TEL AVIV — I learn most of what I know about the Middle East from the people who live here, and I was a bit shocked when I discovered, years ago, that many reporters—especially wire agency reporters—absorb most of what they know, think, and believe about the region from other journalists. I didn’t know anyone, local or foreign, in the Middle East when I first got here, and I initially had to rely on the people I met randomly in cafes and bars and in person via the Internet to teach me what’s going on and how the place works. All my information came from the street. Most of my understanding still comes from the street—not from on high, not from newspapers or press releases, and not from foreign reporters who do not live here. Eventually I worked my way up to the prime minister’s office in Lebanon, and I’ve almost gotten that far now in Israel, but my real education has taken place during long sessions in cafes and bars with Arabs, Kurds, and Israelis.
Benjamin Kerstein’s name will appear on the Acknowledgements page of my book when it comes out in the spring because he has taught me an enormous amount about Israel during the time I have known him. I met him five years ago when I first came here from Lebanon, when Israel was still a partially Arabized abstraction in my eyes. He was one of the first people who humanized the place for me, and he taught me more than he knows about the Israeli people and how they see themselves and their place on earth and in history. The parts of my book that take place here are better than they would be if I did not know him.
It finally occurred to me during this trip that I should meet him for coffee and record our conversation so you can learn about Israel the way I do.
MJT: So what’s it like to read about Israel in the foreign press?
Benjamin Kerstein: Surreal.
MJT: How so?
Benjamin Kerstein: It rarely bears any resemblance to the country I live in, mainly because it either deals only with the conflict or because the news is produced by people who live in the English-speaking Jerusalem bubble.
MJT: Tell me about the English-speaking Jerusalem bubble.
Benjamin Kerstein: There’s a large population of English speakers in Jerusalem. The people who speak English tend to gather around each other, especially if they’re in the higher reaches of government or the media. They tend to hang out with other English-speaking people. They go to the places where such people congregate, they read English-language newspapers, and they watch English-language television. They have very little contact with the rest of Israel, which is predominantly Hebrew-speaking.
Tel Aviv is quite cosmopolitan, but if you go to the development towns in the south or to the towns in the north and in the Galilee, there are Hebrew-speaking and Arabic-speaking populations there. Journalists have almost no contact with this world. What they portray as Israeli is a corner of a corner of a corner of this country.
So when we read about Israel in the foreign press—especially if we know about the English-speaking bubble in Jerusalem, or if we’ve ever dealt with the media in Jerusalem—we recognize almost instantly the same themes over and over and over again. All you usually get is the view of a closed subculture, which is not even interesting in my opinion.
MJT: A lot of these journalists don’t even socialize with English-speaking Israelis. I know they don’t because I’ve met some of them. I know who they hang out with and how disconnected they are. They hang out with each other and with other foreigners. That strikes me as bizarre because almost all my friends here are Israelis. Likewise, most of my friends in Lebanon are Lebanese.
Benjamin Kerstein: You find this sort of thing everywhere. People with shared interests and a shared language congregate. Hebrew isn’t a supremely difficult language to learn, but if you don’t have to learn it, you won’t. There are people who have lived in Jerusalem for thirty years who haven’t learned Hebrew because they don’t have to. This affects their opinions, it affects their view of the world, and it affects how they write about it.
There are Hebrew bubbles, as well, of course. Tel Aviv is a different sort of bubble. We even refer to it as ha’bua which literally means “The Bubble” in Hebrew. This problem isn’t something that only afflicts foreign language journalists. There are bubbles throughout Israeli society.
MJT: What’s the difference between the English-speaking bubble in Jerusalem and the Tel Aviv bubble?
Benjamin Kerstein: There are actually a lot of bubbles inside Tel Aviv. When we say “the bubble,” we’re generally referring to the wealthy and upper-middle class people associated with the high-tech boom. Some use the term to refer to the more freakish elements of Tel Aviv—the artists, the musicians, and the homosexual population that’s way more “out” than any other in Israel, and certainly more “out” than in any other place in the Middle East. [Laughs.]
MJT: Without a doubt.
Benjamin Kerstein: So the phrase is used as a catch-all to describe the high-fashion avant-garde population of Tel Aviv that is actually somewhat parochial. Tel Aviv is the New York City of Israel. It’s at once very cosmopolitan and very parochial.
MJT: Yes, New York is like that.
Benjamin Kerstein: People outside New York will refer to a New York mentality, but at the same time, inside New York there are a billion different subcultures. It’s the same in Tel Aviv.
MJT: Right.
Benjamin Kerstein: The religious movement here also has a bubble of its own. The settler movement lives in a bubble. The Hebrew-speaking media lives in one of its own, especially the television media.
MJT: What is it that outsiders tend not to understand about Israel? I’m not asking because I want to pick on them, but because I don’t want to be clueless myself.
Benjamin Kerstein: The first thing visitors notice is that Israelis are prickly. Native-born Israelis are called sabras. The sabra is a cactus fruit that has prickly thorns on the outside, but is soft and sweet on the inside. That’s how Israelis view themselves. We can be aggressive and rude, but once you get to know us, we love you and we want you to marry our sisters and brothers.
What outsiders first encounter is that, and they often tend to base their view of Israelis on that first impression. And they either react negatively or are enthralled by it. They either see us as boorish, violent, and obnoxious, or as honest, tough, and straight-talking but also sentimental and lovable. But either way, they rarely see what’s underneath.
Amos Oz once gave the best description of us. He said there is an Israel of the day, and an Israel of the night. Israel during the day is a prosperous and cosmopolitan Mediterranean society, but at night it’s the greatest collection of nightmares on the face of the earth. Everyone here, at one point or another, has seen the devil.
Although there’s a general awareness of the Holocaust, I’m not sure outsiders are aware of the depth of the sense of trauma in Israeli society. We’re a people who really are deeply wounded. Around seventy percent of the people who moved here were forced out of the places they came from. That’s true of almost all the Jews from the Muslim world. It’s true of most of the Jews from Europe who fled persecution before the Holocaust, during the Holocaust, or after the Holocaust. Very few people came here out of free choice.
MJT: Mostly just Americans, right?
Benjamin Kerstein: People from the Anglo-Saxon world, yes. Even Jews who are coming here now from France are coming to escape anti-Semitism. The Jewish community in Turkey right now is undergoing a kind of silent exodus. Initially these people come here with a feeling of liberation. They release a lot of themselves. But they also have a strong sense of trauma and resentment because of what they had to go through. Particularly in the regards to the Jews from the Muslim world, there is hardly any understanding of this on the part of outsiders. There is almost no recognition of it. Outsiders are gloriously unaware of this side of Israeli history.
Most people come here and see the conflict. They come here originally as conflict tourists, like you and me. [Laughs.] They come here for the action. They go to the West Bank, they see the checkpoints and the shootings and the riots. And they develop a loyalty to one side or the other.
There are other people who come here to see the country and have a good time. My sense is that they are astonished at the sense of normalcy here. They’re amazed that there aren’t bombs going off every day.
It’s important to understand that outsiders come here with preconceived notions.
MJT: Of course they do. I did. It’s impossible not to. I probably still haven’t kicked some of them.
Benjamin Kerstein: Some people come with preconceived notions and are changed very quickly. Others hold onto their preconceived notions and won’t ever change. Unfortunately I see that with journalists a great deal. [Laughs.] It’s a result of becoming better ill-informed, if you know what I mean. They know more than they used to after spending some time here, but they still don’t get it. They see what they’ve come to see and that’s it.
MJT: What about governments? The US and European government have their opinions about and positions on Israel, and most of their officials have never been here. They hardly know anything. They’re the ultimate outsiders, way more than conflict tourists or journalists who have at least spent some time in the place.
Benjamin Kerstein: I’m not really qualified to talk about how American and European policymakers view Israel. So much goes on behind closed doors. I don’t know how much of it is for show. I don’t know how much of what they say about Israel in public is just to protect their interests in the Arab world.
MJT: Feel free to speculate. Everyone else does.
Benjamin Kerstein: My guess is that Europe and America have a pretty simple attitude: they want a solution to the conflict. It’s a pain in the ass for them, and they’d like it to go away.
MJT: Of course. Aside from Hamas, Hezbollah, and so on, who doesn’t want it to go away?
Benjamin Kerstein: But I also think officials in the US, Europe, and elsewhere are much less naïve than their public statements make them appear. I don’t think many of them believe that the peace process, for instance, is nearly as easy as they say it should be. They say things like, “If we could just get the Israeli and Palestinians to sit down and talk, we could reach a solution.”
I think most of them are smart enough to know that isn’t true. I also think they’re smart enough to know that a lot of it isn’t Israel’s fault, but by blaming most of it on Israel they can buy themselves leverage in the Arab world. I think the Arab world understands this perfectly well, that it’s the politics of the gesture.
I have to say, though, that when foreign governments say Israel has to make concessions and take responsibility for the conflict, Israelis take it all very seriously. The charge of disproportionality during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, the Goldstone Report—Israelis do not take into consideration the possibility that these may just be gestures. Israelis take it personally, and they become very angry. Israelis feel very strongly that the world is against them.
MJT: Why do you suppose that is?
Benjamin Kerstein: Most Israelis are here because they fled from Muslim and European countries. They don’t feel that either of those blocs have the right to lecture them about anything. Why should a country where your parents were expelled or killed have the right to tell you how to conduct yourself in a war against people who are trying to kill you today? This is something hardly any non-Israelis understand. They don’t understand how galling we find this.
Israelis are often accused of being arrogant, but they find it extremely arrogant for Europeans and Arabs to lecture them about morals, especially during a war. What has Israel ever done that is as brutal as what Europe did to the Jews, or what Arabs routinely do to even each other during armed conflicts?
I suspect, though, that a lot of the rhetoric is just that. It’s just rhetoric. If you look at what Europe actually does, in a lot of cases it’s better than what the rhetoric would suggest.
I do think Europe retains an insufficiently pessimistic attitude about the Palestinian national movement, which is perhaps out of desperation. They have to go with either Fatah or Hamas. There is no other option. Most politicians, however ideological they may sound, are basically pragmatists. They think that if Hamas has to be out of the picture, they’re going to have to rehabilitate Fatah. Otherwise, there won’t be anybody to talk to. They might be right about that, but I think they are overly optimistic about Fatah signing an agreement.
I think the smart leaders in Europe are trying to lessen the tension here now, and I think they’re doing a much better job than America is. Barack Obama actually seems to believe that he can end the conflict. He doesn’t seem to be trying to lessen the tension. He seem to be willing to exacerbate tensions if he thinks it might bring results.
MJT: What’s he doing to exacerbate tension that Europe is not?
Benjamin Kerstein: Calling for a settlement freeze.
MJT: But the Europeans have been doing that all along.
Benjamin Kerstein: Yeah, but it has less bite to it. They don’t have much clout here. They have never been able to produce any results. When the US says it, though, the Palestinians are forced to respond to it. If Obama calls for a settlement freeze, Mahmoud Abbas can’t negotiate until after a settlement freeze. When Europe calls for a settlement freeze, Abbas can dismiss it as irrelevant and remain in peace talks with Israel, but he can’t be softer on Israel than America is.
MJT: How would you distinguish between fair criticism of Israel—and even unfair criticism of Israel, for that matter—and outright anti-Semitism?
Benjamin Kerstein: I think a lot of it is a question of rhetoric. A lot of the criticism is fair, but we often hear criticism which is frankly psychotic—that we’re using poison gas, for instance, or poisoned candies to kill Palestinian children. That we poisoned the water in Gaza to prevent reproduction. That sort of thing.
Sometimes the rhetoric is so over-the-top and so vitriolic that it seems to be motivated by a violence that can’t be explained away as strident criticism. Comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany, for instance. Accusations of genocide. Accusations that are clearly—and this, I think, is the most important—accusations which are clearly drawn from the vocabulary and iconography of classic anti-Semitism.
The “Israel Lobby” trope is a big part of this. You can criticize a group of people who are seeking to influence the United States government, but if you read what is actually being said by the critics of the so-called “Israel Lobby,” it comes straight out of the classic anti-Semitic myth of overwhelming Jewish power. I think that’s where the distinguishing factor comes in.
There is also a great deal of criticism of Israel that isn’t criticism. Criticism implies a certain degree of rationality, analysis, and objectivity. Much of what is regarded as criticism is actually an assault. It is intended to wound and cause pain. It is intended to demonize. The way, for example, some people off-handedly accuse Israel of genocide, as if this is not even in question. This, to me, is obviously intended to be as hurtful as possible. I can’t even begin to explain to you how offensive the Nazi comparison is.
MJT: Try.
Benjamin Kerstein: It’s like a person who raped and murdered your child stands up in court and says you did it. That’s what it feels like. It’s difficult to even respond because it’s so unthinkably cruel to say something like that. To compare us to our worst enemies, enemies who decimated us, our fathers, our grandfathers within living memory—it’s not just that this isn’t within the realm of rational discourse, it isn’t even in the realm of human decency.
The issue of human decency is a big one. It may be difficult to define, but whenever criticism crosses that line, that, to my mind, is where anti-Semitism begins. Anti-Semitism ultimately is a refusal to accord basic human decency to the Jewish people. It’s a refusal to relate to a certain group of people with the common human decency with which you would relate to anybody else.
That’s what racism is, essentially. If you saw someone being beaten up in the street, you’d try to stop it if you were capable. At least you would think it was bad.
MJT: You would call the police.
Benjamin Kerstein: Exactly. But a racist would see a black person being beaten up in the street and be indifferent to it or even think it’s a good thing.
MJT: What do you think about people who say they aren’t anti-Semitic, just anti-Zionist? They don’t have a problem with, say, Jews in New York, but they intensely hate Israel. I know many Arabs like this.
Benjamin Kerstein: Again, you have to look at what they’re saying. Do they even have any idea what they’re criticizing? A great deal of what I see out there that’s referred to as anti-Zionism doesn’t actually make any reference to Zionism. They don’t know anything about Zionism. They have a few quotes from Theodore Hertzl, a few quotes from David Ben-Gurion, and the rest is your standard “Israelis are racist, Israelis are genocidal, Israelis are Nazis.” And this is called anti-Zionism. Legitimate anti-Zionism would have to engage in some way with Zionism.
MJT: “Zionist” is often just used as an epithet.
Benjamin Kerstein: Exactly.
MJT: So can you briefly define Zionism for people who aren’t really sure what it is?
Benjamin Kerstein: Zionism is a group of ideologies which try to deal with the question of what it means to be Jewish in the modern world and how the Jewish people should deal with being in the modern world. The answer Zionism has almost always advocated is that the Jewish people need political sovereignty in a nation-state. There was a small group in the 1920s and ‘30s who wanted a bi-national state with the Arabs and believed Zionism could be fulfilled that way, but they were very much on the fringe, and since the founding of the State of Israel, those non-state variations have pretty much fallen by the wayside. Since 1948, Zionism has been more or less defined by the nation-state of Israel.
It’s more complicated than that, obviously, but here are the basics of Zionism: First, the Jewish people are a people, and because they are a people, they are entitled to self-determination in their own homeland by right and not by sufferance. And that homeland is the land of Israel. There’s a debate within Zionism itself about whether the Jewish state can be in only part of the land of Israel and what exactly is the land of Israel in terms of borders, but it has to be in the land of Israel.
MJT: It can’t be in Uganda.
Benjamin Kerstein: Exactly.
MJT: Would you say that those who describe themselves as anti-Zionist are saying, whether they intend to or not, that Israel has no right to exist?
Benjamin Kerstein: That would be true by definition.
Now, you could say that Gandhi’s anti-Zionism was at least internally consistent with his pacifism and other aspects of his ideology. I would say he was historically wrong, but you can make the argument that he was anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic. And you can certainly say that certain Haredi groups who base their entire worldview on the Torah and oppose a secular state of Israel for religious reasons are not anti-Semitic.
But I don’t see how you can support self-determination for Palestinians while declaring yourself anti-Zionist—and therefore opposing self-determination for Jews—without being anti-Semitic. If you support self-determination for one people, you cannot deny it to another. And I do not accept that the Jewish people are not a people. It’s historically wrong, it’s culturally wrong, it’s objectively wrong on every level.
I also don’t see how someone can support the self-determination of other non-Jewish peoples while describing themselves as anti-Zionists and say they aren’t anti-Semitic.
But you can be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic if you say, for instance, that you’re opposed to the idea of the nation-state in general. I think you’d be unrealistic, a utopian dreamer with a totally irrelevant argument, but I could believe that you’re not an anti-Semite. But I think there are very few people out there who genuinely believe that. Maybe some anarchists feel that way.
MJT: What do you think of people who say the Palestinians have a fake made-up identity? Some insist the Palestinians are just part of a monolithic undiversified Arab mass.
Benjamin Kerstein: It’s not my business to tell the Palestinians whether or not they exist. It’s also not their business to tell me whether or not I exist. If I demand that from them, they have the right to demand that from me.
I think people who say the Palestinians don’t exist are…myopic, to put it delicately.
Some of this, though, is just reciprocity, people throwing rhetorical hand grenades back and forth. They say we don’t exist, so some of us say they don’t exist. The Palestinian national charter says very straightforwardly that the Jews are not a people. Now, there are some Israelis who say the Palestinian national identity didn’t exist until after 1948, which is not necessarily untrue. You can make the argument that Palestinian national identity as we know it is basically a product of the Nakba.
MJT: Before 1948, the Palestinians of Gaza said they were Egyptians. Today, though, they’re different. Gaza is not a distant suburb of Cairo. Over time it has become something else. Egyptians think so, too. Egyptians don’t look at the people of Gaza and see themselves. Egypt is walling them off.
Benjamin Kerstein: Either way, it’s not my right to define other people. To say they aren’t a people doesn’t strike me as an honorable argument. I have to agree that the Palestinians have the right to self-determination, but I also have the right to say that they don’t have the right to determine themselves upon the destruction of Israel.
MJT: Zionism doesn’t have anything to say about Arabs, does it?
Benjamin Kerstein: Not a great deal. Zionism is concerned with Jewish rights and sovereignty in the modern world. Its efforts have always been in that direction. It doesn’t have any position on Arabs. None of the things that all forms of Zionism share have much to do with the Arabs or any other non-Jews. This is true of almost all national liberation movements. They tend to be very parochial and inward-looking.
MJT: The Palestinians are a bit unusual.
Benjamin Kerstein: In what sense?
MJT: They define themselves in opposition to you.
Benjamin Kerstein: Yes, they do.
MJT: The Lebanese identity, for instance, has nothing at all to do with Israel. There is an Egyptian national identity that would be the same even if Israel didn’t exist. The Palestinian identity, though, was defined in opposition to Israel.
Benjamin Kerstein: Yes. One of the biggest obstacles to peace is the degree to which that’s true. Making peace with Israel might feel like losing part of their identity to a certain degree, or at least losing any sense of coherence to their identity. I don’t know how relevant this is, though. The Palestinians believe themselves to be a people, and therefore they are. I don’t have the right to argue with them about it. I only have the right to say their rights are not unlimited, that we have rights, too, and they need to recognize ours. I won’t go any farther than that. I’m not going to say Palestinian identity is a conspiracy or a lie. This goes back to the issue of common human decency. It simply demands that you extend a certain amount of reciprocity to someone else.
MJT: How optimistic are you about resolving this conflict within your lifetime?
Benjamin Kerstein: I don’t know. Anything can happen in the Middle East. Everything can change tomorrow, but I’m pessimistic. I don’t expect to see it during my lifetime. It’s always best to gamble on pessimism in this part of the world. Things fall apart here. Instability is the norm. Stability is temporary and can only be achieved and maintained with great effort. Order here tends toward collapse.
I am a long-term optimist, though. The conflict does reach states that are manageable for certain lengths of time, and it seems like these are increasing. The outbreaks of violence get less severe as time goes on. There hasn’t been a major war since 1973.
MJT: The war in Lebanon in 1982 wasn’t major?
Benjamin Kerstein: No, because Israel wasn’t facing the full weight of an enemy army during that war. There hasn’t been a full-on war, with the marshalling of all available resources between the states in this region since 1973. All the wars since then have been limited to a certain degree. And the Second Lebanon War was less severe than the first one.
MJT: It was, but the next one will probably be a lot worse. Everyone thinks it will be worse, in both Lebanon and in Israel.
Benjamin Kerstein: We may be taking a terrible turn. I hope not, but it’s a real possibility.
MJT: But you’re also right that anything could happen. If the Iranian people remove their government, it could change everything.
Benjamin Kerstein: That may ultimately be the only solution, but nobody knows. Nobody really knows anything.
MJT: What do you think will happen here if Iran gets nuclear weapons? I’m assuming here that Iran won’t actually nuke Tel Aviv, but will occasionally threaten to do it.
Benjamin Kerstein: I don’t know. Israelis have learned to put up with a lot. My guess is that our reaction would be to go public with our own nuclear program, if it exists. [Laughs.] We may end up in a state of uneasy deterrence, like with India and Pakistan.
MJT: India and Pakistan have come close to nuclear war a couple of times.
Benjamin Kerstein: That’s true.
I think Israeli society will endure. We’ve faced existential threats in the past. People forget that. The military power the Arab states tried to bring to bear against Israel in the 1960s and 1970s would have been just as destructive as a nuclear bomb. Israel prevailed against them from a weaker position. Still, this is an outcome everyone should do everything possible to avoid. I don’t have enough insider information, though, to know what is actually going on.
MJT: Nobody does.
Benjamin Kerstein: Nobody does. The real question here is the United States. Barack Obama clearly doesn’t want to give the green light on a military strike, but neither did George W. Bush. The United States wants to try to make this work without a war.
MJT: Obviously that would be preferable.
Benjamin Kerstein: Of course. A war of that size would be of immense danger to Israel.
MJT: Absolutely. Hezbollah has an enormous missile arsenal now and would almost certainly use it. I would be surprised if they didn’t.
Benjamin Kerstein: Yeah. If it turns into a large scale conflict, it will be the biggest war since 1973. None of our commanding officers have ever fought a war of that size. Israel has one of the best armies in the world, but all armies are capable of breaking.
MJT: A war in Lebanon and Iran at the same time would be a catastrophe.
Benjamin Kerstein: We’re a small country with limited resources. We can’t sustain a huge conflict indefinitely. So, yes, avoiding that would be best. At the same time, though, that suggests that we should strike as early as possible in order to eliminate the threat. Ultimately it’s out of our hands.
MJT: How many Israelis do you suppose would support a unilateral strike on Iran if it came to that?
Benjamin Kerstein: Ninety percent.
MJT: Really?
Benjamin Kerstein: Of Jewish Israelis, yes. Arab Israelis would oppose it, at least publicly. We’d have the really hard-core people on the left against it, but that’s ten percent of the public at the most. They’re really a very marginal group. Bibi Netanyahu would have overwhelming support in Israel domestically.
MJT: I assume you’re among the 90 percent.
Benjamin Kerstein: Yes. I don’t think we can risk it, particularly with Ahmadinejad. If there was a change of government there, that would be a different story. If they had a secular nationalist government, even one that still wanted nuclear weapons, I would feel differently. But Ahmadinejad is clearly—and I do not use this term lightly—a genocidal anti-Semite. He has said so as openly as a person possibly can. I don’t know what remains for him to say to convince people.
We feel—rightfully so, I think—that we can’t assume this is all just for show, that he’s just playing around. I hate to use the Hitler analogy because it’s a bit of a sucker punch, but people did say the same things about him, that he wasn’t serious. I’d like to think that from our horrendous past we have learned to take such people seriously.
So yes, I would support it. If Iran had a government that, for instance, acknowledged the Holocaust happened and that it was bad, I might feel differently. Ahmadinejad seems to be at least a little bit mentally ill. He doesn’t strike me as a well man. [Laughs.] I don’t know if he’s clinically insane, but I don’t think he’s an adjusted person.
MJT: He isn’t very well-rounded. [Laughs.]
Benjamin Kerstein: I know there are elements in Iran that don’t want war with Israel. There are probably elements in the theocracy itself that don’t want war with Israel.
MJT: I’d be shocked if there weren’t.
Benjamin Kerstein: But can Israel gamble its survival on the possibility that they will succeed? A credible threat from the international community to use force might actually stop the Iranian government without bloodshed. That’s what I would most like to see. I don’t want to see any more dead Israelis, Persians, or Arabs.
MJT: What do Israelis think of Persians? Not the Iranian government, but Iran as a country?
Benjamin Kerstein: Iran used to be secular, open, and friendly to Israel. It once was pro-Western. Jews were at least nominally tolerated. It was seen as a place where there was a certain degree of cultural development. Persian culture used to be recognizable to us like Lebanese culture is. The Iran that is currently ruled by the theocracy is alien and threatening to us. We see it as a cold and hateful place. It’s a place that hates us. It’s a place that would prefer we didn’t exist. It represents a total rejection of us and our existence.
MJT: What about last June when millions of people took to the streets against the regime?
Benjamin Kerstein: Israelis are skeptical that they will succeed. We’re skeptical about democratization in this part of the world. Israelis were never sold on Bush’s democratization plan. The neoconservative argument for democratic peace in the Middle East is something most Israelis never bought into. Sharon a few years ago congratulated Natan Sharansky for convincing the Americans of something nobody else in the country takes seriously.
MJT: It’s funny because so many people in the West think Israel was behind it.
Benjamin Kerstein: They’re just ignorant. That’s simply false. These are claims made by people who do not know what they are talking about. They don’t know anything about Israel. They don’t know anything about our politics. They don’t speak the language. They have almost certainly never been to this country. They’re picking up on ridiculous stereotypes that have been spread around for various reasons. It’s simply inaccurate.
A lot of Israelis supported getting rid of Saddam, but we also thought you should have packed up and left right away. No one here cried for Saddam Hussein, but turning Iraq into a democracy is something most Israelis thought was impossible. Looking back on it now—and I hate to say this—I think they were right. I personally thought it was a good idea at the time, but it was probably wishful thinking.
MJT: I thought it was a good idea, too. I thought the Arabs of Iraq were more like the Kurds of Iraq than they are. That, I think, was my biggest analytic mistake. The parts of Iraq controlled by Saddam Hussein were like a black box that no one could see into. All I could see was the Kurdish part of the country that had escaped Saddam’s rule and managed to build something decent and friendly.
Benjamin Kerstein: Perhaps we should have been more Israeli in our thinking, but I am glad Saddam is gone.
MJT: So why did you move from Boston into this maelstrom?
Benjamin Kerstein: Sometimes I wonder about that myself. I can’t give you a logical answer.
MJT: That’s okay. I like it here, too, and I agree it’s not entirely logical.
Benjamin Kerstein: For me, it’s deeply personal. This place suits me. The way of life here suits me. The mentality suits me. The vastness of America is something I find hard to deal with. I find it very alienating. There are a lot of things I don’t like about living in America, though I’m not anti-American.
MJT: Benjamin, I have known you for years. I know you are not anti-American.
Benjamin Kerstein: Thank you. [Laughs.] I have a deep appreciation for America. My family comes from Latvia and would have been wiped out if it were not for America. Something like 85 or 90 percent of the Jews of Latvia were killed by the Nazis. The entire Jewish culture in Latvia was destroyed. My family never would have survived without the United States as a haven.
But I feel terribly alone in the United States. I’ve always felt that it’s a cold place where I didn’t belong.
MJT: It is warmer here.
Benjamin Kerstein: The weather is warmer, and so are the people. People also have hotter tempers. People here can be crueler than in the United States; though Americans in the Northeast—where I lived—can, in their own quiet way, be extraordinarily cruel through their silence and indifference. People in Israel are never silent, cold, or indifferent.
Life here is more on the edge. I crave being right where things are happening, on the event horizon where violent and transcendent things are occurring. I think you feel that way, too.
MJT: I do.
Benjamin Kerstein: Most people who come here voluntarily feel that way. The Middle East has always attracted people for that reason. People from all over the world come here seeking it, and not just from the West.
Everyone I know who has come here or chosen to stay here—Jew and Arab alike—has said it’s because they can’t imagine being anywhere else. I think the upheaval here is a big part of it.
MJT: Life is lived more intensely here.
Benjamin Kerstein: Much more intensely.
MJT: It’s worse here, but at the same time it’s better. On balance maybe it’s worse, but in good times I think it’s better.
Benjamin Kerstein: I have an Arab friend in Jerusalem. He’s a devout Muslim—in the best sense, not in a fundamentalist sense. His Jerusalem is different from my Jerusalem. There really are two Jerusalems—Jewish and Arab. But he has the same intense feelings toward his Jerusalem that I have toward mine. He loves and hates it in the same way I and so many other Jews do.
I am not a religious person. I don’t believe in God. But this part of the world has an intense and undeniable meaning for millions and millions of people. It just does. Some people don’t get it, but it has an extremely intense effect on the people who do.
Benjamin Kerstein lives in Tel Aviv and is a staff writer at The New Ledger. He is a former resident of Jerusalem where he worked as an editor at Azure magazine. Hopefully he will soon begin work on a book.
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A worthwhile view to read Michael. As most of your friend;, balanced, sane and hopeful. I hope this helps to puncture some of the bubble we live in.
“Very few people came here out of free choice.
MJT: Mostly just Americans, right?
Benjamin Kerstein: People from the Anglo-Saxon world, yes.”
I would guess that a high % or “anglo saxon” immigrants are
children of holocaust survivors. I am, and so are many of my fiends, a higher % than of my friends still living in the U.S.
(correcting typos)
“Very few people came here out of free choice.
MJT: Mostly just Americans, right?
Benjamin Kerstein: People from the Anglo-Saxon world, yes.”
I would guess that a high % of “anglo saxon” immigrants are children of holocaust survivors. I am, and so are many of my friends, a higher % than of my Jewish friends still living in the U.S.
Dude, it’s like he’s in my head but with the ability to construct logical sentences.
MJT: What is it that outsiders tend not to understand about Israel? I’m not asking because I want to pick on them, but because I don’t want to be clueless myself
As an Anglo that has lived here for 30+ years and has “intermarried” with a woman of Eastern descent, I would say that most outsiders do not realize the multiculturalism of the Israeli Jews and how much is non-Western. I woud say about half come from or are descended from Muslim or non Western countries and relate, on a personal but not political level, much better to the East than to the West culture at many levels.
The history of the Jews and Israel did not begin with Zionism or with the destruction of European Jewry. In fact there are Jewish communities in Israel that have lived on the land continuously for more than 2000 years. The graves of our ancestors still are Holy places of worship to us and have been continuously for almost 4000 years. In fact the Jewish Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron is the oldest public building in continuous use in the entire world. I will speak more of this in a few moments.
From 1400 to 1900 CE the Turks ruled but did not live in what was commonly called territorial Palestine. The Muslim Palestinians ( yes there are Jewish and Christian Palestinians too ) currently control 80% of the territory of Palestine. On that 80% they have three operating governments. One in Jordan, one in the West Bank and one in Gaza.
Despite the fact that Jews have lived in Israel for thousands of years Muslims refuse to recognize any Jewish rights what-so -ever.
Hebron is a case in point. The Jewish neighborhood in Hebron comprises only 3% of the town. In that neighborhood 800 Jews live surrounded by 30,000 Muslims. Hebron and its religious sites have been holy to Jews for 2700 years before Mohammed was even born. Yet the Muslims wish to deny Jewish rights to worship in Hebron. The Israeli army is not called in to harass the Muslim population. It is there to prevent a repeat of the 1929 massacre when the Muslims rioted and murdered Jewish men, women and children.
It is time for people to look at the history of Palestine and ask themselves the following- Why do the Palestinians require more than the 80% of Palestine they already control? Why do the Palestinians refuse to recognize Jewish rights to areas that were Jewish before Mohammed was born? Why are the Palestinians so interested in building on top of Christian and Jewish Holy sites? Why have the Palestinians driven the Christian community from Bethlehem? Why do the Palestinians indoctrinate their children to hate rather than live in peace?
As far as Muslims living in Israel there is an answer for that as well. There is a realistic solution-
The world community believes in violent population transfer.
Helen Thomas and Hamas both want the Jews out of the Middle East.
Thomas wants the Jews transferred to Poland.
Hamas wants Jews transferred to the middle of the ocean where there is no tree to hide a Jew if he is chased by murderers.
They are proponents of violent transfer.
Thomas , with her , ” Get the hell out! ” and Hamas with their baby killing.
Different, to be sure, but the intent, identical.
That is true ethnic cleansing .
On the other hand non violent population transfer has been done before.
I am a proponent of non-violent population transfer.
In fact the very first High Commissioner for Refugees of the League of Nations, Fridtjof Nansen , received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922 for ending a war that seemed intractable by using non violent population transfer..
” In 1919, he ( Nansen ) became president of the Norwegian Union for the League of Nations and at the Peace Conference in Paris was an influential lobbyist for the adoption of the League Covenant and for recognition of the rights of small nations. From 1920 until his death he was a delegate to the League from Norway.? ? In June, 1921, the Council of the League appointed Nansen its first High Commissioner for Refugees. Stateless refugees received a ” Nansen Passport ” , a document of identification which was eventually recognized by fifty-two governments. In the nine-year life of this Office, Nansen ministered to hundreds of thousands of refugees – Russian, Turkish, Armenian, Assyrian, Assyro-Chaldean – utilizing the methods that were to become classic: custodial care, repatriation, rehabilitation, resettlement, emigration, integration.? ? In 1922 at the request of the Greek government and with the approval of the League of Nations, Nansen tried to solve the problem of the Greek refugees who poured into their native land from their homes in Asia Minor after the Greek army had been defeated by the Turks. Nansen arranged an exchange of about 1,250,000 Greeks living on Turkish soil for about 500,000 Turks living in Greece, with appropriate indemnification and provisions for giving them the opportunity for a new start in life.” Nobel Prize Website
IN 1922 FRIDTJOF NANSEN WAS AWARDED THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE .
” We all know from the history books of the exchange of Turks and Greeks, which took place after World War I when, after the war ended, there was a further war between Greece and Turkey, at the end of which, the Greek and Turkish governments agreed on an exchange of populations. And as it appears in the history books, the Greek minority in Turkey was sent to Greece; the Turkish minority in Greece was sent to Turkey. That’s what it says in the history books. But if you look at the treaty in which this agreement was incorporated, it says something different. The parties to be exchanged are defined as Turkish subjects of the Greek Orthodox faith and Greek subjects of the Muslim faith. And if you look more closely at who the people actually were, they were, to a very large extent, Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christians from Turkey and Greek-speaking Muslims from Greece. This was not an exchange of two ethnic minorities. It was a deportation of two religious minorities. ”
Prof. Bernard Lewis, April. 27, 2006 interview, Pew Forum
Ninety-nine and one-half percent of the middle east is Muslim. There are enormous swathes of empty land throughout the Arab world. A fraction of the money spent on war would build one thousand Beverly Hills’ for refugees who wanted to move.
There are people all over the world looking for better homes and opportunities. Are the Palestinians all of the same mind? No single Palestinian wants a new villa, a new school for his children, and the money to start a bakery?
There is plenty of money for flagship properties in London. Boutique hotels for the privileged instead of cities for the Palestinians? Why?
What if some Palestinians wish to remain where they are in Israel? They can. Their reason would be their business. No need to justify or argue. You want to stay? Stay
Where people wish to remain they should be able to do so as citizens of Jordan, which already controls seventy-seven percent of territorial Palestine. If Jordan wishes to change its name to Palestine, as the late King Hussein Ibn Talal suggested, that is its right. In any case as long as Israeli laws are not broken there is no reason for Palestinians to move. If, on the other hand, they wish to live in an Islamic country under sharia law they are only a twenty mile bus ride from Amman.
Perhaps there are other countries that would allow applications for citizenship. I don’t know.
Muslims all over the world are on the move. Only the Palestinians stay put?
Hamas wants the Palestinians in Gaza to stay put. They are its hostage.
That is why true humanitarian relief for Gaza would be getting the people out, not the concrete in.
When Jordan, which occupies 77% of Palestine, is asked to accept its historical obligations, there will be a real opportunity for peace in the region.
Huh, his comments on the media kinda mirror what I believe happens to flyover country here in the States.
Alex, I take Nightmares for 1k.
Q:The Greatest Collection of Nightmares on Earth
A:What is the US Congress?
Superb discussion, MJT — thank you. An Israeli told me a few years ago that other people can’t understand the extent to which Israel is shaped by ‘PTSD politics.’
I went to Israel in 2006 as someone expecting to gather some information for a project, see a few sights, and be done. I felt no particular connection to Israel or the idea of Israel one way or the other, but (to my continuing surprise) I turned out to be one of those people who got hit by a bolt out of the blue and fell head over heels in love with the place, the people, and the culture. After four visits and lots of talk with Israeli friends (and a failed 3 year effort to learn Hebrew, which may not be ‘supremely’ difficult, but damn close to it) I’d say the thing most Westerners just don’t get about the region or the conflict is the complexity — of everything.
Also, to most people over here Israel is still an abstraction, like a political position or a map overlay or maybe a project still in the planning stage. They don’t get that Israel has a fully developed and living culture, with a complicated but robust national identity.
You know what people don’t get? People don’t get that Israel really is the most moral country in the Middle East – really tries hard to be the most moral country in the Middle East, under very, very difficult circumstances, and its enemies (not all of them, but some of the most important ones) really are incredibly depraved. It’s embarrassing to say so, but it’s true.
Excellent interview, thanks Michael.
Menachem — what was the point of your essay?
After your outburst the other day, I’m wondering what you think when Michael posts a full-length interview of this sort.
Kerstein seems like a cool guy.
Though I have to say, Mike, that while you have some good, strong hate going on for the English-speaking hacks who only speak to other journalists, you probably shouldn’t have picked this opportunity–an interview with an English-speaking American-Israeli journalist–to bring it up.
great interview. insightful ..it is the Israel I saw when I was there in 79. loved it, if I had to live in a second country Israel would be it. (I live in Canada)
Menachem — what was the point of your essay?
Here is a summary.
Premise: Jordan is the real Palestine.
Main argument: the Palestinians should move there.
Original or creative ideas: 0
Conclusion: Menachem is an astonishingly uninteresting person.
Kerstein does a good job of capturing the inspiring and overwhelming and tiring daily routine of Israeli life. Sometimes the inspiration just hits a person between the eyes, whether they like it or not. And sometimes it feels like a test where the final exam score is open-ended. That’s it, living in Israel often feels like answering an essay question. The essay keeps on going, and winding, and doubling back, and going…
What I’d like to know is: what could an American president with complete military latitude and no great love for either Israel or Palestine (or affection for both of them equally) do to maximize the odds of peace breaking out. The temptation would be to demand Israel fall back to its 1947 borders and then announce the the Palestinian that any town from which so much as a .22 round is fired will be razed to the ground with thermobaric munitions and no regard for collateral damage, as would any Middle Eastern country coming to the Palestinians’ aid. Does Mr. Kerstein have any more practical suggestions?
Kerstein is a sell out. he left a country that gave him everything and now spending all his time and energy for a froign country..
Truly amazing work, but we expect that from Michael and are perhaps even a little spoiled, in a good way.
Very Helpful. At least a beginning for a ‘Danish-American’ (gotta love all the mulit-culture hyphens we live with in the West as a testament to our preening PC diverse world) in a never ending quest to understand a part of the world that continues to mystify most of us, well at least myself.
In any event everything I get my hands on speaks to the Palestinians desire to destroy Israel. Even more interesting is the total, complete, absolute unwillingness of Jordan (Palestinian), Saudis, Syrians, etc, etc. etc., to take in these characters. Why is that? Hmmmm I’m pretty sure I know. Do you? Read up gang.
I went to Israel for three weeks in ’05. I had all sorts of ideas in my head about the Holy Land and the stalwart Israelis standing tall against nearly the whole world.
I was very disappointed. I found a fractured country inhabited by a lot of different people who don’t get along with each other very much, are nearly incapable of self government as they literally hate each other and the place was dirty and disheveled.
Yes Yad Vashem (sp?) was very impressive and there are many beautiful spots ( I went just about everywhere) But basically it looked like Greece on a bad day. I’ve never seen more trashy empty lots, open unfenced dumps and rude people. Well, maybe in E. Texas.
I support Israel. I wish them well. I won’t ever go back.
Well, it’s 1:00 AM & I just got back from the beachfront. I only meant to check my messages before I go to sleep but took a quick look at Pajamas.
The interview held my interest & I read it through. But, it’s too late to write an intelligent comment.
I look forward to re-reading it tomorrow when I’m not tired.
But, I have to admit, this is good reporting.
To me this guy is the classic, smart, secular, Israeli.
He seems to have a very firm grasp on things and would be the kind of demographic that would really get behind a peace deal … if such an utterance can be made.
Clearly Shas isn’t going to do it. Why not an open-minded guy like this?
Good conversation.
Funny how foreigners are often (but not always) more hysterical than your everyday Israeli.
Joo-liz, The purpose of my post was educational. The interview left me little to chew on. A nice fellow with an uninteresting point of view, ill informed and naive, from my point of view.
Edgar, I never pretended the ideas that i mentioned were original. You , on the other hand, wish to pretend they are not factual. As far as your opinion of me I am unperturbed. I have long followed the advise of Maimonides when confronted with someone like yourself –
” I seek no victory, for the honor of my soul and character consists in deviating from the paths of fools, but not in conquering them. ”
Here is something from another ” astonishingly uninteresting ” person…..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJAFRF75OVA&feature=related
You need not waste your time Edgar. Others of course may find intellectual growth worthwhile.
Michael–
Thanks so much for this interview. It explains some things I have always wondered about, but had no idea how to find the answers to, and crystallizes other things I already knew, but had no idea how to articulate. Your friend Kerstein’s insights on Israel and the Middle East are brilliant, in much the same way as Angelo Codevilla’s insights on the current political scene in America are.
Abu Guerrilla, your comment doesn’t really add up. Secular Israelis who think just like Benjamin think have been in vogue in Israel for quite a long while; very sensible, usually anti-religious and erudite. In fact they offered up Oslo after Oslo, and the Arab response was rejection, the blood in the streets. People like Ben would have been afraid to go to their favorite cafes for worry that their blood would be mixed with cappuccino, plates, etc. Nice guy, and would make a lousy Prime Minister.
As an American who’s been living in Israel for 8 years, I found your friend to be wonderfully thoughtful and articulate. He really was able to express some of the complexity and also the true underlying consciousness of Israeli Jews. One of the best and most accurate perspectives I’ve had the pleasure of reading.
Great article, Michael…but I strongly disagree with your friend’s assertions about Iran. I talk to Iranians every day…and it is clear to me that they, at least those under 30, despise the regime more than anyone else in the world. They cannot be held back forever.
Great testimony. Thank you.
This was an extremely interesting and informative interview, especially for Americans like myself. The main point I gathered from it is that there will be no real peace between Israel and the Palestinians until the rest of the world (specifically America) stops making political “gestures” and indulging in “peace rhetoric”, thus finally making the realistic decision to engage in the situation on the ground. That would, of course, involve offending a lot of people who persist in the belief that Palestinians want a state that doesn’t involve obliterating Israel and all Jews everywhere. Extrapolate this to Muslim fundamentalist determination as you wish.
Menachem,
Oh all right, I’m sorry. You should have expected to be trolled with such a post, but nevertheless I feel bad hassling a good, respectable Jewish guy.
http://www.politico.com/static/PPM110_100804_arab_public_opinion_poll.html
Menachem,
I would just suggest that there will be ample space and time here to give us your views. I must myself, try and not to stray to far from topic, but as most will attest, that’s obviously hard for me. Sometimes Michael’s posts are vague enough to ramble. When he delivers more meat, then most focus on the subject matter…..
Great article I felt it actually one of the best about Israel I have read on the internet in 20 years.
Menachem, great addition.
For those who come from againstness, I am bored with your need to always find fault.
I guess when I read the statements , ” There really are two Jerusalems—Jewish and Arab. ” and ” I don’t believe in God. ” coming from a Jew, especially one who lives in Israel, statements so devoid of education and reason, it brings out the educator in me.
I know that I am probably wasting my time, but the greatest mitzvah of all, Ahavat Yisroel, demands I make the effort.
Since Mr.Totten was kind enough to accept my apology I will follow his good hearted example and accept Edgars’.
ps- max, I enjoy your posts and appreciate they frequently present articles I may have missed. Soldier on.
“most outsiders do not realize the multiculturalism of the Israeli Jews and how much is non-Western. I woud say about half come from or are descended from Muslim or non Western countries and relate, on a personal but not political level, much better to the East than to the West culture at many levels.” Very perceptive and I think right on.
Granted the Israelis I met are part of the “tech bubble” to use Benjamin Kerstein’s terminology. I was struck by the similarities between Israelis, and the east and South Asia.
The truth is that the country Indians, Chinese, Singaporeans, Malaysians, Vietnamese, heck Asians in general admire most is Israel. They admire Israel’s entrepreneurship, success in innovation, ability to think out of the box, their academic excellence, their success in culture. And Asians desperately want to import those aspects of Israel into their own countries. Israelis have an uncanny ability to work well with large diversified global teams [Chinese, Indians, Europeans, Latin Americans, Canadians etc.] And so much about them is so eastern, and so relate-able and familiar from an Asian point of view. Even the way they pronounce words and their thought process. Is this the reason Israel is admired more than America [which it is]?
I had a Pakistani American friend who use to talk about how he would gladly cut off his arm to destroy Israel [didn't think he really meant it, since he usually said this with a smile and because he felt he was suppose to say it since that is what all Pakistanis are suppose to say.] But what he use to talk much much more about was all the good things about Israel and how much he hoped Pakistanis would become more like Israel. Every now and then he would would catch himself and become embarrassed and say something like, I really am against Israel. But they are very good. Wish Pakistan was more like Israel.
There really is a lot of admiration, respect, for and shared culture/heritage with Israel around the world. Suspect this is true among Persians too.
Does this also extend to the Arab world? Not sure. In some ways Arabs are difficult to understand to make a generalization.
On Iran, MJT, I think the Quom Marjeya, Najaf Marjeya, Maliki and Allawi believe that the IRGC Quds and Khamanei are extremely vulnerable. They continue to support the greens, which will be costly for them if the greens don’t win. Until these players start hedging their bets, I tend to think the Greens win.
We are certainly a crew…lol. Menachem gets to meet Anan. Now that should be interesting. Anan, I won’t say a word. I bet you’ll do that all by yourself…..
Menachem, I’m a Jewish Agnostic, but that doesn’t dampen my principles. Here in NYC, perhaps the most bewildering thing to me is the folly of the intellectual left these days. While I would consider myself Left leaning, that just puts more pressure on me to resist the slide into the abyss. What gives Jews such staying power is their identity as a people, no matter how divergent.
http://defensetech.org/2010/08/04/iran-claims-it-has-obtained-s-300-air-defense-missile-system/
for Max ….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucRK3vJY3cg
thank you mjt for this article even though you did not write much for it.
mark
Edgar: Though I have to say, Mike, that while you have some good, strong hate going on for the English-speaking hacks who only speak to other journalists
I don’t hate them, they are my colleagues, and I defended them in front of hyper-critical Israelis a few days ago. Anyway, Benjamin has spent his entire adulthood here, so he’s hardly in the same category as the others.
Anan: There really is a lot of admiration, respect, for and shared culture/heritage with Israel around the world. Suspect this is true among Persians too. Does this also extend to the Arab world?
Absolutely not.
Benjamin Kerstein: Zionism is a group of ideologies which try to deal with the question of what it means to be Jewish in the modern world and how the Jewish people should deal with being in the modern world. The answer Zionism has almost always advocated is that the Jewish people need political sovereignty in a nation-state.
Your friend over complicates this. Here is an alternative:
Zionism is Jewish national liberation movement to restore and preserve homeland.
Anyone who is “anti-Zionist” must accept to be anti-[put any other nation's name that comes to mind] or else be anti-Semite.
“I am not anti-Semite, I am anti-Zionist”.
“I am not anti-French, I am anti-France”.
“I am not anti-American, I am anti-USA”.
etc…
Menachem, you assume great patience. This is certainly complicated. Survival for Israel is a different matter than the survival of Jews.
Investment in the future certainly involves procreation and education -for Jews everywhere. In Israel this has lead to advanced military competence and a sufficiently sized standing army. The relative importance one identifies oneself as Jewish is a good marker of continuity. As to what constitutes the values of Judaism and how that is similar and different than let’s say in New York is left unclear beyond a general advocacy for excellence.
What threw me was the quote of Kant who equated the survival of the Jews, a confirmation of God. I would rather suggest it was adapting to the present and working for the future. Ironic that the exclusivity of Jewish communities in the past, led to both great tragedy and achievement.
America survives on the assimilation of diverse groups to a Constitutional Process, a national history and a Judeo-Christian set of ethics expressed within a dynamic of liberal/conservative tensions.
Israel survives by the hard working 90% identifying themselves as Jewish Israelis fighting for survival plus the support of Jews world wide and their influence on their prospective countries.
Thanks for the link….
Unlike say the Kurds in iraq or the Palestinian Jews, the Palestinian Arabs of Gaza & the West Bank are not a distinct people w/ their own culture. Tha Gazans are just Arabs & their bretheren live mostly in Jordan (80% Palestinian Arabs) where they already have a state (but recently striped of citizenship by the Jordanina gov’t w/o world outcry about this, of course.) The Palestinian Arabs in Israel are just another dissident group already given semi-sovereign/self-jurisdiction/autonomy status under the suicidal(for Israel) Oslo treaty. This is not complex history, just facts that i can’t understand why your otherwise insightful fried has trouble stating…Jews are ideed a distinct people. w/ a distinct culture & history in their homeland, & the Gaza/WBank Arabs are no different than their Arab brothers in Jordan, Syria etc..
MJT- I like your short posts. Menachem, keep providing the facts to couter the more prevalent lies & ignorance that generally sully the playing field of lies against Israel.
MJT: “Before 1948, the Palestinians of Gaza said they were Egyptians.”
This is a very remarkable assertion which I have seen nowhere else, ever. I should like to see some evidence for it.
Gaza was politically separate from Egypt from early in the 19th century, when Egypt became de facto independent, until 1948. I don’t believe it was considered part of Egypt under earlier Ottoman rule.
There is evidence against the assertion in the treatment of Gaza residents under Egyptian occupation from 1948 to to 1967. They were barred from emigrating to Egypt, and subjected to draconian curfews and other restrictions.
Again, I should like to see some evidence for Gazan self-identification as Egyptian before 1948.
Judith: Tha Gazans are just Arabs
Arab Nationalism is a vicious 20th Century ideology that uses violence to obliterate difference and unite extraordinarily diverse groups of people into a monolithic mass. It is National Socialism for Arabs. Its proponents have almost always been fascists of one kind or another. You do not realize it, but you’re repeating their talking points, and I strongly advise you to stop it.
Rich,
To clarify (I was talking in this interview rather than carefully writing) the Arabic Gazans speak is closer to Egyptian Arabic, and they were “oriented,” so to speak, more toward Egypt than toward the West Bank before the creation of Israel. They have no real sense of unity with the Palestinians of the West Bank, and they don’t particularly like each other.
MJT, not sure I understand your reply to my comment #42, but please tell me what is the cultural distinction btw/n the Palestinian Arabs of Gaza/WBank & those of their brother Arabs in other ME Arab states that would entitled them to a separate homeland (even beyond the one they already have in Jordan).,,Arab infighting alone does not make for a distinct culture worthy of a separate state for a dissident minority. In my earlier post, for example, I mentioned the Kurds who indeed have a distinct culture from their Iraqi & Turk neighbors & are thus deserving of their own state.
You may want to interview Carolyn Glick, a PJM contributor, Israeli resident & a great source for factual history & inside politics on Israel.
Michael Totten.
A completely irrelevent question, but why is there no ”reply” to comments as in other posts on Pajamas, only ”Link to this comment” ?
I liked your interview with Mr Kerstein, he’s articulate & informed. But, he represents only one of the many facets in Israel. I assume you will be doing other ”portraits” to complete your mosaic (Mizrachim, Russians, recent French immigrants, Orthodox Jews, young IDF soldiers, etc.).
seguin,
“mirror what I believe happens to flyover country here in the States.”
Sadly, “disconnect” comes to mind, whether out of disdainful intent or simple indifference; not wanting to know and, more importantly, appreciate other values as legitimate, is the key.
“and ” I don’t believe in God. ” coming from a Jew, especially one who lives in Israel, statements so devoid of education and reason”
Menachem, as my dear, departed Jewish atheist friend from Brooklyn, NY, as fierce a supporter of “Jewishness” and Israel as this American is ever likely to meet told me, Judaism is culture. Perhaps no one took more pride in being Jewish in the blatantly anti-Semitic atmosphere he encountered in Vienna in the 1890s than did Sigmund Freud, another “unapologetic” (his term) atheist.
Both culture and religion bind, for distinctly different reasons.
I agree with almost everything Benjamin says but not all. I am an Israeli whose parents are from North Africa and I may have a different perspective but I think the Shoah (please do like the French and use this word and not Holocaust that means “sacrifice for God”) is not so pregnant in Israeli mentality and psyche. In fact, Israel is much less obsessed with the Shoah than Europeans. And I completely disagree with the “nightmares” line from Oz, who may be a great writer but not a great thinker.
Another small thing: I am married to a French Jewish woman and I know the huge French Jewish community of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv very well – they did not flee antisemitism, they made Aliyah for *exactly* the same reasons as US Jews do – Zionism and Jewish identity. The Arab and Left wing antisemitism in France is real but is not the reason for leaving the country for most Jews.
Michael,
This is one of the most thoughtful, credible and incisive interviews I have read about Israel from the inside in many a moon.
I also moved here from the States close to 30 years ago, and share many of your subject’s observations.
Speaking as an experienced multimedia journalist here and in the States (see my site), I welcome an opportunity to meet with you soon and show you a few other, fascinating sides to this country.
Dave
I have only one criticism of Mr Kerstein & others like him (which includes a very large number of Israelis of all backgrounds).
I see the conflict as a zero-sum game. All that really matters is winning.
Winning is better than losing.
The cost to us of losing is the end of our state, a great many dead, & the survivors fleeing as refugees. The cost to the Arabs of losing is relatively mild.
This is a religious war, it is not a war for a few kilometres of land. Our existence is the reason for the conflict. You cannot negotiate about your very existence.
All of the rest, while intellectually interesting, is essentially irrelevent.
I don’t care about Palestinian nationalism, I don’t care if Palestinians are really a distinct nationality, I don’t care about their factions or politics, I don’t care about the relationship between Palestinian politics & the larger Arab world.
Too many Israelis, like Mr Kerstein, are just too intellectual.
Perhaps I’m too simple-minded, the result of coming from a backward Arab country.
But, in my simple-minded opinion, all the blah, blah, blah is just irrelevent.
The Arabs have defined this conflict – they are out to beat us.
Our task is to beat them.
Benjamin-
“I agree with almost everything Benjamin says but not all. I am an Israeli whose parents are from North Africa and I may have a different perspective but I think the Shoah is not so pregnant in Israeli mentality and psyche”
You certainly have a different perspective to someone like me, the daughter of two Polish-Jewish sole survivors of two large families that were wiped off by the Nazis. Nothing in my upbringing was normal and I will carry the mental scars to the end of my life. The third and the forth generations of our family are still affected, though to a lesser degree. Sorry to be so “heavy” but it had to said.
This is quite possibly one of the best articles I have ever read about Israel. It is insightful, educational, and a truly fascinating read. Well done Michael.
Terry your post#50 is 100% on target…victory first, then negotiate. Israel needs leaders w/ this mindset. Sadly, though, Israel still has to justify its existence & placate its allies as long as this small country wants to be a player in the big bad world. This is especially essential today when the US superpower is going multicultural & Obama has no qualms about making dangerous alliances at Israel’s expense.
Esther, I did not say it was not important and very heavy in some families. But half of the Jews here are from places that did not experience the Shoah. Furthermore, a fact that people often forget is that Israelis are young. Israel has the highest fertility rate of any developed country and by far. It even appears that the Jewish fertility rate is rising and will be higher than the Israeli Arabs one at the end of this decade.
As you say yourself, the new generations of survivors descendants are less affected and when you combine the two factors – you get the fact that although of course the Shoah is central in Jewish history and culture, it seems less an obsession to Israelis than what I see with American Jews or even many European non-Jews.
I can understand the “zero sum game” argument of Terry Eilat, and yet I don’t agree with it. I think this part of the world is going through a lengthy and extremely painful process of change, but that things are changing, and those with the “zero sum” mentality will be the last to notice the change. Anyway, one has to remain cautiously optimistic.
As an immigrant from the U.S. who arrived fifteen years ago, I was also fascinated by this article, and agreed with most but not all of it. For example, Kerstein suggests that Israelis are somehow traumatized – by the holocuast, by the expulsion from their homelands, etc. And yet I do not see Israelis as wounded or traumatized. Quite the opposite, I think Israelis enjoy a higher level of what one could call happiness then people in other societies. Diaspora Jews are traumatized, simply by virtue of being a minority in their country, with a lot of historical baggage to carry. In the U.S. I encountered virtually no anti-semitism, I had plenty of non-Jewish friends, and don’t have a bad word to say about America or Americans. I myself was thoroughly assimilated and non-religious. Yet only after coming to Israel did I discover the almost subliminal dissonance of being a Jew in a non-Jewish country. I always compare it to a background noise that is so tiny you don’t notice it until someone turns it off.
Israelis, by contrast, seem thoroughly confidant and unself-conscious, without any trace of the inferiority complex that can dog diaspora Jews. That’s the “love” part in the love/hate relationship diaspora Jews have with Israel. I love Israelis almost to the point of neurosis, for that very reason. Everyone in the country’s Jewish. Every genius, every moron, every pretty girl. No matter how ugly an argument gets, you don’t have to worry that someone will call you a dirty Jew. It’s that self-confidence, along with all the sunshine and olive oil and inter-racial mixing that has turned Jews cum Israelis into a beautiful race.
I am seconding benjamin (49) that the interviewee’s assessment of the importance of Shoah in the daily lives and thoughts of the Jewish Israelis is seriously overblown. The existential worries that we might not be allowed to have a place under the sun are more likely to come from older immigrants from Europe (East or West). The bulk of native-born Jewish Israelis under 40 (those born after 1973) would say we have an army and we’ll fight if there is a war; all the rest of the time we are just another country on the map. The feeling of being a pitifully small country (and, by implication, vulnerable) is more common in immigrants who experienced countries of quite different orders of magnitude, along with some level of anti-semitism therein or at least in the surrounding public discourse.
This is related to the question of Zionism. People sometimes speak of “zionist” parties in the Knesset, by which they mean everyone apart from the Arab parties. That is, the label “zionist” includes everyone in the Jewish Israeli universe, and in this sense is devoid of meaning. Another way to put the same idea is that zionism is regarded as a part of history, i.e. a highly successful ideological movement of the first half of 20th century. Zionism achieved its goal – a nation-state for Jews in the land of Israel; zionism is no longer relevant to the daily lives of people (which is why attempts by ministers of education from Likud to introduce more “zionism” into the curriculum are so pathetic). The situation is different for a number of groups that might be voice-ful but are really completely marginal: some settlers for whom zionism is still a viable ideology that keeps them fixated on small pieces of land here and there; post-zionists (people who think nation states are out and multi-national federations of the EU type are in); anti-zionists (people who think the evil state of israel is a mistake and should be undone).
BBK, Jerusalem
#40
LOL, I wish I saw that first.
#45
They do have similarities, but just barely. I speak a diluted form of Gazan Arabic (diluted because I’ve lived in Saudi Arabia and most of my friends were West Bank Palestinians or Lebanese).
#50
Terry, I think you’re right, but would you be willing to change your view, IF Palestinians changed their view?
#56 Ali.
Yes, but I see no evidence. I only go where the evidence leads. I don’t base my opinions on wishful thinking or unsupported assumptions.
Most people in the West are basically talking to themselves & only listening to an echo. They are not listening to what Middle-Easterners are really saying. The societies of the Middle-East are completely opaque to Westerners.
You know how any Arab country would deal with a similar problem as Israel has with the Palestinians. I don’t think I have to go into detail. Our mistake in Israel is that we are generally unwilling to play by the rules in our neighborhood. Many Israelis want to pretend we live in Europe or America.
By not playing by Middle-Eastern rules, we have given the Palestinians no reason to change. We have allowed them to believe that victory over us is possible. This hope for our eventual defeat is what sustains the conflict.
#56 Ali.
I should also mention the role that Islam plays in this conflict.
As you may have assumed, I am no fan of Islam. It is my firm belief that Islam has ruined the Middle-East & everywhere else this terrible ideology has taken root.
Without diminishing the hold Islam has on the region, there is no hope for any peace.
I understand what you mean. My question to you was purely theoretical. The day of the Lebanese-border incident, I log on to my Facebook and at the very top of my “news feed” is a status update that said in Arabic “God give Lebanon victory and destroy Israel”. For those here who are not Facebook users, an item gets on the top of a news feed when it gets lots of “likes” and “comments” in a short period of time.
Barry Rubin has an excellent piece about “theories”
http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/2010/08/passionate-heated-debates-over-peace.html
Paul, right on….
good conversation all.
Binyamin is very articulate. I do take issue with his assumption that being a “people” of any vintage is an entitlement to self-determination. That is myopic and dangerous. One need not argue that “Palestinians” are not a nation or point out that their identity was fabricated as a political weapon.
The fact is they are not entitled to self-determination by reason of their actions and core beliefs, which are contrary to any civilized society. The Palestinian national identity is currently based on the destruction of our identity. That is how they define themselves as a people. They teach their children to hate us and murder us from the cradle. “from the river to the sea…”
Granting them self-rule in the face of these bad acts and murderous intentions would simply indulge the worst elements among them. The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza allowed Hamas to take over Gaza and turn it into a terrorist base. A major change in Palestinian ethos and identity is needed, or withdrawal from the West Bank will further indulge the murderers and create a larger terrorist base.
To put it succintly, the Palestinians have to stop being so Palestinian or there will never be peace.
Terry, I think the ‘Link to Comment’ is available when the author or editors don’t want to edit comments, or censor them one by one. Or maybe it makes the censorship easier. I’m not sure.
I enjoyed both the romantic views expressed by Mark and the ‘it’s uglier than Greece’ comment by Scot. benjamin’s comments were interesting as well. I have lived in Israel for six years. Much of this was before the great Israeli internal assimilation that Mark writes about. Perhaps it’s my age, or because I have lived too long in the Golah, but I do think the Shoah plays a big role in Israelis’ perceptions. Or, it may not be the Shoah per se, but the Holocaust as a ‘sampler’ of what Jews can expect from the world. That does not mean it’s 100% accurate, but it’s far more so than the dreamy ‘we’re-all-Christians-and-Jews-and-Muslims-and-we-all-can-coexist’ song that is heard so often in the liberal, assimilated areas of the West.
Israel is a great country. It is family, and family can be tough…and family is also home.
As to the politics of it, I think both Michael and Benjamin K are too involved in the intricacies, interesting as they are, of the conflict. Terry’s truths are basically truths, in my experience. Jews and Israel-affectionate folks like Michael spend lots of time talking with one another because it’s ‘forbidden’ to spend that same energy dealing with the enemy as he should be dealt with.
Larry, Israel cannot afford all the military technology that money could buy. It cannot simply print more money or create a clone army to stand against the BILLION or so out there with hate in their eyes. The history of Israel owes much to others for both calamity and security.
Michael likely spends lots of time talking with others because without the support of the West (which was and is critically necessary to Israel’s survival), the “future” doesn’t look so bright. One’s having Jewish children and building goods schools to teach them in, goes only so far. The narrative plays a large role in driving opinion which in term influences politicians who call the shots. Beware of the bubble. At best alone, Israel can secure mutual suicide, but victory is a whole different thing, let alone a future in peace.
It is not “dreamy” to realize Jews, Christians, and Muslims already co-exist in many places. What you are talking about is the co-existence of mutually exclusive ideology of various States and groups. The discursive framework to improve convergence also already exists. Russia, China, Europe and America agree “in words” the basic thrust of tolerance, human rights and non-aggression despite failure to implement it everywhere. Nevertheless, it is the primary foundation for international justice. It is what must move States to convergence. It has in many ways already influence the world which could be in an even bigger mess. It was only twenty years ago or so, fail safe was a working concept between superpowers.
While Israelis know the constraints of survival in the ME, many Jews and non Jews outside Israel understand that the reformation of Islam and the assimilation of Muslims into the framework of peaceful co-existence and cooperation requires broad global pressure and an ability of Jews and Christians, Hindus and Buddhists to see beyond their own religious identity. Where as identifying with Judaism low on the list is a Darwinian worry, having one’s Jewishness color the entirety on ones thoughts seems counter-spiritual. I’m sure there’s a biblical story warning about that. A strong people don’t lose their identity because they assimilate cooperative and adaptive behaviors. The history of the Jews is perhaps the best example of that.
Many on the Left and sadly even many Jews misunderstand the dynamics of the game going on in the world whether willfully or not. To a large degree I would even argue that neoStrasserism and radical Islam of today do not revolve around the “issue of Israel”, other than as the tactical scapegoat. The real target is Liberal Democracy and the tools of capitalism. This is the wider issue effecting the survival of Western values and calls for an identification beyond religious belief to the principles of reason and altruistic cooperation in order to defeat without untold destruction.
Max, it appears you’ve made a number of assumptions about how I see things that are not true. You seem very wordy, and though I am a writer, I am less so. I’ll do the best I can in a small space:
1) I do not expect Israel to militarily defeat the entire Muslim world;
2) I do believe that Israel would be more secure if it ‘taught’ the Arab world a series of hard lessons, and let it know that the lessons will continue;
3) In my case, this is not directly associated with ‘bringing the Messiah’ or ‘shtei gadot Hayarden’ – in other words, I do not have any desire for ‘expansion’ based on ‘Judaic’ dictates;
4) I posted my comments, and perhaps even exaggerated deliberately, because I believe that folks like Benjamin and Mark – with the best of intentions – keep electing those who keep repeating the same mistakes. I am an Israeli citizen currently outside the country (obviously), and would like to see this change.
I do note that you have apparently labeled me as an ethnic-religious chauvinist. I am much less of that than you imagine, and believe that your comments probably reflect an unease at maintaining the balancing act that all committed Diaspora Jews must maintain. In that context, while you may differ from Menachem in political and religious attitudes, the sense (absent plans to live in Israel) of having to live in two worlds simultaneously and forever causes a certain amount of jumpiness. I’ve been there, but have reached the point where I could care less if liberal Jews or non-Jews think I’m retrograde.
Ah, just a few typos…..turn…of one’s thoughts…etc.
That’s why a preview or edit function is helpful. I never worry about Michael, editing a post. That is not his style.
I nearly laughed myself silly reading BK doesn’t believe in God. That is why this Jew left America for Israel, a Jewish state promised to Jews by God.
What is a Jew if not living proof of God’s existence.
How else would the Jewish people have survived, exiled, homeland conquered, persecutions, forced conversions, wholesale murders and mayhem and managed to flourish and produce their own culture wrapped around their religion. No other people have survived the same fate.
BK may not knowingly be religious. He may practice nothing. He may have issues with God. Hell, just about every Jew does! After all, doesn’t God Himself refer to Jews as a stubborn, show me again and again, people?But not believing in God? Hillarious!
#59 Ali.
I just read the piece by Prof. Rubin. Prof. Rubin is someone I respect greatly, he tries his best to be objective, has much common sense, & he is very well informed.
But, Prof. Rubin is also a liberal, a nice man who cannot see that sometimes being ruthless is in the long run, a good solution.
In any case, my feeling is that the Arab world is heading towards a melt-down. The Arab dictatorships have been spectacularly unsuccessful at delivering anything to their populations. They have only been successful at embezzeling & staying in power.
Islamists will come to power everywhere but such Islamic regimes are unsustainable, they will mismanage everything even worse than the fossilized Arab nationalist regimes or the corrupt monarchies. I think the future for the Arab world is chaos & anarchy & the break-up of many artificial countries into statelets controled by war-lords & petty Islamic madmen like Nasrallah of Hezbollah.
Larry, maybe wordy, but I think clear enough. The central point seems to have escaped you, you know, the point about Michael. And I discussed identification which for me is not a balancing act. I am American. I’m not even particularly religious. Much of my support for Israel is in terms of US strategic goals. radical Islam is a threat to the West. I have little patience however for stubborn or incompetent Israeli leadership. While I do have a desire to see Israel safe “as a Jew”, how the enemy should be dealt with is not an entirely private matter. Can you see that?
I didn’t say you were a religious nut. You certainly would mind if Israel became a non-Jewish State. So identification as an Israeli, implies a religious identification. This is a bigger balancing act. In America this is not the case. Perhaps you didn’t read deeply enough.
My concern for what Liberals and non Liberals think is a political concern. Personally I don’t give a shit. You don’t vote here. I would think however, you would be concerned about US opinion and even more so about failed Israeli politics. It doesn’t strike many of us Jews here, that leadership is so concerned about Israel’s survival, more so than their own.
Israel would like the US to pay for Iron Dome. Yes, a complicated picture.
PS. Max, no intention to hurt your feelings. I simply have read significant parts of the Quran and have grasped Arab attitudes. Also, I’ve met enough of the Jew-hatred here in the US that I’m just going to speak my mind, and so be it.
Hello Menachem Ben Yakov…my friend I agree with you 100% on what you had mention above in your post 6, 23. Little about my backgroud i and my extended family migrated to NYC from Azerbaijan, Baku in 1994. I also have brothers who decided to go to Israel and we also have other family members in Israel. We are jews of south Caucasus, we call ourselves Gorskie, Juhuro or Mountain Jews. I personally don’t speak it because I attended predominantly Russian speaking school and I left my home country in my early age of 15 years old. My elders speak of dialogue of Farsi, we called it gorskie. We are the same jews that were prosecuted from Persia in the past, that’s how some jews end up in Azerbaijan to seek safer grounds. We have only 3 synagogues in Baku. Jewish prayers always had Eretz Israel, Jerusalem and Zion mention in torah that we recited living in Azerbaijan…
Bottom line people need to stop this obsession of Jewish Nation our nation. There are much worse in other countries and bigger land disputes. Israel should stop playing insane games with Arabs land for peace non sense. We keep what we have and they have half of the planet with Islamic dominated countries and land. Our enemies trying to use propaganda in order to rewrite history and change facts…..
May Hashem Bless Israel and its people
Larry in the Silicon.
I liked Scott’s comment as well. The physical description was perfect, the rest of the comment not particularly accurate. Israeli architecture is really ugly. My biggest complaint is the food, just awful.
As for the rest, I lack patience to engage in abstract discussions about coexistence & all that liberal crap. I only see operational or tactical strategies supporting a larger long-term strategy, the goal being to prevail over adversaries.
Larry, no feelings hurt.
I would suggest getting over the Quran and American Jew-hatred (even coming from Jews!)
These “issues” are symptomatic of the convergence of “political convergence” between radical Islam and thne Strasser Left and their useful idiots. The narratives at work are not static. “We” must do a better job making the case and maneuvering Islam towards reformation. Anticipating its moves. This is the intent behind the discourse.
Hopefully, should it come to blows, we will be much smarter than we have in the past.
Unintended consequences are a bummer.
Speak your mind! I never said shut up. I don’t.
Terry, good luck prevailing militarily over your adversaries forever with your GDP. How much did you pay for those Dolphins? How long can Israel fight a war before supplies must be sent? Sure, there are nukes, but there is also fallout, depression….
Peaceful co-existence IS the primary long term goal of strategy. Or is it really prevailing over all adversaries?
To do that forever, what do you do to yourselves?
Wolf: But not believing in God? Hillarious!
Good grief. Israel is full of people who aren’t religious, especially Tel Aviv. It’s not a joke, it’s not funny, that’s just how it is.
Maybe you should get out more.
What happened to the ash on the cigarette in the photo? It is killing me. Did he balance more of it? did it fall and he brushed it off his clothes nonchalantly? did he finally put it in an ashtray?
What surprises me is that there was no talk about the elephant in the room. Namely Islam.
@ Terry
The food is awful in Israel ? Maybe in Eilat and maybe 15 years ago but not today, and not in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, and not when you are from the USA where indeed the food is awful.
The food in Israel is now great, better than in France in average (where most of the food is completely industrialized and without taste – save a few great restaurants of prestige) and I enjoy myself everyday !
Good article/interview MJT. In my personal experience, there are so many misconceptions about Israel from so many angles that it is interesting. So much of American coverage of Israel seems to focus on “Israel vs. other” as in Israel vs. Palestians/Lebanon/Iran/Islam. This is tragic to me because it leads to the over-simplification of Labeling some as Pro-Israeli or Anti-Israeli. Anyone who has even spent a week in Israel or knows Israeli’s knows that there is constant debate about controversial issues and there is far from a plurality. Even on this message board, where major foucus is usually on foreign policy, you can see dissent and intelligent debate. This is not even mentoning issues such as military exemption for certain orthodox, the instution that recognizes marriages, treatment of minorities, and usual secular vs. religious issues. As in most places/families, there is debate and constant disagreement about most issues. I remember all through uni, thought almost every crticism directed at Israel was wrong, misguided or ant-semetic. After uni, I lived in Istanbul and was engaged to Turkish-Jewish girl who had many family members living in Israel. During holidays and weddings through multiple discussions and debates it was quite illuminating the various beliefs held. I laugh at myself now for holding such simplistic beliefs, but I suppose it was like how many people view counties they aren’t intimately tied to….in black and white.
#78 Benjamin.
The food is better in Jerusalem, that is true. I cannot comment on Tel Aviv. Eilat has it’s particular problems due to the distance from the rest of Israel & the abysmal quality of our supermarkets. Indeed, the food in America is often quite awful although New York, in my experience, is excellent if you care to spend some money. And, yes, it’s true, food in France is not as before.
But, I was very spoiled by the excellent quality of food in Morocco & the old fashioned methods of preparation. This is hardly the place to discuss gastronomy, however, so I will leave it at that.
Maxtrue.
My point is that while all these discussions are very interesting & would make for nice conversation over tea or coffee & some sweets, they will mean very little if we are dead or fleeing as refugees. Forgive me for having a rather practical turn of mind (is that English?) but if our country does not survive, these discussions are pointless. And, yes, we can prevail over our adversaries although not if we continue with today’s policies. As it is, because of poor decisions in the past, prevailing over our enemies will cost us more in lives & money. We achieve ”peace” by literally beating the crap out of our enemies, then we have ”peace” ……
In America, Terry, we have found that showing the enemy we can beat the crap out of them and then negotiating a reasonable peace is a better way. Where have we done this? Well, the Soviets folded without pressing the button and they were our biggest existential threat. You however, cannot apply a containment strategy on all your enemies by yourself.
You’re simply not going to beat the crap out of more than a billion people and what you’d get is hardly peace. I see your point, but I doubt if you see mine.
Being practical, and I might add smart, would not have resulted in a series of moves over the last several years.
You have not explained how Israel could continue to beat the crap out of adversaries over time if BDS takes hold and you lose your best friend. Since you can’t beat the crap out of us, I suggest engaging in the necessary political discourse and understand the narrative war means far more than you admit. Otherwise, IDS becomes a self-fulling prophesy, Israel becomes more isolated and your strategic advantages beyond the nuclear(who wins with nukes going off?) fail to stunt multiple threats surrounding from multiplying.
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/blogs/defense/index.jsp?plckController=Blog&plckBlogPage=BlogViewPost&newspaperUserId=27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7&plckPostId=Blog%3a27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7Post%3a6bff4937-b22a-455f-934f-82972e400aeb&plckScript=blogScript&plckElementId=blogDest
Zionism doesn’t have anything to say about Arabs, does it?
This is the biggest failure of Israel the humble independent then less so Occupier & Conquerer. After the 1967/1973 wars, the victorious Israelis didn’t care enough to rebuild the territories into functional, Arab democracies.
I hope there are more parts to the interview, with discussions about internal Israeli politics, and especially the Israeli Arabs.
I’m disappointed that there are so little speculations about any future settlement.
The comments provided some interesting history about Gaza separate from Egypt — funny how Israeli gov’t fails to point out that Egypt oppressed Gaza 1947-67, and didn’t support an independent Gaza then.
(Never visited; know I don’t know details; but certain limited possibilities are obvious to all thinkers.) I expected more discussion of living with Iran having nukes; or follow up on how will/ can Israel stop Iran getting them.
I was hoping for a question/answer about the fundamental justice issue of Jews going to pre- & post- Ottoman Palestine to create Israel.
The analogy of a murdering rapist accusing you of his own crimes was very strong.
Thanks.
http://counterterrorismblog.org/2010/08/print/islamic_radicalism_rising_in_i.php
Convergence will come…
Russia, China, India and Africa not to mention the Far East all have a stake in the outcome.
This, from Comment #19, Larsky…
….”Even more interesting is the total, complete, absolute unwillingness of Jordan (Palestinian), Saudis, Syrians, etc, etc. etc., to take in these characters. Why is that?…”…hits this obstinate, jack-ass of a problem squarely on the head. Thank you, Larsky.
…and, to me sums up the essence of most of the trouble in the Western Asian landmass. And, I mean literally “land mass”.
The Israelis irrigated, then cultivated whole areas of desert into blooming productivity. There is no excuse for the near neighbors of the Palestinians not to open up their arid space for the comparatively few Palestinians. Water scarcity is a major problem, of course, but there is apparently ample water to support the burgeoning population growth amongst the long established population centers. Why not add these “desperate” (by design) Palestinians?
The Palestinians seem to be pawns used by their co-religionists as a human wedge against Israel.
I place the onus squarely upon the surrounding Arab/Islamists to settle “the Palestinian Problem”.
This American strongly objects to the perceived need for American blood and treasure to be the consistently sought after “aid” (I’ve grown to despise the very word “aid”.) to solving this endless Muslim or Islamist ( dear reader, you choose..)quagmire.
Remember Camp David? What a wasted effort. Arafat and the Muslims knew that from the very start.
Taqiyya/Ketman is a malignant virus. We Americans aren’t equipped to deal with this. It’s not in a Petri dish anymore.
Maxtrue.
America has not won a war since WWII. The Korean War left Korea divided & you can see how well that turned out. Vietnam was a defeat, not militarily but politically.
America did not defeat the Soviet Union – the Soviet system collapsed although Ronald Reagan helped it along. But the Russian Federation did not become America’s ally, far from it. Iraq & Afghanistan similarly will not be victories also for political reasons.
Israel is not militarily engaged with a billion Muslims. Our immediate problems are Syria & Lebanon + Iran. Egypt may soon become a military threat again, depending on the succession after Mubarak. Jordan at present is not a military threat unless Abdallah is over-thrown & replaced by a radical Islamic regime. The status quo with the Palestinians is easily maintained (militarily, that is). In reality, ”Palestine” is no priority, it is a distraction from real threats.
The internal threat from Israeli Arabs is similarly manageable.
The rest of the Islamic world can best be described as hostile by-standers not active participants.
Despite the hostility of the Obama administration, Israel is not losing the support of the American people. Rather, it is Obama who is losing the support of the American people (not primarily because of his anti-Israel position).
Israel’s problems are essentially of a political nature, much less of a military problem. The political problem is internal & external.
Our political leadership is mediocre at best. The external problem is of course with the U.N. & the Europeans.
So, my answer to you is that yes, we can continue to beat the crap out of our enemies if we have the political will. We have been at war for the last 100 years & we are doing pretty well.
#69 Terry, Eilat:
I have long thought the same thing. Most of the peoples of this area have never emerged from tribalism anyway. The state dictatorships that have been imposed on them are corrupt and purposeless and the narrow self-interest of these dictator classes, religious or secular, cannot sustain them in power for much longer. The result when they collapse is likely to be a bloody reversion to a backward form of tribalism that will leave these Muslim populations even more miserable than they are now. Oh, and they will, of course, blame it on everyone else but their own history and cultures: i.e., the Jews, the West and anyone else they can think of.
Terry, America prevented the fall of South Korea, Greece, Turkey to the forces of communism beyond the divide in Europe. We have made sure no threat has materialized against Taiwan or Japan. You are mistaken if you think the US played little role in the collapse of the USSR going back to Truman and culminating in Reagan.
We ousted the Russians and the the Taliban from power in Afghanistan, removed Saddam and obviously check NK’s move towards even greater aggression.
As far as Israel, beyond its war of Independence their “victories” have not stemmed the tide of conflict. Survive you have and kudos, but the present situation is not good. You may not be physically fighting with a billion Muslims now, but their money and eventually their jihadists and arms will reach out. And you listed quite number of threats already. Care to take them on all at once? A major conflict will indeed require re-supply. The use of nukes miles from your borders doesn’t sound very pretty.
You didn’t mention Turkey. And should Lebanon fall further into radicalism? Russia and Iran supply Assad more stuff? Are the Saudi royals so safe?
You may be overly optimistic about the American people. That is one reason why I blog and why discourse is vital. Anything is possible. Obama’s number have less to do about Israel and more to do about dollars.
Yes, so far your outcomes have been more positive than negative -BUT WITH HELP. I wouldn’t call the national mood there elated these days, would you?
Don’t get me wrong. I support Israel, but I would argue your attitude strikes me as leading to more of the same. And the situation is deteriorating. New players are involved. You wouldn’t want Pakistan to fall to an Islamic revolution or serious stuff continue between Israel and Turkey. Israel needs to be far more pro-active and engaged. It needs to take narratives much more seriously. Of course I say this as a friend. It is just my opinion.
Kerstein: “It’s not my business to tell the Palestinians whether or not they exist.”
It is your business to counter an anti-Israeli propaganda fraud. The “Palestinian nation” is nothing but a masquerade for propaganda purposes.
Kerstein: “I think people who say the Palestinians don’t exist are…myopic, to put it delicately.”
And I think people who believe the Phakestinians are an actual nation are blind, to put it delicately.
Kerstein: “Now, there are some Israelis who say the Palestinian national identity didn’t exist until after 1948, which is not necessarily untrue. You can make the argument that Palestinian national identity as we know it is basically a product of the Nakba.”
That’s the best refutation of the claim of their existence. What national identity is built upon opposition to something? A national identity requires positive foundations, such as a history!
Kerstein: “To say they aren’t a people doesn’t strike me as an honorable argument.”
You’re not dealing with honorable people, Mr. Kerstein. When will Jews finally get it?!
Kerstein: “but I also have the right to say that they don’t have the right to determine themselves upon the destruction of Israel.”
But that’s all they are, have been and will be about!
Shamil, Thank you for your kind words. I look forward to reading more of your posts and learning from the very special viewpoint your personal history provides. I second your blessing with a heartfelt Amen.
Max, I have come to like you but sometimes I think you are shortsighted and fail to grasp the enormity, the amazing blinding reality of a Jewish state in our time. I say blinding because we are so close to events that many fail to understand how important they are.
” As far as Israel, beyond its war of Independence their “victories” have not stemmed the tide of conflict. Survive you have and kudos, but the present situation is not good. ”
Max, that Israel exists as a sovereign state at all is nothing short of a miracle. After the murder of one in every three Jews on the planet, after the murder of one and one half million Jewish children under the age of five, today Jews have an army, an air force, a navy and the military might to protect our own sovereign nation. In order to stem the tide of conflict nothing less than a complete transformation of humankind is necessary. Good will have to defeat Evil for that is what the war against the Jews and Judaism is. The war between Good and Evil. Nothing less.
” You may not be physically fighting with a billion Muslims now, but their money and eventually their jihadists and arms will reach out. And you listed quite number of threats already. Care to take them on all at once? A major conflict will indeed require re-supply. The use of nukes miles from your borders doesn’t sound very pretty.”
All of these problems pale against the problems that beset our ancestors for almost two thousand years, Jews today are better prepared to face the problems we face than anytime in our history. We have faced worse with less and always survived.
From the wisdom of Rav Kook-
” It was never easy to be a Jew. Even now, with our own state and army, Israel’s ambassador to the UN recently exclaimed, “Thank God that the fate of Israel and of the Jewish people is not decided in this hall!”
With God’s help, the Jewish people have managed to survive throughout the centuries, despite numerous powerful and brutal enemies. Psalms 135 and 136 celebrate the nation’s Divine protection and deliverance (in the words of Mark Twain, ‘the secret of the Jew’s immortality’), starting with our escape from Egyptian subjugation and our triumph over the Canaanite nations.
“He smote many nations and slew mighty kings: Sichon, king of the Emorites, Og, king of Bashan, and all the kingdoms of Canaan.” (Psalm 135:10-11)
What was special about Sichon and Og that, out of all the Canaanite kings, they ‘merited’ to be explicitly mentioned?
Three Types of Power
We can classify the various forms of human prowess and strength into three basic categories. The people of Israel needed God’s assistance in overcoming all three, as they fought for their inheritance in the Land of Israel.
The first form of strength is the formidable spirit found in a cruel and ruthless leader. A fierce king is difficult to overcome. The Midrash says that King Sichon was like a sayach, a young, wild mule in the wilderness (Rosh Hashanah 3a). This refers to his brutally vicious nature, unlimited in its violent outbursts. The ancient despots of the world valued the power to rule by instilling fear and terror. Tyrants like Nebuchadnezzar, who would eat live rabbits, intentionally developed traits of violent cruelty and savagery, aware that these characteristics fortified their reign of terror.
The second form of strength is that of immense physical power. Og, king of Bashan, was a tremendous giant; he epitomized this form of power. The Torah states (Deut. 3:11) that Og was so tall, his bed needed to be nine cubits (13.5 feet) long.
And the third category of strength is the collective power that comes from many nations working together for a common cause. This was the military advantage of the Canaanite kings, who formed an alliance in order to fight against the Jewish people.
As the Israelites strove to inherit the Land of Israel, God subdued all of these forms of power before them. Neither the ruthless brutality of Sichon, nor the terrible physical strength of the giant Og, nor the collective power of all the Canaanite armies together, succeeded in thwarting the Divine plan of settling the people of Israel in their land.
This is a lesson for all generations. We need not fear our enemies’ cruelty, brute physical strength, or numerical superiority. Just as the Sichons, Ogs and other tyrants throughout history could not foil God’s plan, so too our current foes will fail to obstruct God’s promise to the Jewish people.
“There are many thoughts in a man’s heart; but the counsel of God will always stand.” (Proverbs 19:21)
(adapted from Olat Re’iyah vol. II, p. 83) “
terry-as an ex -palmachnik living (part time)in miami ,and in total agreement with your evaluations ,would like u to contact me @ jhardof@gmail.com.
jack
Menachem, it is your right to place your trust in the counsel of God and His promise to the Jewish people. Forgive me if I say however, that the survival of the Jewish State is not identical with the survival of the Jewish people. They lived for a thousand years without Israel.
Now I am not saying that Israel has not become a point of identification for most Jews around the world. I am certainly not suggesting Israel is of little importance. It is indeed a tribute to sheer determination and will that Israel today exists. As I said before, many non-Jews helped in this accomplishment.
The gentlemen I watched on your link reminded us not to look towards the past, but rather the future. If the future is blood and darkness, violence and pain, why would people want to live in the ME? Why would Jews not prefer NY or London?
Yes, Jews have survived. My family journeyed from the Inquisition and the pogroms of Russia. It wasn’t Israel that became a place for my family to find equality and freedom of expression. It was America.
The lesson I have learned is that we trust little to fate and even less to the immaterial. I see no Ark of the Covenant carried into battle by the IDF. I see no Divine plan in the extermination of 6 million Jews. We place the lever of power in the hand of reason and let individual faith be the cornerstone of our heart. Issues and actions are to be deliberated by the people who government serves. This cannot become a battle between rival Gods, a fight between religions or sects, nor can the conflicts that threaten the world. This is the singular issue Liberalism has with Israeli polity, though Israel is a secular state the last I read.
So I respect your life there in Israel, being faithful to your beliefs. The world is a different place than ancient times. WMD can vaporize a city and terror can sweep darkness over prosperity. We are reaching the point of breaking the earth, proliferating dangerous technology and losing our way. The interests of all nations require us to reach a common set of values and codes to insure cooperation and progress. Israel is no different. Its peace is ultimately tied to the greater peace, especially in light of the advent of radical Islam.
We identify with many things. I do place human above Jewish.
You’re okay Menachem. You know, necessity is also the mother of compromise…
I know this OT, and in general Terry I sympathize with many of your points (but not all), but I must take serious umbrage with you about your Korea comments. I have lived in South Korea. It is a wonderful, modern, wealthy, democratic nation. As an American I was shown only respect and admiration. I was there when Ronald Reagan passed. My adopted family hung an American flag out of the apartment window. Just because the US and its allies didn’t manage to defend the entire country does not make it a failed military campaign.
It doesn’t really matter if we think the Palestinians exist as a distinct people or if they think we Jews/Israelis are a real people. We’re both there. Period. Neither is going to get rid of the other side. The only alternative is to divvy up the land in a way that keeps Israel a Jewish majority state with defensible borders and that allows the Palestinians to have a semblance of some sort of independence. The rest is a bunch of hot air bullshit and a waste of time.
@ Menachem Ben Yakov Thank you for your kind words and expressing appreciation for my point of view. I really admire your last post # 93. I just want to point out that we jews always adapted to our host countries in my case I was born and raised in Azerbaijan, Baku. Its true to this day that jewish communities always contribute to their country of origin even thou Israel always been in our prayers and our hearts.
I just want to refer to your earlier post where you mention great scholar Maimonides. My wife works in Maimonides Hospital (Brooklyn,NY) as NP. Copy and paste that link into your browser
http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/static.panoramio.com/photos/original/10691033.jpg
I snap that picture for my memories.
BTW my wife is from Nalchik (Russia) north caucus I and my wife take pride that she works there, but it’s very unfortunate patients and family members on very often occasion and also staff that not Jewish always have this hatred against jews meanwhile attending and working in hospital that build with jewish money, blood, name after great jewish scholar and dedicate to our home land Eretz Israel. Sometimes I ask G-d and myself where is sanity in this crazy world. Hope to hear something heartwarming from you…
Do you live in Israel or States….Thank you
May Hashem watch over Israel and its people
Good Lord, Terry — generalizing about Israel based on Eilat is like describing New York state after a trip to Coney Island. Eilat is an armpit.
Probably a third of the best meals I’ve had were in Israel. Israeli wine can be excellent, there’s wonderful music of all styles, some fine modern art being done, great markets, interesting cities and top-notch beaches (emphatically not Eilat), a beautiful desert (Tzin Wilderness and Negev highlands), wildflowers, world-class bird-watching, fascinating museums, incredibly attractive young people, and in my experience once Israelis take you seriously (or maybe decide you’ll be fair) there’s a warmth and generosity that is pretty unusual elsewhere.
Day-to-day architecture, OK, that’s not a strength, I agree, though Tel Aviv has some interesting stuff. As to the litter and trash — also true, a widespread problem. From my limited observation, it seems a lot worse in Haredi and Arab areas than elsewhere. fwiw Arizona was pretty much a pigsty until they started taking both off-site construction dumping and individual littering very seriously about 10-15 years ago, and ramped up a strong public education and investigation/enforcement program.
Menachem — I really liked post #93, although you do go on a bit.
semite5000,
It seems to me that you fail to realize that the conflict is more realistically understood as between Israel and the Arab states as a whole, rather than between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs — and that this conflict is a subset of the conflict of the non-Muslim world with the Muslim world. And further, the basis of this larger world conflict is in the imperatives of the texts of Islam and example of their prophet, as generally understood by most Muslims (not all, but certainly most).
Rwo quick comments.
(a) to “I think people who say the Palestinians don’t exist are…myopic, to put it delicately.” Let’s be non-myopic: what is the real difference between Arab Israelis (or Israelis Arabs or Arabs of Israel), Arabs of what-is-to-become-Palestine and the Arabs of Jordan? Are those three different nationalities? Only two? Or perhaps one. Or are they Arabs of the Arab nation who happen to live in the area of the Jewish National Home?
(b) to “MJT: Zionism doesn’t have anything to say about Arabs, does it?
Benjamin Kerstein: Not a great deal.”
Funny, actually there is much material in classic Zionist texts, from Ahad HaAm, Ben-Gurion, and even Jabotinsky (read his Iron Wall, both parts).
(c) to “MJT: The Palestinians are a bit unusual. Benjamin Kerstein: In what sense? MJT: They define themselves in opposition to you.”
as I have maintained now for three decades, Palestinianism is the negative of Zionism. If there had been no Zionism, no one would have heard of a sub-group called “Palestinians”.
Nations defining themselves in opposition to someone else is a very old pattern. That there was no Palestinian nation in, say, 1910 does not preclude there being one now, as there clearly is.
With great trepidation (or perhaps with Israeli Chutzpah…) I’d like to challenge Amos Oz’s “nightmare” observation.
It’s not so much that in quiet moments Israel is fuller of nightmares than anywhere else: Witness the third world with its unimaginable poverty, crushing regimes, and cruelty to women, inter alia. Witness the desolate expanses over much of the globe – including the US – with the truly nightmarish possibility of completely disappearing….and perhaps having no one notice. Witness the misty grey collection of restless guilt that haunts Europe.
If nightmares are largely about helplessness or loneliness for most of us, Israel is not a collection of nightmares at all. There is nowhere I can think of that is more interconnected or where individuals feel more empowered. Even our true nightmares – the wars, the dead, the oppression we are regrettably forced to engage in – are so broadly and openly discussed, they don’t stay nightmares for long. Public discourse and national soul searching are so much part of the landscape that I’d say they are BIG PUBLIC PROBLEMS.
But nightmares? No.
Those are private, frightening in that we must grapple with them in a vacuum of understanding. Here, everyone understands.
More accurately, Israel is the greatest collection of broken dreams. Because it was built on little more than hope, and is lived intensely from one optimistic act of building and overcoming to the next, normalcy around here is punctuated not necessarily by nightmares, but by being rudely awoken by a certain overarching reality on a fairly regular basis.
Other places, it is easier to stay asleep.
#99 Pam.
Re-read my post.
I did not say anything about wine, music, etc.
I said I could not comment about food in Tel Aviv.
Eilat is not an ”armpit” – I can only imagine what you think of Dimona or Beersheva.
There are many excellent food products in Israel. Some of the goat’s milk products are outstanding. There are others I won’t waste time listing.
But, in my experience, however limited it may be, much Israeli food is modern crap.
Meat is absolutely awful & way over-priced. The chicken is that fatty, bland, factory-produced abomination like American supermarket chicken (which is even worse).
For someone like me, used to buying live chickens that roamed around & ate whatever chickens eat naturally, and I should say roosters not chickens, since I always bought young roosters, buying old dead chickens in a supermarket is disgusting.
For sure, as I mentioned, Eilat has particular problems but I’ve traveled a bit here in Israel & while I’ve eaten in some good restaurants (way over-priced as well), only a very few could be called outstanding. Anyway, our supermarkets are poorly managed, very unprofessional, have limited variety, & do nothing to train their staff. Perhaps things are better in Tel Aviv but I cannot say.
There is no reason to be sensitive to criticism of Israel – things are what they are, and despite my complaints, I hardly risk starving to death. Unlike some, I can appreciate Israel without it being 100% perfect.
“by being rudely awoken by a certain overarching reality on a fairly regular basis.”
Like incoming rockets and mortars maybe, from drug thugs with $millions at their disposal, launched from inside Mexico, targeting Tucson, Las Cruces, El Paso…
Zolt the dolt #91
He didnt say the Palestinians were honorable. He expressed the importance of the Israelis being honorable. If the other party is dishonorable, it does not follow that one dealing with that party should also be dishonorable.
Max,
For the wider world Jews represent Judaism. Even when an individual Jew has abandoned every speck of Jewish identity or practice. Judaism is hated because it proves that G-d exists. That He is real and that ultimately there are consequences for behavior. Human beings bridle at rules and regulations that are imposed upon them. That is natural and in some cases good and can lead to a better world. Yet when people ignore the rules for life given by the Almighty the outcome is always the same- disaster. Self-hating Jews are those that desire to shed their obligations and duties as Jews but find the wider world will not let them escape their identity. They are driven mad by their desire to flee from Judaism into a world that constantly reminds them they are Jews. Rather than hate a world that imprisons them they hate what they are. No matter how much they try to shed their ancestry, either by adopting the causes and flags of others, or by aligning themselves with another religion, they cannot escape what G-d made them.
Many people wonder why Israel is hated by The Left and The Right. How come such two dissimilar groups share Israel as a common enemy? Those of the left or the right share one trait in common- their desire to impose their will on others. These leftists or rightists are challenged by the reality that a G-d exists whose rules for mankind are beyond their manipulation. Try as they can neither leftists or rightists can fully impose themselves on others as long as Judaism proclaims, Jewish existence proves and the state of Israel confirms that there is a Judge beyond their influence and control. That is why Judaism, the Jews, and now Israel, are hated, because we represent a Truth that can not be overcome.
Israel is hated because it represents the Truth of Judaism.
Max, I leave you with this one last statement from a book I hope you read.
” The most significant aspect of the establishment of the state of Israel is the fact that Jews through the ages knew it was to come. ”
Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits, Faith after the Holocaust
I wrote a response to a number of issues raised by this article. Since its too long to include in a comment, here is the link:
http://deskofzachary.blogspot.com/2010/08/response-to-benjamin-kerstein.html
Terry, you keep talking about how Israel should operate by its neighbors’ rules. What exactly do you think Israel should do? Be specific.
Zachary don’t you think that the Jews’ experience not having a state justifies their right to a state?
And by the way, if I thought Jews would be safe in a Muslim-majority state, then I would support it, but I know that they won’t because I know Muslims.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/08/israels-bubbles.html
One thing I really don’t like about Andrew Sullivan is his selective editing. He takes a snippet of the interview and then states that it “emphasizes the psychological forces at work in Israel that impede any reconciliation with the Palestinians.”
He’s in an anti-Israel phase (he was for Israel before he was against it, he was for the Iraq war before he was against it, he was against promiscuity before he was caught putting up ads for sex online (which I have no problem with, just the hypocrisy of complaining about it afterwards), and he was kinda homophobic before he was outted), so he will always see “forces at work” *IN ISRAEL* that impede reconciliation with the Palestinians. Mr. Kerstein, if anything, has shown how psychological forces OUTSIDE Israel have constantly helped to screw up this situation even further without the participants’ own errors.
He takes Kerstein’s remarks that Israel can see this latest challenge through because it has seen others through, but then states that “yet if Netanyahu were to order a strike on Iran, Kerstein would support him. As I said, the psychology is what’s interesting.”
Right, make Kerstein look like a nutcase. “But, but,… he just said Iran and Israel can have an uneasy coexistence as nuclear powers but then he’d support Netanyahu’s strike on the country! What ‘interesting’ psychology, eh?” I.e., what psychos.
What bothers me about people who have Israel Derangement Syndrome (which Andrew Sullivan has because he posts about Israel at least several times a day, most often very unflaterringly – and NO, I’m not calling him an anti-Semite (he likes to pull that victim card)), is that Israel can do NO right.
If the people are worried about a nuclear Iran which threatens them, though unsure if Iran would actually attack (though if Israel were wrong on this, it’d be screwed), they are judged as having an “interesting psychology.” I think the Israel Derangement Syndrome (IDS) types are the ones with “interesting psychology.”
Looking at the Blue Line Tree Incident, for example, I love how the IDS-ers try to wiggle some sort of blame out for Israel. The Guardian had a piece on how the border needs better definition (ummm, it’s pretty well defined. Had Israel shot a Lebanese officer on the Lebanese side, we know the Guardian would not be running a “let’s better define the border” story). Juan Cole has tried to pin the blame on Israel for not having UNIFIL cut down the tree. Sorry Juan, if it’s on Israel’s side of the border, they have a right to cut the three, climb the tree, carve their initials in the tree, have a campfire around the tree. and Andrew Sullivan, though admiting the Lebanese were trigger happy, asked “couldn’t the Israelis have moved the camera instead of cutting down the tree?” Sigh. You just can’t win with these people! Had Israel moved the camera, incurring the wrath of the sniper anyway, it would’ve been “couldn’t you have just cut down the tree? It was on your side of the border anyway.”
#109 Ali.
Hey, Ali, what are you doing up so late (or so early)? I haven’t been in California in ages, maybe the last time was 25 yrs. ago.
You won’t like what I have to say, I think.
It’s not exactly what Israel should do, it’s what we should have done.
First off, although there was great hardship after the 1948 War of Independance, we were militarily exhausted & had taken many casualties relative to our size, we should not have been so quick to end hostilities. We should have expelled the remaining Arab population. After the 1967 war, similarly, we should have expelled the Arab population, especially from Jerusalem. And, we should have reclaimed the Temple Mount & blown up the mosque.
Our peace treaty with Egypt was a mistake in my opinion. The Sinai is more important than our temporary cease-fire with Egypt (which, essentially, is what our peace treaty really is).
In the years since, we should have maintained a policy of preemptively destroying the military capabilities of the enemy states around us. And, we allowed ourselves over the years to become a vasssal state of the US, dependant & too eager to be used as a pawn in the Cold War.
Every concession, all of the various peace initiatives, our willingness to accept a two-state solution, all of it was a mistake & we are paying the price now.
You name it, Oslo, the withdrawal from S. Lebanon, year after year, we have made mistake after mistake.
Ali.
And, I might add, we should have undermined the Hashemite regime in Jordan & your people would now have a state, for better or worse, and perhaps we wouldn’t be at peace exactly but it would be a stable cease-fire.
Your refugees would have made new lives just as our refugees from Arab countries did here.
Menachem, I’ll spare everyone my response to you right now. I would hoever like to know if you advocate the literal interpretation of the Old Testement.
Terry, I don’t know where to begin with that last one. If it didn’t require such critical help from outside Israel to survive, then perhaps you have some point. So Jews here must side between the inept arrest of sea borne activists or their destruction.
Michael, congrats on bringing quite a group together here. The thread itself flushes so much out of interest.
Ali, comments of sanity. You too Del and S-5000. I guess Michael’s trip has already brought some clarity.
Menachem –
I’ve met enough Jews here who are swept up in religious fervor to know that nothing I could say is going to change your mind or vitiate your need to condescend to secular and atheist Jews like me, but I do have to take exception to your frankly offensive claim that Israel is some sort of miracle from God. Israel exists because millions of Jews have worked, bled, and died to bring it into existence and to maintain it. They received no supernatural aid in doing so, and your attitude makes a mockery of their sacrifices and their labors. I would also note that rabbinic Judaism has traditionally held that the Jews deserved to be stateless because of our sins. It was this that kept us from rebuilding the Jewish state until the modern era, when we finally broke free of the yoke of the Torah and realized that we would have to liberate ourselves, rather than waiting around for God to do it for us.
Even sadder, Jon Stewart asked the question, “couldn’t they have moved the camera?”. What was worse than Andrew was that Jon mocked Israel, questioned whether Israel was really on their side and even made fun of the tradition of American Jews planting trees in memory. No where did he mention the Israeli who was murdered. It was rather unfunny and a disservice to the truth.
I was so annoyed I almost went down the street to protest all day outside his studio with a sign. He has willfully taken on the role of Liberal, rather than stand with conscience. For that he risks becoming a joke himself, playing to his echo chamber. Jewish comics of the past were not so selective in their humor, nor as blind.
Terry, I do some work that involves me being up really early. It should end sometime this month and I will go back to normal human time by then.
If you ignore the moral implications of what you said, then you are left with the fact that is totally unfeasible. Sure you could expel those people, but can you really destroy the military capabilities of your neighbors? As Max said somewhere on this thread, you can’t militarily defeat all the Arabs.
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/blogs/defense/index.jsp?plckController=Blog&plckBlogPage=BlogViewPost&newspaperUserId=27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7&plckPostId=Blog%3a27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7Post%3ace0a21d3-bc7b-43f2-acae-9f6e5232dd48&plckScript=blogScript&plckElementId=blogDest
Arabs Ali, I would say the problem is far bigger than that.
Benjamin Kerstein, I usually do not respond to the posts of fools but in your case I will make an exception. I do so in the hope that your ignorance will clear up some matters for those more open minded.
First, I have served in the IDF as have my children and one day my grandchildren. Our only son was taken from us at the age of 22. He was killed when an explosive charge detonated beneath his jeep after leaving the Aduraim IDF base south of Hebron. He was an company commander in the Shimshon Brigade. I need no lesson from you in sacrifice. When you grow up you will learn to assume less and question more.
Second, Your understanding of Jewish history is rudimentary at best. The history of the Jews and Israel neither begins nor ends with political Zionism, which by the way, I support and understand far better that you do. I would guess that you have never visited Hebron and when you lived in jerusalem I would guess you rarely, if ever, visited The Kotel. The fact that you are estranged from your own history is evident.
Lastly, to claim that Rabbinic Judaism prevented the rebuilding of Eretz Israel prior to the Holocaust is nonsense. Who do you think lived on the Land and maintained a Jewish presence through 1900 years of dispersion? The Jewish communities in israel throughout this time were overwhelmingly observant.
The only thing that you have broken free of is an education.
Benjamin K, I was doing my best to be diplomatic. Survival requires a large tent, yes? Your points are well taken. As I said on another thread, one of Israel’s modern warriors moved here to America because he found the political leadership and strategy in Israel too much to bare. And that’s after taking numerous rounds of fire from enemies. It wasn’t those bullets which changed his mind.
Menachem,
If Benjamin Kerstein was an uneducated fool, I wouldn’t have interviewed him.
The first thing you did when you showed up here was insult me as if you were an overbearing boss, and now you’re insulting Benjamin in just as arrogant and haughty a manner.
Maybe you should just read something else, or be quiet. You really aren’t very pleasant to be around.
And I thought the political divide in America was bad.
http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~samuel/presence.html
Maxtrue — You have no idea.
Menachem — My sympathies for your loss, but if you think it somehow gives you the right to insult people and accuse them of being self-hating Jews because they do not subscribe to your religious beliefs, you are gravely mistaken. Perhaps you would like to tell my friend’s husband, who spent three years having his leg rebuilt after being hit in a Hezbollah missile attack, that he’s a self-hating Jew because he is not observant. 80% of this country’s Jewish population is secular or outright unbelieving, and there is not a house in this country in which there has been no death. According to you, they are all self-hating or disconnected from their past. If you cannot see how egregiously insulting that is, then I don’t think we have much further to say to each other.
I would note, however, you seem to be utterly ignorant of Zionist and Israeli history. The old yishuv was politically quiescent and largely indifferent or hostile to the Zionist movement. Many of its descendants remain so today. Religious Zionism came late to the game, and for most of its early history, the Zionism was secular and at times outright anti-religious. With the exception of Avraham Kook, all of its early theoreticians (Ehad HaAm, Jabotinsky, Sirkin, Herzl, Bialik, etc.) were secular, and quite consciously so. Their embrace of Zionism was also a rebellion against the old halachic way of life. It is not a coincidence that Ben-Gurion threw his tefillin into the sea on the journey to then-Ottoman Palestine. You may not like these facts, but they are the facts. Even Kook was forced to acknowledge this, claiming that the secular Zionist majority was doing God’s work unwittingly.
#118 Ali.
Glad to hear you’ll go back to a normal schedule soon.
I’ll tell you, I’m not much for the ”moral high ground” discussions. Anyway, I find nothing in the current situation particularly moral, not for the Arabs & certainly not for us. What is moral about Gaza ruled by Hamas? For that matter, what is moral about Fatah crooks embezzeling aid money & doing their best to incite hatred & avoid any solution? Is it moral for Arab states to keep Palestinians locked up in refugee camps for the last 60 yrs.? And what is moral about seeking our destruction, doesn’t seem very moral to me. What seems to be ruthless in the short-term is often the most moral solution in the long-term. There is no morality in keeping a conflict going for a 100 years.
As to the practicality of my thinking, I have no doubt. Far more practical than the situation we have allowed to develop around us. We have the means, we do not have the political will. All appeasement has done is make the cost go up for all concerned.
#112 Kyle- Good post, I used to agree with Sullivan frequently but now spar with him on a variety of issues, especially Israel. With regard to the “bi-national state” movement mentioned here, I sent Andrew this yesterday which to me should be the real bi-national state movement:
“Your posting regarding some support among Palestinians and Israelis for Israel to annex the West Bank and allow 2.5 Palestinians to become Israeli citizens (thereby ending the Jewish state) should be flipped around. How about if most of the West Bank is given back to Jordan and made part of Jordan (or a tight confederation as President Reagan proposed)? Everyone is a winner in that scenario:
1. “Palestinian” is not really an ethnicity. It makes more sense to marry them to their Arab compatriots in neighboring Arab states. Plus, a majority of Jordanians are of “Palestinian” origin, including the crown prince.
2. Jordan wins because it gains in population which its sparsely populated kingdom needs, a population that includes a sizable, educated, merchant/professional class.
Palestinians win because they will be part of a much more viable nation and united culturally, ethnically, and religiously.
3. Israel wins because it has a peace treaty with Jordan and for years prior had a solid working relationship with the Hashemite monarchy. Plus, one of the Israeli concerns is a lack of confidence that an independent Palestinian state would be viable enough to be a good neighbor. This solution implants the state firmly into an existing, stable state.
4. The world wins because all that needs to be negotiated is a new Israeli-Jordanian border on or near the 1967 lines.
To all those who keep shouting for a bi-national solution, a Palestine-Jordan state makes much more sense than a Palestine-Israel one.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-10891733
On a lighter note…
“unspecified psychological disabilities”….lol
Well Kyle, I expect Jordan would have the same fears that Israel does. They kicked out many Palestinians once before. It does make rational sense and your idea is not so new….
I concur, Maxtrue.
Just don’t expect the Israel Derangement Syndrome brigade to label the Jordanians as having an “interesting psychology” for fearing the same thing.
” Home Article Print Page Haaretz
17.05.10
Poll shows ranks of secular Jewish minority in Israel continued to drop in 2009
Government study shows 42 percent identify as secular, 8 percent ultra-Orthodox. 80 percent of Israel is Jewish, while 12 percent is Muslim and 3 percent Christian
By Asaf Shtull-Trauring
Just 42 percent of the Jewish population defines itself as secular, according to a socioeconomic poll commissioned by the Central Bureau of Statistic in 2009.
The findings, which were released yesterday, show that 8 percent of Israeli Jews view themselves as ultra-Orthodox, 12 percent characterize themselves as religious, 13 percent are religiously observant, and 25 percent adhere to traditional custom but are not religiously observant.
Since 2004, there has been an increase in the number of religious and religiously observant Jews, while the proportion of secular Jews has fallen. That year, 44 percent of the Jewish population in Israel saw itself as secular.
For the non-Jewish population, the CBS chose to employ a different set of classifications to describe the extent of religious adherence. Among the Arab population, 18 percent described themselves as not religious, 27 percent said there were not very religious, 47 percent answered they were religious, and 8 percent replied that they were very religious.
The annual poll lists data on the living conditions of the adult population in Israel. It gauges indices in the areas of housing, health, education, employment and economic status.
The study, which was conducted last year, included interviews with 7,500 individuals 20 years and up, representing 4.7 million people in Israel today.
According to the poll, 80 percent of those living in Israel are Jewish, 13 percent are Muslim, 3 percent are Christian, and the rest are Druze, atheists, or unaffiliated.
While there are no significant gaps between men and women as to the extent of religious observance among Jews, this is not so with Arabs. While 55 percent of Arab women consider themselves religious as opposed to 38 percent of men, 11 percent of Arab women say they are very religious in contrast with just 6 percent of Arab men.
The percentage of the Jewish population between the ages of 20 and 29 that defines itself as ultra-Orthodox stands at 14 percent. Just two percent of Jews over the age of 65 views itself as ultra-Orthodox.
Among religiously observant Jews, there are no significant discrepancies between various age groups. In contrast, 87 percent of Arabs over the age of 65 said they are religious while 44 percent of Arabs in their 20s said the same.
The poll also found that 93 percent of secular Jewish men and a similar percentage of religiously observant are in the workforce, while 52 percent of ultra-Orthodox men work. Meanwhile, 61 percent of ultra-Orthodox women and 88 percent of secular women have jobs.
Among the religiously observant population, 80 percent of women work. Of the women who view themselves as religious, 83 percent participate in the workforce. ”
So 58% of Israelis are observant to a greater or lesser extent.
The problem with trying to have a discussion with someone who can state, ” 80% of this country’s Jewish population is secular or outright unbelieving…” is the same problem anyone has when talking to a leftist… when the facts do not support their argument they resort to making up facts. I guess they feel that their ” narrative ” is as good as the next guys.
Mr. Totten, Rest assured that this is the last time I will participate in one of your posts. MBY
Terry – sorry, you seemed to be taking off from Scott’s view that Israel was an appalling place with few redeeming qualities. I hardly think it’s 100% perfect and was just trying to make the case that (remove the whole conflict thing for a moment) it has a great deal that is attractive to visitors. Eilat, however, is not a part of the country I would ever bother to visit again.
To be fair, I live in a tourist mecca too, and all you’ll hear about from me are the many obvious negatives. I can’t see why anyone comes here anymore.
Otherwise — I tend to agree with you on the political side. Trying to play by Western rules — rules no one in the West would follow under similar circumstances — makes Israel look weak, and garners no support or room to maneuver. Being respected is far more important to Israel over the long haul than being liked, IMO, and humans just don’t respect weakness.
I can’t believe an interview regarding Israel and the Arabs and there is no talk about the real problem Islam.
I think both of you should read Efraim Karsh, to get a little history
Sol,
That’s only one piece of the problem. Some non-Arab Muslim populations are actually friendly to Israel, and secular Palestinian groups–and also Christian Palestinian groups–are hardly more friendly than Hamas. Focusing only on Islam won’t get us anywhere. This problem would go on even if every Palestinian in the world abandoned Islam tomorrow.
Menachem –
Actually, the poll bears out my claim. Only 20% of Israelis are ultra-Orthodox or “religious”. These would be the only acceptable Jews according to your criteria. To be observant, traditional, or secular implies a relationship to the Torah which, according to you, would be treasonous.
Patient readers –
For those reading this who are unfamiliar with Judaism in Israel, here one’s religiosity is not defined by denomination but rather by degree of observance. Put as briefly as possible, people who live a “halachic” life, following Jewish law as interpreted by the Talmud and the rabbinic tradition, are defined as “haredi” (ultra-Orthodox) or “dati” (religious). Other designations, such as “observant”, “traditional”, and “secular” refer to people who do not live according to Jewish law, but do observe some of it to a greater or lesser degree. According to Menachem, all of these latter three groups (80% of Israel’s Jewish population) are self-hating Jews because they do not live according to the Torah (translated from Menachemese, this actually means according to the Talmud, which is regarded as the authoritative interpretation of the Torah, as well as, I presume, whatever rabbis Menachem happens to approve of).
My apologies if this is confusing, but these are terms which have different meanings in the Israeli context than in the American or European context. For example, a Reform or Conservative Jew in America would be considered religious, but in Israel would likely be considered traditional or secular.
Further apologies for subjecting you to this nasty bit of inside baseball. My thanks for your patience. Needless to say, Menachem has led me to the end of mine.
Well Menachem, that would be your choice. You are stretching this article. I see from the statistics that secular men and women certainly work more than religious ones.
It would be a big mistake on your part to assume that of the 58% of “observant” Jews, they would take your particular side in this debate. Most Americans say they are religiously observant, but upon deeper examination, many say this more as solidarity with group than because of any believe the immaterial will change the course of human events, or even have created Eve from a rib of Adam. I dare not ask you if you believe in evolution.
I am sure in Israel that the literal and unerring interpretation of the Old testament replete with behavior now illegal by Israeli law is confined to a very small minority. I know orthodox Jews that do not believe in the literal interpretations. One remarked that of all the rules involving food, did God not explain basic triage and the use of clean water pn wounds before sending the armies of Israel into war? As for Divine intervention, that didn’t prevent the exile of the Jewish people in the past, nor their slaughter.
If the struggle with the Palestinians is to be solved short of warfare, then some common ground among Jews, Israelis and her supporters should not be even more difficult.
Don’t you think?
Michael, I don’t see how you take “radical Islam” out of the picture. Has the Saudis and Iranians pulled back their meddling, this mess might already be over…
“Had” the Saudis…..working and writing…..sorry for the consistent typos……
#133 Pam.
I’m sorry if I gave the impression that I found Israel an appalling place, it most certainly isn’t. I just happen to come from a very different environment & so, like many immigrants, find some things not as they were at home. Put another way, my stomach misses home far more than my head.
Eilat’s not so bad, it’s a small town or rather, a beach with an attached town. But, it’s an easy life, the weather for me is ideal.
Adapting to a new country with different customs, manners, & psychology is never easy. But, I also see things very objectively, reality is what it is.
I am of the premise that extremists have not hijacked Islam, Islam hacked Muslims. I don’t believe muslims are inherently evil, I believe Islam is evil. I don’t care that the majority of muslims are peaceful, the “religion” is run by the “ist” or “ism” as they are called and sure some muslims do not like the tactic of violence but they still agree with the goal. Submit or die. The conflict is Islam vs. the world ie starting with Israel.
Exactly Ben. I am a Reform, which at one point the rabbinical crowd in Israel wanted to discount as Jewish as well as marriages preformed by reform rabbis.
My rabbi, Jack Stern was a great teacher. He led the congregation for many years at the Westchester Reform Temple in Scarsdale New York -one of the prime areas in the world that delivered millions in donations to the State of Israel.
#136: Michael- I greatly respect your knowledge and experience but can you really say Islam is not a big issue? Over the years I’ve read far more anti-Israel rhetoric from the OIC and non-Arab Muslim states like Malaysia in particular (not to mention Turkey under Erdogan). Sometimes they make the Arab League sound tame!
#136 Michael Totten.
I disagree most emphatically. Islam is at the root of this conflict. And while some Christian Arab groups are anti-Israel (they were anti-Semites anyway, well before Israel) & some non-Arab Muslims (I assume you mean Kurds, I’ll add many Berbers of N. Africa) are not anti-Jewish, the truth is that the Arabs & other Muslims are not exactly anti-Israel, they are anti-Jew & this Jew-hatred is based & derived from Islam. I lived with this most of my life, I used to laugh sometimes thinking that even my best friends were anti-Semites & I can assure you it came directly from Islamic teaching.
Thanks for your explanation, Benjamin.
The significant disunity between strongly opinionated & articulate Jews, secular against religious, inside Israel is seldom seen by us outsiders.
Menachem’s insults (calling you a fool) were uncalled for (foolish?), but his religious voice is one of the key influences in Israel. (Just as religous & pro-life folks are an important influence in the US, less so in Europe.) I wish Michael would find a good one to disagree with politely in an interview.
Is it true that many of the ultra-religious do not allow their children to serve in the IDF? I’ve long been slighly curious about the state sponsored benefits Israel’s gov’t gives, but haven’t seen a good link or discussion about it.
Maxtrue: Michael, I don’t see how you take “radical Islam” out of the picture. Has the Saudis and Iranians pulled back their meddling, this mess might already be over…
I’m not saying it isn’t part of the problem. Hamas is more or less defined by radical Islam. But this problem pre-dates Hamas and the rise of the Islamists, and would be still be extraordinarily complex and well-nigh intractable even if radical Islam vanished tomorrow.
MarcV: I greatly respect your knowledge and experience but can you really say Islam is not a big issue?
Again, I didn’t say that it isn’t. I don’t know why, though, you expected me and Benjamin to spend much time on Islam and Islamism. The topic under discussion is Israel, not Hamas or Gaza.
Menachem is a bit of a douche, but in all fairness, so are most Israelis. I think it would be a shame if he leaves.
#142 Sol.
Right on target, a very good observation.
Islam has been a disaster for the populations that were conquered & had their cultures & languages buried under Islamic BS.
Many Muslims are good, fine people DESPITE Islam.
Benjamin Kerstein and Michael Totten: Thank you for the enlightening interview as well as the follow-up remarks here in the comments section.
Michael wrote:
But this problem pre-dates Hamas and the rise of the Islamists, and would be still be extraordinarily complex and well-nigh intractable even if radical Islam vanished tomorrow.
I find that statement quite fascinating. As I understand it, the Arabs of the region opposed the Balfour Declaration and the intent to create a Jewish state from the very moment the Declaration was issued in 1917. If the Arab opposition was not motivated by Islam, then what, in your estimation, was its root cause?
Thanks again for your valuable comments.
Michael Smith: If the Arab opposition was not motivated by Islam, then what, in your estimation, was its root cause?
Arab Nationalism.
That’s why this has always been called the Arab-Israeli conflict. The radical Islamists didn’t join until later.
As I said above to Judith, “Arab Nationalism is a vicious 20th Century ideology that uses violence to obliterate difference and unite extraordinarily diverse groups of people into a monolithic mass. It is National Socialism for Arabs. Its proponents have almost always been fascists of one kind or another.”
The Kurds of Iraq have been on the receiving end of this, too, unlike the Middle East’s non-Muslim Orthodox Christians, Druze, and Alawites. And that’s part of why the pious Muslim Kurds of Iraq side with Israel against the Arabs. It’s also why, as Terry noted above, the Muslim Berbers of North Africa often don’t side with Arabs.
If you see this conflict strictly through the lens of religion, it will not make any sense when you look closely at it.
My experience with Journalists in Israel from almost 30 years ago was that they covered they news sitting on their asses in a very western bar not far from Nahalat Shiva. It was a bar which very few Israelis frequented, and very few non-journalists. The bubble was not an English bubble–it was a “journalists bubble”–there were journalists from all over who sat there and drank. (It was near an office building that housed a number of foreign journals offices. I think that’s were Reuters wsa back in the day. And possibly Le Figaro.)
Few of them knew Hebrew, even fewer knew Arabic. Most relied on Arab stringers. (Who as I understand are now frequently on the payroll of Fatah.) They did know where the good scotch was served.
They knew nothing about what was happening in Jerusalem, or in Israel. Hell, they knew nothing about what was happening even in the bar across the street! (Which was frequented by Hebrew University students, mostly Anglo-Saxim who had immigrated, and had completed army services. They didn’t drink much, but the beer was a good price, and the food was cheap and tasty. And they could’ve told those idiot journalists a thing or two about what was REALLY going on in the country.)
I always remember the scene from “The Year of Living Dangerously” in which Mel Gibson is with his fellow journalists in the bar in Indonesia. The bar wasn’t as upscale, and it was a lot smokier than the one Jerusalem in the early 80′s, but it was the SAME SCENE: A bunch of reporters who don’t really know anything useful, but sit around in a bar gossiping, hoping something career-making will happen.
And so, I take little stock in anything reported on by any major news outlet, knowing it was picked up in some cushy bar, or else made up by a PLO-paid stringer.
Wonderful interview, thanks, Michael.
For this patient and newly fascinated reader of Blogs in general, but reader of Michael Totten’s previous site for some time under the name of Hrothgar and/or Morningside, ….I keep forgetting which one to use with which site, so I now use my real name….
….I must say that Terry in Eilat’s posts included with the whole of Benjamin Kerstein’s interview here plus his Post #137 and Michael Totten’s Post#136 are to me excellent micro-illustrations..which no doubt are the subject of whole libraries of conventional books….of precisely why we Americans are spinning our wheels in trying to mediate this upwardly spiraling vortex of inter-twined complications.
When I was in Israel in November of 1995, our superbly informative tour guide (with authorized badge) pointed out to our very small group the enormous Menorah which had been presented to the State of Israel by the U.K. (Isn’t this near the Knesset?) and I could hardly contain myself from asking him outright, “Why didn’t you send it back?”
I’ve always thought that the appropriate mediators in this ever evolving tragedy should be the British and the French who, after all, smugly sat down at tables and hand drew these current troublesome, deadly borders.
Both France and Britain been conspicuously absent (publicly)during all of these protracted conferences, meetings, agreements, and pontificating U.N.Resolutions…all of which routinely become so much vapor.
Now, we Americans are deeply involved in Central/West Asia with our young lives and horrendous logistical headaches. It seems that these collective efforts have not yet achieved Peace since 1948. So,it’s time now we Americans came home and agree to provide as much materiel aid to Israel as is needed, but otherwise absent our selves “on the ground” from this maelstrom.
Lately recent shots have been exchanged over the pruning of a much-too-symbolic tree. On and on.
…correction…
..insert “have”…:
“Both Britain and France have been conspicuously absent…”
Michael Smith,
If you will also recall, many Arabs were agitating to get out from under the Ottoman yoke, and the Ottomans as you know were Muslims. So yes, Arab nationalism plays a significant role in the conflict. And although Islam has also always played a role, it didn’t play as large a role, say, in the 1960s as it does in the last twenty years.
Arab Nationalism. . . If you see this conflict strictly through the lens of religion, it will not make any sense when you look closely at it.
I see your point. Thanks for the response.
semite5000, thank you for the input.
Michael, where do I go wrong?
The more virulent antisemitism emerged after WW2 and moved from Egypt (Muslim Brotherhood) across the Arab world in the guise of Arab Nationalism.
Though more secular in rehtoric, this Islamofacist strain advanced in Iraq (Saddam), Arafat (PLO), Assad (Syria) while the Saudi royals yielded their own more religious Wahabists.
All these groups played upon the evils of Israel and Judaism via their Koranic interpretations. They repeated the scapegoating of just a decade before and the world saw it for what it was. Arab leadership (divided) was careful however not to advance Sharia or any call of allegiance to a higher power other than their own. They tried to use the Cold War to their advantage.
The Jews were occupying their land. They were sons and daughters of Pigs and Apes. The masses needed a cause for their despair. The West was robbing Arabs as the oil flowed out and Israel continued to exist.
Now today;
http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/4507.htm
In fact, Iranian leadership seeks merely to out-Wahabi the Wahabists and create a presumably Iranian run pan-nationalism spinning the call of the Koran to the world. Sharia is way.
It smells the same, merely designed now in 4G packaging to engage a broad network of the willing discontent united globally in a more radical religious understanding.
No matter the history, this incendiary fact seems inextricably tied to any solution in this conflict, as was case with the nasty Arab Nationalism of the past. These political realities stood between the Palestinians and Israelis.
How can there be a peace in Gaza without there being some change in the greater regional dynamics? Aren’t these threats to the West greater than the conflict between Palestinians and the Israelis?
Please note the interview with the former Egyptian sniper to the upper right at the site linked above. Well, at least his is a war “story”. I rather doubt the IDF would let their vets say the same provocative things. The part about Hitler is mentioned with not the least bit of embarrassment?
More importantly, the rhetoric seems to be the same “occupation” issue of the Arab Nationalists now fueled by Iranian and eventually AQ.
http://www.memri.org/clip_transcript/en/2568.htm
-which is why lacking the ability to isolate the most intransigent terror will continue the failure to find peace and why I point to the wider strings and conflict.
Never having been to Israel, an analogy takes shape from this conversation of an extended family, stitched together like a patchwork quilt, pulled in so many directions by such a variety of personalities and beliefs as to seem disfunctional to an outsider. Yet they persist, succeed and endure, a tribute to the courage and determination of a people’s collective sense of identity.
Well Paul, not so many of the Liberals Jews in America have chimed in here. No Post Zionists. Don’t see Chomsky.
Here is something you can appreciate….
speaking of family….
http://antichomsky.blogspot.com/2005/05/judge-penitents-turn-on-chomsky.html
It is really quite good and Kerstein is an artist at the bitch slap.
Reading this for the first time recently, reminded me of the humor I found observing Chomsky’s apostles at Znet devour him whole for not supporting their 9/11 conspiracy complete with micronukes and Jewish complicity. His theory was that the government intentionally advanced the conspiracy to make the Left look like idiots which South Park succeeded in doing some time later.
Chomsky’s articles later at the Times of India were hilarious and consistently wrong.
Kerstein is the man to talk Chomsky with you however….
Way over due reading Mr. Berman’s book v watching it in real time.
Max,
“AIPAC…We are to believe further that its 165 member staff apparently directs a terrifyingly powerful pyramid of Jewish organizations (a laughable assertion to anyone who has ever dealt with large Jewish organizations, since they are congenitally incapable of agreeing on anything amongst themselves, let alone with each other)”
Sounds like herding feral cats might be easier.
Phrases that caught my attention, reminiscent of (modeled on?) the Alinsky playbook:
“the value of strategic omission”
“Chomsky’s declaration that his support is a tactical decision and not a moral-ideological one.”
Once again, same game, different players?
Maxtrue: Michael, where do I go wrong?
You aren’t wrong. That’s basically right.
How can there be a peace in Gaza without there being some change in the greater regional dynamics?
There can’t be.
Need to push these types aside if you want a serious chance of peace, on the Israeli side ——> Menachem Ben Yakov. Not that I think there is any present desire on the other side for peace, I just find this poster a real gem.
Do the same few ME armchair experts/loons always dominate this blog ? I’d actually prefer straight up posts. No comments. They add nothing useful.
TomTom: Do the same few ME armchair experts/loons always dominate this blog ?
He doesn’t dominate this blog. He acted like an ass when he introduced himself, continued acting like an ass over a period of several days, and has now kindly left.
#160 Maxtrue.
#160 Maxtrue.
Well, that’s one of your posts I agree with.
Historically, Islam is the vehicule of Arab imperialism. Inherent in Islam is the elimination of the identity of conquered peoples making them, mythologically, Arabs.
Arab nationalism is built on this foundation with a large infusion of Nazi influence, one of the few modern intellectual influences that fit into traditional Muslim thinking was fascism. In any case, Arab nationalism was never all that secular, they could never separate their ”Islamic” identity from politics. Pan-Arabism was just the idea of the Caliphate re-packaged.
Terry: Arab nationalism was never all that secular, they could never separate their ”Islamic” identity from politics.
It depends on which version of Arab Nationalism we’re talking about. The Baath Party version is explicitly secular and non-Islamic, and even anti-Islamic in some ways. One of its founders was the Christian Michel Aflaq, and its chief proponent today is the non-Muslim Alawite Bashar Assad in Syria who just banned Islamic headscarves in schools.
Some Non-Muslims in the Middle East find refuge in Arab Nationalism because they can be thought of first and foremost as part of an ethnic majority instead of a religious minority.
The two main problems with Arab Nationalism are that it is authoritarian/totalitarian, and that it makes no room whatsoever for non-Arabs like Maronites, Kurds, and Jews.
#170 Michael Totten.
Yes, I’m aware of that. Many Christians in Syria, Iraq, & Lebanon promoted a secular Arab nationalism, they saw secularism as a way for non-Muslims to advance in a Muslim country, they had every interest in advocating some kind of secularism & at the same time, proving their bona fides as ”real Arabs” – even if they were just conquered dhimmis. But Arab dictators & their cronies, just like Stalin using Russian nationalism & even the Orthodox Church, always injected more ”Islam” into their version of fascism. So did Arafat.
For the average man on the street, however, secular camouflage means very little.
Of course, I base much of what I say to my experience in Morocco, a country that is somewhat atypical. Sure, there were a few ”socialists” who were convinced atheists but they were considered somewhat eccentric. The Arab nationalists were primarily of the Istiqlal party, they called themselves socialists but they were fascists, they just loved Nasser. They were also in love with French leftist rhetoric which when translated into Arabic was even less comprehensible than in the original French.
But, they all fell back on Islam. In any case, these pseudo-intellectual phonies did not represent the typical man on the street who saw Islam & Arab nationalism as identical. Today, Arab nationalism in Morocco is a fossil, old guys writing the same crap over & over. They have been completely replaced by the ”Islam is the Solution” crowd.
#170 Michael Totten.
Just as an aside, from what my father told me when he was a young man in pre-WWII Poland & from reading European history & more specifically, Jewish history, many Jews became Socialists or Communists for the same reason as Arab Christians became Arab nationalists. In both cases, these people were greatly mistaken.
Terry: many Jews became Socialists or Communists for the same reason as Arab Christians became Arab nationalists. In both cases, these people were greatly mistaken.
Yes and yes.
And Lebanon’s Maronites, who refused to go along with this, forged a political and military alliance with Israel. It’s dormant at the moment for obvious reasons, but one day it might come back.
#173 Michael Totten.
If the Maronites renew their ties with Israel, I have a feeling they’ll be doing it from France or California. You don’t seriously believe the Maronites have a future in Lebanon, do you?
#174 Terry
Of course the Maronites have a future in Lebanon. If they don’t, then there is no future for the Druze, Shiites, Alawites, Greek Orthodox Christians, and yes, Jews, and other minorities in the Levant. It will just be wall to wall Sunnis. One reason the Alawite Assad and some Maronites are ‘allies’ of Hezbollah (nutcase Aoun) they all know the biggest threat against them are the Sunnis, not the Israelis. But don’t say it too loudly.
Forget the one state or the two state solutions. That is old thinking. The Levant is more fragmented and is the home of many many minorities. We need a multitude of small states, perhaps a union even, a confederacy say like Switzerland, of which Israel is one, a Christian Lebanon (reduced in size) is another, a Shia homeland a third, Palestine a fourth, etc…
Excellent post and stimulating discussion. I have linked to my site
http://jewishrefugees.blogspot.com/2010/08/seventy-percent-of-israelis-did-not.html
This interesting modern contemporary discussion following Totten’s most interesting interview with Benjamin Kerstein should take a few moments to review the pivotal point of the earlier contemporary circumstances of the Balfour Declaration. Today’s verbal skirmishes are pointless without a review of the era of the First World War and Colonialism.
Today’s Wall Street Journal has this book review:
….” The Great Promise
Amid world war and nationalist passion, Britain committed itself to the founding of a Jewish homeland in Palestine…” a new book by one Jonathan Schneer.
I really don’t want to be thought of a going “off topic”, and I don’t think this is the least bit “off topic”….I offer this only as aid to our blogging perspective.
Earlier I’d suggested the curious and conspicuous absence of British and French public participation today, after the contradictory embryonic deals they made with Arabs and Jews during the machinations of the early twentieth century re the Ottomans, the Russians, and needed allies to fight the Germans. We seem to have let the Brits and the French off of the hook in recent decades.
This is merely a follow up which I think is pertinent.
I really think that Europeans should stay out of this, since it seems that all they are capable of is attacking and criticizing Israel.
Terry, from my own experience, I have to say that you are right about your average non-Baathist Arab nationalist viewing Nasserism as the true Islam. But I think that saying Kurds, Kosovars, and other Muslims are friendly to Israel despite Islam is untrue. But its definitely no because of Islam, they see it as a separate issue, unrelated to religion, which is how I view it and how Arabs ought to view it.
Pretty funny…
http://www.thememriblog.org/blog_personal/en/29156.htm
Ali, these clerics should stick to explaining nuptial deflowering which you can see at Memri in an article from Egypt. Is this true? The fact that Liberal women are not screaming blood is beyond me. Are feminists really subservient to political correctness? That media does not take the average American on a tour of Islamist behavior including honor killings is pathetic. Well, Fox tried last night on a story of an honor killing here in the US of two beautiful girls. Their father is on the loose, being protected by the Muslim community.
Terry, we differ more on strategy. I don’t think you really care what the solution looks like, as long as it works. And survival IS the bottom line.
Paul, yes, quite funny.
I suggest Fox team up with Memri. In NYC, Cuomo investigates the claim a phony nun taking charitable donations, but he refuses to investigate where the Mosque’s money is coming from. Bloomberg dropped the ball.
Terry: You don’t seriously believe the Maronites have a future in Lebanon, do you?
Yes, actually I do.
http://www.aina.org/news/20100806211608.htm
for Ali
…of course the “occupation” justification for jihad is beyond silly.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3929819,00.html
When Chomsky and Abbas agree. And this from the “moderate” of the Palestinian leadership.
#178 Ali…
I was thinking more in terms of the British/French (i.e. Sykes-Picot) hypocrisy and double dealing during and immediately after the First World War which remains a major cause of the continuing bloodshed and tension now….they should be called to account. It’s the all important perspective of history which seems so totally missing in today’s media and also missing here in this blog.
I’m almost 79 years old, and well remember the events during the 1940′s and later…. ‘tho of course I don’t recall the details; naturally enough, the critical background information was well hidden. However, the great accessibility right now to mammoth amounts of previously buried twentieth century history made by this Internet seems too valuable to gloss over.
Yet it is glossed over.
Joe @ 174: “Of course the Maronites have a future in Lebanon. If they don’t, then there is no future for the Druze, Shiites, Alawites, Greek Orthodox Christians, and yes, Jews, and other minorities in the Levant.”
Just to point out – there is no Jewish community in Lebanon anymore. Few old Jews how are allowed to meet their end in peace do not count.
It makes idea regarding Maronites not so far fetched.
…the History I refer to was not made by this Internet, it is made available now by this Internet which I personally find mind boggling. Let’s use it to fill in some of the lacunae. (…love that word..)
<;-)
Leo, every single one of your comments goes into my spam folder. I have to fish them out manually. I think it’s because of the bogus email address you’re using. Can you use a real one? Or at least one that looks like a real one? I’d rather not have to keep doing this. Thanks!
At another website (New English Review), a 1947 letter from Maronite Archbishop Ignace Moubarac to the UN Special Committee on Palestine was recently posted. I copy it below. Lebanon was intended, when split off from Syria in the 1920s, as a Maronite Christian refuge-enclave. It only became an officially “Arab” state in 1989 with the Taif agreement ending the Lebanese Civil War. It is important to realize that when Moubarac refers to “Lebanese”, he is referring to Maronites. I am unsure if Archbishop Moubarac wrote or spoke for most Maronites at the time. I expect his views were not universal, but also not unique.
Lebanon was mostly Maronite but demographics became its destiny. It is now an Arab and majority Muslim country, with enclaves of Maronites and Druze. The future for Lebanon seems to me to become increasingly Arabized and subservient to its Arab neighbors. That is the essence of the 1 state solution, both as imposed on Lebanon and as planned for Israel. But for Israel, I would expect more bloodletting since Jews are singled out in the texts of islam for particular hatred beyond that heaped upon all non-Muslims. One might note that Lebanon/Syria was a “2-state solution”, transitory to the “1-state solution”, and now transitioning further to the non-Muslim-minorities-as-nearly-helpless-dhimmi-”solution”.
Archbishop Ignace Moubarac Of Beirut, In 1947, On “The Two Homelands”
“Beirut, 5 August 1947
Mr. Justice Sandstrom, Chairman, UNSCOP
Geneva,
Switzerland.
Sir:
I regret that my absence in Europe coincided with the visit of the Special Committee on Palestine to the Lebanon, otherwise I should have had an opportunity to speak and to express my opinion – which is,moreover, that of the majority of the Lebanese people with regard to this question.
This is not the first time I have voiced my opinion on this matter. A lot of ink has already been used and after each of my complaints the world press has seized upon my words and made ample comment on everything I said.
Here in the Middle East, which is for the most part Moslem, if the present Lebanese Government is recognized as having an official right to speak on behalf of the Lebanese nation, we should feel disposed to answer and prove that the present rulers represent only themselves and that their so-called official statements are dictated only by the needs of the moment and by the imposed solidarity binding this preeminently Christian country to the other Islamic countries which surround it on all sides and enclose it, volens nolens, in their politico-economic orbit.
By reason of its geographical position, history, culture and traditions, the nature of its inhabitants and their attachment to their faith and ideals, the Lebanon has always, even under the Ottoman yoke, kept itself out of the clutches of the other nations surrounding it and has succeeded in maintaining its tradition intact.
Palestine, on the other hand, the ideological centre of all Old and New Testament,has always been the victim of all the troubles and persecutions. From time immemorial, anything with any historical significance has always been ransacked, plundered and mutilated. Temples and churches have been turned into mosques and the role of that eastern part of the Mediterranean has, not without reason, been reduced to nothing.
It is an incontestable historical fact that Palestine was the home of the Jew and of the first Christians. None of them was of Arab origin. By the brutal force of conquest they were forced to become converts to the Moslem religion, That is the origin of the Arabs in that country. Can one deduce from that that Palestine is Arab or that it ever was Arab?
Historical vestiges, monuments and sacred mementos of the two religions remain alive there as evidence of the fact that this country was not involved in the internal war between the princes and monarchs of Iraq and Arabia. The Holy Places, the temples, the Wailing Wall, the churches and the tombs of the prophets and saints, in short, all the relics of the two religions, are living symbols, which alone invalidate the statements now made by those who have little interest in making Palestine an Arab country. To include Palestine and the Lebanon within the group of Arab countries is to deny history and to destroy the social balance in the Near East.
These two countries, these two homelands[Lebanon and the Jewish National Home as a successor to Mandatory Palestine] have proved up till now that it is both useful and necessary for them to exist as separate and independent entities.
The Lebanon, first of all, has always been and will remain a sanctuary for all the persecuted Christians of the Middle East. It was there that the Armenians who escaped extermination in Turkey found refuge. It was there that the Chaldeans of Iraq found a place of safety when driven from their country. It was there that the Poles, in plight from a blazing Europe, took refuge. it was there that the French, forced out of Syria, found protection. It was there that the British families of Palestine, fleeing from terrorism, found refuge and protection.
The Lebanon and Palestine must continue to be the permanent home of minorities.
What has the role of the Jews been in Palestine? Considered from this angle, the Palestine of 1918 appears to us a barren country, poor, denuded of all resources, the least developed of all the Turkish vilayets. The Moslem-Arab colony there lived an the borderline of poverty. Jewish immigration began, colonies were formed and established, and in less than twenty years the country was transformed: agriculture flourished, large industries were established, wealth came to the country. The presence of such a well-developed and industrious nation, next to the Lebanon could not but contribute to the welfare of all – the Jew is a man of practical executive ability, the Lebanese is highly adaptable and, for that reason, their proximity could only servo to better the living conditions of the inhabitants.
From the cultural point of view these two nations may boast that they have as many cultured and intellectual people as all the other countries of the Near East put -, together. It is not fair that the LAW should be imposed by an ignorant majority desirous of imposing its will.
It would not be fair to allow a million advanced and educated human being to be the plaything of a few interested persons who happen to be at the head of affairs, who lead several million backward and unprogressive people and dictate the LAW as they please. There is an order in the world, an order which establishes the proper balance. if the United Nations are really desirous of maintaining this order, it must do everything possible to consolidate it.
Major reasons of a social, humanitarian and religious nature require the creation, in these two countries, of two homelands for minorities: a Christian home in the Lebanon, as there has always been~ a Jewish home in Palestine. These two centres connected with each other geographically, and supporting and assisting each other economically, will form the necessary bridge between West and East, from the viewpoint of Culture and Civilization. The neighborly relations between these two nations will contribute to the maintenance of peace in the Near East, which is so divided by rivalries, and will lessen the persecution of minorities, which will always find refuge it these two countries.,
That is the opinion of the Lebanese whom I represent; it is the opinion of this people whom your Committee of Enquiry was unable to hear.
Behind the closed doors of the Sofar Hotel you were able to listen only to the words dictated to our so-called legal representatives by the lords and masters of the neighboring Arab countries. The real voice of the Lebanese was smothered by the group who falsified the elections of 25 May.
THE LEBANON DEMANDS FREEDOM FOR THE JEWS IN PALESTINE AS IT DESIRES ITS OWN FREEDOM AND INDEPENDENCE.
I have the honour to be, etc.,
(Signed) Ignace Mobarac (Mubarak)
Maronite Archbishop of Beirut.
In further (but more cautious) reference to the Maronites’ relationship with Israel, here is a 1996 article by a Canadian academic:
“Vol. XVI No. 1, Spring 1996
Perceptions and Misperceptions: Influences on Israeli Intelligence Estimates During the 1982 Lebanon War
by Kirsten E. Schulze
Kirsten E. Schulze teaches in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics.
INTRODUCTION
Israel’s Lebanon War of 1982 has been seen as one of the most traumatic experiences for the Jewish state. Many studies have been conducted on the immediate events surrounding the war in an attempt to explain where Israel went wrong. While many of these explanations are valid, it will be argued here that Israel’s main failure was the incorrect evaluation of its junior ally, the Lebanese Maronite Christians, and that this flawed intelligence estimate had its roots in a long-standing misperceived Israeli-Maronite relationship…”
http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/JCS/S96/articles/schulze.html
I believe that the article has as footnote #13 the letter I posted above from Ignace Moubarac to UNSCOP.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug/07/historian-tony-judt-dies
Thanks for that Del…..
“It’s the all important perspective of history which seems so totally missing in today’s media and also missing here in this blog.”
I’d say not missing entirely; this American has learned more in this Internet enabled classroom about Middle Eastern history than I ever picked up in a world history class. But too often it’s overwhelmed or drowned out by contemporary grievances and animosity.
“demographics became its destiny”
An interesting topic for discussion; I’ll guess it has more legitimate perspectives than I’m aware of.
pam pam pam pam pam ….
I did not say it was a horrible place. I did not tell you even close to the half of my experience there. We were robbed in the parking lot of the place (can’t remember the name) where you go to look at people floating up out of the water in the Dead Sea and smear themselves with stinky mud. ( I say look at cause there is no way I was getting into that muck.
The proprietors of that attraction were unhelpful and uncaring. There are no police to be found out/down there. We had to go back to Jerusalem to file a report to an even more uncaring police department even though my wife’s passport (jewish, dark, even semitic looking) was taken. To this day I wonder if that document was sold by the Beduin who stole it to some terrorist outfit.
We went through near hell getting her a new passport, waiting for hours in line at that horrible place in E. Jerusalem (consulate annex or something) where they march lines of unfettered unfenced Arab criminals around right across the street from you while you wait in line (for EVER). This was one of the worst experiences of my life. It would take a long page closely spaced to recount what it took to get her a passport and the only reason the situation was resolved in a week’s time was because we had serious connections we finally called upon. The officials we dealt with were ALL jerks. The process was dehumanizing and maddening.
On the other hand the people at the King David were wonderful and if not for them I would probably have cracked and committed assault on one of those jerk officials behind the little windows.
Then there’s the airport. In AND out a crappy deal on every level.
Oh, and I forgot to inform that we had a private/personal guide, a sabra, who is highly regarded and known and recommended by the important and connected within the most respected jewish philanthropic society.
It was not all bad. I loved Eilat. Ordinarily I shun tourist spots but that open sea aquarium was the most. I will always remember the goofy parrot fish that seemed to love the camera and followed me around from window to window.
Forget the trash. Forget the bureaucrat problem. Forget the robbery. The main reason I was disappointed in Israel is because they will not put the violent hateful Arabs within their borders on garbage scows with outboard motors and gas, tow them several miles off shore and let them know they will be met with machine-gun batteries if they ever return.
Max, I do hate the fact that the mosque is there, but what I’m saying is theres no legal way to stop it.
for example, its named the Cordoba institute. Cordoba is in Andalusia, Spain.
Its name is irrelevant, Ali. Its proximity to a horrific American tragedy, perpetrated by violent jihad, is the issue. A non-denominational memorial to 9/11′s victims would be fitting. Ground zero is now sacred to this secular American.
Please, my fellow Americans, and citizens of the world, never allow yourselves to forget. For your children’s sake.
Michael and Benjamin,
I’m a “chareidi” Israeli Jew who greatly enjoyed reading this interview, and feels that each of your work is a valuable contribution to a better world. Since I saw no other representation of religious Jewry in these discussions other than Menachem (in the debates above), I felt compelled to comment. While I felt sympathetic to some things he wrote previously, it should be clear that there is nothing in Judaism or the Torah itself that seeks to invalidate people or delegitimize them, G-d forbid. It is the sages of the Talmud who wrote in Pirkei Avot “do not judge a person until you are in their place”.
After nearly 2,000 years since the Temple and our previous sovereignty in the land of Israel, filled with the nightmarish oppression and horrors that Benjamin so meaningfully articulated in the interview, it strikes me as terribly inappropriate and wrong to condemn people for their apparent distance from a “religious” lifestyle.
The Torah itself prescribes many mitzvot, many of which are performed by millions of “secular” Israelis every day. An enormous portion of these mitzvot have to do with interpersonal relationships and one’s own relationship in the heart and mind with G-d- none of which can be measured externally by dress or appearance.
The true content and wisdom of Torah Judaism is immense and deep, and cannot be summarized adequately in comments on a blog, but certainly an important starting place is the importance of seeking and seeing the good in others and in oneself, for the sake of encouraging and building from what one finds.
To be specific, it wasn’t just general lack of observance of the Torah that the sages say led the Jews into exile- it was rather “sinat chinam”, baseless hatred and unnecessary conflicts between them.
Michael, from what you wrote I understand that you are in Israel to generally seek the reality “on the ground”, and learn about the different perspectives of people that live here. Welcome to one of the most complex societies on Earth! But I would say that the perspective of Religious Jews is an important one amongst others here, if the goal is to holistically understand the modern State of Israel and it’s people. That said, not every outwardly religious Jew is a qualified spokesperson for Judaism itself- the forces of sociology and history shape attitudes and emotions a great deal. There is also tremendous diversity and nuance even within the spectrum of Judaism in it’s perspective on most issues, such as the larger Arab/Israeli conflict, the significance of the State of Israel, and more.
Anyway, if you’re interested, you’re welcome to visit for a Shabbat. This family of “chareidi settlers” would be happy to have you. And Benjamin, I felt your words reflected great compassion for the Jewish people and humanity in general- thank you.
I have very fond memories of a particularly juicy steak in the El Gaucho restaurant in Eilat. Terry – have you eaten there?
Mmmmmm….
Maybe I should go have lunch.
“Benjamin Kerstein: The first thing visitors notice is that Israelis are prickly. Native-born Israelis are called sabras…”
The Sabra metaphor is the standard way Israelis describe themselves to outsiders. I often wonder – is it really accurate? Or are we so wedded to this metaphor that it influences how we interpret such interactions? Do we truly observe what happens when an American meets an Israeli for the first time? I often use this metaphor myself, but when I wrack my brain for a real-life example, I come up empty. Perhaps it’s because I always see it from the Israeli side.
Benjamin – have you actually seen this reaction with your own eyes? Could you describe some examples?
Michael – was this your personal experience? I would love to hear some examples from you as well. (I know you’re busy now – perhaps this might be a subject for a future post?)
Please forgive my impertinent questions. It’s always fascinating to see oneself through another’s eyes.
Jonathan,
Sometimes I find Israelis prickly and obnoxious, and sometimes I don’t. Israelis are not as polite to strangers as Arabs in general, so it’s really noticeable when I come here from an Arab country. But Israelis aren’t all that different from New Yorkers, and tend to be considerably warmer than people in many former Soviet countries, so it’s all relative.
I don’t find Israelis prickly and obnoxious at all after more than a minute or so of interaction. You all really only seem that way during brief interactions with strangers, and even then only sometimes. I expected it to be worse and found your reputation somewhat exagerrated. I could say the same for people in Paris.
Ali (comment 110), you say “Zachary don’t you think that the Jews’ experience not having a state justifies their right to a state?” I don’t think mistreatment of a people confers a right to statehood. Yes, Jews were badly mistreated in history, and especially shamefully so in the 20th century. But one can say the same thing about Roma/Sinti — should they have the right to their own state?
Jews at least could identify a mythological homeland — calling it ‘mythological’ is not to deny it as having a historical basis, but simply to identify that its function is independent of its truth — and had significant financial and political power. By contrast, Roma/Sinti lacked such a myth, and had far less financial/political power than Jews. So one can understand, on a historical basis, why Zionism arose and succeeded, but not “Roma-Zionism”. But I don’t think that has anything to do with rights. Roma/Sinti do not have a right to a state. Nor do Jews. Nor do any other ethnic or religious group, no matter how mistreated.
If an ethnic or religious group happens to form the majority on a particular territory, I might be willing to support political independence for that territory (conditional upon factors like how will minorities be treated, and whether the rights of recent refugees or expellees from the territory will be respected). But to me, that is a democratic right of the people of that territory, not a right of the particular ethnic or religious group which happens to form a majority thereupon.
Having come to this discussion via Sullivan and agreeing with most of his sentiments about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but finding his obsession with it rather tedious, I think I better tell all of you something about mainstream sentiment in the British and American populations regarding Israel and her endless conflicts in the Middle East: we’re NOT INTERESTED IN THEM, OR IN YOU, ANYMORE.
We want to stop expending our treasure in support for you or for your Semitic brethren who hate you so much (and whom you hate, but–obviously from this interview–more tactfully). We are certainly tired of our soldiers being put in harm’s way to bring “democracy” to Muslim Arabs, who don’t want it, but we are also tired of supporting your so-called “democracy,” which, with its apartheid measures and its marriage of theocracy to civil status, doesn’t look much like ours.
Please don’t be misled by the Palins and the “Christianist” “dispensationalists” in our society: we may not like Obama’s domestic policy, and we may know that he’s unpopular with the majority of Israelis, but we do, for the most part, support either his demand (which will be reinvigorated if he wins a second term) that you trade land for peace and dismantle the settlements, or–what is probably coming after that, if you don’t agree to the “two-state” solution–Tony Judt’s idea that you become a secular, pluralist democracy like what we are, if we are to continue to bail you out. If not, look to yourselves. And the same goes for the bloody Palestinians.
#203 well said, Zachary — but the Kurds deserve a state more than the Palestinians, so far. Yet, becuase of surrounding countries and Great Power politics, are less likely to get one.
Unless, maybe, the Israelis can help support an Iranian- Kurdish independence movement that destabilizes Iran.
Kurds have not yet been willing to die and effective enough at being willing to kill others, for statehood.
Secular folk seem to often forget how religions that support willingness to die, and kill, result in much much stronger positions on the ground in any violence based solution.
Recall the Catholic Solidarity of Poland, and the many who risked death, often because of their faith — and the unwillingness of the mostly secular military to slaughter the anti-commie protesters.
@digby, I understand being tired of a long-standing problem — but not so tired that I stop reading about it. Niether you nor Andy S seem as tired of it as you are tired of Darfur slo-mo genocide, for instance, or illegal Chinese occupation & colonization of Tibet (perhaps a model for Israel?).
Michael Sometimes I find Israelis prickly and obnoxious … especially if they are religious and like that. Maybe you could look Yosef up?
Charlie Griffith – Nice to meet you.
=
#177 – I highly recommend Bataween’s little bloglet.
===
#204 DigbyDolben – You do not speak for me and you do not speak for all Americans. You speak only for that tiny minority of the far left that shares its talking points with the likes of David Duke, Pat Buchanan, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Fred Phelps, and Alex Jones. Your sole value and contribution to this discussion thread is to serve as abject proof that the extreme right and extreme left agree with each other when it comes to Jew hate. You are a genocide enabler.
===
Land does not equal peace when genocide is the goal, it only delays the inevitable.
LEGION,
R
Tom, I was speaking more for my fellow American citizens and the Europeans of my acquaintance. Bring this tedious subject up at a party or a barbecue in Greensboro, North Carolina, Haslemmer, Surrey or Dusseldorf, Germany, and all you get is a look of pained exasperation. I, like Sullivan, am more interested in it than most because I have an amateur historian’s interest in the region, am an international school teacher whose interviewed with schools in that area, and am one-fourth Jewish. I’m an anomaly.
Tom, I was speaking more for my fellow American citizens and the Europeans of my acquaintance. Bring this tedious subject up at a party or a barbecue in Greensboro, North Carolina, Haslemmer, Surrey or Dusseldorf, Germany, and all you get is a look of pained exasperation. I, like Sullivan, am more interested in it than most because I have an amateur historian’s interest in the region, am an international school teacher who’s interviewed with schools in that area, and am one-fourth Jewish. I’m an anomaly.
You are SO crazy, “Render”; my politics are of the moderate, card-carrying Republican kind. I only occasionally vote Democratic (but now wonder if I ever can again). A “Jew-hater,” indeed!? Sort of like Tony Judt himself, right? (And, like him, I’m Jewish.)
“DigbyDolben – You do not speak for me and you do not speak for all Americans.”
Me either; obnoxious arrogance may draw an audience in your echo chamber but it doesn’t grant spokesperson status here.
You’ve now been added to my mental Scroll On list.
digbydolt,
You’re a Jew , so what.
You’re also a superficial fool with a profound ignorance of history who no doubt gets his news from the NYT or more likely John Stewart and Steven Colbert.
Your comments betray the aforementioned points. In your own mind you may consider yourself a moderate and if you compare yourself to the late Tony Judt, so much the worst.
Yawn
I knew I’d attract the ire of the scum of the Likudnik pack by telling folks here that we in the predominantly liberal Judaeo-Christian and secularist West find the Zionist “struggle” to be, now, frustrating, tedious, shrill, repulsive and increasingly pointless, as well as a distraction from our countries’ real national interests, but there it is, and, if you feel that Israel can go it on her own, and continue to develop into a pariah state, then you may shrug, tell us that we don’t “understand history” and forget about us–and let us, please, forget about you.
Thanks Michael for a very interesting interview.
I do not agree with all the points made however, but such is Israeli society in all its permutations and combinations.
I am rather pessimistic about the long term situation however.
My feelings are based on Arab education which is steeped in religion or anti-semitism and anti-Israeli venom.
To take small children and inculcate them with a permanent hatred and a Jihadist philosophy is nothing short a fascist totalitarian undertaking. And this ethos has persisted since the Balfour Declaration, the beginning of the Muslim Brotherhood and the ascendancy of Haj Amin al-Hussaini. There is an uncomfortable parallel (actually a similarity) between Islam and fascism which many are loath to make because of the serious implications such a conclusion holds. But it is more and more difficult to ignore.
The observations of Jeffrey Herf apply today as well as in the 1940′s and most unfortunately the effects of Nazi propaganda found a welcome home amongst the Arab populace. This popularity persists today and has shaped the mind-set of many many Arabs and will continue to do so courtesy of their education system supported to some degree by the UN.
The latest Zogby poll of Arab attitudes in so-called moderate countries is distressing but not surprising.
It does not offer any hope at all at some kind of coexistence but reflects deep down the ultimate attitude of the Muslim world.
I usually don’t sound so negative but there are too many examples despite Michael’s comments to warrant such negativity.
One can only shake one’s head in dismay at a society in which a woman can have her infant saved from some rare disease by Jewish doctors in Israel and then state that she hopes he grows up to be a suicide bomber and kill Jews to recapture Jerusalem. There is such a wide gulf here that discussion or dialogue is fruitless for the foreseeable future. Not just fruitless but impossible.
digbydolt,
Do you even know what your country’s national interests are? With comments that are “frustrating, tedious, shrill, repulsive and increasingly pointless” likely not!
You’re an arrogant little prick who spouts off pathetic twaddle as if its profound wisdom.
I will shrug at your nonsense and have forgotten you already!
“digbydolben” is not a Jew and is not an American. “digbydolben” is a Jew hater with a long history on the internet.
Unless of course, there are multiple people using the online nic “digbydolben” who all seem to share the identical talking points and code phrases on the identical subjects and have done so over a period of not less then three years.
Links available for those who might need to know and know the correct contact address.
CITY
OF
DAVID,
R
#205 (Tom Grey) – I’m sympathetic to the Kurdish cause, but I wouldn’t justify it on the grounds that Kurds as an ethnic group have rights. On my view, if there are regions of Iraq or Iran or Syria or Turkey, and the majority of those populations desire independence, then I’d be inclined (on the basis of democracy) to grant them that right, if the rights of minorities, etc., could be guaranteed in the process. It so happens that those areas are majority Kurdish, but I don’t see them as having that right because they are Kurdish, but simply because that is the desire of the majority. Equally, if the majority of the population of Scotland or Quebec or Crete or South Dakota or Western Australia wanted independence, I’d support that too, whether or not ethnicity is a factor in them desiring independence.
In the case of the Israel/Palestine issue, I think whatever the majority wants, should be, so long as the rights of minorities are respected in the process. But to me, the population relevant for determining the majority must include not just those that live there now, but also those who have been expelled or fled from there in recent history, and their descendants. So, from a democratic point of view, I’d look not just at what the majority of Israeli citizens want, but also the wishes of the residents of the occupied territories, and also the Palestinian refugee population worldwide.
Last thought on this Digby doofus: “don’t listen to…” was a tipoff.
203. Zachary
“Jews at least could identify a mythological homeland — calling it ‘mythological’ is not to deny it as having a historical basis…”
Calling it ‘mythological’ also has the (presumably unintended) side effect of deprecating the continued Jewish presence in the land of Israel (as a substantial minority) for the preceding 1,900 years. If I’m not mistaken, the Old City of Jerusalem had a majority Jewish population towards the end of the 19th century.
“If an ethnic or religious group happens to form the majority on a particular territory, I might be willing to support political independence for that territory (conditional upon factors like how will minorities be treated, and whether the rights of recent refugees or expellees from the territory will be respected). But to me, that is a democratic right of the people of that territory, not a right of the particular ethnic or religious group which happens to form a majority thereupon.”
I’m not sure I understand. At first you say that you would support political independence for an enthic group forming a majority on a particular territory, but towards the end you say that it is a democratic right of the “people of that territory”, and NOT a right of an ethnic group which forms a majority thereupon. I’m confused.
Let me ask this question – in 1948 the Jews formed a majority in a subsection of the Palestinian Mandatorial territory which they had purchased acre by acre over the previous 70 years. At this time no land had been acquired through war.
At this stage:
1) Does this historical ethnic group forming a majority on its territory have your political support for independence?
2) Does the Arab population on the remainder of the territory have your political support for independence?
204. digbydolben
“Having come to this discussion via Sullivan and agreeing with most of his sentiments about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but finding his obsession with it rather tedious, I think I better tell all of you something about mainstream sentiment in the British and American populations regarding Israel and her endless conflicts in the Middle East: we’re NOT INTERESTED IN THEM, OR IN YOU, ANYMORE.”
Don’t feel bad, we’re also pretty tired of the conflict. However, attributing the conflict solely to Israel is a bit unfair. Have you read the translations of Nasrallha’s speeches? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WK3HbXwN0k
Would it not be at least equally fair to say that you are tired of the Arabs and their endless conlicts in the Middle East?
“We want to stop expending our treasure in support for you or for your Semitic brethren who hate you so much (and whom you hate, but–obviously from this interview–more tactfully).”
I wonder – are you suggesting to stop the financial aid to Israel, or the financial aid to the Palestinians, via direct subsidies of the PA, or indirectly via the U.N. and UNRWA?
“We are certainly tired of our soldiers being put in harm’s way to bring “democracy” to Muslim Arabs, who don’t want it”
I can certainly sympathize. But this is about Iraq, not Israel or the Palestinians. Are you perhaps suggesting that there is a connection?
“but we are also tired of supporting your so-called “democracy,” which, with its apartheid measures and its marriage of theocracy to civil status, doesn’t look much like ours.”
As a citizen of this “so-called democracy”, who follows the news and votes, I find the “so-called” to be quite surprising. In what sense is it “so-called”? I vote, my party gets in the Knesset, a prime minister is chosen, and proceeds to make horrible mistakes. Sounds just like the UK, or the US. There is no cabal of Rabbis making the mistakes for him, or choosing him for us. I respectfully suggest that you review both the facts on which you base this opinion, and the criteria by which you judged it. I believe you will discover that the facts you believed are incorrect or misrepresented, and the criteria you used would exclude every other democracy, if they were applied without a double standard. Perhaps you will choose to list them here.
“but we do, for the most part, support either his demand … that you trade land for peace and dismantle the settlements, ”
Land for peace? Been there, done that. Dismantling settlements? Ditto. See Gaza. It only makes things worse.
“or–what is probably coming after that, if you don’t agree to the “two-state” solution–Tony Judt’s idea that you become a secular, pluralist democracy like what we are, if we are to continue to bail you out. ”
Actually, Israel is already a secular, pluralist democracy. The majority of Jews are secular Jews. But when CNN wants to show you a typical Israeli, they always show you a religious extremist. We have a million Arab citizens, including some 200,000 Christian Arabs. Israel is the only country in the Middle East where the Christian population is increasing. And this is not including the pluralism inherent in gathering in Jews from all over the world, from the U.S. to Russia to Ethiopia to Morocco to Iraq. It is the Arabs who have a fondness for military or religious autocracies, not us. But if we are a democracy, and through your tinted glasses all you see is an apartheid theocracy, well, you can understand why your presumably well-meaning advice is treated with a degree of skepticism. After all, for you the price of a mistake is another annoying headline in the Times, or a pinprick of irritation at your next dinner party. For us, it’s paid in blood.
217. Zachary
“In the case of the Israel/Palestine issue, I think whatever the majority wants, should be, so long as the rights of minorities are respected in the process. But to me, the population relevant for determining the majority must include not just those that live there now, but also those who have been expelled or fled from there in recent history, and their descendants. So, from a democratic point of view, I’d look not just at what the majority of Israeli citizens want, but also the wishes of the residents of the occupied territories, and also the Palestinian refugee population worldwide.”
1) At the end of WWII, a million ethnic Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia’s sudetenlands. As you recall, it was in the name of these ethnic Germans that Czechoslovakia was dismantled and overrun following the Munich Pact. Should they and their descendants have voting rights in the modern Czech republic?
2) At the end of WWII, several million Germans were expelled from eastern european territories, with the advance of the Red Army towards Berlin. Should they and their descendants have voting rights in Poland?
3) You are suggesting something quite extraordinary. In 1948 the Arabs in the Palestinian Mandate rejected partition, began a war against their Jewish neighbors to push them into the sea, and called in 5 neighboring Arab armies to assist them; When the war went badly for them, they fled for fear of reprisals (with a few admitted exceptions), and have been fighting us ever since (e.g. Lebanon in ’82). And now, sixty years later, you consider it fair and just that their descendants should be granted control over the fate of the Jewish state which their grandfathers failed to destroy?
Quite agree with Jonathan -it’s extraordinary that the rights of Palestinian refugees should be considered, but that the rights of a greater number of Jewish refugees from Muslim and Arab lands, who lost four times as much property and land as Israel itself, are not.
The fact that 21 Arab states have failed dismally to treat their minorities decently, causing the ethnic cleansing of their Jews and the severe depletion of many other minorities is reason enough in my book for the existence of a majority-Jewish state.
People like digbydolben love to hear themselves talk and love to be at the center of attention. The easiest way for them to achieve it is to make outrages claims and then enjoy the limelight. That I am not surprised. However, I am surprised by so many here who decided to reply. Please, you mustn’t be so gullible next time. You do not reply and troll goes away.
Yosef–
Many thanks for weighing in. You are, of course, correct about “sinat chinam”, and it remains one of my worst fears. Perhaps I should have been more conscious of it in responding to Menachem, but I felt he was trying to write me out of the Jewish people for not being religious. Needless to say, I found this extremely insulting. However, I hope that I did not give off the impression of being anti-religious in general, which I think I am not, though I may be unduly harsh on the subject sometimes. “Do not be sure of yourself,” as the sages put it, “until the day of your death.” In any case, thank you for including your perspective here.
Well, I’m not a “troll,” and I’m not going away, and under the repatriation law of the State of Israel, I most certainly AM a Jew, and am entitled to Israeli citizenship (which I don’t want).
I’m truly sorry that you think my expression of mainstream American and British sentiment regarding the horrors of the Middle East is “Jew-hating,” but it really isn’t. Your Zionist State simply doesn’t look to us to be as noble an experiment as it used to, after Gaza, after the wall, after the murder of a young Turkish boy who was an American citizen on that ship–and, especially after the insulting treatment of our President and Vice President at the hands of your clown of a Prime Minister, and after our President’s chief military commander, Petraeus, said that the intransigence of BOTH Israelis and Palestininas is endangering the lives of our young men every day in the Muslim world.
And just in case I didn’t make myself clear, the loathing of the Palestinian people here and in Europe is equally as great. What you need to understand–and quickly–is that the average people of Europe and America are now seeking intensely, through research into alternative energy sources and through shifting of alliances and dependencies, for a way to disengage from BOTH Israelis and Arabs.
Digby, your arrogance is what’s putting most people off. You do not speak for two continents. You speak only for yourself.
I have many many friends, Arabs and Jews, who live in this part of the world. What happens here is life or death for them and their families. If you wish to disengage, great. Go away.
We will, Mr. Totten, believe me, we will. We are in the process of doing so, and you and your friends, both Arabs and Jews, will become increasingly aware of it, to your peril.
Well, Digby, thanks for telling us where you stand. As you are quite clearly a hater, however, without evidence of human sympathy, you will leave, and I will make you.
I have a question for anyone who wants to take a stab at it. Israel is certainly a democracy by the most widely accepted definition of the word (all citizens have the right to vote). But does Israel have a secular form of government? I am asking in light of the current “Who is a Jew?” controversy in Israel. Israel has officially recognized/sanctioned religions, and Israeli citizens who don’t belong to one (including Protestants) cannot marry in Israel. This brings religion into civil rights. Is that compatible with the principle of secularism? Is it a matter of degree?
Dikehopper,
Lebanon has the same system, and it’s stupid. Lebanese and Israelis who run into this problem get married in Cyprus, and their marriages are recognized back home. They can BE married in Israel and Lebanon, they just can’t GET married.
Israel, or so I heard recently, will soon recognize gay marriages as long as they were performed outside Israel and are legal in the place they were performed.
Dikehopper,
I am not an expert on the subject, but I have an opinion anyway.
“But does Israel have a secular form of government?”
Yes, it is secular government.
There are some exceptions to this rule, which Israelis are slowly removing or so I hear.
Re: #206 Render..
…here’s an observation no doubt coming from an observer off on another planet:
…scrolling slowly through these sometimes acerbic comments reminds me of when I lived in Hong Kong during the 1960′s, and I’d hunch over my shortwave radio late at night with a partial glass of scotch (no ice) and turn the dial along the frequencies active at that hour and try to penetrate the static.
I never attended any sessions of the Knesset….do they even have a visitors’ gallery?….but I wonder if the barbs hurled back and forth there are much different from those I read here? If not, then all of us are healthier for the venting.
Pajamas Media (Editors: take note) is much, much more stimulating than th’ General Media.
Charlie (#232) – My father was a HAM hobbiest from the middle 1940′s through 1989, he made a similar observation to yours when I first started BBSing in the early 80′s. He didn’t live long enough to see the Internet but I can only imagine his observations would have been unchanged, and we would be having a dickens of a time getting him off the Internet.
I have a very clear memory of sitting in his basement shack, surrounded by all the old radio gear and N scale train parts, listening to the HAM and shortwave calls from Israel in 1973. I remember how pissed Dad was when the Russian Woodpecker radar went on line in the mid-70′s. But Dad spent much of the 1970′s being pissed (that Carter bastard)…
http://www.knesset.gov.il/tour/eng/tour9.htm
Yes, the Knesset has a visitors gallery.
MAYBE
ONE
DAY,
R
In response to 219. Jonathan Levy: I don’t deny there has been a continual Jewish presence in the region of Palestine – of course there has. But there is a substantial period – beginning in late antiquity and ending in the 20th century – when the Jewish population was a minority, at times a quite small one. As I said, it is “mythical” not in the sense of being without factual basis, but simply due to the important role it played in Jewish religion and ethnic self-consciousness. If Jews had not felt the same way, it would not be mythical, even given exactly the same historical circumstances in terms of demography. Whereas, there are other widely dispersed ethnic minorities that lack such territorial myths (e.g. Roma/Sinti peoples).
I think democratic rights accrue to those ordinarily resident in a territory – as I mentioned, I think in some circumstances, former residents also participate in those rights, depending on the circumstances in which they ceased to be residents. I don’t think ethnic groups have rights. So, I think the population as a whole have a right to independence, and if the majority desire to exercise that right, that right can be exercised. But it is a right possessed by the population as a whole, not just by those who favour its exercise, nor by some ethnic subgroup of it, even if it happens in practice that most of those who desire independence belong to that ethnic group. (I don’t think the two necessarily go together – I would expect some people who support Scottish independence aren’t ethnically Scottish, for instance. But then, I think the Scottish national movement is rather post-ethnic, whereas the Jewish national movement is definitely ethnic.)
As to the situation in 1948, I think if parts of the Mandate of Palestine desired independence, then prima facie I would support that – whether those parts be Jewish or Arab. However, I don’t think a right to independence is absolute. One condition is sufficient respect for minority rights. I would question whether either the Arab or the Jewish population were willing in practice to express that respect, so that would argue against independence for either. I would certainly have supported independence for the Mandate as a whole, as a multinational state.
bataween (comment 222): I oppose both the expulsion of Arabs by the Zionists, and the expulsion of Jews by Arabs. Both are shameful acts. So I would support the right of return for both populations. But I think a major reason why there is so much focus on a Palestinian right of return to Palestine, and so little on a Jewish right of return to Middle Eastern/North Africa countries, is that there are many Palestinians actively demanding such a right of return, but I have not heard of any Jewish refugees demanding a similar right of return. If any one of them wish to advocate for it, they have my support.
The mass expulsion of Jews from the Middle Eastern states was wrong, but it seems clear to me it was in retaliation for the mass expulsion of Arabs from Palestine. Two wrongs do not make a right. But, it seems the two wrongs go together; if the state of Israel was never established, these mass expulsions of Jews from Middle Eastern countries would likely never have occurred. (And I think, in a world without the state of Israel, Jews and Arabs, Jews and Muslims, would get along much better than they do in today’s world.)
There are many Jewish people in North America, Western Europe, Australia, etc., who are living quite well, which makes me think that Jews would still be surviving and prospering today even in the absence of a Jewish state.
Its late and I’m exhausted and maybe I’ll tackle the comments in 234 and 235 another day.
But give the history of the mandate and the history of the Jews, your comments, Zachary need to be addressed.
I would guess that many contributors on this site whether living in Israel or not but who have more than a nodding acquaintance with the history of the area, ancient and modern, can only be shaking their heads.
But perhaps not. I will speak only for myself. your comments, Zachary, are truly incredible!
Jonathan Levy, comment 221: I think the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia was wrong, and some mechanism should be adopted to remedy this, such as a right of return, a right to return of confiscated property or compensation for it, revocation of Benes decrees, etc. Part of the justification for these policies was to punish Germans for supporting the Nazi regime. But, to me that is wrong as collective punishment – if individual Germans are shown to have committed crimes, punish them as individuals; but to seek to punish an entire group for the crimes, is to buy in to the same mindset which motivated Nazism.
The German minorities in Czechoslovakia, and other countries of Eastern Europe, had legitimate claims, which Hitler exploited to his own ends. He didn’t actually care about the people he was using, only whether they could advance his geopolitical calculus – witness the South Tyrol question, where Hitler opposed the claims of the German-speaking population, because he wanted an alliance between Germany and Fascist Italy. If Hitler really cared about these people, as opposed to just using them for imperialist purposes, he could have sought a much more minimal solution (e.g. improved rights and protection and recognition for German minorities, or at the most involving some transfer of territory to Germany, but leaving Czechoslovakia on the whole intact.)
I would make similar comments about the situation of Germans in Poland.
As to the situation in 1948, I don’t see why the Arab population should be forced to accept a solution imposed on them by outside powers. I note how Israel and its supporters react to proposals that outside powers should impose a solution to the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict – why should not the same apply to the Arab population in 1948? I also disagree with your account which puts all responsibility for the war on the Arabs and none of it on Zionists. I think the ultimate cause of the war was Zionism (if Zionism never happened, the 1948 war would never have happened either.)
Re: Zachary
“I think the ultimate cause of the war was Zionism (if Zionism never happened, the 1948 war would never have happened either.)”
Yes, and you think the ultimate cause of pogroms were the Jews ( if Jews never existed, pogroms would never have happened either).
Zachary – you think whatever you want, this is pretty irrelevant. People has been expelled and that’s it. It happened over 60 years ago, history moved on. Same about Israel – whether you think Jews have a right or not to have a state – they have a state so there is no discussion to have.
Digbydolben – Most Europeans (I don’t know for Americans) do not care about the ME and that’s very good. Now if their governments could do the same we would be very happy.
By the way, you are not Jewish according to Israeli law – you can make Aliyah and be Israeli but that does not make you a Jew – you still need a Jewish mother or be converted. That’s why we have around 30% of the immigrants from the former USSR since 1989 who are not Jews and can’t marry in Israel for the moment – soon they will be able to do it between themselves.
Zachary@234 & 235
“I think democratic rights accrue to those ordinarily resident in a territory – as I mentioned, I think in some circumstances, former residents also participate in those rights, depending on the circumstances in which they ceased to be residents.”
And an attempted war of annihilation (of the Arabs agains the Jews in 1948) is not a circumstance which might invalidate those rights? If not, then what is?
“However, I don’t think a right to independence is absolute. One condition is sufficient respect for minority rights. I would question whether either the Arab or the Jewish population were willing in practice to express that respect, so that would argue against independence for either.”
Why do you question which side was willing to grant civil rights, when the answer is right in front of you? Arabs have full civil rights in Israel. There are hardly any Jews left in any Arab country. No Jew wants to emigrate to an Arab country. Many non-Israeli Arabs try to immigrate to Israel (by marrying Israeli Arabs). Whenever the question of population transfers arises, Israeli Arabs protest against it very forcefully. The answer is plain, but you don’t want to see it.
“I oppose both the expulsion of Arabs by the Zionists, and the expulsion of Jews by Arabs. Both are shameful acts. So I would support the right of return for both populations.”
You describe these two acts as morally equivalent. But they were not. An overwhelming majority of the Arabs in Palestine fled when the war which they started began to go sour. My authority is Benny Morris’ Origins of the Palestinian Refugee Problem. The Jews in Arab countries were expelled as an act of revenge for the humiliation which the Arabs perceived themselves to have suffered by that defeat.
Let me put it another way – suppose you’re in a college dorm, and have an argument with your roommate. There is fault on both sides. A solution is imposed by the dean, you accept, he refuses, pulls a knife, brings 5 friends with knives, and tries to kill you. You kick him out. Next day he comes back demanding to be let back into his room, castigating you for shamefully exiling him and demanding the right of return. Do you open the door?
“if the state of Israel was never established, these mass expulsions of Jews from Middle Eastern countries would likely never have occurred. (And I think, in a world without the state of Israel, Jews and Arabs, Jews and Muslims, would get along much better than they do in today’s world.)”
Try telling that to the Arab Christians, whose numbers have been steadily dwindling in the Middle East since 1945. The Jews would have suffered the same fate – slow pressure to leave – instead of being kicked out quickly. And they would not have had a Jewish State to accept them, and help them get on their feet. A small benefit of having a Jewish State.
“There are many Jewish people in North America, Western Europe, Australia, etc., who are living quite well, which makes me think that Jews would still be surviving and prospering today even in the absence of a Jewish state.”
North America, Western Europe, Australia, etc. I couldn’t help but notice you didn’t mention Central Europe, or Eastern Europe. As in Germany. Poland. Could there be a reason? It takes a strong dose of double-think to blandly assure us that the Jews can manage quite well without a state, and deliberately omit from your examples those regions in which they were exterminated not 70 years ago.
Re: Jonathan Levy #240
Just to correct your unintentional misstatement:
“Whenever the question of population transfers arises, Israeli Arabs protest against it very forcefully”.
Not “population transfer” – transfer of certain territory with its population to future Palestinian state jurisdiction. Basically, redrawing the border.
And yes, not only do Israeli Arabs decry such ideas as racist and fascist, but Umm-el-Fahm city council ( and they are Islamic Movement, mind you) were among staunch supporters of separation fence between Israel proper and West Bank ( they were suffering from burglaries no less than Jewish villages in the same Wadi Ara area).
Pakistan was also “established” in 1948. Millions were killed, multi-millions more were exiled from their homes.
In 1945 the then new Czech government exiled its entire German minority back to Germany.
In 1920-22 the Turks exiled all Greeks into Greece.
ZONES
OF
CONFLICT,
R
“Israelis are not as polite to strangers as Arabs in general, so it’s really noticeable when I come here from an Arab country.”
Sometimes, cultural politeness increases to the degree that life in that culture is also dangerous and restricting. I think first of pre-war Japan, and much of Asia. Of the Arab or Muslim world, I do not know enough.
rabbit256@241
You are quite right, my phrasing was not precise. Your correction is most appropriate.
Zachary, comment 235
It is precisely because you don’t hear any Jews advocating a right of return to Arab countries that the Palestinians should not have such a right of return to Israel. When did you last hear of Greeks and Turks expelled from Turkey and Greece wishing to return, and India and Pakistan? The ‘right of return’ does not actually exist in international law, and it is absurd to apply it to a third generation born outside Palestine.
It’s a politically motivated demand, and invoking the Jewish refugees from Arab countries shows how unreasonable and abnormal it is – resettlement, not return, is the solution.
For a good history of right of return
http://www.mideasttruth.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8878
Ben Dror Yemini has 3 great articles on this. Well worth your time
http://www.mideasttruth.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8877
http://www.mideasttruth.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8878
http://www.mideasttruth.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8894
@ Menachem Ben Yakov
Its very unfortunate that you guys shouted at Yakov rudely like that….he said nothing offensive just expressing his believe in Hashem. I bet if it was some other person with different religion background you would not dare to shut him/her down. So called atheist Jews willing to give up their identity and their connection to Israel. That’s exactly the reason world hates Jews. Just for the record I despise those lefty Jews savage. I say this Israel must stop this dangerous tactics land for peace non sense, they have half of the world Islamic dominated countries let them assimilate in those courtiers, why we jews can do it and they cant. Yakov is more righteous man then you all put together….its my last comment… Toda Roba
May Hashem Bless Israel and its people
What Kerstein says about the Jews holds true for any country: people who do not live there cannot judge. It’s the same for Israel but the point is that all over the world Israel is an extremely popular country to discuss in comparison with many others. That’s the reason for so many misunderstandings.