My new column is up at the Daily Beast:

“Don’t look,” said my friend Alon. “But the former Shin Bet chief just sat down at the table to our right.”

I gazed intently into my soy latte and then, without moving my head, squinted over in the direction of said table.

illustration by Avi Katz

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

More Necessary Stories satire:
For Whom the Pole Knells


And lots more Necessary Stories here!

Necessary Stories Live!

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.

illustration by Avi Katz

The Niot Project, established by our family in Niot’s memory, in partnership with the Society for the Advancement of Education, Jerusalem, offers comprehensive assistance to Israeli teenagers with learning disabilities and their families. For more information, see The Niot Project on the SAE website.




See also:
The Day of His Birth (on SoJo)
June 6, 2011

Links to more Necessary Stories columns