Politics and Policy

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

The film shows emails scrolling across a computer screen. Addressed to Peter Stein, director of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, they carry more venom than it seems mere pixels of text could contain. They accuse him of being an anti-Semite and of running an “anti-Israel hate-fest.” They include words like “Hitler” and ask if next year he will present a retrospective of Nazi film director Leni Riefenstahl’s work.

This sequence comes early in the documentary Between Two Worlds, which premieres later this month in New York. Stein’s offense during the 2009 film festival was showing another documentary: Rachel, about Rachel Corrie, an American activist killed several years earlier in Gaza by an Israeli army bulldozer as she tried to stop it from razing a Palestinian house. At the same festival, Stein also showed 36 Israeli movies as part of his effort to catalyze intelligent conversation of Jewish issues.

That didn’t save him from the hate letters or from the protests outside the Castro Theater when Rachel screened. For balance, Stein invited a representative from the right-wing group Stand With Us explain his objections before the screening began. A barrage of cat-calls from the audience interrupted the guest’s comments, as if to prove that silencing opponents is a game everyone can play.

Between Two Worlds, by directors Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow, portrays the internecine fury that has seized the American Jewish community. This is a periodic illness, a social auto-immune disorder in which healthy dissent—particularly regarding Israeli policy—sets off panicked accusations of perfidy.

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Gershom Gorenberg

My cover story in The American Prospect is now online:

Nadim Khoury watches as brown bottles march single file along the conveyor belt from the machines that sterilize them to those that fill them, cap them, and glue on labels reading, “Taybeh Beer. The Finest In The Middle East.”

Nadim Khoury at the Taybeh Brewery (Gershom Gorenberg)

Under his large graying moustache, Khoury has a small smile of entrepreneurial pride.

Patriotism brought Khoury and his brother David home to the West Bank village of Taybeh in 1994. They’d lived for years in America, where Khoury earned a business degree from a Greek Orthodox college, then studied brewing at the University of California, Davis. In the euphoria that followed the September 1993 Oslo Accord, they wanted to help develop the economy of what they thought would soon be an independent Palestine. Next to the palatial house their father built to help attract them home, downhill from Taybeh’s single traffic circle, they set up their microbrewery, with shining steel tanks for boiling malt barley with hops, fermenting the brew, and aging it. “I made history,” Khoury says. “I made the first Palestinian beer.” The firm’s advertising poster says, “Drink Palestinian,” and “Taste the Revolution.”

The revolution, though, has acquired a taste more bitter than hops. During the Second Intifada, tourism vanished and with it, beer sales in the hotels of Bethlehem, the West Bank’s most popular destination. Israeli roadblocks and checkpoints, intended to keep terrorists from entering Israel or attacking settlers, choked the movement of people and goods. At one point, Khoury says, the brewery was shipping beer through the hills to Ramallah, the nearest city, on donkeys.

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Gershom Gorenberg

I confess, I’m not a regular reader of Daniel Gordis’s blog. But an acquaintance thought I should read what Gordis – senior vice president of the Shalem Center – said last month when given the opportunity to address a visiting J Street delegation.

So I obliged, and read, and was truly struck by Gordis’s – let’s put this delicately – self-confidence. Invited by a group of visitors to present his political perspective and to hear theirs, Gordis was – shall we say – sure enough of himself to tell his hosts with firm certainty what they actually think.  Repeatedly, he attacked them for “arrogance.” And then, according to Globes reporter Vered Kelner (in Hebrew), he left without actually allowing them time to answer him. Not everyone would have that ability to teach about arrogance.

Here’s a bit of Gordis’s talk:

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

The settlement’s security man did not like us. He did not like the cameraman with his bulky gear, or the two documentary film producers who’d brought Dror Etkes and me to the outpost of Derekh Ha’avot south of Bethlehem, and he certainly didn’t like Etkes, an Israeli activist known for expertise on land ownership and for his legal challenges to West Bank settlement. The security coordinator wore civvies but bounced a bit on the balls of his feet in the spring-coiled posture of junior combat officers, or recently discharged officers.

“You can’t film in the neighborhood,” he told us. Neighborhood is a euphemism for an outpost, a mini-setttlement ostensibly established in defiance of the Israeli government but actually enjoying state support. Derekh Ha’avot — the name means “Forefathers’ Road” — is next to the veteran settlement of Elazar but outside its municipal boundaries. The security man worked for Elazar. Filming would be “a security risk. I don’t know a lot about security, but I know a little,” he sneered, meaning, I know a whole lot.

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Gershom Gorenberg

A few months ago, when Dalal Rusrus completed her two weeks of treatment at Alyn Hospital in Jerusalem and her parents were told to bring her back on May 30 for a follow-up visit, I had two opposite premonitions.

Logic said that after the weeks of wrangling with the Civil Administration in the West Bank to get her parents permits to enter Israel, after the diplomatic and journalistic and public pressure to let one small Palestinian girl get treatment for CP in an Israeli hospital whose staff was eager to help her –

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Gershom Gorenberg

From my new column in Moment:

… Why does Israel Bonds still exist in 2011? To broaden the question, do other classic Israeli fund-raising institutions serve a legitimate purpose anymore, at least in their present forms?

Don’t get me wrong. Giving isn’t obsolete. It’s great that Jews like to give. “Checkbook Judaism” is a problem when writing checks is the only expression of someone’s Jewish identity, but not when it’s part of a diversified portfolio of living by Jewish values. Overseas gifts to Israel’s nonprofit sector – from soup kitchens to symphony orchestras, human rights groups to universities – are a blessing for Israel and a bridge between it and the Diaspora. But some of the most prominent institutions channeling funds from world Jewry to Israel are past their expiration date.

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

The counterman at the snack-food shack called A Blast of a Kiosk spotted the ownerless valise next to the busy bus stop and called the police to report a suspicious object. While he was talking on the phone and simultaneously trying to shoo people away from the bag, the bomb went off, spraying the metal pellets that had been packed with the explosives.

The kiosk got its name after it was destroyed in an-early 1990s suicide bombing at the same spot, in front of the Jerusalem Convention Center, and then was rebuilt and defiantly reopened. That time, the owner was luckily late for work. This time, his brother-in-law, the vigilant counterman, sustained shrapnel wounds.

The blast on the grimy street was heard clearly more than two miles away by pedestrians in the gentrified German Colony. It took a moment to register what the sound meant. A Border Police jeep racing past the cafés helped jog memories. The bad old days were back, like malaria resurfacing after years of dormancy. For a second you don’t recognize the fever; then you realize you’ve been waiting for it, that you can’t actually believe it was ever gone.

This disbelief in a cure for the conflict is the achievement of the terrorists. It is also what makes them the unintentional allies of Israeli hard-liners, who likewise fear paying the necessary price to end the disease. Yet the one certain meaning of a bombing is that the infection will not go away by itself, that it must be treated immediately, that peacemaking is acutely needed.

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

Before he went into government service, Benjamin Netanyahu was a furniture marketing executive. His first public-sector job was as an Israeli diplomat posted in the United States, for which he spent much of his time promoting Israel’s image. His approach to politics was shaped by his experience as a salesman: You can sell people the product that you want to sell as long as the packaging is what the customer wants to buy. And when sales slip, boost advertising.

Judging from the Israeli prime minister’s sudden burst of marketing in recent days, Netanyahu believes his political product is deeply in trouble, both at home and overseas. He has launched a drive to rebrand himself as a successful — if underappreciated — moderate. To that, he has added a negative campaign against the Palestinian Authority leadership. The effort testifies that Netanyahu sees a recent drop in his polling figures as an omen, not a momentary dip, and that he is scared about deteriorating relations with Western governments. It also underlines his attitude toward the Palestinian government in Ramallah — as a competitor for Western sympathy, not as a strategic partner for making peace.

Netanyahu’s distress began showing at last week’s Cabinet meeting, where he chastised his ministers for not talking enough about the government’s achievements. “There are governments that talk and don’t act. This one acts and doesn’t talk,” one Hebrew press report quoted him as saying. The ministers, unfortunately, didn’t know what achievements he had in mind and asked for talking points. Netanyahu then asked Information Minister Yuli Edelstein to put together a list, according to leaks from unnamed Cabinet members. The same Cabinet scuttlebutt described Netanyahu as “frustrated” and “irritable and grumpy.”

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