Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

Office of Misrepresentations

I received an email this week from Israel’s Government Press Office (GPO) that begs to be read as commentary in the margins of Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress. In his speech, Netanyahu gave his  inflated figure for the number of Israelis living over the Green Line, said that most lived in suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and then asserted (emphasis added):

…under any realistic peace agreement these areas, as well as other places of critical strategic and national importance, will be incorporated into the final borders of Israel.

Netanyahu did not explain what he meant by “national importance.” But in Israeli politics, national usually refers to nationalism, to Jews as a national group. The implication was that places in the West Bank that are central to national identity because of their place in ancient Jewish history or myth, and so must remain under Israeli rule, even though they do not have any practical defensive value.

The email, sent this week, invites foreign correspondents to a tour of Hebron under the auspices of the GPO, which is itself part of the Prime Minister’s Office. It says that the guide will be David Wilder, without mentioning that Wilder is the English-language spokesman of the Jewish settlers in Hebron. “Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs Minister Yuli Edelstein will accompany the tour,” the notice says, adding that the first stop in Hebron will be:

10:00 – Tel Hebron (Tel Rumeida) – Historical & archaeological explanation; explanation of the living link between the Jewish People and Hebron as the basis of national and religious Jewish identity.

So the trip will be led by the representative of the Hebron settlers, and its point is to underline that Hebron is a place of “national importance” and part of the foundation of Jewish identity. Relinquish it, and we’ll all forget we’re Jewish.

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Gershom Gorenberg

My recent column for Hadassah Magazine on the Egyptian revolution and preserving peace with Egypt is now online.

The news came over the radio on a Thursday evening.

Indeed, if you were in downtown Jerusalem, the news blared into the street from radios turned to top volume in every café and falafel joint at the same time, as loud as the shofar of the End: Anwar al-Sadat, the president of Egypt, the enemy incarnate—the man who on Yom Kippur just four years before had launched a war that shattered Israel’s defenses and confidence and left it a country of bereaved parents, of war widows and of orphans too young to remember their parents—would be arriving at Ben-Gurion International Airport in 48 hours. He was coming to make peace.

If Israel Radio had announced that Martians were landing at Ben-Gurion that evening in November 1977, if it had announced that gravity would be repealed in the morning, the news would have done less to overturn Israelis’ basic understanding of the universe.

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

The film shows emails scrolling across a computer screen. Addressed to Peter Stein, director of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, they carry more venom than it seems mere pixels of text could contain. They accuse him of being an anti-Semite and of running an “anti-Israel hate-fest.” They include words like “Hitler” and ask if next year he will present a retrospective of Nazi film director Leni Riefenstahl’s work.

This sequence comes early in the documentary Between Two Worlds, which premieres later this month in New York. Stein’s offense during the 2009 film festival was showing another documentary: Rachel, about Rachel Corrie, an American activist killed several years earlier in Gaza by an Israeli army bulldozer as she tried to stop it from razing a Palestinian house. At the same festival, Stein also showed 36 Israeli movies as part of his effort to catalyze intelligent conversation of Jewish issues.

That didn’t save him from the hate letters or from the protests outside the Castro Theater when Rachel screened. For balance, Stein invited a representative from the right-wing group Stand With Us explain his objections before the screening began. A barrage of cat-calls from the audience interrupted the guest’s comments, as if to prove that silencing opponents is a game everyone can play.

Between Two Worlds, by directors Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow, portrays the internecine fury that has seized the American Jewish community. This is a periodic illness, a social auto-immune disorder in which healthy dissent—particularly regarding Israeli policy—sets off panicked accusations of perfidy.

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Gershom Gorenberg

My cover story in The American Prospect is now online:

Nadim Khoury watches as brown bottles march single file along the conveyor belt from the machines that sterilize them to those that fill them, cap them, and glue on labels reading, “Taybeh Beer. The Finest In The Middle East.”

Nadim Khoury at the Taybeh Brewery (Gershom Gorenberg)

Under his large graying moustache, Khoury has a small smile of entrepreneurial pride.

Patriotism brought Khoury and his brother David home to the West Bank village of Taybeh in 1994. They’d lived for years in America, where Khoury earned a business degree from a Greek Orthodox college, then studied brewing at the University of California, Davis. In the euphoria that followed the September 1993 Oslo Accord, they wanted to help develop the economy of what they thought would soon be an independent Palestine. Next to the palatial house their father built to help attract them home, downhill from Taybeh’s single traffic circle, they set up their microbrewery, with shining steel tanks for boiling malt barley with hops, fermenting the brew, and aging it. “I made history,” Khoury says. “I made the first Palestinian beer.” The firm’s advertising poster says, “Drink Palestinian,” and “Taste the Revolution.”

The revolution, though, has acquired a taste more bitter than hops. During the Second Intifada, tourism vanished and with it, beer sales in the hotels of Bethlehem, the West Bank’s most popular destination. Israeli roadblocks and checkpoints, intended to keep terrorists from entering Israel or attacking settlers, choked the movement of people and goods. At one point, Khoury says, the brewery was shipping beer through the hills to Ramallah, the nearest city, on donkeys.

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Gershom Gorenberg

I confess, I’m not a regular reader of Daniel Gordis’s blog. But an acquaintance thought I should read what Gordis – senior vice president of the Shalem Center – said last month when given the opportunity to address a visiting J Street delegation.

So I obliged, and read, and was truly struck by Gordis’s – let’s put this delicately – self-confidence. Invited by a group of visitors to present his political perspective and to hear theirs, Gordis was – shall we say – sure enough of himself to tell his hosts with firm certainty what they actually think.  Repeatedly, he attacked them for “arrogance.” And then, according to Globes reporter Vered Kelner (in Hebrew), he left without actually allowing them time to answer him. Not everyone would have that ability to teach about arrogance.

Here’s a bit of Gordis’s talk:

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

The settlement’s security man did not like us. He did not like the cameraman with his bulky gear, or the two documentary film producers who’d brought Dror Etkes and me to the outpost of Derekh Ha’avot south of Bethlehem, and he certainly didn’t like Etkes, an Israeli activist known for expertise on land ownership and for his legal challenges to West Bank settlement. The security coordinator wore civvies but bounced a bit on the balls of his feet in the spring-coiled posture of junior combat officers, or recently discharged officers.

“You can’t film in the neighborhood,” he told us. Neighborhood is a euphemism for an outpost, a mini-setttlement ostensibly established in defiance of the Israeli government but actually enjoying state support. Derekh Ha’avot — the name means “Forefathers’ Road” — is next to the veteran settlement of Elazar but outside its municipal boundaries. The security man worked for Elazar. Filming would be “a security risk. I don’t know a lot about security, but I know a little,” he sneered, meaning, I know a whole lot.

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Gershom Gorenberg

A few months ago, when Dalal Rusrus completed her two weeks of treatment at Alyn Hospital in Jerusalem and her parents were told to bring her back on May 30 for a follow-up visit, I had two opposite premonitions.

Logic said that after the weeks of wrangling with the Civil Administration in the West Bank to get her parents permits to enter Israel, after the diplomatic and journalistic and public pressure to let one small Palestinian girl get treatment for CP in an Israeli hospital whose staff was eager to help her –

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Gershom Gorenberg

From my new column in Moment:

… Why does Israel Bonds still exist in 2011? To broaden the question, do other classic Israeli fund-raising institutions serve a legitimate purpose anymore, at least in their present forms?

Don’t get me wrong. Giving isn’t obsolete. It’s great that Jews like to give. “Checkbook Judaism” is a problem when writing checks is the only expression of someone’s Jewish identity, but not when it’s part of a diversified portfolio of living by Jewish values. Overseas gifts to Israel’s nonprofit sector – from soup kitchens to symphony orchestras, human rights groups to universities – are a blessing for Israel and a bridge between it and the Diaspora. But some of the most prominent institutions channeling funds from world Jewry to Israel are past their expiration date.

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