Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

My preview of Netanyahu’s speech to the U.N. General Assembly is now up at The American Prospect:

… Returning to the U.N., Netanyahu is going back to an easier time in his life, when he did not have to worry about an unsteady coalition in parliament, constant resignations from his feuding staff, or hundreds of thousands of demonstrators opposing his economic policies. In comments to his cabinet this week, he said he would “represent… the truth” to an organization capable of deciding “that the sun rises in the west and sets in the east.” His truth, he said, would include “The fact that [Jews] are not foreigners … that we have rights in this country that go ‘only’ 4,000 years”—an argument not likely to convince U.N. delegates that the Palestinians do not also have a right to self-determination. Nor will his claim that “the Palestinians are doing everything to torpedo direct peace negotiations” erase his own refusal to stop settlement construction. His rhetoric, like his presence, fits the 1980s better than today.

Read more

Gershom Gorenberg

My new article is up at The American Prospect:

Dear Mr. Obama,

A clever person succeeds in climbing out of the hole that a wise one avoids falling into. So says a Hebrew adage often applied to national leaders. To my great sorrow, you have already missed the chance to respond wisely to the upcoming Palestinian bid for U.N. recognition. You still have a few days left to be clever. I desperately hope you use them.

Read more

Gershom Gorenberg

Earlier this month, the Israeli Supreme Court woke up from a deep slumber and issued an order to the government to evacuate the illegal outpost of Migron on the bypass road between Jerusalem and the Israeli settlements north of Ramallah. Migron, according to founder Itay Harel, was originally established on the hilltop in 1999. The settlers claim to have bought part of the land in 2004 from a Palestinian owner – but as Matti Friedman reported for AP in 2008,the claim rests on a document that the man purportedly signed and had notarized in California over 40 years after he died.

The Palestinian owners of the land on which Migron stands went to court in 2006, with the help of Peace Now, to demand that the government remove the squatters on their property.  Before the Court, the state admitted that the outpost was an egregious violation of the law but said it wanted to build a new neighborhood in a different settlement for the lawbreakers to enable a peaceful evacuation. The outpost settlers rejected that deal. If the Migron ruling achieved only moderate headlines, it was partly because March is a long way off and no one really believes the state will carry out the orders, and partly because the top acreage on newspaper and website front pages had already been seized by the growing economic protests of the July 14 movement.

In this morning’s Ha’aretz, defense reporter Amir Oren has a story saying the police have run out of patience with the tent city on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv and elsewhere around the country, and are preparing to dismantle them – if need be, by force.

Read more

Gershom Gorenberg

The question of the week last week was: Would the protests fade or grow? What would happen Saturday night? On Saturday night, the moment I got to downtown Jerusalem, I knew: The previous week’s demonstrations had been a warm-up act, a small-town band before the real show, merely a test of the amps and speakers.

In front of me on Ben-Yehudah Street, a woman wearing a headscarf and a man with a kippah were pushing their baby carriage  toward Zion Square – a family from the tribe of religious Zionists which, according to the usual unreliable reports, is not taking part in this uprising. A flock of scouts in khaki uniforms and kerchiefs from Modi’in – the most classically apolitical youth movement in Israel, from the absolute Pleasantville heart of Israeli middle-class ennui – were rushing up the street next to the blue-shirts from the classically leftwing Hashomer Hatzair and some teenage girls in jean skirts from Bnei Akiva, the kids of the religious right. There were more little children on shoulders or in carriages or walking, holding a parent with one hand and a sign with the other, more old people, more guys wearing skullcaps, more of the graying parents of the twentysomething protesters who’d been there the week before.  More people were drumming on snare drums and pots and anything that would bang. The crowd couldn’t fit into Paris Square near Bibi Netanyahu’s official residence anymore. The river had burst its banks. The torrent swept away the feeling of every Israeli for years, that it’s me, that it’s me who can’t get by, can’t work enough to pay enough, can’t remember what it felt like to feel good here.

And this was the Jerusalem sideshow to the much bigger demonstration in Tel Aviv.

And the craze isn’t just limited to Jerusalem. Go ahead and find your drum machine and you’ll soon start to discover the varied range of different drums, and how each drum is different can be tailored towards your musical talent. It’s no wonder Jerusalem are going crazy for it.

Add up the estimates of 300,000 in Tel Aviv and 30,000 in Jerusalem and more elsewhere and you come to this startling idea: one out of every 20 Israelis was on the streets demanding a better country Saturday night – the equivalent of three million people in France, four million in Egypt, 15 million in the United States. And those comparisons themselves shatter, because, as Ma’ariv’s NRG site reported, the police couldn’t possibly keep track of the crowd that broke down gates and overflowed into alleys and side streets. Or as a police source told the paper: “This is the biggest demonstration we’ve ever, ever faced. We’re seeing hundreds of cars that have simply been left on the Ayalon Freeway and people are walking to the demonstration.” And that’s besides the people who couldn’t get on the overpacked trains to Tel Aviv.

You know, I honestly do think something is happening here. I honestly do think that people have discovered something in themselves and in the faces next to them that they thought they’d lost, that they were sure they’d merely dreamed and gotten over in the morning while trying to get to work. I think that any reporting of what’s happening in Israel that doesn’t include the shocked reborn ebullience of the crowd has missed something. I’ve been in many angry demonstrations, more than I can count or remember. I can’t remember being in a crowd of people so happy.

Read more

Gershom Gorenberg

Excerpt from my new column at The American Prospect:

… Because the protests are a challenge to the entire political system, politicians have been absent from the list of speakers at demonstrations. On Wednesday, the new movement did suffer an old-fashioned parliamentary defeat: On a straight party-line vote, the Knesset ratified real-estate legislation championed by Netanyahu. The law purportedly cuts bureaucratic barriers to building housing—and in fact reduces citizens’ power to challenge developers’ plans. …

Then again, the fact that the opposition, including Tzipi Livni’s centrist Kadima Party, opposed the legislation as a bloc is a partial victory for the protesters. In the past, some of Kadima’s legislators might well have cast “aye” votes. Livni herself is a former corporate lawyer, and in her first political position oversaw privatization of government companies.

Today, many politicians are seeking the protesters’ favor. On Tuesday night, at a demonstration on the hill overlooking the Knesset building, I found two Kadima members of the Knesset standing in the shadows at the edges of the crowd, like high schoolers uncertain they had been invited to a dance. “Even capitalist America, whom we all respected, is in a state of economic collapse,” Knesset Member Shlomo Molla told me. “Why? Because it exalted the wealthy, it sanctified capitalism.”

Read more

Gershom Gorenberg

Foreign coverage – especially American coverage – of the rising social protest movement here continues to be sporadic and off-target. The mindset behind the media failure, let me suggest, is also what prevented a meaningful debate on economic policy in the United States before the national-debt deal.

‘For Sale: Country, Model ’48, in bad condition, for the wealthy only. For details, contact: Benjamin Netanyahu’ (Gershom Gorenberg)

Reports from here in the American press – when they appear at all – try to answer the wrong questions, such as: “What does this have to do with security, or the conflict with the Palestinians?” and  “Has the Israeli left been reborn?” Since I know some of the correspondents doing these stories, and I know that they are very sharp and very in touch with life here, I assume they are suffering from one symptom of the correspondent’s conundrum: You have to answer questions from an editor across the sea, who doesn’t get what’s going on and tries to fit it into the story he already has in his mind. You can tell him that he’s wrong, but then you won’t be able to do a story at all. So you answer his misplaced questions.

More basically, though, the news items give economic information, but don’t center on the basic issues that have suddenly become the topic of public debate: Is the government’s role to encourage business and a rising GDP, or to take responsibility for the welfare of the citizenry as a whole? Are we a society of individuals, or a collective? Why is it in Denmark it is so easy for the country to provide its citizens services like loans and financial assistance, while here in Israel we are left to fight for ourselves? The government has even sponsored initiatives like Eksperten.com which is a free website created by Danish PhD financial professionals and provides loan advice, how to get SMS loans (loans with your phone), kviklaan (quick loans), and more for free. I digress.

Read more