South Jerusalem

Elections? Ooh, That’s Scary. Let’s Not.

Gershom Gorenberg — Wed, 09 May 2012 15:46:16 +0000

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.

Shouting Points: The Stand With Us Method

Gershom Gorenberg — Mon, 07 May 2012 18:59:32 +0000

Gershom Gorenberg

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.

On each page, in large type, Israel: Pocket Facts provides a few easy-to-memorize shouting points with which pro-Israel students can respond to the equally simplistic slogans of anti-Israel students while everyone else wanders off in disgust. Some of the factoids are footnoted. The authors apparently hope that students won’t follow the footnotes to the sources, or learn anything else about Israel, or think with complexity about the issues.

So, for instance, there’s a page about why Palestinians left the territory that became Israel in 1948. It lists five reasons, including “to escape the war,” and “Arab leaders encouraged the masses to get out of the way of the advancing Arab armies.” If you read to the bottom, you get to “In some cases Israeli troops forced Arab residents from their homes in sensitive, strategic zones.” All five are footnoted to Benny Morris’s The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949—without page numbers.

In essence, the booklet repeats the classic Israeli account of Palestinian flight, adds a quarter of an acknowledgment of expulsions, and cites the very book that shattered the classic account beyond repair. …

Read the rest here.

Please Help The American Prospect

Gershom Gorenberg — Thu, 03 May 2012 19:19:10 +0000

Gershom Gorenberg

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.

Argument Is a Jewish Ideal. With No Exemption for Israeli Policy

Gershom Gorenberg — Thu, 03 May 2012 13:07:51 +0000

Gershom Gorenberg

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..

Let’s Not Even Pretend Any More

Gershom Gorenberg — Thu, 03 May 2012 13:02:59 +0000

Gershom Gorenberg

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.

Benzion Netanyahu’s Legacies

Gershom Gorenberg — Tue, 01 May 2012 17:29:21 +0000

Gershom Gorenberg

My new piece is up at the Daily Beast:

Honesty is difficult, perhaps distasteful, in talking of man just now dead. Honesty nonetheless requires saying that Benzion Netanyahu would be briefly eulogized as a historian, and more briefly recalled as a footnote to forgotten Zionist rivalries, were it not for his other legacy: the son whose politics, view of history, and resentments he shaped.

Netanyahu, who died Monday at age 102, was a specialist in the history of the Jews of Spain. In his books, he asserted a revisionist thesis: Spanish Jews converted to Christianity willingly, not under duress. Their willing assimilation did not reduce their neighbors’ hatred of them. The Inquisition’s pursuit of conversos was not based on religion, nor was Spain’s expulsion of Jews who remained Jewish. Both persecutions expressed economic resentment and racial hate toward Jews. And, he wrote, “Just as the Jews of Germany failed to foresee Hitler’s rise to power… so the Jews of Spain failed to notice… the mountainous wave which was approaching to overwhelm them.”

I leave it to scholars of Spanish and Jewish history to debate whether Benzion Netanyahu’s depiction fits facts or explains them well. But I hazard to say that it is breathtaking example of how historians can write about the present when they portray the past, of how history can be autobiography. Netanyahu explicitly describes fifteenth-century Spain as a dress rehearsal for twentieth-century Jewish life in Germany and in his own native Poland. Jews who believed they could successfully assimilate were deceiving themselves, because gentile hatred was racial, implacable, unconcerned with the optical illusion of religion. Spanish Jews were as willfully blind to the danger as were Polish Jews who ignored the warnings of Netanyahu’s ideological mentor, Vladimir Jabotinsky. If Germany and Poland repeated Spain, then all of Jewish history was a series of repetitions, a “history of holocausts,” as Benzion told the New Yorker’s David Remnick in 1998.

As loyal son and prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu regularly repeats this doctrine. …

Read the rest here.

Never Before v. Never Again (Professorial Pride Dept.)

Gershom Gorenberg — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 11:43:35 +0000

My former student Sumit Galhotra has an excellent piece up at HuffPo on marking Armenian remembrance day in Jerusalem:

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.

Other Nights — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

Haim Watzman — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 07:44:10 +0000

Haim Watzman

illustration by Avi Katz

“This night is no different from other nights,” says Pharaoh, “True, on previous nights I have had a son, and on this night I do not. But this is not relevant to what I must do now.”

“This time sounds different from other times,” says Mozart, “for in previous times I did not have a son, and now I do.”

What time is it? I write this two days before the Seder night. It will reach its readers a few days before Memorial Day for Israel’s fallen soldiers.

It is not a good time, I tell the friend who sits down next to me on the row of chairs outside the sanctuary. I have a glossed Haggadah open on my lap. I am trying to prepare for this year’s Seder, to think of how to retell, once more, the Exodus from Egypt and the crossing of the sea. Pesach is next week and my son Niot, who was a soldier, will have been dead for a year. The earth has circled the sun a single time since the last Seder, which was the last night he was with us. We are cleaning and preparing once more to eat matzah and bitter herbs and tell again the story of how we came out of Egypt. Two and a half weeks later we will again remember the fallen soldiers. But this year is different, for there is a newly fallen soldier to remember, and he is my son.

“This night is different,” says Alexander Pavlovsky, first violinist of the Jerusalem Quartet, “because Mark Kopytman is dead.”

“Shall I prepare the palace for mourning?” asks the chamberlain, weeping, for his son too is dead.

“You will not,” says Pharaoh. “To mourn is to repeat, rehearse, to wallow in death. In the face of catastrophe, we must not look back. Saddle my horse and muster the army.”

“D Minor?” asks the copyist, staring at Mozart’s staves. “But D Minor is the key of tragedy, of suffering. Your first son has just been born. Why this key?”

I cannot focus on the Haggadah nor on the huge backlog of work. Neither Ilana nor I have much strength for cleaning. There is a concert at the YMCA, I tell Ilana. The Jerusalem Quartet is playing Mozart, Kopytman, and Shostakovich. Just drop everything and go, says Ilana. It’s already ten after eight. I hop on my bike and speed down to the Y.

“We will now play for you,” says Alexander Pavlovsky, first violin of the Jerusalem Quartet, “Mark Kopytman’s String Quartet number four, which we have played many times before because of our long collaboration with this greatest of living Israeli composers. But now we will play it again and it will be different because Mark Kopytman is dead.”

A performance of chamber music is much like a Seder, I think to myself. A work of music is like a text read in different times and places, endlessly reinterpreted by players and listeners. Mozart’s string quartets were inspired by Haydn’s, and in turn inspired those of Beethoven, and later Shostakovich and Kopytman, the man who just died. If the Jerusalem Quartet played only newly-composed works at each concert, its audience would have no context, no tradition on which to base its experience of listening. If it played only Haydn’s quartets, it could never bring its audience to look forward and experience the new, rather than just experience anew. Kopytman’s quartet sounds weird and dissonant; even experienced audiences have trouble parsing it. But the same audience might delude itself into thinking it understands Mozart’s simply because melodies and structures that are familiar in form may seem, illusively, to be transparent.

The text of the Haggadah is like a string quartet. It has four movements, it goes slow and fast, varies from major to minor and modulates from key to key. It is interpreted and embellished differently in each year and by each family, for each Seder night is a different night. It can be puzzling and infuriating, seem beautiful in one place while dissonant in another. Yet if its puzzles and dissonances lead us to change the text or abridge it, we would be like a string quartet that plays only those themes and motives it likes from Mozart’s or Shostakovtich’s or Kopytman’s work, permitting itself to revise those parts it thinks the composer got wrong.

My Haggadah’s text has not changed this year, but it is entirely different, because last year was the last time I read it with Niot, and this year is the first year I will read it without him.

Remembering a fallen soldier is like listening to a recording of a concert. The abstraction of the music fills the ear but the eye cannot see and the arms cannot embrace.

On the night of the first Seder, Pharaoh has no time for texts or compositions. He hears no music; memories are a waste of time. His gaze is directed forward, not back, as he leads his army into the desert. His dead son was not so much a son but a sign, a symbol of the future of his dynasty and of the stability of his state. The fleeing slaves threaten the very foundations of his kingdom. Another heir can be sired, but without the slaves who will perform his empire’s hard labor?

The third movement of Mozart’s string quartet in D Minor, one of six inspired by and dedicated to Haydn, is a minuet, as the third movements of classical-period string quartets are supposed to be. But the minor key renders melancholy what should be a stately dance for a celebratory occasion. The dissonance between the nature of the dance and its sound is jarring. It is the sound of a dark and different night. But then comes the middle section, in which the dark clouds give way to a light and jumpy melody that sounds like children playing. But then the night returns, as if the children have died. Tears well up in my eyes. Was Mozart imagining that his newborn son might not survive?

On the Seder night we speak of four children. I have four children. This year, one is dead. Niot had wisdom, mostly of a commonsensical sort, and in his younger years he could be challenging and disobedient. He had a simple and pure love of other people and he asked many, many questions. On the afternoon after Seder night, I spotted him lying on a couch, reading a book. He did not often read books. He did not like string quartets, either. That night I drove him to a bus stop and let him off and said good-by, and did not see him again conscious and alive. This Seder night we will again speak of four children. Every year on Seder night, and not on Seder night, we will have four children. And one will be dead.

And on Memorial Day, two and a half weeks afterward, we no longer mourn only the sons of others. We mourn our son as well. He is buried in the Mt. Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem. The tulip bulbs his older sister planted on the grave have sprouted and are now starting to bloom.

To the best of my knowledge, no one in Egypt today mourns Pharaoh’s son. His grave is unknown. His dynasty ended long ago. The ancient kingdom of Egypt crumbled and the people who live in that land today speak a different tongue, worship a different God, and listen to different music. Pharaoh pushed forward. He had a kingdom to build, wars to win. There are no tulips. But each year the Jews take a drop from their wine glasses and set it aside, in memory of Pharaoh’s oldest son.

Kopytman’s string quartet is unexpected, at times lyrical, at times jarring. Pavlovsky and his three partners lunge, grimace, and grin as they play. It is a signature piece of theirs and they have not recorded it. It can be heard only when they play it with their arms and bodies. They first played it under the composer’s direction. But now he is an abstraction, and they continue to play without him.

A Seder is like the performance of a string quartet. The composer is long dead but the notes remain and we may play them as we see fit and as we feel best. On Memorial Day the players are dead as well. We can only recall the music in our minds. The music may be happy, but it does not lighten our hearts.

We continue to perform our Seder without Niot. We look backward, and forward, like a composer.

We now live in other nights.

******************************

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

Chill. The Jews Aren’t Voting Republican.

Gershom Gorenberg — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 13:03:05 +0000

Faith-based policy, nativism, and Ayn Randian economics will not create a Jewish electoral shift.

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.

Bibi as Pharaoh

Gershom Gorenberg — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 10:57:51 +0000

To distract attention from his economic policies, Netanyahu blames the victims

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.