Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

 

I just finished Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby. 

The title is a promise fulfilled.  I have read a lot of Jewish history and listened to more in the dozens of episodes of "The Jewish Story" by the Rav Mike Feuer. 

Every history is selective, Tishby, by design, has to cram decades into sentences and eras into paragraph.  I like what she chose. Particularly, her description of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD 70 showed how complex that disaster was.  When she describes everything the Jews did inside the walls to provoke the Romans and lose the conflict, the disaster seems inevitable.  

On the rise of Ultra Orthodox culture in Israel, she notes that their tradition and weird black hat uniform dress is a product of a 17th Century Eastern European subculture, nothing to do with Torah.  

The book was published before October 7, 2023, so it does not include the slaughter of innocents by Hamas terrorists. In a speech six months after the tragic events, Tishby was very clear in her views.

The speech us below.  I recommend this book as a brief, lucid history of Israel.  

----

This is the most challenging speech I’ve ever delivered, but it’s time the world wakes up to what the Jewish community has been saying all along. What we experienced on and since October 7 was sadly, predictable. We’ve warned of the danger of radical Islam or, more accurately, the radical Islamic Nazism that is constantly lurking at Israel’s borders. And we’ve warned of the ongoing grooming of Western civilization – through universities, the media, and social media. We warned what the phrase “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free” really looks like. It means “itbach al Yahud” – “slaughter the Jews.” This demonization of Israel is not “progressive”, it’s not peaceful and it absolutely won’t Free Palestine. It is a modern-day blood libel calculated to incite, pave the way for, and then justify - a genocide. We’ve seen it for over three and a half thousand years of Jewish “lived experience”. It’s the generational trauma that is in our bones. We understand it. That, is our “Jewish privilege.” We knew where it would lead, and we are devastated to be proven right. Israel is one of the greatest stories ever told and its vilification is one of the greatest smear campaigns in the history of the world. But we have news for you: when we say Never Again, we mean it. When you tell us you want to kill us, we believe you. And when you set out to do it in the most horrific of ways, we will defeat you. We stand shoulder to shoulder with the families of Israelis and Americans held hostage by the Hamas terrorists and demand they return the hostages now! Bring them home! Above all I am grateful that for the generations to come, the Jewish people will still live, love, and thrive and reach out a hand to the world. And Hamas will be nothing but a footnote in history, just like those who tried to exterminate us before. Am Yisrael Chai

Marking Major Anniversaries

 

9-11 Memorial NYC

One reason for marking fateful days in history is to remember how much the world has changed in your own lifetime.

Fifteen years ago today, 11 September 2009, I was a soldier on a one-year deployment to the Iraq War with the US Army.

Fifteen years before that, in 1994, I was a civilian still not quite believing the Soviet Union had collapsed in 1991.

Fifteen years before that in 1979, I was tank commander on the East-West border in Germany waiting for the Soviet invasion of that never happened.

Fifteen years before that I was an 11-year-old 5th grader at Robin Hood Elementary School in Stoneham, Massachusetts. Our school was a fallout shelter. Nuclear war was a shadow on life during the Cold War.

The world has changed a lot in some ways, and not at all in others.

In just over a week, I will be advocating for Ukraine in the US Congress. Russia invaded. The attack I was waiting for for the first four decades of my life happened in Ukraine.

Huge changes, some sad consistency.

Glory to Ukraine!

Icons on Ammo Boxes: Seven Galleries Show Ukrainian Art at NYC Art Week Preview

On September 4, on the eve of the beginning of  Art Week in NYC, I went to a gallery in Chelsea for the Volta Art Fair. Dozens of galleries exhibiting and thousands of works of art on display.  Seven of the galleries featured art by Ukrainians, both in Ukraine and from the Ukrainian diaspora.  

On gallery featured several Orthodox icons painted on ammo crates.  I saw the icons just passing and then looked closer at the one on the right in the photo above and noticed latches that are used on NATO machine gun ammo crates.  Ukrainian soldiers create these icons.  It was a lovely display of faith expressed in art in a country invaded by a tyrant.

Below are a sampling of what was on display by Ukrainian artists.

And one more icon

Quoting Hannah Arendt: Not Easy, but No Excuse for Fake Quotes

On Friday, 6 September, the Virtual Reading Group of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, will begin the discussion of "Between Past and Future" first published in 1961. 

Recently, Roger Berkowitz, founder and academic direct of the HAC, wrote an excellent essay about the problem of made up quotes of Hannah Arendt and by extension all authors.  He is right. Read it here. 

Last month an insightful essay on this book was published on the HAC site.  It begins with a quote from Arendt's preface to the work that I marked as "theme" in the margin.  Here is the essay by Mark Aloysius, S.J.

The opening quote on the essay shows why quoting Arendt can be so difficult.  The 70-word sentence has three independent clauses, with three dependent clauses. Reading this sentence made me glad I am old enough to have diagrammed sentences in elementary school. The quote is an entirely appropriate opening for an essay on the HAC web site, but not the kind of thing that would get likes on TikTok or Snapchat. 

Here is the quote:

Seen from the viewpoint of man, who always lives in the interval between past and future, time is not a continuum, a flow of uninterrupted succession; it is broken in the middle, at the point where ‘he’ stands; and ‘his’ standpoint is not the present as we usually understand it but rather a gap in time which ‘his’ constant fighting, ‘his’ making a stand against past and future, keeps in existence.”
(Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. Edited by Jerome Kohn. New York: Penguin Books, 10).

One of my many reasons for being a member of the HAC is the discussions that guide the reading of Arendt's complex thought.  After reading Arendt's preface, I transcribed the paragraph that the above quote is in. The 263-word paragraph has just five sentences. One is a simple16-word sentence quoting William Faulkner.  The other four have 60, 36, 70 and 81 words.  

The relatively snappy 36-word sentence has two dependent clauses.  The closing 81-word sentence has two independent clauses and four dependent clauses.  Arendt was not writing for social media.  

In a decade and a half of reading Arendt, the former ad writer in me has never found her quotable, but I have been able to discuss with enthusiasm what she has said with people who care about the human condition (to make a pun) in all of its complexity.

Here is the paragraph I transcribed:

"The first thing to be noticed is that not only the future—“the wave of the future”—but also the past is seen as a force, and not, as in nearly all our metaphors, as a burden man has to shoulder of whose dead weight the living can or even must get rid of in their march into the future. In the words of Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It is not even the past.” This past, moreover, reaching all the way back into the origin, does not pull back but presses forward, and it is, contrary to what one would expect, the future which drives us back into the past.  Seen from the viewpoint of man, who always lives in the interval between past and future, time is not a  continuum, a flow of uninterrupted succession; it's broken in the middle, at the point where “he” stands; and “his” standpoint is not the present as we usually understand it but rather a gap in time which “his” constant fighting, “his” making a stand against past and future, keeps in existence.  Only because man is inserted into time, and only to the extent that he stands his ground does the flow of indifferent time break up into tenses; it is this insertion—the beginning of a beginning, to put it in Augustinian terms—which splits up the time continuum into forces which then, because they are focused on the particle of the body which gives them their direction, begin fighting with each other and acting upon man in the way Kafka describes."

The (Pot)Hole Story -- Panama is a tough place to ride

 

First Week in Panama--The Daily Downpour

I bought a bike the first full day I was in Panama.  The bike is great. I wrote about it here.    

I quickly got good at dodging the rain. The weather app in my phone that is so reliable in America, is rubbish here. It says it will rain when the sun is shining and it will be cloudy when rain is falling in sheets.   

Rain I could handle.  But the farther I ride, the more I have to contend with potholes.  On a descent a few miles from the city, I hit a hole so deep it flatted the tire and tore a hole in it.  I wrote about that here.  

And the holes deep enough to flatten a tire are everywhere.  It's not so bad riding uphill, but downhill, I have to scan for holes the whole way! I'm riding the brakes and very focused--not having fun feeling the wind.  It's surely safer to roll down hills on high alert hands on the brake hoods, but it's not fun. 

On the way up the hills, the holes are no problem, but even riding the white stripe at the edge of the tarmac, buses and trucks have to move around me.  One the main roads in and out of the city, there are no shoulders.  

When there are shoulders, another hazard appears at random--sewers without covers.  Some of these uncovered drains are big enough to swallow a whole wheel, not just flat a tire.  I told a local guy about this. He shrugged and said people steal the covers and sell them for the metal.  When there is a shoulder, I ride just off the roadway and scan for the uncovered drain.  

I've been riding every day here, but my rides are getting shorter and are on roads where I have memorized the holes and know the hazards.  On Labor Day I will return to the US until mid November.  

When I return, I will have Gatorskin tires and be looking for weekend groups to ride with.  Right now, I'm feeling like the cocodrillo in the photo below is waiting in holes on every road here.

 

Why the West Rules — For Now: A Review by The New York Times

Why the West Rules — For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future

by Ian Morris 

A friend recommended I read "Why the West Rules--For Now" and I was delighted with this long history of the entire world.  This is my kind of book, so I was predisposed to like it. Other books in this genre I love:

• Sapiens, Yuval Harari
• Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond
• Civilization: The West and the Rest, Niall Ferguson
• These Truths,  Jill Lepore
• Prisoners of Geography, Tim Marshall

A one-volume history of all or part of the history of the world is ambition incarnate. When a historian can assert: Here is the history of the world (or a large slice of it) and make a good case, it is both interesting and opens a hundred interesting questions.  

Ian Morris writes about the history of the East and the West in parallel. At the time the book was published they looked to be converging. A decade and a half later the West retained economic leadership, but the world is much more fragmented and dangerous than in 2010.  

I am going to read more of Morris starting with "Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels" published in 2015.  I have read at least one other book by all the other authors in my  list above, but the one in the list is my favorite, so far.   

---------

"The Final Conflict" a review by Orville Schell

Dec. 10, 2010

This is a big “big book.” To accomplish his ambitious goal of both understanding the evolution of mankind’s past development and prognosticating the future of the continuing East-West horse race, Ian Morris starts around 15 millenniums ago. That’s a lot of history.

With such a grand design, “Why the West Rules — For Now” suggests the pretension of those Imperial Chinese encyclopedists who produced works like the Qing dynasty’s “Complete Collection of Illustrations and Writings From the Earliest to Current Times,” which sought to document “everything under heaven” in its 800,000 pages. It is hardly surprising that China, which has recently stolen up behind the “developed world” to threaten its supremacy (and all its common wisdom about development models), sits at the center of Morris’s book.

A British-born archaeologist, classicist and historian now at Stanford University, Morris is the historians’ equivalent of those physicists who search for a still elusive unified field theory. In his new book, he sets out to discover broad patterns, “the overall ‘shape’ of history,” by sifting through the world’s long development process. Following the oscillating forces from prehistory to the present, he shows how both the East and West managed to catalyze themselves at different times and in different ways to progressively new heights of development. But his ultimate challenge is to make sense of all these cycles of rise and fall, the better to judge whether either side was in possession of any innate superiority. His answer to that question is an emphatic no. East and West, he tells us, are just “geographical labels, not value judgments.”

If neither East nor West has had any innate developmental advantage, what then allowed the West to propel itself forward so successfully in the 18th century (answer: the discovery of fossil fuels), and what does that dominance portend for the future? “One of the reasons people care about why the West rules,” Morris explains, “is that they want to know whether, how long and in what ways this will continue — that is, what will happen next. . . . How long the West will stay on top is a burning question.”

But before you get to the answer, you must be ready to steel yourself for Morris’s early chapters, which nonspecialists will no doubt find arcane. His discussions of primitive man’s common African gene pool; of how the “Hilly Flanks” in the Middle East developed after the Ice Age; and of China’s ancient Zhou dynasty can seem awfully remote. And as he visits ancient places like Urartu, Erlitou, Tenochtitlán, Uluburun and Yue; introduces us to individuals like Hoshea, Tiglath-Pileser III, Khusrau II, Merneptah and Zhu Xi; or sets us down among the Ahhiyawans, Xiongnu, Kizzuwatnans, Hurrians and Jur­chens, your head may begin to spin.

However, just as you begin to wobble beneath the breadth of such impressive research, Morris will pull back and give a brief coda of down-to-earth clarification, rescuing those readers with the will to soldier on through a few more millenniums. Or he will drop in a welcome wry aside to goad you down the trail of history. Commenting on the Ming dynasty explorer Zheng He, he notes that Zheng “was enlisted in the emperor’s service and castrated,” but nonetheless “seems to have taken all this in his enormous stride.” Or, on the discovery of the Americas, he observes, “Europe got a new continent and Native Americans got smallpox.”

Fortunately, Morris is a lucid thinker and a fine writer. He uses a minimum of academic jargon and is possessed of a welcome sense of humor that helps him guide us through this grand game of history as if he were an erudite sportscaster. He shows us how different empires were boosted by periods of “axial thought” to surge up the development ladder, only to crumble upon hitting a “hard ceiling,” usually inflicted by what he calls the Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse: climate change, migration, famine, epidemic and state failure.

But failure of one civilization only allowed another to arise somewhere else. The Roman Empire, Song dynasty China, Renaissance Europe and the Britain of the Industrial Revolution came along, got lift under their wings from new technology, social innovation or a creative organizing principle and pushed the whole process of development forward another notch.

According to Morris’s scorecard, since this age-old process began, the world index of social development has risen to 900 points. And, he predicts, in the next 100 years this index will rise an additional 4,000 points. He calls such progress “staggering.”

But with the West’s power and confidence now declining, and China’s authoritarian form of capitalism ripsawing its way toward an ever more dominant position in the world, a reader may be forgiven for becoming somewhat impatient. Is Morris ever going to answer the “burning question”? Who will win the next phase of our East-West horse race, the United States or China?

Finally, Morris surprises us. He duly acknowledges that “patterns established in the past suggest that the shift of wealth and power from West to East is inexorable” and that we may even be moving from “bankrupt America to thriving China.” But what really concerns him, it turns out, is not whether the West may be bested by the East, but whether mankind’s Promethean collective developmental abilities may not end up being our common undoing.

The competition that East and West have been pursuing for so long, Morris warns, is about to be disrupted by some powerful forces. Nuclear proliferation, population growth, global epidemics and climate change are in the process of radically altering old historical patterns. “We are approaching the greatest discontinuity in history,” he says.

Sounding suddenly more like an admonishing preacher than the amiable sportscaster to whom we have grown accustomed, Morris counsels that we now need to concentrate not on the old competition between East and West, but on a choice. We must decide between what Morris, borrowing from the writer Ray Kurzweil, terms “the Singularity,” salvation through the expansion of our collective technological abilities, and “Nightfall,” an apocalypse from the old Five Horsemen aided by their new accomplices. He warns that this choice offers “no silver medal.” One alternative “will win and one will lose.” We are, he insists, “approaching a new hard ceiling” and are facing a completely new kind of collective historical turning point.

For the Singularity to win out, “everything has to go right,” Morris says. “For Nightfall to win only one thing needs to go wrong. The odds look bad.”

Because distinctions of geography are becoming increasingly irrelevant, Morris views the old saw that “East is East and West is West” as a catastrophic way of looking at our present situation. Like it or not, East and West are now in a common mess, and “the next 40 years will be the most important in history.”

Although he implies it everywhere, Morris does not explicitly call for the United States and China to find new ways to collaborate. There may be no other solution. But will the leaders of these two unpredictable countries be able to rise to the unprecedented challenge they face? Not even Morris’s polymathic research abilities and pathbreaking analytic skills can help us answer that . . . for now.

------

Illustrated. 750 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $35

Orville Schell, the Arthur Ross director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society, is writing a historical interpretation of China’s economic boom.

A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 12, 2010, Page 19 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Final Conflict. 

First Flat Fixed: Pinched in a Panama Pothole

Today I had my first flat in Panama.  The pothole was not quite as bad as the one above, but for those who kvetch about potholes in Pennsylvania, Panama has a lot more.  

Today I was rolling back toward the canal from the Gamboa road junction. I stayed away from the edge of the state highway running along the canal to avoid the gaps in the pavement, but saw a pothole too late to swerve.  The front tire flatted immediately, the back was fine.  

I was near a bus stop at the village of Paraiso a five miles from where I live.

Buses in Panama do not allow bicycles on board.  I waved at  a couple of taxis, then ordered and Uber.  It was $5.83 to take me home.  The driver didn't have a bungee cord to put the bike in the trunk, so I took the wheels of and held it in the back seat.  

I fixed the flat at home and rode to a local bike  shop to buy another tube. When I got there I saw a small bulge in the sidewall.  The tube was coming out. I had cut through the sidewall. The shop owner wasn't busy so I bought a new tire and he put it on for me.  $50 with an extra tube. All the tires he sold were Goodyear Eagles--which is what was on the bike already.

With all the potholes here, I will bring back more tubes and cartridges and a pair of Continental Gatorskin tires.