Art is 80

I hate to keep writing about the same things, but for now…….

There are a lot of folks bashing Israel today, bashing Israel for its current tactics in Gaza, bashing Israel for its general treatment of neighboring Arabs since the 1967 Six Day War, and bashing Israel for its very existence. As to the first two of these three items, I may agree or disagree with particular commentators. As to the third, I have no tolerance. I refuse to give any respect to, or credence to other thoughts of, those who claim Israel is an illegitimate state. Full stop.

I do not base this on religious claims, or ethnic claims. I have little tolerance for those, too. I base it on hard facts.

These are those hard facts.

1. The land of what now comprises Israel was part of the Ottoman Empire, dismantled at the end of World War I.
2. The League of Nations gave the land comprising Israel and the Palestinian Territories to Great Britain under a Mandate, which included respect to the then current mixed population of Jews and Arabs, and to those Jews coming into the land under the Balfour Letter.
3. During the British Mandate period, there were times when relations between Jews and Arabs was quite bad.
4. After World War II, Britain determined to end its Mandate, and the United Nations proposed a partition of the land between Arabs and Jews, which the Jews accepted and the Arabs did not.
5. The Jews then declared the State of Israel, which the United Nations blessed and seven Arab countries invaded.
6. After the fighting ended in 1948, the Arab nations refused to sign a peace treaty or recognize Israel. The United Nations did recognize the State.
7. During the 1948 war, many Arabs left the land of Israel, assuming they would return after an Arab victory, or were forced out of Israel during the war. When the war ended, many Arabs remained in Israel and today, 75 years later, comprise about 20% of the Israel’s population.
8. Following the establishment of the State of Israel, approximately 700,000 Jews were expelled from Arab countries (most going to Israel), and there were virtually no Jews left in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Tunisia or Yemen. Talk about ethnic cleansing.
9. Only Jordan and Egypt eventually signed treaties with Israel and recognized the State. The remainder of the neighboring Arab countries still have not done so, and have maintained “a state of war” with Israel for 75 years.
10. Israel took over territory, including Gaza which had been governed by Egypt, after the 1967 War, and Egypt refused to take it back when it took back Sinai in the 1970s. In 2005, Israel ended its military occupation of Gaza, although it retained some control over entry to Gaza for security reasons; Egypt also had control over entry to Gaza.
11. In 2007, a radical group, Hamas, founded by the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt and supported by Iran, took control of Gaza, maintaining through its charter the right to attack Jews and destroy the illegitimate state of Israel, creating a Palestine from the Sea (the Mediterranean) to the River (the Jordan).
12. After 2007, there has been sporadic fighting between Israel and Hamas/Gaza, but nothing the like the attack of October 7, which was an invasion of sovereign Israeli territory, and which included the murder of approximately 1400 Israelis (including children and the elderly) in a brutal, inhumane fashion, and the taking over between 200 and 250 Israelis as hostages.
13. The ultimate fact is, had the Arab states accepted Israel in accordance with the United Nations resolutions in 1948, the entire Middle East could have remained at peace, and both Jews and Arabs could have prospered. Again…..full stop.

Any one who wants to criticize Israel after accepting these facts I will accept and, as I said, either agree with or disagree with on specific points. Any one who doesn’t accept these facts is, as Samuel Goldwyn once remarked about someone else, not even worth ignoring. And of course sometimes cannot be ignored. But what they say is worth nothing. At all.

Did you read the article on the relationship between Kanye West and Adidas on the front page of yesterday’s New York Times? If not, I suggest you do, and read it through, although it runs about five pages. Why? Because I think it shows a lot of what’s wrong with the world today.

Now, I guess Kanye West is or was some sort of a rap star or something. From this, you can assume that I have never (consciously at least) listened to any of his music. And don’t want to. But I guess is must be good at what he does, because Wikipedia says that he has sold 160,000,000 records (not sure what a “record” is these days) and won 24 Grammys.

He also is in the shoe business, having had some sort of an arrangement with Adidas for the last ten years. Now, I don’t know really what this means, except that his name on a large number of shoe designs has made Adidas Adidas (or at least allowed Adidas to remain Adidas) and – along with his music royalties – has made Kanye West a billionaire.

He is also someone who suffers from mental illness. And it appears his mental illness – perhaps a serious form of a bi-polar condition – along with his ego, and presumably emboldened by his success, has made him a rather dangerous figure, subject to personal outbursts and acts of irrational behavior, but also someone expressing strong antisemitic feelings (he is a Holocaust denier) and and someone engaged in an apparent bromance with Adolf Hitler, and another with Donald Trump.

It’s all too much, for sure. But one thing it has not seemed to have done is slow down his sale of shoes. And it hasn’t hurt Adidas.

You can go to azlyrics.com, and look at the lyrics to hundreds of his songs. I sampled a few, and they are not the kind of lyrics I would recommend for people under or over 18. They promote all the wrong things, they use the infamous “n-word” over and over, but they must hit a chord in a lot of people. Shouldn’t society be discouraging this, rather than encouraging it?

And, as the article points out, Adidas is a German company, and West (I guess his name is now Ye, which is hardly even a syllable, much less a name, IMOH) confronts them with swastika imagines, antisemitism, and Holocaust denial (all of which is illegal in Germany)” and they turn aside and sing “My God, how the money rolls in”.

“I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.” Remember that? Remember when Twitter suspended him for posting a picture of a swastika? Did you see where the Times says West told a Jewish Adidas manager to kiss a picture of Hitler daily?

We are clearly facing an antisemitism problem in the United States and the western world today. As I have said before, I think this is mainly a result of Israel bashing by those who believe that the entire Middle East is God-ordained Muslim country, and by those who have strong anti-colonial feelings and believe that Israel is a European colonial outpost in someone else’s land. Were it not for this, we would still be facing traditional antisemitism to be sure, but not to the extent we see it now. By letting uber influences like Kanye West double down on antisemitic tropes and images, we only make the problem worse.

A few days ago, when I wrote a post about campus antisemitism, I talked about the influence of anti-colonial thinking on “progressive” or “left wing” academics, and how this has now spilled over to feelings about Israel, forming the basis of antisemitism activities on campuses, along with expected Muslim anti-Israel feelings and how, as Jews generally oppose this overall, the anti-Israel feelings morph into general antisemitism. Some thought I was overplaying the anti-colonial aspect of the problem. I was gratified, therefore, because when Edie and I watched David Harris interview Charles Asher Small, the executive director of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, on TV last night, on the subject of campus antisemitism, Dr. Small immediately talked about anti-colonialism studies at major universities.

He then added something that I know nothing about and said that ISGAP was soon to issue a major piece on the subject: large amounts of money coming in (some illegally) from Arab countries – he cited Qatar particularly – to American Universities to set up programs to study anti-colonialism and other subjects, controlling much of the curriculum development in ways to lean to anti-Israel support. We will see what this is when it is released.

Where did we see the interview? On JBS, the Jewish Broadcasting Service, which you receive in Washington on FIOS on channel 798. Worth looking at their schedule and picking what interests you.

Until tomorrow….where I will try to pick a more uplifting subject.

It’s been a tough month for everyone, and the lawn decorations which you see all around town (skeletons, vampires, witches, graveyards, and all the rest) seem appropriate for reasons other than the original one.
In addition to all of the news out of the Middle East, six people that I have known have passed away in October – including two high school classmates, the mother of Hannah’s best high school friend, a member of my Thursday morning breakfast group and – only a few days ago – a long time member of the Board of Directors of the Jewish Funeral Practice Committee of Greater Washington, Inc, an organization of which for the last six years I have been the president. He died very unexpectedly of a presumed heart attack – I had spoken with him about a week before he died, and he was fine.

Thursday night, as Edie and I sat around watching still more depressing news on the MSNBC, I was scrolling through Facebook, and saw an ad pop up telling me that there was going to be a one-night only concert of Edith Piaf music at the Strathmore Music Center. “Maybe we should go?”, I asked, and got a answer that surprised me (since we haven’t gone to this type of event within recent memory): “Sure”. So, spur of the moment, I bought two tickets.

For those who have never been to Strathmore, it is located in North Bethesda on Rockville Pike, about six miles from our house. It’s a large facility, built years ago now (but I still consider it new) by Montgomery County MD, which was trying to provide an alternative to the downtown DC venues. The main auditorium, which has very good acoustics, seats about 2,000 (to be precise, 1976 – I wonder how they came up with that number).

Because a Piaf music concert was primarily just that – music – and because the acoustics would not be a problem (and because I am – as they say in older English novels – parsimonious), I bought the cheapest seats possible. Which of course does not mean that they were cheap. It just means the we were in the fourth and last row in the second balcony of the theater, truly the stratosphere. Of course there was no one behind us, and our row was relatively sparsely settled (I am not sure why, since the house generally looked pretty much filled), and I must say – we could not have had better seats.

Now Edith Piaf is someone we both identify with. Edie, for obvious reasons, and me, because Edith Piaf was known as the Little Sparrow, and my maternal grandmother’s maiden name was Wrobel, Polish for sparrow. OK, it’s a stretch, I know. But there you go.

We didn’t really know what to expect. I hadn’t looked at anything about the program. It turned out it was basically a one woman show, with four backup musicians – a piano, a base, a percussionist (drums, xylophone and more) and an accordionist. The singer and central figure on stage was a French vocalist named Nathalie Lermitte, and we had never heard of her (nor, I imagine, had any – or many – of you).

Lermitte is 10 years older than Piaf is when she died. The performance went on for about two hours (with an intermission), so was quite vocally demanding, and it was really wonderful. The backup musicians were just right (there was one terrific accordion solo), and Lermitte’s voice is very rich, very powerful, and – to my ear – pitch perfect. It’s a richer voice than Piaf’s was, and may lack a bit of Piaf’s drama, but so what? She was not an impersonator; she was a performer. And she performed perfectly.

All the well known Piaf songs were there, there were some historic visuals on a screen projected behind the stage, there was a tribute to Piaf’s one time boy friend, prize fighter Marcel Cerdan, who died in a commercial airplane crash in 1949 at a young age, and there was minimal dialogue – and virtually all of that in French.

The audience lapped it up. I am certain that it was filled with French speakers, and the crowd’s version of La Vie en Rose (with the original words projected on the screen) also seemed pretty much pitch perfect.

And Padam, Padam, Padam? Watch or listen to the Piaf version. Here is the URL: I hope it works. https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-trp-001&ei=UTF-8&hsimp=yhs-001&hspart=trp&p=edith+piaf+padam&type=Y143_F163_201897_123021#id=0&vid=b385fd7869f11bef94e1fcf3772c2f76&action=click

Now back to my regularly scheduled activities……

It’s hard to know what book to read next when you have a house filled with books you have never read, and sometimes your choices surprise even you.

A few days ago, I finished reading a Penguin called “The Archeology of Palestine”, written in the late 1940s by William Albright. Albright was both a biblical scholar and an archeologist, teaching for years at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and leading digs in Palestine/Israel. He was deeply involved in the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls (found in 1947), and in the relationship between history as told in the Bible (Hebrew Bible and New Testament) and as found on the ground. This included, to some extent, the validation of some Biblical passages, and the relationship between ancient Judaism and pre-existing Canaanite religions.

The book was very well written and, even though somewhat dated, was well worth reading. He covered a lot of ground in a few hundred pages. For example – what you needed in order to mount an archeological expedition when they were first organized in the 19th century, everything from clothes, to tools, to personnel, to permissions, to money, and where you went to obtain them. Then there were the political issues – how much easier it was for European and American archeologists to undertake digs during the period prior to the times that countries began to become independent and you could no longer rely on easy approvals from colonial powers and had to deal with indigenous governments, and their demands. He did not state this in a way to favor the good old days…..just stating the facts.

Then he dealt with the problems stemming from expeditions before the appropriate tools were available for careful excavation and preservation of materials. And the problems with dating and identifying sites. It was interesting to me how many sites in the 19th and early 20th centuries were misidentified and incorrectly dated, and how this didn’t seem to Albright to detract from the skill of the archeologists involved, or the value of their work. It was all just part of a long learning curve, and to me seem like the work of many scientists – just because a conclusion is reversed after subsequent experiments, don’t degrade the original conclusion. Had it not been made, the reversal may never have been made.

As to dating, until carbon dating was developed in the 1920s, there was no way to really date many items found. And when you are looking at, say, pottery, sometimes the only way to determine appropriate dates is to look for similar pottery elsewhere where a date is more certain. For example, he said that archeology in Egypt was more advanced than in Palestine, and because there was so much (friendly and unfriendly) contact between the two, that you often found pottery in Palestine that you could date, because you knew that similar pottery had been found and dated in Egypt. He also talked about languages, and how they could be used as dating tools.

When I finished reading “The Archeology of Palestine”, I had to decide on my next book. I’m not finished reading it yet – in fact I am only about a quarter through the book, but there was enough of interest to mention it now.

The book is called “Both/And”, and it is the memoir of Huma Abedin, who has always interested me. Why? I knew she worked closely with Hillary Clinton, I knew (I thought I knew) that she was from Saudi Arabia, and I certainly knew she was married to the infamous Congressman Anthony Wiener, whose pictures of his private parts created quite a scandal. I have seen her subsequent to that on MSNBC (or it is CNN, or both?) and she has always impressed me. Such a strange combination of things. Who is she anyway?

Let me sketch what I have learned so far. Her parents were from India and were Muslim; both came from prominent families. They were both very well educated, thanks to her grandparents, who were also well educated for their time, especially her grandmothers, who were very progressive for Muslim women in India. Reaching back on their family tree, her ancestors on both sides came to India from the Middle East, from the Arabian peninsula and from Iraq. This was a surprise to me, because I had never connected Arabian Muslims so closely with Indian Muslims before, and I hadn’t thought much about Indian Muslims at all.

After the partition of India in 1948, educated Muslim families in India had a choice to make. Do they stay in India, their homeland, or do they move to Pakistan, a new Muslim country? Both her father’s and her mother’s parents decided to stay in India, perhaps the better choice, but a difficult one to make and to live with.

Coincidentally, both her mother and her father won Fulbright scholarships to the University of Pennsylvania and that is where they met. After a few years, they married and – when her father got an academic position at Western Michigan University – they moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan. It was in Kalamazoo that Huma was born. I did not know that – I thought she was from Saudi Arabia.

Why did I think that? I thought that because, when Huma was two years old, her father got a one year position in Jedda, and the family moved there for a short stay, which lengthened into a much, much longer stay. Huma grew up and went to school in Jedda, and didn’t leave until after high school graduation. Reading about her time in Saudi Arabia was fascinating. Her father and, eventually, her mother both had teaching jobs. Her father’s field as a sociologist was studying the treatment of minority populations in countries around the world, and he founded an institute headquartered in Jedda and London. Her father was also ill, having suffered from chronic kidney disease, which seemed to increase his determination to make the most of every minute.

Life in Saudi Arabia for a Muslim family clearly had its routines and limitations but, like everything else, they became the norm. But the Abedin family didn’t spend 12 months a year in Saudi Arabia; they traveled the world. Every year, apparently, her father would take the family to some exotic place for most of the summer – it might be England, it might be Japan, it might be somewhere in Asia. In addition, every year, they returned to the United States for a period of time, visiting relatives. (By the way, among non-Saudis in Jedda, this was not unusual – she tells of all of her friends who lived half of their lives in a very traditional and restricted Muslim society, and half playing on beaches in bikinis – they found the mix perfectly normal, apparently.)

Huma’s father died when she was a senior in high school. This was very difficult for the family but her mother insisted that Huma not give up her desire to attend college in the United States (her two older siblings had pursued their education in England), and brought her to this country to visit colleges. They didn’t visit many because Huma immediately decided she wanted to be in Washington and that George Washington University was her place. And so it was to be.

Her college time (a devout Muslim, she didn’t drink, didn’t date, and studied hard) was interesting, as it contrasted to so many of her classmates and, when she was a junior, she was selected for an internship in the White House working for someone in Hillary Clinton’s office.

She started as an assistant to an assistant to an assistant, but – presumably by competence – worked her way up to being the advance person for First Lady Clinton’s various speaking engagement around the world, a remarkable accomplishment for someone young, who had grown up thousands of miles away in a totally different society.

More to come

In my 4 college years and 3 law school years, I never heard of any anti-Jewish activity on campus. That was from 1960 through 1967.

Something else happened in 1967. Israel defeated its neighbors in a 6 day war, and found itself in control of the East Jerusalem and the West Bank (formerly controlled by Jordan), Golan Heights (formerly part of Syria), Sinai (formerly part of Egypt), and Gaza (formerly controlled by Egypt).

If you had told anyone back then that 56 years later, Israel would still have virtual control over all that territory (aside from Sinai, returned to Egypt in 1973), and that American campuses would be wracked by antisemitism, you would been hard put to find many who agreed with you. But that is where we are today.

There are many reasons for this, including many (mainly but not exclusively Muslims) who believed from the beginning that Israel was an illegitimate country, an outpost of European colonialism, approved by a United Nations with no authority to do approve. They believe that the entirety of Israel is Muslim land, as it has largely been for about 1500 years. To them, Europe simply had no right divide up the Middle East as it did, and that – in this post colonial era – only Israel remains as a vestige of colonialism.

And in general, scholarship has been treating colonialism as an evil past practice. As a way for “developed” countries to effectively enslave indigenous populations, extracting their wealth, their potential and their self-respect. In most colonial empires, there have been colonial (i. e., white) populations who have moved into the colonized territory, creating wealthy, elite societies at the expense of native populations.

Of course, Israel is not a traditional colonial enterprise for one obvious reason – it is self governing and not an outpost of a more powerful country. In addition, Israeli citizens are in a different position from colonial ex-pat populations in that they have no citizenship other than Israeli.

But to the extent Israel is a society of immigrants, living in a land that been populated by others for centuries, one can argue that at least it may be considered quasi-colonialist, particularly that the part of the population that is not from somewhere else does not treat the more indigenous society with true equality. In fact, Israel’s Arab and Jewish societies are by and large two separate societies, living in a reality of different levels of rights and privileges.

And I am talking about Israel proper. In the lands added in1967, the situation is worse. East Jerusalem has been added to Israel proper for “historic” reasons, the Golan has been annexed for security reasons, and large parts of the West Bank have been effectively annexed to accommodate approximately 600,000 Israelis who have moved there.

For scholars and students who are steeped in the study of colonialism, the many parallels cannot be ignored. And the apprent lack of recognition of this by Israelis, who are reputed to be quite intelligent, is hard for these anti-colonialists to swallow.

When you add to this volatile mix, tens of millions of Muslims who have ingrown belief in the rightfulness of their religion and religious destiny and their collective rights to Ottoman lands lost in World War I, when you provoke them further when Israelis claim that the land was divinely given to the Jews in perpetuity, and when you see that Israeli leadership wants either to continue the status quo, or change it in ways to Arab disadvantage, the volatility is multiplied, which many scholars deem not only inevitable but appropriate.

Add to that the isolating and overcrowded situation of Gaza and the multiplication itself is subject to more multiplication.

For these reasons, many on campuses have sympathy with the Arabs who lack their conception of freedom to breathe and advance. You then have the added, and of course obvious, but not reallymentioned yet in this post that most Israelis are Jewish, that they are supported by those nations with colonial pasts, and that they are supported by Jews world wide, and the anti-Israel feels quickly and easily become anti-Jewish.

This is not to say that there wasn’t antisemitism before in Arab countries. Of course there was. But on a different level, and without the support of so many others, across the world, who now are saying Israel=Colonialism=Jews.

Untangling this will take some work. And bombing and moving troops into Gaza with apparent disregard for its population is probably not the way.

As a Jew not living in Israel, I really don’t want to be collateral damage. That hasn’t happened, for sure, but there increasing number of antisemitic incidents being reported around the world (and admittedly, more outside of this country than inside it) is worrisome. And I am not one usually worried about such things.

And that brings me to the old discussion of what is antisemitism after all. I know that there is now a somewhat universally accepted definition of antisemitism, drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, and the IHRA gives eleven examples of antisemitism, of which seven which refer to the State of Israel. These include (1) comparing Israeli actions to Nazi actions, (2) claiming that Israel is a racist “endeavor”, and (3) holding all Jews responsible for the actions of Israel. There has been a lot of pressure for the adoption of the IHRA definition by national governments, and it has been adopted by about a dozen countries, including Israel and many European countries, but not yet by the United States as I understand it. The advocates of this definition tend to favor equating the bashing of Israel or Israeli policy with antisemitism.

The definition itself is rather straightforward: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, towards Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

Nothing there about Israel – but the interpretation of the definition, both by its creators and its advocates bring in Israel and, to me, confuse the issue. If Israel bashing is to be considered antisemitic, shouldn’t this have been clearly stated in the definition, rather than handled so obliquely? As it is, I think it creates problems, rather than promoting solutions. Let me explain….

There are at least three types of critics of Israel. First, there are those who criticize Israel without meaning to criticize Jews in general. After all, there are Jews who criticize Israel, and there are certainly those who might criticize the actions of Israel without holding any animosities towards Jews who live outside of Israel, or those who live inside of Israel but are not supporting or implementing governmental polices. Then, there are those who criticize Israeli policies and have an animus towards Israeli citizens or more specifically Jewish Israeli citizens, but do not have any animus towards Jews who live in the United States, or elsewhere outside of Israel. And finally, of course, there are those who equate Israel and Israelis with Jews in general and hate them both.

The IHRA definition does not distinguish between these groups, just as it does not distinguish between those who absolutely hate Jews, and those who find Jews a bit distasteful and would just as soon not be intimate with them, but who tolerate them by and large.

Look at the wording of this definition: “….a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews….” What does that even mean? It reminds me more of Justice Potter Stewart’s comment about pornography: “I know it when I see it.” And that is just not very helpful.

But the problem goes beyond the IHRA’s definition and examples. The State of Israel, by and large, wants to identify itself with all Jews of the world. It has legislated itself to be a “Jewish” nation, and, through the “right of return” allows all Jews (with very few exceptions) to live and become citizens of the State. And so many Jews around the world give large amounts of money to Israeli institutions, have relatives in Israel, and travel to and from Israel, that they seem to sometimes equate themselves with Israel. When they talk about the actions of the state of Israel, for example, they talk about “we” do this or that, not that “they” are doing this or that.

So, like everything else, it becomes complicated. And it becomes especially complicated when there is a war going on. Or, even when there is no war, when the conversation goes to the relationship between Israel and the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip or the Golan Heights.

And, as we see more and more, this complexity spills over into, or sometimes seems centered in, American institutions of higher learning. Here, much more than anywhere else in this country, Jews and Israel are equated.

How should we react to this? What should we do to relax the tension that exists in so many places, not just within student bodies, but within faculty groups as well?

Ah……we have a long (and important) post already and…….as opposed to my usual situation….I think I know about what I will write tomorrow.

See you then.

OK, this format is bit irregular, but so is the world today

Israel

I read that Hamas fighters who came into Israel were told they would get $10,000 and an apartment if they brought back and Israeli hostage, and that they were supposed to concentrate on young people. Is this true?

In any event, why doesn’t Hamas say “We will give you our 200+ hostages back, if you stop fighting us?” (Or “if you stop fighting us” is not enough, why don’t they come up with something that would be?) It would certainly put pressure on Israel to get back their citizens. But Hamas does not say this – they would rather hold on to the hostages and let Gaza be completely bulldozed, and Gazans deprived of life, safety, possessions and everything else. They would rather dribble out hostages 2 at a time, in hope that this will forestall the ground war.

And why don’t so many Arab (and other) supporters of Hamas (or of Palestinian rights in general) condemn the October 7 invasion, even if they support the aims of the Palestinians for a future Gaza?

And why doesn’t Israel work even harder to avoid civilian deaths in Gaza? Why does Israel tell people to move south, and then bomb the south?

And how does Egypt get away with not opening the Rafah border crossing? Seriously!

And if Hamas leadership is comfortable in Qatar and Beirut, what is Israel planning to do about that?

And if the hostages are being held in tunnels under Gaza City, how does Israel plan to get them out before Hamas kills them?

And are the tunnels so deep or so well protected that Israel bombs don’t get to them?

And why can’t the hospitals be evacuated to safety with the agreement of all parties?

I just have so many questions. These don’t even touch the surface.

And when does Israel reach the limit of what it can do to civilians in Gaza?????

House of Representatives

Mike Johnson? Election denier, pro-life absolutist, homophobe, opponent of medical marijuana, against allowing Muslim immigrants into the country, supporter of Christian prayer in public schools, admirer of Donald Trump. Just what this country needs.

How long will he last as the candidate for Speaker? Who will be next?

Donald Trump

Here are some of the things Donald has promised in term #2, according to a posting from the Meidas Touch Network. Each has a date and citation.

1. He will pardon and apologize to all those convicted in connection with Jan 6 at Capitol
2. Anyone convicted of a drug crime will get death penalty
3. He will arrest all homeless people, round them up and relocate them in tent cities where they can be rehabilitated
4. All federal employees will have to take a patriot test and, if they refuse or fail it, they will be fired.
5. He will build ten “freedom cities” around the country free of any government regulation
6. He will appoint federal judges who are like Clarence Thomas.
7. If he doesn’t like the way a DA is doing their job, he will remove them from office. (May)
8. He will fire all college accreditation boards, since they are dominated by Marxists and lunatics.
9. He will take over university endowments of any school dominated by Marxists or discriminating against white people
10. General Milley will be prosecuted for treason by DOJ
11. He will end the Ukraine War 24 hours after his inauguration by cutting off all Ukraine aid if they don’t reach immediate agreement with Russia
12. Principals of schools will be elected every year by parents (June)
13. He will remove Comcast, MSNBC and NBC from the pubic airwaves and have them investigated for treason by DOJ (Sep)
14. He will appoint Michael Flynn to a top position
15. He will end all diversity training programs in civilian agencies and the military
16. He will bring back the originator of the child separation program to run ICE
17. If he finds fraud in an election, he will override the Constitution
18. He will eliminate absentee and absentee voting.
19. He will form a commission to determine if vaccines cause autism.
20. He will end birthright citizenship by executive order.
21. He will fire 40,000 career civil servants and replace them with people loyal to him.
22. He will set up a commission to study whether marijuana causes mass shootings
23. He will abolish the Department of Education
24. He will ban transgender people from the military
25. He will bring back God into the public school system
26. He will impose a 10% tariff on all goods brought into the United States
27. He will restore the ban on immigrants from certain Muslim countries.

I have a college friend who is now a Libertarian (don’t ask) in Florida, and active in Libertarian groups. He sometimes asks for help for his unusual activities, and I help when I can. Yesterday, he said that he wanted to rewrite the words to Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Modern Major General” to reflect a Libertarian leader. I suggested the following (and if any of you have more ideas, pass them on to me, and I will forward them – unless he is reading this now):

“I am a very, very modern Libertarian
I’m positive I’m negative and also quite contrarian,

I criticize the government in manners quite formidable,

I trash with glee the programs that I think are just goodridable.”

Does anybody but me (now and again) listen to Gilbert and Sullivan these days? My guess is that no one does, and G&S Societies seem to have pretty much disappeared, but I find Gilbert to be perhaps the most clever librettist in the history of the world, and his satirical approach to world politics and world society may be just what we need today.

“Modern Major General” is from “Pirates of Penzance” – the story of poor Frederick who has been mistakenly bound to a pirate king until his 21st birthday (his nursemaid thought she was apprenticing him to a “pilot”), and whose future is further garbled by the question of when someone born on February 29 celebrates his 21st.

We went to Penzance (it’s a port in English Cornwall) years ago, and didn’t see any pirates. But it turns out that Penzance has quite a pirate history. Here is the way I remember the story (not from our visit, but from reading various things); I can’t vouch for it being 100% true (or even 10%) true, but I like the story so much that I am going to repeat it with the request that you repeat it over and over again, the goal being to turn it into historic truth whether or not it ever happened. Here goes:

Portugal, at the insistence of Spain, expels its Jews in 1497. Many go to Holland, the one place in Europe that they have a modicum of religious freedom. Holland, a powerful seafaring nation at the time, colonizes portions of northern Brazil, and some Portuguese/Dutch Jews settle there, especially in and around Recife.

The Portuguese capture the entire of Brazil, and the Dutch are out. The coming of the Portuguese means the coming of the Inquisition, so most Jews leave (think of those who were blown off course to New Amsterdam in 1654), but some stay having converted to Christianity, at least outwardly.

Brazil is the largest source of diamonds for Europe in those days. The Portuguese/Dutch/Christian Jews who stayed in Brazil include very wealthy families involved in the diamond and the shipping industries. Their job is to ship diamonds back to Portugal.

But, in those days, shipping was very risky, and sometimes the winds or the ocean currents blew the ships off course. When the ships were blown too far north, the “pirates” of Penzance would sometimes seize the ships and their valuable cargo and off-load it in Penzance. When they did, they would first stash the diamonds in secret places (such as Jamaica Inn, not far from Cornwall and still there – think Daphne Du Maurier), and then transport them to London (which is where the Portuguese/English/Christian Jewish financiers lived, who made money off this whole business, and who then further transported the diamonds (perhaps legally; this I don’t remember) back to Holland, where the diamond cutters of Antwerp went to work to turn them into jewels, to be distributed throughout Central Europe through a network of financial advisors to kings and counts, often known as Court Jews.

End of story. Fact? Fiction? You tell me.

At any rate, back to Gilbert and Sullivan (who, as you know, didn’t really get along at all) and who had very different visions for their futures.

What other shows do I recommend? “The Mikado” which makes fun of Japan in a way that one of my daughters disapproves of, but which I find very cute. “The Gondoliers”, showing what happens when Spanish “royalty” comes to Venice. “H.M.S. Pinafore” – the Lord High Admiral who has never been to sea. “Trial by Jury”. “Ruddigore”.

Want to know what else I like? “I have a little list.”

By the way, think what Gilbert and Sullivan could do to Donald Trump and the Republican Party. They could do an entire play based on Trump’s performance yesterday, when he told his supporters not to vote, just to watch others vote, because he has plenty of votes, and where he said that Victor Orban (Hungary’s semi-fascist leader) was a great, strong leader of Turkey. Can you imagine what would happen if Biden and his dementia had said these things?

One more thing to think about. Do you think that Recife has changed at all since 1654? Look at this photo.

We have owned a condo in Montgomery County for a number of years and we are finally selling it this week. The settlement day is Wednesday, but we were given the option of signing everything virtually beforehand, so that we won’t have to travel to the title company. So, that happened today.

It would have been so much simpler to go to the title company. I think we each had to sign our name and initials about 30 times (yes, sometimes I exaggerate, but not this time) to various documents. Except that I had to sign about 90 times. You ask “why?” The answer is that, as the documents scrolled by you would see a yellow arrow that said “sign”, and next to it a pink colored space over where the signature was to go on the document. I assumed (none of this fancy stuff existed for the Yale Law class of 1967) that all I had to do was to click on “sign”, but in fact I had to click on the pink space. All “sign” did was get me to the next signing place on the next document, so I went through all 30 documents twice before I realized I was signing documents I had already signed, but that in fact I hadn’t signed any of them.

As the documents flashed on the screen, we were in a video conference with a Notary Public. The Notary Public was in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and we were in Washington, DC, but that didn’t seem to bother him. Now, I am used to notaries being in the same room, and the fact that we weren’t even in the same state (although we were electronically being connected through a data center in, who knows, maybe Bangladesh) was strange in my mind.

Now, you ask, how did the Notary know that I was I? (I think that is proper English, even though it doesn’t seem to be, and maybe shouldn’t be) Well, the answer, I thought, is that we had to upload our IDs (in our case drivers’ licenses which have our photo on them). When you upload them you have to make sure that your computer’s camera has focused on them clearly enough so that everything can be read. So I asked our Notary (who went by the name of Ryan) whether the photo was clear enough. His response: “I don’t know – we don’t see the photos.” Figure that out.

The system (called pandadoc) also asks us five questions as it verifies us. They are multiple choice questions, and sort of easy (i.e., which zip code have you been associated with?), but Edie did almost fail. One of the questions they asked me was to pick an address I had an association with and (somehow) that included my office address from 1991-1993. I picked it and passed. They asked Edie the same question, and this address (1 Thomas Circle) was one of her choices, as well. She answered “none of the above” (that was an option on each question), because she never had a connection with 1 Thomas Circle. Wrong! They also asked her if she was related to any of the following Hessels, giving her a bunch of strange names (the oddest was Herschel Hessel, I think), including Lindsey Hessel. We do have a cousin Lindsey Hessel in Portland OR, so that was Edie’s answer. Wrong again! The correct answer was “none of the above”. Shows the limits of AI, I guess.

At any rate, we were finally allowed to push a button that said “Finish”. The buyer will have to do the same thing, and then hopefully that will be that.

So that is how we started this week. We ended last week with two very busy days: first, an exploratory drive to see fall colors through Frederick MD to Thurmont (where we had lunch at the Kountry Kitchen – “just like home, but we do the dishes”), and on unexplored roads leading to two covered bridges (one in Utica MD, and one in unnamed territory, as far as we can see – we just followed the signs that pointed us to “Covered Bridges” – we also followed a sign that led (we thought) to “Old Main Streets”, but all we saw were fields and hills). We saw two interesting and new (to us) towns, Graceham (the biggest building, an old Moravian Church – do I know any Moravians – with nice old and modest wooden houses and a minimum of Halloween decorations, and the other Woodsboro, where everyone looked like they lived better than the average American. We then saw a newer town and that wasn’t at all interesting, called Eldersburg, which apparently has 30,000 people and no core, like a suburb in search of a city to attach itself to. From Eldersburg, we found our way to Route 97/Georgia Avenue, and made our way home.

Rural Maryland is beautiful almost anywhere you go, but its beauty is marred in most places by a general adoration for Donald Trump and extreme hatred for Joe Biden. I remember two weeks ago, in Boonsboro, which is west of our house, and not north like Thurmont and Eldersburg, seeing a sign that said “Biden”, rather than “F–k Biden” on a front lawn. I was so excited, I went around the block to see it again, and saw that I had missed the bottom and that the sign actually said “Biden Sucks”. But that was child play to what we saw this weekend. This weekend we saw at least six houses which had both large Trump signs and Confederate flags.

This might remind you of that old saying that everything in the United States outside of big cities in Alabama. And I think this might be an exaggeration (but not by a lot), but there is something else that is the opposite. [What is the opposite of an exaggeration, anyway? English language, you have failed me.]

This is because I have just finished reading Jeanne Theoharis’ book “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks”, which traces her brave and somewhat interesting life from Montgomery, Alabama, where she refused to give up her seat on the bus, to Detroit, Michigan, where she lived most of the rest of her life. It became clear to her that racism was different, perhaps, but just as bad in Detroit as it was in Montgomery, much worse than you might imagine it to have been. It reminded me of another book I read several years ago entitled “Arc of Justice” by Kevin Boyle, also about Detroit’s racism, when a black family tried to move into a white neighborhood. I know Detroit has good Greek food, but after reading these two books, you will have to work hard to prove to me that it isn’t a racist cesspool. (On Friday, I joined a group having breakfast with our Councilman Matt Frumin. Matt is from Detroit (or better a suburb thereof) and we had a lot of questions for him. But I didn’t get a chance to ask him that one I wanted to ask: Is Detroit a racist cesspool?).

There was more to our weekend. Grandson Izzy turned a very happy 3 and, while we didn’t have a traditional birthday party for him with kids or entertainment – I leave that to his parents – we did have a Mickey Mouse cake and dinner for his immediate family and three of OUR friends. Izzy was really happy with his Spiderman pillow, his large model Metro bus, his big tractor which you can take apart and screw together again, and his soccer ball. And really ecstatic when everyone sang happy birthday to him – he blew out the candles before we got beyond “Happy”. He is the youngest in his pre-school class, and we figure he finally felt he caught up with everyone else.

Other than that? We saw Edie’s old college friends, Little Red and the Renegades, at El Golfo Restaurant Saturday night. A lot of fun and good food. This was our third time at El Golfo – it’s a traditional Tex-Mex restaurant that calls itself Mexican, with good food and even better margaritas.

And last night (Sunday), we saw Aviva Kempner’s new documentary, “Pocketful of Miracles”, about her mother’s hiding in plain sight through the Holocaust and her uncle’s time in Auschwitz among other places – both had several narrow escapes and were separated during the war, finding each other in Berlin in 1945. Their pre-war and wartime story of spellbinding, and their experiences in America, where they lived for more than two thirds of their lives (her uncle, for example, was only 17 when he came here, having been living in prison camps when he was 15 and 16), which were as successful as their early years were painful. The film itself is extraordinary, blending perfectly their recorded testimonies to the Shoah Foundation (Stephen Spielberg’s project), with perfectly curated Holocaust footage, family photographs and video footage, and even excerpts from well known feature films. A “must” whenever you can get to see it.

[Edie hasn’t read this one yet – but boy will she think it is too long]

I am trying to sort out my thoughts on the pickle Israel finds itself in today. As you read this, keep in mind that this is a moving target. Tomorrow, I might look at this differently. But today……

I think you have to start with two completely unbelievable things. First, that Hamas has been working for a year or two on a plan to break through the Israeli border with the presumed object to kill and to capture, as well as to create havoc. Second, that Israel’s touted security capacity failed so completely, as did the strength of its border installations, which were expected to keep out any and all ground excursions. Of course, these things are tied together: if Israel had discovered what Hamas had been doing, and if the border wall had performed as promised, it didn’t make any difference what Hamas was planning, or what Hamas had started to plan. The scheme would have been nipped in the bud. And if Israel’s security system missed this, what else may they have missed?

Obviously, you can’t turn the clock back. But you can plan for the future, and I am sure this is being and will be done. But how deep was this failure? And what will it take for the security apparatus to regain the expertise and the confidence of the nation? And can it happen at all with the current coalition government in place, a government that has divided the country as much as this government has. Sure, the war has brought the country back together, they say, but this is only for one reason: to win the war. Once that has been accomplished, the problems leading to the uprisings will not only return to the fore, but will be exacerbated. These are all problems for the future, but the future is not that far off, and the problems are very serious.

Now, the war itself. So much has already been said about the brutality of the “troops” (if indeed they were troops, as opposed to youngsters who just decided to join the fun) and the brutality of the killings and the kidnappings. I don’t have to repeat any of that. But there is a related point: all of those who are commenting on this brutality as unheard of, as inhuman, with the possible exception of the ISIS beheadings, which were done as much for theater as for anything else. The killings in Israel were not done for theater; they were done out of hatred. But are they really that unique? In addition to ISIS, am I wrong in saying that this type of brutality has been seen in many parts of central and western Africa, where Islamic mobs have attacked villages, beheading and killing anyone they could find, and certainly have attacked schools, where tens (hundreds?) of young children have been kidnapped, some returned, and some not?

People say that these activities are in violation of the rules of war. I beg to differ. They may be in violation of the rules of war as propagated by western nations, but the rules of war as propagated by virulent Islamic jihadists everywhere have not been violated here. They have been upheld. And we need to be cognizant of that in working with, or against, fundamentalist Islamic groups. Including those groups headquartered in the West Bank, in Lebanon and elsewhere. Nothing may be beyond them.

That then leads to what is an appropriate Israeli response. There are a number of things to be considered. First, there are the 210 or so Israelis who have been kidnapped – how many are still held, who is holding them, and where they are held, I don’t know. Two have, for some reason, been released. And apparently, the prisoners fall into categories: those who are not Israeli citizens, those who hold dual nationalities, and those who hold only Israeli citizenship. They stand to be treated differently – and prospective “deals” to release hostages possibly will not include those hostages who hold only Israeli citizenship, whom Hamas refers to as opposition soldiers, regardless of age, disability, or health. Here again, there may be difficult decisions ahead – I don’t envy the Israelis who have to make them.

And then there are the Gaza Palestinians themselves. Over 2 million of them and, yes, half are under 18. They may not live in a prison camp, as their supporters like to say, but they live under very circumscribed conditions, where they need to be reliant on themselves, since so little comes in from the outside world and their ability to visit the outside world is so limited. And, as we see, they are reliant on their enemy, Israel, for certain basic supplies and utility flows.

Who are they? Who is innocent and who is not? What about their schools which teach hatred of Jews, and promise that one day the Zionists will be chased out of the territory they now control, and everything will be handed back to the Palestinians? And what about the mullahs, who teach the same things? And do the majority of the adult Palestinians really want peace? I assume they do, but at what cost? Do they want peace living next to the Zionists, or do they want peace after they eliminate the Zionists. It obviously makes a difference.

At any rate, the question is how the Israelis should treat the Gaza Palestinians? Israel wants to eliminate Hamas and says it will do anything possible to eliminate the threat from Hamas. Is that even possible? And what are the limits of what Israel should do? They obviously are dropping unbelievable numbers of bombs on Gaza. They continue to threaten a land invasion. They have asked those in the north of Gaza to move to the south. Most, but far from all, have done so, but resources are fast dwindling. A hospital in Gaza City was struck and hundreds (maybe not the 500 Hamas claims, but hundreds) were killed. It appears that this tragedy was not the fault of Israel, but came from a Palestinian rocket that misfired. Well and good, but nobody in the Arab world believes it – and won’t for a long time.

What should Israel do about the half of Gaza that is under 18? If Israeli air strikes or ground forces wind up causing the death of young Gazans, is that really any different than the Gazans causing the death of young Israelis? If young Gazans die because insufficient food, water and power are allowed into their country, is that equally an Israeli problem?

Remember (as I have said before), the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States totally firebombed Tokyo, and Dresden and Berlin. As Germans or Japanese were starving during the last stages of the war, no one even suggested that the United States or its allies send food into Berlin or Hamburg to feed the Nazis or their starving children. There was a war and it had to be won.

And when you are in a war, you don’t want to be shown as weak, or as nice guys. You want to be seen as more powerful than you are, and – if truth be told, and why not? – you want to be seen as ruthless and a bit crazy.

And then there is the question of publicity. For true believers (either side), the publicity simply confirms your feelings. For others, those who may be influenced, Israel and the Palestinians have differing strategies. For Israel, it’s all about the individual – the young children just starting out, the hard working mothers and fathers who are struggling to make a life for themselves and their children, the elders, who have already been through so much. We know, or can find out, so much about each individual who has been murdered or kidnapped, just by tapping on our phones. On the Palestinian side, it is the opposite. We know that buildings have been leveled, that hundreds of thousands are now homeless, and so forth, but we know nothing about the individual families. Would it make a difference if we did? Perhaps.

One day the war will be over. Tomorrow, probably not. But a month from tomorrow, perhaps. Then the region will be changed. There will be no going back. Two peoples will have to learn to live together, and will have to agree to give up some of their belief of their “God-given rights” to live in this land, and cooperate more closely with other. If not, the next peace will simply again be a waiting time before the next war. How will they be able to do this?

Final note: Edie tells me my blog posts are too long. I am sure she is correct (as usual). But, I am afraid to say, they are what they are.

By the way, I have not proofed this post. Why? Because it is so, so long.

So long….

The people who comment on C-Span’s morning call-in shows share two characteristics: (1) clearly they are all a bit crazy (and some are totally out of their minds) and (2) they vote. Those who call in as Republicans share an additional characteristic: they are scared to death of Democrats because of what they believe is an open border. This is their most consistent point.

They are convinced that there are no controls at the border for many reasons: (1) The Democrats won’t complete Trump’s magic border wall, (2) the Democrats want to change the face of America, (3) among those coming into the country are murderers, rapists and terrorists, (4) those coming into the country are given benefits beyond those of citizens, (5) once they come into the country, they simply “disappear” and avoid legal proceedings, (6) they are coming into the country to vote Democratic, (7) we cannot afford to take care of them, and so forth.

It doesn’t make any difference as to whether there are factual arguments against any of these points. It doesn’t make any difference that this country’s immigration laws are out of date, but are still our laws. What’s happening in the rest of the world to cause this migration surge is unimportant.

This is the most serious danger to the United States today, they say, and, yes, only Trump can fix it.

It is my fear that the Republicans, disorganized as they clearly are, will win the presidency in 2024 with their candidate Donald Trump as a result of the border issues, and no others.

I told this to a friend last night and she said “No, there’s a counter balance – abortion. The Democrats will win because of abortion.” Maybe, I don’t think so.

When you look at current polls, as I tend to do on Realclearpolitics.com, you see that the presidential race is 50-50, and when it is not 50-50, you normally see Trump leading by 2 to 4 points. For most of us, this is unthinkable and incomprehensible. How can this be after we see what four years of Trump brought us, and after Trump has been indicted in 91 felony counts? Well, unthinkable or not, this is where we are.

Sure the polls could change (and probably will, many say), sure serving presidents often poll poorly at this time (many say), sure the pollsters may not be talking to a representative selection of people, sure, sure, sure. But what else is sure is that all of this polling, done by many national polling organizations, does show remarkable consistency.

The border situation may be important, but it isn’t the only point brought up by the C-Span callers. The next in order seems to be the economy generally – inflation at the grocery store and the gas pump. To me, this should be easier to answer than the border. Grocery and gas prices have risen world wide – a lot of this the result of the war in Ukraine, which has greatly affected agricultural production around the world, and led to strange machinations in oil prices – and the United States looks better than virtually any other country. In addition, some of the policy issues promoted by these callers would have the opposite effect than what the promoters think would be the result. You would think that these arguments could be blunted, although the Democrats have not yet figured out the right words. Similarly, the national debt – it can be shown that the Republicans tend to increase the debt more than the Democrats, even though this is hard for some to believe. And again the Democrats don’t know how to put their case forward.

But it all comes back to the border. And here, I don’t think that the Democrats really have any talking points that could work, no matter how well they might be presented. The fact is not that the border is “open” (it clearly is not), but we do have many too many people coming across it. The Democrats need to admit this, to agree with their critics on this point. And they need to have a plan to deal with it. What should the plan include? Better border security (it’s ok, if part of that includes fence improvements or additions), more border personnel, more immigration judges and court personnel, more shelters, better ways to track migrants who are subject to court proceedings, and so forth. And it’s insufficient to say that our current laws are outmoded – what are the changes that should be made? And perhaps there has been too much energy expended on saving the job of Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Mayorkas may be doing the best job possible. I don’t know. But he has become a target, and okay, let’s remove him as a target. The Democrats should have an active program that they can put forth.

The Republicans can’t fix themselves, but they know how to convince people that they can fix everything else. The Democrats need to be able to be just as convincing – they won’t convince the majority of Republicans, to be sure……but they don’t have to. They just need to convince, say, 10% of those who today say they will vote again for Trump rather than Biden.

And then there’s the question of whether Biden should be the candidate – there’s no polling on a race between Trump and anyone else. But the results of polls like that may be surprising.

When I was a college junior, I went on a Spring Break trip to Washington with the Harvard Young Democrats. There were maybe a dozen or so of us, and as this was 1963 and the Kennedy years, we were given the royal treatment.

I remember that one of our meetings was with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, in his dark wood paneled office in the Department of Justice, with refrigerator quality art work by his many young children taped to all the walls. I don’t remember what the topics of our conversation were, but I do remember Kennedy making it very clear at the beginning of our session that everything he was saying, he was saying “off the record”.

One of the students on our trip was a Harvard Crimson writer. I remember, after we got back to Cambridge, opening the paper one morning and seeing an article about our trip. The article referred to our meeting with Bobby Kennedy and started off with the words “Speaking off the record, Kennedy said ……..” And then it went on to detail everything he told us.

Well, this morning I attended a breakfast session with DC Ward 3 Councilman Matt Frumin, and about 15 others. Frumin’s remarks were all “off the record”. So, there you are. Had they been on the record, I would tell you that the biggest and best surprises that Frumin had after being elected were that the Council members all get along with each other so well, and that the Council is really made up of talented people. If this gets out and is attributable to me, I will deny every word of it.

It was an interesting conversation about many Ward 3 interests – interestingly, little was raised that affected DC outside of this ward. No one asked about crime, or whether the Commanders should have a new stadium built at the current RFK (speaking of Bobby Kennedy) site, or why there weren’t sufficient groceries in Ward 8, or how to bring back downtown. I guess it’s true — all politics are local.

So we spoke about traffic cameras, and school expansions, and development sites, and the proposed Connecticut Avenue bicycle lanes, and the redevelopment of the Chevy Chase Library and Community Center, and the role of Metro buses in revitalizing the neighborhood, and the future of the Intelsat building, the status of Metro garage and turnaround sites, the Massachusetts Avenue Safeway and more. We really stayed within the ‘hood.

Yesterday, on the other hand, politics was not involved in the visit we made to the new Capital Jewish Museum. We were there before it opened for the day for a special tour for my Thursday morning breakfast group and their presumably significant others.

The Museum is very well done. We visited the large exhibit rooms on the first and second floors which tell the story of Jewish Washington quite well from the days of the Isaac Polock, the first recorded evidence of a Jew in Washington. His residency dated from 1795, just 5 years after the founding of the city by Congress. Then, Polock was alone – now there are about 300,000 Jews in the greater DC area.

The museum is built around the oldest synagogue building in Washington, the Adas Israel congregation building that dates from 1876, and served the congregation about 25 years when it was sold and replaced by the building at 6th and I Streets NW that now serves as a community center, the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue. The current Adas building dates from early 1950s. The second floor sanctuary of the original building has been restored, and as you sit on original benches, you see a three sided film about the history of the building and the history of the Washington Jewish Community. Edie and I went with our 8 year old granddaughter, who liked the film and the exhibits and I think got quite a bit out of the 90 minutes or so we were there.

On the second floor, among many other things, there is a wall which shows photographs of 100 (I think that’s the number) of prominent Jews in Washington through the years. Interestingly, I could probably identify and tell you at least something about 75 or so of them. I was happy to see included was my great uncle Moshe Rubin Yoelson, my paternal grandfather’s older brother, who presided over the Talmud Torah congregation in Southwest Washington for decades. He died in 1945, well before I moved to town. But his tomb in Southeast Washington is very impressive.

The third floor contains a temporary exhibit on Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which will be there until, I think, November 30. We told our granddaughter we would come back to see it. Edie and I saw it several years ago at the Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. It was quite well done, and now – after Justice Ginsburg has passed away – we understand it has been somewhat expanded.

That’s it for today. Getting ready to celebrate grandson Izzy’s 3rd birthday this evening.

It was the best of cities, it was the worst of cities. Dickens never said that, but he could have, and one of the cities he could have described that way was Vienna during the first half of the 20th century. Last night, Professor Marsha Rozenblit of the University of Maryland gave a Zoom presentation about the 20th century Jewish history of Vienna for the Haberman Institute of Jewish Studies. I introduced Marsha, whom I have know for quite some time, to our audience of about 300.

The Haberman Institute is celebrating its 40th year of providing adult educational programs, but Marsha has us beat. She is now in her 45th year of teaching at Maryland; she joined the faculty in 1978. (That last clause was redundant.)

Vienna was, of course, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before World War I, a large entity that included today’s Austria and Hungary, as well as the Czech Republic, Slovakia, parts of Poland and Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, the entire former Yugoslavia and, I am sure, places I am forgetting. It was a multi-ethnic, and multi-linguistic as you can get. When my father’s mother lived in Lviv (Lvov, Lemberg), she lived in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When my mother’s maternal grandparents, with their Polish last name, lived in Vienna, they obviously did the same.

There were many Jews in this Hapsburg Empire and from the 1860s, they had full and equal rights, including the rights to move anywhere they wanted within the Empire. Many chose to move to Vienna, which had, prior to some time in the mid-19th century been off limits to all Jews, but for the very wealthy.

By the time the 20th century arrived, there were about 200,000 Jews living in Vienna, having moved there from all parts of the Empire. Similar, even larger migrations, had occurred to Budapest and to the Prussian capital of Berlin. It was in cities like these that many Jews became “Europeans” – soaking up and contributing to general European culture and life. So different from the Jews of the Russian empire, who were by and large isolated from the larger urban concentrations of that society.

The Jews were by and large in different occupations than the non-Jewish Viennese. They were much more concentrated in mercantile and clerical activities than the others, who were more engaged in factory jobs and other jobs that required physical exertion. A minority of Jews were factory owners or wealthy businessmen, and relatively few were in the civil service.

There was a lot of antisemitism in Vienna, with the largest party, the Christian [Somethings] being quite antisemitic, as was the long time mayor, Karl Lueger. But, Marsha said, this really didn’t affect the Jews much, because the authority of the city government was limited, and the government of the Empire, led by Franz Josef II for over [ ] years made sure that all minorities in the Empire were protected. The Jews loved the Emperor, she said, and that reminded me of what I heard a number of times from my grandmother – “Franz Josef – he was a good emperor”.

Everything changed after World War I, when Austria, being on the losing side, lost its empire and was suddenly a much smaller country with a much too big capital. Economic conditions were not good through the 1920s, and were even worse in the 1930s, and the Jews suffered along with others. Antisemitism grew during this period, and when Hitler and the Nazis finally moved into Austria in 1938, he was greeted by about one million cheering Austrians, and the Jews were soon the target of everything bad in the Nazi quiver.

But in advance of, and for a time after, the Anschluss (as the incorporation of Austria into Germany is termed), the Jews could leave Vienna, and almost 2/3 of them did. Some of them escaped to places where they were beyond Nazi reach (Great Britain, the U.S., etc.), but others flew to Holland, France, Belgium and other countries, where they soon caught in the Nazi web. In all, about 1/2 of the Jews who were or had been living in Vienna were killed, and about 1/2 su

And, as to the one-two-three, last night the name Richard Strauss did not come up. But it’s in the back of my mind (one-two-three) whenever I think (one-two-three) of (one-two-three) Vienna. Sing along with me: The Blue Danube Waltz, by Strauss, by Strauss…..

Murphy’s Law. Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. That pretty much sums it up so far in the current dispute between Hamas and Israel. But, of course, there’s a difference. Murphy might be saved because he had the luck of the Irish. Neither the Israeli Jews nor the Palestinian Arabs have anything like that working for them.

What am I thinking about? The bombing of the hospital in Gaza which apparently killed somewhere between 200 and 500 patients and personnel. The Arab world, and the world-wide supporters of the enemies of Israel, have concluded that (1) Israel bombed the hospital, (2) Israel purposely bombed the hospital, and (3) the more killed in the hospital, the happier Israelis must be. Israel says (1) we don’t bomb hospitals, (2) we didn’t bomb this hospital, and (3) Islamic Jihad destroyed the hospital when one of their rockets launched to strike in Israel failed and landed on the hospital instead. Israel said it can prove it in at least two ways: (1) it can track every one of its bombs, (2) it has photos that show that Islamic Jihad fired a few rockets at the time of the hospital blast and the photos show that one of these rockets failed and dropped almost immediately, and (3) it has an Arabic language recording of two Palestinians in Gaza talking about the Islamic Jihad misfire.

The Israelis have apparently turned this material over to U.S. security personnel for analysis, and we will see what comes of this. My guess is that they will agree with the Israelis. But, as we have learned domestically as well as more broadly, facts don’t matter, especially when there are alternative facts that have been developed. Even if it becomes clear to independent observers that the hospital tragedy was the result of an Islamic Jihad misfire, the Arab world will continue to blame Israel – either because they will stick with their alternative facts, or because the facts don’t matter and what does matter is the primal cause of all of their problems, the existence of the State of Israel. So it goes.

And as we already know, it isn’t just the Arabs on the street that have jumped to this conclusion, it’s also the Arab leaders. Starting with PA chief Abbas, who has blamed the Israelis for the strike publicly and without qualification and who has cancelled his planned meeting with President Biden, scheduled for this afternoon. And after Abbas made this announcement, Egyptian President El-Sisi, and Jordanian King Abdullah followed suit, canceling the mini-summit that was to be held in Amman.

I don’t know that I can blame them for the cancellation, and in fact I think it’s a good thing. In the current circumstances, there is no reason why President Biden should travel to an Arab capital. In fact, in my opinion, he shouldn’t be traveling to Tel Aviv either. Remember my friend Murphy.

It was Sartre who wrote the play “No Exit”. I think I may have seen in somewhere in another universe, but I couldn’t begin to tell you what it’s about. But the title would make a great title for the national anthem of Gaza.

With all of the tragedy that has unfolded and continues to unfold, one of the saddest interviews I heard was this evening, when Anderson Cooper interviewed a young architecture student in Gaza. I guess I actually didn’t “hear” the interview – I read the subtitles (I was listening to something else at the same time), and they were very touching. This young woman was in her last year of architecture studies and just thinking about and beginning to create her “senior project” when the war began. She seemed like such a nice young woman, and she said that now, her plans had to change, her studies seemed to be over. It wasn’t that her classes were going to be put on hold for a while, she said that “the entire university has been destroyed”. And, she went on to say (and I wasn’t concentrating on every word) something about now staying in a house that was sheltering 57 people. And that there was no place where you can feel safe. And when you go to bed at night, you know that – at some point during the night – the ceiling might fall right down on you, and you will be killed. She, by the way, said nothing political, nothing vicious, showed no directed anger; she said, she just wanted to be able to live her life, having the same rights as everyone else.

All this is obviously true. And somehow, it can’t be right.

It does look like Israel’s plans might have been changed a bit; certainly they have slowed down. There might not be the extensive ground attack that had been promised, but rather something smaller and more targeted. And this must be because of the extensive damage done through the Israeli air strikes. From the pictures I have seen, much (most?) of Gaza, even if the war ended today, would not be habitable.

So what are the residents of Gaza going to do after this war ends? How will the rubble be cleared and their cities be rebuilt? How will their utilities (power, electricity, water) be turned back on? Who will pay for all of this, and how will they live in the meantime? In other situations, you would think that a large number of these residents would migrate elsewhere. This is what happened, for example, in nearby Syria (admittedly a bigger country), 6,700,000 people emigrated from Syria, as of the end of 2022. (My source is of course Wikipedia: “Refugees of the Syrian Civil War”). They went to neighboring countries, and they went to Europe.

But it does not look like the Gazans will have that choice. Where can they go? Who will take them in? King Abdullah of Jordan today said (or so I heard) that there will be no refugees from Gaza let into either Jordan or Egypt; he called it a “red line”. Yes, the Gazans have “No Exit”. Once again, the Palestinians will be ignored by their fellow Arabs. Mark my words.

Now in a perfect world (not the perfect world so named by Dr. Pangloss), everyone would pitch in once the war was over (or even during it) and – even assuming Hamas is out of the way – work for a perfect Gaza. But we don’t live in a perfect world, and there won’t be a perfect Gaza, and there will remain a Gaza with 2 million people (and more as time goes by) trapped there. They will have no exit, and they will continue to be a powder keg ready to explode and, as is often the case in wars to end all wars, the result will be a slow march to the status quo ante. And that only if we are lucky.

One more thing before I forget. Who was Murphy? It turns out that Edward Murphy was an American aeronautical engineer, and that the first reference to Murphy’s law came at a press conference in 1948 where they were trying to explain what happened…….in a failed rocket test.

So it goes.

Perhaps, I am just on a quest for normalcy. Yesterday, I decided I should go to a museum. I haven’t really done that on my own in years – we have been to a lot of museums on our various trips, but just to get up and say “I think I will go to a museum today”….hasn’t happened for a long time.

So, about noon, I left the house, walked the 2/3 of a mile to the Van Ness Metro Station, paid by $1.20, was happy to see a train waiting for me, and rode to Gallery Place, 6 stops away. I must admit to getting a bit sad every time I go downtown, because it looks far from what it used to look like, with fewer than half the workforce that used to be there, and especially now that the tourist season is basically over. At Gallery Place, which is the stop for DC’s Chinatown, there are a number of Chinese restaurants that have not made it and whose sites stand empty. In addition, G Street particularly is dirty and generally unpleasant, something that it was not a few years ago. That doesn’t mean that it’s more dangerous (although it might be), just more unpleasant.

On the other hand, the building that houses the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian Gallery of American Art, recently having been redone, looks to be in very good shape.

My reaction to the museum was strange. My usual museum visit is thorough. I start in the first room and visit every other room before I leave. Today, I went through the first floor and a small part of the second, and decided I had seen enough. Maybe I was a bit tired, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that my mind was full. I could absorb no more.

So what did I see? I saw a dozen or so new pieces of art, shown in groups of two describing the relationship between the artists. I saw a massive exhibit of art of the American West, concentrating on views not normally seen, those of Latino, Indian and Black artists. I saw the folk art galleries, which now have a number of new pieces on display. I saw a display of the work of Washington artist Alma Thomas. And I saw the work hanging the hallways between these galleries.

From the exhibit on the West. The first is a portrait of novelist Sandra Cisneros by Angel Rodriguez Dias, the second by Hung Liu, and the third by Jacob Lawrence who lived in Seattle for decades.

So let’s look at Alma Thomas. You may not like these. I do. Thomas was a DCPS teacher and prominent artist, the first art graduate of Howard University. Apparently her reputation has been growing and growing.

So, a question from the folk art exhibition. Can you tell which of these I like and which I don’t?

One more thing. It’s always interesting to see two famous people come together when you didn’t know they had had any contact. You may remember, for example, when I learned that Horatio Alger, Jr. was the live in tutor for the children of New York Jewish financier Joseph Seligman. Today, I learned that Jackson Pollock’s primary art teacher was Thomas Hart Benton and that they remained close until Pollock’s early death. Hard for me to imagine.

I came home mid-afternoon. Turned on the so depressing news. Turned it off and realized why I decided to go to a museum.

Yesterday was a very normal Sunday, and much appreciated. It was so welcomed because we haven’t had a normal Sunday in such a long time. Between vacations and illnesses and simply conflicts, each of our Sundays has been – in its own way – far from normal.

But yesterday, my daughter Hannah and her family (her husband Andrew, her 8 year old daughter Joan, and her just about 3 year old son Izzy) came before lunch and stayed the day.

One of the good things about the day was that we had to turn off our television coverage of the Israel-Gaza war. We obviously didn’t want our grandchildren to be exposed to the cable news outlets we normally have on either in the background or the foreground. So we were without news for most of the day, and that was a minor blessing.

Not only that, but I spent a good part of the day watching the Washington Commanders beat the Atlanta Falcons, 24-16. A good game, with a number of memorable plays (for those who have memories), and the right amount of suspense. Izzy was taking a nap, and the only person in the house who paid any attention to the game with me was Joan, who was more concerned with what the cheerleaders were wearing and with the age old question as to why the referees always wear black and white stripes in all the sports, so that they look like prisoners. But she is a big Washington fan and let out an appropriate cheer every time I told her it was time to do so.

After the game was over, I told her she could watch her favorite cable station, PetTV. I doubt if any of you spend time watching PetTV, but it passes the time away and this afternoon, they had a show about the most popular dog breeds in the year 2017. Maybe you saw the show back then. Other than that, Joan spent her time with a selection of color pencils that she inherited from her great, great Aunt Hazel who died this year at 102. In fact, we had a number of things at the house from Aunt Hazel that we divided among the two kids, including a koala and a kangaroo. Joan also spent quite a bit of time making vehicles from Legos,each with a distinct purpose, and helping me answer a quiz on Halloween films. We were pretty even in our knowledge. I also asked her what she knew about Taylor Swift – turns out she knows a couple of her songs, and doesn’t pay much attention to her, but hears about her from some of the other third graders from time to time. Only from time to time.

Because Izzy took a long nap, he had less time to busy himself, and I am not sure what he was doing, but it involved a lot of cars and trucks, which found themselves driving around and about the house. And of course time jumping up and down on the trampoline outside and running on the treadmill inside. Of course the treadmill wasn’t turned on; the goal seems to be to make noise with your feet.

We will see him next on Friday, when he will be three years old. He wants a Mickey Mouse cake.

Other things on this normal Sunday? I actually had time to read through the entire Sunday Washington Post and New York Times, and do the Times, the Post and the L.A. Times crossword puzzles. I found both papers quite interesting, but could I tell you now what I learned, or what I read? Not a chance. There was a very interesting and said article in the Times about how Ben Gurion University (which I have devoted much time to) is faring during the war – classes closed for a couple of weeks at least, students, employees and faculty members dead or missing, dorms turned into temporary medical facilities. One day this will all be over, but that day is not here yet. And I pity poor Ukraine, fearing that their battle is getting lost with all attention on the Middle East. The Post had an interesting article about the effectiveness (or not) of our border wall – probably one that Republicans should read, but won’t.

A couple of other things – in addition to the news about the war this week, we also had news of the death of a friend – the mother of Hannah’s closest school friend – in Oregon, and the death of the husband of another friend yesterday, the husband of a woman who helped Edie as a mother’s helper when our daughters were very young. On the other hand, I saw that Edie’s cousin’s husband, a rabbi in Seattle, has a Substack blog to which I just subscribed (I don’t know how often he writes the blog, or if it original writing for the blog itself or a transcription of his sermons), and the Leonard Downie, who used to be managing editor (I think that was his title) of the Washington Post, who is my age, has also been writing a daily diary of his year after he turned 80. I don’t know if he publishes it every day – the Post, maybe on-line only, posted excerpts that dealt with his good, but not great, health – a lot of falling and dropping, which he seems to think everyone 80 must do from time to time.

In the evening, all I did was finish Daniel Finkelstein’s book, Two Roads Home, about his grandparents and their Nazi era and Stalin era adventures. They survived by determination and by chance – I’d say 10% determination and 90% chance. But they did. And the book, which I mentioned before, is very interesting.

That’s all, doc.

In six weeks, I will turn 81. I must say that most of my life has basically run along a straight line (sure, a few knots, some big, but not many) from when I was a child to now. And today’s world is similar to the world of the 1940s when I was growing up here in America, just more modern, with more people and more technology. But our country is still our country and the greater world, with all of its troubles, is not unlike the world we grew up in, which also had its share of troubles.

But the times, they are a changin’.

Over the last several years, we have seen and heard rumblings of CHANGE (yes, not “change”, but “CHANGE”). There was the COVID pandemic. It altered how we spend our daily lives, and not only the way we do things, but the way we think about illness and contagion and work and home. There has been a rupture in our way of thinking about our government – we elected a celebrity non-politician to the presidency, he turned out to be the most partisan president we ever had, he cared nothing for role modeling, or for decorum in the presidency, he refused to accept the results of the next presidential election, and he led an attempt to get the vice president to fail to approve the certification of electors by the states. All of a sudden, our government, and therefore our very country, seemed vulnerable, less secure. As a result, fear spread, and everything in this country became politicized, and some of our elected politicians turned out to be loony, and our government is in many ways not functioning (think House of Representatives). It is unclear when we will recover.

While this is going on, there has been an invasion of a sovereign European country, Ukraine, by another, Russia, leading to a war there has been going on for over a year with no end in sight. The strong opposition to Russia’s invasion from the American and European countries has kept Russia from winning the war, but now that alliance is tested. It feels like it might at some point break apart, leading who knows where. At the same time, China is threatening to invade Taiwan, and now Hamas, from Gaza, has led a massacre of almost 2000 Israeli citizens. Israel is preparing its strong response, and other Middle Eastern nations are threatening intervention on the side of Gaza. Big CHANGEs could be happening there sooner that we ever thought possible.

As if this is not enough, civil wars, autocratic governments and general anarchy in other parts of the world are leading to unprecedented numbers of refugees leaving their homes for greener pastures in countries that may not want them and may not have sufficient resources to care for them. This is compounded more and more by climate change, where we see parts of the world becoming increasingly uninhabitable, and which is bringing desertification and unbearable heat to parts of the world, rising seas and flooding world wide, stronger storms seemingly everywhere, drought conditions, uncontrollable fires and so forth, causing major loss of life and property.

But wait, there is more. How about never ending technological changes that are bringing a combination of threats and promises, including the threats being brought about by artificial intelligence? And then there is education that does not educate to today’s world, and unemployment and lack of sufficient candidates to fill jobs at the same time. And an increasing need for political correctness, with everyone over sensitive to normal human discourse. And guns and crime.

Yes, this is a time of CHANGE, with capital letters.

But again, I am about to turn 81. And I see CHANGE as a threat to the world I know. But if I could turn the number around and be 18, then what? Would I not notice CHANGE, and just see normality? Would I look at the threats I have listed and just see challenges and opportunities? I don’t know.

The old “Chinese curse” – May you live in interesting times! We are certainly doing that, and there is, for sure, one level on which I really appreciate it. The times are so interesting. There is so much to learn. I know so much more about our planet and the human condition than I did before. Yes, interesting times are a curse and, if they are not a blessing, they certainly keep your mind engaged.

I saw a Facebook post today that dealt with these changes in our society, but from a different perspective. It listed all these CHANGES and concluded that the “end days” are here, and the CHANGES are proof. Pretty soon, the post suggested, there would be the “rapture” followed by the coming of the “antichrist” and then…….nothing good at all.

I am not concerned about the antichrist (unless he’s elected to another term in 2024), but I look forward to the possibility of the rapture. The rapture might halt CHANGE in its tracks, or at least would alter its course. I wouldn’t miss those who would be raptured away, I don’t think, and wish them well. And they might leave a smaller and more manageable world behind. Just sayin’.

(Oh, Arthur, the last two paragraphs were not necessary at all. Don’t you think you should delete them? Until I got to these paragraphs, I was in agreement with everything you said. Sometimes, you just don’t know when to stop.)

One thing is clear from history, and that is that the victors get all the credit. But that’s history – it didn’t always seem that way to the victors at the time.

It’s another fact of history that the ends justify the means – there have been a lot of empires, for example, that were founded on unspeakable wars and horrors, but what is remembered are not the wars and horrors, but the empires. My guess is that, at the time, things did not seem so clear.

So it does appear that Israel is about to march into northern Gaza with the goals of destroying Hamas, destroying a network of tunnels, and (maybe) saving some of the hostages. It may be, in fact, that Israel only has the first two of these goals – Israel’s government may have already decided that saving the hostages will not be possible, and that they will be sacrificed for the greater good. We don’t know.

What is clear is that there will be hundreds (probably thousands) of additional casualties. Casualties on both sides, but more on the Palestinian side (unless Hezbollah enters the war and then all bets are off). Many of those killed or injured will be children (although many of those who stormed into Israel, and certainly those who throw stones even in times of cold peace, are children – i.e., under the age of 18). And there will not be a way to treat the injured Palestinians because the Gaza hospitals will be out of commission. Things will become very messy.

Much of the world will turn against Israel once again, the Abraham Accords will be under tremendous pressure, Joe Biden and his team will come under enormous criticism for supporting Israel’s incursion into Gaza, and antisemitism around the world may increase. Yes, these are the things that will happen even if (and perhaps even especially if), Israel’s tactics are successful and Israel “wins” the war.

But if this war ends the possibility of Israel being endangered by a criminal element in Gaza, Israel will be a safer place (at least from that direction) and other enemies of Israel may think long and hard before replicating the massacre which Hamas brought about. And one day, guess what? The Gaza incursion and all the casualties will be forgotten and Israel will be deemed once again to be a miracle nation. We may not see that time, but that does not mean that that time will not come.

It’s a long game. But this is the way history works. But in the meantime, there will be trauma both in Israel and in Gaza and among Israel’s supporters and enemies. Questions will be asked: was it worth it? Did they go too far? Could it have been done another way? If Israel hadn’t done what it did, would there have been even more carnage because its enemies would have been emboldened? And there will be no answers to these questions……ever.

Several days ago, I said that I was not a military strategist (or did I say military tactician)? And, several days later, nothing has changed. Maybe Israel now knows what it is doing. Maybe they have it all sussed out. Maybe civilian casualties would be eliminated for the most part if only the Gazans would evacuate the north and move south, as being instructed to by everyone but their own leaders. We will see.

But I doubt it. And I assume that, after the Israelis are finished with Gaza, Gaza City will be a history – flattened like so many other cities in history. What will the Gazans do then? Will the other Arab nations – Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and so forth, take them in and give them a new chance for a life? Will they drop their animosity towards Israel once their new life takes hold? Will peaceful relations between Israel and its Abraham Accord partners continue as if nothing happened. Will the destruction of the Gaza infrastructure allow for the building of something new and less crowded, filled with Palestinians who, along with the majority of West Bank Palestinians, be ready for a long term commitment to peace with Israel?

Hard to imagine, right? Almost impossible? And, unless this happens, what has Israel really accomplished?

I was going to post another diversionary piece today; in fact, it is pretty well complete. But I am going to save it, I guess, for another day. There is too much going on.

No analogy is perfect, as we all know. So you can read what comes next and respond with “that’s a bad analogy”. I would probably agree with you. But I proceed.

When someone tells me they are “pro-life”, I always ask if they are against capital punishment, if they are against war in general. If they tell me that they are for capital punishment, I tell them they are not “pro-life”.

Hamas attacks Israel. Kills over 1000, including families in their homes, young Israelis at an all-night concert and so forth. And they take 150 hostages. Obviously awful.

Israel responds with bombing attacks on Gaza, dropping (as I have heard) thousands of bombs. Pictures on TV make parts of Gaza look like an earthquake has hit, a very severe earthquake. Israel has apparently killed as many Palestinians at this point as Hamas has killed Israelis. Because Gaza is an area where half of its residents are under the age of 18 (enormous birthrate – what else is there to do?), many of those killed in Gaza have been children.

Israel has also cut off all supplies to Gaza which come through Israel as well as electricity and water. It has stated that this blockade would end as soon as the hostages are returned. Hamas has not returned any hostages (Hamas this morning said that 13 of the hostages have been killed by Israel’s bombs – we don’t know if this is true).

Over the last two days, preparation has begun for a land invasion (I wrote about this yesterday), with 300,000 Israeli troops at or near the border. Israel has told over 1,000,000 Gaza residents who live in the north of the Strip to move south, leaving Gaza City empty. Hamas has told Gaza residents to stay where they are.

Complicating all of this is Egypt. Egypt and Israel have had diplomatic relations for the past 50 years, since the end of the Yom Kippur War. Residents of Gaza can leave Gaza only through three “gates” – the two that go to Israel are understandably closed. So is the Rafah gate, that goes to Egypt. If Egypt opened the gates, refugees from Gaza would have somewhere to go….at least temporarily. But Egypt is not opening Rafah. I doubt that this is per an agreement with Israel. I assume that Egypt knows it would be very hard for it to take in so many refugees. But it makes things much harder. And don’t forget that Egypt controlled Gaza between 1948 and 1967, so it does bear some responsibility; it was offered control over Gaza in 1973 and said, politely, “no, thanks”.

So, I can ask Israel: if Hamas’ killing of children and innocent civilians in Israel is so awful (and it obviously is), is the killing of children and innocent civilians in response by Israel any less abhorrent? I am not looking here to answer this question (I don’t even think I have an answer), but to put it out there. If Israel could get at Hamas without harming many civilians, there would not be a question as to what Israel should do. But it doesn’t appear that this is possible. And it’s not even clear that they can destroy Hamas, even if there is so much collateral damage. So, the question it out there.

Now, though, I will turn it around. For those who think that Israel should stop where it is now, I ask: Should the U.S. have dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Should the Allied Forces in WWII have firebombed Dresden, or carpet bombed Berlin? Hundreds of thousands of innocent people were killed in these three actions alone – yet it ended with Western Europe prepared for a democracy which has lasted to this day.

So if it is possible to change the politics of Gaza drastically, can one say that the full out attack on Gaza is wrong? Or would that be hypocritical?

Of course, there are more complications. Let me mention two of them. First, there is Hezbollah and Iran – if a second front is begun in the North of Israel, not only will Hezbollah and Lebanon be drawn into the battle, it is likely that Iran, the United States and other countries (on both sides) will also become more intensely involved. Where this would end, no one can say. Is this possibility so frightening that Israel (and the United States) should tread more softly? It’s another question that I have no answer for.

Secondly, it’s the question of the population of Gaza itself. It’s too easy to say that the problem is Hamas, and that – in the most recent polling – less than 50% of Gaza residents support Hamas. But virtually all residents of Gaza were born after 1948, after the birth of the State of Israel. They have only known Israel as a powerful neighbor, and since 1967, 56 years ago, as a controlling neighbor. They have all grown up with schooling that teaches them that Israel and Jews are not only the enemy, but evil incarnate. This hasn’t been a side subject in Gaza schools, but it has been the core of the education of all Gaza children. It won’t be easy to find moderate political leaders to run a Gaza government.

Again, I have no answers. That isn’t a problem. No one cares if I have any answers. But there is a problem. The problem is that nobody has an answer. That is a real problem.

There are many things that I am not. One of the things that I am not is a professional military strategist. Come to think of it, I am not even an amateur military strategist. But I do have a degree of common sense.

The figures I have seen show that over the last five days, 1200 Israelis have been killed, thousands of others injured, and about 150 taken hostage. Since then, Israel has pounded – and continues to pound – Gaza from the air, and has stopped any deliveries of water, electricity or anything else into Gaza. At this point, it also appears that the death and injury totals in Gaza have exceeded those in Israel.

It has been reported that Israel now has 300,000 troops at or near the Gaza border and that a house to house land invasion is coming soon. My advice is to forget about any land invasion at this time.

Why? Because Israel already has 1200 dead and thousands more injured. I would assume that any land attack would most likely lead to the death of the hostages, and to the death and serious injuries of hundreds or thousands more Israeli soldiers. And to what end?

Now, because I am not a military strategist, I have no idea what is in the minds of Israel’s military leaders. They may know something that I don’t know (gee, I hope so), but what could it be that makes it worth putting so many more Israeli lives at risk? What do they hope to accomplish?

During the Vietnam War, the Vietcong had an entire network of tunnels throughout the country. A friend of mine who was an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army learned, decades after he was stationed in rural Vietnam at an American base dedicated to routing out the Vietcong, that the very Vietcong he was trying to find were, in fact, right under him in a group of tunnels, where they were listening to everything the Americans were saying. Who knew?

We are told that Hamas has built tunnels under much of Gaza, and especially under Gaza City. We are told that hostages may have been hidden throughout the Strip in various of those tunnels. If the hostages are hidden away in the tunnels, shouldn’t you assume that many Hamas leaders would be similarly out of sight in these tunnels? And if both the hostages and Hamas personnel are beneath the streets, you can quickly see that house to house combat won’t take you where you need to go. You need to go into the deep tunnels – and how do you do that? And do you really want your army in deep tunnels that are unknown to you, but perfectly known to your enemy? So why wouldn’t you think that Israeli soldiers entering tunnels would easily be ambushed and the hostages immediately murdered?

So what should the end game be in Gaza? No one seems interested in re-occupation. Starvation of 2,000,000 people from isolation doesn’t seem like the way to go. And you have 150 hostages to worry about.

Can the Gaza problem be solved militarily, or does it have to solved politically? And, if you need to solve it politically, how do you do that? How, as some Israeli officials have said, do you “destroy Hamas”? First, apparently some of the top Hamas officials aren’t in Gaza now, but are in places like Doha and Beirut. Is Israel going after them there? Second, even if these leaders could be neutralized, aren’t there people in Gaza ready to replace them?

In World War II, Germany’s Nazi government was ended when they admitted defeat and gave up. I don’t see Hamas doing that, do you? And, after they gave up, there was another group of Germans ready to form a new government on totally different terms. If that group exists in Gaza, I haven’t heard of them. So barring military occupation (whether by Israel or by some sort of coalition), how would you bring about a change of government? And especially, how could you bring about a change to a government which would be willing to work out a peace with Israel? Of course, one possibility would be to turn Gaza over to the Palestinian Authority, and unite its government with the West Bank government. But, in the opinion of almost everyone, the PA is very unpopular in the West Bank. And who is more popular in the West Bank? You guessed it – Hamas.

So, everything is beyond complicated. And the instability of the Israeli government makes things even harder. Yes, there has been an announcement of a limited “unity government”, but “unity” does not mean “unified”; it just means that additional voices have been added to the cacophony of an already motley crew.

So what do you think should happen next. Are any of you a military strategist? I didn’t think so.

There are so many unknowns that I don’t even know what to write about. So many questions. Israeli security debacle. Hamas’ violence. Palestinian rights. Israeli fear. Failure of Israeli government. Failure of the Republican Party. Russia in Ukraine. Iran. Too, too much.

So I divert. I chanced upon a poem yesterday, written by John Farrar. You may know of Farrar (more likely, you may not) as the founder of the publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux. But he was also a poet – and a clever one at that.

So, bear with me a minute. Sit back and relax and read this poem to the end. The, go about your day, and fix the world.

I am just going to quote his poem:

The Jealous Lover

“If I were an Arab

With a battle horse to ride,

I’d show you how I loved you,

I’d win you for my bride.

I’d ride across the desert

Like an untamed, unfixed star

Where the white moons fire the spear

And the ghosts of warriors are

I’d whirl my sword in golden gyres,

Till my enemy lay dead,

And where I held my gift for you,

The white horse would be red.

But I am not an Arab

So I must make you rhymes

And send you pale tea roses,

Oh! these are stupid times.

And if I were an Arab,

Bringing gifts to you

and found beneath your tent flap

Another Arab, too.

I’d choke him like a rabbit

I’d crack him rib and thigh

I’d throw his carcass to the night

And toss his wet head high.

I’d throw his head across the moon

Till all the sky was red,

I’d toss his trappings to the stars,

I’d dance upon him, dead!

I’d catch you with my dripping hands

I’d light you like a flame,

Till you forgot that Arab’s voice,

That Arab’s face and name.

But I am not an Arab,

And when I see him go

As I come up the stairs to you

I smile, and say “hello”.”

It’s not Shakespeare; I understand that.

In 1948, at the time the State of Israel came into existence, the Gaza strip was under the control of Egypt, and had an estimated 80,000 residents. At the time of the 1967 Six Day War, when Egypt was defeated, and Israel took over control of both Gaza and Sinai from Egypt, the population of the Gaza Strip was approximately 300,000. Today, 55 years later, it is over 2 million. It has grown to 2,000,000 as a result of, through the early 1990s, the average Gazan woman having over 8 children, and even today, having an average of more than 4 children, giving it one of the world’s highest fertility rates. This also means that, when you look at Gaza’s population, you see it is a very young population. The median age of a resident of Gaza is approximately 18. The median age in Israel is closer to 30, which is also close to the median age world wide. When your median age is only 18, one thing can be fairly certain. Your population will continue to expand at a rapid rate as years go on. Is it any wonder that Gaza is always ready to explode?

When Egypt and Israel signed a treaty for the first time in 1973, after the Yom Kippur War, in return for recognition and other benefits, Israel gave up the Sinai and returned it to Egypt. It would have given up Gaza as well, I am sure, but Egypt didn’t want it, one example of the greater Arab world shucking off responsibility for the Palestinian Arabs. Gaza remained under Israeli occupation until 2005, when Israel – under fiery prime minister Ariel Sharon – pulled its military out of Gaza, and, at some cost, required all Israeli Jews to leave Gaza, in the hope that peace would be the result. It was a complete pullout from the Gaza territory, but not from its connection to Gaza, because Gaza was dependent on Israel for a number of things, including its electric power, some of its food supply, some of its water supply, and more. And of course, Israel was concerned about its own security, controlling two of the three land entries into Gaza (the third is controlled by Egypt), and wanting to keep materiel that could be used for military purposes from entering Gaza, whether by land, sea or air. So, although not occupied, Gaza was still somewhat beholden to Israel, and to Egypt with whom Israel was cooperating.

From 1948 onward, Palestinian ideology has viewed Israel as an occupying power, occupying land rightfully belonging to Palestinians, not to Jews, who were viewed as European (or North African, or Asian) occupiers. Of course, as your high school math shows you, if the population of Gaza was only 80,000 in 1948 and is now over 2,000,000, virtually no one now alive in Gaza had any personal connection with land that is now Israel at any time. Yet, the ideology remains (as had the Jewish people’s belief in the “right of return” for millenia).

In 2006, less than two years after Israel gave up military occupation, after an election that may or may not have legitimate, and some intense internal battles, the ruling Palestinian Authority was replaced by Hamas as the government of Gaza. Today, there is no reason to think that the majority of Gaza does not support Hamas, a militant organization created in the late 1980s with the support of the Muslim Brotherhood, headquartered in Egypt.

Hamas makes no bones about it. It’s charter talks about the destruction or obliteration of the State of Israel (which is of course does not mention by name), and the creation of a Palestinian state throughout what is now Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. It rejects the continual existence of Israel, and certainly is not in favor of a two state solution. So, the idea of Israel (or anyone else) negotiating a settlement with Israel is fantasy.

I try to figure out what Hamas was thinking about when they launched this horrific attack on Israel. My guess is that even they were surprised at how successful it was, and that they have hopes that it will become more successful yet. What do I mean by that?

Clearly Hamas knows it cannot win a conventional war with Israel. It must also have known that the majority of its soldiers sent into Israel would die – that this would be a suicide mission for them. How much religious longing for martyrdom and dozens of virgins were in the mind of these pawns of Hamas, I don’t know. Obviously, for some it meant nothing, and for some it meant something.

I am assume that Hamas is ecstatic about having brought 150 Israelis back to Gaza as hostages. This clearly changes the dynamics of the conflict – unless Israel decides to proceed as if the hostages weren’t there. I think that’s a possibility, although an unlikely one.

I also assume that Hamas thought that Israel’s resistance would be weakened by its internal political dissension, especially as so many reservists seemed to suggest that they would stay at home in bed if called to active duty. This was a miscalculation.

But, at the end, I think that Hamas hoped (expected, knows) that other forces might join the battle – the large numbers of young men in the West Bank, the Iranian backed groups hanging out in Lebanon and Syria, maybe the Arabs living within Israel and maybe Iran itself. Yes, if that happens, all bets are off as to how things would end.

And, just as both Israeli and intelligence failed in Gaza (where it should have been relatively easy), it is probably even more weak in these other places, so it may be that – today – no one knows what likely steps third parties might take.

As Israel pummels Gaza, we will see what the reactions are. How will the hostages fare? And at what point will Iran or others say “enough, already”, we are entering the battle?

And what if no one joins in, and Hamas says “you win for now”? There will still be 2 million people in Gaza, and more as time goes on. All waiting for the opportunity to take revenge against those who are today doing the same.

More to come……unfortunately. Keep tuned.

We went to American University’s Katzen Museum to see the one woman show featuring the art of our old friend, Lilian Klein Abensohn. After a career as a biblical scholar and university teacher, Lilian decided to become an artist. And she succeeded, as you can see.

Covid kept us from the opening of the show several weeks ago, and we didn’t go until yesterday. We were impressed as I knew we would be, and you should see it if you are here in town. It only runs to this coming Sunday. The museum is closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

Lilian’s paintings in this exhibit are all still lifes. And, as you will tell as you read the explanations posted at the exhibit, each of these paintings has a biblical base, and each a clever erotic sense.

While you are at the Katzen, also look at the photographic exhibit, Lost Europe, a large exhibit of black and white photos of Ukraine, taken by three photographers over a number of years. This exhibit will be there until mid-December.

Before our museum trip, it was Simchat Torah services at Adas Israel, and after the museum, we were glued to our TV and our smart phones and the tragedy unfolding in Israel.

(By the way, I figured out how to illustrate my blog. Only took me 11 months.)

So, we were on our way to a used book sale (what else?) in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, but decided to stop for lunch on the way. Boonsboro, Maryland seemed like a likely spot. All we needed was a restaurant and a parking space. And, indeed, we saw a small sign that said “Mini-Mart and Diner”, and then we saw a parking place. Right in the middle of this charming, historic town.

We went in the door and saw that we were in a mini-mart that sorta looked like a second class truck stop on a highway. To the right, was an open door and a sign that said “Please Seat Yourself” and a room that had maybe six tables. One table had two men and a young child, perhaps a year old. One table had a young couple, he with a beard and a laptop, she who stood up the entire time, drinking a cup of coffee and doing things on her smartphone, while she was talking to him. A third table had a single tall man, and cup of coffee and a phone and some papers. A fourth table had a few dirty dishes. So we had two choices, a table right next to the door, and a table between the baby table and the young couple table. This is the one we chose.

A rather disheveled looking woman came and gave us each a regular menu (a lot on it) and a piece of paper with the specials. She only had one of the paper with the specials, which seemed to upset her – with what or with whom, we were not sure. She found it, or someone gave it to her, and she gave it to us.

While this was going on, the tall man at the back table got up, took a broom and started sweeping the floor under another table, where someone must have recently sat. Since I thought that he was a customer, it surprised me that he was sweeping, and it occurred to me that he must work at, or own, the mini-mart. It was generally hard to tell anyone’s position – for example, the young woman standing up with her phone and her coffee had a number of conversations with the tall man. Her boyfriend (that is what he looked like) said nothing and didn’t join into the conversations. I didn’t know if she was also an owner or family member, or maybe just a local who knew everyone…..or what? It all seemed confusing.

The tall man then asked us what we wanted to drink. We told him, and started to order, but he told us he was just going to get us the drinks and then get our order. He said that was because, to take the order, he needed a “machine”. In a few minutes, he came with my coffee, and a few minutes later, the disheveled woman brought Edie her ice tea.

A young man (maybe he was 16 – maybe) was asking the baby table what they wanted to eat. He seemed to be having trouble, and the disheveled woman was trying to help him out.

The tall man then asked us what we wanted. We told him that we each wanted a vegetable omelet, and he was about to take our order, when the disheveled woman came to him and said “Dom will do it.” He smiled and walked away. He told us that this was Dom’s second day, and we should be nice to him.

Dom came to us with the machine and asked what we wanted. We told him that we each wanted the vegetable omelet and hash browns, but that we didn’t want the “creamy jalapeno sauce” that the menu said would be on the omelet. This really puzzled poor Dom, because he couldn’t figure out how to tell the machine to leave out the sauce. But he called over the tall man, who showed him how to pull up something called “special comments” or something like that.

Dom was very nice, and very unsure of himself, and it was obviously difficult for him to take our order on this machine (it may be that just talking to anyone was hard for him; in fact we may have been the first people he ever talked with). But then there were other questions, each of which he had to ask each of us separately and input separately into the machine. Do we want hash browns, or tater tots? Since we don’t want the jalapeno sauce, do we not want any peppers in the omelet? Do we want toast or a muffin or a biscuit? What type of topping do you want on your biscuit – butter or nothing or ??? The ordering process took so much time that we could have already finished our omelets if the tall man had taken our order when he tried to. Dom apologized for how long it took.

About 6 hours later, the omelets were delivered. In the meantime, we watched the baby throw crayons on the floor, we watched two more people come in the “diner”, watched the girl with the coffee speak with the tall man, and tried to figure out the Keno and Horse Race screens flashing on the wall above the door. And we also talked to the disheveled lady, who told us that it was impossible to get anyone to work in the diner, that it was Dom’s first day (yes, it was his second, but on his first, he just watched) and he was wonderful, but the others just drove you nuts, and besides that no young people wanted to work. How do they money? What do they do all day? How can you not want to work? She told us she was even thinking of closing the diner at the end of the year.

Eventually, our omelets came. They were very attractive looking, moist and fluffy, with cheese on the top, and the hash browns looked just right. The biscuit was an English muffin, it was buttered, and that was fine. But as we ate into the omelet, we realized something was missing – vegetables.

The next time the disheveled woman was in our neighborhood I called her over and asked her why there were no vegetables. She was taken aback and asked us if we had ordered a cheese omelet or a vegetable omelet. I thought about asking her to ask her machine, but I didn’t. We told her that it was okay, that the omelet was very good and we were happy with it, but just wanted her to know. We didn’t even tell her that our biscuit turned into an English muffin. The muffin would have actually been a better choice.

The disheveled woman went and talked to the cook (we actually thought she was the cook and that she might have gone and talked to herself), and came back and said that the cook told her that he thought that he had made the most beautiful, fluffy omelets, that he was so proud of them and how they looked when he folded them over, that he just forgot to put the vegetables in. Mistakes happen, she said. It seemed like the tall man wanted to express his anger to the cook, but the disheveled woman told him not to. It was just one of those things, she said.

We paid, and we left. Everyone wished us a good day and a good weekend. They were all very nice. I felt we had been given a rare treat. Good food, coffee and tea. And an hour’s entertainment. All for about $20.

If you ever get hungry in Boonsboro, stop by the Mini-mart Diner and give our best to the disheveled lady, the tall man, Dominick, the mystery cook, and – if they are still there – the young man with the laptop who doesn’t talk and his girlfriend, who will be standing up. And remember, it doesn’t matter what you order. It’s just like the telephone game – the order goes from you to Dom to his machine to the disheveled lady to the cook (maybe) and by the time it gets to the cook, it will bear no relationship to what you ordered. But I think you will be very well satisfied because it will be very good.