Let’s Not Even Pretend Any More

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Gershom Gorenberg My new article is up at The American Prospect: The decision broke with a policy that Israel has held for 20 years: no new settlements will be established. Right-wing Israeli governments, in particular, have broadcast that policy as part of their international PR efforts. Yet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his most senior … Read more

Benzion Netanyahu’s Legacies

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new piece is up at the Daily Beast:

Honesty is difficult, perhaps distasteful, in talking of man just now dead. Honesty nonetheless requires saying that Benzion Netanyahu would be briefly eulogized as a historian, and more briefly recalled as a footnote to forgotten Zionist rivalries, were it not for his other legacy: the son whose politics, view of history, and resentments he shaped.

Netanyahu, who died Monday at age 102, was a specialist in the history of the Jews of Spain. In his books, he asserted a revisionist thesis: Spanish Jews converted to Christianity willingly, not under duress. Their willing assimilation did not reduce their neighbors’ hatred of them. The Inquisition’s pursuit of conversos was not based on religion, nor was Spain’s expulsion of Jews who remained Jewish. Both persecutions expressed economic resentment and racial hate toward Jews. And, he wrote, “Just as the Jews of Germany failed to foresee Hitler’s rise to power… so the Jews of Spain failed to notice… the mountainous wave which was approaching to overwhelm them.”

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Never Before v. Never Again (Professorial Pride Dept.)

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My former student Sumit Galhotra has an excellent piece up at HuffPo on marking Armenian remembrance day in Jerusalem:

JERUSALEM — As dusk settled over the Old City one evening recently, Noemie Nalbandian stepped into the dimly lit cathedral of St. James in Jerusalem’s Armenian Quarter. Hundreds of oil lamps hung from the vaulted dome like an army of parachutes in the evening sky. In one corner, Nalbandian lit a candle, performed the sign of the cross, closed her eyes and offered a prayer.

St. James is the center of Armenian life in Jerusalem. Each year on April 24, Nalbandian and hundreds of other Armenians living in Israel gather at the cathedral to commemorate the Armenian genocide. After prayer services, they march to the Turkish consulate singing songs and holding posters demanding that the Turkish government recognize the mass killing of 1.5 million Armenians living under the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1923. No Israeli officials were expected at the commemoration; indeed, the Israeli government is itself an unmentioned target of the protests since it, too, refuses to recognize the Armenian genocide.

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Other Nights — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

illustration by Avi Katz

“This night is no different from other nights,” says Pharaoh, “True, on previous nights I have had a son, and on this night I do not. But this is not relevant to what I must do now.”

“This time sounds different from other times,” says Mozart, “for in previous times I did not have a son, and now I do.”

What time is it? I write this two days before the Seder night. It will reach its readers a few days before Memorial Day for Israel’s fallen soldiers.

It is not a good time, I tell the friend who sits down next to me on the row of chairs outside the sanctuary. I have a glossed Haggadah open on my lap. I am trying to prepare for this year’s Seder, to think of how to retell, once more, the Exodus from Egypt and the crossing of the sea. Pesach is next week and my son Niot, who was a soldier, will have been dead for a year. The earth has circled the sun a single time since the last Seder, which was the last night he was with us. We are cleaning and preparing once more to eat matzah and bitter herbs and tell again the story of how we came out of Egypt. Two and a half weeks later we will again remember the fallen soldiers. But this year is different, for there is a newly fallen soldier to remember, and he is my son.

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Chill. The Jews Aren’t Voting Republican.

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Faith-based policy, nativism, and Ayn Randian economics will not create a Jewish electoral shift.

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect.

Forecasts of the Great Jewish Shift began as soon as the presidential campaign did: This year, we are told, Jews will finally vote Republican, or at least significantly more of them will than have done so in many a decade, perhaps forever. The predictions are a quadrennial ritual. They are made most often by Jewish Republicans, speaking in the bright voice of a compulsive gambler who knows that on this spin, the little ball will absolutely land on the right number. They are made by social scientists certain that reality will finally behave according to their models. They are made by Jewish Democrats as unable to control their anxiety as someone is to stop a tic. This year’s minor variation is the explanation that Jews will switch because they are upset with Barack Obama’s attitude toward Israel.

As an Israeli political writer, I admit, I am particularly conscious of this ritual, because the Great Jewish Shift (GJS) is the second thing that people want to discuss with me as soon as I get off the plane in America, after they ask me if Benjamin Netanyahu will bomb Iran and before I have put down my suitcase. I do not know if Netanyahu will bomb Iran; he does not tell me such things. However, I submit that there is considerable public evidence that the GJS will not happen this year. A newly released survey of American Jews provides the latest data. History and the Republicans’ demonstrative cluelessness about Jewish voters provide more.

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Bibi as Pharaoh

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To distract attention from his economic policies, Netanyahu blames the victims

Gershom Gorenberg

My new Daily Beast piece is up:

Spring in Israel this year brings not only Pesah but a whiff in the air of renewed economic protests, like those that swept the country last summer. Activists believe that after a long winter of empty government promises, they can bring Israelis back to mass demonstrations. On the eve of Passover, Benjamin Netanyahu previewed his strategy for coping with popular anger: Turn it against social outsiders. Exploit prejudice. Learn from the European far right, or from Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman or perhaps —in the spirit of the season—from Pharaoh.

In a pre-Pesah interview to Ha’aretz, the prime minister referred to the poverty among Israel’s Arab and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, and then asserted, “The middle class that went out to the streets feels that it’s paying for the two sectors I mentioned… They’re not always wrong.” (Hebrew text)

'People before Profits'
'People before Profits' Jerusalem, July 2011 (Gershom Gorenberg)

Let’s parse this. Last July, a few young Israelis, organizing through Facebook, started a tent encampment on the center island of a Tel Aviv boulevard. By August, one out of every 20 Israelis marched on the same night against the government’s economic policies—the equivalent of Occupy Wall Street bringing out 15 million Americans out to demonstrate.

According to the prime minister, those protesters’ unhappiness was aimed at Arabs and ultra-Orthodox Jews—or at least it should be aimed at them for freeloading while the middle class works. So please, protesters, stop chanting, “What’s the answer to privatization? Revolution!” Don’t demand to know why state-owned companies ended up in the hands of a small cadre of oligarchs. Stop noticing that the country that once had the lowest rate of inequality in the West now has one of the highest, nearly matching America’s. Don’t use the expression “piggish capitalism,” with the connotation of treif, for Netanyahu’s dogmatic neoliberalism. Just blame Arabs and the ultra-Orthodox. 

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The Bitterness of Egypt, in Memory of Niot

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Haim Watzman My thoughts on the significance of the bitter herbs, on the anniversary of my last night with my son Niot, appear in this week’s “Shabbat Shalom,” the weekly Torah portion sheet put out by Oz VeShalom/Netivot Shalom. It’s available in both Hebrew and English Thanks to Kaddish Goldberg of Tirat Tzvi for giving … Read more

The Niot Project / “בנאות למידה”

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Haim Watzman

Dear Friends,

This coming week, during the Pesach holiday, we will mark the first anniversary of the death of our son Niot z”l. Niot, a soldier in the IDF’s Golani Brigade, was killed in an accident. We miss him very much.

In Niot’s memory, his family has established, in cooperation with the Society for the Advancement of Education, the Niot Project to help teenagers with learning disabilities and ADHD. We have prepared a brochure explaining the project, and more detailed information is available on the Society for the Advancement of Education website.

We would be pleased to have your support for this important project. Donations may be made in the following ways:

In the USA: Tax-deductible contributions to the Niot Project can be made by making out a check to “PEF Israel Endowment Funds Inc.” and mailing it to 317 Madison Avenue, Suite 607, New York, NY 10017, USA, with a cover letter indicating that the donation is for The Niot Project, at the Society for the Advancement of Education, Jerusalem.

In Israel: Tax-deductible contributions to the Niot Project can be made through either of the following routes:

By mailing a check made out to the Society for the Advancement of Education (Address: P.O. Box 16252, Jerusalem 91162, Israel).

Donations may also be made on-line (choose the Niot Project button).

Wishing you a happy Pesach,

The Watzman Family

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Does the Court do Justice, or Legitimize Injustice?

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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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Draw the Line, in Green

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new piece is up at the Daily Beast:

One day in the late 1980s, my wife and I visited a staffer at the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem for an off-the-record conversation. The walls of his office were decorated with large maps produced, he mentioned, by the CIA. One showed the West Bank, with the border between it and Israel precisely depicted. Our careful journalistic distance from the interviewee evaporated. We shamelessly begged him for a copy, which he politely gave us.

It was a treasure. In those days, the Israeli government had a near-total monopoly on mapmaking in the country—and government maps never showed the Green Line, the border between Israel and occupied territory. The Internet’s instant access to alternative maps was still in the future. To the best of my memory, so were the commercially published Israeli road atlases that today show the border in a barely noticeable gray. Even members of parliament weren’t always sure if a new community was inside Israel or was a West Bank settlement.

I point this out, firstly, to lay to rest any notion that erasing the Green Line is a recent or accelerating phenomenon. It’s not. Bibi Netanyahu did not initiate the cartographic cover-up, nor did his predecessors in the rightwing Likud. Nor was it inspired by the messianic fervor of religious activists, much as some Israelis would like to blame them for all the ills of the occupation.

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Join Me at the J Street Conference

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Gershom Gorenberg I’m at the J Street conference today and tomorrow and will be speaking at three events: My talk on The Unmaking of Israel today at 1 p.m. The panel on “Jewish Extremism and the Politics of Religion in Israel” today at 2:15 The panel on “One-State, Two-State” Monday at 9 a.m. I’ll be … Read more

Spring — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

Dani held his coffee glass up to the sky. The residue the Turkish coffee grounds left on the sides filtered the rays of the late March sun like a gossamer veil that brings to light precisely what it hides.

Nuriel, Dani, and I were on our bellies on the top of a desert hill come to life for a brief week or two after a late and south-wandering thundershower. We lay on velvet-red poppies with voluptuous black irises and brassy-yellow mustard flowers watching two formations of our platoon converge from the west and south on the slopes of the next hill over. That hill, guarded by evil-eyed cardboard cutouts of Syrian soldiers, was ours to conquer. Nuriel, Dani, and I were the fire team meant to keep the paper riflemen’s heads down with high-intensity machine gun and mortar fire until the two attack forces were positioned to make their final run toward the defensive positions. Nuriel’s arm, its spare dark down glistening, was draped over his MAG machine gun. Dani’s much thicker elbow rested on a pack full of assorted charges for his 60mm mortar. I was the team leader. The platoon had done a dry run of the maneuver an hour before and now the live fire version was beginning. But the formations were still far off and we awaited our lieutenant’s order to begin the barrage. So we had taken the opportunity to make a round of coffee on Nuriel’s camp stove.

illustration by Avi Katz

Nuriel, a baby-faced kid new to our unit, just six months past his three-years stint in the Givati Brigade, was explaining to us why he had felt compelled to tell Merav, to whom he had just gotten engaged, that he first fell in love with another woman on a flower-strewn hill like this one during his first furlough after basic training.

“My friend Mendy and I were hiking a trail on Mt. Meron in the Galilee,” he told us, “and we saw two spots of white on a boulder. We got closer and saw that it was two girls in linen shirts washing their faces in a spring that spurted out from the side of the mountain into a large pool.

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