Gershom Gorenberg

A Response to +972’s Joseph Dana and Noam Sheizaf

by
The following is a response to two pieces that appeared at +972, and is cross-posted there. Links to Dana’s and Sheizaf’s pieces appear in the body of my reply. Dana’s reply to me is below, followed by my reply to him, which is not yet up at +972.  

I’ve recently read Joseph’s piece mentioning me and Noam’s piece responding to my book excerpt in Slate. Out of respect for +972 and its readers, and surprise at the imprecision of both these posts, I’m taking the time to respond.

First, regarding Joseph’s piece, “A Sad Commentary”: In the course of criticizing an article by Bernard Avishai, Joseph, you also refer to a recent column I wrote in the American Prospect. Brief as the reference is, it includes two errors.

Read more

Letter to a Progressive Jewish Friend in America

by

Gershom Gorenberg

Excerpts from my new column at Hadassah Magazine:

Dear L——,

Please don’t give up on Israel. And please give me a chance to explain before you hit the delete button.

I know, your last e-mail virtually asked me not to write this one. You said that you were tired of news about growing West Bank settlements, stalled peace negotiations and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s bellicose statements. Your daughter says the campus debate between anti-Israel and pro-Israel groups is too shrill to bear. You would prefer to focus your progressive political energies on issues close to home. When I write, you implied, I should stick to updates about my kids….

Read more

Why Egypt Matters

by

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

The women banter with the soldiers and get through the checkpoint carrying bombs in their handbags. We see them in black and white, which sharpens the lines in their faces and shows their fear more starkly. They arrive at their target. One enters a restaurant. The camera pans the people eating as she pushes her bag under the counter and leaves. As individuals, the victims are innocent, but seeing the world from the camera’s perspective has already told us that the explosion that will rip them apart belongs to revolutionary necessity.

This is a sequence from The Battle of Algiers, the classic 1966 drama about the uprising that drove France from its central North African colony. The film is worth watching again this week, when the Egyptian revolution is back in the center of the news, precisely because Egypt has not followed the Algerian script. Comparisons with the past matter because they underline that so far, history is not repeating itself in Cairo. And this is just part of why the reshaping of Egypt, tarnished and volatile as it may seem, is still so terribly important to the Middle East, and why the revolution turning oppressive would be a tragedy for the entire region.

Read more

Peace Mosque; Gentrifying Mumbai Slums; Women Breaking Glass Walls (Professorial Pride Updates)

by

Gershom Gorenberg Another happy opportunity to showcase the work of my erstwhile students, who have been producing fantastic work (even if I’m a bit late in posting some of it): “The battlefront that I see is not between Islam and the West or Muslims and America but between all of the moderates and all of … Read more

Why Are They So Angry?

by

Gershom Gorenberg

My latest column is up at The American Prospect:

“He’s lying! He’s lying!” the man at the back of the hall shouted, in a tone as desperate as it was angry. “He hasn’t read the Geneva Conventions. You haven’t read them, so you don’t know he’s lying.”

The primary object of his rage was me. The secondary object, it seemed, was his fellow congregants, who’d allowed me to lecture at his New York-area synagogue. I’d spoken about threats to Israel’s democracy, including those posed by ongoing expansion of West Bank settlements. This was the first time, I’d been told, that the congregation had hosted a speaker on Israel from outside a spectrum running from right-wing to very right-wing. During the question-and-answer period, I was asked about my statement that the legal counsel of Israel’s Foreign Ministry had warned before the first West Bank settlement was established that it would violate the agreement of the Fourth Geneva Convention. That’s when the man in the back came unstuck. The congregation’s rabbi, who was moderating the Q&A session with the trained calm of a psychologist running group therapy for fractured families, slipped to the back of the room and talked him down.

The incident stayed with me, demanding to be decoded. True, the particular synagogue was Orthodox, and more Orthodox Jews espouse hawkish views than do members of other Jewish denominations. But I’ve been lecturing around North America for three weeks, and the experience fit a pattern. I’ve been told repeatedly that it’s a breakthrough for a congregation to invite someone with my views, which back home in Israel register as well within the political mainstream. On previous trips to America, I’ve faced similar outbursts in non-Orthodox synagogues and on college campuses.

Read more

Reestablish Israel

by

Day 3 of Slate’s ‘The Unmaking of Israel’ Excerpts

Gershom Gorenberg

Slate has published a third excerpt from my new book The Unmaking of Israel. You can also read Monday’s excerpt, with groundbreaking new evidence showing that Israel did not plan the expulsion of its Arab population in 1948, and yesterday’s, on how the secular state of Israel created ultra-Orthodoxy as we know it.

I write from an Israel with a divided soul. It is not only defined by its contradictions; it is at risk of being torn apart by them. It is a country with uncertain borders and a government that ignores its own laws. Its democratic ideals, much as they have helped shape its history, or on the verge of being remembered among the false political promises of 20th-century ideologies.

What will Israel be in five years, or 20? Will it be the Second Israeli Republic, a thriving democracy within smaller borders? Or a pariah state where one ethnic group rules over another? Or a territory marked on the map, between the river and the sea, where the state has been replaced by two warring communities? Will it be the hub of the Jewish world, or a place that most Jews abroad prefer not to think about? The answers depend on what Israel does now.

For Israel to establish itself again as a liberal democracy, it must make three changes. First, it must end the settlement enterprise, end the occupation, and find a peaceful way to partition the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. Second, it must divorce state and synagogue—freeing the state from clericalism, and religion from the state. Third and most basically, it must graduate from being an ethnic movement to being a democratic state in which all citizens enjoy equality.

Read more

The Invention of Old-Time Religion

by

Day 2 of Slate’s ‘The Unmaking of Israel’ Excerpts

Gershom Gorenberg

Slate has just posted another excerpt my new book The Unmaking of Israel – this one on how the secular state of Israel created ultra-Orthodoxy as we know it. You can also read yesterday’s excerpt, with groundbreaking new evidence showing that Israel did not plan the expulsion of its Arab population in 1948.

The Unmaking of Israel goes on sale in bookstores today. I’ll be lecturing Wednesday night in Boston, and Thursday night in Brooklyn.

I’m standing in the Kerem Avraham neighborhood of Jerusalem. Across the street is the stone-faced building where Israeli novelist Amos Oz grew up in a small ground-floor apartment. Back then, in the 1940s, Kerem Avraham was home to “petty clerks, small retailers, bank tellers or cinema ticket sellers, schoolteachers or dispensers of private lessons,” as Oz writes in his memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness. They observed the last vestiges of Judaism—lighting Sabbath candles on Friday night, attending services on Yom Kippur—and avidly argued fine points of secular Zionist ideology.

While I stand on the street, a flock of teenage girls walks by, dressed in blue blouses buttoned to the neck, pleated skirts, and high socks, so that no skin besides their faces and hands shows. A family passes, the husband in a circular, flat-topped black hat, his wife pushing a stroller, three more children younger than age 6 walking with them. The mother wears a wig, the common method for haredi (ultra-Orthodox) married women to hide their hair in modesty. On a cross street, I pass a kollel—a yeshiva where married men receive small salaries to study full-time.

Kerem Avraham today is one neighborhood in the haredi belt of northern Jerusalem, a land of wall posters denouncing television, Internet, and rival religious factions; of life-long Torah study for men and countless pregnancies for women; of schools that provide scant preparation for earning a living and no preparation at all for participating in a democratic society. The neighborhood began changing in the 1950s, after the rebellious young Oz moved to a kibbutz, which he left many years later.

Less than a mile from Amos Oz’s childhood home is an apartment development put up several years ago for better-off haredim. The nine-story buildings surround a courtyard with a playground that is crowded with children in late afternoon. Underneath the buildings is a three-level parking garage, with small storerooms along the sides of the half-lit concrete caverns. The storerooms, a standard feature of Israeli apartments, belong to the residents who live above. But some of the small rooms have doorbells, names on the doors, water meters, and high windows looking into the dark garage. I hear the voices of a couple inside one, and an infant crying. Outside another is a metal rack on which laundry is drying. They’ve been rented out as apartments to young haredi families who can afford nothing else.

The picture above ground is of a thriving community. Beneath the surface one can see one part of the price being paid by the haredim themselves, and by Israel as a whole, for the peculiar development of ultra-Orthodoxy in Israel.

Read more

Did Israel plan to expel most of its Arabs in 1948?

by

Gershom Gorenberg

An excerpt from my new book, The Unmaking of Israel, now up at Slate, brings new evidence that recasts the story of 1948. Additional excerpts will be appearing tomorrow and Wednesday.

The most basic question about Israeli democracy has existed from before its birth: What would be the status of Arabs in a Jewish state? The answer is riddled with contradictions.

On the surface, the partition of Palestine approved by the United Nations in November 1947 offered a straightforward way to deal with two national groups claiming the same territory: Each would get part of the land. The problem with that solution was the same one faced in drawing borders between nation states in Europe after both world wars, or in partitioning the Punjab between India and Pakistan in 1947. No clean geographic line separated the groups that were to be divided. They lived among each other. The U.N. plan for Palestine gave 55 percent of its territory to the Jewish state and 40 percent to the Arab state, with Jerusalem as an international enclave. In the area designated for the Jewish state lived 500,000 Jews and 450,000 Arabs. Another 100,000 Jews lived in Jerusalem, and a small number in scattered communities in the land assigned to the Arab state.

Given those numbers, and given what happened to the Palestinian Arabs in 1948, it is easy to conclude that the founders of the Jewish state adopted a policy of expulsion and proceeded to carry it out. The conclusion, however, suffers from the fallacy of intent—assuming that if things turned out a certain way, someone planned it that way. More subtly, it fails to distinguish between political mood and explicit policy.

Read more

Condi the Zombie Killer

by

And News From the Road

Gershom Gorenberg

Greetings from New York. I’ll be speaking tonight at Mechon Hadar on the Upper West Side and on Saturday night at the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale. If you’re in the neighborhood, or who have friends who are, I’d love to see you and them. My new book, The Unmaking of Israel, will be in bookstores next Tuesday, but if you come tonight, you can get an early copy.

Next week’s stops include Brooklyn, Boston and Michigan State University.

And in the meantime, my new column is up at The American Prospect:

She killed the lie, I thought, as I read Condoleezza Rice’s semi-revelations about the Israeli-Palestinian peace deal that was really almost nearly reached three years ago.

The lie says that Israel’s then-prime minister, Ehud Olmert, offered everything the Palestinians could possibly expect, and Palestinian Mahmud Abbas said no because he isn’t interested in peace. Rice was secretary of state at the time and seems to have believed in peacemaking, despite serving under George W. Bush. In her new memoir, she confirms an account of why peace slipped away that fits evidence and logic much better than the lie does.

Read more