A Perpetual Outsider Writes...

A Soldier's Mother has also written movingly about it, about the photos the media shows and the photos they don't show - of children being taught to fight and posed with weapons. I'm reminded of a quotation from the aftermath of England's bloody civil wars of the middle of the seventeenth century, that the defeated royalists "bring their children up in the struggle" - but they never hid in schools and hospitals, nor did they use their wives and children and human shields.

This video is also quite good for background on the conflict, pointing out that Israel left Gaza in 2005, yet the rocket attacks continued, a fact apparently lost on much of the news coverage (you may need to turn the volume on).

According to Ha'aretz, Israel is treating Palestinians hurt in the attacks on Hamas' terrorist infrastructure. This doesn't surprise me, as treating Palestinian civilian casualties is something the Israelis have been doing for years. Doesn't sound much like the actions of a racist state determined to commit genocide and absolutely wipe out all Palestinians, does it? Sounds more like the actions of a state desperate to stop the attacks on its civilians by cowards who hide behind women and children, who rejoice in the deaths of their own civilians because they mean more international sympathy.

  There is an interesting article in The Jerusalem Post today on what exactly (dis)proportionate force is and why Israel is acting legally.

Useful context - what the news doesn't show you.

  Some primary sources on the current conflict in Gaza, with commentary over at my other blog.

  There were two things in the news today that the left-wing press (including the BBC) downplayed or totally ignored.  One is that Israel has been treating Palestinians wounded in the internecine Fatah/Hamas fighting.  The other is that the new Lebanese government has declared that Hizbollah has a “right” to keep its weapons in order to fight Israel, despite this being a violation of UN Resolution 1701, which demanded Hizbollah’s disarmament (instead it has been rearming, aided by Syria and Iran).

  This annoys me.  This is the kind of ‘deep context’ lacking from much left-wing Middle East reportage.  This one-sided presentation of events always serves to portray Israel as the aggressor and the Arabs as the victims.  Of course the Palestinians and Lebanese seem like helpless victims of a racist aggressor if you simply pretend that things like rocket attacks on Israeli schools or Israeli treatment of sick Palestinians don’t happen.

  Like a lot of instinctively left-wing people upset by the current state of the moderate and far left, George Orwell is something of a hero to me.  One particular passage has been on my mind for the last few days.  It is from the essay Inside the Whale, and deals with a poem by W. H. Auden that speaks of “the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder”.  Says Orwell:

  “But notice the phrase ‘necessary murder.’  It could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word.  Personally I would not speak so lightly of murder.  It so happens that I have seen the bodies of numbers of murdered men – I don’t mean killed in battle, I mean murdered.  Therefore I have some conception of what murder means – the terror, the hatred, the howling relatives, the post-mortems, the blood, the smells.  To me, murder is something to be avoided.  So it is to any ordinary person.  The Hitlers and Stalins find murder necessary, but they don’t advertise their callousness, they don’t speak of it as murder; it is ‘liquidation’, ‘elimination’ or some other soothing phrase.  Mr Auden’s brand of amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled.  So much left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.”

  I think this goes to the heart of what is wrong with so much left of centre thought, particularly regarding Israel.  People like Tony Benn, Ken Livingston and George Galloway can be blithely go on “We are all Hizbollah” marches, and The Guardian, The Independent and the BBC can refer to child murderers as ‘militants’ simply because they are never around when the bombs go off, when the rockets hit or when the sniper shoots.  The Israeli centre-left press, such as Haaretz, is rather more mature in its view of the conflict, perhaps because they realize that the lives of them and their children are at stake.

  The Midrash tries to explain why Kain (Cain) killed Hevel (Abel).  Kain said, “let us divide the world.  You take the moveable property and I will take the land.”  Sometime later they began to argue.  Wherever Hevel went, Kain said he was on his land.  Eventually he told Hevel to float in the air.

  I sometimes think that this describes Jewish history.  For centuries, we were told, “Jews!  Europe is for the Europeans.  Jews are not Europeans, but Semites.  Go back to the Middle East!”

  For the last sixty years, we have been told, “Jews!  The Middle East is for Arabs.  Jews are not Arabs, but Europeans.  Go back to Europe!”

  The paradox was illustrated most pointedly in the Soviet Union, where Jews were attacked for being “rootless cosmopolitans” and for being Zionists.  It seems the only thing worse than not having a home is longing for one.

  Perhaps in a few more centuries, the problem will resolve itself.  The Jews will evolve wings.  We shall have six wings.  With two, we shall hide our faces in shame.  With two, we shall hide our feet to disguise the fact that we were ever on the ground.  With two, we shall fly.

  Then we shall be able to go back to doing what we do best: building castles in the air, and living in them.

  This Modern Midrash is an experiment with several different aims:

• to see if I can understand ‘historical’ aggadot better from the ‘inside’;
• to see if genuine events in modern history can be turned into aggada;
• to contribute to a moderate religious Zionist discourse;
• to try to express a philosophical idea in narrative form (as in all aggadot);
• and to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the foundation of the State of Israel, which starts this evening and goes into Thursday.

  Only [God] is my Rock and my Salvation

– Tehillim/Psalms 62.3

  When they came to draft the Declaration of Independence of Medinat Yisrael (the State of Israel), there was an argument.

  Rabbi Shapira and Rabbi Maimon wanted to thank God.  Rabbi Shapira said, “we must thank the Almighty, the Redeemer of Yisrael.”

  Aharon Zisling said, “We must not thank God.  God has not redeemed us.  God did not save us from the death camps.  We have redeemed ourselves.”

  David Ben-Gurion said, “Let us thank the Rock of Yisrael.  Each of us, in his own way, believes in the ‘Rock of Yisrael’ as he conceives it.”

  The religious signatories of the Declaration signed, thanking the Rock of Yisrael, the Holy One, the Source of all blessing.  The non-religious signatories of the Declaration signed, thanking the Rock of Yisrael, the rock-like strength and tenacity of the Jewish people.  Thus was fulfilled the verse, “God spoke once, but I have heard these two.” (Tehillim 62.12)

  A certain scoffer said that this was not the case.  “The religious thought of God, but the non-religious thought of the Jews.  This is not two religious interpretations of one word, but two separate concepts brought together in one word for diplomatic reasons.”

  However, the matter was really predetermined from the very beginning.

  “God created the man in [God’s] image.” (Bereshit/Genesis 1.27)  God has no image, because God has no physical form.  God created man in the spiritual image of God.  God is kind, so mankind can be kind.  God is just, so mankind can be just.  God is merciful, so mankind can be merciful.  God redeems, so mankind can redeem.  When man redeems himself, he does so by acting like God.  When man redeems, God is redeeming through man.  Therefore it is correct to say that the Rock of Yisrael is both God and the Jewish people.

  I’m currently on a depression-induced break from Shabbat and Pesach preparations.  I’m not going to have time to respond to the comments on my last post; I don’t have much to say that I haven’t said before anyway.  Instead, I am going to vent my anger quickly at something I saw in the newspaper.  No time for one of my usual, well-researched posts, but I’ve said it all before anyway; this is just to let off steam.

  Jews for Justice for Palestinians have taken out a full-page advert in the Jewish Chronicle.  In a way, this is a good thing, because it helps prove that they are a bunch of liars whenever they claim that the rest of the Jewish community tries to censor their voice.  I’m still annoyed by the advert, though (several of the signers are familiar names from cult TV land and one seems to be someone I was at school with, which makes it seem more personal).  They claim to be opposed to all attacks on civilians, but they ignore the fact that only one side deliberately targets civilians, and only one side deliberately hides its combatants amongst non-combatants, both war crimes.  Under the Geneva Conventions (which I’ve read, unlike most people who seem to voice an opinion on the subject) Hamas and the other Palestinian terrorist groups are responsible for the deaths of the Palestinian children they hide behind, not Israel.  That is what both the letter and the spirit of international law state, and Israel actually goes far beyond both in its efforts to avoid civilian casualties.  Again, time and space do not permit elaboration at this point, but this something I have said before anyway.

  JFJFP say Israel should accept Hamas offer of a “ceasefire”.  The problem is, Hamas have not made such an offer.  They have offered a hudna, a temporary truce for strategic purposes, the better to resume the struggle at a later date.  There is no mention of the Arab world rejecting the UN’s two-state solution the Zionists accepted in 1947, or their rejection of Israeli peace offers in 1948, 1967, 1979 and 1999 (I might have missed one or two there).

  If these people really want justice for the Palestinians, they should stop according legitimacy to a bunch of terrorists who see the deaths of Palestinian children as glorious martyrdom and the deaths of Israelis as the extermination of vermin and swine.  On the other hand, if they just want to help Hamas achieve their stated objectives, they could simply kill themselves.  After all, the Hamas Covenant states clearly that “Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people” and that “The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: ‘The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews)…’”  One searches in vain for any indication that left-wing anti-Zionist Jews are to be treated any differently to Israelis and pro-Israel Jews.

  The rest of us remember the words of the song we will sing at our seder tomorrow:

And this has stood for our ancestors and for ourselves,
For it was not one alone that stood against us to annihilate us,
Rather, in every generation [people] stand against to annihilate us,
But the Holy One, Blessed be He, rescues us from their hands.

  I’m not quite sure why I should have been so upset at events in Yerushalayim.  By this stage, such tragedies have ceased to be shocking, in the full sense of the term.  Nor was the age of the victims a factor; true, it is horrible for men – boys –my age and younger to be murdered, but, again, it is not unprecedented.  It has been reported in the J-blogosphere, although I have yet to see it officially confirmed, that the gunman’s weapon had been supplied by Israel under the terms of the peace process.  Even if that is the case, it would not be the first time that this has happened, nor would is it likely to be the last, so, again, it can not explain why I feel like this.  Maybe it’s just being alone in the house by myself.

  I think it might be something more.  For whatever reason, I seem to have passed beyond the point of absolute pessimism regarding Israel.  I have moved from thinking peace likely in the near future, through thinking it possible in my lifetime to now thinking it almost impossible in my lifetime, short of a miracle (although, as David Ben Gurion said, in Israel, to be a realist, you have to believe in miracles).  More another time, when I’m less emotional.  For now, a very bleak analysis from left-wing Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz on Israel’s options in the months ahead (“Hamas, with the direct or inadvertent cooperation of Hezbollah, Iran, the Islamic Jihad, Fatah fatcats, Fatah rebels, the Bush administration, and, of course, Israel itself, has created a situation in which every one of Israel's moral and strategic options is a bad one.” ) as well as this piece  from the same newspaper, less an analysis and more a prose poem of despair and anger at left-wing western received wisdom:

“Spare us the conclusion that the only reason Hamas kills Jews, and that its underlying motive for encouraging others to do the same, is to force Israel to agree to a cease-fire…

Spare us the sight of the thanksgiving prayers for the great victory, prayers that began in Gaza City mosques just after the slaughter of the Jews. Spare us the sight of the sweets being handed out by little children to motorists in passing cars in the Strip, sweets to celebrate the young Jews dead on the floor, the young Jews dead at their desks, the Jews killed for the crime of being Jews in that place of study and worship…

Even the Israeli left, which for decades championed the Palestinian with courage and determination, has, in large part, had it with the Palestinians. The reason is terrorism. The reason is murder. The reason is that the rulers of Gaza are people who see an intrinsic value in the killing of Jews for the sake of increasing the number of dead Jews in the world.”

  Whatever the underlying political reason, the last couple of days have been unbearable.  I spent an actual majority of Shabbat asleep, which was at least a way of avoiding thought and feeling, but it meant I missed davening Mincha and eating seudah shlishit.  I did at least manage to eat the other two meals, make kiddush and motzei, even though I did not feel like eating much at lunch, and somehow I managed to finish reading Halakhic Man, although I have no idea how much any of it has sunk (not the best thing I could have been reading over the last few weeks).  Likewise, I managed to daven Ma’ariv tonight, but skipped the extra ‘verses of blessing’ that it is the minhag of my community to say at the start of the week.  I may go back and say them later, if I feel up to it.  Davening Ma’ariv at the start of Shabbat was helpful, though, particularly kabbalat Shabbat and Lecha Dodi, composed mainly of quotations and paraphrases of verses of redemption from Yishaya.  I think it was Elie Wiesel who said that after Auschwitz, all prayer is a protest at God.  It’s a very Jewish approach to theodicy.  Attempts to resolve the matter on a theoretical level, one way or the other, would ultimately destroy us as human beings.  We need to feel our pain and confusion.  That’s much more important than proving or disproving the existence of God.  So the intellectual is transformed into the active and prayer becomes an act of defiance, a challenge to the unknowable God to explain Godself to us, again through action.  “You might be our Father, our King, our Judge, our Healer, our Redeemer, our Shield, our Comforter and our Protector, but that doesn’t give You the right to do what You want to us.  See here, where it says,

“Those who despoiled you will be despoiled,

And those who consumed you will be far away;

Your God will rejoice over you,

As a groom rejoices over his bride.”

When’s that going to happen, huh?  Nu?”