Dear Alex,
 
Shalom!
 
I wanted to express my personal (and my people’s) thanks to you for valiantly highlighting our cause by your articles in the Guardian. Much appreciated.
 
We’re also grateful that you have taken a principled stand, despite the recent attacks in Mumbai.
 
The people in Kashmir are horrified by the targeting of Jews by lunatic killers. These killers were Pakistani and had nothing to do with Kashmir. Nothing could be more against Kashmir’s cultural ethos and its tradition of co-existence than the heinous actions in Mumbai.
 
Jews are and always have been welcome in Kashmir. In fact, in 1991 when Jews were taken hostage by Pakistani militants, it was a Kashmiri group - JKLF which stands for secular independent Kashmir - that rescued them.
 
The simple, decent folk of Kashmir have nothing but feelings of brotherhood and hospitality for the Jewish people. You are always welcome here.
 
Kind Regards

He decided to rehearse the testimony he would give against her. When he’d come back and told Marcus what had happened Marcus had been disgusted. “She’s worse than Caroline,” he’d said, Caroline being Marcus’ ex who had ended things after a month. Joshua had defended Chloe. Marcus didn’t understand, things couldn’t be neatly categorised and packed into easily comprehensible boxes. Now he wasn’t so sure. Away from Marcus, he felt the need to make his case for the prosecution.

Had he known the relationship was that precarious, would he have gone to Rome with her? He never had an inkling. It had been a whim, a delicious piece of spontaneity, to book flights and escape classes and lectures for three days, with this sophisticated, spiritual young woman he had only known for five weeks. She was unlike anyone he’d ever met: her teasing smile and the way she talked about life was as near to poetry as he’d encountered in a lover. On that first day in Rome she talked about sitting in the sunshine and knowing God was making love to her.

Should he have been alarmed from the moment she’d mentioned her initial reasons for choosing Rome? That an ex lover lived there, Roberto, almost a mentor figure to her, a boutique owner 10 years her senior, who had whisked her away from a pursuing army of prospective but unwanted Romeos twelve months earlier. She had no intention of seeing Roberto, she’d said when she invited Joshua. “He doesn’t even know I’m coming. It’s just I always planned to go now, so why not with you?”

How culpable was Joshua? He’d been too clingy, too uptight on the journey from Oxford to the airport and then, in Italy, on the way to the Piazza Campo dei Fiori. Later, on the first full day, in the old neighbourhood of Trastevere, he’d bought a tall orange juice and she’d not bought one for herself, watching her money. He offered her a sip but didn’t think to buy her one. Had little things like that been his undoing?

First there’d been the phone call. They’d just arrived in Rome, literally stepped off the plane and were walking towards passport control when Chloe’s phone rang. She took it out and looked at it aghast, like it was some infectious piece of alien matter to be feared. “It’s him,” she said. “Who?” Joshua asked. “Roberto.” But the phone didn’t show any caller ID. She said she ‘knew it was him’. Had she told him she was coming? No. But they had this “telepathic link” she said. He’d sensed her arrival. She didn’t answer and didn’t want to call him back.

Then was the first evening. They had a meal together outside in the piazza, around all the Italian ragazzi and the tourists seizing photo opportunities. After they finished she said it: “Joshua, I cannot be your girlfriend, not how you want me to be.” Joshua didn’t know what this meant and Chloe didn’t have the answers. But he understood she didn’t like the cosiness of a conventional relationship. “I still want you to be my lover,” she said. “I still want you to make love to me tonight.” An African man in a brown leather jacket came over and tried to sell Joshua a rose to give to his young lady. He declined, Chloe’s words still echoing in his ears. “I cannot be your girlfriend.”

The next day was Trastevere. A hot day of walking. The orange juice incident and a film in the afternoon. But there was a tension they carried around between them, That night, in the probably once welcoming albergo, Chloe told him: “I cannot make love to you.” She had sensed anger when they had had sex the night before. And now she felt…estranged. Joshua felt as if he were watching a film, in which these events were happening to someone else. Yet he found them hard to accept. First “I cannot be your girlfriend” and now “I cannot…” Cannot until when? What does this mean? She couldn’t say.

Enkephalin. Either of two morphine-like peptides in the brain thought to control levels of pain.

He told her he was going for a walk and left the hotel room without waiting for her response. He wasn’t wearing a watch but he noticed the Roman numeral clock in the piazza said it was 1. When he returned, having mulled things over until he was positively angry, the liquid crystal display clock in the room said 3:23.

Their last full day in Rome. And here it was. Chloe said she wanted to see Roberto. Just for the morning. To say she was here and she wasn’t interested in being with him and hello. Joshua agreed. What could he do? He spent the morning walking around the shops at the foot of the Spanish Steps. He picked up a post card and wrote to his friend Jon. “I’ve had an unexpected and… interesting time. Will tell you more when I get back.” He sat in the cathedral at the top and met her when she agreed. In the afternoon they had a beer outside a café in the sunshine and he laughed for what seemed the first time in three days.

But there was one more trial. She had told Roberto she would visit a final time, in the early evening, just to say goodbye, a half hour visit. So Joshua waited for her in the hotel room. She returned with the same wild look she’d had when she’d taken that phone call. The first thing she did was strike her forehead with the heel of her hand and exclaim: “I’m so stupid.” Joshua told her to calm down. What had happened?

Roberto had put to her an ultimatum. She had to “be with him” – with Roberto – tonight, and now, or never see him again. In these moments Joshua felt like rushing out the room and running, as far across the city as he could, until he had no more strength or breath. But instead, he just told her he felt that way.

“I’m not going to go to him,” she said.

It surprised Joshua. He couldn’t understand why she would choose this hotel room, with him, rather than across town with Roberto.

“I feel like he’s a wise being, calling to me from my future. But it is still the future and I can’t be there with him.”

That night they walked in silence through the nearby cobbled streets. There was nothing to say.

In the morning, their final few hours in Rome, they went to the Coliseum. There they saw someone paid to dress as a Roman soldier. He was smoking a cigarette. He might have been on his break or he might have just been apathetic and casual about his work. He stood on a little stone podium and curled his lip up in an unimpressed sneer.

“Where you from?” he asked Joshua and Chloe.

“England.”

“Huh.” He grunted. “England. You English don’t know how to soddisfy the ladies.”

The funny thing is the two of them had finally had fun together that last morning. Freed from something, some burden removed, they’d laughed at the soldier and told jokes on the flight back. That was why Joshua felt compelled to defend her to Marcus. How could he understand?

And now Chloe expected him for drinks, some event in a converted church where students were to wear lounge suits.

His phone rang. He knew it was her.

“Rain check?” she said.

“I’ll be there in twenty,” he replied, and turned on the light.

Today, in the wake of Barack Obama’s victory in the US Presidential election, more and more people are starting to think about that question. And few have answered it as directly and honestly as Daniel Gordis, South Jerusalem’s self-proclaimed conscience of enlightened Anglo-Israelis, whose dispatches from Jerusalem are disseminated as Hasbara around the world.

In his native Los Angeles for the US elections, Gordis begins by emphasising how moved he was by Obama’s victory: “Like Jews, African Americans have known more than their share of suffering, and to see them transcend yet another barrier moved many of us precisely because in some ways their story is akin to ours. The authors of Negro spirituals who sang of getting out of “Egypt land” understood that, perhaps before we did.” Moreover, Obama’s victory provided more vindication for the American dream: “Ultimately, though, the power of that day stemmed from the sense that America had discovered its purpose, had found once again the capacity to be about something…Americans had good reason to be proud.”

Indeed they did. But what about Israel, and the implications of Obama’s victory for its future? Much has been written about the implications of Obama’s victory for the Arab-Israeli conflict, but what about the implications of Obama’s victory for the future of Zionism? After concluding that many Israelis and Americans judge Israel according to American standards of liberal democracy, Gordis bluntly asks the question my fellow gap-year student had asked ten years ago: “Could Israel ever elect an Israeli Arab as a Prime Minister?”

Gordis begins his answer by accepting that Israeli-Arabs have been victims of discrimination. In the spheres of infrastructure and education, not to mention day-to-day life, like blacks in the US, “there is much work to be done.” But. “The work to be done should not blind us to Israel’s very purpose. And Israel’s purpose is fundamentally different from the United States.” What is that purpose? “Israel was established as the sole country in which the Jews could flourish as only a majority culture can, where they would shape the contours of their society and home its collective narrative…If Israel one day were to have a Knesset in which a majority of the members were Arab [a rather different question to that of an Israeli-Arab Prime Minister, but there you go], Israel will have failed in its purpose.”

Those of us on the left-wing of the Zionist spectrum are often accused by supposedly more radical thinkers of pursuing the impossible task of trying to square the circle by trying to reconciling Zionism with democracy. It can’t be done, they say, as long as Israel constitutes itself along ethnic lines. Once it changes its identity and defines itself as a “state for all its citizens”, and accepts the right of return for millions of Palestinian refugees, it will be a pariah no more.

But nor will it be Israel. This is why Gordis and I would be united in our opposition to the various one-state solutions that have been offered, at least as long as they constitute themselves on anti-Zionist lines. My criticism of Gordis, then, is that he is also missing the point of Israel. The notion of a Jewish State does not mean discriminating in favour of Jews. It means that the national culture - the language and festivals and public memory - will predominantly reflect the Jewish experience. But this should be a national culture in which anybody should be able to actively participate, just as Britain’s national culture of Shakespeare and the English Civil War and Dr Who on Christmas Day was available to me, a third-generation Brit whose grandparents had migrated from Germany less than fifty years before my birth. This is the aim, I think, of the Hebrew Repulic, of cultural Zionism.

Gordis seems to be arguing that normalisation - the raison d’etre of Zionism - is impossible. Despite this, he wants to have his cake and eat it. “Navigating this course will never be simple. To remain both Jewish and democratic, Israel will have to preserve a substantial demographic majority. That will require nuanced decision-making.” I recognise the whimpishness in that “nuanced”. It’s the ’nuanced’ of someone who isn’t quite brave enough to spell out what he means, because he knows that it would instantly undermine his claim to believe in democracy.

Gordis’ single external justification for allowing Israel to be uniquely discriminatory (we can assume that he would not appreciate it if a French thinker, for example, used similar arguments to suggest that French-Jewish aspirations should not extend beyond having running sewage and adequate schools in their towns) is a pithy quotation from Montesquieu - ”Each state has a purpose that is particular to it.” It’s hard to understand his meaning without the context, but this seems to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. As I’ll discuss in a future post, the international system is relatively unconcerned about how states define themselves internally, a state of affairs which has its advantages and disadvantages. But Israel was very clear about its purpose: to be a Jewish and Democratic state. The way Gordis sees it, this is an impossibility. In that sense, he’s thrown in his lot with the anti-Zionists.

The idea that the existence of minorities exposes Zionism for what it is is false. On the contrary, strong minorities are necessary for Zionism’s fulfillment. Zionism is succeeding when four Thai children wander the Tel Aviv streets speaking Hebrew, or when an Israeli-Arab author sits in Berlin writing in it. No doubt their relationship with the Jewish state is complicated, as is mine. The point is that they are forming an integral part of its core. Strengthening these positive associations is the vital task Zionism faces today. Indeed, it’s arguably a more important task than solving the conflict.  If we can achieve the dream of integration, the fulfillment of the Hebrew Republic, speculations about an Israeli-Arab Prime Minister will be unnecessary.

Waltz with Bashir opens with wild dogs peltering down Rothschild Boulevard, on an unseasonably windy Tel Aviv night. It’s instantly unsettling, this dream sequence, and I was more agitated than usual by the latecomers whispering in the aisle. Then we cut to our hero, Ari Folman himself, sipping a twilight pint with his friend in a cosy pub, transported to the port to emphasise the effect of the stormy sea cascading outside. Soon, we learn, Folman wants to try and remember what he did during the First Lebanon War, how he’s connected.

Shooting and Crying is the phrase given to the Israeli tendency to take part in brutal acts of violence, to wailingly bemoan the fact afterwards, and then to carry on shooting. It’s a derogatory description of the Israeli preference for psychoanalytic reflection over political action, embodied by Golda Meit’s famous complaint to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat: “We can forgive you for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.”

Waltz with Bashir has rightly received praise from a diverse range of sources, and came close to winning the Palmes D’Or at Cannes this year. It’s an extraordinary film, one of the best war movies ever made, blurring the line between documentary and fictional narrative, while at the same time showing just how potent a medium animation can be. It’s also - and perhaps this is what’s really unsettling - deeply beautiful. The pursuit of a teenage rocket-launcher in an orchard appears like an image drawn from a Greek epic; a soldier spraying bullets like a maniac on a Beirut street looks like the loveliest thing in the world. I suppose this is what one friend was getting at when he said he didn’t like the fact that it was a cartoon. I understand his concerns - the cartoon is firmly established in our consciousness as a diversion for children - but by the end it’s clear that only animation could have helped Folman with his remembering.

Folman is trying to remember what happened: by talking to his comrades, and with the aid of psychologists, he is able to get closer to the truth of his experiences. He has stated explicitly that Waltz with Bashir is not intended as a political film, and - given the central place of Sabra & Shatila in the Arab-Israeli propaganda war - this is a brave statement indeed. So while the atrocitities of Israel and its Phalangist allies dominate the film, it would be a mistake to see Waltz with Bashir as some kind of national mea culpa. Folman is happy to leave that task to the op-ed writers and agitators. Instead, he has unapologetically made a film for the perpetrators and the bystanders, a kind of banality of evil for the twenty-first century.

Pyschological experiments have shown that people find it harder to recall details of violent events than quotidian ones. At the start of the film, aside from the waiting on the beach and the furloughs home, Folman remembers nothing of his soldier days in Lebanon. Painstakingly, he manages to unravel the truth, all the way to the camps of Sabra & Shatila, where the most notorious (although by no means the only) massacre of the war took place. The audience knows what is coming from the beginning; this doesn’t make the finale any less startling or wrenching. At the very end, Folman makes a brief switch to the live footage that previously served as inspiration for the animated sketches. His explanation for this is that he didn’t want audiences going away without having a real-life sense of what the camps looked like after the slaughter. A responsible finale, or the justifications of a filmmaker who doesn’t quite have the courage of his convictions, who isn’t quite able to see his vision through to the very end? It’s hard to say.

Sitting in the cinema in silence, I felt I had a small sense of what it must have been like to be a German watching Schindler’s List in Berlin. The Lebanon War was an unmitigated disaster, the Israeli overreaction par excellence, resulting in 20,000 civilian casualties and the steady erosion of Israeli deterrence over the following years. Folman has shown our folly in a remarkable new light, and at the same time has breathed new life into the war movie genre. Following Beaufort, Israel can once again take dubious pride in being able to make the best war movies around. The depressing implications of this don’t need to be spelled out. Just go and see Waltz with Bashir, traipse silently home afterwards, and - if you can - try and remember.

Jaipur was bombed three days after I arrived in India. This is what I wrote at the time: “Terrorism - in its rational form - is successful only if it can impact on the civilian population, to change their behavior enough in order to draw concessions from the government. In a country the size of India this is a near-impossibility. To use the callous language of risk assessment, sixty dead in India is but a statistic.” After the near-schadenfreude of yesterday’s post on targeted assassinations, my reaction to yesterday’s awful events in Mumbai is rather more humble. India is now arguably the country with the greatest terrorist problem of them all. Even worse, the terrorism is increasingly adopting chaotic forms, forms which in many ways reflect life on the subcontinent, but seem impervious to attempts at prevention.

The Mumbai attacks seem to have been targeted at foreigners, and the demands for US and British hostages implies some kind of Al-Qaeda inspired involvement. This is why the Maximum City is dominating the news cycle. But it’s important to remember that local train stations were hit as well. Random bombs went off. Shots seem to have been fired  manically, like the climactic scene in Waltz with Bashir. Even the Habad house didn’t emerge unscathed.

It seems futile to ask what the people who perpetrated this act want. As ever, there is talk of Pakistani involvement (the background being recent moves by the Pakistani Prime Minister against the ISI), or perhaps groups from Bangladesh. Outlook reports that the terrorist were speaking in Arabic, and may have numbered Somalis in their ranks - at this stage all this is speculation.  The backlash from the BJP and its cohorts will be quick to follow, another blow against the world’s largest pluralist democracy. What is clear is that India has a terrorist problem that may yet prove to be more difficult to deal with than those experienced in other countries. I fear that Mumbai will not be the last city to be targeted.

In December 2006, the High Court ruled that assassinations are permissible only if the target cannot be arrested instead, and that “harm to civilians will be legal only if it meets the demands of proportionality.” This ruling falls far from declaring the practice illegal, but at least it was a step in the right direction. Now, documents obtained by Haaretz show that even the High Court guidelines haven’t been adhered to. “The documents reveal that the IDF approved assassinations in the West Bank, even when it could have been possible to arrest the targets instead, and that top-ranking army officers authorised the killings in advance, in writing, even if innocent bystanders would be killed as well.”

We are often told that the IDF only targets so-called “ticking-bombs” (always a difficult claim to make when speaking about despicable heads of terrorist groups who would never put themselves up for martyrdom); now we learn that ”the assassination of at least one member of a so-called “ticking infrastructure” was postponed due to an impending visit by a senior U.S. official.” In other words, politics as usual.

The article goes on to cite examples of cases in which assassinations were approved even if there were unidentified people in the vicinity. It is important to note, though, that Chief-of-Staff Gabi Ashkenazi forbade the operation if there was more than one unidentified person in the car. More worryingly, given the supposed urgency of targeted assassinations, he then went on to say that “in light of the diplomatic meetings anticipated during the course of the week, the date of implementation should be reconsidered.” An IDF spokeperson acknowledged that diplomatic considerations were taken into account when planning operations, but “this does not detract from the operation’s urgency or necessity.”

Put simply, the IDF has been violating the High Court’s rulings. The High Court is the guardian of Israeli democracy, the IDF is its sword. If the IDF does not follow Israeli law, what hope is there for the rest of us? I don’t buy into the simplistic narrative which suggests that Israeli carried out assassinations during the Second Intifada in order to elicit an even more horrific response for the Palestinians. At the same time, though, empirical evidence continues to show that targeted assassinations are ineffective in confronting an urgency. Without sounding too smug, it’s nice to occasionally be vindicated. If - God forbid - the 3rd Intifada is ever upon us, I hope the IDF’s top brass will show a bit more wisdom in dealing with it.

Update: Here

I asked Yossi who he was planning to vote for in the upcoming elections. “None of them, they’re all a bunch of shits,” he told me. Now fifty years of age, he had voted for various parties over the years, but hadn’t voted in any of the recent polls. “They only look out for themselves. The day they start caring about me, I’ll start voting. Now, though, it doesn’t make a difference.” I argued that it does make a difference, even if only a small one, and that it is perhaps elections like February’s - the ones which attract little interest - which end up being significant. He was not moved. “I don’t know how long you’ve been here,” he told me, “but you’ll soon learn.”

On reflection, this was another cliche. The idea that the democratic process makes no difference is a common one. What’s sad is how quickly and recently the idea has taken root in Israel, a country known for its robust participatory politics. Even more interesting is how this apathising process has gone almost unnoticed, despite the close attention Israel receives around the world. Israel is seen as some ideological relic, a place where decisions are made because of absurd attachments to nineteenth century notions like blood and land, a state where the national ideology - Zionism - drives policy and leads to war or peace.

Somewhere along the way, though, Israelis just started watching Big Brother. And that, in a nutshell, was that. We’re not quite at the stage where the latest developments in the programme will make the front page of the newspaper (although you shouldn’t quote me on that), but reality television does now seem more important to us than the driving false dichotomy of Israeli political history: peace or security.

An opinion poll published this week bears this out. According to Haaretz, only 51 percent of every Jewish 18-35 year old (rates of political participation in the Arab sector are difference; hence the usefulness of surveying them separately) are sure that they will vote in the February elections; 69 percent of the same age bracket think most politicians are corrupt. Those who are certain they won’t vote give a number of reasons: it doesn’t interest me, it’s not important to me, there’s nobody to vote for, I don’t believe in anyone…

More cliches, then. And were I in Britain, I might have more sympathy. The first-past-the-post system is one in which millions of votes are rendered redundant; in such circumstances, apathy becomes almost inevitable. In Israel, however, we have proportional representation, a system not without its flaws, but one in which nobody can say that their voice won’t be heard.  Despite this, I’m going to stick my neck out and predict that February will see the lowest turnout in Israeli history. The considered cynicism of the taxi-driver, borne of experience, has become second-nature to the nation’s youth, a development which favours only the right, hence Likud’s lead in the polls.

I’ll be voting in the elections (assuming that the rumours that olim can only vote three years after arrival aren’t true), but I know I’ve been as apathetic as anyone in the last year or two. Consider this series on Israeli Apathy an attempt to rouse myself out of the stupour, to audaciously hope that Bibi Netanyahu will not be the next Prime Minister of Israel, and that change is not far away…

עשרים אלפ יהודים צפויים להגיע לחברון בסוף השבוע

(20,000 Jews are expected to arrive in Hebron for the weekend)

Back home, I checked Yediot Ahranot, where the description of the participants in the event was rather different:

בסוף השבוע צפויים לפקוד את חברון 20-25 אלף ישראלים

(At the weekend 20-25 thousand Israelis are expected to visit Hebron)

This is worthy of comment. The context is Shabbat Hai Sarah (named after this week’s parshah), in which Hebron features prominently. As a result, it’s turned into an annual show of strength by those who believe in Jewish sovereignty over the city. It’s a particularly sensitive pilgrimage this year, though, because of the High Court order to remove settlers from one of the buildings in the town.

Why does one newspaper describe the out-of-towners as Jews, and the other as Israelis? Which is the best way to describe them and what is the significance of the choice? We can presume that not quite all the celebrants will be Israelis, that there will be - for example - the odd American yeshiva bocher or two burgeoning their ranks. But perhaps not all of them will be Jews, either. Perhaps a gaggle of Christian-Zionists will blend in with the crowd? Hard to say. But I think, on reflection, that Yediot got it right, and Haaretz got it wrong.

We hear a lot about Israel’s Jewish nature excluding those citizens who aren’t Jewish. But we hear less about how the Israeli/Jew dichotomy is used to delienate boundaries within Jewish discourse. By describing the Hebron pilgrims as Jews, Haaretz is outing them as the other, as a rabble alien to the secular liberal values of the, ahem, hummus-scoffing, Friday morning apathising denizens of the Tel Aviv bubble. When Yediot calls them Israelis, it is acknowledging their common-bond with the rest of the Israeli people, even if they so often represent the worst of what this country has to offer.

Settlers and their supporters are Israelis, as are Israeli-Arabs, Olim, and Scandinavian kibbutzniks who fell in love and stayed here. Calling them Jews is a way of washing our hands of responsibility for them. This is a dangerous step, and one unbecoming of the newspaper that strives to represent Progressive Zionist values.

With these words, printed in Hebrew, the tenacious story of the Arab Peace Initiative took another intriguing twist. On Thursday, the Palestinian Authority advertised the plan in Israel’s three leading Hebrew-language dailies. This marks an interesting change of strategy. For the first time, an Arab government has gone over the head of the Israeli leadership, reaching out directly to the Israeli people, in their own language.” Read on at CIF.