My new column is up at the Daily Beast:

My new column, now up at The American Prospect. Enjoy. And please help keep the Prospect publishing.

Talk about a quick campaign. The latest one in Israel lasted about a week, and there wasn’t even an election at the end.

Just last weekend, local political commentators were enthusing about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s tactical brilliance in deciding on snap elections more than a year ahead of schedule. The opposition—particularly the centrist Kadima party—was unprepared. Polls purportedly proved that Netanyahu’s Likud would be the only party holding more than a quarter the seats in the next parliament; all the rest would stand in line to join his coalition. An cabinet press release on Sunday named September 4 as election day.

Two days later, the nation awoke to news that Kadima leader Shaul Mofaz had cut a deal with Netanyahu to bring his party into the current coalition. Elections can wait till late 2013, as originally scheduled. Political commentators enthused again, this time about Netanyahu’s brilliance in co-opting one potential rival and frustrating others. Foreign analysts wondered whether Netanyahu’s deal with Mofaz, a former general, would promote or hinder an Israeli strike against Iran.

Brilliance, schmilliance. Panicked zigzags are a prominent part of Netanyahu’s resume. Fright best explains his decision to hold elections and his quick reversal.  Despite foreign obsession with the Iran question, it was a consideration only in a negative sense: Facing a veto from Washington and harsh criticism from ex-security officials, Netanyahu doesn’t really have a military option right now.  So it’s harder for him to use Iran to divert public attention from other issues.

Netanyahu hoped to run a quick campaign, heavy on horse-race reporting, light on substance, in which the inevitability of his victory became a reason to vote for him. But the week began with a rebellion in his own party, a crisis over settlements, bad economic news and the electoral upheaval in Europe. All signaled that the election was no safe bet.  He ran for cover.

. …

Read the rest here.

My new column is up at the Daily Beast:

I found the pamphlets on a table at the Hillel house of a West Coast university. They’d been left by a representative of Stand With Us, the Los-Angeles based member of the “Israel advocacy” family of organizations. The booklets, entitled Israel: Pocket Facts, were the size of missionary tracts of yesteryear—small enough so that you can always keep one with you to consult when your faith is challenged.

On its website, Stand With Us says it aims at helping people “educate their own local campuses and communities about Israel.” Putting “campuses” first appears intentional: Fierce arguments about Israel are more likely on campus than at the average workplace, and some donors worry that Jewish kids are besieged on the quad.

The American Prospect, my journalistic home for the past 10 years, is in danger of closing. The magazine operates as a non-profit, and will only be able to keep publishing with the immediate help of donors.

The Prospect is an invaluable source of reporting and progressive political analysis. The loss of the magazine will leave a media world with less depth and fewer challenges to cliches and convention.

Of course, I have a strong personal interest: While the magazine focuses on American domestic issues, it has provided me a place where I can write freely about Middle East. Without The American Prospect, it will be more difficult for me to continue reporting on the occupation, Israeli politics, religious extremism, U.S.-Israel relations, the wider regional context, and more.

If you’d like to help, you can find more information here. If you know other people willing to lend a hand, please link, tweet, and mail this message onward.

And here’s my new column from Moment Magazine:

The incident repeats itself with small variations. A rabbi somewhere in America writes to ask if I’ll come speak to his congregation about Israeli politics and my recent book, The Unmaking of Israel. Afterward I receive another email: At a meeting of the Israel Committee or the board, he has encountered worry that inviting me could offend right-wing Jews. He asks how I respond to such concerns. Here’s one abridged version of my reply:

Dear ___,

Oy.

Your note reminds me of the apocryphal story about the new rabbi of an American Orthodox congregation who asks the shul president what he should talk about for his first Sabbath sermon. The president says, “Something to do with yiddishkeit.”

“Maybe I’ll talk about Shabbos,” the rabbi says.

“Well,” says the president, “a lot of our members drive to shul. They might take offense.”

“All right, I’ll talk about kashrus,” says the rabbi.

“Actually,” says the president, “some of our members eat in Chinese restaurants. Maybe you should skip that.”

“Fine. I’ll talk about taharas mishpuche,” the rabbi suggests, referring to the laws regarding ritual immersion for women.

“Now that you mention it,” the president says, “my wife is scared of water. Not a great topic.”

“In that case, what should I talk about?”

“Yiddishkeit, of course.”

So I should prepare a lecture based on my recent book, which describes how the occupation of the West Bank threatens Israeli democracy. But I’d best not talk about anything that could upset anyone.

Jokes aside, my first inclination is to answer defensively—to say that I moved to Israel 35 years ago and have raised three children here, that I’ve worked as a journalist for nearly three decades, and that my views are similar to those expressed daily by mainstream Israeli politicians and by other Israeli commentators. From experience, I know that some right-wing American Jews will indeed disagree with my argument that Israel must stop West Bank settlement and more aggressively pursue a two-state solution. But someone who is alienated by the very fact that I’ve been invited to speak doesn’t really want to know about the issues discussed daily in Israel.

Getting defensive, though, implies that I need to defend myself. And the real question isn’t who I am or what I’ll say. The question—though it sounds surreal to ask it about Jews—is whether disagreement is acceptable within the Jewish community. …

Read the rest here, and return to SoJo to comment. We allow arguments – respectful, of course..

My new article is up at The American Prospect:

The decision broke with a policy that Israel has held for 20 years: no new settlements will be established. Right-wing Israeli governments, in particular, have broadcast that policy as part of their international PR efforts. Yet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his most senior ministers granted official approval last week to three West Bank settlements. No big deal, say government spokesmen.

“This is only a technical matter,” Netanyahu’s staffers told U.S. Ambassador Dan Shapiro, the Daily Ma’ariv reported on Sunday. There’s actually a measure of truth in that claim—but that dollop of truth is an indictment of 20 years of settlement policy.

The settlements of Rehelim, Brukhin, and Sansanah already exist. They are just three of the settlements erected over the last two decades with the government’s aid and abetment. The ministerial decision merely relabels a rogue operation as an official action. If hypocrisy is tribute that vice pays to virtue, this is the moment when vice stops coughing up the tribute. Or, in diplomatic terms, it is the moment when the client state decides that it no longer needs to pay any attention to the preferences of its patron in Washington. …

Read the rest here.

My new piece is up at the Daily Beast:

JERUSALEM — As dusk settled over the Old City one evening recently, Noemie Nalbandian stepped into the dimly lit cathedral of St. James in Jerusalem’s Armenian Quarter. Hundreds of oil lamps hung from the vaulted dome like an army of parachutes in the evening sky. In one corner, Nalbandian lit a candle, performed the sign of the cross, closed her eyes and offered a prayer.

St. James is the center of Armenian life in Jerusalem. Each year on April 24, Nalbandian and hundreds of other Armenians living in Israel gather at the cathedral to commemorate the Armenian genocide. After prayer services, they march to the Turkish consulate singing songs and holding posters demanding that the Turkish government recognize the mass killing of 1.5 million Armenians living under the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1923. No Israeli officials were expected at the commemoration; indeed, the Israeli government is itself an unmentioned target of the protests since it, too, refuses to recognize the Armenian genocide.

Nalbandian, an Israeli citizen who works as a nurse and heads the Jerusalem branch of the Armenian Relief Society, the oldest international Armenian aid organization, belongs to the third generation of survivors of the Armenian genocide. During the killings, her maternal grandparents were forced into the desert of Deir ez-Zor, in what is today northern Syria. Unlike many other Armenians who perished in the desert, Nalbandian’s grandparents survived and traveled across what is now Syria and Lebanon, and settled near the Israeli port city of Haifa along with about 100 other families.

Nalbandian and her two brothers were raised in a very patriotic Armenian household in Jerusalem. “From our childhood, we were raised to love our motherland Armenia, our alphabet, our songs,” she said. Nalbandian, who also speaks Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, French, English and some Spanish, was not allowed to speak anything but Armenian at home.

“We commemorate the 24th of April, 1915, because on that day the Turks rounded up more than 300 [members of the Armenian] elite — doctors, writers and intellectuals — and shot them in the middle of Istanbul,” she said. This was considered the start of the wider genocide. “It took the Armenian years to find themselves, build themselves and asking for recognition for what happened to them,” she said.

Turkey denies that a genocide of Armenians occurred, and argues that lives were lost on both sides as a consequence of war.

Experts reject that argument. In a 2005 letter to the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the International Association of Genocide Scholars affirmed that an act of genocide occurred. They wrote, “We want to underscore that it is not just Armenians who are affirming the Armenian Genocide but it is the overwhelming opinion of scholars who study genocide: hundreds of independent scholars, who have no affiliations with governments, and whose work spans many countries and nationalities and the course of decades.” …

Read the rest here.

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect.

Forecasts of the Great Jewish Shift began as soon as the presidential campaign did: This year, we are told, Jews will finally vote Republican, or at least significantly more of them will than have done so in many a decade, perhaps forever. The predictions are a quadrennial ritual. They are made most often by Jewish Republicans, speaking in the bright voice of a compulsive gambler who knows that on this spin, the little ball will absolutely land on the right number. They are made by social scientists certain that reality will finally behave according to their models. They are made by Jewish Democrats as unable to control their anxiety as someone is to stop a tic. This year’s minor variation is the explanation that Jews will switch because they are upset with Barack Obama’s attitude toward Israel.

As an Israeli political writer, I admit, I am particularly conscious of this ritual, because the Great Jewish Shift (GJS) is the second thing that people want to discuss with me as soon as I get off the plane in America, after they ask me if Benjamin Netanyahu will bomb Iran and before I have put down my suitcase. I do not know if Netanyahu will bomb Iran; he does not tell me such things. However, I submit that there is considerable public evidence that the GJS will not happen this year. A newly released survey of American Jews provides the latest data. History and the Republicans’ demonstrative cluelessness about Jewish voters provide more.

The survey, conducted by the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) in Washington, found that 62 percent of Jewish voters want to reelect Obama, compared to 30 percent who’d vote for a generic Republican. Let’s reframe that: 92 percent of Jews say they’ve made up their mind. Of them, just over two-thirds would vote for the incumbent, and one-third for the GOP challenger.

Yes, this would be a drop-off from the 78 percent of Jews who voted Obama last time around, according to exit polls. It would not be a vast historic shift. Republican contenders won between 31 and 39 percent of the Jewish vote in four out of the five elections between 1972 and 1988. But the poll results do not actually suggest even that much of a change since the 2008 election. “Current levels of support for Obama among Jewish voters are nearly identical” to those “at a comparable point in the 2008 campaign,” says the PRRI polling report. Between the spring of 2008 and November that year, Obama’s Jewish support rose. Was that a result of one-time, nearly accidental circumstances, such as John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin? Probably not. Suspected of moderation, McCain needed a running mate to satisfy the Republican base—and even a more qualified ultra-conservative would have been a deal-killer for wavering Jewish voters. Massachusetts Mitt Romney will face similar pressure to reassure his right flank. Besides, I suspect that Palin was a pretext, rather than a cause, for many Jews to return to the fold.

It’s one thing to register under-satisfaction with the Democratic candidate by telling a pollster in the spring you’ll vote Republican. It’s another to defy upbringing and instinct to mark the ballot that way in November, especially while imagining your brother or aunt asking you over Thanksgiving dinner how you voted.

If Obama does lose some Jewish support, Israel won’t be the reason. Only 4 percent of PRRI’s respondents listed Israel as the most important issue for them in the election, and only another 5 percent listed it in second place. Some of those were already in the Republican camp, perhaps most. Anyone who is terribly impressed that Mitt Romney and Benjamin Netanyahu are old friends from their days as apprentice robber barons was not a likely Obama voter to begin with. …

Read the rest here.

Gershom Gorenberg

My new Daily Beast piece is up:

Spring in Israel this year brings not only Pesah but a whiff in the air of renewed economic protests, like those that swept the country last summer. Activists believe that after a long winter of empty government promises, they can bring Israelis back to mass demonstrations. On the eve of Passover, Benjamin Netanyahu previewed his strategy for coping with popular anger: Turn it against social outsiders. Exploit prejudice. Learn from the European far right, or from Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman or perhaps —in the spirit of the season—from Pharaoh.

In a pre-Pesah interview to Ha’aretz, the prime minister referred to the poverty among Israel’s Arab and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, and then asserted, “The middle class that went out to the streets feels that it’s paying for the two sectors I mentioned… They’re not always wrong.” (Hebrew text)

'People before Profits' Jerusalem, July 2011 (Gershom Gorenberg)

Let’s parse this. Last July, a few young Israelis, organizing through Facebook, started a tent encampment on the center island of a Tel Aviv boulevard. By August, one out of every 20 Israelis marched on the same night against the government’s economic policies—the equivalent of Occupy Wall Street bringing out 15 million Americans out to demonstrate.

According to the prime minister, those protesters’ unhappiness was aimed at Arabs and ultra-Orthodox Jews—or at least it should be aimed at them for freeloading while the middle class works. So please, protesters, stop chanting, “What’s the answer to privatization? Revolution!” Don’t demand to know why state-owned companies ended up in the hands of a small cadre of oligarchs. Stop noticing that the country that once had the lowest rate of inequality in the West now has one of the highest, nearly matching America’s. Don’t use the expression “piggish capitalism,” with the connotation of treif, for Netanyahu’s dogmatic neoliberalism. Just blame Arabs and the ultra-Orthodox. 

Some relevant background: Poverty is in fact endemic to Israel’s Arab and ultra-Orthodox communities. For very different reasons, both communities are socially segregated from mainstream Israel. They’re also ideologically segregated, outside the Zionist consensus. Prejudice against Arabs is widespread and, on the political right, unembarrassed. On the mostly secular left, the one culturally different group that it’s acceptable to dislike is the ultra-Orthodox.

Part of the resentment is, in fact, based on the community’s dependence on state funds, even as two-thirds of ultra-Orthodox men spend their prime years studying Talmud rather than working. Yet that resentment was decidedly not a theme of last summer’s upheaval. The protest movement, with tight message discipline, avoided Israel’s traditional tribal divisions.

For a prime minister to describe Arab poverty as an economic burden on other Israelis is classic blame-the-victim chutzpah. By virtually every measure, the Arab community has suffered decades of underfunding and discrimination. In Arab elementary schools, class size is nearly a fifth larger than in Jewish schools, according to the latest report from Sikkuy, an organization promoting Jewish-Arab equality. The proportion of young Jews enrolled in Israeli universities is nearly three times higher than the proportion of young Arabs. State grants to develop industry have bypassed Arab towns.

Less obviously, ultra-Orthodox poverty is also a creation of state policy, especially the policy of Netanyahu’s Likud party. As I’ve written elsewhere, the trend of ultra-Orthodox continuing to study Talmud into adulthood was the unexpected consequence of a 1949 law that gave state funding to the community’s schools. Young women could get teaching jobs and support their husbands for a few years of adult study.

But the trend escalated wildly after Likud leader Menachem Begin won his first electoral plurality in 1977. To form a government, he needed the ultra-Orthodox politicians as partners. The price included dropping any limit on the number of men who got draft exemptions if they studied Talmud instead of going to work, and providing state funds to help them do so—albeit in poverty. The system satisfies ultra-Orthodox leaders who want to keep their flock safely apart from secular society, but it’s an economic trap for their constituents. Netanyahu’s coalition is based on maintaining that system.

Meanwhile, though, the prime minister is ready to fan resentment of the two impoverished minorities. Netanyahu has been justifiably criticized for his alliance with Lieberman, whose platform is based on portraying Arab citizens as Israel’s misfortune. Now, it seems, the prime minister is willing to double down on the same method.

Or perhaps he’s learning from the Pharaoh of the Pesah story, who distracted his people from their oppression by urging them to “deal shrewdly” with a despised minority. I can only hope that this year the prime minister stayed awake long enough during the Seder to be reminded of what Jewish tradition says about that kind of politics.