Flying Things

I’ve never written a screenplay, but I have a great idea for one that I’d like to try out on my readers this week. The scene opens in the Situation Room at the White House. The President is sitting at the end of a long couch deep in thought with a sheaf of papers of different sizes and colors in her lap. Most of the Cabinet is present, including especially the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State, but the President’s full team of personal advisors and consultants is there as well. And the First Gentleman is there too, standing in a corner and trying to look unobtrusive.

“So,” the President says, “how are we going to handle this?”

For a long moment, no one responds. But then the Secretary of Defense finds his voice. “I have an idea,” he says tentatively. “Let’s just tell them it was a stealth balloon the Chinese sent over to check out the ICBM silos in Montana.”

The room explodes in derisive snickering. “A stealth balloon!” the President responds. “A giant bright-white spherical stealth balloon the size of three busses end-to-end that we’re going to ask the American people to believe the Chinese just hoped no one would notice floating low against the bright blue Montanan Big Sky? Who in the world would believe that? The American people aren’t complete idiots. Well, some maybe. But surely not all!”

The Secretary of Defense stands up in a clear attempt to regain command of the room. “Yes, of course they won’t believe it at first. But if we just say it over and over, we’ll wear them down. And, besides, what’s the alternative? Telling them the truth? I don’t think the American people is quite ready for that! Not just quite yet.”

The President nods slowly. “Okay,” she finally says, catching the First Gentleman’s eye before continuing. “We’ll go with the Chinese Balloon story. They’ll find out how things are soon enough anyway, won’t they?” The President then turns to face the Secretary of Defense directly. “When exactly do our people expect the Mother Ship to arrive? Our best estimate, I mean.”

The Secretary of Defense looks thoughtfully as he looks down at his telephone and touches a few buttons before responding. “Three days, eight hours, and seventeen minutes, Madame President. That’s our best estimate.”

“Oy,” President Goldfarb says quietly. “This is nisht git.”

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So what do you think? Should I keep writing? What’s that? Yes, you all know perfectly well that I have a day job. Okay, okay. But I won’t delete the file either. Not just quite yet!

And now we return to reality. A bright white balloon the size of three busses end-to-end was spotted floating over Montana by eagle-eyed locals about two weeks ago. For reasons as yet undisclosed, the balloon was allowed to float over more or less the entire country until it was finally shot down by our Air Force on February 4 over the Atlantic near the coast of South Carolina. The government has identified the balloon as something connected with Chinese intelligence-gathering efforts, but has left unexplained how the Chinese could possibly have imagined no one would notice such a thing. Did they just not care? That doesn’t seem to make any sense. (Aren’t covert surveillance efforts supposed to be undertaken in a, well, covert manner?) But neither does the argument that we tolerate this kind of low-tech surveillance over our nation because we do the same thing over China convince especially. (That accusation was one the Chinese actually did make in response to the downing of the balloon, insisting that we have flown similar balloons over China more than ten times in recent years. This was categorically denied by our government. For a summary of that set of traded-off accusations, click here.)  No further information has been forthcoming, almost at all. Or at least not any information we could reasonably call definitive.

But Montana was only the beginning. On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of last week, the Air Force located and downed three different unidentified objects flying low over North America, one over Alaska, one over the Yukon, and one over Lake Huron, the giant body of water between Ontario and Michigan. (Our Air Force was acting in concert with the Canadian Military and did not enter Canadian air space uninvited.) No real information has been released about any of these incidents either, prompting a firestorm of anger-tinged curiosity in the media and in the blogosphere.

The White House went so far earlier this week as to make the specific point that there is no evidence that these flying objects, the balloon and the other three, constitute evidence that E.T.s are on their way and were simply reconnoitering possible landing sites for the Mother Ship when it finally arrives. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre went so far as to laugh out loud at the very thought of these flying things having their origins in outer space. “There is,” she said, chuckling, “no indication of aliens of extra-terrestrial activity with these recent take-downs.” Then, as though she was worried that someone may not have been listening, she repeated herself: “Again,” she said again, “there is no indication of aliens or extra-terrestrial activity with these recent take-downs.” Is the lady protesting too much? Me isn’t sure what methinks. “I loved E.T. the movie,” she concluded even more jocularly, “but I’m just gonna leave it there.” Which she did, putting her amused self in direct conflict with General Glen VanHerck, head of NORAD and the United States Northern Command, who, when asked about the possibility of any or all of these flying objects originating in outer space, said clearly that he personally hadn’t ruled that possibility out entirely. Or at all. (What he said specifically in response to the question was “I’ll let the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out. I haven’t ruled out anything.”)

Then, just last Monday, the administration announced that it was forming an interagency group to address the question of all four incidents. (It’s a good example of where my head is at that when I saw that headline, I misread “interagency” as “intransigency,” which I at first found amusing.) The formation of that group, however, really does suggest that the government is taking this all very seriously, as was evidenced by the remarks by National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, who explained that the creation of this interagency group will be “to study the broader implications for detection, analysis, and disposition of unidentified aerial objects that pose either safety or security risks.” That sounds like a good idea to me! But it still doesn’t go anywhere close to saying what any or all of these flying objects were or weren’t.

I suppose we’ll eventually find out what’s going on. If the Montana balloon was a reconnaissance device, it couldn’t have been more noticeable. Did the Chinese—or whoever—think that Montanans would just suppose that the Earth had acquired a second moon like in Haruki Murakami’s great novel, 1Q84 ? I know at least one Montanan very, very well…and I can assure you he is not the type to be won over easily by the “it’s just a second moon, nothing important” argument. Nor, I suspect, are many—or any—of his neighbors.

So, bottom line, I have no idea what these things in the sky were or are. Will there be more? Who can say? Is the truth that they’ve always been there but we haven’t been looking carefully in any of the right places up to now? I guess…but the notion that they’ve always been floating around but we just didn’t notice them up until now sounds remarkably unlikely. Even the China connection isn’t that certain in my mind. Yes, the Chinese claim now that it was a mere weather balloon that drifted off course. But if that were the case, then why wouldn’t they have notified the Canadians and ourselves that a rogue balloon was about to float into Canadian and/or American air space? The whole story, as Churchill said of Russia, is a riddle wrapped up in a mystery wrapped up in an enigma.

Myself, I’d like to think it’s a save-the-date kind of thing from Alpha Centauri. Or from somewhere. My faith in God the Creator doesn’t turn me away from imagining life on any of the countless planets out there circling the innumerable stars that exist. (And innumerable is precisely the right word: astronomers estimate that there are something like 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe, each with an average of about 100 million stars. For more, click here.) When the psalmist wrote millennia ago that the heavens alone are able truly to tell of the glory of God, he was thinking along the same lines. And, if that is so, then it really is inevitable that, somewhere along the way, the residents of one of those planets will find a way to send a note—perhaps in the form of a balloon, perhaps a radio signal, perhaps a gift-comet—inviting us to meet the neighbors and, in so doing, to find out more (and probably much, much more) about ourselves in the process.

Stay tuned on the secret-objects-in-the-sky thing! And if you notice two moons in the nighttime sky, definitely phone General VanHerck and let him know.

Whispered in Gaza

 Regular readers of my Friday letters know that one of the topics that has engaged me continually over the years is the question of how the concepts of individual responsibility and collective guilt (and particularly collective guilt on the national scale) relate to each other in the worldviews of people who wish to think of themselves both as moral human beings and practical souls who live in the “real” world and who know how things sometimes must be done.

I’ve returned to this topic from the bimah many times over the years, speaking personally about this specific issue in any number of historical contexts. No one, for example, could be more caught up internally and emotionally in the story of the Shoah than myself. As a result, I cannot condemn any action deemed necessary by the actual people on the actual ground at the time to defeat Germany and its allies, and thus to rescue from annihilation the surviving Jews of Europe. And yet, even though I certain mean that wholeheartedly and fully unambivalently, I also can’t bring myself just to wave away the deaths of innocents—the children, not to mention the babies—who died in the effort to bring Nazi Germany to its knees, innocents who died in the carpet bombing of German cities or in the course of incidents like the firebombing of Dresden in February of 1945. The Nazis were monsters. But to exult in the death of babies would be grotesque. Easier would be to wave those deaths away with regret as unavoidable collateral damage—but that doesn’t feel quite just or ethically reasonable either. The loss of a child’s life is a tragedy no matter what language that child’s parents speak or how depraved those parents’ political philosophy might be. I really do think that. (How could anyone not?) And so I find myself on the horns of a great dilemma: wanting to maintain my self-conception as a moral human being, yet apparently able to accept the death of innocents as part of a greater plan to do good and bring peace to the world.

All these thoughts returned to me the other day as I visited, and the revisited again and again, a series of twenty-five short videos posted on the website of the Center for Peace Communications by a consortium of media outlets including the Times of Israel, the all-news Arabic-language television channel Al-Arabiya based in Dubai, and the anti-government Persian-language new site called Kayhan London. Entitled “Whispered in Gaza,” the videos feature regular Gazan types speaking openly and, I think, honestly about life under Hamas. These are not happy people. They think of themselves as victims as Hamas as intensely as do the residents of Sederot when rockets are sent over the border between Gaza and Israel with the express intent of killing Israeli civilians. But they dare not speak out for fear of the reprisals against themselves and their families that will almost surely follow, an issue even the people of Sederot don’t face. They couldn’t sound more sincere. Or more believable. And that brings me back to the issue I mentioned earlier: these people are not the enemy, but they share the fate of Gazans when Hamas goes to war, as they have repeatedly in the last decade, with Israel. Are these people the latter-day version of the citizens of Sodom on whose behalf Abraham was pleading when he suggested that the city could be spared if there were just ten decent people living within its boundaries? I’ve known that story my whole life. But suddenly a new question in its regard presents itself to me: what if there had been, say, eleven righteous souls in Sodom and God made good the promise made to Abraham and spared the city. Would the rest of the population—not the eleven, but all the other citizens of Sodom—would they have survived along with the eleven? I suppose they would have. (How else can you read the story?) How to translate that lesson to today’s situation in Gaza is not that obvious. But one inescapable conclusion would have to be that the decent people present in a sea of evil-doers and -wishers—be it in Sodom or Hamas-led Gaza or in Nazi-run Berlin—that those specific people are key players in the ultimate fate of their place, and that that is so even if they themselves don’t know it or would deny it.

To see the videos, click here. I’ve watched almost most of them now. Each is compelling. Each is tragic. Each is a reminder that Hamas’s victims include not only they people whose murder they have effected or sponsored within Israel, but also their own people—held captive by a terrorist government that brooks no dissent and punishes even the faintest whisper of non-allegiance. (To get a clear picture of what that means exactly, click here to read a hair-raising story first published in the British on-line newspaper, The Independent.)

You can start with Ibrahim (click here), a man who imagines living at peace with Israel as a basic right and who has nothing but scorn for the upper echelons of Hamas leadership who themselves have no interest in actually living in Gaza, but who live in Qatar or Turkey and from there pull the strings that make their fellow Gazans as miserable as Ibrahim sounds and no doubt truly is.  And then you can go on to listen to Zainab (click here), a woman who dares to think of Palestinians and Israelis as one people, or at least as the people of one land who can and should be able to live in peace. Her description of her “dream version” of Gaza is beyond moving. But, of course, she and Ibraham (and also all the others) are represented on the screen by animated portraits of themselves to prevent them from being identified by Hamas and duly punished for allowing themselves to dream of peace.

I was particularly moved by the testimony of Khalil (click here), a young man who remember his grandparents’ accounts of the “olden days” when Palestinians were free to travel into Israel and work in the nation’s cities alongside Jewish workers, whom they got to know and even to respect. And also striking was the testimony of Walid (click here), a young man jailed by Hamas on seven different occasions for daring to express himself freely, a basic civil right the exercise of which got him branded as a traitor to the Palestinian people. When, almost casually, he describes the experience of being arrested on seven different occasions for speaking out, in the context of which arrests he was beaten severely and, to use his own word, “tortured” by his Hamas captors, it’s impossible not to see in this young man an ally—a decent fellow whose great crime in life was to wish to express himself openly, a right we in our nation mostly take totally for granted.

Those are just a few of the voices I heard on that website. The videos are all short—mostly just two or three minutes long. The speakers speak in Arabic, but the subtitles are large and easy to read. The interviewers ask a few questions, but mostly the time is given over to the interviewees who are free to speak at length about their lives in Gaza.

Visit the site and you’ll see what I mean. These all sound like rational, decent people…and exactly the kind of people who could live in peace with their Jewish neighbors in Israel if they only had the chance. It’s beyond heartrending, the whole thing. The lot of these people is misery, oppression, and the endless fear of arrest. None is happy. But knowing they exist should be a source of hope for us all. Eventually, good triumphs over evil. And the day will come, I hope in our lifetime, when the people of Gaza find a way to chart their own course forward to a peaceful kind of co-existence with the neighbors and a bright future for their own children and grandchildren.

Given the current climate in the Middle East in general and in Israel in particular, it was very satisfying to spend an hour listening to video clips of people who dare hope for peace…and who found the courage to speak openly and honestly to the world through the Whispered in Gaza exhibition. Take a look and a listen. I think you’ll be as moved as I was.

The Book of Names at the U.N.

The United Nations, so intensely and relentlessly hostile to Israel for almost as long as I can remember, is the living embodiment of the argument set forth in Dara Horn’s 2021 book, People Love Dead Jews, a book I reviewed favorably in this space just a year and a half ago. (To revisit my comments, click here.) Israeli Jews fighting vigorously and strenuously for the security of their nation, uninterested in acting contrary to their own best interests to suit the agenda of their foes and those foes’ supporters in Turtle Bay, and imbued with patriotism born of pride in the might of their military—those people, the United Nations can’t stomach. (For a brief survey of the U.N.’s latest anti-Israel outrages, click here.) But dead Jews, especially in enormous numbers—those Jewish people, the U.N. can’t get enough of.

In 2005, for example, the U.N. took some time off its busy schedule of Israel-bashing to approve General Assembly resolution 607, proposed by (of all nations) Israel itself, recognizing January 27, the day in 1945 that the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The fact that Jews the world over—including especially in Israel itself—observe Yom Hashoah annually on the 27^th of Nisan, the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, makes the observance of the U.N.-sanctioned day feel confusing, or at least superfluous, for most of us. And yet it’s hard to disparage any attempt to memorialize the martyrs who died during the Shoah. And I don’t. But I also don’t know quite what to do with it.

At Shelter Rock, the day comes and goes each year without us doing anything at all to take note of it. Partially, that has to do with my personal disinclination to do anything at all that could possibly appear to be supportive of the U.N. And partially, I suppose, it has to do with the fact that the importance of marking the specific day the Russians arrived at Auschwitz is diminished, at least somewhat, by the fact that the Shelter Rockers themselves who had been prisoners in Auschwitz were all liberated at Buchenwald by the U.S. Third Army. But most of all we are disinclined to make much of International Holocaust Remembrance Day because we are already firmly committed to observing the annual anniversary of Kristallnacht in the fall and Yom Hashoah in the spring.

Nonetheless, I was prompted to rethink the issue after listening to the address delivered to the U.N. General Assembly by Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on “their” Holocaust Memorial Day last week. Choosing his words carefully, the Secretary-General spoke directly and specifically about the rising tide of anti-Semitism in the world. “We now know the terrifying depths of the abyss into which Germany would plunge,” he said unambiguously, “but the alarm bells were already ringing in 1933. Too few bothered to listen, and fewer still spoke out. Today, we can hear echoes of those same siren songs to hate.” I was impressed—both by the sentiment and by the man’s willingness to say it out loud and unequivocally. And then he went on to observe that the rise of Nazism itself was not an unavoidable natural catastrophe like a tsunami or an earthquake, but rather a fully avoidable nightmare that was specifically made possible by “the indifference, if not the connivance, of so many millions.” Hearing him say that reminded me instantly of the many, many times I heard the late Irving Roth, himself a former Auschwitz prisoners liberated at Buchenwald and one of the truly great Holocaust educators of our time, say precisely the same thing. It was, for me personally at least, a striking moment.

And then Gutteres went on to discuss anti-Semitism in the world today. He was sharp and unequivocal, describing as a “painful truth” the fact that “anti-Semitism is everywhere” and is, in fact, “increasing in intensity.” Nor, of course, is anti-Semitism an isolated phenomenon: “Survey after survey,” he went on to observe, “arrives at the same conclusion: anti-Semitism is at record highs. And what is true for anti-Semitism is true for other forms of hate. Racism. Anti-Muslim bigotry. Xenophobia. Homophobia. Misogyny. Neo-Nazi, white supremacist movements are becoming more dangerous by the day.”

As regular readers surely know, I generally find it irritating—to say the least—when the kind of almost unimaginable barbarism that led to the Shoah is served up as just the Jewish version of some other kind of prejudice. And yet, listening to the man speak, I thought I heard a certain cogency in the man’s remarks. The tide of hatred, including violent hatred, is rising. And, although it once would have, it no longer strikes me as inherently absurd or reductionist to see all of its manifestations as part of the same terrifying phenomenon. And Gutteres also highlighted a fully cogent reason for seeing things in that light in his remarks: “The threat is global, and it is growing. And a leading accelerant of this growth is the online world…Many parts of the internet are becoming toxic waste dumps for hate and vicious lies. They are profit-driven catalysts for moving extremism from the margins to the mainstream. By using algorithms that amplify hate to keep users glued to their screens, social media platforms are complicit, and so are the advertisers subsidizing this business model.” I myself am absent from most social media platforms. I don’t have a Facebook page. I have a Twitter account but haven’t ever tweeted anything out to my non-existent followers, choosing silently to follow American, European and Israeli politicians and read their tweets. I don’t have an Instagram account. I’m sure I’ve never even visited TikTok, whatever that is exactly. So I’m insulated from the kind of material Guterres was describing. But I know it’s out there. And his words sounded a kind of clarion call to me to speak out about an phenomenon I had until recently mostly managed blithely to ignore.

And then, after speaking, Guterres went personally to see the Book of Names exhibit.

This project, undertaken by Yad Vashem and soon to be on permanent exhibit in Jerusalem, is the result of decades of work undertaken by researchers at Yad Vashem to collect the actual names of all the Jews murdered by the Nazis during the Shoah. So far, they have collected an amazing 4.8 million names. There are, historians posit, at least a million names missing. Probably, there are far more than that. When the Einsatzgruppen massacred the entire Jewish population of towns in Ukraine and Belarus, they did not pause to collect the names of their victims. Even those murdered in the camps were not all listed by name: children sent to their deaths, which was basically all of them, were generally not listed in the Nazis’ record books at all. The book itself—a real book, at least of sorts—is gigantic: six feet tall and twenty-six feet wide. And, almost prosaically, the names are neatly arranged alphabetically, each one followed by the decedent’s hometown, year of birth, and place and date of death.

The work has been tedious, but continuous: just last year, 40,000 names were added to the Yad Vashem data base and then included in the Book of Names. The hope is to reach the 5 million mark sometime this year. But the work will become harder and harder as the years pass because so many of the names, and particularly of children, were simply not recorded and are therefore not recoverable.

And so I find myself on the horns of a dilemma. I want to see the book. I want to have that experience personally. But I can’t imagine myself setting foot in the United Nations building, a place synonymous in my mind with the most vile kind of anti-Israel prejudice. For me personally, the problem has an easy solution: I can go and see the Book of Names this summer at Yad Vashem itself. But that only solves the logistical problem, leaving me to grapple with a different problem entirely.

Is there some chance that Israel’s enemies at the U.N.—and they are legion—will be moved by the Book of Names to consider their attitudes? Will they see an exhibit and suddenly understand why Israel needs to exist…and why Israelis feel the need to defend themselves vigorously and not just to trust the rest of the world to look after their interests? Will they see the names of these millions of innocent victims and understand why Jews today cannot imagine a future without a strong Israel defending itself against enemies like Iran, a nation whose leaders regularly use Holocaust imagery to describe the slaughter of Jews it hopes one day successfully to accomplish in the Near East? Or will contemplating the Book of Names just be another task for U.N. personnel to tick off on their already over-packed to-do lists: condemn Israel, get coffee, censure Israel, email Mom, promote violence against Israel, tear up yet another parking ticket I don’t have to pay, encourage anti-Israel terrorism, drop by Book of Names, pick up dry cleaning….

I don’t expect much. In fact, I don’t expect anything. But the presence of the Book of Names in the U.N. Lobby combined with Antonio Guterres’s remarks in the General Assembly gives me some smidgen of hope that the U.N. might someday turn back into the force for good it was expected to become and which it briefly was. I suppose we’ll have to see. But Antonio Guterres has done the impossible by making me think that such a thing even could happen.