Ariel Sharon: The Andrew Jackson of Israel.

A 2005 photo of Ariel Sharon. (Kevin Frayer/AFP/Getty Images.)

Warrior, Farmer, Leader. By Aaron David Miller. Foreign Policy, January 11, 2014. Also here.

Ariel Sharon: Israel’s Soldier and Strongman, 1928-2014. By Karl Vick and Lisa Beyer. Time, January 11, 2014.

Ariel Sharon: A Hard Charger Who Was Loved and Hated. By Josef Federman. AP. Real Clear World, January 11, 2014.

Remembering Ariel Sharon – a great man who defied stereotypes. By Judith Miller. FoxNews.com, January 11, 2014.

Ariel Sharon: Larger Than Life. By Caroline Glick. Townhall.com, January 12, 2014. Also at National Review Online, CarolineGlick.com.

Sharon: Myths, Facts, and Blood Libels. By Tom Gross. National Review Online, January 11, 2014.

Ariel Sharon: 1928-2014. By Benny Morris. Tablet, January 11, 2014.

Ariel Sharon’s Legacy of Separation. By Geoffrey Levin. The Atlantic, January 11, 2014.

Left for dead in 1948: The battle that shaped Arik Sharon. By Mitch Ginsburg. The Times of Israel, January 12, 2014.

Sharon, a warrior who sought peace. By Michael Oren. CNN, January 11, 2014.

Sharon realized the limits of military power. By Gideon Levy. Haaretz, January 11, 2014.

Sharon’s contradictory life and legacy: The good, the bad and the very, very ugly. By Chemi Shalev. Haaretz, January 11, 2014.

Sharon’s lasting legacy: Proving that rabbis and settlers can be defied. By Anshel Pfeffer. Haaretz, January 10, 2013.

Ariel Sharon, the Ruthless Warrior Who Could Have Made Peace. By Ronen Bergman. New York Times, January 11, 2014.

Ariel Sharon: Champion of controversy. By Amir Oren. Haaretz, January 12, 2014.

“Sharon was no warmonger, he just put Israel first.” Ron Ben-Yishai interviewed by Atilla Somfalvi. Ynet News, January 12, 2014.

Sharon: The man who executed the Zionist vision. By Nahum Barnea. Ynet News, January 12, 2014.

Barnea:

The life of Ariel Sharon and the life of the State of Israel are intertwined. He was everything the State’s forefathers dreamed of seeing in the generation of the sons, the born Israelis: Handsome, strong, a farmer working his land, a soldier for life. The forefathers provided the vision; the sons – the execution. And there wasn’t a more determined, talented, scheming person of execution than Ariel Sharon.

. . . .

 

He didn’t believe in peace agreements. In that he was no different from most of the members of his generation, who were raised on the sword and found it difficult to accept any Palestinian as a partner. He believed in unilateral moves. They matched his activist character, and catered to his anxieties over an external solution, a forced solution. If he hadn’t fallen asleep in 2006, he would have spent several months in negotiations doomed to fail with the Palestinians, and then carried out a one-sided withdrawal from most of the West Bank. That was his scheme.


Let’s Remember the Dark Side of Ariel Sharon’s Legacy—and Bury “Sharonism” With Him. By Gershom Gorenberg. Tablet, January 13, 2014.

Arik the Recalcitrant and Brutal. By Emily L. Hauser. Haaretz, January 13, 2014.

How will Sharon be remembered? By Sima Kadmon. Ynet News, January 13, 2014.

What if Sharon Still Lived. By David Landau. New York Times, January 13, 2014.

Burying Unilateralsm Along With its Patron. By Tom Wilson. Commentary, January 13, 2014.

Why I can’t mourn for Ariel Sharon. By Amit Schejter. Haaretz, January 14, 2014.

“How fast can you run?” A soldier remembers Sharon. By Barbara Opall-Rome. The Times of Israel, January 14, 2014.

Sharon realized occupation was the greatest threat to Israel, says just-released biography. By Judy Maltz. Haaretz, January 14, 2014.

Sharon didn’t embrace peace, he defeated it. By Daniel Levy. Al Jazeera America, January 14, 2014.

Top Ten Ways Ariel Sharon Ruined Israel and the Middle East. By Juan Cole. Informed Comment, January 14, 2014. Also at History News Network.

Call Off the Sainthood of Ariel Sharon. By Rashid Khalidi. Foreign Policy, January 13, 2014. Also here.

Sharon: The Man Who Made Peace Impossible. By Ali Jarbawi. New York Times, January 21, 2014.

Ariel Sharon and the Great Leader Peace Myth. By Jonathan S. Tobin. NJBR, January 3, 2014. With related article by Jacob Heibrunn.


Khalidi:

Sharon was emblematic of the Israeli refusal to accept that Palestinian resistance was an inevitable response to the forcible establishment of a Jewish state and the concomitant expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. In later years, he became one of the most sophisticated employers of the trope of “terrorism” to demean this resistance.


Miller:

Reflections on the flawed-but-unmatched legacy of Israel’s Ariel Sharon.


Love him or hate him, Ariel Sharon was a stunningly consequential, larger than life, and historic figure the likes of whom we will not see again. For those Palestinians, Arabs, and even Israelis who will never forget or forgive his transgressions, that’s just as well. Still, Sharon’s passing highlights the troubling reality of a region without leaders. This isn’t so much reflected in the comparison of what Sharon accomplished to what little has been achieved by current politicians in the Middle East; Sharon was far too controversial for greatness. Rather, it is reflected in the thought of what leaders of Sharon’s stature, authority, and power might be able to do for the Middle East today if they had the necessary skill, strategy, and partnerships.

 

We face a regional leadership vacuum: In Israel, younger leaders lack the credibility of their predecessors. Among the Palestinians, Mahmoud Abbas may have the desire to make peace, but he does not have the power. He’s also 78, and it is not evident what figure of national prominence could succeed him and unite a divided Palestinian polity. And in the Arab world, you would be hard-pressed to identify a single leader of vision and capacity.

 

You might say that we’re rudderless. In contrast, Sharon – for all his flaws – could steer the ship that was his country, and particularly as prime minister, he did so boldly.

 

I met Ariel Sharon for the first time at a Druze wedding feast outside of Haifa in the summer of 1973, a few months before the October war. He was much thinner and more agile then and bounded out of his Israel Defense Forces (IDF) jeep bantering in Arabic, plunging into the crowd of Druze and Israeli Arabs who had gathered to greet him. The bride's family was honored he had come, and Sharon seemed as comfortable there as he might have been at a Jewish wedding in Tel Aviv.

 

His appetite was already legendary. My wife Lindsay and I watched him devour the heaping platters of rice and steaming lamb – including the brains, of course, which we and Sharon, as guests, were offered. Years later, at meetings with various prime ministers, I’d watch Sharon consume hard-boiled eggs and sandwiches with such abandon that I wondered even then about his life expectancy.

 

Even more legendary at that time was Sharon’s image as a bold, courageous, and somewhat reckless warrior. His battlefield exploits in crossing the Suez Canal in October 1973 were well-known, as were his grand schemes to use the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon to push the Syrians out, make the Lebanese Christians allies of Israel, and force the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) into Jordan, and convert the Hashemite Kingdom into a Palestinian state.

 

These schemes were as nutty as they were dangerous; certainly, the Palestinians, Lebanese, and Israelis who died in the course of them paid dearly.

 

As it turned out, an Israeli State Commission charged Sharon with indirect responsibility for allowing Christian militias to massacre hundreds of Palestinian innocents in Sabra and Shatila. He resigned as minister of defense. As for his schemes, the Palestinians didn’t end up in Amman but instead went to Tunis. Sharon, it turns out, produced the very circumstances he had sought to avoid. Stripped of a military option and stunned by the First Intifada, Yasser Arafat ended up in a political process that brought him to where Sharon didn’t want him: the West Bank and Gaza.

 

There may not be second acts in American politics. But Sharon’s rise to prime minister – a move few thought imaginable, given his role in the 1982 war and his bulldozing personality – revealed that there are in Israel. His election in February 2001 over Ehud Barak – the largest electoral landslide in Israel’s history – reflected Barak’s unpopularity and the public’s fear and anger at Palestinian suicide attacks during the Second Intifada. It also demonstrated the desire for strong, experienced, and tough leadership from a man much of the public believed might break the back of Palestinian terrorism. And through security measures, the wall/security barrier (which he initially opposed), and targeted killings, he delivered.

 

In addition to being a warrior, Sharon was also a farmer, with a deep knowledge of and connection to the land – both its agricultural and biblical dimensions. He was proud of this fact and loved to talk animals, or about them. This was on display at the 1998 Wye River Summit, hosted by President Bill Clinton in the United States. Sharon refused to shake Arafat's hand, and he talked about the Palestinians in the third person even though they were sitting at the same table. Indeed, Sharon seemed more interested in the herd of prize Angus cows that the University of Maryland maintained at the Wye River plantation than in the negotiations themselves. Also, on more than one occasion at his farm at Shikmim in southern Israel, Sharon insisted on talking flowers and livestock before business. In 2002, on the helicopter tour he gave Gen. Anthony Zinni, then the Bush administration’s special envoy on the peace process, Sharon narrated with the authority of a man who had walked or driven every kilometer from the Lebanese border to the Negev. Watching Sharon explain the real estate, I thought of the poet’s line about individuals being monarchs of all they survey. Sharon was certainly that.

 

As prime minister, Sharon matured. I think he learned at least two critical things about his own politics: First, that he had to read the public correctly and not overreach; and second, that if it was possible to do and didn’t cost much, he should keep the Americans happy. Sharon's decision to disengage from Gaza – and essentially take down the settlement enterprise he had created – did both these things. However imperfect the disengagement turned out to be, it was an act of boldness and brilliance that no other Israeli politician of his day could have implemented. Hamas or no Hamas, few Israelis would still want the IDF in Gaza today, even with Hezbollah’s rockets in southern Lebanon.

 

Just as Sharon learned two things as prime minister, upon his passing, I now have two takeaways on his legacy.

 

First, with Sharon gone, Israel faces a significant leadership transition. Only the extraordinary and indefatigable Shimon Peres – now 90 – remains from the cast of Israeli characters who shepherded the state through its early years. At a breakfast once at Sharon’s farm with Peres, I watched the two interact. Despite their political differences, there was a real affection and a shared sense of history between them. Indeed, they had both seen just about everything. At one point, Peres actually said that there were few surprises left for the two of them.

 

The Israeli prime ministers who have followed that generation – Barak, Ehud Olmert, and Benjamin Netanyahu – are incredibly smart, able leaders. But they don’t have the same authority, legitimacy, and authenticity as their predecessors. Despite their flaws and mistakes, Israel’s previous leaders had tremendous will and skill to keep a challenging enterprise afloat and prosperous during very tough times. Who now will make the difficult but important decisions? Sharon presided over the evacuation of 8,000 Israeli settlers from Gaza – deeply traumatic but without serious or sustained violence. Who will deal with the evacuation of tens of thousands of ideologically motivated and well-armed Israelis living on the West Bank? The answer just isn’t clear.

 

Second, Sharon was not a peacemaker. Suspicious and mistrustful, he believed deeply that Israel was engaged in a hundred-year war with the Arabs and had profound doubts about the viability of a Palestinian state. He asked me once whether it was true that I wanted to become the first ambassador to the state of Palestine. When I said no, he laughed and said that was a good thing because there would never be one.

 

Could Sharon – a man with the power to make big decisions – have changed his tune while prime minister, had he not been felled by a stroke? I doubt it. But we’ll never know.

 

Had he changed his mind while in office, it would have confirmed the reality that, on the Israeli side, the history of peacemaking isn’t the purview of the left, the doves, or even the moderate right. Instead, it's a history of transformed hawks – Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, and perhaps Netanyahu, still the only Likud prime minister to have actually withdrawn from any West Bank territory. By and large tough guys who, for any number of reasons, believed – as Sharon did in calling for disengagement from Gaza – that the situation (and Israel’s interests) demanded a change.

 

Yet the equation of peace requires many parts to reach a conflict-ending solution. Even if U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry succeeds in getting a framework agreement on peace, anything remotely resembling the creation of a Palestinian state, let alone a true end to the Israeli-Palestinian problem, will require heroic leaders on both sides willing and able to make big decisions. And in the wake of Sharon’s passing, I’m reminded, sadly, that even will and capacity aren’t enough. Such leaders must also have the desire to do get the job done.


Vick and Beyer:

Ariel Sharon died Saturday after having spent the last eight of his 85 years on life support. Incapacitated by a coma that followed a massive stroke, Sharon’s last hours were spent with members of his family at his bedside. Outside, an Israeli nation watched with one eye on the news and another on the past, re-assessing the qualities of a leader whose lifetime spanned the life of the nation.

 

The long illness, out of public view, seemed to transform how Israelis viewed Sharon. In active life, he had always been a warrior first — a profoundly polarizing one, in the thick of every major conflict during the nearly six decades Sharon spent either in the Israeli military or running it. As an invalid, the hard edges disappeared.

 

When Sharon was remembered at all in recent years, it was for the five years he spent as prime minister. His signature actions in office – including the unilateral pull-out  of Jewish settlers and troops from the Gaza Strip, and leaving behind the rightist Likud Party he founded to start the center-right Kadima –  were seen as the bold strokes of a confident leader, a quality more associated with the country’s vanishing Founding generation than the media-genic politicians who followed.

 

“People are forgiving him for what happened in the past, and he is seen as a national icon today,” his longtime media adviser, Ra’anan Gisson told TIME last week, after doctors announced that the end was finally coming. “This is the reincarnation of Israel that people would like to see in the future.”

 

The following piece on Sharon, “The Lonely Warrior,” was written by Lisa Beyer and ran in TIME magazine on Jan. 9, 2006 after Sharon had slipped into a coma.

 

To his detractors, Ariel Sharon will always seem the fanatic. He convinced Menachem Begin that invading Lebanon in 1982 would be worth the costs, and in 2000 he insisted on visiting the Temple Mount, the Muslim-controlled holy site in Jerusalem—a walkabout that helped trigger the second intifadeh. As Israel’s Foreign Minister, he refused to shake Yasser Arafat’s hand at the Wye Plantation peace talks in 1998 and eventually made sure Arafat spent his last years barricaded in his offices in Ramallah, unable to jet around the world espousing the Palestinian cause. His planetary dimensions—at 5 ft. 7 in., he weighed as much as 312 lbs.—have long suggested a lack of discipline at the table that many think reflects a deeper wildness. At one point, American intelligence monitored Sharon’s weight in an effort to predict his actions—the theory being the more he consumed, the more adveanturously he would behave. Alluding to his politics, Sharon once acknowledged that he was thought of as someone who “eats Arabs for breakfast.”

 

That is one image of Ariel Sharon: the right-wing zealot. In the past few years, another reputation has taken hold: Sharon reborn as peacemaker. The idea is that, having achieved his dream of becoming Prime Minister of Israel in 2001 at the age of 73, Sharon would—in a Nixon-goes-to-China kind of way—become the man to reconcile the Israelis and Palestinians once and for all. That was his campaign slogan: “Only Sharon can bring peace.” And people inside and outside Israel began to believe it after Sharon, the man who once planned and nurtured the Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip, had them forcibly evacuated last August, enabling Israeli troops to leave and turning the entire Gaza Strip at last over to Palestinian self-rule. In the weeks before Sharon’s debilitating stroke, rumors abounded that he was preparing to make bold withdrawals in the West Bank as well.

 

Sharon, however, has always resisted the stereotypes imposed on him. He was never an unrelenting right-wing ideologue nor, in recent years, a devotee of peace-making. Politically, Sharon is best known as a co-founder of the hawkish Likud bloc, but he has been a member of four other parties, including the precursor to the left-wing Labor Party, in which he started out, and his own creation, Shlomzion, which flirted with doves.

 

Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip served the interests of peace, although that was perhaps not why Sharon carried it out. His emissaries suggested that he quit Gaza—a sandy, squalid quarter to which few Israelis feel any attachment—to win goodwill in the world in order to strengthen Israel’s claim to its more valued settlements in the West Bank. Media reports recently suggested Sharon was prepared to unilaterally draw a border in the West Bank between Israel and what might become a Palestinian state, emptying Jewish settlements that fell on the wrong side. It’s an interesting idea, and perhaps a good one, but it’s not peacemaking, which requires mutual consent. Sharon almost certainly would have apportioned more West Bank land to Israel than the Palestinians would have kept the conflict alive. His notion of coming to terms with the Palestinians is a bit like the idea that getting out of a bad marriage is as simple as saying, “I divorce thee,” and dictating the property settlement.

 

But what made Sharon such an enduring—and ultimately appealing—politician was his obdurate self-belief, a refusal to be bound by the constraints of negotiated agreements or ideology. Whatever Sharon did, he was at least as devoted to the fight as to the cause. That is what made him one of the greatest—some peers say the greatest—military commander in Israeli history. It’s what enabled him, from a variety of Cabinet posts, to construct settlements in the face of international opprobrium. But it’s also what allowed him not only to evacuate Gaza but, 23 years earlier, to tear down settlements in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula and use water cannons to force out the Israelis there, putting Israel in compliance with Israel’s 1979 peace treaty with Egypt.

 

Sharon loved the military. He writes in his autobiography that it was in the camaraderie of the army that he first experienced expressions of familial love that he had missed out on as a child. He grew up in Kfar Malal, a moshav, or collection of farms in which major equipment is jointly owned. His parents were so prickly that the family was ostracized on the moshav. Life was hard. Theirs was a three-room house made of mud and manure walls. Sharon’s response was to focus on work. “You could lose yourself in it,” he wrote.

 

At 13, armed with a club and a dagger, he joined the older moshavniks guarding the fields at night from sporadic attacks by Arab villagers living nearby. “They were not afraid of anything,” he observed of the moshavniks, a quality he emulated the rest of his life. He respected the moshavniks’ views about the local Arabs: they believed the Arabs had “full rights in the land” but only Jews had rights “over the land.” Translation: you can live here, but under us.

 

Sharon, known as Arik to everyone, was just 14 when he joined the Haganah, a Jewish militia in British mandatory Palestine. Six years later he fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that erupted after Israel declared its independence. As he rose through the ranks, he played a significant role in every one of Israel’s wars. In 1967 he commanded one of three divisions that wrested the Sinai peninsula from Egypt.  In 1973 he led a counterattack in Sinai that broke through Egyptian lines and ended up just 60 miles outside Cairo.

 

Where Sharon fought, there was usually controversy. As head of Unit 101, Israel’s first commando team, he was assigned in 1953 to avenge the murder of an Israeli woman and her two toddlers by Palestinian infiltrators from the West Bank village of Qibya. Sharon’s forces destroyed a few dozen buildings in Qibya, killing 69 villagers and earning Israel a censure at the U.N. Charged with cleaning Palestinian fighters out of the now Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip after the ’67 war, he did so with ruthless efficiency. It was Sharon who pushed Israeli Prime Minister Begin to bomb Iraq’s nuclear facilities in 1981, an operation applauded today but widely condemned then.

 

Israel’s most divisive war is often laid at Sharon’s feet: the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which he planned as Minister of Defense. One objective, running the P.L.O. out of Lebanon, was largely achieved, but the scheme to install in power the leader of the Lebanese Phalangist militia, a Christian group friendly to Israel, was a debacle. After Phalangist forces massacred as many as 800 men, women and children at the Palestinian refugee camps Sabra and Shatila, an Israeli inquiry concluded that Sharon bore “indirect” responsibility, forcing him to resign as Defense Minister. Sharon sued TIME for $50 million for a 1983 cover story that said a secret appendix to the Israeli report stated, in effect, that he had encouraged the massacre. In 1985 a federal jury in New York City concluded that TIME had not libeled Sharon, though it also found that the magazine had acted negligently; after being allowed to examine the appendix during the trial, TIME acknowledged that it had erred in describing what the appendix said and apologized.

 

Sharon’s lifelong militarism is often mistaken for lifelong rightism. In fact, he spent his military career in the bosom of Mapai, the precursor to the Labor Party, as a favorite of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister. Sharon remained close to those in Labor, especially his friend Shimon Peres. Sharon served as a special adviser to Labor Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the mid-1970s.

 

Those good relations are partly the product of good manners. Belying his oafish appearance, Sharon was a charmer. At the house he shared with his wife Lily until her death in March 2000, on their 1,000-acre ranch on the edge of the Negev Desert, he was an enthusiastic and attentive host. “Please, more lemonade, more cookies,” he would insist to visitors.

 

After years of political probation following the Lebanon war, it was, ironically, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat who gave Sharon his final big break. At peace talks in the summer of 2000, Labor Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Arafat a Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and the bulk of the West Bank, including some part of East Jerusalem. Arafat refused the deal. Presumably to protest Barak’s offer to divide Jerusalem, Sharon, accompanied by dozens of Israeli police, took the unusual step of visiting what Jews call the Temple Mount, the plateau that today hosts al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. The visit provoked rioting and an Israeli response that sparked the second intifadeh, which together with Israel’s countermeasures has claimed some 3,000 Palestinian and 1,000 Israeli lives. While some Israelis and Palestinians blamed Sharon for provoking the violence, it soon became clear that Arafat, who fanned the unrest, had been spoiling for a fight and would have taken any excuse.

 

Sharon had always opposed the Oslo peace agreements, arguing that Arafat would just use self-rule to wage war against Israel from up close. As a Palestinian mob lynched two Israeli soldiers on camera, as Palestinian marksmen shot into Israeli houses, Sharon’s view came to be accepted by a growing number of his compatriots, propelling him to power in 2001. Israelis, right and left, were spoiling for a fight too, and Sharon was just the man to deliver one. In his first year in office, he was relatively restrained, punching hard but always calibrating his response to avoid a slap-down by the U.S. But after Sept. 11, the Bush Administration moved closer to Sharon’s zero-tolerance view of Palestinian terrorism. So when a bomber killed 30 people at a Netanya hotel during Passover in 2002, Sharon went all out. He reinvaded the cities of the West Bank with brutal force, using the army’s presence to get intelligence on the terrorists and to make arrests. He stepped up construction of a controversial barrier, started by Barak, that cut through the West Bank and walled out the Palestinians. In 2004, Sharon ordered the assassination of Hamas leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin and, later, another of the group’s leaders, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, steps that previously had been considered too provocative. And he got results; the intifadeh never recovered its early strength, and Israelis regained their sense of security. Sharon succeeded at what many security experts said was impossible: he found a military solution to terrorism.

 

Sharon was elected and re-elected in 2003 for his pugnacity, not his vision. He swam among many political ideologies, and none have found the solution to the Palestinian problem. But in the final years of his tenure as Prime Minister, with what was likely to be his last election looming, he seemed closer than ever to defining an ideology of his own. The hard-line Likudniks still believe that Israel can somehow hold onto all the territories. Sharon came to accept the Labor argument that it is impossible for Israel to rule over millions of Arabs indefinitely and still remain a democracy with a Jewish majority. But Labor’s efforts to negotiate a division of the land with the Palestinians have failed. Sharon may have found a third way: draw the line yourself and see what happens. If his successors in his new party Kadima have a chance to try it out, the success of the venture will define a unique political legacy for Sharon. If they don’t, he will have been a hell of a warrior.


Moshe Dayan on Why David Ben-Gurion saw Sharon as the New Jew. Dayan quoted in David Landau, Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014, pp. 32-33.

In his memoirs, Dayan wrote of Ben-Gurion’s “special affection” for three IDF officers: Haim Laskov, Assaf Simchoni, and Sharon. The founding father saw in all three of them “the antithesis of the galuti, or diasporic Jew. The New Jew was a fighter, bold, self-confident, expert in the art of war, in weaponry, in field craft, in the region, and in the Arabs. Ben-Gurion could not bear casuistry and beating around the bush. He didn’t like the Talmud; his heart rebelled against two thousand years of exile. He yearned for the Israelites of the Bible, living on their land, farming and fighting, independent and proud and building their national culture. Haim, Assaf, and Arik were like those ancient Israelites in his eyes.” Ben-Gurion’s biographer Michael Bar-Zohar writes that the Old Man told him he admired two soldiers above all for their bravery and resourcefulness: Dayan and Sharon.


A major goal of Zionism was to reverse centuries of Jewish passivity and powerlessness by creating a “New Jew”: a bold assertive Jewish farmer and warrior, in effect a Hebrew-speaking Jewish Jacksonian. Max Nordau had called for such a “muscle Jew” in 1898: “We must do away with the demeaning image of the stooping Jew in the ghetto, afraid for his life . . . Let us become strong men, with full chests and a deep, lucid expression in our eyes.” Nordau’s description is similar to Walt Whitman’s description of Jacksonian manhood in “A Song of Joys.”

 

While politically Ben-Gurion wanted modern Israel to be the kingdom of David reborn, socially and culturally he wanted to re-create the independent Israelite farmer warrior of the period of the Judges.

 

William Dever writes [p. 18 in pdf] that “the early Israelites are best seen as homesteaders—pioneer farmers settling the hill-country frontier of central Palestine, which had been sparsely occupied before Iron I.” The Israelites were in a sense the Jacksonian pioneers of the ancient Near East, who created a primitive democracy of small autonomous farming villages in the highlands of Canaan. Israel Finkelstein believed the houses in one village (‘Izbet Sartah, possibly biblical Ebenezer) were arranged in a circle for protection against Canaanite or Philistine attacks much like the covered wagons on the American frontier. So America’s Jacksonian frontier settlers, who saw themselves as Israelites building homesteads the Promised Land, had a more profound understanding of history than they realized.

 

As Dayan observed, Ben-Gurion saw this New/Old Jew, ancient Israelite/modern Jacksonian come to life in Ariel Sharon.

The Exodus in Biblical Memory. By Ronald Hendel.

The Exodus in Biblical Memory. By Ronald Hendel. Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 120, No. 4 (Winter 2001). Also here.

Exodus: A Book of Memories. By Ronald S. Hendel. Bible Review, Vol. 18, No. 4 (August 2002). Also here.

Hendel:

The Exodus from Egypt is a focal point of ancient Israelite religion. Virtually every kind of religious literature in the Hebrew Bible-prose narrative, liturgical poetry, didactic prose and prophecy—celebrates the Exodus as a foundational event. Israelite ritual, law and ethics are often grounded in the precedent and memory of the Exodus. In the Ten Commandments, Yahweh identifies himself as the one “who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Exodus 20:2 = Deuteronomy 5:6). The deliverance from Egypt is the main historical warrant for the covenanted religious bond between Yahweh and his people Israel. In some texts (and featured prominently in the Haggadah, the traditional retelling of the Exodus story at the Passover Seder), the historically distant event is drawn into the present by the elastic quality of genealogical time: “You shall tell your son on that day, ‘It is because of what Yahweh did for me when he brought me out of Egypt’” (Exodus 13:8; see also Deuteronomy 6:20–25). In its existential actuality, the Exodus, more than any other event of the Hebrew Bible, embodies William Faulkner’s adage: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

 

But is it true? Well, yes and no.

 

Does the story contain real history? Very probably yes, although it’s not easy to pinpoint.

 

The biblical account is a conflation of history and memory—a mixture of historical truth and fiction, composed of “authentic” historical details, folklore motifs, ethnic self-fashioning, ideological claims and narrative imagination. It was communicated orally and then in written texts and circulated in a wide discursive network. We may plausibly assume that the Bible (including its constituent documentary sources) depends in various ways on earlier discourses, both oral and written. The collective memory of the Exodus is, in this sense, situated in a history of discourses. It is the remembered past that we have in our Bibles. The past and the present are interrelated in collective memory.


The Exodus from Egypt: Myth or Reality? By Baruch Halpern. The Rise of Ancient Israel. By Hershel Shanks, William G. Dever, Baruch Halpern, and P. Kyle McCarter, Jr. Washington, D.C.: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1992.

Halpern:

Under what circumstances did Romulus and Remus found Rome? What was the role of Hercules, or Jason and the Argonauts, in creating a unified Mycenaean consciousness? If you can answer those questions, you are ready to tackle the issue of the Exodus. For our accounts of the Exodus reflect the prehistory of the Israelite nation, or, perhaps, of some part of it.

 

The closest parallel to the Book of Exodus in the ancient West is Homer’s Odyssey. Both are stories of migration—of identity suspended until the protagonist—Odysseus or Israel—reaches a home. Neither account records events of the sort that are likely to have left marks in the archaeological record, or even in contemporaneous monuments. At both ends of the journey, though, in Egypt and Israel or at Troy and Ithaca, the narrative can be said to reflect local conditions. In both cases, our sources reflect long-term oral transmission, followed by authoritative codification in writing. In both cases, there is evidence of that peculiar process of oral transmission in which the story is renegotiated with each separate audience each time it is told. Each story reflects a healthy admixture of fancy with whatever is being recalled.

 

The Odyssey is the story of an individual at odds with sorceresses, one-eyed cannibals and sirens—very much like a metaphor for the journey of a social welfare bill through the legislature. The implausibility of the story occasions no great difficulty: Augustine tells us that the Odyssey was taught as gospel in the Greek world of his day; it is basically a piece of children’s literature. So, in its way, is the story of the Exodus.

 

But the Exodus is not the story of an individual; it is the story of a nation. It is the historical myth of an entire people, a focal point for national identity. The Exodus story was to the ancient Israelite what the stories of the Pilgrims and the Revolutionary War are to Americans. At a deep level, in fact, our American fathers modeled their notions of identity and history on the Exodus.

 

The Exodus coded certain common values into the culture. All Israel shared the background of the ancestors—all Israel had been slaves in Egypt. Whatever one’s biological ancestry, to be an Israelite meant that one’s ancestors—spiritual or emotive or collective ancestors—had risen from Egypt to conquer Canaan. YHWH liberated the Israelites from Egypt and executed a covenant with them. The covenant stipulated that, in return for their emancipation and for the gift of the land of Canaan, Israel would worship YHWH and obey his law. In Near Eastern culture, a sovereign who saved his subjects from ruin and gave them land merited loyalty. This nexus furnished the myth of the Passover, celebrated every spring as the green wheat broke ground. This was the story of how Israel came to be, and how it came into possession of Canaan. For without the conquest of Canaan, the Exodus would have been without a point.

 

The earliest Israelite Passover ritual already incorporated the pretense that the participants were in transition from Egypt to Israel, from bondage to freedom: The unleavened bread they ate was (and is) the “bread of affliction,” the unleavened bread that their ancestors ate on leaving Egypt. And the roasted lamb they ate was the stuff of rugged campfires; it reflected the absence of basic amenities—since in civilized settings, meat was always boiled. The ritual of the Passover, in sum, always presupposed the threshold location of the celebrant, between bondage and freedom, between Egypt and Canaan, in the realm of the uncivilized.

 

The difference between the early Israelite celebration and the Jewish festival is this: The Jewish celebrant in the Diaspora expresses hopes for national reintegration; the ancient Israelites knew, from the bleatings of the flocks and from the greening of the landscape all around them, that the festival would leave them in possession of the land of Canaan.

 

Yet modern scholarship divorces the Exodus from its completion in the conquest. For the relation of the Exodus to Israel’s settlement of Canaan is no longer as clear as it was to the Israelites of the Iron Age. Neither the date of the Exodus nor the duration of Israel’s sojourn in Egypt can now be ascertained with any confidence. Consequently, we cannot accurately gauge the interval between the Exodus and the emergence of Israel in Canaan. More the pity: to the Israelite of the Iron Age, the events were all but simultaneous; this is the reason that the Book of Joshua locates Israel’s entry into Canaan at the time of the Passover (Joshua 4:19, 5:10–11).

 

The historical uncertainty arises from the nature of our sources, and of the events reported. Endless generations of oral recital have made themselves felt in shaping the literature. The accounts—of J, E, P, D, and other sources—differ in detail. And the story of the Exodus is so central to Israelite identity that changes in that identity almost unconsciously registered in the evolution of the story. Nevertheless, behind the Exodus story events can be discerned that, unlike those of the patriarchal narratives, can be termed historical in scale.


How to Tell a Canaanite from an Israelite. By William G. Dever. The Rise of Ancient Israel. By Hershel Shanks, William G. Dever, Baruch Halpern, and P. Kyle McCarter, Jr. Washington: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1992.

Ceramics, Ethnicity, and the Question of Israel’s Origins. By William G. Dever. The Biblical Archaeologist, Vol. 58, No. 4 (December 1995).

Dever:

The thirteenth/twelfth century BCE “Proto-Israelite” entity or polity that I have tried here to characterize archaeologically as an ethnic group was not, of course, homogenous in the beginning, because its members were of diverse origins. We must probably think of most of the highland colonists as “displaced Canaanites” (both geographically and ideologically), including an assortment of urban refugees, social dropouts and malcontents, migrant farmers, resedentarized pastoralists, perhaps some Shasu-like bedouin and other immigrants from Transjordan, and even some newcomers from Syria and Anatolia. All these peoples were among those displaced by the radical socio-economic and cultural upheavals at the end of the Bronze Age toward the late thirteenth century BCE. But the new alignments that followed soon produced, among the other coalitions, our “Proto-Israelites,” emerging as an agrarian socio-economic movement on the highland frontier, and thus with sufficient solidarity to constitute an “ethnic group.” This group certainly possessed an ideology as part of its self-awareness (although this is difficult to discern archaeologically) and perhaps pronounced "reformed" tendencies, as such dissident groups have often had.

 

The foregoing seems to me to be the most likely scenario at the moment for the origins and early development of ancient Israel. Yet it must be confessed that it is in sharp contrast to the biblical tradition of the Exodus and Conquest—a theological dilemma that few archaeologists, those who precipitated the current crises about “Israelite origins”—are willing to face. I can only suggest that we must presuppose a complex, multi-faceted process for the formation of the later literary tradition of the “origin stories.” Thus we are dealing here with literature, which does not reflect “real” life directly or even necessarily accurately—especially ancient literature, which never claims to be historical in the modern sense. Literature reflects life imaginatively. The biblical writers and editors are therefore interpreting events; seeing the past through “the eyes of faith”; looking at monarchical Israel after its history is finished, trying to make sense of it all. When the authors of the Bible do look back, the fact that a small and obscure people from the fringes of the desert became, even briefly, a great nation; that despite their fecklessness, Yahweh revealed himself to them through prophets and priests; and that even a remnant survived the Assyrian and Babylonian onslaught and kept their faith intact-all this seemed miraculous. It must have been God’s doing all along! Such a conclusion may be somewhat skewed historically; it may seem to us naive theologically; and it certainly cannot be confirmed archaeologically. But the Bible’s “explanation” of Israel’s birth may be in some ways as good as our own, for much about ancient Israel still remains a mystery, if not a miracle.

 

The “Exodus-Conquest” story is perhaps really about only a small group, the central unrepresentative group, the southern tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, who were sometimes called the “House of Joseph,” because of the obvious Egyptian connection in one strand of the early tradition. If we ask then how the story of the “House of Joseph” became in time the story of “all Israel,” the answer may be deceptively simple. It was they who in the end told the story; and quite naturally, they included all those who later reckoned themselves part of biblical Israel. In time most people no doubt believed that they had been in Egypt.

 

A simple analogy may help us to understand this phenomenon. In mainstream American tradition, we all celebrate Thanksgiving as though we ourselves had come to these shores on the Mayflower. That is the myth; yet in fact, most of us got here some other way. My ancestors came from County Donegal in the potato famine 150 years ago. Yours may have come as slaves from Africa or from the ghettos of Europe, or as farm workers from Mexico. But spiritually (yes!), we are all Pilgrims: that is what makes us “Americans.” So are the myths of Israel’s origins, or ours, true? Of course they are—in the deepest sense. That we can put off our religious or cultural hat, and temporarily don the hat of the modern skeptical historian or archaeologist, does not necessarily alter or diminish the value of the tradition. We are what we believe we are, just as ancient Israel was.


How Did Israel Become a People? The Genesis of Israelite Identity. By Avraham Faust. Biblical Archaeology Review, Vol. 35, No. 6 (November/December 2009).

Migrations, Ethnogenesis, and Settlement Dynamics: Israelites in Iron Age Canaan and Shuwa-Arabs in the Chad Basin. By Thomas E. Levy and Augustin F. C. Holl. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Vol. 21, No. 1, (March 2002).

Biblical Peoples and Ethnicity: An Archaeological Study of Egyptians, Canaanites, Philistines, and Early Israel, 1300-1100 B.C.E. By Ann E. Killebrew. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005.

Exploring Exodus: The Oppression. By Nahum M. Sarna. The Biblical Archaeologist, Vol. 49 No. 2 (June 1986).

The Exodus and the Settlement in Canaan. By H. H. Rowley. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, No. 85 (February 1942).

The Egyptian Empire in Palestine: A Reassessment. By James M. Weinstein. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, No. 241 (Winter 1981).

Were the Jews Slaves in Egypt? By S. David Sperling. NJBR, June 20, 2013. With related articles.

Was King Saul Impaled on the Wall of Beth Shean? By Amihai Mazar. NJBR, June 8, 2013. With related articles.

The Exodus and Cultural Memory. By Ronald Hendel. Video. Biblical Archaeology Society. (BAS Membership required.)

Ancient Israel’s Exodus from Egypt, rather than being a single, momentous event that can be confirmed through archaeology, should be viewed as a deep-seated cultural memory that allowed disparate groups of highland villagers and escaped Canaanite slaves to coalesce into a single people. How this story arose and why the early Israelites adopted this memory are key questions, which find coherent answers in the relationship between Canaan and the Egyptian empire of the Late Bronze Age. By fusing historical and fictional memories, the story created the necessary social context for the birth of Israel as a people.


Out of Egypt: Israel’s Exodus Between Text and Memory, History and Imagination. By Noah Wiener. Bible History Daily, February 6, 2014. With links to videos from the Qualcomm Institute conference to be added.

Exodus: Out of Egypt: Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Archaeology, Text and Memory. Qualcomm Institute. Calit2. University of California at San Diego.

Website introduction by Thomas E. Levy:

This website does not advocate any solutions to the story of ancient Israel’s Exodus from Egypt, known from the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible. Rather, it highlights new transdisciplinary perspectives on this ancient puzzle based on an international conference held May 31 to June 3, 2013 in Calit2’s Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego. The conference – Out of Egypt: Israel’s Exodus Between Text and Memory, History and Imagination – brought together more than 40 of the world’s leading archaeologists, Biblical scholars, Egyptologists, historians and geo-scientists. In tandem, the Qualcomm Institute staged an exhibition, EX3: Exodus, Cyber-Archaeology and the Future, through June 9, as an experiment in trans-disciplinary research, team science, and scholarly communication using technologies developed for the museum of the future. Archaeologists and Biblical scholars teamed with computer scientists, engineers, geo-scientists and sonic artists to show how 21st century collaboration in these fields can provide new ways of looking at ancient historical problems. Nearly four dozen scientists contributed their unique expertise and worked “out of the (disciplinary) box” in search of potential answers to historical questions. They explored cyber-archaeology data collection, analyses and dissemination, and the exhibition featured new 3D and large-scale visualization platforms developed by the Qualcomm Institute as prototype display systems for the museum of the future. At right is a collection of images from the conference and exhibition. Below, this portal features streaming video, including an overview of the exhibition, as well as on-demand video of all conference proceedings. At bottom, click on the links to view panels from the exhibition on the significance of the Exodus from an ecumenical perspective in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.

 

Thomas E. Levy, Distinguished Professor, Conference Host, Qualcomm Institute - UC San Diego.


Keynote Lecture: The Exodus as Cultural Memory: Poetics, Politics, and the Past. By Ronald Hendel. UCSD Exodus Conference, May 31-June 1, 2013. Video. Calit2ube, June 11, 2013. YouTube.




The Exodus and the Bible: What Was Known, What Was Remembered, What Was Forgotten. By William Dever. UCSD Exodus Conference. Video. Calit2ube, June 11, 2013. YouTube.




The Emergence of Iron Age Israel: The Question of “Origins.” By Avraham Faust. UCSD Exodus Conference. Video. Calit2ube, June 7, 2013. YouTube.

Ben-Gurion Didn’t Recognize Israel as the Nation State of the Entire Jewish People. By Chemi Shalev.

Ben-Gurion didn’t recognize Israel as the nation state of the entire Jewish people. By Chemi Shalev. Haaretz, January 8, 2014.

Shalev:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is demanding that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a “Jewish State” or, in a different formulation, as the “nation state of the Jewish people.” He says that this recognition is “the real key for peace," a “minimal requirement” and an “essential condition” without which there can be no agreement.

 

Love it or loathe it, one cannot understate the public relations genius behind this stipulation. It has captured the imaginations of Israelis, Jews and many other Israel-supporting people around the world. Secretary of State John Kerry is said to be pressing Arab states to accept it. A decade ago it didn’t exist and, presto, out of the blue, it is the now the lynchpin of the process, it's sine qua non, the make or break issue.

 

I would be more than happy if Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas somehow succeeded in overcoming Palestinian objections and acceded to Netanyahu’s demand. Palestinian recognition of Israel as the state of the Jewish people would remove a serious obstacle to peace talks and may convince Israelis that Palestinian rejectionism has turned a historic corner. Such a move would also put immense pressure on Israel to be far more forthcoming in the concessions that it needs to make to reach a deal.

 

But here’s the thing: I don’t know what Netanyahu’s demand is doing for Abbas, but it is making me increasingly uneasy. The more I think of the demand to recognize Israel as the “nation state of the Jewish people," whatever that is, the less I like it. In my eyes, Muslims and Christians who were born in Israel and live there are Israelis; Jews who live in Tulsa or Tashkent are not. Jews around the world may worship Israel but that does not make it theirs.

 

My position is this: “The name Israel differentiates between the sovereign Jewish people in its homeland, called by the name of Israel, and the Jewish people in the world, in all the generations and in all the land, who are called the “Jewish people” or the “people of Israel." That’s what David Ben-Gurion wrote to Brandeis historian and philosopher Simon Rawidowicz in 1954.

 

Rawidowicz – a towering Jewish intellectual whose memory has faded to the extent that he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry in English to his name – was a champion of the “equal status” of Israel and Diaspora Jewry, which he described as “Jerusalem and Babylon”. He objected to the name Israel that Ben-Gurion had chosen for the state because it excluded Diaspora Jews, and, in essence, relegated them to a second-tier status.

 

While denying charges of “negation of the Diaspora," as it was known then, Ben-Gurion, in effect, agreed with Rawidowicz: Diaspora Jews can worship Israel and can very well call themselves “the people of Israel” if they wish, but they are not Israelis, and Israel is not their country unless and until they choose to live there.

 

Likud leaders from Menachem Begin to Netanyahu have been systematically erasing Ben-Gurion’s fine line. As columnist Doron Rosenblum meticulously recorded over the years in Haaretz, the Likud and the religious right have steadily downgraded secular “Israeliness” as inherently alien and leftist and fostered traditional “Jewishness” for ideological, political and cultural reasons in its stead. When the Likud first came to power in 1977, most Jewish Israelis defined themselves as being Israelis before being Jews, but a majority now claims the opposite.

 

And if Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people as a whole, then the prime minister, ipso facto, is the prime minister of Jews wherever they may be. That’s why Netanyahu can tell the U.S. Congress “I speak on behalf of the Jewish people,” That’s how he can openly call on U.S. Jews to “stand up and be counted” in his campaign against U.S. policies on Iran. That’s why he made no effort to correct David Gregory who anointed him “Leader of the Jewish people” on Meet the Press last year.

 

The right wing, in fact, would like to adopt the Jewish people wholesale, wherever they are, and to thus prop up the Jewish majority in the “Greater Land of Israel” by remote control or even, potentially, by giving Diaspora Jews the vote. And by demanding that hundreds of thousands of Israeli Arabs be “transferred” to another sovereignty and another citizenship, Netanyahu’s deputy and Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is only confirming the claims of many Palestinians: that by recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, Abbas would be giving his blessing to those, like Lieberman, who view the citizenship of Israeli Arabs as second rate and expendable.

 

Don’t get me wrong: As long as there is a Jewish majority in Israel, I have no problem with its Jewish character or with its decision to grant automatic citizenship to any Jew who wishes to make it their home. Ancient ties, millennia of devotion and 20th century horrors justify such a position.

 

If Netanyahu had demanded that Abbas recognize the historic links between Israel and the Jewish people or its centrality in Israeli life, I would be backing him all the way. But Netanyahu has not only injected Abbas into the whole “Who is a Jew” conundrum, he wants him to accept that a Jew who lives in Buenos Aires has a weightier connection to Israel than the Palestinian family that has lived in Shfaram or in Tirah or in Taybe for hundreds of years.

 

That may be a reasonable position for Jewish uber-patriots, but it’s a bridge too far for me.

 

I have never accepted the contention that in order to be a Zionist one has to live in Israel. One can be a Zionist and support Israel even if one lives in Timbuktu. But one cannot live in Timbuktu and claim Israel as one’s own. Abbas may choose to accept Netanyahu’s demand, but as far as I am concerned, Israel is an Israeli state, and it is the nation state of Jews who choose to live in it. Period.

Fighting Back Against the New Anti-Semitism. By Charles Krauthammer.

Fighting Back Against the New Anti-Semitism. By Charles Krauthammer. National Review Online, January 10, 2014. Also at the Washington Post.

Ari Lesser: Boycott Israel. A Rap Reply to the Boycotters. Video. Ari Lesser, October 6, 2013. YouTube.

Krauthammer:

For decades, the American Studies Association has labored in well-deserved obscurity. No longer. It’s now made a name for itself by voting to boycott Israeli universities, accusing them of denying academic and human rights to Palestinians.

 

Given that Israel has a profoundly democratic political system, the freest press in the Middle East, a fiercely independent judiciary, and astonishing religious and racial diversity within its universities, including affirmative action for Arab students, the charge is rather strange.

 

Made more so when you consider the state of human rights in Israel’s neighborhood. As we speak, Syria’s government is dropping “barrel bombs” filled with nails, shrapnel, and other instruments of terror on its own cities. Where is the ASA boycott of Syria?

 

And of Iran, which hangs political, religious, and even sexual dissidents and has no academic freedom at all? Or Egypt, where Christians are being openly persecuted? Or Turkey, Saudi Arabia, or, for that matter, massively repressive China and Russia?

 

Which makes it obvious that the ASA boycott has nothing to do with human rights. It’s an exercise in radical chic, giving marginalized academics a frisson of pretend anti-colonialism, seasoned with a dose of edgy anti-Semitism.

 

And don’t tell me this is merely about Zionism. The ruse is transparent. Israel is the world’s only Jewish state. To apply to the state of the Jews a double standard that you apply to none other, to judge one people in a way you judge no other, to single out that one people for condemnation and isolation — is to engage in a gross act of discrimination.

 

And discrimination against Jews has a name. It’s called anti-Semitism.

 

Former Harvard president Larry Summers called the ASA actions “anti-Semitic in their effect if not necessarily in their intent.” I choose to be less polite. The intent is clear: to incite hatred for the largest — and only sovereign — Jewish community on earth.

 

What to do? Facing a similar (British) academic boycott of Israelis seven years ago, Alan Dershowitz and Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg wrote an open letter declaring that, for the purposes of any anti-Israel boycott, they are to be considered Israelis.

 

Meaning: You discriminate against Israelis? Fine. Include us out. We will have nothing to do with you.

 

Thousands of other academics added their signatures to the Dershowitz/Weinberg letter. It was the perfect in-kind response. Boycott the boycotters, with contempt.

 

But academia isn’t the only home for such prejudice. Throughout the cultural world, the Israel boycott movement is growing. It’s become fashionable for musicians, actors, writers, and performers of all kinds to ostentatiously cleanse themselves of Israel and Israelis.

 

The example of the tuxedoed set has spread to the more coarse and unkempt anti-Semites, such as the thugs who a few years ago disrupted London performances of the Jerusalem Quartet and the Israeli Philharmonic.

 

In this sea of easy and open bigotry, an unusual man has made an unusual statement. Russian by birth, European by residence, Evgeny Kissin is arguably the world’s greatest piano virtuoso. He is also a Jew of conviction. Deeply distressed by Israel’s treatment in the cultural world around him, Kissin went beyond the Dershowitz/Weinberg stance of asking to be considered an Israeli. On December 7, he became one, defiantly.

 

Upon taking the oath of Israeli citizenship in Jerusalem, he declared: “I am a Jew, Israel is a Jewish state. . . .  Israel’s case is my case, Israel’s enemies are my enemies, and I do not want to be spared the troubles which Israeli musicians encounter when they represent the Jewish state beyond its borders.”

 

Full disclosure: I have a personal connection with Kissin. For the last two years I’ve worked to bring him to Washington to perform for Pro Musica Hebraica, a nonprofit organization (founded by my wife and me) dedicated to reviving lost and forgotten Jewish classical music. We succeeded. On February 24, Kissin will be performing at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall masterpieces of Eastern European Jewish music, his first U.S. appearance as an Israeli.

 

The persistence of anti-Semitism, that most ancient of poisons, is one of history’s great mysteries. Even the shame of the Holocaust proved no antidote. It provided but a temporary respite. Anti-Semitism is back. Alas, a new generation must learn to confront it.

 

How? How to answer the thugs, physical and intellectual, who single out Jews for attack? The best way, the most dignified way, is to do like Dershowitz, Weinberg, or Kissin.

 

Express your solidarity. Sign the open letter or write your own. Don the yellow star and wear it proudly.

Point of No Return in Egypt. By Khaled Dawoud.

Point of no return. By Khaled Dawoud. The Arabist, January 8, 2014. Originally published in Arabic in El Tahrir, December 28, 2013.

Amanda Knox: I’ll Be A Fugitive If They Convict Me. By Barbie Latza Nadeau.

Amanda Knox: I’ll Be A Fugitive If They Convict Me. By Barbie Latza Nadeau. The Daily Beast, January 9, 2014.

An Italian newspaper says the babyfaced Seattle native vowed to go on the lam if an appellate court upholds her conviction in the trial of the murder of Meredith Kercher.


Amanda Knox: I’ll Be a Fugitive If Found Guilty Again of Murder. By Tom Kington. The Huffington Post, January 9, 2014.

A New Hampshire Rebellion for Aaron Swartz. By Lawrence Lessig.

A New Hampshire Rebellion for Aaron Swartz. By Lawrence Lessig. The Daily Beast, January 10, 2014.

What the Internet Did to Aaron Swartz. By Noam Scheiber. NJBR, March 12, 2013. With related articles.

Aaron Swartz, Internet Pioneer, Found Dead Amid Prosecutor “Bullying” In Unconventional Case. By Zach Carter. NJBR, January 13, 2013. With related articles.

The Smartest Book About Our Digital Age Was Published in 1929. By Ted Gioia.

The Smartest Book About Our Digital Age Was Published in 1929. By Ted Gioia. The Daily Beast, January 5, 2014.

Gioia:

How José Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses helps us understand everything from YouTube to Duck Dynasty.


I first read José Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt ofthe Masses more than thirty years ago. I still remember how disappointed I was by this cantankerous book. I’d read other works by Ortega (1883-1955), and been impressed by the Spanish philosopher’s intelligence and insight. But this 1929 study of the modern world, his most famous book, struck me as hopelessly nostalgic and elitist.

 

Yet I recently read The Revolt of the Masses again, and with a completely different response. The same ideas I dismissed as old-fashioned and out-of-date back in the 20th century now reveal an uncanny ability to explain the most peculiar happenings of the digital age.

 

Are you, like me, puzzled to learn that Popular Science magazine recently shut down comments on its website, declaring that they were bad for science? Are you amazed, like me, that Duck Dynasty is the most-watched nonfiction cable show in TV history? Are you dismayed, like me, that crappy Hollywood films about comic book heroes and defunct TV shows have taken over every movie theater? Are you depressed, like me, that symphony orchestras are declaring bankruptcy, but Justin Bieber earned $58 million last year?

 

If so, you need to read The Revolt of the Masses. You’ve got questions. Ortega’s got answers.

 

First, let me tell you what you won’t find in this book. Despite a title that promises political analysis, The Revolt of the Masses has almost nothing to say about conventional party ideologies and alignments. Ortega shows little interest in fascism or capitalism or Marxism, and this troubled me when I first read the book. (Although, in retrospect, the philosopher’s passing comments on these matters proved remarkably prescient—for example his smug dismissal of Russian communism as destined to failure in the West, and his prediction of the rise of a European union.) Above all, he hardly acknowledges the existence of “left” and “right” in political debates.

 

Ortega’s brilliant insight came in understanding that the battle between “up” and “down” could be as important in spurring social and cultural change as the conflict between “left” and “right.” This is not an economic distinction in Ortega’s mind. The new conflict, he insists, is not between “hierarchically superior and inferior classes. . . . upper classes or lower classes.” A millionaire could be a member of the masses, according to Ortega’s surprising schema. And a pauper might represent the elite.

 

The key driver of change, as Ortega sees it, comes from a shocking attitude characteristic of the modern age—or, at least, Ortega was shocked. Put simply, the masses hate experts. If forced to choose between the advice of the learned and the vague impressions of other people just like themselves, the masses invariably turn to the latter. The upper elite still try to pronounce judgments and lead, but fewer and fewer of those down below pay attention.

 

Above all, the favorite source of wisdom for the masses, in Ortega’s schema, is their own strident opinions. “Why should he listen, when he has all the answers, everything he needs to know?” Ortega writes. “It is no longer the season to listen, but on the contrary, a time to pass judgment, to pronounce sentence, to issue proclamations.”

 

Ortega couldn’t have foreseen digital age culture, but he is describing it with precision. He would recognize the angry, assertive tone of comments on web articles as the exact same tendency he identified in 1929. He would understand why Yelp reviews have more influence than the considered judgments of restaurant reviewers. He would know why Amazon customer comments have more clout than critics in The New Yorker. He would attend an angry town hall meeting or listen to talk radio, and recognize the same tendencies he described in his book.

 

Recently I had dinner with a friend who is affluent, educated, and a noted wine connoisseur. We were talking about wine critic Robert Parker and other experts, and my friend asserted that he now relies more on wine advice from websites where anyone can post their evaluations of different vintages. And if the mass mentality has taken over wine-tasting, what can we expect from film reviews or rock criticism?

 

Of course, this rise of mass opinion comes at a cost. For example, music criticism is turning into lifestyle reporting. Even specialist magazines avoid dealing with any technical descriptions of what a performer is doing, and I have a hunch that the less critics know about the structure of music, the more likely they are to succeed today. This same tendency, outlined with precision by Ortega back in 1929, can be seen in numerous other fields where experts once reigned, but have now been replaced by the opinions of the masses.

 

Strange to say, not all kinds of expertise are ignored nowadays. The same people who denounce expert opinion about movies or music will praise a skilled plumber or car mechanic. The value of blue-collar expertise is accepted without question. The same people who get angry when I make judgments about the skill level of a pianist, would never question my decision to pay more to hire a superior piano tuner. This is a peculiar state of affairs, but very much aligned with the “revolt of the masses.”

 

Ortega also predicted the close connection between advancing technologies and these new rude attitudes. He devotes an entire chapter to the co-existence of “primitivism and technology.” He understands that the rise of new technological tools gives a global scope to the unformed opinions of people who, in a previous era, would have only focused on what was nearby and familiar. Above all, he marvels at the fact that the “disdain for science as such is displayed with greatest impunity by the technicians themselves.” Or put differently, skill in manipulating a technology (say, Instagram or the iPhone, in our day) has nothing in common with a zeal for facts and empirical evidence. That shocked Ortega, but we encounter it daily on in the web.

 

I wish Ortega were around nowadays to comment on digital age culture. At one point in The Revolt of the Masses, he complains about a woman who told him “I can’t stand a dance to which less than 800 people have been invited.” So how would the Spanish philosopher respond to the crowd mentality that seeks out viral videos with a hundred million views? How would he evaluate TV reality shows in which the best singers or dancers are determined by the verdict of the masses? What would he think of political judgments shared by the millions in the form of 140-or-fewer-characters tweets?

 

I can’t do justice to all of this book’s riches in a short article. On almost every page, Ortega addresses some issue that still resonates today—for example, the rise of consumerism; or the possibility for barbarism to flourish in tandem with technology; or the unbalanced specialization which favors science over the humanities; or (in his words) “the loss of prestige of legislative assemblies.” You recognize all of those hot topics, don’t you?

 

Okay, we encounter these dysfunctional tendencies every day, but Ortega forces us to see them with a different perspective—from the standpoint of “up” versus “down.” Indeed, his book is more valuable for the speculations it will spur in a current-day reader than in the specific situations Ortega addresses. But isn’t that always the measure of a timeless thinker?

Egypt’s Arab Spring Gives Way to Spring of the Patriarch. By Christopher Dickey.

Egypt’s Arab Spring Gives Way to Spring of the Patriarch. By Christopher Dickey. The Daily Beast, January 10, 2014.

Does Prince Charming Really Need to Be Reinvented. By Akash Niklolas.

Does Prince Charming Really Need to Be Reinvented. By Akash Nikolas. The Atlantic, January 8, 2014.

A Tiny Glimmer of Hope Amid the Ruins of Syria. By Gordon Brown.

A tiny glimmer of hope amid the ruins of Syria. By Gordon Brown. Washington Post, January 10, 2014. Also here.

Israel Boycott Strikes at Academic Freedom. By Pierre Atlas.

Israeli Boycott Strikes at Academic Freedom. By Pierre Atlas. Real Clear World, January 9, 2014. Also at the Indianapolis Star.

Florida-Georgia Line: Get Your Shine On.

Florida-Georgia Line: Get Your Shine On. Video. FlaGeorgiaLineVEVO, February 25, 2013. YouTube.

Pharaoh and the Palestinians. By Stewart Weiss.

Pharaoh and the Palestinians. By Stewart Weiss. Jerusalem Post, January 9, 2014.

Weiss:

There are two axioms that I believe help to guide Jewish history along its twisting and tumultuous path. The first is that the more things change, the more they remain the same. The second is that nothing significant ever occurs in our national life that cannot be found in the Torah portion we read that week.

 

We are now smack-dab in the middle of the story of the Jewish experience in Egypt, which culminates in the Exodus (read about it this Shabbat in Parshat Beshalah) and the giving of the Ten Commandments (read it next Shabbat in Parshat Yitro). These events, recorded for posterity so long ago, remain to this day a road map for our struggle to overcome our adversaries and become a nation.

 

Pharaoh is the archetypal anti-Semite, the dictatorial and despicable poster boy for all the Jew-haters of future generations.

 

Ignoring the fact that Joseph brought immense wealth and prestige to Egypt, he rewrites history and accuses the Hebrews of being an alien, divisive “fifth column” that must be dealt with mercilessly. To divert attention from the real problems of his society, and to unite the populace by appealing to its basest instincts, he tells his people that the “Nation of Israel” (ironically Pharaoh is the first person ever to use that phrase) is “great and mighty from us!” In other words, the Jews are parasites; they take the land that is rightfully ours, and they suck the very life-blood out of it.

 

This approach to demonizing the Jews is exactly the course that the Palestinians and their many sympathizers have taken. They begin by denying any historical legitimacy to the Jewish residents of the land, maintaining that we have no ongoing connection whatsoever to Israel. There never was a Temple in Jerusalem; kings David and Solomon, the Prophets and the Maccabees never inhabited this part of the world; the Twelve Tribes – if they existed at all – lived somewhere in Europe.

 

And as for what to do with the mountain of archeological evidence, the accounts of the Bible, and the overwhelming opinion of historians that this truly is our ancestral land? That is cavalierly dismissed as “Jewish propaganda” and disregarded by the Pharaohs “who knew not Joseph.”

 

Their national mantra, one of which their pharaonic predecessor would surely be proud, is repeated so long and so intensely that even normally level-headed people begin to believe it: “The Jews stole the land and usurped its rightful owners.” From this canard flows all the evil that our neighbors perversely perpetrate upon us, what I call the “10 Plagues of the Palestinians”: the boycotts, the car thefts, the home invasions, the deadly rock-throwing at our vehicles, the suicide bombings, the drive-by shootings, the firing of rockets on civilians, the glorification of child-killers, the education to terror, the turning of so many beautiful Israeli families into blood.

 

All of these atrocities and more are blithely justified among the Palestinians as the rightful reward for those who took what was theirs.

 

OF COURSE, the greatest victims of all in this drama are the Palestinians themselves.

 

Their lives could be infinitely more rewarding and more productive if only they chose compromise over conflict.

 

They know that they – like their Israeli Arab brothers – would enjoy an immensely higher standard of living and quality of life if they ceased their extremism and met us halfway. But like Pharaoh, who remained impervious to the pleas of his own people to release the Israelites – “Do you not know that Egypt is lost?” the Egyptians said to him after the eighth plague – the Palestinian leadership is supremely steadfast in its stubbornness.

 

The secret to success in international relations – no less than in personal ones – is knowing when to let go and when to hang on. Just as Pharaoh could, theoretically, have saved himself and his nation from untold amounts of suffering if only he had acquiesced to Moses’s initial demand – “Let us depart for three days into the wilderness to serve our God” – so the Arab world, by consistently squandering its manifold opportunities for a peaceful settlement, has “upped the ante” and brought disaster upon itself. From their rejection of the 1947 partition plan to their “Three Noes of Khartoum” (“no peace, no recognition, no negotiation” with Israel) following the Six Day War, to the present- day refusal to accept Israel as a Jewish state, the Palestinians have always taken – to their detriment – the most hard-line positions, and this, above all, has created the self-inflicted “Nakba” that they so often moan about.

 

ONE OF the more celebrated aspects of the Exodus story is God’s “hardening of Pharaoh’s heart.” While this clearly creates certain theological difficulties – the denial of free choice being primary among them – it also serves to highlight the Almighty’s active part in the equation, and His determination to see His people achieve their goal of becoming one nation, under God, in their own land. At some point, God “allows” Pharaoh to fall victim to his own obstinacy, resulting in his demise and our redemption.

 

In like fashion, the Palestinians, too, suffer from a case of “hardening of the heart.” Just when reconciliation appears to be possible, they make sure to thwart it by coming up with some new demand that they know we can never meet. It might be a return to 1949 “Auschwitz borders,” or an insistence on reclaiming the Kinneret, or a demand for the “right of return” or the redivision of Jerusalem.

 

Whatever it is, it brings us back to our senses as we realize just how far this Arab entity actually is from desiring a true and lasting peace with its neighbors.

 

As Jordan learned when it stubbornly refused Israel’s peace overtures in 1967 and belatedly entered the war, resulting in the Jordanians’ loss – and our gain – of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria; and as Pharaoh learned when he reneged on his freeing of the Israelites and attacked us at the Reed Sea, resulting in the destruction of his army and the end of Egypt forever as a world power, there is a high price to be paid for making the wrong choices and for trying to block Jewish destiny.

 

Despite Israel’s readiness to bend – indeed, often to a fault – we will never abdicate our God-given right to recreate our eternal homeland. And it is this steely resolve that will win out in the final analysis. The end result of the Passover story, quite remarkably, is that “the man Moses was great in the land of Egypt, and great in the eyes of every Egyptian” (Exodus 11:3). Those who remain humble yet steadfast in their mission and who believe in the justice of their cause will not only see their efforts prevail; they will gain the grudging respect of even their bitterest enemies.

Israeli Official Points to “Incitement” by Palestinians. By Jodi Rudoren.

Israeli Official Points to “Incitement” by Palestinians. By Jodi Rudoren. New York Times, January 6, 2014.

Israelis Document Incitement by the Palestinian Authority. New York Times, January 6, 2014. Also here.

NYT casts Israelis as victims of Palestinians who complain bitterly about oppression. By Philip Weiss and Donald Johnson. Mondoweiss, January 7, 2014.

Palestinian Children: When we die as martyrs. Video. noterrorhere, June 15, 2010. YouTube.

What If Israel Were a Jewish State? By Daniel Gordis.

What If Israel Were a Jewish State? By Daniel Gordis. Jerusalem Post, January 9, 2014. Also at DanielGordis.org.

Movement on the Right. By David Brooks.

Movement on the Right. By David Brooks. New York Times, January 9, 2014.

A Kind of Racism We’re Not Used To. By Masha Gessen.

A Kind of Racism We’re Not Used To. By Masha Gessen. New York Times, January 9, 2014.

Israel in the Eye of the Hurricane. By Ofir Haivry.

Israel in the Eye of the Hurricane. By Ofir Haivry. Mosaic, January 2014.

The Middle East is imploding. America is pulling back. Time for a new regional strategy.


Map of Middle East Ethnic Groups. By Michael Izady. The Gulf/2000 Project.

The Culture of Rebellion in Syria. By Faysal Itani.

The Culture of Rebellion in Syria. By Faysal Itani. Atlantic Council, January 7, 2014.