Friday, November 7, 2008

Foot Shooting

When I was starting out as a software engineer a coworker told me of the three kinds of errors. The metaphor was shooting yourself in the foot.
The most common error is to take careful aim at the foot and blow it off. The most desired error was a system in which you took careful aim at your foot and missed. The most dangerous error was a system in which you took careful aim at your foot, pulled the trigger and blew your head off.

Now we come to Israel.

I am absolutely committed to the idea that Israel exist. I am also equally committed to the idea that for Israel to exist it must be more than some other country. It must stand for something. Otherwise, what is the point of Israel existing? There is an old Talmud statement for which I do not have an immediate reference that went something like this: It is a greater sin for a Jew to cheat a non-Jew than for a Jew to cheat another Jew. In the latter example, the cheat stands for itself and is a minor sin. But in the former case, the Jew is standing as an example of the Torah to the world and therefore the sin is greater as it is against the Torah and God. As was said, God made the world for the Torah, not the Torah for the world.

An odd thing for an atheist to say, isn't it? Still, let us leave that little dichotomy for another time and place.

Given the above, it gives me great pain when the government of Israel does silly things. This weekend I got this link across my desk. It seems the Simon Wiesenthal Center, based in Los Angeles, has decided to build a Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem. And it seems it is building it over a parking garage that is also the Mamilla Cemetery. (See here and here.)The Wiesenthal point of view is represented here and here. It's been a parking garage for a while. It's not classified as a cemetery for "over fifty years".

That's an interesting statement to make. Do bodies disappear when a space of land is no longer used as a cemetery? We have little family cemeteries all over the place in New England. I saw them in Missouri, too. It didn't mean they were no longer revered.

It gets even more involved, however. The cemetery fell into disuse in 1948-- when Israel was created. (See here and here) It is the Wiesenthal Center's point of view that the cemetery had been declared abandoned in 1964. Though there are those who dispute that. Regardless, as in Missouri and Massachusetts, people don't quit grieving and revering the dead just because a place is politically modified. A good essay on the subject is here. In Massachusetts there were the "lost towns of Quabbin". Towns that were leveled and destroyed to make Quabbin Reservoir that feeds water to Boston. There are still people who are ticked about it.

Now, imagine that sort of situation with a "Museum of Tolerance" with a known occupied territory in a place where both sides consider all men, women and children of the other side as essentially enemy combatants.
A better solution would have been to rebuild the Mamilla Cemetery and incorporate the Museum around it. That would have been a Museum of Tolerance worthy of its name.

"Shooting yourself in the foot" doesn't begin to cover it.
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1 comment:

  1. UnknownNovember 11, 2008 at 4:51 AM

    Thanks for linking to my post about the Museum controversy. I've done some further research & wrote a new post today. It's a nasty business.

    ReplyDelete

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