Buddha’s Nativity in Ladakh

By Israel Shamir

A long snake drops down the mountain: hundreds of monks form a curving paved path from the monastery at the top to the broad polo grounds at the bottom, where the whole population of Leh had gathered to celebrate the Buddha’s Nativity. Powerful, muscular monks in yellow hats and orange robes were accompanied by peasants, city folk, urchins of sorts, cars and cattle. The polo grounds with flags and garlands, important folk sitting up on a long elevated tribune, and performers queuing up recalled a typical May Day celebration in a provincial Soviet town, though there were Lamas instead of Party officials. Actually, (ex-Soviet) Tajikistan is not far from here – just over the impassable mountains, for Leh, the capital city of Ladakh, is located in the upper reaches of the Indus River, between the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush, squeezed between Tibet and Kashmir, bordering on China and Pakistan, next to Afghanistan and Tajikistan. The local people are fond of horseback riding, so the game of polo is not a foreign invention to them, but rather a native game. Actually, the Brits learned it in the southern slopes of the Himalayas , and later on built polo grounds all over the Empire.

Once, Leh was an important place on an important road, but that was long time ago. Nowadays, Ladakh belongs to India , being part of the State of Jammu and Kashmir , its farthest-away part. The border with China and Pakistan having been closed, Leh is isolated by frontiers, troops, rivers and mountains. In the winter, Ladakh is practically cut off from the rest of the world. The road from Kashmir to Ladakh was opened in May, and it will be closed again at the end of September. It passes through awe-inspiring passes with romantic names: Zoji-la, Namika-la, Fatu-la; reminiscent of Shangri-la, beyond the snow-capped mountains. It is a scary experience to come to Ladakh from Kashmir – the Zoji-la mountain pass can frighten any atheist into saying a prayer. There is an image of the Virgin next to that of Buddha and to an Islamic mihrab at the top of the pass, and all of them are well attended by grateful travellers. However, the passes on the second road to India , the Manali road, are allegedly even worse, though one wonders whether that is even possible.

Ladakh, this vast, frozen and sparsely populated desert, looks like the South Sinai , a barren land with high mountains and huge military bases, mercifully enlivened by temples and monasteries. There are trees in a few spots in the river valleys, but otherwise this land is bare. Ladakhi towns are tiny and rather pleasant. They have wonderful palatial houses with colourful frescoes on the walls. Ladakh was once ruled by its own king, but not anymore. The royal palace has been taken over by the government. Now the queen, the widow of the last king, lives in an ordinary house one hour’s drive from the capital Leh.

I’ve been visiting a few monasteries in this most remote Buddhist country with an average altitude of 10,000 feet. Though religions differ, man’s need for communing with God remains a constant. Buddhists – like Orthodox Christians – strive to achieve this perfect union with God; they call it enlightenment while we call it theosis or deification. Their monasteries are full of icons they call tanka. Their night chants begin at the same time the monks of Mt Athos start their morning prayer, and last very, very long. There are differences, too: though we admire and venerate our spiritual teachers, we never worship a living person like they do. There are more photos of the Dalai Lama in the monasteries than there were portraits of Stalin and Mao in Russia and China . To make the comparison stick, there are also copies of his collected works in so many languages.

Once there were many monks and monasteries; huge reliefs of the Buddha still embellish the land, as well as their mani walls made of ritually inscribed flat stones. But the attraction of monkhood has faded notably. I stayed in Lamayuru, one of the biggest monasteries in Ladakh. It is a vast complex with dozens of houses and stupas, big and small – but there was only one resident monk. I was told that a few more were scattered throughout the area, helping with the harvest and teaching children. In the old days, the monks taught children in a monastery school. Now the Indian government provides schools, so children do not have to go to monasteries, though monks still teach. Still, the literacy rate here is below 25%, while in neighbouring Tibet it is 95%. Moreover, Tibet is accessible all year round even by train, while Ladakh is not.

Ladakh is a good place to get an understanding of the Tibetan problem, for Ladakh is also a part of Tibet, and the native population is kin to the Tibetans. Ladakhis and Tibetans understand each other almost as well as people from different parts of Ladakh understand each other.

There is one important difference: we never hear any bad news from Ladakh, though their situation is quite similar. Both are not independent. While Tibet belongs to China , Ladakh belongs to India . Whereas in Tibet , money and business is mainly in Chinese hands, in Ladakh business, trade, hotels, tourism are in Indian, mainly Kashmiri hands. The reasons for the differential treatment lie elsewhere: India is more compliant with the West than China, and that is why China is attacked. If India were to become equally ‘stubborn’, we should soon be hearing about mistreated Ladakhis, too.

The people of Ladakh and of Tibet surely have their problems but these problems are mainly due to “progress” – the State ( China or India ) took over the role once performed by the monasteries. Nowadays, roads are repaired, schools run, and taxes collected by the state, not by monasteries. The monasteries have lost their position as feudal seigniors. Naturally the monks are not happy about it; but the same can be said in France or Russia : even there, the monks would like to revert to less hectic times. Tibet is just the only place that the Western media brings us the opinion of the monks as a valid one rather than as curiosity.

The native people haven’t sufficient capital, connections or experience to compete with the Indians and the Chinese in trade and business. Native culture is being eroded by globalisation both in Tibet and in Ladakh (as it is in your home town), but only in Tibet we hear it called “cultural genocide”.

On a wall in Ladakh I spot a sticker ("STOP Culture GENOCIDE in Tibet") attached to a Pepsi Cola sign, apparently the very opposite of “cultural genocide”. Indeed the present attack on China because of its “cultural genocide” in Tibet is a cynical media manipulation. Tibetans actually do better in Tibet than Ladakhis in Ladakh, and with departure of communism, even this reason evaporated.

If ever Tibet will become independent, it is likely to tear away the Indian territories of Ladakh and Himachal Pradesh, as the native population is akin to Tibetans, and connected to Tibet by blood, marriages, customs, language and religion. This is a strong argument against giving too much support to the Tibetan cause: changes of status quo are bloody and violent and usually are connected with ethnic cleansing.

The Tibetans in Himachal Pradesh and Ladakh describe themselves as ‘refugees’, but after all they live in close proximity to their old homes, among their cousins and at their own choice. They are as much refugees as the Irish in Liverpool . They should make their choice: go back to Tibet or become naturalised in India . Apparently both possibilities are open to them. Chinese Tibet is not some dreadful place of communist torture chambers, and they can go back without fear for their lives. Instead, they take CIA money to despoil the walls of Leh with their nasty anti-Chinese slogans and with their cheap propaganda in English aimed at foreign tourists. I asked some Tibetan refugees: would they return to Tibet ? Yes, we would, they said, if the Dalai Lama would return as well, and this is not likely to happen soon.

Tibetans are just one ethnic group among many others living in the area. Their independence would cause other small groups to claim their independence, as it happened in the most recent case of Georgia and Ossetia . Indeed, if Kartvelis can become independent of Russia , why can’t Ossetia become independent of Georgia ? If Tibetans may become independent of China , why can’t Ladakhis become independent of India ? Promotion of ‘national independence’ is a deadly game, it always was, and it is better to stop it.

Let the Tibetans and the Ladakhis worship at their monasteries and improve their lives, let the Dalai Lama concentrate his efforts of the real Buddhist goals, i.e. seeking Nirvana, while leaving the dreams of full cultural (let alone political) ind ependence where they belong – in the Dream Kingdom.

Reading Douglas Adams in Yanoun

By Israel Shamir

[Many lines in this essay were taken from Douglas Adams’ books, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.]

Given a choice, I would rather turn into a tree than into a god; into a fig tree in Yanoun, a tiny village on the eastern slopes of Samarian hills. It was the only place on earth where such a thought could come to my mind one perfectly peaceful August afternoon, when a light breeze found its way into the valley. I sat under a tree, for the August sun is hot and as furious as tropical rain, and you have to take shelter – in the shade of a fig tree. I had nowhere to hurry to, nothing had to be done. This was a place of peace and tranquillity, suitable for a Buddha – or for a tree.

The terraced valley opens into another big valley with a flat opening at its bottom, and that dry river feeds the even bigger Wadi Akraba carrying rare rain water to Jordan River . While Tel Aviv is hot, humid, sticky, noisy and boisterous, calm Yanoun enjoys the cool air of the mountains. Terrain makes us what we are. Walk in the thick groves along Jordan River , and discover the night-prowling tiger in your soul. Emerge in the open valley and sense the peaceful soul of sheep. The Yanoun mountains are for tree-like contemplation, for growing into the hillside and gazing. “When you can’t take being a god any more”, mused Douglas Adams, whose book I had for a companion, – “you lay on the ground and after a while a tree grows out of your head. You rejoin the earth, seep into its bowels, flow through its vital arteries, and eventually emerge as a pure torrent of water”.

Probably Douglas Adams knew of our country, otherwise how could he feel its ways so well? A small spring bubbles up a few yards below, in a covered cave, and provides the few households of the tiny village with sweet and cool water. Maybe it was a god, or a prophet. A young girl rocks a goatskin full of curdling milk tied up by a string to a bow of a fig tree. Her mother and grandmother sit next to her in the shadow, gazing into the far valleys. Below, a flock of sheep grazes on the opening, and the kids of Yanoun play football with Tarek, a young American volunteer.

Further down, there is a manor built in the 19th century by Mustafa Beg, a Bosnian nobleman, who fled the Balkans and reached the shores of Palestine . The Bosnians settled in two villages, in Caesarea Maritima, on the dune-covered ruins of the ancient capital of Palestine , and in Yanoun, in the deep hinterland of the country. It was the impeccable choice of a gifted people. In Caesarea , they built a gentle mosque on the seashore, which was turned into a bar by the Israeli conquerors in 1948. In Yanoun, they built the manor. Its red roof tiles remind one of the builders’ European origin, for in warm Palestine there is no need for tiled roofs. The rooms are still full of old furniture. Mustafa Beg (a title of respect) was a prominent and wealthy man of his day, and he recognized an opportunity when it came his way. The Ottoman Empire made a go of privatization of the common lands, and the land of the villages was up for grabs to whoever had money or good connections in Istanbul . Mustafa Beg had his opportunity when Ottoman tax officials came to collect their dues, and the people of neighbouring Akraba did what they and their ancestors had always done in such occasions: they made themselves scarce.

They took their light belongings and went up into mountains, hoping that the tax collectors will go away as quickly as they had come. But the new ideas of economic liberalism were already infiltrating from Europe , among them the idea of privatisation.

The collectors offered Mustafa the prospect of paying the due taxes in exchange for the lands of Akraba, and he agreed. In return, the lands – hundreds and thousands of acres with olive trees – were registered on his name. The peasants came back, and Mustafa had to give back much of the land, but he still kept enough to make it a very, very profitable deal. Until now many peasants of Yanoun give half of their olive harvest to the descendents of Mustafa Beg living in Nablus . Others share their crops with the next largest land-owner, Nimr. But there are free farmers, too. I stayed at Hassan’s hospitable house, built on his own land. Hassan is over eighty, a strong and stately old man in grey galabiye and abaya, a sort of full-length dress with a mantle on top. His galabiye is girdled up by a broad leather belt, and a sharp short knife hangs on it. His hands are of good shape and feel as hard as if they were chiselled from local stone when he shakes my hand. Last year Hajj Hassan made the pilgrimage to Mecca , but he is first and foremost a peasant.

He was born some 50 miles away as crow flies, in Beit Jibrin at the foothills of Halil, once a prosperous vine-growing community, spread around the gentle hills of Biblical Shefela. In 1948, the Jews attacked it and expelled the peasants, seized their spacious homes and fields, and created a commune for-Jews-only, – a kibbutz. The extant houses of Beit Jibrin still impress the visitor with their gracious forms, perfect location (good feng shui, the Chinese would say) and integration with fruit trees and vines.

Hassan became a refugee like all the peasants of Beit Jibrin, like peasants of hundreds of villages from Galilee and Shefela and Negeb. That was the Nakba, the Palestinian holocaust, when this great culture with its deep 147 traditions was shattered. The refugees were herded into refugee camps, dreaming of returning home. Hassan had landed in Deheishe Camp, some 20 km from his lost home in Beit Jibrin. On a clear day, he could even see the roofs of Beit Jibrin. His friends tried to steal across the new border and return home, but they were invariably shot by Jews.

Hassan was a young man, ready to start all over again: he went to far-away Yanoun and bought a parcel of land from the family of Mustafa Beg the Boshnaq. Our Lord and Lady of Palestine blessed Hassan. He married, and had a few sons and daughters, and then he took a second wife, and had had some more, until he was surrounded by twelve strong sons and pretty daughters. His spacious three-storied house with smaller outbuildings can compete with the manor of the Beg. There are many olive trees he planted on the slopes, and there is a vine with heavy yellow grapes in front of his house. A few yards up the slope I found the clear-cut rectangular of an old vine press, with perfectly round cavity for the grape juice. Until the fall of the Umayyad Caliphate in ninth century, the bare feet of local peasants squashed yellow sweetish grapes in this place. Now this land is not considered suitable for wine cultivation, as opposed to the lands to the south of Jerusalem , but who knows? The green thumb of Hassan can work wonders!

The local peasants plant olives, and this morning the second wife of Hassan, a tall and dignified woman in her sixties, brought me this thick greenish juice of olive together with a big and round country bread, hubz baladi, she had baked half an hour ago. Hard white goat cheese, salty thyme, a bunch of grapes and a glass of sweetish tea with maramie (sage) leaves completed the meal.

The voice of Adnan, a son of Hassan, broke my meditation. Adnan, an electric engineer, is employed by the local authorities to make regular rounds and check the electric installations. He also attends to the generator that provides the village with four hours of power from seven to eleven at night. Like many other villages in the mountains, Yanoun is not connected to the grid. Adnan is dressed like a city man, in a bright silk shirt and neat lacquered shoes. A Nablus university graduate, he married a girl from Nablus , and brought her here into the village.

In the evenings we chatted: Adnan, his city wife and me. Life was better in the village, they told me, but oh boy do they miss an odd evening out in the city. It was an impossible wish. In normal days Nablus is just half an hour away, but now it takes a whole day to get anywhere from Yanoun. The direct road Akraba – Nablus is cut off by the Jews who do not permit Palestinian cars to use it. Instead, Adnan and his wife have to drive a rough dirt track climbing mountains and crossing valleys, to wait for hours at checkpoints, to suffer the rudeness and obstinacy of the road-block soldiers, to walk for miles from one block to another, or to drive even rougher roads in their own thirty-years- old VW Beetle. It was faster in the days of Mustafa Beg, riding a donkey; but nowadays the hills around Yanoun are full of watchful eyes and gun barrels.

“Do not sit under this tree,” called out Adnan. “They do not like it.” A full moon had risen on the still blue sky just above the hill on the other side of the valley. The moon was speared by a narrow watchtower, and perennially lit fog-lamps surrounded it, reflecting on the razor wire. That looked like a small penitentiary, but its dwellers were jailers as well as prisoners. ‘They’ were a gang of Jewish settlers, who came to redeem the land of Israel . Instead of buying the land, as Hassan did, they grabbed it. The peasants of Yanoun would not worry about the land grab overmuch, for the land was not theirs either. But the settlers were like a tensely wound coil, ready to unwind. Though their small enclosure was on top of the opposite hill across the wadi, they did not allow the peasants to move on the slopes as far as the settlers’ guns could reach.
A violent lot, full of fear and loathing, they acted out Wild West fantasies. If I took a walk, they turned a Walk into a military operation with Biblical name, say, the Walk of Jehu (Kings II, 10) duly coordinated with the Central Command. They considered everybody else – a source of danger. They imprisoned themselves on the hilltop, and tried to imprison the peasants as well. Adnan, this urbane engineer, carried their bullet buried in his hip. The settlers had tried to steal the village flock of sheep, and he stopped them, though he was with a small kid, while they were five armed men. Still, he fought them bare-handed until they shot him, and in the ensuing commotion the kid drove their flock back to the village.

Israelis do not mind our denunciation of settlers. Nice old peace-loving Uri Avnery likes to offer us an alternative: the bad settler versus the good Israeli, and people always in desperate search for a good Jew grasp this cash. But actually, who cares? A ‘bad settler’ is the one who bothers Hassan in Yanoun, while a ‘good Israeli’ is the one who expelled Hassan from Beit Jibrin in 1948. A bad settler would be lost in two days without armed support of good Israelis, while this support wouldn’t last without moral support of even better Jews abroad.

Indeed, Israelis aren’t better than the settlers. They are of two kinds. Some are typical Vogons, thoroughly vile and ugly. For those of you who do not remember The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Vogons were “one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy, not actually evil, but bad-tempered, officious and callous” who love to destroy, to shove people around and shout “resistance is useless”. In the book, they demolish the Earth; in real life they demolish pretty villages and beautiful trees without as much as saying “by your leave”. They even use the same pretext as Adams ’ Vogons: they were preparing ground for a bypass connecting two Jewish settlements over the natives’ land.

Only after encountering the second kind of Israelis, does one begin to appreciate the Vogons, who look the part and act the part. The second kind looks deceptively human. They wear a friendly open smile, a blond forelock, suntan, nonchalance; and they like to show off their tortured souls and demand empathy from their victims. They are perfectly able to demolish a pretty village and uproot a fruitful tree while insisting (in words of Adams ):

“You are not dealing with any dumb two-bit triggerpumping morons with low hairlines, little piggy eyes and no conversation; we are a couple of intelligent caring guys that you’d probably quite like if you met us socially! I don’t go around gratuitously shooting people and then bragging about it afterward in seedy bars. I go around shooting people gratuitously and then I agonise about it afterward for hours to my girlfriend!”

Both kinds are foreign to the land they were born, but they are about to inherit it by ruining the native. Incidentally, they ruin the land, as well. Our planet Earth was created to find the meaning of life, says Adams , and this was the mission of Man he was about to fulfil. But something went wrong, as it often does, and the natives of Earth, bearers of the mission, were exterminated by foreign invaders: stupid and useless PR consultants, real estate agents, wheelers-dealers and TV-assistants, who were kicked out of their planet for they were too stupid and useless. So much for the mission. Years will go by, but the meaning of life won’t be found, to the utter delight of psychoanalysts.

A similar thing happened in Palestine . This country was uniquely crafted to help Man to find his way to God. Every detail of its landscape may lead to illumination. Its people, the native Palestinians, are essential because of their tending of the land and their love of it, their piety and tradition, their wonderful open hearts, shining eyes and hospitality. But something went wrong, and a lot of useless real estate agents and currency speculators were dumped on its holy ground. Will we find our way to God now, with this land being devoured?

They ruin the land so much that even turning into a spring is not an option anymore. Emerge as a pure torrent of water, and as likely as not you will get a load of chemical waste dumped into you.

The Snatch

By Israel Shamir

A fast guy had thought that a wallet was unattended, and tried to snatch it. But to his distress, he was stopped in his tracks by a burly wallet owner. This might be a fair description of Saddam Hussein’s effort to snatch Kuwait. It also fits the war over South Ossetia.

Georgian President Saakashvili thought he could take South Ossetia while nobody was looking; while everybody was busy watching the Olympiad. In order to maximise the surprise factor, he declared barely three hours before the snatch that he would never send troops in.

Here the similarity ends. While Saddam succeeded in taking Kuwait, Saakashvili failed to take over the SO. Saakashvili’s strategy also was different, and more reminiscent of the Israeli conquest of 1948: he wanted to have Ossetia without its native folk, the Ossetians. To this end he bombarded the SO capital, Tskhinvali, causing a mass exodus of the people – some thirty thousand of them, or almost half of population crossed the high mountains to the Russian side. The Russians rolled in and kicked Saakashvili’s troops out.

So far, so good.

(1) Saakashvili has had it coming for a long time. His flirtation, no, his heavy petting with the US and Israel, his fervent anti-Russian sentiments, his Kartveli nationalism had led him and his country to trouble. Like young Fidel, he wanted to turn his land into a match to set the global fire. He was the first to be burnt.

(2) Russia fulfilled its residual imperial duty: as the successor of the Soviet Union, it is duty bound to guarantee some well-being of its erstwhile junior member-states. Russia could not allow Saakashvili to ethnically cleanse the Ossetians, for practical reasons, too: fifty thousand refugees from South Ossetia would destabilise the North Caucasus.

(3) Russia demonstrated that beyond its bark, it has bite, too. Probably other adventurous neighbours, namely pro-American leaders of Estonia, Poland, and the Ukraine will entertain second thoughts before their next paroxysm of anti-Russian sentiment.

(4) Russia proved that it can use force quickly, efficiently and with moderation. There was none of the old Soviet overkill; rather it was a moderate and modest, well-executed military operation. The best thing about it was its brevity, two or three days of actual fighting and the rest just a bit of mopping-up.

(5) Russian leadership proved that they are not scared by Washington’s rhetoric. This is a very good thing after so many years of complicity and impotence.

(6) Military defeat may be very good for the Georgian soul. Georgians are wonderful people, warm, handsome, pleasant and generous. However, they are ferocious nationalists of the tribal kind. Like some of their neighbours, they tend to see others mainly through an ethnic prism. The first thing the Georgians did when they became independent in the wake of 1917 Russian Revolution was to expel all Armenians and confiscate their property. Joseph Stalin also acted in the Georgian way when he expelled the Chechens from their mountains and the Germans from Prussia. Georgia is by no means homogeneous: it is populated by a few smaller ethnic groups, in addition to the Kartveli majority (or at least plurality). Since Georgia became independent a second time, in 1991, the Kartvelis have tried to deal with the minorities by harsh methods, undermining their culture and language and even expelling them on the first suspicion. This was the reason three autonomous areas of the country decided to split off from Georgia. SO is one of the three, but unless the Kartvel nationalism would be reined in, Adgars, Svans and other ethnic communities may rebel, too. Military defeat might just cause the Georgians to re-think their attitude towards their immediate neighbours.

(7) Though Russia did not send in its troops in order to remove Saakashvili, this does not make such an outcome any less desirable. Saakashvili is dangerous for Georgia, Russia, Ossetia and the world. What a pity he did not lose the general elections a few months ago; what a shame that other candidates met with untimely deaths under suspicious circumstances or were jailed. One may hope the true patriots of Georgia will kick him out and choose a better president, opting for neutrality and for friendship with Georgia’s neighbours including Russia.

(8) Georgian communists expressed their distaste with the Saakashvili’s attack; they would like to lead their country back into a close union with Russia. It should be considered: many Georgians, say the Communists in their letter from Tbilisi, would love to see the end of Saakashvili’s adventurism.

(9) A neutral and neighbour-friendly Georgia would be able to re-integrate South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The Kartvel and Mingrel refugees would be able to return into their villages. The Caucasus is so poly-ethnic that mutual expulsions and transfers are unacceptable.

(10) This is the time to stop anti-Georgian propaganda in Russia and anti-Russian propaganda elsewhere. Russia has a long tradition of friendship with the Caucasian nations, with Georgians, Ossetians, Circassians; the tradition has been well established by Leo Tolstoy, Lermontov and Griboedov. Let it prevail. As Marshal Stalin would say, Saakashvili come and go, but the Georgian people endure forever.

Europeans showed more understanding of the Russian action than some might have expected. There was no mass hysteria, and the Ossetians were allowed to express their viewpoint. Israel stopped its supplies of military hardware to Georgia. While American leaders responded to the victory of Russian arms with expected verbal severity, they wisely avoided any action likely to enhance the military standing of Saakashvili. They could have made an airlift of American armour to Tbilisi, they could have shown more muscle, but they did not.

This was the true mystery of the campaign. Did the Americans encourage Saakashvili? Did he act at his own foolhardy will? There may be a few explanations of the enigma.

(1) Every Georgian president has tried to regain the lost provinces, so Saakashvili could have decided to give it a try, perhaps being carried away by the magic of auspicious triple eight, as his offensive was begun on 8.8.8.

(2) Saakashvili may have failed to understand the Americans. This happened to Saddam Hussein when he snatched Kuwait. He was convinced that the Ambassador Gillespie had given him the green light for the operation.

(3) The Americans and Saakashvili may have failed in their prognostication. They interpreted Russian inaction in the past as a harbinger of their inaction in the future. On 8.8.8, a pro-American Russian newspaper Gazeta.ru predicted that the Russians would not move their forces and would swallow the defeat, as otherwise they would have acted earlier.

(4) The Americans are planning some kind of operation in Iran, and they encouraged this Georgian diversion to keep the Russians busy. This could still be the case, as in its present position Russia has a weak hand in the UN to deal with the American demands or with direct aggression.

(5) Iran expressed its support for the Russian operation and condemned the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia. The New York Times and similar papers editorialised that the US should not push Russia too hard, in order to get Russian approval for anti-Iranian sanctions or other measures.

My preferred version of events is that the Americans (and the Israelis) encouraged the Georgian president as they were curious to see the Russian reaction and to observe the preparedness of the Russian Armed Forces. In military parlance, such a minor operation is called “contact reconnaissance”, or just a “feeler”. No one could be certain how the Russian army would operate. In 1996, having been sent to retake the rebellious Grozny, the Russian Army ran away in disarray leaving its burning tanks behind. Since then, the Russians had not fired a single shot in anger; they have been very much a mystery for the West. In such a situation, there is no substitute for a bout of actual fighting, and Saakashvili unwittingly presented this opportunity to the West.

This is rather an optimistic view, as the following comparison will make clear. In the 1930s, the Japanese occupying Manchukuo faced the Russians. The Japanese did not know whether the Soviet Russians would fight well or run away, as they had easily defeated the Russian Imperial Army in 1903-5 war but had taken a beating from the Bolsheviks in 1918. This is why they carried out a contact reconnaissance raid at Khalkhyn Gol (Nomonhan) to take the measure of Russian resistance. After General Zhukov destroyed their attacking force, they decided to keep peace with Russia, and despite many pleas by Hitler, Japanese troops stayed put.

If this reading is right, we may be optimistic. Weakness invites war; the Neocons attacked Iraq because it was the weakest link. Now, the Russian army demonstrated its fighting capability, the Russian diplomats have confirmed their abilities and the Russian society has shown itself remarkably united. Russia is not so weak as to invite pressure or war.

Sages Rule

By Israel Shamir

Who Brought Olmert Down (and Why)

You would not envy the position of Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert. He did not have a snowball’s chance in hell. Every day the newspapers and the TV channels broadcast new accusations against him and announced fresh police investigations. Often the Israeli viewer learned of Olmert’s alleged misdeeds before the Prime Minister himself did. Police did not just leak the details of the case – they poured it out like tropical torrent. Charges landed all over Olmert like the bomblets he dropped on hapless Lebanon: small but plentiful.

The charges were petty, at best. They are summed up here <http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1007072.html> You and I have probably done similar things. Olmert was accused of charging two different organizations for the same expenses, of accepting some contributions in cash, of flying with his family to a trip abroad while not strictly observing the difference between his funds and those of contributors. Probably the Biblical injunction “Don’t muzzle the ox while he is threshing” (Deut 25:4) covers the case. But the police went after him, the Supreme Court began deliberations on private actions against Olmert, while newspapers and the TV blew it out of proportion. Thus two mighty powers of Israeli politics, the media and the legal system, united in one effort to unseat Olmert, and he caved in.

This episode may demonstrate who actually runs Israel. Though media amplifies, the judges judge. The Hidden Hand that unseated Olmert was that of the Supreme Court and its power-hungry President, Chief Justice Dorit Beinish. Beinish and her bosom friend Justice Arbel activated police and prosecution, while their special storm-troops, the fighting sorority of lesbian activists straight out of Barb Wire organised mass demonstration and intimidated the opposition. The reasons had nothing to do with Olmert’s alleged corruption or with his real failure in the 2006 Lebanon War, but were grounded in the power struggle between the weak elected government and the unassailable judges. Moreover, Olmert makes the third recent, high-placed victim of the Supreme Court’s drive to supreme power.

The Supreme Court of Israel is self-elected and self-perpetuated, like the Sanhedrin of old. Formally, the new judges are appointed by the President, who confirms the decisions of a committee led by the Justice Minister <http://elyon1.court.gov.il/eng/system/index.html> ; factually the sages elect the new sages from amongst their apprentices (“interim appointees”) and close colleagues. This system is called in Hebrew ‘haver mevi haver’, ‘a friend brings a friend’. After twenty years of the system’s strict application, the Supreme Court is a monolithic and highly influential body.

The Court is closely and personally connected with other legal authorities, with the attorney general office, the state prosecutor office, the police and the secret police. State prosecutors and attorney generals dream of joining the Court after leaving their jobs. Police bosses take the Court orders as if they were sent down from heaven. The Court is the top of the legal pyramid, and its president can manoeuvre and manipulate the whole system formally and informally. Under the flag of judicial activism, the Supreme Court has assumed control of the state, leaving Parliament and the existing government high and dry. The judges have assumed powers any dictator would envy: they can nullify any law; they can prosecute any MP or minister, they can block any government action or agreement. They rule whether the state has to build shelters for border towns, whether an army commander made a right tactical decision, whether a law can remain on the books and whether prisoners may be swapped.

Incidentally, these powers have no legal basis. The American professor of law Richard Posner noted that the Israeli judges abrogated these powers to themselves “without benefit of a constitutional or legislative provision. One is reminded of Napoleon's taking the crown out of the pope's hands and putting it on his own head.”

The man who took the crown of Israel and placed on his head was not Arik Sharon. It was the previous Chief Justice Aharon Barak, the most powerful man of Israeli politics. Posner called Barak “Enlightened despot … who created a degree of judicial power undreamed of even by the most aggressive [American] Supreme Court justices”. After he retired, sycophantic slime spewed forth from printed and electronic media alike. Barak had had to retire having reached the mandatory age, but he remained very much a moving force behind the scenes.

His succession by the highly ambitious Dorit Beinish brought the conflict between the Judicial and Executive branches to the fore. A tug-of-war ensued, with the government trying to cut the Supreme Court down to its natural size, and with the Supreme Court fighting for the top slot. Both sides wished to keep the struggle under the carpet, far away from the eyes of hoi polloi.

The wars of succession were concentrated around the Judges’ Nominations Committee, which is chaired by the Minister of Justice who is appointed by the prime minister, while the actual appointment of judges is done by the Israel’s president. Surely this was sheer coincidence that all three of these persons were politically assassinated!

In 2006, Minister of Justice Haim Ramon objected to the nomination of Dorit Beinish to the top post of chief justice. He also planned to break with the unwritten tradition of appointing to the Supreme Court only those interim candidates who had been invited there by the Supreme Court to serve on a temporary basis, and instead to bring in an outsider, a lawyer or a judge not vetted by Beinish.

Ramon was treading on a live wire, and the response was fierce. Within a month, Ramon was under investigation for sexual harassment; in July 2006 he was forbidden to appoint judges, and in January 2007 he was convicted.

The story went as follows. A soldier girl came to visit the Justice Minister Ramon; she looked at him with adoring eyes and asked to be photographed with him. Eventually Ramon kissed the girl who later claimed she had expected a kiss, but rather a fatherly and less fervent kiss than the one she got. The girl went away, expressed her dissatisfaction with the French kiss, and flew away to Latin America. A senior police officer flew to Latin America, located the girl and literally forced her to file a criminal complaint. The police woman in charge of the investigation admitted at the hearing that she had threatened the girl with prosecution unless she stuck to her complaint.

The newspapers and TV discussed the details of the case but practically nobody (but a few bloggers) dared to ask who had ordered Ramon’s head. It took an American Jewish journalist to break with the vow of silence and connect this “targeted judicial assassination” with the struggle for Court primacy. Halpern wrote in the Forward: “Many suggest that the judges and the attorney general had it in for Ramon because he opposed the appointment of Judge Dorit Beinish as chief justice of the Supreme Court. His trial prevented him from appointing someone else, while his conviction prevented him from making changes to the judicial system later. “

Meanwhile, the President of Israel, Moshe Katsav, the man who actually appoints judges, came under fire. He was also against Beinish’s rise to Fuhrership, and paid for it dearly.

A girl in his office codenamed “A” complained of sexual harassment. It appeared in the course of investigation, that she was lying. She had actually carried an affair with the President and had tried to blackmail him. Her lies were so obvious that the prosecution had to drop her, but meanwhile, the media had a field day, or rather a field month. The media harassment sparked many complainants; apparently every woman who ever worked with Katsav came forward to try her luck, and a few of the accusations could possibly stick. There were daily demonstrations by the angry feminists, the fighting sorority of Beinish and Arbel, demanding Katsav’s balls, or at least his resignation. In August 2006, he was forbidden to appoint judges, just a few days after Ramon's resignation. If that was not enough, on September 7, 2006 the Israeli Police declared they have the evidentiary basis for an indictment.

On that day, the Judges' Election Committee approved the succession of Dorit Beinisch to the presidency of the Supreme Court. Katsav refrained from attending, "to prevent dispute". He also stayed away from Beinisch's formal swearing-in ceremony, normally held in the presidential compound, now to be held in the Knesset, so she was sworn-in by another woman, the Knesset speaker.

Katsav agreed to be charged with indecent behaviour, then later changed his mind, but still had to resign and vacate the position to Shimon Peres, a smooth man very much to Beinish’ liking.
Olmert understood that not only his own career, but the very position of the legitimate government was being undermined. He harboured these heretical thoughts for a long time. In 2002, the fighting sorority attacked another male Oriental politician, Minister of Internal Security Avigdor Kahalani. Edna Arbel, then state prosecutor, indicted him and brought him to trial, but he was acquitted. Ehud Olmert, then mayor of Jerusalem, called upon Arbel to resign and said that she lacked the professional judgment to continue in her senior position. State Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein defended Arbel in his response to Olmert’s comments. Since then, Rubinstein has been rewarded with a seat in the Court, while Olmert has gained an enemy not to be trifled with.

Olmert went on the warpath by returning Ramon to his cabinet in a senior position (though not to the post of Justice Minister) and by hiring a new justice minister, Professor Daniel Friedmann, the very man who was most vocal in his objection to the rule by the Supreme Court. Friedmann made a two-pronged attack, by bringing into the Supreme Court the first external nominee and by proposing to limit the Supreme Court agenda by a law that would restrict the Supreme Court from ruling on political, security and budget matters. He was immediately attacked by the retired justices of the Supreme Court, especially by the former president of the Supreme Court Aharon Barak and his ex-deputy Mishael Cheshin, the very men who had established the present system, enthroned Dorit Beinish and kept advising her. While acting judges are precluded from speaking ex-cathedra, it is a moot point with the retired ones: they bear the title of Justice and they draw their Judge’s pension, but they certainly speak out all the time. They went to the Knesset, to newspapers and to TV channels and described Friedmann’s actions as a “putsch”.

They pled with Olmert to fire Friedmann and let the things go as usual. But Olmert wanted to return executive power to the government, to the elected legitimate body from the self-appointed usurpers. He stuck to his guns. Ehud Barak, the Labour leader and a minister in Olmert’s government, threatened Olmert with his resignation and the possible fall of government unless he fired Friedmann; but the unrelenting Olmert refused to bend and said he’d rather let Barak go than part with Friedmann.

And then they attacked Olmert personally. They found an American Jew Morris Talansky who claimed he had squeezed crumpled dollar notes into Olmert’s sweaty palm. In the course of interrogation it appeared that the man used to boast that he gave money to every Israeli PM, including Yitzhak Rabin, the very paragon of honesty. He had also threatened to bomb some Rabbis who did not want to pay him. The trustworthiness of his claims was severely undermined. But Olmert’s enemies did not stop: every day they produced a new complainant, a new accusation of corruption. If it was parried, they made a new one. With the police and the Attorney General at their disposal, their resources were practically unlimited.

Meanwhile, the retired justices were outspoken. They demanded Olmert’s resignation, completely forgetting the “innocent until found guilty” rule; just as they had in the related cases of Katsav and Ramon. Dalia Dorner, a retired justice, declared: “Olmert must resign. The public opinion should force him to resign.” But public opinion remained unconvinced despite the relentless spin, and Dorner bewailed Israeli simplicity of mind: “There is no public culture of politics in Israel, and people pay no attention to reports about misbehaving leaders”.

In the end, Olmert resigned to the supreme force of the Supreme Court. Was this a victory of Law over arbitrary and corrupt politicians? Do not be so sure.

Law or Democracy?

One may like or dislike Ehud Olmert, but he was elected by the people to do his job. We elected Olmert. One may be happy or unhappy about this result, but one should respect the decision of the majority. We did elect Olmert, Katsav and Ramon, and we did not elect Mrs Beinish and her fighting sorority, though she thinks she knows what we need better than we do. In a democracy, one should respect the people’s decision. A prime minister should rule the country, a hard enough job, instead of spending his time answering questions by the police.

Olmert has been neutralised as prime minister, because nobody is yet able to survive a media cum judiciary assault. Apparently, Israel may need a Berlusconi Law protecting its executive from police investigations and legal actions. Police investigation about whether Ehud Olmert took his wife along at government expense can wait until he completes his tour of duty.

But the problem lies deeper; the choice is whether we want democracy, or the rule of law. These two regimes are not identical, - they stand in direct opposition. In a democracy, the people rule via their elected representatives; under the rule of law, the sages (or Judges) rule supreme. Now Israeli democracy faces a serious challenge, more serious than Altalena crisis: unless we stop the police and the Court from meddling in politics, democracy will be lost.

A short detour is required. Of old, there were three branches of government, or ‘powers’: the Legislative, the Executive and the Judicial, as described by Montesquieu and as established by the US constitution in the 18th century. The 20th century ushered in a fourth power, Media[1].
The Legislative, in our case, the Knesset, is a democratic body, despite its limitations. The Executive is also elected - by the Knesset and is responsible to the Knesset.

But the Judicial power, i.e. the Court is not elected. It is a self-appointed and self-perpetuating oligarchy equipped with a vast apparatus which intervenes in matters of war and peace, labour, education, family life and even in questions of faith. This is, let us put it charitably, a Platonic rule by Sages. Yes there is the Law, but they interpret it as they see fit. They may nullify a law, or reinterpret it in an entirely different vein. Jewish history had a go at it, too, when the sages of Talmud reinterpreted the Written Law. The Rule of Halacha was actually rule by sages, and only the Enlightenment broke its iron grip. Now we have reverted all the way back to the Sanhedrin, this traditional (for Jews) but not very successful, non-democratic system of rule by Wise Elders.

This was noticed by the American law professor Robert Bork, who wrote: “[Aharon Barak’s rule of law… is in fact … the rule of judges, a trend to which he himself is the major contributor. Perhaps [Barak] believes that judges are simply intellectually and morally superior to other actors in the nation’s politics”.

The supporters of the Supreme Court supremacy deride the Ultra-Orthodox Jewry of Mea Shearim who accept rule by their sages, but they themselves actually want to return us all to the rule by sages, albeit sages of their own choosing. Karl Popper correctly stated that this is just another form of totalitarianism. In our case - liberal totalitarianism.

Some simple-minded people consider these judges to be “of the left”. A pro-family right-wing activist and blogger, while correctly noting the anti-family tendency of the Court, called them The Wicked Witches of the Left. One may agree or disagree with “the wicked witches”, but they certainly have nothing to do with the Left, and this blogger should have his eyesight checked. The Supreme Court sages, after twenty years of inbreeding and selection, belong to an almost pure strain of totalitarian liberals, and they indeed enforce liberalism in the worst meaning of the word:

Workers’ rights are frowned upon as an affront to humanity. Majority of Israeli workers are now employed by subcontractors on contract basis, thus eliminating benefits and social security. They approved of shifting the tax burden to the worker, while usurers pay no tax.
They do not protect tenants against rent rise and allow landlords to collect rent tax-free.
They are against children. That’s why abortions and gay marriages are welcomed; gay pride parades are approved, but life of families with children is getting increasingly difficult.
Even their favourite topic, gender equality, does not lead to a more equal society but rather encourages young girls to join the counter-insurgency fighting units.
They authorise torture, the kidnapping of civilians, the demolition of Palestinian homes, the confiscation of their land, and the building of settlements.
They accept the Secret Services version of everything, sight unseen.
They participate in the Assassination Committee, or the committee for “extra-legal executions”.
They support the illegal Wall.
They had no problem trying and imprisoning illegally kidnapped civilians, from Mordecai Vanunu to Marwan Barghouti.
They undermine religion because they hate anything smacking of compassion.

If that is “Left”, then what is Right? But let us be fair, they are not Right neither Left, they are the Third Kind, totalitarian liberals. Totalitarian liberals are profoundly undemocratic, for they are forever suspicious of the Majority. They use the Minority Rights in order to undermine Majority Rule. They do not act in the interests of the minorities whose name they bear in vain: rather, they use them as a ploy for seizing supreme power. Their world-view is essentially that of Leo Strauss, the godfather of neo-cons, “a man profoundly hostile to the concept of rule by the people. He believed it was the natural right of the wise and strong to lead societies to the fulfilment of their wise aims, using subterfuge when necessary”.

Such a subterfuge is a presentation of the Court as the only defence of pro-Western, ‘civilised’ society against the onslaught of crazy religious nationalists, Kahanists and unruly settlers. Without their approval, however, not a single settlement would ever have arisen, and not a single dunam of Palestinian land would ever have been confiscated. With one hand, they allow the Wall to encroach on the Palestinian lands, with another, they pretend to defend Palestinian peasants.

Actually, the leading judges of the Supreme Court, Beinish and Arbel, are personally responsible for the outbreak of the First Intifada. As state prosecutors, they came up with a nasty legal trick, the type a rabbi might describe as “kasher aval masriach” (“it is kosher, but it stinks”). Only a minority of Palestinian lands were parcellated and privatised, while the majority of lands were in public use and were called ‘the lands of the Sultan’. The two “liberal leftist” lady lawyers claimed that these lands belong now to the Jewish State as it is now the Sultan, and thus they allowed the State to seize Palestinian common lands and give them to the settlers. Aharon Barak authorised the snatch. This mass confiscation was the reason for the First Intifada.
They are also responsible for the second intifada, as they permitted Ariel Sharon his march to the Temple Mount.
They are responsible for the terror, as this was caused by their glaring injustice. When they sentenced Nahum Korman to six months of public service for the murder of a Palestinian child, they signalled to the Palestinians that they should not expect legal remedies from this Court.
They are responsible for the Second Lebanon War, as they blocked the release of Kuntar after Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon.
More than anyone else , they are responsible for creating the apartheid system in Israel.


We should not allow them to shift their guilt to the Executive or to the Legislative powers, i.e. to the government and to the Knesset. They interfere in the affairs of the state so often and so thoroughly that they should bear the responsibility themselves.

Still, they would not be able to seize supreme power without some important help from the Media. The Media are another non-democratic, non-elected power. In Israel, the media belong to five wealthy families; they appoint chief editors and journalists as they see fit, and they decide who are their friends and enemies, and whether they should attack Olmert or Beinish, nuke Iran or make inroads into Gaza. Being inherently non-democratic, mass media owners tend to support other non-democratic structures, be it the Armed Forces or the Supreme Court.

These two non-elected and non-democratic powers of Media and Judiciary entered into conspiracy against the elected parliament and government. In every newspaper you can read that the public despises the parliamentarians and does not trust the government. The media promote these feelings, thereby undermining the democratic powers. The police and the judiciary do all they can in order to confirm our suspicions. They leak their deliberations into the media and start a witch-hunt. As a result, the elected politicians appear as sinful, if not outright criminal, weaklings, and the very concept of democracy, of Majority Rule is undermined.

When the Judicial and Media powers allied and took control over the Executive and Legislative, they create a paradigm shift. This shift is universal, rather than local. Just recently, in Turkey, the High court decided to outlaw the ruling party; in Philippines, the High court blocked an accord that was concluded by the government and the Muslim rebels. In the US, the courts allowed for abortions and same-sex marriages, for dismantling trade unions and for social insecurity. This is the great success of totalitarian liberalism. People convinced that Supremacy of Law is a good thing should consider that this puts paid to democracy as decisively as any dictatorial coup. This leads to rule by anonymous ‘Wise Elders’, while ordinary people are excluded from decision-making.

The true Left and true Right should look at this shift with horror, for these movements have their basis in the people’s will. They seek the people’s approval; they try to attract the people to their side. Even the most far out political movements, from Fascists to Communists, still turn to the people for their mandate. Deep down, they are democratic, for they believe in Majority Rule. Now is the time for the Left and the Right to unite to regain democracy, while cutting the judges power down to their normal size.

The People never had much say in Israel: the country was run for years by one party and one army, with power smoothly shifting from a party boss to a general and back. Still, there was at least the occasional appearance of democracy, and a chance to extend the democratic base. Now, the Knesset and the Government have been made irrelevant by the Court’s powers; and the Court is outside of our influence.

Under the Court’s rule, Israel is entering the dark realm of faceless and nameless dictatorship. This is not the dictatorship we were taught to be afraid of, with the dictator riding a white stallion surrounded by outriders or speaking in a stadium to the enchanted masses. We have no portraits of the new dictators in our homes; we are not asked to adore them; it’s the other way around, we may not utter their names or even suspect that they exist. They do not run for public office, they do not ask for our opinion, but they decide what will be done.

They do not belong to the left or to the right. The Left and the Right are parliamentary terms, while they are against democracy. They undermine outstanding, personable and charismatic leaders; only petty and corrupt politicians are allowed to survive their purges, for such would never dare to fight these nameless dictators. With every generation, Israeli politicians grow smaller in moral stature, until they finally disappear in all but a name.

There is an urgent need to clean up the act of the police and the Court. They should stay away from state business and leave parliamentarians alone. They should take care of their job instead of hunting for mischief. This needed roll-back can’t be done without some left-and-right cooperation.

Fighting Sorority

Active and pugnacious feminism is a part of the Court agenda. The President of the Supreme Court, Dorit Beinish, and her best friend Justice Edna Arbel are fervent feminists of Gloria Steinem’s type. The rumours in Tel Aviv are divided, whether they like women, or just gratuitously hate men. Such persons are certainly needed and useful for the society, but they are entirely unsuitable to bear the dictatorial powers they assumed. This subject is rarely discussed openly for fear of being labeled ‘sexist’; likewise US Democrats are unable to effectively fight the Neocons as they can’t politically survive an accusation of antisemitism.

It would be good to roll the sorority’s advances back a notch, for being convinced of the justices’ support, lesbian and feminist organisations have sped up their drive to convert the country to their creed: they ran gay pride parades, even in Jerusalem, though this annoys the conservative and pious Jerusalemites. They noisily demonstrate against the men pointed out by Beinish. Persecution of alleged heterosexual harassers and abusers assumed the dimensions of a Salem witch hunt. Under Beinish’s guidance, a new law has been promulgated, which classified every heterosexual relationship between two co-workers as sexual abuse, if not rape. The majority, family men and women are discriminated against as they have less disposable income than gays and lesbians.

Forceful and aggressive feminists take too much of air time and wield too much influence. They are clannish, and defend each other; criticism of such a woman is perceived as an attack on women’s rights. In the Jewish state, the lesbians became the Jews of the Jews: influential, powerful, pugnacious and protected by fear of sexism label. It’s not that they have grievances: the prosperous and numerous lesbian community is well integrated into all areas of public life. From the Jewish religious point of view, lesbianism is not a sin (as opposed to male homosexuality). They are really after re-gendering of the whole society, and here they find some extremely antidemocratic allies: re-gendering is not a way to gratify sexual desires or to correct wrongs, but a most efficient form of social taming.

Under the fighting sorority’s influence, Israel has been transformed. Once, US Jews would send their kids to Israel to get married, now, Israel is the place to find a same-sex partner. Once, Israel was a country of manly men and womanly women; not anymore. Things have changed since the macho days of Six Day War, when homosexuality was banned, one-eyed Defence Minister Dayan screwed every female conscript and the Israeli army vanquished three Arab armies in a single week. Now the gay tendency is no snag, ministers are sued for kissing a girl, and the army is beaten up by a few bearded Lebanese. Traditionally independent, Jewish women became even more so as they now serve in the combat units, earn as much as men do, and are protected from flirtatious looks by ever-alert police.

Beinish and Arbel are representative of this group. The woman they hope will become the next Prime Minister of Israel, Tsippi Livni, the foreign minister and an ex-secret service agent, is a sorority girl, she passed millions of dollars to gay organisation led by her patriotic sisters. Her victory is almost certain.

The sorority fights especially hard against men of other, non-Ashkenazi communities, not only because of their racism, but also because they – the Oriental Jews, the Arabs, the Russians – were not tamed and re-gendered. They watch out and destroy every bright or personable public man of these communities. For this purpose, they set the police to spy after him, and eventually arrange for his downfall.

Aryeh Deri, the astute and pious founder of the Moroccan Shas (“the Jewish Hamas”) religious party, was followed for ten years, until they succeeded in building a dubious case against him and sending him to jail.
Avigdor Lieberman, a brutal but personable leader of a Russian party. The many sexist remarks around him concentrate on his, and his party members, moustaches, that clear sign of hated masculinity. Lieberman has been called to the police from time to time, and this event is well publicised with the suspicions being aired, but he has never been charged. Last week (27.7.08) frustrated Lieberman appealed to the Supreme Court against the Attorney General. He demanded to termination of the case against him, still open after 12 years of police efforts: “Charge me, or close the case”. In his words, “State Prosecutor Edna Arbel continues to hound him because he is a “friend of Aryeh Deri, Russian, sports a beard, and a settler”.
Arcadi Gaydamak, the charismatic Russian businessman and philanthropist, is rather a romantic buccaneer type of a businessman; a Henry Morgan or Cecil Rhodes. His past includes stints in the Angola jungle and in the mountains of Yugoslavia, and friendship with MPLA guerrillas and Serb militants. Now he is running for mayor of Jerusalem. He was attacked by the sorority the moment he decided to enter Israeli politics. He was accused of money-laundering in a Bank ha-Poalim Affair, which came to naught despite years of investigation and much of bad publicity. He was never charged, but his name was besmirched and many Israelis are afraid to be seen in his company. He also demanded to be charged or declared innocent, but they prefer to keep the Damocles Sword hanging over his head.

Could it be that these men were rotten, and police just fulfilled its duty by investigating reports of their misdeeds? If you go to police and complain that your house was robbed or your car stolen, you’d probably will be told that they have no time or resources for such investigations. They have more pressing things to do, like spending thousands of working hours and millions of dollars to fight the politicians. And the crosshairs were being set by the fighting sorority.

[1] It may be conceived as the rebirth of the old fourth power, the Ecclesiastic one, for Media preaches, and guides minds of people, establishing normative and forbidden behaviour, just like the Church did.

Noam Chomsky and the 9/11 Crusaders

By Israel Shamir

Walking around town, we are sometimes accosted by well-meaning people who are greatly devoted to a cause. It can be a Kurdish refugee replete with blood-curdling photos of Turkish atrocities, or an Iranian émigré with a petition to sign, or, if we are lucky, it could be Mia Farrow asking us to condemn the Chinese. These good people do not take no for an answer. They grasp your buttonhole and keep it in their sweaty hands until you sign their petition or ask them rather impolitely to buzz off. Then they explode in a fury not unlike that of a woman scorned.

Such a thing happened to the great luminary Noam Chomsky. He was accosted by one Kevin Barrett, a 9/11 enthusiast, whom he tried to reason with politely, but was eventually forced to tell to get off. An infuriated Barrett published an acrimonious attack: “Chomsky, an anemic speaker with all the charisma of a garden slug, endlessly bashes the USA in a whiney voice, phrasing his criticism in terms that only the sectarian left will agree with. Chomsky's boring, unpleasant style, and his obsessively anti-American argument, identifies anti-Empire with anti-American.”

What did Chomsky do to deserve this abuse? If one delves into Barrett’s tedious torrent of vituperation, one finds that his main objection to Chomsky is that the Boston Professor does not want to fight Barrett’s war for crediting Bush and Mossad with 9/11. And so he does not. Does he have to? Barrett tried to push Chomsky into immersing himself in the technicalities of 9/11 “Truth Movement” discourse, and refused to take no for an answer. You know these guys: anyone who does not agree with them is an agent of the Enemy. Chomsky did well to retort: “That's a curious feature of the Truth Movement … the curious ‘with us or against us’ mentality that pervades much of the movement: either you accept our claims, or you're a ‘left gatekeeper.’”

There is always a place for critique and argument -- even against Chomsky, and I have had my go at that, too. However, there are some red lines we should try to observe in friendly critique, and this one was a crude ad hominem and paranoid attack. Barrett is similar to the holocaust-obsessed Jews (and their ‘denying’ counterparts) who need your confirmation of their narrative and do not let go of your buttonhole until you respond. Let Barrett fight this war himself, without Chomsky at his disposal. This is a free country, more or less. For instance, I do not deny or confirm holocausts and massacres. Peak Oil does not pique me overmuch. And as for 9/11 whodunit, I feel that the 911 Truth Movement of Barrett et al. trivializes the event, turning it into a successful insurance swindle. I wrote about the event, at the time it took place:

“The kamikaze could be practically anybody: American Nationalists, American Communists, American Fundamentalist Christians, American Anarchists, anybody who rejects the twin gods of the dollar and the M-16, who hates the stock market and interventions overseas, who dreams of America for Americans, who does not want to support the drive for world domination. They could be Native Americans returning to Manhattan, or Afro-Americans who still have not received compensation for slavery.
They could be foreigners of practically any extraction, as Wall Street and the Pentagon ruined many lives of people all over the globe. Germans can remember the fiery holocaust of Dresden with its hundreds of thousands of peaceful refugees incinerated by the US Air Force. The Japanese will not forget the nuclear holocaust of Hiroshima. The Arab world still feels the creeping holocaust of Iraq and Palestine. Russians and East Europeans feel the shame of Belgrade. Latin Americans think of American invasions of Panama and Granada, of destroyed Nicaragua and defoliated Colombia. Asians count their dead of Vietnam War, Cambodia bombings, Laos CIA operations in millions. Even a pro-American, Russian TV broadcaster could not refrain from saying, ‘now Americans begin to understand the feelings of Baghdad and Belgrade’.

The Riders could be anybody who lost his house to the bank, who was squeezed from his work and made permanently unemployed, who was declared an Untermench by the new Herrenvolk. They could be Russians, Malaysians, Mexicans, Indonesians, Pakistanis, Congolese, Brazilians, Vietnamese, as their economy was destroyed by Wall Street and the Pentagon. They could be anybody, and they are everybody. Their identity is quite irrelevant as their message is more important than their personalities, and their message is read loud and clear in the choice of targets.”

This was also the view of the late French thinker Jean Baudrillard: “In the end it was they who did it but we who wished it. If we do not take this into account, the event loses its symbolic dimension; it becomes a purely arbitrary act. . . (A)nd in their strategic symbolism the terrorists knew they could count on this unconfessable complicity.” He saw 9/11 as “arguably the most potent symbolic event since the crucifixion of Christ”, says Bradley Butterfield.
In other words, the act of 9/11 was by far too powerful of a symbol to give it away to the Enemy. Not in vain did people all over the world rejoice when this Mammon symbol collapsed. The knowledge that the Americans may be beaten on their home ground has comforted the innumerable victims of the Empire. I do not know who did it, but it was planned and executed by people of great spirit.

I can’t accept the Mossad and/or the Jews as the perpetrators of the 9/11, not because it is an antisemitic claim. My readers know that this consideration has never stopped me before. It’s the other way around: I consider it a deeply pro-Jewish claim implying that only Jews are capable of enterprises of great pith and moment, while others prefer to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and never take arms against a sea of troubles. In a way, the Jewish perpetration theory shows how far this belief in Jewish superiority has entered the hearts of Americans and of many Muslims: “if it was done and it did not flop, it’s got to be Jews”. We Israelis are more critical; we say “if it did not flop, it can’t be the Mossad”.

This does not mean that one has to subscribe to the 19 Osama warriors’ conspiracy as presented by US officialdom. Of many kamikaze attacks, that of 9/11 towers above the rest. It cannot be compared with any other, certainly not with any Islamic suicide attack. The assault on the very symbol of Mammon and at the heart of its military might was a great, paradigmatic event. It is easier to believe that this feat was done by avenging angels, by St Michael in person, rather than by five merry Mossad agents or by Bush and Cheney’s accomplices. It is easier to agree with Baudrillard that the Twin towers had committed suicide in order not to be outdone by the pilots, than it is with Barrett et al that it was done by crafty Jew Larry Silverstein in order to collect insurance.

Baudrillard spoke of people who “try everything to discredit their actions. Thus we call them "suicidal" and "martyrs," and add immediately that such martyrdom does not prove anything. But such a moral argument can be reversed. If the voluntary martyrdom of kamikazes proves nothing, then the involuntary martyrdom of the victims cannot prove anything either, and there is something obscene in making it a moral argument.”

Unwillingly, Barrett and the Truth Movement are engaged in undermining and discrediting the supreme sacrifice of those who died to knock off the Towers. I understand Noam Chomsky, who did not want to support this effort. Nor did he want to uphold the arrogant American view of 9/11 as the worst lie and the most dreadful atrocity ever. Chomsky suggested that Barrett compare this lie with “the massacre of 4 million people in Indochina or the Reaganite terror, leaving some 200,000 tortured and mutilated bodies in Central America.”

“But qui bono?!” – I hear them calling. – “The Jews (call them Zionists, or Neocons, if you wish) profited from 9/11. Even Netanyahu said recently that 9/11 was good for Israel.”

There is no doubt that the Jews used 9/11 to its fullest extent; but they can make use of any event due to their media control. Be it a Mars landing, a victory over Germany, a defeat in Iraq, oil price rise or the dollar’s collapse – they can use it to their advantage. They do not have to fly to Mars, knock down the dollar – or the Twin Towers, themselves.

“In order to succeed, a terrorist needs dynamite and newspaper”, quipped a Jewish terrorist in 1901. In 2001, a hundred years later, a newspaper alone would suffice. With newspapers, or rather, with TV under one’s control, one can utilize others’ dynamite for one’s own benefit. One can expropriate others’ actions freely, even others’ supreme sacrifices. In such situations, qui bono? does not apply. Everything, even the most damning event will be turned for their benefit – as long as they will do the explaining.

Noam Chomsky does not fight the Truth Movement. Let these good people continue with their research of steel and concrete boiling points; let them accuse the administration, the CIA, the Jews and Mossad as much as they wish. Their struggle has some positive value: it undermines public trust in mainstream media and in good intentions of the authorities. They may try to understand that their position is not the only one possible: others may actually approve of the attack, or consider it of little importance, or just have other fish to fry.

People attach the “left gatekeeper” label to anybody who does not agree with them with great ease; but this pertinent expression should be used against pundits who fight us, not against allies and neutrals.

Our friend Jim Petras had unleashed such philippics against Chomsky: “Noam Chomsky has long been one of the great obfuscators of AIPAC and the existence of Zionist power over US Middle East policy... To continue to masquerade as ‘war critics’ while ignoring the central role of the Zionist Power Configuration makes pundits like Chomsky, Moyers and Powers and their acolytes irrelevant to the anti-war struggle. They are part of the problem, not part of the solution.”
Petras also wants Chomsky to fight his war, that is the war against Jewish establishment (he calls it ‘Zionist Power Configuration’). Yes, it would be nice, but then, Petras won’t be needed. Instead of seeing Noam Chomsky as an enemy (“part of the problem”), it is better to view him as an important ally covering an important part of the battle line. He does not cover all, he does not go to places Petras or I go, but he does not stop us from going. That is why it is ridiculous to call him “left gatekeeper”, as he keeps no gate locked.

We have many points of disagreement with Noam Chomsky. To mention a few:

(1) He supports the obsolete idea of Two States in Israel/Palestine and thus of preserving the Jewish state, while we call to undo it and replace it with One state where Jews are equal rather than superior.

(2) He considers the American support of Israel being derived from “the imperial interests”, (‘Chomsky thesis’: “Israel is good for true imperial interests of the US elites, and the Jewish Lobby is powerful exactly because its line coincides with these interests of elites”) while we think that this support is caused by the commanding heights the Jews occupy in the US discourse.

We argued for our views and against his, sine ira et studio, in many articles, both our own and those of other writers published on our site or circulated. My essay Fiesta of St. FerminRNR (included in the book The Galilee Flowers) dealt and debunked the Chomsky thesis in 2001. It caused very interesting polemics. I discussed it with Chomsky. In Spider Web, we brought up the polemics of Noah Cohen who called Chomsky’s position on Palestine "Apologetics for Injustice". We published Jeffrey Blankfort’s ‘The Israel Lobby and the Left: Uneasy Questions’ and ‘The Chomsky/Blankfort Polemic. W e published a very censorious article by Bob Finch, who described Noam Chomsky as “the chief Rabbi of the left who absolves the Jewish state of guilt and responsibility for its apartheid regime and its military belligerence against neighbouring countries.” We published harsh critique of Chomsky’s views qua the Lobby by Pappe, Blankfort and Petras in Contra Chomsky and by Mazin Qumsiyeh., see also Chomsky under Fire.


Despite many, many attacks on him, Chomsky never responded in kind. He always remained polite, even courteous. He had never ever blocked a publication. He is going his way and let us respect it. Light infantry and heavy artillery have different modes of operation. Chomsky is our heavy cannon, while Petras or Gilad Atzmon or Israel Shamir, we are light scouts, the reconnaissance unit. We should go further than he does, but he is our fallback. Let us cherish this man and his activity.

The bottom line was editorialized by Ian Buckley in his In Defence of Shamir .. and Chomsky

“I would content that Noam is basically an honest and very knowledgeable man, despite his occasional personal blind spots. It should be freely admitted that Chomsky doesn't go far enough on the Middle East. Whatever the slight defects and blind spots in this particular area, he still deserves kudos for his excellent, indeed pioneering, investigations into the distortions of the mass media and the profoundly undemocratic nature of 'democratic' societies. After a reading of Chomsky, you are inoculated for good against the foetid netherworld of the mainstream media. There is nothing wrong at all with a little criticism, but we shouldn't lose sight of who the 'good guys' really are. After all, there are so few of them around. And in my book, both Shamir and Chomsky are good guys.”

July Thunder

By Israel Shamir

Since the recent Russian presidential election of Medvedev (which shifted Vladimir Putin to the less prominent post of Prime Minister) and even for a while before that, Russian foreign policy was a matter of guesswork. There was a widely-held view that Mr Medvedev would take a more submissive line towards the US and the West, and eventually surrender the positions taken by his mighty predecessor. Assuming that Russia is the main hindrance to Bush’s wet dream to take over Iran, this was not just a theoretical question, and many observers around the world (including this one) followed these developments in Russia with great apprehension.

Recent developments have disabused those fears. The Russia of Medvedev-Putin is even more independent and coherent than the Russia we knew last year. The transfer of power has been hanging like a dark cloud over the Russian skies for a very long time, and only now, with the July thunder of Russian-Chinese veto over Zimbabwe, can it be said to be over. It had been preceded by a small warning: Russia had demanded the dismantling of the Yugoslavia Tribunal, this last vestige of NATO’s war against the once-independent Balkan state.

This was a richly symbolic demand. Yugoslavia had indeed been the arena of a terrible crime, but the crime was not a NATO- invented and Photoshop-produced “genocide”. So many years of the Tribunal’s operation produced zero proof, while “mass graves” and “million victims of Bosnian Holocaust” turned out to be a figment of somebody’s imagination. The real crime was NATO’s intervention, blockade and bombardment which eventually led to the Balkanization of the Balkans, and to endless suffering for all its residents. This crime was made possible by Russia’s disappearance from the world arena. After 1991, the broken, impoverished, mentally exhausted and spiritually colonised successor states of the USSR became objects rather than subjects of international relations. With a great black hole where the USSR used to be, the West was able to act freely for the first time since 1920, and it did so by reverting to the colonialist-imperialist policies of Nineteenth Century: The brutal rape of Yugoslavia and the first Bush war on Iraq were the high points of the 1990s.

But the Russian people proved their resilience once again, just as they did after the German invasion of 1941. Sobered out of her silly pro-American sentiments by the bombing of Belgrade, Russia regained her legitimate place in the world. She did not acquiesce in the Anglo-American attack on Iraq, Afghanistan and (now) Iran. She supplies Chavez with weapons. Russian leaders routinely meet with Hamas, the much-demonised though democratically elected governing party of Palestine. In friendship with China, Russia may yet reshape world politics.

There is one area where the 1990s still lingers, and that is Africa. The Black Continent is in terrible shape, and the US-proposed resolution on Zimbabwe would have made it even worse by repeating the experience of Somalia. Somalia is a disaster: the US-sponsored Ethiopian invasion has destroyed virtually all of its life-sustaining economic systems; Somalis are now being starved, and a flood of refugees flows freely, from South Africa to Sweden. The Ethiopians invaded when Somalia had just recovered from the previous American intervention under the UN flag, and they formed a rather stable rule of local autonomous bodies called Islamic Courts. This invasion – and consequent disaster – would not have happened without the relevant Security Council resolution. Salim Lone, a columnist for the Daily Nation in Kenya and a former spokesperson for the UN mission in Iraq, wrote:

“The US pushed through an appalling resolution in December [2007] saying the situation in Somalia was a threat to ‘international peace and security’ and basically gave the green light to Ethiopia to invade. Not much different in text and intent to the current failed attempt by the Bush administration to bulldoze a Security Council resolution on Zimbabwe. Unfortunately for Somalia, neither Russia nor China intervened then, resulting in a blatantly false resolution setting up the country for an American-backed invasion leading to inevitable losses, including displacement of millions.”

This time around, Russia and China united in vetoing the Zimbabwe resolution, supporting the view of virtually all African and Asian countries, including Zimbabwe’s own neighbour, South Africa. One does not have to be an expert on African affairs to bless this veto. We have had enough of the many neo-colonial interventions since Gorbachev’s time: Iraq, Panama, Nicaragua, Yugoslavia, Somali, Eritrea, Congo and what not. It is a good thing that in Zimbabwe, this wave has been broken -- the principle of sovereignty has been upheld. If today the colonial masters were to be allowed to ride into Zimbabwe, tomorrow Iran would follow, and sooner or later Moscow and Beijing would be besieged. Now we can hope that Russia and China will use this right more often, and will block every colonialist attempt to strangulate Iran or squeeze Burma.

For too long a time Russia and China have hesitated to use their right to veto; this right has been used mainly by the US in the interests of its Middle-Eastern proxy, Israel. Now, the Brits and the Americans are enraged that this right is being used by Russia and China. Let them rage, and let them discover that the world has changed once again, and that the lull of opportunity they have had since 1990 is over.

What was going in Zimbabwe? There was a failed “orange revolution”, like those the US and the UK instigated in Ukraine and Georgia and failed to achieve in Burma and Mongolia. Pro-Western forces tried to remove President Robert Mugabe. Mugabe won elections just like Milosevic in Yugoslavia, or Lukashenko in Belarus or Hanieh in Palestine, but the West never accepts democratic elections if the results are politically unsatisfactory. The main opposition candidate opted out of the second tour of elections by his own will, and it does not make the elections’ results illegitimate. Moreover, even if they were not legitimate, it should not provide green light for the US intervention.

Stephen Gowans wrote: “At the core of the conflict is a clash of right against right: the right of white settlers to enjoy the stolen land against the right of the original owners to reclaim their land.” This is not exactly correct. Everywhere the imperialists try to use a local minority in order to undermine an undesirable regime. This is not a White against Black struggle. The white settlers could be a useful and important element of national economics, but some of them have made a wrong choice. The Zimbabwe whites should not ally themselves with the imperialist West. Their problems, along with other local problems, may only be solved locally, with help and advice of South Africa and African inter-state organisations.

Our friend, South African Joh Domingo explained the situation: “There was an opportunity for individual White farmers to utilize their experience and embed themselves into the fabric of African society, but they chose the path of aligning themselves with big agribusiness, and with exploitation of the mineral wealth of Zimbabwe.”

Mirroring the campaigns in Belarus, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and Venezuela, reports of electoral bias fills the media. - "The opposition is being starved, they are assaulted, and the elections are rigged": So goes the refrain. At the same time, progressive groups bemoan their fate, and ask why they cannot champion saints instead of savages. Instead they should ask why all those at odds with the Global superpowers are always savages: Mugabe, Saddam, Milosevic, Aristide, Castro… the list goes on and on.”

For sure Zimbabwe goes through a difficult period, but the way out of crisis goes through regional consultations, without overseas intervention. Russia and China are working for stabilisation of the region; but the final word will be said by the people of Zimbabwe.

Heemeyer Rides Again

By Israel Shamir

This is a human interest story. It could have happened anywhere, but it happened in Jerusalem. Yes, we have Jews and Arabs here, but this is a story about men and women. It would make a good subject for a film, or for a novel, as it includes romantic love, beautiful young lovers separated by prejudice, severe and unjust punishment meted out in the name of law and order - and untimely death.

A few days ago, a young Jerusalemite got aboard his Caterpillar tractor, ran amok on the main street, hitting buses and cars and was finally shot dead by a vigilante. Why did it happen? For the same reason an American, Marvin Heemeyer, did his deed. When a man is pushed too far, too hard, he snaps. One weeps, another one commits suicide, and yet another one takes a gun and shoots everybody in sight – or rolls his bulldozer over cars and people.

Marvin Heemeyer was a Colorado welder who, on June 4, 2004, drove his bulldozer through the town hall, the office of the hostile local newspaper that editorialized against him, the home of a judge and others. He was pushed too hard: the municipality had blocked his access road, his livelihood had been ruined, his simple requests were being refused. The young Jerusalemite, Hosam Dwayyat was pushed much harder.

Hosam was born in Jerusalem after the Jewish takeover, and grew up in a village on the outskirts of the city. Sur Bahr, his village on the edge of the desert with its shepherds and sheep, is not a bad place: it is walking distance from both the Old City of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Houses are nice, spacey and covered with white limestone, surrounded by small gardens.

Hosam, like all the youth of Sur Bahr lived in the twilight zone between Jews and Palestinians. He spoke Hebrew and Arabic, had Israeli and Palestinian friends, went to discos and concerts, could go to Tel Aviv or West Jerusalem like an ordinary human being, like you and me. However, on his way he would frequently be stopped, searched, ordered to present his documents, detained, beaten and released: Israeli security police, Border Guards, do this regularly in order to remind an Arab that he is an Arab. For this reason, the dwellers of East Jerusalem hesitate to venture westward, much like you’d hesitate to visit a violent South Bronx.

But Hosam was young, and youth does not surrender easily. Some eight years ago, and he was 24, he had met a young Russian girl Marina who was 19, and they fell in love. He was her first love, and she did not hide her happiness.

The Russians are a breed apart in the social mosaic of Israel. Though nominally “Jewish”, they have kept their Russian identity, and their own ways. They were not infected with Jewish chauvinism in the cradle. For Russians, Jewishness is a private thing, not a public identity. In the internationalist Soviet Union and in its successor states, boys and girls fall in love with or befriend a person without regard to his or her ethnic and religious origin, and it does not cause a ripple, let alone a storm. Upon arrival to Israel, these good-natured young people are classified by rather arrogant Israelis as “Johnnys-come-lately”. They are snubbed and socially rejected. They have little contact with youth of good social standing, while the children of poor Oriental Jewish suburbs are too foreign for them. The Russians do not share the ideals of other Israeli Jewish communities, i.e. military valour and the amassing of wealth.

The Palestinians, especially those brought up in the bigger cities of Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa-Tel Aviv and Ramallah, are closer to the Russians than are members of other communities: they are smarter, behave like gentlemen, and do not look down on Russians. They intermarry, or have romantic connections with them, quite often. Among my immediate friends, a young Russian girl married a boy from Batir, and now she lives in that village near Jerusalem with her new family. Another one had a Palestinian boyfriend for two years, before breaking up for personal reasons.
Hosam and Marina went steady; they lived together for a while in Tel Aviv. “Hosam liked Israelis”, Marina told the newspaper this week. But their love was crushed upon the rocks of apartheid.

Liaisons between nominal “Jews” and goys cause much alarm or outright hatred in official Israel. A few days ago, the largest Israeli newspaper, Yediot Ahronot, informed its readers that “the Kiryat Gat municipality has decided to act against … female teenagers falling in love with young Bedouins and they … presented a 10-minute film titled Sleeping with the Enemy”. In June, the Israeli army removed an Israeli girl named Melissa, 23, who married a local man named Muhammad Hamameh, 25, from the village of Husan. There is a vigilante organisation called Yad Leakhim that fights intermarriages and conversions to Christianity or Islam, and they are busy interfering with interracial happiness.

Marina’s parents received hints and odd looks from neighbours. It was explained to them that “it is not done”, that it is “sleeping with enemy”. They conveyed this pressure to their daughter, but strong-willed Marina moved to live with her boyfriend and his family. He wanted to marry her, but Russian girls rarely marry so young, and – like other Western girls – they do not necessarily want to marry their first boyfriend. They still want to flirt with others, while seriously minded sincere young men may well disapprove of it. You do not have to be a Russian and/or Arab to know about this. Moreover, you do not have to be a Moor to be aware that jealousy may cause you to slap the flighty partner, and slap he did. In a moment of anger, Marina complained to the police, and they took away her lover. Marina tried to take her complaint back; at that time she was pregnant and lived with Hosam’s parents. “He slapped me when he had reason to feel jealous”, she said last week. But even her intervention in favour of Hosam in the court did not help – he was sentenced to 20 months of jail.

Jerusalem judges are notoriously anti-Arab; they'd have to be, as they approve of so many unjust acts towards Arabs. Here they saw a chance to break a forbidden liaison of a nominally Jewish girl with a goy, of teaching the Russians and the Palestinians a lesson. But there was another reason, and it was equally relevant. In post-feminist Israel, as in many other Western countries, a woman may not withdraw her complaint against a man. The state provides for the ham-fisted over-protection to women. It is ready to do violence to real women for the sake of “Women’s Rights.” In an unrelated case, Israeli minister Hayim Ramon kissed a soldier girl. She complained, but later withdrew her complaint. Police pursued her all the way to Latin America and forced her to complain, threatening her with charges of making a false accusation. The feminists witch-hunted Ramon all the way to court, and they still refer to him as a “rapist”. So Hosam and Marina could suffer their same fate in any feminist-ridden European country.

Last week Marina, 27, still pretty, slim and blond, bewept Hosam and told a reporter that she was and still is in love with him, her first love and the father of her child she was now bringing up alone. She was angry at the vigilante, a far-right activist who kept shooting at unarmed Hosam. She shed tears for the man Israeli authorities and media had already judged to be an “evil terrorist”. For years, Marina hoped he’d forgive her momentary lapse and come back to her after his release. But he did not return. His family arranged for his marriage, and he tried to reshape his life in the Palestinian milieu after his failure in the Israeli one.

This second try was even worse. Once his family had had much land, but it was confiscated to build nearby Jewish neighbourhood. The remainder of their land was confiscated to build the Wall, a fourteen-feet-tall monster that cut them off from Bethlehem and the desert. On what was left, he built a house for his new family, for his wife and two children.

But a Palestinian may not build a house in Jerusalem, even on his own land, and he can’t ever get a permit. Hosam had been met by Israeli “justice” a second time, with equally disastrous consequences. They ordered him to demolish the house and fined him $50,000. After that, he snapped, took his front-loader tractor and ran amok in the centre of Jerusalem, ramming cars and buses. He was quickly shot dead.

There are some local specifics, and bulldozers as well as killing of an attacker are permanent fixture of the Arab-Israeli conflict: a Jewish bulldozer driver drove his armoured machine over the American peace activist Rachel Corrie who defended a Palestinian home from demolition and was never prosecuted. Another Jewish bulldozer driver shared with the world his experience of razing Jenin: “I had no mercy for anybody. I would erase anyone with the D-9, and I have demolished plenty. For three days, I just destroyed and destroyed. The whole area. I didn't see, with my own eyes, people dying under the blade of the D-9. But if there were any, I wouldn't care at all. If you knocked down a house, you buried 40 or 50 people. I had lots of satisfaction in Jenin”. While the Jewish vigilante who killed Hosam was called “hero”, Arabs who killed Jewish murderers in Hebron or in Shafa Amr were prosecuted for murder.

However, putting aside le couleur locale, such a story could happen almost anywhere, in the US or in Europe. Some prejudices are common: A young girl could get cold feet right before marriage. A jealous youngster could slap his flirty girlfriend. Feminist judges could separate a young couple. She could remain alone loving him and bearing his child. City hall could demolish anybody’s house for being built without a permit or in order to build a bypass. A man could become incensed and mete his vengeance on whoever came his way Death Wish style. And here in Israel, as in your country, we are first of all human -- men and women. This is an optimistic tragedy: normalcy creeps in through the holes in apartheid.

It is not necessary to view every event through the binary, Jew-Goy, or Jew-Arab perception. This perspective is dearest with people for whom their Jewishness is more important than their humanity. For them, denial of the “tractor terrorist murder of Jews” is “another blood libel against Jewish people”. They force their binary view onto others. Thus, Prime Minister Olmert and the Labour leader Barak immediately sent their police forces to disturb the mourning family, and, equally devoted to the Jewish paradigm, President Bush, UN chief Ban Ki-moon and sundry others condemned the “bloody terrorist”. Even good guy Seth Freedman wrote that “Israelis should be under no illusions as to why we're being targeted by terrorist killers such as Hosan Dwayyat”. Their counterparts in Hamas, Hezbollah and the mythic Galilee Liberation also claimed responsibility, or “understood” Hosam’s actions as those of resistance. The yellow press of Israel and of Jewish communities abroad invented his criminal past (“the convicted rapist, burglar and drug dealer”), his terrorist call to God and his hatred of Jews.

But this miasma of obsessive hate can’t transform the human tragedy: that of an unhappy man pushed too far, whose broken body was washed by the tears of a Russian Israeli girl named Marina.

PS. Only Gilad Atzmon, Israeli saxophonist and writer of note, wondered “why the Israelis are entirely sure that it was an act of terror. It may as well be that the man was slightly mad, he might have had a phone row with his wife or alternatively a soaring dispute with his Israeli boss that made him flip. I would assume that in order to declare an incident to be an act of terror, a terrorist motivation or a scenario must be established first. Without establishing such a motivation we are doomed to admit that we are dealing here with a criminal case that must be investigated. We should as well refrain from jumping to conclusions.”

He was right here, though, in a moment of despair, he came to the wrong conclusion continuing “However, the Israelis seem to be pretty convinced here. The Israelis are indeed united, and it is good that they are so united because it allows us to see what the Jewish state is all about. Sadly, there is no partner for peace in the Israeli society… Unfortunately, and this is indeed a tragedy, the Palestinians are at the forefront of the most crucial battle for a better world. The Palestinians have been captured in a grave encounter with a psychotic, phantasmic, bloodthirsty self-centric Jewish national identity that knows no mercy.”

Not only native Palestinians, but Israelis too, including nominal Jews, are at odds with this Jewish paradigm, or identity. Just as normal women suffer from their feminist defenders, ordinary Israelis officially classified as “Jews” do not need defence from the binary perception priests. While abroad, every man can choose whether to accept Jewish identity -- in Israel we have it forced upon us. Israeli unity is a phantasm as seem from afar; up close, you see men and women with their own preoccupations, and “professional Jews” are even rarer in Israel than elsewhere.

Like Gilad, I doubt that ‘Jews’, i.e. the people who uphold this identity, will agree by their own good will to any fair arrangement with native Palestinians. But unlike Gilad, I consider Israelis, including nominal Jews, to be capable of such an arrangement. For we do not fight Jews, we fight the Jewish identity, and we can win. If the Russians succeeded in making Jewishness a private thing, not an identity, so can we.

As long as there are Israeli girls like Marina and Israeli men like Gilad, there is a chance for peace. Better than a chance -- a certainty!