Whose Religion Is This, Anyway?

by

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column on being an Orthodox dove is up at the American Prospect:

The American Jewish filmmaker told me he was doing a documentary on possible answers to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — one state or two — and human-rights issues. When he showed up at my Jerusalem apartment on a recent afternoon to interview me, he was wearing a beret. His wife and producer wore a maxi skirt; a scarf covered her hair. Their attire showed they were Orthodox Jews. Hers, in particular, fit the stereotyped look of the Israeli religious right, of settlers and their supporters, including some Jews abroad. I was surprised. Maybe, I thought, I was the token leftist interviewee in a project by settlement backers aimed at showing that there is no exit from the conflict and that Israel must hold the West Bank forever.

I was also painfully aware of an irony: My own skullcap identifies me, correctly, as an Orthodox Jew. Countless times, my appearance has also caused people to assume, incorrectly, that I belong to the religious right.

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My Big Fat Iraqi Hummus Joint–“Necessary Stories” from The Jerusalem Report

by

Haim Watzman

Hummus from Robobby's photo streamIlana’s got that look on her face.
“It’s August,” she says, “and all our friends are going to Corfu, Barcelona, and Antalya. But us?”
“If you wanted fancy European vacations, you shouldn’t have married a freelance writer,” I reply. Although, I have to admit there was something quite enticing about exploring the Island of Corfu in a rental car from e-mietwagenkreta.de.
“J.K. Rowling is a freelance writer,” Ilana observes, “and I bet she’s not vacationing in Baghdad this summer.”
“Who wants to go where everyone’s going?” I say. “Seasoned travelers know that the best spots are the ones no one’s discovered yet. Besides, don’t you want to reclaim your inheritance?”
“A burned-out store in the shuk? What good is that going to do me?”
“It may not be much now, but it’ll be prime downtown property in a few years when Iraq is a flourishing Western-style democracy and staunch Israel ally.”

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South Jerusalem Antipathy Awards

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Gershom Gorenberg

Before I head off for the Galilee for the week, I’d wanted to give an award for statement in the past week’s Israeli news showing the least understanding of someone else’s motivation. Try as I might, though, I can’t break the tie between two contenders:

  • Col. Ilan Malka, commander of the Givati Brigade, on Breaking the Silence’s publication of soldiers’ testimony on Operation Cast Lead in Gaza last winter: “I have a sort of feeling that they’re doing this out of some kind of evil.” (Yediot Aharonot, Aug. 4, 2009).

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C.K. Williams Dusts It Again

by

Haim Watzman

Sorry to have been absent from the blog this week—I’ve been busy trying to keep up with the comments on Gershom’s South Jerusalem History Awards post, which has set an all-time SoJo record. Pretty interesting debate, too (although I encourage Suzanne, Charlotte, Raghav and the rest to count to ten before hitting the send button—I’m gratified by the high quality of the discussion but could do without the pique).

I just want to flag a new poem by C.K. Williams, one of my favorite poets (as readers of my posts will know), at The New Yorker. It’s called Dust and it’s worthy pre-Shabbat reading.

I don’t have time to write in detail. But Williams’ image, that the stuff in his mind and heart, the stuff from which he composes his poetry, is dust, seems to me to play off two sources. The first Genesis 2:7 (and elsewhere in the Bible), where dust is the substance from which God fashioned man. We usually take that to mean that God made man (and woman’s) physical body out of dust, but Williams offers another reading.

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Umbrella Politics

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column on the the U.S. Jewish establishment repeating Netanyahu’s misleading spin on East Jerusalem is up at the American Prospect:

Western communists, it was said in another era, took out their umbrellas whenever it rained in Moscow. I remembered that adage as I read a recent statement from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations that arrived in my inbox. The subject was the latest U.S.-Israeli flap over construction in East Jerusalem. No matter that the diplomatic thunderstorm appears artificial — deliberately engineered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to deflect the Obama administration’s pressure to freeze settlement activity. At the Presidents Conference headquarters in New York, the umbrellas were opened with alacrity. The statement is an uncritical repetition of Netanyahu government spin.

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South Jerusalem History Awards

by

Gershom Gorenberg

At the start of a new week, I’d like to award the best and worst discussions of history in the past week in Israel.

The best take on the past came from Yoram Kaniuk, writing at Ynet (in Hebrew and English translation). Kaniuk writes about the government’s intent to legislate against commemorating the Nakba and Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar’s plan to revise a history textbook for Israel Arab children to erase a sentence about 1948 war saying, “The Arabs call the war the Nakba – a war of catastrophe, loss and humiliation – and the Jews call it the Independence War.”

Kaniuk, who fought in the War of Independence, writes,

I remember the Nakba. I saw it to a much greater extent than the education minister, who apparently only heard about it. It was a harsh, merciless campaign of young soldiers who spilled their blood while fighting a determined enemy that was eventually defeated. Yet the enemy that was defeated is not a geometrical unknown, but rather, a people that still exists. Its parents and grandparents fought well. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have suffered so many casualties.

I was wounded in battle, but I believe that the education minister must educate our young people to be heroes by teaching them that this war had losers too, and that they too have a narrative. They don’t have the country that was theirs but they have a history… The Nakba fighters fought heroically, but we fought better.

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Hamas Caught In the Tide of History

by

Gershom Gorenberg

My review essay on Paul McGeough’s book “Kill Khalid” and the history of Hamas appears this weekend in the Review section of The National, published in Abu Dhabi.

“When Israel occupied Jerusalem, I was 14,” Sheikh Jamil Hamami once told me. Hamami grew up in East Jerusalem. That week in June 1967, he had heard the promises on the radio that the Arab states would defeat Israel “in a few days, a few hours”. Instead came the Israeli advance. Hamami described the day that the Old City fell in a series of staccato images: “The black picture in my mind is seeing an Israeli soldier enter Al Aqsa… Near the Wailing Wall, I saw a soldier step on the Quran… A soldier told us it was forbidden to pray in Al Aqsa.”

Hamami later became one of the first leaders of Hamas in the West Bank, though he left the movement in 1995, believing that the time for “military action” had ended with the establishment of the Palestinian Authority. His jagged memories of June 1967 allude to two of the reasons for the Islamic revival in the occupied territories – and for the birth of Hamas, for that organisation’s ascendance as a rival to the secular nationalist PLO and for its position today as one of the two power centres of riven Palestinian politics.

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The Method in His Madness — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

by

Haim Watzman

“What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties,” remarks the patient in one of the two beds opposite mine. He has a long face, flowing long white hair parted in the middle and, like me, he’s dressed in hospital pajamas. The bristled cheeks have a plasticity that makes him look young, although he’s no doubt 80 or so. Both of us are seated in high-backed imitation-leather upholstered chairs next to our beds, our various tubes carefully arranged for our comfort.

<em>Yosef Milo</em>
Yosef Milo
The time: January 1997. The scene: the intensive care unit on the eighth floor of Hadassah’s Ein Karem complex. The u-shaped ward has two wings; we’re in the smaller of them, with just three beds. The third one is occupied by a bearded Moroccan elder. Next to me sits my wife, Ilana. Next to Hamlet sits his Ophelia. Surrounding the elder are a clutch of children and devotees. Hanging over each bed are intravenous bags to which we are connected; over each bed hangs a monitor that displays our vital signs, but in such a way that we can track the heartbeat and oxygen supply of everyone except ourselves. On the ledge behind each bed stands a vase full of lung suction catheters. Stage left, for Hamlet, is a large sliding door leading out to a narrow balcony where the nurses slip out to smoke. Dark clouds hang low over Mevasseret Tzion and the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway.
I can’t remember my line, and in any case speech comes hard—it’s only been a couple days since the doctors removed the ventilator tube that had been stuck down my throat for two and a half weeks.

Hamlet cocks his head and smiles at me expectantly. When I don’t reply,

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A Time To Be Icky: Tisha B’Av and James Dickey’s “The Sheep-Child”

by

Haim Watzman

It’s summer and the Jews are being perverse again. Instead of singing of sand and sea, next week we’ll spend a day fasting and lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem. The lamentation lyrics get pretty sickening—blood flows, people get tortured and burned alive, famished women cook and eat their own children. Why do we need this annual national gross-out?

I’ll answer that question by adducing a stomach-turning, very un-Jewish, all-American poem, James Dickey’s “The Sheep Child,” which you can read and hear Dickey read on the wonderful poetry pages of The Atlantic, here. (If that doesn’t work, try the Poetry Foundation).

The poem is about a myth, an untruth, that becomes true. The monster in the jar becomes true not because it actually can be found in a back corner of a museum in Atlanta, but because it brings about a change in human behavior. There is an effect whose cause is an object fabricated by the human mind.

The reality of the fantasy is underlined by the poem’s structure. The first stanza states the problem, the huge force of the animal instinct that drives boys to copulate with the earth itself. But there’s something that is taboo, so forbidden that it overcomes even that nearly irresistible desire. Animals are off limits.

The second stanza is the story that the boys tell, the object they have created in their minds. The third stanza is the result: the story has directed the boys’ desire to its proper object. Perhaps the story was simply a fairy tale?

. . . Are we
Because we remember, remembered
In the terrible dust of museums?”

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The Bedouin and the Land: Leeor Kaufman’s “Destiny Hills”

by

Haim Watzman

Leeor Kaufman’s Destiny Hills, screened at the Jerusalem film festival this week, documents the struggle of Mohammad of the al-Talalqa Bedouin tribe of the Negev to assert his right to live on his tribe’s ancestral land.

In cinematic terms the film is impressively accomplished, and Mohammad, his wife, his four sons, and the rest of their family are so winning, pleasant, and determined that I walked out of the film wishing they were my neighbors. The family, which lives in poverty, endures the repeated destruction by Israeli authorities of the jerry-built shacks and cinder-block structures they erect and re-erect on the Destiny (Goral) Hills, land that once belonged to the tribe and which they still claim. They resist the government’s policy of resettling the Negev towns and claim that the state has not lived up to agreements it signed years ago with the tribe’s leaders.

While Kaufman’s film portrays life rather than makes political statements, I’m sure that most viewers’ immediate reaction is to sympathize with the Bedouin and their wish to maintain (a modern version of) their traditional lifestyle on the lands their forefathers roamed. I’m not expert in the details of their dispute with the government or the terms under which their land was, with the consent of their leaders, taken from them. But as a minority population with little representation facing a strong state, it’s not surprising that they’ve gotten a raw deal.

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Notes in the Margins of the Testimony

by

Gershom Gorenberg

In the post below this one, you’ll find my American Prospect article on Breaking the Silence’s book of testimony from soldiers who fought in Gaza last winter. There’s much more I’d like to say, but here are just a few notes in the margins:

  • Reading the testimony, one can find some evidence for the argument that the difference between how one unit and other behaves in the field is largely a function of their immediate commanders on the company level. There’s the account (told by two witnesses) of the company commander who wouldn’t let his men fire warning shots to keep an old man from approaching their position at night. Unaware of the soldiers, the man kept walking – till he was so close that the soldiers shot to kill. On the other hand, there’s the deputy company commander who ordered his men not to sit on the couches in the Palestinian house they had taken over.

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    • No. What Happened in Gaza Won’t Go Away.

    by

    Gershom Gorenberg

    My new article on the latest, and most extensive, testimony from soldiers who served last winter in Operation Cast Lead is now up at The American Prospect:

    “We didn’t see a single house that was not hit. The entire infrastructure, tracks, fields, roads — was in total ruin,” an anonymous soldier says, describing his days in the Gaza Strip during Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli incursion last winter. “Nothing much was left in our designated area … A totally destroyed city … The few houses that were still inhabitable were taken by the army … there were lots of abandoned, miserable animals.” The destruction continued daily, he testifies, though Palestinians — fighters and civilians — had fled the area.

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