Politics and Policy – Page 20

The June 4 Lines

June 5, 2009June 5, 2009 by Gershom Gorenberg

Barack Obama likes to change what history means, and that’s a very good thing.

Today, for instance, marks 42 years since the Six-Day War began. Ever since then, the term “June 4 lines” has referred to the on-the-ground border between Israel and its Arab neighbors on the eve of the war – not the lines marked on maps, but the lines marked by forward military positions. On the Syrian front, for instance, the actual positions lined up with neither the pre-1948 international border between Palestine and Syria, nor with the 1949 armistice agreements. The small distances on the ground make for big problems in peace negotiations.

As of yesterday, however, June 4 means something entirely different. It now refers to the day on which Barack Obama chose to speak in Cairo. “June 4 lines” henceforth mean the line of thinking that the president laid out for reconciliation between the U.S. and the Muslim world, and along the way, between Israel and the Palestinians.

His message to us was very, very basic Obama: First, I acknowledge your history. Second, it’s time each of you recognize the other’s side history, that you stop thinking that somehow by admitting the other’s side suffering you’ll erase your own. And now that you’ve acknowledged history, stop holding on to it as if electricity were running through it, as if your hand can’t let go. Move forward. Turn history into history – the text explaining how we got here – and stop treating it as an ever-repeating present. This is what he told Americans about race when he was campaigning for president. Now he’s telling it to us and our neighbors:

Unnatural Growth

June 4, 2009 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

My new piece at The American Prospect is part II of the explanation of how Netanyahu would like to sell continued settlement growth to Barack Obama. Part I is below. Despite Bibi’s rep as a salesman, Obama isn’t buying, as he made clear today in Cairo.

It’s Benjamin Netanyahu’s fault. Because of his insistence on allowing for “natural growth” of West Bank settlements, I decided to go real-estate shopping. I called Amana, the settlement-building organization, and said I was interested in homes in Binyamin, the name used by settlers and Israeli officialdom for the piece of the West Bank directly north of Jerusalem.

The sales rep was so helpful I could hear her smile. At Shilo, a 30-year-old settlement north of Ramallah, construction has recently begun on a new development. For about $160,000, she said, I could get a 1,200-square-foot-house. To American ears, that sounds small, but for a Jerusalem apartment-dweller, it would be a step up. Besides, that’s a starter home; I could add a second floor now or later, she said.

At Eli, just up the road from Shilo,, she offered homes in the center of the settlement, and in outlying “neighborhoods.” In Hayovel, for instance, she had a house for $115,000, with a completed first floor and the outer shell for the second floor. She didn’t mention that the “neighborhood” of Hayovel is an illegal outpost, built partly on private Palestinian land. She offered me a similar house at a settlement called Ma’aleh Mikhmash. I thanked her, and said I’d talk to my wife.

Bibi Just Wants To Build

June 4, 2009 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

So Bibi has taken down some outposts. My new piece at the Forward explains why no one – least of all Barack Obama – should be impressed. I’ll have more up soon on Netanyahu’s efforts to fool Obama.

The show goes on. As I write, a radio newscaster is repeating an item about the evacuation of an illegal settlement outpost in the West Bank: At Nahalat Yosef, near Nablus, the army demolished two makeshift mobile homes and removed a third, thereby erasing the outpost. Settler leaders promised to rebuild it. Judging from past experience, the promise will be kept.

The show started after Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington. Police razed several shacks comprising Maoz Esther, northeast of Ramallah. It was a grand demonstration that Netanyahu was acting against the 100-plus illegal outposts – small settlements established since the mid-1990s without government approval but with well-documented help from government agencies. Settlement activists immediately began rebuilding Maoz Esther. Like Nahalat Yosef and several other outposts removed with fanfare in recent days, Maoz Esther is among the least substantial of the outposts. Larger outposts haven’t been touched.

The outpost campaign is pure theater. The intended audience is Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and George Mitchell. President Obama has made it utterly clear that he expects Netanyahu to fulfill Israel’s obligations under the 2003 road map for peace and the 2001 Mitchell Report: Remove outposts, stop all construction in other settlements. Netanyahu would like to convince Obama that he’s making a good-faith effort to evacuate the outposts and that the president should therefore let him continue building new homes in other settlements. This kind of con might work on a legacy student with a C average named George. To Netanyahu’s dismay, Barack Obama isn’t George.

Shame on You, Zevulun Orlev

May 27, 2009 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

Zevulun Orlev, I used to think, was the last nearly respectable man in the National Religious Party, or as it’s now renamed, Habayit Hayehudi. Like the rest of the party, he defended permanent Israeli rule over the Whole Land of Israel, without seeming to notice that it meant an apartheid system in the occupied territories. But that didn’t seem to be where his heart was. It was reflex, or lack of imagination. He worked across the aisle with Knesset members on the left for social legislation. He wanted the party to have a wider platform than ultra-nationalism.

So I was wrong, or Zevulun finally got tired of the dissonance between moderation and his party. He’s the author of a bill that would make it a criminal offense to call publicly “to negate Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state, where the content of such publication would have a reasonable possibility of causing an act of hatred, disdain or disloyalty.” Offenders could be punished by a year in prison. Today, the bill passed its first hurdle, when the Knesset voted 47-34 to send it to committee.

Zevulun, you must have studied Talmud. You must understand that some arguments contain their own refutation. According to the bill you authored, you and 46 other Knesset members could surely be charged with the criminal offense of denying both the democratic and Jewish nature of the state, most certainly arousing hatred, disdain and disloyalty. What could possibly be more undemocratic and more utterly, insanely un-Jewish than banning disagreement? What could cause greater disdain for the state?

FAQ: Amalek, Goldberg, Netanyahu and Iran

May 24, 2009May 24, 2009 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

When Bibi Netanyahu thinks about Iran with nukes, does he “think Amalek”? And if so what does that mean? You ask, we provide answers.

Does Bibi think Iran is Amalek? Jeffrey Goldberg set up this discussion last week in a New York Times op-ed. The key sentence is:

I recently asked one of his advisers to gauge for me the depth of Mr. Netanyahu’s anxiety about Iran. His answer: “Think Amalek.”

Please note: That’s not a quote from Bibi, it’s a quote from the adviser taking measure of Bibi. It could be that the prime minister would use the word “Amalek,” the mythical enemy of the Jewish people. But I doubt it. It’s a term from a religious lexicon, more commonly used among religious Jews or those shaped by a religious education. Netanyahu sometimes tries religious metaphors before religious audiences, but without a lot of skill or conviction. It’s more likely that one of Netanyahu’s advisers used his own language for the boss’s state of mind.

Bibi tends to take his metaphors from history. Never mind his ability to warp history, that’s what the historian’s son likes to study and cite. As in this well-known example, as reported in Ha’aretz after Netanyahu spoke in Los Angeles in November 2006:

Potemkin Outpost Follies

May 22, 2009 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

Yesterday the army evacuated the illegal outpost of Maoz Esther, as various newspapers reported. Orders for demolishing an outpost have to come directly from the defense minister, Ehud Barak. The bulldozers appeared a few hours after press reports that Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu had agreed to dismantle illegal settlement outposts, and even less time after Barak met settlement leaders and insisted that if outposts weren’t taken down voluntarily, they’d be removed by force, because “there’s no compromise on enforcing the law.”

Oh, and of course this is all after Netanyahu’s uncomfortable conversations in Washington, where Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and everyone else including the waiters at his kosher dinner at Blair House told him that settlement building had to stop and outposts had to be taken down.

So Bibi comes back to Israel, declares in that proud strong Bibi voice that he told Obama that Jerusalem will never be divided (hint to outside observers: that’s the voice Bibi uses after an uncomfortable experience of his own weakness). And then, just to show that he does take U.S. opinion into account, he sends a bulldozer to a Potemkin outpost. (Barak, not wanting to look like a wimp himself, says, “The evacuation is not related to U.S. pressure but to the obligations of Israeli society to itself.”)

Ezra Moves. Alas. Hurray.

May 22, 2009 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

Ezra Klein and his blog have gone away, gone away, from The American Prospect site. Alas.

However, he has landed at the Washington Post, which is apparently betting that the Net will live on and make profits when print is dead. To make the site attractive, the WP is willing to have Ezra’s solidly progressive, and very smart, blog on domestic affairs. So you can read George Will deny global warming (next up for denial: evolution, or perhaps the role of the HIV virus in AIDS). Or you can read Ezra. Read Ezra!

I particularly like this item, on why junk food whipped up in factories costs more than healthy vegetables grown on farms. Ezra suggests that taxing soda and ending subsidies to grow corn for corn syrup isn’t enough; the government should subsidize fresh vegetables. Cheaper vegetables equal healthier people, which also mean lower health costs, saving the government money.

At Maskiot, the Bulldozers Speak

May 19, 2009 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

You could call the timing mere coincidence. Yesterday Bibi met Barack Obama, who told him to stop settlement building:

Now, Israel is going to have to take some difficult steps as well, and I shared with the Prime Minister the fact that under the roadmap and under Annapolis that there’s a clear understanding that we have to make progress on settlements. Settlements have to be stopped in order for us to move forward. That’s a difficult issue. I recognize that, but it’s an important one and it has to be addressed.

And the day before, as if to answer Obama in advance, contractors visited Maskiot in order to prepare bids to start construction of a settlement at the site. (A Ma’ariv report in Hebrew is here.) The Jordan Rift Regional Council – the local government for Israeli settlements along the Jordan River in the West Bank – issued the call for bids last week.

Let’s say this is just business as usual; no one was even paying attention to Obama.

A Hebrew Lesson For Obama: Hu lahitz

May 18, 2009 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

As I write, Barack Obama and Bibi Netanyahu are still meeting in Washington. The meeting has been extended for half an hour, Ha’aretz reports. Until the protocol is released in 25 years or so, we can guess that Bibi is lecturing to Barack about the Spanish Inquisition, Masada, the Holocaust and Iran, and Barack is too polite to shush him. In the meantime, my curtain-raiser is up at the American Prospect.

Hebrew is a compressed language. Much disdain can be packed in a few syllables. To say of the prime minister, “He’s someone who cracks under pressure,” takes just two words: hu lahitz.

When a television mike caught the Israeli Finance Ministry’s budget chief using those words last week, the budget chief denied he was talking about Benjamin Netanyahu. The denial was hard to take seriously.

Interview with the Science Minister

May 17, 2009 by Haim Watzman

Haim Watzman

My interview with Israel’s new minister of science, Daniel Hershkowitz, now up on the Nature website, offers food for thought on two fronts, one a matter of policy implementation and one a matter of policy principle.

If you have trouble understanding the arcane details of how the state of Israel funds basic research (why do we have a science ministry when the lion’s share of research funds are handled by another agency?), then you’re not alone. A high-level source in the ranks of science policy makers told me in frustration a few days before my talk with the minister that he doesn’t have reliable data on how Israeli scientists fund their work—there is a welter of agencies and funding sources and no one who tracks them all. How can the nation formulate a rational basic research program without accurate information?

As Hershkowitz notes, free, untrammeled, and well-funded basic research is vital to the development of Israel’s human resources. The country is a scientific powerhouse compared to its size, but it’s slipping quickly, largely because scientists have difficulty finding money to pay the costs of their work. Many Israeli scientists now do most of their actual research on holidays and sabbaticals overseas, where grants are easier to obtain and laboratories better-equipped.

Bibi’s Taxes–Value Subtracted

May 14, 2009 by Haim Watzman

Haim Watzman

Gershom and I had an argument back in 1996, when Binyamin Netanyahu was elected to his first term as prime minister. Gershom claimed that Bibi was, at core, a radical right-wing ideologue, whereas I argued that he was an opportunistic hack.

In that term, Bibi went on to prove himself a devout Republican-style capitalist on the economic front and a territorial maximalist on the diplomatic front. But, in the wake of the government’s approval of the national budget yesterday, I think I might win the argument this time around. Over the past week, Bibi has swayed, bent, and ended up breaking most of his principles. The result is a budget that is a mishmash. It’s not the tax-cutting, small-government budget he promised, nor is it an Obama-style Keynesian economic recovery budget. It’s the worst of both.

One of its weirdest provisions is the hike of one percent in the value added tax, to 16.5 percent, and the decision to levy the tax, for the first time ever, on fresh produce. No one likes tax hikes, nor do people like filing their tax returns for the year. Luckily, software exists to help people do this and you may even find TurboTax deals online too. If you are running a business, you may want to try professional tax services similar to those from somewhere like Dave Burton, that may be able to provide you with a tax accountant nyc who might be able to help manage or sort the taxes for your business.

With Israel, like the rest of the world, facing recession, national economic policy needs to encourage consumption. Raising this consumption tax does the opposite. Goods and services will cost more, and people will buy less. Economic activity will slow, jobs will be lost, and people will buy even less.

Furthermore, the VAT is a regressive tax. It’s paid by all Israelis, and since the poor and middle class (this includes the authors of the South Jerusalem blog) spend nearly all their income and have little to save, they pay a higher proportion of their income in VAT than do rich people. Imposing it on basic goods like produce makes it even more regressive.

Ghosts of Gaza

May 11, 2009May 11, 2009 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

The questions from the Gaza war don’t go away. They stay in the air, seep into conversation like smoke into a room.

In the course of some reporting I recently spoke with a rabbi at a West Bank settlement. The conversation meandered to the ethics of war. He raised the question of whether, in order “to strike a terrorist who endangers the Jewish nation,” it’s permissible to cause harm to additional people around him.

“In parentheses, I don’t call them ‘innocent,'” he said, referring to people who live, work or go to school near a terrorist. Rather, he said, such people “envelop” the terrorist. The word he used in Hebrew was otef, which means to wrap or package – the hint being that simply by being nearby, non-combatants have voluntarily become human shields.