Haim Watzman

Votes Are Not Enough–Hillel Cohen’s “Good Arabs”

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Haim Watzman

All too often, Israel’s supporters kill their cause with clichés. One of the most common and problematic of these clichés is the claim that Israel’s Arab citizens have always enjoyed full and equal rights because—and here’s the clincher—they vote for and sit in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset.

As Hillel Cohen shows in Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948-1967, my translation of which is to be published shortly, suffrage and representation do not in and of themselves guarantee a minority the rights that a democracy is supposed to grant to all its citizens.

In Good Arabs, Cohen continues the study he began in his previous book, Army of Shadows (see my earlier post Good Arabs, Bad Arabs) about the complex relationship between the Zionist movement and the local Arabs in Palestine. As in that earlier work, Cohen eschews the slogans long shouted by Palestinians and Israelis, rightists and leftists. He shows how both Israeli officials and leaders of those Palestinian Arabs who became inhabitants and citizens of the Jewish state adopted a variety of strategies in reaction to real and perceived threats and opportunities.

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Necessary Stories Live–On YouTube

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Haim Watzman With thanks to my daughter Mizmor, who filmed and edited, I offer this preview of my new “Necessary Stories” program. It includes selections from four of the stories. For more on my speaking topics and availability, see my Speaking and Performance page. Am I really genetically smarter than my Sephardi wife? Find out … Read more

Save the Pool

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Haim Watzman I haven’t been blogging because I’m busy saving the Jerusalem Pool. This venerable and unique South Jerusalem facility is in danger of being closed down and turned into a parking lot by a developer. I work out at the pool daily and it’s been an inspiration to me as a writer, too (see. … Read more

Red Briefs and Rain Ink–“Necessary Stories” Column in The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

The dust rose so high to the sky that heaven and earth seemed to have reverted to a dull yellow primordial chaos. The engines of dirt-caked, drab army transports rumbled, the horns of master sergeants’ white vans honked. I stood, trying to be seen and heard, at the Fatma Gate in Metula, seeking a ride up to my base at Ana, in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.

As of early summer 1983, the IDF had been bogged down in Lebanon for a year. Rational procedures and clear rules had been drafted for transporting soldiers to and from and through the Cedar Republic, but like so many army regulations, few knew them, and no one obeyed.

The way to get from Metula to Ana was to stand as close to the gate as the military police would allow and hold out an arm. An occasional driver would notice the lonely soldier through the smokescreen thrown up by the Holy Land’s parched soil, take pity, and stop long enough to ask where I needed to go. More often then not, they were going somewhere else. I needed to be back at base by 3 p.m.; driving straight up from Metula, the trip took at least three hours. It was already nearly an hour before noon, and I was getting desperate.

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Baka Blights

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Haim Watzman

<em/>Photo by Zeevveez” title=”Bethlehem Road” width=”300″ height=”225″ class=”size-medium wp-image-1557″ /></a><figcaption id= Photo by Zeevveez
Baka’s a wonderful neighborhood. I’ve lived here for nearly 25 years, so it feels very much like home. That means that, as happens in homes, I tend to overlook some of its ugliness.

A physically ugly blight on the neighborhood is the huge dumpsters, overflowing with garbage, that stand on or by the neighborhood’s streets. These are especially unpleasant and unsanitary in Baka’s commercial areas, specifically along Bethlehem Road’s cafés, shops, and produce stands. In many cities, garbage disposal bins are located inside buildings or underground. Perhaps it’s difficult to get the garbage out of sight because of the neighborhood’s history, its narrow streets, and its old stone structures. The owners of the businesses along Bethlehem Road have resisted changes that would cost them money, even though the overflowing garbage bins (and the rats) must be deterring potential customers. Garbage disposals are not only outside but they are part of people’s home too, and when they overflow or break it can be incredibly frustrating to deal with, luckily homeowners can visit this site to set a home warranty plan, but it is not as easy for a general garbage disposal that the residents all use.

One moral blight on the neighborhood is the underage workers, most of them Arab kids, that one sees working in the stores and on the streets. These boys, many of them well under 16, should be in school; their presence at workplaces is illegal and wrong.

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Where the Extremes of Zionism and Anti-Zionism Meet

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Haim Watzman

Many of the comments on my post First Sheikh Jarrah, Then Baka?, here and at The Forward, constitute textbook examples of how the mere mention of Israel acts like a gravitational lens that bends the rays emanating from extreme Zionism and anti-Zionism until they merge into a single image.

Let’s take, as an exhibit on the anti-Zionist side, Phillips Brooks. Brooks argues that the land on which the state of Israel was created belonged to the Palestinians. Therefore, it is stolen. Therefore, Israel is founded on a crime. Therefore there is no difference between the land Israel took in 1948 and in 1967; it’s all stolen and held illegitimately and the Jews should return whence they came.

Now, that might sound like a voice of conscience to the unthinking. But if you think it through, it’s based on a concept of originalism that makes no sense in the real world. In other words, for Brooks’ logic to work, there has to be some particular point in history in which the world’s territory was divided up fairly between different nations. Then bad nations started conquering peaceful ones to gain territory. Peace and justice can be regained if everyone goes back to where they came from.

But of course there was no such point in history.

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First Sheikh Jarrah, Then Baka? — Op-Ed in The Forward

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Haim Watzman Mike Huckabee recently made a virulently anti-Zionist remark — and the Jews who accompanied him on his tour of East Jerusalem cheered. “It concerns me when there are some in the United States who would want to tell Israel that it cannot allow people to live in their own country, wherever they want,” … Read more

Lawlessness and Disorder–The Failure of Israel’s Police Force

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Haim Watzman

The most frightening piece in today’s Ha’aretz doesn’t appear on the newspaper’s website, in either Hebrew or English. It’s Gidi Weitz’s essay on how the police responded when a pal from his weekly soccer game got beaten up by some roughnecks who didn’t like where he’d parked his car.

There was no police response to speak of. The policeman who arrived a half hour later in response to Weitz’s call was uninterested, took some scratchy notes, and told Weitz’s friend that he could file a formal complaint at the police station. When the policeman left, the assailants threatened the friend that if he complained they would make his life miserable. As a consequence, the friend’s wife panicked and refused to allow her husband to file a claim. When Weitz convinced his friend to accompany him to the police station anyway, the cop on duty showed no interest. All this—beating, initial police response, and subsequent police apathy—took place in the presence of the friend’s 18-year old son.

Weitz’s piece appears in the midst of a wave of violent attacks and murders of Israeli civilians by other Israeli civilians. Dismembered bodies have been discovered in trash bins and a Tel Aviv father was beaten to death on the city’s beachfront promenade, in front of his family, by a gang of young men and women who had been drinking.

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My Big Fat Iraqi Hummus Joint–“Necessary Stories” from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

Hummus from Robobby's photo streamIlana’s got that look on her face.
“It’s August,” she says, “and all our friends are going to Corfu, Barcelona, and Antalya. But us?”
“If you wanted fancy European vacations, you shouldn’t have married a freelance writer,” I reply. Although, I have to admit there was something quite enticing about exploring the Island of Corfu in a rental car from e-mietwagenkreta.de.
“J.K. Rowling is a freelance writer,” Ilana observes, “and I bet she’s not vacationing in Baghdad this summer.”
“Who wants to go where everyone’s going?” I say. “Seasoned travelers know that the best spots are the ones no one’s discovered yet. Besides, don’t you want to reclaim your inheritance?”
“A burned-out store in the shuk? What good is that going to do me?”
“It may not be much now, but it’ll be prime downtown property in a few years when Iraq is a flourishing Western-style democracy and staunch Israel ally.”

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C.K. Williams Dusts It Again

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Haim Watzman

Sorry to have been absent from the blog this week—I’ve been busy trying to keep up with the comments on Gershom’s South Jerusalem History Awards post, which has set an all-time SoJo record. Pretty interesting debate, too (although I encourage Suzanne, Charlotte, Raghav and the rest to count to ten before hitting the send button—I’m gratified by the high quality of the discussion but could do without the pique).

I just want to flag a new poem by C.K. Williams, one of my favorite poets (as readers of my posts will know), at The New Yorker. It’s called Dust and it’s worthy pre-Shabbat reading.

I don’t have time to write in detail. But Williams’ image, that the stuff in his mind and heart, the stuff from which he composes his poetry, is dust, seems to me to play off two sources. The first Genesis 2:7 (and elsewhere in the Bible), where dust is the substance from which God fashioned man. We usually take that to mean that God made man (and woman’s) physical body out of dust, but Williams offers another reading.

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