All of the above? Yeah, that was January. Just January.

Since then, in the Territories, Hamas and the P.A. cracked down fiercely on popular protests in favor of unity. Then, suddenly, they agreed to unity, even though it was always doubtful it would actually work. But they stayed together long enough to mount the most threatening Nakba Day protests in years if not decades, and to threaten even worse come September—if they seek unilateral statehood.

Substantively, the most consequential thing President Obama did vis-à-vis Israel was veto a Security Council resolution condemning settlements. In a speech in May, Obama pledged similar opposition to the statehood gambit, condemned Hamas and the P.A.’s deal with it, sharply criticized Iran, and committed the U.S. to totally standing up for Israel’s security and right to exist. And he mentioned what the previous two presidents had assumed: That a two-state solution depended on land-swaps based on the ’67 borders. So, naturally, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded angrily, creating a huge diplomatic mess that has yet to be fully untangled, and which could have implications on the 2012 U.S. presidential contest.

The Fogel massacre. The Hamas rocket attacks. The Jerusalem bus stop explosion. Israeli responses claimed lives, including of innocents.

On the Iranian front, first we were given ample reason to believe that its purported nuclear program was substantially delayed. But then we learned that Stuxnet, while helpful, was no panacea. And then we learned that Iran has made significant progress on weaponization technology.

Egypt continues to move tentatively toward democracy.

In Lebanon, the sealed U.N. indictment for the 2005 assassination of the former prime minister (and father of the also-former prime minister, who had to resign when Hezbollah pulled its support) was only last week partially unsealed; expect things to continue to get hotter there.

It was weird that the Syrian regime was brutally cracking down on internal dissent, and barely anyone was saying anything. And that was half-a-half-a-year ago.

Former White House chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel, who once harbored dreams of being the first Jewish Speaker of the House, instead decided to run for mayor of Chicago; was briefly declared ineligible, then not; then won.

We were there as Rabbi Gershom Sizoumu ran for and lost a seat in Uganda’s parliament. We observed the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Ellen Weiss, an NPR honcho and wife of the enormously influential Rabbi David Saperstein, was forced to resign. Rep. Peter King held hearings on the American Muslim community, attracting the opposition of the American Jewish community. The Reform movement picked a new head.

Jimmy Carter was sued by people who bought and hated his book. Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder sued Washington City Paper, and even got the Simon Wiesenthal Center to endorse his ludicrous accusation of anti-Semitism—maybe his buddy Tom Cruise helped? Jon Demjanjuk was convicted of helping carry out the Holocaust, and then set free.

Quote of the Half-Year (paraphrased): “Oops!” — Richard Goldstone.

Western countries invaded Libya, possibly out of Holocaust guilt. A crazy guy tried to blow up a Santa Monica Chabad house. Benjamin Netanyahu and Justin Bieber were plausibly mentioned in the same sentence. A glass ceiling was shattered when Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz was picked to be the first woman to run either the Democratic or Republican National Committee. The Prince of Wales had the least Jewish wedding ever. Controversy swirled about playwright Tony Kushner. Jill Abramson was named the first woman editor of the New York Times. Dolph Schayes rooted for the Dallas Mavericks to win the NBA championship, and lo, it came to pass.

Eva Braun in blackface. Eva Braun speaking to the Tenafly JCC.

On the home front, Nextbook Press author Hillel Halkin was honored, and Rush Limbaugh said we were a “radical left-wing” outfit. We rolled out a welcome mat for Goldblog. And the American Society of Magazine Editors confirmed that it enjoys The Scroll.

We said several goodbyes, most of them sad: Elizabeth Taylor; Chris Hondros (whose photograph adorns the top of this post); Juliano Mer-Khamis; and Debbie Friedman, whose death I managed to turn into a controversy, though I swear I mourn for her as well. I don’t, however, mourn for one of the most important U.S. neo-Nazis, who was killed by his own son. There were many other sad goodbyes. Meanwhile, Sen. Joseph Lieberman announced he would retire after four terms. John Galliano’s career ended, or at least lulled, on less favorable terms. So did Rep. Anthony Weiner’s. Oh, and a final goodbye: Enjoy your virgins, Osama. Hamas will enjoy them with you. (Fortunately or not, Noam Chomsky’s religion does not conceive of an afterlife.)

Where do we stand now? Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested for rape, which is looking more questionable by the day; Israeli central banker Stanley Fischer was barred from replacing him as head of the International Monetary Fund. The most Jewish state got gay marriage thanks in part to a handful of Jewish Republicans. Israeli-American law student Ilan Grapel is still being detained by Egyptian authorities under dubious espionage accusations. Benjamin Netanyahu’s greatest domestic rival may well be retired Mossad chief Meir Dagan. The Gaza flotilla remains docked.

How should you deal with all this? We suggest going the f**k to shul.

• Palestinian President Abbas takes to the Times Op-Ed Page to justify the unilateral statehood route. Mentions of unity: 1. Mentions of Hamas (or Fatah): 0. [NYT]

• In what looked to be a preview of what he will say next week to the U.S. Congress, Prime Minister Netanyahu told the Knesset he would give up most of the West Bank for a Palestinian state—but not to a group that included Hamas. [NYT]

• We are likely to see more of things like Sunday’s “Nakba Day” protests in the lead-up to the September General Assembly. [AP/WP]

• Iran denied U.N. allegations that it has violated sanctions by buying weapons and the like from North Korea. [AP/WP]

• Deborah Lipstadt, author of Nextbook Press’s The Eichmann Trial, argues that the prosecution and conviction of John Demjanjuk, 91, for crimes in connection with the Sobibor death camp he worked at, was just and important. [NYT]

And yet, Demjanjuk is not in jail—he was freed pending appeal, a process expected to take something like a year. How you feel about this probably depends on how felt about trying a wheelchair-bound 91-year-old in the first place. In Tablet Magazine in November 2009, Michael C. Moynihan argued this was the right thing to do; around the same time, in Esquire Scott Raab was not so sure; already, the Simon Wiesenthal Center has argued that failure to imprison him “is an insult to his victims and to the survivors, that after all of this they may see John Demjanjuk strolling in the park in Germany for having been complicit in the mass murder over 28,000;” at the very least, the Center’s Rabbi Martin Hier added, he could have been placed under house arrest. On the one hand, Demjanjuk is no longer even about “never forgetting;” it is about punishing an individual offender, who in fact served roughly five years on Israeli death row before he was freed. On the other hand, the thousands and thousands of Demjanjuk’s victims surely would have preferred to have made it to 91.

Demjanjuk Convicted for Role in Nazi Death Camp [NYT]
Related: Still Terrible [Tablet Magazine]
The Eichmann Trial [Nextbook Press]
John Demjanjuk: The Last Nazi [Esquire]

• Homs, Syria’s third-largest city, is the latest target of the violent government crackdown. [NYT]

• P.A. Prime Minister Fayyad is threatening to take the issue of Israel’s withholding of $90 million in tax revenue (since the Hamas reconciliation deal) to the U.N. Security Council. [DPA/Haaretz]

• A Jewish wife and Armenian husband were executed in Iran, it’s not clear why. [Jewish Journal/JTA]

• Two men were arrested in New York City for trying to attack as-yet unspecified syngagoues, in a sting. [ABC News]

• Remember how one of Jerusalem’s quarters is Armenian? This article is all about them. [WP]

• More than one-fourth of the more than 200,000 survivors in Israel live below the poverty line. [Ynet]

• Edward Rothstein has a brilliant essay, on the occasion of a visit to Los Angeles’s Museum of Tolerance, on the intellectual flimsiness of connecting the Holocaust to other “issues,” or even to other genocides. [NYT]

• In a speech not apparently timed to Yom HaShoah, on Saturday Rep. Michele Bachmann, a putative Republican presidential candidate, compared America’s debt crisis to the Holocaust (though she disclaimed that her analogy was, in fact, “no analogy,” so, phew!). [JTA]

•Moshe Landau, a former president of the Israeli Supreme Court who presided over the Eichmann Trial, died, fittingly, on Sunday, at 99. [JPost]

• In a speech at Yad Vashem, Prime Minister Netanyahu argued that not enough of the rest of the world has fully learned the lessons of the Holocaust. [JPost]

• Friend-of-The-Scroll Rabbi Andy Bachman found a swastika keyed into his car parked in Park Slope, Brooklyn; he reflects on it. [Water Over Rocks]

• John Demjanjuk, 91, will likely be the last living person held accountable for Holocaust-related crimes. [JPost]

• All about “Gathering the Fragments,” a Yad Vashem initiative to collect survivors’ artifacts. [AP/WP]

• In a case of people-unclear-on-the-concept, 90-year-old alleged Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk—extradited by Germany from the U.S. last year—called his trial, currently proceeding in Munich, “torture.” [JTA]

• A report on global anti-Semitism released by Tel Aviv University last week claims that incidents doubled last year—because, leftist journalist Max Blumenthal says, it includes such dubiously qualifying events as the release of the Goldstone Report (written, of course, by a self-identifying Zionist Jew). [Huffington Post]

• The Israeli government has denied conductor and political provocateur Daniel Barenboim permission to perform with his youth orchestra in Gaza, on the grounds that no concert shall be held while Gilad Shalit remains imprisoned there. No word on whether Hamas wants to trade Shalit for a 15-year-old second violist. [Coteret]

• Tomorrow you can buy Real Housewife of New York City Jill Zarin’s new book, Secrets of a Jewish Mother, in which “you’ll learn how to make her methods your very own.” Then you too can go on Good Morning New York and apologize for acting like a crazy person on reality television.
[My Fox New York]

Haaretz points to Bronislaw Hajda as one such non-German. An 85-year-old Polish-American who resides in Chicago, Hajda allegedly served at Treblinka in 1944. Though he “without doubt” committed war crimes, a U.S. court found, he cannot be tried under U.S. jurisdiction. Instead, he awaits deportation to Poland or Germany—a prospect that the prosecution of John Demjanjuk has made, for him and for any others in his position, suddenly much more threatening.

Update: While Haaretz says Hadja is still alive, a reader pointed us to the Chicago Tribune, which reported he died in 2005, and the Social Security Death Index, which reports him as deceased.

Demjanjuk Case Could Set Precedent in Germany [Haaretz]

Pangs of sympathy for an enfeebled octogenarian, wheelchair-bound and encircled by weeping family members, are understandable. But for those familiar with the story of Demjanjuk, it should be a fleeting emotion. Born in the Ukraine and a former member of the Trawniki SS, Demjanjuk stands accused of complicity in the murder of 29,000 Jews at the Nazi death camp in Sobibor, Poland. Last week, a team of German doctors determined that, despite his advanced age, Demjanjuk was fit to stand trial for war crimes, and yesterday he was formally charged.

Demjanjuk, convicted in an Israeli court of being the notoriously sadistic Treblinka guard “Ivan the Terrible,” saw that conviction overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1993. So why try him again, in a different country? The evidence collected two decades ago strongly suggests that prosecutors in that case had a Nazi guard, just not the one they thought they did.

During investigations leading up to his first trial, American investigators obtained—and withheld—an identity card placing Demjanjuk at an SS training facility in Trawniki, Poland, at the death camp at Sobibor, where approximately 250,000 Jews were killed, and at a concentration camp in Flossenburg, Germany. His defenders have long claimed that the document, delivered to prosecutors by the Soviet Union, was a KGB forgery. But that argument has become impossible to sustain: prosecutors later uncovered corroborating documents in the German Federal Archives in Koblenz confirming both Demjanjuk’s military ID number and the timeline of his service in occupied Poland.

When entering the United States in 1952, Demjanjuk listed Sobibor as his primary residence between the years of 1937 to 1943. When questioned on this, Demjanjuk, who admitted that his timeline was a fabrication, claimed to have spotted the name on a nearby map when filling in immigration paperwork, though he later changed his testimony, claiming that a fellow refugee provided him with the town name. But as historian Gitta Sereny notes in her book The German Trauma, Sobibor was “little more than a railway halt in the forest [that] hardly appeared on pre-war Polish maps.” So, asked investigators, if Sobibor was nothing more than a unknown railroad junction—a fact the defense never convincingly challenged—how did Demjanjuk come to choose it as his alleged pre-war home?

To those investigating the “Ivan the Terrible” charges, these contradictions and shifting histories suggested that Demjanjuk was likely hiding a more sinister history. Indeed, an American judge called his oscillating alibis “so incredible as to legitimately raise the suspicions of his prosecutors that he lied about everything.”

While receiving significant coverage in the German media, Demjanjuk’s recent deportation hasn’t been widely debated in this country. But when the news reached conservative columnist Pat Buchanan, he compared Demjanjuk, who admitted having had an SS tattoo under his arm removed after the war, to both Alfred Dreyfus and Jesus Christ. Buchanan deploys an argument—and Google reveals its popularity elsewhere—that is at once reductionist and compelling: what good comes from prosecuting a feeble old man previously exonerated of being a guard at Treblinka? Contained within this question is an odd neutrality on the matter of Demjanjuk’s having served at a different death camp—and the implication that there’s a statute of limitations on genocide. Nor is it particularly relevant that, as is often argued, that at such an advanced age Demjanjuk is no “threat,” and thus unlikely to foment a pogrom in suburban Cleveland. The prosecutors aren’t likely motivated by a desire to reform, but to punish. Those who insist upon bringing Demjanjuk before a court, Buchanan argues, are motivated by the “same satanic brew of hate and revenge that drove another innocent Man up Calvary that first Good Friday 2,000 years ago.” (It is perhaps the one instance in which Richard Nixon is a useful character witness. In 1992, Nixon told his then-assistant Monica Crowley that Buchanan was “so extreme” that he’s “over there with the nuts.”)

Surprisingly, though, after his acquittal on charges that he served as a guard at Treblinka—significant and compelling evidence suggested that, while a member of the SS, prosecutors placed him at the wrong camp—the Israeli government expressed little interested in prosecuting Demjanjuk for his role as guard at Sobibor, arguing that too much time had passed to make a convincing case. According to Sereny, Israel only agreed to the first trial after three conditions were met: “the accused had to be healthy and reasonably young, indictable for murder, and credible witnesses had to be available.”

In Germany, newspapers across the political spectrum are broadly supportive of the new prosecution. As the left-leaning Süddeutsche Zeitung recently editorialized, “the German judicial system has been so terribly slow and forgiving” of fascist—and, it should be added, communist—war criminals and that this will likely be “the last Nazi trial.” And as such, let’s make this one count.

Does this suggest that the prosecution of a cog, a bit player like Demjanjuk, serves only to satiate a German quest for historical absolution? Buchanan argues that “[h]e is to serve as the sacrificial lamb whose blood washes away the stain of Germany’s sins.” This is undeniably a factor, though Buchanan also claims that it’s impossible for Germany to prosecute a homegrown war criminal, “[b]ecause the Germans voted an amnesty for themselves in 1969.” This would come as welcome news to the family of 90-year-old former Wehrmacht officer Josef Scheungraber, a German national currently on trial in Munich for the 1944 “reprisal” murder of 14 Italian civilians. (Buchanan, it seems, is referring to a 1968 modification of Article 50 of the German penal code requiring prosecutors prove that that defendants acted out of “base motivation”—i.e. anti-Semitism—in the commission of war crimes.)

If convicted—and simply establishing Demjanjuk’s voluntary employment in a Nazi death camp is significant—divining the motives of those who agitated for his deportation and prosecution will be interesting only to historians, who will weigh the role of “German guilt” in this final flesh-and-blood confrontation with its hideous past, and the conspiracy cranks, who will track the hidden hand of “international Jewry.”

For the victims like Thomas Blatt, a former inmate at Sobibor, such debates are inconsequential: “I don’t care if he goes to prison or not—the trial is what matters to me. I want the truth. The world should find out how it was at Sobibor.”

Michael C. Moynihan is a senior editor at Reason magazine.