Gershom Gorenberg

You Can Turn the Page. Or You Can Buy a New Atlas for These Newspapers

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Gershom Gorenberg Ha’aretz, as of 1:47 a.m. Israel time: Army Radio reported that a separate Iranian ship, carrying 60 Iranian activists, was being prepared to sail to Gaza via the Caspian Sea. Ynet (Yediot Aharonot) is also hot on the story: However, other Iranian figures are not ready to give up. Iranian Member of Parliament … Read more

A C- for Prof. Fish

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Gershom Gorenberg

Prof. Stanley Fish has a regular online column in the New York Times on education and society. His latest post is intended as a critique of right-wing efforts to treat universities as businesses, and specifically of of a proposed “reform” (“deform” would be a better term) of the Texas A&M college system.

Criticizing free-market attempts to hijack higher education is a good idea. Fish, however, ruins his argument with a needless, grumpy rant against students.

Students, Fish says, all students, the whole awful lot of them,

…like everything neatly laid out; they want to know exactly where they are; they don’t welcome the introduction of multiple perspectives, especially when no master perspective reconciles them; they want the answers.

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Letter from the Hotel Zamenhof

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On Being Shocked, Shocked to Learn That Israel Is Not a Liberal Utopia

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at the American Prospect:

Meyer Landsman lives in the Hotel Zamenhof. Landsman is the hero of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, in which the Jews lost the 1948 war in Palestine and have taken refuge in a Jewish autonomous region of Alaska. The run-down hotel is named for L.L. Zamenhof, the Russian-born Jew who invented Esperanto in order to bring world understanding and peace. In other words,The Yiddish Policemen's Union Landsman’s residence is a liberal Jewish dream that has seen much better days.

I remembered this while reading Chabon’s New York Times article, “Chosen, Not Special,” a response to the Israel Navy’s ill-considered raid on the flotilla to Gaza last week. The article describes the shock that Jews feel when they discover that Jews can act as stupidly as other people. The novel, in my view, alludes to more basic kinds of American Jewish surprise with the State of Israel, including half-repressed disbelief in its very existence.

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The Facts, the Law and the Table

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Reading Shaul Magid, Kevin Jon Heller, MJ Rosenberg, Leon Wieseltier, Daniel Gordis

Gershom Gorenberg

An older journalistic colleague of mine, now retired, studied law in his youth. He regularly quoted the advice of one of his professors: “When you have the facts on your side, pound on the facts. When the law is on your side, pound on the law. When neither the law nor the facts are on your side, pound on the table.”

The Gaza flotilla affair has produced some excellent reading for those interested in the law and facts. It has also led some of the usual suspects to pound even harder on the table. A brief guide:

At Zeek, Shaul Magid makes a strong argument that Israel’s leaders are undermining the argument against an anti-Israel boycott  by maintaining the blockade of Gaza:

One reason ordinary Gazans have turned to smugglers is that Israel determines what does and does not constitute “humanitarian aid” and can be allowed through the blockade to reach Gaza. While to my knowledge there is no exhaustive list of items refused entry into Gaza, UNRWA, the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees, has compiled a list of items that have been refused entry at one time or another, including light bulbs, candles, matches, books, musical instruments, crayons, clothing, shoes, mattresses, sheets, blankets, pasta, tea, coffee, chocolate, nuts, shampoo and conditioner. …

… Israel claims to be innocent of human rights abuses, yet strictly controls all items in and out of Gaza, including items that are necessary for a war-torn society to function (and may items that have nothing to do with security). In other words, Israel is creating or at least contributing to a human rights crisis while claiming to be innocent of human rights abuses.Israel’s counter-argument that it needs to blockade Gaza to protect its own security is real and should not be minimized by the international community. However, one can also justifiably question its sincerity when it turns down an offer of diplomatic relations with a moderate Arab country over the quantity of cement that country wants to import. …

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A Brief History of the Gaza Folly

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Gershom Gorenberg

What was the real mistake in the Gaza flotilla fiasco? The answer depends on how far back you want to go, as I explain in my new piece at the American Prospect:

At first, reports of the number of dead fluctuated by the hour. After Israeli naval commandos landed on a Turkish ferry heading for Gaza, rumors said that Sheikh Raed Salah, leader of the radical Islamic movement among Israeli Arabs, had been killed on board. The rumors turned into news items in the Arab media; the sheikh was then reported alive and well. Descriptions of what actually happened on the crowded deck of the Mavi Marmara have, predictably, been wildly at odds. Activists who were on board say the Israeli commandos fired before being attacked; the Israeli military says the soldiers were defending themselves from a mob. Both sides present film clips of the nighttime struggle to back up their case.

Out of this blurred picture, one thing seems agonizingly clear: The raid was a link in a chain of premeditated folly.

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Beinart Sees the Light

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Gershom Gorenberg

Peter Beinart, former editor of the New Republic, former Iraq hawk, has made a splash by noticing that

the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.

and, moreover, by noticing it on the pages of the New York Review of Books. Some of his critics – Jeffrey Goldberg, for instance – latched onto that venue as reason to find fault. This is even sillier than an ad hominem argument: If Beinart’s argument is correct, who printed the pages is relevant onlyfor people who make up their minds about what an article is going to say purely on the basis of where it appears, and then get confused when it doesn’t say that. (JTA provides a short guide to other responses here.)

As  Ron Kampeas points out, for once the defenders of the hawkish U.S. Jewish establishment can’t use the ad hominem argument itself; they can’t dismiss Beinart as some raving anti-Zionist or reflexive peacenik.

But that misses the point: Beinart’s article is news only and precisely for ad hominem reasons.

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Road 443: The Facade of Human Rights

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Gershom Gorenberg

Road 443 from Modi’in to Jerusalem through the West Bank has supposedly reopened today for use of the Palestinians who live along it. My new piece in The American Prospect explains what has actually happened.

Arriving home in Israel after a semester teaching in New York, I got in a taxi at Ben-Gurion Airport and asked the cabbie to drive me to Jerusalem. “Take the main road, not Route 443,” I said. Route 443 runs through the West Bank. When it was transformed from a country road to a highway in the 1980s, Palestinian land was expropriated under the legal fiction that the project’s main purpose was to serve Palestinian residents of the area. Since 2002, however, the Israeli army has barred Palestinians from using it. I take 443 only when I must to cover a story.

“I don’t like 443 either,” the cabbie said. ” It’s dangerous now that the Supreme Court made them let Arabs use it. ” He pronounced “Supreme Court” like a curse. Such antipathy is common among Israeli right-wingers, who regard the Court as a club of bleeding hearts. I prefer a calm driver, especially on a road into the mountains, so I didn’t argue politics with him.

Nor did I point out his factual errors: The army hadn’t yet opened the road to Palestinians. That’s planned for today. Even then, the military will allow so little access to the villagers living near the road that they will have scant reason to use it. All this is in keeping with the Supreme Court’s ruling last year, which affirmed Palestinian rights under international law — and then rendered that affirmation nearly meaningless by allowing the military a free hand in setting new “security arrangements” for the highway.

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OK, Some Truths About Jerualem (for Elie Wiesel and others)

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Gershom Gorenberg

My latest piece for the American Prospect:

Lest it be said that I never agree with anything that Benjamin Netanyahu says, I actually concur with one clause — not a whole sentence — in the speech he gave Tuesday evening. “The struggle for Jerusalem is a struggle for the truth,” the prime minister of my country said.

The rest of his speech consisted of the usual quarter-truths and myths that make up most statements about “eternally united” Jerusalem — by Netanyahu himself, by other Israeli officials, and by often-naive American supporters. Nobel Peace Prize Winner Elie Wiesel’s open letter, published as a full-page ad last month in The New York Times and other U.S. papers, is a good example of the art form.

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Bibiology 101: For Each Zig, There is a Zag

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Gershom Gorenberg

From the American Prospect, how to understand what Bibi says, and what the State Department doesn’t say:

A worldly colleague of mine once complained that with the demise of the Soviet-era Pravda, the intellectual joy went out of newspaper reading — the satisfaction of examining photos for who wasn’t on the dais, of studying statements for what wasn’t said, in order to reason out the real news. He was too quick to mourn. Reading the text of the State Department’s daily press briefing provides nearly the same pleasure and even sheds some light on what Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu is up to.

At [two recent] sessions, Assistant Secretary of State Philip Crowley emphatically refused to comment on reports that Netanyahu has imposed a de facto freeze on building in annexed East Jerusalem. “I’ll refer to the Israeli government to enunciate its own policy,” Crowley said. Of course, the policy that Netanyahu has publicly enunciated is that Israel will continue to build anywhere it wants in Jerusalem. And Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat denies there’s a freeze. Crowley wouldn’t comment on that either. As the reporter grilling him pointed out, the Obama administration commented clearly and loudly in March when Israeli officials approved new construction of 1,600 new units in Ramat Shlomo, a neighborhood in annexed East Jerusalem.

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The Whistleblower’s Story and the Spiegel Report

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Gershom Gorenberg

Even if cyberspace has no “here” or “there,” I found it difficult to blog at SouthJerusalem when I was physically far from Jerusalem. Now I’m catching up – first by posting what I’ve written for the American Prospect.

Here’s my piece on the Anat Kam controversy. Please pay attention to an important detail: The documents that Kam leaked included the Spiegel Report, the army data base detailing the land theft and lawbreaking in the building of settlements. Despite freedom-of-information requests, the army had refused to release this data. The information itself proves that there’s no security justification for keeping it secret.The information was simply a political embarrassment.

Now that the Tel Aviv District Court has lifted its gag order on the Anat Kam affair, Israelis don’t need foreign news sites to learn about the ex-soldier who allegedly leaked digitalized reams of classified documents to a reporter. That makes life easier for those whose English is weak, but the difference in public awareness probably isn’t significant. The gag order had already insured intense curiosity. What the increased access should do is stir a serious debate about balancing freedom of the press and whistleblowing with secrecy and security — a debate every democracy needs regularly. This kind of thing isn’t a problem in places like the states, where they have stringent whistleblowing laws so that people who want to speak out against corruption are able to protect themselves with a whistleblower lawyer. If only more countries were as progressive… With this being said, as laws tend to change, it wouldn’t hurt to stay on top of the news in the world of legal news. It could be as simple as researching attorneys and law for example to do just that. Plus, the more you know, the better this may be for you when it comes to understanding the law a little better.

What’s reliably known is this: Kam is 23. (In news photos, she looks 15 and terribly innocent — possibly an image designed by her lawyers.) During her required army service, she worked as a clerk in the office of Gen. Yair Naveh, then-head of the Israel Defense Force’s Central Command. When she completed her service, she took home CDs to which she had copied many classified documents. Later she passed information to Uri Blau, an investigative reporter for Ha’aretz, the Israeli daily that has been most ready to criticize government policy in the occupied territories. In November 2008, using some of Kam’s material, Blau published a long article titled “License to Kill.” It alleged that the IDF had deliberately ignored an Israeli Supreme Court ruling that barred targeted killing of suspected terrorists when it was possible to arrest them. A source whom I consider quite reliable tells me that far more people have read Blau’s article online in recent days than when it was originally published.

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Alla fiera dell’est

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Gershom Gorenberg

Why sing Had Gadya at Seder tonight in pseudo-Aramaic when the version in real Italian is so gorgeous?

I first heard it my first time from an Italian-speaking Swiss guest at a Seder at a teacher’s home 30 years ago, and have bringing the lyrics to Seder ever since.

You can learn the melody from Angelo Branduardi’s  video clip below, but you don’t need the violin and drums to sing it at your table.

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Here are the lyrics (posted purely for personal, non-commercial use):

Alla fiera dell’est

Alla fiera dell’est, per due soldi, un topolino mio padre comprò
Alla fiera dell’est, per due soldi, un topolino mio padre comprò

E venne il gatto, che si mangiò il topo, che al mercato mio padre comprò
E venne il gatto, che si mangiò il topo, che al mercato mio padre comprò

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And Your Friends, Bibi, They Treat You Like a Pest

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new article on our prime minister’s disastrous trip to Washington is up at The American Prospect.

Mr. Netanyahu wanted badly to go to Washington. He wanted to warm himself in the worship of thousands of delegates at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual convention, far from the cacophony of his unruly ruling coalition. He knew that if he didn’t get White House time during his visit, the media back home would report, chorally, that he’d caused a rift in relations with Israel’s essential ally. To end the spat with the administration over Israeli construction in East Jerusalem, he made some half-publicized promises to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and got his invite to meet President Barack Obama.

And perhaps during this meeting he learned (if Benjamin Netanyahu ever learns) that you should be terribly careful what you wish for.

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