Politics and Policy

“Excuse Me, I’ve Been Listening to this Conversation, but What’s a Settlement?”

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Gershom Gorenberg

There’s a lot of discussion on this blog about the issue of Israeli settlements. For someone just dropping in, some of the terms may be unclear.

As it happens, the Los Angeles Times’ opinion section today includes a package on the settlement issue, and the editor asked me to explain some of the basic terms and issues. The piece is here, and includes definitions of “settlement,” “Green Line,” and “outpost,” as well as an explanation of the current U.S.-Israel tensions over the issue. (It doesn’t include a discussion of international law, because the package includes a separate article on that, by Sarah Leah Whitson,  Middle East director at Human Rights Watch).

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Shockwaves from Iran on the Mediterranean Coast

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Gershom Gorenberg

People often read read news, my son once pointed out, because they want to know what will happen, not what has happened. They want the Daily Prophet.

Sorry, we don’t have any more clue of what will happen in Iran than anyone else does. Will there be a crackdown? Will Mousavi win, and be a Gorbachev? For heaven’s sake, the last thing Gorbachev expected to be was Gorbachev.

Nonetheless, when smoke is coming out of the largest house on the block, it’s sure to affect the neighbors.  What effect, of course, depends on the final act of the drama in Iran. Here are some estimations:

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Is There an Obama Effect?

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Gershom Gorenberg

Is this all coincidence? Or is part of what’s been happening in the Middle East for the past two weeks a result of the U.S. president declaring that the conflict of civilizations is over? My new article in The American Prospect examines the evidence.

Barack Obama spoke in Cairo two weeks ago. The Middle East has been roiling since. The street scenes in Iran have pushed the surprise pro-Western victory in Lebanon’s elections out of the headlines, along with Benjamin Netanyahu’s pained, precondition-crippled acceptance of a two-state solution and the enraged Palestinian response. Two top Israeli intelligence figures scaling down the Iranian nuclear threat from looming Holocaust to mid-range risk — a major story for a calm week — has gone almost unnoticed.

So did Obama set this off, or was he like the king in The Little Prince who ordered the sun to rise at the precise moment when it would have done so anyway? With that come two more questions: Will the crisis in Iran shake up the region even more? And what should Obama do in response?

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Obama is a Better Zionist Than Netanyahu

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new article is up at Slate – on the dispute over settlements and why Obama’s approach is better for Israel. An excerpt:

…Diplomatic entreaties over the two-state solution will continue in closed rooms. The dispute over the settlements, however, is likely to remain public. In that dispute, Obama is working for the classic Zionist goal of a thriving democratic state with a Jewish majority. Netanyahu is undercutting that strategic goal by sticking to a Zionist tactic that became obsolete decades ago.

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Beyond Unbelief: Bibi’s Speech and Fred Cavayé’s Pour Elle

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Haim Watzman

Sometimes a mediocre film puts everything in perspective. When the lights went down in the Cinematheque last night I was in the middle of discussion with my companion (full disclosure: I’m married to her) how to parse Bibi’s two-state speech. One position (not mine) was that the prime minister had offered an honest and sincere statement of both Israel’s willingness to compromise for peace, whereas the other position (not hers) was that Bibi was just paying lip service to President Obama’s peace initiative and had no real intention of making any progress with the Palestinians.

The film was Fred Cavayé’s Pour Elle (Anything For Her), a thriller that calls for a willing suspension of more beliefs than does Christopher Hitchens writing about God.

Lisa and Julien are happily in love and have a cute little boy named Oscar. Lisa is arrested and convicted of a murder she did not commit. When all legal recourses are exhausted and Lisa turns suicidal, Julien, who teaches French in a high school, decides to free his wife by force. He consults with a former prisoner who has written a book about his many prison breaks (for a guy on the lam, the guy is startlingly easy to locate and oddly willing to speak freely to a total stranger). Then he carefully concocts a plan, scrawled all over the wall of his study at home, to grab Lisa when she’s being taken to the hospital because of her diabetes and abscond with her and Oscar to El Salvador.

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Longer Analysis of Bibi’s Speech: Man of the Past

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Gershom Gorenberg

My article analyzing Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech is up at the new Jewish web magazine, Tablet:

Before Benjamin Netanyahu stood at the lectern to give his foreign policy speech Sunday night, the most optimistic prognostications went like this: It took Charles de Gaulle, a man of the political right, to recognize that France must leave Algeria. It took a Richard Nixon to go to China, a Menachem Begin to give up the Sinai for peace. So perhaps Netanyahu, the lifetime nationalist, would recognize the demands that history have thrust upon him, change political direction, and lead Israel toward a two-state solution with the Palestinians.

So much for optimism. Responding to the diplomatic challenge posed by President Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo, Netanyahu delivered an inadequate, internally contradictory and disappointing message.

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Unaerobics: Bibi’s Speech Tonight

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Haim Watzman

It’s a hot afternoon and I’m still feeling heavy from overeating on Shabbat. So should I go to my Sunday night masters swim group or stay home and watch Binyamin Netanyahu’s much-heralded policy address? Which will get my pulse up higher?

I think I’ll go for the swim. By all accounts, Netanyahu will surprise no one. He’ll try to square President Obama’s circle by declaring how important the Israel-U.S. relationship is, while at the same time refusing to accept America’s lead in setting Israel on course toward serious negotiations over an accommodation with the Palestinians and the Arab world.

Netanyahu will follow the lead of his mentor, Menachem Begin, in insisting that Israel’s settlements in the territories have no connection to negotiations with the Arabs. President Jimmy Carter thought he had gotten Begin’s consent to a settlement freeze until the ultimate fate of the West Bank and Gaza Strip was determined; Begin insisted that he’d agreed only to a three-month freeze. Netanyahu might offer a similar sop,

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Racism, Amalek and Videotape

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Gershom Gorenberg

The recording of Max Blumenthal’s combat journalism in the pubs of Jerusalem has been making the virtual rounds, stirring vast debate: Has Max proven that Israelis are racists, or that American Jews are? That Israel should raise its drinking age from 18? Or what, exactly?

Well, yes, he did prove that some drunken English-speakers in Jerusalem bars are quite drunk, and quite racist, especially when the booze and perhaps the distance from politically correct campuses in America loosens their tongues.

Sadly, he also did what looks like some very sloppy journalism. Originally he explained that he and a friend had set out to “interview young Israelis and American Jews” and described those who actually appear in his clip as “beer sodden twenty-somethings, many from the United States.” Listening to the accents, I lean to believing that the “many” should be “most” if not “nearly all.” If  Max had been familiar even with the narrow journalistic territory of young Americans visiting Israel, he would know that the fact that “some told me they were planning to move to Israel in the near future” should be taken with several kilos of salt. Kids say that when they’re here. They like to think it’s true. Then they go home.

In a second post, explaining himself, Max explained that he’d been in Israel for a month. He describes his interviewees as “the college-educated sons and daughters of middle and upper class American Jews,” and then slides into describing the racism among Israelis he has found during his month in Israel. Well, OK, those are two good topics. I’m disgusted by racism when found among  American Jews, and likewise by racism among Israeli Jews. But if you want to find the racists in the latter group, interview Israelis. And if you interview Americans, write an intro about American Jewry. As currently framed, the story is best read as an argument for the old media, in which gravelly voiced editors checked young pups’ work before it went on the air or on dead trees.

That said, more professional journalists have gathered the evidence of racism – as ideology, not drunken outbursts – and done a better job of giving context.

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Scribbled on Other Walls

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Gershom Gorenberg

  • So Bibi has learned from Obama – that you can get a lot of attention with a speech at a university campus. Of course, Obama dared speak at Cairo University. Netanyahu is going to Israel’s most conservative campus, his home turf, on Sunday.

    • Just to make clear why Bibi shouldn’t try the “natural growth” argument again to justify continued settlement building, the lovely folks at Foreign Policy asked me to explain the myths built into this scam. For example:

    Since we’re negotiating, building doesn’t matter: Most previous U.S. administrations have avoided confrontation over settlements if peace talks were in progress. Obama is right to avoid this mistake, because construction is aimed at preempting the negotiations.

    Unintentionally, [Settlement Council Director-General Pinchas] Wallerstein made the point clear in his radio interview. There are already 300,000 Israelis living in the West Bank, he noted. (The figure doesn’t include the Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem.) If we really make peace, he said, it won’t matter if the number has risen to 325,000. A few seconds later, he recalled the trauma to Israeli society caused by evacuating 9,000 settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005.

    The classic definition of chutzpah is murdering your parents and begging for the mercy of the court because you’re an orphan. Adding thousands of settlers to existing communities so that later you can claim that evacuating them would be too great a trauma could be another definition…

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“On the Other Hand…”

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Gershom Gorenberg

Some commenters on my post about Obama’s Cairo speech have raised the question: Should Obama have based Israel’s existence on the Holocaust? The point is worthwhile. Zionism began before the Holocaust, as a national movement aimed at political independence.  With its ritual of dragging every foreign dignitary to Yad Vashem, the Israeli government itself has created the false picture of Israel as a response to the death of European Jewry. Arguably, Obama shouldn’t have fallen for this historical distortion.

Nonetheless, there was clearly value in a speech to the Muslim world rejecting Holocaust denial.

The other objection some Jews have made to the speech is that in the next breath, Obama said, “On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people – Muslims and Christians – have suffered in pursuit of a homeland…” The critics claim that in doing so, he “equated” the suffering, as if the pain of Jews and the pain of Palestinians had been placed on old-fashioned scales and the scales balanced.

The simple response is that the phrase does not imply equivalence. It states that each side has to recognize the other’s history and political claim to independence. But there’s more to it than that, as my friend Shaul Magid has explained eloquently in a post at Religion Dispatches. Here are some excerpts, but I strongly recommend reading the full post:

…One of the ways the Holocaust is deployed by some Jews is as a sign of their exceptionalism. This is not always conscious and often, when conscious, not overt. It is based, in part, on the Holocaust. There is ongoing debate among scholars whether the Holocaust was an unprecedented event in Jewish or human history. Stemming from Emil Fackenheim’s book God’s Presence in History (1970), the claim went that the Holocaust was described as an expression of human evil that is different in kind from any previous event of Jewish suffering. Fackenheim intended this as a theological claim, arguing that a radically different event required an equally radical theological response acknowledging the need for a paradigm shift in Jewish life and thought. Now that we can only hear “the voice of Sinai through the voice of Auschwitz,” everything had to be different…

Such research, correct or mistaken, cultivates the attitude among some Jews that they have suffered in ways categorically different than other peoples, and that their claim to a homeland is exceptional…

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