Who am I to judge?

Conservative Catholics demand that the Pope withdraw his stand on gay marriages. Conservatives of whatever stripe demand that the world should stay still, that the clocks should stop. They have an unshakeable faith in their rightness. Whatever they strand for is right, whatever is different from that is wrong. They have a clear understanding of sin, and sin belongs to others. Pope Francis is a greater man with a broader vision than any of his critics. He said that it is not for him to judge. If it is not for the Pope to judge, whose infallibility is the corner stone of Catholic belief, it is certainly not for anyone else to judge, who is steeped in his or her own bigotry. The world is full of judges, those who call anyone a sinner, a heretic, a traitor, who depart from their own hidebound set of beliefs. It takes the humility of a great man, a Pope Francis, to put such judges in their place.

My friend Sam

Sam Gezentsvey passed away this week quietly in his sleep, a day before his 91st birthday. Sam was a musician, a clarinet player. Some years ago I thought that a Jewish community ought to have people performing Jewish music, a Klezmer band, and asked Sam to get a group together. We were an assorted bunch, some of us could play an instrument with a measure of competence, others were complete beginners, yet others were a bit like me, I knew how to play the violin, but lacked confidence, but it didn't matter, it is people getting together to play Jewish music that mattered. Sam threw himself into the challenge to cobble some kind of ensemble together from this mixed bunch. He wrote music for us, rehearsed us with patience and at time exasperation. We were not the Kiev Philharmonic. But making music was important to Sam. More important for him than for some of us. We just want to have fun as one of us said. To have fun, Sam said, you play cards. Music is serious business. The music he wrote for us was more Red Army Band than Philharmonic, perhaps a bit corny, but Sam was a simple soul, smiling, lovable. In reality, we didn't know Sam. Some of him was left behind in Kiev, where he taught music and played the clarinet and saxophone. Some of him died when Sarah, his beautiful wife, died. Sam and Sarah were a close inseparable couple who complemented each other, Sarah, the assertive school teacher, who was ever prepared to speak her mind and stand up for what she believed, Sam the musician, the artist with a song in his heart. They moved to Wellington when their son, Yury, was appointed Principal First Violin in the NZ Symphony Orchestra. Yury was the apple of the eyes of Sam and Sarah. They gave up their lives in Kiev and followed him to New Zealand. Sarah could get by in English, Sam had to learn the language late in life, but he mastered it in his own idiosyncratic way, and they settled into their new environment with its culture far removed from the culture they were brought up in. They became involved in the Jewish community, Sarah was a vocal and respected member of the Board with strong opinions, Sam taught music at Rongotai College. They made friends, they were local identities. They had the joy of witnessing their son's musical and daughter-in-law's literary success, and above all the pleasure of seeing their three grand-daughters grow into lovely young women. Sam also had the great privilege of knowing his three great-grandchildren and the knowledge of a fourth on the way. Sam was a humble man but he was rewarded with a long full life, and will live in the memories of all of us who knew him. 

Slaughter on the Somme

Last week I went to a talk at the National library at which three librarianas talked about their projects. One of them, Peter Ireland, talked about William Clachan, a New Zealand soldier who fought at the Battle of the Somme and was later killed in Malawi, Africa. In a letter to his mother, Clachan describes the battle. On 15 September, 1916, at 6.20 am 6000 men went over the top, that is, emerged from the trenches and rushed towards the German lines. Eight minutes later, faced with German machine gun fire, 600 were dead, 1200 wounded or missing. He describes the line of men all emerging from the trenches simultaneous and mowed down in a line. The man who gave the order to charge faced an enormous moral responsibility. He was probably never called to account. The battle was the brainchild of the British Commander in Chief, Sir Douglas Haig. To him the hundreds of thousands of men at his disposal were like toy soldiers. He could move them here, he could move them there. The enemy line won't budge throw a few more thousand men at it. No one counted the value of lives lost. This kind of thinking was also reflected in Clachan's letter. He mentioned that his barman was shot, that a lance corporal was killed, but to him they were just bodies, rank and number. They had no names, let alone family, lives left behind. In total, there were 618,257 Allied and 434,500 German casualties. The allies gained 12 km of ground. Haig was loaded with honours and medals, and was buried in 1928 amid great pomp and ceremony, but historians of recent times considered him the worst general of the First World War, someone mired in old strategic thinking. Blaming generals for their folly may be justifiable, but at the root, blame the idea of nations fighting nations, throwing vast resources at murdering each other. It was Napoleon who created the idea of a national army, the Grand Army. At the Battle of Borodino there were 250,000 troops involved and there were 70,000 casualties. There were 850,000 Axis causalities and 1,129,619 Soviet causalities at the Battle of Stalingrad. The damage these huge encounters did to the survivors and the collective memories of the combatant nations is incalculable. With the advances in technology and the consequent rethinking of military strategy it is unlikely that there will ever be such great battles again. At the root of the tragedy is the thinking of the casualties as nameless soldiers, the 'lance-corporal', the 'batman', the poor bugger who copped the bullet.

The doubts of Victor Gollancz, publisher and Englishman.

I have to clear my shelves, and in particular, my bookshelves, and discard what I no longer want. When I was still a bookseller and was interested in the book trade I bought every book on publishing I came across, and I picked up Victor Gollancz two autobiographical ruminations, My Dear Timothy long-winded letters to his grandson, which I have never read. Victor Gollancz was highly respected in the circles I moved in for his liberal views, but in My Dear Timothy he dwells at great length on Orthodox Judaism. This clearly bothered him, and he tried to explain to his grandson, no longer Jewish, where he stood. He himself was the grandson of an eminent cantor and nephew of a great rabbinical authority. His father was a religious, man practising an orthodox religious life. For his father orthodox Jewish observance meant that you followed the rules and never asked the reasons why. If Shabbat came in at an inconvenient time you walked home from school instead of catching the bus. You fasted on fast days even if you had to atone for sins you could not possibly have committed. You ate certain foods and not others even if it meant turning down a dinner invitation by some great dignitaries. This made it hard for Victor to fit into British society, to fully enjoy his schooling at St Paul’s and at Oxford. These required compromises. He would compromise his religious beliefs, because some of them made no sense to him; by seeking rational explanations the compromise was easier. But when his pro-communist beliefs came under scrutiny he was reluctant to compromise. His firm published the early books of George Orwell, but wouldn't publish Animal Farm because that was deemed offensive to Soviet communist ideology. Turning Animal Farm and later Nineteen eighty-four down was not a smart publishing business decision. But living in England as a successful, highly regarded Englishman Victor Gollancz had to jettison his father's values and principles. He was a charming, esteemed businessman and publisher, a colourful prolific writer, but neither quite a Jew nor quite an Englishman.

China and in the context of world history

Recently I attended a talk about Liang Qichao, the Chinese scholar, journalist and politician, and it brought home to me how little I know about Chinese history. With this in mind, I read Rana Mitter's A Bitter Revolution: China's Struggle with the Modern World. Mitter sets what was going on in China in the context of what was happening in the rest of the world, a very broad approach to understanding history. China was the victim of imperialism since the Opium Wars of 1839. The British, and later the French and the Germans, and ultimately the Japanese, saw China as a backward country there to be exploited. In 1919, the Treaty of Versailles, where China failed to regain the Shandong province that was until then occupied by the Germans, brought home the high-handed imperialist view of China, and the resentment over this issue lead to the May 4 uprising. The protest was against imperialism, and colonialism. The protesters demanded modernization, democracy, and the end of Confucian domination of the Chinese social order. These demands kept recurring throughout the turbulent history of twentieth century China, although the meaning of these terms was understood differently by Nationalists, Communists, and other reformers. Just as in the rest of the world, particularly in Europe, modernization could mean the tradition of eighteenth and nineteenth century enlightenment, empirical science, and a rejection of religion, superstition, and myths about nationhood. It could also mean the exact opposite, a romantic view of the myths of the 'volk' the primitive wisdom of the simple people of the land, folk stories, tradition. Democracy was seen as a political system that enfranchised the individual, or alternatively, as seen though Fascism, the embodiment of the will of the people as manifested through a supreme leader. Just as in Europe, these conflicting views are reflected in the history of modern China. Mitter describes the changes in Chinese thinking through a re-evaluation of the writings of a handful of significant writers, Zou Taofen, Lu Xun, Ding Ling, and others, and the way these were interpreted at different times. He also draws parallels between Mao Zedung and his views of communism and that of Stalin, Gorbachev, and the disintegrating Soviet empire. Using a very broad brush, Rana Mitter not only wrote a fascinating account of modern China, but provided an insight into the key developments of world history. 

Palestinians though the eyes of a Zionist

Between the ages of 12 and 14 I was a Zionist and a Communist, a dedicated member of HaShomer Hatzair. I knew how the world worked, I had answers to the problems confronting the world. I had a clear vision of right and wrong. The wrong was the murder of Jews. The right was resistance, fighting back like Bar Kochba. I knew nothing about Bar Kochba's messianic pretensions, about Betar and the tragedy he brought down on the remnant of Jews in the land of Palestina. All that I knew was that he wouldn't put up with Roman persecution and fought back. The heroes were the resistance fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto. I knew of no other instances of resistance. My personal hero was the brother of Julika, who when attacked at the university by his patriotic noble fellow students, lashed out with his knuckleduster, floored one and killed him. He was on the next train, out of the country, but certainly taught that student to show respect to Jews. The answer to the Jewish question was socialism. Fascism was the by-product of Capitalism. Socialism, as practised in the socialist kibbutzim was the way to stop the resurgence of Fascism. And unlike some other Zionists, we recognized that there was an Arab population in the land of Israel, but knew that the Arab poor, the workers, the fellahin, would rise up against their feudal landlords, their exploiters, and join the Jews in their struggle for a just, fair world. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the leader of the Arabs fighting Jewish settlement, showed his true colours by aligning himself with Hitler. He was the creature of the Arab feudal class, the absentee landlords, the oppressors of the poor Arab peasants. I knew that Jews and the exploited poor Arabs had a common cause. And indeed, the Arab workers working for Jews, the Arab villagers living in villages near Jewish settlements flourished as a result of the skills, the single-minded work ethic and enterprise the Jews brought with them. The Jews brought them prosperity. It was the Arab ruling class and its obscurantist Islamic priests that brought disaster on them. Perhaps there is some truth in this reading of history by a fourteen year old teenager. History is not simple and our understanding of it depends on the narrative framework that colours our views.

A counter-history of Palestine and Israel

Faisal I bin Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi, King of Iraq, until he died of suspected arsenic poisoning at a young age, was a patron, perhaps a friend of that most arrogant, loud-mouth British imperialist, Thomas Edward Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia. Faisal, a wily Arab desert chief, had a clearer eye for an advantage for his people than most Arab patriots. Like the Japanese and the Koreans, he believed that if the Jews are so smart that they control the world he would want to have Jews on his side. In his letter to Chaim Weizmann he pledged his support for Jewish immigration to Palestine. He wrote “we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home... I look forward, and my people with me look forward, to a future in which we will help you and you will help us, so that the countries in which we are mutually interested may once again take their places in the community of the civilised peoples of the world." Tragically, some Arab nationalists preferred to long for a distant romanticized past than to live in their time. If you describe the history of the Middle East from the Jewish vantage point you recount a story of Arab hostility, threat to Jewish existence, and ultimately the triumph of Jews over the Arabs. The Palestinian narrative is one of victimhood. But in reality, the story of the Jews, the establishment of a Jewish State, is a minor event in the historic landscape of the Arab world. The Arab story is a struggle against colonialism, and the failure of Arabs to talk to each other and forge an Arab state in the territories formerly ruled by Turks and later by European colonizers, an Arab State, that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Sea, a country bound together by a common language, and shared cultural, religious and historical heritage. Over the years there were attempts to create such an entity. There was a pan-Islamic conference in Jerusalem in 1931 and the Arab Independence Party was formed with the

participation by Palestinian and Iraqi activists to achieve Arab unity and solidarity. They elected Hajj Amin al Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem as their leader. He, far from bringing Arabs together, fomented the Arab revolt that lead to the murder of Jews; instead of noting the new found prosperity of the Arab villagers living near Jewish settlements, he brought destruction on his own people. The attack on the Jewish settlers instigated the formation of Jewish armed resistance,  which ultimately became the strong army that defeated the combined Arab armies. Attempt to form an Arab League was jeopardized by rivalry between Iraq and Egypt. Nasser tried to form an Arab League and brought Egypt and Syria together in the United Arab Republic, but he failed to enlist other Arab states and this joint enterprise only lasted for a short time. Gaddafi attempted to unite Libya, Egypt, Sudan and Syria to form the Federation of Arab Republics, but this like the United Arab Republic failed. The Ba'ath parties of Iraq and Syria, working with socialists and communists failed to unite. The Saudi royals sought to counter the influences of Marxism-Leninism and Arab nationalism promoted Islamism as an alternative. This lead to a bloody religious conflict between sects of Islam and the slaughter of Arabs who were not Muslims. The one thing that all Arab countries agreed on was their hostility to Israel. With the advent of Palestinian nationalisation, the unfortunate dream child of Arafat, the debate was between those who believed that pan-Arab unity would bring about the destruction of Israel and those who thought that the destruction of Israel would bring about Arab unity. Feisal's holistic, broad-minded view was forgotten, yet had the Arabs made use of Jewish know-how, Jewish skills, instead of trying to eliminate Jews, the whole Arab region would have benefited, as the Arabs had befitted from Jewish settlement in the 1920s and 1930s, and all countries that made Jews welcome had benefited. The Middle East, the Fertile Crescent would now be a prosperous region of the world. We can't turn the clock back, history cannot be undone, but looking towards to the future, perhaps this generation, or the next, will learn lessons from the past and embrace Jews, and in particular, the Arab Jews who form a majority of Israelis now, as vital part of the region.

.

Ari Shavit's Promised Land

Ari Shavit is a respected journalist, a contributor to Haaretz with an impeccable old Zionist pedigree. His book, My Promised Land (New York 2014) drew fire from critics both on the left and on the right. But although reviewers in the Guardian, the Jewish Journal and The New York Times Review of Books discussed the book in terms of the left and right divide they lost sight of the existential issues at the heart of the book, the survival of the Jewish people in an ever hostile world. 'For as long as I can remember I remember fear' is the opening sentence of the book. 'One day, I dreaded', he continues, '… a mythological tsunami would strike our shores and sweep my Israel away. It would become another Atlantis, lost in the depth of the sea'. The Jews of the Diaspora face an even greater threat. Demography, as Shavit reads it, suggest that Jews face extinction: the Jewish population of Britain, Western Europe and ultimately America will shrink, schools and synagogues will close, the rate of intermarriage will rise, the non-Orthodox Jewish people might gradually disappear. This is a very Zionist view of the Jewish world, after all, the small Wellington Jewish Community in far flung New Zealand survived for 172 years, grew and shrunk over this time, but in its modest small way continues to thrive and if this is true of Wellington it is likely to be even more true of the large Jewish communities of America, Europe, Australia and South Africa. Of more concern, however, for Shavit, is the survival of the essence of the Zionist vision that was the driving force of the modern day political miracle that is the State of Israel. A small, underdeveloped, backward province of the Ottoman Empire, was transformed into a country of Jews, its Jewish population increased ten fold over its seventy years of existence, it became a dynamic economic, scientific, cultural and military power. But there was a great cost involved in this. The Palestinian inhabitants of the land who were driven out paid this cost. Yes, they were driven out, not left voluntarily as the lies fed to me by generation of Zionist propagandists told me. The price was also paid by the immigrants from Arab lands, many of whom left behind comfortable lives, respected stations in society, to be considered second rate citizens in a country dominated by an Ashkenazi Zionist elite, and was paid by survivors of the European Holocaust whose cultural values and their sense of loss were not appreciated by the Zionist pioneers who wanted to build a land of new muscular Jews without the baggage of the old world. And the price was paid in the currency of moral ambivalence. Israel became a coloniser, an oppressor, an occupier of other people, a people of torturers, prison guards, thugs, and thieves. The country changed from a land of idealists, of exemplary moral rectitude, to a country of opportunists, hedonists, with no values other than materialism. The country became divided, with huge gulfs between settlers and peacenicks, orthodox obscurantists who live in an enclosed medieval world and enlightened people in the vanguard of modern enlightenment, people who harbour nostalgia for the uncorrupted vision of early Zionists and corrupt politicians and businessmen who are only out for themselves, and between a younger generation who are out to enjoy life while they can and an older generation who live with the memory of sacrifices.

Shavit describes all this through personal accounts of his own grandfather's commitment to leave his comfortable home in England and settle in Palestine, stories of early kibbutz settlers, soldiers, Arabs who lost their homes and soldiers who drove them out, farmers who grew Jaffa oranges that dominated the European orange market, industrialists who grew a small home based dairy operation into a large multinational corporation, the leading pilot who built a vast software enterprise, settlers who occupy land that belong to others and liberal proponents of peace between Jews and Arabs who would remove these settlements. It is a story of people who turned Israel into the dynamic, economically successful melting pot told through riveting accounts of how people remember events that change Israeli society. But the end of the books, when the Shavit meditates on the present and the future is disappointing. There is no room for nostalgic for the values of a past that is no more. The world moved on and is moving on. It would be disappointing if Israel would still be the country of fifty years ago. There is no peace and no prospect of peace until Israel faces the dark shadows of its past, its treatment of the Arabs they drove out, its treatment of its immigrants from various parts of the world. But Arabs will also have to face their historic mistakes. And the likelihood of this happening any time soon is remote. A hundred years ago King Feisal could talk to Chaim Weitzman and discuss the benefits that Jewish immigration would bring to the Arab world, but Arab nationalism destroyed Feisal's level-headed sensible understanding of the realities of the Middle East and the House of Feisal itself. Nationalism was a poison imported from European romanticism to replace colonialism. As to the Jews, a fear of the future that Shavit starts his book with, is a good thing. Fear, the threat of persecution is the glue that holds the Jewish people together. As long as Jewish people accept that killing Jews is not on, it is not acceptable and it has dire consequences the role of Israel is secure.