My Correct Views on Everything

I took the name of this blog from Leszek Kolakowski's crushing rejoinder to EP Thompson in the 1974 Socialist Register. I find it exhilarating to follow the sharp blade of his sardonic wit as it slices through the superficial slogan mongering of the ideologically befuddled. I shall do my best, herein, to anger everyone: from the predictable anti-Zionist left to the bigoted, clerico-fascist right, going out of my way to trample settlers and peaceniks alike, sparing none but my own peremptory conceits. Palestinians and Israelis, liberals and laborites and -- on occasion -- American politics, all sustain the clacking abuse of my merciless keyboard. And, while I'm at it, I will try not to take myself too seriously. For as the subject of this blog's icon would no doubt confirm, today's prodigy is inevitably tomorrows fool, and my own correct views on everything are entitled to an occasional, malicious critique. -- Sam Shube, Jerusalem.

[mycorrectviews]

Beyond the Carnage: Credo of a democratic Zionist

October 2023

No Monopoly on Barbarism

We buried our cousins in four freshly dug graves at Kibbutz Revivim, 40 miles as the crow flies from the killing fields of Kibbutz Beeri where they made their home.  Chen, a burly farmer, the kind of guy you want in your corner;  Rinat, a veteran social worker;  17 year old Alon and 14 year old Ido.  Two smaller siblings survived when Rinat and Alon spread their bodies over the little ones, like a blanket at bedtime, taking the bullets in a final act of love.  Hundreds of people wept in silence, an extended family of farmers from agricultural communities across the Gaza envelope, dozens of them young men and women on "funeral" leave from their reserve units, rifles slung over their civilian clothing.  Rinat had texted the family that dark October morning, as I huddled with my partner and nine-year-old son in our own safe room, just 10 miles north of Beeri.  We were sure that Chen – veteran of an elite IDF reconnaissance unit – would get them out.  Electricity and cell phone service were down all morning at our kibbutz as fighting raged on the perimeter fence.  By the time we received her message, she was likely dead, as scores of heavily armed killers hunted for Jews -- Gazan civilians in tow, rounding up livestock and home appliances like shoppers on black Friday.  Did the Hamas warn them that their own homes would soon be reduced to rubble by the inevitable IDF response?   For 21 hours I stood at the threshold of our safe room, listening for sounds of the battle raging at the edge of our own kibbutz, knowing that if they broke through, we'd be next.  Only the resourcefulness and bravery of a handful of volunteers kept the killers at bay until we could evacuate.  At Revivim, rows of fresh graves extended beyond the funeral site, waiting to receive another hundred members of Kibbutz Beeri. It was a scene to be repeated throughout the country for other communities who shared the same fate.  At Kibbutz Nir Oz, a quarter of the population was murdered. A day before I had debated a friend about whether the massacre resembled the German Einzatzgruppn or 19th century Russian pogroms.  Either way, I reflect, Islam has no monopoly on barbarism.  And Israelis are not immune either.   

The Jewish State or the Boer State

Siblings and schoolmates eulogized the Even-Segev family in a quiet ceremony, closed to the press, soft Hebrew music playing in the background.  The grief was palpable, but the word "revenge" was not to be heard.  No room in their hearts for gratuitous hatred or racism.  Never was.  These folk work with Bedouin farmers and colleagues on a daily basis, and many remember a time when personal and commercial interaction with the Gaza Strip was routine.  Here in the Negev, civil society has a depth and breadth that crosses ethnic boundaries and ideological preconceptions.

Elsewhere, however, things look different.  Right wing groups have draped banners from overpasses around Israel demanding revenge, as if a dose of their sickening screed could reverberate through a society already numbed by atrocity.   They may be right.  Just over the Green Line in the West Bank, nationalist fanatics are already creating their own, violent fantasy world.  Since October 7th, at least seven Palestinian farmers have been shot dead by Israeli settlers.  The occupation of this swath of Palestinian territory was once justified by the need to secure a defensive line along the Jordan rift valley, a formidable geographic barrier against invasion from the east. No longer. Today the IDF is tasked with protecting the 460,000 Israeli settlers who live between the Jordan and Israel's internationally recognized boundaries to the West under a separate and unequal legal regime designed to preserve and extend their hegemony; and controlling their 2.6 million Palestinian neighbors who subsist in a legal twilight zone, bereft of political rights, their civil liberties and freedom of movement curtailed and their land often confiscated for Israeli use.  Former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo, has called this apartheid. Indeed, today's West Bank might be properly described as a kind of Boer state, where armed colonists are the law and even the Israeli army treads lightly for fear of incurring settler wrath. Israel's infantry provides the muscle that keeps armed Palestinian groups at bay. But security coordinators in the settlements – settlers who are deputized, armed and trained by the IDF – often call the shots on the ground. A pervasive atmosphere of lawlessness invites violence against Palestinians. Brutal and primitive in its tactics, it has included defacing mosques, burning fields, destroying olive groves and vandalizing property. In the Palestinian village of Hawara, perpetrators set 200 buildings and 30 cars ablaze, killing one resident.  Now, with the armed force of the IDF massed on Israel's northern and southern borders, their wildest fantasies may seem within grasp.

Hamas or no Hamas, the Boer state is a dilemma of our own making.  No Israeli government, save those of Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon, has had the courage – or the incentive – to defy settler political clout. This must change.  Once this war is over and the IDF eradicates the Gazan terror regime, Israel must be asked to choose:  advanced American weapons systems or housing developments on the West Bank. Israel needs robust US military aid to survive.  But every home, industrial zone, municipal subsidy, road, streetlight, or sewage pipe for Israeli settlements in the West Bank should be deducted from that sum. Put these funds in an escrow account to help relocate settlers to new homes within within the Green Line. Or use them to compensate Palestinians for loss of income due to restricted access to farmland.

Always a Reason to Kill Jews

Some folks insist on seeing Palestinian victimhood and Jewish malfeasance whenever innocents are killed, like some uncontrollable, Pavlovian response, no matter how Orwellian the logic.  Thus on October 8th, with the killing still in progress, Mohammed R. Mhawish explained in 972 magazine that "for us [Palestinians]. . . It is the moment when we defend our very existence and right to live peacefully in freedom."  UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres ruffled a few feathers when he proclaimed that the October 7th massacre "did not happen in a vacuum.  The Palestinian people have been subject to 56 years of suffocating occupation."  Without justifying the murder spree itself, Gutteres seems to have identified its cause as the 1967 war.  More often than not however, critics of Israel point to the blockade imposed on Gaza in 2007, after the Hamas took over the enclave, as the proximate source of violence. "The international community has for years neglected the plight of the 2.3 million Palestinians living under a 16-year-long Israeli siege," explains Jonathan Kuttab of the Arab Center in Washington, DC.   Indeed, back in 2008, the Red Cross had already warned that 70% of Gaza's population suffered from food insecurity and chronic malnutrition as a result of Israeli policy.  Perhaps mass murder is a natural response from people who have been starving to death for 15 years, though one wonders if it is biologically possible to starve for so long while building an arsenal of tens of thousands of rockets, hundreds of miles of military tunnels, and highly trained death squads.  Or perhaps one might ask why food was lacking, if it was lacking, with such plentiful military resources on hand.  But the ultimate reason Hamas does its thing, according to some observers, is the Naqba, the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians by Israel in the war of 1948, ground zero – we are told – of the Arab Israeli conflict.  Historian Ilan Pappe sums up the events of October 7th with the pithy insight that "[Israel's] present genocidal policy towards Gaza are [sic] part of the ongoing Naqba."  2007, 1967, 1948, take your pick. But don't stop there.  In 1929, long before the Naqba, Palestinian marauders killed 133 Jews in Hebron, Safed, Jaffa and Jerusalem, most of them ultra-orthodox, with no connection to the Zionist movement, many of them neighbors with whom they had lived for years.  As Hillel Cohen painstakingly explains in his landmark study, Palestinians had come to see all Jews as representatives of the same Zionist enterprise. So it was and so it is.  Any organized Jewish national presence in this land, apparently, is a legitimate cause for "armed struggle." Perhaps it is time someone reexamined the causal relationship between this culture of death and the Naqba, occupation and blockade that followed.

When a Zionist Sees Palestine in the Mirror

Palestinian nationalism may be irredeemably poisoned by nihilism, but Palestinian identity itself defines the very humanity of millions of people, some two million of them Israeli citizens.  If our democracy is to rise again after the war, we must learn to distinguish between the two and embrace the latter – nuanced as the idea may be.  I have devoted my own career to building a more inclusive paradigm of shared culture for Jews and Arabs in the Negev.  Below the surface, civil society may now be laying its foundation.  In the midst of the crisis, dozens of grass roots initiatives are mobilizing Jews and Arabs for collective action to help everyone in need, from Jewish farmers in the Western Negev to the unrecognized Bedouin villages in the east. Some 15 Arab citizens have been killed by Hamas rockets and another dozen were murdered or kidnapped on October 7th.   In this wartime emergency, even the most innocuous display of Palestinian colors can lead to arrest, termination at work or suspension from university.  This will have to stop.  In the end, Jews must be able to see in the pain, pride and determination of the Palestinians a reflection of our own.  No, we cannot bridge the unfathomable political gulf that separates us.  But a dose of mutual respect would serve us well. 

Rethinking Ukraine

The international show of support for Israel so far has been impressive.  Biden, Macron, Scholz, Sunak, Ursula Von der Leyen – leaders from across the democratic world have rushed to embrace Netanyahu, a man whose signature contributions to Israeli diplomacy have been to drape Likud headquarters with a massive poster of Vladmir Putin, embrace Victor Orban and glorify Donald Trump.  It must be humiliating for Bibi to bend the knee in gratitude to the liberal order he has done so much to disparage, but this is no mere personal matter. America's massive resupply of military hardware – a replay of Nixon's strategic airlift in 1973 -- and the deployment of two carrier strike groups to protect Israel against a regional conflagration, should be a stark reminder to Israel's political class as a whole that sometimes you have to choose sides.  Israel's flirtation with Russia and the Visegrad bloc was, perhaps, the product of Bibi's own delusions of self importance, but Israel's shameful failure to support Ukraine in its struggle to survive was an act of cowardice that crossed political lines.   Biden's Oval Office address linking aid to Ukraine and Israel was a formative statement, and something this country would do well to ponder.  Israel turned a cold shoulder to Ukraine, it is widely assumed, for fear of provoking Russia to launch its S-300 antiaircraft rockets in Syria against Israeli jets, thereby limiting our ability to strike Iranian proxies in that country.  Those rockets are a serious consideration, to be sure, but if Biden is willing to take political risks for Israel, we can show a little moral fiber as well.  Russia has interests at stake in Syria too, and striking Israeli jets would put those at risk.  In 1970 Soviet personnel manned Egyptian anti-aircraft batteries that fired on Israeli planes, and Israeli jets held dogfights with Russian pilots over the Suez Canal.  Not a few Russian servicemen paid with their lives.  When the present crisis is over, the time will come for Israel to take a stand – for Ukraine, and for the democratic prospect writ large.

Going Home

No, I'm not a farmer. Everything I know about wheat comes from the back of a cereal box.  For the past six years I've been at Kibbutz Nir Am, never of Nir Am. It was simply where I slept and parked my car before heading off to work in the morning.  But something has broken in my own suburban, residential paradigm.  The government says kibbutzim such as Nir Oz will take years to rebuild.  Nir Am, we hope, will bounce back sooner.  While my family is settling in to its temporary refuge in Jerusalem, we are eager to get back to our community on the Gazan border fence, replant and rebuild.  Rehabilitating the kibbutzim and the towns of the Gaza envelope, caring for the orphans and shattered families, reconstructing the homes, nurturing devastated communities back to emotional health, and weaving the multicultural fabric of life back together in the Negev will be the final challenge of my generation, and the first one for that of my son.  We owe it to our country.  We owe it to Chen, Rinat and their kids.  

[mycorrectviews]

Report from Israel:  The End of Labor or the Start of Something New?

Breaking the Impasse

It was a strange year for Israeli politics even before the Corona virus turned us all into extras on the set of a bad sci fi movie.  Things are not supposed to work this way.

Israel went to the polls three times over the past year, and each time Bibi fought his way to a draw with Blue White, the most recently created -- and lately deceased -- successor party to the one time Labor led center left.  This stalemate was born of polarization, with orthodox parties swearing obeisance to the supreme leader of the Israeli right in advance of each election. Avigdor Lieberman, the Putin-wannabe secular nationalist, meanwhile, joined the other side with equal vigor, in attempt to rebrand himself as an anti-Bibi, right wing liberal.  The usual way out of such an impasse, a Likud- BW unity government with a rotating prime ministership, proved equally impossible.  As a collection of disparate groupings with no ideological common denominator save opposition to the indictment-plagued Netanyahu, BW was unable to join a unity government almost by definition, driving the country to round after round of electoral gridlock.  Three elections and a pandemic, however, changed the calculus. Neither side knew how they’d emerge from a fourth round of elections in the midst of a recession and health emergency.  Benny Gantz blinked first, dismantled his party and the “Never Bibi” coalition, joining his nemesis in an “emergency” government.  Gantz brought over enough MK’s from his rump faction of Blue White to help Netanyahu build a comfortable majority.  In return he received an equal number of ministerial portfolios along with a turn in the prime minister’s office 18 months from now – all at an impressive discount for a fractured party only half the size of the Likud.  Bibi, meanwhile, will continue his fight to stay out of jail from the prime minister’s chair, where he can influence the selection of judges and disburse patronage to potential trial witnesses.

How bad is all this?

Well, it’s a matter of perspective.  To the extent Bibi is the main, existential question facing Israel, the unity government is no cause for celebration.  Using every conceivable stratagem to avoid doing what he unabashedly demanded of his hapless predecessor Ehud Olmert -- to leave the political stage and face justice like any other citizen -- Bibi has severely undermined the rule of law.  But it could get even worse.  Over the past three years Netanyahu has spared no effort to eviscerate public confidence in the Supreme Court, the Police, the office of the attorney general and the independent press – working in precise lockstep with everyone who owes him a dime, from government ministers to his Adelson financed newspaper to brand any and all opponents with the stain of left wing elitism.  The unity government, with the Justice Ministry passing to a Gantz appointee, will now presumably cease its war on Israel’s free institutions.  One may also hope Bibi and his ministers will dispense with the racist, Arab baiting rhetoric he needed to question the legitimacy of Blue White.  In the final analysis, what interests Netanyahu is neither judicial activism nor Arab politicians; all that matters is what works for Bibi.  Had Gantz left him to continue running an interim, right wing government until September, with a potentially more extreme one on the horizon, we might all have ended up joining some ideological street militia in the dangerous twilight of Israel’s democratic order.  Hard to say.

Amir Peretz’ Continuing Odyssey

Amir Peretz took the reins of the Labor Party at the nadir of its political fortunes.  In April, an irrelevant nonentity, Avi Gabbai, had crashed the party of Ben Gurion and Yitzhak Rabin to six MK’s out of 120 in parliament.  

To be fair, Gabbai, like Peretz in his wake, had little chance under the circumstances.  Blue White, with its unprecedented challenge to the Netanyahu regime, sucked the oxygen out of Israel’s political environment for the Zionist left.  Gantz and his allies fired the imagination of voters thirsty for change, no matter what that change would mean.  BW, after all, was an ideologically incoherent alliance of three different lists: Yair Lapid’s neoliberals, Bougie Yaalon’s right wing annexationists, and Gantz’s own startup –- a party that could easily have found its place in the historic Mapai.  As a political force, Blue White always had a limited shelf life.  

Peretz – I can only assume, extrapolating from my own assessment at the time – took the long view. Harboring no illusions of winning , he sought to rebuild a social democratic alternative for the day after.  Labor had been in precipitous decline since the Rabin assassination, but now, with his party on the brink of extinction, Peretz sought to break the genetic code of Israeli politics that kept middle eastern Jews and their descendants (Mizrachim) – over half of Israel’s Jewish population -- loyal to the Likud.  

Schadenfreude

Left wing intellectuals have long struggled to explain why Mizrachim – more heavily working and lower middle class than their Ashkenazi counterparts – vote against their “own interests” by repeatedly supporting the Likud and its occupation policy.  But the very endeavor belies the elitism and ethnic condescension that defines Israel’s ethnic divide.   The left’s inability to conceive that right wing voters are capable of rational decisions reminds many folks – and rightly so -- of the arrogance and paternalism with which the European, Mapai establishment treated North African immigrants during Israel’s first three decades.   The recoil has been powerful and enduring.  You felt it in the schadenfreude with which Likud activists gleefully told journalists how they lied to exit polls on election night last year to humiliate the press with unrealistic projections of a Gantz victory.  And the culture of Israel’s left never ceases to trigger more recoil.  Israeli pundits have treated Amir Peretz, himself an immigrant from Morocco, as a clown – or a trickster – ever since the Lebanon war (one Labor voter explained to me a few years back that Peretz simply “didn’t know his place”). You felt it, too, in the visceral reactions to Peretz’ short lived partnership with Orly Levy, another “Moroccan” politician last summer.  In the words one left wing columnist, “there is now a Mizrachi party on the left. Peretz has condemned the left to the status of Salah Shabbati [Ed. an iconic, wiley, poor Moroccan immigrant in a classic Israeli theatre production].  Peretz lives in his own tribe,” she wrote.  It’s evident in the hysterical accusations one self-declared Mertz supporter wrote me on Facebook (“Peretz is a racist who thinks Ashkenazim are evil”). These folks just can’t put two and two together.  If the left can still brand Mizrachim as incapable of understanding their own interests by voting against peace, is it any surprise that attacking the left as Arab-lovers is so popular on the right?

Playing the Ethnic Card

Amir Peretz, to be sure, never played the ethnic card in his long and distinguished political career. A protégé of the late Lova Eliav -- an early Labor supporter of Palestinian statehood -- and a veteran Rabin loyalist, Peretz made his first mark as mayor of the Mizrachi town of Sderot -- a Likud stronghold, despite his unabashedly socialist politics.  Moving on to become an MK, Histadrut boss, cabinet minister and ultimately deputy Prime Minister, he is the rare, dovish politician who can hold his own in right wing constituencies without being branded a “leftist,” (itself a demonstration of how little a role ideology plays in the politics of identity). There was something contrived, yet native about his open shirt collar and Stalinesque moustache (which always reminded me of the Mapai forefather Beryl Katzenelson but which Israel’s hi-tech, Tel Aviv elite saw as a mark of buffoonery).   One way or another, many Mizrachi voters saw him as authentic.  But last summer’s merger between Labor and Orly Levy held out the promise of something big.  Levy’s father David symbolized the political coming of age of Israel’s Mizrachim, rising to power with the Likud as Menahem Begin’s deputy prime minister and foreign minister.  David Levy, too, was initially ridiculed in the press (he spoke French but not English when he addressed the UN).  His star ultimately faded, and he ended his career as a foe of Netanyahu.  Orly, a fiercely independent – some would say unabashedly opportunistic – politician in her own right, left Avigdor Lieberman’s right wing party to form her own, unsuccessful list in 2017.  Her calling card was a social democratic economic policy, not foreign policy or human rights. Amir Peretz saw an alliance with Levy as Labor’s game changer.  It would give right wing voters – especially Mizrachim – the legitimacy to vote Labor, thereby genetically reengineering Israel’s political paradigm for the long term.  Was he playing the ethnic card now?  Well, in a sense he was.  But no Israeli political party was ever accused of tribalism for fielding two (three or four) Ashkanzim in their top slots.  Left wing critics of the merger said Levy was, if not a Trojan horse, then at least guilty of ideological impurity.  Peretz countered by asking why [the very non-Mizrachi] Tzipi Livni was treated as a liberal heroine after bolting the Likud for an electoral run with Labor.  He was right in principle, tragically wrong in practice.

Save Us, Amir Peretz

As Amir was trying to reinvent Labor, political space was narrowing on the left.  In the June elections, Labor and Meretz, running separately, each polled dangerously close to the electoral threshold, prompting calls for a joint run in September under Amir’s leadership to avoid wiping out one, or both.  Peretz demurred.  By his calculations, such a union would be worth less than the sum of its parts. The Likud supporters he hoped to attract would never vote for Meretz -- a symbol, in their view, of Israel’s socio-cultural elite. Meretz voters, meanwhile, could not stomach Orly Levy.  It was a marriage made in hell, but the pressure was high.  Meretz supporters demonstrated in front of Peretz’ home and took out full page newspaper ads calling for unity.  Liberal columnists had been accusing Peretz for months of political adventurism and self-delusions of grandeur.  He would, no doubt, be blamed for the extinction of the Israeli left if Meretz failed to reach the threshold.  The result was humiliating in any case.  In September’s election the united list polled only 6 MK’s, about half of what Meretz and Labor scored separately in June.  But that was not the end of it.  Orly Levy, apparently, decided she had no political future in a tiny, left wing niche party and bolted right again, declaring she would not join a Gantz-led government.  It was the end of the road.  That road, in any case.

Mapai Redux?

Peretz had repeatedly vowed never to join a Netanyahu government.  Sometimes, however -- as Emerson says -- consistency is merely a hobgoblin of little minds.  Since the elections Peretz did, in fact, turn down go-it-alone offers from Netanyahu that would have guaranteed the Likud a slim majority and Labor an unprecedented bounty. But once Gantz gave Netanyahu his government, the only question for Peretz is where he could make the best use of his remaining political capital.  Purists demanded he remain in an opposition led by the neoliberal Yair Lapid and his far right allies, Lieberman and Yaalon, along with the Joint Arab List (a stellar political force that merits separate discussion in its own right).   Despised and irrelevant, he would have finished his career, and the historic role of Israeli Labor, on the margins of the 23rd Knesset.  Instead, Peretz and his ally Itzik Shmuli led a two member Labor faction into the government, receiving two ministerial portfolios, chairmanship of the government’s economic cabinet and responsibility for Bedouin development in the Negev.  But his move carries with it far greater political meaning.  Peretz will has now formed an ad hoc political axis with his Blue White allies including former Histadrut boss and Peretz protégé Avi Nisankorn at the Justice Minstry, another one-time Peretz appointee, former IDF chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi, as foreign minister, and a list of other progressive MKs that could easily form the nucleus of a new, center-left political force.  To be sure, the two lists have not merged, but Labor and BW have signed a separate, cooperation agreement within the unity government itself.   It calls for raising the minimum wage, defense of collective bargaining rights, fighting racism and pursuing the peace process.

What now?

Is Amir Peretz reinventing Labor, once again?  The risks are far from negligible.  This government will lead Israel into an unprecedented, Corona induced recession. The main beneficiaries could be today’s opposition, with everyone associated with the governing coalition being held responsible for mass unemployment, foreclosures and bankruptcies.  It might have been preferable to leave Bibi holding the bag alone. Gantz also promised to support the annexation of the Jordan Valley on the eastern limits of the West Bank, a move some argue could trigger to a chain reaction leading to the collapse of the Palestinian Authority itself. Let’s hope not.  On the other hand, this unity government could also work the other way, with Benny Gantz proving his mettle and by leading the country out of recession, and talented young social democrats like Labor’s Itzik Shmuli (the new minister of labor and social affairs) gaining vital governing experience, positioning them for national leadership in the future.  

As they survey the smoking wreckage of an opposition that defined itself by opposition to one man, some pundits have called for an entirely new paradigm, with progressive Jews joining forces with the 15 members of the Joint Arab List to form the nucleus of a revived, Israeli left.   In my view, this is premature.  Israel’s Jewish and Palestinian citizens still constitute distinct national communities with opposing views on the legitimacy of Jewish statehood.  They can, and still must, collaborate to promote civil equality, democracy and social justice.  Zionist parties must find a way to integrate more Arabs into senior positions, and Arab parties must do the same for Jews.  But there must still be a powerful, mainstream, center left political force that supports the legitimate aspirations of the Jewish People for self-determination, while championing civil equality, economic justice and human rights for all.

[mycorrectviews]

Israel and Gaza:  The Insufferable Cynicism of Appeasement

Last week’s big story was neither the long overdue termination of Gazan rocketeer Bahaa Abu el Ata, nor the ensuing barrage of 400 Jihadist rockets on civilian communities. Israeli society has long been inured to the existence of an armed gangster state adjacent to the Western Negev, and to the human toll it takes on Palestinians and Israeli residents of the Gaza envelope alike.  Last week’s real news was the sudden revelation that Islamic Jihad, hitherto considered a small and renegade militia in the Hamas ruled enclave, possesses a ballistic arsenal as large as that of the Hamas, with a range extending from Tel Aviv to Beer Sheva, operated by a two brigade strength military force.  Netanyahu’s apologists still blame left wing governments for the growth of Hezbollah rocket power in Lebanon, despite a decade of uninterrupted right wing rule. What conceivable excuse do they have for the latest fiasco?  Did the Islamic Jihad emerge spontaneously, unbeknownst to Israel’s vaunted intelligence? How did they build such a formidable threat under the very nose of the IDF?  If ever there was good reason for a commission of inquiry, this is it.

As if hiding the truth from the Israeli public wasn’t bad enough, the government’s craven impulse to negotiate with terrorists reached new lows on Friday with the announcement of an Israel-Jihad cease fire.  Forgoing even the pretense of deterrence, the government abandoned its existing policy of holding Hamas accountable for events in Gaza, exempting it from retaliation for rocket attacks and focusing exclusively on Islamic Jihad targets. The familiar pattern of Egyptian mediation then ensued, followed by a reversion to the status quo ante.  Having recognized the Hamas and, now, Jihad as legitimate sovereigns in Gaza, Netanyahu has in effect proclaimed a new doctrine.  Israel will deal with any claque of disaffected, rocket armed killers, as long as they fail to seriously disrupt Israeli life outside the Gaza envelope. The families of those living in Sderot and adjacent rural communities are the human buffers that insulate this doctrine from public disaffection.

Meanwhile, the cynicism of the right about Gaza is matched only by the willful ignorance of the left. The New Israel Fund, for instance, responded to the latest events by declaring that the only way to guarantee security for residents of the south is to achieve a cease fire, jointly reconstruct the Gaza Strip and negotiate with (unspecified) Palestinian leadership.  In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that I am a regular NIF supporter, grateful for their uncompromising defense of an open and democratic society in Israel.  Their prognostications on national security, however, are as predictable as they are useless.  After all, Israel already has a cease fire with Hamas, and now with the Jihad as well. Gazan reconstruction is well under way, with a $30 million per month subvention from Qatar, a dramatically improved electrical supply and new infrastructure projects in the advanced planning stage.  No, the long suffering Gazans still do not enjoy normalcy, and will not attain it until they are freed from the yoke of the terrorist mafia that rules them.  This, however, has nothing to do with negotiations. Israeli has a long standing negotiated peace with Gaza, formalized in the Oslo Accords and given full territorial expression with the disengagement 0f 2005.  Until the left faces the unpleasant fact that no amount of appeasement can shield Israel from the annihilationist goals of Gaza’s current rulers, they will never be able to offer a coherent alternative to the empty bombast of superhero wannabe defense ministers like Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennet.

The strategy of the Israeli right, meanwhile, is painfully transparent.  Decouple Gaza from the West Bank politically by undermining the Palestinian Authority while strengthening the Hamas, thereby facilitating ongoing settlement expansion in the West Bank.  Justify this with the bizarre claim, repeated interminably on radio news programs by Likud spokespeople like Yuval Steinetz, that Abu Mazen (whose security cooperation with the IDF is invaluable for the protection of life in Israel) is the most anti-Semitic leader in the world today.  Deflect criticism of Israel’s Gaza capitulation with ever more strident rhetorical balustrades against the center left and Israel’s Arab citizens.  The greater land of Israel – not national security -- remains the top priority of the Israeli right.

Confronting Hamas – while simultaneously pursuing peace – is s multi-level effort that requires a degree of foresight beyond the capacity of Israel’s current regime.  The last Israeli leader to offer a strategic vision of the required complexity was the much maligned Amir Peretz.  As defense minister, Peretz built a missile shield with the purpose of buying the government valuable time to formulate a tactical response to aggression in real time.  Concurrently, he advocated a robust military response to the Gazan terror while building an international coalition, supported by the Gulf States, to replace the Hamas with the Palestinian Authority.  Iron Dome was never intended to serve as a silver bullet. It was merely one, technological feature of a broader, long term strategy.  That is still the only way to go.  For the sake of Israelis and Palestinians alike, Hamas and its allies must be dismantled, not appeased.

[mycorrectviews]

Report from Israel:  After Bibi

What cognitive disconnect can explain Israeli voting behavior? With Netanyahu’s name connected to no less than five corruption investigations and two long time Bibi confidants turmed state’s witness, polls show Netanyahu winning the next election hands down.   The man is literally up to his neck in the detritus of his own corruption.  Has he devised some new, hi-tech moral teflon?  

To his credit, Bibi has deftly navigated the jungle of Mideast bloodshed.  As Iran digs in on the charred rubble of Syria under the wing of Russian jets, with 50,000 Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon trained on Israeli cities, when Egyptian troops on the southern border are regularly slaughtered by the world’s last successful ISIS franchise, Israelis feel surprisingly safe.   Much safer than under the Rabin, Peres, Barak and Olmert governments, when bus bombs and ballistic missiles forged a Pavlovian association between terror and the peace process in the public mind.  

But that is not all.  Israelis today feel prosperous.  Despite rampant inequality, soaring real estate prices in this tiny country have given most families equity of unprecedented value, while the hi-tech driven economy has kept unemployment at frictional levels.  The Thomas Pickety effect of capital, Israeli style.  Those on the bottom of the rung, meanwhile – guest workers, Arab Israelis and the ultra-Orthodox -- either cannot vote or go for narrow sectarian lists that only help maintain the status quo.   There is, to be sure, an underlying sense of economic insecurity, and folks in deindustrializing communities on the nation’s periphery must know that asset prices are no alternative to a good job.  But, as with Trumpism in the US, a sense of foreboding inevitably serves those who appeal to people’s basest instincts.

Strangely enough, the same polls that show Netanyahu in the lead reveal that a majority want him to step down in face of ubiquitous corruption. On the face of it, this is good news for the rule of law.  Bibi, it appears, already has one foot out the door.  His coalition allies smell blood, each of them waiting to be second in line to unsheathe his dagger – perhaps when the Attorney General decides to press charges.  Bibi’s replacement, however, will not come from the left.  Labor’s new chief, former telecom exec Avi Gabbi, is a political irrelevance, selected, I can only explain, in a suicidal fit of temporary insanity.  If elections were held today, Labor’s Knesset representation would crash to unprecedented lows.  The lightweight Yair Lapid leads the opposition pack, but trails Netanyahu by a wide margin.  Pundits identify the latest coalition crisis surrounding ultra-orthodox military conscription as a Machiavellian maneuver on Bibi’s part to move up elections.  No better time to hit the hustings – on the heels of well-orchestrated Independence Day celebrations featuring Trump’s’ theatrical embassy relocation, before the Attorney General makes his move.

Elections may delay justice, but the bell will eventually toll. Bibi’s lasting political legacy, aside from his own, Trumpian efforts to delegitimize the country’s legal system, will be to have destroyed the Likud’s own leadership cadres, reducing its front bench to a gaggle of amateur sycophants.  Long gone, sidelined or AWOL are the likes of Benny Begin, Dan Merridor or Tzipi Livni who, in better times, would have provided effective national leadership. When Bibi goes down, an unpredictable realignment fight will engulf the right.  Those vying for control will include Defense Minister Lieberman, an Arab-baiter who got his present job by attacking the military courts during the trial of a soldier convicted of shooting a Palestinian attacker in the head as he lay, bleeding helplessly on the street; and Education Minister Naftali Bennet – an apparently decent fellow who heads a settler annexationist party that contains some of the most extreme, clerico-fascist elements in Israeli politics. Both lead sectorial, third party lists, and both are hard at work rebranding themselves as the responsible voice of national defense, poised to move in on the rotting carcass of the post Bibi Likud.

The greatest tragedy of Israeli politics, however, is the capitulation of otherwise intelligent people to mythologies of their own creation. The center left continues sell the line that Israeli security depends on interminable peace talks, something that has proven empirically false.  The right, meanwhile, insists it is a function of settlements, as if kindergartens and red roofed houses on the hills of the West Bank could stop advancing Arab tank columns or intercept ballistic missiles.  Security, few people seem to remember, is a function of, well, security. Settlements must go because apartheid has no place in a democratic society, not because dismantling them will cause Palestinians to embrace the Zionist ethos.  And the peace process, in and of itself, cannot neutralize the danger of Hamas rockets in Gaza or, potentially, the hills of Ramallah. The left has chosen the worst position on both matters.  Avi Gabbai has actually embraced settlements in the hope of demonstrating Labor’s security mettle, while declaring his ongoing fealty to the peace process.  A pale and irrelevant policy alternative, most Israelis might rightly conclude, to the status quo.  

Full Palestinian statehood, to be sure, is a desideratum for those who aspire to a democratic Israel, at peace with its neighbors.  It may not, however, be a sin qua non. Rabin, it should be remembered, only reluctantly embraced the two-state Oslo process after his predecessor, Yitzhak Shamir, buried Labor’s historic preference, the Jordanian option.  Both were simply different means, easily exchanged, to extricate Israel from the cancerous trap of settling populated regions in the occupied territories.  In the age of Trumpian newspeak, egged on by America’s pro-settlement ambassador to Israel, Likud pols have begun to think what was hitherto inconceivable and utter the unspeakable – annexation.  Let there be no mistake about it.  I have no problem with the phrase Netanyahu currently bandys about – “a state minus” for the Palestinians.  There are many options short of statehood in an imperfect world.  These include self-governing or non-self governing territories, protectorates and the like.  But what Netanyahu means by the term is nothing other than continued settlement in a region where the civilian population enjoys – or is denied -- civil and human rights based on ethnicity.  In short, he’s talking about a system of bantustans.  

Netanyahu and Trump, the most cynical pair of leaders postwar democracy has known, will eventually go down.  Israel’s hope – and America’s – is not more spin.  The left cannot brand itself out of irrelevance.  What we need, above all else, is a determined, uncompromising, clear-sighted defense of the democracy.  

       �����

[mycorrectviews]

Report from Israel:  Political Suicide and Genteel Racism

Twilight of the Netanyahu Era?

Corruption has already brought down one Israeli prime minister, and a minor infringement of foreign currency regulations by his wife brought down another.  Netanyahu, now Israel’s longest serving PM, is knee deep in no less than three major corruption scandals, and his wife will soon be charged in a fourth.  The law, apparently, does not oblige him to resign until convicted, though legal opinions are mixed. Ehud Olmert, his corrupt predecessor, threw in the towel when he was indicted (Bibi is not there yet), but his public standing had already crashed as a result of the Second Lebanon War, and a well-orchestrated,  mendacious, right wing campaign to paint it as a military failure of epic proportions. Bibi’s Teflon, opinion polls show, has barely been scratched – yet. Things could change if one of his coalition partners – fearing the ubiquitous stench of misconduct -- forces his hand, as Ehud Barak did to Olmert.  Meanwhile Likud ministers are closing ranks – at least publicly.  The time may come when they, too, decide it is time to give someone else a chance.  Problem is, the alternative could be worse.  Defense Minister Lieberman, for instance, (I still cannot grasp why such a Putinesque xenophobe got that job) has his eyes on the top spot.  (He’d have to merge his party with the Likud – not an impossible scenario).  Forty-one years ago, Yitzhak Rabin left the prime minister’s office, taking responsibility for a US bank account his wife had maintained from the time he served as ambassador in Washington, in violation of foreign currency regulations that were later rescinded.  Rabin, to be sure, was a man of integrity.  Bibi doesn’t know the meaning of the word. 

Labor Commits Suicide

Last month the Labor Party elected a wealthy businessman to replace the hapless Isaac Hertzog. Avi Gabbay came out of nowhere, joining the party just a few months before the primaries.  His CV includes a six-year stint as CEO of a telecommunications firm, after which he helped form a new party with Finance Minister Kachlon, serving briefly as environment minister under Netanyahu.  Gabbay seems like a decent guy (he’s the first Labor leader I’ve never met since coming to Israel 30 years ago).  He’s an articulate self-starter, intelligent, and went through the school of hard knocks, having grown up in a poor, Jerusalem family.  Gabby, however, is not a candidate for prime minister, no matter what he or his party says.  He’s the candidate of an opposition party competing with other opposition parties to be the largest opposition party.  Gabbay has not served a day on the Knesset Security and Foreign Affairs Committee, a mandatory rite of passage for any pol aspiring to national leadership. He’s never served in the security cabinet, never run a major, government institution of any kind.  Every idiot junior government minister from the Likud has more security credentials than him.  Gabbaywon the Labor primaries running on the “I’m new, try me” ticket.  When the novelty wears off, allot of people will be banging their heads against the wall, saying, “What was I thinking?”  New elections, after all, may not be far off. 

 Genteel Racism and the Tragedy of Israeli Socialism

I met Amir Peretz in 1988.  At the time he was the up and coming mayor of Sderot, his Stalinesque mustache reminiscent of Israel’s t Zionist pioneers, a firebrand socialist with a grasp of working class sensibilities.  I asked him to speak to the Labor Young Guard in Bat Yam in the middle of a municipal election campaign.  He didn’t hesitate and came up to help, only to find me and four other guys in the room (OK, I was new in the country and didn’t know how to market it). Years later, after the Lebanon war and subsequent rounds of fighting in Gaza, I accompanied him on visits to bereaved families who had lost their sons in battle.  As a former defense minister, Peretz makes it is business to visit every such home.  No press, no bells and whistles, just a condolence call and a chance for the family to shed a tear as they share the details of what happened with someone who knows every battalion, every IDF deployment.  His energy and commitment are boundless. 

Amir shatters the great divide in Israeli politics, the divide between Mizrachim, descendants of Jews from North Africa and the Middle East, and Ashkenazim, whose parents or grandparents came from Europe.  A stubborn socio-economic divide separates the groups by every empirical measure, from education and family income to life expectancy.  Nine times out of ten, a company will choose a CV with the name Abromowitz over Abuoutbul.  During the mass immigration of the 1950’s and 60’s, Mizrachim were settled in remote locations in the country’s geographic periphery, establishing a demographic presence that secured the country’s borders.  These development towns, as they are known, were plagued by drugs, unemployment and a sense of grievance against the Labor establishment, not least of all the kibbutzim – usually the closest symbol of Ashkenazic privilege they knew.  Borrowing terminology from the US, a seminal Mizrachi protest movement that emerged in an inner city Jerusalem neighborhood called itself the Black Panthers.  By 1977, Israel’s North African immigration came into its own, helping sweep Menahem Begin and the Likud to power.  And just as the right embraced the Mizrachim, the Israeli left embraced the Palestinians, so that the ethnic identification between Ashkenazim and Labor extended to the idea of peace itself.  It is this politics of identity that has defined Israeli politics to this day. 

 In 1983, when the Likud was taking control of development towns, one after another, Peretz won the election in Sderot on the Labor ticket.  Born in Morocco, Peretz was severely wounded in in the army and, after extensive rehab, worked as a farmer before entering politics.  He quickly branded himself as a leader of the Labor’s left wing, championing a Palestinian state long before party stalwarts would even consider the idea.  His career took him from municipal leadership to head the Histadrut labor federation and, ultimately, to the position of defense minister and deputy prime minister. His political achievements include a higher minimum wage, mandatory pension and the Iron Dome anti-missile system that has literally changed the strategic balance of power between Israel and the terrorist organizations that surround it. 

 In 2006, as the head of the Labor Party, Peretz faced a catastrophic party split, with Shimon Peres and other top leaders bolting to Arik Sharon’s new Kadima party, and a brief lived pensioner’s party siphoning off support from that traditionally Labor voting demographic.  Labor, however, won the development towns and, together with Kadima, was able to form a peace coalition.  Amir chose the defense portfolio and, in an historic first, brought about the appointment of a Moslem Arab as a government minister. That government was brought low by Hezbollah missiles and Olmert’s corruption.  The war itself granted Israel over a decade of quiet on the northern border, but the public imagination remembers it as a colossal failure.  Rumblings against Peretz began on the center left.  Why did he chose the Defense Ministry to begin with?  One Labor voter told me “the problem with Peretz is he doesn’t know when a job is beyond his competence.”  What, indeed, did that guy from you know where think he was doing in a job held by the likes of Ashkenazi giants such as Ben Gurion, Moshe Dayan, Arik Sharon and Ehud Barak?  During one visit to the front, a journalist got a photo op of Peretz looking at the horizon through binoculars.  Peretz obliged, but didn’t bother to take the lens covers off.  The unfortunate photo of Peretz looking through the covered binoculars reappeared mercilessly in the paper, electronic and social media.  As if to say, “what do you expect from a….”  That’s when I figured it out. 

 Peretz took some time off from public affairs to recallibrate, teaching for while in boarding school for underprivileged youth before planning his comeback.  In 2011 he ran again for party leadership, contending against the briefly serving Shelly Yehimovitch.  The voting breakdown showed a classic black-white fault line.  76% of Tel Aviv primary voters chose Shelly.  80% of voters in southern development towns went for Amir.  And the kibbutzim?  85% for Shelly.   The Labor Party won’t release a breakdown of the 2017 primaries, but my guess is the figures would be similar.

 I tried to figure out where the antagonism to Peretz comes from in discussions with people from my in-laws’ kibbutz, located adjacent to Sderot.  Folks here grew up with Peretz, and many to this day work with his articulate and charismatic wife, Ahlama.  And it was Peretz who, against opposition from the experts, insisted on developing the Iron Dome missile defense system that has transformed the kibbutz from a target for Gazan rocketeers to a flourishing community.  The response I got from one acquaintance was that “Amir seems too ethnic,” an answer as unfair as it is bizarre.  Unfair because never in his entire career has Peretz played the ethnic card or trumpeted his North African background.  Like Bayard Rustin’s famous essay, Amir thinks Israeli politics must move from race to class.  Bizarre because Avi Gabby, too, is the son of Moroccan immigrants (the latter point is a cause for some celebration.  For the first time in history, both front-runners in a Labor Party primary were Mizrachim).  The explanation, however, is apparent when you see the two in action.  Peretz wears an open shirt collar.  Gabbaysports an expensive suit and tie, befitting a telecommunications boss.  Peretz speaks with pathos, raising his voice for dramatic effect, betraying emotion (you know, that’s how those people speak. . .).  Gabbayspeaks quickly like a hi-tech executive.  Peretz’ walks with an uneven gait that betrays his military wounds. When Gabbaywalks through the door, he seems like your rich cousin. 

 Avi Gabbaymay indeed increase Labor’s share of the vote in the next election, but it will be at the expense of another, centrist opposition party, resulting in no net gain for the center left.  Peretz might have lost Tel Aviv voters to Yair Lapid's centrist list, for instance, but he would have attracted new voters from development towns, potentially bringing about a paradigm shift like he did in 2006, paving the way for a center left coalition.  No politician in Israel, aside from Bibi, is more qualified to serve as Prime Minister than Amir Peretz.  He’s been a mayor and a Histadrut boss, a defense minister and deputy prime minister (and environment minister along the way).  He’s a guy who has both fought in wars and led wars, a true working class leader and an authentic representative of the pioneering, Labor Zionist tradition.  Instead, Labor voters chose someone “new.”  And less “ethnic.” I’m beating my head against the wall already.

 Get Back to Where You Once Belonged

 Several Years ago I managed the organization behind several of Israel’s bilingual schools, Hand in Hand. After a few years running my own business, I’ve now taken on the management of Hagar, an organization that runs the bilingual Arab Jewish school and community of families in Beer Sheba.  A fascinating organization bringing together not only Jews from different backgrounds but a diverse group of Arabs from the urbanized north as well as Bedouins from the south. It’s a place where children live and learn together, celebrate the holidays of Islam, Christianity and Judaism, learn about the tragedy of the Palestinian Naqba along with the Jewish national story of holocaust and rebirth.  And, like so many social change organizations, it’s in desperate need of funds. Unlike the liberal Tel Aviv bubble, Beer Sheba is a more right wing town.  “Like Sinatra sings it,”If we can make it here we’ll make it anywhere.”  It will be tough, but I’m ready for the challenge.  The way I see it, I can’t solve the Israeli Palestinian conflict, but I can help promote shared citizenship within Israel.  Wish me luck, comrades.

[mycorrectviews]

The Loyalty Test that Wasn’t:   Paternalism and Provocation on the Grave of Shimon Peres

This post originally appeared in Hebrew:  http://cafe.themarker.com/post/3344364/

The Accusing Finger

The Zionist left’s pavlovian reflex following the Joint List’s decision to boycott the funeral of the late President Shimon Peres landed it in a predictable trap.  “At this time,” posted New Israel Fund President Talia Sasson in an accusatory tone, “one would expect people to set aside this kind of accounting.”  In a similar vein, the peace oriented group Darceinu declared “On this day we would have expected them to serve as a bridge for peace.”  There is something repelling about all this judgmental finger waving.  Once again, it appears, Israel’s Palestinian minority finds itself boxed into a corner under a Zionist spotlight as onlookers demand they dance the hora.  “Why must I fawn after the desires of the Israeli public,” asks MK Aida Tuma-Suleiman, “in a populistic attempt to gain their approval?”  She makes a persuasive argument.  The ceaseless demands on Israel’s Arab community to demonstrate its loyalty to the Zionist ethos will only generate a growing backlash.  Or so it appears. . .

 The Middle Finger

 At second glance, the response of the Zionist left may be a case of stupidity in hindsight, but a loyalty test it certainly was not.  It was the Joint List that started the finger wagging: the middle finger, to be exact.  Amidst the tempest following Peres’ demise, MK Jamal Zakhalka’s plans for the day of the funeral should have been the last thing on Israel’s public agenda.  The 13 MK’s from the Joint List could have elegantly made themselves scarce from the crowd of 4,000 who attended the event had they not chosen to trumpet their obstreperous boycott in the press.  It was a premeditated controversy.   MK Basel Gatas started the ball rolling while Peres was still dying in Sheba hospital by declaring that the former president “is covered in our blood, from head to foot. .  .  He was a pillar of the Zionist project, colonialism and settlements. . . a cruel extremist who caused extensive harm to the Palestinian People.”  By contrast, MK Aiman Oudeh’s explanations were far less coherent. “It wasn’t my narrative.” [What exactly did you expect from the funeral of a president?]  “Jews don’t mourn the Arabs killed in October 2000.” [And this is how you plan to change that?]  “He built a nuclear reactor.” [Like government officials in another 30 countries].  No, this was not a case of the Zionist left demanding that Arab Israelis sing Hatikvah. The Joint List knowingly used the occasion of Peres’ funeral to challenge the majority.

 A Judaic, Judaistic State

 In recent years the ideological glands of the Israeli right seem to be working overtime, uncontrollably secreting jingoist hormones.  Ultranationalist legislation, from the Naqba Law to the Impeachment Bill are symptoms of a more serious disorder whereby Israel’s Jewish majority increasingly behaves like a persecuted minority whose culture and way of life are on the verge of extinction. In the words of Alexander Jacobson, the right is behaving as if Israel were “the nation state of the Jewish People, Judaic and Judaistic, whose purpose is to enable the Jewish People to Judaify nationalistically and to nationalize Judaically so that it can realize its nationalism and Judaism.”  This obsession with entrenching the status of the majority is a recipe for deepening polarization and tribal divisions within Israeli society. A reasonable person might wonder what is so difficult about respecting the national identity of the Palestinian minority in the Jewish State, and why is it not possible to demonstrate empathy with Palestinian pain over the naqba without giving up on Zionism.  The common public space Israeli society so desperately needs to create cannot tolerate so much flag waving.

 A common public space, however, is the last thing that interests Balad.  Paraphrasing Groucho Marx, these folks would not stoop to being part of a country which accepts them as citizens – Israel in particular.  In 2012 Yair Lapid refused to join the “Zouabis” in an opposition bloc.  Two years later the Joint List refused to sign a surplus vote agreement with Meretz since latter is a Zionist party.   No sweat, Yair.  Balad wouldn’t even think of cooperating with a Jewish parliamentary group.  Balad’s MKs never lose an opportunity to demonstrate their contempt for 80% of their fellow citizens.  Their moment of silence for Baha Alian, the terrorist who murdered three Israelis on a bus, MK Hanin Zouabi’s refusal to define the murder of the youths Frankel, Shaar and Yiftach as terror, their public condemnation of the Gulf States for defining Hezbollah as a terrorist organization – in short, their seeming affinity to virtually anyone who kills Israelis has less to do with support for violence than it does with their utter revulsion with Israeli society.

 The Threat of Israelification

 Israel’s future depends on its ability to grant all groups that comprise it a sense of belonging. Mike Prashker, a leading theoretician of the idea of social cohesion in Israel, argues that common citizenship is the most solid category available to Israel’s 8.5 million citizens in their effort to build a shared society.  I would only add that Israel’s Jews bear primary responsibility for bringing that about.  We must be willing to relinquish exclusive control over political power and decision making, forfeit economic advantages deriving from overt or covert discrimination, ease control over national resources – including land, and adopt a more inclusive cultural approach in defining what it means to be an Israeli.

 But let us have no illusions.  These matters are of no consequence to the folks at Balad.  Their three MKs are committed the struggle against “Israelification” among Israel’s Arabs, on the assumption that Palestinian identity is by definition incompatible with membership in a broader Israeli collective. MK Zakhalka calls any Arab youth who volunteers for civil national service a “leper,” and vows to “vomit” him or her out of the community.  Balad’s MKs do not seek Jewish compromise so as to facilitate shared society in Israel. What they want is surrender.

Wishful Thinking

 I do not purport to understand the inner workings of the Joint List, much less the political currents in Israel’s Arab society as a whole. Some commentators point to the condolence visit by Israel’s’ Arab mayors to the Peres Center, and to the 69% of Israeli Arabs who feel, according to a poll by channel 10, that boycotting the funeral was a mistake.  Jewish observers frequently argue (or perhaps they just hope) that Arab members of Knesset do not accurately represent the interests of their constituents.  If there is one thing I do know it is that Balad’s MKs are democratically elected to parliament by tens of thousands of voters, Knesset after Knesset.  There is no reason to believe they do not reflect a genuine current of opinion among Israel’s Arab minority.

 A person must be truly neurotic to insist that others mourn for his own loss.   But Peres’ funeral is not really at issue.  Palestinians with Israeli citizenship – what is the politically correct term that properly expresses the disconnect between citizenship and that state that grants it? – know what they want.  I do not “expect” anything of anyone else’s public representatives.  I continue to strive for a democratic State of Israel in which all citizens can feel at home, whatever their collective identity. Yes, MK Basel Gatas, I know you think this approach is beneath contempt.  The truth is, noone asked your opinion.

   mmƾ;gy�

[mycorrectviews]

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#Lego #nightscape #azrielicenter #Tel_Aviv #Israel

[mycorrectviews]

#Lego #cityscape #Azrielicenter #Tel_Aviv #Israel

[mycorrectviews]

The Bouncing Beverage Boycott and a Homiletic Postscript:  Israel's Democratic Prospect at the Dawn of a New Year

Bulldozers at the Supreme Court

Never has a leader been willing to gamble so much for so little as Bibi Netanyahu.  And yet his instincts as a furniture salesman rarely fail him: There's a marketing gimmick to get him out of every jam.  When, in the heat of an electoral campaign, he resorted to rank anti-Arab slander just to garner a few more votes, he already had a damage control plan.    A quick post election photo op with kaffiya-clad Arab Likud members did the trick.  His bungling intervention in US politics threatens to split the Jewish community to turn support for Israel into a partisan hot potato?  A couple of sound bites from the inevitable post-Iran-deal parley with Obama will reassure the faithful.  Bibi and his diplomatic demolition expert, Ambassador Ron Dremer, know they'll come out smelling like roses no matter what – compared, that is, with the sanguine stench wafting in from the butchery taking place just over the borders of the Jewish state.  He is, of course, right to tout Israel's brand as an island of stable democracy in a sea of chaos.  The question is whether he knows how to distinguish between the brand and the product itself.  Democracy, after all, is not a talking point.  It is Israel's greatest asset.  But when judges ordered the dismantling of two homes built illegally by settlers on private Palestinian land, a Knesset member from the Jewish Home party – the coalition partner that holds the Justice portfolio – called for D9 bulldozers to demolish the Supreme Court.   Bibi was too busy to comment on such trifles as the integrity of the judicial system. It makes one pine for his political forebear, Menahem Begin, a man with much deeper ideological commitments – both to the settlement enterprise and to Israel's democratic institutions.  In 1980 Begin ordered the dismantling and relocation of an entire West Bank settlement at the behest of the Supreme Court, an institution he extolled with a phrase which has entered Israel's political lexicon:  "There are judges in Jerusalem."  In Bibi's Jerusalem, apparently, judges have been replaced by spin doctors.

The Bouncing Beverage Boycott

As irresponsible as he is, however, Netanyahu cannot be blamed for the sniveling anti-Semitism of the anti-Israel left. If Mother Teresa were resurrected and elected Prime Minister, the BDS movement would still accuse Israel of war crimes. I was recently reminded of a video clip featuring a claque of Israel-bashers performing aerobics as they urge their tights-wearing compatriots to boycott Soda Stream, the Israeli producer of a carbonated beverage device, for violating Palestinian rights. But Soda Stream is no longer manufactured in the West Bank, points out one exercise enthusiast.  True, responds her bouncing friend.  But it now it operates in Naqab where there are unrecognized Bedouin villages.  

My initial reaction was bemusement followed by a double take.  THAT'S why we should boycott Soda Stream?  The "Naqab" or Negev region comprises 60% of Israel's land mass.  It's like accusing General Motors of operating in the American Midwest. The Negev contains cities, such as Beer Sheba, Dimona and Eilat, and is home to most of Israel's Bedouins who reside in both established towns and dozens of unrecognized settlements that have sprouted, without planning or licensing, along Negev transportation arteries in recent years.  Repeated attempts by the Israeli government to work out an arrangement with Bedouin stakeholders – it makes no sense from a planning perspective to build schools, roads and infrastructure in every single encampment that pops up – have ended in failure and acrimony.  Greater minds than I will have to figure this out one day.  

 A Glimpse of the Future

 OK, you are probably wondering.  But what made me think of that inane BDS video clip?  Well, it happened at the Rahat Conference, one of several annual meetings dedicated to Jewish Arab relations, where NGO's and entrepreneurs mingle with government representatives and philanthropists.  Rahat is the world's largest Bedouin city and Israel's second largest Arab town after Nazareth.  This conference focused on Bedouin economic development, highlighting the new Idan Hanegev industrial park, a joint venture of the city of Rahat and neighboring Jewish kibbutzim and moshavim. Idan is a big deal by Israeli standards. The country's main highway has been rerouted to access it.  Some 20,000 people will ultimately work there in factories and business, alongside a new regional college.  Rahat is the largest shareholder, meaning a lucrative flow of municipal taxes in addition to employment opportunities.  Mayor Al-Krenawi took advantage of the presence of President Rivlin at the conference to ceremonially sign a protocol for economic collaboration with his neighboring Jewish counterpart.  Idan Hanegev is a glimpse of Israel's democratic future – one possible future -- hidden behind all the spin.  So WHAT, you are probably insisting by now, does all this have to do with that BDS video? One of Idan's largest employers, it turns out, is Soda Stream.

European Foliage

Alongside what's right, however, these conferences also offer insight into what's perennially wrong.  The Rahat meeting was sponsored by the Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development, founded by the late Yehuda Paz, an old comrade and one time head of the Histadrut's Afro-Asian Center. The annual Jaffa Conference, meanwhile, is sponsored by the venerable Rabbi Michael Melchior, the face of a kinder, more forward looking Orthodox Judaism.   Rather than economic development, however, the Jaffa event emphasizes intellectual dialogue on identity politics.  One regular speaker, the Arab-Israeli poet Salman Natur -- is a voice for coexistence.  But liberal Zionists would do well to listen to him carefully.  In 2014, he opined that separation between Israel and Palestine is a colonialist, racist reality.  He, as a Palestinian, will not accept Israeli identity until Israel accepts responsibility for the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948.  So does he, or does he not, support two states?  At this year's conference Natur made it clear.  "We all live in one state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean sea.  I want to replace the current regime and ensure rights for all citizens."  OK, so let us consider a unitary state for Jews and Arabs west of the Jordan, the common denominator for most Palestinian nationalists and current bon ton of certain left wing Jewish Israeli intellectuals.  Let's assume, for a moment, that it would not mean a bloodbath or exile for Israel's 7 million Jews, bereft of the mechanisms of security and defense, surrounded by half a billion Arabs.  Let us further assume we are talking about some future reality without Hamas or Hezbollah, Assad or Isis, Al Qeda or Jabhat al Nusra, where Iraq is a model of cultural pluralism and Syria a bulwark of democratic governance. Would such a state at least guarantee the cultural sustainability of the Jewish People alongside their Palestinian fellow citizens? Natur:  "People who seek to become permanent residents must get to know the place. You cannot take the land and plant European trees.  What kind of residents do the Jews seek to be:  permanent residents or colonialist occupiers?"  So there you have it. It's not a matter of Israel promoting bilingual education, of Jews learning about Islam and Arab tradition; it's not about highlighting Arab theatre at Israeli festivals or Arab literature at Israeli book fares.  Jews and Palestinians simply do not have equal and complementary national identities.  3,000 years of Jewish civilization, a century and a half of modern Hebrew literature and theater, the establishment of 7 world class, Hebrew speaking universities, it's all just a colonial imposition.  Jews may be tolerated in the future State of Palestine.  But the Jewish People has no place. This, too, is a glimpse of a possible future.

The Father and Mother of Racism

If Netanyahu is not to blame for the antics of the BDS, neither can Likud policies be faulted for the implacable hostility of Arab nationalists to the Israel's existence.  Judging from another speaker at this year's Jaffa Conference, liberal Zionists bear even greater culpability.  Knesset Member Jamal Zakhalka, leader of the Arab nationalist Balad Party and a strident opponent of "Israelification" among Arabs, once famously threatened that any Arab youth who performs non-military civic community service would be "spit out" by the community. In a recent diatribe from the Knesset podium, he bared his scorn for the Israeli left.  "[Labor MK Stav Shafir has] never exchanged a word with me.  I'm transparent for her.  The Arabs don’t exist.  She's a silent racist. . . The extreme right are at least human beings; they greet you and smile. . .  The Labor Party is the father and mother of racism. . . You [Labor MKs] stand on ground you stole from me and piss on me from above in the name of universal values. Who hurt us more, Likud or Labor? The Likud built settlements next to Arab villages.  You built your kibbutzim, your socialism, on the ruins of our lands." Contempt for the Jewish State runs like a leitmotif throughout the Balad Party.  In fact, party founder Azmi Bashara fled the country in 2007, one step ahead of the General Security Service, suspected – sources say -- of assisting the Hezbollah select strategic targets for their rockets during the 2006 Lebanon war.  

At the Jaffa conference, Zakhalka showed his "compassionate" side regarding the Jews.  "Zionism destroyed Iraqi Jewry, with their 3,000 year history [presumably by encouraging emigration], and in Israel they committed cultural genocide against Jews of Middle Eastern background" [I just love that term, "cultural genocide."  Does it involve literary crematoria or theatrical gas chambers?].  I was tempted to remind him that what destroyed Iraqi Jewry were violent pogroms instigated by none other than Haj Amin al Husseini, the preeminent Palestinian leader of his generation and the man who did more than anyone else to suppress the Palestinian moderates who might otherwise have helped prevent the1948 war and the Palestinian refugee tragedy. Husseini spent WWII supporting Hitler in Berlin, following which he put his Jew baiting skills to effective use in Baghdad.  Jews, too, have grievances, Mr. Zakhalka.  The question is for how many more generations will the politics of grievance stand in the way of Arab-Jewish reconciliation?

The Rivlin Paradigm

 A 2012 survey by the Israeli Democracy Institute showed that, in line with Zakhalka's attitude, some 70% of Israeli Arabs deny Israel's right to exist as a state which maintains a Jewish majority.  At the same time, clear Arab majorities accept Israel's existence as a state where Hebrew is the dominant language, Saturday is the day of rest, Hebrew culture prevails and, yes, Jews are in the majority. How to understand these inconsistencies?

At the Givat Haviva conference, organized by the educational arm of the left wing Hashomer Hatzair movement, Israeli President Ruby Rivlin is received like a hero, his speech introduced with a panegyric and a warm hug from Deputy Director Muhammad Daroushe.  For a man whose one and only job is to symbolize Israeli sovereignty (Israel's President has few constitutional powers), this is curious.  Even more so for a life-long Likud stalwart like Rivlin.  Unlike his illustrious predecessor Shimon Peres, who made his mark globe trotting on behalf of the peace process, Rivlin has focused on ensuring the cohesion of Israeli society itself, most saliently by his up front struggle against racism and vociferous defense of equal rights for Israel's Arabs.  This puts Rivlin squarely in the liberal tradition shared by other former Likudniks like Tzipi Livni and Dan Merridor – with the difference that Rivlin still supports the idea of Greater Israel.  Go figure.  

 Rivlin's stump speech describes Israel as a state consisting of four "tribes:"  Secular Jews, National Religious Jews (who form the backbone of the settler movement), Ultra Orthodox "Haredi" Jews (perennially ambivalent or hostile to the Zionist enterprise) and the Arabs.  Israel must be pluralistic enough to allow all four tribes to coexist and share equally in the nation's bounty.  Where do the West Bank Palestinians fit in to Rivlin's schematics? Hard to say.  In any event, Israeli presidents do not have to answer major foreign policy questions. But Rivlin does offer a compelling paradigm, another glimpse into the democratic possibilities for Israel's future that liberal Zionists can fully embrace.  

Still, what explains the enthusiasm for Rivlin that grips Arabs and Jews alike at these conferences?  To be sure, it's always a good draw to have the President as your keynote speaker and, well, if you want the guy to show up, you've got to play the game.   But, at least to me, the special warmth he generates suggests something more significant. Perhaps deep down, beyond the politics of Palestinian grievance, beyond Bibi's cynical marketing ploys, there exists a genuine desire for community, a sense that Jews and Arabs can indeed spill less blood over symbols and invest more sweat in building their common homeland.  An unlikely hero, Rivlin is.  But a source of hope nevertheless.  

 A Homiletic Postscript

 As of this writing, the city of Jerusalem is experiencing a familiar – and frightening – upswing of violence, with Palestinian youths stockpiling pipe bombs in the El Aqsa Mosque, stoning Jewish motorists and battling police.  A similar development during the holiday season 15 years ago sparked the outbreak of the second intifada.  Moslem clerics blame tensions on Jews attempting to worship on the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif.  Once forbidden by rabbinical authorities for fear that worshipers might tread on the site of the holy-of-holies, whose exact location is not known and access to which is limited to the High Priest on Yom Kippur (and only at times when a Temple actually exists on the spot), a growing number of religious-nationalists have made a point in recent years of praying at the site where the temple once stood – and which, in their prayers, will yet arise as part of the messianic process of redemption.  For Moslems this is simply a violation of the status quo which has prevailed on the site since 1967.  For interested Jews, it is a matter of freedom of worship.  Both sides know this mumbo-jumbo is the stuff of geopolitical dynamite, but they insist on tossing it around as if it were a bunch of harmless religious paraphernalia.

Before the pious clerics launch another round of theocratic bloodshed in an attempt to please their creator by supplications delivered from the top of a flat rock in the Jerusalem hills, they might keep the following in mind. In just a few days Moslems will celebrate Eid el Adha, commemorating Abraham's binding of Ishmael in a demonstration of his willingness to sacrifice in the name of faith, followed by the divine command to cease and desist from the act of slaughter. This year Eid el Adha coincides with Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement.  Kippur is preceded by 10 days of repentance that follow Rosh Hashana, the New Year festival when Jews read the biblical account of – the binding of Isaac. At the dawn of both Abrahamic religions, the primal forefather is commanded to reside in the holy land.  His next test of faith is to bind his son on the altar, followed by a divine injunction is not to sacrifice his offspring, thus concluding a drama that took place – tradition tells us -- on the site of the Temple Mount/Harem el Sharif.  For 7 decades Jews and Palestinians have shown an almost unlimited willingness to sacrifice for control of the land, its symbols and its holy places.  May this year's holiday season teach us that, like the Abraham, we too can move to the next stage.  May Jews and Arabs learn, once and for all, to live in this land and admire its history without slaughtering our children.  Happy New Year to one and all.

[mycorrectviews]

After the Fall: Why Bibi Won and What to Do Next

The Hole in the Bagel

It should have come as no surprise, really. What electorate throws out a government during a period of sustained, low unemployment of 6%?  Yes, there is the housing crisis, the opposition's erstwhile strategic electoral card, but here, too, the left was grasping at the hole in the bagel while Netanyahu gobbled up the dough.  Let's see:  housing values have skyrocketed.  70% of Israelis own houses.  Hmmm. . . .  

Netanyahu knew what he was doing when he called these elections.  He was the beneficiary of a deep, obscure and totally surprising concept most politicians haven't heard of:  the business cycle. Israel suffered its economic slowdown back in 2001-3 and was, thus, shielded from the crash of 2008.  Netanyahu's entire social and economic platform was summed up in the word "prosperity."  A recent Pew Research Center report showed that Israelis are the most satisfied people in the developed world.  Go convince them that they're actually miserable.  

There was frustration, to be sure, at Israel's high levels of inequality – among the highest in the OECD.  But when you eliminate those at the bottom of the economic food chain;  haredim and Arabs -- whose votes are siphoned off into sectoral parties,  and the industrial reserve army of guest workers, West Bank and East Jerusalem Palestinians who do not vote, Netanyahu had noone to contend with.   Frustration produced 21 MKs for Kachlon/Yair Lapid, but most of those voters were seeking social change, not regime change.  

Rockets and Clear Skies

On foreign policy, too, Netanyahu operated under clear skies.  A few thousand families in the Western Negev have been suffering for years from Gazan rockets while governments come and go. Nu?  Who cares?  Hamas gave us everything they got over the summer and most people felt nothing more than inconvenience.  ISIS was a double bonus:  scaring Israelis into the nationalist camp while pinning down Hezbollah and Assad.  

The left, meanwhile, has been stuck in Oslo for a generation, as if Arafat didn't launch a bloody intifada from territory he controlled in the West Bank, Hamas didn't turn Gaza into a terror haven and Nasrallah didn't transform Israeli evacuated south Lebanon into a huge rocket base.  No rethinking.  No strategic creativity.  

Of course, Netanyahu is digging a security hole that will be hard to fill the next time around.  He's alienated the White House and, by undermining the Palestinian Authority,  is deliberately creating conditions for its collapse and the outbreak of the next intifada on the West Bank.  He has squandered the geostrategic advantages offered by the disintegration of Syria and the rise of Asisi to humiliate Abu Mazen and expand settlements.  Those who understood this voted Herzog.   But for now, reasonable Israelis might be forgiven if they see no immediate reason for hysteria.    

Burlesque Banter and the Iron Wall

Herzog, therefore,  cannot be faulted for running a bad campaign.  He had no chance to begin with.  The funny thing about the business cycle, though, is that it behaves like, well, a cycle.  What goes around comes around.   The question is whether the left will be in a position to take advantage of the situation when it does.  Netanyahu has been twice defeated:  on both occasions by military figures who projected strength in a period of uncertainty:  Ehud Barak and Arik Sharon.  Their policies were less important than the feeling of confidence they engendered.  

After all, Netanyahu's fundamental security  argument is correct. We ARE surrounded by Hezbollah and Hamas and ISIS and Al Qeda.  And by different names, we have been so since 1948.  Jabotinsky was right.  Only an Iron wall will protect the Jewish state from the unwavering hostility of the Moslem world.  The question is what goes on inside those walls. Jabotinksy envisioned a liberal society of the sort that is anathema to the present day Likud and its allies.  

Here Netanyahu is at his most dangerous.  Not that he is fundamentally a racist or an authoritarian.  He is simply an opportunist of the most cynical variety. He travels the world lecturing everyone about Israeli democracy, while the settler apartheid he and his friends are building on the West Bank hollow it out from within.  The mosque burnings, the price tag attacks, Netanyahu's own shameful appeal to racism at the height of the campaign – make those who truly cherish Israel's political culture llok askew at his burlesque banter about democratic values.  And his next government will go one better, with every fringe coalition partner pushing its own high handed solution to Israel's travails, from undermining the Supreme Court and the Government Legal Advisor to the "national laws," from new settlement initiatives to limiting foreign funding to human rights groups and the death penalty for terrorists. Netanyahu will buy in to this dark legislative agenda because it serves his needs, not because it resolves any fundamental problems.

It's Not About Peace

To prepare for the next round, The left must overcome, once and for all, the juvenile idea, born of hubris, that underprivileged Israelis are concerned with "bread and butter issues," not whether they are blown up on a bus (to be sure, Herzog and Livni were themselves innocent of this stupidity, pioneered by their predecessor, though one still hears it on the left).  We must recognize that peace depends not only on Israeli concessions but, first and foremost, on a still nonexistent Palestinian willingness to accept the Zionist enterprise. We must learn to make the distinction that the entire democratic world understands between settlements and security, taking a relentless stand against apartheid in the West Bank and racism within Israel.  In the end, it's not about peace.  It's about freedom.  Let us not squander our capital by joining the European chorus chanting the eternal Palestinian state mantra and hectoring Israel for endless negotiations to nowhere.  These are all means, and means change with evolving circumstances.  Our focus must be sharper.  We must hammer home the message that ruling 2 million disenfranchised people is not some problem for the distant future but a real and present danger, an unsustainable aberration, a moral blight that is eating away at the most important asset we have:  a democratic political culture based on a broad social consensus. That settlements are illegitimate. Period.   Finally, Labor must begin grooming a confidence-inspiring leader with outstanding security credentials.  Yuval Diskin? Amos Yadlin?  Gabi Asheknazi?  When the time comes to duke it out again, we cannot send a caricature into the ring.

When the Veil Lifts

In the end change will come, as it inevitably does.  As soon as the veil of prosperity is lifted, Israelis will come to understand the long term damage Netanyahu has caused to Israel's internal value system and to its standing in the world – and he will be swept aside.  The key is not to lose our heads.  

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[mycorrectviews]

Why I Support the Occupation: An Urgent Appeal for Essential Distinctions

(this is a translation of an article that originally appeared in Hebrew in The Marker Café)

Feiglin's Candid Admission

I recall a fascinating TV interview from year or two ago (which I am still searching for on YouTube – sorry I cannot document this yet) in which former Likud MK Moshe Feiglin exposed the essential truth that the Israeli right refuses to admit and the left finds difficult to acknowledge.  The world, said Feiglin in his characteristically straightforward manner, will not buy Israel's security arguments for holding on to the settlements.  The time has come to declare that we are in Judea and Samaria to make good on our historic rights. 

A Case of Intellectual Fraud

In less candid moments, the right tends to discuss security and settlements in one breath, though this is sheer intellectual fraud.  Mobile homes in the illegal outpost of Adei Ad cannot fight off advancing Iraqi tank columns.  In an emergency they will be evacuated in a snap, just like Israeli settlements on the Golan Heights in the face of advancing Syrian divisions in 1973.   It was the 643rd IDF Corps that stopped Palestinian rockets from Beit Hanun, not the Kindergartens of Gush Katif.   For the past 47 years Israel has claimed that the Six Day War was a defensive action, but the right believes it was a real estate campaign.  Many settlements were established on land originally confiscated by the Israel army for security reasons.  Just two weeks ago the Prime Minister allocated NIS 70 million to relocate a military base so that 300 more housing units can be built in the settlement of Beit El.  And still, many on the left take the bait.  Thus, former Labor Chairperson Shelly Yechimovitch, in an interview for YNET, insisted on speaking about the defense budget in response to a question about investing in the settlements, despite repeated attempts by the interviewer to distinguish between the two.

The Baseless Assumption of the Gaza Withdrawal

The confusion between settlements and security is so widespread that even praiseworthy initiatives are undermined thereby.  So it was with the disengagement from Gaza, which began with the baseless assumption that where settlements go, so must IDF divisions.  Why did the Israeli army have to abandon control over the Rafiah border with Egypt just to vacate civilians from Gush Katif?  Why did it have to dismantle IDF Gaza Command in order to close the settlement of Morag?  There was no logical connection between the two.  Neither is there one on the West Bank.

The Dangers of the Peace Process

If the right hides this elementary distinction for clerico-nationalist reasons, the left ignores it out of a commitment to the "peace process," and a desire to terminate the "occupation."  In the name of his grand diplomatic gamble at Camp David, Ehud Barak allowed a dramatic expansion in the settlements.  The summit blew up.  The settlements continued.  Settlements also expanded during the tenure of Labor Party Defense Minister Binyamin (Fouad) Ben Eliezer.   Fouad was, admittedly, busy putting down the second intifada.  In the end Israel crushed the terror campaign, but the settlements just kept proliferating.  Shelly Yehimovitch went one step further by openly defending the settlement enterprise in a famous interview in Haaretz ("not a crime,"  "an act of consensus"), while declaring her continued fidelity to the peace process.   But behind the smokescreen of the peace process, Israel is building an apartheid system on the West Bank. This is not some accusation by the UN Human Rights Commission, but the analysis of former Likud Justice Minister Dan Merridor.  There is simply no better description for a situation in which the civilian population of the West Banks is divided on the basis of ethnicity into a minority with political rights and freedom of movement and a majority which has been denied these rights for two generations.  And it should come as no surprise that the settlements, whose very existence is predicated on separate legal systems for Jews and Arabs have engendered a racist, violent culture that gave birth to the Jewish terrorist underground, Baruch Goldstein, the Kings Torah, the Lehava organization and the "price tag" attacks.

But while the peace process has provided cover for settlement expansion, it has also fostered diplomatic illusions.  The peace process is a tango for two, but it is far from clear that the other side seeks to bring the dance to a successful conclusion.  As Shlomo Avineri has cogently argued, the Palestinians have repeatedly used negotiations to wring additional concessions out of Israel, while refusing to close a deal at the moment of truth.  Such was the case with the Beilin-Abu Mazen agreement of 1995, with the Camp David negotiations in 2000, with Olmert in 2006.  It may be that neither Abu Mazen – nor any other Palestinian leader at this stage – is capable of taking the essential steps required to reach an agreement with Israel.  If this is the case, then the preoccupation of the Israeli left with the peace process while settlement continues is nothing short of a death sentence for Israeli democracy.

Al Nusra on the Shores of the Kinneret

But the dangers of the peace process do not stop there.  The time has come to concede that, even if we could sign a peace agreement tomorrow, nothing guarantees that the geostrategic assets we would be obliged to forego thereby will not fall into the hands of more pernicious elements.  I still recall Peace Now demonstration in front of the Foreign Ministry demanding Israeli territorial concessions on the Golan Heights.  Had the government agreed to this demand, we would today find ourselves facing terrorists from Jabhat Al Nusra on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, and ISIS just outside Kiryat Shemona.   Need we be reminded that just five years ago Hamas drove the Palestinian Authority out of Gaza by force of arms, and that the Moslem Brotherhood assumed power in Egypt through democratic elections?  If the truth be told, a peace agreement – even if attainable --  would be a dangerous gamble for a small country bordered by civil wars, geopolitical vacuum and unstable governments, armed to the teeth with advanced weaponry.  Netanyahu never tires of reminding the world that Israel is surrounded by blood and chaos.  On this point, at least, he is correct.

From Vilnius to Berlin

The occupation may indeed be an ugly arrangement, but it is preferable by far to a Hamas government in Ramallah, a Hezbollah base in Jenin or an Iranian intelligence presence in Nablus.   And occupation, in and of itself, is not illegitimate.  Occupation is what happens when the victor in an armed confrontation remains in territories seized so as to counter threats to its security and sovereignty.  Recognizing this reality, the Fourth Geneva Convention offered one, salient criterion for distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate military occupations by forbidding the occupying power from making demographic changes in the territory it occupies. The decades long allied occupation in West Berlin, for instance, met that criterion. The Soviet occupation of the Baltic states, characterized by a major transfer of Russian speaking civilians into Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, did not.  In its own occupation of the West Bank, Israel has failed this basic test of legitimacy.  That is, if one can still speak of the occupation. . .

The Moth and the Cocoon

The settlement enterprise is like a moth that crawled out of the cocoon of occupation, shedding the remnants of the territory's previous geopolitical reality.  In fact, "occupation" in the original sense of the term hardly exists anymore.  Hundreds of thousands of Israeli civilians today live on the West Bank under the rule of the Israeli justice system, patrolled by the Israeli police force and served by Israeli government ministries.  If there were an occupation, the IDF Judea and Samaria Corps would take action in response to hostile military action.  Instead, it is spends its time guarding settlers as they take over Palestinian land.  If there were still an occupation the IDF would appropriate hilltops, roads and staging grounds when needed for military purposes exclusively, not Palestinian fields and grazing areas for Israeli suburban developments.  If the West Bank were occupied, Israeli civilians would not dare enter the occupation zone without military permission.  Today, gun toting settlers traverse the hilltops as if they land belonged to them.   Normally speaking, the military is sovereign in the territories it occupies.  In the West Bank the IDF takes orders from the security coordinators of the settlements, and its strategy is determined by the Judea and Samaria Settlers' Council.

Where is the Democratic Discourse?

The religious right today sets not only government policy on the West Bank, but the very terms of public discourse on the occupied territories.  Instead of focusing on geopolitical strategy, the left is preoccupied with defining the "settlement blocs" it wishes to preserve, as if the continued existence of Ganei  Shomron or Tekoa have any bearing whatsoever on national security.  But what is lacking above all is a democratic discourse.  Many on the left lose sleep over what will happen when the Palestinian share of the population between the Jordan and the Mediterranean grows from 49% to 51%.  But what difference could that possibly make?  Is it OK to deny political rights to 49% or 38% or 25% of the population on ethnic grounds, generation after generation?

A State of Idol Worshipers

On the settler right, of course, this is perfectly OK.  In fact, that’s the whole story in a nutshell.  Settler leader Benny Katzover, for instance, openly says that Israeli democracy must "disappear."  Rabbi Dov Lior, a one-time spiritual leader of Naftali Bennet's Jewish Home Party, says that democracy is "idol worship," and Moshe Feiglin has no problem denying Palestinians voting rights while annexing the West Bank.  If the left had an iota of self-respect it would cease its useless deliberations on what constitute the "settlement blocs" and which concessions to make in exchange for another round of negotiations with the Palestinians.  In a region plagued by anarchy, terror and ballistic missiles, there are only two questions that must be asked:  How can we defend ourselves and how can we preserve our democracy.  Other matters are mere trifles by comparison.  The time has come for Israel to be a fighting democracy.  Because only democracies have legitimate right to self-defense. And only democracy is worth defending.

No More Judea and Samaria

If only the conditions would coalesce for the establishment of a Palestinian State alongside Israel, for toppling the nuclearizing regime of the Ayatollahs, for the destruction of ISIS and the Hezbollah, for the establishment of a functioning government in Syria.  As of now, however, that all seems far off, and Israel must start behaving, once again, like a fighting democracy:  we must hold on to the West Bank as a forward line of defense against the rivers of blood flowing around us – without settlements and without price tag attacks.  We must put an end to the theocratic-biblical discourse on the territories:  the West Bank is not "Judea and Samaria," just as Jordan is not the "Gilead" and Syria is not the "Bashan."  We must immediately institute a compensation scheme to encourage the evacuation of settlers and their relocation within the sovereign borders of the State of Israel; We must terminate the division of the West Bank into areas "A, B and C," and hand over full civilian control to the Palestinians, with the exception of areas deemed by the IDF necessary for military use (in practice, some 40% of the territory of the West Bank today serves Israeli purposes – civilian or military).  If the Palestinians take advantage of this arrangement to build a "state in waiting," everyone will benefit.  If not, another generation will learn the meaning of the words "roadblock," "curfew" and "administrative detention."

Back to the Occupation

Time is running out for Israel as its democracy is sucked deeper into the clerico-nationalist whirlpool of apartheid on the West Bank.  Abu Mazen, apparently, will not save us from this quagmire of our own making.  The time has come to cut loose.  Time to go back to occupation, pure and simple, a normative occupation that conforms to the dictates of international law.

[mycorrectviews]

Islamic Terror and Islamophobia: Thoughts from Israel in the Wake of the Charlie Hebdo Massacre

As I write these lines, the trail of murder and violence continues to stain Paris with blood in a series of hostage taking situations motivated by radical Islam.  From fascism in the early 20th century to Stalinism in the latter half, democratic societies have faced down totalitarian threats before.  We'll survive this one as well.  Jihadist Islam is only the latest in a series of brutal ideologies that sanctified the use of terror in an endless quest for power.  And like its illustrious political forebears, Jihad is threatened most by diversity – religious, cultural, political or intellectual.  Diversity gives the lie to totalitarianism's warped sense of reality and forced historical paradigms.  Diversity is what has empowered democracy to build the most creative and industrious societies on earth.  And diversity is what has helped democracy triumph over authoritarianism, whether in armed conflict or on the battlefield of ideas.

It is precisely here that Islamophobes get caught up in the web of their own ignorance.   Pam Geller, the diva of dumb in modern American xenophobia, argues that Islam itself – not some extremist expression of it – is "an authoritarian and supremacist political system" and should therefore be denied the protections of religious freedom.   A self-proclaimed expert in theology and classical Islam who cannot read a word of Arabic, Geller traces the problem back to "the Quran and Sunnah as understood by Islamic jurists." 

If Geller and her ilk are correct, then Judaism itself is suspect.  From Maimonides and Ibn Ezra through Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Islamic culture has been a crucible of Jewish civilization.  Could some inherent intolerance, common to Judaism and Islam, explain the 29 Moslems murdered in Baruch Goldstein's bloody Hebron rampage, the grenade and shooting murders of Islamic students by the "Jewish underground" in 1983 or the latter's foiled plans to detonate 5 busses full of Arab civilians?  Is it an "authoritarian and supremacist political system" that has prompted vandalism and arson attacks on 34 Moslem and Christian holy sites by the right wing Jewish extremists in recent years?  Obviously not.   To generalize from the acts of extremists to the essence of Judaism itself would be as anti-Semitic as Geller's fulminations are racist.  Religion, the uncensored repository of both the worst and best products of civilization, has always been an accessible tool for those driven by dark and violent impulses in the satisfaction of their own blood lust.  And it has served with equal distinction as an inspiration for liberals and humanitarians.

Democracy can coexist with different cultures, as John Dewey explained, and derives sustenance therefrom.  Islam is no more inimical to freedom than the Catholicism which produced Torquemada and Francisco Franco, the Russian Orthodoxy that engendered bloody pogroms, the Shintoism of Hirohito or the caste ridden culture of Hinduism.  And yet democracy prevails today in Madrid, Tokyo and New Delhi and, one we may hope, the Russian intellectual tradition of Andre Sakharov will yet overcome the scourge of Putinism.  Islamic societies, to be sure, have a long way to go if they wish to expunge the medieval detritus of religious hatred.   Anti-Semitic diatribes and conspiracy theories enjoy a frightening degree of public legitimacy and official patronage in Moslem countries, as a perusal of MEMRI's extensive catalogue of racist screed from the Middle Eastern media will sadly bear this out.   But the kulturekampf must be waged, first and foremost, by Arab and Moslem democrats themselves.  Highlighting ethnic antagonisms by libeling their cultural heritage is no way to help them along. 

The Charlie Hebdo massacre should be a wakeup call to France, just as 9-11 was to the US and London underground bombings were to the UK.  Tolerance for violence – any violence – is an invitation to mayhem, and the war on terror must be as persistent as it is ruthless. Clerics who advocate violence must be locked up without regard to religious sensibilities.  And the battle cannot stop at the borders of France.  It must be prosecuted as long as El Bagdhadi roams freely in Iraq,  Nasrallah rules south Beirut, Heniya crawls the tunnels of Gaza and the Taliban shoot school girls in Afghanistan. 

But to identify violence with Islam itself is a strategic mistake of historic proportions.  The godfather of Middle Eastern terrorism was none other than George Habash, a Greek Orthodox Christian who sang in a church choir in his youth.  Habash, who pioneered the art of airplane hijacking, massacred 29 people at Lod Airport and took the hostages at Entebbe, was a self-proclaimed Marxist Leninist, the same ideology that turned Eastern Europe into a huge jail cell and whose Maoist offshoot was responsible for mass genocide in Buddhist China and Cambodia.  Habash's partner in planning the Lod Airport attack was Fusako Shigenobu of the Japanese Red Army Faction.  The German Baader Meinhoff terror gang was not Islamicist. Nor was the Venezuelan Catholic born arch terrorist Carlos the Jackal.  In the war on terror, Islamophobia is a dangerous diversion, and Islamophobes no more than useless parasites.

As the free world mourns the victims of the Paris massacres and prays for the hostages, democrats around the globe must join hands in a common effort to crush the purveyors of violence.  And above all, they must redouble their efforts to build and tolerant societies, the most important cultural line of defense against terrorism.

[mycorrectviews]

Barbarians at the Gates, Barbarians within the Gates

  A Homily for Parashat Pinchas

July 2014

If, as Feuerbach wrote, people worship a God to which they alienate their essential being, Parashat  Pinchas -- the Torah portion Jews read this past Sabbath -- reveals human nature at its most beastly and terrifying.  It is, then,  a macabre coincidence indeed that we read this portion at such a dark time here in Israel. 

Pinchas – grandson of Aaron the High Priest -- who stabbed the Israelite Zimri Ben Salu and his Midianite consort Cozbi through the belly with his spear, is acclaimed for turning back God's wrath from the Israelites with his zeal.  For this he is incongruously granted God's "pact of peace."   But not only Pinchas is zealous.  God himself, the portion tells us, is consumed with jealousy.  This act of primal violence quenches not only Pinchas' thirst for blood but the deity's own blood lust.  God's anger with his people is thus pacified, but not his uncontrolled venom regarding the Midianites, whom Moses is subsequently commanded to assail and defeat for the crime of tempting Israel to idol worship. 

This human cum divine urge to violence, basic to religious fundamentalism throughout the ages, is today corroding the foundations of Israel's modern political culture from within, just as the Jewish state is being surrounded by a web of heavily armed fundamentalists aimed at its own destruction – from Hamas in Gaza and Al Qaida affiliates in the Sinai to Hezbollah in Lebanon and ISIS in Syria.  Israel's technological prowess may shield  it from the rivers of blood flowing around it, but only if the glue of democratic civility can sustain the social cohesion and resilience necessary for continued self-defense.  This, first and foremost, is the key to Israel's survival, even more so than its acclaimed cybernetic knowhow and high tech innovation.   But like a virus infecting the infrastructure of a communications network, there is a Pinchas lurking in the corner of our national soul, threatening to unleash from within the same primitive barbarism that imperils us from without.

The story of Pinchas shows how the urge to vengeance can overcome even our most fundamental cognitive abilities, erasing powerful memories, casting aside elementary  human instincts such as compassion and loyalty.  The MIdianites, whom Moses is unceremoniously ordered to assail without the slightest indication of protest on his part – it is these very Midiantites who granted him refuge upon his flight from Pharaoh.  It was Jethro, priest of the Midiantes, who gave him is daughter in marriage and offered him wise counsel on how to organize the Israelite legal system in the desert.  It was Moses  and the children of Israel who sought the protection of the Midianites, their comradery,  their intimacy.  And yet the Pinchas  within reacted to the inevitable effects of cultural intercourse with uncontrolled barbarity.

As the latest wave of Middle East violence swells, our modern day Pinchas complex – churning for years in the gut of Israel's body politic --  is now bubbling to the surface.  Most Israelis were outraged by the brutal revenge killing of Muhammed Khdeir in Jerusalem, but the outpouring of solidarity with his Palestinian family could not drown out the incessant drumbeat for revenge in the wake of the killing of the three Jewish youths near Gush Etzion, a drumbeat emanating not only from the dredges of Israel's homegrown (and technically hirsute) "skinhead" culture – the rabid "fans" of the racist Betar Jerusalem soccer team (with whom Khdeir's assailants are reportedly associated), but from inside the military, from the ideologues of the settler right, and from the educational institutions of Israel's religious Zionist movement. 

Thus, soldiers from Israel's ultra-orthodox military brigade, a supposed model for haredi participation the armed forces, launched a social media campaign replete with photos of armed, uniformed servicemen alongside placards demanding vengeance.  And while the army meted out a somewhat flaccid punishment for this egregious act of insubordination, Noam Perel, Secretary General  of Bnei Akiva -- the historic youth movement of religious Zionism --  wrote a despicable Facebook post, flaming on about how and entire nation demands revenge, and how the government should turn the IDF into an army of vengeance.  Perel subsequently retracted his words, but others did not.  The front page of a weekly Torah brochure distributed by Machon Meir, a flagship educational institution of religious Zionism, featured a lead article last week arguing that Israel's response to today's Ishmaelites  should take its cue from the biblical demand of Sara regarding Hagar and Ishmael in the book of Genesis:  "Expel the handmaiden and her son."  And at the hysterical end of the rabbinic spectrum, Rabbi Yossi Elitzur called upon the IDF to kill "innocent" Palestinians (quotation marks his) so has to save the lives of Israeli soldiers.  Elitzur, author of The Kings Torah, a book dealing with the killing of gentiles from the perspective of "Jewish law", has been investigated by Israeli police for racist incitement and banned from entering the UK.  His sick volume, however, was given official sanction by several other religious figures including Dov Lior, chief Rabbi of Kiryat Arba  and a spiritual leader of Economy Minister Naftali Bennet's Jewish Home Party.  Bennet, meanwhile, the modern face of settler politics, is said to have supported the candidacy of Shlomo Eliyahu for the position of Chief Rabbi.  Eliyahu, an inveterate purveyor of discrimination and hatred, famously called upon Jews not to rent apartments to Arabs in the city of Zfat, his current religious bailiwick, a call supported by dozens of municipal rabbis around the country.  Fascism, apparently, runs deep among those steeped in the Pinchasian tradition. 

But while the God of vengeance calls upon his faithful to take hold of their spears, some still worship the God of compassion, that heavenly projection of ourselves whose Torah commands us to direct our love in three directions:  "And thou shalt love the stranger, for you were strangers in Egypt,"  "and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," "and thou shalt love the Lord they God with all thy heart."  One such devotee, Gadi Gevaryahu -- also a scion of religious Zionism – leads the most proactive campaign against racism in the State of Israel today.  As head of the "Tag Meir" movement, Gevaryahyu has almost single handedly kept the anti-racist struggle on the national agenda, organizing solidarity visits to each and every Arab town or village -- within Israel or on the West Bank -- where right wing zealots carry out the so called "price tag" attacks, those disgraceful acts of vandalism against Arab property, mosques and churches aimed at inciting further violence and hatred, attacks abetted by the likes of Yosef Elitzur.  Gevaryahu, a strange bird in the skies of the holy land, established the Orthodox  "Yitzhak Rabin" synagogue in Rehovot after another right wing fanatic murdered Israel's prime minister some 19 years ago.  Gevaryahu's own brand of zealotry, so desperately needed in these dark times, seeks not only to save the honor of Judaism and Zionism.  It also affirms the basic civic decency and trust necessary to preserve a shared, democratic society in Israel.

As the Torah portion proceeds, God unceremoniously terminates Moses' career.  After having seen his brother Aaron receive the priestly pink slip on Mount Hor two portions earlier, Moses is now told of his own impending death on the heights of Abarim.  Israel's greatest prophet is thus denied the privilege of bringing his 40 year journey to its rightful denouement in the Land of Israel for the sin of eliciting water from the rock by striking it rather than speaking to it.  A belated admission, perhaps,  that –  despite repeated paroxysms of violence – the deity himself knows  that dialogue is far more desirable a solution than force? 

Moses' failings do not spell doom for the Israelite cause.  Knowing that the time has come for new leadership and new policies, he lays his hands on Joshua and invests him with authority to take the people to the next stage.  In our own trying times, as the Jewish state faces off against a barbaric enemy determined murder Israelis at any cost -- even if it means death and suffering for its own subjects – the time has come for a new kind of leadership:  one  that will simultaneously defeat the enemy from without while zealously resisting the Pinchasian barbarian within the gates before he undermines the democratic foundations of the Zionist republic itself. 

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Meditations on Prayer and Obligation: In Memory of Muriel Shube, z"l

Journeys

Mom went to sleep for the last time on the night of the Seder.  And a thick darkness descended on the land of Egypt, a palpable darkness that lasted for three days. And after the Israelites celebrated the Passover they set out on their journey.   And after three days in her own darkness, Mom's life journey came to an end.

Some, however, would say it continues elsewhere.  Carl Jung believed our psyche is not subject to space-time, and that there is "another order of things lying beyond or beneath" our world.  When, many years ago, my late father came to me in a dream, he came as a wanderer, only to leave again and continue on his trek. 

Is there a substrate of reality in these mythologizings?  To think so would require a "temperamental optimism," as William James put it, an innate confidence that there is a greater cosmic order to our apparently cold world of empirical facts.   The idea of an enduring soul was authored by a human civilization seeking unifying principles to help make sense of an otherwise meaningless universe.  Its primitive provenance, however, is not to be held against it.  Our own preoccupation with the integrated "self" – notwithstanding the lack of empirical evidence for the existence of such an entity -- is no more justified than a belief in the Cartesian soul or the biblical deity. We assume we are all in possession of a self (or perhaps that we are possessed by one), sensing, too, that logic requires some ontological ground on which our sensations can play out.   But just as early 20th century scientists were never able to produce a bottle of that ether whose pervasive existence their electromagnetic theory required, neither has anyone yet found a specimen of a self. 

For 23 years after my father died, Mom went to sleep with his old leather jacket draped on her bed.  Nostalgia?  Or perhaps an effort to preserve a link with the departed, a sort of converse to the rituals of the ancient Egyptians who buried their loved ones with implements and jewelry to serve their needs in the netherworld.  Was she reaching "beyond or beneath?"

I, for one, do not share that temperamental optimism, though sometimes I wish I did.

Moments of Grace

"Well," they console me, "she lived a full life."  Yes, I think to myself, but who am I going to call on Friday nights?  Reason, it turns out, provides little guidance on how to fill the gap.  Tradition, at least, offers a plan of action. 

A Jew's eleven months of mourning constitute a journey of sorts.  The discipline of saying Kaddish every day takes one to some interesting places in search of a prayer quorum.  My default location in Jerusalem is the "Shtiblach," the ultimate railway station of synagogues.  A residential building in the city's German Colony neighborhood with four different prayer rooms, the Shitblach offers a new minyan starting every 15 minutes or so, if you're not picky about whether to  follow the Ashkenazic or Sephardic rite.  With swift mechanical precision, morning prayers proceed from the introductory hymns to their final denouement with the two recitations of the mourner's Kaddish bracketing the Aleinu prayer.  Any slackening of attention may cause one to miss the Kaddish.  As the prayer leader speeds his way through the liturgy several ultra-orthodox men in full regalia move through the crowd, seeking a handout.   I give one of them a few shekels.  Who knows?  It might help him get through the day.  And amidst the rapid fire recitations, occasional moments of grace intrude. About half way through the recitation of the Amida, I head out to the sink with another priest and unravel the phylacteries from my left palm to have my hands washed by a Levite.  Returning to the sanctuary, the two of us approach the ark, remove our shoes and cover our heads with our prayer shawls.  Thus hidden beneath a veil of linen, shielded, symbolically, under the wings of the shechina -- we spread out our hands in Dr. Spock's Vulcan greeting and, as the crowd lowers their eyes, recite the priestly blessing, repeating the words of the cantor in an eerie monotone incantation. You don't actually have to believe this mumbo jumbo, I think later, to feel its effect.

Lost in Translation

I decide that mourning is as good a time as any to read Leon Weiseltier's book, Kaddish, a rather dense tome that combines Sisyphean literary detective work with a personal journal of introspection.  Weiseltier's scholarly goal is to uncover the origins of the mourner's Kaddish.  Not to be found in the Talmud, this tradition emerged from the intellectual swamp of mediaeval Jewish speculation.  By reciting the Kaddish for one's father, sources tell us, a son helps save the soul of the deceased from the torments of Gehenna – or at least helps raise it to a higher plane.  I read through Weiselteir's impressive catalogue of documentation, spanning the Jewish world from Babylonia to Germany to France and Spain, vainly searching for an explanation with even the slightest intellectual or spiritual appeal, but in vain.  The familiar Aramaic words of praise contain no hidden philosophical meaning, they make no mention of death or longing, offer no hint of consolation.  Nothing.  Nada.  But no synagogue, no matter how liberal or reform, no matter what else they might have changed in the liturgy, would hold a service without at least one recitation of Kaddish.  How to resolve this paradox?

I find a partial answer at my girlfriend's Kibbutz in the Negev desert, a community established in defiance of Jewish tradition, a revolutionary attempt to create a new, rationalist Jewish paradigm.  Every year her extended clan holds a memorial service at the kibbutz cemetery for the family matriarch, one of the pioneers who established the collective some 70 years ago.  At the gravesite, Ayelet's uncle incongruously recites the Kaddish translated into Hebrew. "Magnified and sanctified be his holy name, in the world that he created according to his will, and may his kingdom be established. . ."  I am struck by how barren the words seem, how naked in their literal meaning.  The Aramaic, whose common linguistic roots hint at the overall gist of the prayer's Hebrew meaning while preserving a sense of mystery and distance, whose familiar cadences bridge centuries of Jewish experience and penetrate cultural barriers, conveys a feeling of awe and depth that is inevitably lost in translation, a depth that is simply not verbal. 

Between Anger and Acceptance

Weiselteir's most fruitful endeavor is more personal than literary:  "What is tradition without confusion?  But I don't mind such confusion. It is an existential excess. A measure of vitality.  A tradition that is completely transparent is a tradition that is completely over."  Obscurity, then, is part of the magic. But Kaddish is more than the obscurity of its origins.  Kaddish is a definitive statement of fidelity to divine judgment, an acceptance of a painful and unjust reality.  For Weiseltier, this is a critical psychological mechanism. "I will justify judgment, not because I know it to be right, but because I know it to be true."  And again, "I have a choice between anger and acceptance.  I would like to be angry.  But I would not like to be stupid."  And finally, "Reflection parts the assertions of grief from the assertions of grievance, so that mourning can transcend its own narrowness.  The world cannot be understood from the standpoint of personal injury. . . The taming of subjectivity is the work of the Kaddish.  Three times daily, the inner perspective of the mourner is unmagnified, unsanctified. .  . Objectivity is death's gift."

A Great Peace

On most weekdays I pray at the synagogue closest to my office. The Mikve Israel boarding school is a religious institution serving youth from underprivileged or broken families.  Prayer services are a mandatory part of their socialization process, their daily routine.  From what I can tell, 80% of the kids attending synagogue are of Ethiopian or North African family origin.  Wearing shorts and T-shirts, Crocs or Sandals, they drag themselves into the sanctuary at what must seem an ungodly morning hour for a rambunctious teenager, dutifully wrapping themselves in their leather tefillin straps, trading the occasional profanity or soccer score.  Stern faced counsellors pace the room, firing an accusatory look at anyone whose prayer shawl is still in its bag or who is caught texting during the utterance of the Trisagion prayer.  One kid I notice sings with an angel's voice.  Another one is lost in a deep slumber, his tefillin housing squeezed between the wall and his forehead. 

Mom was not originally religious, but her attachment to tradition increased with her age.  Perhaps it was pining for her own father, a simple but observant man whom I took to minyan every morning during high school.  Over time, nostalgia became duty, with synagogue attendance and Sabbath candle lighting forming an element of her routine.  During Mom's final year of decline, I found myself reminding her to light candles during my weekly long distance phone conversation – notwithstanding the fact that my own Friday routine consisted of a couple of glasses of Arak and a late night movie. Reminding her of her religious obligations became, for me, a personal duty.  Maintaining her routines, I sensed, was a way of keeping her sharp.  And maintaining her tradition, I felt, helped me preserve my own cosmic order.  Wiesltier:  "My obligation does not oppress me, it refreshes me."

Back at Mikve Israel, a youth is called up to read a sentence of Jewish law before the cantor proceeds with a traditional selection from the Ethics of the Fathers:  "Rabbi Eliezer said in the name of Rabbi Hanania.  Students of Torah increase peace in the world.  As it is written. . ."  This is my cue.  The penultimate Kaddish ensues.  "Let there be a great peace from heaven," I declare, "and life upon us and upon all Israel, and let us say Amen."  No, I need not search for Mom in the beyond or the beneath. She is gone, but at least my filial duties remain. I will faithfully execute them for the next 11 months, and thereafter recite kaddish every year on the anniversary of her death, her "yahrziet."     I look at the kids and cannot help smiling.  For them, services are no great spiritual event.  Just another school day discipline, a rote learning of the language, costume and choreography of prayer that I will forever share with them despite the vast social and cultural differences that will inevitably separate us.  They, too, are just fulfilling a duty.  And after all, without them I wouldn't have a minyan.

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Purim 2014: A Political Homily

The scroll of Esther, that most intellectually and spiritually vapid specimen of biblical literature, features a plethora of protagonists but a paucity of heroes.  A misogynist monarch whose geopolitical horizons extend from the bedroom to the palace garden; a political lobbyist who prostitutes his stepdaughter in a power play that makes him top dog in the wake of an ethnic bloodbath, and a youthful diva who rises, Evita-like, from obscurity to stardom in the royal harem, neither for love of king nor out of duty to her co-religionists (her first instinct is to turn down Mordecai’s request that she intercede with her sovereign on their behalf).  Meanwhile, Vashti — the proto-feminist heroine — is consigned to oblivion in the first chapter.  Is there any hope for human decency that stands out among the villains and anti-heroes of this sordid tale?

I cast my vote for the royal couriers, those trusty bureaucrats who go out, posthaste, to carry forth royal decrees on two occasions – the first confirming  Haman’s anti-Semitic edict, and the second rescinding it and calling upon the Jews to defend themselves.  No, we are not told what these cogs in the imperial machine think about the content of their missives.  All we know is that they send them to “every province in its own script and every people in its own language” – every one of the “127 nations” of the Persian Empire, “from India to Ethiopia.”  For these couriers, the medium is indeed the message.  And the message is diverse, multi ethnic and pluralistic, like the very empire they so eagerly serve. 

The Persian realm was truly a tolerant one by the standards of the ancient near east.  Certainly in comparison to its Assyrian and Babylonian predecessors, powerful killing machines that crushed nations and exiled entire populations.  The Persians, by contrast, preferred the rule of relaxation, replacing extermination with tribute and – as Ahasurerus’ wine feasts attest – inviting everyone to join the party.  It was Cyrus who facilitated the Jewish restoration to Zion and the rebuilding of the Temple, a decree that earned him the cognomen “messiah” in the words of Isaiah. 

Assyria and Persia represent two archetypes of multi-ethnic states that have recurred, curiously, throughout Jewish history.  In modern times, Czarist Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire have played the role.  While the Slavic behemoth, the proverbial prison house of nations, butchered its way towards the twentieth century with pogroms against the Jews and mass relocation of Moslem nationalities, Franz Joseph pursued a policy of toleration, guaranteed equal rights and twice refused to confirm the appointment of the anti-Semitic Karl Lueger as mayor of Vienna, despite his democratic election.  It is no accident that Austria-Hungary was the birthplace of Herzylian Zionism. 

The age of Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East confronts us with a choice of paradigms.  As tiny as we are, the Jewish republic is no less a multi-national State than so many larger historical conglomerates, and the choices we make under the circumstances will be as fateful as theirs.  Will the machinery of Israeli statehood follow the path set by the Persian couriers of old – to each province in its own script and every people in its own language – or will we pursue the policies of ethnic hostility promoted by Haman and avenged with no less sanguine methods by the partisans of Mordecai?  Will Israeli society have the wisdom to see the Arab 20% of its citizenry as a bridge to the cultural wealth of the Arab world of which we are in many ways part, or will we eschew them as an alien influence?  Both possibilities are equally conceivable. 

Much, of course, depends on whether the Arab world itself reverses its longstanding refusal to accept Jewish sovereignty.  We, for our part, have behaved with unfathomable schizophrenia.  On the one hand, Israel has wisely adopted a policy of linguistic autonomy, guaranteeing the existence of an Arabic language public education system for its Palestinian minority.  On the other hand, the separate educational systems thus engendered have guaranteed further ethnic polarization and alienation.  On the one hand, the Israeli government has launched several unprecedented media campaigns combatting racial discrimination.  On the other hand, a growing ideological wellspring — led by fundamentalist-xenophobes such as Rabbis Dov Lior, Shlomo Eliyahu and Yitzhak Ginzburg – all political compatriots of Israel’s Economy Minister — demands the marginalization of Arabs and their elimination from the public sphere.  As a Zionist, I jealously defend Israel’s right to don the symbols of Jewish national identity – much like Great Britain shrouds its own sovereignty in the symbols of a Christian past.  And I agree with Netanyahu that our democratic system remains sui generis in the Middle East.  Yet I live in constant angst that the partisans of nationalist mayhem may yet set the tone for our still emerging republic.  Ohad Ezrahi, writing in Haaretz this past Shabbat, relates how settlers in Bat Ayin cheered news reports as casualty figures came in following the massacre of Moslem worshipers by Baruch Goldstein in Hebron on that black Purim day, 20 years ago.

Purim can be a holiday of vengeance and blood.  And it can be a celebration of diversity.  By the waters of Babylon we wept our exile.  But in the streets of Shushan we enjoyed “light and gladness, happiness and honor.”   These are the options that history offers us.  In the age of Jewish sovereignty, the choice is ours, and ours alone.