Not Your Mother's Israel

I've made my way through Max Blumenethal's Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, with profit though I wouldn't say exactly with pleasure.  Any book that might be entitled The NeoNazification of Israel is not going to wind up on the shelf next to your DVD of Springtime for Hitler.  The book is, in short, pretty much what the author promises--a serious of vignettes, 70 or so, designed to show what is really going on in Israel these days, and a pretty picture it is not.

I've also read a bit of the blowback-notably the exchanges between Blumenthal and Eric Alterman (start here and Google for responses by Blumenthal, Alterman and others; this one is particularly subtle).  Though I'm actually a little surprised that there isn't more blowback; the American Likud noise machine must have decided that the best strategy against Blumenthal would be to ignore him--but I noticed a full page ad for the book in the NYT a couple of Sundays ago so it sounds like he isn't just going to go away.

I can't add much to the give-and-take although it is perhaps already obvious that I tend to think Blumenthal has on the whole to the better of the exchange (I'm open to the possibility that there are particular instances of error or distortion--with 70-odd examples, there are bound to be).  What I would like to do is to offer a bit of context. Specifically, I suspect that those of my generation (is there anybody left in my generation?) simply haven't got there mind around the idea of just how complicated the demographics of Israel have become.

That is: however careful we are in keeping up with the news, we can't disentangle ourselves from the sense of gauzy optimism that consoled us back when Israel was all about earnest social democrats building kibbutzes to make the desert bloom (saying nothing about the sense of guilty relief that might have overtaken us when the refugees on Cyprus took events in their own hands and simply claimed the country for themselves, rather than trying--heaven forbid!--to come here).

Yes, yes, we know better, sort of, but the seductive old vision (buttressed by a liberal dose of Zero Mostel in Fiddler on the Roof ) dies hard.

Or maybe it is just me.  Anyway, review some basics, culled variously from Blumenthal and a bit of supplementary Googling.  For starters, some 20 percent of the Israeli population is Arab; most of the rest is "Jewish," although there are a lot of problems of definition here.  Of the Jewish portion, barely half are "Ashkenazim:" the ones who pretty much structured the new nation and fashioned its narrative.  You knew that, or you should have: you've been on notice since they elected Menachem Begin--himself from Belarus, but in politics the voice of the voiceless.

Way more important, I think--and still pretty much misunderstood in the west--would be the immigration of something like a million Jews from the old Soviet Union, mostly with the enthusiastic support of the United States foreign policy establishment. And what a mixed bag they are: something like a third aren't even "Jewish" by theological standards and an unknown portion really don't have any tie to Judaism at all, except that it provided a ticket out.  The cohort surely includes a large number of people who have made Israel second to (almost) none in skilled labor and high-tech entrepreneurship; also a who's who of Russian gangsters who get to call Israel home as long as they practice their trade elsewhere (recall how Cyprus ceded over its banks to the Russians on more or less the same principle). The cohort also includes quite a large component of the most bellicose nationalists--but a nationalism not so much rooted in Biblical tradition, nor even the memory of the Holocaust, as in the notion of "we're here, stay out."

Which brings me to the final major piece in the puzzle: per Blumenthal, something in excess of a million "Israelis" now live outside the Promised Land--lots in America, quite a few in Germany, particularly Berlin.  Apparently most of these are young, highly skilled; most descend from the old Ashkenazi originals.  Which is to say: an Exodus (heh) of "traditional" Israelis that more or offsets the former-Soviet immigration.  Not your mother's Israel, nor anybody else's mother's, either.

More: For on Russian emigres in Israel, go here.  For more on the "demographic time bomb" facing Israel, go here (though I don't think I buy it).

The Gatekeepers, Twice

I don't think I've ever done this before: watched the same movie on two nights in the same week.  Not quite successive: last night we had a dinner guest.  But tonight and Wednesday, we watched The Gatekeepers, Dror Moreh 's documentary comprising extended interviews with the six living former heads of Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency.  Maybe my search set isn't large enough to justify an opinion but I'd have to say this is very likely the best documentary I've ever seen.  Face it, most documentaries, certainly including those that get the award nominations, have a a fairly crude and obvious agenda.  I suppose I'll have to grant that Moreh has a sort of an agenda:   Israeli-Palestinian relations are just awful.  But it is hard to think of any comparable product that shows a realm of such unforgiving intractability.

Credit goes to Moreh, of course, but even more to his six interviewees.  Every single one sounds sane, even when they are talking about what may look like the insane moments in their own career.  None seems ready to apologize for much, but none, so far, as I can tell, feels that he accomplished much and none seems to see much hope for the future.

Two viewings.  Partly the problem is just my own ignorance.  I like to think I pay attention to Israeli politics: I've visited there with great pleasure and profit and I could name you most of the prime ministers in something like chronological order.  But lending an ear to these six is, if nothing else, a jarring reminder of just how much there is one might need to know before even pretending to make sense out of so challenging an issue.  

Which raises, perhaps, a second point: I would have done well to do some homework.  Each of these six is a sharply defined individual, with his own issues and his own stories.  On first viewing, I had a tough time keeping them straight. I found myself frantically flailing at Wiki to try to get at some thumbnails. And happily, before this second viewing, I did stumble onto some pretty good capsules at the producers' website.

All that said, I suppose the audience for this product is pretty limited.  I gather that many, perhaps all, of the interviewees have gone public with their views in Israel before now, so nothing would have come as much of a surprise to the home audience (and as others have said, the whole display is a reminder of how much easier it is to talk frankly about Israeli politics in Israel than it is in the United States). And if there's one thing worse than a story with now happy ending, it may be a story with no ending at all.  At least so far.

Lazare on Sand

Catch of the day: Daniel Lazare's LRB deconstruction of Shlomo Sand's deconstruction of the history of the Jewish "People"  and "Land"--the terms Sand uses, though he describes each not as a history but as an "invention"   Lazare's account seems to have been long in the baking: Sand's "people" book came out in English in 2010, in Hebrew two years earlier.   Fashioning it as an attack on Jewish "essentialism," Sand certainly understood his book to be contentious, although in many ways it builds on the work of earlier inquirers, notably Israel Finkelstein.  He cannot have been disappointed: his book has already generated a subgenre all its own (a Wiki does a pretty good job of summarizing criticism of Sand's earlier book). 

Lazare is ideally equipped to carry the inquiry forward.  He's been a sympathetic student of the general topic for more than a decade now: here is a 2002 article that offers a superb introduction to the inquiry in an earlier manifestation.  He says that as a line of inquiry,  "Sand's investigation is more than justified," but he calls the earlier book "a messy polemic" (he says the new one is "better").  Whatever: if you read Sands, you will want to read this.  If you don't read Sands but feel you should, this might  be a good place to staat. 

Bernard Lewis Again

Followup notes on Bernard Lewis and his Notes on a Century; Reflections of Middle East Scholar. For a man of 96, and one who has placed himself t the center of the passions (if perhaps not the actions of his time, Bernard Lewis has enjoyed a remarkably untroubled life. Grant the odd kerfuffle: a public feud here, a grotesque lawsuit there (Paris, actually), a failed marriage back home--grant all this and grant also that it's a good thing he had a few such encounters or his life would have been boring almost beyond tears. He found his calling early; he got people to pay him what he enjoyed doing, and since before most of his professional peers were born, he has pretty much defined the study of Islam in the West.

Almost boring, then, in its virtually uninterrupted fecundity. Lewis has produced more polished works--monographs, overviews, (semi-) popular accounts, polemics--than many of his aspiring competitors have years in their lives--more than half of all these, in retirement. He has played a dominant role as one who explains Islam to the West, but he has made any number of particular contributions of his own--on slavery under Islam, for example, on the Muslim view of the West, perhaps most important on the place of Jews under Islam. Recognizing that a memoir is only a record of a life--not a life, still on reading Lewis, one is hard put to figure out how he got it all done. For Lewis appears also to have been an indefatigable globe trotter; for all his time in the library, he must have spent a comparable amount of time in the airport departure lounge, on his way to conferences, seminars, festschrift presentations, consultations with potentates and whatnot. Among his many talents, Lewis seems to have been a natural guest: cultivated, affable, easy to have around, an adornment to almost any scholarly gathering. When Lewis says "and so I told the Pope," he means just what he says: he is talking about a real Pope and a real conversation. Thus we get to enjoy the amusing ironies that accompany a Jew explaining Islam to the head honcho among the Catholics.

Of course Lewis' role as the primo interpreter of Islam in the west has not been quite as sedate as his memoir might suggest.  Far from anodyne, he has built his life around a worldview and a model of scholarship that have put him in the center of contention not only of how we understand Islam but for how we conduct scholarly issue.  He doesn't really elide these issues in the memoir; rather he presents them with a kind of austere dignity that makes it easy to overlook just how fraught these issues may be.  In this light, perhaps the centerpiece of the book is a chapter/essay articulating his view on the place of the scholarly inquirer.  It's as good an introduction to the topic as you might imagine; I'd rank it alongside Max Weber's great lecture, "Science as a Vocation,"   But perhaps the critical word here is "inquirer:" scholarship, on Lewis' presentation, begins with the unknown, not known, with hypothesis, not with thesis.  It's a view not always evident among his adversaries nor even (dare one say it) among his friends.  But Lewis makes a strong case for the proposition  as a guiding principle in his own life.

Beyond the basics, I'd say the easiest way to understand Lewis s in terms of three other public figures, two of them obvious linkages, the third perhaps less so.


The first, as Lewis explains with bleak irony, is Osama bin Laden.  By the sheerest chance, a book by Lewis entitled What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response appeared in bookstores just weeks after 9/11.  It gave Lewis a kind of minor/major celebrity that  most academics only dream of.  "Osama bin Laden made me famous," Lewis observes with no particular relish.  "I was interviewed, quoted, filmed, and I even made the front page of The Wall Street Journal."


No doubt Lewis' new-found notoriety was enough to dismay the second of the defining figures in his life--Edward Said, the doyen of what has come to be known as "post-colonial studies."  In his pathfinding Orientalism (1978), Said had done Lewis the courtesy of singling out Lewis for special venom.  The two continued to define and redefine each other until the end of Said's life (he died in 2003).   Lewis, with the gift of longevity, has the last word.  He states his case crisply and with vigor, but I wouldn't say he overdoes it.

The third may be not quite so obvious a choice.  I'm thinking of Abba Eban, known to the world as Israel's public face at the United Nations during the critical formative period for the new Jewish state.  But "public face" scarcely does it: by his dynamic and magnetic presentation, I suspect Eban did as much as, or more than, any one person to breath life into the new nation.

Lewis calls Eban "Aubrey," his non-public name.  He doesn't discuss Eban at length in the book; he doesn't mention that he spoke at a memorial service for Eban (who, like Said, died in 2003), where he declared that they had been friends for 70 years.  But it is almost uncanny how closely those two lives parallel.  They were born just over a year apart; they grew up in modest circumstances in London.  Each achieved a dazzling record at University, in each case not least because of their knack for languages.

From there, their careers part, although they run in parallel.  Eban, far more the public man, devoted the larger part of his career to Israel and to Zionism.    Lewis sustained a passionate curiosity about Israel (late in life, he said he visited there every year).  But his main public presence was in the Muslim countries--Turkey first, but so many other states as well.  What's remarkable in retrospect is how much these two men, Eban and Lewis--three, if you count Said--continue to define so much of what we know, or thought we knew, about Islam and Israel and the Middle East.

Some Advice for the Insurgents

My friend David went out to Viet Nam late in the war, not long before the great peacemaker brought us all together again.   He was a construction crew, building roads and such.  Did he ever a shot fired in anger?  Not really, David recalls.  The only time they bothered us was when we took too long for lunch.   They'd wing a few past us to remind us to get back to work.  They knew it was all going to be theirs soon and they wanted to make sure we left good stuff behind.


Flash forward to 2011:  my friend Sean is wondering when the Palestinians  in the West Bank will start thinking along the same lines.

Mossad: Not Perfect After All

I don't know about you but I'll drop everything to read a good Mossad tictoc, like this one in GQ on what the mag is  willing to call "The Dubai Job" --even though (or perhaps "in particular because") the point is to show how the Israeli hit squad, though successful in accomplishing its short-term  goal, really made rather a dog's breakfast of things and may have done itself serious long-run harm.  The particular culprit seems to be arrogance--Mossad, evidently having watched too many international espionage movies, cannot get it through its head that it really is  not smarter than God, and that it may be coming up against contenders who can at least match its savvay.  I grant that you've got to be impressed by as catalog like this (if true):

There were several acts of sabotage of the Iranian nuclear program: two mysterious crashes of Iranian aircraft associated with the program, fires breaking out at two important laboratories, damage inflicted upon Iranian nuclear centrifuges, and the disappearance of two Iranian scientists and the killing of a third. There was also a mysterious explosion at a Syrian plant where Scud missiles were being fitted with chemical warheads, and the Mossad is credited with the discovery of a nuclear reactor in Syria, built with North Korean assistance, whose existence the Syrian authorities had managed to conceal for over five years. (The Syrian nuclear facility was subsequently destroyed by the Israeli Air Force in September 2007 after the United States proved reluctant to do so.)

The number of complex targeted assassinations carried out by the Mossad also increased ... The most high-profile of these was the elimination in Damascus of Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah's military chief. Among other terrorist acts, Mughniyeh was responsible for the bombing of the U.S. embassy and the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, and the bombings in Buenos Aires of the Israeli embassy in 1992 and a Jewish cultural center in 1994. In February 2008 his head was blown off by an explosive device that had been planted in the driver's-side headrest of his rental car. Dagan's Mossad is also believed to be responsible for the death of General Mohammed Suleiman, a close aide of Syria's President Bashar Al-Assad, who headed that country's nuclear program and handled military cooperation with Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah. Suleiman was killed in the Syrian city of Tartus in August 2008 by a sniper's bullet that hit him as he stood on his balcony after his daily swim. (According to other reports, he was shot by the sniper as he swam in the sea with his bodyguards

Link.  It's enough to make any decent hit squad proud, but I notice one important deficiency.  They haven't taken out the Iranian nukes.  And surveying this list, you can be sure it is not for lack of trying. Likewise the Stuxnet virus: Israeli sources quietly crowed at how it set back Iranian nuclear operations by a couple of years.  But that wasn't the goal, was it?  The goal was total destruction, and that's one that seems to elude them.
 

Competing Bible Narratives

I've been watching some DVDs on the archaeology of Israel and environs, by a teacher with solid professional credentials, both in the field and in the library.  She tells her story in a helpful and instructive manner from which I take great profit. Yet there's an issue of presentation here that strikes me as profoundly irritating.  And it's not just her; it's a rhetorical strategy that you see in a lot of "scholarly" material about the Ancient Near East, and invites some exegesis.  Let me see if I can make myself clear.

First: in wretched oversimplification, there are are two ways of telling the story of "the Bible," aka "The Old Testament."  One is to embrace the text: to accept the document itself as a, perhaps the, primary source on events in its purview, and to accept the document as the arbiter of all doubts, the ironer-out of all lacunae.  Some people profess to accept the Bible in tote, though I doubt that very many actually do so.  Others claim the Bible as a primary document, while subtly dismissing more doubtful or embarrassing portions, (sometimes sub silentio) in a kind of cafeteria doctrinalism.

There is a counter-view that approaches the issue from a wholly different perspective. This counter-view takes the Bible as thee product of a particular place and time--an historical event in its own right, if you like--designed not so much to memorialize but to create the identity of a people.

More precisely: on this view, the heavy work of producing the Bible takes place in or around the Seventh Century BC, particularly in and around the reign of Josiah, seeking to generate a narrative that will justify a single identity for all of what we now call (retrospectively) "Israel and Judah."
Operating from this point of departure, it is natural to evaluate the record of preceding centuries with a critical, if not necessarily skeptical eye.  Seen in this light, we notice a number of remarkable facts.  One, the account of the original Abraham-and-Isaac story is hopelessly anachronistic, impossible to reconcile with the time at which it was supposed to have occurred. Two, the physical evidence for a "flight out of Egypt" is at or near absolute zero.  Three, there is no really satisfactory evidence of a Jewish "invasion" into Israel (the alternate view is that the Jews were in fact a segment of the indigenous Canaanites who hived off with an identify of their own).

Further: there may be some historical evidence of a "King David," but the chances theat he was a great monarch are not so strong as the possibility that he was some kind of tribal chieftain.  As to his son Solomon, said to have ruled from sea to sea--the evidence is equivocal at best, depending largely on whether you accept some archaeological sites as relating to Solomon himself, or perhaps rather to the supposed enemies of the Jews, the evil Omrids (Ahab, Jezebel, and the rest of tht lot).

Just as with those who accept the primacy of the Bible, there isn't a single agreed account among all archaeologists, but a rough outline--along the lines that I just set forth--would win broad acceptance.  And while there are, generally speaking, two contending schools of thought, there is a highly contested no-man's land. Plenty (well--some) of the Biblicists make highly informed and sophisticated arguments that there view can be reconciled with an exact reading of the archaeological evidence.

Back to the DVDs.  Where is our lecturer on this spectrum? This is where it gets interesting. The thing is, if you listen inattentively, you'd take her for a strong Biblicist.  She quotes frequently from the Bible as an evidentiary source.  She festoons the presentation with some of those awful pictures of Biblical scenes you saw so long ago in vacation Bible school.  She unfailing refers to the ur-community on the site of modern Jerusalem as "the City of David."  The title of the series is perhaps a giveaway: it is called "The Holy Land Revealed"--one of those names that seems to punt on the first down.

But listen closely and you get a far different picture: pay attention and you can see that she is fully informed of the competing "archaeological" view, and that she almost buys into at least some of it.  Just exactly how much is hard to tell.  My guess is that at the end of the day, she is some kind of "left Biblicist."  She's far too well informed for vulgar belief.  She even takes pains to try to respond to some of the important talking points in the competing view.

The trouble is, she never lets on that there is a competing  view.  Instead, she gives her (apparent) Biblical narrative; she dances around some difficult issues; and she answers questions that she has never asked.

This strikes me as disingenuous and as far as I am concerned, highly unnecessary.  As I suppose should be obvious by now, I am much more of an "archaeologist" than a "Biblicist."  But I recognize that some of these issues are technical and I am an amateur: the technical heavy lifting is just way above my pay grade.  I'm open to careful analysis and indeed, I thought my lecturer scored some interesting points in favor of the Biblical view without ever acknowledging that she was doing so. How much better--and, I should think, easier--it would have been to lay out a more candid account of the competing positions: this is what I think, this is what the other guys argue and this is why I think they are wrong.

Just why she doesn't do this is anybody's guess.  It doesn't seem that her employer imposes a loyalty test: one of her colleagues is Bart D.  Ehrman, perhaps the best-known secularist scholar of the New Testament, almost a celebrity in the field of informed unbelief.  It might be that it's just easier her way.  She may have decided (and I suspect she would be right) that she catches far less flac this way from the committed God squad.  Indeed I've always thought that the occupation of professor for a serious scholar of ancient Israeli* history must be a pretty thankless job.  I should think the best of them have to fight day and night to be herd over the thrum of grinding axes.

And I stress it isn't just her.  I wouldn't be wasting all these bytes on just one set of DVDs.  From my perspective it is a far too frequent presentational style among expositors of ancient Israeli scholarship, and the listener is the worse for it.
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*Names themselves are a problem here.  Jewish?  Palestinian?  Standard labels like "Holy Land" or  "Biblical," seem to me hopelessly to rig the bidding.  I choose "Israeli" as a back-formation from modern Israel, with no pretense that I have ironed out any of the difficulties.
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Bibliographic note:  I suspect the best of the "trust-the-Bible" camp is Eliat Mazar, discoverer of what she believes to be "King David's palace" in the ur-city of Jerusalem.  The standard source for the "archeologist's narrative" would be The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman.  A more contentious view, setting the topic in the context of the larger history of  nationalist ideologies, is Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People.  The lectures by Professor Jodi Magness are available here.

Shlomo Sand on Jewish Identity

Reading Shlomo Sand's  The Invention of the Jewish People,  I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that it created such a rumpus when it was first publish (in Hebrew) in 2008: tell anybody that their cherished national narrative is a fiction and you are bound to get some blowback.

But from another perspective, it is remarkable just how non-radical this book is.  In two senses: one, there is an entire genre of  "invented nationalism narratives," drawing on the likes of Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson. (both cited by Sand; I might have added Eric Hobsbawm).

Two (and perhaps more remarkable), there is scarcely a sentence in Sand that isn't a repeat of something said somewhere by somebody else--often a well-recognized, even a prestigious,  Israeli. Partly this  is a matter of necessity: Sand's academic specialty is elsewhere, and he doesn't claim to have done any independent archival research.  But I think it may also be rhetorical: what Sand does is to take insights from everywhere and assemble them into battalion strength, as if to overpower the defenses by sheer force of numbers and organization.

 For me, perhaps the most interesting part was a longish second chapter called "Mythistory," in which he lays out the articulation of Jewish nationalist ideas in 19th-Century Germany, in conversation with emergent notions of German nationalism.  An unexpected hero of the piece: Theodore Mommsen, who felt that Germany could function quite well, thank you, as a multi-ethnic nation-state: he was basing his view on his work on the history of multi-ethnic Rome.

Perhaps the weakest part of the book is his work with the new evidence from DNA.  DNA research certainly has a great future here (and a great present: I was in Jerusalem a while back, and every bookstore seemed to be featuring something or other on Jewish DNA).   The trouble is, it is too new, and too fast-moving.  For example, Sand makes much of the theory that Eastern European Jews weren't "Jews" at all, but descendants of the mysterious Khazars.  It is not by any means an eccentric view, as Sand is at pains to show (I admit to having been intrigued by it myself, without ever feeling that I knew what I was talking about).  At any rate, I take it for the moment at least, DNA research is tending to discredit the Khazar few of things.  But maybe he just needs to wait: the whole field is moving fast enough that  yesterday's dogma is always becoming tomorrow's canard.

Fn.:  The reader is earnestly encouraged not to overlook the personal stories in the introduction, including those of Sand's own father and father-in-law, offering at least a hint of just why this guy is so ornery.

Brooks on the Israelis

Surely the funniest thing in today's NYT comes form an unlikely source--it's David Brooks on Israel. And I'm not being snide here and neither, so far as I can tell, is he. It is just a crisp, affectionate, and insightful account of a country he obviously cares about a great deal.

But if he thinks Israel is really a Middle Eastern country, he needs to ask himself in how many other Middle Eastern countries he'd be willing to drink the tap water.

Harry S Truman and the Attic

Uri Avneri, writing in the London Review of Books, observes a sea change in Israeli politics: they used to be in it for power, says Avneri; theses days, it’s mainly about money. “I can’t say I ever liked Ehud Olmert,” Avneri confesses:

But now I almost feel sorry for him. It isn’t pleasant the way he is being pounced on. The stories about envelopes stuffed with cash, cigar and luxury suites in posh hotels are good for gossip, but Olmert’s behaviour is no different from that of Binjamin Netanyahu or Ehud Barak. . . . Ben-Gurion, Begin and Rabin didn’t decide to live modest lives and dispense with luxury: they were just not interested in luxuries, money or the easy life.

No question but what he is onto something here, but it is hardly limited to Israel. In his massive history of Modern India, Ramachandra Guha recalls Max Weber, who “once remarked that there are two ways of making politics one’s vocation: Either one lives ‘for’ politics or one lives ‘off’ it.'" Guha explains:

The first generation of Indian leaders lived mostly for politics. They were attracted by the authority they wielded, but also often motivated by a spirit of service and sacrifice. The Indian politicians of the current generation, however, are more likely to enter politics to live off it. They are attracted by power and prestige, and also by the opportunities for financial reward. Control over the state machinery, they knew, can give glittering prizes to those in charge.

In January of 1966, I started work as a Washington correspondent for the The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Kentucky. Part of my brief was a aongressman named John C. Watts. Watts represented the 6th District in the Bluegrass; but more importantly, he presided over an appropriations subcommittee that controlled the tobacco subsidy program. “The thing you need to know about John,” someone (I forget who) told me, “is that he is richer now than he was when he came to Congress.”

Boy, doesn’t that sound quaint? It was offered as a character assessment, identifying a trait that would distinguish him from the common horde. Of course there were exceptions but politicians in those days just weren’t in it for the money. Sam Rayburn didn’t do it for money. Hubert Humphrey didn’t do it for money. Hell, I’d say that not even Richard M. Nixon did it for money, although he would up pretty well heeled at the end. And Clement Atlee? Oh, give us a break. Winston Churchill lived like a lord and very nearly was one. But for most of the life he also lived by his pen, and at that mostly one step of the sheriff. Only at the end did he go into service as a pet poodle to the rich and not terribly respectable—and a lot of people thought he did fatal damage to his reputation in the process.

Hard to say just when and how it changed. I suppose for the United States, a tipping point was Sam Rayburn’s great pupil, Lyndon B. Johnson, someone who was whole orders of magnitude richer when he ascended to the presidency than when he showed up in Washington just a couple of decades before—thanks to his wife’s business acumen, we used to say. Right, and their joint knack for nicking off valuable government resources along the way. Almost hard to remember how, just a few years before, they asked Harry S Truman what he would do at the end of his term when he got home to Independence, MO. “I’ll take the suitcases up to the attic,” he said. These days, none of these guys knows where the suitcase is, or how to find the attic.

Sources: Uri Avneri, “Olmert and Friends,” London Review of Books 10 (19 June 2008); Ramachandra Guha, India After Ghandi 672 (2007).

If I Forget Thee, Oh Jerusalem ...

Fascinating piece up at FP on the 60th anniversary of the State of Israel and how, well, underwhelmed (in default of a more negative word) they all seem to feel about it. And how mediocre (in default again) they perceive their leadership to be.

I was in Israel for a couple of weeks just a couple of years ago for a tourist's-eye (which is to say, wildly distorted) view and all I can remember is how well, in spite of everything, it all seemed to work. I'd come from Jordan which was interesting in its own way but seemed on the whole gloomy, as if almost depressive. Then here's Israel, all noise and hustle.

I know, I know, I couldn't have seen much, but I suspect that part of the problem is just that things grow old. Including me, in the sense that I can remember the mood of euphoria that followed upon independence: we will make the desert bloom, swords into plowshares, if I forget thee oh Jerusalem, yada yada. It was wonderful while it lasted, but nothing retains that kind of fever indefinitely. Sooner or later you get to the point where you just keep at it, recognizing that your life is bound to be shot through with mistakes and disappointments, but you can't let them grind you down. And mediocre leadership? Yeh, well, not nice. But in a world where most people are wretchedly governed most of the time, mediocre can appear far above average. Happy birthday, Israel, and enjoy the heroism of sheer dailiness.

Fn.: Just a nanosecond after I posted this, my Google ad was inviting the reader to buy real estate in Jerusalem. So somebody hopes I have hope.

Kinda Sweet, Actually...

The Guardian translates this bit from a Swiss newspaper:

"Israel imports Iranian oil on a large scale even though contacts with Iran and purchasing of its products are officially boycotted by Israel. Israel gets around the boycott by having the oil delivered via Europe. A reliable Israeli energy newsletter, EnergiaNews, reported this last week [March 18] ...

"EnergiaNews got the information about the Iran trade from sources with ties to the management of Israeli Oil Refineries Ltd ... According to EnergiaNews the Iranian oil is liked in Israel because its quality is better than other crude oils.

"The report by EnergiaNews editor Moshe Shalev states that the Iranian oil reaches various European ports, mainly in Rotterdam. It is bought by Israelis and the necessary European bill of lading and insurance papers are supplied. Then it is transported to Haifa in Israel. The importer is the Eilat-Ashkelon Pipeline Co (EAPC), which keeps its oil sources secret." ...

"It is not clear if the Iranian exporters know about Israeli purchases of their oil. At the other end, the Israeli buyers and governmental offices are well aware of where the high-grade oil comes from, although it is a blatant defiance of the boycott. The EnergiaNews article even made it through Israeli censorship, which asked only for some changes in the text. The fact that the report cleared the censors increases the credibility of the information. In the past, such reports were forbidden.

"When questioned by Sonntag, an energy expert of one of the leading Israeli papers confirmed the EnergiaNews report: Israel has been importing Iranian oil for many years. The expert stressed, however, that the purchases were made on the free market and not directly from Iran."

Link, and H/T: FP Mag. That much oil sloshing around the port of Rotterdam on their dime and it is "not clear" that the Iranians know? Ah huh, translated as "oh, gimme a break." Richard Silverstein at the guardian is sputtering and muttering about "hypocrisy" here and I suppose he's got a point. It certainly ought to be embarrassing to the froth-at-the-mouth hawks in Israel--come to think of it, either place--if indeed shame is still part of their skill set. Me, I think it is kinda sweet.

Shout-out for Haaretz (and for Laura Rozen)

This is interesting in itself, but there's a meta story worth noticing. That is: you get a more diverse view of Israeli politics inside Israel than you do in the United States. I admit, I had never really heard of Haaretz until I was traveling in Israel last fall. Now it is on my IGoogle homepage and I look at it more often than several others. For stuff like this (link):

Livni behind closed doors: Iran nukes pose little threat to Israel
By Gidi Weitz and Na'ama Lanski, Haaretz Correspondents

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said a few months ago in a series of closed discussions that in her opinion that Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel, Haaretz magazine reveals in an article on Livni to be published Friday.

Livni also criticized the exaggerated use that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears. Last week, former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy said similar things about Iran.

The article also reveals for the first time a document Livni prepared and sent to Olmert a few months after the Second Lebanon War proposing a new division of labor between the two. "Enclosed is a proposal for work procedures between us, with the aim of providing an answer to Israel's strategic needs and facilitating early planning and the formulation of coordinated Israeli positions ... within the framework of cooperative relations, full transparency and continuous mutual updates," wrote Livni.

Afterthought:Also a shout-out for Laura Rozen at WarandPiecewhere I found this. She might be the best foreign policy journalist going.

He Beat Me To It

Faithful readers will know I spent a month last fall trekking over archaeological sites in Israel and Jordan. Apparently I was not the first. Here is the estimable Sir John Mandeville, Kt., the granddaddy of all travel writers. “And I, John Mandeville, Knight, left my country and crossed the sea in the year of Our Lord Jesus Christ 1332,” he reports (in the Penguin translation of C.W.R.D. Moseley). It seems I was following in his footsteps:

In the marches of Galilee, among the mountains, was the Ark of God taken. On the other side is the hill of Endor in Hermon. … Five miles from Naym is the city of Iesrael [Jezreel], also called Zaraym. Iesabel [Jezebel] the wicked queen was of that city; she had Naboth slain unrighteously for his vineyard. A little way from this city is the field of Mageddo [the plain of Megiddo], where the King of Samaria slew Josias the King of Judah, who was afterwards carried to Mount Sion and buried there. A mile from Jezreel are the hills of Gilboa, where King Saul, his son Jonathan and a great number of the Children of Israel were killed. For this reason King David cursed those hills. A mile to the east is a city called Citople [Scythopolis], or Bethsaym [Bethshan]. The Philistines hung the head of King Saul on the walls of that city.

--The Travels of Sir John Mandeville 94

Penguin Paperback ed. (C.W.R.D. Moseley, trans. 1983)

Unlike some parts of the Travels, which are pretty clearly pure fantasy, the incidental detail here suggests that “Sir John” may actually have seen the sites he describes here.

More on the Book I Wish I'd Read

More on The Bible Unearthed: you can get a hint of what this book is about without ever opening the cover without ever cracking the cover by taking a look at the Amazon reviews. At the moment, there are 97, with an average rank of four stars. But 45 of them give five stars and another 11 give only one—and probably would give zero if they had the chance. For some portion of the reading public, suggesting that the Bible not inerrant, is not a cool thing to do.

It will be obvious that I am not of the inerrancy party, but I don’t want to appear dismissive here: this kind of thing has great meaning to people and it’s not at all surprising if they seem to feel dissed or affronted when somebody challenges a deeply held belief.

In response, I’m sure I can’t save any souls here, but for whatever it is worth: if FS are right, then the Bible is not what we (once thought it was?). But if they are right, then the creation of the Bible has got to qualify as one of the great cultural achievements of human history: they’ve created a culture, a history, a reason for being—and they put it all down in a book. As FS insist, nobody else has anything like it:

The Greek epics and myths spoke only by metaphor and example: Mesopotamian and Persian religious epics offered cosmic secrets but neither earthly history nor a pracxtical guide to life. The Hebrew Bible offered both, providing a narrative framework in which every Jew could identify both family and national history. In short, the saga of Israel that had first crystallized in the time of Josiah became the world’s first fully articulated national and social compact, encompassing the men, women and children, then rich, the poor, and the destitute of an entire community.

There’s a scene in a Stanley Elkins novel (I quote from memory) where God says—alright, you want to know why I did it? I’ll tell you why I did it! Because it is a good story, that’s why!

“Is that all?” says Jesus, rubbing his stigmata. “All?”

Indeed it is all, and perhaps no cultural product has ever done better.

Thanks again, Joe.

The Book I Wish I'd Read

Here’s the book I wish I had read before I went to look at archaeological sites in Israel/Jordan last fall: The Bible Unearthed, by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman (Free Press 2001) (link). It’s an assessment of how the archaeological evidence fits with the Bible, or more precisely the Old Testament, or more precisely the “Deuteronomistic History”—the material in Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings that makes up about 25 percent of the Old Testament.

No point in suspense here: FS think the archaeological evidence does not support the narrative very well. But it does support a historical narrative all its own, and explains how the remarkable Deuteronomistic History came into being—together, cultural artifacts of the first order in their own right.

More precisely, FS find no convincing evidence of (1) an Egyptian captivity; (2) a flight out of Egypt; (3) military conquest of the Canaanites by the Hebrews; (4) a “unified kingdom” of Israel and Judah (or at any rate, not before, say, the Third Century BCE). They seem willing to accept that there was a King David and King Solomon, but they treat them as minor local strongmen in a political backwater. They do accept the notion of a strong kingship in “Israel”—i.e., the “northern half” of the supposed joint kingdom. But their candidate is the family of Ahab—he who is perhaps the most excoriated of all historical figures in the Old Testament text.

What can possibly be going on here? FS don’t doubt that there were a “people” in what we now call Israel from perhaps late in the second millennium, who spoke a form of Hebrew and knew of a God named YHWH—Jehovah. They find reason to accept the presence of the “strong kingdom in the north—see Ahab, supra. But they believe that the south –“Judah”—was poorer, weaker, less populous, until the Eighth Century BCE, when the Babylonians conquered the northerners and carried them off into captivity. Rather suddenly and unexpectedly, Judah becomes central, populous, and indispensable to the survival of a more or less common culture. Then—and only then, FS argue does someone (or some group of people) generate the narrative that forms so central a part of our own experience.

Of course this is not going to be everybody’s dish of tea. If you are going to criticize it, I can think of at least two important lines of approach. One, if you believe in Biblical inerrancy, then this is all bollocks from the get-go. And two, whether or not you believe in Biblical inerrancy, there may be all kind of arguments over issues of, e.g., dating and interpretation. It is hard for me to imagine any two archaeologists agreeing with all this stuff in detail, any more than they agree on, for example, the historic home of the Indo-European language.

Either way, however, this might make a pretty good guidebook for the amateur archaeologist. FS do as good a job as you can expect (within the limits of the format) to lay out the substructure of their argument and, so far as I can tell, a fair-minded job of exposing its limitations. Still, you are left with an excellent framework for considering why it is you might care about particular archaeological sites and what it is you might want to look for and at when you are there.

I’ve got more I want to say about this book, but this post has gone on too long already. I may do another one later.

Credit: Thanks, Joe!

War Is About Winning, Not About Killing

Not being a regular reader of the New York Post, I don’t think I had ever heard of Ralph Peters until I stumbled onto this intriguing review by TigerHawk. I’ve now had a chance to explore a bit of Peters’ work with (qualified) pleasure and (qualified) profit. Without pretending to be present a fully developed review of my own, let me see if I can make one basic point.

But first, background. It may help to have earplugs. Peters is a romantic with a gushy, hand-wringing over-the-top style that assures you the world will end on Thursday if you don’t listen to him. His primary theme is something on the order of “the beleaguered virtue of the soldier” versus “the fecklessness and corruption of”—well, of just about everybody else. (quoted words are mine, not his) As a literary trope, this is pretty well worn. Still, as a rule of thumb for life, it probably has more truth than a lot of literary tropes. There’s no escaping the fact that the organized military is a behemoth organization and as such, is vulnerable not just accidentally, but systematically and predictably, to the kinds of ailments that beset behemoths everywhere. As TigerHawk says:

Peters['] sharpest observations turn on the relationship between weapons procurement and America's likely warfighting requirements. In short, he believes that the defense industry, the Pentagon brass, and the Congress have, through a combination of stupidity and self interest, seduced the rest of us into believing that small numbers of extraordinarily expensive and technologically advanced weapons systems can both achieve American military objectives and substitute for quantity.

Myself having almost as little military experience as our President, this kind of stuff gets beyond my pay grade fairly fast, but I’m generally persuaded that there is something to it: the chances are very good to excellent that the structure of the military enterprise will guarantee that it spends tons of money on the wrong things.

Now, take this as context for what seems to me to be Peters’ central error: he seems to believe that war is about killing. He doesn’t say so in so many words—at least not in what I’ve read. But he does seem to say that “war is about winning” and that “winning involves annihilation of the enemy (my quotes again).

If this is, in fact, his point, he is wrong. War is about winning. Sometimes, this involves a lot of killing, and sometimes it does not. There was probably no way for the Russians to beat back the Germans than with wholesale slaughter. But (to take just one example among many possible), consider General Sherman: a great warrior and a great victor—but not a great killer. The South remembers him bitterly for having achieved almost total dominance over them. They forget that he did it with only modest loss of life.

By contrast, consider that most useless of all modern battlefields: the Western Front where two sides hammered away at each other savagely because neither could think of a good reason to stop—the cream of ironies was that they never had a good reason to start in the first place.

That, of course, is the lesson of the modern “people’s wars” that we seem so determined to misunderstand. As may have said, we won it twice and lost it twice. As Ho Chi Minh liked to say, it didn’t matter because we didn’t understand the war we were fighting. So also the Israelis with an even more dramatic record of success on the battlefield and disappointment after the battle is over.

We do a bit better these days. No American seems to have understood the Vietnam War while it was going on. A few seem to understand Iraq today. On issues of operation and management, Peters is probably one of them: he certainly merits attention. On articulating strategic goals, he is not to be trusted.

[Peters’ book is: Never Quit the Fight available here, and do your best to ignore the fact that Amazon offers it as a companion piece to Ann Coulter.]