A Progressive, Skeptical Blog on Israel, Judaism, Culture, Politics, and Literature
My cover story for Foreign Policy magazine, on seven myths about Israel and why they’re misleading, is still available only to paying customers at FP’s own site. But it’s been reprinted by a Texas paper that was kind enough to put it online .
Update: The article is no longer on the newspaper’s site, but at least for now can be read via Google cache here.
Here’s myth #4:
“Israel’s existence is in danger.”
The best country in the world for a mother is Sweden. The 27th best country in the world for a mother is the United States, according to Save the Children’s “State of the World’s Mothers” report, just released.
Among the factors figured into the ratings are risk of maternal mortality, female life expectancy, and under-5 mortality rate. Norway and Iceland are in second and third place.
Why are those Scandanavian countries so high, and the U.S. – which spends wildly on health care – so low? The statistics reflect why Americans are being encouraged to explore life insurance policies with a greater sense of urgency. The answer to the above question could be because the Scandanavian countries have a long tradition of social democracy, and the United States has a market-driven health care system. There are some things that socialism does much better than capitalism. Health care is among them. Let’s be clear: More mothers die in childbirth, more infants and toddlers die in the United States because the U.S. does not have universal, government-backed health care. If we look at the patient experience, one would notice the growing displeasure in the healthcare system. You could see this blog to know more about this.
It means more people are calling out for law firms to help them get justice for these deaths and injures that were at the hands of trusted professions. You can find more here if you think this applies to you. It’s a sad but very real statistic that has to be focused on as a very real problem.
As Ezra Klein just wrote , the standard claim for American health care – no waiting for care – is nonsense. Some waits are hidden by poor reporting. More importantly, many people don’t wait for care – they don’t get it all.
The Save the Children report anachronistically lists Israel in Tier II, Less Developed Countries, so it doesn’t directly compare us to Sweden and the United States. In Tier II, Israel is the best place for mothers. Women’s life expectancy is higher than that in the U.S. (83 years in Israel, 81 in the U.S.). In Israel, 5 children out of 1,000 die under the age of 5. In the United States, 8 do.
Why is it healthier to live in Israel than in the United States? Uh, it’s not because life is less tense here, or because people drive better.
Hey Gershom, I always get smiles at the bakery. Maybe it’s because they know I can track their every move from my living room window.
Why should we argue? This is a blog, so let’s ask our readers. How many of you think service has improved in Israel in stores, government offices, banks, and health clinics over the last three decades? How many of you think it’s due in part to increased competition? Feel free to offer specific examples and anecdotes. Here’s one of mine:
At the Wonk Room , Matt Duss discusses attempts by the National Review to prove that Barack Obama might actually be a closet Muslim who (gasp!) studied Quran as a child in Indonesia. And here I thought the unhinged right was busy sliming Obama for his connections to his pastor. What an interesting man that Obama is, what a religious innovator: A Muslim, a follower of a controversial black pastor, and a Marxist too. A one-man repertory theater, as talented as the Jews who were once accused of being bankers, communists, zionists and cosmopolitans all at once.
As prooftext for the Obama-is-Muslim attack, NR’s writer brings articles by none other than Pipes. "We don’t know if he is [Muslim], but we know Daniel Pipes is no crank," says NR’s Lisa Schiffren.
Matt agrees: Labeling Pipes a crank would libel all those harmless folks
A couple hundred meters from your house, Haim, there’s a bakery, a capitalist enterprise to the best of my knowledge. For a couple of years, I went there every Friday after morning services and bought the big flat pitot that my kids love for Shabbat dinner. The first time that the owner, or manager, or staff thug – I didn’t check his precise title – shouted at me for daring to stop to talk to a friend in his store, I ignored him. The second time, I put down my pitot on the counter and left. My friend came out and told me that the reason he does the Friday morning bakery run is that his wife refuses to enter the place, after she was target of a similar tantrum.
I feel a bit uncomfortable telling this story, because I generally enjoy life in South Jerusalem, and I’ve found another bakery where the pitot are great and the guy at the register is generally polite. But if you ask me :
Remember standing in line endlessly at the bank only to finally reach a surly teller? Remember sales clerks who thought they were doing you a favor by deigning to speak to you?
– well, yes, I do remember. And I don’t have to stretch terribly far back into my memory
Gershom, I agree with the spirit of your Cause of Death post, but I think you’re over-idealizing Israel’s socialist past.
Think back to those good old days, when the country was making makework for everyone. Remember getting shunted from one bureaucrat to another in grossly overstaffed government offices where everyone always seemed to be on break? Remember standing in line endlessly at the bank only to finally reach a surly teller? Remember sales clerks who thought they were doing you a favor by deigning to speak to you? Remember having to take an entire day off of work to see a doctor, because there was only “sick call” and no way of making appointments?
Journalistic colleagues – in the Jewish and general American media – have emailed me to thank me for my recent column on CAMERA’s apparent efforts to slant Wikipedia articles. The notes came with comments like “batten down the hatches” or “hope they don’t throw eggs at your house.” I felt like the kid who took the dare to walk across the yard of the neighbor who keeps rottweilers, or who talked back to the teacher who still uses a paddle.
Knowing those colleagues, I don’t think any of them would pass up a story or a sentence just because CAMERA will attack them afterward. They are folks who have shown themselves to blessedly, professionally foolhardy. I can’t say I’m sure this is true of everyone in the business. This may please some donors to CAMERA, the attack-dog organization that claims to monitor the media for anti-Israel bias and that barks at any report it perceives as negative: See, those nasty media people have had the fear of God put in them.
Me, I’d think that if you cared about Israel, you really would want accurate info about what’s happening here, which means reports on what’s wrong as well as what’s right – as I’d think you’d prefer the doctors treating family members to be honest. You wouldn’t want the pediatrician to be afraid you’d start roaring at her if she said your kid showed definite signs of junk-food addiction and obesity.
Meanwhile, “dajudem,” a member of the CAMERA-organized group of stealth editors of Wikipedia has posted a fascinating comment on my Prospect column :
He was 48 years old, according to the brief items that appeared in the Hebrew press late last week (here , and here ). Yossi Danziger was the director-general of Polgat, a producer of wool fabric in the southern Israeli town of Kiryat Gat. He died of a heart attack, shortly after the company did. He’d been trying to find alternative jobs for the 300 workers who lost their jobs when Polgat’s owner, the Bagir firm, decided to cut its losses and shut down the factory, apparently without great success .
Polgat, according to the news reports, couldn’t match the low production costs of Far Eastern competitors – especially when energy prices were soaring and the value of the dollar was shrinking daily. Most of the company’s export contracts were in dollars. Old-timers here recall a time when the dollar was considered a strong world currency and when using it for international contracts made sense.
As for labor costs, the news items did not detail how the Far Eastern competitors keep them down. We are supposed to accept the idea of garments and fabric and everything else being produced more cheaply in far away places where there are no safety protections for workers,
CAMERA, which claims to monitor the accuracy of reporting on Israel in the American media, doesn’t feel obligated to be all that truthful itself, as I explain in my new column at the American Prospect. A CAMERA staffer organized activists to work as a group to edit Wikipedia articles on Israel – while hiding their intent and their connection to each other. Some would conceal their interest in Israel, get elected as impartial administrators, and then be able to decide disagreements between other volunteer editors.
Ineffectual as the CAMERA effort apparently was, there are several morals to the story. One is that despite the techno-idealism that Wikipedia can inspire, it’s best to approach the encyclopedia with an attitude of caveat lector, let the reader beware. The affair is also a reminder — not the first — that CAMERA is ready to exempt itself from the demands for accuracy that it aims at the media.
Eyal Zisser, a top Israeli expert on Syria, says that Ehud Olmert and Bashar al-Assad appear serious about talking peace. The latest sign is Asad’s comment to the Qatari daily al-Watan Olmert has given him a commitment to return the entire Golan Heights.
In an analysis published through the Dayan Center at Tel Aviv U, Zisser describes that the most likely reason for Assad to reveal Olmert’s commitment, which was delivered via Turkey:
…the Syrians may have wanted to test Olmert’s seriousness, to check whether the message delivered to them was reliable, and whether Olmert would be capable of weathering the inevitable criticism from portions of the Israeli public. The fact that the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office declined to deny the news of the commitment has been understood as a tacit confirmation of its veracity.
The peacemaker here is Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
Poor God. You created the world, you are the power and glory, but everyone thinks you’re a Republican.
But the association of the Most High with the most right-wing doesn’t stand up to philosophical scrutiny. Conservatives, after all, love order. They want today to be like yesterday, and tomorrow to be like the day before yesterday.
But then they’ve also got this all-powerful God who, they believe, intervenes in their lives, in politics, and in everything else on a daily, ongoing basis. But wait a minute–if God is constantly intervening in the world, that means the world operates according to God’s will, not according to any established laws. A world ruled by an omnipotent, interventionist God would, on the face of it, be totally unpredictable. Tomorrow would most certainly not be like today.
That’s not a very conservative proposition.
Reading your last post , Haim, I suspected that you’ve been hacking into my thoughts. Not about swimsuits per se , but about Daniel Pipes’s curious belief that swimming in mixed company is a democratic duty.
Strangely, I spent a day once with Pipes. A dovish friend of mine with an interest in the Middle East was then active in the Middle East Forum (MEF), Pipes’s organization. I’d recently published my book, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount , and my friend arranged for me to give two talks for the MEF – a lunch in New York, a dinner in Philadelphia. We took the train together between the two cities. Pipes was polite, energetic, intense. His eyes moved quickly when he talked. Did I say he was intense? He reminded me, strangely, of Bassam Jirrar, a Hamas-linked sheikh whom I’d interviewed for the book, and who’d been amazingly hospitable while explaining numerological hints in the Quran that Israel will be destroyed in 2022.
Sometime during the day, as I remember, Pipes gave me an article of his to read,