Book Review: Three Weeks and Six Days Memoir

The 28th of Iyar
Rabbi Emanuel Feldman
Feldheim Publishers, Jerusalem, 176 pgs.

As Atlanta's Rabbi Emanuel Feldman was winding down his sabbatical year from Congregation Beth Jacob as a lecturer at Israel's Bar-Ilan University at the end of the 1966-1967 academic year, residing in Bnei Brak with his wife and four children, the events that would lead to the Six Days War were being wound up.  The journal he kept of those few weeks, first published in 1968, has been reissued and presents us with a gem of an insight into the events of that time.

This is not a diplomatic history; nor an analysis of the military moves and neither is it a sociological commentary.  It is a daily ordinary record of what Rabbi Feldman's life was.  And because of its simplicity in being a reflection of what an "ordinary citizen" was going through, it is a book that succeeds.

His students leave classes for reserve duty. His brother who has made aliyah attempts to convince him to leave. The conversations in synagogues and the broadcasts from the radio are all laid out as they happened with almost no post-production hindsight. It is as it happened.

Being the result of a Rabbi's pen, the book resonates, of course, with the religiously observant public. Virtually all the personalities whose voices, to varying extents, we hear, are all from the non-secular world.  This is limiting, in one aspect, but is unique in another for as far as I can recollect, the concerns, thoughts and actions of this 15% of Israel's populace at the time is largely missing.  The religious Zionist voice was also censored out of the famous "The Seventh Day" compilation of reflections on the war by the combat soldiers who liberated the Old City and fought the Arab armies on three fronts. And his living in Bnei Brak also allows us a peek at the ultra-Orthodox community.

What I did find interesting was that while Feldman reports the contents of radio broadcasts and what he hears in the streets and the synagogues, his reminisces contain very little of the politics at the time. And to the extent that there is such discussions of politics it appears to be quite shallow.

It is claimed that the National Unity Government coalition formed on June 1, the Thursday before the war, was a result of a groundswell of public opinion increasingly becoming quite unsatisfied with Prime Minister Levy Eshkol's leadership. There is passing mention of the intra-political tensions but I found little in the book to confirm the view that Eshkol yielded to the need to shore up public confidence in a firm way. 

The name Menachem Begin doesn’t appear. Was Feldman unaware of the significance of his cooption to the government and his coming in from the political wilderness? Was it not seen to be important? Was the event not reflected in the news he was hearing? As this is a second edition, he could have added a more complete and reflective chapter to deal with this and other issues.

Many pages are devoted to a tisch on the Shabbat at the Vishnitz Chassidic court as well as elucidations of Zoharic texts supposedly connected to the period than other histories but this certainly reflects the religious audience for whom the book is intended foremost as well as Feldman’s own milieu.

On the other hand, the book serves to inform us what was actually known and discussed by the man-in-the-street. Rumors from the political establishment, the army, international news and more abound in its pages. As such, it serves as a genuine resonator of what was the atmosphere within his sphere of contacts and that is an important contribution to the history of those three weeks and six days.

One linguistic comment: on page 27, I would have employed the word "pharmacy" instead of drugstore which, as an American, I would understand to also include a snack shop, especially malteds. 

^

On The "Other Zionism", A Book Review

On the heroism of the "Other" Zionism

Rodney Benjamin and David Cebon, The Forgotten Zionist, The Life of Solomon (Sioma) Yankelevitch Jacobi, Gefen Publishing House, 2012, 248 pp.

A book review by Yisrael Medad

There are four main methodologies to writing history. The recorder of history can concentrate on the ideas and cultural trends that moved the period and people or he can retell the events and provide an interpretation. He can highlight a certain crucial event or an institution and explain the results or its development. He can also select a person and through him and around him, relate what happened and perhaps why.

This book, while essentially a biography, makes a contribution to the growing field of the “other” Zionist history, that of the Revisionist movement led by Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky to who Solomon Jacobi was an assistant, secretary and close friend. It is a history of the fourth type.

I think we can agree with the words of Jabotinsky himself, in his graveside eulogy of Jacobi, and apply them to the book: "this is not a biography, nor is it a history of the Revisionist and New-Zionist movement: I am only trying to sketch a character" (p. 215).  Indeed, just a Jabotinsky was sketching Jacobi's character, the authors, quite successfully, make an important contribution in the sketching of the character of the nationalist camp in Zionism in the years leading up to the creation of Israel.  They have, in their book, brought the "Other Zionist" into focus, even clearer.

The “Other Zionist” is the young Betari who was refused entry into the Yishuv because the Eretz-Yisrael Offices that oversaw immigration schedules defined his training as non-Halutzic with no true “pioneering” value. He is the Revisionist party activist who was excluded from representation in official Zionist bodies and could not benefit from funds collected from the Jewish people to achieve Jewish national goals. He is the Irgunist, opposing the restraint policy of the Hagana in the late 1930s and attempting to assure security for the residents of the Mandate while Arab terror rages unchecked.

There is much to be learned by the younger generation in this volume. Personal heroism, unbelievable commitment to an ideological cause, determined persistence in the face of nigh insurmountable odds and above all, the disunity in the Zionist camp, the so debilitating battles over, what was in the end, such a useless expenditure of energy and time while the Arabs killed, the British betrayed and Hitler was gaining confidence to implement his extermination plans.

In addition to the main subject matter, there are additional gems of minor history. One media-related item noted on p. 132 is that Michael Haskel, a Jabotinsky supporter, was intent upon obtaining a 49% share in the Palestine Post which, as we read on p. 166, Chaim Weizmann sought to prevent, aghast that the paper would come under “complete and intransigent Revisionist control”. Where would the Jerusalem Post be today but if that ownership bid had been successful. On p. 202, it seems that one of those with whom Jacobi negotiated to obtain boats for the clandestine immigration was none other than Aristotle Onnasis. It was in the Jacobi kitchen, while his wife, Edna was away, that David Ben-Gurion fried an egg, the act that pushed AB Yehoshua to write his new play, Will the Two Go Together?

While the book is very much welcomed, nevertheless, it is unfortunate that a copyeditor with a strong background in the history of that period did not review the final draft before publication. There are a few errors that could have been avoided.

Most embarrassing, I think, is a major error of geography, a central element to the political program of the Revisionists regarding the area to become the Jewish state. On p. 51, the authors write that Transjordan is now Jordan and that in 1922, Britain had reduced “Palestine to the tiny area that lies between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean”. However, in chapter 4, entitled “Palestine on Both Sides of the Jordan”, they seem to lose direction. On p.41, they claim the home of “the tribes of Reuven, Gad and [properly half of] Menasseh” was in “areas on the western side of the Jordan”. It was not but rather it was on the eastern side of the river, in Gilead as contained in Numbers 32. 

On p. 162, they quote Jacobi mentioning an “Arab demonstration on January the 16^th” but we do not know what this was. In fact, it was called on the first day of Id El-Fitr to demand the cancellation of the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate authorities were severely criticized for permitting the agitation even after daggers had been discovered and that political designs and “religious exultation”, as the Palestine Post reported, were being dangerously combined. In a footnote on p. 160, the date of the founding of Betar is 1922 although on p. 23, the correct year, 1923, is recorded. On p. 154, Abrasha Stavsky’s death is noted as June 21, 1948 but he died on June 22. 

Further down the page, the authors write that the Irgunists, despite three weeks earlier having been incorporated into the IDF, “now defied demands from Ben-Gurion that the arms be handed over to the IDF. This is much more problematic as it ignores the weeks of discussions and the agreement that had been reached for bringing in the arms and that the ultimatum to hand over the arms came from a senior IDF officer who Menachem Begin assumed was unaware of the arranged that had been achieved.

On p. 67, they write that the phrase, “a home for the Jews” from the Balfour Declaration was also used in the wording of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine”. Actually, the phrase is “a national home for the Jewish people”. In the Mandate preamble there is another phrase included: “recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country”.

On p. 195, the authors record that in 1934, Jabotinsky complained to Jacobi that he thought the Revisionists were "lagging behind" other Zionist groups in facilitating the immigration of Jews into Palestine.  Actually, after 1934, it wasn't until 1938 that the Mapai-linked Hechalutz youth movement began anew illegal immigration via boats.

On p. 193, in a footnote, they inexplicably credit Lechi, the Stern Group, for the King David Hotel explosion.  It was an Irgun operation.

On p. 188, the authors seem to imply that Jacobi, in letters to the Jewish Chronicle in late 1937, asserted that the NZO was not responsible for reprisal attacks against Arabs in Palestine.  This is technically correct, of course, but nevertheless, the Irgun members who were carrying out the attacks were very much part of the Jabotinsky family and later, in 1938, Jabotinsky explicitly gave instructions to increase the attacks even to the extent of planning an armed invasion of the mandate territory and seizing power from the British.

On p. 187, the date for the Tel Hai attack when Trumpeldor and 7 other comrades were killed by Arabs is noted as 1919 in footnote 10.  This is incorrect.  Tel Hai fell in March 1920.

There is one incongruity that I think should have been addressed by the authors.  The tribulations of Jabotinsky and Jacobi in trying to administer a proper bureaucratic apparatus, including assistants and secretaries, office rentals and such in Paris and later London with reliable budget are referred to again and again.  And yet, on p. 209, a description of Jacobi's Bucharest operation informs us that he had a suite of rooms at his disposal, typists, telephone operators and offices.  How did this come about?  Was it a special budget or the urgency of the emigration that resolved the long-suffering crisis of the Jabotinsky movement?

I understand that one of the authors died just as the book was going to print and perhaps this disrupted the final stages of publication.

But, despite all these, they do not detract from the expression – and lesson – of the true heroic spirit of Zionism that Jacobi displayed.

Jabotinsky in a Book Review

From Joshua Cohen’s review of THE INSTRUCTIONS, a novel of 1030 pages by Adam Levin

“The Instructions” purports to be a document called “The Instructions,” word-processed by one Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, then “translated and retranslated from the Hebrew and the English by Eliyahu of Brooklyn and Emmanuel Liebman,”...This fat tablet is partly a theologico-political tract, and mostly a chronicle of four days in the life of a junior high schooler in suburban Illinois.

Gurion, master of the portentous name, is a misbehaved 10-year-old, expelled from various Chicago-­area yeshivas and now condemned to an experimental disciplinary program at Aptakisic Junior High referred to as the Cage. Oppressed by a one-handed Australian detention monitor named Victor Botha, Gurion’s Cage miscreants eventually form a beginner’s militia, aimed at overthrowing the school administration and establishing a new Jewish holiday celebrating something Gurion calls “perfect justice.” When the genuinely religious Eliyahu enters their incorrigible ranks as a transfer student from Brooklyn — unlike Gurion, Eliyahu’s a frummer, who wears a fedora and tzitzit — the Cage’s rebellion boils into an open war less “The Breakfast Club” (A.D. 1985) and more the Bar Kokhba revolt (A.D. 132-35).

Gurion’s your typical Midwestern prodigy, with multilingual fluency and super­human strength, his mother a retired Israeli Defense Forces commando of Ethiopian descent, his father a civil rights attorney reviled publicly (but respected at home) for defending the First Amendment rights of local neo-Nazis. This prepubescent Jabotinsky also has something of the rabbi in him, as he’s able to command in a single breath assorted items of Judaic arcana: biblical anecdotes, Talmudic responsa, Hasidic homiletics. Yet one of the most promising students ever to grace an Illinois Solomon Schechter School can’t keep from fighting others: Gurion’s as bellicose as most anti-Semites think Israel is, and if you’d agree with them then you’d be his enemy, too. Despite the daily self-­defense demands of his stridently expressed identity, Gurion still finds time to make two classic blunders that keep the story moving. He falls in love with a Unitarian, his redheaded classmate Eliza June Watermark, then takes pep-rally hostages whose release requires the negotiation tactics of Philip Roth. (Literally so: Roth makes a Mosaic cameo and, as usual, has the best lines: “Boychik, we’ve got very little time here, and what I want to tell you is you should let these kids go.”)

As in the Talmud, there isn’t much plot, just water-fountain tattle, summaries, lists and, interspersed, charts and strange doodled maps that only distract...

...Unfortunately the illuminations of “The Instructions” aren’t the three millenniums of Jewish literature in a host of tongues but rather the very recent language of the American novel: hyperactive, hyper-reactive. Just as Titus, who destroyed Jerusalem’s Second Temple, was bad for the Jews, so is David Foster Wallace — Levin’s tutelary goy. Nebuchadnezzar, who decimated the First Temple, was said to have the body of a lion, the wings of an eagle but the head of a man, and Wallace wrote Nebuchadnezzarian sentences: similarly motley, mutant. Levin’s attempt to ape Wallace’s caffeinated chatter, to mimic that ferocious power, is unseemly and disastrous — an instance, almost, of a man playing God...

^

Aghast But Reverent?

Does this bit intrigue you?

As the Coen brothers did in “A Serious Man,” Ms. Goldstein takes an aghast yet reverent view of the Jewish culture that gives her novel its best ideas and jokes. (One dislikable literary critic is given the extremely unflattering name Nathan Paskudnyak, and the so-called International Style architecture at Frankfurter is said to owe less to Le Corbusier than Hadassah.) The book becomes most deeply immersed in Judaism when it uses flashbacks to explain Cass’s relationship with his grandiose mentor, Jonas Elijah Klapper (mother’s name: Klepfish).

Does this?

Klapper is a tyrannical pedant who loves alliteration (he once taught a course called “The Manic, the Mantic and the Mimentic”), expounds on Kabbalistic arcana with a level of detail Dan Brown would envy, and leads this novel to the place where its heart lies: a Hasidic community in the Hudson River Valley. This setting is a place that sounds very like New City, N.Y., where Cass would be living had his mother not left the fold.

When Klapper, Cass and Roz, an old flame of Cass’s who is now an anthropologist, pay a visit to this community, they meet an astonishing little boy whose unmistakable genius exerts a strange force throughout the book. This boy is one of Ms. Goldstein’s walking philosophical constructs, insofar as his destiny will be determined by the Hasidic community unless he insists on independence.

And does this?

give Ms. Goldstein a philosophical case to make about potato kugel, Jewish cuisine and Kabbalistic numerology, and she really does soar. It is only half-surprising to find that her background research includes a scholarly article titled “Holy Kugel: the Sanctification of Ashkenazic Ethnic Foods in Hasidim.”

From here.


Well, then read a novel about a Hassidic child who is a mathematical genius and the struggle between the secular and religious worlds for his soul. 36 ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD: A Work of Fiction by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein


Here:

Azarya, a 6-year-old Hasidic mathematical prodigy of transcendent genius who is intended to succeed his father, the rebbe of the Valdener Hasidim. Insulated from the outside world and without benefit of any secular education, Azarya has independently discovered the concept of prime numbers—which he calls maloychim (angels)—and has arrived at the proof (among others) that there is no largest prime.

The otherworldliness of Azarya’s genius and the path that his life will ultimately take serve to bring a kind of resolution (not to be confused with a solution) to the central mystery of human existence that Seltzer grapples with while gazing into the frozen Charles River in the book’s first chapter:

Here it is, then: the sense that existence is just such a tremendous thing, one comes into it, astonishingly, here one is . . . one doesn’t know how, one doesn’t know why . . . and all that one knows is that one is a part of it, a considered and conscious part of it, generated and sustained in existence in ways one can hardly comprehend . . . and one wants to live in a way that at least begins to do justice to it . . . and . . . to live one’s life in a way commensurate with the privilege of being a part of and conscious of the whole reeling glorious infinite sweep. 

That resolution comes to him in the book’s final chapter, when the star atheist realizes that “to be human is to inhabit our contradictions . . . to be unable to find a way of reconciling the necessary and the impossible.” In the face of that primal inability, and of the “brutality of incomprehensibility that assaults us from all sides . . . we try, as best as we can, to do justice to the tremendousness of our improbable existence.” Like the asymptotic relation in which a straight line approaches a curve to which it will be tangent only at infinity, “we live, as best we can, for ourselves, or who will live for us? And we live, as best we can, for others, otherwise what are we?”

When Extreme Left Attacks Moderate Left

From here, on, among two other books, this one - The Myths of Liberal Zionism by Yitzhak Laor, Verso: -

...Yitzhak Laor’s “The Myths of Liberal Zionism” also takes issue with the ways in which Israel becomes fantasy; however, whereas Schalit’s book is characterized by a deep empathy and humanity that seek to understand how we got into this mess, Laor, primarily a left-wing protest poet, offers an angry and uncompromising polemic. He seeks to demonstrate how liberal versions of Israeli Zionism seek to align Israel with the West and how they look for approval from the Western intelligentsia for the Zionist project. As he says, “There is something in modern-day Israeli culture that emphasizes more than ever a fantasy for Western homogeneity, side by side with a lack of will — or lack of ability — to cease to live by the sword.” The liberal peace camp, while it appears to offer compromise, is, for Laor, hypocritical in its willingness to perpetuate the Zionist causes of the conflict.

Laor’s main targets in his book are Amos Oz, David Grossman and A.B. Yehoshua. His argument is that while these writers are feted in Europe as courageous members of the peace camp, their work is ultimately an attempt to flatter European intellectuals’ deep-seated Islamophobia. Laor is certainly right to draw attention to the less-than-progressive aspects of Oz and the others that are often ignored by their European admirers, such as Oz’s support for the 2006 Lebanon War and (initially at least) for Operation Cast Lead. Ultimately, though, Laor’s problem is that these writers are Zionists and for him, Zionism is unacceptable, particularly when masked as liberalism.

(Kippah tip: BT)

My Book Review of "Major Farran's Hat"

Not yet up online, Here's the link

but my book review of "Major Farran's Hat" is in the print edition of the Jerusalem Post Weekly Magazine today.

Here's the version I submitted (some slight editorial alterations were made):

Cesarani, David
MAJOR FARAN'S HAT:
Murder, Scandal and Britain's War Against Jewish Terrorism 1945-1948
William Heinmann, London, 2009
20 Pounds Sterling


Exceptionally Good; Exceptionally Bad

By Yisrael Medad


The outlines of the story David Cesarani unfolds are not complicated. On May 6, 1947, teenager Alexander ("Haim") Rubovitz approached a rendezvous with Yael, his liason in the Lechi underground, with a packet of leaflets to be distributed. He never arrived. He was snatched by a special counter-terrorist unit recently formed by the British command of the Palestine Police Force, presumably taken to Wadi Kelt, tortured and killed by blows to his head with a rock. The killer was Roy Farran whose hat was found at the kidnapping scene, Ussishkin Street. His crime, which made world headlines, was covered up and he gained an acquittal at his court martial. Lechi took revenge by sending him a book bomb the following year that was opened at the Farran household outside Wolverhampton by his younger brother who was killed. Farran died in 2006 denying his role and never revealing where the body was buried.

Major Roy Farran was a commando, imperial soldier, buccaneer and adventurer. He was brave, flamboyant, swashbuckling and assuredly heroic.

He was also a philandering lady's man, a frequently inebriated lout, at times a ill-disciplined commander and, most horrifically, a cold-blooded torturer and a killer of a defenseless sixteen-year old. He was exceptionally good and he was exceptionally bad.

David Cesarani has written a wonderful book, riveting, persuasive, based on (lucky for him) newly released 60-year old archival material as well as a wealth of other books, documents and newspaper reports that were disconnected and lost. He zeroes in on his subject and leaves the reader without a doubt of the guilt of Farran. Nevertheless, he inexplicably gets dates wrong, leaves unfortunate typos uncorrected, fails to include crucial and readily available archival material, skips over important subject matter, seems to be uncomfortable with Hebrew sources and has a nasty habit of using '[sic]' pedantically ad nauseum. He is exceptionally good and he is exceptionally bad.

A Research Professor could and should do better than to allow silly items to slip through a book loaded down with references to Public Record Office papers, books, academic papers, stashed-away memoirs and personal correspondence of British officials and soldiers. He writes, p. 96, that Rubovitz was tied to a tree but his source, the Hadingham Report, does not include this fanciful situation. He refers to the activities of Rabbi Baruch Korff, pp. 149-151, but fails to acknowledge Korff's own 1953 book, "Flight from Fear" which reproduces hundreds of documents on the period which, incidentally, can be found on an internet site. He suggests that Chaim Weizmann (p. 14) 1Z 2led no party of his ownS when, in truth, he was the head of the General Zionist faction. On p. 185, he records the day of the UN Partition resolution approval as being November 28 when it was the 29th. He records the date, p. 57, of an Irgun attack in Tel Aviv when flamethrowers were used to set alight parked vehicles as January 7, 1947 when it was January 3. Was Lechi actually "delighted" (p. 23) to assassinate British Mandatory officials and security personnel? Any other spelling of Alexander Rubowitz's name, despite the fact that it being of European origin and in Hebrew phonetics could be spelled a number of ways, Cesarani tirelessly and annoyingly appends a [sic] to it perhaps a dozen times.

But worse is his interpretive prose. It is here that Cesarani injects an unsubstantiated political and ideological backdrop to the unfolding events in Mandate Palestine, one that is highly subjective and biased.

Cesarani, after misleading the reader into thinking the land of Israel was empty ("forced dispersion of the Jews and depopulation of the land"), asserts that "since the 1880s Jews had started emigrating to Palestine from countries where they suffered discrimination and persecution" (p. 11). That formula is historically false and reads like it was lifted from some Arab propagandistic manual. In every single century since 135 CE and the failure of Bar Kochba s revolt, Jews returned to the Land of Israel in small and larger numbers and the continuum of a Jewish presence despite the conquests and persecution in the Holy Land is a fact. To credit British involvement in restoring to the Jews their national homeland in such a limited fashion does a disservice to Lord Shaftesbury, Laurence Oliphant and a major social-religious movement of the 19th century with masses of adherents not to mention previous support in Holland or Ezra Stiles in the United States. The British Government discussed Jewish restoration in 1840 and in 1818, President John Adams wrote, "I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation" .

Even the position of Zionism s international legal justification is faulted by Cesarani. Cesarani skips over the February 1919 Versailles War Conference to which draft proposals were made including "The High Contracting Parties recognize the historic title of the Jewish people to Palestine and the right of Jews to reconstitute in Palestine their National Home" and which detailed the historic title of Jews to their land. So, too, he eliminates the January 1919 Faisal-Weizmann Agreement.

Returning to the Rubovitz affair, Cesarani could have done more investigating the historical record and providing his readers with a more comprehensive work. What was the identity of "X" who passed on a detailed letter, p. 8, to the Rubovitz family on what happened to their son? Why was Franciscan monk Eugene Hoade, the Roman Catholic chaplain to the Palestine Police Force, not even mentioned by Cesarani? He might have hidden Farran during his second escape and even help dispose of the body. Why does he fail to mention the Acre Prison breakout on May 4, 1947, two days prior to Rubovitz s kidnapping, as a possible motive for the perverse wrath of Farran and his fellow policemen? What happened to the members of the ‘Q Squads other than Farran and were they contacted to elicit further information? Why did the most senior British government officials who knew the truth keep mum for decades? Was Rubovitz s snatch truly coincidental or had there been a tip-off about his whereabouts as he had been under Hagana surveillance for over a year? And was Rubovitz the sole victim of a snatch-torture-murder scenario or were there additional victims as Farran himself claimed in an intelligence document I have read?

At the present, a detective, Steve Rambam, is seeking information on the whereabouts of the remains of Alexander Rubovitz. If he is successful, then the sorry tale will truly be brought to closure and with it, perhaps further details of the comprehensive historical record.

And What Book Is President Obama Reading?

Leafing (yes, actually physically touching paper, turning over the pages and holding the newspaper up) through the International Herald Tribune Israel edition, I spotted a book review which informed me of:

Eduardo Galeano, the lifelong political and literary activist recently brought to the American public eye when Hugo Chávez gave President Obama a copy of “Open Veins of Latin America,”...His political stance is one of consistent moral horror and his idiom the plain and sometimes primitivist voice of his native Uruguay...The literary form Galeano has created in his many books is unique: little narratives and descriptive vignettes — here elegantly translated by Mark Fried — that might range from a paragraph to a dozen pages and that progress with a powerful hypnotic rhythm.

And of what does Galeano write, among other topics?

This:

AT times the entries are simply testimonial...Elsewhere they are poetic. And sometimes they can be uncomfortably polemical: a brief history of the Holocaust (a “colossal butchery organized by Hitler”) concludes that “hunting Jews has always been a European sport. Now the Palestinians, who never played it, are paying the bill.”

Is the elision of the complex victimization of the Palestinians by Arab states a necessary consequence of this lapidary form?

Here's the original Spanish of that excerpted quotation:

La vieja Europa, tan capaz de belleza y de perversidad, derrama alguna que otra lágrima, mientras secretamente celebra esta jugada maestra. Porque la cacería de judíos fue siempre una costumbre europea, pero desde hace medio siglo esa deuda histórica está siendo cobrada a los palestinos, que también son semitas y que nunca fueron, ni son, antisemitas. Ellos están pagando, en sangre contante y sonante, una cuenta ajena.

And in translation:

Old Europe, so capable of war and malignancy, sheds a tear or so, while secretly celebrating this master move. Because hunting the Jews was always a European custom, but since half a century that historical debt is being paid for by the Palestinians who also are Semites and who never were, nor are, anti-Semites. They are paying, in blood money, the price of others.

The paragraphs before that read:

...The Israeli army, the most modern and sophisticated in the world, knows who it kills. It does not kill by error. It kills by horror. The civilian victims are called collateral damages, according to the dictionary of the other imperial wars. In Gaza, three of every ten collateral damages are children. And the maimed add up to thousands, victims of human mutilation that the war industry is successfully rehearsing in this operation of ethnic cleansing.

And as always, always the same: in Gaza, a hundred for one. For each hundred Palestinians killed, one Israeli.

Dangerous people –warning of another bombardment – in charge of the enormous manipulative media that invite us to think that each Israeli life is worth as much as a hundred Palestinian lives...

...Before the tragedy of Gaza, the worldwide hypocrisy shows up once again. As ever, the indifference, the vacuous discourses, the empty declarations, the high sounding declamations, the ambiguous postures are a tribute to sacred impunity.

Before the tragedy of Gaza, the Arab countries wash their hands off. As always. And, as ever, the European countries wring their hands...

So, if you ever wonder why Obama exhibits less-than-pro-Israel sentiments in his rhetoric and even worse, offers policies that can be inimical to Israel, you can thank...Hugo Chavez.

My Comment on A Book Review at the London Times

Here:-

Michael Chabon has another opportunity to write his "Jews with Swords" book. All he has to do is to review the true story of a Jewish revolt in the Persian exile, later Iran, under Mar Zutra II. He led the revolt against the fanatic Kobad the Zenduk (488-531) in 502, establishing a Jewish state in Babylon with Mahoza as its capital. It lasted seven years. Eventually his army was overcome and he and his grandfather, Mar Hananiah, were crucified on the bridge of Mahoza. Many Jewish leaders were forced to flee and their institutions were closed.

Yisrael Medad, Shiloh, Israel

Almost Balanced Book Review

BT sent me this review of the polemic of Akiva Eldar and Idit Zartal penned by Adam LeBor, "LORDS OF THE LAND" in which he writes:

This may be an angry, embittered book, but the two authors are well-informed experts. Zertal is a noted Israeli historian, who now teaches at the University of Basel, and Eldar is an influential columnist for the left-wing daily, Ha’aretz. [and they are ideolgocially opposed to the book's subject with no objectivity]

“Lords of the Land” is richly detailed. Nonetheless, it would have benefited from wider context and discussion. There is a case for the defense, not made here. Are the settlements an inevitable consequence of Zionism, for example, or an aberration, spawned by the specific circumstances of 1967? Or something of both? Israel then was a long way from being today’s military powerhouse. It fought a war for survival in which victory was not assured: mass graves were prepared in public parks; hotels were turned into first-aid stations. Post-1967 triumphalism may have had tragic consequences, but it was probably also inevitable. Any state surrounded by enemies will seek strategic depth.

It is also curious, especially considering the authors’ leftist perspective, that the Palestinians barely feature in their book, other than as passive victims of rapacious Zionist settlers and expansionist Israeli governments. The Palestinians have been greatly wronged, but they have also had choices available to them and too often chose badly. Land grab aside, the security fence was built after a spate of barbarous suicide bombings and continues to prevent further attacks. When Yassir Arafat rejected Ehud Barak’s offer at Camp David in 2000 he turned down what was probably the best chance of meaningful statehood.

Indeed, the entire history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of missed opportunities...