Politics and Policy

Zionists of the World Unite! (Around Me)

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Haim Watzman

Beware of Israelis who call for unity. More often than not, what they really mean is “everyone should unite around my political program.”

In yesterday’s Ha’aretz, Moshe Arens calls for unity with an invocation of American revolutionary rhetoric (”Divided We Fall”). Yet his bottom line is that unity means acceding to the agenda of Israel’s right-wing religious extremists.

Arens is a right-winger I like to disagree with. He writes well, argues cogently and logically, and sincerely believes both in Zionism and democracy. Like me, he grew up in the United States and absorbed the principles of liberal democracy. While he’s a territorial maximalist and a hawk to end all hawks, not to mention a talented political maneuverer in his Byzantine Likud party, he has devoted much effort to promoting minority rights in Israel, in particular serving an advocate for the Bedouin.

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Sorry, Nir Barkat Will Not Save Jerusalem

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A lot of my friends in Jerusalem think that mayoral candidate Nir Barkat will save the city. There are generally two arguments they offer: First, he’s a former high-tech entrepreneur, and the business world produces better managers than the political arena does.

Second, and much more important, Barkat is secular. Among secular, traditional, and modern-leaning Orthodox Jewish residents of Jerusalem there’s a backlash against ultra-Orthodox hegemony at City Hall. There’s a pervading sense that ultra-Orthodox rule is responsible for the city’s economic decline, and for the exodus of young people. The conventional wisdom is that the ultra-Orthodox are on the demographic march toward turning Jerusalem into a giant neo-shtetl, big sister to Bnei Brak. Barkat is supposed to be the solution.

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Khaled Hosseini on the Republicans’ Anti-Muslim Incitement

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The author of The Kite Runner has the courage and confidence to raise a necessary issue: The anti-Muslim incitement that has become part of the Republican campaign against Obama:

Twice last week alone, speakers at McCain-Palin rallies have referred to Sen. Barack Obama, with unveiled scorn, as Barack Hussein Obama.

…Never mind that such jeers are deeply offensive to millions of peaceful, law-abiding Muslim Americans who must bear the unveiled charge, made by some supporters of Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin, that Obama’s middle name makes him someone to distrust — and, judging by some of the crowd reactions at these rallies, someone to persecute or even kill. As a secular Muslim, I too was offended. Obama’s middle name differs from my last name by only two vowels. Does the McCain-Palin campaign view me as a pariah too? Do McCain and Palin think there’s something wrong with my name?

To the extent that they are the product of cynical calculation, the attacks on Obama as Muslim are meant to put him in a double bind:

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Laugh Your Guts Out–Irony on Yom Kippur and Election Day

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Haim Watzman

Penitents are like voters. They face critical choices, ones that will set the course of their lives, and must make them in a situation of uncertainty. Committed voters try to grope through the fog of rhetoric in order to understand the true wills and predilections of the candidates they must choose from; penitents seek to dispel the mystery and ambiguity that cloaks the divine in order to understand what God wants of their lives.

But when I look around me this year, three days before Yom Kippur and a month before the American elections, I have a feeling that a lot of Jewish penitents and American voters are not using an essential tool that they need to make their choices. I mean irony.

Irony? Doesn’t that have something to do with punch lines? Is the choice of the leader of the free world and the acknowledgment and correction of one’s sins a joke?

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Update: Kfar Etzion, Ma’aleh Adumim and the Law

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Gershom Gorenberg

The last week has been rather packed, and not just because of two days of Rosh Hashanah. On the first night of the holiday, while my wife and kids and I were at the synagogue praying, our kitchen caught fire. By the time we got home, the fire crew had been and gone. A cop was standing in the dark, smoke-filled, wet apartment to calm us – and to tell us we’d need to find someplace else to stay. Thank God for my friends and especially for my congregation, Kehillat Yedidya. Generosity has turned this from a crisis to an inconvenience.

In the meantime, though, I’ve been remiss in putting up the links to two new articles.

In the Washington Post, I wrote this article on a recurring pattern: Poorly implemented diplomatic initiatives on Israeli-Arab peace have actually spurred settlement construction. A prime example is Ma’aleh Adumim, born of the failed talks with Jordan in the mid-70s. It was also born in flagrant violation of international law:

The government’s method of acquiring land for the settlement was audacious — and, until now, well hidden. After a tenacious freedom-of-information legal battle, Israeli human rights activist Dror Etkes of the organization Yesh Din recently received data from the Israeli army’s Civil Administration on West Bank land expropriations. In April 1975, Israel expropriated 11 square miles east of Jerusalem “for public use.” In 1977, another square mile was taken.

On his laptop, Etkes showed me an aerial photo of the settlement today, superimposed on a map of the expropriation. Most of the built-up area of Maale Adumim lies inside the land that was confiscated.

This is a prima facie violation of international law. Under the 1907 Hague Convention, an occupying power may expropriate land only for the public use of the occupied population. Taking private West Bank land for Israeli use is therefore barred.

Meanwhile, my article on the 41st anniversary of Kfar Etzion went up at the Ha’aretz site – in Hebrew, and in English translation. As I explain there, the long-standing Israeli consensus on settling at the Etzion Bloc is based on some lazy and dangerous thinking:

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Israelis for Obama – Now, the Movie

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Gershom Gorenberg

I met Avraham Yakin 30 years ago. We were on a tour group together in the Sinai. Everyone in the group but Avraham and his wife Hannah were students. Avraham was much older, an established artist. He’d been in the British army in World War II, and afterward in the Haganah.One night we climbed Jebel Mussa, the supposed Mt. Sinai, to reach the top at dawn. When the students arrived gasping for breath, Avraham was up there with his artist’s pad, sketching mountains and sunrise, serene, quiet, looking with sharp eyes across distances. Later I visited his home, in the Mahaneh Yehudah neighborhood of Jerusalem, next to the open market. He lived in a rambling stone house that had belonged to his family for several generations, the house in which he’d grown up, in which he and Hannah were raising eight kids in a kind of non-stop festival of creativity that made me look forward to being a father. (You want family values? Here are family values for you.)

What a pleasure meeting old friends in the right place. Avraham is in this video of Israelis – prominent and less known – who hope that Barack Obama will be elected president of the United States. To say that Obama would be better for Israel does not require revelation at Sinai, merely the ability to take a clear look back across the last eight years, and a clear look forward. Once again Avraham has that ability. So does ex-Knesset Member Naomi Chazan, one of Israeli’s leading political scientists and feminists. So does Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, former military chief of staff.

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Go to Florida, and Save the World

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To my great sorrow, I no longer have in-laws in Florida. Were they still around, I would not have to convince them to vote for Obama. Sol and Gert would certainly have done that, unless a butterfly ballot got in the way of their failing eyes. That said, were convincing possible and necessary, I would certainly accept Sarah Silverman’s* advice and make the Great Schlep to Miami to explain to the old Jews I love why they have to vote Obama to leave a decent world to the grandchildren they love. And listen, it would be a really long schlep for me, and I really truly, utterly, sincerely dislike Florida. And that’s on the good days.

Sarah Silverman has this video at www.thegreatschlep.com that urges you to go. You can watch it below. I actually don’t find her terribly funny, and I think anyone reading this blog could do a better job of explaining why McCain-Moosehunter is not a ticket a Jew would like to support. But Sarah gets an A for kavannah, the right intentions (despite the usual F for decorum) so I’m putting the video in.


The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.

When my Dad was slipping away last year,

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Military Intelligence – a Contradiction in Terms?

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Maybe there’s some uniquely calm land where military heroes and ex-generals don’t get a head start in politics. But that land is neither Israel or the United States. The only thing consistent about John McCain’s campaign is the claim that he deserves to be president because he was a POW. Closer to where I live, both Shaul Mofaz and Ehud Barak presume that having been the country’s top military commander not only qualifies them to be prime minister, but makes the job theirs by right. A military man, supposedly, not only understands national security but has proven his ability to make decisions under pressure.

For the past week, though, all three have done their best to disabuse of such notions:

  • John McCain finds himself behind in the polls, trying to design policy on economics, which he doesn’t understand, facing a debate for which he is not ready. What does our war hero do? Why, with heroic cool and elan, he panics.

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The One-State Dissolution

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Haim Watzman

“Suicide,” said Shaya. He meant the one-state “solution” to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. More and more Palestinian intellectuals are now advocating a single state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, this after years in which short-sighted Israeli governments pursued policies aimed at making it impossible to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Suicide? But isn’t a unitary state in which Israelis and Palestinians live peacefully and equally under the law the epitome of Western liberal values?

Let me tell you a little bit about Shaya. Like me, he’s a transplanted American. He’s got a long record of left-wing Zionist activism. He works to promote understanding between Jews and Arabs, democratic values in Israeli society, and equality and social justice. On the political scale, he’s to my left—in fact, on occasion in the past he’s gone so far as to vote in national elections for the non-Zionist Communists on the grounds that they are the Knesset’s most vociferous and effective advocates of peace and social justice (I thought he was crazy).

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