Jewish

Removing Borders, Erasing Palestinians: Israeli Population Maps after 1967

How Israeli population cartography incorporated Palestinians through the very act of erasing them.

Despite how it is sometimes represented, the Israeli occupation of Palestine is not the result of some ancient and illogical sectarian quarrel. It instead emerged in concert with international methods of developing and analyzing land, as many Palestinian scholars, and those working with them, have shown. Prior to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, land management efforts were aimed at clearly defining distinct and separate spaces for Palestinians and Israelis. But this changed after 1967, when the Israeli government began attempts to enforce a single state in both Israel and the Palestinian Territories.

Today, in addition to the devastation of Israeli strikes and incursions, Palestinians are also regularly tried for crossing borders that are functionally invisible and whose precise location, for “security” reasons, they aren’t officially permitted to know. The effects might be comical if they were not so debilitating. To give just one example, despite paying Israeli taxes for decades, Diana Kurd, a Palestinian widow from Anata, was stripped of her pension because her deceased husband had slept on the wrong side of their bed. Namely, his side of the bed lay outside the Jerusalem city boundary, while hers lay within it yet the boundary itself was determined according to the Israeli authorities’ maps – maps that at such fine scales, are usually classified.

The borders that intrude into the bedroom also split towns in half and sever them from their surrounding regions. The construction of the infamous Wall within the West Bank has created enclaves in Barta’a and western Bethlehem. Despite officially being part of the West Bank, these Palestinian towns are left on the Israeli side of the Wall, which functions as a de facto new border on the ground. The border has literally moved around them. It is as if Canada built a wall around northern Vermont and then told the residents that they were all now illegal squatters on Canadian soil.

Physical inclusion into territory annexed by Israel, however, does not come with citizenship or egalitarian political inclusion in the Israeli state. Instead, the Palestinian inhabitants are trapped. Because of the Wall, they are physically unable to enter the West Bank, but legally they are equally unable to enter Israel even though, for all practical purposes, that is where they now reside. Their presence has become logistically and legally impossible — but partly out of sheer courage and determination, there they are still.

Making these experiments sometimes made me feel like a kindergarten boy playing with colored papers, and afforded boundless amusement for my grandchildren.

—Roberto Bachi, Graphical Rational Patterns

It was decided to carry out the enumeration from house to house under curfew. … The enumerator marked the doors of the houses enumerated with chalk to ensure an orderly and complete coverage.

—(Israeli) Central Bureau of Statistics, West Bank of the Jordan, Gaza Strip, and Northern Sinai, Golan Height

The quotations above, which date from the beginning of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, serve to illustrate the intimate ties between population control and the development of statistical cartography. The population census described in the second quote began only a little over two months after Jordanian and Israeli troops had ceased fighting street by street through the Old City of Jerusalem. The author of the first quotation, Roberto Bachi, was the head of the Israeli CBS, which was in charge of the enumeration, and he was at the height of his career. Bachi remained a key architect of the Israeli census for over 20 years, and was praised in diverse corners of the international scientific community for his innovative work in statistical cartography and geostatistics.

Roberto Bachi. Photo: Dani Bachi/Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0

The quotation captures Bachi’s romantic depiction of his academic research into his method of Graphical Rational Patterns (GRP), which were a new set of symbols for depicting numbers in a precise way on maps. The “colored papers” he refers to were transparent stickers or transfers that were applied when making a map, to prevent the cartographer from having to draw every symbol by hand. The second quotation comes from the official report of the 1967 census of the Palestinian Territories, carried out by the CBS that Bachi both founded and directed. It describes the curfew imposed on the Palestinians, who were forced into their homes, or the home they happened to be closest to at the moment, their doors and walls marked with chalk, so that the count might be considered “orderly and complete.”

There is a clear symbiosis between the coloured papers and curfew. In the first instance, Bachi depicts himself cutting into the coloured sheets, using glue to stick them into place on maps. In the second, Bachi is at the head of an army of enumerators, supported by the actual military, which physically marches through the streets, metaphorically cutting up groups of people and sending them back inside, fixing them in place, marking them with chalk in order to obtain a clear picture. This confluence of seemingly innocuous snips of paper, on the one hand, and the violence of putting entire regions under house arrest, on the other hand, gives an idea of why the national census, or systematic population count, resonates across such a wide array of research areas. The census encapsulates so many major themes of contemporary social theory: the falsity of the boundary between politics and technoscience; the creep of big data and minute slicing up of individuals and communities into predetermined check boxes like “age” and “nationality.”

In many countries, the census was one of the main points of interaction between the masses and governments that sought to both discipline and depict them in ways that made sense to bureaucrats. In this context, Bachi’s seeming glibness about his paper cutouts provides a cautionary note for studies of the census that do not take into account the ordinary and extraordinary coercions of quantification. For the violence of a census under military occupation is not so far distant from the context of the everyday work of national censuses more broadly.

Bachi claimed his findings were scientific, and that he concentrated not on political issues but rather on obtaining an objective, quantitative view of Israel and the Palestinian Territories. Yet even Bachi’s most abstruse equations were fully embedded in the cultural and material landscapes where he worked.

The census as Western science

Bachi had been a successful professor of statistics in Italy before the fascist government’s racial purity laws forced him to flee prior to World War II. Over the course of his career, Bachi was active either in government, academia, or independent research, throughout nearly every major political transition in the region in the second half of the 20th century, from before the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 until just before the official signing of the second Oslo Accords in 1995. From the beginning, he insisted that the Israeli census be firmly rooted in Western science. The 1948 census was carried out while the war that followed the founding of Israel still raged around them. But even then Bachi contended that the census would be conducted according to rigorous and objective statistical principles. Later, as the director of the Israeli CBS, he continuously argued that military concerns should not be allowed to dominate over scientific rigour.

Throughout this process, he looked to Europe and North America for models for his scientific work. In the planning stages of the Israeli censuses of the 1950s and 1960s, Bachi and his colleagues requested numerous census documents from countries such as Canada, France, and Spain — and coincidentally, from Iran, which at that time was still under the control of the shah, who was politically supported by governments in Europe and North America. Bachi was a main contributor to both the “Statistical Atlas of Italy” and the “Atlas of Israel,” and spoke at innumerable international conferences.

Bachi’s repeated attempts to present his research as objective and neutral are evidenced by the fact that under his leadership, the CBS fought to compile data “solely according to professional considerations, without interference from political quarters,” as the demographers Usiel Schmelz and Nathan Gad write in their book “Studies in the Population of Israel in Honor of Roberto Bachi.” Yet Bachi’s more politicized work counting Palestinians nonetheless exerted a strong influence on his abstract research, and did so in ways that were not wholly incompatible with his aim of developing statistical cartography as a science. As a result, Bachi’s work was both thoroughly scientific and thoroughly colonial at the same time. It therefore demonstrates how empirical science and settler-colonial practices can coincide.

Indeed, Bachi’s academic context was also related to his governmental efforts. In addition to running the census, Bachi founded the Department of Statistics at the Hebrew University of Israel, thereby further linking academic statistics to Israeli state objectives. His two major academic books were published in tandem with census milestones: the first, in 1968, immediately after the census of the Occupied Territories, and the second, after his death in 1995, following the earliest census in Israel to fully incorporate quantitative digital mapmaking of the kind that Bachi had long advocated. Both books, which I examine in detail in Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine, address key issues of the census and develop methodologies first implemented in the enumeration of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). As such, the theoretical, academic, and governmental areas of Bachi’s professional career were thoroughly interlinked, and mutually reinforced one another.

The relationship between Bachi’s governmental and theoretical work was also affected by the advent of digital cartographic technology. Throughout his career, Bachi took part in a technological transition in cartography from a professionalized trade that relied on hand-drafting skills into a quantified, mechanized science that became heavily dependent on computers. Bachi himself was trained within a modernist tradition of statistical cartography in Italy. He was instrumental in bringing the paradigm to the nascent Israeli state, where it was further developed in part due to his personal efforts. Additionally, later methods enabled the detailed management of piecemeal territories — a type of complexity that is considered a hallmark of postmodern or late modern digital governance.

Computers are often presented as a break or revolution in the history of technology, an abrupt disjuncture between the modern and postmodern. However, Bachi’s maps serve to demonstrate that this is not an all-or-nothing transition. Bachi’s work wasn’t a case of “bad science” but rather a case of how science itself is political, how a violent politics and the scientific goal of rationalization were made to align. Bachi chose to further key modernist goals in formulating cartographic knowledge, such as accuracy and the continuity of borders, and this lent continuity to the maps he made both before and after computers became commonplace. He also actively rejected other goals considered to be hallmarks of modern statistics, like completeness and the consistency of space. So his later studies arguably are evidence of a new form of modernism that challenged the fundamental goals of completeness and consistency, but nevertheless it is one that still would be accepted and recognized among international scientific communities.

Moreover, Bachi’s research illustrates how in the context of modernization processes, the landscapes that are produced can transform the goals of modernization. The efforts to enforce a single set of national borders for Israel instead spiraled into the construction of tightly linked networks of bounded settlements in the West Bank. In time, the very process of determining their borders would transform the aims and purpose of Bachi’s theoretical work. Bachi largely cooperated with broader efforts to literally and figuratively expunge Palestinians from the land. Yet he could not extricate himself from the social and material connections afforded by his physical proximity to Palestinian communities. As a result, years of occupation ultimately fed back into his statistical cartography, shaping both Bachi’s research trajectory and, through him, the very fabric of the digital canvas on which population statistics in the region continue to be mapped.

Palestinian existence and the Israeli census

The outcome of a conflict between two parties usually doesn’t hinge on a debate over whether or not one of them exists. But this is precisely the way that some Zionist groups have attempted to frame debates over the right of Palestinians to live in and enter Israel and the Occupied Territories. Prime Minister Golda Meir’s famous proclamation in 1969 that, “There never was such a thing as Palestinians. … They did not exist” has been reiterated over countless election cycles both within Israel and abroad.

Irrespective of these claims to Palestinian nonexistence, from the perspective of the Israeli military administrators who took over the Palestinian Territories in 1967, the Palestinians existed and needed to be counted. The first steps were to devise population categories, count people according to them, and note the precise locations of every individual. This is precisely what the CBS set out to do. But the population count was not only aimed at the surveillance of those in the OPT. If the push to conduct a census after the 1967 war demonstrates a tacit acknowledgment of Palestinians’ existence, the census also aimed to limit the number of Palestinians who were allowed to remain. As Anat Leibler, a researcher who specializes in the study of quantification, has shown, one of the primary motivations for conducting the census so quickly was to prevent those who had fled during the conflict from returning. The census was the basis for issuing identity cards that allowed their bearers to reside permanently in the Palestinian Territories, if not to become citizens. So by performing the census early, the administrators prevented those who were away from gaining the right to come back.

As a result, the census could be said to have two potentially conflicting priorities: on the one hand, to gain an accurate count of the populations now under Israeli control; on the other hand, to exclude as many people as possible in order for fewer Palestinians to be able to claim residency. Since the population of Israel was produced in part through the census, it was crucial for census takers to preemptively make as many Palestinians as possible uncountable, and therefore invisible and, for national purposes, nonexistent. It was, in other words, in the best interest of the census takers both to rigorously count Palestinians who were there and shape the population by excluding Palestinians before anyone was ever counted.

In this context, the census authorities were especially wary of being charged with undercounting. They consequently stress the extreme lengths to which census enumerators went to obtain precise enumerations. Their report notes that “despite the use of special vehicles (and even donkeys), the enumerators could not reach isolated houses or distant localities (especially nomads’ tents), because of difficulties of access or danger of mines.” In so doing, they highlight some of the ways that as a result of enduring political realities, much of the West Bank became practically inaccessible to the Israelis in the immediate aftermath of the war. So just as the very presence of Palestinians made the 1967 counting necessary, in the eyes of Israeli officials, the ongoing geographic impacts of 1948 and 1967 circumscribed their ability to conduct that census. The census in turn would affect the types of maps that Bachi used and advocated in his 1968 book, Graphical Rational Patterns: A New Approach to Graphical Presentation of Statistics. His theoretical academic work is thus emblematic of the census maps that had tremendous practical power over Palestinians’ lives.

Bachi played a key role in the way the 1967 census was conducted, and his name appears on the official report both as the “director of the census” and “government statistician.” In the process, however, he contradicted one of his own judgments from 1948. Back then, against members of the Israeli military who had wanted to count Palestinians with different methods from those used by Israelis, Bachi argued forcefully that the methodology should remain the same for both groups. He claimed that only with consistent methods would the results be seen to be statistically rigorous. The 1948 census reports also described the hesitancy to enumerate Jews via a curfew, given that this method had been widely used by the British during their occupation after World War I, and thereby would have brought back traumatic memories. Yet by 1967, under Bachi’s direction, the census did precisely this for Palestinians — a process undertaken for the OPT alone. So a curfew that was seen as too debilitating for Israeli citizens was nonetheless applied to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Bachi oversaw the one-day curfew with the stated reasoning that indiscriminately confining people to their homes would improve the chances of counting as many people as possible.

The curfew was justified using arguments for accuracy, but it had its own consequences in terms of the accuracy of the statistics. The curfew indeed excluded refugees who were missing, away from home, or homeless due to the war. It also, by the census takers’ own omission, had the effect of creating “differences between the locality in which [inhabitants] were registered and the permanent places of residence.” People were counted according to where they happened to be under the curfew, not necessarily where they primarily lived.

The resulting census data for the Palestinian Territories would have presented a logical conundrum for Bachi. As someone who considered himself a scientist, to Bachi the Palestinian census data would have seemed less than rigorous — seeing as how they were collected under restrictive conditions that made them only partially comparable to census data for the fully annexed areas of the state of Israel. Yet also as a scientist, he could not completely ignore that the data existed — for example, by placing labels that read “no data available” on relevant areas of his maps of Israel. After all, he spearheaded the operation that collected the data in the first place. So on scientific maps, the question for Bachi would have become: How is it possible to best map Israel while neither denying that data exist for Palestinians, nor actually including that (only semirigorous) census data on the map?

In fact, despite directing and overseeing the census of the OPT, Bachi rarely, if ever, used the data from that census in his work. To omit the data without appearing to be unscientific, Bachi increasingly began using one type of map from among two commonly available options. As is evident in his 1968 book, for mapping census data collected from 1967 onward, Bachi started to favor graduated circles more and more. He became increasingly critical of the shaded area technique called choropleth, which was more commonly used at the time. Choropleths are maps in which districts, states, or regions are progressively shaded darker or lighter in order to represent increased percentages of some particular characteristic, such as the average number of people in each household for specific areas. Choropleths are convenient because unlike graduated circle maps, they allow cartographers to indicate statistical data without an abundance of different symbols. At the same time, they can be misleading, and there are several problems that arise. For instance, because different regions are shaded in, those with larger geographic areas often stand out as more significant than they would otherwise appear to be, if they were judged by the statistics alone — and this is only one of multiple layers of complexity.

At left (a) is a sample choropleth map from the 1961 Israeli census. At right (b) is a map that shows the extent of the development of an Israeli national GIS database as of 1996. In figure a (CBS 1963), the shaded areas indicate the average number of people in each household in that subdistrict, called a “natural region,” as defined by the CBS. Because the map was made prior to 1967, data for the West Bank and Gaza Strip are not included. In figure b, the shaded regions indicate those areas where digital map data existed or was in progress. The survey of Israel appears to have prioritized the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which both fall under the “Mapped” category — namely, those areas that were converted first to GIS from paper maps. In part but not solely due to Bachi’s legacy, GIS data in Israel were developed using an overhead view that seamlessly incorporated all of the Palestinian Territories. This was likely accomplished precisely with the expectation that Israel would lose the ability to collect data on the ground throughout the entire Palestinian Territories due to the handover of limited sovereignty to the Palestinians following the Oslo Accords.

In contrast to choropleths, graduated circle maps are those that use shapes of different sizes, generally circles, to represent a particular statistic. The difference between choropleths and graduated circles are not obvious at first, and both are widely used. But graduated circle maps have one advantage that relates to Bachi’s research: They allow for the omission of certain boundaries, including the Green Line, which was used to delineate the demarcation line between Israel, Jordan, Egypt and Syria from the period following Israel’s 1948 Independence War until Israel captured the West Bank in 1967. For instead of shading an entire area or subregion, the graduated circle is located with respect to one single point on the map.

This allows for greater precision in depicting — or choosing arbitrarily, since a random point could be used — the precise locations of populations within national boundaries. The result, however, is that in graduated circle maps, the actual boundaries of those districts do not have to be included on the map. In contrast, on choropleths, if each district is shaded in, then the edges of those shaded regions — their boundaries — are already implicitly indicated. This had its limits, however, as on some maps that omit the borders around the West Bank and Gaza strip, a ghost of the political border can be seen around segregated Palestinian areas. By depicted these as blank areas, Bachi in effect sketched out the boundary as a type of palimpsest. There were simply so many Palestinians, and the Israeli military had pushed them into segregated areas like the West Bank, that the Palestinians show up through their very erasure.

Bachi’s 1968 book is evidence of how, in his early work, he started omitting internal boundaries and moving from areas to points. In contrast, by 1995, Bachi had largely abandoned his attempts to rectify GRPs with choropleth maps. He turned instead to drawing boundaries around statistical data, beginning to constitute new borders based only on those points that he selected as being significant to the census. In so doing, Bachi again adapted and innovated on international statistics in order to meet the strategic political goals of the Israeli state. In the process, he rejected the traditional focus on the consistency of national territory in order to retain the continuity of borders around the fragmented territories, including the settlements, claimed by the state. His methods allowed for an enlargement of the total area of Israel that is inhabited by Israelis, and they did so in a way that naturalizes the settlements as a part of Israel.

In addition, when the total area of a particular settlement is determined based on the furthest points of habitation, these can be far larger than its official municipal boundaries, which might take longer to catch up to the pace of construction. Any private Palestinian areas that happened to fall between two outlying points would simply be incorporated into Israeli territory through the use of the convex hull — that is, by drawing an enclosed line around those (newly) Israeli points and calling everything in between “Israeli.” In combination with GIS software, the geographic database that was developed in the course of the 1995 census enabled the cartographers to calculate convex hulls for hundreds of thousands of individual points at ever finer scales, including individual buildings, thereby defining and quantifying a set of ever more multiplicitous borders. The convex hull method sacrificed national contiguity in order to maintain strict and increasingly numerous boundaries. Yet the fact that there were more borders did not mean that they became more open or less guarded; quite the contrary.

The continuity of computer cartography

Population statistics, like those developed in the national census, form one of the core connections between the state and local communities, and they are central to everyday governance practices. As one of the primary means through which population statistics are communicated, census cartography fundamentally influences both national and international public imaginations of those governance practices as well as society itself. Yet cartographic methods are also shaped in local social and geographical landscapes. Bachi’s attempts to make graphing and statistical mapmaking more readily available served to place him in the international statistical vanguard, but his work continued to be informed by the political realities of the Israeli occupation.

This was not obviated by the spread of computers and their allegedly universal rationality. In the end, instead of representing a radical departure from previous cartographic methods, computers and GIS proved useful in legitimizing Bachi’s political position and further integrating it into the international scientific community. While the public use of his GRP symbols was fast outpaced by computer graphics capabilities — even to the extent that they appear less frequently in Bachi’s own later research — his contributions to core concerns of geographic and demographic statistics, and their application in statistical cartography, continue to be influential, as many researchers have demonstrated.

By omitting internal boundaries altogether, Bachi could include Israeli data without making plain that such data for the Palestinian Territories were either not being collected or, in the case of the census, not being indicated on the map. He then helped to actively naturalize the presence of Israeli settlements in the landscape by redrawing boundaries around the area of Jewish habitation — an area that by design, were spread across most of the Palestinian Territories. As such, both GRPs and convex hulls were useful in constructing facts that were empirical and political. Yet in order to reconstruct a total national area that includes the settlements, the 1995 census first had to extricate the settlements from their surroundings — that is, precisely the numerous Palestinian towns of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Bachi’s research is therefore both fully internationally scientific and thoroughly influenced by local political contexts. Despite his best efforts to position himself otherwise, Bachi’s work even at the most abstract levels was shaped by the landscape of Palestine and Israel. At the same time, his choices were circumscribed by the hierarchies of international technoscience — whereby his legitimacy depended on his ability to present his findings as objective and exact. Computers lent credence to this goal. But the tension between maintaining supposed empirical rigor, on the one hand, and adapting his methodology to the people and landscapes so that they might further the simultaneous oppression and erasure of Palestinians by the Israeli government, on the other hand, is one that continued through the adoption of GIS in the region. Rather than furthering goals of equality and justice, GIS was mobilized to rationalize Israeli state violence against Palestinians that sadly continues to this day.

Jess Bier is an assistant professor of urban sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where she studies the social and political landscapes of science and technology. She is the author of Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine: How Occupied Landscapes Shape Scientific Knowledge, from which this article is adapted.

Ludwig Lewisohn’s 1927 Book Has Lessons for Indian Minorities Today: A Review From Jail

An exploration of Jewishness written long before the Holocaust shows how fraternity and solidarity are required to overcome majoritarianism and fascism.

A month ago, Sudha Bharadwaj wrote the following review by hand in Mumbai’s Byculla Jail. While her friends and family typed the text for possible publication, Bharadwaj was diagnosed with a heart disease. As she remains incarcerated in an overcrowded prison on the basis of contentious charges for her alleged involvement in the Elgar Parishad case, appeals for her bail are ongoing.

I was starved for reading material in jail when The Defeated, a philosophical novel by Ludwig Lewisohn came into my hands from the jail library. Both the title and author were unknown to me. First published in 1927, this book is the story of successive generations of Jews migrating from Russia to Germany and America. It speaks with great empathy, pain and sensitivity not so much of Jewish society as of the inner struggles of individuals of successive generations as they deal with the continuing discrimination they face in diverse forms; how they try to cope with their “Jewishness” in different ways – by mimicry, self-hatred, flights of fancy, cutting off their roots, anger, and religious conversion; and how the ultimate protagonist, Arthur, comes to terms with his Jewishness by accepting it and setting out to help other suffering Jews.

Ludwig Lewisohn

In its narrative over nine books, interspersed with passages on the history, psychology, culture and religious notions of the Jews as well as passionate philosophical ruminations, the book vividly sets out what “being Jewish” means.

What struck me was that this novel precedes both the Holocaust and today’s aggressive Israeli state that denies freedom and dignity to Palestine and yet carries in it so clearly the seeds of both apprehensions. Clearly, even then in 1927, the writing was on the wall for anyone who cared to see it.

Today, when it is critical to understand “being a Dalit” or “being a Muslim” to comprehend how a majoritarian Hindutva mindset becomes “the mainstream” and “other-ises”, puts down and demonises other identities, this piece of literature provides a rare, deep insight into “being Jewish.”

The story of the Levy family is related from the time of Reb Mendel and his wife Braine in Russia in 1840, through their son Efraim and his children, Tobias, Bertha, Rose, Samuel and most importantly, Jacob in Prussia, and finally ends with Jacob’s children – Hazel and the main protagonist, Arthur Levy, in America around 1925 when anti-Jewish pogroms were going on in Rumania (today’s Romania).

Braine, Efraim and Tobias

Reb Mendel wants to understand more of the world and feels attracted to Isaac-Ber Levinsohn’s Beth-Ye-Huda, which proves from the history of Israel that “pious and holy Jews had in all other lands and ages cultivated profane science and philosophy.” He rebels by giving up his position as a ‘melamed’ (scripture teacher) in Russia, where Jews are forced to sink their synagogues deep in the ground and not raise their eyes except when praying. His wife Braine’s father had been extremely wealthy and was looted and devastated in the Polish anti-Jew uprising of 1840. While Mendel joins a rich distiller, Bratzlawer, his wife disapproves. Like her father, she believes intensely in “Jews being the chosen people” who have to be “divided from all other nations” in their ways. Much later, after the death of Mendel and even the prosperity of her son Efraim, when she’s about to die, Braine leaves for Israel to die there. She always speaks to Efraim and his sister about a chest from which her father would extract a parchment to read alone in his room with tears rolling down his cheeks. It is this parchment which finally falls into the hands of the main protagonist, Arthur, the grandson of Efraim, in book nine.

Efraim joins Bratzlawer’s business in his youth, making himself indispensable, and later marries Bratzlawer’s daughter, Hannah. They take the name of Levy and move to Insterburg, Prussia, where they shift from the Yiddish language to German, except when they wish to converse privately about their ‘shikse’ (gentile) German peasant helpers. But they still observe “the Law of Israel in form” and go to the orthodox synagogue, rather than the “reformed intensely German” one.

Yitzhak Arad, Yad Vashem, Alina Bothe, Lewi Stone, Tel Aviv University, Shoah, Holocaust, Operation Reinhard, Operation Reinhardt, Adolf Hitler, World War II, Deutsche Reichsbahn, German National Railways, Reinhard Heydrich, Wannsee Conference, Poland, concentration camps, Final Solution to the Jewish Question, Nazis, Rwandan genocide, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka

Jews being deported to the Bełżec concentration camp in April 1942. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Though the businesses of East Europeans like Efraim are eventually outdone by the sophisticated West Europeans, Efraim’s eldest son Tobias grows up in an idyllic feudal set-up in a beautiful German landscape. The memories of his childhood are of the fairy tales told and folk songs sung by the affectionate German peasant women in the spinning room, not of the fears of his ancestors. He feels oppressed when he is sent to the “cheder” (Jewish primary school) to learn Hebrew and Jewish scriptures. He finds the other Jewish children there poor and dirty and the gentile children gather to throw stones at them.

Tobias has an excellent career at the gymnasium (college) of Insterburg; his modest well-behavedness and the help he readily gives his blond-haired, blue-eyed classmates who find learning a burden gain him friends. But despite his giving his very heart in his friendships, he can only get the status of “a confidential upper servant” even as his friends’ sisters giggle and ridicule him behind his back. He realises that whereas any decently intelligent gentile can enter a career of judgeship, for a Jew to do the same, he must be “a veritable paragon of learning, tact and devotion.” He feels ashamed of the poor Jewish students that the professors smile at; even ashamed of his own father with his sing-song Jewish accent. His fear is that if he is classed with them, what will become of his career?

He meets Burghammer, an elegant Jew, whose father had had him and his siblings baptised. Burghammer tells him, “We are Protestants. Yes, the Junkers [the land-owning aristocracy of Prussia] cut us socially but the state is on our side. Our Jewish brains are needed. Count Bismarck consults my father twice a month, he raised the money for the Austrian War…”

Some years later, after participating in the 1870 war effort, Tobias becomes independent of his father’s allowance and sends some generous sums for his siblings’ education. In 1880, he informs his father that he has married the daughter of Burghammer and taken his wife’s name. What he doesn’t reveal is that he has also been baptised by a notorious anti-Semitic preacher. But his father understands and feels like “shredding his clothes and strewing ashes on his head” for this ‘geshmatt’ (turncoat) as if hearing of a death.

Theodore Burghammer becomes a distinguished jurist. When his shopkeeper brother Samuel, in a bankrupt state, once searches him out, Theodore gives him more money than he has seen in his life and quickly hurries out “for an important appointment”. Theodore never sees any of his family again. When he is politely informed of his mother’s death, he initially buys a ticket for Insterburg but crumples it up at the station. The money he wires to his father is returned. The next month he is appointed as a ‘Justizrath’ (counsellor of justice).

Polish Jews captured by Germans during the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Photo: United States Holocaust Museum/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

The justizrath and his wife build a palatial house in Berlin with the fortune she inherits, where “all literary and artistic Berlin crowd” gather – mostly Jews. Though he has become a great man, unaffected by “the anti-Semitic ribaldries of press and pulpit” and the “growing roar of the race-conscious Nordics”, sometimes he becomes extremely distressed. Then a secret agent is asked to seek out his brothers and sisters, who get large sums of money from “an unknown hand.” Of course they understand where it is coming from.

In the autumn of 1917, Justizrath Burghammer’s house is surrounded by a mob of hungry, tattered creatures suffering from the pains of war. A woman shrieks, “The accursed Jews feed while our children die of hunger!” He stands stern and upright at his window while stones crash into the glass panes above his head. The mounted police drive the mob away ruthlessly even as he receives the terribly polite telegram of his son’s martyrdom in the war. With a dry sob, he stretches out his arms, and cries words he had not heard in 50 years – “Shmah, Yisroell (Hear, O Israel)”.

Also read: ‘No Longer the Other’: How Holocaust Poetry Reclaims Identities

Jacob, Arthur and Reb Moshe

Jacob, the youngest child of Efraim, is the only blond sibling. He stays away from the ‘cheder’ and later, school, and follows musicians with a twig held trumpet-like to his lips. In his 18th year, he meets a poor, illiterate Lithuanian girl. They live for a month in “deep ardour” and “undisputed instincts” before “the crash”! Jacob goes home to find his frail father hemmed in by two brothers of the girl, demanding money from “the Jew.” They extort, threaten and leave, spitting on the floor and crossing themselves. Jacob experiences a cold disgust and “ages by years in those few minutes”. He resolves to leave for a free land – America – and indeed reaches there with $130 in his pocket in the year 1879.

How the Jewish community hangs together by supporting the early new immigrants is also illustrated by Jacob’s case. He is picked up by a kind old Jew named Friedenfeld, whose pleasure it is to gather such “greenees” from “decent families” or those who came from somewhere close to his home and who speak German and put them to work where they can learn English and make their way in life.

Jacob initially works as a day caretaker at Friedenfeld & Cohn’s department store catering to every domestic need of poor Irishmen and later, of even poorer Italians, particularly cheap furniture. In this way Jacob escapes from his history with relief and despite many half-hearted plans, he never returns to Prussia, writing to his family rarely. He learns English slowly, which he speaks with a heavy German accent till the end, and lives as a tenant with a German gentile widow on Friedenfeld’s recommendation. He embraces enthusiastically the American ideal, where, in a nation of migrants, he is treated as a German and not a Jew.

At the department store, Jacob meets another hardworking young Jew, Nathan Goldmann, and together, with some financial help from Friedenfeld, they set up their own furniture firm of more modern designs. In the first three years, were it not for support from Friedenfeld’s customers, Jacob’s landlady and Goldmann’s family, their firm would have collapsed half a dozen times. But they persevere and by 1889 have established a tiny factory and modern showroom by the secular name of “Phoenix Arts”.

Jews on selection ramp at Auschwitz, May 1944. Photo: Public domain

Both their marriages into Jewish families bring them substantial dowries and both the Goldmanns and the Levys prosper over time. Like his wife Gertrude, Jacob becomes an American citizen and so are his children. They have no overt Jewish observances, for to them the synagogue still smacks of their migration, oppression and the ghetto.

Jacob and Gertrude’s son Arthur, the main protagonist, appears in book three. Though Arthur and his sister Hazel always seemed to know they are Jewish, he often wonders how. For apart from a few remarks like “so-and-so cannot be trusted as he is ‘goyim’ (non-Jew)” or “so-and-so can be depended upon as he is ‘Yehudim’ (Jew)”, there are barely any overt signs of Jewishness in their household.

Yet when Arthur first enters school, he has a searing experience. A little classmate, George, makes a gargoyle-like face at him, puts out his tongue and calls him “Sheenie”. He is so hurt and rebellious against the hurt that he does not even inform his mother; rather, he invites the boy over. George, after sniffing the air suspiciously, relaxes and rampages boisterously with the toys, scaring the well-behaved Arthur and Hazel and finally, stuffing himself full of cake, says, kicking the table, “My dad says there’s lotsa nice Jews, he did so.” Though George forgets and becomes friendly, Arthur never forgets.

Arthur takes refuge in reading books that are very difficult for his age. He only fears a group of boys whom he usually passes on his way home from the library who shout, “Purge the Sheenie” and once trip him up. He is blinded with rage and hatred and being outnumbered and weak, seeks comfort in arrogance. “I will be a great learned man and these hoodlums will be sweepers of bars and diggers of mud.”

While excelling at studies, he has headaches and nightmares. George, who barely scrapes through his exams, is happy, carefree and active in sports. During gym, a group of boys tease Arthur about his circumcision and thereafter he adamantly refuses to participate in sports, getting a medical certificate from a Jewish doctor. He becomes “morbidly aware” of his name, his father’s accent. His father cannot fathom his irritation and reproaches him sadly. “Vell ve are Chews, my son.”

Arthur enters Columbia University in 1910. Initially he feels the dignity, freedom and smugness so healing that he hardly goes downtown, confining himself to his lodgings and the university. Though he makes good friends with several gentiles, he notices they don’t invite him to social events. It’s Tobias’s experience all over again. And when he criticises the Russian Alliance, he is told, “Now you are speaking as a Jew, not an American.”

German troops parade in Warsaw to celebrate the defeat of Poland, October 5, 1939. — US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park

Once America enters the war, the situation changes for Jacob. “Being suspected of German sympathies”, Jacob faces threatening slights and direct pressures from larger houses, political bosses and banks. He loses the pride he had in being “a self made American” as he is brutally informed of the number of war bonds he has to buy.

Arthur is lucky not to be conscripted, but is assigned as an assistant to a rather ignorant psychological expert. By this time, Arthur has already read Freud and is far advanced. With the help of Friedenfeld’s son Mortimer Freefield, who has now become a typically American lawyer, he is appointed as an intern at the women’s department of the Hospital for the Insane on Drew’s Point. He throws himself into the work with passion, but is extremely disturbed to find the low-paid and untrained Irish nurses, particularly one Donovan, physically abusing the patients. Only one other doctor, Dr Kirke, is interested, but he is too ambitious. He advises Arthur not to complain, as Donovan is a “sweetie” of the senior Dr Duval. But Arthur first resigns and then confronts Donovan. Later that night, Dr Duval comes in drunk and abuses him for his Jewishness outside his door.

Gertrude’s sister had married Adams, a Jew in the construction business. When Adams had constructed a block of flats, he had fondly reserved one as a clinic for one of his two sons, whom he had hoped would take up medicine. Since neither of them does, Arthur moves in and fulfills the old man’s dream.

Arthur falls in love with the feminist suffragette daughter of a Protestant minister, Elizabeth. They are great friends and support each other immensely. When she discovers she is pregnant, she fights against the idea of marrying him, but finally gives in to Arthur’s care. Arthur’s parents are worried: though they would like to accept Elizabeth as a daughter, they feel she would not be comfortable. And indeed, put off by the very first embrace of her mother-in-law, Elizabeth tends not to accompany him on his visits home.

Also read: The Ghosts of Auschwitz: Inside Hitler’s Killing Machine

Gradually Arthur and Elizabeth grow apart. She seems to him not to care for the child, John, or “their family.” She takes up writing and is hectically busy socially, from which activities he feels alienated. A time comes when tensions become extreme. Arthur sends John on a holiday with his parents and lets Elizabeth go to her father. When she returns, she comments how alike her father and Arthur are – both patient and not judgemental. “But I am a rebel and a pagan,” she says. Arthur explains that even her rebellion is part of a legitimate stream, but if he rejects his Jewish roots, there is nothingness, a void. They are both deeply concerned about how John is to be brought up.

Arthur has meanwhile decided to give more of his time to a Jewish institution called the Beth Yehuda Hospital. He feels comfortable there – the patient, the doctors, the administration are all Jewish. He does not have to pretend or be anxious before expressing an opinion. There he meets Reb Moshe.

Braine’s father, Reb Elizer Hacohen, had a younger brother, Reb Moshe Hacohen. This Reb Moshe is the latter’s grandson. Reb Elizer was an orthodox ‘Mithnaged’ but his brother was a ‘Chassid’, as is his grandson. Reb Moshe tells Arthur, “I believe that active love will gradually bring a better world, a world of brotherhood and peace. When that world is completed, the Messiah will be among us. The way is not communicated by any book but from soul to soul.” He describes to Arthur his journeys across the world to meet Jewish people, particularly in Rumania, where they are suffering from pogroms at that time.

A group of Jewish girls wearing the yellow star. —United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Oesterreichische Nationalbibliothek.

One day Elizabeth is shocked when Reb Moshe suddenly arrives at their home. She is frightened by his orthodox black dress and black hat, but he puts her somewhat at ease by telling her a parable about the attire. Reb Moshe tells Arthur that he has come to request him to join a commission to Rumania as a qualified psychiatrist to see people “who neither live nor die”. Elizabeth realises Arthur’s desire and need to go and leaves the house with John, writing him a straight-forward and principled letter. Even when they meet later, they understand and respect each other more than ever before, yet feel their ways are separate. This part of the book leaves us with the same poignant question they ask each other: “Does this mean mixed marriages don’t work?”

Before Arthur is to leave, Reb Moshe gives him a scroll of parchment. It is the English translation of a Hebrew document written by their common ancestor, Reb Efraim Hacohen. The document is the very one Braine’s father would read and weep. The text, laid out in book nine, is based, according to Lewisohn, on historical fact, and narrates what the Jews suffered in the 11th century as martyrs of the Christian crusades – a buried and unacknowledged history. Reading it, Arthur feels liberated, in touch with his people and history, as if he has suddenly understood himself. As he prepares to leave, Reb Moshe warns him: “Don’t be too enthusiastic. Jews have always been a difficult people. While you avoid the ‘rich goyish man’s error’ of thinking all Jews are Christ killers and usurers, even while individuals are honourable and kind; beware too the “rich Yehudim error” of thinking that Jews are a Holy Nation, but individuals are thieves and rascals!”

Many other well-etched characters in the book

There are many other well-etched Jewish characters in the book. There is Nathan Goldmann’s son, Joe, who becomes a Marxist and believes that “though Jewishness is a curse, the way is not to run away from it, but destroy it through the proletarian revolution….” There is his brother, Victor Goldmann, who has no gift for mimicry and is confused, angry and consumed by self-hate. Even though he becomes a successful architect, he commits suicide.

There is Hazel, Arthur’s sister, who is refused admission to a fashionable girls’ school because she is Jewish and who is separated from her gentile boyfriend by the family. Though she later marries a moderately successful young Jewish man, Eli, and keeps a model house, she, her husband and her daughter are unhappy. She doesn’t want to stay with her in-laws in the ghetto, for she feels too superior for it and hates the “uncouthness” of the ghetto. But where she and Eli live, they have no friends and are lonely. In his unhappiness, Eli begins to stay out, drink and even see other women. Catching him out, she storms out of the house with her daughter and returns to her parents in a hysterical state. Only after Arthur’s mediation does the ice melt between Hazel and Eli. They realise they need to move to a Jewish neighbourhood to have more friends and a social life.

And there is Bertha, the independent-minded and balanced sister of Jacob and Tobias, who gets married late in life to a Talmudic scholar, Benjamin. He later becomes an assistant professor of Jewish Scripture in the university. She keeps a comfortable Jewish home and kitchen, where they engage with gentile friends on an equal footing. Bertha is a great support to her father, Efraim, in his old age, speaking to him in Yiddish and finally closing his eyes when he dies.

Thus Lewisohn paints a vivid mosaic of very different but believable characters.

Jewish prisoners are issued food on a building site at Salaspils concentration camp, Latvia, in 1941. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

The tortured Jewish psyche, identity and nationalism

Lewisohn describes through vivid examples the effects of the Jewish feeling of inferiority and comments ironically on the fact that “the part played by such inferiority in psychical life was fittingly described by a Jewish physician (Freud) for though all men can be afflicted with this feeling (inferiority) in consequence of a specific cause, nearly every Jew is afflicted without specific and discoverable cause… where the cause is known, the mind consents, where it is not known, the soul rebels… There arise intricate maladies of the soul. Sudden suspiciousness, fear of fear, propitiation without belief, rage apparently at others pointed at oneself, arrogance, sensitivity in a thousand contorted and contradictory ways.”

Lewisohn traces this to a thousand years of intermittent persecutions and maybe even further back to “the Babylonian captivity that ended the Jewish people’s brief dream of equality”. Even their last war-like heroes, Judah Makkabi and Bar Kochba, he says, are “heroes of defeat”. It is to this he attributes Jewish penitence, their sense of perpetual exile, their belief that “force is evil, war is sin and passive martyrdom is triumph.”

Lewisohn’s analysis goes to the extent of justifying the Pharisees who were, according to him, actually “a nation in bondage” to Rome. Their aim was “to preserve the Jewish nationality, to substitute religious and cultural solidarity for political independence.” Hence, their objection to even the “first faint stirrings of what was to later become Christianity, with its universality, its anti-nationality.” He claims that for the crucifixion, it was actually the empire of Pontius Pilate that was to blame. For after all, even Judas, after the betrayal, ultimately hangs himself. To appreciate how this “other view” has been suppressed by the Christian mainstream, one only needs to recall the debates around ‘Ravana’ or ‘Mahishasur’ that Dalit and tribal communities are raising today in our country.

The importance of an identity is also something Lewisohn repeatedly stresses upon. He elucidates how, “in an ambitious empire, throwing its millions into war, the absolute pacifist is the only friend of mankind”, but in an oppressed, decimated and tormented national minority, “there is something to be said for those who are anxious that no jot of their cultural or religious heritage, that makes them a people, is abandoned”. For, as he rightly remarks, “Before there can be internations, there must be nations” and “we must not let the strong ones stamp out the weak before the days of the internation.”

The story itself illustrates Lewisohn’s contention that “Jews tried to forget themselves and their people in the Germanising time and the Americanising time… The nations said: Be like us and we shall be brothers and at peace! Then began the Jewish practice of protective mimicry … to escape difference, conspicuousness and hence danger … But can it be done without inflicting an inner hurt, a wound to the moral fibre?” No, he concludes, indeed not.

A view shows a construction site in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Givat Zeev, near Jerusalem, December 19, 2011. Credit: Reuters

Unidimensional? Perhaps necessarily so

Lewisohn’s understanding is that mankind progresses in a “triangular formation”. “At the apex are a handful of thinkers, at the base the thousand million who have hardly changed … At the apex race prejudice and sex slavery are forgotten. Peace, knowledge and compassion prevail. Just a few ranks below, the old savage diseases of the soul continue.” He describes Arthur’s predicament: “How should a young man then bear himself? As if there was progress, or as if there was none? At the apex there is no Jewish problem, but how can he guard against the cries of hate and pain that come to his ears from the base?” It is these cries that Arthur finally responds to.

Interestingly, the author does not hesitate to depict the conflicts among different Jewish sects or the shortcomings of orthodoxy. The arrogance of being the chosen people, the unquestioning atmosphere of the ‘cheders’, the refusal to accept scientific or secular knowledge. He speaks of the “reformed synagogues” too, which tried to mimic the Christians. And of course the generations long and deep debate between the Mithnageds and the Chassids is described pictorially in the distance between Braine and Reb Moshe.

While there are many penetrating insights in this work, Lewisohn’s entire understanding is only through the lens of “Jewishness.” In that sense, the book is certainly unidimensional; the aspects of class or gender, or the historical processes of capitalism and colonialism, while mentioned, do not form part of his analysis.

Also read: Amnesty Report Accuses Delhi Police of Torture, Violence, Serious Rights Violations During Riots

Yet, just as it is important to see each colour of the rainbow in its own distinct individuality to understand ‘white light’, there is no doubt that The Defeated is an eye-opening work of literature on the Jewish question, that it is essential to understand how fraternity and solidarity are required to overcome majoritarianism and fascism in today’s world.

(The spellings of Yiddish and Hebrew words in this book review are taken directly from the book and may differ at times from the spellings commonly used today)

Sudha Bharadwaj is a human rights activist, trade unionist and lawyer.

Germany Criminalises BDS Movement Against Israel

Germany becomes the first country in the world to criminalise the boycott, disinvest and sanction movement. Shir Hever, TRNN correspondent in Germany and expert on Palestine-Israel, responds in this conversation.

The German parliament, the Bundestag, has just passed an unprecedented piece of legislation condemning the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), declaring it anti-Semitic and illegal. The bill itself was a well kept secret until only two days before the vote. Initially promoted by far-right, pro-Israeli parties (both the neoliberal Party FDP and the racist anti-immigrant party AFD), members of all German parties ended up ultimately supporting it – even those on the far left. The Real News Network‘s Sharmini Peries spoke to Shir Hever about how this anti-BDS bill came about so quickly, and its problems.

“A few days ago, there was the German-Israeli Congress, which is an annual congress where Israel sends delegations to meet with German politicians and discuss a cooperation between the two countries. And they dedicated this meeting to fighting BDS,” Hever said. “And I think that was maybe a clue for those of us who are following it to understand that Israel is planning to get a resolution against BDS from the German parliament.”

The resolution said “the pattern of argument and methods of the BDS movement are anti-Semitic,” claiming BDS’s slogan of “Don’t buy” echoed the Nazi slogan “Don’t buy from Jews.” It also took issue with claims that Israel was an apartheid state.

“This meeting of the Congress was very confused. People kept contradicting themselves and contradicting each other, because they couldn’t really agree if a boycott is an allowed thing in the name of democracy and free speech, or should it be completely banned,” Hever said.

“They kept insisting that Israel is a democracy, but never finding any arguments to say how, in what way Israel is a democracy actually, and in what way the critique that ‘Israel is an apartheid state’ fails to meet the truth, or in what way it is anti-Semitic. So I think the result of that Congress was that they have to pass the legislation very fast.”

As the legislation was proposed to the Bundestag, there was a counterpetition explaining that it was misguided to call BDS “anti-Semitic.”

“There was an immediate counterpetition by Jewish and Israeli scientists and scholars—especially scholars of anti-Semitism, scholars of hatred against Jews—who said that this proposal is wrong,” Hever said. “[They said] that the BDS movement is not anti-Semitic, and calling BDS anti-Semitic movement weakens the real fight for equal rights for Jews and the protection of Jews against racism.”

Throughout Europe, most left-wing parties fully or partially support the Palestinian call for a boycott against Israel and for sanctions and divestment. Germany is the exception, Hever explained.

He observed that much of this response has to do alleviating German guilt about the Holocaust and the acceptance of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s outrageous—and factually inaccurate—claim years ago that Adolf Hitler got the idea for the Holocaust from Palestinian nationalist Haj Amin al-Husseini: “We underestimated how much racism against Jews is still entrenched in German society today, and how deep is the desire of German politicians and the German public to rid themselves of the guilt over the Holocaust. And this bill is doing just that for them,” Hever said.

Still, Hever added he was surprised the German left would side with the German far right.

“We thought that the fact that this bill was supported by the far right in Germany would dissuade leftists from supporting it. We thought that the call of Jewish Israeli scholars against this bill would also dissuade them,” Hever said. “But we were wrong.”

Transcript

Sharmini Peries: It’s The Real News Network. I’m Sharmini Peries, coming to you from Baltimore. And in breaking news, the German parliament, the Bundestag, has just passed an unprecedented piece of legislation condemning the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement, known as the BDS. They deemed BDS as anti-Semitic and illegal. This makes Germany the first and only country in the world to criminalise the BDS movement.

The legislation was passed at lightning speed in Germany. The bill itself was well kept secret until only two days before the vote. It was initially promoted by the far-right pro Israeli parties, both the neoliberal Party FDP and the racist anti-immigrant party AFD. But members of all German parties ended up supporting it, even from the far left.

Here to discuss all of this with me today from Heidelberg, Germany is Shir Hever. Shir is a Real News correspondent. He’s also the author of the book Privatization of Israeli Security, published by Pluto Press in 2017. Shir, good to have you here.

Shir Hever: Thank you, Sharmini, for having me.

Sharmini Peries: All right. Let’s start off with why has this vote come so quickly to Parliament? Why was it rushed? And even someone like you, who followed this issue very closely, had no idea till two days ago.

Shir Hever: Yeah. A few days ago there was the German-Israeli Congress, which is an annual congress where Israel sends delegations to meet with German politicians and discuss a cooperation between the two countries. And they dedicated this meeting to fighting BDS. And I think that was maybe a clue for those of us who are following it to understand that Israel is planning to get a resolution against BDS from the German parliament.

And this meeting of the Congress was very confused. People kept contradicting themselves and contradicting each other, because they couldn’t really agree if a boycott is an allowed thing in the name of democracy and free speech, or should it be completely banned. They kept insisting that Israel is a democracy, but never finding any arguments to say how, in what way Israel is a democracy, actually, and in what way they critique that Israel is an apartheid state fails to meet the truth, or in what way it is anti-Semitic. So I think the result of that Congress was that they have to pass the legislation very fast.

And indeed, as the legislation was proposed to the German parliament, the Bundestag, there was an immediate counterpetition by Jewish and Israeli scientists and scholars, especially scholars of anti-Semitism, scholars of hatred against Jews, who said that this proposal is wrong, the BDS movement is not anti-Semitic, and calling BDS an anti-Semitic movement weakens the real fight for equal rights for Jews and the protection of Jews against racism.

Sharmini Peries: Shir, I know we were all caught off guard here, but it was interesting that in Europe the left, and some of the Green parties in other countries in Europe, actually partially or wholly support the BDS movement. So how has this legislation won the support of members of the German left? Die Linke, for example?

Shir Hever: Yeah, I admit that I was myself surprised by that. And I think–and many of my fellow activists here were also surprised. We thought that the fact that this bill was supported by the far right in Germany would dissuade leftists from supporting it. We thought that the call of Jewish Israeli scholars against this bill would also dissuade them. But we were wrong. And the reason I think is that we underestimated how much racism against Jews is still entrenched in German society today, and how deep is the desire of German politicians and the German public to rid themselves of the guilt over the Holocaust. And this bill is doing just that for them.

And I’ll explain that through the quote from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Five years ago he said that he actually doesn’t believe that killing the Jews during the Holocaust was Hitler’s idea, was the idea of Adolf Hitler. He said Hitler got that idea from a Palestinian called Haj Amin al-Husseini. And this is, of course, false, and every historian knows that this is not the case, and Hitler called for the extermination of Jews long before he met Haj Amin al-Husseini. But by making that statement, Netanyahu–and he also repeated it. He stood by his statement a second time.

Netanyahu was sending a message to Germans. Instead of feeling guilty about the Holocaust and feeling the need to apologise and to bear responsibility for those crimes which were committed so many years ago, you could actually transfer the guilt to the Palestinians. And that is a dogwhistle message to the right wing in Germany.

But apparently the left, parts of the left, have expressed some desire to rid themselves of their guilt over the Holocaust by equating the BDS movement, which is a Palestinian call, with anti-Semitism. Of course, it’s not anti-Semitic. But by doing that they’re saying, oh, we’re fighting anti-Semitism by choosing to support Israel, the state of Israel, rather than by being responsible for the protection of Jewish people.

And the Israeli government has said to Germany very clearly, you have to choose. Either you’re pro-Israel or you’re pro-Jewish. But you can’t be both. And the German parliament has decided today to be pro-Israel and not pro-Jewish.

Sharmini Peries: Interesting. Do you see this move of this piece of legislation as a result of racism, then, towards Palestinians in German politics?

Shir Hever: Well, I think that there is, of course, a lot of Islamophobia in Germany, and there is also racism towards Arabs. But I don’t think that, specifically, racism towards Palestinians is any different from other kinds of racism in Germany. But I think that this particular legislation was not motivated by racism towards Palestinians, but actually by racism towards Jews.

In fact, the German government since the Second World War, since the Holocaust, has been very clear on its position that it must take responsibility for the crimes of the Holocaust and respect the rights of Jews. But since the Holocaust it made two major blunders in that sense, where it allowed anti-Jewish sentiment to get in the way of their politics by preferring to support the state of Israel instead of supporting Jews.

The first time was when German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer established diplomatic relations with the state of Israel and decided that Holocaust survivors who live in Israel will not receive compensation from Germany, and instead the German government will give the money to the Israeli government to decide how to use that money, and whether parts of that money will go to Holocaust survivors or not remains and a decision with the Israeli government.

One can say in Konrad Adenauer’s defense that he could not get into the internal politics of Israel, and he could not force the Israeli government to distribute the compensation to the actual Holocaust survivors.

But of course, there were also a lot of economic interests involved. The Israeli government said, Why don’t you give us weapons instead of money? And that fit, if course, the German industrial interests very well.

But now is the second. Today was the second time that the German political system has failed to meet up to its moral obligations, and instead of supporting and protecting Jews from racism it chose and to protect the state of Israel from legitimate critique, and calls that kind of legitimate critique anti-Semitism even though it is clearly not.

Sharmini Peries: All right, Shir. We’ll leave it there for now. I’ve been speaking with Shir Hever, Real News correspondent in Heidelberg Germany, and of course an expert, as you can see, in this particular area. I thank you so much for joining us today, Shir.

Shir Hever: Thank you, Sharmini.

Sharmini Peries: And I thank you for joining us here on The Real News Network.

This article was originally published on the The Real News Network. Read the original article.

Tony Award-Winning US Playwright Neil Simon Dies at 91

US playwright Neil Simon, who became one of Broadway’s most prolific and popular playwrights as he combined humor, drama and introspection in works such as “The Odd Couple”, “The Goodbye Girl” and “Lost in Yonkers”, died on Sunday at the age of 91, the New York Times reported, citing his publicist.

Simon drew on his tumultuous New York Jewish upbringing in many of his works.

A new Simon play almost every theatrical season was a Broadway staple from 1960 through the mid-1990s, placing him in the ranks of America’s top playwrights. He wrote more than 40 plays that were funny, moving and immensely popular – sometimes shifting from slapstick to melodrama with the turn of a phrase.

At one point he had a record four plays running simultaneously on Broadway.

Simon was called “not just a show business success but an institution” by one New York critic. While his voice and comedy were decidedly East Coast and often reflected an ethnic Jewish experience, Simon’s works played to packed houses around the world.

Screenwriter Neil Simon at the Paramount Studios lot in Hollywood, California April 6, 1998. Credit: REUTERS/Fred Prouser/File Photo

He won Tony Awards for “The Odd Couple,” “Biloxi Blues” and “Lost in Yonkers” and a fourth for his overall contribution to American theater. He was nominated for 13 other Tonys.

“Lost in Yonkers” (1990), a painfully funny story about the relationship between an abusive mother and her grown children, also won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1991.

Simon’s childhood was marred by the breakup of his parents. At first he was reluctant to draw on that pain, fearing it would make his plays too dark.

Later in his career, he would use his own painful experiences, such as in the semi-biographical “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” to give his work more depth.

But being entertaining was his primary goal.

“When I was a kid, I climbed up on a stone ledge to watch an outdoor movie of Charlie Chaplin,” Simon once told Life magazine. “I laughed so hard I fell off, cut my head open and was taken to the doctor, bleeding and laughing.

“… My idea of the ultimate achievement in a comedy is to make a whole audience fall onto the floor, writhing and laughing so hard that some of them pass out.”

Simon’s plays made him a wealthy man and many were turned into films, which made him even wealthier and earned him four Academy Award nominations. Among his works appearing on movie screens were “Barefoot in the Park,” “Plaza Suite,” “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” “Biloxi Blues” and “Broadway Bound.” “The Odd Couple” was even made into a successful television sitcom.

Early Simon works were sometimes deemed too sentimental or commercial by critics but as his career entered its third decade, the plays grew more serious, more mature. Frank Rich of the New York Times wrote of “Biloxi Blues” (1985) that Simon “at last begins to examine himself honestly, without compromises, and as a result is his most persuasively serious effort.”

Marvin Neil Simon was born on July 4, 1927, in the New York City borough of the Bronx, son of Irving, a garment salesman, and Mamie Simon.

After attending New York University and the University of Denver and serving in the US Air Force Reserve, Simon and his mentor, older brother Danny Simon, worked together in the 1940s writing comedy sketches for radio performer Goodman Ace.

Simon and Danny, whose living arrangements once inspired Neil’s “The Odd Couple,” then moved to television, working with such popular entertainers as Sid Caesar, Phil Silver and Jackie Gleason, and with other writers including Mel Brooks and Woody Allen.

But Simon did not like television work and in 1960 came up with “Come Blow Your Horn,” which became a modest Broadway hit. It was followed by “Barefoot in the Park” in 1963, which ran for more than 1,500 performances. Simon would go on to dominate the 1960s with “The Odd Couple,” “Sweet Charity,” “Plaza Suite” and “The Last of the Red Hot Lovers.”

In the ‘70s he turned out “The Prisoner of Second Avenue,” “The Sunshine Boys” and “California Suite” while his ‘80s works included “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” Biloxi Blues,” “Broadway Bound” and “Rumors.” Simon continued into the next decade with “Lost in Yonkers,” “Jake’s Women,” “The Goodbye Girl” and “Laughter on the 23rd Floor.”

His semi-autobiographical trilogy – “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” “Biloxi Blues” and “Broadway Bound – was a fixture on Broadway in the 1980s.

Creative ‘pinball machine’

Simon once compared his own creative process to a pinball machine, such as when he was writing “Lost in Yonkers.” The creative concept, he said, began “to move circuitously around in my brain, bouncing off one neuron to another, like a pinball that hits every number of the board repeatedly, rolls down, hits the flippers and goes bouncing back up for another go at every bell-ringing number again.”

Simon’s plays were usually set in New York with characters whose problems were similar to those experienced by Simon.

“Chapter Two,” for example, dealt with a writer whose first wife had died, trying to open himself to love a new woman. Simon’s wife of 20 years, Joan Baim, died of cancer in 1973, after which he married actress Marsha Mason, who starred in the 1979 film version of “Chapter Two.” Mason also won an Oscar for 1977’s “The Goodbye Girl,” another Simon play he adapted for the screen.

Simon received Kennedy Center honors in 1995 from President Bill Clinton for his contribution to the arts and to popular culture in the 20th century.

“He challenges us and himself never to take ourselves too seriously,” Clinton said in presenting the award. “Thank you for the wit and the wisdom.”

Simon was married five times, twice to actress Diane Lander. He is survived by wife Elaine Joyce and his three daughters from different marriages, the Times reported.

(Reuters)

Hey Leonard Cohen, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye

RIP, Leonard Cohen, the troubadour of lost souls and interpreter of our saddest moments

RIP, Leonard Cohen, the troubadour of lost souls and interpreter of our saddest moments.

Musician Leonard Cohen tips his hat to the audience as he accepts the 2012 Awards for Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. on February 26, 2012. REUTERS/Jessica Rinaldi/File Photo

A 2012 photo of Leonard Cohen who passed away on November 7 at the age of 82. Credit: Reuters/Jessica Rinaldi/File Photo

“There’s a crack, a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in,” sang Leonard Cohen, and like everything else he wrote, it is layered with depth and meaning. Interpret it the way you will, but it is tempting to look at it as a positive message in these dark times-don’t be downhearted, friends, there will always be a ray of hope.

Leonard Cohen, the troubadour of melancholy, the poet of loss and longing, the interpreter of our saddest moments, is no more. He died on November 7 but his death was announced three days later. Like Methuselah, we thought he would go on and on-didn’t he just bring out yet another album, You Want it Darker, at the age of 82? Wasn’t he still touring, drawing in the crowds wherever he went, the fans getting younger and younger, mesmerized by his gravelly and smoky voice emerging from some deep abyss, singing songs of isolation and love. How many heartbreaks have been nursed by his songs, how many moments of despair have been articulated just right by his words?

Cohen was born in Wesmont, Quebec, in an English speaking area of Francophone Montreal to a Jewish family. He recalled he had a very Messianic childhood, and references of the Jewish tradition are common in his work: “I’ve heard there was a secret chord/That David played and it pleased the Lord (Hallelujah): is the most obvious one, but there are many more.

Though he was already a reasonably well known but not successful writer in his native Canada, it was not until his first album Songs of Leonard Cohen that he really caught the attention of fans and critics. The album includes Suzanne, about a girl who wears “rags and furs from the Salvation Army counter”, which remains his signature song. Two more songs from the album, So Long Marianne and Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye have become better known over the years; both refer to his girlfriend, Marianne Ihlen, whom he met in Greece in 1967. Marianne died in July this year and just before her death, he had written to her, saying, “I will follow you soon.”

His next album Songs from a Room has the immortal Bird on a Wire, once again a song that has grown in reputation. It has the same sparse sound of his early songs, with an emphasis on the poetry and minimal instrumentation. This remained the Cohen hallmark till his music became more elaborate, in songs such as First we Take Manhattan which has a ‘synth-pop’ beat; it also is one of his most political songs, like Everybody Knows, which is replete with social satire that has a contemporary resonance:

Everybody knows the dice are loaded

Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed

Everybody knows that the war is over

Everybody knows the good guys lost

Everbody knows the fight was fixed

The poor stay poor, the rich get rich

That’s how it goes

Everybody knows

Cohen was deeply influenced by poets such as Lorca and when asked to interpret one of his poems, wrote the dream-like Take this Waltz, and sang with his muse and lover Anjani Thomas:

There’s a concert hall in Vienna

Where your mouth had a thousand reviews

There’s a bar where the boys have stopped talking

They’ve been sentenced to death by the blues

Ah, but who is it climbs to your picture

With a garland of freshly cut tears?

By the 1980s, he was getting famous, and younger listeners were discovering him. His songs were finding their way into films, such as Pump Up the Volume and Exotica and Natural Born Killers. His songs of angst and farewells appealed to a wide cross section of music fans who found them an antidote to the pap that was being churned out by the recording companies.

Cohen had always been interested in Buddhism and in the 1990s, he retreated to Mount Baldy Zen Center, meditating for five years, emerging as a fully ordained Rinzai Zen monk, with the name Jikan, which means silence. In 1999 he also came to Mumbai to meet his guru Ramesh Baleskar, a former banker and Advaita master, and spoke to journalist Khalid Mohammed.

The post monastery songs did not become as popular as his earlier work even if they were praised by critics. But he began touring more, at the advanced age of 68, when he discovered that thanks to financial mishandling and fraud by his advisor, he was completely broke. The tours were sold out and in the winter of his life, Leonard Cohen had become a bonafide superstar.

By that time, his song Hallelujah had become a huge hit, thanks to its use in the film Shrek, in which it was covered by Rufus Wainright. K D Lang sang a brilliant version for the opening of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

Apart from his recorded songs, Cohen wrote 13 books of poetry and two novels. Aching desire and long gone lovers are not the only themes in his work. Cohen also sang about democracy, war, death and peace. Though Israel and Judaism drew him and he remained a Jew even after his interest in Buddhism, he stayed away from partisanship, saying, “I don’t want to speak of wars and sides.”