Mystical Politics

The garden of my apartment building in Jerusalem - night photos

2012-01-22T17:48:00.000-05:00

Listening to Janis Ian in Israel

2012-01-22T17:03:00.000-05:00

I'm listening right now to a beautiful concert of Janis Ian on Galei Zahal (Israel army radio). She's singing in English, and talking between songs - with her words being translated by the broadcaster. She just sang her hit, "At Seventeen," there was a lot of applause, and now she's singing the encore. One of the things she talked about earlier was going to Toronto for a science fiction conference and deciding to get married to her girlfriend there! Oh, I'd love to be at the concert!

Israeli trade with the Muslim world

2012-01-20T09:36:00.001-05:00

Haaretz yesterday had an interesting article on Israeli companies selling (often through third parties) to countries in the Arab and Muslim world with which it has no diplomatic relations - The badly kept secret of Israel's trade throughout the Muslim world.

I discovered today that this trade goes both ways. I went shopping this morning for Shabbat at a makolet and vegetable market in Jerusalem and discovered that they were selling juice made in the United Arab Emirates: by a company named Masafi. This juice is from a product line called "Zesty Citrus."

So much for the Arab boycott!

Sima Shlosberg

2012-01-16T16:33:00.001-05:00

This is a photograph of Sima Shlosberg, whose letters my grandfather Mark Falcon Lesses received during the 1930s into the beginning of 1940. For the text of the letters, see - http://faculty.ithaca.edu/rlesses/familyhistory/sima/

Just arrived in Israel - walking around the Old City of Jerusalem

2012-01-12T12:25:00.000-05:00

I just arrived in Israel earlier this week for my sabbatical (I'll be here until the end of July), and I went to the Old City of Jerusalem with a friend this afternoon. See my other blog for the story - Today in the Old City of Jerusalem.

May 16, 1948 - Jews of Arab lands endangered

2011-12-29T23:09:00.000-05:00

I've published an article on my Israel blog, "The Land and the People," giving the text of a New York Times article published on May 16, 1948, detailing the danger that Jews of Muslim and Arab lands were in with the establishment of the state of Israel. See Jews in Grave Danger in All Moslem Lands for the complete text.

Why not say 'sci fi'?

2011-12-29T08:17:00.000-05:00

I used to be part of science fiction fandom, in my teens and twenties, and one of the things that drove us crazy was when people referred to sci fi (pronounced sci fye) instead of SF. I think it was mostly a matter of defining boundaries - we the real science fiction fans knew the correct word to use, while the mundanes (our name for non-SF fans) didn't know what real science fiction was and called it sci fi. Calling it sci fi was a way to belittle the literature (and by extension, us).

Normblog provides a more elegant and literary reason:

Readers, I'm here to tell you that I've now thought of an argument in favour of my ~~prejudice~~ preference. 'Sci fi' is supposed to abbreviate 'science fiction', but it is spoken as if it rhymes with 'hi fi'. What kind of sense does that make? If I say 'in the circs', I wouldn't pronounce 'circs' to rhyme with, say, 'larks', so that it came out 'sarks'. If I say 'peeps', I don't rhyme it with 'hopes' and call them 'popes'. And so on, you get the picture. Accordingly, 'sci fi' ought to be said as if the second syllable was the beginning of the word 'fiction'. But no one says it like that. It would sound silly, as if it had been interrupted by a sponge suddenly being thrust into the mouth of the speaker. From now on I'll be urging this silly pronunciation upon all who say 'sci fye', in the hope of shaming them towards the more elegant 'SF'.

The semester is OVER!!

2011-12-28T22:34:00.000-05:00

I finally handed in my grades tonight - at 10:00 p.m., the deadline. What a relief! Next Wednesday I'm driving to Cambridge to see my family for a few days, and then on January 8 I'm flying to Israel for my sabbatical - I'll be there until the end of July.

Ron Paul, Anti-Semite

2011-12-26T21:35:00.001-05:00

Eric Dondero, a former staffer for Ron Paul, has just published a statement on a right wing site - Right Wing News - trying to exonerate Paul of racism and homophobia, but concentrating on Paul's foreign policy isolationism, his opposition to the existence of Israel, and his callousness about the lives of Jews in Europe during the Holocaust. He does a really lousy job of exonerating Paul of racism and homophobia (in part by retailing a couple of stories about how Paul recoiled from physical contact - like shaking hands - with his gay male campaign supporters).

Paul's views on Israel and Jews

Israel

Is Ron Paul an Anti-Semite? Absolutely No. As a Jew, (half on my mother’s side), I can categorically say that I never heard anything out of his mouth, in hundreds of speeches I listened too over the years, or in my personal presence that could be called, “Anti-Semite.” No slurs. No derogatory remarks.

He is however, most certainly Anti-Israel, and Anti-Israeli in general. He wishes the Israeli state did not exist at all. He expressed this to me numerous times in our private conversations. His view is that Israel is more trouble than it is worth, specifically to the America taxpayer. He sides with the Palestinians, and supports their calls for the abolishment of the Jewish state, and the return of Israel, all of it, to the Arabs.

Again, American Jews, Ron Paul has no problem with. In fact, there were a few Jews in our congressional district, and Ron befriended them with the specific intent of winning their support for our campaign. (One synagogue in Victoria, and tiny one in Wharton headed by a well-known Jewish lawyer).

On the incident that’s being talked about in some blog media about the campaign manager directing me to a press conference of our opponent Lefty Morris in Victoria to push back on Anti-Jewish charges from the Morris campaign, yes, that did happen. The Victoria Advocate described the press conference very accurately. Yes, I was asked (not forced), to attend the conference dressed in a Jewish yarlmuke [sic], and other Jewish adornments.

There was another incident when Ron finally agreed to a meeting with Houston Jewish Young Republicans at the Freeport office. He berated them, and even shouted at one point, over their un-flinching support for Israel. So, much so, that the 6 of them walked out of the office. I was left chasing them down the hallway apologizing for my boss.

On Paul's isolationism and Jews during WWII

On one other matter, I’d like to express in the strongest terms possible, that the liberal media are focusing in on entirely the wrong aspects regarding controversies on Ron Paul.

It’s his foreign policy that’s the problem; not so much some stupid and whacky things on race and gays he may have said or written in the past.

Ron Paul is most assuredly an isolationist. He denies this charge vociferously. But I can tell you straight out, I had countless arguments/discussions with him over his personal views. For example, he strenuously does not believe the United States had any business getting involved in fighting Hitler in WWII. He expressed to me countless times, that “saving the Jews,” was absolutely none of our business. When pressed, he often times brings up conspiracy theories like FDR knew about the attacks of Pearl Harbor weeks before hand, or that WWII was just “blowback,” for Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy errors, and such.

I would challenge him, like for example, what about the instances of German U-boats attacking U.S. ships, or even landing on the coast of North Carolina or Long Island, NY. He’d finally concede that that and only that was reason enough to counter-attack against the Nazis, not any humanitarian causes like preventing the Holocaust.

The conclusion I draw from these remarks is that Ron Paul represents a revival of the staunchly isolationist, anti-semitic conservative movement that existed in this country before the Second World War. He would be in good company with Charles Lindburgh and the America First Committee. No matter the number of black or Hispanic staffers he's hired, he still hold old-fashioned racist views, and he fully shares in the homophobia of the American religious right. I wonder what Andrew Sullivan, anti-Israel gay conservative, will make of these words from Dondero. I wonder what the evangelical Christian base of the Republican Party will make of Dondero's exposure of Paul's anti-Israelism and anti-semitism. This statement by Dondero deserves the widest possible publicity.

Update (December 27, 2011): See Jeffrey Shapiro on the Big Government site today reaffirming Paul's remark that he would not have entered WWII "to save the Jews." While this is an unpleasant thing for him to say, it seems to me that at the time a lot of people were saying this (and others were thinking it). And of course the US did not enter the war to end the Holocaust - if we had, we should have declared war against Germany in the summer of 1941 (after the German invasion of the Soviet Union) rather than after we were attacked by Japan in December. And of course, once we entered the war, it took rather a long time to persuade Roosevelt to do anything special to save European Jews (other than trying to win the war), with the establishment of the War Refugee Board in 1944. Roosevelt could have authorized US action long before then to vigorously try to save Jews in Nazi Europe, not through military action (which would have been quite difficult before D-Day), but by doing the things the WRB did - send agents to Europe to negotiate with Nazi satellite regimes, to threaten them, and to pay them off. But that is another subject.

Is this apartheid?

2011-12-22T22:33:00.002-05:00

Separation Wall at Abu Dis, Jerusalem

Israel gearing for effective separation of East Jerusalem Palestinians (Haaretz).

Last week, a new border crossing was opened in East Jerusalem's Shoafat neighborhood, to little fanfare. Two days later, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat asserted that Israel should relinquish Palestinian neighborhoods of the capital that are beyond the separation barrier, despite the fact that their residents carry Israeli identity cards.

Some people view these events as two pieces of the same puzzle. A third piece is the resumption of work on separate roads for Israelis and Palestinians between Jerusalem and the West Bank settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim.

Separation Wall at Abu Dis

(Also published on my new Israel blog - The land and the people, which I'm setting up to write for when I'm going to be in Israel for my sabbatical - January-July 2012).

Photos of the Separation Wall at Abu Dis were taken when I went on a tour of East Jerusalem sponsored by Ir Amim, in the summer of 2010.

Christopher Hitchens and the Iraq War

2011-12-18T12:19:00.000-05:00

I've been reading all of the obituaries and encomia of Christopher Hitchens, and realizing when I started paying attention to him - after the September 11 attacks. Terry Glavin writes -

“OK, that’s a confrontation between everything I like and everything I don’t like,” he remembered saying to himself. Writing in the Boston Globe a year later, he put it this way: “On one side, the ethics of the multicultural, the secular, the skeptical, and the cosmopolitan ... on the other, the arid monochrome of dull and vicious theocratic fascism.”

But Hitchens quickly noticed that something else had happened that day, and he’d resolved that he wasn’t going to shut up about it. The bloody spectacle had opened up a deep rot down in the structural foundations of the political culture that had nurtured him, first as a young Luxemburgist pamphleteer at Oxford, then as an acid-witted chronicler for obscure Trotskyist journals, and later, as something extraordinary in American culture: a popular, prize-winning, hard-left public intellectual.

By the morning of Sept. 11, Hitchens had established himself as an essayist, literary critic and a formidable Washington correspondent for such venerable liberal American journals as the Nation, Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly and Vanity Fair. What he saw in the meaning of Sept. 11 was not just this: “You couldn’t really have wanted a better and more dynamic and radical confrontation.” It was this: “And the American left decides: ‘Let’s sit this one out.’ That’s historical condemnation. To be neutral or indifferent about that, it’s just giving up.”

This is as close as you can get to any paradigmatic truth about any of the important political debates and controversies that were to rage and churn through the first few years of the 21st century, a decade of vile hatreds and hysterics that consumed the Left and rendered much of the liberal American mainstream an ugly caricature of itself.

I agree with Hitchens that the "American left decides to sit this one out," something that I experienced in futile arguments here in Ithaca, New York, a bastion of reflexively left-wing thinking (Ithaca is home to Cornell University and Ithaca College, where I work). I remember in the summer of 2002, being told by a local left-wing political activist that a local candidate for the New York Assembly should be voted for because she had opposed the NATO intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo (as if this had anything to do with whether she would be a good member of the Assembly!). He said this as if it was universally accepted that this was the only proper way to think - to leave the people of Kosovo to the tender mercies of the Serbian nationalists. I was in Israel during this time (spring of 1999), following the news, and came to the conclusion then that it was better for NATO to intervene than to stand idly by. I couldn't imagine why someone who purported to be on the left and on the side of oppressed people would oppose the NATO bombing. I realized slowly that this was part of the idiotic "anti-imperialism" of fools that had overtaken the left - the assumption being that everything that the US does outside of its borders is wrong, to be condemned, and is part of American imperialism, leading to the truly disgraceful sight of people on the left consorting with vile dictators. But that was okay, since they were opposing American imperialism!

Today is also the day when the last American troops leave Iraq. I was a supporter of the Iraq War at the beginning - I believed the claim that Iraq had WMDs and was prepared to use them (being persuaded by among other things Colin Powell's presentation at the UN). Once it became clear that Iraq in fact did not have WMDs I began to have my doubts - and then more so when it also became clear that the US had no plan for what to do once we succeeded in conquering Iraq - remember the unrestrained looting and destruction after the invasion? Remember Rumsfield saying, "Stuff happens," and doing nothing? And then there came the horrible scandal of Abu Ghraib and the other prisons in Iraq where American soldiers tortured and humiliated Iraqi prisoners, and the feeble defenses of torture by the Bush administration. I am glad that we have finally withdrawn all of our soldiers. We have left behind us a devastated nation - although we are certainly not responsible for all of that devastation, since Saddam Hussein did his level best before the US invasion to destroy his own country, first by invading Iran and fighting with it for eight years, and then invading Kuwait and being defeated by the allied coalition in 1991. But even then we had a role in helping him to kill his own people - the first president Bush, after encouraging the people of Iraq to rebel against Saddam, stood idly by as Saddam's troops brutally killed thousands of Shi'ites and Kurds who began to do what he had urged them to do.

So should I have opposed the Iraq War at the beginning? In hindsight, yes, although if we had not invaded Iraq in 2003, would we still be imposing sanctions on the country which were strangling it economically and further impoverishing its people? I remember the bitter protests against the sanctions by people on the left-wing before the invasion. The sanctions were denounced as evil, as child-killing, and there were people who went to Iraq then, while Saddam was still ruling the country, to stand in solidarity with the people of Iraq. I was also dumbfounded by this response - how could western leftists act in such a way as to put themselves on the same side as Saddam Hussein, who by this point had probably killed about 300,000 of his own people (remember the hundreds or thousands of mass graves discovered after the conquest of Iraq?). It could be argued that they went in to support the people, not Saddam - but do you think that if they had openly opposed him, they would have been allowed into Iraq? No, of course not.

The situation of Iraq long before the war in 2003 was a real challenge to the leftist assumption that everything the US did was wrong and that any foreign ruler who opposed the US was an anti-imperialist. Saddam Hussein *was* an imperialist - he invaded two of the countries neighboring Iraq in order to gain benefits for Iraq.

One of the strengths of Christopher Hitchens is that he did in fact stand with the people of Iraq against Saddam - he was a long time supporter of the Kurds. Surprisingly, when I tried to argue that the invasion of Iraq did in fact help the Kurds, this did not move the people I knew who opposed the war - they could not admit that perhaps the war, for all of its cruelty and stupidity, had actually benefited some of the people of Iraq, who had been the victims of attempted genocide.

I don't know how to end this essay. My thoughts and feelings about Iraq are still very mixed - I can't come to a single, unambivalent statement about the war and what we should have done. Certainly what we did do was horrible, cruel, and bloody - but on the other side, Iraq is no longer ruled by Saddam Hussein.

Christopher Hitchens is dead

2011-12-16T00:34:00.000-05:00

I've just read the announcement in Vanity Fair that Christopher Hitchens has just died of cancer. I have nothing particularly profound to say about him, except that I found his writing about his struggle with cancer to be immensely moving and also terrifying in his open confrontation with death. In his last column for Vanity Fair, he wrote:

I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.

These are progressive weaknesses that in a more “normal” life might have taken decades to catch up with me. But, as with the normal life, one finds that every passing day represents more and more relentlessly subtracted from less and less. In other words, the process both etiolates you and moves you nearer toward death. How could it be otherwise? Just as I was beginning to reflect along these lines, I came across an article on the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. We now know, from dearly bought experience, much more about this malady than we used to. Apparently, one of the symptoms by which it is made known is that a tough veteran will say, seeking to make light of his experience, that “what didn’t kill me made me stronger.” This is one of the manifestations that “denial” takes.

I am attracted to the German etymology of the word “stark,” and its relative used by Nietzsche, stärker, which means “stronger.” In Yiddish, to call someone a shtarker is to credit him with being a militant, a tough guy, a hard worker. So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion. It is our common fate. In either case, though, one can dispense with facile maxims that don’t live up to their apparent billing.

May he rest in peace.

Political attack on study abroad in Israel

2011-12-06T00:25:00.000-05:00

California State University is considering reestablishing its study abroad program in Israel, while a group of Cal State faculty and administrators has written an Open Letter to the administration calling for this attempt to be stopped, on the grounds of danger, possible discrimination against some CSU students, and of course the apartheid charge. They also think that it would be one-sided to establish a study abroad program in conjunction with Israeli universities without also establishing a similar program with Palestinian universities. It might be a good idea to establish a similar program with Palestinian universities (Bard College has established a joint program with Al-Quds University in Jerusalem), but the absence of such a program should not prevent the reestablishment of the Israel study abroad program.

The University of California restarted its formal study abroad program in partnership with the Hebrew University in 2009.

I certainly hope this attempt to cut off student opportunities to study in Israel is ignored. David Klein, who teaches at CSU Northridge, and was the main author of the letter, argues that "cutting off engagement with Israeli universities is an exercise of academic freedom, not an abridgement of it: 'We’re choosing not to have relationships with institutions that participate in apartheid, in the same way that in the lead-up to World War II, universities broke off relations with universities in Nazi Germany.'"

Notice the rhetorical slip here - from the evil of apartheid to the evil of Nazi Germany. Does Klein think that Israel is trying to exterminate the Palestinians?

Zeev Maoz, a UC Davis professor who has taught a summer study abroad course in Israel, "offered a different interpretation. 'They’re raising the notion of academic freedom, and what they’re advocating is putting limits on academic freedom,' he said. 'To me, this is the epitome of hypocrisy.'"

I agree with Maoz. Klein and his supporters are using their own academic freedom in order to prevent others to exercise their own academic freedom to study and teach in Israel. That is the epitome of the BDS campaign.

Another discussion of JANT

2011-11-28T21:38:00.001-05:00

I just discovered another discussion of JANT, by Walter Russell Mead - Faith Matters Sunday: The Jewish Discovery of Jesus. He doesn't, however, review it, because he hasn't gotten it yet from Amazon. I'll be curious to hear what he thinks of it once he has a chance to read the commentaries and essays.

And here's some more:

From the JPS Blog - Rachel Broder discusses the book.

Joe Winkler on Jewcy again mentions the book, but hasn't read it yet.

A discussion on Project Quinn by Jessica Youseffi.

A very nice review of the book at Ancient Hebrew Poetry (John Hobbins).

More reviews of JANT

2011-11-26T21:51:00.000-05:00

Messianic Jewish Musings has just published a review of JANT - Jewish Annotated New Testament.

An anti-semitic review of the book at Maurice Pinay Blog: Anti-Christ "New Testament" published. His perspective seems to be extreme traditionalist Catholicism (which rejects the Second Vatican Council); he also advertises books by Michael Hoffman, a notorious Holocaust denier.

Discussion forum at the Center for Inquiry presents a range of interesting perspectives - Here comes the Jewish Jesus.

Jim West of Zwinglius Redivivus mentions the book favorably, but doesn't have a full review.

New York Times article on the Jewish Annotated New Testament

2011-11-26T21:11:00.000-05:00

Good New York Times article on A Jewish Edition of the New Testament.

Some highlights:

The book she [A.J. Levine] has just edited with a Brandeis University professor, Marc Zvi Brettler, “The Jewish Annotated New Testament” (Oxford University Press), is an unusual scholarly experiment: an edition of the Christian holy book edited entirely by Jews. The volume includes notes and explanatory essays by 50 leading Jewish scholars, including Susannah Heschel, a historian and the daughter of the theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel; the Talmudist Daniel Boyarin; and Shaye J. D. Cohen, who teaches ancient Judaism at Harvard....

And yours truly, who wrote the article on Divine Beings.

So what does this New Testament include that a Christian volume might not? Consider Matthew 2, when the wise men, or magi, herald Jesus’s birth. In this edition, Aaron M. Gale, who has edited the Book of Matthew, writes in a footnote that “early Jewish readers may have regarded these Persian astrologers not as wise but as foolish or evil.” He is relying on the first-century Jewish philosopher Philo, who at one point calls Balaam, who in the Book of Numbers talks with a donkey, a “magos.”

Because the rationalist Philo uses the Greek word “magos” derisively — less a wise man than a donkey-whisperer — we might infer that at least some educated Jewish readers, like Philo, took a dim view of magi. This context helps explain some Jewish skepticism toward the Gospel of Matthew, but it could also attest to how charismatic Jesus must have been, to overcome such skepticism.

My response to panel on Religious and Mystical Experience at SBL

2011-11-22T00:32:00.000-05:00

I participated in a panel jointly sponsored by the Religious Experience and Esotericism and Mysticism sections of the SBL, giving a response to three papers - by Frances Flannery, Istvan Czachesz, and Jim Davila.

If you would like to read my paper, it's after the jump.

I would like to begin by offering my thanks to all three authors for their thought-provoking articles. My discussion will consider each paper in turn, while also making comments drawing the papers together. I am starting with Jim’s paper, “Ritual Praxis in Ancient Jewish and Christian Mysticism.”

Jim’s paper is a lucid discussion of the issues involved in discovering the relationships between ancient instructions for ritual practice and mystical experiences. His survey of the sources for these rituals surveys texts that provide explicit directions, first-hand accounts of mystical experiences, fictional accounts, and architecture and artifacts. His discussion of how to glean rituals from first-hand or fictional accounts is very useful. I would emphasize that the Hekhalot literature, as discussed later in the paper, also contains many ritual instructions intended to bring angels down from heaven (for example, the Sar ha-Panim or Prince of the divine Countenance) and instructions for travel to the heavenly throne room. The instructions for invoking angels, in particular, include many details of ritual practice that are similar to some of those in Sefer ha-Razim. As for the Babylonian incantation bowls, I question whether in most cases we can regard the rituals accompanying their use as mystical in nature. As Jim points out, most of them are protective and exorcistic, intended to protect those named on them from demonic attacks. It is also difficult to discern exactly what rituals would have accompanied the use of these bowls, because we do not possess any kind of accompanying ritual handbook which explains how they were used once they were written. In terms of methodology, Jim’s work and the work of others has demonstrated amply how useful cross-cultural comparisons are, either within the closer culture area of Greco-Roman and Ancient Near Eastern societies or farther afield, for example his own comparison with the Hekhalot rituals and shamanistic traditions from Siberia, North and South America, and Japan. Jim’s most intriguing suggestion for comparison is his last, with modern ceremonial magic. I think this suggestion is well worth following up, and there are anthropologists who have already written ethnographies of a number of groups using the various techniques of ceremonial magic, whether or not derived from the Golden Dawn – for example T. M. Luhrmann’s study, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England, and Felicitas Goodman’s Where the Spirits Ride the Wind: Trance Journeys and Other Ecstatic Experiences. Other comparative possibilities also suggest themselves – to the meditative and ritual techniques of medieval and early modern Jewish mystics, among them Abraham Abulafia and Isaac Luria (via Luria’s disciple, Hayyim Vital). J. H. Chajes’ study Between Worlds is a useful entry into the world of Safedian Kabbalah, where these techniques were developed and elaborated. The proposals that Jim makes in his paper have the potential to be very useful in helping us to understand the experiences of ancient Jewish and Christian mystics.

I now turn to Istvan’s and Frances’ papers. My expertise is in the study of mysticism in late antiquity, not in cognitive neuroscience. My comments here will center what I think is useful in Istvan’s and Frances’ papers for the study of mysticism, and on questions I have about whether, and how, the insights of neuroscience can be applied to the study of mysticism in late antiquity.

Let us begin first with basic definitional questions raised by both Istvan’s and Frances’ papers – how can we define both religion and mysticism? Is mystical experience necessarily religious? Frances’ definition assumes this, when she says that mysticism is a “sub-category of religious experiences that entails experiences rooted in personal bodily expressions of an epistemological revelation.” Questions of definition have bedeviled the study of religion for many decades, and there is no unified definition that all or even most scholars would agree upon. The same is true for the study of mysticism, perhaps even more acutely. Earlier definitions of mysticism saw mystical experience as “union with the divine,” but this definition excludes religious communities whose practitioners deny the possibility of such unions, non-theistic religions, nature mysticism, mystical experiences by people who do not belong to a particular religious community, and probably others that I am not thinking of. One of the great virtues of William James’ discussion of mysticism in his Varieties of Religious Experience is that he attempted to collect a very wide range of testimonies of mystical experience and then present them on a spectrum of experiences. He does come up with a well-known synthetic definition but does not deny the mystical aspects of experiences that do not fit the full definition. Istvan’s paper would appear to agree with this approach (when it says that “mystical experience should include sensations of being near to superhuman, absolute, ultimately significant, hidden, or overwhelming things and beings,” p. 3) but to take it back when it says “Mystics maintain elaborated philosophical and exegetical traditions and emphasize the importance of a sustained, long-term engagement with them” (p. 11). This is certainly not true of all mystics. I think that there needs to be much more careful attention paid to exactly what mystical experiences are being studied through neurological testing, in order to end up with results that will be meaningful for understanding mystical experiences. And if we want the results to be relevant to mysticism in late antiquity, following a definition such as that offered by April DeConick in Paradise Now would be helpful, as Frances says. DeConick’s definition “identifies a tradition within early Judaism and Christianity centered on the belief that a person directly, immediately, and before death can experience the divine, either as a rapture experience or as one solicited by a particular praxis.”

Istvan’s paper surveys a range of neurological studies that attempt to determine the parts of the brain activated by a variety of activities that the researchers consider religious or potentially religious – meditation by Tibetan Buddhists or Franciscan nuns, glossolalia, Bible reading, and rhythmic dance and music engaged in by Pentecostal Christians. He says, however, that “It is important to note that simply observing that a certain brain area plays some role in a certain kind of experience is not yet a satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon,” because “one has to keep in mind that any real-life cognitive and behavioral phenomena depends on the cooperation of a network of brain areas.” Therefore discovering what part of the brain is active when a certain activity is done is an interesting fact, but does not necessarily explain the phenomenon. One question I would have about these findings is whether they tell us anything about how the practitioners themselves would explain their own experiences? One advantage that researchers of contemporary religious activity have over studies of ancient religion is that they can observe and even take part in religious performances, as well as ask people directly what their experiences are. Has this been done? I think it would be interesting to see if the neurological findings align with the practitioners’ reports of their own experiences.

Finally, I would like to ask how these studies of contemporary practitioners of various religions can apply to the study of ancient religious texts? As Jim has pointed out, the way we learn about ancient mystical experiences is by interpreting texts that may be first-person accounts, or fictional accounts, or ones that correlate certain ritual activities with experiences such as visionary dreams – but we cannot ask ancient people what their experiences were. Nor do we know how close the written accounts are to what people actually experienced. It is much easier for us to figure out what ritual activities people engaged in. Perhaps by making a catalog of ritual activities that the ancient texts refer to, and then testing people today who engage in those ritual activities, we might be able to learn something about the areas of the brain that would have been activated in ancient people who did those same rituals. Frances’ paper, it seems to me, is making the first steps towards trying to do something like this in her examination of the Testament of Abraham.

Istvan’s discussion, however, leaves out a crucial element in the study of experience, whether ancient or contemporary, whether religious, mystical, or another kind of experience – the role of culture and language in determining experience – both the experience itself and how it is later interpreted. Steven Katz has famously stated that, “There are no pure experiences … it is not just a question of studying the reports of the mystic after the experiential event but of acknowledging that the experience itself as well as the form in which it is reported is shaped by concepts which the mystic brings to, and which shape, his experience.” The virtue of Katz’s position is that it strives to deal with the differences in mystical experiences across cultures and religions, rather than eliding them. Frances modifies Katz somewhat, saying that “the brain simultaneously processes religious or mystical experience as stimuli of various neurological regions of the brain along with cultural matrices of interpretation, and that these are inseparable even on a neurological level of processing.” Frances’ account of mystical experience is sensitive to the particular cultural matrix of a particular account of mystical experience, even if she would not go as far as Katz does.

Despite my hesitation to identify all mystical experiences as religious, there are several aspects of Frances’ definition of mystical experience in antiquity that I think are quite interesting and useful, especially her insistence on paying attention to the body. Ancient accounts of mystical experience do often include bodily descriptions – for example, a passage in the Hekhalot literature refers to the experience of standing in limitless space with one’s feet cut off [need to find exact reference]; in the Apocalypse of Abraham, Abraham finds himself prostrate, clutching at the rolling floor of heaven; and Paul is taken up to the third heaven “whether in the body or out of the body.” And various ritual practices involving the body are often a requirement to achieve specific mystical experiences – for example, again in the Hekhalot literature, in order to encounter an angel and speak with him, the practitioner typically has to fast for a certain number of days, eating only bread he has baked and water he has drawn, isolating himself from all other people in a room, and reciting prayers and adjurations – all physical, bodily activities.
The question I asked earlier – about how the neurological studies can be useful for the study of mystical experience in antiquity – is answered in an interesting way by Frances, when she says that “when we marginalize the body in our discussions of mysticism in antiquity, we miss the one sure bridge we have to antiquity…. it is our embodiment that is the one sure window into those persons who composed, heard, and/or circulated the mystical texts.” She then focuses on details that Jim also addresses in his paper from the point of view of ritual studies – the bodily expressions in mystical texts. The texts describe body postures, the senses, affective changes in the body, etc. These insights are easy to apply to Frances’ discussion of the Testament of Abraham, which includes many physical actions that correlate with affective experiences – for example, when Abraham washes the stranger’s feet, his “heart was moved and he wept over the stranger.” Her discussion of the Testament of Abraham also accords well with the cross-cultural approach that she and Jim both advocate, when she compares the activities in the Testament with those typically engaged in by someone who engaged in dream incubation at a temple of Asclepius. It will be interesting to see Frances’ full exploration of the Testament of Abraham in the light of cross-cultural studies of mystical experience and ritual and the findings of cognitive neuroscience.

Jewish Voice for Peace at AAR/SBL

2011-11-21T01:51:00.000-05:00

I spent the morning going through the book exhibit, and came upon a booth for Jewish Voice for Peace, where I argued with them for a long time. Not much enlightenment on either side - we were really talking past each other (not that I expected anything else). They are here trying to get people to support their divestment from TIAA-CREF campaign. I argued that punitive measures like this are guaranteed to alienate most Jews both in the U.S. and in Israel, but they kept saying that divestment had an effect on getting rid of apartheid in South Africa. I objected to the comparison of Israel with apartheid South Africa, and we disputed over the issue of Israeli Arab representation in the Knesset. They issued a rejoinder that even in the Iranian parliament has one token Jewish representative. I didn't bother arguing that Israel is nothing like Iran. I agreed with them on some of their diagnoses of the problems (settlement building, Bibi's intransigence, the perverse map of the separation wall which shuts whole Palestinian towns off by surrounding them with a wall - Kalkiliya and Walaje spring to mind) - but not on the solution. It was frustrating, and I felt angry that they were even here at AAR/SBL. I've been going to annual meetings since 1985, and I don't remember ever seeing a both on political issues - even in the heyday of anti-apartheid campaigns or protests against the Iraq War.

Jon Haber of Divest This! has many times described the disruptive effect of groups like JVP, which try to bring Middle Eastern politics into organizations that basically have nothing to do with them, in order to push their own agenda. They drag their own agenda into unrelated groups, and cause nothing but discord and bad feelings. This is in sharp contrast to groups like J Street or the American Task Force for Palestine, which work openly to persuade people of their political views in the political arena. They lobby Congress or the President, they hold conferences of various kinds, they organize local chapters that engage in letter-writing or citizen lobbying. They do not try to take over groups that have nothing to do with the Middle East to further their own ends.

"Reconstructing Practice from Texts" - Esotericism and Mysticism session at SBL

2011-11-20T15:43:00.002-05:00

Yesterday morning I went to the fabulous first panel sponsored by the Esotericism and Mysticism in Antiquity section of the SBL (we used to be called the Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism section), where the presentations were fascinating and very wide-ranging. The two I found the most interesting were April DeConick's, “'The road for souls is through the planets': The Mysteries of the Ophites Diagrammed" and Cordula Bandt's "The Tract 'On the Mystery of Letters' in Context of Late Antique Jewish, Gnostic and Christian Letter Mysticism."

Here are the abstracts:

April's paper

This paper will reexamine the Ophite Diagram presented by Origen in his treatise against Celsus (6.21-40). I will make a detailed reading of the text and argue that the Diagram is exactly what Celsus and Origen claimed it was, a map of the soul’s journey through the planets. Furthermore, I will demonstrate that the prayers correlate to a Neopythagorean ascent pattern. I will conclude with the argument that Origen has preserved for us a piece of an Ophite initiatory handbook, that is the map, prayers and seals used in the intermediate initiatory rite when the soul practiced the death journey through the heavenly realms.

Cordula's paper

Speculations on letters play an important role within Late Antique mystical and magical tradition. Letters are regarded as smallest units of speech, but on a more esoteric level they are also understood as tools to gain spiritual progress or even influence reality. Names of angels and heavenly powers which are nonsense clusters of letters, composed by combining them according to certain rules, occur as prominent means of protection and power in early and later Jewish mysticism as well as in Gnostic texts, which are preserved in original or as quotations in polemical writings by the Church fathers. However, in orthodox Christian tradition references and responses on the symbolism of letters are rather rare, despite Christ's famous saying in the Book of Revelation "I am the Alpha and the Omega" (Rev. 1:8, 21:6, 22:13). Nevertheless, exactly this cryptic dictum inspires the remarkable tract "On the mystery of Letters" which was composed probably by a Christian monk in mid-6th century Palestine. This tract is thoroughly rooted in orthodoxy, but presents an astonishing variety of interpretations of the Greek alphabet, revealing hidden secrets by close examination of certain features of the letters like name, shape, numerical value, position in alphabet, pronunciation etc. In 2007, I published the editio princeps of this unique work, accompanied by a German translation and analysis of its content. In order to give a wider public access to this still quite little known text, I am currently preparing an English version of my book. My paper at the SBL Annual Meeting 2011 will focus on similarities between Jewish and Gnostic letter mysticism in the first centuries of the Christian era and the tract "On the mystery of letters". I will show how the author transforms rather heterodox ideas into a truly orthodox approach towards the alphabet. I will also discuss why mainstream Christianity at this time seems to be reluctant to involve into mystical letter speculations.

Bandt has also published her dissertation "On the Mystery of Letters" and the Bryn Mawr Classical Review has a very laudatory review of the book. (The title is Der Traktat "Vom Mysterium der Buchstaben," Kritischer Text mit Einführung, Übersetzung und Ammerkungen. Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur, 162. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2007).

I'll post more about them later. In a few minutes I'm heading over for our second session, which we are doing together with the Religious Experience in Early Judaism and Early Christianity section.

I'm in San Francisco for the SBL

2011-11-19T01:07:00.000-05:00

I arrived in San Francisco earlier this evening for the AAR/SBL conference. I just noticed that both April DeConick of Forbidden Gospels and Jim Davila of Paleojudaica had blogged on their attendance at the conference. We are part of the Esotericism and Mysticism in Antiquity section, which has two meetings at the SBL this year, one at 9:00 tomorrow morning, the second on Sunday at 1:00. Tomorrow's session is on the theme of Reconstructing Practice from Texts (in Convention Center 2011). Sunday's session is on Praxis and Experience in Ancient Jewish and Christian Mysticism (in Convention Center 2018). I'll be responding to the papers on Sunday. Jim just wrote that he's going to be participating in another panel tomorrow, S19-212b - Engaging the "Wired-In Generation": Knowledge and Learning in the Digital Age. It's from 1:00-2:30 in Convention Center 3002.

This is the first time in several years that the AAR and the SBL are meeting together - I'm looking forward to going to some AAR sessions as well as SBL sessions, especially those sponsored by the Study of Judaism section of AAR.

Strange places in China

2011-11-16T21:56:00.001-05:00

Noah Schachtman of Wired's Danger Room has called attention to a bunch of strange structures out in the Chinese desert. After the jump, there are some pictures of them.

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Größere Kartenansicht

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Stephen Sizer's debate with Calvin Smith

2011-11-12T20:54:00.000-05:00

Joseph W reports on Rev. Stephen Sizer's debate with Dr. Calvin Smith last night, in particular focusing on Sizer's closeness to the Iranian regime: Stephen Sizer on his links with Iran’s Khomeinists: “I’ll go anywhere to share the gospel”.

Dr. Smith has just written to let me know that the recorded debate has now been uploaded to Vimeo - here is the link.

Has the Church Replaced Israel? (TV debate) from Calvin Smith on Vimeo.

A rather opinionated assessment of the debate by Moriel Archive.

Gev of the Rosh Pina Project has some harsh words for Rev. Sizer's performance at the debate -

Stephen Sizer is a master at speaking a different way with a different message to different audiences. A prime example is last night’s debate he had on Revelation TV with Calvin Smith, Principal of King’s Evangelical Divinity School, UK. Sizer conceded most of the theological ground to Smith and sought to seem as reasonable and as nice as possible. I just felt like he was grooming his audience for some nefarious purpose.

Last night he concluded that he wanted to “learn from his Messianic brothers” however to an audience of largely non-Christian Palestine Solidarity Campaign supporters he called Israeli Messianic Jews, who support their country, an abomination! He later issued an “apology” when he was caught out, but blamed the naughty Zionists who filmed him for putting him under-pressure and hence he came out with that howler....

Sizer couldn’t keep to the theological topic that was billed in the debate and launched a tirade against Israel’s injustices but ignores, and sometime worse, he rationalises the violence and minimises the murderers of Jews by calling them political prisoners, as we reported here.

Sizer’s elastic-sided ethics stretch so far as to allow him to promote a new blog site as if he had nothing to do with it, when it fact he started it. We reported this here.

In conceding to Calvin Smith that the Jews were still God’s chosen people and God has not finished with them, Sizer sang a different tune to the one he sang in Malaysia for a Viva Palestina meeting he addressed. He said in an interview to Shahanaaz Habib of the Star Newspaper that the idea that the Jews were God’s Chosen people was “absolute rubbish”. We reported this here.

Who tarnished Penn State's reputation?

2011-11-10T08:14:00.002-05:00

I wondered whether there might be student response at Penn State last night to Paterno's firing. Well, there was, and it turned into a riot. Penn State Students in Clashes After Joe Paterno Announcement.

The New York Times reports -

After top Penn State officials announced they had fired Joe Paterno on Wednesday night, thousands of students stormed the downtown area to display their anger and frustration, chanting the former coach’s name, tearing down light poles and overturning a television news van parked along College Avenue.

One student said:

“We got rowdy and we got maced,” Jeff Heim, 19, said rubbing his red, teary eyes. “But make no mistake, the board started this riot by firing our coach. They tarnished a legend.”

The Board "started this"? They "tarnished a legend"? How about - Joe Paterno's turning a blind eye to hideous crimes started this? How about Joe Paterno tarnished his own "legend."

I look forward to the day when colleges and universities, along with the NFL, decide that it has to run its own farm system, rather than relying on American colleges and universities. Somehow baseball has managed to succeed without this kind of massive subsidy from our supposed higher education system.

TV Debate between Calvin Smith and Stephen Sizer

2011-11-10T08:03:00.000-05:00

Dr. Calvin Smith has a brief report on his debate last night with Rev. Stephen Sizer on his blog - Calvin L. Smith: That TV Debate. He will be uploading video of the debate eventually to his website. If anyone would like to comment on the debate, I'd be interested to hear it. (I did not hear it, since I'm in the US and was at work when it occurred).

Violence and sex, money, and war

2011-11-09T23:13:00.000-05:00

Some random thoughts, in no particular order -

The scandal at Penn State is really unbelievable. When I read the story yesterday about how graduate assistant coach Mike McQueary had caught assistant coach Jerry Sandusky in the act of anally raping a 10 year old boy in the locker room, I was appalled - and then even more appalled to learn that McQueary did nothing to stop the rape, left, called his father, then reported it to Joe Paterno, the head coach, who sent the report up the line, with no one calling the police, or apparently even learning the name of the young victim. Today, the university's president, Graham Spanier, stepped down from his job, and Joe Paterno was fired by the Board of Trustees of the university.

Students at the university have been holding large rallies at Paterno's home, in support of him. Why? Apparently, football, the American religion, can't be questioned, even if the sainted head coach covers up the grotesque crime of child rape.

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Is the world economy about to go into freefall again? Now it's Italy's turn to totter at the abyss. And maybe France's.... When will the EU leaders get their act together?

Italy, a central member of the euro zone and its third-largest economy, struggled to find a new government as anxious investors drove Italian bond rates well above 7 percent and the markets tumbled worldwide. And although critics have warned of just such an escalation for months, European leaders again were caught without a convincing response....

And of course the fear in Paris is that France will be next. Mr. Sarkozy’s government just announced another set of budget cuts and tax increases in the face of lower growth, to keep to its promises to cut its own budget deficit. But on Wednesday, the spread of 10-year French government bonds over their German equivalent rose to a euro area high of around 140 basis points. “Contagion” is not just a movie.

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Iran apparently is much closer to getting a nuclear weapon. Should we do anything about it? Should Israel do something about it? An Israeli attack on Iran would very probably lead to a regional war, with thousands of missiles being launched from Lebanon and Gaza at Israel. I hope there's not a war - I'm going to Israel in January for seven months (I'm on sabbatical), and I'd rather not spend the time in a bomb shelter!

Another Gaza flotilla

2011-11-02T19:42:00.003-04:00

This morning I received an email from my favorite correspondents, US Boat to Gaza, informing the world that boats are now sailing to Gaza. From the press release:

At this moment, two boats are in international waters in the Mediterranean heading to Gaza. One boat, the Saoirse from Ireland, includes parliamentarians among its passengers. The other, the Tahrir, carries representatives from Canada, the U.S., Australia, and Palestine. The U.S. Representative on the Tahrir, Kit Kittredge, was a passenger on the U.S. Boat to Gaza, The Audacity of Hope mission in Athens in July. A journalist from Democracy Now is on the Tahrir also. Civil society organizations in Gaza await their arrival, and look forward to the delivery of letters collected from thousands of U.S. supporters in the To Gaza With Love campaign.

It appears to me that this time around, they kept the sailing completely quiet before the boats reached international waters, in order to prevent what happened this summer from happening again, when the boats were basically stuck in Greek ports, under heavy pressure from Israel and the US. (I hope Israeli intelligence knew they were sailing!) Also, the boats sailed from Turkey, which supports the attempt to break the Israeli embargo on Gaza. (See article from Haaretz, which confirms that they kept the plan quiet so they wouldn't be stopped; apparently the Turkish authorities insisted that they send fewer people on the boats than they had originally planned).

Reuters reports:

The Israeli navy will prevent two yachts carrying pro-Palestinian activists which left Turkey on Wednesday from breaching an Israeli blockade and reaching the Gaza Strip, an Israeli military official said. Lieutenant-Colonel Avital Leibovich, speaking to reporters by telephone, would not say how the boats might be stopped, saying only "we will have to assess and see if we are facing violent passengers."

Israel was aware two yachts had set sail carrying Irish, Canadian and U.S. activists, Leibovich said. Describing their journey as a "provocation," she said they were still far from the Israeli and Gazan coast. Israel would offer to unload any aid supplies on board and deliver them to Gaza, Leibovich said. Israel blockades the Gaza coast to prevent the smuggling of weapons to Palestinian gunmen in the territory, she added.

There is, apparently, an unidentified boat following the Canadian one, about which @PalWaves says, "The #Tahrir captain is 99% sure it's Turkish Coast Guard following them, still trailing." I hope not - the worst thing would be a confrontation between the IDF and any part of the Turkish military.

UPDATE: apparently it was *not* the Turkish Coast Guard, and the Israeli Navy intercepted them yesterday (Nov. 4) and led them to Ashdod port.

Goldstone debunks the "Israeli apartheid" slander

2011-10-31T23:51:00.000-04:00

I don't have the time to say much about this right now, but Richard Goldstone (of Goldstone Report fame or infamy) has just written an op-ed piece for the New York Times, entitled Israel and the Apartheid Slander, which demolishes the accusation that Israel is an apartheid state.

One particularly pernicious and enduring canard that is surfacing again is that Israel pursues “apartheid” policies. In Cape Town starting on Saturday, a London-based nongovernmental organization called the Russell Tribunal on Palestine will hold a “hearing” on whether Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid. It is not a “tribunal.” The “evidence” is going to be one-sided and the members of the “jury” are critics whose harsh views of Israel are well known.

Jews and Halloween

2011-10-29T20:09:00.000-04:00

Inspired by Jared's post on zombie Halloween, I decided to do some investigation about Jews and Halloween. I grew up, like most American children, celebrating Halloween by going out in a costume and trick-or-treating. This was in the 1960s, before parents got involved in taking their children, and I remember on at least one occasion being chased by some older kids - we were also warned not to take apples, lest they have razor blades in them. I also remember how much fun it was, how much candy I collected (and then ate), and the one year that a neighbor created a haunted house, including the darkened room with spaghetti in a tray that we were told was intestines. I was never told anything about a Jewish attitude towards Halloween (but then, I didn't grow up in a very religiously Jewish home).

So what do religious Jews have to say about Halloween? Should Jewish children "trick-or-treat"? Should Jewish houses welcome children in to give them candy? I now live in a neighborhood in Ithaca that is very child-friendly, and lots of people trick-or-treat - parents even driving in with their children from neighboring towns to go from house to house. If you don't want to take part, you have to make sure that there are no lights on at any doors, or just leave for the evening.

An article in My Jewish Learning, by Rabbi Michael Broyde (who is Orthodox), argues that Jewish children should not go out and collect candy on Halloween. He writes, quoting a newspaper article:

"According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Halloween originated with the pagan Celtic festival of Samhain, a day on which the devil was invoked for the various divinations. 'The souls of the dead were supposed to revisit their homes on this day', Britannica says, 'and the autumnal festival acquired sinister significance, with ghosts, witches, hobgoblins ... and demons of all kinds said to be roaming about.' In the early Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church instituted All Hallow's Eve on October 31 and All Saints Day on November 1 to counteract the occult festival. It did not work. All Hollow's Eve was simply co-opted into the pagan celebration of Samhain."

Since Halloween is rooted in a pagan holiday, he argues that Jews should not celebrate it. He concedes that the vast majority of Americans who celebrate it do not know of its pagan origins and do not celebrate it in order to observe Samhain, yet he still thinks it should not be celebrated by Jews. This is because of the injunction not to imitate the customs of the Gentiles (Leviticus 18:3: “You shall not copy the practices of the land of Egypt where you dwelt, or of the land of Canaan to which I am taking you; nor shall you follow their laws” ). Rabbi Broyde writes:

Tosafot [a medieval Talmud commentary] understands that two distinctly different types of customs are forbidden by the prohibition of imitating Gentile customs found in Leviticus 18:3. The first is idolatrous customs and the second is foolish customs found in the Gentile community, even if their origins are not idolatrous. Rabbenu Nissim (Ran) and Maharik disagree and rule that only customs that have a basis in idolatrous practices are prohibited. Apparently foolish--but secular--customs are permissible so long as they have a reasonable explanation (and are not immodest). Normative halakhah follows the ruling of the Ran and Maharik. As noted by Rama [Rabbi Moshe Isserles, c. 1525-1572]:

"Those practices done as a [Gentile] custom or law with no reason one suspects that it is an idolatrous practice or that there is a taint of idolatrous origins; however, those customs which are practiced for a reason, such as the physician who wears a special garment to identify him as a doctor, can be done; the same is true for any custom done out of honor or any other reason is permissible."

Rabbi Isserless is thus clearly prohibiting observing customs that have pagan origins, or even which might have pagan origins. His opinion, the most lenient found in normative halakhah, is the one we follow.

Rabbi Broyde believes, therefore, that Jewish children should not go out and collect candy on Halloween. What about giving out candy?

The question of whether one can give out candy to people who come to the door is a different one, as there are significant reasons based on darkhei shalom (the ways of peace), eva (the creation of unneeded hatred towards the Jewish people), and other secondary rationales that allow one to distribute candy to people who will be insulted or angry if no candy is given. This is even more so true when the community--Jewish and Gentile--are unaware of the halakhic problems associated with the conduct, and the common practice even within many Jewish communities is to "celebrate" the holiday. Thus, one may give candy to children who come to one's house to "trick or treat" if one feels that this is necessary.

Magical images from Sefer Raziel

For a more journalistic, and non-halakhic discussion of Jews and Halloween, see the article in the Baltimore Jewish Times - Jews and the Halloween Dilemma.

For an article on Jews and magic/the occult, see this article in Tablet Magazine from two years ago: Under a Spell.

An interesting article by a Reform rabbi on Halloween - the comments are also interesting - Is Halloween Good for the Jews?

Ancient Zombies for Halloween

2011-10-29T14:06:00.000-04:00

A great post by Jared of Antiquitopia on Ancient Zombies (his Halloween post):

As everyone begins preparations for the most important religious holiday of the year--Halloween (what else would it be? Yom Kippur? Easter? Diwali? Ramadan?)--I thought I would provide some seasonal cheer for your undead pleasure.

While the jury is still out on whether or not Jesus was a zombie, who did come from the dead and encourage us to drink blood and eat flesh (although drinking blood lends itself to a more vampiric reading), zombies appear to be as old as civilization itself. The earliest reference I know of occurs in Mesopotamian stories of the Descent of Ishtar and, perhaps a bit more well-known, the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Jewish Annotated New Testament just published

2011-10-26T21:29:00.000-04:00

I just received an email from Marc Brettler, the editor, that the Jewish Annotated New Testament has just been published. I contributed the article on "Divine Beings." There are going to be two sessions at the SBL about it - one a panel discussion, one a reception (see below).

Some blog commentary on it:
Annotated Jewish New Testament, first impressions, on the BLT blog.
The Jewish Annotated New Testament – First Impressions on the Baker Book House Church Connection.

----------------------------------------------------

M20-300
Publication of Jewish Annotated New Testament and Jewish/Christian Relations
11/20/2011
4:00 PM to 5:00 PM
Room: 3009 - Convention Center

Theme: Sponsored by the Oxford University Press The Jewish Annotated New Testament is a complete edition of the New Testament in the New Revised Standard Version, with scholarly comment and contextualizing essays by Jewish New Testament scholars, Greco-Roman historians, and theologians. It aims to open up new perspectives on this text for Jewish and Christian readers, and for all who are interested in expanding their reading of the New Testament.

Amy-Jill Levine, Vanderbilt University, Panelist ; Marc Zvi Brettler, Brandeis University, Panelist ; Adele Reinhartz, University of Ottawa, Panelist

M20-315
The Jewish Annotated New Testament Reception
11/20/2011
6:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Room: Atrium Lobby - Marriott Marquis

The release of Gilad Shalit and the 405 bus attack in July, 1989

2011-10-17T23:16:00.003-04:00

I was visiting Israel in the summer of 2006 when Gilad Shalit was kidnapped, and I remember the two-week mini-war that his kidnapping caused (and which has since been forgotten, since that was also the summer of the Second Lebanon War). I wrote a blog post then, but haven't written anything else about Shalit since then.

In my subsequent visits, I was puzzled by the emotion that my Israeli friends felt about Shalit, and about the many signs posted everywhere calling for his return home. As Ethan Bronner in the New York Times has noted, most Israelis see Shalit as being almost a member of their families - a son or brother who is missing in an unknown location, held by ruthless killers. I still don't quite get the emotion, since I'm not Israeli and don't have the same visceral connection to him. The only thing I can really compare it to in the United States is the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979-1980 - I remember watching "Nightline" with Ted Koppel, with the banner on the screen, "America Held Hostage." Even then, it was nowhere near as personal.

I do, on the other hand, feel more personally about some of the terrorists who are being released in return for Shalit, one in particular - Abd al-Hadi Rafa Ghanim, who attacked the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv bus 405 on July 6, 1989.

I was living in Jerusalem at the time. The bus was on its way to Jerusalem, and had just passed Abu Ghosh. The terrorist grabbed the steering wheel and drove the bus into the abyss. The road is very steep at that point in the climb up to Jerusalem, and there is a deep fall into the valley at that point. The bus tumbled into the ravine and sixteen people were killed, some of them being burned alive.

The attack was a horrible shock to everyone. Anyone living in Jerusalem had taken the 405 to and from Tel Aviv. It was so easy to imagine being on that bus as the terrorist wrestled the steering wheel out of the driver's grip. I remember taking the bus after that and peering out, trying to discover where the attack had occurred.

The Jerusalem Post article published the next day on the attack (retrieved via LexisNexis) is available after the jump:

A bearded Palestinian man shouting "Allahu Akbar" seized the steering wheel of a No. 405 Jerusalem-bound Egged Newsbus from Tel Aviv yesterday and sent it crashing over a steep precipice, killing 14 passengers and injuring at least 27, seven of them seriously.

Among the dead were several who were trapped inside the bus and burned alive when it exploded in flames at the bottom of the ravine. Forensic experts at Abu Kabir were last night still trying to identify some of the dead who had been burned beyond recognition. Names of the dead were not released by press time.

Senior police officers said the attack had been planned, and that this would make it the most deadly terrorist incident in Israel since the Coastal Road massacre in 1978, when 37 people were killed and 76 were wounded.

Police Inspector-General David Kraus said last night that the police had been placed on high alert, especially in the Jerusalem area, to prevent reprisal attacks against Arabs. The alert was announced after the Kach movement distributed leaflets calling for attacks on Arabs.

Kraus's assessment that the attack had been planned was apparently based on the preliminary interrogation of the suspect's father, who was reportedly among the passengers on the bus and was arrested yesterday afternoon. Police and General Security Service officers were interrogating the suspect, under guard at Hadassah Hospital in Ein Kerem, where he is being treated for "moderate injuries." Police reported that the suspect had begun speaking to his interrogators after hours of not cooperating. They said his identity was known. Kraus said that the suspect's father, who had also been on the bus, was also under arrest.

The terror suspect, 28, was a worker in Tel Aviv's Carmel market, and had not been in Gaza in weeks. Arab sources say that the man was a member of the Islamic Jihad. Israel Radio reported at midnight that the suspect told interrogators that he acted out of revenge, saying his family members were beaten by the IDF.

Investigators moved from bed to bed in the two Jerusalem Hadassah hospitals and Shaare Zedek, as well as Sheba Hospital, Tel Hashomer, taking statements from the injured as they recovered sufficiently to speak. Many of them had been asleep at the time of the attack, or had not seen what occurred at the front of the bus.

Medical staff at Hadassah Ein Kerem, where 14 of the wounded were taken, worked feverishly in the emergency ward for hours after the crash. The most serious cases were rushed into surgery shortly after their arrival, while others, bandaged but still covered with drying blood, were tended to in the emergency ward. Among the three most seriously wounded, two men were apparently unconscious. A hospital spokesman said that two of the seriously wounded were being operated on last night - one for multiple fractures, the other for head injuries.

A U.S. Consulate spokesman in Jerusalem said seven American nationals were among the wounded.

The incident occurred when the bus began picking up speed on the long straight stretch after the Abu Ghosh junction.

Driver Moshe Elul, who sustained minor head injuries, seemed dazed as he recounted from his bed at Shaare Zedek the events that led to the tragedy. "A young man approached me suddenly. I thought he wanted to ask a question. (But) he grabbed the wheel, shouted 'Allahu Akbar' (God is the greatest, in Arabic) and pulled the wheel with all of his strength rightward. "I struggled with him and tried to pull the wheel back to the left. But he planted his legs on the dashboard of the bus to gain more strength, and that's how he made us topple over the precipice."

Elul was apparently later flung out of a window. He said he could not recall clearly what happened after his initial struggle with the passenger.

Most of the passengers were thrown from the bus, which disintegrated as it tumbled dozens of metres down a 45-degree slope.

First to provide assistance to the wounded were drivers who stopped by the roadside and yeshiva students from nearby Telshe-Stone. When Air Force helicopters arrived, they found it difficult to land in the wadi and turned the highway into a makeshift landing strip. Scores of volunteers joined Magen David Adom and IDF rescuers in the difficult evacuation operation.... Victims were lifted out of the wadi by rope. Ambulances took 22 of the wounded to hospitals in Jerusalem, while five were evacuated by helicopter to Sheba Hospital.

Dr. Ya'acov Adler, director of Shaare Zedek's emergency ward, where four of the wounded were taken, happened to be driving by the scene when the crash occurred. He rushed to administer emergency treatment.

Police were searching last night for two missing passengers, believed to have made their way home after being slightly injured.

Teams from the Hevra Kadisha burial society worked until nightfall to help evacuate the dead, gather scattered limbs, and search for signs of any other bodies. The burial team consisted of 25-30 ultra-Orthodox men, some of whom crawled under the bus to evacuate casualties. Rabbi Elazar Gelbstein, head of the burial society, said: "After six hours of work, I broke down and cried. I hope that God stops the suffering inflicted on the Jewish people."

Most of the wounded were in shock; those who could talk, did so in a whisper.

A team of doctors and nurses treated the suspect in hospital, while a group of Shin Bet interrogators stood by, waiting for a chance to talk to him. One armed soldier stood guard by the bedside, while other security men with walkie-talkies milled around the crowded ward.

Among the wounded at Hadassah Ein Kerem was Eliezra Ben-Yehuda Cassuto, 53, granddaughter of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the father of modern Hebrew. Cassuto, who lives in New York, was on her way to see her daughter Sigal represent the U.S. in the Maccabiah gymnastics event yesterday afternoon in Jerusalem. Cassuto, with a cast on her leg and speaking through an oxygen mask, said that just before the bus swerved she heard passengers sitting in front of her say that "something is not right. Then we were on our side, it happened so quickly. I woke up outside when there was an explosion and the fire started. I was lying on dry grass and there was fire all around. I wanted to get away but I couldn't move. I heard a woman scream that she couldn't find her son and that he was trapped inside the bus. But people told her not to go near, it was too dangerous."

Another of the wounded was Victor Assal, a 23-year-old American-born soldier from Jerusalem, who had been given a few days' leave and was on his way to see his mother who is here on a visit. Assal, who had been sitting on the left side of the bus near the back, has a broken leg and cuts and bruises on his back and head. Doctors removed large chunks of glass from his back. "I hadn't slept last night and I conked out on the ride up," Assal said from his bed in the emergency ward. "I woke up when the bus veered sharply to the right. I saw people thrown to the side and heard people screaming up front. I grabbed for my gun and then blacked out. I woke up in a sitting position above the bus. I don't know how I got out of the bus, whether I was thrown or whether someone pulled me out. My whole body hurt. I tried climbing up the slope and someone came and helped me."

Netanel Zuberri, 29, of Tel Aviv was lying on his back yesterday evening in the orthopedic ward of Sheba Hospital, counting his blessings. He was lightly wounded. His parents Naomi and Shalom were at his bedside, his mother trying to feed him vegetable soup while his father, pale and tearful, sat slumped in a nearby chair.

"At about 11.45 I was half asleep. I sat near the back door. I opened my eyes and thought I was dreaming. The bus was going straight through the safety barrier into the ravine. It happened so fast, that as soon as I understood what was happening there was an enormous crash as the bus smashed into a boulder on the floor of the wadi and overturned. The funny thing was that on the way down I flew in the air with my eyes open and I saw other people flying. It all happened in a fraction of a second. After the bus overturned I must have blacked out. I woke up and saw I was on my back and smoke was all around me. I crawled through a broken window, and got to three metres away from the bus. The whole time I could hear people screaming and crying. I gathered my strength and crawled 50 metres away where I lay down and saw how the bus was burning. You look and you can't believe it's happening."

"I lay there about 30 minutes, and only then did I realize I was injured. I felt pain in my back and I had a deep and long wound on my knee through which I could see the bone. I was very thirsty and I tried to clean the hole in my knee of all kinds of thorns and dirt. The first people to come to me were a soldier and another fellow who gave me a drink of water from a jerrycan. I tried to talk but I didn't succeed. Afterwards they pulled me up the side of the ravine with ropes and put me on the helicopter. Throughout the flight I prayed: 'God, just make it so I won't be paralyzed,' and I patted my legs the whole time to make sure I could feel them."

An American woman, Pella Fingersh, was dozing next to her 25-year-old son when she was wakened by a scream. "It sounded like some catastrophe had happened. The bus began somersaulting through the air. I felt like a ball in a bingo basket going round and round, being thrown against the ceiling and everywhere. We went around three or four times before I was thrown clear." She could not remember if she was thrown through an open window. "I found myself lying on a rock. The bus was still rolling down the hill. It hit bottom and began to burn. There was a young soldier lying next to me. He didn't move. I hope he wasn't dead. There was also a young girl covered with blood. She said 'Help me. I can't feel anything.'"

Finding herself able to move, Fingersh got up and looked around her. "It was a scene from hell. People lying about, people wandering around, covered in blood. I wanted to look for my son. I began walking. I had lost my shoes. The ground was covered with thorns." She did not find her son and was finally persuaded to leave the scene in an ambulance. She was taken to Hadassah Hospital, Mount Scopus, where she was treated for bruises. Hospital officials informed her that her son had been taken to Hadassah Hospital, Ein Kerem. "They say he has only light injuries, but I haven't spoken to him yet."

A Hadassah spokesperson last night released the following details on the wounded: Haviv Amar and Pella Fingersh, both lightly wounded, were released from hospital. Haya Cohen, aged 12, and Rami Ben-Ami remained at Hadassah Mt. Scopus.

At Hadassah Ein Karem, Rita Levin, Arye Yardeni and Shimon Fahima were all reported in serious condition. Suffering from medium wounds were Iris Peretz, Spanish tourist Sylvia Martinez, Eliezra Cassuto, and Shlomo Dgani. Dov Itkin, Naomi Yardeni, Victor Assal, Eitan Zilberman, Amit Limor and Paul Fingersh were said to have been lightly wounded.

The Egged management asked all their bus drivers and the rest of the drivers on the nation's roads to drive with car lights on today to honour the victims of the attack.

The Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway was reopened to traffic at approximatley 10 p.m. after having been closed since the accident.

Ruth Connell Robertson adds:

Maestro Zubin Mehta and the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra matched the national mood of mourning at their concert in Jerusalem last night by asking the audience to stand in silence for two minutes, and then to refrain from applause during the performance.

Wikipedia supplies the names of the dead:

Shimon Dahan, 27, of Herzeliya
Kinneret Cohen, 14, of Jerusalem
Rita Susan Levin, 39, of Philadelphia
Cpl Tova Maimon, 19, of Or Yehuda
Cpl Shaul Chai Tzur, 21, of Netanya
Nahum Mizrahi, 63, of Tel Aviv
Shlomo Atzmon, 60, of Lod
Miriam Tzerafi, 41, of Jerusalem
Isaac Na'im, 47, of Holon
Esther Na'im, 45, of Holon
Mordechai Rosenberg, 50, of Sha'arei Tikva
Matityahu Gershon Resnik, 25, of Givat Haim (Ihud)
Ya'akov Shapira, 73, of Jerusalem
Emil Gorbman, 54, of Jerusalem
Dr. Shelley Volokov Halpenny, 32, of Vancouver
Fern Rykiss, 17, of Winnipeg, Canada

It is of Abd al-Hadi Rafa Ghanim that I think when I hear of Gilad Shalit's release, and of the sixteen people he killed and the many others he injured and traumatized, one attack of so many during the wars between Israel and its neighbors.

For a disturbing and uncanny perspective on Ghanim and his attack, see an article written by John Hockenberry (NPR reporter in Israel during the first intifada) in Tikkun. Hockenberry had met Ghanim before the attack. When Hockenberry was visiting a young Palestinian friend of his named Radwan in Mokassed Hospital in Jerusalem, Ghanim was also visiting him.

Why did Yasser Arafat deny the existence of the Temple in Jerusalem?

2011-10-08T23:40:00.001-04:00

Interesting article on Palestinian Jewish Temple denial and where it comes from, by Yitzhak Reiter in the American Interest. He explains why Yasser Arafat asserted in the 2000 Camp David peace negotiations that "the Temple never existed in Jerusalem, but rather in Nablus." Longstanding Muslim tradition never denied the existence of Solomon's and Herod's Temples in Jerusalem, but instead assumed them. It's only since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war that denial of the existence of those temples had spread among Palestinians and in the wider Arab world.

Steve Jobs is dead

2011-10-05T22:01:00.000-04:00

I just saw on TPM that Steve Jobs has just died. I find myself quite sad, which surprises me, because the death of public figures usually doesn't touch me. But I feel a quite personal attachment to Apple Computers, as many people do, I suppose, because I've owned an Apple since 1985, when I started graduate school at Harvard. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on a typewriter (which meant that I had to retype it several times....), and vowed that for graduate school I would get a computer.

I remember reading a little booklet on how to choose a personal computer, and the Macintosh seemed much better than the clunky PCs with DOS machines - I liked the more intuitive interface, with icons, and WISYWIG, and different fonts. (I spent several years as a typesetter and was definitely into fonts). I've had one ever since, going from the Macintosh 128K, then to an upgrade to a 512K. I then went to Israel for two years and first used my roommate's DOS machine (I still have 5 1/2 inch floppy around somewhere) and then the next year rented something in a heavy metal box that ran Wordstar. When I returned to the US I bought another Macintosh (bequeathing the 512K machine to an old roommate) - I don't remember which one now. The next time I went to Israel I brought a rather heavy laptop - 5300 something. I wrote my doctoral thesis on this one, and ended up printing out the whole 450 page behemoth on an Apple Stylewriter (which I had bought in Israel the previous year).

Eventually I got an iMac, then a better laptop, and now my MacBook. I still feel the same fondness for Apple Computers, and I hope that the company continues to prosper and build more fantastic computers and other devices.

R.I.P., Steve Jobs.

Hussein Ibish on Atzmon and Mearsheimer

2011-10-01T16:49:00.001-04:00

Excellent discussion by Hussein Ibish on Gilad Atzmon and John Mearsheimer: self-criticism, self-hate and hate.

Why Mearsheimer found Atzmon compelling in spite of these attitudes, even if they are largely concealed, implicit or downplayed in his book, is a very disturbing question. Ever since he and Walt began criticizing the role of the pro-Israel lobby (Jewish power in Israel and the United States being a subject that deserves serious interrogation of the kind being done by Peter Beinart, among others), Mearsheimer (far more than Walt) has been developing an outright vendetta with the Jewish mainstream that, I fear, has become deeply personal and therefore distorted.

Last year he gave a dreadful speech at the Palestine Center in Washington in which he abandoned his long-standing good advice to Arab and Muslim Americans to develop an alliance for a two-state solution with peace-minded Jewish Americans. Instead, he counseled Palestinians and their allies that Israel would never agree to the creation of a Palestinian state and that because of demographics and other factors, Palestinians would ultimately prevail, and that in effect they need do nothing to achieve that victory (save, he noted, engaging in the kind of violence that might rationalize another round of Israeli ethnic cleansing). In response to that worst of all possible advice, I dubbed him the “Kevorkian of Palestine,” because I believe he was preaching a form of assisted suicide. He was repeating the siren song Palestinians and other Arabs have been telling themselves about Israel and Zionism since the 1920s: that demographics are destiny and steadfastness alone would secure a victory over the Israeli national project. To say that history has proven this logic incorrect, and led from defeat to defeat, would be a gross understatement.

Debate between Calvin Smith and Stephen Sizer on Israel - November 9

2011-09-25T15:49:00.001-04:00

Conor O'Riordan submitted a comment (to an old post of mine) about an interesting debate coming up on November 9 in the UK.

Live televised Debate: Israel and The Church: Replacement or fulfillment?
Place: Revelation TV London UK in front of a studio audience
Date: November 9th 2011
Time: 9 pm to 10:30 pm UK time (please adjust for local time) broadcast live via SKY TV in Europe and live streaming worldwide at this link: http://www.revelationtv.com/watch_now

Participants: Calvin L Smith and Stephen Sizer

Defending the position that the nation of Israel as it exists since 1948 still has a place in end time Biblical prophecy will be Calvin Smith, principal of Kings Evangelical Divinity School.

Opposing this and giving a different Biblical view on Israel and the Church will be Stephen Sizer ,who is vicar of Christ Church Virginia Water Surrey UK and founding member of the Institute for the Study of Christian Zionism.

E-mails and texts will be intermittently read out and tallied to ascertain which position garners most support from the public.

Note: Viewers in USA with a ROKU BOX can now watch Revelation TV and so view the debate through this medium.

Revelation TV is the most popular UK Christian television station www.revelationtv.com

Dr Calvin L. Smith

Dr Calvin L Smith is principal of Kings Evangelical Divinity School, editor of the Evangelical Review of Society and Politics, author of numerous books including The Jews, Modern Israel and The New Supercessionism. He lectures in theology and hermeneutics. He is an academic researcher conference and Church speaker.

Stephen Sizer

Stephen Sizer is senior pastor of Christ Church, the community church of Virginia Water in Surrey UK. He is a founding member of (ISCZ) Institute for the study of Christian Zionism. He is a member of the advisory council of Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding. He co-authored the Jerusalem Declaration on Christian Zionism signed by the heads of Churches in Jerusalem. He has an extensive international ministry teaching regularly in Churches, seminaries, and universities in the USA, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.

Update - Dr. Smith has posted about the upcoming debate on his blog.

Who else endorsed Gilad Atzmon's "The Wandering Who?"

2011-09-23T15:18:00.000-04:00

There's been several blog posts recently on John Mearsheimer's endorsement of Gilad Atzmon's book, The Wandering Who, but there are several other remarkable (or appalling) blurbs on the book:

1) Richard Falk has a blurb on the front cover of the book: "Gilad Atzman has written an absorbing and moving account of his journey from hard core Israeli nationalist to a de-Zionized patriot of humanity and passionate advocate of justice for the Palestinian people. It is a transformative story told with unflinching integrity that all (especially Jews) who care about real peace, as well as their own identity, should not only read, but reflect upon and discuss widely." Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law Emeritus, Princeton University, author of over 20 books, and United Nations Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestinian Territories. It appears that he has now also decided that he should be ashamed of his Jewish identity. He appears to be a frequent contributor to Counterpunch.

2) James Petras - not a surprise (he is the inventor of the phrase "Zionist Power Configuration" as the new term for the international Jewish conspiracy - we've got to move on from the Protocols, after all. He is a frequent contributor to Counterpunch). He writes: "‘Gilad Atzmon's The Wandering Who is a series of brilliant illuminations and critical reflections on Jewish ethnocentrism and the hypocrisy of those who speak in the name of universal values and act tribal. Relying on autobiographical and existential experiences, as well as intimate observations of everyday life, both informed by profound psychological insights, Atzmon does what many critics of Israel fail to do; he uncovers the links between Jewish identity politics in the Diaspora with their ardent support for the oppressive policies of the Israeli state. Atzmon provides deep insights into “neo-ghetto” politics. He has the courage - so profoundly lacking among western intellectuals - to speak truth to the power of highly placed and affluent Zionists who shape the agendas of war and peace in the English speaking world. With wit and imagination, Atzmon’s passionate confrontation with neo-conservative power grabbers and liberal yea sayers sets this book apart for its original understanding of the dangers of closed minds with hands on the levers of power.This book is more than a “study of Jewish identity politics” insofar as we are dealing with a matrix of power that affects all who cherish self-determination and personal freedom in the face of imperial and colonial dictates."

3) Alan Hart: "THE WANDERING WHO? is a magnificent title for this challenging and incredibly controversial book. Author Gilad Atzmon quotes Israel Shahak: “The Nazis made me afraid to be a Jew and the Israelis make me ashamed to be a Jew.” In what Gilad calls this Study of Jewish Identity Politics is the explanation of why he, too, is ashamed to be a Jew."

4) Robert Wyatt: "A seriously funny writer and the wittiest musician since Ronnie Scott…We’re lucky Gilad Atzmon is around. "

5) Karl Sabbagh: "A book by a professional saxophone player, a philosopher, and an anti-Zionist Jew promises to be an unusual read, particularly since they are all the same person. Gilad Atzmon’s book, The Wandering Who? is as witty and thought-provoking as its title. But it is also an important book, presenting conclusions about Jews, Jewishness and Judaism which some will find shocking but which are essential to an understanding of Jewish identity politics and the role they play on the world stage."

6) William Cook: "Atzmon’s insight into the organism created by the Zionist movement is explosive. The Wandering Who tears the veil off of Israel’s apparent civility, its apparent friendship with the United States, and its expressed solicitude for Western powers, exposing beneath the assassin ready to slay any and all that interfere with its tribal focused ends." He is professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California and author of Tracking Deception: Bush Mid-East Policy, The Rape of Palestine, The Chronicles of Nefaria, and The Plight of the Palestinians

7) Samir Abed-Rabbo: "The Wandering Who? is a pioneering work that deserves to be read and Gilad Atzmon is brave to write this book!’" According to the Zero Books website: "He is director of the Center for Arabic and Islamic Studies in Brattleboro, Vermont and the former Dean of The Jerusalem School for Law and Diplomacy."

PLO ambassador says Palestinian state should be free of Jews

2011-09-14T18:14:00.001-04:00

There's been a lot of depressing and discouraging news lately in the US - awful flooding just south of where I live in Ithaca (the flooding of Binghamton, Owego, and Candor by the Susquehanna River as a result of the torrential rains brought by hurricane Lee, leaving devastation behind), the horrible state of the American economy, the fear that the European economy is about to take a dive which will bring us down with it, Obama's decreasing popularity and the grim possibility of a Republican president being elected in 2012, not to mention the depressing news coming out of the Middle East - the storming of the Israeli embassy by a mob in Cairo, Turkey's prime minister Erdogan doing his best to stir up further hostility to Israel by threatening to escort any future flotilla to Gaza with Turkish warships, his expulsion of the Israeli ambassador from Turkey, and now this disgusting statement: PLO ambassador says Palestinian state should be free of Jews.

The Palestine Liberation Organization's ambassador to the United States said Tuesday that any future Palestinian state it seeks with help from the United Nations and the United States should be free of Jews.

"After the experience of the last 44 years of military occupation and all the conflict and friction, I think it would be in the best interest of the two people to be separated," Maen Areikat, the PLO ambassador, said during a meeting with reporters sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor. He was responding to a question about the rights of minorities in a Palestine of the future.

Such a state would be the first to officially prohibit Jews or any other faith since Nazi Germany, which sought a country that was judenrein, or cleansed of Jews, said Elliott Abrams, a former U.S. National Security Council official.

Israel has 1.3 million Muslims who are Israeli citizens. Jews have lived in "Judea and Samaria," the biblical name for the West Bank, for thousands of years. Areikat said the PLO seeks a secular state, but that Palestinians need separation to work on their own national identity.

The Palestinian demand is unacceptable and "a despicable form of anti-Semitism," Abrams said. A small Jewish presence in a future Palestine, up to 1% of the population, would not hurt the Palestinian identity, he said. "No civilized country would act this way," Abrams said.

Israel has often complained of anti-Semitic views in Palestinian discourse. Palestinian media frequently publishes and broadcasts anti-Semitic sermons by Islamic religious leaders, while the Hamas-run Al-Aqsa TV shows programming for preschoolers that extolls hatred of Jews and suicide bombings, according to a 2009 State Department human rights report.

The PLO seeks a U.N. vote on Palestinian statehood when the U.N. General Assembly meets in New York City next week. Areikat said Palestinian negotiators have been stymied in peace talks with the Israelis because of the two sides' unequal status before international legal institutions such as the U.N. and the International Criminal Court, where Israel is a full member and the Palestinians are not. The Palestinians hope the increased pressure will push the Jewish state to agree to their demands.

"We are trying to preserve the concept of a two-state solution," Areikat said. "And to make the Israelis understand there will be consequences for their actions."

The Obama administration has promised to veto the statehood bid if it reaches the U.N. Security Council. "This shortcut is not going to create a Palestinian state," U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice said. "We continue to urge them and convince them that would be self-defeating."

I have supported the two-state solution since the late 1980s, when I first understood that in fact, there was a partner for peace on the Palestinian side. I heard Faisal Husseini (former PLO leader in Jerusalem, son of a distinguished Palestinian nationalist family) speak in 1988 and say that it was time for both peoples, the Israelis and the Palestinians, to give up on their dream of possessing all of Palestine, and dispossessing the other.

I oppose racism both in the United States and in Israel, in my own small way - in Israel I believe that non-Jewish citizens should be treated equally before the law in all ways (which they are not), and I consider it a betrayal of the principles of the Israeli declaration of independence that Arab citizens are not treated equally. I feel the same way in the United States about our shameful history of slavery, Jim Crow, and continued discrimination against people of color.

What, then, should my response be when the PLO ambassador to the UN says that the future Palestinian state should be empty of Jews, even of Jews who agree to live peacefully under Palestinian rule? This is racism, pure and simple. I understand that a Palestinian state would not want to contain people who are actively fighting against it, which would be true of some of the settlers who live in areas that would come under Palestinian sovereignty - but that is far different from categorically stating that no Jews could live in a state of Palestine. Imagine the worldwide protest if Israeli prime minister Netanyahu had just announced that no non-Jews would henceforth be allowed to live in the state of Israel.

The ambassador's statement also highlights the utter hypocrisy of official Palestinian statements that they will not recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people. Israel is supposed to recognize a Palestine where no Jews can live, yet to refrain from declaring its own national identity?

Remembering September 11, 2001

2011-09-09T23:31:00.001-04:00

I was trying to figure out what to write here on the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on September 11, and I started looking through the collection of emails I have from immediately after the attacks. I found an email that I wrote to a number of my friends, and I find that it still expresses my feelings. I reproduce it here.

September 16, 2001

Dear friends and family,

These are some of my thoughts on the events of the last week....

Since the terror attacks in New York and Washington, I've been listening to the radio late at night (since I haven't really wanted to go to sleep). NPR has continually broadcast news since the attacks, and on each night, starting around 10:00 p.m., they've been opening up the phones for callers from around the country. Each night they've asked people a different question. On the first night it was: "how has everything changed since the attacks." On the third night it was, "what are you doing to survive – how are you coping with the attacks." I must say that I have a real hunger to hear the news, to know what's going on, and to hear what a variety of people are saying around the country. I'm very glad they haven't gone back to the regular schedule yet.

I woke up on Tuesday morning when I received a phone call from a friend inviting me to dinner the second night of Rosh Hashanah. I turned on the radio, and heard that a plane had struck the World Trade Center in New York. I immediately jumped up and went downstairs to turn the television on. I then saw the replay of the second plane striking the second tower – the unbelievable scene that I'm sure you've all seen, of the plane going through the tower. I couldn't believe what I was seeing – and then a few minutes later, to hear that the Pentagon had been struck by yet another plane. I was in shock.

In the afternoon I had to go into the office to start getting ready for my evening class. I wasn't sure what to do. Had classes been cancelled? I arrived on campus, and found students wandering around, watching television, talking on the telephone, trying to reach family and friends, and talking to each other about their worries and fears. Classes weren't cancelled, but professors had the choice of whether to meet. On Tuesday night the class met very briefly – it was clear that students were not able to focus. One student was missing – apparently she was very worried about someone from her family. Another student just kept talking nervously. A third student stared into space.

On Tuesday night, the local Jewish community met at Temple Beth El downtown for a memorial service. This included the usual evening prayers as well as the Jewish prayer for the dead – "El Malei Rahamim" ("God who is full of mercy"). The Conservative and Reform rabbis both officiated – it was very moving.

The next day (Wednesday) three of my classes met, and we spent most of each class session discussing the attack the previous day. It was clear that my students were confused, and often didn't know the first thing about who Osama bin Laden was, or even where Afghanistan was. In my Jewish history class we abandoned our discussion of the wars of the Maccabees (second century B.C.E.) for a quick overview of Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, and Islamic fundamentalism. I think that on Monday I will hand out some further information on these topics (including a map of central Asia) and then, I hope, proceed to talk about our planned class subjects.

On Friday at Ithaca College there was a service organized by the president of the college, Peggy Williams, and the chaplains: two Catholic, a Protestant, and a Jewish chaplain. Students also participated, as musicians (we have a great music school). We sang some songs, including Amazing Grace and a really beautiful round in Latin called "Ubi Caritas." The Jewish chaplain led us in the Kaddish. There is no Muslim chaplain, because there aren't very many Muslim students, but the regular imam (prayer leader) for the Jumaa (Friday) prayers was asked to speak. I'm glad he participated. The president of the college spoke. Many people came, about 2,000 (we have a total student body of around 5500). I heard that a similar gathering at Cornell drew 15,000 (out of a total population of 30,000).

Then, tonight (Saturday) I went to a candlelit vigil organized by the local Tibetan Buddhist monastery (only in Ithaca!) – the monks chanted in Tibetan, the rest of us held candles, we walked around the Commons downtown, and then dispersed. Interestingly enough, at both the Ithaca College service and the Buddhist prayer vigil there were American flags flying.

At the end of the Ithaca College service, after the official part was over, a group of student starting singing the Star Spangled Banner – which I had been hoping we would sing, because it just seemed appropriate – our nation has been attacked. I started crying – the first time I've really been able to cry all week.

I feel like I'm getting a grip on what love of country really is — it's not about beating our chests and saying "we're America, we're No. 1, we can beat you up!" – it's about all the people who volunteered to look for survivors in New York, all the rescue workers who died when the World Trade Center towers collapsed, and all the people around the country who are organizing their own local prayer vigils and candlelit vigils and spontaneous singing sessions (like the amateur chorale singers who got together in New York on Thursday night at Lincoln Center and just started singing patriotic songs, and the crowd started getting larger and larger), all the people who are trying to donate blood, all the folks who are giving lots of money without thinking twice to help those who were injured in the attacks, those who lost family in the attack – etc. etc. I've never seen anything like this in my country, and I'm proud of it. I now have a better understanding of why people in Israel don't leave the country when they're in danger – it's their country and they love it for all of the specific ways in which Israelis do good things. And I love this country for all the specific ways that the vast variety of Americans manage to do good. I think that militaristic patriotism feeds off this more basic, open, pluralistic patriotism – but that we don't have to let it. The flag belongs to all of us, not just xenophobes, racists, and warmongers. I think we have to remember that.

Google Translates Yiddish now!

2011-09-06T21:35:00.001-04:00

Google Translate now translates from (or to) Yiddish - see Google זעץ.

Some online resources for the study of Jewish magic

2011-09-04T23:03:00.002-04:00

From the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1904, which has been put on line: the article on Amulets is by Ludwig Blau.

From the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe: Amulets and Talismans (by Avriel Bar-Levav). It includes pictures of several amulets on paper. In the same encyclopedia, see also the articles on Magic, Ba'ale Shem, and Demons.

Article on the finding of a Jewish amulet from the 3rd century CE in a child's grave in the Austrian city of Halbturn.

Article by Dan Levene on Aramaic incantation bowls. He discusses one of the bowls that uses the get formula to expel demons. Here's a link to a photograph of the bowl - http://www.edshare.soton.ac.uk/5331/.

Virtual Magic Bowl Archive at the University of Southampton (created by Dan Levene).

Traditions of Magic in Late Antiquity online exhibit at the University of Michigan.

A printing plate for an amulet from Slovakia (1832). The amulet is against Lilith, to protect the mother and new-born child. From the website of the Center for Jewish Art at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

A short blog post on one of the Babylonian magical bowls held by the University of Pennsylvania museum (from Nippur - published by Montgomery). It's a very nice photograph of the bowl.

Speaking of Montgomery, his Aramaic Incantation Texts (1913) is also now available from Google Books as a PDF download - very handy. The bowl mentioned in the blog post above is #2 in Montgomery's book.

My course on Jewish magic this semester

2011-09-04T21:35:00.000-04:00

I just started teaching my course on "Jewish Folk Religion: Magic and Ritual Power." When I was putting in a book order for the course, I included Joshua Trachtenberg's Jewish Magic and Superstition (1939) because it's a classic and much of it is still very useful. I found out from the bookstore that it's now available in its entirety from Google Books (for free) and that Sacred Texts.com has also just put it online - at http://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/jms/index.htm. I think the Sacred Texts version is easier to use. Both versions have all of the illustrations as well as the notes.

For those interested in seeing the course syllabus, I've posted it as a Page (see link on right side) , leaving out the sections that are only of interest to the students in the course (like the rules for how to behave in the classroom), but including everything else.

It was interesting putting together the syllabus. I first taught the course in 2004, but I wanted to include more anthropological theory (it's now cross-listed with the anthropology department), so the first three weeks are devoted to theory. At the end of the course I'm going to include more about contemporary Jewish magic, principally in Israel. I found a good article by Zion Zohar on the invention of the Pulsa DeNura curse and its use in Israeli politics - "Pulsa De-Nura: The Innovation of Modern Magic and Ritual" (Modern Judaism 27 [2007] 72-99). I'd like to find more articles in English about other manifestations of Jewish rituals to gain power in contemporary Israel - especially about the use of amulets and the contemporary use of the ritual to exorcise a demon, and how it has become politicized.

Endeavour Crater - on Mars

2011-09-01T23:53:00.001-04:00

Another beautiful NASA photo, this time of Mars, not Earth. It was taken by the Mars rover Opportunity at the Endeavour Crater, just as it was entering the crater. For details, see Mars Rover’s Discovery Excites NASA Scientists.

When I visited the Negev this summer and saw the three large craters there, they looked like this (although they had life in them, which of course we can't see in this photo).

Jerusalem street cats

2011-08-29T21:39:00.001-04:00

Two Jerusalem cats at 12 Elazar ha-Modai St.

Because so many people make their way to this blog when they are searching for cats online, I decided to put "Jerusalem street cats" into Google, and discovered that this blog in fact is the first hit. There were some other interesting sites after it - one a Facebook page whose goal is protect the neglected street cats of Jerusalem. Another was an article on the cats of Jerusalem by Basem Raad in the Jerusalem Quarterly, published by the Institute of Jerusalem Studies. While the article makes a number of questionable assertions, it is also an affecting, humane meditation on the street cats and how they are mistreated by people. He writes:

Something similar happens with cats and people in the old streets of Jerusalem. Jerusalem cats stand apart; they are and are not like other cats. What is striking is the absolute non-pet nature of their existence and the feline grace some of them can exhibit, even under conditions of hardship. I am speaking of the many street cats, not the ones owned by west Jerusalem Israelis who have come from the West and imported that pet culture (and sometimes the pets themselves) with them, or the few cats kept by “aristocratic” Palestinian families in east Jerusalem who generally keep their pets locked up inside. That kind of culture comes with luxury. The “non-pets” are the many feral cats on the streets, mostly on the east side of the city or within the confines of the Old City walls.

It is actually not true that feral cats are mostly on the eastern side of the city - there are many street cats in West Jerusalem as well, and they are generally subjected to the same sad fate as the east Jerusalem and Old City street cats that he writes about.

The author argues also that the English name "cat" probably comes from North African and Asiatic roots, which I suppose is possible, but the Oxford English Dictionary's entry on the etymology of the word does not mention such an origin.

Etymology: The Middle English and modern cat corresponds at once to Old English cat and Old Northern French cat. The name is common European of unknown origin: found in Latin and Greek in 1–4th cent., and in the modern languages generally, as far back as their records go. Byzantine Greek had κάττα (in Cæsarius c350) and later κάττος, as familiar terms = αἴλουρος; modern Greek has γάτα from Italian. Latin had catta in Martial a100, and in the Old Latin Bible version (‘Itala’), where it renders αἴλουρος. Palladius, ? c350, has catus, elsewhere scanned cātus (Lewis and Short), and probably in both cases properly cattus. From cattus, catta, came all the Romanic forms, Italian gatto, Spanish gato, Portuguese gato, Catalan gat, Provencal cat, Old Northern French cat, French chat, with corresponding feminines gatta, gata, cata, cate, chate, chatte. The Germanic forms recorded are Old English cat, catt, Old Norse kött-r ( < kattuz) masculine, genitive kattar (Swedish katt, Danish kat); also Old English catte ? feminine, West Germanic *katta (Middle Low German katte, Middle Dutch katte, kat, Dutch kat, also Swedish katta), Old High German chazzâ (Middle High German, modern German katze) feminine; Old High German had also chataro, Middle High German katero, kater, modern German and Dutch kater, he-cat. The Germanic types of these would be *kattuz (masculine), *kattôn- (feminine), *kat(a)zon- masculine; but as no form of the word is preserved in Gothic, it is not certain that it goes back to the Germanic period. It was at least West Germanic c400–450. It is also in Celtic: Old Irish cat (masculine), Gaelic cat com., Welsh and Cornish cath (feminine), Breton kaz, Vannes kac'h m. Also in Slavonic, with type kot-: Old Slavonic kot'ka (feminine), Bulgarian kotka, Slovene kot (masculine), Russian kot (masculine), kotchka, koshka (feminine), Polish kot (koczur m.), Bohemian kot (masculine), kotka (feminine), Sorbian kotka; also Lithuanian kate; Finnish katti.

On the other hand, the Arabic word for "cat" does seem very similar to the Indo-European. From Wiki Answers:

A male cat = qitt قطّ
A female cat = qitta قطّة
Cats = qitat قطط

The Hebrew word for "cat" is unrelated - it is חתול or חתולה - hatul (masc.) or hatulah (fem.).

Hurricane Photos

2011-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00

NASA has put up some beautiful photos of Hurricane Irene from space, including one that gives a full disk image of the western hemisphere. Notice how enormous Irene is, to the east and south of North Carolina.

Here's a photo showing how enormous the storm is.

Jews in Whispers - Roger Cohen

2011-08-20T23:48:00.001-04:00

Roger Cohen of the New York Times has written a column that I actually mostly agree with, on "Jews in a Whisper," on the contrast between the forthright acknowledgement of Jewish identity in the United States with the half-embarrassed standpoint of (some) Jews in Britain. Nonetheless, he still has one irritating paragraph that strikes me as irrelevant to his argument.

His paragraph:

The lesson is clear: Jews, with their history, cannot become the systematic oppressors of another people. They must be vociferous in their insistence that continued colonization of Palestinians in the West Bank will increase Israel’s isolation and ultimately its vulnerability.

That — not fanning Islamophobia — is the task before diaspora Jews. To speak up in Britain also means confronting the lingering, voice-lowering anti-Semitism.

Cohen seems to saying here that the way to get rid of some forms of antisemitism in western countries is to oppose the settlements, and the Israeli occupation, in the West Bank. Does Roger really think that opposing the settlements in the West Bank is a way to get rid of antisemitism in western countries? He's ascribing a rationality to antisemitism that simply isn't there. If Israel didn't have settlements in the West Bank, I suspect antisemites would find plenty of other reasons to hate Jews.

I also oppose the settlements (most of them) as an obstacle to peace, but I don't say so with the goal of opposing antisemitism, or for that matter opposing anti-Muslim prejudice. It's something worth doing for its own sake, rather than worrying about what antisemites think - for the sake of the future of Israel.

In my opinion, the way to oppose antisemitism is simply to speak out against it forthrightly whenever it appears in any of its forms: if it's the supposedly genteel antisemitism that he's writing about in Britain, to call it out and say it's not funny. (And how genteel is it in fact? Such genteel antisemitism existed before WWII - was it a contributing factor in the lack of sufficient welcome to Jewish refugees from Hitler, and the White Paper that cut off Jewish immigration to Palestine?). It seems to me that the anti-Zionist antisemitism that has taken up residence among some of the British intellectuals (see the UCU - University and College Union and its attempts to forward the academic boycott of Israel) needs to be opposed by forthrightly calling it what it is, and refusing to back down in the face of the pathetic attempts to deny that it's antisemitic.

Sinai contested: Outlaws, Islamists, Israel and army

2011-08-20T23:26:00.000-04:00

An interesting Egyptian perspective on what is happening in Sinai right now and the role of Israel in the Sinai: Sinai contested: Outlaws, Islamists, Israel and army.

Terrorism, retaliation, and what next for Israel?

2011-08-20T23:05:00.001-04:00

What's happening in Israel right now is very scary - not just the terrorist attack that occurred on Thursday, but also the extensive rocket fire and shelling of the southern part of the country. A man has been killed in Beersheba, at least 18 have been injured, and there has been extensive property damage.

One person was killed last night when a Grad rocket struck a home in the southern city of Be’er Sheva. A woman was in critical condition and three others was in serious condition from the rocket strike. Dozens more were treated for shock.

Also last night, three people − a man, a young girl and a female infant − sustained minor injuries after four Grad rockets landed in Ofakim.

Three people were injured, one seriously and two moderately, when several Grad rockets fired from the Gaza Strip Saturday morning hit the southern city of Ashdod.
On Friday morning two Grad rockets fired in close succession hit Ashdod. One landed in a synagogue, causing damage but no injuries. The second, however, exploded inside a Gur Hasidic yeshiva. One person was seriously injured in the explosion, one sustained moderate injuries and four were treated for mild injuries.

Grad missile strike

“There were around 180 pupils who were praying shahrit,” said Avraham Mordechai Zand, who was in the yeshiva when the rocket hit, referring to the morning prayer service. “When we heard the first siren we took cover and then we heard an explosion. When we went outside I heard another explosion, and the rocket exploded about five meters from where I was standing. There was white fog, I couldn’t see anything and then two people who were bleeding came in. We started treating them until the rescue services came. The administration told the children to go home, and we asked them to pray gomel,” referring to the blessing recited when one is saved from injury or death.

Report from Ynet:

Dozens injured over weekend

According to police officials, Saturday was the worst day in terms of the number of rockets fired into Israel since Operation Cast Lead two and a half years ago – almost 60 rockets and mortar shells in 24 hours.

Massive police forces have been deployed in the southern cities and are working to maintain the citizens' safety.

Dozens of people injured from the rocket fire were evacuated to hospitals over the weekend, including three illegal Palestinian residents, who were hurt while hiding in an orchard near Ashdod. Ten people injured from a Grad rocket fired at Ashdod on Friday morning were evacuated to the Kaplan Medical Center in Rehovot. Eight of the injured have already been released, while the other two are still hospitalized in serious and moderate condition.

Three people were evacuated to the same hospital on Saturday, and another woman was rushed to the Rabin Medical Center in Petah Tikva. The Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba is still treating six Israelis who were injured in the terror attack on the Egyptian border. Three people, two of them children, were evacuated to the hospital on Saturday following a rocket attack on Ofakim. The hospital is also treating a woman in critical condition, three people who were seriously wounded and a person lightly hurt in Saturday evening's rocket attack on Beersheba.

More photos of Grad strike

From the reports in Haaretz and Ynet, it appears that Israel will now engage in graduated attacks on Hamas and other terrorist organizations in Gaza, which I imagine will result in the deaths of civilians as well as terrorists. If we believe reports from Gaza, it already has - see the New York Times report from today:

An Islamic Jihad member was killed late Friday in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City. A boy, 5, and another civilian were killed in that attack, according to Gaza medical officials. Islamic Jihad’s military wing said that it would force Israel “to pay a high price.”

At least 14 Palestinians, four of them civilians, have been killed in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza since Thursday. The Israeli military says it has been striking at Hamas training facilities, weapons manufacturing sites, smugglers’ tunnels, and rocket and mortar teams preparing to attack.

Being gay/lesbian in Israel

2011-08-18T10:46:00.000-04:00

Good article by Lillian Faderman on the situation in Israel for GLBT people: If You Take Down Israel, What Else Goes With It?

Americans have every reason to envy Israel's enlightened policies toward its LGBT citizens. So it puzzles me deeply when I hear of LGBT groups lending their sympathy to opponents of Israel.
The rights we have been fighting for and still have not fully achieved in the United States, LGBT Israelis already enjoy. I came out in the middle of the last century and witnessed firsthand the persecution and oppression of LGBT people. It was because of those early experiences that I devoted the last 40 years of my life to writing books and articles about our community’s history and progress.

(Don't read the comments on the article - they're disgusting).

Terrorist Attacks in southern Israel - 7 Israelis killed

2011-08-18T10:13:00.001-04:00

Seven killed in series of terrorist attacks in southern Israel

From Ha'aretz:

Seven people were killed and at least 26 people were wounded Thursday in a series of terrorist attacks on Israeli targets approximately 20 kilometers north of the southern city of Eilat, close to the border with Egypt.

The first attack, at around 12 P.M., was a drive-by shooting targeting Egged bus 392 traveling from Be'er Sheva to Eilat, near the Netafim junction.

Shortly afterward, IDF forces rushed to the scene and were faced with several explosive devices that were detonated alongside an IDF vehicle.

At approximately 12:35, a mortar was fired from Egypt to Israel. No casualties were reported.

At 1:10 P.M., a terrorist cell fired an anti-tank missile at a private vehicle, wounding seven.

Minutes later, another cell fired an anti-tank missile at a private vehicle, killing six.

The IDF Spokesman reported that two to four terrorists were killed during the clashes.

According to reports, the terrorists in the car opened fire at the Egged bus, which carried a significant number of soldiers leaving their bases for the weekend.

In the aftermath of the first attack, Israeli security forces launched a search for the vehicle thought to have transported the gunmen, setting up barricades in the area. A firefight erupted once the IDF troops caught up with the vehicle, in which several of the armed men were killed.

Two IDF helicopters were called to the scene in order to evacuate those wounded to Yoseftal hospital in Eilat and to Soroka hospital in Be'er Sheva.

What do you think are the best novels in English?

2011-08-14T17:52:00.001-04:00

I'm supposed to be finishing writing an article on women and the Hekhalot literature, but instead I just read an entertaining article (and comment thread) on Slate about overrated fiction. Much of the comment thread was actually about books that people really liked. I then took a look at the Modern Library list of 100 Best Novels and thought I'd say something about them. (This is the list put together by their literary board, not the Reader's list).

Well, first of all, how many of them have I actually read?

1. Ulysses - I might have tried to read a little of this when I was first year college student, to try to understand some of Joyce's linguistic experimentation, but I didn't get very far through it.

2. The Great Gatsby - I probably read this in high school, but I don't remember it at all.

3. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - I read this in Expository Writing during my first semester at college, and loved it. I didn't love having to write a lit crit paper about it, however. I also loved Dubliners.

5. Brave New World - I read it in high school, liked it then because I liked reading dystopias.

7. Catch-22: Also read it in high school, but wonder if I would still like it.

9. Sons and Lovers, by D.H. Lawrence: I went through a D.H. Lawrence phase when I was in my late teens, but then decided I really didn't like how he depicted women.

13. 1984 - also read this in high school, and most of Orwell's other fiction, as well as all of his non-fiction, which I still sometimes reread. He's one of my favorite political writers, although he had some unpleasant lapses. I haven't been able to find anything he wrote about the Holocaust (which of course wasn't called that at the time, but he writes very little about the persecution of the Jews in any of his WWII writings).

17. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers. I read this and all of her other books when I was a late teenager also - such a beautiful writer.

18. Slaughterhouse-Five - read this along with lots of Vonnegut's other books in my teens and early 20s. I think I preferred Mother Night.

19. Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison - I think I tried to read this in high school. It was one of those books that I thought I *should* read.

23. USA trilogy by John Dos Passos - I read this on my own in high school and really liked it for its depiction of how American life felt (at the time he wrote it).

29. Studs Lonigan trilogy by Farrell - also read it on my own in high school and also liked it.

39. Go Tell it on the Mountain, by James Baldwin. His writing is heartbreakingly lovely.

52. Portnoy's Complaint. I tried to read it in high school, but just found it disgusting. I'd probably get more out of it now.

64. Catcher in the Rye - also read it when I was a teenager. A lot of the Slate writers and commenters hated it, but I don't remember feeling very strongly about it.

65. A Clockwork Orange - I enjoyed trying to figure out the Russian in the jargon Burgess invented, but there were too many revolting events in the book really to enjoy it.

71. A High Wind in Jamaica - I loved this book.

78. Kim, by Rudyard Kipling. I read this book because I read Laurie King's Sherlock Holmes Pastiche of it, The Game. Kim is really great - better than Laurie King, I have to say. When I was in high school I read a lot of Kipling's shorter fiction and poems.

The Reader's List starts off with some very dubious novels - Ayn Rand's and L. Ron Hubbard's book at the top of the list?! The Scientologists must have spammed the voting. It also includes some books I really like, but I don't know if I'd include them in a list of "best novels" - Lord of the Rings, To Kill a Mockingbird (loved it as a child, although it makes me wince a bit now). There's a lot of science fiction on the list - two by Heinlein, Dune by Frank Herbert. Oops, I didn't go down far enough on the list, because there's more than 2 Heinleins, including The Door into Summer, which I always loved because of the cat character - who was always looking for the door into summer. The Reader's List also includes The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie). I bought it when it was first published - I was living in Israel at the time and it wasn't very easy to get hold of. I found a copy by going to the Jerusalem International Book Fair, where you could order it from an anonymous bookseller (no kidding - Rushdie's life and those of his translators and publishers had been threatened by Iran). My copy came in the mail a couple of weeks later and I tried valiantly to read it, but didn't get more than 100 pages in.

Summer rain in Israel

2011-08-14T11:41:00.001-04:00

When I was in Israel in June and July, I longed for rain, since it doesn't usually rain at all from late April until sometime in October or November. So this is a nice story: Rain falls in central Israel in surprise summer shower.

"Tycoons" in Israel

2011-08-12T08:19:00.000-04:00

This is the best explanation I've read about the economic reasons for the tent protests in Israel - Protesters Force Israel to Grapple With Wealth Gap.

Conference on "Origins of Islam."

2011-08-08T23:30:00.000-04:00

On the personal level, I'm not feeling so apocalyptic - I just spent the last two days at a wonderful conference at Dartmouth on "The Origins of Islam: Narratives of History and the Historiography of Narratives." It was organized by Susannah Heschel (at Dartmouth) and David Powers (Cornell).

From the description of the conference:

This conference will bring together historians of the field of Islamic Studies with scholars working today on new paradigms for understanding the emergence of Islam. Until perhaps the last quarter of the 20th century, the approach to the formation of Islam emphasized borrowing and dependence. This scholarship was Arabo-centered, treating the key religious doctrines and institutions of Islam as products of the experience of one man living in the Arabia between 610 and 632 CE, and it was unidirectional. During the past twenty-five years, Islamicists have returned to the question of origins, armed with new perspectives, languages, and methodological tools. In place of borrowing and dependence, they focus on the dynamic interaction between early Islam and its cultural environment. Without denying the importance of Arabia, they examine the formation of Islam in the context of the wider Near East in late antiquity, using not only Arabic sources but also sources written in Greek, Syriac, Aramaic, Hebrew, and other languages. In place of borrowing and dependence, the current generation of scholars highlights the complex, back-and-forth processes of transmission, reception, and adaptation that account for the incorporation of biblical and post-biblical materials into Islamic sources. Our conference will investigate continuities and changes in 19th/20th century and contemporary orientalisms, asking about the intellectual politics that both enable and derive from the highly significant shifts in political, economic, and geographic relations, including the partition of India and Palestine, the rise of oil interests in the Middle East, and the transfer of Oriental Studies from Germany to the United States, Britain, and Israel during the 1930s and 40s. By placing the contemporary in the context of the history of Islamic Studies, we would like to provide present-day scholars with critical tools to understand the origins of their own explanatory frameworks.

Some of the talks that I found the most interesting were: Gabriel Said Reynolds, "The Problem with Reading the Qur’an Chronologically"; Lawrence Conrad, University of Hamburg, "'Wonderboy': the Childhood Formation of the Orientalist Ignaz Goldziher"; and Michael Pregill, Elon University, "Remaking the Legacy of Israel: Tafsir and Midrash as Imperial Literatures."

I've recently gotten interested in the question of the origins of Islam and I've been doing some reading about it. I was particularly fascinated by Reynolds' talk in this respect, as he is challenging the traditional Muslim and modern Orientalist chronology of the Qur'an, which tries to figure out which suras are early and late by relating them to incidents in the life of Muhammad. Conrad told the fascinating story of the early life of Ignaz Goldziher, who was a child prodigy who wrote his first book at age 12, and got into a lot of trouble for it. Pregill challenged the paradigm that goes back to Abraham Geiger's book, "Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen?"which sought to trace the influences of Judaism (or Christianity) upon nascent Islam. He proposes instead a model that sees the Qur'anic texts as responding more directly to the biblical stories (rather than being constructed of later midrashic texts), and as coming out of a common Middle Eastern cultural koine.

I took pretty detailed notes on all of the talks, and will post more detailed comments on them later.

That apocalyptic feeling

2011-08-08T23:18:00.000-04:00

It feels like a very strange time we're living in right now. The whole debt limit fiasco that happened last week, ended by what feels like it's mostly Obama's capitulation to the Tea Party Republicans (despite the pep talk that Jon Chait and people like him were giving us last week that the deal was also going to put the Republicans in a bind). I had thought that after that was ended, we could stop worrying about the economy for a little while - but no, the stock market is now taking us all for a wild ride, before and after the debt of the US has been downgraded (so what was that whole debt limit thing about anyway?). Are we headed for Great Recession 2.0, or do we get a Great Depression 2.0 because the Republicans are determined to push our economy further down?

I feel a real sense of hope about Israel, at least for a little while, because of the tent city protests there. At least there's activism, and movement - it's giving my friends in Israel hope. What would it take to create a movement like that in the US? Sometimes in Israel it feels like events can move on a dime - they happen all of a sudden, and there's a new situation. But Israel has a population of only 7 million - and we're so large. What would it take for us to make such a major shift?

And then - riots in London. What is going on there? I'm no expert on England, but it feels like it's coming utterly out of left field.

Massive Israeli protests tonight for social justice

2011-08-06T23:12:00.000-04:00

Very exciting - wish I had been there! 250,000-300,000 were at the demonstration in Tel Aviv, and about 30,000 in Jerusalem.

Haaretz report on the Jerusalem demonstration (my translation)

In parallel with the demonstration in Tel Aviv, tonight there were also demonstrations throughout Israel. In Jerusalem the massive demonstration began with a march from the tent city at Horse Park, through the center of the city, and then to the central rally at Paris Square. The demonstrations held up signs that read "Return to the welfare state," "Both right and left: education above everything" (it rhymes in Hebrew), "Pensioner and retired, grandfather who still is the breadwinner - until when?"

In the demonstration the leaders of the protest in Jerusalem spoke, among them the head of the student union in Jerusalem (Hebrew University) Itai Gotler, Rabbi Rafi Feuerstein from the rabbinic organization Tzohar, representatives of the teachers, people evicted from public housing, and Rachael Azariah, a member of the city council, and at the end also the writer Sayed Kashua (a writer for Haaretz).

Photo of the Jerusalem demonstration. The signs read: "Find an eye doctor for a blind government!" "The people want social justice!" "Give me justice!"

Another photo of Jerusalem, from above:

From the Ynet coverage (my translation):

Demonstration of democratic unity: In Netanyahu's government they hoped that the social protest would die out, but last night it rose to a climax reverberating through the land, when at least 300,000 people from all parts of the political spectrum went out to the streets, from Kiryat Shemona to Eilat, with one thundering voice, lucid and clear: "The people have decided - social justice."

Ynet on the Jerusalem protest:

In the center of the rally (in Jerusalem) - a public reading of the (Israeli) Declaration of Independence, under the slogan - "Returning the state to the people." Thousands of people, among them the writer Meir Shalev, marched from Horse Park to Paris Square, close to the Prime Minister's house, carrying signs and calling for justice and equality. "Do business with your neighbor as yourself!" (A play on "Love your neighbor as yourself"). "No right and no left, social responsibility is above everything."

Meir Shalev said to Ynet - "My thinking is positive, optimistic, and passionate. I think that the involvement of the public in Israel with social issues and not with Rachel's Tomb or the Iranian bomb is something positive." In his words, "Enlisting the Israeli community and public in social issues is a positive turn. The Prime Minister must understand that he can't play tricks with us or threaten us. He has to relate to an entire generation of the public. He cannot relate to them in the usual way. It's impossible to sell us anymore the old world of Netanyahu. We need a country that considers its citizens and cares for them," he emphasized.

It's all very inspiring - and may it lead to a real change in the government and policies of Israel!

Jerusalem parents stroll for change

2011-08-01T01:01:00.002-04:00

This sounds like a fabulous demonstration!

Jerusalem parents stroll for change

Thousands of children and their young fathers and mothers marched through the capital’s streets on Sunday evening, in a call to reduce living costs and enable them a decent future in the city and the country.

Departing from the Prime Minister’s Residence, where there was a large rally on the same theme the previous night, the families strolled down to King George Avenue’s Gan Hasus (Horse Park), where Jerusalem’s central protest tent city is located. Others have sprung up around the city.

According to police, a thousand adults took part in Sunday’s march....

The children and parents were then treated to storytelling by two of the country’s foremost authors. Meir Shalev read his story about The Tractor and the Sandbox, making minor alterations to change the protagonist tractor into the overworked Israeli middle class. David Grossman then captivated the audience with his story about a boy called Itamar who was afraid of rabbits.

To wrap things up, singer-songwriter-guitarist David Broza provided the thrilled parents and children with a passionate serving of some of the children classics he wrote and performed from his stellar The Sixteenth Sheep album, as well as more of his songs, including a reworked hit he and Yehonatan Geffen wrote 34 years ago, “Yihiye Tov” (Things Will Get Better), with the words updated to suit the spirit of the times and the protest.

‘The State Is Responsible for the Well-Being of Its Citizens’

2011-07-31T22:09:00.000-04:00

Gershom Gorenberg reports on the demands of the leaders of the tent protests, which they made at a press conference today: ‘The State Is Responsible for the Well-Being of Its Citizens’. This is after the 150,000 Israelis they brought to the streets last night.

The demands, as laid out by Stav Saphir:

Last night at the rally we declared our demands, what we define as social justice. These demands are actually dreams more than demands – but all these are dreams that can be made real and turn this country into a country of social [responsibility], in which it will be good for all of us to live.
Housing: A home is not just real estate. The state must intervene, immediately, in the housing market to defend the citizens. We demand decent housing for all via construction of state-owned housing… The state must regulate rent and rental conditions.

Education: A school isn’t a business. We demand a free, egalitarian school system throughout the country – for the religious and the secular, for Jews and Arabs, for everyone. We demand free public education from age zero and assistance for those who need it to pursue higher education.

Health care: We identify with the struggle of the doctors, deeply identify with their struggle, and join in all of their justified demands. We’d demand even more. They deserve more. We deserve more. It’s our health.

Social welfare: The state must be responsible for the well-being of the citizens. This is not the job of non-profits and voluntary organizations. In particular, the state must provide for social workers, police, firefighters, teachers and all others who dedicate their lives to protecting, caring for and defending the entire public.

Fair wages: Contract labor, temporary employment and personal contracts are only some of the evils that have become endemic and deprive many citizens of their most basic rights. The state must make sure that pay is commensurate with the cost of living, and must increase enforcement of labor law.
Those are our demands. We expect them to be accepted as quickly as possible. This is the country that we want to live in.

That's the country that I want to live in too! The idea that "the state must be responsible for the well-being of the citizens" is one of the principles that the state of Israel was built on by its Labor founders, and which has been lost over the last 25 years. Would that the leaders of the United States would also take heed of this principle, rather than squabbling among themselves about how much more to cut from Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, aid to education, and all the other social responsibilities of government, in order to guarantee still lower tax rates to rich people and corporations. The United States needs an Arab Spring also!

Photos from the Israeli protests

2011-07-31T21:57:00.000-04:00

I'm looking through a series of photos that Haaretz photographers have taken of the protests, and the first ones are from July 14 - when I was still in Israel (I left on the 17th). I had thought the protests started immediately after I left (oddly enough, the second Lebanon War in 2006 started two days after I left the country....). The first photos are of tents being erected on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv on July 14.

Some striking ones (to me): one from 7/17/11 in Beersheva, showing an ultra-Orthodox father and his children setting up a protest tent; one from 7/19/11 in Kiryat Shmona (a poor development town in the north), showing a small encampment of tents; another from the same date, showing tents in Tamra, an Arab town in the Galilee; 7/20/11 - protests tents in Jerusalem, just outside the walls of the Old City; a demonstration in Jerusalem on 7/25/11 that blocks Kikar Paris, with people being dragged away by they police. I remember Kikar Paris well from the first intifada, when Women in Black and Dai la-Kibush held frequent demonstrations there. Also from 7/25/11, a march in Beersheva, with a woman holding a sign that reads "the monster of the mortgages."

On Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, posters are put up with the names of the few wealthy individuals and families who now own the most of Israel: David Weissman/Shraga Biran - owners of Dor Alon, Alon Energy, Rosebud Real Estate. David Azrieli - owner of Garnit ha-Carmel Investments, the Azrieli Malls, Globus movie theaters, Sonol gas stations, Bank Leumi. Isaac Teshuvah (gasoline companies) - owner of the Phoenix (investments), Delek Real Estate, Delek Cars - importer of Mazda and Ford, Delek Energy - Gas and Oil, Delek Israel - gas stations. Ofer Family - Israel Company, owning Bank Mizrahi Tefahot, Israeli Chemicals, Ofer Ships, Zim.

From 7/26/11 - a photo of a protest march in Haifa, with signs in Hebrew and Arabic, and people carrying Israeli flags and tents. From the same night - the protest march blocking the street, with one sign held high - "We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, and today to the State of Israel." Also from the 26th, a photo of tents in Independence Park in Jerusalem, with a giant picture of Bib's face strung up above them. From 7/27/11 - a photo of a sign hung up on the Prime Minister's house in Jerusalem: "House for Sale. 5 Million shekels. For details - Bibi." The last few photos are of the "stroller protest" in Tel Aviv on 7/28/11 (I'm not sure what that is - I haven't yet read the articles about it).

Israel protest news

2011-07-31T21:27:00.001-04:00

Now, would this ever happen in America? No. Of course, I've never seen this happen in Israel either, although there certainly have been general strikes before.

Most Israeli municipalities declare general strike in solidarity with housing protests

Most municipal authorities have declared a one-day strike scheduled for Monday, in sympathy with popular protests spreading throughout Israel.
Municipalities will not be giving services to government offices or holding public office hours today, streets will not be cleaned and garbage will not be collected.

Israeli settlers largely back the housing protests but are wary of left-wing slant.

After two weeks of front-page headlines about demonstrations over the high cost of housing, Yehuda Shimon - a lawyer from the West Bank Jewish settlement outpost of Havat Gilad - decided on Thursday that the time had come for him to visit Tel Aviv himself for a firsthand look at the tent city on Rothschild Boulevard. As an expert in the never-ending struggle over the unauthorized Havat Gilad outpost, Shimon thought he might be able to learn a thing or two from the Tel Aviv demonstrators.
After surveying the scene, Shimon returned to Havat Gilad disappointed. Calling the protest tent encampment "one big, despicable summer camp," Shimon proclaimed that the tent city was not a genuine protest; his impression was that most of the protesters seemed to have come out of mere summer boredom. "Once the boredom passes, this whole battle will die out," Shimon predicted.

Yet even as Shimon spoke, his wife Ilana challenged his remarks.
"The protest is justified," she said. "You can't raise children in this country."
The difference of opinion between Yehuda Shimon and his wife appears to be a reflection of wider sentiments among residents of the West Bank settlements. On one hand, they agree that the burden on the public must be eased. On the other, they see the current housing protests as an effort by left-wing activists to piggyback on justified grievances in order to promote the broader diplomatic agenda of the left.

The power of Facebook in Israeli protests.

....the role of Facebook is not limited to news updates. The protesters on Rothschild Boulevard hold meetings where everyone can have a say. On Facebook, one status update can provoke a flood of responses and turn into a heated public debate.
Facebook is what radio was in the early days of the state, what television was when the Iron Curtain crumbled, what the newspapers were during the Spring of Nations. The protests over the price of gas, cottage cheese and, of course, housing, would not have accelerated as they did without Facebook.
It's even possible that without this platform, where people can call for a boycott and get infinitely more exposure for their views than they would by standing in the town square, these protests would have never taken place.

Why are Israelis protesting for social justice?

2011-07-31T11:06:00.001-04:00

When I was in Israel earlier this summer, the big local protest was about the cost of cottage cheese, which had been raised greatly in the last 2-3 years. The protest was started on Facebook by a haredi man and eventually gained 100,000 signatures. The three big dairy companies in Israel finally conceded and lowered the price. But this was only symbolic of the increasing discontent with rising prices of food, real estate, and everything else. I've commented for several years to my friends in Israel that the only housing being built in Jerusalem seems to be extravagantly expensive developments that only rich people from outside of the country can afford to live in. This has created the phenomenon in the city of "ghost" neighborhoods - blocks of luxury apartments that are largely uninhabited for most of the year, when their wealthy foreign owners visit the city.

I was talking to some new friends this summer - a young couple with two children, one working as a teacher's assistant in a school for severely handicapped children, the other working in construction (yes, there are Jewish Israelis working as construction workers) - but he recently quit that job and started one that probably pays quite a deal less, working as a clerk at a grocery story. My guess about their income is that they make around 7,000 shekels a month (=about $2000). They're living in a rented apartment, where I would guess the rent is around 2500-3000 shekels per month. The night I got together with them, they were discussing an apartment for sale that a friend had told them about - for 900,000 shekels (=about $264,000). Could they afford an apartment at that price?As a young couple, they could get some funding from the government, but that wouldn't cover very much, and they'd end up with an enormous mortgage, if a bank would lend to them.

It's the situation of people like them that is driving these protests.

Another significant development over the past years is the privatization of big parts of the Israeli economy that used to belong to the government. These companies now belong to enormously rich people (the "oligarchs" - like the Russian oligarchs who ended up dominating that economy after the fall of communism). After talking to some friends this summer, I finally grasped that this is one big reason why the gap between rich and poor has grown so immense in Israel. Israel is also a high-tech incubator, but that has also added to the increasing gap. Of all the countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (which Israel just joined last year), Israel has the biggest gap.

..... the country is still at the bottom of the rankings. Every fifth Israeli is twice as poor as the average person in OECD member states. Most of the poor come from Arab and ultra-orthodox communities, where poverty rises to 50 percent and 60 percent, respectively. More than half of Israelis are paid less than NIS 4,000 a month, while only a very few make many times as much.

You don't hear much of this in the foreign press, or even the Jewish press in America - the economic stories I have read recently about Israel are all about the high-tech sector, leaving behind the more than half of Israelis who don't make more than $1200 per month.

"The people want social justice" - protests in Israel

2011-07-31T11:03:00.000-04:00

Has the Arab Spring come to Israel? If you expect to learn about this by reading the New York Times or listening to NPR, you're out of luck - they haven't discovered the story yet. But fortunately we have some independent journalists from Israel reporting on something different from the usual hopeless Israel-Palestinian conflict stories.

My friend Gershom Gorenberg reports from Jerusalem:

The dead have come to life.

I saw them marching tonight through Jerusalem, jumping, swaying, pounding pots and water-cooler bottles as drums, the Israelis in their twenties who’d been written off in a thousand political obituaries as dead of terminal apathy, sweating in the absurd heat close to midnight, roaring so deep you could hear their throats tearing in anger and in joy at being angry together and being alive again.

‘People before Profits’ (Gershom Gorenberg)
They came flooding down from Zion Square through Independence Park and up Agron Street to the square outside of one of Netanyahu’s three homes, and they sang an old kindergarten song about “my hat has three corners” rewritten as “my Bibi owns three houses,” and they overflowed up onto the walls and fences past the sidewalks and they danced with mad happiness at seeing each other.

They chanted “The people want social justice!” and “What’s the answer to privatization? Re-Vo-Lu-Tion!” and waved flags, both blue-and-white and red. They cheered for the Arab medical student telling the government it has to pay for health care, and for the teacher decrying the pure insult of treating teachers as temp workers, and for the rabbi quoting Isaiah....

For those reading from abroad, I also note that so far, foreign editors have completely missed what’s happening here, because the stories they expect from Israel are about war and terror and peace talks, so they haven’t gotten their minds around two weeks of protests that just keep getting bigger, Israelis inspired by Egypt, demanding what was once the basic minimum here before the poison of privatization arrived: free education, free health care, affordable apartments.

Read the whole thing.

For more coverage, from +972: Marches for Social Justice in Israel .

Huge protests in cities across Israel signal they are a growing political force

The housing and social protests tonight reached a huge crescendo, with throngs flooding streets in over 10 cities across the country Israel. Haaretz is reporting roughly 150,000 people around the country in Hebrew (most conservative estimate in the morning papers belongs to the pro-Netanyahu free paper, Israel Hayom: 100,000 protesters).

Compared to the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 who demonstrated last week, the number of protesters around the country may have more than quadrupled.

In Tel Aviv, the roar of frenzied euphoria mixed with anger preceded the crowd as the parade rounded a major intersection on its way to the Tel Aviv museum. Screams of “revolution” were echoed all over the country. Estimates speak of 10,000 in Jerusalem, similar numbers in Haifa and Beer Sheva, along with demonstrations in Kiryat Shmona, Nazareth, Ashdod several other locations.

Like last week, the Tel Aviv demonstration ended with a large and loud sit-in at a major traffic intersection (Dizengoff and Kaplan streets); police formed human chains to block streets, mounted police appeared, and eventually called to break up the protesters. Eight were arrested and released in the following morning.

At first glance, it appeared that the crowd’s demands were not significantly different from last week. The main rallying cry was still: “The people! Want! Social justice!” with a generous dose of “Bibi go home,” as well as anti-capitalism, pro-welfare state slogans, all laced with dripping sarcasm along the lines of: “The market is free, but we’re slaves.”

Over the last two weeks, the protests have been criticized as unfocused and lacking concrete demands. Tonight there were new signs of a plan taking shape. In the final speeches, after a lineup that included celebrity musicians, the organizers wrapped up with several quite specific demands. In what sounded very much like an ultimatum, they said that Netanyahu has until Wednesday, the day the Knesset goes on recess, to do two things: Withdraw the pending law for national housing committees – which they consider deeply damaging - and prevent the privatization of the Israel Lands Administration, which holds the vast majority of land in Israel.

On Sunday, Netanyahu has announced that a team of ministers would meet the representatives of the protest movement. The director of Israel’s finance ministry has resigned in the morning following the protest, citing the protest among his reasons.

Justifying murder

2011-07-30T09:55:00.002-04:00

I just spent some time this morning reading through the comments on a posting on Harry's Place about Pamela Geller deleting the violent part of an email she published in 2007 from someone in Norway. Joseph W picked up the item from Charles Johnson's LGF: Pamela Geller Edits Post to Conceal Violent Rhetoric in 'Email from Norway. Charles comments that this email was "from a reader who sounds a lot like the Oslo terrorist, Anders Behring Breivik."

Some of the comments on HP were fine, but others descended into the abyss of trying to justify what Breivik did. "Hutch" quoted israelmatzav as saying, "Norway's ambassador to Israel justifies 'Palestinian' terrorism and we're supposed to cry for the Norwegian Laborites?" "Ben" writes, "Israel is once again displaying a lack of self-respect. The exaggerated display of solidarity with the Labour Party youth victims (lowering the embassy flag to half mast, Peres making overly fulsome speech of grief) is unseemly, because it is quite clear that most of the Norwegian Labour Party establishment and its youth cadres acquiesces in or is indifferent to Jew-killing in Israel." "censoredbyyou" writes "I in no way condone his acts, but as the smirking 'Left' internationally observed after 9/11 - they had it coming."

J.J. Golberg of the Forward wrote about a similar phenomenon in the talkbacks to articles on Breivik on the websites of the Israeli newspapers - Ynet and Maariv.

Damian Thompson, right-wing writer for the Telegraph (UK) and editor of their blogs, has some trenchant words on Anders Breivik and the echo-chamber of the trolls:

Was Anders Breivik an internet troll? I’m sorry if that seems a flippant question to ask about a man who killed dozens of Norwegian teenagers, but you can’t read his 1,500-page “manifesto” without being struck by how thoroughly he trawled the web. Whatever the explanation for his murderous actions, this was definitely a brain warped by the blogosphere....

Then there are the pyjama-clad pseudonymous obsessives whose fingers are calloused from rattling out the truth about the “EUSSR”, BBC bias, Big Pharma, Zionists, Islam etc.

These trolls aren’t confined to the far Left or the far Right: some of the most noxious internet bores turn out to be Liberal Democrats. It’s true that, on the whole, their views tend to be controversial, but the essence of their trolling is their rhetorical style: in particular, an insistence that they know the truth about everything. All they really have in common – apart from an aversion to deodorant – is hysterical omniscience.

Speaking as someone who hates the way the mainstream media suck up to radical Muslims, I find it frustrating that websites devoted to monitoring Islamism are dominated by trolls and writers who play up to them. I don’t trust a word that the BBC tells me about “the religion of peace” – but equally, I can’t trust either the articles or the comments on the Gates of Vienna or Jihad Watch websites. (This I learnt the hard way, by quoting on my own blog an anecdote about Muslims besieging a hospital that turned out to be an urban myth.)

Someone who did trust them, however, was Anders Breivik, whose manifesto draws far more heavily on anti-Islamic and anti-EU blogs than it does on neo-Nazi sources. This is massively embarrassing for the Right-wing bloggers he cites, three of whom are old friends of mine, but it demonstrates cunning on Breivik’s part.

He knew where to look to find statistics to support his vicious theories. He knew that the far Right can succeed only by exploiting public anger at political correctness and immigration, avoiding the idiocy of neo-Nazism, about which the manifesto is scathing. Above all, he revelled in the special hysteria of the internet, which allows its users to bolt together whatever ideas turn them on, while ruthlessly excluding inconvenient data. (This new hysteria taints even the most trivial internet discourse – you should have seen the way supporters and opponents of vibrato-free Mahler were squawking at each other after Roger Norrington’s Prom on Monday.)

I don’t know why Breivik made the leap from propaganda to mass murder. I don’t think he was mad, in the sense of suffering from psychotic delusions, but there’s no doubt that years spent in the echo chambers of cyberspace can cause psychological damage.

In the months leading up to last Friday’s atrocity, did he join in the internet discussions he read so avidly? Given his verbosity, it’s more than likely. The manifesto is written in the self-righteous, autodidactic style of a troll; it will be interesting to see whether, following Breivik’s arrest, one of the anonymous contributors to Right-wing websites suddenly disappears off the map.

Anders Breivik: Insane or Guilty?

2011-07-28T13:00:00.001-04:00

Norm has a good post today on whether Anders Breivik (the Norwegian terrorist who killed 76 people a week ago) is insane. "It's puzzling this tendency to assume that someone who does something very bad - of a degree that we're even inclined to say of it that it's evil - must be crazy."

Plenty of people who were not mad shot and killed thousands of civilians on the eastern front during WWII. The Einsatzgruppen committed their murders of Jews, Communists, and others largely by shooting people. Altogether, they killed about 1.5 million people, including most of the Jewish populations of the Baltic countries - numbering among them my grandfather's uncle Mordechai Falkon and his wife Dvora Falkon, who were murdered in July and December of 1941, respectively. The Soviets who tried and executed some of the Einsatzgruppen members after the war did not consider them not guilty by reason of insanity - they held them responsible for their gruesome acts of destruction.

Does anyone consider the hijackers of September 11, 2001 to be insane? In all of the millions of words I've read on the subject since then, I've never heard anyone suggest that Osama bin Laden and his minions were crazy.

Why shouldn't we hold Breivik to the same standard? I've read some of his 1500 page manifesto, where he lays out the ideology behind his acts. His thinking is racist, distasteful, and obsessive but his methodical description of the process involved in creating the fertilizer bomb did not strike me as at all insane.

Calling Breivik or others who commit terrorist acts (violent attacks against civilians for political purposes, in order to sow terror) insane is in most cases a way to diminish their responsibility for their actions. I can understand why Breivik's lawyer is calling him insane. I don't understand why other people are, unless they wish somehow to diminish the gravity of his acts and his responsibility for them.

The Spatial Humanities

2011-07-26T13:51:00.000-04:00

Today's New York Times has a fascinating article on the "spatial humanities" - the use of Geographic Information Systems for mapping historical events: Geographic Information Systems Help Scholars See History.

I want to do something like this for my Jerusalem course. I wrote a proposal for an in-house grant, but unfortunately didn't get it, but I'm still interested in doing it.

Debt ceiling news

2011-07-25T21:17:00.000-04:00

Listening to President Obama now giving his speech on the debt ceiling. He's in professor mode. I like what he's saying, but would appreciate more passion. Perhaps a threat or two that there won't be Social Security payments if the debt ceiling isn't raised, and that the Republicans are to blame.

Now he's speaking against the Republican idea that the debt ceiling should be raised only for the next six months. "This is no way to run the greatest country on earth." Amen. Now he's speaking in support of Reid's proposal. "I'm confident we can reach this compromise" (between Democratic and Republican plans). I wish I felt as confident.

He's engaging in his sweet reasonableness, pro-compromise mode - but what do you do when the Republicans aren't interested in compromising?

"Americans voted for a divided government, but not for a dysfunctional government." Now he's asking for people to contact their representatives if they want a balanced approach.

Compromise as the American virtue. "Out of many, we are one."

"We remember the Americans who put country ahead of self."

"To form a more perfect union."

"The entire world is watching."

John Boehner is about to speak - not planning to listen to him too!

Back in Ithaca

2011-07-24T22:05:00.000-04:00

Back in Ithaca now. I left Israel on Sunday night, flew to Philadelphia, then to Boston, where I spent a few days with family, and drove back to Ithaca on Wednesday - in a car with no air conditioning! Somehow I didn't expect that it would be hotter on the east coast of the US than in Israel, but it has been. Fortunately, here in Ithaca there are a number of ponds, lakes, and waterfalls to jump into when it really gets too hot to bear, and I've been taking advantage of them.

Open Letter to Alice Walker

2011-07-17T11:29:00.000-04:00

My friend Bonna Devora Haberman, who lives in Jerusalem, has written a beautiful response to Alice Walker's presentation of her reasons for taking part in the US Boat to Gaza. I post it here with her permission.

Dear Alice Walker,

Though your riggings are tied, your heart has set sail. Your desire to deliver audacious hope to our region and your caring about children inspire many. As a person who lives in Jerusalem and dedicates many of my waking hours to Israeli-Palestinian collaboration, may I float some ideas that might advance commitments we share?

I co-direct an Israeli-Palestinian activist community theater project in Jerusalem together with my Palestinian partner, Kader Herini. YTheater—housed at the International Jerusalem YMCA. We work in those languages you cannot decipher—in Arabic and Hebrew, and in English. Our theater arises from shared exploration. We strive for an artistic language to express and respect our differences and to develop our joint potential for betterment. We train leaders in our process to inspire more collaboration. Our audiences, Muslims, Jews, and Christians, laugh and cry together; they participate in the enactment of joyous tolerance and creativity, where women and men, gay and straight, yearn and strive together.

I also parent Jewish children who risk at least three of their prime years to protect us. History proves that defend ourselves we must—today there are so many armed to harm us. My children have done National Service—caring for needy school children from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union, and served in elite units of the Israel Defense Forces. My sons persevered through grueling training, navigating hundreds of miles by maps they memorized, plodding on without sleep in the black of night with more than 100 pounds of equipment on their backs. When our son Bezalel completed his training as a medic in his combat unit, the commanding officer emphasized to his class their obligations. Their oath to treat the injured with justice—saving friend and enemy equally—brought tears to our eyes.

The IDF ethics of engagement often expose our children to extra danger in order to avoid harming non-combatants, searching door-to-door for terrorists rather than bombing from above. In Gaza, Israel electronically relayed tens of thousands of phone messages and dropped harmless “knock on the roof” sound bombs to advise civilians to evacuate their homes where Hamas stashed weapons and hid military operators. The US army learns from our methods in their war against terror in Iraq and Afghanistan. Though their opponents pose no imminent threat to your life or your family and friends, your soldiers inevitably wound and kill women, men, and children far from your home.

After Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Palestinians were free to choose their leaders. Hoping for less corruption and dysfunction, and better social services, many Palestinians voted for the only alternative to Fatah, Hamas. The Hamas covenant seeks not only the destruction of Israel. Citing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Hamas seeks to murder Jews.

Similar to the tough sanctions imposed on the South African apartheid regime, The Quartet—the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and Russia—imposed sanctions on Hamas-controlled Gaza. Egypt and Israel imposed a blockade. The goal is to pressure Hamas to meet three conditions:

recognize Israel,
accept agreements made by the previous Fatah-led Administration, and
denounce violence.

Refusing all of these, Hamas waged civil war, ousted Fatah, broke apart the Palestinian Legislative Council in June 2007, and rained rockets down on southern Israel. 3,278 rockets and mortar shells fired from Gaza into Israel in 2008 aborted normal life—kindergarten, school, and work, and caused trauma, death, and destruction daily. My daughter's medical school held class underground. While she was doing her rotations, the pediatric intensive care unit was treating children from Gaza. In all Israeli hospitals, Arabs and Jews routinely receive the same medical care together. Meanwhile, the university dorm of one of our sons in Beer Sheva took a direct hit—students were, thankfully, in class.

Israel launched operation Cast Lead in January 2009. Shortly after my son, Bezalel was mobilized during Sabbath, I wrote the following journal entry,

We spent an hour before he left reading poetry together, Coleridge and Blake, Wordsworth—romantics who defied social institutions with their embodied eros, and Mary Wollstonecraft's introduction to Vindication of the Rights of Women. He napped until it was time to go. We packed food—vegetarian rations for a gentle soldier. I shiver with our embrace at the threshold of our home, at the threshold of Shabbat and desecration, at the seam of peace and war.

We have not yet heard from him. It is impossible to imagine this, the most difficult thing that I have ever faced.

There are no words to describe the anguish and vulnerability, the fusion of Zionist conviction with empathy. The sheer fear for the life that we birth, nurture, raise, and cherish is beyond any comprehension. There is no safety for innocence.

Not for Israelis.

Not for Palestinians.

My son Bezalel is an artist. He spins wood and metal into sacred vessels, paints on canvas, welds, builds tools and furniture.

May he and all dear ones speedily return to their true passions, bodies and souls intact. Our life force could be so much better spent.

I write of love in the midst of blood.

May we enable peace.

Thank God, Bezalel completed his compulsory army service. He has undertaken a course of study that will prepare him to design new limbs and organs that communicate with the nerves and mind.

The Goldstone Report on the 2009 Gaza operation documents blood-curdling accounts of how Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank persecute their political rivals. At the same time as retracting the central and unsubstantiated claim of his Report that condemned Israel for intentionally targeting civilians during the operation, Judge Richard Goldstone maintains that, “the crimes allegedly committed by Hamas were intentional goes without saying — its rockets were purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets.”(1) The Goldstone Report comments about Hamas strategy,

In July 2009, Hamas declared that it was entering a period of “cultural resistance”, stating that it was suspending its use of rockets and shifting its focus to winning support at home and abroad through cultural initiatives and public relations. (2)

In spite of this statement, the rocket bombardment of Sederot, the town where Bezalel goes to college, and the south of Israel has not ended; he is on the medic volunteer roster. On April 7, 2011, Hamas fired a laser-guided Kornet anti-tank missile at an Israeli school bus near Kibbutz Nahal Oz.

Willingly or not, Alice, you are participating in the Hamas cultural initiative and public relations campaign, a fusion of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

I share your desire to improve conditions for people in Gaza—they and we all suffer from Hamas policies. In June, 2010, Israel loosened restrictions to relieve the hardship by allowing all strictly civilian goods to enter; in May 2011, Egypt opened the Rafah crossing to women and to men under 18 and above 40 without a visa.

This brief sojourn in Greece is not a set-back, but preparation to make hope and love a daily routine, a way of life. As you re-group, please make plans to deliver love letters that arouse desire for a civil society in Gaza that denounces violence, recognizes Israel, and makes peace. Please long to deliver a love letter to Gilad Shalit who Hamas has held captive for more than 5 years, and please plan to unearth the love in Gaza to release this child to his parents, Noam and Aviva who ache for him. Please plan to deliver love letters to Palestinians in Gaza to support their choice of new leaders who will invest in cultivating and contributing to humanity.

With humility and hope, I offer these tenets of Israeli society as an agenda to share with the people of Gaza. Most Israelis accept Palestinian statehood—flourishing side-by-side with us in peace, with dignity and security. Israelis will surely open all ports to support the people of Gaza pursuing this building work:

sustainable economic development
universal education for civic responsibility and respect for all peoples
women's liberation from systemic oppression and full participation in public life and leadership
a comprehensive, high quality universal health care system
academic institutions that promote open, critical thinking and innovation
technology, scientific and medical research and development
vibrant and uncensored media, culture, and arts

I close with a few lines of hope that I wrote after our soldiers came home from Gaza—a love letter to Palestinians in Gaza and everywhere, to Israelis, and to all who care.

Let us conceive
a new covenant with life
incise in our broken hearts
to open to one another
to give and to receive
to fix
to build and
to love

With blessings,
Bonna Devora Haberman

Jerusalem, Israel
______________________________________________________

(1) “Reconsidering the Goldstone Report on Israel and war crimes,” Washington Post, April 2, 2011, retrieved May 3, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/reconsidering-the-goldstone-report-on-israel-and-war-crimes/2011/04/01/AFg111JC_story.html.

(2) “Goldstone Report,” of the “United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict,” headed by Richard Goldstone, p. 523, 1680.

Terrorist attack in Mumbai today

2011-07-13T12:17:00.000-04:00

Report from the New York Times:

Three bomb blasts shook the city of Mumbai at the height of the evening rush hour on Wednesday, in what appeared to be coordinated attacks on India’s economic capital. The Interior Ministry described the explosions as a terror attack, India’s NDTV reported.

Indian news outlets reported that at least 10 people were killed, and that dozens may have been injured. The explosions struck central locations in the city, including the crowded Dadar neighborhood; the Zaveri Bazaar, a jewelry market; and near the Opera House, according to news reports citing the Interior Ministry.

For the latest reports, go to Twitter - http://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23Mumbai. May this not be the beginning of more terrorism in India!

More interesting opinions about the Israeli anti-boycott law

2011-07-13T12:11:00.000-04:00

False Dichotomies has an interesting post about the anti-boycott law:

An unholy alliance of the Zionist far-right and the anti-Zionist far-left is trying to bring Israel down. Like previous unholy alliances, the two partners despise one another, but realize that they are locked in a symbiotic relationship: without one another they will die. The far-right needs the hysteria of the far-left as a pretext for the legislation that fulfills the far-left’s fantasies.

The whole thing is worth reading.

Michael Weiss of the Telegraph (UK) also has an interesting column:

One of the more elegant ways pro-Israel activists used to be able to confront the absurdities of anti-Israeli activists was by referring to the tolerance and patience that Israel has for its many critics and enemies. An Islamist cleric whose answer to the Jewish Question is straight out of Torquemada? We’ll let him become mayor of an Arab village. A sinister campaign for the economic and cultural boycott of Israel? We’ll let the head campaigner work toward his doctorate at Tel Aviv University, where his oral defence will no doubt be an attack on his own academic viability. Even an Israeli Arab parliamentarian is allowed to sail on a blockade-busting “freedom flotilla” to denounce the very government to which she belongs.

Israeli democracy, in other words, has long been patient with its gadflies, cranks and nudniks who sometimes confuse that democracy with a banana republic. (Ben-Gurion was hinting at national self-definition when he joked about two Jews with three opinions.) Now, however, those doing the confusing are purportedly acting in Israel’s defence, which is deeply problematic for its democracy.

On Monday, the Knesset voted in favour of a bill that would allow citizens to sue anyone recommending a boycott of not only Israel but of West Bank settlements. This is a distinction with a difference. Salam Fayyad, the prime minister of Palestine, has long favoured a boycott of settlement goods, but not Israeli ones, as a way of forcing Israel to distinguish its GDP from its occupation economy. Diplomatically ill-considered though such a policy may be, and however skirted by the Palestinians themselves in practice, Fayyad’s policy was by no means “anti-Semitic” or belligerent in its logic.

On a related topic, Shiraz Socialist has published a very interesting critique of the BDS campaign written by Cathy N of Workers Liberty (a small left-wing group in the UK).

BDS may seem in the ascendant for now. It may make progress in places, on the back of the Israeli state’s next atrocity. BDS needs to be fought politically, because it stands in the path of two states, the only consistently democratic solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. But BDS is ultimately a pessimistic approach. It put the agency for change outside of the region. It wants civil society, which includes not only NGOs and unions but bourgeois governments and business internationally to make things right for the Palestinians. There is another road. The Palestinian workers in alliance with Israeli workers fighting for a two state democratic solution to the national question, is the force that could deliver peace and much more besides.

Other interesting articles: Jeff Goldberg - A self-defeating anti-boycott bill, and in Tablet - American Jews unite against Knesset bill: "Apparently the best way to unite American Jews is for the Knesset to do something particularly stupid, like pass a law that criminalizes calling for boycotts."

The quiet sound of going fascist

2011-07-13T03:39:00.001-04:00

Read Bradley Burston's column in Haaretz today: Israel's boycott law: the quiet sound of going fascist.

This is the one. Don't let what we like to call the relative calm here, fool you. When the Knesset passed the boycott law Monday night, it changed the history of the state of Israel.

In real time, a tipping point of great magnitude can sound a lot like nothing at all. But if the Boycott Law makes it past challenges filed by human rights and pro-peace organizations in Israel's High Court of Justice, then anything goes, beginning with democracy itself.

Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak and 10 other cabinet ministers already know this. That's why they failed to show up for the vote.

They stayed away because they know that this is the stain that may prove indelible. The Boycott Law is the litmus test for Israeli democracy, the threshold test for Israeli fascism. It's a test of moderates everywhere who care about the future of this place.

Why is the law so bad? Among other reasons:

The effect of the law could be crippling to the efforts of all organizations and many individuals working for Israeli-Palestinian peace and enhanced freedoms and human rights within Israel and the territories. The rabid anti-NGO campaigns of Im Tirtzu and other groups could escalate into a full-bore "lawfare" offensive, hauling them repeatedly into court and costing them prohibitive legal fees.

And this law is not the last attempt to stifle dissent.

A list of new bills, beginning next week, each designed to choke debate, gag protest, punish criticism, and/or cement the rule of the right. First up: The return of a bill to create McCarthyesque committees to investigate organizations the panels deem leftist. The bill was originally withdrawn for lack of votes in Knesset, but, buoyed by the success of the Boycott Law, the McCarthy Bill's sponsors now believe they can win passage.

Boycott Bill rollcall

2011-07-13T03:25:00.001-04:00

Noam Sheizaf, at +972, provides a useful list of who voted for (47) and against (38) the new boycott law, as well as who was not present for the vote or abstained from voting.

Those not present included the leading ministers in the government:

Foreign Minister Lieberman (Yisrael Beitenu)
Defense Minister Barak (Atzmaut - split off from Labor)
Prime Minister Netanyahu (Likud)
Education Minister Gideon Sa'ar (Likud)
Internal Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch (Yisrael Beitenu)

It's quite remarkable that they weren't even present for the vote. Sheizaf's comment: "Many of the votes were those of backbenchers, and it seems that the leading ministers preferred not to be present at the vote, once it was clear that the law was going to pass. The three most important ministers in the government–Prime Minister Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman—chose not to attend the vote. Some leadership Israel has."

Coalition - 66 MKs: 21 not present, 2 didn't vote, the rest voted yes

In Likud, out of 27 MKs, eight were not present for the vote. The Knesset Speaker, Reuven Rivlin, didn't vote. The rest voted yes.

In Yisrael Beitenu, out of 15 MKs, five were not present. The rest voted yes.

In Shas, out of 11 MKs, three were not present. (Interior Minister Eli Yishai voted yes, along with the rest of the party).

In Atzmaut, which is part of the coalition, 4 out of 5 were not present, and the fifth didn't vote. Since they're part of the coalition, they're supposed to vote for laws proposed by the coalition - but they rebelled.

United Torah Judaism - out of five MKs, one was not present and the rest voted yes.

HaBayit HaYehudi - out of three MKs, all voted yes.

Opposition - 12 not present out of 54 MKs
Kadima - out of 28 MKs, 7 were not present. All the rest voted no, including Tzipi Livni, head of the opposition.

Labor - out of 8 MKs, 2 were not present. All the rest voted no.

Hadash (Communists) - all 4 MKs voted no

Ra'am-Ta'al - three out of 4 MKs voted no, the other was not present.

Balad - one was not present, the other three voted no.

Meretz - all three MKs voted no.

Ichud Leumi (extreme right wing party, but not part of the coalition) - out of 4 MKs, one was not present, the other three voted yes.

Reactions to the Boycott Law

2011-07-13T02:33:00.001-04:00

Some interesting reactions to the boycott ban:

Liel Leibovitz of Tablet Magazine:

I am a citizen of Israel. I also wholeheartedly support a ban on the settlements, which I believe to be illegal, morally reprehensible, theologically misguided, and politically ruinous. So sue me.
No, really: Now you can.

Marc Tracy, also of Tablet, writes:

In striking against the international BDS movement and its undeniable, and undeniably unfair, campaign of delegitimization with such an absurd, draconian gesture, isn’t the Israeli government compelling all honest observers to pay more attention to the motives and arguments of the BDS movement? It seems to me that MK Zeev Elkin, of Likud, the bill’s main sponsor, is the BDS movement’s most useful of idiots. He ought to get a cut of the donations that are about to pour in.

David Schraub picks up on the theme of useful idiots:

But the true stunner is that it looks like this law is even too much for ZOA's Mort Klein, who said "Nobody was more appalled by the boycott of Ariel theater than me, but to make it illegal? I don't think so."

I mean, seriously? How badly do you have to fuck up for Mort Klein to attack you from the left? Mort Klein criticizing Israel for being too harsh on its critics is like hearing Pat Robertson condemn a "family values" org for being too homophobic. It's a sign that you didn't just go off the deep end, but cracked your head open on the side of the pool mid-leap.

Gush Shalom, which already in the 1990s began a campaign to boycott goods produced at the settlements (I remember reading their list of things produced at the settlements at that time), has filed a petition to overturn the boycott law:

The appeal states that the new law violates basic democratic principles: “The parliamentary majority seeks, through the Boycott Law as by other pieces of legislation, to silence any criticism of government policy in general and of government policy in the Occupied Territories in particular, and to prevent an open and productive political dialogue, which constitutes the basis for a functioning democratic regime” (art. 7).

"Boycott Law" just passed by Israeli Knesset

2011-07-11T16:53:00.001-04:00

The Knesset just passed (on its second and third readings) the "Boycott Law," which penalizes people and organizations that call for a boycott against Israel or against the settlements. Tomorrow a petition will be submitted to the Supreme Court against the law by the organizations Coalition of Women for Peace, Physicians for Human Rights, the Public Committee Against Torture, and Adalah. This is after the opinion of the Legal Adviser to the Knesset, who ruled today that the law suffered from a "real constitutional defect" and is a "violation of core political speech in Israel."

To protest against the law, Peace Now has just started a Facebook page calling for boycotting products from the settlements. The head of Peace Now, Yariv Oppenheimer, said tonight that "Someone who buys products from the territories himself funds building in the settlements and the outposts, damages Israeli exports, and deepens the occupation. As Israelis we will not surrender the right to protest and the freedom to say this."

As should be clear to anyone who reads my blog, I am opposed to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign, because I believe that it is fundamentally antisemitic and will never lead to peace between Israel and the Palestinians. On the other hand, I myself have grave doubts about buying products made in the settlements. As the Peace Now leader said, doing so directly supports the settlements financially and enables them to continue to exist.

I oppose the occupation and think that Israel should withdraw from most of the West Bank to enable the establishment of a Palestinian state. The continued building of settlements and the establishment of settlement outposts has continually diminished the amount of land that could be used for the Palestinian state. In addition, many settlers engage in illegal and violent acts against their Palestinian neighbors, up to and including setting fire to mosques in retaliation for Israeli government actions (usually quite mild) against the settlements (for example, tearing down an outpost consisting of a few caravans). I don't want to reward people for these actions.

The Peace Now Facebook page says (my translation): "Prosecute me, I boycott products of the settlements. This is an historic day in which the Israeli Knesset transformed itself from a representative of the people to the national thought police. It appears that the extreme right prefers to end the many years long debate about the settlements by means of an anti-democratic law. In the wake of the law, we will call (for the first time), tomorrow morning, together with thousands of supporters, to boycott the products of the settlements, and we will explain to the public that one who buys products from the settlements damages the state of Israel."

The point of this law is not to attack the BDS movement outside Israel, which will not be injured by it. It is to attack the Israeli left and its activism against the settlements. There are a few extreme Israeli leftists who support the BDS movement, but groups like Peace Now are certainly not among them. This law is part and parcel of the campaign by the Israeli extreme right to demonize and delegitimize the Israeli left, including such human rights organizations as B'Tselem. Israelis and Jews in the other countries may not like what Peace Now, B'Tselem, the Public Committee Against Torture, and other organizations say in criticism of Israeli governmental actions, but to deny them the right to free speech, on penalty of extensive fines, is a blow to Israeli democracy.

Glenn Beck in Israel speaking about "truth"

2011-07-11T16:05:00.001-04:00

Glenn Beck visited Jerusalem today and spoke before a Knesset committee: he called on MKs to "speak the truth" about Israel and its adversaries. He addressed the Immigration, Absorption, and Diaspora Affairs committee (why this committee in particular?). Beck did say, surprisingly, that "I'm not against a Palestinian state. I'm not here for a political solution. There's something bigger than politics here. I don't think in my lifetime I've seen a more clear definition of evil that has been dismissed," referring to the massacre of the Fogel family in Itamar.

Apparently Beck was criticized from the right by a number of MKs for not condemning the proposal for a Palestinian state. MK Arye Eldad also criticized Beck for saying that Arabs and Israelis are all "people who want to live their lives and raise their kids." Eldad said: "Not everyone is like us. They don't just want to have a good life. They have different motives than we do."

I guess it takes an Israeli politician to make Glenn Beck look good!

Some questions for the Gaza flotilla from Christopher Hitchens

2011-07-04T16:01:00.001-04:00

Some excellent questions for the Gaza flotillistas from Christopher Hitchens.

A sample:

It seems safe and fair to say that the flotilla and its leadership work in reasonably close harmony with Hamas, which constitutes the Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. The political leadership of this organization is headquartered mainly in Gaza itself. But its military coordination is run out of Damascus, where the regime of Bashar Assad is currently at war with increasingly large sections of the long-oppressed Syrian population. Refugee camps, some with urgent humanitarian requirements, are making their appearance on the border between Syria and Turkey (the government of the latter being somewhat sympathetic to the purposes of the flotilla). In these circumstances, isn't it legitimate to strike up a conversation with the "activists" and ask them where they come out on the uprising against hereditary Baathism in Syria?...

Only a few weeks ago, the Hamas regime in Gaza became the only governing authority in the world—by my count—to express outrage and sympathy at the death of Osama Bin Laden. As the wavelets lap in the Greek harbors, and the sunshine beats down, doesn't any journalist want to know whether the "activists" have discussed this element in their partners' world outlook? Does Alice Walker seriously have no comment?

Hamas is listed by various governments and international organizations as a terrorist group. I don't mind conceding that that particular word has been used in arbitrary ways in the past. But what concerns me much more is the official programmatic adoption, by Hamas, of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This disgusting fabrication is a key foundational document of 20^th-century racism and totalitarianism, indelibly linked to the Hitler regime in theory and practice. It seems extraordinary to me that any "activist" claiming allegiance to human rights could cooperate at any level with the propagation of such evil material. But I have never seen any of them invited to comment on this matter, either.

Somehow I doubt that any of them will bother considering these questions, since it would require them to pull themselves out of their magnificent self-regard for a moment and think about the real world. The latest "action alert update" that I received from the US Boat to Gaza informed me about the eight members of the group who had just been arrested by the Greek authorities in front of the American embassy. Not a word about the people of Gaza about whom they supposedly passionately care.

Trip to the Galilee and the Golan

2011-07-03T14:09:00.000-04:00

I got back verrry late last night from my trip to the Galilee and the Golan with my friend A., her daughter, and her daughter's friend. It was a lot of fun. We stayed at the Beit Sefer Sadeh Har Hermon (Mt. Hermon Field School), next to Kibbutz Snir, from which we had a view of the upper Galilee, the Golan, and Lebanon - which is very close that far north. On Friday we planned a trip to a waterfall on the Golan (the Sa'ar waterfall), not far from the Nimrod Castle (a Crusader castle from the middle ages) - the photos in the guide book promised a lovely waterfall, but all we found were lots of climbing up and down, and a dry river bed. We definitely came in the wrong season if we wanted to see the waterfall!

Dry wadi of the Sa'ar waterfall.

We still wanted to find water, preferably to swim in. We continued up Rte. 99, which is the road that goes up from the Galilee into the Golan (a beautiful, winding, somewhat dangerous road). On our way we encountered a small kiosk by the side of the road, selling "Druze pita" - a big round pita, with lebene and zaatar in it - delicious. The kiosk was situated right in front of a field of cherry trees - now is when the cherries are ripe. The owner of the kiosk invited us to pick some cherries - and so A's daughter and her friend followed him into the orchard and they came back with delicious, just picked cherries.


A cherry orchard in the Golan.

We then continued on our way, drove through Masade (one of the Druze towns on the Golan), and finally came to a beautiful, small, almost circular lake called Birket Ram. We scrambled down the hill and into the cool blue water. In past visits to the Golan with friends, we've tried to get to into the lake but had never figured out how to do it. Apparently the lake is a "crater lake" (according to Wikipedia), whose only sources are rain water and underground springs. It is not stream fed, nor do streams flow out of (which would be impossible anyway, since it is lower than the surrounding hills). It is surrounded by bountiful orchards and fields cultivated by Druze farmers.

Birket Ram

The next view is of some of the orchards surrounding the lake.

Notice the little saplings that have just been planted, close to the water.

After enjoying the nice cool water for a while, we climbed back up the hill and got back in the car. We drove through Majdal Shams, a Druze town quite near Syria (on Nakba Day and Naksa Day it was where people tried to get in from Syria). Our goal was to drive up as far as we could on Mt. Hermon, but we were stopped quite close to the town at a military base. There's a ski resort on the Israeli side of Mt. Hermon, so it is possible to get there, but the sign said that the road was not open after 3:30 p.m. The Golan is full of Israeli military bases and listening stations, and there are roads that civilians aren't permitted to drive on, all in addition to the still-active minefields (which are clearly marked).

We turned around, through Majdal Shams again, and then back down to the Field School. On our way we passed by the same kiosk again and bought some more delicious food - in all, we bought lebene in olive oil, cherry jam (with whole cherries, pits and all), apricot jam (with whole dried apricots), eggplant jam (tiny little eggplants cooked in sugar), and a comb of honey. All delicious.

We passed by Nimrod's Castle again - this is a view from the road. I've visited there in the past, but this time we didn't go into it.

Nimrod's castle and a long ridge leading up to it.

Flowers on the side of the road, Nimrod's Castle in the background.

We made our way back to the Field School after that, and sat down to eat more pita with delicious cheese (lebene) and jams on it. After that my friend A. and I painted a bit in watercolors (she is definitely more skilled than I am!) and I took photos of the scene. Very quite and pastoral. As the sun was setting, we heard the eerie howls of some animal - hyenas? jackals? I don't know what is common in Israel.

The view from our porch - fish ponds with the mountains behind them. I think the fish ponds belonged to the nearby Kibbutz Snir.

And then to bed!

Photos from the Galilee - Carmel, Jezreel, Beit Shearim, and Sepphoris

2011-06-30T04:35:00.000-04:00

I've posted some of my photos to Picasa, and below are some examples - a link to the whole album is just below.

Galilee, June 28, 2011

Carmel Forest - trees burned in the Carmel fire.

View from the Muhraqa (on the Carmel) towards the Jezreel Valley.

Fish ponds in the Jezreel valley.

At the Alexander Zaid property in Kiryat Tivon, looking down to one of the fish ponds.

Alexander Zaid statue - he was one of the founders of Ha-Shomer, created before WWI to protect Jewish agricultural settlements.

One of the sarcophagi at the ancient Jewish cemetery at Beit Shearim - in a burial cave.

Menorah carved out of the rock of one of the burial caves at Beit Shearim.

Mosaic floor at the Sepphoris synagogue (ancient Roman Jewish city) - the sun being drawn on his chariot, in the middle of the wheel of the Zodiac.

One of the seasons, pictured in the corner of the Zodiac panel in the Sepphoris synagogue - this is Summer.

Two of the signs of the Zodiac - Scorpio and Sagittarius.

Basket of first-fruits, which were brought to the Temple in Jerusalem when it still existed.

The "Mona Lisa of the Galilee," found on the mosaic floor of a Roman villa in Sepphoris.

Menorah on the mosaic floor of the synagogue, with a shofar on the right under the menorah.

Image of an Amazon riding a horse and about to throw a spear, at the Nile House at Sepphoris.

Tomorrow - a tiyul (trip) to the Galilee!

2011-06-27T16:39:00.000-04:00

For those interested, including those bored with Alice Walker, the flotilla, and politics, I am going on a visit to the north of Israel tomorrow with a couple of friends, one of whom is a licensed tour guide. He's taking us to Sepphoris, Beit She'arim, and Megiddo. I'll post photos when I return.

Once again, Alice Walker

2011-06-27T16:36:00.001-04:00

A good essay by Marc Tracy of Tablet on why Alice Walker Is Sailing to Gaza.

Alice Walker dreams of classic civil disobedience. She quickly name-checks Gandhi as well as Schwerner, Cheney, and Goodman in an essay explaining why she will participate in the flotilla set to disembark for Gaza in a few days. But there is something fishy about her essay that betrays her stated cause of universalism (“One child must never be set above another”). It begins when she weirdly isolates Schwerner and Goodman, the two young civil rights martyrs who happened to be Jews, from Cheney, who was black, and it culminates in the story’s concluding anecdote, in which she reports what inspired her ex-husband to be a civil rights activist:
He was a little boy on his way home from Yeshiva … He was frequently harassed by older boys from regular school, and one day two of these boys snatched his yarmulke (skull cap), and, taunting him, ran off with it, eventually throwing it over a fence.

Two black boys appeared, saw his tears, assessed the situation, and took off after the boys who had taken his yarmulke. Chasing the boys down and catching them, they made them climb the fence, retrieve and dust off the yarmulke, and place it respectfully back on his head.
Walker seems unaware of how easily she—a novelist, who should know better—allows everyone their standard roles: The meek, pious Jew taunted by the evil, brutish goyim and saved by the goodhearted and even more powerful Magical Negroes (“appeared!”).... Regardless, a stereotype-laden fable, even if depicting a real event, is not a sufficient basis for a grown-up to adopt a cause. Does Walker’s objection to the blockade derive from liberal humanism or from a recoiling at Jewish power? Sadly, her essay suggests the latter.

I agree with Tracy. Walker does have a problem with both Jews and Jewish power. Despite the fine words about nonviolence she wrote in her CNN essay, she is not merely anti-Zionist, she is anti-Semitic.

From an essay she published a couple of years ago, about her trip to Gaza in 2009 with Code Pink:

And so I have been, once again, struggling to speak about an atrocity: This time in Gaza, this time against the Palestinian people. Like most people on the planet I have been aware of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict almost my whole life. I was four years old in 1948 when, after being subjected to unspeakable cruelty by the Germans, after a “holocaust” so many future disasters would resemble; thousands of European Jews were resettled in Palestine. They settled in a land that belonged to people already living there, which did not seem to bother the British who, as in India, had occupied the land and then, on leaving it, decided they could simply put in place a partitioning of the land that would work fine for the people, strangers, Palestinians and European Jews, now forced to live together....

[A description of meeting a Palestinian woman - RL] Coming upon another grouping of tents, I encountered an old woman sitting on the ground in what would have been, perhaps, the doorway of her demolished, pulverized home. She was clean and impeccably dressed, the kind of old woman who is known and loved and respected by everyone in the community, as my own mother had been. Her eyes were dark and full of life. She talked to us freely. I gave her a gift I had brought, and she thanked me.

Looking into my eyes she said: May God Protect You From the Jews. When the young Palestinian interpreter told me what she’d said, I responded: It’s too late, I already married one. I said this partly because, like so many Jews in America, my former husband could not tolerate criticism of Israel’s behavior toward the Palestinians. Our very different positions on what is happening now in Palestine/Israel and what has been happening for over fifty years, has been perhaps our most severe disagreement. It is a subject we have never been able to rationally discuss. He does not see the racist treatment of Palestinians as the same racist treatment of blacks and some Jews that he fought against so nobly in Mississippi. And that he objected to in his own Brooklyn based family. When his younger brother knew he was seeing me, a black person, he bought and nailed over an entire side of his bedroom the largest Confederate flag either of us had ever seen....

The people of Israel have not been helped by America’s blind loyalty to their survival as a Jewish State, by any means necessary. The very settlers they’ve used American taxpayer money to install on Palestinian land turn out to be a scary lot, fighting not only against Palestinians, but against Israelis, when they do not get their way. Israelis stand now exposed, the warmongers and peacemakers alike, as people who are ruled by leaders that the world considers irrational, vengeful, scornful of international law, and utterly frightening. There are differing opinions about this, of course, but my belief is that when a country primarily instills fear in the minds and hearts of the people of the world, it is no longer useful in joining the dialogue we need for saving the planet.

There is no hiding what Israel has done or what it does on a daily basis to protect and extend its power. It uses weapons that cut off limbs without bleeding; it drops bombs into people’s homes that never stop detonating in the bodies of anyone who is hit; it causes pollution so severe it is probable that Gaza may be uninhabitable for years to come, though Palestinians, having nowhere else to go, will have to live there. This is a chilling use of power, supported by the United States of America, no small foe, if one stands up to it. No wonder that most people prefer to look the other way during this genocide, hoping their disagreement with Israeli policies will not be noted. Good Germans, Good Americans, Good Jews. But, as our sister Audre Lorde liked to warn us: Our silence will not protect us. In the ongoing global climate devastation that is worsened by war activities, we will all suffer, and we will also be afraid.

The world knows it is too late for a two state solution. This old idea, bandied about since at least the Eighties, denounced by Israel for decades, isn’t likely to become reality with the massive buildup of settlements all over what remains of Palestinian land....

What is to be done? Our revered Tolstoi asked this question generations ago, speaking also of War and Peace. I believe there must be a one state solution. That Palestinians and Jews, who have lived together in peace in the past, must work together to make this a reality once again. That this land (so soaked in Jewish and Palestinian blood, and with America’s taxpayer dollars wasted on violence the majority of us would never, if we knew, support) must become, like South Africa, the secure and peaceful home of everyone who lives there. This will require that Palestinians, like Jews, have the right of return to their homes and their lands. Which will mean what Israelis most fear: Jews will be outnumbered and, instead of a Jewish state, there will be a Jewish, Muslim, Christian country, which is how Palestine functioned before the Europeans arrived. What is so awful about that?

As I wrote earlier, Walker's essay is marked by serious errors of fact. She doesn't seem to be aware of the actual history of Palestine before the establishment of Israel, revealing no knowledge of either the British Mandate or the Ottoman Empire. She refers to the "holocaust," as if doubting that it occurred, and thinks mistakenly that it was the British who decided to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza - does she actually know what genocide is? With such willful ignorance, how can she reach valid conclusions?

But what is most unnerving about her essay is not these errors, but her statement that Israel "is no longer useful in joining the dialogue we need for saving the planet." In other words, Israel is not a partner in solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - it is an object, rightfully subject to the plans of others. It has committed crimes so awful that it cannot be worked with, only upon.

"What is so awful about that?" Walker asks about Jews becoming a minority in a unified Palestine. Do I need to instruct her in the sorry progress of Jewish history in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? Apparently, yes, because she refers to the "holocaust" without understanding its devastating effect on both those Jews who survived it and Jews living elsewhere in the world who were not physically affected by it (including the Jews living in Palestine during the British Mandate). She seems to have no knowledge of the growth of political and racial antisemitism that led to the birth of the Zionist movement and the conviction that the only way Jews would be safe would be to create their own state. Jews have a well-founded fear of becoming a minority, especially if it means living in a unified state of Palestine where Hamas and Fatah would have the upper hand. There would be no return to a mythical "living together in peace" - the one state solution is a recipe for an intense and cruel civil war, with the losers being massacred and expelled. And I do not assume that the Jews would be the losers. For the sake of both the Israelis and the Palestinians, a two-state solution is an urgent need.

News from Greece & the flotilla

2011-06-27T13:48:00.001-04:00

On Reshet Bet of Israel Radio now:

"We are coming! We are coming!" The Gaza flotilla participants shouted today at their press conference in Athens. According to the Kol Israel reporter, the Greek authorities "threw the book at them," demanded that they pay customs, etc., and is doing what it can to delay them. The press conference was short and didn't provide a whole lot of information.

He also reported on how the Greek government is dealing with the threat of a national default and the constant demonstrations against it (including threat of a general strike for a couple of days), which are protesting the austerity measures required by the EU, the IMF, and the World Bank.

Other flotilla news - yesterday, the director of the Government Press Office, which is responsible for foreign journalists, threatened that if any sailed on the flotilla, they would be at risk of not being permitted to enter Israel again for ten years. But now, today the government has dropped this threat.

A statement issued by the Prime Minister's Office said: "The prime minister has instructed not to apply standard policy against infiltrators and those entering the country illegally. It was also decided to allow Israeli and international media outlets on Navy boats in order to enable transparency and credible reporting of the events."

Updates on the Gaza flotilla

2011-06-27T02:29:00.000-04:00

Roi ben Yehuda at Roi Word suggests another Israeli response to the Gaza flotilla - conflict resolution commandos.

Ynet reports that the Gaza flotilla is losing momentum.

Six ships which were slated to take part in the Gaza-bound flotilla are being detained by the Greek port authorities, Ynet learned Sunday night. Senior officials in Jerusalem have confirmed the report, which followed a Sunday decision by Greece to stop the US vessel "Audacity of Hope" from participating in the sea-bound convoy. While the organizers of the maritime convoy claim that more than 1,500 activists are set to take part in the initiative, it now appears that no more than seven ships, carrying 200-500 passengers, will participate in the flotilla.

Howard Jacobson responds to Alice Walker.

It should not need arguing, this late in the ethical history of mankind, that good people can do great harm. One of the finest and funniest novels ever written - Don Quixote - charts the damage left in the wake of a man who would make the world a better place.

Human beings are seldom more dangerous than when they are sentimentally overcome by the goodness of their own intentions. That Alice Walker believes it is right to join the Freedom Flotilla II to Gaza I do not have the slightest doubt. But beyond associating her decision with Gandhi, Martin Luther King and very nearly, when she talks about the preciousness of children, Jesus Christ, she fails to give a single convincing reason for it.

"One child must never be set above another child," she says. A sentiment that will find an echo in every heart. But how does it justify the flotilla? Gaza is under siege, Israelis will tell you, because weapons are fired from it into Israel, threatening the lives of Israeli children. If the blockade is lifted there is a fear that more lethal and far-reaching weapons will be acquired, and the lives of more Israeli children endangered.

You may want to argue that had Gaza been treated differently it would have responded differently, but if the aim of the flotilla is to ensure that one child will not be set above another it is hard to see how challenging the blockade will achieve it. All an Israeli parent will see is a highly charged emotionalism disguising an action that, by its very partiality, chooses the Palestinian child over the Israeli.

Human beings are seldom more dangerous than when they are sentimentally overcome by the goodness of their own intentions.

The boat on which Alice Walker will be traveling is called The Audacity of Hope. Forgive me for seeing a measure of self-importance in that reference. It will be carrying, Alice Walker tells us, "Letters expressing solidarity and love." Not, presumably, for Israeli children. Perhaps it is thought that Israeli children are the recipients of enough love already. So what about solidarity? It is meant to sound innocuous. "That is all."...

The flotilla is engaged in an entirely political act ... to call it by any other name is the grossest hypocrisy...

Even before the deed, Alice Walker has her language of outraged moral purity prepared - "but if they insist on attacking us, wounding us, even murdering us..." The Israeli response is thus already an act of unprovoked murder, no matter that the flotilla is by its very essence a provocation. Whatever its cargo, by luring the Israeli military into action which can be represented as brutal, the flotilla is engaged in an entirely political act. To call it by any other name is the grossest hypocrisy.

Notes on Canadian boat to Gaza

2011-06-26T05:22:00.000-04:00

Fear and no clean clothing: Amira Hass preparing to sail for Gaza

Amira Hass, the Haaretz writer, is going on the Canadian boat "Tahrir" that is part of the Gaza flotilla. She writes about how they have prepared for a violent IDF response:

In advance of the departure of our ship, we - the participants - sat in a Greek hotel, getting to know one another and rehearsing the prospect that the Israeli Navy would take control of the ships in the flotilla. In simulation drills over several hours, about 50 civilians - ranging in age from 20 to 69 - attempted to imagine themselves facing Israeli warships and M16 rifles with fighter helicopters hovering overhead, along with water cannon, tear gas and Taser stun guns. The participants also imagined verbal abuse along with physical blows, dogs, and masked commandos.

The activists concluded from the exercise that they should acknowledge their fears and learn as a group of people, mutually responsible for one anther, how to confront their fears.

I'm glad they decided to prepare themselves for the possibility of violence - but what are they preparing to do? "Acknowledging their fears" is fine, but have they trained to do something specific?

Notes on the Gaza Flotilla

2011-06-24T11:05:00.002-04:00

Alice Walker: Why I'm sailing to Gaza

Highlights

Our boat, The Audacity of Hope, will be carrying letters to the people of Gaza. Letters expressing solidarity and love. That is all its cargo will consist of. If the Israeli military attacks us, it will be as if they attacked the mailman. This should go down hilariously in the annals of history. But if they insist on attacking us, wounding us, even murdering us, as they did some of the activists in the last flotilla, Freedom Flotilla I, what is to be done?

There is a scene in the movie "Gandhi" that is very moving to me: it is when the unarmed Indian protesters line up to confront the armed forces of the British Empire. The soldiers beat them unmercifully, but the Indians, their broken and dead lifted tenderly out of the fray, keep coming.

Unexpectedly, I find myself being moved by some of Alice Walker's words here - in particular, her memory of the non-violent Indian protests against the British Empire. If Palestinians had been able to act like this decades ago, there might now be a Palestinian state.

When I lived in Israel from 1987-1989 (I was a visiting graduate student at the Hebrew University), I went to many demonstrations against the occupation and in favor of negotiations between Israel and the PLO. (At that point it was illegal for Israelis to meet with representatives of the PLO, so this was a radical demand). My second year, I got involved with a group called "The 21st year of the occupation." A good friend of mine was involved, and I decided to join as well in supporting them in non-violent civil disobedience against the occupation. [For a glimpse at what it felt like to be involved with Israeli anti-occupation groups during the late 1980s, during the first intifada, see an article by Milton Viorst in Mother Jones, December 1988 - on Google Books].

Before I came to Israel in 1987, I had been part of a group in Boston called "Pledge of Resistance," which was a nationwide group founded to protest against the policies of the U.S. government in central America, in particular against the threat of a U.S. invasion of Nicaragua. We trained in tactics of civil disobedience, and those involved pledged either to engage in civil disobedience (which could lead to arrest) or to support those doing the civil disobedience. I chose to be a supporter - I was afraid of being arrested. There was one big protest that I remember taking place at the Federal Building in downtown Boston, where people blocked the doors of the building and were arrested en masse - about 500 as I recall. Several friends of mine were arrested, and I remember going to the bail hearing later in the day. Those who refused to identify themselves (including my friends) were kept in jail for a couple of days until they were released.

The "21st year of the occupation" had similar actions in mind - public civil disobedience, with certain people risking arrest, and others watching out for them and supporting them. As in the U.S., my choice was support, not to risk arrest - especially since I was living in a foreign country. I went early one morning in Jerusalem to a training session in civil disobedience along with another friend.

The first and as it happened only action of the "21st year" that I took part in was an aborted attempt in May, 1989, to visit a Palestinian family in Qalqiliya, on the West Bank - one of the sons of the family had been arrested and was accused of being a terrorist, and in response the IDF was going to seal off one of the rooms of the house (this was a common punishment at that time - I don't know if the IDF continues to do this). The group's intention was not to engage in civil disobedience - no one planned to get arrested. Our goal was to express support for the family.

We set off for Qalqiliya and at the entrance of the city we were halted by the local IDF commander, who told us that we were forbidden to enter a "closed military zone." A foreign film crew was waiting outside the city, presumably to film us. We turned around, and some people left (including Dedi Zucker, a member of the Israeli Knesset then and a founder of B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights group). Instead of going back to Jerusalem, however, we sneaked into Qalqiliya by going through the orchards around the city (something impossible to do now, because the city is surrounded by the separation wall, an apt name in this case). We ended up in a main square of the city, and asked some passersby how to get to the street of the family we were going to visit. We started in that direction, and then an IDF patrol came upon us and asked what we were doing. They then ordered us to leave. Since the group had decided not to engage in civil disobedience, we started to walk out of the city. There were a number of local Palestinian residents watching us, and one of the men of the group decided to give them the "V" sign for solidarity. The soldiers saw the gesture, and went up to him and told him not to do that again, or he would be arrested. He made the sign again, and they started to arrest him. Then another man in the group did the same thing.

Reuven Kaminer, in his book "The Politics of Protest: the Israeli peace movement and the intifada" (1996) writes of this moment (p. 129): "It seems that everything was going to end quietly when one of the protestors flashed a 'V' sign to the local residents (later, the 'V' sign became the basis for the charge that the 27 had incited the local population to rebellion....)." The IDF charged later that we yelled "להמשיך באינתיפדה" - "continue the intifada" - but this was an invention to support the charge of incitement to rebellion. Kaminer continues, "The officers were incensed and began arresting; first, several men in the group, and then all the women who refused to abandon them." (Women were the majority of the group). Kaminer then writes, "In a matter of minutes, 27 demonstrators were being held in the local police station and a chain of events was set in motion which forced the 27 to remain in prison for five full days."

I was not one of them. At the last minute, as I was about to get into one of the police trucks, one of the leaders of the "21st year" shouted out - "You don't have to get arrested if you don't want to be." I didn't want to, and dropped off the back of the truck with two other people who also didn't want to get arrested. The soldiers told us to leave the city, and we started to walk out the main entrance. Fortunately for us, the film crew was still there, and they gave us a ride to the bus station in Kfar Saba, the closest Israeli city to Qalqiliya. When we got to Jerusalem I went home and called the office of Dedi Zucker to let him know what happened.

As Kaminer reports, those arrested spent five days in jail before being released. I went to the court at least a couple of times as a supporter during hearings for the arrested protestors, bringing clothing to my arrested friend. They were eventually brought to trial in the fall of 1989, but charges were dismissed because it turned out that the order the IDF commander was holding for a "closed military zone" had never been signed.

The feeling I was left with after the whole incident was over (including court hearings, publicity, demonstrations, etc.) was that the members of the "21st year" simply weren't prepared to engage in civil disobedience both because they/we didn't really understand what civil disobedience was, nor the possible consequences to ourselves of it. Did the two men who flashed "V" signs know that they were doing something that could provoke the soldiers to arrest them? They certainly displayed no awareness of this risk. The group members in Qalqiliya were not prepared to get arrested - in fact, after the soldiers ordered us all to leave the city, we had a short discussion on whether to engage in civil disobedience, and decided that we had not come with that purpose. As Kaminer points out in his book, a number of the arrested women were mothers with children at home who did not want to risk a stay in jail. Those arrested were not prepared for conditions in the jails, nor for the (initial) seriousness of the legal charges against them.

Compared with those who risked their liberty and their lives in the American civil rights movement, we were rank amateurs. For example, the people who were involved in the 1960 sit-ins that desegregated lunch counters in the South (for example Diana Nash in Nashville) prepared themselves physically, spiritually, and psychologically for their non-violent struggle. From the Wikipedia article about Diana Nash:

After experiencing such shocking discriminatory events, Nash decided to search for a way to challenge segregation, Nash began attending civil disobedience workshops led by Rev. James Lawson.^[2] James Lawson had studied Mahatma Gandhi's techniques of nonviolent direct action and passive resistance while studying in India.^[9] By the end of her first semester at Fisk, she had become one of Lawson's most devoted disciples. Although originally a reluctant participant in non-violence, Nash emerged as a leader due to her well-spoken, composed manner when speaking to the authorities and to the press.

I don't know if a strong religious faith is necessary for effective civil disobedience, but I think that it helps a great deal in standing up to the difficult circumstances that participants may have to confront. Thorough training in how to remain non-violent when faced with a violent reaction is an absolute necessity. Our group had neither of these advantages.

Are the members of the Gaza Flotilla really prepared for what may happen to them? Alice Walker talks a good line, but have she and the other Americans on the "Audacity of Hope" trained for how to respond if the IDF decides to board their boat? Are they all really committed to nonviolence? How would they have behaved if they had been on the Mavi Marmara last year? How would they have responded to the IHH activists on the boat who prepared to fight off the IDF commandos? Have the passengers on the boat organized themselves to resist nonviolently? Walker suggests in her essay that all of the responsibility for possible violence is on the shoulders of the IDF - but what if it turns out that some of the passengers do want to resist violently? I hope that the passengers have discussed these issues thoroughly. While I don't support the flotilla, I have no desire to see the passengers injured or killed - and both the passengers on the boats and the IDF have a responsibility to make sure that there is no violence.

Turning Point 5 - Israel Home Front defense exercise this week

2011-06-21T17:34:00.000-04:00


Map from the Israeli Home Front Command - length of time before one has to enter a protected space after hearing a siren warning of missile attacks.

This week, the Israeli home front command is conducting a week-long national defense exercise to prepare to respond to a possible war against Israel conducted largely by missile strikes. "This week Turning Point 5, the annual home front defense exercise, will begin, the fifth such drill since the Second Lebanon War, which was marked as a turning point in the government's attitude toward the civilian front." Thousands of missiles fell in the northern part of the country (launched by Hezbollah in Lebanon) during the Second Lebanon War, and it became clear that civilians were not adequately protected against missile attack.

Tomorrow at 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. sirens will sound across the whole country, and everyone is supposed to go immediately to the closest protected area and wait for several minutes. I asked a friend earlier tonight (who lives in the same apartment building where I'm staying) what I should do when the siren sounds. She said - look around and see what the people around you are doing, and follow them. Her daughter also asked her what to when the sirens sound - in particular, where to go to shelter herself. If I'm at home in the morning (rather than in the National Library, where I've been doing research), there really is no place to go - there's no bomb shelter attached to this apartment building, and apparently the shelter across the street (Elazar ha-Modai) is locked, and in any case it's usually used as a sports club (as many of the shelters around the city are used for a variety of purposes - there's one on Yohanan ben Zakkai St. that has a synagogue in it).

The English website for the Home Front Command (available also in Hebrew, Arabic, and Russian) provides the map above of the length of time one has to reach a shelter before the missiles land. Jerusalem, apparently, enjoys the longest time of warning - three minutes.

The English website, however, has no information about this week's defense exercise - for that you need to go to the Hebrew site. The Hebrew website has a short video explaining what to do. There's also a video in Arabic.

Today I went to the Mt. Scopus campus of the Hebrew University (to meet a couple of people). On my way back, I took a bus to the Damascus Gate and went to the Old City. I left via the Jaffa Gate, and walked along Mamilla Street (recently restored - it was left a ruin after the 1948 war for several decades, even after the reuniting of the city under Israeli rule in 1967). I kept seeing signs pointing to the מרחב המוגן. I had no idea what these words meant - there was no explanation. The Home Front Command site in Hebrew solved the mystery - the words mean "protected space." The signs were pointing to where people visiting the pedestrian mall and shops should go to when the sirens sound tomorrow.

It will be interesting to see if people pay attention to the exercise - will they go to the closest protected area, or will they simply go about their normal business? Stay tuned for my report!

Visiting the Negev last week

2011-06-19T16:39:00.000-04:00

I've been meaning to post some of the photos that I took on my trip to the Negev this past week. I stayed at a place called the "Alpaca Farm" near Mitzpe Ramon, with a friend. We visited several barren but beautiful places - an ancient Nabatean/Roman city called Shivta, we hiked along Ein Avdat until we reached the pools, and we drove through ha-Makhtesh ha-Gadol (the large crater) and went partway into ha-Makhtesh ha-Katan (the small crater), and finally watched the sun set spectacularly at Makhtesh Ramon (the Ramon crater) - with a full moon. I had thought that the large crater was amazing, but Makhtesh Ramon is bigger and the term "awesome" is really appropriate to it! We weren't able to go down into it, but from above I felt that we were looking into another world than earth.


Ibex near the tomb of David Ben-Gurion, at Midreshet Ben Gurion

Llamas and alpacas at the Alpaca Farm.

A llama.

Atlantic Plane Tree (250 years old) at the Ein Avdat nature reserve.

One of the pools at the Ein Avdat reserve.

Waterfall at Ein Avdat.

Makhtesh Gadol.

I'm standing in front of the Makhtesh ha-Gadol.

Almost full-moon above Makhtesh Ramon.

Makhtesh Ramon at sunset.

Makhtesh Ramon.

Sunset near the Tel Aviv University observatory (near the Alpaca Farm)

View of the Alpaca Farm from our cottage ("zimmer")

Beware of camels - sign on the road near Beersheva

Update on the Gaza flotilla

2011-06-18T17:07:00.001-04:00

On Friday the IHH announced that they won't be sending the Mavi Marmara on the latest flotilla to Gaza, scheduled for later this month. This has put the other organizers into a tizzy. Haaretz reports: Gaza flotilla organizers disappointed by Turkish group's decision to cancel ship.

On Saturday, flotilla organizers held urgent consultations. A source familiar with the details told Haaretz that problems have arisen on other boats that are supposed to take part in the flotilla and it is still not known exactly how many ships will participate. The estimate is that five to eight ships will set sail for Gaza. The source also said that the number of activists taking part in the flotilla is being reduced from 1,000 to around 300.

On the other hand, Ynet reports that two French ships will join the flotilla. I don't know if they are included in the number of 5-8 of the Haaretz report. And on yet another hand, the French Jewish community has apparently succeeded in preventing a French ship from sailing from Marseilles.

There's no hint of any of these developments, however, on the web site of the US Boat to Gaza folks - just continued cheerleading for their message.

Institutionalized Antisemitism

2011-06-18T04:03:00.000-04:00

Over at Harry's Place and Engage there have been extensive discussions of institutionalized racism and antisemitism, in the wake of the UCU decision that the EUMC working definition of antisemitism should in no way be used by the UCU. It seems to me that before us we have a really good example of institutionalized anti-semitism: the UN Human Rights Council. The five-year agenda of the council, which was just overwhelmingly approved by the UN General Assembly (no votes: US, Canada, Israel, and Palau) devotes "clause number seven to Israel while all other countries in the world – including Yemen, Syria, and Libya – are united under clause four, which describes human rights violations in the entire world."

Jerusalem

2011-06-12T05:50:00.000-04:00

So much for political doom and gloom - now for some photos of Jerusalem trees, flowers, and houses.

Pretty bush in the garden of my apartment building.

Door-knocker.

9 Amatzia St.

Pe'er Yerushalayim synagogue, also on Amatzia St.

Pretty flowers

House on Yehoshua bin Nun St., Greek Colony.

Windows on house at corner of Yehoshua bin Nun St.

5 Yehoshua bin Nun St.

9 Yehoshua bin Nun St.

Pomegranate tree in the yard of my apartment building.

Sculpture of rhinoceros in the Christian cemetery on Emek Refaim St.

Roses in the garden of my apartment building.

House number at 9 Yehoshua bin Nun St.

The Syrian role in Yom ha-Naksa

2011-06-07T10:44:00.000-04:00

[Note: "Yom ha-Naksa" means "Day of the setback" - referring to the anniversary of the Six-Day War, which in 1967 began on June 5. "Naksa" is an Arabic word that means "setback" and is apparently the term that Palestinians use to refer to the Six Day War].

In order to get to the border at Magdal Shams and Quneitra, the Palestinian/Syrian protestors had to pass by Syrian army checkpoints. They were waved through on Nakba Day (May 15) and on Sunday, but not yesterday. Clearly, the Syrian government has the power to foster or prevent these protests as it wishes - as we have all been witnessing, the government does not hesitate to use force against those it views as enemies.

Isabel Kershner, in her New York Times article today, reports on the possible motives of the Syrian government:

But Israel said the government of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria was exploiting the Palestinian issue by sending unarmed protesters to the frontier in order to divert attention from its own antigovernment uprising and the bloody attempts to put it down.

In a rare convergence of Israeli and Palestinian sentiment, that sense of exploitation may at least in part explain the markedly muted reaction in the Palestinian territories to Sunday’s deadly confrontation in the north.

Leaders in Hamas-run Gaza condemned the killings of the protesters but, unusually, did not go as far as to call for revenge. The mainstream Fatah movement and other political factions also issued condemnations, but there were no official statements from the office of President Mahmoud Abbas or other Palestinian Authority leaders in the West Bank.

And then yesterday there were still more tragic consequences of the protests at the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Syria. There were funerals for those who had been killed the day before, and fourteen of the mourners were shot dead, not by Syrian troops, but by Palestinian security guards.

Palestinian security guards reportedly killed 14 Palestinians Monday in the Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria. According to witnesses, an angry crowd of mourners began to charge toward leaders of Palestinian factions, prompting their security guards to open fire.

The mourners accused the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) of endangering their lives during Sunday's protest on Israel's border, by encouraging them to put themselves in the line of fire.

The crowd chanted slogans against Maher al-Taher, PFLP spokesman and politburo member, and set fire to the PFLP headquarters. There are additional reports that Khaled Meshal, Hamas political leader in Damascus, arrived at the camp but was forced to leave.

Yom ha-Naksa

2011-06-07T10:35:00.000-04:00

What did happen on Sunday on the Israel/Syria border at Magdal Shams and at Quneitra? According to the Syrians, more than 20 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire. According to the Israeli army, Israeli snipers did not fire many shots, and they aimed at people's legs. Also according to Israel, those at Quneitra were killed not by Israeli fire, but by land mines that were accidentally blown up by the Syrian/Palestinian protestors who threw firebombs that set off the mines. In an article in today's New York Times, Isabel Kershner reports that the Israeli army says about 10 protestors died in the land mine explosions at Quneitra. So did the IDF kill any of the protestors at Magdal Shams?

And what should Israel do when (largely non-violent) protestors try to cross the border? Apparently, at Quneitra, the IDF used largely non-lethal crowd-dispersing techniques, while at Magdal Shams, they used live fire.

When the protesters neared the border at Majdal Shams, IDF officers told them in Arabic to stop, as continuing could endanger their lives. When dozens nevertheless kept going, soldiers started firing into the air. When the marchers reached the first fence, snipers were ordered to fire at their legs from about 200 meters away.

At Quneitra, in contrast, soldiers mainly used nonlethal weaponry like tear gas and rubber-tipped bullets, with which all troops along the border had been equipped following the Nakba Day incidents. The use of nonlethal means was possible because the confrontations took place at much closer range.

The IDF acknowledged that "dozens" of marchers were hurt, but said the Syrian figure of 23 dead sounded highly unlikely.

I'm currently in Israel, visiting until mid-July for my annual summer visit, and what's going on at the border with Syria, and inside Syria itself, feels much closer than it did from the safe distance of Ithaca. On the one hand, it feels much more like a threat that people are crossing the Syrian border (and on Nakba Day, the Lebanese border) - and if it's a real threat, isn't Israel justified in taking even lethal measures to deal with the threat? On the other hand, if the protestors are not armed, is it justified to shoot them, even without the intention of killing them? Were there less lethal methods that the IDF could have used in Magdal Shams to keep the protestors from crossing the border?

I'm no fan of the current Israeli government, but it seems to me that it's caught here between a rock and a hard place, without really good choices.

Jewish Voice for Peace and Divestment from Israel

2011-06-02T18:02:00.000-04:00

Divest This! just posted about the latest failure of divestment activists in the U.S. - the attempt by Jewish Voice for Peace to place a shareholder resolution on the ballot of TIAA-CREF regarding several companies that do business with or are situated in Israel - Caterpillar, Elbit, Northrop Grumman, Veolia, and Motorola Solutions. JVP says about them: "These serve as examples. TIAA-CREF is invested in other companies that proﬁt from the Israeli occupation," thus implying that this shareholder resolution could be the first of many that would require TIAA-CREF to divest from a wide variety of companies that do business in Israel.

The proposed resolution would have required TIAA-CREF to engage with these companies about their activities in Israel, and if they didn't stop "profiting from the Israeli occupation" within the next year, to divest from them. TIAA-CREF wrote to the Securities and Exchange Commission informing it that the resolution would not appear on the ballot, and the SEC informed it that there would be no action taken in response to the non-appearance of the resolution. See No-Action Letter for the text of the SEC's letter. An article at Social Funds online provides links both to the TIAA-CREF letter to the SEC and the JVP letter with the proposed sharehold resolution (they are downloads from the SEC website).

TIAA-CREF - the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association/College Retirement Equities Fund - is the largest retirement fund for college and university employees in the US. My retirement funds are invested with TIAA-CREF. CREF has divested from investments in the past for political reasons - for example, they divested from several non-US oil companies doing business in Sudan because of the ongoing genocide in Darfur. This was based on the "TIAA-CREF Policy Statement on Corporate Governance" - "[TIAA-CREF] may, as a last resort, consider divesting from companies we judge to be complicit in genocide and crimes against humanity, the most serious human rights violations, after sustained efforts at dialogue have failed and divestment can be undertaken in a manner consistent with our fiduciary duties." (Quotation taken from the letter sent to the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 22, 2011, requesting permission not to consider the JVP proposal at this year's upcoming shareholder meeting).

The reasons that TIAA-CREF put forward for rejecting the shareholder resolution are very interesting, in my opinion, because they point out how biased and partial the JVP resolution is: "The Proposal advocates one side in a highly controversial and complex geopolitical dispute, and makes assertions of immoral and illegal conduct that are subject to widespread disagreement." The letter also points out that there is no consensus in the United States supporting divestment from companies that do business with or in Israel: "In this connection, it is instructive to compare the Proposal with the human rights situation in Sudan, where public attention and debate led to the passing of legislation by the United States government, condemnation by the United Nations, and widespread divestiture by a broad spectrum of university endowments, public pension funds and other entities. By contrast, the United States has vetoed proposed resolutions in the United Nations Security Council that would have supported condemnation of the activities at the heart of the Proposal."

The TIAA-CREF letter also accuses the JVP resolution of presenting accusations without a factual basis and of falsely attributing a quotation to a 2011 TIAA-CREF investing report (in other words, accusing JVP of making up a quote and attributing it to TIAA-CREF).

The Proposal includes factual assertions that are, at best, highly controversial and subject to widely differing views as to their accuracy and implications and, at worst, on their face untrue and contrary to positions taken by the United States government. As discussed above, the Proposal makes these statements in connection with asking shareholders to take sides on a complex, controversial geopolitical dispute. CREF could not include the Proposal and these asserted facts without a response. However, CREF does not believe it would be possible to provide, in the 2011 Proxy Materials, a fair and balanced presentation on these facts and issues that would provide a basis for shareholders to reach an informed view on this controversy and the merits of the Proposal. Even if it were possible to provide a balanced discussion of the facts asserted, CREF does not believe that the Commission's proxy rules are intended to subject issuers to the severe burdens and expense of attempting to make their proxy materials a full and fair forum for debate on Middle East politics.

In addition, the Proposal materially mischaracterizes CREF's beliefs and policies relating to activities of its portfolio companies in a manner that is likely to be confusing and misleading to CREF shareholders.

I am glad that TIAA-CREF has decided not to consider the JVP shareholder resolution, and I hope that they continue to reject such proposals.

Reactions to UCU Congress motion on antisemitism

2011-05-30T19:49:00.001-04:00

From the Jewish Chronicle:

By Martin Bright, May 30, 2011

The Universities and Colleges Union has voted to distance itself from the European Union's working definition of antisemitism at its annual congress in Harrogate. Delegates overwhelmingly supported the move on the part of the union's leadership, which believes the definition from the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia prevents open discussion of Israel. The union has a history of anti-Israel activism and on Sunday voted through a boycott motion. The definition includes any attacks on the Jewish people's right to self-determination.

Last week, the Board of Deputies, the Jewish Leadership Council and the Community Security Trust wrote to the union and the Equalities and Human Rights Commission urging a rethink on the issue. The Jewish organisations urged the union to adopt the definition of racism contained in the Macpherson report on the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence. This defines a racist incident as one which is viewed as such by the victim or a third party. EHRC chair Trevor Phillips wrote back saying he was surprised the lecturers' union had not consulted him before taking action on the issue. Jeremy Newmark, chief executive of the Jewish Leadership Council said: "After today's events I believe the UCU is institutionally racist."

Sarah AB at Harry's Place:

Although the result was fully expected, it was still extremely depressing to read David Hirsh’s report of the debate which has just taken place at Congress.

Fair Play Campaign Group:

Today, UCU voted to reject the EUMC working definition of antisemitism, leaving nothing in its place.

David Schraub at the Debate Link:

The UCU, perhaps embarrassed over continuing allegations that it harbors a culture of institutional anti-Semitism, has finally agreed to investigate complaints from Jewish members and a torrent of resignations by Jewish academics.

Just kidding! Actually, they just decided to redefine the meaning of anti-Semitism itself, rejecting the commonly held EUMC definition (which affirms the possibility -- though, of course, not the inevitability -- that criticism of Israel could constitute anti-Semitism) in favor of, well, it appears in favor of no definition at all. So I guess it's not a "redefinition" of anti-Semitism so much as an erasure of it entirely -- which, when you think about it, is at least more in line with the UCU's general practice.

From the World Union of Jewish Studies (WUJS):

The World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS) condemns the British University and College Union (UCU) in the wake of its passing a motion rejecting the European Union Monitoring Committee’s (EUMC) definition of anti-Semitism. This definition of anti-Semitism is used on a day-to-day basis by the National Union of Students to combat anti-Semitism, as well as by every major British Jewish communal body.

WUJS Chairman Oliver Worth said; “The UCU has consistently shown a total disregard for the welfare of Jewish students over an extended period of time. WUJS completely rejects the assertion that Jews cannot be trusted to define the ways in which they feel discriminated against, and that the Jewish community is incapable of defining anti-Semitism. The University and College Union stinks of institutional anti-Semitism, and as an organization that exists to protect Jewish students all over the World, we are deeply, deeply concerned.”

University and College Union, UK, endorses antisemitism

2011-05-30T12:34:00.002-04:00

David Hirsh live-blogged the discussion and vote today in the UCU Congress to reject the EUMC definition of anti-semitism. Very depressing.

(From his report) Sue Blackwell on the EUMC working definition:

Sue Blackwell to propose the motion against the EUMC. definition adopted by NUS, parliamentary inquiry, US State Department. In Jan 2010 Denis Mcshane tried to have Azzam Tammimi banned from speaking. [Tammimi is Hamas's guy in London - DH] Blackwell goes on, McShane argued that an external speaker should be rejected if they have a history of antisemitic language in line with the EUMC…” EUMC comes from the American Jewish Committee, European Jewish Congress, self confessed lobby groups for Israel. Ken Stern, author of EUMC is deeply concerned about “politically based antisemitism” otherwise known as antizionism which treats Israel as the classic Jew…. antisemites seek to qualify israel from membership of the community of nations.” In other words, if you are for a boycott, you are an antisemite. These influences are evidenced by American spellings in the document. Definition is not fit for finding Real antisemitism but is ideal for those who want to blur boundaries between antisemitism and antizionism.

Where to start with this incoherent verbiage in favor of antisemitism? Because the definition has American spelling it should be rejected? American and European Jewish defense organizations exist solely to lobby for Israel? Blackwell is deliberately ignoring the bloody history of antisemitism (how she can, as a European, escapes me!) which necessitates the existence of such groups as the AJC and EJC! What is "real antisemitism" to Blackwell? Since she's opposing the use of the EUMC definition, what definition does she propose instead? From reading Tony Greenstein's repulsive response to the Engage report of the debate, I get the feeling that only someone like Gilad Atzmon qualifies as a "real antisemite" to these people (and I suspect that for some of them even Atzmon, who spouts classic antisemitic rhetoric, is not antisemitic).

(From Hirsh's report) Ronnie Fraser's opposition to the UCU motion:

I, a Jewish member of this union, am telling you, that I feel an antisemitic mood in this union and even in this room.

I would feel your refusal to engage with the EUMC definition of antisemitism, if you pass this motion, as a racist act.

Many Jews have resigned from this union citing their experience of antisemitism. Only yesterday a delegate here said ‘they are an expansionist people”. It is difficult to think that the people in question are anything other than the Jews.

You may disagree with me.

You may disagree with all the other Jewish members who have said similar things.

You may think we are mistaken but you have a duty to listen seriously.

Instead of being listened to, I am routinely told that anyone who raises the issue of antisemitism is doing so in bad faith.

Congress, Imagine how it feels when you say that you are experiencing racism, and your union responds: stop lying, stop trying to play the antisemitism card.

You, a group of mainly white, non-Jewish trade unionists, do not [have] the right to tell me, a Jew, what feels like antisemitism and what does not.

Macpherson tells us that when somebody says they have been a victim of racism, then institutions should begin by believing them. This motion mandates the union to do the opposite.

Until this union takes complaints of antisemitism seriously the UCU will continue to be labelled as an institutionally antisemitic organisation.

It’s true that anti-Zionist Jews may perceive things differently. But the overwhelming majority of Jews feel that there is something wrong in this union. They understand that it is legitimate to criticise Israel in a way that is, quoting from the definition, “similar to that levelled to any other country’ but they make a distinction between criticism and the kind of demonisation that is considered acceptable in this union