A couple weeks ago I published my first short story. That’s an important milestone in my career as a writer, since up until now I’ve only published journalism and non-fiction. But, in fact, it’s less of a breakthrough than it sounds, because I made my fiction debut in the pages of a news magazine, and everything my story recounts actually happened.

The story is called “Hagar,” my most recent “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report, which I cross-posted here on South Jerusalem. It’s about a dumpster cat who had kittens on my doorstep. This really happened, about two and a half years ago.

As journalists tend to do at middle age, I’ve long been getting itchy at the constraints imposed by my trade. For years, I’ve been getting more and more interested and involved in the practice of writing—style, structure, word choice, sound. Writing my two books, a memoir and a travel narrative, gave me an opportunity to experiment with telling a story in ways far different than my newspaper writing ever allowed. Writing them made my yearn to take the next step and write fiction. In a fictional narrative, I thought, I’d be freed from the constraints of writing only events as they happened about people I’d actually met.

When I took another look at the cat essay, I decided it offered me an opportunity to experiment. I rewrote the story, changing it from the first to third person. I replaced myself with a fictional protagonist, added another character, and elaborated on and restructured the events to make the plot more intricate and the narrative tighter.

I sent that story out to a few magazines and literary journals, but no one liked it as much as I did.

At about this time I began writing the “Necessary Stories” column. The columns are, for the most part, personal essays about places I’ve been, funny things that happened to me, movies I’ve seen, books I‘m reading, and music I’m listening to. The events I describe are real and the people I write about really were in the places I describe and really did the things I say they did. But the account is stylized and literary.

Soon after starting to write the column I realized that it would be best if I had an extra piece in the drawer for emergencies, something I could pull out close to deadline if I got sick or had to travel or got writer’s block. I looked through my files and came across my two accounts of the cat I’d named Hagar.

The fictional version was much too long for my column. Furthermore, I was pretty sure that if I submitted a third-person narrative, I’d be told by the editors that I’d crossed a line into a literary genre that a news magazine couldn’t publish.

The first, truthful version of the story was just the right length, however. Yet, in rereading it, I realized that it is no less a short story than the third-person version. It has all the hallmarks of fiction—a narrative structure, a protagonist, a theme, even a metaphor. I could easily have submitted it as fiction to a literary magazine, even though the protagonist really was me and the events really happened.

But since it really did happen and was about me, I figured it could also do as a personal essay, just like my account of going with my sons to see a Batman movie or my piece about listening to Felix Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony. So I designated it as my emergency column and let it lie.

Last month the inevitable happened. Deadline was approaching and didn’t have an idea for Necessary Stories. So I whipped out “Hagar” and sent it in—and the newsroom received it enthusiastically.

It strikes me that I may have stumbled onto the ultimate solution to my urge to write fiction and my failure to sell any of the fiction I’ve written. The fact is that it’s not easy to get fiction published today. Fifty years ago, there were dozens of general-circulation magazines and nearly all of them published short stories; today there are far fewer and most of them do not publish fiction. The reading public, it seems, prefers memoirs and stories labeled as true accounts of experiences to imaginative accounts of people who never lived and events that never happened.

Perhaps I need to adjust to the times. I want to play with form, style, and other techniques usually associated with fiction—but I also want to get published and read. If I restrict myself to journalistic reportage, I can’t do the former, but if I spend my time writing imaginative fiction I can’t do the latter. Maybe “Hagar” should be my model—a new genre, if you will.

The rules are: 1) the events related must actually have happened, and be told as they happened; 2) the characters in the story are the people the events happened to—no made up foils, no composites. In exchange for restricting himself in this way, the author may imbue the account with reflection, metaphors, literary references that were not present at the time the events took place. Let’s call the product true fiction, or imaginative reporting. News magazines that publish it will become the 21st century’s arbiters of the imaginative, just like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Saturday Evening Post were in an earlier age.

Whatever it is, it may be the closest I get to writing fiction, and the farthest I get from writing news. I’m off to the dumpster to look for another interesting cat.

As a follow-up to an earlier post, I have a new column in Moment magazine on the Chabad rabbi who recently wrote that “The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way…  Kill men, women and children (and cattle).” Manis Friedman, unfortunately, isn’t alone in our world in claiming divine sanction as he presents evil as morality. There’s a pattern that ties him to other people, in Judaism and in other faiths, who do the same:

Friedman may think he’s presenting old-time Judaism. In fact, his words are an example of the thoroughly modern phenomenon known as fundamentalism. Fundamentalists are frightened by the openness of the modern world, by the autonomy of the individual, by modern insistence on reaching truth through reasoned debate. They want to feel certain that they are following an unambiguous religious authority.

That desire makes humanistic religious ethics appear suspect in their eyes. After all, the Western philosophic tradition, from the Greeks to Kant, can also produce ethics that stress the value of every human being. If one follows such ethics, the fundamentalist worries, how can one be sure one is doing God’s will? Perhaps one has been misled by a morality “of human invention,” to quote Friedman.

The fundamentalist solution has several elements. First, insist on heteronomy, on an authority outside oneself. Second, assign that role to a person or a book that speaks for God. Third, assert that the sacred text has an obvious “literal” meaning. And fourth, proudly derive from that text the willingness to believe and to do things that are scandalous in ethical terms—indeed, that defy your own basic moral instincts. That way, you can be sure you are following the outside authority. Declare, for instance, that “the Jewish way” requires killing “men, women and children (and cattle)” in times of war.

Read the full article here, and come back to South Jerusalem to comment.

My sister Nancy once worked for Public Citizen’s Congress Watch, project that tracks where legislators get their money from and how it affects their votes.

But Congress seems to be in danger no less from bad theology as bad money. Yesterday she referred me to this incredible video of Rep. John Shimkus, who represents a huge chunk of southern Illinois. Shimkus believes that, because God promised Noah that he would not destroy the world again, we don’t need to do anything about global warming.

Note that Shimkus segues without blinking from God’s promise that He will not destroy the world into the odd idea that therefore mankind is incapable of destroying the world on its own. That’s sloppy theology.

Maimonides would not have made such a ridiculous mistake had he been elected to Congress. He adduced the Talmudic principle that ha-olam ke-minhago noheg—meaning that the universe functions in accordance with the laws of nature. Even when the Messiah comes, he argued, we will see no supernatural events or miracles that violate the natural order. (One reason Maimonides and other theologians have held this position is that if the natural order must be violated for God to carry out his will, then the world is an imperfect creation—implying that God made mistakes that He needs to correct.)

So God’s promise to Noah is not that he’s made it impossible for Noah’s descendants to destroy the world. God’s message to Noah is that it’s entirely up to humankind to maintain the world. It would be apt to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin today: “A world—if you can keep it.”

A few days ago, I wondered in print whether the Obama administration would blink first or stand firm on a settlement freeze. So far, the adminstration is standing quite firm.

Ehud Barak has tried to convince the world that his meeting on the issue with George Mitchell led to a shift in the administration stance. Examine all the reports carefully: You’ll find no evidence of a change in the U.S. position. Which is good news.

A key reason that President Obama can avoid blinking is that Congress has his back.

I spoke this morning with Rep. Robert Wexler, one of Israel’s most dependable supporters in Congress. “The level of Congressional support for the president’s policies is substantial, and that’s reflected by public statements of prominent members of Congress,” he told me.

I also spoke this week with a foreign policy aide to a key senator. He gave the same assessment: “The president has a great deal of confidence and support from Congress.”

What that means, as I read it, is that members of Congress who care deeply about Israel’s future understand that settlement is hurting Israel. It also means they have reason to believe that the rank and file of American Jewry supports Obama on this. It’s important that they continue to get that message.

Ehud Barak still doesn’t get it.

According to a piece by Ben Caspit and Merav David in yesterday’s print edition of Ma’ariv, when Barak met U.S. envoy George Mitchell in New York, he told him that in 2000 “I was the Israeli prime minister who took the most bold steps to make peace, and that year also saw the greatest extent of new construction.” For Barak this was proof that building like mad doesn’t get in the way of negotiations. Alas for a country with men like this as leaders.

It’s true that settlements expanded at a ferocious pace under Barak. Trying to co-opt extremists, he handed the Housing Ministry to settlement advocate Yitzhak Levy. During the Camp David summit in the summer of 2000, I had a day of reserve duty in the West Bank. The bus to the base meandered through settlements deep in the territory. Again and again, I saw signs advertising new developments.

But that’s precisely one of the things that foiled his negotiating efforts. The building shattered trust before Barak ever got to Camp David. Yes, he talked about peace. In the meantime, his government was demonstrating that it intended to hold onto land. Barak, who once described negotiating to me as akin to Greco-Roman wrestling — “a form of struggle with agreed rules” — did not understand that trust is part of diplomacy, that if you enter the process as if you want to impose surrender on the other side, they will read all your proposals in the most negative light. He destroyed the worth of his own offers. As Robert Malley and Hussein Agha wrote:

[T]he steps Barak undertook to husband his resources while negotiating a historical final deal were interpreted by the Palestinians as efforts to weaken them while imposing an unfair one.

The Israeli right was not, in fact, co-opted. Neither were the Palestinians. But for Ehud the Obtuse, if negotiations failed, it was wholly the other side’s fault. In the nine years since, in his effort to protect his own reputation, he has worked to convince the Israeli public that there was never a partner for peace. In the process, he has left his own party without a platform, and shattered it electorally. And  now, since he can’t see his mistakes,  he wants to repeat them.

My new piece is up at The American Prospect:

Let’s face it: When Barack Obama said in Cairo that “the only resolution” of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is two separate states, he was courageously insisting — well, on what’s become conventional wisdom.

But not the unanimous wisdom. The hardliners on each side aren’t alone in questioning the two-state idea. On the street in Jerusalem, I’ve run into old friends, veterans of Israeli peace and human-rights activism who say we’ve passed the tipping point: There are too many settlements; Israeli withdrawal is impossible; negotiations on two states have repeatedly failed; the only solution is a single, shared Jewish-Palestinian state. I’ve heard Palestinian intellectuals, former supporters of a two-state solution, who say the same. Among writers outside the conflict zone, British Jewish historian Tony Judt may be best known for suggesting — back in 2003 — that as a nation-state, Israel is “an anachronism” and should be replaced by a binational state. Ironically, Obama himself may have given this idea a bit more traction among American progressives — his election proving, perhaps, that multiculturalism within one polity can work, perhaps not just in America but elsewhere. So is he pursuing an obsolete strategy?

Actually, no. This time the conventional wisdom is correct.

Difficult as reaching a two-state agreement is, it is still a more practical solution than a single state. It has more political support on both sides. And in a very basic way, more psychological than philosophical, most Israeli Jews and most Palestinians are nationalists: Their personal identity is rooted in a national community for which they want political independence.

Let’s imagine that tomorrow, Israel and the occupied territories are reconstituted as the Eastern Mediterranean Republic, with equal citizenship and rights for all, and elections are held. With the current population, the parliament will be split virtually evenly between Jews and Palestinians. One of the first issues that the parliament and judiciary will face is the settlements that Israel built — in large part on land requisitioned by the Israeli military in the early years of the occupation, or on what Israel declared to be “state land” under its stunningly wide interpretation of Ottoman-era law, or simply on real estate privately owned by Palestinians. In all three cases, Palestinian claimants will demand return of their property, quite possibly meaning the eviction of those living on it. The problem of evacuating settlers won’t vanish. Rather, it will divide the new state’s politics on communal lines. …

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

There are many beautiful theories about how to bring Gilad Shalit home, but it’s an ugly fact that he now has been a captive for three years. And it’s an ugly fact that a series of Israeli governments have been unable to free him. Both diplomatic and military means have failed so far. Shalit’s family and friends blame the government for not doing enough, as do many Israelis. Others, including army officers, diplomats and the families of terror victims, argue that not every price is worth paying. Gilad, they say, does not stand alone; his life is not worth more than the lives of others.

If I were Gilad Shalit’s father, I would do everything in my power to persuade Israel’s leaders to free my son at any price. I’d be a poor father if I did anything less. If I were a government official or army officer involved in the effort to free him, I’d be telling those same leaders the opposite. I’d remind them that, whatever the political pressures they face, and whatever their empathy for the plight of this one young man, they must take into account the consequences that any military operation or diplomatic deal inevitably would have for the security of Israel’s citizens, the lives of its other soldiers and Israel’s position when facing similar situations in the future. I’d be a poor policy adviser if I did anything less.

That’s why the ugly fact of Gilad Shalit’s long years in captivity leaves me frustrated and nonplused. I’m not Gilad’s father, but I am the father of a soldier. As such, I cannot escape the possibility that my son might fall prisoner to one of Israel’s enemies. My academic training in public policy lies many years in my past, but the ethos of dispassionate, objective and rational analysis of policy options that I learned as an undergraduate remains the foundation of my thinking about public affairs.

One of our required first-year courses was in rational decision-making theory. The professor opened the first class with the question, “How much money is a human life worth?”….

Read the rest in The Forward–Comment there or here.

explain our family’s perspective on blogs and the new media. Nancy is hostess of the Sunlight Foundation’s Party Time! blog, which last month won an award at the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum. Nancy got a free trip to Bonn while we here at SoJo slaved away under the Levantine sun.

Nancy Watzman @ DWGMF 2009 from Cafe Digital on Vimeo.

In the last few weeks, the Netanyahu government has introduces some new arguments for why it can’t freeze settlement, along with recycling the old confidence games. Among the new cons is the legal claim. As Ha’aretz reported:

A government source in Jerusalem said the Americans understood that even if Netanyahu agreed to a full freeze, the government did not have the legal authority to force private construction companies to stop building. The source said that if an attempt were made to order a halt to construction, contractors or homeowners would appeal to the High Court of Justice and probably win.

I’ve got an article in Saturday’s Washington Post explaining why this and other such claims are bunk:

…under Israeli Supreme Court precedents, the government’s authority to set policy in territory under “belligerent occupation” (the court’s terminology) trumps the interests of settlers and Israeli companies.

In 1992, the government of Yitzhak Rabin imposed a partial construction freeze in the West Bank. In two rulings, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected challenges to the freeze by developers and the municipal governments of settlements. The court eliminated any doubts left by those decisions with a far-reaching ruling in 2005, when it upheld the authority of the government and parliament to evacuate settlers from their homes in the Gaza Strip.

Achieving goals such as “peace, security, [and] international recognition” justified harming settlers’ property rights and civil rights as long as they received financial compensation, Israel’s highest court held. Let’s be logical. If, for reasons of state, the court allowed the government to remove settlers from homes where they had lived for years, it would allow the state to prevent Israelis from completing homes where they haven’t yet chosen the kitchen tiles. The only legal question would be how much compensation developers and buyers would receive. Netanyahu’s reported assertion that he’s hamstrung comes down to a hope that no one in Washington checks Israeli legal history.

Raising this argument may have boomeranged seriously. Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Barak reportedly laid out the legal-restraint claim to American envoy George Mitchell in the first half of June. On June 15, at a press conference, President Obama said (hat tip to JTA’s Eric Fingerhut for reporting this):

“I’ve also made very clear that both sides are going to have to move in some politically difficult ways in order to achieve what is going to be in the long-term interests of the Israelis and the Palestinians and the international community,” he said. “On the Israeli side, that means a cessation of settlements. And there is a tendency to try to parse exactly what this means, but I think the parties on the ground understand that if you have a continuation of settlements that, in past agreements, have been categorized as illegal, that’s going to be an impediment to progress.” (my emphasis).

This is a very significant return to the  original U.S. view of settlements, after a long hiatus.

From the Johnson administration through the Carter administration, the official US stance was that Israeli settlements were illegal - in all territory taken in 1967, including the West Bank, which in turn includes East Jerusalem. Ronald Reagan, taking a position that could be termed voodoo law, said settlements were “not illegal,” though they were ”unnecessarily provocative.” As the New York Times reported in 1983, that put the State Department’s legal office in a serious bind. The lawyers couldn’t disagree with their boss, their president. Professionally, they also couldn’t disagree with the obvious meaning of the law. When asked about the legality of settlements, they would diplomatically evade the question.

From then on, presidents did the same. International law was clear (as I’ve explained here, here and here).  But as William Quandt, author of Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967, once told me, after Reagan referred to settlement legal, “anyone who said it wasn’t…would be viewed as anti-Israeli” in the U.S. The State Department legal office, on the other hand, never revised its view, as the Washington Post reported two days after Obama’s press conference:

Despite the passage of time, the legal opinion, issued during the Carter administration, has never been revoked or revised. President Ronald Reagan said he disagreed with it — he called the settlements “not illegal” — but his State Department did not seek to issue a new opinion…

After the Post report, a former State Department lawyer wrote a letter to the paper with some important additional info. The article, said David Small,

…might be read to imply that the Carter administration broke new ground in finding Israeli settlements unlawful. It did not… Until President Ronald Reagan took office, our government shared the international consensus that this law prohibits changes such as civilian settlements. Mr. Reagan’s embrace of a distinctly minority contrary view was an unfortunate diversion.

The minority legal argument is that, because Egypt and Jordan — which Israel ousted from these territories in 1967 in lawful self-defense — were themselves illegal occupiers, Israel was not bound by international occupation law… The most important flaw in this argument is that it overlooks the rights of the people living there at the time…

Obama, it appears, has returned to the original stance, the one that accords with what’s distinctly the majority opinion. He has refused to bow to the political pressure of those who falsely equate “pro-Israel” with “pro-settlement.” It may be easier for him to do so because criticism of the settlements has become more widespread among Americans, including American Jews.

And it’s also possible that the timing has to do with the Netanyahu government’s claim that it legally can’t stop settlement. Nope, Obama replied, legally you can’t continue it.

That said, there is something a bit strange in Obama’s wording - “settlements that, in past agreements, have been categorized as illegal…” He doesn’t specify the agreements. The road map calls for a freeze in settlement but doesn’t refer to their legality. The agreement to which he’s referring is apparently the Fourth Geneva Convention itself.

There’s a lot of discussion on this blog about the issue of Israeli settlements. For someone just dropping in, some of the terms may be unclear.

As it happens, the Los Angeles Times’ opinion section today includes a package on the settlement issue, and the editor asked me to explain some of the basic terms and issues. The piece is here, and includes definitions of “settlement,” “Green Line,” and “outpost,” as well as an explanation of the current U.S.-Israel tensions over the issue. (It doesn’t include a discussion of international law, because the package includes a separate article on that, by Sarah Leah Whitson,  Middle East director at Human Rights Watch).

Since I’ve written a lot on this issue over the past month, here’s a brief directory for anyone wanting more info:

On how settlement threatens Israel:

At Slate: Barack the Zionist: Why President Obama’s approach to settlements is better for Israel than Benjamin Netanyahu’s is.

In the American Prospect: Settling for Radicalism

On the Netanyahu government’s sundry arguments against a freeze, and other deceptions:

At the Washington Post: Netanyahu’s Settlement Smoke Screens: Yes, the government does have the legal power to freeze settlement, even if it tells Washington differently.

At the American Prospect: House Hunting in the West Bank.

At Foreign Policy: Unnatural Growth.

And at the Forward: Ignore the Theatrics, Bibi Just Wants To Build. Netanyahu would like to convince Obama that he’s making a good-faith effort to evacuate the outposts. The con might work on a legacy student with a C average named George.

As always, feel free to come back to South Jerusalem to comment.