Imaginary Conversation: Reflections on Israel and the Middle East

I am very sad. Sad for the Palestinians and sad for the Israelis. This post is my attempt to understand the senseless.

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The following is a transcript of a conversation with an imagined version of myself born and raised in Israel..

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[Enter zoom meeting. There are two heads on the screen.]

Halim - Could you start by telling us a little about yourself?

Hayim - My great-grandfather was a Russian Jew who escaped pogroms and other hardships in Russia. He left during the Second Aliyah, just before the War. My grandfather was born in Odessa, and my father and I were born in Jerusalem.

H - What was your childhood like?

H - We were poor. Our apartment had two rooms and a tiny kitchen. My parents had one room, while my sister and I slept on floor mats in the other, rolling them up each morning. Our neighborhood was full of Russians. Though my parents spoke Russian with each other, they insisted I learned Hebrew.

H - Why was that?

H - I think they wanted us to integrate into our new home. When I was a child, Israel was a melting pot, a “hodge-podge society” where one’s rank was often tied to one’s origins.

“… it was the pioneers who occupied the highest rung on the ladder of prestige. But the pioneers lived far from Jerusalem, in the Valleys, in Galilee, and in the wilderness on the shores of the Dead Sea … On the next rung below the pioneers stood the ‘affiliated community’, reading the socialist newspaper Davar in their singlets on summer verandas,… Over against this established community stood the ‘unaffiliated’, aka the terrorists, as well as the pious Jews of Meah Shearim, and the ‘Zion-hating’ ultra-orthodox communists, together with a mixed rabble of eccentric intellectuals, careerists, and egocentric artists of the decadent-cosmopolitan type, along with all sorts of outcasts and individualists and dubious nihilists, German Jews who had not managed to recover from their Germanic ways, Anglophile snobs, wealthy Frenchified levantines with what we considered the exaggerated manners of uppity butlers, and then the Yemenites, Georgians, North Africans, Kurds and Salonicans, all of them definitely our brothers, all of them undoubtedly promising human material, but what could you do, they would need a huge amount of patience and effort. Apart from all these, there were the refugees, the survivors, whom we generally treated with compassion and a certain revulsion.”

Oz, Amos. A Tale of Love and Darkness (pp. 12-13). Random House. Kindle Edition.

Hebrew was the only language that united Jews from such a variety of nations and backgrounds.

H - Did you have Arab neighbours?

H - No, though I remember a grocer selling cheese from a nearby Arab village. It was always cheaper than kibbutz cheese. But I don’t recall playing with Arab children or attending school with them.

H - Was this typical?

H - Yes. The kibbutz children also had little contact with the neighboring Arab villages.

H - Tony Judt had similar memories of kibbutzing before the War. Do you think things might have been different if Israel had been set up with mixed neighborhoods?

H - Martin Buber advocated for a different vision in the 1920s, one that avoided ignoring the Arab population. My parents disagreed, though. They felt kinship with Arabs was sentimental and that a Hebrew state would be less secure, reliant on Arab goodwill. Most people at the time felt this way.

H - What did you think?

H - I was too young to understand fully but remember feeling scared when these issues were discussed.

H - Why?

H - You know that immediately after the declaration of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, the armies of Egypt, Jordan (then Transjordan), Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, along with forces from other Arab countries and Palestinian militias, invaded our country. I was not born at that time but we read about it in School as our War of Independence. All my childhood, I remember fearing Arabs repeating this invasion and this time succeeding. I think most kids of my age had similar fears.

H - The 1948 war ended with significant land gains not only for Israel, but also for Egypt and Transjordan (today’s Jordan). The only losers were the Palestinians.

H - I do not think it was a conspiracy against Palestinians, even though they may have been the only losers of the 1948 War as you say. Today I see it as a result of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and a land grab by the former Ottoman subjects. This land grab had been delayed by 30 years due to the colonial rule.

When I was a child, all I knew was that seven Arab neighbours tried to invade us in the first year of our nation. They failed then but I was scared that we might not be lucky the next time. In fact, when I was 12, the Egyptian army entered the Sinai desert again and blockaded the Straits of Tiran, directly threatening the State of Israel, I remember asking my father if the Arabs were to conquer Israel? Would they throw us into the sea? A few days later the Six Day War began. Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) destroyed the air forces of four Arab countries in three hours. Within six days the IDF conquered the Sinai desert, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. I remember the joy on our street. It was less than a decade before another attempted invasion happened. This time, the Yom Kipur war in 1973 almost destroyed Israel, certainly destroyed our jubilance and renewed our existential anxiety. “The two diametrically opposed war experiences, which occurred within six years of each other, threw the Israeli psyche out of balance, ” said Ari Shavit and he was right.

H - What happened afterwards?

H - Setlements happened. They started after Yom Kipur 1973. Seeing the secular Zionists almost losing the war, the religious Zionism got stronger and they wanted to settle Judea and Samaria and make them an integral part of Israel. The weakened Labour Government could not stop them. I think the future path of Israel was redrawn after 1973 and this was the religious Zionist path. We have been following that path since then.

H - So you believe that the root causes of today’s troubles are the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Would things be different if the 1948 War ended with a permanent peace treaty between Israel and its Arab neighbours instead of the Armistice agreements as it happened?

H - Yes. The whole history of Israel and Middle East could have been different and a much happier one. Unfortunately, no Arab State was interested in recognising Israel by signing a peace agreement.

H - Incidentally, this is the map proposed by the United Nations for the partition of Palestine into two states:

Wikipedia

Yellow shaded areas are for the proposed state of Palestine and the blue shaded area is for the Jewish State, Israel.

After the 1948 War, most of the yellow area in the above map was invaded by Egypt and Jordan as shown below:

BBC - Israeli Maps

H - One interesting point about the above map is that both Egypt and Jordan now formally recognise Israel (Egypt since 1979 and Jordan since 1994). If this decision to formally recognise Israel were made in 1949 by these two countries, the conflict would have ended there.

H - Some people would still raise the plight of the displaced Palestiniand after the 1948 war as an obstacle to peace.

H - 700,000 Palestinian Arabs became refugees during that war. Arabs refer to it as the Nakba (the Catastrophe), which is an apt name because no one assisted these refugees and they experienced immense hardships. Similar number of Jews left their Arabic homes and emmigrated to Israel where they were welcome and received government assistance. You know very well that Turkey and Greece successfully handled a much larger population exchange in 1924. I refer you to your own post. While the massive 1924 population exchange was permitted even forced between Greece and Turkey and was managed successfully by these two nations, a much smaller group of refugees was totally mishandled and became a catastrophy for them in 1949.

H - Right. Until I started writing this post, I did not know how relatively small that number was. I would have expected those refugees to be managed by the two Arab nations that partitioned the land earmarked by the UN for a future Palestinian state. Both Egypt and Jordan were relatively new states at that time and still under the influence of United Kingdom. UK pushed for forced Greek-Turkish population exchange very strongly at Lausanne but seemed to have decided to remain indifferent in the instance of the Palestinian refugees.

H - I do not know what influence UK had on Egypt and Jordan.

H - The past is past. What happens now? Last year, straight after the Hamas murders, I asked “if the Israeli government had the foresight to forego a kneejerk response in favour of a necessarily delayed but civilised process that still duly punished killers but would spare the innocents. Unfortunately, the Israeli government chose the path of answering violence with more violence. We will all learn once more that those to whom evil is done do evil in return.”

H - I read both posts, Part 1, and Part 2. Some parts, I am sorry to say, I found gratituous and ignorant. Needless to say, I do not agree with them.

H - I am sorry you think so. My point in those posts were that answering violence by violence simply continues this blood feud and further isolates Israel in the global public opinion. Since that time, the IDF killed 40,000 people in Gazza, mostly civilians, and the Netanyahu government is now threatening to do the same in Lebanon. Most Western governments, except USA, are trying to distance themselves from the Israeli actions. The French President recently asked for an arms ambargo against Israel. Israel is being tried at the International Court of Justice for genocide acts. All of these are vindicating my points.

H - In your first post, you say “the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a blood feud fueled by a desire for revenge, perpetuating a cycle of violence.” I disagree vehemently. This conflict is not a blood feud for us. We are not interested in continuing this fight but at the same time we have to defend ourselves.

How do you think the Turks would behave if a Greek government fired missiles on Ankara. What would Erdogan do if the Greek Prime Minister said that “from the Ararat mountain to the Aegean Sea and from its north to its south, Asia Minor is Greek land. Constantinople is our Holy City and our goal, and there is no place for the Turkish invaders on the Anatolian peninsula”? I did not imagine this sentence. It is what Khaled Meshaal said after a Friday prayer, I only changed the place names to fit a Greek - Turkish dispute and to make my point.

On the other hand, we Israelis do not hold grudges. Israel’s fight with Egypt and Jordan ended on the day they stopped wanting to destroy Israel. Israel has no reason to keep fighting Iran and its proxies if they also accept our right to live.

H - I have no problem with Israel’s right to defend itself. My problem is the killing of 40,000 people in Gazza, mostly civilians, women and children. Netanyahu now says that he will do the same thing in Lebanon. Do you think this is justified?

H - Killing of innocents can never be defended. On the other hand, even Amos Oz thought that sometimes there are no good options. Oz supported Israeli actions in Gaza during the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict, criticizing the tactic of using human shields, widely imputed to be employed by Hamas at the time, asking: "What would you do if your neighbor across the street sits down on the balcony, puts his little boy on his lap, and starts shooting machine-gun fire into your nursery? What would you do if your neighbor across the street digs a tunnel from his nursery to your nursery in order to blow up your home or in order to kidnap your family?"

I do not like the Netanyahu government, but I have to recognise that their options being limited in October 2023. Your last year‘s post said “Israel is justified to demand punishment but I am hoping it will choose to form an international coalition to do this instead of taking actions that will result in deaths of many more innocents.” This was not feasible. What nation would join Israel in a Gazza policing action? Would our Arab neighbours do it? Turkey? Would UN pass a resolution in support of such an action? Even America would be reluctant to participate. Israel had to do it on its own.

H - Netanyahu government did not even try. At the very least, Israel could have sought collaboration with Egypt towards a protected area on the Egyptian land bordering Gaza, for the civilians to take shelter while the IDF was pursuing the Hamas in Gazza.

H - Egypt would never agree to it.

H - Did the present approach work? What did Israel achieve with the killing of 40,000 people? Hostages were not freed. In fact, some probably died because of the invasion. Some of the Hamas leaders were killed but Hamas will continue. In fact, some people say that Hamas is not an organisation but an idea. How is Israel going to kill an idea?

H - There are ideas that are of basic human nature. For example, the idea of freedom, the idea of basic human rights. I agree that you cannot kill such ideas. Hamas is not such an idea. It is an evil construct based on the tenet “Israelis are invaders, kill them all”. Ordinary people including Arabs do not think like that. Without Iranian backing, this evil Hamas ideology cannot gain local support.

H - You may be right but Iran is not going away. Israel will have to live in this neighbourhood in the future. The way I see it, Israel so far has survived by always favouring the nastiest actors in the Arab world at the expense of more temperate ones and when these nasties perpetrated horrific actions against Israel, Israel used those actions as an excuse to further expand its grip on the land. As long as the USA maintains its power and Israel can continue on relying on unconditional US support, this policy may work. But I am afraid for Israel that this era seems to be approaching a closure or at least a transformation.

H - …

H - I think we should stop here. I was interested in your thoughts about the possible future where an economically diminished USA might want to limit his presence in Middle East to better focus on Americas and Far East. However, this talk has already gone too long and we should stop here. I wish the best for you and the family.

H - The same.

[Exit zoom]

References

Judt, T. (2005). Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. Penguin.

Oz, Amos (first published in Hebrew in 2002). A Tale of Love and Darkness.

Oz, Amos (2014). Judas.

Shavit, Ari. My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel . Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

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Postscript

My great-grandfather was a Tartar born in Bessarabia. He brought his family to Istanbul on a boat before the first World War to escape the violence and bloodshed of the Balkan Wars at that time. The Ottoman Sultan settled him in Eskisehir, where my father was born in 1925 and I in 1955.

I emigrated to Australia in 1982 and have been living there ever since, but that’s another story.

In this post I am imagining I have a friend in Israel at exactly my age, named Hayim. Hayim’s great-grandfather was not a Tartar living in Bessarabia but a Jew living in Russia and he brought his family to Palestine to escape the pogroms. This was during the Second Aliyah before the First World War. Hayim’s Dad is born in the same year as mine, i.e. in 1925 in Jerusalem. Hayim is born in 1955 in the same city.

No part of the above post should be understood as defending the actions of Hamas or Hezbollah. I see both as criminal and malevolent organizations that thrive by exploiting the plight of Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank. Nothing would please me more than to see their defeat and the prosecution of their leaders. However, I don’t believe that Israel’s current actions serve this purpose. They will only escalate the conflict, and rather than weaken Hamas and Hezbollah, they may actually strengthen their influence in the occupied territories. Additionally, these actions are likely to increase the influence of religious Zionism at the expense of secularism and further isolate Israel on the global stage.

Israel is one of the best-educated nations in the world. I’ve prepared the following table to compare some basic metrics across four countries:

It’s disheartening that, despite its high level of education, Israel risks becoming another ultra-religious Middle Eastern nation. This seems to be the direction Netanyahu and his coalition partners are steering the country.

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Short Takes

2024 Nobel Prizes

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for their work on artificial neural networks. While they didn’t invent artificial neural networks, they introduced feedback mechanisms and backpropagation, which made it possible to train these systems effectively. Both are pioneers in machine learning, and their contributions are undeniably important—but this is not physics. Admittedly, Hopfield was led to develop recurrent neural networks through his background in statistical mechanics and physical chemistry. Hinton, however, is not a physicist; he’s a psychologist.

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was shared equally between David Baker of the University of Washington and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis and John Jumper. The Google duo developed AlphaFold2, an advanced AI system designed to predict protein structures with remarkable accuracy. This breakthrough has significant implications for drug and vaccine development, and DeepMind’s decision to release it as open source has accelerated its adoption by researchers worldwide.

Awarding two (or perhaps one and a half) science Nobels to AI work reflects just how crucial computing—and AI in particular—has become to scientific research. It also, I think, highlights the lack of groundbreaking progress in physics itself, despite the billions being poured into exotic areas of study.

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature went to a Korean author. I read one of her books (I review it in my Book Review section below).

The Australian media had mentioned Gerald Murnane as a candidate. I read Murnane’s The Plains about twenty years ago and remember it as an inventive allegory on the people and landscape of the Australian outback.

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Another miracle by SpaceX

Associated Press, 14 October 2024

In May 2023, I wrote about how “the confluence of competent AI and cheap orbital launch technologies will bring on a new space age with space habitats and automated orbital factories before the end of this century” and how Elon Musk and SpaceX seemed to be the agency for this transformation.

Last week, SpaceX achieved another milestone toward that future. As you may know, up until now, rockets have been lifted to escape velocity by a booster, which then detaches and falls back to Earth. Last week, the enormous 71-m tall 270-tonne Super Heavy booster for the Starship was successfully made to return to the launchpad, where it was captured and secured my mechanical arms SpaceX calls “chopsticks”.

Reusable boosters will make future rocket flights so much cheaper. This is exciting not only for travellling to Mars but also for intercontinental flights in Earth.

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Diary

Jacaranda Bloom

Jacaranda is native to South America. They were introduced to Australia in 19th century, first in Brisbane. They are very popular especially in their blooming season, which is now. Here you see Jacaranda trees along the lake on the University of Queensland campus.

I took the following photo near our home from the car park of the Sunnybank Plaza shopping centre:

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Queensland State Election

I live in Queensland, which will hold a state election on October 26. The incumbent government is the Labor Party, which has been in power for the past eight years. Pictured above on the left is the current Premier, Steven Miles, and on the right is the Leader of the Opposition, David Crisafulli. It seems like politicians are getting younger every year.

Australia has three levels of government:

• Federal — one national government

• State — six state governments

• Local — numerous local councils

Any party that holds power for eight years inevitably becomes complacent, and Queensland Labor is no exception. As it looks like they might lose this election, they’ve recently introduced policies that seem aimed at buying votes. For example, they announced a $500 rebate on electricity bills and almost-free (50-cent) public transport two months ago. Last week, they introduced two new policies: new bulk-billing clinics and free school lunches.

Will these initiatives be enough to keep them in power? We’ll see—but probably not.

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You Tube

When I worked for Labtam in Melbourne in the 1980s, a colleague’s brother was researching the vulnerability of parts of the Great Barrier Reef to rising ocean temperatures. This was the first time I became aware of what we now call climate change. I have to admit, I didn’t take it too seriously at the time.

Forty years later, insurance premiums for Florida real estate are skyrocketing due to the increased frequency of natural disasters attributed to climate change. (Listen to the second part starting at 15 minutes in.)

In support of the assertions of the All-In quartet, Reuters quotes the US investment bank Jefferies that estimates the cost of a 1-in-100-year event as “$175 billion in losses for landfall in the Tampa region, and $70 billion in losses in the Fort Myers region". As the 1-in-100 events start happening every 10 or 20 years, the insurance costs may indeed start becoming unsustainable.

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Pascal Hagi

Pascal and Hagi are watching TV with us in this video. The painting on the wall, Two Friends, is a present from Taylan. He gave it to us after Pascal came back and Hagi joined him.

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What I read

I picked up Human Acts after hearing about the 2024 Nobel Prize, and I’m surprised I hadn’t come across Han Kang before. This tells me how vast our ignorance is and, therefore, how difficult it is to make definitive statements about anything. Perhaps that’s why conviction politicians tend to be so successful—they’re untroubled by doubts about their own opinions.

Human Acts centers on the student-led demonstrations that took place in Gwangju, South Korea, in May 1980. At that time, South Korea was ruled by successive military juntas. The country’s first president, Syngman Rhee, resigned in 1960 following protests that left 185 people dead. After a brief period of instability, General Park Chung Hee seized power in a 1961 coup and ruled until he was assassinated in 1979 by his own Director of Security. General Chun Doo-hwan then took control, imposing martial law nationwide, banning political activities, and closing universities.

After almost two decades of Park Chung-hee, South Korean citizens recognised a dictator when they saw one. In the southern city of Gwangju, student demonstrations had their numbers swelled by those for whom the country’s ‘miraculous’ industrialisation had meant back-breaking work in hazardous conditions, and for whom recent unionisation had led to greater political awareness. Paratroopers were sent in to take over from the police, but their brutality against unarmed citizens resulted in a still greater turnout in support of the civil militias. Together, they managed a brief respite during which the army retreated from the city centre. … Han Kang starts with bodies. Piled up, reeking, unclaimed and thus unburied, they present both a logistical and an ontological dilemma. … In Gwangju, part of the magnitude of the crime was that the violence done to these bodies, and the manner in which they had been dumped or hidden away, meant they were unable to be identified and given the proper burial rites by their families.

(from the Introduction by Deborah Smith who translated the book to English, Granta Publications, Kindle edition)

To this day, the exact number of people killed in Gwangju remains unknown. The official count—200 civilian deaths—was initially protected by law from dispute, with those who challenged it risking arrest. Despite substantial evidence of a higher death toll, this number remains unchanged in the official record.

The book opens with a group of young people guarding the dead in a gymnasium. They wash the bodies and attempt to identify them so families can be notified. The first chapter follows a high-school student who was caught up in the demonstrations while looking for his sister and saw his friend shot by a sniper. Han Kang uses second-person narration throughout the book, which is hauntingly effective in conveying both the grief of the characters and the cruelty of the soldiers.

As the corpses had only been given a cursory treatment, it was left to the bereaved to stop their noses and ears with cotton wool and give them a fresh change of clothing. Once they had been thus simply dressed and placed into a coffin, it was your job to oversee the transfer to the gym, and make a note of everything in your ledger. The one stage in the process that you couldn’t quite get your head around was the singing of the national anthem, which took place at a brief, informal memorial service for the bereaved families, after their dead had been formally placed in the coffins. It was also strange to see the Taegukgi, the national flag, being spread over each coffin and tied tightly in place. Why would you sing the national anthem for people who’d been killed by soldiers? Why cover the coffin with the Taegukgi? As though it wasn’t the nation itself that had murdered them.

Kang, Han. Human Acts (pp. 22-23). Granta Publications. Kindle Edition.

Most of the young people in the gymnasium that night are later killed by the army; others are arrested and tortured. The subsequent chapters explore the fates of the survivors and the lasting trauma they carry.

This is not an easy book to read. Although relatively short, it is terrifying in places. Han Kang asks whether cruelty is the only experience that truly unites us as a species. Is the dignity we cling to merely a self-delusion, masking the reality that degradation, suffering, and slaughter are humanity’s essential fate—a fate history has confirmed time and again?

The humanist in me resists answering “yes” to that question. But after reading Human Acts, I can’t help but wonder why, in some countries, the military can turn so brutally against its own people. Is this a product of the national psyche, a consequence of local conditions, or simply a matter of how military officers are trained?

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Other Books

• Yellowface, Rebecca F Kuang — This is the probably most popular book by RF Kuang but I did not like it as much as her Poppy Wars trilogy or Babel.

• Lake of Darkness, Adam Roberts — One reads Adam Roberts for his inventive take on interesting questions. Here you get an inkling of how a post-scarcity society might work and how unprotected it may become against an evil intrusion.

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AT Index

Based on my basket of goods, Australia is 85% more expensive this week compared to Istanbul. Below are the prices in Turkish liras for the items in the basket on 13 October 2024. The exchange rate is 1AUD=23.15TRY.

The following is the plot of AT index. The height of the bar represents how more expensive Australia is.

The code to create the above tables and the plot is in my github repository and can be downloaded if you are interested.