Letters From a Young Contrarian

In Tamerlan's Footsteps

Wed, 22 May 2013 17:00:30 +0100

by Simon Shuster, Time, May 27, 2013

The imam, Khasan-Khadji Gasanaliev, agreed to an interview a few hours after the service and invited me up to his office on the third floor, just beneath the emerald-colored dome. We had been talking amicably for about 20 minutes when one of the imam’s assistants, who had the tough look of a special-forces alumnus, entered the office and sat down. For a few minutes he eyed me with a smirk, and broke in only when I turned the conversation back to Tsarnaev’s time in the region. “And what is your ethnicity?” the man interrupted.

Pride or stupidity — maybe both — did not let me lie. “My mother is Russian,” I said. “My father is Jewish.” He was already aware that I wrote for a U.S.-based publication, and the rant that followed killed any chance of continuing the interview. The imam sighed, got up and began preparing for the next call to prayer, washing his hands and feet in a sink in the corner of the room while his assistant stood up and continued yelling: “Americans are bombing the Muslim world for how many years? And you help them do it! Don’t lie to me! You are carrying these mortal sins!”

Still, the visit was worth it — one of the friends I made on Kotrova Street, a taxi driver named Magomedgadzhi, gave me a tip about Tsarnaev. Magomedgadzhi had agreed to show me the house of a suspected terrorist who had been blown to bits by the special services, and he mentioned in passing as we were driving there that his cousin had seen Tsarnaev in the flesh. (This is what we call in the news business “burying the lede.”) The cousin turned out to be a 36-year-old construction worker named Gussein, a lapsed Salafi who had been invited early last summer to a cookout on the beach attended by a brash young American boxer named Tamerlan. “He said none of those black fighters in America ever hit him in the head, that’s how good he was,” Gussein told me.

…The young men from that wedding party, mostly members of the Union of the Just, were the first people I’d met who were willing to talk about meeting Tsarnaev. He would have been hard to miss. As several people later told me, Tsarnaev had shown up at Friday prayers wearing a brown knee-length jubbah cloak like you might see in Morocco, but not in Dagestan, where men prefer T-shirts and track pants. He would slick his hair back with olive oil and pin it to his head with one of those plastic bands that David Beckham used to wear on the field. He would paint his eyes with the black eyeliner that men in the Persian Gulf sometimes wear. “He looked like an Arab,” recalls Tagir Razakov, a young Salafi who knew Tsarnaev. “It’s like he was trying to prove something.” One afternoon Tsarnaev had almost gotten into a fistfight at the mosque when a young Salafi told him how ridiculous he looked.

Carla On a Hot Tin Roof

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:00:17 +0100

Carla On a Hot Tin Roof:

by Maureen Orth, Vanity Fair, June 2013

Although Bruni had almost finished her album by 2011, it wasn’t considered appropriate to release it while she was First Lady. To get her own campaign rolling at last, she first released “Chez Keith et Anita,” an up-tempo song with a Latin beat meant to recall the early, globe-trotting, drug-fueled days of the Rolling Stones—which she would have been too young to experience—but also to remind us, surely, of Mick and Carla. That song did not seem to generate the buzz she was looking for, but the next pre-release, “Le Pingouin,” did. “Le Pingouin” begins with a ticktock ticktock that suggests the awkward gait of a penguin, a pejorative term in French that means an oaf or buffoon. Because of the harsh lyrics describing an ill-bred, indecisive person—“neither yes nor no”—the French press immediately speculated that the song referred to François Hollande, who has also been tagged Mr. Neither-Yes-nor-No, as well as Mr. Flanby (as in the custard). In addition, in the power handoff last May, Hollande neglected to honor tradition and walk Sarkozy and Bruni down the steps of the Élysée to their waiting car. At first Bruni did not discourage speculation as to who the penguin in her song was, but when I pressed her on it now, she refused to go there.

“I swear, Maureen, it’s not related to that. You believe the penguin could be someone special, but it wasn’t anyone special when I wrote it.” Despite my skepticism, she went on to insist that the penguin stood for ill-mannered people in general, including one of her neighbors. “It’s ‘Oh, you gained weight.’ ‘You look tired.’ ‘You had a bad holiday, right?’ Some people put you down.” I said I remained unconvinced, and that’s when she excused herself to wash her hands. She came back saying, “So, the penguin is a metaphor. Everyone has his own penguins.”

Ironically, Sarkozy is the one who is often described as brash or abrupt with people, while Bruni is noted for her manners. “People at the Élysée say she was very kind to them,” an official of Hollande’s government told me. When we spoke in 2008, Bruni said she was going to learn the code of the Élysée and how to be a First Lady. Today she claims it was easy. “I love to follow rules. I don’t like to be on the outside,” she tells me, despite writing the song “Not a Lady,” which includes the lyrics “I’d rather be a witch, a virgin, or some old nun.” She says that meticulous protocol made everything easy when she met the Queen at Windsor Castle. “Most people think it’s a weight, but it’s actually a help—it’s like someone holding your hand,” she says. “I like it when everything works smoothly with people.” Bruni did not look particularly dressed up when she left the Élysée for the last time, and her nondescript gray pantsuit and T-shirt caused speculation that she was subtly telegraphing “Good riddance. I’ve had it.”

The Shooting Star and The Model

Wed, 22 May 2013 15:00:35 +0100

The Shooting Star and The Model:

by Mark Seal, Vanity Fair, June 2013

She spent February 13 polishing the speech she was going to give the next day to students at Sandown High School to commemorate the “Black Friday Campaign for Rape Awareness,” following the death of a 17-year-old girl named Anene Booysen, who had been gang-raped outside Cape Town. “I woke up in a happy safe home this morning,” Reeva wrote on Instagram. “Not everyone did. Speak out against the rape of individuals in SA. RIP Anene Booysen. #rape #crime #sayNO.”

“I spoke to her the day before she died,” said her publicist Simphiwe Majola. “I asked her to come to my office so I could see her present her speech.” He said she delivered it with passion. She talked about growing up poor on a farm and later losing her self-esteem in an emotionally abusive relationship, only to regain it as a model in Johannesburg. She urged the students to realize the importance of being heard and realizing your value.

“The last e-mail I received from her was at a quarter past five P.M., and she died the next morning.” He took out his computer to show me her final e-mails. She wanted to get involved with a brand like Virgin Active Health Clubs, she wrote, and to launch her own lingerie line. In response to Majola’s suggestion that she model herself after an international star, Reeva mentioned Cameron Diaz, whom she admired for her down-to-earth attitude and sense of humor.

Just before six that evening, Reeva Steenkamp was recorded driving her Mini Cooper through the massive gates of Silver Woods Country Estate. One month later, I drove through those gates and entered a vast development surrounded by high fences. Thieves had breached security there only twice, I was told. A house was burglarized four years ago, and a robbery in 2011 caused the development to increase its security procedures considerably. At present, equipped with what the Silver Woods Web site calls “a solid, electrified, security wall,” the community seemed so safe that on the evening of the shooting Pistorius was sleeping with his balcony doors open.

“What do you have up your sleeve for your love tomorrow?,” Reeva tweeted the day before she died. However, during what sounded like an argument in Pistorius’s house between two and three A.M., according to Hilton Botha, “witnesses said they heard a lady scream, and they heard bullet shots fired, and then they heard a scream again and then another few shots fired.”

“She wanted to make herself heard,” said Sarit Tomlinson. “And she did.” Gina Myers added, “I can’t imagine living my life without her, but I know that something good will come out of it. People have heard her and will continue to hear her. She has become an icon.”

The Boy Who Cried Dead Girlfriend

Wed, 22 May 2013 14:00:35 +0100

The Boy Who Cried Dead Girlfriend:

by Ned Zeman, Vanity Fair, June 2013

While Tuiasosopo never showed up to a pre-arranged interview with Vanity Fair, he told his side of the story to Dr. Phil, network television’s resident celebrity therapist, in interviews that aired over two days, on January 31 and February 1. According to his version of events, Te’o, not he, initiated their Facebook friendship; Te’o and Kekua broke up two weeks before Kekua died because Te’o had been “Skyping and seeing” other girls (can you blame him?); he “fell deeply, romantically in love” with Te’o, even though he was trying to “recover” from homosexuality. (A source close to Tuiasosopo, TMZ reported, said that he had invented the persona of Kekua to normalize his feelings about men.) After much prodding, Dr. Phil persuaded Tuiasosopo to speak in Kekua’s voice. Standing behind some kind of iconostasis, Tuiasosopo loosed a miraculous—if not entirely persuasive—replica of the voice, with the original taken from a voicemail left on Te’o’s phone. F.B.I. experts hired byDr. Phil ventured that the voices were a match.

Tuiasosopo verified Te’o’s claim that he and Te’o had met only once, at the Irish’s final regular-season game of 2012, at the University of Southern California. Tuiasosopo’s family lives a few hours north of the school, in Palmdale. There he works as a musician at the fundamentalist Oasis Christian Church of the Antelope Valley, where his father, Titus, serves as pastor.

Tuiasosopo’s assertion that he had feelings for Te’o fueled the existing rumors that the hoax was meant to disguise Te’o’s homosexuality. Those rumors are strongly disputed by Teo’s family and friends, including his most recent girlfriend, Alexandra del Pilar, a student at St. Mary’s College, located just a few miles from the Notre Dame campus. They dated from November until December. “He’s not gay,” she says. “His feelings about her were so strong. He talked about what a strong faith she had. She was different than the girls he’d meet at Notre Dame and more like the girls he grew up with.”

What's up with Israel's poor Eurovision showing?

Wed, 22 May 2013 13:00:41 +0100

The Jewish Daily Forward, May 21, 2013

A Romanian opera singer dressed like Dracula and wailing falsetto. Dancers in a Perspex boxes and drummers dosed in baby oil. Moustachioed Greeks dancing and singing about the joys of free alcohol. A Russian plea for world peace in three minutes with a key change.

In case you missed it, that was the Eurovision Song Contest, Europe’s annual festival of music, costumes, and lights that at once unites, divides, and simply baffles the continent. And the winner wasn’t half bad this year. Denmark’s Emmilie de Forest sang “Only Teardrops,” a steady tune with a smattering of drums and Celtic pipes, and won 281 points, including the maximum points from eight countries, beating out Azerbaijan and the Ukraine respectively.

Absent once more from the spectacle was Israel. Since Harel Skaat placed 14th in the 2010 final with “Milim” (“Words”), Israel has failed to make it out of the semi-finals on three successive occasions. This year, Israel entered the talented if unknown reality show winner Moran Mazor, and her ballad “Rak bishvilo” (“Only for him”) fell flat in the semi-final, finishing 14th out of 17 acts.

For its size, Israel has a very strong record in Eurovision. Since it first entered in 1973, Israel has won on three occasions – including back-to-back in 1978 and 1979 with “A-Ba-Ni-Bi” and “Hallelujah” – and has come second twice and third once. This is more remarkable given Israel hasn’t even submitted an entry every year, missing the contest when it has fallen on the memorial days Yom HaShoah or Yom Hazikaron.

However, following Dana International’s triumph in 1998 – when, incidentally, she became the first transgendered artist to win the contest – Israel’s record in Eurovision has been patchy at best. Shiri Maimon’s 4th place finish in 2005 was the highpoint in an era that has seen Israel miss out on the final five times. When Israel has qualified for the final, it has finished in the bottom half more often than not, including 23rd out of 24 in 2006, scoring just 4 points.

It would be easy to suggest that Israel has been the victim of dramatic changes made to Eurovision’s format in the last twenty years. Since 1993, the number of participants has increased considerably, with the introduction of nations from eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. This, combined with the replacement of national juries with mass televoting, has beget entrenched regional voting blocs: Scandinavia; Greece and Cyprus; the former Yugoslavia; and the CIS nations. Countries like Israel, the United Kingdom, and Ireland who were once successful (and now are decidedly not) all point to this as the source of their downfall.

But speaking to The Forward, Gil Laufer, an editor for ESC Today, suggested that to argue Israel’s lack of success is attributable to some reflexive dislike amongst the voting public is too simplistic an explanation. After all, when Israel has submitted decent songs like Maimon’s “HaSheket SheNish’ar” (“The Silence That Remains”), they’ve been rewarded. “It’s common to say here that ‘everyone is anti-Semitic’ and that everyone hates Israel. But we have managed to show that when we deserve a good place, we get it. When the crowd was shouting ‘Israel, Israel’ before announcing the last finalist of the second semi-final this year, I don’t think that it’s because they hate Israel.”

Laufer also doesn’t believe Israel has suffered from other major rule changes, including the decision in 1999 to allow artists to sing in languages other than the national tongue. Since then, all the winners bar one (Serbia in 2007) have been performed in English, while the Israel Broadcasting Authority maintains a rule which stipulates that at least half of its nominated song must be sung in Hebrew. Laufer supports this rule, arguing that as Hebrew is “a beautiful language, if the song comes across in the right way, it can only help Israel. Many fans appreciate Israel as a country which doesn’t send trashy pop music every year.”

Thus if Israel’s recent failure isn’t attributable to external factors, the problem is internal. Israel has no clear or consistent way of selecting its Eurovision entry. Since 1998, “Israel has had five internal selections, six national finals for an internally chosen singer and five open national finals. There is something different every year, and the juries and the committees who are responsible for selecting the song are mostly old-fashioned and choose something that might be good for their ears but not for Europe.”

This contrasts dramatically with this year’s host nation, Sweden, which is famous for its grand Melodifestivalen. This annual music competition is consistently one of the most-watched shows on Sweden television, and both the public and music industry professionals have a hand in the selection their Eurovision entrant. Since 1998 when Israel last won, Sweden has finished in the top five on no less than seven occasions, including two victories, and has only missed out on the final once.

In Israel, meanwhile, Laufer observes that “much of the public don’t care about Eurovision. With all the commercial channels around, people hardly watch IBA unless there is a special sports event on. Many people say that our time in Eurovision is over and we should quit, and famous Israeli artists refuse to take part in the contest or in the national finals. In this year’s selection, all artists were refugees of reality shows or other unknown people. The Israeli entries are not played on the radio, and less than 100,000 households watch the competition every year.”

“Only when Eurovision is taken seriously, like in Sweden or Denmark,” Laufer concludes, will Israel “get back on track and (at least) make it to the final again.”

I found this short documentary over the weekend, and feel it...

Mon, 20 May 2013 17:00:52 +0100

I found this short documentary over the weekend, and feel it aptly demonstrates the internal debate which occurred within the Kibbutz Movement during the 1990s over the nature and necessity of capitalistic reforms.

After 1985 and Israel’s programme of economic stabilisation, the country as a whole implemented market-oriented reforms in a bid to tackle inflation and soaring debts. As part of this, the kibbutzim — which for decades had been loss-making enterprises, subsided by various Labor governments — were forced into two rounds of debt negotiations with then-Likudnik governments. As part of the restructuring process and in order to survive and meet the demands placed upon as regards repayment, many kibbutzim underwent processes of privatisation to introduce forms of capitalism to the kibbutz while seeking to retain its socialist character. This included the sale of land, the privatisation of industrial enterprises, and the introduction of hard currency to be spent in communal facilities such as the dining hall, laundrette, and convenience store.

This documentary reflects that debate, as well as the generational conflict attached to it, particular the apathy expresses towards kibbutz life by younger members would wished to see the pace of reform quickened.

The strange disappearance of Joseph Massad

Mon, 20 May 2013 15:00:36 +0100

Last week, I commented on Columbia professor Joseph Massad’s essay in al-Jazeera, “The Last of the Semites”:

[Massad’s] essay — of that length by virtue of the fact that no-one seems to have thought to edit it down — hinges on that old idea that Zionism is racism. In this case, Massad applies this cliché not just in the usual way to indicate prejudice towards non-Jews. No, he believes Zionism is explicitly anti-Semitic. Zionism, according to Massad, emerged not as a response to European anti-Semitism but in sympathy with its racialist precepts.

Since last Tuesday, prominent journalists including Jeffrey Goldberg, John Podhoretz, and James Kirchick picked up on Massad’s piece and shared it about for all to see, while my critique was mentioned in media outlets like The Jerusalem Post and The Washington Free Beacon (a magazine I don’t believe I would appear in under ordinary circumstances — Bill Kristol doesn’t strike me as a Meretz guy). Well, as of yesterday, Massad’s essay is no longer available, it having been taken down from the web by al-Jazeera without explanation or notice.

And this is exactly the wrong thing for al-Jazeera to have done. First, denying people the right to read this disgraceful, unlettered essay also denies people the right to find out just what a horrible little man Joseph Massad is — which, is a useful public service for al-Jazeera to be engaging in. Second, if al-Jazeera feels it made a bad call by lending its imprimatur to the original work unedited (which, by removing it, is evidently the case), they should be made to pay for that mistake. Either, they should have kept it up on the website with an addendum, or if they absolutely had to take it down, they should have provided a note with reasoning for why exactly Massad’s essay was palatable to them on Tuesday but spoilt by Sunday. The current situation is unsatisfactory for supporters and opponents of Massad’s screed.

I mention supporters, because in spite of (or more likely as a direct result of) the backlash against Massad’s article, those residing on the fringes of the debate have felt the need to come out and defend it. Ali Abunimah — hero and saviour of the Jewish people — stated:

The backlash has been so intense precisely because Massad goes to the core of Israel’s claim to represent Jews and to cast its critics as anti-Semites by showing that indeed it is Israel and Zionism that partake of the same anti-Semitism that targeted European Jews.

In doing so, Massad pulls the rug from under Zionists and Israel lobbyists by demonstrating that they are the anti-Semites and taking away the most formidable weapon they wield against critics of Israel: the accusation that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.

By neutralizing this ideological weapon that Israel has used so effectively in the Western media to cover up its colonization of Palestine, Massad’s pro-Jewish position and strenuous attack on Zionist anti-Semitism is clearly understood by Israel lobby figures such as Goldberg as a complete obliteration of their ideological arsenal.

Abunimah has said stuff like this before, and it wasn’t terribly interesting then, just as he’s called Goldberg “President Barack Obama’s favourite Israel lobby gatekeeper and former Israeli prison guard” in that at once slimy and slightly tedious fashion. What would be interesting, however, is if Abunimah made clear whether he endorses the article in its totality, including Massad’s charming thesis (and this is not to mischaracterise it) that all of Europe’s good Jews were the ones that did not heed to call to make aliya and died in the Holocaust, and the Zionist Jews who made it to Palestine and survived were (and are) bad Jews. Abunimah doesn’t say otherwise in his all-in defence of Massad. What are we supposed to think?

#Eurovision2013

Mon, 20 May 2013 13:00:38 +0100

So Denmark won the Eurovision Song Contest. And it was a good song, so congratulations to them. When it comes to an overall winner of Eurovision, I don’t mind who wins, pretty much. I only request that who’s picked isn’t embarrassing for the sake of the contest. No Romanian castrati, for example, or moustachioed Greeks dishing out free alcohol.

But I do have my preferences, and these were my top five on the night:

1. Anouk, “Birds” (The Netherlands, 9th, 114pts)

2. Robin Stjernberg, “You” (Sweden, 14th, 62pts)

3. Birgit, “Et uus saaks alguse” (Estonia, 20th, 19pts)

4. Gianluca, “Tomorrow” (Malta, 8th, 120pts)

5. Dina Garipova, “What If” (Russia, 5th, 174pts)

OVER THE WEEKEND: Howe warns Tories over Europe; Homophobic murder in New York; Denmark wins Eurovision

Mon, 20 May 2013 11:00:34 +0100

Geoffrey Howe warned David Cameron that he is losing control of his party over Europe, damaging the country in the process. [The Guardian]
Victims of Cardinal Keith O’Brien alleged sexual molestation condemned the Vatican’s decision to permit him to leave Scotland for prayer and penance. [The Guardian]
In New York, Mark Carson was murdered Friday night in a homophobic hate crime, just blocks from the Stonewall Inn. [The New York Times]
Thomas Friedman visited north-eastern Syria, reporting on how water shortages and ossification in government begat political and civil unrest. [The New York Times]
Daniel Ben Simon reported on the efforts by secular and religious Israelis to regenerate the deprived, mixed city of Lod. [Al-Monitor]
Denmark won the Eurovision Song Contest. “Only Teardrops”, performed by Emmilie de Forest, scored 281 points, beating out Azeribaijan and the Ukraine. [BBC]
On the final day of the Premier League season, Aston Villa drew 2-2 with already-relegated Wigan away from home. Villa finished the season in 15th place with 41 points. [BBC]

The winning song:

THE WEEK THAT WAS (13-17/05/2013)

Fri, 17 May 2013 21:35:38 +0100

This week, I countered Joseph Massad’s essay in al-Jazeera, which argued that Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism akin to Nazism.

As Shelly Yachimovich pressed Israel and the Palestinians to renew peace talks, the Netanyahu government approved four new settlements beyond the Security Barrier. This Wednesday was also Shavuot in Israel.

My essential musical this week was Kander & Ebb’s The Act, while with the Eurovision Song Contest coming up on Saturday, I picked my favourite winners since ABBA in 1974.

It's that time again: Eurovision!

Fri, 17 May 2013 13:24:24 +0100

Every year it disappoints me, yet every year I return. And once more, the Eurovision Song Contest is upon us. For the uninitiated (though I can’t imagine there are that many people unaware of exactly what this affair entails), I have selected some of my favourite Eurovision winners from ABBA to Loreen, both of whom are Swedish, by coincidence I presume. My selection indicate two things: first, that Eurovision had a kind of musical peak between 1974 and 1982; and second, I started watching Eurovision after 1997, and in spite of the overall decline in quality, I keep doing so.

ABBA, “Waterloo” (Sweden, 1974)

Marie Myriam, “L’oiseau and l’enfant” (France, 1977)

Izhar Cohen and the Alphabeta, “A-Ba-Ni-Bi” (Israel, 1978)

Johnny Logan, “What’s Another Year”(Ireland, 1980)

Nicole, “Ein Bisschen Frieden” (Germany, 1982)

Katrina and the Waves, “Love Shine a Light” (United Kingdom, 1997)

Dana International, “Diva” (Israel, 1998)

Olsen Brothers, “Fly on the Wings of Love” (Denmark, 2000)

Alexander Rybak, “Fairytale” (Norway, 2009)

Lena, “Satellite” (Germany, 2010)

Loreen, “Euphoria” (Sweden, 2012)

ESSENTIAL MUSICAL #16: THE ACT In the post-Rodgers &...

Thu, 16 May 2013 15:21:00 +0100

ESSENTIAL MUSICAL #16: THE ACT

In the post-Rodgers & Hammerstein era, John Kander and Fred Ebb’s contribution to American musical theatre should be considered in the same breath as those of Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein and Jule Styne.

The music of John Kander has an instantly recognisable sound, while Kander and Ebb’s shows at their most successful explore (as I have previously argued) uniquely dark political and sexual themes, focusing in on characters that reside on the margins of society: cabaret girls in Weimar Germany; murderesses in Prohibition-era Chicago; political prisoners in Latin America. This is also the case with The Act. While not as ambitious or successful as Chicago, Cabaret, or Kiss of the Spider Woman, through Michelle Craig — the protagonist of the piece — Kander and Ebb examine the life of a faded, washed-up, lonely movie star, trying to make a comeback as a Las Vegas singer.

Lyrically and structurally, The Act helps highlights the marked difference that exists between the songs of Fred Ebb and Stephen Sondheim. Sondheim (to speak generally) uses break for song in musicals in order to advance the plot, so in other words the character is in a different place at the end of the song when compared to its beginning. Ebb, on the other hand, seems to use song to focus in on one particularly funny or emotional idea, and then augment it, largely through repetition or expansion.

Examples of this include “The Grass Is Always Greener” from Woman of the Year, where a housewife and a TV star sing back and forth about how one person’s life is better than the other, and “The Apple Doesn’t Fall (Very Far From the Tree)” from The Rink, this time with mother and daughter sharing the traits that make them similar. This particular technique is prominent in The Act, too. The conceit of “The Money Tree” is noted in the title: that love will come when the sky turns black and there’s a money tree, an idea that is repeated myriad ways. And, in “City Lights”, urban-rural tension and the notion that the city is better than the country is said about twenty different ways, if not more. Sties and stables sure are smelly, let me sniff some Kosher deli, is my favourite.

Another slap in the face from Netanyahu

Thu, 16 May 2013 11:00:15 +0100

From Peace Now:

Following a rumoured freeze, and Secretary Kerry’s continuing efforts to launch negotiations, Israel announces intent to establish four new settlements by legalizing existing illegal outposts.

On Tuesday, the Government submitted a formal response to Peace Now’s Supreme Court petition against six illegal outposts. In the response the government declares its intention to legalize four outposts, in isolated areas.

The Civil Administration has been instructed to begin a process of legalizing the outposts of Ma’ale Rehavam, Haroeh, Givat Assaf, and Mitzpe Lachish. The former government had previously promised to remove the illegal construction built on private land, but had not declared its intention to legalize the outposts.

The Supreme Court will hold a hearing on the petition on Wednesday, May 22nd.

All of these proposed new settlements — retrospectively legalised ones — are located outside of the Security Barrier and beyond the boundary line drawn by the Geneva Initiative, both of which form the basis for a future border between Israel and Palestine to be finalised in negotiations. This move is, therefore, another slap in the face delivered by Benjamin Netanyahu to his coalition partners Yesh Atid and Hatnua, his few partners for peace in the Palestinian Authority, as well as Secretary of State John Kerry who has been working diligently in recent weeks to restart the peace process.

View New settlements (16/5) in a larger map

Joseph Massad's problem with rooted cosmopolitans

Tue, 14 May 2013 18:48:37 +0100

Joseph Massad’s op-ed, “The Last of the Semites”, demonstrates above all that the Columbia professor knows very little about not a lot.

His essay — of that length by virtue of the fact that no-one seems to have thought to edit it down — hinges on that old idea that Zionism is racism. In this case, Massad applies this cliché not just in the usual way to indicate prejudice towards non-Jews. No, he believes Zionism is explicitly anti-Semitic. Zionism, according to Massad, emerged not as a response to European anti-Semitism but in sympathy with its racialist precepts:

When Zionism started a decade and a half after Marr’s anti-Semitic programme was published, it would espouse all these anti-Jewish ideas, including scientific anti-Semitism as valid. For Zionism, Jews were “Semites”, who were descendants of the ancient Hebrews. In his foundational pamphlet Der Judenstaat, Herzl explained that it was Jews, not their Christian enemies, who “cause” anti-Semitism and that “where it does not exist, [anti-Semitism] is carried by Jews in the course of their migrations”.

Zionism, Massad thinks, was anti-Semitic not only of this reason but because it represented a “continuation of the Haskalah quest to shed Jewish culture and assimilate Jews into European secular gentile culture,” which of course is a total perversion of Jewish history and what Herzl actually thought and wrote.

In part, the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, was related to assimilation but in the main it was an attempt to synthesis traditional Judaism with the modern ideas of the Enlightenment, including liberalism, nationalism, egality, and emancipation. Zionism emerged throughout the nineteenth century (not bang on 1897, as Massad understands it) as a product of this intellectual and cultural shift in the sense that its claim was that Jews are equal to all others and as deserving of statehood as anybody else. It is not, as Massad seems to think, some declaration of Jewish supremacy.

But it is also a by-product of the Haskalah: it is a reflection of the actual, lived Jewish experience in nineteenth-century Europe, and the waves of anti-Semitism that came with Jewish emancipation and entry into the professions from which Jews had previously been barred. Massad doesn’t seem to wish to acknowledge that anti-Semitism affected Jews in this way, at all.

Something else Massad doesn’t know very much about is Nazism:

The Nazis’ Final Solution initially meant the expulsion of Germany’s Jews to Madagascar. It is this shared goal of expelling Jews from Europe as a separate unassimilable race that created the affinity between Nazis and Zionists all along.

Did it? Did they? The road to Auschwitz is a long and twisted one, and the so-called Madagascar Plan was during that time examined by functionaries within the Nazi apparatus but not until the late 1930s and at no point was it near implementation. Indeed, by the time it was fully abandoned in late 1940, the process of destroying European Jewry in totality had commenced, with the concentration of Jews into ghettos and their deportation to labour camps.

As for the comparison of Nazism and Zionism, I think such an attempt at equivalence says a good deal more about the author than he intends. It is the statement of a sick and disordered mind. To compare the two and deem one as bad as the other is beyond the pale. However, that isn’t even the worst thing he says in the article:

While the majority of Jews continued to resist the anti-Semitic basis of Zionism and its alliances with anti-Semites, the Nazi genocide not only killed 90 percent of European Jews, but in the process also killed the majority of Jewish enemies of Zionism who died precisely because they refused to heed the Zionist call of abandoning their countries and homes.

First to say something nice. Without intending to, Massad has managed to justify one the foundational principles of Zionism: that in order to be safe and secure and free of the burden of European anti-Semitism, Jews required a state of their own in which they could be self-governing. It is certainly so that the existence of the Yishuv and Jewish emigration to Palestine saved hundreds of thousands of lives, and that restriction on said migration by British colonial authorities in the years prior to the Holocaust prevented the preservation of a good many more. It’s good of Massad to acknowledge this.

But then there’s what else Massad says here, and it is not much of a stretch to characterise Massad’s thesis as follows: All of Europe’s good Jews were the ones that did not heed to call to make aliya and died in the Holocaust; the Zionist Jews who made it to Palestine and survived were (and are) bad Jews. “The Jewish holocaust killed off the majority of Jews who fought and struggled against European anti-Semitism, including Zionism,” Massad says, and he uses this idea to build the next part of his article:

Post-War West German governments that presented themselves as opening a new page in their relationship with Jews in reality did no such thing. Since the establishment of the country after WWII, every West German government has continued the pro-Zionist Nazi policies unabated. There was never a break with Nazi pro-Zionism. This is to be added to the massive billions that Germany has paid to the Israeli government as compensation for the holocaust, as if Israel and Zionism were the victims of Nazism, when in reality it was anti-Zionist Jews who were killed by the Nazis.

Never mind the families who lost relatives in the Shoah who were living in Israel during the Holocaust. And, never mind the thousands of European refugees of the Holocaust who, unwanted in Europe and the United States, made their way to Palestine both legally and illegally in the years following the Second World War. They, evidently, are undeserving of restitution because they had the gall to make it to Palestine. And, in getting to Palestine, at that point through Massad’s eyes they ceased to be Jewish: they became Zionists. And once one becomes a Zionist, one are no longer a victim of the Holocaust. Remember: “in reality it was anti-Zionist Jews who were killed by the Nazis.”

Massad is particularly fixated on the link between Zionism and Nazism, one which apparently continues to this very day:

Even the new holocaust memorial built in Berlin that opened in 2005 maintains Nazi racial apartheid, as this “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe” is only for Jewish victims of the Nazis who must still today be set apart, as Hitler mandated, from the other millions of non-Jews who also fell victim to Nazism.

The ignorance here is absolutely astonishing. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe exists in defiance of Nazism and previous attempts by German governments East and West to fudge the past.

To be specific, this kind of memorialisation came about in reaction to East German (but also West German) narratives of the Holocaust which equated those who died in the Shoah either to members of the communist resistance or in some cases conscripted soliders. All, then, were victims of Nazism. It only after 1990 that appropriate distinctions came to be made, with the emergence of both general Holocaust memorials and memorials to the separate groups targeted by the Nazi regime. If Massad has a problem with the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, I can only suggest he should go to Berlin, find said memorial, and then walk across the street where the Memorial to the Murdered Homosexuals of Europe can be found. Then again, he might not like that either.

The whole point of Massad’s long, boring, and unlettered article is summed up in this statement:

Israel’s claim that its critics must be anti-Semites presupposes that its critics believe its claims that it represents “the Jewish people”. But it is Israel’s claims that it represents and speaks for all Jews that are the most anti-Semitic claims of all.

The most anti-Semitic of all. It’s enough to make you heave.

haaretz: Israelis celebrate the Jewish holiday of Shavuot

Tue, 14 May 2013 16:08:42 +0100

Photo by Guy Eisner

Photo by Eliyahu Hershkovitz

haaretz:

Israelis celebrate the Jewish holiday of Shavuot

If I were a politician and therefore had to deliver public...

Mon, 13 May 2013 13:11:07 +0100

If I were a politician and therefore had to deliver public speeches, I would almost certainly do all of them in front of a giant portrait of Yitzhak Rabin.

(Credit: Haaretz/Oren Nachshon)

OVER THE WEEKEND: Senior Tories back EU exit; Sharif wins Pakistan election; J14 returns in Tel Aviv

Mon, 13 May 2013 11:00:39 +0100

In the continued fallout from UKIP’s decent showing in local election, Michael Gove and Philip Hammond said that if a referendum were held tomorrow, they would vote for the UK to leave the European Union. [BBC]
Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif claimed victory in Pakistan’s legislative elections, although his Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz party did not secure an absolute majority. [The Guardian]
Authorities linked twin car bombings in southern Turkey to the continued unrest in Syria and the government of Bashar al-Assad. [The New York Times]
More than 12,000 marched through Tel Aviv on Saturday night, to protest against Yair Lapid’s budget proposal and for social justice. [+972]
Following a meeting with Mahmoud Abbas, Shelly Yachimovich called on Israelis and Palestinians to renew the process for a two-state solution now. [Ha’aretz]
A celebration of Stiliyan Petrov’s life and career was almost ruined by Aston Villa’s 2-1 defeat at home to Chelsea. Frank Lampard became Chelsea’s leading goalscorer with two second-half goals. [BBC]

THE WEEK THAT WAS (07-10/05/2013)

Fri, 10 May 2013 20:00:42 +0100

This week, I covered the Church of Scotland’s slanderous new document, “The inheritance of Abraham”, which used a twisted definition of Zionism to deny Jewish claims to the Land of Israel. Also, I looked at the anti-Semitic tropes Philip Weiss utilises in his articles, and asked who exactly has the right to determine who is a good or bad Jew.

Amos Oz asks this very question in his new book, Jews and Words, and he spoke about it recently in a lecture at the University of California San Diego. Peace Now, which whom Oz is connected, found the money Yair Lapid has been looking for (hint: look beyond the Green Line), while in Ha’aretz, Anshel Pfeffer argued that those who support BDS are merely useful idiots for Israel’s right wing.

Elsewhere, this week’s essential musical was Miss Saigon, and I wrote about the role of the production number, while my song choice was “I Am Here”, as part of the ongoing look at Israeli music.

This is adorable. The song is called “Hineni Kan”,...

Fri, 10 May 2013 19:38:08 +0100

This is adorable. The song is called “Hineni Kan”, “I Am Here”, and is — insofar as I can tell from the translation — not only about love and longing in general but specifically the Jewish yearning for Jerusalem. The chorus goes:

I am here, like circling birds,
I am here, looking from the roofs;
I am here, like a stone in the fence,
like a rock, like a well -
I am the one who always returns, returns.

I am responsible for all the views of the video.

(Lyrics in Hebrew and English)

Is he or she a good or a bad Jew? This is up to the next Jew to...

Fri, 10 May 2013 15:50:00 +0100

Is he or she a good or a bad Jew? This is up to the next Jew to say…

The Rabbi of the Western Wall, Shmuel Rabinowitz, had called for calm, but in the end the scene at Women of the Wall’s monthly visit on Friday morning was far from it. As Judy Maltz and Yair Ettinger report in Ha’aretz, thousands of ultra-Orthodox demonstrators turned up to picket and try and block Women of the Wall from worshipping as they deem fit:

The demonstrators jeered at the women as they prayed, some throwing water bottles and chairs in their direction. Dozens of riot police were on hand to separate them from the women’s prayer group and they grew increasingly violent. After the women exited Dung Gate, ultra-Orthodox demonstrators ambushed them with rocks.

…Several young seminary girls questioned by Ha’aretz said that they had come to the Western Wall because they were told to do so. One young woman, named Rachel, who refused to provide her last name or the name of her seminary, said she had come to protest women praying in the men’s section. Women of the Wall, however, do not pray in the men’s section, but in the women’s section.

Rabbi Aaron Frank, the principal of Beth Tefiloh, a modern Orthodox day school in Baltimore, said he had just “come to daven” at the Western Wall with a few of his students. But when a group of ultra-Orthodox noticed him being interviewed by a foreign TV crew, they began shouting in his direction: “You are a Reform Christian. You are a Muslim. You are the pope.”

This is shameful. The Western Wall belongs not to one Jew, nor one strand of Judaism — it is the collective property of all Jews: secular, Liberal, Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, and ultra-Orthodox. It must be possible for haredi Jews to pray as they wish, and for Women of the Wall to do the same, without the two coming into conflict.

The onus, in this instance, is on the haredim: it is about time they acknowledge, at least in the public sphere, that there more than one way to be Jew. This begins with refraining from calling Jews who aren’t ultra-Orthodox goyim, and ending these brash displays of verbal and physical intimidation at the Wall and on the street. At the moment, their words and actions not only undermine religious pluralism in Israel, but the few gathered at the Wall today threaten the haredi community more widely, particularly given that their privileged position is evermore being called into question. The haredi community — known for its charity and dedication to study — is better than this.

Perhaps to clarify: It is not that one Jew does not have the right to tell the other how to be a Jew from time to time. To assert to the contrary would be a threat to discourse and argumentation, and evolution of thought and religious practice. Better to say, then, that while it is fine for one to Jew tell the another how to be a good Jew, they do not have to heed that advice, and should not be forced to do so, either.