#nor do they actually care about our Palestinian neighbors

[hazel2468]

Okay no I need to ask. Jews who throw their lot in with blatant bigots and antisemitic racists-

Do you think it will save you?

Do you think that when they scream for "Zio" blood, they do not mean you? Do you think that when they cheer the rape and kidnapping and murder of Israelis, they do not mean you? Do you think when they come into the inboxes and DMs of random Jews to tell them that they "deserve it" and that the world would be better without Jews in it, they do not mean you? Do you think that when they assault and beat and stab and kill Jews in the name of their so-called "activism", they do not mean you?

They DO mean you. You are not exempt. You will not escape this. No matter how much you throw your own tribe under the bus. No matter how much you swear you are not like those other Jews, the Bad Jews, the Zionists, the Yids, the kikes. No matter how much you get up on stage and disavow your Jewishness to them, no matter how much you wail that you're on their side.

No matter how much you betray your own people. No matter how much of your sibling's blood you have on your hands.

When the time comes. When the people you have been working so hard to please file into that meeting room to discuss their triumph, to sing praises of Jewish blood in the streets.

You will find a hand on your shoulder and a voice saying "Now, hold on a minute, Jew."

[stealth-liberal]

While Jumbler on this site focuses massively on left wing issues and left wing sins (of which Jew Hatred is paramount) I live in a red area, so my life and the lives many other Jews just like me are different.

Jews like us have MAGA nutbags come up to us, apropos of NOTHING, and try to get us to agree with them about the CRAZIEST islamphobic bullshit you've ever heard in your life. For Jews like us, this is the only time right wing antisemites try to do anything other than terrify us or try to bully us out of our homes and neighborhoods, or to bully our children out of the schools. And it's so clearly a trap that they actually think we're stupid enough to fall for, that we might actually play respectability politics for them. That we'll be the "good Jew" that they can point to that they know, so as to defend themselves from accusations of antisemitism or straight being a neo-nazi.

I haven't met a Jew yet who plays along. For Sephardim, MENA, Mizrahi, and Beta Israel Jews... it's so very clear they want them to play "the good darkie" and for many Ashkenazi Jews, it's so clear they want them to twist themselves into knots to prove that they're "white like you". It's a losing game. No Jew can be "the good darkie" enough for them. No Jew can be white enough for them. They will ALWAYS toss us into the fire.

In my city, we have Jews and Muslims, and we don't have the option to tear each other apart. There is an embedded hate element here, and for the most part, we watch each other's backs. It isn't always perfect, but I don't mind watching my Muslim neighbors back, and they don't mind watching mine, and so on and so forth.

Why am I writing about this? Because since the war in Israel began, I have had some stomach churning experiences in my town. Many of them some right wing fuck nugget trying to get me to agree that we should do some sort of violent act towards Muslims in this country because... blah, blah, blah. And when I back away and vehemently don't agree, they practically turn purple with rage and yell at me. I live in a city that Marjorie Taylor Greene visited on her Jewish Space Laser tour. So it's just a day ending in Y for me. It's clear they want to scare me, but I used to be a Marine, don't let the makeup fool you, I can take care of myself easily. That kind of thing doesn't scare me.

But I want to be clear. I hate Hamas with every fiber in my body. I support Israel's right to exist and to defend itself. I do not, nor have I ever hated Palestinians. They're just people, individuals. I do not, nor have I ever hated Muslims. They're just people, individuals. No Muslim that I've ever known has made me feel unsafe, hated, or in any way fearful. I've spent too much of my adult life in areas with small or even tiny Jewish populations to turn away someone who's willing to reach out and watch my back. I think most of the Muslims I know have had the same situations.

So if one more fucking right-wing antisemite/islamaphobe comes up to me and tries to get me to agree to some Muslim hatred nonsense... I swear to G-d, they're getting my hands in their teeth. Same goes for online encounters. Though instead of hands, you'll get blocked and reported.

I have been dealing with intense antisemitism both in my real life town and online. I refuse to add islamaphobia to that shitty cocktail. Go find some other putz, I'm not the one. I'm heartbroken and enraged right now. Don't try me. I'm not your fucking pawn. Jews are not your scape goats nor your pawns.

[ruminativerabbi]

Defending Dr. King’s Legacy

It’s hard to imagine anyone arguing with the notion that freedom of the press will always be among the most basic features of life in any democratic state. And, indeed, ever since December 15, 1791, when the first ten amendments to the Constitution were formally adopted, this has been true with respect to our American republic not merely philosophically but legally as well. That, surely, is as it should be. But, just as freedom of the press exists specifically to permit the publication of even the least popular ideas, so do citizens have the parallel right—perhaps even the obligation—to respond vigorously to published essays rooted in ignorance, fantasy, and a prejudicial worldview. And it is with that thought in mind that I wish to respond to a truly outrageous op-end piece about Israel—and, more precisely, American support for Israel—published in the New York Times last Sunday in which the author appears to have no understanding of ancient or modern history, no sympathy for any of Israel’s security needs, no ability critically to evaluate even the most baseless Palestinian claims about the history of the land, and no interest even in getting the facts straight.  

The author, Michelle Alexander, is formally employed as an opinion columnist at the Times. And her essay, published on Martin Luther King weekend, presented itself as the result of the author’s brave decision finally “to break the silence” regarding the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It’s hard to imagine what silence the author imagines she has boldly broken by daring to criticize Israel viciously and in print—just lately the number of opinion pieces hostile to Israel published by her own newspaper gives lie to that notion easily. Nor was there anything at all new or groundbreaking in her essay, which mostly just parroted the same propagandistic claptrap the enemies of Israel cite regularly to justify their anti-Israel stance. But most outrageous of all was the suggestion that she was somehow keeping faith with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy by finding the courage to speak out against Israel. That last point, then, is the first I will address.

I am personally too young to have been present in 1968 when, just a week before his horrific death, Dr. King came to the annual convention of the Rabbinical Assembly, my own professional organization, and spoke these words:

Peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all of our might to protect its right to exist, its territorial integrity and the right to use whatever sea lanes it needs. I see Israel, and never mind saying it, as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy. Peace for Israel means security and that security must be a reality.

Those were his final remarks about Israel, never revised or updated. How could he have? He was dead a week later! And, with his horrific end, his unqualified support for the right of Israel to defend itself against its enemies entered history as part of his formidable legacy, a legacy that touched on many areas of American domestic and foreign policy and not solely on the questions related to civil rights, non-violent protest, and race relations for which he is justifiably the most famous.

In her essay, Alexander broke no new ground. She seemed ignorant about Israel—about its history, its foreign policy, its long history of one-sided overtures to the Palestinians, its withdrawal from Gaza, and the restrained way it has responded not to dozens or hundreds but thousands of separate acts of terror aimed specifically at the civilian population over these last years alone—and neither did she seem to know, or care, how it was that Israel came to control the West Bank in the first place. But when boiled down to its basics, she seemed unable to move past her sense that the Jews who founded the State of Israel were colonialist interlopers from Europe who were intent on doing to the indigenous Arab population what the Belgians in that same era were attempting to do to the Congolese, the British to the Indians, and the French to the Algerians: seize other people’s land and then ignore the presence of those people other than when it came to subduing them and forcing them to serve their new masters. As I read it, that was the core of her argument.

The fact that the Palestinians have refused offer after offer to negotiate a fair, just peace seems to be unknown to her. Perhaps more to the point, the fact that there is nothing at all preventing the Palestinian leadership from doing what they should have done in 1947 and finally declaring a Palestinian State, then negotiating its borders with the neighbors and getting down to the business of nation building—this too seems not to have occurred to Alexander, who finds it courageous to support the notion of boycotting Israel (and who is paradoxically appalled by the publication of the names of individuals who support the BDS movement, although you would think she would be proud for their names—and her own name—to be known widely in that context). And she certainly has no interest in responding thoughtfully (or at all) to the inconvenient fact that the Arabs, hardly the indigenes, came to the Land of Israel in a series of invasions in the seventh century CE in the course of which they successfully wrested control of the land from its then Byzantine masters. (Nor was the Land of Israel the sole target of the Caliph Umar and his hordes back in the day: the Arab armies, true colonialists precisely in the style of the age of imperialism, also overran modern-day Turkey, Cyprus, Armenia, and most of Northern Africa.) On the other hand, there is every imaginable kind of evidence—literary, archeological, genetic, epigraphical, and numismatic—to support the argument that the ancestors of today’s Jewish people were present in the land in hoariest antiquity and have remained present, one way or the other, ever since. But of that truth, Alexander has nothing at all to say.

It’s true that there have been Arabs living in the Land of Israel for many centuries. But the detail Alexander passes quickly by is precisely that there is nothing at all preventing the outcome she clearly dreams to see: the establishment of a Palestinian state in the Middle East. If they will it to happen, then it will surely be no dream! (I’ve lost track of how many nations already recognize the non-existent State of Palestine as though it were an actual political entity.) Yet all the misery of the Palestinians, so Michelle Alexander, is exclusively the fault of Israel. The Jordanians, who ruled over the West Bank for nineteen years and kept the Palestinians interned in refugee camps, are not mentioned. The extraordinary acts of violence directed against Israel—the tens of thousands of missiles fired at civilian towns and villages within Israel from Gaza, for example—these too are left unreferenced. Perhaps the author considers each of those missiles to constitute a valid expression of political rage. But I would only begrudgingly respect her right such an opinion if she were to write similarly about the people who brought down the Twin Towers on 9/11—that they weren’t terrorists or violent miscreants, just brave martyrs making a searing political statement.  

Alexander makes much of the fact that Martin Luther King apparently cancelled plans to travel to Israel after the Six Day War in 1967. She cites a phone call—but without saying to whom it was made or where recorded—according to which King based his decision on the fear that the Arab world would surely interpret his visit as an indication that he supported everything Israel did to win the war. That King had misgivings about this or that aspect of Israeli military or foreign policy is hardly a strong point—I myself  harbor grave misgivings about many Israeli policies, including both domestic and non-domestic ones—but infinitely more worth citing are Reverend King’s remarks the following fall at Harvard. Some of the students with whom he was dining began to criticize Zionism itself as a political philosophy, to which criticism King responded by asserting that to repudiate the value or validity of Zionism as a valid political movement is, almost by definition, to embrace anti-Semitism: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism!” And King’s final statement about Israel, cited above, certainly reads clearly enough for me!

To take advantage of the freedom of the press guaranteed by the Constitution implies a certain level of responsibility to the facts. To be unaware that Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 is possibly merely to be uninformed and lazy in one’s research. To write about the West Bank as though it were the site of a formerly independent Palestinian state now occupied by Israeli aggressors is either to be willfully biased or abysmally ill informed. But to write about Israeli checkpoints designed to keep terrorists from entering Israel without as much as nodding to the reason Israelis might reasonably and fully rationally fear a resurgence of violence directed specifically against the civilian population—that crosses the line from ignorance and poor preparation into the terrain of anti-Semitic rhetoric that finds the notion of Jewish people doing what it takes to defend themselves against their would-be murderers repulsive…or, at the very least, morally suspect.

I have been a subscriber to the New York Times forever. My parents were also subscribers. In my boyhood home, the phrase “the paper” invariably referenced The Times. (If my father meant The Daily Mirror or The Post, he said so. But “the” paper without further qualification was The Times.) Much of what I grew up knowing about the world and thinking about the world came directly from its editorial and, eventually, its op-ed pages; that the writing in “the” paper was presumed unbiased, informed, and honest went without saying. That, however, was then. And this is now. I haven’t cancelled my subscription. Not yet, at any rate. And I really do believe that people should be free to express even the least popular views in print without fear of reprisal. But when someone crosses the line from harsh criticism of Israel to propose that there is something reprehensible about Israel defending itself vigorously against its enemies—that is where I stop reading and try to calm down by looking at the obituaries or the crossword puzzle instead.

[nataliesnews]

Palestinian and Israeli activists from Combatants for Peace and Mothers 21.3.2022

"Palestinian and Israeli activists from Combatants for Peace and Mothers Against Violence held a theatrical protest today in the Hebron area - wearing white uniforms and holding white umbrellas in place of weapons - calling the Israeli army to stop groups of settlers that are planning to build new illegal outposts across the occupied West Bank later this afternoon.

The activists were trying to show the Israeli soldiers that came to the spot, armed from head to toe, that even cardboard soldiers can protect the Palestinians and stop the planned settlers' crimes.

In the last couple of months, settler organizations have been recruiting funds and volunteers and planning a big operation to take over control of about 10 strategic spots in the West Bank. Though the plan was published widely and left wing organizations tried to alert officials - neither the police nor the army, nor the Shin Bet have made any attempt to stop the organizers and prevent the crimes before they happen.

Today, Wednesday afternoon, the settlers are planning to take over land and erect at least 3 outposts. Together with other peace and human rights organizations we are trying to push the authorities to do their job - to prevent crimes and protect the Palestinians in the occupied west bank from the settlers' violence."

 There were two demonstrations, one by the Rabbis and one by us. I did not go with the rabbis as they were leaving at the hottest hour of the day and said they would  be out all day. Also I did not know what sort of terrain they would be on. We drove in private cars on Road 60 to the village of Saier which I often passed on my way to Hebron. We already saw there a massive army presence…..I don't think even with the Palestinians that we were 150 people. What is so bitter to swallow is that with all the government saying that the settlements were illegal and they would not allow them they came in their thousands and were allowed to do exactly what they wanted. Can you imagine if the Palestinians had done something like that. They would have been mowed down as soon as they started out. Here the settlers were protected by the army, some of whom even helped to carry up all their gear.

 We stopped our cars further down the road and then went back to the site where we had our :"performance'. At first everything was quiet but then Ofer Ohana who is the sheriff of Kiryat Arab and who is a paid provocateur arrived. It is so dispiriting to see how he wanders around at will, comes in between us with the satisfied smirk on his face, photographing us as if to frighten us, how the soldiers receive him as one of them and then when they evidently felt that against the small amount of people that we were they also had to call in the police. And then he goes up to the police, shaking hands with them, slapping them on the shoulders, their great buddy. This same bastard is known for taking his garbage and throwing it on the doorstep of his Palestinian neighbors.

 This is the event the Combatants set up their "checkpoint". Interestingly enough the soldiers left them in peace and concentrated their efforts on those of us who were there as "spectators" including many Palestinians. They kept moving us off the road, claiming that we were blocking the traffic. However, they did let Ohana block the road to the villagers parking his car in the middle of the road so that they could not come through. It was there for a good fifteen minutes before the soldiers "persuaded" him to move, much more gently than they did with us. This same character always  shouts at me that I should be in the grave and I shout back that I would actually rather be there that in a world in which he lives. No soldiers stops him from his cursing and attacking physically or arrests him as they did Anat.

   My si

My sign says  "Be careful, Apartheid area before you."

 As so often, the women soldiers were the worst. They kept designating spots which we were not supposed to cross through and a couple of times even stopped us from crossing the road to where the "checkpoint" was. This is not a road on which there is much traffic either. Mainly just to the villages. At one point I wanted to stand against a cement boulder in the shade and it was just on the designated point and the woman commander told me to go stand further on. I pointed out that there was no shade there and nothing to lean against. One of our women tried to remonstrate with her and I said to her, "Don't. I don't want anything from them." But I said to her that I hope that when she went home at the end of the day to her mother and grandmother that she would look at them and remember.

 But the crowning point was when they arrested Anat Teitlebaum and then tried to make out that she had attacked  them. And pushed her into the jeep with her yellow umbrella which is the sign of Women against Violence.

 Eventually we left

 but went to the police station to which they had taken Anat which is the DCO I go to every week. After  a while most people left and three of us remained. It was senseless for all to wait as we did not know how long they would keep her. I was very tired as I had not slept well the previous night and lay down on the picnic bench in the shade. Charles phoned from America and I told him what had been happening and as I did so I heard someone calling "Natanya" and he said, "I think they have released your friend" and they had. She said she was glad that they had arrested her as she had given them a whole lecture there on what they should be doing as soldiers and not acting as the bodyguards of the settlers and they listened to her and maybe she even got through to a few of them. But the crowning point was when the woman commander remained  behind and apologized to her!!!! The days of miracle are perhaps at hand. She tried to explain to Anat why she had acted as she had. Some small consolation..

 Natalie

[garudabluffs]

Map of Concentration Camps in Italy

List of Italian concentration camps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Italian_concentration_camps

How evil happens

Why some people choose to do evil remains a puzzle, but are we starting to understand how this behaviour is triggered?

READ MORE https://aeon.co/essays/is-neuroscience-getting-closer-to-explaining-evil-behaviour?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=af34be6cf1-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_08_08_01_46&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-af34be6cf1-70417325

It wasn’t just hate. Fascism offered robust social welfare

“The fascist solution ultimately was, of course, worse than the problem.”

READ MORE https://aeon.co/ideas/fascism-was-a-right-wing-anti-capitalist-movement?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=db840944ed-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_08_08_03_52&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-db840944ed-70417325

These are human shields, in the strong and specific sense, and it is Israel that has a history of using them.   OpEdNews Op Eds 8/3/2

Israel's "Human Shield" Hypocrisy By Jim Kavanagh                                       "The conquest of the earth, which mostly means taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look at it too much""-- Joseph Conrad "Heart of Darkness" [h/t William A. Cook]

The Israeli-American (Let's never forget this is a team effort!) slaughter in Gaza is so horrifying that I've been at a loss to find the words to comment on it without letting anger get the better of me. The media coverage of what's happening, dominated by the ridiculous notion that Israel is "defending" itself, is so grotesquely mendacious, hypocritical, and racist (imbued with colonialist ethno-supremacism) that it is hard to know where to begin critiquing it--without, again, becoming enraged.   - Advertisement - For the moment, I'll focus on one particular, insistent meme, constantly being promoted by Israel and its apologists, namely that Hamas is using civilians as "human shields." The idea is that for Hamas to place any kind of military personnel anywhere in or near a civilian neighborhood constitutes using all the civilians in that neighborhood as "human shields." Furthermore, it makes of that neighborhood a legitimate "military" target for devastating Israeli attack, absolves Israel from any culpability for the scores of resulting dead, blown-apart civilians including children, and places all moral and legal responsibility for those victims on the Palestinian resistance fighters who dared appear anywhere near civilians.   So, for example, the personal homes of Palestinian political and military leaders, construed as "command and control centers," are legitimate military targets. If a Hamas functionary lives with his family of five children in an apartment building of 8 stories with 4 apartments per floor, it is perfectly legitimate to bomb that building and kill all 32 families--"human shields," after all--in  order to destroy that "command and control center."                 - Advertisement -                 This "human shields" argument is what allows Israeli officials, as Noura Erakat points out, to "openly admit that they are deliberately and systematically bombing the family homes of suspected militants," killing whole families. It suggests an ethic that supposedly justifies an Israeli offensive which produces 75-80% civilian causalities , 33% of which are children, among the Palestinian population (and somehow renders insignificant the contrasting fact that almost 100% of Israeli casualties from Palestinian resistance operations are military). To hear it in the American media, poor, anguished Israel actually becomes the victim of all these "telegenically dead," deliberately sacrificed, Palestinian "human shields."   American political "leaders" and media pundits universally endorse this pretense of an ethic, or at the least, let it pass unchallenged.   Of course, anyone with an ounce of intellectual or moral honesty would have to accept that such an ethic was universally applicable: Kill by that ethic, die by that ethic.               - Advertisement - As Amira Hass points out, "the [Israeli] Defense Ministry is in the heart of Tel Aviv, as is the army's main "war room." [These are real "command and control centers"] And"the military training base at Glilot [is] near the big mall" And the Shin Bet headquarters [is] in Jerusalem, on the edge of a residential neighborhood." If Israel's claimed ethic were anything other than the flimsiest excuse for its presumed ethno-supremacist license to kill, Israel and its supporters would have to accept that Hamas has at least as much right to fire its crude rockets in the general direction of the Israeli Ministry of Defense as Israel does to blow up homes, schools, and hospitals with its precision weapons--civilian casualties be damned. By Israeli logic and ethic, are not the Israeli civilians near these military facilities "human shields"? When they get killed, should we not sympathize with the anguished Hamas rocketeers who were forced to kill the civilians that Israel cleverly placed in dangerous neighborhoods?   [Actually, unless one is comfortable with colonialism, it's arguable that Hamas has every right  to its attacks, and it's inarguable that Israel has no right to theirs.]   We all know, of course, that there is no intellectual or moral consistency here, only the ethic of ethno-supremacist, colonialist "exceptionalism." Can you imagine the moral outrage and gnashing of teeth on the part of the oh-so-tough-minded American political and media personalities who accept the Israeli "human shields" argument if anyone tried to apply it to hundreds of dead Jewish children? If this were the scene, day after day, for Israeli Jews:   The father is saying: 'Wake up -- I brought you a toy.' (Image by مختلفون mo5talfoon)   PermissionDetailsDMCA But we need to take a step back to see how Israel is deliberately and dishonestly confusing a specific definition of "human shields" with a more general notion of something like "collateral damage" in a way that tries to justify the viciousness of its current massacre in Gaza.   As Brad Parker, of Defence for Children International Palestine, points out: the use of civilians as human shields is prohibited under international law and involves forcing civilians to directly assist in military operations or using them to shield a military object or troops from attack. The rhetoric continually voiced by Israeli officials regarding "human shields" amounts to nothing more than generalisations that fall short of the precise calculation required by international humanitarian law when determining whether something is actually a military object. Israel is using the "human shield" argument in a way that dilutes is specific meaning in international law, and turns it into another catchall bugaboo, used to hinder careful thought and justify the unjustifiable. Israel finds "human shields" everywhere there are civilians in the way the U.S. government now finds "weapons of mass destruction" anywhere there's "an explosive or incendiary charge of more than one-quarter ounce."   It's particularly brazen for Israel to be raising and confusing the "human shields" issue because it is Israel itself which has repeatedly used the specific, prohibited tactic of using children as "human shields" to protect its military forces. According to the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, along with the torture, solitary confinement, and threats of sexual assault toward detained children, Israel is guilty of the "continuous use of Palestinian children as human shields and informants." The report, issued last year, cites14 cases in 3 years.     We're not talking here about some vague notion of endangering children by allowing them to live in a dangerous town. Nor are the accusations limited to namby-pamby UN Committee that  no red-blooded American/Zionist would pay any attention to.  We're talking about specific practices, identified and denounced by the High Court of Justice in Israel, "like the 'neighbor procedure,' whereby neighbors of wanted Palestinians are forced to go into the wanted man's house ahead of troops, in case it is booby-trapped." Here's a picture, from The Guardian in 2007, of Sameh Amira, 24, who--along with his15-year-old cousin Amid, and an 11-year-old girl, Jihan Dadush--was forced to act as a human shield to search homes in Nablus during a search for bomb-making labs. They were forced them to enter apartments ahead of the soldiers, and to search the houses, emptying cabinets and cupboards, in order to protect the most-moral IDF boys from getting hurt. And here's a picture of a 13-year-old Palestinian boy lashed to the front of an Israeli armored vehicle to prevent stone throwers from" What? Damaging the clearcoat? These are human shields, in the strong and specific sense, and it is Israel that has a history of using them.   And, according to a report in Mondoweiss, there is evidence that Israel is using these explicit human shield tactics in the present conflict.  One resident of Khuza, Ayman Abu Toaimah, reports that: "As Israeli invading troops advanced to the village they besieged it and used residents as human shields." Another, Abu Saleem, 56, says: "Israelis claim that Hamas is using us as human shields-- how? This is a lie, we do not see fighters in the streets. It's them, the Israelis who used us as human shields in Khuza'a and Shuja'iyeh. They turned our houses into military posts, terrified residents in the houses." And a third, Abu Ali Qudail, said: "When the ICRC told us that ambulances are waiting us at the entrance of the village from the western side, about 1,000 people rushed to leave their homes, some of which were used as a hideout for Israeli forces."   Here's a good rule of thumb: Every nasty tactic that Israel accuses the Palestinians of using is one that they are actually the masters of. It's called projection, and you'll be understanding the world a lot better if you consider that most of the accusations Israel (as well the United States) makes against its enemies are projections of its own faults and crimes. Do you think for a second that, if there were one piece of evidence as clearly dispositive of Hamas's use of human shields as the pictures above, you would not have seen it all over the news every day?   Corollary question: With all the constant chatter about "human shields," why does none of this factual evidence about Israel's use of the human shield tactic ever enter into the media discourse?   Because American politics and media are in complete collaboration with the colonial savagery that is Zionism, and they do not want to disturb the American public's acquiescence to that. This is a stance that must be refused, with contempt. As Congress approves unanimously and Obama supplies the weapons, no American can think s/he stands in a neutral space, shielded from the nasty effects of the decision s/he is making--whether by resting silently complicit or by speaking up in protest.  

[ruminativerabbi]

Dual Loyalties

I think most of us in the Jewish community take the accusation of “dual loyalty” as a feature specifically of anti-Semitic rhetoric. But the reality is that the insult itself, although always a popular way among anti-Semites to disparage Jewish Americans, has a far more complicated history than taking it “just” as a way of questioning the patriotism of American Jews would make it sound. And the philosophical underpinnings of the idea—the question of whether loyalty to one’s country by definition precludes the possibility of also harboring a deep sense of emotional, financial, or activist involvement in the affairs of some other country—is itself an interesting question to think through.

It is widely understood that the heart cannot love two other persons simultaneously with the exact same level of passion or vigor, and that, as a result, one of the two parties will always be the less loved and one the more no matter how pure one’s original intention to love them both equally well might have been. Indeed, it was the slow insinuation of this idea into our Western consciousness that led to even the most traditional Jews turning away from polygamy despite its scriptural bona fides and instead embracing the monogamous model in marriage. Nor is this just a non-binding instance of a custom falling into gentle desuetude: Rabbi Gershom ben Judah of Mainz formally interdicted polygamy in the year 1240—an amazingly daring move in his day in that it actually made (and makes) it forbidden to obey to least one of the 613 commandments according to the simple meaning of the text, which is surely how Scripture meant for it to be observed—and thus does it remain forbidden and not merely out of vogue for Jews even today.

What is true with respect to the love of another person is also widely understood to be true with respect to the love of one’s country. And, indeed, although fidelity to one’s spouse and allegiance to one’s country are hardly each other’s exact counterpart in every single way, there are features that both clearly do—and should—share. To consider the issue from an American vantage point, for example, I think it is entirely fair to say that the love of country that characterizes the patriotic citizen, rooted as it must be in a deep allegiance both specifically to the foundational ideas upon which the republic rests and more generally to the whole American ethos as it has evolved to our day, simply cannot co-exist with that citizen’s same level of allegiance to some other country and to its institutions and foundational ideas.

But does that concept of patriotic monogamy, so to speak, mean that citizens are somehow being untrue to the country of their own citizenship by caring deeply about, and feeling intensely involved in, the affairs of other nations? Is it an act of disloyalty for someone happily married to a loving spouse also to care deeply about other people—about a neighbor suffering from some terrible illness, say, or about a co-worker suddenly in danger of losing his or her home? Who would say it does? And yet the dual-allegiance derogation—with its implication that one cannot be a truly patriotic American if one also cares deeply about the affairs of another country and is emotionally or even spiritually caught up in that country’s affairs of state—continues to surface like an endlessly recurring infection that simply refuses to succumb until it has done the maximum damage possible…to those whose American patriotism it attempts to sully and, paradoxically, also to those who degrade their own allegiance to our nation’s democratic principles by using it to question the patriotism of others. And, yes, this does seem to be more focused on Jewish supporters of Israel than on others: I imagine Irish Americans care more about Ireland than most other Americans do, but I can’t recall anyone accusing them of disloyalty because of it.

Most recently, this has come up in the wake of a comment of Rashida Tlaib, the newly elected member of the House of Representatives from Michigan, who openly and publicly suggested that people backing a series of pro-Israel bills in the House appear to hear to have forgotten “what country they represent.” The implication of that remark, tweeted out to her 280,000 followers on Twitter, is completely clear in its suggestion that any member of the House of Representatives or the Senate who actively and vocally supports Israel cannot be a truly patriotic American and so should not be trusted to serve in the Congress or imagined invariably to have the best interests of American citizens at heart. (The irony that inheres in the fact that Tlaib is both a Palestinian-American and an outspoken supporter of the Palestinian cause, yet presumably does not see herself as unsure what country she represents, went unnoticed only by some. See below.)

The “dual loyalty” mud has been flung at many others as well over the years. The internment of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans in West Coast concentration camps during the Second World War could only be justified with reference to the fear that, now that war had come, Americans of Japanese descent might reasonably have opted to preference allegiance to their ancestral homeland over loyalty to their adopted one. The 1960 presidential election was marred by opponents of John F. Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, openly wondering if the then-candidate’s true allegiance was to our nation or to the Vatican. There are lots of other examples too, of course. But all have in common the basic notion that caring deeply, personally, and intensely about the security and wellbeing of a foreign state is a form—albeit a minor and unactionable form—of sedition. But is that a reasonable supposition? It is one thing, after all, for the Constitution to require that the President of the United States be a “natural born Citizen,” presumably because of the fear that any citizen who was formerly the citizen of a different country will necessarily harbor in his or her heart the kind of indelible allegiance to that country that would make it impossible to be wholly loyal to this one. When spelled out that clearly, that sounds ridiculous. Or at least to me it does! But to posit that citizens in general, and not specifically those seeking the highest office in the land, are by definition disloyal if they care deeply about the fate or wellbeing of specific other nations strikes me as being infinitely more so.

Two essays published last week spoke directly to this issue and I’d like to recommend them both to you.

Writing on the Jewish Telegraphic Agency website, Andrew Silow-Carroll cited a remark by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis dating back to 1915 in which he could have been addressing himself to Rashida Tlaib directly. “Multiple loyalties,” he wrote, “are objectionable only if they are inconsistent. Every Irish American who contributed towards advancing home rule [i.e., in an Ireland then fighting for its own independence from Britain] was a better man and a better American for the sacrifice he made. Every American Jew who aids in advancing the Jewish settlement in Palestine, though he feels that neither he nor his descendants will ever live there, will likewise be a better man and a better American for doing so.” In other words, caring deeply about an ancestral homeland and feeling a tie of kinship and emotional affinity to its inhabitants is not a sign of disloyalty, much less of sedition, but rather a natural extension of the allegiance we all feel to our extended families. But Silow-Carroll’s comment on that passage is also worth citing: “The Brandeisian notion that ‘multiple loyalties’ make you a better American has guided and justified Jewish activism for Israel even before its founding in 1948. It’s based partly on Brandeis’ theoretical notion that loyalty itself is an admirable and fungible quality, like honesty or sobriety. And it assumes, as Brandeis did famously, that American values, Jewish values and Zionist values are fully aligned.” I couldn’t agree more. To read Silow-Carroll’s piece, click here.          

The other essay was by Alan Dershowitz and was published on the website of the Gatestone Institute. His essay is less about Tlaib herself, however, and more about the anti-BDS legislation whose supporters Tlaib was attacking. (To read the essay in its entirely, click here.) That legislation, intended to make illegal discrimination against entities (commercial or academic or otherwise) that do business with Israel, is being widely attacked in some circles as an attack on the freedom of speech promised all Americans by the First Amendment. He addresses that charge, I think effectively and—for me, at least—conclusively, and then turns his withering gaze to Rashida Tlaib herself and addresses her tweet: “Tlaib argues that ‘boycotting is a right and part of our historical fight for freedom and equality.’ Would she have supported, in the name of equality, the right of white bigots to boycott Black owned stores in the South or Black apartment renters in the North? Would she support the right of homophobes to boycott gay owned stores? Or the right of anti-Muslim bigots to boycott Muslim-owned stores or products from Muslim nations? If she were to support legislation prohibiting anti-Palestinian boycotts, how would she respond to an accusation that she ‘forgot what country’ she represents?...No one has accused Tlaib of forgetting what country she represents when she supports the Palestinian cause, even though Palestinian terrorists, acting in the name of ‘Palestine,’ have killed numerous Americans. Americans of any religion have the right to support Israel, and most do, without being accused of disloyalty, just as Americans of any religion have the right to support the Palestinian cause. It is both bigoted and hypocritical to apply a different standard to Jews who support Israel than to Muslims who support the Palestinian cause.”

What else is there to say? I couldn’t feel myself to be a more patriotic citizen of our great country. My deep commitment to the security and wellbeing of the State of Israel is not solely rooted in the fact that Joan and I own property there, but far more deeply in my conviction that the future of the Jewish people is inextricably tied to the fate of the State of Israel. I can’t even begin to explain why anyone would argue seriously that that makes me less of an American patriot. 

[ruminativerabbi]

Learning to Listen

The Israeli-Palestinian dispute has many unique features, by which I mean qualities that it specifically does not share with similar geo-political disputes and which are features particularly of the parties to it. But there are other features that it does share with other disputes between nations or peoples, into which category I would put those aspects of the problem that are specifically not especially unique to the players involved. I suppose there are probably many different aspects to the endless sikhsukh between Arab and Jew in the Holy Land that could be included in that second category, but I think probably the most prominent of them all—and paradoxically both the most difficult to resolve and, in other ways, also the simplest—is the inability both sides show with remarkable regularity to see the people on the other side of the fence at all clearly. Or to hear them when they speak. Or to listen without prejudice to what they wish to say.

There are circles, as I am well aware, in which even the suggestion that the responsibility for the situation as it has evolved to date could or, worse, should be shared by the involved parties is anathema. I have fallen prey to that line of thinking myself. And although I find some scant comfort in the fact that I was in excellent (and famous) company in that regard, the reality of the situation no longer affords anyone who longs for peace in the region the luxury of listening only to his or her own voice. To describe those willing to listen to dissenting opinions as terminally gullible seems beyond childish at this point: it seems counterproductive and morally indefensible to imagine that peace can ever be made between people who are not prepared even formally, let alone intently, to listen to each other and to respond honestly and genuinely to what the other party has to say. It is certainly so that lots of what people say about the Middle East is nonsense, their arguments baseless blather and their positions intellectually and morally indefensible. The problem is that there’s no way to weigh the worth of other people’s opinions without listening to them carefully, and doing so generously and without prejudice. To do that, however, requires that you at least occasionally stop talking yourself. But that inability to fall silent with someone else speaks turns out, more than slightly paradoxically, to be one of the major things Israelis and Palestinians actually do have in common.

All this by way of introducing to you a very interesting book I finished reading earlier this week, Yossi Klein Halevi’s Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor. Published just last month by HarperCollins, the book is remarkable in several different ways and I would like to recommend it as serious, thoughtful summer reading for anyone who wants to understand—and on a particularly intelligent, reasonable plain—the underlying reasons that the Israeli-Palestinian dispute seems so intractable.

Halevi has framed his book as a series of letters to an unidentified neighbor living in Iswiya, the Arab town on the other side of the separation fence that blocks access to French Hill, the modern Israeli neighborhood adjacent to the Mount Scopus campus of the Hebrew University in which Halevi lives. For readers unfamiliar with the geography of Jerusalem, the basic principle is that, with certain famous exceptions, most Arab villages—including ones inside the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem—and the Jewish communities almost adjacent to them are sealed off from each other, if not precisely by law, then by custom: my own apartment in Arnona is not half a mile from the Arab village of Jabel Mukaber, but I’ve never been there and wouldn’t think of going there—it would be unsafe and unwise—and neither do I know anyone who has ever gone there. That’s just how it is. Yet I see Arab families all the time in the shopping malls in Talpiyot, the neighborhood directly to our west, and no one seems to notice or care. It’s all a little hard to explain, but Halevi’s idea—which I think he manages to carry through successfully—is both to notice and to care…and also to imagine that where people shop contiguously and eat at adjacent tables in restaurants, they could also speak to each other honestly and from the heart…if they felt that there was someone actually listening. A little bit, he’s tilting at windmills. But he’s also taken the remarkable step of having his entire book—this book that I’m writing to you about—translated into Arabic and posted for free download on a website that should be easily accessible to all Israeli and Palestinian Arabs.

The author writes frankly and from the heart. To the Palestinians, he offers the clear message that they are doing themselves a disservice and more or less guaranteeing that almost no Israelis will listen seriously (or even at all, really), when they speak as though the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel began in the nineteenth century and refuse on principle to take the preceding millennia into account, millennia which included centuries of Jewish autonomy in that place and of ongoing spiritual, emotional, and intellectual attachment to it. Indeed, when Palestinian leaders insist—passionately but ridiculously—that the entire Bible is a falsification of history, that there never was a Temple on the Temple Mount, that the Davidic kingdom never existed, that all the archeological evidence that ties the Jewish people to the Land of Israel is bogus and phony, they are more or less guaranteeing that no Israeli with any sense of pride in his or her nation will still be listening after the first sentence or two. But when Israelis, and particularly religious Israelis, wave away the Palestinians as mere interlopers because their ancestors only arrived on the scene a mere twelve centuries ago, they are guaranteeing no less surely that no thoughtful Palestinian born in that place and whose whole sense of identity is tied to his or her national sense of self is going to continue listening after the first few words either.

In other words, what both sides have accomplished magnificently is the discovery and honing of precisely the right kind of code words to use so as to be able to guarantee that no one will actually be listening when you finally do stand up to speak.

Halevi addresses painful, difficult topics in the course of his letters to his unidentified neighbor across the security fence. He talks openly—and passionately—about the way that terrorism has taken its toll not only on the specific individuals who have died as the result of Palestinian terror attacks, but on the national consciousness of Israelis as well. And he also writes, in my opinion remarkably openly, about the specific reasons so many Israelis do not feel themselves able to believe truly that their Palestinian neighbors wish to live in peace. Indeed, when he asks, not guilelessly but sharply and acidulously, why the Palestinians have turned down so many different offers of statehood—at Camp David and at Oslo, but also on other occasions as well—if they truly wish to negotiate a settlement and get on with the work of nation building, he is merely doing his part to hold up his end of the dialogue honestly and candidly.

One review I read suggested that the best way to read this book would be first to read an entirely different one: Hillel Halkin’s Letters to an American Jewish Friend, published in 1977 and still in print. I was in my final year at JTS when that book came out and I remember reading it and feeling both inspired by its argument, yet unjustly marginalized by its conclusions. The book angered me—which I’m sure was exactly the response the author hoped to provoke—but also challenged me to revisit my feelings about living in the diaspora and about my personal relationship to Israel. I recommend the book highly to all my readers, however: here is a truly passionate argument for aliyah that all who wish truly honestly to engage with the Zionist ideal should read.  

For most, it will not be pleasant reading. But political writing at its best is not meant to soothe, but to irritate—somewhat in the way sand irritates oysters into producing pearls—and to allow readers to confront their complacency and address the logical flaws or moral sloppiness in the way they approach the philosophical or political issues that engage them the most passionately. I see that reviewer’s point and second the motion: to read those two books, one after the other, would truly to engage with the twin axes of Israel life: the x-axis of Jewishness which connects Israelis with Jews in all the lands of our dispersion, and the y-axis of rootedness in the land which ties Israelis, whether they like it or not, to the Palestinians who self-define in terms of their own rootedness in that same soil. And for those of us whose hearts beat with Israel, that kind of engagement with the grid can only produce insight into what we all understand is a very complicated situation.  Anna Porter, who wrote a very intelligent review of Halevi’s book for the Toronto newspaper, The Globe and Mail (click here to read it), wraps up her appraisal by noting that “Israel is a very complicated country.” That, surely, we can all agree is true. But books like Halevi’s are attempts to shed more light than heat on the precise issues that make life in the Holy Land so complicated…and to inspire a dialogue, for once, that is rooted in reality rather than rhetoric.

Since I am not a Palestinian, I am presumably not the intended audience for a book entitled “Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor.” Nor will the large majority of people reading this be. Nonetheless, I recommend this to you all wholeheartedly as an opportunity to look out at the world, and the Middle East in particular, through Yossi Klein Halevi’s eyes. Particularly for young people eager to understand their parents’ deep commitment to Israel but unsure of where they personally stand, this book will be an eye-opening, inspiring read.

[nataliesnews]

A school in Palestine

Your children went safely to school. You often drive them there and back. You never had a problem to find a school or to get a permit to buy one. This is how Israel deals with Palestinian children who try to get a basic education. Very, very rarely do Palestinians get permission to build anything Starting with a pen for animals, a toilet or an addition to a building. As for a building it …forget it. And how cares where they go? They do not walk on roads or through the desert…imagine in summer. Often the schooling of the girls is cut short because parents say is it dangerous for girls alone in the desert. We are the people of the book……but better to keep them uneducated as one settlers said….They were created to be our servants”         This Pastoral Palestinian Community Built a School of Its Own. Now Israel Wants to Demolish It

Before the schoolhouse was built, children had to walk seven kilometers each way to get an education. Will the dream be destroyed by bulldozers?

The schoolhouse in Ras a-Tin.Credit: Alex Levac

Gideon Levy

Alex Levac

Published at 15:00

It’s exactly 12 noon. A little boy bursts out of the teachers’ room holding a heavy iron bell and rings it. The chime of redemption? Not quite. Immediately afterward the doors of the five classrooms open and dozens of boys and girls spill out of them. Schoolbags on their backs, most of them wearing corona masks, they walk in a line down the slope of the verdant valley to their homes – in tents. One “privileged” boy has a ride waiting for him: a mule that’s tied up nearby. He’s from one of the neighboring pastoral communities.

Since the start of the school year in September, the lives of these Palestinian children from the village of Ras a-Tin, east of Ramallah in the West Bank, have been transformed beyond recognition. Until then they had to walk more than seven kilometers each morning to school in the closest village, Mughayir, and then take the same route home – about 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) back and forth in the heat and the cold, in the wind and the rain, and sometimes also in the face of settlers’ attacks along the way. So in late August the community decided to act: It would build its own school.

With the aid of the Palestinian Education Ministry and GVC, an Italian-based European Commission aid organization, the miracle occurred. Residents built a simple brick structure of six rooms – five classrooms and a teachers’ room – covered with a tin roof, situated on a gravel mound. This was the primary school of the village of Ras a-Tin.

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The schoolhouse in Ras a-Tin.Credit: Alex Levac

It’s a very touching sight. The simplicity of the white building; the small, Spartan classrooms that contain only a few children’s work tables, chairs and a whiteboard; the sparkling eyes of the teachers, the enthusiasm of the pupils; the principal who came here after administering a similar institution in another shepherds’ community. Previously most of the children were frequently absent from school, or dropped out altogether, because of the ordeal of the daily trek, but now the attendance rate is high.

This week pupils in the new school learned about equations with an unknown variable.

The real unknown, however, is whether and when the dream will be shattered and the school demolished. The fear is that this heartwarming vision will be a short-lived one, because the occupation authorities won’t let it last. Israel’s Civil Administration, which administers the West Bank, has already issued the demolition orders; the bulldozers are on the way.

First, personnel of the Civil Administration tried to prevent the building’s construction, then they began to confiscate equipment and furniture. Now they are preventing the town from hooking up the teachers’ bathroom to some sort of plumbing infrastructure, in a locale that’s not even connected to the main water or power grids. Inspectors from the Civil Administration show up regularly to make sure no one has connected the plumbing in the meantime so as to make it possible to flush the toilets in the teachers’ bathroom. That’s how far this evil has gone.

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A classroom in Ras A-Tin. Credit: Alex Levac

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An expert opinion written on behalf of the Israeli human rights NGO Bimkon – Planners for Planning Rights by architect Alon Cohen-Lifshitz, which was submitted to the court last month states that the school has tremendous importance vis-a-vis the lives of these pupils.

“For some of them, it is their only possibility to participate in the education system, as it is close to their home,” he wrote. “The school makes it possible for all the children in the community to exercise their basic right – the right to education: for those who never attended school, for those who have dropped out, and also for those who previously had to make their way to a distant school across difficult terrain and who were frequently absent. Demolition of the school will deprive these children” of this opportunity.

According to Cohen-Lifshitz’s document – which will also be submitted to the Supreme Court, following a district court ruling that the school’s demolition can go ahead – in numerous other cases in the West Bank, ways have been found to avoid demolition of a school that has been built without a permit, and special directives to that effect have actually been issued by the military government, citing “regulations authorizing the establishment and exemption from permit for an educational structure.”

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But such exemptions, of course, apply solely to Jewish settlements, not to the other residents of the region. Cohen-Lifshitz emphasizes that the land on which the Ras a-Tin elementary school was built is privately owned and that the Palestinian owner gave the go-ahead for the structure’s construction. In addition, under the Mandatory-era regulations that apply in this area, a school may be built on agricultural lands, even though there is of course no chance they would ever receive a building permit from Israeli authorities in Area C of the West Bank (under exclusive Israeli control).

Cohen-Lifshitz went on to describe what the typical school day would look like should the children be required to return to attending their former school in Mughayir. . “Here we should try to imagine little girls and boys, in the first grade, who need to leave home at 6 A.M. to reach school on time for their first class. These children end their school day at 1 P.M., but will arrive home only at 4 P.M. Their school day thus lasts 10 hours, only half of which is devoted to learning,” the document says, he wrote on behalf of Bimkom.

In the period of the coronavirus pandemic, this predicament is even more acute, as online learning is virtually nonexistent in a community lacking electric power, not to mention computers and internet.

About 300 people, around half of them children or adolescents, live in Ras a-Tin, where their parents make a living raising sheep and growing wheat and other feed grains for them. It is situated next to the Kokhav Hashahar settlement’s rock quarry, itself a gross violation of international law, which forbids occupying forces to mine natural resources in an area under their control. Kokhav Hashahar is located on the ridge opposite.

We are perched above the Jordan Valley. On the surrounding hills settler outposts and mobile homes sprout up like poison mushrooms after the rain. The Israeli residents’ aim is identical to that of the Civil Administration: to strangle and force out the pastoral Palestinian communities in the vicinity and shunt them to the Jericho region – in a reprise of their expulsion in the early 1970s from their previous habitation in the South Hebron Hills.

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 A maths class in Ras a-Tin. Credit: Alex Levac

Israel does not recognize its existence, but the community of Ras a-Tin is relatively well kept, consisting of a group of family tents spread across the hills above a valley where wheat fields bloom after the first rains of autumn. The grain is stored in nearby caves that function as natural granaries. But Israel is out to destroy this way of life.

The abuse here is long-standing. Iyad Hadad, a field researcher for the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, shows us some documents and testimonies that he took from the residents of Ras a-Tin back in 2009, when the campaign to expel them began. The mukhtar, or headman, of the community is Ahmad Ahadishan Kaabana, and we’re sitting with him now on a gravelly area in front of the new school, which is neither a yard nor a playground.

“Free Palestine” declares a sign in childish handwriting pinned to the door of a classroom. Unlike other schools in the Palestinian Authority, they’re afraid to fly the Palestinian flag here. It is evident in only one classroom, on the floor in a corner, leaning against the wall, folded and ashamed. Maybe also frightened.

“We don’t dare hang up even a drawing of a tree here, so you want us to hoist a flag?” says the principal, Nura Azhari, who lives in Ramallah. Before coming here, she ran a school in another shepherds community, near Beit Liqya, west of Ramallah. There, too, a demolition order hangs over the school.

There are 22 “challenged” schools like this across the West Bank at present, under threat of being torn down at any time. Mapping carried out by Bimkom for 260 routes that run between 130 communities like Ras a-Tin in Area C and the schools their children attend, shows that accessibility is poor and difficult. For more than 80 communities, the route to school is longer than two kilometers; for 48, it’s longer than five kilometers, which often must be traveled on foot.

Ras a-Tin residents haven’t felt secure for even one day since moving here in 1971, Kaabana tells us. “They have us in their sights, they don’t leave us alone.”

Several times they have been moved from one place to another, and sometimes they are forced to leave their homes temporarily to allow training exercises by the Israel Defense Forces. They are not permitted to dig wells; they must bring containers of water at high cost. No one even dreams of being hooked up to the water and power grids.

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 The school principal, Nura Azhari.Credit: Alex Levac

When the children attended the school in Mughayir, they were sometimes bused by the PA, but no more than two or three times a week. The situation became more acute during the past two years because of attacks on the children by members of the settler outposts. So the community decided to build its own school, close to home. The revolutionary idea was implemented quickly, because the PA promised to help if land could be made available – and that was contributed to the community by its Palestinian owner. Afterward the mukhtar heard about GVC, an NGO that helps build schools in disadvantaged areas around the world, and the dream of the school materialized.

Construction began on August 20. Eleven days later, on August 31, Civil Administration forces showed up and confiscated construction equipment, bricks, rods and cement. The next day they returned with an order: “Final order for cessation of work, and demolition,” issued by the “subcommittee for construction supervision of the Supreme Planning Council.” The work continued, however, and skeleton of the structure was in place by September 3.

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 School children in Ras A-Tin. Credit: Alex Levac

Civil Administration personnel returned and confiscated the tin sheets that were intended for the roof. They also took the opportunity to make off with four pallets of bricks, 30 chairs and 12 tables. The community’s race against time reached a peak of intensity – three days later, on September 6, the school year was supposed to start.

At first, the pupils sat on the floor surrounded by gray, unplastered walls and no roof over their heads. On September 10, the Israeli forces returned and expropriated more tin sheets, which were already serving as a roof in place of those previously impounded. The forces also took 12 more tables that the PA had provided. In the following days, empty olive oil containers were used as tables.

The Civil Administration hasn’t actually confiscated anything since, but on three occasions teachers and pupils arrived in the morning to find all the furniture from the school strewn on the ground outside. The perpetrators might have been settlers, perhaps the Civil Administration: In Ras a-Tin, people believe there is total identification of the latter with the former, and collaboration between them all.

Administration personnel returned on September 20, this time only to photograph the site. They also came back last week, to do more photography and to check that the toilets were not connected to the water supply. Each such visit of course gives rise to more fear and dread among teachers and pupils alike.

A spokesperson for the unit of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories issued the following response to a series of questions from Haaretz this week: “A petition concerning the allegations [of the residents] was received in our office. The response to the petition will be made to the court, as usual. We emphasize that the Civil Administration’s supervisory unit carries out activities of enforcement against offenses relating to planning and building, this as part of its duty to preserve public order and the rule of law. The enforcement activities, like the confiscations of equipment carried out in the place mentioned, are executed in accordance with its powers and procedures, and also subject to orders of priorities and operational considerations.”

During the period of the coronavirus epidemic, pupils only are at school for four hours a day. The classes are coed and mixed: First, second and third grades are in one classroom, and the same holds for the upper grades too. All told, there are 50 pupils, 30 girls and 20 boys, six teachers, a secretary and the principal. Now it’s girls, who previously hardly attended school because of the distance and the dangers involved in going, who constitute the majority.

Principal Azhari says that with all the fears and anxiety caused by the demolition order, the changes from the period before the school existed have been dramatic. Parents tell her proudly that their children suddenly know a little English. And math. And literature. And suddenly they want to learn. As for the teachers, the principal says, they can’t wait for each new day to dawn so they can come to the school.

[ruminativerabbi]

Possible/Impossible

I was struck by several different things when I read the obituary the other day of Roger Bannister, the first person recorded to have run a mile in under four minutes.

Bannister, who died in Oxford, England, at age 88 last Saturday, achieved world-wide fame for his feat even despite the fact that he wasn’t necessarily the first person to run a four-minute mile, there having been human life on earth for about 200,000 years but the stop-watch only having been invented in 1821. So that leaves about 199,802 years during which no one knows how fast anyone ran and races were won merely by running faster than the other people in the race without anyone knowing anyone’s actual time. Nonetheless, it was considered in its day—and still—a remarkable accomplishment, the doing of something that it was widely thought simply could not be done.

It wasn’t under four by much: his time was 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds. Nor did his record stand for long: the next person to run a mile in less than four minutes, an Australian runner named John Landy, replicated Bannister’s feat just a few weeks later and even managed to shave 1.4 seconds off Bannister’s time. Still, Bannister’s accomplishment was not the momentary blip in the record books it could have been: by the end of the 20th century, the International Association of Athletic Federations certified that the fastest-mile-record was broken no fewer than 32 times, culminating in the 3 minute, 43.13 second mile run in 1999 by a Moroccan runner named Hicham El Guerrouj. Of course, not every runner who runs the mile in less than four minutes breaks the standing record. And, indeed, since Bannister set his record on May 6, 1954, well over a thousand runners have been certified to have run a mile in less than four minutes.

Bannister’s subsequent story is also quite interesting. Realizing, I suppose, that there wasn’t actually any way to earn a living as a competitive runner, but also knowing himself well enough to understand that he wished to pursue a career in medicine rather than in the world of professional or amateur athletics, Bannister went on to attend medical school and from there to become a distinguished neurologist. In 2004, on the fiftieth anniversary of his accomplishment, Bannister was asked by an interviewer if he considered being the first to break the four-minute mile to have been his life’s crowning achievement. Bannister’s response, modest and thoughtful, was that he considered his four decades of medical practice as the great achievement of his life, particularly when the various new neurological procedures he personally introduced were taken into account. In a world that seems so often to value celebrity over mere accomplishment, it sounds at first like a surprising answer. But why should it be? And, indeed, when you think about it carefully, pathetic indeed would be the individual who devotes an entire life to the care of the sick and the development of innovative techniques to cure them, yet who considers all that good to be outweighed by having one single time run a mile really, really quickly.

I write about him today, though, neither specifically because of his death last week nor because of the record he broke per se, but rather because of what the whole incident says about the possibility of impossibility. Or, rather, about the whole concept of impossibility itself.

We could begin by asking where the notion that the four-minute mile was an impossibility came from. It obviously wasn’t true—well over a thousand people have replicated Bannister’s famous achievement since that blustery, damp day in May 1954 at Oxford’s Iffley Road track when he earned his place in the record books—and there obviously can’t have been any actual data to back up such a wholly arbitrary assumption about human ability. Yet it was thought—and, as far as I can see, universally—that no human being could run that fast. Everybody just knew it. Just in the same way that everybody once knew that there was no way to sail west from Europe and end up in India. Or, in a slightly different key, that America would never elect a black president. Or that it would be physically impossible for human beings to travel to the moon and return safely. Or that cars could ever self-drive.

All of those are examples of things that everybody just knew…until somebody decided not just to know it and instead to proceed as though the allegedly impossible was just something no one had figured out yet how precisely to pull off. Taking this thought to its natural conclusion, the great science-fiction author Robert A. Heinlein once wrote that, until it is done, “everything is theoretically impossible. One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.” That more or less sums up what I think too!

As an interesting exercise in the possibility of impossibility, I’ve assembled a list of my three favorite things that everybody just (magically, somehow) knows are impossibilities.

At the top of my list is the notion that peace between Palestinians and Israelis is simply impossible because the Palestinians, having failed to embrace partition in 1947, won’t ever give up their claim to every inch of Mandatory Palestine, which basically makes it impossible for Palestine and Israel both to exist. The Palestinian leadership is not especially flexible, that surely is true. Yet the world is filled with examples of nations that chose compromise over endless struggle, with countries (including our own, the U.K., Mexico, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Japan, and many more) that simply decided to live in peace with the neighbors rather than to hold on endlessly to land claims that there was no reasonable expectation ever to see satisfied. The Palestinians have made such a fetish about their knee-jerk rejectionism over the years that it just feels like an impossibility to imagine them behaving differently. But if the Germans can move past the sense that East Pomerania (now part of Poland) and Alsace (now part of France) should be part of Germany, then the Palestinians can move past their irredentist claims as well. (Have you forgotten what irredentism is and why it’s an important term for students of Middle Eastern politics to understand? Click here!) The world just needs to find a way to nudge them forward in a way that feels constructive rather than degrading…and then the impossible will suddenly feel entirely possible.

Moving along to the Jewish world, my second example of something everybody just knows is that it will be impossible for non-fundamentalist religion to survive in the long run, that the adherents of the liberal versions of all faiths—including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—are doomed by the very tolerance and reasonability they vaunt as primary spiritual values to lose the battle against assimilationism and, eventually, to lose their sense of purpose and of self. It surely is true that the more people are taught to view people outside their own group with suspicion and hostility (both, hallmarks of fundamentalism), the more challenging it will be for members to feel justified in leaving the group. But it is also true that the virtues promoted by non-fundamental religion—open-mindedness, rationalism, and respect for alternate points of view—can exert a siren call on the human spirit as well, as evidenced by the millions of people who, despite all the predictions of doom, actually do belong to such faith communities. The further decline of non-fundamentalist religion in the West is not inevitable. And neither is it impossible to imagine a world in which it is the fundamentalists who perennially lose their people and versions of religions that promote absolute spiritual and intellectual integrity that increase almost without having to self-promote hardly at all, let alone actually to proselytize door-to-door.

And my third example of something wide known to be impossible is an American one—the widely held belief that it is simply impossible to imagine an American political landscape that features politicians reaching across the aisle to create policies and laws that benefit the nation as a whole through the strengthening of its core values and the legislative expression of those values. The common wisdom, as everyone knows, is that that kind of willing cooperation, desirable though it may sound, is simply nothing that could ever be an actual feature of our legislators’ work in Washington, that the whole Congress is so riven by factionalism and interparty dislike and mistrust that cooperation on the level that would be necessary for our legislators actually to work together for the people and not solely against each other is simply an impossibility. And yet…why should that be the case? Our legislators are mostly lawyers (43%), but all have other ways to earn a living yet have chosen to devote some or, in some cases, all of their professional lives to service of our country. Surely at least some of them—maybe even most—could make more money elsewhere! The notion that they are all agenda-driven, that nothing matters to any of them more than pushing his or her personal set of initiatives without respect for the public weal or the nation’s best interests—that seems, at the very least, to be only how things mostly seem, not how they inevitably have to be. Also worth noting in this regard that is almost 28% of the bills passed in the House and in the Senate pass unanimously and without opposition. That points to a different reality than the one we’ve trained ourselves to expect from these people: if Congress is narrowly divided in half along party lines with a slight edge for Republicans in the Senate and a slightly larger one in the House, how can more than a quarter of bills brought to a vote be passed unanimously? Clearly, these people can work together when properly motivated! So that is not an impossibility, just something we’ve been trained to think of that way!

And that concludes my list of possible impossibilities. None of my readers would mistake me for a natural optimist, but contemplating Roger Bannister in life and death buoys me slightly by making me remember that, in the end, most things deemed impossible are merely things that no one has managed to do just yet. May he rest in peace!

[ruminativerabbi]

Lawfare is Warfare

When I first heard that the International Criminal Court based in The Hague had determined that war crimes have been committed on the West Bank, in Gaza, and in East Jerusalem and was going to embark on the process of deciding whether or not to prosecute those alleged crimes, my first tendency—like most normal people, I imagine—was to wave it away as yet another example of an organization founded to prosecute wrongdoing being hijacked by Israel’s enemies as part of a long-term effort to delegitimize the Jewish state. In a nutshell, that actually is what this is all about. But the potential consequences for Israel are serious. And the situation, as it turns out, is far more complicated than I had first understood.

The court was founded in 2002 by the signatories to the so-called Rome Statute that now serves as the court’s foundational document. Neither the United States nor Israel is a signatory to the Rome Statute, however, because at the time both nations feared—apparently entirely reasonably—that the court would end up delivering highly politicized judgments unrelated to the pursuit of justice that was supposed to be the court’s raison d’être in the first place. And although the ICC is in theory independent of the United Nations, the on-the-ground reality is that the Court is so intricately related to the U.N. so as to make of its latest machinations just another part of the U.N.’s mission to ignore—and, indeed, to whitewash—the crimes of all members states except Israel so as to have the time solely to devote itself to the demonization of the Jewish state. (More on this below.) But just to wave this latest development as just another example of the moral bankruptcy of a United Nations-related agency like UNESCO or (even more egregiously) UNRWA would be a mistake. This is an important development that needs to be taken seriously.

The ICC can only try individuals, not entire countries. And so, if the pre-trial hearing that will now ensue endorses the opinion the President of the Court, Fatou Bensouda of Guinea, that the ICC does indeed have the right to pursue the matter, what will almost inevitably follow will be the issuance of subpoenas to major Israeli political and military figures ordering them to appear before the court. If they declined to appear, warrants could then be issued for their arrest. And although it is so that the Bensouda’s original decision speaks in passing about crimes committed by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, no one appears to be taking any of that too seriously—including not Hamas or the Palestinian Authority, both of which organizations openly and effusively praised Bensouda’s decision to proceed and neither of which entities seemed to harbor even the slightest worry that it might end up having to answer for any of its own actions.

There are strong arguments against the ICC decision to move forward against Israel, some procedural and some moral.  Of them, though, surely not the least compelling is the relationship—ignored by the court but fully relevant—between the fact that Israel is not a signatory of the Rome Accord and the fact that the ICC only has the right to bring the citizens of member states to trial. But there are other strong arguments in Israel’s favor as well.

The ICC’s decision to treat the Palestinians as though Palestine were an independent country is rooted in the kind of wishful thinking that has characterized the fantasyland approach to reality of the United Nations for decades. Palestine, of course, could easily become an independent country: having already been recognized as a state—or at least a state in potentia—by well over one hundred countries, all the Palestinians have to do is to declare their independence and then get down to the task of negotiating a workable modus vivendi with the neighbors. It’s that last part, of course, that has gummed up the works for decades now: the obvious necessity of recognizing the reality of Israel’s existence and learning to live in harmony with the Jewish state has been the sticking point that has held back the Palestinians from doing what they endlessly insist is all they really want to do: to live in peace as an independent state among the nations of the world.  But that inability to accept reality and create a nation is hardly Israel’s fault: the door to Palestinian independence has been open for decades even despite the Palestinians’ unwillingness to step through it. The ICC’s solution—simply to ignore reality—is simultaneously childish and malign, and does not do the court any credit. But there is far more to say as well.

Key too is that the court exists to prosecute individuals for war crimes in places where there is no independent judiciary that can investigate and try its own citizens. But Israel is hardly that place: the independence of the Israeli judiciary and its ability to act freely has just been demonstrated in the various indictments handed down against Benyamin Netanyahu. Even more relevant, though, is that there actually have been individuals tried over the years in Israel for having behaved with excessive force or violence against Palestinians. So the notion that the ICC would need to step in even if it did have some sort of jurisdiction in the matter is not particularly convincing. And when paired with the fact that neither the Palestinian Authority nor Hamas has ever tried anyone for war crimes committed against Israeli citizens and actually foster terror crimes against civilians by lionizing terrorists who die on the job and providing endless financial support for their families—taken together, those two facts make the whole notion of trying Israel at the ICC even more Kafkaesque.

But when all of the above is considered in light of the ICC’s own history, the situation moves past Kafka.

The ICC has, to date, undertaken investigations into twelve different countries, mostly in Africa. (The countries involved are Burundi, the Central African Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Georgia, Kenya, Mali, Libya, Uganda, Myanmar, and Bangladesh.) But it has adopted a totally hands-off policy with respect to the Arab world: the government of Syria has killed hundreds of thousands of its own civilians over the last few years, destroyed countless towns and villages, and turned fully half of its own population into refugees. But the ICC has shown no interest of any sort in that behavior. Indeed, among the nations of the Middle East, only Israel arouses its ire…and merely for defending itself against entities that openly espouse terror as their weapon of choice in a war they could end tomorrow but prefer to pursue perennially as though violence directed at civilians could somehow result in the achievement of their avowed goals.

Finally, the argument—which I’ve noted in a dozen different on-line settings—that the ICC is independent of the United Nations is simply not true. For one thing, the ICC depends fully on the United Nations for all of its funding. For another, the ICC regularly bases itself on the kind of one-sided, wholly biased reporting of U.N. agencies that no reasonable person would consider even remotely accurate.

The world has mostly nodded. Yes, the P.M. of Australia, who has more on his plate this week to worry about than the ICC, took the time to opine in public that the ICC has no jurisdiction in the matter of Israel’s behavior. The German government said much the same thing, as did our own Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo.  So there’s that to be grateful for. But the larger issue—the public demonization of Israel in the larger forum of nations and the general willingness of the nations of the world not to care or even particularly to notice—is beyond distressing.

Finally, and perhaps most important of all, the issue itself of war crimes committed during the Gaza Uprising of 2014 is itself a bogus charge invented by Israel’s enemies without any serious evidence to muster on its own behalf.  A year later, in 2015, the independent High-Level Military Group—a group led by General Klaus Naumann, the former chief of staff of the German Army and the Chairman of the NATO military committee and staffed by generals, high-level military experts, senior officers, and chiefs of staff from seven NATO nations—came to the following conclusion regarding Israel���s actions in Gaza: “Each of our own armies is of course committed to protecting civilian life during combat. But none of us is aware of any army that takes such extensive measures as did the IDF last summer to protect the lives of the civilian population in such circumstances…During Operation Protective Edge, in the air, on the ground and at sea, Israel not only met a reasonable international standard of observance of the laws of armed conflict, but in many cases significantly exceeded that standard.”

As the specter of anti-Semitism rises at home and abroad, we tend to focus on the thugs and brutes that attack Jews at worship in synagogue or at home. That rising tide has to be addressed, obviously, and somehow confronted. But to allow our distress over that kind of activity at home to divert our gaze from institutions like the ICC merely because they present themselves not as ruffians or hoodlums but as jurists concerned solely with the pursuit of justice—that would be a disastrous error of judgment. In the end, I still hope that reasonableness will prevail, but I feel less sanguine with each successive article I read, both in print and online, about the inner workings of the International Criminal Court. Our government has already spoken out forcefully on the side of decency and rationality. I mentioned above the responses of Germany and Australia. Which of our other so-called friends and allies will join us in calling out the ICC, on the other hand, remains to be seen.