Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

Israel at the End of 2011: Better than Ever

2011-12-30T15:26:00.002+02:00

No, this blog is still dormant, as explained here. However, I still post every now and then, so the Google overlords won't delete the entire blog for having gone entirely silent. The end of 2011 is a good moment to reflect on Israel's condition, which, if you believe much of the media, is catastrophic. Growing numbers of folks dislike us, we're told, our isolation is growing ever more dire, our democracy is crumbling, we're forcing women into second-class status, America's Jews are turning away in growing disgust, and so on and on and on...

Well, no.

Back in my blogging days I used to propose three criteria for measuring the long-term robustness of Israel. So let's start with them:

Economics: While the European economy enters recession if not worse, and the American economy is in a protracted funk, the Israeli economy continutes to boom. Here, check it out at the Economist website, which tells that GDP is growing higher in Israel than in any European country, the US, and lots of other places too. Unemployment, you might be interested to hear, at 5.6%, is not only lower than in most countries, it's at its lowest in Israel for decades and by some estiamtes, the lowest ever. If things stay this way until the next elections there will be no need to speculate on how crazy the Israeli voters have become to re-elect that supposedly universally hated government: any government running for re-election with an economy like this would stand a fine chance of re-election.

The BDS campaign to destroy Israel is not obviously working, apparently.

Culture: is Jewish culture thriving, stagnating or declining in Israel? This is a rhetorical question. There's no measure I can think of by which to claim there's any stagnation or decline. It has been thousands of years since the Jews have had such a broad-based cultural creativity, which isn't surprising if you remind yourself that for the first time in millennia there are millions of Jews living in their language in their own society (and their own land).

How does cultural creativity fit into disappearing freedom of thought, you ask? It doesn't. The disappearing freedom and democracy exist only in the minds of a certain section of Israeli society and the multitudes of ignorant foreign reporters and politicians who avidly agree with them whenever they criticise Israel. Apart from them, it's not happening. There's a racuous debate about all sorts of things, of course, but in other countries that would be called democracy, not facism.

Demography: here the question is simple: are there more Jews in Israel today than a year ago. Of course there are. In an aside, there are growing indications that the demographic pendulum has peaked and is swinging back in favor of the Jews over Palestinians, whose birthrate is either declining or tumbling, depending on the data-sets one uses. (Here, for example).

Terrorism is mostly dormant, by Israeli standards. 2011 was one of the most peaceful years Israel has had since 1947. (The Palestinians had a rather peaceful year, too, since there's some correlation between the two).

The internal clash with the Haredi sections of society seems to be moving in two contradictory directions. The crazies are growing ever more crazy; but there's a long-term trend in which ever-growing numbers of Haredi are slowly acquiring modern education and entering the labor market; some thousands of young Haredi men are even finding their way into special programs in the IDF. I can't say which trend will ultimately be more important, but I feel confident in hoping for the better outcome.

The Arab revolutions seem likely to create ever more outlandish-looking societies. I don't see how normal Westerners (as distinct from the chattering classes) will look at them in 5, 10, or 15 years, and then look at us, and not prefer us.

You'll hear endless punditry about how bad off Israel's Arab citizens are. Well. The reality I see is that growing numbers of them are integrating into mainstream society. I have Israeli Arabs working under me, as well as alongside me, and they are just regular folks and treated as such. I see Arabs - Israeli citizens or East-Jerusalem permanent residents - everywhere: in markets, at the university, in professional groups, in hospitals, at universitities, and so on. Also in the hallways of the government ministries and even in classified installations.

Whinch brings me to my final point. I stopped blogging when I joined the civil service, and went behind a wall of security clearance and the need to shut up about it. Indeed, I won't report on what cannot be reported. But I will say that what I find there is very heartening. Alongside the usual, and universal, red-tape and mediocracy, there are large numbers of highly talented Israelis purposefully going about their jobs of making this a better country, stronger, more successful, better able to withstand whatever gets thrown at it.

Yes, there are lots of folks out there who dislike us, but that's always been so. These days we don't have to give them too much attention. Seen historically, 2011 was probably one of the best years in millennia of Jewish history.

Law isn't Objective Science

2011-12-30T14:22:00.002+02:00

The Mishna is instructing how to determine if various physical defects make an animal permanently impure and ineligible to be sacrificed while still being permitted for non-sacred consumption. At one point Rabbi Akiva suggests a method of checking a particular defect, in which a lamb seems to have only one testicle. The Gemara then brings a story of a case in which his method was used, yet after slaughtering the lamb it turned out the second testicle was there all along, only not visible. Rabbi Akiva permitted the animal to be eaten, while Rabbi Yochanan ben Nuri forbade the animal to be eaten (as a fistrborn it should have been given to a cohen). This led to a sharp excahnge between the two rabbis:
Rabbi Akiva to Rabbi Yochanan ben Nuri: how long are you going to waste the money of [the people of] Israel?
Rabbi Yochanan ben Nuri to Rabbi Akiva: how long are you going to feed forbidden carcasses to Israel?
the original Hebrew is more pithy:
עד מתי אתה מכלה ממונם של ישראל?
עד מתי אתה מאכיל את ישראל נבילות?

Both scholars start from the same set of facts: the lamb seemed to have a defect, Akiva's proposed method of checking was used and proved the defect was permanent, and the animal was slaughtered based on that tested proposition. Then, they both agree, an external fact, unknowable at the moment of slaughter, was revealed. They differ on the ultimate outcome. Is doing your best enough? Is there an objective commandment which supercedes informed intentions? Do social considerations trump (unknowable) facts? Is there a legal truth which overrides all social measures and intentions?

This deliberation is exactly as fresh today as it was two thousand years ago when Akiva and Yochanan had their altercation; each side brings a set of values which precedes their interpretation of the law and informs it. It's the reason there can be no permanent, immutable and universal legal system: every legal system has to reflect the values of the society which legislated it and applies it and adapts it as the underlying values change.

B'chorot 40a.

If you've never visited this blog before, well, now it's too late; I've stopped blogging as described here.

Hanan Porat, 1943-2011

2011-10-04T23:55:00.001+02:00

This blog is still shut down, as explained here. I did however mourn the death of Hanan Porat, here. He was a greater man than his misconcieved politics.

Do Ants have a King? Is it Permissible to Ask?

2011-08-26T17:57:00.000+03:00

It's been almost two months since I shut down this blog. The reason for the shutdown is still in place: Having been appointed as Israel's State Archivist and a high-ish civil servant, I can't write a political blog. (Nor, to be honest, do I have the time). Interestingly, however, since the shutdown there's a steady stream of a few hundred daily visitors to this dormant blog; apparently, if one believes the visitor stats, some of the posts are useful even long after they were written. Which poses a problem since truly dormant blogs eventually get deleted by the owners of the servers on which they reside (Google, in this case). So by way of staving off that fate, I will ocasionally post here, never on political matters, and only rarely - just enough to keep the appearence of a live blog.

Here's a nice Daf Yomi story from Hulin 56b, which we passed earlier this week. It is written, in Proverbs chapter 6 verses 6-8:
Go to the ant, you sluggard;
   consider its ways and be wise!
⁷ It has no commander,
   no overseer or ruler,
⁸ yet it stores its provisions in summer
   and gathers its food at harvest.

Rabbi Shimon ben Halafta asked himself if this was really so, and decided to test it. On a hot summer day he found an anthill, and used his cloak to cast shade over it, since ants (so the story) like shade and dislike the hot sun. Soon an ant came out and saw the shade. Rabbi Shimon ben Halafta marked the ant so he could recognize it. The ant went back into the anthill and annonced that there was shade outside, and soon enough other ants began swarming out. Rabbi Shimon then removed the shading cloak; When the new ants saw there was in fact no shade, they killed the first ant; from this Rabbi Shimon infered that they indeed have no king, since if they had one they would have required his permission before killing the errant ant.

The Gemarah then tells of a discussion between a number of Amoraim, scholars of a latter generation, who aren't sure Rabbi Shimon's research reslts were vaild. Isn't it possible, for example, that the ants had standing permission from the king to kill individual ants who lie to the community? Or perhaps the king was one of the ants that came out and felt tricked, and he authorized the killing on the spot? Or perhaps it just so happened that the experiment fell on a transitional moment between kings, as is told in the book of Judges (17, 6) In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes. Rashi (11th century) and Tosafot (12-13 century) debate how it's possible that Rabbi Shimon ben Halafta didn't take King Solomon's word (King Solomon being traditionally regarded as the author of Proverbs); they also wonder how the Amoraim ask so many questions: after all, King Solomon must have known what he was talking about, no? This discussion continued at least until recent centuries, when some rabbis resolved it by pointing out that King Solomon himself said we should go and observe the ants, back in the original verse.

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If you've never visited this blog before, and now, as I said, it's dormant, see my reading recommendations here.

Farewell to Blogging

2011-06-02T17:09:00.000+03:00

I'm shutting down this blog. In a moment I'll explain a bit about why, and what might come next, but first a word about what's still here.

Blogs are a very ephemeral type of writing. No-one reads old blog-posts, or entire blogs from cover to cover. They can be a useful way of saying immediate things, but they're not very good for saying anything of lasting value. Indeed, most of what I've written here these past four years hasn't been durable. Some bits, however, perhaps have, or so I'd like to hope. These parts I've now collected in a short series of pages, listed at the upper left corner of this screen. There are three such series:

At Don't Divide Jerusalem I've collected links to the 15 essays I wrote explaining and demonstrating why I think the idea of dividing Jerusalem is a travesty which, should it ever be implemented, will be the root of the next war.

At Seeking Peace, Living at War I collected the dozen or so essays about war and peace which I hope will have some value for readers who might stumble upon them even well after they were written.

At Jewish Culture, Israeli Culture I told about the Daf Yomi series I ran here, and about the Shirim Ivri'im one.

Regular readers will have noticed that I've been uneasy with blogging for quite a while. The reason I'm desisting precisely now is that I seem to have been offered the job of Israel's State Archivist. The appointment is not yet official, and the way these things work, it shouldn't be regarded as final until it does become official, but even were it to fall through I wouldn't continue with blogging in the present form. Assuming the appointment does come through, however, I obviously can't be both a civil servant and a political bloggger.

What next? Well, mostly I expect to be engaged in that new job, which includes some very large challenges. Alongside it, however, I intend to continue with the researching for and writing of a book about Jerusalem, the living city that it is, rather than the historical city it as been these past 4-5,000 years - though of course, the present city is also the historical one - very much so. One of the nicest things about blogging is that I've had the opportunity to listen to intelligent people as they responded to the thoughts I've been spewing. I've been wondering if it might be feasible to have a website where I put materials, thoughts, ideas, pictures and general stuff that I'll be collecting (and discarding?) along the way towards writing that book. Professors use their students as sounding boards for the emerging drafts of their research; perhaps a website could do the same? So I've put up a provisional site, over here. It's not supposed to be a daily blog, and Im not certain what it will evolve to be, but if you're interested, feel free to come by from time to time.

Another idea I've had is connected to the archivist position. The State Archivist does various things, including being the head of the national archives, and also the professional head of the entire field. This means he can acquire a good idea about what Israel's various archives have, and what stories they tell. Perhaps, if I find the time, I'll set up a blog that reports on interesting documents from our many archives. Perhaps.

I remain on Twitter, @yaacovlozowick, and whenever I feel I've got an announcement to make, it will happen there. Should I someday return to something resembling blogging, in this format or any other, for example, I'll tweet the momentous news.

Finally, I wish to thank the many readers who followed this blog, those who identified themselves and joined the discussions, and the many who never did. I appreciate the time you gave me.

Yaacov

Politics Trump Treaties

2011-06-01T15:36:00.000+03:00

In the summer of 2005 America and Europe wanted Israel's disengagement from Gaza to be complete. It was really important to them. So by way of convincing Israel there'd be no danger in opening the border between Gaza and Egypt, everyone signed a treaty. The Americans signed, the EU signed, Egypt signed, Israel signed, and the PA signed. The treaty described how European professionals would watch the movement of goods and people in and out of Gaza, and they'd be nice to the Palestinians but also protect Israel's interests.

Then, about six months later, Hamas won the Palestinian elections and it all started unraveling. By the time Hamas violently threw the PA security forces out of Gaza, nothing was left of the treaty. This week, less than six years later, a new Egyptian regime (a temporary one, perhaps) opened its border with Gaza, and no-one even pretends to respect the defunct treaty, nor to care.

Meanwhile, far away in Africa, Sudan is using military force to change its border with the emerging country of South Sudan. If you look hard enough you can find mention of this at well-informed websites such as the Economist; the Guardian has even mentioned it repeatedly (here, here, here and here). So far as I see, words such as "illegal according to international law" or their synonyms don't make it into any of these reports; though here's a blogger who's pretty explicit about what's going on. A blogger. At one point the Guardian does use the term "disputed territory", however, thereby demonstrating that there's at least one keyboard in their system that has the keys necessary for such words.

Just another example among many that international law may be useful when peaceful democratic states suchas Iceland and Britain need to resolve disagreements about fishing rights in the Northern Atlantic, but it's useless when coping with international conflicts.

My point, of course, is not to bemoan the irrelevance of international law; on the contrary, my position is that international law needn't be brought into armed conflicts in the first place, not as a tool for resolving them. The mere fact that they're violent proves that at least one side is willing to kill so as to promote their interests, so why would they be frightened off by some words in a dusty book on a shelf. National interests are what makes international relations happen, not laws.

Michael Totten Visits Hebron

2011-06-01T14:36:00.000+03:00

And comes back with an unsettling report.

I once did the same, in 2009, and also came back with a report.

Liberation of Jerusalem, 44 Years

2011-06-01T12:12:00.000+03:00

Yossie Klein Halevy writes about Israel's most famous picture (The article was published four years ago. Today is the 44th anniversary of that day, by the Jewish calender).

Photographs which Say the Opposite

2011-06-01T00:30:00.000+03:00

Michael Totten recommends an essay by Walther Russel Mead, who claims that America very much won the war in Iraq. Personally I think it's still too early to know, but I"m glad such a compelling and cogent argument can be made; it wasn't long ago that anyone who didn't regard the American war in Iraq as total lunacy, was assumed to be a lunatic themselves. Perspective will make the picture look different.

Michael then links to a weird collections of photos from North Korea, by Charlie Crane. Crane was allowed into North Korea to take pictures, but only the pictures his minders permitted. So he turned the tables on them by taking only pictures they'd approve of, and presents them to us confident that we'll see what he saw, not what they saw: even though it's all the same pictures. Genius. One of Michael's readers then suggests another website that does something very similar: it takes official pictures of Kim Jong-Il, adds a very thin layer of ridicule, and suddenly the pictures say the opposite of what their creators intended.

Both websites use our conditioning as citizens in democracies, to turn totalitarian photographs on their head, without tampering with the photos themselves in any way. Fascinating.

Return of the Nerds

2011-05-31T16:32:00.001+03:00

Here are a few links to articles about how Israelis are working to make their country stronger, or to withstand this onslaught or that, and in general things that demonstrate why Israel is not weakening.

The techies are convening. I was at one of these conferences last year, and was tickled to see all the translations into Chinese, and the Indians who got along fine with English. Didn't see may Egyptians, tho, nor even many Europeans. These folks are one of the many reasons why a boycott of Israel, or sanctions against it, won't work.

The lawyers are revving up. No-one in their sane mind thinks there's a pure legal case against Israel and its occupation and its borders. Clearly, most of the people who talk about what's legal and what's not don't know a thing about law, and care far less. The whole thing is and always was a political matter, not a legal one. Still, it's nice to see a group of lawyers play the game from Israel's perspective for once:

8. While the UN has maintained a persistent policy of non-recognition of
Israel's sovereignty over Jerusalem pending a negotiated solution, despite
Israel's historic rights to the city, it is inconceivable that the UN would
now recognize a unilaterally declared Palestinian state, the borders of
which would include eastern Jerusalem. This would represent the
ultimate in hypocrisy, double standards and discrimination, as well as an
utter disregard of the rights of Israel and the Jewish People.

Danny Gordis strikes again: Danny was invited to speak to a J-Street leadership group on their recent trip to Israel. Since he's not a government official, he can meet them without any implications of any sort - so he did. And told them how odd they appear, and how arrogant, and how unfriendly. Looks to me like he washed the floor with them, though I doubt they saw it that way.

The Money printers strike again: I've already linked to this elsewhere, but it's worth pointing out again. The reason the Hamas government in Gaza still uses the Shekel for its currency isn't because of an evil Israeli occupation. It's because they've got no better alternative. (h/t Andre)

Follow-up on Leaving the West Bank

2011-05-31T15:04:00.002+03:00

Here are a number of responses or follow-up comments to the discussion of my post yesterday, about how Israel should leave most of the West Bank, and disengage from the Palestinians. I have no way of knowing what most readers thought of all this, but the ones who commented tended to be critical of the idea.

1. It occurs to me that I didn't say explicitly what should have been obvious. The entire project of leaving the West Bank will require significant legislation on many topics, which cannot be passed by the current coalition (though it could be by a different coalition in the present Knesset). Therefore, the project will need to be sanctioned by the electorate long before it happens. Having closely watched Israeli politics for almost 40 years, since my late teens, I'm convinced such a proposition, formulated correctly, would be a winning platform for any large political party, though Kadima is currently the best positioned to run with it since it was essentially invented for this purpose. But Likud, Lieberman's party or even the almost defunct Labor party could also run with it, and were any of them to do so, they'd probably win the elections. (The formulation would be important).

Such a move wouldn't be a putsch by Leftists, it would be the expression of the Israeli will as formulated through the political process. As such, it would be accepted by a majority of the settlers.

2. An early part of the legislation, the proposition to assist settlers to move, has already been under discussion for a number of years; surprisingly - or not at all, depending how much you know about the reality - many settlers themselves are eager to have such a law passed. At the moment, many thousands of non-ideological settler families who moved to acquire cheap housing, cannot move out since their homes cannot be sold at reasonable prices. Were the government to alleviate this in some manner, they would move immediately. This piece of legislation alone would noticeably reduce the number of settlers, it would send a message to our friends abroad that we're serious, and would have no impact at all on the Palestinians' ability to harm Israelis. (On the contrary: there would be fewer Israelis on the West Bank to be harmed).

3. Water, aquifers and so on are not relevant in the mid- or long-term. As I wrote recently, Israel is already on the road to supplying its needs by desalination and purification of used water. This isn't because of the West Bank, it's because we've already exhausted the natural resources. Moreover, Israel supplies water to the Palestinians, not the other way around.

4. The line to be moved back to - I offhand said it would be the line of the security fence - is not the same as the line of 1967, though it isn't very far from it, either. So of course the state of war with the Palestinians would continue, and anyone who loves to damn us for any inch of occupation will be able to continue to do so. I never said otherwise. This is inevitable in any case, since reaching an agreed line of partition with the Palestinians is not possible, as I explained yesterday and many times previously. On the other hand, Barack Obama himself seemed in his recent speech to be suggesting the same thing, or at least something resembling it; so far as I understand the dynamics of international relations, such a move, or even merely its initial steps, would significantly improve Israel's relations with foreign politicians who are not automatically anti-Israel. Such figures would include, at the moment, people like Angela Merkel, Nicholas Sarkozy, Silvio Berlusconi, and as I said, Barack Obama. I don't see how this would be bad for Israel.

5. Canny Israeli leaders should indeed be able to get some political gains from America and even Europe for such a policy. There is no doubt about it.

6. Palestinians and Israelis in the remaining narrow parts of Israeli-occupied West Bank: I don't know what would happen to them. Were Israel to annex the areas, the local Palestinians would be offered Israeli citizenship, and all Israeli laws would apply to anyone living there, Jew or Arab. However, I rather doubt they'd be annexed. There are good reasons why Israel hasn't ever annexed these areas, and they'd still be in place.

7. Gilad Shalit doesn't fit into this discussion. Lots of things don't. It's not a suggestion to correct the world's ills, rather to deal with a specific part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

8. Regarding the objection that I'm advocating fleeing under fire, and that the missiles will rain down on Tel Aviv and Jerusalem (where I live): Guilty as charged, only in the opposite way. Yes, I'm suggesting we leave the West Bank without any expectation of peace with the Palestinians - because such an expectation can't be fulfilled anyway. No, I'm not suggesting that Israel then live with a rain of missiles on Tel Aviv etc etc. I don't regard myself as a fool, nor will the Israeli majority that votes for this project be made up of more fools than any regular electorate. I know all about Gaza (some of you may remember that I had a son fighting there in 2009), and Southern Lebanon, and the mistakes of Oslo, and the Second Intifada, and all those things. I look at all those cases, and see general calm on all fronts, and I deduce that the calm is no coincidence. Hizballah, many West Bank Palestinians, and Hamas in Gaza all hate us as much now as they did previously, and yet over the past few years they've all decided to stop most of their violence against us for the time being. As did the Syrians, Jordanians, and Egyptians before them. At the moment, the weakest link in the chain are the settlers on the West Bank, who are the hardest to protect, just as the settlers in Gaza were effectively impossible to protect before 2005 - a matter never mentioned, somehow, in all the rhetoric about how awful it was that Israel left Gaza.

Unlike Hizballah, the Palestinians are susceptible to various types of Israeli pressure. Their economy is essentially dependent on Israel's, while Israel isn't dependent on them. They're dependent on Israel for water, electricity, and indeed their very currency (they use ours, for reasons of their own). The thing is, Israel has never had a policy of full disengagement from its control of the Palestinians, and thus has never been in the position to claim that it owes them nothing. Were there to be such a policy, the entire equation would change. True, Palestinian violence against Israeli civilians would remain part of the equation, but only one part among many. I don't see why Israel's cards in that game would be weaker than the Palestinian hand.

Anyway, as I've repeatedly written, the Israeli occupation of Palestine has become the Palestinians' worst weapon against Israel, worse than any military threat they might pose. It's time for Israel to disarm that weapon. That is the base of my position, and all the talk about missiles on Tel Aviv doesn't change it.

Dare to Leave the Palestinians Alone

2011-05-30T22:02:00.001+03:00

Back in the 1880s, Yehuda Leib Pinsker thought the Jews could cure the non-Jews of antisemitism by rectifying the abnormality of Jewish existence as a nation without a homeland. He was an important theorist of the first wave of what would later become Zionist settlement. 15 years later Theodore Herzl had the same idea, but given his position as a prominent journalist in Vienna (an important town in those long-past days), and his indefatigable energy, he was able to launch more than a small wave of settlers.

Both men were wrong. There's nothing the Jews can do to cure the non-Jews who hate them. Yet their efforts resulted in something vastly better than a cure for Jew hatred. They contributed to the creation of a world in which the Jews can live a full national life, without having to bow scrape and grovel before their enemies. The hatred is still there, but to a certain extent, Jews needn't care any longer. They can get on with life - and they do.

Moreover, in spite of the bloody violence directed at the Jews in their homeland, it's nowhere as bad as what Pinsker and Herzl saw, not to mention what came after them, between 1918 and 1945. Remember, in the forgotten pogroms of the early 1920s vastly more Jews were murdered than have been killed in a century of war between the Zionists and their neighbors.

Israel is not going to enjoy normality with the Arab world anytime soon, nor will it have peace with the Palestinians. However, this does not preclude living a vibrant and creative national life in Israel. It hasn't so far, and won't henceforth. Nor does it necessarily mean there will be permanent violence. It's probably not a coincidence that after reaching for its nuclear sword in 1973 (according to foreign sources) no Arab army ever again attacked Israel. Instead, the Arabs moved to wars of civilians against civilians, or at least wars of irregulars embedded amongst civilians against Israeli civilians. Yet even those have not proven effective, and once Israel figured out how to beat them, they tapered off. Israel defeated the 2nd Intifada (the first, too), and it frightened both HizbAllah and Hamas, in 2006 and 2009, enough to make them mostly desist from violence. For the time being, of course, until they change their mind, obviously, but nevertheless.

In the meantime we get on with all the things we wish to do. Jewish life in the early 21 century is richer, more diverse and more vibrant than at any time since Herod the Great, and even the parts that aren't happening in Israel wouldn't be the same were it not for the return of the Jewish nation to the political realm.

None of this success is predicated on settling the West Bank, nor need it be harmed were that settlement to be dismantled (or left outside the border of Israel, which is a far less likely scenario). So why is Israel there?

Between 1967 and the beginning of the 1st Intifada 20 years later, Israeli society held a raucous conversation about the importance of settling Jews in the Biblical heartland. (It is significant that the non-Israeli part of the Jewish people didn't have much input one way or the other: Jewish national discussions, it appears, happen essentially in the Jewish national state). The positions and the arguments went back and forth, but by the end of the 1980s the Jews of Israel had decided, as a community, that settling Judea and Samaria was not important enough, and it was abandoned as a national project - if it ever had been one. No matter what might have been the case in, say, 1978 or 1980, for the past 25 years the Israeli consensus has been that someday, in the fullness of time and in the correct international context, Israel will hand over most of the West Bank so as to enable the creation of a Palestinian state.

From that moment on, every addition to the settlements, any investments and construction of infrastructures must be regarded as a strategic waste of effort, even if in some cases the creation of better roads, say, or security measures, were essential. For a while the supporters of the settlement project could tell themselves the conversation was not yet over and could yet be tilted back to their position, but not after decades.

The reason the Israeli majority never made the effort to halt the settlers was because of considerations relating to the Palestinians. There was the plausible, perhaps even correct assumption that it was the settlements alone which would eventually convince the Palestinians to start negotiating for a two state solution to the conflict, before there was no room left to have Palestine. (The Palestinians made this decision, slowly, impartially, and if they ever really made it, between 1989-1992). There was the assumption that dismantling settlements would be a major negotiation chip for which the Palestinians would play some chip of their own. There was the assumption that the decision to dismantle many settlements was going to be traumatic for Israeli society, and should happen once, in the context of an end-of-conflict peace agreement with the Palestinians, at which point it would enjoy sweeping support and be less painful than in any conceivable other context. Or, as any settler will tell you if you steer the conversation deftly: we've been repeatedly saved by the Palestinians.

Since late 2000 and the collapse of the Oslo negotiations at the latest - some would say, it should have been many years earlier - it has become obvious to a very large majority of Israelis that peace with the Palestinians is not to be had. At best, the Palestinians are willing to accept partition only if it's done in a way that leaves open the possibility of an eventual disintegration of Jewish Israel, while the Israelis insist on an end-of-conflict agreement which blocks any conceivable future Palestinian moves or claims. During the 2nd Intifada Israel reconquered sections of the West Bank which had been handed over to the Palestinian Authority, because this was essential to militarily defeating the Palestinians.

In 2005 Ariel Sharon began the project of unilateral disengagement from the Palestinians. The strategic idea, never publicly spelled out for obvious reasons but quite explicit nonetheless, was to end the occupation even without agreement with the Palestinians. Perhaps even, some might say, precisely without agreement with the Palestinians, who had demonstrated that their terms for peace would be unacceptable to Israel. The novelty of Sharon's positions in 2004-2005 was the understanding that the occupation itself had become a millstone, a weapon the Palestinians were wielding with tremendous effectiveness against Israel so as force concessions that otherwise would not be offered.

If one assumes the Palestinians and Israelis really and profoundly understand each other, an assumption that a century of conflict and cohabitation and enmity and daily collaboration make plausible, the events of 2004-2006 take on a meaning never presented in the Western media. By 2004 both sides knew they weren't moving towards peace. Both recognized how the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians had become the main weapon against Israel. Both knew that the outcome of the unilateral Israeli departure from Gaza would determine the next step. Both knew Sharon's move was a sign of Israeli weariness, though the Palestinian side may have seen it as existential weariness, while the Israelis saw it as tactical weariness with dominating Palestinians. The Palestinian election of Hamas was therefore the result of two considerations. First, that since Israel was wearying, the Palestinian response should be to strengthen their hawkish side. Second, that post-disengagement violence would serve the Palestinian interests, by further weakening Israeli resolve but also by thwarting the next stage of Israeli disengagement, from the West Bank. The Israelis, on the other hand, elected Ehud Olmert in the Spring of 2006 on the explicit platform of continuing the disengagement.

The war in Lebanon and the violence from Gaza derailed the unilateral disengagement from the West Bank. Instead, Olmert (and his foreign minister, Zippi Livni) did their best to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, and offered them even more than previous Israeli negotiators ever had, but predictably they were rebuffed. The Palestinians have no interest in an end-of-conflict agreement.

Netanyahu, elected in 2009, tried his hand at improving the daily lives of the Palestinians by lifting much of the weight of the occupation, but this has failed: individual Palestinians may benefit, but the leadership, and the people as a nation, need the pressure on Israel to continue until someday it caves in, which is the context for the current policy of having the UN give the Palestinians a state, or - since the UN can't do that, only Israel can - having the UN lay the ground for international sanctions against Israel.

These are unlikely to work, for reasons I may write about elsewhere, but the Palestinians see no downside in trying.

Which brings us back to the Israeli control of the Palestinians. The attempt to have Greater Israel is long over. The settlements have been dismantled in Gaza, and the electorate has voted to dismantle them in the West Bank. The only reason Israel still controls the West Bank, and still blockades Gaza (ever less efficiently, since Egypt has now opened its border) is because of the Israeli assumption that it must control the Palestinians to fend off their violence. Should Israel leave the West Bank or remove the blockade of Gaza, so the logic, the Palestinians will immediately rain down destruction on Israel, as they did after the departure from Gaza.

And well they may. The Palestinians will have the motive and the means, and the international community will shield them from Israel's wrath. But only for a while. Actually, assuming they'll be aiming at Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and the airport, rather than far-away Sderot, I don't expect the Israelis to hold their wrath very long. For there's a second lesson of the past decade, and that is that in each case where Arab enemies of Israel goaded it, be it Palestinians or Hizballah, the Israelis were eventually goaded and the enemies backed off. In other words, full-blooded Israeli wrath (I use the word blooded advisedly) is not something people enjoy provoking. Moreover, since the Palestinians already provoked it once, in 2002, and watched from close up as others provoked it (2006, 2009), perhaps they might even refrain from trying, at least for a while.

My position, to be clear, is that Israel needs to end as much of the occupation as possible, by moving out of the West Bank till the security fence, so as to continue the conflict from a vastly better starting point. Before that, Israel should lift the blockade of Gaza, right now. (This is what Shlomo Avineri says in his column today). This doesn't mean major moves need to be done carelessly. Moving out of the West Bank will take a few years in any scenario, and these could be calibrated: first, stop all construction in settlements, and offer financial encouragement to individuals who wish to move (there will be many thousands of them). Then clarify to the Palestinians that the disengagement may have serious consequences for them, such as severing economic ties, or cutting off supplies of water and electricity, as part of a true end of Israeli engagement - unless the Palestinians wish to negotiate otherwise. Later on, dismantling settlements doesn't have to include pulling back IDF forces, until Israel decides it is safe to do so. Yet the overarching policy should be clear: Israel intends to leave, to let the Palestinians live their own lives, and in return expects the Palestinians to get on with their lives, not attack Israel.

Peace will come some other day. But Israel will be a better place, with better international relations. It will still need the most lethal military possible, and it will need to confront many enemies that surround it, but its fundamental situation will be healthier. Most important of all, its internal cohesion and determination will be strengthened. The whole society will know it needs to defend its existence, not an occupation many of us don't want.

Update: I've done my best to respond to the many thoughtful comments, here.

The Power of Water

2011-05-29T16:32:00.000+03:00

The other day I was talking to a young scientist from China who's completing her PhD at one of the very best American universities, and has just spent a month in Israel. She hails from what she describes as a "middle-or-smallish-sized Chinese town" of about 8 million people, which I admit I'd never heard of. When I asked for her impressions of her first visit to Israel (pop. 7.76 million) she gushed. First, about the geographic and climatic diversity, then over the human diversity, then over the creative energy. (The first of those three isn't of our doing).

The creative energy is constantly seeking new avenues. A couple weeks ago the Economist agreed to stop kvetching over our politics long enough to look at a spot of our economics, and came up with the story of how Israel is trying to corner the international market of water technology. It may or may not work, but if it does it will significantly benefit mankind. To me, the interesting part of the story is how we're trying to repeat a model which proved extremely efficient in the 1990s: the problems that could be solved are there, the eagerness to resolve them are there, then the government steps in with significant funds, but with the intention to jump-start an industry and then get out so as not to interfere with the private innovators and investors and risk-takers. In the 1990s it was the Yozma program which jump-started the high-tech revolution; a few years ago it was a fund for water technology; five years later the government is already moving out and the innovators and entrepreneurs who made it in the 1990s are moving in.

I expect it will take another five years or so to know if this is working. During that time many of the water-tech start-ups will fail, for various reasons. If some succeed, however, especially if any of them succeed spectacularly, Israel really could be the Mecca for anyone worldwide who's got dirty water or lack of water and wishes to improve things. Which means most of the world.

Well, perhaps not a Mecca. Though the Meccans sure could use it. Also, this success or failure will happen regardless of the settlements on the West Bank, and the blockade or not of Gaza. That's a different universe.

Scots: We're not Boycotting Israel, only Israel

2011-05-29T13:56:00.000+03:00

That seems to be what the folks in West Dunbartonshire are saying. See for yourselves, and tell me where I'm wrong.

On Changing the Dynamics of the Conflict

2011-05-29T13:44:00.002+03:00

Aluf Benn at Haaretz comments on the Obama-Netanyahu spectacle:

Obama believes Israel will have trouble surviving if it keeps holding on to the territories, expanding settlements and suppressing the Palestinians. Ultimately, Israel will find itself facing a Palestinian majority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, weapons that can crack its defensive shields and the harsh hatred of the Arab masses. That threatening combination will vanquish the Jewish state.
That is hard talk. Obama reiterated this scenario in his two speeches - at the State Department last Thursday and at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference this past Sunday. No other U.S. president has expressed more concern for Israel's future. Get out of the territories and you will gain life, Obama is saying.
Netanyahu sees this as nonsense; he believes Obama does not understand the Middle East. The prime minister is convinced Israel will be destroyed if it withdraws from the territories. He believes his mission is to face the international pressure and foil the plot to remove the Israel Defense Forces and the settlers from the West Bank and replace them with a Palestinian state.
[...]

The Arab revolutions have only deepened the dispute between Netanyahu and Obama. The demonstrators in Egypt, Yemen and Syria remind Obama of the American civil rights movement. He believes history is on their side, that the Middle East masses will smash the tyrannies and win political power and civil rights. America will set an example for them and be a beacon of liberty and democracy.
To Israeli ears, this vision sounds like an aging hippie's drug-riddled hallucination. Every Israeli cabinet minister, official, expert and intelligence authority who visited Washington in recent months has warned his or her American interlocutors that Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood are lurking behind the demonstrators. Israel is being suffocated by the Islamic octopus, which is closing in on it from all sides. Turkey is already lost. Egypt, Syria and Jordan shortly will become Iranian clones. Netanyahu believes that in the face of this threat the only recourse is entrenchment, and that any concession will bring the whole wall tumbling down. Israel must batten down the hatches and wait for the ugly wave to pass.

Both men are partially right and partially wrong, I suspect. Obama is right that holding onto the West Bank is bad for Israel. Netanyahu is right that the Arab revolutions have almost nothing to do with the American Civil Rights Movement, or with the end of Communism in Europe. (Obama yesterday said Poland should be the model for the Arabs; the nicest thing I can say about that is that perhaps he was trying to be real nice to his Polish hosts). They join each other in being wrong, however, when they both assume Israel's existence is in danger because of this decision or that.

I've been reading a lot about Jerusalem recently, as an early stage to writing a book of my own on the subject. Since Jerusalem is a very old city, reading its history tends to give a bit of perspective. The world has changed fundamentally 7 or 8 or 9 times since the city first gained any significance beyond its own walls (it existed for about 2,000 years before that, unnoticed). The people living in each of the eras probably regarded their own age as permanent, and they were always wrong, even if sometimes the change didn't come until a few centuries later. So I'm wary of anyone who warns that not heeding him will lead to destruction, but following his advice will lead to permanent stability and peace. Some forces are beyond our ability to bend to our will (or even to foresee); on the other hand, willpower and determination are the only human agents that ensure survival no matter what the surrounding turmoil - which explains why there have been Jews in Jerusalem with very few interruptions no matter how dramatic the upheavals.

In my reading, the determination of the Jews to have their own state in this chapter of the human saga, is what will ensure it. Not this specific political decision nor that. Retaining control of the West Bank will not cause Israel's destruction, just as relinquishing control won't; in both cases the determination to persist will be more important, and will enable Israel to deal with whatever threats develop. So let's tone things down a bit. Contra both Obama and Netanyahu, Israel is not about to be overwhelmed one way or the other.

Of course, there will still be scenarios less catastrophic than the end of Israel which will play out better or worse, so there's lots of room for idiotic decisions, mistakes which later seem wise, and other internationally acclaimed events which will prove disastrous. Which is why I rather liked the interpretation suggested by David Samuels, writing in Tablet (h/ Michael).

Samuels thinks highly of Obama, and thinks his recent moves demonstrate sky-high political abilities. I'm not there yet, but am willing to accept that Obama may be moving towards a practical position which is actually quite promising: defusing the conflict of its worst excess, then hunkering down. This to be achieved by getting Israel out of most of the West Bank, enabling the Palestinians to build a state there (and in Gaza), redoubling Israel's security capabilities - and dealing with Jerusalem and the Right of Return many years later. In which context Samuels tells that the Palestinians are not going to relinquish their demand for a return. Not:

The question, then, is whether Obama believes that Jerusalem and the right of return are real issues—the core of the crisis—or not.
Having spoken with most of the leading figures in Fatah over the past decade, it is my sense that the real fantasy here is the arrogant assumption that the Palestinian leadership will abandon its most deeply held principles in exchange for what even moderates see as a shriveled slice of historic Palestine. Indeed, reviewing my notes of conversations with all of Arafat’s key political advisers and security chiefs, including Mahmoud Abbas, I can’t identify a single one who expressed any clear willingness to abandon the right of return, or recognize Israel as a Jewish state. At best, these were framed as issues for future negotiations that would need to be submitted to a vote of the entire Palestinian people—including an estimated 4 to 6 million refugees and their descendants. No Palestinian leader I’ve ever spoken with—secular moderates included—imagined Israel as a permanent feature of the political landscape in the Middle East. All saw it as a more or less unnatural creation that would be subsumed, peacefully or not, by the resurgence of Arab Palestine in 20, 50, or 100 years.

Samuels thinks Obama knows this:

What Obama has very cleverly done therefore is to appropriate the Israeli proposal to establish a Palestinian state with interim borders—albeit on terms that the Israelis don’t particularly like. Yet each side stands to gain something very real from an interim arrangement that they would be unlikely to gain from an actual peace deal: The Palestinians would receive almost all of the territory they claim for an interim state—except Jerusalem—while holding on to their national dream of one day reclaiming all of Palestine from the Zionists. The Israelis, meanwhile, get a U.S.-sponsored end to the tar-baby of occupation and boatloads of shiny new weapons while holding on to major settlement blocs and an undivided Jerusalem. Hamas doesn’t have to sign a peace deal with the Israelis, and the Israelis don’t have to sign a peace deal with Hamas. America will benefit by having followed through on its promise—made by George W. Bush and repeated by Obama—to establish a Palestinian state. The millstone of Israeli occupation will be removed from around the necks of America and Israel, both of which will presumably find it easier to make friends in the Middle East.

This scenario doesn't relate very well to the near certainty that there will be violence from the West Bank directed at Israel, and that Israel will be damned if and when it then responds with violence. Yet the story of the past decade shows that when Israel disregards the international opprobrium and does what it has to do, its neighbors - on the West Bank, in Southern Lebanon, and in Gaza (2002/4, 2006, 2009) do back down, at least for a while; the Syrian example of 1973/4 demonstrates that sometimes getting hit hard enough by Israel can convince Arab enemies to refrain from violence for quite a long time. The idea that ending Israeli control of the lives of most Palestinians might convince them to move along, is not obviously foolish.

The way I see it, the structure of the conflict is that the Palestinians reject the Jews right to a nation state, and will not accept peace unless it comes in a form which will enable them to keep striving for the end of Jewish Israel. This is why they've never agreed to anything offered to them. Israel, in the meantime, mostly does accept the Palestinians' right to a nation state, so long as it's permanently limited to the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinians see a peace treaty as a step on the longer road to Israel's disappearance as the Jewish nation state; the Israelis will allow a Palestinian nation state only if it's the final stage of the conflict. These positions are irreconcilable.

What Israel needs to do - and what Obama may indeed be offering - is to break the stalemate by giving the Palestinians less than they could achieve in negotiations, i.e a state without Jerusalem. The assumption since Bill Clinton was president is that someday Israel would agree to divide Jerusalem if the Palestinians agreed to relinquish their demand for return. But they won't, so why should Israel? Better to remove the occupation - by far the most potent weapon the Palestinians have against Israel - and then continue the conflict from a position in which Israel holds all the main cards: It controls Jerusalem, and it prevents a Palestinian return. If the Palestinians can ever think of something to entice Israel to change its positions, good for them, but until then they won't be able to say that Israel must relinquish its most important positions in return for a Palestinian willingness to have sovereignty. They'll have sovereignty already. And they'll be judged - not in the court of world opinion but in the court of real life - by what they do with it.

Seen this way, the Egyptian decision to open the border with Gaza yesterday, is good for Israel, not bad. It is another step on the road to separating Israel from the Palestinians, in this case by reducing Israel's ability to intervene in Palestinian lives. If you read carefully, you'll see there are serious voices in Israel who agree on this.

Gender Separation on Public Transit

2011-05-29T11:12:00.000+03:00

Chances are, if you read this blog you're something of a news junkie, with a focus on Israel. In which case you'll most likely have heard all about how Jim Crow is coming to Israel, as demonstrated by the Black Buses on which Haredi men sit up front, and Haredi women are segregated to the back. Of course, the Supreme Court has ruled against the practice, twice - which shows that the problem isn't about to go away, since some sections of the Haredi community feel it's important, and no court can force men and women to sit together if they choose to sit apart.

I've got no words of defense for the practice. Nor do I buy into any of the chatter about how it's a reflection of a tradition and needs to be preserved or respected or that sort of thing. It isn't. It's a brand new invention of people who are too engaged in fending off modernity to notice they've gone off the cliff, and it's a sad story about how a fervent minority can dictate to the surrounding majority: so far as I understand it, the innovation comes from the Gur Hassids, and the rest of the Haredi community is being swept along becuase they don't care enough to resist.

Still, I was interested to learn, the other day, that in Egypt they've got special compartments in the subway for women only, because women traveling in normal compartments are routinely harassed, and the authorities felt it better to segregate the women than to convince the men to respect them. I don't think I'd heard this before, in spite of all the reports about how great Egypt is about to be.

The 1967 Line

2011-05-26T19:59:00.006+03:00

There's been a lot of talk recently about the lines of 1967, most of it not helpful, and some of it vague. Politicians, journalists, pundits, bloggers and most everyone else much prefer generalities to particulars. Here's an attempt to be specific and grounded.

(Map taken from the CIA World Factbook)

The original line was drawn in 1949 during the armistice talks between Israel and Jordan. They mostly reflected the reality of military positions at the end of the war of 1948, but with one major change. The Israelis, fearing that the extreme narrowness of their country would repeatedly entice their neighbors to attack it, demanded that a strip of land along the northwestern edge of the Jordanian-held West Bank be handed over to them, in return for an area to the west of Hebron. The area, known till this day in Israel as The Triangle, contained a series of Arab villages, from Um el-Fachem at its north-east down to Kfar Kassem at the south-west. The Americans demanded that Israel promise not to force any of the villagers out of their homes, and Israel agreed, and today there are hundreds of thousands of their descendents, Israeli citizens all, living in the area. A very detailed map of the region can be found here, put up by the University of Texas, but since it's so detailed it is a bit cumbersome to navigate. It's worth the effort, however.

At the time, in 1949, the line, along with the rest of Israel's borders, was explicitly and contractually defined as an armistice line, not as a border, since the Arab states were not willing to officially recognize Israel's existence, and perhaps they wished to have legal grounds for changing the lines later on. For all I know, Israel may have had the same thought. The importance of the matter, however, is that all sides agreed the line was not permanent.

This line is variously referred to as the Green Line, the 1949 line, and the 1967 line (meaning June 4th 1967).

At its narrowest point, the distance between Kalkilya on the West Bank and Israel's coast north of Kfar Shemaryahu is 8.54 miles, according to the ruler function of Google Earth. Israeli politicians of all stripes like to talk about Israel's narrow waist, even those among them who propose to relinquish control of most of the West Bank. On the other side, Palestinians and their myriad supporters demand that Maale Adumim, a very large settlement east of Jerusalem, must be dismantled, since it cuts the West Bank in two; the distance between the town of Maale Adumim and the Dead Sea is 9.69 miles if you use the definition of the Geneva Initiative folks, and 8.82 miles if you measure from the easternmost structure in the industrial area to the east of town. There is however a significant difference in that Israel has repeatedly indicated that there will be a north-south road under Palestinian control to the west of Maale Adumin, under or over the Jerusalem-Maale Adumim road, so that Palestinians will not need to go all the way around Maale Adumim when traveling from Ramallah to Bethlehem. Actually, quite a bit of its length is already paved.

(Pardon my rather clumsy cartographic additions, but you get the idea).

My apologies in advance to all friends of Israel for the myth-busting I'm about to engage in, but honesty forces me to it: Nowadays there is no serious Israeli politician who suggests Israel annex the Palestinian town of Kalkilya and its tens of thousands of people; indeed, the security barrier, commonly accepted in Israel as an approximation of the line Israel is comfortable with moving back to, follows the Green Line here. This means that Israel essentially accepts it will return to that narrow waistline of 8.54 miles.

This is not to say the entire argument is farcical. It isn't. Israel has serious threats to worry about should it relinquish military control of the West Bank; but that particular, eye-catching slogan, so convenient for sound bites, isn't one of them.

The dangers of relinquishing military control of the West Bank are as follows:

An Arab army will attempt to sever Israel at its narrow waist along the coastal plain.

Palestinian forces - regular or irregular - will infiltrate along the line, and given the tiny distances they'll be able to reach Israel's main cities within minutes and wreak havoc.

Palestinians will be able to shoot directly at numerous targets in Israel's populous heartland.

Palestinians will be able to shoot mortars and short-range rockets at numerous targets in Israel's populous heartland.

Israel will lose its ability to collect human intelligence about terror cells in the West Bank.

Rather than controlling the West Bank, Israel will have to defend itself along a long and twisted border much of it in hilly terrain.

Israel will lose most of its control over the aquifer that supplies much of the water to the coastal wells.
The Palestinians will have the legal right to demand some of the water of the Jordan Basin.

These threats are of varying quality. The first, regarding an Arab army, can be fended off through two measures. First, the Palestinians will not be allowed to have a full-fledged army. If they ask the Europeans, this will be a blessing for them, since armies are extremely expensive things to have, but if they insist having an army is essential to sovereignty they should be reminded that Germany (both of it) was allowed only a limited military between 1945 and 1991, and got along quite well, and Japan's military was also limited post 1945. So no, having an army is not an essential prerequisite for sovereignty.

Second, Israel demands a military presence along the Jordan River, to the east of the West Bank. This presence is directed at anyone to the east of Palestine who might be tempted to use it as a launching pad for an invasion of Israel. There is total unanimity among all Israel's security types that this presence is essential, though Netanyahu has recently been hinting it need not require Israeli sovereignty. Perhaps the Jordan Valley will be sovereign Palestinian territory in which Israel has contractual rights to a military presence. I admit I'm personally skeptical. Modern armies being the cumbersome things they are, I don't see how one could arrive on the West Bank suddenly, unannounced, and launch an attack on Israel. Not to mention that no Arab army has tried the full-fronted assault method since 1973, probably for the good reason that it's a harmful exercise. In any scenario Israel will need a powerful and threatening military for the first three or five generations after making peace with all its neighbors, but I don't see why a few thousand troops along the Jordan make much difference. There's a major road down there from Jerusalem, and another can be built from the north, and if there's to be a war IDF forces will be there long before Iraqi or Iranian or Emirati divisions arrive.

Water: this is a serious matter, but ever less so. At the moment we're preparing to lay the fifth major pipeline from the coast up to Jerusalem (if I'm not mistaken), which will be unusual in that for the first time it will draw its water not from coastal springs but from desalination stations. There isn't enough natural water in Israel/Palestine for the 12 million people who already live here, and there's not going to be any more, either. Israel already operates major desalination plants, while holding the world record for recycling water; this trend will have to continue no matter what. I don't have the exact numbers at hand, but Israel already supplies some of the water the Palestinians use, and will probably supply more as their numbers grow, no matter who controls them politically. This means water will be a Palestinian weakness, not a threat against Israel. Anyway, the entire subject is one that can be resolved with money, and need not cost human lives.

Which leaves us with the various threats of low-level Palestinian violence. These are serious. In 2002-2004 Israel needed to reoccupy the entire West Bank, re-build its intelligence sources and networks, and also construct the security barrier; only then was the bloody 2nd Intifada defeated. Its ongoing control is the reason no kassam rockets or mortars are shot from the West Bank, while many thousands have been shot from Gaza. Moreover, only a fool, or perhaps a Swedish foreign minister, would believe that by signing a peace agreement with some Palestinians, there will remain no Palestinian individuals or groups willing to shoot at Israeli civilians from the shelter of civilians towns and villages; those Swedes and other EU fellows will conspicuously not fly into Ben Gurion airport if they ever remotely fear that their plane could be shot down as it comes in to land at the airport which is within range of Palestinian gunmen with easily portable shoulder missiles. Until someone comes up with a way to assure Israel this danger is not acute, I don't see how it will relinquish military control of some sort over the West Bank. Which is not to say that Israel might not move all its civilians back to a line, say that of the barrier. Which brings us to the matter of the settlers.

The real reason Israel insists it cannot go back to the Green line is a combination of security to the east of the airport, and the existence of large settlements, most of them quite close to the Green Line. No official maps have ever been made public, obviously, since the negotiations have never reached completion, but here are a number of plausible approximations. First, the Taba negotiations of January 2001:

This comes from Le Monde, and refrains from showing that Israel apparently offered some ground inside the Green Line in return for some of the areas it demanded in the West Bank. In any case, since most of the 2nd Intifada happened after the talks at Taba, it clearly didn't happen because Israel was unwilling to dismantle most of its settlements. In case the map isn't clear, everything in either hue of green was to be Palestine.

Here we've got a projection of what Ehud Olmert apparently offered the Palestinians in September 2008, a proposal they never even responded to. The triangles are settlements to be dismantled. (source)

A cursory glance tells us Olmert wasn't trying to create "defensible borders", since the crazy lines reaching up to Kdumim and Ariel, deep into the West Bank, can't really be defended. But we can see how he wanted the line away from the airport (to the west of Jerusalem), and he wished to uproot as few settlers as possible and was willing to pay with territory from within the Green Line. Some of that territory would have made the Gaza Strip noticeably larger, which may have been one reason Abbas never responded: Gaza is Hamas-land, and why would he want them to gain anything?

Finally, here's the line proposed by the Israelis and Palestinians from the Geneva Initiative.

There are no security considerations here at all, with the possible exception that Israel retains its half of the no-man's land east of the airport. The only consideration is to leave Israeli settlers in their place, if they are within a very few miles of the Green Line; in return, the Palestinians get equal territories from Israel. If you compare their map with that of Olmert inch by inch, as I have, there are the obvious differences of Ariel and Kdumim, but there are also less obvious ones such as dismantling Efrat (15,000 people) because it's to the east of Route 60 from Bethlehem to Hebron, dismantling the industrial zone of Maale Adumim, and other things like that. Even in the Geneva Initiative map, however, a majority of Israeli settlers don't move.

No matter which map you use, from Taba onwards, the Palestinians get all of the Gaza strip (they've already got it), and just about all of the West Bank, with compensation for what they don't get. I think this demonstrates quite clearly that the inability to reach an agreement isn't about Palestinian sovereignty, which the Israelis have long since agreed to, nor about the size of Palestine. Ariel and Kdumim may still be a noticeable sticking point, but they're not the reason for the lack of a peace treaty. Those would be Jerusalem and the right of return or its corollary, Israel's demand to be recognized as the Jewish State. This has been the case for at least 11 years, if not 45, or 63, or 100.

A personal comment: if I had my druthers, I wouldn't have Israel offering empty areas in the foothills west of Hebron or along the Gaza Strip. I would undo the mistake of 1949, when Israel took over the villages of The Triangle, which in the meantime have turned into cities. If the sense of partition is to divide the land along ethnic lines, then that should be what is done. The Palestinians with Israeli citizenship in the Galilee, the Negev, Haifa and Jaffa all live too far from any line to be transferred to Palestine, and they are welcome to remain Israelis. Yet by moving the populace of the Triangle from Israel to Palestine, without ever physically moving any of them a single inch, the Palestinian minority inside Israel will drop significantly from its current 20.5%. Since the Palestinians will not allow there to be any Jews at all in Palestine, this seems a reasonable proposition. The reality, however, is that in the occasional case where Israeli politicians moot this idea (Sharon in 2004, for example, and Lieberman since then) they are always received with howls of protest, and marked as fascists, racists, brutes and evil. The Palestinian Israelis, you see, are eager for their nation to have its own state, but they don't want to live there. They want to live in Israel.

Which isn't surprising, if you think about it. Given the choice, who would prefer otherwise? Would you?

Arab Israeli Democracy Collaboration

2011-05-25T23:11:00.000+03:00

An anonymous reader suggests this story and recording, about right-wing Amir Benayoun who has recorded a song in Arabic for the Syrian democracy demonstrators, at their request. What can I say? Hee hee sort of sums it up.

Antisemitism among British Academics

2011-05-25T15:09:00.001+03:00

Eve Garrard, writing on Normblog, says it's time for union members to recognize their passivity equals complicity with the antisemitism of their union's leadership. The trigger of her piece is the attempt by the UCU to redefine antisemitism so that their actions aren't it; by the current definitions, they certainly are.

Timing

2011-05-25T13:30:00.000+03:00

Netanyahu mostly said the right things yesterday in his speech to the American Congress; he mostly said them with the wrong timing; and many of the reports on the speech are unreasonable or uninformed or both.

First, an historical fact which is not open to interpretation. Netanyahu broke substantial new ground in his speech. No Israeli prime minster before Ehud Barak spoke openly about Israel recognizing Palestinian sovereignty. Not because they couldn't imagine such a thing, but because it was assumed such Israeli recognition was an important negotiating chip, to be played at the right time. Barak played it at Camp David in July 2000, and in return got praise from President Clinton which no-one remembered half a year later. At the time, however, Barak pretended nothing he had offered was real unless an agreement was reached, as if he could take back what he had offered. So Barak never gave an official speech recognizing Palestine. Nor did Sharon. Olmert may have: it was certainly his position, and since he was prime minster later than Barak, the reluctance to speak openly was gone. Yet Olmert presided over a center-left Israeli government. Netanyahu spoke yesterday about Israel's being the first to recognize a sovereign Palestine, if only the Palestinians reach an agreement with us. He said this in a speech watched by millions, as the head of a right-wing Israeli coalition.

We've come a long way from Golda Meir saying "there is no Palestinian nation", and indeed, we've come a long way from the positions of Yitzchak Rabin, remembered worldwide as a brave Israeli leader seeking peace: Rabin never said there'd be a sovereign Palestine, he never intended to move back to the lines of 1967, and he never would have dreamed of dividing Jerusalem. On the first two, Netanyahu, for all his verbal gymnastics, is to Rabin's left. Moreover, the assumption all over Israel's media today is that he enjoys broad support in the Israeli electorate for his positions.

Not that you'll find any of this in the international media's reports. Here's the New York Times:

His speech broke no new ground concerning the peace process, but it was not expected to. Israeli officials said that Mr. Netanyahu could hardly lay out new proposals to an American audience without telling his own people first.
Palestinian officials were dismissive of Mr. Netanyahu’s message, saying it included no new concessions along with the new demands.

The Economist will appear in print only on Friday, but their first web response is that

Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, addresses a joint session of Congress with a speech that was big on hype but short on substance

Haaretz, far to the left of either the NYT or The Economist, thunders that

Netanyahu wasted the generous credit he got from his American hosts to cast accusations at the Palestinians and impose endless obstacles in connection with the core issues. Instead of accepting the principle that the border between Israel and the Palestinian state would be based on the 1967 lines, Netanyahu declared that the Jewish people are not foreign occupiers in Judea and Samaria.
He couched his readiness to make far-reaching concessions within endless conditions that have no relation to reality.

What are Netanyahu's conditions which are so far from reality, pray tell? First, there's his demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the nation state of the Jews, as Palestine will be that of the Palestinians. It seems a perfectly reasonable requirement, unless both sides agree on an end to the conflict and relinquishing of all future demands in an agreement which contains no right of return. Essentially, the two demands are the same thing: if there's no right of return and there is an end of conflict, then the Palestinians indeed don't need to proclaim their recognition of Israel being the Jewish State. So far no Palestinian leader has ever said openly that he will relinquish the demand for a right of return, or even hinted that he might recognize Israel as the Jewish state. Until a democratically elected Palestinian leadership which can deliver on its words does this, there will be no peace.

Netanyahu then said Israel would never move back to the lines of 1967. This is also a fact. No Israeli government ever will. The question is what happens to the 5%, give or take, which won't be relinquished, and what will be given in return. This has been the topic of much discussion between negotiators over the past 18 years, and will continue for a while yet. What would Haaretz have expected? That Netanyahu say he'll dismantle Modi'in Illit?

Finally, there are Netanyahu's demands that Palestine be demilitarized, a demand any sane (and electable) Israeli leader will always make; and the demand for a military presence along the Jordan River. I'm not enough of a military man to know how extremely essential this really is, especially if Palestine itself is demilitarized; it's aimed against Jordan and Iraq, not the Palestinians.

Then there's Jerusalem. Netanyahu says it can't be divided, and of course he's right. Barak and Olmert offered to divide it, but fortunately the Palestinians weren't interested. I certainly hope that Netanyahu's position will be that of all future prime minsters, since the reality of dividing Jerusalem will never bring peace.

The summary of all this is that Netanyahu is now staking roughly the same positions his predecessors took, from 2000 onwards, and is well to the left of Rabin and Peres in the 1990s. He - and they - enjoyed a broad consensual support among Israel's voters, now bolstered by a prime minster of the political right. The Israeli electorate is willing - some are eager - to live alongside a sovereign Palestine, but on conditions the Palestinians cannot remotely accept. So there will be no peace anytime soon, as all reasonable observers know, and have known for years.

The main thing to regret is that Netanyahu didn't give this speech two years ago. Had he spoken this way when he and Obama were both new in their jobs, the chemistry between them would have been much better, and the positions Obama would have taken would have been different. Look how close they are right now, in spite of all the smoke and mirrors about profound disagreements. Precisely because peace between Israelis and Palestinians is not possible in our generation, it is crucial that Israel's leaders always position themselves as wisely as possible. This means doing everything reasonable to maintain active good will between Israel and the US, and giving Israel's dwindling friends in Europe something to work with. Had yesterday's speech been the official position of Netanyahu's government all along, as it has been the position of most of the electorate, this would have been easier to do.

Demographics and the Long-Term Israeli Victory

2011-05-24T15:35:00.000+03:00

Not long ago I read an article about some Israeli legislation in the 1950s. It was sobering to see that I'd never heard of almost any of the legislators involved in the matter; even the high-ranking cabinet member who had been presiding over the circus was a fellow I'd never come across before, and in the interval have once again forgotten. Fame is fleeting, it seems.

This is one of the main drawbacks to blogging, as I've noted before. It's extremely contemporary, which means, it's of the most fleeting importance. No one reads blogposts from two months ago, and why would they? No-one remembers that Bill Clinton and Yitzchak Rabin got off to a cold and stony start, as did Bush II and Sharon, not to mention Reagan and Begin, or Carter and Begin; Bush I contributed significantly to the downfall of Yitzchak Shamir in 2002: Nu, so what? Did it make any real and lasting difference, the kind that anyone will remember in 50 years? (Shamir who? Or, let's see who can arrange the following presidents in correct chronological order: Taft, Roosevelt, Hoover, Wilson, and the other Roosevelt).

Barry Meislin has uncovered an article in the Asia Times (of Hong Kong) that takes a very long look. So long, as a matter of fact, that none of us will be alive to test his full thesis, which deals with the year 2100. Yet the demographic trends he discusses will be felt - or not, if he's wrong - well before the end of the century, demographic developments being what they are.

Like the vanishing point in a perspective painting, long-term projections help us order our perceptions of what we see in front of us today. Here's one to think about, fresh from the just-released update of the United Nations' population forecasts: At constant fertility, Israel will have more young people by the end of this century than either Turkey or Iran, and more than German, Italy or Spain.

With a total fertility rate of three children per woman, Israel's total population will rise to 24 million by the end of the present century. Iran's fertility is around 1.7 and falling, while the fertility for ethnic Turks is only 1.5 (the Kurdish minority has a fertility rate of around 4.5).

Not that the size of land armies matters much in an era of high-tech warfare, but if present trends continue, Israel will be able to field the largest land army in the Middle East. That startling data point, though, should alert analysts to a more relevant problem: among the military powers in the Middle East, Israel will be the only one with a viable population structure by the middle of this century.

That is why it is in America's interest to keep Israel as an ally. Israel is not only the strongest power in the region; in a generation or two it will be the only power in the region, the last man standing among ruined neighbors. The demographic time bomb in the region is not the Palestinian Arabs on the West Bank, as the Israeli peace party wrongly believed, but rather Israel itself.

The key part of the article is this:

The right way to read this projection is backwards: Israelis love children and have lots of them because they are happy, optimistic and prosperous. Most of Israel's population increase comes from so-called "secular" Israelis, who have 2.6 children on average, more than any other people in the industrial world. The ultra-Orthodox have seven or eight, bringing total fertility to three children.

Europeans, Turks and Iranians, by contrast, have very few children because they are grumpy, alienated and pessimistic. It's not so much the projection of the demographic future cranked out by the United Nations computers that counts, but rather the implicit vision of the future in the minds of today's prospective parents.

And then this:

This, I believe, explains the implacable hostility of Israel's neighbors, as well as the Europeans. It is the unquenchable envy of the dying towards the living. Having failed at Christianity, and afterward failed at neo-pagan nationalism, Europe has reconciled itself to a quiet passage into oblivion.

Israel's success is a horrible reminder of European failure; its bumptious nationalism grates against Europe's determination to forget its own ugly embrace of nationalism; and its implicitly religious raison d'etre provokes post-Christian rage. Above all, it offends Europe that Israel brims with life. Some of Europe's great nations may not survive the present century. At constant fertility, Israel will have more citizens than any of the Eastern European countries where large numbers of Jews resided prior to the Holocaust.

From there on it gets better. Read the whole thing, if only to raise your spirits. By the time he gets disproved we won't be here to notice anyway.

American-Israeli Defense Technology Collaboration

2011-05-24T14:58:00.000+03:00

Eli Lake at the Washington Times tells how the relations between the Pentagon and Israel's arm's industry soured between 2000-2005, and then very much got back on track. The crucial turning point was that Israel needed to make up its mind to prefer American needs over Chinese ones. This was clearly the better decision for Israel, though it's good that we had choices to choose from. As China - and India, another burgeoning trade partner of Israel - continue to rise, the alternatives will still be there.

In the meantime, the relations don't harm American interests in any way, either:

Rep. Steven R. Rothman, a New Jersey Democrat who serves on the appropriation subcommittees that fund foreign aid and defense budgets, said during a seminar at the AIPAC conference that the $3 billion in annual military financing for Israel was a sound investment.
“We gave them $3 billion, they have to use 75 percent of it to buy our stuff, and then they give us improvements on all the stuff we sell them, plus all the intelligence network,” he said. “The prepositioning of our supplies in Israeli territory, the safe port for U.S. troops in time of war and peace, and many many other ways. Such a bargain.”

This story is worth keeping in mind as folks get all roiled over the Obama-Netanyahu spat. Relations between nations are based on interests, and shared values, and other imponderables; they rarely stand or fall because of two particular individuals, especially ephemeral ones such as elected leaders.

Ir Amim is Forging World Opinion

2011-05-23T23:22:00.000+03:00

Here's a longish report on the lefty Israeli NGO Ir Amim, which shows how the organization is successfully inserting its message into the international discussion about Jerusalem. It's in Hebrew, and I'm linking for future reference.

Colonel Kemp and the Antisemitic Scots

2011-05-23T23:16:00.000+03:00

Here's a fine speech by Colonel Richard Kemp against the slanderers of Israel, which starts from an unusual point of departure, but then turns to the depressing intensity of the hate regularly spewed at Israel. Then, as if on cue, here's an example he doesn't give: public libraries in Scotland are banning books by Israelis.

In a recent discussion I had we were looking at antisemitism in Western civilization. I posited that hatred of the Jews is hardwired into it - this doesn't mean that all westerners are Jew-haters, rather that the potential is there and needs to be fought off. One of the other discussants asked if I was also saying that hatred of Jews is in the DNA of Western civilization, and it occurred to me that the two metaphors are actually instructive. DNA can't be changed, at least in the present stage of technology, so saying that antisemitism is in the DNA of Western civilization would mean there's no hope for change, but also no responsibility to try. DNA is what we're born with, and we can't choose it or control it. Hard wiring, on the other hand, can be changed by the engineers, at the very least, so the moral requirement is there: will people make the effort to re-engineer the wiring, or won't they? Because if they won't, that's their decision. Some people and societies are quite advanced in re-wiring. Lot's of folks, in Scotland and elsewhere, haven't even begun.

Haim on Niot z"l

2011-05-23T17:10:00.000+03:00

Haim Watzman has begun writing about his dead son Niot.

In Hebrew, the word that means “pastures” (or “oasis” or any green place) is “Niot.” But there’s a small problem. The word is in construct form, a declension that never stands alone. It requires completion.

“He’ll complete it himself, in his life,” Ilana says.

Don't Divide Jerusalem: The Curious Case of Beit Safafa

2011-05-23T16:26:00.001+03:00

A century ago Beit Safafa was a village in the hills north of Bethlehem and south of Jerusalem. By the time the British Mandate ended, in 1948, the southern neighborhoods of Jerusalem could be seen on the slopes to the north of the village. When the war of 1948 was over, there was an armistice line running straight through the village, the northern part lying in Israel, the southern part in Jordan. Over the next decade or so, the fields between the village and Jerusalem filled with the neighborhoods of Katamonim, populated mostly by Jewish refugees from Arab countries; eventually the Jewish homes of Pat were erected right next to the Arab homes of northern Beit Safafa.

Pat on the right, Beit Safafa on the left.

During this period the border was sealed. Family members living a stone's throw apart could shout to each other, but never meet, never break bread together, never share family events.

In 1967 the Israelis occupied the West Bank and annexed East Jerusalem. Beit Safafa was united. The villagers were united, too, and over the coming years they multiplied and moved, some crossing the old and forgotten line into the Israeli part, some building larger homes on the hill to the south, which, I remember, used to be mostly empty and now no longer is.

Of course, if you know Jerusalem, you'll recognize that the neighborhood on the top of the hill is Gilo, which much of the world calls a settlement since it was populated by Israeli citizens beyond the line of 1949-67. The odd thing is that in all the endless verbiage on the matter, no-one (NO ONE) ever calls the Israeli Arabs from Beit Safafa who moved in the same direction, settlers. Yet it can't be that Jewish Israeli citizens who crossed the Green Line to settle are illegally forbidden settlers, while the Arab Israeli citizens who did the exact same thing are not. That would make international law explicitly racist and antisemitic, and for all its silliness, it isn't those.

(If we're splitting logic, by the way, it would be interesting to know how American or Russian or French citizens who moved to the area after 1967 can be regarded as internationally forbidden. Merely because many of them took on Israeli citizenship along the way? And if they didn't? Say some of them retained their original citizenship and never acquired Israeli citizenship: are they also forbidden by international law? There are such people, you know. I recognize this sounds silly, but so does the entire construct if you think about it long enough or observe its details close up).

In the decades since 1967 thousands of Israeli Arabs from elsewhere - Nazerath, Jaffa, Sachnin and so on - have moved to Jerusalem. It's a big city, it's got the country's largest university, it's got hospitals, government ministries, and all sorts of other things to encourage migration. Some of them have moved to Beit Hakerem or Rehavia, and that's all right. Others have moved to Beit Hanina, a wealthy area on the city's north side, so they're clearly legally forbidden settlers. Some have moved to Beit Safafa, because it's the one part of town that already had a community of Israeli Arabs and it felt hospitable. Of course, if they moved to the northern part of the neighborhood (it has long since ceased to be a separate village), no problem. If they moved to the southern part however, they're illegal settlers, as we've already seen. The thing is, when you walk through the neighborhood, there's no way of recognizing which it is, unless you happen to be old enough or savvy enough to remember where the long-defunct line ran. Most people aren't. Most people, that is, except for the teeming millions who know that Jerusalem must be divided.

So let's get this straight. According to conventional wisdom, the buildings in the forefront of the picture below remain in Israel no mater what, since their denizens are inside the Green line and they're Israeli citizens anyway, except for the ones who aren't. The buildings in the center of the picture must become part of Palestine, since their denizens are outside the Green Line and they're not Israeli citizens, except for the ones who are. Then the buildings on the top of the hill, at the back of the picture, they will remain in Israel since they're part of the Jewish neighborhoods constructed since 1967 which will not be dismantled since there are more than 200,000 people living in them. Of course, the line between the two parts of Beit Safafa doesn't exist on the ground, and in some cases runs through homes constructed since 1967, and the line between Jews and Arabs near the top of the hill runs along garden fences and between parking places on common roads, but hey, don't confuse us with such minutiae.

So now we've got the following situation. There are about 8,000 people in Beit Safafa. Some have been Israeli citizens since 1948, but they'll move or stay depending upon where they live now. Some have become Israeli citizens since 1967, but that's immaterial. If they're Arab (they are), and they live south of the Green Line (many do), they obviously yearn to live in a free Palestine, not Israel. No? Some are not Israeli citizens, merely permanent residents, but if they live north of the line, they can stay put, or move to Haifa, or move 25 feet to the south, and thus choose to live in whichever country they prefer. And then of course there are the non-Israeli citizens who moved in 1974, or 1983, or 1992, or 2001, or whenever it was, to Haifa or Kfar Kassem or elsewhere in Israel, and they won't be affected in any case, since they're inside the Green Line and thus impervious to the entire discussion. It's only Jews who are on the wrong side of the line who need to do any explaining or accommodating.

In case you're skeptical that anyone would really consider drawing all those lines, here's the map as it appears on the website of the Geneva Initiative. I'm not making up any of this.

Post script: My friend Sami (false name), who lives elsewhere in East Jerusalem, tells me many of his neighbors are envious of the Beit Safafians: "They or their cousins have been in Israel since 1948, and they know how to navigate the system in a way the rest of us don't always know."

Hamas is from Mars, the EU is in La La Land

2011-05-23T14:22:00.000+03:00

Hamas responds to Obama's speeches:

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri was quoted by Ma'an news agency as saying that Obama's speech showed the U.S. government will continue "to support the occupation at the expense of the freedom of the Palestinian people."Moreover, Abu Zuhri emphasized that the U.S. "will fail" in forcing Hamas "to recognize the occupation."

Occupation, in the Hamas vocabulary, means anything and everything in what was once British Mandatory Palestine, a fact they never try to hide.

Meanwhile, at a meeting of EU bigwigs, the suits competed with one another in their haste to praise Obama and castigate Netanyhu for his obstruction of peace. The Swedish Foreign Minster, for example, thundered that Netanyahu's positions are indefensible, and "the only defense possible is peace". The only solution to poverty, I expect, is money, and the only response to illness is health.

I wish I knew how to inculcate such terminal childishness in adults elsewhere. Imagine if we could reduce Hamas folks to the blathering idiocy of "the only conceivable way to live is in peace". Or "Fatah functionaries have our peoples' best interests at heart, and we must work with them to realize our common goals." Or "Christian Palestinians are just like us, and we must embrace them as our brothers." Or "Jews have needs just like we do and the only way to reconcile them is to talk about things until we all accept our differences." Or "women are half of our nation, and only by ensuring they can realize their full potential will we achieve a just society."

Book Review: The Hustle

2011-05-22T17:14:00.001+03:00

Crisscrossing Germany by train last week gave me more time than I usually have to read. So I read Doug Merlino's new book, The Hustle: One Team and Ten Lives in Black and White. It's a wonderful book, and I warmly recommend it, even though it has totally nothing to do with the usual topics of this blog - actually, that's an additional reason to read it.

The book is presented as the story of a black and white basketball team: a black basketball coach and a wealthy white businessman came together to create a team of 8th-graders half of whom can from wealthy families in white Seattle in the mid 1980s, and the other half came from the black parts of town. They learned to play ball together, they became friends, they eventually even won a championship, and then they got on with life. 20 years later Doug Merlino, one of the white boys, set out to find what had happened to them all and if playing ball together had changed anything, and he found precious little to celebrate. The cultural conditioning on each side was too strong, playing basketball never dented it, the white boys grew into successful white professionals, and the black boys went back to their neighborhoods to be stunted. Sad.

This description doesn't do justice to the book, nor to the reality, for that matter. First, because the racial divide isn't so clear-cut. At least one of the white boys has grappled with serious emotional issues and lives on the edge of society, holding his own but far from being a pillar of anyone's community; meanwhile, a number of the black men have climbed out of their childhood circumstances, by dint of the strength of their character, while one or two others, having lived long enough to survive the drug wars and gain perspective on the potential of life, are on the path to offer their children more than their parents offered them.

Moreover the description doesn't do justice to the book because it's actually not about a baseball team at all. It's a cultural cross-cut of American society as seen by the men of Doug's generation. He has sections about hi-tech (Seattle!) and drug wars; prep-schools and ghetto schools, churches and welfare policies. He repeatedly talks about the power of movies to depict American society and also inform it. He discusses trends in music.While perched mostly in Seattle, he watches the ebbs and flows of American migration over the past half century. Immigration, too: not all the white boys came over on the Mayflower; some are newcomers finding acceptance. He tells how once black neighborhoods are being gentrified, and how that's playing out, and who's moving where. Even the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc make a couple of appearances, once as the backdrop for the murder of one of the boys, once as a place to escape to. America is a gigantic and complicated place, not to be encapsulated in any single short description, but Merlino does an admirable job of depicting its complexity and diversity. Some of the diversity isn't even remotely regrettable: society needs money managers, wine technicians, grade school teachers, attorneys, journalists, janitors and church laypeople. All of them.

Most profoundly, however, it isn't a book about a black and white basketball team, because it's a story about universal growth. Doug's voice is what makes this happen. He's got an unusually strong sense of self-deprecation, though without any apologies or cringing. Simply: he wasn't a very good basketball player (neither was Myron, though); he wasn't that good at school, and didn't manage to hold out at the top-notch prep-school (neither did Eric or Damian, though), as a young adult it took him time to find his place (the same went for Maitland, and JT). He set off on the journey that eventually led to writing this book because he missed the old team, and was searching for some sort of closure for Tyler's death. The story begins with a pile of rambunctious pre-teens, then describes a game; after a few hundreds of pages with essentially no group scenes or sport descriptions, it ends with a reunion of thoughtful early mid-aged adults who get together once again and play basketball. When we first met them it was impossible to follow the characters; by the time we leave them, we not only can, we have. Each of them has made his own way through the same moment in history, bolstered or hampered by his own relations to it - which means, its a deeply human story.

Final note: English is a rich language. There are more than one way to say things. I was tickled by the extent to which Merlino uses a vocabulary I'm not familiar with, and not only because some of it comes from the black parts of town. He's got capping and peanut galleries, beat-boxing, cutting a line through fog, "I'll hit you" as an invitation to talk, and so on and on. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that, so far as I could tell, the entire cast of the book, heroes supporters and one-line interlopers, doesn't contain one single Jew. Not surprising, of course, given how few of them there really are in America, but quite refreshing for me.

Anyway, it's May. Order the book and take it with you to the beach this summer.

Back to 1948

2011-05-22T15:02:00.001+03:00

I was blissfully offline last week, as large groups of notionally "Palestinians" tried to break through Israel's borders with Syria and Lebanon. So a week later I'm adding the obvious comment, whereby the demonstrators were not decrying Israeli settlements on the West Bank. They were demonstrating against the existence of the Jewish State. They were demanding that descendants of people who once lived in British Mandatory Palestine be allowed to move back. Israel could dismantle all settlements, move back to the Green Line, divide Jerusalem, set up an embassy on the Palestinian side of town, and apologize for decades of being not nice to the Palestinians, and these demonstrators wouldn't dream of being satisfied. And all the Western media that didn't explain this, or even condemned Israel for defending itself, are effectively lining up on the side of the Palestinian demand for a right of return.

I'm not certain why this needs to be pointed out, but sadly, it probably does.

Don't Divide Jerusalem: Roundup

2011-05-22T10:48:00.000+03:00

I've collected my various posts on the idiocy of dividing Jerusalem and put them all in one place.

I've been telling people about this little project, in which I walk along the putative line of division and see what it looks like. Most people are quite startled: first, by the idea; then, upon reflection, by the fact that it's novel. You'd think there would be thousands of reports like this, that every new journalist coming to town would wish to report on what the line is supposed to look like, and that politicians who are so enamored by the idea would be shoving each other sideways in their haste to be photo-opped on the line. But no.

Dwindling Room for Optimism

2011-05-22T00:28:00.000+03:00

Wherever I went in Germany, people assumed I joined them in welcoming the new democracy and freedom in the Arab world. In each case, I had to explain that I hoped for the best, but saw no particular reason to expect it. Now the New York Times has begun to backtrack:

The revolutions and revolts in the Arab world, playing out over just a few months across two continents, have proved so inspirational to so many because they offer a new sense of national identity built on the idea of citizenship.
But in the past weeks, the specter of divisions — religion in Egypt, fundamentalism in Tunisia, sect in Syria and Bahrain, clan in Libya — has threatened uprisings that once seemed to promise to resolve questions that have vexed the Arab world since the colonialism era.

Actually, the specter of divisions and other bothersome matters were there all the time, of course. So there's nothing happening so far which is particularly surprising, and certainly nothing that couldn't have been foreseen at the height of the popular demonstrations. This isn't to say that the revolutions were always doomed to fail, nor that they're now certain to fail. Rather, anyone with a modest sense of history and human nature should never have been carried away in the first place, has little to be surprised about now, and should hope for a positive outcome. In any case, there's precious little any outsiders can do.

Nature is Stronger

2011-05-20T18:38:00.000+03:00

Nature is stronger than Man, as these photos demonstrate.

Stuff from a Trip

2011-05-20T18:31:00.000+03:00

The folks who invited me to Hamburg put the entire event on YouTube. The talk at Hamburg wasn't the best of the series - that would have been Weiden or Freiburg - but since the reason to travel was to get the word out, I'm linking. It will be useless, however, for readers who don't know German, which is the language generally spoken in Hamburg. The still photo from the video is ridiculous, I agree.

Along the way I met various journalists. The ones in Weiden put a summary of our talk online, tho they quite misunderstood my point about Egypt. Or maybe I wasn't clear.

Obama on the Middle East, Again

2011-05-19T21:35:00.002+03:00

My initial reading of Obama's speech this afternoon is that he is learning.

The first two thirds, where he rattled on about the Arab Spring and so on, had all the right words, most of which he forgot to use in Cairo two years ago, and very little substance.

The section about Israel and Palestine seemed pretty good to me. On the clearly bright side, he ticked the following boxes: Israel as a Jewish state (twice), Israel's need for security, a demilitarized Palestine, and the silliness of the forthcoming September Spectacle which will do no-one any good. He also seemed to be saying, at least once, that the descendents of the Palestinian refugees will move to Palestine, implying they won't move to Israel.

On the dark side, he claimed once again that the present situation is unsustainable. Since it's been sustained, one way or the other, for 44 years, or 63, depending upon how you define it, it's hard to know what he means. Had he said it shouldn't be sustained, that would be different: that would be setting a goal. But can't be sustained? How so? He also castigated the ongoing construction in the settlements, which is disappointing because you'd think the president of the United States would have someone around him to explain that there's almost no construction going on. People who read the NYT can be fooled all the time, but isn't the President supposed to be briefed each morning by an assortment of spooks, analysts other types who get paid to really know what they're talking about?

Then there were the gray parts, where different Israelis would have differing interpretations as to whether his speech was positive or negative. He said the partition would be based on the line of 1949-67. Many of us recognize that this may not be historically, legally or morally the case, but practically, it is. Like it or not, that's the line the negotiations have been focusing on for years, and as the man said, there will be adaptation of it, but it does serve as the base of the negotiations.

His direct contradiction of Netanyahu's position of let's wait and wait some more, will trouble Netanyahu and his fans, but is actually plausible. We should hurry up, because there's nothing to be gained by waiting. Or is there anything to be gained by being passive while the world around us is active.

Most significant of all in my mind was that Obama did not repeat the universally silly line about how peace can be achieved anytime soon. On the contrary, he resoundingly forgot to mention Jerusalem, except to say that it will need to be talked about some other time, as will the Right of Return. In effect, his speech adopted the position of Avigdor Lieberman (and most Israelis) about moving towards a partial resolution of the conflict rather than a final resolution.

Update: It occurs to me he also seemed to say the Palestinians have some explaining to do about their new unity government with Hamas. Tick that box, too.

He has learned something these past two years. Good for him.

The B'Tselem Witch Trials

2011-05-17T08:30:00.000+03:00

I continue to be offline, sorry for the inconvenience. In the meantime, here's an interesting article about a subject I often write about. Noah Pollak takes a long hard look at B'Tselem.

Israel at 63

2011-05-10T10:58:00.000+03:00

We're approaching 8 million people: ten times the population in 1948, but still one of the world's smaller countries, not that you'd know it from all the noise about us.

Yad Vashem generally estimates the number of Jews murdered in the Shoah as close to 5.8 million. The number of Jews in Israel today is 5,837,000. Most of the 322,000 non-Jewish immigrants are culturally Jewish, and their definition has more to do with the politics of religion than with reality.

For a demonstration of how committed Israelis are to their national project, I recommend Alex Stein's blogpost yesterday. Alex is decidedly to the left of most of us, but not in a loony way. He's description of Israel and his feelings about it are easily echoed by almost all of us, and the disagreements we'd have with him are much less important than the agreement.

I posted my own thoughts on the matter in a concise way on Independence Day three years ago; the words are exactly right today still. Israel's First Century.

Lectures in Germany

2011-05-10T10:33:00.000+03:00

For whatever reason there seem to be many German readers of this blog. If any of them are interested in introducing themselves, starting Thursday I'll be lecturing in Berlin, Erfurt, Bremen, Hamburg, Weiden (yup) and Freiburg. In Berlin it's the Mideast Freedom Forum Berlin, in most other places the local DIG will have the details.

Blogging may well be slow over the next week or so.

Eliezer's Handshake

2011-05-08T21:53:00.000+03:00

We're not close friends, Eliezer and I. He's almost a decade older than my father would have been, were he still alive. Born in a small town in Eastern Europe, he was a teenager when his father sent him off to Budapest in the hope things would be better there, which in a way they probably were, since Eliezer survived and the rest of his family didn't. I think about that sometimes: The teenager sent off by his father; the survivor now twice as old as his father ever was.

After the war he came to Israel, and in the 1950s started a family, but it wasn't a happy ending. His second son has disabilites, and today, in his early 50s, you can still see this pains Eliezer. His wife, the mother of his three children, died of cancer in about 1970; I remember how her slow death was whispered at school, and can only imagine how horrible it was for her, and for him. Their oldest son, Avi, about whom I've written here and elsewhere, was scarred by his mother's death, to an extent that even we, teenager boys, could recognize. Then in 1982 he was killed in battle, landing Eliezer yet another body blow.

He's not a cheerful man, Eliezer, but he's very much alive. At our synagogue he's one of the stalwarts of the conservative branch of the congregation, the ones who are wary of some of the more liberal innovations which sometimes are mooted, yet he's always respectful of the liberalizers who could be his grandchildren, and they treat him with courtesy and accept that some changes can't be done so long as he and his group are still with us. A few years ago he was seriously ill, and it would have been reasonable to suppose he'd reached the tipping point beyond which old men fade away, but no. He lay at home for a few weeks, then determinedly made his way to synagogue with a walker, then a cane, and now he's back to normal; I often see him at the pool.

We're not close friends, Eliezer and I, but he knows I preserve Avi's memory, and this has created a bond between us. "Your husband knew my son Avi", he once said to my wife, who responded "I know". "You do? How?" "They were friends, Avi and Yaacov, and Yaacov remembers, and talks about him".

It's memorial day, and last week was Yom Hashoah, and tomorrow evening we'll begin celebrating Israel's 63rd Independence Day, and Eliezer is part of all these days. I usually make a point of going over to him after services to shake his hand. His grip is the steeliest handshake I've ever experienced.

Early Summer Reading List

2011-05-06T17:33:00.000+03:00

Here are some books I've heard good things about, in no particular order.

Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, has written a memoir. Apparently he really doesn't like the other co-founder, watzizname, but other than that it's a fine book. Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft.

Michael Korda has written a very good biography of Lawrence of Arabia, Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia. Given that the things Lawrence dealt with are very much still with us, it's probably worth the time.

Having mentioned those two books, it occurs to me that a while ago a reader asked what sort of books are on my wish list. Well, it's a long list, it continually gets longer, and life is not going to be long enough for all of it, so there's no actual danger that by sharing it will disappear, is there. So here are a handful of the specimens:

Norman Geras, Crimes against Humanity: Birth of a Concept

Edward Dolnick, The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World

Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams, by Charles King

The Koran: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Michael Cook

A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles by Thomas Sowell

Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism (Columbia/Hurst) by John Calvert

The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain by Benzion Netanyahu (Bibi's dad)

As Meat Loves Salt (Harvest Original) by Maria McCann

I dare anyone to come up with a common thread, except for the fact that they're all available on Amazon.

The Never Noticed War

2011-05-06T17:00:00.000+03:00

For all that I've tried once or twice, I've never quite managed to figure out what the 1st World War was all about. Something about balance of powers, or retraining German militarism, or something. Yet this vagueness is as nothing when compared to what was probably the third worst war in the 20th century, and by far the worst since the 2nd World War: the war in Congo. Perhaps five million people perished, the killing never really ended, and yet the international community, the UN, the world's media, and everyone else, basically didn't notice; in the rare cases when they did, no-one ever tried seriously to explain what was going on.

Now there's a book which tries to explain, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa, by Jason Stearns. The Economist reviews it approvingly here. I don't know if everyone interested in world politics needs to read it, but I can't think why not.

The Hubris of the International Lawmongers

2011-05-05T18:50:00.002+03:00

Here's a very short and necessarily superficial summary of the theory of lawmaking in modern democratic societies.

The people are sovereign, or rather the broad section of the people which comprises the electorate. The electorate periodically chooses its representatives and sends them to the legislature. The legislature legislates: it debates, formulates and passes laws, which thus express a rough approximation of the people's will. The laws are sent out into the real world, where they are tested, refined, and elaborated through a complex process of decrees, practice, litigation and adjudication, and general public discussion, not in any particular order. On the contrary, this is a permanent multi-layered process. Decrees are promulgated by the executive, which is itself subordinate to the sovereign people; adjudication is done, obviously, by judges, and they too are subordinate to the electorate either because they must deal with the law as legislated, or through the mode of their appointment, or through whatever channels each democratic society chooses to control its judges. Ultimately much of the ongoing creation of the law and its application reflect moral values as they're defined by each society. Does it prefer to encourage risk taking over security, say, or how it chooses to allocate its limited resources. Successfully functioning democratic societies strive towards a common ground, a rough consensus around which most members can coalesce, and they navigate inevitable changes in social mores, technology, and all the myriad other things that change and evolve over time, in an approximation of general agreement. Societies which cannot roughly agree, because they're too diverse or haven't agreed on principles of managing legislation and its evolution, run the danger of disintegration or worse.

Telegraphic summary of the summary: the sovereign people figure out how they wish to organize their particular society and how they wish it to evolve, and their institutions strive to express this agreement.

International law doesn't have a sovereign, and worse, it doesn't have a universally accepted notion of priorities, mores, or institutions to express them. True, there are valiant attempts to pretend otherwise, and over the past half century or so they've grown ever more valiant. These include the creation of international institutions with a cursory appearance of democratic institutions such as a parliament, an executive and courts. There is a conceit whereby there's a set of fundamental documents which define universal mores, and these documents enjoy democratic legitimacy since they've been ratified by national institutions such as parliaments or governments. Yet the obvious fact that most of the parliaments or governments which did the ratifying were themselves not democratic should give us pause; the lack of credible accountable institutions for applying and evolving the old fundamental documents ought to convince that the entire system may be a noble and well-intentioned attempt, but it's not remotely possibly successful. Nor can it be: the idea of having a sovereign electorate is to preserve its power to change its mind. Almost by definition different societies will change their minds in different directions: because they're different.

An interesting example rarely mentioned in such discussions but which I have seen close up many times is the availability of archival documentation. Roughly speaking, American archivists reflect the will of their society by assuming documentation should be thrown open to public scrutiny as much as possible. Europeans, meanwhile, and especially Germans, are far more wary. Neither side is "right", and both sides have reached their present positions through an understanding of their respective histories; since the histories are very different, so is the legislation. Anyone who reads newspapers perceptively can easily put together their own long list of other examples. This is inevitable, it reflects the human condition, and it should be celebrated not bemoaned.

Unless you're of the opinion that there's a set of universal rules in which one size fits all. To an extent, the European Union project sort of takes this position - but the extreme reluctance to let in the Muslim Turks or the impoverished and hardly democratic Ukrainians demonstrates loud and clear that the EU project isn't universal, it's merely European, and can include only those societies who can be trusted to agree to the same broad consensus. I expect it will take another century or three to know if this can work even in Europe. Imagine trying to incorporate the US and you see how silly the conceit of universality is; then think of China or Russia. Heh.

None of which stops folks from pretending. The German Der Spiegel magazine, for example:

What is just about killing a feared terrorist in his home in the middle of Pakistan? For the families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks, and for patriotic Americans who saw their grand nation challenged by a band of criminals, the answer might be simple. But international law experts, who have been grappling with the question of the legal status of the US-led war on terror for years, find Obama's pithy words on Sunday night more problematic. Claus Kress, an international law professor at the University of Cologne, argues that achieving retributive justice for crimes, difficult as that may be, is "not achieved through summary executions, but through a punishment that is meted out at the end of a trial." Kress says the normal way of handling a man who is sought globally for commissioning murder would be to arrest him, put him on trial and ultimately convict him. In the context of international law, military force can be used in the arrest of a suspect, and this may entail gun fire or situations of self-defense that, in the end, leave no other possibility than to kill a highly dangerous and highly suspicious person. These developments can also lead to tragic and inevitable escalations of the justice process.[my emphasis]

Translation: Claus Kress and other unnamed self-appointed legal experts trump the sovereign will of the American people. It's not historical fact that punishment can be meted out only via trials, so Kress can't be talking history. He's talking law, or anyway he thinks he is. Except that of course he's not, since he allows no room for an adaptation of law to new circumstances. Nor does he grant the American people the right or legitimacy to fashion their own response to a new situation. If the murder of 3000 people in New York is hiding in Pakistan, America may not chose the manner it will deal with him, rather it must do what Claus Kress says, since he represents a higher justice than the mere will of the American people. Moreover, his interpretation trumps theirs, since he knows he's right. And of course, Claus Kress is against capital punishment, as most Europeans are, and the international court he's referring to has no capital punishment on its books, so there's no way in which the Americans could have legally caused the death of Osama Bin Laden unless he was shooting at American policemen with a legal arrest warrant.

Kress isn't important as an individual. I'm criticizing him because he represents a widely accepted Weltanschauung.

Kenneth Roth agrees, but takes the hubris a very important step forward. Roth is an American, so on one level he, unlike Kress, is a legitimate participant in the American discussion of how America should deal with its enemies. Yet Roth doesn't refer to American law, rather to international law; actually, he doesn't refer to law at all, rather to a philosophical principle which he adheres to and demands that all the rest of us do, too:

It's not "justice" for him to be killed even if justified; no trial, conviction.

What makes this statement positively comic is that it came in a tweet in which he rebutted the Secretary General of - are you sitting? - The United Nations! Ban ki Moon, you see, had just announced his satisfaction at the death of Osama bin Laden. Roth then turned to the American government and demanded:

White House still hasn't clarified: OBL "resisted" but how did he pose lethal threat to US forces on scene? Need facts

It's a fine thing that individual citizens can place demands on their government. It's an essential part of democracy. What's so repulsive is the strident demand that a democratically elected government justify its actions - pronto! - to an unelected, and very much unelectable private individual who sees himself as superior to the democratic process of his country, in the name of an undemocratic system which lacks all the elements of a living legal system.

It's tempting simply to write people like Kress and Roth off as kooks. Sadly, Kress represents a widely accepted theology in Europe, and Roth has an impressive cachet in some circles in America; they are supported by many very cynical governments who have very limited patience with their sentiments when it comes to their own societies, but find the appeal of intervening on the sovereignty of other lands irresistible Feeling superior at the expense of America is fun; garnering points from the large Muslim contingent at the UN by rigorously applying these notions to Israel is painless. On that level, it's hard to know if Roth is a knave or a dupe. Knave for propagating a crooked and anti-democratic system, dupe for being the tool of hard, undemocratic and unscrupulous regimes. I expect he's both.

Update: Apropos theology, the Archbishop of Canterbury joins the chorus.

Bin Laden Still Popular in Israel's Neighborhood

2011-05-04T09:22:00.001+03:00

Yesterday I linked to the story about the Hamas Prime Minster, no less, who condemned America's killing of Bin Laden. Meanwhile he has been joined by others. The Al-Aqsa martyrs Brigades - that's Fatah, if you keep track of such matters, not Hamas; Fatah as in Mahmoud Abbas - published a long statement condemning the killing and calling it a catastrophe. And no, the explanation that it's Fatah's military wing, not its political wing, is not helpful. These people are claiming the right to a sovereign state, for crying out loud; would we brush off a separate foreign policy of the Syrians, say? The Russians? Karl Vick, a journalist not known for Zionist inclinations, wandered around Ramallah yesterday and found some support for Bin Laden even after his death, though of course Vick allows the supporters to explain it's Israel's fault. An imam in El Aksa mosque told Obama he'd soon be hanged for his crime of killing Bin Laden. The Economist, a bit more cool-headed, reports that support for Bin Laden among Palestinians has declined over recent years from 70% in 2003 to a mere third not long before he was killed. How reassuring.

Over in Egypt, the Muslim Brothers have also lined up on the wrong side of the current discussion. Something to keep in mind the next time a clueless media type assures us the Brotherhood is eager to be an Egyptian version of a European Christian Democratic party or some such silliness.

Of course, the Europeans weren't all unanimously overjoyed by the killing either, though not because they liked Bin Laden; rather, it seems there's a significant constituency in Europe for the idea that extra-judicial killings are always wrong, no matter what the circumstances. This is not at all the same as Muslim support for Bin Laden, but it does help explain why too many Europeans can't get their heads around the facts of Islamism. There are other facts they can't comprehend, either, because they don't fit the paradigm of how the world ought to be, which makes explaining Israel's positions largely impossible to such people. Personally, I think the sentiment that there's an international system of law which overrides anything else and must dictate everyone's behavior, is quaint at best on the day after the world's most powerful nation has just demonstrated it doesn't accept the idea: if not the US, and certainly not many others, what might be the source of authority for such talk except wistful thinking?

But I digress.

Too many Palestinians and others in Israel's neighborhood are firmly on the wrong side in the war between the Islamists and humanity. They are the enemy. This has to be clear, and the myriad attempts to obfuscate it must be countered. At the same time, the fact that too many Palestinians support humanity's enemies is not a justification for building more settlements on the West Bank, nor must it inevitably dictate that Israel needs to assist the Palestinians in their war against us by sitting on them and granting them perpetual propaganda victories for their victimhood. It doesn't even mean that the Palestinians can't have a state, such as everybody else has.

Thinking adults in a democracy can be - must be - expected to be capable of holding contradictory thoughts simultaneously.

(Short addendum: the strange people who inhabit the Mondoweiss universe are deeply troubled by the killing of Bin Laden. The reason this is significant is that it demonstrates how far from any type of American normality these folks are; this probably means their extreme aversion to Israel is just as far removed, and just as unlikely ever to have a politically significant public).

Hamas Mourns Bin Laden, Condemns his Killers

2011-05-03T06:54:00.000+03:00

I suppose it's not surprising that Ismail Haniya, the Hamas prime minister in Gaza, responded to the killing by stating that

the operation is "the continuation of the American oppression and shedding of blood of Muslims and Arabs."

Still, surprising or not, from now on whenever someone tells us Israel must accommodate itself to Hamas, we need to put on a puzzled face and say something along the lines of "Hamas? Weren't they the ones who condemned the Americans for killing Bin Laden? That Hamas?" If needed, one can add that Haniya is often described as a moderate Hamas fellow, not one of your militant types at all actually.

Killing Bin Laden

2011-05-02T08:13:00.000+03:00

The killing of Osama Bin Laden is an unalloyed good thing. Congratulation to all the American officials who contributed, and to any others who assisted.

Israel Finkelstein on the City of David Excavations

2011-04-29T17:50:00.000+03:00

Israel Finkelstein is the founding father of the Tel Aviv School, a group of Israeli archeologists who are skeptical about sizable chunks of the Biblical story of early Jerusalem. He is the co-author of The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, perhaps the single most important popular book for those who'd like to minimalize the Jewish history in Jerusalem - though I rather suspect most people who cite it have never read it, and most of those who have read it don't understand its context. They find joy in the perceived ambiance, and examine no further.

A demonstration of the degree to which Finkelstein isn't the bogeyman many of his supporters think he is can be found an an interesting article he has just published in The Forward, which appears under a mid-20th century photograph of the area which demonstrates what he's talking about: It's not Silwan, it is an archeological site of unique significance, and even if he, Finkelstein, doubts the stories about David and Solomon, the parts about Isaiah and Hezekiah are certainly true. Furthermore, the scholarship of the archeologists digging there is impeccable (remember that Haaretz suggested otherwise earlier this week).

I recommend reading it.

Zipper: The Egyptian Revolution will End Badly, Soon

2011-04-29T17:29:00.000+03:00

Benny Zipper is a veteran member of Haaretz' stable of light-weight lefties. I don't think I've ever linked to him, because there wasn't much point. Well, there's always sometimes a first time. Zipper is in Cairo right now, seeing things just as you'd expect any mainstream Israeli septic would, but not Haaretz folk or their Western look-alikes:

Tahrir Square still attracts curious crowds on weekends and holidays, including families there to gaze at the last remnants of the naive and romantic two-month-old popular uprising, which also photographed wonderfully in pictures broadcast around the world. However, now the backyards behind the smiling facades are being canvassed assiduously, and the seed of the political toughness is being sown that - though I do hope I am wrong - will bring about the second, real revolution, and will wipe the smiles off many faces.

Even more oddly, he blames Obama, which probably isn't fair, though I suppose one might explain Obama's rise to the same cultural malaise.

Benny Morris: Don't let there be a Palestine

2011-04-29T17:22:00.000+03:00

Benny Morris - who doesn't read this blog, to the best of my knowledge - takes direct aim at my thesis in the previous post, and says it's all wrong.

Peace Impossible; Progress Needed

2011-04-27T12:58:00.002+03:00

There are four fundamental dynamics to Israel's conflict with its neighbors.

The Jews have a sovereign state. The Palestinians don't. The West Bank Palestinians are occupied by Israel.

Significant numbers of Palestinians will never accept Jewish sovereignty and will act against it, including by violence.

Significant numbers of Arabs and Muslims will never accept Jewish sovereignty and will act against it.

Noticeable numbers of Westerners will never accept Jewish sovereignty and will agitate against it.

One can debate each and every one of the points endlessly; indeed, once could restrict oneself to dispassionate and intelligent discussion, and still keep at it indefinitely. This would result in nuanced and finely differentiated depictions; the fundamentals would still be the same four dynamics described above.

There is no way to achieve peace in our generation. No matter what agreements are signed and what changes made on the ground, there will remain significant numbers of Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims who will continue to wield violence against Jewish sovereignty, and noticeable numbers of Westerners to support and aid them.
Seen through soulless logic, the destruction of Jewish Israel would enable the peace of the graveyard. Likewise, were the implacable enemies of Jewish sovereignty to change their minds, peace would be possible. Seen in the historical perspective of centuries and millennia, either outcome might happen. Not anytime soon, though.

In October 1973, according to many publications, there was a moment when some Israeli leaders feared the military actions of Egypt and Syria might destroy Israel, and they mooted the use of nuclear weapons. There has never again been a concerted military action that could destroy Israel, and there's unlikely ever to be one for as long as Israel is perceived to have a strong nuclear option. Violence against Israel since 1973 has always been an attempt to break the Jews' willpower. The growing attempts to isolate Israel and deligitimize it have the same goal, of forcing the Jews to give up their obstinate determination to have sovereignty.

Compared to long periods of Jewish history, deligitimization is a reasonable problem to have. For that matter, deligitimization compounded with a low level of violence isn't an existential threat, either. Yet Jews haven't become one of history's oldest living nations by passively suffering circumstances. They have always tried to improve their lot, often with surprising success; Zionism is merely one of the more spectacular improvements. The Zionist tradition of activism requires we confront the present threat, rather than wait. The way forward is to disable the weapons of our enemies. Since the single most potent weapon in their arsenal is our occupation of the Palestinians, we must do as much as we reasonably can to end it.

Ending the occupation as a maneuver in an ongoing conflict is not the same as making peace. Making peace requires that all side to the conflict accept mutually agreed terms. There's a reason this hasn't yet happened, namely that the two sides cannot agree; even if they could, however, no Palestinian government could reconcile all Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims to Jewish sovereignty, nor convince the western supporters of ongoing violence to desist from aiding and abetting it. The aim of ending the occupation is to severely weaken the enemies of Jewish sovereignty by reducing the wind which currently blows in their sails.

As recently as 2006, a majority of Israel's voters felt it would be possible to end the occupation through the program Ehud Olmert called Hitkansut, which broadly meant Israel would move back to the line of the security barrier, and allow the Palestinians to do their thing beyond it. As the elections of that Spring approached, Olmert told us explicitly that was his plan, and he won the election. Since then however we have seen a number of unfortunate developments. First, the result of Israel's unilateral retreat from Southern Lebanon in 2000 proved to be war in Summer 2006. Second, the United Nation Security Council Decision 1701 - as solemn a guarantee as the international community can give - which promised Hizballah would not be re-armed, has proved totally useless. Third, the Palestinian response to Israel's evacuation of Gaza was to elect Hamas and go back to war with Israel. Fourth, the international community's implied commitment to support Israel when it disbands settlements and evacuates Palestinian territory proved worthless. Fifth - and perhaps most serious of all - the decision of the Obama Administration to renege in 2009 on public commitments made by the President of the United States and ratified by both Chambers of the House in 2004, in return for Israel's evacuation of Gaza, demonstrated that even the United States cannot be trusted. Finally, we recently learned to our horror that regime change in Egypt may well mean harm to the peace we made with that country - not its president - 30 years ago. So even internationally acclaimed treaties only have temporary value.

In spite of the events of 2006-2011, the need to end the occupation or at very least significantly limit it is still there. Moreover, there are still measures Israel can make to promote this goal.

1. Stop building in settlements that will someday be dismantled or transferred to Palestinian sovereignty. I'm not drawing a line, but Israel needs to.

2. Pass a law that enables Israeli citizens of the settlements who wish to move back inside the line to do so without losing the value of their homes (significant numbers of settlers are eager to move but can't).

3. Have an election where the question of dismantling settlements is clearly on the agenda. I'm reasonably certain whichever party suggests this in an intelligent way will win, but let's have the election and see.

4. Dismantle those settlements.

5. Demand of the United States and Europe that they figure out a way to assuage our fears of relinquishing military control of most of the West Bank so as to enable the emergence of a sovereign Palestinian state. This state will not be at peace with Israel, for the above reasons, nor will it have the borders the so-called moderate Palestinians insist they need. Still, let's change the dynamic. Rather than deligitimizing Israel for obstructing Palestinian independence, let's frame the discussion as a border conflict between two states. And let's put the responsibility for calm on the NATO nations. You want an independent Palestine? So do we. So you disarm it and keep it harmless.

6. Plan and apply practical policies to detach Palestinians from Israel: demand of them that they use their own currency rather than the Shekel, that they build an economy that doesn't trade 80-plus percent of its goods with Israel, and so on.

7. Promote the well-being of the Palestinians in East Jerusalem. Already today most of them prefer Israeli rule, and growing numbers of them are acquiring Israeli citizenship to replace the permanent residence status they already have. If the people of Jerusalem are Israeli citizens, it's hard to see how the land they live on can be defined as occupied. Concurrently, change the Israeli law that defines Jerusalem's municipal lines so that the 60,000 Palestinians beyond the security barrier (mostly in Kfar Akeb and Shuafat) are part of the West Bank, not Israel. Essentially, this means division of Jerusalem though not on the line the Palestinians hope for. Yet it would change the dynamic of the discussion: Israel would be able to demonstrate it's willingness even to hand over sections of Jerusalem.

So far I have spoken only of Israel's needs and interests. Ending the occupation, however, would be the right thing not only because it's good for Israel. The Palestinians really don't have their own state: they should. It will admittedly not be the one they want - this is true in any scenario - but they should have a state of their own. Zionism is about correcting the existence of the Jews, not preventing Palestinian's national existence. The two nations cannot each have their entire homeland for themselves, but they should each have part. The line of division will reflect more than a century of actions taken by each side, and the Palestinians will end up with the smaller part as a result of their actions; they should however at least have that part.

Diversity in Israel's Left

2011-04-27T10:27:00.000+03:00

Alex Stein, an occasional reader of this blog, has reactivated his own blog. Alex is rather to my left, and he and I disagree on much, but he's solidly within the healthy diversity of opinion any functioning democracy must have.

After I posted last week on some pernicious radical-left Israelis who support the families of murderers as they defame Israel, I had the dubious pleasure of observing some of their attempts at apologetics. The best they could come up with was that since the Machsom Watch visit to Awarta had been before the gag order on the investigation was lifted, they couldn't have known better; this in spite of the obvious fact that their visit and subsequent reports took place after the conclusion of the investigation itself, when there was widespread unofficial knowledge about its results.

At least whoever was making those excuses had some sense of shame. When I contacted Didi Remez to hear his opinion, he refused to utter a single word of criticism of his friends of the radical left, preferring instead to attack me personally. The reason I occasionally pick on Didi is that while he has no impact on policy or even on the Israeli political discourse, in the parts of the world which love to hate Israel and use Israelis as their sources of malice, Didi is a significant figure.

The insight I gleaned from the exercise is that Israel's radical left doesn't criticize the society it comes from as part of an attempt to make it a better place; rather the motivation draws on estrangement and revulsion. On that level, the radical left aren't capable of testifying about Israeli society at all, since they've severed their relationship with it.

On a related note, here's a very funny talk by Souad Amiri, a Palestinian who uses humor to confront Israel. Of course I could point out the fallacies in her narrative, and so could most readers of this blog, but she's still funny. Enjoy.

Condolences for Haim Watzman

2011-04-26T16:20:00.000+03:00

Niot Watzman, son of the co-author of the South Jerusalem Blog Haim Watzman, has been killed in an accident. He was 20. Haim recently blogged about a friend who lost a daughter and wrote a meaningful book about the loss and life thereafter. Haim has already written two books and translated many more; maybe he'll someday be able to craft one out of this horror, unimaginable as the thought must be today.

"If there's one thing that even slightly consoles me", he told me this morning, "it's that Niot was a happy person. He enjoyed his life".

Interesting Links

2011-04-26T15:55:00.000+03:00

Avi Bell elaborates on how awful the Goldstone Report always was. There was a report, but it was preceded by no investigation.

Newsweek, always a superficial newspaper, now deep into intellectual decline, has a longish puff-story about Mahmoud Abbas. Somewhere along the way a representative of the Obama adminsitration denies most of what Abbas has to say, so this gives us an inkling about how serious or not the man may be if it's a permanent and solid agreement you wish to build on him.

At one point in the Abbas story, he says the Americans deciding what to do about the Egyptian revolution could have chosen between chaos and the Muslim Brotherhood, and got them both. Gideon Rachman reports in the Financial Times that Abbas may be right. It doesn't sound good, though at this stage we should still hope for the best since we can't do much else anyway.

Michael Oren writes about Israel's value to the United States. His article builds on things he knows as a scholar, from the days before he was a diplomat.

Herod's Sewage Tunnel

2011-04-24T16:59:00.000+03:00

Imagine a sewage tunnel built more than 2,100 years ago, which could still be used almost a century later by rebels attempting to escape a besieged city, but being fished out one by one and killed. Imagine a contemporary book which describes this all, which is still a popular read 2,000 years later. Imagine that the city above continues its life, repeatedly being built, destroyed, built and destroyed, while no-one ever returns to the long-forgotten sewage tunnel, which is assumed to have been a legend or an exaggeration or the figment of someone's fervid imagination.

Now imagine a team of professional archeologists who accidentally stumble into the ancient tunnel, then spend a few years carefully cleaning it out, thus demonstrating that it's still there, in its entirety, and is large enough to walk through from end to end. Soon, they announce, perhaps even as soon as May 2011, it will be open to the public, and everyone will be able to walk though it.

In any normal place in the world, this would be a wonderful story, it would be favorably reported in the world's media, and would be celebrated at least as a minor wonder of the world.

Alas, there's a snag to the story. The archeologists are descendants of the original builders and their grandchildren the rebels. They speak the same language, and regard the ancient city as their capital, just as their forefathers did. Uh oh. Not good. Bad, as a matter of fact. Very bad. Pernicious. Destructive. Horrendous.

Haaretz has a long report on the matter, which explains why opening Herod's sewage tunnel is a Zionist conspiracy designed to undermine Palestinian homes and destroy truth, or something of the sort. Thankfully, Nir Hasson, the author, also reports on the counter arguments, so it's a balanced report and you can judge for yourself. Balanced, that is, in the crazy reality which regards Jews unearthing Jewish history as a colonial conspiracy.

I've been through the southern half of the tunnel, by the way. Once it's opened it will be an ideal place to tour on hot summer days, which Jerusalem has many of.

Elliot Abrams: Netanyahu Should Initiate, not Hunker Down

2011-04-24T15:10:00.000+03:00

Elliot Abrams is hardly an enemy of Israel. A high official in the (2nd) Bush administration, he is well versed in the minutiae of Mideast politics and the practicalities of international diplomacy. Last week he wrote a long article in the Weekly Standard - about as supportive of the present Israeli government as any American publication can be - about the dangers facing Israel at the moment, and how Israel should respond. He has no illusions about the international dynamics, nor the untrustworthiness of the Obama adminsitration: when it comes to unilateral Israeli measures:

Sharon decided to act without an agreement with the Palestinians: “I will take these new steps as unilateral steps; I don’t want to be in their hands,” he told me at the time. The theory was simple: If there is no real negotiating partner, try to shape Israel’s future yourself. Don’t wait, and don’t limit yourself to what the Palestinians will agree to right now. But Sharon asked Bush for what he called “ideological compensation” to make up for the lack of actual compensation from the Palestinians for his moves. There would be no peace treaty, no Palestinian concessions, no abandonment of claims by the PLO; instead there was Bush’s endorsement of several critical Israeli positions in his April 14, 2004, letter to Sharon. There Bush addressed both the refugee and settlement issues. He stated that Palestinian refugees had no “right of return” to Israel and would have to find a future and a solution in the eventual state of Palestine, and he argued that a return to the 1949 armistice lines—a term he used in preference to “1967 borders”—was unrealistic given the existence of the major settlement blocks. To Sharon these statements by the president of the United States were critical gains for Israel, and they were soon endorsed by resolutions in both houses of Congress.
But those statements have been forgotten and abandoned by the United States, treated by the Obama administration as if they were some kind of private gesture by Bush in a personal note to Sharon. This devaluation of solemn pledges among allies has been a huge Obama mistake, for it undermines the value not only of past American pledges but of his own future words as well and makes Israel far less likely to take risks for peace.

In spite of this, Abrams says it's time for Israel to return to its standard policy of acting and initiating rather than hunkering down in the hope that the enemy will make mistakes:

But Israel should not be frozen in fear of a Palestinian declaration of independence or recognition at the U.N. and should in fact head it off. Perhaps the next country to recognize an independent Palestine should be Israel.
[...]
Israel should say that with this new state of Palestine it has a million practical issues to discuss, beginning with grave border disputes but continuing from customs issues to the management of the Allenby Bridge to possible use of Mediterranean ports. Personal status issues are dangerous and complex: What is the situation of Israelis in areas the state of Palestine views as its own? Is it the Palestinian position that the new state must be Judenrein, a position President Abbas has repeatedly taken? Israel should immediately challenge that position in every possible forum, for it is an indefensible racist view that the EU for one will have to denounce. Israel should demand immediate negotiations on all these complex matters, and remind the world that the dozens of statements “recognizing a Palestinian state” actually do nothing to advance the parties toward the resolution of the issues they face. In fact, commencement of practical negotiations on some of these issues between Israel and “Palestine” might lessen their appeal as great causes and turn them from emotional claims into tedious and detailed bargaining positions.
[...]

Israel should start to disentangle itself from governing the West Bank and the Arabs who live in it, and if this cannot be achieved through negotiations with the Palestinians it should be achieved through Israeli-designed unilateral steps that maximize Israeli security interests. One example: passage in the Knesset of a compensation law buying the home of any settler who wishes voluntarily to move back behind the security fence, whether to Green Line Israel or a major settlement. Another: turning additional areas within the West Bank over to the PA for normal daily governance. Such moves, which signal an intention to change the ultimate pattern of Israeli settlement in the West Bank, do not require abandoning the IDF’s security role there. Nor do they require or accept a total settlement freeze, which would be counterproductive: Whatever the wisdom of a freeze in outlying settlements that will eventually become part of Palestine, to freeze construction in the major blocs that will remain parts of Israel is to send exactly the wrong message.
Israeli officials should explain the policy to the Obama administration and the Europeans (among whom some consequential leaders, like German chancellor Angela Merkel, are still friendly to Israel): It looks like final status negotiations are not on, and anyway they may take forever or may fail. So Israel will act, trying to shape a better future for itself without harming the Palestinians. We won’t wait for them, but nothing we are doing closes off possibilities for future agreements. In fact, reaching those agreements will become easier over time, not harder, if Israel begins to act now. Israel should use as its set of principles the Bush letter of April 14, 2004, in essence demanding that the United States adhere to pledges made about the key issues. No “right of return” for Palestinian “refugees” except to the new state of Palestine; secure and defensible borders for Israel; no full return to the 1949 lines, given the new realities on the ground; final borders to be mutually agreed; Israel as a Jewish democratic state. But Netanyahu will have to act as well as speak, telling both Israelis and foreigners what he will do to begin to shape an outcome where there are no Israelis in over 90 percent of the West Bank. He can maximize the ability of Israel’s friends and supporters, not least in this country, to support Israel if he acts with boldness and principle to guarantee the future safety of the Jewish state.

Read the whole thing. He's right.

Practical Peace in Jerusalem

2011-04-24T14:47:00.001+03:00

Last week the Economist had a cheery little item about the Jerusalem Zoo. Now I recognize it's ungrateful of me to nitpick when the paper is being mostly positive, but the subtitle of the item said the zoo is "a corner of cheerful coexistence in a largely segregated city", and that does require a response. Of course, the city is largely segregated, and will remain so no matter what, since the Jews and the Muslims speak different languages, live by different calenders, and are separated by different cultures. Having said that, however, here's a short and abbreviated list of places where you'll find both Jews and Muslims together on a regular basis:

The four Jewish hospitals. The University (all three campuses). The center of town. The Mamilah open-air mall. The Malcha air-conditioned mall. The public swimming pools. The Hadassah Technological College. Cafes on Emek Refaim. The Knesset. Machane Yehuda. The markets of the Old City. Abu Shukri in the Old City. The city parks. City Hall. The courts. The National library. Most supermarkets. Buses. Taxicabs. Security guards: you'd be astonished how many of them seem to be Arab. The Police. The water company. The Firefighters. Construction sites.

Which reminds me that last week we overheard a lady at the cinemateque, probably a visitor from Tel Aviv, saying to her friend "this little Jewel is the first place we've seen since entering the city where there are no Haredi. Such a relief!"

Having recently read Simon Sebag Montefiore's Jerusalem: The Biography, then a book in Hebrew on the Jerusalem municipality under the British, and now I"m approaching completion of Karen Armstong's Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths, I feel reasonably confident in saying there has never been a period in the past two thousand years when all of Jerusalem's inhabitant's enjoyed freedom and equality - unless it was in the periods when entire religious or ethnic groups were simply banned, so the remaining insiders enjoyed equality among themselves. This morning, being Easter Sunday, I walked through the Christian Quarter of the Old City. Masses of Christians from the world over were celebrating. The Arab Christian shop owners had mostly not opened their establishments so their Muslim neighbors were doing a roaring business. The Jews are celebrating the week of Pessach, so there were lots of them around - Israeli tourists or international ones. It wouldn't be accurate to say there's perfect peace and equality in Jerusalem at the moment, but the situation is closer than it has ever been.

Something to be proud of.

Radical Israelis Prefer Murderers

2011-04-22T01:01:00.003+03:00

For years I've believed - and have said in print - that for all my disagreements with far-left Israelis, they were a legitimate voice and deserved respect for criticizing from inside the war zone: if proven wrong, they'd be here to pay the price; when Palestinian or Hisballah murderers do their best to kill random Israeli Jews, the far-left Israelis are here along with all the rest of us. This creates a qualitative distinction between them and their foreign fellows in malice.

I'm no longer convinced. As I've long been documenting in this blog, the contribution Israel's radicals make to the Big Lie against Israel is immense; sometimes the entire anti-Israeli argumentation comes from them. Absent them and the hatred of the Jewish State wouldn't go away, but its purveyors could present far fewer arguments.

This week we've had a further example which to my mind crosses all the lines of simple human decency. The Hebrew part of the Internet has been all a-buzz about the story of the Israeli radicals who went to the West Bank town of Awarta to give succor to the families of the murderers of the Fogel family, while disseminating unforgivable slander against the IDF and the law enforcement agencies.

The story of the investigation was under a gag order for a month, until its successful conclusion. Still, Israel being the very small place it is, anybody who cared to know had a pretty good idea what was going on. In brief, immediately after the murder trackers identified tracks of the suspected murderers from Itamar to the nearby town of Awarta. We now know that the two suspected murderers walked back home after the massacre of the Fogel family, where a number of their friends and relatives burned their clothes and hid their weapons near Ramallah. The investigators, who had reason to believe the murderers and potential accomplices were in town, but couldn't yet have known who, how many, how well armed, and if they intended to murder again, sealed off the town and began to investigate. At a minimum, the investigators knew the murderers had the two M-16's stolen from Itamar. At one point they collected DNA samples from most of the men. Had anyone come forward and admitted their part in the massacre the investigation would have been greatly expedited, but this didn't happen, so the investigators had to find their men in a hostile environment. They succeeded in less than a month. The week before the gag order was lifted the suspected murderers were brought to Itamar to re-enact the murder, so everyone in Itamar knew they'd been caught; soon, everyone else who cared knew, too, even if the precise identities of the murderers were not yet known.

At this point a delegation of radical Israeli leftists visited the town: after the investigation, mind you, since as they openly said in their subsequent reports, during the investigation itself they couldn't get in.

There are two extraordinarily incriminating pieces of evidence for the malice of the radicals. The first is a report by Yaakov Manor, of the Alternative Information Center. It was written in Hebrew, and published on their website. It describes the violence of the Israeli forces, and attributes it to their need for revenge. It is based largely on eye-witness reports of local townspeople, the exact same people who had been obstructing the investigation for most of the month. The head of the town informs Manor that the reason the IDF spent so much time in town was to prepare the confiscation of agricultural land. Then Manor went to visit the family of Hakem Awad, one of the suspected murderers. Here's the English translation of what they found:

The horror that we saw with our own eyes in the home of Mahmoud Awad cannot be described as anything but a pogrom, primate and brutal vengeance intended solely to impose fear in the heart of the residents.

All rooms in the home were turned upside down. Most of the furniture and electronic equipment was broken. Food from the kitchen was dumped on the floor and on it a large vat of oil was poured.

The mother of the family, Shama and the children Majd, 14 years old and Alaa, 6 years old, who were not detained, related that the army’s invasion of their home began at 4am and ended around 11am. Family members were dragged out of their beds and not permitted to bring warm clothing or blankets. A soldier who saw the little girl trying to shield herself from the cold ripped the blanket away from her. Alaa relates that “they took my blanket and I was very cold and afraid, and waited outside until the soldiers left. Majd notes that “I was handcuffed, my eyes were covered and they beat me. All in all I’m a little boy, what did I do wrong?

The father of the family, Mahmoud, 45 years old, the son Majdi, aged 20, a third year university student and the son Amjad, 19 years old, a first year university student and the son Hakhem, 17 years old, were detained. Their cousin Ayman, 21 years old, was also detained. The mother claims that soldiers took 2,500 Jordanian dinars from a drawer and 5 mobile phones. The mother looked broken, in shock and in deep grief. The fear and terror had not yet left her eyes.

It gets worse. Hagit Beck, a member of Machsom Watch, describes on her blog how she and some other women went to visit "the 2 homes which had been ransacked". The second of the two was the home of Hakem Awad. (Isn't in interesting how in spite of all the horror, the reports all seem to focus on the same one or two homes?). The blog-post has been put up also on the Machsom Watch website: they're obviously proud of it. While in the house, Raya Yaron, the Machsom Watch spokeswoman, tried to comfort Shama Awad, mother of suspected murderer Hakem Awad, and wife of one of the men suspected for destroying the evidence. If proven in court, this will mean Shama Awad hid her murderer son from the police for most of a month, knowing fully what he had done. This is the woman Raya Yaron is embracing, and Hagit Beck is celebrating.

For what it's worth: The Alternative Information Center is cited on page 555 of the Goldstone Report as one of their sources. Also, some of the Hebrew websites are claiming that the two NGOs are or have been supported bythe NIF. It's plausible,but I haven't checked. Something worth looking into.

Don't Divide Jerusalem: Asael Street

2011-04-21T12:08:00.000+03:00

Asael Street is on the Green Line in Abu Tur, on the hill south of the Old City. It's a small street, which can be entered by car only from the south, where the skeleton of a 1948-67 IDF bunker still stands, a reminder of the 19 years in which the neighborhood was divided between Israeli territory in the West, and Jordanian territory in the East; in those days the line between the homes was hostile and sometimes violent. The years of peace and prosperity since 1967 have encouraged the locals to build right up to their respective national lines, and the result is that along the entire line in Abu Tor, Jewish and Palestinian homes sit next to each other. In the picture below, the red-roofed building is Palestinian, and the building facing it to the left is Jewish. They're both on Asael.

Here you can see how narrow the street is; in this picture the red-roofed building is on the left.

Here's the street from its entrance:

All the people who live on the street enter their homes from it, which means that if this narrow little lane were to become a hostile international border, no-one could enter or leave their homes. Yet let's hope, unrealistically, that it won't ever be hostile. You may have noticed the green garbage truck on its way into the street? Here, have a closer look:

Since there are cars parked on one side of the street, the truck had to inch by them, so narrow is the street. If the city is ever divided, there will need to be two different trucks, each serving its respective side. No, don't tell me the services will remain unified, since they won't: One of the most essential aspects of sovereignty is that society determines its own priorities. That means one side may decide to buy new garbage trucks every eight years, while the other allocates funds for garbage trucks only once in 20, because it has other priorities. On one side garbage workers are paid at Israeli wage levels and come by every two days; on the other side they may be paid only a quarter, or a fifth, and come by only once every three days. Or vice versa, what do I know: maybe it will be the Palestinian ones who come by every day, and do a great job, while the Israelis will only come by once a week, and in the meantime the Jewish neighbors will throw their garbage onto the Palestinian side. Since there isn't a single such place anywhere in the world, it's hard to know what the specific grudges will be and how they'll poison the atmosphere on this peaceful little alley - but they probably will.

At the end of the street it turns west, so that the final homes on both sides are all Jewish.

The building on the right is Palestinian; the one on the left is Jewish. And the picture below shows the intended border.

Have I mentioned I find this whole proposition to be extremely idiotic?

Thwarting Sanctions against Iran

2011-04-20T22:49:00.001+03:00

The Iranians just had a big shindig about selling oil:

The largest contingent came from China, which has an extensive record of dealings with Iran and indifference to sanctions. So does U.S. ally Germany, and more than 40 German companies were in Tehran this week. Austrian companies were also well-represented, and the Spanish government sent an official delegation. Also present were India's Essar Group and Norway's Statoil, two firms that previously announced they were cutting ties with Iran—and thereby earned recognition from U.S. officials as examples of successful international pressure. So much for that.

Norway. Might that be this Norway? (h/t Barry M)

The Ironic Tragedy of Human Rights

2011-04-20T15:38:00.001+03:00

Charles Blattberg responded to my post about how international law has not created world peace or anything remotely like it, by e-mailing a link to an article he wrote attempting to explain why this is so. The abstract is here, you can download the entire article at a link in the upper left corner. I admit it's too philosophical for my abilities, though it seems he's writing about a tension which the Talmud resolved some 1800 years ago with the simple statement: "The poor of your town and the poor of another town, the poor of your town come first".

This probably also means the Talmud disagrees with The Guardian, but there's not much novelty in that thought.

The Unforgivable Maliciousness of Goldstone

2011-04-20T10:18:00.000+03:00

The New York Times tries to figure out what made him change his mind.(If you've run out of free access to the New York Times for the month, Haaretz summarizes the article here). The thesis seems to be that he thought that by castigating both sides, he'd promote a process of mutual reflection and eventual reconciliation; this bizarre idea stemming from a similar experience he had in South Africa as Apartheid waned.

Yet another example of how different Apartheid always was from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Mostly, however, it's a demonstration of how weirdly ignorant Goldstone may have been (and still is) about the conflict here.

He noted in Sacramento, for example, as in his later essay, that the deaths of about 29 members of one Gazan family grouped together by Israeli soldiers in a building that was subsequently bombed probably resulted from a misreading of a drone photograph. Men carrying firewood might have looked as if they were holding rocket launchers.At a debate last month at Stanford Law School, he did not excuse that Israeli killing but said that originally, “in the absence of any evidence at all, the only conclusion we could come to was that it was intentional.” Now it appeared to have been negligence due to lack of communication and verification, he said. [My emphasis].

Translation to English: we didn't know what we were talking about, since we lacked most of the relevant data, so we had no choice but to assume the worst about Israel and broadcast this assumption to the world as proven fact.

Only after the enemies of the Jews greeted this malicious accusation with the greatest of glee did it occur to the judge that he had been willingly manipulated. In my understanding of repentance, he hasn't even started the process. What he needs to do now is systematically tear down the entire edifice he built; if it take the rest of his life, so be it.

Why Oh Why Don't the Downtrodden Israelis Revolt?

2011-04-19T23:34:00.000+03:00

Yuval Elbashan, a 40-something Israeli lawyer who'd like to rectify all the social woes of Israel (wouldn't we all?) moans about how the downtrodden masses are so downtrodden they can't muster the energy to revolt.

Of course, one might argue that the downtrodden might be better advised to invest their energies in actively bettering their situation and generally getting on with their lives. One might ask if that hasn't been the broad trajectory of most Israelis over the past six decades since most of them arrived mostly penniless and were stuffed into refugee camps by very harried officials, until the present day when most of them (not all, alas) live reasonable lives in a wealthy society. One might ponder whether theorizing about the dearth of revolution is actually as useful as pursuing capitalist occupations such as making money and spending it.

But then one wouldn't get published in Haaretz. On the contrary. One might well get sneered at by Haaretz.

Long Term Structural Things Israel Does Right

2011-04-18T15:41:00.001+03:00

The Israeli economy continues to grow faster than expected. The annual rate of growth recorded in the final quarter of 2011 was 7.8%. If we manage to keep it going like that, we'll soon enter Indian territory, from a higher starting point. Part of the growth is a fine rise in exports, which is happening even as the exporters have been kvetching and wailing about the strength of the Shekel:

Israeli industrial exports in the December 2010 to February 2011 period jumped 23% - in annual terms - mostly as a result of a steep rise in high-tech exports, 28.1%, the stats bureau reported. The increase in exports came despite exporters' complaints in recent months over the fall in the dollar against the shekel, reflecting the recovery of Western economies.

This is the sort of thing Jon at Divest This! likes to write about: the more the boycotters strive, the faster Israel's economy grows. I rather doubt there's any correlation, but the growth is welcome and important; keep in mind Yaacov's Three Parameters for measuring Israel's strength, the third of which is economic.

The Economist last week has a long special report on pensions (it begins here). What looked like a great idea in the late 19th century when invented by Bismarck, the eligibility of folks to live off a pension from a certain point in time until the ends of their lives, now accepted nearly universal as a basic right, will cause enormous economic stress in many countries over the next few decades (though the problem may go away by the late 21st century, if that's reassuring). The subject is complex, and actually not the sort of thing this blog usually tells about, but the outlines are simple, and the report sums op the four main issues:

The first is that people are living longer, but they are retiring earlier than they were 40 years ago. A higher proportion of their lives is thus spent in retirement. Second, the large generation of baby-boomers (in America, those born between 1946 and 1964) is now retiring. But the following generations are smaller, leaving the children of the boomers with a huge cost burden.
Third, some employees have been promised pensions linked to their salaries, known as defined-benefit (DB) schemes. In the 1980s and 1990s the true cost of these promises was hidden by a long bull market in equities. But the past dismal decade for stockmarkets depleted those funds and left employers on the hook for the shortfall. Private-sector employers have largely stopped making such promises to new employees; the public sector is beginning to face the same issues, particularly in Britain and America.
Fourth, private-sector employers are now providing pensions in which the payouts are linked to the investment performance of the funds concerned. These defined-contribution (DC) schemes transfer nearly all the risk to the employees. In theory, they can provide an adequate retirement income as long as enough money is paid in, but employees and employers are contributing too little. Both sorts of funded schemes, DB and DC, essentially face the same problem. “The aggregate amount of pension savings is inadequate,” says Roger Urwin.

The situation is Israel is different. There is no baby-boom generation which hangs over its predecessors and descendants. There have been ups and downs in rates of fertility, but at no point have the rates ever been negative. Looking forward, each retiring generation will be followed by a larger one. In spite of this, Israel already has raised the age of retirement to 67, higher than almost anywhere else (though a few far-seeing countries have recently moved to peg the retirement age to longevity; given Israel's high life expectancy, we'll probably have to do the same).

Most Israeli workers are paid from pension funds, not the government budget, and in DC schemes; since these are mandatory by law, most people contribute to them automatically their entire post-student working lives. The pensions are computed as a rough average of contributions throughout one's career, so there's no way to artificially raise decades worth of pension by tweaking the final year or two of a career, as is often done elsewhere.

How is it that Israel seems to have mostly sidestepped a strategic predicament that looms over most developed nations? I don't know. Perhaps we've had some reasonable decision-makers along the way. Netanyahu raised the pension age in 2002 when he was Finance Minster; other parts of the configuration were in place earlier.

Guardian: International Law has Created World Peace

2011-04-17T23:58:00.001+03:00

Norm pokes fun at a Guardian leader here. Always a worthy pastime, even if it's not a hard one. So I went and read the piece he finds so sloppy, and noticed an additional oddity in the article:

The current attorney general would do well to remember the damage done during the Iraq affair, when dubious interpretations of resolution 1441 were used to license the course the superpower was already set on. This created the sense that the UN's role was a fraud. Whether it has been right or wrong on Libya, it has proved capable of shared resolve, and shown it can have teeth. The new language of regime change may leave the council descending into accusations of bad faith – and the planet slipping back into a more lawless world. [my emphasis].

If I understand the argument, it seems to be saying that the rise of the UN and international law have made the world a more lawful, and thus more peaceful, place. I suppose this might seem compelling to an egotistical ignoramus in Europe, but does it bear any relation to the human condition? I didn't think so, and did a spot of digging around - well, about 30 seconds of digging, to be precise. Google directed me to this list of the wars of the 20th century, which seems to be hinting that there were more than twice as many wars worldwide in the half century since the foundation of the United Nations as in the half century preceding its creation.

This seems to indicate that abolishing the United Nations and discarding international law might dramatically reduce human suffering. At any rate, that's the plausible outcome if you concur with the Guardian that there's any connection whatsoever between the UN and international law on the one hand, and the human propensity to warfare on the other.

Frozen Settlements

2011-04-17T16:11:00.000+03:00

It is common knowledge the world over that Israel continues to enlarge its settlements in the West Bank, devouring ever more of the territory the Palestinians regard as their own. Israel is condemned for this every day of the year. Since the advent of President Obama, it has also been in a state of high tension with its only significant friend, over its insistence on not freezing construction.

The only problem with this narrative is that it's not true.

Anyone who wanders around the West Bank (admittedly a very very very small subset of the people with an opinion on the matter) knows perfectly well that the settlements aren't growing, and haven't been growing much for at least the past 5-6 years, not to mention the mildly relevant fact that there aren't any new ones being built at all.

Sadly, this is true also in Jerusalem, where Netanyahu's rhetoric has been quite decisive: Jerusalem is our capital and we'll build in it as needed. Now the minister of Housing and Construction admits as much openly. There are no large construction projects happening in East Jerusalem (and precious few small ones, either).

Yiddish has a pithy saying for such a situation, but this isn't a Yiddish blog.

Judaism on its Own Evolution

2011-04-17T13:04:00.001+03:00

Judaism is famously both a religion and a nationality, though this is not a matter everyone likes to accept. Recently I've been revisiting various topics and seeing them through the prism of the knowledge I've accumulated over the years, and I'm beginning to suspect the case for Jews being a nation is even stronger than Jews as a religious belief; at the very least, the beliefs have repeatedly and dramatically evolved over the ages. Given Judaism's unusual longevity, there's been a lot of time for evolution.

Of course this isn't a particularly startling insight. The entire Koran reflects divine words handed down in the single lifetime of Mohamed. The New Testament covers, what, two centuries? The Hebrew Bible (aka Old Testament) spans at least 1,500 years, if you start counting with Abraham. Most of what was recognizably Jewish on the eve of the Emancipation, in the 18th century, was created or added after the completion of the Bible. So it's banal to say that Judaism contains very thick layers of historical memory. King David and his contemporaries, whatever their culture was, didn't much resemble the earliest creators of the Mishna, who were roughly contemporaries of Jesus, and while we can trace the line from them to the Lubavitcher Rebbe and to his contemporary Abraham Joshua Heschel, it's unlikely the Tanaim would have foreseen either scholar.

This also works backwards. The Holocaust plays a central role in the identity of America's Jews, yet it obviously didn't play any role in the identity of their great grandparents who migrated at the turn of the 20th century. The destruction of the (2nd) Temple and the yearning for Jerusalem were absolutely central to the identity of Jews for some 2000 years, but no-one had ever heard of them when the Hasmoneans. What did Judaism in Jerusalem in Isaiah's time look like, in the 8th century BCE? There's no real way of knowing, but even if it was as memory based as Judaism has become, it was laden by perhaps 8 centuries of it, not 35. (I'm not discussing modern theories of ancient history here, nor am I discounting them. That's not the topic, and doesn't change my point).

Predictably, but perhaps not fully appreciated, the Jews have long been aware of this dynamic. Nothing better demonstrates this than the story of Moses' visit to the yeshiva of Rabbi Akiva, as told on a daf we passed last week.

Rabbi Yehuda told in the name of Rav: When Moses went to the heavens [to receive the Torah] he saw the Holy One Be He Blessed tying ktarim to the letters [ktarim being decorations which appear above some letters which have no use since the letters are recognizable without them]. Said Moses
- Creator of the World, who's delaying You [who needs the ktarim]?
- There will one day be a man, after some generations [about 1,400 years, to be precise], named Akiva son of Josef, and he will learn many halachot from each thorn and thorn [katrim look a bit like thorns].
- Creator of the World, can you show him to me?
- Walk back behind you.
Moses found himself in the yeshiva, and sat at the back of the room behind all the scholars. He didn't understand anything that was being discussed no matter how hard he tried, until at one point the disiples said to Rabbi Akiva "Rabbi, how do you know that?" "It was given to Moses at Sinai".
Reassured, Moses returned to God.
- Creator of the World, You have such a man in your world, and you've chosen me to bring down the Torah?
- Silence. That is my intention.
- Creator of the World, You've shown me his greatness in Torah, can you show me his reward?
- Walk back behind you.
Moses found himself at Rabbi Akiva's execution, as the Romans were slowly torturing him to death.
- Creator of the World, that's Torah and that's it's reward (zo Torah ve-zo sechara)?
- Silence. That is my intention.

Menachot 29b. This thread is introduced and explained here.

Making Peace with Israel Will Create More Terrorists

2011-04-17T00:52:00.000+03:00

An oft-cited mantra tells that whenever Western countries fight Muslims, they inevitably create additional terrorists. In some circles this idea has acquired the status of an article of faith, perhaps even a fundamental dogma.

In reality it probably is true in some cases, and false in others. Some people who are filled with hate may be propelled by this or that into violence; others, with different frames of mind, will be deterred by violence. I'm not aware of any solid research which has ever investigated the balance, and to be honest, I'm not certain how such an empiric investigation might be carried out. Which leaves us with our beliefs: some of us belive one way, others the opposite.

An otherwise standard boilerplate Guardian article following the story of the murder of Vittoria Arrigoni accidentally contradicts the Guardian's dogma:

While many view Hamas as a radical Islamist group, the responsibility of being in power has forced it to sacrifice ideology for a pragmatism that has alienated many of its supporters. Some have rejected Hamas's brand of nationalist Islam and embraced fundamentalist Salafi Islam, which aims to create a single Islamic commonwealth in place of nation states. Tawheed and Jihad means oneness of God and holy war or struggle.
Mkhamir Abusada, a professor of political science at An-Najah University in Gaza, said such groups began to emerge after Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007. "Most of the members of the Salafi groups were previously members of Fatah or Hamas. They are dissatisfied with Hamas's failure to fight Israel and Islamise Gaza," he said. "They cannot compete with Hamas but they are a source of annoyance....
The Army of Islam split from the Popular Resistance Committee. It initially carried out operations with Hamas such as the kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2006. When relations between it and Hamas broke down, the Army began kidnapping foreigners, including two people from Fox TV in 2006 and the BBC's Alan Johnston in 2007. Johnston was released unharmed after four months.

To be clear: even according to the Guardian, when radical Palestinian groups begin to accept the reality of Israel's existence, even if only on a very limited basis such as Hamas in Gaza, this inevitably further radicalizes some Palestinians. Put concisely: making peace with Israel will create terrorists.

This dynamic is not new, and not surprising. Nor should it preclude Israeli attempts to reach accommodation with the Palestinians. It does however mean that even when the accommodation is eventually reached, Israel will need clear borders with the Palestinians, and it will need to control the gates through those borders, so that the murderous Palestinian crazies won't be able to get in along with the peaceful ones. It will not be possible to have an open border running through Jerusalem, of course. It won't. Any division of Jerusalem will inevitably mean a hard border running right through the city. Don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise, no matter how impeccable their credentials.

Germany and Austria, Major Iranian Trade Partners

2011-04-16T23:47:00.000+03:00

Germany is Iran's main European trade partner. Austrian imports from Iran rose by 397% in 2010.

I'll be traveling to Germany to give some lectures next month. I suppose I should add this item to the agenda.

How Many Palestinian Refugees Were There?

2011-04-15T17:52:00.000+03:00

Jewish Ideas Daily recommends we read Efriam Karsh on this question.

Aaron Miller on UN Palestinian Statehood: A Dumb Idea

2011-04-15T17:45:00.000+03:00

On the scale of American friends of Israel, Aaron David Miller is not anywhere near the top of the list. All the more interesting, therefore, that he's very critical of the Palestinian intention (if it really is an intention) to collect a UN declaration of Palestinians statehood. A very dumb idea, says Miller.

An Italian Rachel Corrie?

2011-04-15T12:24:00.001+03:00

Vittorio Arrigoni, an Italian ISM volunteer in Gaza, has been murdered by local Islamists. The Israeli Y-net website has an interview with him, in which he explains that his arrival in Gaza in 2008 was the happiest day of his life, because he and his friends had broken a the blockade which began in 1967. (Their boat was allowed through by Israel). He goes on to explain that he's here because it's in his DNA: his grandfather fought the Italian Facists. The interview is only a few minutes long but has enough nonsense in it to fill a very long blog-post.

Rachel Corrie was accidentally killed by the IDF in 2001, yet her name has been widely commemorated, there's a play based on her letters, and she has become an icon of the non-Arab anti-Israeli forces. Arrigoni was purposefully abducted, beaten and hanged, so he should rightfully be canonized even more. I doubt this will happen, but who knows. We'll wait and see.

On another related matter: Salafi murderers are a small minority among Palestinians. But they're there, and if you assume the Palestinians are Arabs or Muslims, their power and popularity could yet grow, as has happened elsewhere in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Salafists hate all sorts of people, including Italian fools who hate Israel, but they vehemently hate Jews. I think any reasonable person would agree that offering such murderers uncontrolled access to large numbers of Israeli Jews would be a bad idea. Yet that precisely is what most of the world, from President Obama down, insists is the key to peace, since Jerusalem must be divided and also remain an open city. I apologize for droning on about this matter, but I admit I'm personally threatened by the imbecilic idea.

Finally, a nice little note: The Guardian reports on Arrigoni's murder:

Arrigoni arrived in the Gaza Strip on a boat bringing humanitarian supplies in 2008 that Israel, which enforces a blockade on the tiny coastal territory, allowed into Gaza port. [My emphasis]

Update: Just Journalism demonstrates the British media are being worse on this story than I'd said.

An Important Journalist Talks Through His Hat

2011-04-14T09:58:00.000+03:00

David Ignatius is an important journalist who's been around a long time and is regarded as reliable. He's been talking to prominent Egyptians, and has a column about three he thinks will come out on or near the top. Amr Moussa and Mohammed el-Baradei are no-brainers if you're an external observer who couldn't name five Egyptians without a spot of Googling. (And I have no idea if the Egyptian voters will agree that they're so important, or if this is a Western conceit). It's interesting to note that the three men seem significantly more wary of the Muslim Brotherhood than most of the Western media is.

The reason I'm interrupting my non-blogging to call attention to the Ignatius column, however, has to do with Naquib Sawiris, the third Egyptian power-broker he chooses to introduce to us.

...Naguib Sawiris, the chief executive of Orascom, a giant telecommunications company that is Egypt’s biggest private employer. Egyptian analysts describe the first two as potential future presidents and the third as a possible kingmaker. (Sawiris, a Coptic Christian, wouldn’t have a chance in a presidential bid, but he has just formed a powerful new political party.)

Is there any conceivable way Ignatius can know that Sawiris' new political party is powerful? There isn't is there? Normally, the power of political parties is measured first and foremost by results of elections, and that hasn't happened yet in Egypt. I suppose one might try to gauge such power by counting membership or some other form of secondary measurement, perhaps the power of political patronage - but Sawiris' party didn't exist a month ago, so that can't be it. Note also that we're not told what the name of the party is, which may somewhat hamper our ability to watch it as it rises or not.

How very puzzling.

Can the New York Times Count till Ten?

2011-04-13T22:21:00.000+03:00

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

Incoming Train

2011-04-13T19:08:00.001+03:00

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

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

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

Nails from the Cross

2011-04-12T15:16:00.000+03:00

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

NGOs Need Not Stake Responsible Positions

2011-04-11T23:50:00.000+03:00

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

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

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

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

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

Hamas War Crimes

2011-04-10T22:41:00.000+03:00

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

Slow Blogging

2011-04-10T21:36:00.000+03:00

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

The Inability of the Radical Left to Deal with Reality

2011-04-08T16:53:00.002+03:00

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

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

UN-Supported Unilateral Palestinian Independence Will Mean War

2011-04-08T16:50:00.000+03:00

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

Shooting a Schoolbus

2011-04-07T22:27:00.000+03:00

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

Layers of Jerusalem

2011-04-06T16:45:00.001+03:00

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

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

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

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

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

2011-04-05T22:59:00.000+03:00

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

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

2011-04-05T12:17:00.002+03:00

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

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

It's depressing how unusual this is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The State Department & J Street Welcome Goldstone's Retraction

2011-04-05T09:31:00.001+03:00

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

The State Department Condemns the Status Quo

2011-04-05T09:15:00.001+03:00

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

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

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

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

Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch Responds to Peter Beinart

2011-04-04T13:04:00.000+03:00

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

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

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

Construction Beyond the Green Line in Jerusalem

2011-04-03T18:25:00.002+03:00

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

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

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

BBC Tells about Jerusalem as it Isn't

2011-04-03T13:26:00.001+03:00

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

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

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

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

Goldstone Sort of Recants

2011-04-03T11:34:00.000+03:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

J Street Defends Palestinian Authority's Right to Incite

2011-04-03T10:57:00.001+03:00

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

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

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

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

Father Olivier and the IDF

2011-04-01T17:03:00.001+03:00

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

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

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

Jerusalem never ceases to surprise.

The UNSC, the International Community, and the Media are Worse than Useless

2011-03-31T22:46:00.000+02:00

The Washington Post yesterday carried a story about how Israel claims the Hizballah has built hundreds of military targets in Lebanese towns and villages all across Southern Lebanon.

Note that the paper didn't lift a finger to attempt to validate or disprove the story. Validation is apparently no longer part of the journalist ethos. Israel says yes, Hizballah says - well, it doesn't really say - and us journalists, what are we supposed to do? Send someone to poke around and try to report from the area? Inconceivable.

Note further that there's no mention in the news item of Security Council Decision 1701, which specifically proscribed the re-armament of Hizballah in this area. There's likewise no mention of the legality or illegality of storing rockets in folks' basements and garages. The Washington Post doesn't do "illegal according to international law".

Finally, note that Israel received a solemn and official promise from the International Community as expressed by its highest authority, the UNSC, in August 2006, and the promise was promptly broken and almost immediately forgotten. Keep this all in mind next time you hear some fool or prime minister or president or whomever chattering on about the risks Israel absolutely MUST take for the sake of peace.

The Power and Denial of Biblical Stories

2011-03-31T22:31:00.000+02:00

At one point this afternoon we were standing on the top of the hill where Sokoh once stood. Sokoh was a village in the bronze and iron ages, meaning before the arrival of the tribes of Israel, and then into the period of the First Temple. It's main claim to fame is that according to chapter 17 of the First Book of Samuel, in the section of the valley of Ela between Sokoh and Azeka there was once the most famous duel in history, between young David and very large Goliath.

No, not that Valley of Ela. The real one. The thing is, while Sokoh has been identified with certainty, Azekah hasn't; part of the story we heard today was about new archeological findings, some of them very significant, which may indicate that Azekah was on a hill about a mile to the east of where it was thought to have been until recently. So we peered at the various hills, speculated about lines of vision and ancient borders, heard about new evidence which probably bolsters the Biblical tale of King David's reign, and then clambered down to the bus in the parking lot at the bottom of the hill.

A few minutes later I noticed a fellow reading the sports section of today's paper. The title of the story, splashed over half the width of the page, was "The Battle Between David and Goliath!!!".

This immediacy of the Biblical stories, their automatic presence at the heart of Western culture, ensures that the Palestinian efforts to criminalize Israeli archeology won't succeed. Or could they? As Alex Joffe asks in Jewish Ideas Daily,

How long will it be before Israeli archeologists are unable to get off a plane in London lest they be served with a subpoena initiated by a Palestinian NGO?

America's Jews are Tops!

2011-03-30T17:28:00.003+02:00

I've been getting locks of flack recently for being so mean to American Jewry. Apparently some readers think I blamed them all for being J Street supporters (most aren't), for not caring about their Judaism (many certainly do), or for being generally flaky-headed (I don't think I said that). Victor, Ishai and RK have been leading the charge, but it's become a bit of a fad, piling onto me and reproaching me for being so cantankerous. So by way of proving I appreciate American Jews, and even think they're making some neat innovations on the Jewish side of things, here's some music that could only come out of the American part of the Jewish world.

Neshama Carelbach, daughter of, has paired up with the Green Pastures Baptist Church Choir, my daughter tells me (my daughter is in charge of my musical education). Here, the Rabbi's daughter and the Choir:

Try and imagine that in England. Or Israel.

Sadly, I must admit that of all Neshama's songs, the one I appreciate the most isn't with the church people, it's Yehi Shalom - May there be peace in your hosts, calm in your palaces

However, if it's Jewish-Goyishe innovation which makes everyone richer you seek, here's Matisyahu, doing melting pot at its best:

Ah, America!

Feel free to add suggestions.

Checked Again: Still anti-J Street

2011-03-30T00:09:00.001+02:00

A number of people, some quite thoughtful, disagreed with my position against J Street yesterday. Since I spent part of the day doing Pessach cleaning, I was able to listen to some of the sessions of the recent J Street conference. I heard Rabbi Saperstein, Jeremy Ben Ami, Peter Beinart, Bernard Avishai, Daniel Levy and Roger Cohen, and was also able to hear when the audience applauded for which statements.

Daniel Levy at one point made a statement about how if it were to be proven that the Arab world really isn't willing to live in peace alongside Israel "then Israel wasn't such a good idea, was it?" but then he went on to say that of course, the Arabs are willing. You'll pardon me if I don't feel compelled to regard Levy as a fellow Zionist in any form or way, even if he was once an aide to Yossie Beilin.

Apart from Levy, however, here's what I found.

These J Street speakers and guest speakers are more or less aligned with the positions of Meretz, perhaps a shade to its left. Meretz, of course, is a legitimate Zionist party, even though it has lost almost all its Israeli voters and hovers near extinction. Yet J Street isn't Meretz, it's something much more troubling, and worthy of our disdain.

First, Meretz positions sound different and more acceptable from Israelis. The reason the party has lost most of its voters is that we've empirically tested its proposals, and lots of people have died as a result - not once, but repeatedly, in 1993-6, in 2000 (twice, once in Lebanon and once with the Palestinians), in 2002, in 2005, and in 2006; arguably also in 2008. Having its basic assumptions serially disproved has discredited Meretz, but if after all that some Israelis still wish to hang on, that's their right; the rest of us don't take them seriously, and that's our right. It's actually surprising how very little animosity Meretz generates these days, especially when compared to their heyday. They're an oddity, and one doesn't get aggravated about oddities; one pities them, or suffers them for the color they add.

The J Street people seem not to have noticed any of this, which is either very peculiar or very disturbing. If they've simply not been watching, what gives them the right to have an opinion about life and death matters they can't make the effort to understand? If they've been watching and refuse to accept what is there to be seen, how exactly do they portray themselves as being on our side?

Second, there's a consistent tone of disdain of Israeli society coming from these people which I find arrogant and very distasteful. Americans left and right have lost their civility in political discourse; Israelis, admittedly, never had it. Yet there are codes in language, deeper than mere words, and the subtext of these J Street spokesmen when discussing Jews from Russia, religious Jews and centrist Jews, is ugly. I find no other word for it. Just as their compassion for Israel's Arabs (the citizens) is odd. There's a level of identification with them which is totally lacking when they talk about the majority of the Israeli Jews. I say this as someone who wishes only the best for Israel's Arabs.

Another widespread sentiment they've got about Israelis is moral superiority. We American Jews, we understand human rights, democracy, dignity and so on, not like our benighted Israeli cousins who need to learn from us because they've turned into an embarrassment. I"m not going to respond in detail to this, but it needs to be rejected vehemently. It's the opposite which is true. Israeli Jews, unlike American ones, live in a hard reality which beats down on those admirable human values and could easily smother them. Yet it doesn't. Israelis know more about raising children to be moral human beings at time of adversity, more about respecting one's enemy's dignity, more about respect for law under extreme duress, than most American Jews can even begin to imagine. How could they? When are they ever faced with true moral quandaries, or required to pay a price for preserving their values? Do Israelis sometimes fail? Of course. Are American Jews ever put in situations where they're ever even tried? Perhaps, but they don't spring to mind.

Then there's the matter of having enemies. Nothing I heard in all those speeches gave any cause to believe the speakers understand what an enemy is; they certainly can't imagine the Palestinians are such. To the best of my recollection, the word Hamas was never mentioned. The Palestinians, when they were talked about, are noble and suffering people who must be reached out to, must be embraced, must be comforted. I have Palestinian friends, and am seeking more of them; through them I try to understand how they see us and how they see themselves. Yet I never forget that so far, we're at war. I'm convinced the ones I know personally are all right, but there are many in their society who would gladly kill me, my family, and my society. There's a war on, it's not over, and it's not something that can be talked away with nice sentiments. War mean enemies: a concept - I repeat myself but it's a crucial distinction - the J-Street people seem quite oblivious of. So far as I can tell, they can't imagine an enemy, astonishing as that may sound.

All of this, serious as it is, perhaps still doesn't justify the distaste I have for these people. So they disagree with me and with most Israelis on many matters: so what? You know how many things there are I disagree on with various factions of Israelis? Heaps and heaps.

The difference between those disagreements and J Street is in the reason J Street exists: to put pressure on the American government. I'd add, to put pressure on the American government to harm Israel, but my Meretz friends will tell me it won't harm Israel. J Street isn't a talk club, it's a lobby, which intends to have an impact on policy.There's an extreme irony in this, since what J Street is essentially saying - quite openly and explicitly - is that the sovereign political decisions of the Jewish State need to be upended. True, the Jews didn't have the ability to make sovereign decisions until Zionism created Israel, but now that the Jews have Israel they're making the wrong decisions and need the outsiders to correct their mistakes for them. If this isn't anti-Zionism by Jews, I don't know what it would look like.

Finally, to sum it all up, there's the content of the pressure that needs to be put on Israel. All of the speakers I heard, and most of what I had previously heard and read about J Street, agree that the reason there's no peace between Israel and Palestinians is that Israel isn't interested, or isn't serious. At the moment they blame "Netanyahu and Lieberman", but Netanyahu and Lieberman were democratically elected (not by me - but they do represent a real majority). Should it be a different Israeli government, however, the J Streeters will say the same about them (since that government won't make any more peace than this one). So let me return to my paragraph yesterday about the Big Lie: I've marked the parts which the J Streeters clearly seem to accept, in bold; the parts in italics some of the J Streeters seem to accept.

The Big Lie of our day has a number or versions. The Jews are not a nation and deserve no state. The Jews have no historical rights to the land they call Israel, and even if they do, they're anachronistic and cannot justify harming the Palestinians. The Palestinians have been in their homeland for time immemorial, and were pushed out by the Jews. The Jews continue to aspire to ever more control of the land, and to ever more oppression of the Palestinians. The Jews' way in war is uniquely evil and cruel. The Palestinians yearn for peace, but the Israelis refuse to allow it, because they haven't finished taking Palestinian land, or because they don't recognize the Palestinians as equally human. The Jews protect their nefarious projects through sinister control of power-brokers, most importantly the United States.

I have no doubt many of the supporters of J Street mean well. Really and truly. But context is important, and when Jews say loudly that the Israelis are to blame for the lack of peace, or that they're immoral or becoming so, and that foreign powers must restrain them: well, that's anti Israel, and it plays into the lie of our day.

Conquests of Jerusalem and Israel's Control

2011-03-29T12:30:00.002+02:00

After reading Simon Sebag Montefiore's very good Jerusalem: The Biography, I skimmed back over the whole thing to see how many times Jerusalem was conquered, in his telling. Of course, one can haggle about the word "conquer", but I'm using it in a broad and straightforward meaning: when the people with the power over the town changed as the result of some sort of military event. This can mean a full-fledged siege followed by mass murder, as in the cases of Titus or the Crusaders, it can be mostly peaceful as when the British arrived in 1917 (though there was quite a bit of fighting elsewhere in the vicinity before and after the conquest of Jerusalem), and it can mean hordes of marauders arriving, rampaging and leaving, as with Zenobia, a woman leading Palmyrian troops in the year 260, or Barkha Kahn in 1244.

It must also be said that there's an element of uncertainty about some of these conquests, either because Sebag Montefiore merely alluded to them, or because no-one really knows and therefore he wrote so briefly. There is also almost no way of knowing about the first 2,000 years of the town before the arrival of David: there's next to no data.

The number I reached was 61. I encourage everyone to read his book, so I'm not going to give any descriptions, but here are the dates and names of the conquerors:

1458BCE	Egypt
1350BCE	Marauders
1250BCE	Jebusites
1200BCE	Tribes of Israel
1100BCE	Judges
1000BCE	David
697BCE	Nebuchadnezzar
586 BCE	Nebuchadnezzar
323-301 BCE	Macedonians, 6 times
170BCE	Menelaus
170 BCE	Antiochus
167 BCE	Antiochus
164 BCE	Judah Macabee
163 BCE	Nicanor
155? BCE	Jonathan Hasmonai
143 BCE	Antiochus VII
64 BCE	Pompei
44 BCE	Pacorus& Antigonos
40 BCE	Herod
66	Gessius Florus
66	Sicarii
67	Idumeans
70	Titus
130	Bar Kochva
134	Hadrian
260	Zenobia
272	Diocletan
602	Greens (Byzantine rebels)
602	Byzantines
614	Shahrbaraz
630	Heraclius
636	Omar
969	Jawahr al-Siqilli
1073	Atsiz
1099	Crusaders
1187	Saladin
1229	Frederick II
1244	Barkha Khan
1250-1260	10 years of chaos and alternating temporary rulers
1263	Baibars
1299	Hethoum II
1317	Nassir Mohammed
1480	Beduins
1517	Selim the Grim
1590	a local rebel
1625	Farrukh
1702	Husseini
1705	Ottoman forces
1831	Mehmet Ali
1834	local fellahin
1834	Mehmet Ali
1840	Ottoman forces
1917	Britain
1948	Jordan&Israel
1967	Israel

Has anywhere in the world been conquered more times? I don't know. If so, it would probably have to be somewhere in the vicinity, along the Fertile Crescent, since no-where else is there enough recorded human history. Perhaps Damascus? Not Baghdad Constantinople or Cairo, which are all younger towns.

The notion, accepted as an article of faith the world over these days, that the 60th conquest of the city, in 1948, was the one that sets the bar for legal occupation, so that the Israeli conquest in 1967 is illegal, is profoundly silly when you look at this list. Not to say idiotic, and not to mention that the occupier in 1947 was Jordan, not the Palestinians. One might say allowing Palestinian rule over half the city would create peace, but that's a different argument: pragmatism, not international law; it is compelling only if there's reason to believe it's true and division will bring peace.

How Many Times has Jerusalem been Conquered?

2011-03-28T22:56:00.001+02:00

I've been counting, and the number isn't what I expected. If anyone wishes to hazard a guess, feel free to use the comments section.

Contra Jeffrey Goldberg: Lozowick is an Anti-J Street Blog

2011-03-28T18:52:00.003+02:00

Jeffrey Goldberg is angry that Israelis are fuming about J-Street, and has proclaimed on his blog that "Goldblog is a pro-J Street blog". I'm not going to cut and paste any segment of his; you should read it in its entirety. It's a good post, written with the passion of his anger.

I like Jeffrey, personally, and although I don't always agree with everything he writes, I like his blog - actually it's the first one I read every day. Yet in the Jewish spirit of a squabble among friends, I've got to say that Lozowick is an anti-J Street blog.

Since Jeffrey starts with his personal credentials, here are some of mine: I have gone to war for this country. Both of my sons have, too, as we raised them to. I have been in favor of a Palestinian state alongside Israel since the late 1970s. Just for context: back in those days Jeffrey may have been too young to have an informed opinion on the matter; Barak Obama almost certainly was, and for all I can tell, so was Jeremy Ben Ami, the boss of J Street. Also, the late 1970s were more than a decade before the PLO grudgingly began talking about the two-state solution; as late as 1989 their official and practical position was that Israel must be destroyed, preferably by the force of arms.

Also, I have been against the settlements for all those years, and am against them till this very day - though I know the large settlements that straddle the Green line will never be removed, and I'm strongly against the division of Jerusalem which will cause war, not peace. So far as I can tell, these are the positions of a large chunk, and probably a significant majority, of the Israeli electorate; contrary to what Jeffrey seems to think, no-one is shutting my mouth, banning me from saying what I think, or branding me a traitor for saying it. Nor do I need faraway outsiders such as J Street (or President Obama) to inform me what's good for Israel.

I am also a historian of Nazism, and a student of history. I know that words are dangerous things, since they are the tools with which we formulate ideas, and ideas are what motivate people to do things, and justify their actions for them. Persecution of Jews over many centuries was because of anti-Jewish words and the ideas expressed and disseminated in them. Call them a series of Big Lies about Jews. The freedom and equality enjoyed by America's (and these days, by Europe's) Jews are the result of words and ideas. Call them Rational Enlightenment. The war against Israel is also first and foremost because of words. Because of a new set of a Big Lie.

The Big Lie of our day has a number or versions. The Jews are not a nation and deserve no state. The Jews have no historical rights to the land they call Israel, and even if they do, they're anachronistic and cannot justify harming the Palestinians. The Palestinians have been in their homeland for time immemorial, and were pushed out by the Jews. The Jews continue to aspire to ever more control of the land, and to ever more oppression of the Palestinians. The Jews' way in war is uniquely evil and cruel. The Palestinians yearn for peace, but the Israelis refuse to allow it, because they haven't finished taking Palestinian land, or because they don't recognize the Palestinians as equally human. The Jews protect their nefarious projects through sinister control of power-brokers, most importantly the United States.

One of the odder parts of the story is of course that the most important propagators of this Big Lie are not only Jews, they're Israelis. No one persecutes them for their malice: we're not Islamists, not Arab dictators, not Argentinian generals or Bolshevik commissars or Gestapo or anything of the sort.

Do Jeremy Ben Ami and his J Streeters believe in the full set of lies? No. But remember, the Knesset member who lead the hearing against him last week, Otniel Shneller, is from Kadima, not Likud; moreover, he's a settler who openly espouses the dismantling of settlements - probably including his own - if that's the price for peace. What distinguishes him from Ben Ami, therefore, isn't the idea of partition and dismantling settlements; what distinguishes them is the idea that Israel is the reason there's no peace; that pressure must be brought to bear on Israel to force it out of Palestinian territories; and also, alas, Israeli willingness to use force to protect its interests.

In other words, what distinguishes Otniel Shneller from Jeremy Ben Ami is that Ben Ami and his organization agree with parts of the Big Lie about Israel, and promote it. If in response a significant segment of Israeli society wishes to ostracise him and his organization, this seems to me a moderate and measured response.

In his final sentence Jeffrey seems to be saying that there are many American Jews attracted to J Street's message. This may be true - I'm too far away to judge. If so, it's a serious problem - first and foremost, of those American Jews who prefer the Big Lie to the Jewish State.

The Frightening Power of Nature

2011-03-28T17:39:00.000+02:00

By now we've all seen the footage of the incoming Tsunami rolling across fields and destroying everything in its wake. This film, however, is by someone standing above the wave, watching as it sweeps away the surrounding town. Part of what makes it so frightening is that the destruction rises - it doesn't happen all at once, and landmarks you see high and dry in the first minutes, are gone by its end.

Daf Yomi in South Korea

2011-03-28T10:51:00.000+02:00

I don't know what to make of this story, except to say that the world is a curious place.

Democracy in Action

2011-03-28T10:30:00.000+02:00

If anyone can explain this procedure, please feel free to explain in the comments section.