For the last week I have been watching with interest and dismay how this post with 1948 Israeli photos went viral. When I posted the photos I knew right away that this was a remarkable, eye opening material but the reality unfolded unexpectedly, I was staying on a side of a stampede. My midnight notes:
- It took a month for someone to notice the photos. First a blogger linked to the photos in comments to a moderately read blog. The next day a small blog linked to the post. Then slightly larger blog and then a fairly known blog. Each link brought in from a 100 to a 1000 visitors. The virus got seeded. People started sneezing.
- The post got linked in a widely read email list.
- This is interesting and unexpected stage. The links were picked up by a few foreign language niche blogs. A German political blog and a Spanish Jewish blog. I guess the blogosphere is not as vast as in English. The very simple blogs turned out to have shockingly large readership. Hundreds or readers from every Spanish speaking country on earth came to look at the photos. This was really amazing to watch.
- This is the stage where people who saw the photos started to email it to their friends in large numbers. Again there was certain order in this. First people who are advanced enough to have a gmail account, huge number of people, to my utter surprise, who still have an aol email and then all the wall.co.il people… This is when the post gone viral in Israel. Majority of visitors to the blog in the last week are from Israel. I think eventually every person in Israel will see the photos. I think the photos are so strong that they cane enable a cultural perception shift in the entire county. Once you have seen it, you are never the same. And here is the huge point that the reality supersedes mythology. Yes, reality supersedes mythology!
- At this stage a few hareidy forums and a French Jewish blog picked up the posts. This was the most disappointing stage. They immediately lifted the photos and reposted on the hideous sites with no credit to the photographers, photos linked back to my server. This is called bandwidth theft and I had to disable all hot-linking via a server script. I don’t like to do this because it causes display problems with some of the RSS readers but I had no choice. In case of the moronic French blog they reposted all pictures on one page, triggering a cascade of error massages on my server. They never responded to my emails or even a phone call to France. The hareidy blogs are the examples of the supreme typographical ugliness, it is hard to imagine that people write and contribute to such a hideous site. The anonymity encourages most vile and stupid content. This is the culture that pretends to care about the crowns above the sacred letters but in realty have no concept of intellectual property, authorship or beauty. I hope this culture will perish soon, it is unbearable.
- Couple of observations about the visitors that are still coming to the site, even caused my server to crash yet again yesterday. Let me say that I didn’t know so many morons existed in such a large numbers. There are three parts to the post but most don’t know how to click on the prominent links 2 and 3. Like monkeys they can only see one link at a time. They are completely unable to navigate a blog or any web site. Only 1% of visitors cared to look around.
- Comments – Idiots, you come here to say that the photos are amazing? I know they are, everything I write is amazing or why would I blog? Every blogger must think that. Morons, if you can’t write a complete sentence, let alone a paragraph than shut the f. up. No one needs your comments. Especially the hideous a. holes who post backlinks to their monotonous propaganda.
- Almost forgot, the posts got linked from some Palestinian forums where every member has an avatar of a dead martyr. And here the unexpected part. The hareidim and Palestinians both highlighted the same photos. I.e. an old Jew sitting on the ground in Jerusalem, Jews driven from Jerusalem, etc. I was thinking about that. For the hareidim seeing a Jew on the grounds evokes the iconic imagery of Tisha B’Av, proves that Jews were always in Jerusalem, proves that Jews are the real victims and evokes the favorite “we are humiliated and misunderstood by the world” Jewish porn. Palestinians repost the same pictures but they enjoy them for a different reason, they just like every instance of the Jewish humiliation. While Jews hide pictures where they drive away Arabs, Palestinians display the pictures of Jews being driven from Jerusalem with pride! And this brings me to th e following comment on a hareidy forum:
רבני ירושלים
הרב ישראל זאב מינצברג סבי זקני
ראבד העיר העתיקה
החכם הספרדי הוא הרב חזן
שניהם הלכו במסירות נפש עם דגל לבן להיכנע
למרות שראשי ההגנה התנגדו לכך ואפילו ירו לעברם אש חיה!
כי ראשי הממשל רצו שגורל אנשי הרובע יהיה כאנשי מצדה
שכולם ימותו
Was there ever a bigger pleasure, a bigger “self sacrifice” than to give up? The pathetic history under a white flag. I am sorry some of the Israeli Rabbis didn’t have the luck of their European contemporaries, namely using money and influence to escape the Nazis and leaving their misled followers to die. The Zionist pioneers wanted to get rid of this decrepit culture but the virus spread and it is threatening to consume the entire house of Israel.
Further Reading:
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Ben,
With all due respect, I think you're criticism is somewhat unfair. The residents of the Jewish Quarter, almost all of whom were religious Jews who had lived in the city for generations, had ample opportunity to flee while the Old City was still under British jurisdiction. The majority chose to stay until the bitter end.
The day before the surrender was Lag Ba'Omer. The beleagered Jews prayed for reinforcements. They were almost out of food and water; there was no electricity; the Haganah garrison had expended almost all of its ammunition; 300 soldiers had been killed, most of the others were injured but refused to leave their positions. The Jewish Quarter had endured two weeks of shelling and gunfire.
By Friday morning “only Batei Machse, the Sephardi synagogues and Shaar Hashamyim Yeshiva remained in Jewish hands.” More civilians were killed, including several women, a shopkeeper and a man helping the soldiers but the garrison refused to give up; and the Jordanians refused to permit civilians, now holed up in the synagogues, to leave unless there was a complete surrender.
With no other possible recourse, the Rabbis put themselves into the line of fire to negotiate a surrender. They were shot at by a few of the Haganah boys – Haganah leader Moshe Rusnak was afraid their action would lead to a massacre of the residents – and forced back; but, everyone knew the situation was hopeless. After brief discussions, they were back on the streets 30 minutes later with their white flags (only to be shot at by Jordanians). They might have been killed on the spot. The Jordanians were only meters away from the Jewish postions. Instead, their intervention managed to convince both the Haganah and Arab Legion to temporarily stand down while civilians were evacuated, and the captured soldiers and men were returned to Israel in exchange for Jordanian prisoners several months later. Many of the survivors returned to the Old City only 19 years later after the city was successfully captured by the IDF.
Morey, not sure why your facebook profile doesn't come through. You have to consider this fight in broader context of what happened to Jews of Europe at the same time. And just like in Europe people didn't leave or where discouraged to leave by the Rabbinic leadership. People usually don't leave their homes unless they forced to. Just like in Europe Jews din't defend themselves and here relied on the Russian Zionist immigrants to fight.
And of the fate of European Jews was not like the glove treatment of the Yerushalmis. Not to say it was a picnic, but lets compare apples to apples here.
And regardless of what actually happened not unimportant are the views if the purported grandson quoted here and how he views the events today, that counts for a lot and says a lot.
Not sure about the Facebook profile either. Odd. Well, here's my blog: moreyaltman.blogspot.com
The broader context is indeed important. Events in Europe and Palestine were intertwined in ways many people don't appreciate. As for apples and oranges, it's important to avoid stereotypes about both the Holocaust and the war in Palestine. I get concerned when I read things like, “Just like in Europe Jews din't defend themselves and here relied on the Russian Zionist immigrants to fight.”
I'd like to expand on what you've written but it must wait until tomorrow.
לילה טוב. כל טוב :)
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Hi Ben,
I'm not actually sure your point about Mintzberg's grandson. He hasn't written anything untrue: the Haganah fired at the Rabbis to prevent them from surrendering. This is a known fact. And it's likely the injury to one of them was from the Haganah. Like good soldiers, they were prepared to die but there was no reason why over a thousand civilians needed to die with them, especially when there was no hope of saving the Jewish Quarter without outside help. It was the right thing to do. The losses during the 1948 war were astronomical; we didn`t need more martyrs.
I want to address your comment about Europe`s Jews not defending themselves, and the role of Rabbis during the Holocaust.
In many places in Europe, the Jews did defend themselves. We need to rid ourselves of the 'Fiddler on the Roof' imagery of Eastern Europe and remember that by 1939 most Jews lives in urban settings (often towns and small cities) and were no longer confined to shtetles. The fact is, most Jews weren't ready to fight because the thought of what was to come was to impossible to foresee, regardless of religiosity or Rabbinic pleas. And those who were willing to fight, once word of systematic elimination – as opposed to systemic discrimination – began to spread, were hampered from doing so by myriad forces: inability to procur weapons, active denial of weapons by antisemitic partisans, collective action against communities protecting Jewish partisans, overwhelming odds, etc.
But they did fight back. In occupied Poland alone, there were at least three armed rebellions, four attempted rebellions and 17 places where Jewish armed groups fled into the forests. There were
rebellions in at least six death camps, including a failed uprising at Auschwitz in which, “prisoners attacked the SS with axes and rocks and set one crematorium on fire.” In response, “the SS mobilised, rounded everyone up in groups and killed them all with shots to the neck.” There are known to be around 30 Jewish partisan groups, and a further 21 in which Jews represented at least 30% of the membership. In eastern Poland, Lithuania and Byelorussia, it's now known that at least 60 ghettos had armed rebellions, attempted rebellions or sent fighters into hiding to join partisans. The numbers in Russia are more difficult to obtain because so many Jews either hid their identities because of antisemitism, or they were fighting as Russians against German occupation and not as Jews fighting elimination. This was the case in other places, too. (On a personal note, my great-Uncle Jack was a partisan in Byelorussia. He was encouraged to flee with the other men by the wives and mothers, who believed that the Nazis would only arrest the men but spare women and children. They were wrong. The women and children were shot while the men watched from the woods. Jack joined up with partisans, who were later incorporated into the Russian army. He withheld his Jewish identity going so far as to pretend to be a Turk after the war until reaching a Red Cross DP camp.)
In Western Europe, Jews were active in every place. There were thousands of fighters in France and Belgium, in fact, the first urban fighters to act against the Nazis in Paris (Spring 1942) were members of a Jewish unit of the communist Main-d'œuvre immigrée (MOI.) (data from Yehuda Bauer`s `The Jewish Emergence from Powerlessness` 1979)
We also shouldn't underestimate the role of unarmed resistance. Jews fought deportation and destruction in many way; the myth of millions of Jews marching to the camps is just that – a myth. Jews resisted by not complying with orders to report to trains; they smuggled or produced illegal food supplies; they organized clandestine schools and religious services; they published newspapers and pamphlets.
Sadly, these efforts couldn't save lives, but as acts of resistance, they shouldn't be minimized. In many places, it was Rabbis, as community leaders, who organized these efforts. While it's true some fled before German occupation, it's important to not moralize based on hindsight: the sense then was that the Jewish leadership would be the first targeted, especially those who had been vocally critical of the Nazis, and that communities themselves would not be harmed; where Rabbis and other leaders remained they were, in fact, almost always the first to be arrested and/or executed.
http://www1.yadvashem.org/Odot/prog/index_befor...
We have a tendency to blame ourselves when things go horribly wrong. The Kamza story in the Talmud is the classic example. But, it was the Romans that destroyed Jerusalem, regardless of the internal bickering, just as it was the Nazis that destroyed European Jewry, regardless of whether or not Jews fought back or fled.
Last comment.
The stereotype of the Jewish 'sheep', incidentally, was prevelant in Israel for many years. Despite the fact that thousands of survivors immediately joined the Haganah and Irgun as they arrived in Palestine (many survivors had belonged to Zionist organizations before and during the war), the Holocaust survivors were resented by the Zionist majority who felt that they had done nothing to protect themselves in Europe while Jews in the Yishuv were fighting both Arabs and British colonization. Considering the difficulties survivors have had here in getting reparations, I suspect some of that resentment persists.
Stereotypes of Haredim are also very dangerous here in Israel. Despite the impression that religious Jews don't serve in the army, I was standing behind a young man with shtreimels, in IDF uniform with his M-16, at the grocery store yesterday. I also have a close friend who belongs to Chabbad and is a full-time army officer. There ARE Haredim choosing to stay in yeshiva rather than serve, although many now are looking for ways to do national service. And there are plenty of secular beach bums in
Tel Aviv avoiding army service, too. Interestingly, the two groups going into the army in largest numbers are secular kibbutzniks (as usual) and religious Zionists. The bigger danger are those groups – like Neturei Karta – who are openly hostile toward the state, embracing those who would do us harm. It saddens me to say this but as their actions threaten the lives of Jews, I believe they must be shunned. And don`t even get me started on parking lot protests. ;)
I dint' know all the details but from his comment it appeared that the valor was in the white flag. You can see how this comments might sound odd and objectionable.
Why people, you, assume you are talking to idiots and assume the lowest common denominator in history, I might not know the details about the Israeli war of indpendence but please spare lecturing me about European history. My opinions are well informed, unfortunately.
You know what I am talking about very well, no spin required. Start by stopping spinning your own perception of this.
Actually, I'm not sure what you're talking about.
What did you mean by this? “And regardless of what actually happened not unimportant are the views if the purported grandson quoted here and how he views the events today, that counts for a lot and says a lot.”
I don't think he was saying anything about there being any honour in giving up. What IS really objectionable is the assumption by the writer that heads of government wanted everyone in the Quarter to die. I assume he's from an anti-Zionist group (I'm curious which one). They were antagonistic toward the government in 1948 and not much has changed, but they don't represent all Haredim (which I'm not, btw)
No offense meant, and I apologize. My concern was for other people who might read your comment and believe that Jews didn't fight back which we both know wasn't true.
Don't worry about other people, this is propaganda free zone, snap out of it.