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Lamed-E A Quarterly Journal of Politics and Culture

Selected and Edited by Ivan L Ninic ________________________________________________________________________Autumn 2013 Number 20

Can Islam Be Reformed? By Daniel Pipes

Islam currently represents a backward, aggres-sive, and violent force. Must it remain this way,

or can it be reformed and become moderate,modern, and good-neighborly? Can Islamicauthorities formulate an understanding of theirreligion that grants full rights to women and non-Muslims as well as freedom of conscience toMuslims, that accepts the basic principles ofmodern finance and jurisprudence, and that doesnot seek to impose Sharia law or establish acaliphate?

A growing body of analysts believe that no, theMuslim faith cannot do these things, that thesefeatures are inherent to Islam and immutably partof its makeup. Asked if she agrees with myformulation that radical Islam is the problem,

but moderate Islam is the solution, the writerAyaan Hirsi Ali replied: Hes wrong. Sorryabout that. She and I stand in the same trench,fighting for the same goals and against the sameopponents, but we disagree on this vital point.My argument has two parts. First, the essentialist

position of many analysts is wrong; and second, areformed Islam can emerge.

Arguing Against EssentialismTo state that Islam can never change is to

assert that the Koran and Hadith, which constitutethe religions core, must always be understood inthe same way. But to articulate this position is toreveal its error, for nothing human abides forever.Everything, including the reading of sacred texts,changes over time. Everything has a history. Andeverything has a future that will be unlike its past.Only by failing to account for human nature and

by ignoring more than a millennium of actual

changes in the Korans interpretation can oneclaim that the Koran has been understoodidentically over time. Changes have applied insuch matters as jihad, slavery, usury, the principleof no compulsion in religion, and the role ofwomen. Moreover, the many important inter-

preters of Islam over the past 1,400 yearsash-Shafii, al-Ghazali, Ibn Taymiyyah, Rumi, ShahWaliullah, and Ruhollah Khomeini come tominddisagreed deeply among themselves aboutthe content of the message of Islam.

However central the Koran and Hadith may be,they are not the totality of the Muslim experience;the accumulated experience of Muslim peoplesfrom Morocco to Indonesia and beyond mattersno less. To dwell on Islams scriptures is akin tointerpreting the United States solely through thelens of the Constitution; ignoring the countrys

history would lead to a distorted understanding.Put differently, medieval Muslim civilizationexcelled, and todays Muslims lag behind innearly every index of achievement. But if thingscan get worse, they can also get better. Likewise,in my own career, I witnessed Islamism rise fromminimal beginnings when I entered the field in1969 to the great powers it enjoys today; ifIslamism can thus grow, it can also decline.How might that happen?

The Medieval Synthesis

Key to Islams role in public life is Sharia andthe many untenable demands it makes onMuslims. Running a government with theminimal taxes permitted by Sharia has proved to

be unsustainable and how can one run a financialsystem without charging interest? A penal systemthat requires four men to view an adulterous actin flagrante delicto is impractical. Sharias pro-hibition on warfare against fellow Muslims isimpossible for all to live up to; indeed, roughly

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three-quarters of all warfare waged by Muslimshas been directed against other Muslims.Likewise, the insistence on perpetual jihadagainst non-Muslims demands too much.

To get around these and other unrealisticdemands, premodern Muslims developed certainlegal fig leaves that allowed for the relaxation of

Islamic provisions without directly violatingthem. Jurists came up with hiyal (tricks) andother means by which the letter of the law could

be fulfilled while negating its spirit. For example,various mechanisms were developed to live inharmony with non-Muslim states. There is alsothe double sale ( bai al-inah ) of an item, which

permits the purchaser to pay a disguised form ofinterest. Wars against fellow Muslims wererenamed jihad.

This compromise between Sharia and realityamounted to what I dubbed Islams medievalsynthesis in my book In the Path of God (1983).This synthesis translated Islam from a body ofabstract, infeasible demands into a workablesystem. In practical terms, it toned down Shariaand made the code of law operational. Shariacould now be sufficiently applied withoutMuslims being subjected to its more stringentdemands. Kecia Ali, of Boston University, notesthe dramatic contrast between formal and appliedlaw in Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam ,quoting other specialists:

One major way in which studies of law have proceeded has been to compare doctrine with theactual practice of the court. As one scholardiscussing scriptural and legal texts notes, Social

patterns were in great contrast to the official picture presented by these formal sources.Studies often juxtapose flexible and relatively faircourt outcomes with an undifferentiated andsometimes harshly patriarchal textual tradition of

jurisprudence. We are shown proof of theflexibility within Islamic law that is often

portrayed as stagnant and draconian.

While the medieval synthesis worked over thecenturies, it never overcame a fundamentalweakness: It is not comprehensively rooted in orderived from the foundational, constitutional textsof Islam. Based on compromises and halfmeasures, it always remained vulnerable tochallenge by purists. Indeed, premodern Muslimhistory featured many such challenges, includingthe Almohad movement in 12th-century NorthAfrica and the Wahhabi movement in 18th-

century Arabia. In each case, purist effortseventually subsided and the medieval synthesisreasserted itself, only to be challenged anew by

purists. This alternation between pragmatism and purism characterizes Muslim history, contributingto its instability.

The Challenge of ModernityThe de facto solution offered by the medieval

synthesis broke down with the arrival ofmodernity imposed by the Europeans, con-ventionally dated to Napoleons attack on Egyptin 1798. This challenge pulled most Muslims inopposite directions over the next two centuries, toWesternization or to Islamization.

Muslims impressed with Western achieve-ments sought to minimize Sharia and replace itwith Western ways in such areas as thenonestablishment of religion and equality ofrights for women and non-Muslims. The founderof modern Turkey, Kemal Atatrk (18811938),symbolizes this effort. Until about 1970, itappeared to be the inevitable Muslim destiny,with resistance to Westernization looking re-arguard and futile.

But that resistance proved deep and ultimatelytriumphant. Atatrk had few successors, and hisRepublic of Turkey is moving back towardSharia. Westernization, it turned out, lookedstronger than it really was, because it tended to

attract visible and vocal elites while the massesgenerally held back. Starting around 1930, thereluctant elements began organizing themselvesand developing their own positive program,especially in Algeria, Egypt, Iran, and India.Rejecting Westernization and all its works, theyargued for the full and robust application ofSharia such as they imagined had been the case inthe earliest days of Islam.

Though rejecting the West, these movements which are called Islamistmodeled themselveson the surging totalitarian ideologies of their

time, Fascism and Communism. Islamists borrowed many assumptions from theseideologies, such as the superiority of the stateover the individual, the acceptability of bruteforce, and the need for a cosmic confrontationwith Western civilization. They also quietly

borrowed technology, especially military andmedical, from the West.

Through creative, hard work, Islamist forcesquietly gained strength over the next half century,

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Women in Iran have won broader rights to suetheir husbands for divorce.

A conference of Muslim scholars in Egyptdeemed clitoridectomies contrary to Islam and, infact, punishable.

A key Indian Muslim institution, Darul UloomDeoband, issued a fatwa against polygamy.

Other notable developments, not specificallyabout women, include:

The Saudi government abolished jizya (the practice of enforcing a poll tax on non-Muslims).

An Iranian court ordered the family of amurdered Christian to receive the same com-

pensation as that of a Muslim victim.

Scholars meeting at the International Islamic

Fiqh Academy in Sharjah have started to debateand challenge the call for apostates to beexecuted.

All the while, individual reformers churn outideas, if not yet for adoption then to stimulatethought. For example, Nadine al-Badir, a Saudifemale journalist, provocatively suggested thatMuslim women have the same right as men tomarry up to four spouses. She prompted athunderstorm, including threats of lawsuits andangry denunciations, but she spurred a neededdebate, one unimaginable in prior times.

Like its medieval precursor, the modernsynthesis will remain vulnerable to attack by

purists, who can point to Muhammads exampleand insist on no deviation from it. But, havingwitnessed what Islamism, whether violent or not,has wrought, there is reason to hope that Muslimswill reject the dream of reestablishing a medievalorder and be open to compromise with modernways. Islam need not be a fossilized medievalmentality; it is what todays Muslims make of it.

Policy ImplicationsWhat can those, Muslim and non-Muslim

alike, who oppose Sharia, the caliphate, and thehorrors of jihad, do to advance their aims?

For anti-Islamist Muslims, the great burden isto develop not just an alternative vision to theIslamist one but an alternative movement toIslamism. The Islamists reached their position of

power and influence through dedication and hardwork, through generosity and selflessness. Anti-

Islamists must also labor, probably for decades,to develop an ideology as coherent and com-

pelling as that of the Islamists, and then spread it.Scholars interpreting sacred scriptures andleaders mobilizing followers have central roles inthis process.

Non-Muslims can help a modern Islam move

forward in two ways: first, by resisting all formsof Islamismnot just the brutal extremism of anOsama bin Laden, but also the stealthy, lawful,

political movements such as Turkeys AKP.Erdogan is less ferocious than Bin Laden, but heis more effective and no less dangerous. Whoevervalues free speech, equality before the law, andother human rights denied or diminished bySharia must consistently oppose any hint ofIslamism.

Second, non-Muslims should support moderateand Westernizing anti-Islamists. Such figures areweak and fractured today and face a dauntingtask, but they do exist, and they represent theonly hope for defeating the menace of global

jihad and Islamic supremacism, and thenreplacing it with an Islam that does not threatencivilization.

About the Author

Daniel Pipes is president of the Middle EastForum.

Commentary

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Athens or Sparta?

By Benny Morris F o r t r ess I s r a e l : T h e I n si d e St o r y o f t h eM i l i t a r y E l i t e W h o R u n t h e Co u n t r y a n d W h y T h ey Ca n t M a k e Pea c e

by Patrick Tyler Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Back in 1988, I refused to do a stint ofreserve duty in the Israel Defense Forces and was sentenced to a twenty-one-day prisonterm. It was at the height of the First Intifadaand my unit was to serve thirty-five days in thecasbahthe old townof Nablus, in the heartof Samaria. I refused because I thought thatIsraeli rule in the occupied West Bank andGaza Strip was oppressive and that Israel

should make peace with the Palestinians basedon a two-states-for-two-peoples solution. TheFirst Intifada, from 1987 until 1991, was apopular uprising, largely consisting of strikes, boycotts, street demonstrations, and riots, in which the rioters almost invariably employednon-lethal means. (By contrast, in the SecondIntifada, from 2000 to 2004, the Palestiniansemployed highly lethal meanssuicide bombings in buses and restaurantsand theirtarget, in my view, was not so much theoccupation as Israel itself.)

The judge at my trial was our divisionsdeputy commander, a lieutenant colonel who was obviously uncomfortable with the situ-ation. He said something like not all of us inthe military are happy with whats happeningand coaxed me to relent. But the followingSunday I went off to Prison No. 4, in Sarafand, where I served out a relatively pleasantseventeen days (I arrived two days late, andtwo days were taken off for good behavior). A year or two later, I was again called up forreserve duty (not in the territories), and a whilelater I was honorably discharged from the IDFat the age of 44, in line with the custom at thetime for combat soldiers.

I was reminded of this personal episode while reading Patrick Tylers Fortress Israel:The Inside Story of the Military Elite Who Runthe Countryand Why They Cant Make Peace . As the title makes clear, Tyler chargesIsrael with being a modern Sparta. How wereconscientious objectors punished in Sparta? Idont know if Leonidas suffered conscientious

objectors before the Hot Gates, but I do knowhow they were treated in WilhelmineGermany, the classic modern militaristsociety. And I know how they fared in theUnited States, France, and Great Britain whenthese countries were at war and hadconscription and reserve duty. The norm ineach case was either a few years behind bars orsome form of internal exile.

Tylers book is a gossipy overlong pseudo-history of Israel, which is noteworthy mainlyfor what it indicates about the standing ofIsrael among the chattering classes. For PatrickTyler is the former chief correspondent of The New York Times and the former Middle East bureau chief of The Washington Post , and his book comes festooned with blurbs from formerTimes executive editor Howell Raines, CNNsnational security analyst Peter L. Bergen, andothers lauding its scholarship as meticulous

and describing it as the definitive historicaland analytical account of the role of themilitary in Israel. Incidentally, Tyler does notknow Hebrew or Arabic, and the only archivehe appears to have visited is the Lyndon BainesJohnson Library in his home state of Texas.

For decades Zionists and their supportershave described Israel as a latter-day Athens,and Tyler seems to take it personally, insistinginstead on describing Israel as a modernSparta in a region of weak states. Indeed, atone point Tyler seems preposterously to liken

Nassers Egypt to Athens:Thucydides had written of the Peloponnesian War: What made war inevitable was thegrowth of Athenian power and the fear whichthis caused in Sparta. But in this case there was no growth of Athenian power. Nassersstrength was declining It was IsraelSpartawhose power had grown . . .

I will return to Tylers perverse andimplausible account of the lead-up to the Six-Day War. For now, let us ask: Is Israel Sparta? Well, lets see. It is true that Israel has apowerful army and spends a large part of itsannual budget (say twenty to twenty-fivepercent) on defense; true, too, that generalsand security chiefs, past and present, have amajor say in shaping defense and foreign policyand have had substantial representation insuccessive cabinets, though only three Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharonout of Israels twelve prime ministers wereformer generals. All the others, David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Sharett, Levi Eshkol, Golda

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Meir, Menachem Begin, Shimon Peres, YitzhakShamir, Binyamin Netanyahu, and EhudOlmert, were civilians. It could be argued thatBegin and Shamir, as former commanders ofguerrilla organizations in the pre-state period,also had security backgrounds. (Shamir alsoserved for a while in the Mossad.) But thenIsrael has been under siege from without andterrorist threat from within since itsestablishment. So security, personal as well ascollective, is understandably a paramountconsideration in the minds of Israelis. This ishardly surprising. American ex-generals haveoften risen to political prominence during orafter wars: Washington in the 18th century,Jackson and Grant in the 19th, Eisenhower,George C. Marshall, and Colin Powell in the20th, to name just a few.

In his Prologue, Tyler asserts that mili-tarism is the ruling spirit in Israeli society:

Once in the military system, Israelis never fullyexit. They carry the military identity for life . . .through lifelong expectations of loyalty andsecrecy. Many Israeli officers carry their topsecret clearances after retirement, reporting back to superiors or intelligence officers itemsof interest gleaned from their involvement in business, finance, and interactions withforeigners.

On the next page, he writes, the specter ofthe security state remains a dominant aspect oflife, and a little later, The military is the

country to a great extent. This is all nonsense.Had Tyler been writing about Israel during thelate 1940s and 1950s, perhaps he would havehad a point. Perhaps. But the Israel of the pastseveral decades, Israel today, is another animalaltogether. For most Israelis, individualachievement and interests trump the oldcollectivist Zionist ethic. Indeed, fewer andfewer Israelis actually serve in the army or doreserve duty (as the few who carry the burdenare constantly complaining). It is true thatamong eleventh and twelfth graders, there isstill great competitiveness to get a slot, onceinducted, in one of the IDFs elite units or inpilot training, but this has more to do withadolescent competition and machismo thanmilitaristic ideology. Indeed, a good argumentcan be made for depicting the Israeli army asone of the worlds least military. Since itsinception in 1948, the IDF has abjured saluting(the practice exists only in formal parades),and the men, after completing basic training,generally address their non-coms and officers

on a first-name basis. The dress code in thearmy ranges from informal to sloppy andalways has (except in the Armored Corps), and breaches of discipline tend to be punishedlightly. While females are still kept out ofcombat units, women non-coms and officersare playing a major role in training combattroops (in armor and artillery, for example),and there are growing numbers of womenpilots and navigators, also flying combataircraft. All of this points to a liberal ratherthan militarist military.

As with poker players, books have tells. Atone point in Fortress Israel Tyler writes thatIsraels paratroops wear black berets. Had heinterviewed any Israeli, even a child (even anIsraeli Arab child), he would have known that,as in Britain and France, paratroopers wear red berets. Sadly, Tyler knows nothing about thenuts and bolts of Israel or its military.

Israel is, in sober fact, a small, flawed, andembattled democracy, with a strong andunusually egalitarian military that hasproduced an extraordinary stream of writers,academics, and artists, supported by world-class academic and artistic institutions. Inshort, it is more Athenian than Spartan.

Tyler is as weak on the history of Israel as heis on its sociology, though he is chock-full ofopinions and judgments, all of them anti-Zionist. Lets return to the causes of the Six-Day War. The history of the countdown to this

conflagration is clear, generally agreed upon,and pretty well documented. The opening ofthe relevant Israeli military and cabinetpapersclosed for another four years byIsraels fifty-year ruleis unlikely to offermuch added enlightenment. And the Arabarchives, which might shed new light, remainclosed, as they are for every period of theIsraeli-Arab conflict (dictatorships do not openstate archives). The slide to war began withSyrias sponsorship of Palestinian operationsagainst Israel across the Lebanese andJordanian borders and Syrias own efforts atdiverting the headwaters of the Jordan River.Syrias leaders spoke frequently and publicly ofa coming war of liberation for Palestine.Israel warned Syria that it was playing with fireand might even provoke an Israeli assault.

In early May 1967 Damascus and Moscow,Syrias chief international backer, passed onintelligence to Egypt that Israel was massingtroops on the Syrian frontier. The implication was that Israel was about to launch a massive

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attack and that Egypt, with whom Syria had adefense pact, would have to come to Syrias aid.Moscow spoke of ten to twelve Israeli brigadesand of May 17 as D-Day. This intelligence wasuntrue. The UN armistice supervision orga-nization, UNTSO, checked the border areasand dismissed the reports. Indeed, Nasser senthis army chief, Muhammad Fawzi, toDamascus to find out what was happening. Inhis memoirs, Fawzi later wrote, I did not findany concrete evidence to support theinformation received. On the contrary, aerialphotographs taken by Syrian reconnaissanceon May 12 and 13 showed no change in normal[Israeli] military positions.

Tyler fails to tell his readers any of this.Instead, he slyly implies that there wassomething to the Syrian and Russian reports:The Soviet information was mostlydisinformationnote the carefully placed

modifier mostly. It was clear, Tyler goes on,that the Israeli army was in a heightened stateof alert along the northern frontier. Again, theimplication is that an attack was beingprepared. It wasnt.

Tyler then proceeds to justify Nasserssubsequent actions, which directly provokedthe Six-Day War:

Still, it was impossible for Nasser to ignorethe [Soviet-Syrian] intelligence reports . . . ForNasser, it didnt matter whether theintelligence reports were false . . . What mat-

tered was that Nasser was in an untenable spotas the putative leader of the Arab world.So, on May 13 he ordered his armored

divisions to cross the Suez Canal into Sinai, which had been demilitarized after the 1956 War, threatening southern Israel. Nasser thencompounded this with two steps that, in theabsence of international intervention, made war inevitable. On May 16, he ordered the UNpeacekeeping force in Sinai (UNEF), whichphysically separated the Egyptians and Israelis,to leave, and on May 22 he announced theclosure of the Straits of Tiran to Israelishipping and aircraft, blocking the port ofEilat, which was Israels port of access to Africaand southern Asia, and its air-link to South Africa. All of this was in violation ofinternational law. At the end of the month,Nasser signed a defense pact with his oldenemy King Hussein, and battalions ofEgyptian troops were flown to Jordan; Iraqmade ready to send armored divisions to

bolster Husseins defenses. Israel felt a pan- Arab noose tightening around its neck.

Tyler describes these Egyptian moves, eachof which was a clear casus belli , but then blames Israel for the wars outbreak. He writesthat Prime Minister Levi Eshkol tried but failedto restrain the generals and quell the surge ofenthusiasm for war that was becoming moreand more pronounced in the officer corps.Meanwhile, the Americans failed to puttogether an international flotilla that wouldforce open the straitsTyler writes as if thisidea was still in play when Israel struck on themorning of June 5, but it wasntor to send intheir own ships, which is why Washington inthe end gave Israel a yellow light (the phraseis William Quandts) to attack.

One other Six-Day War matter that Tylerelides and distorts is the Israeli conquest of the West Bank, an area that Jordan had ruled since

conquering it in 1948. Early on the morning ofJune 5, Israel told King Husseinthrough theUN and U.S. channelsthat if Jordan held itsfire, no harm would come to it. The Jordaniansnonetheless opened fire, including artillery fire,on Israeli West Jerusalem and the coastalplain. Israel re-contacted the Jordanians,promising not to open fire if they immediatelyceased. But the Jordanians continued firing,and around noon, Israeli troops began to pushinto the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Withinthree days, the territory down to the Jordan

River was in Israeli hands.Tyler omits any mention of these June 5 warnings and assurances to Jordan, andinstead writes:

After Jordanian artillery batteries hadopened fire on Jewish neighborhoods inJerusalem, Yigal Allon and Menachem Begin joined in proposing . . . that the shelling gaveIsrael the pretext it needed to liberate ArabEast Jerusalem, including the Old City and the Western Wall.

One wonders if Tyler would describe the American response to a comparable attack (saythe shelling of Washington, D.C. and New York) as a pretext.

In the aftermath of the war, on June 19, theIsraeli cabinet resolved, in secret session, thatIsrael would agree to withdraw from all of theSinai Peninsula in exchange for peace withEgypt and the peninsulas demilitarization andfrom all of the Golan Heights in exchange forpeace with Syria and the Heights demi-litarization. (The cabinet could not agree on the

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fate of the West Bank, so nothing was offeredto Jordan.) Tyler, as usual when trying todownplay Israeli peace-mindedness, puts it vaguely: Eshkol, Meir, and Dayan convinced[the ministers] . . . that they should at leastoffer to return some of the Arab territories ifthey could do so on favorable terms. Which isnot quite the same thing.

It is worth adding that there are historians who are convinced that this cabinet decisionnever reached Cairo and Damascus, though thetruth, on this score, will only be definitivelyknown if and when the Egyptian and Syrianarchives are opened. What is certain is that inSeptember 1967, in response to the Israeli victory and perhaps to these peace proposals,the Arab governments unanimously resolvednever to negotiate with Israel, never torecognize it, and never to make peacethefamous three nos of Khartoum.

One other point Tyler makes about the warsaftermath is worth quoting because it is so blatantly untrue: It seemed that with fewexceptions, everyone in Israel had embraced acreed that envisioned a Greater Israel, from theMediterranean to the Jordan. There weredifferences [only] about how to achieve it. It istrue that a semi-messianic euphoria took hold, but post-1967 Israel was nonetheless a deeplydivided society and remains so down to thepresent. Many opposed, or were uncomfortable with, retention of the Palestinian-populated

territories. Tyler forgets to tell his readers thatBen-Gurion, whom he repeatedly brands anarch-expansionist and warmonger, imme-diately advised Eshkol to withdraw from the whole of the West Bank except East Jerusalem,nor does he mention that Labor Party minister Yigal Allon quickly formulated a plan whichcalled for withdrawal from the bulk of the WestBank in exchange for peace with Jordan. TheAllon Plan was never formally adopted as theLabor Partys platform or Israeli governmentpolicy, but it guided Labors policies for adecade. (Settlements were not established inthe areas earmarked for transfer to Arabsovereignty.) In the immediate post-1967 years, Israels leaders, in secret meetings,repeatedly proposed the plan to King Husseinas a basis for a bilateral peace settlement to noavail.

Following the Six-Day War, Egypts pre-sident, Nasser, launched a war of attritionagainst Israels forces in the Sinai Peninsula,hoping to wear down Israeli resolve to remain

in occupation of Egyptian territory. Thisconsisted of artillery strikes against the Israeliforts built along the Suez Canals eastern bank(the so-called Bar-Lev Line) and of commandoraids against the forts and the roads through which they were supplied. The Egyptiansenjoyed overwhelming superiority in artillery, which caused serious Israeli casualties on analmost daily basis. (I was wounded by a shellsplinter in one of the forts, codenamed ZahavaDarom, on the southern edge of Small BitterLake.) To offset this Egyptian advantage, in thesummer of 1969 the Israelis sent in the Israel Air Force (IAF) to hit the Egyptian artillery andfrontline trench system on the west bank of theCanal. By the end of the year the Egyptianartillery had not been silenced, so in January1970 the Israelis sent the IAF and commandosto attack army bases and anti-aircraft missileemplacements deep inside Egypt. Thousands of

Egyptian soldiers and military construction workers were killed and injured during thehalf-year air campaign. On two occasions, bombs went astray or the targeting wasmistaken and an Egyptian factory and anelementary school, which was situated inside amilitary compound, were destroyed, causingdozens of civilian deaths. Tyler summarizes theIsraeli air assault as follows: The air force . . .[dropped] an estimated eight thousand tons of bombs on military and civilian targets overthese months . . . U.S.-made F-4 Phantoms ter-

rorized Egyptian cities. In effect, Tyler tells hisreaders that Israel indiscriminately killedEgyptians, deliberately targeting civilians. Infact, during these months life went on asnormal in Egypts cities, since its governmentand citizenry knew full well that they were not being targeted.

The War of Attrition came to an end after theSoviets sent in thousands of their ownpersonnel to man anti-aircraft missile batteriesand fighter squadrons to counter the IAF. Inone incident, Israeli Phantoms shot down fiveSoviet-piloted MiG-21s. At this point, bothsides called it quits. The Egyptians were nowthoroughly exhausted, and the Israelis fearedan open-ended clash with the Russians. Tyler,as usual, has the story all wrong. He tells usthat Soviet pilots shot down half a dozenIsraeli Phantoms. This never happened.

Tyler replays the same atrocity card whendescribing Israels First Lebanon War, againstthe PLO and Syrians in Lebanon in 1982, whenhe writes of the saturation bombing of the city

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[of Beirut]. Of course, there was never anysaturation bombing. Tyler himself writes ofsix hundred civilians killed; in Dresden onFebruary 13-15, 1945 Allied bombers killed anestimated twenty-five thousand civiliansolder estimates put the number at around onehundred thousand or even higher. Thatssaturation bombing. In 1982, the IAF verycarefully targeted PLO buildings and camps inand around Beirut, and while hundreds ofcivilians no doubt died collaterally, some ofthem Lebanese rather than Palestinian, this was not the result of deliberation or intention.Thats what happens during wars in built-upareaseven when the more powerful side iscareful. Tylers description is agitprop, nothistory.

The subtitle of Tylers book carries a clearmessage: Bloodthirsty Spartan generals runIsrael and that is why it has not achieved peace

with its neighbors. The actual history of the various post-1967 Israeli-Arab peace processesgives the lie to this argument. IDF generals andex-generals have actually loomed large in thesepeace processes, both those which succeededand those which didnt.

Israel so far has signed two peace treaties with Arab states, with Egypt in 1979 and withJordan in 1994, both of which are still in force(though how they will fare in the coming years, with fiercely anti-Israeli and anti-SemiticIslamists on the ascent in Arab politics, is

anyones guess). Negotiations with Egypt wereled by Menachem Begin, a civilian who hadheaded the pre-state right-wing Irgun ZvaiLeumi (IZL). But the two men who pressed andpersuaded him to make the requisiteconcessions, including handing over to Egyptthe whole of Sinai, were his foreign ministerMoshe Dayan and his defense minister Ezer Weizman, both of whom had spent most oftheir lifetimes in the IDF. Dayan was a formerchief of general staff, and Weizman was a pastcommander of the Israel Air Force. The peacetreaty with Jordan, in which Israel cededseveral hundred square kilometers of territoryin the south, was negotiated and signed by Yitzhak Rabin, also a former IDF chief ofgeneral staff.

In the late 1970s, the public drive to pressureBegin to make peace with Egypt wasspearheaded by the Peace Now movement.Tyler says, almost correctly, that its importancewas that it arose in great measure from themilitary establishment. Most of the original

signatories of the letter that launched themovement were, in fact, IDF reserve officers.But of course this contradicts Tylers ownthesis that the Israeli military cant makepeace. He seems not to notice.

After the Sadat-Begin treaty, the Israelipublic, which according to Tyler had by then been tutored to militarism and expansionism by its leaders and generals for decades,immediately endorsed the governments con-ciliatory posture, and some eighty percent ofIsraelis supported giving back all of Sinai toEgypt in exchange for peace. How does Tylerexplain this? It was, he writes, a strongaffirmation that the martial impulse could beoverpowered by a strategy based onaccommodation with the Arabs. What thisfluff means is anyones guess. But what a morehonest and plain-spoken commentator wouldhave written would have been something like

this: The Israeli public, when persuaded thatthere was a sincere, genuine Arab partnerready to make peace, would overcome itssecurity-driven hesitations and rush headlongto sign on.

The basic problem with Fortress Israel isthat Tyler dismisses, or is simply unaware of,the pan-Arab desire to rid the Middle East ofthe Jewish state and its periodic efforts to doso. According to Tyler, Israel alone is to blamefor the wars, for the absence of peace, for thehopelessness. Thus, he fails completely to deal

with the 1948 War, about which all acknow-ledge that the Arabsfirst the Palestinians andthen the neighboring Arab stateswere theaggressors; thus, he fails to come to grips withthe very real Arab threats to Israel in 1956 and1967 and, indeed, ever since. He pooh-poohsSaddam Husseins effort to achieve nuclear weaponry in the early 1980s and writes offIsraels destruction of the Osirak nuclearreactor outside Baghdad in 1981 as merely anew phase of [Israeli] militarism.

Indeed, Tyler kicks off the book with adescription of how, in 2011-2012, Israeli agentsmurdered two top Iranian nuclear scientistson the streets of Tehran. The astonishingthing, Tyler writes, was that Iran might nothave been engaged in clandestine nuclear weapons development at all. Rather, Israelshighly provocative killing of the scientistspushed Iran into pursuing, or resuming thepursuit of, nuclear weaponry. All of this flies inthe face of what almost all the worldsintelligence agencies believe, which is that Iran

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aims to build nuclear weapons and has beentrying to do so for more than two decades. Afew years ago, the American intelligencecommunity suggested that the Iranians mighthave halted their nuclear weapons program in2003, but it has since concluded that Iran isstill pursuing nuclear weapons. Israeli intel-ligence has never believed that there was a realhalt and continues to believe that Iranstheocratic, brutal government is bent on building nuclear weapons as soon as possible.Israeli intelligence also takes the Iranianleaders at their public word and believes thatthe Iranian regime seeks to destroy Israel. Adivision of opinion exists among the Israeliintelligence assessors about whether theIranians, once they build an arsenal of such weapons, will unleash them on Israel or whether they will use them to strategicallyoverawe and defeat Israel in some more subtle

and staggered manner. In any event, returningto Tyler and his thesis, according to pressreports, it is the IDF general staff and theheads of the security services who held backand are currently holding back Netanyahufrom launching a strike against Irans nuclearfacilities, which, once again, upends theauthors thesis.

Along the way, Tyler also makes anotherargument: that the warmongering generalshave traditionally controlled their peace-pronecivilian superiors. But here, too, history ill-

serves him. During the 1948 War, which Tylergenerally avoids, Ben-Gurion repeatedlyoverruled the army. In May 1948 he forced thegenerals repeatedly to launch assaults on theLatrun Police Fort, against their better judgment. Later in 1948 and again in March1949 the army (meaning OC Southern Front,General Yigal Allon) pleaded with Ben-Gurionto order the conquest of the West Bank. Ben-Gurion turned Allon down flatly, though theIDF could easily have managed the conquest,militarily speaking.

During the early and mid-1950s, some IDFgenerals, including then-head of operationsand, from 1953, chief of general staff Dayanpressed prime ministers Ben-Gurion andMoshe Sharett (1953-1955) to launch a waragainst Jordan to conquer the West Bank inorder to give Israel a more secure, naturalfrontier or to launch wars of pre-emption andconquest against Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon.Ben-Gurion occasionally toyed with theseexpansionist ideas, but he and Sharett always

held back, checking Dayans annexationistproposals. Only in 1956, after Nasser acquiredlarge amounts of advanced Soviet weaponryand launched massive fedayeen attacks on theIsraeli heartland did Ben-Gurion agree tolaunch a pre-emptive war against Egypt.

A decade later, in the summer of 1967, withNasser provoking war, the IDF General Staff,to a man, pushed and pressed their civilianmaster, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, to launcha pre-emptive strike against Egypt. But it tookhim three long, nail-biting weeks to decide thatinternational diplomacy had failed and wouldcontinue to fail. In other words, from May 15until June 4 Eshkol held off his generals andthe dogs of war. If Tylers thesis were right,Eshkol would have crumpled before themilitary elite who have always run thecountry in mid-May.

In the early 1970s then-Prime Minister

Golda Meir scuppered peace or interim peaceinitiatives by Moshe Dayan, her defenseminister, and Egyptian President Anwar Sadatthat might well have resulted in averting theOctober War. Dayan at the time was supported by two of the IDFs top generals, Ariel Sharonand Israel Tal, but opposed by chief of generalstaff Haim Bar-Lev. In 1981, when Beginpressed the motion for the IAF attack on theOsirak reactor, he was opposed by the head ofIDF intelligence, the head of the Mossad, andthe head of the opposition, Labor Party chief

Shimon Peres, who for years had headed thecountrys defense establishment (though he was no general). A decade later, in 1991, whenIraqs Saddam Hussein launched 39 Scudmissiles against Israels cities, it was thehardline prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, whofaced down much of the defense establishmentand checked the IDF.

In other words, the picture that emergesfrom the actual history is clearly one in whichthere is complete subordination of the militaryto the Israeli civilian authorities. Sometimes,the generals are the ones pushing for actionand war and the civilians are successfullyputting on the brakes; at other times it is thecivilians who are gung ho, while the generalspersuade their bosses to exercise restraint. Atall times, it is the prime minister and thecabinet who have the final say.

Tylers purpose in writing this book was notto offer his readers an honest history, it was to blacken Israels image. Fortress Israel is justthe latest in a spate of venomous perversions of

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the record that have appeared in the past few years in the United States and Britain, allclearly designed to subvert Israels standing inthe world. Deliberately or not, such books andarticles are paving the way for a futureabandonment of the Jewish state.

I am reminded of the spate of books andarticles that appeared in Western Europe in1936 through 1938 repudiating the legitimacyof the newly formed Czechoslovakia before itssacrifice to the Nazi wolves. In 1934, theConservative weekly Truth hailed Czecho-slovakia as the sole successful experiment inliberal democracy that has emerged from thepost-War settlement. By the end of 1936, TheObserver was writing it off as a diplomaticcreation with no sufficient national basis eitherin geography or race. By March 1938 The New Statesman , in the past a great friend to centralEuropes only democracy, was writing: We

should urge the Czechs to cede the German-speaking part of their territory to Hitler without more ado. Of course, as all under-stood, this meant leaving Czechoslovakiadefenseless. Hitler conquered the rump of thecountry a few months later without a shot. Theappeasement of the Arab-Islamist world atIsraels expense is in the air and Tyler is one ofits (very, very) minor harbingers.

Benny Morris is a professor of history in the Middle East Studies Department of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is theauthor of 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (Yale University Press).

One More Reason WhyPeace Wont Happen

By Jonathan S. Tobin

Anyone who regularly follows the translationsof the Palestinian media available on PalestinianMedia Watch www.palwatch.org or Memri.orgunderstands that the blithe talk about the

possibility of Middle East peace that is heard onthe left is utterly unrealistic. But keeping onesfinger on the pulse of a Palestinian culture thatcontinues to foment hatred of Jews and Israelisnt the only indicator of just how deep thisanimus runs in Arab culture. Just as informativeis a look at the cultures of the two Arab countriesthat have already made peace with Israel: Egyptand Jordan. The potent anti-Semitism of theMuslim Brotherhood as well as the prejudice thatruns throughout the culture of the largest Arabnation is well documented. But the situation inJordan is less well known.

Jordans reputation as a moderate Arab nationstems mostly from the attitude of former KingHussein and his successor King Abdullah. Likehis father, the Jordanian monarch is well spokenin English, charming and, despite the criticismshe lobs across the border at Israel in order tomaintain his standing as an Arab leader, verymuch uninterested in conflict with the Jewishstate. But his people and even those in hisgovernment are a very different manner.

As the Jerusalem Post reports, 110 out of 120members of the Jordanian parliament haveendorsed a petition calling for the release of theformer soldier who murdered seven Jewishchildren in 1997. The shocking incident at theIsland of Peace along the border between Israeland Jordan prompted King Hussein to personallyapologize to the families of the victims for whathe considered a blot on the honor of both hiscountry and its armed services. But to theoverwhelming majority of Jordanians, he appearsto be a hero. If that doesnt tell you somethingabout how difficult it is to imagine the end of theMiddle East conflict, you arent paying attention.

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The details of the Island of Peace shootingwere horrific. Ahmed Daqamseh, one of theJordanian soldiers on duty at the site that day,turned his gun on a group of visiting Israelischoolgirls, killing seven and injuring five. Thedeath toll was limited only by the fact that his gun

jammed. He was spared a death sentence because

a tribunal ruled that he was mentally unstable.But the elevation of his former defense attorney,Hussein Mjali, to the post of minister of justice in2011 gave new life to the campaign to spring thekiller.

Unlike other such causes to free long-imprisoned figures, this effort isnt based on anyideas about a miscarriage of justice or an overlyharsh sentence. It is, instead, based on theabhorrence with which Israel and Jews in generalare viewed in Jordanian society. Daqamseh is

unrepentant about his crime and that appears tomake him popular. Part of this can be traced tothe fact that the majority of Jordanians arePalestinians who are generally marginalized in agovernment run by and for the Hashemite rulingfamily. But it must also be traced to a generalcurrent of Jew-hatred that grips the Arab andMuslim worlds. It is only that feeling that canexplain the desire of so many in Jordan to treat amadman who went on a rampage killing littlegirls as a hero or imprisoned martyr.

The problem between Israel and its neighborshas never really been the location of borders,settlements or the severity of its measures of self-defense. Its about the unwillingness of a criticalmass of Palestinians and Arabs in general totolerate Jewish sovereignty over any portion, nomatter how small, over part of the Middle East.The hate that leads serious people to demandfreedom for a mass killer of children is the samefactor that makes true peace unlikely in theforeseeable future. This is regrettable, but thosewho wish to claim any insight into the politics

that drive the Middle East conflict cannot ignoreit.

Commentary

For Future Friends ofWalter BenjaminOn the life and flourishing posthumous reputation of

Walter Benjamin By Bran Hanrahan

As for me, I am busy pointing my telescopethrough the bloody mist at a mirage of thenineteenth century, which I am trying toreproduce based on the characteristics that it willmanifest in a future state of the world, liberated

from magic. Of course, I first have to build myselfthis telescope.

Walter Benjamin, letter to Werner Kraft,October 1935.

1.In 1942, Gershom Scholem, the oldest friend

of the German writer and philosopher WalterBenjamin and his unofficial literary executor,wrote to Benjamins ex-wife Dora, in exile inLondon: We are almost the last who knew himwhen he was young [] and who knows howmuch longer we will survive in this apocalypse.Two years previously, Benjamin had committed

suicide in police custody at the French-Spanish border, overdosing on morphine in fear of whatmight happen upon his transfer to the Germanauthorities. But in spite of the bleakness of themoment Benjamin dead, his library and papersscattered, his writings banned, burned, and lost Scholem was determined to think of the future.He asked for donations of letters and othermaterials for his Benjamin archive in Jerusalem,for the sake of those who never knew Benjamin,

but who might someday read his work: forfuture friends of Walter.

Even with his resolute optimism, in 1942Scholem could hardly have imagined theflourishing of Benjamins posthumous reputation.After a slow beginning in the immediateaftermath of the war, Benjamins standing andinfluence have risen with every decade. With hisassociations with revolutionary Marxism nowlargely removed, defused or ignored, Benjaminholds an unshakable position as an icon of theacademic humanities. Benjamin Studies is a

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thriving sub-discipline, comfortable with itsstatus as a professional specialism. In German,early, limited anthologies have been replaced bytwo generations of Collected Works . Where thefirst was comprehensive, the second is forensic inthe vast scope of its philological completism:including color facsimile volumes, the full run of

this Critical Collected Works , due for completionin 2018, will cost over $2000. In English, theturn-of-the-century publication of an acclaimed,four-volume Selected Works and the translationof the thousand-page Arcades Project greatlyexpanded the Anglophone oeuvre, and introducednew generations of Walters future friends tothe breadth of his writing. New French and Italianeditions are in progress. And in spite of or

because of tough times for the publishing business, there is a steady stream of Benjamin books, from scholarly and trade presses: newselections (an English Early Works last year),monographs and biographies, introductions andfacsimiles, essay collections, lexicons and semi-fictional ruminations, even the occasional

polemical counterblast. The marketing hook thisyear is the 120 th anniversary of his birth. Not sucha round number, but why wait for 125? One wayor another, Benjamin is an intensely popularfigure, and a good commercial bet.

But beyond the name and the famousmelancholy face, it is not easy it has never

been easy to sketch the contours ofBenjamins work and thought, or for that matterhis life and personality. There are various reasonsfor this, not least the sheer scope and diversity ofhis writing. Among many other things, Benjaminwrote metaphysical treatises, literary-criticalmonographs, philosophical dialogues, media-theoretical essays, book reviews, travel pieces,drug memoirs, whimsical feuilletons, diaries andaphorisms, modernist miniatures, radio plays forchildren, reflections on law, technology, theologyand the philosophy of history, analyses of

authors, artists, schools and epochs. His intense, precise, enlightening intellectual engagementgrasped miniscule events and tiny details amotto on a stained-glass window, 17 types ofIbizan fig while at the same time, in the samemovement, retaining a sense for historys lon-gitudinal waves and metaphysics worlds behindthe world. Although he often lamented his ownindolence, as both a writer and a person Benjaminwas mobile, endlessly inquisitive and engaging,

and exceptionally productive. Looking back onhis friends capacity for churning experience intothought, the philosopher Theodor Adorno sawsomething depersonalizing, almost inhuman, inthis prodigious apparatus of absorption andreflection: Despite extreme individuation [...]Benjamin seems empirically hardly to have been

a person at all, rather an arena of movement inwhich content forced its way, through him, intolanguage.

Second, much of his writing was unpublishedduring his lifetime and comes in fragmentary,draft or multiple forms. More than most,Benjamins oeuvre forms an open system: ideasand passages migrate between different texts,letters morph into essays and vice versa, texts areso heavily rewritten that they contradict their

previous versions. There are unfinished books,unstarted books, abandoned books, aborted

books. Even the more settled and public texts the semi-autobiographical vignettes of BerlinChildhood around 1900 , say rarely fit theirown apparent genre; they are often curiouslyloose and modular, parts not quite subordinate tothe whole. Moreover, Benjamins startling mentaland verbal facility has had its own decompositoryeffect. His writings contain ideas and imageswhich are both memorable and ambiguous theartworks aura, the flneur in the streets, the angelof history, the decay of experience, the flash ofmessianic Jetztzeit , among many others andwhich have, as a result, readily taken on a life oftheir own. Finally, throughout his writing,Benjamin continually reflects on these questions:on text and context, author and oeuvre, readingand writing, language and history, on the

production and collection of texts, on theirfragmentation and decay, reconstitution and re-constellation. Think about Benjamin, the writer orthe thinker, and he has almost always been therefirst, and written ahead of you.

2.So, for example, we find Benjamin in 1919, ina letter to his former school friend Ernst Schoen,discussing the autonomous life of publishedcorrespondence. Individual letters, he says, candetach themselves from their authorship,

becoming abstract, but collections of letters havea different kind of posterity. A writers letters arean index of a life as it unfolded, but thetelescoping of events into a few pages, and the

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compression of lived time into short minutes ofreading, brings something else into existence. Theletters contain the authors afterlife , but anafterlife that is already embedded within thelife, something which in one sense is alreadythere, but in another, is produced in theunknowable and never-finished encounter

between writer and his unknown later readers, between a fluid now and a fluid then.Two closely-related themes are at work here:

first, Benjamins abiding preoccupation with thecomplexity of temporal experience and form,with how past and future communicate throughthe present, but do so, in a sense, behind the

presents back; and second, his strong sense forthe de- and re-composition of phenomena in time,with bits and pieces detaching to form themselvesanew, accumulating in new configurations,working to rhythms and by dint of forcesunknown to the momentarily stable world of

beings and things. In addition, and again this istypical Benjamin, the idea of letters afterlife isgraced with an unusual self-reflexivity. His letter,in making a general point about the life of lettersand of letter-writers, seems to invoke indirectly but knowingly specific past futuresand future pasts, both its own and that of itsauthor.

But the complex temporality of experience is just not a private matter; it unavoidably coincidesand intersects with public, historical time. Thiscrossing of public and private temporalities can

be seen in Benjamins own editing of authorsletters: nearly twenty years later, his last German

publication (pseudonymous, to circumvent hisstatus as a banned author) was an edition ofletters between German writers, a collection ofminor texts tracing a counter-historical linethrough the nineteenth century. The book is oftenseen as a letter in its own right, an exemplarymessage sent to Germany from exile, under theironic, quietly admonitory title of Deutsche

Menschen (translated as German Men andWomen). As well as preserving small, intensemoments of friendship and lived affect, the lettersoften like Benjamins introductions to eachexchange combine learning with a wise,unpretentious, ethical sensibility: a posthumous

portrait of civilized living, sent anonymously to aculture now defined by hero cults, brutality andmurder.

Benjamins own letters were first collected inthe late 1960s, under the joint editorship ofScholem and Adorno. His correspondence, likeall of his writing, was immediately drawn into theagonistic political culture of the time, as themutual suspicion and incommensurablestandpoints of Benjamins interwar friends

caricatured as Scholem the Jewish mystic,Adorno the prissy dialectician-aesthete, BertoltBrecht the manipulative leftist bully werereplayed in highly politicized responses to thework. Adorno, back from American exile andhead of the reconstituted Institute for SocialResearch (the Frankfurt School), was mistrustedon the left, who saw his mandarin Marxism asquietist collusion with the ruling class. At themoment when Adorno was publishing hiscorrespondence with Benjamin, radical studentswere appropriating his friends name: theFrankfurt University literature department wasoccupied and temporarily renamed the WalterBenjamin Institute. (Adornos own institute wasoccupied too; famously, he called in the police.)Samizdat copies of the then-little-known 1930sessays The Author as Producer, Programfor a Proletarian Childrens Theatre, The Workof Art in the Age of its Technological Repro-ducibility carried slogans on their coversaligning Benjamin with contemporary politicaland psychochemical revolt. In this climate,Scholem and Adorno were accused of abusingtheir position, downplaying Benjamins sharpleft-political turn, editing out correspondencewith Brecht, even of deliberately suppressing latework, supposedly too explosive to be releasedfrom the archives.

Suspicions of censorship waned as scholarlyeditions were published in the following decades,including a six-volume German Collected Letters .It became clear that the limitations of the earliestvolumes of correspondence were mostly attribu-table to the simple unavailability of material. A

revised single-volume Letters appeared in the late1970s, incorporating newly available material; itsoon came out in an excellent English translation.This volume, now published in English

paperback for the first time, offers a generoussampling of Benjamins life and correspondencein over 600 pages. Beginning before the FirstWorld War Benjamin in 1910, 18 years old,traipsing around the Alps near Liechtenstein,writing to school friends, full of beans, full of

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opinions, fond of exclamation marks (!!) itruns until just before his death in 1940, its last

pages documenting the years in France, colored by poverty, illness and internment, but dominated by an unchanged devotion to his work. Largelymade up of letters to male friends and colleagues,the collection is testimony to passionate intel-

lectual engagement and to sheer epistolarystamina: Benjamin seems never to have stoppedwriting words on paper. But there are limits to thecollection: no correspondence with his family,nothing from his love affairs or his marriage.(Benjamin married Dora Pollak in 1917. Theyhad a son in 1919 and a bitter, expensive divorcein 1930.) The closest to love letters are somemildly flirtatious notes to an ex-girlfriend, thesculptor Jula Radt. Many rediscovered letters

published separately are not included; while wecan read some of the chatty letters to Adornoswife Gretel here, there is none of thecorrespondence with Siegfried Kracauer, fellowanalyst of popular culture and later his fellowexile in France. (In a prefatory note, the

publishers point out restrictions on revising theoriginal German Letters .)

Letters formed an extension for Benjaminsundoubted gift for friendship, but they were alsoa particular mode of thought, driven and shaped

by what Adorno, in his introduction, calls theirmediated, objectified immediacy: letters

particular compound of absences and presences,at once temporal, spatial and communicational. Inthe letters, ideas appear, form and develop atdifferent rates and in different registers. Writingto Scholem and Florens Christian Rang in theearlier years, and in the scintillating latercorrespondence with Adorno, there are pages ofsustained theoretical reflection, rehearsingarguments and sometimes drafting passages hewill use in the work proper. But at times, asingle word, an observation or an aphorismannounces the tiny presence of a germ of thought.

For the reader of the afterlife, knowing what isto come, these moments of emergence can havethe force of dramatic entrances, as when, inJanuary 1928, he tells Scholem in passing that heintends a short piece on the nineteenth-centuryarcades of Paris. The topic, in all its rami-fications, would dominate his work for the rest ofhis life.

Benjamins letters to Scholem form the basisof the collection. The two had been students

together, neighbors in Basel and Munich duringthe war, passionate co-readers of philosophy andliterature. Their long, affectionate letters containfascinating quotidian stuff malicious gossip,complaints of bad luck, apologies for poorhandwriting, accounts of illnesses and travels

but above all, they teem with collaborative

thought: to no one else does Benjamin write ofhis work with such ease and excitement. Thefervent discussion of books and ideas isinseparable from a more material bibliomania.Famously, Benjamin was a collector; above allelse, he was a collector of books. His library wasan extension of his self, its condition an index ofhis fortunes, its maintenance a central task of hisexistence. It would be, he writes to Scholem, thesole material epitaph of my existence. Early on,confident in the future, he constantly visitsdealers and auctions, buys first editions withmoney he doesnt have, complains aboutinflation-hedgers distorting the market. Later,

biographical vicissitudes take their toll. In thedivorce, he loses his beloved collection ofnineteenth-century childrens literature (he wrotelater: it is growing steadily even today, but nolonger in my garden.). He manages to have halfhis library shipped out of Germany, but is thenforced to sell it off bit by bit. The textUnpacking My Library among his mostcharming essays, an account of the pleasures ofre-finding books, of sorting and ordering them is, in part, a fantasy of his books homecoming,and his own.

On one level, Scholems emigration toPalestine cemented the separation fromBenjamin. On another, their relation took on newand deeper form: in Jerusalem, Scholem ap-

pointed himself Benjamins archivist and firstreader, the keeper of his thought; his letterscontain the earliest attempts to grasp the shape ofBenjamins work as a whole and assess itshistorical significance. Back in Europe, Benjamin

is a loyal correspondent, but not always a perfectfriend. He takes advantage now and again:Scholem arranges a stipend to learn Hebrew,Benjamin takes the money, but not the classes.Scholem continually suggests a move toPalestine: Benjamin doesnt want to go, but wontcome straight out and say so. By the 1930s, therelation in letters remains immensely importantfor both, but on Scholems rare visits to Europe,

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Benjamin seems to be going out of his way toavoid him.

Disagreements over politics and Benjaminsfriendship with Brecht were the biggest problem,disagreements that are both the theme and thereason for the small number of letters toBenjamin included here. These, by Scholem and

by Adorno, ultimately turn on the place of politics in Benjamins work and his life: theirinclusion is partly a response to the 1960sdisputes, the editors gesture of retrospective self-

justification. Scholem thought Benjamins deepe-ning Marxism a desperate and masochistic self-delusion, with isolation and frustration underlyingwhat he saw as a profound betrayal of intellectual

principles. You issue a currency in your writingthat you are [] simply incapable of redeeming,he writes, your desire for community placesyou at risk, even if it is the apocalypticcommunity of the revolution that speaks out of somany of your writings [] [in] imagery withwhich you are cheating yourself out of yourcalling. Adorno took a similar, if more nuancedline, and certainly shared Scholems distrust ofBrecht. For him, Benjamins turn to history andto politics risked robbing his work of

philosophical force. Worse still, his new-foundand insufficiently dialectical enthusiasm fortechnology, popular culture, and the massesultimately ran the danger of identification withthe aggressor: collusion with historical forces ofuntruth, reification and delusion.

3.This tension between religiously-infused

metaphysics and radical politics coalesces with asecond tension in Benjamins life and work

between philosophy and literature, as modes ofwriting and understanding and as academicdisciplines. For many of Benjamins biographers,the year 1924 is both a biographical turning pointand the moment when these tensions begin to

ratchet up. The more dramatic accounts of theshift have Benjamin vacationing on Capri, where,in quick succession, he reads Georg Lukcss

History and Class Consciousness and falls in lovewith the Latvian Bolshevik Asja Lacis,Brechts former stage manager, whom he then

pursues to Riga and then Moscow. The currentscholarly consensus, well summarized in UweSteiners introduction to Benjamins thought,downplays notions of epiphanic readings and life-

changing encounters, suggesting instead theexpansion of intellectual horizons, and theapplication of existing metaphysical methods toconcrete historical themes, with spectacularly

productive results.What is clear is that Benjamins mid-twenties

turn was as much a becoming-worldly as it was

a straightforward politicization: it involved newideas and new identifications, but also newgeographies (his appetite for travel only inten-sified as the years went on) and a new

professional identity. Benjamin had trained bothas a literary scholar and a philosopher; it was asthe former that he first sought professionaladvancement, and spectacularly failed to achieveit. Steiner sketches a vigorous portrait ofBenjamin as an experimental and philosophical

philologist, at odds with his institutional andcultural surroundings. Problems came to a headaround his university Habilitation candidacy a

process somewhat akin to academic tenure which centered on his study of Baroque theatre, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama . Whilethe book carefully fulfilled academic convention,it was dense and demanding, its unorthodoxconceptualizations of origin and allegorygoing far beyond the bounds of humanist belleslettres . In professional terms, it was a disaster.Benjamin was rejected even before his formalapplication.

Steiner describes the refusal as a combinedresult of academic politicking, anti-Semitism and

blockheaded philistinism, and as a tragedy forthe German university. Perhaps it wasnt such atragedy for Benjamin himself though: the refusalsteered him all the more surely towards the avant-garde and the arcana of nineteenth-century life, inthe direction of the Arcades Project . In any case,they would have kicked him out in 1933. As itwas, his dismissal was yet another event markinga fork in the biographical path, if not a rupture inthe structures of his thought. From here on out,

Benjamin was a professional writer, his increa-singly itinerant lifestyle matched by theeclecticism of his subject matter and the various-ness of his publishers. As a freelance essayist inGermany, he made a good enough living; he hadfriends who commissioned for the newspapersand radio stations. Later, exiled in Paris andelsewhere, he continually struggled to make aliving at all.

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As his engagement with literary history hadmade clear, Benjamins philosophical formation

marked above all by Kant, encountereddirectly and through the various post-Kantianismsof his day suffused his writing across manytopics. But as with Nietzsche, Benjaminsoccasionalism, the quality of his prose and the

breadth of his subject matter have cast doubt onhis philosophical status. The question hascontinually been asked: what is the philosophy,and what exactly is philosophical, in his works

busy arena of movement? One approach, taken by two prominent recent Benjamin monographs,is to emphasize Benjamin as a philosopher oftime. As implied in his comments on thetemporality of published letters, for Benjamin,time can be seen and should be written, andmust be lived as something more complicatedand denser with potential than the homogenous,evenly sequential temporality to which weconceptually and experientially default. Hiddenand possibly secret relations bind together theapparently personal time of inner experience, thelarger-scaled, historical time of societal andanthropological existence, and the transcendenttime of messianic intervention.

Peter Fenvess The Messianic Reduction:Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time tracesBenjamins rethinking of experience andtemporality to his formative years as a student of

philosophy during and after the First World War.This Benjamin, not yet much taken withvernacular culture or avant-garde experimen-tation, writes in a difficult, abstract voice, but isfully and confidently engaged in the

philosophical debates of his day. (AlthoughBenjamin wrote prolifically while very young, hewrote almost nothing considered juvenilia, apart,maybe, from the Alpine letters.) Fenvess readingof Benjamins early texts locates them in a densenetwork of influences and dialogues, a complexforce field encompassing contemporary mathe-

matical theory, various strands Cohenist,Rickertian, Cassirerite of neo-Kantianism,and, more unexpectedly, the phenomenology ofEdmund Husserl and his followers.

Benjamins stance towards all these, and hisreadings of Husserl in particular, are alreadycolored by the modernist messianism that becamea hallmark of his later thought. The messianic, forBenjamin, was nothing so simple as a redeemerarriving to call time and distribute justice at the

end of days. Rather, it referred to something likea structure of temporal experience, but anexperience that goes beyond the individual andeven the social. To use the Benjaminian termi-nology that Fenves brings into sharp relief, it isthe immanent tension that is the fact and the forceof divinity in the world, permanently present,

endlessly mutable. This belief was the basis ofBenjamins particular take on Husserls pheno-menological reduction, the program of rigorousmind-clearing phenomenology used to set asidethe default natural attitude of consciousness,with its preconceived notions of causality,subject-object relations and mind-worlddistinctions.

For Benjamin, the reduction mediated asphere of experience beyond the conditionedframings of conscious thought. But, as Fenvesreads him, Benjamin granted this subjectlessexperience of pure receptivity a near-mysticalvalence. The reduction was an opening onto akind of paradise; the stubborn natural attitudewas both analog and agent of the fallen, guiltystate of mankind. This also underlay Benjaminsdisagreement on questions of method. UnlikeHusserls willed bracketing of philosophicalassumptions a carefully prescribed method fordismantling the self-evident for Benjamin,getting beyond the natural attitude was not amatter of decision, for the philosopher or anyoneelse. Not that the impossibility of a chosen pathimplies the non-existence of the divine, or even,strictly speaking, its inaccessibility: the divine issomething that can be thought and experienced,

but always as the irruption or appearance of anoutside, never commanded forth by a directaction of human will. The reduction was doneto the philosopher, not by him.

The Messianic Reductions difficult, butultimately revelatory, analyses track the earlyBenjamin as he searches for islands of reducedexperience within the fallen world. In his very

early essays and fragments, Benjamin hones in on phenomena where experience is loosed from thewretched ballast of subjecthood and causality.Hlderlins poetry is one privileged place. The

practice of painting, with its relation of spatiality, perception, fantasy, and color, is another. Thechilds experience of color, as seeing subject and

biological being, is a third. Notwithstanding itshighly abstract idiom, Benjamins writing here isoften breathtakingly intense and original. There

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are extraordinary pages in which Benjamin asif to look sentimentality full in the face reflects on childhood innocence, transforming thetheme into a bizarre and brilliant reflection on the

paradoxical phenomenology of blushing. (ForBenjamin, involuntary physical coloration doesnot express subjective interiority, it locally

abolishes it.) Most abstractly, Fenves finds tracesof reduction in Benjamins rather vague references to advanced mathematical theory,which he encountered through his great-uncleArthur Schoenflies, an early set theorist, andthrough Scholem, a student of mathematics. If

phenomenology strengthened Benjamins nascentcritique of Kants narrowly-drawn ideas ofexperience, avant-garde math seemed to offernew images of temporality, beyond thehomogeneity of calendric sequence, beyond thethis-then-that of simplistic causalities imagesof time as cycloid, or planar, or, alluding to anearly theory of fractals, as a continuously turning,tangentless curve.

4.In a coda, The Messianic Reduction fast-

forwards to the 1940 essay, On the Concept ofHistory, finding the non-linear shape of timewrit larger here in the late philosophy of history:now the messianic is the making-congruent of thelocal shape of time and the larger shape ofhistory, and the messiah is a name for the forcethat accomplishes this temporal structuring. Thissoterio-temporal formalism, linking the early andthe late work, also features in Eli FriedlandersWalter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait . Buthere things go the other way round. Friedlandersanalysis centers on the Arcades Project , the vast,uncompleted for some, uncompletable work which consumed Benjamin in the 1930s,and which, in the form of sketches, sub-projectsand spin-offs, gave rise to many of his bestknown essays and images. Friedlander reads the

Arcades Project as the cohering, sense-makingculmination of the oeuvre, its logical as well as itschronological terminus, which can if the direc-tion is reversed reveal the coherence ofBenjamins philosophy, and the unique spiritualcharacter of his thought. In the rigor andsobriety, but above all the unity and systematicityunveiled by this method, so goes the claim, inherethe fundamentally philosophical character ofBenjamins work.

For Friedlander, the Arcades convolutes, atfirst sight a sprawling taxonomy of notes andexcerpts on nineteenth-century Paris, in factrespond to, and keep company with, the work ofthe greatest of philosophical system builders:Plato and Leibniz, Kant and Hegel. Inter-

pretations of Benjamins work as a compendium

of brilliant, disconnected images and thoughts epitomized by Hannah Arendts image ofBenjamin as a pearl diver rescuing strangethought-artifacts from the deep are more than

just wrong, they are catastrophic misreadings.The eye-opening implication, in other words, isthis: for all his vast, appreciative reception,Benjamin remains severely underestimated.Transcending every peer group except the mostrarified philosophical canon, Benjamin is not, forFriedlander, just a writer or a thinker, he is a

philosopher of world-historical significance, andhis work is a vessel of the highest truth.

The books title is accurate, but potentiallymisleading. This is not a life and worksintellectual biography; it has no interest in whatBenjamin looked like, where he lived, what hefelt or ate, whom he loved or who he was:Friedlander wastes no time on Scholemssuggestion that one key to Benjamins writinglies in his encoding of personal experiences. Thisis a very different kind of method than Fenvessdense net of readings, encounters and influences,the reconstruction of micro-capillaries in thesocial body of thought: the distinction betweenintellectual history and the history of ideas couldhardly be clearer. Walter Benjamin in thissecond study should not be considered a person,

but, first, as a prodigious structure of capacities ,capable of gathering thought into form, creatingwritten images which address, absorb andultimately reshape historical time, and, second, asthe corpus of significant texts made in thecrucible of this knowledge. All that matters iswhat has been read and what comes to be written.

There is no need, in this analysis, for Berlin orPort Bou, Dora or Asja, the angry father or theneglected son.

If the content of the life is irrelevant, thecontent of the late work the Arcades Project and its accompanying train of essays and studies

is abstracted. On one level the Arcades can beseen to mark the furthest development of the shift

begun around 1924, where Fenves breaks off away from philology and pure philosophy, and

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towards a new form of cultural history, bothexperimental and, in a complicated way, monu-mental. This entailed archaeology of modernity

its urban spaces, temporal structures, emergentmedia, dreamworlds of commodities and crowds

based on a much broader conception ofexperience and thought than normally accepted

within philosophys walls. But, like Adorno orat least like one side of Adorno Friedlanderdoes not regard the Arcades as primarily orultimately an investigation of Parisian history,commodity capitalism or phantasmagoric urbanmodernity. He takes his cue from a comment inAdornos 1935 correspondence with Benjamin: Iopenly confess to regarding the Arcades not as ahistorical-sociological investigation but rather as

prima philosophia in your own particular sense[] I regard your work on the Arcades as thecenter not merely of your own philosophy, but asthe decisive philosophical word which must findutterance today; as a chef doeuvre like no other.For Friedlander, the Arcades Project s materialand formal heterogeneity is no obstacle to therecuperation of its systematicity. The perfectlychosen cover photograph presents a visualmanifesto for his profoundly ambitious essay: the

photo shows one of the famous Parisian arcades, but only its framework, looking through the iron-and-glass grid of its roof to the sky beyond. The

books aim, accordingly, is ultimately to passthrough the Arcades itself, to grasp the formalarmature that gathers and shapes the content (its

Darstellung , which Friedlander rightly stresses aspresentation not representation), and divineits structure and philosophical significance.However, the form that, for Friedlander, bears the

books truth is not to be found in the actualarrangement of Benjamins material. His analysisdoes not address particular taxonomies or

juxtapositions; there is no investigation of thestrata laid down by the books successiveorganizational conceptions, from the original

impulse lent by Benjamins reading of LouisAragons Paris Peasant , to the infusion ofdeepening historical horror, and more explicit

political reflection, as the 1930s wore on. Rather,the presentational form is a secondary for-mation, a constellation of concepts transcendingthe Arcades content, as Friedlanders intricate

presentation systematically reconstructs Benja-minian idea-material in dozens of interlockingsub-chapters.

Given the systematizing impulse, all here isconnected to all else. But one concept stands outin the formation, the point towards and throughwhich every path runs: the dialectical image . Thisdifficult concept is central to the double task ofBenjamins late political-historical epistemology:first, understanding the relative motion of history

and knowledge, and second, gathering past and present in an explosive interrelation, generating aflash of Jetztzeit , the time of the now. Concretely,it is clear that Benjamin wanted to apply thesurrealists profane illumination to historicalwriting, to deploy the alienated artifacts of arecent past to break up conventional historio-graphys commonsense epistemologies and inerttemporal imaginaries, stupid and stupefying. Buta stable definition of the dialectical image has

proved elusive: generations of Benjaminians havestruggled with the term as it oscillates betweensingular and plural, subjective and objective,method and metaphor, materialist constructionand autonomous historical emanation. Moreover,the stakes for the dialectical image are set so highthat Benjamins own thought-images andhistorical objets trouvs the July Revo-lutionaries turning their guns on the publicclocks, say, or the flneur at Notre Dame deLorette, remembering with the soles of his feet,like an ascetic animal have seemed in-adequate, even paltry, next to the vauntedconcept.

Friedlanders interpretation here is radical andunivocal. There is one dialectical image, and itsname is The Arcades Project . In Friedlandersreconstellation of Benjamins work, the concept

becomes the capstone of a metaphysical system,an homage to and elaboration of Benjaminsfamous, near-posthumous observation: There is asecret agreement between past generations andthe present one. Our coming was expected onearth. Like every generation that preceded us, wehave been endowed with a weak Messianic

power, a power to which the past has a claim.Reflecting on his method, Friedlander alludesto Benjamins notion of origin, developed inThe Origin of the German Tragedy : not the startof a linear development, but an intense vortex oftransformation, in which elements of the pastundergo a complex process of rearrangement andrecognition, disappearance and endurance. Viarestructuring, the dialectical image Benjaminswork appears as a higher form of origin, a

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couple of hundred miles away. In the last monthsof his life, his ex-wife Dora begged him to comeover: it would have saved his life, but instead hewent south, waited around in Marseilles with theother transitoires , stopped in Lourdes for a while

before heading for the Pyrenees. But in one wayat least, London was his future. In the late 1930s,

along with Dora, Benjamins twenty-year old sonStefan had also come to Britain. Their escape wasa relief to Benjamin, whose late correspondenceworries about their fate, first in Italy, later inAustria. London seemed for the moment like amuch safer refuge, where Stefan could completehis disrupted education, and maybe even,Benjamin hopes in a letter to Scholem, be given aBritish passport. For Dora, things worked out until her death two decades later, she ran a

boarding house in Notting Hill. But someanomaly in Stefans case led to a mysterious turnof events. A footnote in the Letters reports that in1941 he was expelled from the country as anenemy alien. He was deported by ship toAustralia, a journey on which he was placed,according to Scholem, under "German Nazi"authority and traumatized by their brutalmistreatment. After the war, he somehowreturned to London, where he became anantiquarian book dealer: the son taking up,

professionally, the fathers amateur bibliomania.He died in 1972, Benjamins other posterity.

Los Angeles Review of Books

Dora and Stefan Benjamin

Historical patterns ofwomens activism

in the region

The case of Serbian writerJelena J. Dimitrijevi

(1862-1945)

By Ana Stjelja

This paper discusses the historical patterns ofwomen's activism in Serbia through the case ofone very interesting Serbian woman who,although now largely forgotten writer and culturalworker, played an important role in women'semancipation primarily in her homeland. She wasafter the traces of other Serbian female writersand feminists who lived before her, such asEustahija Arsi , first Serbian female poet fromthe 18th century. Although there were just a fewof them, they left an indelible mark upon thecultural history of Serbia. The paper will attemptto show how Serbian female writers and feministsin the mid of 19th and early 20th century weredealing with women's emancipation and whatwere the patterns of women's activism in Serbia

of that time. The case of Jelena J. Dimitrijevi is particularly interesting due to her open -

mindedness , very interesting life, often travels,contact with East and West, writing about awoman and her destiny.

Jelena J. Dimitrijevi (1862-1945) was Serbianwriter, world traveler and women's rights fighterwho marked Serbian literature at the turn of the19th to the 20th century. As a poet, novelist, andfolklorist she was a prominent woman in Serbianliterary circles. Despite having no formaleducation, Jelena was very educated woman of

her time. She was a polyglot and an eruditewriter; she spoke English, Greek, Turkish,French, German. She was raised in respected andwealthy family, in the spirit of Serbian culturalheritage and Orthodox religion. From an earlyage she dedicated herself to writing. She had agreat support in her husband Jovan Dimitrijevi .Beside supporting her writing and socialactivities, he was often her fellow-traveler and the

person she could completely rely on. When he

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died, she was in mourning for the rest of her life.From the moment she stayed alone, she dedicatedher life to writing, traveling and fight forwomen's rights. She shared the destiny of otherSerbian feminists who are now almost forgotten.

Serbian feminists were very progressive anddecisive in their attempt to draw attention to the

social status of women and the problems theywere facing with. These women were mostlyintellectuals, most numerous among them werewriters (such as Jelena J. Dimitrijevi ), painters(such as Nadeda Petrovi ) and humanitarianworkers (such as Delfa Ivani ). These womenwere expressing their personal thoughts andattitudes, whether through art, different socialactivities or humanitarian work. An associationcalled ''Serbian Sister's Circle'' played animportant role in the process of emancipation ofSerbian women. Through different activities, itsmembers were trying to offer help to the poor orthose in need and to inspire girls and women toget more active in the society they are part of.Jelena J. Dimitrijevi was very respected andactive member of this association. She and herfemale fellows were mostly wealthy and bravewomen who were real patriots, some of themgave lives for their country. Voluntary nurses ofthe Circle had a significant role during theBalkan Wars and First World War. The membersof the Circle were publishing their own journalcalled Calendar Vardar where its members could

publish literary works and promote patrioticideas. Jelena J. Dimitrijevi was one of the mostactive co-authors of this journal. Therefore, the

pattern of women's activism in Serbia isrevealing the tight connection between patriotismand the fight for women's rights. We could saythat just like feminists from Europe and America,Serbian feminists were also very educatedwealthy women who used all their knowledge,

power and fortune to upgrade the status ofSerbian women in general.

Jelena was active in this fight, primarilythrough her literature, especially travelogues.Here trips to different parts of the world were justan attempt to find out how other women live, soshe could apply this knowledge and shareexperience with women in her homeland. Eachof her trips was an amazing journey through theintimate world of women of her time. This is thereason why all her writings focus on women,

whether covered with veil or wearing a suit andsmoking cigar.

Since Jelena's early age, her interest hasfocused on the oriental world represented byTurkish women and their way of life. The life inTurkish harems and the problems that thesewomen she first met in Ni, the largest city in

southern Serbia (which at the time when shemoved there was a part of the Ottoman Empire)were dealing with, attracted her so much that shestarted exploring it in details. All the impressionsabout the life in Turkish harems she wrote in her

book titled Letters from Ni on harems.Her literary work is remarkable for two

reasons. First for its explicit focus on women ingeneral, and for its interest in the fate of womenin the East. Her literary work played an importantrole in the process of rediscovering contributionof women to Serbian cultural life in the first halfof the twentieth century. Through her entireliterary work she shows individuality andindependent spirit. To be a woman writer in hertime it was rarity itself.

Jelena drew attention to herself by publishing poems written in exotic, oriental style. Most herworks are specific and remarkable. They werehonest reflections of one woman, who withoutany social boundaries was speaking about thewoman and her intimate world, includingsexuality.

Her first published pros book was a travel book Pisma iz Nia o haremima (Letters from Nion harems) and at the same time the first pros

book written by some Serbian woman authorever. She knew the internal structure of haremsas confined community of women, and definingfactor of Turkish cultural identity. She was

particularly interested in social status of a Muslimwoman. She knew the status of a Muslim woman,and what's more important she showed under-standing and compassion for the psychologicalstate of harem women. As a witness of some

events crucial for liberation and modernization ofTurkish women, she wrote a travelogue Pisma izSoluna (Letters from Thessaloniki) where she

portrayed the historical moment of the facing andclashing of two different civilizations. In her

Letters from Thessaloniki, she focusses herattention to the Jewish women who converted toIslam, called dnme, describing their life habitsand the process of their emancipation.

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Another Jelena's significant literary work is atravelogue from America with title New world orone year in America. In this travelogue sheshowed all her writing potential. The mostinteresting element of her work is the way s