Hazony Today, Kuhn Tomorrow

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Haim Watzman

Poor Thomas Kuhn . Superzionist, a.k.a. Yoram Hazony, author of the quirky The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul, has drafted the author of the seminal but flawed classic of the philosophy of science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, to explain why everyone hates Israel.

I’m late in getting to Hazony’s essay, Israel Through European Eyes which he e-mailed to his fans last July 14. But it just reached me, through a series of forwards long enough to man every team in the World Cup. Like all of Hazony’s writing, it displays great erudition, has lots of footnotes, and makes some obvious points while parsing them all wrong.

Behind the excess philosophical baggage, Hazony says something that has been said before—that the antipathy that Europe, and especially Europe’s political left, displays toward Israel is deeply rooted in the Holocaust. Hazony correctly notes that Zionism and the European left learned two disparate lessons from Hitler’s genocidal program. Zionism claimed that no one would defend the Jews if they did not defend themselves, while the Europe emerged from World War II horrified at the death and destruction wrought by chauvinistic nationalism and concluded that national feelings were too dangerous to be left to politics.

The Zionists established a Jewish state, while the Europeans sought to create a pan-European political framework that would make it difficult for the fanatics of any one European nation (but those of Germany in particular) to persecute outsiders and to seek to impose hegemony on the entire continent. So we have Israel, and we have the European Union.

But Hazony can’t just say that.

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Netanyahu Isn’t In Charge Here

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column at the American Prospect explains why Netanyahu refused to extend the settlement freeze, and what’s missing from U.S. diplomacy.

The confession of weakness was startling. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak was explaining to the BBC why Israeli-Palestinian peace talks should continue despite Israel’s refusal to extend its freeze on new building in West Bank settlements. People had to understand, he said, “Israel doesn’t have a way to stop this building totally.”

Barak is the civilian official directly responsible for the Middle East’s strongest military. He’s also responsible for governing the West Bank, since it’s under military occupation. Nonetheless, he says he just can’t stop settlers from revving up the cement mixers. Since settlement constructions are intended not merely to provide homes but also to set Israel’s borders and reduce its diplomatic options, Barak is also admitting that the government has ceded its monopoly on foreign policy.

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The Occupation Comes Home

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

A recent news item in a niche publication about a new recruitment program for Israel’s national police force obliquely provided some of the most telling testimony I’ve seen recently about the importance of the current Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. It said nothing about the talks, yet read properly, it was a reminder that reaching a two-state solution is essential not only as a means of achieving peace — critical as that is in itself — but also of protecting Israel’s own society from the rot caused by occupation.

I spotted the article in Olam Katan (“Small World”), a free weekly given out in Israeli synagogues on the Sabbath. The target audience is religious Zionists — Orthodox Jews who generally favor integration into the wider Israeli society but who often nurture a strong minority identity, a tribal sense of “us” and everyone else…

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Land’s End– “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

illustration by Avi Katz
“Man, this is the life!” I say as I lean back in my empyreanite chair and stretch my legs and arms out as far as they can go. My Talmud is open in front of me, Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” is wafting through the beit midrash, and a cool, balmy breeze wafts through the ether.

My eternal havruta, Shimon Bar Kappara, eyes me from over the top of the large volume of Tractate Sotah that he’s holding up in front of him so as to hide the smaller volume he’s really reading.

“I hate to break this to you,” he says. “But you are neither a man, nor do you have a life.”

“Don’t be such a cynic,” I sigh. “Although I do miss a good cup of really strong Turkish coffee. Nectar just doesn’t do it for me.”

Bar Kappara’s eyes swing left, then right. He reaches into his robe, pulls out a small jar, and pushes it toward me.

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McCarthyism on the Mediterranean

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Gershom Gorenberg

A bit delayed, I’m posting my American Prospect article on the latest, nutty attacks from the Israeli right on universities, NGOs, and even wanting natural gas producers to pay the government for the gas they extract:

During a decade in Israel’s Parliament, Michael Melchior made his name as an effective legislator. The rabbi and social democrat chaired the Knesset Education Committee, pushing the government to provide hot lunches for poor schoolchildren and to mainstream special-needs pupils. As an environmentalist, he was willing to partner with Omri Sharon — son of the rightist former prime minister — and Dov Khenin of the Communist Party.

Melchior flunked flamboyance, though. He was nearly invisible to the general public. He owed his seat to an alliance between the Labor Party and his dovish religious party, Meimad. In the 2009 election the alliance was dissolved, and Melchior’s party failed to get the 2 percent of the national vote needed to win seats in the Knesset.

This month, though, Melchior is in the news. That’s partly due to his own efforts. A group he founded, the Civil Action Forum, is pressing the government to take royalties from a new natural-gas field off Israel’s coast and to devote the money to social needs.

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Excuse Me, Is This the Road to Peace?

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Gershom Gorenberg

The terror attack south of Hebron took place a few hours after I filed my curtain-raiser on the Washington peace talks for the American Prospect. Besides my pain at hearing of the deaths, I also had a tinge of professional self-criticism: Without intending to, I’d made a prediction of quiet in the West Bank, simply by describing, in present tense, the quiet that had existed in recent months. And I’d forgotten the iron rule of Israeli-Palestinian negotiating: The people who regard any compromise as betrayal will do their best – or rather, their worst – to stop diplomacy by igniting a new cycle of attack, crackdowns, rage and more terror.

In this case, the killers seek to discredit the Palestinian Authority and its extenisve efforts to prevent violence. Most Israelis and Palestinians already appear pessimistic about the talks, but hard-liners are desperately afraid that the negotiations might just bring a peace agreement. If the Israeli public can be convinced that the PA is either soft on terror or complicit in it, the fragile foundation for negotiations might crumble.

Despite Hamas’s latest attacks, the real problem in the negotiations is the imbalance that I described in my article:

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Sendoff for My Son — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

by

Haim Watzman

Dear Niot,

The scene at your enlistment next Monday will not be as dramatic as your grandfather’s. He set off for infantry boot camp in the U.S. Army on February 19, 1944. His entire family—Ma, Pa, and sisters Jean, Bernice, and Laki—accompanied him to the train station at Cleveland’s Terminal Tower. Your great-grandmother and her daughters wailed and screamed. When the young recruit pointed out that other families, if teary-eyed, were sending their sons off with considerably more decorum, Ma retorted: “They’re not Jewish mothers!”

Nor will it be as lonely as my own enlistment. My parents, brother, and sister were on the other side of the world, and the kibbutz driver who dropped me and a few other guys off at the enlistment office in Tiberias on August 16, 1982, was hardly an adequate surrogate for family.

illustration by Avi Katz

Your older brother insisted on going alone; farewells were bid at our apartment door. You’ve kindly agreed to allow your mother to take the number 4 bus with you to Ammunition Hill in East Jerusalem, where an army bus will be waiting. I’ll be on the other side of the world, on a trip to the U.S.

Your grandfather and I enlisted in the middle of wars. His sergeant greeted him and his fellow-trainees by shouting: “Gentlemen, in six months, half of you will be dead!” My sergeant was not so blunt. But, while Beirut was not as deadly as D-Day, I faced the prospect of being sent to a front in a foreign land.

No war rages now, but your mother and I are not much comforted by that. While it’s true for the moment, Israel faces vicious enemies on all fronts. And we know that the present semi-calm is precarious—invasions, incursions, and operations are regular occurrences and there’s a good chance that you’ll be involved in one or more during the three years of your mandatory service. Since you’ve chosen the Golani Brigade, you’re likely to be in the vanguard of whatever campaign the government decides on.

Your grandfather joined a non-Jewish army to fight against Hitler, in a war he believed in with all his heart and soul. He ate, for the first time in his life, pork chops, ham, and bacon, and guiltily enjoyed them. He didn’t bother putting on tefillin. He had to put up with anti-Semitic comrades and his sergeant’s regular Sunday morning order: “Men, you will now attend the church of your choice!”

I joined a Jewish army fighting a war about which I was skeptical at enlistment. Within a few weeks, as the facts of the decision to invade Beirut and of the Sabra and Shatila massacres hit the newspapers, I was convinced that the Begin government’s Lebanon adventure was wrong. But in the IDF the food was kosher and we religious guys were given 20 minutes each morning to put on tefillin and daven a super-fast shaharit. There were no anti-Semites, but some of the tough development-town kids who were the great majority in our platoon were pathological Ashkenazi-baiters.

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…For the Help That You Can Bring

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On meeting Haim Gouri at the shut gate to Sheikh Jarrah

Gershom Gorenberg

My new article on the Sheikh Jarrah demonstrations is up at The American Prospect. This was written just before yesterday’s demo, which I’d guess drew between 500 and 1,000 people – a large increase from previous protests. During Ramadan, the demos will be held on Saturday night, after nightfall, inside the neighborhood.

'Jewish-Arab solidarity in Sheikh Jarrah': Protesters, August 8, 2010
‘Jewish-Arab solidarity in Sheikh Jarrah’:
Protesters, August 8, 2010 (Gershom Gorenberg)

I spotted Haim Gouri standing in the East Jerusalem park among several hundred other demonstrators on a recent Friday afternoon. The wind swept the poet’s silver hair over a face scarred by nearly 87 years of history. Paramilitary border police stood next to an impromptu roadblock across the street, barring the protesters from Sheikh Jarrah — an Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem where several Palestinian families have been evicted from their homes so Israeli settlers can claim real estate owned by Jews before 1948. To remove any doubts: No one is letting the evicted Palestinians reclaim the homes their families owned before 1948 in what is now Israel.

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Won’t You Please Come to Sheikh Jarrah…

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Gershom Gorenberg Stop the Racism: Show Solidarity with Sheikh Jarrah, August 6, 4 p.m. It’s been a year since the eviction of two Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah. The eviction was carried out under laws that give Jewish refugees from 1948, or whomsoever appoints themselves to act in those refugees’ names, the … Read more

With a Little Help From My Friends (or: Judaism as Justice)

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Gershom Gorenberg

I know that today is Tu Be’Av, the 15th of the Hebrew month of Av, an obscure holiday from the Second Temple period that has been secularized in Israel as the Day of Love – and that, according to Chana Pinchasi, should really be understood as an assertion of women’s freedom and a rejection of violence against them.

But there are things left to said about Tisha Be’Av, and if I wait to the eve of the fast next year, I’ll forget the poetry of protest that my friends and mentors – meaning the same people, my friends who are my teachers – have woven around that day, making it even more relevant than I thought it was.

Let’s start at Frost and Clouds, where Joshua Gutoff writes an essential reminder: The rabbis who created post-Temple Judaism weren’t philosophers (or engineers); their words were poetry and the calendar they designed was choreography. So if you think they were talking about the stones in Jerusalem when they talked about “destruction of the Temple,” please rethink:

…“The Temple” is their way of speaking about a world in which God was experienced as directly and even intimately present, and “Destruction” is the language for the loss of that experience. …

But poetry can sometimes be badly, dangerously misread. The standard religious Zionist reading of Tisha Be’Av quotes Rav Kook as saying that the destruction took place because of “baseless hatred” and that the Temple will be rebuilt out of “baseless love” – a term that is quickly transformed into condemnation of dissent, disagreement and disunity, so that Judaism becomes an introduction to fascism. (Yes, I know what the word means. I use it deliberately, in its historical sense, to describe the disgrace of religious Zionism today and the constant effort of its mainstream spokespeople to label any criticism “baseless hatred.”)

Yehudah Mirsky sticks a pin in this large, hollow idea:

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The House at the End of the Road

by

Gershom Gorenberg

My new piece is up at The American Prospect:

Dror Etkes picked me up in front of the bank, next to the convenience store, on a normal Jerusalem street where nothing slows the morning commuters except normal traffic jams. I wanted to visit the Palestinian village of Silwad. To that, Etkes added a couple of other stops on our tangled route through the West Bank.

Life in the enclaves: A Palestinian boy at Beit Ijza.

Life in the enclaves: A Palestinian boy at Beit Ijza. (Gershom Gorenberg)

The day’s task was to examine how to take someone’s land for settlement — via stealth, strong-arm tactics, or legal maneuvers. Only at the day’s end would I understand what my real goal had been: to remind myself that the main street, the bank, the apartment buildings, the buses taking kids to summer day camps — the whole normal city day flowing according to sensible rules — is an enclave of illusory sanity.

Once upon a time you could get from Jerusalem to Silwad easily. You drove north on the main mountain-ridge highway. After Ramallah you turned right. On the other side of the country road from Silwad stood the wooden sign marking the entrance to the Israeli settlement of Ofrah. In the Oslo years of the 1990s, when Ramallah became the de facto capital of the Palestinian Authority, the drive got even easier. A new road — built so settlers wouldn’t need to commute through Palestinian towns — bypassed the Arab city.

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