Today, I finished writing a CSM column, scheduled to appear Thursday, that draws a little on my experience of being here in a bustling and unified Europe.
The question I ask is how Israelis plan to build the kind of respectful relations with their neighbors, the Palestinians, that alone can assure their own longterm wellbeing. The examples I drew on were the way France and its Allies treated Germany after WW1 (punitive, harsh) versus what they did after WW2 (visionary, rehabilitative). I didn’t mention the war memorials here. Probably, I should have.
Tomorrow we drive up into Belgium. Definitely through WW1 trench country. I’ve found one part of our route that is called “La Route des Fortifications”. Maybe that would be the Maginot Line, folly of follies. Like Sharon’s Maginot Fence in the West Bank.
But generally, this trip seems to have had Romanesque (10th-12th century) churches as a major theme. Boy, France was a rich area back then, to support the building of so many, such huge churches, abbeys, etc.
Last Friday, we hiked two kilometres down to this little church at Thines:
The next day…
The next day, we saw this abbey church in Cruas (near a large nuclear power station):
On Sunday, Bill and I were driving past Cruas again. This time, unlike Saturday, we were able to get in. But only to participate in the morning mass, which was being held in a small, roped-off area around the choir. The little bit of singing/chanting we stayed for was fabulous. What accoustics those Cistercian churches have!
The part of the sermon we stayed for was also interesting. The priest seemed eager to see some signs of life in a church that evidently– as shown, for example, by the congregants there that morning–has appealed mostly up to now to a dwindling band of older women worshipers. But he boldly proclaimed the truth of Christianity, in contrast to other religions. At one point he mentioned Islam and said something like, “While it is a religion we should respect, still, i worships only one God, not the Trinity that we hold dear.”
Which is probably a lot more respect than Islam used to get in sermons in these churches in the days of the Crusades.
I always thought the Cistercians were an order of “good”, contemplative monks whose lives were inner-directed and calm. Today, I learned that Bernard of Clairvaux, the founder of the Cistercian Order, was big propagandist for the Second Crusade…
Then, yesterday evening, we arrived in Tournus which has one of my all-time favorite Romanesque churches. Part of what I like about Tournus is the simplicity, grace, and strength of its arches:
Today, we spent quite a bit of time at Vezelay, another great Romanesque church on top of a hill. But I can’t find a good picture of that.
Later, by chance, we were driving through a small town called Poitigny, and I read in the Guide Verte that it, too, had a great Cistercian abbey church, that had been built in the 12th century and was “transitional” in style– trainsitional, that is, between the semi-circular arches of the pure Romanesqe and the increasingly pointed arches of the Gothis period that followed.
It was a spectacularly large church! A portion of the main nave and the whole of the choir had unfortunately (from my standpoint) been transformed into a very fussy, 18th- or 19th-century type of Catholic worship space. But about 60 percent of the vast nave, and both of the side aisles, had been left in their Cistercian simplicity.
Here is a view of one of the side aisles:
I should say, by the way, that all the photos from France were taken by my spouse and travel companion Bill Quandt, with whom I share my love of Romanesque.
I found out two interesting things about Poitigny:
(1) The only Catholic saint born in my UK hometown, St. Edmund of Abingdon, is buried there. He and various other Archbishops of Canterbury, including Thomas a Becket, took refuge in Poitigny after they ran afoul of the various British monarchs…
Thomas, of course, got to return to Canterbury later on. But he was Murdered in the Cathedral.
(2) For some 30 years up to 1940, a well-connected French writer called Paul Desjardins ran periodic “colloquia” of big-name thinkers in Poitigny. hey were called the “Decades of Poitigny”– I think for the number of main speakers invited to each one.
While we were there, I took a quick look round a historical exhibit on the colloquia. The most amazing collections of people took part, including all the big names in French intellectual life of that time (Gide, Maurois, etc etc.), T.S. Elliot, H.G. Wells, Edith Wharton, Nicolas Berdyayev, goodness only knows whom else.
I do recall reading about those “Decades” someplace. I can imagine all those high-minded thinkers sitting around in the 1930s, trying to work out tough issues like how to redefine the relationship between Art and Politics, or about the State of Culture in Europe… and all the time, in nearby Germany, Adolph Hitler was organizing his own very different “solution” to all these problems.
Those are great pictures!
It’s great to be able to see what you two are up two while you’re so far away!
Keep having fun, and I will await the next entry.
I recently went to a concert of the Talllis scholars in one of the cathedrals of Haarlem and found that indeed hearing music written for that environment is breathtaking. 10-12 people, singing a capella, filling the whole (enormous) building and timing things so beautifully that they practically ended up singing in harmony with their own voices.
If you, whilst in Belgium, decide to travel up one border to my own nice country I can recommend this site about Dutch religious architecture: http://www.archimon.nl/
Enjoy your holiday,
Marjolein
Marjolein, it’s great to hear from you! I certainly would love to come up to Netherlands, but alas this time I can’t. I love the country, and shall check out the site you recommend as soon as I have a faster connection and am not blocking the phone line of friends….
Lorna– hi! Great to hear from you, too! CYA soon!
You mentioned your column in CSM, from which I quote:
In other words, once the Allies had handed the Axis powers a crushing defeat, and completed a process of de-Nazification, it was then possible to enable a democratic society to emerge that had given up its dream of overrunning its neighbors.
If I understand you correctly, Israel should do the same thing to the Palestinian Arabs. Why then are you, and others critical of Israel’s fifty-plus years of surviving repeated attacks on its existence, unwilling to allow them to utterly destroy every last vestige of the PLO, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah, et al?
If this was done, followed by a purge of those Palestinian Arab leaders who still cling to the dream of Israel’s destruction, perhaps talk of a Palestinian Arab state within 20 kilometers or less of Israel’s major population centers would be more palatable to Israelis?
Helena,
Just out of curiousity, did America’s rehabilitative and visionary post-WWII policies after WWII come before or after Germany was de-Nazified?
And out of a similar curiousity, do you think that the Israelis might want to de-Nazify their version of the Nazis before they have a rehabilitative and visionary post-stupidfada policy?
Personally, I find you to be a truly disgusting human being. Your support for genocide makes me fee like vomiting. No surprise, I suppose, being that you are in the jew-hating center of the world.
All I would truly like to know is what logical thinking process allows you to arrive at the word “hostages” when describing people in prison. Does it matter if they were guilty of a crime or not? Is Khalid Sheikh Muhammad a hostage of the United States? Please elaborate because your diction comes across rather schizophrenic.
Thank you for your interesting blog.
However, you are obviously not an astute person when it comes to recognizing why things happened.
Germany is what it is today because the United States and Russia defanged it in World War II through what our youth today would call an “ass whooping” and then removing from the German political culture the evil that was within German society, i.e., the Nazis.
What Germany is today has nothing to do with the French making nicey nice to the Germans after the War. In fact France was constantly making nicey nice to the Germans before the War but that didn’t stop the Nazi led Germany from stomping on France.
What makes for changes is when you persuade or force a violent, militant society to change its ways and accept modern, liberal forms of society, such as most Western societies currently exhibit. When a society has become modern and liberal, there will be no war.
This is the issue throughout the Middle East, in Iraq as well as Israel. How do you cause terrorist-like states to get on the right path by becoming modern and liberal. The United States has the formula right, as demonstrated in Iraq. You go in and kick out the evil ones violently, and then you impose modern and liberal institutions on the citizenry. I believe that Israel should do this as well. But alas they don’t have it in them to do it. All they care is about survival apparently, and not bettering the world by renedering the Palestinians into a democratic modern society.
The criminals that Israel has in prision are hardly “hostages.”
That appelation indicates the capture of an innocent, held at force, for ransom or demands.
You would be hard-pressed to provide a realistic and fair-minded explanation as to how terrorists, intent on killing as many Jews as they can, held in custody can be called hostages.
The Jordanian and Egyptian immigrants who lay false claim to the war-abandoned land of Judea and Samaria are held forth as perpetual victims, and are in truth proxies in a bigoted religious conflict. The Dar-al-Islam cannot abide the victory, the success, the freedom, of Jews in their regional midst. If only you could open your eyes to see this.
Before Christianity, before Islam, the Jewish people built the land of Israel. King David, a Jew, built Jerusalem. His Jewish son, Solomon built the Temple long before Mohammed was born, long before the Mosque of Al Aksa was built over its ruins. We survived the Greeks, the Romans, the Moslems, Turks, and finally the British.
We ,the Jewish people are the native people of this land. We are the owners of this land, by international law, by moral right, by Biblical promise. Our claim to this land goes deeper, further back, and is on more solid ground than the Frenchmen have to France. Or the British have to Britain.
When your ancestors were brutal savages in an unknown island swinging from the trees, mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon.
—
Yoni
a proud Jew
Post-war Germany unlike Iraq, did have politicians, who believed in democracy and freedom. It had been a schizophrenic country with a large left wing and a large right-wing. The German left had tried to overthrow the right in the Revolution of 1848 and lost. Many of the left immigrated to the US. After participating in the Weimar Republic, the German left was persecuted by Hitler. Today in Germany “pledging allegiance to the flag”, especially in school and at sporting events would be prosecuted as a fascist act.
I don’t see the same internal pro-democratic trends in Iraq.
I think we fail to appreciate that freedom and multi-party elections take root in a country only if there is a supporting tradition. I am saying this as a conservative. The only example in history of democracy so far of freedom and multi-party elections surviving in an environment without this tradition is India, but perhaps I am discounting the positive aspects of British influence there (at least 400 years of contact).
Where Hatred Trumps Bread
What does the Palestinian nation offer the world?
BY CYNTHIA OZICK
Monday, June 30, 2003 12:01 a.m.
And what rough beast, its hour come at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
–W.B. Yeats
When, some years ago, Golda Meir contentiously remarked, “There are no Palestinians,” she was historically correct and evolutionally mistaken. She was right because the people who had only recently begun to take on the name “Palestinian” were ethnically and civilizationally Arab, part of what the Arabs themselves were pleased to call, with the poetic resonance of indivisibility, “the Arab Nation.” Palestine, moreover, had its origin as a term of malice, the Roman invaders’ way of erasing Judea by naming it after the Philistines who warred against the Jews. And like the Palestinians today, who deny the ancient reality of the Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount, the emperor Hadrian also had the distinction of reassigning the history of Jerusalem; he dubbed it Aelia Capitolina, in honor of Jupiter.
Yet at the same time Golda Meir was mistaken: She declined to recognize a growing sectarianism rooted not merely in the bitterness of contemporary politics–the Arab war against the Jews–but far more comprehensively in a particularized and developing cultism. Whether the Palestinians nowadays constitute a cult or a sect or a nation within the greater Arab world is scarcely to the point. They have become a nation in their own eyes–and, with the blessings of the road map, internationally as well. Nevertheless it is not the determination of political borders that makes a nation; a nation is defined by its traits and usages, by its heroes and aspirations–in short, by its culture.
History, in Benedetto Croce’s formulation, “is about the positive and not the negative.” No one can refute the truth that the Palestinians have fashioned a culture peculiarly their own–but one so steeped in the negative as to have been turned into a kind of anti-history. In order to deprive Jews of their patrimony, Palestinians have fabricated a sectarian narrative alien to commonplace knowledge. Although the Arab invasion of Palestine did not occur until the 17th century, Palestinian Arabs are declared to be, according to activist Salah Jabr, “the descendants of civilizations that have lived in this land since the Stone Age.” With equal absurdity, other such deniers of Jewish patrimony claim a Canaanite bloodline. By replacing history with fantasy, the Palestinians have invented a society unlike any other, where hatred trumps bread. They have reared children unlike any other children, removed from ordinary norms and behaviors. And they have been assisted in these deviations by Arab rulers who for half a century have purposefully and pitilessly caged and stigmatized them as refugees, down to the fourth generation. Refugeeism, abetted also by the United Nations, has itself been joined to the Palestinian cult of anti-history. A people respectful of history, including its own above all, will work to fructify and invigorate life; it will not debase and vitiate it.
The salient attribute of any culture is originality and its legacies. Genius, no matter how rare, is a human universal. It sends into the world new perception and new experience, inspiring duplication: Out of Israel came monotheism, out of Greece philosophy, out of Arab civilization science and poetry, out of England the Magna Carta, out of France the Enlightenment. What has been the genius of Palestinian originality, what has been the contribution of the evolving culture of Palestinian sectarianism? On the international scene: airplane hijackings and the murder of American diplomats in the 1970s, Olympic slaughterings and shipboard murders in the 1980s. And toward the Jews of the Holy Land, beginning in the 1920s and continuing until this morning, terror, terror, terror, terror.
But the most ingeniously barbarous Palestinian societal invention, surpassing any other in imaginative novelty, is the recruiting of children to blow themselves up with the aim of destroying as many Jews as possible in the most crowded sites accessible. These are not so much acts of anti-history as they are, remarkably, instances of anti-instinct. The drive to live is inherent: The very mite crawling on this sheet as I write hastens to flee the point of my pen. The child who has been taught to die and to kill from kindergarten on, via song and slogan in praise of bloodletting, represents an inconceivable cultural ideal. And it is a cultural grotesquerie that Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a pediatrician entrusted by his vocation with the healing of children, is in fact a major recruiter of young suicide bombers. (When his wife was asked by a neighbor why her husband did not outfit his own teenage son in a bomber’s vest, the good doctor instantly sent the boy abroad.)
Confronted by this orgiastic deluge of fanaticism and death, there are some who would apply the term psychopathological. But it is metaphysics, not Freud, that is at stake: the life force traduced, cultism raised to a sinister spiritualism–not because the “martyrs” are said to earn paradise, but because extraordinary transformations of humane understanding are hounded into being. A Palestinian ethos of figment and fantasy has successfully infiltrated the West, particularly among intellectuals, who are always seduced by novelty. We live now with an anti-history wherein cause and effect are reversed, protection against attack is equated with the brutality of attack, existential issues are demoted or ignored–“cycle of violence” obfuscations all zealously embraced by the State Department and the European Union.
The Road Map permits no contradiction to the Palestinians’ emerging nationhood. But if it is teachings and usages that characterize a nation, then what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches out of Bethlehem to be born?
Ms. Ozick, a novelist, is the author of “Quarrel & Quandary: Essays” (Knopf, 2000).
Copyright
Without hope, the rest is nothing.
Poker
In your free time, check some relevant pages in the field of Poker Texas holdem Online poker