Are You Listening, Joe Lieberman?

by

Kudos to Rabbi Eric Yoffie, head of the Union for Reform Judaism, who has publicly spoken out against Jewish political cooperation with Christian Zionists, their most prominent organization – Christians United for Israel – and its leader, John Hagee:

The heart of Pastor Hagee’s message is to be found in these words: “Stop giving the land away. The land belongs to you. Keep it.”

…mainstream Christian Zionists are, by their own admission, not “”advocates” of Israel but “Biblical advocates” of Israel, and this means that they oppose any territorial concessions by the Government of Israel for any reason whatsoever. It follows that their vision of Israel rejects a two-state solution, rejects the possibility of a democratic Israel,

Read more

What Education Costs Us

by

Poor kids get worse educations and graduate from high school at lower rates than rich kids. That’s bad. What could be worse? The Bank of Israel’s annual report (not yet available on line, but here’s a report in today’s Ha’aretz) says that the education gap has remained virtually the same since 1992. We’ve made no progress at all.

Or Kashti writes there:

The study found that in the 2004-05 academic year, the proportion of students who earned a bagrut (matriculation) certificate was 25.5 percentage points higher in the two highest socioeconomic deciles than in the two lowest deciles. That is almost identical to the gap recorded in 1992-93 – 25.3 percentage points

Read more

Excuse me, Ariel isn’t in Israel

by

The Government Press Office was kind enough to send me a notice from the Municipality of Ariel:

Some 600 American Christian Zionists, led by well-known Evangelical leader, Pastor John Hagee, will arrive in Israel this week to express their support for Israel on the Jewish Homeland’s 60th year of Independence. One of the highlights of their visit will take place on Thursday evening, April 3rd in Ariel…

Read more

GDP = Greatly Diverting Propaganda

by

The problem with calculating a nation’s well-being via per-capita GDP:

…you and your friend are the only people sitting at a bar. Then Bill Gates walks in, and your friend states (correctly) that “The average person in this bar is a billionaire!”

That’s from The G-Spot, where Blogger Kathy G. (didn’t Dylan write a song by that name? and if not, why not?) has some fine riffs on inequality.

Measured by per-capita GDP, as I’ve noted, Israel is in superb economic shape. In reality, the Republic of Tel Aviv flourishes, while the rest of Israel languishes.

Kathy G. proposes

Read more

The Politics of Measurement: Miscalculating Public Health

by

Here’s an update in the value of doubt from veteran health journalist and muckraker (the word is a medal of honor) Shannon Brownlee, writing in the Washington Post:

Striking fear… serves pharmaceutical companies, which want you to worry about diseases, because people who worry are more likely to go to their doctors and ask for drugs than people who don’t. It turns out that much of what we — and our doctors — think we know about many health problems has been shaped by drugmakers and their marketers.

High anxiety happens to be good for the bottom line of some big corporations. But perhaps that money could be better spent

Read more

Our Children Will Repair What We Have Shattered

by

I live in a supposedly united city that in reality is fragmented. The average Jewish teenager in Jerusalem would not be able to name a major street in Palestinian East Jerusalem. The average Palestinian teen knows Israelis as Border Policemen in dark green uniforms. Arabic, supposedly a required third language in Jewish schools, somehow gets left out of the curriculum in many. Even where it’s taught, only a small number of kids take it long enough to be able to puzzle out a headline. Language is only a metaphor for the real chasm. Our children grow up in separate worlds.

Now for some hope:

Three years ago, my son went off to a summer camp called Face-to-Face in America. The delegation from Jerusalem included six Jewish and six Palestinian teens. There was also a delegation from Northern Ireland and one from South Africa, and a host group of American kids. They learned how to listen, how to understand that every date and every place in their history means something entirely different to people who live very near them.

There are a number of such camps (links below) that bring together Israelis and Palestinians on neutral ground. The people who run them are blessed with amazing faith: in an age of quarterly returns, they make the long-term investment of educating. If you’re young, I recommend applying. (Yes, adults have left you a broken world. Fix it.) If you have kids, get them interested.

Read more

Animated Identities

by

Check out the first installment of my new monthly column in The Jerusalem Report. This one’s about a visit to the animation program at Sapir College in Sderot, where my daughter Mizmor studies.

Boring Subversion

by

It’s out! The new issue of Ma’ayan, Israel’s most notorious literary magazine, lives down to its reputation. Here’s Dada without the humor, subway graffiti without the color. The prose reads like what you’d get if you transplanted George W. Bush’s brain into the body of Israeli anti-Zionist historian Ilan Pappe (I’m thinking of Bush’s wooden English style and cluelessness chimeraed with Pappe’s hysterical grandstanding and Hebrew kindergarten invective). Most of the poetry was, I suspect, written on Jerusalem’s infamous 15 (recently demoted to 13) bus, which wends its way irrationally and endlessly through streets that no one particularly wants to visit.

Read more

The Land of Asylum

by

This idea that Israel should offer asylum to non-Jewish refugees – how new is that? Some crazy concept thought up by secular Tel Aviv liberals with no concern for Israel’s Jewish character?

Actually, no. Just a bit older than that.

After my post a few days ago on the need for a new policy on African refugees reaching Israel, I got an email from my son, who’s now studying at Ma’aleh Gilboa, the yeshiva of the Religious Kibbutz Movement. He sent me a text from Sefer Hahinukh, an anonymous 13th century religious text

Read more

The Selfish Monk: Kim Ki-Duk’s “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter …and Spring”

by

The ancients asked a question we ask too seldom today: How can I live a good life? Not a happy, successful, or important life, but a good one? The answer the Korean director Kim Ki-Duk gives in his 2003 film, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter …and Spring is: live alone, in a house that floats in the middle of a lake that lies in a beautiful, deserted valley. Do not love, do not raise a family, do not seek out other human beings.

Read more

The Intellectual Defense Forces

by

If you want to bone up quickly on any subject ranging from molecular biology to gender studies to Maimonides, where do you go? If you’re lucky enough to be able to read Hebrew, you know where—you pop over to the nearest book store or library and dig through the booklets published by the Broadcast University.

Israel’s universities may be in decline and their humanities faculties heading for intensive care, but this is one bright corner, and the light comes, of all places, from the army.

Read more

Road to Annexation: The Paper Trail

by

Ethan Bronner’s article on Highway 443, the Israelis-only West Bank road, is now up at the New Yorks Times.

Bronner cites the documents first published at South Jerusalem, proving that the road was conceived from the start as part of settlement plans, contrary to what the government told the Supreme Court. As I’ve written:

…the road was planned in the mid-70s as part of a wider plan for Israeli settlement around Jerusalem. In turn, that plan reflected the original Allon Plan, drawn up by the-Labor Minister Yigal Allon in July 1967, immediately after the Six-Day War. The road’s purpose was to serve settlements and the eventual annexation of West Bank land to Israel. Everything else was purely a cover story…

My previous post on the subject, Lies, Damn Lies, and Supreme Court briefs, referred to the Yigal Allon’s July 1967 proposal to annex the area where the road now lies. Here’s the original document:

Read more