My new piece on the arrest of alleged terrorist Yaakov Teitel and its context is up at The American Prospect:

The glossy flier was posted on a bulletin border in a small, illegal outpost of Israeli settlers near Nablus in the West Bank when I visited last week. The black print appeared over a soft green picture of olive trees. The West Bank is famed for its olive oil, and autumn is harvest season. For years, it’s also been the season when settlers from the most extreme outposts and settlements clash with Palestinian farmers and vandalize orchards.

Citing religious sources, the flier urged Jews to “harvest” the Palestinians’ olives if they could, and uproot the trees if they couldn’t. Since Judaism forbids not only theft but also the destruction of fruit trees even in warfare, the writer had to use considerable casuistry to make his case. It was, in religious terms, akin to preaching the “obligation” of adultery.

The fact that the flier was anonymous indicates that whoever stands behind it prefers not to be known to Israeli law-enforcement agencies. It was condemned a few days later in a popular right-leaning newsletter, published in a settlement and given away in synagogues. The moderate right is disturbed by such tactics — and the flier was distributed widely enough to become an issue. The flier’s text is testimony to the violence and lawlessness that are part of the ideological atmosphere at the settlement movement’s radical edge. The mayhem isn’t just the work of a few crazed individuals.

Use that as context for understanding the arrest of Yaakov Teitel, announced last Sunday by Israeli police. The list of Teitel’s alleged offenses reads like a brief guide to hate crime: attacks on random members of another nationality, on people he saw as promoting apostasy, on a prominent left-wing intellectual, on police whom he saw as protecting “sodomites.”

At first glance, Teitel might look like the angry man for whom the fury comes first, and the objects of the fury only afterward. He was reportedly seen as a loner on the small West Bank settlement where he lived; he kept a small arsenal in his house; he learned to make bombs from the Internet.

But that’s framing the picture much too narrowly. Even if Teitel is a man driven by his own particular furies, he chose to live in an environment where acting on fury is sometimes treated as acceptable, even as a virtue. …

Read the rest here, and come back to SoJo to comment.

Mt. Nevo, photo by Argenberg

אֵינִי קוֹבְלָה! בְחֶדֶר צַר
תִמְתַק כָל כָך עֶרְגַת מֶרְחָב,
לִימֵי תוגָה, לַסְתָו הַקַר
יֵש אַרְגָמָן וְיֵש זָהָב.

אֵינִי קוֹבְלָה! נוֹבֵע שִיר
מִפֶצַע-לֵב בְאָהֳבוֹ,
וְחוֹל-מִדְבָר—כְּיֶרֶק-נִיר
מֵרֹאשׁ פִסְגָה, מֵהַר נְבוֹ.

I don’t complain! In a narrow room
The need for space becomes so sweet;
On melancholy days, in autumn’s chill
There’s scarlet and gold to see.

I don’t complain! A poem wells up
From a wounded heart, a heart in love,
And desert’s sand is like a greening field
From atop the peak, from Mt. Nevo.

In politics, the pure is the enemy of the good. One need look no further than the discussion that ensued in response to my post Votes Are Not Enough. Some of the most prolific correspondents there, coming from both the right and left, shared the implicit assumption that democracy, if not pure, is not democracy.

Unfortunately, they won’t be able to read the fine essay that Nurit Gretz published in the arts and literature section of Friday’s Ha’aretz—the piece, in Hebrew, seems not to be available on-line. Gretz addresses a problem of the same genre and in doing so shows how wrong purism can be.

She does so by writing about one of the icons of Labor Zionism, A.D. Gordon, the Second Aliya’s guru of back-to-the-earth socialist egalitarianism. One of Gordon’s disciples was the poetess Rachel Bluwstein, who lived and worked at Kevutzat Kinneret on the southern edge of the Sea of Galilee, where Zionist farmers first tried to work on a communal basis. Bluwstein—universally known in Israel today as Rachel the Poetess—lived in accordance with Gordon’s teachings. She abandoned the middle-class life she’d known in Russia and set aside her aspirations for education and culture to become a simple farmer.

When Rachel told her comrades that she had decided to leave the commune to attend university in France, many of them condemned her as a traitor to the cause. Shmuel Dayan, father of Moshe, wrote to her cynically: “There was a worker and now there is not one. Will you feel, remember, and understand our world, the world of the laborers?”

As Gretz relates, Rachel told her comrades that she was going to study agronomy—but felt compelled to conceal that she also planned to learn painting.

Ironically, it was Gordon the ideologue rather than her fellow workers who told Rachel that art was a worthwhile pursuit. “Our renewal demands that we accept labor as a new value, a new foundation of our lives, but [we must] not abandon the spiritual assets we have already required.”

Gretz uses this story to call on her fellow Israelis, intellectuals and workers, to reintegrate the two worlds that Gordon believed should never have been separated. The polarization of these values was the product of little minds who sought purity of ideology at the expense of the integration of values that the real world requires.

The purists who commented on my post commit the same sin. They accept a Platonist illusion that there is an ideal democracy out there that is the only standard by which Israel can be judged. They assume, naively, that the provision of equal political rights guarantees fairness and justice. To show that wrong all one needs to do is look at our real world. Indeed, the point of my post, entirely missed by these polemicists, was that the provision of formal political rights can still leave a minority essentially powerless.

All societies are imperfect. Any society that grants equal political rights to all its citizens regardless of their ethnic and religious affiliations can hardly rest on its laurels. Inequalities of power are created inevitably, not just by group affiliations but also by economic inequality, geographical distance from the center, and inequitable access to education and culture, to name a few. All societies that seek to be just societies must balance any number of competing and cross-cutting goals and purposes, and each society has a different set of constraints that it must face. To claim that Israel’s model of government is inherently more unjust than those of other Western democracies is to be blind to the huge disparities of power, rights, and privileges that exist in even the best of modern societies. In all these countries, it’s the obligation of socially-conscious citizens to seek to correct the injustices that each society perpetuates and to seek a better balance of values. Israel is no better and no worse than other countries on this score.

Rachel studied agronomy and painting. In the end she never went back to being a farmer. Circumstances—illness, and the small-mindedness of some of her erstwhile fellows–created constraints that led her to live out her life in Tel Aviv and became a giant of modern Hebrew culture. Was she a traitor to her great cause? Gordon obviously didn’t think so. Thanks to Nurit Gretz for reminding us.

My new article on the implosion of the Israeli left at the very moment when American Jewish doves are finally speaking out is up at The American Prospect:

Danny Ben-Simon has quit. If anyone needed more evidence of the disarray of the Israeli left, this is it — but then, no one actually needs any more evidence.

Ben-Simon became the whip of the Labor Party’s Knesset delegation just five months ago. That sounds like a prominent position for a first-time Knesset member, until you remember that the once-powerful party now has just 13 representatives in the 120-seat parliament and that at least four of them have had nothing to do with Labor since its leader, Ehud Barak, insisted on joining Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government in order to become defense minister.

Before running for office this year, Ben-Simon was one of the country’s most incisive political reporters. He literally wrote the book on Labor’s inability to connect to lower-class voters. At a press conference on Monday, he announced his decision to quit his position as whip with a furious attack on Barak for his failure to pursue peace. The riddle is why he thought he could work with Barak in the first place.

In 1993, when Labor’s Yitzhak Rabin led Israel into the peace process with the Palestinians, the party had 44 Knesset seats. The smaller Meretz Party, to Labor’s left, then had 12 seats; now it has three. The political parties aren’t alone in imploding. Peace Now, a protest movement that in its heyday sometimes drew hundreds of thousands of people to demonstrations, still runs a monitoring effort that provides crucial information on West Bank settlement and has filed important lawsuits against settlers. But it only manages to draw major crowds to the annual memorial for Rabin — perhaps now a memorial for the peace movement itself. …

Read the rest here, and come back to SoJo to comment.

My apologies for being AWOL recently; I’m in the midst of research that has kept me very busy.

As a result, I failed to mark the passing of Dr. Yair Carlos Bar-El. Yair was for years the Jerusalem district psychiatrist and head of the Kfar Shaul mental hospital. Among other things, that meant he was responsible for dealing with normally sane people knocked off their balance by coming to Jerusalem, along with the already unbalanced people attracted to sacred ground like iron filings to a magnet.

Treating the former group, Yair found a repeating pattern he named the “Jerusalem Syndrome.” While in the city, the victims are overwhelmed by the need to purify themselves, dress in white, appear at a holy place and preach. The episode is brief; afterwards, they are sane, and thoroughly embarrassed.

As for the latter group, he said, “People with personality problems arrive here to pray… There are people with illnesses who identify as Jesus, John the Baptist…” Once, he said, “We had three simultaneous cases of the Virgin Mary.” He wasn’t cynical about this. He was a dedicated, caring doctor. The madness of Jerusalem was simply part of his responsibility.

In no way do I mean to criticize the dead, but it seems to me that he did make one small oversight – or at least that a pattern he noticed has been broken since we last talked, around the turn of the millennium. Yair said that he’d never had anyone who thought he was Napoleon. The Holy City seemed to offer too many more interesting possibilities for those who wanted to trade in their own persona for a more powerful one.

At the time, Yair didn’t notice that Ehud Barak was quite sure he was Napoleon, probably because the symptoms were still subtle. More recently, they’ve become alarmingly obvious. Though he leads an insignificant party, he struts as if he were emperor. He also rents hotel suites in Paris fit for an emperor when he passes through town. He believes he can make no mistakes, that people will follow him no matter what, that he can settle all problems with the force of arms. Lost in his delusions, he does not notice that his former followers are deserting him.

Around December, I expect him to try to solve the Iranian nuclear issue by a ground invasion via Russia. Alas, Yair Bar-El is not around to treat him, and no one else knows how.

“I don’t like him already,” Leo Shocken barked to Inga, his svelte, silver-blonde assistant, who had just led me into his office. Large-jowled Shocken lounged behind a large desk strewn with files, calendars, and banana peels. He held a half-filled tumbler of bourbon in his hand and both his stocking feet were propped up on the desk. A thick cigar stood erect between his chomped teeth, pointing in the direction of a side wall festooned with the autographed photographs of the most famous Jewish synagogue speakers of our age.

“Misteh Hocken, it’s Misteh Atzman,” she said, tottering on her super-high heels. There was a whiff of Transylvania in her accent. Or maybe it was Palo Alto. She hadn’t yet managed to pronounce enough complete words for me to tell.

“I don’t care who the hell it is,” Shocken growled, looking me straight in the eye. “What can he do?”

Inga swayed precariously. “He a eaker,” she volunteered.

“So you’re an eaker?” He smiled tauntingly. “Don’t worry about Inga. I make her keep pebbles in her mouth. Helps remind my clients to enunciate.”

“First, I just want to thank you for seeing me,” I said.

“Listen, Joe,” he said. “You’ve already taken up 87 seconds of my valuable time. You’ve wasted every single one. That’s all you’ll get if you don’t tell me right now how you plan to make money for me.”

“Well,” I said, “I thought you might be interested in representing me. I mean, getting me engagements as a speaker at synagogues, JCCs, that kind of thing. I hear such good things about you.”

“If you’re hearing good things,” he said as he bit a piece off his cigar and spat it straight at Inga, “then you ain’t speaking to anyone who ever met me.”

“He ery unny,” suggested Inga, wiping the tobacco from her eyes. Her dress was so tight she had trouble lifting her hand that high. Inga seemed to have taken a liking to me during the hour I sat in the reception room. I wanted to believe that she’d been aroused by my rugged good looks. But I suspected that my look of desperation had stimulated her maternal instincts.

“In the world of Jewish speaking,” Shocken said, leaning back in his chair and waving his cigar toward the photographs on the wall, “there are two kinds of unny. There’s the nostalgic. And there’s the mother-in-law joke. Which one you do?”

“Well,” I said, “my line is more intelligent satire with clever literary allusions.”

Shocken’s jaw slowly dropped and the cigar fell from his mouth.

“Let’s get one thing clear right now,” he said. “Satire is not unny. It turns people off. Gets them angry, upset. Then they don’t pay. Then you don’t make money for me. Then I throw you out of here. Got that?”

“I mean like Woody Allen,” I said defensively. “Or Al Franken.”

“No one invites those guys to their synagogue,” Shocken said sourly. Smoke rose from the carpet where the cigar had fallen. “Let me tell you something about this business. When people take the trouble to turn off their DVDs and stow their Ipods and get in the car and go across town to their temple or Jewish center, they do it for two reasons. The first is to learn new jokes to tell about their mother-in-laws. The second is to feel good about being Jewish.”

He heaved his feet off his desk, sat up straight, and opened up one of the files on his desk, which he studied intently. It was as if I had disappeared. Inga looked at me sympathetically.

“Misteh Hocken ants you to mek him eel ood abou being ewish,” she whispered.

I stood there helplessly. Shocken looked up.

“You heard Inga. Make me feel good about being Jewish. You got 30 seconds. Do it standing on one leg, for all I care.”

“I give a few kinds of talks,” I explained. “One’s about my service in the Israel Defense Forces.”

“You were a soldier? I like that,” Shocken said. For the first time a trace of a smile crossed his face. He stood up, came around his desk, and looked me over carefully. “Tales of heroism. Defending the Jewish people. The most moral army in the world. We must stand steadfastly behind the tiny but brave Jewish state. That always goes over very well.”

“It’s more about the conflicts of conscience I faced serving in wars that I opposed politically.”

Shocken clutched at his chest and grabbed Inga’s shoulder to steady himself. He regained his balance but Inga swung like a chandelier on the Titanic, pivoted on a single stiletto heel, and sank to the floor.

“Let me tell you something,” he said, breathing heavily. “The only kind of conflicts that interest Jewish audiences are ones in which the Jews are always right and everyone else is always wrong. In the synagogue world, angst is not marketable. Complexity kills. What else you got?”

“You want something that’s not political?” I was looking at the orange-tipped flames that were visible from behind his desk, but Shocken grabbed my jaw and turned my face back toward him. “Then you might like my Power Point presentation on Israel’s rift valley. I tell about how this immense and ancient crack in the earth was formed by huge geological forces, and about how it has been seen, studied, and talked about by scientists, archaeologists, industrialists, and its own inhabitants since the dawn of civilization.”

Shocken stamped his foot so hard that the room shook. The quake sent Inga, who was just getting to her feet, careening into the wall of photographs, setting several of them rocking violently.

“Too cerebral,” he said. “True, I do get the occasional call for an intellectual-type talk on Jews in the Civil War or Shalom Aleichem. But geology? Inga, anyone ever call us for a lecture about rocks? Even one rock?”

“Not at I can ecall,” she admitted. A large photograph of a stern looking woman dropped on her head and a pebble popped out of Inga’s mouth. Shocken strode over, picked up the photograph and waved it at me.

“You wanna know what works? Take this woman. She’s a Jewish historian. She gets paid ten grand a shot to tell audiences about her lawsuit against a concentration camp denier.” He banged the wall and a photograph of a smiling man with a well-trimmed beard sailed off its hook and hit Inga in the nose. “This guy’s a rabbi who does a presentation about how all of Western civilization actually comes from the Jews. He’s booked up two years in advance.” He glared up at the wall and another photograph jumped from its nail and bounced from Inga’s shoulder onto her cleavage, from where Shocken scooped it up. “This guy’s a motivational humorist. That means he tells jokes and charges people for therapy. I get him hundreds of engagements a year. That’s what sells! And you want to talk about some valley that no one’s ever heard of? Inga, why’d you let this loser in?”

“He ell ood ories,” she said, rubbing her scalp.

He sighed. “These are the ones that are unny?”

Inga perked up. “Nah ust unny. Sum r ought-ovokig and sum r yrica.”

“Enunciate!” Shocken roared at her. “Thought-provoking and what?”

“Yrica,” she repeated with great effort.

“Yrica!” Shocken shouted in exasperation. “Yrica! Watzman, if Inga here hadn’t fallen in love with that forlorn face of yours, I’d have kicked you out from the start. Try to understand. Thought-provoking, lyrical — these are the wrong words. You want to be a success? You gotta give the audience what it wants.”

“Your carpet is on fire,” I couldn’t help pointing out. Shocken glanced behind him and tossed his bourbon onto the flames. They flared up.

“That’s what I want you to give me!” he shouted. “Fire! Passion! You know what? I’ll settle for warmth!”

“So what do you suggest?”

He began pacing the room. “Think of the calendar. We are just past the High Holidays. Nostalgia goes over big in holiday season. I got a friend, Al, and Al says to me on Yom Kippur, Leo, he says, I just love those speakers who make me remember how I used to see tears rolling down my Grandpa’s cheeks when he wrapped himself in his tallis for Yizkor service. And I say, Al, your grandfather was a Communist. He never set foot in a shul. And Al says, yeah, I know, but how I love it when a speaker makes me remember it anyway.”

“I don’t think that’s really for me,” I admitted.

“So maybe you can do Hanukka. Cute stories about menorahs and dreidels in shtetls go over really good at Hanukka. Throw in a few more Yiddish words. Not too many, though.”

I shook my head.

Shocken was beginning to fume. The fire behind his desk was crackling ominously. “Look, I’m trying to help. I really am. You say you do serious. April we do Holocaust, all month. Holocaust is one of our most popular subjects. You do Holocaust?”

“No,” I admitted. “I don’t do Holocaust. I guess I just try to get people to think about the challenges of living as an observant, committed, but skeptical Jew and a loyal but critical Israeli. Doesn’t anyone want to hear about that?”

“I oo!” Inga said brightly. Shocken threw a banana peel at her. He had good aim. She looked like she was being devoured headfirst by a flying yellow octopus.

“Watzman,” he said, his voice sharp as a nail file, “I’ll give you one last chance.”

“I appreciate that.”

“I’m glad you do. Tell me about your mother-in-law.”

“My mother-in-law? She’s a fine woman. We have a wonderful relationship.”

Shocken’s gaze rose to heaven. “Lord,” he said, “save your chosen people from this idiot. Inga?”

“Yeh, Misteh Hocken?”

“Would you please kick Mr. Watzman down the stairs? And make sure he doesn’t miss a single one.”

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All too often, Israel’s supporters kill their cause with clichés. One of the most common and problematic of these clichés is the claim that Israel’s Arab citizens have always enjoyed full and equal rights because—and here’s the clincher—they vote for and sit in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset.

As Hillel Cohen shows in Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948-1967, my translation of which is to be published shortly, suffrage and representation do not in and of themselves guarantee a minority the rights that a democracy is supposed to grant to all its citizens.

In Good Arabs, Cohen continues the study he began in his previous book, Army of Shadows (see my earlier post Good Arabs, Bad Arabs) about the complex relationship between the Zionist movement and the local Arabs in Palestine. As in that earlier work, Cohen eschews the slogans long shouted by Palestinians and Israelis, rightists and leftists. He shows how both Israeli officials and leaders of those Palestinian Arabs who became inhabitants and citizens of the Jewish state adopted a variety of strategies in reaction to real and perceived threats and opportunities.

Israel wished to present itself to the world as a democracy that respected the rights of its minorities. This was in part motivated by the democratic values to which its leaders sincerely subscribed, but also in part to Israel’s need, as a country dependent on the friendship and aid of the U.S. and Western Europe, to present itself as sharing the values espoused by those nations. So it was clear to the Israeli leadership that the Arabs would be able to vote, and pictures of Arab men in traditional headdresses sitting in Israel’s parliament were important for the young country’s public relations.

That did not mean, however, that the Israeli establishment was going to leave the choice of how to vote to the Arabs themselves. As Cohen shows, the Israeli military government—under which nearly all the country’s Arab citizens lived from 1948 until 1966—used its powers to issue or deny travel and work permits and to provide budgets for local projects to wheedle, induce, and compel Arabs to vote as the country’s establishment wished. The government, led by the Labor-Zionist Mapai party, wanted the Arabs to vote for satellite Arab parties it had founded and which were under its control. (It did not want them to vote for Mapai itself because it wanted to ensure the election of Arab community leaders who supported its policies.) And it wanted to prevent them from voting for the Communists, the major independent political force in the Arab community.

Cohen quotes a secret memorandum written by the Jewish police chief of Nazareth, the country’s largest Arab city: “The GSS [the secret state security service, also known as the Shin Bet or Shabak] officials, military government representatives and I presented an oral report on what is being done in the field and the party’s activities in Nazareth and the region, in anticipation of the elections to the third Knesset.…The committees were to study the situation in the villages, give an indication to the Arabs to vote for the Arab slates and not directly for Mapai.… [T]he governor announced that the committees will be given powers to issue permits to go out of the territories [i.e. to the Jewish towns, outside the military-governed areas], and will likewise offer recommendations on granting gun permits as circumstances may dictate. These powers will be in effect until 28 July 1955 [two days after the election].”

The Israeli establishment’s fear of the Communists were not unfounded. That party was explicitly allied with the Soviet block, and pursued an Arab nationalist agenda in a Jewish state that had recently fought against local nationalist Arabs for independence, and which remained under threat from Arab nationalist regimes around it.

Israel is hardly the only democracy to manipulate the votes of minority ethnic groups. Some of the tactics Cohen mentions sound much like those used by big-city political machines in the U.S. during the first half of the twentieth century. And like those machines, the Israeli system provided a form of ethnic representation that managed to achieve some benefits for the community. However, the military government was able to impose far more severe restrictions and punishments on Arabs who did not cooperate than machine politicians could.

Fundamentally, however, Israel’s Arabs were not equal citizens. In any democracy, suffrage and representation are necessary but hardly sufficient conditions for equal rights. In the absence of complementary freedoms of speech, movement, employment, and political organization, they can be merely symbols with little real content. Contrary to the cliché, Israel’s Arab citizens have not historically enjoyed equal political rights.

My new piece on what’s behind the recent tension at the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif  – and where it could lead – is up at The American Prospect:

Five cops edged the Street of the Chain carrying riot batons and shields. A few meters away, in the shadows of a covered alleyway, four more cops were doing what police do so often, which is wait. The Street of the Chain is one of the main thoroughfares of Jerusalem’s Old City, a narrow, stone-paved walkway descending toward the entrance to Haram al-Sharif, a.k.a. the Temple Mount. It’s lined with Palestinian-owned shops selling scarves, t-shirts, the trinkets of three faiths, and anything else that might catch a tourist’s eye. On Tuesday afternoon, police reinforcements were deployed along the street, on the lawn outside Jaffa Gate, and throughout the Old City.

At a checkpoint a block from the entrance to the Haram, a police commander with a very small vocabulary insisted that non-Muslims, even those with press cards, could not go any closer to the holy site. For that matter, Muslim males under the age of 50 were also barred from entering the wide plaza where Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock stand. Somewhere high in the line of command, someone has decided that testosterone and sanctity are too dangerous a mix.

Once again, trouble is smoldering around the Temple Mount, threatening to ignite a new round of violence between Palestinians and Israelis. For a week and a half, there have been sporadic clashes at the Haram and elsewhere in East Jerusalem. There’s reasonable fear of a more serious blow-up during Friday prayers — at Al-Aqsa, or wherever Israeli police block worshippers trying to reach the mosque. The proximate cause of the tension is jockeying by extreme Palestinian and Jewish groups that fuse nationalism with religion. But when a fire begins at the Mount, it is always fueled by wider issues. Right now those issues include continued Palestinian disappointment with American diplomacy and Palestinian Authority President Mahmud Abbas’s precipitous loss of public credibility. …

Read the rest here and come back to SoJo to comment.

With thanks to my daughter Mizmor, who filmed and edited, I offer this preview of my new “Necessary Stories” program. It includes selections from four of the stories. For more on my speaking topics and availability, see my Speaking and Performance page.

Am I really genetically smarter than my Sephardi wife? Find out with this complete version of my story “The Great Brain”:

I haven’t been blogging because I’m busy saving the Jerusalem Pool. This venerable and unique South Jerusalem facility is in danger of being closed down and turned into a parking lot by a developer.

I work out at the pool daily and it’s been an inspiration to me as a writer, too (see. for example, “Pioneer in the Swim”).

I’ll write more extensively next week about the battle being waged by the Action Committee to Save the Jerusalem Pool. In the meantime, I urge any of you who have visited and value the pool to join our e-mail list by writing to vaad.breichat.yerushalyim@gmail.com and visit our Facebook page.