Write & Wrong

There is an old adage which states that history is written by the winners. No doubt this is generally true, and the unstated premise of this adage certainly makes logical sense: Those who die in a failed military campaign, after all, are not going to be writing anything. But sometimes history is not written by the winners, only by hack journalists who somehow manage to get and keep jobs, their collective serial repetition of error polluting the historical record in such a way that nothing can pluck the error out. Once established as fact, mere innocent acts of random but voluminous repetition over time further insulates the error from notice, let alone correction. This is how “common knowledge” that isn’t knowledge at all gets generated. This is sad, but that’s life.

Case in point: In today’s Washington Post, on page B6, there is an obituary about Roger C. Molander, one of the founders of an organization called Ground Zero and a leader of the nuclear freeze movement of the mid-1980s. I don’t want to talk about Molander now, because it’s not nice to speak ill of the dead, but I do want to take note of a breezy statement in passing made by the author of the obituary, Emily Langer. At one point, down around the tenth paragraph, Ms. Langer writes as follows:

But shortly after the SALT II negotiations were successfully completed, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Relations between Washington and Moscow deteriorated, and the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the treaty.

The clear intimation here is that the Treaty would’ve passed muster with the Senate had the Soviet Union not invaded Afghanistan. While now established, in cloudlike fashion, as common knowledge—I have seen it in supposedly serious scholarly books as well as in journalists’ work––this is simply and very demonstrably wrong.

First of all, the negotiations were essentially completed at least six months before the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. Maybe six months qualifies as “shortly” to some people, but a lot can happen in six months. In this case, a lot included very extensive hearings concerning the SALT II Treaty conducted both by the Senate Armed Services committee and by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Those hearings and a parallel national debate illustrated deep division over the implications and wisdom of the treaty as the Carter Administration negotiated it. By the end of September 1979, by which time the bulk of the hearings had been completed, it was clear to those involved in the process that the Treaty lacked the two-thirds Senate majority necessary to ratify it. There were not 67 votes for passage in prospect; there were probably not even 60. (This should have come as no surprise even at the time, because the chief negotiator of the Treaty, Paul Warnke, was confirmed after a heated Senate debate by a vote of only 54-40 some two years earlier.) So reported California Senator Alan Cranston—the Administration’s appointed headcounter and manager for the purpose of getting the Treaty ratified—to his superiors in the Executive Branch.

So it is true that the Senate refused to ratify the treaty, but it was not because the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The Senate was determined in its refusal before that invasion took place (whether for good reason or not isn’t the point just now). When the invasion happened, the Carter Administration wisely decided to save face by withdrawing the treaty from consideration. The Administration depicted its withdrawal of the Treaty, along with its boycott of the summer 1980 Moscow Olympics and several other symbolic acts, as an example of its strong resolution to oppose Soviet action. (Little did we know at the time, but some very serious opposition was actually in the works thanks to the efforts of National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.) No one who mattered in Moscow was fooled, but a lot of Americans seem to have been fooled ever since. Ms. Langer is hardly alone and, in all fairness, her error is really not her fault. She never had a chance, enveloped as she is in this particular cloud of false certainty. And note: The Senate never voted on the SALT II Treaty, which is something a reader also would never know from Ms. Langer’s account.

How do I know all this? I was there. I was in the Senate Caucus room for most of the hearings. I was an adjunct Senate staffer at the time, and everyone around me understood exactly what was going on.

I was at the time only 28 years old, and this constituted my first experience of being intimate with a political process that was described the next day in the newspaper in a way that resembled barely at all what had actually happened. Lessons this powerful are not easily forgotten. This was the first of many such experiences that have shaped the way I read history––any history. Hindsight is not 20/20, folks, not by a long shot.

It is not necessary to be present at the creation of a discrepancy between fact and historical account to appreciate the phenomena. One can experience the same thing more or less from close acquaintance with archives. There are many accounts of key historical episodes and periods that have become accepted common knowledge but that are either fundamentally wrong or strewn with incidental error. What most people think they know about the formative period of the modern Middle East state system during and after World War I furnishes some stellar examples. (Here's one as a kind of tease: If you are not familiar with the phrase “Arabian Chapter problem”, then you cannot really know how the territorial aspects of the British Mandates for Palestine and Mesopotamia came into being.)

Archives-based enlightenment takes a lot of hard work and time, and in some ways it is more satisfying than enlightenment produced by personal experience strangely depicted. Still, it doesn’t vibrate as powerfully. Archival enlightenment and personal experience do have one important thing in common, however: Neither stands the slightest chance at correcting errors pounded deeply into so-called common knowledge. The SALT II Treaty will always be defeated by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, even though it wasn’t. And there is nothing anyone can do about it.

Emotion and Meaning

When horrible things happen, like the terror attack on a Jewish school in southern France on Monday, our emotions churn and sometimes get the better of our capacity for reason. One commentator, an old friend who will remain nameless, blames the slimy subterranean anti-Semitism of contemporary Europe––much of the time masquerading in anti-Israel drag––for supplying the ammunition for Monday's attack. He and others have singled out Lady Catherine Ashton’s remarks as evidence not just of garden-variety moral equivalence but of “contributing to the demonization of Jews and Israel.”

I take the general point, and I do not quibble with the charge that demonization is afoot. It’s true: Outright fabrications purporting to show Israeli atrocities against Arab children, for example, are very common, and lots of people believe them because they want to, have been conditioned to, and mere facts and reason will not stop them. They remind me of some Arab films from the early 1950s that portray Jews doing awful things to Arabs in Palestine in 1948 that happened only in the fetid imagination of the filmmakers. But I think in this case that the ammunition argument is a bit much. It seems to me unlikely that Mohammed Merah, a self-described 24-year-old al-Qaeda associate of Algerian origins, was influenced significantly one way or the other by the still mild but thickening stench of European anti-Semitism, and particularly by the chic leftwing version of it so popular in so-called intellectual circles. The poisons motivating him came from a far more toxic brew than that.

As for Lady Ashton, she isn’t contributing much to the demonization of anything. She’s just an imbecile out of central casting, and has been ever since the days when she advocated unilateral Western disarmament as head of the Committee for Nuclear Disarmament. A perfect example of everything that is wrong with the mush-headed Left, she believes in the five big whoppers of that school: (1) the fewer weapons, the fewer wars; (2) the United Nations is a positive and independent international actor; (3) poverty causes terrorism; (4) the use of force should always be conceived of as a last resort; and (5) bad actors can never take advantage of meliorative diplomacy (just exactly like Bashar al-Assad is taking advantage of Kofi Annan at this very moment).

There is of course no evidence for any of these beliefs, and plenty of evidence pointing in exactly the opposite direction, but that doesn't stop people like Lady Ashton from believing them. She believes them the same way a child believes a fable, because it makes her feel good and helps her convince herself that she is of the best intentions. She reminds me of a character from a bad Monty Python skit lampooning the inbred idiocy of the British upper classes. Her statement after the Toulouse attack was run-of-the-mill pseudo-ecumenical crap. I would not even dignify it by calling it demonization, and I would not waste so much as a droplet of my adrenalin on her account.

But the Toulouse attack evokes other kinds of emotions—emotions that, particularly for Jews but also for many others, pose real dilemmas. I have two in mind.

First, news of atrocities such as occurred on Monday challenge us to maintain a balance between a healthy stoicism and a necessary compassion. We must be stoic at such times, lest we help the murderers achieve their aims. Eleanor Roosevelt once said that no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. Similarly, no one can terrorize you or turn you into a vicarious victim without your consent. That consent should not, absolutely must not, be granted. As a former boss of mine used to say, “never let them see you sweat, or cry.” Over the years Israelis have come to understand this very well indeed. I only wish that more Americans, including some very high-ranking American officials, had understood this better in the days and weeks after September 11, 2001.

One can overdo it, however. If our stoicism becomes too steely, our upper lip too stiff, we risk paralyzing the sense of compassion that makes us human. To think of an eight-year-old girl being grabbed by the hair and methodically murdered while the gunmen switched weapons is very close to an unbearable thought. Who cannot feel anguish and compassion for her friends and family at a time like this? Who cannot feel utter repugnance for anyone who could do such a thing? The question, again, is how do we balance our need to keep levelheaded with our need to remain fully human. This is a very hard question for which there is no stock or standard answer. Everyone needs to come to terms with it in his or her own way. But come to terms, everyone must.

Second—and this observation applies mainly to Jews—at times like these the history of Jewish persecution can rise up into the back of our throats, its bilious and bitter taste vying to overcome us, even to drive us crazy. It can suggest to the emotionally mobilized that, indeed, it is just as it says in the Psalms (44:22): “For Thy sake they kill us all the day long; we are like sheep led to the slaughter.” But this is a highly truncated and dangerous way to characterize the Jewish people's relationship to God and to Judaism.

Judaism is about life, not death; joy more than sadness; optimism more than futility. The Jewish ethic is about repairing a torn world, not about giving in to evil by exaggerating its power. When tragedy befalls us, we rend our garment; but then in due course we make a new and better garment.

The optic of Jewish history in our times has been distorted by the horrors of the 20^th century. Nearly two millennia of exile have been bad, yes, in many ways, in many places and at many times, but it has not been two thousands years of one unrelieved holocaust after another. To allow events like that of this past Monday to distort our understanding and motivation for what keeps us faithful to our tradition is to harm that tradition’s future. It is very difficult, if not impossible in the long run, to transmit a capacious and beautiful heritage to future generations on the basis of a backward-looking narrative of catastrophe, murder and fear. Turning Judaism into a death cult by allowing tragedy to trump hope in our own hearts only vindicates the acts of depraved men like Mohammed Merah.

We need always to teach our children that the most important moment in Jewish history was not Abraham’s hearing the word of the Almighty, it was not the splitting of the Red Sea, it was not the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai, and it was not the consecration of Solomon’s Temple. The most important moment in Jewish history is the one happening right now, because it’s the only moment we can do something about. Knowing that is what helps us to transmute our pain into purposefulness. Knowing that helps us find the emotional and intellectual balances we seek, and need.

Purim 5772

During Purim this year it dawned on me that there are several parallels between the story in the Scroll of Esther and the story of Joseph. It’s hard to say how long this observation has been marinating in my brain, but suddenly this year it leaped forth, nearly fully formed, into consciousness. (No, I was totally sober….so don’t even go there thinking “ahd lo yadah”.) Let me just mention eight, perhaps nine, aspects that now seem obvious to me. Some are fairly strong parallels, a few others a bit less so; some have been noted over many years, but others appear to be original. Let me then end with a modern Midrash, if I may, just for fun.

First, the protagonists in both narratives are away from home, and they are away from home involuntarily. Joseph is stolen away from Eretz Israel, sold by his jealous brothers to a caravan of traders headed down into Egypt. Mordechai is descended from the captives of Nebuchadnezzar, as we are informed in chapter 2. Mordechai is identified as being from the tribe of Benjamin--"the son of Yair, the son of Shimei, the son of Kish, a Benjamite who had been carried away from Jerusalem with the captives that had been carried away with King Yechanya" by Nebuchadnezzar. That means he was four generations removed from the beginning of the first exile.[1]

In both cases, too, second, the protagonists are "sold" into slavery. This term is used regarding Joseph in Genesis, chapter 38; in Megillat Esther the reference is to chapter 7, verse 4: "for we are sold, I and my people, to be destroyed." It is the same root in Hebrew. I cannot think of any other passage in the Hebrew Bible in which a major figure is “sold.”

Third, both Jacob's family, led by Joseph, and the Jews of Persia, led by Mordechai, have a chance at the end of their respective stories to leave exile and go back to Eretz Israel, but they don't. In the case of Joseph, we have to assume that the famine probably ended while Joseph and at least most of his brothers were still alive. After all, we know from the text that it was supposed to be a seven-year famine, five years of which were left at the time of the story. At the end of Esther's story, the Jews are triumphant, and could have chosen to leave if they had wanted to.

In the latter case especially, if Mordechai is, as already noted, the fourth generation removed from the Babylonian exile, and if we figure 18-20 years per generation, which seems about right in those days, that means about 72-80 years; if we figure 25 years per generation, then 100 years after. Since the Temple was finished being rebuilt under Persian auspices 70 years after the exile, it means that Mordechai lived roughly conterminously with Erza—probably just a generation or so later. So not only could the Jews of Shushan and surrounds have returned to Eretz Israel and to what was then a spanking new Second Temple, they would have been safe within the same imperial security sphere, and welcomed by their countrymen, in so doing.

But they didn't; there is not so much as even a proto-Zionist hint in Megillat Esther. This may have something to do with how Purim became ensconced as a holiday in the Rabbinic calendar as that calendar was codified in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE.

Unless someone discovers a rare document, we are left to speculate about this, of course. But it could be that in the formative period of rabbinic Judaism Purim acquired equal status with Hannukah, the events of which did happen in Eretz Israel, because of a shrewd Rabbinical political decision to accommodate the large, prosperous and high-status Disapora community that had chosen still not to return from the Babylonian Exile. Not only in Mordechai’s time, but for centuries thereafter, large numbers of Jews lived in what is today Iran, Iraq, Egypt and elsewhere in the Mediterranean basin, and there were, of course, very important centers of scholarship in these lands outside of Eretz Israel. In other words, by including Purim as having equal status with Hannukah, the Rabbis saw to it that each major chunk of the Jewish people, those in the land, and those outside of it, got equal treatment by way of instituting a post-Biblical holiday.

In any event, in both cases—Egypt and Shushan—many of our forefathers decided to stay in more cosmopolitan, prosperous and urban environments than go to Eretz Yisrael. There's nothing old about that, is there?

Fourth, at a certain relatively early point in the narrative both protagonists obtain portentous confidential information. Joseph has inside knowledge about Pharaoh’s head butler and baker; Mordechai uncovers a plot hatched by (at least) two of the King's servants. The parallel is not exact, because in the story of Joseph only one of the men is found guilty and hanged, while the other is exonerated. In the Purim story, both are found guilty and are hanged. In the case of Joseph, his knowledge of the plot comes to him through a dream. In the case of Mordechai, we are not told (chapter 2, verses 21-23) how he comes upon the hidden knowledge, but it could have been through a dream. Again, as far as I can remember, this narrative device, or motif, is unique to the stories of Joseph and Esther.

Fifth, both protagonists hide their identity—Joseph’s from his brothers, Esther’s from the other women and the King—and then both reveal it at a strategic moment. They do so for the same reason: to save their people from destruction. Both Joseph and Mordechai are explicit about this. Joseph tries to comfort his brothers by saying to them that what they did was part of God's plan, for now Joseph was in a position to save the family from death in the famine. And of course Mordechai explicitly tells a hesitant Esther that she has to go to the King, because for all she knows she has come to her place for just this purpose.

Sixth, both stories make use of a domesticated transport animal as a prop for humiliation and rage. Joseph uses Benjamin's donkey to hide his goblet, so that he can get leverage on his brothers and prevent them leaving his presence before revealing his identity to them. Judah and his brothers (except Benjamin, I imagine, for a reason noted below) are humiliated by this turn of events and made deeply afraid.

A horse, of course, is involved in Haman's humiliation. As the text tells us, when the King can’t sleep one night and asks to be read the chronicles of his kingdom, he learns of Mordechai’s service in revealing the plot of the two chamberlains. He asks what has been done to reward Mordechai, and he is told that nothing has been done. Just as the exonerated butler forget Joseph as he left prison, so no one remembered to tell the King about Mordechai’s service to the court—yet another minor parallel.

So at this point the King asks who is in the court, and it turns out that the evil Haman is come early for a banquet, of which more in a moment. So the king asks Haman what should be done for the man the King wishes to honor, and Haman, thinking the King means him, waxes eloquent and lavish. As soon as Haman finishes speaking, the king tells him to do exactly as he said for Mordechai the Jew, Haman’s nemesis. This involves Haman dressing Mordechai in the King’s robes, and parading him through the streets on the King’s horse. When Haman’s wife Zeresh hears about this, her reaction is very similar to that of Benjamin’s brothers at the discovery of the goblet, as in “Oh, big, big trouble” and “Really done for now, man.”

Seventh, skipping ahead chronologically, both narratives have one common concluding motif, namely that the size of the government grows. Joseph increases the size of the state in the end for Pharaoh, first purchasing cattle for grain and then land for grain in the course of the famine; Ahashverosh levies a tax on the land (chapter 10, verse 1).

The eighth parallel is the most intriguing, and hardest to understand, for me. It is also one that no other commentators seem to have noted. Both narratives feature a repeated, or doubled, meeting or reception.

In the story of Joseph, in chapter 42 of Genesis, Joseph’s brothers come to buy food, but Benjamin, the youngest child and Joseph’s only full brother, does not come with them. He stays behind with his father Jacob. Some strange things happen in chapter 42, including the fact that every man’s money has been surreptitiously returned to him in the sack of purchased corn. The family in time eats up the food and the brothers plead with their father Jacob for permission to return to buy more, but the elder brothers say that this time they must bring Benjamin with them, because the man in Egypt demanded it of them to prove that they were telling the truth and were not spies. Jacob relents and down to Egypt they go. As the brothers try to leave the second time, this is when Joseph has his goblet planted in Benjamin’s donkey’s sack.

In the story of Joseph this doubling of receptions makes sense in terms of how the story’s dramatic plot line develops. A fair bit of time intervenes between audiences; the brothers provide Jacob an after-action report of their dealings in Egypt, Jacob reacts to it, and all this matters to the storyline. This is not quite so clear in the Scroll of Esther.

In chapter 5 of the Megillah, Esther shows up before the King, and the King asks her when she wants. She wants the King and Haman to join her in a banquet, and so they do. And at the banquet the King asks Esther what she wants again, and again Esther answers that she wants the king and Haman to come to another banquet, this time one she will prepare for them tomorrow over at her place. There is no obvious reason that what Esther told the King in Haman's presence during the second banquet she could not have told him during the first banquet, but she didn’t. Of course, in between the first banquet and the second the King has his bout of insomnia, reads about Mordechai’s good deed, and so forth as related just above. But this seems contrived compared to the way the story of Joseph develops so richly, and it is not entirely clear either that Haman’s humiliation is necessary to sealing his eventual fate.

That fate unfolds in chapter 7. The King and Haman arrive at Esther’s banquet, the second one in two days, and once again the King asks Esther what she wants, because the king knows that just eating and drinking well is not sufficient as a request to a King such as he. This is when Esther asks for her life and the lives of her people, when the King expresses astonishment and anger that anyone would threaten his Queen, and when it is revealed that Haman is the evildoer and the people in question are the Jews. The King’s recent discovery of Mordechai’s service to the King doesn’t hurt insofar as how events subsequently transpire, but, again, it’s not entirely clear that this is necessary for Haman and his sons to have ended up on the gallows.

I have tried to think of other Biblical narratives that feature this twin reception/meeting theme, in other words where there is a meeting of characters, and then a repeat meeting with virtually the same characters. Aside from Moses’ repeated audience with Pharaoh before the Exodus—which falls into a different narrative category—I cannot recall another example in the entire Hebrew Bible. (I am still pondering what, if anything, we can learn from this.)

There is even a ninth parallel, perhaps, but not one unique to the stories of Joseph and Esther. Things end well in both stories, sort of. They end well in the sense that the Jewish people are saved alive, and their political power in their particular circumstances is, if anything, strengthened. But these are no “happily ever after” tales. Joseph and his brothers are never truly reconciled, and they all remain in an exile bound for harsh enslavement. As for Mordechai, he is riding high—but what about Esther?

The only honest way to describe what she has done with her life is to prostitute herself at the highest possible level available to her, and for what turns out to be a very noble cause. But prostitution is prostitution, and never does the text indicate that orphan Hadassah is in love with her King, or that she one day becomes a mother by him, or by any other man. Looking at the story from Esther’s point of view, it’s rather sad in a way. Blood lust is loud, and we hear it at high volume in chapter 9 of the Megillah. A mature appreciation of the book needs, I think, to balance that noise with disappointments of the heart that are never stated, only implied. It is possible to understand Esther’s famous remark, “If I perish, I perish” as an expression tantamount to saying that, in her own estimation, her life wasn’t worth very much anyway. That is, I also think, a much fuller reason for fasting on Ta’anit Esther than simply showing solidarity with her own fasting.

I have looked into the commentaries for some insight as to what these parallels between the stories of Joseph and Esther might mean. I have found some, notably in the Midrash, and I have found a few modern comments noting parallels.[3] But none encompasses all the parallels I have noted here, and none is entirely satisfactory on the level of teasing out a larger meaning.

If there is a key, overarching message that binds these two stories, it is, it seems to me, one that characterizes the mindset of the Bible as a whole—and it was a very different mindset from the one common at the time. It is that events, and more importantly the sequence of events, have meaning and purpose, and a definite role in shaping the future. History and life are not random, and events are not cyclical but progressive—a trajectory well described by a helix. There are many, many illustrations of this theme in the Hebrew Bible, but nowhere are they more explicit than in the stories of Joseph and Esther.

As to what other larger meanings there may be, I have but two fragmentary notions. The first concerns Benjamin.

Benjamin links the two stories. Benjamin is a key figure in the story of Joseph, being Joseph's only full brother and the pivot of his stratagem with his other brothers. And, clearly, Mordechai is from the tribe of Benjamin. In the Midrash Rabbi Yohanan sideswipes the point by saying, and bringing textual evidence to bear, that “the trials of Rachel’s children are equivalent and their greatness is equivalent.” Beyond that, an obvious notion is that Benjamin symbolizes the fact that God looks out for and works in history on behalf of the Jewish people whether they are inside Eretz Israel or not. That doesn’t sound very novel, but in the ancient world, which accepted matter-of-factly the connective trilogy of people-land-god, it is an out-of-the-ordinary assertion in the context of its time.

The second concerns the goblet Joseph put in Benjamin's saddlebag, and here is where my “just for fun” modern Midrash comes in.

Cast your memory back to chapter 31 of Genesis. In this chapter the Torah tells us that Rachel stole her father's teraphim, a word usually translated as "gods" or "idols." No reason is given for Rachel's act, but to even begin to understand it, one has to know the importance of unalienable ancestral land and the spirits of the dead in virtually all ancient cultures; knowing that, in turn, tells you how revolutionary Abraham's leaving Ur Kasdim was at the time, a point that moderns generally miss, and it echoes with the point just made that Israel’s God had power universally, not just in a certain land.

Anyway, Rachel's father Laban accuses a fleeing Jacob of having stolen his stuff—meaning his daughters and grandchildren, but he also mentions the teraphim, which he also calls “elohim”, his gods. Jacob, unaware of what Rachel had done, denies the charge in full, and invites Laban and his posse to search the premises. They search but find nothing, because Rachel had hidden them in the saddle pillow of her camel, and refuses to budge because, she says, "the way of women" is upon her. The Torah through Jacob's words, in verse 37, refers to the items now not as "elohim", gods, or teraphim, idols, but as vessels—kaylim.

So we have three words to describe the same thing, and one of them is vessel. The reason is that, if you look into ancient Near Eastern archaeology, you find that vessels used to hold strong drink ("spirits", not at all coincidentally) were part and parcel of idolatrous religious rituals. Speaking just for fun in a Midrashic tense, as it were, I think that these teraphim of Laban were passed on after Rachel's death in childbirth to her children, specifically to her elder child Joseph. I speculate that Joseph took the most important one everywhere he went (it may have been a vehicle for spirits that stimulated his vivid dreams, and his tactlessness in describing them to his jealous brothers), and that Joseph had it with him when he was carried down to Egypt.

I think it is the selfsame vessel, now called a g’viah that we know to have been silver, that Joseph hid away in Benjamin's saddlebag, and I think that when Benjamin saw it uncovered (we are told, by tradition, by Joseph’s elder son and thus Benjamin’s nephew Menashe), he recognized exactly what it was and knew then for a certainty that his brother Joseph was indeed the vizier of Egypt from whom the brothers had just departed.

This may bear on how Joseph singles out Benjamin in the reunion scene in chapter 45, for, if my modern Midrash is right, not only did Benjamin know what was going on, Joseph knew that he would know. Look at verse 12: "And your eyes see", says Joseph to his brothers, "and the eyes of my brother Benjamin, that it is my mouth that speaks to you." (Now he has switched to Hebrew, say the commentators, that is the meaning here of the words “my mouth.”) But maybe the verse as a whole means not that Benjamin sees that it is Joseph speaking, but that the brothers can see by the look in Benjamin's eyes the truth of what Joseph is saying, because Benjamin already knows it.

Whatever happened to that goblet? Some Christians with imagination, I am sure, would have a theory about that. But maybe Joseph gave it to his brother Benjamin, and it was then passed down from generation to generation within the tribe of Benjamin, from Kish to Shimei to Yair until it became Mordechai’s and then, yes, Queen Esther’s own. (Mordechai, remember, took Esther “for his own daughter” after her parents died, and there is no mention of Mordechai’s having a wife or a child of his own to inherit property.) I like to think that when Haman saw that goblet at what turned out to be his final banquet, that vessel once belonging to Laban and stolen by Rachel, he somehow already knew that an Agagite could never defeat an Israelite in a battle about right and wrong.

There is another parallel in the larger stories of Pharaoh's and Haman's defeat, of course. As Egypt was despoiled at the Exodus, so were the anti-Semites of Shushan at the time of the first Purim (despite the Jews not seizing the loot, so we are twice told in the Megillah). And so it goes, God willing: As every one of our Prophets has taken pains to teach us, as long as Jews know the difference between right and wrong, and act accordingly, God will ultimately protect a faithful people from its enemies. As we say, “The Glory of Israel does not lie.” Samuel 1, 15:29) And if not, well, we know how that movie ends, too.

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[1] I reject the interpretation that Mordechai himself was carried away in the exile, both for logical and grammatical reasons; the pronoun refers to Kish, his great-grandfather. I also reject a traditional interpretation that these men were not Mordechai's immediate male ancestors, but famous ancestors from remote times, because it violates the plain meaning of the text, which one is supposed to avoid doing unless the plain meaning of the text is problematic—i.e., not all that plain. That is certainly not the case here.

[3] Some of these mention some raise close linguistic parallels I have not discussed. See, for example, Rabino Joshua Kullock, “Esther and Joseph: Veiling and Unveiling”, for madrichim.org, 2010; Gavriel Haim Cohen, “Queen Esther in the Footsteps of Joseph the Wise”, in Studies in the Five Megillot: Megillat Esther (Israel Ministry of Education and Culture, 1991); Vered Hollander-Goldfarb, “Purim: Esther and Joseph—Two Models of Exilic Jews”, accessed at www.conservativeyeshiva.org/purim-esther-and-joseph, March 15, 2012. There is also neat little compendium of 13 parallels, found at http: apps.business.ualberta.ca/reshef/purim/joseph.html—no date. I have no idea who is responsible for creating it. Cohen is best at citing precise statements from Midrash Rabbah.

Libya, R.I.P. (1951–2012)

I wrote fairly recently a fourth update on Libya, thinking it would be the last update for a while. But having read this morning’s New York Times, I can’t resist a short comment.

An article by Suliman Ali Alzawy and David D. Kirkpatrick reports that Libyans in the eastern province, centered on Benghazi, have declared their intention of creating what they call autonomy for themselves within a loose federal structure—apparently very loose. The fact that they already have a name for this so-called autonomous region, Barqa, gives away the real game. We may look back on this meeting of Cyrenaicans in an abandoned soap factory as the beginning of the formal end of a unified Libyan state.

The article also happens to be one of the most subtly disingenuous efforts at post hoc self-protection I have read in the Times in a while, and that is really saying something. At one point the article states, “The specter of partition has hung over the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi from the start, in part because of the country’s long history of division in its relatively short history of national unity.”

This is true, of course. As I wrote nearly a year ago:

[T]here is a regional and tribal element to the fight in Libya. It is unlikely that the Benghazi-based rebels could by themselves establish stable control over the whole country. It is almost as unlikely that the Tripolitanian tribes could re-establish firm control over Cyrenaica. . . . We are therefore looking into the maw of a Libya that may well be divided. . . .But I challenge anyone, including the authors of today’s New York Times article, to go back to the February, March and April 2011 editions of that paper and find any abundance of warnings about the “specter of partition.” I might have missed something back then. I was on a U.S. Navy ship sailing from San Diego to Pearl Harbor for part of that period and did not have access, but I am willing to wager actual dough that you won’t find many. Indeed, it took the New York Times and most of the rest of the elite press in the United States months even to mention the word “tribe” in relation to what was going on in Libya.

Alzawy and Kirkpatrick toss off a thumbnail history of the country as though the Times had been on to all this from the get-go. We thus have a new journalists’ form of what I call bullshistory, the invention, explicit or suggested, of a usable past for present purposes.

I wonder what the official flag and coat of arms of Barqa will look like...

The Wisdom of Sheikh Zubar A U.S.-Turkish Option for Syria

I had a friend some years ago, an Israeli (since deceased) of large appetites and an expansive sense of humor, who used to joke that Shakespeare was really an Arab: Sheikh Zubar. I remember one day at a hilltop park near his home in Haifa he acted out a very tall tale of Hamlet with an Arabic accent, to gales of laughter from all assembled. I thought of this moment recently while trying to gather my thoughts about the Syrian cauldron, because the first image that popped into my mind was that of Hamlet. If Sheikh Zubar were around to re-write Hamlet in Arabic today, setting the scene in Syria rather than Denmark, how would the play go? It’s an amusing question, but that’s where the entertainment value in all this stops very short: There is nothing amusing about what is going on in Syria right now.

Hamlet, however, is the right metaphor. There may be other dilemmas about which Americans, not to exclude the American government, have created such a mountainous disproportion of words to deeds, but I can’t think of any. We have talked ourselves all colors of the rainbow, wringing our hands about what to do––and for all practical purposes we have done nothing. The European Union has done nothing. The UN and the so-called international community have done nothing. The Russians and Chinese have done worse than nothing. The Arab League tried to do something and was humiliated—quite deliberately.

All of these efforts have gotten nowhere because they are premised on being able to reason with the Syrian regime, and on the subsidiary assumption that at least at some subterranean level the regime cares what others think about it. American policy for many months seems to have been premised on such assumptions, and this is really unforgivably naïve, not to speak of ignorant. It is cowardly, too, not to face up to reality when that reality is chewing through innocent lives at an accelerating pace. It is good at times like these for diplomats to remember something Dick Gregory once said back in 1969: “You must start with the truth before you tamper with it.”

It is not possible to make the Syrian regime relent with words or implausible threats or mere sanctions. If Ban Ki-moon doesn’t know this already, he will learn it soon during his impending trip, during which the regime will do all it can to humiliate him while appearing polite—so much more admirable are the skills involved in such a balance on the part of those so well practiced at taqiyah (“righteous dissimulation”; in other words, artful lying). In the regime’s view its problem is existential. In its mentality any sign of weakness or compromise is tantamount to suicide, and they can make an objectively good case for that attitude. Bravado and the mass murder of its own unarmed people combine to form the only strategy the regime can think of under the circumstances: Come after us if you dare, but we will pull down the tent on everyone if you do.

This, then, makes for a very, very hard problem in Syria. At the risk of not being able to add much to what has already been expressed, and without mentioning any names of those recently ripe with expression, let us see why.

First, unlike the Libyan case, Syria is a strategic stake in a strategic region. As many have pointed out, whether the Assad regime falls or stands will have a significant bearing on the Iranian position in the region. The future of that regime will also have a major impact on Lebanon, and a less dramatic but hardly trivial influence on all of Syria’s neighbors. That includes Arab states like Lebanon, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, but also non-Arab states like Israel and Turkey. Also unlike the Libyan case, Syria has a significant ally: Iran. The Libyan regime had none, and to miss the implications of this distinction is to miss a lot. More to the point: There are no lessons or transportable insights to be applied from Libya to Syria. None.

To say that the future of Syria will matter far and wide is not to claim to know what that future will be even if the Assad regime falls. The rise of a Sunni–majority government in Damascus would portend a sharp reduction in Syrian support for Hizballah in Lebanon, for the current regime is a willing transfer station for arms and money to Hizballah from the Iranian regime. But the elimination of the Syrian transfer station would not necessarily doom Hizballah, which has resources of its own; nor would it by itself guarantee a happier Lebanese future. The point nonetheless stands: The future of the regime in Syria is a causal torque point for the entire Levant and beyond. One might even say (and several commentators have) that it is a kind of tipping point: If the Sunnis in Syria more or less prevail, then the regional Shi‘a Crescent presumably threatening the Sunni states is broken; if the Alawis prevail, then that Crescent turns into a sword sharper and more likely to swing into action than ever.

Second, these very high stakes are matched by a very low number of attractive policy options. Assuming for a moment that for strategic reasons (that is, not just for aesthetic or moral reasons) the United States wants the Assad regime to fall, we cannot readily send an expeditionary military force to turn the trick. Syria is a country of diverse and sometimes difficult terrain, with about four times the population of Libya. Unlike Libya, it is not for practical military purposes an island (bordered, as is Libya, by barren desert to its south and the sea to the north), where all major targets can be attacked from sea-based airpower. It has a relatively sophisticated air defense system. It has something of an ally in a major power—Russia—although one should not exaggerate the closeness of the relationship these days. Russia would not go to war to protect the Syrian regime from an American- or NATO-led invasion.

But no such invasion is going to happen, and for good reasons. If the United States put boots on the ground in Syria, we would own the place until someone competent came to claim it—which, given the history of modern, independent Syria in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, might be a very long time coming. There would very predictably be an insurgency, an intifada, perhaps not wildly unlike the one we experienced in Iraq after March 2003. I don’t know anyone who wants to go through something like that again. As we should have learned by now, getting into a place like Syria is much easier than getting back out with one’s body parts intact. It has been said many times, but it is worth saying again: It is one thing to burn down the shithouse, another to install plumbing.

And this is not to speak of what a U.S.-led operation in Syria would do for our position in Afghanistan (nothing useful) and as regards our reputational capital, such as it is, in the Arab and Muslim world in general. Wars almost never end neatly and cleanly, or with a full plate of consequences that can be reasonably anticipated. Some of those consequences start out as second- or third-order matters, but they often do not remain so peripheral. That is why so-called wars of choice usually end up being recalled through the currency of regret.

So if we are not going to put boots on the ground, what other options are there to consider? Some have suggested creating a U.S.-or NATO-enforced no-fly zone over Syria, but this has to rank as some kind of thoughtless hiccup produced by bad habit. It apparently has not dawned on the people arguing for this that the Syrian regime has not much used its air force against the opposition and doesn’t need to.

Others have suggested creating humanitarian zones, but under the circumstances those zones would have to be both carved out and maintained by force. If those zones are supplied by air, then Syria’s formidable air defense system would have to be engaged and destroyed. If those zones are to be supplied by land, then one is talking about an expeditionary force of some size and nature to protect the corridor to and from the source of triage supplies. There is no such thing, therefore, as an effective non-kinetic option for Syria. Those who claim there is don’t know what they’re talking about.

Since some observers at least recognize the limitations of such ideas, an alternative proposal has been to arm the Syrian opposition. A case can be made for this idea, but a case can also be made against it. The case against it seems to have found an early home at the State Department. (You are shocked, I know.) Many months ago, when the State Department––even at the level of the Secretary herself––was still saying, with no apparent embarrassment or sense of irony, that Bashir al-Assad was just a disappointed reformer and our best hope for resolving the situation, it also warned the Syrian opposition that it would forfeit all sympathy from the United States if it deigned to arm itself. Back on October 27 of last year, I characterized this view as follows:

We have verbally supported the Syrian opposition, but we have made clear that no intervention on our part is in the offing, and even more bizarre—especially in the eyes of Arabs and others in the region—we have conditioned our support for the Syrian opposition on its not taking up arms. . . . Anyone who had read President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech might have concluded from it that this was a man who would never equate aggressive violence with acts of self-defense. But that person, apparently, would be wrong.

I have not changed my mind about this characterization, but in all fairness, it is not a simple matter. What the Administration and others presumably want to avoid is militarizing Syria’s heterogeneous society, for that is the quickest route to an all-out civil war, one that would make the former Lebanese variety look tame by comparison. That is what spokesmen have meant, I think, when they have said that more guns in the country would not conduce to an eventual stable settlement.

That’s true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. Just because the United States will not supply arms doesn’t mean that others won’t. Others will, and are, and the Saudi regime seems more than willing to finance the effort. We will minimize our leverage in the eventual reconstruction of the Syrian government to the extent that we stay aloof from the fight now. If Assad falls, there will be a ferocious competition for influence over the structure and personalities of the succession. Given the stakes here, it does not serve U.S. interests to be absent from the competition.

Favoring a policy of arming the opposition doesn’t solve the policy problem, however. It only opens up a new one. As is well known, the Syrian opposition in-country, while manifestly brave, is neither united, especially competent or all that trustworthy as a recipient of U.S. military aid. It is not clear what arms we might supply, to whom we might supply them, or how. Even so, these problems could probably be worked out, and there is an argument for doing so more quickly. Some observers fear that the United States would be aiding a group that might eventually give rise to a Sunni fundamentalist regime. That kind of regime might be even worse than the present one, which is why I noted above that it is not an open and shut case that the United States should support the fall of the Assad regime. As desirable in many respects as the regime’s fall is, the question has to be approached with some consideration given to the misanthropies of what might follow it. People say all the time that things can’t get worse, but in fact they can and often do.

On balance, however, it is best that the regime fall, and the reason for acting sooner rather than later to achieve that outcome is that, the more time passes, the more likely it is that the Syrian opposition will become radical fundamentalist in orientation. That, after all, is what happened in Bosnia, as others have pointed out. The sooner the United States, without but hopefully with allies, creates equities with a potential new government, the more readily we will be able to steer, or at least limit, political outcomes.

The supply of arms to an unsteady and disunited Syrian opposition is not a reliable enough undertaking to guarantee the fall of the Assad regime. If we supply arms and the regime endures, it will indeed just ensure that more people end up dead. If we can manage it, something more––and something more dramatic––needs to happen. Let me explain what I have in mind.

The most likely exit route for Bashir al-Assad and his immediate entourage is not a storming of the palace by a militarily triumphant opposition. It is a coup from inside, marshaled by Ba‘ath Party officials and military leaders who have concluded that Assad is more trouble then he is worth. In that sense, what Syrian elites might do is very similar to what Egyptian elites did in throwing Hosni Mubarak over the side. That might happen at some point anyway, but it may take many weeks or even many months. In the meantime, many more innocent people will die and, likely, as already indicated, it will radicalize the opposition in a way that will prejudice the future badly. One way to make that coup happen faster is to shock the Syrian system by external means.

There are two armies on the borders of Syria that are capable of providing this catalytic pretext for action by the Syrian military against the core of the present regime: those of Israel and Turkey. We can rule out any Israeli use of force in Syria under current circumstances for a variety of reasons. If there were ever an over-determined conclusion, this is it. Turkey, on the other hand, is a different matter.

The Turkish government has been embarrassed by the turn of events in recent months in Syria. Prime Minister Erdogan had invested quite a bit of political capital in improved relations with Syria, and only after events in that country grew gruesomely out of control did the Turkish elite change its tune. One reason it did so is because it feared an influx of refugees, mainly Kurdish, across the border from Syria into Turkey. Alas, that fear has materialized. The last thing the Turkish government wants inside its borders is more Kurds, especially ones who will become wards of the state––until, in due course, they turn on that state.

Therefore, the Turkish government and military must have at least discussed by now the idea of creating a holding area for refugees on the Syrian side of their common frontier. It would not be difficult for the Turkish military to enter Syria to set up such a zone. It would not be difficult either for the Turkish military to enter Syria much more deeply than that. It could march directly toward Aleppo and even Damascus if it felt like it, doing medical triage, distributing food and clothing and keeping order as necessary along the way. It could also invite Syrian soldiers and police to join the Turkish effort (one need not use the word “defect” in public)—a far better option for said soldiers and police than being killed by Turkish arms, one would think. An operation premised on humanitarian grounds but that nonetheless had the appearance of a threat to the regime could very well prompt the coup. The tactical logic of such an operation is simple: Its message to the hesitant Syrian elite would be, “The sooner you remove the Assads from power, the less Syrian territory we will occupy, and the less territory we will consequently need to evacuate as a new government is built and achieves a capacity to restore and maintain order.”

The Turkish government thus far has not made any threats about moving into Syrian territory. Indeed, it has expressed a great reluctance to think in such terms. Perhaps one of the reasons is that the government and the military in Turkey do not exactly trust one another these days, and that is no trivial matter standing in the way of a Turkish operation. But this reluctance could change. The idea of a Turkish force returning to the Arab world, this time as a welcome savior, and with the imprimatur of the Arab League, has to paint a beautiful picture in the eyes of Turkey's current neo-Ottoman dreamers.

For Turkish reluctance to change, however, the United States and Turkey’s other major NATO allies would have to privately assure Turkey that such an operation would be in the interest of the alliance, and that Turkey would not be left hung out to dry if anything went wrong. It would be a good thing, of course, for symbolic purposes if the United Nations would bless such an operation, but this seems highly unlikely given Russian and Chinese attitudes. It might be designated a NATO operation, which sufficed in Bosnia, or a joint NATO-Arab League operation, but that is a complicated matter and not really necessary to get the job done. Whether it becomes a formal NATO operation or not, Turkey’s NATO allies could and should provide all necessary financial and logistic support. The U.S. government needs to lead the effort.

A second-order benefit of a NATO-blessed Turkish operation in Syria could very well be to significantly improve Turkey's relationship with the major countries in the European Union. One may doubt whether Turkey will ever be admitted to full membership in the European Union, but certainly relations can be improved over their current state. A “band of brothers” episode may not hurt, especially if it does not stumble badly.

If the Turkish military is present on Syrian soil, and the expected coup takes place partly in consequence, that will be only the end of the beginning in the reconstruction of the Syrian government. (If the coup doesn’t happen, the Turks can withdraw as far as they like, even all the way home, claiming the humanitarian effort has succeeded and is over.) Turkey, the European Union, the Arab League, Russia (if it plays nice) and the United States would need to sponsor a Bonn-like conference to work out a transitional arrangement and eventually a new constitutional structure for the Syrian government—just as occurred in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, but in this case we should do a better job of understanding the country and arranging matters accordingly than we did in the Afghan case.

That effort to work out internal matters would need to be cocooned by an international contact group, sponsored by the same parties, to protect a transitional arrangement in Syria from hostile penetration from outsiders. Such a contact group should rightly include Israel, but if this turns out to be a deal-breaker, then the United States would have to carry Israel's proxy. But it should include Iran. If such a regional contact group were to include both Israel and Iran, so much the better. Another second-order benefit might come from it.

In the context of a shepherded reconstruction of Syrian politics, a parallel effort might be mounted to do the same for Lebanon, in the context of which Lebanon's genuine independence could be more firmly guaranteed. Lebanon has suffered when Syria is strong, and it has suffered when Syria is weak. The Lebanese people are not blameless in all this, but clearly they have suffered enough.

I recognize full well that there are many pitfalls in the suggestions I have just made. But there are no simple and risk-free courses of action in circumstances such as those we confront today in Syria. No one can say, I think, that the status quo is either tolerable or stable. At least what I am suggesting approaches a strategy, and one sensitive to the interests of the United States. If anyone else has a better idea, one that faces reality square on and has some chance of actually working, I would like to hear it. I love Hamlet. Really, I do. But the time has come to stop whining and wringing our hands, to exit the theater, to tell ourselves the truth and to act accordingly.