There are a lot of legends about encounters between Napoleon and the Jews, just as there are about encounters between Alexander the Great and Jews. In both cases, the Jews' ambivalent but ultimately admiring relationship with these world-changing rulers is reflected in the substance of the tales told. They usually show the great ruler learning to admire some aspect of Jewish tenacity in adversity.
One of the ones I always remember about Napoleon is where he's reputed to have passed by a synagogue where he could hear the congregation wailing the mourning chants of the Tisha B'Av service, Tisha B'Av being the saddest day in the Jewish calendar. It's a major fast commemorating the fall on that day of the First and Second temples of Jerusalem, during which Jeremiah's Book of Lamentations is read. When it's explained to him that the Jews he hears are weeping for a loss which took place 1,800 years earlier, he's said to have said:
I vow that this people is destined for a future in their own homeland. For is there any other people who have kept alive similar mourning and hope for so many years?"
Sunday was the 17th Tammuz. For observant orthodox Jews, that's a whole day fast which marks the start of a three week period of mourning, commemorating the beginning of the end of the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE. It culminated in the destruction on the 9th of Av of the Second Temple and the subsequent expulsion of the Jews from their homeland. Most mainstream Jews hardly know of this three week period, though all know of Tisha b'Av, but for those who do, it has some surprisingly effective ways of opening your heart to the sorrows it commemorates. You are not supposed to play or listen to music--and that makes a huge difference in my daily life. You are also supposed to refrain from buying new clothes and cutting your hair. Usually I remember to get mine cut just before the three week period starts. This year, I lost the plot and didn't get it done. So I'll look rather scruffier than I usually do for the next three weeks.
Unlike the major fasts of Tisha B'Av and Yom Kippur, the Fast of 17th Tammuz is one of those you usually observe individually rather than communally.
This year was different. The London Jewish community held a memorial service, arranged almost overnight, for the two returned soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, as well as for the other Israeli soldiers held captive, of whom only one, Gilad Shalit, is known to be still alive.
When I went to the synagogue, I heard the mother of one of the youth group organizers say that they hoped they might get perhaps twenty people attending. By the time the service started, it was packed--even more women than men, with some of them having to stand.
It was quite a low key event, but I was conscious from having spent so much time since the prisoner exchange following the reactions of the UK, Israeli and international media, as well as Israeli bloggers, of the collective sadness that for once united the secular and the religious Israeli public, all too often a non-dialogue of the deaf.
On the same day, Imshin, who, like so many secular Jews, tends to find her spiritual sustenance in Buddhism rather than Judaism, was visiting Jerusalem, and found herself walking up the steps of part of the destroyed Temple. That experience connected with her in a way that I wouldn't have expected:
Here I was standing at the foot of the actual steps that led up to the Second Temple all those years ago. It wasn’t just an old story. It wasn’t a myth. It really happened. And I am a descendant of these people who came to this place to worship....
I always get a bit teary at the Wall, and I’m never sure why. Friday was no exception, standing at the foot of those steps.
I always thought it was all this spirituality in the air that got to me. But perhaps it’s something deeper than that.
When we went over to see Robinson’s Arch , or what’s left of it, the enormity of the destruction really hit me and I was very sad. This has never happened to me before. I must have needed to be able to envision this as a real place, for me to begin to understand the terrible tragedy of what happened back then.
These are actual stones from the outer wall of Herod’s Temple, bearing the distinct features of Herodian masonry, excavated just as you see them, apparently toppled by the Romans when they destroyed the Temple.
And as these things always happen, today was the 17th of Tamouz, believed to be the day the Romans broke through the city walls (among other things), all those years ago (precisely 1938 years I think, if I’m not miscounting).
Then I checked out Karen's Tel-Aviv Diary, as I usually do. She's also a militantly secular Israeli, but being the daughter of Yiddish speaking Holocaust survivors and a fluent Yiddishist herself, she's closer to the traditions of the religion than you might imagine. She is bearing so much beyond the collective grief over the outcome of the prisoners' return-- a tragic family bereavement, the loss of a young nephew after a cruel illness, a husband undergoing chemotherapy, and more.
And in memory of the young man, but perhaps also all the public collective grief over the dead hostage soldiers, she put up on her diary blog a poignant, searing poem by Yehuda Amichai which she had long ago translated. Her translation appeared in the Tel-Aviv Review in 1998, which most English readers, including myself, have no knowledge of.
It commemorates the death--possibly also after a long period of struggle--of someone close to Amichai and yet it also commemorates the pain of some of the legacies that all Jews share.
In a time when it's possible to be silenced by the cynicism and hollow triumphalism emanating from Lebanon and beyond, Amichai's poem speaks into that silence and beyond it.
And there he is, getting only passing coverage, even in the UK press.
The real problem is, he's being upstaged. Barack Obama is about to arrive in Israel while he's there. And while Brown's a serving Prime Minister and Obama's an as yet unelected presidential candidate, there's no doubt who's eclipsed. Because basically, Gordon Brown's press gets him a lot of coverage back home, but for all the wrong reasons. And Obama is the nearest a politician gets to being a rock star.
Even the more discreet aides of Israel's Foreign Ministry are at it:
"Poor Gordon Brown," a senior official in the Foreign Ministry said on Sunday, "he just happened to visit Israel the same week U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama is expected to arrive and isn't receiving much attention." Indeed, visiting Israel on the same week that Obama is expected to arrive is like being the opening act for the Beatles.
There were few signs on the streets of Jerusalem yesterday that the prime minister of one of Israel's most important allies and the leader of one of the most important countries in the world was in town. For some reason, Union Jack flags were nowhere to be seen in the capital.
Simon McDonald, one of Brown's senior aides and former ambassador to Israel, planned his boss' visit months ahead to portray him as the same kind of a statesman as his predecessors. But again, the timing was bad. Brown went to Iraq on a short visit before he came to Israel, and by the time he arrived in Jerusalem most of the press corps were too tired to report the visit and preferred hanging out in the lobby of the King David Hotel.
The official line, from the British Council, is that it is nothing to do with the boycott issue:
Julia Smith, deputy director of the British Council, told The Jerusalem Post Sunday, "This program is not something related to the boycott. The British Council and British government are opposed to an academic boycott of Israel. Boycott calls have come from a small minority of the academic community in Britain.
"BIRAX will hopefully be a long-running program to strengthen the existing ties between Britain and Israel," she said.
You get a rather different view from Professor David Newman of Israel's Ben Gurion University, who has been on a sabbatical in England during the current year:
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Prof. David Newman, who has been active in fighting boycott efforts during his sabbatical in England this year, told the Post that the program "has a great deal to do with the boycott."
"Because of the ongoing discussion of boycotts, the British government decided that the most appropriate response was to strengthen research ties," he said. Newman added that he had been involved in planning the program since its beginning.
And here's a still more revealing comment in the same article from an anonymous source "close to the boycott issue":
A source close to the boycott issue told the Post that the choice of targeting junior academics was not coincidental.
"By choosing starting academics, when the unions start discussing a boycott there will be more people who have had some contact with Israel and will have some knowledge. We've discovered that 80 percent of those who attend the union meetings don't know anything about Israel or the issue. So it's sort of a value added element to the program," he said.
There is also the wider issue of why this happens to be the first time a UK Prime Minister has paid an official visit to Israel, despite over 20 years of British rule via the former League of Nations Mandate.
The last few months have seen the new key ruling pollticians of Germany, France and England rushing to be identified with policies more sympathetic to Israel than in recent years, in contrast to their predecessors' widespread criticism of what they condemned as "disproportionate action" by Israel during the 2006 war with Hezbollah.
What seems to be happening here is a jostling for primacy within an enlarged European Union, whose dynamic, with the accession of so many former Soviet satellites, whose governments continue to wish to shake off the reflex anti-imperialist/ anti-zionist rhetoric of their past, is showing signs of shifting away from its left-wing socialist focus of former near-partisan support of the Palestinians. Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and now Gordon Brown all seem to be keen to make more gestures of sympathy towards Israel, including high-profile official visits, than most EU leaders have done in recent years.
And, behind the scenes, the dynamic of the diplomatic struggle to head off Iran from developing nuclear weapons and so avoid Israel taking a pre-emptive strike may well be a further reason why all these visits have happened over so few months. The Telegraph reports that Brown will make a strongly anti-Iranian statement when he addresses the Israeli Knesset tomorrow, as does The Independent.
This is what Ha'aretz reports of Gordon Brown's account of that process, giving a view that he hasn't yet articulated in the UK Parliament, as far as I'm aware:
...the new European leadership - Germany's Angela Merkel, France's Nicolas Sarkozy, Italy's Silvio Berlusconi and himself - is interested in bolstering the collaboration with the United States in affecting change in the global agenda, including that of the Middle East.
Whatever happens to Gordon Brown over the next few months, and even up to the likely coming to power of David Cameron under a new Tory administration, it looks unlikely that any change of Prime Minister or government will change this course.
Were Israel to launch a pre-emptive attack on Iran, where would the EU stand? No doubt the sudden rush of prime ministerial meetings has provided the opportunity to leave a few messages which would not be sayable in the public realm.
Meanwhile, back in Euston, UCU and its SWP-dominated executive will be continuing to devote hours of their energy and a great deal of their members' money to supporting and hosting the Stop the War Campaign, fighting for their pro-Cuba campaign and of course appearing on platforms and in demonstrations supporting the Palestine Solidarity Campaign with its central plank of boycotting all Israeli goods, facilities and services, including Israel's universities, theatres and films and the people who work in them.
Tonight's BBC Radio 4 radio news reports have centred solely on the new financial aid being set up for the Palestinian Authority, although this is little more than a further episode of a long established relationship. The BBC news website takes up Brown's pro-Israel comments, seen on the ITN news ciip above, from his visit to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Memorial Museum, but remains silent on the new academic co-operation initiative.
And The Guardian goes even further, focusing only on Brown's visit to Ramallah, and amplifying everything he said that was supportive to the Palestinian cause, whilst remaining silent on his condemnation of Palestinian terrorism and on the enthusiastically supportive pro-Israel statements reported in Ha'aretz and the rest of the Israeli press. There is not tonight one UK media mention of the academic agreement, which delivers a socking response to UCU and the pro-boycott campaigners, despite the high profile coverage these campaigns have previously received in the UK media.
UPDATE: The Independent now covers it here. The Guardian on Monday morning still doesn't refer to the exchange and includes an amazing subhead "Echoes of the Holocaust as Ahmadinejad singled out" which presents President Ahmadinejad as a victim. That's a particularly resonant use of "singling out," because it refers both to what happened to Jews in Nazi Europe and is the main focus of the criticism of the UCU and the anti-Israel boycotters, who campaign only for the boycott of Israel, whilst remaining silent on the actions of other states with arguably much more serious records of oppression, suppression of academic freedom and the like.
Question for the Guardian: "Singling out" usually implies a collective of offenders from which just one is selected. How many other heads of state are currently regularly making speeches asking for other countries to be wiped off the map?
I'm a fan of the Body Shop's Tea Tree Oil Face Mask. It was my daughter who introduced me to it--she had the usual teenage angst about the tiny amount of acne she suffered, but she found it helped. I tried it despite not having any acne, and I've been using it ever since. It has two almost magical effects, the second of which may be confined to me alone.
The first and most magical thing is does is instantly to appear to remove a film of crud from my face, so that it looks startlingly brighter and fresher once I've used it. I'm still surprised by the difference, every time.
Now the second apparently magical result seems to have something to do with its being a luminous intense green cream which you smear on your face till you look like you might be taking part in an anthropological documentary about the rituals of some obscure rainforest tribe. Cue for the magical effect. Without fail, someone will come and ring the doorbell. It happens to me every time almost without exception, and I've managed to startle quite a range of friends, neighbours, postmen, meter readers and delivery men that way.
Because of magical effect (1), I've become quite inured to the embarrassment of magical effect (2).
So I was miffed when it went out of stock at The Body Shop. They kept promising they'd have some soon, but "soon" turned out to be about four months. Meanwhile, I tried one or two of their other face masks, but none of the others were a patch on the Tea Tree Oil one. True, one painted me blue and did not seem to produce the doorbell-rings phenomenon, but it wasn't worth changing to.
So when Tea Tree Oil Face Mask came back into stock, I ordered a load of it. I didn't want to be left without it again. And with the order, I got a little pack of freebies, mainly little sample pots of Body Shop's latest products.
I gave the samples to my daughter; she's much more open than I am to experimenting with new toiletries and beauty products. Once I discover something I like, I'll just keep on using it unless I'm presented with strong evidence that something else might be better.
I didn't think any more about it. Then a few days ago, I got this email from my daughter:
I tried some of the Moringa Seed Oil Body Butter - I'd used other body butters from Bodyshop before, so I wasn't really worried about it, and not being food, it didn't even enter my head to check the label. I didn't put it on my face (thank goodness) but put some on my back and chest. A couple of minutes later I was about to go to bed, and realised that I was becoming short of breath.
I thought this was odd as I'd taken my night-time antihistamine (one of the stronger 6-8 hours ones) about an hour beforehand and had been fine, and this was very sudden.
I tried lying down to see if it would help, and could feel my airways contracting and the prickly itching under my chin that makes me think "I've eaten Brazil nuts". I was confused though, as I hadn't eaten anything, so I called B in and asked him to check the ingredients on the body butter. I have no idea what Moringa seed is, so it could have been a new allergy that I'd need help with, but jokingly said, "There isn't anything like brazil nuts in that stuff, is there?" Checking the ingredients, brazil nut oil was one, so I found that I had rubbed into my skin a reasonable amount of the stuff. Being very greasy and already rubbed in, it was hard to get off, but I washed it off and took a ridiculous amount of antihistamines, and thankfully didn't get to the stage where I had to use my Epipen.
Took me about an hour to get to to stage where I was breathing easily enough to go back to bed.
My daughter has a severe brazil nut allergy. This first emerged when she was two, and I fed her a brazil nut one evening. Within minutes, she was screaming and her face swelled and puffed out till she looked like a baby version of the Phantom of the Opera. I gave her a couple of spoonfuls of liquid anti-histamine for kids and called out the emergency doctor, who told me I'd done the right thing. It took almost a day for her to recover. Any time after that that she's accidentally come into contact with any trace of brazil nuts-- a single chocolate in a selection of pralines, even salad from a salad bowl that had previously had brazil nuts in it-- she's had the same extreme reactions, of which the accompanying breathing difficulties are the most alarming.
But neither she nor I had suspected that beauty products might contain brazil nut ingredients. And there wasn't any warning on the product. I looked up Moringa Seed Oil Body Butter on the Body Shop web site. It's advertised as "new" and even bears an endorsement from Good Housekeeping Magazine, but there's nothing in the instructions or "tips" on the sites to alert you to what the effect of using the product could be if you have brazil nut allergy.
This is the list of ingredients carried on the web site:
Do you know the botanical name for brazil nuts? I didn't, despite my daughter's allergy. It's Bertholletia Excelsa. So you would only realise that if you knew. My daughter's never been aware of brazil nuts as a component in a cosmetic product, so she hadn't checked the label before she used it. She told me that the actual pot does include an identification of Bertholletia Excelsa as brazil nuts.
Nowhere on the Body Shop site have I been able to find any indication that there might be problems of any sort for allergy sufferers with any of their products.
Given the severity of my daughter's reaction, that's really surprising--and alarming.
I did a web search to find whether there were any sites that picked up similar reactions with Body Shop products. I found this,this and this .
What most concerns me is this apparent response from the Body Shop's Consumer Help Desk in Canada:
Thank you for taking the time to write to us.
Because anaphylactic allergies are dangerous, we cannot guarantee any of our products to be nut-free. Our manufacturers use the same equipment to make different products so we cannot guarantee against the possibility of cross-contamination in any of the products we carry.
We hope this information helps. If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.
Consumer Help Desk The Body Shop Canada
As an approach to Consumer Help, I'd say it must deserve a place in a Hall of Shame for which there's quite a lot of competition. However, that's the Canadian branch.
I'll be writing to the UK Body Shop. For a start, that sample of Moringa Seed Oil Body Butter was included in a "free gift" given out unsolicited to customers. Had it been tested for allergy reactions? Does the Body Shop give any warnings to its customers about potential allergic reactions? How do they respond to customers who experience them? And what do they do about products where users report reactions as severe as my daughter's.
As she said when she first let me know about it, the Body Shop is very committed to not testing on animals, and to using "natural" products. Does that mean it feels its products therefore must be pure and good, and it's up to the customers to find out if there's any problems with any of them?
I'll let you know what the UK Body Shop has to say. Meanwhile, if you or anyone you know has an allergy to brazil nuts, perhaps you could alert them to the possibility of a very nasty reaction they might get if they try Body Shop Moringa Seed Oil Body Butter.
Desert Island Discs is one of my favourite BBC Radio 4 programmes. Like an awful lot of the Radio 4 schedule, it's been there for ever. Like over sixty years. There's a story that Herbert Morrison, 1940s Labour cabinet minister and leader of the old London County Council so longed to be chosen to appear on it that he used to carry around a list of the eight records he'd selected, just in case he got the call. He never did.
Well, yes, I'd love to be on Desert Island Discs, and I think I could put together an interesting eight track playlist. But I haven't got a pre-selected list I carry around with me. If I wanted to, I could do a Desert Island Discs blog post anyway. It would mean that I'd never get invited, but that's the way it is, anyway. With an iphone with over 900 tracks on it, the whole concept looks a bit absurd.
Then of course, the real reason is the vanity one, the lure of being selected.
So I'll readily own up to my own vanity and say how pleased and flattered I am to have been asked by Norm to be the subject of a normblog profile. Blogging royalty. In a pantheon which includes international star bloggers like Glenn Reynolds, Omar of Iraq the Model and Michele Malkin. And a great many of my own favourites. The thing is, Norm's now up to number 252 . OK, he doesn't do them in rank order, as far as I know, but maybe he's down to scraping the barrel?
So Norm sends me this proforma to fill in for the profile. Consternation. There are fifty questions to answer, and I have to choose just thirty. As you'll see from my archive, I tend never to use one sentence where fourteen will do, so how am I going to work out which ones I can bear to leave out?
Would I prefer to tell the world which political or philosphical thesis I think it more important to promote, or would it be better to reveal what I'd do with a huge amount of money if it came my way? Believe me, the choices weren't easy.
And then, I really like putting links into my posts. It's a sort of extreme pedantry. There are no links in normblog profiles, yet here I was going to identify so many ideas and references to things I'd really like to share with people. I emailed Norm. Could I just put links in? No. But if I supplied the links separately from the draft, he'd try put them in for me. When I sent him my draft, there was a list of about fifty links. Norm's tone was slightly pained, but tolerant. There were an awful lot of links; normblog profiles don't usually have links, and would I mind if he made decisions about which if any to put in? No, of course I'd be happy to leave it to him.
So that's what he's done, being a very excellent mensch, as well as an ace blogger.
Thanks, Norm. And thanks for unwittingly giving me the idea of doing a post in which I include the answers to the rest of the fifty questions that didn't go into the profile, updating it to add a few at a time over the course of the day.
Which is almost certainly more than you want to know. But here's the information if you care to read it.
What has been your worst blogging experience?
Being threatened with being sued by a writer who didn't like what I'd written in relation to a comment she wrote on my blog, and then deluged with emails from her friends and allies who piled on the pressure and some of whom organized various forms of ostracism. I didn't back down, she didn't sue and the whole thing petered out but left me feeling resentful and indignant.
What philosophical thesis
do you think it most important to disseminate?
The idea that groups of ordinary people can organize and achieve enormously beneficial changes, even if they don't belong to a political party. The history of zionism, of the Soviet Jewry campaign, and the various movements that led to the downfall of Soviet Communism are cases that come to mind.
Do you think the world (human civilization) has already
passed its best point, or is that yet to come?
The best is definitely yet to come. That's Jewish optimism for you. I think the problems of global warming will be solved, and the forms of terrorism that blight our world today will be eliminated by changes in technology. I realise this is very much a minority opinion.
I'm still thinking about who might be cultural heroes for me. And then I've run out of time for the moment. I'll be back to do some more later today.
At 12:27:
Who are your cultural heroes?
Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, Elvis Presley, Superman, Lord Snooty, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, Sunny (my aerobics trainer at LA Fitness--she has a huge following), Princess Diana.
Do you have any prejudices
you're willing to acknowledge?
Mmmm. I'm prejudiced against pretty much any variant of English blokeishness, especially the shouty outdoor drinking, upperclass braying and football fan types, but ditto for macho cultural wannabees of every nation.
So I'm now thinking about:
If you could choose anyone, from any walk of life, to be
Prime Minister (President etc), who would you choose?
Given the present incumbent, tempting to say almost anyone, but it's not quite true. The obvious choice is Tony Blair. I liked Lord Desai's comment that Gordon Brown was put on earth to show how good Tony Blair really was.
What is your favourite
proverb?
Many waters cannot quench love
What, if anything, do you worry about?
Like Imshin said, if you're a Jewish mother, you worry about just about everything. On a personal basis, how to provide for an old age which could well include years of dementia; on my daughter and son in law's behalf, what will they live on, and how will they be able to afford a house; in the wider world, how will we be able to keep the rogue states and terrorist groups from blighting our lives and theirs before we find the technologies that will totter them.
If you were to relive your life to this point, is there
anything you'd do differently?
I can think of some people I should have walked right by.
What would you call your autobiography?
Getting the Lightbulb to Want to Change
Who would play you in the movie about your life?
Imshin wrote after she met me that I reminded her of Judy Davis. I don't look like her, but I'm flattered by the comparison, so I'll opt for her.
What is your most treasured possession?
My grandmother's brass candlesticks and my grandmother's silver betrothal spoon, both of which came from Galicia in Poland
What talent would you most like to have?
I'd love to be a brilliant street dancer
Which English Premiership football (soccer) team do you
support (or which baseball and/or basketball team)?
See my comments above on commonly enjoyed activities which I regard as a waste of time.
If you could have one (more or less realistic) wish come
true, what would you wish for?
To be able to give up paid working and devote my energies to all the other things I don't get enough time for
How, if at all, would you change your life were you suddenly
to win or inherit an enormously large sum of money?
Firstly, set up a charitable fund of ten percent of it, and devote a part of my life to using the income anonymously to help individuals and causes I like. Secondly, buy my daughter and son in law a fabulous home and everything needed to make it into whatever kind of place they dream of. Thirdly, use the opportunities to travel to spend time with family and friends across the world, plus attend some fancy workshops run by top people in their trade--like Linda Weinman's Photoshop and Susie Fishbein's cookery workshop. Fourthly, sponsor groups of young Jewish families to get housing near synagogues so they could become long term communities. Finally I think I'd get plastic surgery to do some pin and tuck work on the saggy bits that you get when you're my age.
Last night I had a childish thought. It just flashed through my mind and was gone.
I thought that perhaps if we all prayed very hard, then tomorrow (today), when the time comes for Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev to be returned home, they will be alive.
No, Imshin, not childish. Compassionate, caring, optimistic--the very heart of the Jewish tradition. It was Hitler who said conscience was a Jewish invention. One of the very few things on which he was right. Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh. The Talmudic view: All Israel is responsible for one another.
And not only we Jews have this literally heartfelt commitment of identification with the plight of all political hostages and their families. When the Irish/British aid worker Margaret Hassan was kidnapped in Iraq and finally cynically videoed being murdered, I had so much hoped she would be safely released along with the others--and so did the overwhelming majority of the people of every ethnic group in Britain not marching under the deluded enrage banner of the SWP and the Islamists. And there is no shortage of cases of British and European governments making gruesome deals with kidnappers and murderers for the safe release of their kidnapped nationals.
Despite that, there's been widespread puzzlement and disbelief at the actions of the Israeli government amongst their sympathizers as well as a triumphalist reading by their enemies of the events of 16th July 2008 as a sign of Israel's defeat and weakness .
I mean, I’m all for concessions for peace: but what is the policy aim, here?
The comments on David T's post are interesting, but I thought almost all were too wrapped up in the current and recent history of Israel, and, unsurprisingly for a strongly secularist socialist blog, ignorant of the specifically religious tradition behind Israel's policies.
This is an edited version of the comment I posted in response:
It is a specific Torah commandment that the Jewish people must redeem their captives. This is something Jewish communities having been doing with a heavy heart since the days of Ancient Israel, and it is recalled in the daily prayer services. Joel Brand and his colleagues from the Jewish Agency tried to negotiate with Eichmann in 1944 for the release of the Hungarian Jews in return for arms but understandably the Allies refused. That huge community was then shipped off to Auschwitz and almost all murdered on arrival. This is why it is enshrined in secular Israeli policy and practice and continues to have such huge resonance with Israelis.
But there is another minority orthodox Jewish tradition on how to deal with tragic kidnap- communal ransom situations. Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg in Germany was imprisoned in the Middle Ages by the secular leader of the Christian West, the Holy Roman Emperor, for ransom, but the rabbi gave orders that he must not be ransomed lest others be kidnapped. He died in prison.
During the Holocaust, the rabbis and secular leadership of the Nazi-occupied communities of Eastern Europe sometimes faced equally impossible choices imposed by their captors, often demands to give up the names or the persons of Nazi targets in return for the release of innocent arrested rabbis or communal leaders otherwise condemned to execution. Their rulings sometimes reluctantly complied with the demands in the name of sacrificing the few for the many, but sometimes adopted positions from outright refusal to evasion, on the grounds of not assisting in the murder of fellow Jews even at the hands of a murderous coercive ruler. Few truly realized that all without exception were marked out for extermination by their captors. None did anything other than try their best for the sake of their people.
There is now in Israel a movement of soldiers who are organizing declarations that they do not want to be redeemed if captured. There is also the Torah law that you must not frame your arrangements in such ways that it needlessly leads to deaths.
I am no expert in Jewish law, but I believe that because of this deal and the declared commitment by the terror groups and supporting governments to kidnap more and more Israelis to force Israel to release its hundreds of convicted and unrepentant terrorist murderers of civilians, Israel should change the policy now. I’ll be interested to see how the most influential rabbis in Israel comment.
In the absence of any authoritative rabbinical commentary here's an extract from an outstanding discussion by Jewish legal experts who seem to be equally well informed about international and rabbinical law as applied to such kidnap situations.
Rabbi Meir’s approach has its source in the Mishnah which rules that one does not ransom captives for more than their value because of Tikkun Olam. The Talmud disputes the rationale for the Mishnah’s stipulation.One view is that it is intended to prevent the impoverishment of the Jewish community which would otherwise make extortionate ransom payments; the other is to avoid providing an incentive to the kidnappers to continue in their ways. Both Maimonides and the Shulchan Aruch adopt the second rationale. While both maintain that there is no greater mitzvah than the redemption of captives, ultimately, public security considerations take precedence when evaluating whether to pay a ransom. Interestingly, Tosafot maintain that where there is a danger to life, captives may be redeemed for more than their value, but this position has not been codified.
Application of Jewish law to contemporary prisoner exchanges is not straightforward. Two questions are particularly difficult to resolve. The first is how to establish the value of a captured soldier. The second, related question is how to apply Jewish law where the ransom payment consists of convicted terrorists instead of financial capital. In classical times, the question of value could readily be resolved by resort to the slave market or the market rate for the ransom of non-Jewish captives, but the question today is obviously far more complex. Moreover, as the payment consists of convicted terrorists, the state must engage in an unenviable balancing act, weighing the rights of the individual against the security needs of the country. What is clear, however, is that as a general rule, captives should not be redeemed for more than their value if it is reasonably believed that paying the ransom will increase kidnappings and thereby pose a threat to the public. In fact, former Israel Defense Forces Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren was opposed to lopsided prisoner exchanges, noting that the safety of one or a few Jews in captivity does not take precedence over the safety of the entire public.
A growing number of senior defense and security experts, including the heads of the Mossad and the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet), believe that the “more than fair value” test has once again proven relevant.
As Israelis lacking any family or other connection to the Goldwasser/Regev families, we are convinced that the current skewed deal threatens the public interest, undermines Israel’s ability to defend its legal rights and carry out its legal duties, and could threaten Israel’s strategic objectives. The optimal position, of course, is to rely on military action to free captured soldiers and/or civilians as in the famous Entebbe rescue. If such a rescue is not a viable option, any negotiations should be conducted within the context of national security objectives.
When Israel makes exchanges that are unequal, it is only natural for Israel’s enemies to view the illegal kidnapping of Israeli civilians and soldiers, and the violation of their legal rights in captivity, as an extremely profitable activity. These exchanges present Israel as willing to concede all its legal rights and to accommodate any and all demands of terrorist organizations. Additionally, by bestowing undeserved largesse upon terrorist groups like Hizbullah, these exchanges strengthen that group’s leverage as a political actor in the Arab and Muslim worlds, and enhance its support on the Arab street. Hizbullah has been able to successfully negotiate the release of a celebrated Lebanese terrorist, extract information on four missing Iranian diplomats, and secure the release of an unspecified number of Palestinian prisoners.
The Goldwasser/Regev deal – as a deviation from the Geneva Conventions model – discourages compliance with international humanitarian law, harms Israeli deterrence, encourages future kidnappings, and endangers the lives of those who may be taken hostage by Hizbullah or another terrorist group. The value Israel places on a single life is laudable, but its translation into a policy of capitulation to terrorist kidnappers’ demands magnifies the already grossly inflated price of prisoner exchanges. For terrorist organizations, kidnapped Israeli soldiers and civilians are valuable and relatively cheaply-acquired bargaining chips to bring home their terrorists imprisoned in Israeli jails. As Yoram Shachar, the brother of policeman Eliahu Shachar who was murdered in a terrorist attack involving Kuntar, said: “The release today is the kidnapping of tomorrow.”
As if in response to this article, one of the press reports on the day of the exchange included this policy commitment to the future use of kidnapping as leverage on the Israeli government by a spokesman of one of the terrorist groups, together with the most enthusiastic support for Hezbollah's "achievements" by Mahmoud Abbas, the supposedly moderate PA president and Ismail Haniyeh, Prime Minister of the Hamas regime in Gaza:
Abu Mujahed, a spokesman for the Popular Resistance Committees, told Ynet that the completion of the deal "even after the images of the Israeli soldiers' coffins, proves that kidnapping soldiers will continue to be the most efficient, favored and ideal way to release Palestinian prisoners, particularly those defined by the enemy as having blood on their hands."
According to Abu Mujehad, the Lebanese and Palestinian resistance will continue to work to kidnap soldiers in order to release prisoners "and in order to retrieve our rights, after it has been proved beyond any doubt that no diplomatic negotiations can release prisoners or return rights."
My belief is that where it is an unambiguously declared policy of Israel's enemies, both state and non-state actors, to use kidnap as a major weapon in their struggle to destroy Israel, then Israel's present policy forces it into a position where it effectively concedes in advance all the demands that its enemies care to make. Why should Hamas agree to the release of Gilad Shalit for less than the release of every last convicted terrorist prisoner in Israeli jails? What if required the concession is agreeing to the demand for the Palestinian "right of return"? Or the concession of Israeli territory demanded by Syria or Hezbollah? Indeed some of the most fulsome adulation of Nasrallah you can read in is in praise of the successful outcome of his declared strategy in 2006 of kidnapping soldiers to release prisoners, which he then put into practice with the kidnap of Goldwasser and Regev from Israeli territory in the first place.
Norm's post today takes to task the latest Guardian editorial on the subject for what he reads as its celebration of an Israeli "moral defeat". I don't read the Guardian editorial quite that way. It's interesting that its analysis of the outcome of the Israeli agreement is not that different from that of the impeccably zionist lawyers who wrote the article I've cited at length above.
Both the leader and the article point out that in dealing with Hezbollah as the equivalent of a state actor, Israel has conceded a level of recognition and validation it previously lacked. However, that was already conceded by the results of Hezbollah's successful assault on the Lebanese political settlement earlier this summer, allied with the fresh consolidation of Syria's nominees into the Presidency and Prime Ministership in Beirut.
Yael's blog yesterday had a reference to a Facebook group of Lebanese who deplored the release of the most notorious terrorist murderer, Samir Kuntar, who has been ecstatically celebratedin Lebanon, Gaza and by the Palestinian Authority as a supreme hero, despite the fact that his "heroism" was based on breaking into a flat, shooting a father in front of his four year old daughter and then repeatedly bludgeoning and smashing the skull of the child to death. Lisa's post on Pajamas Media offers further evidence that not every Lebanese was celebrating, despite the shameful participation of the leader of every single Lebanese political party in the rally celebrating Kuntar on his release, including the leaders of those who had fought against Hezbollah. Now Lebanon has a very significant reckoning of the appalling cost to the Lebanese people of Nasrallah's "triumph", quoted by Lisa; Neil D on Harry's Place reports the Lebanese Political Journal's sardonic condemnation of those "achievements:
While that's heartening, it's unfortunately not significant where the compassionate of heart are in a tiny and politically insignificant minority. Sophie Scholl and her tiny band of active German oppositionists to the wartime Nazi regime are now revered; at the time, their protests were isolated and futile. I remember with appreciation the gesture of the gentile warden of my grandfather's Berlin synagogue who brought round his rescued top hat from the flames the day after the Nazi mobs had burned it down. But it did not alter the fate of my grandfather and uncle, deported in chains to the Polish border, or hold back the enthusiastically supported rush of the Nazi regime to the subsequent invasion of Poland with all that followed.
And this compassion and grief which is being tutted over in the world's press is what continues to unite Israel. My hope is that the tradition of Jewish law and the wisdom of the rabbis and communal leaders of the past will open the way to finding a not-so-new path of facing down and overcoming the challenge of Islamist and radical marxist terrorism and hostage-taking.
Am Yisroel Chai-- The people of Israel lives, which today tends to be a triumphalist slogan of the Israeli right. But I mean by invoking it a salute to the future of Israel, for it lives in the sense of being on the side of life.
I got a phone call a few days before from Canadian Radio - a program called "As it happens" - they wanted a story about what was happening in the holy land. I couldn't come up with anything. After all, it was Friday night and new years is not a Jewish holiday. Then I remembered that Shlomzion Kenan had suggested to me that the big stone lion on simtat plonit was facing King George Street, and on the other side of King George Street was Bethlehem Street.
So I told them we were going to visit the stone lion on the stroke of midnight and read it Yeats' "Second Coming" and watch it slouch toward Bethlehem to be born. They decided they wanted to be in on it and call me on my cellphone while the ceremony was going on. So we had to have a ceremony.
But just before midnight a couple showed up, even as I was broadcasting, and proceeded to climb up onto the lion and make love.
"Is the lion moving?" the interviewer asked. "He can't!" I shouted back, "He's got these people on his back!"
Actually, if you like the chaos, it is cute, and very prophetic.
Read the whole poem, and a rather learned discussion of Yeats' own esoteric obsessions underlying it here.
Here we have both President Ahmadinejad of Iran and Ehud Olmert, Prime Minister of Israel, pictured as knife criminals loitering on the streets, apparently ready for the kill.
So let's consider the limits of the moral equivalence in this cartoon, from today's Daily Telegraph. Both men are portrayed as knife criminals-- a street crime blight currently afflicting London, not the Middle East. But it's Olmert who's the one who's standing with his knife pointed upwards, ready for the kill, with something like a smile on his facel. He's eyeing a depressed-looking Ahmadinejad, who's gazing away and into the forward distance, unsuspecting, apparently unaware of Olmert, poised and ready to strike, behind his back. Ahmadinejad's knife is down, his hand's relaxed.
The implication is unmistakable. Israel is the greater criminal, premeditating murder, here. In this context, it looks like Israel is looking at Iran with intent to kill, whilst Iran is maybe criminally armed, but has not got Israel in its sights and is not poised to kill.
The cartoonist? Nicholas Garland, who I have previously posted on as demonizing Israel as a vicious bully attacking weaker individuals, in a cartoon he drew at the time of the 2006 Lebanon war. The adversary "victim" in that cartoon, portrayed as a slightly naughty Little Lord Fauntleroy figure, was Hezbollah.
The logo was unmistakable. Could it really be true that the most respectable of UK media organizations, including the Society of Editors and Associated Newspapers, owners of the Daily Mail and the Evening Standard, were sponsoring the web site of MPACUK, an extremist Muslim campaign group run by a tiny and wholly unrepresentative group of radical activists? MPACUK, with its well documented track record of publishing anti-semitic propaganda with images taken from neo-Nazi web sites?
The logo is that of the Journalism Diversity Fund, a worthy venture which funds young journalists from ethnic minority and underprivileged backgrounds which are under-represented in the press corps to get onto courses and traineeships which will help them establish careers in journalism.
This morning's MPACUK web site carries their logo under the caption: Adverts/ Please click on our sponsors to show your support.
What would you be putting money into if you sponsor or advertise with MPACUK?
If you want to visit their web site, try running a search from their site engine on the word "zionists" to find a long series of posts recycling every current anti-semitic trope about "zionist" world domination and control of US and UK governments.
So I emailed the Journalism Diversity fund to ask if they were indeed funding MPACUK at any level, whether advertising or funding a trainee from MPACUK or to do an internship with them.
Back came a response within half an hour. It was from the JDF administrator, who wrote:
I have never heard of the website you mentioned. It looks like this organisation has copied the info from the Journalism Diversity Fund website and pasted it into their own website.
Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
I wonder how long the JDF logo will stay on the MPACUK web site? I've taken a screen shot of the logo up on the site, and I hope to upload it before long.
I first posted about the spectacular outbreak of this overheated-brain affliction, which blighted her Independent column back in December , when she trembled at the thought of "the wrath of Moses" descending on her as she did her best to spook her readers about the "shadowy role" of the very publicly documented and largely ineffectual Labour Friends of Israel.
On Monday in The Independent, she was fulminating about MPs she identifies as being on the take. And then a propos of nothing in the midst of her list of MPs and their families, in slips the suggestion that super-generous donations from one particular group of people need to be explained in a way that no other super-generous donations do :
George Osborne, it has been revealed, received thousands of pounds for making a speech at a private business function. New Labour doesn't dare to condemn "Tory sleaze" because on its watch sordid deals and favours have become the norm. Under the Blairs, corruption got worse than under the bad old Tories and Brown has not yet shown he understands how much cleaning up there is for him to get on with.
"Poor me" Cherie still can't see why we despise her grossly excessive lifestyle and her holidays with Berlusconi. Wannabe deputy leader Peter Hain is being investigated for his fundraising methods. For some inexplicable reason, super-generous donations from friends of Israel remain unexplained. And now MPs, mainly Labour, including Jacqui Smith, and Andy Burnham and Peter Kilfolye (so-called man of the people) voted to keep all the their unfair perks, including the staggering John Lewis list.
Yes, it's a distressing affliction, which now additionally seems to be manifesting itself in an outbreak of tautology as a secondary symptom.
Meanwhile, if you've the stomach for it, you can watch her on the clip browbeating a surprisingly graciously behaved young woman, with a fraction of Alibhai-Brown's education, privilege and wealth, in the name of anti-racism.
It is a specific Torah commandment that the Jewish people must redeem their captives. This is something Jewish communities having been doing with a heavy heart since the days of Ancient Israel, and it is recalled in the daily prayer services. Joel Brand and his colleagues from the Jewish Agency tried to negotiate with Eichmann in 1944 for the release of the Hungarian Jews in return for arms but understandably the Allies refused. That huge community was then shipped off to Auschwitz and almost all murdered on arrival. This is why it is enshrined in secular Israeli policy and practice and continues to have such huge resonance with Israelis.
But there is another minority orthodox Jewish tradition on how to deal with tragic kidnap- communal ransom situations. Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg in Germany was imprisoned in the Middle Ages by the secular leader of the Christian West, the Holy Roman Emperor, for ransom, but the rabbi gave orders that he must not be ransomed lest others be kidnapped. He died in prison.
During the Holocaust, the rabbis and secular leadership of the Nazi-occupied communities of Eastern Europe sometimes faced equally impossible choices imposed by their captors, often demands to give up the names or the persons of Nazi targets in return for the release of innocent arrested rabbis or communal leaders otherwise condemned to execution. Their rulings sometimes reluctantly complied with the demands in the name of sacrificing the few for the many, but sometimes adopted positions from outright refusal to evasion, on the grounds of not assisting in the murder of fellow Jews even at the hands of a murderous coercive ruler. Few truly realized that all without exception were marked out for extermination by their captors. None did anything other than try their best for the sake of their people.
There is now in Israel a movement of soldiers who are organizing declarations that they do not want to be redeemed if captured. There is also the Torah law that you must not frame your arrangements in such ways that it needlessly leads to deaths.
I am no expert in Jewish law, but I believe that because of this deal and the declared commitment by the terror groups and supporting governments to kidnap more and more Israelis to force Israel to release its hundreds of convicted and unrepentant terrorist murderers of civilians, Israel should change the policy now. I’ll be interested to see how the most influential rabbis in Israel comment.