Gershom Gorenberg

War is a Constriction of Policy By Other Means

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new article on the war in Gaza is now up at The American Prospect (may it speedily be outdated by a ceasefire):

The morning after the invasion began, I ran into a friend at a café. It was a quiet day in Jerusalem, cold and sunny. He’d received a text message, from his son, who was serving in an unnamable unit in the south. The message said that the soldiers’ cell phones were being collected, so he wouldn’t be able to call again for some time. Translated, it meant, “We’re going in.” My friend smiled, with a bit of effort, and then said about the war, “I don’t think we had any choice this time.”

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Delay-Sayers: Two More, One Less

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Gershom Gorenberg

Hussein Agha and Robert Malley have joined the ranks of the delay-sayers.

Agha and Malley are among the most astute analysts of the long-stalled Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic process. Their essay on what went wrong at the Camp David summit in 2000 sparked intense criticism – most notably from Ehud Barak, who preferred to deny the very possibility of peace than to accept any fault.  Since then their once-radical critique has become closer to conventional wisdom, as they demonstrate in a review of three new books by former American diplomats.

Surprisingly, though, Agha and Malley conclude by joining the delay-sayers: the old diplomatic hands advising Barack Obama to avoid a peace initiative at the beginning of his terms:

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The Other Housing Crisis

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Gershom Gorenberg

At the moment, the temptation is to look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a zoom lens that shows the battles in Gaza up-close, in detail. But a zoom lens flattens the picture you see, and entirely leaves out the panoramic view.

In the panoramic view, Israel’s strategic problem remains ending its rule over the Palestinians safely, in order to avoid the alternative of an unstable binational state. That means leaving the West Bank, and giving up settlements. Indeed, the reason that Ariel Sharon insisted on leaving Gaza unilaterally three years ago is that any negotiated agreement with Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas would have meant taking down most settlements. But the unilateral withdrawal empowered Hamas, and is at the root of the current crisis.

The longer the challenge of removing West Bank settlements is evaded, as I explain in an article in the new issue of Foreign Policy,  the more overwhelming it becomes:

Each time I drive out of Jerusalem into the West Bank, it strikes me: The hills are changing. Israeli settlements are redrawing the landscape-daily, insistently. While governments change, while diplomatic conversations murmur on and stop and begin again, the bulldozers and cranes continue their work.

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Who Am I to Say? (Occasional Advice)

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Gershom Gorenberg

Dear SoJo

I am a secular Jew who has a profound respect for Jewish tradition and will be making aliyah shortly. I do not believe in an intervening god, nor do I consider the Torah an accurate historical record or an exemplary moral treatise (not necessarily an abominable one either). I do, however, recognize it as an immensely important cultural anchor that should be studied by anyone wishing to preserve Jewish “peoplehood.”

I’ve fallen in love with an Orthodox woman – dati leumi [religious Zionist], I’d call her. I’ve expressed to her that I have no problem – indeed, I’m quite happy – with upping my observance in the interest of preserving tradition (Shabbat, kashrut, etc). However, I cannot accept the idea of sending my children to a religious school where they learn that the Torah is accurate history and the infallible word of God as written by Moses. She seems open to the possibility of sending her children to a school that exposes them to the Torah while allowing them the freedom to draw their own conclusions about the text’s origin.

Does such a school exist? What has been your experience with this issue? I read your recent article on dealing with the fundamentalism in Israeli religious schools. Are there no progressive religious schools in Israel? Have you come across any couples at your synagogue who are not entirely on the same plane religiously?

Semi-Secular

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Huntington’s Legacy

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Samuel Huntington has died, though it took a few days for the news to reach the media. Huntington, a Harvard professor of political science, was the author of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. When someone dies, the custom is to praise him. I’d like to honor custom, but Huntington’s most famous book was a pernicious work that has seems to have served as ideological underpinning for America’s failed foreign policy under George W. Bush.

Soon after 9/11, when everyone was talking Huntington, I wrote a riff on the book and my concern that it would create unneeded battle lines. I’m sorry to say that my worries were justified. Here’s part of what I wrote then:

…as some ideas do, this one seeped into popular culture, ready to be quoted when the need arose even by people who couldn’t quite recall the source. September 11 created the need. Say “civilization,” and instead of a battle against an invisible enemy with an opaque ideology, you have a war of the West against Islam. The problem is that Huntington’s thesis is intellectually fuzzy, factually incorrect – and likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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Pride, Fury, Fire

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Gershom Gorenberg

Last week I received a press release from Physicians for Human Rights-Israel about a sharp increase in child burn victims in the Gaza Strip. This was before the Israeli air campaign began. After what’s happened in the last couple of days, PHR’s email now seems like a message from another historical era, a time so calm that it was a major concern that

“In December alone, 16 Palestinians were hospitalized who were burned while trying to heat their homes. Most of the cases reported to the NGO were of children playing with fire, following attempts to light bonfires for heating and cooking and lighting candles in order to illuminate homes.”

The fires, that is, were the result of the siege of Gaza, which included fuel shortages and power outages. The head of the burn unit at Shifa Hospital in Gaza reported that his unit was collapsing under the strain. I can only guess that Dr. Nafed Abu Shaaban is having a much harder time this week.

Nonetheless, the problem of kids getting burned can help to understand why all of Gaza and southern Israel are in flames at the moment.

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Big Tent Judaism

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Gershom Gorenberg

Thank you, Aliza!

Because Aliza commented recently on my latest post on conversion, I discovered her blog, Memoir of a Jewminicana. As she tells, she’s a first generation of Dominican descent, and an Orthodox convert to Judaism. She writes softly and powerfully about that experience, and I wish a lot of people born as Jews were reading her.

Much of what she blogs is about the dissonance of converting: She loves the faith. The Jews, however, can be terribly unwelcoming. She’s not talking about the kind of Israeli ultra-Orthodox rabbinic court judge who’s already ready to reverse your conversion. She’s talking about everyday Jews who can’t get straight that not everyone who’s Jewish grew up in their neighborhood, with their grandmothers’ accents, with their mothers’ advice (what a polite understated word) on what can be talked about at the dinner table, and with their skin color.

Here’s a piece from one recent post, called The Worst Guest in the World:

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Feiglin and Fascism

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Gershom Gorenberg After the Likud primary, I wrote briefly here on the unprecedented power that Moshe Feiglin has gained in that party. My new piece in The American Prospect provides more information on Feiglin, his beliefs, and the danger he poses: Until recently, Feiglin hasn’t hidden his goals. On the Jewish Leadership website, a Hebrew … Read more

The Occupation Times: Ofra, Migron, Hebron, Gaza and a Splash of Optimism

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Ofrah is illegal. Not just under international law, like all settlements – but also under Israeli law. The evidence is piling up.

Ofrah, near Ramallah, was the first bridgehead of the Gush Emunim movement in West Bank hills north of Jerusalem. Recently human-rights activists have succeeded in prying information on the settlement from government repositories, relying on the Freedom of Information Act. The evidence shows that most of the settlement is built on land owned by other people.

The latest report was published today by B’Tselem. Using land registry documents, the organization found that most of the land on which the settlement stands is registered as the property of individual Palestinians. Besides that, the settlement lacks any of the basic town planning approval necessary for construction. Built on stolen land, without permits, the comfortable bourgeois neighborhood is in fact a crime made tangible – and a prime example of how the settlement effort has corroded the rule of law.

In 2001,26 years after Ofrah was founded, the next generation of settlers set up the outpost of Migron. As AP’s Matti Friedman reported a few days ago,

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Rabbis v. Jewish Tradition: More on the Conversion Crisis

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Gershom Gorenberg

My latest piece on the conversion crisis is on-line, a bit late, at the Hadassah Magazine site. Crisis is too nice a word. What’s really happening is that part of the Israeli state rabbinate has adopted a radical ultra-Orthodox innovation: regarding conversion to Judaism as something that can be annulled.

Yes, folks, I said, radical ultra-Orthodox innovation. That’s not a contradiction in terms; it may be a redundancy. Like other contemporary religious communities that claim to represent old-time religion – salafist Muslims, fundamentalist Christians – ultra-Orthodox Judaism is a creation of modernity. The ultra-Orthodox assault on conversion is just the latest bit of evidence.

So here’s the article:

Nearly two years ago, a Danish-born Israeli woman named Yael and her husband appeared before the rabbinical court in Ashdod to end their marriage. Since the couple had agreed on an amicable divorce, they anticipated a pro forma procedure.

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Who Am I to Say? (Occasional Advice)

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Dear SoJo,

Very recently, as a lark, my sons and I decided to have our DNA checked. We expected to see vague northern European references and perhaps a surprise or two. When I opened the pdf file with the result (from dnatribes.com), we discovered, with mouths agape, that we are Ashkenazi. That is, the graph showed we are mostly Ashkenazi, almost 100%. (There was some Afghanistan, Iraq, and Turkey thrown in for good measure). I had always been intrigued to see what a DNA test would show and because my friend went for dna testing in chicago and had a wonderful experience, I decided the time had come for me to give it a go too.

This is delightful, of course. And probably not unheard of (see Madeline Albright and Christopher Hitchens). Nonetheless, it’s a confusing state to be in. I was raised in a strict Catholic home and our “German, English, and Irish roots” were all anyone ever alluded to. These results have left my friends asking me “Why don’t you make your family tree?”

As a scholar of archeo-anthropological studies , I am fascinated by migration, wandering hordes, tribal customs and linguistics. But, never in a million years did my mother ever say, “Oh, yes, dear, by the way, we are Ashkenazi Jews, but they converted to Catholicism due to the pogroms.” My mother doesn’t even know what a pogrom is. However, when I gently confronted her the other day with this information, she said “Oh, we sort of knew this.”

Now, my question to you is, and I ask it sincerely, because I am getting a lot of weird answers: What is a Jew?

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Why Pass on the Trauma? A Conversation with Avraham Burg

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On bloggingheads.tv, I’ve interviewed Avrum Burg about his nearly new book, The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From its Ashes.  I say nearly new, because the book came out earlier in Israel, where it was roundly attacked, mostly by people who hadn’t read it but knew precisely what it said. I’m told that this … Read more