Gershom Gorenberg – Page 5

Rebellion in Ramallah?

September 13, 2012 by Gershom Gorenberg

Israel has managed to outsource the occupation—until now.

My latest in The American Prospect:

Thousands of Palestinians take to the streets. In Hebron, demonstrators burn an effigy. In Tul Karm, Ramallah, and other cities, they block streets and set tires ablaze. Teens hurl stones. All of the West Bank’s bus, truck, and taxi drivers go on strike for a day. In Bethlehem, truckers park sideways, blocking streets. In Nablus, kindergarten teachers join the strike; elsewhere storekeepers shut their shops. Universities announce they, too, will strike.

These are updates from the West Bank over the past week. They sound as if taken from the start of the first Palestinian uprising against Israel 25 years ago. But the leader burned in effigy in Hebron was Salam Fayyad, prime minister of the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinian government in Ramallah, rather than Israel, is the direct target of protest. Economic frustration sparked the fury. This sounds like a variation on revolts in other Arab states—except the Palestinian Authority isn’t an independent state. Set up as to provide short-term, limited autonomy until a peace agreement, it has become the lasting means by which Israel outsources its rule over Palestinians in occupied territory. Donor countries foot the budget; the PA provides local services. Israel’s current government acts as if the arrangement can last forever. The protests show how unstable it really is.

Jerusalem Syndrome

September 13, 2012 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

And here’s my take on the slightly unhinged discussion of Jerusalem’s place in the Democratic Party’s platform:

When I first read that the Democratic platform said nothing about Jerusalem, I was quite impressed. Quietly, by omission, the party had brought a moment of honesty to the fantasy-ridden American political discussion about Israel.

Alas, honesty is ephemeral. Republican attacks, news editors eager for a daily controversy, and Democratic wimpishness have defeated it. In Wednesday night’s voice vote, the Democrats added some words to the platform: “Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of Israel … It should remain an undivided city accessible to people of all faiths.” The first part is an implied promise that after re-election, Barack Obama will officially recognize Jerusalem’s status as capital and move the U.S. embassy there. The second piece pretends that Jerusalem is presently united and accessible to all.

This is hallucinatory for at least three reasons: First, Jerusalem is Israel’s capital, independent of what is or isn’t written in American party platforms. Second, no American administration will formally recognize it as the capital before an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. Third, virtually no one in America will decide how to vote based on this issue.

Keep the Peace, Mr. Morsi

September 13, 2012 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

I admit to being AWOL from South Jerusalem recently. So I’m catching up, posting several columns I’ve published elsewhere in the past week or so. This one is from The American Prospect – written before the embassy riot, but all the more relevant now:

Dear President Morsi,

I know you have a lot on your mind….

So relations with Israel may be at the edge of your peripheral vision. Still, I hope you’ll take this Israeli’s suggestion: You should do more to preserve Egyptian-Israeli peace. Rather than imply commitment to the peace treaty, express it clearly. Egypt’s welfare depends on it, as do future Mideast peace efforts.

In domestic terms, you certainly did not waste the first crisis on the Israeli border. Just a month ago, the armed forces still had more power than you did. Then militants attacked a base at the eastern edge of the Sinai, killed 16 Egyptian soldiers, and crossed into Israel, where Israeli troops finished them off. Stunning the world, you used the blow to the army’s prestige to dismiss the top commanders and to void the military decree limiting your authority. Afterward, the army began its crackdown on Islamic extremists in the chaotic Sinai, sending troops, and reportedly tanks and helicopters.

There was a glitch, though. The Israeli government has an unavoidable ambivalence: It wants Egypt to impose order in the Sinai, so that neither jihadists nor Palestinian militants can attack Israel from there. But to prevent war between Israel and Egypt, the 1979 peace treaty restricts the forces and weapons that Egypt can deploy in the Sinai. Changes have to be coordinated with Israel. This time, it seems, your side skipped consultations, at least at the outset.

Republicans and the ‘Quality of Sodom’

July 23, 2012 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

My new piece, just up at the Daily Beast:

Eavesdropping from afar on the debate about how American Jews will vote this year is a slightly surrealistic business. Not just the claim that Jews will vote Republican because of Israel. Anyone who has passed Polling 101 knows that few Jews choose their presidential candidate based on the Israel issue. What’s truly strange about the idea of Jews–especially Jews connected to Jewish religious tradition–voting Republican is that the GOP is rather obviously committed to the quality of Sodom.

Sorry. Let me clear up the confusion caused by the English language and its religious history. I am definitely not referring to sexual orientation. The idea that sodomy has to do with sex is one more piece of evidence that Judaism and Christianity are two religions separated by a common scripture. In Judaism, Sodom stands for economic injustice, selfishness and refusal to redistribute wealth.

Devalued

July 20, 2012 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

My new article in Hadassah magazine:

A few months after Avihai Ronski retired as the chief rabbi of the Israel Defense Forces in 2010, the media reported that he was moving temporarily to a village founded several years before 20 miles south of Beersheba in the Negev.

The news value was that Ronski was moving, at least temporarily, from controversy to consensus: For years he had been a prominent resident of Itamar, a West Bank settlement known as a bastion of the far right. In his role as the military’s top rabbi, he came under criticism for allegedly politicizing the Army rabbinate.

But developing the Negev is a mom-and-apple-pie value in Israel, respected all the more because few people act on it. Moving to an isolated community expressed the Zionist ideal of pioneering—while avoiding the political tempest over West Bank settlement. If Ronski had also become a farmer, he would have completed a trifecta of old-time values.

And yet, maybe the ideals behind Ronski’s move should also stir debate. Does it make more sense in 21st-century Israel, starved for open space, to start new communities anywhere, or should we be building denser and higher? Should developing the Negev still be seen as a Zionist obligation or, as some environmentalists assert, as an ecological disaster? For that matter, what about making the desert bloom or even farming in general: Do Jews need to be farmers when Israel lives on its software successes?

It’s the Occupation, Stupid

July 20, 2012 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

Why did the Great Coalition That Would Solve Everything come undone in a mere 70 days? I explain in the American Prospect.

In France’s Fourth Republic, it was said that tourists in Paris made sure to take in the daily changing of the government. According to myth, a deputy who dozed in the National Assembly might wake up to be told that he’d been premier twice during his nap. The coalitions that rule countries with multiparty systems can be flimsy things. But outside the realm of myth, Israel’s most recent coalition was particularly short-lived: It ruled for ten weeks, just seventy days, before collapsing this week.

By bringing Shaul Mofaz’s centrist Kadima Party into his government in May, Netanyahu sought to avoid early elections. Among the big things that new friends Shaul and Bibi promised to do were ending the widely resented draft exemption for ultra-Orthodox men and jump-starting the peace process with the Palestinians. In other words, Netanyahu would show that he was really a moderate, and that he had been waiting for Kadima’s support to rule as one.

The explicit reason that Kadima left the coalition on Tuesday was irresolvable differences on the draft issue. Turns out that Netanyahu is not any kind of moderate. He’d like to maintain a façade that he is willing to agree to a two-state arrangement, and that he’d sadly compromise on the West Bank eternally belonging to Israel, if only the Palestinians were willing to talk without setting preconditions. But the façade is crumbling.

Romneyland on the Mediterranean

July 5, 2012 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

So Mitt is coming. How appropriate. I explain in The American Prospect:

If Mitt Romney visits Israel this summer, it’s a safe guess that his tour will avoid demonstrations against the government’s economic policies. When Mitt and Bibi dine together, the Israeli prime minister probably won’t show clips of riot cops dragging away Daphni Leef, the woman who ignited the economic protests, as she tries to re-establish a tent encampment in downtown Tel Aviv. Meeting the media, Romney may mention his old friendship with Benjamin Netanyahu, which dates back to the time when the two of them, fresh from business school, worked at the Boston Consulting Group. Journalists will dutifully ask him and Netanyahu about Iran, ignoring the fact that Israel has an economy and that running it is Netanyahu’s passion.

This is a shame, because Israel can be seen as a laboratory where tests have been conducted in managing a country as if Bain Capital had bought it—and the lab results aren’t pretty.

Shamir in His Labyrinth

July 2, 2012July 2, 2012 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

My take on Yitzhak Shamir is up at The Daily Beast:

In mid-October 1986, Yitzhak Shamir was about to begin his second term as Israel’s prime minister. In anticipation, a top settlement planner from his Herut party prepared a map hand-marked with sites for new settlements in the West Bank. I’d seen the map, because the planner accidently handed it to me during an interview, then had an aide call me to ask desperately for it. His boss needed it for a meeting with Shamir.

Shamir was returning to the premiership under a power-sharing agreement with Shimon Peres’s Labor Party. Shamir didn’t adopt the settlement proposal, which would have required a loud fight with Labor. He didn’t need to, because Labor acquiesced as a government-financed housing boom continued in existing settlements. From 1983, when Shamir succeeded Menachem Begin and began his first stint as premier, until 1992, when he lost to Yitzhak Rabin, the number of settlers in the West Bank and Gaza quadrupled. (That’s based on government figures, which don’t include East Jerusalem.) During the 1992 campaign—despite U.S. pressure to stop building—his government launched bus tours to suburban settlements where homes were on sale for a bit more than nothing.

Shamir, who died Saturday at 96, was a very quiet, utterly relentless man, devious but incorruptible, rigid as rock.

Quiet, Revolution in Progress

June 22, 2012 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

The polls had closed a few hours earlier in Cairo, after two days of voting for a president who may or may not have any power. The Muslim Brotherhood was preparing to claim victory. Meanwhile, in the desert to the west, three gunmen crossed the border between Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Israel, attacked an Israeli crew building a border fence, and killed a worker, an Arab Israeli named Saeed Fashafshe.

The human mind likes to make connections, so it’s easy to draw a thick black line of cause-and-effect between these events: One could conclude that the revolution alone is at fault for the Egyptian regime losing control of the Sinai desert—or worse, that the ascendant Islamicists are encouraging the border violence. Those reflexive interpretations ran through Israeli media reports this week.

The reality is more complicated. Nonetheless, the fact that the border and Egyptian politics are heating up at the same time demands attention. For Egypt’s wrestling political forces, the lesson should be that foreign policy problems don’t take vacation because you are busy with a revolution. For Israel’s government, the proper conclusion is that restraint is triply necessary when a revolution is in progress next door.

How Not To Keep Israel Jewish

June 18, 2012 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The Daily Beast:

The great airlift is on. Around the time I tap out the last word of this post, a plane will take off from Israel carrying South Sudanese refugees—the people whom Benjamin Netanyahu calls “illegal infiltrators”—back to their home country. The “infiltrators” must go, the prime minister explained in the cabinet, lest they “inundate” Israel and “largely put an end to its character as a Jewish, democratic state.”

The Hebrew word for “infiltrator” connotes people slipping across the border to perpetrate terror. Nonetheless, such rhetoric puts Netanyahu on the mild side of his party and coalition.

Structurally Flawed

June 9, 2012 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

Before July 1, five apartment buildings in a West Bank settlement will be cut from their foundations and dragged over the hilly terrain to a new location elsewhere in the community. That’s Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan, anyway.

From an engineering perspective, the idea is “delusional,” as one expert put it. That’s an understated evaluation. If the three-story buildings are moved and survive, it’s reasonable to assume that they’ll be riddled with visible and unseen fissures—just like Netanyahu’s Likud party, his ruling coalition, and the jerrybuilt legal underpinnings of Israeli settlement in occupied territory. The interesting question is which of these flawed structures will collapse first.

Samson, the Real Story (Guest Post)

June 7, 2012 by Gershom Gorenberg

The biblical figure Samson is often called Shimshon Hagibbor, “Samson the hero” in modern Hebrew. Writing in Hebrew for Netivot Shalom’s weekly publication on the Torah portion, my son examined what the biblical text actually thinks of Samson through a close comparison with the figure of Judah (Yehudah). Netivot Shalom has now posted an English translation, reposted here:

Yehonatan Avraham Gorenberg

“And the woman gave birth to a son and called him Shimshon”

(Judges 13:24, from the Haphtarah of Parashat Nasso)

The story of Shimshon’s adult adventures begins with his departing his parents’ home: “And Shimshon went down to Timna” (Judges 14:1). Our sages were puzzled by this description, because in the story of Yehudah (Bereishit 35:13), Tamar is told that “Behold, your father-in-law has gone up to Timna”.

The midrash (Bereishit Rabba 5:13) offers several explanations for the seeming contrariety. Outstanding is Rabbi Simon’s solution: “Going up for Yehuda from whom will come kings; going down for Shimshon who betroths a gentile woman”.

Rabbi Shimon’s solution itself demands explication. The Bible tells us that from Shimshon’s very beginning, hidden processes are at work (“For this is from God” [Judges 15]), whereas the hidden processes affecting Yehuda – from whom came kings – is only hinted at, in Jacob’s blessing of Yehudah, and its meaning becomes clear only later on in Scripture, in the stories of Shmuel, Ruth, and Chronicles. And just as Shimshon married a gentile woman, so did Yehuda marry a Canaanite woman, something forbiddened to the Patriarchs. His very going to Timna led him to seduction by Tamar, his daughter-in-law who had disguised herself as a harlot. The Babylonian Talmud solves this contradiction with a more general formulation: “Shimshon was disgraced through her; therefore, in his case it is written went down. Judah was elevated by her; therefore in his case it is written “went up“.

It would seem that comprehension of the midrash lies in a wider comparison of the Yehuda and Shimshon narratives, one which establishes Yehudah as a hero but raises questions about Shimshon.