Another Galaxy

Historical squabbles in the U.S. can be plenty nasty, especially when the origins of the Civil War are on the table. Apparently, though, it's nothing compared to sorting out the history of Israel:

No history of Israel's origins, however, can achieve definitive status for now. While Israel routinely declassifies much state material after 30 years, the Arab states that attacked Israel keep their archives comparatively closed. Rogan and Shlaim, writing in 2001, saw "no immediate prospect" for declassification of their key documents because "Arab scholars would find no support for critical revisions of their historiography." While the Israeli historian Anita Shapira has pointed out that Jordan opens its archives to a limited extent, materials that might resolve factual disputes — such as the degree of sincerity or cynicism on the part of Arab leaders about Islamic jihadism — are not available. Perhaps frustration fuels the hyper-aggression among Israeli historians.

Can the rocket fire among them be squelched? In his thoughtful, just-published A History of Histories, John Burrows, a professor of European thought at the University of Oxford, praises the community spirit among Clio's devotees, first expressed by Polybius, who believed "that if he died before he completed his history, another historian would carry the subject on."

Doubtless some peer would do the same for a departed Israeli historian. It's equally clear that others would cheer the fact that the biased, manipulative so-and-so was gone. The past, historians say, is another country. Israeli history is another galaxy.

The Liberty Incident

[posted by Callimachus]

Forty years ago now, it was one of the most provocative and unsettled chapters of the Cold War. Some people I know claim most Americans still don't know about it. I suspect that may be right. Here's the Wiki on it.

The Israeli and American governments conducted multiple inquiries into the incident, and issued reports concluding that the attack was the result of a mistake, caused by confusion among the Israeli attackers about the precise identity of the USS Liberty. These conclusions have been challenged, most notably by an organization of Liberty survivors as well as by some key former high-ranking U.S. officials who were in office at the time. These skeptics have included Secretary of State Dean Rusk, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Director of the NSA, and the senior legal counsel to the U.S. Navy Court of Inquiry into the incident. While the matter is officially closed for purposes of Israeli-American relations, it remains controversial in public discussion.

We have a local survivor around here. A handsome young fellow at the time, he came out of it with 101 shrapnel holes in his body and missing part of his bowels. Life's been hell for him ever since. He swears before the attack the Israeli plane buzzed the ship so close the pilot waved at the crew. It's really hard to buy the mistaken identity theory, but what do you think?

If nothing else, it's so much more proof to the world that America will tolerate literally anything if you act like a friend. The Saudis know this, too.

UPDATE: Matthew Hogan has a much better-informed, and more thoughtful, post on the topic than mine, here.

The Difference

[posted by Callimachus]

A good question:

I wonder how many of the silly American students participating in the recent “Israeli Apartheid week” can even name a single apartheid law passed by the old South Africa.

From a post by someone who knows about apartheid South Africa and who knows about Israel and who can calmly explain the difference.

Against Forgetting

Iam watching Israeli troops shuffle home in tears and without victory -- in a world where all know there is no draw, no tie, where everything short of catastrophic success for Israel is catastrophic failure for Israel.

Israel has existed longer than most of us have been alive. Its continuance is no more assured today than it was on day one. The same serpents still slither around the cradle -- no, the old ones have passed into senility and hatchlings bred in their rotten wombs now have sharper fangs, fouler poisons.

In Iran, Ahmadinejad framed the story of the month of Rajab, A.H. 1427, as it will be told throughout the Muslim world for a generation: "God's promises have come true," Ahmadinejad told a huge crowd. "On one side, it's corrupt powers of the criminal U.S. and Britain and the Zionists ... with modern bombs and planes. And on the other side is a group of pious youth relying on God." For a generation, at least.

Bashar is beaming.

"We tell them [Israelis] that after tasting humiliation in the latest battles, your weapons are not going to protect you not your planes, or missiles or even your nuclear bombs ... The future generations in the Arab world will find a way to defeat Israel."

Amid the rubble, Hezbollah's flag still flies. That would be enough. But the victory is just beginning. The "New York Times" reports:

Nehme Y. Tohme, a member of parliament from the anti-Syrian reform bloc and the country's minister for the displaced said that he had been told by Hezbollah officials that when the shooting stopped, Iran would provide Hezbollah with an "unlimited budget" for reconstruction.

In his Monday night victory speech, Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah offered money for "decent and suitable furniture" and a year's rent on a house to any Lebanese who lost his home in the last month's war.

Across southern Lebanon hundreds of Hezbollah members began cleaning, organizing, and surveying damage in dozens of villages.

Hezbollah's reputation as an efficient grassroots social service network — as opposed to the government, regarded by many here as sleek men in suits doing well — was in evidence everywhere.

Hezbollah's strength, said Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a professor at the Lebanese American University here who has written extensively about the organization, in large part derives from what she called "the gross vacuum left by the state."

Hezbollah wasn't a state within a state, she said, but "a state within a nonstate, actually."

Nasrallah's speech was interpreted by some on Tuesday as a kind of watershed in Lebanese politics establishing his party on an equal footing with the official government.

The "Chicago Tribune" reports today that in Tyre, "Hezbollah supporters were passing candy along the roadside and cheerily calling out 'Welcome Back' to returning motorists."

Another "Times" story reports on the returning refugees:

Dozens of yellow Hezbollah flags flew from the windows of cars heading south, and few of the returning exiles seemed to hold Hezbollah responsible for their troubles.

"This traffic — what right does Bush have to make us live like this?" said Bilal Masri, 50, who had just spent five hours on a 15-mile drive down the coast. Masri, a Sunni, works at a fuel storage plant that was bombed by Israel, but blames President Bush. "By what right did he bomb us?" he asked. "Bush says he likes democracy and human rights; where is democracy now?"

Before, he said, he hated Israel a little, but "now I truly hate it and want to cancel its existence."

What did he want to do when he only "hated" it "a little?" What sort of rational engagement by Israel, what sort of nuanced ripples of American foreign policy, will make a steady friend of that man?

And what have we allowed ourselves to forget?

Yes, perhaps Israel should have hit more quickly, harder, and on the ground; yes, it has run an inept public relations campaign; yes, to these criticisms and more. But what is lost sight of is the central moral issue of our times: a humane democracy mired in an asymmetrical war is trying to protect itself against terrorists from the 7th century, while under the scrutiny of a corrupt world that needs oil, is largely anti-Semitic and deathly afraid of Islamic terrorists, and finds psychic enjoyment in seeing successful Western societies under duress.

A world where even a professional writer of Jewish jokes in Britain blanches at what he hears on the streets:

There have always been anti-Semitic jokes. But you know times are changing when you go along to a stand-up show at the Pleasance Courtyard at the Edinburgh Fringe and you hear audience members shouting “Throw them in the oven” when the comic suggests kids should stop playing Cowboys and Indians and replace it with Nazis and Jews.

Stand-up comedy is as good a prism as any through which to look at the changing attitudes in our society. If my past few days are anything to go by then it is becoming increasingly acceptable to hate the Jews. Again.

I’ve seen two comics so far who have been happy to amuse their crowds with Holocaust gags. ... One was a left-leaning angry Australian conspiracy theorist, Steve Hughes, whose show The Storm is an assault on all things Western. “I want to bash Condoleezza Rice’s brain to bits and kill that f****** Jew Richard Perle.”

Here it comes again. Time to make a stand.

Israel's Fate

In a Middle East war, perception counts as much as reality. Which is why Hezbollah is winning this one.

Arab nations used to gang up on Israel four and five at a time and routinely get their butts handed to them. Whenever the Arab powers managed to get an edge, as in 1973, Israel made sure to push back so hard everyone knew it could have marched into Cairo and Damascus, had it chosen to, when it was all over.

But this one is shaping up as an ugly draw. And that means Israel loses. Because the perception that it can't be beaten, lurking in the hearts of its enemies, was Israel's best weapon.

Israelis know this. How else to explain the near-unanimity, in that fractious political culture, behind the conviction that Israel must win this war in a convicing fashion? Whatever else they disagree about -- and it's just about everything, apparently -- Israelis seem to kow instinctively that, as the AP recently wrote, "they are surrounded by enemies who want them dead."

What's amazing is the rest of the world so often forgets that.

According to AP, "popular support for the Lebanon campaign remains extremely high despite a growing chorus of media commentators complaining that the war has been poorly conceived and executed." America has the luxury -- so many of us think -- of changing our mind about a war because we don't like how it's being done. Israel never did.

Three things stand out that make me feel gloomy about Israel's future after this:

1. Hezbollah is getting to the tanks. Merkava tanks are the invincible steel castle symbols of Israel's military power, both within Israel and in the eyes of its enemies. They are what aircraft carriers are for America.

Now, thanks to anti-tank missiles made in Russia and Europe, supplied via Syria from Iran, the Merkavas are vulnerable. They're getting hit, and taking losses. The public relations impact is likely to be enormous.

2. Israel is losing in the media. An advanced set of Arab-language networks hostile to Israel dominates regional coverage. Worse for Israel, the worldwide media is focused on the plight of civilian victims in Lebanon. The civilian casualties are real, even if the media in the war zone too often truckles under to Hezbollah's situational censorship for the sake of access.

Taking the fight directly to a Hezbollah carefully protected by human shields, with cameras rolling, probably was a big tactical error by Israel. I'll have to leave it to smarter people than me to outline what else could have been done that would look like victory in the end without exacting a high and terrible human toll.

In previous wars, the story was the map: All those big Arab nations against plucky little Israel. Now it's: all that big muscular Israeli military hardware against poor ragtag villagers, or Beirut apartment-dwellers and their families.

It turns out the key for the Arabs when it comes to beating Israel -- in the perception sense -- was not to get all the big nation-states in the region to gang up on it, but to unleash on it a fierce, Iran-armed, brigade-sized terrorist paramilitary hunkered down among sheep farmers and orphan hospitals in the weakest state in the region.

3. Israel has lowered its expectations. As AP put it:

Israel's initial condition for a cease-fire — the disarming of Hezbollah — has been replaced by the far more modest goal of pushing Hezbollah away from the border to make room for a new multinational peacekeeping force.

Hezbollah always has had the same goal: Survive this, and in so doing build up its rep as the giant-killer, the Arab great white hope, and recruit, and rearm, and wait for next time. Next time might be on the other bank of the Jordan.

The Killing Mind

Apparently Israel has allowed some jailhouse interviews Rafat Moqadi, a Palestinian suicide bomber who changed his mind at the moment he was supposed to detonate himself in a Tel Aviv restaurant. Both AP and CBS have stories on him. (I can't find the AP one on the Net yet.)

As the pace of attacks increases in the Middle East and beyond, a surprising profile is emerging [Surprising to the AP, I guess -- ed.] of those willing to take their own lives: many are young, middle class and educated.

Nearly four-fifths of all suicide attacks over the past 35 years have occurred since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist strikes in the U.S., according to the RAND Center for Terrorism Risk Management. And 80 percent of those have been carried out by radical Islamic groups, said the center's director, Bruce Hoffman.

Both the AP and CBS stories steer the "motivation" angle away from religion. "But religion is only part of the picture," AP writes. "Moqadi said that wasn't his motivation."

"The main reason was to resist the (Israeli) occupation, to create a balance of power with the Israeli army," he said.

"At the moment they put the (explosives) belt on me there were a few seconds of doubt," he said. "But after that I felt strength. I felt stronger than the whole state of Israel. It was a good feeling."

Emphasis added. Moqadi said he joined Hamas "in response to massive gunbattles between Israeli forces and Palestinians in Jenin."

Yet the attempt to steer it away from religions inevitably spirals back toward it. AP writes of the role of group commitment, and then specifically of the heroic image of the suicide bomber in modern Palestinian culture.

Often what makes the person carry out the mission is commitment to a group, making it difficult to back out without losing face, experts say. Many of today's suicide bombers, especially in Iraq and the Palestinian territories, come from societies where many people condone the action, making it easier to execute.

CBS tracks down Dr. Eyad Sarraj, a Muslim who heads Gaza's only psychiatric clinic.

The families of suicide bombers often come to him for help after the deed is done. That's how he has built up his profile. But are the people who want to become suicide bombers especially violent?

“No. On the contrary. If you look at their personal histories, they usually were very timid people, introvert, their problem was always communication in public or communicating their feelings, so they were not violent at all,” says Sarraj.

“There is a pool of suicide bombers everywhere in the world among the community of Islam and Arabs everywhere. They are ready to act when the time comes. Anybody who is living in this area, including yourself, would have seen the rise of temperature, the rise of hatred, the rise of anger every year after year because of the continuous suffering of these people.”

And in Gaza, if you want to tap into this pool of hatred and suicide bombers, you don't need to go further than the neighborhood mosque.

“If they know I am the one who is going to recruit, they will come for me. I just give the message in the mosque that this is what we should do,” says Sarraj. “And then people who are ready will contact me.”

The AP notes the work of Western terrorism expert Jessica Stern on this topic. Stern is more or less non-partisan (she's an opponent of many Bush policies, but who isn't?), and she has focused on Christian, Jewish and Islamic terrorists. In this interview, her frothing Bush-hating questioner wants her to assent to the idea that, "Because of 9/11, many Americans have demonized that this is something that’s Islamic. ... It’s getting back to this point that it’s not exclusive to any one religion, and, therefore, the battle against it isn’t a crusade -- quote, unquote -- because there are many more common factors between terrorists of different religions than terrorism as defined within a religion."

Stern, politely, won't have it.

But there’s something about what’s going on in the Islamic world. Islamist terrorist leaders are able to raise large armies. As you know, we don’t see Jewish terrorists able to raise large armies, and we don’t see Christian terrorists able to raise large armies.

More recently, Stern and researcher Scott Atran have noted that today's Islamic radicals operating in the West (the 9/11, London, and Madrid bombers) have a different profile than the Palestinian and Iraqi bombers. They "have no clear political goals but instead act 'to oppose a perceived global evil.' ... [M]any potential suicide bombers in the West feel marginalized from society and 'bond as they surf jihadi websites to find direction and purpose.' " [AP, quoting a letter from Stern and Atran]

Abdel Haleem Izzedin, an Islamic Jihad leader in the West Bank town of Jenin, said Palestinian candidates for suicide bombings are "normal people" who "believe that Israel is occupying and confiscating their land and want to fight back."

Bombers in places like Madrid and London, he said, were "unusual" and "extreme."

Which suggests two different problems, rooted in one religious/cultural tradition. Perhaps two solutions are in order. The rigorous "law enforcement" approach might work best in the West. In the Middle East? Most suicide bombers were men in their late teens or early 20s. Almost all were single and childless. Many suicide bombers have come from middle class families and have attended a university. But most were "relatively unimportant people, not leader types but follower types," one psychologist said.

How about giving those restless young men something to live for besides death. Give them some sense of a stake in their own futures, a country to participate in governing, a job not dependent on bribery, a chance to raise children who can do even better than their parents did. The American Dream? Something like that. Why not? You got a better idea? As Samuel Johnson knew, "There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money."

Moqadi, serving time in an Israeli jail, is not getting the American Dream. He'll be out on the Gaza streets again by the time he's the age Mohammed Atta was when he plowed a jet into the World Trade Center. AP reports Moqadi "spends most of his time in jail learning to speak, read and write Hebrew, the language of the Jewish state. Islam, he said, teaches that it's important to 'know your enemy.' "

"Disturbing"

Mark Espiner, "world music critic and theatre director," takes a look at rap in Israel in "The Guardian."

Hip-hop on the frontline, has the subhead "Globalised rap music may have lost its bite, but in the Middle East it's giving voice to both sides in the conflict."

Key phrase is "both sides."

The rap form allows a powerful voice for political invective, and is being used on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

But that's about as much "balance" as you'll get from the "Guardian" writing about an Israel it despises.

The appeal of hip-hop has found a voice in the alienated Arab-Israeli/Palestinian communities within Israel, dominated by the Jewish majority and identifying with the sentiments of US rappers in their struggle against discrimination.

Emphasis added, of course. Espiner then goes on to write about Tamer Nafer, "an Israeli-Arab rapper from the suburbs of Tel Aviv," and offers a sample of his lyrics:

"You buried the parents under the stones of their own homes
and now you call me a terrorist
Who is a terrorist?
You are a terrorist."

I wonder if he does it in a Saddam voice. "I am not the terrorist; you are the terrorist!" OK, so we've all heard this kind of apologetics for Palestinian terrorism before. I find it repulsive, but then I find a lot of U.S. rap repulsive, too.

Now compare how Espiner writes about an Israeli rapper:

But countering this alienated voice, rather disturbingly, is the voice of rightwing Zionism in rap. Subliminal, otherwise known as Kobi Shimoni, makes no bones about his stance. His rallying cry to the crowd at a concert is to ask them to wave their Israeli army dog tags in the air. One of his albums, The Light and the Shadow, has a muddy fist - that looks like a bloody one - on the cover, clutching a medallion Star of David.

Please; mud is mud, blood is blood. What's "disturbing" about this whole scene, I fail to see. But then I fail to see how waving dog tags is "disturbing" and how apologizing for bus bombers isn't. But then I'm not "Guardian" material.

Dubbed the Israeli Eminem, the former soldier's shock is not in suggesting Michael Jackson is a paedophile or swearing a great deal, it is in song titles such as Divide and Conquer or lyrics such as "the country is dangling like a cigarette in Arafat's mouth" or "to think that an olive branch symbolises peace / Sorry it doesn't live here anymore. It's been kidnapped or murdered / There was peace my friend / Handshakes, fake smile. Treaties signed in blood." Forget Eminem, this is more like hip-hop's Sharon.

Shocking! He actually says that the peace initiatives of a generation of Israeli leaders have been undermined by the murderous actions of Hamas and Al Aqsa! How dare he! Much more "disturbing" than a Palestinian denying that terrorists are terrorists.

Here the music of alienation is in danger of becoming one of aggression and oppression.

Uh-huh. And "you are the terrorist" is in no such danger at all. What a fool. Espiner concludes with the suggestion that Subliminal is "sinisterly" twisting hip-hop's message into, "you're not from here, get out."

Well, here's some things he doesn't know, or doesn't feel like telling you. Kobi Shimoni is not "countering" Tamer Nafer. Tamer Nafer was a protege of Kobi Shimoni. They had a friendship that eventually broke apart under political pressures, despite the efforts of the two young men to hold on to common ground and their shared love for a music style. The complex relationship was chronicled in an award-winning documentary titled Channels of Rage.

In one scene from the documentary, people in the audience of a Subliminal concert yell, "Death to the Arabs!" He shouts back at them: "Cut it out, you natives! Not death to the Arabs, but life to the Jews!"

"Disturbing," isn't it?

"As the final credits [of 'Channels of Rage'] roll, the two are heard arguing with each other, debating their people's points of view – but actually reaching agreement on some issues."

What a fascinating story that would be; especially compared to the "Guardian's" slithery anti-Israel tripe masquerading in a cheap "both sides" gown.

Some other surprises: Tamer Nafer is hardly "alienated" from Israel. He and Palestinian rappers like him make concert tours of Israeli cities, performing before large crowds of Arabs and Jews. But as a resident of Israel he is regarded as a traitor by Palestinians outside it, and is unable to arrange a tour of Egypt and Jordan. The only place he's truly "alienated" is in the Arab world.