Gershom Gorenberg

Blessed Be the True Judge

by

With immeasurable sorrow, I must tell our friends that Haim’s son Niot has left this world at the age of 20.

Niot, who was on furlough from the Israel Defense Forces, passed away two days after a diving accident in the Red Sea waters near Eilat during Pesah. He was laid to rest last Sunday at the military cemetery on Mt. Herzl in Jerusalem.

I look for words to give to Haim and Ilana on the incomprehensible loss of their son, to Asor, Mizmor and Misgav on the loss of their brother, and my words seem impossibly small next to the consolation that friends wish we could give you.

At Haim’s request, however, I can post here selections from what he, Ilana, Asor and Misgav said at the graveside at the military cemetery on Mount Herzl.  Deep thanks to Jeffrey Green for his translations.

Haim’s Words

Niot, you were already a hero on the day of you were born with the umbilical cord wrapped around your neck.  From that day on, the Holy One never stopped testing you.  And you withstood every test not only like a hero but also with joy.  Never in my life have I seen such a calm hero, so happy with his lot.

Read more

The Fever Returns

by

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

The counterman at the snack-food shack called A Blast of a Kiosk spotted the ownerless valise next to the busy bus stop and called the police to report a suspicious object. While he was talking on the phone and simultaneously trying to shoo people away from the bag, the bomb went off, spraying the metal pellets that had been packed with the explosives.

The kiosk got its name after it was destroyed in an-early 1990s suicide bombing at the same spot, in front of the Jerusalem Convention Center, and then was rebuilt and defiantly reopened. That time, the owner was luckily late for work. This time, his brother-in-law, the vigilant counterman, sustained shrapnel wounds.

The blast on the grimy street was heard clearly more than two miles away by pedestrians in the gentrified German Colony. It took a moment to register what the sound meant. A Border Police jeep racing past the cafés helped jog memories. The bad old days were back, like malaria resurfacing after years of dormancy. For a second you don’t recognize the fever; then you realize you’ve been waiting for it, that you can’t actually believe it was ever gone.

This disbelief in a cure for the conflict is the achievement of the terrorists. It is also what makes them the unintentional allies of Israeli hard-liners, who likewise fear paying the necessary price to end the disease. Yet the one certain meaning of a bombing is that the infection will not go away by itself, that it must be treated immediately, that peacemaking is acutely needed.

Read more

Distress of a Salesman

by

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

Distress of a Salesman

Before he went into government service, Benjamin Netanyahu was a furniture marketing executive. His first public-sector job was as an Israeli diplomat posted in the United States, for which he spent much of his time promoting Israel’s image. His approach to politics was shaped by his experience as a salesman: You can sell people the product that you want to sell as long as the packaging is what the customer wants to buy. And when sales slip, boost advertising.

Judging from the Israeli prime minister’s sudden burst of marketing in recent days, Netanyahu believes his political product is deeply in trouble, both at home and overseas. He has launched a drive to rebrand himself as a successful — if underappreciated — moderate. To that, he has added a negative campaign against the Palestinian Authority leadership. The effort testifies that Netanyahu sees a recent drop in his polling figures as an omen, not a momentary dip, and that he is scared about deteriorating relations with Western governments. It also underlines his attitude toward the Palestinian government in Ramallah — as a competitor for Western sympathy, not as a strategic partner for making peace.

Netanyahu’s distress began showing at last week’s Cabinet meeting, where he chastised his ministers for not talking enough about the government’s achievements. “There are governments that talk and don’t act. This one acts and doesn’t talk,” one Hebrew press report quoted him as saying. The ministers, unfortunately, didn’t know what achievements he had in mind and asked for talking points. Netanyahu then asked Information Minister Yuli Edelstein to put together a list, according to leaks from unnamed Cabinet members. The same Cabinet scuttlebutt described Netanyahu as “frustrated” and “irritable and grumpy.”

Read more

Dalal: And Now for Some Good News

by

Gershom Gorenberg

Thanks and an apology are in order.

The thanks are to all those who donated to the Dalal Project, helping to fund Dalal Rusrus’s stay at Alyn Hospital, and to all those who contacted Israeli officials, helping to get Dalal’s parents permits to bring her from the West Bank to the hospital in Jerusalem. Extra special thanks are due to the people who helped coordinate what turned into a major organizational effort to make sure one three-year-old girl began the treatment she needs.

The apology is for my delay in getting back to you with an update. Travel, teaching and writing haven’t left me with any waking moments.

Dalal Rusrus, for those coming new to this story, is a Palestinian child from Beit Umar in the West Bank. She suffers from cerebral palsy and delayed development. Through a series of events I’ve described previously (first here, then here, and then here), she was invited for treatment at Alyn Hospital, the only pediatric rehabilitative facility in the region. The relatively easy problem that posed was paying for the treatment. The more difficult one, it turned out, was getting the necessary permits for her father and mother, Osama and Sunya, to enter Israel to accompany her.

The request for donations, here and elsewhere, brought a quick response from Israel and around the world, from Jews, Muslims and Christians. Much of the funding was handled administratively by the Tzedakah Committee at Kehillat Yedidya in Jerusalem.

After many long conversations with Civil Administration officials, Sunya and Osama got the necessary permits. The reasons for the initial refusals remain obscure. What’s clear from my conversations is that the level of journalistic and public interest surprised the officials, and increased their motivation to solve the problem. Activism worked.

Read more

Dalal Update

by

Gershom Gorenberg I want to thank everyone who has lent a hand to Dalal Rusrus and her family, by contributing funds for her care or by writing to military officials to ask about her parents’ permits to bring her to Alyn Hospital in Jerusalem. Today Dalal’s mother Sunya was given a one-day permit to bring … Read more

The Vengeance of the Occupation

by

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

I know that the Yiddish writer Sholem Asch didn’t intend his classic play, God of Vengeance, as an allegory about Israel and the impact of the occupation. The play was first staged 60 years before Israel conquered the West Bank. All the same, what’s happening in the Jewish state keeps tempting me to read Asch’s drama as an allegory.

In “God of Vengeance,” a character named Yankel Chapchovich in an unnamed Eastern European town runs a brothel in his basement while trying to bring up his daughter as a chaste Jewish girl on the floor above. To protect her purity, he installs a Torah scroll in his home. His plan naturally fails: There’s a limit to how much tribute vice can pay to virtue before the line between them vanishes.

Likewise, there’s a limit to how long a fragile democracy can maintain an undemocratic regime next door, in occupied territory, before democracy at home is corrupted. A border, especially one not even shown on maps, cannot seal off the rot.

Read more

Saving Dalal

by

Gershom Gorenberg

At 10:03 on Monday morning, Osama Rusrus phoned from Beit Umar in the West Bank with wonderful news:  His wife Sunya and daughter Dalal had crossed through the checkpoint into Jerusalem, on their way to Alyn Hospital.

It took nearly two months of wrangling with the Israeli authorities, especially the agency that never signs its name, and it was touch and go till the last moment.

Before I tell the story, let me note that this is just an early chapter. The next chapter is getting Dalal the full treatment she needs at Alyn, in order to allow her to live as fully as a girl with brain damage can. Right now she is unable to walk, has use of one hand, and has a vocabulary of one word. Treatment, according to Dr. Eliezer Be’eri of Alyn Hospital, will allow her “to develop to her potential, whatever that is” and enjoy a greater quality of life. It will require a  lot of money. If you want to help, read on, or just skip to the bottom of this post for details.

Be’eri met with Osama and his daughter Dalal in October to give an initial assessment of her condition and of whether Alyn could help her. Dalal is three-and-a-half years old and has suffered since birth from brain damage that has drastically slowed her development. (An account of that meeting is here.) Neither Osama nor his wife Sunya were able to enter Jerusalem, so Be’eri performed that initial examination on the patio of the Everest Hotel outside Beit Jalla in the West Bank.

Be’eri’s assessment was that Dalal not only could benefit from treatment, but needed to begin quickly. He arranged for a multi-disciplinary examination at Alyn, and made sure it was scheduled as “urgent.” With Alyn’s letter, Osama requested a permit to enter Jerusalem.

Read more

Beware the Military-Religious Complex

by

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

Lt. Gen. Ashkenazi stood at a lectern last week wearing the kind of size XXL skullcap that is the social marker of Orthodox settlers, praising an army program that is the pride of Israel’s religious right. He looked slightly bashful. Ashkenazi, Israel’s military chief of staff, lives in a rather boring suburb of Tel Aviv, not a West Bank settlement. He’s not an Orthodox Jew, so he usually doesn’t wear a hat or skullcap, except for formal occasions when he puts on his military beret. As a military man, he’s officially not a politician. Then again, you don’t get appointed to head the Israel Defense Forces without a sharp sense of which way the political winds are blowing.

Before I get into the details, let me note several implications of this incident. It demonstrates, yet again, that when politicians create an alliance between the state and a religious movement, the outcome is lose-lose for both. In the strictly Israeli context, it shows the growing dependence of the army on soldiers and officers from the Orthodox right, whose commitment to implementing democratic decisions is a touch iffy. And a major reason for that dependency (I know this is a terrible surprise) is the ongoing occupation of the West Bank.

Read more

Shocking Cables Show that Bibi Manipulates Iran Threat

by

Gershom Gorenberg

All right, not so shocking. Anyway, with a bit of a delay, here’s my column on what the Wikileak cables say about Israel:

In January 1969, the labor attaché at the U.S. embassy in Israel sent a report classified “confidential” to the State Department. In it, she passed on the inside information on Israel’s ruling Labor Party that she’d gained by having an over-the-hill politician named Golda Meir over for dinner. Meir had said that then-Prime Minister Levi Eshkol would run for re-election that fall. “The tone of her remarks indicated that any other possibility was too ridiculous to consider,” attaché Margaret Plunkett commented. Eshkol’s health was “perfectly okay,” according to Meir. As for Meir herself, she’d only agreed under pressure from the party to run again for Knesset. The report would remain classified for at least 12 years.

Eshkol was actually terribly ill at the time. The ruling party’s inner circle had already chosen Meir as his successor. He died a month later. In those days, if you wanted to leak diplomatic documents, you had to copy them one at a time. Had a would-be whistle-blower at State stood over the photocopy machine after-hours, he would probably not have thought this one worth the extra seconds of his time. I have to wonder why anyone would consider it worth making a secret in the first place. To protect a source? If Meir had known that her comments could become public, perhaps she would have been more careful about fibbing. I doubt it, though. The only embarrassment for U.S. diplomacy in the memorandum is that the attaché was so eagerly misled.

Today, as the most recent WikiLeaks dump shows, it’s easier to copy a quarter-million documents than to sift through them for the interesting ones. (That’s also why Israeli whistle-blower Anat Kam allegedly copied 2,000 military documents, rather than a few.) The State Department has just followed young job applicants into the era of Facebook and cell-phone cameras: Anything you’ve ever said or done might be available online.

Read more

Freezing Netanyahu

by

Gershom Gorenberg

The Obama administration’s wild generosity to Bibi may not be quite what it appears, as I explain in The American Prospect:

“There must be more here than meets the eye,” friends and colleagues have been saying about the deal that Hillary Clinton and Benjamin Netanyahu reached for a new three-month freeze on West Bank settlement building. How could Clinton and her boss be willing to pay so much — 20 new F-35s, a guaranteed American veto in the Security Council on recognizing unilateral Palestinian independence — for so little? Surely Obama and Clinton must be up to something.

Actually, I’m beginning to suspect that they are up to something. But before I explain, two provisos. The first is that there’s a common psychological error among smart people: When they see other smart people doing what look like folly, they assume that a hidden, complex plan has got to be at work. Yet as historian Barbara Tuchman taught us, intelligent leaders do sometimes march, eyes wide- open, into folly, rendering moot all the complex rationalizations of how this dumb-looking act will lead to wonderful results.

The second proviso is that in diplomacy, there’s always more going on than reaches the headlines. The point of diplomatic leaks is to bend public opinion, not to let us in on the facts. That seven-hour meeting between Clinton and Netanyahu? In five or 10 years, when they write their memoirs, we’ll get selective, self-serving versions of what was said. In 30 years or so, the transcripts may be declassified. For a journalist, this is one more motivation to live a long time: One day, you’ll get to find out how completely you misread things.

With that nod to humility, let me return to the deal. Based on the latest unreliable reports, two parts of it are not quite what they seem: what the Obama administration has offered Israel and what the administration is asking in return. The combined significance of these two parts is that Netanyahu’s compulsive settlement building has him in a very tight spot.

Read more

Journey to Beit Jala: Border Crossing to Hope

by

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect.

Dalal rested in her father’s lap. She smiled but only said one word, ana, “I” in Arabic — her entire vocabulary at the age of three and a half. My friend Dr. Eliezer Be’eri, carefully felt her feet and ran his hand over her back. “Can she hold things?” Be’eri asked.

“She just started to with her right hand,” answered her father, Osama Rusrus.

“Does she pass things from hand to hand?”

“No. The other hand doesn’t function.”

The examination continued. A cool evening breeze blew across the patio of the Everest Hotel, a mountaintop pensione on the outskirts of Beit Jala in the West Bank. Beit Jala itself is in Area A, the part of the West Bank that is under full Palestinian Authority control and that is off-limits to Israelis by Israeli military order. Alyn Hospital, the Middle East’s only pediatric rehabilitation hospital, where Be’eri is a department head — is in Jerusalem, which is off-limits to West Bank Palestinians unless they procure Israeli permits. Our lives are fragmented by many borders in very little space.

Read more

Why Isaac Herzog is Talking About Fascism

by

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at the American Prospect:

Israeli Welfare Minister Isaac Herzog is normally a soporific politician. Dressed up in a suit, he looks and sounds more like a boy about to celebrate his bar mitzvah than like a Cabinet member. Asked for a sound bite on a controversial issue, he’s likely to answer with a tangle of equivocation. Herzog owes his senior status in the Labor Party to legacy — his father’s career in Labor concluded with 10 years as Israel’s figurehead president, his grandfather was Israel’s first chief rabbi — and to his proven willingness to support whoever’s in charge in the party. A key example: Last year he backed party leader Ehud Barak’s decision to join Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, over the objections of Knesset colleagues who recalled that Labor once had principles.

Herzog, therefore, is not a guy you’d expect to use the f-word when describing the country’s direction under that same government. But he did last weekend. “Fascism,” he said, “is licking at the edges of the camp, and we’re not paying attention to it. We’re on a slippery and very dangerous slope.” When Isaac Herzog talks about fascism, something serious has to be wrong.

Read more