A few days ago, I wondered in print whether the Obama administration would blink first or stand firm on a settlement freeze. So far, the adminstration is standing quite firm.
Ehud Barak has tried to convince the world that his meeting on the issue with George Mitchell led to a shift in the administration stance. Examine all the reports carefully: You’ll find no evidence of a change in the U.S. position. Which is good news.
A key reason that President Obama can avoid blinking is that Congress has his back.
I spoke this morning with Rep. Robert Wexler, one of Israel’s most dependable supporters in Congress. [Read more →]
According to a piece by Ben Caspit and Merav David in yesterday’s print edition of Ma’ariv, when Barak met U.S. envoy George Mitchell in New York, he told him that in 2000 “I was the Israeli prime minister who took the most bold steps to make peace, and that year also saw the greatest extent of new construction.” For Barak this was proof that building like mad doesn’t get in the way of negotiations. Alas for a country with men like this as leaders. [Read more →]
Let’s face it: When Barack Obama said in Cairo that “the only resolution” of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is two separate states, he was courageously insisting — well, on what’s become conventional wisdom.
But not the unanimous wisdom. The hardliners on each side aren’t alone in questioning the two-state idea. [Read more →]
There are many beautiful theories about how to bring Gilad Shalit home, but it’s an ugly fact that he now has been a captive for three years. And it’s an ugly fact that a series of Israeli governments have been unable to free him. Both diplomatic and military means have failed so far. Shalit’s family and friends blame the government for not doing enough, as do many Israelis. Others, including army officers, diplomats and the families of terror victims, argue that not every price is worth paying. Gilad, they say, does not stand alone; his life is not worth more than the lives of others.
If I were Gilad Shalit’s father, I would do everything in my power to persuade Israel’s leaders to free my son at any price. I’d be a poor father if I did anything less. If I were a government official or army officer involved in the effort to free him, I’d be telling those same leaders the opposite. I’d remind them that, whatever the political pressures they face, and whatever their empathy for the plight of this one young man, they must take into account the consequences that any military operation or diplomatic deal inevitably would have for the security of Israel’s citizens, the lives of its other soldiers and Israel’s position when facing similar situations in the future. I’d be a poor policy adviser if I did anything less.
That’s why the ugly fact of Gilad Shalit’s long years in captivity leaves me frustrated and nonplused. I’m not Gilad’s father, but I am the father of a soldier. As such, I cannot escape the possibility that my son might fall prisoner to one of Israel’s enemies. My academic training in public policy lies many years in my past, but the ethos of dispassionate, objective and rational analysis of policy options that I learned as an undergraduate remains the foundation of my thinking about public affairs.
One of our required first-year courses was in rational decision-making theory. The professor opened the first class with the question, “How much money is a human life worth?”….
Read the rest in The Forward–Comment there or here.
explain our family’s perspective on blogs and the new media. Nancy is hostess of the Sunlight Foundation’s Party Time! blog, which last month won an award at the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum. Nancy got a free trip to Bonn while we here at SoJo slaved away under the Levantine sun.
In the last few weeks, the Netanyahu government has introduces some new arguments for why it can’t freeze settlement, along with recycling the old confidence games. Among the new cons is the legal claim. As Ha’aretz reported:
A government source in Jerusalem said the Americans understood that even if Netanyahu agreed to a full freeze, the government did not have the legal authority to force private construction companies to stop building. The source said that if an attempt were made to order a halt to construction, contractors or homeowners would appeal to the High Court of Justice and probably win.
…under Israeli Supreme Court precedents, the government’s authority to set policy in territory under “belligerent occupation” (the court’s terminology) trumps the interests of settlers and Israeli companies. [Read more →]
There’s a lot of discussion on this blog about the issue of Israeli settlements. For someone just dropping in, some of the terms may be unclear.
As it happens, the Los Angeles Times’ opinion section today includes a package on the settlement issue, and the editor asked me to explain some of the basic terms and issues. The piece is here, and includes definitions of “settlement,” “Green Line,” and “outpost,” as well as an explanation of the current U.S.-Israel tensions over the issue. (It doesn’t include a discussion of international law, because the package includes a separate article on that, by Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch). [Read more →]
Had she better breeding and fresher food, I could perhaps have called her a tortoiseshell. But she was an undernourished, neglected garbage-bin cat, a member of the local feral tribe that lives off the huge green dumpster that stands in front of our 38-unit apartment building in Jerusalem. She first caught my eye one morning when I descended to the office I’ve made out of our basement storeroom. She was curled up in the crib on wheels that we keep at the bottom of the stairwell. My wife, Ilana, runs a small preschool in our fourth-floor walkup, and the contraption is what the toddlers hold on to when she takes them out to the park. The cat gave me a mean look, scrambled out of the crib, and was gone.
At the bottom of the stairwell, with its bars and its sheeted mattress, the crib-on-wheels felt soft, dark, reasonably warm, and protected. I kept a cat when I was a kid, so I knew that pregnant cats seek out such cozy places when placental hormones get into their bloodstreams. I made it clear to the faux-tortoiseshell street queen that she was unwelcome, and then made her birthing room uncomfortable by rumpling up a piece of plastic sheeting I happened to have handy.
Few cats in Jerusalem are pets, but the feral cat population is huge. Dumpsters and garbage bins are located on the street, and never close properly. So each one becomes the property of a feline community. The cats generally avoid human contact, but there’s a long-established symbiosis. The human population produces plentiful refuse for the cats and the cats return the favor by hunting down any rats so brave as to try to compete for the scavenging rights. At the time, our tribe consisted of six or seven cats, led by a muscular, gray alpha male with white paws and a scar on his nose. [Read more →]
People often read read news, my son once pointed out, because they want to know what will happen, not what has happened. They want the Daily Prophet.
Sorry, we don’t have any more clue of what will happen in Iran than anyone else does. Will there be a crackdown? Will Mousavi win, and be a Gorbachev? For heaven’s sake, the last thing Gorbachev expected to be was Gorbachev.
Nonetheless, when smoke is coming out of the largest house on the block, it’s sure to affect the neighbors. What effect, of course, depends on the final act of the drama in Iran. Here are some estimations: [Read more →]
Is this all coincidence? Or is part of what’s been happening in the Middle East for the past two weeks a result of the U.S. president declaring that the conflict of civilizations is over? My new article in The American Prospect examines the evidence.
Barack Obama spoke in Cairo two weeks ago. The Middle East has been roiling since. The street scenes in Iran have pushed the surprise pro-Western victory in Lebanon’s elections out of the headlines, along with Benjamin Netanyahu’s pained, precondition-crippled acceptance of a two-state solution and the enraged Palestinian response. Two top Israeli intelligence figures scaling down the Iranian nuclear threat from looming Holocaust to mid-range risk — a major story for a calm week — has gone almost unnoticed.
So did Obama set this off, or was he like the king in The Little Prince who ordered the sun to rise at the precise moment when it would have done so anyway? With that come two more questions: Will the crisis in Iran shake up the region even more? And what should Obama do in response? [Read more →]
My new article is up at Slate - on the dispute over settlements and why Obama’s approach is better for Israel. An excerpt:
…Diplomatic entreaties over the two-state solution will continue in closed rooms. The dispute over the settlements, however, is likely to remain public. In that dispute, Obama is working for the classic Zionist goal of a thriving democratic state with a Jewish majority. Netanyahu is undercutting that strategic goal by sticking to a Zionist tactic that became obsolete decades ago. [Read more →]
Sometimes a mediocre film puts everything in perspective. When the lights went down in the Cinematheque last night I was in the middle of discussion with my companion (full disclosure: I’m married to her) how to parse Bibi’s two-state speech. One position (not mine) was that the prime minister had offered an honest and sincere statement of both Israel’s willingness to compromise for peace, whereas the other position (not hers) was that Bibi was just paying lip service to President Obama’s peace initiative and had no real intention of making any progress with the Palestinians.
The film was Fred Cavayé’s Pour Elle (Anything For Her), a thriller that calls for a willing suspension of more beliefs than does Christopher Hitchens writing about God.
Lisa and Julien are happily in love and have a cute little boy named Oscar. Lisa is arrested and convicted of a murder she did not commit. When all legal recourses are exhausted and Lisa turns suicidal, Julien, who teaches French in a high school, decides to free his wife by force. He consults with a former prisoner who has written a book about his many prison breaks (for a guy on the lam, the guy is startlingly easy to locate and oddly willing to speak freely to a total stranger). Then he carefully concocts a plan, scrawled all over the wall of his study at home, to grab Lisa when she’s being taken to the hospital because of her diabetes and abscond with her and Oscar to El Salvador. [Read more →]
Exclusive at South Jerusalem: We provide an on-line library of original historical documents on Israeli rule of the occupied territories and the origins of the settlement enterprise.
Click here to enter.
Look for the Union Label
We don't
roll on shabbos. This progressive Orthodox blog is on strike, sundown Friday to nightfall Saturday, South Jerusalem time.
Gershom Gorenberg and Haim Watzman are available for lecturing in Israel and abroad.
Gershom made a three-week U.S. tour in February, and is available for engagements in the States later this year or next year. If your organization, congregation or campus would like more information, please contact him at gershomg@gmail.com.
Haim will be in the U.S. in Dec. 2009. Please contact him at hwatzman@gmail.com.
