Bernard Avishai Dot Com

Benjamin Netanyahu’s War At Home

2026-05-18T19:22:44.818-04:00

On April 20th, Alex Sinclair, a novelist and part-time lecturer in Jewish education at Hebrew University, was typing away on his laptop at his favorite café in the city of Modi’in. On his head was a knitted kippah, or yarmulke, that he had worn for twenty years, embroidered with both the Israeli and the Palestinian flag—a tribute, he later wrote in a Facebook post, to “the messy ambivalence of my Jewish-Zionist identity.” (He immigrated to Israel from England, in 1997, at the age of twenty-five.) As he worked, he wrote, “a religious man came over to me with an angry face and shouted at me that my kippah is against the law.” Sinclair denied that it was and invited the man to sit down and talk. Not appeased, the man called the police. Five minutes later, two officers appeared, and one—a policewoman who, Sinclair said, looked about his kids’ age—declared the kippah illegal and said that he would be “detained.”

Read on at The New Yorker

Sheltering In Jerusalem And Looking At The Iran War

2026-03-15T13:28:00.001-04:00

There is a Hebrew word for “squeezed,” sachut, which also means “being played.” In Jerusalem, after more than a week of the war that the United States and Israel launched on Iran, that state of mind seems inescapable. In the German Colony neighborhood, where my family lives, the constant, low growl of fighter jets has become a kind of white noise. Schools are closed, as are restaurants that don’t have shelters, but banks and shopping centers are open at unpredictable hours. Day and night, smartphones deliver a tone, piercing enough to start dogs trembling, alerting us to incoming missiles or drones. There are fewer alerts now, but they come episodically. We then listen for a chorus of sirens, which means that a missile or drone is headed to our general area. The German Colony is in the city center, just a mile or so from the Al Aqsa Mosque, so not a likely target for Islamic forces. But if a missile is shot down overhead, large pieces of shrapnel will be falling.

When the sirens sound, we rush down to a dank shelter, once a water cistern, under our building. On the stairs, we might hear the deafening pops of the launch of intercepting missiles, followed by distant, staccato thuds—or, more ominously, sustained rumbles. About half of the roughly three hundred missiles fired at Israel by March 10th reportedly carried cluster bombs. In the shelter, neighbors banter or trade dark punch lines. After ten or fifteen minutes, we check our phones for an all-clear or reports of where warheads may have gotten through. Later, we listen to security pundits and military experts telling us which Iranian leaders or installations have been “eliminated.” But they offer no answers for the most important questions, and seem to think them academic to people running to shelters: What can be achieved by this war? How will we end it—and not soon have to refight it? Why was it even necessary?

Continue at The NewYorker

Can The Ceasefire Hold And Lead To Peace?

2025-11-19T17:30:00.002-05:00

A shaky ceasefire is in place in Gaza. All the living hostages are home. But much uncertainty remains about the next phases of the deal. What’s the situation regarding Gaza’s recovery, Hamas’ ongoing presence and Israel’s stances, its political future and its deepening isolation? What choices does Israel face? What role will the international community play in shaping developments? And how does the West Bank factor in? A Webinar for Canadian Friends of Peace Now

The ‘Day After’ Plan For Gaza That Netanyahu Doesn’t Want To Talk About

2025-09-13T16:03:00.004-04:00

Despite what Netanyahu says, the West Bank business elite is ready and willing to govern and rebuild.

Every day, now, we are served up horrifying pictures of starving Gazans and starving hostages, yet ceasefire negotiations between the Netanyahu government and Hamas have proven hopeless. This was predictable. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants Hamas to surrender to Israeli firepower, thus vindicating “peace through strength,” intimidation and deterrence as a kind of default diplomacy. On Thursday, his government adopted a plan to attack Gaza City. Hamas, for its part, refuses to disarm, seeing every defeat as merely tactical in a long-term struggle to realize jihadist ambitions.

Netanyahu wants us to believe, or at least wants the Trump administration to, that Israel has no alternative than to intensify the war and, in effect, reoccupy the whole of the Gaza Strip — seriously risking the lives of the hostages in the process. But this is not the case and hasn’t been for the past 18 months. Hamas was never the necessary negotiating partner, or even the counterparty, to any deal that promised to succeed. Netanyahu must know that.

Read on at POLITICO

Opinion | The Endgame Of The Iran Attacks Isn’t Clear, Even In Jerusalem

2025-06-18T04:45:00.003-04:00

The war is five days old, and, like most Israelis, we are getting about as much sleep as the parents of a newborn, roused twice a night and running to our shelter. There, our condo neighbors gather, bantering through the newscasts, damp and in doubt. Living in Jerusalem half the year — the other half, I’m teaching at Dartmouth — this is hardly our first emergency. And our home is just a mile-and-a-half from the Al Aqsa mosque, so we don’t feel particularly vulnerable to a targeted attack by Islamists.

Yet high overhead, as sirens scramble us at 4 a.m., one can see the trailing flames of missiles headed west, to the coastal cities; and see flashes and hear the booms of anti-missile defenses. The danger for us is falling debris; it can penetrate two stories, nothing like the thousand-pound-plus warheads that have shredded multi-story apartments in Bat Yam and labs in Rehovot, but not to be toyed with.

Read on in
Politico

Why Benjamin Netanyahu Is Going Back to War

2025-03-28T07:10:00.001-04:00

As if the Israeli people’s losses from October 7th are not grievous enough, their fears for the hostages not haunting enough, and the miseries of the Gazans not shaming enough, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is bringing his country back to war. He’s also exacerbating its divisions, pitting orthodoxy and coercion against the rule of secular law. “Netanyahu’s true objective appears increasingly clear,” Haaretz’s senior defense analyst Amos Harel wrote, “a gradual slide toward an authoritarian-style regime, whose survival he will try to secure through perpetual war on multiple fronts.”

Read on at The New Yorker

"Is Israel A Theocracy?"

2024-12-13T14:40:00.002-05:00

This may seem a rather abstract question, given the headlines, but I suspect that the growing culture war will be front and center once the guns fall silent and for many years thereafter. Thanks to Bennett Windheim for an interesting conversation.

Link to the podcast here.

Why Netanyahu Won’t Cease Fire

2024-12-13T14:31:00.001-05:00

This was published in early October.

Benjamin Netanyahu came to the United Nations General Assembly on September 27th to tell the delegates—or, at least, those who hadn’t walked out on him—that his cause is righteous. As he did a year ago, he evoked the Book of Deuteronomy, from the Torah, saying, “We face the same timeless choice that Moses put before the people of Israel thousands of years ago, as we were about to enter the Promised Land.” That choice was whether to “bequeath to future generations a blessing or a curse.” Then he pulled out two illustrated maps, one labelled “The Blessing,” depicting Israel at peace with its Arab neighbors, including Saudi Arabia, and the other “The Curse,” depicting Iran forming what he called an “arc of terror” with Syria and Iraq. Our “common civilization” faces a choice, Netanyahu said, and, like Moses’s speech, much of his address was devoted to warning about those who chose the side of the curse, whose forces he promised to defeat.

Read on at The New Yorker

Is Netanyahu Choosing A War Of Attrition Over Biden’s Wider Plan?

2024-05-15T05:44:00.004-04:00

Eleven days ago, the C.I.A. director, William Burns, arrived in Cairo to join the negotiations over Gaza, which have also been brokered by Qatar and Egypt. Since then, ordinary Israelis began checking their phones every couple of hours to find out the fate of the “iskah,” Israel’s never-quite-consummated ceasefire deal with Hamas. Last Tuesday, we found out, instead, that the Israel Defense Forces had conducted air strikes in part of Rafah, and gained control of the Palestinian side of the land crossing into Sinai, near the Egyptian border. As the country marks an unusually vexed Independence Day, it is not yet clear how the Rafah incursion will affect the negotiations. It is clear that, as the Biden Administration (and many Israeli security experts) conceive it, a deal would not just secure the return of hostages but gesture toward a turning point in the war and in the region—which the Netanyahu government continues to resist.

Netanyahu claims that beneath Rafah, in a network of tunnels and bunkers, four Hamas battalions remain intact, presumably joined by fighters fleeing the north and holding an unknown number of surviving hostages. (Unnamed Israeli officials suspect that many Hamas fighters, along with the leader Yahya Sinwar, have actually moved back to tunnels further north.) Above ground in Rafah, a million Gazan refugees languish in tents, with few facilities and little food. Most are from Gaza City and Khan Younis, where, during the winter, the I.D.F. scattered most other Hamas battalions and, in the process, killed tens of thousands of civilians, and destroyed or damaged half the homes and more than three-quarters of the schools. More than three hundred thousand people are reportedly on the move again, desperately seeking safe zones. When Israeli officials speak of applying military “pressure” to secure the hostages’ release, the implication is that Hamas must believe that an attack on them is imminent; paradoxically, though, Hamas must know that Israel knows that an actual attack would doom the hostages—and, in the eyes of the world, the nation. In any case, it would certainly mean that thousands more Gazan civilians would be killed or subject to famine, which is why the White House firmly opposes an attack. Early last week, President Biden announced that he had held up a shipment of bombs that, he said, “have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities.”

Read on at The New Yorker

What Joe Biden Must Tell The Israeli Public

2024-03-02T11:45:00.002-05:00

On February 22nd, four months into Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu presented his war cabinet with a short document sketching out what, in his view, “absolute victory” looks like. The timing was not surprising. The Israel Defense Forces are poised to attack the southern Gazan city of Rafah, where Israel believes that four of Hamas’s last six battalions are hiding in tunnels and holding what is estimated to be around a hundred still surviving hostages. Netanyahu told CBS on Sunday that, once the assault begins, “the intense phase of the fighting” will be “weeks away from completion.” As for his postwar plan for Gaza, Netanyahu offered a laconic mixture of counter-insurgency and Greater Israel fantasies, to which the hostages’ lives seem subordinated. No surprises there, either.

President Joe Biden purports to have other ideas. He told a reporter in New York this week—while eating ice cream with the late-night host Seth Meyers—that he hopes for a ceasefire deal “by next Monday.” For the past few months, his State Department has projected a postwar vision that includes Saudi Arabia’s normalization of relations with Israel, in return for a process leading to a demilitarized Palestinian state. But the Biden Administration, having underwritten Netanyahu’s tactics, risks being subordinated, too. An attack on Rafah would compound the carnage to which Biden is already considered an accomplice, and it would imperil the effort to lead Arab countries to a kind of military and economic alliance in which the integration of Israel might be feasible.

There is an opportunity cost for Israeli politics, too. Netanyahu’s real opposition, now, is Biden. There are secular leaders in Israel positioned to support an alternative vision for Gaza and the region, and, arguably, to bring Netanyahu down. But dread grips the public, and these leaders currently have no real standing in the absence of a U.S. President detailing a plan, proving the support of Arab allies, and warning Israel of the dire consequences of defying him. Biden might well reunite the Democratic Party, and get himself reëlected, in the process. (In the Michigan Democratic primary on Tuesday, the “uncommitted” vote, protesting Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza, was just shy of the spread between Biden and Trump in 2020.)

Read on at

The New Yorker

Co-Teaching A Class On Israel And Palestine

2024-02-03T14:27:00.002-05:00

For the past two years, at Dartmouth College, I have been co-teaching a course called The Politics of Israel and Palestine with Ezzedine Fishere, a former Egyptian diplomat who served under the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process. Our work in the class—a civil, exploratory dialogue sustained over eighteen sessions—anchored a series of public forums at the college in the aftermath of the horrors of October 7th. These drew several hundred students and faculty into the college halls, and were watched by two thousand more online; they proved sufficiently helpful in preëmpting the polarization that has afflicted other Ivy League campuses to gain the attention of various national media. I spend half the year in Israel, and have since returned to a country at war. I’ve been thinking more about our miniature peace process, about how a university might organize for difficult subjects—and about what, after all, universities are.

Ezzedine and I had been teaching versions of our course separately; I started in 2011, he in 2016. We had a mutual friend in Álvaro de Soto, the former U.N. Special Coordinator under whom he served, and Ezzedine did his doctorate in Montreal, my home town, so our relations were warm from the start. But it was only after the eleven-day Gaza conflict in May, 2021, when I returned to campus from Jerusalem, that we determined that we would team up. The catalyst was a statement put out by some faculty members who had organized into the Consortium of Studies in Race, Migration, and Sexuality, or R.M.S. Their statement was in solidarity with Gazans but was infused with viscous rhetoric (“For RMS, this means ensuring that our shared epistemologies and ethics of anticolonial relations are capacious”) and seemed rather hypothetical about attitudes toward sexuality in Gaza under Hamas rule; it also called for “supporting Jewish scholars who have vowed that their future teaching of the Holocaust will be in dialogue with the Naqba, Black scholars who have put Ferguson next to Gaza,” and similar notions in this vein. Ezzedine and I feared that this statement would prompt a counter-statement from other faculty members who might accuse pro-Palestinian activists of antisemitism. “If this became a thing,” Ezzedine recalled recently, “it would have undermined the spirit in which we’d been operating.”

Continue at The New Yorker

Israel's War Within

2024-01-17T06:51:00.001-05:00

In August 1975, I stood outside the Knesset, in Jerusalem, witnessing a fevered demonstration against Henry Kissinger, then the American secretary of state. Thousands of young men in knitted kippahs chanted and danced in circles, their arms wrapped around one another, their voices echoing off the stone building. They were mainly West Bank settlers, I was informed, part of a fledgling movement called Gush Emunim—in effect, the Young Guard of the National Religious Party (NRP).

Kissinger had visited earlier that year, in winter, with the aim of advancing an interim agreement between Israel and Egypt, itself a marker in the step-by-step “peace process” he’d brokered in the wake of the horrific Yom Kippur War. What he’d proposed was an Israeli pullback from the Suez Canal in exchange for American warning stations and various Egyptian steps toward normalization. But the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s young government had rebuffed his proposals, insisting on an Egyptian commitment to “nonbelligerency.” This dismayed Kissinger and provoked him to ramp up diplomatic pressure during the spring and summer: he and President Gerald Ford would lead a “reassessment” of the U.S.–Israel relationship on all levels, including military aid. By this balmy night in August, everyone knew that Rabin and his key ministers were bound to capitulate.

With Kissinger’s blessing, Rabin and the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat had elided the fate of the Palestinians, though nobody doubted their centrality to any solution that was not “interim.” Nevertheless, settler zealots viewed Sinai withdrawal—any withdrawal—as a portent of what was coming for “Judea and Samaria,” their archaic name for the West Bank. The NRP remained a small, but important, part of Rabin’s wobbly Labor coalition, and Gush Emunim was by now assumed to be in alignment with the opposition: the populist, ultra-nationalist Likud founded by Menachem Begin. I had immigrated from Canada three years earlier, and had been contributing reports to the New York Review of Books since the Yom Kippur War. And I watched, with growing unease, as Gush Emunim came to represent not only the settlers in the West Bank, but the moral prestige of “Greater Israel.” This turn of events had been fostered as much by the euphoric atmosphere following Israel’s 1967 triumph in the Six-Day War as by Palestinian terror, the grief of 1973, the inertia of occupation, and the long-incumbent Labor Party’s alleged corruptions.

By 1975, even secular Labor politicians regarded Jerusalem as nonnegotiable, its conquest sacralized by paratrooper deaths, the Jewish right to rule—if not divine—then, more vaguely, historic. The stance preempted, one Foreign Ministry official told me, what might well have developed into an end to the occupation and peace with Jordan’s King Hussein. A new series of Israeli pound notes had recently been introduced, and secular images—the atomic reactor at Nahal Sorek or the Knesset, for example—were replaced with renderings of the gates of the Old City of Jerusalem, as if these proved Jewish splendor since the time of King David, and had not been built by Suleiman the Magnificent in the sixteenth century.

As the chanting grew, I caught sight of Kissinger at the Knesset door. I could not make out the crowd’s words at first, or at least I could not quite believe what I was hearing. The chant grew rhythmic, unmistakable: Jew boy, Jew boy, Jew boy! The epithet had reportedly been shouted at Kissinger by hecklers the year before, during the disengagement negotiations with Syria, in an apparent parroting of Richard Nixon, who was said to have denigrated him in this way.

Kissinger, joined by Rabin, winced and ducked back inside. The chant grew louder and slower: Jew boy, Jew boy! I remember the sinking feeling, a sense that insolence had been raised to the level of ideology. I suspected that this might be a turning point; that, as I put it in my New York Review report, the Israeli government’s “policy of encouraging, or tolerating, various kinds of Jewish settlement in these conquered territories” had engendered “a spiritual élan heavily laden with vulgarized religious mysticism and messianic righteousness”—and that Gush Emunim had “grabbed the center of the stage.”

Read on at Harper's

Can White House Diplomacy Help Prevent Escalation In Gaza And Beyond?

2023-10-16T10:37:00.002-04:00

In Tel Aviv, on Thursday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters what President Biden had said passionately earlier this week—that the Administration has “Israel’s back.” For Israelis, mourning more than thirteen hundred murdered in the Hamas and Islamic Jihad attack from Gaza, stunned by the defensive breach, fixed on the fate of an estimated hundred and fifty kidnapped, and mobilizing three hundred and sixty thousand reservists, the Administration’s statements of support were timely. Blinken, standing next to Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, alluded to his family’s acquaintance with the sorrows of the Holocaust, and said, “You may be strong enough on your own to defend yourself—but, as long as America exists, you will never, ever have to.”

What precisely the Administration and Netanyahu’s government—now expanded to include the opposition leaders Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, both former chiefs of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, in the security cabinet—are coördinating has not been made public. But the Pentagon, according to Politico, had already begun airlifting air-defense missiles and other munitions to the I.D.F., and it has repositioned the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group, which includes eight squadrons of attack and support aircraft, to the eastern Mediterranean. On Saturday, the Administration confirmed that it was dispatching a second carrier group, the U.S.S. Dwight D. Eisenhower, to join the Ford. Blinken and Netanyahu’s most urgent joint priority seems to be deterring Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. (The carrier group “sends a strong signal of deterrence should any actor hostile to Israel consider trying to escalate or widen this war,” a White House National Security Council spokesperson told Axios’s Barak Ravid.) Hezbollah is no longer the ragtag force it was when its artillery barrages forced Israeli troops out of southern Lebanon in 2000; in 2020, the International Institute for Strategic Studies estimated that Hezbollah had up to twenty thousand active fighters and some twenty thousand reserves. It is reported to have more than a hundred thousand rockets, thousands of medium-range missiles, and hundreds of long-range missiles with guidance systems. The great danger is that it will add its rockets and missiles to those already coming from Gaza.

Read on at The New Yorker

What Can Joe Biden Do About Benjamin Netanyahu?

2023-06-17T14:00:00.003-04:00

Since 1977, when Menachem Begin, a founder of the Likud party, became Prime Minister, Israeli leaders liberal enough to entertain a peace process with the Palestinians that could end the conflict have controlled the government for just eight years. But they always had a not-exactly-stealth weapon: Israelis across the spectrum feared alienating Washington—its military technology, its diplomatic shield, its annual billions in aid, and what has been loosely called its “values.” By tradition, of course, U.S. Presidents don’t (openly) interfere with the domestic policies of America’s allies, but not all allies benefit from such largesse, and Israeli Prime Ministers have all been rated on how they’ve cultivated bipartisan U.S. concern for Israel’s security. Civil-rights groups have sought to stop human-rights violations, such as in the occupied territories, by shaming expansionist governments in the U.S. media and before American élites more generally.

So, now that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition, led by his Likud bloc and its allies in far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties, has openly menaced Israel’s democratic structures—demanding, for example, that the governing coalition be given decisive influence over the selection of judges—liberals are reflexively seeking a lifeline from Joe Biden’s Administration. And what seems increasingly clear is that President Biden is loath to throw it. “There are plenty of reasons for Americans to care” about what Netanyahu’s coalition is doing, but “there just aren’t that many reasons for the Administration to do anything,” Steven Simon, a former Middle East adviser in the Obama White House and the author of the recently published “Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East,” told me. “The U.S. relationship with Israel lives or dies by domestic U.S. political dynamics,” and though thirty-eight billion dollars—the ten-year military-aid package signed under Barack Obama—“could become a lever, no Democratic Administration would want to deploy it.” There would be “noise.”

Read on at The New Yorker

Israel Turns Seventy-five As A Nation Divided

2023-04-27T10:07:00.003-04:00

Israel turns seventy-five this week: the ritualized celebrations of patriotic solidarity are, this year, unusually self-conscious and forced. The country is in an escalating culture war, and the festivity seems only a ceasefire. Not unlike America commemorating its seventy-fifth year, in 1851, one feels that a rotten compromise struck at the time of the state’s founding has produced, in effect, two societies in Israel, one passably liberal and bourgeois, one traditional and supremacist, and that the latter has finally encroached upon the former in ways that make live and let live—once justified as unity against foreign enemies—intolerable.

Read on at The New Yorker

The Trump-Netanyahu Strategy Is Revealed

2023-04-12T12:13:00.001-04:00

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have been allies, but also, intriguingly, mirror one another.

That’s not only because both see “strength” as their go-to asset, or at least the con that the political base seems most likely to buy. Each claims to be his nation’s singular guardian against catastrophe. Each turns shamelessness into charisma. Each grew up coddled but plays up resentments for elites. Each cultivates, in effect, dictators like Vladimir Putin and Victor Orban and scoffs at Western Europe. Each will tolerate only loyalists, and has a string of former appointees, especially high-ranking security professionals, who look back on their service in disgust. Each brags promiscuously, condemns “fake news” and has a sycophantic, tweeting son.

Read on at POLITICO

Has Benjamin Netanyahu’s Assault On Israeli Democracy Been Stopped?

2023-03-28T05:23:00.002-04:00

On Sunday night, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, a reserve major general whose mother had been a Polish refugee on the S.S. Exodus. His offense was patriotism. The night before, Gallant had appeared on prime-time national television, calling for a “dialogue” on the fate of the Israeli judiciary and a temporary “halt to the legislative process” that is, in effect, assaulting it. “The growing rift in our society is penetrating the I.D.F. and security agencies. This poses a clear, immediate, and tangible threat to the security of the state. I will not lend my hand to it,” he said. A source close to Netanyahu, changing the subject, said that Gallant was fired for his “feeble and weak response” to the rapidly growing number of reserve officers who, in protest, are refusing to appear for service.

The response from the street was anything but feeble. Overnight, mass demonstrations—of tens of thousands of mostly young people—erupted across the country, building on what have become regular Saturday-night events in the major cities. (During the rest of the week, some show up for improvised, digital teach-ins and spontaneous strategy sessions in towns and neighborhoods.) Protesters were especially focussed on Tel Aviv, where police used water cannons to clear the vital Ayalon expressway. People lit bonfires and chanted, “Democracy or revolt!” and, “You’ve taken on the wrong generation”—and, increasingly, “Bibi, go home.”

Read on at The New Yorker

Netanyahu’s Government Takes A Turn Toward Theocracy

2023-01-07T07:50:00.002-05:00

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new coalition government, which was sworn in last week, is routinely referred to as “extreme right,” but this tortures the meaning of conservatism in a democracy. Thirty-two of the coalition’s members in the Knesset (out of a hundred and twenty parliamentary seats) are disciples of so-called religious parties, the political arms of theocratic communities. These parties, and factions of parties, can be divided into three groups: The largest alliance, with fourteen seats, is religious Zionism, whose forebears were preoccupied with preserving the rabbinic privileges afforded by the British Mandate in the new state of Israel—such as supervision over marriage, burial, conversion, and dietary laws, and state-supported religious schools—but which, since 1967, has been overtaken by the messianic claims of West Bank settlers. The Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, with seven seats, represent self-segregating communities living mainly in and around Jerusalem. Shas, with eleven seats, are a populist, anti-élite party of Orthodox Mizrahi immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, who tend to be poorer and less educated.

In recent years, the three groups have meshed ideologically into the “national camp,” adhering in particular to the ultranationalist, Greater Israel vision of the religious-Zionist alliance: prohibiting the surrender of Biblically promised land, and moving the state further toward Orthodox law. Indeed, the other, anchoring half of the government majority, Netanyahu’s Likud party, includes many rank-and-file members who also openly identify with religious Zionism. (The new minister of environmental protection, Idit Silman, is a former backbencher of a religious-Zionist party who jumped to the Likud last summer, abandoning the “change government” of Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett, thereby helping to bring it down.)

So, at least half of the coalition government cannot be said to be on the right in any ordinary sense, because its leaders and followers aren’t really committed to the secular social contract, founded on scientific skepticism and liberal norms, that even Zionist rightists including Vladimir Jabotinsky embraced. A 2016 Pew study found that eighty-nine per cent of Haredi, and sixty-five percent of dati—others who feel themselves governed by Jewish ritual law and practice, or Halacha—believe that, if the choice is between democratic principles or Halacha, the latter should “take priority.” Yair Nehorai, a former acolyte of religious Zionism, and the author of “The Third Revolution,” a book documenting the teachings of the rabbinic mentors of the messianic movement, believes that these attitudes amount to a novel politicized Jewish creed, advanced by “Jewist” activists who, in pressing for a Halachic state, are equivalent to “Islamist” activists who advocate for Muslim governmental supremacy and Sharia law. “Rabbi Eliezer Sadan, a renowned Israel Prize winner, set up a program in 1998 that’s prepared twenty-five hundred young men for the military—half of whom became officers, even senior officers,” Nehorai told me. “My book quotes him from 2017 preaching that the ‘Torah is our constitution,’ and the nation, ‘living in its land,’ should conduct its life on the basis of ‘divine precepts.’ ”

Read on at
The New Yorker

Can The Israeli Election Solve Anything?

2022-11-07T16:12:00.001-05:00

If the polls are on target, or even slightly off, Tuesday’s election in Israel—the fifth since April of 2019—seems unlikely to settle things down any more than the previous four have. The centrist bloc led by Prime Minister Yair Lapid—who, since June, has been serving in a caretaker role—may deny victory to former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightist bloc. The latter has been consistently projected to win between fifty-nine and sixty seats out of a hundred-and-twenty seats in the Knesset—given the margins of error in major polls, a statistical tie. But, as before, turnout can tip the balance. And either bloc could be seriously undermined if one of its smaller, allied parties attracts significant support but falls short of the, in effect, four-seat minimum needed to cross the threshold for entering the Knesset. Winning is not governing, however. Israel’s electoral system is based on proportional representation, so many small parties do cross the threshold and can then become the last piece that builds a coalition to a Knesset majority. Small parties, like factions of bigger ones, may then wield outsized power in negotiating for seats in the cabinet.

Even if Lapid wins a more decisive victory, his electoral strategy entails coöperation with hard-liners who, were it not for their personal animosity for Netanyahu, would have been more comfortable in the rightist bloc. Ultimately, they could confound Lapid’s effort to build a governing coalition that’s more stable or enduring than the so-called “change government”—a coalition of eight ideologically disparate parties that unseated Netanyahu in the summer of 2021—which he has co-led, in alternation, with the rightist former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. If, on the other hand, Netanyahu’s bloc wins a majority, his coalition, led by his own Likud Party, may appear more coherent, at least at first. But it will be hostage to Religious Zionism, a surging proto-fascist settler party that is projected to win a dozen or so seats. A Netanyahu government would thus be a standing provocation for Israel’s élites, Arab Israelis, Palestinians under occupation, regional Arab partners, and even American political allies. On the whole, the Likud rank and file would go along, much as the majority of Republican politicians have fallen in line behind Donald Trump. But a few Likud veterans may bridle. And, unlike in the United States, just one or two defections in a nearly evenly split Knesset could bring the government down.

Read on at The New Yorker

A.B. Yehoshua’s Culture War

2022-09-11T15:26:00.001-04:00

On the evening of May 18th, the writer A.B. Yehoshua—“Bulli” to his many friends—climbed onto a Jerusalem stage, heavy on his walker, acknowledging the cheers of an audience that had come out to pay tribute to his work. Three younger writers had just described characters and rhetorical gambits that had inspired them, quoting from among Bulli’s more than 20 novels, story collections, and plays. They implied, but did not have to say, that he was among the preeminent writers who had come into their own in the three decades after the Israeli state was founded—joining the novelist Amos Oz, the poet Yehuda Amichai, and the journalist Amos Elon as custodians of Zionism’s prestige, yet wielding modern Hebrew to address personal, not just national, trials. Everyone in the room also knew—because he made no secret of this to reporters—that Bulli had esophageal cancer that was fatal and advancing. The moderator, the young novelist Roni Kaban, asked, with an ironic cheerfulness that he must have supposed Bulli would appreciate, how he was “feeling.” Bulli paused and smiled. “I want to die, but it’s not …,” he paused again, seeming to relish the comedy in flunking death, as the laughter in the room nervously swelled and faded. “My books are full of death,” he said. “I am ready. Aval ma zeh? But what is this? What happens? How can we die?”

When, finally, he found out what “this” is—Bulli died less than a month later, on June 14th, at the age of 85—one might well have wondered if he ever gave up trying to find the words. “It was thus that he remembered the moment of her death,” Molkho, the hero from his 1987 novel of the same name, thinks of his wife’s end, a Mahler symphony playing to her on background speakers, “by its exact bars, the repetition of which could recreate at will that final scene in the silence of the night.” Molkho “had never thought much about such things as life after death or reincarnation, had indeed thanked her mentally for shying away from all that mysticism, whose dark unreason would only have been swept away anyhow by her aggressive, bitter intellectuality.”

Molkho’s reverence seems like an anticipation. And the moral tension he exposes—“dark unreason” at odds with “bitter aggressive intellectuality”—comes across gently, as a private rumination. But, as was typical in Bulli’s fiction, it also reflected a public struggle—by 1987, the public struggle. “Unreason” is not much spelled out here, but the danger of a default to religious dogma is implied, as much by the novelist as by his character. Nor was Bulli alone here. In Israel, in 1987, the culture war was gaining force, and his part in it was never far from his mind.

Read on in Tablet

After A Year In Office, What Has Israel’s Change Government Changed?

2022-06-20T15:49:00.003-04:00

Israel’s improbable “change government” has been in power exactly one year this week, a landmark that is primarily a tribute to how its various leaders’ contempt for former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu marginally exceeds their antipathy for one another. The government is a coalition of two blocs: three rightist parties, managed by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, the leader of the Yamina party, representing Land of Israel hard-liners; and four center and left parties, managed by Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, the founder of the Yesh Atid party, which appeals to Tel Aviv’s bourgeois intelligentsia. The two blocs, with the support of a moderate conservative Islamist party led by Mansour Abbas, whose explicit aim was to increase investment in Arab-Israeli communities, initially held a bare majority of sixty-one seats in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. According to an agreed-upon rotation plan, Bennett and Lapid were scheduled to switch jobs in the summer of 2023; all leaders had agreed to avoid tackling the most divisive issues, especially those dealing with the occupation of Palestine. But a vote in the Knesset on the night of June 6th suggests that division is inescapable and that the government’s run may come to an end, in months, if not weeks. Israel would then face a fifth general election in three years and, once again, as the Haaretz editor, Aluf Benn, told me, “the campaign will largely be about Bibi, who remains the dominant figure in our politics.”

Read on at
The New Yorker

Jews Don’t Have A ‘Holiest’ Site

2022-05-13T07:19:00.001-04:00

Co-authored with Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi

It is routine to speak of the ancient Temple Mount as Judaism’s holiest site, a claim confounded only by its being Islam’s third-holiest site. A new Israel Democracy Institute poll tells us that half of Jewish Israelis sympathize with expansion of prayer services on the Mount’s plateau, though most of those tie their sympathy to their aspiration to political sovereignty. Older polls suggest that perhaps a third favor rebuilding the Temple; among those are a small but growing handful of people actively working to revive ritual sacrifice in anticipation of such a day, to be brought about by political, military — or supernatural — means. Mere rumors of Jewish worship catalyze Islamist zealotry in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Israel proper – and roil streets as far away as Bangladesh. Here in Jerusalem, as Israel begins its 75th year of independence, religious war is in the air.

We won’t address what Palestinians, and Muslims more generally, might believe. Nor whether the word “holy” can even be meaningful to post-enlightenment Jews who also believe in liberal democracy. For us as Israelis, it is more urgent that this growing, allegedly pious, Jewish desire to reconsecrate the Temple Mount be recognized as actually a debasement of what has made Jews distinctive since the first century C.E. – when Judaism, like Christianity, evolved among exiled Judeans as a response to the Temple’s destruction.

Read on at Haaretz

Israel And The Triangular Crisis Of Ukraine, Iran, And Palestine

2022-04-08T05:30:00.000-04:00

On Monday, the U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, joined the foreign ministers of Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Egypt, and Morocco for a meeting at Sde Boker, the retirement kibbutz and burial place of David Ben-Gurion, the nation’s first Prime Minister. The meeting had been initiated by the Israeli Foreign Minister, Yair Lapid, with encouragement from Blinken, whose main aim was to reassure the group that the United States is fixed in its commitment to deny Iran a nuclear weapon, and that the not-yet-consummated Iran nuclear deal is the best of available options to do that. “The summit was to showcase a strategic alliance growing out of the Abraham Accords,” the Israeli journalist Henrique Cymerman told me. “To seed the formation of a kind of Middle Eastern nato to contain Iran—deal or no deal.”

Israel and its Arab guests registered a certain discontent. No deal currently being negotiated contemplates constraints on the Iranian missile and drone programs. The leaders of the Gulf states have been increasingly chagrined by the lack of a U.S. response to the various attacks that Iran’s Houthi proxies in Yemen have made on the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia during the past few months—including, most recently, a strike on a Saudi Aramco facility, on March 25th. Indeed, Saudi Arabia and Jordan were not represented in person at the summit, although their interests were. (“The Saudis were the real enablers of the meeting,” Cymerman said.) According to Axios, Blinken asked Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, at a pre-summit meeting on Sunday, what alternative Israel proposed to a new deal—other than a U.S.-led, preëmptive strike, which Israel continues to prepare for but, particularly given the situation in Ukraine, the Biden Administration would not want to entertain. Bennett reportedly said that he believed Iran might be deterred from enriching uranium to weapons grade if it knew that the U.S. and European countries would intensify sanctions to the extreme levels they have placed on Russia. Since Israel has not joined in those sanctions, one can only wonder how Blinken received the suggestion.

Read on at The New Yorker

Naftali Bennett’s Calculated Effort To Engage With Vladimir Putin On Ukraine—And Iran

2022-03-16T02:45:00.000-04:00

On Saturday night, while Russian forces entered the Ukrainian city of Volnovakha, and blocked convoys of food and medicine intended for the nearby besieged city of Mariupol, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s President, called Naftali Bennett, the Israeli Prime Minister. The two spoke for more than an hour and discussed, Zelensky tweeted, “Russian aggression and the prospects for peace talks”—which, earlier in the day, Zelensky had suggested might take place in Jerusalem. Genuine negotiations would be impossible in Ukraine, Russia, or Belarus, he told reporters: “These are not places where we can come to any understandings on ending the war—I’m not talking about technical meetings but meetings between leaders. I believe Israel can be such a place, especially Jerusalem.”

That call would seem to vindicate what is almost universally framed as Bennett’s “mediation efforts.” They began in earnest a week before, on March 5th, when Bennett travelled to Moscow at the invitation of President Vladimir Putin, with whom the Israeli government, backed by two-thirds of Israeli citizens, continues to maintain normal, if cooled, relations. Zelensky had apparently urged Bennett to attend the meeting, which, Bennett’s office said, had the “blessing and encouragement of all parties”—a seeming reference to the Biden Administration. It lasted three hours—Bennett, an Orthodox Jew, flew on the Sabbath to attend, a violation except when “saving lives.” When the meeting was over, he flew to Germany for talks with Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and reportedly spoke with Zelensky by phone early the next morning—their third conversation in twenty-four hours. “The moment there is even a small opening, and we have the access to all sides and the capability, I see it as a moral duty to make every attempt,” Bennett told the Israeli Cabinet when he was back in Jerusalem.

Read on at
The New Yorker

Ties With Russia Compromise Israel’s Stance On Ukraine

2022-03-01T10:37:00.000-05:00

Last Wednesday, with the news that Vladimir Putin had launched an invasion of its neighbor, Israel’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement concerning “steps taken in eastern Ukraine” and endorsing the principle of “territorial integrity.” The statement didn’t even mention Russia, which rankled the Ukrainian Embassy in Tel Aviv. “We just really hope that they will do something that sounds the same as our Western allies,” an Embassy spokeswoman said. On Thursday, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, the architect of Israel’s current “center” government, abandoned the passive voice but not the guarded tone. Talking with reporters, he condemned “the Russian attack” as a “serious violation of the international order” and offered “humanitarian assistance to Ukrainian citizens,” but emphasized that Israel has good relations with both sides. Later that day, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett returned to the ministry’s original, more muted, style. “These are difficult, tragic times,” he said. “Our hearts are with the civilians of eastern Ukraine who were caught up in this situation.”

Israel’s statements reflect actions, or, rather, inactions. On Friday, the Times of Israel reported that the Lapid-Bennett government had rejected the Biden Administration’s request to co-sponsor a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Russia’s actions. On Monday, Lapid issued a statement saying that Israel would vote with the United States in the General Assembly in favor of the resolution, while holding off on supporting sanctions against Russia. “We established an inter-ministry team that will examine the effects and consequences of the sanctions on the Israeli economy and policy,” his statement read.

Read on at The New Yorker