Politics and Policy

Kfar Etzion, the Meron Opinion and the Illegality of Settlement

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Gershom Gorenberg

Today, according to the Hebrew calendar, is the anniversary of the founding of the first Israeli settlement in the West Bank following the Six-Day War. (Settlement had already begun in the Golan Heights.) In honor of the anniversary, I’ve decided to begin a project that’s been on my mind: An online archive of important historical documents dealing with the history of settlement.

The archive is located here. The first document is Theodor Meron’s legal opinion on civilian settlement in the occupied territories.

Meron was legal counsel of the Israeli Foreign Ministry in September 1967. He was asked by the Prime Minister’s Office for his opinion on the legality of civilian settlement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In a cover note to his opinion, he summarized his conclusion: “…civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”

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“No, no, no, I won’t play on Tzipi’s team. She’s a little giirrl.”

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Gershom Gorenberg

Occasionally, pop culture offers the appropriate commentary on matters of state. To understand Shaul Mofaz’s feelings about Tzipi Livni winning the Kadima primary, view a snippet of this scene from She’s the Man, a remake of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night set in high school. (Sorry, there’s a block on embedding the clip.) The relevant bit here is at 4:18-4:36, after Viola scores the winning goal in the big soccer game. Watch the goalie in the orange uniform who failed to block the kick by the girl.

Ehud Barak seems to feel the same way about serving in a cabinet with Tzipi Livni as the boss.

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Olmert Promised a Pullout, and Built Settlements

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Gershom Gorenberg I have a new article up at the LA Times explaining Olmert’s legacy: broken promises, more settlements.: …At last Sunday’s Cabinet meeting, Olmert chose to end his term with the same message with which he began it two years ago. “The Whole Land of Israel is done with,” he said, referring to the … Read more

Sunshine, Obama and McCain

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The center two pages of today’s The Marker, Ha’aretz’s economic section, are covered by an ad with the large headline “Win-Win.” It’s for a firm called Sunday, based in Israel as far as I can glean from its website. Sunday is making an offer to anyone with 2,000 square meters of roof space (21,500 square feet in archaic U.S. measurements) or 5,000 square feet of available land: It will turn that space into a solar energy facility, then pay the owner a set fee or a share of the profits on the energy produced.

Sunday is saying: You own a big office in Tel Aviv or factory in Haifa? We’ll turn the wasted sunlight heating up your roof into power and pay you for it. I’m not endorsing any company, but on the face of it, this sounds like a good deal for all concerned, including Israel, which can buy fewer fossil fuels to produce electricity, and the planet, which gets less carbon in its atmosphere. We don’t have the same Payless Power rates that other people can get over here, after all.

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Pollsters, Conservatives Flunk Math

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Gershom Gorenberg

This post is really about Jews and Obama. Patience.

A Ha’aretz-Channel 10 poll a couple of days before the Kadima primary said that Tzipi Livni was ahead among the party’s voters, 47-28 percent. Exit polls last night showed Livni with about that share of the vote, with Mofaz doing better, but not better enough: 37 percent.

Earlier, Mofaz himself predicted that he’d win with precisely 43.7 percent, a number he got from his imported Republican mad dog, I mean campaign expert, Arthur Finkelstein.

Funny enough, Finkelstein’s number was pretty close to the 42 percent Mofaz actually got when the hand count of ballots was finished this morning. Only problem is that it was even closer to the 43.1 percent that Livni got to win the election. Maybe importing American experts on negative campaigning isn’t such a good idea.

Tangent: Neri Livneh at Ha’aretz points out that if Livni succeeds in forming a coalition and becoming prime minister, all three branches of Israeli government will be headed by women: Livni in the executive, Chief Justice Dorit Beinisch in the judiciary, and Knesset Speaker Dalia Itzik in the legislature.

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Primary Scream, or Unrepresentative Democracy

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Gershom Gorenberg

Tomorrow Kadima will pick someone to replace Ehud Olmert as party leader. Olmert will then quit, to the sound of 7 million people sighing in relief, and his replacement will get the chance to form a new government and become Israel’s prime minister. The method that Kadima will use to make this momentous decision is quaintly called a “primary” in our parts, and purports to be an election. If you believe that, we have a bridge to sell you in Alaska.

A total of 73,000 people are eligible to vote. That’s 2.3 of the total turnout in the 2006 national election, and about 10 percent of the number of people who voted for Kadima. But there’s no reason to think that people voting in the primary voted for Kadima in ’06, or have any thought of voting for the party in the next national election. A few might, who knows. If so, it’s by accident.

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Also Bankrupt: The Israeli Political System

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OK, Lehman Bros went belly up. Far as I am from wealth, I still find this upsetting. I find it even more upsetting that the Israeli political system currently has about as much credibility with the public as Lehman’s assets had with its creditors. The ruling party’s vote tomorrow for a new leader comes down … Read more

You Mean Environmentalists Aren’t Zionists?

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Haim Watzman

Tomorrow Israel’s National Planning and Construction Board will take up a proposal to establish a new settlement in the eastern Lachish salient, southwest of Jerusalem. An ad in today’s Ha’aretz, placed by twelve of Israel’s most senior environmentalists, calls on the Board to reject the plan.

“The establishment of the settlement will lead, in the opinion of all environmentalists, to the destruction of habitats and irreversible harm to open spaces. Approval of the settlement in opposition to all environmental impact statements will make a laughingstock of national planning policy, which places great importance on the reinforcement of existing settlements and the preservation of open spaces.”

The environmentalists have everything going for them—science, research, policy imperatives—except for one thing. Apparently, they’re not Zionists.

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Requiem for a Mathematician, and for an Education System

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Oded Schramm was an awe-inspiring mathematician. His death at the age of 46, in a climbing accident in Washington State, is sad in all the ways a normal life cut short is sad. The discoveries he would have made and never got to are only a small piece of the sadness. The mathematician, after all, was also a person, a husband and a father. As a small comfort, the last 26 years of his life were apparently a miracle: According to the Ha’aretz obit, in 1982, during the war in Lebanon, his tank took a direct hit. Somehow he survived.

Reading Schramm’s foreshortened biography made me think about Israeli education. He was born in Jerusalem, went to school here, got his BA and MA from Hebrew U. Given the condition of Israeli schools today, will they produce more Schramms?

As reported last week, Israel’s underfunded school system gets terrible marks from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development:

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All The Conspiracy Theorists Are Out To Get Us–More On The Crusade Against Islam

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Haim Watzman

Y. Ben-David, South Jerusalem’s most intrepid commenter, writes, in response to my previous post on anti-Semitism in Islam, that a significant part of the Muslim world today subscribes to theologies that demonize the Jews, as well as to outlandish conspiracy theories. I’d like to declare here, on the front page of this left-wing peacenik accommodationist blog, that Y. Ben-David (hereinafter YBD) is correct.

However, YBD is, like Benny Morris, wearing blinders that make his correct observation nearly useless–indeed dangerous–as a basis for creating good policies to confront such bigoted Muslims and their political-theological movements.

Let’s start with the conspiracy theories. Perhaps YBD has forgotten how popular they are pretty much everywhere and anywhere, including in the enlightened West. Large numbers of Israelis, in particular in the religious-Zionist sector, believe that Yitzhak Rabin was murdered on the orders of the Shabak or Mossad. A large number of Americans also believe in a variety of conspiracy theories regarding the 9/11 attacks. According to a Gallup poll in 1999, six percent of Americans are sure that the Apollo moon landing was faked by a shadowy conspiracy and another five percent think that might be true. That’s far from a majority but it’s a lot of supposedly enlightened Americans.

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Mr. Mazuz, This Is the Hour of Your Testing

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While we’ve all got on our eyes on Ehud Olmert’s alleged sticky fingers, Prof. David Kretzmer has called for an investigation of whether one of Olmert’s would-be successors has committed crimes of an entirely different order.

Kretzmer is emeritus professor of international law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem – a dry understated title for a learned and passionate defender of human rights. As The Independent reports, he has asked Israel’s Attorney General Menachem Mazuz to investigate whether Shaul Mofaz committed war crimes while serving as military chief of staff at the beginning of the second Intifada.

The letter to… Mazuz refers to a book by two Israeli journalists, Raviv Drucker and Ofer Shelah, which says that Mr Mofaz, after ensuring he was not being officially recorded, called for a Palestinian death toll of 70 per day.

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