Bernard Avishai Dot Com

The New GM: Maker Of Mobile Devices

2009-07-10T10:18:00.006-04:00

Wilmot, New Hampshire. It is hard to think of a more wrong-headed take on the new GM than today's Times report on how a new muscle car will save the company. Imagine someone writing that a new Bee Gees will save Warner Music; imagine a government stupid enough to be 2/3 owner in such a venture, especially a government committed to reducing global warming and greening the economy.

In fact, the government gets one real prize with the new GM and that's Voltec, the working name for the electric power-train that is being integrated into the Chevy Volt, Cadillac Converj, and other vehicles scheduled for release over the next couple of years; a power-train whose 40-mile range will be extended by a 1.4 liter engine, acting as a dynamo when the battery pack runs down. (The tough little engine, by the way, was snared from Opel before its sale, a good example of finding components from within the global GM group, something the company will have to be great at in the future.)

I'll be saying a lot more about this electric vehicle and its commercial "ecosystem" in the weeks ahead (I'm writing a feature for Inc., and will be blogging about it with the magazine's permission). Suffice it to say for now that Voltec has a fighting chance to remake GM the way cell phones remade Motorola in the 1980s (a failing consumer electronics company in the early 1970s). Indeed, GM has a chance to be the first to reconceive the car as a the ultimate mobile device, embedded in both a rich information network and a smart electric grid; the first, that is, to set standards for the operating system that will manage the battery pack, and the communications protocols that will allow millions of electric vehicles to syndicate information and communicate their requirements to smarter (hence, greener) public utilities.

In short, GM has a chance to become the software powerhouse of the newest new economy, not just a manufacturing and assembling company (margins from these activities will drop to near zero, as with the manufacture of laptops and cell phone handsets), but primarily a design hub and anchor for hundreds of new software solutions companies that will focus on the tiers of communication the electric car portends: battery-pack to vehicle, vehicle to electric utility, and utility to sources of renewable energy. (Think of GM's OnStar's global positioning platform migrating to a communications platform that collects and interprets information about the timing of recharging of vehicles for power companies; think of, say, Accenture working with a half dozen start-ups to smarten Duke Energy's grid in a way that communicates with OnStar.) This would mean tens of thousands of new economy jobs, and little companies going global, much like Qualcomm did. It means utterly transforming what GM means by a supply-chain.

Of course, GM could blow it. Apple was hardly the leading contender to launch a digital music player and, hence, come to dominate new generation mobile PDAs. For GM to win, it will have to think of the car in the context of its various networks, much like Apple did with the iPod. The fact that the government both owns GM and also has the capacity to create convergent standards for environmental and safety reasons should give GM a great initial advantage. But none of this will happen if GM management, and the business press aiming to keep it honest, thinks about (or with) muscle.

Chess, Not Checkers

2009-07-04T14:55:00.013-04:00

The following notes may be found in President Obama's breast pocket.

Opening: Make Hilary Secretary of State (that is, remove the leader of the opposition from New York). Show the Arab and Muslim world--a place where honor matters--an abiding respect. Embrace the Arab League peace initiative of 2002 and frame the Israel-Palestine conflict in regional terms. Set out the long range goal of a Palestinian state, albeit in vague terms, but along with the insistence that settlements cease--code for some variation on the 1967 border. Draw Egypt and Jordan into the mix, implying their participation as forces on the ground. Open a diplomatic channel with, and through, Syria.

Middlegame: Cultivate the Palestinian Authority's new government, providing training to its police forces, while providing the promise of new investments to its business class. Use channel to Syria to bring Hamas into negotiations with the PA. Encourage rejection of Islamist radicalism in Palestine by implying American pragmatism; leave the Iranian regime to discredit itself and, in the process, the democratic pretensions of Hamas and Hezbollah. Challenge Israeli government on settlements' "natural growth" to establish future position on a 1967ish border. Work with Quartet to establish a consolidated front of world opinion and great power fiat; imply complete diplomatic isolation of groups in Israel/Palestine that defy the "peace process."

Attack: Broker a deal, with Egyptian participation, for the return of Gilad Shalit, in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners and the opening of the Gaza crossings. Visit Russia. Visit Damascus. Prepare the ground to isolate Iran diplomatically. Welcome the creation of a joint Palestinian negotiation team, led by the PA, but including Hamas officials; accept the principle that any deal will be put to a referendum; accept that all groups that agree to abide by a referendum can enter into a dialogue with Washington. Call for renewed, bilateral negotiations between Israel and the PA presided over by George Mitchell.

Endgame: Present American formulations (Clinton parameters, etc.) to resolve the problems of Jerusalem, refugees, and borders; make these public as the negotiations proceed. Announce that the result of the negotiations will be presented to a regional peace conference, including the Saudis and the Syrians. Meanwhile, the latter establish low level diplomatic and commercial contact with Israel under American auspices. In advance of the conference, announce a Syrian-Israeli peace deal based on a demilitarized Golan, returned to Syria, but open to Israeli tourism and including Israeli commercial interests. Rally Europe and the Quartet to Marshall Plan scale investment package for the Palestinians. Provide for a three year plan to isolate the settlers who must be repatriated and compensated. Announce inclusion of Israel in NATO, and sign Israel to nuclear non-proliferation agreement. Prepare speech for Oslo prize ceremony.

Switching Gears

2009-06-30T11:55:00.003-04:00

We are off to New Hampshire for the summer, where I'll be refocusing on the electric car: its commercial "ecosystem," the implications for public policy, and so forth--about which more soon. Watch this space also for updates and reflections on Obama's Middle East peace initiative as seen from the other side of the world.

If you've been thinking about becoming an email subscriber, you might pull the trigger. I expect posts will be more infrequent during the summer. Also, if you'd like to drop a line with suggestions, or simply to tell me how the blog is working for you, I'd be grateful: bernard.avishai@gmail.com.

I confess I am looking forward to spending time in America, to feeling the ambient pressure of ordinary liberalism, rather than the pressure of heroic solidarity. At the same time, I shall miss the narrowing instances of their combination, as captured in this marvelous poem by Lea Goldberg:

Is it true - will there ever come days of forgiveness and mercy?
And you'll walk in the field, and it will be an innocent's walk.
And your feet on the medick's small leaves will be gently caressing,
And sweet will be stings, when you're stung by the rye's broken stalks!

And the drizzle will catch you in pounding raindrops' folly
On your shoulders, your breast and your neck, while your mind will be clean,
You will walk the wet field, and the silence will fill you -
As does light in a dark cloud's rim

And you'll breathe in the furrow in breaths calm and even,
And the pond's golden mirror will show you the Sun up above,
And once more all the things will be simple, and present, and living,
And once more you will love - yes, you will, yes, once more you will love!

You will walk. All alone. Never hurt by the blazing inferno
Of the fires on the roads fed by horrors too awful to stand,
And in your heart of hearts you'll be able to humbly surrender,
In the way of the weeds, in the way of free men.

You can hear Chava Alberstein's wonderful rendition of this song-poem here. Take the time: it is lovely. (My thanks to Ganze Jahr Freylach, whose translation I am poaching.)

Al-Safa, June 27, 2009

2009-06-28T12:03:00.006-04:00

This, from my friend David Shulman, an activist in the Israeli-Palestinian peace group Ta'ayush, who has written widely about acts of witness in the South Hebron hills--including in this blog:

While Prime Minister Netanyahu scoffs at Ahmedinajad’s beatings of peaceful demonstrators, here is what happened yesterday, in broad daylight, at the village of al-Safa, inside occupied Palestinian territory. I am reporting the testimony of Dr. Amiel Vardi, and many other supporting testimonies. There is graphic photographic documentation, including a live video clip, which ca n be seen here. The pictures seen here are part of a series that can be viewed at this Flickr site.

Further photographic evidence will become available within the next day or two. (Israel has so far not resorted to blocking internet sites.) What Amiel reports is incontrovertible.

The activists arrived in the morning at al-Safa to accompany Palestinian farmers to their fields, since it is nearly impossible for these farmers to work their land without the physical protection of Israelis: violent settlers from nearby Bat 'Ayin invariably attack the farmers and chase them away. This time, however, the army and Border Police were waiting, in force—dozens of soldiers (the Border Police are part of the army), including two Brigade Commanders. As usual, they declared the area a Closed Military Zone.

But they also immediately arrested the activists and then attacked several of them brutally with fists, rifle butts, and other weapons. They rammed their heads repeatedly against the sides of the military jeeps (you can see this clearly on the Walla video). They severely beat the detainees while the latter were hand-cuffed and defenseless. Even worse, they continued to beat them while transporting them to the police station—stopping the jeeps on the way and attacking their helpless prisoners with clubs. One Palestinian activist, Yusuf Abu-Maria, suffered a broken leg. An Israeli activist, Sahar, had her armed savagely twisted, though fortunately not broken. Many were injured.

Incidentally, while this was going on, settlers from Bat 'Ayin set fire to Palestinian olive trees only a few hundred yards away; but of course the soldiers saw no reason to interfere.

This was not random violence. It’s the kind of thing that is directed routinely at Palestinian detainees, but this is perhaps the first time Israeli activists have been assaulted so brutally. The sense is that the Border Policemen were acting under direct, premeditated orders. The two Brigade Commanders—the senior officer in this zone, commander of the Etzion Brigade, and the commander of the Kfir Brigade— stood there overseeing the assault. Perhaps they had their orders from above. Internal Security in Israel is now under the direct control of the proto-Fascist party of Lieberman, the Foreign Minister.

Let no one claim that such things happen only in places like Iran but never in Israel. Let no one claim that Israel is an enlightened, free country, the very opposite of places like Iran. Let no one claim that the Israeli army is incapable of inhuman cruelty inflicted on innocent victims, whether they are Palestinian civilians or Israelis demonstrating peacefully against the occupation. Already now, as I write, the system Israel has put in place in the occupied territories is barbaric, in every sense of the word. Unless there is massive international pressure and effective protest, that system is not about to go away. Indeed, in the meantime, things are getting worse, on the ground, day by day.

Presence Of Justice - The Sequel

2009-06-27T11:56:00.006-04:00

I noted back in March that Israel's High Court of Justice has been the only firewall Israel has against encroachments on civil liberties; that defenders of human rights have relied, in effect, on a self-perpetuating community of liberal-democratic jurists, enjoying (by means of law and precedent) the ability to remain self-perpetuating. (Former Justice Aharon Barak gave voice to the unique status of the court rather poignantly a couple of days ago, when he argued that Israel must be, after all, "a state of its citizens," code for the equality of Arab citizens--which caused a storm of criticism.)

Two votes in the Likud-controlled Knesset this past couple of weeks will almost certainly end this run of liberal-democratic jurists. Think of it as a quiet coup by the Judeans. The first is the appointment of Uri Ariel of the Kahanist National Union to the Judicial Appointments Committee. "As of today," writes Haaretz's Yossi Verter, "the committee has a bloc of four rightist and radical-right politicians, including Environmental Protection Minister Gilad Erdan (Likud) and Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman. All they need is a fifth member, probably one of the Israel Bar Association's two representatives, and they will have a majority on the committee and be able to do as they please. The three Supreme Court justices on the panel will become a negligible minority."

The second vote is an amendment that will require a majority of seven out of nine members of the Judicial Appointments Committee. If the amendment becomes law, which it almost certainly will, the government will have, in effect, a veto over appointments to Israel’s highest court, "the most significant change," says the Israel Policy Center, "in the balance of power between the branches of Israel’s government since the current system of judicial appointments was put in place in 1953."

State Of The Jewish People? Yes and No.

2009-06-26T08:17:00.011-04:00

The demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as "the state of the Jewish people" has at least three layers to it: The first is symbolic, without practical significance, and understandable. The second is partly symbolic, is meant to have future practical significance, and is contentious (though resolvable). The third, however, is legal, has great practical significance, and is, for any Palestinian (or democrat, for that matter) unacceptable. It is time to stop working through symbols and start saying what we mean.

1. Israel is obviously the state of the Jewish people in the sense that vanguard Jewish groups in Eastern Europe dreamed a Hebrew revolution, which launched the Zionist colonial project, which engendered a Jewish national home in Mandate Palestine, which earned international backing to organize a state after the Holocaust--a state that became a place of refuge for Jews from Europe and Arab countries--that is, a state with a large Jewish majority whose binding tie (to bring things back to Zionism's DNA) is the spoken Hebrew language.

When Palestinians say they recognize "Israel," they are implicitly recognizing this reality; they are acknowledging, to paraphrase Irving Howe, the name of our desire. At the most visceral level, when Israelis insist Israel be recognized as Jewish, they mean they want this narrative recognized, the same way they implicitly acknowledge the peculiar formative sufferings of Palestinians at the hands of Zionism when they say "Palestinians" and mean "not Jordanians or southern Syrians." When Palestinian spokespeople speak to Israeli reporters in Hebrew, they are recognizing Israel in the most poignant possible way.

2. Why is this not enough? Because, claims Netanyahu (like Olmert and Livni before him), in any negotiation with the Palestinians it must be understood in advance that there can be no "right of return" for Palestinians to Israel--that accepting this formulation, "the state of the Jewish people," really means precluding a flood of Palestinian refugees into Israel's borders and onto its electoral roles.

But the claim is false and puts a stumbling block where a pathway needs to be cleared. You can obviously find a formulation for the refugees which does not ruin Israel's Hebrew character; one that preserves "the right of return" as a seminal piece of the Palestinians' narrative, the name of their desire. You can say the refugees have a right of return to their homes but that the forms of compensation, the number, etc., must be agreeable to Israel, and that, in any case, the vast majority will exercise that right by returning to the Palestinian state. The contradiction between "the recognition of Israel" and "the right of return" may sound impossible to resolve. In fact, it has already been resolved at Taba in January 2001. Why resort to distracting principles when a little tact will do?

3. Unfortunately, however, Netanyahu cannot, or will not, simply leave things there. For the phrase, "state of the Jewish people," also has legal ramifications dear to the heart of Israeli rightists (including old Labor Zionists in love with the saga of the settler state); ramifications that derive from the historical application (some would say misapplication) of Zionist ideas over two generations and which seriously impinge on democratic standards. It is one thing to think of Israel as a democratic republic whose citizens speak a dominant language inflected by Jewish nuances--you know, poetic allusions to classical Jewish texts and liturgy and the like. It is quite another to think of Israel as state that represents, or embodies privileges in law for, certified members of a world Jewish people:

I mean (as I've said often before) a state that allocates land almost exclusively to certified Jews, empowers the Jewish Agency to advance the material well-being of certified Jews, appoints rabbis to marry certified Jews only to one another, creates immigration laws to bestow citizenship on certified Jews, founds an educational system to produce certified Jews, assumes a sacred capital to be a kind of theme park for the world's certified Jews--indeed, a state that presumes to certify Jews in the first place. Such a state must be anathema to Palestinian leaders, who cannot but notice that a fifth (soon, a quarter) of Israeli citizens are Palestinian in origin: they can recognize Israel but cannot possibly accept this Jewish state. But then, neither can Israeli Jews with ordinary democratic instincts. I, for one, do not.

By the way, if you want a poster-child for this creepy, growing Israel within Israel, you could do worse than Natan Sharansky, who has just been "elected" president of the Jewish Agency; a man who preaches Jeffersonian democracy to the world, but whose conception of democracy in Israel is, shall we say, squishy Rousseauian; a General Will interpreted by, well, generals.

"We're in a world where Jews are losing their identity," Sharansky says, "Israel and world Jewry are like receding galaxies, floating apart at a time when contact is easier than ever...Abroad there is the problem of assimilation, but in Israel, too, young Jews are growing away from their roots...The Jewish Agency is [a] meeting place, the ideal tool for developing that connection."

The disease that presumes itself the cure.

Military Intelligence

2009-06-20T06:24:00.020-04:00

As I write, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of mainly young Iranians are deciding whether or not to risk going out into the streets. There is little someone like myself can add regarding the poignancy of their decision. Yet one thing seems obvious: a generation of Iranians has been changed by these rallies--changed in roughly the opposite way they would have been had Israeli military intelligence got its way, and won American and IDF agreement to an aerial strike on Iranian nuclear facilities earlier this year.

Even in the face of mass protest, not only did Mossad chief Meir Dagan refuse to admit the obvious--that an attack would have caused widespread carnage, put Iran on a war footing, and preempted its twittering liberalism--but he's had the audacity to predict to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee what nobody could possibly know at this point, that the protests will peter out; that, anyway, a Mousavi government would be worse than Ahmadinejad's regime, for it would give Iran's nuclear program a prettier face. ("To hell with those students; the PowerPoint is done.")

Still, it is not military planners like Dagan who seem reprehensible to me. It is the politicians and writers who channel them. We pay people like Dagan to sum the weapons of potential enemies and come up with ways to foil them. (The only reason we'll be able to live with a nuclear Iran, should this become necessary, is because military planners will have figured out how to position Israel's own nuclear deterrent.) And Dagan's main job is to think like a "made man," turning worst case contingencies into scenarios, and scenarios into "predictions." Mossad people say they also look at motive, not just capability. But who doesn't know how easily military people assume that capability translates into motive, much the way economists assume big money translates into investment. Motive? We are not talking about James Joyce here.

On the other hand, nothing seems more irresponsible to me than politicians and political analysts who lack the poise to stand up to military intelligence when important policy decisions are taking shape; politicians so eager to prove that they are not still trusting children that they remain forever sophomoric, defining the world as a test of wills, fearing (as Orwell did in "Shooting an Elephant") looking like a fool; writers so eager to prove that they are not just brainy wimps that they hang out with, and flaunt being respected by, officers.

So before the moment passes, we should give thanks that, owing (among other things) to McCain's defeat, this was one attack that never took place--and now never will, since it is obvious, even to the mullahs, I suspect, how the regime can simply be waited out, much the way Communist regimes were waited out; how they have lost the young.

And before the next moment of crisis, we should not fail to note some of the most irresponsible journalism of the last couple of years: Benny Morris' call for a limited nuclear strike last July, and, more recently, Jeffery Goldberg's implied endorsement of some kind of attack. (Both were given enormous space in, of all places, the New York Times op-ed section, so the editors should probably be remembered, too.) And who can forget Haaretz's Arie Shavit, who is silent about Iran this week, but is already taking credit instead for Netanyhu's policy of a demilitarized Palestine?

This accounting may seem small of me, but the celebrity culture being what it is, the periodic violence of extremists being what it is--and the fears summoned by ordinary neurosis being what they are--these writers will no doubt hang on nicely, cultivating their reputation for toughness (though Goldberg, to his credit, is repulsed by Dagan's statements, and seems to have come around to the idea that warning against the reckless use of force is not the same as weakness). Anyway, there is often credit for talking tough, while warning against violence is thankless. Just not at this moment, surely, and not in this case.

Presidents And The Middle East

2009-06-18T14:42:00.004-04:00

The last word on why President Obama can do what none since Eisenhower could--or would.

A Coda On The Speech

2009-06-15T01:05:00.002-04:00

Perhaps the most depressing thing about it is how much it reminds one of Menachem Begin's response to Anwar Sadat in 1977. You get the feeling that the words are not simply tactical but come from Netanyahu's deepest convictions. Yes, he has declared a willingness to entertain the idea of a Palestinian state, so long as it is demilitarized. (For the record, Palestinian leaders in Fatah and the West Bank have never made an issue about having an army big enough to pose a threat to Israel--again, read the Geneva Initiative--and have often called for international forces to replace the IDF.) But he couched the point in Revisionist historical rhetoric that seems more an effort to wrest key Congresspeople from Obama than address the Arab world. My friend Sam Bahour in Ramallah told me he thought perhaps Hamas had written the speech, for all the good it would do Abbas.

Netanyahu has put, as Begin put, so many conditions on getting to a Palestinian state that one can understand the reluctance of Palestinian negotiators to get back in the room: recognition of Israel as the state of the Jewish people (readers of this blog do not require me to elaborate on why, as stated, this is impossible), Jerusalem, united, as the capital of Israel, natural growth of settlements, and so forth. Television commentators here immediately pronounced the speech a concession to Washington, at the same time as wondering if Washington will buy it. My unsolicited advise to Obama and Mitchell: put the speech in your pocket, declare it a breakthrough, and (as I said yesterday) start presenting details of a deal without imagining that negotiations will produce one.

Total Settlement Freeze? No, A Border.

2009-06-14T03:38:00.020-04:00

Anticipating Bibi's speech, his coalition partners and Likud officials are flooding Israeli radio with interviews, insisting that settlements are not an obstacle to peace; that “natural growth” is, well, natural (“should parents tell their children they have to live elsewhere?”). Their claims will strike the ears of informed Americans the way old cigarette commercials do. You blush for people who think others this gullible, or wishful, or hooked. For my part, I have been waiting for an American government to insist on a total settlements freeze for over 30 years. One didn’t have to be a genius to see the danger.

Still, there is something about the anticipated stand-off between Netanyahu and the Obama administration that makes me queasy. Had Ronald Reagan, following Jimmy Carter's lead, demanded a total freeze in 1980, then we would have had something. Today the demand reminds me of the Steve Martin bit about the implacable customer at a restaurant who, having waited too long for his dinner, complains to the maître d' that he can be appeased only by being served his steak “15 minutes ago.”

Sure, Obama needs to make a clear break with the past, indeed, to make a show of force to Israeli rightists. But insisting on a total freeze today, when settlements have turned into substantial towns full of mobilized youth—towns whose residents should be understood as on a scale somewhere between Pat Robertson and David Koresh—seems false. The real goal is a fair, recognized border between two states as soon as possible, so that both sides will know how to plan. Focusing on a total freeze means insisting on the symbol, which cannot seriously be delivered, and deferring the fight over what is symbolized, which will require a hard line from America and the world anyway.

We are supposed to be telling truth to one another, you see, and the truth about these goddamn settlements is that the June 4, 1967 border is no longer feasible, even if the principle of setting a border on the basis of June 4th. is. The only hope is for America to come out, now, for the principle of a 1:1 land swap to achieve geographical area for Israel and Palestine equal to what existed on June 4; to appoint an international commission to suggest a map. This map will need time to sink in. And it will be a way to reconcile the Arab League peace initiative to the difficulties of moving settlers back into Israel.

OUT OF THE half million Israelis who live over the Green Line, about 400,000 live in densely packed communities, more or less contiguous with Israel (like Gush Etzion), or in suburbs of Jerusalem (like Gilo). Some 75-100,000 live in outlying settlements scattered around Hebron and between Ramallah and Nablus. It is these latter settlers who will have to be returned to Israel. The former are obviously staying put.

But just getting the outliers resettled will take years, just like moderating Hamas and rehabilitating the Palestine Authority, reviving Gaza, and so forth, will take years. The IDF and Israeli police could never muster enough boots on the ground to simply move these settlers by force—anyway, a good part of the IDF’s officers sympathize with settlement. If the government tried force, even just to halt construction in Gush Etzion, the settlers would almost certainly commit provocations against neighboring Palestinians that would get Israel’s Arab citizens up in arms. In this polarized situation, we’d be a step away from Balkan-style violence.

Indeed, to get these people out eventually, you have to 1) politically marginalize them, that is, create a conflict of interest between settlers who fall within an agreed border and those more fanatic types falling outside it; 2) induce them to return to agreed settlements or to within the Green Line with time-limited financial compensation; 3) threaten them with power and water cuts on this or that date; and, these measures failing, 4) remove them by siege and, if necessary, force. This is going to be very hard. The IDF should require NATO forces to replace its own forces as it withdraws.

In other words, Obama should use the dispute over a settlements freeze as an occasion to rally the world community to drawing up a permanent border, something along the lines of the one offered in the Geneva Initiative, where Palestinian representatives and Israel peace activists themselves understood the need for a new border—and international forces to help secure it. Obama should make clear that a border is not Israel’s internal affair. That, for example, the world will never recognize the town of Ariel as part of a future Israel (Olmert insisted that it is, which is among the reasons his talks with Abbas went nowhere). A strong sense of where America wants the border would be an early win for the peace process, which could unlock many other possibilities.

I KNOW THAT my Palestinian friends will find anything less than a total freeze infuriating. Every new apartment feels like a new slap in the face, a continuing insinuation that their tragedy doesn’t matter or never happened. In this sense the settlements are not just an obstacle to peace but the continuing cause for hatred and war. After all, Israel conquered something like an area equal to the West Bank during the 1948 war, declared its 400 Arab villages abandoned and more or less leveled them, preventing its 750,000 residents from returning. It then settled the new lands with about a million and half Jewish refugees of its own: survivors from Europe and people expelled from Arab states. In the 1920s and 30s, land purchases by the Jewish National Fund from absentee landlords—for example, from Beirut's Sursok family in the Valley of Jezreel—led to the displacement of tens of thousands of farmer peasants.

So according to the Palestinians, or shall we say (in nice post-modern language) the Palestinian narrative, the settlement project since 1967 only seems more of the same. Likud people, for their part, respond that there were no West Bank settlements before 1967, and Arab countries threatened attack anyway—as if Israelis were ever reconciled to Palestinian rights when Palestinians did not prove that they could not be overwhelmed militarily. Likud people also insist that if the Zionists are wrong to settle around Hebron now then they were wrong to settle around Haifa in the 1930s—a view breathtaking in its shallowness. As I've implied here before, we’d cheer Javert for hunting down Jean Valjean if, after the latter became a mayor, he continued stealing candlesticks.

NEVERTHELESS, VIRTUALLY ALL Palestinians I know are prepared to say what Obama said, that, tragically, the Naqba resulted from the Jews’ European tragedy, and that they will compromise on the 1967 border—so long as a way can be found to compensate and resettle the original refugees of 1948 in a Palestinian state—indeed, so long as the futures of Israel and Palestine are linked to larger federal arrangements. These two city-states cannot be disentangled economically or in almost any other way. We need a border even if five years after it is drawn hardly anyone will care where it is, except when elections are called.

And Obama is right to prevent any new settlement projects from being added to the 160 that already exist—right to insist that Israel remove new outposts, or prevent building that fills in the gaps between existing settlements; prevent projects that compromise still further East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state.

Yet it is unimaginable to get a total construction freeze across the Green Line today. We need a border and we cannot depend on new negotiations to produce it. The original border between Israel and the aborted Palestinian state was produced by UNSCOP, not by negotiation. Something like a new international commission, reporting to George Mitchell, should go to work. The Roadmap is fine and well, but what good is it without a driver?

People Of The Blog

2009-06-10T02:10:00.010-04:00

Haaretz tried something this morning that feels curiously right in unexpected ways. To celebrate "Hebrew Book Week," the paper asked a dozen or so of Israel's best selling writers, Yoram Kaniuk, David Grossman, Etgar Keret, to go out and cover something. The result feels both reassuringly retro and visionary at the same time.

Retro, because the radically secular implication of Hebrew culture is not so easily taken for granted these days. When Netanyahu says "Jewish state," and both Shas spiritual leader Ovadia Yosef and Las Vegas spiritual leader Sheldon Adelson nod approvingly, I know I am in trouble. Actually, the very name of the week in question implicitly acknowledges a continuing (dare I say Zionist?) delight in the sheer novelty of a Jewish experience grounded in an inclusive national language. Which is why Israelis still celebrate "Hebrew Book Week," after all--something like the French ordering French fries. Adam Lebor captures this celebration in his lovely piece about Tel-Aviv in the current Condé Nast Traveler.

But there is another remarkable thing about the paper this morning. It reads like a bundle of fine blog posts. There is voice and creative engagement in these pieces, which does not mean a want of facts or rules of evidence. As Ram Oren put it on Israeli radio this morning, we have a hundred ways of getting (and Twittering) breaking news qua happenings: the Supreme Court issued this ruling, the earthquake was this number on the Richter scale. But getting at the truth is another matter, and a writer has to ask, as Oren asks (using a somewhat materialist phrase, but never mind), "what is the value-added?" Haaretz did not quite ask that question this morning. But I suspect that, if it will still be here 10 years from now, it has given us a peek at the way it will survive.

Doing The Numbers: Obama's Window

2009-06-06T11:03:00.017-04:00

The many questions in Yediot Aharonot's weekend poll gives us a feel for Israeli society, much like many touches give the blind man a feel for the elephant. My friend Jo-Ann Mort suggests that the key finding is a solid majority for evacuation of settlements; and its is true, and reassuring, that by 52% to 43%, respondents now actually favor a "freeze." But I think we might keep feeling around.

The responses do reveal Obama's window of opportunity. But the window is small and it will take consistent outside power, hard and soft, to pry it open. The questions are themselves a kind of code. The responses reveal a deeply divided country that would prefer not to confront its own divisions.

FIRST, THE BAD news. About 54% approve "natural growth" in the more than 150 settlements that already exist. So saying "freeze" new settlements may simply mean no new settlements are necessary to consolidate Israel's presence in the Palestinian territories, whatever the fate of this presence proves to be. Besides, the majority for a freeze, like the minority against "natural growth," includes Arab respondents. If we are speaking of Israeli Jews alone, the numbers are more discouraging.

To the question, "Should the illegal outposts be evacuated?," 70% say yes and 25%, no. Think of the latter number as the core of the hard right, people who will turn on Netanyahu as readily as they turned on Ariel Sharon if the settlement project is put in jeopardy. When you eliminate Arab respondents, you can assume about a third of Jews. The larger right, about 41%, says Israel should "not agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state as part of a peace deal." Think of them as a layer of reactionaries added to the ideologues.

We are not looking here at Pollster.com data about, say, whether Virginia will fall into the blue column. This is not winner takes all. It is loser spoils everything. Israel's right is more like Serbia's in the 1980s than Virginia's in 2008. They live in a world apart. Some 12% say they will "resist" the evacuation of settlers. This is about a third of the third, 600,000 people, as many people as those who lived in the Palestinian Jewish Yishuv in 1948. They are armed. My working hypothesis, based on results of the recent election, is that these people disproportionately live in and around Jerusalem, the territories and in the development towns of the south.

WHICH BRINGS ME to the peace camp. To the question, "Should the birthrate in the settlements be taken under consideration and therefore allow construction for the sake of natural growth?," 54% say yes, 42% say no. The latter number is, in this case, the peace camp's core constituency, people who have come to regard the settlers and the orthodox as a threat to Israel's future and place in the world; they are unwilling to cut settlers any more slack. Their number is almost exactly equal to the 41% who say they are not "disappointed by Obama's policy towards Israel," and the 44% of those who say Netanyahu will "eventually agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state."

But we are speaking here mainly of people in the upper crust of the Tel-Aviv-to-Haifa corridor on the coastal plain, people with their face to America, Europe, and global opportunities. We are also speaking here of Arab citizens who, in a climate of tension, withdraw from ordinary politics entirely. Levels of cooperation between Israeli Jews and Arabs in political life remain slight, even in the peace camp, alas. If the right, opposing the government, provokes open violence, Israeli Arabs will themselves become violent and push the center to the right.

I have said often that the core constituency of the peace camp is very wary of directly confronting the core of the settlers and their sympathizers. The evidence for this fear is in the response to the vague question: "Is Obama's policy good for Israel?" This really translates as, Wouldn't you rather have a president like Bush who just loved us to crazy and helped us preserve the status quo? Some 53% say Obama is bad for Israel, and only 26% say good. There is an inchoate tension underlying this response, not a dispassionate assessment of whether the policy itself is right. There is no other way to explain why only 26% say Obama's policy is good, but some 55% say Israel should "agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state as part of a peace deal." (Again, take out Arabs and we are looking at a small minority of Jews eager for a confrontation.)

THE GOOD NEWS is really in the question, "Should Netanyahu acquiesce in Obama's demands or reject these even at the cost of sanctions?" Once the question is, in effect, What do you fear more, a confrontation with the settlers, or a world without America?, 56% say go with America. Note well: the rightist 40% say, fuck it, if America wants a showdown we'll give them one. The swing here, 15-20%, are mainly Russians, more educated Mizrahi Jews, and young people who otherwise imagine themselves strategic hardliners, but cannot imagine Israel as a Western pariah state.

And here, precisely, is Obama's opening. If he can maneuver Netanyahu into becoming, like Tzipi Livni, an advocate for preserving relations with America over any other concern--if Obama can, as he started to even before the Cairo speech, change Israel's national conversation from Iranian power to American power--he can at least hope to get a cooperative government that will enjoy majority support in the face of provocation from the violent minority.

If, for example, Obama and the Quartet can get Netanyahu to sign off on "two-states," which carries greater symbolic importance after Cairo, it seems almost inevitable that Netanhayu will give Livni what she wants to join a National Coalition. Among Kadima voters, 52% to 41%, would want Livni to join.

A unity government organized to respond to Obama will marginalize the hard right in the government, something that cannot be done in the streets--at least, not immediately. It will take a generation of shows of force by international troops and investors, of secular peace and economic growth, to thin out the Israeli right. Ditto Hamas. If Obama started a peace process in Cairo, this is it.

Obama In Cairo: Going Meta

2009-06-04T12:33:00.006-04:00

Immediately after President Obama's speech, Israeli television interviewed a strapping West Bank settler: "It was very professional," he said, "very well crafted. It focused brilliantly on the rights of man. But he also quoted the Talmud; and if he read that, then he knows that the land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel."

This curious response suggests why, yet again, Obama's instincts are better than mine.

You see, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is full of people like this. In the end they will have to be confronted. But though the end cannot be allowed to seem far away, the end is not the beginning. Why push people into a corner before showing them the corner--before showing them also the people who will be pushing with you? Why not take things in their natural sequence which allows everybody to adjust to the new reality?

Obama's problem, however, was that if he didn't do something dramatic, he ran the risk of losing the people he would need for his coalition even before he began to rally them--because so many presidents have made promises in the past (condemned settlements, called for a two-state solution) and then remembered something better they had to do. Obama, I thought, should not miss this chance to issue some concrete warning or present the elements of a concrete plan--something vivid to stand for the sincerity of his intention--to reassure people who had heard it all before, especially the people in the streets from Casablanca to Islamabad, who were after all the point of the exercise.

Of course there was another way to prove his sincerity, which hadn't really occurred to me. It was to frame the whole problem in such a subtle and honest--and vivid--way that nobody hearing the speech could doubt his sincerity; to go meta on the problem and make his intentions clear to anyone (that settler included, obviously) without needing to make threats or draw up plans. (The final deal is obvious, anyway.)

And it was foolish of me not to anticipate this solution, since this is exactly what he did with his speech on race. Obama is many things, but I'm coming to understand that he is, almost more than anything else, a natural teacher. He knows how to start from where his audience is and connect the dots. He knows the ring of truth. (Just to be sure, I called a couple of Palestinian friends who were skeptical when Obama was elected. They were deeply impressed--certainly enough to stay in the "process.")

The speech did have a few innovations, moreover, which were moving in the elegant way they broke taboos. Obama not only spoke about the need to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, but did so in a way that laid the ground for eventually getting nuclear weapons out of the entire region, Israel included. He plausibly linked the toppling of Mohammed Mosaddeq in 1953 with the kidnapping of American diplomats in 1979. He spoke of human rights and the rule of law in Egypt without appearing to undermine Mubarak. Obama said in a way that could not have offended Jews that the holocaust engendered a tragic injustice for the Palestinians. Finally, and most important, he made the justice of a Palestinian state seem an American interest without denying unbreakable links to Israel, that is, the state Israel would be once a deal is done.

It is a little frightening how indispensable this man is becoming.

Holy Jerusalem

2009-06-03T10:39:00.022-04:00

Here is a little thought experiment. Imagine that both the Islamic world and the Palestinian nation suddenly agreed that the mosques on the Noble Sanctuary in Jerusalem's old city were not that holy after all; that the Jews were welcome to take them down and build a temple if they wanted to. Could Jews really want this? Okay, forget the animal sacrifices. I mean a temple that, whatever its rites, purports to be ground zero of divinity, the building of buildings on the spot of spots--the here and now of a holy of holies. If Jews believed in such things would they be practicing Judaism at all?

This is not a merely hypothetical question. Very few Jews speak seriously about rebuilding the temple in question, but very many--perhaps a majority--are deadly serious about the divinity of the mount in question. From the mayor on down, ordinary Jews in this city seem overwhelmed by the mount's gravitational pull. Close, it is said, matters only when playing at horseshoes, but close also matters greatly when playing at Jerusalem. Most reject out of hand any notion of surrendering Israeli sovereignty over the mount. They think next to nothing (to take just one example) of leveling the Arab neighborhood of Silwan in order to build a kind of biblical theme park close to the mount. Even secular writers say casuistic things like "there is no Zionism without Zion," Zion being the mount overlooking the mount. (In fact, the original halutzim, and Zionism's Emerson, Achad Haam, avoided the place, but never mind.)

JUST TO BE clear, I am not speaking here about "holy" in the garden-variety sense of being understandably valued, sacred in the way your dead father's tallis is sacred, or even possessing what Walter Benjamin called "aura." I don't mean a very, very important place of prayer, a place of utmost authenticity, a place whose stones and contours organize a collective experience that harkens back to a cherished remembered experience. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is holy for Christians in this sense: they don't know where Christ was actually crucified, but they know (as Mark Twain writes) where others before them acted as if they knew. It is good enough for pilgrims to follow in the footsteps of pilgrims.

Indeed, the Noble Sanctuary, whose gorgeous mosques still call the faithful to prayer, is holy even to vaguely secular Muslims in just this sense. Who knows exactly where Mohammed ascended to heaven? Nobody. But all know where generations since the 7th. century ascended to pray. Similarly, the Wailing Wall (whose sovereignty is not in dispute) is "holy" for most every Jew. The night my son was born, in June 1973, I myself cradled my head in its stones and shared my joy with my deceased parents. But I did not do so because I thought I was close to the destroyed ancient arc of the covenant. Rather, I thought I was close to the ghosts of the many Jews who had wept there before me, nursing their losses and mysterious hopes.

Anyway, Jews who claim the Temple Mount today mean holy in a more muscular sense than this. Their Psalmist's Hebrew often sounds like a mental straight-jacket. They imply that the soil of the mount carries traces of God's existence, like basements carry radon. They mean holy in the take-off-your-sandals sense of the word: objectively dangerous, not subjectively poignant. They mean something they are prepared to take on the whole world for, fight and die (and kill) for. Is this Judaism?

MY WIFE SIDRA DeKoven Ezrahi writes more eloquently about these matters than I can here. But even on their surface, her answers make you wonder where traditional Judaism has disappeared to, and how crazed Jerusalem is making its inhabitants. For Judaism, Sidra explains, has always been a religion of distance from the divine, a religion of substitutions. The synagogue is a mikdash m'at, a little temple, that stands-in for the place that is gone, the way debate over Jewish law stands-in for a divine intention, and the Torah stands-in for a God that--so the Torah says--cannot be seen face to face. To put things simply, perhaps a little melodramatically, if the ancient temple were to magically appear, Jews--who are, after all, not just ancient Judeans--would have to destroy it themselves, much the way they would have to break idols and reject a man who claimed to be God.

The Wailing Wall, insofar as it is a kind of synagogue, has something authentic for traditional Jews, she concedes, but not really because of where it is. The wall gestures, like all synagogues only more so, toward what is missing (as does the golden-domed Mosque of Omar, ironically). The wall suggests the supersession of a form of worship which has been long abandoned, and was challenged by Pharisees even in its time--abandoned for good (Hegel might say cunning) reasons that Roman centurions could hardly understand when they tore the temple down: a self-perpetuating priesthood, a hierarchy of fetishists, a sacrificial cult, a comic understanding of sin.

Sidra insists that, after the temple was destroyed, Jews were left, not with divine places or stuff, but only metaphor (God is like this, God is like that). This invitation to poetic innovation engendered our talent for freedom. The Wailing Wall's holiness depends on the Temple Mount being bare of anything meaningful for Jews except for the reminder of the immensity of absence itself. The wall is the evocative symbol (in a religion of symbols) of what is no longer there and, by itself, no longer evocative.

Nor does one have to be a Jew to grasp Sidra's point. My friend Jim Carroll was once asked if his faith in the Resurrection would be shaken if the bones of Jesus were found. No, he said, and he meant pretty much the same thing. Perhaps the most beautiful contemporary work I have seen about the supersession Sidra is talking about is Denys Arcand's Jesus of Montreal. (Trust me: see the film and you'll understand.)

In any case, something new is happening in this city, and it isn't either the Judaism I knew as a child or a return to an ancient practice. It is a hybrid politicized religion, if that's the word; a new claim of return, much like Mussolini's claim to return to Rome; a claim carried by ward-of-the-state orthodox families averaging seven children each, reinforced by neo-Zionist devotion to settlement, and a deep sense of grievance over a more recent destruction of European life, what Sidra calls Judaism's new "ruined shrines."

Make no mistake: the people who wish this new Jerusalem to rise will not be talked out of their goals, certainly not by speeches or editorials (or bloggers). The only hope is that what's left of Israel's secular majority will be pushed, and supported, by what's left of the West to stop them. One more generation, I am tempted to say, and it will be too late. But nothing is ever too late for this benighted, beautiful city, which thrives on the hubris of every conqueror.

Amos Elon (1926-2009)

2009-05-28T16:09:00.005-04:00

Amos Elon died earlier this week at age 82. I published this appreciation of him on New Yorker.com.

“Well, I hope you are r-right, dear boy.”

This was the way my conversations with Amos Elon almost always ended. Year after year, ever since the late nineteen-seventies, his expression of “hope” for my analysis of Israel had been a sign that there was really nothing more to analyze, that though I had won the debate I had lost the argument. I had done my duty: had laid out a logic, a possible convergence of forces that left room for peace, or, at last, American action; had shared part of an interview he hadn’t attended, or pointed out an economic trend he hadn’t considered.

But I had somehow neglected the overriding facts of life, which it was his duty to uphold. And uphold them he did. “It is good that you are optimistic,” he’d say, finally. That is, things do fall apart; history is made by people. Oh, yes, there are naïve, avid Arab kids willing to blow themselves up—and demagogues on both sides who secretly feel relief when they do. But there are also maniac settlers, and clueless American Jews, with their lobby. Philip Roth once wrote, “Jews are members of the human race. Worse than that I cannot say about them.” Amos put it a little differently, explaining (as does a character in Roth’s “The Counterlife”) that one lives in Israel because it is the only place on earth where you can tell anti-Semitic jokes.

Of course, this cheerful misanthropy was partly bravado. His warmth—or the evidence of his fierce wish for it—was everywhere, in the books strewn on his desk, or the drawings on the wall, or a sudden call to his wife, Beth. His clever eyes could beckon like a port. The conversation never ended without a hug, which he found awkward and American, but which he never resisted. Yet his warmth was mixed with serious disappointment. He had seen this tragedy grow from its infancy. At times the conversation began before my coat was off: “Did you read what that idiot said?,” the idiot being someone on the Left who should have known better. (Idiots on the Right were just a force of nature.)

Opening questions, I hasten to add, were not just pawn to king-four. Amos hated intellectual games, or, more precisely, intellectual brats and bullies. He cared that the idiot should have known better, and who if not us should say so, for all the good it would do. What writer who is merely skeptical, or querulous, writes essay after essay, column after column, employing a penetrating sense of history to explain Israelis and Jews to themselves, much the way a physician examines patient after patient who will not quit smoking?

Some eulogists have suggested that, while Amos promoted humankind, he had little compassion for humans. This is exactly backward. Amos could not get over how history went wrong because of the ways in which broken-hearted people act together and ricochet off one another, how qualities that we ordinarily like in people—creativity, loyalty, sincerity, steadfastness—combine to create disasters; how human desires, whose details only a compassionate observer can describe, explain everything, including how we routinely throw happiness away:

Had they [Palestine’s Arabs] agreed in 1919, not to turn Palestine into “the” Jewish homeland, but to incorporate “a” national home for the Jews, as stipulated by the Balfour Declaration, a Jewish minority, moderate in size, probably would in time have been absorbed into an Arab-Palestinian state. Had the Arabs not rejected British proposals for a Palestine Legislative Council a few years later, the Jews would have at best emerged a minority within the general Arab framework, similar perhaps to the Maronites in Lebanon….If, if, if. On the other hand, had Israel after 1949 been more sensitive to the fate of the Palestinian refugees—had it permitted more to come back or compensated the rest for their abandoned property rather than allow the neighboring states to exploit the problem for political ends—perhaps some of the intense hatred of Israel that prevails among the Arab masses and ties the hands of more moderate leaders would slowly have abated…

The easy work of hindsight? In fact, this passage is taken from an essay in The New York Review of Books that Amos wrote in August of 1968—an essay in which he was already pleading (against his colleagues at Haaretz) for a sensible partition and warning of the dangers posed by devotees of Greater Israel—people whose excesses he understood, which made them all the more horrible to contemplate. We went together to Nablus in 1981, just before Menachem Begin was reelected, to interview its former mayor, Bassam Shakha, who had lost his legs to a bomb planted by a Jewish terrorist group. While we were there, as if on some cosmic cue, Shakha’s youngest son, who had spent six months in prison, suddenly appeared at the front door, unexpectedly freed. Amos turned to me, moved, as father and son fell into each other’s arms. “Of course, they don’t love their children the way we do,” he said, winking darkly, resigned to what his readers would say even before he began writing.

Which brings me to his books. The best books, Orwell once observed, organize your scattered thoughts, tell you what you already know. But at times they tell you what you don’t know, or more important, what you don’t want to know. Amos wrote so many such books, over a span of forty years—and with Orwell’s glass-like clarity—that you have to ask the question, What big thing did he know that his readers could not easily bear? Where did he get the stamina—how did he sustain the indignation—to stay so far ahead of the readers he worked so hard for?

The record is impressive, even on its face. While Israelis were finally digesting the facts that came out of the Eichmann trial, Amos wrote “Journey Through a Haunted Land,” which gave Israelis their first glimpse of a democratic Germany emerging from the war, burdened and yet surrendering to the passion for normality much as Israelis themselves were—a Germany that Israelis once thought they would never set foot in, but now journey to more or less routinely. After the Six-Day War, while Israelis were still savoring their victory—and Moshe Dayan had not yet surrendered his laurels—Amos wrote “The Israelis: Founders and Sons,” a book that left no doubt about the ideological sophistication, and corresponding blinders, of the pioneering Zionist leaders, but left you wondering about the coarse “realism” of their heirs: people who prided themselves on thinking that the land was theirs the way the sun rises in the morning—that is, that their parents’ philosophical enthusiasms, like theories of planetary motion, betrayed a diaspora mentality.

“Herzl” came next. You could not put the book down without admiring Theodor Herzl’s courage and practical achievements—his romance turned into a Congress, a bank, a diplomacy. But you could also not fail to reflect on the deeply neurotic sources of Herzl’s ambition and, not coincidentally, of national feeling in general. Amos’s next books—his travels to Egypt, and then his most impressionistic book, “Jerusalem”—sustained these latter reflections, in a way. It was as if he felt that all nationalist and political clichés needed to be explored, down to every frustrated libido and social grievance.

As for historical “lessons,” including the ones in Herzl’s “Der Judenstaat,” we needed to learn how grotesque they could be—how grotesque historical determinism of any kind must be. Amos’s last great book, “The Pity of It All,” tried to nail down this ultimate point by surveying the record of German Jewry, to show that their disaster was by no means preordained, as Zionist theories alleged, but was an unexpected and dreadful interruption in their real progress toward an emancipation unique in Europe until then—and that interruption was another horrifying consequence of the madness and desperation left over from the First World War. The real lesson, if that’s the word for it, was that violence drives people crazy. You needed only ordinary compassion to see this. Violence should be avoided.

This brings us pretty close to the big thing that I believe Amos knew. It was hardly an original bit of knowledge for a Viennese-born Jew advancing, if only in imagination, toward civil society and bildung. People, being people, need political structures that allow them to settle disputes without violence. They—Jews, too—need a state that looks like American or European civil society; they need fair laws and civil rights and common decency, just to keep savage instincts in check. One of the most charming stories he told me (he loved the word “charming”) involved an experience during the 1948 war:

I was a runner in Jerusalem during the war, and one mission was to bring a message to the head of the Haganah in the Jewish Agency building. I arrived one dark evening at the building in the middle of an artillery barrage, with boom-boom everywhere, and the place was gloomy and deserted—except for a light in one office, where I found Dr. Leo Kohn, the legal adviser to the Jewish Agency, curled over his desk, writing. “What are you doing here?,” he asked.

I told him I was looking for the Haganah headquarters.

He pointed me to the basement.

I was young, and a little brash, so I could not resist. I asked him, “What are you doing here?”

He answered almost nonchalantly, in a heavy German accent, “I am writing the constitution of the Jewish state.”

This constitution was never enacted, of course. Kohn’s forlorn hope is what made the story charming. He was, like Amos, a liberal among revolutionaries. And this reminds me of the other backward thing said about Amos, especially after he and Beth began living full time in their home in Tuscany: that Amos—this ultimate journalist insider—left for Europe because he had given up on Israel, or politics, or both. The fact is, Amos had never left “Europe,” any more than Dr. Kohn or, say, Abba Eban did—had never seen Israel from within the closed theories of Labor Zionist theory, or the closed precincts of any Zionist parties. He knew the open society and its enemies, and was sickened by the thought that Israel would fill up with the latter. He was something like our Camus: always an outsider the way a healthy citizen must be: alert to what has been thought said and done in other places and other times.

He was posted in Hungary during the 1956 uprising and saw how absurd revolutions become. As his newspaper’s Washington correspondent, he was a friend and neighbor of John F. Kennedy (“He was furious about our nuclear program”) and celebrated the American civil-rights movement. While Israelis remained stuck in a kind of socialist prudishness, Amos was a natural man about town, an important first for an Israeli intellectual. It was no accident that, when he came back to Israel in the mid-sixties, with his gorgeous, sassy American wife, he began to focus almost immediately on the peculiar, vulgar legal status of Israel’s Arab citizens. He wanted to bring the world to Israel—he lived, above all, in the world.

Nor was Amos indifferent to or (for the sake of expediency) indulgent of Israel’s Orthodox, the way most Israeli leftists were. He actively despised halachic life, the way free-thinkers despise all forms of orthodoxy. He was the first to notice that Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were becoming two separate realities. Don’t try lighting Sabbath candles around him.

But during the last weekend we spent together, this past February at his home in Tuscany, with the winter sun setting, I sang to him Bialik’s welcome to the Sabbath bride, and he listened quietly, smiling, amused (and reassured) by the irony of my singing it and his hearing it—the irony that alone saves the Hebrew gestalt from piety. No, he did not live out his last days in his Tuscan home out of anger, but because he wanted the beauty of the place, which was no more than humans deserved. It was, he told me, a matter of dolce far niente: the sweetness of doing nothing.

Arthur Koestler, whom Amos particularly admired, once wrote that there were two planes of experience, the tragic and the trivial, and that artists and writers are blessed—cursed, really—with seeing “everyday experience” on the tragic plane, the “angle of the eternal.” My last view of Amos called that distinction to mind. He was lying in his living room, too weak from the developing leukemia to sit up, unwilling to speak of disease or goodbyes, asking for a blanket, asking perfunctorily where I was going next in Florence, his frail hand in my hand. But then he was reminded of something that some Likudnik had said, something that we had actually covered earlier, but never mind—and it prompted a new scoffing sentence, a new disbelieving laugh, and his voice rose, gaining strength from the pity of it all.

Why Obama, And What Took So Long?

2009-05-22T05:04:00.013-04:00

(I wrote the following for this morning's Haaretz)

It may seem hard to believe, given America's vital regional interests, but the last president to develop a deal to mitigate Middle Eastern violence - and throw the full weight of his presidency and the international community behind it - was Dwight D. Eisenhower, in 1957. John F. Kennedy had no wars to respond to, and was largely concerned with preventing Israel from acquiring nuclear weapons. But ever since Johnson - since the Six-Day War, that is - one president after another has behaved as though America's role was limited to facilitating a negotiation between Israelis and their neighbors: a kind of regional Dr. Phil. Israel was the client state, yet presidents, in effect, worked to preserve its freedom of action. They might carp half-heartedly about settlements, or empower their secretaries of state to exert economic pressure about particular instances of foot-dragging (Kissinger on Rabin in 1975, or Baker on Shamir in 1991). But presidents did not - how did Colin Powell put it? - presume to want peace "more than the parties themselves."

Some have argued, notoriously, that the Israel lobby must be credited (well, blamed), if presidents have been relucant to lead. This view is too elegant for competent historians, and it also fails to explain why things are changing so fast in Washington. With Benjamin Netanyahu sitting edgily at his side this week, Barack Obama sternly included Americans and Europeans as interested parties in the regional goings-on, too. And he seems poised to sketch out a plan that will bear his stamp, beginning with his upcoming speech in Cairo. Obviously, he wants Israelis to imagine joining a bigger peace process than any they could themselves organize or scuttle. Why Obama and not his predecessors?

This is not the place to review the records of eight previous administrations. But there is an obvious taxonomy for presidents, at least with respect to this region, and Obama emerges as one of a kind. First, we might categorize presidents according to their knowledge of the region - if not their subtlety about the Arab world, then their sophistication about the developing world more generally. This may be compared with, say, a president spouting a Manichaean ideology in which preemption of dark forces takes precedence over any peace, which could anyway never be trusted. (The latter view was hammered into a platform by early neoconservatives during the late 1970s, one that cast America in a perpetual fight against evil - "evil empire," "radical evil," "axis of evil" - and cast Israel as America's biggest aircraft carrier.)

Second, we might categorize presidents as relatively strong or weak. Do they enjoy broad popularity and reliable congressional support for their agenda, however modest, or does presidential popularity fluctuate with media-hyped judgments of their efficacy or ineffectuality, or their virtues or peccadilloes, while each congressional action hinges on tough votes? Finally, do presidents have a peculiar soft spot for Israel, a penchant for seeing it as a tribute to freedom or the answer to an ingenuous religious impulse - as natural to the Middle East as the Holocaust museum is to the Washington Mall or "Jerusalem" is to Baptist hymns? Or, do presidents see Zionism admiringly enough, but mainly through the prism of the practical security problems Israeli leaders say they have?

When you think about it, Obama is the only president since Eisenhower whose profile resembles that of Eisenhower - which means virtually complete freedom to act. One, he has worldly sophistication and knows it; he was brought up in Jakarta and is not put off by the extremist language of the poor and desperate and young; yet his allergy to ultra-nationalist rhetoric was hard won, when he rejected (as only a "mutt" could) Louis Farrakhan's acolytes in Chicago. Two, he has an unprecedented mandate at home. He also enjoys the European Union's support. But, he also has something Ike did not have, the affections of the vast majority of American Jews, 78 percent of whom voted for him. Against this trifecta, it will be hard to flog Israel's role in a clash of civilizations.

Netanyahu - as indeed many Israelis of a certain age - may say that what makes Obama unique is his inexperience, or recklessness, or both. That his presidential predecessors learned from Eisenhower's failure not to meddle in Israeli security strategy. After all, Eisenhower and secretary of state John Foster Dulles forced the Israeli government to evacuate the Sinai after the Suez War. In return, Israel got the opening of the Straits of Tiran, but manned by UN peacekeepers - "the umbrella," as Abba Eban memorably complained to the UN Security Council after the 1967 war, that was taken away "as soon as it begins to rain." Indeed, the justifications for making the Sinai's occupation permanent in 1957 were the same as the ones advanced after 1967: keeping Palestinian terrorism in check, strategic depth through territorial expansion, "deterrence."

But Obama surely knows that this is a very partial assessment of Eisenhower's achievement. Just as the current occupation makes a succession of intifadas inevitable, continued occupation of the Sinai after 1957 would hardly have made a new war with Egypt less likely. As Israelis learned bitterly in 1973, occupation made war inevitable, and on terms that made a preemptive strike diplomatically impossible. For his part, Eisenhower proved that when the U.S. and Europe act together, and rally the UN and America's regional clients, deals get done. On the whole, the decade after Dulles' ultimatum proved to be the golden age of state building, Hebrew cultural innovation and immigrant absorption. So the question is not really why Obama is trying this, but, what took so long?

(I shall take up the question of presidential power and the Middle East more fully in a forthcoming review of Patrick Tyler's book, World of Trouble, in the Nation.)

Netanyahu's Economic Peace: Discuss

2009-05-20T02:23:00.005-04:00

Sam Bahour and I explore the importance, and difficulty, of engendering the Palestinian private sector under occupation.

Israeli Arabs: Time Is (Really) Running Out

2009-05-18T02:07:00.018-04:00

Last year, I posted the results of Haifa University professor Sami Smooha's poll, which reinforced hopes that Israeli Arabs, over a fifth of the population, could eventually accept assimilation into Israeli life.

* 75 percent of Israeli Arabs between the ages of 16 and 22 support voluntary national service;
* 68 percent would be willing to live in a Jewish neighborhood, and 80 percent would like Arabs to enjoy parks and share swimming pools with Jews;
* Over 53 percent feel rejected as citizens of Israel;
* Almost 75 percent of Arabs support the return of refugees only to a Palestinian state;
* 45 percent said that they feel closer to Jews in Israel than to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza;
* Almost half support “comprehensive integration into the Western world.”

Prof. Smooha just released new results of his annual poll. These reveal a shocking decline in feelings of identity and citizenship among Israeli Arabs. Only 41 percent of Israel's Arab minority recognize the country's right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state, as opposed to 65.6 percent in 2003. Only 53.7 percent of the Israeli Arab public believe Israel has a right to exist just as an independent country, according to the poll, down from 81.1 percent in 2003. The saddest result of all: over 40% deny that the Holocaust happened. This might be translated as: 40% believe Jews are liars; or 40% believe Jews use the Holocaust to expropriate, or discriminate against, them.

Jerusalem, we have a problem. Benjamin Netanyahu is saying that "time is running out" on Iran, that Israel faces an existential threat and has to act. He is missing, as I stressed in The Hebrew Republic, the real existential threat to Israel as we know it--and the real count down. Among the things Netanyahu will raise with President Obama today is the demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as as "Jewish state." But as Israeli Arabs well know, there is a difference between a Hebrew-speaking republic (that is, a democracy with a Jewish national character), and a country that preserves over 90% of available land for settlement by legally ethnic Jews, that awards citizenship to anyone who qualifies as Jewish according to Halacha, that preserves a huge Jewish Orthodox school system through public taxation, that annexes Arab parts of Jerusalem, including the Noble Sanctuary, that hands over to rabbis jurisdiction over marriage, divorce and burial--do I bore you?

And on top of this, the regular eruptions of violence between Israel and Palestinians make polarization inevitable. As I argued before, the Gaza operation may not have deterred Gazans from further violence, but it certainly deterred Israeli Arabs from imagining themselves real citizens of Israel.

OBAMA, PRESUMABLY, WILL be too polite to ask Netanyahu: "What kind of Jewish state?" But perhaps his people could later put the question to Uzi Arad, the other Israeli official in the room, who wrote in the New Republic a few years back what Avigdor Lieberman now suggests, that Israel keep the settlements and offer Palestine, in return, the Israeli Arab towns in the Little Triangle. “The various land swap plans,” Arad writes, “proposing a tradeoff of territories aim to increase ethnic homogeneity... [so that] the Jewish majority would remain at 81 percent until 2050." Gee, 81 percent until 2050. And here I thought math was hard; that, anyway, Arab families living in Israel for 61 years, raised in the Hebrew language, and aspiring to lives in Israeli hospitals, high tech companies, and universities, might (if we can get past their rage) actually enrich the country.

Look, Arad was a colleague of mine for a while, and whatever he thought of me, I found him very engaging. I even once tried, in a modest way, to help him raise money in Toronto for his Herzliya Conference and research institute. He always showed me respect, even warmth (though I was hardly in a position to be his rival). I found him brilliant and morally serious; he once told me, what I took to be a kind of foundational fantasy, that he would like to organize a secret force to strike at anti-Semites anywhere in the world--something like the late Mordechai Richler's St. Urbain's Horseman, I thought.

But a warm Jewish heart is not public policy. Neither is Israel a big Jewish family. Arad wants us to think that the problem is Palestinians not recognizing Israel as a Jewish state. But does he recognize Israel as a state at all--I mean a state in any ordinary sense, like France, or even Quebec? In November 2003, he co-authored (with Uzi Dayan and Hebrew social scientist Yehezkel Dror) a new “Zionist Manifesto” for Israel, which was presented to the Zionist Congress in Jerusalem. It aimed to give “constitutional status” to Israel as a “Zionist-Jewish state,” a state of the “whole” [read, world] Jewish people.” Arad’s manifesto also called for a state that would teach “the feeling of a right to the Promised Land, which is a central principle of Judaism.” It also called for “the preservation of democracy for all of its citizens.” It did not say if this were a central principle of Judaism.

Bibi Gun

2009-05-17T10:23:00.005-04:00

I have learned much from Jeffrey Goldberg, and generally admire what he does with his contradictions; but yesterday's New York Times column on Benjamin Netanyahu is troubling on so many levels one hardly knows how deep to drill first.

Basically Goldberg is saying this: You may suspect (given Netanyahu's record, presumably) that the prime minister is an ideologue and something of a manipulator, that he is actually committed to Greater Israel, and is throwing Iranian sand in our eyes, trying to distract us from the occupation and the settlements. But this would be wrong.

Netanyahu, Goldberg continues, truly does believe that Iran is a threat to Israel's very existence, and he believes this for three reasons: strategic, Jewish, and familial. I, Goldberg, do not necessarily believe these things myself, but I have access to Netanyahu and his strategic planners, a purchase on the way Israeli Jews think, and a sympathetic grasp of his family dynamics. So I'm going to explain him to you. (Goldberg does not tell us why, if he does think Netanyahu is misguided, the prime minister's sincerity is a virtue or even worth talking about; or why Netanyahu and his aides particularly like to speak with him. But I digress.)

THE STRATEGIC POINT is the important one, and Goldberg does not so much report it as (how did Stephen Colbert put it?) write it down. He is, no doubt, accurately reflecting the views of most of the professionals currently involved in Israeli strategic planning, from Uzi Arad (Netanyahu's confidant and head of Israel's National Security Council) on down. Roughly, their scenario runs like this:

Iran may or may not be going for a nuclear bomb, but we have to assume that it is; and once Iran reaches the capacity to build one, this will change the Middle East in a way that will eventually destroy Israel. Even if mad mullahs do not just drop one on Tel-Aviv, the mere fact of a "nuclear umbrella" will embolden Hamas and Hezbollah to fire missiles. It will also turn Iraq into a client state, which will cause Kuwait and the Gulf states to fall in line behind Iran's power. Then Saudi Arabia will fall in line, or get a bomb of its own, or both; all of which will eventually bring Islamists to power in Cairo. So Israel cannot allow these dominoes to fall, which will bring its end. Even if an Israeli air strike only delays the Iranian bomb by a few years, it must hit before doomsday processes are set in motion. (Goldberg is by no means alone in reproducing this scenario. Israel's foremost Churchill wannabe--also a kind of IDF stenographer--Haaretz's Arie Shavit, has been flogging it for months; you can read Shavit's version here.)

I say currently involved in Israeli strategic planning because there are plenty of professionals, from former intelligence boss, Ephraim Halevy, to former Chief of Staff Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, who think an attack would be madness, however uncomfortable it might be to live with a nuclear Iran. But how about mere civilians using their heads for a change? The fact is, every terrible domino that the existence of an Iranian bomb is supposed to topple is far more likely to be toppled by an attack on Iran.

GOLDBERG, VENTRILOQUIZED BY Netanyahi and Arad, is not convinced. "Talk of containing Iran after it acquires a nuclear capacity," he writes, "does not make the Israelis (or Iran’s Arab adversaries, for that matter) happy and, in fact, might push them closer to executing a military strike." Notice the parenthetical aside, implying as Netanyahu's loves to imply, that Israel would actually be doing the work of moderate Arab states like Egypt and Jordan, and with their tacit blessing. Goldberg does not tell us that Mohamed El Baradei, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and an Egyptian, has called a strike "completely insane"; that it would "turn the region into one big fireball, and the Iranians would immediately start building the bomb--and they could count on the support of the entire Islamic world."

If you want to know what an Israeli attack will really mean, just read this extraordinarily trenchant summary by Reuven Pedatzur, ironically entitled, "Here's how Israel would destroy Iran's nuclear program." The piece, relying on a study by Abdullah Toukan and Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, blasts the Netanyahu-to-Arad-to-Goldberg thesis more thoroughly than a bunker buster.

Oh, as for missiles coming from Gaza and South Lebanon, you may remember that these have not needed an "Iranian nuclear umbrella" to be launched. You also may have noticed that Israel's nuclear umbrella did not seem to do much good against them either, or for that matter, get its neighbors to fall in line. It seems that, if you subscribe to the big swinging dick theory of diplomacy, the enlargement you can expect from a nuclear bomb is rather limited. (I have had more to say about deterring, not attacking, Iran here and here.)

BUT STRATEGY IS not enough, apparently. To really get Netanyahu we must also understand how "Amalek" (the biblical people that mercilessly attacked the rear of the camp when the children of Israel were leaving Egypt) rattles around in the minds of Israeli planners--also how hard it is to be the son of the Jabotinsky movement's favorite historian of Jew-hatred, and the younger brother of a military icon, to boot. Amalek, Amalek. The ultimate enemy, the metaphor for every anti-Semite, Nazi, and terrorist.

Goldberg might be forgiven for going all squishy here about Jewish fears, though Netanyahu is not the only person to have a difficult father or lose a loved one to terror. But as long as we are onto Amalek, Goldberg might also have noticed that there are two times that biblical Israelites themselves commit genocide. The first, in Prophets, when Samuel commands King Saul to attack Amalek for what their forebearers did. They were to kill every child, lamb, and calf. The second time was after Haman, the Amalekite prime minister in the "comic" Book of Esther, planned to annihilate all of the Persian King's Jewish subjects. The Jews responded preemptively, and with the King's permission, to "destroy, massacre, and exterminate" all of Haman's "sons," and the killing became a bloodbath against Jewish foes that--so the story goes--took over 75,000 lives.

Such Jewish stories, and whether Israelis are to regard them as heroic or tragic, raise the question of what Netanyahu means when he insists on Palestinians recognizing Israel as a "Jewish state." But that's another story.

The Pope And Ruby's Tuesday

2009-05-14T07:04:00.024-04:00

(Reuven "Ruby" Rivlin, second from the left)

Pope Benedict XVI is not a man to feel sorry for himself, or even think his pronouncements just those of a man. Yet it is hard not to extend him some sympathy for braving a trip to Jerusalem this week. The mission was delicate from the start, stepping as he was into the middle of a blood feud between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims. As the world's most famous neither-of-the-above, he was bound to be seen as a some kind of proxy for the conscience of the world--something like what the stately Notre Dame complex has come to represent among the buildings of Jerusalem: a neutral place where Israelis and Arabs go for "dialogue," while Christians listen, encourage--remind. The Pope's silence would have been interpreted, not as tactfulness, but as cowardice. Who in the middle of a quarrel does not imagine, well, an audience?

At the same time, of course, the Pope represents the great rival tradition whose dogmas and power have inspired both ghettos and crusades. Both sides want him in a state of apology, or at least vaguely official regret. And here is where missions become impossible. Dwell on Jewish suffering from European anti-Semitism, and you invite a reprimand from Palestinian nationalists and Muslim clerics that you are implicitly justifying the Naqba. Dwell on the occupation of Palestine, and you are inviting a reprimand from Zionists and Rabbis that you are justifying attacks on the national home. Fail to dwell on either, however, and you are accused of not assuming the church's indirect responsibility for both catastrophes: the Jews will say you are cavalier about the Holocaust, the Muslims ditto about colonialism. Both will say the old suffering of Jews led to the new suffering of Palestinians. Who in the middle of a quarrel does not also wish for a third party to blame? Habemus Papam, no?

All of this explains why this pope more than others has needed to rely, if not just on photo ops, then speech writers with an over-sized delete button. Indeed, this pope of all popes, a writer in his own right, has almost certainly developed a strong propensity to (as Nabokov put it) "kill your darlings." He tried to get fancy about the sources of The Western Tradition and found himself skewered for Orientalism. He thought to reinstate those he did not need to reinstate, retreated, and wound up making his infallibility seem rather hypothetical. So if anyone has learned the value of Rashi's aphorism, "kol ha'mosif gorea," ("he who adds substracts"), it is Benedict XVI. Which brings me to Reuven Rivlin, the Speaker of the Knesset--"Ruby" to his friends.

RIVLIN WAS NOT happy with things left out of the Pope's speech at Yad Vashem. He had already boycotted the Pope's arrival ceremony, even the visit to President Peres' residence. But Rivlin did go to Yad Vashem on Monday evening. By Tuesday morning he was all over the airwaves. "He came and told us as if he were a historian, someone looking in from the sidelines, about things that should not have happened. And what can you do? He was a part of them," Rivlin told Israel Radio. "With all due respect to the Holy See, we cannot ignore the burden he bears, as a young German who joined the Hitler Youth and as a person who joined Hitler's army, which was an instrument in the extermination":

I came to the memorial not only to hear historical descriptions or about the established fact of the Holocaust. I came as a Jew, hoping to hear an apology and a request for forgiveness from those who caused our tragedy, and among them, the Germans and the church. But to my sadness, I did not hear any such thing.

(You may read the Pope's Yad Vashem's address here, and judge Rivlin's complaint for yourself.)

WE SHOULD UNDERSTAND who is talking here. Ruby Rivlin, 70 years old, a lawyer by training, whose undistinguished legal career amounted to advising and managing Betar Jerusalem's football team. He graduated, in other words, from Menachem Begin's Herut youth movement into a party job, and from there into party politics. He postures as the scion of a great sage's family, but he has been, really, the product of a club-become-party-become-job.

And since the party he joined was more or less fanatic, he became a fanatic, too. Rivlin never met a settlement he did not like or a war he did not think "existential." He opposed the Oslo process, bad-mouthed Yitzhak Rabin (even after his assasination), and mocked any movement toward a two-state solution. He railed against Aharon Barak's Supreme Court's efforts to bring in protections for elementary human rights. Even Ariel Sharon, whom he had sucked-up to for a generation, proved not hawkish enough for him in the end. He split with Sharon over the Gaza operation, not on security grounds, but because he did not think Jews should drive Jews "from their homes."

And while I'm on the subject, Rivlin is a notorious glad-hander. He thinks his smile, which is zealously sweet, makes up for any excess or offense. He is blushingly plump and uncomfortably chummy. He thinks that gravitas means saying a little louder than others what is perfectly conventional. He teared up when, after running for the presidency against Peres, he withdrew so as not to lose by a mile; he declared his withdrawal "statesmanship." Imagine a cross between Hubert Humphrey and Sean Hannity .

SO THE REAL question that Rivlin's morning after interview evokes is this: where does a hack like him get the nerve to attack the Pope in this way, after all, the head of a church of a billion and a half Christians, and your guest, for Christ's sake? How could this kind of talk seem so conventional, so approved, that a person so lacking in erudition and moral authority as Rivlin feels that it's safe, even cool, to treat a Pope's visit to Jerusalem the way, say, Pat Buchanan might be treated at an AIPAC convention?

Just to be clear: the young Ratzinger never joined Hitler Youth (though all youth like him were added to it rolls automatically). His father was bitterly anti-Nazi; his retarded cousin was taken away and killed by the SS. He was drafted into an ant-aircraft battery at 16 and soon thereafter deserted. And as Tel-Aviv Univeristy's Dina Porat gingerly put it (on the radio the following day), we need a little perspective--kzat proportzia--here. In 1904, Pope Pius X told Theodore Herzl: "The Jews have not recognized our Lord, therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people. Jerusalem cannot be placed in Jewish hands." No sooner had Pope Benedict XVI landed at Ben-Gurion Airport than he expressed the wish that "both peoples may live in peace in a homeland of their own, within secure and internationally recognized borders," and then he added: "It is right and fitting that, during my stay in Israel, I will have the opportunity to honor the memory of the 6 million Jewish victims of the shoah... [and] pray that humanity will never again witness a crime of such magnitude."

True, virtually all of my Catholic friends think Pope Benedict a kind of Church Likudnik, dogmatic, imperial, allergic to dissent. But that is hardly the point for Rivlin or is implied by the loose talk. For this Israeli government in particular, the Pope's squelching of Vatican II's energies fits nicely with their own orthodoxies. What they want is more about the Holocaust, more contrition.

Funny, in the early 1960s, Israeli elites saw the Jewish state so much as a pioneering adventure--the culture of Hebrew labor, the dignity of self-defense--that they tended to bury talk of the Holocaust, which seemed to them a symbol of Diaspora Jewry's woeful path. Ben-Gurion staged the Eichmann trial just to correct what he took to be Zionism's aloofness from the suffering of Holocaust survivors. Foreign dignitaries, meanwhile, were taken to the kibbutz, or the Hebrew University. Today, guests are whisked off so quickly to Yad Vashem that they cannot tell the difference between its gloom and their jet-lag. Their speeches must include a syllogism in which the "Holocaust" forms the first part and "the Jewish state" the second. They cannot just express their fellow-feeling. They will be graded for levels of sincerity, from "cold" to "understanding." Mention Iran and you get extra credit.

MY LATE FRIEND, Ilona Karmel, who barely survived the Plashow death-camp (and like the Pope was an avid reader of the theologian Karl Rahner), once described American Jews who kept bringing up the Holocaust to her as people with "scars but no wounds." It is like they are trying to get a moral pass in advance of any moral action, she said. Israelis do have wounds, of course, and Holocaust Remembrance Day has now been so braided in with Passover, on one side, and Memorial Day and Independence Day, on the other, that it is seems officially necessary to forget where wounds stop and scars begin.

Still, one listens to Rivlin and cannot help but wonder what, if anything, he learned from the 20th. century other than the need to serve his movement more fiercely and to say "mine" more loudly; to take the territories promised by his movement and be holier than you know who. You also have to wonder if his arrogance, which blends all too easily into Israel's political background, does not suggest a new fundamentalism. If many Jewish Israelis, like many Christians before them, are not trying to achieve innocence simply by identifying with the scars of the innocent murdered, by means of a passion play of their own, with a gospel of their own, only the Romans are the Nazis, and "the Jews" are Poles (Ukrainians, Hungarians, etc.).

Alas, as Rahner might have said, innocence is overrated. He did say, unremarkably, that "self-realization...embodies the result of what a man has made of himself during life." Presumably, this is true of nations, too. Does Rivlin really need Hillel and Jesus to know that passion is not justice and apology is not permission?

Ezra Nawi, Jailed

2009-05-10T11:29:00.006-04:00

I have written about Ezra before and have not hidden my admiration. He is a tireless human rights activist, who has established unique connections, and affections, with the villagers in the South Hebron hills. I have often sat in the back of his truck, being ferried to stand watch over fields that would not be plowed were it not for his courage and resourcefulness. I have seen Ezra stand, dignified, against settlers who regard him something the way Klansmen regarded Jewish northerners who came to bear witness against Jim Crow. He is the subject of a poignant film. He is also my plumber, as it happens, and he does not overcharge his customers.

Ezra is now facing jail: "His 'crime,'" writes Neve Gordon, in a comprehensive report, "was trying to stop a military bulldozer from destroying the homes of Palestinian Bedouins from Um El Hir in the South Hebron region. These Palestinians have been under Israeli occupation for almost 42 years; they still live without electricity, running water and other basic services and are continuously harassed by Jewish settlers and the military – two groups that have united to expropriate Palestinian land and that clearly have received the government's blessing to do so." You can read and watch what you need to know here, but you can also read more about Nawi from David Shulman here.

Attention Washington press corps: If you do not ask Benjamin Netanyahu about Ezra Nawi when the Prime Minister visits Washington, you are not doing your jobs.

Once Again...

2009-05-06T01:29:00.003-04:00

...if you have a few minutes, you may want to read through the remarkable string of Comments at TPM Cafe in response to my recent post on Olmert's offer.

For Sale: Parcels Of The Jewish State

2009-05-05T02:29:00.004-04:00

This little column by Hebrew University law professor, Daphna Golan, is not to be missed. While Prime Minister Netanyahu prattles on about Iranian nukes, or the need for Palestinian leaders to recognize Israel as a "Jewish state," the government continues to remake realities on the the ground, utterly confounding the question of what Jewish state is to be recognized. Golan writes:

Israel has long promised there would be no new construction in West Bank settlements...Yet this week, a Jerusalem daily promised that any Israeli factory willing to move to the settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim would benefit in three ways. First is the community's "Ideal location," ten minutes from Jerusalem. The map featured in the ad shows only Israeli communities as recommended sites for factory owners to build in - no Palestinian communities, even those next door to the settlements. The second advantage is accessibility. In case the Americans do not understand,...Israel has built roads for Israelis alone to use, so they can live and work in the occupied territories without having to come across Palestinians. Route 443 was paved for the sake of accessibility to Ma'aleh Adumim...Third, the advertisement promises the same tax deductions as in "National Priority Area A," adding: "Ma'aleh Adumim's industrial park has the largest land reserves in the Jerusalem area.

Olmert's Unprecedented Offer

2009-05-04T05:02:00.014-04:00

Ehud Olmert has been telling anyone who will still listen that he and Mahmoud Abbas were "very close" to a settlement this past fall; that he presented the PA president a deal and map--in his words, a more generous offer than any ever made by an Israeli prime minister, and that Abbas "refused to sign."

Sources close to their conversations have now filled in the essential details of their talks. Journalists take note: If anything about the following account is mistaken, then it is up to Olmert, the putative maker of the offer, to confirm or deny things, point by point. The idea that these are delicate diplomatic negotiations, and must remain secret, is ridiculous. We are not speaking here about two private people negotiating the price of a rug in the bazaar.

Olmert and Abbas had little standing among their own citizens when they took on these talks; for both, negotiating was a kind of ongoing photo-op. Yet every clause of what Olmert offered has a moral idea behind it--therefore a public consequence to it. If Abbas rejected something, we should all have the chance to judge if we would have, too. Israeli politics are still suffering from Ehud Barak's warped account of the Camp David summit in the summer of 2000. Then, too, Yasir Arafat was presumably made an offer of unprecedented generosity and he rejected it. The resulting meme was: "Israel offered Palestinians everything, and Palestinians came back with violence." This meme was not quarantined in time, and it has infected the talk of Israeli voters, journalists, and American "supporters" ever since.

HERE ARE THE details of Olmert's offer:

Prologue: Sources say there was never a document, formal or informal, presented to Abbas. Everything offered by Olmert was offered orally and provisionally, and with the specific proviso that Olmert's ideas were not endorsed either by Foreign Minister Livni or Defense Minister Barak.

1. Olmert offered an Israeli withdrawal from 96% of the West Bank, but he did not include Jerusalem in this calculation. Israel would compensate Palestine with a land swap amounting to 4% of Israeli territory: 2.5% would be Israeli land in the Negev added to the Gaza Strip, while 1.5% of Israeli land would be the area devoted to a land bridge between the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian state would be demilitarized.

(Note: Since Jerusalem was not included in the land calculation, Palestinians plausibly argue that withdrawal would really be from 94%. They argue, moreover, that the 1.5% devoted to a land bridge would actually be Israeli controlled. But leaving aside the arguable specifics of the withdrawal, it is clear from these numbers that Olmert--unlike Barak at Camp David in the summer of 2000--accepted the principle enshrined in the offer of the Arab League in 2002, that any deal would be based on the 1967 borders, that is, on the inadmissibility of acquisition of territory by force; that land would be exchanged 1:1. This is a principle which must be preserved in any final deal.)

2. Israel would, in return for the land given to Palestine, annex the territory of the major settlement blocs (including Kiryat Arba, next to Hebron, and Alfe Menashe), the Gush Etzion bloc, the town of Ariel in the Samarian hills, the land between Maale Adumim and East Jerusalem, and the towns hugging the 1967 border near Jerusalem, Har Adar and Givat Zeev.

(Note: A glance at a map shows that to retain especially Kiryat Arba, Ariel, and the territory between Jerusalem and Maale Adumim, Israel would require sovereign roads and land bridges that cut the Palestinian state into four enclaves, two north of Jerusalem and two south of it, while cutting East Jerusalem from the descent to the Dead Sea. More important, these annexations would leave the most ruthless Israeli settlers in isolated pockets that are bound to become targets for ruthless insurgents on the Palestinian side. The only possible justification for these annexations is the Israeli government's distaste for confronting the settlers; defending them after a deal would serve as justification for all kinds of military escalations.)

3. Israel agrees to accept up to 30,000 refugees within its 1967 border. But this is a humanitarian gesture only. It does not in any way imply that Israel endorses the Palestinians "right of return."

(Note: The number itself is not very different from what was agreed to in the Taba Agreement and the Geneva Initiative. Those agreements recognized the Palestinian "right of return" in principle, but presented "modalities" for actualizing this right through resettlement in the Palestinian state and financial compensation. No Palestinian leader can come away from a negotiation without this principle being recognized; to abandon the right of return is something like denying the suffering of Palestinian refugees since 1948; indeed, the agreement of PA people to fulfill this right without returning to Haifa, Jaffa, and Acco was a major concession. For his part, Olmert once told me that he will never accept the right of return, since it implies that Israel was born in a great act of cruelty. But being cruel does not always make one wrong, and having a right does not mean actualizing it without regard to other rights. The Arab League Plan states that there must be an "agreed" solution for the refugees. It is time that all sides adopted the Taba and Geneva formulation as a way of meeting the conditions of the Plan, which Olmert did not.)

4. Jerusalem: Jewish neighborhoods would remain under Israeli sovereignty and Arab neighborhoods would be transferred to Palestinian sovereignty. This would resolve all points of contention except for the disposition of the Old City, the so-called "holy basin." The latter would be subject to a trusteeship of four countries: Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

(Note: Of all of Olmert's reported offers, this seems to me the most creative and morally intelligent. The old city is, in effect, an international museum. The question of sovereignty is really a question of custodianship. It seems unimaginable that the mosques on the Noble Sanctuary (Temple Mount) would ever be removed from the administration of the Muslim Waqf (religious administration). Nor would the Church of the Holy Sepulcher be removed from the administration of the various churches that have negotiated custodianship over generations. Nor would the Wailing Wall be removed from custodianship of the Israeli government. Making access open to all, and sovereignty something more international, is merely calling the grass green. And what would redeem our religions more than an all-sided willingness to share rather than to war? Finally, Saudi presence in the city's custodianship would not only establish a presence for the Arab League, but invite further Saudi investment in Jerusalem tourism, which will be Palestine's leading "export" sector for a generation.)

Olmert, it is true, cannot now make policy any more the leaders of the Geneva Initiative could. Out of power is out of power. But his offer provides yet another confirmation of the utilitarian calculus upon which any deal can be based.

Then again, the fate of his offer, and the political constraints surrounding it, prove once again that the time has passed for more negotiations. The time has come, rather, for the U.S. to fully embrace the Arab League Plan, fill in its blanks with derivatives from this calculus, rally Europe and the UN Security Council to its version of the Plan, and present it to Israel and the Palestinian Authority in a comprehensive package (international forces in Jerusalem, defense pact with Israel, investment plan for Palestine, etc.). The Plan should then be put to a referendum in both Israel and Palestine. Is it not obvious that this (and only this) can work, and that every day we do not install the Plan is another we drift toward Balkan style civil war and ethnic cleansing?

Pogrom At Um Safa

2009-05-03T06:01:00.003-04:00

This, from David Shulman, his account of yesterday's action at Um Safa:

Pogroms: it's something the Jews know about. I grew up on those stories—Cossack raids on the shtetl, the torture and killings and wanton destruction. My grandmother had a brother. They lived in Mikhalayev, in the Ukraine. One day the Cossacks came, and everyone panicked, and the seventeen-year-old brother tried to hide in a pond, and he drowned. She mourned that young death all her life; the dead don't age, and some wounds never heal.

And now it turns out—who would believe it?—that there are Jews who also know how to carry out pogroms. For the last ten days or so, settlers from Bat 'Ayin in the so-called Etzion Bloc have been paying violent daily visits to their Palestinian neighbors in Um Safa, perched high on the edge of the western ridge that overlooks the coastal plain all the way to the sea. A terrorist from Um Safa entered Bat 'Ayin two weeks ago, murdered a settler boy with an axe, and wounded another. The police caught him soon thereafter. But that hasn't stopped the Bat 'Ayin settlers from repeated rampages to wreak revenge on Um Safa. They've already killed four innocents, and another eleven or twelve have been wounded by gunfire. As if that weren't bad enough, the soldiers have apparently been making common cause with these settlers, opening fire readily at the villagers. Life in this most beautiful of the mountain villages has become a nightmare; not that it was easy before.

We get the emergency call around 5:00 after a long day that started off in Susya, in South Hebron. At first it looked as though we'd never get through the barriers and the roadblocks; like last week, we had police and army on our tail from the moment we left Jerusalem. Two full buses and several private cars headed south by the long route twisting over the dry hills. A grey, sultry day, summer approaching: in the endless battle in the wadis and terraces between green and brown, green seems to be losing ground. Every once in a while the soldiers would stop one of the cars and threaten to stop the buses. But, happily, by midday we had rendezvoused at Susya with a van of Palestinian activists from all over the West Bank. All in all, some 150 Combatants for Peace—former Israeli soldiers and Palestinian members of the armed resistance organizations who have given up all forms of violence—had come to meet each other and to see the reality of South Hebron.

Read on...