August 7, 2014--Israeli (Jewish) Exceptionalism

The outrage and debate continues over civilian casualties in Gaza and Israel. More accurately, about what has been happening in Gaza. There have been relatively few Israeli civilian causalities and, even if there were many more, the outrage would, by comparison, be muted.

Hamas and the Palestinians are not just the underdogs in this fight--improvised rockets versus jet fighters and smart bombs--but they are also not Jews.

This must be said--being not-Jews means less is expected of the Palestinians.

More is expected of the Jews (and I mean Jews as distinguished from Israelis) because of the Holocaust. Because of it, it goes, Jews should know better when it comes to inflicting harm and worse on innocents--people who are killed or wounded not because they are enemy combatants but because of who they are.

Jews were rounded up and mass murdered in Germany, and in much of the rest of continental Europe, because they were Jews. Not soldiers, not resistance fighters. For this reason, Jews should know better. But they also know that the world stood by largely silent. And thus were complicitous. This complicates matters.

By this logic Israeli Jews, and the rest of us who are Jews, should be very careful about setting upon anyone just because of who they are. We should know that if we allow this, worse perpetrate this, "they" will come for us next. As they have for millennia.

This is the Jews' patrimony. Mine as well.

So here we are today seeing the slaughter of innocents in Gaza. Carried out by Israelis. By Jews.

That is not our patrimony nor the lessons we should have learned from our own history.

All right. Point made.

But there is another, related point to make--

To expect Jews, Israelis to act as if there is something often referred to as Jewish Exceptionalism is to apply a higher standard to them than to any other nation or people.

Where is the equivalent outrage about the United States being responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan? Yes, a few human rights group keep that tally and attempt to grab an occasional headline. But beyond that there is, again, silence.

How much "collateral damage" (that hideous euphemism that means killing of innocent people), how much has there been in South Sudan or Eastern Ukraine? How widely reported has that been? And what martial etiquettes have been assigned to the Russian-backed forces or the Sudan People's Liberation Army? Certainly not the same as those imposed on Jews and Israelis.

But stories about the 1,400 Palestinians who have thus far been killed--admittedly at least half of them noncombatants--have been on the front page of the New York Times for days. Including yesterday, explicitly, with multicolored graphs distinguishing among different categories of the dead, "Civilian or Not? New Fight in Tallying the Dead in Gaza."

This has the tincture of anti-Semitism.

It is no coincidence that anti-Semetic rallies and confrontations have been erupting in many places in Europe, horrifyingly also in Germany. This derives not just from a long history of festering hatred but from the conflation of Israel and Jews--of a nation with a people.

They, we are not one and the same. Many Jews, including me, though we recognize the existential threat to Israel that Hamas and its tunnels and rockets represent and Israel's right to defend itself, not all Jews support a separate state of Israel or the current reactionary, repressive government.

And thus to expect us to be any better than other people is unreasonable. And since it it expressed so one-dimensionally, and leads so quickly to condemnations and worse, all Jews are wise to have their radar tuned to high. Danger of the old sort is lurking.

July 31, 2014--Blood Feud

This is the first Arab-Israeli war that isn't about territory--about expanding or protecting borders.

It is about hated and blood letting. Pure and simple, killing. That's the agenda. For both sides.

It is about Palestinians associated with Hamas trying to kill or capture any Israelis they can get their hands on purely in order to murder them or use them as bargaining chips. And on the other side, it is about the Israeli military, in spite of its denials, attempting to kill as many Palestinians as possible without regard to the distinction between fighters and civilian innocents.

There is no place to hide in Gaza--all available land is built up and there are no open spaces where refugee camps can be established and declared safe havens for non-combatants. And so those whose homes have been destroyed or live in fear are either trapped where they live, continuing to be subject to bombing, or flee to shelters provided by the United Nations.

But then, while cringing in these, they are not immune from attack. Just yesterday one of these shelters was destroyed and 20 more civilians were killed, many children. This is the third or fourth time a UN facility was destroyed with significant loss of life. In an era of smart bombs this cannot be explained away as "collateral damage."

So the Israelis claim it is the Palestinians themselves who have been attacking what should be sanctuaries. Hamas is doing this to its own people, they say, to make it look as if Israeli forces are intentionally targeting women and children.

The UN says it has evidence that it has been Israeli rockets and bombs that have destroyed these so-called sanctuaries.

And so it goes.

Each day we have updated body counts--remember body counts? More than 1,200 Palestinians have been killed and nearly 100 Israelis.

Both sides are seeing "progress" in those numbers--Israelis believe that if they kill enough Arabs Hamas will give up its struggle to expel Israelis from land they claim to be theirs while Hamas, recently losing power and influence in Gaza, will become resurgent if they kill enough Jews and thereby reestablish their credibility as warriors for the Palestinian cause.

This is thus a blood feud fueled by decades of hatred on both sides--equally vicious ethnic stereotyping and bigotry that is promoted in schoolbooks and popular media. Recall that this most recent conflict began after an exchange of barbaric killings of Israeli and Arab teenagers. It is Old Testament retributive tribal warfare waged lustfully and hatefully by both sides.

Both have legitimate issues. Israeli has the right to live securely within some version of its current borders and Palestinians have the right to a contiguous state of their own. Both have ancient claims to these lands. But both have moved beyond the normal range of political and geographic struggle, even warfare, and descended into hatred-drivien, senseless slaughter.

July 22, 2014--Terror Tunnels

I've been struggling with what to say about the current Israeli incursion into Gaza and the Hamas rocket attacks on Israel. All precipitated by the savage killing of three Israeli youth by Palestinian terrorists and the equally shocking capture, torture, and murder of a Palestinian youth by three equally-youthful Israeli ultra-orthodox fanatics.

One could say that this exchange of barbarisms was precipitated by many decades of animosity, ethnic and religious bigotry on both sides, and claims and counterclaims about territorial primacy. There is enough blame to go around and around and around and . . .

There is no good solution here.

Actually, there is the idea of one--the so-called two-state solution--but the motivation to agree to this in practice is virtually non-existent. Radicals and hateful people--again on both sides--make any possibility of compromise remote. I almost wrote "hopeless."

Hopeless is the way I feel and thus my reluctance to try to write about the situation. I dislike even the prospect of considering hopelessness.

Anyone who feels that what is happening now will lead to any sort of reasonable progress on all the conflicting but often legitimate concerns knows nothing about the irreconcilable history that stretches back millennia in that fraught region. When people feel that their right to exist and have a homeland in the area--actually, in Palestine or, of you will, Greater Israel--is divinely sanctioned or, in Israeli's case, chosen for them by God, it is hard to think what adversaries might productively say to each other if they could be induced or compelled to negotiate.

In truth, both sides, not just the side represented by Hamas, do not recognize the other's right to exist. Militant Israelis--more and more in charge of the situation--would as much like to see the Palestinians eliminated or, minimally, expelled from the contested region as radical arabs would like to see Israel "pushed into the sea."

It has even gotten to the point where Hamas and Israel do not know how to effectively wage war against each other.

The best current example is Israel's inability--despite it military superiority and high-tech capacity to deploy smart bombs and anti-missile missiles--to suppress the fighting capacity of their decidedly low-tech foe who blend into civilian areas of Gaza when Israeli troops and weapon systems appear.

Israel cannot even wipe out the tunnel system that enables Hamas fighters to manufacture home-made bombs and rockets and, using them, infiltrate into Israel proper to carry out acts of war and terror.

As incredible as it may seem, until the new military regime in Egypt clamped down on them, there were at least 1,200 tunnels connecting Egyptian Sinai and Gaza and many dozens of others linking Gaza with Israel itself. Some of these latter tunnels--ones Hamas calls "terror tunnels"--penetrate nearly half a mile into Israel. Others, reenforced by thousands of tons of concrete, are over 100 feet deep and, for reasons I cannot explain, go undetected by Israeli satellite, inferred, and other intelligence assets.

We are not talking about a 2,000 mile border like the one between the United States and Mexico which is thus impossible to make impenetrable, but rather a relatively short one in a circumscribed geographic area. One would think it would be relatively easy for Israel to know about every one of these tunnels since they have the will and technology to do so. But that appears not to be the case as the Israeli military is right know risking life and limb to find and seal them.

And so when they do finally find and destroy them all, where will things stand?

Pretty much where they were five years ago, a decade ago, a century ago, a millennium ago. There will be a brief halt in the mass killings as both sick step back under worldwide diplomatic pressure, lick their wounds, rearm, rage on about the cruelty of the other side, ratchet-up the hatred, and get ready to do it all over again within the next two to five years.

Just as the sun inexorable rises and sets, this too shall come to pass.

June 10, 2014--Un-Settling: The Politics of Middle East Real Estate

If you ever for a moment thought that the Israeli government's allowing the building of "settlements" on land claimed by Palestinians is primarily to accommodate population growth, if you imagined that the recent decision by the government to permit 1,500 more housing units to be constructed deep in the West Bank and East Jerusalem was about needing additional apartments for an expanding population, think again.

It's not about living accommodations, it's about the politics of hate and real estate.

The Jewish population has been growing very slowly. Though the ultra-orthodox are having increasing numbers of children, that rest of the Jews in Israel are not growing in number.

There are at least two dimensions to this increase in the number of settlements--the orthodox, the Haredi, are messianic-minded, which means that they are preparing for the appearance of the Jewish Messiah. To them this requires that Jews come to occupy all of Greater Israel--one of the conditions for the Moshiach's appearance--and that includes all of the West Bank, all of Jerusalem, all of Judea and Samaria, the Sinai, and a good slice of current-day Iraq.

The second reason for expanding housing, politically linked to the presence of increasing numbers of aggressive Haredi, is that settlement policy is one vexing arm of the struggle between the current Israeli government and the aspirations of the Palestinian people who want a homeland, a country of their own. And, to present a balanced picture, this to extreme Palestinian  power-players means occupying much of what is currently Israel.

As evidence of the settlements political agenda is the recent move to authorize 1,500 more units in response to the emerging reconciliation between Fatah (moderate Palestinians) and the more radical Hamas, which does not recognize Israel's right to exist.

According to a recent article in the New York Times, the Israeli government was uncharacteristically honest about the new settlement policy. In the past, they would have claim it was to alleviate a housing shortage. But not this time--

By presenting the new building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as a punishment over the newly constituted government of the Palestinians, who regard that territory as theirs for part of a future state, Israel set itself further apart from international consensus and drew criticism from foreign allies, including Britain, France, and the United States. [Italics added.]

Where we go from here is anyone's guess. Minimally, nothing much will change to alter the Israeli government's aggressive behavior until and unless the United Staes and its allies finally say enough. And act accordingly.

November 27, 2013--Fajr and Sijil

At times, the tragic and the absurd merge to become indistinguishable. I can think of no better sad example than the recent case of the lion cubs of Palestine.

Last week two were born in, of all places, the Gaza Strip. Hamas proclaimed this blessed event as evidence that life goes on quite well in even this godforsaken and embattled place.

And, of course, they gave credit to themselves for creating the political and cultural environment that enabled this to occur. Sort of like what the Soviets used to do with Olympic athletes--shoot them full of hormones so that they would win dozens of gold medals and then cite that as proof of the superiority of their system.

But then the cubs, Fajr and Sijil, "dawn" and "stones of clay" in Arabic, proclaimed by Hamas to be symbols of "resistance, beauty, power, and strength," died.

Ignoring the craziness of attempting to breed and raise wild animals in such a forbidding environment, Hamas blamed, who else, Israel for the cubs demise.

Never mind that raising lions in captivity requires sophisticated zoological facilities and expert veterinary care (the mother lion, which is not unusual for animals in zoos, refused to feed the cubs) and they need to be monitored at all times (the lioness last Tuesday stepped on and killed the cubs), it was still all Israel's fault.

Hamas claimed this was because an Israeli warplane dropped three bombs on a Jihad training camp in northern Gaza not far from the zoo and this spooked the lioness who then . . .

Aware of the emotion surrounding the birth and untimely death of the two cubs, Israel quickly let it be known that the bombing was in retaliation for attacks on them earlier in the day, by rockets Hamas calls fajr.

There are a dozen so-called zoos in the Gaza Strip. According to the New York Times, at one, workers painted stripes on two donkeys and passed them off as zebras; at another, Hamas zookeepers stuffed dead animals and put them on display. I assume a similar fate awaits Fajr and Sijil.

August 16, 2013--Arab Winter

Fridays in August should be times for languor and light spiritedness. Pass by this then if you want to protect your tranquility, but I cannot resist saying a few words about the escalating crises in the Middle East.

With a state of emergency declared in Egypt--after hundreds there were slaughtered by the military in an attempt to take the country back from the democratically-elected leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood--with continued unrest in Bahrain; democracy under threat in Tunisia, Iraq, Libya, and possibly even Turkey; and an all-out civil war raging in Syria, what ever became of the hope engendered by the Arab Spring that commenced in Tunisia more than two years ago?  The hope that authoritarian leaders from Muammar al-Gaddafi in Libya to Hosni Mubarak in Egypt would topple one-by-one and liberal democracies would take their places?

Isn't this what Barack Obama early in his presidency in a speech in Cairo saw to be the strategic opportunity in the region? And wasn't it for this that he was awarded a preemptive Nobel Peace Prize?

But now we have this--a tectonic nightmare of old authoritarian regimes overthrown and supplanted by radical leaders, many of whom either have ties to al Qaeda or tolerate their presence. Who foresaw that this would be the last gasp of 19th century colonialism and the dawn of a complicated new day in the Muslim world? 

Actually, many did who knew anything about the history of the Arab lands and the contesting forces active in every country throughout the region.

Does anyone doubt that events in Egypt will lead to a civil war there at least as ugly as the one underway in Syria? With the military government so casual about murdering hundreds of protesters isn't it inevitable that this will not suppress the opponents of military rule but motivate and inspire them to become more aggressive, ultimately take up arms, and prevail?

Is there any doubt that at some point in the not distant future we will see similar situations in Jordan and even Saudi Arabia where corrupt monarchies currently rule?

Then what we will have? A region in full turmoil with access to oil severely restricted. What will then be the consequences for the global economy? 

The ideals espoused by Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in historical perspective look naive. 

Not everyone wants a government similar to ours (in fact, a majority of Americans themselves aren't too happy with the state of our own current government), not every country (especially those with arbitrary borders drawn up by the West after the First World War) is culturally set up to embrace democracy. And when they do fight for and achieve the right to vote--with our endorsement--they elect leaders from Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood. 

This is just another sad example of unintended consequences, of the danger of getting what one wishes for.