illustration by Avi Katz

*

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

*

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

******

Links to more Necessary Stories columns

Necessary Stories Live!

My profile of Sari Nusseibeh and his new book are up on the website of The Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s a pleasure to see my byline in the paper again—I served as its Israel correspondent for many years. My replacement, friend, and neighborMatthew Kalman, does a fine job there now.

Peter Gray came to my youngest daughter’s school last night to talk about why I should just relax and let my daughter play her way through her adolescence.

About fifteen months ago, Misgav, now 15, asked to transfer to the Sudbury School in Jerusalem. The school, located a short walk from our home, operates on the model of the Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts. That means, in short, that the kids run the school. There are no course requirements, the kids only study if and what they want to. Staff exists to facilitate what the kids want, not determine what they should learn. Play is considered no less, perhaps more valuable, than formal classes. The school enrolls children from the ages of 4 through 18 and any activity or lesson is likely to include children of a wide variety of ages.

Gray became acquainted with Sudbury when, more than 30 years ago, he decided to send his son Scott there. Scott is now a staff member at the original Sudbury school and also spoke to us last night. A psychologist at Boston College, Peter conducted research about the school and became one of its major advocates, as can be seen on his blog.

Misgav, who just did not fit into regular school frameworks, is flourishing at her new school. Ilana and I are pleased to see how she is developing responsibility and interests of her own, rather than ones imposed on her from outside. But it does take a lot of patience on our part. It’s not easy to get used to the fact that Misgav is not studying normal high school subjects in the formal way that her parents and siblings studied them in other schools.

I am, however, skeptical of Gray’s claim—seconded by the school staff here in Jerusalem and in other like schools—that this type of school is the best kind of school for all children. I have three other children and I have seen two of them respond well to the frameworks imposed by traditional schools and to the academic expectations that these schools have made of them. True, they’ve also struggled with and rebelled against these requirements at times, and have suffered under a lot of incompetent teachers. But the specific problems of the Israeli school system does not mean that traditional education as a concept is wrong.

Fortunately, one of South Jerusalem’s great amenities is its diversity—among them, its diversity of schools. Each of our children has attended a different one—indeed, each one seems to have needed something different from a school. And each is succeeding his her or his own way. The right way for Misgav to learn is to play her way through high school—and we’re delighted that there’s a place close by where she can do that.

Vitali Friedland and Udi Rotschild in The Dragon's Beloved at the Khan

But now I’m glad we didn’t learn that lesson. We tore ourselves away from the television’s images of the attack on Gaza to head for the Khan theater’s production of a new comedy, The Dragon’s Beloved, and good thing that we did.

Michael Gurevitch, the theater’s artistic director and the playwright behind The Dragon’s Beloved, has in recent years made Jerusalem’s only professional reparatory company into a real pleasure. Each time we go we come out with the feeling that the actors really had a good time on stage and that they like working together. There’s a sense of common purpose and labor that often seems to be missing from the work of the large Tel Aviv theaters.

Gurevitch has written and directed a series of plays composed in collaboration with the actors, most of them comedies with a sting to them. The Dragon’s Beloved is a reworking of the Orpheus myth. A member of the audience with graying hair by the name of Vitzman (Erez Shafrir) is called up to the stage and the actors begin presenting his life—not as he remembers it, but as it perhaps should have been. Vitzman is estranged from his wife, whom he met in his youth after spying on her through binoculars from his apartment window. The cast—his and his wife’s younger selves, three former lovers who keep her, like Hades, in thrall in the darkness, and a harlequin demon—Hermes, Eurydice’s escort on the road from hell, played to perfection by Vitali Friedland—teach Vitzman that he must not look back to the wife of his lost youth but accept her as she is now, in her and his old age.

This is the kind of theater that could never be film—it depends on a playfulness, immediacy, and sense of the unreal that would be impossible to achieve on a screen. Gurevitch is a master of creating a world of illusion out of the simplest props, sets, and dramatic situations.

The only thing I sometimes find lacking in Gurevitch’s work is a depth of theme. The Dragon’s Beloved is a case in point. The reconciliation of an estranged elderly couple is touching, and the message that we cannot expect our beloved to remain as she was when we fell in love with her is incontrovertible. But the play doesn’t begin to address the intricacies of human relationships.

But there are complex truths and there are simple truths and both are important. And the message that we cannot live our lives caught up in the past, but must rather look unflinchingly at the present, is relevant to many contexts beyond love and marriage.

At one point in the play, the confused elder Vitzman looks uncomprehendingly at the players and says “I don’t understand a thing. Couldn’t you have at least put a summary of the plot in the program?” But in real life we don’t have a summary of the plot either—we need to work hard to understand the world as we pass through it. And that’s an important thing to keep in mind in these troubled days.

I am standing on the edge of the pool, in my Speedo swimsuit, feeling like a Second Aliya pioneer determined to speak only the language of their forefathers. It’s Sunday night, Masters Swim Group, Jerusalem Pool. I’m about to swim three kilometers. My swimming is as bad as the typical pioneer’s Hebrew was, but I’m going to do it anyway.

Brenner in a tense moment

I have an acquaintance who teaches meditation. She once suggested that I join the group she conducts once a month before Saturday morning services at our synagogue. “Mediation relieves stress,” she advised me. “Relieve stress? What’s wrong with stress?” I answered blankly. I go to shul on Saturday mornings to get stressed out. I’m not very good at praying. I go to Masters Swim for the same reason.

It’s like those yeshiva dropouts and intellectual women who arrived in Palestine in the 1910s to break their backs at manual labor and tie their tongues trying to make Hebrew their daily language. Imagine trying to express your innermost thoughts and feelings with a preschooler’s vocabulary and grasp of linguistic nuance. It would be like a 52-year-old klutz doing the breaststroke….

Read the rest on the Jerusalem Report website–come back here to comment!

A very long year has passed, and Barack Obama has just chosen Hillary as his secretary of state. Freed of the need to win reelection as senator, burdened with responsibility for policy toward Israel and the Palestinians, she has the opportunity and obligation to update her understanding of our riven city. So here’s some reading material for her (the start below, the rest at The American Prospect). Just trade “candidate” and “president” for “secretary” and it reads fine.

Dear Hillary,

A colleague alerted me to your recent position paper on Israel, with your promise of support for an “undivided Jerusalem.” I appreciate the warm feelings, but I admit I was confused by your description of my city. Since you are a careful, wonky candidate, I figured you must have details at your disposal. So this morning I called a Palestinian cabby friend, and together we went looking for the “undivided Jerusalem.”

I live in Talpiot, an area that hugs the vanished DMZ that ran through part of the city between 1948 and 1967. The next neighborhood over, East Talpiot, was built after Israel annexed East Jerusalem and a swath of land around it in 1967. East Talpiot fills much of the vanished DMZ. It was part of the massive government effort to move Israeli Jews into the new areas and to erase the armistice line between Israel and Jordan. The apartment blocks sit on wide, tree-lined streets with brick-paved sidewalks. There are municipal playgrounds, and green park benches where the elderly can rest, and speed bumps to make life safer for kids crossing the streets. There is no marker to show where the armistice line once ran. If one drove no further, this might seem like the very vision of a city sewn seamlessly together.

But we drove on, into Jabel Mukaber, the Palestinian neighborhood immediately to the east. The community slopes down the side of a ridge toward a valley. We came in from the top, where a few of the streets have wisps of sidewalks. Further down, sidewalks vanish. School was letting out; a crowd of girls filled a narrow street while school buses tried to nudge their way through. The asphalt, cracked and faded, looked like a mere memory of pavement. Trash lay on the sides of the street and covered a hillside.

For copyright reasons, please read the rest here. But you can come back to South Jerusalem to comment.

While I’m on the subject, Todd Gitlin alerts us to this piece by Roger Cohen, also advising the new secretary of state that she should drop the old cliches about Israel:

I think Olmert’s words should be emblazoned on the wall of Hillary Clinton’s eighth-floor State Department office: “We must reach an agreement with the Palestinians, meaning a withdrawal from nearly all, if not all, of the territories. Some percentage of these territories would remain in our hands, but we must give the Palestinians the same percentage elsewhere — without this, there will be no peace.”

Asked if this included a compromise on Jerusalem, Olmert said, “Including Jerusalem.”

And yes, as I’ve mentioned before, Olmert’s era will be remembered for the strange gap between his dovish and evermore desperate rhetoric and his failure to stop settlement growth or reach a peace agreement. It’s my belief that you know people by their contradictions. But rarely are the contradictions writ so large.

Shannon Kisch, the director of Shakespeare Jerusalem’s initially promising but ultimately amorphous production of Henry V, at least has my daughter Mizmor on her side. At nearly midnight last night, as we walked home from The Lab (Jerusalem’s newest and finest stage), Mizmor said, “It’s nice for a change to see someone just do a Shakespeare play the way it’s written.”

Which is what Kisch, in her program notes, says she wanted to do. Recalling a conversation about the problems of staging this historical drama, she writes: “The sentence I remember most clearly, and that which made the most sense to me, was this: ‘Why don’t you just tell the story?’”

I love my daughter and respect her opinions, and I sincerely admire Shakespeare Jerusalem’s ambition to stage the Bard’s works for Israeli audiences, but this production is a textbook demonstration of exactly why you can’t just “just tell the story.”

Kisch’s nearly bare stage, and her use of six actors and one actress to play all the roles, are not traditional devices, but they are ones that have proven successful in many Shakespeare productions—and they are the best part of this one. Yet she has chosen to adhere almost verbatim to the text, making no cuts or emendations. The result, however, is not pure, unadulterated Shakespeare, but an evening that starts out with some flash but quickly bogs down.

This work as written is highly problematic as a work of drama; the main character really never develops and the play is more of a pageant than a coherent narrative. Kisch has eschewed any attempt to use cuts and emendations in the received text to focus the action and provide her actors with real motivations. That’s her second mistake.

Her first mistake, however, is her choice of play. I can’t fathom why Shakespeare Jerusalem chose this tale of British triumphalism as their first full-scale production. I found it, in alternation, eerie and ridiculous to hear the seven members of the company celebrating a British victory over the French hundreds of years ago. When a producer and a director choose a play to stage, they must have a reason. They must think that the work has something to say to a contemporary audience, or they must feel that it offers an artistic puzzle or opportunity that they want to exploit. The motivation to stage the play is critical, because it provides the director with her central concept (what Harold Clurman called “the spine”) and, through that, it provides the actors with the framework in which they find, understand, and express their characters’ conflicts and intentions.

This is precisely what Kisch has failed to do with her actors. They recite their lines well enough and a number of individual scenes work fine as vignettes, but the players don’t know what their characters want or need deep down, just as Kisch doesn’t seem to know what she wants the play to say.

In her notes, Kisch writes that she wanted to avoid giving Henry V a political slant. But, with all due respect, you can’t stage a play that was explicitly written to justify and glorify a specific nation, dynasty, and mythic historical figure without addressing the politics, and you certainly can’t, in Jerusalem, stage a play that is a paean to a conquering hero without giving some thought to how it will resonate with your audience. It’s no a matter of political correctness—it’s a matter of artistic correctness.

You can’t simply, without comment, direction, or sense of proportion have your hero tell the governor of a besieged town that he can’t be responsible for the actions of his soldiers—certainly not when you live in a country where abuses committed by its soldiers are a critical issue. You can’t have King Harry say “What is’t to me, when you yourselves are cause, if your pure maidens fall into the hand of hot and forcing violation.… We may as bootless spend our vain command upon th’enragèd soldiers in their spoil as send precepts to the leviathan to come ashore” and mean it unless you either decide to present the beloved boy-king as a monster or to somehow build some complexity or tragedy into his character. You can’t, in a city where suicide bombers have so recently massacred women, children and old people, have your central character speak of “your fathers taken by the silver beards, and their most reverend heads dashed to the walls; your naked infants spitted on pikes” and just say that you are doing Shakespeare as he wrote it.

I sympathize with Mizmor’s feeling that every time she sees a classic play it’s a production in which the director has taken extraordinary liberties with the text or staging. I can share her yearning to see not just innovative productions but ones that delve into the delivered text and seek to draw out its meanings and significance, rather than ones that impose modern concerns on playwrights who lived in a world different from our own. But even when you deal with the text respectfully you have to have a point of view, you have to have opinions about who the characters are, and you have know why you think it is important for your audience to see this play at this time.

I’m almost afraid to write this—I want to see more Shakespeare at the Lab and I fear that a bad review might doom Shakespeare Jerusalem’s plans for future productions. I appreciate the effort that went into this Henry V. But this is not the way to stage Shakespeare, or any other play.

I just got a call from Meir Porush‘s campaign central. Would I be voting for the Haredi candidate for mayor of Jerusalem, the polite young woman asked me? No, I won’t, I said. I’ll be voting for the rival candidate, Nir Barkat. And to hell with my blogging partner, Gershom, whose concern for an equitable settlement with the Palestinians in Jerusalem (justified) and his abiding suspicion of rich businessmen (somewhat less justified) has misled him into support for Porush (see “Sorry, Nir Barkat Will Not Save Jerusalem“).

Like Gershom, I’m extremely displeased rhetoric Barkat’s Greater Jerusalem rhetoric, which rules out any compromise with the Palestinians in the capital city. Barkat’s recent promise to build a new neighborhood for students in easternmost East Jerusalem seems to indicate either a willful ignorance of the state of the city’s Palestinian neighborhoods or a desire to pander to the extreme right.

But Porush is hardly a leftie on this issue. He, too, declares that he will keep Jerusalem united.

Jerusalem’s citizens are disadvantaged by having no reliable source of information about what goes on in the municipal government. The journalistic level of the local weeklies is somewhat below that of The National Enquirer and the national press treats Jerusalem as if it were in southern Tasmania.

So I can only rely on what I hear from people I trust, and from my own contacts with the city government, as a member of parents’ committees at my kids’ schools and as head of the building committee of my synagogue, Kehilat Yedidya.

What I’ve seen in those capacities is a city administration in which council members and top officials look mostly after their own constituencies. I’ve also seen rampant corruption, involving in particular the Haredi political parties. In contrast, Nir Barkat, leader of the city council opposition, has been available and helpful in all the endeavors in which I’ve been involved.

Is Barkat a messiah who will save Jerusalem? Most certainly not. Will he single-handedly keep Jerusalem united? In the end, it will not be the capital’s mayor or city council that makes that decision. The bottom line is that Barkat is the only candidate who can move the city forward into a more open and responsive administration, one that can begin to solve the city’s myriad problems with rational policies.

So, sorry, Gershom. Despite it all, I’m voting for the hyper-nationalist plutocrat. I’m voting Barkat.

Second, and much more important, Barkat is secular. Among secular, traditional, and modern-leaning Orthodox Jewish residents of Jerusalem there’s a backlash against ultra-Orthodox hegemony at City Hall. There’s a pervading sense that ultra-Orthodox rule is responsible for the city’s economic decline, and for the exodus of young people. The conventional wisdom is that the ultra-Orthodox are on the demographic march toward turning Jerusalem into a giant neo-shtetl, big sister to Bnei Brak. Barkat is supposed to be the solution.

Regarding the argument that Barkat is a real manager because he comes from the free market: In a month when the money managers of the world are desperately begging the politicians to save them, claiming business experience seems a poor strategy. And Barkat’s limited experience at a start-up that happened to ride a high-tech boom doesn’t exactly prove he could manage the relations between Jerusalem’s conflicting communities, negotiate with the national government for funds, or coax money out of philanthropists in the style of the legendary Teddy Kollek.

As for Barkat being secular, I understand the appeal. However, it ignores a lot of facts. For instance, the ultra-Orthodox are actually leaving Jerusalem as well. If they are taking over the city, it’s happening very slowly. As this (Hebrew) article explains, the ultra-Orthodox proportion of Jerusalem’s population has risen from 29% to 32% over 13 years.

More important, the support for Barkat ignores the real causes for Jerusalem’s decline, and the positions and qualifications of the actual candidate. Barkat’s two most striking characteristics are his far-right politics and intellectual capabilities that, at the most polite, can be labeled shallow.

From my new article at The American Prospect, here’s a description of Barkat meeting the press:

Asked if he supported Jewish settlement in Palestinian neighborhoods — a tactic of far-right groups that has dramatically increased tensions in the city — he said, “Definitely yes.” He likewise endorsed the exclusively Jewish account of Jerusalem’s history presented by religious rightists who manage an archeological site at the City of David, inside the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan. “That’s where I connect to my Jewish roots,” he said.

To reverse the city’s economic decline, Barkat asserted he would bring 10 million tourists a year to Jerusalem (a seven-fold increase over current numbers), and attract high-tech and biotech companies. Why, I asked, would the private sector invest in the city, given the risk factors in a city riven by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

“Because it’s the right thing to do,” he answered. “If we look at vision, and where Jerusalem must be, that is the right thing to do. And I believe that Jerusalem has to be managed with a vision, and I think that the world has to play ball and help us strengthen and build the city of Jerusalem. It’s a very simple answer.” Oh, I thought. Just tell them to do it.

That, I should note, was one of his more coherent answers. Asked how he’d work with the national government, which provides most of the city’s funds, he said:

Working with government is a challenge and, uh, it’s a process. I believe that when you put in motion developing Jerusalem to become a destination site for tourists… and start making those first steps to execute a vision, we’ll be able to convince more and more people about the importance and the ability to execute that vision.

That’s clear, isn’t it?

When another journalist asked Barkat his view of the security fence cutting through the city in various spots, he offered an impassioned defense of the fence as such as such, and determinedly avoided relating to the question about its route. Truly, it seemed that he’d taken lessons from Sarah Palin on how to answer questions.

For more on the mayoral race, check my article at the Prospect, and come back to South Jerusalem to comment.

At the airport, before his takeoff for the Middle East, no one will ask Barack Obama if he packed his bags himself. It would be rude, and besides he has a full-time handler for that. He never has the lurching feeling as the cab leaves his house that he left the tickets on the kitchen table and a prescription in the medicine cabinet. Just writing those words, I finally understand the attraction of running for president.

He has, however, packed his political baggage himself. Mostly he’s done a good job – better, in fact, than one could expect.

First, he’s meeting with Palestinians as well as Israelis. At least according to the Palestinian side, Obama has put a meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah on his schedule for next Wednesday. When I wrote about his trip a couple of weeks ago, before the requisite leaks on the itinerary, I was afraid he’d decide it was politically inexpedient to make that stop, essential as it is. Symbolically, the Ramallah visit shows that he intends as president to talk to both Israelis and Palestinians, and that he’s serious about working for peace. Practically, it gives him the chance to see how Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayad respond to tough questions about the compromises they’ll need to make.

It would have been easy to skip Ramallah for fearing of losing Jewish votes, especially in swing states like Florida. The common mistake among candidates is to believe the rightwing minority in the U.S. Jewish community that purports to speak for the community as a whole, and that regards any contact with Palestinians as betraying Israel. The incident that Connie Bruck reported in his her recent New Yorker piece on zillionaire ideologue Sheldon Adelson is typical:

Adelson berated [former ambassador to Israel Martin] Indyk for hosting “terrorists” like Fayyad, who he said was a founder of Fatah. Indyk [now director of the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy] is said to have replied that Fayyad was never involved in terrorism and was not a member of Fatah, and that Adelson’s problem was really with Olmert, because he dealt with Fayyad. Adelson stood his ground, and declared that the Olmert government was an illegitimate government and should be thrown out.

As a point of principle, Obama’s refusal to give into that political reflex shows that he really is committed to peacemaking. Practically, it also makes sense. As James Baker might have advised Obama, “—- Adelson and his ilk, they’ll never vote for you anyway.”

On the other hand, as shown by J Street‘s new poll of American Jewish political views, released yesterday, most Jews are on Obama’s side on this as on other issues. Not only do US Jews believe overwhelmingly (90 percent to 10) that America is on the wrong track, not only do they believe (79-21%) that George W. Bush has mishandled Iraq, they believe (71-29%) that Bush has mishandled the Arab-Israeli conflict. Overwhelmingly, they want the U.S. to play a strong role in reaching peace, even if it means publicly stating disagreements with both the Arabs and Israel. By 59-41 percent they favor giving most of the West Bank and dismantling “many” settlements for peace. Obama isn’t going to drive away the Jews by showing he’s willing to get involved in making peace.

The one hawkish note in the survey was on the question about giving up Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem for peace. Here 44% of US Jews were in favor, 56% against. I don’t think that the people who answered in the negative on that question really picture the Arab neighborhoods of Sur Barhir or Beit Hanina, really understand how much of a different world they are from Jewish Jerusalem, how little the two parts of the city have been made into one.

Given Jews’ generally dovish views, a politician ready to explain and lead could change the balance on this question. Last year, Hillary Clinton’s position paper on Israel, with its promise of an “undivided Jerusalem,” suggested that she wasn’t that politician. When he addressed the AIPAC Conference in June, Obama also seemed ready to pander, promising that “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” When I criticized that statement, an Obama adviser quickly emailed to tell me the candidate really meant physically undivided: No fences. Political arrangements were a different matter. Obama, he said,

has said before that Jerusalem is a final status issue to be negotiated by the parties, but that two principles that should guide any outcome is that it will remain Israel’s capital and it should never be redivided by barbed wire and checkpoints as it was from 1948-67.

Getting ready for his travels, Obama has gotten around to saying the same thing himself on camera:

You know, the truth is that this was an example where we had some poor phrasing in the speech. And we immediately tried to correct the interpretation that was given…

That’s flipflopping only if the definition of “flipflopping” includes “saying something dumb to a receptive audience, and then having the sense to correct the mistake.” Better that he corrected himself, and will be arriving here with a a reasonable position on Jerusalem packed alongside his shirts and ties.

If there’s a flaw in his preparations, it may be that he’ll be coming with Dennis Ross in his entourage, and without Rob Malley. (Thanks to Ezra Klein for flagging this.) I respect Ross, and the presence of the veteran negotiator is another signal that Obama wants to get down to work on Mideast peacemaking, as soon as he has gotten done with the pesky election and sent John McCain off for some remedial geography lessons. (Full disclosure: Though I don’t know Ross personally, he endorsed my book, The Accidental Empire.)

But Malley, a former Obama adviser, has written an essential account of what went wrong at Camp David eight summers ago, when Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak, and Yasser Arafat were such unhappy campers. In Malley’s picture, all three sides mishandled the negotiations. From my own experience with Barak, as I’ve written, that’s also a more believable version than blaming Arafat alone. You can’t experience Barak, and not presume that he’d come unprepared, insult his negotiating partners and then blame everyone else. Which is certainly not to let Arafat off the hook.

With only Ross along to explain what’s gone wrong so far, there’s a a risk that Obama may find his baggage weighted to one side and unwieldy. As prep, he should make a late-night call to Rob Malley. It should include an offer of a business meeting the day after the voters let McCain go quietly back to Arizona.

Also at South Jerusalem:

The Bush Doctrine: No Peace. (And What’s the McCain Doctrine?)

Wright, Race and Contested Stories

McCain, Hagee, Lieberman, Clinton, Obama: Who’s good for Israel

McCain: Uh, Sunni? Er, Shi’ite?