Politics and Policy

The Cotton Gin and the Jewish Problem

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new article on whether Israel is a democracy is up at The American Prospect:

Infant mortality among Arab citizens of Israel is two and a half times higher than it is among Jewish citizens. One out of two Israeli Arab college graduates is out of work. Arabs make up 6 percent of the civil service, though they are over 15 percent of the country’s citizens. National testing shows Arab fifth- and eighth-graders trailing Jewish pupils in math, science, and English, and the gap is widening. That’s not surprising, since Arabs suffer much more poverty, and the national education system spends considerably more per Jewish child than per Arab child.

This a just a selection from the last few weeks’ news reports on the ethnic gap in Israel — not that inequality is big news. The most clichéd phrase in Israeli political discourse is that the country is a “Jewish and democratic state.” The phrase is overused precisely because of the tension between the two adjectives, because of the majority’s insecurity over whether both can be achieved at the same time. (The minority generally presumes it can’t.)

The standard line of the country’s boosters is that it’s the only democracy in the Middle East. The most concise criticism is that it is an “ethnocracy,” as Israeli political geographer Oren Yiftachel argues in his 2006 book of that name. An ethnocracy, he explains, is a regime promoting “the expansion of the dominant group in contested territory … while maintaining a democratic façade.” Looking at this debate in light of two new books by Israeli scholars and of a faded and remarkable document that I’ve just read in the Israel State Archives, it seems both sides could be right.

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Conscientious Objection in the Funhouse Mirror

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new article on the right’s difficulties with the army is up at The American Prospect:

Driving through the West Bank recently, I picked up two hitchhikers. Both wore the long, thick sidelocks and extra-large skullcaps that have become the mark of young men on the religious right, especially among settlers. Since they were what Israelis call army age (what Americans would call college age), the conversation turned to military service.

Despite Israel’s universal draft, the hitchhiker in the back seat said he didn’t intend to serve. The Israel Defense Forces, he argued, hurts Jews — a point he presumed was obvious from the “uprooting” of settlements in Gaza four years ago and the occasional dismantling of tiny, illegal settlement outposts in the West Bank more recently. Besides that, he said, the IDF “doesn’t want to kill Arabs because it wants to look nice in the world.” He didn’t want to die because commanders were too concerned with Arabs’ lives. As a student at a yeshivah — a religious seminary — he had a deferment, and he intended to keep it till he was past draft age.

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The Allure of Lawlessness

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new piece on the arrest of alleged terrorist Yaakov Teitel and its context is up at The American Prospect:

The glossy flier was posted on a bulletin border in a small, illegal outpost of Israeli settlers near Nablus in the West Bank when I visited last week. The black print appeared over a soft green picture of olive trees. The West Bank is famed for its olive oil, and autumn is harvest season. For years, it’s also been the season when settlers from the most extreme outposts and settlements clash with Palestinian farmers and vandalize orchards.

Citing religious sources, the flier urged Jews to “harvest” the Palestinians’ olives if they could, and uproot the trees if they couldn’t. Since Judaism forbids not only theft but also the destruction of fruit trees even in warfare, the writer had to use considerable casuistry to make his case. It was, in religious terms, akin to preaching the “obligation” of adultery.

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Rachel as a Metaphor–Why Israeli Democracy is Just as Bad/Good as All Others

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Haim Watzman

In politics, the pure is the enemy of the good. One need look no further than the discussion that ensued in response to my post Votes Are Not Enough. Some of the most prolific correspondents there, coming from both the right and left, shared the implicit assumption that democracy, if not pure, is not democracy.

Unfortunately, they won’t be able to read the fine essay that Nurit Gretz published in the arts and literature section of Friday’s Ha’aretz—the piece, in Hebrew, seems not to be available on-line. Gretz addresses a problem of the same genre and in doing so shows how wrong purism can be.

She does so by writing about one of the icons of Labor Zionism, A.D. Gordon, the Second Aliya’s guru of back-to-the-earth socialist egalitarianism. One of Gordon’s disciples was the poetess Rachel Bluwstein, who lived and worked at Kevutzat Kinneret on the southern edge of the Sea of Galilee, where Zionist farmers first tried to work on a communal basis. Bluwstein—universally known in Israel today as Rachel the Poetess—lived in accordance with Gordon’s teachings. She abandoned the middle-class life she’d known in Russia and set aside her aspirations for education and culture to become a simple farmer.

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Last One Out, TurnOff the Mike

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new article on the implosion of the Israeli left at the very moment when American Jewish doves are finally speaking out is up at The American Prospect:

Danny Ben-Simon has quit. If anyone needed more evidence of the disarray of the Israeli left, this is it — but then, no one actually needs any more evidence.

Ben-Simon became the whip of the Labor Party’s Knesset delegation just five months ago. That sounds like a prominent position for a first-time Knesset member, until you remember that the once-powerful party now has just 13 representatives in the 120-seat parliament and that at least four of them have had nothing to do with Labor since its leader, Ehud Barak, insisted on joining Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government in order to become defense minister.

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The Ehud Syndrome

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Gershom Gorenberg

My apologies for being AWOL recently; I’m in the midst of research that has kept me very busy.

As a result, I failed to mark the passing of Dr. Yair Carlos Bar-El. Yair was for years the Jerusalem district psychiatrist and head of the Kfar Shaul mental hospital. Among other things, that meant he was responsible for dealing with normally sane people knocked off their balance by coming to Jerusalem, along with the already unbalanced people attracted to sacred ground like iron filings to a magnet.

Treating the former group, Yair found a repeating pattern he named the “Jerusalem Syndrome.” While in the city, the victims are overwhelmed by the need to purify themselves, dress in white, appear at a holy place and preach. The episode is brief; afterwards, they are sane, and thoroughly embarrassed.

As for the latter group, he said, “People with personality problems arrive here to pray… There are people with illnesses who identify as Jesus, John the Baptist…” Once, he said, “We had three simultaneous cases of the Virgin Mary.” He wasn’t cynical about this. He was a dedicated, caring doctor. The madness of Jerusalem was simply part of his responsibility.

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Votes Are Not Enough–Hillel Cohen’s “Good Arabs”

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Haim Watzman

All too often, Israel’s supporters kill their cause with clichés. One of the most common and problematic of these clichés is the claim that Israel’s Arab citizens have always enjoyed full and equal rights because—and here’s the clincher—they vote for and sit in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset.

As Hillel Cohen shows in Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948-1967, my translation of which is to be published shortly, suffrage and representation do not in and of themselves guarantee a minority the rights that a democracy is supposed to grant to all its citizens.

In Good Arabs, Cohen continues the study he began in his previous book, Army of Shadows (see my earlier post Good Arabs, Bad Arabs) about the complex relationship between the Zionist movement and the local Arabs in Palestine. As in that earlier work, Cohen eschews the slogans long shouted by Palestinians and Israelis, rightists and leftists. He shows how both Israeli officials and leaders of those Palestinian Arabs who became inhabitants and citizens of the Jewish state adopted a variety of strategies in reaction to real and perceived threats and opportunities.

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The Scent of Smoke in a Dry Field

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new piece on what’s behind the recent tension at the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif  – and where it could lead – is up at The American Prospect:

Five cops edged the Street of the Chain carrying riot batons and shields. A few meters away, in the shadows of a covered alleyway, four more cops were doing what police do so often, which is wait. The Street of the Chain is one of the main thoroughfares of Jerusalem’s Old City, a narrow, stone-paved walkway descending toward the entrance to Haram al-Sharif, a.k.a. the Temple Mount. It’s lined with Palestinian-owned shops selling scarves, t-shirts, the trinkets of three faiths, and anything else that might catch a tourist’s eye. On Tuesday afternoon, police reinforcements were deployed along the street, on the lawn outside Jaffa Gate, and throughout the Old City.

At a checkpoint a block from the entrance to the Haram, a police commander with a very small vocabulary insisted that non-Muslims, even those with press cards, could not go any closer to the holy site. For that matter, Muslim males under the age of 50 were also barred from entering the wide plaza where Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock stand. Somewhere high in the line of command, someone has decided that testosterone and sanctity are too dangerous a mix.

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Save the Pool

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Haim Watzman I haven’t been blogging because I’m busy saving the Jerusalem Pool. This venerable and unique South Jerusalem facility is in danger of being closed down and turned into a parking lot by a developer. I work out at the pool daily and it’s been an inspiration to me as a writer, too (see. … Read more

Skipping the Summit for the Movies

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new article about the superb new Israeli film Ajami (and the silliness of the protests against the Toronto Film Festival) is up at the American Prospect:

The advance publicity accurately predicted that this week’s U.S.-Israeli-Palestinian summit would fall short of great historical drama. Despite Barack Obama’s efforts, his meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas would not be the denouement of successful diplomacy. Emotionally as well as physically, the get-together in New York on Tuesday would be half a world away from the unsolved conflict. Following updates on news sites would be an exercise in escapism, I concluded.

Instead, to stay real, I went to the movies. More specifically, I went to see Ajami. Like last year’s Waltz With Bashir, it’s an example of Israeli cinema’s maturation as engaged art, harsh and sympathetic. Ajami focuses on Israel’s Palestinian citizens, who are fated to live on both sides of the conflict. In the process, the film’s Palestinian and Jewish co-directors blur the boundary between fiction and documentary.

The film is named for a neighborhood in the coastal city of Jaffa. Until 1948, Jaffa was the cultural center of Arab Palestine. When it was conquered by Jewish forces that year, all but a few thousand of the Arab residents fled. Jewish immigrants moved into abandoned houses, and Jaffa was annexed by the neighboring Jewish city of Tel Aviv. The remaining Palestinians became Israeli citizens and outsiders. Ajami, a mostly Arab neighborhood, has stayed poor and crime-ridden.

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