Dr. Bibi’s Medicine Show

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Gershom Gorenberg A conversation with Robert Wright at Bloggingheads.tv on Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, the packed last week and a half, and what happens between now and the U.N. showdown in September:

The Netanyahu-Haniyeh Alliance: The Context of Obama’s Speech

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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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The Day of His Birth — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

The quarter-moon hovers low on the horizon as Gadi speeds the pickup truck the length of the Jezreel valley. From the passenger seat I gaze up at the stars sparkling above the Hill of Moreh, where Gideon mustered his troops. It’s my second trip down the valley this night to the hospital in Afula. In predawn darkness I think: my third child will be born this morning.

In remembering that night, I recall a poem by Avraham Halfi, versifier of dark nights and the radiance of the soul. For Halfi the moon is an illusion. Those who see it as such are blind—they do not understand that it is God’s lantern.

A sightless God with lantern in hand
Seeks a path in the evening dusk
And everyone says:

Here comes the moon
And like a tree it rises
Pouring light on the road.

Yet God, too, cannot see. He is blind, like justice, like a man groping his way forward on a moonless night.

The road is empty. It’s the ninth day of Shevat, January 24, 1991.

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The Fossils: Israel Bonds, JNF, the Jewish Agency

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Gershom Gorenberg

From my new column in Moment:

… Why does Israel Bonds still exist in 2011? To broaden the question, do other classic Israeli fund-raising institutions serve a legitimate purpose anymore, at least in their present forms?

Don’t get me wrong. Giving isn’t obsolete. It’s great that Jews like to give. “Checkbook Judaism” is a problem when writing checks is the only expression of someone’s Jewish identity, but not when it’s part of a diversified portfolio of living by Jewish values. Overseas gifts to Israel’s nonprofit sector – from soup kitchens to symphony orchestras, human rights groups to universities – are a blessing for Israel and a bridge between it and the Diaspora. But some of the most prominent institutions channeling funds from world Jewry to Israel are past their expiration date.

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Strange Alchemy

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

Daniella Weiss has a soft smile and a round face that is remarkably unwrinkled for a woman of 66 known for most of her adult life as an incendiary activist. A cloth cap covers her hair, in keeping with a strict reading of Orthodox Jewish rules for married women. In her living room in the West Bank settlement of Kedumim, west of Nablus, religious texts fill the bookshelves. Glass cases display a silver crown for a Torah scroll, filigreed spice boxes, and other Jewish ritual objets d’art.

Vehithazaktem
Vehithazakem: Transforming theft into  virtue.

Weiss dates her career on Israeli’s religious right to the mid-1970s, when she helped organize the efforts of Gush Emunim — the Believers Bloc — to settle in this part of the West Bank in defiance of Yitzhak Rabin’s government. Until 2007, she was mayor of Kedumim. Since then, she has been organizing youth of the radical right to establish illegal settlement outposts. She introduces herself as a devoted disciple of Rabbi Moshe Levinger, founder of the Jewish settlement inside Hebron. I visited her recently to find out how she thought settlers should respond to looming West Bank political developments, including the expected bid for U.N. recognition of a Palestinian state.

“A diplomatic tsunami is coming,” Weiss told me, adding that “mental stagnation” afflicts settlement leaders. Their focus on construction only inside existing settlements is “poison,” because settlers need to spread out in order to strengthen the Jewish hold on the land rather than stay in “ghettoes.” Her proposal for “drastic action” to wake settlers up to the looming danger — an idea she said was “burning in her” but that she needed to run by Levinger — was that “we must set up settlements on the Sabbath.”

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Blessed Be the True Judge

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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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Driving Louella — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

Thanks to the editors at the Jerusalem Report for permitting me to post this before the current issue reaches subscribers, so that you can read this story before Pesach.

This is the story I tell my family every Seder night.

When I was about two years old, soon after my little brother Saul was born, my mother fell ill and was hospitalized for a time. My father, then covering City Hall for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, couldn’t handle a toddler and a baby on his own.

illustration by Avi Katz
My memories of that time are fuzzy around the edges, pervaded by a soft light like an ambient dawn. But they are real impressions of a time when I was journeying into consciousness, not long after I learned to talk, to turn feelings into words. In them my gaze is always directed upward, for nearly everything is bigger than me. Our modest suburban ranch house thus remains huge in my minds eye, centered on an endless corridor that had to be crossed to get from my bedroom to Mommy’s and Daddy’s, and to be run down to escape into the light of our living room with its wall-sized picture window. A troop of monsters, led by a sour-smelling pig, lived in a cavity in the corridor’s wall. At night they threatened to devour me.

Daddy needed a live-in nanny for us. In the late 1950s, in Cleveland, this meant a black woman from downtown. A series of matrons in long skirts and aprons made an appearance and then vanished. Sally said we were too noisy, Emma that we lived too far out. Cynthia simply stopped coming, without prior notice. In a dream from that time a dozen of them enter and leave the house in a line, like models on a fashion show runway.

Then Louella came and stayed. Dark, broad, taciturn, and creased, she was stern when that was required but smiled easily. She was very old, older than my grandmothers. She had sons and daughters and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Sometimes she’d bring one of them, a Joe or a Lloyd, to unplug a pipe or fix a fixture. She told us that her parents had been slaves in the south. She slept in the house’s third bedroom, which served during the day as a playroom for my brother and me.

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Sharing Pain–Sara Avitzour’s “And Twice the Marrow of Her Bones”

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Haim Watzman

The thought of losing a child is so frightening that during the years that Timora, the daughter of my good friend Sara (Susan) Avitzour was fighting leukemia, I tried as best I could not to think about it very much. Perhaps because Sara and I are partners in comedy and chaos in Kehillat Yedidya’s annual Purimspiel, it did just not seem possible that anything so horrible could happen to her.

Sara has now published an earnest and incredibly touching memoir about that worst of all possible nightmares. And Twice The Marrow Of Her Bones is a story told twice. The first half of the book is a narrative of the years between the appearance of Timora’s first symptoms, through diagnosis, chemotherapy, two bone marrow transplants, and the end of hope. The second half is a series of short reflections about remembering Timora, about the role of Jewish faith and community in her family’s tragedy, and about how Sara coped with Timora’s illness and death. These are based on posts from a blog she began to write after Timora’s death, “Five Years Later” (and which she’s recently renewed under the title Loving, Losing, and Living.

The book’s structure is a key part of its impact. It enables the reader first to experience the tragedy, and then to think back on it. It’s not a usual pattern for a book of this type, and frankly, when Sara told me about it, I was doubtful that it would work. But it turns out that the intensity of the story of loss that fills the book’s first half almost requires the retrospection of its second half. Without the latter, the reader would be moved, but without having gone anywhere.

All of us who have children understand that we are at risk. But, as Sara writes:

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The Fever Returns

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

The counterman at the snack-food shack called A Blast of a Kiosk spotted the ownerless valise next to the busy bus stop and called the police to report a suspicious object. While he was talking on the phone and simultaneously trying to shoo people away from the bag, the bomb went off, spraying the metal pellets that had been packed with the explosives.

The kiosk got its name after it was destroyed in an-early 1990s suicide bombing at the same spot, in front of the Jerusalem Convention Center, and then was rebuilt and defiantly reopened. That time, the owner was luckily late for work. This time, his brother-in-law, the vigilant counterman, sustained shrapnel wounds.

The blast on the grimy street was heard clearly more than two miles away by pedestrians in the gentrified German Colony. It took a moment to register what the sound meant. A Border Police jeep racing past the cafés helped jog memories. The bad old days were back, like malaria resurfacing after years of dormancy. For a second you don’t recognize the fever; then you realize you’ve been waiting for it, that you can’t actually believe it was ever gone.

This disbelief in a cure for the conflict is the achievement of the terrorists. It is also what makes them the unintentional allies of Israeli hard-liners, who likewise fear paying the necessary price to end the disease. Yet the one certain meaning of a bombing is that the infection will not go away by itself, that it must be treated immediately, that peacemaking is acutely needed.

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Sex in the Diamond City — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

Leaflet pasted up on a bulletin board at the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station:
“The Carat Hotel in Ramat Gan: small, comfortable, discreet, rooms equipped with DVD and coffee, hourly rates.”

illustration by Avi Katz

To: Adina Hefetz, counsel, The Association for Civil Rights in Israel
From: Gal Dagan, proprietor, the Carat Hotel, Ramat Gan

Dear Ms. Hefetz,

I write in response to your letter, received today, with regard to the large sign that I have placed in the front window of my establishment in Ramat Gan’s Diamond district, which declares in large, bright orange letters “No Jerusalemites Allowed.”

You state in your letter that your organization, for which I have the greatest admiration, “has reluctantly concluded that said sign may, by denying access to a group based solely on city of origin, constitute illegal and unwarranted discrimination. While the sentiments expressed may be understandable, indeed shared by a significant portion of the Israeli population, our mandate requires us to take legal action to end all infringements of the rights of all Israeli citizens, even in those cases, as this one, in which they are richly deserved.”

Believe me, I am happy to see that the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the watchdog of our freedoms, stands vigilantly on guard. But I am certain that if you knew the facts of the matter, you would agree with me that the sign in my window is not an infringement of human rights but rather a desperate attempt by an embattled Metropolitan Tel Aviv to survive in the face of an onslaught of medieval mores from the primitive Levantine highlands.

The incident occurred on Monday, March 21, a normal work day, although we were all still feeling the effects of our hard Saturday night Purim partying.

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