Candidates for Worst Political PR…

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Gershom Gorenberg

The Israeli political right is wont to argue that Israel’s only real problem is PR. We’re doing the all the right things; we’re the only real democracy in the Middle East; we want peace and the Palestinians don’t, they proved that in 1947 when they rejected the partition plan and – so goes this brand of kosher whine – we are terribly misunderstand. We need to make our case better. The complaint is sometimes echoed by the kind of “pro-Israel” voices abroad that fail to distinguish between supporting Israel and supporting the policies of the current government, destructive as they may be.

Well, if the government and its supporters want to prove that’s the problem, they’ll have to do a better job at PR than they’ve done in recent days. There are no candidates for best hasbarah (Heb. n.: information, PR, propaganda, bull); only candidates for worst. Readers of SoJo are invited to cast their votes.

  • Avigdor Lieberman’s Foreign Ministry angrily answered criticism from the four European representatives on the U.N. Security Council – Britain, France, Germany and Portugal. A statement by the four countries had blasted settlement expansion as standing in the way of “the two-state solution that is essential for Israel’s long-term security” and expressed concern about attacks by settlers on Palestinians. The Foreign Ministry’s response attacked the Europeans for “interfering with Israel’s domestic affairs, including on issues which are to be solved within the framework of direct talks”  between Israel and Palestinians. There are too many things wrong with this as hasbarah (Heb. n.: PR, propaganda, bull) to list here; I’ll mention just three:

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The Monster Rebels against Its Master

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

The mob numbered about 200 young and angry people. Some had covered their faces. They gathered on a West Bank road near midnight and hurled stones at passing cars. Israeli troops, including the commander of the division in charge of the area and his deputy, rushed to the spot. One of the rioters opened the commander’s jeep door and hurled a brick at him. Another shouted, “Nazi” at the deputy commander and hit him with a rock.

The rioters finally left. A few minutes later, several dozen of them—mostly teenagers—forced open the gate of a nearby Israeli army base. The sentries failed to stop them. At the parking lot outside the headquarters, they broke car windows and slashed tires. When a squad of soldiers chased them from the base, they blocked the road leading to it.

Clashes between the Israeli army and locals in the West Bank aren’t a new story. The apparent twist in these incidents, which took place on the night between this Monday and Tuesday, is that the rioters were Israelis—young, extreme rightists commonly known as “hilltop youth.”

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A Response to +972’s Joseph Dana and Noam Sheizaf

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The following is a response to two pieces that appeared at +972, and is cross-posted there. Links to Dana’s and Sheizaf’s pieces appear in the body of my reply. Dana’s reply to me is below, followed by my reply to him, which is not yet up at +972.  

I’ve recently read Joseph’s piece mentioning me and Noam’s piece responding to my book excerpt in Slate. Out of respect for +972 and its readers, and surprise at the imprecision of both these posts, I’m taking the time to respond.

First, regarding Joseph’s piece, “A Sad Commentary”: In the course of criticizing an article by Bernard Avishai, Joseph, you also refer to a recent column I wrote in the American Prospect. Brief as the reference is, it includes two errors.

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Letter to a Progressive Jewish Friend in America

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Gershom Gorenberg

Excerpts from my new column at Hadassah Magazine:

Dear L——,

Please don’t give up on Israel. And please give me a chance to explain before you hit the delete button.

I know, your last e-mail virtually asked me not to write this one. You said that you were tired of news about growing West Bank settlements, stalled peace negotiations and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s bellicose statements. Your daughter says the campus debate between anti-Israel and pro-Israel groups is too shrill to bear. You would prefer to focus your progressive political energies on issues close to home. When I write, you implied, I should stick to updates about my kids….

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Intermezzo — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

10 July 1922

To the editor of Kuntres:

My fellow music lovers in the Yishuv, tilling the land and laboring on the roads as they whistle and hum the works of the great composers, will no doubt be interested to hear of my encounter with the man who is perhaps the most notable of our nation’s musical representatives in the great cultural metropolis of Paris. However, they may be disturbed to hear that said representative is a broken man from a dying world.

The story begins with my arrival in Paris just last week, after the successful conclusion of my agronomy studies in Toulouse. 

illustration by Avi Katz

Eager to sample what the great city had to offer, I immediately examined the billboards and proceeded to the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées (yes, the same place where, just nine years ago, the premiere of Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps caused a riot!) to hear a program of piano concerti. One of the pieces was Tchaikovsky’s piano concerto no. 2 in G major, and the other a work in E major by a composer I was not acquainted with, one Moritz Moszkowski.

I will reluctantly pass over a description of a wonderful performance of the Russian composer’s great work, which I am sure is familiar to all your readers. Some will complain that it is overly long, but I maintain that its every moment contributes to a whole that is a sublime expression of the Russian national spirit.

I could not have been more astounded to find that the conductor chose to follow up Tchaikovsky’s great work with a piece so devoid of weight that it simply wafted through the air of the concert hall like chaff thrown to the winds.

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Why Egypt Matters

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

The women banter with the soldiers and get through the checkpoint carrying bombs in their handbags. We see them in black and white, which sharpens the lines in their faces and shows their fear more starkly. They arrive at their target. One enters a restaurant. The camera pans the people eating as she pushes her bag under the counter and leaves. As individuals, the victims are innocent, but seeing the world from the camera’s perspective has already told us that the explosion that will rip them apart belongs to revolutionary necessity.

This is a sequence from The Battle of Algiers, the classic 1966 drama about the uprising that drove France from its central North African colony. The film is worth watching again this week, when the Egyptian revolution is back in the center of the news, precisely because Egypt has not followed the Algerian script. Comparisons with the past matter because they underline that so far, history is not repeating itself in Cairo. And this is just part of why the reshaping of Egypt, tarnished and volatile as it may seem, is still so terribly important to the Middle East, and why the revolution turning oppressive would be a tragedy for the entire region.

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Peace Mosque; Gentrifying Mumbai Slums; Women Breaking Glass Walls (Professorial Pride Updates)

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Gershom Gorenberg Another happy opportunity to showcase the work of my erstwhile students, who have been producing fantastic work (even if I’m a bit late in posting some of it): “The battlefront that I see is not between Islam and the West or Muslims and America but between all of the moderates and all of … Read more

Why Are They So Angry?

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Gershom Gorenberg

My latest column is up at The American Prospect:

“He’s lying! He’s lying!” the man at the back of the hall shouted, in a tone as desperate as it was angry. “He hasn’t read the Geneva Conventions. You haven’t read them, so you don’t know he’s lying.”

The primary object of his rage was me. The secondary object, it seemed, was his fellow congregants, who’d allowed me to lecture at his New York-area synagogue. I’d spoken about threats to Israel’s democracy, including those posed by ongoing expansion of West Bank settlements. This was the first time, I’d been told, that the congregation had hosted a speaker on Israel from outside a spectrum running from right-wing to very right-wing. During the question-and-answer period, I was asked about my statement that the legal counsel of Israel’s Foreign Ministry had warned before the first West Bank settlement was established that it would violate the agreement of the Fourth Geneva Convention. That’s when the man in the back came unstuck. The congregation’s rabbi, who was moderating the Q&A session with the trained calm of a psychologist running group therapy for fractured families, slipped to the back of the room and talked him down.

The incident stayed with me, demanding to be decoded. True, the particular synagogue was Orthodox, and more Orthodox Jews espouse hawkish views than do members of other Jewish denominations. But I’ve been lecturing around North America for three weeks, and the experience fit a pattern. I’ve been told repeatedly that it’s a breakthrough for a congregation to invite someone with my views, which back home in Israel register as well within the political mainstream. On previous trips to America, I’ve faced similar outbursts in non-Orthodox synagogues and on college campuses.

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Reestablish Israel

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Day 3 of Slate’s ‘The Unmaking of Israel’ Excerpts

Gershom Gorenberg

Slate has published a third excerpt from my new book The Unmaking of Israel. You can also read Monday’s excerpt, with groundbreaking new evidence showing that Israel did not plan the expulsion of its Arab population in 1948, and yesterday’s, on how the secular state of Israel created ultra-Orthodoxy as we know it.

I write from an Israel with a divided soul. It is not only defined by its contradictions; it is at risk of being torn apart by them. It is a country with uncertain borders and a government that ignores its own laws. Its democratic ideals, much as they have helped shape its history, or on the verge of being remembered among the false political promises of 20th-century ideologies.

What will Israel be in five years, or 20? Will it be the Second Israeli Republic, a thriving democracy within smaller borders? Or a pariah state where one ethnic group rules over another? Or a territory marked on the map, between the river and the sea, where the state has been replaced by two warring communities? Will it be the hub of the Jewish world, or a place that most Jews abroad prefer not to think about? The answers depend on what Israel does now.

For Israel to establish itself again as a liberal democracy, it must make three changes. First, it must end the settlement enterprise, end the occupation, and find a peaceful way to partition the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. Second, it must divorce state and synagogue—freeing the state from clericalism, and religion from the state. Third and most basically, it must graduate from being an ethnic movement to being a democratic state in which all citizens enjoy equality.

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The Invention of Old-Time Religion

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Day 2 of Slate’s ‘The Unmaking of Israel’ Excerpts

Gershom Gorenberg

Slate has just posted another excerpt my new book The Unmaking of Israel – this one on how the secular state of Israel created ultra-Orthodoxy as we know it. You can also read yesterday’s excerpt, with groundbreaking new evidence showing that Israel did not plan the expulsion of its Arab population in 1948.

The Unmaking of Israel goes on sale in bookstores today. I’ll be lecturing Wednesday night in Boston, and Thursday night in Brooklyn.

I’m standing in the Kerem Avraham neighborhood of Jerusalem. Across the street is the stone-faced building where Israeli novelist Amos Oz grew up in a small ground-floor apartment. Back then, in the 1940s, Kerem Avraham was home to “petty clerks, small retailers, bank tellers or cinema ticket sellers, schoolteachers or dispensers of private lessons,” as Oz writes in his memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness. They observed the last vestiges of Judaism—lighting Sabbath candles on Friday night, attending services on Yom Kippur—and avidly argued fine points of secular Zionist ideology.

While I stand on the street, a flock of teenage girls walks by, dressed in blue blouses buttoned to the neck, pleated skirts, and high socks, so that no skin besides their faces and hands shows. A family passes, the husband in a circular, flat-topped black hat, his wife pushing a stroller, three more children younger than age 6 walking with them. The mother wears a wig, the common method for haredi (ultra-Orthodox) married women to hide their hair in modesty. On a cross street, I pass a kollel—a yeshiva where married men receive small salaries to study full-time.

Kerem Avraham today is one neighborhood in the haredi belt of northern Jerusalem, a land of wall posters denouncing television, Internet, and rival religious factions; of life-long Torah study for men and countless pregnancies for women; of schools that provide scant preparation for earning a living and no preparation at all for participating in a democratic society. The neighborhood began changing in the 1950s, after the rebellious young Oz moved to a kibbutz, which he left many years later.

Less than a mile from Amos Oz’s childhood home is an apartment development put up several years ago for better-off haredim. The nine-story buildings surround a courtyard with a playground that is crowded with children in late afternoon. Underneath the buildings is a three-level parking garage, with small storerooms along the sides of the half-lit concrete caverns. The storerooms, a standard feature of Israeli apartments, belong to the residents who live above. But some of the small rooms have doorbells, names on the doors, water meters, and high windows looking into the dark garage. I hear the voices of a couple inside one, and an infant crying. Outside another is a metal rack on which laundry is drying. They’ve been rented out as apartments to young haredi families who can afford nothing else.

The picture above ground is of a thriving community. Beneath the surface one can see one part of the price being paid by the haredim themselves, and by Israel as a whole, for the peculiar development of ultra-Orthodoxy in Israel.

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