So, you want to write an op-ed?

Here's what you mustn't do

When you read them for a living, it's natural to form some opinion about what makes a good op-ed. For me, it's clear writing, a focused argument, the introduction of fresh facts, top-notch analysis and a good opener.

Perhaps it's easier to detail the makings of a bad op-ed: long, complex, meandering sentences, plodding prose, pretentious or jargon-heavy language, categorical statements that can't be backed up, or the absence of a clearly enunciated opinion. You'd be surprised how many writers beat around the bush, insinuating, without actually saying outright, what they want readers to believe.

Finally, op-eds that fail to take into account the opposing view, or do so in a cursory, condescending or dismissive way, also get a poor grade.

Former Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief Bret Stephens, now back at the Wall Street Journal, drummed into his staff that an op-ed has to be proleptic - anticipating what the other side would argue, and then knocking down its claims. Such an approach demonstrates that your stance is based upon substantive reflection.

Another no-no: Writers who make use of exclamation points! or CAPITALS. They're like the guy poking his finger in your belly to make a point; all you want to do is create some distance from them.

The same is true of shrill writing that's replete with name-calling, exaggerated (or patently untrue) claims, and the manipulation of statistics. Savvy readers intuitively sense when they're being hoodwinked.

I'M BORED by writers who are completely predictable, who preach to their own amen-corner and whose product is intended primarily as "red meat" for true-believers. Hey, what about the rest of us?

Granted, there's no shortage of folks who keep coming back for what amounts to a slight variation of the same argument, week in and week out. Which means columnists with a purposefully narrow repertoire had better be extra good at what they do.

This isn't to argue that all ideological writing is inherently bad. The views of, say, a Maureen Dowd or a Paul Gigot may be foretold - but they are invariably well-argued, informed and entertaining. Plainly, there are writers who push a coherent, consistent view of politics and people, yet nevertheless manage to deliver columns that are almost always engrossing.

At the end of the day, good op-ed writing is a combination of art and skill; you may be able to deconstruct a piece to explain why it works (or doesn't), but there's no off-the-shelf template for novice writers to follow.

WOULD-BE op-ed contributors need to consider very carefully what they're going to write about. Most of the unsolicited op-eds we receive at The Jerusalem Post fall broadly into two subject categories: the Arab-Israel conflict (and related issues), and the intramural wars of the Jews (over identity, theology, the nature of the Jewish state, and the like).

Thus if everyone is writing about, say, Annapolis, unless you happen to be a world-renowned Mideast expert you should probably find another topic to address. (Assume, too, that our regular columnists won't let this little conference go unmentioned.)

I'm amazed by how many unsolicited submissions we get that simply cover old ground, regurgitate stale arguments, or fight yesterday's ideological battles when the rest of the world has moved on.

Then there are the folks who write about a topic that has no immediacy, neither news nor chronological hook - in fact, nothing to pique the readers' interest.

But don't lose heart. We sometimes reject a piece not because there's anything inherently wrong with it, but because (a) there is no available space; or (b) to maintain the range of our pages. Regular readers know that Post policy is to provide viewpoints from across the political and religious spectrum. And we trust local readers will have noted that their newspaper also publishes op-eds on music, art, science and popular culture - because there is a world out there, and we can't obsess about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for example, to the exclusion of all else.

EVERY OP-ED writer develops his or her own voice. The question of who's worth reading - and emulating - is largely subjective. Over the years I've found myself drawn to the work of an eclectic bunch of op-ed writers, even though - looking back - I can't honestly claim they meet all the criteria outlined above.

I'm excluding Jerusalem Post columnists and contributors from this discussion for obvious reasons: I don't want to get beaten up in the hallway.

THE FIRST columnist I recall making it my business to read was Pete Hamill. This was when I was in high school and the street-smart Hamill was writing something like three or four columns a week for Dorothy Schiff's New York Post.

I enjoyed Hamill's down-to-earth style. He wrote with a liberal passion that appealed to my adolescent sense of justice. Hamill penned a column in 1970 endorsing Bella Abzug in the Democratic congressional primary on Manhattan's Lower East Side for the US House of Representatives. He argued that Abzug would actively oppose the war in Vietnam, while the incumbent, Leonard Farbstein, was an old fuddy-duddy who wouldn't stand up to Richard Nixon. Because of that column, I went out and volunteered for Abzug's campaign, handing out leaflets on East Broadway near my yeshiva.

Some time later, however, when Hamill wrote a column which - if memory serves me all these decades later - excused the behavior of a punk who mugged his mother on the grounds that the root cause of crime was poverty and discrimination, I abandoned Hamill and never really warmed to him again.

Fortunately, in the natural course of development, adolescent liberals mature into healthy adult centrist pragmatists.

THERE WERE some writers I used to read because they wrote fluidly and I agreed with them. The late Eric Breindel, who was editorial page editor and columnist after Rupert Murdoch took over the New York Post, fell into that category.

Others I read today because they have interesting insights even though I might not agree with them, such as the Paris-based William Pfaff, who publishes in the International Herald Tribune.I'll make time to read Frank Rich of The New York Times even though almost every column takes up most of the op-ed page and is devoted to bashing George W. Bush. Rich is one liberal polemicist who can't be ignored because he marshals his facts so skillfully.

Some writers I read for the sheer pleasure of enjoying their carefully crafted and reported opinion. For instance, Roger Cohen, who writes the "Globalist" column for the Tribune. I always ask myself how a guy so good on other topics can be so wrong about the Palestinian Arabs.

I also read Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal, for the same reason I like a good glass of wine, or a fine cigar.

Then there are the op-ed writers I'll keep an eye out for because their work often contains tidbits of information unavailable elsewhere. These include: John K. Cooley (who first caught my attention when he reported on, and championed, the Palestinian cause for the Christian Science Monitor); Robert D. Kaplan, who traverses the world to produce longish op-edy features for, among others, The Atlantic Monthly; and The Washington Post's Jim Hoagland, for his knowledgeable inside-the-beltway reportage on US foreign policy.

In other words, I prefer columnists who research, report and synthesize rather than exclusively pontificate.

Finally, a word about brevity: Do as I say, not as I do. Almost any argument can be effectively made in roughly 750-850 words. If you are just starting out - and especially if you want to reach people under 30 - aim for staccato writing and paragraphs of no more than a few short sentences.

We're several decades into the Internet age, so keep in mind that many of your readers won't be mulling over your words in hard copy while sipping a cup of coffee; they'll be gulping them down in a frenzy of click-and-scroll.One wrong move, and you lose their attention.

REGARDLESS of your intended audience, to achieve an op-ed worth the readers' time, carefully edit what you write. Few writers can produce anything worth reading on the first draft.

One last thing. Publishing your opinion carries with it the danger that you will contribute to your readers' ignorance. To paraphrase the communications theorist Marshall McLuhan, some people use a point of view as a substitute for true insight. Don't contribute to their stupidity.

In Praise of James Madison

As Americans mark the 220th anniversary of their nation's

charter this week, Israelis can only look on in envy

YOU COULD be forgiven for having missed it, but Monday, September 17, marked Constitution Day in the United States. In schools across America students commemorated the 220th anniversary of the Constitution. A presidential proclamation has designated September 17 through September 23 as Constitution Week.

According to the Center for Civic Education, children in American kindergartens are being taught how and why "authority is useful in society," while high-school students are expected to examine how and why the Constitution reorganized America's original form of government.
As most American youngsters (though, I suspect, fewer adults) can attest, for 11 years - between the time it gained independence from Britain on July 4, 1776, until September 17, 1787 - the United States didn't have a constitution. It operated instead under guiding principles known as The Articles of Confederation.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL foundations of the American Constitution deserve to be studied not only by students of American politics, but also by those who wish to spread democracy to the Middle East; and by Israelis debating whether and how to craft a constitution for the Jewish state.

Though the US Constitution begins memorably with "We the people..." the founding fathers adhered to a cynical view of human nature, which in practice meant that the last thing they wanted was to hand raw power to "the people."

Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, whatever their differences, agreed that men loved power and would, if left to their own devices, act exclusively in their own interest, unmindful of the collective good. That's why the founders concluded that power concentrated in any one place - whether with a majority, a minority or any single branch of government - would be abused.

Thus the architect of the American Constitution, James Madison, argued for a system in which "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition." Power should be set against power, so that no one faction, group, or institution could overwhelm any other.

For Madison, the secret of good government was balancing contending groups. So long as no one center of power could capture the entire government, tyranny could be avoided. This explains why Madison's constitution called for a complex system of checks and balances, and separation of powers ensuring that neither "the people" nor the self-interested elites (meaning Madison and his contemporaries) could hijack the American regime.

THE FAR-SIGHTED founders came up with a framework in which power would be diffused among the elite and the masses. An electoral college - not "the people" - would elect the president; state legislatures would elect the senate. Power in the Congress would be divided between two houses, and a Supreme Court would balance the executive and legislative branches.

Indeed, in one of its first actions, the new Supreme Court gave itself the power of judicial review.

What America's sages produced was not a participatory democracy, but a republican form of representative government. They did this not to hoodwink the masses but to protect them from themselves. The founders held that der oilom is a goilem.

Or as Madison put it, a little differently: The "public voice, pronounced by representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves."

Elsewhere he argued that "You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself." He knew that "enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm," so the US political system was designed for the worst of times, not the best.

Men were not angels, in Madison's assessment of human nature, thus the constitution's architects needed to design a regime which would take the harsh reality of human nature into account. However, he wanted the people granted maximum personal liberties, while constraining the government's ability to impose itself on the individual citizen.

TO SUM UP, the main features of the Madisonian model of democracy include:

Secularism. The preamble invokes "the people," not a deity.

Enlightenment. The manifesto is a product of the 18th-century movement which rejected orthodox social, religious and political ideas in favor of an emphasis on rationalism. The men who wrote America's political rules had read Locke and Montesquieu.

Republicanism. The ethos of the Constitution is representative government, not popular democracy; this explains the intricate system of checks and balances, and the separation of powers intended to prevent both masses and rulers from concentrating too much power in any one set of hands.

Adaptability. The founders designed a system that could be modified as time and circumstances demanded, but not one that could be radically altered with abandon. They did not want lurches in popular opinion during periods of upheaval to set the stage for changing the fundamental rules of America's political game (though as the 1919 18th Amendment outlawing alcohol proved, the Constitution wasn't completely immune to populist pressures).

Elite-driven alterations to the original manifesto were in fact ratified within just four years. Ten new amendments, spearheaded by Congressman James Madison himself and now collectively known as The Bill of Rights, were added to make explicit provisions for freedom of religion, press and speech.

Over time, the American Constitution required further modification to - among other things - belatedly outlaw slavery (1865); provide for federal supremacy over the states in matters of political liberty (1868); give women the right to vote (1920); and, in 1971, lower the voting age to 18 (which, counterintuitively, helped Richard Nixon defeat George McGovern in the 1972 presidential elections).

WHILE THE philosophy that went into crafting the US Constitution ought to inform 21st-century proponents of representative government, let's be mindful that America's Constitution was and remains a product of a particular time and political culture.

Americans can be grateful to Madison (and to several centuries of Supreme Court case law) for helping to create a relatively egalitarian polity that encourages political as well as socioeconomic upward mobility. In my book, this history of what I'd call responsible elitism helped make America the greatest country in the world.

Yet it would be dangerous to think America's unique experience could serve as a template for spreading democracy in the Middle East.

First off, the architects of the American political system would probably be aghast at the notion of tyrannically-oriented masses voting in an ambiance that lacked permanent rules and political institutions. They would, rightly, see such balloting as contributing nothing to political development, minority rights, civil liberties or stability. Using the Madisonian yardstick, the January 2006 elections held in the Palestinian Authority that brought Hamas to power would, I suspect, be the antithesis of representative democracy. The same would probably apply elsewhere in the region.

USING THE US experience as a template for an Israeli constitution is also a nonstarter. Creating permanent political rules for a 59-year-old polity may appear long overdue, but when that also society happens to be an ancient civilization risen from the ashes - prudence should trump speed.

Israel faces this constitutional dilemma: how to conserve and develop the state's Jewish character, while not impinging on the civil liberties of individual citizens. And regrettably, there are no altruistic and wise elites to lead the way. Instead, Israeli politics is largely dominated by small-minded politicians, phoney holy men and moneyed oligarchs. Not surprisingly, they can't agree about where we've come from, where we are, and where we should be heading.

THE DEFICIENCIES of the Articles of Confederation led America's Founders, in 1787, not just to modify their broken system, but to radically overhaul it. A parallel approach in today's Israeli setting would be dangerously destabilizing. This country's hyper-pluralist system - in which narrow-minded and single-issue groups are empowered to run amok while irresponsible, benighted and self-interested elites profiteer - has led many Israelis to lose faith in our regime's legitimacy.

Given the dearth of Madisonian-like wisdom and the fractiousness of our society, perhaps the way ahead is for the Jewish state to first reform its election system (for instance, by raising the electoral threshold and introducing constituency representation), and only afterwards turn to overhauling the permanent rules of the political game.

This week, America's youngsters are fortunate in having the opportunity to study anew why their Constitution deserves to be cherished. It's too bad there's no Madison anywhere on the horizon for their Israeli counterparts.

The taxi ride during which nothing happened

'Yediot Aharonot' claims Israel is a racist society.

I say it doesn't know the meaning of the word


Last Tuesday night I gave in to fatigue and took a taxi home from The Jerusalem Post building. I told the driver where I was going, he clarified my destination - in perfect Hebrew - and off we drove.

As I settled into the back seat, I heard a melodic recitation of the Koran playing low on the radio. Along the way my driver conducted a brief conversation in Arabic. For all I know he might have been saying, "OK sweetie, I'll pick up some feta cheese on the way home," but the fleeting thought crossed my mind that he could be arranging my kidnapping and that I wouldn't be eating supper at home that night. Yet here I am to tell the tale.

I wouldn't even have recalled this non-incident but for the fact that a few days later Israel's main tabloid, Yediot Aharonot, devoted its front page, plus the first four inside pages, to an "exposé" of Israeli racism.

"Racist Country" the headline lamented. "Discrimination in Israel 2007: This is what we're like," ran the intro, which continued: "We sent an Ethiopian, a Russian, a Moroccan, an Arab, a haredi, and an Ashkenazi throughout Israel to search for work, rent a flat, sign up a child in kindergarten..." - and, lo and behold, the newspaper unearthed the startling revelation that Ashkenazi Israelis faced virtually no discrimination, while Arab Israelis encountered lots of it.
That, in the eyes of Yediot, makes the country "racist."

And I suppose Yediot would label me racist because of the neurotic scenario I played out in my head during that evening taxi ride. Or is Yediot confusing prejudice, which is both understandable and mostly curable, with racism, a scourge that is essentially untreatable (think Ahmadinejad) and could lead to genocide?

I'm not being picayune. But if everything is "racism," then nothing is "racism." The term loses all meaning - which only serves the interests of genuine racists.

My gut instinct tells me that Israel isn't "racist" relative to other Western societies, and that the problem Yediot "exposed" was wrongly diagnosed.

YEDIOT HAD six Israelis of similar age and educational background approach a total of 400 restaurants, cafes, rental apartments and kindergartens in 22 cities, from Kiryat Shmona in the north to Eilat in the south in search for work, apartments or play-school slots for their children.
The Ashkenazi candidate received overwhelmingly positive feedback, with the Moroccan (Sephardi) applicant not too far behind. In third place came the haredi, followed closely by the immigrant from the former Soviet Union.

But - and here is where the tabloid thinks it uncovered our "racism" - the Ethiopian immigrant and Israeli Arab candidates lagged far behind. Doors open to the other applicants were slammed shut in their faces. (The Arab was rejected 66 percent of the time; the Ethiopian 44%.) An inexperienced Ashkenazi was invariably taken over the qualified Arab; ditto for the Ethiopian.

When he applied to be a barman, one cafe demanded a "certificate" from the Ethiopian certifying that he could operate a "complicated" espresso machine. The inexperienced Ashkenazi was invited to come down for an interview.

The so-called racism, incidentally, went both ways: Some places preferred Russian speakers over native-born Hebrew speakers.

Strikingly, Yediot's sample group didn't include a "settler." It would have been interesting to see what chance a youth from a community in Judea or Samaria would have had of landing a barmen's job in, say, the trendy Sheinkin neighborhood of Tel Aviv.

In his adjoining comment on the admittedly unscientific survey, columnist Yair Lapid, a quintessential north Tel Aviv yuppie, concluded that Israel had gone astray. Then, quite unselfconsciously, Lapid went off at a tangent, ranting against settlers, haredim and politicians who attend (Moroccan) Mimouna festivals.

I give more gravitas to the newspaper's in-house analyst Sever Plocker, who pointed out the obvious: Four of the participants could not have encountered "racism" because "there is no such thing as a haredi race" or a "CIS immigrant race," or Ashkenazi and Sephardi races.

Haredim, Plocker argued, themselves have a history of intolerance (in housing, transportation, education), so it wasn't shocking that there were cases where they got what they gave.
Plocker's conclusion: "So are we racists? Very much so toward the Arab minority [and], to a troubling extent, toward immigrants from Ethiopia. [But] only to a small extent toward other sectors... in Jewish Israeli society. This is a consolation of sorts."

ACTUALLY, PLOCKER can take greater consolation than he imagines. Because Israelis aren't "racist" toward Arabs either, and the idea that we're "racist" toward Ethiopians is ludicrous.

Need I point out that the Ethiopians got here in the first place because we rescued them from starvation and discrimination? And isn't it at all relevant that Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel - "Israeli Arabs" - have all the rights Plocker and I enjoy despite their (communal, theological and political) affinity for the Palestinian Arabs, who happen to be engaged in a century-long war with the Jewish population of this land?

I'm not saying I would want to switch places with an Ethiopian immigrant or a Palestinian Israeli. But the bias they face needs to be understood for what it is; and what it's not.
Yediot has conflated racism with prejudice and discrimination - of which, alas, there is plenty in Israel. But get the diagnosis wrong and addressing the problem becomes impossible.

Hit the dictionary and this is what you'll learn: Racism, a term first coined by Ruth Benedict in 1942, is a doctrine or teaching - without scientific support - that claims to find racial differences in character or intelligence. It asserts the superiority of one race over another, or seeks to maintain supposed racial purity of a race or of the races.

WHO KNOWS? That Tel Aviv cafe manager who demanded a diploma in espresso machine operations from the Ethiopian job applicant might well be a latent racist - or he might be a garden-variety putz. And no, I don't kid myself: If the Falashas were a white African tribe - all other things being equal - they would integrate a lot more easily. But the fact that we Jews are a people and a civilization, and not a race, means that, with time, today's discriminated-against Ethiopian Jews (assuming we invest smartly in their education and social advancement) will become tomorrow's Moroccans.

Prejudice can dissipate. Racism is largely incurable.

And while prejudice dissipates too slowly, let's understand what it really is: a judgment or opinion formed before the facts are known. It's unreasonable bias, suspicion, intolerance or irrational hatred of other groups, races or creeds. Thankfully, personal experience and proper socialization can alter people's prejudices. You can learn that Moroccans - or Ethiopians - are as good as anybody else.

So my argument is that while Israelis may be biased - meaning that they have mental leanings in favor of or against some group - this isn't at all analogous to being racist. Closed-mindedness and intolerance may be all too prevalent, but time and proper socialization can cure the disorder. That's largely been the case in the West when elites encourage inclusivity and upward mobility.

I am not saying there are no Israelis who subscribe to theories of blood superiority or inferiority - but these people are on the fringes of society, just as they are in the US or Europe. They don't exemplify "what we're like."

I SPENT a good chunk of Sunday in the out-patient department of Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus. Let me suggest that any fair-minded observer wanting to test the canard that Israel is a racist society observe the goings-on at an Israeli hospital. Haredim, Russians, Arabs, Ashkenazim, Sephardim - even native-born New Yorkers - receive (and give) identical, and mostly compassionate, care. Not only is there no "racism," I've never seen even a vestige of bias or favoritism.

Besides, and this is no small matter, it's hard to conceive of Arabs and Jews as being separate races. A race, and here I hit the dictionary again, is distinguished by "form of hair, color of skin and eyes, stature, and bodily proportions." Many anthropologists now consider that there are just three primary racial groups: Caucasoid, Negroid and Mongoloid, each with its various subdivisions.

Arabs and Jews are Semitic peoples. In fact, both traditions maintain that Arabs and Jews are the children of Abraham. Trying to understand what divides us on racial grounds is not only foolish, it's mean-spirited and deceptive.

Oh, and for the record: I really don't like taxi drivers. Never have. Not here, or back in New York City. Call me biased, prejudiced, closed-minded, street-savvy - whatever - but don't call me racist.

'Perfidy' revisited

YadVashem says it's time to end

the vilification of Rudolf Kastner.

Is it?

ONCE IN a very great while you read a book that forever changes your perspective. For me that book was Ben Hecht's Perfidy, which I devoured sometime in 1974 or '75 after it appeared on a recommended reading list issued by the Jewish Defense League, of which I was a member.

Perfidy means treachery; the deliberate breaking of faith. In 1961, when Hecht published his aptly titled exposé about events in the Holocaust, Hitler's war against the Jews was a repressed memory in the American Jewish consciousness.

Perfidy sold well enough to go into a second edition, though by the time I procured a copy it had gone out of print and was rumored to have been blacklisted.

PERFIDY IS a devastating account of how, toward the end of the Shoah, the Jews of Hungary were betrayed by Rudolf Kastner, deputy head of the Relief and Rescue Committee, an ideological affiliate of Mapai (precursor of today's Labor Party).

Hecht tells how after the Nazi invasion of Hungary in March 1944, Kastner brazenly collaborated with Dieter Wisliceny, a top aide to Gestapo Jewish Section chief Adolf Eichmann, to save the lives of cronies and family. Eichmann allowed Kastner to organize a rescue train which brought 1,685 of these people to safety in Switzerland, in return - so goes Hecht's damning accusation - for keeping the rest of Hungarian Jewry in the dark about the fate that awaited them. He thus facilitated the Nazi genocide.

Hecht charges that Kastner, despite his connections with the SS, didn't lift a finger to help Hanna Szenes, the Palestinian Jewish heroine who had parachuted into Nazi-occupied Hungary on a rescue mission.

Perhaps most damning of all: After the war, Kastner testified on behalf of SS officer Kurt Becher (a Nazi he'd been dealing with), though Becher had taken part in the genocide of Hungarian Jewry. With all this under his belt, Hecht wrote, Kastner eventually wound up in Israel vying for a spot on the Mapai Party's Knesset list.

HECHT REVEALED additional treachery that purportedly reached beyond Holocaust-era Hungary, and thus transformed everyone else's Zionist heroes - David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, Moshe Sharett - into villains for me.

For, according to Hecht, the entire Mapai leadership was part of an enormous betrayal: They failed to alert the Jews of the Yishuv to the enormity of the genocide taking place in Hitler's Europe. Had they done so, goes the argument, there would have been an uprising of Palestinian Jews demanding that the gates of Eretz Israel be opened and that the Allies do something to save their doomed brethren. Instead of raising the alarm, the Mapai leaders, who dominated the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency, pursued an accommodationist policy toward the British Mandate authorities.

That wasn't all. In the Joel Brand Affair, Mapai chieftains collaborated with the British in torpedoing the Hungarian Jews' very last chance of avoiding the gas chambers. For in April 1944, Eichmann allowed Relief and Rescue Committee member Joel Brand to leave Occupied Europe with a stunning proposal: The Nazis would trade a million Jews for 10,000 trucks to be used only against the Soviets on the eastern front. Rather than facilitate the mission, Hecht wrote, Mapai leaders conspired with the British to have Brand detained.

As if all this weren't enough, the Mapainiks betrayed Irgun and Lehi fighters to the British both during and after the war, culminating, in their relentless duplicity, in the sinking of the Altalena and the attempted murder of Menachem Begin.

IT ALL TIED obscenely together. From the vantage point of the mid-1970s (when I first read Perfidy), the villains were of a type - quisling Jewish establishment leaders, the same kind of people who were telling JDL activists not to confront black and Puerto Rican hoodlums in the urban badlands of New York City; not to harass Soviet diplomats in an effort to pressure the Kremlin into freeing Soviet Jewry, and not to demand that money raised by the Jewish federations be earmarked for Jewish causes.

No wonder Rabbi Meir Kahane wanted us to read Perfidy, and no wonder we were enraged.
ALL THESE recollections welled up again last week as I read an Associated Press dispatch which reported that Yad Vashem had received "Kastner's private archive" from his family in the hope that it would clear his name, once and for all, and end his "vilification" by proving that Kastner was a hero and not the villain portrayed by Hecht and others.

"There was no man in the history of the Holocaust who saved more Jews and was subjected to more injustice than Israel Kastner," Yosef (Tommy) Lapid, chairman of Yad Vashem's board of directors, told the AP. "Kastner's backers," the AP reported, claimed his actions were on a par with those of Oskar Schindler. Robert Rozett, Yad Vashem's top librarian, asserted that Kastner was indeed a rescuer - not a collaborator.

Was it time for me to reevaluate, to face the possibility that Hecht might have been mistaken in his interpretation of the Kastner case? And if Hecht was mistaken about Kastner, was he also wrong in his portrayal of Mapai's motives?

HECHT BASED Perfidy largely on a libel case brought, contrary to Kastner's wishes, by Israel's attorney-general Haim Cohn against right-wing gadfly Malkiel Grunwald.

In the summer of 1952, Grunwald disseminated a mimeographed newsletter accusing Kastner of collaborating with the Nazis. When "Pamphlet 51" was released, Kastner was working as a spokesman for the Ministry of Industry and Trade - hence Cohn's (and the governing Mapai's) determination to quash the charges.

The trial opened in January 1954 and quickly transformed itself from a libel case against the hapless Grunwald into an indictment of Kastner and the entire Mapai apparatus.
Shmuel Tamir, a leader of the Herut Party, Mapai's bitter foe and precursor to today's Likud, represented Grunwald before Jerusalem District Court judge Binyamin Halevi.

The case lasted 10 months. The court heard 60 witnesses, saw hundreds of documents submitted in evidence and generated 3,000 pages of testimonies.

On June 22, 1955, Halevi delivered his verdict which took all day to read: Kastner had collaborated in facilitating the Nazi destruction of Hungarian Jewry; and his "rescue train" was a "gift" for services rendered - 388 of those on board were family and friends from his home town of Cluj.

Judge Halevi: "Kastner sold his soul to the devil."

IN JANUARY 1958, however, the Israeli Supreme Court, in a split decision, overturned Halevi's decision. In an opinion written by Justice Shimon Agranat, the high court said the task before it was not to give Kastner "a clean bill of health" but to examine whether Grunwald had proved his contentions beyond reasonable doubt.

Hecht summarized: "All five Supreme Court judges upheld Judge Halevi's verdict on the 'criminal and perjurious manner' in which Kastner after the war had saved Nazi war criminal Becher - 'without justification.' Two of the judges further upheld Judge Halevi's findings that Kastner had collaborated with the Nazis during the war. Three did not."

KASTNER - WHO had been working as night editor for the Hungarian-language daily Uj Kelet - never lived to see the lower court decision overruled. At 12:10 a.m. on March 3, 1957, Ze'ev Eckstein, Yosef Menkes and Dan Shemer ambushed him as he was parking his car outside his Tel Aviv home at 6, Sderot Emanuel.

He succumbed to his wounds on March 16, leaving a wife and 11-year-old daughter. Two thousand people attended his funeral.

The three attackers were convicted, served time and were released by 1963. Eckstein, the shooter, was said to have been a paid informer of the Shin Bet.

OVER THE years the case continued to make ripples, with books, plays and documentaries - none definitive.

In 1981, for instance, "documents" were reportedly discovered which were said to "prove" that Kastner had saved the lives of 200,000 Jews - and that Kurt Becher had collaborated with Kastner, not the other way around. In 1982, Israel TV broadcast a fair-minded documentary about the affair. Several plays were written about the trial; one by Motti Lerner was even performed in West Germany in 1985. Another, in 1987, was by the virulently anti-Israel British playwright Jim Allen, who claimed "The Zionists" were "Hitler's favorite Jews."

Paradoxically, there was something - albeit with crucial variations - that the Jabotinsky Right, the anti-Zionist Left and the mad hatters at Natorei Karta could all agree on: Kastner had been a villain, and his behavior emblematic of what could be expected from Mapainiks.

At the same time, I never came across a reputable Holocaust history that embraced Hecht's line about Kastner's dealings with the Nazis - whether Raul Hilberg's classic The Destruction of the European Jews (1985), Saul Friedlander's just-released and widely acclaimed The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945, or anything in between. Friedlander, for instance, writes that it is simply impossible to know why Kastner testified on the Nazi Becher's behalf.

AND THAT'S where things more or less stood when the Kastner "archive" - which Yad Vashem hopes will end his vilification - was delivered to the Holocaust museum on July 22.

In an interview at Yad Vashem, librarian Rozett told me that the "Kastner archives" amount to just several boxes, and that the material contains no smoking gun - or, in terms of what I was looking for, no unsmoking gun that would demonstrate Kastner's pure intentions.

Nevertheless, Rozett argued, "Ben Hecht's book is not a work of history" and his
interpretations are simply wrong.

Take the train that brought 1,685 people to safety. Rozett: "They were a group chosen by Hungarian [Jewish] leaders, Kastner, members of the Jewish council, [and] leaders of Orthodox Jewry." Everybody put on people from their own camp. In fact, the train carried Joel Teitelbaum, the Satmar rebbe, as well as leading Betar activists.

Sure, Kastner packed as many friends and family on board as possible, but so what? He didn't do it as part of a plot, Rozett affirmed.

Understanding the context is everything if you want to evaluate Kastner's behavior, he emphasized. For instance, the impetus for Kastner's dealings with the Nazis in the first place was the fact that Dieter Wisliceny, Eichmann's envoy, had arrived in Budapest with a letter of introduction from Rabbi Michael Dov Ber Weissmandel. The Slovakian Orthodox leader had been bribing the Nazis with money to stop deportations.

WITH GERMANY'S defeat just over the horizon, it became commonplace for Third Reich figures to pursue authorized and freelance negotiations: about a separate peace, to enrich themselves or to prepare alibis.

According to Rozett, the May 1944 Joel Brand affair is now understood to have been part of a far more complex gambit than Hecht described. What most people forget about Brand is that he was accompanied by Bandi Grosz - a double, triple or even quadruple agent. D-Day was just weeks away, and the real purpose was to offer the US and Britain a separate peace with Nazi Germany, leaving the Soviets out in the cold.

In this version, Brand's trucks-for-Jews mission was - unbeknownst to him - just a cover story. "So we have," said Rozett, "this [attempt at] driving a wedge between the Allies and Germany" at a pivotal point in the war. It was the British commitment not to allow the Nazis to divide the Allies at this pivotal juncture that killed the Brand mission.

"And the Mapai leaders didn't cry out because the official position of everybody is that this deal was not workable, but that the Germans needed to be strung along. Hecht's view is predicated on the idea that the Jews had a certain amount of serious power. [In fact,] they had very little power."

In The Seventh Million, popular left-wing journalist Tom Segev also addresses the trucks-for-Jews affair: "The matter had gone from the Jewish Agency executive in Jerusalem to the desks of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. None of them wanted the deal, each one for his own reason, and for one common reason: They did not know what to do with a million Jews. Eichmann ordered the trains to roll to Auschwitz."

In Jews for Sale, Yad Vashem's Yehuda Bauer argues, contrary to Hecht, that Chaim Weizmann and Moshe Sharett wanted the British to allow Brand to return to Hungary in order to buy time with Eichmann. They also pleaded for radio warnings to the doomed Jews, and for the bombing of the rail lines leading to Auschwitz.

But the British weren't interested; incredibly, London suspected, writes Bauer, that the trucks-for-Jews proposal "was a major German-Zionist plot to introduce a million Jews into Palestine."

IN A telephone interview, I asked Tommy Lapid, who was in Hungary during the Kastner period (though not involved in the rescue train), why he is convinced that Kastner should be remembered as a hero, not a villain. While Lapid is not a follower of Jabotinsky, neither is he a Mapainik, so his views carry some weight.

Lapid recalled that he first met Kastner in Israel, and that they worked alongside one other at the Uj Kelet Hungarian daily.

"I saw Kastner in the office the week he was killed," Lapid recalled. He was personally sympathetic to Kastner, whom he remembered as an extraordinarily intelligent man.
Why, I asked, did he testify for the Nazi Becher after the war? Because, said Lapid, Kastner promised Becher: If you help me save Jews, I will do my best to save your neck after the war.

He didn't need to keep his word, Lapid argued; who would know the difference? The fact that Kastner did honor his promise proved his ultimate decency.

Yes, he lied in Halevi's court about not having testified in Becher's favor - because in 1950s Israel it would have been impossible to publicly justify his actions. No one would want to listen.

Lapid feels strongly that anyone who didn't personally experience the Shoah - and he was thinking especially of Kastner trial judge Binyamin Halevi - was in no position to evaluate Kastner's actions.

Kastner had immense "sacred hutzpa," Lapid told me. It gave him the strength to deal face-to-face with Eichmann in an effort to save Jews - only to have the surreal nature of those negotiations dissected years later, in the comfort of a Jerusalem courtroom.

Even though during the war Kastner reached the safety of Switzerland, he nevertheless chose to return to Germany and Hungary, Lapid reminded me. And even with Becher's promised personal protection, who but a hero who wanted to save Jewish lives would put himself in harm's way at the height of the Allied offensive against Germany, with bombs exploding all over the place?

But why, I challenged, didn't Kastner warn the Jews of Hungary of the fate that awaited them? There was no point, said Lapid. "A revolt by Hungarian Jewish women and children would have resulted in an immediate massacre. (The men had already been taken for forced labor.) The object was to buy time in any way possible."

Finally, what about the insinuation that the Shin Bet killed Kastner to keep him silent and Mapai in power? "Absolute nonsense," declared Lapid, if for no other reason than because the then head of the Shin Bet was Amos Manor, a close personal friend of Kastner's from Hungary.

HAVING REVISITED these issues, I'm still in no position to determine whether - or to what extent - Hecht may have been wrong in his interpretation of Labor-Zionist behavior during the Holocaust. But I am left with the sense that their contradictory conclusions notwithstanding, neither the historians, nor Hecht, nor the folks at Yad Vashem, who are intent on clearing Kastner's name, are out to deceive.

Today, I see no value in willing ourselves to remain embittered, perhaps in perpetuity, over Zionist ideological divisions during the Mandate and the Shoah era. It's time to move on.
The true villains of the Shoah, let us never forget, were first the Nazis and their enablers, then those who barred the gates of refuge, and those who rioted to keep them barred.