Mourning for Terrorists

Posted on April 30, 2020 by Victor Rosenthal

In Israel, Memorial Day (yom hazikaron) is the day before Independence Day (yom ha’atzmaut). It makes sense: you can’t think about the miracle of our Jewish state without remembering the 23,816 soldiers, police, and other security people who lost their lives so we could get it and keep it, or the 4,166 civilians who were murdered by terrorists who want to take it from us.

Israel is a small country. An equivalent number, adjusted for population, would be over 1 million Americans. Every Israeli knows someone who has lost at least one family member to war or terror.

When I cook or putter in my little workshop, I listen to the radio, to reshet bet, the news and talk channel of Israel’s public broadcast corporation. My favorite radio personality is a guy called Yigal Guetta. Guetta was born in the northern development town of Kiryat Shmona in 1966 to a family that immigrated to Israel from Morocco. He wears a black kipa and served in the Knesset on behalf of the Sephardic Haredi Shas party in 2016-7, but was forced to resign by his party after he revealed in an interview that he had attended the gay wedding of his nephew. He didn’t dispute the rabbis who demanded that he quit. He was and is a traditionally observant Jew. But family is family. Some years before that he was fired from a job as CEO of a small city when he accused the mayor of corruption. Like me, he likes to cook and sometimes describes traditional Moroccan recipes on the air. This is who he is.

But yesterday, I learned something about him that I did not know. He talked about one day when he was 8 years old, April 11, 1974. That was when Palestinian Arab terrorists (PFLP-GC) infiltrated Kiryat Shmona from Lebanon, and murdered 18 people, including 8 children. The terrorists first entered a school building, but it was closed for the Passover holiday. Then they moved on to a residential building, shooting everyone they saw and throwing grenades. The army was late to arrive, and Guetta’s brother and sister-in-law were among the victims.

He described how his parents were never the same after that. I can’t come close to imagining how it was for them.

You would think things would have changed since 1974, but because of our failure to take a consistently severe stand against our enemies – in Jabotinksy’s phrase, our failure to build an “iron wall” – Palestinian Arab terrorism continues. Just yesterday, maybe while Yigal Guetta was describing 1974’s events in Kiryat Shmona, a 62-year old woman was stabbed seven times, in the street in Kfar Saba. Fortunately she will recover, but less fortunately the terrorist, who was shot by a civilian security guard, will also live. Israelis all know the drill – he will get the best medical care available in the Middle East, spend a few years in probably the most comfortable prison regime in the world outside of the Scandinavian countries, and receive a handsome salary from the PA, funded by generous donations from the EU.

Terrorism won’t end until Israel finds the gumption to eradicate the Palestinian Authority that sponsors, funds, and promotes it. Indeed, the PA’s official media recently praised the terrorists that killed Guetta’s relatives as “martyrs” and “heroes.”

But you haven’t heard the worst part. The psychopathological post-Zionist contingent in Israel, combined with various American leftist groups and supported by the New Israel Fund, holds an annual “Alternative Yom haZikaron ceremony” which “mourns the loss of all those who fell in the context of the conflict – both Israelis and Palestinians.”

Do you understand? The PFLP-GC terrorists, the great “martyrs” and “heroes” of the Palestinian movement, who murdered 18 people in cold blood, including 8 children, including Yigal Guetta’s brother and sister-in-law, are mourned by some of their Jewish targets.

And not only them. The terrorist that exploded his bomb in the Sbarro Pizza restaurant in 2001, killing 15, including 7 children. The ones that hijacked the bus on Israel’s coastal highway in 1978, and killed 38, including 13 children. These Jews pray for them.

I simply cannot wrap my mind around this. I cannot understand why an Israeli Jew or indeed any Jew would mourn for those who met their ends when they murdered or attempted to murder us. Do Americans hold ceremonies to mourn the 9/11 terrorists? Do Russians cry for Hitler? The only word that adequately describes this is “insanity.”

It isn’t surprising that extremist anti-Israel groups like If Not Now and J Street would participate in this lunacy. But the largest Jewish organization in North America, the Union for Reform Judaism, is one of the event’s cosponsors. They even retweeted an announcement by the organizers of this event, and added their own words, asking people to “… Join us and thousands of others from all over the world as we join together in peace.”

One of the feelings invoked in me by yom ha’atzmaut is that the re-establishment and survival of a sovereign Jewish state in our historic homeland is a highly unique and remarkable event. If I were a religious person, I would say it is miraculous. Surely it was accomplished at great cost, and it continues to exact a cost in blood. We owe so much to the families who have lost their sons and daughters in the struggle against an implacable enemy, that to mourn the very ones that ripped the hearts out of those families is an obscenity.

The long struggle has been too much for some of us, and there are those who have descended into a syndrome of madness, who choose to draw close to their murderers by adopting their point of view. They hope, perhaps, that by sacrificing their own people they will purify themselves from the evil they have come to believe is inherent in their nation-state, and if truth be told, in themselves as Jews.

By forcing themselves to empathize with those who are capable of shooting Jewish children, they believe that they will be better humans, and therefore find a way to communicate with the Other so as to bring peace.

But at the end of the day, this strategy always fails; and they find themselves alone, estranged from their people, while still despised by their enemies.

Posted in American Jews, Israeli Society, Post-Zionism, Terrorism | 4 Comments

Ministers of Silly Walks

Posted on April 26, 2020 by Victor Rosenthal

I’ve complained several times (here and here) about the number of ministers and deputy ministers in the planned unity government and their cost. But this is only the symptom of the real problem.

What’s truly wrong is that portfolios are given out as bribes and rewards for political support. Who wouldn’t want to be a cabinet minister, with assistants, a driver, a high salary, and other perquisites? Sometimes the selections are ludicrous. Amir Peretz is a dedicated public servant, but he was eminently unqualified to be Defense Minister back in 2006 during the disastrous war with Hezbollah, when he was famously photographed looking through binoculars without removing the lens caps (yes, I know, even Bibi has done this, and Peretz took off the caps after the photo was taken. But the symbolism was accurate).

But take (please!) present Health Minister Ya’akov Litzman, who has no professional medical qualifications, and has allowed his personal interests and those of his community to affect his decisions. He opposed restrictions on tobacco advertising in print media which would  have cut the revenue of a newspaper published by his political/religious faction, and where his wife works. He has been credibly accused of intervening to prevent the extradition to Australia of a convicted pedophile, Malka Leifer. His ministry has recently been sharply criticized by doctors for its handling of the Coronavirus epidemic; Litzman violated his own ministry’s guidelines prohibiting large gatherings and managed to catch the disease himself. He has recently announced that he will be resigning his position, but will be moving to a new post for which he is not qualified, Minister of Construction and Housing:

Litzman told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday he would agree to switch portfolios as long as the Construction and Housing Ministry will include the powerful Israel Lands Authority. Litzman’s rabbi, Gerrer Rebbe Yaakov Aryeh Alter, told him the Construction portfolio was needed to help his haredi (ultra-Orthodox) constituency.

Litzman clearly agrees with Plato’s Polemarchus that true justice is helping one’s friends and harming one’s enemies. I would like to believe that we have gone beyond that.

Some of the appointments do make sense. Benny Gantz, a former Chief of Staff, knows how to operate binoculars. The Justice Minister will be Avi Nissenkorn, who is at least a lawyer, although he’s expected to undo steps taken by former minister Ayelet Shaked to improve the balance of power between the government and the Supreme Court. Amir Peretz will be Economy Minister; he has been on both sides of the fence, calling strikes as head of the Histadrut labor federation, and trying to keep expenditures under control as Finance Minister. I’m hopeful that highly competent interim Defense Minister and head of the Yamina party Naftali Bennett will find a place in the Cabinet.

The reason that we will get to 36 ministers and 16 Deputy Ministers is simple: the leaders of the various parties that will make up the coalition all demand payment for their participation. If it turns out that the politician to be honored happens to know something about his new job, that’s a plus; but it’s definitely secondary to the main reason for his appointment. When there isn’t an existing ministry for someone to be in charge of, one is created for them. The coalition agreement calls for an equal division of portfolios between Netanyahu’s bloc and Gantz’ faction, which only has 15 members. Most of these, therefore, will become ministers.

It appears that nobody will be left to sit on Knesset committees from Gantz’ party. Kashia [a problem]? Lo kashia! There is a law (the so-called “Norwegian law”) that says a cabinet minister can resign from the Knesset and allow his place to be taken by the next one on his party’s Knesset list. So the new Minister of Silly Walks can concentrate on his ministerial job while a new highly paid position has been created for yet another politician. How charming. One is reminded that cows can die from blood loss due to mosquitos, if there are enough of them.

Everybody knows this is a bad thing, even most of the politicians themselves. But the organization itself, like a swarm of mosquitos, seems to develop a will of its own, even if it runs counter to the will of the individual members – and, needless to say, the will of the Israeli voters that elected them in the hope that they would perform the basic functions of government with honesty, competence, and economy.

These are the three things we expect from every employee or contractor, from plumbers and taxi drivers to corporate CEOs. Shouldn’t we get it from government ministers as well?

Posted in Israeli Politics | 1 Comment

My Tuesday Morning

Posted on April 23, 2020 by Victor Rosenthal

We found a chair on Tuesday morning. In Israel, unlike the USA, most people don’t have garages, basements, or attics to fill up with junk. When something is no longer useful to them, they often put it out on the street. And so we came upon a dining room chair, sound in frame but spattered with paint and with a damaged seat. We took it home, and I easily removed the paint spatters. Then I took off the seat and began the process of removing the countless staples that held the ruined vinyl cover on it. Whoever had put it together had been generous with staples, and they were driven into a chunk of that repulsive, hard particle board that seems to have replaced wood everywhere in recent years.

As I pried them out one at a time with an old screwdriver and pliers, I listened to the radio. A woman was describing her time in the hands of the Nazis. She was six years old at the time, and she remembered every horrifying detail. She talked very fast, but there were many details. She remembered everything, she said. Wasn’t it hard to carry all that around for so long, the radio host asked? That’s why I am telling you, dear, she said.

My wife came in to say that it was yom hashoah, as if I didn’t already know, and there was going to be a siren in a couple of minutes. I put down my pliers and we went out on our roof – one of my favorite things about this apartment is that it is on the top floor and we have a piece of roof for my wife’s plants and my antennas – as is our custom, and stood waiting for the siren.

The building is moderately tall, and when the sirens come on you can hear not only our own, which is located a few blocks away at the Magen David Adom compound, but others throughout the city, and maybe even as far away as Nes Tziona. First we hear our loud one, and then the sound arrives from sirens successively farther away, each one slightly weaker than its predecessor. The sirens sound continuously, rather than the rising and falling that warns of a rocket attack, which is the scariest sound you will ever hear.

We stood silently for two minutes, nothing moving in the street, and I could see someone standing still on their balcony in a building a few blocks away. As the sirens wound down, first ours, then the successively more distant ones, I imagined that I could hear hundreds of them from all over the Jewish state, and I thought that there were hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, all standing at attention to honor that woman who spoke on the radio, the rapidly dwindling group of survivors, and the memory of those who fought for their lives in the Warsaw Ghetto and even in the shadow of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sobibor. And of course all those who didn’t survive.

From the roof I could see a small part of our Jewish state, roads, the green spot of the Hebrew University agricultural campus, a few tall buildings of the Weizmann institute. I am not sure exactly why, but I choked up, I couldn’t speak and I just hugged my wife, who is the emotionally tough one in our family.

Next week, the day before Independence Day will be another day of remembrance, this time for the soldiers, policemen, and terror victims lost in the struggle to preserve this beautiful Jewish state that makes me so proud to see. There will be two more sirens, and I will silently thank Hashem that my son, who spent nine years of his life in uniform, not including reserve duty, came home whole to his family.

***

So that was my morning. And then I read an article in the Forward (motto: “Jewish. Fearless. Since 1897”) , a debate between two youngish American Jews on the subject “Is anti-Zionism antisemitic?” Is anti-Zionism antisemitic?  You are kidding me, right? Ask the woman who spoke on the radio.

Posted in Israeli Society, Jew Hatred, Post-Zionism | 4 Comments

The Bibiad

Posted on April 19, 2020 by Victor Rosenthal

The idea of a hero with a tragic flaw echoes throughout Western literature. It’s found in Homer, in classical Greek tragedy, and of course in the Bible. The tragic flaw is sometimes a character defect, a particular weakness in an otherwise powerful hero, or sometimes a single insuperable sin, that brings down upon the hero his doom in an inexorable, inescapable, and dramatic process. The great Achilles meets his undoing because of his tendency to excessive and uncontrollable rage; his famous heel is emblematic of how a single flaw can be the end of an otherwise invulnerable hero.

The ambition of Lady Macbeth, the indecision of Hamlet, and in real history, the overweening self-confidence that led Napoleon to invade Russia in June of 1812, are examples of tragic flaws that bring about the destruction of the protagonist.

Binyamin Netanyahu is a great man. And as Aristotle points out, you need a great man if you are going to write a great tragedy. Despite the accusations against him, he is not in politics for the money. There is no doubt that he has devoted his life to his, and my, country. He came back to Israel from a comfortable and profitable life in the US to do his duty as a soldier, and was wounded twice. Until recently he has been single-minded in his service. He defied an anti-Zionist American president, and spoke out in the American Congress against the Iran deal. Who else would have done that? Who else could have?

I have always supported Bibi. He is one of the few politicians who actually knows something about economics, and he is a student of history, his father’s son. He understands the region that we live in, as opposed, for example, to Shimon Peres who perceived it in fantastic terms, as though a “New Middle East” were just around the corner. It always seemed to me that we could depend on Bibi, even if I disagreed with particular decisions or policies. He wasn’t like the triumvirate Olmert-Livni-Peretz who bumbled us into a war they were incompetent to manage, at great cost in the blood of our children, and who then agreed to a Security Council resolution to end it that only pretended to prevent Hezbollah from rearming.

He has serious flaws, as we all do. Like a Siamese Fighting Fish, he didn’t allow those he saw as competitors to swim in the same tank. Naftali Bennett, Ayelet Shaked, Gideon Sa’ar, and anyone in the Likud who was good enough to be a threat was banished (some people blame his wife for this, but Bibi ultimately had to decide). But perhaps the flaw that became fatal was his resentment that the State of Israel expects its Prime Ministers to be ascetics, like Menachem Begin or David Ben Gurion (Ben Gurion was addicted to books, but otherwise lived simply). For whatever reason, he thought it was acceptable to receive “gifts” from “friends” that would allow him to live like other prime ministers and presidents.

Bibi won elections. The Israeli public lost confidence in the Left, which had brought us the Oslo Accords and the terror war that followed. Bibi’s understanding of the electorate and the machinery of our coalition system enabled him to pull out a government from close elections, and he became the longest-serving PM in Israel’s history. Nobody could match his manipulation of our complex parliamentary system to get what he wanted. His enemies, some of them decent and others contemptible, despaired at being unable to defeat him.

So they attacked him in other ways. The Supreme Court became more and more activist in order to frustrate his plans, like the development of Israel’s newly discovered reserves of natural gas, or the deportation of illegal African migrants. The anti-Netanyahu media – that means about 90% of it – pounded away at him. And then they took aim at his Achilles heel and let fly their arrows.

In Hebrew the word teek can mean a purse or a bag. It can also mean a file or portfolio – like the one the police open on a suspected criminal. Some would say that the police and the prosecution tafru lo teek, sewed up a bag for him. In American English, we might say “they framed him.”

Some of what is alleged – taking expensive gifts for himself and his wife from rich foreigners who had business with the government – seems more than just ill-advised. But other charges seem to be novel interpretations of political wheeling and dealing, something at which nobody is more adept than Bibi.

The police investigation took about three years, during which there were almost continual leaks to the gleeful media, which put them on prime-time news almost every night. Many of the charges rest on testimony from government officials who were pressured – sometimes in improper ways – to become state’s witnesses. The whole spectacle caused great political damage to Netanyahu, who after all had not – and still has not – been found guilty of anything. This will be determined at his trial, which was scheduled to have already started, but which has been held up by the coronavirus restrictions.

All this took place during the run-up to the series of elections we are suffering through now, three in less than a year and possibly – we’ll know shortly – a fourth. Netanyahu’s opposition, Blue and White, was put together from retired generals and perennial center-leftist Yair Lapid. It doesn’t have a defined ideology except opposition to Netanyahu.

The arrows of his enemies struck home. He and his coalition partners got more votes in the last election than Blue and White and its partners, but not enough to form a government. Blue and White considered a minority government that depended on support from the Arab parties, but several of their MKs could not stomach allowing the anti-Zionist Arab MKs to hold a veto over government decisions. The idea was dropped. Blue and White leader Benny Gantz agreed to join a unity coalition with Bibi, causing some of Gantz’ partners to explode in fury; Blue and White broke up as a party, but Gantz and his faction have continued to negotiate with Bibi for a unity government. Meanwhile, the opposition threatens to pass a law in the Knesset that would prevent Bibi from taking office as PM in a rotation agreement even if a unity government were formed. And the Supreme Court is waiting until it can see the whites of Bibi’s eyes before handing down a decision that a person with indictments can’t become PM.

And now comes the really painful part.

The last three elections and the unity negotiations have all been focused on one issue: Bibi and his indictments. They are not discussing the response to the coronavirus, which has arguably already killed people because of a lack of firm guidance from the government about precisely who is responsible for government-funded nursing homes. They are not discussing the very difficult and complex question of precisely how and when to reopen parts of the economy that have been shut down, so as to avoid a massive depression. Thanks to the delay, we are not moving forward on sovereignty over the Jordan Valley and Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria – for which it might already be too late, if Trump is not reelected.

No, it has all been about “to Bibi or not to Bibi.” That’s why we had three elections, and that’s why the negotiations have revolved around subjects like what to do if the Supreme Court jumps in and decides that Bibi can’t take his turn as PM. That’s why the unity government doesn’t exist now.

Bibi is functionally neutralized. He goes on TV to announce the latest addition or subtraction to the corona-related restrictions on our society, and to brag about how well we are doing (in fact, thanks to heroic efforts by the medical profession, not management by the government). Meanwhile, how many hours a day are devoted to fending off anti-Bibi legislation in the Knesset, or Supreme Court intervention? This is not the Bibi who went to America to stand up in front of the US Congress.

It doesn’t matter today if he is innocent or guilty. The country is more important than he is. We have to end the craziness and get down to business.

Here is what should happen: an emergency government, with rotation of PMs, should be established now. Today. It should be limited to a fixed period, perhaps 24 months. Bibi should agree to retire after that period. But his indictments will be suspended until then, at which time he can face trial.

Possibly someday those who put their personal animosity for Binyamin Netanyahu ahead of all else will understand his true value. For myself, I think he has been one of our greatest Prime Ministers. But now the war is over, and the hero has been brought low. The curtain can come down on the tragedy – but the Jewish state must continue.

Posted in Israeli Politics | 2 Comments

Lessons from the Pandemic

Posted on April 16, 2020 by Victor Rosenthal

We went on a shopping expedition yesterday. Masked up, we walked to the supermarket and pharmacy and then returned home by way of the greengrocer. We made a special stop at a small market that was said to have eggs. There was a long line in front; but we got our eggs. Although I couldn’t tell for sure, I believe that these eggs were among those airlifted in from Portugal and Ukraine to meet the demand at Pesach time.

Israel still produces a lot of eggs, and this particular shortage was probably caused by hoarding by people who were afraid that the disruption caused by the coronavirus would prevent them from getting eggs for Pesach.

Eggs really aren’t a problem. We produce them, we can import them from multiple sources, and in the final analysis, we can live without them. Yes, even at Pesach, if we had to. In case you are wondering, there doesn’t appear to be a shortage of toilet paper, at least in Rehovot.

But what about other things? “Hi-tech” is supposedly the jewel in the crown of Israel’s economy, and semiconductors – microprocessors and countless types of simpler devices – are the building blocks of electronic devices. There are numerous semiconductor companies operating and headquartered in Israel, but – with the exception of Intel, which has manufacturing facilities for advanced microprocessors in Kiryat Gat – as far as I can tell, none of them actually make their products here. Chip designs created here are sent to “fabs” – fabricators – in East Asia, India, and elsewhere where they are manufactured. Other components that are necessary for building electronic devices are all manufactured elsewhere. Indeed, it is normal for a device to be designed in one country, assembled in another from parts made in still other countries, and then marketed worldwide.

Rice is apparently something that Israelis eat a lot of, but it is all imported. Israel exports irrigation systems that make it possible to grow rice with far less water than by traditional methods, but apparently we don’t use them at home. Ptitim, the tiny chunks of pasta that are so popular here, sometimes called “Israeli couscous” although they are not couscous, were developed by the Osem company as a rice substitute at the request of David Ben Gurion in the 1950s. During the first decade of Israel’s existence, not enough food was produced internally for all the immigrants – refugees from the Holocaust and Jews forced to leave Arab countries. In addition, there was little foreign currency available for imports like rice. Ptitim are cheap and easy to make.

There are numerous other products and raw materials that are essential to our daily lives or for our economy to function that must be imported. And we’ve developed complex systems that make this possible. But suppose these systems stopped functioning.

The coronavirus outbreak has made me think about this possibility. Suddenly we’ve noticed that things needed to respond to the epidemic, like protective equipment, diagnostic supplies, and ventilators, were not manufactured domestically. Drugs and ingredients for them come from overseas, often from only one country, usually China. Just-in-time manufacturing and inventory procedures mean that it’s difficult for the system to deal with a sudden spike in demand. Worldwide competition drives prices sky-high.

Israel made use of its Defense Ministry and even the Mossad spy agency to locate and procure urgently needed equipment. Defense facilities are now manufacturing ventilators locally. Thanks to this, and if current models are correct, Israeli doctors will not face the decisions their counterparts in northern Italy had to, in which they must choose which patient will get the ventilator that will allow him or her to live, while another is left to die. If we’re lucky.

But our highly leveraged technological civilization is not out of the woods yet. There is room for significant skepticism about the numbers of dead and sick coming from China. Economic and political instability there are not out of the question. In addition, some have predicted a deep worldwide economic depression caused by the pandemic and the lockdowns. If this comes about, and especially if it is accompanied by political instability – wars, revolutions, and the collapse of states – it could be enough to break some of the weak links in the chain that makes up the global economy. I could imagine widespread food insecurity in countries that until now have been considered highly developed.

Of course this could all be what my wife calls my “3 AM paranoia.” Maybe the coronavirus will quickly burn itself out, and economies around the world will recover quickly. Maybe the Chinese are telling the truth, or maybe they do have 21 million dead and it doesn’t matter. But whether or not this particular crisis is the straw that breaks the camel’s back, or if mankind wriggles out of this one only to be impaled upon the next (I love mixing metaphors), there are lessons to be learned for the people who make policy decisions for the nations of the world.

It is not possible for a nation the size of Israel to be self-sufficient in all things (although one like the US could be). But every nation should strive to be able to grow enough food to sustain its population. The trend toward agricultural monocultures is worrying. In other areas too, self-sufficiency should be a goal. Medical supplies are one. And many countries, including the US, are dependent on China. If something were to happen to China, or if the Chinese were to decide to deliberately act against countries it sees as enemies, it’s easy to imagine the result.

There are other reasons to worry about single sources for critical items. In 2007, Chinese manufacturers sold adulterated food ingredients to pet food manufacturers in the US and elsewhere, causing numerous animals to die. A year later, the same dangerous substance turned up in milk and baby formula, killing six infants in China.

A different kind of “adulteration” affects computer chips. In 2015, a Chinese subcontractor producing server motherboards for an American company secretly added an additional chip to them, one that would allow a hacker to bypass security in any network containing a machine with this board in it. The company’s servers were in use in American warships, drone operation centers, and more. In this instance, the trick was discovered. But it is even possible to modify a standard chip to include a “back door” on its own silicon. Such a hack would be much harder to detect.

The Chinese company Huawei makes 4G and now 5G equipment for cellular phone and data networks. US security officials claim (Huawei denies it) that there is a “back door” in this equipment which makes it possible for Huawei, and of course the Chinese government, to intercept traffic on networks using this equipment.

All this points to the risks in depending on outside suppliers for critical items, whether they be food or computer chips. We should diversify our agriculture and our manufacturing. Self-sufficiency is a worthwhile goal, even if it can only be attained partially. The coronavirus pandemic should be a warning that the worldwide system is not as stable or trustworthy as we have assumed. If we get through this relatively unscathed, we may not be so lucky next time.

Posted in The Future | 1 Comment

Moral Dilemmas Then and Now

Posted on April 12, 2020 by Victor Rosenthal

Dario Gabbai died last month, aged 97. Gabbai was a Sonderkommando, a Greek-Jewish prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkenau who was forced to help herd new arrivals to the German death chambers and remove their bodies to the crematoria a few minutes later. Very few of them survived the war, and Gabbai may have been the last of them.

Gabbai, who was often interviewed and appeared in several documentaries about the Holocaust, described shutting down his brain in order to survive in that hellish place. There were things that he had seen, he said, that he could neither talk about nor get out of his mind.

His situation raised moral dilemmas in the purest possible way. He had a choice: he could help the Germans or they would kill him immediately. Should he sacrifice himself in order to avoid becoming an accessory to murder? It would be pointless: there was no shortage of prisoners who would take his job in order to stay alive a bit longer. The Germans killed all the Sonderkommandos every few months, anyway (Gabbai arrived near the end). Maybe they simply stopped being able to do the soul-destroying work, or maybe the Germans were afraid of a revolt; there were at least three bloody but unsuccessful revolts of Sonderkommandos in Treblinka, Sobibor, and Birkenau. These were men – boys, actually – who had nothing to lose, and who knew in the most graphic and painful way they had nothing to lose.

One day, the transport included two of Gabbai’s friends from Salonika. “I told them they were going to die,” he recalls. “My cousins and I gave them whatever food we had, and we told them where to stand so the gas would kill them in two minutes instead of five.”

The cousins scooped the men’s ashes from the oven and buried them outside the crematoria. “We said ‘Kaddish’ for them,” Gabbai says. “But we were already so ice-cold [emotionally]. Nothing was penetrating. That is the only way we could survive.” – Naomi Pfefferman, “Job of Infinite Horror”

Gabbai was apparently not religious, but he indicated that it gave him some comfort to be told that his actions were permitted as pikuach nefesh, a doctrine that permits violating almost any of the commandments when it is necessary to save a human life.

I rarely write about the Holocaust; I’m not happy with the uses to which it is sometimes put. But I’m thinking about it today because the worldwide coronavirus pandemic has again posed hard, though different, moral questions. There are simple (but not easy) ones, such as that faced by the doctor with an inadequate number of ventilators at his disposal. And there are the more complicated ones, like finding a balance between shutting off economic activity in order to reduce the rate of transmission of the virus, and preventing an ensuing economic catastrophe.

This is a very difficult question from a scientific standpoint, since getting a good answer depends on predicting the effects of social distancing, quarantines, and lockdowns on the spread of the virus, something which as yet is only partially understood. We are better able to predict the economic consequences of these measures, although even then there is uncertainty about possible feedback effects that could make a downturn more severe.

There are moral questions too. As an extreme example, suppose it were decided to impose no restrictions at all on workplaces and schools, and let the virus run its course. Because of the nature of the illness, the greatest number of those seriously affected would be the elderly. It might be possible to mitigate the imbalance by isolating only older people – many of them are retired, after all – but there would still be a much greater opportunity for them to be exposed if movement and commerce weren’t restricted. And if the healthcare system became overloaded, as happened in northern Italy, then they would be much more likely to die, even if care were not apportioned according to age.

If, on the other hand, a society succeeded in “flattening the curve” by reducing normal activity, then everyone who was sick would be more likely to receive the best possible care, which would disproportionately reduce the death toll among the older patients.

A straightforward utilitarian argument can be made for letting the virus run its course. Older people are on balance consumers and not producers. They have a negative effect on the economic life of a society. Economically speaking, they wouldn’t be missed. The virus would just be a small blip, with a small number of productive individuals becoming seriously ill and very few dying.

Sweden seems to be doing something like this. They are taking some social distancing measures and trying to isolate older citizens, but they have not shut down workplaces and schools. At some point there will be herd immunity, and at some point a vaccine.

This strategy could not possibly be adopted in Israel, where even secular people are imbued with Jewish ethical principles, according to which every human life is equally valuable. The tradeoff that is being made in Israel between economic activity and suppressing viral transmission leans in the direction of protecting people from the virus, a policy of pikuach nefesh. And I think this is a humane policy, a morally better one, even if it is less rational by some standard than strictly minimizing economic damage.

Somewhat less admirably, people in assisted living facilities here have been more or less abandoned. Staff have passed the disease to residents, and then essentially fled. No one has picked up the ball.

There are other factors in dealing with the epidemic. I haven’t mentioned the attempt to track and isolate carriers of the disease before they can transmit it. In this respect, Israel could do much better if she would (could?) increase the number of tests done daily. This is a win-win activity, because it only isolates those who need to be. In addition, research is proceeding on various treatments that may be efficacious. The slower the virus spreads, the more patients will be able to receive these treatments in time.

There are (naturally) political problems. There is a struggle between the Health Ministry and the Defense Ministry over who should be in charge of coordinating the overall response to the epidemic, although we do not see the kind of political controversies about the efficacy of this treatment or another which seem to exist in the US. On the other hand, the lack of a permanent government and the specter of a possible fourth election may have serious effects on the ability of Israel to deal with the economic fallout from the epidemic.

The corona pandemic is not like the Holocaust in many ways. There is no Auschwitz-Birkenau and there are no Sonderkommandos. But the campaign against it is much like a military campaign, involving logistics, foot-soldiers, and orders that must be followed. And I suspect that some medical personnel, like Dario Gabbai, will be left with memories that will be very hard to erase, much as they would wish to.

Posted in Israeli Society, War | 1 Comment

The Season of Plagues and Freedom

Posted on April 9, 2020 by Victor Rosenthal

It’s almost Pesach, when the thoughts of Jewish bloggers turn to plagues and freedom. Plagues we certainly have. In addition to the coronavirus, Africa (and possibly the Middle East) is about to experience one of the paradigmatic Biblical plagues, swarming locusts.

We have freedom, too. Leaving aside the corona-related restrictions – which are becoming significantly more severe in Israel around the holiday – Jews in Israel are among the most free peoples in the world. For example, academic freedom is almost unlimited, as illustrated by this article in the wonderful English Edition of Ha’aretz, in which seditious Ben Gurion University professor Neve Gordon argues that the coming impact of coronavirus in Gaza will be Israel’s fault. He’s right that there are few test kits and ventilators there, insufficient hospital beds, and countless other deficiencies that, if the virus spreads widely there, will prove deadly. But of course he’s wrong about whose fault it is.

Recently, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar threatened that if Israel doesn’t give Gaza ventilators, they would take them by force and “stop the breathing of 6 million Israelis (apparently he means only the Jewish ones, since there are 8 million if you count Arabs).”

Gaza certainly doesn’t lack money. Europe, Turkey, and Qatar continue to send aid and invest in projects there. Israeli officials estimate that between 2014 and 2017 Hamas spent about $120 million on tunnels (which have now been neutralized by an even more expensive Israeli project of an anti-tunnel barrier along the border). That’s equivalent to quite a bit of medical equipment. And that’s just tunnels. It doesn’t include the rockets and the villas, malls, and resorts of the Hamas leadership.

Gordon says that Israel has “occupied” Gaza for 40 years, and “continues to control its borders.” His definition of “occupation” is strange, since normally you have to be present somewhere in order to occupy it; but leaving this aside, Israel does not limit the ingress of most medical equipment and supplies to Gaza. It’s true that some electronic equipment is considered “dual use,” (civilian and military) and therefore requires special permission to be imported. But that is a question of extra time, not prohibition. The rules about dual-use items came about from bitter experience, after (for example) chunks of metal pipe imported from Israel returned home in the form of Qassams, and steel rebar ended up reinforcing concrete tunnels.

The biggest hospital in Gaza, al-Shifa Hospital – which boasts a Hamas military command center in its basement – was built by the British in 1946 and was Gaza’s only hospital until after 1948. It was greatly expanded and renovated by Israel during the period 1967-1993. Other hospitals were built with money from various foreign sources (indeed, I haven’t found evidence of any hospitals built by Hamas; if anyone knows of any, please comment).

Gordon refers to the “de-development” of Gaza, a concept attributed to the deranged misozionist Harvard “scholar” Sara Roy. It is certainly true that the conditions of life in Gaza have deteriorated recently – they were much better in the 1967-1993 period than before or after – but the simple and correct explanation that this is due to the diversion of resources away from the welfare of the general population and toward weapons and infrastructure, as well as the enrichment of the Hamas elite, escapes him.

Gordon insists that Arabs in “occupied” Gaza don’t have freedom. But their leaders are doing exactly what they want. Does anyone doubt for a moment that if, through some miracle, they would stop trying to kill us, Israel wouldn’t fall over herself trying to improve the lives of the people there?

Gordon has been fighting against the State of Israel for years while living in it and working at a state-supported university (he is currently on sabbatical in London, but he retains his position in Israel). And we let him do it.

Here are a few short takes on other important freedoms that we have in Israel:

What about freedom of the press? Yes, Israel has military censorship, which sometimes unjustifiably holds up the publication of embarrassing facts. But Israel also has (in Ha’aretz, naturally), Gideon Levy, the anti-Jewish Jewish journalist. Can anybody imagine what would happen to a Russian Gideon Levy? Actually, we don’t need to imagine – the dangers of being a journalist in Russia are well known (to be fair, Russian journalists are as often murdered by local hoods as by the government).

Israel also shines in the area of freedom of religion. The Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, is accessible to Jews through one entrance for limited hours. Jews (and Christians) are not permitted to bring any “religious objects,” and are subject to arrest if they are caught praying, which can include moving one’s lips or even crying (I recommend that you read the link to get the full flavor of the situation). If they are thirsty, they may not drink from the water faucets on site, which are reserved for Muslims to wash themselves.

Muslims, on the other hand, have several entrances available, and unless there is tension related to terrorism, unlimited hours during which they can visit. They can pray, and sometimes Arab kids play soccer there. Freedom.

Now consider freedom to bear arms. That is an interesting one. It is hard for a private citizen to get a pistol permit, and long guns are almost unheard of in civilian hands. But almost every male Jewish Israeli between the ages of 19 and 40 has the right, more correctly the obligation, to take a month out of his life every year and, er, bear arms (when I was here in the 1980s, it was six weeks a year until age 55). And that is in addition to two years of mandatory service, which women also serve.

But what about Arabs? Although Druze and Bedouin citizens serve in the IDF, most Arab citizens are not required to do so. But – here Israel proves to be special again – illegal weapons are rife in Israel’s Arab towns. Even automatic weapons. So they can bear arms whenever they want to, and are not limited to one month a year.

The American Bill of Rights includes the right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure. And in Israel you have nothing to worry about – unless someone claims you owe them money! If that happens, they have recourse to a system called hotza’a lefoal by which a creditor can lock up a debtor’s bank account, make it impossible for them to leave the country, and charge outrageous fees and interest. But as long as you pay your cellphone bills and don’t have an angry ex-spouse, you have nothing to worry about.

So you see, here in Israel we have so much freedom that we can afford to give it to academics and writers who take the side of our enemies, to Muslims who deny our right to worship at our holy places, to members of the various Arab mafias, and to mobile phone providers.

We have so much freedom, in fact, that we don’t need the more traditional plagues.

Posted in Israeli Society | 1 Comment

Governments and Other Parasites

Posted on April 5, 2020 by Victor Rosenthal

Today is supposed to be the day Netanyahu and Gantz finalize their agreement to form Israel’s new unity government. But so what? What is a government for, anyway? Why do we allow ourselves to support such bloated, parasitic organisms? Especially when we watch helplessly as elements of said organism arrogate to themselves resources that ought to belong to society as a whole?

What are governments for? Protection of the citizens is their most important function. Historically a group of humans tacitly agreed to give up their freedom (or were forced to give it up) to a leader who would protect them against the Hobbesian world they lived in. When armies come to sack your city, whom do you call? You need an army too, and somebody needs to command them and pay them. And where does the king or prince or president get the money to pay them? Need I ask?

And naturally he takes something off the top. A “good” leader takes just what he needs (a parasite has to be careful not to kill its host), while a bad one sucks his people dry.

In the far past, governments just protected their people against external aggression and banditry, and internal crime. There wasn’t much that could be done about natural disasters, like earthquakes and epidemics. There was little that could be done to improve economic outcomes as well, although taxation could and did put a ceiling on it.

But with technological progress, intervention by government in both natural and human processes became possible and necessary, for good or ill. The famous saying (who said this?) that civilization replaces frequent small inconveniences with rare large catastrophes, implies a collective responsibility of civilized people to try to prevent those catastrophes. And this responsibility is placed on the shoulders of their leaders, who may or may not rise to the occasion – as we are having quite graphically and tragically demonstrated to us in various countries today.

The next most important job of government is the regulation of markets. Capitalism in a free society is by far the most effective way to create wealth to meet human needs and wants, but it is unstable. As we learn in basic economics class, numerous distortions upset theoretically perfectly efficient markets, and the result is to create a vicious spiral that funnels wealth toward specific sectors of society and starves others.

Radical laissez-faire policies ignore hidden costs of production – for example, air/water pollution – and leave the door open for various causes of instability like artificial barriers to entry and monopolistic practices, exploitation of workers (and shareholders!), and other imbalances. Without external control, a capitalist system will go off the rails.

On the other hand, communism places complete control of the economic system in the hands of the government, supposedly on behalf of the workers; but along with the loss of efficiency that comes from the conscious attempt to control markets, there develops a totally useless, parasitic governmental ruling class which soaks up the available wealth, making the society far worse off than in a purely capitalistic system. The same can be said for monarchies (in which a king or royal family owns most of the wealth) or Islamic regimes like in Iran or Gaza, in which religious principles guide policy. The results speak for themselves: the economy functions poorly or not at all (e.g., Venezuela), and the rulers protect themselves by restricting the freedom of their citizens.

The least bad alternative is some form of regulated capitalism. That requires someone to make and enforce the regulations, which is the second major job of government. It’s easy to see how dangerous this function makes government officials; the temptation to graft for someone given power to regulate commerce is enormous.

The final job of government, international relations, combines the protective and economic functions in the realm of relations with other nations. Governments vary greatly in the way they use their powers in this area. Some wish to live and let live; others – like the Iranian regime, or Hitler’s Germany – behave like pirates. Piratical regimes are dangerous to others and also to their own populations, because they invite reprisals from other nations.

All governments are fundamentally parasitical. But parasites can be useful to their hosts. A good government takes little enough from its citizens to keep from harming them too much, while performing its necessary functions. A bad government, like the regimes of Maduro, Assad, or Khamenei, rapes its people, doesn’t protect them against other dangers, impoverishes them, and exports instability to the international sphere. A good government is like intestinal bacteria. A bad one is like coronavirus.

All this implies that government officials should not be given a smidgen more power than what is required to do their jobs. They should not be venerated or treated as superior or more important than the average citizen, who is their employer. They should not be treated as symbols of the nation they represent; special music should not be played when they arrive; they should not walk on red carpets.

Needless to say, they should not be given outsized salaries or opportunities to enrich themselves that are not available to others. The UK has done a very beneficial thing by offloading the ceremonial and symbolic functions of the head of state to the Monarch, while allowing the Prime Minister to get on with his or her job. A President of the US, on the other hand, has a fulsome array of unnecessary and expensive perquisites, and is sometimes referred to by the offensive sobriquet “leader of the free world.”

Governments are bureaucracies, and like any bureaucracy, only grow larger. Officials protect their satrapies, with far more ferocity than they exhibit in the performance of their duties – high level politicians being the worst of all in this respect. Such cancerous growth can convert a relatively benign parasite into a killer.

Israel’s unity government may have 30, or according to some reports, as many as 36 ministers, the most in the history of the country. As I wrote last week, the cost of each additional minister is 1.2 million shekels a year, and this is an example of parasitism allowed to run rampant – especially at a time that the government needs to come up with a massive bailout for individuals and businesses that will have been hurt by the long shutdown of the economy.

The process of forming the government has so far been enormously expensive, with three elections at an estimated cost of 12 billion shekels. Keep in mind also, that for the past year the legislators have done essentially nothing, while drawing their salaries.

When does a parasite become too costly to tolerate? I would like to think that our politicians are no worse than intestinal bacteria. But could they be becoming a virus deadly to the state?

Posted in Israeli Politics | 3 Comments