Politics and Policy

The Occupation Comes Home

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

A recent news item in a niche publication about a new recruitment program for Israel’s national police force obliquely provided some of the most telling testimony I’ve seen recently about the importance of the current Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. It said nothing about the talks, yet read properly, it was a reminder that reaching a two-state solution is essential not only as a means of achieving peace — critical as that is in itself — but also of protecting Israel’s own society from the rot caused by occupation.

I spotted the article in Olam Katan (“Small World”), a free weekly given out in Israeli synagogues on the Sabbath. The target audience is religious Zionists — Orthodox Jews who generally favor integration into the wider Israeli society but who often nurture a strong minority identity, a tribal sense of “us” and everyone else…

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McCarthyism on the Mediterranean

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Gershom Gorenberg

A bit delayed, I’m posting my American Prospect article on the latest, nutty attacks from the Israeli right on universities, NGOs, and even wanting natural gas producers to pay the government for the gas they extract:

During a decade in Israel’s Parliament, Michael Melchior made his name as an effective legislator. The rabbi and social democrat chaired the Knesset Education Committee, pushing the government to provide hot lunches for poor schoolchildren and to mainstream special-needs pupils. As an environmentalist, he was willing to partner with Omri Sharon — son of the rightist former prime minister — and Dov Khenin of the Communist Party.

Melchior flunked flamboyance, though. He was nearly invisible to the general public. He owed his seat to an alliance between the Labor Party and his dovish religious party, Meimad. In the 2009 election the alliance was dissolved, and Melchior’s party failed to get the 2 percent of the national vote needed to win seats in the Knesset.

This month, though, Melchior is in the news. That’s partly due to his own efforts. A group he founded, the Civil Action Forum, is pressing the government to take royalties from a new natural-gas field off Israel’s coast and to devote the money to social needs.

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Excuse Me, Is This the Road to Peace?

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Gershom Gorenberg

The terror attack south of Hebron took place a few hours after I filed my curtain-raiser on the Washington peace talks for the American Prospect. Besides my pain at hearing of the deaths, I also had a tinge of professional self-criticism: Without intending to, I’d made a prediction of quiet in the West Bank, simply by describing, in present tense, the quiet that had existed in recent months. And I’d forgotten the iron rule of Israeli-Palestinian negotiating: The people who regard any compromise as betrayal will do their best – or rather, their worst – to stop diplomacy by igniting a new cycle of attack, crackdowns, rage and more terror.

In this case, the killers seek to discredit the Palestinian Authority and its extenisve efforts to prevent violence. Most Israelis and Palestinians already appear pessimistic about the talks, but hard-liners are desperately afraid that the negotiations might just bring a peace agreement. If the Israeli public can be convinced that the PA is either soft on terror or complicit in it, the fragile foundation for negotiations might crumble.

Despite Hamas’s latest attacks, the real problem in the negotiations is the imbalance that I described in my article:

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…For the Help That You Can Bring

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On meeting Haim Gouri at the shut gate to Sheikh Jarrah

Gershom Gorenberg

My new article on the Sheikh Jarrah demonstrations is up at The American Prospect. This was written just before yesterday’s demo, which I’d guess drew between 500 and 1,000 people – a large increase from previous protests. During Ramadan, the demos will be held on Saturday night, after nightfall, inside the neighborhood.

'Jewish-Arab solidarity in Sheikh Jarrah': Protesters, August 8, 2010
‘Jewish-Arab solidarity in Sheikh Jarrah’:
Protesters, August 8, 2010 (Gershom Gorenberg)

I spotted Haim Gouri standing in the East Jerusalem park among several hundred other demonstrators on a recent Friday afternoon. The wind swept the poet’s silver hair over a face scarred by nearly 87 years of history. Paramilitary border police stood next to an impromptu roadblock across the street, barring the protesters from Sheikh Jarrah — an Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem where several Palestinian families have been evicted from their homes so Israeli settlers can claim real estate owned by Jews before 1948. To remove any doubts: No one is letting the evicted Palestinians reclaim the homes their families owned before 1948 in what is now Israel.

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Won’t You Please Come to Sheikh Jarrah…

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Gershom Gorenberg Stop the Racism: Show Solidarity with Sheikh Jarrah, August 6, 4 p.m. It’s been a year since the eviction of two Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah. The eviction was carried out under laws that give Jewish refugees from 1948, or whomsoever appoints themselves to act in those refugees’ names, the … Read more

With a Little Help From My Friends (or: Judaism as Justice)

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Gershom Gorenberg

I know that today is Tu Be’Av, the 15th of the Hebrew month of Av, an obscure holiday from the Second Temple period that has been secularized in Israel as the Day of Love – and that, according to Chana Pinchasi, should really be understood as an assertion of women’s freedom and a rejection of violence against them.

But there are things left to said about Tisha Be’Av, and if I wait to the eve of the fast next year, I’ll forget the poetry of protest that my friends and mentors – meaning the same people, my friends who are my teachers – have woven around that day, making it even more relevant than I thought it was.

Let’s start at Frost and Clouds, where Joshua Gutoff writes an essential reminder: The rabbis who created post-Temple Judaism weren’t philosophers (or engineers); their words were poetry and the calendar they designed was choreography. So if you think they were talking about the stones in Jerusalem when they talked about “destruction of the Temple,” please rethink:

…“The Temple” is their way of speaking about a world in which God was experienced as directly and even intimately present, and “Destruction” is the language for the loss of that experience. …

But poetry can sometimes be badly, dangerously misread. The standard religious Zionist reading of Tisha Be’Av quotes Rav Kook as saying that the destruction took place because of “baseless hatred” and that the Temple will be rebuilt out of “baseless love” – a term that is quickly transformed into condemnation of dissent, disagreement and disunity, so that Judaism becomes an introduction to fascism. (Yes, I know what the word means. I use it deliberately, in its historical sense, to describe the disgrace of religious Zionism today and the constant effort of its mainstream spokespeople to label any criticism “baseless hatred.”)

Yehudah Mirsky sticks a pin in this large, hollow idea:

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The House at the End of the Road

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new piece is up at The American Prospect:

Dror Etkes picked me up in front of the bank, next to the convenience store, on a normal Jerusalem street where nothing slows the morning commuters except normal traffic jams. I wanted to visit the Palestinian village of Silwad. To that, Etkes added a couple of other stops on our tangled route through the West Bank.

Life in the enclaves: A Palestinian boy at Beit Ijza.

Life in the enclaves: A Palestinian boy at Beit Ijza. (Gershom Gorenberg)

The day’s task was to examine how to take someone’s land for settlement — via stealth, strong-arm tactics, or legal maneuvers. Only at the day’s end would I understand what my real goal had been: to remind myself that the main street, the bank, the apartment buildings, the buses taking kids to summer day camps — the whole normal city day flowing according to sensible rules — is an enclave of illusory sanity.

Once upon a time you could get from Jerusalem to Silwad easily. You drove north on the main mountain-ridge highway. After Ramallah you turned right. On the other side of the country road from Silwad stood the wooden sign marking the entrance to the Israeli settlement of Ofrah. In the Oslo years of the 1990s, when Ramallah became the de facto capital of the Palestinian Authority, the drive got even easier. A new road — built so settlers wouldn’t need to commute through Palestinian towns — bypassed the Arab city.

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City of Thieves, Day of Mourning (and the Scent of Hope)

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Gershom Gorenberg

Anshel Pfeffer’s article last week against fasting on Tisha Be’Av seemed written for me. I hate to fast. An old friend once told me that on Yom Kippur, he looks at my face in shul to get a real sense of suffering. Enough chastising the flesh. It makes you feel bad.

'There is no sanctity in an occupied city':
‘There is no sanctity in an occupied city’: Demonstrator in Sheikh Jarrah

Pfeffer argued that Tisha Be’Av “has lost any relevance beyond the historical.”

If Tisha Be’Av is meant to mark the exile of the Jewish people, then it’s no longer relevant. For a decade now, there has not been one Jew around the world who was not free to return to Zion. Ever since the quiet exodus of the last Jews of Syria, in the late 1990s, there has not been a country anywhere that has forbidden its Jewish citizens to leave…

As for mourning the Temple,

The only reason that the third temple has not been built is that a majority of Israelis simply are not interested. Secular Jews have no affinity to a priestly caste sacrificing heifers and goats, while the great majority of religious Jews are not very eager themselves.

To which I might add, we should thank God that most religious Jews aren’t interested in slaughtering animals as a means of communicating with the Creator.

Nonetheless, I’m fasting today, and not just out of habit. An email I got just after I read Pfeffers’ article reminded me of why he was mistaken.  From the group Sheikh Jarrah: A Just Struggle for a Just Jerusalem, it was an invitation to a discussion on Tisha Be’Av about the destruction of the Temple and the demolition of Palestinian homes. The process of refuting Pfeffer was completed the haftarah on Shabbat morning, by a midrash that I studied with my son, and by the actual discussion of Sheikh Jarrah last night.

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Do You Know Just How Bad It Is?

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Gershom Gorenberg The human rights group Hamoked has posted an online quiz about the conditions faced by Palestinians living under occupation. It’s worth testing yourself. Since I would never give away answers to a test, I won’t mention that the key to a perfect score is being grimly pessimistic.

Catching Up: Has Obama Given Up?

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Gershom Gorenberg

It’s a reminder to be careful, to avoid making even implied predictions.

For the latest edition of Hadassah magazine, I wrote an article on Barack Obama’s relation to Israel. The idea that Obama is less committed to Israel than his predecessors is a “misconception,” I said very politely. (English provides a more forceful term, but it is not printable in Hadassah or on this blog.) Obama has done much more for Israel’s security and diplomatic status than people realize, I said. If the relationship between him and Bibi Netanyahu has been fraught, I said, it’s precisely because of the president’s commitment to Israel’s future.

…First, some basic information that has received too little media play: The only change in United States military aid to Israel under Obama is upward. In May, the White House asked Congress for $205 million for Israel to finance the Iron Dome project, above and beyond regular defense aid. Iron Dome is an Israeli-produced high-tech system designed to intercept short-range rockets of the type that have been fired at Israel from Gaza and Lebanon. It should make Israelis living in border areas significantly safer.

On the diplomatic front, the Obama administration’s intense lobbying recently gained Israel acceptance to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the elite organization of the world’s most advanced economies. “It’s an economic security matter of highest order,” says Daniel Kurtzer, former United States ambassador to Israel and now a professor at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. “You can either be an object or a subject, and Israel is now a subject. They’re part of the rule-making body.”…

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Catching Up: Winners and Losers in the Gaza Flotilla Fiasco

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Gershom Gorenberg

Busy researching a major writing project, I’ve had too little time in both the real and virtual South Jerusalem. So I’m only belatedly posting recent articles.

Here’s a piece of my piece from the American Prospect, scoring the the raid on the Mavi Marmara:

Hamas
Ismail Haniye’s rejectionist government in Gaza could turn out to be a net loser. Yes, it may gain some public support if economic conditions improve. But the Hamas regime exacts taxes on the rampant smuggling via tunnels under the Gaza-Egypt border. If goods can be imported aboveground, that income will dry up. And with no civilian goods coming through the tunnels, Israel may find it politically easier to attack arms smugglers.

Besides, the flotilla undermines Hamas’ dogmatic attachment to the machismo of armed struggle. Firing rockets into Israel didn’t end the siege; it provoked Israel’s Gaza offensive in December 2008. Without rockets, the flotilla organizers accomplished more.

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