tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14802520432201057282024-03-05T03:47:13.262-05:00Bernard Avishai Dot ComResponses, mainly to rash opinions about the conflictBernard Avishaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12785179301542851440noreply@blogger.comBlogger690125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1480252043220105728.post-49757177047095887522024-03-02T11:45:00.002-05:002024-03-02T11:45:12.453-05:00What Joe Biden Must Tell The Israeli Public<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo-WfYc_khn2ZpPUwtdzvK3wfH30F6y_Xim7bfHkzMIOKCZdMXT-Zs4FP6MX6CydxqB_2iLaDVLcG3cK40nzj-17x6s_gG3MTb9AtYN0c245TW4Qm2vHyamVuZDRRSuf056fEEhNaXbYkJiHXAk93JDGYIrlprQqNqXrtbzkzrHjWy-4E-Rp_RY_kYBvw/s2240/Avishai-Biden-Israel-2024.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1482" data-original-width="2240" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo-WfYc_khn2ZpPUwtdzvK3wfH30F6y_Xim7bfHkzMIOKCZdMXT-Zs4FP6MX6CydxqB_2iLaDVLcG3cK40nzj-17x6s_gG3MTb9AtYN0c245TW4Qm2vHyamVuZDRRSuf056fEEhNaXbYkJiHXAk93JDGYIrlprQqNqXrtbzkzrHjWy-4E-Rp_RY_kYBvw/w400-h265/Avishai-Biden-Israel-2024.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br />On February 22nd, four months into Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu presented his war cabinet with a short document sketching out what, in his view, “absolute victory” looks like. The timing was not surprising. The Israel Defense Forces are poised to attack the southern Gazan city of Rafah, where Israel believes that four of Hamas’s last six battalions are hiding in tunnels and holding what is estimated to be around a hundred still surviving hostages. Netanyahu told CBS on Sunday that, once the assault begins, “the intense phase of the fighting” will be “weeks away from completion.” As for his postwar plan for Gaza, Netanyahu offered a laconic mixture of counter-insurgency and Greater Israel fantasies, to which the hostages’ lives seem subordinated. No surprises there, either. <p></p><p>President Joe Biden purports to have other ideas. He told a reporter in New York this week—while eating ice cream with the late-night host Seth Meyers—that he hopes for a ceasefire deal “by next Monday.” For the past few months, his State Department has projected a postwar vision that includes Saudi Arabia’s normalization of relations with Israel, in return for a process leading to a demilitarized Palestinian state. But the Biden Administration, having underwritten Netanyahu’s tactics, risks being subordinated, too. An attack on Rafah would compound the carnage to which Biden is already considered an accomplice, and it would imperil the effort to lead Arab countries to a kind of military and economic alliance in which the integration of Israel might be feasible. </p><p>There is an opportunity cost for Israeli politics, too. Netanyahu’s real opposition, now, is Biden. There are secular leaders in Israel positioned to support an alternative vision for Gaza and the region, and, arguably, to bring Netanyahu down. But dread grips the public, and these leaders currently have no real standing in the absence of a U.S. President detailing a plan, proving the support of Arab allies, and warning Israel of the dire consequences of defying him. Biden might well reunite the Democratic Party, and get himself reëlected, in the process. (In the Michigan Democratic primary on Tuesday, the “uncommitted” vote, protesting Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza, was just shy of the spread between Biden and Trump in 2020.)</p><p>Read on at <i><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/what-joe-biden-must-tell-the-israeli-public"></a></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/what-joe-biden-must-tell-the-israeli-public"><br /></a></i></div><i><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/what-joe-biden-must-tell-the-israeli-public"><br />The New Yorker</a></i><p></p><p><br /></p>Bernard Avishaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12785179301542851440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1480252043220105728.post-31130649012666117692024-02-03T14:27:00.002-05:002024-02-03T14:27:42.570-05:00Co-Teaching A Class On Israel And Palestine<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1Sz-iuOlRJzlUQ_2eHnxv9al2uG93cY3l0N4q-LPt-Wp7rBhYYBrfdaxAUrpL6J2476HvzytNFlD6YJIhgSQrrcNO-skLoJ7986Y7_lqG01inTguO4ZzwG3nnzZFNtjcPSXPTDPc8eR6XsV97mEsJoo0WtuHB9HnDTpTGTDqwcq89t1I3lrWoLbEq580/s2240/Avishai-Co-Teaching-Dartmouth.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1494" data-original-width="2240" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1Sz-iuOlRJzlUQ_2eHnxv9al2uG93cY3l0N4q-LPt-Wp7rBhYYBrfdaxAUrpL6J2476HvzytNFlD6YJIhgSQrrcNO-skLoJ7986Y7_lqG01inTguO4ZzwG3nnzZFNtjcPSXPTDPc8eR6XsV97mEsJoo0WtuHB9HnDTpTGTDqwcq89t1I3lrWoLbEq580/w400-h266/Avishai-Co-Teaching-Dartmouth.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br />For the past two years, at Dartmouth College, I have been co-teaching a course called The Politics of Israel and Palestine with Ezzedine Fishere, a former Egyptian diplomat who served under the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process. Our work in the class—a civil, exploratory dialogue sustained over eighteen sessions—anchored a series of public forums at the college in the aftermath of the horrors of October 7th. These drew several hundred students and faculty into the college halls, and were watched by two thousand more online; they proved sufficiently helpful in preëmpting the polarization that has afflicted other Ivy League campuses to gain the attention of various national media. I spend half the year in Israel, and have since returned to a country at war. I’ve been thinking more about our miniature peace process, about how a university might organize for difficult subjects—and about what, after all, universities are. <p></p><div>Ezzedine and I had been teaching versions of our course separately; I started in 2011, he in 2016. We had a mutual friend in Álvaro de Soto, the former U.N. Special Coordinator under whom he served, and Ezzedine did his doctorate in Montreal, my home town, so our relations were warm from the start. But it was only after the eleven-day Gaza conflict in May, 2021, when I returned to campus from Jerusalem, that we determined that we would team up. The catalyst was a statement put out by some faculty members who had organized into the Consortium of Studies in Race, Migration, and Sexuality, or R.M.S. Their statement was in solidarity with Gazans but was infused with viscous rhetoric (“For RMS, this means ensuring that our shared epistemologies and ethics of anticolonial relations are capacious”) and seemed rather hypothetical about attitudes toward sexuality in Gaza under Hamas rule; it also called for “supporting Jewish scholars who have vowed that their future teaching of the Holocaust will be in dialogue with the Naqba, Black scholars who have put Ferguson next to Gaza,” and similar notions in this vein. Ezzedine and I feared that this statement would prompt a counter-statement from other faculty members who might accuse pro-Palestinian activists of antisemitism. “If this became a thing,” Ezzedine recalled recently, “it would have undermined the spirit in which we’d been operating.”</div><div><br /></div><div>Continue at <i><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/co-teaching-a-class-on-israel-and-palestine">The New Yorker</a></i></div>Bernard Avishaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12785179301542851440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1480252043220105728.post-14416592208730499772024-01-17T06:51:00.001-05:002024-01-17T06:51:24.836-05:00Israel's War Within<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9xibXSs3mntBfl3pAkDB64Bbn4nVgD2dm0QAfYUhkyEEtHKc1rrQFj35NzF2kWOD_GzmiApq73beD8RrEZmGdDa6kTRHhK1jXQtxKCjtOO-gRDtLkSnZXv_S16bDIuxgFEgwvFgWycbUxfRJahRrKKFkhfzxHwzb7oA8tdXcnhP1zGvgpOv1W9kRDYL8/s1374/CUT-8_New-900x0-c-default.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1374" data-original-width="900" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9xibXSs3mntBfl3pAkDB64Bbn4nVgD2dm0QAfYUhkyEEtHKc1rrQFj35NzF2kWOD_GzmiApq73beD8RrEZmGdDa6kTRHhK1jXQtxKCjtOO-gRDtLkSnZXv_S16bDIuxgFEgwvFgWycbUxfRJahRrKKFkhfzxHwzb7oA8tdXcnhP1zGvgpOv1W9kRDYL8/w263-h400/CUT-8_New-900x0-c-default.webp" width="263" /></a></div><br />In August 1975, I stood outside the Knesset, in Jerusalem, witnessing a fevered demonstration against Henry Kissinger, then the American secretary of state. Thousands of young men in knitted kippahs chanted and danced in circles, their arms wrapped around one another, their voices echoing off the stone building. They were mainly West Bank settlers, I was informed, part of a fledgling movement called Gush Emunim—in effect, the Young Guard of the National Religious Party (NRP).<p></p><div> <br />
Kissinger had visited earlier that year, in winter, with the aim of advancing an interim agreement between Israel and Egypt, itself a marker in the step-by-step “peace process” he’d brokered in the wake of the horrific Yom Kippur War. What he’d proposed was an Israeli pullback from the Suez Canal in exchange for American warning stations and various Egyptian steps toward normalization. But the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s young government had rebuffed his proposals, insisting on an Egyptian commitment to “nonbelligerency.” This dismayed Kissinger and provoked him to ramp up diplomatic pressure during the spring and summer: he and President Gerald Ford would lead a “reassessment” of the U.S.–Israel relationship on all levels, including military aid. By this balmy night in August, everyone knew that Rabin and his key ministers were bound to capitulate.<p>With Kissinger’s blessing, Rabin and the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat had elided the fate of the Palestinians, though nobody doubted their centrality to any solution that was not “interim.” Nevertheless, settler zealots viewed Sinai withdrawal—any withdrawal—as a portent of what was coming for “Judea and Samaria,” their archaic name for the West Bank. The NRP remained a small, but important, part of Rabin’s wobbly Labor coalition, and Gush Emunim was by now assumed to be in alignment with the opposition: the populist, ultra-nationalist Likud founded by Menachem Begin. I had immigrated from Canada three years earlier, and had been contributing reports to the New York Review of Books since the Yom Kippur War. And I watched, with growing unease, as Gush Emunim came to represent not only the settlers in the West Bank, but the moral prestige of “Greater Israel.” This turn of events had been fostered as much by the euphoric atmosphere following Israel’s 1967 triumph in the Six-Day War as by Palestinian terror, the grief of 1973, the inertia of occupation, and the long-incumbent Labor Party’s alleged corruptions.</p><p>By 1975, even secular Labor politicians regarded Jerusalem as nonnegotiable, its conquest sacralized by paratrooper deaths, the Jewish right to rule—if not divine—then, more vaguely, historic. The stance preempted, one Foreign Ministry official told me, what might well have developed into an end to the occupation and peace with Jordan’s King Hussein. A new series of Israeli pound notes had recently been introduced, and secular images—the atomic reactor at Nahal Sorek or the Knesset, for example—were replaced with renderings of the gates of the Old City of Jerusalem, as if these proved Jewish splendor since the time of King David, and had not been built by Suleiman the Magnificent in the sixteenth century.</p><p>As the chanting grew, I caught sight of Kissinger at the Knesset door. I could not make out the crowd’s words at first, or at least I could not quite believe what I was hearing. The chant grew rhythmic, unmistakable: Jew boy, Jew boy, Jew boy! The epithet had reportedly been shouted at Kissinger by hecklers the year before, during the disengagement negotiations with Syria, in an apparent parroting of Richard Nixon, who was said to have denigrated him in this way.</p><p>Kissinger, joined by Rabin, winced and ducked back inside. The chant grew louder and slower: Jew boy, Jew boy! I remember the sinking feeling, a sense that insolence had been raised to the level of ideology. I suspected that this might be a turning point; that, as I put it in my New York Review report, the Israeli government’s “policy of encouraging, or tolerating, various kinds of Jewish settlement in these conquered territories” had engendered “a spiritual élan heavily laden with vulgarized religious mysticism and messianic righteousness”—and that Gush Emunim had “grabbed the center of the stage.”</p><p>Read on at <i><a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2024/02/israels-war-within-bernard-avishai/">Harper's</a></i> </p></div>Bernard Avishaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12785179301542851440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1480252043220105728.post-59764525655846276232023-10-16T10:37:00.002-04:002023-10-16T10:37:18.971-04:00Can White House Diplomacy Help Prevent Escalation In Gaza And Beyond?<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqLIMPI9oCKfQaurtrw61pm7ajSBW3o21Q4PtHmqyGcLzlkO6F30BtUMUvLaSj7B0pWZ7_ey1hWBTV8BKWb9mcyNg2gAL7_y3ujpRxQ93PUrIomV7hy6MmgGeaIy3Gz0jsmiqxXU9dcf3Q_s6tdCs3BCBgS4Q9chElPI-7Fbs72utgou8d985dbqCRVZE/s2240/GettyImages-1719670288.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1494" data-original-width="2240" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqLIMPI9oCKfQaurtrw61pm7ajSBW3o21Q4PtHmqyGcLzlkO6F30BtUMUvLaSj7B0pWZ7_ey1hWBTV8BKWb9mcyNg2gAL7_y3ujpRxQ93PUrIomV7hy6MmgGeaIy3Gz0jsmiqxXU9dcf3Q_s6tdCs3BCBgS4Q9chElPI-7Fbs72utgou8d985dbqCRVZE/w400-h266/GettyImages-1719670288.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br />In Tel Aviv, on Thursday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters what President Biden had said passionately earlier this week—that the Administration has “Israel’s back.” For Israelis, mourning more than thirteen hundred murdered in the Hamas and Islamic Jihad attack from Gaza, stunned by the defensive breach, fixed on the fate of an estimated hundred and fifty kidnapped, and mobilizing three hundred and sixty thousand reservists, the Administration’s statements of support were timely. Blinken, standing next to Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, alluded to his family’s acquaintance with the sorrows of the Holocaust, and said, “You may be strong enough on your own to defend yourself—but, as long as America exists, you will never, ever have to.” <div><br /></div><div>What precisely the Administration and Netanyahu’s government—now expanded to include the opposition leaders Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, both former chiefs of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, in the security cabinet—are coördinating has not been made public. But the Pentagon, according to Politico, had already begun airlifting air-defense missiles and other munitions to the I.D.F., and it has repositioned the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group, which includes eight squadrons of attack and support aircraft, to the eastern Mediterranean. On Saturday, the Administration confirmed that it was dispatching a second carrier group, the U.S.S. Dwight D. Eisenhower, to join the Ford. Blinken and Netanyahu’s most urgent joint priority seems to be deterring Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. (The carrier group “sends a strong signal of deterrence should any actor hostile to Israel consider trying to escalate or widen this war,” a White House National Security Council spokesperson told Axios’s Barak Ravid.) Hezbollah is no longer the ragtag force it was when its artillery barrages forced Israeli troops out of southern Lebanon in 2000; in 2020, the International Institute for Strategic Studies estimated that Hezbollah had up to twenty thousand active fighters and some twenty thousand reserves. It is reported to have more than a hundred thousand rockets, thousands of medium-range missiles, and hundreds of long-range missiles with guidance systems. The great danger is that it will add its rockets and missiles to those already coming from Gaza.
</div><div><br /></div><div>Read on at <i><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/can-white-house-diplomacy-help-prevent-escalation-in-gaza-and-beyond">The New Yorker</a></i></div>Bernard Avishaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12785179301542851440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1480252043220105728.post-57677533439127575292023-06-17T14:00:00.003-04:002023-06-17T14:00:39.960-04:00What Can Joe Biden Do About Benjamin Netanyahu?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRDTeDJcJnKU5ciontbTOVKtDv6YsGqRJ_M_LzXYnnAzjl4AVZnvr8_4nKJg0JA_jYLAl7ftsU_RVsAHm6D17lNkOI_yFf4reYXvjLCfV3Qp4jt08urfw8JeDQBxkrmBcYCbxwVNM8ZsunwHXyd5fNjuv-X461jJ7Bubuz28XpWovEaetNkNAUp8Io/s1200/Biden+with+Netanyahu+2016_413dcf7b-8931-46f0-bffc-c9e81ffdaa60-prv.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="920" data-original-width="1200" height="306" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRDTeDJcJnKU5ciontbTOVKtDv6YsGqRJ_M_LzXYnnAzjl4AVZnvr8_4nKJg0JA_jYLAl7ftsU_RVsAHm6D17lNkOI_yFf4reYXvjLCfV3Qp4jt08urfw8JeDQBxkrmBcYCbxwVNM8ZsunwHXyd5fNjuv-X461jJ7Bubuz28XpWovEaetNkNAUp8Io/w400-h306/Biden+with+Netanyahu+2016_413dcf7b-8931-46f0-bffc-c9e81ffdaa60-prv.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p>Since 1977, when Menachem Begin, a founder of the Likud party, became Prime Minister, Israeli leaders liberal enough to entertain a peace process with the Palestinians that could end the conflict have controlled the government for just eight years. But they always had a not-exactly-stealth weapon: Israelis across the spectrum feared alienating Washington—its military technology, its diplomatic shield, its annual billions in aid, and what has been loosely called its “values.” By tradition, of course, U.S. Presidents don’t (openly) interfere with the domestic policies of America’s allies, but not all allies benefit from such largesse, and Israeli Prime Ministers have all been rated on how they’ve cultivated bipartisan U.S. concern for Israel’s security. Civil-rights groups have sought to stop human-rights violations, such as in the occupied territories, by shaming expansionist governments in the U.S. media and before American élites more generally. </p><div>So, now that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition, led by his Likud bloc and its allies in far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties, has openly menaced Israel’s democratic structures—demanding, for example, that the governing coalition be given decisive influence over the selection of judges—liberals are reflexively seeking a lifeline from Joe Biden’s Administration. And what seems increasingly clear is that President Biden is loath to throw it. “There are plenty of reasons for Americans to care” about what Netanyahu’s coalition is doing, but “there just aren’t that many reasons for the Administration to do anything,” Steven Simon, a former Middle East adviser in the Obama White House and the author of the recently published “Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East,” told me. “The U.S. relationship with Israel lives or dies by domestic U.S. political dynamics,” and though thirty-eight billion dollars—the ten-year military-aid package signed under Barack Obama—“could become a lever, no Democratic Administration would want to deploy it.” There would be “noise.”</div><div><br /></div><div>Read on at <i><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/what-can-joe-biden-do-about-benjamin-netanyahu">The New Yorker</a></i></div>Bernard Avishaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12785179301542851440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1480252043220105728.post-21904657656845887572023-04-27T10:07:00.003-04:002023-04-27T10:07:28.543-04:00Israel Turns Seventy-five As A Nation Divided<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-xM4yz9HqxfhHr-Nn6kG1cWTl7KrHZ2NvVsBv5HSEM3XnE32bnhyj-vnccFaPjKwaBo1dZ-JdHstOVo9MdKNDAYIHy9Z920CwilyPxSbciIKC_NTEsc7lsXBydk4PV-6C4yqs8qQi04DMVUph8r6JsegLDOQV35CPWX9WXtkfY6P7LKGugrhm35YA/s2240/Avishai-Israel-75.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1493" data-original-width="2240" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-xM4yz9HqxfhHr-Nn6kG1cWTl7KrHZ2NvVsBv5HSEM3XnE32bnhyj-vnccFaPjKwaBo1dZ-JdHstOVo9MdKNDAYIHy9Z920CwilyPxSbciIKC_NTEsc7lsXBydk4PV-6C4yqs8qQi04DMVUph8r6JsegLDOQV35CPWX9WXtkfY6P7LKGugrhm35YA/w400-h266/Avishai-Israel-75.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br />Israel turns seventy-five this week: the ritualized celebrations of patriotic solidarity are, this year, unusually self-conscious and forced. The country is in an escalating culture war, and the festivity seems only a ceasefire. Not unlike America commemorating its seventy-fifth year, in 1851, one feels that a rotten compromise struck at the time of the state’s founding has produced, in effect, two societies in Israel, one passably liberal and bourgeois, one traditional and supremacist, and that the latter has finally encroached upon the former in ways that make live and let live—once justified as unity against foreign enemies—intolerable.<div><br /></div><div>Read on at <i><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/israel-turns-seventy-five-as-a-nation-divided">The New Yorker</a></i></div>Bernard Avishaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12785179301542851440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1480252043220105728.post-8971739973881533722023-04-12T12:13:00.001-04:002023-04-12T12:13:32.319-04:00The Trump-Netanyahu Strategy Is Revealed<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpyWkrEjHv543rgh4RH_tOiweyprTE0tm9CsuXbMSY2L2figm9LWNM3Dy54dIWlCCE5wR4LfFUMzLOM31MEcIslG4pDWF7Z6GRDV4IxjmatTMPOVPeFjMjraLqYqmpbbV9CnpudclC7VIJGJrB8JAkLOuXtbCF6qwYkBOqzSM2WqTKomepoPcks23B/s1290/download.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="860" data-original-width="1290" height="253" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpyWkrEjHv543rgh4RH_tOiweyprTE0tm9CsuXbMSY2L2figm9LWNM3Dy54dIWlCCE5wR4LfFUMzLOM31MEcIslG4pDWF7Z6GRDV4IxjmatTMPOVPeFjMjraLqYqmpbbV9CnpudclC7VIJGJrB8JAkLOuXtbCF6qwYkBOqzSM2WqTKomepoPcks23B/w380-h253/download.webp" width="380" /></a></div> <p></p>Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have been allies, but also, intriguingly, mirror one another. <div><br /></div><div>That’s not only because both see “strength” as their go-to asset, or at least the con that the political base seems most likely to buy. Each claims to be his nation’s singular guardian against catastrophe. Each turns shamelessness into charisma. Each grew up coddled but plays up resentments for elites. Each cultivates, in effect, dictators like Vladimir Putin and Victor Orban and scoffs at Western Europe. Each will tolerate only loyalists, and has a string of former appointees, especially high-ranking security professionals, who look back on their service in disgust. Each brags promiscuously, condemns “fake news” and has a sycophantic, tweeting son.</div><div><br /></div><div>Read on at <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/04/06/trump-netanyahu-playbook-00090445">POLITICO</a></div>Bernard Avishaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12785179301542851440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1480252043220105728.post-5678501085642152022023-03-28T05:23:00.002-04:002023-03-28T05:23:43.431-04:00Has Benjamin Netanyahu’s Assault On Israeli Democracy Been Stopped?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHbKVDIxv8dzUMgODFdVMR_IE62bGmvfQnf36rVlCGlYSenLD4UDvTqK_6CjVoAJoxq90sEcz8GpigNx7bCXp1YI8he94F4IDu0DNM2Knat8aYb3oiHfIScg5rpY6d6KvJiCVLWtpZ3FHJELzdbqKDrj9NvSuaVzBBtZYv4haEZcbYDYVq7dIxsY9D/s2048/F200726OF17.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1365" data-original-width="2048" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHbKVDIxv8dzUMgODFdVMR_IE62bGmvfQnf36rVlCGlYSenLD4UDvTqK_6CjVoAJoxq90sEcz8GpigNx7bCXp1YI8he94F4IDu0DNM2Knat8aYb3oiHfIScg5rpY6d6KvJiCVLWtpZ3FHJELzdbqKDrj9NvSuaVzBBtZYv4haEZcbYDYVq7dIxsY9D/w400-h266/F200726OF17.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br />On Sunday night, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, a reserve major general whose mother had been a Polish refugee on the S.S. Exodus. His offense was patriotism. The night before, Gallant had appeared on prime-time national television, calling for a “dialogue” on the fate of the Israeli judiciary and a temporary “halt to the legislative process” that is, in effect, assaulting it. “The growing rift in our society is penetrating the I.D.F. and security agencies. This poses a clear, immediate, and tangible threat to the security of the state. I will not lend my hand to it,” he said. A source close to Netanyahu, changing the subject, said that Gallant was fired for his “feeble and weak response” to the rapidly growing number of reserve officers who, in protest, are refusing to appear for service. <div><br /></div><div>The response from the street was anything but feeble. Overnight, mass demonstrations—of tens of thousands of mostly young people—erupted across the country, building on what have become regular Saturday-night events in the major cities. (During the rest of the week, some show up for improvised, digital teach-ins and spontaneous strategy sessions in towns and neighborhoods.) Protesters were especially focussed on Tel Aviv, where police used water cannons to clear the vital Ayalon expressway. People lit bonfires and chanted, “Democracy or revolt!” and, “You’ve taken on the wrong generation”—and, increasingly, “Bibi, go home.”</div><div><br /></div><div>Read on at <i><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/has-benjamin-netanyahus-assault-on-israeli-democracy-been-stopped">The New Yorker</a></i></div>Bernard Avishaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12785179301542851440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1480252043220105728.post-613446011769232322023-01-07T07:50:00.002-05:002023-01-07T07:50:25.025-05:00Netanyahu’s Government Takes A Turn Toward Theocracy<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4nE-kHW022TUO7zTGua8AOflt8cixIgQx7Nsn-GIr0Qp34rACGy96Y8PhKnkSM7me6xbuvzp5UHj5l-eSZibRqRoN14G3YRiyfq-AROT4QvU1ZVmJRtj__OOnW2XNIRJkA6u3g_u8Ca6Sz8R46HsNSfRnNeRKgifys4leK3oa5p0jb-s0AvZ5PslA/s599/Netanyahu-1.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="562" data-original-width="599" height="361" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4nE-kHW022TUO7zTGua8AOflt8cixIgQx7Nsn-GIr0Qp34rACGy96Y8PhKnkSM7me6xbuvzp5UHj5l-eSZibRqRoN14G3YRiyfq-AROT4QvU1ZVmJRtj__OOnW2XNIRJkA6u3g_u8Ca6Sz8R46HsNSfRnNeRKgifys4leK3oa5p0jb-s0AvZ5PslA/w385-h361/Netanyahu-1.jpeg" width="385" /></a></div> Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new coalition government, which was sworn in last week, is routinely referred to as “extreme right,” but this tortures the meaning of conservatism in a democracy. Thirty-two of the coalition’s members in the Knesset (out of a hundred and twenty parliamentary seats) are disciples of so-called religious parties, the political arms of theocratic communities. These parties, and factions of parties, can be divided into three groups: The largest alliance, with fourteen seats, is religious Zionism, whose forebears were preoccupied with preserving the rabbinic privileges afforded by the British Mandate in the new state of Israel—such as supervision over marriage, burial, conversion, and dietary laws, and state-supported religious schools—but which, since 1967, has been overtaken by the messianic claims of West Bank settlers. The Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, with seven seats, represent self-segregating communities living mainly in and around Jerusalem. Shas, with eleven seats, are a populist, anti-élite party of Orthodox Mizrahi immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, who tend to be poorer and less educated. <p></p><p>In recent years, the three groups have meshed ideologically into the “national camp,” adhering in particular to the ultranationalist, Greater Israel vision of the religious-Zionist alliance: prohibiting the surrender of Biblically promised land, and moving the state further toward Orthodox law. Indeed, the other, anchoring half of the government majority, Netanyahu’s Likud party, includes many rank-and-file members who also openly identify with religious Zionism. (The new minister of environmental protection, Idit Silman, is a former backbencher of a religious-Zionist party who jumped to the Likud last summer, abandoning the “change government” of Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett, thereby helping to bring it down.) </p><p>So, at least half of the coalition government cannot be said to be on the right in any ordinary sense, because its leaders and followers aren’t really committed to the secular social contract, founded on scientific skepticism and liberal norms, that even Zionist rightists including Vladimir Jabotinsky embraced. A 2016 Pew study found that eighty-nine per cent of Haredi, and sixty-five percent of dati—others who feel themselves governed by Jewish ritual law and practice, or Halacha—believe that, if the choice is between democratic principles or Halacha, the latter should “take priority.” Yair Nehorai, a former acolyte of religious Zionism, and the author of “The Third Revolution,” a book documenting the teachings of the rabbinic mentors of the messianic movement, believes that these attitudes amount to a novel politicized Jewish creed, advanced by “Jewist” activists who, in pressing for a Halachic state, are equivalent to “Islamist” activists who advocate for Muslim governmental supremacy and Sharia law. “Rabbi Eliezer Sadan, a renowned Israel Prize winner, set up a program in 1998 that’s prepared twenty-five hundred young men for the military—half of whom became officers, even senior officers,” Nehorai told me. “My book quotes him from 2017 preaching that the ‘Torah is our constitution,’ and the nation, ‘living in its land,’ should conduct its life on the basis of ‘divine precepts.’ ”</p><p>Read on at <i><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/netanyahus-government-takes-a-turn-toward-theocracy"><br />The New Yorker</a></i></p>Bernard Avishaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12785179301542851440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1480252043220105728.post-43623425947910374272022-11-07T16:12:00.001-05:002022-11-07T16:12:13.910-05:00Can The Israeli Election Solve Anything? <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqON9UqWUSgB-9Urg6AfPfzC4KP6XpXNK_UwGGQIvVgId85czI-8y4UV5Fni8QKLWLuT3CHHI4S597hRhvbOPJVmYHUqh0P_i-FiWJJl_pf9iWr9INaVKKobWp7cGUxUkn2T5GAlq00tyq0DcihH7eQhX8tv4QDLN5VuwkYUwulRyNCb1ZI7eku7Nl/s810/Picture1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="810" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqON9UqWUSgB-9Urg6AfPfzC4KP6XpXNK_UwGGQIvVgId85czI-8y4UV5Fni8QKLWLuT3CHHI4S597hRhvbOPJVmYHUqh0P_i-FiWJJl_pf9iWr9INaVKKobWp7cGUxUkn2T5GAlq00tyq0DcihH7eQhX8tv4QDLN5VuwkYUwulRyNCb1ZI7eku7Nl/w400-h266/Picture1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />If the polls are on target, or even slightly off, Tuesday’s election in Israel—the fifth since April of 2019—seems unlikely to settle things down any more than the previous four have. The centrist bloc led by Prime Minister Yair Lapid—who, since June, has been serving in a caretaker role—may deny victory to former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightist bloc. The latter has been consistently projected to win between fifty-nine and sixty seats out of a hundred-and-twenty seats in the Knesset—given the margins of error in major polls, a statistical tie. But, as before, turnout can tip the balance. And either bloc could be seriously undermined if one of its smaller, allied parties attracts significant support but falls short of the, in effect, four-seat minimum needed to cross the threshold for entering the Knesset. Winning is not governing, however. Israel’s electoral system is based on proportional representation, so many small parties do cross the threshold and can then become the last piece that builds a coalition to a Knesset majority. Small parties, like factions of bigger ones, may then wield outsized power in negotiating for seats in the cabinet. <p></p><div>Even if Lapid wins a more decisive victory, his electoral strategy entails coöperation with hard-liners who, were it not for their personal animosity for Netanyahu, would have been more comfortable in the rightist bloc. Ultimately, they could confound Lapid’s effort to build a governing coalition that’s more stable or enduring than the so-called “change government”—a coalition of eight ideologically disparate parties that unseated Netanyahu in the summer of 2021—which he has co-led, in alternation, with the rightist former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. If, on the other hand, Netanyahu’s bloc wins a majority, his coalition, led by his own Likud Party, may appear more coherent, at least at first. But it will be hostage to Religious Zionism, a surging proto-fascist settler party that is projected to win a dozen or so seats. A Netanyahu government would thus be a standing provocation for Israel’s élites, Arab Israelis, Palestinians under occupation, regional Arab partners, and even American political allies. On the whole, the Likud rank and file would go along, much as the majority of Republican politicians have fallen in line behind Donald Trump. But a few Likud veterans may bridle. And, unlike in the United States, just one or two defections in a nearly evenly split Knesset could bring the government down.</div><div><br /></div><div>Read on at <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/can-the-israeli-election-solve-anything">The New Yorker</a></div>Bernard Avishaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12785179301542851440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1480252043220105728.post-35615517077489818312022-09-11T15:26:00.001-04:002022-09-11T15:26:35.179-04:00A.B. Yehoshua’s Culture War<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8Ocuo-CxHAmYX4y9PyaJ_q5-9XdiMSr1mdApxgKHKIOslZ6vITlefRbx7TdTlVL8JvvHD7tXYd5KzMDuoz5KPJI9ltlDP6a3UESgL26nCXJoHHF61iNz-iCjHFNkSb3PdxWUH48XQhFKaNkV7o8QNOFQE3TNGgvu-qDACW0pyp9BmtPBziQENAleL/s1875/2f3418d2ddf72a812733326bf62c61b7b83db928-2000x3000.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1875" data-original-width="1250" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8Ocuo-CxHAmYX4y9PyaJ_q5-9XdiMSr1mdApxgKHKIOslZ6vITlefRbx7TdTlVL8JvvHD7tXYd5KzMDuoz5KPJI9ltlDP6a3UESgL26nCXJoHHF61iNz-iCjHFNkSb3PdxWUH48XQhFKaNkV7o8QNOFQE3TNGgvu-qDACW0pyp9BmtPBziQENAleL/s320/2f3418d2ddf72a812733326bf62c61b7b83db928-2000x3000.webp" width="213" /></a></div><p>On the evening of May 18th, the writer A.B. Yehoshua—“Bulli” to his many friends—climbed onto a Jerusalem stage, heavy on his walker, acknowledging the cheers of an audience that had come out to pay tribute to his work. Three younger writers had just described characters and rhetorical gambits that had inspired them, quoting from among Bulli’s more than 20 novels, story collections, and plays. They implied, but did not have to say, that he was among the preeminent writers who had come into their own in the three decades after the Israeli state was founded—joining the novelist Amos Oz, the poet Yehuda Amichai, and the journalist Amos Elon as custodians of Zionism’s prestige, yet wielding modern Hebrew to address personal, not just national, trials.
Everyone in the room also knew—because he made no secret of this to reporters—that Bulli had esophageal cancer that was fatal and advancing. The moderator, the young novelist Roni Kaban, asked, with an ironic cheerfulness that he must have supposed Bulli would appreciate, how he was “feeling.” Bulli paused and smiled. “I want to die, but it’s not …,” he paused again, seeming to relish the comedy in flunking death, as the laughter in the room nervously swelled and faded. “My books are full of death,” he said. “I am ready. Aval ma zeh? But what is this? What happens? How can we die?” </p><p>When, finally, he found out what “this” is—Bulli died less than a month later, on June 14th, at the age of 85—one might well have wondered if he ever gave up trying to find the words. “It was thus that he remembered the moment of her death,” Molkho, the hero from his 1987 novel of the same name, thinks of his wife’s end, a Mahler symphony playing to her on background speakers, “by its exact bars, the repetition of which could recreate at will that final scene in the silence of the night.” Molkho “had never thought much about such things as life after death or reincarnation, had indeed thanked her mentally for shying away from all that mysticism, whose dark unreason would only have been swept away anyhow by her aggressive, bitter intellectuality.” </p><p>Molkho’s reverence seems like an anticipation. And the moral tension he exposes—“dark unreason” at odds with “bitter aggressive intellectuality”—comes across gently, as a private rumination. But, as was typical in Bulli’s fiction, it also reflected a public struggle—by 1987, the public struggle. “Unreason” is not much spelled out here, but the danger of a default to religious dogma is implied, as much by the novelist as by his character. Nor was Bulli alone here. In Israel, in 1987, the culture war was gaining force, and his part in it was never far from his mind.</p><p>Read on in <i><a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/ab-yehoshua-culture-war">Tablet</a></i></p>Bernard Avishaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12785179301542851440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1480252043220105728.post-72671155752436601932022-06-20T15:49:00.003-04:002022-06-20T15:49:41.990-04:00After A Year In Office, What Has Israel’s Change Government Changed?<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyFxmz-qsqfpy7QuIdSR_8UgclKH_Jy9sNv6zmK1ioranp4Ps1uhCzxxx1y6gDxe2TL9HObQsweOQsSgGZ92YatalkQXgCy_xrf8heNLbX2SFeMnnMGgUdsddn1zweXIyt67eTXmgHW7VqR_tt6u8vpwDmX5drRboCAmfn86Cm4ujFTiWu84NAiFt8/s640/IMG_1364.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyFxmz-qsqfpy7QuIdSR_8UgclKH_Jy9sNv6zmK1ioranp4Ps1uhCzxxx1y6gDxe2TL9HObQsweOQsSgGZ92YatalkQXgCy_xrf8heNLbX2SFeMnnMGgUdsddn1zweXIyt67eTXmgHW7VqR_tt6u8vpwDmX5drRboCAmfn86Cm4ujFTiWu84NAiFt8/w300-h400/IMG_1364.jpeg" width="300" /></a></div>Israel’s improbable “change government” has been in power exactly one year this week, a landmark that is primarily a tribute to how its various leaders’ contempt for former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu marginally exceeds their antipathy for one another. The government is a coalition of two blocs: three rightist parties, managed by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, the leader of the Yamina party, representing Land of Israel hard-liners; and four center and left parties, managed by Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, the founder of the Yesh Atid party, which appeals to Tel Aviv’s bourgeois intelligentsia. The two blocs, with the support of a moderate conservative Islamist party led by Mansour Abbas, whose explicit aim was to increase investment in Arab-Israeli communities, initially held a bare majority of sixty-one seats in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. According to an agreed-upon rotation plan, Bennett and Lapid were scheduled to switch jobs in the summer of 2023; all leaders had agreed to avoid tackling the most divisive issues, especially those dealing with the occupation of Palestine. But a vote in the Knesset on the night of June 6th suggests that division is inescapable and that the government’s run may come to an end, in months, if not weeks. Israel would then face a fifth general election in three years and, once again, as the Haaretz editor, Aluf Benn, told me, “the campaign will largely be about Bibi, who remains the dominant figure in our politics.” <p></p><p>Read on at <i><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/after-a-year-in-office-what-has-israels-change-government-changed"><br />The New Yorker</a></i></p>Bernard Avishaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12785179301542851440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1480252043220105728.post-69366634305694365432022-05-13T07:19:00.001-04:002022-05-13T07:19:08.672-04:00Jews Don’t Have A ‘Holiest’ Site<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaUpYRfGE9TVittHyNNTWpTcyvYjUrr5bjuoENkV3FcorJjTphwQypKiWMtQjcqmqJZ0P1Lok5ScrP2_2G_4Eyk5aMKz8kbA6gUQt_hrVzUlSrSoUV6ZGx-OdHKmM8I3vNXOnuHGCfQWDWIbe2Urxd8n44mJlWrvX9ax8UTIWEk-ZFkdprTIueb0i7/s1280/3631521751%20Large.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="854" data-original-width="1280" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaUpYRfGE9TVittHyNNTWpTcyvYjUrr5bjuoENkV3FcorJjTphwQypKiWMtQjcqmqJZ0P1Lok5ScrP2_2G_4Eyk5aMKz8kbA6gUQt_hrVzUlSrSoUV6ZGx-OdHKmM8I3vNXOnuHGCfQWDWIbe2Urxd8n44mJlWrvX9ax8UTIWEk-ZFkdprTIueb0i7/w400-h268/3631521751%20Large.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><i>Co-authored with Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi</i><p></p><p>It is routine to speak of the ancient Temple Mount as Judaism’s holiest site, a claim confounded only by its being Islam’s third-holiest site. A new Israel Democracy Institute poll tells us that half of Jewish Israelis sympathize with expansion of prayer services on the Mount’s plateau, though most of those tie their sympathy to their aspiration to political sovereignty. Older polls suggest that perhaps a third favor rebuilding the Temple; among those are a small but growing handful of people actively working to revive ritual sacrifice in anticipation of such a day, to be brought about by political, military — or supernatural — means. Mere rumors of Jewish worship catalyze Islamist zealotry in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Israel proper – and roil streets as far away as Bangladesh. Here in Jerusalem, as Israel begins its 75th year of independence, religious war is in the air. </p><div>We won’t address what Palestinians, and Muslims more generally, might believe. Nor whether the word “holy” can even be meaningful to post-enlightenment Jews who also believe in liberal democracy. For us as Israelis, it is more urgent that this growing, allegedly pious, Jewish desire to reconsecrate the Temple Mount be recognized as actually a debasement of what has made Jews distinctive since the first century C.E. – when Judaism, like Christianity, evolved among exiled Judeans as a response to the Temple’s destruction.</div><div><br /></div><div>Read on at <i><a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.HIGHLIGHT-jews-don-t-have-a-holiest-site-1.10797092">Haaretz</a></i></div>Bernard Avishaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12785179301542851440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1480252043220105728.post-68495507106219703652022-04-08T05:30:00.000-04:002022-04-08T05:30:01.247-04:00Israel And The Triangular Crisis Of Ukraine, Iran, And Palestine<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA20Eer7QO3g4uRbOMSPmF5s-csvNFO6Ntx6t2XyXUORh3Wqem-LLJH425OHmJ15WgHW_KzwpqceTcUHApOQjUQH1pMevGJJBXNzYFTrXVFCYK2nugmOR1u8mAoXGj83QeZzcB85yiCDlF7FyVz1egyWORITiF7nFk0VTgKVgusrhiAcceKaj3_RTg/s299/download.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="299" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA20Eer7QO3g4uRbOMSPmF5s-csvNFO6Ntx6t2XyXUORh3Wqem-LLJH425OHmJ15WgHW_KzwpqceTcUHApOQjUQH1pMevGJJBXNzYFTrXVFCYK2nugmOR1u8mAoXGj83QeZzcB85yiCDlF7FyVz1egyWORITiF7nFk0VTgKVgusrhiAcceKaj3_RTg/w400-h225/download.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br />On Monday, the U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, joined the foreign ministers of Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Egypt, and Morocco for a meeting at Sde Boker, the retirement kibbutz and burial place of David Ben-Gurion, the nation’s first Prime Minister. The meeting had been initiated by the Israeli Foreign Minister, Yair Lapid, with encouragement from Blinken, whose main aim was to reassure the group that the United States is fixed in its commitment to deny Iran a nuclear weapon, and that the not-yet-consummated Iran nuclear deal is the best of available options to do that. “The summit was to showcase a strategic alliance growing out of the Abraham Accords,” the Israeli journalist Henrique Cymerman told me. “To seed the formation of a kind of Middle Eastern nato to contain Iran—deal or no deal.” <div><br /></div><div>Israel and its Arab guests registered a certain discontent. No deal currently being negotiated contemplates constraints on the Iranian missile and drone programs. The leaders of the Gulf states have been increasingly chagrined by the lack of a U.S. response to the various attacks that Iran’s Houthi proxies in Yemen have made on the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia during the past few months—including, most recently, a strike on a Saudi Aramco facility, on March 25th. Indeed, Saudi Arabia and Jordan were not represented in person at the summit, although their interests were. (“The Saudis were the real enablers of the meeting,” Cymerman said.) According to Axios, Blinken asked Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, at a pre-summit meeting on Sunday, what alternative Israel proposed to a new deal—other than a U.S.-led, preëmptive strike, which Israel continues to prepare for but, particularly given the situation in Ukraine, the Biden Administration would not want to entertain. Bennett reportedly said that he believed Iran might be deterred from enriching uranium to weapons grade if it knew that the U.S. and European countries would intensify sanctions to the extreme levels they have placed on Russia. Since Israel has not joined in those sanctions, one can only wonder how Blinken received the suggestion.
</div><div><br /></div><div>Read on at <i><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/israel-and-the-triangular-crisis-of-ukraine-iran-and-palestine">The New Yorker</a></i></div>Bernard Avishaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12785179301542851440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1480252043220105728.post-70986461118583113692022-03-16T02:45:00.000-04:002022-03-16T02:45:06.212-04:00Naftali Bennett’s Calculated Effort To Engage With Vladimir Putin On Ukraine—And Iran<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgFKVpM-grSWgKNYqtMjLJdRWXUANPKhVrGH9qOma7fUuAru4x0rygL16-hkEf3jiieoCv2Omj-L4Uiowq-dmOdumNUygxaHAZgXKpBByzE5SUETADqyktRWtG48JqmS1231VbfqYT9gbAvvUgbCqo3FZJlVsbq8JuKSwhJFI9478ObU8Bw9UM7Ab0Z=s259" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="259" data-original-width="194" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgFKVpM-grSWgKNYqtMjLJdRWXUANPKhVrGH9qOma7fUuAru4x0rygL16-hkEf3jiieoCv2Omj-L4Uiowq-dmOdumNUygxaHAZgXKpBByzE5SUETADqyktRWtG48JqmS1231VbfqYT9gbAvvUgbCqo3FZJlVsbq8JuKSwhJFI9478ObU8Bw9UM7Ab0Z=w300-h400" width="300" /></a></div>On Saturday night, while Russian forces entered the Ukrainian city of Volnovakha, and blocked convoys of food and medicine intended for the nearby besieged city of Mariupol, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s President, called Naftali Bennett, the Israeli Prime Minister. The two spoke for more than an hour and discussed, Zelensky tweeted, “Russian aggression and the prospects for peace talks”—which, earlier in the day, Zelensky had suggested might take place in Jerusalem. Genuine negotiations would be impossible in Ukraine, Russia, or Belarus, he told reporters: “These are not places where we can come to any understandings on ending the war—I’m not talking about technical meetings but meetings between leaders. I believe Israel can be such a place, especially Jerusalem.” <p></p><p>That call would seem to vindicate what is almost universally framed as Bennett’s “mediation efforts.” They began in earnest a week before, on March 5th, when Bennett travelled to Moscow at the invitation of President Vladimir Putin, with whom the Israeli government, backed by two-thirds of Israeli citizens, continues to maintain normal, if cooled, relations. Zelensky had apparently urged Bennett to attend the meeting, which, Bennett’s office said, had the “blessing and encouragement of all parties”—a seeming reference to the Biden Administration. It lasted three hours—Bennett, an Orthodox Jew, flew on the Sabbath to attend, a violation except when “saving lives.” When the meeting was over, he flew to Germany for talks with Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and reportedly spoke with Zelensky by phone early the next morning—their third conversation in twenty-four hours. “The moment there is even a small opening, and we have the access to all sides and the capability, I see it as a moral duty to make every attempt,” Bennett told the Israeli Cabinet when he was back in Jerusalem. </p><p> Read on at <i><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/naftali-bennetts-calculated-effort-to-engage-with-vladimir-putin-on-ukraine-and-iran"><br />The New Yorker</a></i></p>Bernard Avishaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12785179301542851440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1480252043220105728.post-47702261177199074232022-03-01T10:37:00.000-05:002022-03-01T10:37:33.316-05:00Ties With Russia Compromise Israel’s Stance On Ukraine<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjhLIhgNVDIuq_bvDvRME76Cg2SLOgzPnHOE46WStInq7YCuG8Pw6EPq_7OD6JwfO-g5e6BOsKCo_WAcdA-nqmpXK6JsWdzwBvnJ_tIzN0pCgXT78qJH_zSx5R4VXtrsZqiAqLh84LUhACOWLnxYGeO0NW2du4vJ3nfkgvSFbRgVQY5Dl1mQepcfA57=s1000" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="522" data-original-width="1000" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjhLIhgNVDIuq_bvDvRME76Cg2SLOgzPnHOE46WStInq7YCuG8Pw6EPq_7OD6JwfO-g5e6BOsKCo_WAcdA-nqmpXK6JsWdzwBvnJ_tIzN0pCgXT78qJH_zSx5R4VXtrsZqiAqLh84LUhACOWLnxYGeO0NW2du4vJ3nfkgvSFbRgVQY5Dl1mQepcfA57=w400-h209" width="400" /></a></div><br />Last Wednesday, with the news that Vladimir Putin had launched an invasion of its neighbor, Israel’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement concerning “steps taken in eastern Ukraine” and endorsing the principle of “territorial integrity.” The statement didn’t even mention Russia, which rankled the Ukrainian Embassy in Tel Aviv. “We just really hope that they will do something that sounds the same as our Western allies,” an Embassy spokeswoman said. On Thursday, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, the architect of Israel’s current “center” government, abandoned the passive voice but not the guarded tone. Talking with reporters, he condemned “the Russian attack” as a “serious violation of the international order” and offered “humanitarian assistance to Ukrainian citizens,” but emphasized that Israel has good relations with both sides. Later that day, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett returned to the ministry’s original, more muted, style. “These are difficult, tragic times,” he said. “Our hearts are with the civilians of eastern Ukraine who were caught up in this situation.” <p></p><div>Israel’s statements reflect actions, or, rather, inactions. On Friday, the Times of Israel reported that the Lapid-Bennett government had rejected the Biden Administration’s request to co-sponsor a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Russia’s actions. On Monday, Lapid issued a statement saying that Israel would vote with the United States in the General Assembly in favor of the resolution, while holding off on supporting sanctions against Russia. “We established an inter-ministry team that will examine the effects and consequences of the sanctions on the Israeli economy and policy,” his statement read. </div><div><br /></div><div> Read on at <i><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/ties-with-russia-compromise-israels-stance-on-ukraine">The New Yorker</a></i></div>Bernard Avishaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12785179301542851440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1480252043220105728.post-3879165465982278452021-05-22T11:03:00.000-04:002021-05-22T11:03:49.440-04:00Even With A Ceasefire, Israel Must Face A Changed Reality<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjl7BfiBVCjM223mB28PjqBKd89NoU9YZRCnIG8XcAA0U9GDEQLTZeavz1QIDBKkhuo_RjSxD-71QnrGo8oTpt4PXia3rmqsSaZ1CDSCSvADpDlUVduZvnp3cQMjxWQ00tlmDkKNc3rntY/s2048/Avishai-IsraelHamasCeasefire.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1366" data-original-width="2048" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjl7BfiBVCjM223mB28PjqBKd89NoU9YZRCnIG8XcAA0U9GDEQLTZeavz1QIDBKkhuo_RjSxD-71QnrGo8oTpt4PXia3rmqsSaZ1CDSCSvADpDlUVduZvnp3cQMjxWQ00tlmDkKNc3rntY/w400-h266/Avishai-IsraelHamasCeasefire.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br />The ceasefire between Hamas and Israel went into effect at 2 a.m. local time on Friday, and seems to be holding. Israelis woke up to their military claiming to have “achieved all our operational goals.” Many Gazans, in turn, celebrated in the streets through the night—among them Khalil al-Hayya, a leader of Hamas’s slate in the now essentially cancelled Palestinian parliamentary elections, whose home in Gaza City was bombed. “This is the euphoria of victory,” he said. <p></p><div>The violence lasted eleven days, long enough for the Israeli military to give its operation a name, Guardian of the Walls, though its briefings to the media have mainly been about tunnels. Hamas has built a web of them, many dozens of miles long, under Gaza’s cities; the defense establishment commonly refers to them, with perverse respect, as the Metro. Israel has mapped them, owing to “very high-quality intelligence”—so the leader of the Southern Command, Eliezer Toledano, told television reporters, last Sunday evening. By Tuesday morning, a military spokesman had claimed that the Air Force had bombed nine launch sites, including some in the tunnels, destroying sixty-five weapons launchers. It even bombed parts not immediately involved in the current action, Toledano added, just to send a message to the Hamas military leaders Yahya Sinwar and Mohammad Deif—themselves now targets—that the tunnels are a “death trap.” Before the ceasefire, the Israeli military claimed to have destroyed more than a hundred kilometres—sixty-two miles—of the tunnels, which is, notionally, the main goal “achieved.” </div><div><br /></div><div>Some buildings above the tunnels also became death traps. The Jerusalem Post reports that the military claims to have destroyed buildings containing “10 government offices, 11 internal security targets, and five banks that manage terror funds.” The Gaza Health Ministry reports that at least two hundred and forty Palestinians, including sixty-six children, have been killed; the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports that seventy-five thousand people have been displaced or made homeless. Israeli government spokesmen, in contrast, say that two hundred and twenty-five militants have been killed, including twenty-five senior commanders—numbers that, for obvious reasons, do not quite match up. By midweek, Israel’s strategic logic seemed to have been reduced to destroying more tunnels and, collaterally, what was around them, including vital infrastructure such as the water and power supply; and destroying alleged command centers in multistory buildings—including, now famously, the Gaza headquarters of the Associated Press and Al Jazeera. By Friday morning, more than four thousand rockets had been launched toward Israeli cities, especially Ashkelon, on the coast; many of the rockets got through the Iron Dome anti-missile shield. Thirteen people were killed in Israel, including two Thai workers; among the Israeli victims were an Arab father and his sixteen-year-old daughter, in the city of Lod.</div><div><br /></div><div>Read on at <i><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/even-with-a-ceasefire-israel-must-face-a-changed-reality">The New Yorker</a></i></div>Bernard Avishaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12785179301542851440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1480252043220105728.post-57428632899536291082021-05-14T05:16:00.003-04:002021-05-14T05:16:38.457-04:00Hamas And Netanyahu Are Gambling Dangerously In Jerusalem<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjs5WFuHEbs4MsgzMqK4rQhZvFGSWLu7oymTcb-OJt6Ubb8_8cDP4UZ8SPCCTN2U1E5UNPf3cTiN6dSoq-wYXQZKyfFhOGmUcdLF6HIXFWXSHT_FvNvkQQ_qh1ufN2WnbKuwanOsHVTFTQ/s2048/Avishai-IsraelPalestine-2.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1366" data-original-width="2048" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjs5WFuHEbs4MsgzMqK4rQhZvFGSWLu7oymTcb-OJt6Ubb8_8cDP4UZ8SPCCTN2U1E5UNPf3cTiN6dSoq-wYXQZKyfFhOGmUcdLF6HIXFWXSHT_FvNvkQQ_qh1ufN2WnbKuwanOsHVTFTQ/w400-h266/Avishai-IsraelPalestine-2.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br />At 6:03 p.m. on Monday, right on time, air-raid sirens sounded over Jerusalem. Hamas’s normally secretive military head, Mohammed Deif, abetted by a spokesman for the Qassam Brigades, which Deif commands, had issued a warning. If, by 6 p.m., Israel did not remove its forces from the al-Aqsa Mosque, and, notably, the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, in East Jerusalem, where Jewish settlers are trying to evict Palestinian families, Israel would pay a “heavy price.” His only means to exact a price were rockets, launched from Gaza. <p></p><div>Deif had inserted himself into a troubled moment. Last Friday, three days after he issued his statement, more than two hundred Palestinians were injured at the al-Aqsa Mosque, as police using stun grenades dispersed rock-throwing protesters, who were incensed, in part, by the presence of police during Ramadan. During the same period, the police violently dispersed hundreds of Palestinians and their Israeli-Jewish supporters who were demonstrating in Sheikh Jarrah, with tear gas and skunk water, a foul-smelling liquid developed for that purpose. By late afternoon on Monday, the city was bracing for a march by rightist youth, who typically taunt Palestinians with nationalist slogans, in celebration of Jerusalem Day. This event commemorates the Israeli conquest of the city in 1967, and its route passes through the Nablus Gate, itself the site of protests two weeks before, when police—unaccountably and, owing to the protests, temporarily—barred Palestinians from socializing on the steps of the gate’s plaza after breaking the Ramadan fast. </div><div><br /></div><div>Few people living where I do, in the part of the city known as the German Colony, just a mile and a half from the Old City, scrambled to shelters when the sirens sounded. We reckoned that, as in 2012, Hamas rockets, not known for their accuracy, would land short. Indeed, of the half-dozen rockets launched at Jerusalem, one landed in Kiryat Anavim, a kibbutz nine miles to the west of the city, hitting a home; others went similarly astray. Nevertheless, and in spite of Israel’s provocations, Deif’s rockets were an obvious escalation. By morning, Israel had escalated further, with air strikes, reportedly killing twenty or more people, including at least nine children. By Thursday evening, more than seventeen hundred Hamas rockets, aiming to overwhelm Israel’s Iron Dome air defenses, and targeting the cities of Ashkelon, Lod, and Tel Aviv, among others, had killed seven Israelis, including a young boy. Israeli strikes in Gaza have now killed eighty-seven people, assassinated Hamas leaders, and levelled a multistory apartment block. Defense Minister Benny Gantz announced that the purpose of the strikes was to make Hamas “regret its decision.” Meanwhile, clashes in the cities of Lod and Ramla have led to more than twenty arrests, the burning of three synagogues, street attacks on Palestinians, and the trashing of homes in both communities. “We will not tolerate this. We need to restore calm,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, during a nighttime visit to Lod. “If this isn’t an emergency situation, I don’t know what is. We are talking about life and death here.” Other mixed Jewish-Arab cities also reported widespread violence.
</div><div><br /></div><div>Continue at <i><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/hamas-and-netanyahu-are-gambling-dangerously-in-jerusalem?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=the-new-yorker&utm_social-type=earned">The New Yorker</a></i></div>Bernard Avishaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12785179301542851440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1480252043220105728.post-84609610046372397832021-04-21T05:10:00.000-04:002021-04-21T05:10:01.696-04:00Netanyahu—On Trial And Trying To Form A Government—Is Promoting His Own Big Lie<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkTjj3pqq7dcvj_bgQWwDMcSTWCFRfxiPEfkeL9DEQIiGOqyECM-Fbc0Jsyg0cPHpqV77jemPDrO2jh5TJL_oh9zLkcj53cdTZpbNEGcX8Z0RCSI48IIiyJzpbFAamPHpz50WWiPrjJl4/s2048/Avishai-NetanyahuBigLie.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1366" data-original-width="2048" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkTjj3pqq7dcvj_bgQWwDMcSTWCFRfxiPEfkeL9DEQIiGOqyECM-Fbc0Jsyg0cPHpqV77jemPDrO2jh5TJL_oh9zLkcj53cdTZpbNEGcX8Z0RCSI48IIiyJzpbFAamPHpz50WWiPrjJl4/w400-h266/Avishai-NetanyahuBigLie.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br />The Israeli election that was held on March 23rd, the fourth such contest in two years, may have seemed yet another referendum on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership. But that is not quite right. This was a referendum, also, on Netanyahu’s Big Lie, which is not, like Donald Trump’s, about voter fraud, but about whether Israel’s judicial professionals—the police, the state prosecutor, and the Attorney General—contrived an élite-leftist putsch against him. In Netanyahu’s telling, they “stitched together cases,” abetted by media cheerleaders, which led to phony indictments for fraud, bribery, and breach of trust, for which he is now on trial. Last week, Israel marked Memorial Day and the seventy-third anniversary of its founding. Hanging over the celebrations was the menace of the lie. <p></p><div>This time, Netanyahu’s Likud Party won thirty seats in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. Together, his bloc, composed of hard-nationalist and theocratic parties, won fifty-two seats, a plurality that earned him, on April 6th, the first Presidential “mandate”—twenty-eight days in which to try to form a coalition government. (Sixty-one seats are needed for a majority.) To maximize his chances, Netanyahu needs a manifestly loyal Likud base to believe or, at least, to abide the lie, and needs to make potential coalition partners believe that the base at least abides it. Those partners are hardly guardians of democratic norms—Netanyahu’s bloc has six national orthodox seats, including an extremist faction inspired by the late Meir Kahane. So Netanyahu is counting on any new coalition to provide him some form of immunity from further prosecution. More important, this coalition would likely pass a law—which most rightists want, in any case—that would subordinate the Supreme Court’s right to review the constitutionality of laws to a simple majority vote in the Knesset. These actions would confirm Netanyahu’s turn to authoritarian rule. The state’s democratic institutions—which were arguably improvised too quickly in 1949—have never seemed more vulnerable. </div><div><br /></div><div>As if to dramatize the point, Netanyahu’s trial resumed, in Jerusalem, on April 5th, the same day that President Reuven Rivlin called Party representatives to his residence to determine which leader would be awarded the mandate. The trial could hardly have gone worse for Netanyahu. The prosecution’s first witness, Ilan Yeshua, the former C.E.O. of the news site Walla!, a division of the telecommunications giant Bezeq, testified that his boss, Shaul Elovitch—then the head of Bezeq—had directly ordered him to “skew” coverage of Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, in favorable ways. Elovitch’s reward, the prosecutors alleged (and Yeshua confirmed on subsequent days), was a regulatory decision from Netanyahu’s Communications Ministry allowing Bezeq to acquire another of Elovitch’s companies—a deal worth several hundred million dollars. By the afternoon, Netanyahu was on the attack. He called reporters to his residence and all but incited insurrection. The prosecutors, he charged, were engaged in a “witch-hunt.” “This is how they try to overthrow a powerful Prime Minister from the right—this is what an attempted coup looks like,” he said. “What is happening is an effort to trample democracy, over and over again. They are attempting to annul the will of the electorate.”
</div><div><br /></div><div>Read on at <i><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/netanyahu-on-trial-and-trying-to-form-a-government-is-promoting-his-own-big-lie">The New Yorker</a></i></div>Bernard Avishaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12785179301542851440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1480252043220105728.post-91788550430956481482021-03-18T04:33:00.007-04:002021-03-18T04:33:41.691-04:00Why American Jews--And Israelis--Should Reject The Law Of Return<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgv_IN_wgYw4gfK2DEkfcjeqw32jHdXoInxC7cNlxeN1k1Q8JO99NkObxCM8JaC-ubsA1JeAerMKXpdUODUOSWrHS9W0LxhwBC7Nv7WCzUJmlBCTMrEBdQGdt_6q1aKWiEi_FiFv9t4MX4/s1920/3580836612.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1116" data-original-width="1920" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgv_IN_wgYw4gfK2DEkfcjeqw32jHdXoInxC7cNlxeN1k1Q8JO99NkObxCM8JaC-ubsA1JeAerMKXpdUODUOSWrHS9W0LxhwBC7Nv7WCzUJmlBCTMrEBdQGdt_6q1aKWiEi_FiFv9t4MX4/w400-h233/3580836612.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br />On June 12, 1995, Quebec held a referendum on independence from Canada. The "No" vote was 50.58 percent and 49.42 percent voted "Yes."
Imagine there had been a swing of three-quarters of a percent, and Quebec had become a sovereign state with a population of eight million people, about 80 percent of whom were French-speaking Roman Catholics – most of whom fancied themselves the true "Quebecois" – founding the only overwhelmingly Catholic commonwealth in North America. <p></p><div>Keep this going. Imagine that, owing to historic persecution of Catholics on the continent – the Acadian expulsion, British occupation, the Ku Klux Klan – one of Quebec’s first laws was to offer automatic citizenship to any proven Catholic who wished to immigrate. Catholic citizens would have a separate parochial, public school system, with priests and nuns teaching Church history and dogma along with French (this school system is actually fact, not fantasy, and existed for nearly a century and a half after Canada was founded in 1867).
Moreover, imagine that, in a newly independent Quebec, Catholics could only marry other legally certified Catholics, and could not divorce except through Church-approved procedures; and, moreover, that some 90 percent of undeveloped land was owned by the St. Jean-Baptiste Society, which, in effect, sold land only to Catholics. </div><div><br /></div><div>Now, imagine that you are one of the roughly 9 percent of the population who are English-speaking and Protestant, or one of the 100,000 Jews, living in and around Montreal. When the state was founded you were made citizens but have few of the privileges Catholics have. Or imagine you are a Greek Orthodox immigrant and would like to get citizenship.
In any case, you decide that, to advance yourself, you must convert to Catholicism; and, historically, conversion was the exclusive domain of the ultramontane Archdioceses of Montreal and Quebec City. Imagine, finally, that, after many years of deliberation, the Quebec Supreme Court decides that comparatively liberal Jesuit priests, or liberation theologians inspired by Vatican II, could also convert people to Catholicism, irrespective of what the Archdioceses do or do not do.</div><div><br /></div>
Would the court’s decision prove this Quebec more "democratic"? Indeed, would we expect the Quebec Democracy Institute, ostensibly founded to advance democratic norms, to hail the decision? Or expect civil libertarians at Harvard Law School to call it "bold" and "egalitarian"? <div><br /></div><div>The state in question, of course, is not a fictional Quebec, but the real Israel.</div><div><br /></div><div>Read on at <i><a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.HIGHLIGHT-why-american-jews-should-reject-israel-s-law-of-return-1.9619845">Haaretz</a></i></div>Bernard Avishaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12785179301542851440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1480252043220105728.post-44804935906715474532021-03-05T07:28:00.000-05:002021-03-05T07:28:05.373-05:00<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8kxyCt-ksT4Npa4KHKJ2meffP31qrWQwOjCDiEfydxbpxXSTLkMzVVVsDDyx76B68LleEef5G0rRCXu9jEkf0v2Wdf55FfyC3Y2nplNcX09cGYmVURFmMLjDCP1EMWf6br-nIs61Rdq8/s326/download.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="155" data-original-width="326" height="190" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8kxyCt-ksT4Npa4KHKJ2meffP31qrWQwOjCDiEfydxbpxXSTLkMzVVVsDDyx76B68LleEef5G0rRCXu9jEkf0v2Wdf55FfyC3Y2nplNcX09cGYmVURFmMLjDCP1EMWf6br-nIs61Rdq8/w400-h190/download.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><a href="https://peacenow.libsyn.com/174-the-case-for-confederation-with-sam-bahour-and-bernard-avishai">This episode</a> is a recording of an APN webinar with Bernard Avishai and Sam Bahour, the co-authors of a recent <i><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/opinion/israel-palestinian-confederation.html">New York Times</a></i> article laying out the benefits of an Israeli-Palestinian confederation, as a possible version of a two-state solution.Bernard Avishaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12785179301542851440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1480252043220105728.post-33180843144687987722021-02-13T10:51:00.002-05:002021-02-13T10:51:27.401-05:00Want Israeli-Palestinian Peace? Try Confederation<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><i></i></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih905IFyWs5vqLODaCWER2NjRZH2TJf1lB4lYX8xuwwkCqig4jphZJSlQdonP-YYgVW-sWYln0o2rXPZf5TPpJUkmZG_o1UEI4TxOPosamCTcf-SmKKKJozJukLmKpcPCpi1dHpgKs3CY/s2048/01Avishai-Bashour-superJumbo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1400" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih905IFyWs5vqLODaCWER2NjRZH2TJf1lB4lYX8xuwwkCqig4jphZJSlQdonP-YYgVW-sWYln0o2rXPZf5TPpJUkmZG_o1UEI4TxOPosamCTcf-SmKKKJozJukLmKpcPCpi1dHpgKs3CY/s320/01Avishai-Bashour-superJumbo.jpg" width="320" /></a></i></span></div><i style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">Politicians and experts should not doubt a two-state solution. But they should finally consider a plausible version of it.</span> </i><p></p><div>Donald Trump has left the Biden administration myriad international crises, and nowhere more obviously than in Israel and the Palestine Authority.
Mr. Trump dismantled relations with the Palestinian side and greenlighted an extremist Israeli government to act as it pleased, ratifying Israel’s exclusive claim to Jerusalem and its continuing settlement project. The normalization deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, whatever their other features, were presented as a way to pre-empt legal recognition of Israeli annexation of territory where Palestinians live outside Jerusalem.</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/opinion/israel-palestinian-confederation.html">Read on at <i>The New York Times</i></a></div>Bernard Avishaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12785179301542851440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1480252043220105728.post-73775374426133873212021-02-04T06:19:00.002-05:002021-02-04T06:19:38.485-05:00Joe Biden Is Playing It Cool With Benjamin Netanyahu<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6S39pe5V4rJqd-RRb-F2CtdXv6d58K-JogXNHyRBzJd6coCpIZeEg6mCIIev7lFSv7NbmMSmqql0LARmr5TFaG1ugTHZDlWI5h0yy3vINLgzuAaWhNiDWdtTkNnhMY_OCk3D67yH2VNw/s2048/Avishai-NetanyahuBiden.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1509" data-original-width="2048" height="295" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6S39pe5V4rJqd-RRb-F2CtdXv6d58K-JogXNHyRBzJd6coCpIZeEg6mCIIev7lFSv7NbmMSmqql0LARmr5TFaG1ugTHZDlWI5h0yy3vINLgzuAaWhNiDWdtTkNnhMY_OCk3D67yH2VNw/w400-h295/Avishai-NetanyahuBiden.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />The Trump Presidency has strained many of the friendships that President Joe Biden cultivated with Republicans over the years. Similarly, Biden’s forty-year friendship with Benjamin Netanyahu, who openly allied himself with Trump Republicans, now seems perfunctory. Biden’s admiration for Israel may be undimmed, but, as of this writing, the new President has yet to place a call to the Israeli Prime Minister. And the Biden Administration has wasted little time in restoring aid to the Palestinian Authority, which the Trump Administration had cut off, and in reiterating U.S. support for a two-state solution, which Trump’s “deal of the century”—written largely by American supporters of Messianic Jewish settlements—had debased. <p></p><p>Even so, it’s hard to imagine new Israeli-Palestinian negotiations ranking high on the list of the Administration’s foreign-policy priorities. Biden is angling to rejoin and augment the Iran nuclear deal, which the Obama Administration had helped forge and which Trump abandoned. Last week, Aviv Kochavi, the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, told the Institute for National Security Studies—reportedly, with Netanyahu’s encouragement—that any such action would be “bad and wrong.” Three days later, Biden appointed Robert Malley, an architect of the nuclear deal, to be his Iran envoy. So, Biden’s frictions with Netanyahu’s government appear likely to intensify well before the question of Palestine exacerbates them. </p><p>But the Trump Administration affected some changes in the region that the Biden Administration has signalled that it does not wish to undo. The U.S. Embassy, Antony Blinken said, at his Senate confirmation hearing for Secretary of State, will remain in Jerusalem. Far more important are the Abraham Accords, which went into effect last August, establishing formal diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. (Deals were also reached with Sudan, in October, and Morocco, in December; direct El Al flights to Rabat and Casablanca were announced on December 22nd.) The deals, the U.S. national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said last week, are “positive for security in the region, positive for economic development in the region.” Though most Palestinians feel betrayed by the accords, the agreements may eventually benefit Palestine, and Jordan, too—if the Biden Administration can prevail on the Israeli government to cease threatening formal annexation of the parts of Palestine that Trump’s deal designated to Israel, and to include opportunities for Palestinian “economic development” in, say, infrastructure and transportation projects with the Gulf states. “I don’t see how a Biden Administration will not embrace normalization for its own sake,” Malley told me in December, “though it will want normalization to advance Israeli-Palestinian peace along the line of two states.” </p><p>For the Biden Administration to actually indulge this hope, though, it would have to believe that Netanyahu did not, as he clearly intended to, make himself the chief beneficiary of the accords—that they are not for him primarily a way to take credit for a major work of statesmanship that could help him stay him office, escalate settlement construction without formal annexation, and rally his new allies in the Gulf against U.S. efforts to reëngage with Iran. In fact, the deal’s timing was critical to Netanyahu’s plan. By August, he was already plotting yet another election, determined to win, finally, a servile majority in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, that would be willing to grant him immunity from prosecution on charges of bribery and breach of trust, which were filed against him in November, 2019. He must have guessed, too, that Trump was likely to lose the U.S. election, and so he would be denied his most important patron. And Netanyahu didn’t have other significant accomplishments to point to—in the spring, he seemed to have the pandemic under control, but another surge hit over the summer.</p><p><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/joe-biden-is-playing-it-cool-with-benjamin-netanyahu">Read on at <i>The New Yorker</i></a></p>Bernard Avishaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12785179301542851440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1480252043220105728.post-31736139913266730802020-10-29T12:47:00.005-04:002020-10-29T12:47:39.156-04:00Is American Tolerance For Political Violence On The Rise?<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSvAWD5DyJ5_AR2dDUsGSyEyGPsPMbxWHRe8TQXZOMX1eMr-ccrzJLHudOiQL80GniBWlDi__2vXmmI7IdHPTqEdNoi7HG3PGzb39Oa8Jl-7jaDpiN5F53TYhk9BcZ6F4grCXxNdatlz8/s2048/Avishai-PoliticalViolence.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1366" data-original-width="2048" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSvAWD5DyJ5_AR2dDUsGSyEyGPsPMbxWHRe8TQXZOMX1eMr-ccrzJLHudOiQL80GniBWlDi__2vXmmI7IdHPTqEdNoi7HG3PGzb39Oa8Jl-7jaDpiN5F53TYhk9BcZ6F4grCXxNdatlz8/w400-h266/Avishai-PoliticalViolence.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />When it’s working, American democracy is a peace process—its institutions were devised to settle radical disagreements nonviolently. On rare occasions, though, the institutions have failed. Is this another such moment? Bright Line Watch, a group of political scientists monitoring threats to democratic practices, has conducted a survey on the robustness of America’s democracy in the face of what it calls “nightmare scenarios.” Election Day is less than a week away, and Donald Trump has indicated that he’ll respect the result if he wins—but he has also been waging an unprecedented campaign to gin up belief in voter fraud. Should he lose in anything but a blowout, he seems poised to try to discredit the electoral process by casting doubt on the mechanics of voting and counting and by manipulating the vote in the Electoral College through spurious legal challenges, among other strategies. Which tactics seem most likely to damage democratic processes, given America’s institutional soft spots? More important, will Americans keep the peace, even as the President riles them? <p></p><div>Earlier this month, the Bright Line Watch team—led by Gretchen Helmke, of the University of Rochester, Susan C. Stokes, of the University of Chicago, and my colleagues John M. Carey and Brendan Nyhan, of Dartmouth College—posed such questions to some ten thousand academic political scientists in the United States. More than seven hundred, “across a diverse range of subfields,” responded, offering opinions about the vulnerabilities of America’s democratic institutions. The team simultaneously commissioned a YouGov survey of twenty-seven hundred citizens “selected and weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population.” The survey asked them not the diagnostic questions posed to the political scientists but, to complement those, whether and in what ways they thought the vote could prove fraudulent. The team then divided those citizens into self-identified Trump “approvers” and “disapprovers” (the survey did not require respondents to identify as registered Republicans or Democrats, but it did establish which parties they felt “closer” to). The team examined the answers to determine how seriously Trump’s claims are believed—and, more important, what both groups might be prepared to do about it. “We asked a battery of questions regarding the ways fraud might be perpetrated,” Carey told me. “What’s fascinating, and cautionary, is the degree to which the President's supporters and his opponents are—no surprise—living in completely disconnected information ecosystems.”</div><div><br /></div><div>Read on at <i><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/is-american-tolerance-for-political-violence-on-the-rise">The New Yorker</a></i></div>Bernard Avishaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12785179301542851440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1480252043220105728.post-19060490107509297852020-09-23T05:00:00.005-04:002020-09-23T05:02:11.790-04:00Orthodoxy And Liberalism<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBi73bvF6X4oMs-1hKtM0djzJn-bpNz9plOpW94Xm0940-mAMduRGxe8cvbpk61rdJu0Pv0fVwC8CAaBbzx37MC2cnUhG1zola8QfzbNBLzTOaE3MwXlC3IQ89tg1kQJr1TCmEdV5C5Kk/s1080/Picture1.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="592" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBi73bvF6X4oMs-1hKtM0djzJn-bpNz9plOpW94Xm0940-mAMduRGxe8cvbpk61rdJu0Pv0fVwC8CAaBbzx37MC2cnUhG1zola8QfzbNBLzTOaE3MwXlC3IQ89tg1kQJr1TCmEdV5C5Kk/s320/Picture1.jpg" /></a></div>Every year, on Yom Kippur, we read from Isaiah and I feel a queasiness, though not quite the response the prophet would seem to have intended. We read: “Is this the fast I desire, a day for men to starve their bodies? Is it bowing the head like a bulrush, and lying in sackcloth and ashes? No, this is the fast I desire: to unlock the fetters of wickedness, and untie the cords of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free; share your bread with the hungry …” and so forth. There is a certain satisfaction in the thought that some phantom rabbinic committee once obliged congregations to read the passage. Yet the plain meaning of the text seems a standing challenge to the rationale for rabbinic committees obliging anything; a challenge to Halachic life as a whole—to the Orthodox world of performative commandments, or rabbinic refinements of commandments. <div><br /></div><div> I don’t mean a challenge like the one originating with St. Paul, who famously spoke about the spirit of the law, but who had resistible dogmatic claims of his own. It is a challenge deriving from what can only be called, in its modern incarnation, principled sympathy, rooted in the attribution of universal dignity. This is an ethical stance, foundational to liberalism, which, the prophet seems to be telling us, precedes and supersedes any ritual or sacrificial commandment—also, presumably, any quasi-ethical commandment, like hosting, visiting the sick, or comforting the mourner. One may, as my mother did, keep kosher, and give a sandwich to a beggar, and in both cases call the act a mitzvah. </div><div><br /></div><div>But—if you take Isaiah seriously—you would never have needed the generosity to be commanded. The capacity for it was already there.
I know, the prophet is not only appealing to a surpassing ethical faculty. He goes on to valorize the keeping of the Sabbath. Nor am I dismissing the value of Jewish ritual, so long as it is selectively voluntary, which is precisely what those enmeshed in Halacha reject. (I’ll return to both points in due course.) And I realize that Isaiah’s words are lifted from their context. These particular verses, from Isaiah 2.0, were apparently written around the time of the Babylonian exile, after the Temple was destroyed, and rituals of atonement replaced sacrifice—that is, a couple of centuries after Isaiah 1.0. Who knows what was meant exactly by obligatory fasting in the context of the Babylonian diaspora-in-formation? </div><div><br /></div><div>Nevertheless, Isaiah’s words are so vivid and clearheaded that they transcend their time. If you want to approach the divine, the prophet says, don’t be distracted by ritual obligations. Don’t soothe yourself with obedience. Rather, show loving mercy to the poorest among you. Help others cultivate what freedom they might exercise. You never needed that to be commanded. It seems a pretty clear, radical, timeless exhortation.<p>Read on at <i><a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/belief/articles/orthodoxy-and-liberalism">Tablet</a></i> </p></div>Bernard Avishaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12785179301542851440noreply@blogger.com