Politics and Policy

Ponzi’s Victims

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Gershom Gorenberg

A parable that will lead me to the fall of Bernie Madoff:

My first newspaper job was in the old Jerusalem Post, back when the rag was union-owned, left-of-center, and still one-fourth worthy of being called a newspaper. I wanted to work with words and ideas and politics. I also believed – and still do – in the old fifth-grade civics-lesson mission of a free press. I wouldn’t have considered for a moment being a wordsmith for an ad agency, certainly not one hawking cigarettes, no matter how much more money I could have made. The Jerusalem Post ran front page ads. Some were for cigarettes.

So while I considered journalism a calling, worth more than a big paycheck, I too lived off the scraps from the tables of the tobacco shareholders. I didn’t like it. I could tell myself that were I the boss, I wouldn’t have taken those ads, and that if the cancermongers went broke the next day, the paper would still limp along. But I couldn’t get around the fact that I was a vegetarian living off his uncle the butcher.

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Why I’m Going Green

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Haim Watzman For years I have preached against small parties. Whenever my friends get excited by the latest new and fashionable political movement or the latest political star whose ego-trip involves founding and leading his own party, I’ve warned that a vote cast for a small party is both wasted and wanting. Wasted because, in … Read more

Return to Hebron, City of Nightmares and Hope

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Gershom Gorenberg

Abd al-Karim al-Jabari sat yesterday in one of the overstuffed couches that line the sides of his living room in Hebron. He has a square face and a graying mustache, and he spoke quietly, with a hint of a smile, as if apologizing for telling guests his troubles. On the cofee table were bowls of nuts and tiny cups of spiced coffee and plates of baked holiday treats whose names I don’t know.

Jabari’s house is near Kiryat Arba, the settlement that looks down on Hebron, physically and in spirit. He’s put up a wall around his house, with barbed wire at the top. It doesn’t help a lot. Between his house and the gate to Kiryat Arba is the so-called synagogue of Hazon David, a makeshift structure, more tent than building. Hazon David is an illegal outpost, which is to say illegal even in the eyes of the Israeli government. The house of prayer was built to seize land, to extend settlements more quickly and aggressively than the government would. It’s the rare outpost that has been taken down by the army and police – 32 times, I’m told. And put back up 32 times. And still there.

“Someone who’s religious, he brings his children to the syngagoue ,” said Abd al-Karim. He corrected himself, perhaps out of respect for those of his guests wearing kipot. “It’s not a synagogue. They say it’s a synagogue… He prays inside, and he tells his children to go throw stones.”

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Bibi as Feiglin’s Figurehead

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I ran into Moshe Feiglin at the end of the 1990s when I was covering the Temple Convention, an annual get together of groups on the far fringe of the Israeli right that want to build the Third Temple now, if not yesterday. In the lobby, Feiglin was passing out bumper stickers for his organization, Jewish Leadership. I asked whether the current leaders of Israel weren’t Jewish. He answered with a smirk that suggested, “You know better than that.”

Soon after that, Feiglin and company decided on a new strategy for their radical group: They would seek to take over the Likud. It was a crafty decision. A well-organized group acting as a block can have an outsized influence in internal party elections. Feiglin encouraged his supporters to become Likud members. (There was no need for them to vote for the party of the mainstream right in general elections.)

Feiglin is patient.

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Is Birthright for Bibi?

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Haim Watzman

Is Birthright a wonderful program that encourages Jewish identity and commitment to Israel, or is it a propaganda machine aimed at promoting a particular right-wing nationalist vision of the Jewish state?

The latter, says Josh Nathan-Kazis in his op-ed How Your Free Trip Will Help Israeli Hard Liner Benjamin Netanyahu Become Prime Minister in the Jewish student magazine New Voices . Nathan-Kazis focuses on Birthright’s dependence on the largesse of right-wing casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson. According to Nathan-Kazis, Adelson has donated $67 million to Birthright and supplied a third of its operating budget for 2008. Adelson also funds the right-wing, pro-Likud newspaper Yisrael HaYom and is a major backer of the Jerusalem-based neo-con think-tank, The Shalem Center

Nathan-Kazis is right that wherever money is involved, we should suspect political influence. And, in fact, some young American Jews who sign up for a Birthright trips find themselves being handed a largely Greater Israel, neo-con bill of goods on their trips. But certainly not all, and evidently not because of Adelson’s money.

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Requiem for Sini, and for the Labor Party

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Gershom Gorenberg My new piece on the Labor Party is up at The American Prospect: Sini died. My son spotted the square black-bordered obituary notice deep inside the newspaper. It was placed by Sini’s kibbutz. It referred to him as “Sini,” his nickname — “Chinaman” in loose translation, politically incorrect today but accepted when he … Read more

Bibi’s Con: “Economic Peace”

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My new article on Benjamin Netanyahu’s new platform of “economic peace” appears in Ha’aretz today. For those who read from right to left, the original Hebrew is here. The English translation is here. A taste:

When Benjamin Netanyahu speaks about “economic peace,” his new, brilliant diplomatic platform, which will postpone any diplomatic moves far into the unforeseeable future, I see his face shrink, his chin sharpen, a patch cover his eye. Moshe Dayan is speaking, just as he spoke in a cabinet meeting 40 years ago, in early December 1968.

The Eshkol government met then to discuss Dayan’s proposal for a policy on the occupied territories. Dayan’s plan had three pillars: large-scale settlement on the West Bank mountain ridge, permanent Israeli rule of the territories without Israeli citizenship for the Arab residents, and economic integration of the territories with Israel. Arabs would work in Israel, Hebron would get its electricity from the Israeli grid, and Israel would raise the standard of living of the residents of the territories. As a result, Dayan argued, they would become dependent on Israel, maybe even grateful to it.

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Don’t Be Greedy. There’s Enough Fault for Everyone.

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Long ago and far away, when I was a college student in Santa Cruz, I wrote a paper on the reasons for the Palestinian exodus of 1948. Benny Morris hadn’t yet written his multiple studies of the subject. But buried in the UC Berkeley library’s vast stacks was plenty of material, including Rony Gabbay’s 1959 work “A Political Study of the Arab-Jewish Conflict: The Arab Refugee Problem,” which foreshadowed much of what Morris found, and which taught me to toss many myths, Arab and Israeli, on the ash-heap of history.

An friend who’d traded her high school liberalism for doctrinaire sophomore leftism asked to read my paper. She got upset that I had criticism of the Arabs as well as of the Jews. She told me my paper was racist.

I said, “J—ie, do you think you can write history so that one side is right and one side is wrong?”

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Recycled: A Note to Hillary on Jerusalem Disunited

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Last year I wrote an open letter to Hillary Clinton, then frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, on the mistake she was making by promising support for “united Jerusalem” – or rather the mistake in believing there was any such thing as undivided Jerusalem.

A very long year has passed, and Barack Obama has just chosen Hillary as his secretary of state. Freed of the need to win reelection as senator, burdened with responsibility for policy toward Israel and the Palestinians, she has the opportunity and obligation to update her understanding of our riven city. So here’s some reading material for her (the start below, the rest at The American Prospect). Just trade “candidate” and “president” for “secretary” and it reads fine.

Dear Hillary,

A colleague alerted me to your recent position paper on Israel, with your promise of support for an “undivided Jerusalem.” I appreciate the warm feelings, but I admit I was confused by your description of my city. Since you are a careful, wonky candidate, I figured you must have details at your disposal. So this morning I called a Palestinian cabby friend, and together we went looking for the “undivided Jerusalem.”

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An Arab Prime Minister for Israel?

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Haim Watzman

In the wake of Barack Obama’s victory in the U.S., there have been a spate of op-eds and blog posts on whether an Arab could ever become prime minister of Israel. Some present it as a challenge to Zionism, at least as conventionally conceived, while others try to explain why such a thing could not, should not ever be. The latest installment is Daniel Gordis’s piece in The Jerusalem Post.

Gordis is correct in saying that an Arab majority in Israel would be the end of Israel as a Jewish state, and that an Arab majority in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, would reflect that loss of majority status. Zionism requires a Jewish majority–and not just a bare majority but a large one–for the state to be Jewish. This is the reasoning that means the two-state solution is the only way of preserving Israel as a Jewish state.

But while the election of an Arab to head Israel’s government, while improbable, is certainly not impossible,

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The Delay-Sayers’ Mistake

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The new conventional wisdom among Middle East hands with lots of State Department postings on their c.v. is that trying to reach a two-state agreement is hopeless. Can’t be done, don’t try. Wait for a better time. Aaron David Miller laid out the case recently in the Jerusalem Post:

It’s not that there are metaphysical or magical reasons why these core issues can’t be resolved; it’s that the political will is lacking among leaders to reach an agreement and that the current situation on the ground between Israelis and Palestinians makes it impossible for them to do to. That everyone knows what the ultimate solution will look like (an intriguing notion that is supposed to make people feel better) is irrelevant if the circumstances for an agreement don’t exist.

The Palestinians are too divided, and “there is serious dysfunction at the political level in Israel as well.” Therefore, Miller recommends to Barack Obama to “manage” the conflict:

…support an Israeli-Hamas ceasefire, train PA security forces, pour economic aid into the West Bank and Gaza, even nurture Israeli-Palestinian negotiations on the big issues, but don’t think you can solve it; you can’t.

I have great respect for Miller’s experience and expertise, and his argument is laid out as cogently as ever. But I have to dissent respectfully for three reasons:

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House of Ill-Dispute

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There have been some pleasant surprises this week. For instance, the Supreme Court ordered the state to explain why it isn’t removing the outpost of Migron, built on other people’s land. The state – meaning Defense Minister Ehud Barak, for practical purposes – wanted an indefinite delay, based on a supposed agreement with the Council … Read more