Bernard Avishai Dot Com

Speaking Of Human Beings...

2008-07-05T20:10:00.002-04:00

...a short film about a magnificent woman, Dr. Rose Bilbool. Thanks to the indomitable Norman Manea for bringing this tribute to my attention. By the way, "Bilbool" means a "confusion" in Hebrew, strangely appropriate during a week of righteous certainties.

Dream Palace Of The Arabs

2008-07-03T16:47:00.013-04:00

The little supermarket in the German Colony of Jerusalem has a famously good meat counter; the man who's run it for the last 10 years or so is named Abed. He is a Jerusalem-born Arab, a Muslim, about 40 years old, the father of three (or is it four, now?), whose pictures are hung behind the counter. The store is a place you wander into several times a week, looking for blueberries or chestnuts. I've almost always wound up speaking to Abed about this and that, and eventually started coming in to talk even if I needed nothing. I am more than a customer to him and he is more than a clerk to me.

Abed has a quick mind, infectious smile and Zhivago-like eyes. He could have been anything he set his mind to becoming. He once told me the story of how he and his closest friends had dreamed of studying the law, that a couple of them actually went to Cairo to get law degrees, but that he wanted to start making money and missed the boat, you know, for reasons young men later come to regret. But he did go to work and did begin saving his money--6 a.m. to 4 p.m., every day for 20 years.

When Abed had finally squirreled-away enough, just around the turn of the millennium, he started building himself a stately house in the northern Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina, just beyond Shuafat, but before the Jewish neighborhood of Neve Yaacov. He and his family finally moved into the house, his dream palace, in 2003. This was, of course, the height of the Al-Aqsa Intifadah.

In 2004, the government announced that the security wall was going up. Beit Hanina was going to be on the other side of it. Abed and his family were given days to find a place inside the wall, or he would be considered a resident of the Palestinian territories, not Jerusalem; he would lose his job, and they would lose their social insurance and health benefits (which his taxes had paid for all those years).

Abed told me this story with resignation. Who lives in the house?, I asked him at the time? "The birds," he said, and added: "God is great." His family squeezed into a two bedroom flat. The only time his eyes teared up was when he explained how he had to pull his kids from school and tell them they could no longer play with their friends. In all the years I have known him, I've heard nothing but words of revulsion for violence of any kind.

Oh, by the way, a couple of years later, his brother's house, in the family compound in Abu Tor, was entirely demolished. His brother had added floors without a municipal permit; the family had applied for years to no avail. No Jewish house has ever suffered this fate. The bulldozer showed up with 24 hours warning. Abed's eyes teared up again when he told me about his brother, that he had sought me out to witness the demolition, but I was out of the country. (My eyes, too.)

I AM TELLING this story because Abed did not wake up yesterday and start killing Jews. Nor did 249,000 other Arabs in Jerusalem, though they are not happy about what's been happening in the city of their birth.

When people speak anxiously about Jerusalem as the epicenter of a national conflict, it is all too easy to assume that Jews and Arabs sort out into their respective national organisms; that every act of cruelty, every atrocity, committed by any Arab or Jew is somehow expressing the DNA of the national organism as a whole. That atrocities such as yesterday's attack by an Arab bulldozer driver run amok would just not happen if Arabs simply condemned violence collectively enough, or if they didn't secretly want atrocities to happen. Presumably, that suicidal driver was revealing Abed's real dream palace. (Oh, well, maybe not Abed, but Arabs in general.)

This is, for God's sake, no way to think about human beings. We do not need theories about national minds at terrible times like this. We need to understand the grim logic of Jerusalem since 1967. We need to understand bell-curves. A peace settlement will not put an end to attacks like the one we saw yesterday. But as Abed once told me, blessing God, what if not peace will?

Public Perceptions

2008-07-01T11:29:00.013-04:00

There is a legendary story about the General Motors marketing department in the 1950s. They conducted a survey of ordinary car buyers, unveiling two designs, one simple and Fordy, and another loaded with style and chrome. Then the survey asked two shrewd questions: "Which do you like?" and "Which do you think your neighbors would like?" Most said they liked the simple design, but that their neighbors would like the opulent one. General Motors produced the opulent one. They sold a lot of cars.

A few days ago, I mentioned in this blog a reported study on Israeli attitudes by the Kennedy School's Center for Public Leadership at Harvard, conducted by Prof. Todd Pittinsky. I just read the full report and you can here. The survey asks two shrewd questions, in effect, the flip of the GM study: "How many Jewish citizens do you think have positive attitudes about Arab citizens?" and, in effect, "What do you think of Arab citizens?" (The study also asked Arabs about Jews in the same way.) The results are telling: 64% of Jews said they had positive feelings about Arabs, but only 13% said they thought other Jews had positive feelings. The Arab side was essentially similar: 68% had positive feelings, but only 33% said that other Arabs had positive feelings.

How to interpret such findings? Some will jump to assume that, again, people are projecting what they really feel onto some majority of others. I think that would be a mistake. There is no public censure in Israel for expressing doubts about the Arab minority. Quite the contrary, to say that you like Arabs makes you somewhat nonconformist, even eccentric. It is a little like admitting that you like the chrome. At the same time, when you say that most Jews have negative feelings, you are stating what seems a public expectation, even imperative--like the need for the frugality of a Ford.

So the survey is actually teaching us that most Israeli Jews actually like the real Arab citizens in their midst, but feel they have to deny this for reasons of state and out of respect for the stereotypes. It is much the same with Arabs with respect to Jews.

ALL OF THIS means that the opportunities for integration and coexistence in Israel are at hand and growing. What gets in the way are public, quasi-official ways of supporting clannish behaviors that reinforce conformist attitudes. The wars do not help. And I have published a great deal about the legal and institutional confusions of the state apparatus.

But sometimes officially sanctioned behavior is just plain obnoxious--and easily preventable. Take this program in Kiryat Gat schools to warn girls not to date Bedouin boys. The minister of education is philosophy professor, and Peace Now founder, Yuli Tamir. Where is she?

By the way, most of these Bedouin boys will serve in the Israeli army. And Kiryat Gat is not some weird little ghetto. It is a booming town of 50,000 where Intel is investing $4.5 billion to build among the largest and most sophisticated chip fabrication facilities in the world. Should the Intel board not say something as well?

Watch the film, if you can stomach it. The pudgy teacher--obviously a Shas "welfare official"--is telling the girls that the danger of an Arab boy is comparable to the danger of speeding cars in the street and strong currents at the beach. Dating an Arab would be a "deviant event," he says; the Arab boys are merely out "to exploit" them for sex. As if Jewish boys are not.

Israel's Identity Crisis

2008-06-29T12:32:00.017-04:00

Who if not Adam LeBor understands that the ways out of our political quagmire cannot be easily encapsulated? I trust that I shall not seem ungrateful for his nuanced, warm reading of The Hebrew Republic by rushing to clarify something a phrase-turned-caption left ambiguous in his TBR review (“Israel’s Identity Crisis,” TBR, June 29, 2008).

The caption reads: “Avishai argues for an Israeliness that is not predicated on being Jewish.”

One of my book’s main points is that an egalitarian, secular democracy whose language is Hebrew would be a Jewish country, in the same identifiable (and marvelous) sense that a Yehuda Amichai poem is a Jewish poem. Indeed, such an Israel continues to be the Jewish national home, and refuge from anti-Semitism, as Zionism’s most original thinkers conceived it. These days, too much attention is paid to the "one-state solution," and too little to trans-national arrangements (like the EU) in which every country's cultural distinction is assured. So Israelis and Western Jews are naturally growing fearful of people who are cavalier about the continuity of Jewish culture. I should not like to appear cavalier in this way.

Nor do I believe (as one might also infer from the caption) that "being Jewish" should somehow be superseded by Israeliness. I want to see Israel confer only one nationality: Israeli. Israel should not have a legal definition for Jew, and should not have laws that require one. But this does not mean I want Israel in the identity business. Rather, Israel should be, like any European democracy, a commonwealth of laws with a distinct language, meant to enable persons, families, communities—citizens—to explore their own identities, religious imaginations, etc., as they see fit. Again, the living Hebrew language makes such exploration congenial for Jews. But it does not determine what a Jew is, or who contributes to our understanding of Jewishness.

I want Israel’s “identity crisis” to remain unresolved. When people use Herzl’s term, “The Jewish State,” I want them to qualify it.

Dream Team

2008-06-27T18:17:00.008-04:00

Unity, it turns out, is only a half hour from Wilmot, so how could I resist?

I know all the reasons why BHO should not choose HRC. None of them seemed very cogent to me this afternoon. Her campaign has made her the iconic figure she was not before the primaries. She connects. ("Bush and McCain are two sides of the same coin, and it doesn't add up to a lot of change.") The debate with the Republican Veep will also be consequential.

In fact, HRC has developed so much as a national figure in recent months, it will be hard for BHO to explain why not choosing her is not an act of pettiness or wimpiness or something bad. Hard, not impossible.

Anyway, it was hard to tell what he is really thinking, though from where I was standing, Reagan gave Gorbachev a warmer hug.

BY THE WAY, where I was standing is itself a story. While my daughter Tamar (the newly-minted art historian) and I were waiting outside the compound, in a long, patient line, a young woman from the campaign came up, out of the blue, and offered us (really, offered Tamar) a red wrist-band, which authorized us to jump the line and sit behind the candidates. We were, that is, invited to be in the world-historical photo-op. She didn't say why she chose Tamar. I wonder.

Check-in On The Truce

2008-06-26T13:29:00.003-04:00

An interview with NPR's "Here and Now."

Game Of Chicken:The Winner Is...

2008-06-25T09:38:00.004-04:00

...Ehud Barak.

Prime Minister Olmert has decided not to simply resign, but to face a party primary by September 25; this vote, he knows, will almost certainly force him to step aside without scuttling the current coalition.

Barak has proven that he is prepared to stand on a matter of principle, and even face the voters if necessary—in short, that he has the guts to lead, which is the last thing you’d expect Israel’s most decorated officer to have to prove.

But there are other winners. Olmert has won back a measure of his dignity. His many friends should be happy for him. He has even valorized an important judicial principle—academic, perhaps, when applied to sitting prime ministers who admit to taking bags of greenbacks to run a campaign—that the accused is innocent until proven guilty.

The real winner is what’s left of the peace process. All the talk about Israeli plans to attack Gaza, or bomb Iran, should not distract us. Leaked descriptions of IDF planning are as consistent with the idea that Barak is trying to create leverage for serious, three-front negotiations as the idea that he seeks military solutions. Barak knows the limits of military power; he is the one who pulled the IDF out of Lebanon, after all.

Anyway, to have negotiations of any kind, you have to avoid elections just now. With Olmert’s announcement, the current, centrist coalition has a realistic chance of surviving for another two years, which means Netanyahu has, for the moment, been blocked. True, if Shaul Mofaz loses the Kadima primary, and leads Shas and Kadima rightists out of the coalition, we might get an election anyway. But the optimism of the will savors one victory at a time.

Netanyahu has responded that Barak has “spit in the face of the Israeli public,” though polls continue to show the public both supports the government’s diplomatic surge and doubts that anything will come of it. Clearly, the government needs new leadership and more time: to work with the new American administration, to preside over a period of calm.

But one can see why Netanyahu is upset. Perhaps Sheldon Adelson will soothe him with more containers full of greenbacks from Macau, now that Maariv seems to be for sale again.

Israeli Arabs? Yes.

2008-06-23T13:10:00.004-04:00

For people who think that Arabs cannot integrate into Israel's Hebrew civil society, or that the only reason for peace is the so-called demographic threat, consider this: 77% of Israeli Arabs would rather live in Israel than in any other country in the world.