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Monday, 4 May 2009
HEBRON - A JEWISH COMMUNITY - NOW , AND FOREVER
HEBRON JEWS: A COMMUNITY OF MEMORY
Hebron Jews: A Community of Memory
Jerold S. Auerbach
Israel recently marked two momentous events in its brief history: two years ago it observed the fortieth anniversary of the Six-Day war, followed last year by the sixtieth anniversary of independence. Although each offered an appropriate occasion for celebration of a stunning historic achievement, both provoked prolonged lamentation by many Israelis, first over Israel’s shameful responsibility for “Naqba,” the Palestinian dispersion in 1948 that accompanied the rebirth of a Jewish state; and then over the “Pyrrhic” victory and “occupation” of “Palestinian” land since 1967. Two anniversaries this year, if noticed at all, are likely to attract even sharper criticism. Hebron Jews will commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the horrific 1929 massacre, which led to the expulsion of a 400 year-old Jewish community from the City of the Patriarchs. But they also celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of their return to inhabit abandoned Jewish property after five decades of forced exclusion from Hebron. Together, these commemorative occasions will demonstrate the power of Jewish memory in a community of Jews committed to preserving the historical links between biblical antiquity and modern Israel, between Judaism and Zionism.
Yet no Jews are as reviled as the Jews of Hebron. Vilified as “zealots,” “fanatics” and “fundamentalists” who illegally “occupy” someone else’s land, they are the Jewish settlers whom legions of critics love to hate. It is seldom noticed that their most serious transgression, settlement in the Land of Israel—the return of Jews to their historic homeland— defines Zionism.
Living in the ancient biblical city south of Jerusalem, Hebron Jews are clustered near Me’arat HaMachpelah, the Cave of Machpelah, the oldest Jewish holy site in the world. There, according to Jewish tradition, Abraham purchased the first parcel of land owned by the Jewish people in their promised land to bury Sarah. There, too, the other patriarchs and matriarchs were entombed. Since biblical antiquity Jews have lived and prayed in Hebron and made pilgrimages to the Machpelah shrine. Conquered, massacred, expelled and exiled over the centuries, they have always remembered Hebron and they have always returned. One of the four ancient holy cities, Hebron was honored with designation as a city of refuge and a priestly city. It became King David’s first capital, an important administrative center for King Hezekiah in his eighth-century war against the Assyrians, and a crucial battleground during the Maccabean and Bar Kokhba uprisings. There, at the beginning of the Common Era, King Herod built the massive stone enclosure around the burial tombs that remains the oldest intact structure in the entire Land of Israel.
But Jews were not alone in finding sacred meaning and inspiration in Hebron. Over the centuries, Christians and Muslims attempted to make Hebron exclusively theirs.
Beginning in the mid-thirteenth century, Muslim rulers prohibited Jews (and other “infidels”) from entering Machpelah to pray at the tombs, permitting them to ascend no higher than the seventh step outside the enclosure. But itinerant Jewish travelers persisted in making pilgrimages to the ancient burial site and some elderly Jews moved to Hebron to be buried near their biblical ancestors. Following the expulsions from Spain at the end of the fifteenth century, a small group of pious Jews built a community of study and prayer in Hebron on land purchased for them by a wealthy benefactor. Sephardic Jews trickled in from villages and cities in the Middle East, subsequently joined by Hasidim from Eastern Europe. Gathered around the Avraham Avinu (“Our Father Abraham”) synagogue, in a dark and cramped quarter adjacent to the market in the center of town, they clung tenaciously to their precarious foothold, dependent for economic survival largely on emissaries dispatched to benefactors scattered throughout the Jewish world.
During much of the nineteenth century, a time of impressive community expansion, Hebron Jews maintained relatively harmonious, if largely subservient, relations with their Muslim neighbors, who treated them as dhimmis. Hebron became widely known for its Talmudic scholarship and learning.
Yeshivas sprouted, a medical clinic opened, and the first paved road from Jerusalem linked Hebron to other Jewish communities in Ottoman Palestine.
But there was little connection between Hebron Jews and the nascent Zionist movement. The secular Jews who rode the swift currents of nineteenth-century nationalism largely abandoned the religious Judaism that had framed Jewish life during 2,000 years of statelessness and exile. At the founding Zionist convention in Basel in 1896, Max Nordau insisted “Zionism has nothing to do with religion.” Like other emancipated modern Jews, these iconoclastic Jewish nationalists were prepared to cast off a religion that looked backward to the past and inward to divine revelation and sacred texts. Only Zionism, stripped of religious content, could provide an answer to the Jewish Question—the place of Jews in modern society—by relocating them within the boundaries of their own homeland.In 1929, after nearly a decade of British rule in Palestine following World War I, Hebron Jews suffered another of the horrific pogroms that had long punctuated Jewish history. Incited by Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, Arab rioting swept through Palestine. The venerable Hebron Jewish community was suddenly attacked. Sixty-seven Jews were murdered; scores were assaulted, severely wounded, even mutilated. After British soldiers removed traumatized survivors from their homes and evacuated them to Jerusalem, Hebron became Judenrein. Two years later an attempt to rebuild the community failed. During Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, Hebron was conquered and absorbed within the Kingdom of Jordan. In the old Jewish Quarter remnants of its past— synagogues, yeshivas, even the ancient cemetery—were desecrated and virtually obliterated.
Nineteen years later, when the Israel Defense Forces swept into biblical Judea and Samaria near the end of the Six-Day War, Hebron—along with Jerusalem—was restored to Jewish control after 2000 years. For the first time since 1267, Jews could pray inside the Machpelah enclosure. Israelis visited Hebron by the thousands, and then tens of thousands. On a single June day, 70,000 Jewish visitors flooded the city.
Inside the venerable shrine a Yemenite man blew repeated blasts on his shofar while a Moroccan woman, wailing Ima, Ima (“Mother, Mother”), kissed the cenotaph marking Sarah’s tomb.
The return to biblical Judea and Samaria was the unanticipated consequence of an unwanted war. Determined to erase the lingering humiliation of 1948 and annihilate the Jewish state, Israel’s Arab neighbors—Egypt, Syria, and Jordan—had inadvertently compelled secular Zionists to confront their Jewish past and future. The sudden presence of Israeli soldiers and tourists in Hebron provoked vigorous debate in government circles over the fruits of victory, the rights of conquest, the claims of history and possibilities for peaceful co-existence—a debate that continues to divide Israeli society.
The Labor government acted with alacrity in Jerusalem. It bulldozed the Arab neighborhood abutting the Western Wall and annexed the Old City and east Jerusalem. In the Old City, where the Jewish Quarter had been abandoned since 1948, ancient Jewish history and modern Zionism converged in an outpouring of nationalist and religious enthusiasm.
There was virtually no question, either in government circles or in an exultant nation, but that the Western Wall would remain under Israeli sovereignty and the historic Jewish Quarter would be rebuilt.
But the government remained ambivalent, at best, about Hebron. A symbol of the old religious yishuv that secular Zionists spurned, Hebron was problematic in ways that Jerusalem was not. Yet former Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, meeting with Israeli Cabinet members, insisted: “On Jerusalem we must not budge. We have to quickly establish a large Jewish settlement there. The same with Hebron.” And in a ceremony at the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives two months after the war, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan boldly proclaimed, “We have returned to all that is holy in our land….We have returned to the cradle of our people, to the inheritance of the Patriarchs….We have returned to the Mountain [the Temple Mount], to Hebron and to Nablus. We will not be parted from the holy places.” Not all Israelis appreciated the encounter with their ancient heritage. A promising young writer, Amos Oz, confessed: “I don’t have any feeling that Hebron’s part of my homeland. But I do feel this about Holon,” the dreary town outside Tel Aviv where he first fell in love. Archaeologist Yigal Yadin sharply denounced the embrace of national and religious relics as “idolatrous.” As passionately (and publicly) as he had previously celebrated his own discovery of the bones of nine hundred suicidal Jewish Zealots at Masada, he now ridiculed Jews for praying inside Machpelah, which he dismissed as the likely site of tombs of Arab sheikhs. In the spring following the Six Day War, a group of predominantly religious Zionists, led by Rabbi Moshe Levinger, came to Hebron to celebrate Passover. Levinger, born in Jerusalem in 1935, had attended a Bnei Akiva yeshiva, served in the army, and studied at the Mercaz HaRav in Jerusalem. Then he joined Kibbutz Lavi, near the Golan Heights, where he combined rabbinical duties with shepherding.
Shortly after the 1967 war, Levinger visited Hebron to explore the possibility of rebuilding the community. In the desecrated Jewish cemetery, he experienced “an awakening of tempestuous spirits.” The visit, he recalled, created “an internal turmoil that left me restless for days and weeks.” He decided to return to Hebron and restore a Jewish community there. Early in the spring of 1968, he contacted the military governor of Hebron to request permission to hold a Passover Seder and spend the night there.
In recognition of the historic Jewish presence in Hebron, Labor Minister Yigal Allon had already floated a proposal for a Jewish neighborhood nearby, perhaps an “upper” Hebron on a hill overlooking the Arab city (modeled on Upper Nazareth in the Galilee). But the government did not respond to Levinger’s inquiries. Meeting with Hanan Porat, who had led the return to Gush Etzion after the war, and Elyakim Haetzni, a maverick lawyer, the decision was reached to go to Hebron without government permission.
Rabbi Levinger negotiated a rental arrangement with the owner of the Park Hotel for Passover week in April 1968. The hotel, a nondescript two-story stone building, had fallen on hard times, losing nearly its entire clientele now that prosperous Jordanians no longer vacationed there. Posing as Swiss tourists, the Levinger group negotiated a rental agreement for one dollar nightly for each guest. Levinger left a substantial deposit for “an unlimited amount of people for an unspecified period of time.” The hotel owner assured Levinger that they could extend their stay if they wished.
Some Israeli government authorities learned of the plan, but they did not interfere. Central Command General Uzi Narkiss told Levinger, “What do you want? To settle in Hebron? I don’t care. I know nothing. Rent a hotel, put up tents….I know nothing.”
A sizable group of Israelis—estimates range between sixty and eighty—arrived in Hebron to celebrate Passover and restore a Jewish presence in the city. The Levingers, clearly intending to stay, brought their four children, a refrigerator, and a washing machine. The kitchen was made kosher, and mezzuzas were attached to door-frames. “We never told anyone that we were going only to celebrate Passover,” Rabbi Levinger recalled. “The government authorities knew that we wanted to settle.” Rabbi Chaim Druckman, another graduate of the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva, led the Seder. Hanan Porat attended. Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, a recent immigrant from France who would lead Ateret Cohanim, the movement to restore a Jewish presence throughout Jerusalem’s Old City, joined the celebration. So did veteran Irgun fighter Shmuel Katz and Maariv journalist Yisrael Harel. Elyakim Haetzni, accompanied by his wife, mother, and four children, described the Seder nearly forty years later as “a once in a lifetime experience.” Miriam Levinger sensed “an historical breakthrough, and we all felt deeply moved and excited.” After the festive meal, exulting participants, joined by a Druze soldier who was guarding the hotel, danced and sang v’shavu banim l’gvulam (“your children shall return to their borders”).
The next morning the celebrants, singing and dancing through the streets of Hebron, carried Torah scrolls to Me’arat HaMachpelah. That evening, after the end of the Jewish Sabbath, some of the older participants left the hotel to return to their homes, but younger Israelis and yeshiva students remained behind, soon to be joined by newcomers. The next day, in their exuberance, they sent a telegram to Labor Minister Allon: Blessings for festival of our freedom to you from Hebron City of Patriarchs from first of those returning to it to settle in it in the name of 30 families Rabbi Moshe Levinger.
The new settlers remained in the Park Hotel for six weeks while the government debated what to do about them. In a compromise solution, they agreed to be relocated to the former British and Jordanian police building, now under Israeli military control, on a hill overlooking the city. There they remained, in miserably cramped quarters, while the government debated their future. After two years of hesitation that ended only after a terrorist attack wounded dozens of Jews awaiting entry to Me’arat HaMachpelah during Sukkoth, government ministers finally decided to decide. The new settlement of Kiryat Arba was built on a twenty-two-acre tract overlooking Hebron on an empty hill that had been seized after the war by Israeli military authorities.
But Kiryat Arba was not Hebron. Despite Levinger’s fiery insistence that “no government has the authority or right to say that a Jew cannot live in all parts of the Land of Israel,” the time was not right, the issue was too sensitive, or there were security problems, budgetary constraints, or American pressures to consider. The Likud government of Menachem Begin, in principle at least, seemed to favor the expansion of Kiryat Arba until it reached the size of Hebron, thereby creating separate Jewish and Arab cities. But exploratory discussions went nowhere. Then, in 1978, the government stunned settlers when it signed the Camp David accords with Egypt, committing it to return the entire Sinai Peninsula and grant “autonomy” to West Bank Palestinians. Settlers sensed that opportunities were slipping from their grasp.
Fifty years after the 1929 massacre, Kiryat Arba residents decided that the time had come to return to Hebron. By community consensus, the issue would be forced by women and children, who were least likely to provoke a harsh response from the government or military. One week after Passover, at 4:00 A.M., ten women led by Miriam Levinger and Sarah Nachshon, joined by thirty-five children, eight of whom were Nachshons, arrived by truck at the rear of Beit Hadassah, the former medical clinic in the heart of Hebron. Assisted by teenage boys from Kiryat Arba, they quietly climbed ladders, cut wires to the windows, and unloaded mattresses, cooking burners, gas canisters, water, a refrigerator, laundry lines, and a chemical toilet.
Safely inside the dilapidated building, the excited children sang v’shavu banim l’gvulam, God’s promise that children would return to Zion. Hearing their voices, an astonished Israeli soldier came down from his observation post on a nearby roof to investigate. When he inquired how they had entered the building, a four-year-old girl responded, “Jacob, our forefather, built us a ladder and we came in.”
In their first message from Beit Hadassah the women declared, “When we went to live eight years ago in Kiryat-Arba . . . it was because of compromise and going towards the government. Our wish was and still is Jewish settlement within Hebron.” At the end of their first Shabbat in Beit Hadassah, yeshiva students from Kiryat Arba came to dance and sing outside. Miriam Levinger described that moment: “We felt as if the souls of the murdered of this place had come and gathered with us at the window...to rejoice with us at the sight of Jews dancing on Saturday evening in the streets of Hebron. I wanted to calm them and say to them, ‘You can rest, you have waited for many years, now we have returned. What was in the past in Hebron is what will happen in the future.’”
“With the sword in one hand and the Bible in the other,” wrote journalist Amos Elon disapprovingly, Hebron settlers had the temerity to insist that “deeds contracted in the late Bronze Age are the legal and moral basis for present claims”—as though biblical roots in the Land of Israel were not the deepest source of Zionism itself. Hebron became the ideological vanguard of the Jewish settlement movement that has embedded nearly 300,000 Israelis in Judea and Samaria.Seven hundred Jews, joined by 200 yeshiva students, now live in Hebron, surrounded by 160,000 Palestinian Arabs. For thirty years, the government of Israel has stifled growth in the Jewish Quarter, obstructed property purchases by Jews, and constricted population enlargement. With their impassioned blend of Zionist nationalism and religious Judaism blamed for undermining Israeli democracy and jeopardizing Middle Eastern peace efforts, Hebron Jews may be the only Jews in the world whose critics can viciously malign them without incurring the taint of anti-Semitism.
Their determination to remember, in the very place where Jewish memory may be said to have originated, places them at the epicenter of a polarizing conflict within contemporary Israel—as acrimonious as the struggle between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs—over the identity and future boundaries, both external and internal, of the Jewish state.
A year ago, the sole surviving member of a Jewish family that had owned property in Hebron since the 15th century Spanish expulsion, appeared before the High Court of Justice with registration records to document his claim. Yosef Ezra was the seventy-five-year-old son of Yaacov ben Shalom Ezra. Father and son had been the only Jews to remain behind in Hebron between 1936 and 1947. Yosef praised Hebron Jews as “true pioneers, among the last who are putting Zionism into practice.”
Jerold S. Auerbach is professor of history at Wellesley College. This essay is drawn from his forthcoming book, Hebron Jews: Memory and Conflict in the Land of Israel, to be published in July by Roman & Littlfield.
taken from: B'NAI ELIM (http://bnaielim.blogspot.com/)
All For The Poop!
10 of the Second Month 5769
The head of the Catholic Church is expected to arrive in Israel shortly. His itinerary includes traveling to his "holy" sites in the Gallil and furthering the desecration of the Temple Mount with his presence. The Israeli Government has already had to convince him to postpone his trip to the Gallil, so that the expected traffic jams and increased security concerns on Lag b'Omer will not be exacerbated. In regard to his visit to the Temple Mount, more than a few questions have been raised. Will he be allowed to pray there, even though Jews are banned from doing so? Must we depend on the Arabs to protest what we Jews should be protesting?
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For Zion's Sake: The Loyalty Fallacy
In the recent Israeli elections, Avigdor Lieberman's party, Yisrael Beiteinu, won 15 seats in the Israeli Knesset. The party slogan of "no citizenship without loyalty" resounded with Israelis after they saw Israel's Arab citizens cheering on Hamas during the latest conflict in Gaza. Lieberman capitalized on the treasonous words and actions of "Israeli"-Arab MKs and on the general perception of Israel's Arab population as a fifth column. Speaking about Arab MKs, among them one who fled to Syria trying to escape charges of treason, Hamas and Fatah supporters and sympathizers, and several who have repeatedly met with Israel's enemies, while receiving salaries from the state, he said:"At the end of the Second World War, not only criminals were executed in the Nuremberg trials, but also those who collaborated with them. I hope that will be the fate of the collaborators in this house."
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For Zion's Sake: The Loyalty Fallacy
Israel Matzav: And again: Soldier attacked by 'Arab looking man' on Ramat Gan bus
And again: Soldier attacked by 'Arab looking man' on Ramat Gan bus
An IDF soldier was stabbed in the neck this evening by an 'Arab looking man' on a Ramat Gan bus. The soldier is hospitalized in Tel Aviv's Ichilov Hospital in moderate condition.
"The motive for the attack is unclear at this stage," a Tel Aviv police spokesman told The Jerusalem Post. "We don't yet know what the background is. We do have a description of the suspect and we have launched a hunt for him," the spokesman added.
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Israel Matzav: And again: Soldier attacked by 'Arab looking man' on Ramat Gan bus
Israel Matzav: Nasrallah accuses Israel of assassinating Hariri
Nasrallah accuses Israel of assassinating Hariri
You had to see this coming down the pike. Just two days after the international tribunal investigating the assassination of Lebanese President Rafik al-Hariri released the four Syrian-affiliated generals who were held as suspects for the last four years, Hezbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah - who is supported by Syria and Iran - has accused Israel of being behind the assassination.
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Israel Matzav: Nasrallah accuses Israel of assassinating Hariri
Israel Matzav: A convenient reality
A convenient reality
There's a very interesting and perceptive comment in Friday's YNet that I would like to share with you (Hat Tip: NormanF in comments). The basic argument is that there is no solution to the 'Palestinian' problem now or in the foreseeable future, and the best thing Israel can do is to take advantage of the current convenient reality. I don't agree with everything he says for mostly historical reasons (he's putting the best face on several things that I would regard as mistakes). For the time being, I agree that maintaining the current status quo ought to be an Israeli interest. However, I would allow the expansion of existing Jewish towns, and even the construction of new ones when appropriate opportunities are presented. The 'Palestinian' unwillingness to compromise and pursuit of terror ought to have real consequences.
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Israel Matzav: A convenient reality
Israel Matzav: Jack Kemp and Israel
Jack Kemp and Israel
I was not a fan of Jack Kemp growing up. Kemp, who passed away Saturday night (Hat Tip: Memeorandum), was the star quarterback for the Buffalo Bills when I was a kid, and I was a fan of the New England (then Boston) Patriots.
I became a fan of Kemp's during the first Reagan administration when Kemp was one of the chief spokesmen for Reagan's 'supply side economics.' Had I been aware of Kemp's support of Israel from the moment he entered Congress in 1972, I would have become a fan much sooner.
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Israel Matzav: Jack Kemp and Israel
Israel Matzav: Another sign the attack on Iran is coming
Another sign the attack on Iran is coming
Here's another sign that Israel is preparing to attack Iran's nuclear facilities: France's L'Express is reporting that Israeli aircraft practiced refueling in mid-air recently.
Here's the translation of the L'Express report:
Aircraft of the Israeli air force had recently conducted exercises in the air refueling between Israel and Gibraltar. The magnitude -3,800 kilometers of this field maneuvers confirms that the IDF is preparing concrete praperations for air strikes on Iran if Tehran continues to refuse to negotiate with the international community on the nuclear issue.
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Israel Matzav: Another sign the attack on Iran is coming
Israel Matzav: Groan: 79% of American Jewry Delusional moonbats support Obama
Groan: 79% of American Jewry Delusional moonbats support Obama
He's stringing us out on Iran, he's ready to force us to give the 'Palestinians' a reichlet from which to murder us, and yet 79% of American Jews still support Barack Hussein Obama. He only scores higher with Muslims. Even 45% of those calling themselves 'Jewish conservatives' (as opposed to 'conservative Jews' who probably support him in even higher numbers) support him.
Israel Matzav: Groan: 79% of <strike>American Jewry</strike> <i>Delusional moonbats</i> support Obama
He's stringing us out on Iran, he's ready to force us to give the 'Palestinians' a reichlet from which to murder us, and yet 79% of American Jews still support Barack Hussein Obama. He only scores higher with Muslims. Even 45% of those calling themselves 'Jewish conservatives' (as opposed to 'conservative Jews' who probably support him in even higher numbers) support him.
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Israel Matzav: Groan: 79% of <strike>American Jewry</strike> <i>Delusional moonbats</i> support Obama
Israel Matzav: Anti-missile system operators doing extra reserve duty
Anti-missile system operators doing extra reserve duty
JPost reports that the operators of the Arrow and Patriot anti-missile systems are doing extra reserve duty these days and that a massive exercise will be held with the US military 'later this year.' Due to an apparent typographical error in the article, it is not clear how much reserve duty they normally do, but the anti-missile system operators have been called up once a week for the last year to practice different intercept scenarios.
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Israel Matzav: Anti-missile system operators doing extra reserve duty
LEAVING RAJAR
Haaretz tells that Netanyahu is preparing a "concession" for the Americans as he prepares for his first meeting with Obama later this month: Israel will evacuate the northern part of the town of Rajar (spelled Ghajar in the article):
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is likely to announce this week that Israel is interested in withdrawing from the northern part of the village of Ghajar on the border with Lebanon.
A senior political source in Jerusalem said on Saturday that Netanyahu wants to respond to the American request on the matter; the move would also be a goodwill gesture to the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora ahead of Lebanese parliamentary elections in early June.
So far, so good. Except there's an unexpected snag:
The withdrawal from the northern part of the village is not expected to take place before the Lebanese elections because of the high number of petitions village residents are expected to file with the High Court of Justice against the pullback.
Huh? Aren't Arabs supposed to be deeply offended and humiliated by cruel Israeli colonial Occupation? Aren't they persecuted, forced to live as second class citizens? Don't they all uniformly yearn to be free of the oppressive Israeli yoke? What kind of poor joke is it to claim some of them might go to the (Israeli) High Court of Justice to force the Israeli government to keep them inside Israel?
Many Palestinians undoubtedly feel this way, though probably not tens of thousands or more of the ones in East Jerusalem. And the townspeople of Rajar are an even stranger story.
Until 1967 Rajar was a village at the meeting point of Syria, Lebanon and Israel, on the Syrian side. Yet even then it was cut off from Syria by the shoulder of Mount Hermon, and its neighbors were the Lebanese villages of Marg Ayoun and its surroundings - and also the Israeli villages just across the line. During the last hours of the Six Day War the town elders sent a delegation to the Israelis calling their attention to the fact that they were notionally part of the Golan, and thus must now be under Israeli rule.
In 1981, when Israel effectively annexed the Golan, it's people were offered full Israeli citizenship. Most of the Druze on the Golan rejected the offer (some accepted); the townspeople of Rajar, however, mostly accepted. Many of them even joined Likud. Between 1982 and 2000 the Lebanese side of the border was also controlled by Israel. Rajar, sitting right on the line, grew northwards because that was topographically the easiest direction to build in. In 2000 when Israel asked the UN to draw the exact line to which it should draw back its forces when unilaterally leaving Lebanon, the UN surveyors drew the line right through the middle of Rajar. (I was there after the removal of Israel's troops from Lebanon, and we crossed the line without ever noticing it; only after we'd left the town and I looked at a map was it clear).
I wrote about this in Right to Exist, and summed it up by telling of the Syrian Likudnik Israelis who live in Lebanon.
I'm not certain what Netanyahu is proposing to do, beyond putting on a show. Israeli troops don't go into the northern part of Rajar since 2000, because it's in Lebanon. So what's the "concession"? That a wall be built through the middle of town, along the Lebanese-Golan border? Turn over the whole town to Lebanon including the Syrian parts of it? And what will happen to the Israeli citizens who live there? Complicated.
taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)
MEMORY OF THE JEWS IN BERLIN
Edward Rothstein visited some of the museums and memorials to the Jews one can find in Berlin (he missed the most poignant of all, at the train station in Gruenewald). His thesis, in a nutshell: bigger and bombastic is worse than small simple and focused.
He didn't find a case of big and focused, so that angle isn't tested, but for what he saw he's certainly right. Big and bombastic is bad. Which reminds me I have a review of Yad Vashem's new(ish) museum somewhere on my hard disk; maybe I should dust it off and post it someday.
taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)
ON GENIUS
Last month I linked to an article in The Economist about autism and genius. The writer noted in passing that 10,000 hours of practice will give anyone a genius-like edge over the rest of us plodders. David Brooks at the NYT has read the books that Economist writer was alluding to, and reports that they've convinced him; indeed, 10,000 hours of practice will do the trick (along with a couple of other beneficial legs-up).
Coyle and Colvin describe dozens of experiments fleshing out this process. This research takes some of the magic out of great achievement. But it underlines a fact that is often neglected. Public discussion is smitten by genetics and what we’re “hard-wired” to do. And it’s true that genes place a leash on our capacities. But the brain is also phenomenally plastic. We construct ourselves through behavior. As Coyle observes, it’s not who you are, it’s what you do.
Well, I certainly prefer "what you do over what you are" as a general proposition which puts moral responsibility solidly where it belongs - on people - and not where it doesn't. Society, genes, race, nationality and all those "other" places we don't control and thus can't be held to account for. Still, while I like Brook's sentiments, and unlike him I haven't read the books, I find it hard to accept it's only a matter what we choose to do. Some people are smarter than others. Some are way smarter. I know quite a few people who are way smart, and I've noticed they tend to be way beyond the rest of us in all sorts of fields simultaneously, including fields they never practiced in at all. I've also met folks who are hard-working and focused on what they do, but still they aren't intelligent. Live with it.
So my adaption to Brook's comment would be , it's not who you are, it's what you make of who you are.
taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)
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