“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

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More Necessary Stories satire:
For Whom the Pole Knells


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My new piece on the Labor Party is up at The American Prospect:

Sini died. My son spotted the square black-bordered obituary notice deep inside the newspaper. It was placed by Sini’s kibbutz. It referred to him as “Sini,” his nickname — “Chinaman” in loose translation, politically incorrect today but accepted when he got the name, somewhere so far back in the previous century that no one is around to remember when it happened. The nickname referred to his eyes, which had the Tartar look that occasionally occurs among Jews of Eastern European ancestry. The ad gave his real name, Arnan Azaryahu, in parenthesis. It said nothing of what he’d done in life. Those who need to know, know — those who were high up in the movement, the underground, the party. The death notice mirrored how he lived, between understatement and secrecy.

I was surprised by my own surprise at his death, and by how sad I was. When I interviewed Sini five years ago about the history of Israeli settlements, he was already 87. He spoke for four hours, with a deep voice and a clear memory, never getting out of the chair in the tiny kitchen of his kibbutz apartment, a few hundred meters from the Lebanese border — an old, slightly slumped man in the Spartan frontier dwelling of another era. I’d been told to go to him by those who remembered him as the shadowy aide of the Yisrael Galili. Galili’s official title in the 1960s and 70s was minister without portfolio; his actual job was advising three Labor Party prime ministers — Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin — on defense policy and party intrigue and quietly (always quietly) orchestrating settlement in the occupied territories. For me, Sini was a living connection to the inner sanctum of Labor in its days of power.

Read the rest here; come back to SoJo to comment.

Meanwhile, Barak has yet to move on evicting settlers from the so-called House of Dispute in Hebron. This is no surprise – it fits the pattern of settlement in Hebron for the past 40 years. Then again, there’s a particular ferociousness in the settlers’ statements and actions against eviction. My new piece in the American Prospect explains what’s happening:

…the militancy in Hebron is part of a wider mood among the most ideologically committed settlers. They want Israeli leaders and the public to be too scared to think about evacuating whole settlements as part of a peace agreement with the Palestinians. They seek strategic deterrence that will eliminate the political option of giving up land and of returning to a smaller and more democratic Israel. And they could be succeeding.

Read the full article here, and come back to SoJo to comment.

For the past week, though, all three have done their best to disabuse of such notions:

• John McCain finds himself behind in the polls, trying to design policy on economics, which he doesn’t understand, facing a debate for which he is not ready. What does our war hero do? Why, with heroic cool and elan, he panics. He calls off his campaign, sort of. He says he just won’t debate, because it wouldn’t be patriotic. Do you trust this man to answer the red phone at any time of day or night?
• Mofaz loses the Kadima primary to Tzipi Livni. The next day he announces he is taking a time-out from politics. In Israeli political terms, this announcement normally means spending a year or two doing something else, so that the public can forget why it voted against you. Within a couple of days, though, Mofaz was already leaking hints to the press that he meant a short vacation. His allies appealed the results of the primary, hoping to prevent Livni from getting the nod to form the next government. Turns out that Mofaz made his original announcement in a fit of exhaustion and pique. Fine. If that’s how the ex-general performs under political pressure, does anyone want him as the person deciding when to go to war? For that matter, if Livni makes him foreign minister, would you trust him not to insult his Syrian counterpart over a misconstrued remark?
• Barak tells Labor party Knesset members meeting with President Peres to recommend him to form the next government. But to be prime minister, one must be a Knesset member – and Barak isn’t. No matter, the general ordered his troops to make fools of themselves for the sake of his honor. Now, according to this morning’s Ha’aretz, “Defense minister and Labor Party chairman Ehud Barak will demand from…that he conduct the negotiations with Syria if she forms a government. Labor sources also say Barak will demand to be fully involved in all aspects of the talks with the Palestinians.” His qualifications for these tasks will apparently be his universally recognized success as prime minister negotiating with the Palestinians and Syria. Barak’s supposedly brilliant analytical abilities do not include an ability at self-evaluation.

Don’t get me wrong. It is possible that an ex-officer might be a good politician. It’s possible that a good doctor may also play a good game of baseball, or be a good administrator. Or not. It’s possible that someone with no military experience might also panic under pressure (see under: Ehud Olmert, Second Lebanon War). At the moment, military experience as such is an irrelevancy in considering a candidate.

Occasionally, pop culture offers the appropriate commentary on matters of state. To understand Shaul Mofaz’s feelings about Tzipi Livni winning the Kadima primary, view a snippet of this scene from She’s the Man, a remake of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night set in high school. (Sorry, there’s a block on embedding the clip.) The relevant bit here is at 4:18-4:36, after Viola scores the winning goal in the big soccer game. Watch the goalie in the orange uniform who failed to block the kick by the girl.

Ehud Barak seems to feel the same way about serving in a cabinet with Tzipi Livni as the boss. She’s not an ex-general, and she is a woman. How could she get picked as team captain? Barak’s Labor party is doing horrendously in polls of a three-way Livni-Netanyahu-Barak matchup. So why does he want to rush to elections? If he really thinks that Livni will do badly, he should want to give her a chance to show the job is too big for her. Ergo, he fears she will do well – but he doesn’t want to be on a team of which she’s captain.

Even if Livni puts together a cabinet, though, it will prove the limits of symbolic politics. You can have a woman premier, a woman chief justice, a woman speaker of the Knesset. But women still get paid less for the same work in the Israeli public service, as this report explains. Systemic change is a lot tougher than electing a single person. Have you heard Livni promise equal pay for equal work? I haven’t. Don’t get fooled by tokenism.

Yossi Sarid entered Israel’s parliament 34 years ago as one of two young, rising stars. The other was Ehud Olmert. Today, Olmert is prime minister, but the operative word here is “today.” Last week, the police recommended to prosecutors that Olmert be indicted for bribery, money laundering, and other forms of corruption too numerous for anyone outside the fraud squad to keep track of…

Sarid, on the other hand, resigned from the Knesset two years ago after a long, principled, and impassioned career… “I felt more than a small measure of apathy, if not to say despair, with the political system,” he told me last week, in the deep melodious voice that can still make a phone conversation hint at a stump speech. “I felt … that the system no longer mobilized the resources of my soul.”

The melancholy last acts of the two careers point to the malaise of Israeli politics. The system itself appears virtually bankrupt, lacking the basic asset of public trust and no longer offering a clear choice between competing ideas.

Read the whole article here, and return to South Jerusalem to comment.

But the record for slow political deaths surely belongs to Israel’s Labor Party. Labor was born in 1968 as a coalition of three Labor Zionist parties, and has been engaged in expiring slowly ever since. The central component of the party was Mapai, which for practical purposes founded the State of Israel. In the brutal light of history, one can see that Mapai began dying as soon as the state was born. As a party aimed achieving national independence, it became obsolete at that moment.

At times Mapai/Labor has looked for a new purpose, but without much enthusiasm or stick-to-itness. Instead, it has mostly stuck to guarding the privileges of the class that created the state, and of the organizations that had acquired vested political interests in the process of national liberation, such as the kibbutz movements. But the kibbutzim are privatizing into neighborhoods. Most of the secular, Ashkenazi Jews whose parents or grandparents believed in Labor Zionism are middle class Israelis who know as little about socialism as they know about Shinto.

When the party chose Ehud Barak to lead it again, it may have chosen the man who will put it securely in history books, to be misexplained by Israeli eighth graders, the local equivalent of the Whigs in the United States.

The latest poll in Ha’aretz showed that Labor under Barak will get 12-13 Knesset seats in the next election, about two-thirds of its dismal showing in the last couple of elections. This may actually be an extremely optimistic poll, though. At the moment, the only possible reason for voting Labor is that one has been doing so for so many years that one cannot break the habit, or has forgotten that voting is intended to influence policy, not just express tribal loyalties.

As Haim has pointed out, Barak has said virtually nothing about the major issues facing the country since being rechosen as Labor leader. But what could he say? For a few years, as it recovered from its post-Six-Day War hawkishness, Labor was the ostensible choice of wishy-washy doves. Back in 1997, Barak was chosen as party leader the first time on the thesis that he’d complete Yitzhak Rabin’s work of making peace with the Palestinians. He not only failed. He created a narrative for his failure that covered up his manifest inability to negotiate by claiming that peace with the Palestinians was virtually unachievable. As much as anyone can figure out, Barak is now to the right of Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni – no great doves themselves. But if one wants to vote to the right of Kadima, there are several other parties there, including the one led by Bibi Netanyahu, he of the fear-mongering and the Friedmanist economics. If one wants wishy-washy attempts at peace to go with Friedmanism, one can vote for Kadima. The question is not why Labor only gets 12 seats in the poll, but why the polls assign it that many. It’s still dying, but its misery may soon end.

Addendum: I began writing the post above at the airport on my way to South Africa. Since my plane actually left early, I didn’t have time to include one more element. So here’s the rest from Jo’burg airport.

Once upon a time, Labor also stood for socialism, or social democracy. Mapai built a socialist state before it had a state – health care for the workers, unions, employment bureaus – and completed the process soon after independence. Anyone – meaning any American troglodyte -  who wants to laugh at the word  “socialism” should talk an American-born Israeli who has faced a major medical crisis in Israel. In my case, the cost of my wife’s emergency C-section, her extended hospital stay, and my son’s 35 days in neo-natal intensive care was precisely zero. In the US, it would have shot through a standard pregnancy policy and cost us the house.

But Labor completed its transition to fundamentalist Friedmanism in the 1980s under Shimon Peres (that name again). The working class channels its justifiable economic resentments into nationalist fervor and nostalgia for Menachem Begin’s economic populism, which gave working people their own cars even if it bankrupted the country.

In 2006, in a brief attempt at rising from clinical death, Labor chose social democrat and union leader Amir Peretz as its leader. Peretz, it would appear, managed to pry some votes away from the Likud in poor towns where people remembered Bibi’s assault on the poor when he served as finance minister. That injection balanced out the party’s slow hemorrhage of votes and the tribal refusal of some Ashkenazim to vote for a Moroccan-born candidate.

Then Peretz sold out. Rather than insist on the Finance Ministry, he gave into the spartan ethic (established by Labor from the 60s onward) that only generals can be national leaders. To fill in his qualifications for prime minister, he accepted the defense portfolio and abandoned economic issues. The generals steered him and Ehud Olmert into the disaster of Lebanon. Social democracy as a limb of Labor ideology suffered permanent gangrene. The party now stands for nothing. Eventually, “nothing” will also be  its  total on election day.  In the meantime, Labor is  still dying.

“Ehud Barak will Talk More to the Media,” says the headline in today’s Ha’aretz (Hebrew edition). It’s a mark of the sad state of Israeli politics that it’s worth a headline when the leader of what ought to be the country’s progressive camp decides to talk to the press.

It’s hard to believe but, since regaining leadership of the Labor Party more than a year ago, Barak has said virtually nothing about the major policy issues of the day. He’s one of the three major contenders for the prime minister’s post in the next elections, yet he’s given the public little information about his thinking. We know his social policies, his foreign policy strategy, or his budget priorities. His message to the voting public has been “trust me because I’m Israel’s most decorated soldier and a proven leader.” But leader of what, and in which direction?

The result has been a steady decline in support for Labor–the latest polls show it winning a mere 14 seats in the next Knesset, five less than the miserable showing last time.

The country can’t afford to have a Labor party leader without a vision and without policy initiatives. The party has some good people in its second rank–Avishai Braverman, the former president of Ben-Gurion University and a former top official at the World Bank is one–but if its leader can’t lead the party in a clear direction, one that distinguishes it from the Kadima of Ehud Olmert and Tzippi Livni, then it will lose even its core public support. If Barak’s policies will be the same as Olmert’s, if he really thinks there’s no way to set the peace process on track and revise Israel’s budget to funnel more money into education and social welfare, he should say so out loud and resign his post.

To Barak’s credit, he’s presided over a large-scale rehabilitation of the IDF in the wake of the debacle of the Second Lebanon War. But that qualifies him to continue in the defense post, not to become prime minister.

So I’m waiting to see what Barak will say. Even though I have a sneaking suspicion that there won’t be much to hear.

Obama stopped through for two nights and a day, as if he were writing one of the New York Times travel pieces about how to spend 36 hours in some locale. At first glance, the trip was purely about photo-ops, gathering footage for later campaign ads that will air in south Florida. But there were some hints of real political content, as I explain in my new article at The American Prospect. Here’s one piece:

Hamas Walks It Back: On Wednesday morning, Israel Radio reported responses to Obama’s arrival, including this one: “A Hamas spokesman said, ‘The American senator is trying to reach the White House via Tel Aviv, at the expense of the Palestinians.’”

The immediate meaning of that comment is that John McCain best stop arguing that Hamas has endorsed Obama. In April, McCain leapt on a report that Hamas political adviser Ahmed Yousef had said “actually we like Mr. Obama, and we hope that he will win.” McCain’s campaign also used the quote in a fundraising appeal. Even if the initial report was accurate, Obama has since succeeded in changing Hamas’s mind.

The slightly deeper significance of the spokesman’s criticism is that Hamas, typically for a hardline group, thinks in zero-sum terms. Perhaps believing Obama’s domestic critics, Hamas originally thought he had a low commitment to Israel, and was therefore pro-Palestinian. McCain was happy to use Hamas as character witness. Now the movement has see-sawed the opposite way: Obama is pro-Israel, and thus bad for Palestinians.

But in promising a new diplomatic direction, Obama is arguing that Israeli-Palestinian peace is win-win. Even the more pragmatic elements in Hamas don’t yet speak this language. So Hamas is no character witness, for or against Obama. McCain’s real error was treating the organization’s judgment as relevant.

Read the full article, with more political subtexts of Obamania in Israel, here.

This week’s key misunderstood news story from the Looking Glass Land of the West Bank is that the Defense Ministry is about to approve settlement at a spot called Maskiot, near the Jordan River. On first glance, that’s bad because it means that the government is abandoning its freeze on new settlements. At second glance, the freeze on new settlements is a joke – but Maskiot is really bad news. It shows again that the government consistently, reflexively, obsessively gives in to the most extreme elements of the settlement movement.

A couple of years ago, then-defense minister Amir Peretz approved constuction at Maskiot, then backed down under American pressure. It looked as if the government freeze on new settlements, in place since the mid-90s, remained in force, thanks to Uncle Sam. But existing settlements went right on growing. This week, the Interior Ministry reported that the settlement population (not counting East Jerusalem) is 290,000. That’s up from 270,000 or so when plans for Maskiot were last stopped.

And while the government hasn’t approved new settlements, it’s done close to nothing about the “unapproved outposts.” That bland term refers to a hundred small settlements established since the official freeze. Despite the freeze, despite the fact that many are they are built on private Palestinian land, despite Israel’s obligations under the road map to freeze settlement and take down outposts, they’ve been hooked up to the electricity grid and to water lines, and guarded by soldiers, and left in place. The Housing Ministry has helped build them. Those are the conclusions of the government-commissioned Sasson Report.

So now Barak appears ready to approve Maskiot. It’s in the Jordan Rift area, which the Labor Party has treated as kosher for settlement since the fall of 1967, under the Allon Plan. Labor’s idea of what’s kosher is like that of a person who eats crab but won’t touch pork because it’s a symbol. A Jordan Rift settlement is as illegal under international law as a settlement next to Ramallah, and is as much an obstacle to peacekeeping.

According to the inimitable Isabel Kershner, Maskiot is part of a deal between Barak and settler leaders: In return for the go-ahead, some unapproved outposts will be quietly evacuated. In other words, the settlers will get an payoff for defying the government: Maskiot in place of outposts. That’s not law enforcement; it’s the equivalent of paying protection money.

So Barak will provide a settlement. And will the settlers keep their side of the bargain, and quietly evacuate outposts?

Here’s one hint: This week Nadav Shragai – the Ha’aretz reporter who often writes like a spokesman for the Council of Settlements in Judea, Samaria and Gaza – provided a feature on Ze’ev Hever, a.k.a. Zambish. Hever, a convicted member of the 1980s Jewish terror underground, is the head of Amana, the organizational child of Gush Emunim. Amana builds settlements. Hever worked closely with Ariel Sharon to expand the settlement map. Outside of Sharon himself, he may have done more than anyone else to move Israelis in the West Bank – though admittedly there’s lots of competition.

Now Hever is thinking of moving out of Kiryat Arba, Shragai reports. Young fanatics are slashing his tires and posting posters denouncing him for negotiating on the outposts. The young fanatics believe the old fanatic isn’t fanatical enough.

Yesterday the army did make a minor gesture toward controlling the outpost settlers: It removed a bus being used as an ersatz mobile home from Adei Ad, an outpost near Shilo, between Ramallah and Nablus. Settler extremists reportedly retaliated with a series of violent incidents. Settlers from Yitzhar, near Nablus, tossed stones at Palestinian cars on a main road. Ha’aretz reported:

Regarding the trailer’s removal, a Yitzhar resident said: “The police and the Civil Administration think they can come and evacuate like a ‘hit and run.’ So we decided that for every attempt to evacuate, we would exact a price throughout the area. The tiniest evacuation will result in incidents all day long, so it will be clear we don’t give up easily.”

Meanwhile, also at Yitzhar, the army has dismissed the settlement security coordinator. According to Ma’ariv (dead tree edition), the man had advance knowledge that a member of the settlement had built a home-made rocket and were going to fire it, apparently emulating Hamas et al in Gaza. The security coordinator did nothing about it, and refused to help in the investigation. The settlement doesn’t accept the dismissal, and has retaliated by throwing out the soldiers there to protect them – a version of “I’ll hold my breath and turn blue till you give in.”

Israel justifiably demands that the Palestinian Authority crack down on armed extremists in the areas it administers. This in the PA’s interest: A government is supposed to have a monopoly on force.

But Jewish tradition says that when you’re giving money to the poor, “the poor of your own city come first.” When you demand the rule of law, the extremists of your own city should also come first. If Barak signs off on Maskiot, he’ll prove yet again that he doesn’t get this.