Politics and Policy

The Bush Doctrine: No Peace. (And What’s the McCain Doctrine?)

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As Laura Rozen points out , George W. Bush wasn’t just attacking Barack Obama in his Knesset speech dismissing negotiations with “terrorists and radicals” as appeasement. He was also attacking his host, Ehud Olmert, whose government was already engaged in indirect peace contacts with Syria via Turkey – the negotiations made public yesterday.

The contacts through Turkey reportedly began in February 2007. If so, the Olmert government may have been persuaded to act (or embarrassed into acting) by the reports published the previous month about Foreign Minister director-general Alon Liel’s back-channel negotations with Syria. The “non-paper ” – or unsigned framework agreement reached by Liel and unofficial Syrian negotiator Ibrahim (Abe) Suleiman is important reading, because it gives a sense of how an Israel-Syria deal is likely to look. One creative feature: in order to keep the Golan demilitarized and to prevent competition over Jordan River water, the Golan would be turned into a giant park after Israeli withdrawal – with free access for Israelis.

Liel has stressed – in a press briefing in January 2007, and since – that a critical part of any deal is a switch in Syrian orientation from pro-Iran to pro-West. That would necessarily mean dropping support for Hamas and Hezbollah. Syria’s secular regime wants the reorientation in order to maintain its independence, Alon reports. For Israel, such a deal would mean much more than removing the direct military threat from Syria. With Hamas and Hezbollah weakened, Iran’s power in our area would be sigificantly reduced.

But the deal requires a third party: Washington.

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Refuge or Refusal: Israel and Darfur

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“An infiltrator is subject to five years imprisonment,” reads the government-backed bill that gained initial approval of the Knesset yesterday, by a vote of 21-1*. If the “infiltrator” – someone crossing illegally into Israel – is from an enemy country, the maximum sentence goes up to seven years.

In other words: The law states that if a refugee from Darfur fleeing genocide reaches the State of Israel, he or she can expect not refuge but seven years imprisonment.

Consider yesterday’s vote a preliminary decision to declare that Israel is no longer a Jewish state – for to refuse refuge is to deny the most basic values of Judaism and to erase the lessons of Jewish history. Rather than “The Prevention of Infiltration Act,” this bill should be titled, “Act of Amnesia.”

According to Ha’aretz , the bill has been sent to the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, “which does not have experience with migration issues and whose sessions are held in camera.” Before I go further, let me note that the fax number of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee is +972 2 6753100 and the email address is v_bitchon@knesset.gov.il . The committee chair

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How To Succeed In School With A Lot Of Trying

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I’m a proud father today-my 17-year old son Niot received a 97 on one of his bagrut (national high school graduation) exams-a particularly hard one. Any father would be proud of such a high mark, but I have cause to be more proud than most. Just a few years ago, most of the teachers who knew Niot doubted he’d be able to earn a diploma. We, his parents, doubted it, too. But now we can send out an announcement (we’re debating if we want to follow what a friend did and order some through Jostens, or simply do so online) to our friends and families about how well he’s done!

In elementary school, Niot had trouble sitting still in class. He didn’t seem to “get” many of the lessons. Frustrated and bored, he developed anti-social behaviors, including fierce outbursts of anger and sometimes violence. The teachers, counselors, and administrators at his school did their best, but were largely at a loss for how to handle him. Ilana and I were as well. Luckily there are schools, similar to this PreK-12 Independent School in Raleigh, that know how to help their students giving them the much-needed attention they may need and struggle to obtain.

After seeking outside advice, we had Niot tested for learning disabilities. The tests showed what we’d sensed all along. The boy was not stupid or dim-minded. He was bright, but his mind didn’t work the way the standard curriculum and teaching procedures expected them to work.

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Synagogue and State: A Divorce Made in Heaven

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I’ll be participating today in al New Israel Fund webcast:

Religion and State: Fundamentalism or Freedom?

Along with Naomi Chazan, Frances Raday, and Jafar Farah.

8 pm Israel time, 1pm EST, 10am PST www.nif.org/webcast

I don’t know how the discussion will develop, but I can describe my starting point: The best way for Jews in Israel to freely debate what it means to live in an independent country where they constitute the majority, and the best way for Judaism to develop and flourish here, is to disconnect the state and religion.

That is, the old secularists and religious camps in Israeli politics are both mistaken. The secularists assume that secularizing the state will complete the secularization of society. The Orthodox political establishment – religious Zionist and ultra-Orthodox – has always agreed with that proposition, and therefore opposed disestablishment. It has been sure that the way to protect Judaism is to link it to the state.

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On Voting Across the Sea

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Since Haim quoted me on the subject of voting in America – and since his father disagreed with me – I’ll explain how my view developed.

In my Jewish home, growing up, I learned that voting was a primary mitzvah, the mark of a responsible human being. In 1980, the first US election after I came to Israel, I tried voting. I wasn’t a citizen here yet. My absentee ballot arrived from California two days before the election, with a punchcard and a little curlycue of a wire to punch the chads out. Mail was taking about two weeks to get from Jerusalem to Los Angeles in those days. There was no way I could get the ballot back in time. For a while, I used the curlycue to clean my garlic press.

After that I didn’t try again for years. Experience showed that I probably wouldn’t succeed. Besides, like Haim, I felt that my life was here. I voted and protested here and wrote about Israeli politics, and called my wife every two hours when I had reserve duty in the ninth month of her pregnancy. In the ancient days of the 1980s and early 90s, I got my news of America from the foreign page of Ha’aretz, in Hebrew, in small doses. Why should I vote over there?

In 2004, I changed my mind.

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Update: Bush and Lebanon; Obama, Israel and Islam

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  • As I mentioned earlier , the Bush administration’s obstruction of peace talks between Israel and Syria has helped Hezbollah and Iran push for control of Lebanon. My new piece on the subject is now up at the American Prospect :

    The time, according to Hilal Khashan, was ten minutes past the ceasefire. That was another way of saying ten minutes after another Hezbollah victory, Khashan explained. I phoned Khashan — head of the political science department at Beirut’s American University — several days into Lebanon’s latest armed upheaval. He spoke in a strangely dispassionate tone I’ve heard before in Jerusalem and Ramallah, the voice of a man taking refuge from chaos in careful analysis.

    So far, Khashan said on Sunday night, the crisis that erupted last week has yielded “a major achievement” for Hezbollah. Iran, Hezbollah’s patron, has extended its influence in Lebanon. The obvious loser is the pro-Western government of Lebanon’s Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. From Beirut, U.S. support appears to be a phantom; Bush unwilling or incapable of supporting its Lebanese allies.

    From the slightly greater distance of Jerusalem, I’d add,

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Should Obama Get My Vote?

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“Are you going to vote for Obama?” my 14-year-old daughter, Misgav, asked me the other day.

“I don’t vote in American elections,” I replied, “because I’m Israeli.”

“But you could vote, right?”

“I could,” I acknowledged. “I’m also an American citizen. But the last time I voted was in 1980. Once I decided to make my life here and began voting in Israeli elections, I didn’t think it would be right to vote in American ones, too.”

“You should vote for Obama,” Misgav said.

“Maybe I should,” I acknowledged.

It’s a dilemma. I retain my American passport and file a tax return with the IRS every year, but I don’t maintain a residence in the U.S. I have served in a foreign army and have no intention of ever returning to the country I grew up in.

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Obama. What’s Complicated Here?

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Gershom Gorenberg

Dan Kurtzer, the former U.S. Ambassador to Israel and an Orthodox Jew, is in Jerusalem for the 60th anniversary celebrations. This morning my wife heard him being interviewed on Israeli Radio, in Hebrew, about the U.S. election. Kurtzer explained that he’s backing Barack Obama.

This was not exactly a revelation. Kurtzer has explained his reasons for backing Obama at length . Here’s some key snippets:

…we have had eight years of disaster with respect to our foreign policy, and I have to share with you as an analyst, we have had eight years that have [compromised] the security of the state of Israel.
An administration that has ignored the search for peace in the Middle East to a point where you have chaos in the Palestinian Authority, and you have a sham process called the Annapolis process, in which our Secretary of State, whom I admire personally, travels to region and announces when she gets there that she is bringing no new ideas.
You have an administration that hasn’t engaged in the peace process, and so inherited a bad situation in 2001 and is leaving it in a worse situation in 2008. And you have an administration that has gotten us engaged in a war in Iraq that has not only cost American lives… but it’s now being called the $3 trillion war…And I would share with you that the cost to the security of Israel is incalculable.

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No Drainer–Why Doesn’t Israel Hire Foreign Brains?

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Low salaries, high taxes, terrorism, not enough jobs–why, one wonders, do any college graduates stay in Israel at all? So why don’t Israeli colleges and high-tech firms do what their counterparts all over the rest of the world do? I mean hire non-Jews.

In the spring issue of Azure, Marla Braverman sums up Israel’s brain drain problems. She calls for free-market reforms in the higher education system to create greater incentives for academics to remain at Israeli universities, noting that faculty salaries here are very low compared to those in the U.S., and that collective wage agreements means that all profs get the same salary, no matter how much they and their field are in demand.

But even in the absence of wage agreements, could Israel’s universities–whose funding comes primarily from the public purse–afford to pay salaries competitive with those in the U.S.? Hardly likely.

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This Country Is Unconstitutional (Perhaps for the Best)

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Gershom Gorenberg

Prof. Yedidia Stern came to my shul yesterday to give a lecture in honor of Independence Day on creating a constitution for Israel. Stern teaches law at Bar-Ilan University and is a fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, a think-tank that has been assiduously pushing the idea that Israel needs a written constitution. Stern is brilliant,articulate and – at a congregation made up largely of American immigrants – should have been preaching to the choir. As often happens to me, I found myself listening to the sermon agnostically.

Years ago, another brilliant law prof, David Kretzmer, punched a large hole in my American 5th-grade-civics-lesson faith in written constitution. A constitution is worth no more than the judges interpreting it, he said. The Soviet constitution looked gorgeous, but was irrelevant to how the Soviet Union was governed. Bolivia has had more constitutions than anyone seems able to count.

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Department of Hope: Celebrating Israel’s 80th

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What could Israel look like in 20 years, if we do things right? My article looking forward is now online at the National Post in Canada:

In Israel, 2028, Ibrahim Abdullah Hapalit is the reigning literary star. His first novel, Sinai, is based on his childhood escape from Darfur, across Egypt and the Sinai desert to the promised land. The last chapter, "Light," describes his parents’ ambivalence when he asked to light a Hanukkah menorah so he could be like the other children in his school. Critics rave over Hapalit’s Hebrew, built out of Biblical language and the Chinese-West African slang of south Tel Aviv’s immigrant alleys.

In Israel in the summer of 2028, no visitor to Jerusalem would skip outdoor Friday night services on the promenade overlooking the Old City from the south. Dozens of congregations meet there, a grand bazaar of Jewish religious styles. Rabbi Sarit Avihai,

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