Central European Trip

The focus of this blog will radically shift direction for the duration of nearly a month (September 24 to October 18) while I travel throughout Central Europe. I fly into Warsaw on September 25 and I hope to visit not only Poland, but Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Hungary as well. It is a balance between trying not to spread myself too thin and trying to see a lot, because this is a part of the world whose history has always fascinated me.

I became interested in history through studying the Holocaust, primarily on my own. The systematic extermination of the Jews, unprecedented in history in terms of its scope and the determination and efficiency of the perpetrators, has always haunted me. My primary interest has been the perpetrators, including Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, Eichmann, and Höss, to name some of the most notorious, as well as lower-ranking, anonymous individuals, chronicled so well in the work of the historian Christopher Browning. The question of how men could remorselessly kill countless women and children, and then return home and live normal family lives, has always appalled me, yet at the same time it has drawn me into the study of this dark period, and of other periods (such as the Soviet).

While my focus has been on the murderers, it is time to shift gears and honor the murdered. The colorful scenery of the Jews of Warsaw, Chelm, and the shtetls of Central/Eastern Europe is never to be seen again. It only exists now in sepia-toned photographs, the writings the Jews left, and in the memories of elderly Jews who will not be with us for much longer. For centuries, the Jews lived a (relatively) comfortable existence in Poland, whose king Casimir the Great, in the 14th century, welcomed them as they escaped persecution after the Black Death. It is therefore all too painfully ironic that that same place, Poland, is now the graveyard of the European Jews.

I did not choose these countries for the food, the beer, or the vistas, although I look forward to all three of these delights. It is my purpose to take a trip through the heart of darkness, and to ponder some of the heaviest thoughts that could trouble a mind; to visit those cemeteries of European Jewry: Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Majdanek. This is a trip of the utmost important to me, something that I have felt compelled to do for several years. I look forward to completing it and to sharing it with you all.  

Israel and International Opinion

What we are seeing around the world, in response to Israel's Operation Protective Edge against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, is an almost perfect illustration of the hypocrisy and selective outrage of the international community. Right next door, there is a civil war of terrifying proportions in Syria that has seeped into Iraq. This past week, in an enormous battle between the Syrian Army and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS, now just going by the Islamic State, or IS), more than 700 people were killed over two days. Overall, at least 170,000 people (and frankly, probably closer to 200,000) have died in the course of the Syrian civil war since its inception as peaceful protests in March 2011. Nine million Syrians have been displaced. At least a quarter of tiny Lebanon's population now consists of refugees fleeing the Syrian hellhole. In Iraq, ISIS has captured Mosul, swept down the Euphrates Valley and has marched to the outskirts of Baghdad, looting, destroying, crucifying, and beheading the entire way. ISIS has displayed the heads of people it has massacred on its Twitter page. But who really cares? The world decides to, instead, unleash its opprobrium in a more westerly direction, to that dagger-shaped, New Jersey-sized country on the Mediterranean - Israel. Of course.

Violent, hate-filled protests have broken out in Boston, Los Angeles, Paris, Rotterdam, The Hague, Berlin, Paris, etc. not to mention the capitals of the Middle East. There is certainly a selective outrage toward the "Zionists" (read: "Jews"). When the Assad regime gassed the people of the Ghouta east of Damascus, the world kind of pretended to be mad about it for a week before moving on to domestic politics, LeBron James, or whatever. However, as soon as there is the exchange of gunfire in the West Bank, or an IAF air raid on the Gaza Strip, or, Heaven forfend, an Israeli incursion, the world simply does not have time for anything else. There are rallies, and angry vituperation, and poisonous anti-Semitic invective spewed both orally and via social media. The other, and far bloodier, conflicts in the Middle East simply do not exercise this much passion (among Westerners, that is). This utter obsession with Israel/Palestine is not rational and, to use a word often used in this context (stupidly), disproportionate. If you were to strip Jews from the equation, and moved the location of the fighting to Greenland, no one would care about this conflict. No one. 

The obsession comes from two places: a naive one and a dark one. 

On the naive side: the absurd notion of post-colonialism that the wealthier, stronger (and usually whiter) side is, ipso facto, wrong and evil. The poorer, weaker (and usually darker) side is, ipso facto, correct and good. This ridiculous one-size-fits-all to history is the opposite of helpful, or analytical. There have been times where it has been correct, and there have been times when it has not been. This is what happens when you try to reduce the complexities of history, culture, and society to arbitrary formulae conjured up by academics in Cambridge, New York, Oxford, Paris, or Berkeley. History is not a "science" and certainly not mathematics; so while the laws of physics dictate natural phenomena, there simply is not a comparable framework within which historical progress, or lack thereof, must operate. The one-size-fits-all approach is somehow seen as sophisticated when in fact it is necessarily rigid and close-minded. This approach has dominated academia, and white liberals trying to feel better about themselves adopt pet causes, most predominantly the Palestinian cause. The whole thing would be comical if it were not so deadly serious in consequence. The fact of the matter is that just because Israel is wealthier and more technologically advanced, that does not make it "the aggressor." Just because Hamas is poorer and less technologically advanced (from its own doing), that does not make them noble freedom fighters. Far from it. They stand for everything that the left claims to stand against. And the whole "white-brown" or "white-black" dichotomy collapses in the face of Arabs who could pass for Europeans and Israelis who are of Middle Eastern, African, Persian, Afghan, etc descent. There are black soldiers in the IDF (two of the dead Israeli soldiers in this conflict were black). The whole thing is absurd and wrong. But for the uninformed, it's very easy to see this as a "white-black" thing, both ethically speaking and racially speaking. That's where the moronic college students come into the picture, and they're the ones pushing these rallies in Boston, LA, and Washington, D.C.

On the dark side: anti-Semitism. It is impossible for me to isolate Israel's Jewish nature from the opprobrium it receives from the international community. Not when Bashar al-Assad and ISIS are doing what they are doing right next door, or people are raped and murdered by the thousands in the Congo and Sudan, or when the North Korean government continues its weird Stalinist policies, and we hear very little, proportionally anyway, about it. When the bullets start flying in Gaza or the West Bank, it dominates the world section of newspapers to the detriment of other, bloodier conflicts. It is very sad to say, and I say this as someone who admires Western civilization more than anything, but anti-Semitism is a central feature of Western civilization. The obsession with the Jews has dogged the Westerner, historically speaking, much more than it has the Arab or the Persian. The terminus of this road was the Birkenau gatehouse. There seems to be an ecstatic, cathartic glee that Europeans experience when they get to shout about how the Jews/Zionists/Israelis are murdering babies and committing genocide against the Palestinians. They enjoy it. Because unadulterated anti-Semitism is not acceptable in polite society, it can be cloaked in anti-Zionism, and Europeans can get that Jew-sized elephant off their chests and scream and rant about the Jews doing these evil things. It is, in many ways, the modern version of the blood libel, which is today found most frequently in the Middle East, although in certain circles in Europe and the United States as well.

In sum, Israeli military action brings with it disproportionate (yes, this word is correct in this context) shouting from the rooftops, rage, rallies, and violence. This is not the case with any other conflict. Syrians get exercised about the Syrian civil war, and the murderousness of Bashar al-Assad and ISIS. And they absolutely should, because their country is shattered and hundreds of thousands of their compatriots have been killed. But where are the Westerners at those rallies? Where are the "die-ins" that we saw in Boston? Where are the equivalents of the shouts of "Zionist scum" directed toward Bashar al-Assad or toward ISIS? I haven't heard any of them calling for the slaughter of all Alawites, of whom the Assads are the most prominent representative (nor should they) but I have heard protesters calling for Jews to be sent back to Birkenau. There is a mindless rage toward any Israeli action, which no matter how limited or restrained is "disproportionate" (and, no, this word is not correct in this context). But with the rage comes the deep, sensual pleasure at being able to unload it. 

The Geneva Conference and the Reality of the Syrian Conflict

The peace talks between the Syrian opposition and the Syrian regime in Geneva, Switzerland have failed. This will not be a shock to anyone but the most naive. While some have tried to suggest that the mere fact that the two parties were sitting in the same room was a positive step, the reality was that, even still, the parties dealt with their counterparts via the UN.

There are very serious issues on the ground in Syria. The major players on the rebel "side", the Islamic Front, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), and Jabhat al-Nusra (Front of Victory) all refused to attend. The latter two groups are affiliated with al Qaeda and the Islamic Front and ISIS are actively fighting each other. The rebel "side" is not a side at all - the violent fighting between the different groups suggests that Syria's civil war will be a long-run thing, and that it will continue to leak into Iraq (where al Qaeda flags have waved in Ramadi and Fallujah) and Lebanon, whose politics are intrinsically linked with those of Syria whether it likes it or not. The Syrian National Council withdrew from the Syrian National Coalition, which was "representing" the rebels in Geneva, because it refused to participate in the talks with the regime. Meanwhile, Bashar al-Assad's forces continue to drop barrel bombs on cities such as Aleppo and Homs, and to besiege the Palestinian neighborhood of Yarmouk on the southern outskirts of Damascus (dozens of Palestinians have died from starvation due to this siege).

The sectarianism of the conflict has intensified to the point where the Middle East is now defined by the Sunni-Shia split. While historically significant and omnipresent, this split has reached a level of phenomenal violence and obsession of which the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi would be proud. While the split was something that motivated Zarqawi and Al Qaeda in Iraq, that violence was largely contained within Iraqi borders. This is not the case anymore as Sunnis and Shiites kill each other in Syria, the heart of the Middle East, as well as Iraq and Lebanon. Sunni fighters call their Shiite opponents "majus" (a reference to Zoroastrianism, the ancient Persian religion), "rawafidh" (refusers - the Shiites refuse the legitimacy of the Rashidun Caliphs preceding Ali), and, less historically but more venomously, they call their enemies dogs. Hezbollah is called "Hezb al-Shaytan" (party of Satan), the opposite of Hezbollah's true meaning (party of God), and they call Hassan Nasrallah Nasr al-Lat (al-Lat was a pre-Islamic Arabian goddess). Shiite fighters refer to Sunnis as takfiris (takfir means to call your opponent an apostate, which means death), Wahhabis, and Umayyads (the caliphate reigning from Damascus from 661-750 that is hated virulently by Shiites for their murder of Ali's son Hussein at Karbala in 680, among other reasons). A great analysis on this phenomenon can be found here.

This represents nothing less than an apocalyptic clash within the Islamic world. This is not something that Europeans in expensive suits can fix from their hotel suites overlooking Lake Geneva. There is primordial hatred and fear on display here, of the most vicious kind. Many innocent people, both Sunnis and Shiites of various stripes, are being caught in the middle and will continue to be killed for the foreseeable future. This should not be seen as a black and white struggle because, as mentioned, there is marked infighting between Sunnis on the ground in Syria. ISIS is the most extreme exponent of al Qaeda's ideology (indeed, its leader went beyond the writ of al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri when he tried to force Jabhat al-Nusra to merge with his group); Jabhat al-Nusra has tense relations with ISIS because of ISIS' above-mentioned power grab; and the Islamic Front  seeks a Sharia state in Syria. The Islamic Front has kicked ISIS out of many towns over which it had previously held sway, including Raqqa, a city in north-central Syria over which ISIS had ruled since last spring. Islamic Front fighters captured ISIS' headquarters in Aleppo a few weeks ago. As it has been faced with more defeats, ISIS has responded with suicide bombings not only in Syria, but in Lebanon and Iraq as well. These separate states represent, to the radicals of ISIS, one large, united area that needs to belong to Islam - their version of Islam. All of this underscores the danger to the region at large as the Sunni-Shia split, and infighting among Sunnis, spirals out of control.

Ariel Sharon: The Lion of Israel

The name "Ariel" in Hebrew means "lion (ari) of God (El)." It could not have been a more fitting name for Ariel Sharon, who died on Saturday at the age of 85. A tough guy, a brilliant and hard-headed soldier who fought in every Israeli war since 1948, the "Father of the Settlements", the architect of the 1982 war in Lebanon, the fierce counterterrorist, and, ultimately, a politician forced to confront his own principles - this, and so much more, was Ariel Sharon.

Sharon was born to Belorussian immigrants in Kfar Malal, north of Tel Aviv, on February 26, 1928. As a young commander in Israel's War of Independence, Sharon led men in battle several times in 1947 and 1948. He fought in the first (of five) battles for Latrun, a strategically important village. Jewish Jerusalem was besieged and the road from Tel Aviv had to pass through Latrun and other villages inhabited by Arabs. Therefore, the capture of Latrun was necessary to keep the road safe for convoys traveling to Jerusalem. Ultimately, it remained in Jordanian hands and was not part of the Jewish state until 1967. At Latrun, in May 1948 (about two weeks after David Ben-Gurion announced the independence of the State of Israel), Sharon was left for dead before being rescued by a 16-year-old comrade. 

Although later in life Sharon was seen as the star representative of Israel's right wing, he was really, in his own words, a "pragmatic" Zionist as opposed to an "ideological" one: he cared more for the clearing of swamps, the building of houses, the raising of animals, and the planting of olive trees than for high-flying intellectual debate about the nature of Zionism and the Jewish state. When one reads his autobiography, one is struck by his dedication to the professionalization of the military and to doing everything in his power to protect the State of Israel. There is no political philosophizing to be found, very little about his views concerning the intense political debates between the  Revisionists and Mapai in the 1940s (although he does say that he sympathized with and even envied Irgun militants). The settlements needed to be built to protect Israel, and not for any real ideological reason (more on this below). Israel could not depend on anyone else's charming words; it had to depend on itself, its own hard work and ingenuity. Sharon was more of a doer than a thinker, which is not to strike a blow at his intelligence, which was considerable; rather, it is to illustrate the stunning activeness of the man. 

In 1953, Sharon became the leader of Unit 101, a special forces unit within the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) whose purpose was to conduct raids across the Israeli border in retaliation for attacks by the fedayeen - Palestinian guerrillas who attacked Jewish population centers from bases in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. In one such raid on Qibya, in the Jordanian-administered West Bank, dozens of Arab civilians were killed when Israeli soldiers demolished buildings. Sharon would later say that he specifically had his men call into the buildings to make sure no one was in them before setting the charges, but was surprised to discover the next day that 69 Arab civilians had been killed. The raid on Qibya was in retaliation for the murder of a young Jewish mother and her infant children. The killers had infiltrated Israel by way of Qibya. This reprisal was particularly intense because it was intended to be a major deterrent against further fedayeen raids. Instead, however, these forays continued (as did Unit 101's counter-actions) and were ultimately one of the reasons for the Sina Campaign of 1956 (Israel's reasons for fighting that war were: 1) fear of Nasser's new arsenal from the Soviet Union, via the Czech Republic; 2) the fedayeen raids; 3) Egypt's closure of the Straits of Tiran).

During that conflict, Sharon sent a reconnaissance unit into the Mitla Pass, a narrow gorge in the Sinai that was heavily-defended by Egyptian defenders. Thirty-eight Israeli soldiers were killed in the fighting. This decision has been heavily criticized to this very day, including by men who fought in the pass, as entirely unnecessary, either from a tactical or strategic point of view. Sharon, for his part, argued that his position at the eastern entrance of the pass was untenable, and he sent the unit into the pass to seek better ground.

Eleven years later, Israel fought in the momentous Six-Day War. Sharon, now a general, made his mark by capturing Egyptian fortifications stretching from Abu Ageila to Um-Shihan in the Sinai Desert. This was a hugely important accomplishment that allowed the Israelis to control the logistical supply routes in Sinai. 

Sharon, already proven a tough, even foolhardy, commander of men, earned his major achievement in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In that conflict, Sharon launched a successful counter-attack against Egyptian armored forces and succeeded in crossing the Suez Canal (infuriating his commander, Shmuel Gonen, who wanted to establish a wider corridor on the east bank of the canal before crossing). In doing so, his forces encircled the Egyptian Third Army, which was only saved by the intervention of the United States: Henry Kissinger wanted to take this opportunity to help "flip" Egypt into the U.S. camp of the Cold War (this was ultimately successful). Sharon's accomplishments in this war, and photographs showing his head wrapped in a white bandage, solidified his image in Israel as a military hero. He was now a living legend of the IDF.

Sharon, up to this point associated with the Labor Party, became a co-founder of the center-right Likud Party with Menachem Begin, for whom he served as Minister of Agriculture and later, controversially, as Minister of Defense. This in and of itself was a revolutionary move, because up to this point, something like 99% of all leading military figures in Israel were Labor Party members. As Minister of Agriculture, Sharon was a leader of the settlement movement. While individual settlements had been established in the environs of Jerusalem and the West Bank after 1967 under Labor governments, their number astronomically increased under the patronage of Sharon. Sharon told the settlers to "grab every hilltop" in the West Bank to secure Israel's eastern front against potential aggression from Jordan, Iraq, and the Palestinians. It is clear that his motivations in building and populating the settlements lay in security and "creating facts on the ground" - if Jews lived in the West Bank, the land would essentially become part of Israel, significantly broadening the tiny country's waist with hilly terrain. Israel required the West bank's hilly spine to provide it strategic depth. Sharon, a secular man, was certainly not motivated by a messianic fervor: while he respected the Jewish history of the place, he was not one to go on at length about that history and how it gave the Jews the right to be there. Begin was known to speak at length on this topic, as was, interestingly, the fiercely secular Moshe Dayan. Nonetheless, Sharon was highly regarded by many of the fundamentalist religious settlers, who are motivated by such a messianic fervor, until he led Israel's disengagement from Gaza in 2005.

In 1982, Sharon's most controversial moment arose. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had been kicked out of Jordan in September 1970 and had succeeded in creating a state within a state in southern Lebanon. PLO fighters launched rockets at towns and villages in Galilee. Using the pretext of the assassination attempt on Israel's ambassador to Great Britain in June 1982, the Israeli army launched an invasion of Lebanon, pushing through the south of that country beyond the Litani River and, ultimately, besieging Beirut. Many speculate that Sharon had kept Prime Minister Menachem Begin in the dark as to his intentions in Lebanon which were, essentially:

1. Destroy the PLO in Lebanon
2. Change the balance of power within the chaotic Lebanese political environment so that the Maronite Christians would take control of the country and, following that, sign a peace treaty with Israel.

While the first goal was achieved, the second goal was hugely ambitious and came to naught. In September 1982, Bashir Gemayel, Lebanon's president-elect, a Maronite Christian, and the head of the Phalange group in Lebanon, was assassinated. In retaliation, Elie Hobeika, one of Gemayel's commanders, sent some of his troops into the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in West Beirut. The consequences were horrifying: several hundreds of Palestinians, men, women, and children, were slaughtered. An Israeli inquiry later found that, although Sharon was not directly responsible for the massacre, he did allow the Phalangists into the camp and he should have been aware of what would have happened to the Palestinians there. Sharon initially refused to resign from his post, but eventually did so in 1983. This essentially cast a shadow over Sharon for the next two decades - while he served in the Shamir and Netanyahu governments, he was decidedly not in the limelight and was ultimately never able to attain his mission: to become the IDF Chief of Staff. This is the major reason why Sharon is, to this day, considered the main "Israeli butcher" by Palestinians, Lebanese, and many anti-Israel activists and thinkers around the world. TIME magazine even accused him of actively perpetrating the massacre, for which Sharon sued the publication for libel.

In September 2000, Ariel Sharon made a visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem's Old City. He did not enter any of the buildings of the complex. Immediately afterward, the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel proper exploded in the Second Intifada (or "Al Aqsa" Intifada because of Sharon's perceived slight of that Muslim holy site). While at the time many viewed Sharon's visit as needlessly provocative, and considered it the immediate cause of the Second Intifada, it has since come to light that the uprising and terror campaign was something that Yasser Arafat and the head honchos of the PLO had been planning for several months. Sharon's visit was simply a convenient pretext and alibi.

After a rash of suicide bombings in Israel, the country's frustrated and frightened electorate brought Sharon to the premiership in March 2001. While certainly controversial, he was also seen as a man who could be trusted to protect his country. In Operation Defensive Shield, the IDF successfully crushed terrorist centers throughout the West Bank. Also controversially (although not in Israel, where Sharon's hands were forced), it was under Sharon that construction of the West Bank barrier began. It should be noted that the idea of separation between Israel and the Palestinians had originally been a Labor idea, and had been explicitly urged by Yitzhak Rabin in the early 1990s. Sharon and others in Likud were opposed to the idea of separation because it implied that Israel did not have sovereignty over the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Jews were just as entitled to live in Maaleh Adumim, Ariel, and Efrat as they were to live in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Netanya. Sharon and others on the right wing of the spectrum did not want to build a barrier because they felt that, in doing so, it would become the de facto border between Israel and the future state of Palestine - and they did not want this to happen, given the reasons mentioned above. However, under relentless public pressure (over 90 percent), Sharon agreed to the construction of the separation barrier. This barrier has been castigated as an "apartheid wall" since its inception, and has been a stick with which to beat the state of Israel. But it is undoubtedly true, as statistics illustrate, that the barrier has been effective in preventing suicide bombings in Israel. The vast majority of suicide bombers, prior to its construction, had originated in the West Bank, easily infiltrated into Israel proper, and then exploded themselves in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The barrier put a stop to all that.

In 2005, Sharon made another decision that caused him to go against long-held principles: namely, the decision to remove not only the IDF, but Israeli civilians, from their homes in Gaza (and four small settlements in the northern West Bank). For the "Father of the Settlements," this assuredly could not have been easy. Because Sharon did not trust his Palestinian interlocutors one whit, and felt that there was no true partner for peace, this move was made entirely unilaterally. He argued that in the final analysis, this meant that Gaza would be under Palestinian sovereignty, so that if rockets continued to be fired into Israel, the IDF would be able to declare war against another sovereign entity and not be seen to be oppressing a subject people. This, however, did not, and does not, prevent many individuals from claiming that Gaza is still, de facto, occupied because it is under siege by Israel. Many settlers and their supporters were concerned that the Gaza disengagement was but a dress rehearsal for withdrawal from the West Bank, which would have involved many more people and many more financial resources. It would be even more difficult emotionally because it is the West Bank, not Gaza (or anywhere in Israel's heavily populated coastal plain) that is the cradle and heart of Jewish civilization. Hebron and Bethel are important locations in the Tanakh, not Ashdod and Hod HaSharon. Ultimately, Sharon bolted Likud and formed a new centrist party, Kadima, whose members supported his push for disengagement.

We will never know the full extent of Sharon's intentions because he suffered a stroke in December 2005 and then a massive follow-up stroke in January 2006, which left him in a vegetative state until his death this past Saturday. But it was the disengagement that made Sharon at least somewhat respectable again in international discourse. It helped to rehabilitate his image as a brutal war criminal, at least in Western eyes (many Arabs, on the other hand, celebrated his death by handing out sweets). I don't necessarily think that it was a 180 degree turn. Sharon was a man dedicated to the protection of the Jewish people and the State of Israel, and he did what he thought he had to do to make that happen. Not trusting his Palestinian counterparts, yet tired of having to protect small Jewish settlements amidst a hostile population, he decided on unilateral disengagement. The intifada proved to him that there could be no peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians and, therefore, that Israel's presence in Gaza, and even in the West Bank, was untenable. For this, the settler movement now holds Sharon in considerable contempt - one MK of Jewish Home recently said that it had been the will of God that Sharon went into a coma when he did so that he did not give up the West Bank.

Sharon was, by all accounts, a larger-than-life personality whose nickname "The Bulldozer" was decidedly apropos. When he thought something needed to be done, he did it, even if it meant circumventing orders in the 1956 and 1973 wars, deceiving his own prime minister in 1982 (as many contend), or undoing what he had built up with his own hands (namely, the settlements). He stood up for what he believed in, even in the face of the severest criticism, whether it came from the right or left. He was known to get in fierce debates with his superiors and peers in the IDF, including Dayan, Gonen, Chaim Bar-Lev, Yigal Allon, and David Elazar. He was truly a maverick. Ultimately, Sharon's legacy is that he was, first and foremost, a fierce protector of the Jewish state. He was the shield that absorbed the blows. He loved the people and the land. He did not mince words about his hatred for Israel's enemies and he did what he could to utterly crush them. These principles informed his controversial decisions to build settlements and invade Lebanon up to Beirut. He was not a warmonger: he said once in an interview with The New Yorker that he would much rather labor at his farm than fight Israel's neighbors. While undoubtedly a roughhewn, brusque man, he was, according to many accounts, very charming as well - a perfect example of the legendary Israeli sabra. He was, indeed, the Lion of Israel and lived up to the name "Ariel." 

Peace Talks

The Israelis and Palestinians are currently in peace negotiations discussing the possibilities for a two-state solution. This is the latest iteration in a process that began with secret negotiations between Israeli academics and PLO officials in the early 1990s, and the first step culminated in the signing of the Declaration of Principles on the White House lawn in September 1993. Since then we have seen Oslo II, the Hebron Protocol, the Wye River Memorandum, the Camp David talks, the Annapolis conference, etc. In 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas the following:

• 93.5% of the West Bank (5.8% of the balance made up in land swaps with Israel and 0.7% in a corridor connecting the West Bank and the Gaza Strip).
• The entirety of the Gaza Strip 
• Sovereignty over East Jerusalem, which would become the Palestinian capital (with the Temple Mount/Haram ash-Sharif placed under the auspices of the future Palestine, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the U.S., and Israel)
• Token amount of Palestinians given the "right of return"- about 3,000. 

Abbas said that he would study the proposal but ultimately never signed it. According to him, "the gaps were wide" between the Israeli and Palestinian positions. Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat was quoted as saying, "Olmert...said: 'We will take 6.5% of the West Bank, and give in return 5.8% from the 1948 lands, and the 0.7% will constitute the safe passage, and East Jerusalem will be the capital, but there is a problem with the Haram and with what they called the Holy Basin [the Old City, Mt. of Olives, the City of David, and the Arab neighborhood Silwan].' Abu Mazen [Abbas] too [in other words, like Arafat] answered with defiance, saying, 'I am not in a marketplace or a bazaar. I came to demarcate the borders of Palestine - the June 4, 1967 borders - without detracting a single inch, and without detracting a single stone from Jerusalem, or from the holy Christian and Muslim places.' This is why the Palestinian negotiators did not sign..." [note the lack of any mention of Jewish holy places in Jerusalem. That was not by accident.]

The problem is that the Israelis and Palestinians should be "in a marketplace or a bazaar." After all, one negotiates in a bazaar. These should be negotiations, not dictations by either side.

This very brief history shows that one should not be too excited about this latest round of negotiations. Abbas has already come out saying that he will never recognize Israel as a Jewish state, will not permit an Israeli presence in the Jordan Valley, will not accept any interim agreement, never accept an agreement where the Palestinians get less than 100% of East Jerusalem (including the Jewish holy sites), etc. This is essentially the same rejection made by Abbas in 2008, and that the late Yasser Arafat made in 2000. In other words, despite the recriminations of the blame-Israel crowd, Israel has been quite willing to give up land in the quest for peace. The Palestinians have said no. And this time will be no different. 

In order to please the Palestinian Authority, Israel has agreed to release 104 prisoners in four tranches. Israel is releasing the third tranche, which consists of 26 prisoners, as I write these words. The men being released have done nasty things. No one seems to be asking themselves the larger question: if a sticking point of negotiations is for Israelis to release prisoners guilty of stabbing women and old men, and murdering fellow Palestinian "collaborators", that speaks to a deep sickness in Palestinian political culture. No country should be forced to release prisoners of this type: we are not speaking of political prisoners or prisoners of conscience. Rather we are speaking of men who have committed the most atrocious of crimes, many against innocent civilians. Furthermore, these prisoners, like prisoners before them, will be greeted with garlands when they return to their homes (and in official festivities in Ramallah). This is very disturbing, and I would venture to say that it is this mindset, combined with the "all or nothing" Götterdämmerung mentality of Palestinian nationalism, that is the cause for the failure of the peace process, not the construction of settlements in the West Bank. The latter are an irritant, but they are not the cause of the failure of talks. 

However, the international community at large does not see things this way. Our own Secretary of State has suggested that if the talks fail, there very well may be a Palestinian intifada, and implied that it would be justified. So in other words, if the Palestinians enlarge their demands (as they have historically done) and the Israelis consequently say "forget it", the Palestinians will have been implicitly permitted to launch a violent campaign against Israel. The onus, in other words, has been entirely placed on Israel. There is very little reason to believe that any peace agreement will be signed. With the combination of Palestinian/Islamic nationalism, Israeli fears and cynicism, and the lens through which the international community sees the conflict, it is not difficult to see why.

UPDATE: Here is the celebration in Ramallah, attended by Mahmoud Abbas himself.

Another Example of the BDS Movement's Obsession

The American Studies Association, a group of scholars, has voted to endorse a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. As the article points out, this is merely symbolic: it has zero real meaning lacking a support from the broader university or college. As the article also mentions, Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, has come out condemning boycotts of Israel (he supports the boycott of goods produced by settlers in the West Bank). So, looks like the residents of the ivory tower of academia are more radical in this sense than the Palestinian government itself.

This is another instance of the obsessions of the BDS Movement (Boycott, Divest, Sanction), an international group of anti-Israel activists, scholars, and so on. One of its most prominent supporters is Roger Waters, of Pink Floyd fame, who said recently that the Jewish Lobby is "particularly" powerful in the rock n roll industry. This feeds into the martyrdom complex of Waters and others who are similarly obsessed with Israel. He has compared Israeli policies vis-a-vis the Palestinians to Nazi Judenpolitik in the 1930s and even into the war period. His comments about the Jewish lobby (Note: not the "Zionist lobby"; he might have slipped) mark him as an outright anti-Semite, whether he thinks of himself consciously that way or not. He continued in the interview: "I would not have played for the Vichy government in occupied France in WWII, would not have played in Berlin either during this time...There were many people who pretended that the oppression of the Jews was not going on. From 1933 until 1946 [sic]. So this is not a new scenario. Except this time its the Palestinians who are being murdered."

Where to begin?

1. World War II ended in 1945, not 1946. This is obnoxious on my part, sure, but it needs to be emphasized just how historically ignorant this man is. Everyone with even a modicum of education knows this.

2. Jews were not being systematically murdered as early as 1933. Yes, the first concentration camp (Dachau) was established then, but its early prisoner population consisted of left-wingers and at this early stage was not remotely comparable to what the concentration camps later became (and what the concentration camps later became is likewise not comparable to the extermination camps, which were worlds different from concentration camps like Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen). This is another quibble, but I get annoyed when people do not know of what they speak.

3. There is, obviously, no systematic extermination of the Palestinians. Rather, their population has increased since they've lived under the Israeli occupation. Certainly, the Palestinians have suffered hardships and, at times, harsh Israeli policies, but seriously: there is absolutely zero parallel between anything the Palestinians have suffered, from 1948 to the present day, and the extermination of the European Jews. The obnoxious, and repetitious, assertions to the contrary do not change this fundamental fact. It is simply outrageous to compare systematic genocide to policies instituted in defense of a people, even if those policies are often harsh.

The BDS movement is much more popular in Europe than in the United States, but it is surely popular among many in academia. The movement is hypocritical, as it does not have anything bad to say about truly nasty governments. Occasionally, there have been token resolutions against the former junta in Myanmar and Mugabe's Zimbabwe. But the overarching purpose of the BDS movement is to delegitimize the State of Israel and to isolate it from the broader international community, including its cultural, educational, and scientific achievements. It sees Israel as morally equivalent to the apartheid regime in South Africa, and it wants the international community to shun Israel the way that it did South Africa. In the past, groups that make up this informal BDS movement have expressed their solidarity with Chavez's "Bolivarian Revolution," hoisted placards of the late revolutionary Che Guevara, and shown absolute, utter indifference to the viciousness of countries in the broader Middle East, such as Syria, Qaddafi's Libya, Sudan (whose government has literally perpetrated genocide), Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq, and other brutal regimes outside of the Middle East. While some universities, such as the University of Johannesburg, have canceled ties with Israeli universities, there has been no change in the status of ties with universities in dictatorial countries such as China. (Oh, and China is also an occupying power; it has occupied Tibet since 1959). The University of Johannesburg had actually issued an ultimatum to Ben-Gurion University to conduct joint research projects with a Palestinian university within six months (which would be done in consultation with UJ); if not, relations would be cut (and they were).

This is another manifestation of the obsessive fixation on the Jewish state, which I wrote about in my last post. These movements write long tracts on Israel's misdeeds against the Palestinians; the very term "BDS" brings up a gazillion hits about Israel but nothing about any other country, because no other country has an international movement designed to "BDS" it; and has been very blunt in its desire to isolate Israel from the world. For example, Britain's University and Colleges Union made Israel the target of a whopping 41% of all international resolutions. For another example, here is a letter written by Mona Baker, an Egyptian professor of translator studies at the University of Manchester who kicked two Israeli academics off the board of her journal:

“My decision [to fire you] is political, not personal. As far as I am concerned, I will always regard and treat you both as friends, on a personal level, but I do not wish to continue an official association with any Israeli under the present circumstances."

I could go on and on. There is no need to hear anything from Israeli academics because of the occupation (even though many Israeli academics are vociferous critics of the occupation themselves). Meanwhile, many of these same BDSers proudly wear the Palestinian kaffiyah (which in its origins was worn by the commoner toiling in the fields, but has become associated with the Palestinian resistance since it was adopted by Arafat), have nothing negative to say about the Palestinian Authority (whose corruption and human rights abuses are atrocious), or even Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who have nothing in common with any of these BDSers except for their hatred for Israel. These groups do not even pretend to care about other peoples under occupation or without their own state, such as the Tibetans or the Kurds.

Cultural boycott is disgusting. It goes against the grain of what should be the focus of academia: the fostering and cultivation of knowledge through free and intellectual discourse. Alice Walker, the author of The Color Purple, has long been an anti-Israel activist and BDSer. She even said that she does not want her novel to be translated into Hebrew. She also tried (unsuccessfully) to prevent Alicia Keyes from performing in Israel. Walker's personal biography finds her peculiarly obsessed with Israel, calling Israel "the greatest terrorist in that part of the world." Certainly, she has nothing negative to say about Arafat's legacy or Hamas. She explains away the firing of rockets into Israel (and would certainly do the same for suicide bombing) because it's a "David and Goliath" situation and that is all the Palestinians have.

There is very little rational about the BDS phenomenon. One BDSer, Naomi Klein, has admitted that Israel is easy to pick on because of its small size and dependence on international trade. In other words, she has made it frank that the BDS movement is a bully. What a cowardly way of thinking.

This is yet another shameful episode for those who cherish the freedom of intellectual pursuit and the marketplace of ideas.

The Fixation on Israel

One of the things that most fascinates, and disturbs, me about popular attention on the Middle East is that the vast majority of it focuses on a tiny sliver of land in the southwestern Levant and north of the Sinai Peninsula: namely, Israel and the Palestinian territories.

There are legitimate reasons for this. Modern Israel is home to locations that are holy and important to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Jesus' family was from Nazareth and he was born in Bethlehem - the former is in Israel proper and the latter is in the West Bank, just south of Jerusalem. Jesus preached throughout what is modern-day Israel and was crucified in Jerusalem. Christians descended upon the Middle East to wrest the Holy Land from Muslims in the Middle Ages. Young men fought their way through Anatolia and southern Europe to secure Jerusalem for Christendom. This is all rather mind-boggling to modern sensibilities, so we say that religion could not possibly have been the motivating factor for the Crusaders: it was greed for territory and for treasures, it was a genocidal hatred for the Muslims. While there were individual crusaders who did set out for land and wealth, and hatred for Muslims certainly did exist, these were not the main motivating factors for the Crusades. The reason was very simple: Jerusalem was holy and by right it belonged to the Christians. It also surely helped that Pope Urban II announced that any Crusaders who died fighting for Jerusalem would receive automatic salvation from God. Westerners have long been fixated on the Holy Land, in other words.

For Muslims, Jerusalem is the third holiest city. It was their original qibla (direction of prayer) and they did much to restore the city, and particularly the Temple Mount, upon their conquest in 638. The Christians, in utter contempt, were using the site of the destroyed Temple as a garbage dump. The Muslims, under Caliph Umar, cleaned this up. In 692, the magnificent Dome of the Rock was constructed at this very spot under the orders of Abd al-Malik, the Umayyad Caliph, whose court was in Damascus. Much of the aesthetically beautiful calligraphy in this shrine is dedicated to sneering at Christianity's notion of the Trinity. The much bandied-about Al-Aqsa Mosque was completed in 705. "Al Aqsa" means "the farther" or "the farthest" in Arabic, and it refers to a Quranic verse, specifically 17:1, which refers to Muhammad's Night Journey: "Blessed is He who took  His servant [Muhammad] by night from al-Masjid al-Haram to al-Masjid al-Aqsa..." "Masjid" simply means "Mosque." Al-Masjid al-Haram is the mosque that surrounds the Kaaba in Mecca.  The meaning of "Al-Masjid al-Aqsa" ("the farthest mosque") was a bit more cryptic. The Quran does not identify this location with Jerusalem or even with Palestine. This identification came later, with the Umayyads, who were the rulers of the roost in Syria. "Syria" at the time encompassed a much greater land mass than the modern state with that name, and Palestine was the southern part of it. The Umayyads sanctified Jerusalem for political reasons: to divert the Muslim hajj (pilgrimage) from Mecca to Jerusalem, which would bring in tax revenues and provide the Umayyads with political legitimacy. The mosque built on the Temple Mount was named "Al-Aqsa" to give retroactive consecration to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. The Night Journey story in the Quran was interpreted to refer to the Temple Mount: it is there from which Muhammad ascended to Heaven. The importance of Jerusalem to Muslims has waxed and waned throughout history, with significant increase when the city belongs to someone else. Hence, the importance ascribed to the city during the Crusades and now, under Israeli rule.

Palestinians have also been profoundly adept at getting the world's attention to their plight: Yasser Arafat was singularly successful in this goal. While the Palestinians' struggle with Israel was, and is, all over world headlines, struggles in other parts of the globe have been relegated either to the back pages or not noted at all. This is, of course, a function of the importance of the region in Western and Islamic tradition. That was certainly helpful to Arafat's cause.

But there is also something a bit more sinister going on here. Israel is internationally vilified in a unique way. The UN has an unhealthy obsession with the Jewish state, going after it with much more frequency and hostility than any other member nation. The EU only agreed to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist group this past summer, and this only concerns the organization's "militant wing". The Europeans like to deceive themselves that groups like Hezbollah and Hamas have different "wings": militant, economic, social, political, etc. This is a fiction.

There is almost a sense of glee in reporting on Israeli misdeeds, whether real, exaggerated, or entirely fabricated. Hence the media orgy over the death of Muhammad al-Dura or the Jenin "massacre," both of which occurred during the Second Intifada. The same with the war against Hezbollah in 2006 and Operation Cast Lead - there was a sense that the press was salivating. I highly doubt this would be the case if there were renewed fighting between India and Pakistan in Kashmir.

Not to repeat myself, but I do, again, want to give the benefit of the doubt and point out Israel's religious importance. Americans and Europeans are familiar with names like Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Hebron, and Jericho in a way they are not with names like Srinagar, Kigali, Sarajevo, or South Ossetia. However, even with this benefit of the doubt, and with the understanding that Israel/Palestine will be under a stronger microscope, it does not explain the bias with which the conflict is reported. It does not explain why the fixation is on Israel's wrongdoings and not the Palestinians'. I could give reams and reams of examples. Just this morning I read about a disturbing rise in honor killings in the West Bank. The Reuters reporter did not hesitate to lead the analysis with this: "Some activists believe the rise in honour killings indicates social and economic problems are mounting in the territories, where Palestinians exercise limited self-rule but Israel holds ultimate sovereignty, including over commerce." Of course there are "some activists" who would say this, but come on. This is right after the author had just written of honor killings being a "social menace that occurs throughout the Middle East" and had examined the phenomenon in Jordan, which is decidedly not under Israeli occupation. But, yeah, it's still Israel's fault. The Palestinians are not wholly responsible. Even something that is a broader cultural phenomenon and has nothing to do with the conflict is still blamed on Israel. I can see arguments that the Palestinian economy is not as healthy as it could be because of the security barrier. I can also see, but argue the exact converse of, the notion that Palestinian violence is a consequence of Israel's occupation. But what I have just quoted is ridiculous. It just goes to show how determined many in the media are to slip in anything, anything, detrimental to Israel. 

Similarly, last month there was another Reuters article whose headline and lede read that Israelis had killed a Palestinian in the aftermath of John Kerry's statements that, if the peace talks fail, there very well could be a third intifada. Clearly, if one was just browsing, the indication would be that the Israelis had shot some random guy because of their anger at Kerry's remarks. In reality, the man had run at them with a knife. This was absent from the headline and the lede (please note that the article to which I've linked has been updated and its lede is much less biased, and headline less misguiding, than was originally the case). This was a conscious decision that someone made, and the intent is pretty obvious. 

So why the fixation? I think there are several reasons. In no particular order of importance:

1) The importance of what is present-day Israel to global religious traditions.

2) The Palestinian success in garnering world attention, beginning with Arafat and continuing full force. The Palestinians have legitimately suffered, but their suffering has been so fetishized as to elevate it from the (worse) suffering of other peoples in the world. While a lot of it is propaganda, there is also legitimate concern about Palestinian well-being.

3) The Schadenfreude at seeing Jews having the upper hand and using force. This has often been combined with outright distortion to make Israel look even worse. This helps to expiate the guilt that many Europeans feel about the Holocaust, which was planned and primarily perpetrated by the Germans but could not have been carried out without wider European collaboration. "You see, the Jews aren't any better!" To quote psychiatrist Zvi Rex: "Germany will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz."You can substitute "Europe" for "Germany" and it's just as true.

4) The idea that the conflict is racial. Westerners like their conflicts racial because (they think) it makes them easier to understand. Many Americans think they understand the conflict because of our own awful history of segregation. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is territorial, religious, and ethnic, but not racial. If you put an Israeli and Palestinian side by side, with no indicative markers of their identity, you would often not be able to tell them apart. 

5) Anti-Semitism. Let's be real here. In modern parlance, "anti-Zionism" is simply an alibi for anti-Semitism. What anti-Zionists say about Zionists is literally indistinguishable from what anti-Semites say about Jews. The "Zionist lobby" controls our politicians and the media, for example. This is the same thing thought and said about Jews. You never hear of other lobbies (Armenian, Greek, Tibetan, etc) "controlling" Congress or the media. You never hear of other small nations "controlling" American foreign policy. Hmm, I wonder why.