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Gershom Gorenberg

And this, too, at The American Prospect:

In the least plausible alternative version of my life, I would have stayed in the San Fernando Valley rather than leaving Los Angeles over 40 years ago and moving not long afterward to Jerusalem. In that scenario, I’d be represented in Congress by Democrat Brad Sherman—and I might be less infuriated by his recent announcement that he’ll vote against the Iran deal, because if I were an Angeleno rather than an Israeli, his decision wouldn’t pose a threat to me, my neighbors and my country.

At this distance of years and miles, I don’t normally pay much attention to an L.A. congressman, but a random tweet alerted me to Sherman’s statement. New York Senator Chuck Schumer’s declaration that he’ll vote against the accord made more headlines, and is even more upsetting, given the relatively greater weight of each vote in the Senate. In both cases, their statements barely mention Israel, but their explanations track Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s talking points for foiling the deal in Congress. You don’t have to be a cynic to suspect that Schumer and Sherman have devoted much of their study of the issue to their constituents and have concluded that voters who support the Vienna accord are a captive audience for a Democratic incumbent, while passionate opponents are swing voters and perhaps swing donors.

I imagine that Sherman, Schumer, and other Democrats who intend to vote against the agreement might respond that Netanyahu is, after all, Israel’s elected leader and therefore the accredited spokesman for its security concerns. But there would be a logical absurdity in that argument.

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Gershom Gorenberg

And this is now up at The American Prospect:

Mike Huckabee met reporters Wednesday at the Waldorf-Astoria on a campaign stop. This particular Waldorf-Astoria was in downtown West Jerusalem. Huckabee wanted to talk about Iran. The folks with microphones and cameras mostly wanted him to talk about his previous campaign event. That was a fundraiser at the Israeli settlement of Shilo in the West Bank—or as Huckabee insistently called the area, “Judea and Samaria,” which he said was part of Israel.

The journalists’ interrogation grew fiercer, and the ex-governor of Arkansas said time was up. As he made his escape, a foreign correspondent sitting strategically near the door asked: “Do you also think Gaza is part of Israel?” and another said, “Would you be the first president to abandon the two-state solution?”

“I’m not sure,” Huckabee replied to one question or the other. It was the most reality-linked response of a hallucinatory session. He was, in fact, clueless.

Jerusalem and Shilo, let us note, are certainly not part of the United States. But why should that bother a Republican presidential candidate? The GOP and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have, together, steadily blurred the border between Israel and America as separate polities.

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column (with some inspiration from Marx and Levinas) is up at Hadassah Magazine:

I was not just stir-crazy but screen-crazy. I was working on two computer screens—my laptop’s and the big one on my desk—and had my Kindle on my left and a document open on my tablet on my right, which made four screens, except when one of my kids texted me, when the phone made five.

Illustration by Christiane Grauert.

I got on my bike. It was late afternoon, with a light Jerusalem breeze blowing. I rode along the promenade that overlooks the Old City, up to where it narrows into a path between tall evergreens, and found a stone bench where I could see the golden Dome of the Rock between the branches. I often come to the same spot on Shabbat, on walks with my wife.

Relief. I inhaled the scent of the woods and thanked God for green.

Then I pulled my phone off my belt. The motion felt like an involuntary twitch of my hand. Anyone watching might have thought that I was checking a news site, but I knew that the screen came first; the choice of what to tap came after. I realized what I had done, looked at the rectangle of glass and plastic and stuck it back on the belt clip.

I thought, “This does not happen to me when I come here on Shabbat.”

I don’t use screens on Shabbat.

It has been such a short time since screens were bulky boxes that we only used at our desks. Then they got smaller and lighter. It is so convenient to be able to take a laptop anywhere—look at me! I can answer my boss while sitting on the porch—especially when the laptop shrank into a tablet and a phone.

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Haim Watzman

This dvar Torah is an English version of one that appears in this week’s issue of “Shabbat Shalom,” the weekly Torah portion sheet published by Oz VeShalom/Netivot Shalom. The Hebrew version can be found here . Its dedicated to the memory of my father and teacher Sanford “Whitey” Watzman, who left us one year ago in the month of Av.

The modern religious public grapples with any number of challenges that our forefathers were spared, and which Jews living in more closed communities seldom encounter. One of the most frequent of these is how to recite Birkat HaMazon, the grace after meals, when one leaves the religious community and goes out into the world. It can be a problem to find the appropriate moment to say this rather lengthy blessing without raising eyebrows or causing impatience among your companions. It’s a common dilemma when one eats with fellow-Jews who do not observe the mitzvah, and when one eats with people of other religions, such as those whose custom is to thank the Lord prior to the meal but not afterward. It is also a problem when one eats with people who do not believe there is anyone to give thanks to. In such situations, I can only agree with the king of Kuzar who asks his Jewish interlocutor if his faith’s system of blessings is not more trouble than they are worth. Is the mitzvah trying to tell us to simply avoid such multicultural encounters? Is that the best way to observe it?

It is polite to say thank you, but if that is all Birkat HaMazonis about, why does it have to be so long? Why isn’t it enough to express gratitude in one’s heart? Furthermore, set blessings, like set prayers, easily become reflexive rote recitations. On a day-to-day basis, even if one wants to keep it fully, Birkat HaMazonis not an easy task—that is, it is so simple both to say its words and mean what it means. Blessings, like prayers, are meant to be “the Temple service of the heart,” and as such are supposed to demand thought and introspection. But when your head is full of other thoughts it easily becomes mechanical.

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at Haaretz:

It was March 1968. Yaakov Herzog, director-general of the Prime Minister’s Office, received a memo marked “Top Secret” from the Foreign Ministry’s legal adviser, Theodor Meron. As the government’s authority on international law, Meron was responding to questions put to him about the legality of demolishing the homes of terror suspects in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and of deporting residents on security grounds.

His answer: Both measures violated the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention on the protection of civilians in war. The government’s justifications of the measures – that they were permitted under British emergency regulations still in force, or that the West Bank wasn’t occupied territory – might have value for hasbara, public diplomacy, but were legally unconvincing.

The legal adviser’s stance in 1968 is important today precisely because it is unexceptional. It’s the view of nearly all scholars of international law, including prominent Israeli experts.

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On the Migron ruling and ‘The Law in These Parts’

Gershom Gorenberg

My new article is up at The American Prospect:

This time, it seems, justice has won: The West Bank settlement outpost of Migron must be demolished. So ruled the Israeli Supreme Court this week.

Migron is the best known of the outposts, small settlements set up across the West Bank since the ’90s with the help of Israeli government agencies—but without the government approval required under Israeli law since official approval would drawn too much publicity. The outpost stands entirely on privately owned Palestinian property. The landowners, with the help of Israel’s Peace Now movement, went to court in 2006. In this week’s decision, the court rejected a government proposal to put off evacuating the settlers for three years until new homes could be built for them elsewhere. The ruling blasts the proposal as “egregiously unreasonable” in light of the “grievous and ongoing harm to the rule of law.”

Prima facie, the court upheld the rights of Palestinians over the government’s fear of enforcing the law against settlers. The Israeli judiciary reined in the executive; the system worked.

Or did it? Certainly court approval of the government’s proposal would have been much worse. Yet perhaps the ruling should be seen as part of a wider picture in which the Israeli courts have permitted greater injustices in the occupied territories. Perhaps an occasional Supreme Court ruling against government actions legitimizes the occupation before the Israeli public by making it seem subject to judicial oversight. Perhaps the word “justice” is hollow in the context of “occupation.” Those are questions that one can’t help asking after seeing the superbly disturbing new Israeli documentary, The Law In These Parts, an indictment of the legal system Israel created in the West Bank.

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

Ismail Haniyeh, prime minister of the Hamas regime in Gaza, may be Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s favorite Palestinian leader — a true ally, a blood brother. What they share is an all-or-nothing approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: either complete Palestinian rule over the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan or complete Jewish hegemony. Neither man is a totally immovable object — roped and dragged by an irresistible political force, either might agree to less than the whole land, but only in violation of his life’s central conviction.

Haniyeh reiterated his views on Sunday at a Gaza rally, expressing “great hope of bringing an end to the Zionist project in Palestine.” Netanyahu seized that comment as a gift from an ally and quoted it the next day in his own speech to the Knesset, using it as proof that “this is not a conflict over 1967; this is a conflict over 1948, over the very existence of the state of Israel.”

Let me add several bits of context: First, in Israeli political debate, “1948” and “1967” are misused as shorthand. If the key to the conflict is the 1967 Six-Day War and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip ever since, then agreement on a two-state solution is possible. It will be based on an Israeli pullback more or less to the pre-1967 borders and creation of an independent Palestine alongside Israel.

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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.

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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.

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