Politics and Policy

Dalal: And Now for Some Good News

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Gershom Gorenberg

Thanks and an apology are in order.

The thanks are to all those who donated to the Dalal Project, helping to fund Dalal Rusrus’s stay at Alyn Hospital, and to all those who contacted Israeli officials, helping to get Dalal’s parents permits to bring her from the West Bank to the hospital in Jerusalem. Extra special thanks are due to the people who helped coordinate what turned into a major organizational effort to make sure one three-year-old girl began the treatment she needs.

The apology is for my delay in getting back to you with an update. Travel, teaching and writing haven’t left me with any waking moments.

Dalal Rusrus, for those coming new to this story, is a Palestinian child from Beit Umar in the West Bank. She suffers from cerebral palsy and delayed development. Through a series of events I’ve described previously (first here, then here, and then here), she was invited for treatment at Alyn Hospital, the only pediatric rehabilitative facility in the region. The relatively easy problem that posed was paying for the treatment. The more difficult one, it turned out, was getting the necessary permits for her father and mother, Osama and Sunya, to enter Israel to accompany her.

The request for donations, here and elsewhere, brought a quick response from Israel and around the world, from Jews, Muslims and Christians. Much of the funding was handled administratively by the Tzedakah Committee at Kehillat Yedidya in Jerusalem.

After many long conversations with Civil Administration officials, Sunya and Osama got the necessary permits. The reasons for the initial refusals remain obscure. What’s clear from my conversations is that the level of journalistic and public interest surprised the officials, and increased their motivation to solve the problem. Activism worked.

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Middle East Maverick

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Haim Watzman My profile of Sari Nusseibeh and his new book are up on the website of The Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s a pleasure to see my byline in the paper again—I served as its Israel correspondent for many years. My replacement, friend, and neighborMatthew Kalman, does a fine job there now.

Dalal Update

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Gershom Gorenberg I want to thank everyone who has lent a hand to Dalal Rusrus and her family, by contributing funds for her care or by writing to military officials to ask about her parents’ permits to bring her to Alyn Hospital in Jerusalem. Today Dalal’s mother Sunya was given a one-day permit to bring … Read more

The Vengeance of the Occupation

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

I know that the Yiddish writer Sholem Asch didn’t intend his classic play, God of Vengeance, as an allegory about Israel and the impact of the occupation. The play was first staged 60 years before Israel conquered the West Bank. All the same, what’s happening in the Jewish state keeps tempting me to read Asch’s drama as an allegory.

In “God of Vengeance,” a character named Yankel Chapchovich in an unnamed Eastern European town runs a brothel in his basement while trying to bring up his daughter as a chaste Jewish girl on the floor above. To protect her purity, he installs a Torah scroll in his home. His plan naturally fails: There’s a limit to how much tribute vice can pay to virtue before the line between them vanishes.

Likewise, there’s a limit to how long a fragile democracy can maintain an undemocratic regime next door, in occupied territory, before democracy at home is corrupted. A border, especially one not even shown on maps, cannot seal off the rot.

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Beware the Military-Religious Complex

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

Lt. Gen. Ashkenazi stood at a lectern last week wearing the kind of size XXL skullcap that is the social marker of Orthodox settlers, praising an army program that is the pride of Israel’s religious right. He looked slightly bashful. Ashkenazi, Israel’s military chief of staff, lives in a rather boring suburb of Tel Aviv, not a West Bank settlement. He’s not an Orthodox Jew, so he usually doesn’t wear a hat or skullcap, except for formal occasions when he puts on his military beret. As a military man, he’s officially not a politician. Then again, you don’t get appointed to head the Israel Defense Forces without a sharp sense of which way the political winds are blowing.

Before I get into the details, let me note several implications of this incident. It demonstrates, yet again, that when politicians create an alliance between the state and a religious movement, the outcome is lose-lose for both. In the strictly Israeli context, it shows the growing dependence of the army on soldiers and officers from the Orthodox right, whose commitment to implementing democratic decisions is a touch iffy. And a major reason for that dependency (I know this is a terrible surprise) is the ongoing occupation of the West Bank.

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Shocking Cables Show that Bibi Manipulates Iran Threat

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Gershom Gorenberg

All right, not so shocking. Anyway, with a bit of a delay, here’s my column on what the Wikileak cables say about Israel:

In January 1969, the labor attaché at the U.S. embassy in Israel sent a report classified “confidential” to the State Department. In it, she passed on the inside information on Israel’s ruling Labor Party that she’d gained by having an over-the-hill politician named Golda Meir over for dinner. Meir had said that then-Prime Minister Levi Eshkol would run for re-election that fall. “The tone of her remarks indicated that any other possibility was too ridiculous to consider,” attaché Margaret Plunkett commented. Eshkol’s health was “perfectly okay,” according to Meir. As for Meir herself, she’d only agreed under pressure from the party to run again for Knesset. The report would remain classified for at least 12 years.

Eshkol was actually terribly ill at the time. The ruling party’s inner circle had already chosen Meir as his successor. He died a month later. In those days, if you wanted to leak diplomatic documents, you had to copy them one at a time. Had a would-be whistle-blower at State stood over the photocopy machine after-hours, he would probably not have thought this one worth the extra seconds of his time. I have to wonder why anyone would consider it worth making a secret in the first place. To protect a source? If Meir had known that her comments could become public, perhaps she would have been more careful about fibbing. I doubt it, though. The only embarrassment for U.S. diplomacy in the memorandum is that the attaché was so eagerly misled.

Today, as the most recent WikiLeaks dump shows, it’s easier to copy a quarter-million documents than to sift through them for the interesting ones. (That’s also why Israeli whistle-blower Anat Kam allegedly copied 2,000 military documents, rather than a few.) The State Department has just followed young job applicants into the era of Facebook and cell-phone cameras: Anything you’ve ever said or done might be available online.

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What To Do About Water

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Haim Watzman

Today’s rollout of a draft model Israeli-Palestinian water accord by EcoPeace/Friends of the Earth Middle East (FOEME) demonstrated several of the salient but frustrating truths about this most urgent area of conflict.

First, it’s solvable. With proper planning, conservation, reuse, and production, there is enough water available for all 11 million Israelis and Palestinians living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Second, it has to be solved now. It can’t wait for a comprehensive peace agreement.

Third, the Palestinians aren’t getting their fair share—and it’s not just the Palestinians who are saying this. Nearly all Israeli experts agree.

Fourth, despite the direness of the situation, Israel’s leaders are doing little to create a political constituency for the changes required.

The FOEME draft agreement, written by David Brooks, a Canadian hydrogeologist and economist, and by Julie Trottier, a Belgian political scientist and chemist, proposes to get away from the zero-sum “dividing up the pie” way of addressing water conflicts and proposes to see water as a dynamic entity.

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Journey to Beit Jala: Border Crossing to Hope

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect.

Dalal rested in her father’s lap. She smiled but only said one word, ana, “I” in Arabic — her entire vocabulary at the age of three and a half. My friend Dr. Eliezer Be’eri, carefully felt her feet and ran his hand over her back. “Can she hold things?” Be’eri asked.

“She just started to with her right hand,” answered her father, Osama Rusrus.

“Does she pass things from hand to hand?”

“No. The other hand doesn’t function.”

The examination continued. A cool evening breeze blew across the patio of the Everest Hotel, a mountaintop pensione on the outskirts of Beit Jala in the West Bank. Beit Jala itself is in Area A, the part of the West Bank that is under full Palestinian Authority control and that is off-limits to Israelis by Israeli military order. Alyn Hospital, the Middle East’s only pediatric rehabilitation hospital, where Be’eri is a department head — is in Jerusalem, which is off-limits to West Bank Palestinians unless they procure Israeli permits. Our lives are fragmented by many borders in very little space.

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Counter-Demonstration– “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

Last Friday, as I mulled over whether to go to the weekly Sheikh Jarrah demonstration, I came across a poem by Natan Zach that I clipped from the newspaper last summer. Zach, whose poems often find him alone in his apartment, afraid to connect and frozen in inaction, declares: “Greater is the courage to wait / Than the courage to pour out one’s heart.” Indeed. As has happened every Friday so far, I decided not to go, and then felt guilty for the rest of the weekend.

illustration by Avi Katz
By all rights I should be in Sheikh Jarrah every Friday. The cause is just and important. And it’s the in place to be for every self-respecting progressive Zionist. I’ve written op-eds, blog posts, and satires in support of the campaign to halt the eviction of Palestinian tenants from their East Jerusalem homes and against the idiotic policy of settling Jews in Arab neighborhoods. But I’ve got complex issues with political demonstrations. Every time I go to demonstrate, I feel like demonstrating against my fellow demonstrators.

I could tell the story of my life as a chronicle of demonstrations past, demonstrations missed, and demonstrations attended but regretted afterward.

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Why Isaac Herzog is Talking About Fascism

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at the American Prospect:

Israeli Welfare Minister Isaac Herzog is normally a soporific politician. Dressed up in a suit, he looks and sounds more like a boy about to celebrate his bar mitzvah than like a Cabinet member. Asked for a sound bite on a controversial issue, he’s likely to answer with a tangle of equivocation. Herzog owes his senior status in the Labor Party to legacy — his father’s career in Labor concluded with 10 years as Israel’s figurehead president, his grandfather was Israel’s first chief rabbi — and to his proven willingness to support whoever’s in charge in the party. A key example: Last year he backed party leader Ehud Barak’s decision to join Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, over the objections of Knesset colleagues who recalled that Labor once had principles.

Herzog, therefore, is not a guy you’d expect to use the f-word when describing the country’s direction under that same government. But he did last weekend. “Fascism,” he said, “is licking at the edges of the camp, and we’re not paying attention to it. We’re on a slippery and very dangerous slope.” When Isaac Herzog talks about fascism, something serious has to be wrong.

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Hazony Today, Kuhn Tomorrow

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Haim Watzman

Poor Thomas Kuhn . Superzionist, a.k.a. Yoram Hazony, author of the quirky The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul, has drafted the author of the seminal but flawed classic of the philosophy of science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, to explain why everyone hates Israel.

I’m late in getting to Hazony’s essay, Israel Through European Eyes which he e-mailed to his fans last July 14. But it just reached me, through a series of forwards long enough to man every team in the World Cup. Like all of Hazony’s writing, it displays great erudition, has lots of footnotes, and makes some obvious points while parsing them all wrong.

Behind the excess philosophical baggage, Hazony says something that has been said before—that the antipathy that Europe, and especially Europe’s political left, displays toward Israel is deeply rooted in the Holocaust. Hazony correctly notes that Zionism and the European left learned two disparate lessons from Hitler’s genocidal program. Zionism claimed that no one would defend the Jews if they did not defend themselves, while the Europe emerged from World War II horrified at the death and destruction wrought by chauvinistic nationalism and concluded that national feelings were too dangerous to be left to politics.

The Zionists established a Jewish state, while the Europeans sought to create a pan-European political framework that would make it difficult for the fanatics of any one European nation (but those of Germany in particular) to persecute outsiders and to seek to impose hegemony on the entire continent. So we have Israel, and we have the European Union.

But Hazony can’t just say that.

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Netanyahu Isn’t In Charge Here

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column at the American Prospect explains why Netanyahu refused to extend the settlement freeze, and what’s missing from U.S. diplomacy.

The confession of weakness was startling. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak was explaining to the BBC why Israeli-Palestinian peace talks should continue despite Israel’s refusal to extend its freeze on new building in West Bank settlements. People had to understand, he said, “Israel doesn’t have a way to stop this building totally.”

Barak is the civilian official directly responsible for the Middle East’s strongest military. He’s also responsible for governing the West Bank, since it’s under military occupation. Nonetheless, he says he just can’t stop settlers from revving up the cement mixers. Since settlement constructions are intended not merely to provide homes but also to set Israel’s borders and reduce its diplomatic options, Barak is also admitting that the government has ceded its monopoly on foreign policy.

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