Gideon Levy, Jeremiah

I want to stay near silent in paying tribute, via this 2010 profile by Johann Hari, to Gideon Levy, Israel's most hated Jewish Israeli reporter and one of its bravest. Just a couple of excerpts below (okay, four)..

Levy’s father never saw any parallels between the fact he was turned into a refugee, and the 800,000 Palestinians who were turned into refugees by the creation of the state of Israel. “Never! People didn’t think like that. We never discussed it, ever.” Yet in the territories, Levy began to see flickers of his father everywhere – in the broken men and women never able to settle, dreaming forever of going home.

and

Would you kill the Boys from Brazil?

Professing himself a lifelong Zionist, Roger Cohen proclaimed a kind of apostasy yesterday:

Jews, above all people, know what oppression is. Children over millennia were the transmission belt of Jewish survival, the object of what the Israeli novelist Amos Oz and his daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger have called “the intergenerational quizzing that ensures the passing of the torch.” No argument, no Palestinian outrage or subterfuge, can gloss over what Jewish failure the killing of children in such numbers represents.

I am reminded of the conflict dramatized in Ira Levin's terror novel, The Boys from Brazil (spoiler alert).  In it, a relentless Jewish Nazi hunter gets a tip from a caller in Brazil and tracks down a final life project set in motion by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele: cloning dozens of little Hitlers around the globe and placing them with elderly, authoritarian adoptive fathers. Ultimately the protagonist, Liebermann, obtains a list of the (literal) Hitler youth and their locations. A militant "never-again" rabbi, Gorin, demands the list, determined to have the clones killed.  That leads to a final confrontation:

Beautiful speech, but...

I am troubled by my tribalism.

I am susceptible, in case no one has noticed, to Obama's rhetoric.  I see myself, as I once noted, in the self-mocking confession of an old graduate school classmate (I give the provenance, because grad students in the humanities are likely to be of this tribe):

I love Obama...Every time he speaks I emit a small sigh of joy, love and delight.  I know, perhaps my eyes are clouded, but he seems so completely appropriate each time he speaks, that he could be singing the national anthem in Swahili, and I wouldn't care.

So when I read Obama's historic address to the students of the University of Yangon, Burma's principal university, my heart naturally swelled in my breast,  and tears welled up. It was, as you might expect (if you're so susceptible), a beautifully constructed speech -- opening dazzling prospects of freedom and prosperity to the Burmese, applying subtle pressure at all the right points on their leaders (as I heard no less tough a judge than Human Right Watch's Tom Malinowski affirm last night), honoring Burma's dissidents, making a cogent case, as Obama always does, that America's best values are or ought to be universal values, softening the paternalism by acknowledging past American error (i.e., in Foxspeak, "apologizing").

Turning the lightbulb on the Gaza blockade

The Israeli cabinet has acted on Netanyahu's agreement with Tony Blair last week to alter the terms of the Gaza blockade.  The key difference is that the blockade will be defined by what materials are banned, rather than by what materials are permitted. That is, if the arms blockade is a lightbulb, the Israelis have decided o turn the bulb rather than the stool on which the bulb-changer stands. From Haaretz:

The PMO said that Israel would release "as soon as possible" a detailed list of goods that would not be allowed into the Gaza Strip, which would include all weapons.

"Israel seeks to keep out of Gaza weapons and material that Hamas uses to prepare and carry out terror and rocket attacks toward Israel and its civilians," Netanyahu said. "All other goods will be allowed into Gaza."

Israel's new policy will allow an inflow of construction material into the Gaza Strip for projects approved by the Palestinian Authority or under the auspices of international supervision, including schools, health facilities, water treatment and sanitation, the statement said.

War of the snapshots

Ever been to a wedding where half the guests are standing and snapping photos as the couple walks down the aisle?

One of the odd features of the videos documenting the current antigovernment demonstrations marking Ashoura in Tehran: it seems that half the people there, including police, are circling the action, holding up their cameras, and snapping away.

One one level, it's a battle of snapshots: Iranians struggling to get their photos out to be viewed around the world; law enforcement targeting people for future persecution. (Gaza too was a war of perception, which continued after the shooting stopped.)

It seems, too, as if the line between participating and recording is disappearing.  How long before someone documents his own murder?

To the spielers go the victory

The PR wars accompanying and following contemporary asymmetric conflicts are growing more complex.

In TNR, Simona Weinglass has a fascinating account of rival tallies of the civilian death toll in the Israeli attack on Gaza early this year. In one corner, Khalil Shaheen of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), who during the war led a team of about 35 that "braved the crossfire to visit hospitals, interview victims' families, and document the location and circumstances of every single war casualty." The PHCR tally: 1417 dead, including 926 civilians, 255 non-combatant police officers, and 236 fighters .

In the other corner, retired Israeli intelligence officer Jonathan Dahoah Halevi, working from his home in Toronto, is meticulously working his way through PHCR's 1417 names, "comparing them to a database of thousands of terrorist operatives he has compiled, as well as whatever he finds on the Internet." So far, concentrating on the 255 police among the dead, he has compiled "a list of 171 people the PCHR defines as civilians that he claims he can prove are actually combatants affiliated with Hamas or other terrorist groups" -- for example, one whom past news reports describe as "a militant cleric who mentored suicide bombers and sent his own son on a suicide mission in 2001, killing two Israelis" and another who "was a Palestinian Resistance Committee operative and suspect in the terrorist attack against three American security guards in Gaza in October 2003."

Halevi's private research sheds some light on the assumptions and sources behind the Israeli Defense Forces' tally: 1,166 dead, 709 of them Hamas terror operatives, 295 'uninvolved Palestinians' and 162 men whose names had not yet been attributed to any organization.

Are Shaheen's methods suspect? No: they're just simple. Anyone who was not carrying a weapon when killed was a civilian. Are Halevi's methods suspect? No, they're just expansive: anyone who aided a terrorist or militant group was a combatant. The data he compiles is a matter of public record.

What's striking is the nature, duration and complexity of the battle personified by Shaheen and Halevi (whose names have a certain doppelganger resonance, given their two-syllable assonance). Here's Weinglass's endnote:

Both agree, however, that the war does not end when the fighting stops. "In every war there are two components," says Halevi. "The first is the battle itself, defeating the other side, and the second is presenting the facts of what happened." If a country is not vigilant, he warns, "The other side will rewrite your history."

An old truism has it that the victors write the narrative. Today, to an as-yet unmeasured extent, the dominant narrative writers become the victors.