Politics and Policy

Bulldozing Bill’s Borders

by

Gershom Gorenberg

It was a busy Friday. Besides my New York Review of Books essay on 1948, my new piece also went up at The American Prospect. This is an on-the-ground report on construction projects in Jerusalem designed to erase the Clinton parameters for peace:

So far, the bulldozers have carved a large hole in the chalky hillside for foundations. On the street, a developer’s sign shows a picture of three multifloor apartment buildings that will rise on the site. The name of the developer, Bemuna, is written in Hebrew and means “in faith.”

A lot of work will have to be completed on this site before we start to see any glimpses of a building. The construction company will have to make sure that they have enough building site security in the meantime as there could be a lot of expensive equipment lying around, and anything that goes missing could cause some disruption to the entire process. And this would not benefit the residents in the area. Construction sites also need to be sure that health and safety are as tight as possible too. This will prevent any accidents or injuries from occurring. Construction sites should really look to get some health and safety signage put up to make sure workers are aware of any potential hazards. This should ensure work can be completed quickly as fewer accidents should occur. Construction sites should also be using functioning equipment to help workers do their jobs. For example, a lot of construction workers will have things to do on higher points of the building. To make sure they can all reach these points on the building, some construction sites use mobile platforms from Platforms and Ladders to help workers get closer to the area they need to complete work in. Perhaps more construction sites should consider this. Additionally, with safety signs and workers all wearing safety equipment, there should be an even lower chance of accidents occurring. Each construction worker will need to have different health and safety equipment, so it’s vital that construction sites make sure their workers are wearing the appropriate gear. For example, any on-site welders will need to make sure they’re wearing welding safety gloves to keep their hands safe from the sparks and power tools that they’ll be using. Health and safety equipment is created for a reason, so it’s important that construction site workers do use this equipment.

The company’s Web site says the project is located in East Talpiot — one of the Jewish neighborhoods that Israel built after it annexed East Jerusalem in 1967. That’s a stretch, as I found when I visited the building site this week. The hole in the ground is surrounded by the houses of Arab a-Sawahra, a Palestinian neighborhood that borders East Talpiot. Once completed, the buildings will be three emphatic statements of Jewish presence in the neighborhood, three declarations that a political border can’t be easily drawn between Arab and Jewish areas of the city.

Read more

The War to Begin All Wars

by

Gershom Gorenberg

My new essay on 1948, Benny Morris, and how the presents shapes our view of the past is up at The New York Review of Books:

In 1963 the young Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua published Facing the Forests, a novella destined to become a classic of Hebrew literature. It is a nightmarish story, the kind of dread-filled dream from which you awake shuddering, about a student who takes a job as a watchman in one of Israel’s newly planted forests. His task is to watch day and night for fire; his only company is an old Arab whose tongue was cut out in “the war”—meaning Israel’s war of independence in 1948—and the Arab’s young daughter. The forest, as the watchman learns, hides the ruins of an Arab village, the remains of an erased past: once other people lived here, members of a different nation. Their departure has to do with vague, unrecorded violence.

At the end, the mute Arab ignites the forest. The watchman-scholar does not participate in the arson, but welcomes the climax of fire and what it reveals: “And there, from within the smoke, from within the mist, the little village rises before him, reborn in its most basic outlines, as in an abstract painting, like every submerged past.” As a watchman, the Israeli has failed. Perhaps as a scholar he has succeeded: he has uncovered history, as if in a hidden archive.

Read more

Deduct the Kids: The Israeli Supreme Court Gives The Nod to Child Care

by

Haim Watzman

When I read in Friday’s newspaper that a Israel’s Supreme Court had ruled that the country’s tax authorities must allow tax deductions for child care costs, my feelings were mixed. As the holder of a B.A. in public policy sciences, I winced. Wasn’t the Court inserting itself into a policy detail better left to planners in the executive branch and to the legislature? As the husband of a long-time child care provider, I was gratified. The highest court in the land had recognized the essential nature of Ilana’s work.

In today’s Ha’aretz, the newspaper’s legal commentator, Ze’ev Segal, offers a cogent explanation and defense of the Supreme Court decision. According to Segal,

The ruling admittedly overturned a well-entrenched norm that had been accepted by the tax authorities for years—namely, that such expenses should not be recognized for tax purposes. But a careful reading shows that the court was not seeking to assume the role of the “great reformer” who overturns the established order in cases where the legislator has refrained from taking action.

Read more

Missing Mahatma: Last Thoughts (for Now)

by

Gershom Gorenberg

Once, while writing an article on Abu Nidal, leader of the most extreme Palestinian faction in the 1970s and 80s, I went to speak to one of my favorite wise men, political scientist  Yaron Ezrahi.  I was asking about Franz Fanon, the revolutionary theorist of the Algerian revolution, whose views on the necessity of armed struggle were adopted by the early PLO.  I was interested in Fanon because Abu Nidal was the most unbending of believers in Fanon’s theory of violence.

Yaron immediately compared Fanon’s approach in The Wretched of the Earth to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The difference between the two philosophies of liberation, Yaron said, is this. For King,  liberating blacks in America also meant liberating their white oppressors. For Fanon, eliminating mastery had to be physical:  The masters had to be eradicated.  Fanon could only imagine liberating one side. King believed in liberating both.

Read more

Mr. Oren Goes to Washington, Maybe

by

Gershom Gorenberg

Michael Oren is an old friend of mine. I respect his scholarship (his Six Days of War is the best history of June 1967). He wrote an endorsement for my last book, The Accidental Empire. And when we (rarely) discuss politics, the differences are also respectful. So a I am not an unbiased judge of the reports on his possible appointment as the U.S. ambassador to Washington.

I am however, an extremely bemused judge. Depending on which Israeli paper you’ve picked up, Mike is either too conservative for the job, or too dovish.  I hope Mike is getting a good laugh out of all this.

Read more

Axis of Sorrow

by

Gershom Gorenberg

In my new article at The American Prospect, I argue that choosing either the Israeli or the Palestinian version of history as correct is no way to make peace.

Spring is national trauma season in the land between the River and the Sea. The wildflowers that blossom briefly after the Mediterranean winter wilt, and Jews and Palestinians relive their agonizing memories, symbiotically, backs turned to each other.

Their memories negate each other. Nonetheless, they are tellings of the same story. Because there is now an American administration interested in diplomacy, because the public debate in America about Israel and Palestine may be opening up, this small truth bears mention: Deciding that one side’s telling is valid, and the other’s is false, is not an act of peacemaking. The trauma itself is a strategic fact, as important as topography, borders, and water.

Read more

Bibi II: Same Character Flaws, Same Plot Line

by

Gershom Gorenberg

My new piece about Netanyahu’s second term as a remake of the first is up at The American Prospect:

Since my wife began writing screenplays, I get a lesson in the mechanics of a film each time we watch one together. First lesson: Pay rapt attention to the opening moments. Character is being revealed; the entire plot is being laid out, though we may not yet understand how. Take the monologue at the start of Michael Clayton, where in a manic voiceover, a lawyer insists he’s not insane but rather, that his firm’s work has left him covered in excrement from which he cannot cleanse himself. Yes, we will learn, this madman is the sole compass of sanity in a world where the law is utterly befouled. It’s all there, the whole story.

I suggest watching the opening scenes of Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to power — call it Bibi II — in the same way. It’s not just that the Netanyahu cabinet…  is the largest in Israel’s history or that key positions are held by politicians manifestly unqualified to deal with the crises that Israel faces. What’s revealing is how Netanyahu constructed his coalition, in more of a panic than a process.

Read more

The Missing Mahatma: Further thoughts

by

Gershom Gorenberg

My article on why there hasn’t been a Palestinian Gandhi has stirred a  wave of commentary. Jim Sleeper at TPM Cafe wrote to me to ask why I’d published it in the Weekly Standard (If you care, my answer is in his post). Svend White, an American Muslim, offered some thoughtful criticism,  commenting here and on his own blog (which I recommend).  And then of course there are the rants.

Svend says,

Fair enough, but kindly direct me to all the non-Palestinian Gandhis out there today…

As much as I hope and pray for a peaceful resolution to the conflict, I don’t think it’s a big mystery as to why a Palestinian Gandhi has yet to emerge. In how many other of the world’s conflicts have we seen such an ethic take root? Gandhi and MLK were extraordinary leaders whose charisma and vision could change the rules of the game.

I agree that leaders who can lead a nonviolent liberation struggle are rare.  Nonetheless, such leaders have existed.  The standard isn’t superhuman. Not only Israelis and outsiders, but some Palestinians have raised the argument that adopting a nonviolent strategy could be successful where other Palestinian strategies have failed. 

Read more

From Nature: Science Journalism Dies, No Water Wars

by

Haim Watzman

It’s the end of the day and I don’t have time to write what I planned, but I’d like to flag two worthwhile articles in the March 19 issue of Nature (a publication I’ve written for in the past).

As a sometime writer about science, I was discouraged to read in Science journalism: Supplanting the old media?, by Geoff Brumfiel, that-big surprise-the daily press is drastically cutting its science coverage and firing its science beat reporters. According to Brumfiel, science blogs, such as agmarketnetwork.net, are now providing interested readers with some of the reportage they used to receive in the general press and in popular science magazines, but of course readers who don’t actively look for science coverage but who used to glance at an occasional science headline that caught their eye are now left with no coverage at all-further distancing the general public from understanding science.

But so far there’s no alternative for another vital role filled by the science beat reporter:

Others worry about the less questioning approach that comes with a stress on communication rather than journalism. “Science is like any other enterprise,” says Blum. “It’s human, it’s flawed, it’s filled with politics and ego. You need journalists, theoretically, to check those kinds of things,” she says. In the United States, at least, the newspaper, the traditional home of investigations and critical reporting, is on its way out, says Hotz. “What we need is to invent new sources of independently certified fact.”

Indeed.

The second is a thought-provoking essay by Wendy Barnaby, Do Nations Go To War Over Water? It should be of special interest to SoJo’s readers, given the role that water plays in the Israel-Arab conflict. I don’t know if she’s right, but she certainly offers an argument I haven’t heard before. (Unfortunately, the entire article seems to be available to subscribers, so I’ll quote liberally here.)

Read more

The Missing Mahatma: Searching for a Palestinian Gandhi

by

Gershom Gorenberg

If Palestinians adopted a Gandhian nonviolent strategy, could they reshape the entire conflict with Israel and finally realize a two-state solution? If so, why haven’t they done so? Or perhaps they really have at certain times and places, and Israel has broken that form of resistance as well?

Those questions have been asked for years, in variations of tone and wording, by moderate Israelis and Palestinians and by concerned outsiders. A while back, a colleague suggested that I investigate the issue in depth.

The question lead to a intellectual journey. My essay on that journey of exploration has at last appeared.

Here’s the opening:

Read more

The Soldiers’ Testimonies–Another View

by

Haim Watzman

Have Israeli soldiers’ values-and the moral choices they make in combat-changed? Do the soldiers’ testimonies from the Rabin pre-military academy show that the IDF and its soldiers have adopted values different from those of earlier decades and earlier wars?

I’m not convinced. They might, and the charges made in the testimonies certainly need to be thoroughly investigated (impartially, not by the brigade commander, who says he spoke to the soldiers involved and denied that the incidents took place). But I’m dubious about jumping to conclusions, as I think Gershom did in his post yesterday.

Gershom argues that Israel’s strategy in the Gaza war-which involved the use of intense fire power in densely-populated civilian areas, so as to ensure a minimum of Israeli casualties-gave soldiers the message that human life on the other side was of no value. Rules of engagement were eased up and soldiers were given the message that they should have few hesitations about killing ostensible non-combatants.

It’s certainly possible that the grand strategy made an impact on the actions of individual soldiers. But we don’t, at present, have any empirical evidence of that.

Read more

The Soldiers’ Testimony and Failure of Cast Lead

by

Gershom Gorenberg

My take on the soldiers’ testimony from Gaza comes in my new article at the American Prospect:

The soldier had served as a squad commander during the Israeli army’s invasion of the Gaza Strip last winter. His unit was assigned to advance into Gaza City. His initial orders, he recalled, were that after an armored vehicle broke down the door of a building, his men were to enter, spraying fire: “I call it murdering … going up one floor after another, and anyone we spot, shoot him.” The word from his higher-ups was that anyone who hadn’t fled the neighborhood could be assumed to be a terrorist. The orders fit a pattern: In Gaza, “as you know, they used lots and lots of force and killed lots and lots of people on the way so that we wouldn’t be hurt,” he said.

Before the operation began, he recounted, the orders were softened. The building’s occupants would be given five minutes to leave and be searched on their way out. When he told his squad, some soldiers objected.

Read more