Gershom Gorenberg

Washington Power Shabbas Whispers

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Gershom Gorenberg

I try to get away from business on Shabbat. I don’t read newspapers. They make me feel like I’m at work. OK, if my kids are reading this, they’ll point out, gently I hope, that I don’t try very hard not to talk politics. I can’t go 25 hours without a fix.

In Washington last Shabbat, it wasn’t even worth trying. At a shul in an unrevealed location, people who work in Interesting Places drifted around the kiddush tables, handing me nibbles of rumors. It was a power Shabbas.

Even so, conversations on Shabbat are off-off-record. In fact, I never actually talked to anyone at all. Merely by the feel of the hall, I picked up these ideas. If they turn out wrong, I take no responsibility for a hint, a whisper and speculation. If they turn out to be true, I’ll take credit for my great sources.

Hint: Dennis Ross is in. He’ll be a special adviser to HRC. “Special adviser” isn’t an insult or demotion, despite what some people think. Dennis can’t be appointed special envoy to Iran, because Washington doesn’t yet talk to Iran. And no, it’s not strange that his appointment hasn’t been announced yet. First the cabinet secretaries, then the undersecretaries. Afterward, envoys and advisers.

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Gaza Failure, Precisely Parsed and Psychoanalyzed

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Gershom Gorenberg

Prof. Stuart Cohen has precisely analyzed why the war in Gaza failed – why, in fact, it was a failure when it began. The full piece is at the BESA website. Here’s a start:

In his classic work, On War, Clausewitz commented that: No one starts a war – or, rather, no one in his senses ought to do so – without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it. The former is its political purpose; the latter its operational form. This is the governing principle that will set the course of the war, prescribe the scale of means and effort that is required, and make its influence felt throughout down to the smallest operational detail.

Looking back, did Operation Cast Lead meet those criteria? Were its objectives clearly defined? And were the measures taken commensurate with those ends?

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The Minister for National Fears

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Gershom Gorenberg

In 2007, I wrote an extensive profile of Avigdor Lieberman in the Atlantic. To complement Haim’s suggestion that we understand Lieberman’s voters,  here’s my effort to understand what drives the man himself.

Avigdor Lieberman is an oversized man in an undersized room. His beard, remorselessly trimmed to a narrow, graying stripe around his cheeks, frames a wide face with pale, icy eyes. As he speaks, he waves his tiger paw of a hand, holding a cigar the proportions of a small cannon. The cigar is not lit, but the laws of drama say it will be by the third act. In Russian-accented Hebrew, he is talking about his admiration for Peter the Great and Winston Churchill. Before World War II, he says, all the “lovely, liberal, progressive people” threw every insult at Churchill that they now throw at him-“warmonger, embittered, extremist”-except for having a beard and being Russian. He smiles at the thought. …

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Election Results: Racism Rising

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My apologies for being away from South Jerusalem, the place and the blog. I’ve been on the road, on a schedule that has allowed time for neither sleeping nor blogging.  Nonetheless, my first take on the disastrous election results is up at The American Prospect. Here are some excerpts:

Numerically, it would be possible for Livni, Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, leader of the shrunken Labor party, to form an alliance and leave Lieberman to rage from the opposition. Instead, both Netanyahu and Livni immediately sought Lieberman’s support. On Wednesday, Livni met Lieberman, and was quoted afterward as telling him, “This is a time of favor … It is an opportunity for unity and for advancing subjects that are important to you as well.” The competition for his support will allow Lieberman to increase his price, demanding control of powerful ministries and legislation favorable to his platform…

When Netanyahu was elected prime minister in 1996, Lieberman became his chief of staff, and earned a reputation as the enforcer who crushed dissent in the party. Eventually, facing a revolt from party veterans, Netanyahu eased Lieberman out of the job.

In response, Lieberman started his own party, initially appealing to the immigrants from the former Soviet Union who had poured into Israel in the 1990s. Many were professionals who found themselves working at semi-skilled jobs, competing with Israeli Arabs for jobs, living in towns that became immigrant ghettos. Some 300,000 were non-Jews, who were able to immigrant under Israel’s Law of Return because of their family ties to Jews, but who felt uncertain of their place in their new country.

The name of Lieberman’s party, Israel Is Our Home, spoke to the immigrants’ insecurities. With a stress on the word our, it also suggested that the country was not home to the Arab minority. It’s a classic gambit of the racist right: Bolster one group’s sense of belonging by attacking another as outsiders who threaten the nation…

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To George Mitchell, Arriving on the Shores of Despair

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Gershom Gorenberg

Following on my previous post on the appointment of George Mitchell as President Obama’s Mideast peace envoy, I’ve written an open letter to Mitchell. The full text is at The American Prospect. Here’s an excerpt:

…as I’m sure you know, in coming here from America now, the biggest difference you’ll experience is not the weather, language, or religion. You are coming from a land of new hope to the countries of despair. The collapse of the Oslo process and the playacting of the Bush administration’s Annapolis initiative have erased belief among Israelis, Palestinians, and our neighbors that negotiations can achieve anything. The al-Aqsa Intifada and Ehud Olmert’s inconclusive wars in Lebanon and Gaza proved that we will not moderate each other’s positions by blowing each other up. The mood, on both sides, is extraordinarily grim. If leaders don’t tell you that honestly, you should change into a cardigan, put a tourist’s day pack over your shoulder, and slip into a Tel Aviv or Ramallah café, where anyone sipping coffee will tell you the truth. Your task, Mr. Mitchell, includes changing the public mood and — even if you must avoid ever saying so publicly — encouraging a change in leadership.

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Shifting Winds

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Gershom Gorenberg

This is a story about politics.

My father was an engineer. He hoped I’d be one. Then he had a grandson. When my son was around 6, my dad got him a subscription to Invention and Technology.

Invention and Technology is a good magazine if the thing that interests you most about the art museum is how the elevators work. When everyone else ran stories on the anniversary of Hiroshima and wrote about the moral questions of using an atomic bomb, I&T ran a technical account, a really technical account, of how the bomb was invented. If it had been any more technical, you could have built one yourself in the garage. These are not the pages to find philosophy or politics. Judging from my father’s office friends, if the politics were there, they’d be conservative. I’ve never checked the stats, but I guess that as a liberal Jewish aerospace engineer, Dad was a rare bird.

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Foxman, Rosner and Obama’s January Surprise

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Gershom Gorenberg

Responding to the appointment of George Mitchell as Barack Obama’s Mideast envoy, Abe Foxman has achieved something remarkable: He has outdone Marty Peretz in the tasteless-comment competition among the self-appointed cheerleaders of Israel. And Foxman did it without using words unprintable in this respectable blog.

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“For You Were Slaves…” Remember?

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Gershom Gorenberg

I have a new article up at the Hadassah Magazine site on African refugees in Israel:

When he was 13, Akon told us, the government-backed militia came to his village in southern Sudan.

“They started killing people and burning their houses,” Akon said, speaking so quietly that I had to lean over our coffee cups to hear his voice amid the music in the Jerusalem café. “They killed my mother. My sister, they raped her, and she died.” The militiamen took Akon to northern Sudan, where they sold him as a slave.

So began the nine-year odyssey that brought him to Jerusalem.

Looking across the table, I saw lines in a dark face. He looked much older than 22 years. The family that bought him, he said, put him to work taking care of their cattle and camels. He was the first to rise each day, the last to sleep. He was beaten and insulted. Because he would not convert from Christianity to Islam, he said, “I was a devil in their eyes.”

Slavery was something I had read about in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and history textbooks. Now a former slave sat across from me. I thought of inviting him to my Pesah Seder, then wondered what he would think of the words.

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Tribute and Desideratum

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Gershom Gorenberg

Strange as the memory is for me now, the first words I ever got published were poetry. In the last few years, poetry has been a very sporadic pursuit. Yesterday, though, looking for an entirely different file, I happened on a poem I wrote nearly eight years ago, early in 2001, apparently after returning to the wellspring of Ferlinghetti, and that I’d since forgotten.

Watching a videocast from Washington last night, it seemed to me that half of what seemed impossible when I wrote this has come true:  Across the ocean, where hope was written off like a bad debt, it has been reborn.

Here, in Jerusalem, one still has to dream of the very possibility of dreaming. The pseudonymous and very wise Jeremiah Haber chides for even considering the possibility. But I know of no biological difference that allows Americans to imagine a better future and prevents us from doing so. With some trepidation at daring poetry in a blog, I’m posting this.

Desiderata

I am hoping for the rebirth of hope
I am waiting for the beat of wheels on steel, the railroad drumbeat rhythm,
I am waiting for the long-distance heaven express.
I believe its time to lay tracks up to heaven
I am waiting for Jimi Hendrix to rise and climb on, for Phil Ochs to declare he’s retracted his resignation,
to rise all bones and anger banging a guitar and climb on,
I am waiting for the kids in the high schools to lay down their guns and climb on
I believe the generation born dead, raised dead, schooled dead in the malls’ mausoleum marble will pass
I believe with an imperfect faith, cracked but still serviceable, that a generation will be born that knows how to hope.

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The War as Warm-Up Act for Obama

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Gershom Gorenberg

I’ve been asked whether the Gaza War was deliberately timed to take advantage of the American interregnum, with the aim of avoiding U.S. diplomatic involvement. Since it will be 40 years before the archives open and we can read the minutes of the cabinet meetings, I can’t answer that question with any certainty now.

But if that was the intent, as I explain this morning in Ha’aretz, the effect is likely to be very different from what Olmert, Livni and Barak hoped for.  For those who read from East to West, the Hebrew original of my article is here. The translation is here.

The diplomatic timing for the war looked lovely. The U.S. president who loved military action was still in power, though fading into the shadows. The new president, dynamic and popular, hadn’t yet entered office. There was no one to interfere, to pressure us to stop.

We don’t know if the Olmert-Livni-Barak triumvirate deliberately picked that window of opportunity. If so, it already looks like another of the war’s mistakes – perhaps the only welcome miscalculation. For instead of preventing American involvement, their decision to go to war on the eve of Barack Obama’s inauguration may well force him to intervene in the Israeli-Palestinian arena and push for a diplomatic solution.

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America Reinvents Itself. What About Us?

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Gershom Gorenberg

My blogging has been sparse of late due to the cast on my right hand. In the meantime, though, the new international news site, GlobalPost, is marking its launch with a series on Barack Obama’s inauguration as seen from around the world.  Here’s my contribution:

The photograph of Barack Obama covered the entire front page of Ha’aretz. He stood with one hand held high, facing what looked like a distant pillar of cloud. Forget comparisons with Abraham Lincoln. This picture said that Obama was Moses, leading the Israelites out of Egypt. The headline – in English, not Hebrew – proclaimed, “Yes We Can.”

Let’s be clear: Hebrew papers do not run English headlines. Ha’aretz is a remarkably staid paper, aimed at people who regard themselves as smart, educated and unemotional. It does not wallpaper its front page with iconic photos – except for this time, when the skeptics in the newsroom were apparently swept away. They were also impatient: That front page was dated Nov. 4, election day. It was printed before any votes were cast, much less counted.

What made all this more remarkable was that through the campaign, the newspaper’s U.S. correspondents had subtly echoed the conservative critique of Obama as insufficiently pro-Israel. On the day of decision, doubt was vanquished by awe: America was defying its history. And Israelis are aware, perhaps too aware, of how the past can imprison people.

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