My new column is up at The American Prospect:

Bashar al-Assad has not yet fallen. I note this only because of the tone of inevitability in some news reports on Syria’s civil war. The downfall of Tunisia’s Ben Ali, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, and Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi may be no more predictive than a roulette ball falling on red in the last three spins. Arguably, the popular convulsion in the Middle East began not in Tunisia in late 2010 but in Teheran in mid-2009, when the Iranian regime—Assad’s patron—crushed a popular revolution and erased the immense hopes it had raised.

Still, it would be foolish to bet heavily on Assad’s long-term survival as Syria’s leader. His forces may have retaken rebel-held suburbs of Damascus this week, but armed rebels holding suburbs of a capital even for a few days is the political equivalent of a tubercular cough.

Wagering on when the regime will crumble or what will replace it is equally risky. Assad has already defied Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s December prediction that the Syrian regime had only “weeks” left. Assad and the Alawite minority’s rule could last into 2013 or beyond but are “doomed in the long run,” writes Joshua Landis, an American expert and editor of the Syria Comment blog— an evaluation made more damning by Landis’s pro-Assad reputation. Then again, a Lebanese expert suggested to me this week that the Alawite-led army might try to follow the Egyptian example, sacrificing the dictator so that it can remain the real power. A Sunni takeover, perhaps by the Muslim Brotherhood, is also possible—or a sectarian war of all against all.

But this is certain: When a tubercular cough racks Syria, the Middle East shakes. The country’s location and its entanglement in other people’s politics guarantee that. The war inside Syria is already having an impact outside. Its outcome will have stronger effects, which in turn will force America to adjust its policies in the region. Here’s a brief and partial rundown on where things stand in the region:

Lebanon: “Cold war” is the term used by Lebanese experts to describe the country’s politics. The pro-Iranian, pro-Syrian front led by Hezbollah is on one side; the pro-Western and pro-Saudi front is on the other. Over the last ten months, their verbal sparring has gotten much nastier, says political scientist Hilal Khashan of Beirut’s American University.

The hot war in Syria has also splashed over the border. The Free Syrian Army rebels who have held the Syrian town of Zabadani are based just across the border in Lebanon; Syrians wounded by government forces have been treated in Lebanon. Meanwhile, Hezbollah snipers are reportedly fighting on the government’s side in Syria, and the Shiite organization has allegedly tried to apprehend Syrian opposition figures in Lebanon—albeit keeping a low profile to avoid embarrassing the Beirut government. …

Read the rest here.

illustration by Avi Katz

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Dear Ever More Desperate,

Our Sages said that God sends tribulations to righteous men so that their merits may be to the benefit of all of Israel. You may consider yourself blessed that the Creator has chosen you as a vehicle for sanctifying his Chosen People.

Nevertheless, like Abraham our Father, you must meet the challenges sent your way and not give in. I suggest fasting on Mondays and Thursdays and ritual immersion three times a day, before meals.

In humble submission,

Rabbi Baruch Rosencrantz

*

To the respected Torah scholar, Rabbi Rosencrantz, may he live a good and long life, amen:

I must express my heartfelt gratitude that a scholar and spiritual guide of your stature has deigned to concern himself with a worm like me, and to reply so swiftly to my entreaty.

I received your reply at sundown and, overjoyed, wished to immediately begin the course of action you prescribed. With my mind conscious only of God’s blessings to me and my poor family, my feet took me directly to our neighborhood mikveh, the ritual bath that God in his mercy has given us so that we may be cleansed of our impurities. Determined to face bravely the tests that God has imposed on me, I strode straight into the changing room, undressed, and headed for the pool of living water. Did not Rabbi Akiva, the wisest of our Sages, say: “Fortunate are you O Israel! Before whom do you purify yourselves? And who purifies you? Your Father in Heaven! As it is said: “I will sprinkle upon you pure water and you shall become purified.” I closed my eyes, said the required blessing, and plunged in.

Then I heard Mrs. Schechter scream, first in one ear, then the other.

The Modesty Patrol was called in and Moishe Bach beat me up. Only by going down on my knees and telling him that I am under your spiritual care was I able to convince him not to call the police. Mrs. Schechter has in the meantime told my wife that my children will be kicked out of their schools and that the minimarket up the street will no longer serve me. I am ashamed to show my face at the kolel.

Rabbi Rosencrantz, what am I to do?

Suicidal

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Dear Suicidal,

The Holy One Blessed Be He expects us to turn over the words of the Torah time and time again to discover his counsel. Did not Rabban Gamliel himself bathe in the bathhouse of Aphrodite, saying “I have not come into Aphrodite’s domain, she has come into my domain?”

What I mean is, you must keep up your studies. Just take a different bus.

With expectations of Israel’s immediate redemption,

Rabbi Baruch Rosencrantz

******

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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.

As a Washington Post fact-checker has noted, Santorum staked out a position more extreme than the official Israeli stance. After conquering the West Bank in 1967, Israel did annex East Jerusalem (a move that no other country has recognized). But the Israeli Foreign Ministry describes the rest of the West Bank as “disputed” territory, not as part of Israel. The explicit reason that even hawkish Israeli politicians haven’t followed through on their desire to annex the West Bank is that they don’t want to offer citizenship to its Palestinian residents.

But Santorum isn’t just ignorant of the positions of his supposed ally. He doesn’t know that it does matter when a country gained ground in war. Post-World War II international law, anchored in the U.N. Charter, bans expansion through conquest. Resolution 242, the Security Council’s November 1967 decision on the Arab-Israeli conflict, refers explicitly to “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.” The man who would conduct America’s foreign policy hasn’t heard about this.

Worse, he doesn’t know the difference between nationality and citizenship. He has missed the whole concept of ethnic nationalism—of people who share a language and a culture, regard themselves as a national community and want self-determination. For Santorum, someone who has Israeli citizenship can’t be a Palestinian. By the same logic, there are no Kurds, and no Kurdish question in Turkey, Iraq, or Syria. The Basques have vanished. The conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots is beyond comprehension in Santorum’s world. …

Read the rest at the American Prospect; comment there or come back to SoJo to vote.

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.

Let’s start with “Mutts.” Jack is a teenager in Dodgeville, a name that evokes small-town America (according to Wikipedia, the “greater Dodgeville area” in Iowa County, Wisconsin, has a population of 6,529). His Dad, who likes to set up a makeshift camp on the front lawn and drink beers with his friend Big Ed while listening to whatever ball game he can find on the radio, has brought home a Labrador from the dog pound that he intends to breed with Big Ed’s bloodhound to produce the perfect dog.

He has a theory about this: the best in all species spring from a mingling of common stock, not the congress of blue bloods. “Look at the great ones,” he likes to say. “They’re mutts, always mutts. Spartacus, DaVinci, Lincoln, Babe Ruth . . . That’s nothing but a pack of orphans, bastards, and slaves. Yet they’ve made their mark, goddammit.” To survive in this godforsaken world, he claims, to really compete and succeed, you need some dirt under your fingernails, a little hunger in your gut.

What prevents this story from being just another small town tale is its internality. We see the story through Jack’s eyes, even though he hardly speaks. While the narrator doesn’t offer us Jack’s explicit thoughts on this, we sense that Dad’s philosophy of rearing his son parallels his theory of breeding. The abortive attempt to romance the Lab and the bloodhound end up telling us a lot about Jack and his life without telling us anything directly. We feel Jack’s life from within. Subtly, Riordan makes what seems at first a stock character into the entire world that is an individual human being.

This is exactly what Kaminsky fails to do. As with the other two stories, my first impression almost led me to stop reading at the start. Australian-born Dina lives in Haifa. Bombs are going off—it’s the height of the Second Intifada—and she fears for the life of her young son. She’s married to David, a tough Israeli who says macho things like “People forget how many wars we’ve had. An Israeli woman would take it all in her stride. It’s all part of life here. The kid only reacts to your overreaction; you’re the one making him nervous. You want to run back to your so-called peaceful Australia, hide among the goyim?” On top of all this, Dina is the daughter of Holocaust survivors.

It’s a set of characters and situation we’ve seen countless times in fiction, but Kaminsky adds nothing new. Compare and contrast the Holocaust and its Jews to modern Israel and its Jews has a pedigree in Jewish and Israeli literature that goes back as far as World War II itself. So is the gendered presentation Kaminsky gives us. True, this is a novel excerpt and perhaps in some other place the author takes us beyond the stereotypes. But all we have is character and narrative. There is no twist of style that takes us into these hackneyed stereotypes to understand their souls.

Let me be honest. When writers write fiction about writing, I usually gag. Not always. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is one of my favorite novels. But few authors have what it takes to paint themselves three-dimensionally. The act of imagination nearly always demands the opposite, getting away from oneself. Too many writers seem to think that their troubles with writer’s block, or worse with getting grants, is something that those of us who live out in the real world can and should sympathize with.

So, as I said, when “Recognition” began this way, I almost stopped: “Dear Applicant: We have received your application for a Fellowship.”

It was the strike-out in the next paragraph that caught my eye. What follows that unpromising first sentence is a series of versions of the protagonists “Statement of Plans” about the novel, or rather “life box” she is seeking funding to write.

Sheehan tells her story indirectly. We see the protagonist only through her desperate efforts to compose an artist’s statement that will get her money. It’s a statement that is, time after time, dishonest, because she’s trying to write what she thinks the judges want. Yet, by the end, we know this woman. We feel her desperation, we feel her frustration as she seeks to fit her vision into the coffin that the application demands that she build around her inspiration.

In her book on Shakespeare’s sonnets, Helen Vendler says that the purpose of a poem is to recreate in the reader or listener the precise emotional state that the author seeks to convey. It’s not an exhaustive standard, but it’s an important one, one I sought to meet in my recent army story, “Winter”. Riordan and Sheehan achieve that. Kaminsky doesn’t.

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. Under the convention, an occupying military power is an “usufructuary”—meaning it can use the fruits of occupied land but must safeguard property and resources. (The usufructuary of an apple tree could pick the apples but not chop the tree down.) More basically, the suit said, the convention requires the military commander who rules occupied territory to act for the good of the local inhabitants, not for the occupier’s economic interests. Prima facie, carving out West Bank rock for Israeli profit breaks that rule.

Implicitly, the case pointed to wider issues. Officially, the West Bank has been under temporary military rule awaiting a diplomatic accord on its future since Israel conquered it in 1967. The policy that most obviously contradicts this official status of limbo is the building of Israeli settlements. But Israel has also made the West Bank a captive market for its products, even as it restricts Palestinian industry. Palestinian firms have not been allowed to join Israel and Jordan in extracting potash and bromide from the mineral-rich waters of the Dead Sea. And Palestinians buy cement (a manufactured good) from Israel, while Israeli firms extract gravel (a raw material) from West Bank quarries.

Beinisch seemed like just the justice to challenge this arrangement. …

Read the rest here.

illustration by Avi Katz

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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: 1. Settlements and settler violence against Palestinians are not “domestic affairs” because the West Bank is not part of Israel. There’s an argument between Israel and the rest of the world about East Jerusalem, but Israel itself rules the rest of the West Bank under laws of military occupation, not as part of the state. 2. The statement acknowledges that the future of the West Bank needs to be discussed in talks with the Palestinians – thereby contradicting in the second clause what is fallaciously asserted in the first clause (that the settlements are a domestic Israeli issue). 3. And most important: There is a long history of regimes asserting that the international community should not “interfere in their internal affairs” or those of their allies. The phrase is used most often by regimes with which decent people do not like to be identified, and with which decent countries are not proud of doing business. Like Lieberman’s praise of Russia’s elections, this comment places Israel in bad company.
• The New York Times invited Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to write an article for its opinion pages. Netanyahu adviser Ron Dermer wrote back to decline the offer on the grounds that the oped page was biased against Israel. Yup. Offered the chance to balance what the prime minister’s office claims is unfair commentary on his policies, Netanyahu said no because he wouldn’t appear on a page that doesn’t have balance. Netanyahu is supposed to be a master of hasbarah (Heb. n.: propaganda, bull) but he simply ceded the podium. Dermer objected to columnist Tom Friedman’s assertion that applause for Netanyahu when he addressed Congress was purchased by the Israel lobby. But Netanyahu is unwilling to face the wider audience of the Times, which cannot be accused of being bought. At first glance, Netanyahu and his advisers gave into childish petulance. If we assume a more adult, reasoned choice, they decided to plead nolo contendere to the criticisms made on the Times oped page rather than risk new criticism based on the inevitable weakness of their defense of Netanyahu’s policies.
• Representative Steve Rothman, Democrat of New Jersey, issued a statement that attacked Friedman for the same column. “I gave Prime Minister Netanyahu a standing ovation, not because of any nefarious lobby, but because it is in America’s vital national security interests to support the Jewish State of Israel and it is right for Congress to give a warm welcome to the leader of such a dear and essential ally,” he said. U.S. News reports that the second largest set of organizational and organizational-linked donations to Rothman since 2009 have come from Norpac, which identifies itself as “the largest pro-Israel PAC.” That obviously doesn’t mean Rothman’s applause was bought; he may have meant it sincerely and his sincerity may be what convinces Norpac to give him money. But Rothman wasn’t just applauding Israel, he was applauding a particular Israeli leader whose policies include continued Israeli rule over a disenfranchised population (that is, extreme ethnic discrimination), supporting legislative attacks on basic democratic principles, and extreme free-market economics. I assume that despite Rothman’s American patriotism – or precisely because of it – a Democratic congressman from Jersey would refrain from leaping to his feet to applaud an American leader who had similar policies. Reading Rothman, we can choose two versions. Either Netanyahu has fooled him, or he thinks he can fool the public. And either way, it shows that bad hasbarah (Heb. n.: bull) can be conducted from Washington as well as Jerusalem.

Those are my candidates. Feel free to vote.

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.” The reason for their wrath, according to the flood of Israeli news reports of the eventful night, was rumors that the police and army were about to carry out Israeli Supreme Court orders to evacuate a small settlement outpost, Ramat Gilad, built in violation of the laws in force in the West Bank.

From Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu down, Israeli officials responded as if the confrontations represented an unprecedented internal assault on the state, the rule of law, and Israel’s internal cohesion. After an emergency meeting with cabinet ministers and top army and police commanders, Netanyahu declared, “We have a democracy in this country. … No one is allowed to break the law. No one is allowed to attack Israel Defense Forces soldiers.” The head of the army’s Central Command, responsible for the West Bank, said that “in 30 years in the service, I’ve never seen hatred like this from Jews toward our soldiers.” In a press statement, Defense Minister Ehud Barak declared that “homegrown terror … will not be tolerated.”

In short, Netanyahu, Barak, and colleagues were shocked, shocked to find that settlers were breaking the law and that the extreme right can attack the state. In fact, only the details—attacking a division commander and his deputy, breaking into a base—are new. Otherwise, there is plenty of precedent for the extreme right’s behavior. In a wider historical view, settler radicalism has been fostered by Israeli government officials and bodies since the occupation of the West Bank began in 1967. The state is under attack by its own creation. …

Read the rest here.

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.

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