Monday, January 28, 2013

The DiploMad 2.0: "What Difference Does it Make?"

The DiploMad 2.0: "What Difference Does it Make?": Diplomad says Hillary Clinton got away with murder in her Congressional testimony about Benghazi

To the matter at hand. There is so much wrong with what Hillary said that I can only cover a few points.  Her whole attitude was one of taking a victory lap. She is leaving the State Department, and she ran out the clock on  Benghazi. Her phrase "At this point" sums it up. The steam has gone out of the issue, and the tactic of delay, obfuscation, and deception has worked; the administration has eluded responsibility for a major foreign policy disaster of criminal proportions. They did it before with "Fast and Furious" and they have done it again. State's Accountability Review Board report, of course, was a whitewash; it was a carefully worded truce between Chicago and Foggy Bottom. It avoided dealing with the fundamentals of the Benghazi disaster, i.e., the foreign policy of this administration, and, in exchange, the bureaucrats were not held responsible for the decisions they took in implementing that foreign policy. Nobody was to blame for anything. 

As a lawyer, Hillary must know how absurd her line "what is the difference?" sounds. Here we have an administration that insists on treating acts of terror against Americans as criminal matters, e.g., call in the FBO to "the crime scene," yet here we have the Secretary of State saying it really makes no difference what motivated the "criminals" or whether the "crime" was premeditated and planned in conjunction with others. More important, however, if it made no difference why did the administration send out that horrid political hack Susan Rice to lie about it all? To blame it on a video? Where was Hillary? Why wasn't she out front telling us all on the Sunday talk shows that it made "no difference?"     Why have Rice lie?

It, of course, "does make a difference." If the attack was a well-planned one, who planned it? Were any foreign states involved? Why didn't our intel pick it up? If it was a spontaneous event, why didn't it occur to anybody at State or in the Embassy in Libya that the date of September 11 was a particularly propitious one for such "spontaneous" events? Why was Stevens in Benghazi on September 11? Why was that facility still open when the security situation in the city had been deteriorating rapidly? The questions just pour forth; you can think of dozens more.

I have written many times before about the idiocy of our policy in Libya and North Africa (see my archives), and won't repeat all that. Let me just say that hearings did not explore the biggest issue of all. What did the administration think would happen in North Africa once Mubarak and Qaddafi were removed?

Peter Van Buren on the Fate of John Kirakou

Peter Van Buren on the Fate of John Kirakou on We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People by Peter Van Buren:

...
The one man in the whole archipelago of America’s secret horrors facing prosecution is former CIA agent John Kiriakou. Of the untold numbers of men and women involved in the whole nightmare show of those years, only one may go to jail.
And of course, he didn’t torture anyone.
The charges against Kiriakou allege that in answering questions from reporters about suspicions that the CIA tortured detainees in its custody, he violated the Espionage Act, once an obscure World War I-era law that aimed at punishing Americans who gave aid to the enemy. It was passed in 1917 and has been the subject of much judicial and Congressional doubt ever since. Kiriakou is one of six government whistleblowers who have been charged under the Act by the Obama administration. From 1917 until Obama came into office, only three people had ever charged in this way.
The Obama Justice Department claims the former CIA officer “disclosed classified information to journalists, including the name of a covert CIA officer and information revealing the role of another CIA employee in classified activities.”
The charges result from a CIA investigation. That investigation was triggered by a filing in January 2009 on behalf of detainees at Guantanamo that contained classified information the defense had not been given through government channels, and by the discovery in the spring of 2009 of photographs of alleged CIA employees among the legal materials of some detainees at Guantanamo. According to one description, Kiriakou gave several interviews about the CIA in 2008. Court documents charge that he provided names of covert Agency officials to a journalist, who allegedly in turn passed them on to a Guantanamo legal team. The team sought to have detainees identify specific CIA officials who participated in their renditions and torture. Kiriakou is accused of providing the identities of CIA officers that may have allowed names to be linked to photographs.
Many observers believe however that the real “offense” in the eyes of the Obama administration was quite different. In 2007, Kiriakou became a whistleblower. He went on record as the first (albeit by then, former) CIA official to confirm the use of waterboarding of al-Qaeda prisoners as an interrogation technique, and then to condemn it as torture. He specifically mentioned the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah in that secret prison in Thailand. Zubaydah was at the time believed to be an al-Qaeda leader, though more likely was at best a mid-level operative. Kiriakou also ran afoul of the CIA over efforts to clear for publication a book he had written about the Agency’s counterterrorism work. He maintains that his is instead a First Amendment case in which a whistleblower is being punished, that it is a selective prosecution to scare government insiders into silence when they see something wrong.
If Kiriakou had actually tortured someone himself, even to death, there is no possibility that he would be in trouble. John Kiriakou is staring down a long tunnel of 30 months in jail because in the national security state that rules the roost in Washington, talking out of turn about a crime has become the only possible crime.
...

Never Again
For at least six years it was the policy of the United States of America to torture and abuse its enemies or, in some cases, simply suspected enemies. It has remained a U.S. policy, even under the Obama administration, to employ “extraordinary rendition” — that is, the sending of captured terror suspects to the jails of countries that are known for torture and abuse, an outsourcing of what we no longer want to do.
Techniques that the U.S. hanged men for at Nuremburg and in post-war Japan were employed and declared lawful. To embark on such a program with the oversight of the Bush administration, learned men and women had to have long discussions, with staffers running in and out of rooms with snippets of research to buttress the justifications being so laboriously developed. The CIA undoubtedly used some cumbersome bureaucratic process to hire contractors for its torture staff. The old manuals needed to be updatedpsychiatrists consulted, military survival experts interviewed, training classes set up.
Videotapes were made of the torture sessions and no doubt DVDs full of real horror were reviewed back at headquarters. Torture techniques were even reportedly demonstrated to top officials inside the White House. Individual torturers who were considered particularly effective were no doubt identified, probably rewarded, and sent on to new secret sites to harm more people.
America just didn’t wake up one day and start slapping around some Islamic punk. These were not the torture equivalents of rogue cops. A system, a mechanism, was created. That we now can only speculate about many of the details involved and the extent of all this is a tribute to the thousands who continue to remain silent about what they did, saw, heard about, or were associated with. Many of them work now at the same organizations, remaining a part of the same contracting firms, the CIA, and the military. Our torturers.
What is it that allows all those people to remain silent? How many are simply scared, watching what is happening to John Kiriakou and thinking: not me, I’m not sticking my neck out to see it get chopped off. They’re almost forgivable, even if they are placing their own self-interest above that of their country. But what about the others, the ones who remain silent about what they did or saw or aided and abetted in some fashion because they still think it was the right thing to do? The ones who will do it again when another frightened president asks them to? Or even the ones who enjoyed doing it?
The same Department of Justice that is hunting down the one man who spoke against torture from the inside still maintains a special unit, 60 years after the end of WWII, dedicated to hunting down the last few at-large Nazis. They do that under the rubric of “never again.” The truth is that same team needs to be turned loose on our national security state. Otherwise, until we have a full accounting of what was done in our names by our government, the pieces are all in place for it to happen again. There, if you want to know, is the real horror.
...

Monday, January 14, 2013

Eliyho Matz's Persian Letter...


LET’S SAY A KADDISH…
BY: ELIHO MATZ

“The meaning of life consists in the search for the meaning of life.”
Terry Eagleton:
The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction


Jewish Biblical tradition encourages the belief in miracles.  The tradition of miracles is transplanted into Christian and Islamic beliefs, and stands as a core foundation of universal human existence. 

One of Judaism’s Biblical miracles is revealed in the story of Esther, which stems from the Jewish Persian tradition.  Jewish tradition is, in fact, heavily indebted to ancient Persian civilization.  Jewish ideas have been influenced by Persian thought ever since the Israelites were forced out of their ancient land of Israel/Canaan.  The encounter between the Israelites and the Persians captivated Jewish civilization ever since its inception twenty-five hundred years ago.  Under Persian influence, Jews developed the Bible and the Talmud between 450 BCE and 500 CE.  The relationship did not end there; it has continued into modern times.  Jewish merchants of Persian extraction roamed the planet from early times.  Iran today has a substantial Jewish minority still living in the midst of Shi’a Iran, an Islamic republic.

The settling of Jews in the Fertile Crescent around 500 BCE brought them into contact with Persian/Iranian civilization.  This early civilization of the Persians provided Judaism with its most important tenets of core Jewish beliefs.  For example, the concept of one God, central to Judaism, is an offshoot of their Zoroastrian worship.  It was during this period of influence that the Jewish Bible was initially developed as a religious literary document that undertook to explain Jewish existence in detail.  Why the Bible was written in the first place is not known, but it remains the foundation of Jewish claims to the antiquity of Jewish ancestry.  With its overtones of hatred toward Egypt, the Bible definitely reflected the political tendency of the Jews to accommodate the historical Persian animosity toward the ancient Egyptians.  The Persians, after a long series of wars with the Pharaonic Egyptians, finally conquered the land of the Pharaohs in the year 525 BCE. 

Politics is an ancient/modern game of options, possibilities and win-or-lose situations.  According to Biblical tradition, the Jews who were permitted to return to ancient Israel with their leaders Zerubbabel, Ezra and Nehemiah, were granted the privilege by decree of the Persian King Cyrus.  I am sure that many serious historians have been puzzled by this decree.  Jews, since that decree, have celebrated it as another miracle in their history.   But, of course, to the politically minded person, the question is, “What was the Tit-for-Tat?  I would guess that those ancient Jews paid for their permit to return to their ancient land: it is possible that the Jews were actually the mercenary soldiers that the Persians needed for their ongoing campaigns to defeat the Egyptians, and thus the privilege to return to the ancient land was paid by military service.  Some of those Jewish soldiers ended up at Elephantine (Yev) in Upper Egypt, or what is today the place of the gigantic Aswan Dam.  This community of border military police is well known today in Jewish historical circles.  So, after all, there was a definite Tit-for-Tat:  the Persians benefited from the Jewish warriors; and the Jews were rewarded by being granted residence in ancient Canaan, as well as the status of privileged  citizens of the Persian Empire.

The Jewish warrior tradition did not end there.  Rather, it continued to reveal itself in the Maccabean revolt against the Greeks, as well as in the revolt against the Romans, of course with catastrophic results.  The worship of warlike people continues today within the Israeli Nation, where the military has been an inspiration as well as a steady source of Israeli politicians. 

         The second incident seen as a miracle in the Persian context comes in the Biblical Book of Esther.  A beautiful Jewish girl is sacrificed for whatever reason, but, to put it in elegant English, the King was obviously  looking for sex.  The interaction between the beautiful Jewish woman and the Persian King led to saving the Jews from extinction.  The moral of the story is, “Don’t mess with us Jews.”  Of course, that miracle was just a miracle, and not an indication of real politics -- Jews prefer to follow miracles. 

In the context of the more than fifteen-hundred years of Persian-Jewish interaction, Judaism developed and thrived.  At the beginning of the early stages the Bible emerged, and later the Talmud, published in 500 CE.  As time passed, Persian Jews also learned the art of trading from the Persian merchants, and eventually, those Jews took a leading role in the East-West trade between China and the West.  In around 900 CE, in the region of Babylon (part of ancient Persia), Jews produced the first Jewish prayerbook, the Siddur.  In addition, they also published the Passover Haggadah.   Several more items of Jewish significance were produced under Persian intellectual influence.  One was the Ketubah, the Jewish matrimonial contract.  In the Talmud we are told that the purpose of the Ketubah is to make sure that it is difficult for the husband to divorce his wife.  Another was the Kaddish prayer for the dead.  Like the Ketubah, this prayer is written in Aramaic, which was the lingua franca of the Persian Empire.  Also, another important prayer written in Aramaic was the Kol Nidre prayer, which begins the service for the Yom Kippur Day of Atonement. 

The Persian Jewish merchants who roamed between East and West established safe and secure stops between China and Europe.  They reached these Jewish safe-havens of Bukhara and other cities via the Khazarian Empire, and thus this passage helped lay the path for the introduction of Judaism to the future Khazarian converts to Judaism.  These merchants’ activities were critical for their introduction of both business and religion to the communities along their route.    Jewish traders continued to roam between East and West for the next few hundred years, until they were later replaced by Italian merchants, one of whom was Marco Polo.  Shakespeare’s play “The Merchant of Venice” is an expression of that change.  It is no surprise that Marco Polo exemplified that change of trade: while visiting the Mongolian court, he used the lingua franca of the Mongolians, which was Persian [Laurence Bergreen, Marco Polo (New York: Vintage Books, 2008), pp. 135-136]. 

While the Jewish merchants carried out their East-West trade, the Yiddish language and Jewish culture were developing in full swing.  Turkic Khazaria lost its empire and what was left were the Yiddish-speaking  Khazarian Jewish converts who settled in small villages all over the former Khazarian Empire.  Their Yiddish language reveals a most interesting DNA.  For example, the word Davenin, which means “to pray,” is a critical Yiddish word whose origin is Turkic.  And there are many other indicators that show the connection between Khazaria and Yiddish Judaism.  Two other important events critical to Judaism developed because of the Persian-Jewish connection.  The first is that the entire Jewish matrimonial structure changed between the Third and Sixth centuries CE.  Suddenly, the determining force behind the “Jewishness” of children started to depend on the mother, not, as had been the ancient custom, on the father (imagine how in Biblical times we said, “B’nei Ya-akov” [Children of Jacob], but now suddenly we were saying, “Children of Rachel”).  The men who traveled from Persia to the far distances of the East and married other women, or had concubines, caused this alteration in the basic nature of Judaism.  Later, in the Tenth Century, again because of the merchants’ activities, Rabenu Gershom Meor Hagolah (in Europe) decreed that Jewish men could marry only one woman.  I would suspect that the Jewish daily prayer recited by men, “Thank God for not making me a woman,” would stem from the Jewish merchants’ activities.  So it is, to thank God for not making me a woman, because if I were I would not be able to travel on the difficult roads to bring parnuseh, wages, to support a family.  With their Far East trade, it is also possible that the Jewish merchants picked up some Chinese customs.  One example is the skullcap, or Yarmulke, a second is the practice of marking the burial place of the dead with small stones, and a third is the style of humor that is an ancient Chinese tradition to insult each other in teahouses.  For an example of this humor, one should only hear Don Rickles and many other old-style Jewish comedians!

Despite the vast span of years that have passed from ancient to modern times, the Persian people have remained on their land -- not like the Jews, who were scattered and converting communities around the world to Judaism.  The Persians went through the process of Islamization, and with it oral and written linguistic changes.  Christianity and Islam were both influenced by Jewish writings and ideas, and the Iranians adopted synthesized Persian/Jewish ideas that Judaism had recycled.  Recently, for whatever political reasons, the Iranians have chosen to create an Islamic Republic ruled by Ayatollahs.  Whether this type of political system will provide them with the tools to live in modern times, only time will tell.  In his recently published book The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran (New York: Doubleday, 2008), Hooman Majd depicts modern Iranian society in a vibrant and critical light.  It is worthwhile reading.  Despite the drastic political changes, the Iranian people are really the same as they were in ancient times: vibrant, argumentative, dreamlike, and, of course, they are waiting for their Messiah to arrive at any minute to bring them a better world.  Today’s Israeli society is likewise awaiting its Messiah, in spite of the fact that Zionism was established as a secular movement rather than a religious one.

The Jews, I mean the East European converted Jews, went through their own transitions.  Some moved to Western European countries, others at the end of the Nineteenth Century and the beginning of the Twentieth came to America, and still others, who became Zionists, moved to ancient Israel, then called Palestine and part of the Ottoman Empire.  The Twentieth Century was the most chaotic century for Jews in their three-thousand year existence as a religious civilization.  Between 1939 and 1945, millions of Jews were exterminated by the German Nazi regime.  Eastern Europe, the birthplace of Yiddish-speaking Jews, became the greatest graveyard for them.  Historians are still trying to figure out exactly how that happened.

In the Holocaust, we did not miraculously have a Queen Esther to defend or protect the Jews.  As far as the protective Jewish God, we can consult Elie Wiesel where that God was (in his book Night, he himself tries to figure this out).  As perhaps the most prominent Auschwitz survivor, his persona has become “psychological” help for Jews, but he has also joined the ranks of many historians and others who have failed to contribute in a more pertinent way to dealing historically, philosophically or politically with the Holocaust events.  His writing and thought does not lead me to be inspired.  Between 1882-1948, the Zionist leaders in Palestine developed a survival kit for the future Israelis.  During the Holocaust years, they did not deviate from this focus, and the leading Zionist leaders in Palestine did not engage in any great effort to save European Jews.  Worse, continuing in a failed effort, Ben Gurion came short of leading the new Israeli nation on the path to a constitutional democracy: an Israeli constitution was never written.  Consequently, “Israeli law” is as liquid as olive oil.  Try to walk on two feet on a floor sprayed with olive oil, and see what kind of miracles will happen to you!   It is my firm belief that the absence of an Israeli constitution is at the root of the cause of all Israeli political troubles inside or outside the country.  No, no, I do not think Israelis yet have plans to write a constitution.           

A perhaps more pertinent issue in this essay is the future of America’s Jews, and its non-representative organizations.  Tony Judt, in his autobiography, expresses this observation of American Jews: “Many American Jews are sadly ignorant of their religion, culture, traditional languages, or history.  But they do know about Auschwitz, and that suffices” [Tony Judt, The Memory Chalet (New York: Penguin Books,2010), p. 202].  The recitation of the Jewish Kaddish prayer on American Jews can start now -- I am not the first American Jew to suggest that idea.  During the Holocaust, Chaim Greenberg, in his essay called “Bankrupt” suggested a similar idea in response to the inaction of American Jewish leadership during the Holocaust.  A few weeks ago, towards the end of 2012, the NY Times, the newspaper of record, reported the announcement that the Washington, DC, Holocaust museum is marking its twentieth anniversary.  One should pay attention to the statistical data cited: “As of Aug.1 [2012], according to the museum, it has drawn more than 34.1 million visitors, about 90 percent of them non-Jewish, and 34 percent of them school-age children” (NYT, Dec 11, 2012, p. B-4).  By what statistical method did this museum arrive at these numbers?  And what is the use of these statistics, unless to show that Jews are simply not interested in visiting such a place.  The reason for the establishment of this museum, or others like it, in the United States is a mystery to me.  If the museums are established as an “insurance policy” to safeguard the future of Jews and Judaism, then I think they are misleading themselves.  What educational values do they offer?  It is frustrating.  Shouldn’t they be in Europe?  For example, in Paris, or in Vienna, or in some minor cities where the Europeans can look at themselves and try to remember what they did to Jews. 

In 1979 at Yeshiva University in New York, I published my Master’s thesis, “The Response of American Jewry and Its Representative Organizations Between November 24, 1942, and April 19, 1943, to Mass Killing of Jews in Europe”.  The impetus for my choosing this topic came when Dr. David S. Wyman, a my former professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, was in the final phases of his important book on America’s behavior during the Holocaust.  His greatest academic difficulty in those days was how to enter into the archives of Jewish organizations; most of them were closed to him.  I, however, was able to gain access and carry out the research that he was unable to do there.  I examined the papers of most Jewish organizations that had offices in NY City.  While working on my MA project, I also met Hillel Kook (a.k.a. Peter Bergson) and Samuel Merlin, two heroic but tragic individuals who during the days of the Holocaust raised hell in the US on behalf of European Jews.  The Jewish people, I mean the Jew in the street, supported them, but not the leadership of American Jews.  Put off by their outspoken and radical methods, the totality of American Jewish organizational leadership wanted them deported, or at least jailed (the files in the FBI indicate this clearly).  One of the great achievements of these two men during WWII was that they were instrumental in helping to bring about the creation of the War Refugee Board (WRB).  In truth, it was not exactly what Mr. Bergson and his allies in the US Congress had envisioned: they did not ask for an agency for refugees, but rather for an act of the President and the diplomatic military authorities to save Jews.  In his book The Abandonment of the Jews (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), Dr. Wyman explained the process that led to the creation of the WRB.  I once wrote an article explaining that, too [“Political Actions vs. Personal Relations” in Midstream (April, 1981), pp. 41-48].  But the Holocaust Museum in Washington prefers the old-fashioned Jewish miracle explanation (let’s not forget the Esther miracle), for according to them and other “scholars” and many “advanced” studies, it was Henry Morgenthau Jr., the “miraculous Jewish” Treasury Secretary, who convinced FDR to do something to save Jews, which is factually incorrect.  FDR as a politician, and quite an accomplished one, understood one thing for sure: political public pressure, and that pressure was provided by Mr. Bergson and his non-Jewish allies in the Congress.

For his efforts to stand up for Jewish rescue, and for his foresight about the practical political structures necessary to the establishment of the new Israeli nation, I believe that Peter Bergson was probably the most important Jewish individual to live in the Twentieth Century.  He was a Palestinian British Jew who arrived in the United States in the 1940’s.  His activities between 1940 and 1948 reflected a deep sense of his burden of responsibility toward the Holocaust, which, over the past ten years, I have written a number of articles about.  His activities are important to explain, but the Jewish Holocaust museums prefer not to mention them.  Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the Holocaust Museum in Washington have ignored his activities on behalf of Jews, and do not appear to be changing their minds yet.  In the 1980’s, while I worked in Bergson’s office in NYC, he and I used to debate, or converse, about issues that included the Holocaust and the Israeli nation.  One of the topics we covered was Elie Wiesel.  Wiesel, an Auschwitz survivor, a writer and a Nobel Prize winner, has become a symbolic guru of American Jews.  I personally do not hold much respect for this individual: first, because he has nothing to contribute intellectually to the future of Jews; second, Mr. Wiesel, when he arrived in NYC during the Fifties, was a victim in a pedestrian- automobile accident near 42nd Street.  The money to save his life was provided by Peter Bergson.  Ever since Bergson’s death, I have never seen any public statement or an article in an important newspaper or magazine by Wiesel about Peter Bergson.  While he did make an effort to make sure that Bergson’s name would be mentioned at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, I do not think that this was enough of a gesture.

And now, something about American Jewish organizations, representative or not representative of America’s Jews.  In recent years, they have all pursued the political policy of supporting almost every action of Israeli politics.  This totally subservient approach and non-critical political outlook is harming American Jews, as well as the Israelis.  We can start again our Kaddish (of course spoken in Aramaic, or Middle Persian) for American Jews.

I would like to end this article with a short story.  Peter Bergson, who, as I stated above, was I believe the most important Jewish individual of the Twentieth Century.  While trying to save European Jews, he also spent quite a bit of time meditating on the future of the Israeli Nation.  He called it the “Hebrew” Nation.  In the early months of 1944, he purchased a building and raised the flag of the Hebrew Republic, which eventually became the Israeli national flag.  Ironically, the building Bergson purchased belonged to the Iranian people and had been their Embassy in Washington!  The flag had been created in the early Twentieth Century in the town of Rishon LeZion, which at the time was part of Ottoman Palestine.  As a matter of coincidence, Rishon LeZion was also the birthplace of the modern Hebrew language.  This small town created the first Hebrew kindergarten and grammar school of modern times.  So the cycle has come full circle: it is Biblical Hebrew coming from the Persian tradition in the Assyrian alphabet that went through the Yiddish and was recycled into what we now call modern Hebrew.  It was my birthplace as well and the place where I started reading and writing in Hebrew.  It was only when I came to America that I started meditating on the subject I wrote about.

Tuesday, January 01, 2013

Happy New Year!

All good wishes for 2013! May the New Year bring you health, wealth, happiness and peace...

Tuesday, December 04, 2012

Eliyho Matz on the UN's Palestine Vote

IT’S 1776 IN PALESTINE: NOVEMBER 29, 2012
by Eliyho Matz

 Well, after sixty-five years of a convoluted labyrinth path, the Palestinian people finally reached the “almost” status of a nation.  Thirty-five years ago when I arrived in New York, I spent quite a bit of time with Hillel Kook, better known in America as Peter Bergson.  Peter Bergson had  come to the United States as a young man from what was then called British Palestine.  During WWII he was the head of the Irgun delegation in the USA.  While most Jewish lay leaders and rabbis hesitated and were not sure what steps to take to save European Jews, Bergson conducted an aggressive campaign here in America and to some degree succeeded convincing the FDR administration to take some action to save Jews.  For his efforts, leading Jews in this country informed against him to the FBI: his FBI file is large, but thankfully he was not deported.

After the War, between 1946 and 1948 Bergson directed his attention to creating the Israeli nation, which he called the Hebrew Nation.  As an important means of advertisement and propaganda in America, he used the slogan “It’s 1776 in Palestine.”  Most Americans understood clearly and related to what this signified, and thus in 1947 the United States supported the creation of the Israeli Nation. 

It is a bit baffling now, after all these years that the Palestinians have struggled to define themselves politically, that the United States and Israel have found fault with that effort of self-determination.   Therefore, let us say it again today: “It’s 1776 in Palestine, November 29, 2012.”

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Eliyo Matz on the Gaza-Israel Conflict


                     THE HORSE AND THE BULL

                      Reflections and Thoughts on the Latest Flare-up

Between Israelis and Palestinians,
November 2012

All the Winners are Losers, All the Losers are Winners:
Some Thanksgiving Day Thoughts By Eliyho Matz, aka Sitting Book


            The latest expression of hostility between Israelis and Palestinians erupted in the Middle East in mid-November 2012.  There is no need to dig for new reasons to explain why the current conflict started, for this is an on-and-off fight that has been going on for years.  Ever since the first Israeli (Jewish) settlers arrived in what we call the “Ancient Land of Israel,” we had the beginning of a political, ethnic, religious enmity between Israeli Jews and Palestinians.  The Israeli Jews  succeeded in creating a nation-state in 1948.  The Palestinians rejected the idea of a nation-state in 1948.  The wars in 1948 and 1967 led directly to the confused war of 2012.

         The leaderships of the Israelis and the Palestinians failed to achieve any sort of a geo-political solution, and there are many reasons for that.  It is evident that the Israeli nation is today in control militarily of the Palestinians; this means that  Israelis control the lives of millions of Palestinians.  The Palestinians are resisting, some passively, some with arms.  The current November 2012 conflict is, in my opinion, a result of the B. Netanyahu government to avoid any negotiations with the Palestinians.  What I mean is, the Israeli settlers on the West Bank have pushed the Netanahu government to the brink of political stalemate, and Netanyahu ready for new elections in January 2013, has created a war, so he thinks, to avoid dealing with Palestinian sovereignty.

         Palestinian Gaza, under the Hamas government, has declared its desire to exterminate the Israelis, thus giving Netanyahu the ability to prolong the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, along with the opportunity not to negotiate with any Palestinians.  Of course, Netanyahu’s calculations are wrong.  The geo-politics of the world-at-large, and the unreasonable Israeli desire to use military force to solve problems associated with the Palestinians, will only hurt the Israelis in the long run.

         The American settlers who moved West encountered American Indian resistance.  The American Indians resisted because their land, their livelihood and their culture were being decimated.  The crescendo of the struggle between the settlers and the Indians happened at the Battle of Little Big Horn in June 1876.  Both American Indian leaders, Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, defeated the American force led by General Custer.  The conclusion of the battle was clear.  But even though the American Indians were courageous and won the battle, in the end they lost in their geo-political war against the American government and settlers.

         In Israel, Israeli settlers who illegally occupy the West Bank with the support of the Israeli government and of course the Higher Authority of the Israeli G-ds, have led the Israeli nation into a battle using the biblical code name that sounds like an American Indian name, “Pillar of Cloud,” to deceive the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.  Unfortunately, the Israeli trick did not work, and the Pillar of Cloud became a cloud of dust.  The Hamas showed resilience and fought back.  The Israelis revealed their strength in the battle, but lost the war.  Mr. Netanyahu can tell many stories, but his trick did not work; nothing has changed, and there are still millions of Palestinians who need to be dealt with.  He and his “Custered” generals have been defeated.  What to do next will depend on the wisdom of the Chiefs of the Palestinians, that is, if they want to apply a bit of wisdom, as well as on the wisdom of the Israeli voters in the upcoming elections. 

         Here is one suggestion: the Israeli nation established in 1948 made a public statement called “The Israeli Declaration of Independence.”  This Declaration was an attempt to copy the Western idea of a declaration of political intent.  Thus it was designed to make it clear to all what the intention of the Declaration of Independence was, i.e., Israeli sovereignty.  However, if one reads the Israeli Declaration of Independence, he or she can immediately see that the Israelis were not sure exactly what they were declaring.  Thus, Mr. Netanyahu recently declared Israel to be a “Jewish State,” while the Declaration spoke of an “Israeli Nation” and about tolerance to Israel’s inhabitants and neighbors.  If wise Palestinians understand that incongruity, they should make a public reading of the Israeli Declaration of Independence in Gaza, in the West Bank, in New York, and in other places of their choosing.  This act alone could topple the Netanyahu attempt to prevent them from becoming a nation of Palestinians, similar to the Israelis. 

         A few additional observations on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

a.)    The leaderships of both the Israelis and the Palestinians are defective.  The question is, of course, what do we do with defective leaderships?
b.)   Is the leadership of both sides doing what it is doing because it is trapped in its own rhetoric?
c.)   Both sides have plenty of Crazy Horses and Sitting Bulls, but not the leadership of reasonable people to solve the issues.
d.)   We all have to remember that the final goal of solving the conflict is an alliance between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
e.)    Is the world, that is America, I mean the American leadership, willing to see item “d” as a viable solution?


Monday, September 24, 2012

Eliyho Matz: The Cat and The Rooster--An Answer to Isaiah Berlin


(Meow) A cat has a thousand dreams, all about mice.

(A Palestinian Arab proverb, first heard in Jerusalem at a conversation with Abram Sorramello, 1970)*
                                               


THE CAT (Meow) AND THE ROOSTER (Cock-a-doode-doo): 
THE INVENTION OF SHLOMO SAND (ZAND) AS A RESPONSIBLE ISRAELI, PATENTED THINKER AND GIFTED ISRAELI HISTORIAN
 By ELIYHO (MEOW) MATZ


         In New York City many years ago, I used to visit Hillel Kook and Samuel Merlin at their east-side office, sometimes several times a week.  It was the end of the 1970’s and early 1980’s.  I was a student, and my studies on America and the Holocaust were near their end.  Our topic of conversation focused on the future of the Israelis, as a modern people who achieved sovereignty in 1948.  As a result of these conversations, I became aware of the fundamental issues relating to Israeli political identity that plagued these two elderly individuals, who mainly spoke of the process of statehood as having been a grand missed opportunity for the Israelis to become a modern people and a new nation with a written constitution, i.e., a constitution for all Israelis within its territorial sovereignty (not a constitution for New York Jews).  They spoke about an Israeli Republic, or, as they called it in the 1940’s, a Hebrew Republic.  Critical for them was the issue of an Israeli political identity, as opposed to the old issues of “Jewishness.”  They were brilliant thinkers.  Talking to them, I first grasped the beginning of what was to become my own intellectual approach to a different way of looking into Israeli society, and at Jews wherever they reside.  Their main argument was, since Israel never wrote a constitution defining itself, the political identity of the Israelis is totally unclear, and thus for a nation this omission causes a variety of political as well as personal crises of identity. 

This array of anomalies, internally or externally, very few Israeli historians till today understand.  In his second book, The Invention of the Land of Israel, Shlomo Sand most profoundly attempts to explain to the Israelis and to the world the complexities of Jewish/Israeli ideas, as well as critical Israeli and Jews’ history.  He does not immerse himself in issues of Israeli political identity, although his themes touch upon them.  His writing style tilts between Tolstoyean narrative to Isaiah Berlin’s literary and historical criticism, and to great effect Professor Sand is profound in his approach to straightening out the outline of Israeli and Jew’s history.


         I met with Professor Shlomo Sand (Zand, in Hebrew) twice, both times on the campus of Tel Aviv University.  We had punctuated exchanges, primarily about his thoughts on the subject matter of his research, as well as some exchange of ideas on the history of Jews.  He is an original: a leftist Israeli sort of a thinker who has presented a Classical interpretation of history from the point of view of neither left nor right, thus avoiding a history that is twisted, inaccurate and misleading.  For a Classical historian’s task is to present facts, and the interpretation of facts, which might lead to “History” or “Philosophy.”  In my view, Professor Sand (Zand) is thus as an historian not to be defined as a Leftist; rather, he can better be defined as a very concerned Israeli, an Israeli patriot, as well as a thoughtful historian who has researched the history of nations.  His expertise lies in his attempt to explain to the Israelis as well as to the worlds’ readers the misconception surrounding the generic term “nationality,” any nationality.  To me, his uncompromising attempt to explore Jews’ history dating back to ancient times is not only absolutely courageous, but also essential for the enduring future of the Israeli nation, as well as for lives of Jews wherever they reside. 

In order to explain a bit of Professor Sand’s (Zand’s) book on Jews’ history as a cultural religious phenomenon, I have to take a turn first to relate or explain some other issues I have encountered over the past forty years dealing with Jews’ history.  My attempt to understand myself as a Jew and an Israeli, as well as Israeli history and the history of Jews, began at an early age, and it was not until I completed my MA at Yeshiva University in New York City that I gained a bit of a better understanding of Jews’ history.  Looking carefully at Jews’ recorded history, we have been around for at least 2½ thousand years, if not more.  My first encounters with the difficulty of explaining the history of Jews came when I was writing my Master’s thesis at Yeshiva University. The subject of my research was an analysis of the initial response of the American Jewish leadership to the massacre of European Jewry between November 1942 and April 1943.  The idea to work on this project was conceived at the University of Massachusetts.  My professor there, Dr. David S. Wyman, who taught modern American history, was at that time involved in an attempt to unravel the FDR Administration’s response to the Holocaust.  My research for him was eventually incorporated into his book The Abandonment of the Jews, published in 1984.  From the beginning his book was, and will continue to be, a profound contribution to Holocaust studies.  To me personally he was helpful, although perhaps not respectful enough academically.  In the course of our work together, Dr. Wyman introduced me to Hillel Kook (a.k.a. Peter Bergson) and Samuel Merlin.  In America during the Holocaust, Kook and Merlin carried on their shoulders the burden of responsibility to stand for the rescue of the dying Jews of Europe during the Holocaust years.  Various books and movies have been made about them; their activities during the Holocaust demand a good history.  Politically, they belonged to the right wing of Zionism, Jabotinsky’s political camp.  In reality, they were members of the proto-Israeli group called the “Irgun” (an explanation of this term will follow).   As a young Israeli, born on September 15, 1948, growing up I had absolutely no inkling about them, I had neither heard nor learned about their activities, because the history of their activities during WWII was not taught in any public schools or universities in Israel.  But to my great benefit, I ended up working at their office in New York City while finishing up my MA, as well as while attempting to write my PhD at the Graduate Center of City University.

         Here I am going to step back a bit again to introduce another individual who made an impact on my life.  He, too, was connected to research on the Holocaust.  While I was doing my graduate work, I became acquainted with S. Beit-Zvi.  “S” stood for “Shabtai,” and “Zvi” was the name of his son who had been killed while fighting in the Israeli War of Independence in 1948.  We first met at his home in Tzahala, a suburb of Tel Aviv, where he lived with his wife.  He was in his 70’s at that time, a former teacher, and the author of a book on the Zionist leadership during the Holocaust, titled Post-Ugandian Zionism in the Crucible of the Holocaust.  Remarkably, he was not a trained historian, but he had the mind of an historian, and as a matter of fact, his book, which criticizes the Palestinian/Zionist leadership during the Holocaust years, has today become a mainstream Israeli history book.  But that was not so in 1976 when the book was published, and it took years to sink into the Israeli historical mind. Self-published after years of research, Beit-Zvi’s book initially was a total failure.  The universities, as well as Yad Vashem, banned him.  Finally in recent years his book has emerged as a contender to Yad Vashem’s official Holocaust history.  From the first, Beit-Zvi always had one strong supporter –me -- and we understood each other very well.  My MA confirms what he wrote.  Beit-Zvi and I met many times in Tel Aviv and in New York, sharing conversations as well as letters, and we developed an excellent relationship that lasted for many years until he died.  The main argument of his book is: the Zionist movement was not really focused on saving European Jewry.  Politically speaking, Shabtai’s work should have shaken up the Israeli political leadership, but that did not happen.  As a matter of fact, it is still not happening.  The fact that Ben Gurion and his cronies did not do much to save European Jews during the Holocaust is still an issue that haunts Yad Vashem as well as every Israeli government until today. 

         While in New York, Hillel Kook introduced me to an Israeli philosopher, Gershon Weiler, who then in the 1970’s was a visiting professor at Trinity College in Hartford, CT.  He was a very interesting person, a Holocaust survivor from Hungary who after WWII came to Israel as a Zionist.  But as his life developed, he became influenced by the Canaanite movement.  Intellectually, the Canaanites advocated the interaction of Israelis into the region, that is the Middle East.  He was a learned man in philosophy, as well as in Jewish studies, and had written a book which was published in 1976, the same year that Beit-Zvi published his book.  However, unlike Beit-Zvi, Weiler had the backing of a very respected publisher, Am Oved.  In his book, titled Jewish Theocracy, Weiler’s basic and most fundamental argument was that Jewish theology (halakhah) inherently stands against the establishment of a modern Israeli nation.  The book is a scholarly attempt to explain that concept.  Weiler was brokenhearted: his book, which contradicted Zionist political theories and challenged Israeli political theory vis-à-vis religion and nation, was ostracized and criticized and basically led to the end of his career as a lecturer.  I met him a few times in New York, in Tel Aviv, and at his home in Rechovot.  He was a broken man.  Israelis could not understand what he had written, and besides, Israeli society was moving swiftly into the realm of political fantasy and deep religious swings, so nobody paid any attention to him or his book.  His book was later translated into English, but his message was never understood either by intellectuals or the wider public.

         I was born in Tel Aviv on September 15, 1948, and grew up in Rishon LeZion.  As a curious kid, I read profusely.  I am not suggesting by any means that I understood better than others what I read, but I read a lot, and as a matter of fact, I aspired to become a writer of some sort, but I was not sure exactly how to achieve that goal; at the ripe age of 64, I am still not sure how to make that work.  But what is significant here is that Rishon LeZion is the birthplace of modern Hebrew.  It is the place where, for the first time in 3000 years of Jews’ history, the “Rishonim” opened up a kindergarten and primary school where Hebrew was taught in Hebrew (rather than as a translation from some other language) as early as the 1890’s.  Of course, Hebrew used as textual material existed for thousands of years, but, as a spoken everyday language it was only first practiced in Rishon LeZion.  And the process was complicated.  For, fifty years after the beginning of modern Hebrew in Rishon, when a million and a half Jews arrived in Israel, and thousands of them came to Rishon, among them my parents, when Israeli independence started, those immigrants arrived speaking Yiddish or other languages, and the newly developing Hebrew became even more complex.  My teachers, with all best intentions, did not speak proper Hebrew.  So I, the Israeli-born Sabra, whose parents’ Hebrew was only mediocre, whose teachers’ Hebrew likewise was difficult to grasp…, no wonder I had difficulties learning and understanding via the broken Hebrew that I was surrounded by.  Math and Physics were difficult enough for me, but to try to study them in Hebrew with teachers who did not speak proper Hebrew – I was lost.  This school system simply did not fit my needs.  Consequently, I left high school.  After completing my high school degree on my own, it was only after three years of military service that I returned to school, enrolling at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  What a thrill it was for me when I took a course in Israeli Hebrew Literature with Professor Gershon Shaked!  Many years later I became familiar with the work of Professor Paul Wexler and his student Ghil’ad Zukermann and their analysis of our current status of Israeli Hebrew.  According to them, the DNA of modern Hebrew is recycled Yiddish. So much then for my struggles, and for the difficulties Israelis have until today in expressing themselves in recycled Yiddish.  I am reminded of the Israeli joke about a man who has just gotten married and immediately afterwards takes his wife to the Western Wall.  When his friends ask him why, he replies, “I want her to learn how to talk to the wall” -- in Hebrew, ledaber eim hakeer, which is a direct translation utilizing the well known Yiddish expression, red tzu de vant.  In another example, when a clerk at a local store in Queens that sells Israeli products asks his customer how much cheese to cut her, the Israeli-American woman answers, “I vont a little bit….”  In Hebrew, ani rotza k’tzat…; in Yiddish ich vil abis’lNu?  Let us imagine Ludwig Wittgenstein visiting Rishon LeZion in the 1930’s, trying to confirm his theories on language and uncertainty.  I cannot imagine a more thrilling situation for Wittgenstein – he probably would have written a thousand-page book on the invention of the new Hebrew (Yiddish) language.  Next, imagine one coming from Morocco or Iraq, trying to express himself in Hebrew (i.e., Yiddish Hebrew) -- it is almost a farce.

 Solving the problem of Israeli self-expression will take a long time.  The repercussions of this unresolved process are not just inconvenient, but impact Israel’s way of conducting itself as a nation.  A cardinal issue relating to understanding the Hebrew language in modern times is demonstrated in the use of the term “leumi.”  For example, the organization “Irgun Tzvai Leumi” was established during the end of the 1920’s into the early 1930’s in Jerusalem and disbanded in 1948.  Irgun means “organization,” Tzvai means “military,” and Leumi means “nationality.”  The question is, what “nationality” were they referring to?  Most Israelis would say, “Jewish.”  But, that cannot be, because Jewish nationality as a political concept has never been politically defined, and to me the political definition of Israeli nationality represents the quintessential issue of Israeli survival; otherwise, we cannot hope to endure in the modern world.  The Israeli Declaration of Independence (or the Declaration of Non-Independence) carries within it the duality of “Israeli” and “Jewish.”  Today’s Prime Minister, B. Netanyahu, with his coalition members, wants Israel to be a “Jewish” state.  But politically one cannot define Jewishness; religiously, one can.  So, does Netanyahu mean that Israel will transform itself into a religious “Jewish” state, thus being one that can be neither democratic nor Jewish, and definitely not Israeli?  Or, to make things more interesting, the human race of homosapiens in Israel will become “homozionists” or “homojewish” – of course, this is absurd.  The political goal of Zionism that was achieved in 1948 was meant to integrate “Jews” of the world community into a new nation that was called the Israeli nation, but still the essence of the concept of  “nation” or “leom” in Hebrew remains fuzzy and undefined. 

         For many who are not aware of it, linguistic inefficiencies in modern Hebrew have created major obstacles in issues of self- and critical-expression as well as in thinking for the Israelis.  Perhaps then it is no wonder that Israel has produced great scientists, great doctors, great generals, great felafel-makers and great Israeli-salad makers, but not a single great intellectual.  To understand the depth of the meaning of “the Intellectual,” it is important to look at a book by Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994).  It is sort of ironical, but not unusual, that an American professor of Palestinian descent who taught at Columbia University wrote a classic piece on the Intellectual; Said was definitely an example of an intellectual.

         Moving on from this odyssey that I have taken to explain Eliyho Matz’ trip to Ithaca ( cf “Ithaca,” a poem by C.P. Cavafy), I would now like to describe what I see as the most important event in Israeli history in recent years.

         Throughout his life, Professor Shlomo Sand (Zand) has been, it can be said, sort of a radical person.  For awhile a leftist and Communist, he later became associated with Palestinian rights and is now standing on the frontline of their fight, presumably appreciated by some of those whose cause he is trying to support.  As for his education, he had a difficult path to higher education, but he made it.  Professor Sand is a concerned Israeli patriot with his eyes on the future of the Israeli nation.  Over the past few years, through teaching and studying the broad aspects of nationality, he has done what no other scholar in Israel has done.  His study of Jews’ history, as reflected in his first book, The Invention of the Jewish People, is a testimony to his unique efforts to explain to Jews their history.  What he reveals is a different type of history – though the entire academic world is not ready for it.  His general theory that he demonstrates unequivocally is that Jewish survival is due to conversion, whether Jews like to hear it or not; that conversion is the pivotal source of success in Judaism throughout the ages, which is the main point of his book.  In his second book, The Invention of the Land of Israel, Sand goes on to deal with the overriding attitude of Judaism, which is how Halakhic Judaism views the Land of Israel.  In this book he makes a very interesting point: he demonstrates that historically as Jews became scattered throughout the world, the Land of Israel came to represent two distinct and separate entities, that although they supposedly seemed connected, they were not really connected.  That is because on one side throughout the centuries, the core rabbinical (Halakhic) thought stood against settling the Land of Israel: praying for the land was the acceptable norm, but to settle there was totally forbidden.  On the other side, it was only the Zionist ideology in modern times that began mixing and connecting the concept of a modern nation with an ancient land, and the consequences have been brutal.  Sand’s book is a scholarly attempt to explain this concept of bringing together the people and the land, and its ramifications. 

         The final chapter of Professor Sand’s (Zand’s) book is a reflection on Israeli military, political and religious extremism.  Tel Aviv University where he teaches stands on the ruins of a Palestinian village.  Sand’s historical narrative includes a mild suggestion for a way for Israelis or Tel Aviv University to display a sign to memorialize the Arab village of Sheik Mounes, but only time will tell if anything will be done to rectify what he points to.  The title of this chapter is “The Scorpion and the Frog,” which reminds me of another professor, Isaiah Berlin of Oxford University, who wrote an important and elegant essay many years ago titled, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” which was Berlin’s attempt to explain Tolstoy’s great novel War and Peace to the English-speaking world.  He was one of the brightest intellectuals of the Twentieth Century.  Apropos to the subject of Holocaust and rescue, during WWII Berlin aided the British government in New York and Washington by providing secret reports on America and its Jews.  How many Jews in Occupied Europe died as a result of his work one can never know (Britain was happy for any excuse not to save Jews), but too much concern for the exterminated European Jews he did not have.  He is not the only Jewish intellectual residing in New York or other areas of the United States who did not pay attention to the events of the Holocaust; many other intellectuals felt no urgency in this regard.  As a general theory on intellectuals of that period, Jewish intellectuals were not in the business of saving Jews.  As a footnote to this, here I would like to insert some radical ideas of my own on the subject of the Holocaust.  Aside from the fact that most Jewish intellectuals did not deal with the Holocaust while it was occurring, one should mention that the entire rabbinical establishment as well as the organized Jewish lay leadership also failed in their response to the Holocaust.  Shouldn’t that teach us something?  Shouldn’t we modern Jews look back at our two-millennium span of rabbinical Jewish authority and conclude that something with Judaism went wrong?  But of course, Jewish life continues without looking back, until the next disaster will arrive.

         Most of my university studies centered around American Jews, American Jewish leaders and the Holocaust, but eventually it became obvious to me that I had to turn my focus to the Holocaust and its aftermath.  What I mean by “aftermath” is explained in my book Who is an Israeli?, which has been published as an Amazon Kindle e-Book.  The Israeli nation, that was born in 1948, has been my concern ever since I became aware of all sorts of issues connected to its establishment.  Many years ago, when I visited Abram Sorramello, I heard from him the famous Palestinian-Arabic saying, “The rooster is dead, but his eye is still looking at the garbage pail.”  Thus, all the historians and philosophers I have mentioned in this essay have been like the cat or the rooster: very, very focused. 

To add to Professor Sand’s (Zand’s) dreams, I would like to suggest a performance by Simon and Garfunkel on the bridge over the Yarkon, which is very close to Tel Aviv University, singing their song “A Bridge Over Troubled Water.”  And since I live in the Berkshires of Massachusetts in the vicinity of Arlo Guthrie’s shrine to his father Woody Guthrie, the great American balladeer, I have suggested to him in a letter that he join with Simon and Garfunkel to perform Woody’s popular American folk song “This Land is Your Land” with a choir of Chassids and Palestinians singing a cappella.

         Benedict Baruch (in Yiddish, Borech or Berel) Spinoza, in his famous Theological Political Tract in which he analyzes the fall of the Second Temple, concluded that a nation cannot exist unless there is a separation between church and state.  This tenet of Spinoza entered into our modern world, though with difficulties, but is normally accepted in the Western tradition of government.  Spinoza, hopeful about the Jewish experience in the future, saw no problem in the future creation of a new Jewish political entity that would adhere to his recommendation.  It is very unfortunate that today’s modern Israeli nation has not followed his line of thinking.

         Good luck Shlomo Sand (Zand).  I hope they follow your advice.

[The famous Italian actor Marcello Mastroiani, the quintessential Don Juan who knew his way around women, once said, “Not a single woman has ever applauded me while we were having sex.”  I think Marlon Brando would probably concur.  STELLA, STELLA!  (For Marlon Brando’s contribution to the creation of the Israeli nation, see my essay on the Altalena.)

Shlomo, don’t wait for the applause….]

*Dedicated to Dianne (DD) and her cats, which
     had difficulties catching mice.