A Progressive, Skeptical Blog on Israel, Judaism, Culture, Politics, and Literature
My new article is up at The American Prospect:
Dear Mr. Obama,
A clever person succeeds in climbing out of the hole that a wise one avoids falling into. So says a Hebrew adage often applied to national leaders. To my great sorrow, you have already missed the chance to respond wisely to the upcoming Palestinian bid for U.N. recognition. You still have a few days left to be clever. I desperately hope you use them.
illustration by Avi Katz
We passed him as we trudged up an earthen path in search of a Bronze Age site north of Montpellier in southern France. He had wispy hair and the soft contours of a man grandchildren love to cling to, but the steady stride of a good walker. Giving us a sideways glance, he walked past us under the oak branches that roofed the trail. But when my daughter, Mizmor, crouched down and exclaimed, in Hebrew, about a patch of wild thyme, he turned back in his tracks.
“So you, too, are seeking your roots?”
Mizmor and I looked at each other and the other members of our party.
“We came to see the ancient village,” I said.
“Oh yes. Down there. You’re just two minutes away. But it’s closed.”
“Closed? But I thought it’s just some ruins out in the open.”
Earlier this month, the Israeli Supreme Court woke up from a deep slumber and issued an order to the government to evacuate the illegal outpost of Migron on the bypass road between Jerusalem and the Israeli settlements north of Ramallah. Migron, according to founder Itay Harel, was originally established on the hilltop in 1999. The settlers claim to have bought part of the land in 2004 from a Palestinian owner – but as Matti Friedman reported for AP in 2008,the claim rests on a document that the man purportedly signed and had notarized in California over 40 years after he died.
The Palestinian owners of the land on which Migron stands went to court in 2006, with the help of Peace Now, to demand that the government remove the squatters on their property. Before the Court, the state admitted that the outpost was an egregious violation of the law but said it wanted to build a new neighborhood in a different settlement for the lawbreakers to enable a peaceful evacuation. The outpost settlers rejected that deal. If the Migron ruling achieved only moderate headlines, it was partly because March is a long way off and no one really believes the state will carry out the orders, and partly because the top acreage on newspaper and website front pages had already been seized by the growing economic protests of the July 14 movement.
In this morning’s Ha’aretz, defense reporter Amir Oren has a story saying the police have run out of patience with the tent city on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv and elsewhere around the country, and are preparing to dismantle them – if need be, by force.
And the Lord appeared to me by the sycamores of Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv as I sat at the door to my tent in the heat of the day, and I raised my eyes and looked, and lo, three men stood by me. And when I saw them, I ran out to meet them from the tent door and bowed down to the earth to be frisked, for they were surrounded by mean-looking buzz-cut security men with little thingies in their ears.
And I said, “My Lord Bibi, if now I have found favor in thy sight, pass not away, I pray thee, even though I didn’t vote for you and never will. Let now a little water be fetched from the kiosk over there and wash your feet because those black Oxfords are really the wrong thing to be wearing on the Mediterranean coast on such a sweltering day.”
Lord Bibi consulted with his companions, the Lord High Treasurer and Philosopher-King-in-Waiting and Mr. Daddy Landbucks.
“We can stand,” Lord Bibi said. “We don’t have much time as we have other engagements to the east. We just came by to offer our sympathies and to say that we’ve been trying for years to lower housing prices but have been frustrated by the monstrous bureaucracy deeded to us by our Bolshevik predecessors.”
The tent protesters have achieved one thing so far—they’ve convinced me to read the financial pages.
I had a lot of fun at the happening on Saturday night. It was a real pleasure to participate in a demonstration attended by more than 50 people—the same people all the time. There was a great deal of energy and hope. But brass tacks policy? Not so much.
photo by Yaffa Phillips
For a few months—since the beginning of the doctors’ strike—I’ve been complaining to anyone who will listen that I don’t see good policy analysis in Israel’s daily press. Everyone had the same response—read The Marker, Ha’aretz’s business and financial section, which up until now I removed from the newspaper each morning and placed in the recycling bag.
So I’ve been giving it a try. Each morning I read several articles in The Marker before going to the rest of the paper.
I’d say that it’s not quite as good as the policy analysis I get from Jonathan Chait and Jonathan Cohn, the two wonky bloggers at The New Republic. I still know a whole lot more about health policy in the U.S. than I do about health policy in Israel. I still haven’t run across a decent analysis of the doctors’ strike.
The question of the week last week was: Would the protests fade or grow? What would happen Saturday night? On Saturday night, the moment I got to downtown Jerusalem, I knew: The previous week’s demonstrations had been a warm-up act, a small-town band before the real show, merely a test of the amps and speakers.
In front of me on Ben-Yehudah Street, a woman wearing a headscarf and a man with a kippah were pushing their baby carriage toward Zion Square – a family from the tribe of religious Zionists which, according to the usual unreliable reports, is not taking part in this uprising. A flock of scouts in khaki uniforms and kerchiefs from Modi’in – the most classically apolitical youth movement in Israel, from the absolute Pleasantville heart of Israeli middle-class ennui – were rushing up the street next to the blue-shirts from the classically leftwing Hashomer Hatzair and some teenage girls in jean skirts from Bnei Akiva, the kids of the religious right. There were more little children on shoulders or in carriages or walking, holding a parent with one hand and a sign with the other, more old people, more guys wearing skullcaps, more of the graying parents of the twentysomething protesters who’d been there the week before. More people were drumming on snare drums and pots and anything that would bang. The crowd couldn’t fit into Paris Square near Bibi Netanyahu’s official residence anymore. The river had burst its banks. The torrent swept away the feeling of every Israeli for years, that it’s me, that it’s me who can’t get by, can’t work enough to pay enough, can’t remember what it felt like to feel good here.
And this was the Jerusalem sideshow to the much bigger demonstration in Tel Aviv.
And the craze isn’t just limited to Jerusalem. Go ahead and find your drum machine and you’ll soon start to discover the varied range of different drums, and how each drum is different can be tailored towards your musical talent. It’s no wonder Jerusalem are going crazy for it.
Add up the estimates of 300,000 in Tel Aviv and 30,000 in Jerusalem and more elsewhere and you come to this startling idea: one out of every 20 Israelis was on the streets demanding a better country Saturday night – the equivalent of three million people in France, four million in Egypt, 15 million in the United States. And those comparisons themselves shatter, because, as Ma’ariv’s NRG site reported, the police couldn’t possibly keep track of the crowd that broke down gates and overflowed into alleys and side streets. Or as a police source told the paper: “This is the biggest demonstration we’ve ever, ever faced. We’re seeing hundreds of cars that have simply been left on the Ayalon Freeway and people are walking to the demonstration.” And that’s besides the people who couldn’t get on the overpacked trains to Tel Aviv.
You know, I honestly do think something is happening here. I honestly do think that people have discovered something in themselves and in the faces next to them that they thought they’d lost, that they were sure they’d merely dreamed and gotten over in the morning while trying to get to work. I think that any reporting of what’s happening in Israel that doesn’t include the shocked reborn ebullience of the crowd has missed something. I’ve been in many angry demonstrations, more than I can count or remember. I can’t remember being in a crowd of people so happy.
Excerpt from my new column at The American Prospect:
… Because the protests are a challenge to the entire political system, politicians have been absent from the list of speakers at demonstrations. On Wednesday, the new movement did suffer an old-fashioned parliamentary defeat: On a straight party-line vote, the Knesset ratified real-estate legislation championed by Netanyahu. The law purportedly cuts bureaucratic barriers to building housing—and in fact reduces citizens’ power to challenge developers’ plans. …
Then again, the fact that the opposition, including Tzipi Livni’s centrist Kadima Party, opposed the legislation as a bloc is a partial victory for the protesters. In the past, some of Kadima’s legislators might well have cast “aye” votes. Livni herself is a former corporate lawyer, and in her first political position oversaw privatization of government companies.
Today, many politicians are seeking the protesters’ favor. On Tuesday night, at a demonstration on the hill overlooking the Knesset building, I found two Kadima members of the Knesset standing in the shadows at the edges of the crowd, like high schoolers uncertain they had been invited to a dance. “Even capitalist America, whom we all respected, is in a state of economic collapse,” Knesset Member Shlomo Molla told me. “Why? Because it exalted the wealthy, it sanctified capitalism.”
Haim Watzman My friend from Kehilat Yedidya, Nir Levy, has been commemorating the current protest movement with a poem a day. Levy, who writes under the penname Nahir Libi, is the author of a fine first book of poetry, Mahol HaNefesh, which he’s also turned into an intriguing and moving show integrating readings of his … Read more
The tent protesters who’ve shaken the complacence of the Israeli leadership these last few weeks combine, as most protest movements do, radicalism with reaction. That is, they call for sweeping changes in Israeli society and government, but they also hark back to a mythical golden time when, they believe, Israeli society was kinder and more egalitarian, and when Israel’s citizens felt stronger bonds to and responsibility for each other. In this sense, they seek not only to remake Israeli politics, but also to restructure—or renew—Israeli identity.
One of the best books on the complex nature of this identity to be published in Israel in recent years was Reserved Seats (Meqomot Shemurim) by Tamar El-Or, an anthropologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Like the best works of anthropology, it almost reads like a novel. El-Or spent five years at the beginning of the 2000s doing field work in Pardes Katz, a Mizrahi neighborhood in Bnei Beraq, a Tel Aviv suburb. She attended classes, got to know a group of haredi (ultra-Orthodox) women, and sought to comprehend families in which religious practice and Jewish identity varies from negligible to ultra-Orthodox and in which ethnic Mizrahi identity alternately separates and connects women from their Ashkenazi counterparts.
Michael Chabon — author of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay — received an advance copy of my forthcoming book. He writes,
Until I read The Unmaking of Israel, I didn’t think it could be possible to feel more despairing, and then more terribly hopeful, about Israel, a place that I began at last, under the spell of Gershom Gorenberg’s lucid and dispassionate yet intensely personal writing, to understand.
Foreign coverage – especially American coverage – of the rising social protest movement here continues to be sporadic and off-target. The mindset behind the media failure, let me suggest, is also what prevented a meaningful debate on economic policy in the United States before the national-debt deal.
Reports from here in the American press – when they appear at all – try to answer the wrong questions, such as: “What does this have to do with security, or the conflict with the Palestinians?” and “Has the Israeli left been reborn?” Since I know some of the correspondents doing these stories, and I know that they are very sharp and very in touch with life here, I assume they are suffering from one symptom of the correspondent’s conundrum: You have to answer questions from an editor across the sea, who doesn’t get what’s going on and tries to fit it into the story he already has in his mind. You can tell him that he’s wrong, but then you won’t be able to do a story at all. So you answer his misplaced questions.
More basically, though, the news items give economic information, but don’t center on the basic issues that have suddenly become the topic of public debate: Is the government’s role to encourage business and a rising GDP, or to take responsibility for the welfare of the citizenry as a whole? Are we a society of individuals, or a collective? Why is it in Denmark it is so easy for the country to provide its citizens services like loans and financial assistance, while here in Israel we are left to fight for ourselves? The government has even sponsored initiatives like Eksperten.com which is a free website created by Danish PhD financial professionals and provides loan advice, how to get SMS loans (loans with your phone), kviklaan (quick loans), and more for free. I digress.
Five minutes after I read a fresh online item about the Knesset passing the National Planning Committees Act (popularly known as the Vandal Act, based on a word play that defies resistance), I stepped out my front door and found an advertising flier, very glossy, hanging from the doorknob. The timing could not have been appropriate.
The note on my door advertised the grand opening of a luxury full-service apartment development for tourists in Baka, the neighborhood next to mine in Jerusalem. Real estate that could have been used for affordable housing for young families will instead generate high profits through rental to wealthy tourists. In the off-season, the building is likely to be mostly empty. The cost to the developers has already been figured into the rent; the social cost to the neighborhood will be paid by the neighbors.
The Vandal Act (Hebrew text of the bill as it left committee here) provides for establishment of one national and six district committees to approve housing plans under an accelerated process. Benjamin Netanyahu – the man with three homes – claims that the bill will get dread government bureaucracy out of the way and speed construction of new homes. But those bureaucratic barriers that Bibi so despises include the process of opening a plan to public discussion and objections on social and environmental grounds. A much more realistic analysis of the law by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Bimkom – Planners for Planning rights, and the Association for Distributive Justice, states that establishing the committees