Meir Shamgar, an old Likudnik, died on 18 October 2019. After he had been a member of the Supreme Court for 8 years, he was appointed president of the Supreme Court in 1983 and held that position for 12 years. A champion of rights, he kept pushing for an Israeli constitution all his late professional life. Because he viewed protection of the law as a basic human right, he was responsible for writing the decision allowing Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to appeal directly to the Supreme Court when they had grievances against the state and the army for, in his mind, they were and are entitled to Israeli justice as long as they are governed by the State of Israel. (See Politics – October 2019 – In Memoriam: Meir Shamgar 13 August 1925 – 18 October 2019) Today, the Likud Party is identified with ethnic nationalism rather than individual rights. How did this happen?

Thus far, I have insisted on equality as a basic principle for Jews, in particular equality before the law. It is a principle that should and did unite both progressives and traditional conservatives. Canada and Israel are both wedded to such a principle, even though sometimes differing on its interpretation and application. I now want to extend the principle of equality to Jews, both those living in Israel and in the diaspora, by complementing equality of rights with equality of responsibilities. I believe that equality of responsibility applies to the cultural, especially the linguistic, and religious spheres, to state membership, security and the economic spheres. I will examine language and religion in this blog and the remaining themes in the next blog. Further, I will argue that any diaspora organization, whether progressive or rightist, should take a stand on each of these areas of equality and responsibility.

I begin with culture because it is most basic. Further, language is the most important ingredient of culture. Currently, the commonest linguistic link between Jews in the diaspora and Jews in Israel is English, not Hebrew. The vast majority of Jews in the diaspora do not speak and many cannot even read Hebrew. Yet Hebrew is central to Israel and the core historical language of religion that united Jews in the diaspora during exile.

My first proposition is that diaspora Jews, and particularly progressive diaspora Jews, should adopt as a goal that all Jews in the diaspora master Hebrew. I say this even though I have periodically tried; I am a total failure in mastering Hebrew. But I believe it should be an obligation and a central plank in any progressive Zionist program. There are deeper reasons than convenience and superficial identity.

I have had many political disagreements with Noam Chomsky over the years. However, my disagreements over his linguistic theories are even more basic, that is his conviction about a universal grammar that is built into the human DNA. The Torah has a different position, namely that linguistic categories are created and communicated by humans and do not have an a priori status even if the capacity to use language and to construct that language into communicable propositions may be inborn. I accept the latter, but also the former, the rootedness of culture in linguistic categories, not because the Torah presumes it, but because I believe it has been verified by science. I refer readers to Daniel Everett’s book Language: The Cultural Tool based on thirty years of study of Amazonian tribes.

Why is this important? Because I believe that the Torah happens to be scientifically correct on this issue, that language creates the categories in terms of which we understand the world and, as that understanding shifts, language must shift as well. Thus, there is a critical dialectic at work between language and culture, between the way in which we classify and understand the world and the way in which our experiences in the world and with other cultures forces modifications to a language and culture. To the extent languages differ among groups of people, they have somewhat different cultural views of the world. 

If Jews are to share a common culture, they must share a common language. That language is Hebrew and ALL Jews should be expected and taught to master the language. This is a cultural statement rather than a political one, though it undoubtedly will have an impact on countering the increasing chasm between diaspora and Israeli Jews. Further, it also takes the lesson of the Tower of Babel, that pluralism should be supported rather than envisioning a common cosmopolitan culture even as we aspire towards universal rights. More specifically, responsibilities must be founded initially and continuously within specific cultures.

That offers a natural segue into religion. Generally, debates over religion between the diaspora and Israel tend to focus on the differences between Humanitarian, Reconstructionist, Reform and Conservative brands of Jewish observance and the orthodox and ultra-orthodox brands officially endorsed by the Israeli state – though non-orthodox movements have made significant progress over the last decades. Further, there is a division over the role of women. Both issues are played out in the political realm in discussions about controlling religious worshipers at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. However, there are other even deeper divisions which divide Israelis over questions of who is a Jew, over control of core institutions such as marriage and divorce, and between secular and religious Jews.

This deeper and more profound problem undergirds all of these divisions and relates to individual and institutional obligations and responsibilities. For in both the diaspora and in Israel, there has been a dramatic fall off in synagogue attendance among younger families. Why is this important? Because in my studies of refugees, I learned that whatever secular Jews offered in support of refugees, religious institutional support was critical for numbers and for continuity.

Now religious beliefs and practices have been declining at a precipitous pace, particularly in non-evangelical Christian congregations, but in Jewish ones as well. Further, although the fall-off may not be as large as in non-evangelical Christianity, it reverberates through Judaism’s central institution in the diaspora, the synagogue. Its effects are felt in voluntarism (time) and charitable commitments (money). Further, not only does communal support suffer, so do communal relationships, particularly in the ability of men and women to meet and mate after they have left the educational period in their personal trajectory. The opportunity to be part of something bigger than oneself – a family, a congregation, a community – is less available as religious institutions decline. Though rites are a terrible substitute for rights, there is a sense in which responsibilities tend to diminish in the absence of some rites.

Why should progressive Zionists take a stand on this issue? Not just because of equality in the treatment of different Jewish religious expressions, not just because of discrimination when it comes to rites of passage, but because religion is as much at the core of what it is to be Jewish, perhaps as much or even more than mastery of Hebrew. Being a Jew means to embed oneself in a community with all of the inherent responsibilities of joining with others in shared joys and sadness, expectations and regrets. Being a Jew means accepting not just a cultural background but some degree of commitment of cultural continuity. And religious participation. Personal relationships leading to the formation of families will likely decline without such participation. I feel that the responsibility to support individuals, particularly young people, to form families will also decline.

I believe that Zionism was developed to ensure a Jewish future. As Jews continue to live throughout the world, Zionism can only ensure that continuity and coherence if Jews also have a language and religion in common. For, in future, I expect Israelis to move out into the diaspora as Jews move from the diaspora to Israel. But the exodus will exceed the influx if Jews in the diaspora fail to develop deeper ties to Israel. Progressive Jews should actively promote and encourage Jewish affiliation through synagogues and other mechanisms of community affiliation.

I recognize that one factor that makes many wary of religion is its history of dogmatism. On the other hand, as membership and participation in religious institutions has fallen away, relatively cheap substitutes – varying from astrology to followers of self-help health care fads – have tended to fill the void. (Cf. the story by Matthew Schultz in the 9 October 2019 issue of Haaretz entitled, “Of Tao and Torah: New Age Beliefs Are Making Serious Inroads in U.S. Jewish Life.”) At the same time, the universal institutionalized practice of charitable giving has been replaced by a system dominated by the wealthy. To avoid faddism and enhance charitable giving amongst all of us, religion is a valuable tool.

However, is it just instrumental? What about God’s role in our ongoing Jewish struggle for justice and law in Israel and in the diaspora? The study of Torah and core practices of Judaism are not just instrumental. However, one’s interpretation of Torah or the collective practices of Judaism need not be determined by the whole community. Different groups of Jews will have their own interpretations of whether even faith in God is a requirement. Some may even argue that the issue is really God’s faith in us. Jews as a collective will have various expectations of God or, for many, none.

However, is not the covenantal relationship to God at the core of Judaism? Yes. But constitutions are also characterized by covenantal relationships; covenantal relations are neither exclusive to Judaism nor is the interpretation of a divine spirit with whom one may share a covenantal relationship uniform. For some, faith in God is equivalent to expectations of God’s intervention in human history. For others, God has withdrawn from any interventionist role and has transferred full responsibility to humans for their future. Some will engage in prayer, both personal and communal, before making decisions and determining actions. Others see prayers as rites rather than as substantive dialogues. If one asserts that a minimal uniformity of practice is required for one to be a Jew, the question arises – where do we draw the line? Perhaps, more importantly, can a line even be drawn that is effective? A respect for pluralism insists that uniform requirements should be minimalized and each community of Jews, whether through their religious institutions or their social substitutes, should be and will be free to determine that for their own group.

Clearly, this is not a position that will be endorsed by the ethnic nationalist right that emerged triumphant in Israel over the last three decades. But it is a position consistent with the new emerging majority on the centre-left or the civic-centre in Israel. These Jews, both in the diaspora and in Israel, share a common approach to their Jewish identity and Judaism, though in the diaspora, the abyss between the secular and religious is both far more pronounced as many of the secular even abandon traditionalism in increasing numbers, and, hence, the last remnant of their Jewish identity.

This week, Tomer Persico, a research fellow at Jerusalem’s Hartman Institute and a visiting professor in Jewish and Israeli Studies at Berkeley, wrote an article in Haaretz entitled, “In Israel: A New Consensus on What Being Jewish Really Means (https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-in-israel-a-new-consensus-on-what-being-jewish-really-means-1.8033870) Jewish identity in Israel has evolved as a sort of privatized traditionalism dependent on the right of the individual to customize Jewish religion by insisting on retaining a Jewish identity while resisting religious coercion. In the diaspora, that has only taken place for Jews determined to retain their Jewish identity. The rest leave Judaism and, eventually, their Jewish identity behind.

In Israel, the religious right married ethnic nationalism to halachic observance rather than individualistic liberalism. “The processes of liberalization and globalization that the West is experiencing have made it more homogenous. The rules of the market and consumer culture, the discussion of human and civil rights, even popular culture in all its channels constitute a fixed framework that molds local societies into similar patterns. On the one hand, privatization and liberalization have turned people into individuals who scrupulously cultivate their own autonomy; on the other hand, these same individuals also develop anxiety about their identity. Most of them don’t want to be swallowed up into the liberal shredder and spit out as a generic Western individual. Strengthening national or ethnic identity provides a solution in this respect: The individual feels part of a unique collective while making minimal lifestyle changes.” (Tomer Persico) Out of panic, the right in Israel sacrificed an adherence to individual rights for an identity based on ethnic nationalism.

The National Religious Party, instead of being the link between the secular and religious worlds, evolved into various versions of the political right dominated by the Haredi minority. On the centre-left, the central-civic bloc, Jewish tradition and a stress on individual rights emerged triumphant. The result – on the right, Halacha + ethnic nationalism; on the left of centre, traditionalism + individual liberalism without Halacha. From both sides, there has been a loss of any identity based on Israeli citizenship married to Halacha. The prevailing trend, in spite of the greater reproductivity on the right, has been the growth of a central-civic bloc that marries traditionalism to civic rights and responsibilities.

Progressive Zionists to save themselves from complete secularism on the one hand and, hence, a falling away from any Jewish identity, and a Halachic Judaism that in Israel increasingly identifies itself with ethnic nationalism, need to identify with this new relationship of religion and state, of traditionalism and civic responsibility, by supporting a Jewish state, but not a halachically Jewish religious state while respecting entirely those who interpret their Jewish tradition in halachic terms to meet their cultural, social and spiritual needs. For Jews, this is a new form of privatized Judaism in a communal dress and one with which most Jews in the diaspora can identify.

There is another very different area in which progressive Jews who support Israel have to re-examine their thinking, the relationship between Israel and the diaspora. Though far from the only area, the domestic political scene with respect to the political party platforms in one’s own country is one obvious dimension of this relationship. Once a Zionist group re-examines and comes up with a political platform that it will support vis-à-vis Israel, then the politics of one’s own country has to be a priority. I begin with the Canadian party most critical of Israel, The Green Party.

Like all Canadian parties, the Greens support a two-state solution, that is, support Israel as a state alongside the state of Palestine. But both states must be viable. The Greens support the right of Israel to exist, but insist that this must be alongside Palestine as a “viable” state, usually taken as a code word for a Palestine which has the old Green Line as a border – subject usually, but not always, to the usual qualifier, “with adjustments agreeable to both parties.” The Palestinians are then put in the position that the Old City, East Jerusalem and any part of the West Bank can only be part of Israel if the Palestinians agree. Hence, the Greens support a divided Jerusalem with the Old City under Palestinian jurisdiction and the dismantling of all settlements defined as “illegal”. There is no mention of “secure” borders, a code word which endorses a shift from the Green Line as a border for Israel for new borders which will enable Israel to reinforce its security.

Thus, with respect to Gaza, the Greens have focused their political fire on the violence used by Israel against the Palestinians in Gaza and not the rockets fired from Gaza onto Israel, even though the Greens deplore the use of violence from either side. In fact, the Green Party leader, Elizabeth May, went even further and accused Israel of deliberately targeting civilians in Gaza. In a May 2018 press release by the party. Elizabeth May claimed that the “Israeli Defence Forces have targeted and killed 110 Palestinians, including 12 children, with more than 12,000 injured…Targeting civilian protesters is in direct violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, to which both Israel and Canada are signatories…We call on the Liberal government to join us in demanding that Israel immediately stop targeting civilians.”

If you believe these words were strong, read her other statements where she condemned “the intentionality of the Israeli military” in “the shooting of unarmed civilians in a peaceful protest,” claimed that the shootings were “a clear violation of all accepted international norms,” and that “ Israeli snipers did exactly what they were ordered to do and that the country’s military commanders have said that “every bullet went where it was intended to go…This was a systematic plan to murder unarmed civilians.”

To that end, the Greens have insisted that Canada impose an arms embargo against Israel, but say nothing about stopping missiles and the parts thereto from being shipped into Gaza. “We again call on the government to cease all arms shipments to Israel.” While stating that the party supports Israel’s right to exist, it does not discipline candidates who support BDS, even though BDS is widely charged, in the end, with denying Israel’s right to exist. The party did discipline a candidate who was a vocal Holocaust denier.

Officially, the Green Party “opposes the use of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions tactics,” but defends the rights of members not only to support BDS, but move resolutions at annual conventions endorsing BDS. The party did not discipline its candidate, Dale Dewar, in the riding of Regina-Qu’Appelle, though Dewar did apologize for her tweets on Israel, but not for her support of BDS, but because of the inflammatory tone of her tweets. She had called Israel “a serial rapist,” dubbed Zionism a “cult,” defined Israel as a colonizing state and a country “imposed” on the Palestinians by the U.N., declared support for Israel to be a product of guilt over the treatment of Jews in WWII and accused Israel of having a “distorted sense of reality” and of picking on children. There was no withdrawal of these specific statements or a reprimand for them.

What was JSpace’s response? Elizabeth May’s statements crossed the line and revealed bias. Karen Mock retorted, “Israel does not have a systematic plan to murder civilians. Hamas cannot be trusted when it says it is committed to non-violence. The demonstrations on the border are not really peaceful protests. When a statement censuring Israel says the killing and human rights violations must end, it is absurd to compare the murderous regime that runs Gaza with Israel. While many of the demonstrators were peaceful and exercising their right to protest, others were indeed engaging in violence, including members of Hamas’ military wing. This is why we believe it is both unwise and unhelpful to accuse Israel of intentionally shooting unarmed protesters, as Ms. May did.”

Everyone knows, or should know, how much I both admire and appreciate Karen and her work. The criticisms are pointed, but the evaluation – “unwise and unhelpful” – comes across as milquetoast when Elizabeth May’s observations reflect not only extreme bias and an ideological underpinning, but very distorted observations and evaluations of what took place in the Gaza War.  

Jagmeet Singh, leader of the New Democratic Party, came in for similar criticism by Karen. He had denounced Israel’s approach to Gaza as “counterproductive to peace.” Singh had removed Rana Zaman as a Nova Scotia candidate when he characterized Israel as behaving like Nazis, committing genocide and even using money to influence Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The NDP policies on Israel are not nearly as repugnant as those of the Green Party.

However, they cannot be considered to be friendly.  In August, when the Federal Court in Canada ruled that labeling wines made in the West Bank settlements as “products of Israel,” as “false, misleading and deceptive” and, therefore, in violation of Canada’s consumer protection, food and drug laws, the NDP went much further and did not just applaud the decision – which I personally believe was a correct one – but denounced the free trade agreement between Canada and Israel for including products made in settlements in the West Bank. The problem was not just one of misleading labeling, but the fact that the items were produced in “illegal settlements” in clear violation of the fourth Geneva Convention. I happen not to agree with the latter statement, but the fact that the NDP used a court ruling in Canada that said no such thing to imply that the court upheld in effect boycotting products made in “illegal” settlements in the West Bank required a more probing criticism. 

At the very least, JSpace had to clarify and define its position on the settlements otherwise it has no foundation for discriminating among different positions and launching hard-hitting critiques based on its platform.

What about the Liberals? Trudeau dumped Hassan Guillet as a Montreal-area Liberal candidate after he was accused of attacking Israel and glorifying terrorism. That party restored funding to UNRWA cancelled by the Tories. That party said it would not follow the lead of the Americans in recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Further, the Liberals also continue to characterize the settlements as illegal.

United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 (2016) during the Obama administration passed by a 14-0 vote with the U.S. abstaining. The resolution characterized Israel’s settlement activity as a “flagrant violation” of international law with respect to an occupying power under the Fourth Geneva Convention and called on Israel to cease all such activity. Since 1980, no UNSC resolution had previously specifically addressed the issue of Israeli settlements. Resolution 2334 changed that. However, it was adopted under the non-binding Chapter VI of the UN charter.

To be binding, the UNSC would have to first determine that, in international law, Israel was occupying the territory of another state and thereby recognize Palestine as a state. There is a controversy over whether non-state territory fell under this part of the charter, an issue that remained moot as long as U.S. administrations vetoed similar motions. There is also the issue of the failure of the UN to condemn other states in unequivocal flagrant violations – Russia in Crimea. The Palestinian Authority welcomed the passage as a step towards ending the occupation and establishing a Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines.

This is the nub of the debate. Are the armistice lines of 1949 also the territorial boundaries of the successor political authorities or were these just ceasefire lines? Progressive Zionists have to determine their position on this question and the policies and strategies that follow from such a determination.

Only the Conservative Party of Canada refuses to characterize the settlements as illegal and denounce them. Andrew Scheer also promised to “recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital when we form government.” Further, it was the Harper government that withdrew support for UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), monies that the Liberals restored after Trudeau’s first victory. Scheer promised to reinstate that withdrawal of financial support.

As for the Bloc Québécois, out of ignorance, I hesitate to write about their policies on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though I have a passing acquaintance with the views of Francine Lalonde, the long-time foreign affairs critic for the party who has an intimate knowledge of the conflict. To the degree that I understand the Bloc position, on the one hand, it was critical of President Barack Obama’s stance on settlements because the Bloc found them to be contradictory, praising Netanyahu for freezing the settlements while characterizing them as illegal. She took the Tories to task for their one-sided approach and Israel for perceiving Palestinians only as threats, whereas the independenistes in Québéc never saw English Canadians as threats. One sensed that she both sympathized with the desire of both groups for self-determination but was very willing to contemplate Israel-Palestine as a united federal state. However, this is only an impression. Finally, she was very critical of antisemitism, but also very wary of any attempt to paint critics of Israel as antisemitic.

The three English progressive parties in Canada, to different degrees, are critical of current Israeli policies. Only the Conservatives seem to support them. Where does JSpace stand on the following issues:

1. The 1967 ceasefire lines as borders or just ceasefire lines
2. Jerusalem
3. Settlements
4. Support for UNRWA
5. The characterization of IDF military actions in Gaza?

In my perception, many Jewish progressives are torn, disagreeing with progressive parties in Canada on these issues to different degrees but unwilling to endorse a non-progressive party even if its stand may, for some or many, correspond more closely to their own convictions. Is it sufficient to support dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, a peaceful approach to resolution of the issues and the recognition of Palestine as a state alongside Israel, or must JSpace, to be effective, come out with concrete positions on these controversial issues?

On the border question, I would hold that the 1949 armistice lines were an interim border. Further, it divided Israel from Jordan as an occupying and annexing power. With Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, the Jewish state revived its right under the Mandate for Palestine (assumed by the UN as the successor to the League of Nations) to settle anywhere in Palestine. This has been a platform of almost all of the Jewish political parties in Israel from left to right. The dispute was over the extent to which it should be exercised, but not over its legal right to do so. Hence, for Israel, the settlements are not illegal, but they may be considered an obstacle to peace.

Subsequent events and international actions, including steps by Israel, went beyond the Mandate which guaranteed the civil and political rights of Arabs (Article 2 of the Mandate), but no national rights to recognition of Palestinians as a nation with collective political rights in Palestine. Just as the extent of Jewish rights are under dispute, so are the boundaries of Palestinian rights. Hence, I would conclude that the settlements are not illegal though they pose a problem for any peace agreement. Further, Area C in the West Bank has almost achieved the same ratio of Jews to Palestinians as in Israel proper. Finally, it is politically impossible to envision Israel uprooting those settlements. Is it really correct to say that the expansion of settlements (all, some, which ones?) in the West Bank is an obstacle to peace and that they threaten Israel’s security?

What about Jerusalem? Though in the aftermath of the Six Day War, excluding the Old City, many Israelis were willing to cede East Jerusalem in return for peace, this is no longer the case since most Jewish Israelis have become convinced that such an offer would not resolve the issues over Jerusalem. Should JSpace recognize a) Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and b) a united Jerusalem?

As for UNRWA, given the evolution of the refugee repatriation issue as a right and the evolution in practice of virtually no repatriation, would Canada be better off continuing its support for education for Palestinians by channeling such support through the Palestinian Authority, thereby facilitating a unified educational system in both the West Bank and Gaza, but also raising the possibility of conditioning such support on Palestine ending its support for terrorism in its textbooks and its denial of Israel’s right to exist?

Finally, there is the issue of the application of just war theory to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. I would claim that the evidence does not support that, in general, Israel has been in violation of those norms and, further, that those who insist that Israel is in violation, more often than not misinterpret those norms.

Would JSpace be better off wrestling with determining its policies on these issues and risk turning off a number of progressives who would hold different views, or would it be better to zero in on its positions on these various issues so that clarity replaces vagueness on JSpace policies?

Next: Israel and Jewish Diaspora Communities

A Re-reading of New Beginnings

Michael Greenstein, a blog reader, responded to Friday’s blog with his own commentary on Bereshit. Note the following differences:

• The radical divergence in methodology used
• Following a very interesting brief literary history in dealing with “beginnings,” Greenstein combined an alphabetic, linguistic, Kabbalistic mathematical and auditory methodology
• Noting the juxtaposition but tension between that which comes first, that which is at the ‘head’, and creativity, Greenstein arrives at an admittedly awkward translation – “beginning begat” – which suggests that the process of beginning itself is the root of creativity
• He states that this conveys “the struggle, mystery, and awe at the heart of the process of creation”
• In his Kabbalistic use of letters to unlock the mystery, he notes “a dialectic between symmetry and asymmetry,” (my italics) “between outside (ox) and inside (house) that continues through “gimel” (camel) and “daled” (door), or between nature and domestication” (my italics), between firsts and seconds
• Using the sounds of the words themselves, he finds that God fashions cosmic chronotopes [particular genres or standard speech patterns representing different worldviews or ideologies via relatively stable ways of speaking combining both the cognitive and narrative characteristics of language] and a utopian garden fraught with the foibles of humanity.

The result is a fascinating articulation of the dialectic that I suggested between the cognitive and the emotional, between the heavenly and earthly, between the divine and the human-all-too human.

First Verse, Second Reading

by

Michael Greenstein

In the nineteenth century Cardinal Newman wrote: “Fear not that thy life shall come to an end, but rather fear that it shall never have a beginning.” A century earlier Laurence Sterne, Anglican priest and author of Tristram Shandy, one of the earliest experimental novels, offered his own advice: “Of all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the known world, I am confident my own way of doing it is best – I’m sure it is the most religious – for I begin with writing the first sentence – and trusting to Almighty God for the second.” These obsessions with beginnings carry over to modern times as well in Edward Said’s Beginnings (which distinguishes mythical origins from secular beginnings) and Meir Shalev’s Beginnings, a secular Israeli reading of biblical stories.

All of these beginnings return to Genesis. One of the most striking features of the first verse of Genesis is its strong initial alliteration, “bereisheet barah.” Although the first three letters of both words are identical, the two words are etymologically unrelated. The root of bereisheet, “rosh,” (head or first) has little to do with “barah” (create), except that creation and beginning are ideologically connected. These words initiate a dialectic between symmetry and asymmetry: it’s as if the two connected-disconnected words form a kind of tectonic plate beneath the earth’s surface and beside the visual and aural representation of the letters. An awkward English translation, “beginning begat,” at least captures the first 3 letters of the words in question, which in turn highlight the struggle, mystery, and awe at the heart of the process of creation.

          Also noteworthy is the placement of the second letter of the alphabet to lead the words, while the silent aleph is deferred until the third position. Aleph derives from the head of an ox: kabbalists see the slanted “vav” in the centre as a connection between a “yud” above (divinity) and one below (humanity), while some Christian theologians take the head to be the chief or Jesus. If aleph is a tangled silent letter, “beit” represents house or open tent: these two letters introduce a dialectic between outside (ox) and inside (house) that continues through “gimel” (camel) and daled (door), or between nature and domestication. (Neo-kabbalists may note that the “resh” resembles a “beit” with the bottom removed, as if the ground itself were taken away during God’s ground-breaking work.) Moreover, the reversal of the two letters highlights the thematic dialectic of firsts and seconds throughout the Bible.

          More important than these visual depictions, however, is the aural appeal of the first verse. The initial strong alliteration gives way to a softer “Elohim et,” and Elohim itself suggests an overarching elevation, almost rainbow-like, linking the first half of the verse to the second, which descends from shamayim to aretz. From the grinding and grounding “br” sounds to the softer elevation to the balance of heaven and earth where “aretz” picks up the grinding, the first verse thereby lays the groundwork for what follows. In the state of “reisheet,” the realm of firstness, God creates, calling (Vayikra) into being from the firmament (rakeeah) where emptiness (rake) is reversed by the call of kara. Out of time and place, God fashions cosmic chronotopes and a utopian garden fraught with the foibles of humanity.

Note, the original Part III, “A Possible Platform for Progressives on Israel,” will appear Monday as Part IV. It will be followed by a final Part V dealing with Israel and the diaspora.

One of the important points I omitted with respect to the JSpace conference on 2-3 November titled, “From Indifference to Making a Difference,” is the vigorous new approach to young people who will be leading some of the sessions in a spirit of tikuun olam, mending the world. As Bernie Farber wrote in the Canadian Jewish News, speakers “will look for ways to put words into actions” (and, I would add, forge words to propel action) to change the Jewish-Palestinian relationships in Israel (Part IV) and re-build Israel-Diaspora relations (Part V). New beginnings as a pre-condition of doing both is the focus of this blog.

For mending the world is at the core of renewal. The function of new beginnings is to reset the effort of confronting chaos, and, hence, calamity, by giving increasing order to events. The beginning of Bereshit reads, “In the beginning of God’s creating…” Not to be translated as, “In the beginning, God created…” Because there is no beginning point. Change, not stasis, is stressed. In the beginning, that change from chaos to order was already underway. It is that primal principle of creation, of imposing order on chaos, that is the foundation for change.

In the beginning of God’s creating heaven and earth, the world lacked form, lacked organization. Creation entails the imposition of order. And the first item of business entails the creating of two modes of dealing with the imposition of order, a heavenly or idealistic one and a grounded or earthly one. Creativity arises from the interaction of the two, but not in a simplistic way one might suppose, such as choosing an Aristotelian middle road between the two.

The roles of Adam and Eve provide examples. Have you ever asked yourself why the God of the Torah in creating the first man did not create a Hobbesian creature with his fundamental insecurity and having as a prime goal the quest for power? Or why not a Lockean possessive individualist with the prime goal of acquiring wealth ad infinitum, unless, of course, he fell back, as most men do, to accepting bare survival, resigned to being a worker bee destined to engage in drudgery his entire life. Instead, God created a nerd.

For Adam is a nerd par excellence and in all dimensions. For one, he sees himself as a primitive scientist, in effect, a taxonomist, who imitates God in giving order to the world by naming different classes of entities. This is a cow. This is a cloud. These are feet. But there is a second dimension to his nerdiness. He does not recognize that he himself is embodied. He thinks he is just a brain and, in that way, imitates God. In failing to recognize and take note that he is embodied, he does not recognize he is mortal and conceives of himself as immortal, though he gives no real thought to the issue or he would recognize how ridiculous that thought is. In visualizing himself as a disembodied brain, he does not recognize he has a penis, that he has a sex drive.

The third, and I believe most important dimension of this nerdiness, of this failure to recognize that he is an embodied creature, is that he projects as other his most demanding passion, his desire for sex. His penis is viewed as an independent being dictating behaviour with no recourse to his own brain. The penis is an erect snake who talks, who cajoles, who seduces. His penis is Other. Further, though he and woman are both created out of the dust of the earth, as embodied creatures, he sees woman as an extension of his body, as an Other who is really himself. Adam others himself by seeing his penis as an independent Other and his Other, his soul mate, as a mere extension of himself, but himself as an embodied creature.

That is why it is not he but the erect snake that seduces Eve. Even though God warned him. He failed to absorb the message that if he and she both ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, if he and she knew one another, if he and she had sex, both would discover they were mortal, that they were embodied, that they would know they would surely die. With sex comes the recognition of one’s mortality. With adolescence we discover that we will not live forever, that we will not be able to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Life.

Was Adam’s sin eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge? Was Eve’s sin eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge? In fact, they learned to love eating that fruit. Adam was thrown into a tizzy. He thought he was a nerd, that he was essentially a brain with a body useful only as an instrument for allowing him to think. Who was he? Adam suffered from extreme cognitive dissonance. He thought he was one thing. His actions showed him that he was another. But instead of becoming enthralled in that discovery, he denied it. He wanted to hide it. He insisted on covering it up in an attempt at disguising it with a fig leaf. The fig leaf was totally incapable of providing that cover-up.

Eve’s sin was not in seeing that she was, and knew she was, an earthly creature. Her sin was not in being seduced by that erect penis, but falling into Adam’s self-denial and also, under his influence, covering up. The sin both committed was the sin of failing to take full responsibility for what they did and for failing to recognize who they were. No longer the innocence of children. With sex, they had to go out into the world, to leave what was perceived to be a world of plenty without scarcity to learn to discover that the world was truly opposite to that, that one had to work for a living, that one would go on to procreate and Eve would give birth to her children in pain and Adam would become enslaved to his labour and suffer from the burden of having to work by the sweat of his brow.

Only the propensity to sin would persist, the propensity to suffer from cognitive dissonance, the propensity to fail to take responsibility, the propensity to cover-up. That is why it is insufficient to classify all things, to subsume everything under objective scientific laws, Know thyself. Own up to who you are. Then see what you do not want to see.

Men are resistant to change. Because their mind becomes set, their mindset becomes comforting and a source of security. The more they are frozen in their ideas, the more they reinforce that way of being. In the extreme, they become troglodytes. Troglodytes are awash in their own ignorance. They refuse to see the reality in front of them. They refuse to acknowledge who they are. They refuse to accept responsibility for what they do.

Ideologists can live on the right or on the left poles of the political spectrum where one burrows into a seeming security in the comforting embrace of a set of dogmas. However, if they are to see truly, if they are to see the world as it is and themselves as they are, they have to throw off the fig leaf of dogma and its supposed heavenly status.  

Allow me to offer two very different examples. The first is a reference to Dr. Andrew Rehfeld, President of Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) – the first non-rabbi in that role. As a political scientist, his focus has been on institutional design, that is how ideals of equality and justice interact in a democratic system with the need to protect one’s nation and one’s state. His stress as a progressive was on the good, the right and the just. But within an institutional context. And in Israel, as distinct from Hebrew Union College, the context was that of state institutions whose primary function was to ensure safety and survival while pursuing justice and equality. It should come as no surprise that the concentration of Rehfeld as head of a non-state institution would be on an almost exclusive focus on ethical ideals.

The role of non-state institutions, of NGOs, is often to take up the issue of ethics and norms, but unless one does so responsibly, one engages in a cover-up and a failure to recognize that a major function of institutions is survival, preserving life via work and progeny and in defence of both. The latter cannot in the end be accomplished without boundaries of ethics and law. But a stress on ethics and law to the exclusion of the needs of survival is a recipe for irrelevance and pie-in-the-sky thinking.

Let me offer a second and very different example, The Sveriges Riksbank Prize is the Nobel Prize for Economics, officially the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel created first in 1968. In 2019, it was awarded jointly to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, both at MIT, and Michael Kremer at Harvard. The unusual aspect of the award was that it went, not to ideologists of the right who have prevailed so much over the last few decades, but to three development economists. But development economists of a very different stripe than those who proceed from abstract models. Their approach to alleviating poverty was experimental. That means that their work focused on very specific and well-defined problems and creating field experiments to test which of several different hypotheses might best contribute to a model that might offer solutions.

There is a premise underlying all their theoretical work – humans are not exclusively nor even primarily self-seekers of material goods driven by self-interest. Instead, they are inclined towards cooperative and pacific behaviour to advance the public good, a public good that begins with their own families but extends to one’s larger “tribal” group and eventually to the nation and then the world. The foundation stone of the world is NOT fraternal conflict.

The animosity between Cain and Abel, between settled agriculturalists versus nomadic hunters and gatherers and then herdsmen, of one way of economic life and another, which translates into territorial disputes between different tribes or tribal groupings, begins, however, with an internal conflict between thinking divorced from reality, from the recognition of passions and interests versus abstractions, both ethical and scientific. We have a propensity to favour the latter, that is various types of abstractions, and deny our passions and interests. One of the great benefits of modernity was to place a major stress on the latter, but in doing so, covering up that insistence with another set of abstractions, ones supposedly rooted in nature rather than in ethics and law.

That is why awarding the economic prize for experimental development economists committed to everyone’s survival in the tradition of Albert Hirschman is so important. For the very point of experimental science is to prevent abstractions from ignoring reality. And whether we come from the left or the right, we have an inherent propensity to ignore reality, the real importance of both sets of ethical norms and scientific laws as well as the quest of groups for survival.  

New beginnings always represent a return to this basic insight. That is why a new beginning on the progressive side of the divisions over Israel has to start with our own efforts to ignore reality, to ignore our propensity to cover-up that reality with lofty slogans and aspirations. War, organized violence in the name of an ideology (civil war) or a group (inter-state wars) result when we fail to undertake this effort in self-recognition and not because humans are natural born killers that need to have their basic instincts suppressed and re-addressed by an authoritarian order. Humans can and do kill. But the lesson of the Torah is that they do not have to, that a return to understanding the self-denial that leads to war offers a formulation for the effort of avoiding war.

Identity politics can be a source of violence. Humans can be beasts in a way that beasts never are. The very idea that we are “beasts by nature” is itself an abstraction, one defining humans as engaged in a war of all against all. We set on the path of war when we become obsessed with abstractions – ethical ones as well as supposedly scientific ones. Abstract symbols (idols) rather than concrete aspirations, ideological doctrines rather than generalizations based on experiments, a focus on appearances rather than on underlying forces and tensions, lead us to actions based on ignorance untouched by experience. We were thrust out of the Garden so that we could and would learn from experience. And the first lesson we learned is that communal identity – I know that I am getting ahead of the story – is developed and preserved over time and provides the foundation for ethics and is not the antithesis to ethics and the rule of law.

Procedural rules rooted in institutions – whether in experimental science or in the rule of law – entail foundational process rules that have been discovered and reified over time. Due process and egalitarian goals are necessary counterpoints to any communal quest to survive and thrive. We need a communal ethos. We need formal structures and institutions to ensure continuity. But we need critique, we need critical self-examination, to ensure that neither the quest for survival nor its necessary and complementary norms become reified as abstractions that leave reality behind.

With the help of Alex Zisman

JSpace Canada will hold a conference in Toronto on 4 November 2019 entitled, “From Indifference to Making a Difference.” (Novotel, 3 Park Home Ave.) This series of blogs is inspired as a side note to the forthcoming deliberations.  Because of my own backlog, I have been tardy in initiating writing on this tissue.

The main topic of the conference is “political activism” and how indifference can be translated into making a difference. Titles are made to be pithy and there is a problem with the title. Adolph Hitler was not indifferent. He made a difference. Donald Trump has not been indifferent. He is certainly making a difference. The title suggests a goal of stirring Jews, particularly in the diaspora, out of their passivity to become engaged to make a positive difference, a difference that makes the world a better place. Further, the title presumes that the main problem is complacency. And that may be a presumption, but not an accurate picture of the problem.

This blog directly follows the previous one and this issue dealing with the first twenty years of my personal activism and the lessons learned. It did not include any activism with respect to Israel. Someone – I forget who – suggested I title the blog, “Reflections on the Life of an Activist – Forest Gump.” Forest Gump was, of course, present at key points in American post WWII history. I was not so positioned with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but was involved sufficiently to offer reflections on political activism that are more specifically applicable than my thoughts in Part I. I will touch on a few of the other topics that will be discussed, including the role of the liberal left and the possible obsolescence of progressivism.

Other topics such as antisemitism and the boycott will be discussed in future blogs following a diversion onto other matters I plan to write about. I begin with an account of my own involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Like many others, though a minority of Jews in the diaspora, I was at best indifferent to and at worst a silent critic of Zionism prior to 1967 given my strong cosmopolitan new left convictions. I was wary of any type of nationalism. As the 1967 war approached, I became terribly fearful that Israel would be wiped out. But this emotional reaction seemed to be totally contradictory to my political beliefs as a New Leftist. Even more shocking to myself, I was overjoyed when Israel won its unbelievable victories in the Six Day War. I was elated. I wanted to jump up with unrestrained joy. However, my emotions seemed so incongruent with my thinking that I initially became silent on the subject. I had not been complacent. I had not been indifferent. My activism had been focussed elsewhere. I became quiet on the issue and determined to probe into the problem and go visit Israel for myself.

In 1973, I took my wife and four children to Israel following a month in Africa that included observing over a million animals – lions and elephants, wildebeest and hyenas – on the Serengeti. I told my children that Israel could not and would not be as exciting as the places and the people and the animals they had seen in Africa, but it was on our way home so we could spend three weeks there. Much to my surprise again, they – and I – found Israel to be even far more interesting and fascinating than what we had just seen. We had spied out the land and became less concerned with the conflict than Israel’s history, character and accomplishments. And that was long before the romance of Israel as a start-up nation.

The Yom Kippur War followed our return. My deep fears turned to panic. But they were allayed by the victory. But I was also very troubled. How could Israel survive as a small nation surrounded by 150 million hostile Arabs? How could the conflict with the Palestinians be resolved? And it seemed to get worse as the conflict had already begun to shift its centre of gravity from an inter-state conflict to a fight between Israel and non-state terrorist actors. When Hussein Abu al-Khair, the Fatah representative in Cyprus, was assassinated by a presumably Mossad agent in January 1973, Baruch Cohen, the European Mossad Director, was assassinated by Fatah in Madrid two days later and Simha Gilzer, a Mossad agent, was assassinated in Nicosia in March again followed by the murder of PFLP’s Basil al-Kubaisi in Paris. This tit-for-tat secret service war continued until the Yom Kippur War.

In 1974, the trend that had had already begun in the shift to an Israeli-Palestinian war became official. After the Yom Kippur War, the UN recognized the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people and adopted Resolution 3236 recognizing the Palestinian right to self-determination and the question of Palestine was made a central fixture of the UN as the PLO gained observer status and the issue was automatically made part of each year’s agenda for the next 45 years. As the Palestinians shifted from an inter-secret service war to one against Israel civilians – 8 Palestinian terrorists killed 8 hostages in the Savoy Hotel in Tel Aviv and 15 Israelis in Jerusalem with a refrigerator bomb – in November 1974, the UNGA adopted the infamous and repugnant Resolution 3379 depicting Zionism as a form of racism.

It was time to get off the fence. Irwin Cotler, a law professor at McGill, initiated the Canadian Professors for Peace in the Middle East. His most brilliant move was recruiting Harry Crowe as a member and then successor as chair.  Harry recruited me and, after his untimely death in 1981, I became chair for a year. I found that I could not develop my refugee work and lead the organization. However, I had never abandoned my then obsession with Israel that had been reinforced when I became a Lady Davis Professor at Hebrew University during 1977-8 when Anwar Sadat came to Jerusalem and he and Menachem Begin signed the Israel-Egypt Peace Accord.

What happened over the next forty years to me as a political activist and to activism on behalf of Israel? In 2015, JSpace was five years old. It defined itself as a Jewish, progressive, pro-Israel, pro-peace organization. Irwin Cotler was invited to deliver the major address. (Jonathan Kay, the editor of Walrus at the time, moderated.) Karen Mock was elected as the new leader. Cotler enunciated the key principles to guide progressive advocates for peace in the Middle East:

• Support for the security, legitimacy and well-being of Israel
• Recognition of the rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination in an independent state
• The rejection of terrorism
• The end to state-sanctioned incitement to hatred, especially of Israel in a new form of antisemitism that went well beyond any legitimate criticisms of Israel

These were precisely the same principles that guided progressives four decades earlier though the emphasis and wording had shifted slightly. But so much had changed. Israel had emerged as unequivocally the strongest military power in the Middle East at the same time as Arab states had been wracked by coups, wars and insurrections. Israel had also moved to a well-off state with a per capita income equal to that of Great Britain, in spite of the drag on the GDP from both the Arab and ultra-Orthodox Jewish sectors. But the most important events that changed the political landscape for political landscape in Israel have been: 1) the first intifada begun in 1987, the same year Hamas was founded; 2) Oslo itself, and 3) the second intifada begun in September 2000 that finally petered out in about 2005.

In the Hamas-PLO civil war, Hamas emerged as the political authority in Gaza in 2007. In the Oslo Accords signed between the PLO and Israel on 13 September 1993, Israel intended to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through both territorial concessions and bringing into being a Palestinian state based on UN Resolutions 242 and 338. (Modifications in Oslo II were signed in 1995.) There were six issues left to resolve by the new supposed PLO-Israeli partnership:

• Borders and the status of Israeli settlements
• The status of Jerusalem
• Full autonomy and recognition of Palestine to emerge out of the Palestinian Authority and its limited self-government in Gaza and the West Bank
• The security of Israel and the continuing presence of Israeli military forces in Gaza and the West Bank
• The sharing of resources, specifically water
• The right of return with respect to Palestinian refugees.

The Oslo Accords ignored the right of the even greater number of Jewish refugees from Arab lands. Further, the Accords did not have the support of Hamas. In the Hamas-PLO civil war, Hamas emerged in 2007 with control over the Gaza strip and its 1.6 million inhabitants, 62.5% of them former refugees and their descendants from what is now Israel. Three Israeli-Gaza wars followed. Since then, the U.S. has recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the Israeli settlements in area C have been enormously expanded in their population to about 450,000 while the Palestinian population has declined to about 115,000. The U.S. has recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

These changes are but the major tips of the iceberg, or should I write volcano. Yet the key planks of the progressive platform in Canada, and more specifically, JSpace, have not changed. In the 1970s we expected Jerusalem to be divided. Can any objective and rational supporter of Israel retain that expectation today? In the 1970s, settlements were an important but relatively marginal concern. In 2020, can any objective and rational supporter of Israel expect Israel to repatriate 450,000 of its citizens in a peace agreement? Is it not far more likely that Area C comprising 60% of the West Bank will remain part of Israel? Given Israel’s experience following its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, can any objective and rational supporter of Israel expect Israel to give up its security dominance of the West Bank? Does anyone, including the Palestinians, expect any significant return of refugees when the vast majority of the refugees already live in Palestine or as a majority in Jordan?

Since the Oslo Accords were signed, and I truly expected peace between Israel and an independent sovereign Palestinian state to result, my personal political activism turned elsewhere, to the genocide in Rwanda, to early warning systems in East and West Africa, to mediation in a few of the African conflicts and to refugees around the world. Prior to Oslo, I had become an active part of one of the many Track II efforts at diplomacy between the Israelis and the Palestinians. We made no real progress. Instead, two Haifa professors, not previously part of any of the Track II efforts, brought the process to a culmination. Given my expertise on refugees and given that Canada had been handed the mandate to gavel the refugee talks after Madrid, I became one of the advisors to those talks.

Initially, the refugee talks were used as a front for the bilateral talks where the breakthroughs were made for the Palestinians to be recognized as a negotiator at the table separate from Jordan and then the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinians after a great deal of Israeli resistance on both issues had been overcome. With Oslo signed, the Canadian attention began to focus on concrete possible solutions to the refugee issue. I will not focus on the myriad dead-end paths of those discussions. Instead I will sum up the conclusions of a book I and Elazar Barkan published in 2011 called No Return, No Refuge: Rites and Rights in Minority Repatriation.

Our study showed that in not one of the refugee flows since WWII did refugees who fled or were expelled as minorities return except following victory in war – the Tutus in Rwanda in 1994. There was no right of return except rhetorically, including with respect to the Palestinians in any reasonable understanding of the UN resolution that was subsequently interpreted as endorsing a right of return. Instead, with some refugees, especially if they had sources of external support, the dream of return had become a rite rather than a right. No significant return of Palestinian refugees could be expected unless the Palestinians managed to defeat Israel in a war. Hamas understands that. So do its supporters.

Where do all these changes leave progressives? Are they engaged in their own rites of repeating the mantras of the 1970s or are they going to face the reality that a two-state solution will involve a very truncated state for Palestinians, which Palestinians will certainly not accept, that Jerusalem will remain under the control of Israel, that the Palestinian refugees – now really their descendants – will not be returning? Will progressives choose to shift from the generalities and mantras of the 1970s to concretely wrestle with these issues or will they prefer to hold onto their rites and rituals developed decades earlier in a much different world?

A former graduate student of mine opined that, “provided there is no clear willingness on the part of the Palestinians to recognize Israel, something which needs to be reflected among other things in their school texts for example, and no clear direction from the Israeli government to curb abuses against the Palestinian population in the West Bank (both by settlers and the military in Judea and Samaria), the sovereignists with their policies will keep on advancing their expansionist agenda, regardless of what international law, the UN or the laughable if not irrelevant UNHRC have to say. Any boycott efforts or sanctions will only keep on entrenching the right, prompting reciprocal measures against the boycotters,”

Finally, may I suggest that the issue is not one of complacency or indifference. Significant sectors of Canada, especially among youth, including Jewish youth, have shifted their emotional allegiance to the underdog or support the de facto victor but will not overtly say so given their empathy for the weaker party. Further, they have other, and more urgent priorities – climate change. If progressives truly want to make a difference, they will have to abandon their allegiance to abstract and amorphous generalized principles and become mired in the muddy mess to which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has descended.

I suggest the following:

• Quietism among Jewish progressive youth in the diaspora is a result of cognitive dissonance between their tendency to support underdogs and the incompatibility of that support with “objective” conclusions that stare them in the face
• The older progressive leadership is stuck and unable to get its hands dirty clarifying in very specific terms and in relationship to actual concrete circumstances policies and programs that make sense
• One cannot make a difference unless one knows the difference one should make
• Until then, confusion should not be mistaken for indifference.

To be continued: Alternative Progressive Models

With the help of Alex Zisman

There are two very different types of political activism. One type is engaged in existing political processes – running for a political position, assisting those who run (and hopefully then make it), or campaigning for a political party of your choice. Alternatively, there are those who apply pressure on various elements of our civil and political society to effect change. Activities may vary widely, from promoting a boycott of Israeli goods from the West Bank to promoting the boycott of the boycotters, from advocacy of drastic measures on behalf of combatting climate change to arguing for universal child care, from urging prosecution of the pharmaceutical companies that promoted the sale of opioids to urging that speed bumps be installed on your street. The possible issues are almost endless.

Political activism can be local; it can be international. I began my personal involvement in political activism in the second NGO stream. In early September of 1959, after sitting around and griping about strontium-90 being spewed forth from the testing of nuclear weapons, Mac Makarchuk (who would later enter stream 1, join the New Democratic Party and win a seat in the Ontario legislature in 1967 representing Brampton) and I decided to set up a talking box similar to the ones they had in Hyde Park, London. We would use that “soap box” to make speeches to denounce nuclear testing and urge governments to sign a test ban treaty.

The threat of strontium-90 was not of the same order of magnitude as the effects of carbon in the atmosphere that is the major man-made cause of climate change. At the time, however, strontium-90 was feared, for it was a byproduct of nuclear testing resulting in a radioactive isotope of strontium produced by nuclear fission with a half-life of almost 29 years. The negative effects were measurable, for scientists had established that strontium-90 was both a carcinogen (a cause of cancer) and a mutagen that damaged a person’s DNA.  In the body, strontium-90 acts like calcium and is incorporated in our bones and teeth, much more heavily in babies and growing children. The results: bone cancer, leukemia (cancer in our bone marrow) and even cancer in the soft tissue around our bones. Even water near nuclear plants in those days was shown to have higher concentrations of strontium-90 and people living near such plants had a greater risk of contracting leukemia.

Mac and I did what we planned and learned at least two important lessons from our first attempt at speaking in Christie Pitts in Toronto. First, a deep immersion in well-established scientific evidence was important to making our case even if cognitive knowledge turned out not to be the most effective organizing tool. Second, we learned the crucial role of media in promoting our initial feeble attempts to get the public aroused to oppose nuclear testing.

The first lesson may be self-evident. In our case, the second lesson was comical. When Mac and I got to the park with our literal “soap box,” I chickened out at first and could not stand on a box and simply start haranguing the people in the park. Mac, however, was not to be intimidated. He got up on the box and started speaking. Only then did I follow. The effects in the park were insignificant compared to the results the next week when we returned to university.

Al Walker, a reporter with The Varsity, who went on to become a well-known Time magazine writer, heard about our initiative and, without bothering to interview us, wrote a front-page story headlined, “Cops Mounted on Horses Shut Down Free Speech.” In his version, those cops rushed us, threatened to arrest us and dispersed the crown that had gathered. The reality was quite different. There was no crowd. Only two people stopped to listen to our harangue. There was only one police officer on a horse. He never charged towards us. He came by and asked if we had a speaking permit. We replied that we did not and did not know that a permit was required to speak in a park. He advised us to get a permit next time and rode off.

I was furious with the total misrepresentation and stormed the office of The Varsity for which I was the drama critic. I railed against Al’s invented version of events. Al countered that if it was not for his story, there would be no Toronto chapter of the Combined Universities Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament for, as a direct by-product of his wild tale, almost sixty students contacted me and we immediately held a meeting and dubbed ourselves the Toronto chapter of the CUCND that had been started in Britain under the instigation of Bertrand Russel. We did not know at the time that an initiative had begun to develop a national organization in Montreal by Dimitri Roussopoulos. He became the first editor of Our Generation Against Nuclear War, later shortened to Our Generation. This marked the beginning of Canadian sixties new left political activism outside the political party system focused on international issues.

Influenced by Murray Bookchin, Roussopoloulos, theoretically an anarchist, believed in and promoted extra-parliamentary opposition and not just activism. He was also a deft self-promoter. Thus, though the founding of his first chapter followed ours by two months, in his writings he claimed to be responsible for the movement, which, in a sense, he was, for we were focused on the University of Toronto and he concentrated on getting CUCND established on every campus, beginning with a national protest in Ottawa which we joined.

There was a third lesson we learned much more gradually – the need for money. In this area, the Toronto chapter excelled for, with our fund raising efforts and the support of other organizations based in Toronto – Voice of Women and the Canadian Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament headed by United Church minister James Gareth Endicott – we raised enough monies to sustain not only our own university chapter, but were able to contribute considerable sums to the national campaign.

We did have a major handicap – we were far more wedded to the truth. Second, we were basically optimists and Dimitri was a born Eeyore. In his article on “Canada: 1968 and the New Left,” he wrote, “By 1963, however, despite its considerable influence and high level of activism…the movement failed: the Liberal Party of Canada, having won the elections, reversed its anti-nuclear stance and imported nuclear warheads for the Bomarc missiles—anti-aircraft missiles developed as a joint US-Canadian effort against the Soviet threat.”

This summary misrepresented what had taken place in two ways. First, we achieved our first and foremost objective. On 5 August 1963, the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty (formally the Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons Tests in the Atmosphere, in outer Space, and Under Water) was signed in Moscow four year after we had begun our campaign. The USSR, USA and UK were signatories. Only underground testing had been excluded.

Second, unbeknownst to both Dimitri and myself at the time, though the Liberal Party under extreme pressure from the USA agreed to allow the Bomarc missiles to be armed with nuclear warheads, a move we opposed, I learned twenty years later that the arming of the Bomarcs with nuclear warheads had been irrelevant. When I chaired a commission looking into the use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, Brian Cox, a professor from Queens University, made a presentation to us that demonstrated that the arming of the Bomarcs with nuclear weapons had been a ruse and a distraction. We had been correct. Nuclear-armed Bomarcs were useless. But while we were all focused on these missile batteries in Sudbury, the USA had armed all its missiles along the Dew Line in the far north with nuclear warheads and we, and, according to Cox, the Canadian government, knew nothing about this.  

Thus, we succeeded in our primary objective. And we failed in our secondary one, but what we did not know at the time, the failure was a total side-show. The lesson: activists may be policy wonks, they may develop a terrific bank of scientific knowledge, but they may also be woefully ignorant of the secret proceedings that may be far more important than what seems to be the case on the surface.

However, I became convinced sixteen years later in the movement to encourage the private sponsorship of Indochinese, which began in 1979, that we had all absorbed an even more important lesson that was not widely recognized at the time. We had learned how to organize. We had absorbed a generic lesson that could easily be applied to other issues. That was probably the most important positive by-product of the nuclear disarmament movement.

We had learned that:

• developing expertise was crucial
• the role of the media in spreading the message was vital
• money is always needed in non-parliamentary advocacy
• advocacy does not have to be defined as opposition.

The last lesson I had learned in getting changes made to the National Housing Legislation to facilitate the funding of student cooperatives. We needed to get politicians in leading positions, the policy mandarins and enough of a small segment of the public onside to prove that there was significant demand for the changes desired. For rational arguments and even political alignment with civil service convictions were insufficient generally unless accompanied by a demonstrated public demand.

In the case of the organization of the movement promoting the private sponsorship of refugees – in 1979 the Indochinese refugees – contrary to the interpretation of the media, the movement was far less of an advocate directed at the government than a public education advocacy movement directed at the larger public. For when we organized the first meeting on a Sunday afternoon in early June, we had come together to advocate that the government become much more generous in the number of Indochinese refugees that would be admitted to Canada. Ron Atkey, the Minster of Employment and Immigration, was our Member of Parliament. We gathered together to write an advocacy letter to him.

Word evidently got out about our planned meeting. A few minutes after we started, there was a knock on the door. Two gentlemen introduced themselves as federal civil servants. One was the Director of Resettlement for Ontario and the other was in charge of public relations for the Immigration Department. They had heard about the meeting and asked if we would mind if they attended. We were very startled (civil servants appearing uninvited at a private house on a Sunday!), but had no objections to their joining us.

After fifteen unproductive minutes of 19 people trying to write a letter to Ron Atkey, the two government officials asked if they could have a few minutes. We quickly agreed – if only for relief from the pettiness of writing a letter as a collective enterprise. They informed us of a sentence in the Immigration Act that allowed the private sponsorship of refugees. Not one of us was aware of that provision. They asked if we would consider that type of activism as witnessing. Within minutes, we agreed that such a move would be far better than writing a letter. In the next hour, we decided to organize fifty private refugee sponsorships in our riding and thought we could accomplish the task in the next 2-3 months.

I had invited one of my graduate students to attend the meeting as a matter of interest and so we could meet afterwards while I was in town to work on his thesis. I did not know he was a stringer for The Globe and Mail. The next morning at 6:30 a.m., I received a telephone call. (I am at my desk early.) The woman on the phone said she was from, if my memory serves me correctly, Battle Harbour, Newfoundland. She asked how she could help Operation Lifeline. I asked, “What is Operation Lifeline?” She was surprised I did not know and read to me a full-length column by Dick Beddoes that had appeared in The Globe and Mail that morning. Dick had given our initiative a name, printed my name and phone number at the bottom and suggested that people get in touch if they wanted to help.

That is when my New Left training in horizontal rather than vertical organizing kicked in. Though the story was totally misleading in numerous ways, I ignored that, asked the woman for her name, address and phone number, and named her the Head of the Battle Harbour chapter of Operation Lifeline. She protested that she had no experience in doing any such thing. I told her how to organize a core group and within days would send her a package of information on how to organize a private sponsorship group.

The phone never stopped ringing literally for weeks. Volunteers showed up at the door unannounced. Within ten days we had achieved our goal of fifty sponsorships from our riding, and, at the end of two weeks, tallied up that we had organized 66 chapters of Operation Lifeline across the country based on a federal constituency system. Serendipity played a role. A lawyer who had been in graduate school with me was one of the persons who showed up at the house that first afternoon when he was unable to reach me by phone. He had accumulated an enormous amount of information and expertise because he had been trying, unsuccessfully to that point, to get his United Church to sponsor a refugee family. Within 24 hours we produced a 60-page pamphlet on private sponsorship, thus solving the problem of expertise.

One final point. None of this would have been possible without the enormous help of the media, not just with Dick Beddoes’ initial column, but with the extensive newspaper, radio and TV coverage. On the other hand, the media never, not once, gave up their conviction that public pressure had forced the government to increase the targeted number for the intake of refugees. The truth was that the government was ahead of the public in this case and needed a partner. Operation Lifeline, and others like us, such as Project 4000 in Ottawa, were responses to the political will at the centre and reinforcements for translating that will into deliverables.

Next: Part II: Political Activism and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

With the help of Alex Zisman

In this blog, I will discuss some of the ethical issues raised in the series Our Boys under the following headings:

Metaethical Issues:

Selection

Theme: terrorism versus hate crime – racism

Equality: moral superiority and self-righteousness

Viewing God and Goodness

In the last blog in this series on Our Boys, I will probe the following ethical issues:

Ethical Issues (in Part IV):

Representation

Proportionality

Punishment

Responsibility

I intended to raise the issue of selection in Part I of this series of blogs on Our Boys, to discuss “The Boys” rather than just Our Boys, but decided to confine the discussion of ethics to a separate blog. However, I forgot my original intention and in a typical Freudian slip ended up sometimes mistakenly calling the series, The Boys.

The ethical issue at one level is fairly straightforward. How we interpret history, agency, choice and individual responsibility depends, in good part, on how we tell our stories. What is at stake here is a very thin slice of history that focuses very much on individual actions rather than historical patterns or structures. This slim historical event is then represented through a docudrama with its own limitations and biases. Inherently, there will be an implication from a piece of micro-history about larger events, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the development of systems of justice or just war theory, to name but a few. Such an examination will touch on human nature and the extent to which it is sociologically determined, but will not deal with issues, such as whether history has a direction, that is, whether there might be progress. At that level, a specifically focused representation is most likely to be indifferent to such larger issues or adopt an agnostic approach. Scale selection has its own built-in biases.

However, the issue of selection – and, therefore, bias – comes up in the specific slice of history represented. The murder of a sixteen-year-old Arab teenager began with grainy material from another crime, the murder of three Jewish Israeli teenagers. Excluded was the issue of teenagers killed in the Gaza War before any of these murders. In Part I, I focused on two deaths and alluded to a few others in May of 2014 after the U.S. mediated peace talks between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority imploded in April, and, therefore, to some degree between Hamas and Israel. In Operation Brother’s Keeper, the search for the missing Israeli teenagers for 18 days in June of 2014, six Palestinians were killed, none of them minors, but almost 300 minors were detained. In the 50-day summer war with Gaza that followed finding the bodies of the three Israeli teenagers, of the estimated over 2,000 killed, 490 minors in Gaza died while Israel lost 64 soldiers and six civilians, one of them a four-year-old boy.

Why focus then on one 16-year-old Palestinian teenager killed by three religious Israelis? The explanation is that the focus was on a horrendous hate crime rather than terrorism or war, and, further, one committed by Jews rather than rabid anti-Semites or anti-Israelis. Further, it was a crime of ostensible vengeance, though the target had absolutely nothing to do with the murder of the three Israeli teenagers. The suggestion of the series is that, while revenge was an immediate motive, the deeper factor was the denigration of Palestinians, particularly by some West Bank Jewish zealots.

Thus, the choice of the story has significance in the message contained in the tale. The reference in the series is to “our boys,” both our three boys who were murdered and the three Jewish Israelis, two of them just boys, who were murderers. Though a Palestinian teenager was killed, the TV series is about our Jewish boys. For as Jews, we must take immediate responsibility for both victims and murderers who are Jewish. Thus, the entire Jewish population of Israel during the eighteen days of the search became mesmerized and focused on the abduction of Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar, and Naftali Fraenkel. When the bodies of the three sixteen-year-olds were found, virtually all Jewish Israelis as well as Jews around the world felt immense grief.

When it came to the Arab teenagers killed by Israeli troops in the military exchanges with Gazans prior to the murders, any possible teenagers killed during Operation Brother’s Keeper in the 18-day search for the abducted boys, and more Palestinian teenagers killed in the 50-day war, Operation Protective Edge, that followed, our “Jewish” responsibility is moved to an outer tier. Thus, the killing of Mohammed Abu Khdier that initiates the series is a matter of Jewish collective guilt and responsibility and the effects on the Palestinian family, and, to a minor degree, the Palestinian community, one step removed.

The focus on the three Israeli murderers rather than the three victims is viewed by some Jews as a travesty. Those murderers are then generally depicted as “crazed,” thereby excluding them from the “normal” Jewish body politique and placing them outside the norms of the Jewish community. There is, indeed, a selection bias. It is inherent in any document or documentary or docudrama. It cannot be avoided. But it does suggest, even if absolutely unintended, priorities.

Further, rather than simply unconcern for the three Jewish victims, implicit in the alternative focus on the murderers, particularly the two teenagers, there is the danger of a possible presumption of moral superiority. Jews don’t arbitrarily murder innocent victims. Arabs presumably do. Therefore, when Jewish boys actually do commit an atrocity of this type, it demands attention, not particularly to deter such crimes in the future, but to understand how those Jews lost their moral compass. Thus, the propensity of the narrative, again almost certainly not intended, will be to reinforce a sense of self-righteousness. The greatest significance of this series, in my mind, is that this pitfall is very largely avoided.

One critic expressed his outrage at the series precisely because it was not self-righteous in its choice of subject matter. “What makes us different in a world of violence and extremism is that we do not glorify terrorism, nor do we respond to it with joyous celebration and the distribution of sweets to children. Jews who commit acts of terrorism are not rewarded with lifelong stipends for themselves and their families nor do they have schools and public places named after them in their honor. They are punished by law, as were the killers of Mohammed Abu Khdeir.” (Rabbi Benjamin Blech)

However, the role of religion, in particular, Jewish ultra-orthodoxy, did play an important role in the interpretation by the makers of the film. This is not only because the killers were Orthodox youth, but the moral understanding of those boys which emerged in the trial and derived from their yeshiva studies, gave the youngest of the boys, Avishay Elbaz (played by Adam Gabay), an ethical rationale. The intention is revealed in the action. “But,” Avishay protested, “I called out not to kill him.” But the prosecutor countered, “You held his arms down. You helped in the killing. You did not try to actually stop it.”

Another angle of insight was the inner conflict of Rabbi Shalom Ben-David (played by Yaacov Cohen), who headed the yeshiva where the boys studied. He was also the father of the uncle who instigated the act and the grandfather of the two boys. On the one hand, he wanted those individuals to own up to their respective responsibilities, particularly his own son. On the other hand, he was strongly driven to seek protection for his son and grandsons and rationalize their crime. The tension between these two polar positions also affected his shift over time from defensiveness to an ethics of responsibility.

The rabbi is not only a father and grandfather, but a moral leader. He lives as if he were Moses asking God to show him the way of righteousness so he can properly lead and, thereby, make Jews a light unto the nations – hence the inherent search for rather than assertion of moral superiority. (The two should not be confused.)  And God answers, as He did to Moses, “I will make All my goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim before you the name Lord, and the grace that I grant and the compassion that I show.” But, He said, “you cannot see My face, for man may not see Me and live.” (Exodus 33:19-20)

One of the shattering moments in the series comes when the rabbi visits his son in prison and asks him to take full responsibility for what he did and not hide behind a mask of insanity, a choice that would benefit the court’s treatment of his two grandchildren. His son does not own up to what he did. The rabbi turns his back on his own son and walks out. It is as if God suddenly hid His face and would never more be seen by that son.

The dilemma is how do we see goodness? How do we transmit what we see? The answer in the tale is clear – we do so when we do not stereotype the other, when we respect the other, when we identify with the pain of the other and when we do not get so caught up in our own pain that we disregard the help we can give to the other We certainly do not engage in murder of the other, even when at war with them.

The rabbi who headed the yeshiva at Har Not clearly tried to hide his face from God, clearly tried at first to avoid his own duties and acknowledgement of his own responsibility for what happened, but he shifts and changes, not because he sees God, but because he stares evil in the face of his own son. We only see goodness pass us by when we stare directly at evil. We must not look away.

But what of the depiction of God as “compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness”? (Exodus 34:6) Man cannot see that God. Humans can only act by serving those very values of God. And the rabbi eventually does, even though the iniquity of fathers will be visited upon their children. (Exodus 34:7)

Where is that best done? Not simply in a psychological-sociological meeting of a son with his father and a father with his son, but in a court of law where the granting of grace and of punishment is left in the hands of a judge who must balance punishment with grace, and withhold any emotional approach to the case.

However, that is harder to do than it sounds. For the psychiatrist confronts Simon, the composite investigator (played by Shlomo Elkabetz) who comes across as the epitome of both detachment and determination, a jaded sensibility but also judiciousness. He is, in turn, justly accused by the psychiatrist of betraying, not only a promise to her, but of tricking the youngest boy into confessing by seemingly extending to him his full compassion.

This shabat portion comes in the midst of Sukkot, of the Festival of Booths, in which we welcome strangers as well as family and friends to share our hospitality. Essentially, the series, Our Boys, is about the important task of respecting strangers and the terrible consequences when this lesson is forgotten. Welcoming strangers is an action, and if Succoth is to be restored to its once mighty holy status, then good deeds will count much more than the study of words.

Our Boys is not, as some critics contend, a condemnation of Israeli society. Quite the reverse. It upholds both the Israeli system of justice as well as the religious roots of the imperatives of responsibility.  The brilliance of the series is that it does this with nuance rather than self-pride, with grey-on-grey rather than in a black and white morality.

In the previous blog, I gave away very little about the show. In this blog, I give away somewhat more, but the focus is on the side stories and especially the aftermath not covered by the docudrama. I advise readers not to read this blog if they intend to watch the show and have not seen it or finished watching the episodes.

One special aftermath was the reaction to the show itself, especially by the Prime Minister of Israel. The show received an unintended burst of attention when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not only dubbed the series as “fake news,” but called the show antisemitic. It is NOT. Not in the least.

Was this part of Bibi’s practice of Trumpian distraction since the Elections Committee had just denied the Likud Party request to prevent the media from reporting on the graft cases against Bibi prior to the “second” election this year? The party letter to the Elections Committee claimed that Guy Peleg, the key investigative journalist covering the investigation of Bibi, was guilty of intentionally misquoting transcripts to harm the prime minister. At the core of the four indictments were claims about Netanyahu’s efforts to control the media coverage of himself. Bibi dubbed the claims a “blood libel” and called Channel 12 a propaganda outlet.

Shlomo Filber, appointed by Netanyahu as Director of the Communication Ministry, had given testimony to police that the prime minister personally instructed him to do something about the proposed reforms in the communications and internet sector since the media tycoon, Shaul Elovitch, was unhappy about them. Similar to the proposed impeachment indictments against Donald Trump. Bibi has been accused of offering a quid pro quo to Elovitch, who controls Bezeq, Israel’s largest communications giant, in return for favourable coverage of himself.

Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit’s transcript of the charges against Bibi make up the majority of the 57-page criminal indictment put before the court at the beginning of this month. The court determined that the case should go to trial. It is the first of four charges against Benjamin Netanyahu, Mandelblit, in his summary of police allegations, charged that the prime minister and his wife, Sara, had accepted more than $260,000 worth of luxury goods and more favourable media coverage in exchange for political favours and Netanyahu’s intervention with regulators and lawmakers on behalf of media moguls, including Israeli-born producer Arnon Milchan, whose credits include Fight Club and Pretty Woman.

On Friday 30 August, Bibi called on Israelis to boycott Channel 12 and its owner for co-producing the show with HBO and airing it. He claimed that the show was a packet of lies and sought to tarnish Israel’s reputation in the world. The Likud Party pointed out that Keshet, the Israeli channel, has been the source of the greatest amount of investigative journalism on the charges against Bibi. Guy Peleg, its most important investigative journalist on the story, was accused of being a puppet of Keshet and of having launched “a terror attack on democracy.” President Reuven Rivlin, as the opening speaker at a Keshet 12 news conference on 5 September, urged Israelis not to “believe incitement and insults.” Netanyahu’s son, however, claimed that, “the series tells the whole world how the Israelis and Jews are cruel and bloodthirsty murderers, and how the Palestinians are badly done by and oppressed.” It absolutely, under any reasonable interpretation, does no such thing. Watch it and decide.

The show does omit a great deal. For example, six were initially arrested for the murder of Abu Khdeir. There is no reference to the other three in the series. In the aftermath, Tariq Khdeir, Abu’s 15-year-old Palestinian-American cousin, was beaten by Israeli undercover police officers caught on camera. He had been caught up in a protest, but had not been a participant. Another cousin, 19-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir was arrested during a 28 July 2014 protest. The series vaguely alludes to this harassment of the Khdeir family, but does not zero in on it even though John Kerry suggested harassment of the family as a possibility.

There was more. Tariq was released quickly after a raft of protests, but kept under house arrest. After he returned to America to go back to school at the Universal Academy of Florida, Israeli police ransacked his East Jerusalem home though he was cleared of any wrongdoing in January 2015. The officer convicted of the assault on Tariq received a suspended sentence of 45 days of community service and a four-month suspended sentence.

The series does abbreviate a great deal, as it must. Most significantly in my mind, unless I fell asleep during a segment of an episode, the family of one of the Israeli victims, the Fraenkels, called the family of Abu Khdeir to condemn the murder and offer condolences. The other families of the murdered Israeli teenagers followed suit. Rachel Fraenkel, the mother of one of the three victims, 16-year-old Naftali, not only condemned the murder immediately, but broke her shiva to declare, “Even in the abyss of mourning for Gilad, Eyal and Naftali, it is difficult for me to describe how distressed we are by the outrage committed in Jerusalem – the shedding of innocent blood is against morality, is against the Torah and Judaism, and is against the foundation of the lives of our boys and of all of us in this country.” She declared that, “There is no difference between blood and blood. Murder is murder. There is no justification and no atonement for murder.” The series did not cover the responses of the three families of the three Jewish teenagers killed just before the Arab boy was killed in a revenge hate crime. I would have liked a greater exploration of the bypaths and aftermath of the murder, but a marvellous production cannot accomplish everything.

However, there was one very significant inclusion. The Israeli Memorial Office, independently of the justice system and without obtaining the approval of Abu Khdeir’s family, mounted a plaque on the wall of the Victims of Acts of Terror Memorial at Mount Herzl. The plaque was eventually removed at the request of the family, who viewed the action as an effort to polish Israel’s image and did not want their son memorialized alongside Israeli soldiers. One incident also not included was the Jerusalem Council order to the family to remove Abu’s image that had hung outside their home for four months and the threat of a $500 fine every day it was left hanging after the order was issued. Purportedly, hanging Abu’s image contravened Israeli municipal law.

The series ended with notes of the sentences received by the three Israelis all convicted of murder. One minor who confessed and fully cooperated with the investigators, received a sentence of 21 years. His cousin, also a minor, was sentenced to life in prison. Their uncle, Yosef Haim Ben-David, 29, owner of an eyewear shop in Jerusalem and a resident of the Geva Binyamin settlement, who instigated his nephews to commit the crime, received a sentence of life in prison plus twenty years. The three had burned Abu when he was still alive. They had beaten him with a crowbar or a heavy wrench and kicked him. The three were indicted not only for the abduction and murder, but for the unsuccessful earlier attempt to kidnap a young child from her mother’s arms, an incident only alluded to in the series. But the earlier torching of an Arab store or a series of other incidents of hate crimes were ignored. From the series, one is left with the erroneous impression that this was not only an exceptional case that led to murder, which it was, but was an exceptional case altogether. It was not.

Also omitted was the widespread instigation of revenge among Jewish Israelis after the three religious settler teenagers were killed. The graffiti painted on the house of the principle investigator of the murderers of Abu – “traitor” and even worse – was shown in full detail after the conviction of the three religious Israelis for Abu’s murder. It seemed that no lessons had been learned about incitement.

Before the murder of the Arab boy and after the three Jewish boys were murdered, in addition to Shaked, MK Michael Ben-Ari, various Jewish Agency officials, hooligan racist supporters of the Beitar football club, all incited violence against Palestinians. Rabbi Noam Perel, head of Bnei Akiva, the world’s largest religious-Zionist youth organization, called on the IDF to be transformed into an army of avengers. None of them were charged with inciting violence, though they grew quieter after the Palestinian teenager had been murdered. The IDF did threaten to punish any soldier severely who posted hate messages and/or photos supporting either racism or vengeance.

In the opening episode, at 3:45 a.m., Abu Khdeir was forced into a car by two assailants who spoke Hebrew according to witnesses, for it was Ramadan and the streets were not empty; boys had just left a local mosque to prepare for the pre-dawn morning meal. The police came, met with the family and urged them to file a formal complaint at the police station. They did not do so immediately. By morning, the police recognized that the boy had been abducted and they quickly launched a search and found his body. Further, the father had gathered video evidence of the abduction and had traced his phone; it turned out that it was in the possession of one of the abductors.

However, the father had a number of legitimate complaints that were supported in the portrayal during the series. His interrogation was lengthy and concerned very specific details of the family life – pocket money given to Abu, sibling rivalry, past misdeeds – all reflected in the first episode. The investigation seemed to be initially propelled by the suspicion that this was an honour killing, though there was virtually no evidence to support that view except for a murky allusion to a girl (?) who was to meet with Abu.

On 27 July 2014, the three main suspects were arraigned. The main suspect, Yosef Ben-David, announced, “I am the messiah” in the entrance to the court. At a second pre-trial appearance on 18 November 2014, Ben-David went silent and declined to cooperate with the Jerusalem District Court, though IsraeIi mental health officials deemed him able to stand trial. In contrast, an American psychiatrist had been imported to testify otherwise. The two minors pleaded guilty to abduction, but pleaded innocent of the charge of murder. In the most riveting part of the prosecution of the one perpetrator who fully confessed, the argument for convicting him of murder as well was powerfully made. And he along with his cousin were both convicted of that murder as well as of assault.

Abu Khdeir’s mother, Suha, throughout the proceedings remained totally pessimistic that justice would be meted out by an Israeli court. Before the trial she opined, “I don’t have any peace in my heart, even if they captured who they say killed my son. They’re only going to ask them questions and then release them. What’s the point?” In the series, she warmed up somewhat to the Israeli judicial system, but, nevertheless, both she and her husband criticized Israel for treating Palestinian terrorism with a far harsher hand than Jewish terrorism. The Khdeir family called on the Israeli government to demolish the murderers’ homes just as they demolished the homes of Palestinian terrorists. Hussein Abu Khdeir, the father of the victim, was very disappointed that the youngest boy who confessed, escaped a life sentence. The murderer could be expected to be released on parole in ten years when he would be twenty-six.  

In July 2016, the Abu Khdeir family petitioned the Israeli High Court of Justice to demolish the homes of the murderers as happened to the homes of Arab terrorists. In July 2017, the Israeli High Court rejected the petition since it would be ineffective as a deterrent. Such incidents were rare and the long time lapse between the murder and any possible demolition would undermine any deterrent effect. Yet the court affirmed the principle that the home demolition policy was valid for both Jewish and Palestinian terrorists. The Abu Khdeir family simply viewed this as more window dressing.  

The family remained bitter towards Israeli politicians, including Shimon Peres who was then president. But they welcomed the condolences of the families of the three Jewish victims of Arab terror, some opposition MKs who received death threats from extremist right wingers and a contingent of Jews that travelled to the family home on a number of chartered buses. This part of the tale was not part of the series.  

There is one final observation, not about “fake news,” but about the bias of any media given the target audience. The story of the three murdered Israeli teenagers was shown from the perspective of an aggrieved nation. Our Boys does not treat the Palestinians as an aggrieved nation, even though the Palestinian segments had been directed by a Palestinian. Instead, the perspective is that of the aggrieved family and a Palestinian society that tried to use the murder for political purposes. In contrast, the Israeli media focused on the potential for further revenge attacks and/or additional Palestinian reprisals and upheavals.  

Was this somewhat skewed or a more or less honest reflection of the reactions of each of the societies? I will not dare to speculate on an answer to that question, but I will explore other ethical issues raised in my final and third blog on the series.

To be continued.

With the help of Alex Zisman

Our Boys is a ten-part Israeli television series co-produced by HBO and the Israeli network, Keshet. There are almost no spoilers in Part I of my review. THIS IS A MUST SEE SHOW!

The series, made by Hagai Levi, Joseph Cedar and Tawfik Abu-Wael, is a docudrama rather than a documentary of the real events it reproduces. Part of the enormous controversy generated by the show was the selection of which events to document. Why the murder of one Arab boy and not the abduction and murder of the three Jewish boys? Why open with the granular footage of the three murdered Israeli boys and not the killing of protesting Arab teenagers in Gaza in 2014? Joseph Cedar justified his focus because the show was not about terrorism but about a hate crime. But the main Israeli investigator in his court testimony called the murder of the teenage Arab boy “terrorism” and the Victims of Acts of Terror Memorial in Jerusalem recognized the murder of the Arab teenager by Jewish right-wingers as an act of terrorism.

A time line:

• May 2014: many Palestinians in Gaza killed protesting against Israel
• 12 June 2014: three Israeli Jewish teenagers, Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar and Naftali Fraenkel were abducted and murdered;
• in the search for the killers, “Operation Brother’s Keeper,” hundreds of Palestinians were arrested
• 30 June 2014: the bodies of the three Jewish boys from the settlement of Alon Shvut were found in a field near Hebron
• 1 July 2014: after the funeral, hundreds of right-wing Israelis rampaged through Jerusalem yelling, “Death to the Arabs” and were morally supported by important Jewish members of the Israeli Knesset; not mentioned in the series, Ayelet Shaked posted a quote from Israeli journalist, Ori Elitzur: “Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads.”
• 2 July 2014: the day after the funeral of the three Jewish boys, a 16-year-old Palestinian boy was abducted from outside his father’s store in Shu’afat, East Jerusalem; his charred body was found at Givat Shaul in the Jerusalem Forest only a few hours after the crime had been committed
• 6 July 2014: the crime was solved and three Israelis were arrested
• The same day, seven Hamas militants were killed in a tunnel explosion in Khan Yunis as a result of an accidental explosion of their own munitions or an Israeli IDF airstrike. Hamas launched 40 rockets towards Israel.
• 8 July 2014: the aftermath, the 50-day Gaza War
• 23 September 2014: Hamas members Marwan Qawasmeh and Amar Abu-Isa, the murderers of the three Jewish teenagers, were trapped and killed in a shootout.

Our Boys, part investigative crime thriller and part socio-psychological drama both of the Palestinian community and the Jewish Israeli community, is also a geographical lesson about the gritty streets of Ramallah, West Bank religious settlements, the roads connecting and dividing the communities, as well as the interiors of Israeli courts and offices. However, the most memorable geographic icon is the Jerusalem Light Rail that passes through a half mile of the Shu’fat area where Mohammed Abu Khdeir’s family had their electrical repair shop as well as through other parts of East Jerusalem. In the riots after the murder, the Jerusalem Light Rail was severely damaged.

The heavy breath of politics haunts each episode. But most of all, the show is a dramatization of a complex, multi-faceted lesson in ethics and could easily serve as case material for a university course on international ethics, terrorism and hate crimes.

Who are “Our Boys”? While writing this review, my top monitor has pictures of nine boys, five of them Jewish Israelis and four of them Arabs from Gaza and the West Bank. All are teenagers. I will introduce them according to the calendar as they appear on the world historical stage.

On 15 May 2014, during the Great Return March commemorating Nakba, the name Palestinians give to the disaster that befell them with the creation of the Israeli state and the exodus of 720,000 Arabs, three Palestinian teenagers, Nadeem (Nadim) Nawara (17), Mohammad Salameh (16) and Mohamed al-Azi (15) were shot within one hour while participating in that march.  I have not included the picture of Mohamed al-Azi because he recovered from his wounds. The other two did not.

Further, because Nawara’s parents had permitted an autopsy, the world learned that Nadeem had been killed by an M16 round to the chest. Israel claimed to be using only rubber bullets. Further, because there was film footage of the incident, an Israeli border police officer, Ben Deri, copped a plea bargain and was convicted of “serious negligence.” Prosecutors definitively demonstrated that both the police and soldiers had been ordered to use only rubber-coated pellets. The prosecutors could not supply evidence that Deri had deliberately used live ammunition in place of rubber bullets when he shot Nawara from a distance of less than 200 metres after Nawara had hurled a stone. Ben Deri had two guns, one used and loaded with rubber bullet and the other with live ammunition. He claimed that he had mistakenly reached for the wrong gun. The officer received a sentence of nine months in prison and ordered to pay the victim’s family US$14,000.  

In the case of sixteen-year-old Mohammad Salameh, the parents had not given permission to have an autopsy performed and no video was produced. No one was ever charged. Did this have anything to do with the fact that his namesake had been a convicted perpetrator of the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing serving time in a Florence, Colorado prison and was regarded as a martyr by many Palestinians of the Hamas creed?

In any case, there were many other pictures I could have used, such as that of Mohammad Abu Thar, named after Mohammad Abu Thar al-Ghaffari who was a very early and very important supporter of the prophet Mohammed in the early days when the prophet only had a few disciples. The sixteen-year-old was also killed for participating in the demonstrations, but not during that hour on 15 May that I selected. There was no autopsy; there was also no video and no charges.

16-year-old Mahmoud Majed Gharabli also died by real bullets when an IDF sniper used live ammunition and not just rubber bullets to quell the demonstrations in May, but died only on 4 July 2014 during the effort to gather the evidence that led to the charges and conviction of the three Israelis. The sniper was not charged.

There were other teenaged Gazans killed in those demonstrations. On 14 May alone, 60 Palestinians participating in those demonstrations died the same day, among them many teenagers. By 30 May, of the 136 who died, seventeen of these “children” had been killed during the demonstrations. I have on my monitor pictures of only two.

Their deaths are not part of the story told in Our Boys. They are not among the boys to which the series refers. The first three murdered Jewish Israelites mentioned in the series opener were Eyal Yifrach (19), Naftali Fraenkel (16) and Gilad Shaar (16). The three teens had been hitching a ride at the Geva’ot Intersection just west of the Alon Shvut (“oak of return”) settlement, a kilometre just northeast of the Etzion Bloc in the Judean Hills directly south of Bethlehem in the West Bank. The boys were headed for Beit Shemesh, their initial target before dispersing to their homes.

Alon Shvut is considered part of Greater Etzion and the site is believed to be the location of the Battle of Beth Zecharia between the Maccabees and the Seleucid army following their defeat of the Seleucids in Jerusalem. The settlement was built on 920 dunams confiscated from the Palestinian village of Khirbet Zakariya. This is not irrelevant to the story.

After the Six Day War, Yigal Alon was a sponsor of the re-settlement of the location in 1970 since Etzion had been captured and destroyed by the Arabs in the 1948 war. Alon Shvut is the location of Yeshivat Har Etzion that offers a five-year program combining military studies and training alongside yeshiva study. Just as kibbutzim in the old days provided a disproportionate number of army officers, by 2014 this settlement was providing a disproportionate number of religious officers for the IDF. It is not the Har Not yeshiva depicted in Our Boys.

Amar Abu-isa Aysha and Marwan Qawasme, two Hamas “soldiers,” abducted the three young Israelis. The hypothesis was that the kidnappers intended initially to offer their captives as an exchange in return for freeing Palestinian prisoners. However, they had only expected to give one or two of the boys a ride in their relatively new Hyundai i35. When the boys got into the car and saw they were in danger, one managed to phone and say they had been kidnapped. The abductors also saw that they were outnumbered when they only expected to give one or two boys a ride. An altercation broke out and the Arabs shot the boys in the back of the vehicle, drove to a deserted field and disposed of the bodies, but only after burning their vehicle and acquiring a new one. They dumped the corpses in the Halhul area near Hebron where they were found 18 days after the killing.

Initially, the officer who had received the original phone call took it as a prank when he could not get a reply. Only seven hours later, when the boys were reported missing, was a very extensive manhunt operation launched. By 13 June, Abu-isa and Qawasme were named as prime suspects. In the wake of the murders and numerous rocket attacks from Gaza, a 50-day Israeli response code named “Operation Protective Edge” was launched.

The show opens with real-world news footage about the three missing hitchhikers. There was no dramatic re-enactment. As a viewer, if totally unprepared for what is to be unveiled, one might reasonably suspect that the series will be about the deaths of those three boys, the pursuit of their killers and the aftermath. It is not. Instead, the show takes a one hundred and eighty degree turn and focuses on the kidnapping of an Arab teenager, Mohammed Abu Khdeir and his murder.

The killing and burning of his corpse are not shown in the series. However, the last 24 hours of his life before his disappearance form the focus of the first episode. When the body is found and discovered to have been burnt, the Jewish terrorist unit of Shabak or Shin Bet, the internal security service rather than the Mossad, took control of the case. Initially, the unit was convinced that Jews could not have committed the crime because “Jews would not commit such an atrocity.” They suspected it was an honour killing because the boy was probably secretly gay.

Hence, a major theme of the series – “fake news.” And there is plenty of that in the series as the security services cannot control the narrative in either the Jewish or the Arab community. In the latter, the boy murdered and burned is turned into a community martyr for a cause. In the Jewish press, especially that controlled by the Orthodox Jewish Community, the murder is either justified as legitimate revenge or rationalized as the deranged and irrational response to the murders of the three innocent Jewish teenagers.

The show adopts the perspective that every one is guilty to different degrees. Responses vary with character, culture, circumstances and a century old competition over the right to return. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict becomes, thereby, effectively an unnamed character is this investigative crime drama of the discovery, investigation, trial and aftermath of the three killers, two religious teenagers from Jerusalem who are cousins and their uncle from the West Bank settlement of Geva Binyamin who operated an optical store in Jerusalem. In light of the witness testimony, the videos of the abduction

and tracking the car’s vehicle license and registration, the killers were very quickly tracked and the full confession of one led to the complete proof of the crime.

The drama is not about the crime itself but about the investigation, the trial, the side effects and the aftermath. I will describe the killers in the next blog and their conviction.

To be continued.

With the help of Alex Zisman

Three events took place the week before last. I have been writing about the least significant, our trip to Stratford (Ontario) to see three plays: Henry VIII, Nathan the Wise and Birds of a Kind; I have already reviewed the latter two. The second big event: President Donald Trump is finally headed towards his impeachment (though not necessarily conviction) for evidently trying to blackmail the President of the Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, by holding back a very large military aid package authorized by Congress and needed desperately to fight the Russians in Eastern Ukraine. Trump wanted to get Zelensky to search for possible dirt on one of the leading candidates for the Democratic nominee for president, Joe Biden and his son. By association, Biden would be besmirched, not because any evidence will be found, but because Trump will claim that, because he is being investigated, Hunter Biden must have done some terrible things. “Of course, Hunter Biden discussed his nefarious business with his father,” The Donald opined, as usual projecting his own way of behaving as universal in the world at large.

But this blog is not about that contemporary most notorious and perhaps most incompetent traitor who uses foreign policy to advance his personal political agenda. I am interested in traitors who insinuate themselves in a regime to serve the foreign policy of another regime, but who maintain their disguise for a lengthy period. More generally, I am interested in the dramatization of historically very significant and able traitors as dramatized on stage and in films.

But first, the most notable event of the week previous to the last, the celebration of Brian Urquhart’s hundredth birthday. Actually, he turned one hundred years of age on 28 February 2019, but his birthday was celebrated as the UN General session opening. Brian Urquhart was hailed as one of last century’s greatest diplomats for his forty years of service to the United Nations covering both its inception and its trajectory during the Cold War. “Urquhart always brought a high level of idealism, courage, geniality, genuine warmth and sly British wit over humankind’s foibles and, most importantly, a love for the UN, to his postings.”

But the most startling credit noted in the many accolades he received was recognition as a very accomplished spy. Brian Urquhart a spy!!! Of course, as a diplomat at the UN in the immediate aftermath of WWII, he had to be a chameleon both to do his job and to serve the UN, for his boss was a Soviet apparatchik who kept instructing him to misrepresent events in service of the USSR. He did not do as he was told but as his integrity dictated, always in a way clever enough to get away with it. The reality was that he had actually been a spy, but a spy, not in the poseur mold, but as an intelligence officer in the 1st Airborne Corp of the British Army. He became famous for analyzing the incoming signals intelligence to forecast that Operation Market Garden to seize the Dutch bridges over the Rhine River was headed towards disaster. And the operation was an overwhelming catastrophe, perhaps setting back the allied victory for as much as six months. The incident, and his role in it, were portrayed in the film, A Bridge Too Far.

That is not the kind of spy who interests me, as estimable as signals intelligence is, but rather spies who are poseurs, spies who operate within one state to serve a foreign power. The play Henry VIII has as its central mover of action, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, a spy in the court of Henry VIII on behalf of the pope while claiming to be a spy on the pope for the king. The disguise is deliberate; the character presents himself as an extreme loyalist to the regime. In reality, he served to undermine rather than enhance national interests. Poseur spy narratives share a common motif with a play about identity politics – Birds of a Kind and Nathan the Wise – hiding one’s true character from others. The drama in both is the reveal.

A note first on Henry VIII himself and the play. For 36 years, from 1509 until his death in 1547, Henry ruled England during the dawning of the English Renaissance and the English Reformation. He was only 17 when he was crowned king and married off to his recently deceased brother’s widow, who was six years older. Henry was a very bright and quite a dashing young man, over six feet tall and very well-built – a dramatic contrast to the very fat and ill man that he was in his older years and as we most often see him portrayed. He was athletic, energetic, and exceedingly well read for a member of the aristocracy. He was also very innovative – but often in the wrong direction:

• Insinuated the divine right of kings in the English constitution
• Centralized and expanded his power
• Appointed himself head of the Church of England
• Used charges of treason on those who fell out of favour, sometimes justly (Cardinal Thomas Wolsey), but mostly unjustly (others also named Thomas – More and Crammer)
• Used extra-judicial means to dispose of them – bills of attainder

Though renowned for having six wives, in particular for getting his marriage to Katherine of Aragon in Spain annulled so that he could marry Anne Boleyn, in fact he deeply loved his first wife.  Martha Henry in her production understood this and conveyed it well. “Henry obviously adored Katherine. He admired her intelligence and her feistiness. When abroad, he named her regent “as he knew she had the fortitude to control the nobles and to run the country while he was away.” Martha Henry takes this insight to create in the role of Katherine, executed with a superb dramatic performance by Irene Poole, an unforgettable performance.

This king in love with his first wife is the one we meet in Shakespeare’s play, Henry VIII. He had, however, three deep flaws. He enjoyed extravagance, at great cost to the national treasury. He ventured into military adventures abroad, at even much greater cost to the national treasury, and did so mostly unsuccessfully. But most of all, in spite of his brilliance, his wilfulness and his intelligence, he was initially very naïve. By 1515, Thomas Wolsey had risen to become archbishop of York, Lord Chancellor of England and a cardinal of the church. He was easily Henry’s equal, saw himself as such, but always presented himself as Henry’s most loyal servant. He was Henry’s close friend.

The two presumably schemed together for Wolsey to acquire the papal tiara. Little did Henry know that this was a guise to hide the fact that all along Wolsey was a spy on the throne of England in service to the pope. Further, Sir Thomas More, perhaps the most brilliant of the triumvirate of Henry, Wolsey and himself, entered into the forefront of the political fray as a new councillor in 1517, but is not included in the play in a period dominated by the machinations of Wolsey. (For a drama centering in good part on the interaction of More and Wolsey, see A Man for All Seasons. Wolsey says to More, “You’re a constant regret to me, Thomas. If you could just see the facts flat on, without that horrible moral squint; with just a little common sense, you could have been a statesman.” Wolsey was characterized by an extravagant immoral squint.)

The play Henry VIII comes to a climax over two key events – Henry’s affair with Anne Boleyn and Henry’s rescinding of the 1524 tax that Wolsey tried to take the credit for even though it had been imposed upon his urging. Henry VIII, the most promising of monarchs, was now very unpopular for his unsuccessful military adventurism abroad and the fiscal disaster at home. The play is not about the rise in power of More or Henry’s break with the pope over his annulment of his marriage to Katherine, but about the discovery that Wolsey had been a mole for the pope. The play at its core is a spy story.

Martha Henry is perhaps even more brilliant a director than she was as an actor. The performance of Irene Poole as Katherine, as I indicated above, is a work of art to behold. Through Shakespeare’s brilliant words and Jonathan Goad’s exuberant Henry VIII, the play that is really a tour de force of pomp and ceremony, that cannot be realized on the tiny stage and in a small theatre, is nevertheless carried off by a combination of the most wonderful costuming and organized movements of the actors even though the drama is ultimately an episodic connection of scenes and acts that succeed more than lead into one another. And the ending has a great deal to do with history but virtually nothing to do with the dramatic action of the play. From Tim Campbell as Duke of Buckingham at the beginning of the play, who is initially an independent voice quickly squashed by Wolsey, to the host of other lords (and ladies), it is hard to find a flaw.

Except, and it is a big except, in the most important role in play in my estimation, that of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, performed by veteran Stratford actor, Rod Beattie. The performance is a disaster. Why is it a disaster and who is at fault?

Rod plays Wolsey as an example of the banality of evil. He is bland. He is unassuming. He manipulates and maneuvers in scenes “behind the scene.” He is a schemer and plotter, but comes across as a plodder. Henry VIII is enthralled by him, but by watching Rod Beattie play Wolsey, a member of the audience would never be able to figure out why a smart guy would be taken in by this overweight bore. Other than in his words and in his role, where is the demonstration of shrewdness? The suggestion is, I believe, that he used his calm and understated exterior to manage and control a mercurial Henry VIII.

However, look at the words Shakespeare puts in his mouth; they betray that characterization. Even before that, listen or re-read the Prologue addressed to the audience. For the pomp and ceremony is but a cover for a different play.

Be sad, as we would make ye: think ye see
The very persons of our noble story
As they were living; think you see them great,
And follow’d with the general throng and sweat
Of thousand friends; then in a moment, see
How soon this mightiness meets misery:

Who is the character that begins as the most successful in all of England at the time, though of relatively humble origins? None but Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. Who begins surrounded by the loyalty of other lords as he organizes the execution of the one independent thinker of the bunch, the Duke of Buckingham? Who falls into the bottom of a deep canyon where “mightiness meets misery?” None other than Cardinal Wolsey. That is the core of the play that Shakespeare makes clear.

As Buckingham says, “no man’s pie is freed from his ambitious finger.” Buckingham continues:

I wonder
That such a keech [a fatty lump] can with his very bulk
Take up the rays o’ the beneficial sun
And keep it from the earth.

Vanity of vanities. A keech who darkens the earth with his overwhelming presence. Not an unassuming manipulator in the guise of a humble man. We are told to expect an overwhelming and dominant presence before Wolsey even appears on stage to reveal how, spider-like, he weaves his plots. As Lord Norfolk notes, he is a powerful and overwhelming presence.

But who does Martha Henry bring on the stage? Not a man who long ago left behind his humble origins, not a big as brass braggadocio consumed by his own brilliance, made all the more blinding by the mediocrity of the lords with their inherited titles who surround him. But a man who feigns humility, who speaks plainly and without eloquence, who cannot hide his pride in himself, whereas he is described by Norfolk as the devil incarnate, a man who made peace with the King of France (Putin?) “purchased at a superfluous rate” only to sabotage it.

Wolsey in the play and in history was a man who loved and exhibited power, who bore grudges and punished all who would defy him. Vengeful and carrying a sword with a very sharp edge, he was a man who slithers and darts hither and thither. And he enters and we expect to watch him humiliate the brave and vocal Duke of Buckingham. The expectation is there. The humiliation is there. But not the means to execute it. As portrayed by Rod Beattie, Wolsey would not be able to swat a fly, yet he is supposed to be a man that brought the whole of the English aristocracy to its knees.

Wolsey has a venemous mouth, but what emerges in the Stratford production is pap that belies the very words uttered. Even Buckingham, mistakenly, muzzles his words lest he awaken the beast in his sworn foe and enemy of the people. Wolsey reviles Buckingham, but the performance is in striking contrast to the depths and volume of his spleen. He makes Buckingham look like an outright amateur in getting the king to take his side. Buckingham plans to use honour to combat insolence and we watch in dread at the failure of such a strategy in dealing with a serpent. Except this is not how Wolsey is portrayed. And anyone both watching and listening cannot help but be thrown off by the incongruency.

I could go on and on with description after description, with speech after speech, with scene after scene, to show how out of kilter Wolsey’s portrait is on stage with that of the historical character and the one Shakespeare put on stage. What Martha Henry, with all her brilliance, demonstrated is that she has not the least clue about what it takes to be a successful spy. And certainly not on why they fail.

When Wolsey is caught out, from the production watched, you cannot figure how such a clever plotter with such great attention to detail could make such an error in allowing damning and incriminating documents to be misfiled. There is also the ambiguity of this self-pitying rascal who has great remorse, not for what he did, but because history will not remember him. There is not an ounce of true regret, for that would be totally out of character, but just another performance, just another guise. Instead, we are led to believe from the performance that he might have truly come to confess his sins before his Lord Jesus.

For me, the problem was not all of Wolsey’s frauds, as enormous as they were, but the fraud I saw on stage in the central character of the play. Why would anyone believe that Wolsey died fearing God, that he felt bad about scheming against the king, that this greedy, acquisitive manipulator was truly remorseful? Katherine, the one character of true integrity and insight, knew better.

Let me end by offering a twist on a quote from A Man of All Seasons: “I believe, when politicians forsake their public duties for the sake of their own private gain, they lead their country by a short route to chaos.”

With the help of Alex Zisman