Politics and Policy

Haim Watzman

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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Gershom Gorenberg

So Aunt Yardena from Rehovot skypes her nephew Jason in Boston.

“Jason,” she says, “why don’t you come visit? We’d all love to see you. The last time you came was before three years.”

“Three years ago,” he corrects her. “I wish I could. Get in some wind-surfing, see the whole family. But college is running around 100K a year these days, and Mom and Dad are still sitting shiva for their Madoff money.”

“Why should you pay for it? You want to be – how do you say frier in English, sweetie? There’s ads in the papers here. And on Youtube. From the Prime Minister’s Office, and the Jewish Agency. Young Jews are being lost to assimilation. Call us and give us their names, and we’ll bring them to Israel.”

“Yeah, I don’t know about this,” Jason says, a little hurt. “You know, I’ve been in Israel seven times. I go to the egalitarian minyan at Hillel every Shabbat, and I helped organize the Breaking the Silence exhibition on campus. I even have a name that begins with J. I’m not really assimilating.”

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new article is up at The American Prospect:

Lest there be any misunderstanding: As an Israeli and a Jew, I don’t believe that the current government of Sweden is quasi-Nazi, that all Swedes are anti-Semites, or that I should boycott Ikea, the Swedish furniture firm. At the same time, to remove all doubt, I solemnly declare that I have never been involved in the international trade in organs for transplant. I do feel exceedingly silly bothering to make these denials. But they seem somehow necessary in light of the current Swedish-Israeli tensions, which are a product of egregiously incompetent journalism in a Swedish paper and equally irredeemable diplomacy by Israel in furious response.

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Gershom Gorenberg

Before I head off for the Galilee for the week, I’d wanted to give an award for statement in the past week’s Israeli news showing the least understanding of someone else’s motivation. Try as I might, though, I can’t break the tie between two contenders:

• Col. Ilan Malka, commander of the Givati Brigade, on Breaking the Silence’s publication of soldiers’ testimony on Operation Cast Lead in Gaza last winter: “I have a sort of feeling that they’re doing this out of some kind of evil.” (Yediot Aharonot, Aug. 4, 2009).

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column on the the U.S. Jewish establishment repeating Netanyahu’s misleading spin on East Jerusalem is up at the American Prospect:

Western communists, it was said in another era, took out their umbrellas whenever it rained in Moscow. I remembered that adage as I read a recent statement from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations that arrived in my inbox. The subject was the latest U.S.-Israeli flap over construction in East Jerusalem. No matter that the diplomatic thunderstorm appears artificial — deliberately engineered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to deflect the Obama administration’s pressure to freeze settlement activity. At the Presidents Conference headquarters in New York, the umbrellas were opened with alacrity. The statement is an uncritical repetition of Netanyahu government spin.

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Gershom Gorenberg

At the start of a new week, I’d like to award the best and worst discussions of history in the past week in Israel.

The best take on the past came from Yoram Kaniuk, writing at Ynet (in Hebrew and English translation). Kaniuk writes about the government’s intent to legislate against commemorating the Nakba and Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar’s plan to revise a history textbook for Israel Arab children to erase a sentence about 1948 war saying, “The Arabs call the war the Nakba – a war of catastrophe, loss and humiliation – and the Jews call it the Independence War.”

Kaniuk, who fought in the War of Independence, writes,

I remember the Nakba. I saw it to a much greater extent than the education minister, who apparently only heard about it. It was a harsh, merciless campaign of young soldiers who spilled their blood while fighting a determined enemy that was eventually defeated. Yet the enemy that was defeated is not a geometrical unknown, but rather, a people that still exists. Its parents and grandparents fought well. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have suffered so many casualties.

I was wounded in battle, but I believe that the education minister must educate our young people to be heroes by teaching them that this war had losers too, and that they too have a narrative. They don’t have the country that was theirs but they have a history… The Nakba fighters fought heroically, but we fought better.

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Gershom Gorenberg

My review essay on Paul McGeough’s book “Kill Khalid” and the history of Hamas appears this weekend in the Review section of The National, published in Abu Dhabi.

“When Israel occupied Jerusalem, I was 14,” Sheikh Jamil Hamami once told me. Hamami grew up in East Jerusalem. That week in June 1967, he had heard the promises on the radio that the Arab states would defeat Israel “in a few days, a few hours”. Instead came the Israeli advance. Hamami described the day that the Old City fell in a series of staccato images: “The black picture in my mind is seeing an Israeli soldier enter Al Aqsa… Near the Wailing Wall, I saw a soldier step on the Quran… A soldier told us it was forbidden to pray in Al Aqsa.”

Hamami later became one of the first leaders of Hamas in the West Bank, though he left the movement in 1995, believing that the time for “military action” had ended with the establishment of the Palestinian Authority. His jagged memories of June 1967 allude to two of the reasons for the Islamic revival in the occupied territories – and for the birth of Hamas, for that organisation’s ascendance as a rival to the secular nationalist PLO and for its position today as one of the two power centres of riven Palestinian politics.

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