Gershom Gorenberg

In my latest American Prospect column, I show that the Republican candidates for president or either incompetent or delusional in their grasp of world affairs. But which is it: Are they D students, or do they live in an alternate universe? And which one’s delusions put him the most parsecs from Earth? You, the readers, can decide!

If there’s anything that can produce more anxiety than watching the Republicans pick a presidential candidate, it’s watching the process from Israel.

Yes, I know that the Republican candidates—well, except for Ron Paul—all love Israel. Newt Gingrich is still in the race because of the cash his super PAC got from casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, whose other political investments include financing an Israeli newspaper that exists to promote Benjamin Netanyahu. Rick Santorum has just been endorsed by the high council of theocons, who are sure they understand Israel’s importance better than the Jews do. Mitt Romney’s foreign-policy platform restates—in more polite but equally counterfactual terms—his accusation of last year that “President Obama has thrown Israel under the bus.”

This is exactly what makes me nervous. These candidates would love Israel to death. What’s scary is not just that any Republican from the class of ’12 is likely to replace Barack Obama’s uneven support for Israeli-Palestinian peace with the George W. Bush-style malignant neglect. It’s not just that the Middle East as a whole is downstream from America: Our region gets swamped by the mistakes made in Washington. What’s really scary is that the way that Republicans—including Ron Paul—talk and act about Israel shows that their grasp of world affairs ranges between incompetent and delusional.

Let’s start with Santorum’s statement—video-recorded at an Iowa campaign event—that “all the people who live in the West Bank are Israelis. They’re not Palestinians. There is no Palestinian.” It’s worth watching how Santorum reaches this remarkable conclusion. The West Bank, he says, is part of Israel, just as New Mexico is part of the United States. “It was ground that was gained during war,” he says. Challenged that it might make a difference that the “annexation” was recent, the candidate insists, “No, it doesn’t matter. … It is legitimately Israeli country.” And since the land is Israel’s, he infers, everyone living on it is an Israeli. Presto, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict evaporates. [Read more →]

Haim Watzman

I almost stopped reading Aurelie Sheehan’s short story “Recognition” after the first sentence. Oh, God, another piece of fiction about a writer, written by a writer who only knows how to write about writing for an incestuous circle of other writers.

But I had a rare opportunity to dip into some short fiction on-line—I was at a bat mitzvah and the DJ’s bone-vibrating music had driven me outside—so I persisted in perusing “Recognition,” the latest short story published by the on-line journal Guernica . In fact, I had a chance to read two other stories as well: David Riordan’s “Mutts” at the Boston Review and ”The Waiting Room”, an excerpt from a novel by Leah Kaminsky at JewishFiction.net. It’s interesting to note that all three offer stock characters, ones we might feel, at the beginning of the story, that we’ve read about so often that we don’t care to read about them anymore. But the first two stories surprise us by using technique to give us a new take on old material. The third fails. [Read more →]

The contradiction at the heart of Chief Justice Dorit Beinisch’s ruling on occupation

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

I’d really like to be angry at Dorit Beinisch, the chief justice of the Israeli Supreme Court. On the eve of her retirement, Beinisch abandoned her role of pushing the Israeli government to honor legal restraints in the occupied territories. Instead, in what could be her last major ruling on Israeli actions in the West Bank, she has given a stamp of approval to colonial economic exploitation.

But let’s put petulance aside. One message of Beinisch’s judgment is that judicial resistance can stretch only so far. Even the highest tribunal in the land cannot reverse a national policy as basic as continuing to rule the West Bank. Another message—whether or not Beinisch intended it—is that treating a situation that has lasted 44 years as “temporary” is absurd. The occupation is not an acute disease; it is a chronic one.

Beinisch’s ruling came in a suit filed three years ago by the Israeli human-rights group Yesh Din, based on the work of land-use researcher and activist Dror Etkes. The suit asked for an order stopping ten Israeli companies from operating quarries in Area C, the portion of the West Bank under full Israeli control. (The autonomous Palestinian Authority administers the land designated Areas A and B.) Most of the rock taken from those quarries is trucked into Israel for use in construction.

Yesh Din argued that the quarries’ operations violated the 1907 Hague Convention on the laws of war. [Read more →]

Haim Watzman

“Can I get some cooperation here?” asks Yoel in the firm but plaintive voice of a reserve platoon commander.

Tourjeman, Brosh, and I are sitting like three monkeys (bald, sandy blond, bearded; wiry, fit, and flabby) on a small mound at the foot of the dusty spur that we’ve been charging up all afternoon. The cardboard targets scattered there, painted in green with the suggestive outline of a helmet-clad infantrymen aiming straight at us, are full of holes already. We have our arms crossed over our chests and our heads are down because we’re trying to stick our noses into the warm place between our arms and our torsos.

An icy wind inflates the backs of our shirts, which are soaked with sweat from our last charge up the hill with full packs. The platoon’s other guys are scattered around near us. Amar and Kochin, short and solid like Middle Earth dwarves laboring at a forge, are desperately trying to light a gas stove to make coffee, even though they know the canister’s empty. Mandelbaum the radioman switches on his flashlight so he can continue to read the book he’s been perusing during breaks in the training. He reads like a goat grazes, whatever’s at hand, halachic responsa, windblown newspapers, the labels on cans in ration boxes. Diki has splayed himself on the hood of the truck that brought us here, trying to absorb some of the heat that the gray metal has stored from the fierce afternoon sun.

Tourjeman, who’s the platoon medic, accuses Yoel. “We’re all going to die of hypothermia. You said we’d be back on base before dark.”

“Only idiots go out to train in the Negev and don’t bring their coats with them,” says Yoel, who did not bring his coat, either. [Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg

The Israeli political right is wont to argue that Israel’s only real problem is PR. We’re doing the all the right things; we’re the only real democracy in the Middle East; we want peace and the Palestinians don’t, they proved that in 1947 when they rejected the partition plan and – so goes this brand of kosher whine – we are terribly misunderstand. We need to make our case better. The complaint is sometimes echoed by the kind of “pro-Israel” voices abroad that fail to distinguish between supporting Israel and supporting the policies of the current government, destructive as they may be.

Well, if the government and its supporters want to prove that’s the problem, they’ll have to do a better job at PR than they’ve done in recent days. There are no candidates for best hasbarah (Heb. n.: information, PR, propaganda, bull); only candidates for worst. Readers of SoJo are invited to cast their votes.

• Avigdor Lieberman’s Foreign Ministry angrily answered criticism from the four European representatives on the U.N. Security Council – Britain, France, Germany and Portugal. A statement by the four countries had blasted settlement expansion as standing in the way of “the two-state solution that is essential for Israel’s long-term security” and expressed concern about attacks by settlers on Palestinians. The Foreign Ministry’s response attacked the Europeans for “interfering with Israel’s domestic affairs, including on issues which are to be solved within the framework of direct talks”  between Israel and Palestinians. There are too many things wrong with this as hasbarah (Heb. n.: PR, propaganda, bull) to list here; I’ll mention just three: [Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

The mob numbered about 200 young and angry people. Some had covered their faces. They gathered on a West Bank road near midnight and hurled stones at passing cars. Israeli troops, including the commander of the division in charge of the area and his deputy, rushed to the spot. One of the rioters opened the commander’s jeep door and hurled a brick at him. Another shouted, “Nazi” at the deputy commander and hit him with a rock.

The rioters finally left. A few minutes later, several dozen of them—mostly teenagers—forced open the gate of a nearby Israeli army base. The sentries failed to stop them. At the parking lot outside the headquarters, they broke car windows and slashed tires. When a squad of soldiers chased them from the base, they blocked the road leading to it.

Clashes between the Israeli army and locals in the West Bank aren’t a new story. The apparent twist in these incidents, which took place on the night between this Monday and Tuesday, is that the rioters were Israelis—young, extreme rightists commonly known as “hilltop youth.” [Read more →]

The lastest issue of Newsweek has a spread on on its writers’ choices for the top 10 books of the year. The Unmaking of Israel is on the list, picked by Peter Beinart:

The online version is the Daily Beast’s longer listing of top reads for the year.

If you’re in Israel and can’t find The Unmaking of Israel locally, you can order a copy from the best best store between the river and the sea, Munther Fahmi’s Bookshop at American Colony Hotel, telephone 02-6279731. And whether or not you buy the book, sign the online petition against the authorities’ egregiously unjust bid to deport Munther from the city of his birth.

The Unmaking of Israel is also available electronically for Kindle, Nook and iEverything.

Gershom Gorenberg

Excerpts from my new column at Hadassah Magazine:

Dear L——,

Please don’t give up on Israel. And please give me a chance to explain before you hit the delete button.

I know, your last e-mail virtually asked me not to write this one. You said that you were tired of news about growing West Bank settlements, stalled peace negotiations and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s bellicose statements. Your daughter says the campus debate between anti-Israel and pro-Israel groups is too shrill to bear. You would prefer to focus your progressive political energies on issues close to home. When I write, you implied, I should stick to updates about my kids…. [Read more →]

Haim Watzman

10 July 1922

To the editor of Kuntres:

My fellow music lovers in the Yishuv, tilling the land and laboring on the roads as they whistle and hum the works of the great composers, will no doubt be interested to hear of my encounter with the man who is perhaps the most notable of our nation’s musical representatives in the great cultural metropolis of Paris. However, they may be disturbed to hear that said representative is a broken man from a dying world.

The story begins with my arrival in Paris just last week, after the successful conclusion of my agronomy studies in Toulouse.

Eager to sample what the great city had to offer, I immediately examined the billboards and proceeded to the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées (yes, the same place where, just nine years ago, the premiere of Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps caused a riot!) to hear a program of piano concerti. One of the pieces was Tchaikovsky’s piano concerto no. 2 in G major, and the other a work in E major by a composer I was not acquainted with, one Moritz Moszkowski.

I will reluctantly pass over a description of a wonderful performance of the Russian composer’s great work, which I am sure is familiar to all your readers. Some will complain that it is overly long, but I maintain that its every moment contributes to a whole that is a sublime expression of the Russian national spirit.

I could not have been more astounded to find that the conductor chose to follow up Tchaikovsky’s great work with a piece so devoid of weight that it simply wafted through the air of the concert hall like chaff thrown to the winds. [Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

The women banter with the soldiers and get through the checkpoint carrying bombs in their handbags. We see them in black and white, which sharpens the lines in their faces and shows their fear more starkly. They arrive at their target. One enters a restaurant. The camera pans the people eating as she pushes her bag under the counter and leaves. As individuals, the victims are innocent, but seeing the world from the camera’s perspective has already told us that the explosion that will rip them apart belongs to revolutionary necessity.

This is a sequence from The Battle of Algiers, the classic 1966 drama about the uprising that drove France from its central North African colony. The film is worth watching again this week, when the Egyptian revolution is back in the center of the news, precisely because Egypt has not followed the Algerian script. Comparisons with the past matter because they underline that so far, history is not repeating itself in Cairo. And this is just part of why the reshaping of Egypt, tarnished and volatile as it may seem, is still so terribly important to the Middle East, and why the revolution turning oppressive would be a tragedy for the entire region.

[Read more →]

My new oped article is up at The New York Times:

“CLEARLY, there’s a war here, sometimes even worse than the one in Samaria,” the yeshiva student said. “It’s not a war with guns. It’s a war of light against darkness.”

We were sitting in the mixed Jewish-Arab town of Acre in Israel. The war he described was another front in the struggle he knew from growing up in a settlement in the northern West Bank, or Samaria: the daily contest between Jews and Palestinians for control of the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

The explicit reason that his yeshiva had been established in Acre was to serve as a bridgehead in that struggle, just as West Bank settlements are built to bolster the Jewish hold on land there.

Israeli politicians and pundits labeled the Oct. 3 burning of a mosque in Tuba Zangaria, an Arab community in northern Israel, and the subsequent desecration of Arab graves in Jaffa as a sudden escalation. But they were mistaken.

For several years, extremist West Bank settlers have conducted a campaign of low-level violence against their Palestinian neighbors — destroying property, vandalizing mosques and occasionally injuring people. Such “price tag” attacks, intended to intimidate Palestinians and make Israeli leaders pay a price for enforcing the law against settlers, have become part of the routine of conflict in occupied territory.

Now that conflict is coming home. The words “price tag” spray-painted in Hebrew on the wall of a burned mosque inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders transformed Israel’s Arab citizens into targets and tore at the all-too-delicate fabric of a shared democracy.

Indeed, the mosque burning represented the violent, visible edge of a larger change: the ethnic conflict in the West Bank is metastasizing into Israel, threatening its democracy and unraveling its society. …

Read the rest here.