Gershom Gorenberg – Page 20

Bulldozing Bill’s Borders

May 10, 2009 by Gershom Gorenberg

It was a busy Friday. Besides my New York Review of Books essay on 1948, my new piece also went up at The American Prospect. This is an on-the-ground report on construction projects in Jerusalem designed to erase the Clinton parameters for peace:

So far, the bulldozers have carved a large hole in the chalky hillside for foundations. On the street, a developer’s sign shows a picture of three multifloor apartment buildings that will rise on the site. The name of the developer, Bemuna, is written in Hebrew and means “in faith.”

A lot of work will have to be completed on this site before we start to see any glimpses of a building. The construction company will have to make sure that they have enough building site security in the meantime as there could be a lot of expensive equipment lying around, and anything that goes missing could cause some disruption to the entire process. And this would not benefit the residents in the area. Construction sites also need to be sure that health and safety are as tight as possible too. This will prevent any accidents or injuries from occurring. Construction sites should really look to get some health and safety signage put up to make sure workers are aware of any potential hazards. This should ensure work can be completed quickly as fewer accidents should occur. Construction sites should also be using functioning equipment to help workers do their jobs. For example, a lot of construction workers will have things to do on higher points of the building. To make sure they can all reach these points on the building, some construction sites use mobile platforms from Platforms and Ladders to help workers get closer to the area they need to complete work in. Perhaps more construction sites should consider this. Additionally, with safety signs and workers all wearing safety equipment, there should be an even lower chance of accidents occurring. Each construction worker will need to have different health and safety equipment, so it’s vital that construction sites make sure their workers are wearing the appropriate gear. For example, any on-site welders will need to make sure they’re wearing welding safety gloves to keep their hands safe from the sparks and power tools that they’ll be using. Health and safety equipment is created for a reason, so it’s important that construction site workers do use this equipment.

The company’s Web site says the project is located in East Talpiot — one of the Jewish neighborhoods that Israel built after it annexed East Jerusalem in 1967. That’s a stretch, as I found when I visited the building site this week. The hole in the ground is surrounded by the houses of Arab a-Sawahra, a Palestinian neighborhood that borders East Talpiot. Once completed, the buildings will be three emphatic statements of Jewish presence in the neighborhood, three declarations that a political border can’t be easily drawn between Arab and Jewish areas of the city.

The War to Begin All Wars

May 8, 2009 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

My new essay on 1948, Benny Morris, and how the presents shapes our view of the past is up at The New York Review of Books:

In 1963 the young Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua published Facing the Forests, a novella destined to become a classic of Hebrew literature. It is a nightmarish story, the kind of dread-filled dream from which you awake shuddering, about a student who takes a job as a watchman in one of Israel’s newly planted forests. His task is to watch day and night for fire; his only company is an old Arab whose tongue was cut out in “the war”—meaning Israel’s war of independence in 1948—and the Arab’s young daughter. The forest, as the watchman learns, hides the ruins of an Arab village, the remains of an erased past: once other people lived here, members of a different nation. Their departure has to do with vague, unrecorded violence.

At the end, the mute Arab ignites the forest. The watchman-scholar does not participate in the arson, but welcomes the climax of fire and what it reveals: “And there, from within the smoke, from within the mist, the little village rises before him, reborn in its most basic outlines, as in an abstract painting, like every submerged past.” As a watchman, the Israeli has failed. Perhaps as a scholar he has succeeded: he has uncovered history, as if in a hidden archive.

Missing Mahatma: Last Thoughts (for Now)

April 29, 2009 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

Once, while writing an article on Abu Nidal, leader of the most extreme Palestinian faction in the 1970s and 80s, I went to speak to one of my favorite wise men, political scientist Yaron Ezrahi. I was asking about Franz Fanon, the revolutionary theorist of the Algerian revolution, whose views on the necessity of armed struggle were adopted by the early PLO. I was interested in Fanon because Abu Nidal was the most unbending of believers in Fanon’s theory of violence.

Yaron immediately compared Fanon’s approach in The Wretched of the Earth to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The difference between the two philosophies of liberation, Yaron said, is this. For King, liberating blacks in America also meant liberating their white oppressors. For Fanon, eliminating mastery had to be physical: The masters had to be eradicated. Fanon could only imagine liberating one side. King believed in liberating both.

Mr. Oren Goes to Washington, Maybe

April 24, 2009 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

Michael Oren is an old friend of mine. I respect his scholarship (his Six Days of War is the best history of June 1967). He wrote an endorsement for my last book, The Accidental Empire. And when we (rarely) discuss politics, the differences are also respectful. So a I am not an unbiased judge of the reports on his possible appointment as the U.S. ambassador to Washington.

I am however, an extremely bemused judge. Depending on which Israeli paper you’ve picked up, Mike is either too conservative for the job, or too dovish. I hope Mike is getting a good laugh out of all this.

Axis of Sorrow

April 24, 2009 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

In my new article at The American Prospect, I argue that choosing either the Israeli or the Palestinian version of history as correct is no way to make peace.

Spring is national trauma season in the land between the River and the Sea. The wildflowers that blossom briefly after the Mediterranean winter wilt, and Jews and Palestinians relive their agonizing memories, symbiotically, backs turned to each other.

Their memories negate each other. Nonetheless, they are tellings of the same story. Because there is now an American administration interested in diplomacy, because the public debate in America about Israel and Palestine may be opening up, this small truth bears mention: Deciding that one side’s telling is valid, and the other’s is false, is not an act of peacemaking. The trauma itself is a strategic fact, as important as topography, borders, and water.

‘Sir’ As an Expletive, as in ‘Service’

April 20, 2009 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

Though I am thoroughly anti-messianic, I did briefly consider the possibility last week that I was seeing signs of redemption: Marty Peretz liked a column by Roger Cohen, and I mostly liked it too.

However, Peretz’s comment that the column is about diarrhea strikes me as akin to someone asserting that Pride and Prejudice is about ballroom dancing: missing the point, most grievously. So I guess the messiah is not coming.

Cohen’s column is about a man arrested because he pushed his way past a flight attendant to use the business-class lavatory. This was on Delta Airlines. A refreshment cart was blocking the economy class facility, and the attendants would neither move it nor allow him to venture into the territory of his betters to avoid mortal shame. He imagines them telling him:

“You’ll have to wait, Sir. We’re doing the drinks and tiny pack of peanuts service.”

Cohen comments, masterfully,

The intonation of that “Sir” will be familiar to many of you, a tone peculiar to American airline companies, one in which resentment, superiority, fear, contempt and impatience are coiled into a venomous parody of politeness — a three-letter expletive really — that stands the notion of service on its head and tells the whole dismal story of U.S. carriers in recent years.

Read more

Bibi II: Same Character Flaws, Same Plot Line

April 11, 2009 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

My new piece about Netanyahu’s second term as a remake of the first is up at The American Prospect:

Since my wife began writing screenplays, I get a lesson in the mechanics of a film each time we watch one together. First lesson: Pay rapt attention to the opening moments. Character is being revealed; the entire plot is being laid out, though we may not yet understand how. Take the monologue at the start of Michael Clayton, where in a manic voiceover, a lawyer insists he’s not insane but rather, that his firm’s work has left him covered in excrement from which he cannot cleanse himself. Yes, we will learn, this madman is the sole compass of sanity in a world where the law is utterly befouled. It’s all there, the whole story.

I suggest watching the opening scenes of Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to power — call it Bibi II — in the same way. It’s not just that the Netanyahu cabinet… is the largest in Israel’s history or that key positions are held by politicians manifestly unqualified to deal with the crises that Israel faces. What’s revealing is how Netanyahu constructed his coalition, in more of a panic than a process.

People’s Committe for a Free Seder: Alternative Agendas

April 7, 2009 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

More suggestions for Seder discussion:

We are, of course, the most free people in history. We can live where we want (even if the cars, streets, and shop signs make a thousand neighborhoods look the same); we can do what we want (though some days the choice seems to be between which brand of peanut butter to buy); we can believe what we want (even if few people believe anything with a passion that grips their lives, and those few, we know, are eccentrics).

“In every generation, a person is obligated to see himself as if he went out from Egypt,” says the Haggadah, “as is written, ‘for the sake of this, the Lord acted for me when I went out from Egypt.'” It’s easy to read on quickly, thinking of the historical Egypt and even of a metaphorical one, a country or a time in which our parents or grandparents did not have our freedoms.

People’s Committee for a Free Seder

April 7, 2009April 7, 2009 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

My friend Josh has a lovely riff on the Seder at his blog, Frost and Clouds – a smart comment on a dazzlingly stupid article in the New York Times. The Times reporter found about colleagues – writers Judith Shulevitz and Nicholas Lemann who have a dairy Seder every year, and wanted to know if any rabbi considered this a real Seder. Then the reporter found out that Judith and Nicholas and their guests sit around munching appetizers and asking questions about the meaning of freedom for hours before they get to main course before they eat. Our reporter thought that the idea of the Seder was to read through a set text, without asking anything or thinking about, and then eat.

In other words, the reporter thought that a particular main course was an absolute requirement of Judaism, and had no ideas that asking questions at a Seder is an absolute requirement – and felt sure that enough other people “knew” the same things that she could base an article in the Times on this knowledge. I’d like to think that this reflects extraordinary ignorance, but I think it’s probably very ordinary ignorance.

The Missing Mahatma: Further thoughts

April 2, 2009April 2, 2009 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

My article on why there hasn’t been a Palestinian Gandhi has stirred a wave of commentary. Jim Sleeper at TPM Cafe wrote to me to ask why I’d published it in the Weekly Standard (If you care, my answer is in his post). Svend White, an American Muslim, offered some thoughtful criticism, commenting here and on his own blog (which I recommend). And then of course there are the rants.

Svend says,

Fair enough, but kindly direct me to all the non-Palestinian Gandhis out there today…

As much as I hope and pray for a peaceful resolution to the conflict, I don’t think it’s a big mystery as to why a Palestinian Gandhi has yet to emerge. In how many other of the world’s conflicts have we seen such an ethic take root? Gandhi and MLK were extraordinary leaders whose charisma and vision could change the rules of the game.

I agree that leaders who can lead a nonviolent liberation struggle are rare. Nonetheless, such leaders have existed. The standard isn’t superhuman. Not only Israelis and outsiders, but some Palestinians have raised the argument that adopting a nonviolent strategy could be successful where other Palestinian strategies have failed.

The Missing Mahatma: Searching for a Palestinian Gandhi

March 29, 2009 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

If Palestinians adopted a Gandhian nonviolent strategy, could they reshape the entire conflict with Israel and finally realize a two-state solution? If so, why haven’t they done so? Or perhaps they really have at certain times and places, and Israel has broken that form of resistance as well?

Those questions have been asked for years, in variations of tone and wording, by moderate Israelis and Palestinians and by concerned outsiders. A while back, a colleague suggested that I investigate the issue in depth.

The question lead to a intellectual journey. My essay on that journey of exploration has at last appeared.

Here’s the opening:

The Soldiers’ Testimony and Failure of Cast Lead

March 26, 2009 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

My take on the soldiers’ testimony from Gaza comes in my new article at the American Prospect:

The soldier had served as a squad commander during the Israeli army’s invasion of the Gaza Strip last winter. His unit was assigned to advance into Gaza City. His initial orders, he recalled, were that after an armored vehicle broke down the door of a building, his men were to enter, spraying fire: “I call it murdering … going up one floor after another, and anyone we spot, shoot him.” The word from his higher-ups was that anyone who hadn’t fled the neighborhood could be assumed to be a terrorist. The orders fit a pattern: In Gaza, “as you know, they used lots and lots of force and killed lots and lots of people on the way so that we wouldn’t be hurt,” he said.

Before the operation began, he recounted, the orders were softened. The building’s occupants would be given five minutes to leave and be searched on their way out. When he told his squad, some soldiers objected.