Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

Barack Obama likes to change what history means, and that’s a very good thing.

Today, for instance, marks 42 years since the Six-Day War began. Ever since then, the term “June 4 lines” has referred to the  on-the-ground border between Israel and its Arab neighbors on the eve of the war – not the lines marked on maps, but the lines marked by forward military positions. On the Syrian front, for instance, the actual positions lined up with neither the pre-1948 international border between Palestine and Syria, nor with the 1949 armistice agreements. The small distances on the ground make for big problems in peace negotiations.

As of yesterday, however, June 4 means something entirely different. It now refers to the day on which Barack Obama chose to speak in Cairo. “June 4 lines” henceforth mean the line of thinking that the president laid out for reconciliation between the U.S. and the Muslim world, and along the way, between Israel and the Palestinians.

His message to us was very, very basic Obama: First, I acknowledge your history. Second, it’s time each of you recognize the other’s side history, that you stop thinking that somehow by admitting the other’s side suffering you’ll erase your own. And now that you’ve acknowledged history, stop holding on to it as if electricity were running through it, as if your hand can’t let go. Move forward. Turn history into history – the text explaining how we got here – and stop treating it as an ever-repeating present. This is what he told Americans about race when he was campaigning for president. Now he’s telling it to us and our neighbors:

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new piece at The American Prospect is part II of the explanation of how Netanyahu would like to sell continued settlement growth to Barack Obama. Part I is below. Despite Bibi’s rep as a salesman, Obama isn’t buying, as he made clear today in Cairo.

It’s Benjamin Netanyahu’s fault. Because of his insistence on allowing for “natural growth” of West Bank settlements, I decided to go real-estate shopping. I called Amana, the settlement-building organization, and said I was interested in homes in Binyamin, the name used by settlers and Israeli officialdom for the piece of the West Bank directly north of Jerusalem.

The sales rep was so helpful I could hear her smile. At Shilo, a 30-year-old settlement north of Ramallah, construction has recently begun on a new development. For about $160,000, she said, I could get a 1,200-square-foot-house. To American ears, that sounds small, but for a Jerusalem apartment-dweller, it would be a step up. Besides, that’s a starter home; I could add a second floor now or later, she said.

At Eli, just up the road from Shilo,, she offered homes in the center of the settlement, and in outlying “neighborhoods.” In Hayovel, for instance, she had a house for $115,000, with a completed first floor and the outer shell for the second floor. She didn’t mention that the “neighborhood” of Hayovel is an illegal outpost, built partly on private Palestinian land. She offered me a similar house at a settlement called Ma’aleh Mikhmash. I thanked her, and said I’d talk to my wife.

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Gershom Gorenberg

So Bibi has taken down some outposts. My new piece at the Forward explains why no one – least of all Barack Obama – should be impressed. I’ll have more up soon on Netanyahu’s efforts to fool Obama.

The show goes on. As I write, a radio newscaster is repeating an item about the evacuation of an illegal settlement outpost in the West Bank: At Nahalat Yosef, near Nablus, the army demolished two makeshift mobile homes and removed a third, thereby erasing the outpost. Settler leaders promised to rebuild it. Judging from past experience, the promise will be kept.

The show started after Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington. Police razed several shacks comprising Maoz Esther, northeast of Ramallah. It was a grand demonstration that Netanyahu was acting against the 100-plus illegal outposts – small settlements established since the mid-1990s without government approval but with well-documented help from government agencies. Settlement activists immediately began rebuilding Maoz Esther. Like Nahalat Yosef and several other outposts removed with fanfare in recent days, Maoz Esther is among the least substantial of the outposts. Larger outposts haven’t been touched.

The outpost campaign is pure theater. The intended audience is Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and George Mitchell. President Obama has made it utterly clear that he expects Netanyahu to fulfill Israel’s obligations under the 2003 road map for peace and the 2001 Mitchell Report: Remove outposts, stop all construction in other settlements. Netanyahu would like to convince Obama that he’s making a good-faith effort to evacuate the outposts and that the president should therefore let him continue building new homes in other settlements. This kind of con might work on a legacy student with a C average named George. To Netanyahu’s dismay, Barack Obama isn’t George.

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Gershom Gorenberg

Yesterday the army evacuated the illegal outpost of Maoz Esther, as various newspapers reported.  Orders for demolishing an outpost have to come directly from the defense minister, Ehud Barak.  The bulldozers appeared a few hours after press reports that Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu had agreed to dismantle illegal settlement outposts, and even less time after Barak met settlement leaders and insisted that if outposts weren’t taken down voluntarily, they’d be removed by force, because “there’s no compromise on enforcing the law.”

Oh, and of course this is all after Netanyahu’s uncomfortable conversations in Washington, where Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and everyone else including the waiters at his kosher dinner at Blair House told him that settlement building had to stop and outposts had to be taken down.

So Bibi comes back to Israel, declares in that proud strong Bibi voice that he told Obama that Jerusalem will never be divided (hint to outside observers: that’s the voice Bibi uses after an uncomfortable experience of his own weakness). And then, just to show that he does take U.S. opinion into account, he sends a bulldozer to a Potemkin outpost. (Barak, not wanting to look like a wimp himself, says, “The evacuation is not related to U.S. pressure but to the obligations of Israeli society to itself.”)

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Gershom Gorenberg

Ezra Klein and his blog have gone away, gone away, from The American Prospect site. Alas.

However, he has landed at the Washington Post, which is apparently betting that the Net will live on and make profits when print is dead. To make the site attractive, the WP is willing to have Ezra’s solidly progressive, and very smart, blog on domestic affairs. So you can read George Will deny global warming (next up for denial:  evolution, or perhaps the role of the HIV virus in AIDS). Or you can read Ezra. Read Ezra!

I particularly like this item, on why junk food whipped up in factories costs more than healthy vegetables grown on farms.  Ezra suggests that taxing soda and ending subsidies to grow corn for corn syrup isn’t enough; the government should subsidize fresh vegetables. Cheaper vegetables equal healthier people, which also mean lower health costs, saving the government money.

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Gershom Gorenberg

You could call the timing mere coincidence. Yesterday Bibi met Barack Obama, who told him to stop settlement building:

Now, Israel is going to have to take some difficult steps as well, and I shared with the Prime Minister the fact that under the roadmap and under Annapolis that there’s a clear understanding that we have to make progress on settlements.  Settlements have to be stopped in order for us to move forward.  That’s a difficult issue.  I recognize that, but it’s an important one and it has to be addressed.

And the day before, as if to answer Obama in advance, contractors visited Maskiot in order to prepare bids to start construction of a settlement at the site. (A Ma’ariv report in Hebrew is here.) The Jordan Rift Regional Council – the local government for Israeli settlements along the Jordan River in the West Bank – issued the call for bids last week.

Let’s say this is just business as usual; no one was even paying attention to Obama.

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Gershom Gorenberg

As I write,  Barack Obama and  Bibi Netanyahu are still meeting in Washington. The meeting has been extended for half an hour, Ha’aretz reports. Until the protocol is released in 25 years or so, we can guess that Bibi is lecturing to Barack about the Spanish Inquisition, Masada, the Holocaust and Iran, and Barack is too polite to shush him. In the meantime, my curtain-raiser is up at the American Prospect.

Hebrew is a compressed language. Much disdain can be packed in a few syllables. To say of the prime minister, “He’s someone who cracks under pressure,” takes just two words: hu lahitz.

When a television mike caught the Israeli Finance Ministry’s budget chief using those words last week, the budget chief denied he was talking about Benjamin Netanyahu. The denial was hard to take seriously.

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Gershom Gorenberg

The questions from the Gaza war don’t go away. They stay in the air, seep into conversation like smoke into a room.

In the course of some reporting I recently spoke with a rabbi at a West Bank settlement. The conversation meandered to the ethics of war. He raised the question of whether, in order “to strike a terrorist who endangers the Jewish nation,” it’s permissible to cause harm to additional people around him.

“In parentheses, I don’t call them ‘innocent,'” he said, referring to people who live, work or go to school near a terrorist. Rather, he said, such people “envelop” the terrorist. The word he used in Hebrew was otef, which means to wrap or package – the hint being that simply by being nearby, non-combatants have voluntarily become human shields.

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