Gershom Gorenberg

Mr. Mazuz, This Is the Hour of Your Testing

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While we’ve all got on our eyes on Ehud Olmert’s alleged sticky fingers, Prof. David Kretzmer has called for an investigation of whether one of Olmert’s would-be successors has committed crimes of an entirely different order.

Kretzmer is emeritus professor of international law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem – a dry understated title for a learned and passionate defender of human rights. As The Independent reports, he has asked Israel’s Attorney General Menachem Mazuz to investigate whether Shaul Mofaz committed war crimes while serving as military chief of staff at the beginning of the second Intifada.

The letter to… Mazuz refers to a book by two Israeli journalists, Raviv Drucker and Ofer Shelah, which says that Mr Mofaz, after ensuring he was not being officially recorded, called for a Palestinian death toll of 70 per day.

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Fire the Founders! Fire the Founding Opposition!

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On the flight back from South Africa I began reading Andrew Feinstein’s After the Party. Feinstein was a young member of parliament representing the African National Congress in South Africa’s new democracy after 1994. While his own involvement with the ANC only began in earnest with the transition to democracy, he revered the people who had succeeded in overthrowing apartheid.

By August 2001, Feinstein had quit parliament, forced out because he had pushed for a full investigation of the arms-purchasing scandal that has led to the top ranks of the party. Even beforehand, he was furious with President Mbeki Thabo’s surreal refusal to deal with the AIDS pandemic sweeping through South Africa. Mbeki insisted that poverty, not a virus, caused the disease, and that Western pharmaceutical companies were trying to bankrupt Africa by selling dangerous and useless drugs. It was a conspiracy theory turned into a national policy of ignoring a plague.

The tie between the arms scandal and AIDS denial was the transformation of the ANC from a liberation movement embracing a wide variety of opinions to a top-down party where dissent was crushed. No questions about AIDS, no questions about government officials and their relatives getting rich in the process of buying unnecessary, inferior and overpriced arms.

As an aside, yes, Feinstein is Jewish, marginally.

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African Notes: Animal Activism, Instinctive Apathy

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Gershom Gorenberg

Above us, two eagles fought: One swooped ahead, the other caught up and dove, the two of the them locked together, plunged, let go, and flew again. “They’re fighting about territory,” said Brad, our guide. “One has entered the other’s territory, and is being warned to leave.”

Elephants emerged from the trees into open grassland near the river bank, a line of dark beasts, moving silently in the late afternoon light. We sat, awed, in the small open truck on a dirt road through the Hluhluwe Game Reserve. Brad explained the cushioning of their feet, which allows them to move like apparitions through the bush. He pointed out at a small elephant and said it was a young male. “They reach sexual maturity when they’re 12-13, like humans,” he said. “Then his mother will force him out of the herd, which will be quite traumatic for him.” For the next 10 years, Brad said, the young bull will live on its own. Then it will start fighting the older bulls for breeding rights.

Elephants, Brad said, are very emotional creatures. “They don’t like death at all. When one dies, the others try to lift her up.” The elephant population in the reserve is rising, he said, and eventually will have to be “culled.” The experts say that whole families have to be “culled.” They’ve learned experience: When only adults were “culled,” the young ones were traumatized. They were much more aggressive, attacking humans more willingly. Some mature bulls had to be brought in from elsewhere, and after a very long time were able to impose order.

At dusk, three rhinoceroses – mother, father and little half-ton child – ambled onto the dirt road in front of us. They like the heat rising from the packed dirt of the road, Brad said. The mother’s long lower horn and shorter upper horn were both curved and sharp. The father’s upper horn was short and dull, apparently broken off in a fight with another male. The females’ horns stay complete, Brad said, because they don’t fight each other. No, said someone in our party of four, they just gossip viciously about each other for many years. Eventually, as Brad moved our truck inch by inch closer, the rhinos rambled back into the trees.

We didn’t see any lions or leopards. Brad had warned us not to expect any. The big predatory cats are elusive. If I heard him right, he also said that they are not bothered by seeing death. They see it all the time. They create it.

The big beasts remind you of the beauty of creation and of its cruelty. They fight over territory, and expel intruders. The males fight over females. The females choose the winners of battle, the powerful and overbearing, who will mate and wander back into the bush. There is a reason we call certain behavior “beastly.”

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What’s My Kid Doing in This School

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Gershom Gorenberg

While the outrageously dedicated volunteers of Limmud – the grassroots Jewish study festival – bounce me around South Africa, Ha’aretz has gotten around to publishing my article on the dilemma that moderate religious families face in Israel as they seek an education for their children (Hebrew original here, English translation here):

At the gates of the state religious schools, in many places in Israel, two cultures meet. One, religious and modern, turns over its sons and daughters to the other, more insular, to educate them in its stead. The parents live with their children alongside secular families in mixed neighborhoods. A quick glance at a list of the teachers’ phone numbers reveals that many live in settlements or in neighborhoods known as Haredi or Hardali – religiously ultra-Orthodox, politically ultra-nationalist.

The geographic gap reflects a rift in attitudes toward religion and toward the wider world. It expresses itself in how each side relates to secular culture, to non-Jews, to the limits of rabbinic authority, and to the manner of thinking about politics…

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The Belabored Party

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My wife occasionally mentions a repeated gag on the fake news broadcast on Saturday Night Live in the 70s. After other mangled news, the announcer would say, “And Franco is still dying.” Given what he could expect in the next world, it’s no wonder he was slow about moving there.

But the record for slow political deaths surely belongs to Israel’s Labor Party.

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The Constantly Troubled Tourist

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Gershom Gorenberg And from The American Prospect: All year long I write about tribal conflicts. In August, when Israeli tribal customs dictate vacation, I want to get away not just from e-mail but also from news, politics, and insistent national claims. But I’m not terribly good at it. A few years ago, we decided to … Read more

Col. Gibli, He Dead. (Dirty business lives on.)

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Gershom Gorenberg

Col. Binyamin Gibli took his secrets with him to the next world when he died this week – unless, as historian Tom Segev forlornly hopes, the old spookmaster left instructions to publish the ghost-written manuscript of his autobiograhy, and it explains what really happened in the Dirty Business of the 1950s. The hope is forlorn because it presumes that we would have reason to trust Gibli’s version.

Gibli was the head of Military Intelligence back in 1954, when MI recruited a handful of Egyptian Jews to bomb American and British cultural centers and other places frequented by foreigners in Egypt. (Yes, you read that correctly.) The idea was that the attacks would look like Egyptian fury against the West, and would derail any improvement in relations between Western governments and Cairo.

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If Lincoln and Douglas Debated the Occupation

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Gershom Gorenberg

A friend from America passed through Jerusalem and brought me a recent book of far-away American history, perhaps thinking that I should get my mind off the troubles a kilometer or two from my home. Allen C. Guelzo’s Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates that Defined America was well worth the read, but it did not provide a vacation from thinking about Israel and Palestinians. Much as I am suspicious of drawing precise historical parallels, it wasn’t too difficult for me to imagine Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debating the occupation.

Let me brutally distill some of Guelzo’s key theses. First, Lincoln’s belief that “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” derived in part from his personal experience. When he was a boy, his father had hired him out as a farm laborer and pocketed the proceeds. It was a very small taste of forced labor. Someone else might have learned from this that it would be much better to be the taskmaster than the slave. Lincoln did not want anyone to be the taskmaster. The relationship itself was wrong.

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Waltz With Unbearable Memory

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Following Haim’s recommendation, I went to see Ari Folman’s documentary, “Waltz With Bashir,” on the 1982 Lebanon War and the Sabra and Shatilla massacre.

Haim is right that every Israeli should see “Waltz.” But so should anyone elsewhere whose country has marched thoughtlessly into war, or for that matter, anyone interested in the art of film. My article about the movie is now up at the American Prospect. Snippets:

Virtually the entire film is presented in film-noir animation. Folman thereby bends the boundaries of his genre (even more than the recent, partially animated “Chicago 10” did). “Waltz” may be to the documentary what Art Spiegelman’s Maus was to the novel. Strangely, animation makes the film less fictional. Not restricted to old footage, Folman can portray scenes that no one photographed, just as a historian can recreate the past with the written word…

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Apocalypse II: Hagee Doesn’t Seek the End? Riiight.

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Does Rev. John Hagee – friend of Joe Lieberman and erstwhile endorser of John McCain – believe the End is Nigh? Is that what’s behind his oft-proclaimed love for Israel? Does he expect horrible suffering for Jews during the apocalypse that he yearns for?

I would have thought these were easy test questions, to be answered, “Yes, yes and yes.” But a recent news report put out by the JTA newswire for Jewish papers asserts otherwise. “The pastor has, in fact, repeatedly disavowed End of Days theology…” it says. It quoted David Brog — executive director of Hagee’s organization, Christians United for Israel (CUFI) — as saying that “Hagee’s theological musings have little to do with why he promotes support for Israel.”

The JTA report dealt with a survey commissioned by J Street, the dovish Israel lobby, on U.S. Jewish attitudes toward Hagee and Lieberman.

According to the poll, which has a margin of error of 3.5 percent, Lieberman scored an unfavorable rating of 48 percent among U.S. Jews, compared to a favorable rating of 37 percent. Hagee… fared even worse: The pastor registered a 7 percent favorable rating and 57 percent unfavorable…

According to J Street’s executive director, Jeremy Ben Ami, part of Hagee’s problem with American Jews is that he brings a strong religious sensibility to his politicking.

But in the article, Brog gets the last word.

So where does Hagee’s interest in Israel come from?

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Apocalypse I: McCain’s Ringtone for the Christian Right

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Let’s update political jargon. Writers still use “dog whistle” for a political message heard clearly by one audience but entirely missed by everyone else. That’s so twentieth-century. Please update to “teenage ring-tone”: Young ears hear it. Older ones don’t. Students yes, profs no. You can pick the tone that will be heard by the age group you want. But be careful: Some people have young ears.

The political equivalent is John McCain’s invidious “He’s the One” ad. Ostensibly, it merely suggests that anyone who inspires people must be a poor leader. (Well, don’t expect a Republican to remember FDR or JFK. But what about Churchill?)

But the message is really intended to ring loudly for dispensationalists, the subset of conservative evangelicals who are looking forward to the Rapture, the Tribulation, the whole timeline of approaching apocalypse.

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Finally, Jewish Law for the Real World

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It is a sign of bad times when a clergyman stating an obvious moral truth is big news. So we live in bad times. Nonetheless, Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld deserves great praise for his op-ed this week in the New York Times on the scandal of the kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, where:

News reports and government documents have described abusive practices at Agriprocessors against workers, including minors. Children as young as 13 were said to be wielding knives on the killing floor; some teenagers were working 17-hour shifts, six days a week…

Herzfeld asserts what should be obvious: that producing “kosher” meat in this way is a desecration of God’s name, and that the leading Orthodox organizations have failed to respond properly. He also asserts that the kashrut of the meat produced in Postville is questionable.

For this he offers a couple of arguments. By his reasoning, if the Agriprocessors company was willing to ignore U.S. law and basic employer ethics, it cannot be trusted to pay attention to Jewish dietary laws. Here, I think, Herzfeld has aimed too low, and accepted the obsessive-compulsive focus of some in the Orthodox community on ritual requirements. His stronger argument is

there is precedent for declaring something nonkosher on the basis of how employees are treated.

That is, food produced through abject exploitation of human beings should be seen as treif even if every other technical detail of kashrut has been observed.

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