Politics and Policy

Fire the Founders! Fire the Founding Opposition!

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On the flight back from South Africa I began reading Andrew Feinstein’s After the Party. Feinstein was a young member of parliament representing the African National Congress in South Africa’s new democracy after 1994. While his own involvement with the ANC only began in earnest with the transition to democracy, he revered the people who had succeeded in overthrowing apartheid.

By August 2001, Feinstein had quit parliament, forced out because he had pushed for a full investigation of the arms-purchasing scandal that has led to the top ranks of the party. Even beforehand, he was furious with President Mbeki Thabo’s surreal refusal to deal with the AIDS pandemic sweeping through South Africa. Mbeki insisted that poverty, not a virus, caused the disease, and that Western pharmaceutical companies were trying to bankrupt Africa by selling dangerous and useless drugs. It was a conspiracy theory turned into a national policy of ignoring a plague.

The tie between the arms scandal and AIDS denial was the transformation of the ANC from a liberation movement embracing a wide variety of opinions to a top-down party where dissent was crushed. No questions about AIDS, no questions about government officials and their relatives getting rich in the process of buying unnecessary, inferior and overpriced arms.

As an aside, yes, Feinstein is Jewish, marginally.

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No Choice: The Unbearable Angst of the Israeli Voter

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Haim Watzman

I envy Americans. The choice they face in their coming election is so clear. The choice we Israelis will face in our next election couldn’t be more muddled.

The choice in the United States is so stark because nearly every policy the Republican administration has put into action has failed, and in just the ways that the Democrats predicted. The implosion of the economy, the metastasization of the national debt, the failure of the adventure in Iraq, the destabilization of the Middle East and now the Russian periphery, the impending disappearance of the arctic ice cap–you name it, the Democrats were right and the Republicans were wrong. During the last eight years, the Democrats erred only when a) they assumed that the Republicans would pursue a risky policy in a responsible way (as in Iraq) or b) when they were too frightened to speak up clearly against insane policies that were popular with the electorate (as with the Bush tax cuts).

Israel, too, faces economic and social ills and threats to its security. But here, over the last eight years, the policy choices have not been as plain, the facts on the ground have been ambiguous, and the political opposition has not offered clear alternatives. The United States has been ruled from the far right since George Bush came into office; Israel has been ruled from the center during that same period.

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The Belabored Party

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My wife occasionally mentions a repeated gag on the fake news broadcast on Saturday Night Live in the 70s. After other mangled news, the announcer would say, “And Franco is still dying.” Given what he could expect in the next world, it’s no wonder he was slow about moving there.

But the record for slow political deaths surely belongs to Israel’s Labor Party.

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Blogging Ethics and Nefesh B’Nefesh–Does Business Class Corrupt?

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Haim Watzman

Shouldn’t journalistic ethics apply to bloggers? Specifically, shouldn’t bloggers refuse to accept perks from companies, organizations, and power brokers they write about? This could apply to all social media influencers too. Some people believe that if an influencer or blogger has put all the work in to grow their following, they should be able to receive some sort of repayment. Whilst that’s true, TikTok influencers can use services to help them grow their following. One such service is the TikTok view increasing service by Virall, which claims to get real peoples eyes on your video by running Google Ads to it. These PPC ads will then help you get more TikTok views, says the website. Once they have a big following, they can then receive some brand deals. I’m a newbie in the blogging world so I don’t really know enough yet, but I believe that any blogger or influencer who seeks credibility and independence must accept this standard, even if you were to start a blog on WordPress and believe yourself to not rack up much traffic in the foreseeable future.

I know I said I’m a newbie, but isn’t the whole point of starting a blog in the first place to have traffic driven towards it? Surely you want it to reach as many people as possible? I’ve heard from many people who have recently started their own blogs that researching something similar to web hosting canada should be one of the very first things that you should do before uploading your first post. They’ve told me that it is meant to help with your page load time, if it’s quick then you have an increased chance of having more traffic. Which should help your blog and its success in the long run. But this might not always be the case.

The issue came up specifically when I attended the First International Jewish Bloggers Convention last Wednesday here in Jerusalem. The convention was organized by Nefesh B’Nefesh, which promotes aliya from Western countries. I’m all in favor of aliya, and Nefesh B’Nefesh does fine work, even if its close association with Binyamin Netanyahu-the convention’s keynote speaker-and other figures on the Israeli right is not to my taste.

To kick off the convention, Nefesh B’Nefesh flew a number of Israel-based Jewish bloggers to the U.S. so that they could accompany a planeload of new immigrants on their move to their new country. At least some of the bloggers were given business class seats. They were also given complete freedom to write whatever they wished about what they saw and heard-it could hardly have been otherwise given the nature of the blog medium.

So what’s the problem? If Nefesh B’Nefesh is a laudable outfit, and if it gave the beneficiaries of its largesse complete freedom, what could be wrong?

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Col. Gibli, He Dead. (Dirty business lives on.)

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Gershom Gorenberg

Col. Binyamin Gibli took his secrets with him to the next world when he died this week – unless, as historian Tom Segev forlornly hopes, the old spookmaster left instructions to publish the ghost-written manuscript of his autobiograhy, and it explains what really happened in the Dirty Business of the 1950s. The hope is forlorn because it presumes that we would have reason to trust Gibli’s version.

Gibli was the head of Military Intelligence back in 1954, when MI recruited a handful of Egyptian Jews to bomb American and British cultural centers and other places frequented by foreigners in Egypt. (Yes, you read that correctly.) The idea was that the attacks would look like Egyptian fury against the West, and would derail any improvement in relations between Western governments and Cairo.

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Barak Speaks–Does He Have Anything To Say?

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Haim Watzman

“Ehud Barak will Talk More to the Media,” says the headline in today’s Ha’aretz (Hebrew edition). It’s a mark of the sad state of Israeli politics that it’s worth a headline when the leader of what ought to be the country’s progressive camp decides to talk to the press.

It’s hard to believe but, since regaining leadership of the Labor Party more than a year ago, Barak has said virtually nothing about the major policy issues of the day. He’s one of the three major contenders for the prime minister’s post in the next elections, yet he’s given the public little information about his thinking. We know his social policies, his foreign policy strategy, or his budget priorities. His message to the voting public has been “trust me because I’m Israel’s most decorated soldier and a proven leader.” But leader of what, and in which direction?

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If Lincoln and Douglas Debated the Occupation

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Gershom Gorenberg

A friend from America passed through Jerusalem and brought me a recent book of far-away American history, perhaps thinking that I should get my mind off the troubles a kilometer or two from my home. Allen C. Guelzo’s Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates that Defined America was well worth the read, but it did not provide a vacation from thinking about Israel and Palestinians. Much as I am suspicious of drawing precise historical parallels, it wasn’t too difficult for me to imagine Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debating the occupation.

Let me brutally distill some of Guelzo’s key theses. First, Lincoln’s belief that “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” derived in part from his personal experience. When he was a boy, his father had hired him out as a farm laborer and pocketed the proceeds. It was a very small taste of forced labor. Someone else might have learned from this that it would be much better to be the taskmaster than the slave. Lincoln did not want anyone to be the taskmaster. The relationship itself was wrong.

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Delta Blues — Airline Security in the Age of Terrorism

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Haim Watzman

Here I am stuck in New Jersey, while the four suitcases checked by me and Ilana are in flight. In other words, while security at Kennedy International Airport kept Ilana and me from bringing hand cream into the secure area, our luggage was allowed to fly on its own to Israel. If a terrorist wanted to blow up an airplane, would he rather use a jar of Ponds or a large valise?

The story began when we arrived at JFK last evening for Delta flight 86 to Tel Aviv. We checked our suitcases, received our boarding passes, had our carry-on bags x-rayed and our persons put through sensors. But when we arrived at the gate, we were informed that the flight would be delayed by an hour and a half. We waited, and then take-off was put off until midnight, and then until 1 a.m.

By that time it was clear that the flight would, at best, arrive only minutes before Shabbat came in, leaving us no time to get to Jerusalem. So we reluctantly relinquished our dreams of a warm Shabbat with our four children and asked to be rescheduled for Sunday night’s flight.

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Apocalypse II: Hagee Doesn’t Seek the End? Riiight.

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Does Rev. John Hagee – friend of Joe Lieberman and erstwhile endorser of John McCain – believe the End is Nigh? Is that what’s behind his oft-proclaimed love for Israel? Does he expect horrible suffering for Jews during the apocalypse that he yearns for?

I would have thought these were easy test questions, to be answered, “Yes, yes and yes.” But a recent news report put out by the JTA newswire for Jewish papers asserts otherwise. “The pastor has, in fact, repeatedly disavowed End of Days theology…” it says. It quoted David Brog — executive director of Hagee’s organization, Christians United for Israel (CUFI) — as saying that “Hagee’s theological musings have little to do with why he promotes support for Israel.”

The JTA report dealt with a survey commissioned by J Street, the dovish Israel lobby, on U.S. Jewish attitudes toward Hagee and Lieberman.

According to the poll, which has a margin of error of 3.5 percent, Lieberman scored an unfavorable rating of 48 percent among U.S. Jews, compared to a favorable rating of 37 percent. Hagee… fared even worse: The pastor registered a 7 percent favorable rating and 57 percent unfavorable…

According to J Street’s executive director, Jeremy Ben Ami, part of Hagee’s problem with American Jews is that he brings a strong religious sensibility to his politicking.

But in the article, Brog gets the last word.

So where does Hagee’s interest in Israel come from?

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Apocalypse I: McCain’s Ringtone for the Christian Right

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Let’s update political jargon. Writers still use “dog whistle” for a political message heard clearly by one audience but entirely missed by everyone else. That’s so twentieth-century. Please update to “teenage ring-tone”: Young ears hear it. Older ones don’t. Students yes, profs no. You can pick the tone that will be heard by the age group you want. But be careful: Some people have young ears.

The political equivalent is John McCain’s invidious “He’s the One” ad. Ostensibly, it merely suggests that anyone who inspires people must be a poor leader. (Well, don’t expect a Republican to remember FDR or JFK. But what about Churchill?)

But the message is really intended to ring loudly for dispensationalists, the subset of conservative evangelicals who are looking forward to the Rapture, the Tribulation, the whole timeline of approaching apocalypse.

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The Educator Who Can’t See Arab Blood

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Moshe Hagar is an ex-colonel who now heads the religious pre-army academy, or mekhinah, at the settlement of Yatir south of Hebron. Such academies provide a year of study after high school, before army service. The idea is to increase motivation and develop leadership skills. The Hebrew web-page for Hagar’s academy (on a government website) says that its purpose is to encourage students

to internalize Judaism in various planes of life and to prepare them for meaningful army service that includes maintaining both a religious and nationalist lifestyle, and to take upon themselves the personal obligation to make a meaningful motivation during and after military service.

The curriculum, says the site, includes studying “Jewish faith” and musar (ethics).

Last Wednesday, Hagar was interviewed on Israel Radio about the religious right’s protests against the withdrawal from Gaza three years ago. His comments provide an insight into his view of faith and ethics. The key comment:

In the end, the disengagement passed with zero casualties…*

That the disengagement protests passed without casualties would surprise the residents of Shfaram, an Arab town in northern Israel. They’ve just marked the third anniversary of the terror attack carried out in their community by Eden Natan Zada, a far-right soldier who’d gone AWOL in protest against the disengagement. Natan Zada killed four people in Shfaram. (Natan Zada was himself killed by Shfaram residents, who will reportedly be charged with lynching him.)

Two weeks later another disengagement opponent, Asher Weisgan, killed four Palestinians who worked at the West Bank settlement of Shilo. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to four life terms. A report on his sentencing noted:

Weisgan, a settler from Shvut Rachel, said his objective had been to prevent the disengagement from proceeding.

For Moshe Hagar, it seems, the blood of Arab victims was invisible, unnoticed at the time, unremembered.

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A Stamp for Letters to the Edge of Madness

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Gershom Gorenberg

The Israeli Post Office has issued a stamp commemorating the settlements of Gush Katif in Gaza – the settlements evacuated by the Israeli goverment in 2005. Gush Katif commemorative stampThe stamp shows an orange ribbon, originally the symbol of the furious protest movement against the withdrawal. Today the ribbon is the icon of those who have never forgiven the state for evacuating settlements from occupied territory. Below the images of greenhouses and the little kids happily jumping rope is the biblical verse, “And they shall no more plucked up out of their land…” (Amos 9:15), which in context can be read as a promise that no more settlements will be evacuated.

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