• Amir Mizroch lays out exactly why Israel is in deep trouble when the U.N. General Assembly rolls around in September. [Forecast Highs]

• Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit offers a biting rebuke to the Israeli left on the occasion of Juliano Mer-Khamis’s murder. [Haaretz]

• “What kind of kosher steakhouse is filled with rambunctious yahoos and hot jazz music at 1 in the morning?” “Uh … the best damn kosher steakhouse on the Upper West Side!” [Vos Iz Neias?/DNAinfo]

• Orthodox Brooklyn Rabbi Mordecai Fish became the latest to go down in the Solomon Dwek sting, pleading guilty today to knowingly laundering $900,000 of criminal proceeds. [DOJ/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Baruch S. Blumberg did not only discover Hepatitis B and show how it could lead to liver cancer—he then helped develop the vaccine. He died Tuesday at 85. [NYT]

• An interesting take on how the logistics of reporting have helped foment anti-Israel bias among the media. [Standpoint/Jewish Ideas Daily]

• A study shows that the United States could learn much from Israel’s health care system. Of course, since Israel has universal health care for its citizens, that’s probably a lost cause. [JTA]

• Roger Cohen’s column on Richard Goldstone’s mea culpa—excuse me, his “volte-face”—is weird and kind of incoherent. [NYT]

• The keynote speaker at Christians United for Israel’s annual conference in July in Washington, D.C., will be soon-to-be-ex-Fox News host Glenn Beck. [JTA]

• Though abandoned, Lifta, just north of Jerusalem, is the last intact pre-1948 Arab village in Israel. The Palestinians want it to be an open-air museum; the Israelis want to build apartments there. [LAT]

• Worth re-reading Moshe Halbertal’s masterful takedown of the Goldstone Report from late 2009 in light of the week’s events. [TNR]

The Passover story, told through Google.

Cantor Says Campaign Office Was Shot At, Accuses Dems of Exploiting Threats [Fox News]

• Bonus! Last paragraph of the same article notes that South African authorities reportedly couldn’t come up with footage of the assassins in a Johannesburg airport because said footage has been “mysteriously wiped.”

• 86-year-old Israeli President Shimon Peres said of the Negev Desert, “This is an attractive area. If I wasn’t a politician, I would even say it had sex appeal.” [Ynet]

• The Arab League head wants to cultivate closer ties with Iran. [Haaretz]

• Rep. Henry Waxman (D-California) said it was appropriate that health care passed when it did: “The meaning of the seder is that no one should be left behind.” [JTA]

• Mark Bittman tells you how to make olive oil matzah. [NYT]

Obama Signs Landmark Health Care Bill [NYT]

• Clashes with the IDF resulted in four Palestinian deaths over the weekend, raising tension in the West Bank. [LAT]

• Lee “Rosy” Rosenberg, the new AIPAC president, kicked off the group’s annual conference with a call for “allies” to “work out their differences privately.” Much more on the conference at 10 am. [Capital J]

• As the diplomatic spat begins to fade, both the U.S. and Israel, unsurprisingly perhaps, think they won. [NYT]

• Visiting Ramallah, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for a total settlement freeze. [NYT]

• The House of Representatives passed the Senate’s health-care reform bill, meaning it will become law. [WP]

Said the National Jewish Democratic Council:

This action culminates a 100-year effort to ensure that the people of the United States have the same type of access to health care as citizens of nearly every other industrialized nation. We are confident that when historians look back on this day, they will equate the passage of this bill with such monumental legislative achievements as the passage of Social Security in the 1930’s. This bill also reflects the clear groundswell of support in the American Jewish community—both among individuals and organizations—for the change in our health care system that’s so desperately needed today.

But he is also guilty of a fourth betrayal. And it is this fourth betrayal that, in my view, accounts for much of the anger aimed at Lieberman, anger greater than that expressed at the Republican opposition, which has cynically voted as a bloc to block any health-care reform emanating from the Democrats. Lieberman’s fourth betrayal is the betrayal of his Jewish heritage.

It may quickly be pointed out that the neoconservative movement itself is populated mostly by Jews and that the so-called godfather of neo-conservatism, Irving Kristol, was himself a Jew. Therefore, some may think, it would seem illogical, irrational, and ahistorical to be angry at Lieberman for betraying his Jewishness by adopting a conservative stance. Maybe so. But in my (Jewish) judgment, it’s a fact.

And it’s a fact whether one regards Judaism as a religion or a culture. Whether one is Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform, whether one is a Zionist or an assimilationist, whether one is a Hasid or a heretic, what unites people of the Jewish faith, persuasion, or heritage is their internalization of the ethical imperative.

Whatever one’s politics, the threat of a fellow Jew to undermine all health-care reform if he does not get his way would seem to run counter to a people whose moral heritage includes wanting to take care of those less fortunate than themselves. (As Marissa Brostoff wrote in an earlier Tablet article, it all goes back to Maimonides, who in effect said that universal health care is an absolute necessity.)

Rabbi Jill Jacobs makes this clear in her new book, There Shall Be No Needy: Pursuing Social Justice Through Jewish Law and Tradition. “Jewish legal texts,” Jacobs writes, “impose on the community an obligation to provide financial and other resources for the ill.” No less a rabbinic authority than Shlomo Goren, chief Ashkenazi rabbi of Israel from 1973 to 1983, sounded a similar note when he argued during a doctors’ strike that “the government may not excuse itself from its responsibility toward the sick since the government is responsible for the health of the people, not the doctors.”

Cynics claim that Lieberman’s opposition to a competitive government-run health care option is prompted by all the private insurance companies in his home state, companies that have supported him through the years. But even if his principal objection is a matter of principle, his fellow Jews (and others) should wonder why not simply vote no rather than bring down the house (i.e., the Senate) and the whole health-care bill with it.

No wonder a people whose legacy is near-universal support for FDR’s New Deal are offended when one of their own invokes the public health insurance option as a pretext for undermining the principle of near-universal health care.

If Lieberman were a gentile, it would, for many Jews, be a mere political disagreement. But Lieberman being Lieberman, the feeling is that he should be ashamed of himself. And by the way, he should.

What’s really new here, Keating argues, is that the Holocaust may not be the sacred cow it once was: in the past, if the ADL criticized a public figure for an inappropriate Holocaust comparison, they’d make a show of contrition, while this crowd throws such accusations right back at the accusers (as in the attacks heaped on Barney Frank from the right after the congressman slapped down a questioner who equated Obama’s health plans with Nazism). “The radical right has created a new game,” he writes, “and Jewish groups haven’t yet figured out how to play it.”

The Right Calls Obama Hitler. Why Aren’t Jewish Groups Making More Noise? [NYMag.com]

Michael Sandel cannot answer those questions. He’s neither a rabbi nor a scholar of Jewish thought (at least, not by profession); he’s a professor of government at Harvard. He is, however, very good at explaining ways of thinking about right and wrong, as the many thousands of undergraduates who have taken his course on justice can attest. He spoke with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about health care, Wall Street bonuses, and other collisions of politics and ethics.

The political climate is even hotter. Every town seems to hold town hall meetings, and in every town hall a gaggle of goons, screaming and making obscene charges, turns up the heat some more.

I would hate, dear readers, to add to the exhaustion and exasperation this summer has wrought. I would feel terrible knowing I’ve contributed yet another voice to the cacophonous choir screaming from every channel on air. And so, let us abandon the ides of summer for something completely different.

Like Moses.

If President Obama thinks the gun-toting maniacs lurking outside his public appearances are a tough lot to govern, he should take a peek at Deuteronomy; both physically and politically, the Israelites’ desert makes Washington’s swamps seem cool and calm in comparison.

Increasingly weary, nearing the end of his term and the end of his life, Moses speaks to the people. And as he orates, his tone grows angrier, more impatient. He has no time for platitudes. What he doesn’t get across, he realizes, might be forgotten as soon as he passes away. He speaks in growingly strong sentences.

Here’s one, from this week’s parasha, a short quip that had since come to adorn many a synagogue wall. “Justice,” Moses booms, “justice shall you pursue.”

To hear the aging leader tell it, it’s a fairly simple pursuit. As long as we are truthful and diligent, as long as we take great care before we wildly throw around accusations, as long as we respect and obey the hierarchy we set in place to govern us and adjudicate in our quarrels, we’ll be just fine.

Reading Moses’s dictates, however, it’s hard not to find oneself back in the present moment, in the thicket that is the debate over health-care reform. The pursuit of justice, the curbing of baseless accusations, the basic respect for our institutions, these are the fronts on which we fail miserably.

Consider the business of death panels. Distorting language in the proposed health care bill that seeks to require Medicare to cover counseling sessions on sensitive end-of-life issues if a person wishes to receive such consultation, Republicans—most notably former vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin and Sen. Chuck Grassley—have been assiduously and insidiously promoting the patently false idea that the government was secretly interested in erecting committees that would determine who among the old and fragile is simply too expensive to be kept alive.

Or the equally hideous canard that health care reform is really just one big front for a devilish plan to divert federal funding into abortions. Having pulled the plug on grandma, goes this libelous logic, the government is now looking for ways to end little babies’ lives before they even begin. That the proposed bill says nothing about overriding the 1976 Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of federal money for abortions, seems to matter not at all to the kooks who carry signs like “No Tax $$$ for Killing Babies.”

As many of the loudest liars purport to be religious folk, and as the Hebrew Bible is a staple both Jews and Christians share, here’s an idea: instead of repeating the scandalous allegations and giving them undue credibility, the media should consider running instead this week’s Torah portion. If it’s too long, or the language too archaic, here’s a fair summary: enough with the malicious falsehoods. Enough with the rabid disrespect for members of the House. Enough with the violent overtones, like the ones William Kostric, an armed New Hampshire citizen, menacingly expressed outside an Obama speech recently when he said, ominously, that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of tyrants and patriots.”

In even simpler terms, enough.

But this week’s parasha carries not only a condemnation of those who are malicious but also delivers a warning to those who witness evil and do nothing to stop it. Detailing the ceremony of Egla Arufa, or decapitated calf, Moses speaks of a particular form of sacrifice a community could perform to atone for bloodletting it was not able to stop. Even if the community’s members are innocent of the murder itself, by failing to prevent it they are nonetheless tainted with endless guilt.

Before an evil wingnut raises his arms and takes a shot at a congressman, before a town hall debate turns bloody, before more harm is inflicted, we must realize that it is we, no less than the maniacs, who are responsible for this intolerably hot summer. If we don’t intervene, if we don’t—regardless of our political worldviews—silence the lies and curb the violence, we may find ourselves with a chronicle of a death very much foretold.

But, dear readers, it’s summer – did I mention it? – and a thundering speech is far too stifling for such temperatures. Let us end, then, on a lighter note, with an example of just how we all should act and sound when encountered with our unhinged brethren. Barney Frank, the stage is all yours:

What kind of role would Maimonides have played if he were here today—would he be a practicing physician? A policymaker? A bioethicist?

I like to think that every physician is in his soul a bioethicist. But there’s no doubt in my mind that Maimonides would want to be thought of as a bedside physician who used the ethical principles both from Hippocrates and from Judaic beliefs taken from the Torah and Talmud. In addition, as the leading physician of his time, he would have been called upon by government to make his thoughts about health care known to the government.

And what were those thoughts?

Anyone who is ill has not only the right but the obligation to seek medical care. It’s very applicable to the current debate about health care. Maimonides is saying that universal health care is an absolute necessity. Healing is not only urged, it’s obligatory, not only on the part of the patient but on the part of the physician. Each doctor is obliged to treat any patient who comes to him for treatment, he’s not allowed to shuffle him off to another doctor. The doctor, as he saw it, was an agent of God, and providing people with health care was a way of finding God and a way of leading people to the moral life. Had Maimonides been living in our time, we would have had universal health care decades ago, probably during the Truman administration, when it was first proposed. The medical associations, at that point, stood in the way of universal health care, and he not only would not have stood in the way, he would truly have been one of its strongest supporters.

There’s been debate over Judaism’s take on universal coverage: some see the Torah and Talmud as insisting that society take care of the sick, while others put more emphasis on people’s individual responsibility to take care of themselves. Where did Maimonides fall on issues of collective versus individual responsibility?

He would fall on both sides. You are sinning if you don’t take care of your body. We keep hearing about preventive care, and he agreed that living a life that is physically healthy is an obligation, but also that the doctor is obliged to provide care to anyone who needs it. Maimonides conducted his practice irrespective of social status. He treated the courtiers in Saladin’s court; I’m assuming he was on a retainer for that. And then he went home, I think his home was about two hours away, and he treated anyone who came to see him.

Is there anything that indicates whether, within the spectrum of universal health care, he would have been inclined toward a public option?

We can’t say that. He would have been in favor of anything that assured a totality of care for the populace. When he was treating Saladin’s people, he was a physician on salary working for the state who also had his own private practice. He would be in favor of anything that absolutely assured that everybody got care and got the same level of care. He was the leading physician of the Arabic world, and he was treating anyone who came to him the same way he treated the vizier’s family.

The notion that the administration’s health care plan would establish government-run “death panels,” though discredited, has, nonetheless, reframed the debate for some voters as a question of who should be able to determine when a person dies. What was Maimonides’s opinion about how much say individuals, or their families or doctors—humans in general—should have in how they want to die?

It would have been forbidden for a doctor to end a person’s life in Maimonides’s way of thinking, in terms of both Hippocratic ethics and Jewish ethics. He believed that nature was determined in a general way by God, and nature must be allowed to take its course. He would not have believed in some of the unnecessary courses of action we take to keep a person alive on a respirator for no good reason; he would have considered those unnecessary invasions of god’s will. This derives both from the Hippocrates—do no harm—and from the Ten Commandments—you can’t kill anybody. It’s as Jewish as can be.

When you ask me that question, I am going to revert to my ethnic heritage and answer your question with a question: On what planet do you spend most of your time? … You stand there with a picture of the president defaced to look like Hitler, and compare the effort to increase health care to the Nazis. My answer to you is, as I said before, it is a tribute to the First Amendment that this kind of vile, contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated. Ma’am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining-room table; I have no interest in doing it.

Are you listening, Arlen Specter? (Yeah, OK, granted it’s easier to be contemptuously dismissive of your wingnut constituents when you haven’t faced serious—if any—opposition in a quarter-century and won your last election 68 percent. But still.)

Rep. Barney Frank Slames Women Comparing Obama To Hitler At Town Hall [YouTube]
Barney Frank Goes Toe to Toe at Health Care Town Hall [CNN]

“There’s nothing in the Torah about palliative care, or dialysis…. When you start getting down to the details of the bills, how do you turn that into a moral argument as opposed to a political argument?” a host of the show asked Saperstein.

The rabbi gave the standard reply that we can apply the moral norms given in the Torah to contemporary situations; then, more intriguingly, he argued that “by the time of the Talmud 2,000 years ago, [these norms] had developed into health care systems and rules and requirements to provide adequate health care for all people. Any community that wanted to be considered a moral community had to provide health care, had to provide health care providers. These are not new ideas.”

So does that imply that people opposed to Obama’s health care plan are immoral?

“Good moral people can differ on the best way to go about achieving universal health care,” Saperstein said. “That isn’t what this debate has been about, unfortunately. This has been a very disturbing debate in terms of the civility of discourse in America. When people make these extraordinary accusations and allusions about fascism and Nazism and the Holocaust, what they’re doing is trying to take these ideas outside the free marketplace of ideas.”

The Moral of the Story: Religious Leaders on Health Care Reform [The Takeaway]
Previously: An Orthodox-Reform Divide on Health Care?

While politicians’ relationships with Israel are often blamed for various problems, drawing a correlation between images of Jerusalem and screaming, visor-clad southerners, all to the soundtrack of an eerily aggressive rendition of Hava Nagila may be in poor taste. The video pits Childers’ reluctance to take a clear stance on health-care reform against a statement by fellow Dem Gene Taylor that he wouldn’t vote for it “if they put a gun to his head.” Y’all Politics is throwing down the gauntlet: Do away with your “civility” and “new friends” who just happen to wear yarmulkes and get back to your hyperbole-loving constituency to join the yelling.

Y’all Might Want to Reconsider this Video [JTA]

Last week, Minnesota Republican Rep. Michelle Bachmann attacked Ezekiel Emanuel in a floor speech, citing a New YorkPost columnist’s interpretation of his writings about rationalizing the distribution of health care to argue that under the Democrats’ healthcare plan, elderly or disabled patients like her senile father-in-law would be stiffed medical care. On Friday, Sarah Palin—making the most of her unemployment—posted an item on Facebook inflating Bachmann’s critique into an attack on Emanuel’s “Orwellian thinking” and accusing Obama of planning to convene “death panels” of bureaucrats who will decide, essentially, who shall live and who shall die. It’s not really clear how far the Nazi trope will go—Mengele references are already circulating in the outer reaches of the Free Republican universe, after surfacing, perhaps predictably, on the blog of perennial presidential candidate (and anti-Semitic crank) Lyndon LaRouche—but if Zeke is anything like his brothers, it’s not likely to keep him up at night. After all, even actual torture doesn’t scare him: “I’ve had various episodes where people have not liked what I said and tried to put the thumb screws to me to shut me up,” he told The New York Times last spring.

Sarah Palin: Statement on the Current Health Care Debate [Facebook]
Previously: Limbaugh Sees Swastikas Everywhere

Yesterday, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh decided to swat at Pelosi’s gnat-sized remark by detonating what amounted to an atom bomb; on his program, he highlighted a conservative blogger’s comparison of Obama’s “Organizing for Health Care” logo—a caduceus, the ancient Greek symbol of medicine, perched atop the familiar red-and-blue Obama “O”—to the Nazi image of an eagle spread-winged above a swastika. Immediately, the search term “Obama health care logo” went “volcanic” on Google. Limbaugh added to the point on his web site, where he featured the two images—Obama’s and the Nazis’—fading into one another, along with another of Obama Photoshopped into the place of a Stasi spy, from “The Lives of Others.” (Note to Rush: The East German Communists may have turned out to be totalitarians, but they were Nazi-hating totalitarians.)

For anyone wondering, yes, the ADL has already objected, noting that calling people Nazis just cheapens and trivializes what the actual Nazis did. Which reminds us: Orly, are you listening?

Whose Swastikas, Speaker Pelosi? [Rush Limbaugh]
ADL Decries Nazi Comparisons [Boston Globe]

For the preservation of life: Part 1: Jewish Perspectives on Healthcare Reform [Jewish Herald-Voice]
Related: Why Jewish Grandmothers Should Oppose Obama Care [American Thinker]

When Rachel first told me about the healer, I laughed him off. And I still wasn’t quite sure why I’d decided to see him now. But I had two good clues: I was barely sleeping at night and I had no appetite. Maybe seeing a healer was a way of admitting to myself that since the war broke out and my husband went to reserve duty, leaving me alone with our two young sons, life had become difficult.

I’d received many wonderful offers from family and friends in America to come spend time with them, but as tempting as a quiet American suburb was when compared to the threat of Hezbollah missiles, I didn’t budge. Ten years ago, after graduating from college, I made Israel my home. Though I now felt far from calm here, this was the place I wanted to be, and I couldn’t bring myself to leave. My biggest step since the war began was crossing Tel Aviv to see the healer.

At first, I was disappointed. Itai, a small, barefoot man with peach-colored hair, seemed nothing but irritated at me. “Your husband went to the army. You’re alone with your kids. These are not reasons to come to me,” he said. “This is not trauma.”

“Wait. Listen,” I said. “That’s just part of it. I have had real trauma.”

But then I got angry. The war was traumatic. And I was tired of hearing Israelis say, “there’s nothing to do about it. In war, there are deaths.” I had heard this stoic acceptance from the cashier in the supermarket, from the pharmacist, from my son’s camp counselor, and even from my husband. I couldn’t swallow it, or go along with the masses who called the war “just” and tolerated its consequences. I would willingly admit to being a kvetch, but I wasn’t whining. I just couldn’t stop myself from saying this time was difficult, scary, and most of all sad. Every hour I listened to the news on the radio and heard about the dead, the injured, the exploded missiles, the ones in flight. And I feared those still to come.

In the early days of the war, an electrician came to my apartment to fix a broken socket in the kitchen. When I mentioned I was afraid of being home alone with my sons during wartime, he said, “What’s the problem? If you hear a siren, stand in the middle of the building, away from the windows.” He said it as if he were saying “if you’re thirsty, drink some water.” And the electrician, like most of the people around me, wasn’t really worried about missiles falling on Tel Aviv. Itai, too, was among this majority. “Hezbollah won’t send missiles to Tel Aviv,” he said. “This is not something to worry about. Now tell me why you are here.”

My list of problems and anxieties was long. I decided to start with what I considered the general problem. “I have an imagination of disaster,” I said. “I always jump to the worst conclusions.”

“Why?” Itai asked.

“I’m sure it has something to do with my mom. She got sick when I was five, really sick.”

“Did she get better?”

“No.”

Finally, I had said something Itai considered traumatic. “Just a minute,” he said. He turned to his computer and looked something up. “Five years old,” he said. “Five is the year when children become shy. You must know this. You are the mother of a five-year-old.”

My five-year-old, Tom, was anything but shy right now. Since my husband left for the army, Tom had been having tantrums, daily. At his summer camp, where a number of children from the north had come to escape the long days in bomb shelters, I saw boys throwing beach balls at each other and shouting “Katyusha,” a sight that made me think of my own childhood in Houston, where rockets were things we went to visit on school field trips to NASA. Tom could find Texas in his atlas, and at bedtime he liked to hear stories about my childhood. He knew all about my dog, George, who liked to swim in the bayou. He knew that my brother and I had a clubhouse in the backyard where no grown-ups were allowed. The stories I told Tom were nothing like the tales he was bringing home from summer camp.

Many of Tom’s stories, like the ones about Katyusha rockets falling in Eilat, and the war we were fighting with Egypt, were false. But the scariest stories, the ones about civilians getting killed in their homes on both sides of the border and the ones about Israeli soldiers dying, were true.

And Tom had seen his father put on a soldier’s uniform. I explained to him that Daddy was not going to Lebanon. He was being deployed in the West Bank which I called, with great irony, a safe place. I knew Tom couldn’t make sense of the geography. He was afraid, like any five-year-old whose father, out of the blue, put on an army uniform and disappeared, would be. And his fear was evident in his behavior. More than ever, he picked fights with his three-year-old brother, Guy. When Guy was playing, Tom took his toys. When Guy sat quietly watching TV, Tom put his feet on Guy’s head. One day when this happened, Guy leaped out of his bean bag. His eyes gleamed with revenge. He leaned over and bit Tom on the forearm. The parallels I drew between my sons’ fighting and Nasrallah and Olmert astounded me.

“He bit me,” Tom cried. “He started.”

“I didn’t start,” Guy screamed. “He started.”

I entered in my role as the UN. I strongly condemned both of their actions and told them, as I would have liked to tell Nasrallah and Olmert, “I don’t care who started. I want both of you to stop it, right now.” I told Tom to go to his bed and stay there. I told Guy to go to his bed and stay there. “If you can’t be nice, just stay away from each other,” I said.

“You keep to yourself, right,” Itai said. “You are shy?” He was absolutely right. I told myself he was an astute observer. My body language told him I was shy. I definitely had the signs of real, genuine trauma, he said. A part of me felt strangely pleased as I heard this. “You are shy because of your experience at age five,” he said. “In a way, you’re stuck there, just where you were when your mother got sick.” Itai said he could help me, but it would take time and a lot of work.

“Tell me something,” he said. “What about your own space? Do you feel a great need for your own space?” This was so accurate, I was almost too proud to admit it. “How do you know?” I asked. He smiled. “Your homework is to think about what having your own space means to you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Just think about it,” Itai said.

Last year when my husband and I began plans for renovating the apartment we bought in Tel Aviv, I had only one architectural demand: “I want my own space,” I’d said. “It can be very small, but it has to be mine, only mine.”

What I settled for as my own space was a desk that measures 30 inches long. It’s stuck between a closet and a bathroom, and has enough room for a laptop and a book. There is even a corner for my cats to curl into.

I don’t know how Itai knew about this need of mine, but I do know I’m in the land of the prophets. As I do the homework Itai assigned to me, I write my life’s timeline in my mind—what happened at each age, and how one thing led to another. Each tiny vertical mark I make on the 33-year-long horizontal stretch brings me closer to understanding why I moved to Israel, why I want to raise my children here, and why despite all the bombings, all the reserve duty my husband does, and now this war, I’ve stayed here. Finally, the answer can’t be any clearer. A person needs her own space. So does a people.