Delay-Sayers: Two More, One Less

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Gershom Gorenberg

Hussein Agha and Robert Malley have joined the ranks of the delay-sayers.

Agha and Malley are among the most astute analysts of the long-stalled Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic process. Their essay on what went wrong at the Camp David summit in 2000 sparked intense criticism – most notably from Ehud Barak, who preferred to deny the very possibility of peace than to accept any fault.  Since then their once-radical critique has become closer to conventional wisdom, as they demonstrate in a review of three new books by former American diplomats.

Surprisingly, though, Agha and Malley conclude by joining the delay-sayers: the old diplomatic hands advising Barack Obama to avoid a peace initiative at the beginning of his terms:

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The Other Housing Crisis

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Gershom Gorenberg

At the moment, the temptation is to look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a zoom lens that shows the battles in Gaza up-close, in detail. But a zoom lens flattens the picture you see, and entirely leaves out the panoramic view.

In the panoramic view, Israel’s strategic problem remains ending its rule over the Palestinians safely, in order to avoid the alternative of an unstable binational state. That means leaving the West Bank, and giving up settlements. Indeed, the reason that Ariel Sharon insisted on leaving Gaza unilaterally three years ago is that any negotiated agreement with Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas would have meant taking down most settlements. But the unilateral withdrawal empowered Hamas, and is at the root of the current crisis.

The longer the challenge of removing West Bank settlements is evaded, as I explain in an article in the new issue of Foreign Policy,  the more overwhelming it becomes:

Each time I drive out of Jerusalem into the West Bank, it strikes me: The hills are changing. Israeli settlements are redrawing the landscape-daily, insistently. While governments change, while diplomatic conversations murmur on and stop and begin again, the bulldozers and cranes continue their work.

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“Waltz With Bashir” on South Jerusalem

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We’re pleased that “Waltz With Bashir” has been named top film of the year by the National Society of Film Critics and would like to refer South Jerusalem’s readers to our posts on this important movie: Ari Folman’s “Waltz with Bashir” (1) – A National Nightmare on Film Ari Folman’s “Waltz with Bashir” (2) — … Read more

Who Am I to Say? (Occasional Advice)

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Gershom Gorenberg

Dear SoJo

I am a secular Jew who has a profound respect for Jewish tradition and will be making aliyah shortly. I do not believe in an intervening god, nor do I consider the Torah an accurate historical record or an exemplary moral treatise (not necessarily an abominable one either). I do, however, recognize it as an immensely important cultural anchor that should be studied by anyone wishing to preserve Jewish “peoplehood.”

I’ve fallen in love with an Orthodox woman – dati leumi [religious Zionist], I’d call her. I’ve expressed to her that I have no problem – indeed, I’m quite happy – with upping my observance in the interest of preserving tradition (Shabbat, kashrut, etc). However, I cannot accept the idea of sending my children to a religious school where they learn that the Torah is accurate history and the infallible word of God as written by Moses. She seems open to the possibility of sending her children to a school that exposes them to the Torah while allowing them the freedom to draw their own conclusions about the text’s origin.

Does such a school exist? What has been your experience with this issue? I read your recent article on dealing with the fundamentalism in Israeli religious schools. Are there no progressive religious schools in Israel? Have you come across any couples at your synagogue who are not entirely on the same plane religiously?

Semi-Secular

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No Wimps in SoJo

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Haim Watzman

I would really like to punch Ismail Hanieh, the Hamas prime minister of the Gaza Strip, in the face. I would derive great pleasure from seeing every Hamas facility in Gaza reduced to rubble and every fanatical Islamic Jew-hater there blown to smithereens.

I just want to put that on the record for the readers of this left-wing accommodationist blog. Because, as always, some readers who disagree with me seem to think I’m a wimp. That rankles. I mean, I have nothing against wimps. Wimps can be fine people to know, especially if they are standing in front of you in a long line at the bank or have just picked the juiciest, finest-looking apple out of the pile at the supermarket. They’re so deferential, so anxious to please.

But that’s not me. In my guts, I’m as eager to bomb Gaza into the stone age as your average kindergarten bully is to push little Yoram off the sliding board. No cease fires for Yoram. Not even for a minute.

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No Happy Endings in Gaza

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Haim Watzman I’ve got war refugees in my home today. I mean my daughter’s fellow second-year students from the animation program at Sapir College, located right next to Sderot. The campus is under fire and has shut its gates, so these budding cartoonists are unable to work on their projects or attend their classes. The … Read more

Huntington’s Legacy

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Samuel Huntington has died, though it took a few days for the news to reach the media. Huntington, a Harvard professor of political science, was the author of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. When someone dies, the custom is to praise him. I’d like to honor custom, but Huntington’s most famous book was a pernicious work that has seems to have served as ideological underpinning for America’s failed foreign policy under George W. Bush.

Soon after 9/11, when everyone was talking Huntington, I wrote a riff on the book and my concern that it would create unneeded battle lines. I’m sorry to say that my worries were justified. Here’s part of what I wrote then:

…as some ideas do, this one seeped into popular culture, ready to be quoted when the need arose even by people who couldn’t quite recall the source. September 11 created the need. Say “civilization,” and instead of a battle against an invisible enemy with an opaque ideology, you have a war of the West against Islam. The problem is that Huntington’s thesis is intellectually fuzzy, factually incorrect – and likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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The Pleasure of Simple Truths: The Dragon’s Beloved at the Khan Theater

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Haim Watzman

<em>Vitali Friedland and Udi Rotschild in</em> The Dragon's Beloved <em>at the Khan</em>
Vitali Friedland and Udi Rotschild in The Dragon's Beloved at the Khan
We really didn’t feel like seeing a play last night. It’s true that our pre-purchased season tickets have in the past sent us to the theater at highly inappropriate moments. The night after Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, when the country was still in shock and no one had thought to shut the theaters yet, we found ourselves at the Jerusalem Theater watching a production of The Good Soldier Schweik. That play begins with an actor shouting “The Archduke Ferdinand has been assassinated!” Halfway into the first act a man in the audience had a heart attack. The omens were clear. We should have stayed home.

But now I’m glad we didn’t learn that lesson. We tore ourselves away from the television’s images of the attack on Gaza to head for the Khan theater’s production of a new comedy, The Dragon’s Beloved, and good thing that we did.

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Pride, Fury, Fire

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Gershom Gorenberg

Last week I received a press release from Physicians for Human Rights-Israel about a sharp increase in child burn victims in the Gaza Strip. This was before the Israeli air campaign began. After what’s happened in the last couple of days, PHR’s email now seems like a message from another historical era, a time so calm that it was a major concern that

“In December alone, 16 Palestinians were hospitalized who were burned while trying to heat their homes. Most of the cases reported to the NGO were of children playing with fire, following attempts to light bonfires for heating and cooking and lighting candles in order to illuminate homes.”

The fires, that is, were the result of the siege of Gaza, which included fuel shortages and power outages. The head of the burn unit at Shifa Hospital in Gaza reported that his unit was collapsing under the strain. I can only guess that Dr. Nafed Abu Shaaban is having a much harder time this week.

Nonetheless, the problem of kids getting burned can help to understand why all of Gaza and southern Israel are in flames at the moment.

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Hebrew As She Is Spoke

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Haim Watzman

Is Hebrew the language of the prophets or the language of modern Israel? The question is symbolized by that well-known phenomenon of the new speaker of the language, fresh from her ulpan course, who sets off on a crusade to correct the grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation to the benighted native speakers she encounters on the street.

<em>Hebrew needs change we can believe in</em>
Hebrew needs change we can believe in
The two stereotypical views of what constitutes proper Hebrew are played out this week on the centerfold of Ha’aretz ’s Hebrew book supplement, Sefarim . In side-by-side reviews of a new book, Israeli, a Beautiful Language by Ghil’ad Zuckerman, Hagai Hitron and Noam Ordan pursue a now-hoary debate about the actual and desirable relationship between the Hebrew language of the Bible and the Sages and the language spoken in Israel today. (I’m reacting here to the two articles, not to the book itself, which I haven’t read.)

According to Ordan, Zuckerman is correct to claim that the language we speak today in Israel is a language distinct from than that of the Hebrew-speakers of the biblical and classical periods. The Zionist revivers of the language, beginning at the end of the 19th century, sought to reinstate a pure Hebrew based on the language of the Bible (not the rabbis!). But, since they were native speakers of Yiddish and Slavic languages, what they actually ended up doing was grafting a Hebrew vocabulary onto the grammar and syntax of their mother tongues. Therefore, Ordan views with favor Zuckerman’s claim that the language spoken in Israel today should not be called “Hebrew” but rather “Israeli.”

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