Bernard Avishai Dot Com

A Big Miracle

2009-12-12T05:44:00.005-05:00

(Today is the first day of Hanukkah. For those many of you who are new to my blog this year, I thought I'd post this again, a little reflection on the season, from a city that can use another, different miracle.)

It is not a simple matter to be a Jew in America this time of year. Not in Jerusalem either, a few miles from Bethlehem. Christmas, as John Updike writes, is Christianity "at its sweetest." Many have written, some with an air of sweet resignation, about the yearning Jews feel as the days darken: to share in the melodies, the hearth, the love of the child.

It was only a matter of time—was it not?—that we would start finding ways to be absorbed into the spirit of the moment. So we exchange presents, greet the "season," tease out of the ancient Chanukah story our own celebration of light and grace—God bless, eight days, not just one! And we leave behind, in mildly embarrassed obscurity, the tale of Maccabean guerrilla war against Greek occupiers around 165 BC—a mythical victory that had been so much solace for medieval rabbis, forced into ghettos, and more recently, for outnumbered Zionists.

Read the rest of the post here...

Brothers And Others

2009-12-11T01:28:00.017-05:00

There is a old saying about Torah, which is deceptively cautionary: "Turn and turn in it, because everything is in it." When I was very young, I immediately loved the image evoked by this saying--of doing somersaults in a pool of serious words--though the Montreal rabbis (or, as they called themselves, "clergy") who taught me the saying meant it--so I sensed with growing dismay--as a demand that I simply exalt the people that has given us so many Nobel prize winners, or at least surrender to our received strictures.

Anyway, I reentered the pool a free man in my thirties. And the more I thought about this saying, the more it seemed to me far more of a warning than a brag. If everything is in Torah, then--as I implied in yesterday's post--nothing of clear value can be received. The only important question is, who is diving in? With what questions do you turn? Just as important, if a person has a political agenda--and who doesn't?--then quoting Torah only becomes an occasion for showing one's hand. The authority of Torah becomes a prop in agitprop.

LAST WEEK, JEWS in synagogues the world over read the portion in Genesis depicting the fraught meeting between Jacob and his older twin Esau many years after Jacob had tricked Isaac (with Rebbecca's collusion) into bestowing the birthright on himself. The whole story, from their birth to this moment, is a marvel of observation. You can read the whole portion here. Being a younger brother myself, the passages that always moved me the most are these:

Jacob looked up and there was Esau, coming with his four hundred men; so he divided the children among Leah, Rachel and the two maidservants. 2He put the maidservants and their children in front, Leah and her children next, and Rachel and Joseph in the rear. He himself went on ahead and bowed down to the ground seven times as he approached his brother.But Esau ran to meet Jacob and embraced him; he threw his arms around his neck and kissed him. And they wept. Then Esau looked up and saw the women and children. “Who are these with you?” he asked. Jacob answered, “They are the children God has graciously given your servant.” Then the maidservants and their children approached and bowed down. Next, Leah and her children came and bowed down. Last of all came Joseph and Rachel, and they too bowed down.Esau asked, “What do you mean by all these droves I met?” “To find favor in your eyes, my lord,” he said.But Esau said, “I already have plenty, my brother. Keep what you have for yourself.” “No, please!” said Jacob. “If I have found favor in your eyes, accept this gift from me. For to see your face is like seeing the face of God, now that you have received me favorably. Please accept the present that was brought to you, for God has been gracious to me and I have all I need.” And because Jacob insisted, Esau accepted it.

NOW, I REALIZE these are shepherds from the Iron Age speaking in a kind of code. But what is the plain meaning here? Enter Rabbi Benjamin Lau, who turned on that meaning in last week's Haaretz. Read it and try to follow it. I hasten to add that Lau is considered one of Israel's more liberal rabbinic figures. It is also important to know that Esau has been transformed by rabbinic tradition into the father of Edom, Israel's tribal enemy, and as such, Lau writes, this was only the first of many meetings. (Note: for those of you who linked to the Lau's column, and quickly gave up trying to make sense of its code, you are missing a chance to understand something important about the politics of this country.)

In any case, my wife, the Hebrew University's Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, who has appeared before in this blog, offers this rejoinder (a shorter version appeared as a letter in Wednesday's Haaretz):

Read literally, Genesis 32-3 is one of the most eloquent examples in “western” literature of reconciliation as the alternative to vengeance. Jacob cheated his older twin brother Esau twice: first out of his birthright and then out of their father’s blessing. Returning to the land of his birthplace after twenty years of working for Laban, Jacob prepared for a confrontation with the brother he had wronged, who had in the meantime established himself in the region of Edom. “And Jacob raised his eyes and saw and, look, Esau was coming, and with him were four hundred men.” Jacob arranged his children and wives so that the beloved ones were in the least vulnerable position at the rear. He then “bowed to the ground seven times until he drew near his brother.”

We all know what the wronged brother did. He ran to meet Jacob “and embraced him and fell upon his neck and kissed him, and they wept.”

The rabbinic interpretations of this explicitly conciliatory passage range from grudging acceptance to downright misconstrual–-in order to preserve Esau, in his various historical incarnations, as the demonic other. It was with the usual trepidation, therefore, but also some hope that I approached the column this week by Rabbi Benjamin Lau, who, I have heard, adds a refreshingly progressive voice to the chorus of rabbinic rabble-rousers in Jerusalem (“Brotherly Love—and Hate,” Haaretz, Dec. 4).

Rabbi Lau takes us through seven encounters (by his count) between Jacob and Esau and their presumed descendants, the children of Israel and of Edom. He demonstrates the poisonous power of free-floating symbols: the psalmist in Babylonian exile remembers that the Edomites, who had not allowed the tribes of Israel to pass through their territory on their way to Canaan, were now in league with the Babylonians. The famous vow to “remember Jerusalem” in Ps. 137 ends with a vision of return that is a pledge to vengeance, culminating in smashing the babies of 'Bat-bavel' [i.e., Edom] against the rocks...

Rabbi Lau acknowledges the vengeful pledge but leaves out the part about the babies.

Then, rather than teasing out the obvious implications of this form of memory, he tells us that Edom was, from an early period, identified with--wait for it--Christendom. (He admits, but never mind, that Israel heaped curses on Edom in the nefarious final verses of the Hanukah song maoz tzur—and that those verses were excised from most Jewish prayerbooks out of fear of offending the Church.)

Lau's argument concludes by telling us that, today, these two “brothers,” sons of Israel and Edom (read: Jews and Christians), come with peace in their hearts but are thwarted by some “third brother from the East, who also has a monotheistic belief.” That is, instead of valorizing the common identification of the Arabs with Esau as well as Ishmael; rather than deploring the culture of vengeance that ancient grievances engender and that periodically take hold of post-traumatic Jews, Rabbi Lau concludes by telling us that the Jews and the Christians are now cozy allies offering an olive branch to each other so they can “form an alliance” against the nefarious other brother who comes from the “East.”

Are we to understand that this “other brother” who is disturbing our Judeo-Christian peace, is the one whose babies we are enjoined—with impunity—to dash against the rocks? Is it not an embarrassment to write such things when, in Sheikh Jerrah and Silwan, neighborhoods unilaterally annexed to Jewish Jerusalem after the Six Day War--and just a stone’s throw from the synagogue in the Greek Colony where Rabbi Lau preaches on Shabbat afternoons--the putative descendants of Esau and Ishmael are being violently evicted from their homes by the descendants of Jacob—presumably, so that there will be no Arabs to disturb our exegetical acrobatics and our “peaceful world”?

Sacred And Secular, Again

2009-12-10T03:32:00.022-05:00

The justice minister, Yaacov Neeman, caused a wave of criticism (with international ripples) this week, when he told a Jewish law convention in Jerusalem--and in the presence of many approving rabbis and rabbinical judges--that the Torah embodies "a complete solution to all the things we are dealing with," and that "step by step, we will bestow religious law upon the citizens of Israel and transform religious law into the binding law of the state." Many--including the opposition leader, Tzipi Livni--immediately bridled. Was this not promising to replace the secular state with a theocracy? Were we really going to run a modern country with a legal system ( if that's the word for it) evolved in the iron age?

The next day, Neeman clarified his remarks, which were meant to be practical, he insisted. "It is difficult for me to accept the things that were attributed to me, as though I had said that the laws of this country should be replaced with Torah laws. Yesterday I emphasized the importance of the rabbinical court system to the State of Israel. The Knesset is the legislator in Israel, and the interpretation of its laws is determined by the courts." Presumably, more and more civil matters should just be assigned to rabbinic courts.

ACTUALLY, THERE IS less here than meets the eye--less change, that is, not less danger. And Neeman's clarification, that he only meant that rabbinical courts take up more of the slack in Israeli civil life, is a jump from the frying pan into the fire. The problem is not adversion to Jewish sources per se. The problem is, precisely, the extension of rabbinical courts, whose judges have inched their way into greater and greater power since the state's founding, and now threaten the state's democratic foundations from within much as (and in alliance with) settlers from without.

Since the 1970s, you see, judges openly began to advert to biblical law, Talmudic precepts, the wisdom of the sages, and so forth, to deal with novel situations; what was called "residual law"--law for which there was no established precedent and which required new ethical interpretation. If judges struggling with a hard case could draw inspiration from, say, an opinion of Oliver Wendell Holmes, why could they not go back into Jewish sources to find an opinion? The result could be poignant, even "progressive," depending on the judge.

When, for example, the commission looking into Ariel Sharon's role in the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, led by Chief Justice Yitzhak Kahan, called for Sharon's resignation, they did so based on a more or less novel legal precept, "indirect responsibility." They based this in turn on biblical and Talmudic sources, and (especially on this day of the Nobel Peace Prize) their reasoning should be quoted at length, just to get a sense of how impressive Jewish sources can be in dealing with a complex diplomatic and criminal matter:

A basis for such responsibility may be found in the outlook of our ancestors, which was expressed in things that were said about the moral significance of the biblical portion concerning the "beheaded heifer" (in the Book of Deuteronomy, chapter 21). It is said in Deuteronomy (21:6-7) that the elders of the city who were near the slain victim who has been found (and it is not known who struck him down) "will wash their hands over the beheaded heifer in the valley and reply: our hands did not shed this blood and our eyes did not see." Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi says of this verse (Talmud, Tractate Sota 38b):

"The necessity for the heifer whose neck is to be broken only arises on account of the niggardliness of spirit, as it is said, 'Our hands have not shed this blood.' But can it enter our minds that the elders of a Court of Justice are shedders of blood! The meaning is, [the man found dead] did not come to us for help and we dismissed him, we did not see him and let him go - i.e., he did not come to us for help and we dismissed him without supplying him with food, we did not see him and let him go without escort." (Rashi explains that escort means a group that would accompany them; Sforno, a commentator from a later period, says in his commentary on Deuteronomy, "that there should not be spectators at the place, for if there were spectators there, they would protest and speak out.')

THE POINT IS, it was not the source of the precept that made it fit for a democracy. It was the judge. Kahan was born in Galicia, and had studied the law before immigrating to Israel in 1935. He knew very well the "indirect responsibility" of others during the Holocaust. He was a man devoted to "equal protection" and (let's call it) the Kantian idea that Jews had the responsibility to live by laws that might be applicable to all human beings. You had to ask, what if everybody did that? (Actually, this was Hillel's idea, too.)

Compare Kahan's marvelously humane stance to that of Rabbi Shmuel Avner, who heads the Ateret Cohanim yeshiva in the Muslim quarter of the Old City in Jerusalem, and whose works (among others) were distributed to troops before last year's Gaza operation: "When you show mercy to a cruel enemy," Avner said, "you are being cruel to pure and honest soldiers. This is terribly immoral. These are not games at the amusement park where sportsmanship teaches one to make concessions. This is a war on murderers. 'A la guerre comme a la guerre.'"

And what is a cruel enemy? Does it include a whole nation, including women and children?

[There is] a biblical ban [Avner writes] on surrendering a single millimeter of it [the Land of Israel] to gentiles, though all sorts of impure distortions and foolishness of autonomy, enclaves and other national weaknesses. We will not abandon it to the hands of another nation, not a finger, not a nail of it...Is it possible to compare today's Palestinians to the Philistines of the past? And if so, is it possible to apply lessons today from the military tactics of Samson and David?

The Torah, Neeman said (echoing Rabbi Kook), is "complete." Let's agree that it is a great chronicle, complete the way great fiction is true. The Talmud, correspondingly, is a record of opinions and interpretations of Torah. The question is, as it always is, who is looking for what? Would Zionism itself have happened had young Jews in the Pale of Settlement, feeling the enchantments of (what they called) "modernity," not gotten fed up with the opinions and interpretations of the ill-educated, bigoted, and sheltered men who dominated the shtetl? Should we now submit our disputes to our homegrown variety?

YAACOV NEEMAN, I hasten to add, is a far cry from Shmuel Avner. Neeman is an expert on tax law, and a founding partner with the late, former president, Haim Herzog, of Israel's largest international law firm, Herzog, Fox, Neeman. As the finance minister in the late 1990s, he helped shape Israel's global profile. (I have taught a member of Yaacov Neeman's family, and based on her brilliance and decency alone, I cannot doubt his good faith.)

No, Neeman's tragic flaw is not fanaticism. It is a kind of complacency in the face of status quo agreements with the orthodox "rabbinical court system." As I've written in The Hebrew Republic, and as the indispensable Gideon Levy puts it in his column today, Israel is already not a secular state in the sense anyone in the West would recognize. The truly terrifying idea is not greater influence for Jewish law, but greater influence for rabbinic courts, which anyway have no place as an official arm of a democratic state. Let Neeman study Torah to his heart's content; let him find inspiration where he can. Just don't tell us that going to some yeshiva in Jerusalem prepares one even for an internship at Herzog, Fox, Neeman, let alone judging the disputes of modern citizens.

“I have never feared really religious people,” Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president and Zionism’s first great statesman, wrote in his 1940s memoir; “it is the new secularized type of Rabbi, resembling somewhat a member of a clerical party in Germany, France, or Belgium, who is the menace, and who will make a heavy bid for power by parading his religious convictions. It is useless to point out to such people that they transgress a fundamental principle which has been laid down by our sages, ‘Thou shalt not make of the Torah a crown to glory in, or a spade to dig with.’”

Brussels And Jerusalem: A Decision

2009-12-08T12:13:00.003-05:00

The EU has done more or less what it needed to. Is the Obama Administration next?

Brussels And Jerusalem

2009-12-07T00:52:00.010-05:00

The European Union, arguably the most important political achievement of our lifetime, is unarguably among the most underestimated, especially when its foreign ministers come together to debate common approaches to global problems--and doubly so when the problem at hand is the Middle East. Perhaps we all just take it for granted that Brussels cannot leverage Middle Eastern leaders the way Washington can, or that European leaders will anyway be followers, or that Germany, for obvious historic reasons, will foil any effort to exert pressure on Israel, whose diplomacy is often couched in the rhetoric of Jewish survival. But something is changing, and we ought to take notice.

Today, European foreign ministers are meeting in Brussels to consider a Swedish draft document, recognizing, among other things, East Jerusalem as the future capital of a Palestinian state and promising to recognize such a state in advance, based on the 1967 borders, unless changes are agreed to by both sides. The document adopts, in effect, the lines of the Clinton parameters, and seeks to advance an international consensus regarding the outline of a final deal.

Enough is enough, the document seems to be saying: a new round of negotiation would be fine, but old rounds have produced plenty to work with. The deal is not so mysterious; the problem, now that the Fayyad government has reasonably stabilized Palestine's security and economy, is to force Israelis to face down its ersatz Judeans while they still can; to get Israelis used to the idea that Jerusalem is not just an Israeli city, Palestine is not just Israel's internal problem, and that down the road is diplomatic isolation and possibly economic sanctions. When you consider that more than a third of Israel's exports (and a higher proportion of high technology exports) go to Europe, the idea that the EU has no leverage here is increasingly preposterous.

In any case, it is clear from past negotiations that Israel and Palestine cannot make peace alone. One can only hope the EU document is essentially adopted, or even that a close vote prompts the requisite attention in Jerusalem. Adopting the resolution might even be a trial balloon for the Obama administration to do what it should have done from the start, which is adopt the Clinton parameters as policy itself.

FOR WHILE THE Wall Street Journal publishes fatuous pieces about shopping in Nablus, the situation on the ground is deteriorating day by day. Anyone with a head and heart can sense a terrible violence coming.

Here, following, is another report from David Shulman, a frequent contributor to this blog, about the explosive situation in Sheikh Jarrah.

December 4, 2009: Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem

Exhibit A. Kindly examine the attached photograph (above). Let's make an inventory. Three stuffed animals, two face up, one face down. The yellow-and-red one, half animal half cushion, has an inscription: "I love you." One school bag. Two unidentified red toys. Five pieces of yellow lego. One armless, legless doll. One yellow brush with blue bristles. An Arabic newspaper. A broken pole wrapped in red cloth. A broken flower, perhaps freshly cut, probably thrown out with the vase it sat in.

I don't want to overload your inbox, so I won't add more pictures of this patch of ground in front of the al-Kurd family's house in Sheikh Jarrah. I can tell you what's there. A kitchen stove, its glass top shattered, green splinters everywhere. Broken microwave lying on its face. Pieces of bicycle and a children's tractor. Shoes, mostly children's. Many more pieces of lego. A few pots and pans. Some sheets. Boxes of odds and ends—cellphone, cords, electric wire. Plastic shovel for playing in the sand.

Exhibit B. See attached photograph. Border Policemen outside the door of the house, now inhabited by Israeli settlers. The police are there, needless to say, to protect them. Note the Israeli flags strung over the windows, just to rub it in. The people taking photographs and milling around are Israeli peace activists who came for today's protest march: ordinary people, shocked by what is happening in Sheikh Jarrah and angry enough to spend this Friday afternoon on the long walk through downtown Jerusalem, then along Road Number One which divides east from west—the future border between the Israeli and the Palestinian cities-- past the American Colony Hotel and the neighborhood mosque to this street where, as of Sunday, a third Palestinian family has been violently expelled from its home.

We're riding a wave of such expulsions. Last Friday we were here, Eileen and I, in this very courtyard, before the court ruling; we spoke at some length with the eloquent, moderate father of the al-Kurd family, who told us the story in gentle Arabic. He had told it many times that day:

"We were refugees from Haifa in 1948. Everyone in this neighborhood is a refugee, some from Lydda and Ramla, some from Jaffa. After the 1948 war, the Jordanian government gave us these plots of land to build on, in exchange for our UNRWA cards. The cards were worth a lot of money, but we wanted to live normal lives in our own houses, so we gave up our status as refugees. We have lived in this home since the 1950's. The Israeli settlers claim the land belongs to the Jews and they went to court, for years we were in the courts. But this is my house, it is our home, I built the annex in the front and planted the fruit trees. Now the court has ordered the annex to be sealed off and they forced us out. Settlers came with the soldiers in the night and started throwing our possessions outside, just like that, and they hit us, one of them grabbed my daughter by the throat and tried to strangle her. They are very violent. We cannot live with them. They hurt us and they insult us and they are thieves and the soldiers help them. The court has left us, for now, with the back part of the house; the front is locked and sealed. On Sunday the court will decide finally. I don't believe they will force us to leave. I don't believe they can be so unjust. Come meet my mother, she will tell you."

We peeked through the window: his mother was sleeping, the afternoon receding into night. We sat with him for a few moments in the tent he has put up in the courtyard across from what used to be his front door. His wife, a handsome, modern woman, rushed into the back of the house and emerged with a box of baklava to offer us; it was 'Id al-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice, when guests are especially welcome.

Then on Sunday the court ruled in favor of the settlers, and they moved in immediately with the soldiers to back them up, as is normal in East Jerusalem these days. That's how the lego and the stuffed animals landed up in the courtyard.

This is the third recent eviction in Sheikh Jarrah—after the al-Hanun and al-Ghawi families lost their homes to settlers-- and six more families have already received court orders preparing them for this same fate. We've tried our best to stop it, we've run an international campaign, we've kept volunteers in the houses and protestors outside, we've done what we could in the courts and the press, and we've failed and will no doubt fail again unless some of you who read this report find a way to bring effective pressure to bear. Let me say at once: the legal situation in Sheikh Jarrah is complicated, but it's also largely irrelevant. The settlers, through what is called the Sephardic Community Committee, have produced documents to support their claim that these plots of land belonged to Jews during the Ottoman period, over a century ago. Ergo, they must be restored to Jewish hands (like all the rest of Palestine?

And what about the hundreds of Palestinian houses in West Jerusalem now inhabited by Jews? No Israeli court is about to return them to their original owners.). All the Palestinian families who live here received the land from the Jordanian government, as Mr. al-Kurd said. They are large families; two generations have been born and grown up in these houses. The whole question has been in the courts for decades, and the rulings have sometimes favored the Palestinians, at other times the settlers. I'm not about to make any judgment relating to the legal niceties.

But make no mistake: these expulsions are first and foremost political acts. They are part of a sustained, constantly ramifying campaign to plant colonies of fanatical Jewish settlers in the heart of Palestinian neighborhoods all over East Jerusalem, at the same time driving out whatever Palestinian families happen to be in the way. The courts merely provide the fig leaf (and the municipality and the government provide the soldiers). If you have any doubt, you have only to look at the settlers who have moved in; you can watch them any evening, gloating from the rooftops at their victims, some of whom now live in ramshackle tents they have put up on the street across from their homes. The police have cruelly demolished even the al-Ghawi tent at least five times. I've sat there with the family on cold winter nights, and I think I won't try to describe how it feels. The settlers also have a habit of viciously attacking the Palestinians whom they've displaced; sometimes fist-fights develop, as happened earlier this week, with the unsurprising result that the Palestinians—in this case two young men from the al-Kurd family and a third from another family—were arrested and sent to jail. Not only have they been evicted from their home; they also get to spend time in prison, for good measure. When the Channel 2 news reported on events in Sheikh Jarrah on Wednesday night this week, the mainstream announcer offered his Israeli audience a one-line moral to the story: "Palestinians in East Jerusalem don't obey the orders of the court."

Would you?

Marching through the city this afternoon was a lot like old times—say the days of the first Lebanon War in 1982, when to join a peace demonstration was like running a gauntlet of hostile, jeering crowds, who would often punch you or spit at you as you passed. Today we were sixty or seventy, maybe a bit more, hardly a vast horde. One happier thought: a good half of the group was made up of young people (early 20's), committed, lucid, fearless, full of life and energy. They are the future of the peace movement here, if it has a future. I saw four or five of my honors students, and also two children, now fully grown, of veteran activists I have known. People emerged from their shops on the Ben-Yehudah pedestrian mall to curse us, and someone on a high balcony over the street tried to blast us with water from a hose, and there were some who tried to hit us as we moved through town, beating our drums, crying out old, rather useless, weather-beaten words like "Thou shalt not steal" and "Thou shalt not murder" and "You can't build a democracy on murder and theft" and then, in Arabic as we moved east, "No to the Occupation," and so on.

As we passed the hospice near Notre Dame, the male nurses in their white caps—all Palestinian—came out onto the roof to watch us, and when they read the Arabic signs we were carrying they suddenly broke into smiles and raised their thumbs to cheer us, so maybe it was worthwhile just for that. A little farther along, deep in East Jerusalem, religious Jews poked their heads out of the windows of the huge hotel they inhabit to yell "Death to Arabs!" So it goes in the Holy City. We filled the courtyard of the al-Kurd house and spilled over into the street outside it; I can't help wondering if the settlers inside the house felt at least a little uneasy listening to our cries urging them to get out, to return the theft; or if a tiny seed of doubt took root in the mind of, say, just one policeman."

Things Fall Apart

2009-12-03T09:45:00.015-05:00

Barack Obama is losing friends. Gary Wills' post at the New York Review blog might as well stand in for the others (though its patronizing tone--"I was deeply invested in the success of our first African-American president"--is Wills' own). Obama, so goes the argument, is fighting a war that will not defeat enemies but will only produce more. This is his Vietnam, which is the more galling since he knows very well what happened in Vietnam. He has "betrayed" the people who supported him.

Others, well, huff that he is nothing but a conciliator, hugging the "center" at every opportunity. Just look at his unwillingness to nationalize the banks, or willingness to entertain alternatives to a Medicare style public option. He must be hanging out too much with Wall Street swells. The New York Times narcissism police (which has no internal investigation unit, apparently) told us he is a "cold shower" even to his close friends; during the campaign, the same investigator charged that the child of black and white parents simply cannot stop himself from trying to please everybody. You get the idea.

For my part, I confess my admiration for Obama is only growing as I watch him navigate the extraordinary tangle of decisions he confronts. And for what it's worth, I think the (bi-)racial profiling of Obama misses the point, too. I do not see a child who is trying to please everybody. I see a man who understands that we mainly inherit what happened before we come into responsibility (and I don't just mean his administration inheriting the mistakes of the Bush presidency); that things fall apart much as Achebe, like Conrad before him, warned us they do; that if we struggle to improve things, we must simultaneously struggle to hold together whatever institutions are more or less working, or we are going to create something much, much worse.

I DON'T KNOW any more about Afghanistan than Wills does, which is impressionistic (impressions reinforced, or distorted, I confess, by many drives to the South Hebron hills, where some of my hosts still live in caves). I am willing to believe that Afghanistan is, at best, a chaotic and backward and ruined place; that people in the war zone there (as reported in this poignant report) shoot at chickens to test life preserving amulets. Let us say that, inevitably, Afghanistan will be ruled by a kleptocracy during our lifetimes; that the best we could ever hope for is to shore up an area around Kabul, which gives a certain freedom to women and a leg up to a narco-mafia over the more traditional warlords. You listen to journalist Rory Stewart, certainly, and you conclude that building a modern, democratic Afghanistan is a fantasy.

The point is, what in Obama's speech or policy would lead one to believe he thinks any differently? He did not get us into this mess. So far as I can see, his strategy is contrived to keep the place from falling apart in the event of a too-rapid withdrawal, a prospect that horrifies Stewart himself: think of Cambodia, not just Vietnam. Besides, the real danger to the region would be chaos in Pakistan, not only Afghanistan. Is the Pakistani government asking for a wholesale American withdrawal now? If there is not a wholesale withdrawal, then how to make America's troops not become sitting ducks?

Is there anything in Obama's speech that would preclude trying to reach an accommodation with local warlords, as in Iraq, so that American and NATO troops can be drawn down at the end of next year? Is there any fear of a "wider war" with another superpower? If this is Obama's Vietnam, or even his Iraq, where is the domino theory, or the hollow call for "freedom," or the Kissingerian claim that withdrawal would damage American "credibility," or the cavalier attitude toward allies, or the attempt to have butter without paying for the guns?

And while I'm getting warmed up, would we really have been better off nationalizing the banks, bonuses or no bonuses, wiping out the shareholders (including our pension funds) and rebuilding their management from scratch? Were we right to assume a recovery that was years away, so that toxic assets would remain toxic for years? Let's assume, which is certainly arguable, that a Medicare-like public option is really the best way to contain costs; lets' assume that private insurance companies and non-profit cooperatives (which for all their perverse incentives work, after all) cannot be regulated to serve the commonwealth as well as a government program. Has Obama been failing to stake his presidency on this option because he's lacked courage since childhood or because he's simply been able to count to 41 since March?

Look, this is a man who organized his Chicago community backed by the Catholic church. When he refused to denounce governments working through faith-based services, progressives denounced him as pandering to the right. He refused to denounce the Supreme Court for valorizing the Second Amendment, but tried to come up with new ways to control guns and apply their ruling. As president, he might have let GM fold--that would serve them right!--but he took the time to see the company's potential and, by next fall, he will have made us all majority stakeholders in the world's most advanced electric car and supplier ecosystem. He invested the stimulus in things that will matter in the years ahead, though he could have sent us shopping to gin up unemployment numbers: "cash for what-not." And is his call for bi-partisanship really just playing into the hands of them. He said on "Sixty Minutes" a while back that it was his responsibility to make decency to adversaries "interesting." I could have kissed him for that.

Oh, and he said what he was going to do in Afghanistan. He said it to a million people in Berlin, for God's sake. Look at the way he's engaged China and Russia on a deeply important trip he's got not credit for, except from Jim Fallows, who thankfully is paying attention.

I DO NOT have Obama's temperament, so let me say to my progressive friends that we are courting disaster. There is betrayal here, but it is not Obama's betrayal of us. I saw this kind of thing before with Jimmy Carter, where the president suffered death by a thousand cuts from the people on his left, Kennedy included; people who couldn't deliver the Congress, but could deliver endless polemics against his fear of budget busting or his more pragmatic health care proposals--and they wound up clearing the path for Ronald Reagan. Just listen to Rick Hertzberg, who like Fallows was in Carter's White House, to learn what a cold shower losing was.

We like to think that "independents," where Obama's ratings are slipping, are the really judicious types. In fact, people who remained undecided the longest during the last election were people who could not easily think for themselves; people who were waiting to see what other people were going to do; people who never want to be thought suckers. A big part of Obama's slippage is coming because the most conspicuously progressive people in the Democratic tent think nothing of "going negative" the way Hilary did, and over things Obama either cannot control or may yet prove right about.

We are fanning public anger against Obama about pain Obama did not cause; refusing to see how many in our benighted public are just looking to see if he continues to inspire loyalty and electricity among the people they had flocked to last year. We are sickened by the right but seem not to see how those waiting in the wings are counting on the Democratic Party falling apart, too.

"If we had wanted Bush’s wars, and contractors, and corruption, we could have voted for John McCain. At least we would have seen our foe facing us, not felt him at our back, as now we do," Wills writes. Really. You'd rather have McCain and Palin in the White House, facing you squarely. Then you'd know who your enemy is. Then the world would make sense.

Two Years Old

2009-11-30T04:32:00.006-05:00

The blog is two years old today. To say I feel grateful does not do justice to the privilege of connecting with so many readers, and writers, around the world. And (as a smart shrink once put it) how do you know what you think until you hear yourself say it? If you are moved to write a note, or a suggestion, I'd be pleased to receive it: bernardavishai@gmail.com. And you might consider sending friends an email subscription, or subscribing yourself if you have not already done so. It is really the best way to keep up with posts, which may become less frequent as I get down to a new book project. (Just write your or your friend's email address in the box to the right.)

Here is a little present to mark the blog's birthday. It is Matti Caspi's song about a dove that spreads its wings and flies, on and on, over the hills of Gilboa.

Israelis Fear Obama. That's The Point.

2009-11-29T03:42:00.026-05:00

Barack Obama can do virtually nothing to halt the mounting fear among Israelis that he is hostile to them: no visits, no speeches, no jets. If you need proof, and don't know Hebrew, just look at the body language of Ben Caspit, the populist-journalist host of the very widely watched "Journal" program on Channel One, Friday nights.

Caspit fancies himself the voice of the common people, or at least its conscience, sort of like Chris Matthews. He may, God help us, be right, at least for the moment. This past Friday, he was (let's call it) interviewing two relatively moderate members of Knesset, one from Likud, and one from Kadima, both of whom support the settlement freeze, both of whom insist that this is not just a sham, for all of its qualifications. Kadima's Gideon Ezra, the former deputy director of the Shavak (the state security services), even insisted the freeze was very late in coming, for all the obvious strategic reasons; he implied that Kadima might well be prepared to join the coalition if Netanyahu required their support to pursue a deal with the Palestinians.

Both of these responses might have raised the antennae of an interviewer. Caspit was having none of it. Instead, he wanted to talk about the public statement Friday by Likud's Limor Livnat, a formidable minister in Netanyahu's coaliton, that the freeze only proves Obama is anti-Israel, that "we have fallen into the hands of a terrible administration."

The MKs tried to finesse her statement. Caspit decided to answer his own question. (You can watch him by clicking here and sliding the time bar to about 13:40.) "But in essence," Caspit said, "she [Livnat] said courageously what most of us think. The Americans--this administration--and I don't fear them because I am not, lucky for all of us, a minister--is really an administration that burdens us, and is awful and terrible for Israel." Nobody contradicted him. Later (at around 17:10) Caspit said: "What, and soon we'll have to freeze in Jerusalem? This is unprecedented." Gideon Ezra protested that, for example, starting a new settlement in Nof Zion--"which is really Jabel Mukaber"--is an absurd provocation; that the key is to strengthen moderate forces among the Palestinians. Caspit's answer in the form of a question (21:30): "So we will have given up 10 months of settlement for nothing, just so the goyim will say we are okay."

I won't dwell on the pathos of Caspit's rhetoric. Let's just say that when Theodore Herzl wrote his play "The New Ghetto" he was not anticipating the journalists of "The Jewish State." (For an antidote, read Gideon Levy's exasperated column from today's Haaretz.) Yet if Caspit was right to claim that he speaks for a majority of Israelis just now, what should Obama do about it? How to respond to the ways Caspi's talk embodies virtually everything Israelis fear in an American administration?

HERE"S THE THING. Instead of trying to allay this fear, Obama should use it. For what Caspit's outbursts really imply is the slow transformation of Israeli politics, where the fear of messing up relations with Washington slowly burns in; and Israelis, like Palestinians, are growing hungry for a "political horizon." Nobody really believes anymore in the "lets-give-them-land-and-maybe-they'll-leave-us-alone" school of peacemaking. But nobody but the hard right believes either in the plausibility of indefinite occupation. Caspit is afraid of change, and for all of his bravado, afraid of isolation. He may not realize this, but he's actually softening Israelis up for something creative from Washington.

The fear is there, and growing, you see. To pressure less will not earn Obama less animus. The point is to fill the vacuum the fear creates; refocus the conversation not only on what Israelis should stop doing, but on positive steps that make concrete what positive steps the world community--goyim--expect Israelis and Palestinians to take.

Here, for example, are three things the Obama administration can do to help reshape the conversation here:

First, it can state--now, in response to the "freeze"--that American policy is to pursue a deal based on the Taba Agreements of 2001. The "Clinton parameters" were at the heart of those negotiations. Senator Mitchell and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton might well enlist the former president to lay out those principles in a joint press conference. Mahmoud Abbas has virtually said he will immediately resume negotiations if Netanyahu will agree "to restart talks where they were left off." Abbas was referring to his months of meetings with Ehud Olmert, but those talks were themselves based on variations of the Taba plan.

Second, the Dubai economic crisis could be a huge boost for Palestine, in the ironic way the Gulf war of 1991 was a huge boost for Amman. Then, as now, the press was full of dire warnings about Palestinians losing their jobs in the Gulf and, hence, remittances back to families drying up. But, actually, the return of thousands of Palestinians (100,000 work in Dubai as engineers, instructors and in technology-related professions) to the West Bank would be a great boost to Palestinian intellectual capital. The Obama administration should publicly call for the return of qualified people, and task the American consul in Jerusalem with reviewing applications and monitoring Israeli responses to them. As I've argued in the past, Palestinians do not lack financial capital to develop their private sector. What they lack is access to their own talent and the capacity to execute their business plans under the burdens of the occupation. If Israel is serious about a peace partner, this is an extraordinary chance to help develop one.

Third, assuming Marwan Barghouti will indeed be released, Senator Mitchell should meet with him. The symbolic impact would be resounding.

These are all doable. Again, Obama will get no credit from Israelis by refraining from doing them.

The Real Meaning Of The 'Freeze'

2009-11-26T01:19:00.020-05:00

Benjamin Netanyahu's announcement "falls short" (in George Mitchell's words) on so many dimensions, reasonable people will conclude that it is simply a piece of theater, meant to appease the Obama administration, and public opinion around the world, particularly in the wake of the Goldstone report:

The freeze allows for the completion of 2,500 partially-built housing units and the construction of 492 new apartments. It does not apply to buildings like schools and synagogues. It does not take into account that the actual drivers of new settlement are not in the government, but fanatic settlement organizations that have been acting more or less independent of government decisions for years, and which the state does not have the manpower (or the army, the stomach) to confront with military force. The freeze does not apply to East Jerusalem, a greatly expanded zone (70 square kilometers) in the heart of the West Bank--historically, Palestine's biggest city, commercial hub, and the site of the mosques. Oh, and the freeze will only last ten months.

In effect, Netanyahu has followed the route of Sharon and Olmert before him on "Judea and Samaria," running like Menachem Begin and governing like Golda Meir: at first refusing to budge, then offering to take a five foot leap over the eight foot pit. No wonder the PA's Saeb Erakat announced almost immediately that the Israeli government's step was "unsatisfactory." No wonder, almost immediately, Avigdor Lieberman told Israel's Reshet Bet early this morning, "the response of the Palestinians is the last consideration the Israeli government's order of priorities." The point, he said, was mainly to attend to relations with Israel's friends, the (so he says) "17 countries" around the world that have supported Israel on the Goldstone report but have otherwise been drifting into hostility. (When you have Lieberman in the government, leaks are superfluous.)

AND YET LIEBERMAN'S admission is precisely what should get our attention. The question was never what Netanyahu would do for the Palestinians. The question was, what could the Obama administration make him do for it. And the critical move Netanhayu made for America here was to affirm, pretty much explicitly, that making critical moves for America was Israel's most important strategic priority; that, by implication, the idea that Israel could simply get what it needed from America by sicking AIPAC on the Senate is nonsense. You can feel the diplomatic isolation here growing everyday. And what government will resume settlements openly against American wishes?

As I've insisted before, the real divide in Israeli politics is between the party of Greater Israel and the party of (let's call it) Greater America; between the people who see Israel from the holy land up, and people who see it from globalization down; between the nut-jobs who take diplomatic isolation for granted, and the elites who fear diplomatic isolation will be followed by economic isolation. Netanyahu has always tried to keep a foot planted in both worlds, or at least run in the former and govern in the latter. This move suggests he is finally admitting his lean toward globalization.

Proof positive is the reaction of Uzi Landau, the biggest nut-job in the cabinet, and the (largely orthodox Mizrahi) Shas Party, who look at Israel's elites a little like the way Sarah Palin looks at Warren Buffet. Landau, alone, opposed the vote, while Shas absented itself. The West Bank Council will meet "in emergency session" later this afternoon.

NO ONE CAN say whether Netanyahu's "freeze" will be enough to bring Mahmoud Abbas into negotiations, but something is happening here, and I'm not at all sure Abbas is that relevant to it. By all accounts, we will shortly have a deal for Gilad Shalit, and among the prisoners to be released is Marwan Barghouti--or so he says. Barghouti will assuredly run for president, is close to Hamas and is the only Fatah figure who can unify Palestinians--a people with globalist elites and "religious" sociopaths of their own. By indirectly negotiating with Hamas for Shalit's release, Netanyahu is handing Hamas a big concession, too. The short-fall of his "freeze," and deal with Hamas for Shalit, both make Abbas look bad.

On the other hand, if all of this were a chess game, the board is not looking so bad for Obama just now, even if the situation on the ground has never looked more explosive. Shalit's release would not only bring Barghouti into play--that is, allow for the creation of a united negotiating partner committed to a two-state solution--but also open up the possibility that the siege on Gaza will be lifted, giving room for West Bank businesses and international organizations to reengage there. The Syria track, or at least Turkish mediation, seems to be opening again. Meanwhile, Israeli politicians will almost certainly realign, too. The closer Netanyahu moves toward America, the closer he comes to bringing Tzipi Livni and Shaul Mofaz's Kadima party into the coalition. The closer he comes to conceding his need for America, the greater is the Palestinian incentive to get back into negotiations.

PERHAPS IT IS foolish to say that the catalyst for all of this movement was the Goldstone report, but on the whole the report has seemed a marker along the path that got us here. As my friend David Shulman pointed out in this very thoughtful post on the New York Review's blog, the Goldstone report, for all its (largely rhetorical) flaws, has driven home to Israel's government that a great many of Israel's erstwhile friends are sick of Israel's own crimes; that they will see even acts of Palestinian terror as a function of occupation--that the occupation will be seen as a chronic provocation. Which means that any actions by Israel to counter genuine terror--especially its inevitably asymmetrical actions: tanks against guns, planes against missiles--will only deepen Israel's isolation.

Or perhaps the report simply reinforced, what we all know in our bones, that there is so much blood on so many hands by now that the very idea of "moral high-ground" mocks our condition. That peace is the only idea that isn't boring.

Gratitude, Again

2009-11-25T05:29:00.006-05:00

Jim Carroll's column (or poem, or blessing) for Thanksgiving. It is too lovely to link to. Here are his words in full:

THANKSGIVING IS THE preferred American holiday not just because it is free of commercial pressures, denominational exclusiveness, and the insatiable longing of children. A month shy of the winter solstice, it is also less prone to inflict seasonal affective disorder, but that does not explain its appeal either. Nor does its distance from the frenzy of New Year’s. Thanksgiving’s place at the center of national good feeling might seem to derive from the sweet, if ahistorical, morality tale of amity between Pilgrims and native peoples. As the universal occasion of family reunion, what else is needed to account for its sanctity?

Sanctity: there’s the clue. Even a secular age desires holiness, and religious people, for their part, want holiness shorn of the normal hypocrisies of organized religion. At Thanksgiving, the secular and religious impulses, usually taken to be antagonists, salute each other with respect. Their spheres overlap. The holiday is built around gratitude, which is nothing less than the great human opening to transcendence, however defined.

What do we talk about, to paraphrase Raymond Carver, when we talk about thanks? Awareness begins when a person grasps the single-most basic fact of existence, which is that existence is given.

The most important aspects of each human’s condition, from physical makeup to intelligence to family connections to cultural legacy, are accidents of birth. The givens of life do not begin with us. How we make use of what we are given is something else, but givenness is the starting point. Self-consciousness is the recognition that we ourselves are not the source of our most precious selfhood. A religious view makes the instinctive leap from the given to the giver, calls it “God,’’ and offers gratitude as the essential form of worship.

But there is a secular equivalent to this impulse, even if it assumes no particular “giver,’’ no intelligent designer - nothing personal. The accidents of birth may have been shaped by a set of temporal precedents - driven, say, by cold dynamics like natural selection and random mutation. But what we are left with is the sacred experience of being, when there could have been nothingness. Awe, wonder, fear, and trembling - these define the spiritual response of the human person, who not only exists, but is existence conscious of itself.

Gratitude is built into that consciousness, needing no specified object, much less a named benefactor. Gratitude extends simply to all that went before, and all that sustains. Grateful to parents, and all ancestors; grateful to the fragile web of nature; grateful to the very air. As Americans, we can be grateful to particular traditions that protect our freedoms, and press us to expand them. As creatures, we can be so grateful to creation as to refuse the urge to make it stand for something else - even a Creator. We can say thanks without saying thank you. Gratefulness is open-ended.

An intense awareness of what is given assumes the like awareness that it will be taken. There was a time when the bounty of life that we celebrate by feasting did not exist, and a day is coming when it will be gone. Knowing that the feast will end is the precondition of true festivity.

No accident, therefore, that Thanksgiving comes as the climax of autumn, the season of mortality, when the vital abundance of nature harvests itself in one last flame-out of red and gold. The December holiday is all about nostalgia, a dream of the past. The New Year’s holiday is all about anticipation, resolutions for the future. Thanksgiving is the holiday of the present tense. We celebrate what we have and who we are - right now.

When religious folks take proper note of the transcendent gratitude of those for whom “God’’ is not necessary, believers, too, can be more open to the deeper meaning of Thanksgiving. One can leap too quickly to the other world, shortchanging this one. The overflowing banquet table is nothing if not worldly, gloriously so. Giving thanks to and for the ones with whom we gather is thus a profoundly secular act. But the great religions all say that such rare heartiness is enough - that loving gratefulness among humans is the only thanks that God ever wanted in the first place.

J Street And The Jewish Tradition

2009-11-24T01:17:00.007-05:00

The Jerusalem chapter of Search for Common Ground, along with the Washington Post's "On Faith" section, asked me to contribute 800 words on how Jewish values animated participants in J Street's October conference in Washington. So--not without hubris--I did:

During the first night of the J Street conference, when delegates were just getting settled, a half dozen speakers -- activists, rabbis and students -- unexpectedly poured their hearts out. The 1,500 people in the hall, the speakers insisted, were not only gathered to represent the majority of American Jews who think U.S. policy should put its weight behind bringing about a two state solution. We were gathered also to redeem "Jewish values." You heard a good deal of the phrase "Tikkun Olam," the repair of the world, that night. And I confess to cringing at times. Was social improvement a peculiarly Jewish desire? Could Tikkun Olam, a kabalistic concept turned into a leftist cliché, cancel out the fact that the Occupation is advanced by zealots of Jewish law, or that rightist, neoconservative ideas are particularly strong (so polls show) among the quarter of American Jews who attend synagogue at least once a month?

And yet something in the claim of these J Street speakers seems vaguely true. After all, 78 percent of American Jews voted for Barack Obama. Why, as the neoconservative Commentary Magazine complained in 1969, do Jews not just vote Republican and advance their class "interests?" Wasn't McCain a more avid "supporter of Israel?" Sure people who have been pushed around as much as Jews might be expected to be for the underdog, including Palestinians under occupation. But suffering, though ingrained in Jewish literature, is not uniquely Jewish either; nor does it necessarily make you peaceful or empathic. Are we to believe then that this desire for social improvement springs from Jewish tradition and if so, can it be redeemed by, of all things, J Street's American liberalism?

Actually, this begs the question, not of who is a Jew, but what is a tradition. Take the most solemn and widely observed Jewish practice, the Yom Kippur liturgy. Jews read the portion from Leviticus in which a stringent atonement fast is commanded. Right after, we read a portion from Isaiah in which people who afflict themselves with starvation are mocked: "No, this is the fast I desire: to ... untie the cords of the yoke," and so forth. In the afternoon, we chant the book of Jonah, in which God uses a parable to teach compassion to his own prophet, a man who -- much like neoconservatives -- says he would rather die than accept a world in which sinful people are not identified and punished.

So what is the tradition? The law commanded by Torah? Or is it the prophet's gloss on the law? Or another prophet's sublime lesson in humility? (or the Talmud's commentaries on the limits to humility?) The point is: the texts are not monolithic and mere humans have made choices about what commandments to perform, in what spirit; what interpretations to bring, and what texts or melodies to juxtapose. Before "modernity," rival rabbinic councils were the ones to choose; their implicit foil was the dogmatic uniformity of the Church. But at least since Napoleon marched the enlightenment into Poland, there was a new question: who gets to make the choices for Jewish "citizens" of a republic? This is where the liberal impulses circulating at J Street come in.

The phrase "Jewish values," you see, makes sense only to people who assume a world of (what we used to call) "free will." You have to believe that, generally, people have intellectual personality, individual sovereignty, and moral erudition -- that more sacred than the Book is the right to interpret books. Incidentally, this enlightenment insight not only marked Jews for successful acculturation into America, but arguably launched Zionism, too. If every Jew was going to be his own rabbi, then Jewish civilization had best be held together by a common language and territory.

So if Jews can be said to have stood for anything traditionally, was it not this allergy to dogma -- this breaking of idols? Did we not see democratic rights as, well, commanded? And, tragically, have not the land of Israel and Jewish military power themselves become idols for American Jews since 1967 -- or at least for leaders who spoke for the "community," while liberals remained aloof from its parochialism? Anyway, J Street says, "No more." Occupation and settlements justified by isolated passages of scripture debases the way Jews justify anything. Jews are not, or not only, an interest group. It is now Palestinians who have a "yoke" to "untie."

In his 1934 preface to the Hebrew translation of Totem and Taboo, Freud asked: when you eliminate Hebrew, the "religion of one's fathers," and "nationalist ideals," what "is left that is Jewish?" He answered: "A very great deal, and probably its very essence." Perhaps.

Jerusalem Syndrome

2009-11-23T03:46:00.004-05:00

Akiva Eldar hits the nail on the head:

What could they possibly want from us? That was the combined reaction of the president, the mayor, the cabinet ministers and the head of the opposition. After all, they said, Gilo is at the heart of the Israeli consensus. What does that consensus mean? Reminder: In June 1967 Israel annexed to Jerusalem some 70 square kilometers of West Bank territory, including 28 Palestinian municipalities and villages that were never considered part of the city. When Jordan controlled Jerusalem, it was six square kilometers, including the Old City, whose territory is no more than a single square kilometer.

Since 1967, some 30 percent of East Jerusalem land has been appropriated for the construction of new neighborhoods for some 200,000 Israelis. Indeed, there is consensus among Israelis that in a peace agreement that would include exchange of territory, Gilo would remain under Israeli sovereignty. But not in a unilateral step that would not be recognized by any other country. Around the world, there is wall-to-wall agreement that East Jerusalem is at best disputed territory; in the Arab world, the consensus is that it is occupied territory.

Read his whole column about the status of Jerusalem, from today's Haaretz.

Intel Inside? Prove It.

2009-11-22T04:00:00.035-05:00

Here is a thought experiment. It is Sunday, and various employees of Intel's R&D and consulting facility in Chantilly, VA, just outside of Washington, are working through the week-end. The facility is suddenly surrounded by several thousand evangelical Christians--mainly educated at Regent University, and led by the aged Pat Robertson--who demand that the company shut down the facility, so as not to violate the holy Sabbath. Windows are shattered by rock throwers. State police move in, but do not disband the mobs.

So Intel's senior management go into a huddle. They authorize the local management team to meet with Robertson's representatives, along with representatives from the Virginia governor's office, now in the hands of rightist Republicans. At first Intel threatens to pull out of Virginia. But finally they approve a compromise agreement. The facility can stay open, the agreement states, but the shifts will be reduced. Also, on Sundays, only non-Christians can work there.

Imagine, in this fantasy, what the Intel board would face at the next shareholders' meeting. Or imagine the employee emails the corporation's global "Director of Diversity," Rosalind Hudnell, would be fielding the next morning.

IF YOU HAVEN'T already heard, something quite like this just happened in Jerusalem. A week ago Saturday, Intel's facility on Har Ha'Hotzvim--a technology park in a belt of land near (but not at all in) the burgeoning ultraOrthodox neighborhood of Sanhedria--was surrounded and vandalized by acolytes of various Haredi rabbis, most notably, the leader of Eda, Rabbi Yitzhak Tuvia Weiss. Intel met with representatives of the Haredi groups, facilitated by Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat and Knesset Speaker Ruby Rivlin--both rightists tied to Haredi voters. The Sabbath shift, so the "compromise" stipulates, will be cut from 120 employees to 20. None of them will be Jews. (By the way, this absurd agreement may have satisfied most, but not Rabbi Weiss. His mobs were back yesterday demanding a complete shut down.)

What can Intel's leadership possibly be thinking? Have they lost all sense of who they are, let alone what Intel has meant to Israel? Intel's global sales are roughly equal to Israel's GDP. Intel's billions of dollars of investments in Israel have not only made it the country's largest high-tech employer, but have engendered dozens of entrepreneurial businesses, from software to clean-room building.

Even more important, perhaps, Intel has been something like Israel's most important business school, putting thousands through management and quality training over the years. Its impact on Israel's business culture has been something like MIT and the Sloan School on Cambridge, Mass. It is because they experienced companies like Intel that a new generation of cosmopolitan managers (people who, unlike their parents' generation, know how to listen) has grown up in the "Silicon Wadi" of Tel-Aviv, Herzliya, and Haifa. Indeed, Intel-Israel's former CEO and founder, the legendary Dov Frohman, has a briskly selling book on leadership. My God, if Intel will not stand for ordinary secular norms of human rights in Israel, who will?

PERHAPS THE MOST depressing thing about this affair is the way Intel's management seems to have concluded that this is the price you pay for operating in a Jewish state. Intel's employees chant, "Bum-bum-bum-bum"; employees in the Jewish state are now and then forced to add, "Cheery-beery-bum!" Okay, this may not be the place to go into it, but Intel's decision implicitly capitulates to the notion, so casual among many clueless American Jews, that Israel is a something like a big shtetl, run to a great extent by Halachic rules, rationales, and rabbis. This capitulation is dangerous: to Israeli Arabs, to Palestinians, but above all to Israel's secular citizens who mostly consider themselves Jews in a wholly different way.

Look, last week, on a glorious Friday morning, my wife and I drove to Tel-Aviv and participated in a lively seminar to celebrate a new Hebrew translation of Freud's Moses and Monotheism; in the afternoon, we saw a brilliant, elegiac show about the settlements of the Valley of Jezreel by the Kfar Yehoshua artist, Eli Shamir--our budding Andrew Wyeth. This Hebrew version of the global thing, including a Hebrew version of Intel, is the real reason for this country. You can have Shabbes in Teaneck.

Which is not to say that Intel executives should take sides in a Kulturkampf to decide the historical reasons for Zionism. It is to say that Intel should just have the guts to be itself: to stop pandering, to stop thinking that it shows its tolerance for diversity by surrendering to diversely intolerant people. In fact, a majority of Israelis are counting on the conscience of the world to help them muddle through against Hamas on the one hand, and, on the other, the one-third (and growing) part of the of the Israeli population who want, say, the national orthodox assassin of Yitzhak Rabin to be released from prison. Intel, and all global companies operating in Israel, should be a pillar of (here, I'll say it) Western values. Allow fanatics to push out this pillar, and our souls will die with the Philistines.

Realists

2009-11-17T03:24:00.022-05:00

I understand the desire of New York Times columnists to appear realist. Writers who advocate for US intervention to induce Israeli-Palestinian peace, in column after column, month after month, can get to look, well, idealist. Writers are assumed to be wimps anyway.

Still, something strange is happening. On two occasions in as many weeks, columnists who have written passionately about the US pushing peace have argued, in effect, that the Obama administration should just disengage. Last week, Tom Friedman wrote that it’s "time to call a halt to this dysfunctional 'peace process,' which is only damaging the Obama team’s credibility." Today, Roger Cohen sees Tom Friedman's bid, and raises him, quoting Israel's most widely respected political scientist to boot:

Obama, who has his Nobel already, should ratchet expectations downward. Stop talking about peace. Banish the word. Start talking about détente. That’s what Lieberman wants; that’s what Hamas says it wants; that’s the end point of Netanyahu’s evasions.

It’s not what Abbas wants but he’s powerless. Shlomo Avineri, a political scientist, told me, “A nonviolent status quo is far from satisfactory but it’s not bad. Cyprus is not bad.”

I have abiding admiration for Shlomo Avineri (and Friedman and Cohen as well), but there is something in this realism that lacks common sense. For it assumes that the status quo can remain peaceful, especially if "we stop talking about peace." That Palestinians can pursue some under-the-radar economic evolution, or that Israelis and their "security wall" can force things to remain quiet when they have to; that Obama and America are better off letting the sides pursue detente, not peace--as if "some non-violent status quo" will hold; as if only idealists like Obama are making the great the enemy of the good.

LOOK, THIS IS all dangerously wrong--and familiar. Moshe Dayan, too, had proposed an "open bridges" policy--in effect, the status quo occupation, in which Palestinians accommodate to economic peace, while Israel does its thing in Jerusalem and with settlements--and the 1973 War blew it up. This has happened again and again since. And today, too, the status quo is a powder keg, and the blasting caps are, among other things, "what Lieberman wants" and "what Hamas says it wants." Is a realist someone whose purchase on reality is so great there is nothing to learn from experience?

The wall has made a pathetic ghetto of the nearly 300,000 Arabs of Jerusalem. A couple of nights ago, a gang of youths from East Jerusalem had some fun--so my young friend, the journalist Benjamin Joffe-Walt, told me--attacking night-clubbers in Nachalat Shiva, right in front of his apartment, with electric cattle prods. The last two terror attacks against Jews in Jerusalem came from neighborhoods within the wall. South Central LA anyone? Do we even need more disturbances on the Temple Mount to get things to blow?
Nor, as I've argued again and again, can the Palestinian economy grow at nearly the rate it needs to--certainly not "like Cyprus"--if the occupation is not ended. IDF presence is largely meant to secure settlements in Area B and C--belts of land that surround Palestinian towns. So the occupation is a kind of antibiotic against Palestinian entrepreneurship. The Palestine Authority is much more likely to just collapse, or fold up, than engage in some "detente" with an ongoing occupation, with its closure regime. Read Shaul Arieli's urgent piece in today's Haaretz, which argues that the status quo, leading to the PA's "disintegration," would open the door to Hamas; or read Steven Cook's thoughtful piece in, of all places, The New Republic.
IDF units sympathetic to Greater Israel are already showing an unwillingness to follow any orders to evacuate settlements. This tendency will only grow.
If the West Bank blows, so will the Arab towns of Israel's little triangle, which Lieberman has already defined as alien to Israel (unless its residents, who have committed to Hebrew, also swear to uphold Israel as a "Zionist-Jewish" state). And when these towns blow, we will be in a Balkan-like civil war, with all the trappings: sniping, ethnic cleansing, terror on all sides.
Oh, and remember Hezbollah's and Hamas's missiles? If the Mubarak regime in Egypt falls to Islamist rioters, will that be good for America, let alone Israel? No doubt, such riots will have a formal cause in Islamist attitudes toward the West; but will not the efficient cause likely be yet more pictures on Al-Jazeera of Israeli bombs dropping on civilian buildings where missiles are launched? Will Mubarak protect the Israeli embassy yet again?

I could go on, but enough is enough. Leave this monster alone, and its violence will destroy the people who live here; and, meanwhile, the things Israelis do to avoid destruction will destroy everything Obama is trying to achieve in the Islamic world.

And as for Shlomo Avineri's sense of things, a little history. When I first got to know him, as a grateful graduate student in 1972, he chastised the peace movement that advocated for a Palestinian state. No, he said, Dayan's "open bridges," preserving the status quo, was the only realistic way to go. When Avineri was Director General of the Foreign Ministry under Yigal Allon in 1976, President Sadat sent Israel his first direct message that he was interested pursuing a comprehensive deal. The foreign ministry (among others in Prime Minister Rabin's government) rejected the overtures, since the National Religious Party, which was part of the coalition, had threatened to bolt if the West Bank would become a focus for any negotiation. Avineri, among others, supposed Sadat's initiative was unrealistic.

There is, in other words, a kind of realism that you can never look stupid peddling. It basically assumes the present exercise of force is always better than the prospect of making peace with political enemies, because the other side can never be trusted; that, Hobbes or no Hobbes, it is vain to try to conceive of institutions in which trust is hedged about by policing, clear commitments and simple justice. I am not sure why we need "political scientists" who do not help us conceive these very institutions, especially in the face of violence and threats. In any case, the only psychological force more powerful than realism seems to be repetition compulsion.

Holy, Holy, Holy

2009-11-10T03:15:00.002-05:00

Harvey Cox, Mary Gordon, and Cornell West.

For those of you who think you've heard the last of God, listen to these three at the Boston Public Library, interviewed by the indispensable Chris Lydon, and broadcast on his Open Source webcast.

What Can Obama Do About Palestine, Meanwhile?

2009-11-08T06:26:00.009-05:00

My old friend Danny Rubinstein, who has covered the West Bank pretty much since the occupation began, came over Friday afternoon. He had covered this week's expulsion of Palestinian residents from their disputed home in Sheikh Jarrah. He had just come from conversations with Palestinian journalists in East Jerusalem, and was not in a cheerful frame of mind.

One gets the feeling that things are coming to a head, he says, what with Mahmoud Abbas' announcement that he would not seek reelection, and Netanyahu headed to a Washington whose Congress had just denounced the Goldstone Report. The Israeli government is doing what it can to defend the status quo. But the status quo engenders a disaster, and the Obama administration is understandably distracted.

The question is not whether time is running out on a two-state solution, as if one state, like South Africa, could ever happen here. The real question is whether we are going to prevent the kind of general violence that will turn Israel and Palestine into a Balkans-style conflict, with Jerusalem a kind of Sarajevo, and the Israeli Arab villages of the Little Triangle a kind of Bosnia. Without palpable outside action to move Israel off the status quo, especially from the Obama administration, the streets of the West Bank will blow. But Obama has no desire to pick a fight with any senators just now, not until 60 of them vote to end the inevitable Republican filibuster.

ABBAS, YOU SEE, is not the point. He has been a force for reconciliation, perhaps the best partner Israel could ever have (or so former Labor minister Ephraim Sneh writes in today's Haaretz), but his personal prestige was never very great. That he is threatening to withdraw from politics is a symptom of danger, not a danger in itself. For Abbas has always been a kind of national working hypothesis: that Ramallah's secular bourgeoisie was a natural leadership to bring forth a state, and that its power to create the rule of law, and its prospects in the regional economy, justified patience; that the continuing flow of money from the international community justified having a person in the (albeit diminished) Palestinian Authority that outsiders could trust.

But when ordinary people in the streets of the West Bank start to believe that this leadership cannot be trusted to deliver--that donor money is meant to palliate them during a silent ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem and the annexation of their land by settlers--Hamas will appear the only game in town. We seem to be in a race between the vote on healthcare in the Senate and the outbreak of riots around Al-Aqsa.

THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION cannot just sit on its hands, and seems to know what it needs to do in the long run. But what exactly can it do in the short-run to reassure Palestinians without inciting a public backlash among senators eager to prove their "friendship" to Israel. The dispute over a "settlements freeze" has proven a dead end, since everybody (including leaders of the PA) have been working on the assumption that at least some of the citified settlements will be annexed to Israel, while Palestine would be compensated with a land swap. Neither could the Obama administration endorse the Goldstone report, which Palestinians justifiably regard as a touchstone of others' empathy for them, without laying itself open to charges that it is cavalier about missiles falling on Israel.

Somehow, then, the administration has to signal that it is not only serious about pursuing a Palestinian state but that it has a pretty clear understanding of what that state would look like, where its borders will be, and so forth--and that it is not simply a cheerleader for negotiations that will, under present circumstances, prove fruitless. But how do you buy time without appearing to endorse the status quo? How do you signal the outlines of the state without presenting the whole plan for a state?

ALL OF WHICH brings me back to Rubinstein. Perhaps the most depressing thing he told me confirms apprehensions I wrote about in Harper's last month, that while the Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad is trying to build out the foundations of a Palestinian state--say, through massive construction projects in and around Ramallah--he is being thwarted in all kinds of ways by the occupation authorities and the IDF. Almost no developments in Area A (the cores of Palestinian cities), for example, can fail to encroach on Areas B and C where the IDF controls the roads and airspace--more than 60% of the West Bank. "He is trying to break ground on the Al-Ersal project and he is suddenly up against a road the settlers use only for themselves in Area C. This is so called 'state land,' the Israeli government has taken from Jordan and calls its own."

But here, precisely, is an opportunity for the American government, is it not? Suppose the Obama administration were to commit, say, $50 million to this project and use its public influence to seek its construction. If the Israeli government gets in the way, then it is obstructing a joint Palestinian-American project. If the question comes up whether parts of Area B or C around the project are ultimately going to be part of the Palestinian state, then the American administration can signal--that is, in advance of any negotiation--that it is siding with the Palestine authority over the interests of the settlers.

The point is, we have to move away from statements of principle to manifest demonstrations of intention. America has to become Palestine's partner not only in training police, but in expanding the foundations of commerce and statehood. Just as important, the Obama administration needs to prove that, unlike its predecessor, it will not become an inadvertent tool of the settlers.

And if while it's focussed on its domestic priorities the administration can't avoid a fight with AIPAC's favorite politicians, let it be over something the vast majority of Israelis, let alone Americans, would support. I mean the peaceful development of Palestinian civil society in parts of the West Bank where cities are growing and, border or no border, settlers have crossed all bounds.

Connected Cars: The 'Killer App' For The Smart Grid--And The New Driver of Growth

2009-11-04T03:47:00.015-05:00

Job figures are lagging indicators but nobody feels reassured right now. It is hard to imagine Americans returning to something like the full employment of the 1980s and 1990s without new industries like telecom and computers engendering a vast new ecosystem of entrepreneurial businesses; companies in which American technological talent can distinguish itself; companies that either require local workers for infrastructure projects, or, design and manufacture products and components whose labor content is too small for managers to consider outsourcing to the Far East.

The good news is that the electric car is around the corner. The bad news--which is the best news of all for the economy, ironically--is that the electric grid cannot begin to cope with the electric car's demands and possibilities. Layering in all the network technology that will smarten the grid, and preparing electric cars to communicate with it (and each other), will transform our economic and physical landscape. These changes will require a new role for government--something the Obama administration seems to understand. I explore the new ecosystem and its implication in the current Inc. Magazine:

At ground level, electric cars like GM's Chevrolet Volt -- due to be launched in November 2010 -- are pretty much everything the U.S. economy is banking on. The cars promise innovative engineering and a resurgence of the American auto industry. They mean an America that is manufacturing things rather than just bundling financial instruments. Cosmically, electric cars mean green technologies that will migrate to China, India, and Brazil, where they will allow for Western styles of personal freedom yet not threaten to overheat the earth.

And you don't have to be George Clooney to want one. Electric cars may be vaguely cool, but GM executives are counting on drivers with nothing more than a householder's logic, something like the good sense to refinance a mortgage when the 30-year-fixed drops more than 2 percent. Jon Lauckner, GM's vice president of global product planning, tells me that his team set out to trump gas-powered cars as a matter of straightforward economics, especially as economic recovery pushes the price of gas back over $3 a gallon. "At that level," Lauckner says, "the cost of running a Volt in full electric mode will be about one-sixth that of a gas-driven car of the same size, 2 or 3 cents a mile rather than 12 to 15 cents a mile. We figured that, for most people, this means a savings of about $1,500 a year." Sticker prices will be high; the suggested price of the Volt will be about $40,000. But federal tax rebates are anticipated to be as much as $7,500, not to mention various state incentives. So the actual price will probably be closer to $30,000 -- not a bad deal, given that borrowing costs will be low for some time.

When he speaks of "full electric mode," Lauckner is acknowledging another barrier he expects the Volt to take down, namely range anxiety, the fear of getting stuck with rundown batteries while driving in a snowstorm, bumper to bumper, on a 150-mile trip to the in-laws'. The Volt will come equipped with a small gas engine, unlike its forthcoming competitors: the smaller Nissan Leaf, BMW's plug-in Mini Cooper E, and Ford's electric Focus. This engine will not drive the wheels, as with the hybrids now on the market (actually, GM likes to call the Volt an "extended range electric car," not a hybrid), but will act as a dynamo to supply the electricity for the car after 40 miles of running on stored power.

The Volt's designers assumed, per Department of Transportation data, that nearly 80 percent of Americans drive 20 miles or less to work. This is why GM was able to make the technically true but sly announcement that the Volt earned a 230-mpg rating for city driving from the EPA. "Most drivers will hardly ever use this engine," says Tony Posawatz, the Volt's line director. "We may have to educate people to change their oil because it hasn't been used for a year! Anyway, when the range-extending engine kicks in, drivers can go up to 300 miles, like a conventional car. In a pinch, they can make use of the existing gas-station infrastructure."

And so, assuming these cars prove safe and reliable, American consumers will almost certainly consume them. U.S. auto companies will make them, and that's good for the planet, right? Yes, but.

Continue with the article here.

Palestine Economy: Update

2009-11-03T07:28:00.015-05:00

I spent the day in Ramallah yesterday, attending a meeting of information technology and telecom entrepreneurs, and catching up with some of the folks I reported on in last month's Harper's: Palestinian business leaders who are, slowly but surely, laying the ground for Palestinian civil society; people fighting the limitations of occupation at every turn just to keep their businesses afloat, while the Netanyahu government boasts about "economic peace."

I reported, for example, on the stalled efforts to launch Wataniya, the Palestine Investment Fund-backed cell phone provider, which had been promised 4.8 megahertz of spectrum by the Israeli government. (Wataniya was conceived by the PIF to compete with Jawal, in effect, the monopoly provider that had been started by the dominant PALTEL, and which now has a million and a half subscribers.) It is important to understand that Wataniya would be stiffening the spine of the Palestinian economy as a whole by inducing competition, and bringing down prices, for services every emerging business desperately needs.

Wataniya--so its Chairman, the PIF's head, Mohamed Mustafa, told me--was organized to offer Palestine's first 3G network. When I wrote my piece, Israel had released only 3.8 megahertz but kept the rest without explanation, suggesting Jawal share what it had. Mustafa was threatening to bury the entire deal, rather than launch Wataniya with one arm tied behind its back. Anyway, Wataniya finally launched a couple of days ago, a "soft-launch" Mustafa told me, not without good cheer, practicing his elevator speech. The company would not be able to offer all the services it had prepared for; it would focus instead "on customer service" while offering 2.5G services like text and messaging.

It is hard to imagine a management more persistent or forward-looking. The conference was buzzing with hopes engendered by the PIF's various investments, not only in telecom, but in commercial office parks and micro-lending. Yet PIF investments are hamstrung by, among other things, its being shut out of Jerusalem. One feature of competition in Palestine's telecom industry is customer poaching by Israeli providers. (Palestinian companies have exclusive rights in Area A, the centers of Palestinian towns and cities where the Israel Defense forces tend to stay out; but in Areas B and C, where the army and settlers operate freely, and in East Jerusalem--altogether, in two-thirds of the Palestinian territories--Israeli cell phone companies operate illegally but with impunity.) In East Jerusalem, Palestinian providers have no access whatsoever.

WHICH BRINGS ME to increasingly ominous economic trends in East Jerusalem, the once and historic hub of all West Bank cities, including Ramallah. The former economics minister of the Palestinian Authority, Bassim Khoury, recently sent me his summary of depressing data ferreted out of Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics. The conclusions suggest why Ramallah's business class may well lose the race to preempt a Bosnia-type violence that may engulf them and Jerusalem both:

Per capita income of Arabs in Jerusalem is less than half of Jews, who are on average the poorest in Israel. Unemployment among Arabs is 25%, 10% higher than in the West Bank as a whole. Infant mortality is almost double that of Jews, though the birthrate is about the same. About 85% of the municipal education budget goes to Jews, 15% to Arabs, though Arabs are about 30% of the grade school population. 50% of Arabs live under the poverty line, while 25% of Jews do so. This means both Arabs and Jews have about 125,000 people officially defined as "impoverished," but the Jews get 88% of the welfare budget. The city of Jerusalem spends about five times more on Jews than on Arabs per capita for municipal services of all kinds (sewage, garbage collection, etc.). Jews get 98% of the "cultural" budget.

Remember, East Jerusalem is now separated from the other West Bank cities by a wall. The idea was to fence out deadly violence. But the trajectory of social relations in the city suggests violence is only being fenced in. (This was predictable.) Last week's disturbances at Al-Aqsa suggest how it will start, which is pretty much the way violence has started in Jerusalem since 1920. Considering the Jewish people's past, it would be rude to call East Jerusalem a kind of ghetto. So let's just call it a walled-in, patrolled, increasingly impoverished enclave for people with diminishing political rights and unlimited encouragement to leave.

Yasir Barakat, among the most established merchants in the Old City, tells me he knows "nobody whose educated children are not planning to leave Jerusalem if they can." Yasir is one of my oldest friends in Jerusalem. He is not sleeping well. His daughter is now in Dubai, a son is studying in England, and another son, with a degree in network security from England, is working (for now) in Ramallah. “Let’s be honest. There is no give-and-take anymore. The Jews think this all belongs to them and that’s that.”

Peacemakers: Palestine's Business Class

2009-11-01T03:34:00.002-05:00

For those of you who wanted to read my piece in the October Harper's on Palestine's business class, but were deterred by having to buy a Harper's subscription to access current articles, you may now download the pdf. here.

The Law Of Return: 'Oh Learned Judge!'

2009-10-30T09:17:00.013-04:00

Undaunted in his campaign to ferret out “anti-Zionists,” yet apparently wondering if his own powers may be faltering, Jeffrey Goldberg has called in his Balthazar, “the erudite Yaacov Lozowick,” to deal with a hard case:

"My impression of The Hebrew Republic thesis is that [Avishai is] talking about medinat kol exrachai'ah, the country of its citizens. This idea was formulated and mostly promoted by folks who were not only non-Zionist, they were anti-Zionist; it was a ploy to weaken the Jewish aspect of Israel until eventually the Jewish state would be submerged into its Arab environment. Yet Avishai isn't Azmi Bishara. I get the impression he's a caring Jew who is attracted to the medinat kol exrachai'ah idea because it fits so nicely into his broader Weltanschauung, the one that praises the European Union as the way of the future, the goal of human history and so on. On that level, he's non-Zionist because he's joining forces with a particular group of enemies of Zionism, even though he and they are using the same concepts for very different goals."

There is more to his letter. You cannot really understand the surreal quality of intellectual life in Israel today—the rhetoric you hear from talk shows to academic conferences—unless you take a moment to digest it whole.

Yet beyond the glib “impressions” of books unread, the illogic (“non” = “anti”), the cozy appeal to dogma (“the Zionist way”), the guilt by association, the condescending tone, the last-minute finessing of obvious contradictions (viz., “the Zionist way” that takes Israeli Arabs as a “constituency and responsibility”), even the yanking-in of hackneyed German to sound, well, “erudite”—beyond all of this transparent demagogy—is a common claim that requires a moment’s thought.

It is that people who argue Israel should be a state of its citizens cannot believe Israel should be a “Jewish state.” Presumably, “state of its citizens,” medinat kol exrachai'ah (actually, this should be ezrakheha), is an idea that originated with “enemies of Zionism” such as Azmi Bishara.

And here I thought the principle that a democratic state’s legitimacy derives from the just consent of the governed was older than that. I also thought it was the counterpart to an argument about human nature and human limitations, you know, a moral argument reasonable people since Kant have had some trouble refuting. Wow, it is actually only a Weltanschauung our kids and other “poor, deluded dears” pick up along with a Eurail pass.

Had Lozowick actually read The Hebrew Republic, rather than merely forming an impression of its thesis, he would know that its point was to clarify just how a democratic state could retain a Jewish national character; how to protect its cultural distinction without violating ordinary standards of human rights. I am no Emile Zola, God knows. But imagine someone saying that Zola's case for equal treatment for Jews in the Republic was discredited by the fact that Jews had demanded it before him; that the case "originated" with enemies of the French nation. (Come to think of it, it is not so hard to imagine such people, is it?)

By the way, I interviewed Azmi Bishara at length in the book, and though I took issue with him on many points, Bishara shared with me his abiding respect for the work of Achad Haam, Zionism’s most influential early writer, who was trying to explain how the “Hebrew national atmosphere” created by Zionism was the only way, really, to create a state of its citizens that was also a Jewish state. The replacement of the Law of Return with an immigration law that gives preference to refugees from anti-Semitism, but conditions citizenship on naturalization to Israeli identity, not J-positive blood, is just one reform that is overdue.

A FINAL WORD to Goldberg. Look, Jeffrey, people we know in common tell me you are “good company,” and given your delight in identifying yourself as a teenage acolyte of Shomer Hatzair, I suspect that, had we met under different circumstances, and though you are closer to my son’s age than mine, we would probably have become what writers call “friends.” Hell, we might have traded nostalgic, knowing glosses on why Borochov’s slavish borrowing from Plekhanov actually caused him to misunderstand how Jewish workers in the Pale would suffer from the rise in the “organic composition” of capital—or was it just that the Shomer Hatazir shaliach in your hometown served better pizza than USY?

In any case, I am humbly asking that you stop. The claims you continue to make about me—that is, “anti-Zionists” like me—are too silly to be worth anyone’s time, but the reach of the Atlantic website is too important to ignore. If I do not respond, it may seem that your take-away is true, or plausible, or at least worth repeating.

Nor is this 1909, when calling someone anti-Zionist meant you were merely a part of a fascinating debate on how Jews survive “modernity.” It is 2009, and calling someone anti-Zionist tends to type him as opposed to the very existence of Israel or a Jewish national home of any kind. Given the constellation that runs from Hamas to the Oxford Debating Union, the epithet can do a person harm.

And I write from the gate at JFK, returning (legally, but warily) to Jerusalem, embattled enough by the fear that Sidra’s and my home will soon be swept up in a kind of Balkan tragedy, with bloody-minded fanatics on both sides demanding allegiance, and "experts" like Lozowick only too eager to choose sides. My deeds upon my head! I crave the law, if not that law. I have enough on my mind.

Hebron Letter: A Good Man

2009-10-26T22:38:00.005-04:00

This, from my old friend David Shulman, who is continuing his campaign of witness in the south Hebron hills, still led by by the indomitable Ezra Nawi:

No settlers anywhere nearby, no soldiers, nothing will happen today"— Ezra keeps reassuring our Palestinian friends on the cell phone as we drive down to south Hebron in the early morning. By the time we reach our meeting point near Samu'a, a good group is in place: some twenty Palestinians and another eight or nine Ta'ayush activists. Most of the Palestinians belong to Samu'a, and the fields we are heading toward through the wadis belong to them, though they have no access to them any more. The "illegal outpost" of Asael, one of the uglier and more malignant in this area, has stolen them.

Ezra seems in good spirits despite the handing down of his sentence on Wednesday, three days ago. Judge Eilata Ziskind, who had already found him guilty of assaulting two Border Policemen in February 2007—a trumped-up charge, in my estimation—sentenced him to a month in jail, a fine of 750 Israeli shekels, another 500 shekels to each of the allegedly traumatized policemen and, the real killer, a six-month suspended jail sentence, in force for the next three years, to be activated any time Ezra is arrested again for "unlawful assembly" or similar heinous crimes. She clearly wanted to neutralize him for the coming years. In addition, she used the occasion to read out a moralistic sermon about orderliness and democracy. "Freedom of expression," she said, "is not the freedom to incite and take actions that prevent or disrupt police work… Democracy cannot allow this, for if the law enforcement system collapses, anarchy will reign and democracy and freedom of expression will be no more." It's more or less what one could have expected. After all, one wouldn't ever want to disrupt, by non-violent protest, the work of the police or the soldiers, not even when they come to knock down the rickety hovels of Palestinian shepherds as they did that day at Umm al-Khair. Ezra threw himself in front of the bulldozers, thus delaying the demolitions by a few minutes—an excellent reason, no doubt, to send him to jail. If you don't, anarchy may reign.

Maybe the appeal will quash this verdict. The international campaign clearly has had an effect. In the meantime, it's business as usual; it will take much more than this to stop Ezra Nawi. So here we are in the sun-baked fields of Samu'a, in the mid-morning sun, just below Asael. I have to say these fields don't look too promising. There was little rain last year, and the land seems terminally dessicated, almost beyond redemption. 'Id, walking beside me, can see at a glance that even the thorny bushes they call natj have remained untouched for a long time by the goats who usually feed on them. Apparently, the settlers have driven the shepherds off. The few goat droppings he can see, with his farmer's eyes, are very old. The only fresh droppings are from the wild gazelles that roam these hills: recently 'Id saw a herd of twenty of them, magnificent in these open spaces on the edge of the desert. To make these fields arable again, they will have to be cleared of stones and rained upon; the first task, a forbidding one, is ours. I glance over the first plot, at the bottom of the hill; at a conservative estimate, some 10,000 rocks, of varying shapes and sizes, will have to be pried out of the clay and re-instated as a terrace that will stand up to the water that will, hopefully, come pouring down the hill when the rains do start. By comparison, Sisyphus had an easy time.

We begin working with pick-axes and our bare hands, and as always there is the joy of doing it and especially of seeing the rightful owners of this land returning, at last, to care for it. I'm especially moved watching a middle-aged Palestinian woman working, face partly covered, hands heavy with thorns and stones, beside me. Of course we can't remove all the rocks, but the plot is looking more inviting by the minute, and soon we drift to the next terrace up, and the next one, getting closer at every step to the outer perimeter of the settlement on top of the hill. Naturally, we haven't gone unnoticed. A heavy-set settler in his Shabbat white is staring down at us, and beside him there are soldiers, first only a few, then more and more, and in less than an hour, with the horrid sense of inevitability that so often signals human folly, they are clumsily descending in our direction. They are proudly waving the piece of paper that can only be the order declaring this area a Closed Military Zone.

The senior officer, bearded, young, opaque, reads it out: "By the authority legally vested in me, etc. etc." He gives us exactly ten minutes to desist from our subversive activity and to disappear. Well drilled in these rituals, we argue with him. If this is a CMZ and we are supposed to leave, we say, then why do those settlers on the hilltop get to stay? Ah yes, "by the authority vested in me, those whom I allow to stay can stay. You now have nine and a half minutes." Amiel leaps to the occasion. He carries with him, always, the text of the Supreme Court's ruling that local military commanders have no right to declare these closed military zones whenever the whim strikes them, and above all they are prohibited from using this mechanism to keep farmers away from their lands. Amiel reads out the text of the court's decision. The officer is utterly unimpressed. "You have eight minutes left."

We go back to work, and now each rock I pry from the recalcitrant soil seems to have some special meaning, as if defiance, however quixotic, were imprinted on it. The Palestinians also accelerate their pace. As always, the South Hebron hills are a good place for unexpected encounters. One of the soldiers, smiling, suddenly greets me by name. I don't recognize him at first, in his fancy-dress costume—helmet, uniform, rifle—but he tells me his name: Spartak, a former student. He studied Sanskrit with me, wrote a very good M.A. thesis. I haven't seen him for some years, but I announce at once to whoever wants to hear: "I don’t mind being arrested, but only if Spartak carries out the order." It would be nice to hear his views on the task he is engaged in. "Seven and a half minutes." By now a genial policeman whom we know well from many such occasions has also turned up and announced, in his mild-mannered way, that by refusing to leave the CMZ we are committing a crime, hindering a public servant in discharging his duty (shades of Judge Ziskind). I figure this merits a response, so I say to him: "And what about those settlers? Their very presence here is a crime by international law and by any ethical standard." He smiles and nods. To my surprise, he agrees with me. "True," he says, "but that's not relevant now." "How could it not be relevant?" "Six minutes left before we start making arrests."

...

You remember what Priam said to Achilles, how he kissed the hand that had killed his son, and how the two of them wept together, Achilles remembering his old father, and how the whole huge war and everything that had been said or sung about it suddenly seemed so futile and foolish and unbearable, a world empty of anything remotely like glory but suffused by shame. You remember how you didn't really want to get up so early this morning and go off to South Hebron because it all seems so futile, and now that today is over it still feels futile and yet strangely beautiful, as if some intimate chord had been struck even if no one could hear it, even if you could barely hear it yourself. Maybe, you might think for a passing moment, it's beautiful because it's futile—but actually you don't believe that. You remember how when you were driving down this morning there were ragged children playing ball by the roadside and the ball rolled onto the highway and Ezra stopped the car right there in the middle of the vast desert and waited for them to cross over and retrieve their ball safely, and you thought: it's a small, everyday gesture, hardly worth noticing in the midst of the madness, but this is the act of a good man.

American Jewish Power: A Clarification

2009-10-23T18:19:00.004-04:00

In a previous post, I wrote this:

In other words, the key to AIPAC's emergence was a Manichean view from America; the fight against the Evil Empire, or since 9/11, the clash of civilizations. In this drama, Israel became cast as America's biggest regional aircraft carrier. AIPAC has succeeded by staying close to American hardliners, arguing against pressuring Israel (to give up territory, to stop settlements, etc.) for the same reason a basketball coach will not foolishly demoralize his slightly brazen power-forward. At the center of the argument was a way of thinking about American hegemony in a dangerous world.

YOU CAN SAY that AIPAC was misguided, that it’s even become a pernicious force, but you can't deny that it got its strategic premises ordered properly. One cannot just assume that the Congress will care what Jews want. One has to start with America's foreign policy strategy and then apply its logic to the Middle East. Crucially, this means building coalitions with non-Jews as well, as any watcher of FOX News can see.

In response, Philip Weiss has written a long, thoughtful post taking issue with the statement that "Congress will care what Jews want." I won't try to reproduce his arguments; you can read them here.

What I should have said, perhaps, is that Congresspeople cannot respond to Jews, or indeed, any ethnic or national sub-group in America, apart from the ways they are presumed to inform or contribute to the common good of Americans as a whole. Jews are powerful, alright, but (much as Phil shows) because of the ways they enrich America's view of itself. This must also be true of the ways Jews inform foreign policy decisions. I thought the point was self-evident; with interest group and identity politics so second nature these days, the point is sometimes lost.

Goldberg: The Last Word (At Least From Me)

2009-10-22T16:03:00.013-04:00

A couple of days ago, Jeffrey Goldberg explained why he was disinclined to associate with J Street, in spite of his sympathy for a two-state solution:

So I'm comfortable in many ways with J Street's basic worldview. On the other hand, I don't think the group has put forward a well-articulated vision of what a progressive Jewish democratic Israel should look like. This might be because, in addition to having progressive Zionists as members, it also has anti-Zionists (these are the types who are happy with Stephen Walt's tragic endorsement of the group) and it's obviously very hard to put forward a positive vision of a Jewish Israel when some of your important supporters -- Bernard Avishai comes to mind -- don't even believe in the idea of a Jewish state.

Now Goldberg denies that "anti-Zionists" like myself are actually keeping him away from J Street's conference. We would know this, presumably, if we had read a different one-line blog post, in which he says, with obvious sarcasm, "I'm sorry I'm going to miss this conference" (which, in context, if you follow his link, reads like "I'm sorry I'm going to miss this circus"). Then, en passant, Goldberg explains his evidence for my "anti-Zionism."

On the more important question of Zionism and anti-Zionism, all I think I need to say is this: Avishai, the author of a book called "The Tragedy of Zionism," believes that Israel's Law of Return should be repealed. This is the law that grants Jews anywhere in the world to claim citizenship in the newly-reconstituted Jewish state, which was meant to be a refuge for persecuted Jews. The law is the raison d'etre of Zionism, and of Israel's existence. I don't think I was being "vicious" in pointing out that Avishai's conception of what Israel should be is very different from the mainstream Zionist position. By the way, J Street's position, as officially enunciated by its head flack to me, is that the group's core mission is to preserve Israel as a "Jewish democracy." Though maybe I should ask J Street if it believes the Law of Return as currently written and implemented is undemocratic.

This is unworthy of Goldberg's talents. It would also be unworthy of our time if Goldberg were not a well-regarded journalist, burying those talents under cozy prejudices that are shared widely among decent American Jews; people who do not have the time Goldberg has to get things right or think things through; people who look to Goldberg to give them direction.

1. Yes, I wrote a book called the Tragedy of Zionism in 1985. William Appleman Williams wrote a book called the Tragedy of American Diplomacy. This did not mean he was opposed to American diplomacy. Tragedy does not mean catastrophe except, perhaps, to tyro reporters covering car accidents on the local news ("This is Shannon Williams reporting from the scene of the tragedy.") Tragedy means we cannot fully undertand the implications of our actions.

The Tragedy of Zionism argued that the Zionist revolution put up a kind of scaffolding in the Palestinian Yishuv, institutions that made great sense in their day, but which were never taken down when the state was organized. In effect, Israel has continued for the past 60 years as two Jewish states: a democratic, Hebrew-speaking civil society (the real triumph of historic Zionism), and, encased by this "Hebrew republic," an heroic settler-state that, covering itself in neo-Zionist rhetoric, gives material privileges to certified Jews, and requires an official rabbinate to certify them.

I argued that this embedded settler state threatens the coherence of Israeli democracy and, thus, the survival of Israel, given the understandable alienation felt by Israel's one-fifth Arab minority. Tragedy, you see, does not come from doing the wrong thing but the right thing too long. I won't say more about this here; readers of my blog posts surely know the arguments by now.

2. Since Goldberg brought this up, let's look at the Law of Return in this context, a perfect example of an institution that fit its day and is now both unnecessary and inflammatory.

Let me be clear: it makes sense for Israel to have an immigration law that gives (what Canada calls) "landed immigrant" status to anyone who can show that he is a refugee from anti-Semitism; or even give preference to someone who can explain to an immigration officer why he reasonably counts himself a member of the historic Jewish people. All western democracies have had messy criteria like this (i.e., claims about persecution, quotas based on ethnicity). The point is, they also then have a process of naturalization, so that citizenship is granted only after immigrants learn the language and culture and civil laws of the country.

The Law of Return, which grants immediate citizenship to anyone who can prove to a rabbi that he is Jewish according to Halacha, or has a one Jewish grandparent (i.e., anyone Hitler would have called "Jewish"), precludes the idea that citizenship requires naturalization: that Israeli identity is something that can be learned, acquired. It makes a nonsense of the idea that Arabs or any other minority can be Israeli. Leave Brookline, get on a plane, poof, citizen.

This law, in other words, makes the idea of an inclusive Israeli nationality (a patently Jewish nationality, that might assimilate others) impossible. Goldberg says he cannot see "a well-articulated vision of what a progressive Jewish democratic Israel should look like." He might if he opened is eyes to precisely what I'm talking about; to standards that are second nature to people all over the Western world. Why not simply bring Israel up to code? The notion that the Law of Return is "the raison d'etre of Zionism, and of Israel's existence" is so much bond-dinner blather. The law made sense for a revolutionary time of ingathering. It makes no sense for a multi-cultural, global Hebrew (that is, Jewish national) democracy.

3. Which brings me to Goldberg's last dig: that my views are "very different from the mainstream Zionist position." Since I have chosen to live mostly in Jerusalem, I am not sure what mainstream position I have to belong to, well, belong. I consider myself a cultural Zionist in the tradition of Achad Haam, Weizmann, and Ben-Gurion; I think everything was worth it just to get Yehuda Amichai's poetry. Anyway, some rightist jurists, like Ruth Gavison, have problems much like I do with the Law of Return, as Ben-Gurion had problems with the persistence of all Zionist institutions after the movement so obviously succeeded in achieving its goals.

Yet the sheer superficiality of Goldberg's dig does not render it harmless. Israel's future is not unchallenged and its citizens are not without real enemies. To call people anti-Zionist in this context is a way of announcing they are traitors to living, struggling fellow citizens, in my case, students and friends I love. It is like calling someone unpatriotic or anti-American.

Back when I published The Tragedy of Zionism, the guardian of the mainstream du jour, The New Republic, reviewed the book and put on its cover, "Jew Against Zion"--in consequence of which I was subject to a blackballing in Jewish organizations (and most mainstream media) of the kind alleged "Reds" had been subject to a generation before. It was shameful for the magazine's editors to have engaged in this kind of thing then. It is shameful for Goldberg to engage in it now.

Ezra Nawi, Jailed And Fined

2009-10-21T17:52:00.003-04:00

I have written about Ezra several times before. The verdict is now in. Read it and weep.

Apropos the grim realities of occupation, which many American Jews refuse to view apart from their sense of the Jews' suffering at the hands of European others, yesterday's snipe at me by Jeffery Goldberg comes on the heels of his column celebrating Tarantino's "Inglorious Basterds." As it happens, my wife, the Hebrew University literary critic Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, wrote the following letter to the Atlantic in response, which they chose (at the last minute) not to publish. She wrote this:

I find Jeffrey Goldberg’s interview with Quentin Tarantino (“Hollywood’s Jewish Avenger,” September Atlantic) troubling because it unapologetically valorizes stereotypes of Jews to, of all people, Jews.

The enduring image of the victimized Jew in Western culture was indeed earned by a long history capped by the Holocaust, but the reality of Jews exercising power—financial, cultural and, in Israel, political and military—is what has defined Jews in the last fifty years. Yet we are being asked, in the film and in Goldberg’s presentation of it, to accept that the most adequate expression of Jewish power is vengeful and brutally violent. As if the Elephant in the Room is not the fact that Jews actually use sovereign power, among other things, to maintain a settlement regime and an occupation.

Tarantino claims that all his Jewish friends love the film. Goldberg acknowledges fantasizing that “when I came out of the screening room…I was so hopped up on righteous Jewish violence that I was almost ready to settle the West Bank—and possibly the East Bank.” What kind of dots are being connected here? Are we really being asked to believe that the daily humiliation of Palestinians is somehow belated revenge for Nazi atrocities? Does Goldberg not know better?

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Jerusalem, Israel

Jeffrey Goldberg's Absurdly Cheap Shot

2009-10-20T13:29:00.002-04:00

I am just about to board a plane for the US, so I am unable to answer this remarkably ill-informed (and, under the circumstances, vicious) shot from Jefferey Goldberg: the idea that he cannot go to the J Street conference because "some of [its] most important supporters -- Bernard Avishai comes to mind -- don't even believe in the idea of a Jewish state." I would simply ask readers to consider this post, or this, or this interview. Or just watch this lecture on You Tube. Goldberg has, alas, started to speak about "the idea of a Jewish state" a little like the way FOX News celebs talk about "America." Complexity is for sissies. Very sad. When he was at the New Yorker, his work on the settlers was the best there was.