Article-length posts

Now I'm finally getting somewhere. Ive figured out how to store documents at Google Docs & Spreadsheets, including the way to publish them there, and then link to them from here. (See previous post.)

Then, as a second test, I took the entire document and pasted it into one of my first posts, and you can read it here. This has the advantage of not breaking the rather quick pace of a blog with large articles, but it retroactively changes the blog itself (not important on this experimental blog, but perhaps more so on a real blog).

It occurs to me that I could have two consecutive blogs - one, the active, daily one (yaacov.lozowick@blog, say), and another one on which to store articles (Lozowicksarticles@blog, perhaps).

Finally, I think I'll try to start a personal website, perhaps at bravenet or some such, put an article up there and link to it from here.

PS. since I've been wandering around poking my nose in all sorts of places, I found a website called helium, where they seem to encourage people to publish their thoughts. I should go back and check sometime. Of course, if one's going that way, it would be better to publish in real journals and link to them, but that's a different subject.

Hell Now

Liza from Lizaswelt has been extraordinary helpful in this process. However, having spent a number of his hours and then mine on figuring out how one puts up long posts, I've decided to take a different tack, and link to a document I've stored on Google. If this works, you should be able to read Hell Now here.

Update: Well, that didn't work very well, did it? But maybe it will work better here.

Moderating comments

Barbarashm left a comment on an earlier post here. it turns out I had activated a function called "Comment Moderation" or some such, which means - I learn - that comments don't even appear untill after I've vetted them. I suppose if a blog is getting hate-filled rants the blogger might want such a function - but then again, perhaps not. Hate-filled rants tend to look like what they are, and sometimes the most effective way to combat them is to let them stand in the fill glare of sunlight.

Anyway, this blog is ulikely to get there, what with its 4 readers so far. So I've disabled the "Comment Moderation" function, which probably means that readers can post their comments without waiting for my permission. And should I ever find myself writting a popular blog, I certainly don't see where I'd find the time to moderate all the comments.

long texts

Somewhere in here is the option to show only the first paragraph of a long text. I've noticed that Andrew Sullivan sometimes uses such a mode, when he's putting up a long post. (James Lileks doesn't generally: basically all of his posts are rather long).

If I could figure out how to do this trick, I could put up article-sized posts on a blog, without creating posts that are thousands of words long. (Bill Whittle used his blog to put up an entire book, chapter by chapter. But that's not what I have in mind).

Anyway, I'll try. The text I'll be using is an article I once wrote after watching "Paradise Now", a very well made movie that was chock-full of lies and nasty tricks that most viewers wouldn't have been able to identify. As far as I remember, it was published somewhere in Holland (where the movvie came from), but no-where else. So if I succeed, this will be a world premiere of the original English - titled, wouldn't you guess - "Hell Now"

Comments

As they say over at the Guardian, Comments are Free. Of course, since it's The Guardian, you'd be gullible to take them at their word without some fact-checking, and so, true to Guardian form, at second glance it turns out that comments are perhaps free, but first you have to register. Since I haven't, I can't say what this might entail. (Something to do some rainy day).

In the meantime, however, Silke sent me a cheerful e-mail, because my comments were configured so that you had to be registered at Google to leave any here. So I've reconfigured (I hope), and now comments really are for free. Ahoi, all you multitudes of loyal readers who aren't registered at Google: even you can now leave messages, freely and for free!

Real Content - 2

Earlier this evening I was talking with someone about the decisions people make as they become old. We noted the significantly different decisions which have been made by two elderly women we know. The first has refused to make any adaptations that would broadcast her enroaching frialty, saying they would make her feel old. The second does not hesitate to accept the limitations her age is forcing upon her, while keeping up with the things she can do.

The result, ironically, is that the first one is more limited than the second (relative to their different ages and medical conditions). By bowing before the inevitable but sticking to what is unaffected by age, the second seems better positioned both to accept the support she openly acknowledges she needs, and to enjoy the strengths she still has.

Update: I made an editorial change or two in this post on June 20th. Will the post still remain identified as a June 19th post?

2nd Update: Guess so, huh?

Real content - 1

This afternoon I was visited by two Palestinain gentlemen, one about 60, with his younger brother who is in his 50s. I need a spot of construction done, and they came to check the matter and suggest how they would go about it. We discussed things for bit, and then I said that I couldn't give them a final response before talking with my wife, who makes such decisions in our family. They both grinned, and told me that in their families it was also so.

Human nature, it seems, can be more of a constant than we sometimes think, in this case crossing the lines of the world's most stubborn conflict. What you learn from that, however, depends upon how you understand the world. Some people would take this vigniette as proof that the conflict is stupid, and if only we would realize the extent of our commonalities we would be able to stop fighting. Others would note that conficts can be very real and serious, becasue while in some things we may all be similar, the conflicts are about the things where we aren't.

blocks

Liza told me

that one can block a text.

Not certain what that means, so I'm using this to try with.

Aha. I see.

And can I color the text?

another try with links

Liza of Lizas Welt sent me some advice about setting up links. Let's see if it works.

Update: Yep! It works! Thanx, Liza! When the time comes for me to start a real blog, as distinct from this practice run, I'll tell all my 5.5 readers what a subversive blog you have. Until then, whenever I get stuck with this experimental one, you can expect me to e-mail you with additional queries.

photos

I've temporarily given up on the link-thing. Let's see if I know how to add a photo into this posting. Say, a picture of ME!

Update: well, that seems to have worked! Tho you might perhaps want to note that since this picture was taken, a few years ago, I had to have an eye operation, which was not only successful, it even removed the need for glasses. So perhaps later I'll photoshop the galsses out of the picture.

not clear

i managed to make a link from the title, but what about having one from the body of the posting? Say I wanted to make a link from here:

surge

this links to an article (which I haven't read yet). If I understand correctly, the link to it will be from the title of the posting.

link?

will it work this time?

Link 3

the previous one didn't work. Curious.. will this one work?

Link_2

Here's a link to a rather well-known website:

links?

A blog wouldn't be a blog if it didn't have links in its posts. Now, how do i do that?

second post

still fiddling around, as you see, and there is nothing of interest here. Also, I've now edited this post, so it's really getting interesting around here, huh?

Update, June 22nd:
I'm putting a long post here, as part of my learning process. Readers may have arrived here thru a link posted today June 22nd.

Hell Now

Yaacov Lozowick

Jerusalem, march 2006

The official website of the much acclaimed 2005 film “Paradise Now” prominently declares that “from the most unexpected place comes a bold new call for peace”. The director of the film, Hany Abu-Assad, explains that “the film is meant to open a discussion, hopefully a meaningful discussion, about the issues at hand”. Well, let’s discuss.

The film is the story of two young Palestinian men, Said and Khaled, in 2004 Nablus, as they prepare a suicide attack in Tel Aviv. It is a powerful film, riveting, cinema of high quality. The fact that it is blatantly one-sided in its depiction of the Israeli-Palestinian war is not fundamentally wrong: story-tellers, unlike historians, are not required to be balanced, and if their audience comes away feeling they have seen the whole truth, they have only themselves to blame. When it impresses upon us the hardship of Palestinian life in the war that began after the failure of peace negotiations in autumn 2000, it does so in a plausible way; any Israeli concerned about truth and facts knows that the Palestinians are suffering under Israel’s yoke.

Were the creators of the film careful with their facts? Not always. The attackers are apparently brought to Tel Aviv by a venal Jewish Israeli. Such a case has never happened, and probably never will, and one wonders why the screenwriter thought it important. The many anguished discussions for and against martyrdom never quite manage to say that the victims will be innocent non-combatants; instead, the implication is that Israeli soldiers are legitimate targets. When an opportunity to kill women and children arrives, Said recoils. His eventual victims, on a mid-day bus in Tel-Aviv, are almost all soldiers – indeed, armed paratroopers. Most viewers might not notice this, but the Israeli-born director had to know that his portrayal of the purportedly random passengers of a bus is actually quite improbable. Coincidence from an otherwise rigorous director?

At one point the commander tells Said and Khaled that this is the first attack he has launched in two years. It is hard to know what to make of this, given the many dozens of attacks that were prepared in Nablus alone in 2002-2004. Admittedly most were foiled by the Israelis, and thus went unreported in the Western media, but quite a number succeeded. Instead, the film would have us believe that while the Israeli siege is omnipresent, the attacks on Israelis are both rare and retaliatory.

Once in Tel Aviv, the staging area for the final bout of doubts is the parking lot in front of the Dolphinarium nightclub – the exact spot where two-dozen Israeli teenagers were murdered in 2001. Their names are etched into a marble plaque, but the cameraman managed to cut it out of his frame. It seems a gratuitous poke in the eye.

The political situation presented by the film may well be an accurate depiction of what the citizens of Nablus and the Palestinians in general believe to be the truth, but this can be read in more than one way. All of them, from the peace-activist young woman to the recruiter of the attackers, agree that the Israelis are intent upon destroying the Palestinian nation, thwarting all their national aspirations, and controlling all their land. Moreover, although they disagree sharply about what can be done about this, it never occurs to any of them to engage in positive, constructive actions. The most they have to offer is that Israel be fought by legal and political measures. This, at a moment in time where an Israeli prime minister – Barak – had already offered to dismantle most settlements as part of a peace treaty that would create a sovereign Palestine, and where polls were unanimous that a large majority of Israelis were eager to end the occupation. Indeed, during the very months when the film was being made, this majority of Israelis was strengthening the determination of Ariel Sharon to unilaterally move out of Gaza.

At one point Said tells us that he has spent his entire life in the prison of the West Bank, having been permitted out only once, at age six, for medical treatment. This may well wash with a gullible Western audience short on facts, but the reality was otherwise. The Israelis occupied the West Bank in 1967, and until the late 1990s there was practically unrestricted movement between the two geopolitical units, sometimes as an expression of Israel’s wish to erase the erstwhile border, and later because of ineptitude. Large numbers of Palestinians worked legally in Israel until the second Intifada. Israeli reluctance to use full force enabled the suicide attacks of the mid nineties – the heyday of the Oslo process – and those of 2001-2002; the repression depicted in the film, appalling as it is, has successfully stemmed the flow of attacks. The horrendous conditions of contemporary Palestinian life are the result of the war, not its cause.

What then are the motivations of the suicide bombers – or, more accurately, the suicide murderers? The movie makes clear there is no expectation Israel can be beaten by them. Interestingly, Islamic motivations are not given much credence, either. Theological considerations seem mostly to be a backdrop, as one might expect from a film meant for Westerners who cannot conceive of a religious motivation strong enough to lay down one’s life for. What is left is the disturbing understanding that the motivation is an unrelenting hatred for Israel, not for its policies in the second Intifada, but for its unforgivable crime of humiliating the Palestinians. Again and again the talk is of the need to redeem Palestinian honor, even if by killing and dying. And the humiliation as it is described is not new, nor ephemeral, it is longstanding; it is the humiliation of 1948 as much as of 1967 or 2002. It is the insolence of Israel’s existence, not its repressive policies. Said and Khaled do not set out to kill themselves in Tel Aviv because Israel has just assassinated one of their heroes; they signed up long ago, and have merely been waiting for the excuse. In all of the ensuing deliberations, that assassination is never again mentioned, not once.

On this, the central thesis of the story, the film may well be telling the truth. Certainly, a large majority of Israelis are convinced that the Palestinian hatred is so deep-seated and irrevocable that there is nothing to discuss, which is why the peace-camp has diminished into political irrelevance, while Ehud Olmert is poised to win an election from a platform of continued unilateral disengagement. Nothing so underlines the existential chasm between Israelis and Palestinians as their contradictory understanding of the moral obligations of victimhood.

The Palestinians have convinced themselves that they face a fiendish enemy intent upon their destruction, and therefore it is moral for them to consider any action; what remains is to deliberate the usefulness of murder. The many Western bystanders who helped create the film or heaped their praise upon it, accept the basic premise which is that there can be conditions in which such deliberations are acceptable, and the Israelis seem indeed to have created them.

Jews find this line of thinking unacceptable, precisely because they can remember being persecuted, and remember their deliberations at the time. Take, for example, the mediaeval Jewish discussion of Moser. What is the community to do, the Rabbis asked themselves, when a ruler threatens to kill innocent Jews unless the community hands someone over? Is it permissible to assist in the murder of one, in order to save others? The rabbinical decision was that moser – the handing over – is forbidden.

The point being that morality is not affected by circumstances. In a just world, Moser would never be an option. The starting point of the entire discussion is that there can be an external evil so great that it will murder innocent Jews for its own purposes; and that the Jewish helplessness is so complete that innocents will inevitably die. (The rabbis had no illusions about the world they lived in). Given such conditions, the rabbis then discussed not the limits of harm they were allowed to inflict upon their tormentors, but the demands of morality upon themselves.

Seen in this context, Paradise Now well explains why mainstream Israel has written off the Palestinians as potential partners for any kind of rational discussion, let alone as partners in peace. If one assumes that many of the accolades given the film truly regarded it as a bold new call for peace, what, precisely, does that mean? And what does it tell us about the commentators?

Finally, a comment on the dishonesty that underlies the entire film. The story is of helpless Palestinians being ground under by a near-genocidal Israeli occupation. The film was made – under the eyes of Israeli troops – in Nablus, in the heart of the occupation. Eventually, when the situation in Nablus became too dangerous, the cast relocated to Nazerath, within Israel itself, where there was no danger. What a peculiar genocidal power Israel is.

first post

this is to see if it works.