Category: Divers

Remembering Deir Yassin – but this time without the mythology

One of the greatest problems in discussing the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is the fact that the vast majority of people speaking about the issue have no understanding of either the history or the current reality. This is especially true of those who claim to support the Palestinians, and who in reality support Hamas or the PLO, the Palestinians’ actual oppressors. The facts of the current reality simply do not align with the positions they take.

The fact that most rank-and-file members of the newly-solidified socialist/far right/Islamist axis know nothing about the current war does not stop them from expounding at great length on the subject, repeating things they have read in Instagram or Facebook infographics or from al-Jazeera’s AJ+ that superficially sound vaguely fact-y. Discuss anything about the conflict with these people and they respond with half-truths and untruths that are easily disproved by anyone who knows anything. Most of these people will simply stop responding, while others, who have more fact-like information, will continue on. But their arguments are in bad faith, almost always like an onion: peel away a layer of bad reporting, and you come to a layer of bad history, and then another, and another, all the way to the core. In the era of online debates, a 1994 term has even been popularized for this rhetorical tactic: “Gish gallop.” Wikipedia defines it well: “attempts to overwhelm [the] opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper’s arguments at the expense of their quality”.

The axis’s liars and useful idiots will tell you “Israel did X” and, when shown X never happened or was actually done by the Palestinians, they’ll say, “Look at this picture from MSNBC of a guy Israel killed!” Then when it is demonstrated that the very same individual, either a great actor or another mythological Christ-like figure, was “killed” and revived multiple times on camera, they’ll move to something else, and then something else,  all the way back to the creation of the State of Israel and before. They will tell you about the “Nakba,” Arabic for “catastrophe,” when Israel supposedly just decided it would be a great idea to drive 700,000 Arabs out of land, obfuscating the fact that the mass migration was the result of a war initiated by Arab armies. Eventually the more learned of these people will come to the onion’s bitter, unattractive core: the purported Israeli atrocities at Deir Yassin.

The strength of the Deir Yassin narrative

Deir Yassin itself is well known, as is the story of the massacre said to have happened there. According to the accepted narrative, Jewish resistance fighters, members of groups called the Irgun and Lehi, carried out a brutal massacre on men, women, and children, even employing sexual violence. The difference between this story and others is that for decades it at least appeared to be true. Even stalwart defenders of Israel and Zionism saw what “happened” there as a black spot on the record of Israel’s founding. These defenders, long having accepted the narrative as a sad truth, meagerly point out that the Haganah, the main Israeli military body of the time, which eventually became the basis of the IDF, was totally uninvolved and condemned the actions of the smaller military organizations.

But here’s the thing about the Deir Yassin massacre: it never happened.

The narrative and the academy

In 2021, Israeli academic Eliezer Tauber published The Massacre that Never Was: The Myth of Deir Yassin and the Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem. In it, Tauber investigates – and demolishes – the story of the massacre. Sadly, despite the fact that the book was peer reviewed and had meticulous footnotes from Jewish, Arab, and western sources, it failed to find a publisher among heavily politicized Western academic publishing houses. Instead, the book was published by the small, mostly religious, Jewish publisher Toby Press.

Scholarly articles and monographs build off of each other. One writer will publish something in a journal or as a book, and then others will come along and critique it, either undermining, challenging, or supporting the thesis or findings; still someone will then build off this round of study, and then someone else will come after that, and so on. Some studies and findings are rubbish; they are (hopefully) criticized and discarded. Others have some truth, and still others are game changers that lead to a new paradigm.

Given the above, and given that Tauber’s book was published (in the U.S.) by such a small publisher, I waited more than two years from the time it hit the shelves in English to writing a review. Surely if Tauber is making such a revolutionary claim – that the massacre never happened – scholars would look into it over that period of time and debunk any mistakes.

No one’s said anything of substance. There are those on Goodreads or Amazon who accuse Tauber of “genocide denial” or some other such nonsense, but even after searching, I am unaware of any serious work refuting Tauber. This is entirely unsurprising, given how exceedingly meticulous he is in drawing his conclusions.

Tauber’s meticulous demolition of the Deir Yassin narrative

For anyone seeking to understand the events of Deir Yassin – and, given the fundamental importance of the narrative that emerged around the “massacre,” the “Nakba” itself – this book is vital. Tauber has collected an enormous amount of material, some of which is still technically classified in the IDF archives as secret (he writes that he obtained the material from historian Benny Morris, who had himself procured it during a period in the 1990s when it had been declassified).

The first thing that Tauber shows is that the Zionist militias’ attack on Deir Yassin was neither unprovoked nor aimed at some notion of expelling Arabs from the land. Instead, Deir Yassin was located in an area that made a battle strategically necessary to foil Arab militants’ plans to to disrupt the main road between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, which would have crippled the Jews’ self-defense capabilities.

Tauber also notes that in carrying out the strategic attack on the village in conditions of war, the Irgun decided to use a car with a loudspeaker to warn residents to leave or seek safety as the Jewish soldiers entered the village, giving up the element of surprise. Further, a route for escape was to be left open.

Using several lists of the village’s residents, Tauber put together the name of every single Arab villager in Deir Yassin, noting which list(s) they appeared on, and, where available, their ages and the way in which they passed. Using this and a wealth of other evidence, including primary source material from Jews and Arabs who were there, Tauber argues that there was no massacre at Deir Yassin. Instead, he writes, there was a ferocious battle that neither the Irgun and Lehi nor the Arab villagers expected, as both miscalculated what the other would do. And as ferocious as the battle was, it was still dwarfed by the rumors that surrounded it.

The kernel of truth in Deir Yassin mythology is that innocent civilians were killed in the battle (far, far fewer than the mythology suggests), but, using current terminology, they would be classified as “collateral damage.” Instead of being targets, their killing was a mistake made in conditions of battle by inexperienced fighters. (Here it is worth noting that Arab militias had been targeting Jewish civilians for decades by this point.)

Unlike previous researchers, Tauber relied on the first-hand experience of both those involved in the fighting and the Arabs in the village, all of whom gave remarkably similar descriptions of events pointing away from the massacre narrative. (Tauber points out that this should be unsurprising, given that they were the eyewitnesses.)

Why has the narrative of a massacre persisted?

Why is it, then, that despite no evidence of a massacre or, especially, sexual violence – both of which are abhorrent to Jewish values, and, more broadly, the values of all civilized people – rumors of such were able to persist and even become accepted?

One thing to note about the Zionist military forces of pre-state Israel is that they were divided. The original and largest was the Haganah, which for years exercised a “policy of restraint,” operating purely defensively, not engaging in retaliation. As Arab attacks on Jews intensified in the years leading up to 1948, the Irgun (or Etzel/אצ”ל, an acronym for “The National Military Organization in the Land of Israel”) and Lehi (an acronym for “Fighters for the Freedom of Israel” in its Hebrew form) split off, arguing that only retaliation against attacks could deter violence against the Jews living in Mandatory Palestine.

While Irgun and Lehi often worked together, there was infighting. The Haganah particularly disliked both splinter groups and only came to work with them, begrudgingly, immediately preceding the creation of the state. The feeling was mutual; the IDF (created out of the Haganah) and the Irgun (just before it fully merged itself into the IDF), nearly found themselves in a shooting battle over the acceptance of a ship, the Altalena, which was carrying weapons. The Haganah/IDF worried that the Irgun would use the weapons to take power, while the Irgun worried that the Haganah held on to too much of the old “self-restraint” policy. Largely because of the Irgun’s leader, Menachem Begin, the battle never happened, but the Haganah/Irgun rift carries on even now on the electoral/political front, through the interactions between the Labor Party and the Likud.

Tauber finds in this animosity much of the genealogy of the massacre narrative. The Haganah, wanting to distance itself from the fighting at Deir Yassin and to portray the Irgun and Lehi as hooligans and savages, did nothing to put an end to the rumors coming out of Deir Yassin (though Tauber shows that before the battle, the Haganah actually agreed with the Irgun that the fight was necessary and even accepted the Irgun’s plans). Instead, the Haganah actually helped to spread the rumors by denouncing the Irgun and Lehi at every turn.

Where did the narrative start?

But where did the rumors of massacre and sexual violence start? In a highly detailed and researched account, Tauber shows that these rumors – which for decades were accepted as facts – were actually the result of the miscalculations of a few Arab propagandists and broadcasters. Attempting to portray the Jews as bloodthirsty savages, the propagandists created out of thin air stories of mass rape. There was a strategic purpose: the propagandists hoped both to rouse the indignity of the Palestinian Arabs and lead them to fight harder, as well as – more importantly – to move the surrounding Arab states to do even more to wipe out the emerging Jewish state.

After pointing out that all interviewed survivors of Deir Yassin said that the sexual violence allegations were false, Tauber notes an oft-overlooked BBC interview with then-Palestinian broadcaster Hazam Nusseibi, who admits to having been told by Arab High Committee Secretary Hussein Khalidi to spread atrocity lies.

Tactics similar to those used now by sympathizers with the Hamas cause were used then as well. Tauber notes, “Rumors also spread that an Arab photographer took pictures in Deir Yassin of mutilated bodies. When the Arab Higher Committee published such photos, a Haganah intelligence man identified the bodies as actually Jewish victims of mutilation by Arabs.” Remember: the Haganah was no friend of the Irgun or Lehi and had no interest in defending them from accusations of bloodshed.

Arab leaders’ propaganda as a cause of the Nakba and the “refugee” problem

The strategy backfired. In fact, it actually became one of the main, if not the main, causes of the Nakba. Instead of rousing Arabs living in Mandatory Palestine to fight, the stories of grotesque sexual violence caused them to flee in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

“This was our biggest mistake,” Nusseibi said. “We did not realize how our people would react. As soon as they heard that women had been raped at Deir Yassin, Palestinians fled in terror.”

In the end, there was apparently no Deir Yassin massacre. Instead, there was a strategic battle, in conditions of a war that Arab militants had already started, in which some “collateral damage” occurred. It was similar to battles that took place across the land during the Arab-initiated war against the emerging Jewish state, with one important difference. The false stories of atrocities, created by Arab propagandists, were not denied by the Haganah, the official military organization of the Jews in pre-state Israel. Thus the rumors spread and, contrary to the expectations of Arab propagandists, caused fear throughout Palestinian Arab society, leading to a mass exodus.

The displacement of 700,000 Arabs from pre-state Israel is the genesis of the ongoing refugee problem (itself incredibly exaggerated by the special rules governing the status of Palestinian refugees as compared to all other refugees anywhere in the world). While Tauber does not expend much ink on the ramifications of this, it is worth noting that, given what we learn about Deir Yassin and its reverberation throughout Palestinian Arab society, the current refugee problem, however it is measured, is a direct result of decisions and miscalculations made by Arab leaders at the time. This is of fundamental importance, because the refugee situation is used, even now, as a justification for the Hamas-infiltrated UN Relief and Works Agency’s existence and as an excuse by Palestinian leadership for not accepting the numerous offers at a state that they have been given.

Essential reading

The Massacre that Never Was is essential reading, given how foundational Deir Yassin is to the anti-Israel mythology surrounding the creation of the Jewish state. While the painstaking detail can become tiresome, the work is of vital importance. Anyone can construct a narrative, but only an honest historian will seek out facts. And despite the density of the figures and lists, the book is overall extremely compelling.

As mentioned, I’ve waited nearly two and a half years after the book’s original publication to write this review (now does seem like a particularly good time), and there has been no real challenge to Tauber’s overall assessment.

That is, of course, why they’ve tried to bury it.

Book Review
The Massacre that Never Was: The Myth of Deir Yassin and the Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem
Toby Press, 2021

Still “watching the world wake up from history”

Recently, I dusted off a copy of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, first published in 1992. What I found is that, despite the derision the idea of history’s end has received over the past few decades, Fukuyama’s book is in retrospect a surprisingly prescient work that helps to make sense of the current period.

Recently, I dusted off a copy of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, first published in 1992. Despite the derision the idea of history’s end has received over the past few decades, Fukuyama’s book is turned out to be a surprisingly prescient work that helps to make sense of the current period.

The end of history

The first part of Fukuyama’s argument is well known. Basing himself on Hegel and, especially, the interpretation of Hegel by the German philosopher’s student Alexandre Kojève, Fukuyama argued that history wasn’t just a bunch of events that happened one after the other. Instead, history advanced in a progressive direction. The outcome, or natural endpoint, of history was liberal democracy, the kind enjoyed by citizens of the United States, France, and other countries.

While Fukuyama was criticized for positing the American model as history’s outcome, he never did so, instead seeing liberal democracy more broadly defined, as some kind of parliamentary system that allows for citizens to express their desires politically and a market economy economically, all accompanied by the rule of law.

In 1989, when Fukuyama first wrote the essay that later became the book, liberal democracy was obviously triumphant. The Berlin wall had just fallen, the Cold War had ended, and the NATO alliance was the victor as the Soviet Union bowed out of superpower status. China was convulsed by uprisings, and the Communist Party there only maintained its grip on power through sheer brutality. Over the course of the next three years, Communist states fell quickly and dramatically, the culmination of what political scientist Samuel Huntington later declared “the third wave” of democratization.

History’s rebirth?

In the intervening years, however, the picture became muddied. Some of the post-Soviet states went through a period of “democratic backsliding,” in which they reverted to autocracy, as did Venezuela and a few other states. After 9/11, another of Huntington’s ideas, that the world would cease to be torn by ideological divides and would become defined by “civilizational” struggles. seemed to take on new credence. Two of the “civilizations” Huntington outlined, the Islamic and the Western, appeared to be the world’s major faultline, while the “Orthodox” (the Orthodox Christian states of the former Soviet Union and several of its allies) seemed to be only slightly less antagonistic.

The Arab Spring of 2011 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, as well as the less antagonistic relationship between the Muslim and Western world (note, especially, the Abraham Accords between Israel and several Arab Muslim states) essentially put the clash of civilizations theory to rest. But there was another challenge to Fukuyama’s “end of history” theory.

For Fukuyama and his reading of Hegel through Kojève, history didn’t progress in some sort of pre-ordained and mechanical way as it does in the Marxist interpretation of Hegel. Instead, liberal democracy is the end state simply because it works better than any other model tried. By spreading out decision making both economically and politically, it allows people to participate in the affairs that interest them and avoids disastrous mistakes of policy like those the Soviets often made. The then-rising “China model” of authoritarianism challenged the theory, however.

The China model

Disappointed that government wasn’t “getting things done,” especially in the early 2010s, many western intellectuals looked to China and saw the benefits of an authoritarian state. Perhaps, they wondered, by limiting the mess of democracy, technocrats in China were able to move their society forward rationally and impartially, elevating only the best people to leadership through a meritocratic model. “I disagree with the view that there’s only one morally legitimate way of selecting leaders: one person, one vote,” Daniel Bell said at an Asia Society discussion entitled “Can the China Model Succeed?”

Then the pandemic happened, and, for a while, and despite ample evidence that the Chinese authorities mismanaged the outbreak from the beginning (despite heroic work done by Chinese doctors and scientists), Western public health experts began to fawn over China. Greg Ip argued that the “Zero-Covid” policy “held lessons” for others in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Public health experts from Duke and UC-San Francisco wrote in Time that China’s response was “100 times better” than that of the United States.

The late 2010s were a bad time for liberal democracy, with the chaos of Trump’s presidency followed by the similar chaos of Biden’s presidency, unable to deal with crime or inflation or virtually any other problem the U.S. faced; Brexit in the United Kingdom; anti-liberal democracy parties elected into governments in a host of Western democracies, including Brazil; and so on. But then things changed.

1991 redux?

In 2022, around the world, people began again fighting in earnest to free themselves from tyrannical systems. As the year began, Russia invaded Ukraine.Though most everyone thought Russia’s invasion appalling, they also expected Putin’s onslaught to succeed relatively quickly. Then the Ukrainians took history into their own hands. Surprising the world and, perhaps, even themselves, the Ukrainian people united together to issue a forceful response to the Russian aggressors. Instead of quickly annexing Ukraine, Russia was forced into a long slog.

Russia had expected the various factions in Ukraine, constantly fighting each other – as the current political factions in the United States fight each other – would fold. Instead, they put aside their differences and began to save their country.

As the Ukrainians inspired the world, the Iranian regime arrested and murdered a 22-year-old Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amini for the “crime” of not wearing her hijab “correctly.” The evil act proved the spark that set off the Iranian tinderbox: across Iran, women, and then men, rose up, demanding an end to their oppression. Across the nation, the morality police and other regime thugs responded in the harshest ways possible, gunning down protesters – women, children, men – in the streets. And yet the Iranians keep fighting: in the streets, on TikTok, on Twitter, everywhere, they fight. Even the Ayatollah’s own niece condemned the regime, signaling a total loss of legitimacy. Backed into a corner, the theocracy has just announced it would abolish its morality police, and now even the hijab law is under review.

The people of Iran are still fighting, likely for liberal democracy.

And now, even China, the prize of the authoritarian model, has erupted in protests unheard of since 1989. As demonstrations raged against the harsh “Zero Covid” police that so enchanted Western technocrats months ago, Chinese authorities cracked down, with videos flooding social media platforms depicting the barbarity. And now, China has begun to back off, easing restrictions. While it’s unlikely that the Communist Party will fall anytime soon, the luster of the China model has been removed.

There is no civilizational struggle and the authoritarian model is not a path anyone wants to follow; those who live under it do so until they have a chance to overthrow it. Despite the detours, we’re still at the end of history.

The other part of Fukuyama’s argument

Part of the reason some have rejected the “end of history” thesis is because of the problems that have become so common liberal democracies, as mentioned above. But these are issues that Fukuyama mentioned in his book (though, not the original article, suggesting that many of those disparaging the book never read it). Challenges that we face are challenges listed in the End of History: income inequality, political decay, and the fraying of social bonds, and the human need for recognition.

A sizable portion of End of History is dedicated to a discussion of thymos, the human need for recognition. Thymos was the impetus for much of history’s forward movement, according to this understanding of Hegel. The fact that some are so driven for status and recognition that they would fight and kill for some cause led to the acts of valor (or butcherie, depending on the moral viewpoint and the actions carried out) that caused war, revolution, and so on. Fighting against oppression is often caused by an injury to one’s thymos: Fukuyama gives numerous examples, including a speech by Vaclav Havel, in which the latter describes the injury to his self-esteem done by Czechoslovak communism.

The question Fukuyama posed about the future of liberal democracy: what happens in a system where thymos isn’t, and can’t be, a motivating factor? Will society become composed of “men without chests,” satiated consumers with no will to fight? As Alexis Carré notes in Foreign Policy, Western Europe, long stable and under the defense of the United States, has weapons but no warriors.

Given the discussion of thymos and the quest for recognition by others, it is hard to understand why so few have made the connection between End of History and the current period in the Western world, in which identity politics, including white identity politics, has come to the fore so prominently. Even those not consumed by identity overtly have become quite tribal in their partisan allegiances. Keyboard warriors, unable to fight on the battlefield, rage-type on Twitter. Is it any wonder that one of the biggest controversies of the day revolves around who gets to say what on a social media platform? 

The book suggested the general dynamics of this world decades ago.

History is still over, and Fukuyama’s work has been vindicated. Regardless of any challenges, the liberal democratic system has proven itself to be the best system possible because it best meets the needs of those who inhabit it. No other system, looking back centuries, has been able to outlast it. Where there is no liberal democracy, people are fighting for it.

As Jesus Jones put it, we’re all still “watching the world wake up from history” in China, Iran, Ukraine, Russia, and other places where it’s not fully over. The rest of us, residing where history still lies dead, have to solve the challenge thymos poses in liberal democracy.

Self-pitying anti-Zionists: A Reply to Shaul Magid

Self-pity is an ugly thing, especially when it comes from the most well-off members of a community. It is even less pleasant when those wallowing in it are completely oblivious to the actual hardships of others. Such is the case with Shaul Magid’s Tablet article “The Enforcers,” in which the reader is expected to pity the poor anti-Zionists who – the horror – are sometimes accused of “not being Jewish enough,” while Jews around the world are daily being imperiled by a rise in violent anti-Semitism.

Currently, the debate around Zionism in the Jewish community is bigger than it has been in decades. This has been obvious to me through interactions with other Jews and viewing ongoing, seemingly never-ending social media debates. Only a few years ago, the question of how Israel could best achieve peace with the Palestinians was the only real subject of debate, while anti-Zionists were relegated to the fringes, where they belong, an area in the discourse they had inhabited since before the second world war. More and more, however, the question of whether Israel should exist has been entertained, increasingly openly. Just hours ago, the Jerusalem Post published an article with some frightening statistics from a recent poll: 28 percent of American Jews apparently believe Israel is an apartheid state (the number rises to 38 percent for those under 40), 23 percent think Israel is engaged in genocide (33 percent of those under 40), and 20 percent of American Jews under 40 actually believe that Israel doesn’t even have the right to exist at all.

Given this sad state of affairs, Magid’s article seems oddly timed. During a period when anti-Zionists are more vocal than at any point in decades, he frets that their voices are being pushed out by “enforcers,” supporters of Israel who, he argues, act as “gatekeepers of Zionist-Jewish identity [to] try to write out of Judaism anyone who doesn’t share their nationalist project.” While he argues that there are “thousands” of such mean-spirited articles, the reader is only shown a few minor examples. Regardless, Magid goes to great lengths to prove that Jewish anti-Zionists are real, actual Jews and that anti-Zionism has a long, Jewish history. In doing so, however, he states the obvious, overwhelmingly mischaracterizes Zionists’ views – and misses the most important point entirely.

Magid writes,

Those who demonize anti-Zionism today never quite define the term. Denial of a ‘Jewish’ state? Of Jewish chauvinism or Jewish supremacy? Of Israel itself? There is the theological anti-Zionism of ultra-Orthodoxy made explicit in the writings of the Satmar rebbe, Yoel Teitelbaum, the moral and anti-nationalist anti-Zionism of Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig, the secular anti-Zionism of the American Council for Judaism, the diasporist anti-Zionism of Judith Butler or Daniel Boyarin, and the anti-imperialist anti-Zionism of Noam Chomsky. Are they all the same? Of course not. All have different assumptions, different thought processes, and in some cases different goals.

He concludes this line of thought with, “But for the gatekeepers, nuance and distinctions don’t really matter.” Does anyone actually believe this? Are we actually expected to believe that the most vocal supporters of Israel actually make no distinction between the anti-Zionism of BDS leader Judith Butler and that of the Satmar rebbe? This is nonsense. Further, the same accusation could be made against the anti-Zionists. This group defines itself as opposed to Zionism, but do they engage with the “nuances and distinctions” Magid accuses Zionists of overlooking? Is the average anti-Zionist opposed to the Revisionist Zionism of Netanyahu’s Likud? The religious nationalist Zionism of Naftali Bennett’s Yamina party? Are they opposed to Rav Kook’s religious Zionism? Do they go so far as to oppose even the two-state, socialist Zionism of Israel’s Meretz Party? Do they make any distinction at all? There is no way to know.

Magid then turns to history. But for anyone who’s studied it – indeed, anyone who’s read Anne Frank’s diary – knows that there is a long history of religious and secular anti-Zionism. This is such common knowledge that it is hard to understand why Magid belabors the point in his article. What Magid does not ponder in his piece is the distinction between what anti-Zionism means now compared to what it meant then. Before Israel was re-founded, being an anti-Zionist didn’t mean advocating for the destruction of the state where nearly half the world’s Jewish population, millions of people who are periodically bombarded with rockets and who are surrounded on all sides by those who want to kill them, live. Instead, Magid  marvels at how wonderful the diaspora is, writing, “There is now a thriving Jewish diaspora in North America, South America, Europe, Australia and elsewhere, one that is not dependent on Israel for its creative sustenance. This should be celebrated.” While I’m sure that Magid feels safe, such is not the case for many diaspora communities around the world. Here in the United States, arguably the place where, at least during the post-war years, Jews have had had better lives than in any other country, anti-Semitic violence is on the rise at a rapid clip. In Boston, not far from where I’m writing this, a rabbi was stabbed multiple times in broad daylight in front of a Jewish day school. In recent months and years, Jews have also been attacked in L.A., Pittsburgh, New Jersey, New York, and elsewhere across the U.S.

Still, American Jews have it good, at least compared to other Jews throughout history and to Jews in other countries. But this is what is so infuriating about Magid’s pity for the anti-Zionists who, from the comforts of (still mostly) safe American suburbs, have had their feelings hurt by those who, he imagines, say anti-Zionists aren’t “real Jews.” How will this Western self-pity come across to Jews in Israel, many of whom are only alive because they were able to make it there? How is the Ethiopian Jew who escaped to Israel supposed to understand the sorrows of the Western anti-Zionist? Or, indeed, one of the several thousand members of Beta Israel still in Ethiopia, constantly imperiled, hoping to make their way to Zion someday? But then, most of even the Western world is not the U.S. Forty percent of British Jews were considering emigration pending recent election results, mostly to Israel. Jews are fleeing rising anti-Semitism in France by droves each year – 5,000 in 2015 alone – mostly to Israel. How are they to understand elite liberal anti-Zionism and the sorrows of the sheltered upper-middle-class American Jews who seem to feel that they should be able to say whatever they want without anyone actually responding?

It appears that Magid is oblivious to these Jews and to history itself. For example, in mocking pre-war Zionists, Magid writes, “Josef Stalin once said that the Jews are not a nation because they lack two essential national attributes: language and territory. Many Zionists agreed!” Obviously, this is a mistake. Zionists disagreed with Stalin; they thought the reason Jews deserved territory was exactly because they are a nation; the anti-Zionists who thought assimilation was best were the ones who agreed with the red dictator. This is a small point; the bigger historical error is in failing to note that it was exactly because Jews had no territory that Stalin was able to deport thousands to Birobidzhan, a wretched place a week’s train ride away from Moscow, from where nearly all Jews fled as soon as they could. And, of course, the mass deportations were just a small part of the Soviet Union’s repression of Jews.

Magid spends paragraphs showing that these early Zionists, including ben Gurion, were not religiously observant Jews, and then sets his sites on contemporary Zionists. In arguing against the idea that Zionism is correct simply because most Jews support Israel (does anyone make the Zionist case this way?), Magid argues that most American Jews are not very observant and break halakha. So? That is between them and their rabbis – and it also is demonstrative of the point opposite that which Magid is trying to make. While many Zionists (myself included) argue that support for Israel is an important facet of Judaism, different Jews place various levels of emphasis on this. The other driving force of the Zionist movement is the demonstrably true belief that Jews, like all other peoples, need a nation state where they can actually be safe, and that state needs to be in the place where the Jewish nation formed. There are many different interpretations of what it means to be a good Jew. Far less negotiable, however, is the need for safety.

Despite arguing that Zionism isn’t correct or incorrect based on how many Jews support it, Magid spends time discussing how many younger Jews have negative impressions of Israel. Pointing out the complexities of geopolitics and how it vexes Jewish youth, Magid writes, “Israel is a complicated place for younger generations of Jews, especially but not only in America. Jews under the age of 50 do not know Israel other than as an occupying power. “ As the Post article shows, this is an accurate assessment of many young Jews’ understanding of Israel. These facts represent a two-fold  problem, but not a failure of Zionism. Obviously, Jewish communal institutions need to do a better job educating young Jews. The number of young people (and not only the young) who think, for example, that Israel randomly decided to start ethnically cleansing Sheikh Jarrah, not realizing the complex history of court cases and titles and contested ownership, is astounding. Magid is correct in that the Zionist organizations have, by and large, not yet been able to properly educate other Jews about what Zionism means, but that is somewhat beside the point. The second part of the problem is the anti-Zionists themselves, many of them Jewish, who spread misinformation. One who knows nothing of Israel but what they read in the often anti-Semitic Jewish Currents will have a very skewed view indeed.

In truth, anti-Zionists aren’t being condemned as “not properly Jewish” or “not real Jews,” at least not often. Even the articles Magid linked to were for the most part not calling Jewish anti-Zionists “bad Jews” or “not real Jews.” It is telling that the article Magid quoted that most illustrates his complaints was written in large part by Natan Sharansky, the heroic Soviet Jew who spent nine years as a political prisoner in the USSR. On the other hand, this article only called anti-Zionists “indecent” and argued that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. Indeed, this is the biggest criticism of the anti-Zionists, whether they are Jews or not: anti-Semitism.

Perhaps it seems odd that here a group of Jews and a specifically Jewish publication are characterized as anti-Semitic. Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, at least in practice, even when the anti-Zionist has fond feelings for the Jewish people. As noted above, struggling for the abolition of the Jewish state either endangers (for Israelis) or removes the possibility of escape to (for Jews living precarious lives in oppressive states) safety for the majority of the world’s Jewish community. An ideology should be characterized by its results. In theory, Maoism sounds nice and egalitarian; in practice it is a death cult. Anti-Zionism has many iterations in theory, but in practice would lead to millions of dead or oppressed Jews living with dhimmi status. Magid writes in his essay, “I want to take the argument about anti-Zionism being antithetical to one’s Jewishness seriously.” He should take more seriously the argument that anti-Zionism is antithetical to millions of Jewish lives; he would then have a better understanding of why many Jews frown upon anti-Zionists.

Maybe this is what offends the Jewish anti-Zionist the most, the idea that they are themselves engaged in anti-Semitism, even if they are descended, as is Norman Finkelstein, from Holocaust survivors, even if they are themselves stellar Jews (however that is interpreted). This is not a concept  unique to the Jewish community. One of the most popular left-wing writers on racism, Ibram Kendi, for example, makes the argument that Black people can in fact be racist, and they do so each time they support a racist policy. You can agree or disagree with Kendi on systemic racism and which policies are racist, but here his argument is sound: if you support policies or ideologies that are racist, you’re being a racist. And, analgously, if you support anti-Semitic ideologies, you’re being an anti-Semite, regardless of how good of a Jew you are.

Maybe that is what is most troubling to left-wing anti-Zionists.

Francis Fukuyama’s new start

Francis Fukuyama, best known for his book The End of History and the Last Man, now aims to tackle all human history, middle, beginning and end, in only two books.

In his earlier work, the author argued that, with the collapse of the Soviet experiment, human history, which developed and progressed in a Hegelian sense, had reached its destination. The communist and every other experiment had failed; liberal democracy was the ultimate endpoint, the historical process’s logical outcome, and this could no longer be disputed. Succeeding years saw conflicts and genocide, even in countries that had so recently overthrown Stalinism, but Fukuyama’s thesis wasn’t disproven: The slides away from democracy were simply bumps in the road.

But a few years later, Fukuyama tied himself to the Iraq War’s success or failure, in line with the thesis of History. According to interviews, the failure of democracy to sprout in Iraq shook his worldview. Fukuyama, after some academic soul searching, published America at the Crossroads in 2006, along with articles in the New York Times and elsewhere, that signaled his departure from his Hegelian understanding of history as unidirectional. Unfortunately, he replaced Hegel with pessimism. The new works were interesting in that they showed the author’s progression, but ultimately unsatisfying: If liberal democracy isn’t that natural outcome towards which all societies are generally moving, what can be done when confronted with the horrors of Saddam, or, more currently, Basher al-Assad?

Fukuyama was left without an overall theory of political development. He studied the question for several years; these studies bore fruit in the form of his new work The Origins of Political Order, the first volume of which was published in April 2011. Instead of history’s end, Fukuyama now revisits all of human history in an attempt to arrive at a better understanding of how the best modern societies came to be, and why elsewhere real democracy never, or at least hasn’t yet, flourished. Democracy, he learned with the Iraq failure, cannot simply be pasted onto a society.

This is the question Fukuyama attempts to answer in Origins: How does a country evolve into a stable democracy ruled by law, or, as it is put in the book, how to get to Denmark? This volume, the first of two, explores not so much the “how does” as the “how did.” How did liberal democracy arise in the first place?

In seeking an answer, Fukuyama discards all of his previous theories of development and goes far beyond the typical modern political/international relations text: He’s produced a sprawling, nearly 500-page book that seeks to reinterpret all of history (the volume’s subtitle is “From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution”).

Much of the problem with this newest work is that it is so counter-intuitive. Some form of democratic society isn’t, as the author argued earlier, the “default” position of human beings, nor was it ever necessarily in the cards. Its arrival in Europe was a simple historical accident that, were a few variables different, may likely never have occurred.

Fukuyama doesn’t reject development entirely, but his studies don’t lead to a worldview like those of Marx or even Weber, in which there is a single overwhelmingly dominant factor in human history. (For Marx, of course, that factor was economics: who controls the means of production, the mode of production and so on determined society; everything else – the superstructure – arose from that, and progressed in a way that is quite linear. For Weber, the factor was religion.)

Our author has found history differently. He laudably mixes a number of disciplines together, including even evolutionary biology. Humanity’s tendency toward cooperation as well as violence and war, towards religion, towards familial preference – all of these are factors that our author finds playing an important, somewhat determinative, role in shaping society.

A main criticism of his for much current thought (leaving aside recent postmodern relativist nonsense, which one has to reject to even attempt a serious understanding of how societies work) is that it has been too Eurocentric. The development of Europe was a lucky exception, he argues. A series of happy accidents brought liberal democracy and capitalism into existence in there, most specifically in Britain and Denmark.

This should be troubling. If Fukuyama, now echoing Barrington Moore, is correct, theories of progress, like Marxism on the left and neoconservatism on the right are out the window. Instead, modern liberal society exists simply due to a few factors that randomly came together in Europe. Now, modern capitalist society has staying power, not through some sort of Hegelian destiny, but because it seems to fit best, or is the most suitable random occurrence.

There are, says Fukuyama, three important components essential to its emergence: a modern, “non-patrimonial” state with a stable bureaucracy; the rule of law; and accountable government. All three things have to emerge and converge, and this only occurred when certain other conditions came into being. China, for example, supplanted tribal society (the “default” state of existence in Fukuyama’s understanding) with the emergence of the first really modern state centuries ago. However, for various reasons, including religion and power relations, neither the rule of law nor accountable government ever developed. This rule of law, in which even kings and emperors feel that they cannot act outside of a certain prescribed set of norms, arose in Western Europe as a result of a Catholic Church power grab. Its separation from the patronage of kings left it able to develop a centralized structure and create a code of canon law (based on Roman law) binding on all Catholics – nearly everyone at that time. Consequently, for the first time in Europe, kings found their power limited, as they were forced to look to the Church’s blessing for authority.

Rule of law developed elsewhere, as in India. But there the rule of law developed too early and impeded the development of a modern, functional state. Only in Western Europe, and only in a few countries even there, did these two factors converge, and then converge again with a third, a set of power relations that forced monarchs to lose their absolutist status and take into account not only law, but the desires of at least a section of the populace.

Origins is an ambitious work, and, given that its subject matter is all of human history and development, there is plenty of room for disagreement. One can argue that Fukuyama’s jettisoning of the idea that one factor (whether religion, economics, geography or something else) is the sole determinant of human history adds sophistication and depth. But questions are left hanging. Everything is a chaotic stew, and nothing is for certain. Certain problems are obvious. The first and most troubling is that this is not at all a cheerful picture of the world. But one doesn’t have to like facts for them to be true. Still, there are non-emotional questions that arise, specifically around democracy and the rule of law.

Is it even necessary to democratize? Fukuyama thinks so, but the book leaves us with no reason as to why, except that it would be nice. According Origins, accountability is a necessity, but that doesn’t automatically mean democracy. While he often says China’s government is unsustainable, Fukuyama himself noted the stability of its political system in a January Financial Times article, saying that it has nothing to teach Washington, because its ruling elite take into account the needs and wants of its citizenry – in its own way.

But modern China seems to show evidence pointing away from Fukuyama’s conclusions. Economics has played a huge, one might say determinative, role in China’s development, and not necessarily in the way that the government there would like. As the economy has developed, the state and ruling party have found it hard to keep up, either through appeasement (better living conditions, etc.) or repression (the Great Firewall, for example). It’s obvious through any number of statistics – simply look at the number of people petitioning Beijing for better living standards, the increased number of strikes, or the recent rioting in various areas for a few cogent examples – that as people’s living standards increase, and as the economy becomes bigger and stronger, people have become more energized to fight for a say in how society operates.

The Arab Spring is yet another example; the general trend in the world is still towards more and greater democracy, more rule of law, and more government accountability, seemingly in accordance with economic development. Fukuyama’s book is ambitious, and his second volume is greatly awaited, but he has not proven that this democratic upheaval is mere historical chance, as he argues, and not “by default.”

Originally published in Dirty Honest.

“Nuclear weapons and humans cannot coexist”

Sixty years ago the United States became the first (and since then the only) country to use atomic bombs, dropping one each on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed. Those at the hyper-center, or ground zero, were the “lucky” ones – they were instantly vaporized. Others died, but not instantly, living their last moments in pain and misery. Their flesh melting off, many perished while looked for water to ease their suffering.

In addition to those who perished immediately, tens of thousands more died due to the effects of radiation exposure in subsequent years.

Another group, today called “hibakusha” (Japanese for “those who suffered an explosion”), survived the bombing, but were never the same again.

America’s use of atomic bombs is even now, six decades later, still controversial. Some argue that the war would have ended with or without the use of atomic weaponry and Hiroshima and Nagasaki represented a senseless destruction of human life. Others argue that the war would have continued much longer, that many more would have died had the United States not acted as it did. Regardless, it is important to know what happened in these Japanese cities, that is, to know the toll of human suffering atomic weapons – far smaller than those currently in arsenals across the world – wrought.

Reprinted below without modification are the words of Taniguchi Sumiteru, a hibakusha, now in his mid-70s, who leads a survivors’ organization in Nagasaki. His remarks were delivered during a session this month at the United Nations sponsored by the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers’ Organizations,  in which he spoke of his own experience on that day in Hiroshima.

–Dan Margolis

I am Taniguchi Sumiteru, a Nagasaki Hibakusha. Thank you very much for giving me the honor of speaking before you on behalf of the 230,000 Japanese A-bomb survivors, and peace-loving NGOs of the world.

In 1945, I was 16 years old. On the morning of August 9 that year, I was riding my bicycle 1.8 kilometers north of what was to become the hyper-centre of the explosion of the atomic bomb. When it struck, I was burned on my back with the heat ray of the fireball, as high as 3000 to 4000 degrees Celsius at its center, melting rocks and iron, and also with the invisible radiation. The next moment I was blown off together with the bike about four meters and smashed to the ground by the blast. The blast had a velocity of 250 to 300 meters per second. It knocked down buildings and warped steel frames.

The earth was shaking so hard that I lay down on the ground and held on so as not to be blown off again. When I looked up, the buildings around me had been smashed. Children who were playing near me had been blown down like they were mere dust. I took it that a big bomb had been dropped nearby and I was struck by the fear of death. But I kept telling myself that I must not die.

When the commotion seemed to be over, I rose up and found my entire left arm had been burnt and that the skin was hanging from it like a tattered rag. I reached for my back and found that it too had been burnt. It was slimy and covered with something black.

My bike was bent and twisted out of shape, the body, the wheel and all, as if it were spaghetti. Houses nearby were all crushed and fires were breaking out from the houses and on the mountain. Those children who had been away were all dead: some were burnt to a crisp, others looked uninjured.

There was a woman whose hearing was all gone and face swollen to the degree she could not open her eyes. She was injured from head to toe, and groaning in pain. I still recall the scene as if I saw it only yesterday. I could not do anything for those who were suffering and desperately calling for help. I deeply regret that, even today.

Many hibukusha were burnt to a crisp and died while seeking water.

A living hell

I walked like a sleepwalker and reached a factory nearby. I sat down and asked a woman to get rid of the burnt skin dangling from my arms. She tore a piece of cloth out of what was left of my shirt, put machine oil to it and wiped my arms. I guess that factory workers thought it was their factory that was the target of the attack – they urged me to flee somewhere else before another possible strike.

I tried with all my strength but I couldn’t even get up or walk. A man carried me on his back up to the mountain and laid me down on the thicket. People there were saying their name and the home address in the hope that it would be conveyed to their family members by survivors. They died one after another while asking for water.

When the night came, the US aircraft strafed the survivors on the ground. They could see humans moving by the light of the fires across the city. Some stray bullets hit the rock next to me and fell on the grass. The US forces were unrelenting. They still wanted to attack the people who were already suffering what I can only describe as hell.

At night there was a drizzling rain. I sucked the water dripping from the leaves and spent the night. When the morning came, it seemed that all who were there were dead. I spent another night there and in the morning of the third day I was rescued and taken to a neighboring city 27 kilometers from Nagasaki. By that time, the city’s hospitals were all full with victims, so that I was taken to an elementary school, which had been turned into a makeshift facility to accommodate victims.

Slow, agonizing recovery

Three days later – six days from the bombing – my wounds started to bleed, and with the bleeding I gradually started to feel the pain. For more than a month I could receive no proper medical treatment. All they could do was burn newspapers, blend their ash with oil and apply it to my wounds. By September the Nagasaki University hospital staff had managed to restart medical practice at an elementary school in Nagasaki City, though the school building had no windows due to the bomb blast. I was sent there and for the first time I received what can be called modern medical treatment.

First, doctors tried to give me a blood transfusion. But the blood wouldn’t go into my blood vessels, probably because my internal organs were damaged by radiation. I suffered serious anaemia and the burnt flesh started to rot. The rotten flesh would drain out of my body and pool underneath. Nurses placed rugs underneath my body to collect the filthy discharges and threw them out a number of times a day.

Generally those hibakusha who suffered burns or injuries were infested with maggots. The tiny worms got into their bodies from the wounds and ate their flesh. But for me this did not happen until one year later.

I could not stir an inch, not to mention sit or lay on my side. I helplessly lay on my belly and was crying out for a merciful death in the excruciating agony. No one believed that I would survive another day. Every morning, I would hear doctors and nurses whisper at the bedside, “He’s still alive.”

Later I learned that my family was all prepared for my funeral. I lingered on the verge of death but failed to die. I was somehow made to live. Because I could not move an inch, my chest suffered severe bedsores even to the bones. As a result my chest looks like the flesh was scooped out of it and even today you can see my heart beating between the ribs.

Wounds that do not heal

It took one year and nine months before I was finally able to move and after three years and seven months I left the hospital, though I was not completely cured. I went in and out of the hospital many times until 1960.

Around 1982 tumors started to appear on the keloid scars on my back and they had to be taken out. After that a rock-hard tumour formed on my chest, the cause of which doctors are unable find a medical explanation. It reappears every time it is taken out. Now it is believed that since the skin and flesh were burnt, the subcutaneous cells and fat that are essential for human survival have been destroyed and this causes a rock-like tumor to form.

Half a century has passed since “peace” was restored. As I look at the aspects of our society today, we are in the process of forgetting the painful past. But I fear oblivion. I fear that forgotten memories are leading to a renewed affirmation of the atomic bombs.

There is a colored film on the atomic bombings that contains footage of myself as one of the numerous hibakusha. When I see it I relive the pain and the hatred for war.

I am not a guinea pig nor am I on exhibition. But those of you who happen to be here to see me, please don’t turn your eyes away from me. Please look at me again. I survived miraculously but you can still see the accursed scar of the atomic bombs all over the bodies of the hibakusha.

I want to believe in the strength and warmth in your eyes.

Nuclear weapons and humans cannot coexist!

No one should be made to suffer the pain we have gone through. I sincerely hope for all of humanity to live a rich and peaceful life. To that end I call on you to join our best efforts to build a world without nuclear weapons. If humans wish to live as they should and deserve to, the only way is to abolish nuclear weapons once and for all. v

I cannot die in peace before I make sure that there is no such weapon left on earth.
Let there be no more Nagasakis.
Let there be no more hibakusha.

Let us spread the cry for a world free of nuclear weapons.

Originally published in the People’s World newspaper, and reprinted on the website of the Hiroshima Committee.