fauxklore | Entries tagged with israel

I’ll get back to the catch-up stuff soon, but there are a couple of newsy things I want to write about while they are still fresh.

Ceasefire: I was going to write a long treatise on this, but I think it is better to just say that I am skeptical of long-term success but trying to be cautiously optimistic.

Art versus the Artist: The scandal du jour is, of course, the sexual assault allegations against Neil Gaiman. I do think that he has taken advantage of vulnerable young women. The question is whether or not he should be “cancelled.” And, for me, this comes down to the long-standing issue of what to do when bad people produce great art.

I first encountered Neil Gaiman in the early 1990’s when I had a long flight delay in Saint Louis and had reached the end of the book I had with me. So I stopped in at the airport bookstore and, in the course of searching for something tolerable to read on the plane, saw Good Omens, which was co-written by Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Not being a reader of graphic novels (with a few exceptions, that tend to be on specifically Jewish themes), I’d never read the Sandman series, but I had read a few of Pratchett’s books and mostly liked them, though I found them uneven. At any rate, I bought that book and ended up enjoying it quite a bit. Sometime after that, I was in Portland, Oregon and browsing in Powell’s Books and one of the people who worked there recommended Neverwhere to me. It had a combination of real life and folkloric themes that I found inherently appealing and it remains one of my favorites of his work. I have read only a handful of his books and I saw him speak at DAR Constitution Hall a while back. I thought he was good-looking and spoke well. Floppy hair and British accent - I could see young women falling for him in the same way they might have a crush on Hugh Grant.

I obviously don’t know exactly what did and didn’t happen, though it seems clear that he doesn’t really understand power dynamics between people and he doesn’t understand the concept of consent. But what does this imply about his books? It may not be fair for me to comment since relatively few of them are the sort of thing that really appeals to me, but the more general question is what should happen to the work produced by bad people? To cut to the chase, I have no intention of throwing out those of his books that I own nor would I necessarily refuse to buy something he wrote if it fell into the types of books he wrote that I’ve liked in the past.

Let me take another example. In May 2001, I took a trip to Malta, where I saw Caravaggio’s painting Beheading of Saint John the Baptist in St. John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta. This is an astonishing painting, considered one of the 10 most important Western paintings of all time. I was blown away by the use of color as well as chiaroscuro. But Caravaggio himself was a sorry excuse for a human being. He had a number of problematic relationships (primarily with young boys), was arrested frequently for brawling, and even committed at least one murder. Nowadays, he would be a prime candidate for cancellation. But he was also the most brilliant painter of the 17th century.

Where I am going with this is I’ve seen the suggestion that it’s okay to tolerate the work of bad people who are dead for some length of time. But if we act quickly to get rid of the works of the living miscreants, how would we ever see the good art created by bad people? And I think the world is enhanced by good art no matter how bad a person the artist is.

I Should Probably Insert Some Sort of Trigger Warning: I’ve been trying to write something about Israel for a while and can’t quite find the words I want. So this is a bit of a brain dump.

Where’s the Outrage: My main thought has to do with something I once read about news coverage. The thing I am thinking of was an analysis somebody did of the New York Times which had the claim that the number of column inches a story gets is roughly proportional to the distance of the event in question from Times Square. This correlation is surprisingly accurate as long as you assume the distance between 42nd Street and Jerusalem is approximately the same as the distance between 42nd Street and New Jersey.

The reason that came to mind is that I very very very briefly saw a couple of news stories about the most recent conflict between the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan and the population of West Darfur. The RSF (who are ethnically Arabic) appears to be determined to commit genocide against the Massalit people (who are non-Arabic, which I believe means they are of African ancestry). There have been reports about massacres and extensive use of rape as a weapon of war. This is something of a follow-up to the ethnic cleansing attempted by the Janjaweed militias in 2003. It appears to have heated up in April 2023, but you wouldn’t know that from the Western press.

My question is where is the outrage? Have you seen anybody marching in the streets about this? Why do I see a story that stays on the news for 5 minutes about these slaughters when there are stories in every newspaper every time somebody in Gaza gets a hangnail?

(I am not intending to dismiss the tragedy of civilians dying in Gaza, but I do blame Hamas for most of them. My point is about what does and doesn’t get reported. And I don’t see a lot of news coverage of the barrages of missiles Hamas fires at Israel.)

Numbers: As for the UN, look at the number of resolutions against Israel vs. the number against other countries. Here’s a quick hint - from 2006 through 2022, the UN adopted 99 resolutions against Israel, 41 against Syria, 13 against Iran, 4 against Russia, and 3 against Venezuela. Where are the UN resolutions condemning China’s ethnic cleansing of the Uyghurs? I’d characterize holding Israel to a different standard than the rest of the world as inherently antisemitic.

Here are some more numbers. The number of Palestinian Arabs displaced by the Naqba was 700,000 - most (but not all of whom) were told to abandon their houses by other Arabs, being convinced that they’d recapture them when Israel lost its War of Independence. At the same time, the number of Jews expelled from Arabic countries was 900,000.

Population growth in Gaza is 1.99% a year, which is the 39th highest in the world. For what it’s worth, most of the countries with higher rates of population growth are in Africa, e.g. 3.34% in Angola. 3.31% in Benin, 3.56% in Burundi, 3.66% in Niger, 4.78% in South Sudan. The point is that the population of the Palestinian territories is approximately 6 times what it was in 1948. That’s pretty much the opposite of a genocide. (The number of Jews in the world peaked at 16.7 million in 1939. It has only recovered to 15.3 million as of 2022.)

Incidentally, it has nothing to do with anything else here, but I was mildly surprised to learn that the country outside the Middle East with the largest Palestinian population is Chile. (The country overall with the largest Palestinian population is, of course, Jordan. This should not surprise anyone who has looked at old maps.)

Cease Fire: Let's just say that I'm skeptical.

One other thing I should have included in the previous post re: Israel has to do with the claim that Jews (and, specifically, Ashkenazi Jews) are not indigenous to Israel. This claim has been definitively discredited by DNA analysis. There is, essentially, no difference in DNA among various Jewish groups, with the possible exception of Ethiopian and Indian (Cochin and Beta Israel) Jews, though the latter two groups do show some evidence of ancient paternal Jewish descent. There is also substantial genetic overlap between Jews and other Levantine groups, including Palestinian Arabs, Lebanese, Bedouin, and Druze populations.

I made a few attempts to find a good segue into what I wanted to say about the personal side of what’s going on in Israel right now. And I failed. So let me just say a few things.

A few weeks ago, I started obsessing about my father’s nightmares. The thing is, I don’t actually remember him having nightmares. I mean, I sort of do, and I sort of know he must have and I have vague memories that may have been fever dreams, a remnant of the malaria he had contracted in a DP camp after the war. I think a lot about all the stories I never heard because Dad didn’t want to traumatize us. So I never know what are real memories and what are things I’ve read about the Kovno Ghtto and Dachau. I don’t know why I started thinking about Dad’s nightmares, but it feels prescient in light of the Hamas pogrom.

I don’t know if generational trauma sank into my DNA or if that even makes any sense. I do know my American-born mother had a large family, while my Shoah-survivor father had his father and an uncle in Israel. (Even at that, my maternal grandfather, who'd studied at a yeshiva in Petah Tikva and ended up in Havana in the 1920's because one of his brothers knew someone there who'd teach him a more marketable trade than being a rabbi, had a sister who’d survived Auschwitz.) I’ve always known it could happen here.

So a week and a half ago, I couldn’t sleep. I was able to get in touch with various relatives in Israel and verify that they’re safe for now, but they’re still worried. (In one case, I have a cousin whose son-in-law, who is a doctor, has been called up.) The operative words there are “for now.”

And I see people marching and chanting anti-Semitic slogans and, yes, it could happen here. I’m reminded of a man I knew 40-odd years ago (Australian-Israeli, living in Montreal), who ended a sentence like that by saying “which is why you shouldn’t be surprised if you see me parachuting into Lebanon.” (Er, no, not something I am planning on.) And I’m not okay.

I don’t think I can ever be okay.

I’ve got several things to write about, but I feel like I have to start with saying some things about Israel. There is a lot of significant misinformation out there about both history and demographics, which I think is important background to understanding what is going on now. I’ll write a more personal entry a little later on.

1. Despite the destructions of the first and second temples and the associated exiles, there have always been Jews who remained in the land of Israel. Prior to roughly the fourth century CE, Jews were the demographic majority in the region. After a series of invasions, expulsions, and massacres, the Jewish population reached a low of of a little under 1% of the population (roughly 2000 people) in the 1690’s. The numbers varied significantly by city over the years. For example, in 1850, about 25% of the population of Jerusalem was Jewish, while under half was Muslim, with the rest Christian (primarily Eastern Orthodox). But 64% of the population of Tiberius was Jewish and just under half of the population of Safed was Jewish. In a 1905 census of Jerusalem, nearly 60% of the Jews living there had been born there. (This is complicated, however, by who was actually included in the census. Compare to recent U.S. census discussions about counting non-citizens and imagine the dying days of the Ottoman empire.)

2. While large numbers of Ashkenazi Jews did immigrate to the region starting in roughly 1880, the majority of Israeli Jews are Mizrachim or Sephardim (who Israel lumps together for demographic purposes). In addition, Israel categorizes all European Jews as Ashkenazim, while, say, Bulgarian Jews are overwhelmingly Sephardic and there are other groups like Greek Romaniote Jews. It’s complicated. But the point is that characterizing Israeli Jews as European is largely inaccurate. The expulsion of Jews from the Arabic world after the partition of the Palestinian mandate was a major factor in this. There are some significant implications of the demographics. In general, the Ashkenazi community tends to be more secular and more liberal than the Sephardi communities. (Note that, like everything in Israel, the demographics are complicated. The younger generations have a lot more intermarriage between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, which are not reflected well in the statistics.)

3. About 20% of Israeli citizens are Palestinian Arabs. They are primarily descendants of people who did not leave during the partition and subsequent war. There are socioeconomic issues relating to them and their treatment, but many of them are successful and there are a small number of members of the Knesset who are members of the Arabic parties. Somewhat ironically, Israeli Arabs have the lowest rate of anti-Jewish attitudes in the Middle East (according to a Pew Research global poll.) There are also several non-Jewish ethnic minorities, e.g. the Druze (many of whom choose to serve in the Israeli military), the Adyghe (Circassians), who are a predominantly Islamic group from the Caucasus region, and Bedouins. I’d argue that the latter are the group to whom one might most accurately apply the term “apartheid,” but that’s not really a factor in the current situation re: Israel and Hamas. They aren’t exactly treated well in the rest of the region. I’d compare the situation of the Bedouins to that of, say, the Irish travelers. In general, nomadic groups are hugely discriminated against in the modern world.

4. I’ve sen some people claim that the Jews who emigrated to the land of Israel prior to Partition were welcomed by the local Arab community with open arms. This is decidedly ahistoric and entirely ignorant. If there were any open arms, they were holding swords and knives. Some of the larger massacres of Jews in mandatory Palestine include the Jaffa riots of May 1921, the Buraq uprising of 1929 (which includes the Hebron massacre), the labor strike revolt of 1936, the Tiberius pogrom of 1938, etc.

5. Re: Gaza, it was created as a refugee camp by Egypt, back in the 1950’s. In general, the Palestinian Arab community has been manipulated by various Arab states since Partition and used as a political pawn by them, including their expulsion from both Egypt and Jordan. There is no real reason why the money that’s gone to arming Gaza with thousands of rockets to fire at Israel and building tunnels couldn’t have gone to building beach resorts that would attract tourists from the rest of the Arab world. (FWIW, Saudi women really love Dubai because they can wear jeans in the shopping malls and hang out on the beach in clothes that would get them arrested at home.)

6. Which brings us to Hamas. Hamas was founded as the Palestinian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. Their original charter, issued in August 1988, was a particularly vile anti-Semitic document, which quotes largely from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian fraud of the early 20th century which propagated the idea of a global Jewish conspiracy. If you can think of any anti-Semitic canard, it’s in there. (It’s also got very problematic things to say about the role of women and several other groups, but that’s an aside.) More broadly, the Muslim Brotherhood has published Holocaust denial and regrets that the Nazis were unsuccessful in their genocide.

Hamas won an election in Gaza in 2006, largely because of corruption within the PLO. They haven’t had an election since. (Neither has Fatah, the political arm of the PLO, which rules the West Bank.) So it’s not completely accurate to say that the current population of Gaza elected Hamas. Nor have they elected anyone else.

At any rate, in 2010 the Hamas leader said that the Hamas Charter was “no longer relevant, but can’t be changed for internal reasons.” One may interpret that however you like. Hamas leader Khaled Marshal wrote a new charter in 2017 which claims they reject the persecution of any human being or the undermining of his or her rights on nationalist, religious, or sectarian grounds. However, they also state that “the Jewish problem, anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews are phenomena fundamentally linked to European history and not to the history of the Arabs and the Muslims or to their heritage.” That is fundamentally untrue. Restrictions applied to Jews under medieval Arab rule included restriction to segregated quarters, wearing distinctive clothing (who do you think invented the yellow badge?), and public subservience to Muslims. Under Almohad rule in North Africa starting in 1130 CE, there were forcible conversions of Jews (and Christians) to Islam and executions of those who refused to convert. To give a another example, there were outbreaks of blood libel (primarily in Syria and Egypt) throughout the 19th century. And then there was active collaboration between the Nazis and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, resulting in multiple pogroms between 1937 and 1945.

7. So where does Hamas get its money? Qatar provides a lot of money (as much as $30 million a month at times) but that is a rather complicated situation and appears to be primarily paying for electricity and direct support to poor families. Iran gives Hamas roughly $100 million a year. And they’re the big player this time out (despite their denials) because they’re terrified of the implications to them if Israel and Saudi Arabia normalize relations. And economics is at least as much a factor in this mess as religion is. There are success stories in the Middle East (largely the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel) and there are abject failures (Lebanon, Syria, the Palestinians). As a bit of an aside, I’ve always found it interesting that in the post World War I era, the British managed to get control over all of the places which had oil, while the French mandatory territories were basket cases. (My theory of colonoiasm starts with noting that former Portuguese colonies are, in general, basket cases. Former French colonies are basket cases with good bread and good coffee.)

So what does all of this mean? The basic conclusion is that it’s complicated and it’s a mess. But every Jew everywhere in the world should feel threatened. And, despite what idiots like Bernie Sanders might think, they’re going to go after him, too.