“Of Mice and Men”

You've seen the story about Farfur? He was Hamas' version of Mickey Mouse who taught Palestinian children to hate Jews and to look forward to Islamic world rule. Following an international storm of protest, al-Aqsa TV finally canceled the obnoxious rodent—by having him beaten to death, on television, by an actor portraying an Israeli because while the Jew wanted his land, the mouse gallantly refused to hand it over. The world forced the withdrawal of a particularly noxious pediatric poison, but at what price? In place of a malicious mouse, the civilized world gave Hamas the opportunity to create yet another martyr to its cause.

It may be time to acknowledge that those who doubt the capacity of humans to progress beyond their immediate self-interest are right. Palestinian Arabs of the Hamas stripe are reluctant to emerge from the clawing spider's-web of the past, preferring instead to fight to the death all those with whom they differ whether they be Jews or other Arabs. Given a chance to make a model state in Gaza, Hamas chose instead to pelt Israel with rockets and to launch a bloody self-defeating civil war against its nominal ally Fatah. Nor is Hamas and its ancillary mobsters alone among the Arab population. Tom Friedman of the New York Times, who initially supported the Iraq war, now concludes that America must pull out by a date certain. He cites Basra as evidence that gradual withdrawal is not viable. “The British forces there have slowly receded into a single base at Basra airport. And what has happened? The void has been filled by a vicious contest for power among Shiite warlords, gangs and clans and British troops are still being killed whenever they venture out.” I might mention that in and around Baghdad the same scenario is being played out with the added ingredient of Sunni terrorists murdering Shiite civilians and vice versa with mosques being bombed and politicians assassinated.

A recent New Yorker article reminds that one of the principal architects of this disaster, Paul Wolfowitz, thought that Iraqis would joyfully greet our liberating forces. He was right. But what he didn't realize, until it was too late, was why. With Saddam's heavy hand gone, pent up hatreds could explode, vengeance against enemies could be accomplished; heretical and infidel blood could flow again on the streets of Iraq. Who now considers that the people of Iraq are better off in the post-Saddam world or that the area is more stable now that Bush's America has tried and failed to impose its will on the region in an aborted effort to bring democracy? Everybody would have been better off had we simply hunted down bin Laden in Afghanistan and then come home to lick our wounds.

Our misadventure in Iraq was doomed from before we started. If Arabs had wanted democracy, they would have had it. If America were a democracy, Al Gore would have been president. The hypocrisy of a nation with the Electoral College trying to bring democracy to a people that doesn't want it is staggering.

In an earlier era, in a less self-aggrandizing spirit, Northern liberals attempted to bring integration and equality to a Southern white culture we were told was so racist it could not be changed. After a while we thought we'd won. And then the backlash began. It always does. The South first took over the Republican party and then swung the entire country to the right. Richard Nixon used a Southern strategy in 1968 to win the White House, and Ronald Reagan announced his 1980 candidacy for president in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town best known for the murder of three civil rights workers, including two Jews, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. The South, Hydra-like had risen again. Last month the Bushs' Supremes virtually abrogated Brown v. Topeka's guarantee of equal educational opportunities. Believers in Natural and Constitutional law had lost again

Humanity, our hope for creating a better world, is a mere chimera while people put more blind faith in obscurantists than in advocates of human potential, in superstition rather than in science, in religion rather than in reason. But they always will. Our salvation is with us, the living, with us the forward thinking, not with antiquated bigotries that lead to Farfur, and Philadelphia, Mississippi and George W. Bush. We are lost if we forget that. We thought the times had a'changed. We were wrong.

June 22- On two critics of Israel, Burg and LeBor

I've been practicing, but it's hard.

Here's a sample. “Heil Hi....” See? I can't do it, not even in print. I'll try again. “Heil Hit...”. Nope, still can't.

And why would I even try? Because I've just finished reading a lengthy interview in a recent Haaretz magazine. The subject was Avrum Burg, 52, former Speaker of the Knesset, former chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, one time candidate for Labor Party leader. You might think that such a person would be an advocate of Israel. Well, he is—much as Vidkun Quisling advocated for Norway.

According to Burg, The Law of Return “is the mirror image of Hitler.” The interviewer, Ari Shavit comments: “In your book we are not only victims of the Nazis... we are almost Judeo-Nazis... You do not actually say that Israel is Nazi Germany, but you come very close. You say that Israel is pre-Nazi Germany. Israel is Germany up to the Nazis.” Burg doesn't disagree. “Yes,” he says, and then explains: Israel has “a great sense of national insult; a feeling that the world has rejected us; unexplained losses in wars. And, as a result, the centrality of militarism in our identity.” His proof is the way Arabs are treated, the separation fence and other defensive measures. He compares the occupation of the West Bank to Hitler's Anschulss (the forced 1938 union with Austria). He doesn't like the comparison to Nazism, though, a term he says is extremely charged, but accepts the comparison to “National-Socialists” to me a distinction without a difference.

If he's right, we Zionists are proto-Nazis, which is why I, an avowed card-carrying Zionist, am practicing my Sieg Heils. But wait! What if Burg is wrong? What if we are not sliding down the slippery slope to a fascistic State of Israel. (Burg says we are already there—Q: Are you concerned about a fascist debacle in Israel? A: I think it is already here.) What if we are surprised when the Knesset doesn't “prohibit sexual relations with Arabs.” What if Burg is wrong and the Jews don't “use administrative means to prevent Arabs from employing Jewish cleaning ladies and workers... like the Nuremberg Laws”? He predicts, he states with the authority of the zealot, that “all this will happen and is already happening!” But, but, but, if we don't start treating Arabs as untermenschen sometime soon I'll have wasted all my goose stepping practice—and it wasn't easy to learn to goose step. Have you ever tried it? Gevalt. My thighs were killing me.

Burg's sense of honor does not distract him. When he was denied a pension for his chairmanship of the Jewish Agency because of his attacks on it (the pension is for NIS 200,000 annually—just shy of $50,000—plus a chauffeur driven limousine) he sued saying he's been deprived of a basic right. Although he's taken French citizenship he appears to want to be Labor's candidate for prime minister. That'll happen when I learn to ejaculate the words that began this column.

In a similar, though less obnoxious, vein Adam LeBor, in the Times (June 18), argues that Hatikvah should be changed, just a wee bit. Instead of referring to “nefesh Yehudi” (Jewish soul) the anthem should speak of “nefesh Israeli” (Israeli soul). This he contends would allow Christians, Arabs, Russians etc who are Israeli citizens to have a sense of inclusion in the Israeli state. “Updating 'Hatikvah' could be the start of a psychic shift among the country's Arab and Jewish citizens about what it means to be Israeli.”

LeBor is obviously whistling Dixie. No matter how conciliatory the Jews of Israel are, by changing the national symbols all they will accomplish is to water down their resolution to survive. About a fifth of the population is Arab. To my knowledge none are fleeing to Syria, but shall we put a crescent moon and star in the center of the Mogen David on the flag to keep them? And if the one wee change is made what shall we do with these lines? “Our hope is not yet lost, The hope of two thousand years, To be a free nation in our own land”? LeBor's proposal is a prescription for suicide. It will not be seen as an attempt at reconciliation, but as appeasement, as were withdrawal from Lebanon and the Gaza with nothing to show in return. Israel is the Jewish state, open to others to live in. Or to move from.

Reflections on the Six Day War, 40 years after

I've been reading “The Seventh Day,” David Remnick's essay in “The New Yorker” of May 28. It's a discussion of Israeli revisionist history. Remnick, who sees Israeli villains under every bed, argues that:

It [The Six Day War] was a war that Israelis regarded as existential in importance––defeat could well have meant the end of the state after less than twenty years––and yet winning had Pyrrhic consequences. Out of it came forty years of occupation, widespread illegal settlements, the intensification of Palestinian nationalism, terrorism, counterattacks, checkpoints, failed negotiations, uprisings, and ever-deepening distrust. What greater paradox of history: a war that must be won, a victory that results in consuming misery and instability.

Relying on the revisionists, Remnick denies the necessity of the war. He quotes Israeli leaders (without giving the context) who argued against going to war, and those who even afterwards said it was unnecessary. He claims that Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was wise in his reluctant ditherings; that the military forced him to go to war. Yes, he concedes, Nasser had the UN remove its peace keepers from the border so that Egyptian forces could bring their tanks and warplanes within striking distance of Tel Aviv. But even Israel's friends, the Americans and the British and the French warned Israel against striking first.

But could Israel listen to Britain and France? In 1938 they had given the same sort of advice to the young republic of Czechoslovakia with disastrous consequences. (By incredible coincidence, in 1938 Czechoslovakia was 19 years old when it was sold down the Danube; Israel was 19 years old when the same dynamic duo of appeasers tried to sell it down the Jordan.)

On June 5, 1967 Israel did attack. By placing his air force so close to the border, Nasser brought it within striking distance of Israeli fighter jets, which essentially destroyed his air capability and lost him the war. King Hussein of Jordan honored a recent pledge to Nasser and struck at Israel and lost the West Bank in exchange. (I suppose it's necessary to point out that the West Bank was part of the remnant of a proposed Arab state, one rejected by the Arabs as they invaded Israel. Gaza was the other remnant, occupied by Egypt since 1949. There never was a Palestinian state—there should have been one, one far bigger than the current West Bank and Gaza, but... As to Jerusalem, occupied by Jordanian forces since 1948, that was supposed to be an international city, open to all. Unlike Muslims permitted to pray at their holy places under Israeli rule, Jews were denied access to their holy places under the Jordanians. I just thought you would like to be reminded.)

Remnick is a fine writer, but he's fallen victim to “The Zeitgeist,” the spirit of the times, which lures historians to ruins against the rocks of misunderstanding. At first I wondered why he began with a seemingly superfluous reference to George W. Bush who called critics of his war policies “revisionist historians” but then it became abundantly clear. The spirit of Remnick's times (and mine and at last count of 70% of America's) is that the war in Iraq is an unnecessary adventure, that currently and in the future the US is and will be paying the penalties for Bush's arrogance. What Remnick forgets is that history is oracular, not predictive. It tells us truth (if we are honest) but it's never repeated. Israel in 1967 was not the United States in 2003. America's war is foolishly opportunistic, Israel's wasn't. Had Eshkol waited, a massive Arab attack would have driven the Jews into the Sea. Nasser was saying: “Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel...The critical hour has arrived.” Control of the air was essential. Either Israel had it or Egypt. There was no choice. The enemy was across an invisible line in the sand, not thousands of miles away. Nasser and his Arab allies had the ability to destroy Israel in a way that Saddam never could touch us. Al Qaeda attacked us; we attacked Al Qaeda's enemy. It was stupid. When Israel attacked it was necessary for survival. Sadly, the long term consequences are as Remnick describes them, but there would not have been a long term had Israel waited, had it not avoided being another Czechoslovakia.

A pagan and an atheist on religion re: Klinghoffer

Those of you who know me know the depths of my piety. So rigorous is my observance of the laws of Judaism that I constantly search for a six-hundred-fourteenth commandment to obey. Until recently, no luck. So it might come as a surprise that four times a year, around my oval table, I entertain two old friends, Paulie (“Poopidingus”) Pearlman, and Artie (“the Dodger”) Alston. Poopidingus is a practicing pagan; Artie, a devout atheist. This despite the fact that both were born to Jewish mothers; I attended their bar mitzvahs.

Over the years we've worked out a pattern. I say kiddish over the wine, Paulie the motzi, and Artie leads birkat. In unison, looking at our respective wives we stutter along through the interminable list of their virtues cited alphabetically in the Eishet Chayil. Why a pagan and an atheist would engage in these Jewish rituals I'm not sure. I, for instance don't sacrifice goats in Poopidingus's backyard. Just to make things kosher in their eyes we end the evening by singing the “Internationale,” for Artie, and “Diana” for Paulie (“I'm so young and you're so old/This, my darling I've been told/I don't care just what they say/'Cause forever I will pray/You and I will be as free/As the birds up in the trees/Oh, please, stay by me, Diana”) which is the closest to a pagan hymn he can find in English.

But this time Paulie arrived madder than Zeus with a toothache. “Did you see Klinghoffer in the April 20th Forward?” As we hadn't, he pulled out his copy and showed it to us. “It's titled 'Defend your Faith when it's Blasphemed.' My goddess (remind me to hit you up for another chai—we're having a building campaign to reconstruct Temple Beth Artemis which burned down a few years ago). Remember the Danish cartoon riots? It's headlines like Klinghoffer's that are the feces that launched a thousand Shiites.

“What is his problem?” he continued, his agitation mounting. “I don't get upset when people deny the existence of Zeus or Hera; Klinghoffer's the atheist to Christians who believe in the divinity of Jesus and the Holy Trinity. He's mad because Richard Dawkins says that the God of the Hebrew bible is 'arguably the most unpleasant character in fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully' doesn't make it true. But Klinghoffer's outrage doesn't make it false, either.” He was just getting warmed up. “I was at a couple of friends' daughter's bat mitzvahs recently and read of the death of Aaron's sons and of the death of the poor chap who was trying to prevent your holy arc from falling to the ground and smashing to smithereens. You do seem to have an arbitrary god there. Homer, at least, gives us the occasional reason for the displeasure of the gods. Your god just kills somebody and then, apparently, demands silence as a response. Some god!”

Artie chimed in. “Have you guys seen reviews of Hitchens's 'God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything'? I can't wait to read Klinghoffer on that.” Skimming the article, he continued: “I see here that he also objects to universities teaching that Tanach is just a collection of stories stitched together, and that the Zohar is not a second century book of mysticism but a 13th century hoax! Can you imagine? A religious hoax? Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, whom he slams, once defended his academic endeavors by saying the “Nonsense is nonsense, but the study of nonsense is scholarship!” I've always loved that line. That the sun revolves around the earth, that'll be Klinghoffer's next claim.”

Sadly, we lamented the decline of the Age of the Enlightenment. It had a good run while it lasted, but the fundamentalists are back in force—Muslims in their madrass schools, Christians at Liberty University, and Klinghoffer at the Forward. “Religion's all made up by man,” said Poopidingus; “still, it's an occasionally amusing story, if you don't take it seriously,” chimed in Artie. Sighing, Paulie in his “Zeus Lives!” tee-shirt, Artie sporting his “Vote Atheist” button, peered deeply into the depths of their Manischewitz Concord Grape wine and wondered where humanity had gone wrong. I, on the other had, had discovered my six-hundred-fourteenth mitzvah! To comfort rationalists as the darkness descends.

A comparison between US and Israel when poor leaders are in charge.

I love America And Israel. (And France and Italy and Britain and Canada, but let's not complicate things too much.) I love the things we share and the things that distinguish us as separate. We practice different forms of democracy—ours based on principles of separation of powers, theirs a hodgepodge of forms including elements that would be familiar in France (multiple parties and separate elections for the legislature and head of government); the Netherlands (proportional representation); British (virtually independent cabinet ministers and an unwritten constitution). We both have trouble controlling our borders, and each has a dominant religion, though we both practice forms of religious pluralism. We both have incompetent leaders who got us into lost/losing unnecessary wars. (It is an historical truism that if you are going to get your country involved in a war of choice, you may as well win.)

And the differences? In America we pretend that religion has no place in secular society despite “In God we trust” and “one nation under God” and crèches on public property and menorah lightings in state houses; Israel pretends to be a secular society independent of its official religion until the rabbinical authorities assert their control over everyday life (see Alison Golub's occasional columns on the perils and pitfalls of trying to prove you are Jewish enough to get married in a theocracy).

But a key difference is in the way we can or cannot control the executive power. In America, regardless of how George W. Bush-like the president is, it's almost impossible to get rid of him before his term expires. Yes, congress controls the purse strings (when it wants to) and yes, the president can be impeached and convicted of high crimes and misdemeanors—whatever that means but in fact, unless one rises (sinks?) to the level of Richard Nixon, there's no effective way to remove a president—and even if there were, in our current case we would just be exchanging the puppet for the puppeteer. Congress can override a presidential veto, but the president can run roughshod over the will of 2/3 (minus one) of either house and have his veto sustained. Israel, which is working with an independently elected prime minister avoids the Italian imbroglio of constantly falling governments, but there can be pressure placed on the prime minister to resign even without a formal vote of no-confidence as required in England, for instance.

Which inevitably brings us to the two commissions. In America an independent commission of senior legislative, executive and judicial retirees, all of great distinction, from both political parties, studied the origins of the Iraq war and made suggestions as to what to do now. These boiled down to “incompetence” (the generous reading) and “withdraw” respectively. Not wanting to influence the 2006 mid-term elections, the commission withheld its final report until after the polls were closed and the votes were counted and it became obvious to all that the president's policy of imposing democracy in Iraq by bullet was throughly repudiated by the democratic process by ballot. So, what has the president decided to do? Ignore. First he called for a surge of troops (the immediate result of which was the huge increase in civilian and GI deaths) and then he vetoed a congressional spending bill which called for gradual then total withdrawal of American troops. If you read this on May 11 there will still be 610 more days of this administration to endure.

In Israel where a similarly constituted commission, this on the origins and conduct of the war in Lebanon this summer reported that “There are very serious failings in these decisions and the way they were made. We impose the primary responsibility for these failures on the prime minister, the minister of defense and the [outgoing] chief of staff.” By the time you read this the Olmert premiership may already be over. It is a consummation devoutly to be wished. Being an accidental premier can work, but not this time. The man who managed to defeat the sainted Teddy Kollek back in 1993. was and is the wrong man at the wrong time who did the wrong thing. His time may already have come and gone, or perhaps he's still hanging on, but at least in Eretz Yisrael it's possible to change course, to get rid of incompetence and try something new. Here in America, we wait, and wait, and wait and wait. 610 and counting.

Reflections on the Virginia Tech killings

Even now, nearly two weeks later, my students look to me for answers. I offer rationality, reason. It is insufficient. Madness is on the loose. Virginia Tech occupies every thought of students and faculty on campus. We are relieved when through the door it's only a late arriving student. My students look to me for explanation. I offer rationality, reason. It is insufficient. Madness is on the loose.

It was the day after Yom Hashoah. Liviu Librescu, born in 1930 in Romania had been a survivor of the Holocaust. Romania's Iron Guard didn't wait for German orders. Jews were rounded up and murdered by homegrown fascists by the hundreds of thousands. But he survived. In the post-War era he lived under the tyranny of the Ceausescu regime which would neither allow him to practice his profession nor leave the country. It was only the personal intervention of Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1978 that secured his release from the suspended animation of life under Ceausescu's tyranny. In Israel he taught at Tel Aviv University and at the Technion in Haifa. In 1984 he came to Virginia Tech on sabbatical leave and stayed, becoming its most published scholar, ever. According to his son Joe, at Tech “he saw himself as the ambassador of Israel ... to an American university that had few Israelis but many representatives from the Arab world.”

I don't know how Professor Librescu observed Yom Hashoa, or if he did at all. I do know that on the Monday, Marlena,his wife, drove him to campus from their home at the edge of a forest through which he liked to take long contemplative walks. Shortly after 9:00 a.m. he was teaching Solid Mechanics to a class of 23 students. Gun shots were heard from the room next door. Professor Librescu slammed shut the door to his classroom and pressed his body against it. One of his students, Alec Calhoun, later told the AP that “he and classmates heard 'a thunderous sound from the classroom next door, what sounded like an enormous hammer.'” The students' initial response was to flip over their desks to use as hiding places. Librescu, though, shouted to them to get out the windows, to jump from the second story. The students kicked through the screens and jumped, one then another then another. The last image Calhoun has of his professor was just before jumping himself. He turned and saw Librescu at the door, blocking it to give the students another few seconds to escape. The killer, Cho Seung-Hui, tried to break in, but couldn't. Soon enough he shot through the door and hit professor Librescu five times. One student, Minal Panchal, was killed. All the others escaped. A survivor, Caroline Merrey, 22, reported that as the students were jumping out the window, “Professor Librescu never made an attempt to leave.” She reports that “He's a part of my life now and forever. I'm changed. I'm not the person I was before Monday.” None of us are. My students look to me for answers. I offer rationality, reason. It is insufficient. Madness is on the loose.

There is no way to bring back the 32 students and faculty killed. There is a way to help prevent a recurrence of the tragedy. Back in 1974, the Buckley Amendment, more formally called the Family Educational and Privacy Rights Act came into being. In short this says that if a student is 18 years of age or older, faculty cannot communicate with their parents. This to protect the students' privacy, a possibly laudatory goal. Down at Virgina Tech Cho Seung-Hui's English teacher noted dangerous tendencies and advised him to go to counseling but could not follow up. The campus police were called in on a couple of occasions in response to some creepy behaviors, but... You get my point. The consequence of protecting Seung-Hui's privacy was the death of 32 innocent students and teachers. The law had been obeyed scrupulously, the deaths are irrevocable. This we can do something about. We can write to our congressmen and senators and urge them to revoke the Buckley amendment, to allow teachers and counselors and administrators to talk to worried, distraught parents. I understand that mental health professionals have a code of ethics by which they must abide—but need teachers be bound by their code? When concerned parents call I want to answer their questions without fear of being sued by a student. Anyone care to join me?

Did we learn the lessons of the Seders?

The Seders of 5767 are now only a memory. Still, it's appropriate to ask, did their stories of freedom change us, clear our eyes, awaken our consciences? Are we more free now than before the Seders? By one definition, the answer is clearly “no,” for no man is free while even a single man is a slave. And, worse, what if we are enablers of the slavers? If we are, can we ever be free or are we merely latter day Egyptians, benefiting from the new pharaohs? Here's a simple quiz.

Did you emphasize that the story of our ancestors was the story of the exploitation of oppressed labor? And then did you go out and buy a product made in a sweatshop rather than in a Union shop?

Did you read of Pharaoh and not remember that people are being smuggled into this country to work in sub-human conditions; indeed, are being smuggled into the country in sub-human ways, crammed into airless trucks from Mexico, driven through deserts, abandoned if their drivers fear capture, or if from Asia, forced to live in ships in conditions comparable to those of the Middle Passage of the 19th century which smuggled Africans to our shores?

Most Jews no longer work with their hands in crafts. If we work with our hands it's as surgeons or dentists or musicians. We work with our minds as lawyers, teachers, store owners, stock brokers. We have achieved the American dream. We have become market driven bottom liners shopping for price, ignoring the human cost that goes into the production of our inexpensive goods. And why not? Being bourgeois is comfortable, it's convenient, it's what people around the world want—as proof of which there are all those desiring to come here. But there was a time when it was us who came to this country as the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to be free. And then we began the American labor movement. Those who did were Yiddish speaking secular Jews; maybe they never entered a synagogue, but they were the product of the Seder, of the retelling as though they had been slaves in Egypt. They were not going to wait to be liberated by a God they did not believe in; when they searched for the Messiah, they looked into the mirror and saw their own grime-lined faces. They remembered that they had a mission as Jews, to redeem not only themselves but mankind in general, so they formed their unions and they marched for workers' rights and then when African Americans demanded equality, of the white community it was Jews who were the first to ride freedom buses and march in Selma. We've given all that up now, but at the Seder, if we did it right, we remembered when we were slaves in Egypt; if we did it right we wept at the success we've achieved at the cost of abandoning our roots as workers for the liberation of the downtrodden.

Rabbi David Teutsch of the Reconstructionist Seminary has it about right. “If we only pour ten drops of wine from our cups and do nothing more, we do not understand the significance of our act. Our joy cannot be complete when there is harshness, cruelty, or suffering in the world. We cannot wait for others to tackle the injustices of our time. What will we do this year?” Oh, Rabbi Teutsch is also a PhD—from the Wharton School of Business. He writes as a Jew, but with that business background he might also be channeling the ideas of the principal theorist of capitalistic economics, Adam Smith. Smith asked the question we too often ignore—what is it that gives something value? And his answer was straightforward and simple—it is labor. Without labor taking a raw material and transforming it into something usable, it is just a tree, not a desk; some ore, not a knife; some gold, not an earing. Smith, who brooked no interference in the economy, not from government, not from price fixing allowed only this—the formation of workmen's associations so that laborers could collectively negotiate their wages. Smith wasn't a Jew, he was, I imagine, a Presbyterian, but like Teutsch, he knew the lesson of the Seder. Messiah? Look in the mirror and see your own reflection. You are the messiah if only you would recognize the strength within yourself, within our tradition that began as slaves in Egypt.