Shalom u-le-hitraot to "Harry's Place"

Here was my parting shot at the Brit blog, Harry's Place, where virtually everything I wrote was misunderstood by my ideological opponents.

The political Zionists are quite happy that they were allowed to represent the two-state solution at the Oxford Union instead of Norman Finkelstein. Pity that none of them really believe in it.

Indeed, as I have written here before, I know very few Israelis, and almost no diaspora Jews, who favor a true two-state solution in which one state neither dominates, nor is dominated by, the other, a solution in which there is real parity between the states.

Most Israelis I know who say they support two-states, basically support one state -- Israel -- and one 'state' -- a weakened Palestine in a neo-colonial relationship with Israel, what Bibi calls "medinat-minus" a "lesser state." The former will have one of the most powerful defence forces in the world, whereas the latter will be demilitarized, or non-militarized. Even the Geneva Initiative has the Palestinian's state security subcontracted out to a multi-national force.

Now, dear friends, imagine an Israel without a Zahal/IDF -- imagine such a Jewish state proposed to David Ben-Gurion in 1948 -- and what do you think he would have said?

Mind you, I am not a big fan of militaries, or the place the military has played in Israeli society. But as an ex-IDF reservist, and the proud father of four children who have served in the IDF -- and one combat officer who still serves in the reserves -- just as I cannot conceive of Israeli without Zahal, so I cannot conceive of a Palestinian state without a strong military force to protect it, and which serves as a source of its national pride.

If you are opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state that would be equal in power -- economically and militarily -- to Israel, then you are not in favor of a genuine two-state solution.

You would be in good company, by the way. The Palestinian negotiators were willing to give in on the army issue because of their weak negotiating position. They knew it would be a non-starter with the Israelis. That was unfortunate. Where there is no central army, there is inevitably a vacuum in which militias, terrorist organizations, and vigilante squads, rush in.

I don't expect most of the pro-Israel folks reading the blog to understand what I have just written. It took me thirty years to wean myself from the pro-Israel gut reaction: "Are you nuts? What would the Palestinians have to be afraid of? It is they who have been the aggressors since 1920's! Let them prove themselves first, and if they can stop terrorism for a few decades, then we maybe can consider allowing them to arm."

But if you answer like that, then you are not in favor of a two-state solution. You want one powerful state, which has virtual control over the land, resources, and borders of another people -- but without the headache of having to take care of that people, much less allowing them citizenship.

The question is very simple. If you believe that the Palestinians have a right to a state in Palestine, is it less a right, more a right, or the same right as Israeli Jews have? If it is less a right, then you are a one state-one 'state' person. If it is an equal right -- and I assume Jonathan Hoffman believes that it is -- then it is simply unfair for one state to be allowed to fulfill the first and most important function of any state -- protection of its people; whereas the other state is not allowed to fulfill that function. Ditto for other aspects of control.

So are the Zionist here willing to bite the bullet and sign a peace-treaty in which the other side has a modern army and not a mere police force, and a strong economy that could wreak the same damage on Israel as Israel's economy could on Palestine? Alternatively, are you willing, to join a federation in which there will be one federal defence force, a coordinated foreign and economic policy, and a federal board for the use of resources?

If you are not prepared for either alternative, then the irony is that the Palestinians who support the two-state solution are much more two-statist than their Israeli counterparts. Because they do not require of Israel that it disarm, or that it allow the Palestinian state to be equal in power. They are quite willing to have a powerful state like Israel, with which it enjoys a natural rivalry, on its borders.

The Israel-Palestinian Victory at Bil'in -- A Sweet New Year

There are some small victories, small points of light in the dark night of occupation. But this will be a big one, if the army and the government obey the High Court of Justice.

For the last several years, Israelis and Palestinians have been protesting about the route of the separation wall in the area of Modi'in. The route was designed primarily to provide Israeli real estate developers more land to sell to Jews, to annex more land by the State of Israel, and to destroy the lives of villagers in Bilin so that there would be more land. Security, as usual, had little, if anything to do with the route of the security fence.

Does the above description sound outrageous? Not to the High Court of Justice that decided this week to direct the government to make a security fence around Modi'in, instead of the planned Lebensraum wall (the Hebrew equivalent of "Lebensraum" -- merhav mihyah -- was used by Nachum Barnea, Israel's most respected and read journalist, in his shabbat column in Yedi'ot to describe the wall. I hope, God willing, to report on what he wrote.

This is a victory for a gallant band of non-violent protesters (the rock-throwing Arabs in their midst were long ago revealed to be General Secret Service provocateurs, but that's another story).

While older Jewish supporters of the good-old-moral-Labor-Zionism have been writing their polemics in the Diaspora, a young group of protesters -- they call themselves "anarchists" mostly as an inside joke; they have no ideology besides fighting for Palestinian rights -- have been risking their lives facing the rubber bullets of the IDF.

Please read the article below, especially if you are a Peace-Now, knee-jerk, opponent of the Occupation -- the sort of person who thinks Tom Friedman knows what he is talking about. The next time you write out a check for the New Israel Fund, try to think of ways also to support the activists who are sanctifying God's name in public. (And keep writing the checks for the New Israel Fund....)

They, and other groups like Children of Abraham, Ta'ayush, Breaking the Silence, ICAHD, etc., are the future of Israel. May God grant them the strength to continue in their struggle.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/901786.html

A victory for the anarchists

By Meron Rapoport

"I remember the moment I marched among a crowd of Palestinians," said one of the Israeli activists who participated in the ongoing demonstrations near the village of Bil'in, this week. Those demonstrations led to a High Court decision a few days ago ordering the rerouting of the separation fence near the village. "I served in the army, and my first instinct was to look for the signal operator and to check if we were marching properly spaced. The Palestinians shouted 'Allahu Akbar,' which is supposed to be the nightmare of every Israeli soldier, but I suddenly realized that I was with them, that they weren't my enemies."

One must understand. Anyone who went to demonstrate in Bil'in knew that he stood more than a small chance of getting hurt somehow by "his" army: by clubs, tear gas, rubber bullets. Undoubtedly, there were a few who sought out this violence, but it also befell those who did not seek it out. It was part of the deal. The violence that the soldiers and Border Police officers employed against the Israeli demonstrators on an average Friday in Bil'in surpassed that used against the settlers during the entire evacuation of Gush Katif. Nevertheless, a few hundred Israelis made this trip every Friday, without fail, for the last two and a half years. Not all of them at once. Sometimes five, sometimes 50, sometimes 100. But they came.

Most of these people were young, sometimes very young, and they gathered under the rubric of "Anarchists Against the Fence." The Zionist left had no presence there. Not Peace Now and not Meretz (some Meretz MKs sometimes assisted the arrestees, but no more than that) - and certainly not Labor. Older organizations from the non-Zionist left were supportive, and provided logistical assistance, but the initiative still came from the anarchists. They led the struggle.

Without question, it was a rather small group. Not everyone, even the most devout leftist and vigorous opponent of the occupation, is prepared to come and take a beating, to run up and down hills, to breathe tear gas, to be arrested. But it wasn't an insignificant number either, this group of people prepared to come to blows with the establishment. In Bil'in their goal was simple and tangible: to restore the lands to the Palestinians.

It will be interesting to see what their next goal is.

Tough Jewess -- Wisse's "Jews and Power"

Because of the well-orchestrated media hullabaloo, I went out and bought Ruth Wisse's new book on "Jews and Power." My expectations were low. A book that advances a grand theory of "Jewish power" by a literature professor who is neither trained in Jewish history, nor, judging from the bibliography, conversant with scholarly literature in any language besides Yiddish and English, in a series aimed for popular consumption, should be judged differently than a work of a specialist. Still, some of the previous books in the Nextbook series are useful as introductions to their topics, despite their flaws(I am thinking mainly of Nuland's Maimonides and Goldstein's Spinoza.) And the idea of a series of short, intellectually challenging books for the "educated layperson" sounds promising.

Unfortunately, "Jews and Power" is a tendentious mix of personal biography, Zionist historiography, and cherry-picking of Jewish literature and history,in the grand tradition of Zionist polemics. Somewhere halfway through the book, Wisse completely loses the train of her argument about power and just provides a ZOA-approved guide to the establishment of the State of Israel through the Oslo accords, the sort of thing that Netanyahu, Dershowitz, and Bard could do in their sleep.

Wisse repeats uncritically the narrative of "Exile and Return" that has been debunked time and time again by serious scholars; she manages to get around to David Biale's "beguilingly contrarian" thesis of Jewish power and powerlessness, which is a direct challenge to her book, on p. 174, ten pages before its conclusion. She does not give Biale's book any serious attention; on the contrary, she seems to think that his point is that Jews in the diaspora glorified powerlessness, whereas Biale showed that the Jewish experience in political power had not ended as good for the Jews as the Zionist historiography pretended.

It is not just the tendentious of the material on Zionism -- Wisse completely omits mention of Zionists like Magnes, Buber, Scholem, etc., who don't fit into her master narrative, much less intellectual and liberal opponents of Zionism. (Cultural Zionist Ahad ha-Am get a nod, but is immediately criticized, of course, for failing to realize the need for Jewish power in a hurry.) It is not just the failure to cite, much less refute, any book on Israel-Palestine that does not fit into her mold (Has she even read Morris, Segev, Shlaim, and Kimmerling? As for Khalidi, she argues with a comparison he makes between Palestinians, Kurds, and Armenians, and then proceeds to ignore entirely the main argument of his book on Palestinian identity) She passes over Kimmerling and Migdal on Palestinian identity in silence, preferring to give her own arguments against their being a Palestinian people united by anything except "its antagonism to Israel and its usurpation of Jewish symbols, history or identity." To prove this last assertion, Wisse refers to the fact that "the Palestinians commemorate the birthday of Israel as their nakba, or catastrophe." But it is not the birthday of Israel that is their nakba -- it is the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes, the destruction of their lives, and the thwarting of their political aspirations

In any event, I could understand Wisse if she were upset at the Palestinians for whining over the loss of Palestine ("self-pity, self-punishment, and self-destruction at the hands of Israel," whatever that last phrase means) without standing up and resisting. As the advocate of people power, she should be the first to praise the PLO and Hamas for armed resistance, as she does the parallel Jewish organizations, the Haganah and the IZL ("functioning as a good boxer's two fists" (p. 126) -- fist that also killed innocents)

No, it is the mind-numbing shallowness of the book -- as if a professor, any professor, can write a short book on Jewish power and powerlessness that takes in (I quote from the jacket) "everything from the Kingdom of David to the Oslo Accords." When Baer wrote his work on Galut, for all of its Zionist tendentiousness and superficiality, at least he had some grip on Jewish history.

Most of the historical errors reveal the secular Zionist prism through which she views the data. Every Israeli knows where the city of Yavneh is located, but for Wisse it is "abroad" (p. 29), where Ben Zakkai took the first steps "to reconstitute Jewish religious and political authority outside the Land of Israel" (emphasis added.) Yavneh, no less than Jerusalem, is within the Land of Israel, and it became for a short time the center of the Jewish communities of the Land of Israel and the Diaspora. Of course, this mistake is telling: for the Zionists, the tragedy of 70 ce was the loss of political sovereignty and exile, to which the development of rabbinic Judaism was a response. But it was not the loss of sovereignty and exile that bothered the rabbis at Yavneh. Virtually none of the tannaim even mention "exile", and for good reason, they lived in Israel. Rather, it was the loss of the cult of the Temple, which stood at the center of Palestinian Judaism up until time.

As I have written elsewhere, there was no exile following the destruction of the Temple or the Bar Kokhba revolt; there was, according to Baron, increasing voluntary emigration of Jews over centures because of the depressed economic state of the country. The Zionist narrative of exile, founded on Christian and Jewish myths, is like them -- a myth. This is not to say that later there was not a consciousness of living in exile, or a messianic hope for a restoration which waxed and waned. But to reduce Jewish history to: first, the Jews put their faith in Divine power, and then they decided, before it was too late, to bring about their own rededemption through their own power is Zionist poppycock. And what's worse; it is stale poppycock, the sort of propaganda that one finds emanating from Zionist circles a half a century ago.

Will the State of Israel be good for the survival of the Jews? Only time will tell, although the initial results are worrying. Over the last half-century, many more Jews have found violent death in the Jewish state (one might say partly as a result of their being a Jewish state) than in the diaspora. Antisemitism waxes and wanes according to the rhythms of the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians and their lands, proving Brian Klug's wise observation that nowadays, most antisemitism is really disguised antizionism, and not vice versa.

Still, as long as self-styled "liberal nationalists" like Ruth Wisse make their home in the diaspora, we can be assured that at least some Jews will survive. It is becoming harder and harder to find neocons of her ilk in Israel among the younger generation of Israelis -- they have to be imported from the diaspora like Michael Oren and Yoram Hazony. This is not a problem, since the growing Israeli diaspora in the US and Europe ensures the requisite level of guilt among the emigres to produce neocons among their offspring. And let us not forget the Russian aliyah...

In a rather odd conclusion, Wisse writes as the thesis of her book:

Jews probably could have endured in the Diaspora had theirs been the only type of political organization in the world. But their political system was not basically structured to defend itself against outside enemies seeking it annihilation.

In fact, Jews and Judaism have survived in the Diaspora, and they are doing rather well at that. It is hard to see how a series like Nextbook, despite its occasional amaratzes, dilletantism, and rightwing slant, could have been produced in Israel (unless some rich American Jewish neocon donated money to the Shalem Center). Wisse should ask why no Israelis are writing Hebrew versions of "Jews and Power," and why there is no public in the Jewish state for such books. Or why nobody in Israel under the age of sixty writes the history of the Israel-Palestinian confilct the way she does, unless associated with the Shalem Center or Bar Ilan.

But wait -- the story gets better. It turns out that the above quotation is an adaptation of Jean-François Revel's prediction in 1983 about the "imminent demise of democracy". Oh, boy, was that "Chicken-Little" wrong! Wisse has the honesty to admit that "the implosion of the Soviet Union proved his fears groundless in this instance" but this "by no means lessens the value of his insights."

That's odd. I would have thought that historical facts have a direct bearing on the value of one's insights. They do for historians.

But not, apparently, for professors of literature, where the perception and interpretation of facts are what matters.

Singling Out Israel for Moral Opprobrium

I am a tribalist at heart. I really care about my tribe, or, I should say, the various tribes of which I am a member. I care about them in ways that I don’t care about other tribes. Kant forgive me, but it’s true – there are other tribes that I really couldn’t care less about. When I sense that I am becoming heartless and apathetic to the sufferings of others unconnected to my tribe, I try to work on my “human” side, or my “living being” side, or my “creaturely” side – in order to make a new tribe in which I am a member with whatever Other has a claim on me. But, usually, it’s only about me and my tribes.

So, when critics say to me, “Why are you always harping on Israel when there is genocide in Dafur, or vast suppression of human rights in China?” my answer is that I simply care more about Israel because I am part of the tribe. And just as I would be more upset if I found out that my brother, and not a total stranger, were a murderer, or even a thief, when there are lots of more vicious criminals out there, because he is my brother, so I am more upset about my country perpetrating human rights violations against the Palestinian people for generations, than about the genocide in Darfur. For one thing, I am much more implicated in what Israel is doing than what is going on in Darfur, although I guess we also have responsibilities there as human beings, and as people who can do something about it. But Israel is my country, and its crimes are mine. I know that some will say that this excessive concern for my own is “racist.” But there you have it, I am a tribalist.

Ah, but you will say, that’s all well and good for you. You are an Israeli; you are a traditional Jew; you have a right to criticize. But what about criticism from folks who are outside the tribe entirely, like from some of those British and German leftwing intellectual-types? Shouldn’t they be more concerned with Darfur than Israel? And if they aren’t, isn’t that a sign that they are unreasonably fixated on Jews?

Not necessarily. Even though such people are not part of my Israeli Jewish tribe, they may be part of another relevant tribe (say, the Palestinian tribe, or the Friends of Palestine tribe, or even the People-who-Expect-the Countries-That-Present-Themselves-as Civilized-Should-Act-in-a-Civilized-Fashion tribe). Whether they feel themselves to be perpetrators or victims, they are perfectly right in focusing their attention on whatever tribe they belong to, as long as they hold that tribe to a justifiable ethical standard. To demand of them to spend that much energy on other tribes may be Kantian, but it ain’t human. We selectively reward and punish all the time. Speed cops certainly do.

What, then, would bother me? Well, if people criticized Israel for behaving in ways that they excuse, or worse, approve of, in others, without further justification, then that would raise my suspicions. If an American of Irish descent would see nothing wrong in the IRA killing innocents and then would blame Israel for doing the same thing, then I would question that person’s consistency, sincerity, and motives. If a person criticized Israel’s actions because she felt that they embody the negative qualities of Jews everywhere, then she would be a member in good standing of the Antisemite tribe.

I think that the Israel advocates understand the tribalism thing. Because they are always singling out Israel for special consideration. They don’t criticize the massive amount of foreign aid that Israel gets from the United States, although, as Kantians, they should be against such preferential treatment. No, they support the preferential treatment because they are, like me, tribalists. I am sure they give good reasons for their position, but why don’t they spend the same amount of time lobbying for other worthy, even worthier causes, than Israel?

So when somebody argues against the academic boycott of Israel as follows:

"The singling out of Israel for special punishment is not about achieving a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It can only stigmatize the Jewish state for being particularly malevolent. This, whatever the intention, feeds negative historical stereotypes and can fuel anti-Semitism." (italics added; see here)

I reply as follows: First, I appreciate that the speaker, unlike others, does not call the “singling-out of Israel for special punishment” in itself morally wrong or anti-semitic. There may be good reasons for singling out Israel on this point; whether Israel is deserving of an academic boycott needs to debated on its merits. Suggest to the Israel Lobby, who single Israel out for preferential treatment, that their actions can fuel antisemitism, and they will respond that antisemites will be be antisemites whatever the Lobby does, and that the preferential treatment is deserved because of Israel’s strategic importance to the US, etc.

And, ribono shel olam, isn’t it time to give the “the possible fueling of antisemitism” canard a rest? How many times has that one been used to stop us orthodox Jews from reporting to the police wife-beaters and rabbinical child-molesters?

On one point I agree with the speaker: the singling out of Israel for special punishment is not about “achieving a peaceful resolution of the conflict”. Rather, it is about achieving justice and dignity for a group that has been without it for too long a time, and, incidentally, for those of us who care, about taking care of Israel’s soul. The punishment is to rectify an intolerable situation that has festered since 1948, and especially since 1967, namely, the thwarting of the Palestinian's people right of self-determination, and the hell that they have had to endure as a result. The fact that other peoples, including my own, have suffered hell in the past, is entirely without relevance to this part of the story.

Speaking of stories, here is one I leave you with:

Once upon a time, two small boys, Pete and Paul, were fighting over a garment. Pete grabbed the garment, wrestled Paul to the ground, and sat on him, at first for days, then for months, finally for years. Pete had nothing against Paul personally. He even made sure that he had enough to eat and drink to stay alive. But Pete was afraid to get off Paul’s stomach, because whenever he did, Paul would start clawing at him, and Pete was scared, for himself and for the garment. He was even willing to share a bit of the garment with Paul – he certainly did not stand to gain by having to take care of Paul -- but how could he be sure that Paul wouldn’t use the opportunity to grab the garment from him, or worse, sit on him?

Whenever an onlooker started to rebuke Pete for sitting on Paul, he would say, “Why are you picking on me ? I am only sitting on the kid; he’s not dead or nothin… If you turn around, you will see plenty of people doing worse things.” And he was right; it was an awful neighborhood. Pete began to suspect that anybody who criticized him was really a friend or relative of Paul, or at least unwittingly gave him support. Because if he really cared about crime, why was he just going after Pete?

Pete was also right to be afraid of Paul. You see, Paul hated Pete and, aside from his getting his freedom and the garment, he would love nothing more than to see Pete dead for what he had suffered all these years. But instead of sending somebody for the police, or seeking outside help, of which he was always suspicious, Pete just kept sitting there on Paul.

And there he sits, to this day: holding on to the garment and defending himself from the accusations of the onlookers by saying, “Hey, I am willing to let the guy up, provided that he….”

Jews, Power, and Garbage: Part One

I haven't finished looking at the Sunday Times, but I did manage to see two items of interest.

First is Steve Erlanger's frontpage story, "West Bank Boys Dig a Living in Settler Trash," which describes how some Palestinians are quite literally living off the garbage of Jewish settlers out of sheer desparation and poverty.

This is the sort of human interest story one doesn't see enough of in the Times, which usually bashes Israel for making the lives of the Palestinians miserable.

The Zionists always claimed that the Arabs of Palestine would benefit from a Jewish state, and here is the proof: after ruling 3 1/2 million people for forty years without granting them citizen rights, expropriating their lands, restricting their movement, and building walls between their villages and their fields (for the purpose not of security -- ok, not just of security -- but also of providing "living room" for the settlers -- at long last the settlers are doing something for the Palestinians. They are producing garbage that supports the natives -- and the natives aren't paying for it.

The second item is a "review" of Ruth Wisse's new book (published by Nextbooks/Schocken) on Jews and Power, by the British lawyer, Anthony Julius, who has, to my knowledge, no background or professional expertise in Jewish history, but who is not too far from Wisse's ideological camp (more liberal hawk than neocon): he has been sponsored by the ADL in speaking out against the so-called "new antisemitism," and wrote a thesis and book on antisemitism in T.S. Eliot.

Not surprisingly, the review is positive, without a single word of criticism, but that may be simply the nature of a Julius-Nextbook-NY Times review.

You see, Julius reviewed for the Times Sherwin Nuland's book on Maimonides, also published by Nextbooks, showing that just as you don't have to be a Maimonides expert to write a book about him (Nuland is a Yale physician and not a Maimonides scholar), you don't have to be one to write a review, either.

But there is something in the puff that caught my eye. The London barrister writes:

Certainly, the book reads as a setting-down of conclusions reached across several decades of controversy and reflection. But it also has a certain delicacy, in particular in its openness to alternative histories, alternative political arrangements. “It is worth considering how the Middle East might have evolved had Arab rulers accepted the partition of Palestine,” she writes. There would have been some voluntary shifts of population. Arab Palestine might have federated with Jordan. Regional priorities would have dictated new patterns of trade, commerce and development. Jews and Arabs who wanted to live in the other’s land could have traveled back and forth.

It is good to be reminded of such possibilities by someone who is also such a doughty defender of Israel. It has always been an aspect of Zionism’s utopianism, this vision of Jewish-Arab cooperation, a mutual flourishing in the one region. This book is both an acknowledgment of that openhearted, clearsighted desire for peace, but also — and so to speak — in the meantime, a celebration of the new Jewish ability to await its arrival. If there is not to be peace, Jews at least will be able to defend themselves against their self-declared enemies. This, in the end, is what it means for Jews to have power.

What Wisse is saying that had the Arabs accepted the Partition Plan, then a utopia -- or at least, something a lot better than the present -- would have ensued, in which Jews and Arabs who wanted to live in the other's land could have done so. Note the "delicacy" of the comment about "voluntary shifts of population," i.e., a transfer of natives out of the Jewish-designated area to the Palestinian area (there were few Jews in the Palestinian area to be shifted out of.) This standard Zionist argument is presented by Julius as an "openness to alternative histories, alternative political arrangements"! Alternative to what? Certainly not to straightforward Zionist narrative!

To put Wisse's point differently -- had the Palestinians accepted partition, and cleared out of the Jewish state "voluntarily" -- the ultimate Zionist fantasy -- then peace and harmony would have reigned. There would not be a refugee problem (because of the voluntary "shift" -- such a nice word, that), but a two-state solution.

But that is an entirely unproved assertion. On the contrary, it is arguable that had the Palestinians accepted partition, the Israelis would be today occupying the West Bank and Gaza.

How so?

Well consider that there was a strong irredentist camp of Zionists that opposed the partition plan, and just as strong a camp of Zionists that were unhappy with the 48 armistice lines, and who were prepared to take the West Bank at the first opportunity. Consider that Ben Gurion himself said that the acceptance of the partition plan was only tactical, a first stage in the conquest. Consider that the newly founded State of Israel never formally accepted partition and worked against it. Consider the 1956 invasion of Sinai and the 1967 invasion of the West Bank, despite the armistice lines.

Now: even if these military operations were absolutely justified in Israel's eyes, they happened, did they not? And who can guarantee that they would not have happened had the Arabs accepted partition?

The "woulda-coulda-shoulda" school of history is part of the propaganda war. It may be true that the Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, as Eban said. But it is also true that the Zionists never refused to offer them an eminently refuseable offer. Of course, the Zionist always considered the offer generous, since they felt that by right all of Palestine belonged to them, including the East Bank of the Jordan.

It is time to put the rest the counterfactual canard that had the Arabs accepted partition, things would have looked better today. We simply don't know that..

According to Avi Shlaim, the Jordanians and the Israelis agreed to split mandatory Palestine to the detriment of the Palestinians -- yet this did not guarantee that Israel would neither invade nor settle the West Bank when the opportunity arose.

It may be that had the Arabs accepted partition, Jews and Arabs would have lived together in harmony. It may be that had the Zionists accepted permanent minority status in a secular Palestine, the two groups would have lived together in harmony. The Zionists rejected minority status; the Arabs rejected partition. No doubt, in retrospect, an Arab acceptance of partition would have placed them in a better position tactically to pursue their aims. It is hard to see that their situation could have been worse.

But arguably in any event they would have been outfinessed by the Zionists, given the power differential.

And that's what it is about, according to Wisse -- power.

The rest is garbage...

"Wiping Palestine off the Map"

Coming posts for the Magnes Zionist include a continuing series of responses to arguments on behalf of the Law of Return. I promised that two weeks ago, and I have yet to get back to it, but I will.

But first, a reply to a comment to A Talmudic Precedent for a Just Solution to the Israel Palestinian Conflict that was posted when I was recently stranded in cyberspace.

I wrote in that post

"...even though one hundred years of Zionism teaches us that the Palestinians have much more to fear from the Zionists than vice-versa. Only one side has ever actually wiped the other’s country off the map – and it wasn’t the Palestinian side."

I am glad to take the opportunity to clarify what I meant by the assertion that Israel wiped Palestine off the map. I was not trying to compete with Iranian President Ahmadinejad, who said that Israel should vanish from the pages of time (which apparently did not mean that the Israeli people should be obliterated. He seems to have been speaking, Reagan-like, of regime change that would replace the current state of Israel with another state. As far as I know, he did not call for the death or expulsion of Israeli Jews.)

What I meant was that the State of Israel, during and after the 1947-8 war, deliberatedly changed the map of Palestine when it systematically destroyed Palestinian villages, renamed existing Arab place names with Hebrew names, and diminished the Palestinian presence in Palestine by expulsion of Palestinians and mass immigrations of Jews.

What I did not mean was that Israel nuked Palestine or mass-murdered Palestinians. "To wipe a country off the map" means simply that one country is totally (or almost totally) replaced by another country. And indeed, if you examine maps of Palestine before 1947 and maps of Israel after 1952, say, you will find radical alterations.

Presumably, part of the reason why the Zionists erased the Palestinian presence was to present Israel as a state that arose, if not ex nihilo, than out of a desert, with only a few picturesque native villages. That way, the natives who had been expelled would have no claim to places which no longer existed, and Zionists could argue that there never was a significant Palestinian presence in Palestine.

Now, it is true that many states wipe their predecessors off the map when they become independent and conquer territory. Lviv was Lwow, and before that, Lemberg, and before that Lwow, etc., depending upon who was in charge. And states do that mostly for the same reason that Israel did; to obliterate the immediate past. Israel went further than this and literally obliterated villages and neighborhoods, but other states have done this, too. I am not, obviously referring to all of Palestine, but only to that part of mandatory Palestine that was under Israel's control by virtue of the armistic agreements.

Of course, not only were villages destroyed, but sites were renamed with Hebrew names. Sometimes, the official Hebrew names never stuck. Few people even in Jerusalem know that the official Hebrew name of the neighborhood of Baka is "Geulim", and that the post office there is called the Geulim post office. Everybody refers to it as Baka, perhaps because the original Arab neighborhood was used to settle Arabic-speaking Jewish refugees from Arab countries.

As for the claim that there was no country of Palestine -- well, that is really silly. There was no modern state of Palestine, but the peoples of Palestine (including the small Jewish communities) had every reason to expect that in time there would be a state, and that given the principle of self-determination, that state would have the character of the majority of its inhabitants. This happened throughout the middle east, and indeed, throughout the world, with the breakup of empires.

Anyway, for those interested in pursuing this subject beyond the information on Palestinian websites, one can consult Meron Benvenisti's Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948, and Salman Abu Sitta's Atlas of Palestine 1948, if you can get a hold on it.

And please look at the website of those Israelis who are trying to bring to the Israeli consciousness the tragedy of the Nakba, the Israeli organization Zochrot. One of their activities is to go around the country posting signs with the old Arabic place names, sometimes in English and transliterated Hebrew.

Hebron Watch -- Beginning of the Redemption?

Worth quoting in full...

Last update - 09:34 09/08/2007 Evacuation orders issued to settlers in four Hebron stores

By Nadav Shragai, Haaretz Correspondent

The Civil Administration has issued evacuation orders for four more Hebron stores where settlers squatted two years ago. The stores are located in the "triangle market," not far from the wholesale market from where two Jewish families were evacuated by Israel Defense Forces on Tuesday.

The evacuation order, which was issued following a petition by Peace Now, will not take place immediately as the settlers have appealed to the Judea and Samaria Appeals Committee, and their case will be heard in two weeks.

The stores in question are on Jewish-owned land that was inhabited by Jews until 1929, when Arabs massacred many members of the local community and the survivors fled.

But the settlers argue that aside from being on Jewish-owned land, the stores are an integral part of the Jewish Avraham Avinu neighborhood: They share common walls with the houses on the edge of the neighborhood, and the neighborhood's access road passes between them.

Between 1948 and 1967, when Jordan controlled Hebron, the stores were managed by the kingdom's custodian of enemy property. After Israel captured the territories in 1967, it upheld the leases that Palestinian shopkeepers had signed with the Jordanian body and gave them the status of protected tenants.

In 1994, following both Baruch Goldstein's massacre of Muslim worshipers at the Cave of the Patriarchs and a stabbing in the area, the IDF closed both the wholesale and triangle markets and forbade Palestinian merchants to enter. Some time later, after the squatters moved in, two of the merchants who had rented the stores asked Peace Now to approach the Civil Administration for an eviction order on their behalf.

The Civil Administration granted the order, ruling that the army's closure of the market did not cancel the tenants' rights to the stores, and that the Jewish squatters had no rights to the property. "This was a deliberate, planned and illegal act that challenged the rule of law in the city of Hebron," it wrote in its submission to the appeals committee.

Orit Struk, one of the leaders of Hebron's Jewish community, said the army prepared a defensive plan for the Hebron settlers "whose goal was to reduce to a minimum the number of [closed] Palestinian stores in the vicinity of the Jewish community," and this plan was approved by the military prosecution, the state prosecution and "every professional and political echelon."

Hagit Ofran of Peace Now retorted that the squatters were following the settlers' well-known recipe for "taking over properties in Hebron. The authorities see everything and know what has been done, but choose to ignore it and do nothing until a complaint is filed. Only when we threatened to go to the High Court of Justice did the system begin to move, and I hope that in the end, the squatters will be evacuated, as happened in the wholesale market."

Principles of Torah Morality according to Tony Soprano (Dov Lior, Moshe Levinger, Shlomo Riskin, Mordecai Eliyahu, Hanan Porat, Elyahim Levanon, etc.)

In my previous post, I talked about how one should go about doing Jewish ethics, and I suggested to look for the broad ethical assumption behind specific Jewish legal rulings. But the broad ethical assumptions are also subject to debate.

Consider the following statements that are much-cited by rightwing rabbis and that Tony Soprano could enthusiastically endorse

1. Get the other guy before he gets you.

2. Don't take pity on your enemies.

3. Only take care of your own folks.

The classical statements,in Hebrew, go as follows:

1. Ha-Kam le-horgkeha, hashkem le-horego

2. Kol ha-merahem al-ha-akhzarim, etc.

3. Aniye Irkha Kodemim.

All three principles are found in rabbinic sources. The first one is the rule of self-defence. If somebody rises up to kill you, get up early to kill him. The discussion in rabbinic sources tells us how to apply the specific law of when somebody sneaks into your house, but it does not address the question where or how to apply the broad ethical principle behind the law. What is legitimate self-defence? There is, of course, legal discussion -- but what of the ethics behind it?

The second principle says, "Whoever has mercy on the cruel people, will end by being cruel to merciful people." Let us call this a conservative defence of retributive justice -- letting criminals off without punishment is bad for the society. While the principle is prima facie reasonable, questions of definition and application also inevitably arise.

The third principle says that when you have to choose between giving charity to the poor of your own city, and those of a foreign city, you should first take care of your own. A fine statement of preferential morality, and, again, in accordance with common sense morality.

Now, Tony Soprano has his good points, but on the whole he is not a moral person. If he lives his life according to the aforementioned Jewish principles, does that mean that they are unethical? But we have seen that they seem reasonable according to common-sense morality.

The problem, of course, is that these are Soprano's only principles, the one he constantly appeals to, and the one he constantly interprets according to his own unethical desires. The problem is not in the principles themselves, but in the way they are used by an immoral agent.

And so we come to the the aformentioned West Bank rabbis, who have reduced Torah morality by their selective reading and overemphasis, based on their perverse ultra-nationalism and religious fundamentalism, to mafia morality.

You see, it may come down to personal morality after all. If the person applying a moral principle herself possesses a vicious moral character, the application of the principle is perverse.

Maimonides notes that physically ill people taste sweet things as bitter and bitter things as sweet. So, too, people who are sick in the soul, i.e., have vicious character traits.

The Jewish ethical and legal tradition can indeed be sweet, but in the hands of a hard-hearted rabbi the illiberal elements can triumph, and then Torah becomes a sam ha-mavvet, a potion of death.

Egoistic ultranationalism and an inability to understand the other has poisoned these rabbis. Whenever they open their mouths on questions of Israel/Palestine, they desecrate God's name in public.

Jewish Ethics and the Question of Justice for Palestinians and Israelis -- Part One

How does one do Jewish ethics? That is, how does one appeal to the Jewish tradition for ethical guidance? Of course, one needn’t be interested in doing so, but if one is – then what is a good way of going about it?

Ask most orthodox Jews, especially rabbis, about Jewish ethics and they will answer you with Jewish law. You want to talk about the morality of abortion according to Jewish sources? Euthenasia? Homosexuality? The rabbis will consult what other (orthodox) rabbis have said about these topics in their law books and responsa. They will try to convince you that Jewish law (halakha) and Jewish ethics (musar) are not only coextensive, but that the latter is reducible to the former.

The halakhicization of Jewish ethics is a recent development in the history of Jewish literature. Alongside the extensive Jewish legal literature, there is an even more extensive Jewish ethical (musar) literature, which, if one looks at the number of manuscripts and printed editions, reached a much larger audience than the small, professional class of jurists that read the legal literature. To consider contemporary issues in light of classical Jewish ethical sources, one needs apparently to take into consideration this literature.

Unfortunately, the musar literatue is of little help in dealing with social and political morality. Most of the classical manuals of Jewish ethics deal with personal morality, specifically, with the virtues an individual should seek and the vices she should avoid. Personal morality is not immediately relevant to determining the rightness or wrongness of social acts, practices, or principles.

But if we leave out both halakha and musar, what do we have left for doing Jewish ethics?

Well, we could take the route of non-orthodox Jewish thinkers, which is to try to appeal to broad ethical imperatives from the Jewish tradition (“Seek peace”; “Pursue justice”; Sanctify God’s Name”). The problem here is that these principles are vacuous without some sort of specification; they can be enthusiastically upheld by people with moral sensibilities as disparate as those of Martin Buber and Meir Kahane. How does one pursue justice? How does one sanctify God’s name? How does one adjudicate conflicts between principles?

Again, to achieve specific Jewish ethical guidance, the orthodox will reach for their law codes and rabbinical responsa. As an orthodox Jew, I have no problem claiming that Jewish law can and should be a source of Jewish ethical reflection. This does not mean adopting the modern orthodox fallacy (heresy?) of reducing ethics to law. Rather it means that precedents can be brought from the Jewish legal tradition not only to determine Jewish law, but also to uncover the broad ethical assumptions on which that law is based. In most cases, these broad ethical assumptions will have nothing specifically “Jewish” about them. Derekh eretz kadmah le-Torah General morality precedes Jewish morality. But how they are specified may be instructive about how we can go about doing Jewish ethics.

In a subsequent post I will apply these general reflections to the question of justice for Israelis and Palestinians.

Time to learn some Mishnah…

David Shulman's Dark Hope

Some important books have come out in the last few weeks in Israel, and I thought I would mention a few of them in short posts.

First, David Shulman’s Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine (2007, U of Chicago Press)

David Shulman is the Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies at Hebrew University, and a world-renown expert in Sanskrit and the history of Indian religion. The book is his diary of activities with Ta’ayush, the Jewish-Arab organization founded during the dark days of the Second Intifada that provides food and relief supplies for Palestinians and Bedouin.

I read the Hebrew version of the book (Ha-Tikvah ha-Marah) this past Shabbat, and at first I found more marah than tikvah. But then I thought of the activists like Prof. Shulman, and I felt a bit of hope.

I thought I would translate a few pages for this blog, but Prof. Shulman told me that the English version had already come out. So please check it out on Amazon

This is not a book about the peace process, terrorism, geopolitics, the rise of Islam, Jewish fundamentalism, yada yada yada. This is a book about how innocent people’s lives are made miserable on a daily basis, and how Jews and Palestinians have come together to help them. I really urge you get it and give it to your friends and family. Testify, testify, testify.

Oh, heck…I can’t help it…just a couple of lines of my own translation from the Afterword, and may the U. of Chicago Press have mercy on my soul:

"'You shall remember that you were a slave'… 'Shake yourself from the dust, arise'…'To loose the chains of injustice, and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke'…'Whoever sustains one life, it is as if he sustained an entire world'…Did I invent these voices? It seems that they burst forth from the depths of a dream, a distant and troubling dream. To be right – that’s nothing. To be “righteous” – that is the true disaster. But to do what you can – that is everything.

"We know our adversaries, the ones close to us: those who sit with indifference in government ministries, or who are recruited in the army’s high command, or who simply stay at home, apathetic and inactive. We shall meet them at every corner. At every house that they destroy, every olive tree they uproot, every rocky field that they go to steal. We will struggle with them again and again,without violence. We will track, document, and testify, and occasionally, we will stop them. They have weapons. We have each other – and a smidgeon of hope in the darkness."

What more can I add?

The Realistic Dove, Mondoweiss, and the Amhaaretz Zionist

Here I am, thinking that I am hot stuff for starting a blog that is neither anti-Zionist nor political Zionist, but represents a line of thought of somebody (Magnes) who was universally dismissed (except by folks like Hannah Arendt), and then it turns out that I have a place in the blogosphere. Place me between Phil Weiss's mondoweiss and Dan Fleshler's realisticdove. That may not be fair to them. They have professional blogs, and I don't know how to type. Also, they're going to hell because they shave during the Three Weeks (wait a minute, I shave during the Three Weeks...ok, so they shave during the Nine Days.)

Anyway, thank you Mobius for making the shiddukh between me and the Realistic Dove....I really hope that my readers from Efrat (you know who you are) check out the Realistic Dove. Pick on him for a while...

It's Rosh Hodesh Av, and I would like to put in my own two cents about bringing together the Jewish anti-zionists and the so-called Zionist left that Dan F. has been talking about I think I have some credentials here because I am a) a religious fanatic who blesses the moon once a month; b) a wimpy liberal democrat who thinks Chomsky is a moderate and c) an opponent of the one-state solution because it shafts the Palestinian people.

What I am about to say seems to me trivially obvious. There is an overriding moral imperative to end the Occupation. That is the platform on which all decent people should agree. There may be moral considerations in favor of slavery, child-sacrifice, wife-beating, and apartheid. I don't recognize any. Ditto for the Occupation.

It will be said that ending the Occupation may endanger the Jewish State. But I say that if the price to pay for the State of Israel is the ongoing occupation of three and a half-million Palestinians, then that price is too high -- and that no decent human being -- and I include all the political Zionist ideologues from Herzl and Weizmann to Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion -- would agree to that price. Liberal zionists, it is about time that you say the same thing, loudly and clearly.

Who belongs in that coalition? I, for one, would find it difficult to sit on the same platform with folks who think that 9/11 was a Zionist plot. But I would sit on that platform. Because even though the thought offends me, as a Jew and as a rational animal, I understand where it is coming from. And as long as the person who thinks so doesn't want to gas Jews, then she should be part of the coalition. Phil Weiss is right -- this is not just a Jewish issue, this is an American issue, and, of course, a human rights issue.

But we all wear different headcoverings, even those of us who go bareheaded. That is the first coalition. There are two more.

The second coalition is the coalition that I believe in deeply -- and that is the Palestinian-Jewish coalition. The history of Zionism has been the history of Jews talking to Jews about how much land we can morally take from the Palestinians. That debate is over for me. Jews should be joining together with Palestinians -- and the place for that is not only in Israel, but davka in the diaspora communities, where American Jews and Palestinian Americans already have so much in common. I am not talking dialogue here...I am talking coalition. See where you agree and see where you don't agree, and work together on what you agree. And remember -- the balance of power is unequal -- so on matters to be negotiated, one should tilt toward the Palestinian side. (A subject for another post -- what we Jews owe to the Palestinian people.)

The third coalition is the coalition of Jews against the Occupation. OK, I am a tribalist here -- Jews mean a lot to me. Norman Finkelstein, Daniel Boyarin, Noam Chomsky -- all moderates in my book, by the way -- mean a lot to me also BECAUSE they are Jewish. Here, I have gripes on both sides. When Tony Judt and Norman Finkelstein snipe at each other, it bothers me, but both are smart enough to know that they stand together against the kohot ha-tumah (better left untranslated) in the world. And they do...Judt was supportive of Finkelstein's tenure bid after Dershowitz stepped in, even though Finkelstein and he have their "issues". But both are adults.

My request from the Zionist liberals is that they NEVER join the chorus of rightwingers who bash the anti-Zionist or non-Zionist left. Disagree with Finkelstein but don't bash him. In another post I will take Gershom Gorenberg, a guy to whom we owe a great deal for his book on the settlements, to task for this. Have your disagreements, but resist the temptation to look over your right shoulder and say to Alvin Rosenfeld, "Hey, I am your side...these guys are heretics."

I have to go to work. Have a good month, even though everything is the pits here in Jerusalem.