Rabbi Dow Marmur is someone I feel lucky to know. He came to Toronto’s Holy Blossom Temple in the 1980s after an already rich life: childhood in Poland, refuge in the Soviet Union during the war, coming of age in Sweden, career and family in England. When we met, he said that on arrival here, he was told to avoid two people. I was one. So he got in touch.
He has been a rabbi and friend. He is a lifelong Zionist and fearless critic of Israeli behaviour, based on his love for Israel. In last week’s Globe, from Jerusalem where he now lives much of the time, he defended Israel’s blockade and attacks on Gaza. He did not try to morally justify them. He said instead that the “prospect of destruction” outweighs “moral scruples.”
That’s honest, brutally so. No moral argument except survival itself. But what’s the evidence that Israel is menaced — by Gaza! Not Iran, Syria or even the feeble West Bank. A tiny, surrounded enclave with no army or economy versus a nation with first-world standards and a mighty military. It’s because, he says, Hamas are anti-Israel fanatics who “don’t accept any half-measures.”
Now it seems to me half-measures typify Hamas. In 1999, its leader, later assassinated by Israel, said, “Let’s end this conflict by declaring a temporary ceasefire. Let’s leave the bigger issues for future generations.” When Hamas was elected two years ago, they offered a 10-year truce. They supported the “prison document” that involves a two-state solution based on 1967 borders. They kept a self-imposed ceasefire for 16 months.
Dow’s thinking seems to me muddled: reason overwhelmed by angst, and it’s not shared by everyone there. A “countrywide relief convoy” will head to Gaza this Saturday. Still, when even he writes this way, it suggests a hardening that makes any resolution even remoter.
What could unlock this jam?
How about that incredible prison break from Gaza through the fences to Egypt on Wednesday. Occasionally, something happens in the world that isn’t scripted or interpreted by official sources. It doesn’t need words, but clarifies. It’s way more illuminating than the restrained outrage of human rights rapporteurs. Never mind Israel’s heralded withdrawal.
Gaza remains a prison: surrounded, strangled, guards on the walls, selectively cutting food and power. We’ve seen this movie: Dog Day Afternoon. The Kill Pit. The guys inside use hostages, but here, the guys inside are the hostages: 350,000 streamed through the breach, said the UN. When they get out, what do they want to do: Make holy war? No: go shopping! For bombs? No, cement, so they can build a house and marry. Antacid!
Don’t worry, the border will soon close again, due to U.S. and Israeli pressure. Will people out here have learned anything from the brief gusher of ordinary life — talk about reality TV? Probably not. It all gets muddled again, so easily.
But it’s a reminder not to rely on the normal versions, from official sources, relayed through the media. Take last week’s spat over a Canadian government training course that named Israel and the U.S. as potential torturers. The minister ordered the names omitted.
A Globe editorial huffed about “so breathtaking a denunciation of Canada’s democratic neighbour and friend — one of the world’s staunchest defenders of liberty.” This is sheer rhetoric.
Democratic states do torture. The most efficient, hard-to-detect torture methods were developed by democratic pillars, exactly because they need to deny or conceal torture when they do it. France in Algeria. The U.S. in Latin America and Vietnam, the U.K. in Ireland, Palestine.
“There is a long history of torture in the main democracies,” writes academic Darius Rejali in Torture and Democracy, a huge, respectable, cautious book. It has 3,400 footnotes from 2,000 sources in 14 languages. It’s not even an exposé, it’s a survey.
Deep breaths now. Take another look, at whatever you took for granted.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
