The Satmar Rebbe and history in hindsight

Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, the Satmar Rebbe, was a flawed personality; arrogant, ambitious and fear-ridden. An article in the Tablet by Menachem Keren-Katz gives a hostile, critical account of a narrow-minded, intransigent man, who abandoned his congregation, was quite unable or unwilling to cooperate with other leaders of the Jewish world, and by not warning his followers of the plans of the Nazis to annihilate the Jews of Europe responsible for their murder. He was a staunch anti-Zionist, who blamed the Zionists for the Holocaust, for provoking the enmity of Hitler and for forestalling the coming of the Mashiah. But the article was written with hindsight. In the 1930s and the 1940s the Rebbe could well have been aware of the dangers, and did at times do whatever he thought appropriate to save himself, but he had to make his judgement on the basis of what he knew. He knew that the Hassidim could live a religious, uncompromising  ultra-observant Jewish life in Sighet. He also knew of the dangers of assimilation and the likely abandonment of such life away from the natural environment of his Hassidim in America, Palestine and the rest of the world. He saw surviving in Sighet, even if it meant accommodation with hostile governments less of a threat than leaving their  habitat and trying to pursue their traditional way life away from there. Compromising with the enemy and bribing them was the way Jewish communities had coped with  threat in the past. No one, not the Rebbe, not anyone could have foreseen the irrational, single-minded persecution of Jews on a huge industrial scale. The Rebbe is depicted in the article concealed behind a curtain in the back of the cattle train on his way to Bergen-Belsen, not talking to anyone, ashamed and humiliated. He was just a flawed human being and should be judges as such.

The duty of journalists

Today the Dominion published an article about Gaza, taken from The Times, which reads like an straight Hamas media release. So there is no water and electricity in Gaza, nine children were killed in the al-Shati refugee camp. War is war. I, the reader didn't learn anything more than that reading the article. Were there rockets fired from the refugee camp, were there rockets fired from the power station? The article doesn't tell me that. The reason why it doesn't is because journalists have very limited access to sights and information. They see what Hamas lets them see. But if this is the case it is the duty of the journalist to say that I saw this, but Hamas did not let me see more. Previous similar articles showed injured children, women crying, all very sad, but did not say that Hamas used the hospital as its headquarters, stored rockets, and fired rockets from there. For this information I had to go to Tablet Magazine, published in New York. The BBC also shows whatever Hamas shows them to show. Why this bias in the respectable British media against Israel? Is it because genteel, educated, smart and well-mannered Brits can't stand bolshie Jews who stick up for themselves? They prefer the meek, quiet Jews who don't want to stand out, want to blend, assimilate, try to be like Brits, but not too like Brits. Antisemitism is a complex issue. I have a lot of time for the Israelis who think that antisemitism is a disease of Western liberal society, and stuff the antisemites, Jews have to look after themselves. I don't want to imply that Jews couldn't do better, that they should not put up a good fight against antisemitism and against people who judge Israel by their own comfortable liberal standards, not by the realities that Israeli politicians face daily. Nor do I think that Israeli politicians did the right thing by bending to extremist sectional interests. But I expect more from reputable journalists who work for The Times, The Telegraph and the BBC.

Winners and losers

The war in Gaza preys on my mind, as it does on the minds of very many people. While thinking about the current news I am close to finishing David Landau's vast biography of Ariel Sharon. And one of the distressing insights that comes out of that book is Sharon's struggle with his own party, Likud. His fellow parliamentarians vehemently opposed his disengagement plans in Gaza and the West Bank, while the vast majority of Israelis supported it. It was the "Settlers" and the rabbis who were behind the opposition. It was a sad reflection on Israeli democracy, where the popular democratically elected Prime Minister was hamstrung by his own political allies. Now there is a repeat of the war in Gaza. Vast numbers of Palestinians died, and close to fifty Israeli soldiers as of today and three civilians. The numbers probably go up as I type. In any conflict there are winners and losers. The winners in this war are Hamas, who forced Israel to wage a war on their terms and gained the sympathy of the rest of the world, Fatah, who kept out of the conflict and are given credit as peacemakers, the Egyptians  for whom the Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood was a thorn in their side, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the other Sunni Arab states that don't mind that an unruly fundamentalist group gets hammered. The losers are Israel who ended up fighting an unpopular  and unwinnable war with no clear outcome, Netanyahu, who showed little statesmanship, the Zionist dream of a democratic state where Jews and Arabs lived in peace along side each other. tolerance of alternative opinions, where anyone not in 100% agreement with what is going on is branded an enemy, the Americans who invested a lot of political capital in trying to cobble together some sort of peace agreement, and the whole world where outmoded bigotry and antisemitism gained a renewed foothold. 

Guy Boyland, our thoughts are with your family

Taupo is a stunningly beautiful place, peaceful, relaxed., This is where Staff Sergeant Guy Boyland, a combat engineer of the Israeli 7th Armoured Brigade was born. He died, age 21 in Gaza. He was investigating a tunnel when he was killed; he had stabilized some booby traps before being attacked from behind. He was just one of more than forty Israeli soldiers killed in the current conflict. Each of these deaths is a tragedy. Perhaps Gus shouldn't have been there at all. His mother is an Israeli. She met her husband, a New Zealander, and they could have lived a peaceful happy life in Taupo. They didn't move to Israel because of the hard life of Jews in New Zealand, nor did they move there because they were ardent Zionists. They moved there to support Guy's ailing grandparents.They stayed because they liked the kibbutz life style, but they planned to return to New Zealand before the children had to go into the army. In the end the pull of Israel and the army proved stronger than the longing for a safe life. We can only grieve for the loss of a life full of promise, and wish to share our thoughts with Guy's family. 

Lorin Maazel, one of the last great conductors of his generation

Lorin Maazel died at age 84. He along with Leonard Bernstein was among the first American conductors to make a mark on European music. He was a brilliantly talented polymath, a child prodigy who developed into a major conductor, conductor of the Cleveland Symphony, The New York Philharmonic, Pittsburgh Symphony, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and significantly, the Deutsche Oper Berlin from 1965 to 1971. Europeans looked down on American musicians. It took a long time for Europeans, Germans and Austrians in particular to learn that the centre of musical talent had moved to America as a result of Nazi policies and the Holocaust. After the Second World War, German orchestras were desperate to find conductors who were not compromised by the Nazis. They hired the Rumanian Celibidache and the Hungarian Fricsay in Berlin, they invited the Hungarian Ferencsik to take over the Vienna Philharmonic, which did not happen only because the Hungarian communist government stopped him leaving. The Germans and Austrians white-washed their previously compliant Nazis, Karajan, Bohm, Knappertbush, but they did not invite the great German Jewish conductors whom they drove into exile to return, not Otto Klemperer, not Kurt Sanderling, not Bruno Walter, or even Fritz Busch, who was not Jewish, but nevethelesds the Nazis drove him out. This is why the Jewish American Lorin Maazel taking charge of the Berlin Opera was a landmark, just as Leonard Bernstein conducting Mahler in Vienna was. Europe was coming to terms with American Jewish musicians. 

Gaza and unlearned lessons from history

Reading the news from Israel is terribly upsetting. It is upsetting because I feel for the parents and families of the soldiers who fell in battle, the soldiers who were wounded and possibly permanently maimed. I also feel sorry for the victims in Gaza, but the priorities of my sympathy are with the Israeli victims. These also included the people who have to live with frequent air raid sirens, the children who are terrified, the mothers who can't shelter their children from anxiety. But I am also worried about the lessons from history that had not been learned. Israel got bogged down in a war in Lebanon that they could not win and which didn't achieve its aims, only strengthened, not destroyed the PLO. The Americans were defeated in Vietnam, despite vastly superior arms by a highly motivated and well marshalled peasant army. The Americans also got involved in a war in Iraq which only destroyed Iraq as a functioning state at a cost of thousands of American lives. They are still bogged down in an unwinnable war in Afghanistan. Similarly the Russians fought unwinnable wars at great cost in lives in Chechen, in Afghanistan. Perhaps bombing rocket sites and tunnels is a sound military objective, but it is not a satisfactory end game and a long term resolution of the underlying issues. For the last seven years the Israeli policy was not to talk to Hamas, not to negotiate with the enemy. Yet if you want a peaceful resolution you can only talk to your enemy and negotiate with them. You have to learn to understand them. They may not be the nicest people, but not talking to them only fuels bitterness. I, of course don't know if Hamas is prepared to talk to Israelis. I don't know whether there is any possible common ground for negotiation. But a policy of not talking to you is not helpful. The war between Hamas and Israel flared up in 2009, 2012, and yet again in 2014. This must not be repeated in another two years.

John Minto and I

I have never met John Minto fortunately, nor did I have any desire to do so. He is a professional protester who has been protesting for the last thirty years, dragging out his rent-a-crowd. But I should make an effort to understand the man and people like him. I can't accuse him oif being an antisemite, because I suspect that he wouldn't know what an antisemite is if he tripped over one. I don't imagine that he knows enough about Jews to explain why he hates them. And perhaps he doesn't know enough about Israel either, but that doesn't stop him from agitating against it. His solution to the Middle East problem is to close down the Israeli Embassy. Sadly, there is a remote chance that should the DotCom Mana Party get enough votes he might enter parliament on the coat tail of Hone Harawira, who has a reasonable chance, because of his family connections, of winning the seat of the Maori electorate of Te Tai Tokerau. Having John Minto in Parliament would besmirch New Zealand's political reputation. 

Happy old-timers

There was a documentary on television yesterday about people 90 years and over whose well-being has been tracked since the 1980s. These old men and women walked, swam, dived, enjoyed ball-room dancing and a little romance, played bingo, and gave the appearance of being happy. Yet one man, who talked about spending happy hours looking through his photo album with his wife and reflecting on his life, was quite distressed when he failed a psychological assessment that required him to remember three words for a few minutes. His short term memory was impaired. I found this documentary very distressing. I don't plan to take up bowls, golf, ball-room dancing or participate in bingo. I don't plan to drink red wine every day to prolong my life. What I treasure is my mind. So far it seems to be working reasonably well, even if names and titles of books keep dropping out. But the prospects for the future are not good. If I hang in long enough some form of dementia is bound to get me.

Longing for a place that no longer exists

This was the title of Monica Tempian's talk about Rose Auslander last night. The place was Czernowitz, a far-flung outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, known then as Little Vienna and Jerusalem on the Prut because of its large Jewish presence. There is no place now called Czernowitz. It is now Chernivtsi, a Ukranian city, with no or hardly any Jews. When it was under Rumanian rule, in Monica's parents' time it was called Cernăuti. When Monica's grandmother was born and grew up there it was the Jews that gave it its distinctive character as a cultural centre. There were colourful hassidic communities in the area which enhanced the distinctive Jewish diversity of the city. In 1910 28,000 Jews lived there, 32% of the total population. Only a few hundred survived the Holocaust. So the place Rose Auslander longed for only existed in her imagination. She spent the last eight years of her life confined to a room in a Jewish old age home in Dusseldorf, writing poems about her memories. These resonated with the young German audience, who were eager to discover what was lost in their parents' generation. Rose Auslander, though little known in the English speaking world, is a popular major poet in Germany. But longing for a place that only exists in the imagination is one thing, longing for a real place with  a bloody terrible history is another. Mayer Golditch pointed out that he grew up among Rumanian Hassids who survived the Holocaust. They expressed no longing for the palces they came from. They didn't talk about these. They wanted to forget. I can have an emotional response to Hungarian gypsy music that my father loved, I can talk about the great Hungarian football team of the 1950s, but certainly have no longing for Budapest where I grew up, or any other part of my native land. 

It is all over until Moscow 2018

The beautiful game was the winner. With Mario Goetze's goal in the 116th minute of the game Germany won the World Cup. Eleven German and eleven Argentinian men ran around on a beauteously maintained green paddock  chasing a ball for almost two hours with millions of people watching, without scoring until almost the end. It is hard to explain to someone who doesn't appreciate football why this was exciting and not excruciatingly boring, but it was certainly exciting, with near misses, opportunities unrealized, frustrations, incredible ball skills and pushing the limits of exhaustion. Being there, even if only on my television set, was a great exhilarating experience. It was also a happy experience. I might have felt sorry for the Brazilians, some of the teams might have been unlucky not to proceed, but that is football. The impression I took away was the happy carnival atmosphere. Few of the hosts, the Brazilians could afford to be at the games, the white faces greatly outnumbered the black faces, but I hope that those who could not be inside the stadiums could enjoy the spectacle on Copacabana beach. I also hope that all of Brazil will feel good about having hosted this wonderful competition despite not winning the major prize. 

Capitalism New Zealand style

Graeme Hart is the richest New Zealander, the 191st richest person in the world. He is the master of leverage buy-out. After leaving school at 16 he worked as a truck driver and panel beater. Later he had a hire company. He used cash flow of well performing companies to fund borrowing. He bought the Government Printer in 1990, at a time when the government was flogging off assets at well below valuation, just to get rid of them for ideological reasons. He was given generous terms. On the strength of this he bought Whitcoulls the following year. He built on these acquisitions, borrowing against them and ultimately selling them at a profit until he built up a vast holding of businesses, buying them cheap, stripping them and then selling them on. Recently he sold Goodman Fielder, a manufacturer of food products. While he owned the company he stripped its assets, reduced expenses, including a 26% reduction in the earnings of the bread delivery drivers. While making a vast fortune for himself, he added nothing to the productivity of these businesses or the productivity of the country. I don't think that Capitalism was meant to be using other people's money to enrich yourself without adding to the total value of the goods produced. See Chalkie's comments in today's DomPost http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/opinion-analysis/10246153/Billionaires-ethos-more-about-cutting-than-creating

Germany and the World Cup

The day Germany played Belgium in the World Cup Quarter Finals was the sixtieth anniversary of their first World Cup triumph. They played Hungary in the finals in Berne in 1954. Earlier in the tournament  the Hungarians beat them 8-3. In the finals the Hungarians lead 2-0 when the Germans came back and scored three goals to beat the Hungarians in this most critical game. It was a critical game not only because it was the World Cop Final, but because it was a contest between East and West, Capitalism and Communism. It was possibly the most brutal encounter in the history of the World Cup. It was more about politics at the height of the Cold War than about football. We have come a long way in these sixty years. The current games in Brazil are just a huge carnival. In the end it doesn't matter to the world at large who wins and who loses, it is about people having a good time. Not all people of course. The stands are full of beautiful pink women and men. Black women and men, beautiful or otherwise are conspicuously absent. Brazil is a predominately  Afro-South American country, but few Afro-South American Brazilians can afford the price of these matches. But perhaps in the end they will all benefit from the investment, from the money the tourists spend, and should the Brazilians win the tournament, from the collective honour and glory. It might also provide some poor Brazilian lads with exceptionally ball skills the opportunity to pick up a lucrative contract with some European club and earn really big bucks.

Mohammed Abu Khdeir

My heart goes out to the parents, family and friends of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, the Palestinian teenager whose burned body was found in the Jerusalem forest. At present it is not known who is responsible for his death. I just hope against hope that it was not Jewish extremists who killed him in revenge for the murder of the three Israeli youths. Should it be Jews responsible for this atrocity their action would divide Israel and the whole Jewish world. Such revenge killing cannot be condoned in any circumstance. What did the murderers hope to achieve? I what way did they imagine that this murder would make Israel a safer place, bring peace nearer? And if they were religious zealots I hope that the entire religious leadership would condemn them.

Robert McNamara's Lessons

Robert McNamara was Secretary of Defence under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. In the documentary film, The Fog of War (2003), which I watched this week, he reflects on the mistakes he made in his time as well the things that he got right. He was a seriously brilliant man, and his advice is worth listening to. He discussed two great conflicts in his time, one of which was resolved well, the other lead to disaster. During the Cuban missile crisis (1962), the Russians placed ballistic missiles in Cuba, which threatened the United States. The Chiefs, Commanders of the armed forces, recommended an attack on Cuba, which would have resulted in the annihilation of the country. President Kennedy refused to take this advice. Instead, he negotiated with Khrushchev through a former ambassador who knew him, and the Russians dismantled the missiles. The Americans could claim that they protected the country from the threat of  of these missiles, while Khrushchev could claim that he defended Cuba from American attack. It was a win-win for both sides. In Vietnam President Johnson and his military advisers thought that they were fighting to save the world from the spread of communism, while the Vietnamese fought to free themselves from colonialism, as they did fighting the French. They had no intention of spreading Chinese communism, they had fought the Chinese for generations. But the Americans and the Chinese didn't listen to each other and didn't take the trouble to undeerstand each other. McNamara's first rule is:

1. Empathize with your enemy

I am concerned about the current sabre rattling of the Israeli government, blaming the Hamas administration for the murder of the three boys and inflaming hatred within Israel, possibly encouraging vigilante action. It so happens that I am in the middle of reading David Landau's very long biography of Ariel Sharon. Begin and Sharon got involved in the Lebanon war on the pretext that they needed to revenge the murder of an Israeli diplomat. The war was a disaster and lead to the death of hundreds of young Israelis. It would be a tragedy if the murder of the three students would be used, as it threatens to be used, for political ends. It would be a more fitting memorial for them if the tragedy would lead to talks and a better understanding of the enemy, and perhaps a cessation of hostilities if not peace.