You’ll come for the terrorism, you’ll stay for the taxes – welcome to the Middle East!

The Sub-Prime Crisis: My response to a response to a response

2008-09-21T20:21:00.001+03:00

A friend of mine—an enthusiastic supporter of John McCain, or at least an enthusiastic opponent of Barack Obama, but otherwise a nice guy—forwarded a rather cute PowerPoint presentation that provided a rather snarky interpretation of the recent fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis. (I don't know if the PowerPoint is available online anyplace—if I can find it, I'll add a link to this post.) My friend added the following:

BLAME THIS ON BUSH TOO! CONGRESS HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS, CLINTON HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS... FANNY MAE $ FREDDY MAC HAD NOTHIG TO DO WITH THIS. RANGLE [sic] HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS. IT WAS ALL CAUSED BY THAT GREEDY BUSH! NOW I HOPE ALL THE LIBERALS THAT VOTED FOR BUSH SEE THE RESULTS!!!

I responded to him—and everyone else on his distribution list, most of whom, I fully believe, had already written me off as some kind of communist, or at least something of a crank—as follows:

Well, considering that Clinton ceased to be President almost 8 years ago, I'd say he's fairly thoroughly off the hook. (As far as I'm aware, the whole "subprime" mortgage boom started years after Clinton left office.) I don't know what Charlie Rangel (who used to be my Congressman in my Upper West Side days twenty-something years ago) has to do with anything; if you're talking about regulations that encouraged banks to lend money to borrowers in less expensive neighborhoods in their districts, then you're off target considering that (A) the mortgages now going into default were almost entirely *not* generated by banks and thus had nothing to do with these regulations; and (B) these regulations have been in existence for something like 20 years, and didn't cause any major problems in all that time. So I suspect Rangel is off the hook as well, although I do wish he'd use less hair gel. (Is his hair still so greasy? It used to look like an oil slick.)

Basically, the Bush administration has been in charge for almost eight years; for much of that time the administration had a Republican-controlled Congress (including John McCain, until the last few days a dedicated fan of financial deregulation), and even now the Republicans have enough strength in Congress that the Democrats can't break a filibuster or override a veto. Of course, this doesn't mean that Bush is responsible for everything that happens on Wall Street, or even in Midtown. But the fact is that (A) the regulatory infrastructure is part of the Executive Branch of government, which Bush controls; (B) many experts as well as ordinary people have been predicting for the last few years something very like what's been happening over the last weeks; and yet (C) the Bush administration did nothing about this brewing mess, through either direct executive action, promotion of legislation, or any other form of leadership. Considering that - unlike most politicians - Bush is from an old Wall Street family and has been in business for himself (mostly drilling dry holes, I'll admit), I think it would not have been out of line to expect him to have a better handle on these issues; after all, if the Republicans have anything to recommend them, it's supposed to be that they understand business and economics. I know Bush puts on a folksy image and appears clueless, but that was all supposed to be a put-on, wasn't it?

Bush, of course, is not up for re-election; and John McCain has never specialized in economics and financial matters. (He doesn't have the background for it, and I don't think he's ever pretended to be an expert on the subject. And given some of the crazy-assed derivatives of derivatives that are a large part of the current crisis, even the "experts" have a lot of trouble coping with what's going on nowadays. I've read that it's become almost impossible to come up with meaningful book values for a lot of the corporations dealing in the new financial instruments, because even the professionals can't figure out what some of these pieces of paper are worth.) For that matter, Obama isn't an accountant or a finance geek either, although he's probably got better financial chops than McCain. Neither candidate seems to be offering any magic answers, and frankly at this stage I think it's too late for magic answers; the time to prevent this crisis was four or eight years ago. (Old Arab proverb: The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago; the second-best time to plant a tree is today.)

Considering, however, that McCain has suggested privatizing Social Security, and that he very recently suggested deregulating healthcare in much the same way the financial markets had been deregulated, I think there are some legitimate grounds for worrying about his judgment in these matters. I certainly see nothing in his record to indicate that a McCain administration would be God's gift to American (or worldwide) financial markets or to the American healthcare system.

As you may be aware, Israel for the last several weeks has been buying 100 million U.S. dollars per business day, in an effort to help prop up the U.S. dollar and keep our own currency from becoming so expensive that we can't export anything. (This seems a bit surreal given Israel's financial past, but it's true - times have changed! Our central bank's target is to increase its U.S. dollar holdings by $10 billion, which is a fair chunk of change for a nation of our small size.) We do like to do our part, of course, even if we can't support you Americans to the degree the Chinese can. And we understand that you're too busy in Iraq to do much about Iran, even though we still can't quite figure out why you went into Iraq in the first place. (You certainly didn't ask us if it was a good idea!) So we'll probably have to deal with Iran for you as well. But we are *not* prepared to solve the subprime mortgage crisis for you! Maybe the Chinese have an extra trillion dollars lying around?

Olmert triumphs in poll – humiliating What’s His Name the Minister for Something or Other

2007-01-07T19:32:00.001+02:00

In a recent poll of 345 Kadima voters, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert triumphed over one of his fellow Cabinet members. Asked whom they would prefer to be Kadima’s next candidate for Prime Minister, the voters chose Olmert over the other minister by 8.7% to 5.8%. The only candidates the voters liked better than the current Prime Minister were Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni (preferred by only 49.3% of the poll participants); Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz Who Used To Be Something Important In The Army (preferred by 14.5%); None of the Above (11.6%); and Undecided (10.1%).

“This is significant triumph for our Prime Minister over someone whose name, I seem to recall, sounds very much like something used to build interior walls,” said one of Olmert’s remaining unindicted spokesmen. “Who says that Ehud Olmert is the least popular leader in Israel’s history? The numbers show that this simply isn’t quite true.”

An Ehud Olmert political-strategy consultant (who refused to be identified because he was concerned about possible loss of clients) claimed that Olmert’s fifth-place finish was in fact a much better result than it seemed: “Remember that the people who chose ‘None of the Above’ were clearly referring to Tzipi Livni and Shaul Mofaz, since they are the only ones who came out above ‘None of the Above’ in the poll. So these 11.6% of the Kadima electorate obviously prefer Ehud Olmert to Livni and Mofaz; they simply chose a more emphatic way of stating their revulsion to those two, rather than merely stating their obvious preference for Olmert.”

According to the same strategist, those who chose “Undecided” were also in the Olmert camp: “As Prime Minister, Olmert has seen first-hand the results of rash decision-making by earlier Prime Ministers, and has learned that putting off crucial decisions until later - or making Avigdor Lieberman make them and take the blame for them - is the essence of great leadership. Clearly, the Israeli people want an undecided Prime Minister, and Ehud Olmert is their choice for the job.”

Counting all the “Undecided” and “None of the Above” voters as members of the Ehud Olmert camp, the Prime Minister’s popularity among the Kadima electorate is clearly impressive: at over 30%, it is more than double Shaul Mofaz’s support, and well over half the support enjoyed by Tzipi Livni. “Ehud Olmert has shown that he has what the voters want, and momentum is on his side. If elections are held at some point in the future, there is a distinct possibility that he’ll be elected to something,” said Olmert’s spokesman.

Housing Minister Meir ~~Sheetrock®~~ Sheetrit could probably use some cheering up.

Living in denial

2007-01-04T15:48:00.001+02:00

Perhaps things are just as bad in the rest of the world, but it seems to me that the Middle East is suffering from an epidemic of denial: denial of the Holocaust, of course, but also lots of less spectacular denials of generally accepted fact^*. This phenomenon does not bode well for our happy little region.

The recent Holocaust-denial conference in Teheran, along with British “historian” David Irving’s early release from an Austrian prison, has highlighted some spectacular instances of denial; however, most discussion of the subject has very little to say about why deniers feel the need to challenge the factuality of the Holocaust. After all, few of them seem all that horrified at the prospect that a future holocaust might occur - for example, the nuclear incineration of the State of Israel - so why is it so important to pretend that the Holocaust of the last century didn’t happen?

Our Palestinian neighbors also have their little denial issues. Prominent among them is the refusal of most Palestinian opinion-shapers to admit that today’s Jews have any authentic connection to “Palestine”; according to this narrative, we are merely a bunch of interlopers from Poland who somehow - Invasion of the Tsuris Snatchers? - took over the ideas and claims of the “true” People of Israel. (Of course, in some versions there is no such thing as the People of Israel even in the past; so not only are we fake Jews, we made up the whole Judaism thing in the first place, in order to experience the pleasure of living here and worrying where the next bomb will explode.)

On our own side, many Zionists refuse to accept the existence of the Palestinians as an authentic people. According to this reading of history and sociology, there was never a separate Palestinian-Arab language, culture, or politics (at least until recently - 1964 is a frequently-cited year for the first use of “Palestinian” as a term for a distinct Arab ethnic-national group); and therefore the Palestinians of today are merely a figment of their own imagination. The fact that millions of people today identify themselves as Palestinians, mourn the “calamity” (“naqba” in Arabic) of Israel’s creation, and share common aspirations for the future is irrelevant: Palestinians didn’t exist in the past, and thus it’s obvious that they don’t exist today.

And most recently, our distinguished Knesset Education Committee has rejected Education Minister Yuli Tamir’s plan to include the Green Line - Israel’s pre-1967 de facto border - in maps included in Israeli geography textbooks. (I’ve written about this issue already - see “Lines and Inanity”.) Despite the fact that the Green Line figures in essentially every discussion of an eventual peace settlement with the (imaginary) Palestinians, nobody is supposed to know where the Green Line is; since “it died in 1967”, it’s somehow no longer relevant despite all indications to the contrary.

For the moment, I don’t want to get into the details of any of these denials of reality, or the many others floating around the Middle East. What I find depressing is not any single instance of denial, but rather the fact that denial is so widespread and pervasive. These flights from reality are not, after all, merely harmless fantasies.

All the denials I’ve mentioned are, at base, similar: they represent a refusal to face facts that do not fit in with our desires, and the willingness to ignore facts - or replace them with convenient fictions - in order to preserve our sense of how the world should be. So some of my fellow Zionists deny the existence of the Palestinians, because Israel can hardly be expected to adjust its borders to accommodate an imaginary people; while much of the Arab world denies the national existence of the Jews (at least as an indigenous Middle Eastern ethnic group), since they can hardly be expected to welcome us home (even grudgingly) if this was never our home in the first place.

Holocaust denial is a bit strange, even among flights of fancy. After all, what’s the point? The State of Israel was not created as a response to the Holocaust; the legal and political foundations for the Jewish State were set up between 1916 and 1923, when Adolph Hitler was a corporal in the Kaiser’s army and later a struggling painter in Vienna. (At most, one might say that the Holocaust nudged the process along a bit in the aftermath of World War II; but on the other hand, had the Holocaust not occurred, there would have been many more Jews alive to lobby for the creation of Israel and add to its population.) It would seem that Holocaust denial involves more than one fiction: first, that the Holocaust is the only justification for the existence of the State of Israel; and second, that it never happened or, at best, has been grossly exaggerated.

Reality, of course, is unimpressed by our denials:

Whether the Palestinians existed a hundred years ago or not, they exist today, according to any reasonable reading of current events; and, sooner or later, Israel is going to have to reach some form of accommodation with them.
The Jews are a genuine, if somewhat odd and annoying, religious/ethnic group; we have a genuine connection to the Land of Israel, which we have maintained faithfully for thousands of years. After all that time, we’re not all going to decide to go somewhere else.
The Holocaust happened, and in its course some six million Jews were murdered.
Even had the Holocaust not happened, the Jews would be entitled to a national home in Palestine/Israel; so said the League of Nations, which created the legal foundations not only for Israel but for most other countries in the Middle East and many in Eastern Europe.
The Green Line is a major fact of Israeli (and Palestinian) life and history; there is no point in hiding it from students as if it had never existed.

Refusing to face up to facts is not healthy - they do not, after all, go away when we turn our backs on them, and the more unpleasant ones have an annoying habit of biting us in the butt when we’re looking the other way. We don’t have to love them, but we do have to live with them. By retreating into fantasy we render ourselves incapable of coping successfully with the real world of today, and abandon all possibility of building a more hospitable future.

^* “Generally accepted fact” is, of course, a bit of a complicated issue - since many true things have been widely disbelieved at times, and many falsities have been “generally accepted” as true. Further, “facts” - even when based upon accurate observation - always reflect some point of view, some limitations in perception. In the immortal words of Stuart Mayper, “No fact is simple.” Nonetheless, the “fact” remains that we can distinguish between “extensional” and “intentional” thinking: The former attempts to ground itself in observations of reality; while the latter begins with a framework of ideas and desires, filtering information based upon what fits comfortably into this framework. “Denial”, then, represents an extreme case of intentional thinking.

If this seems a bit abstruse, remember that you didn’t have to read the footnote.

A Hedgehog’s Hasbara

2006-12-26T22:09:00.001+02:00

Last week I attended the second day of a conference on “The Media as a Theater of War, the Blogosphere, and the Global Battle for Civil Society”. (Unfortunately, I missed the first day, which actually covered a lot of the stuff I was most interested in. My immune system and assorted pathogens disagreed with my plans - and the less said about the details of the dispute, the better.) In the aftermath of the conference (and, indeed, during the conference itself), a number of my fellow blogger-attendees reacted rather negatively to much of the conference’s tone and content.

I’ve waited to set out my own thoughts on the subject, although I’ve written a bunch of long comments on Something Something - Liza wrote a pretty scathing review of the conference there, and some pointed debate (to put it mildly) followed between the liberal-blogger set (of which I appear, somehow, to have become an honorary member) and the rest. Foremost among the defenders of the conference is Richard Landes, who put the whole thing together and, as far as I’m aware, was principally responsible for selecting its panelists. Rather than repeat what Liza and Lisa and Yael wrote about the conference itself, I’ve been trying to figure out what’s really going on here: why is it that good and sincere people have such radical disagreements about a topic that - at least at first glance - should be fairly simple?

* * *

There is one thing that all of us (or at least all of us involved in this debate) agree on: Israel’s image in the eyes of the rest of the world is abysmal. Our response has been to attempt more effective hasbara - literally, “explanation” but more accurately translated as “public diplomacy”, “public relations”, or (less delicately) “propaganda”. The problem is that Israeli public diplomacy has been monumentally unsuccessful of late: the plucky little underdog of yore is now seen as the big bad wolf, oppressing and occupying the Palestinians, offending Hezbollah (by existing, basically), insulting Iran by accusing President Ahmadinejad of all kinds of horrible things, and feeling offensively sorry for itself every time a walking bomb blows up a bus or café.

We seem to have tremendous difficulty understanding why we are perceived so negatively. Are we not a thriving democracy? Do we not mean well? Okay, we’ve had to do some rather unpalatable stuff at times, but hey, we live in a rough neighborhood, and it’s not like we enjoyed knocking all those houses down! And our adversaries include some genuinely evil people: guys who think blowing innocent women and children to bits is a good thing, as long as it happens to us and not them.

The hasbara establishment - consisting of certain individuals and agencies of the Israeli government, along with a bunch of concerned individuals and private organizations - has responded to the failures of Israeli image-making by circling the wagons, closing ranks, girding their loins, going for the jugular, and keeping their powder dry: or, in other words and without the tortured metaphors, they’ve opted to do pretty much what they’ve been doing all along, but louder and more forcefully.

Others of us believe that a more nuanced, diverse, and proactive approach is called for. For example, rather than simply reacting to events on the ground by trying to explain or justify them - the approach that is implicit in the use of the Hebrew word for “explanation” to describe public diplomacy - we believe that public-relations concerns need to be a major input into policy-making: Just as politicians get advice from security experts before making decisions with security implications, they should get advice from people who understand international journalism and public opinion before making decisions that will affect how Israel is perceived overseas.

While we “hasbara rebels” don’t have an official set of beliefs - we aren’t a cohesive, organized group, although someone recently accused us of being a “sorority” and I’ve always wanted to sneak my way into a sorority - a lot of us seem to believe that current, traditional Israeli hasbara is not only too reactive, but also too strident, too self-righteous, and too focused on the evils of our adversaries. I’m not going to repeat all our arguments (and the counter-arguments) here; go to the thread at Something Something to see what I’m talking about. (At some point I should collect everything I wrote there and edit the good parts into something. Eventually.)

At some point early in the debate, I began to realize that the people with whom I was debating - while sincere, well-meaning, intelligent, and well informed - nonetheless didn’t get it: No matter how my sorority sisters and I tried to explain our position, they didn’t understand that we could be enthusiastic Zionists, eager to see Israel positioned better in world opinion, cognizant of the genuine problems out there (including some egregious bias in news reporting, along with an awful lot of simple and not-so-simple cluelessness) - and yet strongly disagree with their approach to hasbara.

I don’t yet entirely understand why traditional hasbara practitioners have such difficulty understanding the Sorority view - it’s not exactly rocket science, after all. Since the debate began, I’ve had the refrain from a favorite song of my youth constantly running through my brain:

Oh, you know all the words, and you sung all the notes,

But you never quite learned the song.

(from “The Hedgehog’s Song” by the Incredible String Band)

It’s rather sad, and very frustrating; I wish I could find some way to convince people who know that their approach isn’t working to think constructively about why it isn’t working and how it might be made to work better.

On the other hand, the debate has had one happy consequence: I’ve ordered CD’s of the first three albums of the Incredible String Band - the second of which includes the old favorite that I’ve had running through my head for the last week. After almost forty years, it’ll be nice to hear that music again.

Tags: Hasbara

Blogging toy of the day: WriteToMyBlog!

2006-12-21T21:14:00.001+02:00

In the past, I've used Microsoft Word to write most of my blog posts; I like its spell-checking and formatting (as opposed to the primitive capabilities of Blogger.com's built-in editor), and I especially like the "smart quotes" feature, which automatically inserts “real” quotes (like the preceding) instead of the tacky "telegraph-style" quotes you get otherwise. It also puts in genuine apostrophes: I don't like the ones like the preceding, while I can’t help loving the real ones.

The problem, however, is this: how does one get what one has written from Word to one's blog?

The new Word 2007 is supposed to have blog integration built in; nice thought, but it doesn't help those of us who don't have (and can't afford) Word 2007. I've been using a Word add-in (from Google, the owner of Blogger.com and much else of the universe) called Blogger for Word; this allowed me to manage blog posts and send new ones to my blogs, right from Word. Only two problems: First, it doesn't work on my office PC, where I do most of my writing; and second, it doesn't support the new version of Blogger, which I'm now (perforce, more or less) using. Good-bye, Blogger for Word.

So what to do? After some frantic Googling, I've discovered a new tool that shows some promise: WriteToMyBlog. It's a free, Web-based editor that allows you to manage posts, write and post new ones, insert pictures (using a range of hosting options), and do all sorts of other cute stuff. So far, the only feature I don't see that I really want is the "smart quotes" (along with "smart apostrophe" and automatic N-dashes) - so you're probably seeing this with a bunch of non-smart quotes. Sorry sorry sorry. If it actually works, it looks like a pretty decent tool - and if you can read this, it worked!

Tags: Blog, Blogging

Lines and Inanity*

2006-12-19T23:22:00.000+02:00

Among the many odd bits of education I’ve picked up here and there, I’ve had the pleasure of receiving some very useful training in General Semantics – a rather obscure discipline that is very difficult to define, but which can be described as a system for promoting accuracy of thought and feeling. (One of my principle teachers was Robert Pula, who I just found out – thanks to Wikipedia’s wonderfully rich cross-referencing system – died two years ago. Rest in peace, Bob.) A good bit of my rather annoying analytical style can probably be attributed to my exposure to General Semantics almost thirty years ago.

One of the fundamental concepts of General Semantics is that the map is not the territory; the word is not the thing – meaning that our verbal and non-verbal representations of reality are, at best, just representations, and not reality itself.

If we want to think accurately, we need to be aware that it’s all too easy to use these representations in ways that radically distort our understanding of the world. For example, I frequently see some of my fellow Zionists saying and writing things like, “The Palestinians don’t want peace; they just want to destroy Israel.” The problem here is that there is no such “thing” as “the Palestinians”; several million people can be classified (more or less accurately) as Palestinians, and they lack even a means of expressing a majority opinion on this or any other subject. To talk about “the Palestinians” as if they were a unitary object with a single opinion on Israel – or, for that matter, on anything else – is non-sense. (I’ve written in this vein before; see the second paragraph of my response to A____ in “Strategic assets and white elephants”.)

Since – with our limited and imperfect senses – we can never perceive reality entire, all we have is representations: words, maps, and other abstractions from the reality that is “out there” but which remains forever inaccessible to us. If we want to get along well with the universe, we should seek the most accurate representations we can get: Someone trying to understand the Middle East can no more afford to think in terms of what “the Palestinians” think than an American long-distance bus driver can afford to use a map that shows New Jersey next to Idaho. Successful navigation requires maps that fit the territory.

* * *

All of this brings me to one of this month’s existential crises in Israel: Yuli Tamir, our Minister of Education, has come under a barrage of criticism from the Right for her decision to order the inclusion of the “Green Line” (Israel’s pre-1967 de facto border, which was in fact an armistice line recognized by neither Israel nor its Arab neighbors as a legal border) in maps to be included in new elementary-school geography textbooks. According to some (but by no means all) Israeli Rightists and their supporters overseas, including the Green Line in our children’s maps will somehow turn them all into raging members of Peace Now and otherwise sap and impurify all of their precious bodily fluids.

This controversy highlights one of the more surreal absurdities in a region that possesses over 60% of the world’s proven absurdity reserves: Although the Green Line is a significant factor in our lives, it is entirely absent from most of our maps. Since a November 1967 government decision decreed that Israeli maps should show only the post-Six-Day-War cease-fire lines and not the previous borders, the Green Line has achieved a kind of massive, intrusive invisibility.

This might make some kind of sense if the Green Line were in fact irrelevant; but it isn’t. Not only is it still a major part of Israel’s history and a constant point of reference in the debate about an eventual settlement of the Israeli/Arab conflict; it’s also a significant influence on the day-to-day lives of many Israelis:

Until about six years ago, Israelis living across the Green Line received reductions in their income taxes. Many Israelis think we still do, and resent us for it.

People living across the Green Line (myself included) have an easier time obtaining gun licenses than otherwise-similar people living inside “Israel proper”.

Many banks will not give mortgage loans on houses across the Green Line, or else will finance a lower percentage of a home’s purchase price than they would inside pre-1967 Israel.

People living across the Green Line know that they can be evicted from their homes by their government, as a result of an eventual agreement with our Arab neighbors or else as part of a unilateral Israeli withdrawal. (When we bought our house, Vaguely Sinister Wife and I had to sign papers acknowledging this; in fact, according to what we signed the government can, at least in theory, evict us without compensation for the loss of our home.)

As soon as you cross the Green Line from pre-1967 Israel, you come under military rather than civilian legal jurisdiction. This is easily forgotten, since Israelis living in the West Bank are normally dealt with by the Israeli legal system just as other Israelis are; but this is a privilege extended as a courtesy, and can be revoked at the government’s will. This means that if the government should decide to evict us from our homes, and should we decide to protest this decision, we could quickly find ourselves without the civil rights we normally take for granted; martial law is already in place, merely held in abeyance for us as long as it’s not needed.

Stuff grown or manufactured by Jews across the Green Line is apt to be boycotted by members of the Enlightened Public overseas, and even by some Israelis.

The Green Line features prominently in our social lives. Many people won’t visit me at home since I live on the “wrong” side of the Line by a couple of kilometers. (Others, of course, avoid me because they’re allergic to cat fluff, or simply because they don’t like me.)

In short, the Green Line is important – historically, politically, legally, economically, and socially. So where the hell is it? An awful lot of Israelis have no idea.

By eliminating the Green Line from Israeli maps, our government did not eliminate the Green Line; all it accomplished was to create a lot of inaccurate maps and ignorant Israelis. If we intend to navigate our future successfully, we need to know where the Green Line is and what the Green Line is. So let the maps be reprinted; let the Green Line show forth in all its wriggly and impractical glory! And when, eventually, it really does become merely a fact of history, let it enjoy an honorable, dignified – and visible – retirement.

* This is a rather wretched play on the title of the seminal – and rather impenetrable – textbook of General Semantics, Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski. I apologize abjectly – although I suspect that Korzybski would have approved of it.

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Israel.

Watching a watchdog: HonestReporting veers off course

2006-12-10T21:29:00.000+02:00

On 8 December, media watchdog HonestReporting came out with a special report on the new – and already discredited – United Nations Human Rights Council. The report is worth a read, although there’s not much there to surprise anyone who follows the United Nations and its relationship with Israel.

As I dutifully read through the report, slightly bored and mildly depressed, if not astonished, by the hypocrisy of the U.N.’s supposed human-rights establishment, I came across the following sentence:

On November 15, 19 Palestinian civilians were killed when an Israeli artillery shell veered off course, missing its intended military target.

Alarm bells began to ring. My boredom vanished. I suddenly felt that old familiar tingle in my typing fingers (all ten of them). Wasn’t HonestReporting going a bit beyond the facts here?

I very recently wrote about the Beit Hanoun tragedy, although in writing that essay I didn’t investigate the details of how Israeli artillery managed to be off-target by several hundred meters. (I was more interested in the applicability of “international law” to the incident, rather than the technical aspect of what went wrong.) Still, I remembered enough about the incident to be suspicious: HonestReporting’s description didn’t ring quite true.

The first problem here was the word “veered”. (The immediate picture that came to my mind when reading that “an Israeli artillery shell veered off course” was an ancient cartoon sequence of some guy firing off a rocket, which then, predictably, did a loop-the-loop and hit him in the butt.) If the tragedy happened because a shell “veered off course”, we are meant to assume that it had been aimed correctly and somehow took a wrong turn in mid-flight. Now this might indeed happen with a primitive rocket, and it nearly always happens when I hit a golf ball; but it doesn’t generally happen with artillery shells.

And indeed, some very quick research revealed that it didn’t happen. According to the IDF itself as well as to other reports, the shells flew straight enough, but were aimed inaccurately because of a malfunction in one circuit card of the artillery battery’s “Shilem” targeting system. The “Shilem” apparatus for this battery had been replaced five days before the Beit Hanoun tragedy; and according to at least one report, it had not been given a live-fire test before being used in the Beit Hanoun bombardment. The final report of the IDF investigation into the incident has not been released, so we don’t yet know why this particular device malfunctioned; the “Shilem” system has been in use for about 30 years and has an excellent record for reliability, which may have (perversely) contributed to the tragedy by allowing the system to be deployed with minimal post-installation testing before real-world use.

According to both the Jerusalem Post and Haaretz, seven shells were fired off-target, not just one. So even though a hardware failure was responsible for the death of nineteen innocent civilians, the operational procedures in use that day failed to correct the problem in an appropriately timely manner. (Apparently, part of the problem was that the same system that had made the mistake in the first place was also in charge of tracking where the shells hit – and it thought it was doing just fine.)

So: It was seven shells, not one. The shells didn’t change their minds in midair; they were aimed wrong by a defective system, under circumstances that remain unclear. And what about the “intended military target” of the shelling?

Here I was on firmer ground, since I had already written about the targeting of the Beit Hanoun bombardment. The actual target of the shelling was an open area that had been used on the previous day for launching Kassam rockets at Israel. Without repeating a long discussion of the targeting issue, I will only say that blithely referring to an open field as a “military target” is, at best, something of an exaggeration. The impression conveyed by the phrase “military target” is of something substantial – a weapons factory, a troop formation, or the like – rather than an open field that had been used for a military purpose on the previous day but might well be hosting a soccer game today. Even if the IDF had a more or less valid military intention in firing these shells at Beit Hanoun, the target was hardly an impressively military one.

* * *

All of this may seem like a lot of bother about one sentence in an otherwise unobjectionable report written by an organization of whose goals I approve. But I think that this sentence highlights an important problem with many of the individuals and organizations that support Israel in the public sphere: the tendency to be just a little bit too convinced of Israeli righteousness, to be too fast to gloss over our own side’s transgressions, and thus to lose the trust of a skeptical world.

Organizations like HonestReporting bill themselves as guardians of the truth – in HonestReporting’s own words, “Promoting fairness. Ensuring accuracy. Effecting change.” If these organizations want to achieve anything, they need to be seen as more than just pro-Israel propaganda mouthpieces. It’s fine to be pro-Israel – many people, myself included, are immediately suspicious of anyone who claims complete neutrality – but if you’re billing yourself as a guardian of accuracy and an opponent of media bias, you need to be scrupulously accurate yourself and try hard not to be swayed by your own biases.

On this occasion – and, I’m afraid, on many others – HonestReporting has let its sympathy for Israel overrule its professed dedication to accuracy, and thus has damaged its own effectiveness.

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Israel, Palestine, Middle East, War Crimes.

The Son Also Rises

2006-12-04T13:38:00.000+02:00

According to the Jerusalem Post, Ariel Katsav – son and purported alibi witness of Israel’s embattled President Moshe Katsav, who has been accused of multiple counts of sexual harassment and rape – has now himself been accused of sexual harassment by a fellow employee of Israel Railways, where the younger Katsav is Director of the Customer Service Department.

Presumably Ariel Katsav, wishing to carry on the family tradition of hands-on management, misunderstood the meaning of the word “service” in his job description.

Categories: Katsav, Sex.

Haveil Havalim #96 has arrived!

2006-12-03T19:46:00.000+02:00

Soccer Dad has done it again – another great edition of Haveil Havalim (the Jewish/Israeli blog carnival) is off the virtual presses. This edition is extra-special, since it includes a post from You’ll Come for the Terrorism; of course, there’s lots of other great stuff to read, too. Enjoy!

Bradley Burston and Beit Hanoun

2006-11-28T20:45:00.000+02:00

Of all the English-language columnists in the Israeli press, there is only one who consistently writes stuff that I wish I’d written myself: Haaretz’s Bradley Burston. I don’t always fully agree with him – he’s generally a bit to my left politically – but he’s always thoughtful, and, unlike many Haaretz writers, he’s never so doctrinaire as to render himself irrelevant.

Of course, there’s no point in writing a blog post simply to tell the world (OK, a very very small portion of the world) that you agree with something; to blog is to quibble, after all. So my lead paragraph is there simply to soften you up for what follows: a detailed disagreement with Bradley Burston.

In his recent column “We can’t be war criminals, we’re Palestinian”, Burston quite correctly argues that Palestinian use of Kassam rockets against Israeli towns constitutes a war crime; and he brings in Human Rights Watch to back up his claim. So far, so good; but Burston also invokes HRW to support his contention that Israel committed a war crime in its shelling of Beit Hanoun, which resulted in the tragic killing of nineteen noncombatant Palestinian civilians. I believe that it is unfair to “convict” Israel of war crimes in this manner, despite the fact that I do not have a great deal of confidence in our military and political leaders’ wisdom or motives; and I wrote Bradley Burston to explain why (correspondence is reproduced with Mr. Burston’s permission):

Dear Mr. Burston:

As happens annoyingly often, you’ve written a column that I wish I’d written myself. Thanks for the good writing and the astute analysis.

I have one quibble with your argument regarding recent events in Beit Hanoun: You seem overly ready to convict the IDF of a war crime in the killing of 19 Palestinian noncombatants, considering that the law on the subject is highly ambiguous.

International law indeed requires that military attacks be directed only at military targets. Human Rights Watch contends that the standards used by the IDF in aiming and timing its artillery attacks are such as to constitute a war crime; but I don’t think they successfully make that case. The problem is that while international law does require certain intentions in targeting, the relevant treaties do not establish any particular standard for “quality control” in executing attacks; that is, there is no well-defined boundary between “legitimate” unintentional killing of civilians and illegitimate attacks carried out with reckless disregard for civilian deaths.

Lacking such a standard, there is no reliable way to judge the IDF’s shelling of Gaza on purely objective grounds.

According to HRW, “the IDF confirmed that it had fired 12 artillery shells at the site, having missed its intended target 500 meters away.” It would seem to me that if the shells that killed the Athamna family fell 500 meters from their designated target, the prima facie interpretation of the incident is that it was a tragic but non-criminal error. Since the legality of an attack is based on its intention (that is, its target) the attack does not become a war crime simply because of an error in aiming weapons – as long as a good-faith effort was made to procure accurate weapons and aim them properly.

HRW further claims that “the evidence suggests that Israel’s day-old information that homemade rockets had been launched from the area, with no specific information that rockets continued to be launched from the area, was an insufficient basis for considering the area attacked to be a legitimate military target.” This claim is problematic for two reasons: first, requiring “specific information” about Kassam firing in “real time” would make most forms of military interdiction of such firing virtually impossible, as Kassam crews arrive, set up their launcher, fire their rocket, and leave again within a very short span of time. The best that can possibly be done is to identify areas that are routinely used for firing Kassams and are not overly close to civilian dwellings or facilities, and then to try to time interdiction fire to achieve best results with minimum risk to the innocent. The second problem with HRW’s claim is that it is completely irrelevant: If the IDF artillery was off-target by 500 meters, the timing of the shelling was not the primary cause of the tragedy. Presumably, had the shells been aimed accurately, tragedy would have been averted even if nobody was firing Kassams from the target zone at the time.

Ultimately, the determination of whether the IDF shelling of Beit Hanoun constituted a war crime can be made only on somewhat subjective grounds:

Did the IDF procure and use weapons that are normally considered accurate and reliable?

Did the IDF select targets taking proper account of the accuracy and precision of its weapons?

Did the IDF properly train its artillery crews to avoid targeting errors?

Did the IDF select targets based upon the best intelligence that could practicably be obtained?

Did the IDF select what it believed to be the best available tactics for combating Kassam fire while minimizing danger to innocent Palestinians?
And lastly - and perhaps most importantly:

Did the IDF express and promote an attitude of proper care to avoid killing noncombatant civilians whenever possible?
(This last question is really the key: If the IDF acted with the proper attitude and intentions, it is innocent of war crimes even if some soldiers botched an operation or equipment malfunctioned; but if the IDF exhibited reckless disregard for the lives of innocent civilians – or, indeed, intended that innocent civilians be killed – then Beit Hanoun was a war crime.)

I cannot confidently assert that the IDF is entirely innocent regarding the Beit Hanoun tragedy; I simply do not know the answers to the questions I’ve asked above. (I’m fairly sure that the IDF’s artillery is normally accurate and reliable; but as I have yet to see an explanation of why the shells were fired inaccurately, I’ll assume that even this question remains open for now.) But until and unless answers to these questions do become available, it is unfair to “convict” the IDF of a war crime in Beit Hanoun. There is, I believe, a reasonably high probability that the shells were fired off-target due to legitimate (i.e. non-reckless) human error; and if this is the case, no war crime took place even given the sad results of the shelling.

Best regards,

-Don Radlauer

Bradley Burston responded thus:

Thanks very much, Don, for your thoughtful letter. I believe that the crime here was not that of the gun crew, nor of the spotters, but of [Israeli Defense Minister Amir] Peretz and senior officers in the Southern Command and the General Staff, who lobbied for and gave the green light to artillery shelling even though more accurate means were available, and even though they had been warned – both by precedent in Gaza and Lebanon, and by predecessors in senior posts – that something very much like Beit Hanun was a very likely possibility.

Best regards,

Bradley

To which I responded:

Dear Bradley -

Thanks for your kind response.

Indeed, if Peretz and the relevant IDF commanders believed that more precise means were available to combat Kassam launches, the decision to use artillery was problematic – and perhaps even criminal. That leaves us with two key questions:

What information did Peretz and the generals have regarding the likelihood of a Beit-Hanoun-style disaster based on extensive use of artillery, particularly in comparison to the risks involved in using alternative means? What information did they have regarding the effectiveness of the various means of attack, as well as the risk to our own forces (e.g. from in-person operations)? (It may also be relevant to consider that if the Beit Hanoun disaster occurred because of human error, other methods of attack might be equally prone to human error.)

Assuming that the answer to (1) would lead a reasonable person (generally defined as someone closely resembling me) to choose something other than artillery, why did our military leaders choose artillery?
I’m not sure that there really are measures available to the IDF that would effectively combat Kassams without endangering Palestinian civilians – particularly given that (as I see it) a large part of the motivation behind the Kassams is to provoke Israeli responses that would lead, sooner or later, to a Beit-Hanoun-style “massacre”. What method do you think would be both effective and safe?

At the same time, I must admit that I don’t have a great deal of confidence in the decision-making abilities of our political or military leaders; too often they seem to be playing to the local audience (which, judged by Haaretz or JPost forum participants, is rather bloodthirsty) rather than understanding the implications of their decisions in a broader context. But lacking a detailed answer to the questions above, I’m still not convinced that Beit Hanoun was a war crime, as opposed to a sad and stupid – but non-criminal - fuck-up.

Best,

-Don

That is as far as our discussion progressed. I’ve done a little further research, just to clarify where the lines are drawn regarding what is a war crime and what is not. It seems that the subject is a rather complex one: the Hague and Geneva Conventions do not draw precise boundaries between legitimate warfare (which is never a clean business, rules or no) and war crime; and there is a substantial gulf between the strict interpretation of the various Conventions advocated by Human Rights Watch and other NGO’s active in the field, and the much looser interpretation reflected in the actual history of war-crime prosecutions.

As both Burston and I have pointed out, it’s quite common – and wrong – for parties perceived as the “underdog” to be given a pass regarding the rules of war. “Enlightened Public Opinion” is quick to condemn Western governments for any perceived violation of the rules (shooting at mosques, for example), but is strangely silent when Third World irregular forces commit flagrant violations of the same rules (like hiding combatants and arms in the aforementioned mosques, drawing Western forces’ fire). This inconsistency undermines the principles on which international law is based; if the rules of war are to have any meaning at all, they must apply to all combatants equally.

There is no real question, then, that Palestinian Kassam attacks and Hezbollah’s Katyushas fired at northern Israel are war crimes, regardless of the legitimacy of Israel’s military tactics. Weapons that cannot be aimed precisely enough to hit military targets are of use only to terrorize and kill civilians; and the use of such a weapon is thus a clear sign of the intent to attack civilian targets – precisely what the Conventions forbid.

But just as Israel’s military tactics, legitimate or not, do not justify our opponents’ violations of the rules of warfare, our opponents’ illegitimate tactics do not justify violations on our part.

If we are to use the strict “NGO interpretation” of the rules of war (which is the interpretation Bradley Burston and I were using in our exchange of letters), it’s possible that some Israeli actions against Palestinian or Lebanese targets might have been criminal; as mentioned above, it all hinges on what information and alternatives were available to commanders, and how they made the decisions they made. However, it is also important to note that in the real world, nobody has ever been prosecuted for war crimes based on this interpretation of the law. An extensive Wikipedia list of prominent prosecuted and un-prosecuted war crimes does not include a single case in which civilians were killed as a consequence of a botched – or even reckless – attack on a military target. Every one of the war crimes listed was a deliberate attack on civilians, with no military justification.

I try (albeit not hard enough) to be a person of principle, and I aspire to live in a nation governed by principle. I would be much happier with my government if I felt that its every decision took into account the rights of noncombatant civilians as well as Israel’s military and political needs – although I do feel that our record could be a lot worse than it is, considering the dangers we face. Like Bradley Burston, I feel very uncomfortable with incidents like the Beit Hanoun tragedy: even if the killing of innocent civilians was not intentional, it was predictable given the number of shells we were firing in close proximity to densely populated areas. But I still think Burston is wrong to classify Beit Hanoun as a war crime.

Words are powerful things. If Israel is accused of committing war crimes – by Israelis, no less! – we are being compared to the Nazis, Cambodia’s Pol Pot, and the rest of the monsters. To be classified as part of this group is to lose all legitimacy among right-thinking people worldwide; and Israel is desperately in need of all the legitimacy it can get. But while the Katyushas and Kassams fit comfortably into the list of acknowledged war crimes, Israel’s actions in Lebanon and Gaza do not.

The kind of even-handedness practiced by Human Rights Watch and Bradley Burston is certainly better than accusations made against Israel alone; but even this “fairness” seems terribly unfair considering that our adversaries have committed war crimes according to all legitimate definitions of the term, while Israel has committed war crimes – if at all – only according to an interpretation of the rules of war that exists only in the minds of human-rights NGO’s, and has never seen the inside of a court of law.

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Middle East, Hezbollah, War Crimes.

Electronic Weirdness Department: Don sells out to ReviewMe.com

2006-11-11T19:13:00.000+02:00

Over the last year-and-a-bit, my loyal readers have come to depend on me for... ummm... I’m not actually sure quite what my readers depend on me for, actually. Possibly a good night’s sleep? Proof that good grammar, spelling, and punctuation aren’t enough to make something worth reading?

But in any case, my ~~many~~ several readers have come to expect the utmost in integrity from You’ll Come for the Terrorism, The Blog That Couldn’t Be Bought.

In reality, of course, the reason that this blog couldn’t be bought was that I couldn’t figure out how to sell it. I’ve had the same problem with cars, cats, and lots of other stuff, which is why my closets are full, my bank account is empty, and I’ve got claw marks in all kinds of awkward places.

But now, thanks to ~~Satan~~ Tricia at Tricia’s Musings, I’ve ~~sold my soul~~ connected with an outstanding organization that promises to make me slightly less insolvent, without - I hope - compromising my precious ethical standards more than a little. The organization is called ReviewMe, and they offer opportunities for bloggers to review stuff in exchange for filthy lucre. (Actually, they pay via PayPal, so I think the lucre gets cleaned off somewhere in the process.) So far, so good, ethics-wise: In fully fifteen minutes since I signed up, they haven’t once asked me to say good things about shoddy products or websites. In fact, the only thing they’ve asked me to review so far is their own service.

Now, this is in fact a bit of a challenge. How exactly am I supposed to review their service if I haven’t actually done anything more than sign up and agree to write the review? It’s hard to come up with anything very substantive after such a brief acquaintanceship.

On the other hand, they’re paying me $20.00 for this review, so I’d better come up with something. (Blogs with higher ratings, based on Technorati rankings and the like, are paid more for reviews. While I wasn’t quite in the “beneath our notice” category, I’m one of their cheaper dates. ReviewMe takes 50% of the price paid by reviewees - so the review for which I receive $20.00 costs the reviewee twice that.)

Here, then, is My First Review: I signed up for ReviewMe. The “Create Account” screen worked flawlessly, although, annoyingly, the “Province” field is mandatory even for people who live in Israel, a country the whole of which would fit comfortably inside even a relatively modest province of someplace normal. The “Enter Your Blog” screen was similarly slick - or at least functional. The two automated emails I received (one congratulating me for having signed up, and the other reminding me that I’d agreed to review ReviewMe and that I had 48 hours to do so) were both brief, grammatical, and correctly spelled. The payment, I hope and expect, will be prompt.

The ReviewMe site’s visual esthetics are good; the fonts are all well-chosen, things are properly lined up, they used CSS (Cascading Style-Sheets) to good effect, and so on. Some of the background colors (notably the orange and green on the “Why ReviewMe?” page) were a bit jarring, but in general the website is well thought out. FAQ’s are brief but clear and informative, and navigation around the site’s pages is intuitive. (I hadn’t initially bothered to investigate most of this stuff - I raced straight into the nuts-and-bolts aspect of the service. Then I figured that for $20.00 I should actually look at more of the ReviewMe website, even though I tend to be more concerned with results than with esthetics.)

So - I’ve sold my soul for $20.00.

It feels great.

Categories: Reviews.

Required Urgently: Peepy Extension

2006-11-07T19:42:00.000+02:00

I finally got it up – and now it’s your turn to help me keep it up!

Get your minds out of the gutter, dear readers; it’s getting crowded here. I’m referring, of course, to my picture at 25Peeps.com – which has finally appeared after weeks on their waiting list, and will stay on their front page as long as hordes of rabid You’ll Come for the Terrorism readers go over there and click on my picture. (It’s the same pic as my Blogger profile – the one with an ugly me hugging my pretty horse.)

Pictures at 25Peeps stay there as long as they’re new or popular – and newness doesn't last long. Showing some nice cleavage helps – but all I’ve got is native talent, cool sunglasses, and a good hat collection. I’ll tell you a secret, though: Sapir the Horse happens to have a great pair of mammaries, and if you, my tasteful and loyal readers, keep me on 25Peeps for long enough, I may (with Sapir’s permission, of course) let you have a look at them.

I know it’s Election Day over in the States; but who’re you going to waste time on – me, or some stupid politicians? Go! Click! Hurry!!!

UPDATE/ADDENDUM: 24 hours later, I’m still hanging in there on 25Peeps, but I’m fading a bit. Keep clicking, folks - especially if you want to see those naughty pics of Sapir! (You’re allowed to click more than once, by the way.)

More brevity: Pride and Presidents

2006-11-06T21:47:00.000+02:00

Following the wild success of yesterday’s post, I’ve decided to continue writing six-word blog articles. Now that I’ve wallowed in the adulation of my fanatical fans, I want more – and if brevity is what it takes to make all three of them happy, then brief I shall be.

Here, then, is today’s miniature masterpiece:

Katzav at home; not getting any.

Kind of says it all, doesn’t it?

And yet…

In these troubled times, I think we need to draw encouragement from whatever sources are available, no matter how unpromising they may at first appear; and the situation of Israel’s President Moshe Katzav – accused of multiple sexual crimes – is looking just about as unpromising as you can get. Such a depressing story can only be heartening to those of us with an appropriately contrarian spirit.

Israel, as you’ll no doubt be aware, is currently embroiled in a raging controversy: Will this Friday’s Gay Pride Parade in Jerusalem be allowed to proceed? If so, will the Haredim (a.k.a. the “Ultra-Orthodox”) attack the marchers? Seldom in the last several weeks of Israel’s history have tensions run so high. Earthquakes and tsunamis – real ones, not the metaphorical kind – have been threatened. Our nation cries out for moral leadership.

What a relief, then, to read that President Katzav – whose job consists largely of embodying the Israeli national consensus, whenever such a thing exists, which is mostly at funerals – has taken a firm position on issues of sexual preference. According to the Jerusalem Post article cited above, our President’s attitude is clear: “What is certain, however, is that if Katsav has to go down, it won't be without a fight.”

That’s the spirit, Mister President. It’s nice to know that whatever you’ve been accused of, you’re a man who stands up for his principles.

Categories: Katsav, Blogging, Jerusalem.

Brevity

2006-11-05T18:10:00.000+02:00

Ernest Hemingway once wrote what must be the world’s shortest short story:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

According to Wired Magazine, he considered it his single best work. I’m not sure if it’s really Hemingway’s best story – certainly it wouldn’t work well as a summer vacation read, except perhaps for a very short visit to the beach – but one must admit that in six short words, Hemingway managed to imply a much longer story, with genuine emotional impact. (With its combination of pathos and brevity, it could, perhaps, serve as a bedtime story for constitutionally cheerful narcoleptics; so even in purely practical terms, the story is a winner of sorts.)

There is a lesson here for writers – a lesson that Hemingway himself understood well, even though most of his work was more prolix than his six-word masterpiece: Don’t try to say everything.

Wired Magazine invited a bunch of science-fiction, fantasy, and horror writers to compose their own six-word stories; here are some of my favorites:

Margaret Atwood	Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
	Corpse parts missing. Doctor buys yacht.
	Starlet sex scandal. Giant squid involved.
David Brin	Vacuum collision. Orbits diverge. Farewell, love.
	Mind of its own. Damn lawnmower.
Orson Scott Card	The baby’s blood type? Human, mostly.
Howard Chaykin	“I couldn’t believe she’d shoot me.”
	[This one resonates with me, considering that I’m an outgunned husband.]
Brian Herbert	Epitaph: He shouldn't have fed it.
Robert Jordan	Heaven falls. Details at eleven.
James Patrick Kelly	We kissed. She melted. Mop please!
Steven Meretzky	He read his obituary with confusion.
	Time traveler's thought: “What's the password?”
	I win lottery. Sun goes nova.
	Steve ignores editor’s word limit and
	Parallel universe. Bush, destitute, joins army.
Richard K. Morgan	K.I.A. Baghdad, Aged 18 - Closed Casket
Rockne S. O’Bannon	It’s behind you! Hurry before it
Richard Powers	Lie detector eyeglasses perfected: Civilization collapses.
Charles Stross	Osama’s time machine: President Gore concerned.
Vernor Vinge	Epitaph: Foolish humans, never escaped Earth.

Some of these are telegraphic plot summaries; others take the form of news headlines, epitaphs, and the like. Many of them made me laugh, and one – the one about a soldier killed in Iraq – approaches Hemingway’s masterpiece in its terse description of tragedy and bereavement (although I’m not sure if counting “K.I.A.” as one word constitutes cheating).

I am not a writer of fiction; I’ve tried, and I simply don’t have the knack. However, if Papa Hemingway and all these others can write six-word stories, I don’t see why I can’t try my hand at writing some six-word blog posts. Given my tendency to blather on, I’m sure the multitudes reading this blog (and while they are indeed very small multitudes, they are most definitely multitudinous) will appreciate my valiant effort to achieve brevity.

So without further ado, I present my first three attempts at writing The Great Six-Word Israeli blog post:

Free Palestine! Limit one per customer.

Caroline Glick: All is lost! Panic!

No Cabinet ministers indicted – slow day.

Elegant, no? And while the first may be more of a bumper sticker than a blog post (I may have more to say about potential bumper stickers, but that’s for later), the second and third seem to me to make rather good blog articles all by themselves.

And so, an invitation: Submit your six-word blog posts! This may^* become a contest! There may be prizes! Stay tuned!

^* (if enough of you submit entries)

Categories: Blog, Blogging, Caroline Glick.

Electronic Weirdness Department: Counting Comments

2006-10-30T17:01:00.000+02:00

As a software developer with over 25 years’ experience – and the grey hair to prove it – I have a strong aversion to computer programs that don’t work. The only thing more annoying than software that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do is broken software (or hardware, for that matter) that all of a sudden starts working properly for no discernable reason. Inconsistency sucks. It’s evil. If I wanted to deal with inconsistency, I’d have found a career dealing with people or animals instead of computers.

So, as a way of expressing myself without the nasty human-interface stuff, I took up blogging as a ~~penance~~ hobby. Beats talking to real people, right? I get to say what I want, nobody can interrupt me, and if nobody actually pays attention to what I’m saying, well, that’s just normal – they don’t pay attention in person either. No arguments, no talking back, I can delete comments I don’t like. In cyberspace, nobody can hear you scream – unless you’re Crystal, of course.

Great. I’ve got a hobby. Just me talking to a computer, not giving a flying copulation who’s reading what I write (which is why I check my visitor stats no more than once every half hour or so, usually). Everything is smooth and simple. No worries. No expenses to speak of: free blog platform and hosting courtesy of Blogger.com, free boring blog template provided by same, future more exciting template to be provided by Vaguely Sinister Wife (who, inexplicably, does things like this for me out of the goodness of her lethal little heart), free sidebar toys. No pressure, as long as I come up with a new post every few days. (Actually, that can add up to rather a lot of pressure.) No aggravations.

No aggravations…

No aggravations?

So tell me: Why can’t Blogger decide how many comments there are on my last post?!? On my main page, Blogger tell me that “Ditching Israel: a false panacea” has four comments. But the single-article version and the monthly archive page say it has five comments. And the “post a comment” page has six comments on it – including the last one I wrote, the absence of which on the single-article page tipped me off to the problem.

Now if Blogger simply wasn’t working for a while, I wouldn’t complain – after all, it’s a free service, and they hardly owe me perfect, 365-day-per-year interruption-free service for the money I’m not paying them. If the comment counter were showing zero, I could understand; after all, I’ve written a bug or two in my time, some of which were doozies. I could even contain my frustration if Blogger had lost a comment or two; shit happens, especially to me.

But how can Blogger come up with three completely different numbers for the same thing? If they have my last comment in their system, why does it show up only on the “post a comment” page and not elsewhere? Why am I seeing this problem only on my most recent post – a slightly boring, but harmless and well-intentioned little essay? What kind of screwed-up logic from Hell could create such an annoying discrepancy? WHY DOES BLOGGER HATE ME?!?

* * *
Sorry for shouting. While I take some deep breaths, please leave comments to console me and help me calm down. Maybe Blogger will even display them properly.

Stupid hobby.

Addendum: Now that I’ve posted this ~~semi-coherent rant~~ touching cri de coeur, the comment counter on my main page, as well as the archive page and the single-post page, is showing six comments for my previous post, as it should. I look like an idiot, even though I didn’t do anything wrong. I hate computers.

Appendix: I have Blogger set up to email me every article that I post, along with every comment that someone posts. Interestingly enough (at least to me), just after I posted this piece, the last two comments that had been posted on my previous article – both of them more than 24 hours old by the time Blogger emailed them to me – suddenly turned up in my inbox. I was thrilled, of course: There really was a glitch at Blogger! I’m not necessarily an idiot! Then, of course, the Blogger server went down so I couldn't tell anyone about what happened.

Have I mentioned that I hate computers?

Categories: Blog, Blogging, Blogger, Rants.

Ditching Israel: a false panacea

2006-10-25T18:51:00.000+02:00

American support for Israel has long been a loaded political issue. Whatever difficulty the United States faces, opponents of Israel find some way to claim that it’s all because of U.S. involvement with Israel. America’s bogged down in Iraq? Well, Bush and his guiding neocons sent the troops in just to protect Israel, right? America’s economy isn’t in great shape? Well, what can you expect when Israel soaks up untold billions in American aid? Oil shortages? Let’s not even get started. And since 9/11, everyone’s thinking about terrorism – and, as usual, it’s all Israel’s fault.

I wasn’t entirely surprised, then, to receive the following question:

If we (America) ditched Israel, wouldn’t that solve all our terrorism problems?

Here’s my response:

The short answer: No.

The medium-length answer: No, it wouldn’t, for various reasons.

First, not all terrorism emanates from the Moslem world (although Islamist terrorism is definitely the flavor of the month nowadays). Anything that would be perceived as a major victory for Islamist terrorists would encourage not only further Islamist terrorism, but also non-Islamist terrorism. It’s a very bad idea to hand any terrorist, anywhere, a major victory, unless the compensating benefits are enormous. Appeasing terrorists does not reduce terrorism – it encourages terrorism.

Second, not all Islamist terrorism has anything to do with Israel. In fact, most of the Islamist terror directed at targets outside Israel is organized, inspired, and sponsored by al-Qaeda (including its many offshoots) and Iran – and neither of these is primarily concerned with Israel. (Both, of course, dislike us, and Iran in particular does sponsor a great deal of anti-Israel terrorism; but both have agendas far beyond opposition to Israel. Al-Qaeda, in particular, is widely viewed in the Arab world as having publicly adopted opposition to Israel as an opportunistic attempt to cash in on the general anti-Israel sentiment in the region.)

Radical Islamic groups perceive themselves as being immersed in a global struggle against “infidels” – a “clash of civilizations”, to borrow a phrase. In this view, Israel is certainly one of the insults inflicted on the Islamic world by the West, but it is hardly the only one, or even the most important one. Were Israel magically to disappear tomorrow, the Islamic world would still be mostly poor, backward, ignorant, envious, and led by incompetent despots; and the West, with the United States as its largest, richest, most powerful, and most “decadent” member, would still be the enemy.

Terrorism, in my view, results from a combination of real – and, more importantly, perceived – grievances, and an ideology that focuses attention on these grievances, promotes violence as a “solution” to them, discourages societal introspection, and dehumanizes “the other”. Once a society has embraced terrorism as a strategy to cope with its self-perceived problems, I believe that a dynamic is established that is very difficult to eliminate; and in particular, I don’t believe that removing the ostensible external causes of grievance is likely to have a significant effect in reducing terrorism emanating from such societies. It’s simply too easy to find new grievances.

Third, eliminating U.S. support for Israel would not eliminate Israel itself – and would cause a great deal of damage to the United States. Israel, while small, is relatively prosperous and technologically advanced, with a per-capita GDP (according to the CIA estimate for 2005) of almost $25,000 and a total GDP of well over $100 billion. This means that U.S. aid to Israel, at about $2 billion per year, represents less than 2 percent of our annual GDP; and in fact, this overstates the importance of this aid, since much of it consists of credits that we must use to purchase U.S.-manufactured military hardware that we would otherwise make – and export – ourselves. In effect, then, the bottom-line value to Israel of the aid it receives from the United States is far less than the official amount of that aid; and for the same reason, the real financial cost to the U.S. of this aid is much lower than it appears. So while losing this U.S. aid would be costly to Israel, it would hardly be fatal to us. (Further, U.S. weapons that are known to be used by Israel are considered to be especially attractive to other international buyers; thus, having Israel as a major export customer brings substantial financial rewards to the U.S. defense industry.)

Were the U.S. to “ditch” Israel, the political and military cost to America would be substantial. While losing U.S. diplomatic support would be painful and difficult for Israel, being perceived as having abandoned one of its closest allies would be terribly damaging to America’s reputation for loyalty and trustworthiness. It would also leave the U.S. without a single strong, stable, genuinely friendly, and reliable ally in the Middle East.

In short, I don’t believe that abandoning support for Israel would in any way help to reduce terror attacks on the United States; in fact, I believe that such a move would only encourage terror organizations and their supporters to continue targeting the U.S. If America’s antagonists believe that America is weak and inconstant, they will redouble their efforts. Nothing is as encouraging as success.

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Israel, Middle East, Terrorism.

Welcome to the world, Havel Havelim #90!

2006-10-24T13:57:00.000+02:00

The 90th edition of Havel Havelim (the Jewish/Israeli blog carnival) is here – hosted by Soccer Dad. There’s lots of great stuff to read, so click on over!

“So what” Department: New review, new sidebar, new title – nu?

2006-10-22T19:09:00.000+02:00

This blog has been reviewed yet again – this time by the good (if somewhat gothic in appearance) folks at Ask And Ye Shall Receive. Strangely enough, they seemed to like it; probably their minds have gone from listening to the wrong sort of music. Happens to the best of us.

Having both reviews come out on the same day – particularly considering that both “Ask” and “I Talk Too Much” took several weeks to get around to my blog – was a bit of a surprise. The fact that the “Ask” reviewer was much more positive than the crew at IT2M wasn’t surprising, however; it just reinforces what seems to be the general verdict about this blog: it’s not for everyone. Most people who meet me say more or less the same thing – I’m not for everyone either. So apparently my faulty blog accurately conveys my faulty personality.

Everyone did seem to agree on a few things:

“Peekaboo posts” – good.

“Peekaboo sidebar” – good.

Still too much bric-a-brac on the sidebar – bad.

Long, abstruse posts – probably okay if anyone had the patience to read them.

My template – uninspiring at best.

…And while I didn’t get any particular criticism of the blog’s title, I was liking it less and less over time; it just didn’t seem accurately to convey what I was getting at. (I was also advised that it would be smart to get “Middle East” into the blog’s title rather than “Mideast”, to attract more search-engine users.)

So, after pondering the reviews and my own thoughts, I made a few changes:

I ditched the “link-swap” ads on the sidebar.

I reorganized the sidebar stuff into five categories, each with its own “peekaboo” menu.

When I saw that multi-level “peekaboos” worked so splendidly, a mad gleam came into my eyes (or so I gathered from the reaction of the various cats, Wolfoid Dog, and Vaguely Sinister Wife – all of whom edged away from me and eyed the room’s exits). Why not create the ultimate uncluttered blog sidebar? Why not, indeed! So I did it. I’ve now got just about the world’s shortest sidebar, until you start clicking on it. (I’m reminded of a beloved Ephraim Kishon story, “The Silver Frenzy” – evidently do-it-yourself projects make a lot of guys somewhat manic.)

I gave my blog a new title. Goodbye, “On the Contrary: Don’s Mideast Musings”. Hello, “You’ll come for the terrorism, you’ll stay for the taxes – welcome to the Middle East!”

So far, nobody seems to care about most of these changes; I ascribe this lackluster response to the masses’ usual inability to appreciate genius in its own time. Several readers have expressed mild approval of the change in title, although pretty much everyone seems to be concerned about how long it is. “How can we possibly ever link to one of your articles now?” they whine. “Just quoting your blog title will make our links two pages long!”

Hmph. Philistines. Art is art, and if my muse demands of me a fifteen-word blog title, I dare not argue. One dismisses muses at one’s peril – they have important friends.

But I suppose that I should show some mercy, to my own poor typing fingers if not to my readers. So now I have to come up with an official, approved shorter version of the new blog title. After deep reflection, I’ve narrowed it down to two choices:

“Welcome to the Middle East!” – functional, friendly, but perhaps a bit too white-bread perky for my taste;

“You’ll Come for the Terrorism” – darker, stranger, scarier. Kind of like me, except that most people don’t find me all that dark or scary.

So, Dear Readers: What do you think? Do we go for the bland, non-threatening “Welcome”, or shall we embrace “Terrorism”? Your opinions are cordially requested; who knows, I might even pay attention to them!

Or not.

I’ve been slapped!

2006-10-20T09:55:00.000+02:00

Some time ago, I submitted this blog to the kind, gentle folks at italk2much.com for one of their famous no-holds-barred, obscene-but-honest reviews. After sending them my information, I began to read what they had to say about other blogs whose owners had dared to request a review - and I began to be very, very frightened.

I quickly realized that my sidebar was far too long and sloppy; this alone was going to get me a right reaming. My frequently-long posts were also going to be problematic. So I scurried to find some technical solutions to these problems - without, G_d forbid, actually putting less stuff on my sidebar or learning to write short posts! I dare to say that I succeeded to a degree; and so when Sassie Sadie at italk2much got around to reviewing On the Contrary last night, she indeed didn’t find too much to complain about.

That said, she didn't find all that much to praise, either:

D’oh. I tried to read this blog. I’m sure that the person writes well and that they have a well-meaning message to send out. But it just seems so all over the place that I can’t follow it. He seems like a nice fellow though. The blog may be a bit too political for some. The template is nothing to write home about. It’s simple. He has used the More/Less code in his sidebar. Thankfully, because there is a f_ckton of useless sh_t in there. [Vowels deleted to avoid offending the sensibilities of very sensitive readers with very limited imaginations. You’re welcome. -Don] Sorry, not much to say on this one. It is what it is.

Well, it wasn’t quite the glowing endorsement I’d fantasized about receiving; but considering how the italk2much reviewers react to a solid majority of the blogs they review, it wasn’t half bad either. On the Contrary is definitely visually dull, and has no pretensions of being otherwise (although I'm thinking of adding a graphical banner). At least I’ve managed to avoid making the blog hard to read, for those few people interested in reading it.

So my blog “is what it is”? I guess I can live with that. Thanks, IT2M!

P.S. I’m also thinking of giving the blog a new title; any suggestions? And no, I’ve already thought of “Yawn: the blog”!

Strategic assets and white elephants

2006-10-20T01:42:00.000+02:00

I just answered an AllExperts.com question relating to to supposed inadvisability of Israeli territorial “concessions” to our Arab neighbors. The question is one that comes up rather often in discussions of Israeli policy and politics; so I think my answer may be worth sharing. A____ gave a fairly thorough account of the historical enmity to Israel of the various Arab countries, then asked:

If the Arabs do not want a binational solution or any form of peace, then they will not stop until Israel is fully destroyed; so doesn’t giving them land just speed up the “wiping israel off the face of the earth” process?

Dear A____ - Your description of Arab states’ hostility to Israel is factual enough, as far as it goes; but I can’t say whether it’s actually a useful answer to any particular question. In response to your question, I’d like first to point out that there is a big difference between talking about “the Arab states” and talking about “the Arabs”, as you did. “The Arab states” refers to a relatively small group of countries (or, more accurately, governments) with known histories and policies, such that it’s possible to say definite and verifiable things about them. For example, I can say that among the Arab countries near Israel, only Egypt and Jordan have made peace with Israel and recognize its existence, and know that I’m saying something true. On the other hand, to say that “the Arabs do not want any form of peace with Israel” is to assume that all Arabs think exactly the same way - a gross over-generalization. There are many millions of Arabs, and among those millions of people there is a great deal of diversity of opinion. We should all get out of the habit of talking about “the Arabs” as if they were all alike, just as we should expect others to avoid making sweeping generalizations about “the Jews”. Second, I believe you’re making one of the classic mistakes about Israeli policy regarding territorial withdrawal. You’re assuming that all land Israel holds is an asset, such that any time we “give” land to the Palestinians (or the Syrians, or the Lebanese, or whoever) we are strengthening them and weakening ourselves. If this were true, obviously it would be important to retain as much land as possible, and to make territorial concessions (if we made them at all) only in return for very substantial benefits. Indeed, this assumption is true in certain cases. The Golan Heights, for example, has genuine strategic importance for Israel - both in regard to our water supply and in direct military terms. Giving up the Golan Heights and returning to the international border - or worse, the 4 June 1967 de facto border, which had some Israeli land under Syrian control - would genuinely weaken us, and thus it would make sense to make this concession only in return for full, reliable, and permanent peace with Syria and other local Arab states. On the other hand, I see no reason to view Israel’s former settlements in the Gaza Strip as an asset to Israel: they were hugely costly to defend, and the only people who benefited from them were a few farmers who made substantial profits by using cheap Palestinian and Thai labor, and irrigated their crops with heavily-subsidized water. As far as I’m concerned, getting out of the Gaza Strip made Israel stronger and more viable, not less; and while the Palestinians certainly “spin” our withdrawal as a victory for them, I believe that in the long run the Disengagement was a victory for Israel. (All this has nothing to do with the issue of how much compensation should have been paid to our former Gaza Strip settlers and how well or badly their resettlement has been handled; the fact that I believe the Disengagement was a good idea doesn’t mean I think the Disengagement was carried out perfectly.) Similarly, I support retaining some parts of the West Bank, in order to strengthen Israel’s strategic position compared to the pre-1967 situation; but I see no reason that Israel should retain all the small settlements scattered through the entire West Bank, where a few thousand settlers live among two million Palestinians. Many of these small settlements are very costly to defend, and do not provide any compensating benefit to Israel. How is such a settlement an asset to Israel? Why does closing down such a settlement aid the process of “wiping Israel off the map”? In short, I believe that certain pieces of land are genuine assets, while other pieces of land are “white elephants” in the technical sense: that is, supposed “assets” that in fact cost far more to maintain than they yield in benefits. (Remember that white elephants were given by the King of Thailand to his enemies: they were holy so they couldn't be used for work, they were a gift from the King so they couldn’t be discarded, and they cost a great deal to feed!) It seems to me that the best way for Israel to survive is to focus less on how horrible “the Arabs” are, and instead focus on how we can strengthen ourselves. What can we do to improve our economy (which in turn supports our military and our educational system)? What can we do to increase our internal cohesiveness? How can we manage our affairs so that we can exist within some vaguely rational border as a democratic state with a solid Jewish majority? If Israel does a good job of strengthening itself - which mostly means strengthening its own population and institutions - nobody is going to be able to “wipe us off the face of the earth”, at least not without using nuclear weapons and presumably facing a massive retaliation in kind. But if we fixate on control of land as the sole criterion for security, we are going to neglect other factors which are in reality much more critical to our long-term survival. Best regards, -Don Radlauer

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Israel, Middle East, Arabs, Disengagement, Occupation.

Havel Havelim #89 is up!

2006-10-15T22:49:00.000+02:00

My friend and colleague Batya is the editor of the long-awaited après-Sukkoth edition of the Havel Havelim Jewish/Israeli blog carnival, and, as usual, she’s done a great job of putting it together. Enjoy!

My contribution to humanity: Don’s aphorism of the day

2006-10-14T19:12:00.000+02:00

All my regular readers have come to rely on this blog for pithy aphorisms that guide them through their daily lives; this may explain why I have very few regular readers. However, today I’ve come up with a truly great aphorism, a paragon of pith, a phrase-o'-wisdom that will make our entire species and its pets smarter, nobler, and more spiritual:

I pitied myself because I had no headlights, until I rear-ended a man who had no brake lights.

Having taken these words into your heart, you are now an enlightened being - and don’t forget who enlightened you! If you meet Buddha on the road, tell him that he’s all washed up in this town - the guy may have been all right in his day, but where’s his blog?

Categories: Aphorisms.

Achieving mindlessness: A tale of fish and fuel injectors

2006-10-10T14:09:00.000+02:00

So - we made it to Eilat.

Mister Mechanic stayed in his shop under Vaguely Sinister Wife’s watchful eye (and concealed .45) late into the evening, reassembling Long-Suffering Renault’s engine, now including the correct (I hope!) timing belt, water pump, and their exciting collection of fashion accessories. As he labored, he frequently called his associate who had disassembled the thing, to ask what went where; since the guy specializes in four-by-fours rather than family cars, apparently he hadn’t done this particular job on this particular model before. Somehow he got the engine back together, with only a few probably-unimportant parts left over; V.S.W. drove home and life continued in its course. More or less. The first time I drove the Renault, I noticed that it was idling a bit rough. Of course, I was concerned. Maybe one of those unimportant left-over parts actually was supposed to do something? But the car did seem to run decently once it had warmed up a bit, so I reassured myself that things must not be too bad. After all, the last time Long-Suffering Renault had a problem with the timing belt, the results were a rather catastrophic engine failure rather than just a little rough going; I assumed that if Mister Mechanic had made some drastic error, it would manifest in some equally spectacular fashion. Before all this drama started, I had already been concerned that my car was showing some manifestations of A.A.S. (Automotive Angst Syndrome, that is - although as a French car, it probably prefers to be diagnosed with less-Germanic diseases of the soul). Mostly it ran fine; but once in a while it took a couple of attempts to start it, and a couple of times it stalled out on me at low speeds. The latter behavior was alarming; but as I do when Vaguely Sinister Wife fondles her chainsaw (a cherished birthday present from herself) and glances my way, I shrugged off the foreshadoings of possible doom. I'm a very good shrugger. On Sunday morning, then, we set out for Eilat. All seemed copacetic. The luggage fit in the trunk, the Wolfoid was happily ensconced in the back of V.S.W.’s jeep, and none of the human passengers had more than superficial knife wounds. So generous was my mood that I decided to give Long-Suffering Renault a treat: when we gassed up at the northern fringes of the Negev Desert, I added a serving of fuel-injector cleaner to the car’s dinner. For such virtue one should receive only nice rewards, no? No. As we proceeded into ever-deepening desert, my car began to seem distinctly anemic; while at 1.6 litres it’s never been exactly a muscle car, it was requiring much more gas-pedal action for much less impressive results than usual. And when it idled (and, for some reason, also at about 3000 R.P.M.) it vibrated alarmingly. Something was definitely amiss. I believe I managed to present a convincing image of sangfroid (I’d originally written “coolth”, but is is a French car, after all) and thus didn’t alarm my passengers overmuch, but I was certainly alarmed. Would we make it to Eilat? “I think I can. I think I can. I think I can.” - seldom have I so sincerely meditated on that mantra. We managed to progress determinedly if not steadily southwards; and it was with a huge sense of relief that I finally greeted the hotels of Eilat as we laboriously topped a rise and they appeared in the middle distance. We found the hotel - a fourth-rate Holiday Inn with the worst soundproofing I can recall in any hotel I’ve slept in that sponsors discotheques in its lobby every other evening - parked with only two or three stallouts, and proceeded with our vacation. (Wolfoid Dog is vacationing at a kennel here in Eilat, so we can visit him and see how he’s doing. I’m told he’s keeping company with a similarly wolfoid female, so I can only imagine him happy. In fact, I’m sometimes amazed that he doesn’t get tired just from smiling so much, the son of a bitch.) * * * Yesterday we spent the day at the beach, snorkeling and relaxing - except for Long-Suffering Renault, which doesn’t swim and thus hung out at the beach’s parking lot all day. The day was exactly the kind of day that makes for completely uninteresting blogging: nothing dramatic happened, and the big excitement was watching fish in every color of the rainbow (sometimes on the same fish!) swim about trying hard to ignore the stupid tourists. I worked hard on achieving a state of Zen Vacation Mindlessness; this state of mind (or of non-mind) is difficult for me to achieve, even with sun, fish, and light reading (a history of the Auschwitz Sondercommando) ready to hand. I state with pride that I managed it, pretty much, at least by my own medium-to-abysmal standards. Today we took our car to a local mechanic, recommended by another mechanic who in turn had been recommended by a local friend of ours. He hooked a gizmo to our car’s internal computer, which promptly complained that one of its fuel injectors was unhappy. He informed us that a more detailed and reliable diagnosis would take a few hours, so we returned to Hotel Noisy; Vaguely Sinister Wife is out walking somewhere with Number One Daughter, and I’ve been left all alone in the hotel room with nothing but books, a bed, and the Internet. Poor me. * * * This is billed as a “serious” blog, meaning that I’m supposed to be drawing cosmic (or at least locally cosmic) conclusions from all the stuff that goes on around me. But I’m on vacation, fer chrissake! Can’t I just skip the conclusion this once? No? Bastards. OK, so I’ve got to come up with some lesson I’ve learned from my automotive travails. Here’s a first stab at it; and if you don’t like the moral, you can find me in the water tomorrow and complain about it. I’ll be the one with a snorkel sticking out above the surface. Today’s profound lesson: Make lots of money, so you can... Buy a new car every few years, so you can... Throw it out (or flog it off on someone) before it starts needing serious repairs, so you can... Buy another one. (Repeat as needed.) It’s not much of a lesson, is it? But I am, after all, on vacation. Categories: Rants.

Original Idea of the Day: A rant about a car mechanic!

2006-10-05T22:31:00.000+02:00

I try not to use blogging as a substitute for psychotherapy. Really I do. Partly because I don’t think it’s fair to expect unpaid strangers to slog through my neuroses, but mostly, I think, because I blog under my real name and I’m worried that y’all would send me bills for each 45 minutes you spent reading about my inner turmoil and conflicts over toilet training. Today, though, I’m gonna rant. I’m gonna rave. I’m gonna kvetch, ’cause I’m pissed. At what, you ask? Oh, this one’s new. This one’s exciting and original. I’m angry at my car mechanic! Still awake? Really? Maybe you should send me a bill. OK – so here’s the story: Vaguely Sinister Wife’s stepmother arrived today for a visit, leaving her home somewhere in Yenemvelt (which is one of those untranslatable Yiddish words that in this case refers to the far-northern stretches of America’s Midwest) to stay for a week or so in our happy climes. We’ve planned to spend next week in Eilat, with hotel rooms booked starting Sunday. And, just to be responsible, we brought my car to the mechanic on Wednesday morning, to get the timing belt and the water pump replaced before the drive down south. Nothing was broken, mind you; the water pump had a slight leak and the timing belt should be good for another 40,000 kilometers, but we figured we’d be virtuous and make sure the car was not going to die on us in the middle of the trackless wastes of the Negev Desert. The mechanic told us he should have the car ready for us at the end of the same day we brought it in – which was yesterday, as I write this. Yesterday evening came and went; no call from the mechanic. (Israelis are famous for calling when they have something they want to say, not when you expect them to call to keep you up to date; the idea of progress reports as a courtesy seems never to have reached our happy little country. Probably has something to do with the fact that telephones used to be an unreliable, scarce, and expensive luxury; but this mechanic came of age in an Israel with an excellent, modern phone system and more than one cell-phone per citizen.) Today we continued to hear nothing from the mechanic; finally, as evening approached, we called him to find out what was going on. It turns out that the mechanic’s part supplier had (supposedly) sent the wrong parts – after the mechanic had already spent a good deal of time on fiddly disassembly of the relevant bits of my car’s engine. The mechanic sent the parts back. The supplier sent different – but still incorrect – parts. Now the mechanic is hoping to get the right parts. Tomorrow is Friday, which is normally a half day for businesses like repair shops. Tomorrow evening is the beginning of Succoth, a major holiday – and the Sabbath to boot. And Sunday morning is when we’re supposed to be off to Eilat. (And yes, we’d told the mechanic in advance what our situation was; now stop interrupting, I’m on a roll here.) So: I don’t have a car. Vaguely Sinister Wife’s jeep (actually a little Suzuki Vitara) can hold four people and a couple of six-packs. (We were planning to take four people in my car, plus two people and Wolfoid Dog in the Vitara.) As of a couple hours ago, the mechanic has my car partly disassembled and doesn’t have the parts he needs to finish the job. Now, the natural solution – assuming the correct parts do not miraculously appear in the very near future – would be for the mechanic to give up for now, put the car back together as it was, wish us good luck on our trip to and from Eilat, try to get his stupid parts supplier to compensate him for his lost time, hope that our repeat business would be worth his extra trouble, and maybe overcharge us a bit when we come back and he redoes the repair. Normal, no? Ahhh, but this is Israel! When we reminded the mechanic that we absolutely need the car by Sunday morning at the latest, and that if he can’t finish the job he’s got to at least get it back to the perfectly drivable state it was in yesterday morning, he informed us that we would still have to pay him something like 600 shekels – call it U.S. $140, but remember that salaries here are much lower than they are in the States – for his labor taking the engine apart and reassembling it with the same old parts he started with. Now this, as we say in Hebrew, is not OK. So his parts supplier screwed up; why is this our problem? Mister Mechanic insists that the whole mess isn’t his fault, since he’s not the one who made the mistake. Very likely (since renting a car for a holiday week would cost a lot more than 600 shekels), we’ll indeed have to shell out the aforementioned sum for a car repair that didn’t happen; we’ll go away mad, and the mechanic already feels persecuted because we have unrealistic expectations having to do with not paying for services ineffectively rendered. And even if by some miracle he gets the right parts and fixes the car in time for our trip, we’ll never take either of our cars to him again: Screw-ups happen, and how could we ever feel comfortable doing business with a guy who expects us to pick up the bill when things go wrong in his operation?

* * *
The problem, of course, is that Mister Mechanic is passing the buck: The person at fault is the parts supplier, so we’re told that we can’t hold the mechanic responsible. But life doesn’t work that way. From the customer’s standpoint, “the mechanic” is not just the guy with a wrench in his hand; it’s the facility he works in, his network of suppliers, and so on. We don’t pay him to tighten (or, in the current case, loosen) bolts, but to fix cars – and the difference between those two concepts is an important one. The mechanic isn’t selling us his labor; he’s selling results. Labor he wastes because he hasn’t developed the right network of parts suppliers is his lookout. But since Mister Mechanic doesn’t seem to understand this, he’s going to lose us as a customer – along with a lot more that 600 shekels in future business. * * *
At the moment, both Israel and the Palestinian Autonomy seem to be having their own Car Mechanic Moments. Here in Israel, generals and politicians are scrambling to absolve themselves of all blame (and cast it on their colleagues, of course) for the less-than-satisfactory outcome of the recent unpleasantness in Lebanon. (I’m still not sure whether to call it a war; it certainly lasted longer than many of our wars, but during most of that time it consisted almost entirely of aerial bombardment and not ground conflict. But unpleasant it certainly was, except possibly for the pilots; so “unpleasantness” it is.) And the Palestinians are having a great deal of trouble deciding whose job it is to make the trains run on time, or indeed whose job it is to build railroads (and pay teachers, and so on) in the first place. Lacking clear answers to their problems of governance, many Palestinians appear to be taking rather drastic measures (i.e. shooting one another) as a means of expressing their discontents. Nobody – Israeli or Palestinian – seems to be ready to say, “It’s my fault; I screwed up; I’ll fix it.” Why do I get the feeling that a lot of ordinary Israelis, along with a lot of ordinary Palestinians, would be happy to take their business elsewhere? Categories: Rants, Israel, Palestine.

Pipes and “provocation”

2006-09-28T20:37:00.000+03:00

Daniel Pipes is one of the West’s most prominent experts on radical Islam and the various organizations promoting an Islamist agenda in the West. In addition to his columns in FrontPageMag.com, The New York Sun, and The Jerusalem Post, he produces his own blog; he offers a weekly email version of the blog for those of us too lazy to take the initiative and go read it ourselves. (He also offers email distribution of his columns; sadly, he doesn’t deliver pizza, so I can’t survive on Pipes alone.)

Mr. Pipes has a lot of interesting things to say, a lot of good information to convey, and some strongly-held opinions and values – some of which I even agree with. However, one of his recent blog pieces raises some serious questions about his adherence to his own professed principles. His initial remarks, along with his reaction when I questioned them, lead me to conclude that Daniel Pipes, while a genuine expert on his own subject matter, is too much a partisan to be taken seriously as a commentator on terrorism.

Mr. Pipes’ blog post refers to reports that a small group of British rightists have threatened to attack Moslems – even going so far as to brandish large knives and threaten to behead British Moslems who don’t “go home”. After a short introduction and a long quote from the original report (from an Australian newspaper rather than a British one, oddly enough), Pipes adds his own brief commentary:

“It is nearly inevitable that Islamist barbarism provoke anti-Muslim barbarism... One can only hope the Islamists will call off their hordes before things get out of hand.”

Pipes’ comment set off alarm bells in my mind (which, as you’ll know if you’ve experienced it, is a very annoying phenomenon – those things are loud!); so I sent the following comment to his blog:

I was rather taken aback by the comment you made at the end of your “Behead Islamists?” post.

Aren’t you making the same mistake you accuse Islamic organizations of making? In “Islamists Threaten Civil War in Great Britain – A Good Idea?” and in many other places as well, you specifically (and correctly) castigate Moslem groups for threatening that Islamist terrorism will increase if Britain’s or America’s foreign policy isn’t changed, Moslems don’t get special privileges, or whatever. The point you make regarding Moslems – that terrorism is wrong and reprehensible regardless of its “root causes” – applies equally to anti-Moslem attacks, doesn't it?

By calling for Islamists to “call off their hordes before things get out of hand,” you appear to be blaming the victims (potential or actual) of anti-Moslem terrorism in a way you don’t do when the terrorism is perpetrated by Moslems against the West.

I’m sure that you didn’t mean to make this distinction; but the fact that even someone as careful and conscientious as you are can make this kind of mistake is an indication of how careful we all have to be to avoid hypocrisy and inconsistent standards. If terrorism is wrong, it’s wrong – period. That means that terrorism is just as wrong when it’s directed at people we don’t like as when it’s directed at our friends; and it means that our enemies are no more required to change their political beliefs and strategies as a response to threatened or actual terrorism than our friends are.

To his credit, Mr. Pipes (who vets all user comments before they’re published on his blog) allowed my comment to appear. But he published it with the following reply:

“It is wrong and I called it ‘anti-Muslim barbarism.’ Further, I am an analyst of this subject, not a spokesman for the British far-rightists, so I think your comparison between my analysis and the Islamist threats is a bit far-fetched.”

Perhaps I didn’t make my point clearly enough when I commented on Mr. Pipes’ blog; but I hadn’t thought that someone as sophisticated as Daniel Pipes would need to be spoon-fed what is, after all, a fairly basic and standard bit of counter-terrorist reasoning. The point I was making was not that Mr. Pipes approves of anti-Moslem terrorism; his use of the term “barbarism” is clear enough even to a reader as obtuse as I. What is objectionable, though, is his call for British Moslems to soften their political rhetoric (assuming that this is what he means by “calling off their hordes before things get out of hand”) in response to terrorist threats against them, despite the fact that he consistently advises Western governments not to modify their policies and rhetoric in response to Moslem terrorist threats against the West. This kind of ideology-based inconsistency is terribly damaging to the fight against terrorism, and if Mr. Pipes has any aspirations to speak with authority on the subject, he needs to understand why.

Terrorism is politically-motivated violence against civilian targets. What is most important about this definition is that it does not distinguish between worthy and unworthy political goals: targeting civilians to further a political cause is terrorism (and is wrong) no matter how just the cause in which it is carried out. As soon as we begin to justify terrorism “in a good cause” (or relabel terror attacks as something more palatable like “resistance to occupation”) we’ve lost the battle against terror – since every cause is a good one in someone’s eyes. Instead of working to prevent civilians from being targeted by political violence, we’re stuck debating which political causes are worth killing for – and dying for.

If we intend to fight terrorism effectively, we need to banish from our thinking the notion of “provocation”. By writing that Islamist barbarism inevitably provokes anti-Moslem barbarism, Daniel Pipes in effect blames British Moslems (or at least their leaders) for any attacks carried out by British rightist “barbarians” against innocent British Moslems – and thus gives the rightists a license to kill. They aren’t committing acts of racist terrorism, after all – they’re simply responding to provocation.

The problem, of course, is that every terrorist on the planet justifies his actions this way. Nobody goes around killing noncombatant civilians just to relieve the boredom of modern life; terrorist movements are founded upon a sense of grievance, and responding to provocation sounds much more sympathetic than murdering the innocent or attacking people you don’t like just for the hell of it.

I don’t sympathize with the goals or tactics of Islamists, British or otherwise. But even if British Moslems are themselves sympathetic to Islamist terrorism, attacks against them are terror attacks, and should be condemned unreservedly. No discussion of “provocation” or “root causes” should be allowed to absolve terrorists of full responsibility for their deeds; terrorism is never “inevitable”, because there are always other ways of achieving political goals. No matter what the provocation, no matter what his grievance, the would-be terrorist must at some point decide that his political agenda is more important than the lives of his victims. It is precisely this dehumanization of the victim that enables terrorism to exist, and it is precisely this dehumanization of the victim that makes terrorism evil.

It’s very easy to condemn terrorism when the perpetrators are our enemies and the victims are our friends. But the true fight against terrorism requires us to oppose political violence against civilians even when the attacks are carried out by our dear friends against our sworn enemies; it requires us to defend our opponents’ right safely to hold and express opinions we find indefensible. This fight requires not only expertise, but also moral clarity and backbone. By falling into the trap of “provocation”, Daniel Pipes has shown that he’s not quite ready to be a true counter-terrorist.

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Terrorism, Counter-terrorism, Daniel Pipes.

BlogAlert Update: Noa Haviv is free, sort of, for now…

2006-09-26T23:55:00.000+03:00

It was reported today that Noa Haviv, the young Israeli backpacker who was arrested in India because she inadvertently brought her brother’s pistol magazine (containing 16 9-millimeter bullets) with her, is now free on bail. She can’t leave the country, and she needs to appear in court on 10 October. It’s not clear from the reports how likely it is that she’ll be convicted of a crime and, if she is convicted, whether she’ll have to serve further time in jail.

Until and unless Ms. Haviv is freed “for real”, I’d suggest that we keep exerting pressure – of the most polite and gentle sort, of course – on the Indian government to let her go.

BlogAlert: Israeli backpacker needs YOUR help!

2006-09-25T18:57:00.000+03:00

David Bogner of Treppenwitz has posted an important alert: a young Israeli backpacker has been arrested in India for possession of a pistol magazine, which had been left in the duffel bag she borrowed from her brother. While we Israelis are quite careful about firearms, we are traditionally much less scrupulous about ammunition; as Dave reports and I can attest from personal experience, it’s quite normal for bullets to be scattered on the floor (and in the trunk) of our cars, cluttering up our bookcases, and even to be played with by our cats once they’ve run out of dead scorpions.

One could argue that the young woman in question made a pretty dumb mistake in not checking her brother’s bag more carefully before packing her stuff in it and taking off for foreign climes. But nobody was hurt or even endangered, and the heavy prison sentence she faces seems out of all proportion to her error. Please go read Dave’s article, and add your voice to those trying to get Noa home.

Don’s recommendation of the day: Pointless Drivel

2006-09-24T14:27:00.000+03:00

One of the best ways of not writing a blog post is to recommend someone else’s blog post. While this lacks some of the thrill of tinkering with your template – danger is, after all, kind of a rush – it has the advantage that your readers, if any, actually see what you’ve done. Spending hours on template hacking may run the risk of destroying your entire blog, but it runs an even higher risk of creating “improvements” that nobody notices. (OK, dear readers: look to the right and admire the fact that “Archives” and “Recent Posts” are now implemented as drop-down lists. My sidebar may still be incredibly long, but it’s shorter than it was. Worship me.)

So… here’s today’s recommendation: Read this post at Pointless Drivel – a consistently funny, well-written, and good-looking blog with even more stuff in its sidebar than mine has. Enjoy!

This is not a blog post

2006-09-18T21:40:00.000+03:00

OK, so I’m not exactly René Magritte, although I think I've come fairly close to surrealistic blogging once or twice. But this really isn’t a blog post, since (A) I’m writing from a (very good) hotel in Eilat, working on a laptop that isn’t set up with nice utilities like Blogger for Word, and I wouldn't enjoy writing on it even if it did have Blogger for Word because I can't stand typing on laptop keyboards; and (B) my mind is essentially blank, as I've got to give my presentation to this workshop (on “Hypermedia Seduction for Terrorist Recruiting”, sponsored by NATO; my topic is “Virtual Communities as Pathways to Extremism”) in the morning, and I have the usual jitters.

Every time I’m due to present something at a conference, I always have the same insecurities: I don’t really know anything, everything I do know is incorrect, everyone is going to throw leftover food at me - you know, the usual stuff.

So I’m not writing a blog post; I’ve got my PowerPoint presentation to go through, my ideas to try to find some merit in - and of course, I’d be better off if I gave up on trying to improve anything and went to bed instead.

But in any case, I certainly don’t have time to write a blog post!

Lessons from Google, or How I Got My Dander Up

2006-09-15T22:55:00.000+03:00

It’s a normal blogger thing: You look at who came to your blog, and how they got there. If your blog came up on the first page of a Google search for something important, you feel great. You’ve been validated – you’re the authority, you’re the man, you’re it. Coming up on the seventeenth page is all right, I suppose; but it doesn’t have that ego-tripping zing that the first page has.

So today, after one of my usual hectic Fridays, in the middle of preparations for a conference down in Eilat at which I’ll be lecturing on a subject I don’t know very much about (I was a last-minute emergency replacement – it’s a long story), I checked my SiteMeter report. Someone found On the Contrary with a search for “Holocaust ‘innocent Jews’” – fair enough, and I don’t even mind a fourth-page finish for search terms like that (sniffle, sob, bravely squares shoulders).

Ahh, but what do we have here? Another Google search that led to On the Contrary? Yes! And this time I made the first page! I’m even above the fold (assuming that someone printed out the Google page and folded it; On the Contrary is listed fifth out of ten items on the page). I’m enough of a closet journalist wannabe that being above the fold means something to me.

Oh, yes… the search. What was someone looking for when my blog – my erudite, controversial, noble, and otherwise admirable vehicle for self-expression and the enlightenment of the multitude – came up on the first page?

“Dander fluff”. Yes, folks, it turns out that Google considers On the Contrary to be the fifth most relevant and authoritative site on the entire Internet on the subject of “dander fluff”. I guess this proves that I’m not wasting my time blogging. No sir. Don’t mess with me, people: I’m The Dander Fluff Man!

The post that this desperately-dandered reader found wasn’t even all that much of a piece of fluff, really – it was about reactions inside Lebanon to the United Nations cease-fire resolution passed last month, and my reactions to the reactions. Ah well… I hope the guy enjoyed it.

Dave Bender gets on my blogroll – the hard way!

2006-09-14T19:28:00.000+03:00

I very, very seldom laugh out loud at anything I see on my computer screen. It’s not that I’m humorless (although a lot of people would prefer me that way, I fear); it’s just that I’m not usually an “intense reactor” type.

But today I saw something that had me practically hysterical, right here at my day-job desk. It’s The Armageddon Flowchart, and the guy who steered me to it is Dave Bender, author of the Israel at Level Ground blog. The rest of his blog is excellent, too – and he has a link to On the Contrary, which makes it that much more special. (OK, Dave – now fix your sidebar so it shows up on the side instead of at the bottom!)

* * *

WARNING: Nerdy stuff of interest only to bloggers follows. Normal humans should quit now and find something better to read.

While I’m on the subject of blogrolls: I’ve come up with what I think is a fairly clever solution to an annoying blog-maintenance problem, which I will hereby share with whoever wants it.

Traditionally, a blogger lists his/her favorite blogs by editing the HTML of his blog template. This is tedious and time-consuming, and in my experience it’s all too easy to forget to keep your hard-coded HTML blogroll up to date. The advantage, though, is that you have full control over how your blogroll displays; in particular, you can create separate categories for the various blogs to which you link, making it much easier for the reader to navigate. (For an example of what I mean, see the Dry Bones Blog – Yaakov Kirschen has a very nicely organized HTML blogroll.)

To simplify the maintenance of blogrolls, a lot of bloggers – myself included – have chosen to use BlogRolling.com to maintain their blogrolls. BlogRolling lets you keep track of your blogroll without all that tedious mucking about in HTML; you just create an account (which doesn’t cost anything), insert some code in your template, and then use BlogRolling’s interface to add blogs to your list.

The problem, though, is that BlogRolling doesn’t offer a way of neatly categorizing the blogs on your blogroll. You can sort them alphabetically, or by length (for visual effect), or by “priority” – which is a number you assign to each blog on your list, from 1 to 99. But when you’ve got a whole bunch of blogs on your list, none of these approaches is really satisfactory – and all too often, BlogRolling blogrolls are so long that any particular blog – most importantly, my blog – gets lost in the crowd.

So here’s what I did, after long cogitation: I set up the following list of categories for my blogroll, each one with an associated “priority”:

Priority     Description
10             Israeli blogs
20             Jewish blogs from elsewhere
30             Arab / Moslem blogs
50             Political blogs (from outside Israel)
80             Everyone else

Then, I set up “dummy blog” entries in my BlogRolling.com blogroll to provide headings for each category. The idea was to add something to the list which would work like a section heading, even though BlogRolling doesn’t offer any such feature. The “dummy blogs” would have to display differently than “real” blogs, and if someone should happen to click on one, nothing should happen. Here’s an example of one of my “dummy blog” entries – with square brackets substituted for HTML angle-brackets so the tags will be visible:

Title:          [br/][font size=+1]Everyone else[/font]
          (larger font, with a blank line before)

URL:          #not_a_real_target
          (if user clicks on it, nothing happens)

Description:     blank
          (nothing appears when user “hovers” over the link)

Priority:     79
          (the heading comes immediately before the “Everyone else” blogs)

You can see the results on On the Contrary's main page. Cute, no?

Israel and the West Bank: Is it an occupation, or just a hobby?

2006-09-10T16:34:00.000+03:00

Yet again, AllExperts.com has come to my rescue. Just when I was coming to grips with having to finish the first post in my upcoming and long-awaited “Lessons from Lebanon” series, someone asked me a good question that allowed me to write something bloggable while continuing to procrastinate.

Question:

Dear Don,

I hope you don’t interpret my questions as hostile, I’m just wondering what the Israeli point of view is.

Firstly, do you consider Israel’s presence in the West Bank to be an “occupation”?

If so, why does Israel continue to occupy the West Bank? The fact that it is building more settlements in the West Bank (I read that 9,000 settlers were removed from Gaza in the summer of 2005, but a larger number have since moved into the West Bank) suggests that it wants to annex the territory and make it part of Israel. Do you agree?

I think I may have some more questions after your response,

With respect,

E____

Dear E____ –

Whether Israel’s presence in the West Bank constitutes an occupation is a surprisingly complex question. The normal definition of that term – or at least the standard definition under the Geneva Conventions – designates land as “occupied” when it legally belongs to one “High Contracting Party” (meaning a sovereign country that is signatory to the Conventions) and is currently under the military control of another “High Contracting Party”. In the case of the West Bank, however, there is no generally-recognized previous owner (that is, a country with sovereignty) of the West Bank:

The Ottoman Empire no longer exists, and modern Turkey makes no claim on land in our region;

Jordan's post-1948 annexation of the area was recognized only by the United Kingdom and Pakistan (and Jordan has renounced all claim to the West Bank in any case);

“Palestine” has never existed as a sovereign country;

All the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean was allocated by the League of Nations to the “Jewish Homeland” – but the League of Nations Mandate (which is still part of “international law” to this day) did not specifically mention Jewish statehood and sovereignty, even if eventual Jewish statehood was implied by the terms of the Mandate;

The pre-1967 “Green Line” was never a legally-recognized border; it was just an armistice line. The 1949 Armistice Agreements explicitly state that the Green Line is not an official border, and that neither side renounces territorial claims on the other side of the Green Line. (This, by the way, is the principal reason why Israel never put up a fence along the Green Line: to do so would have been to grant it de facto recognition, and considering how vulnerable the pre-1967 shape of our country made us – with hardly anything between our effective eastern border and the sea – we never wanted to make the unmodified Green Line permanent);

Outside of Jerusalem, Israel has never formally annexed any of the land taken from Jordan in 1967; so while we have never abandoned our claim to sovereignty over the West Bank, we have never formally asserted this claim either – except regarding the small portion of the territory that is now part of Jerusalem;

United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, which is generally accepted as the political and legal basis for Mideast peacemaking, affirms that Israeli withdrawal from territory occupied in the 1967 war should be one of the principles on which a Mideast peace agreement should be based; but the resolution does not specify a full withdrawal, designate Israel’s legal border, or call for an Israeli withdrawal outside the context of a Mideast peace agreement. (Note, also, that U.N. 242 refers to the territories as “occupied” rather than “disputed”; but in this context, it’s not clear that the phrase “territories occupied in the recent conflict” implies any specific opinion regarding the West Bank’s legal status. The United Nations certainly never recognized the West Bank as sovereign Jordanian territory, which at that time was the only obvious alternative to Israeli sovereignty over the area. Resolution 242 makes no mention of “Palestine” as an actual or potential state, or of the creation of a new country to accommodate Palestinian Arabs.)

All this means that for political and legal purposes, the West Bank is more accurately described as “disputed” rather than “occupied” territory. On the other hand, the practical realities on the ground are essentially the same whether the land is “occupied” or “disputed” – and thus Israel has chosen to adopt a sort of hybrid approach: we adhere (in theory, and for the most part in practice) to the humanitarian provisions of the Geneva Conventions regarding our treatment of the Palestinians living in the West Bank, while we do not necessarily adhere to the more strictly political provisions of the Conventions.

The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine (which, by the way, uses the term “Palestine” in a strictly geographic sense – the term was never used to refer to a potential state until much later) specifically gives Jews the right to settle in all areas of Palestine west of the Jordan River; this right has never been revoked, and the United Nations Charter recognizes the legal validity of League of Nations mandates. Thus one can make a very solid legal argument that Jews have every right to settle in the West Bank – subject, of course, to humanitarian considerations, land-ownership issues, and so on.

In practical terms, most Israelis have no desire to annex all of the West Bank – not that we wouldn’t like to have a larger country without that vulnerable 14-kilometer-wide “wasp waist”, but simply because we know that there are far too many Palestinian Arabs living in Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron, and the other West Bank towns and cities; to incorporate this territory into Israel, we would have to choose between giving up our status as a Jewish state, abandoning democracy, or committing a mass expulsion (or worse) of West Bank Arabs – a measure which only a tiny minority of Israelis are ready to tolerate.

At the same time, most Israelis are very reluctant to withdraw all the way to the pre-1967 “border”: to do so would be a strategic nightmare, especially in this age of rocket attacks. Given all of the West Bank to play with, the Palestinians would easily be able to fire rockets at the vast majority of Israeli population centers.

Accordingly, the vast majority of Israelis are ready to make some sort of territorial compromise on the West Bank: Most of the land would be used to set up a Palestinian state (or, alternatively, given to Jordan – except that nowadays Jordan probably wouldn’t take the West Bank even if we asked nicely), while Israel would retain “settlement blocs” near the Green Line, and perhaps give up some sovereign Israeli territory adjacent to the Gaza Strip as well. Of course, the devil (as always) is in the details; but the fact remains that Israel has repeatedly expressed willingness to negotiate along these lines, while the Palestinians have never responded affirmatively or even offered a realistic counter-proposal.

I hope this clarified the issues a bit. If your head is spinning, that’s a good sign: the status of the West Bank, the legality of Israeli settlements there, and eventual prospects for a resolution of the Israeli-Arab conflict are tremendously complex issues, with far more questions than answers. Of course, I’ll be more than happy to try to answer follow-up questions.

Best regards,

-Don Radlauer

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Israel, Palestine, Occupation, Middle East, Settlements.

Happy Blogiversary to Me: Introducing the Hall of (Obscure) Fame

2006-09-05T15:41:00.000+03:00

A year has passed since I began blogging. (Actually it’s a year and five days, but so what?) In order to celebrate a year of gnashing my teeth, procrastinating, feeling guilty when I didn’t post regularly, feeling guilty when I did post but neglected the rest of my so-called “life” to do so, and agonizing over fine points of punctuation, I’ve added a “Hall of (Obscure) Fame” section over on the right-hand column, just beneath “My Non-Blog Articles”.

To assemble a list of my personal favorite posts, I read through my whole year’s output. Some of the posts I picked are lame attempts at humor; others are lame attempts at seriousness; some are a bit odd, and one or two are out-and-out weird.

It’s been said that all writing is autobiography. If so, the pieces in the “Hall of (Obscure) Fame” – reflecting what was going through my head when I wrote them, as well as what I was thinking last night when I chose them and not others – presumably say something profoundly meaningful about me. Take a look at them; and if any of you figure me out, let me know. I’ve been trying to do it for years, and I still don’t have a clue.

HAR1F: A hot new gene hits the scene

2006-08-31T19:50:00.000+03:00

According to recent reports, scientists have identified a gene which has undergone an unusually rapid series of changes in the last few million years of human evolution. As the gene – assigned the catchy name HAR1F – appears to play a role in the development of the cerebral cortex, it may be one of the key genetic elements that make us smarter than the average bear – or horse, or chicken, or even chimpanzee.

The newly-discovered gene is unusual in a couple of ways: First, unlike “normal” genes – which are transcribed into messenger RNA which, in turn, controls production of a protein – HAR1F is an “RNA gene”: it produces an RNA string that functions on its own, affecting the organism directly rather than through creation of a protein product. But more importantly (for present purposes), HAR1F has undergone substantial changes in the course of human evolution over the last six or so million years, even though it’s a gene that normally changes very little over much longer time-spans.

The HAR1F gene is “essentially the same” in all mammals other than humans. Even between chimpanzees (our closest relatives) and chickens (who make good soup, but otherwise are not our friends), only two out of the gene’s 118 “letters” (more properly, “bases”) have changed – meaning that the gene has been almost entirely static for hundreds of millions of years. This is unsurprising: if the gene is significantly involved in fetal brain development, we would expect it to be conserved – since most possible mutations would be harmful or even fatal. How, then, do we explain the fact that human HAR1F differs from chimpanzee HAR1F in eighteen out of its 118 bases?

* * *
One of the fundamental implications of Darwin’s evolutionary theory is that humankind is no longer to be viewed as something special, apart from the rest of creation. Instead, we are an animal descended from other animals; and our ancestors, while obviously of parochial interest to our not-so-exalted selves, are no more inherently God-like than those of shrimp or shrew. Even worse, modern Darwinism (as articulated, for example, by the late Stephen Jay Gould) tells us that evolution is not “directional”: there is no inherent drive for Nature to come up with “better” creatures over time, but merely random drift, periodic ecological catastrophe, and fortuitous survival of those creatures lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time with the right characteristics and something reasonably cute to mate with.

Obviously, this demotion of Man from “created in God’s image” to “ape descendant” is something that a lot of people find threatening – which may help to explain why Biblical fundamentalists spend so much time passionately fighting the teaching of evolution and yet often seem rather blasé about equally Biblical stuff like keeping the Sabbath and not coveting their neighbors’ asses. (Alternative explanation: a lot of people get all fired up about reading the Bible cover-to-cover, but get bored when they hit the “begats” after Noah’s Flood and give up; so they stick to the parts they know.) And even for those of us who intellectually embrace Darwinian evolution, it’s awfully hard to accept that our own species is ultimately just another bunch of animals enjoying its brief day in the sun until something wipes us out and we’re succeeded by our not-quite-human-in-our-sense-of-the-word descendants – or by something entirely different, like giant carnivorous land clams.

* * *
I find it rather consoling, then, to think about HAR1F and its implications. It was already well known, of course, that we humans are inordinately proud of our intelligence. Our large brains are so important to us that:

they’re worth sacrificing a fair bit of our efficiency as bipeds (in that our pelvises need to accommodate an oversized birth canal, and thus are less than optimal for running away from giant carnivorous land clams, should such fearsome creatures evolve on our watch);
they’re worth having an almost uniquely difficult, painful, and dangerous childbirth process (with our only mammalian competitor for this title being the hyena, which has a whole different set of problems and motivations than we do);
and they’re worth spending some 22% of our metabolic resources on (meaning that we require a good bit more food than a normally-brainy animal our size would need; so if I’m so smart, how come I ain’t thin?)

HAR1F adds a strong molecular confirmation to these more subjective indications of human uniqueness: after at least 200 million years (and perhaps more than twice that) of nearly complete stasis, HAR1F all of a sudden started to change rapidly as one group of apes set out on the road to humanity. Of course, there is no reason to think that our ancestors’ HAR1F genes mutated more readily than anyone else’s; but for some reason, the benefits provided by some of the random changes that took place were enough to preserve them in our genome, while other species were content to stick with what had worked since before the dinosaurs.

Why was it worthwhile for our ancestors to play Russian roulette with a gene that every other species was afraid to touch? Why was it worth having all the cost and inconvenience of a large brain? If intelligence is such a good thing, why is human HAR1F the only one that differs from the usual sort?

It appears that there is something unique about us after all! Over hundreds of millions of years, animals have lived happily with brains that were perfectly adequate for finding food, for escaping from predators in order not to become food, for creating and raising offspring, and so on – but which would never swoon over a sonnet or solve a Sudoku, much less write a blog. If our fellow animals had a use for bigger brains, they would have them; after all, there is nothing at all inadequate about horses or herons, which are quite smart enough to live the lives they choose to live, even if they can’t comprehend James Joyce.

But our ancestors chose (or perhaps were forced into) a lifestyle in which a much higher degree of intelligence was crucial – so important that it was worth paying a uniquely heavy biological price. And the lifestyle changes must have started before our ancestors’ brain size began to skyrocket; otherwise there would be no evolutionary pressure selecting for ever-larger brains and ever-greater intelligence. As far as we know, this experiment has never been attempted before – at least not on this planet.

So what if we humans are not the Paragon of Creation, uniquely created in the image of God? We’re not just another bunch of animals either! We (or our progenitors) have gone down a path that no other Earthly lineage has ever traveled; we’ve paid a high price for unique strengths. Let HAR1F serve as a reminder of just how special we are, how new and unusual, with our oversized brains.

Now if we could only figure out how to use them!

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Evolution, Creationism, Darwin, Genetics, HAR1F.

Clash of the Legal Titans: Fatah meets Resolution 1701

2006-08-29T00:11:00.000+03:00

I’ve long had an interest in the law - not quite enough of an interest actually to go to law school and do something about it, mind you, but an interest just the same. Imagine my fascination and delight, then, to read the following in the Jerusalem Post:

The Lebanese government demanded [that] Palestinians in refugee camps in the Litani area... disarm in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 1701...

...according to “senior Fatah operative in Lebanon” Monir Al-Makdah.

Reportedly, Lebanese Prime Minister Faud Saniora made the request to Fatah representative in Lebanon Abbas Za’aki.

Al-Makdah rejected the demand in an interview with Jordanian newspaper Al-Dostur, saying that the Security Council resolution was illegal since it did not include the right of return of Palestinian refugees. [italics mine]

Now isn’t this wonderful? A legally-binding United Nations Security Council resolution can be declared “illegal” simply because it doesn’t include a reference to a presumptive “right” that is nowhere enshrined in international law - and which would be irrelevant to the implementation of Resolution 1701 even if it existed.

Rather than rail at the perfidy of Fatah, wail at the sheer unadulterated sophistry of Mister Al-Makdah’s logic, or otherwise kvetch, I’m going to take this report as a positive development in the evolution of the law: from now on, I’ll obey laws when they include stuff that makes me happy, and I’ll feel free to disobey them (without penalty, of course) if they lack that certain little something.

For example, I see no reason to obey the speed limit any more - since the traffic regulations don’t provide me with a harem of willing and lovely young women to cater to my every whim, it’s only right and reasonable for me to have other legally-sanctioned ways of coping with testosterone. And why should I be subject to the law against robbing banks when the same statute totally fails to rid my house of ever-present cat fluff? (I had thought that the proper term for cat fluff was “dander” - but I just looked it up at Dictionary.com, and it turns out that dander is actually cat dandruff, not cat fluff. And the law against bank-robbery doesn’t take care of that, either.)

Ah well (sigh)... I suppose that Israel’s legal system probably hasn’t caught up with the latest advances coming out of Lebanon. I’d better tell my getaway driver to keep to the speed limit.

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Israel, Lebanon, Fatah, PLO, Palestine, Palestinian, Hezbollah, Middle East.

Havel Havelim (the Jewish/Israeli blog carnival): 84 and still going strong!

2006-08-27T13:56:00.000+03:00

The new 84th edition of Havel Havelim is up at Batya’s me-ander blog. As usual, there’s a lot to read; as usual, Batya has done a wonderful job of putting it all together; and as usual, I’m trembling in my boots (Crocks, actually) out of fear that someone’s going to pick me to do the job. Enjoy!

Categories: Israel, Jewish, Carnival, Blog.

President Peres? An Israeli political conundrum

2006-08-24T21:38:00.000+03:00

It appears that Israel’s President is in trouble. I must admit that I haven’t been following the story closely – not because it isn’t interesting and important (although, in a very real sense, it isn’t), but because, frankly, I’m sick and tired of hearing about other guys whose love lives are more exciting than my own. (I’ll leave it open to debate whether President Katzav’s alleged escapades constitute a “love life” in the more enlightened sense of the phrase.)

So while our President remains innocent until proven guilty, potential replacements are lining up to announce (or at least quietly to leak) their availability for the job should a vacancy occur.

All of which leads me to the following gem, from this article in today’s Jerusalem Post:

Vice Premier Shimon Peres, who lost to Katsav six years ago, is only willing to run if no serious candidate would run against him. It is possible that [Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert could end up urging Peres to run if he fears that [Likud MK and former Knesset Speaker Reuven] Rivlin could win.

All of this might seem rational enough, had I the answers to two closely-related questions:

How could anyone run against Shimon Peres for national office and not be considered “a serious candidate”? It would seem to me that opposing Shimon Peres in an election is perhaps the most reliable recipe for Instant Seriousness in Israeli politics.

How could Ehud Olmert – who has been accused of many nasty things, but seldom of political ineptitude – view a Peres candidacy as a way of preventing a competing candidate from winning the Presidential election?

I invite you – nay, I beg you, dear readers – to enlighten me. I’m stumped.

Categories: Israel, Politics, Katzav, Peres, Olmert, Middle East.

ClichéWatch: “Israel’s lost deterrence”

2006-08-22T18:06:00.000+03:00

Deterrence is a topic that has been much on my mind since the early days of the “al-Aqsa Intifada” – when every time our army knocked down a suicide bomber’s family home or otherwise seemed to act in a draconian, thoughtless, and insensitive manner, the authorities trotted out the justification that Israel was acting “to deter future acts of terrorism”. The IDF eventually investigated its policy of home demolitions and decided, unsurprisingly, that the practice had never had a significant deterrent effect; indeed, home demolitions had probably acted as a stimulant for Palestinian terrorism. (I blogged on this topic back in December 2005; and my most recent academic conference presentation, at the IEEE Intelligence and Security Informatics conference in May 2006, was on “Rational-Choice Deterrence and Israeli Counter-Terrorism”. I’ll post the full article here if anyone’s interested.)

In the aftermath of our recent military campaign in Lebanon, many Israeli right-wingers have been wringing their hands (and, rhetorically, the necks of our Prime Minister and Defense Minister) over Israel’s supposed “loss of deterrence” due to our failure to destroy Hezbollah and its rocket-launching capability. Now I would hardly claim that our operation in Lebanon was an unqualified success; but I’ve become enough of a deterrence-skeptic that I’m instantly suspicious of people who use “deterrence” as a rationale for using maximal military force in asymmetric conflicts. Too often, “deterrence” is really just an excuse to blast away at people we don’t like.

It was refreshing, then, to read the following in an article by Yair Lapid about the Israeli news media’s handling of the Lebanon campaign (the italics are mine):

“Israel’s deterrence capabilities have been severely handicapped,” we told the whole world. This without bothering to remember that deterrence is a psychological situation for which there are no standards of measurement and no one can really know what those capabilities are.

After the Six-Day War, for example, the Israeli deterrence was at its highest and we got attacked on Yom Kippur anyway. After Yom Kippur every one knew that Israel’s deterrence had been damaged but no one attacked.

In other words, even when dealing with state actors, deterrence can be very difficult to measure – except, of course, in retrospect.

Deterrence works best against entities with a basically materialist outlook. The reason that the American-Soviet deterrent system of “mutually assured destruction” worked as well as it did was that both nations, while differing in many other values, were fundamentally uninterested in “martyrdom”; communism and capitalism both justify their policies based on the prosperity and well-being they provide their populations, and neither system could find a way to portray a nuclear holocaust, even a “victorious” one, as a success.

At the opposite end of the “deterrability” scale, suicide bombers are notoriously almost impossible to deter. How, after all, do you threaten someone who is already determined to die, and who has been promised extravagant rewards in an afterlife that is beyond your reach?

In evaluating potential deterrence, it’s crucial to determine where the entity to be deterred belongs on the Soviet-Union-to-suicide-bomber scale. Syria, for example, is not at all opposed to death per se, but much prefers to see other countries doing the fighting and dying. (Dr. Boaz Ganor of the Institute for Counter-Terrorism has suggested that Syria might be a more fruitful target for deterrence than Hezbollah itself in Israel’s attempts to solve its Lebanese problems.) Iran, on the other hand, is currently being led by a radical Shi’ite clique that appears to set a high value on “martyrdom”, even if Iran itself is the “martyr”. This is why the prospect of Iran’s possession of nuclear weapons is so scary: a country that is willing to become a nuclear wasteland in return for destroying its enemies cannot be easily deterred, even by a country with superb second-strike retaliatory capabilities. Thus the confrontation between an eventual nuclear Iran and a presumed-to-be-nuclear Israel would not have the inherent deterrence-driven stability of the American-Soviet match-up, or even of India and Pakistan.

I see no reason to believe that Israel’s ability to deter Syria has been degraded by our recent operations in Lebanon; after all, we certainly proved that we have plenty of firepower, the political will to deploy it, and even the ability to take casualties without panicking. I don’t believe our ability to deter Iran has significantly declined either – it wasn’t much to begin with. And Hezbollah? Remember who introduced suicide bombing to the Middle East! Hamas and the rest were taught the bomb-belt business by our friends up North; so we shouldn’t delude ourselves that we ever had a meaningful capacity to deter Hezbollah from attacking us simply by attacking them in return.

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Hezbollah, Deterrence, Terrorism, Middle East.

A new star in Cyberspace: Ahmadinejad blogs!

2006-08-14T17:48:00.000+03:00

The Jerusalem Post (apparently along with the rest of the world’s news media) has informed us that Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has started his own blog. The blogsphere’s newest sensation (or at least, its newest sensation as of a day or two ago) can be found at www.ahmadinejad.ir (WARNING: see postscript below before accessing this site, especially from Israel!), and is apparently available in a bunch of languages including English, French, and Arabic as well as its original Farsi. According to the Post’s story (supplied by the Associated Press), Ahmadinejad’s first entry recounts “childhood memories, the country's Islamic Revolution and Tehran's war with Iraq” – possibly a bad move on the newbie blogger’s part, since that much material could easily be stretched out to cover three or four blog posts, keeping the punters coming back for more and building up that all-important Google PageRank rating.

I must admit that my own efforts to peruse Ahmadinejad’s blog have so far proven frustrating: at best, I get a “Server Error” screen. Iran’s President, despite a level of intelligence sufficient to impress veteran CBS interviewer Mike Wallace (who gushed, “He's an impressive fellow, this guy. He really is. He's obviously smart as hell.”), has evidently not quite figured out all the technical wrinkles involved in fine-tuning his blog’s HTML code; perhaps he should have taken the easy approach and set up a Blogger.com blog as I did, using one of their standard templates. I don’t mean to criticize, Mr. President – it’s just a friendly tip from one of your new blogging colleagues. Please don’t nuke me!

One of Ahmadinejad’s local colleagues, (ex-?) blogger Keivan Mehrgan (formerly?) of Tehran, dismissed the President’s blog as “nothing more than a publicity stunt” – implying, I suppose, that the blog’s contents are not a genuine personal project of the Iranian leader. I think that the possibly-late Mr. Mehrgan is (or was) being overly cynical – for even if Ahmadinejad did receive a little help in getting started as a blogger, I have no doubt whatsoever that he will soon become as avid a blogger-hobbyist as the rest of us. I fully expect to see him sweating his Technorati rank, refreshing his SiteMeter visitor statistics page every half hour (struggling not to do it every fifteen minutes), and laboring to evolve in the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem from “Adorable Rodent” to “Marauding Marsupial”. (I blush to admit that I’m still a “Crawly Amphibian”.)

It’s a cheerful thought, isn’t it? An Iranian President busy blogging would hardly have time or energy to send nuclear-armed missiles our way, rearm Hezbollah, or otherwise destroy the Western world that provides the bulk of his readership, would he? Sedentary hobbies are notoriously good for keeping Presidents peacefully occupied: look at Franklin Roosevelt, a famous stamp collector. He never got the United States into a war, or even nuked anyone! (OK, he might have used a small, primitive nuclear device or two had he had the chance, but he died a couple of months before the Bomb was ready. In any case, stamp collecting is deathly dull compared to blogging, so my thesis stands.)

Hey, I finally got through! I’d better post this and read what my new blogging buddy has to say. Do you think I can get him to link to me?

P.S. A comment on the Jerusalem Post article referred me to this page, claiming that President Ahmadinejad’s blog tries to install “Trojan Horse” code when Israeli users click on the links at the left-hand side of the blog’s homepage. Users from other countries did not report this problem, so it may be that if you try to click around the site and you’re not in Israel, you won’t experience any nastiness. Wherever you are, though, I would suggest avoiding Ahmadinejad’s blog – or at least treating it with extreme caution – until and unless all such hostile code is purged from the system.

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Israel, Iran, Ahmadinejad.

Born Into Trouble: Resolution 1701’s rocky start

2006-08-12T21:16:00.000+03:00

The ink is not yet dry on United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, but there is already at least one indication that the resolution’s implementation will be problematic: Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah’s supposed “acceptance” of the resolution in fact contradicts two of its most important operational clauses.

Here are the relevant parts of the resolution:

[The Security Council...]

1. Calls for a full cessation of hostilities based upon, in particular, the immediate cessation by Hezbollah of all attacks and the immediate cessation by Israel of all offensive military operations;

2. Upon full cessation of hostilities, calls upon the government of Lebanon and Unifil as authorised by paragraph 11 to deploy their forces together throughout the South and calls upon the government of Israel, as that deployment begins, to withdraw all of its forces from southern Lebanon in parallel;

And here is some of what Nasrallah has to say about the resolution (with italics supplied by the Don’s Mideast Musings Typography Bureau):

We believe that the resolution that was agreed on last night was unfair, but if there is an agreement on the cessation of hostilities between the Lebanese government and the enemy, we will abide by it without delay...

Regardless of our reservations and political positions, we will cooperate when the Lebanese soldiers and UNIFIL forces are deployed...

We must be aware of the fact that the war will continue for another few days. That's why we are continuing to fight today. We will fight as long as Israeli soldiers are in Lebanon.

In other words, Hezbollah will continue its attacks against Israel – certainly guerrilla warfare against Israel Defense Force soldiers inside Lebanon, and perhaps rocket attacks on Israel’s civilian population – despite the fact that Resolution 1701 calls for “the immediate cessation by Hezbollah of all attacks” before the Lebanese army and a beefed-up UNIFIL take the place of the IDF in South Lebanon. (One Associated Press report claims that Nasrallah “said Hezbollah rocket strikes on northern Israel would end when Israel stopped airstrikes and other attacks on Lebanese civilians” – but as it doesn’t give Nasrallah’s exact words, even in translation, it’s hard to know how seriously to take this statement. In any case, given Hezbollah’s deployment among South Lebanon’s civilian population, almost anything the IDF does there can be interpreted as “attacks on Lebanese civilians”.)

In short, the evidence so far is that despite the headlines, Hezbollah does not, in fact, intend to abide by the terms of U.N.S.C. Resolution 1701 – and thus it’s entirely possible that the fighting in Lebanon, and Hezbollah’s rocket attacks on Israeli cities, will continue.

A more detailed analysis of Resolution 1701 in its entirety would probably be a good, albeit unoriginal, idea – if I can get around to it before the resolution becomes completely irrelevant.

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Israel, Lebanon, Hezbollah, Nasrallah, Middle East.

Israel and Lebanon, continued: Some thoughts on the end-game

2006-08-09T16:51:00.000+03:00

I just fielded yet another AllExperts question on the Lebanon conflict, dealing specifically with the “end game” that seems to be developing on the ground and concurrently at the United Nations. Here’s the question and my answer – slightly retouched, but that seems to be basically normal these days.

Question:

What do you think about the continuing inability of Israel and Lebanon to agree on a ceasefire? From what I have heard, 15,000 Lebanese troops at the border would be useless and Israel will not leave until it believes it is going to be protected. They are at a standoff, right? How do you think the matter could be made appealing to both sides so that both will agree to a resolution? Do you personally think it is time to stop the war or should Israel continue to move north into Lebanon??

Answer:

Dear G_____ –

The question isn’t only how “useful” the deployment of the Lebanese Army to the South would be in strictly military terms. Having the Lebanese government take responsibility for its own country has a tremendous political value, even if its armed forces are (A) weak and (B) largely sympathetic to, and even infiltrated by, Hezbollah. Once the government has its forces deployed in the South, they can (and should) legitimately be held responsible for what happens there - as opposed to the current situation, where Hezbollah attacks Israel from Lebanese soil and the Lebanese government acts as if the country were a completely peaceful, harmless, innocent victim. In effect, by permitting Hezbollah to operate as a semi-autonomous mini-state in the South, official Lebanon has been getting the benefits of being peaceful without actually having to give up armed struggle; once the government takes responsibility for their own country, they can’t act as if Hezbollah attacks on Israel were originating from somewhere in outer space.

Israel’s position is that the Lebanese Army is indeed insufficiently capable and motivated to act decisively to disarm Hezbollah; thus we believe that a strong international force will be necessary in order to supplement and strengthen Lebanese government forces. I don’t see any real impasse here; I view it more as an indirect negotiation that will take a little time to conclude.

I’m not particularly convinced that controlling territory X kilometers into Lebanon will be the answer to all our troubles; thus I don’t think that it will necessarily be a tragedy if we fail to reach the Litani River (or further) before fighting stops. On the other hand, we have something of a dilemma on our hands: we can’t withdraw our forces before an effective Lebanese/international force takes over in South Lebanon, and we also don’t want to stop where we are, take up static positions, and be a sitting target for Hezbollah suicide bombers as we were during our previous occupation of southern Lebanon. So we pretty much have to continue on the offensive and work our way northward, at least until a U.N.-sponsored ceasefire takes hold; at that point we can sit tight (at high alert, you can be sure!) and wait for our forces to be replaced by the Lebanese army and/or a strong United Nations force.

At the same time, I believe that we should always keep in mind that a conflict like the one in Lebanon seldom, if ever, ends in a conventional military victory. Low-intensity conflicts (and the current Lebanese campaign is, I think, in many ways a sort of high-intensity low-intensity conflict) are won and lost in political rather than military terms; and thus when we talk about “letting the IDF win” we are merely fooling ourselves. In my view, the reasons for continuing to move the IDF northwards are at least as much political as they are military: by keeping the offensive going, we ensure (assuming the campaign goes reasonably well) that we end the active phase of our engagement in Lebanon on an upbeat.

Best regards,

-Don Radlauer

The whole issue of defining “victory” in low-intensity conflicts – and thus identifying exit points when the conflict occurs on foreign soil – is a complex and baffling one. At the same time as much of the Arab world has defined victory down to the point where stalemates and even crushing defeats are seriously portrayed as great victories, many Israeli thinkers apply a conventional-war-based definition of victory to our conflicts with Hezbollah and the Palestinians; this creates a situation where our adversaries claim victory merely because we haven’t bombed them into oblivion (or at least “back to the Stone Age”), and we basically agree with them because our criteria for victory are unrealistically high. More of this anon, methinks…

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Israel, Lebanon, Hezbollah.

Still looking for a new job? Try failure!

2006-08-08T00:28:00.000+03:00

Although the Jerusalem Post kindly deigned to run my last piece (for the usual fee of precisely zero), they were utterly silent regarding my implicit plea to be employed there as a headline writer for articles about my personal blogmuse, President Ahmadinejad of Iran. I had thought my qualifications were most impressive, but the good folks at the Post are evidently unimpressed. Their loss, I say, squaring my jaw and suppressing my sobs.

I am, of course, gainfully employed in a profession at which I am rather competent – which is why I am able to write for the supposed (and so far, completely imaginary) fun of it instead of earning fees and facing (ugh!) deadlines. Nonetheless, I am approaching (or perhaps have already approached and am just a bit slow) that age at which men frequently feel a vague sense of discontent, abandon their careers (successful or otherwise), and strike out in directions new and – one must concede – usually rather foolish. I am no less a man, no less a man approaching middle age, than any other forty-six-year-old male human; and after all, what have twenty-five years of striving for success got me? A massive overdraft, ten cats living in my house (plus one large dog who, thank heaven, likes cats), and residence in a country that tolerates weeks of Hezbollah’s Katyusha attacks with fortitude and equanimity, mostly because we fully expect to be incinerated when Iran nukes us on 22 August, just two weeks from now and nine days before this year’s start-of-school-year teachers’ strike.

Thus a new career is definitely in order – especially one in which I can make a good and fulfilling start within the next fortnight. And if I can’t be an Ahmadinejad-specialist headline writer (sob), I’ll be… I’ll be… I’ve got it! I’ll be a failure!

A failure? – you say. What good is being a failure?

Normally, I’d agree with you: being a professional failure is not something that is looked up to back where I come from. But you forget – and you really should feel embarrassed about this, considering the title of my blog – I live in the Middle East. Where I come from now, failure is not merely looked up to – it’s idolized.

Don’t believe me? Listen to the Associated Press, then, in this Jerusalem Post article:

Fierce anti-US protests have erupted in Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait - all top American allies. At the same time, the demonstrators have vented their anger at their Arab rulers, praising their new hero: Hizbullah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah… Meanwhile, Nasrallah has emerged as a hero, even among some secular Sunnis in Egypt and Jordan. In Egypt, protestors and opposition newspapers compare him with the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the old Arab nationalist champion against Israel.

You see? To be a success here – and if having adoring crowds chanting your name and begging you to bomb Tel Aviv isn’t success, I don’t know what is – you don’t have to improve your country’s literacy rates, end unemployment, control inflation, raise living standards, or even get a computer program working properly. All you have to do is get a bunch of weapons from somewhere else, fire them off at Israel, hide in a deep bunker somewhere when the Jews counterattack, and then claim that your personal survival represents a great Arab victory. If you’re halfway decent at the failure business, you won’t even have to pay for your weapons – I mean, is this a great career or what?

I’m still not entirely sure how to get my start in the Mideast failure business; I’ll have to do some research, maybe take an online correspondence course. But don’t worry: I’ll be up there soon with the big boys, bringing ruin on my country and a smile to “the street”. Yessir, it’ll be Nasser, Arafat, Saddam, Nasrallah, Ahmadinejad… and Radlauer!

I'll probably still have too many cats, though – there are some problems that even being a failure can’t solve.

Categories: Israel, Lebanon, Hezbollah, Ahmadinejad.

Easy work and “the main solution”: Ahmadinejad rides again!

2006-08-03T17:33:00.000+03:00

I wish I could get a job writing headlines. Not articles, not editorials, not analyses learned or otherwise – let someone else do that stuff. I want the fun job!

What am I talking about? This headline from the on-line edition of the Jerusalem Post:

‘Israel's destruction is the solution’
Ahmadinejad: Though main solution is end of Israel, cease-fire is first step.

Now come on. Don’t tell me that whoever wrote that headline and sub-headline didn’t spend a few seconds savoring the multi-level irony they convey. Don’t tell me s/he isn’t still chuckling over it as I write – probably guffawing out loud, spraying rancid, stale Jerusalem Post machine-made instant coffee all over his/her keyboard.

And the work is so easy! I mean, here’s the actual Ahmadinejad quote from the Jerusalem Post article:

“Although the main solution is for the elimination of the Zionist regime, at this stage an immediate cease-fire must be implemented,” Ahmadinejad said, according to state-run television in a report posted on its Web site Thursday.

The Iranians even did all the work of translation, for Pete’s sake! And Ahmadinejad, the dear boy, did pretty much all the rest. Just tighten up the wording a bit, check spelling and punctuation, and you’re there. Easy money!

* * *
Since I probably won’t get a headline-writing job at the Post or anywhere else, I suppose I’d better just sit back and savor the irony myself. (Unlike the Post’s headline-writer, I’m drinking green tea at the moment; it doesn’t look half as bad splattered on a keyboard as coffee does.) And really, it is rather nice having enemies like Ahmadinejad! How many enemies are so open (by implication, at least) about their inability to achieve their goals? “We’re going to destroy you, but since at the moment you’re effectively destroying us, let’s all stop shooting for a while!”

Just makes you feel all warm and fuzzy and eager to stop attacking Hezbollah, doesn’t it? I mean, a cease-fire is the first step in our destruction, after all – who can resist that? And I certainly wouldn’t want the inconvenient fact that Israel is winning the war in Lebanon to stand in the way of Ahmadinejad’s “solution” (presumably a final one). After all, he’s got lots of problems to solve, and it’s awfully selfish of us to let our trivial little problems prevent him from making the world into the good and happy place he envisions.

Ah well… I think there’s still some tea in the pot.

Categories: Israel, Lebanon, Hezbollah, Ahmadinejad, Iran.

Israel in Lebanon: Goals, prospects, and “reasonableness”

2006-08-02T14:51:00.000+03:00

Like pretty much everyone in Israel, I’ve had Lebanon on my mind for the last few weeks. After all, we’re at war up there – even if my own life, so far, has been remarkably unchanged by the fighting. Judging by the questions I’ve received through AllExperts.com, the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah has been on the minds of a lot of other people as well.

The question below is a fairly typical one, as is my answer. Many of the topics raised deserve much longer responses; in particular, I’ve been considering writing something about the controversy over the “proportionality” of Israel’s military response to Hezbollah.

Question: What is it going to take for the fighting to stop and for a reasonable solution to be put into place? I understand Israel’s goals, but can they be met anytime soon? I’m also concerned that Israel is creating so many collateral enemies through all of this that she is going to be left with very few allies. What are the chances of Syria and/or Iran becoming directly involved in the war at this point? Do the citizens of Israel need to be concerned about attacks from the east?

Answer: Dear I_____ –

Good questions! I’ll deal with them (or attempt to do so) in order:

1) At this point, I’d predict that fighting will stop when the U.N. Security Council manages to come up with a resolution that more-or-less forces it to stop; or perhaps, less likely, when the U.S. or some other non-U.N. entity comes up with a cease-fire formula that both sides can agree to. I don’t think that Israel is going to be able to achieve a conventional victory over Hezbollah in the time available, largely since the organization is not going to stay in place and let itself be defeated.

Guerilla organizations are notoriously difficult to defeat: rather than fight pitched battles and lose against larger conventional forces, they cut and run, regroup, and maintain their existence to fight another day. At the same time, there will be no Lebanese Dien Bien Phu: the Israel Defense Forces, while they may not be able to deal Hezbollah a decisive defeat, will not themselves be beaten. At the end of the day, Hezbollah will be severely damaged but still standing; the IDF will go home with no more than minor bruises (relatively speaking, of course); and the Lebanese mess will enter its next phase without any real resolution.

Is that “reasonable”? Not really, and I’d certainly love for my prediction to prove to be incorrect and overly pessimistic. Some “reasonableness” would be a very welcome thing around here! What would it take to obtain a truly “reasonable” resolution? Probably a miracle or three.

2) Right now, it’s hard for me to imagine how Israel’s full goals can be met in the near future. There are simply too many players in the Middle East with an interest in preventing a peaceful resolution to the various parts of the over-all Arab-Israeli (and Iranian-Israeli) conflict, and not enough international powers will back Israel strongly enough for us to be able to force all the Arab/Islamic world to recognize our existence and cease sponsoring attacks on us. A more achievable goal would be for Israel to prove (yet again) that it is capable of defending itself, willing to do so, and unwilling to pay an exorbitant price for liberating Israeli prisoners. (Past Israeli governments have erred badly, in my opinion, in their negotiations for the return of living and dead Israelis in enemy hands.)

3) I’m not at all sure that Israel is creating a lot of enemies who didn’t hate us already. Who, after all, were our “allies”? The United States, Micronesia, and that’s about it. The rest of the world has always been ready to condemn us for anything we do in our own defense, not to mention the occasional things we do that actually deserve condemnation. Of course, it’s sad that in pursuit of Hezbollah’s fighters, installations, and materiel we unavoidably kill a lot of Lebanese noncombatants; it’s equally true that Hezbollah very deliberately set things up so that this was our only option other than simply to absorb their attacks without mounting a meaningful defense.

According to the Geneva Conventions and related elements of “international law”, the onus for Lebanese noncombatant fatalities is on Hezbollah, and not on Israel – as long as we are attacking what we believe to be genuine military targets, with levels of force that we believe to be necessary, reasonable, and proportional to the military importance of the target. While our results have not always been perfect (nobody’s are), I believe that Israel has held quite well to this standard.

Of course, most of the rest of the world completely misunderstands (through ignorance or through malice) the concept of proportionality, and thus compares Israeli fatalities with Lebanese fatalities (or Hezbollah fighters killed with Lebanese civilians killed). By such an unrealistic and irrational “proportionality” standard, Israel obviously comes off as the bad guy; but we have no option but to defend ourselves according to the requirements of genuine international law, not according to the bowdlerized version promulgated by our critics.

4) Neither Syria nor Iran is in any hurry to become directly involved in fighting with Israel; nor is Israel especially interested in fighting a shooting war with either of these countries until and unless it becomes absolutely necessary. Iran, in particular, has evidently drawn some “red lines” for Hezbollah – withholding permission for the organization to use their Iranian-made long-range missiles to attack cities in central Israel. This shows that Iran is looking to limit its direct involvement in the current war. When and if any Iranian Revolutionary Guards are killed in the fighting in Lebanon, I fully expect them to receive posthumous Lebanese citizenship with a name-change thrown in at no extra charge.

Of course, any time armies of hostile countries are mobilized, on alert, and positioned near their respective borders, there is a chance that some mishap will lead to fighting even if neither side intended for war to break out. This means that there is a real, if slight, chance that we will wind up fighting Syria; but I would assume, given past history and current intentions and interests, that both Syria and Israel will make every effort to keep the fighting contained inside Lebanon even if a bullet or two goes astray. (Iran, of course, is far enough away that an accidental war is pretty much impossible – unless a few Israeli F-15’s happen to get lost, accidentally get refueled by an equally misdirected airborne tanker, and mistakenly bomb Iran’s nuclear complex at Isfahan in an effort to improve their fuel economy by shedding excess payload.)

5) I assume that by “the east” you mean Iran and/or Syria, rather than Jordan. As I’ve said above, I don’t think either Syria or Iran (and especially not Jordan, for that matter) is looking for open conflict with Israel at this point.

Syria, while it has a substantial military and some non-conventional (chemical and perhaps biological) weapons capability, has a lot of vulnerabilities as well: Its tanks and planes are old and outmoded, and its minority-led government might well not survive any significant military reverses. Accordingly, I would expect Syria to stick to its historical pattern of instigating conflicts but not doing a lot of actual fighting.

Iran is a long way from Israel. While they can certainly annoy us by sponsoring Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations, the only way they could pose a real threat to us would be to acquire or develop nuclear weapons and long-distance delivery systems. I would certainly say that a degree of Israeli (and global) “concern” about this possibility is warranted!

Israel is believed to have significant deterrent capability, including (so it is rumored) submarine-based second-strike nuclear weapons. The problem, of course, is that even such deterrence may not work against Iran’s extreme Shi’ite leaders, who seem to have something of a penchant for “martyrdom”; President Ahmadinejad and those who think as he does might be willing to absorb a massive nuclear attack on their own country in exchange for destroying Israel (and with it, inevitably, most of Palestine). I would hate to stake my life on my ability to predict the whims of Iran’s mullahs and their adherents; and yet (as I live in Israel and work in Tel Aviv) it appears that I have in fact done so.

Best regards,

-Don Radlauer

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Israel, Lebanon, Hezbollah, Syria, Iran.

It lives! Remiss blogger dares to show face after egregious hiatus...

2006-08-01T18:21:00.000+03:00

As has by now become painfully obvious (especially to me) I’ve been somewhat remiss in my blogging of late. (“Of late”, in this context, means that I haven’t posted anything since May; “somewhat remiss” my oversized butt!) In my defense – and a flimsy defense it is, I admit – I’ve been rather busy with other activities, including projects at work and other such trivial pastimes. Mea maxima culpa.

At the same time, since Hezbollah attacked Israel and Israel attacked back, I’ve been kept rather busy answering questions at AllExperts.com. Even my monumental capacity for sloth cannot prevent me from writing answers to these questions, since if I don’t respond to them within a few days I’ll be unceremoniously purged from the AllExperts list of distinguished pundits on every subject from crises to cockatoos to carburetors. For some reason I can’t quite fathom, I’m quite protective of my status as an AllExperts “expert” – even though I’m paid nothing for my effort and occasionally receive abuse from some of my less philo-Semitic querents. Mine is not to wonder why; mine is just to write or die – metaphorically, of course.

I recently received the following question (which I’ve edited slightly):

The Israel Arab conflict is bad. Currently it seems like the U.S. has the most sway in the region, and influences the politics of many of the countries there. However, as you know, other countries are gaining political strength. As India and China gain in power, and their influence grows in the Middle East, how do you think this will affect the Israel-Arab conflict?

Are China and India more pro-Arab or pro-Israel? Is this changing? I know that India also has problems with the Muslims in Kashmir; will India favor Israel? What about China?

I find this question interesting, because those two countries are greatly increasing in importance. They will gain influence in the Middle East, and this could change the crisis there. What do you think?

Here is my answer:

Dear J____ –

China and India are indeed major nations, and are both becoming more significant powers as time passes. Your question about their current and future influence in the Middle East is thus a very good and important one.

To date, both China and India have played only a rather subdued role in the region – basically saying nice things to everyone, buying oil from the Arabs and weapons from Israel, and doing their best not to upset anyone too much. While the oil issue obviously gives the Arabs a degree of leverage (especially with China, whose appetite for oil is large and growing), it’s equally true that India (to a huge extent) and China (to a lesser extent, but with significant problems with Muslim separatists in Xinjiang) are threatened by Islamic radicalism. Israel is a natural ally to both countries in confronting this threat. (Of course, India has a large Moslem population of its own – so while many Hindus might be ready to embrace Israel more closely, the Indian government is careful not to befriend Israel too openly.)

Both countries, then, have chosen a rather typical (if perhaps less than admirably forthright) approach: In public pronouncements, U.N. votes, and so on, both tread a rather pro-Arab line; while in private conversations with Israelis, representatives of both countries explain that these public statements are basically for show, and we should not take them seriously. Of course, we Israelis respond (or at least I do, when I get the chance) that public pronouncements, even when not backed up by concrete action, can still do a great deal of harm.

I can’t really predict the future – or at least, I can’t do so and expect to be any more accurate than anyone else! The obvious prediction in the short term would be for both India and China to continue doing more or less what they’ve been doing: condemn Israel when they feel it’s diplomatically advisable to do so, buy arms from us, get advice from our counter-terrorism experts, and otherwise try to be friendly to everyone. I don’t see any real reason for either country to do otherwise; after all, they have nothing much to gain by ruffling anyone’s feathers.

While I don’t see any reason for a change in China’s or India’s muted approach to the Mideast conflict in the near future, the further we look ahead the more uncertain the picture becomes. I really can’t say what either country will be thinking, saying, or doing twenty or more years from now. Of course, it’s equally hard to predict what will happen in the Middle East between now and then.

Best regards,

-Don Radlauer

Tomorrow I’ll post another question and answer from today; someone asked about Lebanon, a small country somewhere north of Afula where there has evidently been a bit of unpleasantness recently. Stay tuned!

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Israel, China, India.

Haveil Havalim #70 – Soccer Dad’s Repeat Victory

2006-05-21T15:27:00.000+03:00

The new Haveil Havalim (#70) is up – hosted once again by Soccer Dad. As always, there’s a lot to read – and as Vaguely Sinister Wife and I are leaving tonight for one of our trademark whirlwind trips through the States (almost three days in San Diego to lecture at a conference, almost three days in Texas, two days in New York, then home!), we won’t have much time to read it. So you’ll have to read it for us.

Nu? What are you waiting for?

A “Palestinian Holocaust”?

2006-05-17T12:13:00.000+03:00

I received the following AllExperts question last night, and I just sent in my response. I did not enjoy writing it; but I didn’t have any good excuse to refuse to answer.

The question:

Boker Tov and Shalom Don,
I have a question, I was watching Yulie Cohen Gerstel’s documentary about the Holocaust and the possibility of Israel imposing the same hardships on the palestinians that the jews went through and my question is, do you think that the past is repeating itself meaning are the israelis doing the same thing to the palestinians that the nazis did to the jews years ago, what is your stance on this? Thanks.

My answer:

Dear A_____ –

I haven't seen Ms. Gerstel’s film, so I can’t comment on it in any detail.

The idea that Israel “imposes the same hardships on the Palestinians as the Jews went through during the Holocaust” would be laughable if it weren’t evil. Even to suggest such an equivalence would require complete ignorance of the two conflicts, or else an anti-Israeli bias so strong that facts cannot penetrate it.

The Holocaust was the systematic, industrialized destruction of an entire culture: fully one third of the world’s Jews were killed, and European Jewry as a living community was essentially eliminated. In particular, the Eastern European Yiddish-speaking culture and the Greek-Sephardic Ladino-speaking culture were destroyed; all that is left of these vibrant, creative cultures is fossilized remains. These Jewish communities posed absolutely no threat to Germany: there were no Jewish suicide bombings on German buses (or anywhere else), no Jewish military threat, no Jewish boycotts of Germany (at least until after the Holocaust began). The Holocaust was a gratuitous, unprovoked, brutal, and unrestrained attack on a defenseless and inoffensive people.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an entirely different matter. Palestinian terrorists have been killing innocent Jewish civilians since at least the 1920's; the Palestinian terror organizations receive substantial backing and funding from much of the Arab world as well as from Iran. While Israel’s actions in relation to the Palestinians are not always legally or morally perfect, the idea that Israel is trying to commit genocide – either by killing huge numbers of Palestinian Arabs, or by destroying their culture – is simply not borne out by the facts.

While numbers don’t tell the entire story, they are illustrative. Remember that the number of Jews in Europe pre-1939 was roughly comparable to the number of Palestinians living in or near Israel/Palestine today. In 5 1/2 years of the “al-Aqsa Intifada”, fewer than 4,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel – and of these, at least 55-60% have been combatants. Contrast this with the Holocaust: the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau were designed to “process” 12,000 people per day; and at the height of the destruction of Hungary's Jews in the summer of 1944, as many as 46,000 Jews were killed there in a single day. (Those not “lucky” enough to be “processed” in the standard way were simply burned alive in pits in the ground.) The average number killed daily at Birkenau was not quite that high, of course – but it was still at least a couple of thousand per day; the entire Palestinian death toll in 5 1/2 years of “Intifada” is the equivalent of a day or two at one extermination camp.

[Erratum: While the figure of 46,000 Hungarian Jews killed in a single day at Birkenau is indeed mentioned in several places, including the Israeli Foreign Ministry site referenced above, I am told by some serious Holocaust researchers that this number seems unrealistically high. A more credible maximum number killed in one day at Birkenau would be about half the figure quoted – somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 people – which is still a hell of a lot of killing to do in a single day. -DonR, 5 September 2006]

It is true that Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement, including checkpoints and roadblocks, are onerous and inconvenient, and harmful to the Palestinian economy. It is equally true that the terrorist organizations, while supposedly working for “the liberation of Palestine”, are doing everything in their power to ensure that the roadblocks remain in place – after all, Palestinian poverty and alienation are the terrorists’ best recruiting tools. Were the Palestinians, as a collective, to renounce terrorism unequivocally and decisively, the roadblocks would quickly disappear; and in fact, if the Palestinians had truly acted in good faith to achieve statehood, they would have had their own state many years ago. So while Israel is complicit in the oppression of the Palestinian people, the Palestinians’ own leadership is very largely to blame for their people’s plight.

In the mean time, Palestinians are able to get an education (as Jews under the Nazis were not), follow professions (as Jews were not), and vote for their own leadership (as Jews were not). When and if the Palestinians decide to stop blowing up Israeli women and children, they will have their state handed to them on a silver platter, with generous foreign aid to build their economy and institutions. The Jewish victims of the Holocaust do not even have graves: those burned at Birkenau are just mud at the bottom of a lake.

Obviously, I could continue in this vein - but I think I've made my opinion on the topic clear enough. I'll be happy to deal with any follow-up questions you may have.

Best regards,

-Don Radlauer

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Israel, Palestine, Holocaust.

Haveil Havalim #69 is up!

2006-05-14T19:49:00.000+03:00

This week's Haveil Havalim Jewish Blogs Carnival is up! Soccer Dad has done a great job putting it all together. Click on over and enjoy!

Caroline Glick’s bogus math

2006-05-10T11:15:00.000+03:00

I try to avoid commenting publicly on what other commentators write; I dread becoming that lowest of all literary creatures: a critic. My act of self-restraint is often most difficult (dare I say heroic?) in the case of Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick. Ms. Glick is a fine writer with strong Zionist values, excellent qualifications, superb contacts, prestige – and, in my personal opinion, a remarkable knack for being wrong about the issues we both care most strongly about.

Still, I have held my peace in public, while complaining bitterly to my wife, my dog, and any other captive audience. But in her latest column, Caroline Glick has gone too far: she has trespassed into the realm of statistics. I may grudgingly tolerate a split infinitive or two (albeit not in my own home), but misuse of numbers is an affront not to be suffered in silence.

Ms. Glick refers to a factoid that has been repeatedly trumpeted since Ariel Sharon unveiled his Disengagement Plan: the supposed dominance of soldiers from the national-religious community in the Israel Defense Forces. The argument goes that as the national-religious provide the backbone of our defense capability, they deserve extra consideration; and certainly we wouldn’t want to offend the sector that keeps us safe from invading Syrian hordes while we wait for Iran’s nukes to arrive.

Glick claims that “the national religious sector makes up some 15 percent of the overall population, yet its sons make up more than 30 percent of combat soldiers in the IDF” – clearly implying that national-religious youngsters are twice as likely to become combat soldiers as their non-national-religious (a.k.a. unwashed heathen) peers. But this is a statistical nonsense.

Remember that Israel does not have universal conscription. The vast majority of Israeli Arabs do not serve in the IDF. Neither do the Haredim (a.k.a. the “ultra-Orthodox”). Israeli Arabs represent about 20 percent of the population, and Jews represent about 76 percent (a figure of 80 percent is often used; discrepancies are likely the result of different definitions of categories). Of the Jewish population, around 9 percent (7 percent of the total Israeli population) are Haredim. This means that non-Haredi Jews constitute about 69 percent of Israeli citizens; this is the population sector that provides the IDF with nearly all of its recruits.

If 69 percent of the Israeli population constitutes the IDF’s recruiting base, and (as Glick affirms) 15 percent of Israelis are national-religious, the national-religious should constitute at least 22 percent (i.e. 15/69) of the available recruits. Considering that the average non-religious Israeli Jewish family has about 2.2 children and national-religious fertility is double that (see Section 4.0 of this article, in PDF format), it would be surprising if the number of eligible recruits coming from the national-religious sector were not at least 30 percent of the total – in fact, based on demographics alone, we might well expect as many as 40-45 percent of all IDF recruits to be national-religious! (Note that since virtually all IDF combat soldiers are male, we don't have to worry about discrepancies in female recruitment rates between the religious and non-religious sectors.)

So if something betwen 30 percent and 45 percent of the males recruited to the IDF each year are from the national-religious sector, it’s no more than natural that a similar percentage of combat soldiers come from this community; in fact, it's quite possible that national-religious soldiers are less likely than average to become combat soldiers! The contention that the 30-percent-in-combat-units figure demonstrates some kind of national-religious superiority in patriotism or capability is either the product of mathematical incompetence or else simply an attempt to deceive.

Ms. Glick makes other numerical assertions regarding supposed national-religious dominance in various spheres of IDF excellence. I do not have all her source data, so I’m not in a position to comment on each claim individually. But it’s clear that since she bases all her claims for national-religious superiority on their supposed 15-percent share of the IDF personnel pool, essentially all her conclusions should be cut in half, or even reduced by two thirds.

All this does not mean that everything is rosy. A significant part (but by no means all) of the national-religious community is feeling alienated from the IDF and Israeli society in general. And there is no question that the national-religious sector is important to the IDF and to the State of Israel – after all, by my own calculations the national-religious sector represents a very large portion of the manpower available for IDF recruitment. My principal argument is with the contention that national-religious soldiers are, on average, qualitatively superior to other IDF recruits; at my most charitable, I would say that the numbers fail to support this belief.

Bogus math never strengthens an argument. Caroline Glick is intelligent and well-educated enough to get her numbers right; at the very least, she shouldn’t try to bamboozle us with figures that don’t add up.

Mixed Mideast Metaphor of the Day

2006-05-08T16:58:00.000+03:00

From this article in today’s Jerusalem Post:

The financial tensions combined with the fight for control of the security forces has turned Gaza into a tinderbox, with tensions constantly bubbling just under the surface.

Sounds like a rather wet tinderbox to me…

Dancing with Tiktaalik – a fishy comment breaks bloggers’s block

2006-04-27T18:14:00.000+03:00

Some of you may have noticed that I haven’t been posting recently. It’s been three weeks, and in between wallowing in guilt for my lack of literary (?) output (wallowing in guilt is a particular hereditary skill of mine, passed down through untold generations of eastern European Jews who constantly worried that some personal vice of theirs was responsible for the latest bad turnip harvest) I have been searching diligently – more or less – for something compelling to write about. My problem has been neither lack of will nor broken fingers; there simply hasn’t been much going on that seemed worth the effort.

Two days after my last post, scientists announced the discovery and description of Tiktaalik roseae, a 375-million-year-old fish that fit nicely into one of the gaps in the fossil record of the transition from purely aquatic to terrestrial vertebrates. (See also here and here.) The “new” fossil was “discovered to order” – that is, it was found in a predicted location (an area of Greenland that was once a subtropical region of meandering streams) and at the predicted time (that is, in rocks of the right age) for a creature of approximately these characteristics to exist. From the standpoint of evolutionary science, such a find is obviously most welcome, and yet it is anything but revolutionary: Tiktaalik answers some questions about the details of the fish-to-amphibian transition, but it doesn’t create any new paradigms or overturn any old ones.

Nonetheless, anti-evolutionists of various cuts and stripes felt compelled to react to Tiktaalik – here’s an analysis of some conventional creationist critiques of the new fish, and here is an Intelligent-Design-style critique from the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture (analyzed here).

None of this would have triggered a blog post, since evolutionary biology is supposed to be merely a side-line for me, and the new fossil – and responses to it – don’t change anything in my thinking on the subject.

However – and remember the part about my having difficulty finding anything to write about? – today I came across one comment in that last link’s discussion thread that was so wonderful that it got my rusty fingers pounding the keys again. (I really do pound the keys; Vaguely Sinister Wife complains if I do any writing while she’s trying to get to sleep. We didn’t have none of these newfangled electronic gizmoes when I learned to type – it was good old-fashioned cast-iron manual typewriters, and don’t your forget it, sonny! But, as usual, I digress.) The pseudonymous genius (and I’m not being sarcastic!) quotes a passage from the original commentary, referring to the nature of the evolutionary changes represented by Tiktaalik:

But that kind of mosaicism is what you'd expect, and what we should see in a transitional form! Every element of the organism shouldn't be changing in a slow and steady lockstep, but instead should shift haltingly, with sometimes most of the selection on the feeding structures, for instance, and maybe some other time on locomotor morphology.

And responds:

Why do you hate Jesus?

…Which has to be the best capsule-summary-cum-demolition of the creationist “argument” I’ve ever read.

Sigh… I wish I’d written that!

Winners, losers, and the rest of us: thoughts on the election results

2006-04-04T16:15:00.000+03:00

The voters have spoken, or at least mumbled. After an election campaign that was remarkably eventful in its own way (including a split in Israel’s ruling political party and Ariel Sharon’s apparently permanent incapacitation), unusually significant in the issues it presented for the electorate’s judgment, and yet amazingly soporific, the results are in. We don’t yet know the shape of the new governing coalition, but it’s not too early to draw some conclusions about the people, parties, and ideas that won and lost.

First, the results

With all votes counted, the new Knesset looks like this:

Kadima 29 seats
Labor 19 seats
Shas 12 seats
Likud 12 seats
Yisrael Beitenu 11 seats
National Union / National Religious Party 9 seats
Gil (Senior Citizens) 7 seats
United Torah Judaism 6 seats
Meretz 5 seats
United Arab List 4 seats
Balad 3 seats
Hadash 3 seats

Nineteen parties participated in the election and failed to reach the required 2 percent threshold for Knesset entry; about 200,000 votes (the equivalent of around seven Knesset seats!) were thrown away – either because people voted for a party that failed to reach the threshold, because they deliberately stuck a blank piece of paper in the voting envelope instead of a party’s slip, or else because they accidentally included slips for two or more different parties in their envelope.

Only 63.2 percent of the electorate voted; but this figure is somewhat deceptive, since an estimated ten to fifteen percent of eligible Israeli citizens are currently overseas and couldn’t vote. (Israel does not allow absentee voting except for embassy staff and other special cases.) This means that the “real” turnout of those eligible to vote and present in Israel on Election Day was more like 70 to 75 percent: still not stellar, but not quite so abysmal as it’s been made out to be. Israeli Arabs, as a whole, participated at a somewhat higher level than had been expected; usually Arab turnout is 10 percent below Jewish turnout, but this time the difference was only 7 percent. Given that the overall turnout figure includes Israeli Arabs as well as Jews and others, the Jewish turnout (among those present in Israel) was somewhere between 71 and 77 percent.

According to the Jerusalem Post, settlers were among the population sectors with especially low turnout; considering this sector’s normally high motivation to vote, this fact likely points to a degree of despair – or even disenchantment with a democratic system that appears to have turned against much of the settlement enterprise. (Rather annoyingly, the Post neglects to include numbers for the settlers’ participation level; for those blessed-with-numerical-affinity as I am – statistic-freaks, in other words – such a fuzzy description is cause for wailing and gnashing of teeth.)

What didn’t happen – and what did

Before talking about what did happen, it’s worth noting a prediction or two that – predictably, in my opinion – turned out to be untrue:

Some Internet forum commentators (which is a rather more dignified title than they deserve, but I’m stuck for a better one that satisfies even my low standards for propriety) predicted that sinister Kadima officials would “arrange” for Ariel Sharon to die a few days before the election, in an attempt to gain some extra “sympathy votes”. Nothing of the sort happened, of course; and in fact the election appears to have run its course with a minimum of skullduggery.

Despite the warnings of various right-wing spokesmen that Kadima would form a coalition with one or more Arab parties, there is no reason to believe (nor was there ever a reason to believe) that this will happen. Kadima has plenty of options in forming a coalition with other Jewish/Zionist parties; and even if Kadima somehow runs into difficulties in building a “Jewish” coalition, the fragmentation of the Arab vote means that no single Arab party has enough Knesset seats to justify the political cost of including it in a coalition. For now at least, the taboo against recruiting Arab parties into Israeli governing coalitions will remain unbroken.

On the other hand, predictions of declining support for Kadima turned out to be somewhat correct: while the party was a clear winner, with ten more Knesset seats than its nearest rival, it “lost” around five seats between most of the late pre-election polls and the final results, and around eight seats compared to polls taken a couple of weeks before the election. On the other hand, the Center-Left as a whole held its own: while the polls taken around 10 March showed Kadima-Labor-Meretz receiving around 60 Knesset seats, these three parties plus the Pensioners (who didn’t even show up on the radar a couple of weeks ago) gained 60 seats in the election itself.

Winners and losers

Twelve parties will be represented in the new Knesset, and the largest party received less than 25 percent of the vote. Inevitably, such fragmented election results represent something of a Rorschach test, in which the picture one sees depends largely on the observer. Despite the perils of ink-blot punditry, I shall attempt to put my own preferences aside and identify some clear winners, losers, and in-betweens:

Thatcherism lost; “social” economics won. Only one party identified with doctrinaire free-market economics will be in the next Knesset. The Likud’s miserable showing was due, at least in part, to people’s resentment of Binyamin Netanyahu’s program of aggressive social-benefit cuts when he was Finance Minister under Ariel Sharon; the secular parties (including Hetz and what was left of Shinui) that more-or-less shared Kid Brother’s economic philosophy failed to pass the two-percent electoral threshold. On the other hand, a large bloc of parties ran on platforms espousing stronger social benefits: Labor, Shas, Gil, and (depending on your criteria) United Torah Judaism and Meretz. This means that the “social bloc” includes somewhere between 38 and 49 MK’s, plus Arab MK’s who are likely to favor restoration of the large-family benefits that Netanyahu slashed.

*          *          *

“Disengagement” won; “Greater Israel” (as a political program) lost big. Three parties ran on platforms with “disengagement” – past and future – as a central element. Kadima won 29 seats based almost entirely on its pro-“disengagement” stance; The Likud and NU/NRP, both of which campaigned mostly on their opposition to “disengagement”, won a total of only 21 seats. If we view the race among these three parties as a “disengagement referendum”, it’s clear that “disengagement” won; on the other hand, the fact that Kadima won a significantly smaller victory than expected would tend to dilute the significance of this pseudo-referendum.

Another way to view the issue is to group Zionist parties into two groups (Left and Right), or, perhaps more usefully, into three (Left, Right, and Other). If we classify the Pensioners as Left and Shas as Right, we have 60 MK’s on the Left (not counting the Arab parties) and 50 on the Right – a small victory for the Left-Center, and for “disengagement”.

But if we classify explicitly pro-“disengagement” parties as Left, anti-“disengagement” parties as Right, and parties that are willing to go along with “disengagement” in return for government support for their social programs as “Other”, we have a Left of Kadima, Labor, and Meretz with 53 MK’s, a Right of Yisrael Beitenu, Likud, and NU/NRP with only 32 MK’s, and an “Other” of Shas, Pensioners, and UTJ with 25 MK’s. This breakdown may overestimate the strength of opposition to “disengagement”, though, as one of Yisrael Beitenu’s main beliefs is that territorial swaps are necessary to improve Israel’s “demographic security”; even the Likud’s program calls for some form of eventual consolidation of Israel’s West Bank settlements. Only the NU/NRP, with its whopping 7.5% of the vote, takes a principled stand against West Bank withdrawals and the creation of a Palestinian state.

Clearly, if Ehud Olmert is willing to open his checkbook, he can easily assemble a 78-MK majority for further territorial withdrawals. Of course, such withdrawals will be expensive, as will the monetary demands of the “social bloc”; the money will have to come from somewhere, and I’m already running a pretty big overdraft.

One of my blogging colleagues points out (in private correspondence) that we should differentiate between “Greater Israel” as a religious/national ideal (a.k.a. “the dream”) and “Greater Israel” as a practical political program. The latter suffered a crushing defeat last Tuesday; the former – shared even by many who voted for parties supporting “disengagement” – survived two thousand years of exile, and will not disappear because of this or any other election result.

*          *          *

Hot lesbian wedding kisses, Yossi Beilin, Binyamin Netanyahu, and the Palestinians lost; the Pensioners and Avigdor Lieberman won. The Green Leaf Party once more failed to make it into the Knesset, even after running brilliant ads like this one. (R-rated: open-minded adults only!) While they never seem to succeed, the Green Leafers seem to have a good time campaigning! Apparently many of the “protest” voters who might have chosen Green Leaf (including a large number of young voters) switched to Gil when it appeared that the latter would get into the Knesset and Green Leaf wouldn’t; this indicates a sort of “practical protest” mentality, as opposed to “pure” protest voters who don’t care whether their votes actually get anyone into the Knesset. Gil, the pensioners’ party, won enough seats – and has sufficiently specific demands, even if their initial version of these demands is a bit inflated – to make it a desirable coalition partner for Kadima.

When initial results showed Meretz winning only four Knesset seats, it appeared that Yossi Beilin, whose first campaign as Meretz leader had clearly flopped, would quickly be dismissed from his position as party chief. Now that the adjusted results are in and Meretz has a fifth mandate, perhaps Beilin will keep his job; but even at my most charitable, I can only call this election a mitigated disaster for the party. Other than its lack of a convincing and charismatic leader, I believe that the problem lies in Meretz’s failure to adjust to changing times: its diplomatic stance (currently based largely on Beilin’s “Geneva Accord”) seems increasingly dated, and it hasn’t found any other issues to excite the broad Israeli public. As the Labor Party – and, for that matter, the Israeli electorate as a whole – has shifted to the left in many of its positions, it seems increasingly difficult for Meretz to defend a niche to the left of Labor without becoming so extreme as to be irrelevant.

If Meretz’s election results were a fender-bender, the Likud’s results were a train wreck. Under Kid Brother’s leadership, the party lost a full 70% of its previous Knesset seats (counting those won last time by Natan Sharansky’s two-MK Yisrael Ba’Aliyah party, which was merged into the Likud to make a 40-MK faction). I must admit to some astonishment here: I had expected Netanyahu to resign from politics by now. But so far, the Great Communicator has vowed to lead the party through its time in the wilderness. I seriously doubt, though, that Bibi will really stay the course; it’s frustrating enough sitting on the Opposition benches when your party loves you, but it must be truly awful when everyone in the party you’re supposed to be leading knows that you caused their fall from power to insignificance.

Ultimately, the Likud – and perhaps even Kid Brother himself – will, I hope, realize a very basic truth about Bibi: He’s not very good at politics. He may have been a competent (albeit controversial) Finance Minister, but other than that, his record is fairly dismal. He won exactly one election, a head-to-head contest with perennial also-ran Shimon Peres that Netanyahu won by a whisker. Other than that, Netanyahu has led the Likud to two major electoral defeats, and his performance as Prime Minister (admittedly with an especially fractious governing coalition) was both weak and inept. Given his resistance to learning from (or even admitting) his mistakes, it’s hard to see how Kid Brother will have any great future to look forward to – unless he chooses a different line of work.

With 11 MK’s, Yisrael Beitenu and party leader Avigdor Lieberman can certainly consider this election a victory – although some of the late polls were forecasting an even more impressive 14-seat showing. The question now is how Lieberman wants to play his hand: does he attempt to fit himself in as the right-flank of a Kadima-led, pro-“disengagement” coalition, or does he remain in the Opposition? It would certainly appear that he made every effort in his campaign to position himself for a role in a center-Left government, emphasizing security concerns rather than territorial rigidity; but it’s not clear how badly he wants in – or, for that matter, how badly Ehud Olmert wants Yvette as a member of his Cabinet.

The Palestinians, of course, were not candidates in Israel’s election; but they managed to lose anyway, by being less relevant to the Israeli electorate than at any time in recent history. Only the Likud and the National Union / National Religious Party ran on platforms in which the Palestinians (as eternal antagonists, of course) played a major part; if we want to be generous, we can add Yisrael Beitenu and Meretz (which still views the Palestinians as a negotiating partner) to the list. But for a solid majority of the Jewish electorate, the Palestinians are now more or less officially an inconvenient irrelevance – people to be walled off and guarded against, but not spoken to or cared about.

*          *          *

Pretty much everyone else broke even. Kadima won the election, of course; but the victory was not impressive enough to count as a ringing endorsement of the party, its membership, and its leadership.

Labor made a decent second-place showing; but the party failed to show any growth in its Knesset strength despite the collapse of the Likud and Shinui. If Labor is to regain its position as a potential ruling party, it needs to find ways of significantly broadening its appeal; and this election should have been a golden opportunity to do so.

It’s far too early, of course, to judge whether Israel as a whole won or lost this election; that can be determined only after a government is formed, its policies are implemented (or not), and historians have a chance to chew things over for a few decades. In the mean time, the Israeli electorate sent some fairly clear messages to the political establishment:

While the voters might have been more excited by a reassuring, charismatic leader – Ariel Sharon, for example, had he remained healthy – none of the remaining party leaders had any noticeable positive effect on their parties’ electoral success. (The only exception to this was Avigdor Lieberman, who appealed to Former-Soviet-Union immigrants who like strong leaders but don’t like Stalinesque moustaches.) I would like to be able to say that the trend towards idea-based rather than personality-based voting represents a growing maturity in the Israeli electorate’s thinking, but I suspect that the true message is simply that our current party leaders are a rather unattractive bunch.

The voters strongly repudiated Netanyahu’s brand of reduced-benefit capitalism in favor of stronger social benefits.

The voters strongly rejected the “Greater Israel” idea (in its applied form), but did not send a very clear message as to precisely how and when they want Israel to reduce its presence in the West Bank. “Disengagement” proponents did better than opponents, but not well enough to ensure an easy path to a unilateral West Bank withdrawal.

Ehud Olmert will almost certainly be our next Prime Minister; but his unimpressive electoral victory means that he will have to work hard to prove himself (and accomplish anything) as our nation’s new leader.

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Netanyahu, Likud, Olmert, Kadima, Disengagement, Referendum, Israel, Elections.

Finally, a referendum on disengagement – sort of

2006-03-23T19:22:00.000+02:00

Opponents of last year’s Disengagement from the Gaza Strip and part of the West Bank frequently remind us that a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza was actually part of Amram Mitzna’s platform in the previous Knesset election. Since Mitzna’s Labor Party was crushingly defeated by Ariel Sharon’s Likud, disengagement opponents like to portray that election as a referendum on the Gaza Disengagement in particular, and on further unilateral disengagements in general. As they see it, the Israeli electorate had the chance to vote in favor of unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and resoundingly repudiated the idea.

The problem with this line of reasoning is that while unilateral withdrawal was indeed one of the issues presented in the 2003 campaign, there were a lot of other factors involved; and in fact, it is highly doubtful that this issue had any real importance to Labor’s defeat and the Likud’s victory.

Labor in 2003 was something of a basket case. It had never come to grips with the failure of the Oslo process to bring peace and security to Israel; it had never properly recovered from the political incompetence of Labor’s last Prime Minister, the hapless, clueless-yet-arrogant Ehud Barak; and its new leader was a relative unknown with no experience in national politics. Lacking convincing leadership and campaigning ineffectively, Labor managed its worst showing since Biblical times. The Likud – led by a grandfatherly Sharon who had finally found a government job that didn’t require the administrative skills he never possessed – cruised to an easy win.

Of course, the 2003 election was hardly a referendum in favor of Disengagement, either. If anything, it was a referendum on the leadership and personality of Ariel Sharon – an ultra-pragmatic soldier/politician who had never been trusted by the ideological Right. While some Likud voters felt betrayed by Sharon’s eventual switch to a strategy of unilateral territorial withdrawal, the current pre-election polls indicate that an awful lot of the people who voted Likud in 2003 are planning to vote for Kadima – and, by implication, for further unilateral withdrawals – next Tuesday. Either these voters have all made a radical shift in their thinking over the last three years, or else they voted Likud last time for reasons unrelated to the idea of Disengagement.

This time, though, things are different. Ariel Sharon is out of the picture, and there is no figure in the current election with anything like his personal appeal. According to the latest survey, the three Prime Ministerial candidates stack up as follows:

Ehud Olmert Amir Peretz Binyamin Netanyahu Nobody
Viewed positively     26%     23%     22%    N/A

Viewed negatively     39%     43%     50%    N/A

Most suitable to be Prime Minister     26%     16%     20.5%    24%

While Ehud Olmert is slightly ahead of his competition, the differences aren’t all that dramatic; we’re clearly not dealing with a charisma-fest here. If Kadima indeed wins this election, it won’t be because of Ehud Olmert’s whopping 26% personal-popularity rating!

Further, this time there is no question that unilateralism – past and future – is the biggest issue being put to the voters. The Gaza Disengagement happened less than a year ago; its wounds are still fresh and the displaced are not yet resettled. And Kadima has stated clearly that while a negotiated agreement with the Palestinians (under circumstances that now seem wildly improbable any time in the near future) would be nice, a Kadima-led government would not wait long for the Palestinians to transform themselves into suitable negotiating partners. Since the negotiated alternative is obviously not going to happen, Ehud Olmert and his cohorts have made it obvious to all that a vote for Kadima is a vote for a major unilateral withdrawal from large parts of the West Bank within the next few years.

So this time around, it’s entirely reasonable to view the election as a referendum on disengagement. The only real question is how to interpret the results. Since Israeli elections involve lots of political parties, nobody actually “wins” here in the sense that we Americans are used to; a party that gains 30% of the vote is seen as having won a major victory. Further, not all Israeli political parties can be accurately categorized as pro- or anti-disengagement; several significant parties are rather wishy-washy on the subject, while others on the Left favor leaving the Territories but aren’t thrilled by the unilateral aspect of Sharon’s and Kadima’s disengagements.

I can think of three ways to evaluate the results of next week’s vote as a referendum on disengagement:

Identify those votes that are definitely from hard-core proponents or opponents of disengagement, and ignore all others. I would count Kadima votes as the pro’s, and Likud and National Union / National Religious Party votes as the anti’s. This method should give reasonably accurate results, but it leaves out a huge number of voters – since the three parties chosen are predicted to win about 60 Knesset seats, representing 50% of the popular vote.

Categorize all parties as either pro-disengagement, anti-disengagement, or irrelevant. This would include many more voters in the hypothetical referendum, but would add some significant uncertainties: for example, can we be sure that all voters for Yisrael Beiteinu, Shas, and United Torah Judaism would have voted “no” in a Disengagement referendum? Can we be sure that all Labor and Meretz voters would have voted “yes” despite these parties’ disapproval of unilateralism? How would Israeli Arabs have voted? (The latter group might have been more amenable to the first Disengagement, which got rid of all Israeli settlements and military bases inside the Gaza Strip, than they will be to future disengagements from parts of the West Bank, since the latter will leave Israeli “settlement blocs” in place.) Lacking any definitive answer to such questions (although I suspect that the various political parties’ leaders know more about their voters’ preferences than I do), I suppose I would have to follow a simple right-left rule, assuming that Shas, United Torah Judaism, and Yisrael Beitenu represent “no” votes, and Labor, Meretz, and the Israeli Arab parties represent “yes” votes.

For each political party, estimate the percentage of its voters who would vote “yes” and the percentage who would vote “no” in a disengagement referendum. In theory, this method could be more precise than the others; but lacking accurate polling data on the feelings of each party’s voters on the subject, I would worry that the answers we get from this method might be both precise and incorrect.

So by Method (1), if Kadima outpolls the NU/NRP plus the Likud, the disengagement has passed the not-quite-a-referendum test even if Kadima is unable to assemble an effective pro-disengagement coalition; by Method (2), an overall victory for Kadima and the various parties to its left would indicate public approval of disengagement even if many left-wing voters don’t actually like non-negotiated withdrawals. On the other hand, if the Likud plus the NU/NRP outpoll Kadima and the Right (as broadly defined) outpolls the Left/Center, we can safely say that the not-quite-a-referendum has rejected disengagement even if Kadima wins the election and sets up a coalition including Shas and/or Yisrael Beitenu.

Happy voting!

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Netanyahu, Likud, Olmert, Kadima, Disengagement, Referendum, Israel, Elections.

A referendum on disengagement – sort of

2006-03-23T18:49:00.000+02:00

I re-titled this post - and of course, Technorati remembered the old version, with the old link! here’s the new version!

The new edition (#62) of Havel Havelim is up!

2006-03-20T17:05:00.001+02:00

The new Havel Havelim #62 Jewish-Israeli blogging carnival is up at Batya’s me-ander blog. Batya’s done a great job of putting together Purim posts along with all the “normal” categories. Check it out!

ClichéWatch: “Hamas’ Landslide Victory”

2006-03-19T18:05:00.000+02:00

In the weeks since Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian National Council, many commentators – including the Jerusalem Post’s Editor-in-Chief David Horovitz, in his column published last Friday – have referred to Hamas’ “landslide victory” in the elections. Like so many other little journalistic catch-phrases, this one has become a cliché: We repeat it and hear it unthinkingly, so it slips under our critical-thinking radar, depositing its memetic payload of assumptions and implications into our brains undetected.

If Hamas indeed won a landslide victory, then we are perfectly within our rights to assume that this election result demonstrates the Palestinian public’s enthusiastic approval of suicide bombings – since such attacks are a Hamas trademark, despite the fact that the group hasn’t actually carried out a suicide attack in about a year. A Hamas landslide implies that the Palestinians are uninterested in negotiating a peace agreement with Israel, since Hamas clearly isn’t ready to meet even the most minimal standards as a negotiating partner. And a Hamas landslide implies that the Palestinians, or at least a strong majority of them, approve of a fundamentalist Islamist government that will enforce dress codes, forbid consumption of alcohol, and otherwise turn the Palestinian territories into a small copy of Iran.

There’s one problem with all this: The Hamas landslide didn’t happen.

Hamas did win the election, which by all accounts was free and fair. But Hamas won only 44 percent of the popular vote, compared to 42 percent for Fatah. Because Hamas organized itself better – notably, it ran exactly as many candidates as it needed to, while Fatah often ran multiple slates which split the vote – its 44 percent of the vote translated into 56 percent of the PNC seats, while Fatah’s 42 percent of the vote resulted in only 34 percent of the PNC.

There is ample anecdotal evidence that many of the votes cast for Hamas were not really intended to give it a victory; voters chose Hamas in order to protest Fatah’s extensive record of corruption, incompetence, nepotism, and general failure to promote the interests of ordinary Palestinians. (Of course, lots of Palestinians who voted for Hamas actually wanted them to win – for essentially the same reasons.) Considering that this was the first genuinely contested Palestinian election, a degree of miscalculation isn’t all that surprising. The idea that the opposition could actually win an election may seem obvious to Israelis or Americans, but it’s a new, strange, foreign, exhilarating, and perhaps even frightening notion in the Arab world.

Now there’s nothing wrong with winning an election due to your opponent’s ineptitude; similarly, there’s nothing wrong with winning based on voter miscalculation. Hamas won fair and square; and now Hamas, Fatah, the Palestinian electorate, Israel, and the rest of the world must deal with the consequences. Good luck to us all!

The leaders of Hamas, whatever else we think of them, are no dummies. They are quite capable of reading the numbers, and they certainly can figure out the implications: Despite Hamas’ reputation for honesty and concern for the lives of ordinary Palestinians, despite Fatah’s abysmal record in office and utterly disorganized and fratricidal election campaign, despite the Palestinians’ inexperience in tactical voting, the popular vote was very nearly a tie. If Hamas intends to maintain Palestinian democracy and remain in power, it can’t afford to rely on another “landslide” like the last one.

The rest of the world should also be careful in interpreting the results of the Palestinian election. Given that both main parties were heavily involved in terrorism (or, in Palestinian political parlance, “resistance”, “martyrdom operations”, and the like), and given that neither side offered any real promise of a negotiated agreement with Israel that would grant the Palestinians what they have been taught to expect, a 44-percent-to-42-percent “landslide” is not sufficient evidence to support any conclusions about the Palestinian electorate’s readiness for peace or its support for terror attacks.

Personally, I’m quite pessimistic about the medium-term prospects for a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians, and I’ve pretty much given up on the short term – but not because of the “Hamas landslide” that wasn’t.

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Hamas, Fatah, Palestine, Elections.

Kid Brother Writhes Again: Netanyahu’s failed coup attempt

2006-03-15T09:56:00.000+02:00

Earlier this week, Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu met secretly with Avigdor Lieberman, head of the Yisrael Beiteinu (“Israel, Our Home”) party, and separately with Eli Yishai, chairman of Shas (“Sephardi Torah Guardians”). His goal? Nothing less than to steal the upcoming Israeli elections, which he appears to have despaired of winning the conventional way. Yishai and Lieberman, both of whom can perform simple arithmetic, listened politely (more or less) to Kid Brother’s proposal, thought for a millisecond or two, sent Bibi away empty-handed, then revealed all (or enough, anyway) to the press.

Bibi’s brilliant idea was to form such a firm alliance among the three parties (and presumably the combined National Union / National Religious Party as well) that after the election, he could be presented to Israeli President Moshe Katzav as the leader best able to form a governing coalition – even though the Likud is expected to be only the third-biggest party in the next Knesset. While there is no law against such a maneuver, it would be a complete violation of the tradition that the largest party in the new Knesset is invited to make the first attempt at forming a coalition.

According to current polls, the new Knesset is expected to look something like this:

Kadima 37 seats
Labor 18 seats
Likud 16 seats
National Union / National Religious (NU/NRP) 10 seats
Shas 10 seats
Yisrael Beiteinu 9-10 seats
Arab parties 8-9 seats
United Torah Judaism (UTJ) 6 seats
Meretz 5 seats

So a right-wing coalition consisting of Likud, NU/NRP, Shas, Yisrael Beiteinu, and UTJ would control around 51 seats. According to Netanyahu’s logic, if the Right could improve these numbers a little, they could conceivably manage to get up to 61 seats – the minimum needed to form a government. Assuming (A) that the polls consistently underestimate support for the Right, and (B) that a substantial number of Kadima voters could be persuaded to switch allegiance to one of the right-wing parties, it would be possible to cobble together a right-wing government with Bibi as Prime Minister.

Now there’s nothing wrong with a little pre-election scheming and plotting; after all, if the parties didn’t prepare the ground before elections, it would take forever to set up governing coalitions afterwards. Further, Israeli voters are smart enough to adjust their votes based on how the various political parties are positioning themselves as potential coalition members. But unless the polls are far less accurate this time around than they’ve been before previous Knesset elections, Netanyahu’s scheme was bound to create a disaster – either for his own reputation as a political leader and strategist, or for Israel if he happened, by some dark miracle, to succeed.

Since we know how it turned out – Netanyahu got a lecture from his former subordinate Lieberman about “stress and panic” not being helpful to a politician trying to win a national election, while Eli Yishai told him, “Yeah, right – see you after the votes are counted” – it’s obvious that the affair was a disaster for Bibi. He was caught trying to subvert the Israeli electoral system, and (by implication) admitted that his rump Likud is headed for a resounding defeat. Worse, he looks like a fool, since his idea was an obvious non-starter from the beginning:

The scheme would work only if every party to the right of Kadima participated and refused to enter a Kadima-led coalition. The problem is that this broad, cooperative, united right-wing community is a figment of the far-Right’s imagination. Shas, for example, despises Netanyahu’s economic policies, as does United Torah Judaism – both represent Haredi (“ultra-Orthodox”) constituencies that are undergoing considerable hardship due to Netanyahu’s slashing of government support for large families. Both Shas and Yisrael Beiteinu have expressed willingness for some form of territorial compromise with the Palestinians, and even more willingness to participate in a coalition government with Kadima. So while all the right-wing parties might be willing to join a coalition if the Likud actually won the election, only the NU/NRP can be relied upon to join a third-place Likud in trying to block the formation of a Kadima-led coalition.

While Netanyahu’s plan wasn’t actually illegal, it was enough of a departure from normal procedure that President Katzav would almost certainly have refused to go along with it, even if Shas and Yisrael Beiteinu had signed on.

Just when the Likud is struggling to maintain its position as a mainstream force in Israeli politics, Bibi’s scheme would have frightened away whatever moderate center-Right voters were still loyal to the party. By positioning the Likud only as the leader of a right-wing-to-ultra-right-wing coalition and not as a potential partner to Kadima, Netanyahu has made it very clear that a vote for Likud is, in essence, a vote for the National Union. Anyone who wants a moderate-right-wing voice in government but doesn’t want the NU extremists to run the show would be forced to vote for Shas or Yisrael Beitenu; others might bolt to Kadima and hope that Ehud Olmert veers to the right after the elections, or else just stay home and spend the Election Day holiday hiding under the covers.

If Netanyahu’s scheme had worked, Israel would have been in trouble indeed – quite apart from considerations of whether the Right’s policies are correct. Even under the most optimistic scenario (barring major miracles, at least) the coalition envisioned by Kid Brother would be barely large enough to govern. The departure of any one of Netanyahu’s four coalition partners would bring his government crashing down – and he would not have any way of cobbling together a new coalition, since there would be no “reserve parties” in the Knesset willing to join Bibi’s government. (This is in contrast to Ariel Sharon’s coalition with Labor, when Shinui was ready to re-enter the coalition or support the Disengagement from outside, or a possible Kadima-Labor-Shas coalition that could draw on Yisrael Beiteinu or Meretz at need.)

Netanyahu’s previous term as Prime Minister demonstrated that he is completely incapable of exercising effective leadership with a fractious coalition like this; every coalition party would have an effective veto on everything the government attempted to do, and Bibi does not have the force of personality to subdue the extortionists. If Bibi seems to be twisting in the wind now, it’s nothing compared to what his life would be like if his little scheme had worked!

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Netanyahu, Likud, Israel, Elections.

Kid Brother Writhes Again: Netanyahu’s failed coup attempt (Version 0.0)

2006-03-14T18:10:00.000+02:00

(This post has been replaced - the new version is here.)

The Writing on the Wall department

2006-03-13T17:55:00.000+02:00

According to today’s Jerusalem Post, a young man was arrested in Jerusalem for spray-painting “pro-Olmert” graffiti. Apparently he sprayed the message “Olmert will not divide Jerusalem” on a wall of the Malha shopping mall.

…All of which would be moderately interesting, if only because the people who spray-paint stuff on walls usually have rather more exciting (or, at least, rather more vivid) messages to convey; but there’s one thing about the story that I find truly strange: Who exactly decided that “Olmert will not divide Jerusalem” constitutes pro-Olmert graffiti?

Are Israeli Arabs loyal to the Jewish State? Does it matter?

2006-03-12T18:19:00.000+02:00

Ze’ev over at Israel Perspectives may finally be starting to come around – or maybe not; I’ll leave it to others to judge. His latest post, entitled “Are Israeli Arabs Loyal to the Jewish State?”, includes his recent thoughts on the subject, including his reactions to a recent poll of Israeli Arabs’ attitudes towards the Palestinian elections, Israel, and Zionism. It also includes some long comments from me, as well as Ze’ev’s friend “H” – who, unlike me, is an actual lefty. (Has anyone noticed that Ze’ev has some very strange friends for a self-professed right-winger?)

Rather than reproduce the whole discussion here, I’ll suffice with sending you, my loyal readers, to Ze’ev’s site. You are loyal, right? Ze’ev seems to think so: He refers at one point to “Don and his followers”! I never knew I had any followers, but it’s quite flattering to think that somewhere, scattered throughout blogspace, there is a loyal corps of Donistas mesmerized by my charismatic prose and willing to jump through hoops (or even, dare I say, off the top of tall buildings?) at my merest suggestion.

Thanks, Ze’ev – you’ve made my day!

Firecrackers in Nazareth: Terrorism or “Prank”?

2006-03-08T16:17:00.000+02:00

A few days ago, an Israeli couple and their adult daughter entered Nazareth’s Church of the Annunciation disguised as Christian pilgrims and proceeded to throw firecrackers. The three attackers were themselves set upon by a mob, and eventually had to be smuggled out dressed in police uniforms. More than two dozen police officers and protesters were injured in rioting after the incident.

The firecrackers as well as small gas tanks (presumably containing pressurized propane gas) were hidden in a baby carriage the couple wheeled into the church. Assuming that the gas tanks were full and the couple had planned some way of detonating them, it’s entirely possible that the incident could have caused serious injuries or deaths.

Haim and Violet Habibi, the couple that carried out the attack, are of mixed religion: Haim is Jewish and Violet is Christian. (Odelia, the daughter who accompanied them even though she opposed the planned attack, is the child of Haim’s previous marriage; I haven’t seen any clear report of her religious affiliation.) The family has a long history of involvement with Israeli child-welfare authorities: Violet Habibi has threatened at least once to kill her children, and the couple’s younger children have been removed from parental custody and placed in foster homes. The Habibis lived for a time under Palestinian Authority jurisdiction in Jericho, at one point traveled to Ramallah to petition Yasser Arafat for asylum, and later barricaded themselves inside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and threatened to set off explosives (which turned out to be firecrackers); according to one report, Haim Habibi at some point attempted an attack on Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher as well. The Habibis and others familiar with their situation claim that the Nazareth attack was an attempt to call attention to their situation and obtain more favorable treatment from the Israeli government.

Despite accusations made by some Israeli-Arab Knesset members such as Mohammad Barakeh and Azmi Bishara, there is no evidence of any right-wing, nationalist, or racial motive for the attack on the Church of the Annunciation. Haim Habibi has a documented history of mental illness, and Violet Habibi sounds to me like someone who could use a little counseling as well. The couple’s statements after their rescue and arrest have consistently highlighted their economic and family difficulties, and they have repeatedly denied any racial or religious motive for the Nazareth attack.

And now, the Sixty-Four Shekel Question: Was the incident in Nazareth a terror attack?

Many voices in the Arab world have decried the Habibis’ attack on the Church of the Annunciation as a “Jewish terror attack” or an “Israeli terror attack”; these voices generally neglect to mention that one of the perpetrators was a non-Jew, and some have even cast all three as Jewish religious extremists. Defenders of Israel have dismissed the incident as the “random senseless act of a couple of malicious pranksters” (as opposed to terrorists who are trained, sponsored, equipped, and dispatched by terror groups) and complain that “the anti-Israel media is all over this as a ‘terrorist’ attack”. Now it’s clear enough that the Nazareth incident cannot be accurately labeled a “Jewish terror attack”, since its perpetrators were not all Jewish and appear not to have been religiously motivated. It’s equally clear that no terror organization was behind the incident. Does that mean it wasn’t a terror attack after all?

I’m afraid not. Terrorism is best defined as politically motivated violence against civilian targets – where “political” motivations often include ideology and religion, and the perpetrators are normally understood to be sub-state entities. In categorizing the Habibis’ attack on the Church of the Annunciation, we need to consider several points:

The attack was intended to influence the actions of the Israeli government, and thus had a political motive – even if the goal was only to change government policy regarding the couple’s own children.

The definition of terrorism doesn’t require that a terror attack be carried out or supported by a terrorist organization. This is important to remember, as the “leaderless resistance” phenomenon encourages individual terrorist action; in coming years, it’s entirely possible that an increasing number of terror attacks worldwide will be “organizationless” attacks.

There is no “sanity test” for terrorism. As long as the perpetrator of an attack has a political/ideological/religious motive, s/he can be as crazy as s/he likes. If there is a political motive, even an irrational one, the attack is not a “random senseless act” by a “prankster”.

There is no defined “minimum severity” threshold for terror attacks. Even assuming the church had been empty (which it wasn’t – it was packed with worshippers when the Habibis came in) the attack would have qualified: Property attacks, especially when the target has religious, economic, cultural, political, or symbolic significance, fall under the definition of terrorism.

Clearly, then, the Habibis’ attack on the Church of the Annunciation was a terror attack – albeit not a terribly successful one. But it certainly wasn’t a “Jewish terror attack”, and (considering that the government whose policies the Habibis wanted to change was our own) it was an “Israeli terror attack” only in the most tenuous sense.

* * *
Hat tip: My research for this segment was considerably aided by this post at Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion. Erudite blogger Richard Bartholomew seems to be a little left-of-center for my taste – for example, he makes the rather dangerous mistake of thinking that the Guardian has anything useful to say about the Arab-Israeli conflict – but his posts are clear, thorough, well-written, and well-documented.

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Terrorism, Annunciation, Nazareth, Habibi.

Logic, Internet-style

2006-03-07T18:02:00.000+02:00

As I related a week ago, I left a comment on Ze’ev’s Israel Perspectives blog regarding his post on the conflict between “democratic values” (as elucidated by Israel’s Supreme Court) and Israel’s identity as a Jewish state. After the dust had already mostly settled, someone added the following comment to Ze’ev’s post:

Radlauer and his ilk would lead us down the drain with Olmert & Kadima at the helm... Heaven help us!!! We cannot grant equality to the Arabs for they do not recognize Israel at all, they want to supplant Israel with their pseudo-"palestine". But Radlauer & his cohorts are too stupid to read the writing on the wall, and hopefully, will be the next - and ONLY - Jews to be disengaged!

The gentleman who posted these lines is, of course, correct about my political leanings; I admit that he has correctly discerned my personal qualities as well. However, I find the logic of his central non-Radlauer-related contention to be rather suspect:

Premise: Israeli Arabs do not like the State of Israel, and have political aspirations with which Israeli Jews, in general, do not agree.

Conclusion: Israeli Arabs must be punished for this disloyalty. In the context of Ze’ev’s post, this punishment can be assumed (conservatively) to consist of lower funding for their children’s education and other government-provided services than Israeli Jews receive.

At a bare minimum, it appears to me that we’re missing a middle premise here – since I see no obvious and necessary connection between the stated premise and the conclusion. What might such a middle premise look like? Here’s a suggestion:

Premise (suggested): Government services should be provided on the basis of some form of loyalty test (or perhaps based on simple race or ethnicity) rather than on the basis of equality before the law (adjusted as necessary for actual need).

Now, if we accept this premise, Ze’ev’s – and this comment-writer’s – contention is correct, and Israeli Arabs (at least collectively) would in fact deserve a lower level of government services, despite the fact that they pay the same taxes as Israeli Jews. Were this premise to become part of Israeli law, even Stupid Radlauer (along, no doubt, with his cohorts) would read the writing on the wall – and Stupid Radlauer, with or without his cohorts, would be on the first plane out of here.

* * *
I wouldn’t normally waste time refuting some miscellaneous Internet forum post; I suspect (or at least hope) that few people take the medium all that seriously, and this comment is actually far less incoherent than some. But this particular bit of illogic, with its missing and highly questionable middle premise, is amazingly common in Israeli politics. (It’s probably just as common everywhere else, but I happen to live here.) I can’t remember how many times I’ve read comments from the Israeli Right (including some by very reputable columnists who are actually paid for their opinions) that basically boil down to the same thing:

The Arabs don’t like us…

(insert questionable middle premise here)

…and therefore we can’t leave the Gaza Strip / we can’t get out of Lebanon / we can’t fund Israeli Arab schools equitably / we need to hold on to every silly settlement in the West Bank / or whatever.

This kind of illogic is particularly dangerous because it effectively removes reasonable consideration of our national interest from Israeli political discourse. Instead of logically discussing what’s best for the State of Israel – taking account of the hostility of our neighbors where appropriate, of course – we use the hostility of “The Arabs” and the missing-and-thus-unchallengeable middle premise as a way of aborting thought and forcing the desired (usually right-wing) conclusion.

* * *
On the other hand, I suppose this type of logic does have its advantages:

The Arabs don’t like me.

The right-wingers don’t like me.

Therefore, I must go eat some pizza.

Yum!

Drawing the Line: Nationalism or Racism?

2006-02-28T19:53:00.000+02:00

Once again, I find myself reacting to something Ze’ev has written in Israel Perspectives; only this time, I’m afraid that my friend and colleague has gone rather seriously off the deep end. In his latest post, Ze’ev argues against Monday's Supreme Court ruling that Israel’s system of “national priority zones” constitutes illegal discrimination against Israeli Arab communities; he feels that this decision constitutes an attack against Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.

According to Ze’ev, “The concept of Israel existing as a Jewish State” implies that “the interests and needs of the Jewish People are placed above all others” – and thus that our Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of equality in educational funding (and other government benefits to “priority zone” communities) constitutes a frontal assault on the essential nature of our country.

Upon reading his post, I left the following comment on Ze’ev’s blog:

Ze’ev, if I’m understanding you correctly, you’re saying that providing equal funding to schools in the Arab sector would destroy Israel as a Jewish state. Is this correct?

If being a Jewish state requires discriminating against non-Jews in this manner, then why bother to educate Israeli Arabs at all? If you want one fifth of our population to be second-class citizens, then why not keep them illiterate, deny them health care, and make them all dig ditches or pick cotton for a living? Oh, and you might want to keep them from voting, make them ride in the back of the bus, and set up separate water fountains for them while you’re at it.

Am I missing something here? When I made Aliyah, I didn’t think Israel was supposed to be a Middle Eastern version of Alabama-circa-1955. Maybe they changed the pamphlets they give out to potential olim... ’cause the Israel you seem to have immigrated to sure doesn’t sound like someplace I’d want to live!

* * *
The basic idea of a “Jewish and democratic state” has always posed something of a dilemma for Israel. Clearly, the State of Israel was created to benefit the Jews – a people who had lacked a sovereign national homeland for nearly two millennia, and as a result had suffered the pains of living as second-class citizens in other people’s countries. Zionism is, after all, our national-liberation movement; and I see no reason to believe that we’re any less entitled to nationhood than anyone else. But at the same time, if we aspire to be a modern democracy, we need to grant full civil rights to all Israeli citizens, Jewish or not. So far, nobody has come up with a fully successful way to arbitrate between these two conflicting demands: How can Israel exist as a state of and for the Jews while still meeting the standards of democracy?

I don’t pretend to have a precise answer to this dilemma; I’m not even sure that a precise answer is something we should seek. After all, sometimes wisdom consists in preserving some areas of ambiguity. I certainly do not advocate complete egalitarianism in such areas as immigration policy; I believe that we do need Israel to remain a Jewish state, and that we are within our rights to take reasonable and appropriate steps to keep it that way. I see no pressing need to alter our flag or our national anthem, Jewish though they be. But the approach Ze’ev advocates seems very wrong to me.

In his response to my comment, Ze’ev writes, “This is the national home of the Jewish People, the only one we have, and as such, all policies and decisions should first and foremost have the best interests of the Jewish People and State at heart. If there are those within Israel, such as the Arab population, who are uncomfortable with this setup, they have plenty of Arab/Muslim countries to choose from where they might feel more at home.” Or, in other words, we can discriminate against you all we like, and if you don’t like it, feel free to leave.

And here, I am afraid, is the nub: I don’t believe that Ze’ev’s problem is really with equal funding for Arab-sector education per se. After all, it seems apparent to me that we can mandate equality in fields like education (as we already do in health care) without in any way harming Israel’s Jewish identity. Ze’ev’s real goal – whether he realizes it or not – is to make Israel such an unpleasant place for Arabs to live that they will emigrate of their own accord, sparing us the effort and stigma of expelling them by force. While I can’t say exactly where the line is drawn between legitimate nationalism and racism, I feel very strongly that economic and social discrimination as a form of “soft ethnic cleansing” is far over that line.

Is it legitimate for Israel to have a flag with only Jewish symbols on it? Why not? How many impeccably liberal countries (many of which are now functionally “post-Christian”) have flags based on the Christian Cross? Can we have a national anthem that speaks of Jewish yearning for our homeland? Certainly! As national anthems go, Hatikva is fairly soft stuff. I see nothing wrong with maintaining Israel as the sovereign state of the Jewish people, and I see nothing wrong with expecting our non-Jewish citizens to accommodate to that situation. I would even go as far as to suggest that someone who really can’t stand living in a Jewish state – however that is defined – might well want to consider living elsewhere. But at the same time, to discriminate unnecessarily – in education, health care, access to housing and employment, and so on – is not legitimate nationalism; it’s gratuitous racism, and I, for one, want no part of it.

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Demolition in Dushanbe: Doesn’t Anyone Care About Tajikistan’s Synagogue?

2006-02-26T19:53:00.000+02:00

I don’t often agree with my friend Ze’ev over at Israel Perspectives; but in his latest post, he’s alerted us to an issue that truly demands our attention and outrage, as well as that of the Israeli government: the destruction of Tajikistan's only synagogue.

My previous positions may not recommend me as the world’s most enthusiastic opponent of synagogue demolitions: a few months ago I wrote that the Israeli government should have demolished the Gaza Strip synagogues itself rather than waiting for the Palestinians to do the job (and kvetching when they did). There is a critical difference, though, between demolishing synagogues that no longer function – empty shells bereft of Jews, holy books, and all other meaningful signs of life – and tearing down synagogues that continue to serve living Jewish communities, as the synagogue in Dushanbe does. Several hundred Jews in Tajikistan are now (or soon will be – the demolition has begun, but will not be completed for a few months) without a synagogue; while they have evidently been offered land somewhere to build a new one, they cannot afford to do so. The remaining Jews there are mostly elderly and poor, and they have been offered no compensation from their government for the destruction of their old synagogue.

Ze’ev wrote:

One might have expected the government of the State of Israel to try and intervene in the matter, and save this century old synagogue from being destroyed, yet the government of the State of Israel has been strangely silent.

…and I must say that I agree with him completely on this point. A Google search revealed no articles about Israeli protests (official or otherwise) against this demolition; the United States and the rest of the West also appear to have been rather quiet. No doubt the Americans and the Europeans have other things on their mind at the moment, but even so I would have thought that some Deputy Assistant Under-Secretary of State or other could have picked up a phone and called the government of Tajikistan. How much pressure would really have been required to get them to save (or appropriately relocate) a single little synagogue?

If we can reluctantly forgive the rest of the world for its silence on the Dushanbe synagogue – and I can’t really, not completely, but you’re welcome to do so – what’s our own government’s excuse? Surely Ehud Olmert should welcome the opportunity to prove his yiddishkeit at minimal expense! And standing up to the fearsome Tajiks wouldn’t be a bad stature-builder for Tzipi Livni, who would very much like to remain Foreign Minister after our upcoming elections. Perhaps nobody alerted our senior politicians to the issue; but after all, we have people in the Foreign Ministry who are paid to follow this stuff, don’t we?

It’s not too late to do something about this. Rather than use the Dushanbe demolition as yet another piece of election-year ammunition (and Lord knows we don’t lack for political brickbats just now), I’d like to propose that we do something positive: Write about this issue, talk about it, pick up the phone! Let our government (and maybe a few other governments) know that this is important! Get the big human-rights organizations on the case! March in front of the Tajik embassy!

If we do all this, perhaps we can enable the Jews of Tajikistan to continue to function as a religious and social community – perhaps not one with a great future, but at least one that will live out its days in some comfort and dignity. This, I believe, is a goal that we can all agree on.

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Tajikistan, Demolition, Synagogue, Olmert, Livni.

BlogPlugs: Vive Lisa! Vive Norman!

2006-02-20T20:45:00.000+02:00

Lisa Goldman of On the Face has been entirely too quiet lately. So I was very glad to see some new posts from her at last – especially this one, with, for some reason, a French title. (Ah. A quick Google search informs me that “Trois Couleurs” is a famous trilogy of films directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski. I suppose I should rent and view the films, then re-read Lisa’s post – since thinking you know anything about a movie just because you read a review of it is a sure sign that you are that most despised creature – the pseud.) As usual – and I would hate ever to start taking her for granted! – Lisa paints vivid pictures of people and situations, leaving us the richer for having read them. I won’t give away more than that; just go read her article, and tell her I sent you.

Speaking of pseuds, Norman Geras – no pseud he! – has outed one in his analysis of a Guardian op-ed by one Paul Oestreicher. I reserve my right to comment and expand on the points Norman raises; but for now, I’ll just point you his way.

Likud to Israel: “Vote for us, or else!”

2006-02-16T22:06:00.000+02:00

The Likud has done it again. Just when I was starting to like them – OK, I wasn’t actually starting to like them, but I did have a moment or two when I felt vaguely sympathetic towards their plight – they come out with this warning: “Kadima is a left-wing party that will form a leftist coalition with Meretz and the Arabs.”

Now, we’re all used to a bit of more-or-less subtle racism in Israeli political campaigns; but this statement, coming from a party with aspirations to national leadership, is a bit over-the-top. Not only is it rather offensive; it’s also wildly unlikely to be correct, unless every poll taken so far in this campaign is completely inaccurate.

Not once in Israel’s history has an Arab political party been part of a governing coalition. Considering the Israeli Arabs make up a considerable portion of our population, I consider this a crying shame and something of a mark of dishonor for our society. I am not saying, mind you, that the marginalization of the Arab parties is entirely the fault of the Jewish/Zionist parties or their voters; the Arab parties themselves, by remaining staunchly anti-Zionist, have made themselves pretty much untouchable as potential coalition partners.

Is there any reason to think that the next Israeli government will be the first one with an Arab party in the governing coalition? None that I can think of. According to recent polls, Kadima plus Labor should garner anything from 56 to 63 Knesset seats – either just shy of the required 61-seat majority required to form a government, or just over the threshold. Shas, a party that hates being in opposition and is likely to wind up with around ten MK’s, is making conciliatory noises about territorial compromise; clearly they’re positioning themselves as a coalition partner, and their economics would fit in reasonably well with Labor’s socialism and Kadima’s vagueness. While it’s obviously too early to determine the exact makeup of a Kadima-Labor coalition, there is no reason to think that a comfortably large Knesset majority couldn’t be assembled while effectively shunning Meretz, the non-Shas religious parties, and especially the Arab parties. Surely the “Likud spokesman” who tried to frighten us with the prospect of an ultra-leftist coalition knows all this as well as I do.

So why the scare tactics?

Part of the problem, I think, is with Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu. I can’t recall any campaign he has run which didn’t rely on scaring the voters; a deeply insecure man himself, he doesn’t seem to know any way to sell himself other than to try to make everyone else feel as frightened as he does. So instead of campaigning based on positive images of a Likud-led future, Bibi’s party is reduced to trying to convince us that the future under Kadima would be even worse than another Netanyahu administration.

Another problem for the Likud is that except for Netanyahu’s economic policies (which I suspect aren’t too popular even in his own party, although I rather like them) the party doesn’t seem to have much of an agenda, other than doing nothing and blaming the rest of the world for Israel’s being stuck in a rut. OK, they won’t negotiate with Hamas. But neither will Kadima. Neither will Labor. As long as Azmi Bishara doesn’t become Prime Minister, every Israeli politician is going to be “tough against Hamas”. (OK, I’m giving Yossi Beilin a break here; but c’mon, folks, cut the poor guy a little slack!) So once we’ve decided that none of the major parties want to invite Khaled Mashaal over for tea, the only advantage Bibi has is that nine-year-old photographs of him may be slightly more frightening than photographs of Ehud Olmert.

From what I’ve seen so far, the Likud seems like a party struggling unsuccessfully to stave off complete despair. If this trend continues, we can look forward to nearly six more weeks of increasingly lurid threats. By the Ides of March, I fully expect to hear the Ehud Olmert plans to invite al-Qaeda and Hamas into a Kadima coalition!

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Likud, Kadima, Netanyahu, Olmert, Bibi.

The Revenge of Elmer Fudd: A Cheep Shot at Richard Cheney

2006-02-15T18:55:00.000+02:00

This is supposed to be a blog about Middle-East politics and counter-terrorism. Why, then, am I writing my second post in less than a week about hunters and their weapons?

The answer, I suppose, is that sometimes one has to focus precisely on one’s “official” subject matter, while at other times a shotgun approach works best. (If you found that last joke lame, you may want to stop reading now. It won’t get any better. Even I’m frightened of reading the rest of this post, and I haven’t even written it yet. As I seem to be saying more and more these days, don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

So – Dick Cheney, the Vice President of the United States, accidentally shot his hunting companion, a 78-year-old lawyer and Republican “stalwart” by the name of Harry Whittington. The unfortunate Mr. Whittington took a charge of birdshot in his face, neck, and chest, leaving him with as many as 200 small pellets lodged in his body – including one close enough to his heart to cause heart complications. Other than to draw the obvious conclusion that one should avoid being near Mr. Cheney when he’s carrying a loaded firearm and has that gleam in his eye, what can we learn from this incident?

If there isn’t already a policy in place to prevent the President and Vice President from going hunting together, perhaps there should be. In fact, it would seem to me that this and future Veeps should be strongly discouraged from going hunting with anyone higher in the government hierarchy than Second Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Department of Agriculture With Special Responsibility for Elementary School Earthworm Appreciation Programs. White-water rafting with high officials might also be problematic. Badminton would be OK, I suppose, as long as the President wears shuttlecock-proof body armor.

The circumstances under which poor Mr. Whittington was shot do not give me warm, fuzzy feelings about the possibility of Richard Cheney’s becoming Commander in Chief of the world’s most powerful military. There are certain situations in which one’s true personality inevitably manifests itself: for me, it’s when I’m confronted with a large portion of really good lasagna; and evidently for Dick Cheney it’s the sound of a covey of quail taking flight in an attempt to avoid becoming his dinner. Both of us seem to have a little restraint problem; but I’ve never actually stabbed a dining partner with my fork, nor is there any significant likelihood that I’ll ever be in control of a major nuclear arsenal.

I can hardly count myself as an opponent of firearms, considering that I’ve got a pistol at my side as I write, and two sniper rifles (mine and Vaguely Sinister Wife’s) next to my side of the bed. However, there is something I find a bit troubling about recreational hunting. I can’t complain about the morality of the pastime (at least as long as one eats one’s kill), since I’m far from being a vegetarian and I’m rather better at identifying hypocrisy than Dick Cheney is at distinguishing between birds and barristers. What bothers me is more a matter of culture: in my life, guns exist in order to kill people – hopefully only in self-defense or in defense of the innocent, but killing is killing even when it’s necessary. Practice (under tightly controlled conditions) is important and even fun, but for me firearms are never really recreational. I’m always aware that in an emergency I may be called upon to make life-or-death decisions very quickly, with no chance to change my mind. Using firearms purely for sport seems strange to me – almost sacrilegious. (Don’t bother arguing with me about this – it’s just my personal “gut” feeling, not a statement of general morality.)

And finally:

What ever happened to golf? I know Dick Cheney’s from Wyoming, where golf may be considered a bit tame. But then again, the Vice Presidency of the United States is perhaps the tamest job in America; if Cheney can handle the challenges of that position (which consist largely of looking appropriately lugubrious at funerals of people one didn’t know and wouldn’t have liked anyway) surely he could maintain his concentration through eighteen holes with some well-heeled defense contractor and a cute administrative assistant or two. Sure, golf looks silly – but as I can attest, it’s actually a difficult and challenging sport. And is hitting a little ball into a small cup really any more pointless than shooting quail (who may even be Republicans, for all we know) when there are perfectly good supermarkets nearby?

Besides which, golf needn’t disappoint the man who requires a bit of danger to keep him interested: It’s perfectly possible to injure the innocent while golfing, at least the way I hit a golf ball.

Ah well… time to return my thoughts to my home in the Middle East, where my firearms are ready to hand and my golf clubs are tucked away in the back of a storeroom. Sigh…

Categories: Cheney, Hunting, Fudd.

Tyrants Should Tremble When Buses Strike

2006-02-13T20:27:00.000+02:00

For the last three weeks or so, Tehran’s bus drivers have been striking for better pay and working conditions; here’s a very good Observer (U.K.) article and commentary about the ongoing dispute, written by Nick Cohen. (Hat tip: the inestimable, astute, and erudite Norman Geras of NormBlog.) I won’t waste your time (or mine, for that matter) restating what’s in the Observer piece; go ahead and read it.

Finished yet?

Good. The article pretty much speaks for itself, but it triggered a couple of thoughts:

In case we needed to be reminded, this story shows that a dictator is never a friend of “the people”, or at least not for long. Power-seekers are also wealth-seekers and prestige-seekers; once they don’t have to worry about winning free and fair elections, they no longer need the support of the poor, who have little to offer beyond their votes. It doesn’t matter whether a dictator is a right-wing capitalist, a left-wing socialist, a theocrat representing the religion of your choice, a populist demagogue, or some other flavor of despot. Ideology is, in many ways, a distraction; the central dynamic in these situations is power and its abuse by entrenched elites. Thus we should always be cautious – at least – about supporting “good” dictators who we think are our friends and allies; in truth, the despot is a friend only to himself, and not always even that.

Stories like this should be cautionary to those on the Israeli religious right who denigrate democracy and yearn for some form of Jewish theocratic state. I feel a bit odd having to mention this – it should be obvious to anyone, I would think – and yet, I frequently see anti-democracy comments written by some of my fellow “settlers” and their supporters, as well as other nominally Zionist types. (Even more strangely, all such comments I’ve seen were written by people who grew up in democracies. Perhaps these folks are too familiar with the problems of democracy, and not familiar enough with the alternatives.) These messianic types long for a return of the Biblical monarchy, or perhaps advocate a state run by a revived Sanhedrin; presumably they believe that such a non-democratic regime would be virtuous because it would be run by righteous, observant, scholarly Jews rather than by Ayatollahs, Communists, or other disreputable types.

I’ve got news for you, guys: There is no such thing as a virtuous dictatorship. Power corrupts, and democracy – despite its manifest flaws – is the only system available that limits this corruption.

President Ahmadinejad and the rest of Iran’s ruling establishment should be very worried indeed. In general, dictators don’t have too much to fear as long as their opponents are intellectuals, students, human-rights activists, and the like. These groups and individuals can all too easily be marginalized, suborned, suppressed, exiled, killed, or simply ignored; after all, nations can live quite comfortably (at least for a time) without philosophers. But when ordinary workers begin to lose faith in “the system” and cease to cooperate with it, things can become very rocky very quickly. A government can function without philosophers and novelists on its side, but it can’t survive for long without bus drivers, mechanics, nurses, garbage men, and the rest of the working-class heroes who keep society running. If Ahmadinejad and the mullahs keep trying to suppress labor unrest as they’ve been doing, sooner or later an Iranian Lech Walesa will appear; and once that happens the regime’s days are numbered.

Don't say I didn't warn you, guys!

Ralph Kramden’s gonna getcha if ya don’t! watch! out!!!

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Iran, Ahmadinejad, Strike, Tehran.

Befuddled BlogScoop: Vegetarian Hunters Threaten New Cartoon War

2006-02-11T19:21:00.000+02:00

It was reported yesterday that a rare German hunting gun that may have belonged to Adolf Hitler sold for just over $140,000 in an online auction. The combination shotgun/rifle would have been worth around $7,000 under normal circumstances; so apparently someone (or, given the nature of auctions, several someones) thinks that the claim of previous ownership is credible.

Something about this story triggered my finely-tuned bloggerly instincts: something was odd. I set the matter aside and proceeded with my Friday routine, which seems to involve a good bit of hectic running about for little discernable purpose. Then, while I waited for my turn at the supermarket meat counter, it came to me: Hitler was a vegetarian!

The idea of a vegetarian hunter is, most will admit, a rather odd one; after all, hunting, in its primal form, is supposed to be about putting food on the table. But then, as I continued to stroll along the supermarket’s aisles (it may have been as I passed the breakfast cereals; I recall receiving an accusatory glare from the Trix bunny) I had yet another revelation: Hitler wasn’t the only eccentric hunter of his day; Bugs Bunny’s nemesis Elmer Fudd was also a vegetarian!

The apparent coincidence smelled fishy to me – although it may have been the sea-bass fillets, now that I think about it. Regardless of the source of my nasal discomfort, I proceeded to conduct some inquiries upon my return to the Mideast Musings Research Center. It was a matter of mere minutes to ascertain that Adolf Hitler and Elmer Fudd had never been seen together. I kept digging.

After some exhaustive (and exhausting) historical research, I uncovered the bizarre and shocking truth: Elmer Fudd and Adolf Hitler were one and the same person! I have not yet managed to elucidate all the details of this seemingly impossible double life; and yet I have documentary proof that the enthusiastic yet ineffectual hunter of harmless (albeit sarcastic) rabbits and ducks was also the genocidal tyrant who became our era’s leading icon of evil.

“Elmer Fudd” in a rare candid photograph taken during rehearsal – before the make-up artists and hairstylists had finished the job of disguising the Fuehrer as a cuddly outdoorsman. “He could not bear to eat meat, because it meant the death of a living creature. He refused to have so much as a rabbit… sacrificed to provide his food.” (Léon Degrelle, The Enigma of Hitler)

Was it naïve to fall for Fudd’s fatuous false front? Perhaps. Looking back on my childhood, I feel a sense of personal failure in not having unmasked the Great White (!) Hunter way back then. If nothing else, that speech impediment should have awakened my suspicions – it was too obviously designed to cover up something. And in retrospect, it’s painfully obvious that Fudd’s publication of a book of Haiku shows an influence from his wartime alliance with the Japanese.

* * *

Having written the above, I’m aware that my revelations may ignite yet another cartoon-instigated Kulturkampf. If rampaging mobs of Warner Bros. cartoon fans start setting fire to stuff and threatening to behead “Wascally Iswaelis” who defame the Great Fudd, I suppose you can blame me. ‘Twas ever thus: those who speak the truth sometimes upset the applecart.

A Frenchman Speaks Out – the original photograph that (as a grainy photocopy) helped spark riots throughout the Muslim world when Danish Islamic leaders claimed that it was one of the cartoons published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. According to the Associated Press, the photograph had nothing to do with Islam or the Prophet Mohammed; someone, apparently, was telling a porky.*

*“Porky” (short for “Porky Pie”) is Cockney rhyming slang for a lie. See here for a comprehensive Cockney-to-English lexicon.

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Hitler, Cartoon, Mohammed, Rifle, Fudd.

SnoopyTheGoon Blogs Bibi

2006-02-08T16:31:00.000+02:00

Every so often, I come across something I really wish I’d written myself. Here’s one of them, courtesy of the good (if possibly slightly odd) folks at SimplyJews.

WARNING: Do not attempt to read while drinking coffee, or for that matter while drinking anything else you wouldn’t want to experience nasally.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you, folks. I even put it in boldface!

Categories: Netanyahu, Bibi, Likud, Hamas.

At Last! - My Amona Post

2006-02-07T01:10:00.000+02:00

I’ve been trying to come up with something coherent – not to mention original, interesting, and important – to say about last week’s demolition of nine houses at the Amona settlement outpost, and the violent confrontation between Israeli security forces sent to perform the demolition and the many protestors who came to oppose them. This has proven to be very difficult for me – not because I’m choked up with emotion about the incident, but simply because I’ve been unable to construct a comprehensible, reliable picture of what happened there.

Normally, I have no great difficulty in assimilating the news. I gather information from various sources, correct for known biases, add in my own experience, observations, and general knowledge, ask questions where necessary – and it’s possible in most cases to feel that I know more or less what happened. This time, though, I found that the picture simply wouldn’t come clear for me. One set of accounts – emanating from the police and many journalists – has the police acting with admirable restraint while being pelted with stones and other projectiles by settler youth who came a-purpose to make the confrontation violent. Another set of accounts – emanating from anti-demolition protestors, their supporters, and some news media – has the police engaging in wanton, unprovoked, and extreme violence against protestors who were, for the most part, completely innocent.

Were I not a raging centrist, I could make my own cognitive life easier by dismissing one side’s version as the product of extreme bias or even out-and-out dishonesty. Unfortunately, I can’t convince myself that anything so simple and convenient is true. Many of the people accusing the police of unnecessary brutality are thoughtful, principled, and careful in their judgments; but so are many of the people who accuse the Amona defenders of being primarily at fault. Both versions of the story can’t be correct, can they? It would almost seem that there were two different Amona incidents on two separate planets – both of which claim to be Planet Earth.

Let’s assume that the people involved (or at least most of them) are telling the truth as they see it. How are they seeing such different and contradictory truths?

When I contacted one of my fellow bloggers privately about this question, s/he asked in response: “How many good, honest, thoughtful left-wingers were actually at Amona, or had kids and neighbors there?” The answer, of course, is “few, if any” – but there were certainly plenty of cops there, many of whom report that they felt endangered. My colleague also reminded me that TV Channel 10’s reporter, Roni Daniel, reported that the police used unnecessary force, while Channel 1’s reporter, Chaim Yavin, claimed that police lives were definitely in danger. While my blogger friend clearly believes that the police were principally at fault, I can’t agree that only the right-wing version of the story is credible.

*          *          *

The human brain is a pattern-finding machine: it is hard-wired to make sense of a chaotic flood of sensory inputs by fitting them into schemas and narratives. This built-in programming is so powerful that it can lead us to perceive patterns that aren’t really there – for example, we can often see faces in random designs, simply because we have extensive neural circuitry that enables us to evaluate facial expressions without having to think consciously about them, and which operates even when there isn’t really a face to look at. Faced with complex situations, we simplify them in order to grasp their “essentials” – which may be an excellent survival trait for dealing with emergencies, but can create very distorted perceptions of the real complexity of the world.

The Amona incident involved several thousand participants: as I recall, something like 4,000 protestors faced 3,000 or more police and soldiers. (I’ll correct those numbers as necessary and appropriate; approximations are good enough for now.) The physical confrontation took place over several hours, and was the culmination of many months of legal maneuvering. Roughly 150 protestors and 50 police sustained injuries serious enough to require medical attention. Looking at these numbers – and remembering how the human mind copes with complexity – I can begin to understand how the dissonant accounts of Amona came about.

First, let’s look at one of the complaints frequently raised against Ehud Olmert’s decision to go ahead with the forcible demolition at Amona: that settler leaders had offered a “reasonable compromise” early that morning, which would have made the whole confrontation unnecessary; and that Olmert rejected this compromise – presumably because he wanted to look “tough” for his potential voters in the run-up to Knesset elections. I won’t attempt to judge whether the offered compromise was indeed “reasonable” – other than to state that nothing offered to me before 7:30 in the morning seems reasonable, except maybe the chance to go back to sleep for a few hours. The important point here is that whether the compromise offer was in fact reasonable, or indeed credible, depends in part on how one perceives the process that led up to the final decision to act forcibly. Had the whole legal-political process lasted a week or a month, such a last-minute compromise offer might have been acceptable as a way of resolving the conflict in good faith . But after a legal process lasting many months (and including many delaying tactics), the same offer could well be construed as yet another insincere effort to force a delay, in the hope that the promised days before the houses would be moved could be turned into weeks and months, and perhaps even years. (It’s also worth noting that at least some of the protestors were themselves highly critical of the compromise offer – they explicitly rejected a non-violent resolution of the conflict, at least until things started getting rough.) So whether a “reasonable compromise” was in fact offered and rejected depends, in large part, on who you are. Long, complicated legal processes are something like Rorschach blots – what you see in them depends largely on your own viewpoint.

*          *          *

Out of about 4,000 protestors, about 150 sustained injuries requiring medical attention; of these injuries, only a small number were serious and only one was at all life-threatening. While I don’t want to minimize the suffering of those who were hurt, I think it should be emphasized that fewer than five per cent of the protestors were injured; given that there were almost as many police and soldiers on hand as there were protestors – and further, given that any policeman who was excessively violent is likely to have hurt more than one protestor – it seems clear that the vast majority of the confrontation took place at a level of violence below that which would cause serious injury to protestors.

Let’s assume that out of about 150 injuries sustained by protestors, around 50 were “legitimate” – that is, they would have occurred in a “normal” civil-disobedience/riot scenario, without any excess police brutality. (This seems reasonable and even conservative to me, given the number of people involved.) This leaves us with an “excess” of something like 100 injuries which we can ascribe to unnecessary police violence. Assuming that one “bad” cop, on average, would cause three injuries (a figure that seems reasonable, given the accounts I’ve read and the videos I’ve seen, and given that the protestors were not wearing armor or helmets), all these “excess” injuries would have been caused by around 33 cops – in other words, about one per cent of all the security-force personnel present in Amona.

Performing the same sort of analysis of police injuries is complicated by the fact that the police were wearing protective gear (which means that far fewer police were injured than would have been the case without armor); and further by the fact that while injuries to protestors were caused principally by batons and the like, wielded by hand, injuries to police were caused mostly by thrown and dropped objects. The first complication means that many more police were potential casualties than the fifty who were actually injured; the second complication means that a relatively small number of protestors likely accounted for most of the police injuries. I can’t give precise numbers with any confidence, but it seems reasonable to assume that as few as forty or even twenty protestors may have accounted for the majority of police injuries. (Of course, a few of the police injuries were probably “legitimate” – that is, the normal injuries you would expect to see in a civil-disobedience incident of this size and severity.)

Tentatively, then, we can say that 99 per cent of the security-force personnel at Amona were not directly involved in excessive violence (except, perhaps, as targets for thrown stones); and 99 per cent of the protestors acted more or less within accepted bounds of vigorous civil disobedience. This explains why pretty much everyone who was there perceives his own side as being in the right: The “bad” one per cent of the opposing side was much more “worthy” of attention, as it posed a threat; while most participants were themselves relatively innocent, and would if anything tend to ignore or downplay the few “bad apples” on their own side of the confrontation. Indeed, it’s likely that many participants never even saw the roughnecks on their own side.

*          *          *

Where does all this tedious analysis lead me? My conclusions are simple enough.

Both sides were right, mostly.

In a highly-charged conflict involving thousands of people on both sides, only a small proportion of the participants were injured, and the vast majority acted within the acceptable bounds of a civil-disobedience scenario.

Both sides are wrong, mostly.

Left-wingers, government spokesmen, and others are wrong to the extent that they categorize all, or even most of the protestors as “violent hooligans”. Right-wingers are wrong to categorize all or most of the policemen and soldiers at Amona as excessively violent. Given the build-up, this incident could have had much worse results than it did; and rather than castigating ourselves, our government, our society, or anyone else for what happened, perhaps we should congratulate ourselves – quietly, of course – for the fact that we all handled this as well as we did.

Now can we talk about something else?

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Amona, Settlements, Outposts, Evacuation.

Treppenwitz Blogs Amona

2006-02-05T18:22:00.000+02:00

While I’m still trying to get my thoughts together for my own Amona post (or if they never do come together, I’ll give up and move on to another subject), David Bogner of Treppenwitz has written his. As usual, Dave’s post is very much worth reading.

Pending investigations, I’m prepared to believe that the police involved in last week’s fracas (or at least some of them) indeed acted with undue violence. At the same time, there are a couple of points Dave makes that I can’t quite accept at face value:

I’m not convinced that the timing of the demolitions at Amona really had all that much to do with Ehud Olmert and the upcoming election campaign. The demolition orders were issued quite some time ago, long before Ariel Sharon’s stroke. That said, it may be that Olmert felt some pressure to be particularly decisive at this moment – but so what? One point that is constantly raised by those who opposed the demolition is that a compromise was offered immediately beforehand, and Olmert rejected it. If this compromise offer was really sincere, why was it offered only on the morning of the demolition? It looks to me like the “compromise offer” was in reality just another deceptive delaying tactic.

David, like most anti-demolition writers, decries the violation of the “rights” of those living in Amona and those who came to protest the demolition. But settlers – myself included! – need to remember that we do not live inside “Israel proper”, and that as residents of territories under military administration, we do not have the full civil rights we would have inside the Green Line. Even legal settlements exist subject to the government’s say-so; and the illegal settlement outposts are simply that: illegal. The fact that settlers were encouraged (by Ariel Sharon, among others) to “grab” these hilltops is unfortunate; but the fact remains that the people living in these outposts, and the people supporting them, know quite well that they are on shaky ground. I get a little tired of hearing about how victimized they feel when the government finally decides to enforce its own laws!

David makes a very thoughtful analogy between the more extreme section of the settler movement and the “wicked son” of the Passover seder. However, like most pro-settler commentators, he appears to assign all (or most) blame for the alienation between settlers and the general Israeli public to the latter. He discusses “the sense of ‘otherness’ and disenfranchisement that had taken hold of the teenagers in the settler movement as a result of the unrelenting and heavy-handed rhetoric directed at them,” but never addresses the reasons the general public might have for feeling alienated from the settlers. As someone who maintains contact with both camps, I believe that the setter movement itself has a lot to answer for in this regard; sadly, most of the movement is becoming only more self-righteous and dismissive of ordinary Israelis as a result of the ongoing process of disengagement from the Palestinians.

Categories: Amona, Settlements, Outposts, Evacuation.

Disgusting Quote of the Day

2006-02-01T19:44:00.001+02:00

Knesset Member Arieh Eldad (of the National Union party) spoke to Army Radio while being treated for a broken arm he sustained fighting against Israeli forces working to demolish nine houses in the illegal outpost of Amona, north of Jerusalem. Israel Insider (hardly a left-wing news source – I can’t imagine they would be trying to make Eldad look bad) quotes him as saying:

“They are relating to human beings here like they wouldn't relate to Arabs.” [The italics are mine.]

It’s possible, of course, that somebody mistranslated Eldad’s remark; if so, I’d like to see his original Hebrew. But if this is really an accurate translation of what he said, it’s utterly reprehensible, even for someone who just got his arm broken. People who think like that – even if they’re normally able to repress their true feelings and pretend to be civilized – have no business being in politics, here or anywhere else.

Addendum: It turns out that Israel Insider got the quote right. According to Israel’s Army Radio website (link is in Hebrew), Eldad said the following:

“Mityachasim kan l’b’nei adam c’mo shelo hityachasu l’aravim.”

“B’nei adam” translates literally as “descendents of Adam”, and is the Hebrew equivalent of “human beings”. While translating idioms is always somewhat dicey, I’ve checked with several people whose Hebrew is much better than mine, and all of them agree that the implications of the remark in Hebrew are about the same as in English.

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Eldad, Amona, Settlements, Outposts, Evacuation.

Interpreting the Palestinian Vote: The “Can’t Win” Syndrome

2006-01-30T18:34:00.000+02:00

In the aftermath of Hamas’ surprising (at least to most of us) victory in the Palestinian legislative elections, a lot of commentators have decried the Palestinians’ supposed preference for terrorism over peacemaking, rejectionism over recognition of Israel, and so on. These pundits express disappointment at the Palestinians’ choice, and recommend a “get tough” policy with our now-confirmedly-hostile neighbors.

There’s one problem here: Most of these commentators are right-wingers who, until the last few days, frequently reminded us that Fatah was just as much a terror organization as Hamas, that Abu Mazen was basically Yasser Arafat in a suit and necktie (and with the charisma of a tree-sloth, but that’s beside the point), and so on.

You can’t have it both ways, guys. Either Fatah is a vicious terrorist organization intent on Israel’s destruction – more or less like Hamas, in other words – or it isn’t. If it is, then the Palestinians who voted for Hamas over Fatah didn’t do so because of Hamas’ pledges to eliminate Israel (since Fatah feels the same way); they voted for Hamas because Fatah was utterly corrupt and incompetent, and Hamas gave them some hope of better, more honest government.

If, on the other hand, Fatah really was a “peace partner” for Israel – meaning that voting for Hamas was a rejection of peace and coexistence, an endorsement of terrorism, and so on – then why were you guys so hostile to Fatah when it was in power?

As I’ve said before, I tend to view the difference between Fatah and Hamas, terrorism-wise, as more a matter of degree and nuance than anything substantive. While Fatah – or at least some parts of it – may be slightly more amenable to compromise and coexistence, it’s more than a little silly to pretend that Yasser Arafat’s old outfit is some sort of Palestinian Peace Now. Given this – and assuming that Palestinian voters are no dumber than the average hedgehog – it seems rather foolish and unfair to accuse the Palestinians of “rejecting peace” by voting for Hamas rather than Fatah. If neither party contesting the elections could rationally be seen as opposing terrorism and promoting a final settlement based on compromise and accommodation, the election results cannot be viewed as expressing any clear opinion on these issues.

The Can’t-Win Syndrome

According to some of my fellow Zionist opiners’ world-view, it would seem that the Palestinians, unless they roll over and play dead (metaphorically, of course – or maybe not), can do no right. Everything they do or say is viewed exclusively in terms of their conflict with Israel and the Jews, generally in order to highlight their refusal to countenance Israel’s existence, their acceptance of violence as a means to achieve their national goals, and so on. If the Palestinians choose Hamas over Fatah, the decision can be understood only as an endorsement of terrorism and irredentism, never as a choice between possibly-good administration and abysmal administration.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that Palestinian hostility towards Israel is merely a figment of the right-wing Zionist imagination. The fact that there was no significant contender in this election running on an anti-terrorism, pro-compromise platform is sad. The fact that any such contender would have been murdered at the polls – perhaps literally – is sadder. But given the choices that were presented to the Palestinian electorate, there is no valid reason to interpret the election results as having anything much to do with Israel or with terrorism.

In this light, I’d like to pose a little challenge to anyone who disagrees with me. Try to answer honestly: If Fatah had won the Palestinian parliamentary elections, would you be congratulating the Palestinian voters for “choosing peace” as loudly as you now condemn them for “choosing terror”?

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Palestine, Hamas, Fatah, Hamastan.

A Small, Sad Change

2006-01-29T22:37:00.000+02:00

I just made a small change to this blog’s subtitle: instead of “eleven cats for company”, there are now ten. Shandy, a very friendly young male African Wildcat hybrid, died last Thursday morning of feline distemper. His colleague Eponine, a little grey tabby kitten we rescued, got sick as well, but appears to be recovering. Pixel, Shandy’s one-eyed, slightly evil sister, and Echo, Eponine’s presumed brother, seem okay so far; all our other cats (Shunar, Ember, Cricket, Xiao Lin, Tribble, Shalva, and Meshi, in case anyone’s counting) are adults, and, we hope, less at risk than the youngsters.

I don’t normally blog about purely personal stuff; this is supposed to be a site about my thoughts and opinions, not about my private life. But in truth, the division is an artificial one: all writing is, to some degree, autobiography. I have no idea how the death of a cat affects my thinking about Israeli politics, the peace process (or whatever’s left of it), or anything else, really. Maybe having animals in my life helps to keep things in some kind of perspective: whatever’s going on in the human sphere means little or nothing to cats, dogs, and horses, as long as they are cared for, loved, and – when the time comes – mourned.

Goodbye, Shandy.

Enjoying History: The Birth of Hamastan

2006-01-26T17:06:00.000+02:00

There are some days when I don’t devote much thought to the fact that I live in Israel. Those are days when I’m busy dealing with technical problems, doing pretty much the same thing here that I did back in America, in Hong Kong when I lived there, and in London when I lived there.

There are other days when I find living in Israel pretty frustrating. Usually, these are days when I’ve had to reassure Ettie at the bank; she occasionally gets nervous about my overdraft, and the one thing that one doesn’t want when one is perennially overdrawn is a nervous banker. On days like this, I think back to the salary I received before coming to Israel – a salary that was easily twice what I now earn for doing much the same work – and wonder if I’m crazy to live here.

But then there are days when I absolutely love living here – and thankfully, there are lots of them. Lying out in my hammock on a warm Saturday in November; never feeling the need for a G.P.S. system (my secret for successful navigation in Israel and the West Bank: When the signs are all in Arabic, make a U-turn); understanding the people around me (most of them slightly insane, but in nice familiar ways); or just enjoying living in a country that runs to a rhythm that doesn’t feel alien to me, I realize that I’m having a ball here, overdraft or no.

One of the things I like best about being in Israel is the feeling that I’m living through genuine history: things actually seem to happen here. And yesterday, it turns out, was one of those historic days.

I have publicly stated my somewhat grudging approval of Hamas’ participation in Palestinian elections. Now it turns out that not only did Hamas participate – Hamas actually defied forecasts and won the elections outright! This may be bad news for the “peace process”, but I suspect that it’s at least likely to be good news for the Palestinians, and it’s excellent news for Israel. (It also represents a major political milestone for the Arab world in general – how many other times has an election in an Arab country resulted in the peaceful transfer of real political power to the opposition?)

The first thing to understand about Hamas’ victory is that it didn’t really have much to do with Israel. As I pointed out back in November, a vote for Fatah was hardly a vote against terrorism; by the same token, a vote for Hamas shouldn’t be interpreted as a vote for terrorism. Fatah offered some hope of revived negotiations with Israel, but was doing an absolutely wretched job of running the day-to-day affairs of the Palestinian proto-state. Hamas offered no real chance of a negotiated peace with Israel, but has a good record of providing education, health services, and in general acting as if it cares about the lives of ordinary Palestinians. Whether this social outreach work is largely a bit of slick manipulation – which it is – is not really relevant to the beneficiaries of these services; all they care about is that Hamas provides them with services they need, and the official Fatah-run apparatus doesn’t.

By voting for Hamas, Palestinians simply demonstrated that right now, the slim hope of a negotiated settlement with Israel – which likely wouldn’t improve their lives all that much – is less important to them than their purely domestic problems. From what I’ve read of the failures, mismanagement, corruption, and dishonesty of the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, I’d have to say that I agree with the voters.

* * *

Who are the winners and losers, now that Hamas has won and Fatah has lost?

Hamas is now going to be forced to face up to the problems of government without having passed through much of an apprenticeship. The organization made it very clear before the election that – while they might be willing to talk to us, if we begged nicely enough – they weren’t interested in abandoning terrorism, recognizing Israel within any borders (except perhaps on another continent), or otherwise giving up their tough-guy agenda in order to focus on fixing potholes. But as the governing party of the Palestinian Autonomy, elected on an honesty-and-prosperity platform, Hamas will be caught in a bit of a bind: Previously, they mounted terror attacks knowing full well that Israeli responses (such as closures and roadblocks) increased impoverishment and discontent among ordinary Palestinians. Impoverishment and discontent were exactly what Hamas wanted – as a force in opposition to the Palestinian Authority. Now that Hamas is going to run the Palestinian Authority, promoting Palestinian poverty isn’t going to be good politics for them – even if they blow up Israelis in the process. My prediction for Hamas: continued tough rhetoric, no disarming, but probably no actual increase in terror attacks – at least not in attacks carried out by Hamas.

Fatah has never been an opposition party before. I think they need the time off, and it appears that at least some of their leaders (who are no dummies) think so too. Every political party needs to spend a certain amount of time in opposition, or it gets soft, decadent, and corrupt. Fatah (as a political party) started out decadent and corrupt, and they went downhill from there.

Labor and Likud – both of which are reading from the same page, really – should both lose by Hamas’ victory, at least if Ehud Olmert plays his cards right. Since both parties base their diplomatic agendas on negotiations with the Palestinians rather than on unilateralism, a victory for either of them would mean years of stasis. Were the election to be decided between Labor and Likud, our only real choice would be between right-wing Thatcherite stasis and left-wing populist stasis.

Kadima should be able to come out ahead after Hamas’ victory, since only Kadima has a diplomatic stance that doesn’t require a Palestinian “partner”. (Of course, Kadima officially says that they would prefer to negotiate a settlement with the Palestinians; but I’ve never taken this claim very seriously, and I suspect that not very many other Kadimites do either.) The main goal for Kadima now is to avoid making mistakes: don’t over-react and look too right-wing, don’t offer to negotiate with Hamas and thus look too left-wing, don’t attack Iran unless the odds of success are extremely high. And whatever you do, don’t gloat, at least not until March 29th.

* * *

What should really be interesting – assuming that Hamas does form the next Palestinian government, and assuming that Kadima does win in March – will be watching two unilateralist, mutually distrustful movements trying hard to dance gracefully together without actually touching or talking. Who said that history isn’t fun?

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Palestine, Hamas, Fatah, Hamastan.

Treppenwitz on Hebron

2006-01-19T20:01:00.000+02:00

David Bogner of Treppenwitz has come up with yet another excellent post – one of the best commentaries on recent (and not-so-recent) events in Hebron that I’ve seen. Go there. Read it. If enough of you do so, maybe he’ll put me on his blog-roll.

Article of Note: “Iran’s Redefined Strategy”

2006-01-19T15:33:00.000+02:00

I just came across a very interesting Stratfor article by George Friedman posted over at IsraPundit. I’m not sure if I agree with all of it, but at the very least it’s thought-provoking – if not entirely reassuring. I suppose I should try to take some comfort in the thought that if Iran does succeed in nuking Israel, it will be in pursuit of a rational strategy for regional ascendancy (according to Friedman, at least) rather than merely because they don’t like us.

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: Iran, Ahmadinejad

Well, That About Wraps It Up for Intelligent Design (Maybe)

2006-01-18T19:44:00.000+02:00

I’m starting to feel a little sorry for the Discovery Institute and its Center for Science and Culture. They’ve undertaken the unenviable task of promoting “the scientific theory known as intelligent design”, while vigorously maintaining that “intelligent design”, properly understood, is not a sneaky way of promoting Biblical creationism.

Now, I’m no great fan of “Intelligent Design”; I’ve even seen fit to repeat myself on the subject – something I normally never do. (Well, hardly ever.) But I imagine that the Discovery Institute’s real problem isn’t pedantic Darwinists like me; what really must annoy them is some of their “friends”.

The El Tajon, California school district yesterday agreed to scrap an elective philosophy course in “Philosophy of Design”, avoiding a costly court battle that it would almost certainly have lost. The Discovery Institute advised the school district to cave in, since what was being taught was in fact mostly Biblical (or “young earth”) creationism rather than intelligent design as properly understood.

This raises a rather interesting question, and poses a sticky little dilemma for intelligent-design proponents: Besides the Discovery Institute and a few offbeat scientific types, does anyone have any interest in “official” (or, if you like, “scientific”) intelligent design theory? If intelligent design is in fact a back-door way of promoting Biblical creationism, then it loses whatever claim it may have to scientific legitimacy; but if intelligent design in fact contradicts the Biblical account of creation, then it’s difficult for me to imagine that a lot of school boards will be in any great hurry to add it to the curriculum. After all, intelligent design (as described by the Discovery Institute, who should know what they’re talking about) would work together with Darwinism as a sort of anti-fundamentalist tag team: Darwinists say you don’t need God to create the diversity of species; and intelligent design says that even if God did create species (or helped things along by creating some of the sub-cellular “machinery” that makes life possible) it didn’t happen the way the Bible tells it.

My prediction: Intelligent design theory may survive for a while as a scientific backwater (or, to be less polite, a pseudo-scientific waste of time); but its popularity among the general public will soon fade. If intelligent design amounts to just another way of saying that the Bible is untrue, who needs it?

Oh yes, before I forget: The teacher who taught the “Philosophy of Design” course defended it as follows: “I believe this is the class that the Lord wanted me to teach.” So much for “the scientific theory known as intelligent design”!

Categories: Intelligent Design, Intelligent-Design, evolution, DARWINISM, Science, Education

Medicine on the March: “Yoghurt against HIV”

2006-01-18T17:23:00.000+02:00

As I previously announced, I wasn’t planning to do any real blog posting this week – too much “serious” writing to do, plus a fair bit of “real” work at my day job. But every so often, something comes up that must be blogged about. Today’s blockbuster story is from the Jerusalem Post, and is entitled “Yoghurt against HIV?”. (The original, more detailed article is here in news@nature.com; but the Post’s version is more fun to write about.)

The story is that scientists have succeeded in genetically altering Lactococcus lactis bacteria – the “good” bacteria in yoghurt – to produce cyanovirin, a new drug that shows promise in preventing HIV from infecting cells. According to the Post, the researchers say that

…the bugs might one day be incorporated into yoghurts that would deliver drug-producing bacteria straight to a woman's vagina, providing a week's worth of protection from a single dose.

Now, this is a family blog – at least in the sense that some of my close relatives read it – so I can’t delve into all the implications of the preceding paragraph. I’ll leave it to my ever-so-tasteful readers to follow my line of thinking; after all, as Vaguely Sinister Wife says, great minds travel in the same gutters. (I’ll also mention that the news@nature.com article doesn’t actually mention the dosing method suggested by the Post. Strangely, neither publication makes any mention of using the new technique to prevent the spread of AIDS among men; I don’t know quite what to make of that rather glaring omission.)

I hope you’ll agree that I’ve handled this story with some delicacy; when science advances so dramatically, I would hate to be tasteless.

Categories: HIV, AIDS, cyanovirin

Crunch Week: A Pathetic Apology

2006-01-16T18:06:00.001+02:00

It is so true as to be a cliché: the writer’s worst enemy is the blank sheet of paper. All the wonderful technology in the world hasn’t changed that; every time I set out to write something, the first thing that confronts me is a blank editor screen, which Microsoft has even graciously designed to look like a sheet of paper, untouched and threatening. I try to stare it down, but Word for Windows doesn’t have an auto-wilt feature. The blank page stares right back at me, fearless, implacable, cold, mocking. And, worst of all, empty.

This week, I fear that the blank-sheet-of-paper-surrogate will have at least a partial victory. Vaguely Sinister Wife and I are both busy writing our papers for the next IEEE Intelligence and Security Informatics conference, with a Friday deadline. My paper will be entitled something like “Rational-Choice Deterrence and Israeli Counter-Terrorism”; sadly, I’m not allowed to publish it anywhere other than the conference proceedings, which come out in a book that you won’t exactly find at your corner bookstore. (If the final result looks halfway decent to me, perhaps I’ll put up a version with enough changes to get around the copyright problems.)

We’ve had months and months to get these papers ready, so there’s been plenty of time and there’s absolutely no reason for there to be a last-minute rush. Yeah, right. Both V.S.W. and I are adrenaline junkies, and so the last week is always the time to get ourselves in gear. (Actually, V.S.W. will probably have her paper ready by some time Thursday, a day or more before the last second. I consider this highly neurotic, albeit useful – as it means I get to use our computer at home for the final bits.)

In the mean time, I won’t be able to do much blogging this week. My massive and loyal public – which, as far as I’ve been able to determine, would comfortably fit into an average-sized American family car – will have to survive without me.

Of course, a glass of warm milk and a couple of milligrams of melatonin right before bedtime are almost as effective as reading my blog…

“Don’t Kiss the Dying Chicken” – News from the Frontiers of Public (and Private) Health

2006-01-11T19:48:00.000+02:00

The Associated Press, among others, reported yesterday that one of the Turkish children who had contracted H5N1 “bird flu” apparently contracted the disease after hugging and kissing the dead and dying chickens in her backyard.

My first reaction – probably your first reaction as well, but I’m brave enough to admit it in public – was to laugh and dismiss this poor child as rather silly, even for an eight-year-old. Then I thought a bit, and realized that while I am indeed no great fan of live, not-yet-acquainted-with-Colonel-Sanders chickens (there are a bunch of them at the stables where our horses live; they steal food from Kahlua, who is not exactly the most assertive equine in the world), I am not really one to criticize, because…

Shocking Revelation: Obscure Blogger is a Bird-Kisser!!!

Yes, you read it here first – not only do I consort with horses and various furry carnivores; I have also owned parrots in the past. My first parrot was Spot, an Orange-winged Amazon. And I must admit that I did, on occasion, give him a little kiss on the beak.

As I was between twenty and thirty years old when I owned Spot, I cannot even defend my actions as having been those of a mere stripling. The only possible mitigation I can offer is that from some of “his” behavior, I gradually concluded that Spot (whose genus is notoriously non-sexually-dimorphic) was actually a female. Does that make it better? Dunno.

It would thus appear that I am an expert (or what passes for an expert in Blogland) on human-bird relationships. It behooves me, then, to offer society my thoughts on how we can prevent the spread of H5N1 to our own exalted species by reducing our exalted tendency to… um… consort with barnyard fowl.

Clearly, we need to initiate a massive advertising campaign, with resonant voiceovers and catchy slogans. The first slogan I came up with was “Don’t Kiss the Dying Chicken.” I think it has a certain je ne sais quoi (only the French can make ignorance sound so sophisticated – but I digress), but somehow it sounds more like some kind of heavy-metal mantra or Satanist chant than like the kind of wholesome motto we’d want to plaster all over our ever-so-wholesome airwaves. I continued thinking… and here it is! (Actually, here are the first and last lines. Geniuses don’t have to write middles.) I present the first great public-service advertisement of the campaign to wipe out the scourge of infected-chicken cuddling:

They Don’t Love You Back!

[I’ll leave the body of the thing for someone else to complete. Michelangelo, after all, let his assistants paint the cherubs. You’re welcome.]

The next time you hug a chicken, you could be the one who winds up in the soup!

My cousin knows James Earl Jones; I think he’d be perfect for the voiceover.

* * *

While I’m on the subject of health, I recall reading yesterday that one of the indications of Ariel Sharon’s increasing responsiveness (as he’s slowly weaned off the anesthetics that maintained his artificial coma) was that his blood pressure rose slightly when one of his sons spoke. That does sound like a sign of approaching normality – my kids do a pretty good job of raising my blood pressure too!

(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)

Categories: H5N1

Kadima	29	seats
Labor	19	seats
Shas	12	seats
Likud	12	seats
Yisrael Beitenu	11	seats
National Union / National Religious Party	9	seats
Gil (Senior Citizens)	7	seats
United Torah Judaism	6	seats
Meretz	5	seats
United Arab List	4	seats
Balad	3	seats
Hadash	3	seats

	Ehud Olmert	Amir Peretz	Binyamin Netanyahu	Nobody
Viewed positively	26%	23%	22%	N/A

Viewed negatively	39%	43%	50%	N/A

Most suitable to be Prime Minister	26%	16%	20.5%	24%