South Jerusalem

Shas is claiming credit – or should we say “responsibility”? – for the recent approval of construction in the bedroom settlement of Givat Ze’ev. The ultra-Orthodox party was looking for a justification to stay in Ehud Olmert’s coalition; now it can say it melted the settlement freeze. Who wants to bet that Secretary Rice will not provide any counter-pressure?

On the surface, Olmert has little choice but to give into Shas. Without its 12 Knesset members, his coalition shrinks to 55, and he needs more than 60 to rule. Inside and outside Israel, this leads to criticism of proportional representation, of weak coalition government and of the power of the ultra-Orthodox to blackmail the majority. That’s a mistake.

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In Ha’aretz this morning, eternal pundit Yoel Marcus comes out for including Hamas in peace negotiations:

Abbas and his buddies no longer reflect or represent the Palestinian reality of spring 2008.

…America must initiate and accept a change in the makeup of the Palestinian delegation, namely, the addition of a Hamas representative. This will allow the Israeli side to speak to those who are really running the Palestinian show today. Will Hamas want to? Will it say yes? That is the ultimate test of the Bush administration.

Marcus usually represents stolid, mildly left-of-center establishment thinking, as soporific as a Labor pol’s speech. For him to argue that Hamas must be included in talks indicates that the idea is moving from radical to conventional.

Other not terribly wild-eyed types have been voicing similar ideas.

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Israeli Housing Minister Ze’ev Boim has given instructions to renew building of a major development in the West Bank settlement of Givat Ze’ev, northwest of Jerusalem. (Here’s an earlier Hebrew report on the affair.) The development is planned for ultra-Orthodox Jews, and the ultra-Orthodox Shas party has been pressing to go ahead. So much for the “total freeze” on settlement construction that Vice Premier Haim Ramon described at a press briefing several weeks ago. What’s even scarier is this:

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Across the page of my morning paper are the pictures of eight teenage boys murdered in the terror attack at Merkaz Harav yeshiva last week. They demand of me to imagine lives that will not be lived. The pictures have a dark magic; they try to conjure up the thought that a parent must force himself not to think, because otherwise it would be impossible to get through the day.

The sound of the newspaper page as I turn it is a whisper: The season of killing has not ended. There was a lull, like a few sunny days in the midst of the winter rains in Jerusalem. We must think about whether the children should ride the bus, whether to set appointments in cafes. I went and had coffee this morning anyway on Emek Refaim. An act of sumud, sticking to the soil.

Of course there has not even been a lull in the killing in Gaza or in Sderot. The dead of one’s own city are more noticeable, and the dead of one’s own side: No Israeli paper prints a long line of pictures of those who died on a given day in Gaza. The one-sided mourning is inevitable, and is a dangerous illusion. The tragedies are indivisible.

Friday, the morning after the attack, Ha’aretz reported that Prime Minister Olmert said

“It shows the extent to which the Palestinian Authority is insufficiently fighting terror. We will not make our peace with such events.”

A reflexive and foolish response.

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How many Palestinians live in the West Bank, and does it matter?

On Thursday, right-wing think-tanker and publicist Yoram Ettinger will lecture (in Hebrew) at Bar-Ilan University and will make a might effort to prove that there a lot fewer Palestinians than the Palestinian Authority claims, and that this matters tremendously. Or so I judge from the title of his talk (“Palestinian Demography: Myth or Fact”) and from articles he has written and a major study in which he collaborated. Unless Ettinger has decided to recant, in fact, you can learn what he has to say on the subject online, without shlepping to Ramat Gan. I’m agnostic about Ettinger’s numbers. But I’m sure he flunks the mathematics of democracy.

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John Hagee – pastor of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, founder of Christians United for Israel, and eager herald of End – has endorsed John McCain for president of the United States. One reason that Hagee gave for his choice was McCain’s “support of the state of Israel.” Hagee also claimed that he personally backs Israel because it is a democracy, not because of its place in apocalyptic scenarios. One must presume that after saying these words at a San Antonio press conference, the good minister turned and gave an immense wink to anyone who has read his books.

In 1996, Hagee turned out “Beginning of the End: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Coming Antichrist.” It fits a genre of “prophecy” works churned out by popularizers of dispensational premillennialism: To prove that the final seven years of history are about to begin, he presents a standard list of verses and his own collection of headlines that supposedly fulfill scriptural predictions. His description of the last seven years – the so-called Tribulation – is pornographically violent. (Despite Hagee’s disrespect for Catholicism, I’d bet Mel Gibson would love to film the gore that Hagee describes, which includes a 200-mile river of blood.) The ultimate proof that the End is coming is the creation of the State of Israel. Hagee manages to bend the murder of Prime Minister Rabin into additional evidence. As a good dispensationalist, Hagee portrays the seven years ending with Jesus’s return and the Jews accepting him en masse.

Before getting to the End, Hagee express uncommon sympathy for Yigal Amir,

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A ritual seems to get played out every time a new and original work of Israeli history comes out. Sooner or later, a major review pronounces the book and its author to be “post-Zionist.” What this usually means is that the book has suggested a new way of looking at Israel that is not a knee-jerk confirmation of the reviewer’s right-wing prejudices.

The common wisdom—summed up, for example, in Yoram Hazony’s The Jewish State—is that once all Israeli historians were staunch and loyal Zionists, and that sometime around the 1980s or so a vicious cabal of self-hating eggheads decided to launch a frontal attack on Israel’s founding principles.

But wait a minute—a similar attack was mounted long ago against a man who today resides in Israel’s pantheon of Zionist historians—Jacob Katz.

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