The Transforming Fire (book review)

Review of Jonathan Spyer, Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict

The mainstream understanding of Israel's conflict with the Arab world starts with Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories. There is a grudging acceptance that Arab resistance to Jewish sovereignty in the area was once the primary cause of the conflict, but somehow, so the accepted wisdom, the Arabs reconciled themselves to the Jewish state, and if only the Israelis would offer the Palestinians an honorable partition the entire conflict would be over, and the last significant rejectionists would fade away for lack of justifiable motivation for their grudges. True, even in the West there are people, mostly on the political Left, who regard any Jewish sovereignty as an injustice to Palestinians and an affront to Arab solidarity, or as an anachronistic Colonial remnant. Yet the unspoken assumption of the mainstream is that such voices, when they exist in the Muslim world, are as marginal as they are at home.

Here's a random example from the London Economist, one of the most important of mainstream publications in the world, writing this week about how Israel is unsettled by the democracy demonstrations in Egypt:

The Egyptian cataclysm slots into Israel’s endless national debate, much as Anwar Sadat’s assassination did in 1981, when Mr Mubarak assumed power. Then, as now, the Israeli right refused to recognise that the separate peace signed by Israel and Egypt in 1979, and Israel’s continuing occupation of the Palestinian territories conquered in 1967, rendered the Israel-Egypt relationship both parlous and unpopular among large sections of Egyptian society and in most of the Arab world.

No matter that in 1981 the PLO's operative document was the Ten Point Program from 1974 which rejected any settlement with any form of Israel, and that only in 1988 would it grudgingly accept the UN's 1947 partition plan. No matter that the entire Arab world severed its relations with Egypt when it made peace with Israel, even though the terms of the treaty foresaw negotiations towards resolving the conflict with the Palestinians.

Jonathan Spyer's new book is like a breath of fresh air in the stifling public area of public Mideast discourse, not only for its bracing content, but also for its insistence that history is a combination of ideological motivations and real people who live by them.

Spyer is a political scientist by training, who reads Arabic and focuses on the Arab and Islamic world. The backbone of his book is an exposition of much he has learned over years of monitoring the intellectual trends of political discourse there. Yet he embeds the political analysis in the tale of his own participation in it. Thus the prologue tells how he and his fellow reservists were mobilized and prepared for battle during Israel's 2^nd Lebanon war in the summer of 2006, which he sees as the first major engagement of the Islamist war against Israel.

I myself once wrote a book about history and policy, cloaked in a personal memoir of how it had been to live through the events I was analyzing; as a matter of fact, some of the events, most notably life in Israel during the Oslo process and the 2^nd Intifada, overlapped with Spyer's. Yet Spyer has a very different life-style than mine. He lives a bachelor-like life of a journalist and bar-hopper, many of whose acquaintances are foreigners temporarily in Israel; I'm ten or 15 years older, a family man who mostly knows other similar-aged family folks, and don't think I've ever been to a bar in my life.

All the more interesting therefore, that Spyer's experiences have exactly the same ambiance as mine. The certainty in the 1990s that war was a thing of the past; the eager embrace of life in a "normal" country, centered around economic policies and the personal sphere rather than the national. The astonishment in 2000-2001 that we'd been exactly wrong. The all-pervading sense of dread and resolute defiance in the face of the tidal wave of suicide murders in 2001-2003. In some cases, Spyer and I have immediate memories of the exact same attacks.

As the book gets deeper into its subject, it becomes clear these personal narrations are not the narcissism which afflicts some reporters, nor an attempt to garner credibility by demonstrating immediacy. On the contrary, Spyer is listening closely to real people, discerning their underlying convictions, gauging the seriousness of their attitudes. Most journalists and too many scholars assume they already know the answers and seek mere confirmation.

Spyer's thesis is that the Islamist rejectionist Weltanschuung is serious and appeals to significant numbers of Muslims; indeed, in recent years it has replaced earlier regional ideologies and has become the leading ideology in the region. In response the Israelis have also shifted their understanding of reality, and have formulated a response geared to last for as long as needed.

The first chapter, about the Oslo process and its failure, introduces a novel perspective. Analyzing the motivations of Israelis and Palestinians to enter the process, Spyer tells how different their points of departure were. The Israelis had been at war for most of a century, and were eager to reach a compromise which would essentially complete the Zionist revolution. As Yossie Beilin and his fellow peace warriors often exhorted the Israelis, compromise with the Palestinians would be the ultimate Zionist victory, as it would enable Zionism to thrive as an accepted member of the regional family. The point, for the Israelis, was to put war behind them and enjoy the fruits of their forebears' efforts. This was never true for the Palestinians, who glumly entered the process from a position of weakness, having failed for over a century to dislodge the Jews, and having recently lost the backing of the defunct Soviet Block. The Palestinians may actually have been listening to Yossie Beilin, too, and if so, they couldn't have been happy. The disintegration of the Oslo Process in 2000 may not have been preordained but certainly shouldn't have been surprising.

Chapter two describes two responses to Oslo. The main one is Muqawama, the Islamist rejection of the West, its culture, and the expectation of its eventual self destruction. This is not a Palestinian ideology, but Spyer recounts various chilling encounters he had with its Hamas expounders. Even when they took place in an Israeli military jail, he compares the steely determination of a Hamas leader to the jocular pragmatism of the PLO man and the fumbling sloppiness of the IDF military police; when he travels to Ramallah to observe Hamas in action on election day in 2006 or interviews a Hamas commander, he tells of Palestinians with a clear purpose and well grounded sense of time: it will take generations but eventually the Jews will leave. Yet even as he presents Hamas as a serious foe, his tales of Jewish Jerusalem at the height of the suicide murders hints at the mirror image: the Jews aren't weakening, either.

The non-weakening Israelis are the theme of the third chapter, which I found deeply moving. Spyer launches it with a frontal critique of the bastion of weakening Israel: the demonstration on Rabin square of November 2006, and the memorable speech of David Grossman, one of Israel's premier public intellectuals, who's son Uri died in battle that year. Grossman's speech is etched in Israel's common memory for his excoriation of the "hollow leadership" that went to war but doesn't know how to make peace. Not long ago the New Yorker had a long profile of Grossman, in which this speech was a central piece, for he is widely held as Israel's foremost prophetic voice.

Nonsense, says Spyer. The labor wing of Zionism indeed created the country and bore it on its shoulders for decades, but now it has wearied – and been replaced. One group which has replaced it is the national religious camp, and he tells some moving stories about some of its members. Most significantly, however, it has been replaced by the Samohas of Hod Hasharon. Alon Samoha was a friend of the author who was killed at his side in southern Lebanon; Hod Hasharon, he correctly says, "is one of the many towns in Israel rarely visited by foreign correspondents, which is a pity. It is a place where not everyone speaks English, and not everyone is looking to get their message through to the outside world. But the real Israel lives in such towns". The message of this "real Israel" is concisely summed up by Alon's father, who tells the author that "If we're tired then we won't exist. If we're tired then we'll have to accept any script that they want to write for us. But we're not tired" (p. 85). Two bereaved fathers, two strikingly different messages.

Chapter four describes the rise of political Islamism in the broader Middle East. Iran is the mother ship, Syria Hisballah and Hamas are forward bases, and there are political beachheads in many Arab and Muslim countries. Common to all is an understanding of history which sees Zionism as an aberration, and the liberal West a waning force. To which Spyer responds with more tales about Israelis, this time the ones who used to be labor-Zionists or Ashkenazi secularists, who have reconciled themselves to war with an enemy who thinks in generations or centuries (chapter five). In chapter six he steps back even further, not to Iran but to London. Again, his personal experiences inform his basic understanding. In this chapter we learn that as a graduate student in London he used his dark complexion to join meetings of local Islamists: and lo and behold, they turn out to have been the same sort of hard, patient and utterly ideological men convinced of the supremacy of their brand of Islam over the West. Eventually they began blowing up targets in London, and in 2003 sent two suicide murderers to Tel Aviv.

Chapter seven describes the Lebanon war; the author's perspective, for all his service as a mere grunt, serves well. In the 1990s Israel thought it had put the conflict behind it. After 2000 it went back to fighting, but focused only on the Palestinians, forgetting to be prepared for wars of larger scale. This set the stage for the poor showing against Hisballah in 2006, which Spyer describes in painful detail. Then, true to his daredevil image, chapter eight describes how he used his British passport to travel to Lebanon, and once there cajoled some Beiruties to drive him down to where he had fought. (He seems not to have informed his hosts who he was). It's a depressing trip, as the area is controlled by Hisballah, normal Lebanese don't go there, and preparations for the next war are underway – it will be more violent and destructive than the war of 2006.

If you were a Palestinian, imbued with the humiliation of the Jewish invasion but comforted by a worldview which thinks in centuries and is assured of its superiority over the weak West and the Jewish interlopers who stole your land, would you see a two-state resolution of the conflict with Zionism as a goal, as the way to end the conflict? Or would you agree with Nizar, the Hamas commander Spyer interviewed in Ramallah, who scoffed at the Zionists for their dwindling hopes: first they wanted to control the entire Mideast. Then they wanted the land between the Jordan and the sea. Now, all they want is to be left alone in the lines of 1967. Soon, they won't even have the will to hold on to that, and history will be back on its natural track (p. 221). Spyer concludes his sobering but excellent book with reflections on the implacable wills on both sides of the conflict, the Islamists on the one, the determined Israelis on the other: since it's going to be along conflict yet, Israel had better not stumble again. Someday, he muses, the Islamist side will prove weaker, since it doesn't produce societies people actually enjoy living in.

It's an excellent book. Read it.

Jerusalem, the Biography

Steven Zoraster recommends we read Cairo To Damascus, if we're interested Egypt, even though it's hardly a recent book.

If it's brand new books you prefer, there's one about Jerusalem which is making waves, at least in Britain: Simon Sebag Montefiore's Jerusalem: The Biography. (Alas, in the US it will only be published much later this year; in the meantime you'll have to wait or buy it from the Brits). It has been reviewed by Antony Beevor in the Guardian; by Virginaia Blackburn in The Express, by John Cornwell in the Financial Times; by Bruce Anderson in Prospect; and, the review I liked the most, by Tom Holland in The Telegraph. There are links to a reading by the author here, and an article by Montefiore himself about Jerusalem, here.

I don't see how flooding the British airwaves with praise for a book about the history of Jerusalem can be a bad thing, and if lots of people read it, all the better.

On a personal level, apparently Montefiore's book ends with the Israeli conquest of the city in 1967. These days I'm gearing up to write a book of my own about Jerusalem, starting with 1967. Just saying.

On the Irresponsibility of Peacemakers

No-one foresaw the collapse of the Soviet Block and the Soviet Union. Gazillions of words were written about the Cold War and Detente and Perestroika, and meanwhile the events of 1989 crept up unnoticed, and even then people were still surprised when two years later the Soviet Union itself collapsed. Forecasting the future is hard. Even when half a century of international policy was predicated upon reaching a result more or less as eventually happened, and summed up in a single word, Containment. It's as if generations of policy makers, politicians, pundits, and everyone else spent their lives aiming for a goal, but it never occurred to them it might happen.

Due disclosure: I was as surprised as anyone; but then, I wasn't a policy maker - and, in the late 1980s, not even a blogger.

No-one foresaw the present turmoil in the Arab world, either; and of course, no-one knows how it will end. Yet there comes a moment when you ask yourself if the leaders are really doing their job:

It is hardly the first time the Obama administration has seemed uncertain on its feet during the Egyptian crisis, as it struggles to stay on the right side of history and to avoid accelerating a revolution that could spin out of control.
The mixed messages have been confusing and at times embarrassing — a reflection of a policy that, by necessity, has been made up on the fly. “This is what happens when you get caught by surprise,” said one American official, who would not speak on the record. “We’ve had endless strategy sessions for the past two years on Mideast peace, on containing Iran. And how many of them factored in the possibility that Egypt,” and presumably whatever dominoes follow it, “moves from stability to turmoil? None.” (My Italics)

In all the learned discussions, no-one ever put up a chart with hypothetical but logical possibilities? Islamists come to power in Turkey; Shias revolt in Suadi Arabia; democrats try to re-take a stolen election in Iran; Israel hands over the West Bank to the PA, the rejectionists take over and the Middle East descends into bloody war; Islamists take power in Pakistan and lob a nuclear bomb at Israel; Iraq collapses, Kurdisatn declares independence and Turkey invades, so a NATO member is at war with an American ally; Belarussion democracy succumbs to dictatorship (oops, sorry, make that Ukrainian democracy)...

Armies the world over are supposed to have contingency plans for unlikely but nightmarish scenarios. You would think the people surrounding the president of the United States, who at the moment still is the leader of the world's only real superpower, would have them, too. If they don't, what else haven't they thought of?

Pardon me for being narrow-minded and fixated on my own navel, but is it conceivable they've not thought about the possibility that dividing Jerusalem will cause war?

Benny Morris does History

Benny Morris has read Kai Bird's Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978. The Economist reviewed the book a while back, at which point I understood I wouldn't be putting it on my reading list. Morris' review, on the other hand, is simply history as done by a professional, so it's worth your time:

From this point on, to the best of my knowledge, practically nothing that Bird tells his readers about the Arab-Zionist conflict conforms with the facts of history. And I am not talking about matters of interpretation. Take the Palestinian revolt of 1936-1939 against British rule (and the Zionist enterprise). “Initially,” says Bird, “their protests were entirely nonviolent. They demanded free elections, based on majority rule … As the months rolled by, strikes and peaceful demonstrations gave way to escalating violence.” This is nonsense. From the first, from the gang-style execution of two harmless Jewish drivers on the Anabta-Tulkarm road on April 15, 1936, which marked the start of the revolt, and the subsequent chain of deadly attacks in Jaffa, there were daily shootings and minings directed against the Jewish settlers and the British rulers of the land. Had Bird simply looked at the almost daily dispatches from Palestine in the London Times from the spring of 1936, he would have discovered this. And this has nothing to do, again, with interpretation or opinion—whether the revolt was justified or wise, whether the Palestine Arab cause was legitimate or not. These are questions of fact, of historical accuracy.

Morris himself has of course written many books on Israel's wars, all of which are worth reading. If you'd like to choose one, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001offers a fine overview of the first 120 years of the conflict.

How Corporations didn't save Egypt

If you're the kind of person who prefers thoughtful books to breathless media or blogger reports so as to understand events, the Economist offers an interesting review of a new book which tries to explain why the Muslim world is so far behind: The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East. Apparently, it's not the Jews who did it to the downtrodden Arabs. It's the coincidence that medieval Islam didn't like corporations. Well, that's the short version. The book itself offers a longer one.

Is Unfettered Democracy Good?

Jefrey Goldberg notices that the American neo-cons and the Israelis have split over what they wish for Egypt. The neo-cons want democracy now, period. The Israelis are fine with Egyptian democracy assuming it can be trusted - but what if it can't? (Not that there's anything Israel can do about it anyway). Jeffrey also notes that this break sort of doesn't fit the narrative about how the neo-cons are the Israelis, or their stooges in America, or whatever it is people like Juan Cole like to say.

May I remind everyone that when Israel made peace with Egypt in 1978, at some considerable price, we thought we were making peace with the Egyptians? Eventually it turned out we hadn't, we'd merely made a very cold peace with the ruling Egyptian clique, but that wasn't our choice, nor our doing, nor anything we could influence one way or the other.

In the meantime there have been various experiments in Arab democracy. The one in Algeria ended extremely disastrously. The one in Iraq is still underway, and we should all hope for the best but without holding our breath. The one in Lebanon doesn't seem to have worked that well. Then there's Palestine, where in 2006 the Americans forced Israel and the PA to accept Hamas as a legitimate party in elections. That didn't work out so well either, did it.

After WW2 the Americans made sure the Nazis couldn't run in West German elections, and they still can't till this very day. If I'm not mistaken, in the US itself the communists were not allowed to run. Sometimes unfettered elections are not the best way to achieve freedom or even democracy.

Apropos what the Israelis think, here's Netanyahu yesterday. Spoken by a different sort of man, many would hail such talk as nuanced and sophisticated.

Israelis Watching Egypt

The media is awash with reports and commentary about the uprising in Egypt. Rightly so, since there's no bigger story right now. Wrongly so, since no-one (not one single living person on the globe) knows what's going to happen, what Egypt will look like in six months or two years, and consequently what the entire Middle East and beyond will be like. The only thing that's clear is that the international structure which has been in place for decades is wobbling, and may well soon be gone.

Who do you listen to in such moments? The folks who say what you think anyway? That's comforting, but possibly not helpful. The ones with the best expertize? Since when have experts ever been able to forecast paradigm-changing events?

So I'm offering only two well-written articles, neither about Egypt, both about Israel. There's no paradigm-changing event happening in Israel this week that needs to be forecast, only a deep feeling of dread, slightly tempered by hope. Dread, because the events could obviously lead back to the Middle East of the 1950s and 1960s, when Israel was surrounded on all sides by nations committed to its destruction. Dread, because if the heavy price Israel paid for peace with Egypt only bought a few decades of it (in an icy form), how can we ever consider making another painful deal? Hope, because a free, democratic and liberal Arab world would be a much better place for Israel to be living alongside.

Benjamin Kerstein

Yossie Klein Halevy

Amnesty International: Israel is Criminal by Definition

 I've been wondering for months if Amnesty International would ever repent for the way it blasted Israel when our police arrested Ameer Makhuol last year. (Here, here, here and here). I even e-mailed them a couple of times, and tweeted. There was of course never any response, nor was one ever expected.

Yesterday, following Makhoul's conviction, Amnesty International finally revisited the story:

"Ameer Makhoul's jailing is a very disturbing development and we will be studying the details of the sentencing as soon as we can," said Philip Luther, Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa deputy director.

"Ameer Makhoul is well known for his human rights activism on behalf of Palestinians in Israel and those living under Israeli occupation. We fear that this may be the underlying reason for his imprisonment."

Translated into English: we haven't read the court's decision, but we know it's wrong, and we know it was handed down because Makhoul is a human rights activist who stands up for Palestinians.

Since the court's decision is in Hebrew, there's no reason to expect anyone at AI will ever read it.

Many years ago, when I was a wee lad at university, I was profoundly and lastingly impressed by the writings of Carl Popper. One of the things I learned from him was about how rational inquiry always needs to ask itself not only what might constitute proof, but what would constitute disproof. In other words, what set of facts might force the inquirer to admit that his thesis is wrong, or at least needs to be modified. If the AI folks and I were still sophomoric students bandying around ideas for the intellectual stimulation, I'd ask them what set of hypothetical facts could possible dampen their conviction that Israel is evil, and is the kind of place that sends innocent men to long jail terms out of mere spite.

Since we're not, I'll postulate that they're driven, among other motivations, by simple old hatred of the Jews, and invite them to submit facts that would disprove this. In any case, they're clearly not in the business of carefully reporting reality. And they are in the business of discrediting the noble idea of human rights.

Ameer Makhoul: Human Rights Activist and Hisballah Spy

In May 2010 Amnesty International blasted Israel for arresting one of their own, a human rights activist; they trumpeted the action as cruel Israeli harassment of a honorable man. This morning he was sentenced to nine years in jail for spying for Hisballah.

Either Amnesty retracts its statements, or we'll be left with the conviction the organization supports Hisballah in its war against Israeli citizens.

Racism in Israel (Against Jews)

I don't have much to say at the moment on Egypt. Last night however there was a demonstration in Tel Aviv in which the demonstrators supported the Egyptian demonstrators, with a delicious twist to the story.

You no doubt remember how a while back some rabbis wrote an awful letter against Israeli Arabs moving into Jewish parts of Safed. Someone, I think it was Jeffrey Goldberg, wrote at the time that the subsequent events were proving to him that Israel's immune system was working quite well against this pernicious virus, as almost everyone, from left to right, from the prime minster to most rabbis, united in condemning the racist letter and its few supporters.

That was then. Now the shoe is on the other foot, so to speak, as Arab activists in Jaffa demonstrate against Jews who are moving into their area. (Of course, Jews have been living in Jaffa, on and off, since before the days when Jonah shipped out on a whale). Last night about a thousand demonstrators, Arabs and Jews, marched in Jaffa against the racist Jews who wish to live there. They chanted their support for the Egyptians, and their detestation of Jews, or at any rate, religious Jews:

The demonstrators including Hadash Knesset Member Dov Khenin, who said: "We came to say no to racism and to settlement in a clear voice. Justice and equality will defeat racism and the settlers."

If that isn't delicious enough for you, reflect on the predicament of Joseph Dana, one of the most extreme voices in the Israeli democracy, a man who routinely demonstrates with Palestinians against the troops of his own army. I haven't found anything he wrote directly about the Safed rabbi, though he did link approvingly to some colleagues of his who wrote back then about how awful and racist Israeli society is. Last night he participated in the demonstration, yet his report is uncharacteristically terse, made up mostly of pictures and this short text:

As Egypt continued its revolution on the streets, the citizens of Jaffa held a passionate march thorough the city against racism and settlements. About 800 Palestinian and Israeli residents of the city marched through the streets chanting in Arabic and Hebrew against the wave of racism taking over Israeli society. “Jews and Arabs Against the Hate and Terror of Settlers’ and ‘From Jaffa to Cairo all people power is revolutionary.” Some protesters carried Egyptian flags and many seemed energized by the events unfolding in Egypt. Despite a heavy police presence and even police helicopters, no incidents of violence were reported from the nonviolent protest.

You see, Dana's got a problem: he's a Jew.... who lives in Jaffa.

Maronites in Jerusalem

I spent a few hours this morning at the Maronite compound in the Old City. I admit that until recently, I hadn't even been aware there is such a place, nor that there are any Maronites in town. There are, it seems, and have been since the 19th century. They were extremely hospitable, and their small compound is beautiful. It's in the Armenian quarter, very near the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which is the heart of the Christian Quarter. (The double domed church in the center of the picture)

While there, a number of thoughts crossed my mind.

First, during the Ottoman era the entire Levant was one political unit, and people moved around it all the time. I have no doubt that there are Palestinians whose families have been here for millennia, perhaps even back to Jewish forebears; large numbers of them, however, got here in the 20th century, or the 19th, or the 18th. They aren't any more natives to this particular patch of land than the Jews who had been moving here since the 16th century (or earlier).

Second, there are probably a few thousand Arabic-speaking Israelis (I"m not certain how "Palestinian" our main host was) who have moved to Jerusalem since 1967 and live on the "Palestinian" side of the Green line. If you're a stickler for the interpretation of international law that says Israel is forbidden from allowing its citizens to move over the Green Line, that has to include non-Jewish Israelis, too. Which means these Arabs, since they don't live in the Jewish neighborhoods, must be pulled out when Israel divides the city.

The idiocy of the idea of dividing Jerusalem gets ever greater, the more you look at the details.

In the next section of this series I left the Old City, and walked south, toward the Abu Tor section.

Seamus Milne Is Correct - and Evil

Seamus Milne lives in a different reality than most people I know. This isn't new - back when I wrote Right to Exist I cited an outlandish article of his to illustrate the oddities the Guardian is capable of. (The newspaper has since gotten worse). Now, however, having spearheaded the paper's Palestine Papers project, he sums up what he's learned from it, or rather, what he always believed but has now had re-confirmed. Any Palestinian leadership which is willing to compromise with Israel so that both nations embark on peaceful co-existence is an evil leadership which must be overthrown; the only way toward peace is to have the Palestinians get everything they demand and the Israelis forced to give it to them.

One doesn't expect better from Seamus, of course. Yet in his present column he is actually more revealing.  His thesis, that the only arrangement acceptable to the Palestinians will mean dismantling Israel, is actually plausible; it may well be correct. Yet note how he couches this:

It's a study in the decay of what in Yasser Arafat's heyday was an authentic national liberation movement. Try to imagine the Vietnamese negotiators speaking in such a way at the Paris peace talks in the 70s – or the Algerian FLN in the 60s – and it's obvious how far the West Bank Palestinian leadership has drifted from its national moorings.

The role models for authentic liberation movements? Arafat in his heyday, when his troops were murdering Israeli children in Maalot or Avivim; the communist Vietnamese, and the FLN. Arafat's movement differs, however, in that it didn't succeed, moans Seamus, and the Palestinians must return to those days of glory and achieve the successes of... whom? The North Vietnamese? The FLN?

Seamus Milne hates real people. He hates them with a passion. The only thing he loves are a set of warped and cruel ideas. If millions of Vietnamese have to suffer for his ideas, or generations of them live in a stunted impoverished and primitive country, great; if Algeria is one of the least humane regimes in the world, who cares so long as the French have been vanquished half a century ago by an authentic movement of liberation. This is what needs to happen to the Palestinians, too, and the sooner the better.

Truly sickening. 

Israeli Loonies Envy Egyptians

Hagar Sheizaf and Bar Rose, contributing to +972, Israel's radical-Left community, reporting from the demonstrations in Cairo:

We would be lying if we said we did not envy the Egyptian people: Seeing masses of people out on the streets to protest for what they believe in is something we, as Israelis, can only dream of now. And it is truly frightening to think that similar masses of Israelis will act only when have experienced the levels of oppression and rage that people are experiencing here.‬

There may be more than one possible way to read this statement, but I can't think of any that makes any sense. (h/t Noah)

A Story about Jews, Muslims, and Christian Pilgrims

The other day Israel's Antiquities Authority showed some journalists an ancient sewage duct which runs under the southern wall of the Old City, from the area under the Western Wall more or less, down into the City of David. Apparently some of the defenders of the city during the war against the Romans used this tunnel, but up till then it had been for sewage and since then it was blocked by the detritus of millennia, so in a way you can say it's a "new" tunnel.

As expected, various Palestinian notables immediately castigated the Israelis for intending to undermine the nearby mosques. No-one expected them not to. Of course, anyone with a modicum of understanding of the matter realizes that digging to the west of the Herodian wall which supports the Temple Mount can't lead under the mountain. The reason Herod's wall still stands so intact more than 2,000 years after it was built, having survived dozens of major earthquakes and destructive conquests of the area is that it's very very solid. No-one knows how thick it is, since no-one has ever blasted through it, but the assumption is somewhere between four and seven meters (that would be about 20 feet of solid rock).

The story I'd like to tell, however, isn't about the malicious Palestinian notables,but about the more regular folks.

About a week ago I went to listen to Prof. Dan Bahat, one of Jerusalem's top archeologists, talk about the current state of archeological knowledge about the city. He spoke for about four hours, in front of an audience of about a hundred people, many of them tourist guides. I'd say about 10-15 of them were Palestinian, some Israelis and some from East Jerusalem. For the first three hours, or more, Bahat talked about all the incendiary aspects of the city you'd expect from an important archeologist: have we identified this building from the Bible, that building from the revolt against the Romans, the market from the days of the Arab conquest, and so on. Throughout it all, the audience sat politely, with an occasional request for this clarification or that. If there was any animosity or even mere tension, I didn't notice.

Then, near the end of his lecture, Bahat said something about the Via Dolorosa, and how accurate or not its various stations might be. At which point the room erupted. A very loud group of the guides - Jews and Arabs together - demanded that he explain, or retract, or apologize, or jump in the lake, or all of the above. The explanation for this became clear: The Jewish and Arab stuff was all academic. The Via Dolorosa, however, is a crucial source of income if you're a tour-guide who works entirely with Christian pilgrims. Everyone knows the Jews and Arabs disagree about lots of stuff, so there's no need to make an issue of it. Cast doubt on a central part of the Christian narrative, however, and you'll soon be out of a job.

Gadi Taub's Levelheaded Views

Still by way of contradicting what I wrote yesterday here, about how Israel's Left has lost it, see this fascinating interview with Gadi Taub, a secular lefty Tel Aviv fellow who writes books about dens of iniquity (not available in English), and a fine and thoughtful book about The Settlers: And the Struggle over the Meaning of Zionism. The interview, done by Michael Weiss of Just Journalism, deserves to be read in its entirety, but here are some nice sections:

We tend to remember the danger of nationalism, but to forget that it has a central role in supporting the democratic structure. The sense of ‘we’, as in ‘we the people’, is what makes each citizen use the vote with a view to the public good. So the connection runs both ways: democracy allows national sentiments and national sentiments are functionally necessary for the well being of democracy.
The question is how to prevent national chauvinism, and Herzl believed – quite rightly, I think – that national chauvinism comes about when national sentiments are stifled by force. Zionism followed this path, in anchoring the right of Jews to self-determination in a vision of universal democracy. The Jews, explains our Declaration of Independence, have this right because they are a people, and all peoples do. This is why Zionism cannot be reconciled with an occupation. You cannot demand a right for yourself based on its universality, while denying it to others. By the same token, if someone believes in the right of all peoples to self-determination, it makes little sense to say that all, except Jews, have it.

A look at Gaza, where the differences between Hamas and Fatah were settled by the use of arms, should help us all wake up from imaginary schemes of peaceful bi-nationalism. I don’t see how Gaza would have turned into a liberal democracy if only there was a Jewish faction added to the mix. What the one-statists are promoting is going to be a chronic Lebanon style civil war. And the odd thing is, how little the London Review has drifted from old colonial habits of mind. The natives – we Jews and Arabs – aspire to national self-determination. But the good ol’ Brits, never tired of carrying the White Man’s Burden, know that the natives are too barbaric to understand what the right form of self-determination should be for them. So until they grow up, we, Western intellectuals, will serve as their political parents, and impose on them the state we know they should want. Because it is Western and enlightened, of course.

Though there are very shrill chauvinistic tones in Israel’s public sphere, and many anti-democratic forces, in many ways we are far more open than other democracies. I can only imagine what would have happened to an American legislator had he or she participated in a flotilla in which American Navy Seals were beaten with iron rods. Not only would that person not have returned to Congress, he or she would not have returned home, but gone straight to prison.
Israel let [Arab Knesset Member] Hanin Zuabi back to parliament, and I think it did well. Israel also does not outlaw a political party (named Ballad) despite its explicit support of the enemy at a time of war (in this case the Hezbollah in the last Lebanon war). This is illegal in Israel as it is in most democracies, but I don’t see any other state which would turn a blind eye to it as Israel did. So, despite the shrill tones, which should be and are denounced, we are not yet on the road to lose our democratic institutions.

Stories of Birthright

By way of muddying the waters of my previous post, allow me to say that one of the most intelligent and prominent figures of the eclipsed social-democrat-EU-model of Zionism was Yossie Beilin. Yet some future biographer of his may yet conclude that his single most important contribution to Israel and the Jewish people was his creation of the Birthright programs. He didn't do it alone, of course, but he played an important role.

Anyway, allow me to introduce you to Wayne Hoffman's What We Brought Back: Jewish Life After Birthright- Reflections by Alumni of Taglit-Birthright Israel Trips. If you'd like, you can start by reading one of the stories, which doesn't fit into any standard pigeon holes.

Is Israeli Democracy Finished? If not, Why?

Benjamin Kerstein has an excellent article on the subject of Israel's eroding democracy and slip towards fascism. He starts by quoting some of the more serious Israelis who are currently warning about the end of Israeli democracy. He then firmly rejects the thesis

Have Jewish hands indeed wreaked the destruction of Israeli democracy? The real problem with polemics like these is not that they are critical of Israeli society, but that their basic descriptions of that society bear no relation to reality. For the truth is that Israel today is more democratic, and substantively so, than it has ever been before. Until 1977, Israel was essentially a one-party state, dominated by a secular and socialist Ashkenazi elite. Today, it is one of the most politically, ethnically, and religiously diverse societies in the world. Sephardi Jews, religious Jews, Arabs, Russian immigrants, and many others have a voice and a degree of political influence they could never have enjoyed in the past that is so nostalgically remembered by the Israeli Left.
Many Israelis today may not like what these groups have to say, or what they want to do. But that is not a threat to democracy. It is democracy. And here, in its apparent powerlessness to change the face of this democracy, lies the Left's insoluble dilemma. To paraphrase Brecht, its only recourse is to dissolve the Israeli people and elect—or, better, appoint—another one.

Finally, he suggests an explanation, having to do with the failure of the Oslo Process and the fading of hope for peace with the Palestinians.On this point Kerstein is correct, but too narrow. The real divide between intellectuals of the Zionist Left (in the case of Gideon Levy, it's probably the ex-Zionist Left) and the rest of us is cultural, not political. In a nutshell, the part of the Left which so bemoans Israel's decline is mourning a worldview in which the point of Zionism was to create a Hebrew-speaking and Jewish-majority Western European state, one which could comfortably fit into the EU and its project of shared sovereignty, weak nationalism, and belief in Human Rights as the overriding principle of social organization. Of course, this isn't what Zionism's founders had in mind, since the EU hadn't been invented at the time. But when you read Herzl's two books, The Jewish State and especially Old New Land (Altneuland), you'll see that he'd have been quite comfortable with the EU had he lived a century later.

Most Israelis, however, aren't interested in that vision. Not that they've got a clearly defined alternative vision - they haven't. But they've got a healthy appreciation of the nation as an important component of identity, and many of them are of course committed to a version of Judaism as a religion. This forms a distance, and sometimes a chasm, between the majority of Israelis and the remnants adherents of the more universally-minded social-democratic vision of Zionism.

The sad part of the story is that some (not all) of the old elite, the one that founded Israel and fought for its success for decades, are refusing to accept that their vision has been replaced, and arguably they're willing to tear down the edifice if it doesn't look like what they imagined.

This needs to be fleshed out in greater detail than a blog post, but a blog post is all I'm offering right now.

A Picture with the Wrong 1000 Words

I'm not going to say much about the so-called "Palestine Papers" yet, if at all. Being a trained historian and archivist, I can easily recognize the potential significance of a sizable collection of documents created during peace negotiations. I can also imagine some of the more obvious pitfalls. In any case, the value lies in a careful reading of the documents along with a solid understanding of their context and relation to other documents. Cherry picking single sentences and cutting them out of context is propaganda, not history; in a better world, it wouldn't even be acceptable journalism. (Hah!)

Anyway, I assume most readers of this blog are fully aware of the fine work being done by others. Elder of Ziyon is looking closely at lots of the hogwash being trotted out by Israel's enemies and their ignorant chorus, and calmly poking holes in it. So I don't need to do that. CiFWatch is documenting how the Guardian has no interest in supplying news, only in bashing Israel and the facts be damned. I honestly don't know how the CiFWatch folks manage to wade through that muck day after day and not lose their sanity. Hats off to them. Robin Shepherd has a magnificent post about how the BBC, Guardian and others are now publicly aligning with Hamas, since the PA negotiators have proven willing to consider some of Israel's claims and thus must be beyond the pale. Anyone who regards Israelis as anything less than monsters, is himself a criminal.

Ethan Bronner in the NYT has an article which, while not always accurate, is reassuring for its lack of excitement. The whole story, he seems to be saying, is yet another anecdote on the long road to wherever it is we're going. This is probably true.

Assuming I should be trying to say something original that you won't get elsewhere, well, the photo at the top of Bronner's article was actually quite tickling:

The caption in the NYT was "Palestinian schoolgirls on Monday near Jerusalem’s Old City. Documents reveal that much of Jerusalem would have remained Israeli as part of a peace deal."

Well, no. The schoolgirls are indeed Palestinian. And yes, they're near the Old City. You can see the wall right behind them. But they're actually in Mamila, on the Israeli side of town, and they're headed deeper into the Jewish side. In other words, this innocent picture of schoolgirls wandering through their town will not be possible if the city gets divided. The pundits all insist it will, of course, because the city will be divided but it won't really; but those are the pundits who look at this picture and haven't the faintest idea what it's about.

Har Homa

A while ago Jonathan sent me a link to this article in the Guardian, by a fellow who says he knows all about real estate in Israel and Palestine. Having read it I'm unconvinced of his expertize, but everyone's entitled to spout nonsense. What Jonathan wanted to know was about this section:

Thirteen years ago, the first Netanyahu administration built the settlement of Har Homa on land inside the Palestinian city of Bethlehem. Har Homa has struggled to find residents and is still largely empty. The head of the residents committee recently claimed it had filled 4,000 properties, but a tour of the development tells another story, with building after building unglazed and cold.

Might I comment, Jonathan asked?

So, first, the part about Bethlehem. Har Homa, and Um Tuba, and Tsur Baher, are all situated in what the Jordanians defined as the Bethlehem county. Not the city, the county. Since the Jordanian control of the West Bank was illegal according to international law, and lasted only 19 years ending in 1967, one might wonder why it's important to mention and if the author's description is helpful. More significant, however, was the part about the empty buildings. I admit I'd never heard that there are lots of empty apartments in Har Homa, rather the opposite, but it never hurts to check. So one evening last week I drove down to Har Home, about a 20-minute drive from where I live. It was early evening, when families with children tend to have lots of lights on, and cars are parked out in front. Lo and behold: most buildings had lights in the windows and cars parked out front. The only place that fit the Guardian's description was at the edge of the neighborhood, where some of the buildings are clearly just a bit short of being populated, in that chaotic stage where the construction workers are still there but the first movers can be seen coming.

I came away with the surprising result that once again, the Guardian isn't the most trustworthy purveyor of facts about Israel.

Yesterday the Guardian joined up with Al Jazeera to launch what they're calling "The Palestine Papers". I admit I don't know if these papers are or are not authentic. However, they tell that the Palestinian negotiators apparently acquiesced to the Clinton Parameters of December 2000, whereby Jerusalem would be divided along ethnic lines: Jewish neighborhoods in Israel, Arab ones in Palestine. Except when they didn't: they were not willing to except Israeli control of Maale Adumim (population of about 40,000), nor of Har Homa. Perhaps because Har Homa is the most recent of Jewish neighborhoods, with construction beginning in the 1990s (and still going on today). There are somewhere betwen 15-20,000 people in Har Homa, but they must leave, say the Palestinians. True, the hill lies less than a mile from the Green Line of 1967, and there are no Palestinian neighborhoods that will be "trapped" between it and Jewish Jerusalem, but it must be dismantled.

So I went down there again today, to look around in daylight. Here's what some of it it looks like from the main road, traveling east.

 This is what it looks like from Um Tuba, directly to the north, and then what Um Tuba and Tsur Baher look like from Har Homa:

 Once you're inside the neighborhood, it looks like a standard large-scale development project. Lots of uniform buildings marching up the roads.

It's a middle class area, with lower prices than most of Jewish Jerusalem, so the folks here tend to be young families, not the top of the professions, a standard mix of orthodox, secular, Russians, the usual. The more enterprising families will move on in a few years, to be replaced by their somewhat younger counterparts; others will stay here for decades and never manage to move up the real estate ladder. It's not a slum, so that won't be a catastrophe for them.

Looking out from their windows one can see the security fence (the winding road) with Bait Sachur, a suburb of Bethlehem, or Tsur Baher, or, if they're pointed west, they can see the hotel at Ramat Rachel, which is inside the Green Line. None of it is very far.

Finally, if they look down towards the bottom of the hill, they can see the new buildings, still under construction, that so impressed that Guardian fellow.

If it makes sense to you that these people must be uprooted so as to have peace, you might ask yourself what peace is for.

Next chapter of this series: Beit Safafa. I assure you that if you've found any of this so far disconcerting, the story of Beit Safafa is even worse. There's nothing in it that fits the universally accepted narrative. The only way to deal with it is to pretend it isn't there: which is what everybody does, of course.

Re'em Hacohen Combines Belief and Clear Thinking

Here's a link to a fascinating talk by the Rav Re'em Hacohen about the divine origins of the Torah, and the impact of human choice upon them. It's in Hebrew, and it's long. If you can deal with those two, I recommend.

Due disclosure: Back when the rav was a child in short pants and sandals, he and I were in the same class at school.