Gershom Gorenberg – Page 15

Witch-Hunting Season, Under Government License

March 28, 2010 by Gershom Gorenberg

Rimon is a fantastic caterer. She has turned her talent at Kurdish-style cooking into a business through the help of Ahoti (My Sister), an organization that works with Israeli women from mizrahi (Middle Eastern) backgrounds to develop their economic potential. Ahoti is a grantee of the New Israel Fund.

I mention this because a couple of days after I enjoyed Rimon’s cuisine, Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar spoke at the convention of Im Tirtzu. Prime Minister Netanyahu couldn’t make it because he was on his way to humiliate himself in Washington, but he sent his written greetings to be read to the crowd.

Im Tirtzu, you may remember, is the organization that recently launched a smear campaign against the New Israel Fund. A so-called study by Im Tirtzu alleged that the NIF-backed organizations provided an overwhelming share of the material from Israeli sources that was cited in the Goldstone Report on the fighting in Gaza the winter before last.

One More Way In Which Obama Must Avoid Being Carter

March 27, 2010 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

I’m feeling something akin to parental pride. One of my Columbia students, Seth Anziska, has published an excellent opinion article at Foreign Policy’s new Middle East Channel:

Reactions to the recent diplomatic squabble between the U.S. and Israel over building in East Jerusalem display a startling lack of historical memory. More than 30 years ago, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin insisted on building beyond the green line, and President Jimmy Carter proved unable to stop him. President Barack Obama risks a repeat performance. With the Netanyahu government’s announcement to build 1,600 more housing units in Ramat Shlomo, the consequences of U.S. inaction will prove even more damaging than in Carter’s time. Given a shift in American priorities, Obama can’t afford to stand down.

Read more

Forward-Looking Faith II

March 20, 2010 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

My own South Jerusalem congregation, Yedidya, is on the progressive end of Orthodoxy, and that’s where I’m comfortable. During some synagogue-hopping in New York, though, I came across the egalitarian community of Kehilat Hadar, part of the growing movement of independent minyanim, and it inspired some unexpected, unconventional optimism about the next generation of American Judaism. My latest American Prospect article explains:

Halfway through the Saturday morning service, it struck me: A transcript of the service would be no different from that of a standard Orthodox Jewish service. We were faithfully adhering to the unamended, centuries-old traditional Hebrew liturgy. A transcript, however, would not show that men and women were sitting together, without the physical divider that separates them at an Orthodox synagogue, or that women were leading parts of the service — another blatant egalitarian break with Orthodoxy.

For that matter, a transcript wouldn’t show the fervor of the singing — by the congregation, not just the leader — in the rented church basement on New York’s Upper West Side. It wouldn’t indicate that nearly everyone there was between 20 and 35 — precisely the demographic that professional leaders of established denominations of American Judaism ritually complain they have trouble getting into synagogues. But this congregation, known as Kehilat Hadar (“community of splendor”) doesn’t belong to an established denomination and quite deliberately doesn’t have professional clergy. Lay members of the loose-knit community lead the services.

Forward-Looking Faith I

March 20, 2010 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

My friend Aryeh Cohen has written a fascinating piece at Religion Dispatches on a convergence of traditional-leaning Jews and progressives. On the one hand,

…what really stands out is the new, though cautious, embrace of social justice goals by the institutions of the Conservative and (to a much smaller extent) the Orthodox movements. Spurred on by the exposure of the unjust treatment of workers and the abuse of animals at the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, the Conservative movement launched the so-called heksher tzedek. This is a kosher seal of approval which guaranteed that the product under supervision was manufactured ethically—that workers’ rights were being respected and that animals were not being abused.

An Orthodox group called Uri L’tzedek (“Awaken to Justice”) organized shortly afterward to the same end. …

Bibi’s Hebron Illusions: The Back Story

February 26, 2010 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

Alas, caught up in my teaching schedule at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, I’ve been absent both from the physical South Jerusalem and the virtual one. Meanwhile, though, my columns are appearing in the American Prospect. The latest is here; two previous ones are below.

By all accounts, Benjamin Netanyahu devoted very little thought to the two final sites added to a list of designated heritage sites set to benefit from a large government restoration budget. Never mind that the Tomb of the Patriarchs, known to Muslims as the Ibrahimi Mosque, is located in the West Bank town of Hebron. Likewise, Rachel’s Tomb is in Bethlehem — also occupied territory. Just before Sunday’s Cabinet meeting, rightist ministers noticed that the two shrines, regarded as the burial places of the biblical ancestors of the Jewish people, were missing from the list. They leaned a bit on Netanyahu, he added the tombs, and the Cabinet unanimously approved the plan…

You might expect Netanyahu to be careful about playing with holy fire. In September 1996, early in his previous term as prime minister, he approved opening a tunnel alongside the Temple Mount, otherwise known as Haram al-Sharif. That set off a week-long mini war between Israel and Palestinians. How could he so easily give in to pressure and repeat the mistake of asserting ownership of contested holy places? While we’re at it, how does a country declare that a place outside its borders is a national heritage site?

I could give quick responses based on Netanyahu’s famously flawed personality. But deeper answers to these questions — and quite a few other Middle Eastern puzzles — can be found in Israeli political sociologist Lev Luis Grinberg’s remarkably insightful recent book, Politics and Violence in Israel/Palestine. The starting point of Grinberg’s analysis is that Israel doesn’t have borders, or perhaps has too many of them: “If we would ask Israelis … where the state of Israel is — where its borders are — we would never receive a simple answer. … There is no consensus among Jewish citizens of the state where its borders are, where they should be, or even what the legitimate procedure is to decide on them.”…

The Old Paranoia and the New Israel Fund

February 26, 2010 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

From my column in the American Prospect on the right’s defamation campaign against the New Israel Fund:

Ronen Shoval caught me off-guard. I’d phoned the newly prominent rightist to listen to him repeat his allegations that the New Israel Fund, the major philanthropic backer of Israeli human-rights groups, was “aiding Hamas.” But I wasn’t expecting him to say that the NIF was “serving communist interests.” He’s not actually an Israeli neo-McCarthyist, I realized. He’s an authentic, original McCarthyist — cut loose in both time and space, in free fall, looking desperately for his mother ship. For a few seconds I felt sorry for him.

Amnesty and Amnesia

February 26, 2010 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

From my column in the American Prospect on the amnesty for disengagement protesters as a means for warping Israel’s memory of its past and its policies in the future:

The amnesty law is impressive in its brevity, in its focus, and most of all in its terrible audacity. Passed by Israel’s Parliament this week, it is barely two pages long. It wipes clean the criminal records of one very specific group of political protesters: those arrested while trying to block Ariel Sharon’s unilateral evacuation of Israel’s Gaza Strip settlements in the summer of 2005. The legal system will forgive and forget the young ultra-nationalists who insisted that the divine imperative to settle the Whole Land of Israel trumped other law, and who in some places turned the pullout into a mob confrontation with Israeli police and soldiers, televised globally.

The amnesty, I need to note, does not cover those convicted of the most serious offenses, such as aggravated assault, or those sentenced to actual jail time. Nonetheless, it reportedly applies to 400 of 482 people charged for their role in the anti-pullback turmoil. It does, for instance, cover those who entered the Gaza Strip illegally as well as those who rioted after being ordered to disperse — two of the standard charges reported at the time. At just one settlement, Kfar Darom, 245 people were arrested after barricading themselves in the synagogue and hurling everything from light bulbs to toxic acid at police who came to evacuate them. Some, it seems likely, faced watered-down charges and received light sentences that will now be erased from their records.

To the Victor Go the Street Names

January 17, 2010 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

My apologies to readers for being away for a while. My new article is up at The American Prospect.

Walking along the beachfront street in Akko recently with a social activist from the town’s Arab community, I looked up at a sign and saw I was at the corner of Shlomo Ben-Yosef Street. Then I looked again just to make sure. Really, I’m embarrassed I was surprised. Naming the street after Ben-Yosef showed an entirely predictable blend of bad taste and flagrant educational incompetence.

Akko, on the northern Israeli coast, is an ethnically mixed city: Arab citizens of Israel make up a little more than a quarter of the town’s 53,000 residents. The rest are Jews. Today’s relations between the two communities are just short of explosive, but I’ll leave that story for another time. Akko was entirely Arab until May 1948, when the Haganah — the proto-army of Israel — conquered it. Afterward, those Arabs who stayed in the town lived in the walled Old City, later spreading to nearby neighborhoods. The beachfront thoroughfare, which runs into the Old City, is named after the Haganah. This must be painful for Arab residents, but it follows an old, unwritten principle: To the victors go the street names.

Bibi Zig, Bibi Zag

December 17, 2009 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

So the furious reaction to Netanyahu’s settlement freeze has made you think that maybe, just maybe, it’s actually for real, and that he has become a pragmatist? Nope, he’s the same old Bibi, as I explain at the American prospect:

“No Entrance To Bibi’s Freeze Inspectors,” reads the long, professionally printed banner hanging at the eastern entrance to Ariel. Ariel has a reputation of being a relatively moderate settlement. Its residents are mostly secular suburbanites; its eternally re-elected mayor belongs to Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s mainstream right-wing Likud. The Ariel finger — the heavily settled strip of land joining Ariel to Israel — is one of those blocs that centrist Israeli politicians insist will stay in Israeli hands under a peace agreement.

But the suburbanites, like the hard-core ideologues of the religious right, are furious at Netanyahu’s declared freeze on building in the settlements. When police and building inspectors showed up this week at Tzofim, a smaller settlement closer to central Israel, to seize a bulldozer being used for illegal construction, an angry crowd blocked their way. One policewoman was hospitalized, apparently with internal injuries, after protesters pummeled her.

The settlers’ response might give the impression that Netanyahu is serious about the freeze, that he has moved toward the center, that he has accepted the need to compromise on the West Bank’s future. Impressions can be misleading. Netanyahu remains what he was in his first term as prime minister in the 1990s — an ideologue, but a weak-kneed one. Under U.S. pressure, he makes concessions that are sufficient to incense his right-wing allies but never enough to allow progress toward peace. The settlers’ fury has more to do with their own fears than with Netanyahu’s actions.

Ultra-Orthodoxy, Made in Israel

December 17, 2009 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

I have a new piece in Hadassah magazine describing how Israel created the ultra-Orthodox community as we see it today, with its life-time students, large families and poverty:

I’m standing in the Kerem Avraham neighborhood of Jerusalem. Across the street is the stone building where Amos Oz, Israel’s most famous novelist, grew up in a small apartment. Back then, in the 1940s, Kerem Avraham was home to “petty clerks, small retailers, bank tellers or cinema ticketsellers, schoolteachers or dispensers of private lessons,” as Oz writes in his memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness. They observed the last vestiges of Judaism—candles on Friday night, services on Yom Kippur—and avidly argued fine points of Zionist ideology.

When it was time for Amos to start school, his father faced a dilemma. Party-linked school systems educated the Jewish children of Mandatory Palestine. One school within walking distance belonged to the socialists of Labor Zionism, the other to the Orthodox Zionists of the Mizrahi movement. Oz’s father, however, was a right-wing secularist. He chose the Mizrahi school because the “red tide was on the upsurge in our land” and the socialist school might turn the boy into a Bolshevik. He felt the religious school posed no parallel risk because “religious Jews…with their synagogues would disappear off the face of the earth in a few years.”

The Cotton Gin and the Jewish Problem

December 7, 2009 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

My new article on whether Israel is a democracy is up at The American Prospect:

Infant mortality among Arab citizens of Israel is two and a half times higher than it is among Jewish citizens. One out of two Israeli Arab college graduates is out of work. Arabs make up 6 percent of the civil service, though they are over 15 percent of the country’s citizens. National testing shows Arab fifth- and eighth-graders trailing Jewish pupils in math, science, and English, and the gap is widening. That’s not surprising, since Arabs suffer much more poverty, and the national education system spends considerably more per Jewish child than per Arab child.

This a just a selection from the last few weeks’ news reports on the ethnic gap in Israel — not that inequality is big news. The most clichéd phrase in Israeli political discourse is that the country is a “Jewish and democratic state.” The phrase is overused precisely because of the tension between the two adjectives, because of the majority’s insecurity over whether both can be achieved at the same time. (The minority generally presumes it can’t.)

The standard line of the country’s boosters is that it’s the only democracy in the Middle East. The most concise criticism is that it is an “ethnocracy,” as Israeli political geographer Oren Yiftachel argues in his 2006 book of that name. An ethnocracy, he explains, is a regime promoting “the expansion of the dominant group in contested territory … while maintaining a democratic façade.” Looking at this debate in light of two new books by Israeli scholars and of a faded and remarkable document that I’ve just read in the Israel State Archives, it seems both sides could be right.

Conscientious Objection in the Funhouse Mirror

November 19, 2009 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

My new article on the right’s difficulties with the army is up at The American Prospect:

Driving through the West Bank recently, I picked up two hitchhikers. Both wore the long, thick sidelocks and extra-large skullcaps that have become the mark of young men on the religious right, especially among settlers. Since they were what Israelis call army age (what Americans would call college age), the conversation turned to military service.

Despite Israel’s universal draft, the hitchhiker in the back seat said he didn’t intend to serve. The Israel Defense Forces, he argued, hurts Jews — a point he presumed was obvious from the “uprooting” of settlements in Gaza four years ago and the occasional dismantling of tiny, illegal settlement outposts in the West Bank more recently. Besides that, he said, the IDF “doesn’t want to kill Arabs because it wants to look nice in the world.” He didn’t want to die because commanders were too concerned with Arabs’ lives. As a student at a yeshivah — a religious seminary — he had a deferment, and he intended to keep it till he was past draft age.