PRESUMABLY, CRAMER'S intention is to give his prose a spoken quality, to capture voices and to project one of his own. There are, however, two problems with this. First, it is hard to endure 280 pages of unremitting syntactic crapulence. Second, the purpose of the ellipsis is not emphasis but elision. This is something Cramer seems not to understand, and it is the failing of the whole book: as he hops from one thumping indictment to another, he skips over every inconvenient fact, detail and nuance.


Thus, in explaining Ariel Sharon's malignant role in perpetuating the so-called cycle of violence, Cramer states as fact that "In the summer of [Sharon's] first year, 2001, Hamas had observed a cease-fire on Israeli civilians for a couple of months, until July 31, when the Israelis assassinated two Hamas commanders in Nablus."


Well, not quite. Between the June 1 attack on the Dolphinarium disco and July 31 the following attacks on Israeli civilians took place:


June 11, 2001: Yehuda Chaim Shoham, a five-month old boy is critically wounded in a stone throwing attack on his parents' car. He later dies.

June 12, 2001: Gur Pzipokatsatakis, a 35-year-old Greek Orthodox monk, is shot in a drive-by attack, and dies.

June 18, 2001: Doron Zisserman, 38, father of four, is shot in the head, and dies.

June 20, 2001: Ilya Kirivitz, 62, is shot in the head, and dies.

June 28, 2001: Ekaterina Weintraub, 24, is shot in the chest, and dies.

July 2, 2001: Aharon Abadian, 41, father of four, is shot at point-blank range, and dies.

July 2, 2001: Ya'ir Har-Sinai, 51, father of nine, is shot in the head and back, and dies. He is described as a "man of nature" who "would tend his sheep with no weapons and was on friendly terms with neighboring Arabs."

July 4, 2001: Eliyahu Naaman, 32, is shot at point-blank range, and dies.

July 13, 2001: David Cohen, 31, is shot in the head and chest in a drive-by attack, and dies.

July 24, 2001: Yuri Gushtzin, 18, is shot and stabbed to death.

July 26, 2001: Ronen Landau, 17, is shot in a drive-by attack, and dies.


The list excludes Israeli soldiers killed during this period. It fails to mention the July 16 suicide bombing at the Binyamina railway stop, which killed two soldiers but was aimed at civilians. It excludes an attempt to stage an attack at the opening of the Maccabiah Games in Jerusalem, which failed when the bomb exploded prematurely. It excludes a foiled suicide attack in the town center of Afula. And while it is true that most—though not all—of the victims listed above were killed in the territories, it is not precisely clear why they should be discounted as civilians. Was little Yehuda Chaim Shoham a perpetrator of occupation and thus a legitimate military target?

# posted by Squach : 9:39 AM   |