Politics and Policy

Gershom Gorenberg

The dead have come to life.

I saw them marching tonight through Jerusalem, jumping, swaying, pounding pots and water-cooler bottles as drums, the Israelis in their twenties who’d been written off in a thousand political obituaries as dead of terminal apathy, sweating in the absurd heat close to midnight, roaring so deep you could hear their throats tearing in anger and in joy at being angry together and being alive again.

They came flooding down from Zion Square through Independence Park and up Agron Street to the square outside of one of Netanyahu’s three homes, and they sang an old kindergarten song about “my hat has three corners” rewritten as “my Bibi owns three houses,” and they overflowed up onto the walls and fences past the sidewalks and they danced with mad happiness at seeing each other.

They chanted “The people want social justice!” and “What’s the answer to privatization? Re-Vo-Lu-Tion!” and waved flags, both blue-and-white and red. They cheered for the Arab medical student telling the government it has to pay for health care, and for the teacher decrying the pure insult of treating teachers as temp workers, and for the rabbi quoting Isaiah.

Rock singer Kobi Oz got on the stage with his guitar and roared into the mike the blessing praising God “Who has kept us alive to this moment!” Someone had a sign saying, “I’d burn a tire, but I can’t afford one.” An eight-month pregnant woman leaned back against her partner for support. A dark-eyed woman climbed onto a man’s shoulders and danced to the chants. A little girl held up a sign saying, “People before profits.” The crowd chanted, time and again, “Revolution!”

There were over 10,000 people in Jerusalem, but that was only the local Jerusalem crowd, because the marches took place in 11 cities, Jewish and Arab. Local news reports list said the national total hit 150,000. For those reading this from abroad, I note that this number is equivalent to six million people marching in America.

For those reading from abroad, I also note that so far, foreign editors have completely missed what’s happening here, because the stories they expect from Israel are about war and terror and peace talks, so they haven’t gotten their minds around two weeks of protests that just keep getting bigger, Israelis inspired by Egypt, demanding what was once the basic minimum here before the poison of privatization arrived: free education, free health care, affordable apartments.

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column on the economic protests sweeping Israel is now up at The American Prospect:

“Even Adam Smith is turning over in his grave,” reads a handwritten sign pinned to one of the small, square tents. Next to the sign, sewn to the tent, is a piece of cloth with the address printed on it: “51 Tent Boulevard.”

On maps of Tel Aviv, the street is listed as Rothschild Boulevard, but over the past two weeks, the new name has become more appropriate. On the wide, tree-shaded center island, hundreds of nearly identical tents have been pitched in neat rows: a city of protest against the robber-baron economic policies of Israel’s current and recent governments, particularly a drastic housing shortage that is hurting not only the poor but the daughters and sons of the country’s middle class.

At the north end of the boulevard, facing Israel’s Habima national theater, a cloth awning hangs over the tables that serve as the protest headquarters, with an Israeli flag standing on either side—as if the ranks of gray tents were about to march northward, toward the wealthy end of the city and the flush suburbs beyond. Under the awning, a thin 29-year-old man with a three-day beard tells me that he gave up plans to get married for lack of cash. “They stole our dreams,” he says. “A person is built of dreams.” A large hand-painted sign nearby renames the intersection “Habima-Tahrir Square.”

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

This article is against the law. To be more precise: It includes a call for boycotting the products of West Bank settlements, a call that will be illegal in Israel as soon as legislation just approved by the Knesset is published in the official gazette and takes effect. That’s normally a matter of a couple of days, perhaps a week.

The Prohibition on Instituting a Boycott Act was submitted by Zeev Elkin—a West Bank settler and Likud politician who chairs the ruling coalition in Israel’s parliament. On Monday night, the Knesset passed the Boycott Act on a straight party-line vote, with the 47 members of the coalition and a far-right opposition party voting in favor, and the 38 members of center and left-wing opposition parties voting against.

Under the law, publicly calling for an “economic, academic or cultural” boycott of “the State of Israel, one of its institutions or an area under its control” is a “civil tort.” That is, publicly organizing or even supporting a boycott is grounds for the boycott’s target to file a civil suit, and for a court to award punitive damages even if the plaintiff doesn’t prove actual financial harm. Promoting a boycott isn’t a criminal act, but it’s definitely an illegal one, and the Knesset has made civil lawsuits the method of punishment. (My thanks to leading Israeli legal commentator Moshe Negbi and to Georgetown University law professor David Luban for parsing the law.)

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect.

The plan is to comb the floor of the Mediterranean for the remains of the ship. The Israeli government will reportedly allocate $60,000 for the search. The next stage, much more costly, will be to salvage the Altalena and turn it into a memorial for the men of the right-wing Irgun underground, which sparked the momentary Israeli civil war in June 1948.

Gershom Gorenberg

Office of Misrepresentations

I received an email this week from Israel’s Government Press Office (GPO) that begs to be read as commentary in the margins of Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress. In his speech, Netanyahu gave his  inflated figure for the number of Israelis living over the Green Line, said that most lived in suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and then asserted (emphasis added):

…under any realistic peace agreement these areas, as well as other places of critical strategic and national importance, will be incorporated into the final borders of Israel.

Netanyahu did not explain what he meant by “national importance.” But in Israeli politics, national usually refers to nationalism, to Jews as a national group. The implication was that places in the West Bank that are central to national identity because of their place in ancient Jewish history or myth, and so must remain under Israeli rule, even though they do not have any practical defensive value.

The email, sent this week, invites foreign correspondents to a tour of Hebron under the auspices of the GPO, which is itself part of the Prime Minister’s Office. It says that the guide will be David Wilder, without mentioning that Wilder is the English-language spokesman of the Jewish settlers in Hebron. “Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs Minister Yuli Edelstein will accompany the tour,” the notice says, adding that the first stop in Hebron will be:

10:00 – Tel Hebron (Tel Rumeida) – Historical & archaeological explanation; explanation of the living link between the Jewish People and Hebron as the basis of national and religious Jewish identity.

So the trip will be led by the representative of the Hebron settlers, and its point is to underline that Hebron is a place of “national importance” and part of the foundation of Jewish identity. Relinquish it, and we’ll all forget we’re Jewish.

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Gershom Gorenberg

My recent column for Hadassah Magazine on the Egyptian revolution and preserving peace with Egypt is now online.

The news came over the radio on a Thursday evening.

Indeed, if you were in downtown Jerusalem, the news blared into the street from radios turned to top volume in every café and falafel joint at the same time, as loud as the shofar of the End: Anwar al-Sadat, the president of Egypt, the enemy incarnate—the man who on Yom Kippur just four years before had launched a war that shattered Israel’s defenses and confidence and left it a country of bereaved parents, of war widows and of orphans too young to remember their parents—would be arriving at Ben-Gurion International Airport in 48 hours. He was coming to make peace.

If Israel Radio had announced that Martians were landing at Ben-Gurion that evening in November 1977, if it had announced that gravity would be repealed in the morning, the news would have done less to overturn Israelis’ basic understanding of the universe.

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