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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Arabs at the Counter

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Go into a trendy clothing store, sports outlet, or home improvement warehouse emporium in Israel these days and, as often as not, it’ll be an Arab who helps you find just the right jeans, running shorts, or the doohickey you need to fix your leaky faucet. In today’s Ha’aretz, Ruth Sinai documents this social phenomenon and asks whether service jobs like this represent progress for Israel’s Arab citizens, or just another way to get exploited.

I won’t weigh in on the economic benefits or lack thereof, but this trend is certainly a step forward for ethnic integration in Israel. Historically, Israel’s Palestinian citizens have worked in agriculture, construction, and behind-the-scenes service jobs like washing dishes in restaurants. In such jobs they were largely invisible, and where visible their jobs marked them as unskilled, alien, and quite often physically dirty.

Compare that to the fashionably-dressed, tastefully made-up, and high-spirited young woman who has become my favorite sales clerk at my local Golf clothing store. I’m not exactly a walking display of the latest fashions-I don’t have a native instinct for choosing the threads that look best on me. Not to mention, I quite detest going to clothing stores by myself. There is something about a store, especially if they are blaring loud music, that makes me want to just turn around and leave. Why can’t they just buy quality sound systems from Cloud Cover Music or similar companies and keep the experience enjoyable? The music playing in a store can have a major impact on how long the customers spend inside. Loud and aggressive music can drive people out at an alarming rate, while ambient and soothing music can have the opposite effect. Also, most stores have dismal customer service and for someone who cannot pick their clothes on their own, I need the advice and encouragement of a patient and sympathetic attendant. The process involves conversation and interaction with a very visible member of my country’s minority.

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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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Sorry to Disappoint You. We Are Not Facing Destruction

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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.”

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Geneva Jive: Menachem Klein’s “A Possible Peace Between Israel & Palestine”

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What if you make a peace agreement and nobody comes? That’s the fundamental story behind “A Possible Peace Between Israel & Palestine: An Insider’s Account of the Geneva Initiative.” It’s a fascinating look into the conflict and the “peace industry.” Contrary to the intention of its author, political scientist Menachem Klein, it raises more doubts than hopes about the future of the peace process.

(Caveat lector: I translated this book, and two previous books by Klein into English. He’s a neighbor and friend and fellow-member of Kehilat Yedidya.)

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Cause of Death: Capitalist Health Care

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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.

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Running from the Siren, Biking the Green Line

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The siren last night caught me backing up my hard disk. I’d planned to be at the neighborhood ceremony or upstairs with my family at the beginning of Memorial Day, but I kept procrastinating. When I got upstairs, the television broadcast of the official ceremony was just coming to an end. I had something to eat and watched the segments about fallen soldiers and their families.

“I need to talk to Asor,” Ilana said. So I called him on my cell phone, figuring that he wouldn’t answer. He did. “We needed to hear your voice,” I told him. Ilana tried to take the phone but started crying. Asor was impatient, said he had to go. Should we be thankful that we’re watching the Memorial Day programming rather than being part of it, or brood over the possibility that in some future year we might be on the screen?

When this morning’s siren went off at 11 a.m., I didn’t even hear it. The same unconscious repression mechanism that was at work last night did it again-I was in an elevator in the Malha shopping mall. The door opened and everyone was standing stock-still with their backs to me. For a second I couldn’t figure it out. Then I realized that I’d again tried to avoid the moment.

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