Week 17, Monday

For those of you who have had enough of me writing about ‘the situation’, good news: so have I (at least temporarily). For those who want more, let me point you (not for the first time) to the man who, more than any other, makes me feel that anything I have to say is less thoroughly researched, less insightful, less well-expressed than anything he has to say. Daniel Gordis offers a substack (whatever that is) also available as a podcast, entitled Israel from the Inside.

Click the link in the previous paragraph to read all about it, and read it, and even subscribe to it. In normal times, it provides a fresh and wide-ranging dip into anything of interest culturally, socially, politically, academically, scientifically – anythingly really – in Israeli life. (Since October 7, it has, naturally, reflected Israel’s almost exclusive focus on current events.) Its own blurb states, accurately: ‘Israel from the Inside is for people who want to understand Israel with nuance, who believe that Israel is neither hopelessly flawed and illegitimate, nor beyond critique. If thoughtful analysis of Israel and its people interests you, welcome!’ While aimed primarily at American Jews, it is relevant and accessible to everyone, and I highly recommend it.

74 Today

It may have slipped under your radar that today (or yesterday, as it will be tomorrow when I send this out) is (or was) my 74^th birthday. I was planning to celebrate by sharing with you some fascinating facts about notable 74s. When I started researching (which is a rather grand term for Googling) 74s, I soon discovered that 74 is the number of different non-Hamiltonian polyhedra with a minimum number of vertices. This looked promising!

In a previous existence, when I was at college studying to become an English teacher, I was required to take a second subject. I opted for maths, having eliminated all of the options that didn’t appeal to me, and, as part of my coursework, I completed a project on regular polyhedra, which included building models from stiff card of all of the stellated regular polyhedral. (A polyhedron is stellated by extending the edges or face planes of the polyhedron until they meet again to form a new polyhedron or compound.) Here, for example, is a stellated dodecahedron.

 So, non-Hamiltonian polyhedra sounded promising. All that I was missing was the faintest idea of what the hell a non-Hamiltonian polyhedron was. A little further delving clarified the issue. Non-Hamiltonian polyhedra are polyhedra that are not Hamiltonian. Well, who would have thunk it!

All that I was now missing was the faintest idea of what the hell a Hamiltonian polyhedron was. A little further delving clarified the issue. A ‘Hamiltonian’, I learnt, is a function that is used to describe a dynamic system (such as the motion of a particle) in terms of components of momentum and coordinates of space and time and that is equal to the total energy of the system when time is not explicitly part of the function.

Not yet entirely daunted (although the amount of daunt I had left was rapidly shrinking), I felt my heart leap as I read the dictionary’s final laconic instruction: ‘Compare Lagrangian’. ‘Well, this looks promising’, I thought. Lagrange I did at least recognise as the name of an 18^th Century mathematician, The definition of ‘Lagrangian’, I discovered, is: ‘a function that describes the state of a dynamic system in terms of position coordinates and their time derivatives and that is equal to the difference between the potential energy and kinetic energy’.

Increasingly, in recent years, I find that there comes a point in some of my research where I realise that Google has a lot more in common with Hampton Court maze than is first apparent. I felt that I had reached that point, and decided to look for other, equally fascinating, but less abstruse, 74s.

So, how about this? What is the definition of a hurricane (or, indeed, a typhoon)? It is a system with sustained winds of at least 74 mph. How, you are doubtless asking, did they arrive at this precise number? The only explanation I can find is that this figure is chosen on the Beaufort scale because it ‘represents the point at which the storm’s wind speeds become strong enough to cause significant damage to property and pose a threat to human life. Even so, the decision to opt for 74 rather than the more rounded 75 seems bizarre. Converting to kph or even knots (119 and 64 respectively) sheds no further light on the puzzle. Another mystery of life unsolved.

My final, desperate attempt to find something interesting to say about 74 is this. A ‘seventy four’ was, so I gather, a third-rate warship with 74 guns. This definition aroused my interest. I found it difficult to imagine His Majesty’s Navy being so self-deprecating as to describe one of its models of warship as ‘third-rate’.

This was, of course, in the days before British warships bumped into each other, as happened nine days ago in a Bahrain port, when HMS Chiddingfold reversed into HMS Bangor, apparently creating a large hole in the unfortunately named Bangor’s hull. Rear Admiral Edward Ahlgren sounded, to be frank, less than reassuring when he stated that while a full and thorough investigation is conducted, “the UK will continue to play a key part in ensuring the safety of merchant shipping in the region.” It would be petty to point out that the Royal Navy appears to be unable to ensure the safety of even its own shipping.

But I digress! Back to those third-rate warships. In the rating system of the Royal Navy, a third rate was a ship of the line which from the 1720s mounted between 64 and 80 guns, typically built with two gun decks (thus the related term two-decker). A second rate had more guns and a third deck, while a first rate had even more guns, although no more decks. The Navy maintained a hierarchical system of six “ratings” in all, based on size and firepower.

Ironically, the third-rate warships proved to be what we would term ‘first-rate’, since they represented an excellent balance between firepower and sailing qualities. These third-rate warships formed the mainstay of most major fleets in Europe until well into the 19th Century.

So, the mystery remains of why we persist in regarding third-rate as reflecting a ranking of quality rather than being purely descriptive and not judgmental.

And that, dear reader, is about all of the most interesting stuff about 74, so you can imagine what the least interesting stuff is like! I have to say that, so far, 74, for me, doesn’t feel strikingly different from 73. Personally, I’ll certainly settle for more of the same as I enjoyed when I was 73. We are all, of course, wishing for a better year nationally, regionally and globally, but that’s another story that I’m trying not to think too much about for this one day at least.

Editor’s wife’s footnote: I’ve just realised why this post isn’t very satisfying. It’s not at all personal; there’s nothing of David in it.

Editor’s footnote: Bernice is, of course, right, as always. I promise to try harder next week, but it’s now 8:52 on Tuesday morning, so I’m cutting it a bit fine for a complete rewrite, even with my track record of finishing homework on the bus to school.

Wot? No Photos!?

Although I have been vaguely aware of deepfake for some time, an article in The Times one day last week made me much more conscious of deepfake’s invasive reach and ugliness. Apparently, facial images are being lifted from social media and faked onto actors’ bodies in pornographic and paedophile videos.

Over the day after we both read this article, Bernice and I each independently started thinking about this, and when Bernice suggested to me a day or two later that I should stop posting photos of our grandsons, I had already reached the same conclusion. To recognise that this is what the world has come to, and that there seems to be no concerted effort to find a way back, is a depressing thing to think about on your 74th birthday, but it is what it is.

Week 16: Monday

Can We Win the War, or Have We Already Lost It?

I don’t have much in the way of good news to share on the national front this week. Indeed, at this stage it is not easy to imagine what might constitute good news. As one week gives way to the next, the declared (indeed, originally proclaimed) aims of the war – to bring home the abductees and to eliminate Hamas – seem less and less realistic.

As someone wrote about an earlier round of fighting in Gaza: ‘The public invariably expects the government to continue the battle and “flatten Gaza,” believing that with enough punishment the Hamas regime would collapse. Yet that would only happen if we sent in the army. The casualties would mount: many hundreds on the Israeli side and many thousands on the Palestinian side. Did I really want to tie down the IDF in Gaza for years when we had to deal with Iran and a possible Syrian front? (The someone was Netanyahu, in his autobiography.) Is the country ready for the daily rollcall of fallen soldiers – on a good day, one; on a particularly bad day last week, nine – to continue for years?

Note: It’s now Tuesday morning. When I wrote that last sentence yesterday, my heart sank as I typed ‘nine’. When I came out of shul this morning and caught the news headline, I wept: since last night, 24 reservists have died. Of those 24, 21 were in the process of mining two buildings used by terrorists close to the border, in preparation for their demolition; the buildings suffered a direct hit from an RPG, which triggered the mines, and the buildings collapsed on the soldiers. Is the country ready for this to continue for years? On the other hand, do we have any option? May their memories be for a blessing, and may their deaths prove not to have been in vain.

As for the hostages, the feeling is growing that it is unlikely that they can be brought home. This is a feeling that was for some time unspoken, but now, tellingly, is being articulated in the media as well as on the street. A prominent radio pundit last week baldly stated that it is completely unrealistic to think in terms of an Entebbe-type military rescue. The conditions under which the abductees are undoubtedly being held, the alertness of their captors, and the complexity of the terrain in which they are being held, all confirm what he said.

As for negotiating their return, it now appears that Hamas is not interested in the release of security prisoners (which, if Netanyahu were to agree to it, would probably bring about the collapse of his coalition). Instead, they are looking for a protracted ceasefire – possibly over 50 days – with a staged release of all of the abductees in return for increased humanitarian aid,

These conditions would, of course, allow Hamas to regroup, repair and recruit. Resuming hostilities after such a break would be, for Israel, like starting from square one again, All of our fallen soldiers to that point would have died for nothing. Not resuming hostilities would, of course, make their sacrifice seem even emptier.

Add to all this the fact that a significant number of the abductees are probably already dead, with more liable to succumb with every week that passes. This horrible situation offers no glimmer of hope that I can see.

Meanwhile, on the Northern front, it can be convincingly argued that Hizbollah has already won the war that officially has not started. They have advanced from North of the Litani river (as per international agreement) to the very border with Israel. The buffer zone has now moved from Southern Lebanon to Northern Israel. With almost 100,000 Israelis evacuated from Northern Israel, and with no indication of when, if ever, they might feel able to return, Hizbollah has effectively taken territory from Israel to a depth of several kilometres south of the border.

Can We Start Again?

Before turning my attention to other matters, let me leave you with a flicker of better news. Like the first saplings emerging in a forest ravaged by fire, here and there are signs of a possible direction for Israel’s political future. I heard today on the radio of a grassroots initiative to create a dialogue between religious and secular elements in Israeli society to explore common ground in the hope of being able to agree on a shared vision for Israel. There are, from various directions, calls for entirely fresh faces to enter the political arena: leaders of industry, organisers of voluntary initiatives, social activists.

Meanwhile, on Another Planet…(It Sometimes Seems)

Every now and again some philistine argues that state education should focus on ‘real’ subjects (like sciences and maths), instead of wasting time on ‘soft’ subjects like music and art. This month, the power of the arts has been demonstrated resoundingly in Britain…and Zichron Ya’akov.

Let’s start with the big story. (Those of you who live in Britain can safely skip the next three paragraphs.)

Between 1999 and 2015 an estimated 4,000 branch owner-managers at the Post Office were accused of wrongdoing after faulty IT software showed errors in their accounts. Many were sacked, chased for money, or accused of crimes such as false accounting, fraud or theft. As many as 900 were prosecuted and 236 sent to prison. Others were ordered to pay back substantial sums, leaving them financially ruined. Some of the accused have died without clearing their names, at least four are known to have committed suicide and others have been shunned after being convicted.

Horizon was the largest non-military IT system in the world in operation at the time and had been designed to deal with transactions, accounting and stock taking. It covered each of the 20,000 Post Office branches in the UK. From early on, many workers continually reported bugs in the system, with unexplained shortfalls in their accounts, but these were ignored. The Post Office allowed many of these workers to think they were the only one reporting faults.

In 2009, after being contacted by seven postmasters, the website Computer Weekly ran an article detailing their struggles with the system. It led to the formation of a campaign group, the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA), which began talking to MPs and fighting in the courts. Eventually, the High Court ruled that there were IT problems in the system, the Post Office apologised for the suffering caused, 10% of convictions were quashed and, in 2021, a full public inquiry was initiated.

However, all of this was much too little, and, for many involved, much too late. Despite the very real concerns being in the public domain, the powers-that-be seemed to still be wishing the story would go away, and stalling.

Then, in the first week of January this year, the mainstream TV station ITV aired a four-part dramatization of the postmasters’ struggle for justice, with the title Mr Bates vs The Post Office. Overnight, this changed the entire status of this story. Within days, the Government announced that a new law would be passed “within weeks” to achieve a blanket overturning of convictions, the former Post Office boss returned her CBE (a middle-order rank within the British Honours system), and the public outcry generated new interest in the case on the part of the police, the public inquiry and the press.

There is a long tradition of British television drama exposing injustices. The first prominent example is probably Cathy Come Home, which was a 1966 BBC television play about homelessness, unemployment, and a mother’s right to keep her children, topics that were not until then widely discussed in the media. The play produced a storm of phone calls to the BBC, and discussion in Parliament. For years afterwards Carol White (who played Cathy) was stopped in the street by people pressing money into her hand, convinced she must be actually homeless.

In 1990, the TV film Who Bombed Birmingham raised serious doubts as to the guilt of the Birmingham Six, six Irishmen who had been sentenced to life in prison in 1975 after two IRA bombs went off at pubs in Birmingham, killing 21 people.  The film led to their subsequent release after 17 years of wrongful imprisonment. The film discredited the government’s most prominent forensic investigator and went as far as identifying the actual culprits.

Cathy Come Home was watched on its first broadcast by 12 million people, a quarter of the British population. In 1966, when Britain had only two television channels, such an audience size was impressive, but understandable. In 2024, the British public’s home viewing options seem almost infinite. The average viewing figures across the four episodes of Mr Bates vs The Post Office, of over 9.8 million, are therefore arguably even more impressive.

The question I have been asking myself is: How is it that a dramatization that presented no new facts, that did not, essentially, tell the public anything that they did not already know, succeeded in igniting a nation in this way? The answer, it seems to me, is that the sheer scale of the impact of this miscarriage of justice made it more difficult for people to conceptualise. Mr Bates vs The Post Office, as the title suggests, personalised the story. It focussed on an individual story (that of one victim, Jo Hamilton, and one – albeit the central – campaigner, Alan Bates) that served to represent the total picture.

This is, of course, part of the magic of drama: its ability to capture the universal in the particular. Viewers were able to identify with the plight of one victim and extrapolate from that, in a way that the story as reported in the media had failed to make them do.

At a time when funding of the arts in general is under attack in Britain and Israel, this month has given us a timely reminder that a healthy democracy needs a thriving and independent art culture, not least to ensure that stories that need to be heard are heard.

And Closer to Home

On a not dissimilar note, Raphael’s fancy has been taken in recent weeks by a charming book entitled What’s Cooking at 10 Market Street. Each flat in the eponymous brownstone is occupied by a family with a different ethnic cuisine, and each double page of the book visits one family to see what they are cooking, and includes a recipe. Raphael, who, it’s fair to say, is fascinated by food preparation, adores the book. Here is the double-spread devoted to the Pings, and their stir-fried broccoli.

Under the influence of this book, Raphael is now a great fan of broccoli. Such, dear reader, is the power of art.

Meanwhile, Tao seems to be fascinated by a very grand-looking cake at a friend’s recent birthday party, Ollie continues to find the world a really fun place, and Raphael really enjoys his new sponge paints.

Week 15: Monday

Yesterday marked 100 days, a figure which not only resonated here in Israel, obviously, but which also echoed worldwide, in a variety of ways. Most notably in Turkey, perhaps, where Sagiv Yehezkel, an Israeli footballer playing for local team Antalyaspor, dedicated to the hostages a goal he scored, displaying on a bandage on his hand the inked message ‘100 days 7.10.’ As a consequence, he was suspended by his team and detained by the police for questioning with regard to a possible charge of incitement against the state. We have just heard that he has been released by the police and is expected to be expelled from the country. (Update: he has landed safely back home.)

In South Africa, the Jewish captain of the national under-19 cricket team was relieved of the captaincy on the eve of the Cricket World Cup being hosted by South Africa ‘for fear of endangering his safety in the face of expected pro-Palestinian protests at the event’.

In Mauritania, the exhibition that an artist friend of ours was invited to make, after travelling in West Africa and painting what she saw, has been cancelled for fear of antisemitic and anti-Israeli demonstrations and a real worry that the gallery would be burned down if it displayed non-political paintings of West African scenes by an Israeli artist.

And, of course, in The Hague, the International Court of Justice is trying Israel for genocide. Israel agreeing to this Orwellian trial is either a very smart or a very stupid move.

The statement from the German Government spokesman, when discussing his country’s request for third-party status at the hearing, was very encouraging: “In light of German history and the crimes against humanity of the Shoah, the German government is particularly committed to the [UN] Genocide Convention…We stand firmly against a political instrumentalization [of the Convention]… The German government decisively and expressly rejects the accusation of genocide brought against Israel before the International Court of Justice.”

David Cameron, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, when asked whether he thought Israel has a case to answer in the ICJ, stated: “No, I absolutely don’t. I think the South African action is wrong, I take the view that Israel is acting in self-defence after the appalling attack on October 7… To say that that country, that leadership, that armed forces…have intent to commit genocide, I think that is nonsense.

The US has stated that the allegations against Israel “are unfounded” and has called the submission at the ICJ “meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever.”

So far, so good. Naturally, the hearing also gives Israel an opportunity to make its case before a world audience that may find it difficult to ignore that case. While many of the ears Israel’s presentation of its case falls on will doubtless be deaf, there may be others that are prepared to listen.

The make-up of the justices hearing the case suggests that South Africa’s claim may even be rejected. While the judges do not represent their governments but are independent magistrates, nobody is under any illusions that Iran and its axis of evil partners will be swayed by Israel’s arguments. However, among the nationalities of the judges are several whose governments are not irrevocably hostile to Israel.

The 15 permanent judges hail from Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Jamaica, Japan, Lebanon, Morocco, Russia, Slovakia, Somalia, Uganda, and the United States. In addition, the parties to the hearing (South Africa and Israel) are each allowed to nominate a judge. It is not impossible to imagine a scenario where that panel votes 8-7 to reject the South African claim of genocide.

As I remarked to Bernice the other day, either the claim is rejected, which will be a good thing, or we will have an even clearer understanding of who our enemies are, which will be a good thing.

Meanwhile, in today’s (Monday’s) Jerusalem Post, Senior Editor David Brinn makes the excellent point that the slogan ‘Bring Them Home Now’ implies that the obstacle to the return of the hostages is our government or our army. Of course, this is not true. “The enemy is Hamas, and they would like nothing more than for the internal struggles that gripped Israel before October 7 to reemerge as a dominant force, with blame replacing unity as the primary fuel running the country… Hamas…could spare their people unimaginable suffering by simply doing one thing:” releasing the hostages. That, argues Brinn, needs to be the slogan going forward. Let us call on Hamas to ‘Let Our People Go!’ He makes a lot of sense.

Happy Talky Talky

After due reflection, we have come to the conclusion that we are a family for whom language matters, and one of the joys of this visit has been observing the language skills of all three of the boys.

Tao has spent most of his first four years with his parents, both of whom – Micha’el in English, Tslil in Hebrew – have avoided talking childishly to him. He also seems to have inherited his parents’ relish for language and his father’s ear. As a result, his command of English is very impressive. This obviously includes a mature vocabulary, but also an ear for accents.

Exposure to American children’s videos means that for his own imaginative play, when he is pretending to be a super-hero (or, more often, a super-villain such as the Green Goblin or Dr Spooky), he speaks in a pretty convincing American accent and register. In addition, when he combines his language skills with his considerable negotiating skills, he is often able to persuade his parents to see his point of view on issues such as bedtime or food treats.

Tao’s Hebrew is not as strong as his English. Although Tslil is very disciplined about always speaking to him in Hebrew, he usually answers her in English. One considerable side-benefit for Tao of his visits to Israel is that his interactions with his mother’s family, and with children of friends, help his fluency and confidence in Hebrew.

While his Portuguese is currently very much his third language, this is something that will, naturally, become stronger in the years to come.

Ollie, on the other hand, gets by at the moment with basically one sound: the schwa. (This is the sound of the second ‘a’ in ‘America’ or the ‘e’ in ‘item’.) Remarkably, Ollie can use this single sound, in combination with a set of hand signals, head movements, and body postures, to convey almost anything he wants to express.

While he usually only verbalises this one sound, there is nothing that Ollie does not understand. Indeed, the gap between his listening comprehension and his spoken expression sometimes seems ridiculously large. However, Bernice keeps reminding me that Micha’el did not speak until he was almost three (since when, of course, he hasn’t stopped).

What is slightly surprising, given his current limited range of speech, is that Ollie is quick to mimic, and has a good ear for mimicking, sounds that he hears. His animal sounds are very good; he quickly copied my tongue-clicking when I was imitating a horse’s clippety-clop; he adopted his brother’s raspberry blowing depressingly quickly; and, when Tao blew through a long tube and produced a note something like that from a shofar, Ollie immediately reproduced a remarkably similar sound without any tube or other artificial aid.

On our weekly visits to Zichron, we of course have the opportunity to see Raphael’s progress, in language acquisition. Like Ollie, he understands everything, and, unlike Ollie, he has a rapidly-growing vocabulary. While he very much favoured English until a couple of months ago, the influence of his gan has brought his Hebrew on tremendously (not least with such phrases as “בא לי” (I’d like…) or even, occasionally, “לא בא לי” (“Don’t want to). Paradoxically, what was always “מים” has now, for some reason, become “water”. He has also now graduated from a generic term that covered both Esther and Maayan to referring to Esther exclusively as “Mummy” and Maayan exclusively as “אמא” (Ima).

In addition, Raphael is now moving from single word statements to two- and three-word sentences, which he does not really appear to find quite as exciting a development as I do. Indeed, rather like his, and Ollie’s, ever-advancing walking skills, he seems to take it all in his stride.

As always, to spend any time with young children is to stand in awe of how they achieve what they achieve, at what speed, and with what apparent lack of effort.

A House Full of Action…and Then It Wasn’t

From Shabbat afternoon until Sunday morning, we had a houseful. Esther, Maayan and Raphael arrived to join Micha’el, Tslil, Tao and Ollie for a last overnighter. What a joy to see the three cousins interacting!

Then on Motzei Shabbat we had all the adult extended family round to see our lot, and for us to celebrate, very belatedly, Esther’s 40^th birthday. Uncharacteristically for us, the evening was marked by no formality: no speeches, no music, no presentations; just an opportunity for everyone to catch up and make a fuss of the three boys, all of whom stayed up and sociable way past their normal bedtimes.

The following morning, the kids somehow managed to keep the grandkids away from Nana until 8:30. When they could contain them no longer, they erupted into our bedroom, and we were soon up and into action. After Esther and family left mid-morning, Bernice and I spent the rest of the day with Tao and Ollie, while Micha’el and Tslil somehow managed to condense all of their varieties of stuff, including the many gifts the boys had been given by generous family and friends, into their cases and rucksacks.

This morning, after a last breakfast, and games, and stories, and one last puppet show from Nana (with Zippy – a shout-out to all the Rainbow fans among my readers), the taxi arrived at 9:45 and suddenly we were, once again, two old fogies banging around our suddenly huge house.

Games, toys, books, trikes, baby chairs, floormats, kids’ table and chair were all stowed away in record time. Birthday banners and balloons were taken down; floors were swept; kinetic sand was cleaned from Lego cars; marbles were retrieved from under sofas; the extraordinarily loud and aggravating battery-operated noise-maker toy that Micha’el and Tslil conveniently omitted to pack was discreetly disposed of. Finally, Bernice and I sat down to a quiet and leisurely breakfast.

…and in five weeks we fly off to Portugal.

Meanwhile, some photos, including a rare one of all three boys together (at Esther’s last week).

Week 14: Monday

A number of you (mostly from outside Israel) have written to me in the last couple of weeks, expressing appreciation for my reflections on ‘the situation’. Thank you for that support. While I actually want to write about a couple of entirely different things today, let me start by briefly reflecting on the state we are currently in.

Plenty of Whats, but Precious Few Hows

Discussion in the corridors of power, in the media and on the street is increasingly about ‘the day after’. This phrase is, I fear, deliberately vague, because everyone is increasingly reluctant to articulate exactly what marks the day before the day after. The official talk is of the aims of the war being the complete destruction of Hamas’s capability and the return of the abductees. However, exactly how we achieve either of those aims is far from clear.

Will anything less than the killing of all 30,000(?) Hamas operatives completely destroy Hamas’s capability? Tzahal claims to have successfully destroyed Hamas as an organised fighting force in northern Gaza. I very much doubt that that is the same as completely destroying its capability. What Tzahal has achieved to date, remarkable as it is both in its success and in its minimisation of civilian casualties, looks like little more than kicking the can down the road. Further down the road than previously, certainly; but, nevertheless…

(Let me put that ‘minimisation’ into context. Yesterday, the Gazan Health Ministry reported that at least 22,835 Gazans have been killed in the war. Israel reported that about 8,500 Hamas fighters have been killed. This represents a ratio of 1.7 civilian deaths for each terrorist death, in a war fought against terrorists embedded among and shielding themselves with a civilian population. This ratio is unprecedentedly low in the history of warfare.)

As for ‘bringing the abductees home’, everybody agrees that this is an aim; but how is it to be achieved? “They ‘must’ come home before 100 days are up” is the latest mantra, but it is a mantra without teeth. The sad fact is that, when you are fighting an organisation like Hamas, there are no pressures that you can put on them to force their hand.

The only thing we could offer them is an immediate end to the war and the release of security prisoners. As Hamas has made clear, this would be the equivalent of offering them the opportunity to prepare for a repeat of October 7 in another couple of years. Nothing else that we could offer Hamas (in other words, nothing that we would be prepared to offer) would be more valuable to them than witnessing the agony that their continued torture of the abductees inflicts on Israel.

The Histadrut (National Trade Union) has declared a 100-minute national strike on the 100^th day (January 14) to support the families of the hostages. I may be a cynic, but I fail to see how a national strike supports the families. I would have thought that a more meaningful gesture than damaging the economy and adversely affecting the functioning of Israel’s public life would have been volunteering to work an extra 100 minutes on that day. They could use this extra time to advance such initiatives as the payment of grants to businesses crippled by the war, and the provision of practical and emotional support for displaced families.

The entire Jerusalem Post magazine section last Friday was devoted to ‘the day after’, but, again, it was full of whats and almost empty of hows. Yes, a framework for Gaza has to be found where terrorism is no longer taught in the schools, but how? Yes, Gaza has to be rebuilt and its economy established and grown, while ensuring that no resources are taken to rebuild a terrorist infrastructure, but how? Yes, ‘the world’ has to take some responsibility for the policing and the nurturing of Gaza, but how?

Stating the whats when there are no hows to be found is, sadly, little more than mouthing political slogans, whether it is the Prime Minister or the man in the street making the statement. We are in Week 14, but the day before the day after looks no clearer and no nearer. The Chief of Staff stated yesterday during an assessment of the situation: “The year 2024 will be challenging. We will be at war in Gaza. We will be fighting in Gaza for the entire year.”

And so to matters less heart-wrenching, but no less important to me.

In the Eye of the Beholder

A week and a half ago, I took Tao to ‘the circus’. This was billed as a Ukrainian circus appearing on the stage of our local cultural centre in Maale Adumim in a performance dedicated to the memory of a local soldier who had been killed in Gaza. Quite apart from being on the side of justice in two current armed conflicts, and involving no animal acts, we thought that this was something Tao would really enjoy, and I would just about be able to tolerate.

In the event, the noise from the audience was far less than I had feared. Indeed, I could hardly hear the audience of children. Sadly, this was because the volume of the music that played throughout the performance was deafening. Tao didn’t make many comments during the performance, but I was unable to hear any of the few he did make.

The performance was very interesting, not least because of the difference between Tao’s experience and mine. What I watched was a rather sad affair: two Ukrainian circus people – a man and a woman – had been brought over, and augmented by half-a-dozen Israeli amateur gymnasts.

The Ukrainian woman performed a fairly good act balancing on a growing tower of chairs (although she failed to conceal the fact that each chair solidly locked into the one below it, rendering the act considerably less death-defying). She followed this with a graceful act balancing and spiralling on a silk skein suspended from the stage flies. The Ukrainian man performed a very good high-wire act, executing a perfect back somersault, and crossing the wire with his partner on his shoulders.

Apart from that, there was an inordinate amount of strutting and posturing by the Israelis, a few floor exercises, some bouncing on giant tyres and on Oscar-Pistorius-inspired blades attached to their ankles, and some general padding out of the afternoon.

Woven less than artfully around these acts, and ostensibly holding them together, was a devilish plot. A personification of evil (who provided the comic relief), was battling the rest of the cast (who, in a very demanding suspension of disbelief, we were required to believe were superheroes) for world supremacy. The villain’s avowed aim was to destroy the world, which would mean the elimination of fun and happiness but also, as he fiendishly pointed out, the elimination of school.

At the end of the performance, the superheroes were triumphant, trapping the villain in a net and hoisting him above the stage until he repented his evil ways, and left the audience with a message to spread love and joy.

While I was marvelling at the amateurishness of all this, Tao was never less than absorbed and more than once spellbound. At some point I decided to stop watching the action on stage and instead watch Tao. I then got much more out of the show, with the result that we both had a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon. As a bonus, by the time we returned home, I had almost completely regained my hearing.

I was a little surprised that the performance included an intermission, until I realised that this was just a marketing ploy. The foyer of the cultural centre was given over to the sale of merchandise. On offer were water guns, equipped with laser sights and looking chillingly realistic. Of course, in a country where every child at the moment sees assault rifles in their homes, streets, shopping malls and synagogues, authenticity is significant. Well, I had no intention of buying an assault rifle, even a water-firing one. So we kept looking.

Also on offer were rotor hand-held fans, laser-pointers and suchlike, all looking rather tatty and all on the theme of Santa Claus. Well, I had no intention of buying any of that, either. So we kept looking. Tao, I have to say, was very patient and accepted without any fuss that we weren’t buying anything we had seen so far.

It was at this point that we discovered a small pile of bubble-blowing guns. The downside was that they required a battery and played music. The upside was that the volume of the music was soft, and each gun came with not one but two bottles of bubble-mixture. Fortunately, Tao thought a bubble-blowing gun was a wonderful idea as well; the price was a half of what I had expected, and so we made our purchase.

Sadly, once we were home, Tao demonstrated that, in the imagination of a four-year-old, a rainbow-coloured bubble gun can be conjured into being as destructive as any far more realistic assault rifle. Still, once his parents had insisted that the slipperiness of the bubble-mixture spill meant that this was an outdoor toy, we were all well satisfied.

While Tao was at live theatre, Ollie was engaged in a puppet show, and Raphael was learning all about the seasons at gan.

Week 13: Sunday

I was just reflecting on the fact that it no longer seems practical to measure the passage of the war in days. This, in itself, is unusual for Israel when marking the passage of time during wars, but, as we approach the three-month mark, nothing points to a conclusion being reached any time soon. Today’s local news seems to be probing this passage of time from any number of directions.

First, the Government today decided to further postpone the local and municipal elections from the end of January to the end of February. With large numbers of candidates for mayor and for council seats currently serving in the forces, and with potentially many more than a hundred thousand reservist voters still serving on January 31, it is widely felt that a fair election campaign, and a large and informed voter turnout, would prove impossible.

In addition, the academic year in higher education officially began today, having already been postponed. It is impossible to see how the close to 30% of students who are currently serving in the forces can be expected to make up the time they will inevitably lose; even if remote-learning and other provisions are made, it is unrealistic to expect women and men fighting a war to be able to give any thought to their academic studies. On the other hand, the country cannot afford economically to ‘lose’ an entire academic year’s cohort. There is, I fear, no fair and practical solution.

Meanwhile, the fragile coalition seems to be showing signs of cracking over, among other things, the issue of whether the question of what ‘the day after’ looks like is a ‘military’ question for the smaller war cabinet that includes representatives of parties that have joined the Government for the period of the war, or a ‘civil’ question for the larger security cabinet that includes the Likud’s right-wing partners in the Government.

These issues are, of course, playing out against the background of hundreds of thousands still displaced and with no prospect of returning to their homes in the coming weeks, with all of the domestic and national emotional and economic strain that this brings.

And above and beyond all of this is the still horrifyingly large number of abductees and prisoners of war held in Gaza, whose release seems no nearer this week than last.

Surrounded by all of this, with an extraordinary dissonance that I am finding it almost impossible to cope with, we have been enjoying the first week of Micha’el and the family staying with us. They arrived in the small hours of Sunday night, and after a day and a half Esther and the family came for a couple of days. Rather than attempt to write at length about my very mixed thoughts and feelings in this most surreal of weeks, I thought I would leave you this week with a photo montage.

Day 79: Sunday

Two of my readers last week asked me to drop them from the list of recipients, because “What started out as an interesting blog posting highlights of Michael’s experiences in a new country has now become political …. the news is distressing enough without adding to it.” I’m not sure that ‘political’ is the word that I would choose for what these posts have largely been over the last couple of months, but that is nit-picking. I accept the charge by-and-large, and it has set me musing about this whole blogging business, not for the first time.

The fact is, of course, that Penamacorrespondent has not been an accurate title for a very long time now, and the blurb on the Background page of the blog, proclaiming that ‘This blog is the story of our retirement adventure’ is only intermittently accurate. The simple truth is that this blog is a distillation of whatever swims most powerfully into my head in the twenty minutes after I sit down at the laptop on a Sunday or Monday every week. There have been weeks when I knew what I wanted to write about well in advance. Some of those have been recent weeks, and others have been weeks when we actually were in Portugal. However, more often than not, I start writing and hope that a theme will emerge. This is, as you may have suspected, starting to feel like one of those weeks. It’s not that the war is any less real or immediate, but rather that I do not feel that this is a week where there were dramatic developments on any front. I don’t feel I have anything new to add to the debate.

For us personally, it’s been a funny old week. Bernice has been opening more and more doors of her own personal Advent calendar. I’d better explain that quickly.

Micha’el, Tslil, Tao and Ollie should be arriving on our doorstep, God willing, around 4:00AM Monday morning, for a three-week stay. (Don’t worry – I’ll update you at the end of this post.) So, we have been excitedly counting down to December 25. For Bernice, rather than the calm before the storm, this has meant a co-ordinated campaign, mapped out meticulously in a series of to-do lists strategically deposited around the kitchen; a campaign of borrowing mattresses, bimbas (which are ride-on toys – we have to have at least two, and preferably three – to avoid tensions when Raphael joins us), high-chairs and so on; buying the one or two items of toddler and child equipment we haven’t yet acquired; organizing the children’s books; finding increasingly fiendish hiding places for the presents; cleaning bedrooms, washing windows, making up beds; leafing through menus; stocking up on nappies, favoured snacks and suchlike.

I cunningly managed to avoid almost all of this heavy lifting, by scheduling to give a talk in shul on Shabbat eight days ago and a talk to the local English-speaking seniors group last Tuesday. This meant that I was locked in the office researching, creating a PowerPoint presentation and polishing my notes until Tuesday. I conveniently came down with a cold then, which has actually become quite chesty, so I have been severely restricted. I did manage, on Wednesday and Thursday, to lay down supplies of my baking that would, in other circumstances, see Bernice and myself through the winter. If I’m lucky, they may last the expanded family a week: granola, rye bread with caraway seeds, platzels and beigels, seeded spelt-flour crackers.

This Shabbat I made it to shul on Friday evening, and we actually had two couples as guests for dinner. The attraction of a winter Shabbat Friday night is that you can chat for a while before dinner, eat a very leisurely meal, shmooze for hours afterwards, and then discover, when your guests leave, that it’s still only 9:30. I felt very congested through Friday night, and slept on some four-and-a-half hours later than usual on Shabbat morning. It’s fair to say that Bernice and I both spent Shabbat recharging our batteries. Today, not wanting to risk infecting Raphael, who has his own catalogue of childhood ailments without my help, thank you very much, I have stayed at home, leaving Bernice to spend the day in Zichron and explain to a devastated Raphael why Grandpa is not there. At least, we anticipated he might be devastated. Since it is now three hours after Bernice collected him from gan and he still hasn’t asked to video call me, I’m guessing maybe he’s putting on a brave face.

In Bernice’s absence, I spent the morning adding to our digital photoframe all of the pictures from the last 14 months, having been talking for the last few weeks about how under-represented Ollie is on the display, and how he is sure to be really upset by that. With any luck, he won’t read this post, and will never know how last-minute the redressing of the balance was.

And so, without even a feeble attempt at any kind of segue, to today’s trivia question. Who wrote the classic horror story The Monkey’s Paw? If you answered ‘Edgar Allan Poe’, you can give yourself a bonus point…but only because you fell into my trap and gave the wrong answer. The correct answer is ‘W W Jacobs’. (If it’s not Poe, it’s always Jacobs.) The real question is: Why do so many of us mistakenly attribute it to Poe? I know that I did, and at least two friends who I regard as men with impeccable educational and cultural credentials did as well, so what is going on here?

I spent a little time sniffing around online and discovered the following. First, Barnes & Noble, who, one would have hoped, know something about literature, have an excellent page advertising for sale an eBook of a radio script of the story, in which the text is headed ‘The Monkey’s Paw, by Edgar Allan Poe, Dennis Rhodus (created by)’ which doesn’t seem to me to be very coherent, but actually means that Rhodus ‘created’ the radio script. This text stands opposite a facsimile of the book cover, which proudly proclaims: ‘The Monkey’s Paw by W W Jacobs’.

Next, Amazon offers a Modern Library edition of an anthology entitled: ‘The Raven and The Monkey’s Paw: Classics of Horror and Suspense.’ The first author listed is Poe, which might lead to confusion.

It is ironic that this story, which is far and away Jacobs’ best-known work, should be misattributed by, I suspect, so many, to Poe, whose prolific work is so well-known that he would scarcely notice one story more or less. It hardly seems fair.

Jacobs’ other claim to fame is that he was a jury member in the mock trial of John Jasper for the murder of Edwin Drood, the character in Dickens’ last and unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. This was something of a celebrity mock trial, organized by the Dickens Fellowship and held in the Covent Garden Assize Court in London in 1914, with G K Chesterton presiding as the judge, and George Bernard Shaw acting as foreman of the jury. As I was tumbling down the Google rabbit-hole of this story, I noticed, incidentally, that the charge sheet states: “John Jasper, feloniously, wilfully, and of his malice aforethought did kill and murder one EDWIN DROOD on the 24^th day of December in the year…one thousand eight hundred and sixty.”

I cannot help observing that I am writing these words exactly 163 years after this murder took place, to the very day! I find that coincidence no less remarkable for the fact that the murder didn’t actually take place, since the victim, and, indeed, the defendant, are both fictitious characters, and, as if that were not enough, the ‘facts’ of the murder are not even stated in the fiction in which they appear, so that the murder is only speculatively fictional. It may not even not have really happened.

Forgive me for these ramblings. I shall put them down to nasal and bronchial congestion and stop here to make another of my excellent hot toddies. Come to think of it, these ramblings may have something to do with the toddies. Perhaps this time I’ll step up the lemon juice and honey and ease off on the brandy….and perhaps not.

Promised update: As you can see below, Raphael stoically accepted my absence yesterday. (I can’t reasonably expect to be able to compete with a banana.) Tao and Ollie arrived with their parents, on time, and were sufficiently recovered by lunchtime today (Monday) to test drive the trike and the bimba.

Day 73: Monday

Last week, I started by noting:

Tuesday 8:40AM: What’s missing from this week’s post is a reaction to Netanyahu’s statement last night in a Foreign and Security Committee debate that “the Oslo Accord [sic]  is a disaster that resulted in the same number of victims as October 7”. I would like to respond to that now, but I didn’t hear of it until half an hour ago, and there isn’t time before the deadline, so I will just have to let it simmer on a low light for another week., and pray that nothing even more egregious and outrageous emerges before then.

So, let’s start by getting that out of the way.

I’ve just googled ‘What is the difference between a statesman and a politician?’ The first twenty hits all contained the same message, best summed up by the aphorism: ‘A politician thinks about the next election, while a statesman thinks about the next generation.’ Looking back at politicians and statesmen of the past, I’m tempted to suggest another difference, which possibly covers different scenarios from the first. ‘A statesman acts morally, while a politician acts expediently.’

Either way, two things seem clear to me in the cloudy world that is political reality.. First., a general observation: If we illustrated this on a Venn diagram, there wouldn’t be a lot of overlap between statesmen and politicians, not in Israel, anyway!

Second, a specific observation. The days of Netanyahu even appearing to be a statesman are, regrettably, in the past. In the last week or two, he has demonstrated on at least three occasions that he is motivated in his public statements principally by the need to ensure his personal political future. He strives to do this both in the short term. by nurturing the right wing of his coalition, and in the longer term, by appealing to those sectors of the voting public that are to his political right.

First we had his appalling playing of a macabre numbers game, as quoted at the head of this post. It is a fact that between the signing of the Oslo Accords in September 1993 and October 6 2023, at least 1,334 Israel civilians were murdered in Palestinian terror attacks. It seems, at the time of writing, that the October 7 death toll was at least 1200 Israelis. (That we cannot be confident of a final figure after Israel has undertaken 10 weeks of the most intense, painstaking and painful forensic investigation is, itself, an eloquent comment on the scale of horror of the atrocities.)

The pogrom of October 7 resulted from a series of intelligence failures and operational misjudgements, and claimed 1200 lives in less than two days. Attributing responsibility for the failure of the Oslo Accords is a more nuanced subject. However, let us assume, for the sake of argument, that it was, similarly, a set of Israeli intelligence failures and operational misjudgements that led to the loss of life since the signing. Let us go even further, and assume that all of the murders of Israelis by terrorists between September 1993 and October 6 this year are attributable to the signing of the Oslo accords. Even assuming all this, to make a bald statement about numerical equivalence, while ignoring the difference between 2 days and 11,000 days, is ridiculous.

Netanyahu followed this up with an astonishing response to a question in a press conference on December 2, when asked about the horrible shooting in error of Yuval Castleman, who was killed at the scene of the terror shooting at a Jerusalem bus stop, when Staff Sgt. (res.) Aviad Frija, one of two off-duty troops who responded to the attack, shot at the two terrorists. He also opened fire at Castleman, an armed civilian who had stopped his car across the street and himself shot at the terrorists. Footage from the scene showed that Frija shot Castleman after the latter had put his gun down and was holding his hands in the air.

Asked about this, Netanyahu acknowledged that more guns in the hands of the public can produce more such tragic incidents. But more civilians with guns can save the day in times like this, he said, defending his government’s policy on encouraging more eligible Israelis to carry weapons. He then continued: “Therefore, I think that in the current situation we need to continue with this policy — I definitely support it. We may pay a price, but such is life [my emphasis].” For as experienced a politician as Netanyahu to fail to weigh his words so egregiously seems inconceivable. Either he regarded the whole matter as not worthy of his attention, or he was speaking specifically to Ben-Gvir’s constituency, knowing how central a plank of Ben-Gvir’s policy arming civilians is.

Finally, in the last couple of days, Netanyahu has been reiterating his rejection of the two-state solution and of the Palestinian Authority playing a role in Gaza after the war. While taking this position, which undoubtedly represents the Israeli mainstream at the moment, Netanyahu claims that he prevented the establishment of a Palestinian state and takes credit for “putting the brakes” on the Oslo peace process. In what has become his signature style, Netanyahu refuses to address the contradictions in his actions over the years. In 2005, he originally voted in favour of disengagement from Gaza. In his Bar-Ilan speech of 2009, he stated that he was willing to accept the two-state solution. In 2011, he triumphantly welcomed Gilad Schalit home, while releasing Yahya Sinwar and another 1,026 security prisoners.

Politicians are certainly allowed to change their mind. Situations may change. Politicians may reassess and reevaluate. Netanyahu, however, pretends that he has always been right and never changed his mind. I have long believed that this reflected his desire not to undermine his followers’ belief in his infallibility. I am now feeling that he has bought into his own rhetoric and believes himself infallible.

Let me finally offer another definition of the difference between a statesman and a politician. A statesman is elected in order to do what needs to be done. A politician does what needs to be done in order to be elected. For Netanyahu, re-election has changed from being the means to being the end. The fear is that if he succeeds, it may well be so.

Tis the season for grandsons to catch anything that’s going, apparently. Ollie seems his usual cheerful self, despite being under the weather; Raphael is enjoying being out in the weather; but poor Tao has been feeling proper poorly, as we say in South Wales. May they all, and you all, and we all, have a better week this week!

Day 66, Monday.

This week’s post is aimed more at my friends and family in Chutz La’aretz than at my Israeli readers, who will be very familiar with most of what I have to say.

Tuesday 8:40AM: What’s missing from this week’s post is a reaction to Netanyahu’s statement last night in a Foreign and Security Committee debate that “the Oslo Accord [sic] is a disaster that resulted in the same number of victims as October 7″. I would like to respond to that now, but I didn’t hear of it until half an hour ago, and there isn’t time before the deadline, so I will just have to let it simmer on a low light for another week., and pray that nothing even more egregious and outrageous emerges before then.

Day 66 and counting

Those who have not lived their lives in Israel cannot really understand what that statistic sounds like to Israelis. The Suez Crisis in 1956 lasted ten days. The war in 1967 lasted six days. The Yom Kippur War in 1973 lasted 20 days. Combat during the First Lebanon War in 1982 lasted 20 days. The second Lebanon War in 2006 lasted 34 days. Operation Cast Lead in 2009 lasted 26 days. Operation Protective Edge in 2014 lasted, sporadically, for 50 days.

In other words, Israelis expect a war to be over in about a month. In addition, since Israel’s wars are fought just beyond the state’s formal borders, Israelis expect that their soldier children and spouses will be home for a 24-hour leave every week or two.

None of this has been the case in the current war. Many of those who have been fighting in Gaza presented themselves for service on 7 or 8 October and did not get home again until the ‘pause’ on 24 November – and some not even then. On radio stations, when field officers are being interviewed, parents phone in to ask the interviewers to question the officers as to when their children will be getting leave.

I well remember what happened during my own military service (three-and-a-half weeks of basic training in 1990, since you ask – and 15 years of annual reserve duty after that). The entire intake I served with were immigrants in our thirties or forties. When some were begging the officers to allow them home for Shabbat, one of the Russians I befriended, a veteran of the Soviet–Afghan war, recalled how, immediately following his 18^th birthday, he had been taken 4000 kilometres away from home to the mountains of Northern Afghanistan, where he spent the next three-and-a-half years, having no contact with his family.

As with so much in life, our ability to accept circumstances depends as much on our expectations as on objective realities. The anxieties of parents and spouses are no less intense for being different in scale from those of my Russian comrade-in-arms’ family. And, as every day of those 66 days brings another list of “Approved for publication…” announcements of the names of one, or two, or three, or more, soldiers who fell in the previous day’s fighting, or who succumbed to injuries they suffered earlier, so the days weigh ever more heavily.

Everyone is Someone’s Child

One of the soldiers who fell last week was the brother of a close friend of our niece. Just before Shabbat, we learnt of the son of a close friend whose tank suffered a direct hit; he, thankfully, suffered what are described in these circumstances as very light injuries, but his fellow tank-crew members were not so fortunate. Then, as I was in the middle of writing these paragraphs, a death notice came up on our shul WhatsApp group: the son of a family who used to daven in our shul.

I have, in recent weeks, been davening in the mornings in the shul they moved to, and often pause for a few moments’ conversation with the now bereaved father. We are far from being close friends – we are more acquaintances than friends – but when you have joked and prayed with a family, and when you remember their son as a young boy, even if only vaguely, life is suddenly breathed into the bald statement of a death…and then, of course, you remember, that, for every such death, there are circles of immediate family, less close family, friends, and acquaintances, who all feel the death because they all knew the life.

Instructions to Parents

I offer you a pair of bookends: two sons communicating to their parents what is important to them. I offer this without comment.

The first, which you may well have heard at the time, is a phone conversation between one of the Hamas terrorists and his parents, while he was committing atrocities on October 7. You can hear the recording here.

The second was a ‘will’ left by Reservist Sergeant Major Ben Zussman, who fell a week ago, which he passed on to a friend, to be delivered to his parents in the event of… Here is the complete text:

“I am writing this message to you on the way to the base. If you are reading this, something must have happened to me. As you know me, probably no one is happier than me right now. It was not for nothing that I was on the verge of fulfilling my dream soon. I am happy and grateful for the privilege I will have to defend our beautiful land and the people of Israel.

Even if something happens to me, I don’t allow you to sink into sadness. I had the privilege of fulfilling my dream and vocation and you can be sure that I am looking down on you and smiling hugely. I will probably be sitting next to grandpa and we will catching up; each of us will talk about his experiences and the way things were different in the different wars. Maybe we’ll also talk a little politics, ask him what he thinks.

If God forbid you’re sitting shiva, make it a week of friends, family and fun. Let there be food, meat of course, beers, soft drinks, seeds, tea and, of course, of course, mum’s biscuits. Crack jokes, listen to stories, meet all my other friends you haven’t seen yet. Wow! I envy you. I would like to sit there and see them all.

Another very, very important point. If, God forbid, I fall into captivity, alive or dead. I am not ready for one soldier or citizen to be harmed because of some deal for my release. I don’t allow you to conduct a campaign or struggle or anything like that. I’m not prepared for terrorists to be released for me. in no way, shape or deal. Don’t go against my word, please.

I’ll say it again, I left the house without even being called to the reserves. I am full of pride and a sense of mission and I have always said that if I have to die, may it be in defence of others and the country. “Jerusalem, I have placed guards,” May it be that the day will come when I will be one of them.” [Ed Note: This is a reference to Isaiah 62 v 6. Ben follows here the interpretation that the guards are angels watching over Jerusalem until such time as the Temple is rebuilt.]

The heart-wrenching decisions

One of the conditions of the ‘pause’ was that Israel would suspend its aerial observation of Gaza. Agreeing to that condition contributed to the safe release of the children and women that were released.

Agreeing to that condition also enabled Hamas to make preparations for when the fighting would be renewed. Today the deaths were announced of seven soldiers, including five who were killed in the explosion from a device concealed near a school, and probably detonated remotely on a signal received by a concealed spotter watching from a nearby building. It seems likely that this device was placed during the observation blackout imposed throughout the ‘pause’.

Nobody could envy the Israeli authorities the decision-making this inhuman enemy confronts them with.

Conflicting Voices

A large number of the families of the abductees have, since October 6, been working together to ensure that their voice is heard. Their message has been that the safe return of all the abductees must be the authorities’ first priority, and that they must do all they can to bring it about. They are also demanding that the Government bring them home now.

It is, of course, impossible to criticise these families. What they are suffering is unimaginable, and their fears for the well-being of the abductees are completely realistic. They are reacting in ways that are totally understandable. It is, indeed, hard to imagine any parent, or child, or spouse, or sibling, reacting differently.

And yet… I fail to see what response they want to their demand that the Government bring back the abductees. What, in practical terms, do the families want the Government to do that it is not doing?

It seemed for a long time that this message was one that all the families wished to convey. However, it has become increasingly clear that there are at least some families who feel differently, and who felt until recently that their voice was not being heard sufficiently. We are now hearing more from families who accept the Government’s statement that the safety of the abductees is top priority at face value, and who are expressing their trust in the authorities to make the right decisions to maximise the chance of achieving the outcome we all want.

It occurs to me that the more the families confront the authorities, and the more they demonstrate against what they perceive as the Government’s inaction, the more they strengthen Hamas’ resolve not to release abductees. This is a cruel thing to say, but it seems to me that, if the families were publicly expressing faith in the authorities, this would lead Hamas to question whether releasing more abductees might be a tactically more sound move.

And this is the point at which I begin to suspect that I am overthinking everything, and, not for the first time, I come up against the realization that bargaining with the devil is not easy, and may not even be possible.

In a simpler, and more innocent, universe, our grandsons are at peace: both the one we will be seeing, God willing, tomorrow, and the ones we will be seeing. God willing, in just under two weeks (!)

The more observant among you will notice that I have not started this week with a reminder that today (Monday) is Day 59. (Of course, cunningly, I have now, which we call having your cake and eating it.)

On a related note, Bernice didn’t need me to point out that I did not, today, as soon as I was free, go upstairs to write my blog, as I usually do on a Monday, but, rather, I was doing what I have always known as pitzelling around downstairs: reading the paper, shelling peanuts, making a cup of tea, alphabetising the CDs. When I eventually faced up to it, I explained to her that I had decided in advance that I was not going to write about ‘the situation’ this week. However, between my making that decision last Thursday, and today, there have been so many developments that it seemed in some way perverse to talk about anything else. So, I really could not make up my mind how to proceed.

What I decided to do eventually was to outsource this week’s heavy lifting. I recommend to you a lengthy and dispassionate essay by a blogger called Richard Hanania. (Many thanks to my good friend and fellow-blogger Ron for drawing my attention to the article.) I find it very difficult to disagree with Hanania. Even if you find yourself reluctant to accept his conclusions, he will, I think, challenge you to marshal your counter-arguments. And again, even if you do disagree with him, you will, I hope, agree with me that he sets a standard for reasoned and calm discussion that we would all do well to emulate.

This outsourcing leaves me now free to write about anything, to act just as if life goes on, which, of course, it does; indeed, it must. Bernice and I have heard the good news of births and engagements in the last few weeks. We are due to be joining wedding celebrations in the next few weeks. Micha’el and family should be arriving in three weeks’ time for three weeks. We have to keep believing and recognising that much as what has happened here sometimes looks and feels like the end of the world, it is not.

Mamaloschen

So, let’s start by dealing with ‘pitzelling’ from two paragraphs ago. While I had no idea how to spell it, I vividly remembered it, from my childhood, as meaning: ‘to fail to get down to doing something properly’. I always assumed it was Yiddish.

However, on researching today, I can discover it only as a German word for ‘penis’, and not as a Yiddish word at all. This led me to doubt my memory. However, both Bernice and my brother Martin remember it in similar contexts from childhood, so I am reassured that I have not made it up. Why, then, is it not mentioned online? This may, of course, simply be because all self-respecting Yiddish dictionaries and word-lists, having identified the first twenty or thirty Yiddish words for ‘penis’, lost interest. I must also say that the path from ‘penis’ to ‘being slapdash or wasting time’ seems a little tortuous.

If any of my readers can shed light on the etymology of ‘pitzel’, I will be very grateful.

Mama(Mia)Loschen

I was put in mind this week of a piece of graffiti that I saw on the wall of a cowshed on kibbutz 50 years ago. (I was tempted to write: ‘I was put in mind of a graffito’, so that I could be accused of pedantry, but even I feel that ‘graffito’ is best avoided, in the same way as I would never write: ‘I try to eat spaghetti with a twirling fork, but there’s always one spaghetto that refuses to twirl.’)

Anyway, as I say, I was reminded of a piece of graffiti this week. I have been harvesting produce one day in each of the last couple of weeks, as part of a group of volunteers going to help Israel’s farmers who are suddenly without foreign workers. Last Thursday I spent five and a half hours on my knees picking tomatoes. Interestingly, the next day my knees were fine, but my gluteus maximus muscles ached like anything. In other words, I not only was, as usual, a pain in the arse, but I also had one– or, more accurately, two – one in each buttock. It was at this point that I recalled the piece of graffiti from an earlier period when I worked on kibbutz. This requires a little background.

Among the strands of Zionism that co-existed as a rich tapestry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was one championed by Aharon David Gordon, who argued that the national redemption of the Jewish people could be brought about only by fostering, through physical labour, the organic relationship of the People with the Land. His philosophy, and his personal example, inspired the entire Labour Zionist movement. Physical labour, working the land, became a cornerstone of the Zionist dream become reality.

His philosophy also inspired a later volunteer on kibbutz to paint on the cowshed wall the dedication: “A. D. GORDON DIED HERE”. I now find myself able to point to, but not to view directly, exactly where A. D. Gordon died for me personally.

Marketing Patriotism

In the immediate aftermath of October 7, the major radio network stopped broadcasting commercial advertising. This seemed a very natural decision. The brash blaring of adverts would have seemed very jarring. At some point in the last couple of weeks, however, the decision was made to resume advertising, and it has been interesting to observe how advertisers have….How to complete that sentence? I am torn between:
…how advertisers have demonstrated their patriotism…
and
…how advertisers have cynically exploited the country’s existential crisis…

I think maybe I will sit on the fence.

It has been interesting to observe how advertisers have adapted to the new reality, and incorporated it into their message. So, for example, we have the advertisement for the energy food supplement in which a senior citizen explains that “In these difficult times, it is particularly important for me to keep my strength up, and so…”. We have many banks offering, to businesses affected by the war, loans that are interest-free for an initial period or that have an extended period before repayments begin. We have many products that have introduced patriotic packaging, like these tissues, proclaiming that “Together we shall win”.

I am sitting on the fence because I genuinely cannot decide whether I find this cynical or moving. All I can say is that when, a week or so ago, there was only one radio advert that did not reference, directly or indirectly, our existential crisis, I found it offensive and insensitive. This was an advertisement from a major retail chain selling domestic electrical appliances, which relentlessly advertised its November sale as if we were not in the middle of a war.

I was, subsequently, made to feel very bad, when I read that this chain, in partnership with another major chain, had installed washing machines and dryers in the public areas of shopping malls throughout the country, for the use, free-of-charge, of soldiers.

Like Light at the Hem of the Cloud

That heading is a quote from a poem by Leah Goldberg: a poem which looks forward, longingly, to a future time of “forgiveness and grace”. It seems to me an important image for these times. Here is a translation of the poem that doesn’t really do it justice:

Will there yet come days of forgiveness and grace,
When you walk in the field as the innocent wayfarer walks,
And the bare, bare soles of your feet will caress the clover leaves
Or trample the oat stubble and sweeten its prickling?

Or rain will overtake you, its thronging drops tapping
On your shoulder, your chest, your throat, your head, refreshing.
And you will walk in the wet field, the quiet in you expanding
Like light at the hem of the cloud?

And you will breathe in the odour of the furrow, breathing and quiet,
And you will see the sun mirrored in the gold puddle,
And simple will these things be, will life be, and touching will be allowed there,
And loving will be allowed, will be allowed.

You will walk in the field, alone, unscorched by the flame
Of conflagrations on roads that bristled with horror and blood.
You will once again be peaceful in heart, humble and bending
Like one of the grasses, like one of humanity.

I was led to this poem by a programme of meetings held under the auspices of, and in the breathtaking new building of, the National Library (which I am in danger of boring you with, I suspect). Each meeting is a conversation between Yuval Avivi, who presents a book programme on television, and a particular author, who is invited to present readings from their own and others’ work to offer some comfort, in these troubled times. The programme is called ‘Like Light at the Hem of the Cloud’, and I was curious about the origin of the phrase.

In one of the meetings, Eshkol Nevo read an extract from his novel ‘A Man Walks into an Orchard’. This is not a book that I know. Nevo is not even an author that I have read. However, I find the short extract he chose, even without a context, to be very haunting and very empowering. Unfortunately, I cannot find a translation, and I haven’t the talent to attempt a translation myself that would come anywhere near doing justice to this passage. So, with apologies, I offer this as a bonus for my Hebrew readers only. The rest of you can jump straight to the photographs below.”אם לשנות אז את העולם. אם לחטוא אז בלי רגשות אשם. אם גל אז ירוק. אם לנסוע אז רחוק. אם נעליים אז קלות. אם לחצות אז גבולות. אם לעשות אז שלום. אם שלום אז עכשיו. אם נותרנו, נאהב. אם נותרנו, נאהב. אם יש זמן הוא הולך ואוזל. אם לרקוד אז להשתולל. אם עבר אז לשכוח. אם אסיר אז לברוח. אם גדר אז חיה. אם להקים אז שערורייה. אם גבר אז אישה. אם אישה אז בבקשה. אם לחשוב אז לעשות. אם לעשות אז לטעות. אם לטעות אז עכשיו. אם נותרנו נאהב. אם נותרנו נאהב. אם נותרנו, נאהב

אם לשנות אז את העולם. אם לחטוא אז בלי רגשות אשם. אם גל אז ירוק. אם לנסוע אז רחוק. אם נעליים אז קלות. אם לחצות אז גבולות. אם לעשות אז שלום. אם שלום אז עכשיו. אם נותרנו, נאהב. אם נותרנו, נאהב. אם יש זמן הוא הולך ואוזל. אם לרקוד אז להשתולל. אם עבר אז לשכוח. אם אסיר אז לברוח. אם גדר אז חיה. אם להקים אז שערורייה. אם גבר אז אישה. אם אישה אז בבקשה. אם לחשוב אז לעשות. אם לעשות אז לטעות. אם לטעות אז עכשיו. אם נותרנו נאהב. אם נותרנו נאהב. אם נותרנו, נאהב

“.

In keeping with this week’s theme, let’s end with a couple of images of family life in all its glorious going-on-ness. There’s something to celebrate in just pitzelling around.

Day 52: Monday

Today, let’s take a deep dive. Of necessity, a deep dive insulates you from all of the noise above the surface of the water. This means that I’m not going to wrestle with what will probably, in the next day or two, become Israel’s next unanswerable question: if and when we proceed on the understanding that Hamas will release ten abductees in return for a further day’s pause, and Hamas offers, instead, only nine or eight hostages, will we accept this, or will we tell Hamas to keep the hostages, and resume hostilities?

Similarly, I’m not going to discuss Hamas’s psychological torture of the Israeli public over the exchange of hostages for terror prisoners.

I’m not even going to discuss Kay Burley’s breathtaking assertion during her Sky News interview of Israeli Government spokesman Eylon Levy. (In this particular case, I’m not discussing it because words fail me – thankfully, they did not fail Eylon Levy, although, in his case, his eyebrows were even more eloquent than his mouth.)

Instead, I want to look at a phenomenon that only became prominent following the advent of mass media, and was, indeed, enabled by mass media: fake news. The world’s first big international fake news story revolved around what became known as The Rape of Belgium: the German invasion of Belgium in autumn 1914. This is a story in instalments, and it has relevance to what is happening today.

Between August and October 1914 German troops invaded and occupied Belgium. Rumours quickly spread of brutal acts of violence against civilians, including mass rape and mutilation of Belgian and French women. As a result, Belgium, France and Great Britain set up a committee of inquiry to document the German war crimes in accordance with the Hague Convention of 1907. The committee confirmed the reports of massive sexual assaults on the female civilian population by German soldiers.

The Allies considered the rapes to be a central component of the atrocities committed by the German troops, rendering the German enemy inhuman and impossible to negotiate a ceasefire with. These reports were used to justify the war and the continued killing so as to prevent further such acts and avenge the violence. The defence of family and sexual values became an essential element of Allied motivation. Apart from the mobilisation of the British and French people, the instrumentalisation for propaganda purposes of the German atrocities also served to influence neutral countries, particularly Italy and the United States.

Tabloid newspapers, popular literature, postcards and cartoons disseminated the image of German barbarians and their Belgian and French victims. Not just individuals but the entire German people were accused of the atrocities. Germany became the ultimate evil power capable of committing the most atrocious deeds. The German war atrocities and their exploitation for propaganda purposes contributed significantly to the image of Germany as an enemy and to the moral legitimation for the war by the Allies.

Many of the more sensational stories of German “outrages” are very hard to believe, much less corroborate.  German soldiers eating Belgian babies; German soldiers hanging Belgian nuns between church bells and ringing them to death; German soldiers crucifying dozens of farmers by the roadside; and so on — these are stories that after the war became standard examples of why “propaganda” is not to be trusted, with the result that all stories of German atrocities were largely discredited. It is possible that this distrust led to the English-speaking peoples’ failure to react swiftly to the events of the years leading up to 1939.

In recent decades, historical research has indicated that, in fact, large-scale German atrocities were indeed committed against the Belgians. It turns out that it is not the atrocities that were fake news, but the discrediting of the atrocities.

Fast forward 109 years, and we see that fake news is alive and well, and flourishing in the modern world of social media and online video. Indeed, as media become more sophisticated, so does the range of tools and techniques available to propagators of fake news.

In a world where fake news passes for reliable information, how do we separate lies from the truth? Enter Fake Reporter, an Israeli online watchdog group that uses a combination of professional intelligence experts and an online crowd-sourced research platform to lead efforts against disinformation, Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour (CIB), hate speech, and online incitement.

In 2021, they logged over 9,000 reports, and this number has risen every year since.

The organisation was formed to protect and support Israel’s civil society and pro-democracy forces against targeted attacks, as well as expose the mechanisms and actors behind the distribution and weaponisation of malicious content online. Since October 7, Fake Reporter has been working around the clock to identify, expose, debunk and, where possible, take down, fake news around the events in Israel and Gaza.

For those of you who are Hebrew speakers, this 9-minute TV report on Fake Reporters’ activities in the last weeks gives a sense of the scale of the challenge. Six minutes in (at 2:34:36), it gives an example, in English, of AI-generated video that seems to me undetectable to the naked eye as fake.

If you want to learn more about the organisation’s work, this 25-minute presentation in English, made in 2022, gives an excellent overview of the spread of fake news and how it can be combatted. (Trigger warning: the organisation was founded at the height of the judicial reform demonstrations way back when, and is funded by the New Israel Fund. If the combination of those two facts tempts you to dismiss the organisation out of hand, I would recommend you read the rest of this post.)

If you encounter anything which you suspect is fake news or a fake profile, or which is an inciting post, you can use the following link to report it (in English or Hebrew) to Fake Reporter, who will then research it in depth.

https://www.fakereporter.net/?lang=en

What you should not do is respond to the incitement or the fake news online, since social media algorithms are built to promote any item that generates interest. By responding to the item, you will actually be promoting it.

Which begs the question: how do I spot fake news? The International Federation of Library Associations…. Remember libraries? They used to be large, imposing buildings where people went to google, back in the day. But I digress. The International Federation of Library Associations, as I was saying, has produced the following useful tips.

Let me now try to explain what led me to believe that I should turn my back on all of the headline issues this week, and focus my intention instead on what may seem like a comparatively academic topic.

In the last months, and especially since October 7, I have been puzzled, and sometimes dumbstruck, by the behaviour of much of Western intelligentsia. That a university professor felt exhilarated by the news and scenes of the atrocities of October 7 is astonishing; but it is not, arguably, unimaginable. All you have to do is imagine that degree and intensity of antisemitism. However, that functioning human beings should deny that the Hamas genocide of October 7 even happened seems at an entirely greater level of unimaginability. “But,” we say, open-mouthed, “they filmed their own video of it, and boasted of it in phone calls to their parents.”

In refusing to believe that evidence, I think that these people are saying that they refuse to believe any evidence. This may be a more extreme version of the allies’ inability to believe the evidence of the 1930s. As a consequence of the widening spread of fake news, and of the increasing difficulty of detecting it as fake, people are increasingly refusing to accept any news as true. Unable to judge what is true anymore, they give up the attempt, and reject all ‘objective’ evidence presented to them. What they are then left with is their belief system, their ideology.

What we are witnessing is, I fear, the beginning of what George Orwell documented with terrifying accuracy 75 years ago, in 1984. In Orwell’s words, these people are prepared to believe that “every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

There is no such thing as historical context, so any past action (such as slave ownership, or even manufacture that depends on purchasing raw materials that were made available using slave labour) must be judged solely by current sensibilities. There is no such thing as extenuating circumstances. There is only the one truth from which all moral judgement derives.

This renders the world binary. Everyone is either an oppressor, and evil, or oppressed, and good. No amount of rational thought will change that binary division, and, therefore, there is no practical benefit in rational thought. To quote Orwell again:

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?… Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?… The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

Clearly, Israel faces very real and tangible challenges: completing the return of all the hostages; destroying Hamas in the north and then the south of the Gaza Strip; finding a way of preventing the resurgence of Hamas or a similar terror army in the future. Equally clearly, if Israel does not meet these challenges successfully, there will be serious consequences not just for Israel and the Middle East, but for civilisation as a whole.

At the same time, the rise of fake news and the tightening chokehold of binary inter-sectionalism on the Western world may represent a no less serious threat to civilisation. 2050 is less than 27 years away, and Orwell’s prediction is looking more and more accurate every year.