'It's dangerous inside and outside'

An AP reporter who lives in Gaza, Ibrahim Barzak, reports on the current horrendous fighting in Gaza between Fatah and Hamas:

With battles raging outside my building, and my windows blown out by bullets, I sit in a dark hallway outside my apartment with my wife and baby. It's dangerous inside and outside.

Today I have seen people shot before my eyes, I heard the screams of terrified women and children in a burning building, and I argued with gunmen who wanted to take over my home.

I have seen a lot in my years as a journalist in Gaza, but this is the worst it's been....

There have been clashes between Hamas and Fatah before, but there are dangerous new elements this time. Now they are arresting or even shooting people for the way they look. If you have a beard, you might be arrested by Fatah security for looking Islamic. If you have a chain around your neck or on your arm, Hamas gunmen might shoot you because you look secular....

I saw several people shot right in front of my home today. I'm preparing myself for even worse violence.

$25,000 for what?!

A local Ithaca man who has been recently diagnosed with rectal cancer is trying to raise money for an "alternative" cancer treatment called the "Gerson Method." The article in the Ithaca Journal about this story is not very well written, so it's hard to tell if he's also planning to use conventional cancer treatment methods like chemotherapy or radiation therapy. (I certainly hope he is!) This alternative method requires him to go to the Baha Nutri Care clinic and pay $25,000 for the privilege, so he and his wife have organized a benefit tonight to help him pay his expenses.

So, what is this "Gerson Method" and does it have any legitimacy in the treatment of cancer? According to the article, it is a nutritional method that uses coffee enemas, "which are said to stimulate immune functioning." The passive voice is a wonderful thing - who is saying that they stimulate immune functioning and is there any evidence to support this assertion? Clearly, the reporter responsible for this article did not do any research to find out what this method was and whether it was reputable, but as I found out quickly, it's not too hard to find out that this is a wholly dubious treatment.

From what I can tell from a rather cursory websearch, this method will not cure rectal cancer, and if it is used instead of the usual methods, it will endanger the man's life by postponing effective treatment. A physician blogger known as Orac tells a sad tale about a patient who came to him with orange skin. It turns out he had been diagnosed with rectal cancer, but rather than having surgery, had begun a nutritional treatment that involved coffee enemas and megadoses of carrot juice (hence, the orange skin). His treatment was based on a program designed by Dr. Max Gerson.

Orac describes this treatment as follows:

The basis of this "therapy," developed first by Max Gerson, MD back in the 1940's and 1950's, then continued by William Kelley, DDS in the 1960's, and still practiced today by Nicholas Gonzalez, MD, is a belief that all cancers come from a deficiency of pancreatic enzymes, which supposedly allows cancer cells to grow. By the "concept" behind this, cancer grows and metastasizes because there is lack of cancer-digesting enzymes in the body. The solution is, supposedly, is to get pancreatic enzymes to the place where cancer is growing, in a concentration high enough to stop growth, but not so high as to cause too rapid production of "toxins" from tumor breakdown. Consequently, the treatment consists of "detoxification" with coffee enemas, which supposedly help flush the waste products of tumor cell breakdown out of the body; dietary manipulations; ingestion of pancreatic enzymes; and megadoses of supplements and vitamins, like carrot juice. The original Gerson diet required more than a gallon a day of juices made from fruits, vegetables, and raw calf's liver, but there are many variants.

This treatment does not do anything for rectal cancer, and because the patient had postponed surgery for over a year, by the time he came back to Orac the tumor had increased greatly in size and the operation required to treat it was much more difficult, and his chance of surviving the cancer was much lower. I hope that the Ithaca man does not postpone an appropriate cancer treatment out of the mistaken hope that the Gerson treatment will actually help him.

An exhaustive debunking of the Gerson diet and its coffee enemas can be found at Unconventional Cancer Treatments: Dietary Treatments. This is taken from Unconventional Cancer Treatments, published in September 1990 by the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress, pp. 44-51. A more recent source of information can be found on the website of the American Cancer Society: Gerson Therapy.

Jimmy Carter, again

Jimmy Carter recently met with a group of "rabbis, Christians and Muslims organized by Michael Lerner." While I'm not a fan of Lerner, it sounds like he gave Carter some valuable criticism of his recent books and statements (whether Carter really received it is another questions).

In his e-mail, Rabbi Lerner said he “invited eight rabbis, two nationally respected leaders of the Muslim world, several ministers and activists in the Christian world, several professors, and leaders in the Network of Spiritual Progressives and in Beyt Tikkun Synagogue, as well as Mitchell Plitnick, the national director of Jewish Voices for Peace, and one of the founders of Brit Tzedeck ve’Shalom.” Four Reform rabbis declined the invitation, he wrote, citing political differences.

Most of the hour-long meeting between Carter and the group, and a later one-on-one meeting between Carter and Rabbi Lerner, was spent discussing the fallout from Carter’s book. The rabbi said some critics were won over, and some asked Carter how they could help him spread his message.

Rabbi Lerner, who strongly advocates a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, generally supports the book’s thesis — that inequities between Jews and Arabs on the West Bank hamper peace efforts — but said he is not without disagreements, which he expressed in the meeting.

“It’s a mistake to use the term apartheid,” Rabbi Lerner said Tuesday. “It’s incendiary and really has the opposite effect to what he wanted, which is to have a serious discussion about Israel.”

Rabbi Lerner also faulted the book as lacking historical context. “It was a big mistake not to focus on the role that Arab states played before the creation of the state in relation to keeping Jews out of Palestine in the ‘30s and ‘40s when Jews were being murdered in Europe. They played a significant role in convincing Britain to impose a blockade … They had incurred a moral guilt that needed repentance. The failure to discuss that was in my mind a significant failure of the book.”

Further, Rabbi Lerner said Carter should have scrutinized Arab rejection of the 1947 Partition Plan and “didn’t give adequate attention” to the fears of modern Israelis generated by terror attacks.

Another important topic of discussion was the relationship of Christian Zionists (particularly right-wing ones who belong to conservative churches) to Israel and Jews. Apparently Carter, who is a Southern Baptist, is trying to get his denomination to be more open to criticism of Israel while at the same time affirming Judaism as a legitimate path to God, so that Jews need not convert to Christianity in order to be saved. Both of these strike me as a tall orde, especially the latter, since the Southern Baptists support such groups as Jews for Jesus, whose goal is to convert Jews.

“Carter described his efforts to counter the extreme right-wing Christian Zionists, and his efforts to help the Baptists understand that the real way to be allies to the Jews is not by giving unconditional support to the current government of the State of Israel,” Rabbi Lerner announced in an e-mail to supporters after the meeting. He said the comments were on the record, taped and would appear, in part, in Tikkun this summer.

In a phone interview from California, the rabbi said Carter, a devout Southern Baptist, “has been involved and continues to be involved in theological debate within the American Baptists on the issue of how best to serve Jewish interests …

“He pointed out the strong connections between Christian Zionism and the desire to push the Jews eventually toward converting to Christianity or burning in hell. He pointed out that the Christian Zionist view is part of that general theology that essentially views the Jews as an obstacle, not as friends, but temporarily views the Jews as friends in the process of bringing back Jesus and at that point having all of us convert .”

I am also very concerned when evangelicals hold to a theology that leads to their looking forward an end of days scenario where Jews will return to Israel only to be slaughtered on a massive scale by enemies led by Russia, and a remnant will become Christians. This does seem to be the basis for the support that some evangelicals give to Jews and Israel - because we play a crucial role in their end-time plans.

On the other hand, I have also met other evangelicals who seem much less apocalyptic in their thinking, who are curious about Jews, are interested in learning more about Judaism, and support Israel as the state of the Jewish people. (See Liza's account of her recent trip to the U.S. where she encountered an enthusiastic evangelical supporter of Israel). I think it's really a mixed bag, but that it is important for the Jewish community to be careful with whom we ally ourselves. I don't think it should be done on a one-issue basis (only support for Israel), but we should consider carefully a range of issues, including social and political issues here in the United States as well.

Ray Hanania on Israel/Palestine

Ray Hanania on the Mideast Youth website has a very interesting posting on the upcoming demonstration in Washington to commemorate the 40th year of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and to call for an end to the occupation.

This June marks the 40th anniversary of the Six-day war when Israel defeated the combined Arab armies and occupied the West Bank, Arab East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.

To commemorate the event, pro-Palestinian supporters including ultra-leftist Israelis and American Jews have organized a rally in Washington June 10 –11.

But, a war of words has erupted between protest organizers and moderate Israelis and pro-peace American Jews that touches on the heart of how pro-Palestinian groups are helping to undermine rather than help the peace movement.

The protest is organized by two powerful yet loosely structured networks called “the U.S. Campaign to end the Israeli Occupation” and “United for Peace and Justice” who contend the rally should “only” focus on pressuring Congress to stop supporting Israel’s policies.

They do not want to lose the support of the more extremist pro-Palestinian groups who advocate the “One-State solution,” which is the latest in a long line of creative strategies to destroy Israel and undermine peace based on compromise.

Two Israeli and American Jewish leaders who advocate the “Two State solution,” Uri Avnery and Rabbi Michael Lerner, challenged the protest in the May/June issue of Tikkun Magazine (www.tikkun.org). They argue that the failure of protest organizers refusal to denounce the wrongs of both sides and offer a reasoned political settlement only strengthens the extremist Palestinian and Israeli elements who continue to fuel the occupation and the conflict.

Hanania agrees with Avnery and Lerner and argues that:

Avnery and Lerner argue that in order to be effective and achieve its goals, the peace movement must disassociate itself from extremists who use peace demonstrations as a cover for extremist policies like advocating the “One-State Solution.”

There is a sad truth in the pro-Palestinian movement. It is dominated by a small group of fanatics who use intimidation to silence moderate voices. They exploit Palestinian suffering to augment the hate against Israel and Jews, and advocate Holocaust Revisionism and anti-Semitism. They say they support peace but all they do is bash Israel and close their eyes to Palestinian crimes against Israel.

He says:

The correct and principled strategy is to denounce the Occupation and denounce those who reject compromise based on Two-States. They should denounce Hamas and suicide bombings and the use of violence against Israeli civilians just as strongly they denounce the brutality of the Israeli military occupation against Palestinians.

Don’t just denounce the Wall and the expansion of settlements, denounce the refusal of the current Palestinian government to embrace the fundamental principles of the only solution that will result in both sides winning.

They should speak out when Israelis are killed just as strongly as they speak out when Palestinians are killed.

I agree with everything he says, and have the same discomfort with groups like United for Peace and Justice and the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. I certainly want the occupation to end, but I don't want Israel to end - and Israel is not coterminus with the occupation. It is groups like this that increasingly make me feel like there is no room in the middle, between them and the right-wing elements of the American Jewish community who think that our salvation lies with the Christian Zionists (like Pastor John Hagee who spoke to an enthusiastic crowd at the most recent AIPAC conference in Washington). (For more information on Hagee and his organization, "Christians United for Israel," see Jews on First).

Progressive/moderate blogs on Israel

I've been wondering if there are any blogs whose main subject (whether written by Israelis or others) that are somewhere in the middle politically on Israel, tending to the left - i.e., center-left. I have quite a few Israeli blogs on my blogroll - most don't touch much on Israeli politics, and the ones that do, tend to be fairly right-wing. The blogs I've seen that are left-wing on Israel are much too left-wing for me. I'd love to receive some suggestions for blogs to read on Israel that are both supportive of Israel and also critical of the occupation, calling for a two-state solution and displaying compassion for people on both sides of the conflict.

Jimmy Carter at Berkeley

Amos of Kishkushim reports on Jimmy Carter at Berkeley. It's an interesting account of his speech, making Carter sound much more moderate (and in some ways ill-informed) than I had previously thought. (Ignore the bitter argument in the comments to the post, however - it's almost entirely irrelevant to the post itself).

On another note, Israeli politics certainly is interesting these days, after the Winograd preliminary report was released on the conduct of the Lebanon war last summer. Amir Peretz, the defense minister, will be stepping down when the Labor party has its primaries in about a month. It's anybody's guess how long Olmert can hang on. I find it hard to get excited about any of his possible replacements. If there are new elections, Bibi Netanyahu has a pretty good chance of winning - and he was a disaster the last time he was prime minister. Barak may run (Labor). He was also not much of a success. I kind of like Tzipi Livni, but perhaps this is because I don't know enough about her. And Peres, who would I'm sure dearly love to be Prime Minister again, would have no chance in an election. It will be an interesting summer in Israel.

Protesting Iran

Given the negative posts that I've written about the behavior of the Iranian regime and its president, you might think that I'd be in favor of kicking it out of the UN, as called for by a recent protest (April 17) at the United Nations organized by Rabbi Avi Weiss and his organization Amcha. Steg attended the demonstration and provides a detailed account and lots of photographs. I feel ambivalent, however, because I've been reading a couple of Iranian blogs - one written by Esther, an American woman married to an Iranian and now living in Tehran (View from Iran) and another written by Arash, an Iranian who is now studying in Canada (Kamangir). Both of them are quite critical of the regime (perhaps Arash is more critical), but they both obviously love the country. I despise the Iranian regime, and think that it is a threat to Israel, especially if they manage to make nuclear weapons, but I'm not sure that calling for throwing Iran out of the UN is really a worthwhile demand. For one thing, it's not going to happen. For another thing, why should this just be identified as a Jewish issue? For another thing, I wish that the demonstrators had made it clear that they're not interested in the U.S. going to war against Iran.

The thing is that when I read Esther's and Arash's blogs, I stop thinking of Iranians as a monolithic mass, and start thinking of individual Iranians that I might really like, and who are and who will be harmed by sanctions against Iran (which Hillel is calling for - see this news release on their website - Iran Petition). There are already sanctions against Iran imposed by the U.N. because of the intransigence of the regime about their nuclear program - and of course they will hurt the ordinary people of Iran and not the members of the regime. So I'm very ambivalent about them, since I'm starting to think of people whose writings I enjoy being injured by them, not just an undifferentiated mass of people who are an "enemy."

Yom Ha-Atzma'ut

Today we had our IC Hillel Israel Independence Day celebration - a day earlier than Israel (since we have Sunday off). It was fun, although a bit loud (students like louder music than I do). The last band was Pey Dalid, a Jewish rock/reggae band - fun to listen to. On their MySpace page you can listen to four of their songs.

Professor Liviu Librescu z"l

Of all the acts that happened at Virginia Tech on Monday, Professor Librescu's standing in the path of the shooter to save the life of his students is inspiring, but so sad. I don't really know what to say that others haven't yet said. May the memory of the righteous be a blessing for all of us.

Killings at Virgina Tech

Peggy Williams, the president of Ithaca College, sent out an Important Message for the Campus Community on the massacre at Virgina Tech today. I first learned about them when I looked at the New York Times web site this afternoon, when they first reported that about 22 people had been killed. Now at least 33 people are reported dead. It's scary to hear about this - American colleges and universities are open places, and anyone can walk in, unlike Israeli universities which have fences around them and checkpoints with guards. I don't know that I can say anything particularly new about this - I can only imagine the shock and horror the students, their families, the faculty, and the staff at Virgina Tech feel. May they be able to find some comfort in the coming days and years.

Israeli Masorti movement and gay rabbis

Rabbi Einat Ramon, the dean of the Masorti Rabbinical School in Jerusalem, writes in an article in the Washington Jewish Week, Healing heterosexuality within Jewish people, that

Should we, then, deviate from the longstanding and clear perspective on the issue presented by Jewish law and theology? The answer is positive only if our vision is to transcend sexual differences between men and women and blindly follow the modern reality and ideology of gender and family fluidity. As long as there are Jews who advocate that view, they deserve to be able to make their spiritual homes at various rabbinical schools and congregations that promote such an ideal.

Yet, will the spiritual home at Schechter Rabbinical Seminary, for those of us who believe in the complementary difference between men and women, as an opportunity for deeper intellectual and spiritual family and community bonds, be likewise respected by our colleagues in the long run? We hope that the value of unity - not uniformity - of the people of Israel has not disappeared in the face of different ideologies of gender.

It is very disappointing to read such a viewpoint from Rabbi Ramon. It is clear from reading the entire article that her views are heavily influenced by Rabbi Joel Roth, who was her teacher at JTS. Rabbi Ramon, however, was the first Israeli woman ordained by JTS, and certainly in the past has expressed a far more feminist vision of the relationship between men and women.

In an article published in the book Life of Judaism, edited by Harvey Goldberg, she spells out the ways that she and her husband rewrote the traditional ketubah to spell out a broader range of obligations of both parties (unlike the traditional ketubah, which only spells out the obligation of the husband to the wife, and assumes what the wife's obligations are to be). For them, kiddushin was an act of mutual consecration, not an act of a man acquiring a wife by transferring a ring. She justifies this rewriting of the ketubah by recourse to Mordechai Kaplan's concept of "reevaluation" - clarification of the values and religious and psychological needs that a particular observance required in the past, and an adaptation of the observance and creation of a modern halakhah that remains faithful to those needs and values, as well as to modern sensibilities. It seems that she no longer holds to the values she wrote about so passionately in this article, which is a step backward for women, feminism, and certainly the role of gays and lesbians in the Israel Masorti movement.

Later thoughts: Since both JTS and the University of Judaism rabbinical school have decided to admit gays and lesbians into their rabbinical program, how will they be greeted when they go to Israel for their obligatory year of study at Machon Schechter? Will they be shunned by Rabbi Ramon and the other faculty, or the Israeli students? Will they be forced back into the closet? Will they be given aliyot or counted in the minyan? I wonder if Chancellor Eisen of JTS or Rabbi Artson of the UJ have communicated with Rabbi Ramon on this issue?

Today

Today is one of those moist, rainy, Ithaca days that we get so many of. The daffodils, tulips, and forsythia are just about to bloom if we ever get a couple of warm days. The weather forecast is for a big snowstorm, but it's certainly not happening yet. The birds are out and singing - I have a cardinal who sits in the fir tree between my house and the next, who sings out vigorously, and I hope avoids being eaten by my cat, whose ability to run up the trees is impressive. I walked down the street to Gimme! coffee to sit and drink a mocha and grade papers. As I walked over the bridge at Cascadilla St. the stream was racing along towards Cayuga Lake. Gimme! was full of academic looking folk - I sat down and sipped my mocha and someone who taught computer science sat down across from me and read his New Yorker. Further in, several people crouched in front of their laptops, and one man wrote comments on a paper. It looks chilly outside, but nonetheless there are the sights and sounds and smells of spring about to pop.

New York to Paris

Normblog has pointed out a highly amusing feature of Google Maps. See New York to Paris for directions on how to get from New York to Paris. I find that the same directions work for New York or other American cities to London and other European destinations, but not across the Pacific Ocean. According to Google, it should take about 29 days 21 hours to drive from New York to Warsaw. What is wrong with this picture?

The Forbidden Gospels Blog

I just discovered The Forbidden Gospels Blog, written by April DeConick, professor of biblical studies at Rice University and founder of the Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism section of the Society of Biblical Literature. There's a very interesting discussion going on now about the Jewishness of Jesus. April writes:

It has only been in the last eight or ten years, as far as I can tell, that scholars as a collective voice have been reacting to this problem in their publications on the historical Jesus, demanding that we take seriously the obvious - that Jesus was Jewish. Jesus as a Jew is not just another agenda-driven "construct" as some have been suggesting (this really is a hyper-post-Modern stance). Being Jewish was Jesus' self-identity, and it has taken us two thousand years to admit it and talk about what it means. No amount of pressing the button on the "diversity" and/or Hellenization of early Judaism is going to erase the fact that for Jesus the Torah and prophets were his scriptures, the Temple his cult, Yahweh his god, and the coming of God's Kingdom his hope. Jesus as Jewish is probably the most essential (and dangerous) idea that I can think of.

Susannah Heschel has written a fascinating book on Abraham Geiger, who already in the 19th century constructed a Jewish Jesus, seeing him as a Pharisee who came to reform Judaism. He also denounced the anti-Judaism of Christian scholars of Judaism. It is interesting that Geiger's arguments (and those by other Jewish scholars of Jesus) are finally getting their just due.

Israel

I just bought my plane ticket for travel to Israel this summer. I'll be in Jerusalem for two months, doing research and I hope finishing a first draft of my book. This may be too ambitious a goal, but I'm going to try to do it. Tentative title: Angels' Tongues and Witches' Curses: Women in Early Jewish Magic and Mysticism.

Fateless

I just went to a couple of movies sponsored by FLEFF - the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, which is run by people at Ithaca College. The first movie was Fateless, after a book by Imre Kertesz, the Nobel Prize winner (in literature). I was fooled by the description given of the movie, which gave the impression that it focused on a Jewish boy's experiences (Gyurgy Koves) in Budapest after he had returned from imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps. Actually, most of the movie shows his experiences under Nazi rule. It begins by showing the goodbye given to his father just before he is going to be taken away to a forced labor camp. (He never saw his father again - he died in Mauthausen). Then Gyurgi has to go to work in a factory. One day on his way to work the bus he is riding is stopped by a Hungarian policeman, and all those wearing the yellow star are taken off.

This is the beginning of his journey to the camps - first to Auschwitz, then to Buchenwald, and finally to Zeitz. For most of the story detailed in the movie he is in Zeitz, where we see him become more and more drawn and emaciated until he almost dies. These scenes are beautiful and disturbing - and I would think they are far more realistic (and much less sentimental) than Schindler's List. He is then sent to Buchenwald to be cremated (because Zeitz does not have a crematorium) - although he is not dead yet. He ends up somehow in a hospital ward (at least that's what it looks like) be taken care of. As I watched the movie I thought this must have happened after the Americans liberated the camp, but apparently this took place in Buchenwald, somehow, before the liberation. He is there when the Americans liberate the camp, and there is a scene showing his encounter with an American Jewish officer who urges him not to return to Budapest, but to go to another country and apply for entrance to the United States.

Instead, he does return to Budapest, and searches for his father. He goes back to his old apartment, but another family is living there now and a woman opens the door just a little at his buzz and then closes it on him. He goes to the next door, and at first he is turned away, but then it turns out relatives of his live there - who were never sent to the camps. This is when he learns of his father's death. All of the people he meets in Budapest say the right things - how horrible and dreadful it must have been for him - but none of them truly understand what he experienced.

When I saw these encounters it crystallized for me a feeling I had a couple of summers ago when I visited what had been the concentration camp at Terezin, in the Czech Republic - that if one had not suffered that experience, one could really not understand. It was not possible to touch it from the outside. The movie gives the viewer a sense of both positions - both the returning survivor and the friends and relatives whom he is returning to. They have been continuing their lives as before (although they probably suffered something under Nazi rule) but he has had this utter interruption in his life that they cannot understand - and that they really don't want to (and who can blame them?). They still have their own personal concerns - they tell him that his stepmother has remarried. They talk about the business his father used to own. They tell him that his mother is waiting for him. We the viewer have seen his experience in the camps, so we have the feeling that we understand his perspective - although we are actually in the situation of the people he returns to. We were not in the camps - instead, we visit them now, 60 years later, and see movies about them that give us the illusion of experience and understanding. But the barrier to true understanding still remains.

Episcopal Church and gays

There are times when I think of the Conservative movement as being like the Episcopal Church - in its establishment nature and its stuffiness (and I say this as a member of a Conservative synagogue). The Episcopalians have also been confronting the issue of what the place of gay people should be in the Church - whether they should continue to ordain gay priests and bishops, as well as whether to perform commitment or marriage ceremonies for gay or lesbian couples. Now, "Responding to an ultimatum from the leaders of the worldwide Anglican Communion, bishops of the Episcopal Church have rejected a key demand to create a parallel leadership structure to serve the conservative minority of Episcopalians who oppose their church’s liberal stand on homosexuality." Leaders of other Anglican churches had also demanded that "the Episcopal Church refrain from ordaining openly gay bishops and stop allowing blessings of same-sex couples." I have to say that I'm glad to see that the Episcopal hierarchy in the U.S. has rejected these demands. It was disheartening to think that for the sake of unity they would be willing to go along with something so unjust. To see the official statement, go here. One key statement is: "We proclaim the Gospel that in Christ all God's children, including women, are full and equal participants in the life of Christ's Church. We proclaim the Gospel that in Christ all God's children, including gay and lesbian persons, are full and equal participants in the life of Christ's Church. We proclaim the Gospel that stands against any violence, including violence done to women and children as well as those who are persecuted because of their differences, often in the name of God."

Six Days of War

I've been reading Michael Oren's book, Six Days of War, on the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 and its aftermath. It's fascinating and well worth reading, and one of the many things that the book reminded me of was the importance of the Cold War in understanding conflicts between Israel and Arab countries. Another thing that struck me was the rhetoric used by the Soviet officials and spokesmen - talking all about anti-imperialism and revolution and fighting for democracy, when they were actually doing the opposite. Somehow it wasn't imperialism when the Soviets were trying to project Russian power in the Middle East by arming the Syrians and the Egyptians, but it was if the United States backed Israel or the conservative Arab regimes like the Saudis. (And what made the Soviet attempt to project Russian power any more pure than the earlier Czarist attempts to do the same thing?)

And a third thing that struck me was the importance of Soviet propaganda in propagating anti-semitic anti-Israel themes. I have been reading more recently about how Nazi anti-semitism began to enter the Middle East in the 1920s and 1930s, but some of the same themes were then taken up by the Soviets and used by Arab propagandists as well.

Sudanese in Israel

The New York Times reported yesterday that Sudanese in Israel Hope They Have Found a Home. This is a touching story about Sudanese from Darfur who have made their way from Egypt (to which they had fled) to Israel. They have been locked up in Israeli prisons because they came from an enemy country (Sudan) but some of them are finally being released to live on kibbutzim and moshavim.

Yosef Lapid, a former justice minister, noted the parallel with 'the historical curiosity' of German Jews who escaped Hitler, landing in England only to be put in detention camps because they, like today’s Sudanese refugees in Israel, were considered enemy nationals. “I don’t think that the Jewish people can look the other way when such a horrible genocide is being conducted. It is our obligation to be as of much help as we can,” said Mr. Lapid, a Holocaust survivor.

[A group of Sudanese recently were taken on a tour of the museum at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial. They stood silently, some wiping away tears as they looked at photographs of corpses and cases displaying children’s dolls and a mother’s final postcard. “It was very hard to see this, really shocking,” said a 24-year-old man who fled Darfur last year. “It reminded me of my own people. I hope one day we can have a museum like this in Darfur.”]

I remember that this was an issue last summer when I was visiting Israel, and human rights groups were already beginning to agitate for the release of the Sudanese. I hope this continues, and that Israel finds it possible to accept some more Sudanese refugees.

Some more catblogging

I seem to have entered the netherland of the blog world - talking about my cat. So much for politics or religion.... Today was the beginning of our spring break (not that it's actually spring out there or anything - in my opinion, spring in Ithaca actually begins on May 1, which is generally when we begin to see some serious flowers blooming) and I'm visiting my family in Cambridge. On my way, I brought my cat to a new kennel, since the old one has closed down (alas). The new one is in Freeville, about a half hour drive from my home. The poor creature miaowed the whole way there, and then when we finally got to the kennel, he sat in his box looking unhappy. This kennel (which is actually a vet hospital that also boards cats) has a couple of cats living on the premises who were rescued from bad situations - one lacks an eye, the other one lacks a hind leg. The legless cat jumped up on top of my cat's carrier, much displeasing my cat. Then we brought him over to the little room where he'll be living with a number of other cats until next Monday - in such a small space! He'll get out at some time during the day to spend some time in a larger cage with things to play with. Still, he'll be happy when I come to pick him up next week.