Gershom Gorenberg

Channeling Strangelove: Benny Morris on Iran

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Gershom Gorenberg

Benny Morris’s riff on nuking Iran, featured on Friday’s New York Times op-ed page, conjures up Maj. Kong’s bronco-riding whoop at the end of Dr. Strangelove, and not just because that film revealed the glee with which the military-minded can look forward to apocalypse. Playing off the terrifying “Fail-Safe,” Stanley Kubrick and Peter Sellers also reminded viewers that the sane side could start a nuclear war by mistake – and that the “sane” side could not be counted on to act sanely. Forty-four years after Kubrick, Morris argues that Israel will use the bomb so that Iran won’t get the bomb. Is this a warning, a recommendation, or the whoop of joy as someone gives into temptation and picks up the Dangerous Thing that Dad said not to touch?

Morris, it happens, does agree with one point in my piece last week in the American Prospect. Given, he says,

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Israel Attacking Iran? Five Reasons for Doubt

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Is Israel planning to attack Iran sometime in the dying days of the Bush Error, I mean Bush Era? Speculation is rife. Laura Rozen has done a great job of reporting the bookmaking in Washington on this possibility.

There are very good reasons for thinking an attack would be ineffective, and that the talk about it is damaging. In a new article up at the American Prospect, I give the five reasons for doubting the wisdom of an Israeli strike, starting with this:

At first glance, the model for Israeli action is the 1981 bombing of Iraq’s Osiraq reactor. But striking Iran would be far more difficult. Former Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh, a hawk on Iran, told me to “assume that with ingenuity” Israel could succeed. Sneh cites the 1976 Entebbe raid — in which Israel flew commandos to Uganda to free passengers from a hijacked airliner — as an example of doing what appeared impossible. Sneh was the head of the medical team on that mission. Yet he is only underlining the problem: Entebbe, like Osiraq, was a pinpoint attack and totally unexpected.

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Mr. Obama, Did You Pack These Bags Yourself?

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Gershom Gorenberg

At the airport, before his takeoff for the Middle East, no one will ask Barack Obama if he packed his bags himself. It would be rude, and besides he has a full-time handler for that. He never has the lurching feeling as the cab leaves his house that he left the tickets on the kitchen table and a prescription in the medicine cabinet. Just writing those words, I finally understand the attraction of running for president.

He has, however, packed his political baggage himself. Mostly he’s done a good job – better, in fact, than one could expect.

First, he’s meeting with Palestinians as well as Israelis. At least according to the Palestinian side, Obama has put a meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah on his schedule for next Wednesday. When I wrote about his trip a couple of weeks ago, before the requisite leaks on the itinerary, I was afraid he’d decide it was politically inexpedient to make that stop, essential as it is. Symbolically, the Ramallah visit shows that he intends as president to talk to both Israelis and Palestinians, and that he’s serious about working for peace. Practically, it gives him the chance to see how Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayad respond to tough questions about the compromises they’ll need to make.

It would have been easy to skip Ramallah for fearing of losing Jewish votes, especially in swing states like Florida. The common mistake among candidates is to believe the rightwing minority in the U.S. Jewish community that purports to speak for the community as a whole,

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Conversion: The American Machers Protest!

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Gershom Gorenberg

If there’s one subject that forces U.S. Jewish leaders to express their views on Israeli politics, it’s “Who’s a Jew.” In previous years, the crises began when it looked like the Knesset would change the Law of Return so that non-Orthodox converts would not qualify to immigrate as Jews. That threatened the legitimacy of Reform and Conservative Judaism. The Israeli government couldn’t ask for U.S. Jewish support based on eternal family ties while telling part of the family that, oops, we don’t recognize you as family.

Those were the good old days. Now the rabbinic courts have shown themselves willing to disqualify most Orthodox conversions, performed in Israel or abroad. Conversions performed by the head of the government’s own Conversion Authority, Rabbi Haim Druckman, have been annulled ex post facto, and Druckman has been told to go home. (Read the background in my article in Moment magazine.) Now the leaders of the organized Jewish community are demanding the Prime Minister Olmert fix the broken Orthodox conversion system. But I don’t think they’ve yet recognized the depth of the crisis.

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The First Settlement, the Lasting Danger

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Gershom Gorenberg My article on the first settlement in occupied territories, and the obsolescence of settlement as a value, appears today in Ha’aretz. The original Hebrew is here, and the English translation is here. (No, now that you ask, that’s not my English.) Also in South Jerusalem on settlement: Israeli Right Supports Right of Return … Read more

Vote for the Crook. Or: Privatizing Corruption

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Gershom Gorenberg

The difference between corruption in Israel and other places used to be that Israeli politicians stole from the government for the sake of their parties – lama’an ha’inyan, for the cause. It was part of what political scientist Ehud Sprinzak called the “culture of illegality” in his classic 1986 study, “Ish Hayashar Be’einav,” a Hebrew title taken from the last frightening words of the Book of Judges, “every man did what was right in his own eyes.”

Sprinzak listed the reasons that the culture of illegality developed, a couple of which Haim mentioned in his last post: For one, Israeli memory included the Diaspora experience of living in tight-knit communities as a persecuted minority. Within the community, informal rules applied. The general society’s laws were unfair and arbitrary and given little respect. Once Jews came to Palestine, getting around the rules of the British Mandate became a value: illegal settlement, illegal immigration, illegal military activity were all the signs of dedication to the national cause. Sprinzak also mentioned the original, fairly Bolshevik structure of a lot of institutions in the Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine) and Israel: resources were distributed by a bureaucracy formally committed to political values. But there really weren’t enough resources to go around. So the rules were the rules, and the resources got distributed on the basis of who you knew.

To that I would add: Since the party embodied political ideals, acting for the party was acting for Truth and Virtue.

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More on Mofaz’s mediocrity

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Gershom Gorenberg

Buried in a Ha’aretz story on training exercises aimed at rebuilding the Israeli army’s ability to fight a war is the mention of the newspaper’s own report [emphasis added]

from October 2002 about the expected reduction in training exercises by the regular units for 2003, stating: “The burden of the territories displaces training; only two weeks per year.” This was the plan, but in reality, the troops sometimes trained even less than that. The article also reported that the army was compelled to divert all of its resources to combating Palestinian terror, and it quotes brigade and battalion commanders who admit that, two years into the intifada, their charges have no notion of regular training and exercise.

That article was based in part on a conversation with the head of the IDF’s training department at the time, Colonel Moti Kidor. Kidor told about how, when he tried to warn then chief of staff Shaul Mofaz about the decline in the regular units’ battle fitness, Mofaz nearly threw him out of his office.

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Tzipi and the General: Who’s Experienced?

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Gershom Gorenberg

Tzipi Livni is running against the embodiment of dumb military macho, and she’s responding wrong.

In a Ha’aretz piece this morning (in Hebrew), political reporter Mazal Mualam tells us that Livni’s main competition in Kadima, Shaul Mofaz is conducting “a negative campaign against Livni, focused on her lack of military experience” while Livni “is refraining from personal attacks.” Instead, she’s trying to set her own defense agenda, most recently by touring the northern border with the Italian foreign minister. It’s a quieter version of an ad about phone calls at 3 a.m. to the commander-in-chief.

Livni, let me stress, is far too hawkish for my tastes. A colleague who covers diplomacy describes her as a person who lacks empathy, a quality needed for good negotiation: You don’t have to agree with the person across the table, but it’s valuable to understand how he or she thinks. That said, she’s more of a diplomat than her rivals within Kadima, or outside of it. Labor’s Ehud Barak not only flubbed his chance, he has rationalized his failure by dismissing the very possibility of peace, reinforcing the right’s politics of despair. His line is, “If I couldn’t do it, it can’t be done.” Fortunately, in a multiparty system, I’m not constrained to vote for Barak, Bibi Netanyahu, or whoever Kadima picks. But how Kadima goes about making the choice still matters.

Mofaz is an ex-chief of staff who exemplifies how mediocre the officer class has become.

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The Temple Institute of Doom, or Hegel Unzipped

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Gershom Gorenberg

I once spent a surrealistic couple of hours with David Elboim, an ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem carpenter who’d spent years learning how to weave so he could handcraft the proper garments for priests to wear in a rebuilt Temple while performing sacrifices. In those days, working on my book, The End of Days, I was spending my days interviewing extremists of all three monotheistic faiths who agreed that the End was nigh, and disagreed only on who would be redeemed and who doomed when it came. (“My father is a squirrel,” my son used to say, “he collects nuts.”)

At first glance, Elboim resembled members of the South Pacific cargo cults, who believed that if they built runways, planes would land bearing riches. Elboim seemed to believe that if all the proper utensils and garments were made for the Temple, it would arrive, that it would necessarily be built, right where it belonged, and all would be right with the world.

But Elboim claimed credit for inspiring Yisrael Ariel to open his Temple Institute in the Old City. Ariel is one of the most extreme figures in Israel’s messianic religious right, a one-time defender of the Jewish terror underground of the 1980s, who ran for Knesset on Meir Kahane’s racist ticket.

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Barack Obama’s Pilgrimage

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Gershom Gorenberg

Sometime before November, traffic in Jerusalem will be tied up by Barack Obama’s visit. My new article in The American Prospect explains what Obama should do while he’s here to prepare for the presidency, and why he won’t do any of that:

…In Jerusalem, Obama has another task — shoring up support among voters who question his pro-Israel credentials. This is hardly the Jewish vote as a whole. Rather, it is the subset that falsely conflates “pro-Israel” with supporting the hawkish side of the Israeli political spectrum. Trying to satisfy those voters while demonstrating a fresh, diplomacy-based foreign policy increases the chances of a slip-up…

Besides those constraints are the practical ones. Protocol forces a visiting political figure to spend his time with top officials, providing a terribly restrictive view of a country.

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This Convert Walks Into a Bar, See…

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Gershom Gorenberg

Yisrael Campbell is a tall guy with a receding hairline who wears a black hat, black jacket and sidecurls. The name on his passport, actually, is Christopher Campbell, and he has been circumcised three times. If you do not yet see the humor in this, you have not seen “Circumcise Me.” You should. Feel very guilty if you have not.

For a while now, ads for Campbell’s stand-up routine about his conversion from lapsed Catholic and ex-substance abuser to frum Jew have decorated Jerusalem’s public notice boards. What’s quite amazing about “Circumcise Me” is that journalists and first-time producers Matthew Kalman and David Blumenfeld successfully turned a spiel for microphone and small hall into a film.

Now in the interests of full disclosure I should tell you that Campbell is married to a woman who used to babysit my kids, and Matt Kalman belongs to my synagogue, and his daughter goes to school with mine, and he and I once covered the same antiquities trial, which was not the least bit funny except that the defendant claimed that he hadn’t forged the ancient ossuary, it looked fake because his mother had insisted on cleaning it.

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Ultra-Orthodoxy Cancels Conversion, Sends Modern Orthodox for Reeducation

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Gershom Gorenberg

The divide between the ultra-Orthodox and other Jews over who is Jewish continues to widen. In the latest developments, ultra-Orthodox rabbis in both Israel and the U.S. have asserted that conversion is reversible — that a convert can cease to be Jewish if she or he does not live according to halakhah, Jewish law, as most strictly and constrictingly interpreted. The immense irony is that regarding conversion as conditional is itself a radical break from halakhic tradition.

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