Netanyahu's Quandry (Mid-November 2018 version)

Spare a moment to reflect on the hardship of being Binyamin Netanyahu this week. Actually, don’t. He’s a very powerful man and deserves none of our emotional support. Still, the position he finds himself in is quite instructive, far beyond the impact of the present news cycle.

As a leader of the opposition Netanyahu routinely taunted the government by promising that when he returned to power he’d act decisively and effectively against Palestinian violence. Israeli social media is full of his erstwhile plans for Hamas in Gaza, which he promised to rout once and for all. Yet here he is, starting the week by authorizing the transfer of millions of dollars from Qatar to bolster the rule of Hamas in Gaza, then sending the IAF to carefully bomb a series of pre-marked targets in Gaza, then accepting a cease-fire with Hamas, then watching his coalition crumble. His political allies and rivals will use all this to attack him for his indecisiveness.

Part of this is that Netanyahu truly dislikes sending soldiers to their deaths. I once saw this close up, and wrote about it here. Yet there’s an important structural explanation which needs elucidating, and that is the darker and often overlooked side of the vaunted “managing the conflict” policy.

Arguably, this policy has been the central plank of Israel’s behavior since the failure of the Oslo Process. If one assumes the most Israel can offer the Palestinians is considerably less than the minimum they demand in return for ending the conflict – or, vice versa, the most the Palestinians can offer Israel is less than the Israelis demand to hand over full control to a sovereign Palestinian State – then there’s no chance of peace. Or at least, there’s no chance until one of the sides changes its fundamental position. The goal then becomes managing the conflict with a minimum of violence, not trying to end it. Most Israelis, with the exception of the political extremes, subscribe to some version of this policy. It may well be that a majority of Palestinians also accept it, probably hoping that someday Israel will tire and waver. Well-meaning foreigners such as Barack Obama and John Kerry keep on hoping to break this model, and they keep on failing.

But there’s a snag: managing means you don’t make a dash towards peace, which is unachievable. It also means, however, that you never convincingly defeat your enemy. Managing is predicated on the enemy’s permanence. You can’t reach an agreement that will make the enmity go away; but nor can you take military measures that will make the enemy go away. As Netanyahu knows, the IDF could conquer Gaza and kill most of the leaders of Hamas. And then what? Would Hamas’ ideology of hitting Israel until some day it collapses, also go away? It wouldn’t. Would a new chapter of Israeli rule in Gaza do anyone any good? Most certainly not.

And so Netanyahu the Prime Minister does the opposite of what Netanyahu the opposition leader said he would. He tries to contain Hamas and limit its harm, while bolstering Hamas so that it bears responsibility for Gaza; better they than we. His gamble is that most Israelis understand what he’s doing and grudgingly agree: and they’ll give him yet another electoral victory sometime in 2019.

Yom Hazikaron - commemorating Israel's fallen

It's Yom Hazikaron again. The second holiest day of the year, in my book, second only to Yom Kippur. Independence Day, tomorrow evening, is perhaps more important for its historical stature, but Yom Hazikaron is easily holier.

I'm reading Yuval Noah Harrari's fun book Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind, about which I may write sometime soon. One of his central ideas is that humankind is what it is because of its ability to tell itself stories and thereby create imagined realities which have no objective existence, such as the Catholic Church or the United Nations, and compelling ideas such as banks and human rights. He's a compelling storyteller himself, is Yuval. Having grown up in Israel, he would immediately recognize the power of Yom Hazikaron and everything it connects to, and would appreciate its centrality in organizing the world for Israelis.

The second most popular post I ever wrote here on this blog was the introduction to the Shirim Ivri'im series. (The most popular of all, sadly, was my dissection of that idiotic series of four maps which lies about the history of Israel and Palestine).

On this Yom Hazikaron I'm offering a random but chronological series of the songs with which Israelis come together and mourn.

Fania Bergman, Nigunim (Melodies). Bergman was born in what is now Poland in 1908, and spent her childhood dodging the calamities of the early 20th century in Eastern Europe. In 1930 she made aliya and joined a recently founded kibbutz, Gvat. She worked on the kibbutz as long as her failing health allowed, dying in 1950. She left behind a son, Giora, and many children songs which are taught to schoolchildren till this day. Nigunim, however, isn't for children, it's more about being a child. Written in 1944 and directed to her parents (who by then were already dead in the Holocaust), she tells how, try as she may to be a new sort of Jew in a new sort of life, the melodies they inculcated in her can never be erased, and indeed, they create a bridge from her to them over the impassable chasm.



Fania's only son Giora was killed in the Six Day War.

Speaking of the Six Day War, here's one of its quirkier songs: Jerusalem of Iron and of Lead and of Bereavement. It was written by one of the paratroopers, right after the battle for Jerusalem, who went on to become one of Israel's most original and unusual songwriters, Meir Ariel. The melody and structure are a copy of Naomi Shemer's Jerusalem of Gold, except that, as Ariel says in his song, Jerusalem is only mostly of gold.


40 years after the Six Day War Erez Stark wrote a poem for himself: Nothing Will harm Me. Stark was a soldier, and in his poem he promises that nothing will happen to him, he's promised his brother, his sister, his parents, his father keeps on saying "if anything happens to you what reason will I have to live" so he's promised nothing will ever happen to him, and if you're all standing around my grave I guess I didn't keep my promise and I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Erez was killed in 1997 in Southern Lebanon.


Finally, here's Ariel Horowitz's "20,000 brothers", from 2014. Sean Carmeli was killed in Gaza that summer, and when word went out that he had made aliya alone and didn't have family in Israel, the soccer team he'd been a fan of called on all the other fans to come to his funeral. His two sisters flew in from Texas, and thus the refrain "two sisters and 20,000 brothers, and you're in front". I suppose it's not great music, and the lyrics are spontaneous, not poetry, but you need to listen to them while watching the film. That will do it for you.

The grandchildren of '73

Yom Hazikaron, Memorial Day for more than 23,000 Israelis killed in the wars. One of the most meaningful days of the year. A central part of it is listening to hours of Shirim Ivri'im in minor keys which flood all the media channels.

One of the most important shirim (songs is an inadequate translation) is "The Children of '73". It is sung by a group of soldiers who were conceived in the dark months after the Yom Kippur War ("the winter of '73") to shellshocked fathers and relieved mothers clinging to each other in mourning. You promised us no more wars, sing the soldiers, and you promised us peace. You promised we'd not need to be soldiers. Well, we're young men and women ourselves now, and we're soldiers, and you needn't worry. We're strong, and we can shoulder the burden.




Do the maths. Those soldiers concieved in the winter of '73 are the parents of today's soldiers. The ones who were killed in last year's war.

Tarek Abu Hamed appointed to a senior position

Tarek Abu Hamed was appointed today to the position of Deputy Chief Scientist in the Ministry of Science. This is big news. Not gigantic, not an historic event to be recorded in the annals of the Levant, but significant nonetheless. In order to understand why, I need to tell a bit about Israel's Civil Service.

The Civil Service is a formidable place. Over the years it has acquired layers of complexity far beyond what non-civil servants recognize, making it much harder than necessary to get things done. Cabinet ministers, for example, usually have only very little long-lasting influence. They're not in the system long enough to figure it out, and even when they're experienced operators the system is geared to slow them down and limit their ability to do things. (There are some exceptions). The folks who have real power are the ones who are high in the system, but not so high they'll be moved within a year or three. The ones who are high enough to be in regular contact with many others of their general rank, as well as with the really top figures when they have the need.

The job Dr. Abu Hamed has just landed, therefore, is potentially a powerful behind-the-scenes mover, in a corner of the bureaucracy which itself has real significance: the allocation of funds and apportioning of government support in developing scientific and technological programs. Not anything to be sniffy about.

Dr. Abu Hamed is Arab, as his name indicates, but that's not the surprising part. There are higher ranking Arab civil servants, including some in positions which require high security clearance. The thing about Dr. Abu Hamed is that he's not an Israeli citizen. He's a Palestinian of East Jerusalem, a permanent resident by legal status, but not a citizen. Yet look what job he has just won.

Noteworthy. I certainly wish him the best.

The Prime Minister and the Soldiers. A true story.

We went to present Prime Minster Netanyahu a commemorative volume of documents dedicated to Menachem Begin. With us was professor Arye Naor, who had been Begin’s Cabinet Secretary, and the prime minister was interested in hearing from him how Begin and managed the war in Lebanon, and to compare notes with his own methods in Protective Edge. From there it was but a short and natural step to a discussion about Begin’s agony at the deaths of IDF soldiers, and Netanyhau’s own difficulties in sending men to die.

It proved harder than he had expected. “I thought a lot about Begin this summer, and I understood him better”

.

“I spoke to each of the parents [of fallen soldiers]. If there were divorced, I spoke to each of them separately. It was very hard”.

There is a profound difference between hearing about bereaved families, and actually being in one: he knows about that difference, and understands it from personal experience. But to his surprise – this was my impression – sending soldiers to their death turned out also to be hard to a degree that one cannot appreciate in advance.

We had expected to spend ten minutes in his office. The ten minutes became fifteen, then twenty; the twenty minutes became thirty, and the prime minster spoke of the horrible price of war, and of the difficulty in deciding to pay it.

“The soldiers fear death. They try to strengthen each other, and try together to be strong as a group, but they are afraid.” He knows they are afraid, and that some of them will be killed, and he sends them. A ground operation, he knows what awaits them, what preparations the enemy has made: “Some of them will die. It is inevitable.”

“They must be sent only when there is no other choice left. They must be brought back at the very first possible moment, as soon as the immediate goal has been achieved. Later, once they’re out, we’ll see what happens, but first, get them out, out, out.”

“And every night I’d get home in the wee hours, and my wife would be awake, waiting for me. She spent the days visiting the bereaved families. I only spoke to them on the phone, with each and every one of them, but she sat at their side, and at night she would tell me about them. We must send them, and we must bring them back, and I didn’t appreciate how hard it would be. A leader who loses the understanding of how difficult it is, ought to lose his job.”

“I thought a lot about Begin this Summer.”

Beyond the window it was dark, gray, and raining.

Israel has nothing to fear from a fair investigation

At some point our government will have to determine its positions towards various avenues of investigation into the events of the Gaza war. Fortunately I'm not in the government, and won't have to be part of that discussion. I have no doubt that the people who will be, will take into account all the relevant considerations.

I'm here today simply to re-iterate that on the level of simple evidence, Israel seems to have collected mounds of it. Assuming, as I do and explained here, that we prepared adequately, and then collected the evidence we've obviously collected, we have nothing to fear from a professional investigation of impartial investigators.

The IDF yesterday put online an example of this: it's a map of Gaza,created by the UN, depicting all the spots where damage was caused. To which the IDF responded with films of how the damage was caused. As I"ve explained in the past, this ability, while demonstrated in only 4-5 cases in this short film, is apparently pervasive. The IDF seems to have documentation of just about everything it did, from go-pro cameras on soldiers' helmets, through data from Iron Dome radar, to drone-based films of everything going on below.

To the extent any non-Israeli professionals investigate these events with open minds, the wealth of evidence the IDF has amassed seem to assure the investigators won't find any major problem with Israeli conduct. Since even Israel doesn't rule out that mistakes were made here or there, we seem to be fine.

The end of the Enlightenment?

A funny thing happened to me this week, but its implications are anything but funny.

My occasional pen-pal Phil Weiss, he of the Mondoweiss website, that lair of American-hating Antisemites, wrote to tell me he was troubled by a short message I posted a few weeks ago on Twitter. This may be the time to admit that contrary to what you might think given our rather different public personas, Phil and I are cautiously civil with one another in private. We're not close buddies, and many months can go by with nary any contact between us, but when we are in contact it's usually civil, and sometimes even almost friendly. If it weren't for his absolutely totally inexcusably repulsive website. i.e. in another life, he and I might even be friends. Anyway, as I say, he was troubled by that message and wished me to explain. So I did. Next thing I knew he had posted our exchange on his website (perhaps he thought I knew he was going to do this though in the past he hadn't and he didn't say he would).

As of this writing, 24 hours later, 136 of his readers have commented on the post. I used to follow his commenters regularly, so I can say that the comments were rather subdued compared to standard viciousness at Mondoweiss. They mostly agreed that I'm a Nazi, and Israel's being a Nazi state is a given at that website, but not a single one of them made any intellectually interesting challenge to my note.

(The reason I used to follow them by the way, was to learn about contemporary anti-Semitism. When I was researching my doctorate many years ago the Nazis I was following were mostly dead and I learned about them from documents. The Mondoweiss hordes are alive and active, and I can provoke them and learn how they respond).

A few hours later, Elder of Ziyon copied the entire exchange onto his fine website, perhaps as a public service so people might read it without giving Mondoweiss the traffic. And here's the point I'm meandering towards: that the precise same set of arguments, actually, a cut-and-paste copy, is comfortable at two diametrically opposing websites. Phil put my mail online to demonstrate to his gang how far gone those Israelis are; Elder put it online to demonstrate how defensible Israel's actions at war are. Both readerships came away with the conviction they're right. Let it be clear: there's no moral equivalence between the two groups. Phil himself isn't quite an antisemite, but the crowd he travels with and hosts are indistinguishable from the swamp of European Jew-haters at the turn of the 20th century, plus Twitter. Elder's readers are the profoundly despised Jews themselves (and many comrades in spirit). Yet most of the people in both groups live in the US, and just about all of them, I suppose, live in Western countries which were formed by the Enlightened philosophers of the 18th century.

Those Enlightenment philosohers were complex fellows who had many thoughts (some of them hated Jews, for example). Yet one of the most fundamental thoughts they had was about the power of reason. They were convinced that humans could use words to understand reality in universal ways, which is to say, in compelling explanations and concepts which would make sense to any thinking person irrespective of their ethnicity, gender or social status (none of those terms existed in the 18th century).

They were wrong, it appears. Words don’t have the power to create anything resembling universal mutual comprehension. Since the Enlightenment is the fundament of the democratic West, this is a problem.

Anyway, here's the Mondoweiss link; here's the Elder of Ziyon one, and here's the entire text, up now also at my own place.
------------------------------
The original tweet:

Lesson of this war: The Jews will defend themselves even if it means killing children.Just like every warring nation in history.
— yaacov lozowick (@yaacovlozowick) August 4, 2014

Phil's mail to me:
This strikes me as a somewhat crude slogan– given that you’re an intellectual at the highest level.

And secondly, you omit me in your declaration of what “The Jews” do. I’m a Jew and I don’t want to be part of a collective that makes these types of determinations. And I feel great concern about having anyone — even the distinguished state archivist of a “warring nation” — announce to my non Jewish neighbors how many children I need to kill to keep my nation going. It’s actually a kind of blood libel– again from a distinguished state archivist.

Also: what does it mean to be a “warring nation”? Really, is that a category that any citizen would embrace? The history of “warring nations” doesn’t offer a lot of hope. It seems to me you are making Israel a Sparta [cribbing Hannah Arendt]. Or as my friend Golda once said to me in Rehavia, We’re going to have one war after another after another, till they accept us. It’s not a vision for a future. Yet 95 percent of Israeli Jews have embraced the Gaza onslaught out of this understanding. Which only increases the responsibility of American Jews to say, Not in my name!

And my response:
1. The Jews: It is an objective and implacable fact that Zionism is the largest and most significant Jewish project in at least 2,000 years, probably more. There are non-Jews who are Israeli citizens, there are Jews who intensely dislike Zionism, there are even a handful of anti-Zionist Jews in Israel. None of these facts can change the fundamental truth: in Zionism the Jews set out to re-create a national existence on the political playing field, in their ancestral homeland, and Israel is its expression, or outcome, or whatever you wish to call it. The fact that about 50% of the world’s Jews live in Israel strengthens this, (the proportion will soon tip over to more than 50%), and the fact that a majority of self-identifying Jews among the non-Israelis are Zionists, bolsters its strength, but doesn’t change it. You can’t have Jews pining for Israel over millennia and then going there, and not have it be the most important development in all those millennia.

You can rail against this for every remaining day of your life (until 120, as we Jews say), and it still won’t make the slightest difference, not even if you gather around you thousands or tens of thousands of like-minded American Jews. I think it was Abe Lincoln who once said in court something about the strength of a fart in a blizzard or some such. Live with it, Phil, because there’s nothing you can do to change it. Nothing.

(Apropos numbers: there were more Jews at the funeral of Max Steinberg last month, which I blogged a bit about, than all the committed Mondoweiss Jews together, and it was just one funeral).

2. Will defend themselves: Look, I know you’re convinced Israel is the once and always, perpetual aggressor. Of course this doesn’t explain how if we’re such aggressors the Palestinians keep multiplying and acquiring new assets such as the PA, parts of WB, all of Gaza, international standing etc etc. We must be really really bad at getting our job done. But as we both know, you and I can’t agree on the basic facts of this point, so let’s leave it as I said: A majority of the Jews worldwide and a total majority in Israel know we’re defending ourselves from enemies who would eagerly destroy us if they had the power, just as happened in the past. (Lots of non-Jews agree with us, by the way, either because we’ve got them under our thumb as you see it, or because it’s a simple fact, as I see it).

3. Even if it means killing: My PhD was about Nazis, and I know more about them than most people, so Godwin’s Law doesn’t apply to me. I can speak about Nazis as a scholar, not a demagogue. So here’s a thought experiment. Say that in order to end Nazism you had to kill 70,000 (not a few hundred) innocent, non-German civilians, Frenchmen, say. Would that be defensible? 70,000 dead French civilians, all innocent, many children, to end Nazism and as a by-product also end the Holocaust? Would that be moral? Permissible? Defensible in some later discussion? I ask because it’s not a thought experiment, it’s what the USA and UK did in 1944 as they went through France so as to destroy Nazism in Germany. Some goals, my friend, justify even horrible side effects, or collateral damage, or whatever you wish to call it. The reason being that the alternative, of allowing Nazism to stay in place, would have been far worse.

So If Israel has to chose between its own safety or refusing to kill any innocent bystanders whatsoever, we’ll choose to defend ourselves. You bet. Of course, we can seek shades of gray, alternatives of greater or lesser destruction, and we can argue about those and indeed, we must seek them and argue about them. But the basic framework remains solid. Our safety is to be assured even if there’s a price to it, even if some innocents die. As few as possible, hopefully, but the inevitably some, yes.

4. Just like every warring nation in history: Simple. Every single nation in human history, including in the 21st century, which finds itself at war, has one of two options regarding the moral dilemma in the preceding paragraph. Either it accepts that it will kill some innocents in order to protect ts goals, or it doesn’t care. The Syrian don’t care. ISIS certainly doesn’t care. The North Vietnamese probably didn’t care, so far as I can tell. I don’t think the North in your Civil War much cared. The US in WWII didn’t care at all when it came to German civilians in bombable towns. Hamas certainly doesn’t care – well, actually it does. It regrets it doesn’t manage to kill more Jews and Arabs who live among them.

Americans nowadays do care, as do the British, and a small handful of other mostly enlightened nations, Israel among them. Yet whenever they chose to go to war, they also accept they’ll be killing at least some innocent bystanders – and they then do. In Serbia in the 1990s, in Kuwait in the 1990s, in Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s, and yes, I’m sad to tell you, against ISIS in 2014 (and 2015? 2016? 2025?). No-one has existentially threatened the US since the 19th century, or maybe even ever. Which isn’t to say the US hasn’t fought just wars. But they were never about its very existence. And in every one of them they have killed civilians. Tragic, but true. And as long as the US continues to be at war, for whatever reasons, it will continue to kill civilians. As few as possible, one hopes, and one assumes they’ll take great efforts to limit the numbers, but to pretend you can go to war and not kill civilians is being willfully blind.

Israel, unlike the US, faces enemies who proudly broadcast their intention to destroy it, in the most basic meaning of the word “destroy”. So Israel must choose: will it defend itself even if thereby some number of innocent civilians die, or will it not defend itself, and thereby large numbers of its own civilians will die.

The answer is clear. Any other answer would be immoral.

So, that’s it. I know your methodology, and that of your fans. You’ll now turn to all sorts of other objections and whatabouttery. But I’ve responded to the questions as you posed them, and that’s enough. The whatabouttery is, by definition, about other matters.

IDF and the Laws of Warfare

A couple of weeks ago I posted a short item about the data being collected by the IDF during the war and the implications this might have when the time comes to investigate it. Most of my comment was based simply upon observing the capabilities of the IDF spokesperson.

In the Friday edition of Yedioth Acharonont there was a much longer and more detailed description. It's not online, and it's only in Hebrew, so far as I can see, so as a public service here's a quick summary.

The IDF takes international law very seriously. Over the past decade it has considerably expanded the part of the military prosecution which deals with the laws of war, and there is now an entire team of officers, many at the colonel level, whose entire profession is to ensure the IDF functions within the law. I'll stray from the Yedioth article for a moment to add that I've come across these folks in recent years, in professional discussions, and they're knowledgeable, committed and professional. I expect that they know more about the laws of war than just about any media type or pundit who pontificates on the matter, except of course the other professionals. It seems safe to me to say that if anyone who doesn't have a full and updated education in the laws of war informs you about how what the IDF does is illegal etc, they are probably talking through their hat comfortable that you, too, don't know enough to call them out. The laws of war, like any branch of law, is a professional field, and it takes training and practice to be good at it.

 That's the first stage.

The second stage is that these officers spend a significant chunk of their time training other IDF troops in the basics. Clearly a corporal in the infantry won't go through a full course of training, but the higher the officer, the more exposure they will have had to the principles and concepts of the laws of war, and the more occasions on which they'll have been required to think about applying them. The training of an IDF soldier includes the understanding that the IDF respects the laws of war; the training of an officer includes applying these laws.

The third stage is that the legal types participate in the planning of all operations. I'm not going to detai the many levels of preparation an IDF operation goes through from conception to execution, but there are lots of them; the legal experts are part of the process. According to Yedioth, this results in some operations never being authorized in the first place, and others are adapted to stay within the law.

The fourth stage of preparation is that there's a legal expert in every division, and there are channels of communication down to at least the level of battalions; since companies and platoons don't generally execute their own operations, that more or less covers everyone.

Fifth stage: Ariel and artillery actions. Ariel and artillery actions are not necessarily susceptible to heat of battle situations. Both pilots and artillery officers are less likely than infantry, tank or engineering soldiers to need to respond immediately to fire from an unidentified source in the confusion of a battlefield. The article in Yedioth claimed that every single shell shot by those two branches was thought about in advance, and targets were vetted in advance, after they were visually identified by one or more of the layers of eyes the IDF had over Gaza - drones, other drones, radar and other stuff.

Sixth stage: heat of battle situations. Once the ground forces were engaged in close-hand battle, all of he above is nice to have, and the stream of digital data coming in to the grunts and their officers is impressive, but at the end of the day it's split-second decisions made under threat of immediate death which form the outcome. There are no legal advisers who can ponder the alternatives. You do your best in training, secure in the knowledge that training is different from battle. Always has been, always will be. Still, training does have a significant impact on the result of battle.

Seventh stage: post-battle investigation. The upshot of all this is that the IDF has the data to examine just about every single move or piece of action that happened in the Gaza war, and most of the time has the documentation to prove whatever results its investigators reach. The Goldstone Report was chock full of inferring, since its members had no access to the documentation. Whoever investigates this recent war without full access to all that documentation and evidence the IDF has amassed, will essentially be talking nonsense, no matter what their conclusions are. Sort of like trying to figure out how an American presidency functioned based only on contemporary newspaper reports from the Russian media.

Were mistakes made? I have no doubt. It's inevitable. Were crimes committed? On this point the legal officers being interviewed by Yedioth were admirably careful in answering: they wouldn't say no, they were only willing to say that every case would be investigated.

I recognize this entire story is completely, totally and irrevocably incompatible with roughly 100% of the international media reports over the past month. But you see, the thing about truth is that it isn't effected by media reports one way or the other. People's understanding of reality is; their ideologies and Weltanschaungen can be, but hard facts aren't.

It's also yet another example of how it happens that Israelis understand the world differently than everyone else. This is often used against them: if everyone says you are X, you must be X, and if you insist you aren't X you're not only wrong, you're fools. But of course, the entire surroundings has been telling itself falsities about Jews for millennia (literally). This didn't make it true then, and doesn't make it true now.

Ah,I forgot to add: feel free to show me one other military in the annals of war which can tell a similar story.

Yet another military funeral

I've been going to military funerals for more than 40 years. This says more about my age than anything else: people old enough have been going to funerals for 60, or 70, or 90 years. Though the funerals before 1948 weren't military, technically. So there's that. The young soldiers at the entrance to the cemetery handing out fliers explaining how to behave in the case of a rocket attack, however, are an innovation.

This was the second funeral I've joined in a week. The first was of Max Steinberg, a young American Jew who came here alone to defend us, so 30,000 of us came to thank him. Today it was 21-year-old Barkai Shorr, whose father, Yaron, I have known for 46 years. And that was the first thing I noticed about the crowd. There were thousands of us, not tens of thousands, from widely diverse social circles: People who went to grade school with Yaron, high school with Barkai, the synagogue of Barkai's grandmother, neighbors neighbors neighbors, professional colleagues of Yaron but also professional colleagues of Barkai, and on and on. Yet it was clear that people from different circles also knew each other. Maybe we really are just one big circle.

Yaron spoke on his son's grave in a clear and steady voice. He told us about his family, which has been living in Jerusalem for 180 years. He told about Barkai, whose single most important characteristic was his constant volunteering (I noted the large number of Magen David Adom staff, where he's been a volunteer for six years). He told about his name,which is a bit unusual; it's a mishnaic word for dawn, and he was born at dawn. Yaron quoted a Mishna which uses the word barkai: on the morning of Yom Kippur the High Priest started working when the barkai was bright enough to see down to Hebron. He told about Barkai's years at a yeshiva in Hebron. He told us that for the coming 180 years his family's clan in this land will have lots of descendants named Barkai. Finally, he told us all, the thousands of us, to volunteer, to commit acts of service for others, and each time to say to ourselves: Barkai. Barkai. Barkai.

That was the only time his own voice cracked.

The military cemetery sits on a high hill above Jerusalem, and as we were burying Barkai you could see the magic gold of Jerusalem at sunset, Jerusalem of Gold.

As the crowds were dispersing Hamas rockets from Gaza were being shot down over the hills to the west and one could hear the explosions.

                                                      *               *                *

Every family is different, and each funeral is unique even within the structure of a military ceremony. Five years ago I was at a military funeral, that of Nitai Stern. I went there in the name of our son Achikam, Nitai's friend, since Achikam himself was fighting in Gaza. Here's what I wrote that day, about that funeral. I can hope there won't be any further ones.

A comment on military abilities on display in Gaza

A few days ago the media was full of allegations that the IDF had shelled a school in Beit Hanoun, Gaza. 15 civilians were allegedly killed. In an improvement over past practice, the IDF didn't respond with a quick apology. Instead, it came out with an immediate response that essentially said "we don't think it was us, we certainly weren't aiming at the school, we think Hamas forces were active there, and we'll check and get back to you."

In a world of Twitter and its like, news needs to be less than four minutes old to be of interest; saying you'll investigate and come back isn't compelling. So all the usual suspects had a field day lambasting Israel for its inhumane cruelty (CiFWatch has a roundup of the UK culprits).

A few days passed and the IDF came back with their results. Yes, there had been fighting in the area. Yes, one errant IDF shell had even hit the schoolyard. But No, it hadn't killed anyone, because the yard was empty at the time, and here's the video of the event to prove our position, with a link to the Youtube segment. In a move that surprised no-one, the media wasn't interested in this IDF version. (CiFWatch tried to catch their attention but to no avail).

My point is about the documentation of reality, not the distortions of malicious media outlets. How is it that Israel just happened to have an aerial film of that particular building? If it has, why wait 3 days to show it? Is there more?

The full answer will go to the archives once the war is over, and will be declassified only in decades. No army in history would throw open its raw military intelligence data, for multiple obvious reasons. Yet even the little the IDF does show demonstrates that it's collecting an awesome amount if it, and is using it to direct its actions with as much care as the battlefield allows. There have been reports in the media that every shell shot by the IDF is tracked to ascertain it does what it was meant to do. I don't know if that's true, but the ability to procure a film of a random event the media is interested indicates it may be.

This capacity puts most of the immediate reporting of events in an interesting position: reporters tell what they see, through the lens of how they understand the world. But there's a second, documented version they know nothing about. A collapsed building, for example, is clearly collapsed, but how it came to be collapsed, at the hands of whom: these can be at best a matter of speculation for the cameraman who chances by a week or a month later; all the while, the IDF may well have full documentation of the event.

In the immediate term, the media has all the advantages except for the truth. Having extensive data, however, is important. It indicates that the IDF decision makers, local and tactical ones, generals and political leaders, are informed actors. They may not show us all their information, but we pretend they're mindless atavistic or blinded, at our own peril.

It is also of profound importance for Israelis, soon to round off their first entire century at war, to know that their side is doing its best. If Israelis had to understand their reality through the sole lens of the international media, they would probably long since have been demoralized into submission, as many of their erstwhile supporters abroad are. The first- or second-hand information about what's really going on, even if it never makes its way into the media, coupled by the understanding of the distance between strident media reports and reality, these are a source of long-term resilience which can't be bettered as a weapon of war.

Jewish-Arab integration in Jerusalem

The neighborhood pool just happens also to be the only full-sized Olympic pool in Jerusalem, and we've got some active swim-teams. Yesterday evening as I was preparing for my swim, there was a gang of teenagers from the team who were showering and dressing. Most of them happened to be Arab teenagers, tho some were Jews. At one point three or four of them were standing near me and I eavesdropped. Only one of them was Jewish, and they were talking about the matriculation exams they'll all be taking in the next few weeks, as they finish high school. The Jew, it turned out, had chosen to take the easiest version of math, and his chief interlocutor was poking gentle fun at him. "Of course it depends on what you intend to do afterwards, but don't you think you should at least try for the intermediate level, not just the easiest?" Two of the others launched into their own discussion, in Arabic, about which math credentials it's best to strive for.

This banal discussion would have been inconceivable in the first decade after Israel annexed Jordanian Jerusalem in 1967. As recently as 10 years ago it would have been conceivable, but not possible. Things are changing in Jerusalem, under our noses but also under the media radar.

After my swim and shower, there were two fellows in their mid-30s chatting as they dressed. They were discussing the hardship of living a mostly sedentary modern work-life, and then going off for three weeks in the infantry and being called upon to make physical exertions that were easy 15 years ago but not anymore.

Library of the Dead

Next week is our double-whammy Day of Commemoration (Yom Hazikaron) and Day of Independence (Yom Haatzmaut). So I'm putting up a story I once posted elsewhere, on Yom Hazikaron of 2008. It's still just as true.
70 years ago, 50, even merely 30 years ago, youth movements played a significant role in the lives of Israeli teenagers. Somewhere along the way, perhaps in the 1980s or 1990s, most of them disappeared. Here and there you can still find remnants of the phenomenon, but they’re rather few and far between. The single exception of any significance, so far as I can tell, is the Bnei Akiva youth movement of the national religious strand of Israeli society – roughly the Israeli counterpart of Modern Orthodoxy in the US.

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A couple of weeks ago I chanced by the building that houses the “Central Jerusalem” branch of the movement, one of the larger branches in the country. When I was a teenager the branch – called “Sneef Merkaz,” or simply the “Sneef” – was downtown, at least half an hour away; the more gung ho of us easily spent more time in the sneef than at home between the ages of 8-18. (I wasn’t gung ho). About the time we enlisted, it moved to a spanking new building near where most of us lived, and dozens of us used it as our meeting point Saturday mornings whenever we got home for a weekend. We would converge there for Shabbat morning services, and afterward we’d hang out for half an hour or more, exchanging yarns and tall tales, and hoping the girls were noticing. Though, truth be told, putting on the airs of combat soldiers in front of the girls wasn’t all that useful, since essentially all the guys were in, and it was hard to appear special. We also didn’t get home often enough to create continuity. But we did keep updated about all the other guys: who’s in which course, who’s been sent where, and so on.

I don’t think I’ve been in there for something like 30 years, though I’ve gone by it thousands of times. One morning a week or so ago, as I walked by, the gate was open and no one was there, so on the spur of the moment I went in.

Decades of teenagers haven’t added to its appearance. None of the doors seemed to close. The walls were covered with colorful murals that must have been an inch deep; if someone could figure out how to remove paint layer by layer it could be a fascinating exercise. It looked just like you’d expect a building to look where nobody’s mother has come to check on the maintenance in living memory: ramshackle, worn, chaotic, but also comfy in a way that would appeal to kids in “their own place”. It has a “lived in” look.

At the end of the corridor there’s a stairwell. I remembered that on the second floor there used to be a reading room dedicated to our friend Zvika, who was killed in a hiking accident in the Judean desert when we were 16; on the wall there was a large and dramatic picture taken from the top of a high cliff and in its corner, as if gazing out over the wide vista, a portrait of Zvika. So I went up to see what had happened to the room.

Zvika’s picture is still there. Apparently the kids, none of whom could possibly have any memory of anything about him, have a healthy respect for commemoration. Then I noticed the far end of the room, where the entire wall was covered with pictures of young men, and a long shelf offered a series of publications – books, pamphlets, albums. I didn’t remember this exhibition, and I approached it with a queasy feeling that turned into something bordering on awe. In this house of teenagers with a memory span that can’t exceed 15 years, someone had collected pictures, information, and publications about 60 years of fallen soldiers who had been active at the Sneef when they were of that age. There were more than 30 pictures, the earliest were of two young men killed in 1948.

I followed the pictures. Here’s a young paratrooper who was killed a few months before I was born. Here’s one killed in the early 1960s, a decade remembered as peaceful. Meir R. was killed in 1968. I came to know his father about that time when we moved into this neighborhood. Every year he would lead our congregation during the Ne’ilah service at the end of Yom Kippur, the single most powerful service in the entire year. He never managed to get through the service without weeping, not in all the years I heard him, and no doubt in the many years thereafter until his death, a little old man walking the streets of Jerusalem with his battered leather briefcase. I’d never seen a picture of his son: he was a strikingly handsome young man.

Yakov F. was killed in the summer of 1970, a week before the Roger’s Plan brought the end of the War of Attrition between Israel and Egypt. I hadn’t known him, but I remember how that week our madrich – councilor – told us that maybe Yakov would be the last soldier killed.

Sariel was killed on the Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur war. He was two or three years older than I, his sister was in my sister’s class. Moshe T. was killed a few weeks later, on the last day of that war. He had been our madrich, and a few months before the war he had married Yaffa, also one of our staff. I remembered them as two exceptionally good looking people; the picture on the wall confirms this.

Moshe K. was a paratrooper, killed a few months after the Yom Kippur war. He was Yaffa’s little brother, so she lost a husband and a brother within six months. The synagogue I go to has a mantle on its podium donated by their parents in Moshe’s memory; his mother passed away last year.

Avi Greenwald was a friend of mine from the moment I joined his school in 6th grade. I wrote about him briefly in Right to Exist. Ram M. was the younger brother of one of my best friends; he used to hang out with us sometimes, and although he was younger than us we welcomed him into the circle for being such a serious kid. Avi and Ram were both killed in 1982 in Lebanon.

Boaz was killed in 1988. Shlomo C. was killed in 1989. I remember his face, but don’t think I knew him.

Here's a picture of Noam, killed in 1992. I taught him history when he was in high school; he was one of those students who fit into the background at school, and then excelled and stood out once they reached the army. He was a highly respected young officer; on occasion I still hear people talking about him with admiration and regret.

Aviad was killed in 2001. I've vaguely known his father since the late 1970s. The past few years we have been studying together in a Talmud study group that convenes every Saturday afternoon.He always comes well prepared, and he never smiles.

Dani C. was killed fighting terrorists in 2002.

Facing the wall was like following an inverted cycle of life, from young men killed before I was born all the way to young men whose parents are my friends. The library, however, is in a building used only by teenagers, who don’t even yet know there is a cycle of life. Somehow, they understand the need to relate to these young men, some of whom were contemporaries of their grandfathers. So in the middle of a building run wholly by teenagers is a dignified section dedicated to young men only marginally older, who never grew old.

Home-made Rockets

Yesterday I wrote that I'm back to blogging-retirement, but as a parting image: next time someone tells you about the home-made rockets Hamas shoots at Israel, show them this image, made by Israeli photographar Matanya Chakhmon in Ofakim this week.

Thanksgiving

Operation Pillar of  Cloud, as it was called in Hebrew, is over. At the end of this blogpost I'll shut down once more. Before signing off, however, here's an immediate summary of what I saw. I'm not going to say what will happen next because I don't know, and, being the civil servant I am, I'll do my best to stay away from Israeli politics.

So far as I can tell, many Israelis are angry today. They saw the IDF inflicting considerable pain and damage on Hamas without destroying it, and they wished us to unleash the power of the ground forces to break Hamas and leave no doubt who won. I've repeatedly heard the refrain, since yesterday afternoon, "What have we achieved? In a year or two or three we'll just be back in the exact same situation? So why not break Hamas now? Why Wait?"

This may well prove true; it's at least as plausible as not that the next round really isn't more than a few years off. On the other hand, it's hard to see the scenario in which our being more destructive now would prevent the exact same next round. The urge to harm us isn't going away, and where there's a will there's a way. The question What the Gazans think they're doing, what they possibly hope to achieve by their actions, isn't easy to answer, and I don't pretend to know. It certainly doesn't look like anything rational. It's not as if anything they might throw at us will make us go away.

Yet - with all the care I need to take in pronouncing on internal political matters -  I don't think the operation was a failure at all. Not miltarily, not morally, not in the media or international relations, and not in leadership.

First, the military and moral issues.

1. Iron Dome is magnificant! Not perfect, sadly, but very very good. And it will get better. And we owe thanks to the Americans who have been financing much of it.

2. Preparedness: The number of layers of society which need to be prepared for such an onslaught on civilians is large, from the police and health services to the kindergaten teachers and the baby-sitters, not to mention the civilians themselves. Israel has just demonstrated that it has this preparedness, and the resilience and determination which underly it.

3. The air force (IAF) carried out more than 1,500 attacks, in what is often described, with a bit of hyperbole, as one of the world's most crowded areas. (Hyperbole because it's crowded, yes, but Manhattan and Mumbai are both more crowded. Cairo, too). In 1,500 sorties, something like 150 Gazans were killed. Some, tragically, were innocent bystanders, but many weren't. One way or another, the numbers mean one person killed for every ten attacks. At most, since some of the casualties were probably killed by more than 100 Hamas rockets which fell on Hamas civilians.

This is a mind-boggling statistic. I dare anyone to find another army in the world which can do that. As a matter of fact, any army in the history of mankind.

4. The extremely limited amount of collateral damage wasn't happenstance. It was the result of lots of hard work:
4.1. Detailled intelligence gathering and data-crunching.
4.2. Aquisition of weapons systems and ordinance that fit the decision.
4.3. Training. Lots of it.
4.4. Developing and honing procedures. The fact that the operator of a drone has the technical ability to stop an imminent attack because a civilians just wandered into the frame doesn't mean the attack will indeed be aborted. There have to be procedures, worked out and practiced in advance.

The heart of the matter is that there needs to be a decision, and it needs to be understood and accepted by everyone in the system, from the bean-counters authorising the significant expense to the young woman with her finger on the button. The decision has to be made from top to bottom. Or, to put this into more precise language: Israel killed so few Gazans in spite of weilding such awesome power, because Israeli society decided to do it that way. Is Israel the most moral society ever to be at war? I don't know. But it's very high in a very small league.

(I can hear the haters screaming: "So few!??! Palestinian lives aren't important for you!!! You're a racist, and a monster!" Let them froth at the mouth. Facts remain facts even if you really don't like them).

Second, the media. Look, the BBC can't help itself, and the Guardian neither. Their animosity towards Israel is so deap-seated and partially even subconscious they can't tell the story in a balanced way. Not capable.

Yet much of the media actually told it essentially as it is. The howls of rage over at Mondoweiss, a top purveyor of Jew-hatred, as they saw Jodi Rudoren of the New York Times trying to be professional, was a pleasure to see. So far as I could see Rudoren hasn't yet picked up her Elders of Zion membership card, but to hear the invective hurled at her was a fine demonstration of how far gone the true haters are, and how reasonable a professional journalist will be if allowed to see the events and report on them. Hamas was exerting itself with all its sinews to kill Israeli civilians, and Israeli soldiers were exerting themselves not to kill Palestinian civilians. This stark reality often did come accross in much of the reportage. (Not all, of course).

Then there were the social media. Israel seems to have grasped the concept of talking to people directly, not through the media. A week ago the IDF had 70,000 followers on twitter; by last night there were more than 200,000. Some will now wander away, but there will remain a large number who don't need the BBC to hear Israel's version of events (which will never be supplied by the BBC anyway). Having suceeded once, Israel will now put thought, effort and funds into improving its capabilites on this battlefield, too. Contrary to the moans of many despairing supporters, Israel isn't obviously losing the ability to tell its version of events.

International relations: they played out well, don't you think? If there was any light between the Israeli and American governments, I didn't see it. William Hague, a British fellow not know for giving pro-Zionist speeches, was supportive. His German counterpart traveled over to say Israel has a right to defend itself and Hamas has no right to be shooting at Israeli civilains. The UN passed no resolutions - and now won't set up any new version of the Goldstone Commission, either.

None of this happened by accident. Israel doesn't get international support by default, and certainly not at time of war. Just as with the the military and media aspects, someone worked hard in advance to achieve the result. Syrian bestiality helped, as did blatant Hamas ciminality, but the diplomats have apparently been earning their upkeep by the sweat of their luggage.

Egyptian President Morsi: now there's a pleasant surprise! I doubt he's about to join Likud, but no-one's asking him to. (Update: Hours after I wrote this Morsi annointed hiself Dictator of Egypt. It's an odd world).

One final comment in this section: Yes, violence works. No, violence can't solve many of the world's problems. But faced with a gang of armed thugs suh as rules Gaza, the careful appliance of violence is not only legitimate, it can be an important tool for making things better, even if only as one tool among others, and even if only for a while.

Leadership: We've got an election coming up so I"m going to be very sparse in words. Yet one must say that all the above are the result, along other things, of leadership. I do recommend people go back and read what's been said about Israel's leaders in recent years, and then see if the descriptions fit the actions we've just seen; if these actions were predictable given the descriptions.

One more comment about leadership. Important Israeli pundits and activists said, in 2006 and 2009, that Israel's initial air attacks against Hezballah and Hamas were legitimate, but the subsequent decision to keep on going and throw in ground forces was wrong. OK. So this time we listened to their advice. One hopes this will be duly noted, though it probably won't. More important: the theses has been put to test. Now we'll see if it proves itself.

Enough. As I expalined last year when I stopped blogging, I have made a decision to desist from public punditry about Israel in return for the opportunity to make some changes real changes. To do, rather than to talk. In the past year my colleages and I have set out on the road to dramatially altering the way Israel deals with it's documentation. If we succeed at what we're currently beginning, by the end of the decade Israel will be a world leader in proccessing its documentation: in creating it, appraising it, preserving it, cataloguing and declassifying it, and offering it to its owners, the public. Given the size and complexity of the challenge, I don't expect this to be visible before 2015 at the earliest, but - rather like preparing for war, actually - impressive results require years of hard preparatory work. So I thank the thousands of readers who have come by this past week, and this blog will now return to it's semi-dormant condition, with perhaps a post once every month or three. Although, come to think of it, you're welcome to follow the archives' blogs (Hebrew, and English). We're a bit proud of them and feel they're worth taking a peek. They're active most days of the week but not on the weekends.

Finally, I wish a happy Thanksgiving to those of you who'll be celebrating this evening. I can easily empathize with a nation giving thanks for all that is worthy of celebration.

Three Ways to be Against Israel

It's an interesting thing, is Twitter. Whoever cooked it up must have been either a genius or extraordinarily lucky, because although it sounds like an absolutely whacky idea, the fact is that it creates value. The thing I've noticed this past week, as I've been using it quite intensively because of the operation in Gaza, is that it easily beats other media outlets in its speed of supplying news of immediate developments, but even more interestingly, it enables conversations with people from walks of life I would otherwise never come across. In spite of its highly limiting format, conversations with some of these people can be highly informative.

First, there are the Hamas terrorists themselves, to be found at their own Twitter account, @AlqassamBrigade. Their view of the world is very simple: What we do is heroic, what the Israelis do is the epitome of criminal. Thus they crow about all the rockets they shoot at various Israeli targets (and they name them specifically: no random shooting in a general direction), and they scream about all the awful Israeli atrocities. In the reality their achievements are less impressive than they'd have us believe, which means their intention to harm is greater than their ability to harm, while with the Israelis it's the other way around. Their ability to harm, if they only wished to, is greater by many magnitudes than what they're doing in reality. Such a consideration, however, belonging as it does to the realm of moral deliberation, would be utterly lost on the Hamas people for whom morality is a subjective reflection of their own bestial urges.

Then there are the deniers of time. These are people who look at the present and assume that whatever they see must be self-explanatory. If there's an Israeli blockade of Gaza, there must have always been an Israeli blockade of Gaza. If the blockade doesn't go back all the way to 1967 (some of them say it does), then only because Israel periodically replaces one form of persecution with another; the constant being that Israel always does its worst against the Palestinians. Confronted with past Israeli actions that are so well documented they can't be brushed aside, the explanation will always be that Israel is continually refining its methods of persecution, true, but the persecution never disappears, and the Israelis never intend it to. The events of September 2005-February 2006, for example, were not indicative of an Israeli willingness to have the Gazans demonstrate their ability to be constructive following an Israeli departure; no, they were merely a prelude to a new period in which Israel would persecute Palestinians from afar and at reduced cost.

Similar to the moral imbecility of Hamas, these people cannot think in terms of historical causation, and thus they, too, remove morality from the discussion. Israel cannot be understood as navigating its way through the moral and practical complexity of life, because Israel always intends to harm the Palestinians, and any modifications to its actions are merely tactical tweaks, not human deliberation. Of course, the Palestinians are the mirror image of the Israelis, and while some of their actions are sometimes not nice, they are always the victim, they are powerless, and as ultimate victims they cannot be required to make moral decisions. They're too busy trying, and only just succeeding, to survive.

Hamas makes no pretense of recognizing universal morality. Their knee-jerk apologists use the opposite tactic, and clothe their entire argumentation in the terminology of universal human rights. Yet since they refuse to perceive Israel as human, insisting on its a-historical and inherent and immutable evil and the Palestinians automatic justness, both groups end up in the same position: whatever the Palestinians do is good, whatever Israel does is evil, and moral thought is banished from the entire discussion.

Finally, in an entire different category, there are the well intentioned rationally-minded observers. These tend to be liberal in the American meaning, or left-leaning in the European political vocabulary. Their problem is not a deficiency of moral thinking, nor a disability to apply it to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Their problem is the inability to accept the degree to which people can be immoral. They cannot accept that some people are so different from them as to be unrecognizable. The implication being, that if only everyone seeks hard enough it will be possible to resolve most differences. As a number of them have said to me in recent days: if your pessimism were to be justified, Yaacov, then there's no hope. There needs to be a resolution to the conflict. There must be a resolution to the conflict. If you're not seeing it it's because you're not truly seeking it – and this laziness is unacceptable; ultimately, it’s a moral weakness, since you're willing to remain in a state of war when it's possible to leave it.

Faced with the possibility that what "needs" to be, what "must" be, actually isn't necessarily so, they retreat into a form of speechlessness, of cognitive paralysis, from which they soon emerge by denial. How often have I heard the sentence "But if you're right, Yaacov, then there's no hope, and I refuse to accept that there's no hope".

The refusal to accept reality is sometimes highly admirable, as it motivates us ever to strive for something better; this determination is probably one of history's most beneficial motivating forces. Yet it needs to be tempered by humility: in spite of our determination to make the world a better place, ultimately it won't be anywhere near as nice as we'd like. Faced with terminal illness we can rail against fate but eventually the time will come for other sentiments. Faced with historical conditions beyond our power to change, there likewise comes a time when adaptation is more useful than millenarianism. Or, to return to Israelis and Palestinians: striving for a just peace is extremely admirable. Failing to reach it, however, since inevitable, cannot break the determination to live correctly.

And to think that all this can be found on Twitter…..

A Counter Intuitive Comment on IDF Capabilities

The IDF operation in Gaza - Defensive Shield, or in its better, Hebrew version, Amud Anan - has been on for about 70 hours. According to the twitter feed of the IDF, as of this morning more than 500 targets had been hit from the air in Gaza, many of them underground storage installations of weapons.

We don't know how many people in Gaza have been killed so far. The highest number I've seen is 18. Of them, how many are civilians? We don't know that, either. Some of them. The death of any non-combatant is always tragic (The deaths of terrorists is tragic for their families, but they made the choice to be terrorists and their possible death was part of that choice).

Nor do we know what lies in the future. It's sadly possible that an hour from now, or a day, or next week, an Israeli piece of ordinance will kill a large number of Palestinian civilians. This happens all too often in wartime. Yet even if that happens, the fact of the operation's first three day will be unchanged. Israel attacked hundreds of military installations in the middle of densely populated parts of Gaza because that's where Hamas was positioning them; Israel knew precisely where they are even when they were carefully hidden underground; and Israel managed to destroy them with the loss of perhaps ten Palestinian civilians, perhaps fewer.

All of which goes to disprove the entire narrative about the blood-thirsty Israelis callously (gleefully) slaughtering innocent Palestinians etc. etc. etc.

One Gaza Picture is Worth Which 1,000 Words?

Here's a powerful AP picture from Gaza, yesterday afternoon:

Now the question is, which 1,000 words does it replace? When we look at the picture, who are we seeing? Since it clearly depicts an act of violence, who shoud we recoil from, and who should we identify with?

Is it a picture of evil Israeli aggression against the helpless civilian population of Gaza, who are under attack and can't defend themselves? Or is it perhaps a picture of the cynical strongmen who control Gaza, and store their long-range Fajr misslies in the middle of a residential neighborhood, so that if Israel ever tries to destroy them, this will be the resulting picture?

Both interpretations can't be simultaneously true. Yet the picture, in spite of its powerful image, is quite useless in giving us a thousand words of context or even simply of clarification.

Israelis and Palestinians in Jerusalem and Gaza

This afternoon I was on the road up from Tel Aviv. There were three of us, on our way back from a day-long meeting. R was driving. Her mobile phone rang and she said to her husband
 - Hi P, I've got passengers.
- No problem,We just killed a Hamas biggie and I"m on my way to Ashdod to pull out your [80-year-old] mother.
 - OK. I'll talk to you later.
  Five minutes later her sister was on the line:
- The authorities are shutting down schools and markets here in Ashdod. There are immediate threats about Jerusalem, so make sure none of your kids are in crowded public places.
- P is on his way down to take Mom up to Jerusalem.
- Too late. They're shutting down the town. She'll stay at my place.

20 minutes later we were in Jerusalem. I got off near the large mall, and went through it on a quick errand. It was packed, as usual, with Jews and Palestinians intermingled, as usual. from there I crossed town and went to the supermarket. It, too, was packed, with Jews and Palestinians, shoppers and staff, all going about their normal lives.

The End of Israel?

It's Tisha b'Av, the fast day of mourning for the destroyed Temple in Jerusalem. Three years ago, in 2009, when this blog was still active, I wrote an essay wondering if Israel could be ended. I just went back and re-read it, and it's still as relevant and essentially up to date as it was three years ago. So I'm re-posting.

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The End of Israel?

Tisha'a be'Av, the Ninth day of Av, 2009. Today we mark 1,939 years since the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by mourning and fasting, but also, from noon onwards, with acts of construction such as fixing something around the house. It's hot, we haven't had a sip of water since yesterday, but we're puttering about with a hammer looking for something to fix. Mourning, in Jewish tradition, is as much about looking forward as backward.

There's a growing constituency for the idea that Israel's time is limited. Between 1949 and the early 1970s, Israel's right to exist was openly denied by most of the Arab world, but largely unquestioned elsewhere. Then the narrative changed, and for the next quarter century the growing consensus in the West and in Israel itself was that the existential threat had passed, and if only Israel would accept the Palestinians alongside it, peace would flourish. The Green Line of 1967: if only Israel would retreat to it!

Since summer 2000 this narrative has been steadily losing ground. Most Israelis and their elected leaders have accepted the fundamental thesis if not all its details, but the Palestinians have made clear their claims begin with 1948, not 1967.

So Israel's enemies and harsh critics are dropping the pretence of seeking partition; they are ever more openly striving for an abolition of Zionism. The Jews should have no separate state of their own, say the enemies; the Jews may end up with no state of their own, say the unconfident friends, and all call for Israeli actions which may bring this about.

Here are three random examples, all from the past 24 hours. First, the rabid antisemites at the Guardian's Comment is Free, ranting about the urgent need for a world without Israel. Second, Andrew Sullivan, muddled thinker but very popular blogger, telling A.Jay Adler he can't see Israel reaching its 60th anniversary (which happened back in 2008, but no matter). Finally, Jeffrey Goldberg, journalist and blogger at The Atlantic and a staunch supporter of Israel, fearing that wrong Israeli policies might cause it not to survive. The antisemites hope for Israel's end, Sullivan is beginning to wonder, and Goldberg is beginning to fear; they all agree it's possible.

Is it? How?

*****

There are some seven and a half million people in Israel. 20% are Arabs or Arabic-speaking Druze, with a slowing birthrate. A few percent are Christian non-Arabs, most but not all from the former Soviet Union; culturally they are part of the Hebrew-speaking Jewish society. The rest are Jews; their birthrate is slowly rising, even the non-religious among them. The Jewish community in Israel is the world's largest; at some point soon they will become the majority of the world's Jews, though this will not immediately be obvious because the rest of the Jews are not easy to define nor count. The number of Jews in Israel is roughly the same as the number of Jews murdered during the Shoah. That would be one way to end Israel: by violence.

In December 2001 Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, often touted in the media as a moderate among the Iranian leaders, said in a public speech that Muslims should not fear from a nuclear confrontation with Israel: Israel is small and can be destroyed, the Muslim world is large, and can't. (Translated by MEMRI, but also posted on the website of the Iran Press Service). Of course, such a nuclear conflagration would also kill millions of others – Palestinians, Iranians, Jordanians, Lebanese and Syrians, but some people are willing to pay a steep price to rid the world of Jews. History proves that, just as it proves that when people repeatedly announce their intention to rid the world of Jews, they may actually mean it.

I cannot say how near the Iranians are to being able to destroy Israel with nuclear weapons, nor how many of their leaders agree with Rafsanjani, but a nuclear war could indeed end Israel; moreover, it could be launched by a very small number of people. Should a group of Israel's haters have the nuclear ability, they would not need to hold a national referendum. A few hundred willing technicians and a handful of committed mass murderers would suffice. So it must be prevented.

Sometimes I wonder if perhaps Israel shouldn't warn, that if the day ever comes when the last of her people in some nuclear submarine realize that all is lost, their orders will be to shoot off their remaining missiles at Berlin, London, Paris and Moscow. Simply to focus minds on the cost of having a world without Israel to the nations whose forefathers often gleefully persecuted Jews.

Nuclear Armageddon is logically possible; personally I have decided to live as if it's not going to happen. Elected leaders and a small number of specialists must spend their lives bearing the burden of preparing for the worst; the rest of us can't be expected to do so while living normal lives.

Interestingly, the haters of Israel yearning for its destruction don't believe in the nuclear danger. Should Israel ever take pre-emptive military action the Guardian and its ilk will shrilly denounce Israel for its paranoia; I expect the Andrew Sullivans to join them. There's a tension at the heart of the anti-Israeli discourse, which postulates that Israel should or may go down for its crimes against the Palestinians, while denying the existence of any real danger to it from anyone else. This is the Western corollary of the tension common among many Muslims of denying the Holocaust while regretting that Hitler didn't complete the job.

Short of nuclear war, is there any danger to Israel's existence?

But of course, say those who fear it or yearn for it. Their favorite scenario is that someday America will turn its back on Israel, and Israel will cave in. There are other scenarios, in which British academics and politically enthusiastic activists manage to set in movement a boycott that devastates Israel's economy and brings it to its knees, but without the active encouragement of America it's hard to see how this might work.

For such a scenario a number of things must happen.

First, a significant proportion of American society must greatly sour on Israel. Disliking a particular Israeli leader or policy won't be enough to make them enact anti-Israeli legislation. For that masses of Americans must decide Israel is uniquely evil, to the extent they'd be willing to take highly unusual measures. Since Israel isn't uniquely evil, and actually is far better than many players on the international stage, this means someone will have to inculcate in masses of Americans a dislike of Israel that is irrational – in effect, they'll need to inculcate antisemitism in a society which is largely free of it. If you assume there's a reason America is the first large Western society to cure itself of the malaise of Jew Hatred, this means that reason must be turned back.

For all my affinity to America, I don’t live there and can't say such a thing could never happen. I doubt it, but perhaps I'm naïve. It's certainly a likely scenario in Europe, indeed, it's already happening – though of course, no large European society was ever really free of Jew Hatred.

For the sake of the argument, let's assume America participates in placing sanctions against Israel, demanding Israeli measures Israel otherwise refuses to take – i.e not dismantle settlements, for which an Israeli majority could easily be found, but accept half a million descendants of Palestinian refugees, say, or dismantle the homes of hundreds of thousands of Jews in Jerusalem. That sort of thing. Would international sanctions against Israel succeed, on an issue a majority of Israelis regard as existential?

Sanctions, as a general rule, don't work. The world economy is too porous. People, companies and states will always be found to circumvent them for profit. Lots of European companies are past masters at the deception, but the Chinese don't even pretend. Furthermore, while it's just conceivable that America might roll back its history and re-acquire the taste for Jew Hatred, the Chinese and Indians never had the taste to begin with. The sole example of successful sanctions I'm aware of, against South Africa, never made a dent until the world was suddenly unipolar, in the early 1990s. It's less unipolar now than then, which is why the various sanction schemes now running aren't making much difference.

What if, improbable as it seems, there were to be universal sanctions against Israel, on a matter Israel felt it couldn't compromise on. What then?

I know I wouldn't cave in. I've gone to war, three weeks after my wedding, hoping to be back but knowing I might not. I went anyway, and some of my friends indeed didn't return. I've lived through a period where busses and supermarkets were life threatening environments. I've sent my children off to war – that was probably the hardest. Why would anyone expect me to give in on something essential faced merely with, what, economic hardship? So far as I can tell, I'm no different than most people around me. We would love to have peace with our neighbors, we have absolutely no joy from our war with them, but we're not going to relinquish the essentials we've acquired at tremendous cost these past few generations.

****

It's Tisha beAv. The fast will be over in a few hours, and we'll go back to our normal routines. For today, however, we're mourning the time, two millennia ago, when our forefathers were crushed by the mightiest military power in the world. Bad things can happen to Jews, and do, with consistent regularity. Sanguinity, as in "we've got a vibrant society here, nothing can ever beat us" is not warranted by history. We actually often do get beaten, and perhaps will again. Yet it's late afternoon of Tisha Be'Av, and I suppose I should take out my tools and find something around the house that needs fixing. After all, the generation of Jews who were pulverized by the Romans were also the greatest generation of Jews ever, along with their children and grandchildren. They were the ones who got up from the rubble and re-defined their world so as to get along without the Temple; they created the Mishna; they lay the foundations for the ability to survive millennia of homelessness and disenfranchisement. Why, they even managed to launch a second, even more furious revolt against the Romans. And then they got out from under Hadrian's genocide and kept on going, until the Roman Empire was long since gone, and its successor, and its…

I'm sorry – no, I'm not sorry at all – but whoever is planning our near demise doesn't get it. We're not here because the Colonialists sent us and forgot to take us back.  We're not here as revenge for the Shoah the Europeans enabled the Germans to commit on us. We're not here on the sufferance of the Americans. We're here because we've decided to be here. Short of divine plans, which I don't pretend to be able to explain, our decisions are the most important part of the story, as they always have been.

Yaacov Lozowick
Jerusalem, July 30, 2009