Netanyahu, Cornered or Repackaged

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Gershom Gorenberg

The day after the election, the most horrifying part of the outcome was watching Tzipi Livni and Bibi Netanyahu trying to outbid each other for Avigdor Lieberman’s support.

That’s over:  Netanyahu won, and is commited to having Lieberman, our aspiring autocrat, in his government. The next chapter in horror is watching Bibi try to enlist Livni and Ehud Barak as packaging for his rightwing coalition. So far, Livni is standing on principle, a prettier sight than her earlier groveling to Lieberman.

My new piece about why Netanyahu is so desperate to seat his opponents at his cabinet table is now up at The American Prospect:

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Dueling Ethicists in Gaza

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Haim Watzman

What was most surprising about the conference on Battle Ethics in the Cast Lead Operation held on Sunday by the Ethics Center at Mishkenot Sha’ananim in Jerusalem was how much agreement there was among speakers with ostensibly different points of view. Everyone from noted liberal Mordechai Kremnitzer to the IDF’s favorite ethicist Asa Kasher dissented from the simplistic extremes and sought to balance the conflicting demands of defense and respect for human life.

As Daniel Statman noted at the beginning of the conference, there’s no need for a discussion of Israel’s battlefield ethics if one’s position is either that either fighting in general or Israel’s fighting in particular is absolutely and utterly criminal. Or if you think that in war Israel can do whatever it pleases, without any constraints, in order to win.

That these two extreme positions play a prominent role both in Israel’s internal debate and in the international polemic about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has not, thankfully, deterred the philosophers, journalists, and legal scholars who spoke at the conference from thinking through the issues.

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Should Scientists Study Race and IQ?

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Haim Watzman

The neurobiologist Steven Rose argues in an essay in the Feb. 12 issue of Nature that there are certain hunches scientists should not follow—namely, those which have to do with the relationship between race, gender, and intelligence. In a paired essay, developmental psychologists Stephen Ceci and Wendy M. Williams argue for the pursuit of such research, even if it threatens to have dangerous and socially divisive implications.

The essays are available on-line only to subscribers to the journal (although the opinion forum where the pieces are discussed by readers is publicly accessible). So I’ll briefly outline the two arguments and explain why I think Ceci and Williams make a stronger case—and why I suspect that Rose means more than he says.

Rose writes:

To meet the canons of scientific enquiry a research project must meet two criteria: first, are the questions that it asks well-founded?… And second, are they answerable with the theoretical and technical tools available?

Rose summarizes the sorry history of science that has sought to prove innate disparities in intelligence and abilities between men and women or between white Europeans and other races and ethnic groups.

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Playing to Learn

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Haim Watzman

Peter Gray came to my youngest daughter’s school last night to talk about why I should just relax and let my daughter play her way through her adolescence.

About fifteen months ago, Misgav, now 15, asked to transfer to the Sudbury School in Jerusalem. The school, located a short walk from our home, operates on the model of the Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts. That means, in short, that the kids run the school. There are no course requirements, the kids only study if and what they want to. Staff exists to facilitate what the kids want, not determine what they should learn. Play is considered no less, perhaps more valuable, than formal classes. The school enrolls children from the ages of 4 through 18 and any activity or lesson is likely to include children of a wide variety of ages.

Gray became acquainted with Sudbury when, more than 30 years ago, he decided to send his son Scott there. Scott is now a staff member at the original Sudbury school and also spoke to us last night. A psychologist at Boston College, Peter conducted research about the school and became one of its major advocates, as can be seen on his blog.

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Cold Feet–Why Israeli Voters Shouldn’t Get Their Fantasy Government

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Haim Watzman The talk in the locker room at the Jerusalem Pool has been surprisingly conciliatory since the election last week. Dani, who voted Meretz (after seriously considering Hadash) and Siman, who voted Likud, agree that the next coalition should consist of the Likud, Kadima, and Labor, under Bibi Netanyahu’s leadership. When I pointed out … Read more

Washington Power Shabbas Whispers

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Gershom Gorenberg

I try to get away from business on Shabbat. I don’t read newspapers. They make me feel like I’m at work. OK, if my kids are reading this, they’ll point out, gently I hope, that I don’t try very hard not to talk politics. I can’t go 25 hours without a fix.

In Washington last Shabbat, it wasn’t even worth trying. At a shul in an unrevealed location, people who work in Interesting Places drifted around the kiddush tables, handing me nibbles of rumors. It was a power Shabbas.

Even so, conversations on Shabbat are off-off-record. In fact, I never actually talked to anyone at all. Merely by the feel of the hall, I picked up these ideas. If they turn out wrong, I take no responsibility for a hint, a whisper and speculation. If they turn out to be true, I’ll take credit for my great sources.

Hint: Dennis Ross is in. He’ll be a special adviser to HRC. “Special adviser” isn’t an insult or demotion, despite what some people think. Dennis can’t be appointed special envoy to Iran, because Washington doesn’t yet talk to Iran. And no, it’s not strange that his appointment hasn’t been announced yet. First the cabinet secretaries, then the undersecretaries. Afterward, envoys and advisers.

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Gaza Failure, Precisely Parsed and Psychoanalyzed

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Gershom Gorenberg

Prof. Stuart Cohen has precisely analyzed why the war in Gaza failed – why, in fact, it was a failure when it began. The full piece is at the BESA website. Here’s a start:

In his classic work, On War, Clausewitz commented that: No one starts a war – or, rather, no one in his senses ought to do so – without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it. The former is its political purpose; the latter its operational form. This is the governing principle that will set the course of the war, prescribe the scale of means and effort that is required, and make its influence felt throughout down to the smallest operational detail.

Looking back, did Operation Cast Lead meet those criteria? Were its objectives clearly defined? And were the measures taken commensurate with those ends?

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The Minister for National Fears

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Gershom Gorenberg

In 2007, I wrote an extensive profile of Avigdor Lieberman in the Atlantic. To complement Haim’s suggestion that we understand Lieberman’s voters,  here’s my effort to understand what drives the man himself.

Avigdor Lieberman is an oversized man in an undersized room. His beard, remorselessly trimmed to a narrow, graying stripe around his cheeks, frames a wide face with pale, icy eyes. As he speaks, he waves his tiger paw of a hand, holding a cigar the proportions of a small cannon. The cigar is not lit, but the laws of drama say it will be by the third act. In Russian-accented Hebrew, he is talking about his admiration for Peter the Great and Winston Churchill. Before World War II, he says, all the “lovely, liberal, progressive people” threw every insult at Churchill that they now throw at him-“warmonger, embittered, extremist”-except for having a beard and being Russian. He smiles at the thought. …

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Understanding Lieberman’s Voters

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Haim Watzman

Why do I really dislike Avigdor Lieberman? Because he’s forcing me to write about politics. When Gershom and I started this blog, I thought he’d take the political beat and leave me free to write about my country’s diverse and exciting culture and literature. But who can concentrate on books when the wolves are howling at the door?

A couple days before the election I had a long conversation with a young Palestinian-Israeli woman I often see at my favorite South Jerusalem café, The Coffee Mill. Like me, she was in despair over the likely results of the impending election, although unlike me, she wasn’t planning to vote.

I told her something that I’m afraid may shock some of SoJo’s readers, those who seem to measure us by the extent to which we conform to left-wing clichés. I told her that the Israelis who voted for Lieberman and his party aren’t evil people.

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Election Results: Racism Rising

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My apologies for being away from South Jerusalem, the place and the blog. I’ve been on the road, on a schedule that has allowed time for neither sleeping nor blogging.  Nonetheless, my first take on the disastrous election results is up at The American Prospect. Here are some excerpts:

Numerically, it would be possible for Livni, Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, leader of the shrunken Labor party, to form an alliance and leave Lieberman to rage from the opposition. Instead, both Netanyahu and Livni immediately sought Lieberman’s support. On Wednesday, Livni met Lieberman, and was quoted afterward as telling him, “This is a time of favor … It is an opportunity for unity and for advancing subjects that are important to you as well.” The competition for his support will allow Lieberman to increase his price, demanding control of powerful ministries and legislation favorable to his platform…

When Netanyahu was elected prime minister in 1996, Lieberman became his chief of staff, and earned a reputation as the enforcer who crushed dissent in the party. Eventually, facing a revolt from party veterans, Netanyahu eased Lieberman out of the job.

In response, Lieberman started his own party, initially appealing to the immigrants from the former Soviet Union who had poured into Israel in the 1990s. Many were professionals who found themselves working at semi-skilled jobs, competing with Israeli Arabs for jobs, living in towns that became immigrant ghettos. Some 300,000 were non-Jews, who were able to immigrant under Israel’s Law of Return because of their family ties to Jews, but who felt uncertain of their place in their new country.

The name of Lieberman’s party, Israel Is Our Home, spoke to the immigrants’ insecurities. With a stress on the word our, it also suggested that the country was not home to the Arab minority. It’s a classic gambit of the racist right: Bolster one group’s sense of belonging by attacking another as outsiders who threaten the nation…

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