A Progressive, Skeptical Blog on Israel, Judaism, Culture, Politics, and Literature
An afterword on Ma’ariv publishing the note that Obama put in the Wall: McClatchy correspondent Dion Nissenbaum brings the newspaper’s most recent comment on the affair. It doesn’t improve the Ma’ariv’s journalistic rep:
Maariv received the note last Thursday and, after realizing it contained no personal or intimate content, decided to publish it.
“Is Anything Sacred?” was the title of a post a couple of days ago on the New Republic’s blog, The Plank. The subject: Publication of the note that Barack Obama placed in the Western Wall when he visited last week. The daily Ma’ariv ran that “scoop,” and immediately found itself under intense criticism – from rabbis, talk-show hosts, and a lawyer who began organizing a consumer boycott of the paper – for violating Obama’s privacy and Jewish religious sensibilities.
But the Plank’s Zvika Krieger wasn’t aiming his question at Ma’ariv. He was asking if Obama considered anything sacred. For in responding to the firestorm, a Ma’ariv spokesman had told various Israeli papers (English here, Hebrew here): “Barack Obama’s note was approved for publication in the international media even before he put [it] in the Kotel…” Krieger accepted that statement. A fairly early version of his post (via Google’s cache) said:
Obama may be above politicizing our troops, but if his campaign did approve the note for publication before he placed it, then I guess he isn’t above politicizing religion.
Clever: A snarky reference to Obama’s canceled visit to wounded U.S. soldiers, casting doubts on his reasons for canceling, as prelude to a statement that the candidate was willing to trash Jewish sensitivities for politics’ sakes. Truly, Obama had hit the trifecta: apostate Muslim with radical Christian preacher desecrates Jewish holy sites. But by writing the story this way, Krieger actually doubled down on Ma’ariv’s failed journalistic judgment. At least he has been doing a somewhat better job of backtracking.
My mother liked to think that everything was better in America. She didn’t want to hear that we’d bought a German dryer because it was the best one in the shop. She was sure that she got the best health care in the world because she lived in America. The idea that by running off to some Third World country in the Middle East I might get better care was beyond unbelievable to her.
As an American, she certainly paid more, lots more, for medical care than Germans, Canadians or Israelis. But she got less for her money.
American suburbia is like an SUV. It’s big. It’s spacious. It can be beautiful, quiet, and well-kept up. But it’s such a waste.
Ilana and I always have opposite reactions when we visit America’s great suburbs. This last Shabbat in southern New Jersey was typical. Ilana gets dreamy about having her own lawn, house, garden–all that elbow room, all that green. And I get antsy–why should I want to live in a place where you have to drive half an hour to buy a pair of socks?
Obama stopped through for two nights and a day, as if he were writing one of the New York Times travel pieces about how to spend 36 hours in some locale. At first glance, the trip was purely about photo-ops, gathering footage for later campaign ads that will air in south Florida. But there were some hints of real political content, as I explain in my new article at The American Prospect. Here’s one piece:
Hamas Walks It Back: On Wednesday morning, Israel Radio reported responses to Obama’s arrival, including this one: “A Hamas spokesman said, ‘The American senator is trying to reach the White House via Tel Aviv, at the expense of the Palestinians.'”
Gershom Gorenberg
This week’s key misunderstood news story from the Looking Glass Land of the West Bank is that the Defense Ministry is about to approve settlement at a spot called Maskiot, near the Jordan River. On first glance, that’s bad because it means that the government is abandoning its freeze on new settlements. At second glance, the freeze on new settlements is a joke – but Maskiot is really bad news. It shows again that the government consistently, reflexively, obsessively gives in to the most extreme elements of the settlement movement.
“It’s no coincidence that men with knitted skullcaps-two of them soldiers-were involved in killing the terrorists who carried out the last three terror attacks,” Nadav Shragai writes in today’s Ha’aretz. Shragai, who himself hails from the mainstream of Isareli religious Zionism, is right to be proud, but he doesn’t tell the whole story.
The kipah (why does Ha’aretz insist on using the ugly term “skullcap?”) and the rifle weren’t compatible in classic Zionism. The Palmach ethos pretty much excluded religion. The authors of soldier memoirs from the pre-state period through the 1970s almost always express surprise when the occasional religious guy shows up in their special forces unit, and the religious guy almost never made it through the rigorous selection process. In the mindset of most of the IDF’s early commanders, being religious meant being weak, and time spent observing the mitzvot was time wasted.
The settlement movement, which I think has been a catastrophe for Israel, nevertheless played a role in an important and positive sociological process in Israeli society-it brought the modern religious population into the mainstream. In a society in which so much revolves around the army, military service, and in particular service in elite units, is the key to larger social acceptance. From the 1970s onward, young religious men increasingly sought service in such units and, overcoming no little prejudice, proved their worth and their ability. This process was an important one for creating a more tolerant, open, and multicultural Israeli society (notably, many of these young religious men were Sephardim).
My friend John showed up in South Jerusalem. Long ago and far away, John and I slouched in the back of high school classes together in Los Angeles, mumbling snidely about what was being left out of American history (women, blacks, slaughter of Indians, lynch mobs, poor folk…). Eventually I went into mumbling snidely as a profession. John, by contrast, is gainfully employed in high-tech, working for an Israeli firm that kindly brought him for a visit to the home office.
In late afternoon we walked out to the promenade. Some Palestinian kids were playing soccer on a stretch of lawn despite the ferocious heat. In front of us was the Old City and the Dome of the Rock. On the east, I pointed out to John, was the high concrete wall dividing the Palestinian side of Jerusalem from the Palestinian towns of the West Bank.
“So,” John asked me, “is there anything parallel to Israel’s control of the West Bank? What do you think of Jimmy Carter calling it apartheid? Is it like Jim Crow?”
I spotted Guy at the shabby bus stop on the south-bound side of the Geha Highway, at the foot of the narrow bridge that leads to the Ramat Gan campus of Bar-Ilan University, near the predominantly ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak.
Most highway bus stops in Israel have been cleaned up, but 30 years ago, they all looked like this – pockmarked, cracked, crumbling, covered with graffiti and posters. Trash litters the ground, and behind us, down in a gully, stands a small trailer-cum-snack bar, whose stick-skinny and unshaven proprietor sprawls on one of several plastic chairs scattered around his enterprise, which may or may not be legal, but looks like it isn’t.
Gershom Gorenberg
NGO Monitor, Gerald Steinberg’s group, which tracks human-rights groups for anti-Israel bias, sent me its annual report. I don’t claim the resources to monitor every detail of its monitoring. But a section in the report on B’Tselem helps illuminate an underlying bias in the work of the bias-hunter.
The report quotes B’Tselem Executive Director Jessica Montell as acknowledging
that Israel is held to a higher standard within the international community and “in some ways Israel is discriminated against and disproportionately criticized.” But she also stated, “Israel is a democracy that holds itself to a higher standard. And I think that’s appropriate,” a comment which denies the universality of human rights. [my emphasis]
Does holding Israel to a higher standard in fact defy the universality of human rights? Sometimes, depending on context. Some groups, especially foreign ones, notice only Israeli offenses, because they begin by being offended that Israel exists.
But there are three essential flaws in the NGO Monitor argument against B’Tselem on this point.
Gershom Gorenberg
Benny Morris’s riff on nuking Iran, featured on Friday’s New York Times op-ed page, conjures up Maj. Kong’s bronco-riding whoop at the end of Dr. Strangelove, and not just because that film revealed the glee with which the military-minded can look forward to apocalypse. Playing off the terrifying “Fail-Safe,” Stanley Kubrick and Peter Sellers also reminded viewers that the sane side could start a nuclear war by mistake – and that the “sane” side could not be counted on to act sanely. Forty-four years after Kubrick, Morris argues that Israel will use the bomb so that Iran won’t get the bomb. Is this a warning, a recommendation, or the whoop of joy as someone gives into temptation and picks up the Dangerous Thing that Dad said not to touch?
Morris, it happens, does agree with one point in my piece last week in the American Prospect. Given, he says,
Haim Watzman A recommendation: Leonard Fein’s article in the current issue of Dissent. Fein offers a good summary of the current travails of left Zionism. It’s hardly new that Zionist liberals and social democrats often feel as if they are not only out of synch, but positively rejected, by both the left at large and … Read more