Book

Has anyone ever told you the blurbs written on dust jackets of books are actually written by the authors themselves? Shocking, huh? And here, they led you to believe someone had really read the book, and thoughtfully commented on it for the benefit of the browsers in the bookstore. Nope. The same goes for descriptions of books on publisher's websites. My apologies for the disappointment.

So there's this new book out, titled "The Good Book", and since David Plotz, its author, has so helpfully told us about it on the HarperCollins website, I'll simply cut and paste it in here, before going on to the blog-post part:

Like many Jews and Christians, David Plotz long assumed he knew what was in the Bible. He read parts of it as a child in Hebrew school, then at-tended a Christian high school where he studied the Old and New Testaments. Many of the highlights stuck with him—Adam and Eve, Cain versus Abel, Jacob versus Esau, Jonah versus whale, forty days and nights, ten plagues and commandments, twelve tribes and apostles, Red Sea walked under, Galilee walked on, bush into fire, rock into water, water into wine. And, of course, he absorbed from all around him other bits of the Bible—from stories he heard in churches and synagogues, in movies and on television, from his parents and teachers. But it wasn't until he picked up a Bible at a cousin's bat mitzvah—and became engrossed and horrified by a lesser-known story in Genesis—that he couldn't put it down.

At a time when wars are fought over scriptural interpretation, when the influence of religion on American politics has never been greater, when many Americans still believe in the Bible's literal truth, it has never been more important to get to know the Bible. Good Book is what happens when a regular guy—an average Job—actually reads the book on which his religion, his culture, and his world are based. Along the way, he grapples with the most profound theological questions: How many commandments do we actually need? Does God prefer obedience or good deeds? And the most unexpected ones: Why are so many women in the Bible prostitutes? Why does God love bald men so much? Is Samson really that stupid?

Good Book is an irreverent, enthralling journey through the world's most important work of literature.

Sounds reasonably interesting, doesn't it. Though I admit the thought of someone getting through a chunk of life, well into adulthood, before ever reading the Bible, saddens me. I won't say it astonishes me, because it doesn't, but it saddens me. It's the best book ever written, after all, besides being history's best seller (well ahead of Mao's Little Red Book, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Harry Potter, which follow it on the list so far as I know. The Koran must be on the list, too). Not to mention being the most influential book in history, with no contenders in sight. (Try to imagine Abraham Lincoln without the Bible). And bear in mind that Plotz is the editor of Slate, which means he's a figure of some significance on the American intellectual firmament; he's not some physics professor, recently fired Wall Street broker or a member of Congress.

Shmuel Rosner has posted an e-mail interview with Plotz:

4. You're an editor (and writer) with a political mind. You wrote a lot about politics, you thought a lot about politics. Did you find the Good Book politically relevant?

Yes, in a couple of ways. The Bible is the book that guides tens of millions of my fellow Americans. They make their decisions about gay marriage, economic policy, education, abortion, etc based on the words in the book. If I want to be able to understand them, and to engage with them, I need to know what they believe. Also, the Bible has many episodes analogous to political events. It's much easier to understand Bill Clinton having read about King David.

I'll bet Bill Clinton has read the Bible. Come to think of it, if you've got to choose between Plotz's Good Book and the real Good Book, I recommend the real one.

Reality is More Complicated than Logic

I said I'd stop reading and reporting on Juan Cole, since by now his methodology is clear, he's becoming boring, and my observations of him even more so. I expect to stick to my commitment, at least for a while, but one of you in the comments sent me to his post last week where he complains about the Guardian allowing an Israeli to speak. So I had a peak. Actually, it wasn't Cole, it was an anonymous "guest blogger"; and it was neat to see that Georgina Henry herself, executive editor of CiF, felt she had to defend herself. Broad sections of the (saner part of the) blogosphere regularly castigate the Guardian without Ms. Henry responding; it makes one wonder what particular chord Cole struck.

Cole's unnamed guest uses a standard but false trope: If Uri Dromi thinks he can get away with explaining the behavior of the IDF, he's wrong, indeed, he must be lying, since his allegations don't make sense:

My reaction to the content is that the piece attempts to blame the victims-- which is a well known sophist technique. As for the misleading explanations of what seems to be the use of legitimate weapons in inappropriate ways and contexts, my reaction can be summarised as "what absolute bollocks!”

The pictures of airburst phosphorous being used to set areas on fire are conclusive evidence of misuse.

Smokescreens use ground burst. If I had ever wanted a smoke point to cover a flanking movement then I wanted the smoke as a dense cloud on the ground at a height that exceeded the height of my people. Armoured Fighting Vehicle also have small smoke dischargers on the turrets and hulls designed to put a cloud of smoke in front of the vehicle to give time to reverse out of danger or to debus and engage the enemy.

Cole also often uses this technique: if the Bad Guys make a factual claim, we'll refute it not with counter-facts, which we don't have, but by ridiculing it with logic. It's a fun technique, because it dosen't require real acquaintance with the facts; it casts the original reporter as a fool and a liar for concocting such an obviously false tale; and since it does, after all, have a ring of logic to it, it can be refuted only by someone who really has the facts and can explain why the reality trumped the logic, or rather, why the logic of the reality was stronger than the logic of the arm-chair critic. The people with these facts rarely read Cole's blog, obviously, since they're on the field of battle and have better things to do with their time, while Cole's audience, most of whom have never been and cannot imagine, can join him in feeling smug and righteous.

So I waited a few days, and then asked the soldier when he came home over the weekend. I didn't show him Cole's screed, rather I asked him about this whole "white phosphorus and flechette" business. He started with the flechette topic. As he and I both know, flechettes are useless against hard targets such as tanks, APCs, or buildings; they are however quite effective against people - and remember, wars are waged by and against people; they are about killing, which is why they're such unpleasant things, even when they're necessary. Given the specifics of flechette shells, he told, they were used quite sparingly, and only in very specific cases: when Hamas fighters had been identified in specific places which were otherwise empty of civilians as far as could be known. Given their rather precisely knowable range of damage, this isn't so hard to do. The scenario of

The only mass of humans I could see were the women children and old men taking shelter in schools and hospitals and UN premises.

never happened. Nor would it have made any sense: even if one wished to kill civilians in a school, flechettes wouldn't work, not if the school had walls. Criticizing Israel for things it never did is, how to put this gently, potentially antisemitic.

The white phosphorus claim was used more often since it's a more dramatic weapon, I suppose. Achikam was very clear on how it was used: as a smokescreen, never on residential neighborhoods (in his section. He can't say what happened elsewhere). Very often, when his unit moved from place to place during daylight, they did so behind an artillery-laid smokescreen of white phosphorus; when I asked about the height above the ground, he was momentarily puzzled by the question: often there were many-storied buildings beyond the area, and in order to be hidden from spotters you need a smokescreen high enough to cover them, he explained. Obvious, isn't it, the moment you glance up from your laptop screen and think about the terrain of reality.

Poker and Management

The single best pundit of Israeli politics is, of course, Nahum Barnea of Yediot Acharonot. However, most of what he writes doesn't get put onto the Web, since his employers want people to buy their dead tree version, and even the articles that do find their way online more often than not don't get translated to English.

Yossie Verter of Haaretz, however, is pretty good, and he's easy to find online in English since Haaretz has a different business model (an inferior one but that's not my subject). Yesterday Verter tried to explain what's going on in the negotiations towards forming a government. No one really knows, of course, but Verter's description rings true. The essence of it is that Bibi and Tzipi are playing poker. She wants a power-sharing government with a rotating prime minstership, Bibi the first two years, then she for the next two years. Bibi wants a government with Kadima, but intends to bring along some of his natural (or not-so-natural) allies; and he extremely definitely decidedly completely determinately isn't in favor of a rotating prime minstership. Their sticking point is a declaration of acceptance of partition and the two-state solution: Tzipi demands such a declaration, Bibi refuses. Their reasons are that Tzipi expects that such a declaration will frighten off Bibi's more lunatic allies, such as Ichud Leumi, the far-right settler party which has four MKs; once they're gone Bibi will have lost his block, and he'll have to offer her the parity she wants. His position is the mirror image of hers, with the addition that he really doesn't want that far-right coalition, but he expects that in a week or two parts of her own party will begin clamoring for government posts because otherwise they'll revert to being mere mortal MKs, heaven forbid.

On the face of it, this is all pure spin, maneuvering and poker. After all, with the possible exception of Ehud Olmert, there is no individual in the entire state of Israel who knows better than Tzipi Livni that peace with the Palestinians is not in the cards for the time being. She and Olmert, after all, have spent much of the past 18 months or so dealing directly with the top two Fatah Palestinian leaders, the so-called moderates, Abu Mazen (Olmert) and Abu Ala (Livni). They talked and talked and talked, and no-one stopped them from reaching agreements, proclaiming peace, signing agreements, celebrating at the White House and getting Nobel Peace Prizes. I didn't stop them, and neither did you. The reason it didn't happen was that the distance between the positions of these moderate Israelis and moderate Palestinians are, at present, unbridegeable, and have to do with the Right of Return but also all sorts of other matters - and also, one might add, with the total inability of the Palestinian side to deliver, what with Hamas being actively hostile to the whole idea.

So why are Tzipi and Bibi fighting over such a demonstrably non-issue? I can think of three explanations. The first is that one or both of them are idiots. This could be the case, of course, one should never over-estimate one's political leaders, and history is chock full of political and military leaders who in hindsight at least must have been fools.

The second explanation is that one of them is bluffing, or perhaps even both, but no-one knows which of them (or both). In this scenario, one of them will blink, but not yet. The time for blinking will be during the last of the six weeks Bibi legally has to form a government. At that point, either he'll decide her version is better than the best he's managed to cobble together, or she'll decide what he originally offered is better than sitting in the opposition. Whichever of them blinks will, of course, have a rational explanation along the lines of "I've changed my mind for the Greater Good, Call of Duty" and so on.

The third explanation is actually serious, and has to do with opposing appraisals of reality. The fact that both know no agreement can be reached with the Palestinians doesn't mean they agree with the implications. Bibi looks at the situation and figures it isn't time to clash with his natural allies nor with his (very old and idealistic) father, nor with his own preferences, and will say that since the Palestinians don't want peace on terms any electable Israeli can offer, screw them and let's do what is most convenient. Tzipi, on the other hand, says that in spite of there indeed not being any Palestinian with whom to make peace, it's important that we preserve the impression that we're willing to walk the extra mile only there's no peace at the end of it. This position assumes the Obama administration will put pressure on both sides as the Bosh administration didn't, and prefers to go along with the American demands so that even the Americans understand who's being reasonable and who isn't. This is called "intelligently managing the conflict", and I'm reasonably convinced Livni's tactic for doing so is better than Netanyahu's. But maybe that's just me.

Boycotting Durban 2

In the name of fairness: not long ago I posted an article criticizing the Obama administration for participating in the preparations for the Durban 2 hatefest. Yesterday the State Department announced that having tested the waters they'd decided not to plunge in, essentially continuing the policy formulated by the Bush administration of boycotting the conference. A number of European countries are mulling the same - after all, it's the Obama Americans who are boycotting the conference, not the Bush ones.

All in all, the process seems reasonable. The new folks inherited a rather unusual position - America doesn't often boycott things - so they went to check what it was all about. Having learned first hand, they understood the inherited position was correct, and they affirmed it. Can't do better than that, it seems to me.

Early Proto-Proto-Hobbsianism

Now and again the Gemara wanders off from its mostly legal discussions into legends, myths and stories. Aggadeta is the word for these excursions. Many talmudists rather dislike these detours for not being legalistic or practical; me, since I'm more of a historical mindset than a legalistic one, I think these sections are great fun. They give all sorts of fascinating insights into how life was lived, how it's still lived, and how it out to be lived.

Everyone's heard the story of the man who had two wives, one young the other elderly, and how the young one weeded out his gray hairs while the elderly one weeded out the black hairs, until he was "bald from both sides" (keraiach mekan u-mikan). I don't know where the story originated, but you can find it in the Gemara, where it was recorded at least 1,600 years ago, at Bava Kamma 60b. But I mention that one for the anecdote.

More interesting, further down the same page, is the story told by Rav Huna about a case where King David, warring with the Philistines, could only get at them by burning the fields in which they were hiding. He sent a question to the Sanhedrin (the high court in Jerusalem) asking if it is permissible to destroy property of non-combatants to save oneself. The Sanhedrin responded that as a general rule, one may not do so, but for the king it is permissible, because the King must forge a path for his army so as to face his enemies.

More than a millennium before Hobbes.

This thread began, and is explained, here.

Litany of Horrors

One of the frustrations of standing up to the liars about Israel is when they churn out statistics and facts (often, "statistics and facts") about how uniquely bad Israel is, and you absolutely know they're spouting nonsense, but you don't have counter facts at your fingertips, nor are you brazen enough simply to invent them (a tactic that actually does work, since your interlocutors generally don't know much about the world, but I'd advise against it none-the-less). So, since one of the points of this blog is to strengthen the resolve of our side, the following link is offered as a service to our public.

It's an article from the Economist about the eagerness of many combatants in many wars to aim specifically at women and children. It isn't pleasant reading. On the contrary: I wouldn't recommend it all, if it weren't for the insight it gives about how wars are often waged in the early 21st century. And note that the article isn't about local cases of loss of control. It's about calculated tactics, some of them even strategies, purposefully articulated and generally cold-blooded in their execution. If international human rights organizations have any right to exist, it is to stop these evil practices. Since they are mostly powerless to do so, it's legitimate to cast doubt.

Israel isn't doing any of this; as a matter of fact, in some 90 years of warfare, Israel has never done any of this.

Paul Berman's Must Read Interview

Michael Slackman has a troubling piece in today's New York Times. He's been wandering around Cairo, talking to regular Cairenes (nothing intrinsically wrong with that), trying to understand what the Obama Administration must do if they are really listening to the Arabs and wish to mend bridges to them. His answer, in a nutshell, is to abandon the American perspective on terrorism. According to the Arabs, terrorism is the word used by the Americans for what Arabs do, even though the real terrorists are the Americans themselves, and much worse than them, the Israelis.

I have no doubt this is indeed what most Arabs feel - nay: fervently and devoutly believe. They also believe Jews murder non-Jewish children for their blood, for example. The antisemitism the Arab world is drenched in these days can only be compared to the worst version of the Nazi form of it in its severity. It makes the antisemitism of the Guardian look like a mild case of benign and harmless distaste. I'm not saying this for the hyperbole. The Arab world really and truly is awash in Nazi-like hatred of the Jews; a fact Michael Slackman is totally unaware of (or he's aware and willfully disregarding, or he's aware and uncaring - so let's assume he's merely an ignoramus). So his article is totally lacking in context, lacking in history, but most peculiarly, it's also lacking in moral fiber. His thesis is "Hey, these people think we're hypocrites, so we're going to have to bend over backwards to prove to them we're not, including changing how we see the world and behave in it, otherwise they won't like us!"

Craven, silly, and of course dangerous. For the Americans, I mean.

Contrast his thoughtlessness to the long interview Michelle Sieff has just published with Paul Berman. (I was directed to it by Jefferey Goldberg's valuable blog). Berman is one of the last representatives of a politically Left worldview that was admirable, humane, and the sort of intellectual home a fellow could feel proud to be in. Alas, it's a dying breed. Anything he writes is always valuable; this interview is by far the most important thing anyone has formulated on the Israeli-Hamas war, on contemporary antisemitism, and on where we are. It's absolutely excellent. Long, but mandatory reading. It starts out excellent, then gets better. Here's a section from the middle:

Oh, as Irving Howe said, "There is no heart so warm that it doesn't have a cold spot for the Jews." We like to think of hatred of the Jews as a low, base sentiment that is entertained by nasty, ignorant people, wallowing in their own hatefulness. But normally it's not like that. Hatred for the Jews has generally taken the form of a lofty sentiment, instead of a lowly one - a noble feeling embraced by people who believe they stand for the highest and most admirable of moral views.

Unlike journalism, this one is by someone deeply immersed in historical context.

An Israeli at the Guardian

The Guardian allows Uri Dromi - a former IDF spokesman - to present Israel's version of the use of various weapons in Gaza. By this stage of the story, this is no longer enough to exonerate the Guardian from the accusation of fomenting antisemitism and being antisemitic in their editorial line and ethos, though as I've said in the past, the Guardian is indeed better than the worst Jew haters in the Arab world: they live in a democracy and still go through the motions of allowing multiple voices.

The readers of CiF, however, have no such compunctions. If you want to plumb the cesspool of Western Jew hatred, the comments at Comment is Free is a fine place to start.