Why celebrate Israel?

As a teenager, I was perplexed by my father’s pride in the State of Israel. He’d never been there; he’d spent his entire life working at his store, Paul’s Paint and Wallpaper, to support himself and our family, only ever taking brief weekend vacations to Maine or to a little vacation shack we had on a lake in the woods. He didn’t particularly like religion, but still, he loved the Jewish state. I thought it was nice that a state for the Jewish people existed but didn’t think it mattered very much: it was just another country, far across the world, not much more interesting than any other  state.

Further perplexing to me was his even greater pride in Israel’s military achievements. While he was a person who wouldn’t hesitate to defend someone or something he cared about, he generally let things roll off of his back. He knew the horrors of war: he lost friends in Vietnam, including his best friend, Danny Manzaro, whose name I bear. He was no pacifist; I recall him proudly hoisting the American flag when the U.S. led a world coalition to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi domination in 1991. He was annoyed that people would protest that war, since it was, as he characterized it, about justice for  the underdog. Still, he wasn’t one of those people who loved military history, or learning about this type of tank or that type of missile. Wars were only to be fought for moral reasons – so why take pride simply in another country’s strength?

Still, he described to me Israel’s military exploits in detail. During the 1990s, the public school system I attended in Worcester, Mass., was a mess, and, even though I was in all honors classes, I didn’t learn anything about 20th century history past the first World War; the American Revolution and some stuff about Greece and Rome were about it. Nevertheless, from my father, I had in-depth knowledge of Israel’s battles: the amazing victory of the Six Day War, the bitter losses and eventual victory of the Yom Kippur War, the heroic triumph of the state’s establishment, the horrors of Yasser Arafat, and much more. Israel, he said, would take apart weapons America sent and make them work better.

As I grew older, and a bit rebellious, we got into many heated debates on the problem or plight of the Palestinians. Who doesn’t?

Now, looking back years later, it’s easy enough to see how my father, though always maintaining his American patriotism, could feel so connected to, and supportive of, a state he never had the opportunity to visit, located halfway around the world. For him, and now for me, and for millions around the world, the state represents the triumph of a people who were for 2,000 years history’s underdogs, frequently oppressed, dispossessed, and murdered.

If you look at a calendar of public observances in the State of Israel, you’ll see that, about this time of year (based on the Hebrew dating system), several fall close together, one after another: Yom HaShoah, Yom HaZikaron, and then Yom Ha’atzmaut. These are, respectively, the day of remembrance of the Holocaust, the day of remembrance of fallen Israeli soldiers and Israeli victims of terrorism, and Israeli independence day. So close together, in order, these observances tell a story.

The Holocaust, or Shoah, was Hitler’s attempt at a “final solution” to the “Jewish question.” There had been pogroms all over the world, including all over the Middle East, for millennia already, but Hitler hoped to finish the job that the wicked had been failing at for centuries. He nearly succeeded: one out of every three Jews in the world was killed in the Holocaust, and an astounding two out of every three Jews who lived in Europe were killed. Six million dead. Even now, after decades, when the population of the world has increased nearly 300 percent, from about 2.6 billion people in 1950, to around 7.6 billion currently, there are still well over a million less Jews alive than there were before the Holocaust.

But the Jews weren’t wiped out; Hitler was the one who ended up pathetically committing suicide in his underground bunker. And while the Jews weren’t ultimately the ones who overthrew the Nazi regime, they never stopped fighting.

While the Allied Powers, who eventually founded the United Nations, cheered themselves on their victory, things didn’t immediately become  good for the Jewish people. I recall working in Iowa City and catering a dinner party for a man named Janusz Bardach. An exceedingly friendly person, he offered me and my coworker to join his dinner party,  infusing us with multiple “shooters,” i.e. shots of vodka. He gave a brief description of the events of the autobiography he had just written, the publication of which the party was thrown to honor: Man is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag.  Bardach had escaped the Third Reich, crossed the border, and joined the Red Army – and then found himself the victim of Stalin’s anti-Semitism, winding up in a gulag. Liberating the death camps didn’t end Soviet or other persecutions of the Jews.

The Jews continued to fight. They fought against the British colonizers, who who continued to restrict the immigration of Jews to Mandatory Palestine, continuing a policy in place throughout the Nazi period with the support of the region’s Arab leaders.

“Fighting” isn’t symbolic: the Jews fought a guerrilla war against the British colonialists. They were organized in different factions and guerrilla armies: there was  the establishment Haganah, the more revolutionary Irgun,  and the Lehi. After intense fighting, and intense negotiations that involved Britain, the Soviet Union, the UN, and other powers, as well as large compromises made only by the Jews, the Jewish guerrilla forces won, and out of that victory was formed the State of Israel. The three guerrilla armies were all unified into the Israel Defense Force, or IDF.

The State of Israel was proclaimed by Haganah leader David ben Gurion on May 14, 1948.

It was a miracle. A people that seemed on the verge of being wiped out in the Holocaust (commemorated by Yom HaShoah) continued to fight, and, in many instances, gave up their lives (these sacrifices commemorated on Yom HaZikaron), and won, for the first time in nearly 2,000 years, their own state (celebrated on Yom Ha’atzmaut).

There were terrible things that happened on all sides of the revolutionary war for independence, perpetuated by all sides, as happens in all wars and revolutions. Many people, Jews and Arabs, were dispossessed from their homes. When Jordan took control of the “West Bank,” it ethnically cleansed Jews from areas they’d lived in since the 1800s (as in Sheikh Jarrah) or even centuries longer. There continue to be problems. Israel is even now unsure of how to securely and justly handle the areas it came into possession of during the 1960s wars of defense, how to balance justice and security generally, and how to eradicate discrimination against minority groups. These problems have to be solved. If history is any guide, they surely will be.

Still, who wouldn’t be proud? For the first time in history, when my father was just about to turn three, Jews had a state they could go to in their indigenous land if things became unbearable where they were living. And they did go: as pogroms occurred in various Middle Eastern countries, more and more Jews left the lands they’d been in for generations and moved to Israel. Waves of Jews fled the Soviet Union and its satellite states. Many even emigrated from America, where Jews have fared better than anywhere else in diaspora, to Israel.

Over the past seven decades, the state has moved forward: it made the “desert bloom,” invented new technologies, welcomed Jews fleeing the Communist states, became an economic powerhouse, developed culturally, and has maintained a vibrant, cosmopolitan democracy with many (perhaps too many) parties. History’s victim became a powerful force.

With power, as it is said, comes great responsibility. I recently listened to an Israeli rabbi speak (on Zoom, of course), and he restated what the prophet Isaiah intimated: the historic role of the Jewish people and the Jewish state is to act as אור לגויים, a light to the nations. This means, the rabbi said, while fighting for the security of the Jewish people, to fight for justice, for safety and security, and for the wellbeing and freedom of all peoples. As the gains of 1948 are solidified and a viable peace is eventually achieved, this will become even more the goal of the Jewish state. This is something Israel’s been engaged in all along, even under adverse conditions. (For a brief list, see here.) And despite many terrible things in the press, the IDF has some very strong, humanitarian practices that are unlike those of other states’ armies.

Many Israelis demonstrated beautifully their understanding of the needs of other peoples, still without a state, by demanding that more be done for the Kurds. More than 150 IDF reservists wrote a letter asking Prime Minister Netanyahu to send them to fight for the Kurds.

Israelis wearing patriotic masks
Israelis wearing patriotic masks

According to the petition, “We, as Israelis and Jews, must not stand by when we see another nation abandoned by its allies and left defenseless. We remember very well the blood of our people, what happens when the nations of the world abandon the fate of a people.”

Now, years later, I understand why my father was proud of this small, upstart nation (now the “Startup Nation,” for its technology companies), why he felt so connected to it, as I now do. The thing about the world pre-state Israel is that Jews weren’t safe anywhere, at least not for long. They might settle here or there and live for a few generations unmolested, but, at some point, in each country, whether in a figurative Persian kingdom during the time of Esther, or in Minsk, where my father’s grandparents came from in 1905, some kind of pogrom always broke out. Even now, in America, where Jews have had it better than anywhere else outside of Israel, there’s been a rise in antisemitic violence. Now, there’s somewhere to go if things turn bad. As for turning bad, even now,  the mayor of New York City, Bill DeBlasio, has tweeted what appears to be a modern-day version of the blame that Jews felt in Europe for the plague.

Nor is Israel mainly an escape from violence. While many of its citizens came escaping violence in Europe or Middle Eastern countries, it is the only Jewish state in the world, the only place where the Jewish culture, traditions, and religion can thrive and be the dominant public culture (all while respecting minority groups), something the Jews had lacked for nearly two millennia.

Since it’s now Yom Ha’atzmaut, I’ll close by wishing Israel a happy 72nd anniversary.

Islam and Terror?

The rise of Donald Trump to the presidency has raised, once again, the question of the relationship between Islam and terror. Unfortunately, the conversation in the United States, at least at the popular level, has tended to be highly clichéd.

Anyone who is able to look at the world and form cogent thoughts should be able to see that the planet’s billion or so Muslims are not inherently violent, at least not more so than other humans. The vast majority live in peace, very often with Christian or Jewish neighbors. Still, while “Islam is a religion of peace” is a nice thing to say, and is usually said by the well meaning, the statement falls short. First, there are clearly Muslims, even if a tiny minority, who don’t believe it. Who are non-believers like me to disagree with them? I don’t have any moral standing to say to these people, “You are not truly good Muslims.” My doing so would be akin to a rabbi showing up at a conservative Southern Baptist Church and telling the congregants that they’re bad Christians because they don’t follow the faith as laid down by the world’s billion Catholics.

All of the world’s large religions (and perhaps all of the world’s small cults) have blood on their hands: Indian Hindus, including the current prime minister of India, have had a hand in massacring Muslims, as have Burmese Buddhists; Japan’s Shinto faith helped to justify that nation’s atrocities in China and Korea; and Catholics packed shrapnel into pipe bombs to kill as many civilians as possible in London shopping malls, not to mention its thousands of years of pogroms against Jews. The list goes on, though each of these faiths also has its share of peacemakers and justice lovers as well. While all of them have a majority of faithful adherents who are good people, none has earned the moniker “religion of peace.”

Islam, just like other religions, has faithful members who, because of their religious beliefs, kill innocents. The reverse is true as well: like those of other faiths, Muslims have have given their lives to help others, Muslim or not. Still, the question arises: why does it seem that the majority of religious inspired violence involves a radical version of Islamism (political Islam, a relatively recent invention)? I would argue that there are two reasons, each of which only applies in certain parts of the world, and neither of which can be found in the Koran or the Hadiths.

The first reason involves sections of the Muslim world, most especially the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) as well as parts of South Asia. There is true butchery carried out in these regions most of it committed by those professing to be Muslim. Famous examples are ISIL and al-Qaeda, but there are other groups as well: al Shabaab in and around Somalia, Boko Haram in Nigeria, etc. Looking at this section of the world – which represents a huge swath of humanity, as well as a sizable portion of the world’s Muslims – it becomes easy to see how it is that many observers would take from a superficial glance that Islam is the cause of the trouble. But these observers are mistaken; Islam isn’t a cause, but a confounding variable. A more rational answer comes when we step back from viewing Islam as the area’s common feature, and instead focus elsewhere. The more important unifying feature is the region’s lack of strong institutions, the most important of which is the state.

No area wrought by Islamist violence has a strong state. According to Max Weber’s widely accepted definition, a modern state is bureaucratic (meaning that its servants are selected based on qualifications, not familial relationships), and it maintains a monopoly of legitimate violence. All violence should flow from the state for reasons accepted as legitimate, e.g. stopping criminals or defending from foreign invaders; any other should be met with strong sanction. But as Samuel Huntington illustrated in his Political Order in Changing Societies, arguing against those who believe that economic development causes a society and its state to become more orderly and modern, the process of economic development before strong institutions have been introduced causes societies to become more and more disordered, i.e. it starts a process of political decay. Without a state that is able to really impose order and act as the sole arbiter of force, violence stays common and decentralized.

States did not simply spring into being; they arose out of war, as sociologist Charles Tilly noted first in his “War and State Making as Organized Crime”: before states existed, groups plundered and took territory; after they took the territory, they had to govern it; they “taxed” those they’d plundered in exchange for protection from others: the plunderers/governors plundered more land, and so on, until they eventually formed a standing army, and a modern state with bureaucratic institutions was born. (Note: this is an extremely vulgarized explanation of Tilly’s argument; I highly encourage you to read the full article, linked above.) The violence and plunder, then, is a sort of “default” in human history, or at least human history post-hunter-gatherer society, and much of the violence we are seeing in MENA and other areas without strong institutions is of the same variety that produced, quite by accident, the states that later democratized and became the modern Western democracies we now know. This is the process by which states rose in Europe. These “pristine” states were letter recreated through settler colonies in the Americas (especially North America). The rest of the world, however, was colonized before modern states could be built (or, was colonized after modern states had been built and had then collapsed, as in China). The “states” left after decolonization looked like pristine states – with capitals, parliaments, armies, and such – but they never gained the legitimacy (that is, the acceptance by the people they supposedly ruled over) that the European states had been able to build due to their centuries of development. Of course, there are exceptions. Due to historical factors too detailed to go into here, modern states with strong institutions have arisen in other places – South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, to name a few – but suffice it to say that these were exceptions that can be easily explained based on historical facts. And, of course, the former Communist states are in various levels of development.

ISIL is a perfect illustration of the problem: this group even call itself the Islamic State, and they’ve succeeded at building a proto-state in the regions that they have conquered. They use the progressively more extreme and perverted version of the faith to encourage their followers to ever more cruel, yet effective, ends. Social psychology’s group polarization theory offers some explanation for how ISIS has been able to become so extreme in its violence, far more explanation than can be found reading the Koran. Also adding to the mix is the fact that a portion of ISIS’s leadership is composed of ex-Baathists, ousted from Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion, which, due to de-Baathification, destroyed what little institutional stability there was in Iraq to begin with).

Thus, Islam isn’t the reason for the violence, but the mask placed over it as justification. Islam can, and certainly has been, quite comfortable with modernity. In his Being Arab, Samir Kassir, the former Lebanese Communist leader murdered by Syria’s Baathist dictatorship, made much of the fact that the Arab world, for centuries mostly Islamic, was a stronghold of modernity by the 1930s. Cairo was a hotbed of the women’s rights movement at that time, and was only behind Hollywood and Bollywood in film production. This changed in part with the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia, long the most backward and fundamentalist of the Arab states. Using oil money, the Saudi kingdom exported their version of Islam, as Kassir noted, around the Arab world. The destruction of colonial institutions (often by the colonizers themselves); constant interference by the world’s two hegemons during the Cold War; the chaos of the Iraq War; and, eventually, even the Arab Spring led to the disintegration of what little institutions there were. (It is worth adding that, with the fall of the Soviet Union; the co-optation of “secularism” by highly repressive regimes in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and elsewhere; and brutal repression from monarchical governments, the secular left movements were crushed or delegitimized as well, and could no longer provide a vehicle to channel violence and build institutions). Thus, when the inevitable violence began, it was draped in, and bolstered by, Islam, prevalent faith in the region.

Again: Islam has been able to deal well with modernity. Look to the majority Muslim sections of eastern Europe and you find relatively peaceful people. For 70 years, Muslims, Christians, and atheists lived at peace in Yugoslavia, and conflicts arose only when, as could be imagined, the federal state itself collapsed. Further, none of these conflicts were primarily religious; instead they were ethnic and national: Bosnian vs. Croatian vs. Serbian, for example. In Albania, probably a Muslim majority nation (though poll results are widely disparate), there has been no widespread terror or disturbances. The difference between Albania and MENA obviously isn’t religious; instead, the difference is the state. After the Communist regime was overthrown in 1989, the state was transformed, but not destroyed; the bureaucracy continued to function.

All of the explanation above answers the question of violence in Muslim sections of the developing world. But what of the terrorist attacks that have been happening in the West, so-called “homegrown terrorists”? Obviously, America has a strong bureaucracy, as do the European states that have experienced violence. While some incidents have been committed by refugees from areas experiencing violence, a phenomenon far more pronounced in Europe, many of the acts have been committed by those born in the U.S. or in EU states. The explanation for these terrorists is much simpler: they are misfits, social outcasts, who have become violent.

The western world has a long history of violent social outcasts, which we periodically forget. In the 1960s, young westerners joined groups like the Baader-Meinhoff clique (Red Brigade) or the Japanese Red Army or the Weathermen or the Communist Party USA/Provisional, which blew up a townhouse in Greenwich Village. These groups all committed terror, as did the Symbionese Liberation Army and a host of others. At that time, the menace that the West feared was communism, but the official Communist Parties (CPUSA, Japanese Communist Party, DKP, etc.) didn’t advocate a violent revolution, so the more outcast, prone to violence members of society joined or created groups that called themselves communist, but which practiced terror.

As the “communist” terror groups receded, we began to see lone wolf acts of violence. School shootings started in the 1980s, and the trend has continued, with the Newtown massacre of elementary school-aged children being one of the most horrific of the incidents. These instances, perpetuated generally by young males who were isolated from society and (since it came into being) on the internet are the milieu out of which American homegrown Islamist radicals emerge. The brothers who bombed the Boston marathon are not different than the friends who killed high school kids in Columbine. The latter were nihilists, and so were the former. They slapped the label of “Islamic radical,” now one of America’s worst fears, on themselves to seem even more outré, or to emphasize how much they hate the society they were isolated from. This is the case too with the Orlando massacre perpetrator and other “lone wolves.”

The West, and America especially, has a problem with isolated people who become violent, often after immersing themselves in negative, anti-social material. Years ago, it was an extreme variant of the communist movement; now it is an extreme variant of Islam, in short, anything that terrifies Americans. Now, thanks to ISIL, al-Qaeda, and other groupings, there is a whole world of nihilistic death-cult ideology for these people to immerse themselves in.

It is good for Muslims to stand up and speak out against violent acts committed in their name (everyone should speak out against violent acts committed in their name), and by and large they are doing this. When Muslims argue that Islam is a religion of peace, they are arguing for their, peaceful, interpretation of Islam over that of the fanatical sects, including the ideology of death perpetuated by ISIL and others of that ilk. The same is the case with Catholics and other Christians who argue that, for example, the Westborough Baptist Church members are not real Christians.

The real solution to these problems, however, are not uniform: in the West, in addition to punishing violent nihilists, we have to erode the isolation and conditions that lead some people to commit acts of terror, disrupt these people’s networks, online and off. Further, we have to somehow reverse the atomization of our society (as described in Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone). Reversing atomization, though, will be harder and requires creativity. In other parts of the world, fighting and killing violent extremists is part of the solution, but only part. The other, harder, part is to build the institutions that can provide political order and monopolize violence.

These are gargantuan tasks, and they won’t be won in the battle of ideas. And they certainly won’t be ridiculous “Muslim bans.”

Image by Edward Muslak under a Creative Commons copyright.

Too many teachers reject or ignore evolution

Something needs to be done about teachers who simply refuse to educate kids.

We’re not talking the anti-union, anti-teacher rhetoric of the news media and Republican officials. We’re talking about science teachers who refuse to teach science, specifically the scientific fact of evolution.

These problem teachers – who openly flout the law – aren’t discussed by Fox News or right-wing politicians.

According to a recent article in Science magazine, by Michael B. Berkman and Eric Plutzer, thousands of people employed as science teachers across the country actually teach their students “creation” myths – even though 40 years of court rulings have consistently upheld the principle that all kids deserve a real, scientific education. And, according to the courts, that doesn’t mean creation myths, intelligent design “theories” or anything else but evolution.

Other mis-teachers teach intelligent design as a co-equal theory with evolution. Some other teachers, out of fear of controversy, simply avoid the subject altogether.

The teachers who teach real science deserve applause. Unfortunately, that means applauding only the 28 percent of biology teachers who, according to the article, “consistently implement the major recommendations and conclusions of the National Research Council. They unabashedly introduce evidence that evolution has occurred and craft lesson plans so that evolution is a theme that unifies disparate topics in biology.”

An astounding 13 percent of teachers explicitly advocate intelligent design, the article says, and another 5 percent say they endorse that non-scientific notion when answering student questions. And they apparently have few qualms about it. According to the article, “29 percent of all other teachers report having been ‘nervous at an open house event or meeting with parents'” about the subject, while the corresponding figure for creationists, or creationists in disguise – the supporters of “intelligent design” – is only 19 percent.

Then there are the “cautious” teachers, as the report calls them. These educators, who make up about 60 percent of the whole, do the best they can to skirt the issue. Some teach only molecular biology, others make a point of noting that they only teach evolution because the state requires it, and others expose students to both science and the variety of “competing theories.”

As Berkman and Plutzer point out, these methods, especially the “competing theories” one, undermine real scientific understanding of the reason for the diversity of species and can also lead some students to believe in creationist thought. This means that a total of nearly 75 percent of biology teachers either specifically teach non-science or shy away from the subject of evolution and development of species.

The authors quote a teacher who says he wants students to make up their minds “based on their own beliefs and research. Not on what a textbook or on what a teacher says.” While this sounds nice, Berkman and Plutzer point out the obvious: Can a student really be expected to possess “enough information to reject thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers?”

This lack of teaching of real science – either because of intimidation or because of creationist subversion of court rulings – hurts students overall. How can they be expected to understand the scientific method if they aren’t taught it? Especially given that for about a quarter of all high school students, these biology classes are the only science classes they ever take?

Why should anyone care? The study’s authors respond that when many young people are not provided “a sound science education,” it is “problematic in a democracy dependent on meaningful citizen input on highly technical, but consequential, public policies.”

Further, as the study points out, this illegal teaching helps to reproduce a socially reactionary culture. The authors say, “We ranked school districts from least to most socially conservative, and in the 15 percent most socially conservative school districts, nearly 4 in 10 teachers personally do not accept human evolution … The next generation of adults is thus predisposed to share the anti-evolution views” of the preceding generation.

This hurts democracy and progress. Evolution is accepted by most major religious groups in our country: Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and Islamic. Strengthening the anti-evolution camp strengthens the smattering of anti-evolution religious groups and extremist evangelicals, who also support the most backwards elements in national politics. These are also the same groups who will fight to keep “intelligent design” in the classroom.

The fight for real science education is the law of the land, as determined repeatedly by various court decisions. More importantly it is the fight for democracy and progress.

Originally published in People’s Weekly World.