Red Briefs and Rain Ink–“Necessary Stories” Column in The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

The dust rose so high to the sky that heaven and earth seemed to have reverted to a dull yellow primordial chaos. The engines of dirt-caked, drab army transports rumbled, the horns of master sergeants’ white vans honked. I stood, trying to be seen and heard, at the Fatma Gate in Metula, seeking a ride up to my base at Ana, in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.

As of early summer 1983, the IDF had been bogged down in Lebanon for a year. Rational procedures and clear rules had been drafted for transporting soldiers to and from and through the Cedar Republic, but like so many army regulations, few knew them, and no one obeyed.

The way to get from Metula to Ana was to stand as close to the gate as the military police would allow and hold out an arm. An occasional driver would notice the lonely soldier through the smokescreen thrown up by the Holy Land’s parched soil, take pity, and stop long enough to ask where I needed to go. More often then not, they were going somewhere else. I needed to be back at base by 3 p.m.; driving straight up from Metula, the trip took at least three hours. It was already nearly an hour before noon, and I was getting desperate.

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New in the Archive of Occupation: The U.S. is a trifle bothered by early settlements.

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Gershom Gorenberg The United States has opposed Israeli settlements in the occupied territories since 1967. But the paper trail shows that the objections were often low-key. In Washington, more attention was paid to diplomatic statements than to the “creation of facts” through settlement. The current administration is seeking to change that pattern. To provide some … Read more

Baka Blights

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Haim Watzman

<em/>Photo by Zeevveez” title=”Bethlehem Road” width=”300″ height=”225″ class=”size-medium wp-image-1557″ /></a><figcaption id= Photo by Zeevveez
Baka’s a wonderful neighborhood. I’ve lived here for nearly 25 years, so it feels very much like home. That means that, as happens in homes, I tend to overlook some of its ugliness.

A physically ugly blight on the neighborhood is the huge dumpsters, overflowing with garbage, that stand on or by the neighborhood’s streets. These are especially unpleasant and unsanitary in Baka’s commercial areas, specifically along Bethlehem Road’s cafés, shops, and produce stands. In many cities, garbage disposal bins are located inside buildings or underground. Perhaps it’s difficult to get the garbage out of sight because of the neighborhood’s history, its narrow streets, and its old stone structures. The owners of the businesses along Bethlehem Road have resisted changes that would cost them money, even though the overflowing garbage bins (and the rats) must be deterring potential customers. Garbage disposals are not only outside but they are part of people’s home too, and when they overflow or break it can be incredibly frustrating to deal with, luckily homeowners can visit this site to set a home warranty plan, but it is not as easy for a general garbage disposal that the residents all use.

One moral blight on the neighborhood is the underage workers, most of them Arab kids, that one sees working in the stores and on the streets. These boys, many of them well under 16, should be in school; their presence at workplaces is illegal and wrong.

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Lost: Last Shreds of Sanity in the Prime Minister’s Office

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Gershom Gorenberg

So Aunt Yardena from Rehovot skypes her nephew Jason in Boston.

“Jason,” she says, “why don’t you come visit? We’d all love to see you. The last time you came was before three years.”

“Three years ago,” he corrects her. “I wish I could. Get in some wind-surfing, see the whole family. But college is running around 100K a year these days, and Mom and Dad are still sitting shiva for their Madoff money.”

“Why should you pay for it? You want to be – how do you say frier in English, sweetie? There’s ads in the papers here. And on Youtube. From the Prime Minister’s Office, and the Jewish Agency. Young Jews are being lost to assimilation. Call us and give us their names, and we’ll bring them to Israel.”

“Yeah, I don’t know about this,” Jason says, a little hurt. “You know, I’ve been in Israel seven times. I go to the egalitarian minyan at Hillel every Shabbat, and I helped organize the Breaking the Silence exhibition on campus. I even have a name that begins with J. I’m not really assimilating.”

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Invention of the Body-Snatchers

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new article is up at The American Prospect:

invasion of the body snatchersLest there be any misunderstanding: As an Israeli and a Jew, I don’t believe that the current government of Sweden is quasi-Nazi, that all Swedes are anti-Semites, or that I should boycott Ikea, the Swedish furniture firm. At the same time, to remove all doubt, I solemnly declare that I have never been involved in the international trade in organs for transplant. I do feel exceedingly silly bothering to make these denials. But they seem somehow necessary in light of the current Swedish-Israeli tensions, which are a product of egregiously incompetent journalism in a Swedish paper and equally irredeemable diplomacy by Israel in furious response.

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Where the Extremes of Zionism and Anti-Zionism Meet

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Haim Watzman

Many of the comments on my post First Sheikh Jarrah, Then Baka?, here and at The Forward, constitute textbook examples of how the mere mention of Israel acts like a gravitational lens that bends the rays emanating from extreme Zionism and anti-Zionism until they merge into a single image.

Let’s take, as an exhibit on the anti-Zionist side, Phillips Brooks. Brooks argues that the land on which the state of Israel was created belonged to the Palestinians. Therefore, it is stolen. Therefore, Israel is founded on a crime. Therefore there is no difference between the land Israel took in 1948 and in 1967; it’s all stolen and held illegitimately and the Jews should return whence they came.

Now, that might sound like a voice of conscience to the unthinking. But if you think it through, it’s based on a concept of originalism that makes no sense in the real world. In other words, for Brooks’ logic to work, there has to be some particular point in history in which the world’s territory was divided up fairly between different nations. Then bad nations started conquering peaceful ones to gain territory. Peace and justice can be regained if everyone goes back to where they came from.

But of course there was no such point in history.

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First Sheikh Jarrah, Then Baka? — Op-Ed in The Forward

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Haim Watzman Mike Huckabee recently made a virulently anti-Zionist remark — and the Jews who accompanied him on his tour of East Jerusalem cheered. “It concerns me when there are some in the United States who would want to tell Israel that it cannot allow people to live in their own country, wherever they want,” … Read more

Lawlessness and Disorder–The Failure of Israel’s Police Force

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Haim Watzman

The most frightening piece in today’s Ha’aretz doesn’t appear on the newspaper’s website, in either Hebrew or English. It’s Gidi Weitz’s essay on how the police responded when a pal from his weekly soccer game got beaten up by some roughnecks who didn’t like where he’d parked his car.

There was no police response to speak of. The policeman who arrived a half hour later in response to Weitz’s call was uninterested, took some scratchy notes, and told Weitz’s friend that he could file a formal complaint at the police station. When the policeman left, the assailants threatened the friend that if he complained they would make his life miserable. As a consequence, the friend’s wife panicked and refused to allow her husband to file a claim. When Weitz convinced his friend to accompany him to the police station anyway, the cop on duty showed no interest. All this—beating, initial police response, and subsequent police apathy—took place in the presence of the friend’s 18-year old son.

Weitz’s piece appears in the midst of a wave of violent attacks and murders of Israeli civilians by other Israeli civilians. Dismembered bodies have been discovered in trash bins and a Tel Aviv father was beaten to death on the city’s beachfront promenade, in front of his family, by a gang of young men and women who had been drinking.

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One Measure of Awe, Please. Hold the Nationalism.

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Gershom Gorenberg

I’d been at Rosh Hanikra recently for a wedding, held in the evening on the small plaza set on the side of the bluff, overlooking the sea. The grottoes were lit at night, but the water rushing into the chasms from the open sea was dark.

Until last week, though, it had been many years since I visited in the daytime, buying a ticket for the cable car down to the grottoes. Since my previous visit, a short introductory movie has been added to the tour, shown in the now-blocked railroad tunnel that once crossed the border into Lebanon.

The film explains how waves, wind and salt carved the grottoes in the rock. It shows how sea turtles lay their eggs on the bluff – the mothers returning to where they were born, the newborns racing at night toward the shine of the waves to escape predators.

And then there’s an explanation that the place was once called Sulamah shel Tzur, the Ladder of Tyre, in Hebrew. (Actually, the name refers not just to the bluff, but to the mountain ridge that ends at the bluff, and that one needs to ascend to come up or down the coast.) The film explains that according to legend, Abraham entered the Land of Israel here and received the promise, “To your seed I will give this land” (Gen. 12:7). 

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