Gershom Gorenberg

The Educator Who Can’t See Arab Blood

by

Moshe Hagar is an ex-colonel who now heads the religious pre-army academy, or mekhinah, at the settlement of Yatir south of Hebron. Such academies provide a year of study after high school, before army service. The idea is to increase motivation and develop leadership skills. The Hebrew web-page for Hagar’s academy (on a government website) says that its purpose is to encourage students

to internalize Judaism in various planes of life and to prepare them for meaningful army service that includes maintaining both a religious and nationalist lifestyle, and to take upon themselves the personal obligation to make a meaningful motivation during and after military service.

The curriculum, says the site, includes studying “Jewish faith” and musar (ethics).

Last Wednesday, Hagar was interviewed on Israel Radio about the religious right’s protests against the withdrawal from Gaza three years ago. His comments provide an insight into his view of faith and ethics. The key comment:

In the end, the disengagement passed with zero casualties…*

That the disengagement protests passed without casualties would surprise the residents of Shfaram, an Arab town in northern Israel. They’ve just marked the third anniversary of the terror attack carried out in their community by Eden Natan Zada, a far-right soldier who’d gone AWOL in protest against the disengagement. Natan Zada killed four people in Shfaram. (Natan Zada was himself killed by Shfaram residents, who will reportedly be charged with lynching him.)

Two weeks later another disengagement opponent, Asher Weisgan, killed four Palestinians who worked at the West Bank settlement of Shilo. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to four life terms. A report on his sentencing noted:

Weisgan, a settler from Shvut Rachel, said his objective had been to prevent the disengagement from proceeding.

For Moshe Hagar, it seems, the blood of Arab victims was invisible, unnoticed at the time, unremembered.

Read more

A Stamp for Letters to the Edge of Madness

by

Gershom Gorenberg

The Israeli Post Office has issued a stamp commemorating the settlements of Gush Katif in Gaza – the settlements evacuated by the Israeli goverment in 2005. Gush Katif commemorative stampThe stamp shows an orange ribbon, originally the symbol of the furious protest movement against the withdrawal. Today the ribbon is the icon of those who have never forgiven the state for evacuating settlements from occupied territory. Below the images of greenhouses and the little kids happily jumping rope is the biblical verse, “And they shall no more plucked up out of their land…” (Amos 9:15), which in context can be read as a promise that no more settlements will be evacuated.

Read more

Prayergate: Ma’ariv Denies Denial

by

An afterword on Ma’ariv publishing the note that Obama put in the Wall: McClatchy correspondent Dion Nissenbaum brings the newspaper’s most recent comment on the affair. It doesn’t improve the Ma’ariv’s journalistic rep:

Maariv received the note last Thursday and, after realizing it contained no personal or intimate content, decided to publish it.

Read more

The Freedom To Be Religious: Wins and Losses

by

Gershom Gorenberg

Religious freedom is often confused in our parts with freedom from religion, and atheism is mistakenly equated with liberalism. For the state to be secular – so goes the thinking – everyone who lives in it should secular too. As political scientist Yaron Ezrahi once said to me, “The Israeli secular community lacks the understanding that you don’t have to secularize individual identity to evolve a secular state.”

Ezrahi made the comment to me when I was writing a story on Gil Kopatch, a stand-up comedian who for several months in the late 90s appeared on a Friday night TV show and presented a pointed, often-ribald commentary on the weekly Torah portion. Kopatch was attacked by the ultra-Orthodox for his supposed blasphemy. But he confused his secular supporters when he insisted “I’m a believing Jew” and expressed “love of Torah.” Secular MKs presumed that in defending Kopatch’s freedom of expression, they were also attacking religion as such. The idea that freedom of expression includes religious expression was beyond them.

Ezrahi’s comment fit the American model: secular state, religious society. But “liberal” Israelis aren’t alone in assuming that for the state should impose secularism. Here are several recent stories, starting with the most important:

Journalism Lesson: Obama’s Note, The New Republic’s Goof

by

Gershom Gorenberg

“Is Anything Sacred?” was the title of a post a couple of days ago on the New Republic’s blog, The Plank. The subject: Publication of the note that Barack Obama placed in the Western Wall when he visited last week. The daily Ma’ariv ran that “scoop,” and immediately found itself under intense criticism – from rabbis, talk-show hosts, and a lawyer who began organizing a consumer boycott of the paper – for violating Obama’s privacy and Jewish religious sensibilities.

But the Plank’s Zvika Krieger wasn’t aiming his question at Ma’ariv. He was asking if Obama considered anything sacred. For in responding to the firestorm, a Ma’ariv spokesman had told various Israeli papers (English here, Hebrew here): “Barack Obama’s note was approved for publication in the international media even before he put [it] in the Kotel…” Krieger accepted that statement. A fairly early version of his post (via Google’s cache) said:

Obama may be above politicizing our troops, but if his campaign did approve the note for publication before he placed it, then I guess he isn’t above politicizing religion.

Clever: A snarky reference to Obama’s canceled visit to wounded U.S. soldiers, casting doubts on his reasons for canceling, as prelude to a statement that the candidate was willing to trash Jewish sensitivities for politics’ sakes. Truly, Obama had hit the trifecta: apostate Muslim with radical Christian preacher desecrates Jewish holy sites. But by writing the story this way, Krieger actually doubled down on Ma’ariv’s failed journalistic judgment. At least he has been doing a somewhat better job of backtracking.

Read more

Israel in the First World, U.S. in the Third

by

My mother liked to think that everything was better in America. She didn’t want to hear that we’d bought a German dryer because it was the best one in the shop. She was sure that she got the best health care in the world because she lived in America. The idea that by running off to some Third World country in the Middle East I might get better care was beyond unbelievable to her.

As an American, she certainly paid more, lots more, for medical care than Germans, Canadians or Israelis. But she got less for her money.

Read more

Obama in Israel: Political Implications

by

Gershom Gorenberg

Obama stopped through for two nights and a day, as if he were writing one of the New York Times travel pieces about how to spend 36 hours in some locale. At first glance, the trip was purely about photo-ops, gathering footage for later campaign ads that will air in south Florida. But there were some hints of real political content, as I explain in my new article at The American Prospect. Here’s one piece:

Hamas Walks It Back: On Wednesday morning, Israel Radio reported responses to Obama’s arrival, including this one: “A Hamas spokesman said, ‘The American senator is trying to reach the White House via Tel Aviv, at the expense of the Palestinians.'”

Read more

Does Israeli Equal Jew? On a Shared Israeli Identity

by

Gershom Gorenberg

A few days ago, Haim, you responded to a challenge I raised in a post on the conversion battles. Your answer made me realize that I hadn’t phrased the question sharply enough.

I wrote: “We need to define a civic Israeli identity not dependent on halakhic status.” You wrote that I was right, but that it was sad that I was. And then you said:

The secular Israeli state’s way of determining who is Jewish—and therefore who belongs to the state’s majority culture and ethnic group—is a religious definition.

It seems to me that by beginning the discussion there, you are mixing two separate questions. One is: Can someone belong to the majority culture and society in Israel without being a member of the Jewish faith? The other is: Can Israel develop a civic identity that is shared by Jews and non-Jews, including Palestinians who are citizens of the state?

Read more

The Extremists of Your Own City Come First

by

Gershom Gorenberg

This week’s key misunderstood news story from the Looking Glass Land of the West Bank is that the Defense Ministry is about to approve settlement at a spot called Maskiot, near the Jordan River. On first glance, that’s bad because it means that the government is abandoning its freeze on new settlements. At second glance, the freeze on new settlements is a joke – but Maskiot is really bad news. It shows again that the government consistently, reflexively, obsessively gives in to the most extreme elements of the settlement movement.

Read more

Parallels for the Occupation? Colonialism, More or Less

by

Gershom Gorenberg

My friend John showed up in South Jerusalem. Long ago and far away, John and I slouched in the back of high school classes together in Los Angeles, mumbling snidely about what was being left out of American history (women, blacks, slaughter of Indians, lynch mobs, poor folk…). Eventually I went into mumbling snidely as a profession. John, by contrast, is gainfully employed in high-tech, working for an Israeli firm that kindly brought him for a visit to the home office.

In late afternoon we walked out to the promenade. Some Palestinian kids were playing soccer on a stretch of lawn despite the ferocious heat. In front of us was the Old City and the Dome of the Rock. On the east, I pointed out to John, was the high concrete wall dividing the Palestinian side of Jerusalem from the Palestinian towns of the West Bank.

“So,” John asked me, “is there anything parallel to Israel’s control of the West Bank? What do you think of Jimmy Carter calling it apartheid? Is it like Jim Crow?”

Read more

Is All Criticism Anti-Israel? A Question for NGO Monitor

by

Gershom Gorenberg

NGO Monitor, Gerald Steinberg’s group, which tracks human-rights groups for anti-Israel bias, sent me its annual report. I don’t claim the resources to monitor every detail of its monitoring. But a section in the report on B’Tselem helps illuminate an underlying bias in the work of the bias-hunter.

The report quotes B’Tselem Executive Director Jessica Montell as acknowledging

that Israel is held to a higher standard within the international community and “in some ways Israel is discriminated against and disproportionately criticized.” But she also stated, “Israel is a democracy that holds itself to a higher standard. And I think that’s appropriate,” a comment which denies the universality of human rights. [my emphasis]

Does holding Israel to a higher standard in fact defy the universality of human rights? Sometimes, depending on context. Some groups, especially foreign ones, notice only Israeli offenses, because they begin by being offended that Israel exists.

But there are three essential flaws in the NGO Monitor argument against B’Tselem on this point.

Read more

Religion v. Secularism? Let’s Skip This Fight.

by

A guest post from Sam Fleischacker, Chicago philosopher and honorary resident of South Jerusalem (Thanks, Sam!):

A conferee at the Madrid interfaith conference called by King Abdullah said on the radio last week that he thinks religious people of all faiths should unite against the threat posed to them by secularists. As a religious Jew myself, I applaud the call for unity, but deplore this basis for unity. Religious people should unite with one another, but will only continue to wreak havoc if they take secular people as their enemy. They will also harm themselves: the secular world is good for religion.

Read more