Let’s take a step back: neither I nor Breaking the Silence are in a battle to tarnish the IDF wantonly. It may feel that way. But I’m not. Because I’ve worked so closely with the Breaking the Silence staff, their patriotism is irrefutable for me, and I’d stand with them against any naysayer. I realize not everyone has that benefit.
The reasons you, distant reader, should be concerned with anonymous, unattributed whistleblowers from inside the IDF is because purity of arms is the only value that makes an army civilized. Anything else, even in national defense, is just organized killing. The alleged deterioration of the IDF’s principles should be worrying to all for many reasons:
Israel’s conduct in conflict powerfully sets the tone of Israeli-Arab relations. It can make not only Palestinians unwilling to negotiate with Israel, but unite the other Arab states behind even the most appalling of Hamas’ activities.
Understanding the substance and truth behind misconduct claims not only allows us to bridge to Palestinians’ grievances, but limits the disconnect of Jews themselves believing two hugely disparate versions of history. Polls and media indicate Israelis are mostly convinced that zero abuses happened, not that such abuses were unavoidable. Breaking the Silence has helped rectify the gap.
Human rights abuses are a call to reform the system, both at the foreign policy level and the military’s field strategy. Operation Cast Lead was a failure for Israel’s strategic concerns in the region, achieving little deterance at great cost. High civilian casualities may not have been intended for such a short-term excursion (albeit unsurprising to some of us) means this approach cannot be repeated. More »
Just saw “The Unborn” on DVD – an unbelievably cheesy horror film about a young woman who is plagued by a dybbuk that has been haunting her family since the Holocaust. OK, I rented this one because my son told me that Gary Oldman played the exorcising rabbi. How am I going to pass that up?
Almost reaches the level of high camp – almost, but not quite. There’s lots of stuff you’ve seen in this kind of thing before (i.e. creepy dreams on dark rainy nights, the heroine prancing around for much of the movie in her underwear.) It also has its share of stuff I assume was meant to be scary, but mainly just left you scratching your head (i.e. an elderly man falls out of his wheelchair, twists his head around 180 degrees, and scuttles like a crab while chasing Jane Alexander through a kind of gothic elder care facility…)
Rabbi Gary Oldman was a bit of a disappointment, but he did figure in the movie’s most hilarious moment: he convenes a sort of interfaith exorcism minyan together with an Episcopal priest/basketball coach, who solemnly describes the exorcism ceremony to the heroine, then asks her to sign a release form before he can proceed…
In this video by Breaking the Silence, IDF vet “Amir” testifies that no only were the rules of engagement lax, but that they barely consisted of more than instructions to shoot anything that moved. A veteran of several reserve terms in Gaza and the West Bank, Amir says he never encountered any briefings or attitudes like those conveyed by commanders during the Gaza offensive.
I know the Breaking the Silence guys, having coordinated their 2008 U.S. exhibit tour which generated substantial controversy. I spent two months living with them as we took their expose from city to city. Much criticism has been leveled against them as liars. But they have no reason to lie — and every reason to protect the Israel they love.
It is really through these men — my age, only so much older — that I approach a love of Israel. These men are aware of all the skeletons in Israel’s closet, because they committed them personally. Killing civilains, beating old men, the list is long and ugly. It breaks your heart, it broke their heart.
And yet they fight to save Israel. Why? Why wouldn’t they just leave like so many others? Come to America, leave it all behind. A few have, in pursuit of school or love or escape. And they deserve it, having bared their ugliest secrets to a society that rejects their pain because of it’s political implications! But so many stay. They work thanklessly for a job reviled by many. It is hard not to be moved by the moral imperative buzzing in their tenacity and overwhelming work load. More »
Just in case you missed her guest stint as a Hasidic Jew on Saving Grace last night — or, like me, you’re just too damn Orthodox to own a television* — there’s still plenty of Mayim Bialik love to go around. On the Jewish Wedding Network yesterday, she talked about her first experience going to a mikveh (and name-drops Aryeh Kaplan!). And she collaborates with Allison Josephs, better known as Jew in the City, to disspell some myths about Orthodox Jewish women:
It’s pretty awesome how Bialik is playing with her ’80s iconoclasm, but isn’t allowing herself to be a prisoner of it. And how she’s playing with her religious identity (dammit, I want to see Mayim in Hasidic drag on TV*) without making it as simple as a non-Orthodox person playing an Orthodox one, or an Orthodox person playing a non-Orthodox one.
______
* — but not to watch Buffy. OK, we just don’t have room for one. Caught.
Breaking the Silence’s long-awaited Gaza soldier testimonials just hitthepress — 112 pages, 50 testimonies, 30 soldiers. The testimonies themselves decry a completely different category of military behavior than previously exhibited by the IDF. Half the soldiers in the book are still in service, all were ground soldiers, all in different units.
The booklet opens with a testimony of the use of civilians as human shields and follows quickly with testimonies of demolishing whole neighborhoods with little cause, using white phosphorus in dense urban settings, vandalizing homes, and shooting civilians.
Because the Rabin school testimonies were quickly dismissed as hearsay, these are only eyewitness accounts. Because the military has attempted to blame individuals as “rotten apples,” these focus on policy-level orders at the battalion and brigade level, such as the rules of engagement, the atmosphere set by commanders, and permitted weapons.
This booklet may be mystifying to many a non-veteran soldier, meaning most of us Americans. Those of us who’ve not served in uniform can be suckered into excusing anything so long as “operational necessity” is tagged at the end. If we have learned anything from the Bush-Cheney era, it is that morals and jurisprudence stand above operational necessity. We have learned that political interest can wrap itself in military terminology just as readily as read needs. Moral laziness can too.
The soldiers describe using tank cannons to return fire against un-pinpointed sniper fire in refugee neighborhoods — this cannot be excused as operational necessity in any way, even to the uninitiated. Or the use of human shields.
Yet the soldiers describe time and again shooting civilians under the rationale that any people remaining in their homes were combatants — a shoddy and shocking excuse that flies against common sense. The “operational necessity” rationale will be compelling for Jews eager to rubberstamp the IDF with a clean bill of health.
Bush and Cheney have also reminded us through Abu-Ghraib and Gitmo that moral superiority and cultures of permissiveness suffice in place of explicit orders. The higher ups maintain plausible deniability for themselves. Meanwhile the dutifully obeying soldier, either cruelly or in the heat of battle, commits war crimes with short-lived impunity. They cannot take the entire blame for this.
These have thus led the “most moral army in the world” to become at least an army as deplorable as all others. The credibility of the IDF version of events crumbles.
Quite frankly, there is very little to redeem this military to me, except for the amazing voices of the soldiers who contributed their testimonies here. I have no love of the IDF’s responses to world opinion, “We had no choice” and “All is excused in war.” These soldiers know what is right and wrong, and have offered the Jewish people a glimmer of hope that Jews could wield power with conscientious justice, in accordance with international law.
In the eloquent voice of Testimonial 51:
“Anything we did there, we’d answer ourselves: there’s no other choice, but this is how we shirk our responsibility…You had another option. You always have another option. You have to admit you chose to go into Gaza. As soon as you did, you’ve brought people into a moral twilight zone…As soon as you say ‘there is no other choice,’ you’re immediately shirking your responsibility. Then you don’t need to investigate, to look into things. That was my feeling about it then, and still is today.”
We commend these voices as we condemn their commanders. Both their military commanders who implemented this operation seeking to maximize the harm permitted by the law, and their civilian commanders who decided such a useless, directionless, objectiveless and successless engagement be waged in the first place.
IDF commanders, you owe the Jewish people an honest reckoning of what transpired in Gaza. Reopen your investigation to civilian oversight, participate in the UN investigation. Give yourself a chance at reclaiming a shred of your credibility. For democracy’s sake.
When you oppose evenhandedness, you know you’ve lost your moral compass.
For a more complete report on the meeting in question, click here.
I’m jaded enough to think that this little ray of sunshine in US – Israel policy is not going to do a damn thing to end the occupation, but I think its going to shake the relative power of American Jewish orgs in a good way. At the very least the new administration is going to cause AIPAC and the Presidents Conference to cut back on their saber rattling.
Okay, usually I’m sympathic to the outrages of the Israeli left, but I don’t necessarily get this one. This video is a commercial for Israeli telecom giant Cellcom. Since a Facebook group was started calling on Cellcom to pull the ad, it’s hit Israeli news and liberal blogs. And it’s already sparked some dark parodies. But I actually think this is rather benign. I mean, it’s not accurate to reality. But it’s got the slightest glimmer of hope in it, doesn’t it?
“What’s up?” you ask. For one thing, the new movie, Brüno. The swishy, semi-fascist fashionista Brüno is the imaginary Austrian TV personality created by the very real British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen. In 2006, Baron Cohen broke box office records (and probably a couple of laws) with his movie Borat, about another foreign fictional reporter’s adventures in America.
With their microphones in hand and their cameramen at their heels, both characters give Baron Cohen the unique ability, in our media-crazed age, to access people and places few “real” people could get close to. The results are hilarious or offensive – sometimes both – depending on your point of view. More »
Koren, Israeli publishers renowned for Eliyahu Koren’s gorgeous fonts and refreshing layouts, have finally given us a sidur for the English-speaking world. And it’s everything I hoped it would be.
I’ll start with my personal impressions of this siddur and move on to it’s significance on the world’s liturgical stage second.
I’ve never opened a new sidur before and immediately felt its beauty above all else. As a font nerd, I’m still going nuts for Koren’s two similar fonts, used throughout the siddur for the Hebrew text. Parts of the liturgy that are direct biblical quotes are in Koren’s original tanach font and the rest of the text is presented in the similar, but sublty different sidur font. Both are elegant and totally readable. More »
A woman is suing an Egyptian hotel claiming her daughter got pregnant – from using the swimming pool.
Magdalena Kwiatkowska’s 13-year-old returned to Poland from their holiday expecting a baby.
Magdalena believes the teenager conceived from stray sperm after taking a dip in the hotel’s mixed pool. She is now seeking compensation from the hotel.
A travel industry source said: “The mother is adamant that her daughter didn’t meet any boys while she was there.
“She is determined to go ahead with the case.”
Tourist authorities in Warsaw, Poland, have confirmed they received the bizarre complaint.
Kind of wacky on its own, but particularly interesting in light of the fact that Judaism has a whole pregnant-via-the-pool thing going on. More »
See below for the press release about the project, which is already attracting increasing numbers of supporters, including many rabbis. Click the link above to visit the website and sign up yourself…
It being 17 Tammuz, a fast day, Yeshivat Hadar was learning about fasting.
We learned the story from Ketubot 67b:
In Mar Ukba’s neighbourhood there lived a poor guy, and every day Mar Ukba used to leave a dollar in his mailbox. One day, the poor guy decided to find out who was leaving these dollars, so he kept a look out. Now, that day Mar Ukba stayed late at the beit midrash, and his wife came to find him. They went home together via the poor guy’s mailbox, and the guy spotted them and came out! Mar Ukba and Mrs Ukba ran away fast fast fast, and hid [naturally] in a conveniently-empty communal oven. But it was still hot, and Mar Ukba’s legs got burned, ouch. But his wife’s legs were fine.
DailyKos posted this video today, poking fun at Arizona State Sen. Sylvia Allen (R), as she speaks at the Senate Retirement and Rural Development Committee meeting.
First of all, let’s give her the benefit of the doubt, and assume that she’s just a lazy Creationist, rounding up to 6,000. (We all know the earth is actually only 5,769-years old.)
But here’s the real concern:
This Earth’s been hear 6,000 years — and I know I’m going on and on and I’ll shut up — it’s been here 6,000 years, long before anybody had environmental laws, and somehow it hasn’t been done away with.
She’s falling back on a still-lazy belief common amongst a certain subset of neo-con Christians: that because G!d created the earth, everything has been, and will be, provided for us. If those same Christians believe in the end times, they feel no pressure to protect the environment now, because the world’s supposed to end soon anyway. I’m glad Jews don’t have that same mentality. (Nor do all Christians; remember when the Vatican added polluting the environment as a sin?)
But here’s the real shortcoming of her statement. Allen claims that there weren’t any environmental laws for the last 6,000 years. I call foul. It doesn’t take too close a reading of the Bible to find many references to our responsibility to the earth, nature, and animals; heck, the land even gets its own sabbath. Yeesh.
Since Israel doesn’t really think anyone in the Diaspora should convert, apparently the Conservative movement, in a very non-typical move, has decided to accept this ruling and no longer bother.
After several years of actively attempting to encourage intermarried families to become “one-faith families,” since the efforts made to stem the rather strong social forces we live with in the Diaspora didn’t have immediate and overwhelming success, and were even faced with contradiction from within their own movement by its own Men’s Club, in the Men’s Club “Keruv” program, they just decided to move on to other important topics, such as whether or not New York City is actually the center of Judaism and the original site of the Temple.
These different approaches to the intermarried caused such concern among the other arms of the Conservative movement that a committee was established in an attempt to find common ground. The result is a pamphlet that will be distributed in the coming days in which all arms of the Conservative movement speak with one voice — decidedly softer in tone on conversions — in spelling out their principles on outreach:
-All are welcome.
-There is a commitment to fostering Jewish marriage and family life.
-Interfaith couples are welcome.
There is “nurturing and support for the spiritual journey of non-Jewish partners who join us, to deepen their connections to the synagogue, the Jewish community and to the Jewish people, and to inspire them to consider conversion.”
…It was also a compromise that all arms could live with; an initial draft didn’t even contain the word “conversion.”
Is it just me, or is someone from the Onion contributing to JTA these days?
Converts in the diaspora are still having trouble getting citizenship in Israel. We’ve been seeing this going on for years, of course, but every time the soup simmers down, someone throws in a new bone and turns up the flame.
Seems that the Interior Ministry has changed the rules again. Of course, the new rules haven’t actually been approved, but that hasn’t stopped the normally rule-bound Israelis (can you detect the sarcasm? Okay) from employing them.
Critics say the new rules are too stringent and are disenfranchising Diaspora Jewish communities that approve the conversions, ultimately making it harder than ever for converts from the Diaspora to immigrate to Israel. Supporters say the new rules are meant to separate genuine converts from those interested in little more than a quick path to Israeli citizenship.
Yes, of course. It has nothing to do with the battle between certain of the power-holding Orthodox and everyone else.
According to the new regulations — they have not been approved officially but already are being employed, according to advocates who deal with converts — converts to Judaism from the Diaspora must remain for at least nine months before and after their conversions in the community where they converted before they can immigrate to Israel.
The rules also mandate 350 hours of classes and hands-on practice for converts in the Diaspora (modeled on standards set in Israel for its official conversion institute) and bar any convert who has a non-Jewish relative living in Israel and anyone whose stay in Israel was previously deemed illegal for any period of time.
My favorite part is that if you have a non-Jewish relative living in Israel you aren’t eligible to be Jewish. WTF? Yes, I’m aware that there are foreign workers living in Israel who might want to -God forbid- become Israeli. And we all know that OF COURSE there could only be ulterior motives.
Um, they DO realize that this is counter to halakhah, right?
Kudos to JTA’s Uriel Heilman for posting this video of Israel’s Channel 2 News covering the volunteers and staff of Peace Now’s settlement monitoring crew. It’s a good day when a bit of Israel’s vibrant press corps penetrates the dull and defensive Diaspora Jewish media. Thanks, Uriel.
While Brit Tzedek v’Shalom and J Street receive much attention as the peace movement’s Washington representatives, the question “What does Americans for Peace Now do?” comes up quite frequently. Among the most important of their valuable work, including also being a force behind the Washington scenes, is funding the settlement watch program. In 2006 the Israeli government discovered Peace Now had more detailed information on settlement activity than the government, which led them to appoint a special investigator to build a settlement database, later leaked to Haaretz. Their findings? Palestinian claims of expropriated land and settler activism are absolutely, without a doubt, true.
Just saw “
I’m not one to dabble into gossip tabloids, but when this came across my Facebook newsfeed, I couldn’t resist (from 
I’ll start with my personal impressions of this siddur and move on to it’s significance on the world’s liturgical stage second.
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