Bernard Avishai Dot Com

One Man's Legacy

2012-02-01T10:06:00.001-05:00

Uri Avnery accepting Yesh Gvul's Leibowitz Prize

I'll be blogging intermittently over the next three weeks. We'll be traveling to the US and Russia, returning to Jerusalem toward the end of February. And as a kind of going away present to ourselves, we went to Tel Aviv a couple of nights ago, to see Uri Avnery collect Yesh Kvul's Yeshayahu Leibowitz prize for his peace work over the past 60 plus years. I won't say more about him now. Uri is an icon. I will recount a story he told, apparently well known by now to historians, but which I had managed never to have heard before.

It seems that the IDF military officer who accepted the surrender of Nazareth in 1948 was one Ben Dunkelman, a Canadian who had fought in the Canadian Army during WWII and then came to Israel to fight for the nascent Jewish state. Once in command of the city, which was entirely peaceful, Dunkelman received an order to expel Nazareth's inhabitants--a direct order from the Chief of Staff, Haim Laskov--much as the populations of Ramle and Lod were then being expelled.

"I was shocked and horrified," Dunkelman wrote. "I told him I would do nothing of the sort--in view of our promises to safeguard the city's people, such a move would be both superfluous and harmful. I reminded him that scarcely a day earlier, he and I, as representatives of the Israeli army, had signed the surrender document in which we solemnly pledged to do nothing to harm the city or its population. When Haim saw that I refused to obey the order, he left."

The order had been oral. Dunkelman, it seems, insisted that it be in writing, which no senior officer was prepared to do. (Neither would David Ben-Gurion put in writing the order to evacuate Ramle and Lod, by the way; Yitzchak Rabin and Yigal Allon complied with a wave of Ben-Gurion's hand.) Twelve hours later a new commander was appointed for Nazareth, Avraham Yaffe. "I complied with the order, but only after Avraham had given me his word of honour that he would do nothing to harm or displace the Arab population. [....] I felt sure that [the order to withdraw from Nazareth] had been given because of my defiance of the evacuation order."

We fell silent in the hall as Avnery told the story, reflecting on Dunkelman's heroism. You don't need unusual courage to fight your enemies, Leibovitz (and Orwell) taught, but you do to risk being called a traitor or a fool by your friends. Rabin described the evacuation of Lod and Ramle in poignant detail in his memoirs (pages the censor first tried to suppress, but which Avnery printed in his now defunct magazine Ha'Olam Hazeh). Rabin supposed the act was justified. But was it, even for strictly "security" reasons?

Nazareth is a hybrid city that, for all of its tensions, portends the democracy Israel must become. It has never been the source of violence. But among the youths expelled from Lod and Ramle 1948 were Khalil Ibrahim al-Wazir, or Abu Jihad, and George Habash--eventually, leaders of political organizations willing to engage in grotesque acts of terror. What was cause and what effect? Again, men and legacies.

Obama, Healthcare, And Progressive Critics

2012-01-26T10:36:00.000-05:00

The following review essay was just published in the Nation.

It is hard to read Remedy and Reaction, Paul Starr’s remarkable chronicle of the hundred-year effort to legislate universal health insurance in the United States, without recalling Robert Gibbs’s tortured quip that Democrats who’ve denounced the Obama White House for having knuckled under to Republican principles or intimidation “ought to be drug-tested.” Nobody with a sense of history—that is, nobody who reads Starr’s book—could doubt how sensible and brave was the president’s effort to drive the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 through Congress. Nobody with a feel for the present moment should doubt how imminent is the threat to the act, how urgent it is for progressive Democrats to rally around Obama—and without all the condescending qualifications that “independents,” who flock away from allegedly weak or incompetent leaders, interpret as contempt.

Starr, who teaches at Princeton and, with Robert Kuttner and Robert Reich, founded The American Prospect, has written 300-plus pages of tightly woven policy description, narrative and polemic; but one needn’t be a wonk to benefit from the tutorial or detect an occasional sigh between the lines. Literary scholars speak of a pathetic fallacy, the idea that inanimate objects have intentions and feelings. Starr makes clear that various political commentators have been susceptible to a somewhat different fallacy, pathetic in its own way, that America’s desires can be fathomed through polling and that the president must somehow be at fault if a desire is not fulfilled, as though flawed legislative institutions, entrenched political forces, conflicting popular incentives, regional rivalries and sheer corruption do not shape political outcomes.

Starr learned his lessons the hard way. He closely advised the Clintons on health strategy in the early 1990s (he still knows and has debriefed key Congressional staffers). The centerpiece of Remedy and Reaction is a long section, full of illuminating asides, on the frustration of the Clintons’ plans. Starr shows that, even as Bill Clinton submitted his bill to Congress, some 70 percent of voters subscribed to the principles embodied in the legislation he proposed. Yet the bill didn’t come close to being enacted. True, Clinton was losing altitude by then, but to suppose his failure was largely a matter of leadership—you know, that he didn’t use his bully pulpit forcefully enough, the sort of gripe heard relentlessly on MSNBC, the Huffington Post and Daily Kos about Obama and the “public option”—is to suppose that willows really weep.

Obama’s actions were cannier than Clinton’s, but they also amounted to a profile in courage. When Obama came into office, Starr explains, only 11 percent of Americans thought reform would have a “negative personal impact,” but by August 2009 this segment of the population was trending to 31 percent. Both Rahm Emanuel and Joe Biden were urging retreat. Starr writes, “Obama not only resolved to go ahead; in September and again in the new year, the president took charge of the effort to steady the health-care initiative and prevent it from careening off the tracks.” Nor was the final bill anything less than what might reasonably have been expected, filling as it did the negative space left by four generations of government programs and serial compromises. Starting with clean sheets of paper was never realistic when one-sixth of the economy was at stake.

Starr’s great fear is repeal of the Affordable Care Act, which would not only deny healthcare to more than 30 million people but would cast doubt on whether “Americans will ever be able to hold their fears in check and summon the elementary decency toward the sick that characterizes other democracies.” Obamacare, in short, was healthcare reform’s best—and last—shot, and it would be unconscionable for liberals to remain cavalier about its defense, or Obama’s, for that matter. It’s past time to discard the misguided assumption that in a better economy, or with more of “a fighter” in the White House, something like a Canadian-style single-payer system might have been (or might sometime fairly soon be) enacted.

Read on at the Nation's website. Or download a pdf.

A Night At The Opera

2012-01-21T13:07:00.000-05:00

Kurt Weill

Sidra and I went to see the Israeli Opera's performance of "The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny" a couple of nights ago, which, like other Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht collaborations, was an odd combination of the sophomoric and prophetic, musically interesting without being moving--yet, days later, haunting.

I won't go into the dystopia Weill and Brecht present us. I'll say only that it is a burgeoning city in the American desert, built up almost overnight, whose businesses sell nothing but food, drink, sex, gambling and spectacle (that is, boxing). The buyers are ordinary stiffs who have earned their bankrolls through dignified but exhausting physical labor; our hero is a lumberjack from "Alaska." They have come to Mahagonny to let things rip. This is payback time, they guess, and lose themselves in gluttony and whoring.

The whores, in turn, are women freed from (what Brecht, an evangelical Marxist) seems to consider bourgeois constraints and have a kind of spunk that often seems more admirable than pathetic, which the score (especially the famous "Moon of Alabama") reinforces. All are finally worn out by cynicism, far more than by any work or memory of work. The only thing that gives life meaning (if that's the word for it) is the fear of mass death from a great natural storm, which narrowly misses the city in the opera, but also leaves the inhabitants empty of hope.

I naturally assumed, before reading the notes in the playbill, that Brecht and Weill managed to write this together when the got to the United States in the 1940s, though the former, I knew, found himself in Hollywood and the latter in New York. I figured they somehow got wind of Las Vegas taking shape in Nevada, near the Hoover Dam, and Mahagonny was a kind of satire of that emerging city, a useful embodiment of where the bourgeoisie takes us.

I was a little shocked to read that work on the opera actually began in 1927, and was first performed in Berlin in 1930. Shocked, because Mahagonny was just an imaginative projection from things happening all around Brecht and Weill in Berlin, not America. It was Brecht's "Pottersville," the nightmare place George Bailey found himself in when he envisioned a world stripped of decency. The opera was not a specific satire of America but a general warning about human nature, well, human nature under "capitalism." (The ruinous storm Brecht and Weill assumed people needed to give themselves a kind of consoling drama was not the Second World War but the First. The nightmare was even worse than the pair could imagine.)

Bertolt Brecht

I CAN'T QUITE explain why seeing the opera in Tel Aviv in 2012, knowing it was dreamed up in in Berlin in 1930, touched me the way it did. In part, it was simply the irony that operas like "The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny" almost certainly had an effect very different from the one Brecht and Weill were hoping for. The Nazis came to power largely because, in the middle of a shattering economic crisis, Hitler was able to spread the idea that "the Jews"--not capitalism in general--were profiteering from decadence. ("The part which the Jews played in the social phenomenon of prostitution, and more especially in the white slave traffic, could be studied here better than in any other West-European city," Hitler rails in Mein Kampf.)

But I suppose the thing that got to me, in a scatter of feelings, was that 1930 was also the year Ben-Gurion formed Mapai, which promised Palestinian Jews a kind of permanent "Alaska," quite different, he thought, from the fate of Jews in the bourgeois diaspora. Yet Israel's current prime minister is bankrolled by an American sidekick, Sheldon Adelson, who made his fortune spreading Mahagonny around the globe. He is the closest living thing the audience might imagine to the grotesque "hotel" owner, Leocadia Begbick, whose manipulations and creepy self-pity cast a shadow over the entire production. (I was told by someone who knows that Adelson introduced himself to George W. Bush in the Oval Office as "Sheldon Adelson the third." When Bush said that he thought Jews did not name children in this way, Adelson responded: "The third richest man in America, and soon to be the second.")

Adelson's fortune has been used to subsidize Israel's largest circulation tabloid, given away for free, pushing an agenda of "markets" and "toughness," all-Bibi-all-the-time. It is also helping to revive Newt Gingrich's surging campaign, of course, though I suspect a great many of the latter's voters in the Republican primaries think of Adelson and his casinos pretty much the way Germans who voted for the Nazis for the first time in 1931 felt about "the Jews." Anyway, bloggers can turn on ironies only so far.

The symbolism is a little contrived, I admit, but it was hard to leave the theater not fearing that the bad guys already won, that Brecht's prophesy proved more powerful than Ben-Gurion's. Then again, this was the wonderful Tel Aviv mall for the performing arts. It was not an accident (as evangelical Marxists like to say) that this opera was chosen, of all times, now. Besides, just last summer the streets of the city for were alive with tens of thousands of young people hungry for "social justice" and excoriating the consumerism Mahagonny brought to an exaggerated climax.

Then again, again, when masses march for meaning and social solidarity, as in Berlin in the 1930s, it is not usually social democrats who keep their place at the head of the line. Soon after the first performance of "The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny," Brecht and Weill would be running for their lives. Weill's parents made it to Tel Aviv, where the story, as it were, continues.

Justice For All: The Numbers Speak

2012-01-16T10:05:00.002-05:00

I wrote last week about a Knesset bill to determine in a new way the composition of Israel's High Court of Justice. This would tip the needle toward government power over the court, presumably, a last bastion of liberal-democratic law in a land without a constitution. The bill in question was withdrawn in the end, as Netanyahu appeared to bow to objections by moderates in the cabinet (Dan Meridor, Benny Begin, and others); and withdrawing the bill set off a round of last minute horse-trading among members of the appointments committee.

In effect, High Court President Dorit Beinisch and Justice Minister Yaacov Neeman each got one person--the former, a known liberal, the latter, a known settler--and they also agreed on two "moderates" who were less well known (though one is known "Mizrahi"). Instead of high-handedness, one hand washed the other--and it's hard to say just what is worse when choosing members of the highest court in the land.

In any case, the first decision made by the High Court in the wake of this tussle leads one to wonder if the fight for civil liberties in Israel is really going to be winnable. I am speaking, of course, of the amendment to the immigration bill that refuses Israeli Arab citizens the right to bring in their wives or husbands to the country, as Jewish citizens do--especially if spouses are from the occupied territories.

I won't go into the details, which Haaretz's Gideon Levy does here, and with continuing passion. Suffice it to say the decision vividly underlines how grotesque it is becoming for Israeli leaders to present their country as a Western democracy while putting off final status negotiations and the confederative solutions these will (as I argued in Harper's) inevitably lead to--the only way to square circles of citizenship, the right of return, and so forth. The court, like the "consensus," generally confuses Jewish state with Jewish majority, and demographic hegemony with "security." This cannot go on without internal explosion or international isolation, or both.

THEN AGAIN, ONE has only to look at how the system (if that's the phrase for it) of justice works in the West Bank to know that justice has been anything but blind for a generation. And no organization has looked into that system, more thoroughly than the somewhat ironically named Yesh Din, or "There is Justice (or, perhaps, Verdict)." The chief legal counselor to Yesh Din, the indomitable Michael Sfard, recently prepared a summary report on how criminal complaints have been handled since Yesh Din began its work in 2005, which he kindly sent over to me. (Readers of Hebrew can get a pdf. of the presentation here.)

Of the total number of crimes committed against West Bank Palestinians, about 38% involved gunfire, 42% damaged property, and 15% encroachments on private land.
91% of complaints to police resulted in no indictment: 86% of violent crimes; 96% of property crimes. Of 127 cases of olive groves being uprooted between 2006-2011, one case resulted in an indictment.
66% of cases were closed because police claim the perpetrators were unknown, 24% because there were no (credible) witnesses. Under 4% of crimes brought to the military police were investigated. (In over 90% of cases, settler alibis were accepted without corroboration or further investigation.)
Between 2007-2011, 267 complaints were filed against soldiers; in just 30 cases (about 11%) was it decided to open an investigation.
13 cases of settlers building on Palestinian private land resulted in 11 High Court injunctions; 5 of these have been violated without consequence. Land illegally built on for settler roads were retroactively expropriated for public purposes.

The numbers speak for themselves; they are deeply disturbing. A social contract is destroyed when the rule of law loses its moral prestige. The idea that Israeli judges and police can just go through the motions in the occupied territories but otherwise take justice seriously is implausible, as, come to think of it, the decision regarding the immigration law reveals.

Pervasive Feelings And Class Warfare: A Coda

2012-01-15T08:05:00.002-05:00

Many people have written over the past couple of years--including faithful (and valued) commentators here and at TPM in response to my last post--that President Obama blew it pretty much from the start by failing to adopt a more "populist" line. This is code for other code: populist means more committed to fighting for the "economic interests of lower-income people," which in recent days has come to mean, rather misleadingly, the other 99%.

Sure, Republicans and Democrats from red states blocked him on almost everything he tried, from climate change to immigration to infrastructure spending. But Obama after (or is it before?) the healthcare reform "failed to make the case" that the federal government could be a lever to redress the grotesque inequalities that have grown up over the past generation. It was the economy, Stupid. Okay, not Stupid, Timid.

The background premise is that "class" trumps (or, with the right leadership, could be made to trump) other divisions. Many progressive Democrats of a certain age (me, too) acquired this premise reading socialist classics in the 1960s, and it's circulated like an antibody ever since, reinforced, oddly, by the sincerity (or vanity) of professional economists of all kinds.

If you appeal to citizens' "bread-and-butter" interests, presumably, you've got them. Obama's task was to rally "ordinary working people" to confront those whose income is 10 or 20 times theirs. Obama "failed to connect" with "lunch-pail Democrats" because he allowed himself to be identified rather with Robert Rubin's acolytes. (Obama's "they-cling-to-guns-or-religion-or-antipathy-to-people-who-aren't-like-them" remark didn't help, though it was a window onto his understandable apprehensions.)

LET'S LEAVE ASIDE the question of how many "ordinary working people" actually remember (or have even heard of) Robert Rubin. Leave aside those who loudly identified Geithner, Summers, etc., as Obama's Wall Street tar babies, and over policy differences about how to deal with "toxic assets" (remember them?) that now seem rather trivial. The serious question, with Republicans whining about "class warfare," is what exactly is a class, and between which classes does class warfare generally get fought?

This is not the place for a full answer, but I think I should add a coda to my post. It is that populist appeals would not likely have been interpreted by "ordinary working people" in quite the way the way the theory calls for. (Marx was more astute about the bourgeoisie than he was about "the proletariat," too, but that's another story.)

America's first African-American president, who happened to know at first hand what was the matter with Kansas, also knew not to look for a definition of class only in a book of Studs Terkel's interviews. Implicitly, he looked also in J. Anthony Lukas's disquieting classic, Common Ground, which depicts Boston-Irish working class fears during the busing riots.

Obama knew, in other words, that class warfare has not generally been fought between the working class and "the ruling class" but between the working class and the (alleged) underclass. This means between ethnic whites and exasperated blacks, Southie and Roxbury, the docks against the inner city--what Obama saw working the streets of Chicago, by the way. Why is this so obvious when we watch "The Wire" and so hard to see when we write blogs for The Huffington Post?

No doubt, Terkel could still find a great number of ethnic white working people who'll perceive brotherhood in shared economic interests, without being prone to racist simplifications; 35-40% still say they'll vote for Obama. This many people is a moving testament to the success of the civil rights movement, when you think about it. But 60% of ethnic white males have now turned against Obama, reverting to form, that is, to the pattern we've had since busing, the busting of unions, affirmative action, rustbeltization--that is, since Ronald Reagan. Again, Obama won with under 53%. This much of a shift among lunch-pale ethnic whites and he will lose.

Which is why Newt Gingrich is talking about "food-stamps," of all things. Romney is talking about "Europe." This guy? Not us. Without this residual class resentment, Fox-News is unimaginable. Obama broke the mold with this group in 2008, not by stressing economic egalitarianism per se, but by speaking about unity, individual responsibility, the "America" his grandfather fought for--by advocating for a more predictable middle class life (health insurance, student loans) and an administration run by someone more responsible than the person who'd choose Sarah Palin.

This was Obama's promise and he kept it. Had he come out of the blocks attacking Republican leaders and free enterprise principles, that is, without first showing how badly he wanted, and embodied, "bipartisanship" (also code for a hybrid of black and white)--had he radicalized his "narrative" and advanced the claim that government action was needed to (how did he put it to "Joe-the Plumber"?) spread the wealth--he would not have spooked Wall Street nearly as much Main Street. He would have been suspected of reverting to form himself, a Jesse Jackson in John Kerry's clothing.

The point is, Obama might have expected progressives to be shrewd enough to understand the dilemma he faced. That ethnic white working men do cling to what he was overheard saying they did; that, by implication, "ordinary working people" respond to a strong leader, yes, but so long as that leader looks like Giuliani or Christie. If you are black in America, they have to believe you are brave, sincere, a unifier and wicked smart.

This is where we especially let Obama down. We made "independents" believe, with unearned superiority, that we could have done better.

President Obama And Pervasive Feelings

2012-01-10T13:09:00.000-05:00

Today is the New Hampshire primary, Romney is calling for "leadership," and he seems to be getting away with it. He's not really calling attention to his own qualities, since he's rather slavishly followed his market the way a person who thinks he's a corporation would. No, Romney is tapping into a pervasive feeling--or what reporters, it seems pervasively, call a pervasive feeling--that Obama's leadership has failed. "Leadership" is for the new Romney what "law and order" was for the new Nixon. He's got (as we sang while Nixon shrugged) a ticket to ride.

The question is, why this feeling about Obama? Really. Why? How has it become so hip to doubt Obama's leadership even as--here comes another cliche--"people like him"?

I won't now recount all the accomplishments of the Obama presidency, certainly by comparison with any president in living memory. Others have done a good job compiling these (check out this list to 2010, before Libya, etc., and take a few minutes to contemplate it). I will myself be publishing a review essay in The Nation shortly, reconsidering his greatest accomplishment, healthcare reform, which took a hundred years to enact.

Still, Obama's re-election seems anything but certain--Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, etc. all seem within Republican reach--and he's polling around 45% (he won with only 52.8%). If he loses, the "leadership issue" will likely be the critical one, which is a little like saying he will lose because he's widely thought to be a loser.

THERE IS ANOTHER way of looking at this, of course. Almost from the moment he was elected, Republican leaders in Congress announced that their mission was to obstruct and defeat him--not only on issues where they might have genuine disagreements, but also on things they generally endorse but might improve the economy, like roads and bridges. The Republican fear, quite openly expressed, was that Obama might get credit if things improved.

It was as if a surly, jealous crew (one that could not be fired, Mr. Romney) had announced at the outset of a voyage that they intended to sabotage the ship's engines to make the captain look bad. And yet the passengers, once at sea, and with the ship foundering, do turn on the captain. What did congressional Republicans know about American politics that allowed them to assume they could indeed get away with this?

THE ANSWER, OR so we are told again and again, has to do with unemployment. "No president with an unemployment rate above etc., has ever etc." So the first charge leveled against Obama is that he spent too much time on healthcare when he should have focused on the economy. Sure, his policies may have allowed us to avoid a depression, and saved the auto industry, but healthcare? The vast majority of people did not really benefit from the healthcare reform, so the argument goes, since only 30-40 million are uninsured. But all are affected by the squishy employment numbers (less squishy now than last month, but never mind).

A moment's thought reveals the nonsense here. Of course everybody benefits from the health reforms (preexisting conditions, etc.) but especially those who risk unemployment. Besides, if people who are insured don't see why the health reforms are for them, why should the people who are employed care about the unemployment numbers? If their attitude to the first problem is "I-worry-about-myself-I'm-OK-fuck'em," why is this not their attitude toward the second?

Which leads to the second charge, that Obama has not put himself on the side of the people who are falling out of the middle class--you know, the charge leveled by Velma Hart, who told the president to his face, oh so photogenically, that she was "exhausted" defending his administration. Never mind that the squeeze on people like Hart has more to do with a generation-long shift, where digits in companies are being replaced by digital technology. Never mind that Obama has said dozens of times that America must invest in education and infrastructure to prepare. No, Obama, in courting "bipartisanship," or appointing Larry Summers, etc., put himself on the side of the bad guys.

What should he have done? Now things become vague. Nationalize the most reckless banks, or indict Wall Street CEOs, anticipate oil spills. Anyway--and now comes the third charge--he "squandered an FDR moment" precisely by trying to cut deals, even if this meant currying favor from powerful interests. As if TARP (which Obama reluctantly endorsed while campaigning) did not work. As if the private sector is not 8-9 times greater than the public, and to get out of the crisis Obama knew he would have to calm people who had benefited from absurd inequalities over two generations, whatever he privately felt about them. Oh, and as if FDR did not reconcile himself shamelessly to the Jim Crow South to make deals with southern Democrats.

THE FOURTH CHARGE now comes in. Okay, maybe he did steer the country away from a depression, etc., but unemployment remained high because the stimulus was too small. Never mind that administration figures like Larry Summers, of all people, were saying again and again that it was better to err on the side of too much than too little. Never mind that Obama got something twice as big as what Nancy Pelosi originally thought feasible. Never mind that Obama did come back to Congress for more in the fall of 2009 and was told he could forget it. Never mind that he never had a day in office--not one!--in which he had the votes in the Senate to simply do what he wanted. (Ditto healthcare and the late, lamented "public option.")

And this leads to the fifth (and for now final) charge. Obama had a bully pulpit; if only he had used it more aggressively, he might have lost Congressional votes, sure, but he'd also have "changed the narrative." There is a measure of truth here, though Fox-News gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "bully pulpit." Then again, he was our first black president and, as commander-in-chief, inherited a quarter of a million troops in harm's way. What would have been said about him had he polarized the country, instead of trying to project unity and reasonableness in 2009 and 2010? He could not overturn American capitalism just because a million people held candles for him the night he was elected. He called the Cambridge police stupid for arresting Skip Gates (which they clearly were) and who cared about the reason he called the press conference?

Nevertheless, the charge just grew that Obama was timid, or did not know how to negotiate, as if the result of negotiations do not reflect actual power relations, and he was something less than half of the government. The culmination of his fecklessness, we are told, was the debt-ceiling crisis, in which Obama "lost," or should have invoked the Fourteenth Amendment, as if that fight did not actually set him up to fight the current fight and "change the narrative"; as if our first constitutional law professor in the White House does not know the limits of presidential constitutional authority. Let's call it the "Jon Stewart disappointment" (reinforced by his erstwhile TV buddy, Anthony Wiener), which finally defined the hipness of disappointment. In this view, the candidate who implied he was going to change Washington just started working the system. He wasted time on bipartisanship.

Obama, to continue, refused to see the meanness, fanaticism, and venality of congressional Republicans. (Stewart then called a half million people to the mall in Washington and gave them a pale version of the very speech valorizing bipartisanship that Obama gave to the Democratic Convention in 2004.) The flip side of this is the "Tom Friedman disappointment," which implies the need for the very bipartisan "grand bargain" Obama has been trying to nudge Republicans to accept, and whose inference for action, you'd think, is to rally around Obama, but for Friedman seems to mean a third party candidate like Michael Bloomberg (who presumably would get along better Jim DeMint.)

ONE THING THAT all of these charges have in common is that they have been picked up by the mainstream press, so that the question of leadership per se is now always there to embarrass Obama. Watch Steve Kroft's creepy interview. ("Isn't it your job as president to find solutions to these problems, to get results?") The other thing is that they all originated with the progressive left. What Obama underestimated was not the venality of Republicans, but the capacity of prominent Democratic supporters, people who pride themselves for being progressives, and who seem to forget what it was like to live under Nixon, Reagan and two Bushes, to demean him.

And progressive democrats also underestimated their own power to influence things. Sure, they constitute a rather small percentage of the total vote. But unlike the leaders of the Tea Party, the leaders of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party are disproportionately concentrated in elite universities, media, civic organizations, and new economy businesses. When Paul Krugman's face is on the cover of Newsweek not two months after Obama took office next to the caption: "Obama Is Wrong," it gets the attention of the press in a way that a guy in a funny hat at a county fair does not.

What Obama was presumably wrong about was the plan for bailing out the banks. Krugman wanted something like nationalization, and tarred Obama with Wall Street connections. You decide who was wrong. About the Huffington Post, MSNBC, etc. during the 2009 summer of the public option, or during the debt-ceiling crisis, the less said the better. Today, 42 % of Americans think Obama favors Wall Street. Who started that snowball?

The thing recalcitrant Republicans knew all along, you see, is that independents are basically flockers who will vote for a strong leader, who is on their side, which is another way of saying a leader who promises to be "a winner." And Republican "strategists" also knew that the press is lazy and so enamored of the horse-race that most will report on "enthusiasm" rather than on what policy or integrity there is to be enthusiastic about. Rather, the press will satisfy itself with Nate Silver's correlations--wow, 8% unemployment, so the stats say you should lose!--because causes are too hard. They will also look for evidence that you are a loser--and look no further than "disappointment" from the very people you ought to be inspiring.

There is much more to say here, but I won't. The point is simple: there will be an election in the fall, and "independents" will decide it. There is no question whether they lean to Obama's policies, which generally poll much better than his "job performance." But if Obama is going to be reelected, he must not only lead (which he has), but also appear to be a leader. Here, the relentless condescension of the Democratic progressives has been a terrible burden on him.

I had my own hopes for an Obama presidency regarding the Middle East, which have not been realized--not yet, in any case. But on the whole, he's been the sanest, most intelligent president of my lifetime, and we are at a pivotal moment. There are nine months to close the "enthusiasm gap." And that is our problem, not his.

The Law In These Parts

2012-01-02T06:43:00.002-05:00

The Knesset is about to pass a bill that will amend a little restriction on the way the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is elected. From now on, the candidate for Israel's highest judicial post need not be at least three years before his or her 70th. birthday, hence, the age of mandatory retirement. The Knesset is also set to pass another bill that will change the weight of the various electors on the Judicial Appointments Committee, so as to tip the balance in favor of the Justice Minister.

The first change will allow Asher Grunis, known for "rightist" views, to be elected head of the court. The second would permanently transform the way appointments to the court are made, so as to strengthen the legislature's power over its composition.

ON THE SURFACE, these are fairly trivial changes. Okay, it is wrong to tinker with a law to accommodate a particular figure. But that figure may represent a class of people that, arguably, never should have been disadvantaged in the first place. Think of changing the U.S. constitution to make it possible for Arnold Schwarzenegger--and thus all naturalized immigrants, Arianna Huffington, say--to run for president. Who says an immigrant is not a real American? Similarly, who says a Chief Justice cannot contribute something substantial in two and a half years, or one and a half? And why should the legislature not have a decisive say over the composition of the court, the way, say, the Senate does in the U.S.?

As I argued here a couple of years ago, these questions miss the point entirely. Israel has no liberal constitution the way the U.S. does. I mean a constitution that protects individual human rights as a matter of law. This tinkering is a way of changing the legal status of liberal-democratic life.

Israel has a "basic law," The Law of Human Dignity, which the Supreme Court has been generally interpreting broadly so as to protect human rights on an ad hoc basis. Unlike other basic laws, this law can be repealed by a simply majority of the Knesset, but no government has (yet) been brazen enough to repeal it. So long as the Law of Human Dignity exists, and no constitution exists, Israel will remain a place in which ordinary human rights are protected only if sitting justices have ordinary liberalism in their bones.

And here is where Grunis comes in, and ways of electing justices that promise more candidates with his cast of mind. Justices who think "Zionism" (the common word now for ultra-nationalism, protecting the settlement project, etc.) trumps individual conscience will open the door even wider to the tyranny of the majority. The superb documentary, "The Law In These Parts," shows that, at least with respect to Palestinians in occupied territory, the judiciary has already compromised civil rights to the point that it has become window dressing on a repressive and often brutal regime. Moving the needle on Israeli "leftists" could easily come next, especially now that military courts can try them.

IT IS TRUE that the Israeli legal community has been, on the whole, far more liberal than the public. It is also true that the legal community has been, correspondingly, more highly educated, and more "Ashkenazi," than the public. And it is true, finally, that election to the Supreme Court has in the past been something like election to the leadership of a guild by its members: judges, the heads of the Bar Association, etc. have constituted a self-perpetuating elite choosing justices the way tenured professors choose deans.

But these sad facts have kept Israel inside the green line a more or less free country much the way the tenure system has kept its universities more or less bastions of free thought. Liberal-democracy has been protected by more liberalism, less democracy. Passage of these changes will portend the transformation of the Supreme Court into an instrument of a rightist coalition that is not soon going away. Without a liberal court, civil rights in this country will go into eclipse with the eerie, perceptible speed of the sun setting over the Mediterranean.

Hanukkah And Christmas, Again

2011-12-20T10:15:00.001-05:00

I have posted this meditation on the complimentarity of Hanukkah and Christmas every year since I started this blog four years ago. Last year I added something more. This year, I suggest one might get into the spirit of the moment by listening to this remarkable broadcast on Judas Maccabeus from the BBC's wonderful "In Our Time" series with Melvyn Bragg.

The scholars interviewed give a very rich context for the Hasmonians' revolt, and for the ultimate collapse of their regime, which, I dare say, no Hellenized Jew, from Philo to Maimonides, Herzl to Henny Youngman, would have cared to live under. The final word goes to Youngman, who said that the miracle of Hanukkah is actually recurrent: "You eat a latke and it burns for eight days."

Skin In The Game

2011-12-18T05:52:00.000-05:00

'Circumcision' by Jackson Pollock

A couple of days ago, Sidra's and my family celebrated the brit milah, the ritual circumcision, of her new grandson, and all of us future grandparents were given a moment or two to say a few words. One set of grandparents (there are three) are enlightened German Protestants who have more or less embraced Tel Aviv--their eldest son, who also spoke, quoted movingly from Lessing's Nathan the Wise--yet circumcision, so we Jewish sets knew, could not be easy for them to witness, let alone justify.

This was not the first time we thought about the subject. My own son Ben and I struggled with moments quite like this over the past four years, awaiting the births of his and his wife's two children, who turned out to be (adorable!) girls. I tried to find the words to explain why the brit meant something to me, but was taken off the hook by persistent X chromosomes.

And since we've just marked the death of Christopher Hitchens, I might add that you do not actually have to be faced with a brit in the family to reflect on its meaning. Some of the most compelling parts of God Is Not Great were his reflections on circumcision as a form of child abuse, "genital mutilation" (though the book, admittedly hilarious, mostly seemed like the effort to discredit love by detailing every bad marriage one could think of). My friend Danae Elon made a wonderful film about her and her husband Phillipe's second and third thoughts about the circumcision of their three (adorable!) sons. As I say, the practice is simply interesting.

For what it's worth, here are my two minutes of reflection on the subject. I invite comment:

For those who are experiencing a brit milah for the first time, rest assured that those of us who have been to many remain fascinated, at times skeptical, a little queasy, pained as well as elated. Does this act, first attributed to Abraham, not violate the most natural instinct we have around a newborn, which is to protect him absolutely? Abraham, after all, was capable of treating his sons with, let us say, fervor. Why has this ritual remained so cherished, indeed absolute, while so many other ancient commandments have fallen into eclipse?

Some say it is because the brit mila is ancient and one dare not break a chain others have died for. Such claims tear at the heart, but torn hearts are a counterpart of freedom. If chains were themselves reason enough to preserve old ways, we would still be sacrificing doves to quell feelings of guilt.

As for claims of ancient hygiene, I leave that to ancients hygienists.

Most Jews, of course, assume that this is a primordial act of covenant, precisely a kind of sacrifice, which marks our commitment of our children to the Jewish people and its mission. But this begs the question in a way. For most Jews also believe that the covenantal mission unfolds as life and history unfold. The commitment is to inherited principles, not to inherited genes.

What deeper meaning is implied here so that Jewish parents, generation after generation, swallow hard and perform this act? How does the back of the mind take in the brit milah so that certain Jewish sages thought the lessons so indispensible they suggested how men are born imperfect and the circumcision makes us whole?

The question is too big for a moment of grace. But let me suggest a direction—and it takes us back to torn hearts and the sad secret of freedom. The poet Robert Bly once said, “A man’s wound is his genius.” There is a way this ritual infliction of pain is an act of parental love, and arguably divine love—that is, love of human beings as we truly are, without—dare I say, childish?—illusions.

For parents who commit this act cannot but feel the beginning of an acknowledgement that will grow over time: that it is not our role merely to protect our children but to expose them; to introduce them, affectionately yet at times strictly, to the stings of the world, which are everywhere, and are the real prompts for their maturity and autonomy—thus the deepest sources of their happiness. You don't have to have Sophie Portnoy for a mother to know that, eventually, protection is the ultimate form of child abuse.

Saint Paul said, following Jeremiah’s admonition, that we ought to circumcise the heart. I have had both circumcisions, of flesh and of heart, and I can report that the latter one is far more painful. But who among us would live our lives over again without the pains that instructed, fashioned and liberated us?

The part of Paul’s theology I love most suggests that the divine proved truest by becoming flesh to suffer with us, thus to truly know us. I like to think the divine is here today, as It was when God slyly instructed Abraham to circumcise his sons, tenderly implying what rabbis have also said, generation after generation, that there is nothing so whole as broken heart. Welcome, little one to our people’s covenant to explore, without cover, this poignant, magnificent world.

Hitchens

2011-12-17T13:39:00.002-05:00

I knew him fairly well in the early eighties, before he really became Christopher Hitchens. He had just arrived from England, smart, left, a little earnest in a New Statesman way, or at least that was the pose, which worked wonderfully well on a University of Toronto political philosophy Ph.D. like myself. He had followed my writing on Israel and the conflict in the New York Review, he said, and so called me to ask (quite boldly, and charmingly, I thought) if I would introduce him around.

I brought him to a meeting of the Dissent Magazine board at Irving Howe's apartment (this is what "around" meant to young, left, earnest, writers) and we kept in touch sporadically the way one did back then, before email and free long-distance. Once I hit my own professional turbulence, after I published The Tragedy of Zionism, and took refuge of a kind at the Harvard Business Review, we pretty much fell out of touch. In 1991, we debated about the first Gulf War at Wellesley College--he was against it, I was for it, neither of us really knew what we were talking about--then went out for a drink and that was pretty much that.

The last time I saw him was most memorable, however. It was sometime in the mid-nineties and he was hitting his stride. MIT's Phil Khoury invited him to give a public lecture about the Palestinians, about which we knew considerably more. The talk was simply masterful, fueled by periodic sips from a flask. Not a word was out of place, not a thought was wasted. I confess to being a little dazzled by how carefully he marbled the talk with his wit.

But this presented a problem. How could I trump such a performance with my expression of appreciation. We had been sort-of friends. I didn't want to fawn like a fan. I wanted to receive him as would befit the moment. So when he came down from the podium, I took his hand in the middle of the crush of colleagues and told him, in what I thought a moment of inspiration: "Christopher, when I hear you speak, I become aware of latent homoerotic urges." Without missing a beat, he took my chin in his hands and kissed me passionately on the lips. I simply burst out laughing. He allowed only a little mischievous smile, like that of killer. I told him, "Okay, I give up."

Netanyahu's 'Alignment' Of Law In The Territories

2011-12-15T15:16:00.000-05:00

Ever since the occupation began, Israeli citizens traveling in the territories, in effect, carried the protections of Israeli criminal law on their backs, irrespective of place.The army could stop you, or declare that certain locations were "closed military zones" (where civilians could not enter). But otherwise, whatever civil freedoms an Israeli had in Israel, he or she had in the territories.

If you disturbed the peace, say, or stole something, or attacked someone, and an army unit caught you at it, the officer in charge could detain you, of course, but had to remand you to the local Israeli police, which alone could arrest you and press charges.

And if you were arrested, you could appeal for justice to Israeli civilian courts, which ran by strict rules of evidence, and tended to apply the Law of Human Dignity (the closest thing Israelis have to a Bill of Rights) broadly. Under the cover of these protections, arguably, settlers and hill-top youth often got away with serious crimes. The rightist attacks on the army have certainly been a kind of turning point for public opinion here, something like Joe McCarthy's attacks on the army were.

So last night, the Netanyahu government announced new regulations in the occupied territories meant--so it was reported with a certain satisfaction in Israel's liberal press--to manage the conduct of right-wing Jewish settler youth engaging in violence against soldiers, "price-tag" attacks on mosques (the "price," in this case, is exacted against Arabs when the government enforces the law and tries to evicts settler), and random attacks on Arab farmers adjacent to settlements.

What has Netanyahu done? Henceforth, army officers will themselves be able to arrest and incarcerate Israeli citizens in the territories, bring them before military courts. These will then have the right to hold them more or less indefinitely under administrative detention procedures governed by the emergency regulations inherited, with certain modifications, from the British Mandate.

Anyone with a smattering of knowledge about the way the army operates in the territories knows that Palestinians have been subject to precisely these legal processes virtually from the start of the occupation. Now the same standards will apply to Israelis. As one high official in the prime minister's office told a journalist friend of mine, to date there have been two sets of laws and procedures in the occupied territories, one for Arabs, one for Jews. Now the two "have been brought into alignment." Only fair, right?

CAN WE PLEASE take a deep breath and pay attention to what is actually going on here? Let me repeat the changes introduced yesterday. Army officers will be able to arrest Israeli citizens in the territories. They will be able to haul citizens before military courts. The courts will then have the right to sentence them or hold them more or less indefinitely under administrative detention. Given the recent history of the Jewish people, it would be tactless to call these procedures fascist. So let's just say Costa-Gavras would see a pattern.

Yes, this will make it easier on the army in dealing with rightist fanatics. But peace groups have been rallying and protesting settlements in the territories for years, and organizers like Ezra Nawi are a fixture in the South Hebron Hills, often clashing with IDF patrols. More and more, IDF units in the West Bank are commanded by officers who are either sympathetic to the settlers or actually from settlement families. Who will these regulations likely be used against most often? Where has the army been most often challenged if not at places like Nabi Saleh and Bili'in?

Nor has Netanyahu made any bones about his determination to use these new regulations against the left, too. Tonight, he told a Likud gathering, at which some expressed anger at his treatment of the settlers, that any attack against the army in Bili'in would be treated the same way Jewish fanatics would be treated. No kidding.

Any legal change this potentially dangerous eventually proves, well, dangerous. Surely the relief we feel at watching the government finally take on the worst of the settlers ought not to obscure the suspension of civil rights. Such changes are always justified by the fight against disorder. More soon.

The Euro And The Wealth Of Nations

2011-12-10T15:00:00.000-05:00

Francisco Goya - Peasant Carrying a Woman

As euro leaders struggle to save the zone, and global hedge fund managers reckon whether the Merkel-Sarkozy fix--so dramatically announced (and, I may add, superbly reported) yesterday--will work or actually prove a five foot leap over a six foot pit, the unresolved question most economic journalists seem focused on pertains to near-term bond auctions:

Will Mrs. Merkel finally agree, not only to the purchase of even more southern European debt by the Central European Bank, but to the issue of a "Eurobond" guaranteed by the collective of euro zone member states (read, German taxpayers). Will she, that is, finally try to get her voters to shake off the inflation nightmares of Weimar and use the German government's current revenues to, in effect, subsidize the ongoing deficits of, say, Spain, much the way Ontario--albiet, through more transparent "equalization payments"--has historically subsidized Quebec? Will the European federation become fiscally united, controlled, real?

These are good questions, but are they really the right ones? Clearly, if the southern countries do not grow more quickly, subsidies of this kind would be unsustainable into the future, even for Germany. How does imposing more fiscal controls on southern states allow them to create more real wealth?Yes, keeping today's southern European consumers buying is as important to German factories operating as American consumers are for Chinese factories. And if Germans were not on the euro, whose value is being depressed by bail-outs of poorer member countries--if, say, Germany was still on the DM--a VW Golf made in Wolfsburg would sell in Tel Aviv for what an Audi does now.

Nevertheless, the best question in deciding whether saving the euro makes sense at all should be this: Under what scenarios are the southern economies most likely to grow? Who will be starting, owning, and profiting, from what businesses? In that context, would not Spain, Portugal, Greece, etc., be better off with their own currencies? Would they not become more competitive if they could simply devalue them?

No, they would not.

THIS SEEMS THE right time to reiterate the point I've made before, that the euro implies an economic vision of a networked world no sane leader of a developing country dare retreat from. The euro is a way of understanding the future; the case against it is chasing the past.

The argument for allowing the euro to retreat from the southern European countries is still widely made. If poor and still essentially developing counties like Portugal and Greece had their own currencies, they'd be able to weather fiscal crises (i.e., unsustainable national debt, ongoing deficits, sovereign bonds at junk-bond rates of interest, etc.) simply by devaluing.

In this way, so the argument goes, they would become more competitive. Why? Because their exports would become cheaper. As I've said, development economists as different as Paul Krugman and Martin Feldstein take this axiom for granted.The euro, in this view, has proven a kind of hammerlock that rich European countries like Germany and France now have on them, a kind of monetarist scold sitting on their shoulder, and advantaging—wait for it!—German exports.

But what exactly would southern European countries be exporting more cheaply with devalued currencies of their own? To think that they would be able to devalue themselves out of crisis assumes a world of 1950, not 2010--a world in which companies-qua-factories made most of what people needed (toothpaste, tires, pencils, typewriters; things anybody could learn to make with imported recipes, formulae, and blueprints)--and local companies could get a leg-up on imported consumer goods if local labor costs could be driven down relative to more developed countries. In this world, the game is “import substitution.” Devaluation cheapens, first and foremost, people.

Really, however, does any seasoned economist or business executive really think this is the world we still live in?Today, production of consumer goods is in a world ecosystem whose drivers are science and advanced design: a changing complex of know-how, advanced information technologies, networks and supply-chains, global branding, financial instruments—indeed, a globalized system that rewards the tech-savvy initiated while punishing those left behind.

If Portugal and Greece have a hope of developing, it is by getting the direct foreign investment of Volkswagen, Phillips, Bayer, Thomson, ABB, GE Capital, Samsung. It by getting Apple and Google to expand design hubs in Madrid. It is most of all in getting globals to invest in local enterprises that might be drawn into their supply chains.The key is not cheap labor but rich brainpower, the climate that will cause globals to inject the DNA of various businesses into the commercial life of southern European states.

The path to development is not devalued money in the hinterland, but intellectual capital from the metropole.Why would globals invest directly in economies where currencies were constantly spiraling down? How would they negotiate wage contracts or buy new real estate for its plants when imported goods (that is, its employees’ most favored goods) were constantly rising in price, kicking off new rounds of inflation and real estate bubbles? How would they react when local assets lose, say, 20 percent of their value overnight in a devaluation?

Rather, southern European countries need to be slowly improved and integrated into northern economies over a generation. All need to become both importers and exporters in a true division of labor, like Adam Smith's hunters of beaver and hunters of deer. Countries outside the euro zone, like Israel or Argentina, have had the same problem, of course, but they attracted direct investment by more or less pegging their currencies to the value of the dollar. Why should not southern European countries achieve the stability globals need by staying on the euro instead?

THE MERKEL-SARKOZY agreement puts the EU in the right direction, then. These leaders mean to put in place judicial actions, decision-making structures and regulations that override national sovereignty so that no member can go on cooking their books. Meanwhile, and under the radar, richer European countries will be transferring wealth and critical know-how to the south for the coming generation, much as West Germany did for East Germany.

The lesson here is not just for Europe. The relationship between Germany and Spain is not that different from the one between Massachusetts and Mississippi. In a networked economy, poorly paid, ill-educated people are no longer any advanced democracy's competitive advantage. The knows have to find a way to teach the know-nots. A common, stable currency is the place to start.

Any Friend Of Sam's...

2011-12-09T05:10:00.001-05:00

Walid Abu Rass

I have spoken often of Sam Bahour in this blog and in various published articles. Sam and I have been friends for five years, collaborated on a number of articles ourselves and have been working together closely in recent months with the office of the Quartet on developing management education for young Palestinian entrepreneurs. Today, Sam sent around the following appeal to his friends, which I reproduce verbatim and with sadness:

Where's myfriend?

By SamBahour

My friend isWalid Abu Rass. He is the Finance and Administration Manager for the HealthWork Committees (HWC, at www.hwc-pal.org),one of the largest community health service providers in the occupiedPalestinian territory. HWC serves over 500,000 patients/beneficiaries per year!More on HWC in a second.

I had not seenWalid for a while. We are both knee deep in Palestine’s daily rat race. Abouttwo months ago, Walid and his HWC colleagues called for a meeting of theircircle of friends. They sought assistance. HWC was going through some financialhard times, especially with the financial crisis in Europe, where many of theirdonors are based.

Given it wasclose to the end of year, a season when I usually donate some time to assist acommunity based organization to fundraise, I offered to volunteer. Walid was mycounterpart. During the past weeks, we were in daily phone and email contact,and every few days we met up to visit a potential local donor. Progress wasbeing made. We then started to plan, with a few others, an end-of-yearfundraising raffle. Plans were coming together, and there was excitement amongthe team and staff that we were taking our fundraising needs to our localcommunity to compensate for the loss in European institutional funding. This iseven more significant since HWC does not accept funding with strings attached(“conditional donor funds”), so they have to struggle just to keep the doorsopen in this tainted donor-driven market.

For nearly aweek I was emailing Walid with no reply. This was not like him. He and I nearlylive behind our keyboards. The deadline for the raffle details was rapidlyapproaching and if we did not get started, we would miss the end of yearopportunity for fundraising. I started to think Walid was mad at me for somereason. I rethought our last few weeks of working together. There wasabsolutely nothing there to cause him to just ignore my calls; after all, I washis volunteer counterpart.

Then, lastnight I learned why Walid stopped replying to me. On November 22nd, Israelioccupation soldiers arrived at his home at 1:30 A.M. Walid lives in Ramallahwith his wife, Bayan, and two daughters, Mais, 13 years old, and Malak, 4 yearsold, who were all frighteningly awakened during his arrest. Walid was takeninto custody and transported in the bone chilling cold of the night to Israel’sOfer Military Detention Center where hundreds of Palestinians are detained, thevast majority with absolutely no knowledge of why.

The Israelishave been arresting Palestinians nightly for years now. Israel releases a fewhundred prisoners in a media frenzy and then, the same night, starts to refillits prisons, a few Palestinians at a time. Although, as per the OsloAgreements, the Palestinian side is responsible for security inside thePalestinian cities, Israeli armed forces routinely—read nightly, everynight—enter the cities in their armored vehicles in the middle of the night andarrest a dozen or so Palestinians from their homes. Walid was merely the latestvictim of this kidnap-by-night strategy.

The routinethen goes something like this. Within eight days he will be brought before anIsraeli military “judge” for the sake of processing only, not deliberating. Theentire kangaroo court then, without sharing the reason why the Palestiniandetainee is being held, flashes the security card to justify not sharinginformation on why they have acted against a specific individual. Then thecourt slaps a six month Administrative Detention Order on the detainee. Thatmeans you sit in prison for six months for no reason at all. Walid has alreadybeen given just such an order.

Your wife, yourchildren, your work, your end-of-year fundraising campaign, your 500,000patients/beneficiaries, your life, all abruptly stop. Then, usually, that sixmonth order gets extended a few times before you are released. Walid is notunacquainted with this Orwellian mess. He previously spent nearly five years inand out of detention, never once being charged with anything!

The Health WorkCommittees association is registered as a not-for profit organization with thePalestinian Ministry of the Interior and also has a Jerusalem registrationsince they work in Jerusalem as well. HWC employees over 300 persons andoperates 14 clinics throughout the West Bank, providing primary health servicesvia these health clinics, mostly in areas not fully covered by the Ministry ofHealth. HWC also has a community development aspect of their work and operatethe following: Jadal Center for Culture and Social Development, Nidal Center(providing health education to East Jerusalem schools), Community DevelopmentPlan, Oasis Rehab Center, Community Based Rehabilitation, and the Elderly CareNursery and Kindergarten. One of the success stories of HWC is its partnershipwith the Dunya Women's Cancer Clinic.

All of theseactivities need health care administrators, of which Walid is one. At a timewhen the Israeli closure system is making life hell for Palestinians,especially those living in marginalized areas or areas directly affected by theSeparation Wall, HWC is needed more than ever. Likewise, at a time wheninternational organizations, like USAID, have dramatically cut funding and laidoff staff from their heath care programs (such as Flagship) as punishment tothe Palestinians for pursuing membership in UNESCO, HWC’s services are neededmore than ever.

The era ofsilence is over. Also, over for me are the slogans that can’t beoperationalized. Yes, we want all 5,000 or so Palestinian detainees released.Yes, the policy of administrative detention is inhumane and must end. However,these slogans, although needed at times, must be matched with action items.Each life being destroyed by the Israeli revolving door policy of detainment isa person with a name and a family and a job. And when the person is my friendor colleague, I refuse to swallow the fact that Israel has carte blanche to actabove the law.Help me get Walid back to his family and his desk so we can get back to the work ofimproving the Palestinian health care system.

Consider contacting your localIsraeli Embassy and/or the following to demand his immediaterelease. Reference his name, Walid Abu Rass, and his ID #9-9702819-6. Judea and Samaria RegionOffice of the Legal AdvisorP.O. Box5 Beit El, 90631via IsraelTel: +972-2-997-7071Fax: +972-2-997-7326 Prime Minister Benjamin NetanyahuOffice of the Prime Minister3 Kaplan StreetPO Box 187Kiryat Ben-GurionJerusalem 91919Fax: +972-2-651-2631 or +972-2-670-5475E-mail: rohm@pmo.gov.il or pm_eng@pmo.gov.il Deputy Prime Minister & Minister of Defence Ehud BarakMinistry of Defence37 Kaplan StreetHakirya, Tel Aviv 61909 IsraelFax: +972.3.691.6940Email: minister@mod.gov.il

Phoning It In

2011-12-06T08:36:00.000-05:00

Marc Steiner's program is remarkable in the freedom he gives his guests to develop their arguments. He asked me to elaborate on the Harper's article, which I did yesterday by phone. I am grateful for the invitation, and hope the program is as rewarding for listeners as it was for the talkers. Listen.

Two Political Rumors Worth Following

2011-12-05T01:48:00.001-05:00

Here are two rumors worth noting, one Israeli, one Palestinian, each with potentially big political significance.

1. The first has to to do with Netanyahu's decision to call a snap Likud primary for late January. The superficial explanation is that he wants to take advantage of his current strength in the Likud, or the complacency of the rank and file, or both, and renew his mandate in case a government partner moves to break-up the coalition and he faces an unexpected election. But the (slightly obnoxiously) shrewd Hanan Krystal, Israeli radio's closest thing to Bill Schneider, has an intriguing alternative explanation:

Krystal says that Netanyahu's move is aimed to preempt Barack Obama, whom Netanyahu thinks will be reelected. After November 2012, so the argument goes, Obama "will put away the carrot and take out the stick." (Presumably, Leon Panetta's shot across Netanyahu's bow at the Saban Forum, which has rattled America's connoisseurs of victimhood, has put things in focus.)

So Netanyahu, Krystal thinks, will call a general election himself for the fall and win a new mandate before Obama wins his. Implicitly, Krystal is suggesting (something I've believed for some time), that Israel's opposition parties, Kadima and Labor, have one card to play in any future election, and that is the fear of international isolation trumping the fear of regional siege (especially since international support is Israel's only hope for withstanding regional siege).

If the Israeli election is scheduled for the spring of 2013, and opposition leaders like Livni, Mofaz, and Yachimovitch have several months to rail at Bibi for screwing up relations with Washington, they'll have a fighting chance to defeat him. In that context, the energies of last summer's street demonstrations can also be channeled, since economic growth depends on continued global integration.

2. There has been a lot of understandable anxiety in the West following the announcement that Salam Fayyad will be forced out as the Palestinian prime minister. The fear: Fatah and Hamas are trying to achieve a "unity" government of professionals and technocrats, to preside until new elections in the spring, and Fayyad is unacceptable to Hamas. Arguably, this is an indication of Hamas's rising power, a portent of a new government to be led by hard-liners less loyal to Abbas.

But sources in Ramallah tell me that rumors, which have generally proven true, suggest a different story. The next prime minister, they say, is likely to be Mohammed Mustafa, the current CEO of the Palestine Investment Fund. His name has reportedly been approved by Hamas. He is, if anything, even closer to Abbas than Fayyad ever was, regularly accompanying Abbas to Washington, and even to the White House.

Mustafa, a former World Bank official, has run Palestine's sovereign wealth fund (formerly "the billion dollars Arafat kept in his mattress") with transparency and vision. He's invested in telecom, housing, and new businesses. He is a man of exceptional talent and genuine humility, which I've had the privilege of learning at first hand. He is in many ways chairman of the board of Ramallah's entrepreneurial and professional class, and certain to continue to work toward unity mainly through (where possible) economic integration with Gaza.

If it is true that Hamas approved Mustafa, this only proves what is obvious but provisional, that the state-building efforts on the West Bank, however stymied by the occupation, provide Palestinians their only political horizon. Hamas has no choice but to go along. They are even less popular is Gaza than in the West Bank.

Fayyad was unacceptable to Hamas, according to this view, not because of what he stood for, but because his forces jailed (and allegedly roughed-up) Hamas people; many old Fatah leaders had no loyalty to him and lost certain economic plumbs under his administration. Besides, some of Fayyad's ministers were themselves charged with corruption.

Oh, and as for the Palestinian election scheduled for the spring, we can safely assume the opposite of what might happen in Israel, that the vote will not take place until after the American election. If Obama wins, and does take out a stick, Abbas will have a chance to prevail. If Obama loses, or if hope for a two-state deal is lost, then expect Abbas to resign--and, election or no election, for the leadership of Palestine to fall into Hamas's hands like a ripe fruit.

Thought Experiment: Two Treaty Provisions

2011-12-04T06:07:00.000-05:00

A thought experiment, my final word on the Harper's piece for now. Who among current leaders could possibly agree to, say, "permanent residence" for Jews in Palestine, or an international commission to deal with the Palestinian right of return? Is the approach in the piece realistic? I thought I might try to make things clearer, and more challenging, by posting suggested wording for the two relevant clauses of a final status agreement:

Residency

1. Subsequent to the establishment of the Independent State of Palestine and its recognition by the State of Israel...

a. There will be no exclusive civilian residential areas for Israelis in the State of Palestine.
b. Individual Israelis remaining within the borders of the Palestinian State shall be subject to Palestinian sovereignty and Palestinian rule of law.
c. Individual Israelis who have their permanent domicile within the Palestinian State as of [negotiated date] shall be offered Palestinian citizenship or choose to remain as alien residents, all without prejudice to their Israeli citizenship.
d. Within the agreed schedule for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Palestinian territories, the Israeli Government and its security forces shall maintain responsibility for the safety and security of Israeli settlements outside the areas of Palestinian security jurisdiction, pending the transfer of said areas to full Palestinian rule.
e. The parties shall establish the mechanism for dealing with security issues relating to Israeli citizens in Palestine and Palestinian citizens in Israel...

Right of Return

1. Whereas the Palestinian side considers that the right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes is enshrined in international law and natural justice, it recognizes that the prerequisites of the new era of peace and coexistence, as well as the realities that have been created on the ground since 1948, have rendered the implementation of this right impracticable [in most cases...] [State target number allowed to return]. The Palestinian side, thus, declares its readiness to accept and implement policies and measures that will ensure, insofar as this is possible, the welfare and well-being of these refugees.

2. Whereas the Israeli side acknowledges the moral and material suffering caused to the Palestinian people as a result of the war of 1947-1949. It further acknowledges the Palestinian refugees' right of return to the Palestinian state and their right to compensation and rehabilitation for moral and material losses.

3. The parties agree on the establishment of an International Commisssion for Palestinian Refugees (hereinafter "the ICPR") for the final settlement of all aspects of the refugee issue as follows:

a. The Parties extend invitations to donor countries to join them in the formation of the ICPR. b. The Parties welcome the intention of the Government of [neutral European country] to lead the ICPR and to contribute financially to its activities. c. The Government of Israel shall establish a fund for its contribution, along with others, to the activities of the ICPR. d. The ICPR shall conduct all fundraising activities and coordinate donors' involvement in the program. e. The ICPR shall define the criteria for compensation accounting for:
(1) moral loss; (2) immovable property; (3) financial and economic support enabling resettlement and rehabilitation of Palestinians residing in refugee camps.
f. The ICPR shall further:
(1) adjudicate claims for material loss; (2) prepare and develop rehabilitation and absorption programs; (3) establish the mechanisms and venues for disbursing payments and compensation; (4) oversee rehabilitation programs; (5) explore the intentions of Palestinian refugees on the one hand and of Arab and other countries on the other, concerning wishes for emigration and the possibilities thereof; (6) explore with Arab governments hosting refugee populations, as well as with these refugees, venues for absorption in these countries whenever mutually desired.
g. The ICPR shall implement all the above according to the agreed schedule...

4. The ICPR shall be guided by the following principles in dealing with the "refugees of 1948" and their descendants:

a. Each refugee family shall be entitled to compensation for moral loss to a sum of money to be agreed upon by the ICPR. b. Each claimant with proven immovable property shall be compensated as per the adjudication of the ICPR. c. The ICPR shall provide financial and economic support, enabling the resettlement and rehabilitation of Palestinians residing in refugee camps. d. The refugees shall be entitled to financial and economic support from the ICPR for resettlement and rehabilitation.

5. The State of Israel undertakes to participate actively in implementing the program for the resolution of the refugee problem. Israel will continue to enable family reunification and will absorb Palestinian refugees in special defined cases, to be agreed upon with the ICPR.

6. The Palestinian side undertakes to participate actively in implementing the program for the resolution of the refugee problem. The Palestinian side shall enact a program to encourage the rehabilitation and resettlement of Palestinian refugees presently resident in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, within these areas.

7. The PLO considers the implementation of the above a full and final settlement of the refugee issue in all its dimensions...

***

Of course no Palestinian or Israeli official could accept these provisions, right? Actually, I lifted them directly from the Yossi Beilin-Abu Mazen agreement of 1995, which was meant to serve as the basis for negotiation between Rabin and Arafat, but was tragically sent into eclipse by the Rabin assassination. Oh, and that's Abu Mazen as in Mahmoud Abbas, the current head of the PA, the man who is desperately trying to hold off Hamas with diplomatic movement and state-building; the man the current Israeli government and its hallelujah chorus in America--along with various pundits who think two-states are for "liberal Zionist" dinosaurs--seem eager to discredit.

The 'Right Of Return' And Other Rights

2011-12-01T01:38:00.001-05:00

At bottom, the question my Harper's piece tries to answer is deceptively simple and by no means relevant to the Palestinian right of return alone. It is this: how can a democratic state, a commonwealth of free citizens, be reconciled with the right of citizens, collectively, to sustain national distinction? How is an individual's right to conscience and property reconciled to a nation's right to draw boundaries, legal and geographical? The tension between these rights may seem tangential to Middle East violence, but if two democratic states are going to emerge here, both Israelis and Palestinians will have to come to a common standard for resolving it, for each other, but also for themselves.

Assume, as the piece does, that the Palestinians' most poignant claims are reasonable (and ignore for the moment whether some Israelis have similar claims): assume, that is, that the suffering and material losses of refugees need to be recognized and compensated, indeed, that the right of refugees to choose among various modalities for redress (including return to their lands and homes, "at the earliest practicable date" as stipulated in U.N. 194) must be realized as part of any final peace. Assume, further, that this right, which is inherently one of individuals and families, is of a piece with the right of Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel to live in a country in which they are equal to all other citizens.

How, then, do such claims stack up against, and work with, the most poignant claims of Israeli Jews--inherently a collective claim--that Jewish civilization should find new and modern forms, or at least not be extinguished; that Israel is and will continue to be the Jewish national home? How to honor the democratic individual, liberalism, in (to use the vernacular) a "Jewish state"? For that matter, how do the individual rights of people ordinarily considered Jewish, but who (like me) reject Halachic obligations, shape the laws of a Jewish state?

The answer I tried to offer is the one virtually all democratic states have come up with, which I discussed at length in The Hebrew Republic. Israel should of course be a state of its citizens, that is, guarantee equality and freedom of conscience, and search for many confederative relations with a Palestinian state where feasible and sensible. But all citizens of Israel should be educated in Hebrew, or to a working knowledge of it. Hebrew should be the default, though not the only official, language of the state bureaucracy (i.e., you must be able to speak write in Hebrew to work for it, though the state should offer help in Arabic and English to people who cannot) and the default language of work.

Practically, Hebrew should be the main language of state-supported high schools and institutions of higher education. It should be required on every sign. And so forth. In addition, the commercial calendar should reflect the practices of the most widely practiced religious observances: this means the right not to work on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, and Friday for that matter, though people who do so voluntarily should not be forced not to. This is how virtually every EU country handles national claims and how Quebec handles its special status within Canada.

Palestinians should therefore endorse this basic Israeli national right as a quid pro quo for Israelis endorsing the Palestinians' individual rights, among them the right of return. Actually, both sides, if they aim to be democracies, have an immanent stake in both kinds of rights--and the ways these rights are made to complement one another. Palestinians should insist that, in endorsing Israel's right to sustain a Jewish national home, they are not thereby endorsing material discrimination against people who lack J-positive blood (as is currently the case). Israel must change: secular freedoms must be the standard all around (a point Fatah is trying to hold off Hamas with, and Israeli liberals should reinforce). Israelis, for their part, should insist that the right of return must be realized in ways that reflect the desire of Israelis to incubate Jewish linguistic and cultural difference. Where the two rights clash, confederative institutions may soften hard lines.

SOME WILL ARGUE that Hebrew language protection is not enough to make Israel "Jewish." I reject this. Language is not some inert instrument of communication merely signifying realities external to us. It is what we really mean by "nation," more formative than the shared territory that, historically was the key to enabling language itself to be shared. We ought to take for granted what everyone from Wittgenstein to Orwell (and, more recently, fellow Montrealer Steven Pinker) have taken for granted, that a language is a nuanced way of grasping one's most intimate relations and the stuff of the material world.

Language, moreover, is as human and formative as touching members of your family. It contains within its precincts the accumulated experiences, signs and detritus of a collective story. Spend a day with the OED, or the Even Shohan, dictionary. The word "civilization" must spring to mind. Language gives one direct access to a people's classical literature, myths, religious ideas, criticism, legal precepts. It gives identity, shapes the mouth and tongue and imagination. It is the background music of one's life, the dreamscape of sleep.

And Zionism at its most radical understood this. The idea of an independent state (so-called "political Zionism") was a minor chord from the start. It was not officially adopted as a goal until the Biltmore Conference of 1942. (It was formally rejected in 1931.) But the idea that building Hebrew-speaking colonies and cities would provide Jews the means to live as moderns, with individual liberties, and yet remain custodians of a Jewish civilization that would otherwise disappear--well, that was there in Zionism from the start.

I know I am repeating myself (I tell this story at length in The Tragedy of Zionism), but some things cannot be said often enough. This "cultural Zionism" inspired the people who called themselves Zionists from Achad Haam and Weizmann to Ben-Gurion to Yehuda Amichai. It is still the crucial fact of Israel. It is not gone because reactionary leaders or Halachic mullahs distort Zionist history, or just take Hebrew for granted. Any American Jewish visitor to Israel senses how out-of-it he or she is as soon as the novelty of Hebrew letters on the supermarket wears off.

AND YET, CRUCIALLY, the Hebrew language, like contemporary Israeli music, is inherently inclusive. A kid from Nazareth can groove on Matti Caspi. The Palestinian Arab Israeli activist, now in exile, Azmi Bishara, told me he owed his political education to the psychological subtly of Achad Haam. Similarly, the kid of a kid from Bialystok like myself goes to McGill and finds himself an heir of Thomas Hobbes. But he also lives, if he wishes, in Hebrew and Yiddish and French. Indeed, collective identity is only enriched by this kind of hybridization.

Nor is the Jewish religion, in all of its forms, diminished in a Hebrew-speaking state that does not privilege any religion. Acolytes of the Anglican religion in Canada are not impoverished because the Canadian state, in offering cultural protection of English, does not privilege members of the Anglican church. The Hebrew language provides a background, a framework, in which voluntary and self-funded Jewish congregations might thrive. But the state is not a person or a congregation. Where, if not in a Hebrew Republic, would an orthodox Jew rather live?

In short, the Hebrew language is the collective material upon which an individual citizen works his or her magic. It is the basis for freedom to, not just freedom from. It is the means through which Israelis construct fictions about one another, riff on the poetics of the Jewish past, innovate the art and technology that seeds the future. Sayed Kashua can use Hebrew to, among other things, mock the foibles of Israeli Jews and advance the equality of Arab citizens. But in the very way he uses Hebrew, with its inescapable allusions to Torah culture, and modern Israeli shtick, he is paying Jewish civilization an unprecedented tribute.

WHAT MY ARTICLE really aims to make vivid, then, is not just a psychologically necessary process (Israelis recognize Palestinians' rights to freedom and "return," Palestinians recognize Israelis' right to a national home) but an end-point in justice: two states, each committed to the equality of all of its citizens, each tied to the other in a host of confederative relations, but each recognizing the national life, the language and collateral culture, the other is trying to preserve.

These states would have to use confederative institutions to square circles where necessary: say, by allowing Jerusalem to remain united while serving as a capital for two states; or by offering a legal innovation allowing permanent residency but not citizenship, so that Arabs living in Israel who wish to educate in Arabic rather than Hebrew can do so, and vice versa. The territory in question is so small that such solutions are inevitable and feasible--unless, of course, fanatics on both sides simply bring us to a fight to the finish.

And I am reviewing these ideas because various bloggers have written to criticize the article yet seemed unwilling to engage the ideas themselves. Perhaps I might have made things clearer. But at least some of this criticism seemed less bothered with the article's ideas than with the chance to depict its author as an instance of a type. Does this kind of thing really advance our thinking?

One writer, apart from questioning my reporting skills, laments "liberal Zionism" (whatever that is) and its media power. Another comes to the defense of liberal Zionists "like Avishai" but with arguments and formulations that are not mine and I would never endorse (e.g., that Israel, as a Jewish state, "inherently privileges Jewish citizens over Arab citizens"). Yet another congratulates me for abandoning the two-state process, which any balanced reader could see I have not; and for offering confederative ideas, ostensibly "moving" closer to his own position, though I began advocating for these same ideas in various op-eds over twenty years ago, and even in this short New Yorker article in 1995.

I understand how radioactive this subject is. And writers are lying when they pretend not to like the attention. But things are pretty bad here now, and even if broad conceptions of justice cannot pull us out, ad hominem attacks certainly won't. If my argument is wrong--not just hopeless, or coming from the wrong mouth, or typical of a political type, but unjust--then I'd be grateful for refutations or refinements. Then again, if the argument is more or less sound, can we not talk about how to build on it?

The Return Of 'The Right'

2011-11-23T04:23:00.000-05:00

I surprise nobody by remarking what a difficult time this is for Israelis and Palestinians. In many ways, the sides are closer than ever to sensing what a modus vivendi feels like, as the institutions and economy of a Palestinian state gradually take shape, and the parameters of an initial deal become more widely understood by the international community. For the younger generations, who live more and more in cyberspace, the issue of land per se seems less and less relevant to quality of life. And yet I cannot remember a time of relative calm when the sheer hatred between the two sides has been more palpable, and the ultras on both sides are on the ascendancy, enjoying (and fueling) the resulting polarization.

Late last summer, I thought I'd take a step back and simply ask why we are so stuck. The result is this long essay in the current Harper's on the Palestinian right of return (for now, behind the magazine's paywall, I'm afraid, but a year's subscription to this great magazine is about the cost of lunch).

IN A NUTSHELL, the article argues that the sides are not simply stuck because of the Israeli occupation and settlement policies, inflammatory and destructive as these are, or because of Hamas' arguable power. Rather, the vast majority of people on each side hold to nonnegotiable principles of identity, and understandable but exaggerated fears regarding the other side's intentions. These make the polarization serious even if demagogic rejectionists were not exploiting them.

Most important in this context is the Palestinian right of return, which is not just another matter to be settled or finessed once a border has been agreed to. It is a nonnegotiable demand for Palestinians and cuts to the heart of what the Palestinian nation is. The problem is, Israelis tend to hear the demand through a prism that is different from that of Palestinians. And the prism is of a piece with the Israelis' own nonnegotiable demand, that Palestinians recognize Israel as the Jewish national home, or even more vaguely, the state of the Jewish people. What are these prisms?

FOR ALL THE obvious reasons, the Palestinian nation is unselfconscious about its cultural life. Were it not for their confrontation with historic Zionism, the Palestinians would be virtually indistinguishable from other Muslim and Christian Arabs in the Fertile Crescent. Palestinian identity derives from a deep and abiding sense of injustice done to many but specific Palestinian families. Palestinians as a whole feel the dispossession and suffering of these families have never been acknowledged, let alone redressed or compensated.

Israelis, for their part, are extremely selfconscious regarding their cultural distinction, also for obvious reasons. They can easily imagine the world with Jews and Jewish culture extinguished. They look at America and see personal successes but, for Jewish civilization, a wasteland. They think of themselves as the last best hope for preserving Jewish language and everything this subtends. The article attempts to recapitulate the history of the confrontation between these rival needs.

It should come as no surprise, yet does, that people of good faith on both sides are still talking past each other.When Palestinians speak of a right of return they are really insisting on the centrality of the individual rights of Palestinian families, historically, but also gesturing toward the contemporary rights of Arabs in the state of Israel. They want their day in court, as it were, but also constitutional protections, "equality" going forward, something they think historic Zionism never accorded them.

For their part, Israelis hear the demand for a right of return and immediately assume Palestinians want to flood them with Arabic and Muslim culture and snuff out Jewish national identity. So they turn things around and insist that, before talks could get serious, Palestinians must recognize the legitimacy of Jewish national self-determination. What Palestinians hear is that Israel is demanding Palestinians accept a Zionist movement and state that once displaced them and now create institutions that discriminate against them.

WHAT CAN WE learn from this? For some time, most of us have assumed that the best way to approach peacemaking is by getting to a border, building confidence, and dealing with the right of return last. But perhaps this is misguided. (It is a little like a divorcing couple trying to come to an agreement about property before they have taken care of custodianship of the children.)

Rather, I argue, Israelis interested in peace should agree up front to participate in an international commission that will carefully investigate the property losses and pain and suffering of Palestinian families. (Olmert offered something like this in his negotiations with Abbas.) There are other actions, flowing from the establishment of this commission, that Israelis should agree to, including modalities for compensating refugees and, in various cases, allowing them to return to Israel should they choose to (though polls show most would not). I go into these modalities in the article.

At the same time, Palestinian leaders should agree in advance that Israel is the country where the distinct civilization of the historic Jewish people will find its contemporary expression. It is disingenuous on the part of Palestinian leaders, even moderates like Abbas, to say that they recognize Israel but have no intention of endorsing a "Jewish state" (or something like this) for fear of condemning Israeli Arabs to second class citizenship. If there are things about the Israeli state apparatus that Palestinians reject, that is, in addition to the occupation, they should say so--but this should not prevent their affirming Israel's purpose to provide a Jewish national home.

Both sides, in other words, have to state a view regarding the proper boundary between individual rights and national-cultural survival, just the way Canadians have had to, or members of the EU had to. Palestinians have to stop talking about the Jews as if they were referring to just another religion in some larger secular state, or about historic Zionism as if the Naqba and occupation are all there is to say about it. Israelis have to stop talking about Palestinians as if refugees who demand attention to their grievances are inviting genocide or Israeli Arabs who want a "state of its citizens" are calling for the end of Jewish national identity.

ALL OF THIS brings us to a culminating point, which I take up at the end of the article. The right of return is the most dramatic but by no means the only issue that forces Israelis and Palestinians to confront how to reconcile individual rights to national rights. This reconciliation cannot be achieved without certain confederative institutions that, say, permit certain Palestinian returnees to live as "resident aliens" in Israel (and may well allow some Jewish settlers to live in Palestine as resident aliens).

In fact, no two-state solution is even conceivable without any number of confederative institutions: a single municipality for Jerusalem, and international custodian for the holy basin, an international custodian to administer security arrangements on the Jordan River, institutions that guarantee the sharing of water, electromagnetic spectrum, and many other benefits. This has nothing to do with the sides loving each other--no more than the French loved Germans at the launch of the Common Market.

In short, the right of return can become a cause of a fight to the finish. Or it can be an invitation to finally settle this conflict humanely and imaginatively--and fully. Again, you can download the entire article here.

Gaza Interlude: A Report

2011-11-22T10:53:00.001-05:00

My friend Kathleen Peratis is a partner at the New York law firm Outten & Golden LLP, and co-chair of the Middle East Advisory Committee of Human Rights Watch. She traveled to Gaza last week and wrote the following report for this blog. It will appear in the Nation, in slightly different form, in a forthcoming issue.

It became clear to me that Fatah was no longer the reluctant partner in a potential reconciliation deal with Hamas. I was here in May when Hamas, at the behest of Egypt, was the reconciliation suitor while Fatah found pretexts (and was subjected to great pressure by the US and Israel) not to go forward. Hamas is stronger now, Fatah is relatively weaker, and both are ready to defy the US and Israel.

“The US told Abu Mazen to choose between the US and Hamas. But he now knows there is no hope that Israel will give him anything in the years to come,” said Hamas Huda Naim Naim, member of the Hamas Politburo and the Palestinian Legislative Council “Hamas is stronger now due to Bibi and, in wake of Shalit deal, is more popular,” said Fatah official Husam Zomlot.

According to most of the people I spoke to, both sides, for their separate reasons, have signaled that they are ready to accept the results of elections, win or lose. And Hamas’ price? For one thing, the unity government will reportedly be based in Gaza and not in Ramallah, which will significantly empower Hamas. Since the shoot-out between Hamas and Fatah in 2007, Fatah officials have rarely, until quite recently, come to Gaza. The Fatah officials I spoke to were pleasantly surprised that they had been in Gaza for a week and Hamas had not stormed their offices. “They are now using soft power,” said Mr. Zomlot, the Fatah official, “because they want to show good will.” He added, “They have implanted fear for so long that the people know the consequences of opposing them – they know that if they oppose Hamas, they will be crushed.”

Fatah officials based in Ramallah can’t go abroad or come home without Israel’s approval (which Israel usually gives, but still). Gazans, however, can now go to Egypt pretty easily whether Israel likes it or not and, from there, any country in the world that will let them in--Egypt, Yemen, Sudan, Syria, of late Scandinavia, so far (“Maybe because Hamas is on a blacklist,” according to Ms. Naim) but, in light of the Arab Awakening and the probable entry of Islamists into many Arab governments, Hamasniks expect that blacklist to become shorter.

“For Hamas, reconciliation will legalize its past, normalize it, and give it protection. The US will speak to the Brotherhood (in Egypt) and once Hamas is in the parliament, the US will speak to Hamas too,” said Omar Shaban of the Gaza-based think tank PalThink, who is attempting to form a secular democratic party in Gaza. Being able to travel is tantalizing to the Hamas officials I spoke to.

“I remember the day—before ’67--when I used to be able to take a train from Cairo to Gaza. It was cheap—90 piasters. People used to go by car. Maybe that day will come again,” said Mahmoud El Zahhar, the co-founder of Hamas. “In two or three years, we will be able to drive from Gaza to Morocco. The era of the Arab people has started. We speak the same language, we are the same religion,” said Mohammad Al-Agha, Hamas Minister of Agriculture.

Economically, also, the Gaza base presents opportunities. “The West Bank is linked only to Israel whereas Gaza has managed to cut its cord with Israel and reestablish itself with other markets,” said Mr. Zomlot.Many Hamas officials implied that in a reconciliation deal, they would demand the dissolution of Palestinian Authority itself because “It is farcical to declare a state when you are under occupation,” said Yahya Moussa of the Palestinian Legislative Council. “The PA failed in its task to serve the political project,” agreed Fatah official Amal Tawofeeq Hamd, Deputy Secretary of the Revolutionary Council of the PLO, “and so what use is there for the PA?”

Such talk is for now mere polemic, thank god. It would not be good for Israel should it actually occur; who then would administer the Palestinian areas of the West Bank? Worse news: Reconciliation will not bring abolition of the “private” militias (Qassam, Islamic Jihad, Al Aksa Brigade), those who fire rockets into Israel. While many Hamas officials they say they are committed to a mutual cease-fire and are, to some extent, now restraining Islamic Jihad and others, they believe they drove Israel out of Gaza in 2005 and 2009 on account of their armed resistance and there is no possibility that their private militia will now be banned.

“It will take a long time to deal with these militias. After elections, security forces need to be unified but …armed resistance (remains) a strategic option,” said the reasonable, urbane and Western-oriented Fatah official Mr. Zomlot.I asked Mr. Zahhar, a founder of Hamas and a proponent of reconciliation and elections, “If you say Hamas to most Americans, they will not think the beautiful Islam you describe; they will think: Rockets and killing civilians.” He responded, “We tried all peaceful methods and we failed. Egyptians and Libyans and Tunisians will not accept the status quo and neither will we. When we use violence, they say, ‘Stop and we will negotiate.’ Then we stop but they don’t negotiate. They keep killing us.”

During the two weeks I was in the region, eight rockets were fired into southern Israel from Gaza causing injury to one foreign worker, and, according to a UN report, Israeli airstrikes and shelling launched in response to the firing of rockets killed five Palestinians in Gaza, of whom two were civilians, and injured and 15 others.

I asked Hamas official Mr. Moussa, “How can you succeed with arms against Israel? Isn’t non-violence the only way to win your struggle against an adversary that is so strong? “If everyone comes at the elephant with pins, the elephant will die,” he said. “Non- violence can work in an internal struggle but not a national liberation struggle against guns and tanks.”

'Pennies From Heaven'

2011-11-21T05:48:00.001-05:00

When I joined Monitor Company (now Group) in the spring of 1992, the first party its directors, my new colleagues, invited me to was at Mitt Romney's mansion in Belmont. Romney was at the time still with Bain Capital, but his political ambitions were clear. The party, in fact, turned out to be a fundraiser for a friend of his who was planning a run for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senator from Utah.

As my new Monitor friends whipped out their check-books, writing in numbers that elicited broad smiles from Romney and his special guest (Monitor directors were "kicking McKinsey's butt" at the old AT&T at the time, which was spending tens of millions on strategy consultants on its road to eventual oblivion), I gingerly took out my check-book, too. I wrote in $50, and mumbled some apology about being new. The smiles came anyway. (I did not mention I was a left Democrat, which would have been a little like admitting you were a Republican at my son's Bar Mitzvah.)

Make no mistake. Romney and his wife Ann could not have been more gracious--or attractive. Their sons (I think I met three out of the five) were about as good-looking as it was possible to be outside of a Land's End catalogue, yet they were warm, respectful, and the huge, imposing home-on-a-hill had an unmistakably lived-in air about it. Homework was being attended to around the kitchen table. You got the sense that they were good and grateful people, who simply assumed their wealth was earned, deserved, yet a blessing, something to be put to the fullness of life. They seemed middle class, only more so.

I should add that I had just finished five-year stint as the Harvard Business Review's technology strategy editor, and found the karma familiar. The Romney home seemed a kind of extension of the business school's architectural principles, not just the physical space, with its understated but firmly established elegance, but its implied social architecture as well.

YOU STARTED WITH a sincere and disciplined mind, erudition (though not too much, one is humble among Jewish intellectuals), a willingness to work hard, and the instinctive fairness needed to build teams; you then graduated to the company, a kind of nobler--because collective and stronger--citizen; and through the company you did the world good: brought new things to history, learned science and practical skills, forced all colleagues into excellence through good-faith competition, earned a nice living--all in all, the sorter of people in a meritocracy.

You needed government the way Derek Jeter needs the umpire. The idea that Jeter would not have been Jeter without government or, as Malcolm Gladwell writes, crazy good luck that governments can spread around, would never have entered your mind.

The heart of the architecture was the family. Raising children was a calling. Once, when I was in Salt Lake City, my ex, Susan, and I visited the home of a man who'd become a close friend at Monitor, Henry Eyring, scion of a famous scientific family, now himself an educator and senior Brigham Young administrator. We sat for hours on the Eyrings' living room couch, talking, gossiping: politics, companies, the politics of companies, the ways of families. Throughout this conversation, the Eyrings' daughter, 7 or 8 years old, sat quietly in a chair of her own facing us, listening, taking in what adults had to say, practiced at this, fascinated: reality television without the television. The younger son, whom I had never met, curled-up on the couch next to me, put his head on may lap, and fell asleep. The trust was poignant. Obedience had tipped into cultivation.

THESE WERE NOT my first encounters with the business school's Mormons. Kim Clark, who would go on to become the dean (and, later, president of a campus of Brigham Young), was one of the faculty who wrote often on technology. I can't remember working with, or editing, a man of greater professionalism: smart, kind, prompt, constructive, inviting. The same could be said of his colleague, Steve Wheelwright, and my colleagues at HBR had similar feelings about the now renown Clay Christensen. (Editing Larry Summers was, let us say, another matter.)

I ran into the same good-natured professionalism with other Mormons at Monitor, which had the good sense to recruit a great many. Monitor's CEO, Mark Fuller, made a point of putting young Mormon associates on his personal staff, assured of their discretion, their appetite for long hours and tolerance for hierarchy. (One of Mark's assistants once asked to have lunch and revealed, almost as if this were an illicit love affair, that he ached to study political philosophy, as I had. But he felt vaguely ashamed of his ambition: the egocentric implication of it, the presumptuousness of taking liberties, the fear of appearing disloyal to Mark, or leaving him without support. I gave him permission to follow his bliss; he wrote five or six years later, out of the blue, to thank me, his Ph.D. in hand.)

I REALIZE THESE anecdotes do not amount to a scientific sample. Mormons, I guess, are no better or less tortured than human beings, who are not the greatest species. But when I hear Christian preachers or the magnificent Hitchens question Romney's fitness for office owing to his Mormon beliefs, or even hear responsible journalists raise this as an "issue" for the campaign, all I can say is that I know better. Original dogmas and founding myths are not some inner mind. They are the raw material minds work on, the stuff from which believers make beliefs--along with the practical cultures perpetuating their sense of goodness. The Oral Torah supersedes the Written Torah, as the Jewish sages said. (Besides, living as I do a few parched blocks from where Christ was supposed to have been resurrected around the year 33, I can say with authority that he might well have then preferred to try upstate New York in 1823.)

And yet. You don't need to be Max Weber to know that the political cultures of faith communities may be fair game. When you vote for Chuck Schumer you know (or should) that you are getting along with the person the communitarian proclivities of Eastern European Jews, the kind of worldview, so Michael Walzer would tell you, that makes the social safety-net of Democrats seem natural. When you voted for Obama, how could you not have the political morality of black churches ringing in your ears? ("You were born on second, Jeter; so don't think you hit a double.")

It's the same with Romney's kind of Mormons. The political culture evolving from their saga and sense of salvation is relevant to the evolution of Republican "values." Which brings me to the real reason for this post, to urge you to read this terrific piece in the October Harper's by Chris Lehman: "Pennies from Heaven: How Mormon Economics Shape the G.O.P." (behind a pay-wall, alas, but at 16 bucks a year, Harper's is the best deal there is). The piece hasn't got nearly the attention it deserves.

What you are getting with Romney, Lehman shows, is not just a man but a political economic weltanschauung ratified by his faith community, something not weird at all, but rather all too complacent: the self-regard of business school meritocrats; the elevation of the obedient family to a sacrament; a genuine love of markets and enterprise and competitive self-realization; a belief that what might be seen as hypocrisy is just what market actors do to protect and refresh their brand. "Corporations are people," Romney called out in Iowa. Actually, Lehman shows, it is something like the other way around for him: it is people who compete to prove their worth and keep faith with their adorable little share-holders.

I want Obama to beat Romney badly, but the latter should not be underestimated. This will be, in a way, a clash of civilizations. Romney is probably as good an embodiment of the Republican gestalt as we are likely to see. His Mormon background, or his peculiar version of it, will not be a drag on his campaign but a kind of preparation for it. Obama will need Democrats to close ranks behind him, now, and without all the condescending qualifications that seem to be our specialty.

Jerusalem Arabs, Hebrew Labor

2011-11-21T04:29:00.001-05:00

"Let Me Work!"
(Socialist Zionist poster, 1930s)

Haaretz reports this morning that Meir Ettinger, a resident of the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar, and a grandson of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, was recently caught "investigating" on behalf of a project called "Hebrew Labor" Jerusalem businesses that employ Arabs. The goal of the project is "to warn the public" against buying from these businesses.

THE PHRASE, HEBREW Labor, was originated by Ben-Gurion and the pioneers of the Second Aliya. They were (as I write in the current Harper's) intoxicated by the prospect of evolving a new Jew: Hebrew-speaking, emancipated, communitarian, self-reliant. They understood land to be an instrument of cultural reconstruction and therapeutic heartiness. They determined to put down contiguous agricultural collectives, in which the Hebrew language could be modernized and incubated, unfettered by rabbinic dictates.

Especially during the 1930s, Ben-Gurion’s Histadrut, the colonists’ labor federation, set about building a state within a state, establishing urban industries from construction to food processing, social benefits from a health insurance fund to sporting clubs, providing Polish Jews a commercially viable refuge from European fascism. Displaced Arab peasants, streaming into the cities, were mainly excluded. Histadrut leaders believed the Jewish proletarian class would evolve into a nation, but that this would shrivel up, and lose moral prestige, if colonists became nothing but Arabic-speaking overseers of Arab labor.

Anyway, the Hebrew nation is no longer hypothetical, and the exclusion of Arab workers from Jewish enterprises--provisionally, arguably, justified in the revolutionary 1930s--is now just another feature of how Jerusalem is degenerating. Nor are things really better for those Jerusalem Arabs who are employed by Israeli Jews. Here is a little story, published in the Los Angeles Times in 2008, about my friend Abed, whose fate seems indicative. Try to read it without blushing for me.

“The moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself,” Sherwood Anderson writes in Winesburg, Ohio, “[the moment he] called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque, and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.” Meir Ettinger is a very young man. I wish him the strength to escape the gravitational pull of his grand-father's pathetic life--and death. I wish him the strength of, say, Abed.

Four Years: Repetition Compulsion, Revisited

2011-11-20T06:18:00.000-05:00

This coming week I'll have been working this space for four years and will have posted 412 times. It still feels a rare privilege to sit down at my desk, get something off my chest, and feel engaged by the expectation of reaching so many intelligent readers. (I don't know exactly how many, but some 24,000 "unique visitors" have checked in at various times over the past year. Far fewer see the blog more or less regularly, but getting to know people who, in various chance encounters, say they feel like they know me has been delightful and humbling.)

If you are a regular reader, you may have noticed that I haven't posted in almost three weeks. I could give the excuse that I've been busy with a mix of long-form projects, which is true: an article in the December Harper's on the Palestinian right of return (subscribe!), a book review on American healthcare forthcoming in the Nation, the galleys of my Portnoy book--all projects dear to my rather promiscuous heart. But the truth is a little less grand.

More and more, I've been finding that the thing on my chest has been got off before, here and elsewhere--in some cases many times before--and that knowing the intelligence of the blog's readers gives pause in a vaguely familiar way. When I was around nine or ten, a pupil in an orthodox Hebrew day school (Talmud Torah in Montreal), I came to the precocious understanding that the daily Jewish liturgy, whatever its aesthetic virtues or failings, was excruciatingly repetitive; that most of us came to regard "davening" as a kind of smug sacrifice. You were seriously bored (try even listening to Pavarotti sing "Nessun Dorma!" three times a day), but in suppressing revulsion for your boredom, and whispering, say, the "Amida" yet again, you were proving yourself worthy, ethically disciplined somehow, in touch just a smidgen with the suppressed revulsion Isaac must have felt when Abraham bound him, and thus sharing a smidgen in his moral prestige. I thought: was the All-Knowing dumb enough to fall for this kind of thing?

Anyway, I sat down recently to write yet another post about the folly of entertaining an attack on Iran and felt that I was just davening. Ditto, the many laws pending before the Knesset that expose how vulnerable Israeli democracy is, and has been almost from its inception. I called a friend and went out for coffee, instead. I've done that a few times since returning to Jerusalem.

Needless to say, I don't want this blog to become some kind of mandatory ritual, and certainly not just a way of punching an ostensible moral coupon. So I ask your help in refreshing it. I have opened a new email account, bavishai.blog@gmail.com, and invite you to let me know what's on your mind--not "comments" in the ordinary sense, but ideas, reactions, hopes, confusions. I'll post notes I think especially provocative or original. Meanwhile, I'll pick up the pace, but probably with shorter and more off-beat posts.

UNESCO: Boycott for Boycott?

2011-11-01T07:13:00.002-04:00

The admission of the Palestinian Authority into UNESCO has occasioned a fuss about the American response, the automatic cutting of $70 million in funding to the organization, triggered by existing, AIPAC-inspired Congressional legislation. (M.J. Rosenberg's good column on the subject here.)

But the thing nobody seems able to explain is what possible interest Israel, or even the Netanyahu government, has in keeping Palestinians out of an organization that focuses on the the sharing of scientific information and universal artistic and cultural values?

I have argued in the past that no Palestinian (or foreign sympathizer with the Palestinian cause) interested in peace could have an interest in boycotting Israeli universities or entrepreneurs, that is, the people who have an inherent interest in globalism and reciprocity, hence, coexistence with Palestine. Precisely the same logic applies in the other direction. How do Netanyahu and AIPAC justify keeping Palestine out of UNESCO and expect this not to set off renewed calls to boycott Israeli scientists, educators, and artists?

Netanyahu has made much of the importance of "economic peace," of Palestine advancing economically, even under occupation. He may mean nothing more by this than token improvements in living standards, but the larger implication, which even he would not deny, is that advances in Palestinian civil society can only be good for Israel. And the most important changes that would enable such advances are the freer flow of talent and intellectual capital into Palestinian territories: talent for educational institutions, talent for private sector ventures. If Israel were itself serious about peace, it would have long ago proposed Palestinian membership in UNESCO, just as it would have encouraged dozens, hundreds, of Palestinian entrepreneurs to come to the territories and build.

President Abbas has set the PA on a course toward reconciliation. The Israeli government claims to want to head off the turn to Hamas in the streets of occupied territory. Then why stifle the forces that bring cooperation and vindicate the forces that depict Israel as inherently opposed to Palestinian life?

Some will argue that Palestinians, once in UNESCO, will foment disputes over the disposition of ancient sites in Jerusalem and all over the 'Holy Land.' But since when did Palestinians need to be in UNESCO to do that? They live on the disputed ground, for God's sake, and the disputes have raged for decades. Others argue that making any concessions to Palestinian independence at the UN encourages Palestinian resistance to bilateral negotiations. But what resistance? Abbas has said again and again that he'll return to negotiations in a heartbeat if Israel stops its settlement project. The ball is, as it has been for two years, in Israel's court.

The idea that Abbas will give up this stance--negotiate, but not if settlements continue--because of continuing pressures such as denial of membership in UNESCO is not worthy anyone already educated enough to be a member. Or do we have here just another case of Netanyahu diplomacy confusing transparent (and rather pathetic) efforts at bullying with "realpolitik"?

The Shalit Deal Is Not Really A Victory For Hamas

2011-10-24T11:39:00.000-04:00

We got back to Jerusalem last week, coincidentally, the very hour Gilad Shalit was finally reunited with his family. Our own pulled themselves away from the television to receive us, though greeting him vicariously was, for all the obvious reasons, more preoccupying than greeting us in the flesh. We watched, too, captivated, before giving in to sleep.

Shalit has been a symbol for so long that it was touching to see the poise of the pale young man, particularly during the spontaneous interview forced upon him by Egyptian television. He exuded a kind of decency, not entirely a surprise given how winning (and devoted) his parents have been throughout this ordeal. When asked the kicker question, namely, could he imagine the feelings of released Palestinians, he answered tactfully that he could, but that he hoped they would not return to acts of violence against Israelis. He said that he missed most of all during his captivity not being in conversation with people. As I said, decency.

The same could not be said about many of the reporters who covered the event, but nothing surprising there either. Perhaps the award for tactlessness went to Channel Two's Friday anchor Yair Lapid, the son of former reporter-turned-politician Tommy Lapid, who himself gestures toward a political career at times. Lapid was interviewing a spokesman for the Palestine Authority in Ramallah (I wish I could remember his name, but jet-lag wins) and asked something like: "Aren't you sometimes jealous of Israel, that we value human life so much that we trade one for a thousand?"

It fell to this spokesman to say, yes, he admires Israelis for making the trade, but also to remind Lapid that Arab families value the lives of their children, too (and that, though this is hardly a reasonable way to keep moral books, during the past ten years ten Palestinians died for every Israeli death).

PERHAPS THE MOST common assumption in the press is that Hamas wins as a result of the deal, and, indeed, street demonstrators in Gaza held signs suggesting that more kidnappings would lead to more freed Palestinian prisoners. There have even been rumblings that the heads of the IDF and army intelligence are adamantly arguing for freeing another 500 prisoners to the PA's Mahmud Abbas simply to give him a victory, too.

But though a new release of prisoners to Abbas may be a good idea, I think this awarding of a victory to Hamas is short-sighted. The deal, like all bilateral deals, implies a common desire to look forward rather than backward. Otherwise, how to justify releasing people who've committed heinous murders for one rather callow soldier? And if people are looking forward, Hamas does not have much to offer--unless the only thing to look forward to is stalemate and a fight to the finish. (In that case, the question of who gains from the deal is irrelevant.) Does anyone really think Gazans have the stomach for a new kidnapping and a new retaliatory war? Has Hezbollah tried another kidnapping since 2006? (Before the exchange, Abbas was even more popular in Gaza than in the West Bank.)

If, on the other hand, the deal portends both an ongoing effort to restart diplomatic efforts and a more or less normal Palestinian rivalry among incumbent movements, any step toward greater calm can only help Fatah. For Fatah, not Hamas, is the Palestinian state-builder, the symbol and manager of international diplomacy and economic development. If the Israeli government does indeed internalize the idea that Abbas and his secular nationalists need help just now, some kind of peace process may be rekindled. It cannot be an accident that Netanyahu offered a freeze of government building in the territories immediately after the deal--a hollow offer, since almost all building is by private contractors, but an offer nevertheless.

Besides, just think of what will happen if, as seems likely, the deal will end the closure of Gaza and West Bank business people will enter Gaza more easily, renewing steps toward the economic integration of the two territories. How does Hamas gain from that? How does Hamas gain either from Israel calming its relations with Egypt, which was central to the negotiation?

(A footnote: Palestinians will argue, not without plausibility, that the swap was actually symmetrical because any member of an occupation army is guilty of crimes under international law. And who knows what Shalit believed about IDF cruelties to Palestinian civilians before his capture. But even by the standards of the Goldstone Commission, a common soldier in the IDF, born long after the territories were conquered, is hardly a war criminal. A man who, whatever the political provocation, organizes a suicide bombing of a restaurant or launches a rocket into a civilian area is. Then again, a great many of the Palestinians released from prison were not murderers or war criminals either.)

NONE OF THIS is to suggest that negotiations will succeed if they are started. I'll argue at length in the December Harper's that without Israelis coming to terms with the various underlying meanings of the Palestinian right of return, and Palestinians coming to terms with the various underlying meanings of Israel as a "Jewish national home"--without, moreover, the confederative relations implied by "coming to terms"--no lasting peace deal can be struck. Still, the Shalit deal can only be seen as a positive force toward reconciliation, especially if Netanyahu moves quickly to capitalize on the solidarity and high-emotion evoked by seeing sons coming home to longing families. This, after all, is the fugitive point of peace.

And since I've had some skeptical things to say about the Israeli press, I ought to compliment one commentator, somebody I've poked at in this blog in the past, namely, Haaretz's Ari Shavit, who appeared on Channel One Friday evening and said just what the moment called for. Netanyahu, Shavit argued, had crossed a line in doing this deal, but he dare not underestimate what he achieved. He should now either accept Hamas as an interlocutor or move quickly to help shore up the Fatah-led PA with a serious diplomatic offer. The worst thing to do is nothing.

He was joined on the panel by the always rational Aharon Ze'evi-Farkash, the former head of Israeli military intelligence, who took things another step. If the Quartet, Farkash said, is able to create an agenda for new negotiations, Israel should do what it has to do to get the talks started and put a genuine offer on the table. As I said, intelligence.

Father Mapple, Ambassador Oren, Prophet Jonah

2011-10-09T19:33:00.001-04:00

I was privileged to address the Harvard Hillel Worship and Study congregation during the Yom Kippur Torah service yesterday. I decided to look again at the Book of Jonah in light of Ambassador Michael Oren's sermon in Washington last year. Services were held at the First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church in Harvard Square, where Melville's spirit is strong. The following long post is the sermon in full. You may want to print a pdf. file of the sermon here.

There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who do not. Now usually (okay, paradoxically), I would place myself in the latter category, but today I fear I may be close to falling into the former. For when it comes to the Book of Jonah—why it found a place in the Yom Kippur liturgy—there seems to be two kinds of Jews, those who actually read the text to find out why Jonah ran and those who don’t. And those who don’t themselves divide the world into two kinds of people, good and bad, awestruck and scoffers, obedient and reckless. Get it? Bare with me.

Since we are in New England’s church of churches on this Sabbath of Sabbaths, I can’t resist starting with someone who, though not a Jew, had some pretty strong opinions about Jonah and what makes for good Hebrews—one who gave perhaps the most famous sermon on the subject, certainly the most paradigmatic for our purposes. I am speaking of course of Father Mapple in Moby Dick, whom Ishmael hears just before he first sets sail:

Shipmates, it is a two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men, and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God. As sinful men, it is a lesson to us all, because it is a story of the sin, hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and joy of Jonah.

The “joy of Jonah.” Really? Mapple continues, explaining why Jonah ran away.

All the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do- remember that- and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further flouts at God, by seeking to flee from Him. He thinks that a ship made by men, will carry him into countries where God does not reign but only the Captains of this earth. He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a ship that's bound for Tarshish.

Father Mapple, en passant, ferrets out of the Book of Jonah Jonah’s idea of what a Hebrew is, someone who knows God’s power, and who knows better than to expect mercy when sins are great:

I am a Hebrew,' he cries- and then- 'I fear the Lord the God of Heaven who hath made the sea and the dry land!' Fear him, O Jonah? Aye, well mightest thou fear the Lord God then!

We know what happens next. Jonah is tossed overboard according to his own wish. Then Mapple reaches his climax:

He goes down in the whirling heart of such a masterless commotion that he scarce heeds the moment when he drops seething into the yawning jaws awaiting him; and the whale shoots-to all his ivory teeth, like so many white bolts, upon his prison.

The fish pukes him up, Mapple says:

And Jonah, bruised and beaten- his ears, like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean- Jonah did the Almighty's bidding. And what was that, shipmates? To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!

That was it. The challenge is to preach the Truth in the face of falsehood. Who does and to whom? This requires an implied structuring. The world is made up of two groups of people, clumps of people, and most significantly for Jonah’s purposes people who know the truth and people who either don’t know it or resist it, or both. The good are good, moreover, because they obey authorized wisdom, or are in awe of God’s power, or preferably both. And the way to get people to be good, or afraid to be bad—and, again, what’s the difference?—is through a kind of permanent regime of deterrence: we warn like Father Mapple, warn like Jonah eventually did. And we will preach the truth of a force that will find you anywhere, idiot. No place to hide. No place to avoid consequences.

Nor will life be very good if you shirk this Truth. If you fail to fear the forces of good, if you scoff at the sacrifices asked of you, then your life will hardly be worth living. You will be mangled by human corruptions. Or wind up in the prison-belly of fish. To rail against the pressures of this terrible justice is naïve and pitiful; it is to “weep and wail” as the text tells us Jonah did not do; like a child or weakling. All the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do.

I REMEMBER READING Father Mapple many years ago and feeling vaguely sorry for Ishmael. Not what you needed to set sail: the kind of sermon you expected for, or from, the simple son at the Passover Seder; the ideology of the battered child. Was this really what the Book of Jonah taught? Is this why Jonah ran? Because he was afraid of doing hard duty and taking its consequences?

I should add that I was already part of this Harvard minyan at the time, and took a certain pride in my skepticism. I felt that being a “Hebrew” meant something more than panic in the face of dire consequences, which is why the sages had the guile to include Jonah, of all times, at the most poignant moment on Yom Kippur. I also thought that being a modern Hebrew (I was back and forth to Jerusalem even then) was a particular privilege. This Manichean view, Father Mapple’s view, would have felt terribly out of place in a Yehuda Amichai poem, a Shalom Hanach song, or over an Emeq Refaim cappuccino.

WHICH BRINGS ME to another sermon on the Book of Jonah, this time a Yom Kippur sermon, delivered exactly a year ago in Washington, and by another pilot of the flock, the Ambassador of Israel, our Republic of Hebrews, Michael Oren.

His entire sermon is worth reading. I don’t claim to do justice here to all of the notes he strikes, though I think I am getting the music right. Here is some of what Oren said:

On Yom Kippur we read the Book of Jonah, one of the Bible's most enigmatic texts... And it features one of our scripture's least distinguished individuals. Yet this same everyman, this Jonah, is tasked by God with a most daunting mission. He is charged with going to the great city of Nineveh and persuading its pernicious people to repent for their sins or else.

I stop only to notice that word “pernicious.” Hold the thought. Oren continues:

Jonah, though, cannot escape the responsibility. Nor can he dodge his divinely ordained dilemma. If he succeeds in convincing the Ninevehians to atone and no harm befalls them, many will soon question whether that penitence was ever really necessary. Jonah will be labeled an alarmist. But, what if the people of Nineveh ignore the warning and the city meets the same fiery fate as Sodom and Gomorrah? Then Jonah, as a prophet, has failed.

Such is the paradox of prophecy for Jonah, a lose-lose situation. No wonder he runs away. He flees to the sea, only to be swallowed by a gigantic fish, and then to the desert, cowering under a gourd. But, in the end, the fish coughs him up and the gourd withers. The moral is: there is no avoiding Jonah's paradox. Once elected by God whatever the risks, he must act.

Once elected by God he must act. Oren might have just said "elected," for Jonah is for him a handy stand-in for political leaders. What the fates ask from pilots is hard: responsibilities that cannot be shirked, not like those who carp from the sidelines--the "pundits," Oren says. Nor can real consequences be avoided. Fishes swallow, gourds whither. Stuff happens. And what is the moral dilemma that truly responsible people face? Oren continues:

The quandary of statecraft: Every national leader knows it and few better than Israeli leaders. They, too, have had to make monumental--even existential--decisions.…My personal hero, Levi Eshkol. On June 5th, 1967, Eshkol had to decide whether to unleash Israel Defense Forces against the Arab armies surrounding the Jewish State and clamoring for its destruction or whether to alienate the international community and especially the United States and be branded an aggressor.

This hard decision is paradigmatic for Oren. The choice is between being right and labeled, or, being popular and dead. You do the right thing or do the popular thing. Go to your Ninveh or run away. The contemporary meaning of Jonah is all too clear:

Consider the case of terror. Israel today is threatened with two major terror organizations: Hamas in Gaza and, in Lebanon, Hizbollah. Both are backed by Iran and both call openly for Israel's destruction. And, over the past five years, both have acted on that call by firing nearly 15,000 rockets at Israeli towns and villages.Next imagine that you're the prime minister of Israel. You know that in order to keep those thousands of rockets out of Hamas's hands you need to blockade Gaza from the sea. The policy is risky--people may get hurt, especially if they're armed extremists--and liable to make you very unpopular in the world. But you have to choose between being popular and watching idly while a million Israelis come under rocket fire. You have to choose between popular and being alive.

And again:

You know that Israel has in the past withdrawn from territories in an effort to generate peace but that it received no peace but rather war. And, lastly, you know that many Arabs view the two-state solution as a two stage solution in which the ultimate stage is Israel's dissolution. Imagine that you're Israel's prime minister. Do you wait until Hizbollah finds a pretext to fire those rockets or do you act preemptively? Do you risk having the much of the country being reduced to rubble or having that same country reduced to international pariah status?

Now, I don’t want to go into all the various ways Oren represents these events. He is an historian and I have benefited from reading him. Let us say I find his facts partial. And I know this synagogue and this day are not the place for politics, certainly not "punditry"; nor would not I want to slight Oren, whom I have often admired. I knew him in Jerusalem and found him good company. Indeed, Oren is representing things much like most Israelis and American Jews do, and much like certain other sacred texts do. If this were a gloss on the Book of Joshua, no problem.

No, on my mind are not the arguable facts Oren ticks off, but the way he presents moral dilemmas, presents, "responsibility"—the way his version of Jonah suggest a more general, even archetypal, structure to the way Israeli Jews should view themselves and their dilemmas. The details are not merely partial. They are partial in order to set up a particular kind of drama. It goes something like this:

We were fair and got war. Why? As with Father Mapple, it is because you have two clumps of people, us and them, the peace loving and the bloody-minded, though Oren hedges his categories about with phrases like “a great many” and the use of the passive voice. Once you establish this bifurcation, you establish the moral dilemma. And Oren’s plain, if implied message maps to the structure implied by his interpretation of Jonah: in this contest between the righteous and the "pernicious," Israeli leaders must do something hard but inescapable: exercise firm power, bring a message of deterrence, preach the truth in the face of falsehood, bomb if you have to and the New York Times be damned.

Indeed, Oren’s only real innovation in Mapple's Manichean drama is the idea that what makes things particularly hard for the prophet-leader these days is that doing what’s necessary could lead to the loss of global reputation, something statesmen have to be concerned about but God did not—well, except for that time after the Golden Calf, when Moses warns God his reputation among the nations will suffer if he wipes Israel out in the desert, but that’s another story.

YOU THINK ABOUT Oren’s tone, his framing, his pathos, and what’s missing from his Jonah is something quite like what is missing from Father Mapple. I would call it critical self-consciousness, the gift that leads to a kind of moral triangulation: I see this course, I see that course, but I also see myself seeing. I see this person, I see that action, but because I am fallible like any person, I understand that I might, under similar circumstances, do what he or she does. Indeed, what have I done that may have contributed to some escalating evil? How can I change my part of the tragic story? An historian with this sensibility would, I suspect, have more to say about what happened in this conflict.

Let me be clear. Terrorism is not tolerable; members of my own family have been its victims. Just because something is understandable does not make it right. No matter what, your actions have to pass an ordinary moral test—to do to others what you would have others do to you. But before you can agree to be bound by such a test you have to see the other’s humanity, not just ostensibly collective crimes—you have to see yourself a part of a common humanity. You have to renounce Manichean visions, this notion that life presents us with struggles against evil forces—the idea that goodness rests merely, or even mainly, on the terrible power of good forces to intimidate the bad.

What is a Jew, if only on Yom Kippur, if not someone who sees this? And where would we learn this, ironically, if not from the Book of Jonah? For what, if not the humility of self-consciousness and the renunciation of Manichaeism does Jonah teach?

THE PEOPLE OF Ninveh are not the real villains, are they? They are not very bad: one perfunctory warning from the prophet and even the cattle are put into sack-cloth. No, it is is Jonah the book is warning us about, that we should not be like him: small, angry, certain of right and wrong, hungry for the punishment of crime, more than a touch depressive, incapable of handling uncertainty.

For why, really, did Jonah run? Actually, he tells us, or God, after God forgives Ninveh. It has nothing to do with fearing God's mission and everything to do with fearing God's compassion. This is what Jonah says just after Ninveh atones and God pardons:

I pray Thee, O LORD, was not this my saying, when I was yet in mine own country? Therefore I fled beforehand unto Tarshish; for I knew that Thou art a gracious God, and compassionate, long-suffering, and abundant in mercy, and repentest Thee of the evil.

Therefore now, O LORD, take, I beseech Thee, my life from me; for it is better for me to die than to live.'

And the LORD said: 'Art thou greatly angry?'

Then Jonah went out of the city, and sat on the east side of the city, and there made him a booth, and sat under it in the shadow, till he might see what would become of the city.

You sort of get the feeling that Jonah builds the booth to look out onto the city in the forlorn hope that God would incinerate the sons of bitches after all. Anyway, he obviously feels more comfortable far away from the people he was notionally saving, that he cares about humanity more than humans. He is Javert in Les Miserables, someone who rather die than live with the confusions brought into the world by forgiveness. You can almost hear him shouting for "responsibility" from the audience of a Tea Party candidates debate.

Jonah, in other words, is hardly the hero in the book. God is. God has a lesson to teach, but the heart to be transformed is Jonah’s. God sends the gourd, not to prove his power some more, but because he realizes that, as with a numbed child, you can teach Jonah compassion only step by step; by starting with the potential personal loss of something precious, intimate and then hope the child will extrapolate to a larger class of things. What makes moral dilemmas really hard, as opposed to merely daring, is the sense of identity people develop for all people, the idea that “there but for fortune go you or I,” that none of us can really “know our left hand from our right”?

The problem is that Jews, like all people, like Jonah quintessentially, find critical self-consciousness hard. As Philip Roth put it: “Jews are members of the human race; worse than that I cannot say about them.” We find it hard to look in the mirror and not blame the mirror. We find reciprocity hard. We find telling the whole story hard, indeed we find the building blocks of stories more and more complex and various the more gourds we encounter.

What we don’t find hard—because childhood inculcates this simple drama—is Oren's elevation to archetype the idea that the most powerful personalities in our lives are good, though they may just be stuck with a public relations problem.

How would God, the hero of the Book of Jonah, try to imply statesmanship to a prime minister? What gourd would He send—what worm—to try to get all leaders to see enemies as many individuals and see risk as permanent? How would He help Israel’s prime minister to see, to paraphrase David Grossman, the little Hezbollah in you?

I suspect the future of what Jews mean by Jews will depend very much on the answers we provide to these questions in the coming year. So let me end with a story.I have spent a good deal of time with another prime minister this past year, nobody’s hero now, who actually launched two wars against “the missiles.” He can speak for himself, but my impression of Ehud Olmert is that he is not at all certain in retrospect that he saw enough of the consequences, enough of the story, though he certainly saw as much as Oren implies statesmen must. Anyway, when I asked him about his proudest moment of statesmanship, he told me this:

Olmert had sat in on meetings in which Ariel Sharon had treated Abbas as the representative of a defeated, insurgent enemy that needed to be intimidated. This often made Olmert cringe. So when he assumed office, and tried to set appointments with Abbas, he was not surprised that Abbas kept putting him off, determined, Olmert surmised, to avoid more humiliation. Finally, they set an appointment for a Thursday evening, and again Abbas cancelled at the last minute. So Olmert got him on the phone and said: “I understand why you might want to insult me, but why insult my wife?” Abbas was taken aback and said he did not understand. Olmert said: “When Aliza found that you would be coming, she spent the last 24 hours preparing your favorite dishes for dinner. What shall I tell her now?” Abbas came, eventually met with Olmert 36 times, and the two came closer to a comprehensive agreement than any previous leaders.

This is not the kind of approach to truth and power Father Mapple or Ambassador Oren, or Jonah, for that matter, would have respected. But I like to think that the Book of Jonah's God would have been relieved.

Days Of Awe

2011-10-05T12:37:00.001-04:00

It is hard to imagine a more vivid contrast between the Israels that Israelis must choose.

This morning, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to Daniel Shechtman, 70, a professor of materials science at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. A professional in cosmopolitan Haifa, who also teaches in Iowa, Shechtman personifies the old Zionist dream of a Jewish modernity, taking in what is best in the larger world, and breathing out a creative newness--in this case, an ingenious proof that nature, the natural crystal, is capable of imitating of all things classical Islamic art, which might have also been Maimonides' art, since its genius was delighting without "graven images."

Also this morning, I got this email from my friend Assaf Sharon, who along with other members of Solidarity was attacked near the settlement of Anatot on Rosh Hashana: "Perhaps you have already heard about the violent attack we experienced on Rosh Hashana. I paste below a description of the events and a video capturing some of what happened. Although I took quite a beating, I must confess that the pain of the blows and wounds dulls in comparison with the frustration from the silence and indifference with which this unprecedented event is being received."

I reproduce his report in full. Something to consider on Yom Kippur:

For decades, the Israeli government and police force have passively allowed settlers to act violently against Palestinians and Israelis who protest the occupation. Last Friday, when a mob of settlers attacked a group of Palestinian farmers and Israeli solidarity activists outside the settlement of Anatot, a new level of collusion was reached: not only did the police not act to stop the mob of settlers, but indeed many of the settlers in the mob were themselves out-of-uniform policemen and state employees. The press was silent. The occupation has found a new way to silence non-violent resistance and dissent.

At first glance, Anatot is a pastoral gated community close to Jerusalem, inhabited by law-abiding citizens, many of whom are employed by the Civil Administration and the police. But despite its benign appearance, Anatot is a settlement, located in Palestinian territory occupied in 1967. Anatot was built in 1982 on land allocated by the Israeli government, and inexpensive housing was offered to police officers and other government employees in order to encourage them to live and work in the otherwise unattractive area known by the Israeli government and settlers as “Judea and Samaria,” and by the rest of the world as the West Bank. Like many other settlements, Anatot is surrounded by a separation fence that envelops acres of privately-owned Palestinian land.

Six years ago, the residents of Anatot decided to expand their settlement southward. They neither requested nor received government permits to expand. They simply rerouted the settlement’s fence to encompass additional private Palestinian land, including land owned by a farmer named Yassin el-Rafa’i and his family, who are citizens of Israel. For years, settlers from Anatot have regularly harassed el-Rafa’i. On multiple occasions, settlers have uprooted el-Rafa’i’s trees and otherwise damaged his property, including poisoning his well with animal carcasses. El-Rafa’i has filed numerous complaints with the local police, but to no avail.

The police have consistently refused to address el-Rafa’i’s complaints, or to take any action whatsoever to restrain the settlers’ continued harassment. Last Friday (9/30/2011), a group of a dozen Israeli activists from The Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity Movement, Ta’ayush, and other groups, went to visit Yassin el-Rafa’i and his wife Iman, in order to hear their story and to express friendship and solidarity. While the activists were getting ready to go home, a crowd of nearly a hundred settlers from Anatot surrounded the el-Rafa’i family and the Israeli activists.

The mob of settlers quickly grew violent, and began to attack Iman, Yassin and the Israeli activists with fists, rocks and clubs. Three people were hospitalized, including Yassin and Iman, and several activists were detained for interrogation. During the entire incident, uniformed police officers were present, and did nothing to stop or restrain the mob, despite the activists’ repeated pleas for intervention. Not a single settler was detained or arrested. No journalists were present, and the majority of the evidence was destroyed by the attackers, who specifically targeted cameras, breaking or stealing them and beating the photographers.

That evening, a group of about 40 Israeli activists returned to Anatot, to protest the brutalities committed earlier that day. The activists held a nonviolent demonstration in front of the settlement’s locked gate, while hundreds of settlers amassed on the other side. Some had participated in the afternoon's violent attack, and some were soldiers and police officers in civilian dress: a horde of men seething with hatred and hungry for violence. The settlers demanded that the gates be opened, and charged at the activists, again with fists, rocks, and clubs.

The police officers in uniform that were present did nothing to restrain the crowd. One of the attackers tried a number of times to stab activists with a knife. When we tried to get away from the place, the attackers chased us, chanting “Death to Arabs!” and "Death to leftists!" They were accompanied by a group of uniformed police officers. About 10 demonstrators were injured, three of whom were evacuated for medical treatment. Six cars were seriously damaged or destroyed. On one of them a Jewish star, a Magen David, was incised.

Despite the attack, which was caught in stills and in video, the police did not arrest a single rioter. And despite the fact that the afternoon’s attack was known to the press, not a single journalist was present to witness the evening’s attack. The readiness with which the settlers turned to brutal violence - violence which in any other context would be called terror - exposes Anatot for what it is: an extremist ideological settlement. Furthermore, these attacks call into question the commonly held belief in Israel which posits a clear distinction between extremist, ideological settlements and moderate, ‘quality of life’ settlements.

All settlements are based on expropriation and dispossession, and all are maintained by the same tools of the occupation. The fact that the police accommodated and enabled the rioters highlights the complete lack of both accountability and justice in the occupation .The police and security forces do not monitor the settlers; they work for the settlers. In many cases, including the case of Anatot, the police are the settlers, and the settlers are the police. Police out of uniform assaulted citizens while uniformed police looked on and did nothing. The press largely ignored the events, and only after considerable public pressure and the release of videos and photos did several newspapers cover Friday’s events.

Even then, most of the coverage was tepid, equivocating, and biased towards the settlers and the police. With the Anatot events, political conflict in Israel has reached a watershed. In the light of day and under the supervision of the law enforcement, nonviolent dissent is being silenced with brutality. Dissidents are branded as traitors, and their physical safety and property are forfeit. Israelis and Palestinians alike were savaged by a mob of settlers, who acted with the complete confidence of those whose impunity is guaranteed.

Decades of occupation and repression have made Israeli society largely callous to settler and state violence against Palestinians. In Anatot on Friday, this violence was extended to Israelis who arrived to show nonviolent solidarity with the struggle against injustice, discrimination, and occupation.

•We demand an investigation of the events in Anatot, to be carried out by a special commission made of officials unrelated to the Judea and Samaria District.
•We demand the immediate suspension of the law enforcement officers present, and the dismissal of the chief security officer of the settlement, Tomer Shapira.
•We demand that the el-Rifa’i family be guaranteed full and uninhibited access to all of their land, including, if necessary, security escorts and protection.
•We demand the dismantlement of the illegal separation fence that allows the settlers of Anatot to expropriate privately-owned Palestinian lands.

We will not be silenced. We will continue to struggle against the occupation, violence, and repression. We will continue to stand up for justice, civil equality and democracy. Will you stand up with us? Share the story of the Anatot events and of the el-Rifa’i family. Share the videos of the attacks with your friends, family, classmates and colleagues. Bring these stories to the attention of your political representatives and community leaders.

-- Assaf Sharon

Half-Truth For A Half-Loaf

2011-09-22T11:10:00.001-04:00

President Obama's U.N. speech was a sad spectacle, even if it was utterly predictable, a kind of tribute to the militant defensiveness of organized American Jews (which I encounter in every lecture these days) and the limited attention span of American voters in general. It is discouraging to see a good man saying half the truth you know him to know in order to save half loafs you know he knows he might lose.

These half loafs, from universal health care to tax equity, are hardly trivial. The first took a century to enact, largely because of the obstruction of southern politicians who saw helping the uninsured as a way of taking from whites to help blacks. FDR pandered to them to hold his coalition together to enact such things as Social Security. So you can imagine why our first African-American president should want to pander to Democrats who fear Israel is a test. Clinton did precisely the same thing.

And yet you could almost hear Arab streets groaning when Obama spoke, and see him hearing them with his third ear. Funny, when he was first elected I thought he would save Israel from itself. Now I wonder if we are not finally getting a mounting opposition in Israel to counter the Netanyahu government's demagogy, which will help Obama.

A case in point is Ehud Olmert's op-ed in today's Times. It contains nothing that readers of this blog don't already know, but the timing is significant--and brave. Moreover, Labor has a new leader, Shelly Yachimovitch, who has been a kind of poster child for "quality of life issues" in Israel, and may just steal votes, not only from Kadima, but from Likud, if she maintains a populist appeal.

Of course the relevance of any new Israeli election depends on whether violence in occupied territories can be preempted. A new piece in Foreign Affairs by friend-of-the-blog Alvaro de Soto is worth reading, if only to help with that question. On to Friday.

Mr. President: Play Jujitsu With The U.N. Vote

2011-09-18T15:54:00.000-04:00

The most frustrating thing about Gershom Gorenberg's smart letter to President Obama in The American Prospect is that there is nothing in it that its recipient does not already know:

Abbas is going to the U.N. Security Council because bilateral negotiations have become fruitless and embarrassing; the pursuit of statehood is actually a last ditch effort to save the two-state "peace process"; U.N. membership for Palestine would not preclude future negotiations but would clarify their terms and strengthen Abbas, the best of all possible partners in building peace; membership for Palestine in boundaries based on "the 1967 border" is an historic precedent that also confirms Israel's border.

An American veto will sour, if not poison, what residual prestige Obama has gained among the young makers of the Arab Spring; a veto will only throw the issue to the General Assembly, and a defiant vote there by an international majority will intensify Israel's isolation; a General Assembly vote will likely touch off rebellious demonstrations across the region, including, ominously, the West Bank (which the IDF has no way of handling peacefully); acceptance of Palestine by the General Assembly will give it "observer state" status, like the Vatican, and open Israel to proceedings in the International Criminal Court.

Why then is Obama backing Netanyahu in this matter? There is nothing about the decision that we don't already know: 9% jobless, Greece; Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio; AIPAC's email list; Eric Cantor's House; Dennis Ross's hubris; a media that swarms to "disappointed" Democrats (among them, editors of The American Prospect).

It is pretty clear that Obama has about as much room to do what Gorenberg suggests as revive plans for the "public option." Or is it?

I WANT TO stress that I am not among those who have lost respect for the president over the past two years. If anything, his treatment by Democratic "progressives" who can't seem to count to 41, and professional journalists who can't seem to tell correlation from cause and sabotage from strategy, has only increased my admiration for his poise. More on that another time.

But I believe Obama still has an opportunity here, one that plays to his considerable strengths, and it may not be too late to seize it.

Ross and David Hale have tried and predictably failed to preempt the U.N. vote by getting the sides to agree on a formula to resume negotiations. Let us assume the administration goes ahead and vetoes any Security Council resolution, insisting that full statehood must nevertheless be a product of bilateral Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. This will, again, only shift diplomatic activity to the General Assembly.

So why not use the larger forum to sketch out much more completely and assertively what, in America's view, a negotiated settlement would look like? Why not announce support for upgrading Palestine to observer statehood along with a commitment to veto any House resolution to cut off support for the PA? (J Street has, in effect, suggested a move of this kind, supporting the veto but leaving open the possibility of endorsing a General Assembly resolution while strongly opposing cutting off help to Ramallah.)

Just to be clear, I share Gorenberg's wish that Obama's administration had acted more aggressively last spring, though I understand the president's need to pick fights (and bundlers) judiciously. And I realize this approach to the General Assembly is a little fancy: for many, the U.N. is the U.N., a vote is a vote, the media's question is whether you are "pro-Israel" or not.

But as Abbas well knows, this U.N. move is political theater for everybody. The question is whether the Obama administration can play jujitsu with it, turning negative energy in the Security Council into a positive energy in the General Assembly hall, that is, force the writers of headlines around the world to think of something more nuanced and hopeful than "Obama Sinks Palestinian State."

The president has already stated his view that negotiations should proceed on the basis of the 1967 borders. Why not use this occasion to endorse the rest of the Olmert-Abbas package: an international Holy Basin in Jerusalem, a formula to acknowledge the rights of refugees, a series of steps to promote regional integration? The vision would resound in the Arab world, especially if Obama wins endorsement from the EU (and finds a way to be photographed with leaders of the emerging Libya).

Instead of just opposing Abbas's U.N. initiative, then, the administration could try to shape something more popular with Israel's perplexed majority. It is in this context he might have adopted Dan Kurtzer's suggestion that a General Assembly resolution be based on the original partition plan, which ratified international recognition of a vaguely "Jewish state."

THE LOBBY'S HARD-RIGHT forces will never forgive Obama for this, anymore than for the '67-border thing, and (as Gorenberg suggests) would never vote for him anyway. But 60-70% of American Jews are more admiring of David Remnick than Ed Koch. They will support a clear path to peace if they can be sure Obama is generally sympathetic to Israel, which (alas,) the Security Council veto will prove. It could be followed up by a trip to Jerusalem and rally in Tel Aviv. In for an agora, in for a shekel?

Anyway, the possible loss of some Jewish voters is far less important to Obama than the possible gain of voters who will see his global spine. Doing something unexpected, but something everybody from New York Times editors to David Patraeus, Tony Blair to Haaretz, can publicly defend, is worth the risk.

Obama, after all, can win over the predictable demographics and still fall short next November--unless he can turn around the perception (not deserved, but there you are) that he has been playing much too safe. We write about "independents" as if they are independent minded when they are mostly people waiting to see who others are flocking to; people impressed by trends and "strength" and Bin Laden assassinations. They are waiting to see if talking heads start calling Obama bold again, if his own start calling him theirs again.

Obama does not have many more dramatic ways to turn things around with domestic policy. Here is his chance to show courage in foreign policy, and about the region he is most heavily invested in. He can do it with a step that feels consistent with his policies and values (and unearned prizes), not some opportunistic lurch--indeed, at a time when forces at home are putting Netanyahu on the ropes. Throw Palestinians and the Israeli peace camp a life-line, Mr. President. Save yourself.

Upcoming Lectures: Please Come

2011-09-14T15:25:00.003-04:00

I'll be speaking at Boston University tomorrow night, Thursday, September 15th., on the agreeably general subject: "Israel and the Emergence of a Palestinian State." (Actually, I'll be trying to think through why we are so stuck.) I'll be speaking on the same topic for the Houston World Affairs Council next Wednesday, the 21st., and at the University of Texas on Thursday, the 22nd. I'll be coming to Pittsburgh on Tuesday, October 11th. More details soon.

Back To Basics: The Heartbreak Of 1948

2011-09-13T18:00:00.001-04:00

I have been backing off this blog lately, finishing up longer projects, but also trying get some distance from events that are forcing us to face up to things in a radical frame of mind. The U.N. vote on Palestine is going ahead, and I'll have more to say about it. In the meantime, I can't add much to Brad Burston's reasons for Israeli liberals to support statehood.

Yet a move to statehood, even if this were to precipitate more productive negotiations, or just make Israeli hardliners increasingly besieged--even if it led to a Palestinian state founded in a border deal with Israel--will only open the door to even more more basic and long repressed challenges, namely, the relations between Israel and a Palestinian state and the kinds of states these will be: the cultural distinction of each and the rights of individuals in each, including rights accorded citizens of the other state.

As I argued in The Hebrew Republic, and subsequently with my friend Sam Bahour in Haaretz, independence will in any case need to be shaped by interdependence if, for example, the Palestinian right of return is ever going to be resolved or, indeed, if the economic integration both sides need is going to be managed. What we think of as states will have to be expanded; much of what has been built will gradually have to be redesigned. Dafna Leef, the remarkable young woman who helped rally 450,000 Israelis a couple of Saturdays ago, told the assembled throngs in Tel Aviv: "Every heart is a revolutionary cell." I suspect that hearts will be tested and changed a good deal in the months ahead.

So perhaps this is the time to open them some, by looking back, in sadness and new found empathy, at the formative events of 1948. What happened then still matters now--the pain still matters now. Most readers of this blog have, I suspect, a pretty vivid image of Israeli military heroism in the 1948 war, and the justifications for making a stand. Just this morning, I was sent a bulk email exhorting me to watch this moving film, "The Volunteers," about Jews from around the world who came to Palestine in 1948 because they believed they might be needed. (I did the same in 1967, though I was clearly not needed by the time my plane took off.)

But I wonder how many readers have ever seen this stunning film, "Sands of Sorrow," about the Palestinian refugees of 1948. There has been much dispute about whether (or how many of) these shocked people left out of fear or by expulsion. This has been a silly dispute. The governing fact is that they were not allowed back, and that Israel formed around that decision.

Before the war--so the historian Hillel Cohen shows--Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, had planned a democracy with a large Arab minority living, Ben Gurion wrote, in “complete equality, ” and “ethic autonomy.” Even during the war, debate about the nature of the state was tortured.

“An Arab also has the right to be elected President of the state, if he is chosen for this role,” Ben Gurion told the government in June 1948; “If in the United States, it is not possible for a Jew or a Negro to be elected president of the country, I have no faith in the quality of its civil rights…Were we to enforce such a regime—well then we will have missed the raison d’être of a Hebrew state… denying the most treasured elements of our Jewish tradition.” Nevertheless, Ben Gurion’s mounting fear of a fifth column eventually proved decisive. He wrote in his diary: “We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinian refugees] never do return... The old will die and the young will forget.”

Anyway, the young did not forget--and will not. Nor should we forget "the most treasured" Jewish values underlying a "Hebrew state." Is it really too late, even after 60 years, to design political institutions in a way that reconciles the Israelis' stand to the Palestinians' justice? Do we care?

Dark Winter: 10 Years

2011-09-10T16:28:00.000-04:00

As in past years, I'd like to share this song, "Dark Winter," written and recorded by my daughter, Ellie Avishai. Ellie is now a distinguished young educator, but on September 2001 she was an aspiring singer-songwriter. When the towers were attacked, she wrote "Dark Winter" almost in one sitting, and I still cannot think about that event unaccompanied by its music and (prophetic) lyrics.

Palestinian Strategy

2011-08-31T13:33:00.000-04:00

There has been a great deal of anxious speculation about what Palestinians really want, the speculation tied to the questionable mandate of a president who has not stood for election since 2005 (and his prime minister who was never elected at all), the anxiety tied to concern that, if you take these men away, a gush of pro-Hamas sentiment will be unplugged. So Israelis, and people in the West more generally, should take a close look at this impressive document from the Palestine Strategy Group, the closest thing there is in Palestine to an independent voice reflecting what the educated center is thinking.

Look, especially, at pp. 6 and 7 of the executive summary for the various strategic options open to the Palestinian leadership. Read Akiva Eldar's analysis. If the Israeli government were serious about peace, or merely about avoiding a diplomatic debacle, it would take to heart the growing power behind the non-violent struggle the Group maps out. September is upon us, and the consequences of Palestinian action in the U.N. are hard to predict. But no Israeli can say the intention behind Palestinian action is mysterious. It is all here and deserves a response.

To my mind, the key to the document can be found in the following passage, with its emphasis on a "rights-based" strategy, appealing to international law. Embedded in this is an evolving view of, among other things, the "right of return," related to the federal political structures to follow after the end of occupation. I'll have more to say about both in the weeks ahead.

From the document:

Strategic option (D): Smart resistance

Smart resistance means an intelligent, focused and flexible use of the various sub-components of the broad strategic option of national resistance in general. These include legal action against Israel in the world’s courts and boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaigns. But the main emphasis in the PSG is on non-violent popular resistance, as demonstrated so powerfully in the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions so far, and elsewhere in the Arab world. Palestinians have been pioneers in this area as in the first intifada 1987.

But now a new chapter needs to be opened because the full force of this strategic option was only partially exploited at that time. It remains a vast and largely untapped resource waiting to be fully activated in the framework of the new Palestinian liberation strategy. The PSG is in general agreement that the scope of popular resistance needs to be broadened and reactivated on all fronts, especially where youth stand to the fore.

The PSG discussed the role of armed resistance and agreed that this is an entirely legitimate tool in international law in cases of foreign occupation. Some see armed struggle as an essential, albeit partial, ‘equaliser’ to Israel’s military power without which Israel will continue to ignore Palestinian demands. Others - probably a majority - think that this is not the moment to emphasise the armed struggle, because it plays to Israel’s strength, provides Israeli right wing elements with propaganda tools to justify the use of force, and enables the nature of the conflict to be misrepresented as a military confrontation between two antagonists rather than a clear-cut case of military occupation.

There was a strong feeling in the PSG that attacks on civilians should play no part in the new national liberation strategy as they are in clear breach of international law, which is what our Palestinian strategy mainly appeals to, and only serves to alienate international opinion.

Libya, The Climax

2011-08-25T12:29:00.003-04:00

Saif-al-Islam Qaddafi

I wrote about my time in Libya, and of the country's serious potential, back in February, just as the uprising started. I am not sure there is anything to add, except to caution against all the analysis that emphasizes the country's tribal divisions and lack of a functioning government--as if we are dealing with another Somalia. Libya is a country with only 6-7 million people and about 40 billion barrels of oil, as much as two million pumped each day.

Which means that Libya has been host to tens of thousands of ex-pat managers from France and Italy and elsewhere over the years, people who have in turn engendered a domestic professional and business class of considerable heft: managers running engineering and logistics companies, tourism businesses, cellular infrastructure businesses, and so forth. The latter are the centripetal force around which a state apparatus promises to function; it will get off the ground with considerable resources.

It is widely believed, as I wrote in February, that Qaddafi has stashed away more than $150 billion; most of this will turn up. The country's transportation infrastructure, though inconsistent, is nevertheless as impressive as, say, Jordan's during the 1980s and 90s: the ports, roads and airport are certainly good enough to build on. Tourist sites and beaches are magnificent, assuming they can be cleaned of trash. The educational and health systems are in terrible shape; but Tunisian counterparts are better and close by. Finally, it seems unlikely that Qaddafi, or his surviving retainers, will lead an insurgency. He did not command an ideological movement, though he postured as an intellectual. And thanks to President Obama's and NATO's good sense, there is no foreign invader to rally against.

There are reports that Qaddafi and his sons are surrounded. I confess that I feel a certain sadness for Saif-al-Islam's tragic fate. During the early 2000s he tried to lead his father, hence, his country, into something like a liberal and globalist reform, studying classical liberal texts at LSE, and hiring well-respected strategy consultants, including the Harvard Business School's Michael Porter, to set up an economic planning commission: a kind of shadow prime minister's office, that would slowly grow into a functioning state, and displace, or render redundant, the pervasive security apparatus. The current head of the rebel government, Mahmoud Jibril, was to be its first head.

The son failed to move things fast enough to preempt the counter-moves against reform by the security apparatus, or failed to move his father against others in the family, or was perhaps faking it from the start. If he was faking it, he was a very good actor. Actually, I suspect he was a kind of Michael Corleone character, eager to make his family "legitimate," drawn to a kind of Western normal, but finally sucked into the regime's violence and muck out of sheer love for his father, or at least his honorable sense of loyalty. As I write, he may well be contemplating his speech to the International Criminal Court or, indeed, his last hours on earth. To say that he deserves what he will get is true. It is also to want a prettier world than the one we have.

Motorola's Cellphones: An Elegy

2011-08-16T16:16:00.005-04:00

I am having a strangely sentimental response to Motorola selling its cellphone business to Google--presumably so that Google will be able to create a serious competitor for Apple in mobile devices (like the iPhone and iPad) and acquire Motorola patents for the growing Silicon Valley patent war.

In the early 1990s, Motorola dominated mobile devices like Apple does today. The company pretty much invented mobile technology. Apple, for its part, was becoming a second-rate computer maker, about to lose its franchise in graphical user interfaces to Windows 95. In 1989, when Motorola was on the launching pad, Bill Taylor and I interviewed the company's remarkable young CEO, George Fisher, for Harvard Business Review. Fisher (who had recently taken over from the legendary Bob Galvin) was certain, as we all were, that Motorola stood to grow into cellular's international standard; he was then setting up a venture fund for start-ups.

After I left HBR, I undertook (among other consulting projects for Motorola University) to review the corporation's cellphone penetration strategy into China and write its case history. Motorola was the first to be granted the right to maintain a wholly-owned subsidiary, rather than be forced into a joint venture. By 1997, Motorola was first in every major market in which it competed in China, and maintained the largest presence of any global company operating in the country. Motorola’s rate of growth here had been unprecedented: the company was under $250 million in sales in 1992, and reached $1.5 billion in 1994. It expected to be at $10 billion by the year 2000.

There was talk then of Motorola, which made Apple's microprocessors, buying licenses to Apple's operating system and bringing it to Chinese hardware maker, Panda, which would then conquer the Far East before Microsoft got there. It is easy to imagine that had Motorola maintained its trajectory, it would have been the place where "convergence" between cellular and computers would have happened. (For those interested in a good international business story, you can read the case by clicking here.)

In those years, you walked around the Schaumberg campus, as I did almost weekly, and saw people walking with silver and gold access cards around their necks. The gold ones were for people with more then 15 patents, if I remember correctly. They were accorded great respect. Patents, then, were not developed merely to threaten Silicon Valley start-ups with lawsuits, or to keep competitors from suing you in a strategic game of mutually assured destruction. There was talk of Motorola, then a $30 billion company, becoming $100 billion by 2000. The corporation led American companies in developing quality standards, and was expert in working with schools to improve public education.

MOTOROLA'S TRAGEDY, LIKE all tragedies, was not in doing the wrong thing but doing the right thing too long. In the mid-nineties, Motorola dominated the analog technology that its people-with-the-gold-access-cards had developed and which was, indeed, the standard. When digital cellular technology became feasible, Motorola management delayed implementing it, fearing this would cannibalize its own infrastructural systems, certain it had time to transition, afraid to demoralize its proud engineers, unable to make the transition to a consumer handset company. (I once visited a cellphone product manager who took a new model phone, put it to his nose, and exclaimed: "I love the smell of software in the morning.")

And before Motorola turned around, Nokia and Ericsson had jumped on the new digital technology and stolen its thunder, even in China. The rest is history (that is, the one Motorola didn't hire people to write).

A friend of mine at Duke recently did a rough calculation of how fast one third of Fortune 500 companies were "selected out"--failed or bought out. A generation ago this took about 13 years. Today this takes 4 years. Put that together with software companies buying hardware companies, almost as an afterthought, "for the IP," and lament the speed with which America's great companies can be made and unmade. Oh, and the next time you hear some economist smugly talking about "putting people back to work" by using, well, analogs to the 1930s, think about how economists, of all people, can be right too long.

Protest: NPR's "On Point"

2011-08-15T15:08:00.002-04:00

I mentioned yesterday that NPR's "On Point" would be hosting a discussion on the protests. For those who missed it, here is the program, Etgar Keret and myself.

Odds And Ends About The Protest Movement

2011-08-14T16:19:00.003-04:00

I've gone quiet for the past couple of weeks, working on a longer essay about the Palestinian right of return. For those who missed it, a shorter version of my last post was published as an oped in Haaretz last weekend. I also spoke about the issue with Kojo Nnamdi on his WAMU's talk show, and will be on Tom Ashbrook's "On Point" tomorrow, Monday, at 11 AM. But enough about me.

I called some (young) friends who lead the Solidarity organization in Jerusalem, to get their take on the protests. They have been, they said, in the circles around the (even younger) protest leaders, but can only speculate. They cannot say how deeply the new leaders are committed to connecting the dots between economic disabilities and peace, though the latter clearly do have backgrounds that imply peace movement sentiments: the kibbutz movement, the student union, and so forth.

The new young leaders on Rothschild Boulevard are very willing to associate with, and seek advice from, liberal NGOs. They are also willing to keep a focus on the "tycoons" and the monopolistic pricing of certain consumer goods, because this kind of issue is the easiest to understand. (Go tell people that if, during the 2008 meltdown, Israeli banks were not highly regulated in ways that kept foreign competitors out, the country could have become another Iceland.)

Anyway, the new leadership are clearly not keen to gesture toward the issue of Palestine, though smoking the nargila seems a part of the way tent-dwellers keep debate going into the night. The fear is dividing people along "ideological" lines.

And yet I think it may be impossible to keep the issue of the occupation and, correspondingly, the texture of the state regarding non-Jews under the surface much longer, because at least some Israeli Arabs have been mobilizing, especially in and around Haifa. Once Arabs join the coalition--and how can the leaders not wish the most disadvantaged Israelis to join an economics-driven movement?--the movement such as it is will have to decide how to keep Arabs engaged.

Arabs will not stay with movement that projects a desire to return to the good old days of the Histadrut and collective enterprises, which more or less made clear that Arabs need not apply. They will insist on an end to occupation in the New Israel. There will never again be a democracy-and-peace front in Israel that wins an election that is not a coalition with Arabs.

Moreover, the real divide in Israel's political future may not be ideological in the old sense. It may be generational: the divide between people who are cool (a word that may mark me as from an older generation) and those who are not; the divide between Israelis who have traveled the world, and "friend" people all over it, and those who still think in terms of their immigrant aspirations.

The young movement, in short, seems made of Israelis who expect to be joined to world, as opposed to Jews who see the world as heartless in a way that requires an Israeli haven. This may be enough to move sentiment in the street to preclude a future of international isolation, implied by the world's rallying to Palestine. Stay tuned (or should I say, online).

The Streets Of Tel Aviv: Bursting The Bubble?

2011-07-30T18:59:00.003-04:00

More than a hundred thousand young Israelis, in every major city, took to the streets on Saturday night to protest the prohibitively high cost of living, especially the very high cost of housing. Last week, a tent city went up on Rothschild Boulevard—supposedly, the epicenter of the Tel Aviv bubble—and tens of thousands began marching in sympathy. A sense of grievance is spreading like last year’s fires in the Carmel forests.

Columnists and television pundits pronounce this the biggest domestic crisis the Netanyahu government has faced, or is likely to face. It is coming just as he is trying to rally Israelis en masse to resist a U.N. General Assembly vote to endorse a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders—a vote that will itself produce mass street demonstrations in occupied territory. (Jailed Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti has called Palestinians to the streets. Not to be outdone, President Abbas has too.)

The lingering question—which will determine the complexion of the Israeli protest, and perhaps the fate of Israel’s place in the region—is how much young people in the streets of Tel Aviv believe that the former problem, the difficulties of making ends meet, is a function of the Israeli government’s failure to address the latter problem, that is, failure to make peace with Palestine.

How much do Israel’s economic stresses, long incipient, but gushing up in response to housing costs, result from the kind of government and ideology Netanyahu administers and represents? Can this connection be popularly believed?

The question is particularly important because, for the first time in a long time, young people who would ordinarily vote for the parties of the right—lower middle class scions of Moroccan immigrant families, Russian immigrants, and so forth—are marching with peacenik descendents of old Labor party families.

Something new is forming on Israel’s political landscape, and Israel’s left senses an opportunity. My young friends who started the “Solidarity” movement, protesting the dispossession of Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, have thrown in with the housing protests. Are the goals really capable of being merged?

I BELIEVE THE answer is yes, hell yes, but connecting the dots will not be simple. There is a communitarian tinge to the idea that the government has ignored the problems of the poor, the struggling middle class, the young, but such sentiments can quickly morph into fierce nationalist ideas—you know, that the government, unlike in old pioneering times, is letting down “amcha,” a colloquial way of saying the common people, but which literally means “your people.”

Menachem Begin built the Likud exploiting just such resentments. The suburb-settlements built for Jews in East Jerusalem—Neve Yaacov, Ramot, Gilo—were a sop to the poorest Jews who also happened to be Likud voters. A third of young Israeli children live under the poverty line, but almost half of those are Arabs. If Netanyahu offered to give big housing subsidies exclusively to young Jewish Israelis, say, as a reward for army service, would the new street coalition hold together?

The politics are hard to predict; it is not impossible that the Arab spring has inspired an Israeli summer. Haaretz has taken pains to report the Jews and Arabs are finally demonstrating together.

What seems easier to predict, in any case, is that without peace the economic strains on Israel will grow. Even more important, the wealth Israelis will forgo for not making peace, the opportunity cost, will increasingly be seen as enormous—if a leadership emerges to make the case.

GROWING INEQUALITIES ARE not, in themselves, an indication of economic failure or are even preventable. The Israeli economy, driven as it is by high technology export businesses in software, value added components, advanced medical devices, etc., is bound to have a social profile more like Silicon Valley than a manufacturing city like Wolfsburg, Germany.

Technology start-ups that succeed in global markets make young entrepreneurs very rich very fast and out of all proportion to their neighbors. Two former students of mine, just over the past year, sold the little businesses they started for $20-30 million, I could work at a university for a lifetime and not accumulate their share of these “exits.”

The real question is whether, as the very rich get richer, the incomes of ordinary people are growing and their quality of life is improving. Are Israelis getting the kinds of services we need for the taxes we are paying? Can we afford essential things like higher education, medical care, and, yes, housing, from what we earn? Is there growth in sectors like construction and housing, tourism, food processing, retail—sectors in which people who are not high-tech entrepreneurs can start steady businesses that are not fancy shots at a global jackpot?

This is where planet Netanyahu and the absence of peace bite together. The streets need to learn some hard truths:

* The settlement project was, and is, insufferably expensive. It is commonly understood that upwards of $20 billion have been spent on settlement and infrastructure in occupied territory, not including the costs of securing them, which are continuing. Meanwhile, traffic in Tel Aviv and the coastal plain more generally has graduated from heavy to infuriating. Mass transit in major metropolitan areas is constantly postponed.

* The industries that Palestinians are going to focus on, and draw regional investment to, in the event of peace are precisely the ones Israeli “amcha” are most likely to benefit from—again, tourism, construction, retail, food processing. Israel and Palestine are one business ecosystem. Israel could generate another $8 billion in GDP just from doubling its number of tourists from 3 to 6 million a year. (Florence get 12 million.)

* One sixth of the government budget goes to defense and is creeping up to incorporate new weapons systems. Social services are constantly being trimmed back. The ratio of national debt to GDP is stuck around 80%, not unmanageable as long as interest rates remain low and growth rates remain high, say, 4-5% year; but if Israel were to enter periods of lower growth, as now seems inevitable with global recession and political isolation, it will be impossible to outpace the social tensions we now see, or discontent in the Israeli Arab community.

* Educational infrastructure is in serious decline. High school classrooms average 30-40 students. University budgets have been slashed in recent years, causing the closing of departments, especially in the humanities, and Israeli scholars by the hundreds have sought jobs overseas. Yet the Netanyahu government is focusing on the nationalism of the curricula, indoctrination, not the expansion of the development of critical thinking.

* The health care system is in crisis because government subsidized hospitals and health maintenance organizations cannot pay doctors a living wage. The latter have been on strike for two months. When you figure hours worked, young doctors make less on average than babysitters. Yet Israeli medical training is world-class; medical tourism, especially from neighboring Arab countries and the Gulf, could rejuvenate the Israeli medical profession overnight.

* Participation in the Israeli workforce is among the lowest of OECD countries, perhaps 56%, as compared with 68% in Japan. This is largely because of the long-standing policy of the Israeli right to keep ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students on the dole.

* A major impediment to reducing the cost of land is the Israel Land Authority, a throw-back to the old Zionist Jewish National Fund (whose lands are about a fifth of the ILA’s holdings). The ILA still controls roughly 90 percent of Israel’s land, which it manages, by mandate, for “the Jewish people.” Privatization and auctioning of land is inevitable if the cost of housing is to be brought down. But this would mean that Arab citizens would be able to gain much more land for development, anathema to the Israeli right.

* Ginning up the cost of flats themselves, especially in Tel Aviv’s and Jerusalem’s core, are absentee owners: wealthy Diaspora Jews who—excited by the Israeli right’s pandering, and encouraged to think of Israel as a kind of metaphysical theme park—drive out younger Israeli buyers and renters.

* Strong recent evidence suggests that all of these things together, added to the incessant war tension, have so degraded the quality of life in Israel that as many as a million Israeli Jews live abroad today, mainly in the U.S. Many of these people are highly educated and could be founding companies at home.

* Last, not at all least, is Netanyahu’s free-wheeling approach to market regulation—so much like that of American Republicans, and masked by ultra-nationalist distractions—which has led to the enormous concentration of ownership in Israel, The wealthiest 16 families own 20 percent of the top 500 companies: Ofer, Dankner, Arison, Tshuva. Some family-based conglomerates have been taking super-profits from, in effect, monopolies in banking, telecom, food retailing, media, and so forth. But they are also over-leveraged, and highly invested in real estate. Burst the housing bubble—by releasing a great deal more ILA land, for example—and some will be under water. The impact on Israel could be something like the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the U.S.

Ideally, the demonstrators in the streets would know all these things. I suspect they know some of them and sense that, in any case, Netanyahu is not to be trusted.

One thing is certain: the idea that the young of Tel Aviv live in a bubble is finally, clearly nonsense. They have always been the Israelis with globalist commercial experiences and cosmopolitan instincts, a sense of how Israel fits into world. It is Netanyahu and the right, settlers and the orthodox and Russian Putinists, who have lived in a bubble. The streets of Tel Aviv may burst it before the streets of Ramallah plan to.

September: Why Israelis Are Anxious

2011-07-20T12:13:00.000-04:00

Al Arabiya, the Dubai-based news network, asked me to reflect on Israeli responses to the PA's decision to go to the UN. Here is my contribution; readers of this blog will recognize some formulations.

This week, the Fatah leadership of the Palestinian Authority announced a full-bore diplomatic effort to gain UN membership for a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders with its capital in Jerusalem. President Mahmud Abbas is touring Europe and Turkey. Emissaries will be traveling to China, India and other rising powers. Saeb Erekat, Abbas’s indefatigable chief negotiator, called the campaign for statehood “massive.”

Many observers, including my own Palestinian friends in and around Jerusalem, express doubts about this campaign—not out of fear of jeopardizing the flow of American aid, the fear Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad openly voices—but rather because they cannot see the point of taking on so much to elicit what will likely prove an empty gesture. Israel, they say, will still control Areas B and C, or nearly 70 percent of what the world recognizes as Palestinian land, assuming the green line as the basis for a border. The settlements will not stop; calling the hemmed-in Palestinian Authority a “state” does not change any facts on the ground. (You might as well call it the Palestinian “empire,” one friend quipped grimly.) Besides, UN membership depends on a resolution of the Security Council, and the Obama administration seems likely to veto this, at least until after the US presidential election. What can possibly be gained from Abbas’s effort, other than inflated expectations which, when deflated, could turn an already tense situation more generally violent?

It is hard not to share the skepticism, especially a week after the Knesset passed the Netanyahu government’s most provocative law, in effect, erasing the border between Israel and “Judea and Samaria,” criminalizing Israelis who advocate for economic boycotts, including even boycott of settlements. And yet, Israeli commentators—especially those in the business and army intelligence élite—seem far more exercised about “September” (the nick-name they’ve given Abbas’s push for statehood in the UN) than you’d expect given so much Palestinian skepticism and shows of force by pro-settler politicians.

Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan is warning that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s effort to thwart Palestinian statehood will backfire. Yaacov Perry, the former CEO of cell phone giant Cellcom, along with business mogul Idan Ofer and others, have offered a peace plan much like the one then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered Abbas in 2008. One can almost detect (forgive me) a paradigm shift among Israelis who constitute the “center”: people not cloistered in settlements or Jerusalem houses of religious study; young people who perhaps cannot imagine Israel without the settlement of Ariel, but also cannot imagine European basketball without Maccabi Tel Aviv; people who can be the difference between a 65-seat majority for the parties of Greater Israel or a 65-seat majority for the parties of Global Israel.

“September” means a kind of layered anxiety, the fear of a global deadline. And underlying the fear are implicit assumptions:

The Palestinian middle class is coming into its own. After 1967, ordinary Israelis vaguely assumed that Israeli business and banking would dominate in the territories, while Arabs—if they could be induced to abandon insurgency—would be farmers, merchants, laborers, perhaps even quaint figures on the landscape where tour buses stopped. For the past decade, it has become clear to their Israeli counterparts that Palestinian entrepreneurs, professionals, and bankers expect, and deserve, a different fate. They have not left for Jordan and the Gulf, but are organizing a mini-state in Ramallah, one far more attractive to ordinary Palestinians than Hamas’s mini-mini-state in Gaza. The spine of this state is not simply Fayyad’s American-trained police, which provides the rule of law (while offending Palestinian liberals with its excesses). It is an economy that shows promise, even if it still relies heavily on international donors.

The Palestinian economy, while growing, is in danger. Israeli élites are finally seeing that managing the territories for the sake of the settlers thwarts what Palestinian élites are trying to develop in the womb of the Occupation. Netanyahu’s offer of “economic peace” is just a smokescreen. Palestinian commerce is stifled by barriers to internal movement, lack of access to Jerusalem, global supply-chains constantly disrupted for so-called security reasons, and stringent limits on entry and exit of Palestinian managers, scholars, and investors. The World Bank reports: “Ultimately, sustainable economic growth...will not rebound significantly while Israeli restrictions on access to natural resources and markets remain in place…”

Thwarted development will bring resistance. Palestinians, in this context, will struggle for political independence not just to oppose Zionism, or throw-off occupation forces, but out of a positive need to win control of immigration and keep their economic development going, indeed, much like Zionist pioneers struggled against Britain in the 1940s. Nor do Israelis in the center see settlers as culture heroes they way they did in the 1970s. Rather, they admire globalist Israeli entrepreneurs like Iscar’s Step Wertheimer. Conspicuous Palestinian entrepreneurs—Munib Al Masri springs to mind—speak their language.

Backed by world opinion, Palestinian action will resemble the Arab Spring. Israelis are used to fighting violent insurgency and appealing to world opinion. What if there is no violence and no sympathy? An acquaintance of mine attended a dinner with Defense Minister Ehud Barak recently, who was asked what he would do if tens of thousands of non-violent Palestinian demonstrators began marching toward Jerusalem. Barak responded—sincerely, my friend tells me—that he really didn’t know. Israelis do know the Arab Spring has produced a government in Egypt that cannot bolt down popular opinion as in the past. No sane Israeli thinks the actions of soldiers on the Golan last June, opening fire on Palestinian demonstrators approaching their lines, would be morally or politically acceptable, not even in Israel; another operation like Cast Lead, Israel’s incursion into Gaza, seems almost unimaginable, particularly since Hamas has implicitly allowed Abbas to lead into September.

Israel’s own economy is at stake. A vote in the UN General Assembly cannot recognize Palestine or offer it membership. But it can become the occasion for member states to recognize Palestine—and as many as 130, by current count, will do so. This matters because, economically, countries other than the US matter. The Israeli business world is especially tied to Europe. The government’s level of debt to GDP is comparatively high. To continue growing fast—as it must to pay for defense, and outpace its looming social tensions—Israel’s economy relies on technology companies that build relationships with—that is, build solutions, process technologies, and components for—other global businesses, particularly European corporations.

So “September” means a change in the rules: influential Israelis know it, ordinary Israelis finally sense it. For years, Palestine seemed an internal problem; the IDF handled insurgents, Mubarak handled the region, and Washington handled the world. No more. When many countries in the Euro zone, Latin America, and the Far East recognize Palestine and the 1967 border, many will claim that Israel is in breach of international law. The danger will not simply be, say, a Norwegian mayor bringing charges against some traveling IDF officer in the International Criminal Court. It will be a German supervisory board telling the chairman of a German company that working with an Israeli supplier is not worth the hassle. Any Israeli investor will tell you that venture capital for start-ups is already much harder to come by than it was a couple of years ago.

Ironically, the same global forces that have made Israel an economic success make its occupation of Palestine more fraught. It has made an independent Palestine plausible, and interdependence with Israel attractive. For Israel’s part, it can’t have an economy like Singapore and a nationalities crisis like Serbia. Israelis are feeling the danger of September—of the changing rules—even if Palestinians are not so sure.

What was the Knesset’s action against advocates of boycott last week if not a tribute to a rising, general fear of the economic isolation that Palestinian diplomacy can help bring about? The point is, this fear is justified.

Jerusalem March: Unprecedented

2011-07-15T16:25:00.002-04:00

About a year and a half ago, I suggested that the young activists organizing protest in Sheikh Jarrah (now calling themselves "Solidarity") had the potential to refashion the landscape of Israel's peace movement. Today's march in Jerusalem, organized by those same young leaders--the first protest in 44 years in which Israelis and East Jerusalem Arabs marched side-by-side to call for two states and a shared capital--is another turning point.

Do not be misled by the numbers. The protest in Sheikh Jarrah started with a few dozen. It grew into a weekly vigil of several hundred that is monitored around the world. Today's march, of perhaps 3000, is just the beginning, too. Once Jerusalem Arabs see they can march peacefully, that is, along with Israeli leaders who coordinate in advance with the courts and police, they will come out in ever greater numbers. And when they get mobilized, the much larger peace movement in Tel Aviv will get mobilized.

The leaders of Solidarity, Assaf Sharon, Avner Inbar, Sarah Benninga, and Hillel Ben-Sasson, just sent the following report around to their supporters. I urge you to go to their website and offer what help you can:

The Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity Movement's march for Palestinian independence earlier today was a tremendous success. More than 3,000 Israelis and Palestinians marched from Jaffa Gate to Sheikh Jarrah in a historic and inspiring cooperation between the Solidarity movement and the popular committees of East Jerusalem. We held signs quoting Nelson Mandela's saying that "only free people can negotiate" and drove home the message of the nonviolent struggle for freedom and equality.

Even before it set out the march stirred a debate long absent from the Israeli political and ideological conversation. This is a debate about generational transition, political vision and the nature of the struggle for the future and soul of our region...[T]his morning the Haaretz editorial endorsed the march.

The picture arising from this discussion is becoming quite clear – a fundamental change is taking place in the Israeli left. A new generation with a new political language is growing on the scorched earth of what used to be the Israeli peace camp. This new generation aspires not only to end the occupation but at the same time for civil equality to all inhabitants of the land. It grows from local grassroots organizing but keeps it eyes on the goal of a transformative change in the Israeli political culture...

[W]e encourage you to follow this discussion and add your voice to it. Israel's actions in the last weeks, from the reactions to the 'flytilla' to the boycott law, prove that these are no ordinary times. We cannot continue supporting a peace process that has long been dead. The voices of the thousands of Israelis and Palestinians who marched today in Jerusalem should lead the way towards politcal freedom and civil equality.

Age Of Wonders

2011-07-13T09:49:00.002-04:00

There is little I can add to Bradley Burston's passionate column on the anti-boycott law, which passed the Knesset this week, and will eventually go to the Supreme Court for overturning. What I can add is my deep sense of sorrow, which Brad--a Berkeley radical who, like myself, gravitated to Israel in the Sixties for the progressive and cultural innovations of Labor Zionism--shares. We thought that we were coming to a place where the new Jew was being born; and the unity of Jerusalem and the emancipation of Soviet Jews would yield an age of wonders. We did not figure on Avigdor Lieberman.

Here is the nub of Burston's column on the law:

1. The measure curbs political freedom of expression in Israel in a number of ways, setting potentially significant – and dangerous – precedents. It allows any individual to, in effect, become a private law enforcement agency, empowered to bring lawsuits against anyone or any group the plaintiff accuses of having taken part in or even simply supported any action the plaintiff construes as a boycott against Israel, against the settlements, or even any individual Israeli, for any reason.

2. The measure erases the legal differentiation between settlements and Israel proper, regarding targeted boycotts against goods from the settlements as actions harmful to the state of Israel itself.

3. The Knesset's apolitical Legal Advisor Eyal Yinon has ruled that the law's broad definition of "boycotting the state of Israel", coupled with its "civil wrongdoing" or anyone-can-sue clause, may compromise freedom of expression where it comes to public debate over the fate of the West Bank. Prior to the Monday vote, Yinon stated that the law could be brought to bear against targeted boycotts "whose goal is to influence the political debate in connection with the future of Judea and Samaria, a discussion which has been at the heart of political debate in Israel for more than 40 years now."

4. The effect of the law could be crippling to the efforts of all organizations and many individuals working for Israeli-Palestinian peace and enhanced freedoms and human rights within Israel and the territories. The rabid anti-NGO campaigns of Im Tirtzu and other groups could escalate into a full-bore "lawfare" offensive, hauling them repeatedly into court and costing them prohibitive legal fees.

The UN--A Coda

2011-07-12T10:06:00.006-04:00

Two friends of the blog wrote me with, in effect, the same addition to Alvaro de Soto's note from yesterday. The first is from renowned civil rights attorney Kathleen Peratis:

In the General Assembly, if a majority of those voting vote yes on recognition of Palestinian statehood, then the Secretary General has no choice but to refer Palestine to join all treaty bodies that are open to "all states," which is, according to Larry Johnson, former UN undersecretary for legal affairs, most of them. Thus, Palestine would sign onto the Law of the Sea, the ICC, and many other bodies. There are treaties and UN bodies that are only open to states that are approved by the Security Council, such as the International Court of Justice (different from the ICC), and, as to those, Palestine will not become a member state. So a General Assembly majority vote, even without the Security Council, is not nothing.

The second is from Ramallah political activist and business consultant Sam Bahour:

De Soto leaves out another option, which is the upgrading of the current status of the PLO/Palestine observer status to be accepted in UN agencies as having the rights of a member state, thus opening the ICC for us to apply cases to directly (and without all the drama in the big hall).

In other words--aside from occasioning the application of bilateral trade (or other economic) sanctions by member states--upgrading the UN status of Palestine to the point where Palestinians can bring charges against Israelis in the International Criminal Court is no small matter. Leaving aside the workings of the occupation itself, international law regards settlements as clear violations of the Geneva Conventions, to which Israel and most member states are signatories.

And a coda from Alvaro de Soto, following the Quartet's inability to reach a joint statement today:

Bernie, Ramallah shows its cards:

President Mahmoud Abbas vowed on Tuesday to take the Palestinian bid for statehood to the UN after the diplomatic Quartet failed to reach a breakthrough to revive peace talks. We will go to the United Nations and we hope the United States will not use its veto, but that we will go with its agreement," the Palestinian leader told reporters after a meeting with Greek President Karolos Papoulias. "The fact that there is no statement from the Quartet is a negative indication that there is deep division between them," Abbas added.

Earlier, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told AFP that "there is no other option but to support the Palestinian plan to go to the United Nations to seek full membership for the state of Palestine on the 1967 borders."

What The UN Vote Means--And Does Not

2011-07-11T13:05:00.006-04:00

My friend Alvaro de Soto, the former Special Ambassador of the United Nations's Secretary-General to the Middle East peace process, is a legend in the UN, from which he is now retired. Peruvian by birth, an aide to Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, Alvaro was an indispensable mediator in talks that resolved the bloody crisis in El Salvador during the early 1990s, and was later called in to help manage crises in Myanmar, Cyprus and Northwest Africa. He resigned his Middle East post in May 2007, frustrated by the inaction of the Bush Administration; and his End of Mission Report, leaked to The Guardian, was famously frank and incisive, sparing neither the Israeli government nor Palestinian rivalries. He now teaches international relations in Paris. You can hear him speak about his mission here.

Alvaro wrote me yesterday about the impending UN vote on Palestine, frustrated by the simplifications he reads in the media, laying out what actions the UN can and cannot take. With his permission, I reprint his email in full:

The annual September gathering at the UN is being portrayed as a showdown between Israel and Palestinian aspirations for statehood. I haven't seen a draft of the much touted Palestinian initiative which will, by some accounts, be Israel’s undoing. Without this, it is hard to tell what the Palestinians--or at least those headquartered in Ramallah--are seeking. David Shulman posits the prospect of a US Security Council veto. Others speak of the Palestinians obtaining between 120 and 150 votes--which, of course, would be in the General Assembly.

These are two quite different approaches. If the idea is to bring the Palestinians up to par with Israel by pushing forward a mirror image of the resolution that led to the creation of Israel, it should be a General Assembly resolution as was the case in 1947. But as a matter of international law, neither the UN nor any other international organization can give legal validity to the creation of a state. The UN is not in the recognition business; only states can recognise states.

Contrary to widespread belief, (except in a metaphorical sense) the UN did not create Israel; rather, Israelis used the approval by the UN General Assembly in resolution 181 of the partition plan as the basis for proclaiming the creation of Israel, which was then recognised by states. In 181 the General Assembly approved the partition plan (stage 1), within hours Israel proclaimed its independence (stage 2) and this was followed by recognitions (stage 3), including quickly those of the US and the then USSR. Israel's application for membership in the UN was subsequent to these separate and discrete stages. Of course at the time it made its proclamation Israelis had reason to believe that they would receive recogniton from these important players.

The Palestinians would likely get widespread recognitions--arguably it already has a large number and the PLO is represented by ‘ambassadors’ in some of them, but they do not have, to my knowledge, advance certainty that if they proclaim a state they will receive the recognition of key players that can make the difference between UN membership and continued second-tier status--certainly the US is in doubt. Thus while they may improve their standing with a view to the continuing struggle to break free of Israeli occupation, they seem destined to fall short of what Israel achieved in 1947.

If the Palestinians were to pursue UN membership, a different procedure would apply. Ultimately UN membership is granted by the General Assembly if 2/3 of the members present and voting so decide, but the opportunity to take such a decisión only arises if the Security Council puts its positive stamp on a membership application. There is no bypass mechanism, no uniting-for peace procedure in case of Council deadlock: The drill is that a state aspiring to membership writes to the Secretary-General signifying its desire to be accepted. The Secretariat’s Office of Legal Affairs prepares a report on whether the basic formal legal requirements are met--including, presumably, whether the applicant actually constitutes a state. This report goes to the Security Council which makes a political assessment regarding whether the applicant meets the substantive requirements spelled out in the UN Charter--whether it is peace-loving and otherwise committed to the obligations arising from UN membership under the Charter, including its financial obligations, and whether the Council judges that it has the capacity to meet those obligations. The Council votes, with the usual requirements of 9 votes in favour and no permanent members voting against. If it is approved it goes to the General Assembly. If it is not, there will be no General Assembly vote.

Thus until there is clarity regarding what Ramallah wants, discussion of the import of a UN decision on the subject is speculative. Could they be seeking, for example, some sort of general statement by which the bulk of the international community expresses the view that, all efforts to date having failed, they will henceforth consider that unless the parties conclude otherwise, they will not accept that Israel has any rights beyond the 4 June 1967 lines?

On the face of it that should garner a robust majority: I don't know of any state which today recognizes that Israel has any such rights. In fact, the UN is repeatedly on record as regarding the occupation--of territory captured starting on 5 June 1967--as illegal. The principle of inadmissibility of acquisition of territory by war is enshrined in Security Council resolution 242. So it is not clear whether anything new would be achieved nor what effect it would have. Yet Israel seems to be letting out all the stops in its effort to stymie the as yet unspecified initiative. Smoking out the reason for such strong opposition, which absent a draft remains a mystery, may be sufficient grounds for such an otherwise nugatory initiative.

It has been said that one of the reasons that have led Ramallah to pursue unification or reconciliation with Hamas is that without it its case at the UN come September will be weakened. Hamas, however, has been silent at best on the Palestinian démarche, originally a Salam Fayyad initiative. Thus the question of what the Palestinians are pursuing is not a matter of detail. It is the crux of the matter.

Bottom line: What the UN vote would occasion is not the creation of a state, but the various decisions of existing states to recognize Palestine and possibly sanction Israel, in bilateral trade, say, for violating international law. The real question is, what countries significant to Israel would recognize Palestine, and what would they be prepared to do to back up recognition with economic action? Indeed, what do Palestinian leaders really want?

July 15: Two States, One March

2011-07-09T07:05:00.000-04:00

A drawing on the Separation Wall

Something unprecedented, but long overdue, is planned for July 15 in Jerusalem. What isn't new is Solidarity and other peace organizations marching in the center of the city for Palestinian independence. What is new is overt cooperation with East Jerusalem Palestinians, who this time will be marching alongside Israelis. It is hard to know how the police, or settler organizations, will react.

The biggest hedge against violence is numbers, and peace activists in Jerusalem itself are greatly outnumbered by rightists. The more people (especially from Tel Aviv and Israeli Arab cities) show up, the more impressive and peaceful the march is likely to be. It is a little creepy, I know, to urge others to demonstrate when you are thousands of miles away. All I can say is that, were Sidra and I in Jerusalem this summer, nothing could keep us away.

Friend of this blog, David Shulman, writes about the march here. The Facebook page is here. David writes in part:

It was thus not by chance that on June 2—Jerusalem day, and the forty-fourth anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem in the Six Day War—the municipality sponsored and largely financed a mass march in favor of further Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem (and, indeed, throughout the occupied West Bank). With police protection provided by the state, tens of thousands of marchers followed Road Number One south and west into Sheikh Jarrah and then into the Old City. The very idea of dividing the city is anathema to those who organized and took part in the march—although most know very well that there is no hope whatever of achieving any settlement with the Palestinians without such a division. The march was clearly meant as a statement of the right-wing goal of asserting and cementing Israeli sovereignty over the entire city by pursuing the settlement project in Palestinian neighborhoods. As it happens, the marchers also called out aggressive and overtly threatening messages aimed at the Palestinian population and at Israelis who support Palestinian independence that should not be minimized or overlooked.

Most of the marchers were young people, and probably a majority of them were settlers. (The police estimate of the turnout was 25,000, almost certainly on the low side; others estimated over 40,000.) For much of the way, this huge crowd was chanting slogans that, I think it’s fair to say, Israelis have never heard at such a pitch—slogans such as “Butcher the Arabs” (itbach al-‘arab) and “Death to Leftists” and “The Land of Israel for the People of Israel” and “This is the Song of Revenge” and “Burn their Villages” and “Muhammad is Dead” (the latter with particular emphasis outside the mosque in Sheikh Jarrah and then again as the march entered the Muslim Quarter of the Old City). It’s one thing to hear such things occasionally from isolated pockets of extremists, or from settlers in the field in the South Hebron hills, quite another to hear them from the throats of tens of thousands of marchers whipping themselves into an ecstasy of hatred. The slogans call up rather specific memories: I couldn’t help wondering how many of the marchers were grandchildren of Jews who went through such moments—as targets of virulent hate—in Europe. Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah and the Muslim Quarter of the Old City watched in horror, but there were no attempts to meet the hatred with violence...

So here you have one vision of the future of Jerusalem—and, sadly, it looks very much as if the current wave of racist hysteria is only gaining strength in Israel. Moreover, as is usually the case with modern nationalism, the political center and the more moderate right show no signs of attempting to hold back the tide. Indeed, a number of members of the government, which is in any case dominated by settler parties, regularly contribute to the inflammatory rhetoric. What’s left of the old Israeli left is fragmented, diminished, and politically ineffectual.

And yet the peace camp is not dead. A joint Israeli-Palestinian initiative is planning a counter-march—under the banner “Marching for Independence”—on July 15 of possibly historic significance. The numbers will be much smaller—maybe 2,000 or so, if the organizers are lucky—but the meaning of the event will certainly transcend the bare numerical count. Something quite new is under way in Palestine. September is getting closer, and with it the possible proclamation of the Palestinian state at the U.N. General Assembly in New York. Even if the United States casts its veto in the Security Council against Palestinian independence— a paradoxical move, given the official and long-standing American support for a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders— the reality on the ground may begin to change.

Useful Lives

2011-06-30T11:55:00.001-04:00

Anyone who's read The Hebrew Republic, or who has seen my lecture on the book, will remember my dear friends Chanan and Esther Shiloh from Kfar Yehoshua, the couple with whom I stayed when I was a young volunteer in 1967, and whose sensibilities in many ways inspired my writing all these years. I just dropped off my car with them, as I do every summer, when Sidra and I leave for New Hampshire, as we will tonight; the ostensible reason is to keep the car under a secure roof; the actual reason is the chance to be reminded why I came here in the first place.

Chanan and Esther are the soul of the Zionist revolution: curious about how things work, from the smallest weld to the arguable claims for God; full of loving humor and patriotic pride (and shame); certain of the value of their Hebrew lives, which their parents invented. And even at age 78, they are still opening to the future. The roof under which my car will be locked now produces 50 kilowatts of power owing to the solar panels Chanan just helped assemble. The investment of over a million shekels will break even in about ten years, and Chanan isn't at all sure he will live to see this. But he is already concerned about the problems of recycling the panels when their useful life is over. Then again, what other kind of life is there, even if you can't know how things will turn out? Here is a song they love, about a dove that flies high above the hills of Gilboa, on a very long journey.

Greece, Economists, And The Value Of The Euro

2011-06-23T06:31:00.024-04:00

Is the euro bad for Greece? "I’ve never seen Europe in such dire straits," Roger Cohen writes in yesterday's Times. "Greece is full of the aganaktismenoi, or the outraged, who resent the sharp cuts and sales of state industries made necessary because there is no drachma to devalue in order to regain competitiveness. Like protesters in Spain, they feel the poor and unemployed are paying for the errors of politicians, the evasions of the rich, and the whole globalized system that rewards the tech-savvy initiated while punishing those left behind."

Hmm. You devalue, you become more competitive. The ideal of European unity cannot trump this macroeconomic axiom, one that economists as different as Paul Krugman and Martin Feldstein take for granted and increasingly resentful Greeks have a right to embrace. Once--so the argument goes--countries in Greece's position would not have been forced to deflate, radically cut budgets (hence, services) or engender widespread anger from the poor and unemployed. They could have cheapened their currency and counted on cheaper exports to jump-start growth. The euro, however, is a kind of hammerlock rich European countries like Germany now have on them, a kind of IMF scold sitting on their shoulder, and advantaging--wait for it!--German exports.

"Many Greeks and Spaniards feel Europe is no more than a scam," Cohen reports without quite endorsing the "feeling" but without quite contradicting it either. "Their anger is understandable...Open borders are beginning to close again. Turkey is turning its back on the Union. Germany has checked out from its postwar European idealism." Quel dommage. You'd think the euro were a seductive credit card offer that had needed Elizabeth Warren to explain the fine print. Greece, Cohen concludes, should simply reconcile itself to a default (well, an "orderly default") and exit the euro. Presumably, Portugal and Spain should follow suit.

THE ECONOMIC AXIOM Cohen rehearses here is just quaint. What exactly would Greece be exporting more cheaply with devalued drachmas? Yes, olive oil and hotel rooms would be cheaper? But who really wants the things Greeks make, including Greeks? Almost 80% of its economy is "services." Agriculture is 4% of its GDP and over 12% of its population. By comparison, 2.5% of Israel's economy is agriculture, and 2% of the population works in it.

To think that Greece would be able to devalue itself out of crisis assumes a world of 1950, not 2010; a world in which "factories" made most of what people needed--toothpaste, tires, pencils, toasters; things everybody could learn to make with a few imported recipes and blueprints--and local factories could get a leg-up on imported versions of stuff if labor costs could be driven down relative to more developed countries; a world in which growth happens because of "import substitution." Does any seasoned person think this is the world we still live in?

Today, production is in a world ecosystem whose drivers are scientific, a changing complex of know-how, advanced information technologies, networks and supply-chains, global branding, financial instruments--indeed, "the whole globalized system that rewards the tech-savvy initiated while punishing those left behind." If Greece has a hope of developing, it is by getting Volkswagen, Phillips, Bayer, Thomson, ABB, GE Capital, Samsung--and the INSEAD business school--to expand hubs in Athens, invest in local enterprises that might be drawn into their supply chains, inject their DNA into Greek commercial life. The path to development, in other words, is not cheap labor in the hinterland, but intellectual capital from the metropole. Israel in the 1980s and 90s was paradigmatic.

And the beauty of the euro zone for Greece--such was the commercial principle along with the political ideal--was the stability and predictability it aimed to give to metropolitan investors, much like the stability Israel finally achieved when it pegged its currency to the dollar, and held firm, after a decade of reckless devaluations. If you were Volkswagen, thinking about setting up an advanced car seat plant in Patras--with all the forward planning and investments in training and robotics this requires--would you want to have to deal with the added risks associated with periodic devaluations? How would you negotiate wage contracts, when imported goods (i.e., your workers' most favored goods) suddenly rise in price, kicking off new rounds of inflation, fueling rushes into real estate, hence, new bubbles?

Greece's inflation rate is now 4.5%. What would it be with constantly devaluing drachmas? How would foreign investors (like, notionally, Volkswagen) like to see all of its local assets lose 20% of their value overnight, or be constantly negotiating contracts according to a cost-of-living index? The point is, no sane business manager would like this environment much at all. It would be easier for Volkswagen to put the plant in Hungary. And the suffering Greeks would feel owing to ongoing devaluation would be at least what they feel with deflation--worse, since they'd be struggling also with an inflationary spiral.

A EUROPE UNITED by the euro is not, as Cohen puts it (channeling its rashest critics), "a borderless order conceived by technocrats, sustained over a heady period by low interest rates, appreciated by the moneyed classes who made more money..." It is a solid conception about how European businesses needed--as then-Volkswagen CEO Carl Hahn put it to me in 1990--a "European platform for global competition." The fact that Greece cooked its books does not degrade this vision. It raises the question of how economies like Greece can be slowly improved and integrated, over a generation, while structures and regulations are put in place so that--national sovereignty be damned--books cooking cannot go on.

Canada, in a way, has been a model here. To sustain its federation, along with the Canadian dollar, Ottawa's "technocrats" have had to transfer wealth, year-in, year-out, from southern Ontario and oil-rich Alberta to Quebec and the Maritimes. Toronto bankers and Western oil companies like to gripe about this, the way, no doubt, German bankers and industrialists do, if only with their shrinks. It is comforting to think you can just throw those reckless, lying, hot-blooded Greeks out of the euro in way that would not send waves of insolvency, frozen lending, recrimination, and panic through global financial markets, much like the collapse of Lehman Brothers did. It is comforting to think that Greece would then be better off, more "competitive," though it would still be mired in debt and begging for loans.

Alas, this is wishful thinking all around. Richer European countries will have to be transferring wealth, along with critical know-how, to poorer countries for a generation. Germans will live well enough anyway, like middle-class Chinese who, by buying American debt at near zero interest, keep subsidizing American trips to Walmart where they buy guess what. In fact--and here the old macroeconomic axiom is useful--the downward drag on the value of the euro occasioned by continuing subsidies to Greece (Portugal, etc.) will keep German (French, etc.) exports a good deal cheaper than they would otherwise be. If Germany were still on the Deutsche Mark, and enjoying years of trade surpluses, what American would now be able afford a Jetta made in Wolfsburg? Would an Indian be able to afford a Siemens CAT-scan?

I DON'T MEAN to imply something too comforting here myself. The Greek crisis has given every reasonable person occasion to think about the shape of the world we are building, and Cohen is right to wonder whether ordinary citizens, struggling with reverses and the fears if being left-behind, can take it all in. "Strikes and violent protest are one measure of a Europe that now leaves many citizens unmoved by the great achievements of European integration," he writes. Fair enough. But what--armed with obsolete economic theories valorizing vaguely national and "working class" grievances--will move them?

The crisis should be a time when our best liberal commentators, reflecting on the mistakes and dissembling of the Greek government, redouble efforts to build institutions of pan-European governance and regulation, that is, make the pan-European currency more viable and stable. This, not default, is just what EU visionaries like Jacques Attali called for this earlier week.

Which brings me to a final word about the uncharacteristic glibness of Cohen's column. I can't help imagining the reverence with which, say, Joseph Conrad would have held the European Union, or wonder what he would have made of writers who, growing complacent about its dull workings, fail to see the fragility of civilized liberalism. The EU's legal, commercial and physical structures are breakwaters against relentless national tides. The euro in this sense may be the greatest political achievement of our lives. We can lose it.

Right Too Soon, Again

2011-06-19T05:22:00.002-04:00

In the fall of 1970, a newly-minted graduate student at the University of Toronto, I was hired by the Canadian Zionist Federation to be its representative on campus. My first (actually, pretty much my only) achievement in that position was to petition the local Hillel and other campus organisations to keep Uri Avnery from speaking. The word had come down from Israel's Foreign Ministry that Avnery was a danger to Israel's good name--advocating such extremist things as a Palestinian state, maintaining contacts with writers and notables allegedly connected to the PLO--and the Canadian members of the Zionintern did what we had to do.

The first time I met Avnery in person was in the Knesset cafeteria in the fall of 1978, when Begin's government returned from Camp David with a provisional deal in hand. I was now an aspiring journalist, and he was sitting at a raucous table with then-Defense Minister Ezer Weizman, who was flanked by Avnery on one side, and the late peace activist Abie Natan on the other. I stood close by, hoping nobody would ask who I was, and listened for half an hour to what conversation sounded like when lions lay down with lambs. I also felt a little twinge of shame. (If you slid over it in the first paragraph, read Avnery's biography now, and see why my shame was warranted.)

I have had occasion to laugh with Avnery about both events, and the game of snakes and ladders peace advocates have been playing over the years, but nobody is feeling amused these days. His latest polemic could have been written in 1970, and a version of it probably was. Anybody familiar with this blog would immediately understand my sympathy for its arguments. But, in a way, Avnery's tone is even more revealing. It is one thing to be right too soon. It is another to be proven right, again and again, and wake up like the hero of "Groundhog Day" having to start as if from scratch, but with an even more stubborn cast of characters. Avnery was born in 1923 and time is running out for him. Then again, I'm not sure it is not running out for those of us born in 1949.

By Uri Avnery

I AM fed up with all this nonsense about recognizing Israel as the “Jewish State." It is based on a collection of hollow phrases and vague definitions, devoid of any real content. It serves many different purposes, almost all of them malign. Binyamin Netanyahu uses it as a trick to obstruct the establishment of the Palestinian state. This week he declared that the conflict just has no solution. Why? Because the Palestinians do not agree to recognize etc. etc.

Four rightist Members of the Knesset have just submitted a bill empowering the government to refuse to register new NGOs and to dissolve existing ones if they “deny the Jewish character of the state." This new bill is only one of a series designed to curtail the civil rights of Arab citizens, as well as those of leftists. If the late Dr. Samuel Johnson were living in present-day Israel, he would phrase his famous dictum about patriotism differently: “Recognition of the Jewish Character of the state is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

IN ISRAELI parlance, denying the “Jewish Character” of the state is tantamount to the worst of all political felonies: to claim that Israel is a “State of all its Citizens.” To a foreigner, this may sound a bit weird. In a democracy, the state clearly belongs to all its citizens. Mention this in the United States, and you are stating the obvious. Mention this in Israel, and you are treading dangerously close to treason. (So much for our much-vaunted “common” values.”)

As a matter of fact, Israel is indeed a state of all its citizens. All adult Israeli citizens – and only they – have the right to vote for the Knesset. The Knesset appoints the government and determines the laws. It has enacted many laws declaring that Israel is a “Jewish and democratic state.” In ten or in a hundred years, the Knesset could hoist the flag of Catholicism, Buddhism or Islam. In a democracy, it is the citizens who are sovereign, not a verbal formula.

WHAT FORMULA? - one may well ask. The courts favor the words “Jewish and democratic state.” But that is far from being the only definition around. The most widely used is just “Jewish State.” But that is not enough for Netanyahu and Co., who speak about “the nation-state of the Jewish people,” which has a nice 19th century ring. The “state of the Jewish people” is also quite popular.

The one thing that all these brand-names have in common is that they are perfectly imprecise. What does “Jewish” mean? A nationality, a religion, a tribe? Who are the “Jewish people”? Or, even more vague, the “Jewish nation”? Does this include the Congressmen who enact the laws of the United States? Or the cohorts of Jews who are in charge of US Middle East policy? Which country does the Jewish ambassador of the UK in Tel Aviv represent?

The courts have been wrestling with the question: where is the border between “Jewish” and “democratic”? What does “democratic” mean in this context? Can a “Jewish” state really be “democratic”, or, for that matter, can a “democratic” state really be “Jewish”? All the answers given by learned judges and renowned professors are contrived, or, as we say in Hebrew, they “stand on chickens’ legs.”

Read on (and on)...

Just The Facts

2011-06-16T06:13:00.004-04:00

Ari Shavit is back to the subject of Iran this morning:

First fact: Neither the West nor Israel can accept a nuclear Iran. A nuclear Iran would make the Middle East nuclear, threaten Western sources of energy, paralyze Israel with fear, cause Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt to go nuclear and the world order to collapse. A nuclear Iran would make our lives hell.

Second fact: Neither the West nor Israel has to act militarily at present against Iranian nuclearization. A military attack against Iran would incite a disastrous regional war, which would cost the lives of thousands of Israelis. A military attack against Iran would turn it into a great vengeful power that would sanctify eternal war against the Jewish State. A military attack against Iran would cause a world financial crisis and isolate Israel from the family of nations.

Shavit's "sophisticated" conclusion ("sophisticated" is his favorite adjective after "mature") is that Israel must be perceived to be fanatic. "Israel must not behave like an insane country. Rather, it must create the fear that if it is pushed into a corner it will behave insanely. To ensure that Israel is not forced to bomb Iran, it must maintain the impression that it is about to bomb Iran."

And just why is Shavit reviving this "madman" strategy, of all times, now? Because he thinks he must chastise former Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, former Mossad chief Meir Dagan, former Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin for dissociating themselves from Netanyahu's rhetoric, you know, that thing about options and tables.

IN FACT, THE "first fact" is an intentionally grim thought experiment, the kind of worst case you pay intelligence officers to imagine, work through and plan for, but then expect statesmen to step back from, as Ashkenazi, Dagan, and Diskin clearly have. Our "first fact" suggests that if Iran has a nuclear bomb its clerical leaders would use it (or, unprovoked, credibly threaten to use it) against Israel and the Gulf states, i.e., "Western sources of energy," and to what end, exactly? Spread Shi'a Islam with a radioactive cloud? You would have to assume, that is, that Iran would attack without considering the prospect of nuclear retaliation from Israel and the US, or that Turkey (a member of NATO, remember) Saudi Arabia, etc., would not feel safe without nukes of its own.

But even if an Iranian bomb would touch off some regional nuclear arms race, why would this be "hell" in a way that total regional war would not? I mean the catastrophic war described in Shavit's "second fact," which precludes an Israeli attack in the first place. Indeed, if Israel is savvy enough to understand the awful effects of such a war, shall we assume Iran (which lost a generation fighting Iraq in the 1980s) does not? Shall we not at least assume that Iran sees how Israel can see this fact--that it knows Israel knows a preemptive attack on Iran would invite catastrophe for Israel--all of which makes the madman theory a little contradictory if not more than a little daffy?

Ashkenazi, Dagan, and Diskin, now that they are civilians, are simply doing what citizens must: calling on their leaders to speak sanely, constructively, and map out a foreign policy and security strategy that appeals to common sense. This includes, they say (something Shavit cannot quite get his mind around), getting on with the challenge of reconciling with Palestine's growing international power and making the most of the Arab League peace initiative while it is still on the table.

American neocons fancy themselves, as Irving Kristol put it, "liberals who've been mugged by reality." Shavit has come to the precocious conclusion (which he thinks less sophisticated and mature Israeli liberals resist) that our neighbors can be very dangerous. Someday, no doubt, he will graduate to the idea that we all can be.

Portnoy's Revenge

2011-06-13T12:38:00.018-04:00

Not long after Philip Roth published Portnoy's Complaint, Jacqueline Susann went on the Johnny Carson show. Susann, we remember, had become famous for her pulp novel Valley of the Dolls, which triangulated, in what seemed an all-American way, ambition, sex and barbiturates. Everybody was a "user" in more ways than one.

By 1969, the year Portnoy's Complaint was published, the paperback version of Valley of the Dolls had been as inescapable in the supermarket as the Coca-Cola trademark. So Carson asked Susann if she had ever met Roth. No, she said, but that she would like to. Then she famously added, with the coyness of a Mickey Mouse Club graduate: "Of course, I would not like to shake his hand." (Ed McMahon, we may assume, chortled knowingly.)

I thought of Susann's response to Portnoy, listening to the chatter about Anthony Weiner this past couple of weeks, in part because I've just finished a little book about Portnoy, but mostly because Susann's mockery seemed so iconic--and, sadly, still does. She did not do Roth any real damage, no more than, say, Ann Coulter's recent mockery of Cong. Weiner much mattered. (“After all, it wasn't as if André Malraux said it to François Mauriac,” Roth would later tell his friends.)

Rather, it was the way Susann epitomized America's endless ambivalence towards sexual desire--on the one hand, the assumption that desire was everywhere, the nuclear energy fueling ambition, and, on the other hand, condescension toward people in whom desire is discovered or, worse, who just let things rip. Portnoy feels this ambivalence himself, of course, which is what turns his complaint into a syndrome.

"Anthony Weiner," in this sense, has become a useful fiction for Americans, not the least for Anthony Weiner. Our hero wants, and WANTS, and wants!. He fantasizes, risks, hides and lies. This cannot end well, and not simply because with Facebook "friends" you don't need enemies. This is America: desire is bound to bring one to the ultimate sin, the loss of self-possession, the ultimate bourgeois possession.

Our hero also wants the happiness that comes with responsibility, you see, wants discipline, the training of the senses. He is a good Jewish boy, finally, good enough to make himself almost preemptively ludicrous, homing in on any word of sexual encouragement or admiration, but never "doing anything." Now he is going to his Spielvogel to learn how to become a "better husband and healthier person." He will, one may suppose, eventually join a panel on addiction with Tiger Woods and John Edwards on the Oprah channel. Then he will be forgiven.

You'd think that, forty years after Portnoy's Complaint, we'd all be wiser about such things. You'd think we would at least apply to public life some of the subtlety we expect from fiction. Or, if you missed it, just listen to Rick Hertzberg's wonderful comments about the scandal in this New Yorker podcast. Politicians are not people who think they can get away with everything, Rick says. They are people who, doing what everybody does, should be, well, politic enough to know they get away with nothing. When a politician lies publicly about secret lusts, it is not out of fear of public retribution, but mainly to deceive the spouse. Unadulterated (so long as it is not adulterous) sexuality is no crime in America. It can be mandatory. Who would give a thought to the hot air between Coulter's hardcovers if she looked like Betty Friedan?

As for the spouse, who if not the Portnoy generation would know something that endows all these scandals--to mention only those on the left, Clinton, Edwards, DSK, Weiner--with what might be called a pattern. "It was routine and understood," Rick said about the Victorians, "that these powerful men had an appropriate wife; and then, for release, went to the brothel. What's striking about all these [recent] cases is that, yes, it is the wife that is the proper, accomplished, admirable person, his equal. And then he wants something a little more yielding."

Pathetic? Of course. What if not a man's desire for something more or less perfectly self-possessed and infinitely yielding is pathetic? Which is why we have novels and satires--or had them before they were eclipsed by cable news and other reality shows. "I once cored an apple," Portnoy told Spielvogel, "and ran off to the woods to fall upon the orifice of the fruit, pretending that the cool and mealy hole was actually between the legs of that mythical being who always called me Big Boy when she pleaded for what no girl in all recorded history ever got…” Like.

"Equipment, Not Workers"

2011-06-11T02:32:00.003-04:00

The New York Times reports that manufacturing companies are recovering, but not in a way that much reduces unemployment. They are acquiring, the report says, machines, not workers. This was as foreseeable as financial bubbles in an age of electronic securitization, and many have been warning about it for a generation.

Back in 1997, I wrote a piece for Strategy and Business laying out in simple terms what innovations in manufacturing would do to "labor" and, broadly, how governments ought to prepare for them. I imagined the warning coming as a farewell speech by a retiring CEO with common sense and vision (I confess, I was thinking of Motorola's 1980s leader Bob Galvin). When I read the Times lead this morning, I looked over this imagined speech and thought it finally sounded true. Add to its warning the job losses from peer networks that dominate the management of supply chains, and the social networks that dominate marketing and you start to get the picture.

TOMORROW IS MY last day as C.E.O. The first was more than 23 years ago. I suppose you're expecting some words of gratitude -- you richly deserve them -- but indulge me. I want to talk to you about something that has been weighing on my mind more and more in recent years, but I could never find the words or opportunity to raise. It is about what business owes society, what has fashionably and not improperly been called business' "social compact." Nothing could be more important than clarity about this, given the disturbing changes we've been living through. Everyone, from Business Week to former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, says we need a new one. But it seems to me there has been growing confusion about business' obligations under this compact because we have forgotten some first principles.

A friend of mine once quipped that America is the only country in the world where people tell you, "You're history," and they're insulting you. Whether I like it or not, I'm too old now not to know some history. Retirement brings one to consider the work of our lives, and, in any case, takes away the excessive fear of appearing tactless. So I want to start by examining what in the conditions of work has changed, and what has not. I'll build on that to argue what, if anything, needs to be changed in the compact between business and society.

The most direct way to get into this is to think about what has happened to the circumstances of "labor." I'll just touch on some points, which have been extensively debated in the press and in the recent election campaign.

Labor is a fast diminishing part of value. When I first joined this business, in 1954, the cost structure of our manufactured products included about 55 percent direct labor. Today, the number is less than 11 percent. There is a revolution underneath that deceptively simple number; you would not still be senior managers of this company if you didn't appreciate it.

Blue-collar jobs have been made redundant by robotics, flexible machine tools and automated inventory management systems, others by outsourcing to low-wage countries. White-collar jobs have been made redundant by scheduling, order entry, word-processing and dozens of other kinds of software -- and more recently by growth of our fledgling corporate intranet. Middle management is disappearing.

Some have called this a revolution of re-engineering. It is really a revolution in computer-integrated production, and we are only at the start of it. While the market capitalization of the Fortune 500 has grown three- or fourfold since the early 1980's, their work forces have shrunk by 25 percent.

Lost jobs? Good riddance. Remember Michael Dukakis's earnest promise of "good jobs at good wages." His campaign now seems quaint. The new entrepreneurial economy -- technology companies with 500 employees or less -- is responsible for virtually all of the job growth since 1988, and no Federal industrial policy could have precipitated so much dynamism. Investors, not the Government, have been picking winners and losers, and on the whole have not done a bad job of it. Businesses, not Department of Commerce officials, have made the necessary investments in crucial technologies.

What Mr. Dukakis neglected to add, moreover, was that the "good" jobs he wanted to assure through a Government industrial policy were mainly boring, soul-destroying and intellectually demeaning -- production-line assemblers, data processors, the kinds of jobs that were the hallmark of old manufacturing. Frederick Winslow Taylor once wrote that the best businesses were the ones in which workers "left their heads at home." He was right, which explains why socialism had always seemed so magical for working people who could not bring off the feat.

Anyway, much of this dehumanizing work is impossible in the businesses of the new economy. Manufacturing and service businesses like ours want fewer workers, but we want all of our people to be literate, numerate, imaginative and civil enough to engage in team-based problem-solving. We want a scientific mind for production, and an empathic heart for customers and fellow workers. We know that manufacturing matters, but that developing a piece of scheduling software for a plant in Taiwan is manufacturing. All in all, this new style of work is significantly more satisfying than what it has replaced. If socialism is dead, it is because the industrial capitalism it rose up against died first.

The game into which workers are recruited has changed. The new technologies have changed the rules of management: the old division of labor has been replaced by more integrative approaches, interfunctional teamwork, knowledge sharing. A business' most important asset is its "intellectual capital"-- the competencies of employees that allow them to be innovative in a thousand ways. Employees must be learners for their whole lives, not just specialists. They must also understand the business' strategy.

A company used to be like a football team, in which only senior managers, like quarterbacks, saw the whole field, and most everybody else performed a single, drudge task. Your plays (that is, your product lines) were mostly set for the long season; the few times you got close to the goal you had better score. Bigness mattered.

Now a company has to be more like a basketball team -- or really an alliance of basketball teams -- lean, versatile, disciplined in spontaneity. Marketing, design and production people take on problems together; senior managers must lead like a point guard. Real-time communication is key, and it must be horizontal, not just vertical. Networks are replacing hierarchy. The corporate office I run looks more like a holding company, a teaching center and a bank than it does a command center.

By the way, a football team can have too many Dan Marinos. A basketball team can never have too many Michael Jordans, and has no room at all for a 300-pound, barely educated tackle.

Labor's real crisis is not unemployment but unemployability. Of course, the only thing worse than a boring job is no job, which is why some people -- opponents of Nafta or the critics of outsourcing, for example -- view the loss of old industrial jobs with alarm. Their concerns are reasonable. Their solutions are not. Don't be fooled by apparent fluctuations -- last year's "downsizing" or this year's drop in unemployment. For the first time in the history of industrial labor markets, the problem for unskilled people is not cyclical unemployment but chronic unemployability. The bottom rungs of the ladder are disappearing; protection and macro-economic "stimulation" can do nothing to change the trend.

Continue reading...

Sderot: Nostalgia For The Future

2011-06-03T09:47:00.008-04:00

Danae Elon at Cinema South

You would think Prime Minister's Netanyahu's insistence that Israel could never go back to the "indefensible" borders of 1967 would play at least as well in bombarded Sderot as it did in the Congress. He certainly thought it would, or that Congresspeople could be suckered into thinking it would. "Imagine that right now we all had less than 60 seconds to find shelter from an incoming rocket," Netanyahu said, rolling to his next standing o. "Would you live that way? Would anyone live that way? Well, we aren’t going to live that way either."

I visited Sderot earlier this week, to attend the opening of the wonderful Cinema South film festival, curated by my friend, the filmmaker Danae Elon. Danae teaches in Sderot's Sapir College, which also happens to be the festival's inspiration and host. She has often spoken to me about the comparatively open-spirited atmosphere of Sderot and the Negev, about how much more hopeful, or at least pragmatic, people at the college and community are than what you find in Jerusalem, far from the missiles, complacent in a kind of misty borderlessness. Anyway, this seemed a chance to take it all in.

TO OPEN THE festival, Danae and her committee chose "Eidut," or "Testimony," by gadfly director Shlomi Elkabetz, a film, in which actors speak, well, testimonies collected by groups such as Breaking the Silence, all of them translated into Hebrew and delivered with fierce eyes in barren landscapes.

The film was obviously meant to dramatize for ordinary Israelis what it has been like for ordinary Palestinians to live under occupation and, less predictably, what it has been for ordinary soldiers to enforce it; to recruit empathy for both sides, and a deeper sense of how tragically this daily exercise of raw power corrupts Israeli youth. (The most affecting moment--given that the Hebrew made Palestinian testimonies seem a little arch--was when a young actor reproduced the lines of a soldier who explained how, after weeks of exhausting, mind-numbing duty at a blisteringly hot check point, he found himself taking out on Palestinians what he could not take out on his officers.)

And much as Danae predicted, the response of Sapir's faculty and audience would have given Eric Cantor something to think about, if actually thinking about Sderot as a living community, and not just as a convenient prop, were on his agenda. Avner Faingulernt, the head of film at Sapir, was first to speak. It is worth quoting some of what he said:

[Ten years ago] we could not imagine, but we did believe, we dreamed and fell in love with the world of the South. With the images, the voices, the colors, the stories, and with a grasp of the world in which there are warm associations and much love for human beings whoever they are... It is we who have to write a new agenda in light of the great privilege that we have, we the people of the periphery, liberated from the established worldview that you find in the center.

Because of this privilege, we are able to live under the threat of missiles and war and yet believe in peace; because of this it is our responsibility to demand from the government talks with any Palestinian or Arab who lives in our vicinity; because of this we can believe in the fabulous revolution that is taking place beyond our borders, and to demand from ourselves an openness to the world that is next to us, to stop closing ourselves off in mental borders, that cruelly imprison us in a dead-end. We who live on the border know and believe that the residents of Gaza are our neighbors and our partners; we know that Gaza can be the most important commercial center for the western Negev.

And we know that in Gaza there can arise a school for film and a cultural center with which we could partner and create festivals, ones that will bring audiences, creative talent, artists, and people of culture and scholarship from the whole world. We live in a place that perhaps looks cruel and hopeless but especially at this time and in this place we feel the greatest opportunity.

The audience responded with overwhelming warmth. Guests to Sderot could just feel the power of such sentiments, in this place, of all places. Then Netanyahu's Culture and Sport Minister, Limor Livnat, took the floor. And something happened.

IT IS IMPORTANT to understand that opening the festival with this film had caused a good deal of controversy before it was even screened. Likud Party insiders, anticipating a film that would show the Palestinian side of the occupation--or give a platform to soldiers who were prepared to share honest memories and doubts--condemned it in advance for one-sidedness. The mayor of Sderot, the Likud's David Buskila, was pressured to boycott the festival, as was Livnat. Nevertheless, both came to the opening, and Danae spoke with particular respect for Buskila, who stood up to the pressures and remained a strong friend of Sapir College, Sderot's most important institution.

When Livnat started to speak, however, things turned surreal. She brought greetings from the government, and expressed her solidarity with Sderot. She registered her opposition to boycotts; the audience cheered. But then, unwilling to leave well enough alone, she began to lecture the audience about what, in effect, they should be feeling. She condemned the film for its bias, and insisted that it was an unfortunate choice to open the festival. She expressed concern that "Testimony" would be used internationally to delegitimize Israel, or the IDF, or portray Israel's soldiers "in a negative light."

The audience, almost all of whom had lived under a rain of missiles, erupted. "Why don't you see it first?," someone shouted at her. "How can you condemn a work of art before you see it?" yelled another. The noise grew to Knesset-like unpleasantness. Livnat began to throw back at the audience that they were now boycotting her. After another minute or two, she left for "a previous engagement."

So Buskila took the mike. He appealed for calm, which he got. Then he launched into a disquisition on freedom of speech that would have been worthy of John Stewart Mill. It was important to hear both sides, he insisted. She came and we shouted. The audience, not the Likud politicians, he implied, had failed the test of democracy. They had responded angrily and noisily to Livnat who was, after all, only trying to state her views.

DANAE AND I could only look at each other and shrug. These were the gears of Israeli democracy grinding away. The left advocates for tolerance of the Arab narrative, the right accuses the left of disloyalty. The left cries foul and accuses the right of closed-mindedness, and the right accuses the left of failing to tolerate its views. The left, in this view, is arrogant, hypocritical and one-sided. It tolerates the Arabs but not fellow Jews. Freedom of speech is turned into an internal and purely Jewish conversation in which the left proves its intolerance by refusing to tolerate the right's intolerance.

"In Judea and Samaria," Netanyahu told the Congress, "the Jewish people are not foreign occupiers...This is the land of our forefathers, the land of Israel, to which Abraham brought the idea of one god, where David set out to confront Goliath, and where Isaiah saw his vision of eternal peace. No distortion of history...could deny the 4,000-year-old bond between the Jewish people and the Jewish land."

Perhaps. But the atmospherics of this room in Sderot pointed to another, moral standard, one in which people are nostalgic for the future, not the past. It felt a relief, much as Danae predicted, to be with people on a genuine Zionist frontier, dreaming of how land might liberate people, rather than how people might liberate the land.

The Volt: More Good News

2011-05-30T10:37:00.006-04:00

The New York Times leads today with a piece about Detroit's recovery, but somehow manages to overlook the continuing and crucial good-news story of the Chevy Volt, which will eventually do for General Motors what the iPhone did for Apple. This would only be a business story if electric cars were not so critical to American manufacturing and the planet, too.

In response to strong demand and glowing reviews--including Motor Trend's "Car of the Year" and a strong endorsement of its engineering from IEEE Spectrum--GM will increase production of the Volt (the Opel Ampera in Europe) to 60,000 a year; it had originally projected a third less. GM's Volt program is beginning to reach the point at which scale will drive down the prices of its most innovative components, as well as second generation development of its batteries and proprietary software. This will make electric mobility feasible for the mainstream market and drive, in turn, the smartening of the electric grid. "Our challenge," a friend at GM writes, "will be, going forward, how do we reach the ordinary mainstream customer so that we can continue to grow the volume and with this added scale, continue to reduce our costs."

Incidentally, customers love the car. My friend, a program insider, tells me that marketing people involved with early adopters mostly hear what car companies long to hear. The car is "fun to drive." Any Volt on a dealer's lot will not sit there for more than a day; GM has nearly 700 selling dealerships and a little over 300 units in inventory. The Volt team is not only gearing up for a full US national launch for later this year but also a global launch in Europe and China (and a roll-out the following year including Australia and Israel).

The Volt is connected to GM's OnStar network, which will eventually allow for charging information about all Volts on the road to roll up to power companies; and also allow GM to monitor cars and download software updates. (Think of OnStar as GM's iTunes.) "We are collecting a good deal of data from our OnStar connectivity," my friend writes, "which is proving particularly rich. On average, our Volt customers are driving over 1,000 miles before they have to fill-up their gas tanks, which ends up being about once a month. Nearly two-thirds of their miles are powered from electricity from the grid. The OnStar MyLink mobile app for smart phones, which monitors and can initiate charging, has been downloaded by nearly a third of the customers (and is used many times a day)."

Early Volt buyers seem to be a fascinating group: the kind of tech pioneers who feed valuable information back to product developers. Well over a third of them were not even considering buying another car when they purchased their Volt. Toyota Prius, BMW 3-series, and Honda luxury makes were the cars most often traded in. Nearly half have an iPhone, nearly half have an iPad and nearly a quarter have or are planning to get home solar. They are highly educated and affluent: mostly male. Nevertheless, presumably, this group will not be voting Republican.

Aggressively Non-Violent: Ras al-Amud

2011-05-28T16:45:00.000-04:00

My friend David Shulman, who has appeared often as a guest blogger here, filed the following report from our non-violent demonstration in Ras al-Amud on Friday afternoon. I particularly admire how he captured our feelings at the moment we sat down; no need for me to add anything about it. David is also the author of this lovely essay on Gandhi and Palestine in the current Harper's (still behind a pay wall, alas). And this post on Judge Goldstone for The New York Review.

Ras al-Amud, May 27, 2011

We gather at 4:00 outside the settlers’ multi-story stone building opposite the old police station at Ras al-Amud, on the Mount of Olives. This was the week of Netanyahu’s speech before Congress; if, utterly unlikely as this may be, there is anyone in the world who failed to notice that he was lying, then Wednesday’s official ceremony unveiling the new settlement here in East Jerusalem should be enough to remove the veil.

It is hot, dusty, dry, and from the start I’m thirsty, and it keeps getting worse. I’m also a little high on the mood of the crowd: I sense a savvy toughness, a clarity of purpose, and I feel the rage. The lines are lucidly drawn. Some 20 to 30 settler children, boys and girls, and a few adults line the rooftop overlooking the street and the activists milling just below them; sometimes the children spit at us, or spray us with water (not unwelcome in the fierce heat), and sometimes they sing or chant, as if to mimic the rhymed slogans we’re shouting to the beat of the drums. They hang a sign down from the roof: “refuah shlemah, Speedy Recovery,” the implication being that we are mad, perhaps suffering from some kind of mass psychosis. Perhaps
they’re right.

Not only Jews are here to demonstrate today; there are many Palestinians, far more than in most of the Sheikh Jarrah demonstrations, and they’re up front in the thick of it, facing the police. There’s a large underground parking area beneath the massive stone apartments; we’ve taken our stand on the path leading up to it, so settler cars entering or leaving are having rather a hard time. At one point one of them, surrounded by activists, suddenly accelerates, plowing through the crowd; people leap to the side; miraculously, no one is hurt. The police bark and push and shove at us, trying vainly to clear a way. It all takes time, a long time, as the tension slowly mounts, reaching toward a climax, though there are also moments of anomie and perplexity, and the weariness of boredom, thirst, and heat.

A Palestinian boy, maybe 12 years old, takes the megaphone and boldly leads the chanting for a few minutes, half in Arabic, half in Hebrew, the languages running together on his tongue: la l’ihtilal, ken le-meri ezrahi, “No to Occupation, Yes to Civil Disobedience.” I like the sound of it, coming from him. Civil disobedience is
what is called for in the extreme conditions of Israel-Palestine 2011—and with it relentless provocation, a constant seeking of the point of friction, giving no inch. The police seem bewildered, out of their depth: what are they supposed to do with these 200 demonstrators? I can see the two commanders hesitating, uncertain; they’re not much of an enemy, this time round; for once they don’t seem eager to arrest us. Maybe—just a guess, or wishful thinking- the senior one, who carries himself with a certain dignity, doesn’t really like defending these fanatical settlers.

Still, we prod them, taunt them, we call them a “settlers’ police” (all too true), we tell them they have the right and, indeed, the duty to refuse illegal orders, we spill over the line they are trying to hold, and finally we do what many have done before us, in Gandhi’s India, in Alabama and Mississipi, in the Vietnam years, in Tibet—we sit down on the approach road, blocking access to the building and its parking lot, and wait, arms looped together, for the police to pry us loose and drag us away.
It takes some time. The usual happiness washes over me.

THERE IS REALLY nothing quite so sweet as doing the right thing. I am, at last, or again, one with myself—apart from the tormenting thirst and the occasional drizzle of spit from above. We’re packed together in an ungainly mass. Profound equality, communitas, like a physical force, binds us together in the face of what is about to come. But I’m not thinking about the future now. This moment is enough.

Of course the ranks ahead of me are rapidly thinning out, for the police have begun their attack; they grab whatever part of the body presents itself first, head, feet, arms, buttocks, they struggle to separate us one from another—it isn’t easy—and they drag us, one by one, sometimes punching us for good measure, yelling curses, to the side of the road which, of course, must be kept open for the settlers at all costs. I can’t see the larger scene very well from my small piece of paradise on the ground, but I hear the shouts and cries and the steady roar of the drums, and I can see the soldiers’ black boots getting closer and closer, the first couple of rows gone by now, only two or three meters left, they will be on me in a moment, I really ought to be
afraid but nothing seems capable of shattering my eery peace.

Perhaps, I think, I’ll be able later to write about that peacefulness and explore it further; I know I’m not the only one to feel it. Eileen will say later, when it’s over: “That moment all of you sat down was beautiful and powerful.” She’s right about that. Maybe that’s why, as she says, I love it so. Let’s say a hundred of us were sitting there, defiant, ready to be pummeled or dragged away or arrested. Clearly we didn’t have to explain it to anyone, least of all to ourselves, because the rightness of it was perfectly evident, and, after all, we’ve done such things before, many times, and by now we’ve learned what had to be learned—above all the lesson of action, saying “no” not in words but with our bodies, again and again, as long as it’s necessary to do so until some day we win. But even that thought is not right and not needed, these days we’re not thinking much about winning.

I smile at Tehila, just behind me, remembering our arrest in south Hebron just a month or so ago—her first time. But the smile is because I have just realized that we are doing this precisely because we can’t know where it will lead or what effects it will have, and I have just remembered the verse from the Bhagavad Gita which says that human beings are given the right to act but should never consider the fruits of action—it is enough that it is good, godly, and intrinsically humane.

There’s quite a lot of tugging and tearing and poking and grabbing and punching, and to my surprise I am swept, as if by a whirlpool, away from the center and toward the curb, since by now the soldiers and police have cleared just enough space for one of the settler cars to struggle through, and they’ve apparently tired of
the struggle against these interlaced arms and legs and heavy bodies. I guess I was lucky. Someone just a yard or two away was not: they shot him with a Taser, and he fell, clutching his right chest, his eyes racing wildly in their sockets, his body twitching a little, hardly conscious. I rush over, but before I can begin to dredge up my medic’s instincts, Daniel is there, cradling his head in his arms; Daniel is a doctor,with the doctor’s assurance.

We call an ambulance, but within a few minutes our friend comes to, sits up slowly, even more slowly tries to stand. Tasers are dangerous; they hit you with an electric shock that can kill. My son Misha warned me some months ago that we’d be likely to encounter them one of these days, and today it happened, my first time. Our wounded activist, uncowed, rejoins the others still sitting on the road.

THERE ARE ARRESTS, of course—six, to the best of my knowledge; but when they try to arrest one of the Palestinians, the activists swirl around and manage, with much difficulty, to extricate him from the clutches of the police. One minor victory. Meanwhile, while I was busy, many things have happened. Uli, my former student, comes week after week to hold up a black flag with a pirate’s skull and bones; some have found this banner enigmatic, though Uli says its message is self-evident, a perfect emblem of the settlers’ ways. Today one of the settlers manages to snatch it and tear it off the pole, which now, I have to admit, looks a little forlorn. Maybe it’s become a Buddhist flagpole, supporting the deep emptiness of all that is.

Then Uli’s cellphone rings, and on the line is a former girlfriend of his, whom he describes as a nihilist or anarchist, utterly apolitical; and by a strange twist such as turns up regularly in Israel, this woman happens to be the sister of one of the settlers inside the building, and the sister’s children are with the former girlfriend and are supposed to be taken “home”, if a stolen piece of Palestinian land counts as home. What to do? Uli doesn’t want the children to be traumatized: “Wait an hour,” he suggests.

And then—when? Some two hours or more have gone by-- it’s over. The police drive off with their captives. Eileen sees Palestinian children grasping stones and broken shards of ceramic in their fists. This is a new danger, worse than anything that has happened so far. She goes over to try to calm them, and others join her, and it works--or maybe the boys decide rightly by themselves. No tear gas or rubber bullets today. On the main road just beside us, while we’re still embroiled in the melée, drums beating, people screaming, a Palestinian car, brightly decorated with white ribbons, with bride and groom inside, painfully threads its way past this battle zone, somehow avoiding the jeeps of the Border Guards that block the way. Will they make
it in time to the wedding?

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position, how it takes place
When someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully
along…

The Auden poem happens to be about us, Eileen and me: we spent this morning in Tel Aviv shopping for Misha’s wedding. Should I be feeling guilty for this great joy, this pleasure, when I could have been in south Hebron or Silwan or Nabi Saleh, when I could have bound up the wounds of the suffering and tried, at least, to free the slaves?

No, I should not. But you know—it’s utterly impossible to make sense of these sharp transitions. It’s crazy. One moment we’re having our espresso in Tel Aviv, and the next we’re here with the police and the settlers and the dust and the drums and the pain and the unanswerable questions and the hopelessness and the dread. Whatever god invented the world we inhabit didn’t think things through. I wish Him a speedy recovery.

Netanyahu's House: Knowing Your Audience

2011-05-25T15:23:00.004-04:00

Anyone with a shred of knowledge about the Middle East conflict knows that yesterday's performance alienated its most critical audience. I am not speaking about Netanyahu's performance. He played the Israeli center, American Jews, and American media like Isaac Stern playing the Brahms. I mean the performance of members of Congress, who watched him with ingenuous smiles, and jumped to their feet to applaud every word, including, it seems, "and" and "but." Did they really not understand that, for the rest of the world, they were the more important show?

Israel, the only democracy. Cheers. Israel in Gaza, defending itself against Iran's terror proxies. Cheers. Judea and Samaria. Cheers. Israel as the reason why the Palestinian economy booms. Cheers. Conflict, not over Palestinian state, but over Jewish state. Cheers.

Compromise must reflect settlements since 1967. Cheers. Israel will not make the lines of 1967 the basis for negotiation. Cheers. Israel will take in no refugees at all. Cheers. Jerusalem must remain Israel's united capital. Cheers. No negotiations with Abbas if Hamas is in the government. Cheers. (For a more comprehensive analysis, read Mitchell Plitnick's fine post.)

"American members of Congress did not seem to realize that this speech was tuned in by young people across Palestine and the Middle East," my friend Sammy Abu Dayyeh, the CEO of Net-Tours, told me over a gloomy lunch at his Ambassador Hotel in East Jerusalem. "I was shocked, I admit. Everything Netanyahu did and said was predictable. Okay. But the way he was received--that I did not really expect. It was as if the Congress was actually trying to incite the Arab street just when, since three months ago, everything is changing, and Obama is trying to show himself on the right side of things."

No doubt, Netanyahu's speech will be seen as historic. It may well turn a tide, just what Netanyahu needs to wrestle Obama into submission, even silence internal critics accusing him of alienating Washington--a masterful job, ingratiating, clever, poised.

But Congress's enthusiasm for its slyness may also mark the moment the rising Arab world, including what will rise in the streets of Palestine and on the borders of Israel, dismisses America as a misguided empire. The speech may eventually prove a world-historical photo-op as damaging in its way as Abu Ghraib; the moment to despair, once and for all, of America's once-promising young president being seen as even-handed.

This reaction of Congress may also mark the moment when intellectuals across Europe and Latin America--also on American campuses, for that matter--claim absolute proof that America's Middle East diplomacy is bought-and-paid-for by the people Netanyahu romanticizes. It is a people they are inclined to romanticize, too, though in a quite different way, alas.

Decoding 'The Speech'

2011-05-23T12:08:00.001-04:00

Encrypted: [T]he bonds between the United States and Israel are unbreakable and the commitment of the United States to the security of Israel is ironclad.

Unencrypted: "Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem, Creatorem caeli et terrae, et in Iesum Christum, Filium Eius unicum, Dominum nostrum..." and so forth.

Encrypted: As two vibrant democracies, we recognize that the liberties and freedoms we cherish must be constantly nurtured. And as the nation that recognized the State of Israel moments after its independence, we have a profound commitment to its survival as a strong, secure homeland for the Jewish people.

Unencrypted: "I know very well that I'm going to lose some Jewish donors, and even some voters; but if I cannot get the 78% I got last time, I know how to fight for the 65% or more who want a two-state solution and will take Jon Stewart's send-up of Joe Lieberman over the real Lieberman any day of the week? Do you really want to fight me as a Foxy Republican, Bibi? Have you noticed what's going on on American campuses?"

Encrypted: ...homeland for the Jewish people.

Unencrypted: "This is not quite the same thing as a 'Jewish state,' which some of your coalition partners think of as a Jewish theocracy, so I am qualifying the phrase as 'democratic and Jewish' (see my speech continuing below). Anyway, given Israel's 20 percent Arab minority, better get used to American and European diplomats defaulting to this vaguer but truer formulation."

Encrypted: And that includes additional support–-beyond regular military aid-–for the Iron Dome anti-rocket system.

Unencrypted: "Okay, let's talk about what long-term technologies will reassure you, or even about close military cooperation as part of a deal. But let's stop hearing about how Israel is 8 miles wide. The real problem, as everyone knows, is the settlers you put in around mile 9, and then mile 20. Besides, the crudest missiles travel 40 miles, but I'm getting ahead of myself."

Encrypted: When an effort was made to insert the United Nations into matters that should be resolved through direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, we vetoed it.

Unencrypted: "I made myself look ridiculous vetoing the Security Council's condemnation of settlements, which was formulated in my own Cairo speech's language. I gave Dennis this victory to reinforce the idea that bilateral negotiations are the only way to peace; though you destroyed the chance to resume bilateral talks by refusing to stop the building, and the rest of the world is calling on me to impose a plan."

Encrypted: First, the number of Palestinians living west of the Jordan River is growing rapidly...This will make it harder and harder -- without a peace deal -- to maintain Israel as both a Jewish state and a democratic state.

Unencrypted: "Oh, by the way, I know how to speak the language of the Israeli opposition, Kadima, Labor, etc., and play to it, whatever I really think of it. Two can play this game, Bibi. You have an election coming up, too. Do you want to run as the leader who screwed up relations with Washington, while Livni and others run as the saviors of our common language?"

Encrypted: Second, technology will make it harder for Israel to defend itself in the absence of a genuine peace."

Unencrypted: " Look, AIPAC, can you please tell your Bibi to stop pandering to his nutjobs and try forming a coalition that will, say, take us back to where Olmert and Abbas got stuck before the region explodes? Israel is fit to repel any invasion; no more wars like 1973. But can't you see Israel is prepared for the last big war, not the next one? It is facing 40,000 missiles that cost a few thousand dollars each with anti-missiles that cost over a million each. Its air force and smart bombs can level the apartment buildings from which the missiles are launched, but then what happens when CNN and Al Jazeera start running 24/7 videos of children's bodies pulled from the rubble? Which brings me to..."

Encrypted: Third, a new generation of Arabs is reshaping the region. A just and lasting peace can no longer be forged with one or two Arab leaders. Going forward, millions of Arab citizens have to see that peace is possible for that peace to be sustained.

Unencrypted: "The Arab street is rising and hates Israel. I'm doing my damnedest to help young Arabs see that I, as the poster child for democratic globalization, can still be their friend. Does your Bibi really expect Western powers to defend Israel, which means his occupation just now, at the cost of alienating a whole new generation that's shown an almost unimaginable courage to face dictators' guns? What will Israel do when thousands more march on Israel? Mow them down like Qaddafi?"

Encrypted: And just as the context has changed in the Middle East, so too has it been changing in the international community over the last several years. There’s a reason why the Palestinians are pursuing their interests at the United Nations. They recognize that there is an impatience with the peace process, or the absence of one, not just in the Arab World -- in Latin America, in Asia, and in Europe. And that impatience is growing, and it’s already manifesting itself in capitals around the world.

Unencrypted: "Actually, I mean every word here. And I could rally the rest of the world to put the screws to Bibi in a heartbeat. My trip to Europe, starting tomorrow, will prove this. Have you noticed who are Israel's most important trading partners? Have you noticed how Israel's debt structure looks like Greece? What do you think will happen to Israel's hyper-globalized, start-up economy if Palestine is recognized by most of the world, and Israel is considered in breach of international law? Wake up: I'm the best, if not the only, friend you've got."

Encrypted: No vote at the United Nations will ever create an independent Palestinian state. And the United States will stand up against efforts to single Israel out at the United Nations or in any international forum.

Unencrypted: "I know Israel can make statehood merely symbolic--at first. How can the Palestinian state grow while the Israeli army sits in Area C to protect the settlements? And I can withhold recognition and maybe even get away with this in the Arab world until the 2012 election--if, that is, I keep encouraging the youth and sending aid packages to Egypt. But can you not all see the writing on the wall?"

Encrypted: ...Israel cannot be expected to negotiate with Palestinians who do not recognize its right to exist. And we will hold the Palestinians accountable for their actions and for their rhetoric. But the march to isolate Israel internationally -- and the impulse of the Palestinians to abandon negotiations –- will continue to gain momentum in the absence of a credible peace process and alternative.

Unencrypted: "I can help Abbas & Co. to pressure Hamas to get real. But, Jesus, can you really not see how Bibi is the best friend Hamas has? Are you actually trying to bring Abbas down by making his past concessions to Olmert seem ludicrous?"

Encrypted: There was nothing particularly original in my proposal; this basic framework for negotiations has long been the basis for discussions among the parties, including previous U.S. administrations. Since questions have been raised, let me repeat what I actually said on Thursday--not what I was reported to have said.

Unencrypted: "Condi Rice set this formula to get Olmert and Abbas going. Bush adopted the framework, too. Bibi wants you to think Israel has some new threat in me because he is counting on you to panic like Pavlov's dog salivating at the sound of a bell."

Encrypted: The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states. The Palestinian people must have the right to govern themselves, and reach their potential, in a sovereign and contiguous state.

Unencrypted: "Forget Ariel and probably also Maale Adumim. Abbas offered a 1.9 percent swap, with 62 percent of the settlers staying in place. Olmert offered 5.something percent. And Jerusalem is part of the deal, as Olmert agreed. It's time to get used to the fact that Abbas's offer is the best one Israel will ever get."

Encrypted: As for security, every state has the right to self-defense, and Israel must be able to defend itself –- by itself -– against any threat. Provisions must also be robust enough to prevent a resurgence of terrorism, to stop the infiltration of weapons, and to provide effective border security.

Unencrypted: "I'm willing to put troops on the Jordan. But forget about a permanent presence in the Jordan Valley."

Encrypted: The ultimate goal is two states for two people: Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland for the Jewish people, and the State of Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people--each state in joined self-determination, mutual recognition, and peace.

Unencrypted: "Your most winnable fight is over the number of Palestinian refugees who'll be repatriated to Israel proper under the "Right of Return" provision, UN 194, of the Arab League initiative. Who knows how integrated Israel and Palestine will eventually become. But if you want to keep the number of returnees low, the US and most of the world will back you. Then again, the longer you keep the settlement project going, and/or complain about disrupting settlers' lives, the more you turn every Palestinian's attention back to 1948, and strengthen the logic of a bi-national state. Notice Abbas's oped from last week?"

Abbas And The 1967 Border: In His Own Words

2011-05-20T15:22:00.000-04:00

President Obama has now stated that it is the policy of his administration that a Palestinian state should rise in the 1967 borders with agreed land swaps. Prime Minister Netanyahu immediately called those borders “indefensible,” insisting that Obama should instead honor “U.S. commitments made to Israel in 2004″ by his predecessor, George W. Bush, in an exchange of letters with Ariel Sharon.

Bush wrote Sharon:

As part of a final peace settlement, Israel must have secure and recognized borders, which should emerge from negotiations between the parties. … In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.

Clearly, Bush's letter can be interpreted in various ways, including an invitation to consider the land swaps Obama anticipates. More important, Obama's formulation is precisely the same as that of Secretary Rice, who stipulated the 1967 border when she kicked off negotiations between Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas three years ago. Those negotiations broke down over the extent of the swaps, not over the principle of using the 1967 border, which Netanyahu now rejects.

As to whether the border would be "indefensible," perhaps it is best to listen directly to how President Abbas conceived of a deal when I spoke with him in Amman on January 21. Much has transpired since then, but I suspect that any reasonable person, listening to Abbas stipulate in his own words the suggestions, claims and conditions he put to Olmert, will doubt Netanyahu's effort to discredit the 1967 border or Abbas as a negotiating partner. You can listen to the entire interview here.

Berlin: A Coda

2011-05-14T16:04:00.000-04:00

A note from a reader:

I really enjoyed your recent column on Berlin... I'm living here for 6 months, running an exchange program for my university. I was particularly struck by your line: "Can you not see how we reject what was monumental here?"

For an excellent example of that, I'd suggest a visit to Tempelhof airport, which is now no longer an airport, but a huge area for roller skaters, kite flyers, bicyclists, dog walkers, grill parties, and so forth. It's an amazing re-purposing of the space, and it's best to see it soon, before it's more "developed," which is happening to much of Berlin (they're apparently going to add a big climbing wall, etc.).

The airport buildings are some of the most striking examples of "monumental" (i.e. facist) architecture, and from the street, as one always had to approach them in the past, they are overwhelming. But from the airport runways and fields, with the perspective of a distance that was normally not available to the public, even these buildings don't seem monumental anymore, but strike me as almost graceful, but also insignificant. Interestingly, the architect for Tempelhof, Ernst Sagebiel, had been project leader...in Erich Mendelsohn's architectural practice in the '20s. Mendelsohn is one of my favorite architects, and in Israel he designed among other things Chaim Weizmann's house.

Also, one of the more bizarre relics of Hitler's megalomania is the Schwerbelastungskörper, which was built to study the feasibility for building a massive "arc de triumph" on the north-south axis of "Welthauptstadt Germania," as Hitler (and Albert Speer) imagined the future of Berlin. It was to be several times larger than the Arc de Triumph in Paris.

The Schwerbelastungskörper is located several blocks west of Tempelhof airport, a 15-minute walk far from the S-Sudkreuz S-Bahn, and very close to the 104 bus. From U-Tempelhof, or you can take Bus 104 to the Kolonnenbrücke bus stop (heading west--just a few stops).

Best regards,

Jeffrey Wallen, Professor of Comparative Literature,
Hampshire College

Berlin And Tel Aviv: Independence Day

2011-05-10T22:49:00.003-04:00

This is Berlin, and we are traveling on Israeli Independence Day; so the little piece of moral kitsch on our breakfast table felt curiously precious, a little reminder of how many decisions people have to make to infuse a society with civilized responses, or to serve notice of the lonely other’s story—the counterintuitive principles, curricula, and “recommendations” that pull us out of our tribe and into the human condition.

You see a great many such decisions in Berlin, so many you get the feeling the city was rebuilt as if from tiny liberal bricks. Almost nowhere is there a German flag without the flag of the European Union flying beside it. Berlin, indeed, is the informal capital of the EU, not only because of German banks, but because the city would never aim to be anything so vulgar as the formal capital.

The architecture is almost transparent in its intent. The Reichstag, just to the left of the Brandenburg gate, is rebuilt to “quote” the way the building looked after it was bombed; also to reveal the people—citizens, tourists, though the words "Dem Deutschen Volke" is still carved into its walls—walking a circular path to the highest point in its rotunda. Watch them, and you hear in your mind the word Deutschen Volke spoken gently, tragically, maybe a little neurotically, the cadences of Brahms’ Deutsches Requiem, which was written back when German meant something liberating and secular. Transparency is itself an architectural principle here. The chancellery next door looks like a small mountain of glass blocks, inviting us to spy on Angela Merkel yawning after a long day.

AT ALMOST NO place in Berlin can you see buildings rising above the human level, five or six stories, perhaps, each building renovated slightly differently (that is, with window treatments and colors), aiming for simple bourgeois elegance. They look like new condos in Cambridge Massachusetts, except perhaps for the commercial buildings in Potsdamer Platz, announcing the pleasures of Sony and Disney. The other exception is the violently ugly radio tower in the Alexanderplatz, built by the DDR to make a statement now received ironically as a symbol of the regime’s hubris and failure. Everywhere are tributes to cosmopolitanism, a museum of world cultures, an institute of world science, a street of world cuisines: a world of self-chastisement for the treatment of Turkish workers. And tributes to the once quintessential cosmopolitan Germans, German Jews, are now memorialized in every possible conspicuous space.

Irony is the key to Berlin, I think. The winged victory tower anchoring the Tiergarten, pointing to the Brandenburg Gate, or the Von Moltke Bridge over the Spree, or the Soviet Army Memorial, or the Checkpoint Charlie museum—all of these monuments—seem to say: Wars are over; Europeans have manifestly outgrown them, just by putting some familiar laws and protections in place: permeable borders, a common currency, the kind things Pennsylvania did with Virginia long ago. And wasn't Bismarck and his generation hopelessly unimaginative, at least as compared with what Germany and Europe have become?

The Winged Victory is just what the city needs to remind it of its pathetic story. The Junker imperial ambition, so blinkered by a world of marches and bayonets, so oblivious to machine guns, so innocent in its mimicry and stupidity, lead the world down a path unimaginable in its catastrophe, then on to the madness of bloodlust and revenge. Bismarck, the monument’s real creator, now seems such a smaller than life figure. Bigger than life is the Holocaust memorial, an abstract cemetery of stones at the other end of the boulevard, just to the right of the Brandenburg Gate, occupying nearly as much real estate as the Reichstag itself.

Of course, Germany being Germany, the card on out breakfast table does suggest a kind of social engineering, or at least some transcendent coordination. Make a friend: it is something Absolute Mind recommends, like an Audi blinking you to an oil change. Yet the whole city seems to be saying, in every corner, You didn’t expect this, did you? Can you not see how we reject what was monumental here? Can you see how modern we’ve become, how we see that we preserve our past only by holding it at arm’s length, using it as material for the individual’s muse—that we, better than anyone but the Jews, perhaps, know where things lead when you fail to put up a thousand little barriers against what comes naturally.

I AM THINKING of Israel’s Independence Day in Berlin, at breakfast, though not for the obvious reasons. Actually, no other city in the world feels like the new Berlin to me as much as the newer Tel Aviv. No other city shares so deeply in a common ambition and common horror out of which each newness is sprung.

Externally, Israel’s great city is renovating itself in much the same way as Berlin, taking socialist blocs and fitting them out for a bourgeois revolution. And Tel Aviv’s irresistibly cosmopolitan nature impresses itself on the senses in much the same way: Russian theater, Arab melodies, Thai food, American everything: the place ostensibly closed to Arabs yet where gay Arabs find a refuge. But at a deeper level, the old modernism of the new Tel Aviv, what we used to call Zionism, seems to me a precursor of this rehabilitated German way of looking at the nation. Independence Day always makes me wish Israelis had not forgotten this modernism, even if Tel Aviv unselfconsciously practices it.

To have a Jewish state meant a place where Jews could breathe in what was best in the cultures of Europe and breathe out what was enduring, or innovative, in a civilization of ancestors, Rabbis, and dissenters. It would be a nation of people holding “the people” at arms’ length. It would be egalitarian, internationalist, progressive. Otherwise, why not just go to America? Then again, ironically, were it not for this transcendent dream, would Zionists not have taken Arab objections to dispossession more seriously?

Mofaz's Permission

2011-05-06T04:26:00.004-04:00

Should Mahmud Abbas tell Bibi Netanyahu that he would not engage with the Israeli government unless every minister was, individually, prepared to endorse a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders, renounce the use of force in the occupied territory, renounce settlement, oh, and represent a faction with no civilian blood on its hands? It would be a small coalition, without Shas, Yisrael Beiteinu, National Union, and half of the Likud. Secretary Clinton, so far, is striking the right note.

Yesterday, on Israeli radio, there was report that Shaul Mofaz, the former Chief of Staff and Kadima's Number Two--the Chairman, Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, and former Defense Minister to boot--told Yediot's Nahum Barnea in a soon to be published interview that Palestine's unity government is an opportunity that cannot be missed. Watch this story. Mofaz may well give the Israeli center, and the whole of the Western diplomatic community, permission to support Abbas's efforts to make unity work--perhaps even give Palestinian democracy the respect it deserves.

Note: I'm going to be traveling for a couple of weeks and will be blogging haphazardly. This is probably a good time to sign up for email delivery of the blog. New Yorkers: I'll be appearing at YIVO on the evening of May 18 on a panel honoring Philip Roth.

Palestinian Politics: Getting Interesting

2011-05-03T12:00:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project revealed that among six predominantly Islamic countries, Muslims in the Palestinian territories "voiced the most support for the assassinated al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden." Something like a third of respondents admired him and trusted that he "would do the right thing in world affairs."

Yesterday, also, Hamas officials in Gaza condemned the killing of bin Laden, and Ismail Haniya, the leader of the Hamas government about to sign a unity deal with Fatah, calling it a “continuation of the United States policy of destruction.” PA Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad strongly condemned bin Laden and applauded his death. But credible reports suggest Fayyad, among every Israeli's favorite Palestinians, will likely be ousted from the prime minister's job as a consequence of the deal.

It is hard to imagine more perfect evidence for Netanyahu's case that Israel has no partner; that the unity deal should result in the West's boycott of the Palestinian government; and that continuing the war on terror means strengthening Israel's hand in dealing with the territories. And just to show it is not afraid to lead, Netanyahu's government, led by Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz, announced that Israel has suspended the routine transfer of customs and VAT paid by Palestinians to the PA, some $88, or about 70 percent of PA revenues.

IT IS DANGEROUS to ignore this evidence. It is even more dangerous to ignore mitigating evidence. The Pew poll actually shows a precipitous drop in support for bin Laden since the dark days of the Intifada, when his popularity ran as high as 70 percent. Hamas's antipathy for Fayyad may be great; but even Fatah moderates from Gaza like former minister Sufian Abu Zaida--whom Hamas physically attacked a couple of years ago--openly support the unity deal (he reiterated this at a J Street panel in Jerusalem we appeared on last Saturday night); and Abu Zaida, too, expressed skepticism about Fayyad's legitimacy, since the prime minister was appointed by Abbas and has never been elected.

At the same time, Fayyad's popularity far outstrips that of Hamas. Pollster Faysal Awartani said 58 percent of respondents now say they want Fayyad to be head of the new government. Fayyad himself insists that suspending payments should not stop unity. Abbas (as I wrote in my last post), would easily beat Hamas's Haniya. By the way, about a third of Israelis would like to see Rabin's assassin freed; the power of fanatic and orthodox nationalists in various Israeli governments has not prevented the world, or even Palestinians, from dealing with them.

The point is that Palestinian politics is on the verge of becoming electoral politics, which means on the verge of becoming interesting. Fatah is now the party of state building, Hamas, the party of resistance to occupation. Hamas has committed (or endorsed) terrorist acts and is still an unlikely partner for peacemaking. But it is a faction representing residual hatred and desperate poverty, not the secret psyche of every Palestinian. Thwart state building and economic growth as Steinitz is doing--increase Palestine's sense of isolation--and Hamas will gain ground, in spite of the drop in its standing. But show Palestinians that a state is imminent, and that Hamas has been compelled by Abbas's success in recruiting support from global powers, and Fatah gains.

Tomorrow we learn the details of the agreement and probably a good deal of the government's composition. Expect the finance ministry to remain in Fatah's hands, if not in Fayyad's. In any case, now, more than ever, Abbas's hands need to be strengthened. I trust Clinton's State Department understands this, even if Netanyahu's cabinet has other ideas.

Fatah vs. Hamas: An Analogy

2011-04-30T03:23:00.005-04:00

I wrote in my last post: "Fatah now represents the power and prestige of the Palestinian middle class, the dictatorship of its bourgeoisie: growing businesses and banks, women's emancipation, universities, infrastructure and construction projects, regional networks of intellectual capital, a sovereign wealth fund..." This article, from Germany's Der Spiegel, will give you some better idea of what I mean.

The Palestinians hope to receive United Nations approval for an independent state in September, and the chances are good that the world will approve. In the last year and a half, Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has brought radical change to the Palestinian Autonomous Authority, at least in the West Bank. Ministries now operate much more effectively than in the past, when they were little more teahouses for the minions of former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. A commission is discussing a constitution, and Fayyad has had 2,250 kilometers (1,406 miles) of roads paved and connected villages to the power grid. Unemployment has declined to 17 percent in the West Bank, compared with 37.4 percent in the Gaza Strip. More than 500 new companies have been established in the last few months alone. From the UN to the World Bank, many seem convinced that Palestine is ready for independence.

Ramallah now has a five-star hotel, sushi restaurants and parking meters. A rotating, panoramic restaurant will soon open its doors on the 28th floor of the Palestine Trade Tower, floating above Ramallah like a spaceship. The economy grew by 9.3 percent last year. Samir Abdullah, the former planning minister, current president of the Rotary Club and head of an economic research institute, says: "When we finally have access to our resources and are no longer restricted by the occupation, our economy will be able to grow by 25 percent a year, and then we'll be the new tiger economy."

Fatah's conception of statehood, rooted in an emerging civil society--its spine, a promising private sector, along with its secular freedoms, including cooperation with Israel--is now far more palpable than what Hamas has to offer. The problem, again, is that a promising private sector is not necessarily a sustainable one. Statehood will be stillborn without an end to the occupation, soon, and everybody knows it. The elephant in the room is Israel's control of access of people and goods, as well as occupation of Area C and the closure of Gaza to West Bank businesses.

Fatah offers the state. What Hamas offers is anger and solidarity in the face of this stifling occupation.

THE ANALOGY IS to what the Irgun offered in the late 1940s as compared to the Jewish Agency leadership under Ben-Gurion and Weizmann. The Histadrut and Hevrat Ovdim built up the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine in the 1930 within the British occupation, and founded the Haganah defense force. The Irgun, by contrast, projected the charisma of sacrifice and violent resistance. Its leaders (demagogically) accused Ben-Gurion and his circles of collaborating with the British precisely because building requires cooperation. Blowing something up requires only imagined purity.

If the US hopes to influence Palestinian politics, it must now show ordinary Palestinians that Abbas's leadership of the unity government will indeed lead to statehood. If it follows Netanyahu's lead, and boycotts Abbas's unity government--reinforcing despair of ending the crushing occupation, or ending the settlement project--it will not strengthen Fatah, but play directly into Hamas's hands.

Abbas has renounced violence, recognized Israel, and committed to democratic process. That should be good enough. It will take a generation of sovereignty for an underground movement like Hamas to either disappear or be domesticated into just another political party.

"The appeal to halt our work for some time," Ben-Gurion told the St. James Palace Conference in 1939, "resembles an appeal by happy families, blessed with many children and living in comfort, to a woman after many years of childlessness is about to give birth... When she is overtaken with birth pangs, the neighboring women rebuke her and shout: 'Could you stop this noise so that we can sleep in peace?' The mother cannot stop. It is possible to kill the child or kill the mother; but it is impossible to expect her to cease giving birth."

Palestinian Unity: "No Plan B"

2011-04-28T09:52:00.017-04:00

"A 'unity government' or 'technocracy'--as the Palestinians called it yesterday--is a nice but empty headline," Aluf Benn writes in this morning's Haaretz. He goes on:

In real life, there is no a-political rule and there are no egalitarian governments. There is always a ruling side with partners being dragged behind it. The stronger, more organized, better armed side, i.e. Hamas, will rule the Palestinian Authority and the PLO, not 'technocrats.' This is how the communists took over East Europe after WWII.

Benn is putting Israeli fears in a nutshell--not unreasonable fears--but also revealing Israeli reflexes about Palestinian politics, and politics in general, perhaps. Aren't the choices complex for Palestinians? You hit the phrases "real life" and "better armed" and you can almost hear the Sabra's mind going click. Of course Hamas will win. That's the way the world works. Don't be naive. Think of Communists in Eastern Europe. Never miss a chance to miss...

IT IS TIME to get real, which is not quite the same as what Benn means by "real life." Is Hamas stronger and more organized than Fatah? No. Fatah still dominates the institutions of the PLO. It is still Palestine's incumbent, the custodian of its history and manager of its patronage. As Khalil Shikaki's most recent polls show, Hamas has lost popular support in Gaza since the split. Insiders suggest this is not only because its confrontations with Israel have produced devastation, but also because of its religious and other repressions and the corrupt profiteering of Hamas leaders from the tunnels. Nor has Hamas's patron in Damascus exactly distinguished himself. As the Arab spring evolved, there have been models of "steadfastness" that did not have an Islamist cast.

As of March, even after the collapse of Abbas's strategy of engaging with Israel, Shakiki's polls show the president winning the presidential election in both the West Bank and Gaza, though Fatah's Marwan Barghouti would win more handily. In Gaza, about 70 percent say the Haniyeh government has been "so-so" to "very bad." Only about 50 percent of West Bankers say this of Salaam Fayyad's government. Over 70 percent of Gazans believed that a Fatah win would be necessary to lift any potential international boycott of Palestine.

Abbas's police force in the West Bank is armed well-enough: not nearly as well-armed as it might be (Abbas complained to me in January that, because of American caution, his police force has one rifle for every two officers), but capable of holding its own. And Hamas has been infiltrated by both Fatah and Israeli collaborators in the West Bank; Fayyad has thrown a good many Hamas people in jail, which is why, surprisingly, more West Bankers than Gazans are dubious about press and other freedom in the West Bank.

For God's sake, Communists took power in Eastern Europe because Stalin's troops occupied these countries. What significant prestige Salaam Fayyad has lost since moving from Finance Minister to Prime Minister has to do precisely with Israeli troops occupying his country; though most appreciate the law and order, Fayyad's police, unfairly perhaps, is regarded as something imposed by an outside, hostile power.

WHAT BENN REALLY means, I guess, is that Hamas has become the symbol of armed resistance to occupation--because of its missiles, rejectionism, bloody-mindedness, etc. In this he is surely right. And the polls over the years show that Hamas popularity rises inversely with pessimism about peace, corresponding with Israeli hardening of occupation and settlement. Why then assume Hamas will "rule" unless Benn is also just assuming the status quo from which rejectionists gain? Why is unity a "bonanza" for Netanyahu and Lieberman not a "bonanza" for Hamas?

Perhaps Benn is not intending this, but you read the phrase "stronger, more organized, better armed" and the image evoked is of a defeated people, living in rubble, not terribly well-educated, surviving from day to day; a people mad as hell about Zionism, or the occupation, or from being pushed around--in any case, tolerant of atrocities, and easily impressed by the militia and soup kitchen at the mosque.

Some Palestinians fit the template, no doubt. But what Benn is missing is how Fatah--which began as a secular nationalist insurgency--has over the last decade become closely associated with international sources of funding and investment. By implication, Fatah now represents the power and prestige of the Palestinian middle class, the dictatorship of its bourgeoisie: growing businesses and banks, women's emancipation, universities, infrastructure and construction projects, regional networks of intellectual capital, a sovereign wealth fund. It means impressive, corresponding successes of Palestinian entrepreneurs in Jordan. Fatah means the promise of gaining international recognition for a state that is not simply an armed gang with a grievance. It means "September."

BENN IS RIGHT that the word technocrat can be empty; but in this case it is a euphemism we need to understand. Abbas's Fatah now means an endorsement of a development path that puts emphasis on the expansion and valorization of the Palestinian private sector: the creation of a viable state's embryo within the occupation, though things cannot stop here. Abbas, and Fayyad, too, know that the womb is too small and inhospitable for this embryo to survive without an end to occupation.

Unity means that Abbas has reached the limits of this strategy, since talks with Olmert ended, and Obama has proven unwilling to stop Netanyahu's settlement project. Nevertheless, Abbas's Fatah symbolizes building, diplomatic victories, streams of funding, which are still more impressive than anything Hamas can point to. (A third of West Bankers say "the spread of unemployment and poverty" is the biggest problem they face, significantly greater than even the occupation and disunity, though you double-click on this and you find that poverty and the occupation's crimping of businesses are intertwined.)

It is therefore very premature to write Abbas and Fatah off. Yes, young people in the West Bank find Hamas's hard-line message appealing, the way young Israelis favor the right. But almost 50 percent of Palestinians say the top priority is "Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders and the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital." Only about 25 percent suggest the priority is "obtaining the right of return to refuges to their 1948 towns and villages," code for fighting Israel to the finish.

IN JANUARY, AFTER I interviewed Abbas in Amman, I went out to dinner with a friend, a senior member of Abbas's economic team. I asked him how, in view of what was unfolding in Egypt, he deals with the obvious pressures.

After all, I said, the development path of any emerging economy requires entry into the global system. This is bound to produce serious inequalities between educated and not-so-educated people, which in turn will produce explosive tensions. "But in the case of Palestine," I said, "the tensions have an extra dimension, for development is under occupation. Inequalities seem to be a product of occupation, and entrepreneurs getting rich seem like Quislings." My friend thought for a moment, then looked me sadly in the eye. "I have no Plan B," he said. I could have kissed him.

Indeed, nobody in Palestine has a Plan B. "We don't really know what unity means, since the document is not yet released," Sam Bahour told me this morning. "But let's keep our eye on certain things. Did the unity agreement get a yellow light from the Americans? We'll see if the money keeps flowing. Fayyad is rumored to be out of the prime minister's job, because he has become a focus for Hamas resentment; but will he retain his job as Finance Minister? That would be a sign of continuity, though the circles of business people and professionals he represents will continue irrespective of whether or not he stays."

Other things to notice. The same way Hamas's patron in Syria has lost ground, Abbas lost his patron in Egypt. Perhaps unity is simply a way for both sides to reassess and save face. Certainly, the outcome of elections in Egypt will give heart to one side or another.

Abbas said the PLO, which he heads, would still be responsible for "handling politics, negotiations." But unity agreement almost certainly means Abbas will not entertain new, direct negotiations with Israel, or perhaps even proximity talks with Mitchell, whose role Abbas just pooh-poohed to Dan Ephron in Newsweek. Then again, if a Palestinian state is indeed going to gain international recognition at the UN, the free election of a united people will be necessary sooner or later.

"The key is that the world should work with whatever government is elected," Bahour, no supporter of Hamas, told me. "Even Hamas people will quickly learn the facts of life. The first thing Hamas people did when they entered the government in 2006 was approve a contract with an Israeli oil supplier. They will learn responsibility now as well."

The Finger

2011-04-26T02:53:00.000-04:00

In response to my recent post on borders, Doug Suisman, the urban architect and planner behind the RAND Corporation's ARC Project, sent me this thoughtful note:

I agree that the “fingers” of Ariel and Maale Adumim (more like a thumb in the latter case) are a nearly insuperable obstacle to the needed contiguity for successful statehood. It would be like asking New Yorkers to accept a miles-long high-security barrier belonging to Canada or Mexico (or perhaps more aptly in terms of hostility, Cuba) interposed between Manhattan and Newark, or Angelenos to accept such a wall between downtown Los Angeles and the port of Long Beach.

In my view, it’s not so much because of the actual settlement area itself – problematic though this is – which is more like the fingernail on the finger. It’s the whole security cordon needed to connect the settlement to the mother ship – the finger to the fingernail. Israel’s perceived security and sovereignty interests demand that the settlements be the tips of peninsulas rather than islands. (It’s the old French Hill / Hebrew University problem writ large). Maale Adumim and Ariel are described as settlements, but can also be read as salients: “A military position that projects into the position of the enemy."

I do think it would be possible for Israel to keep the original core of Maale Adumim, if the Palestinians could run the Arc in the valley between it and Jerusalem. In other words, two umbilicals: an Israeli one east to west, and a Palestinian one north to south. As you know, such a double-umbilical, or dual sovereignty crossroads, was employed twice in the ‘48 partition plan, one near Qustina in the center and the other near Nazareth in the north. I don’t know if it would have ever worked.

Israel might refuse to accept this as a security arrangement, and the Palestinians might be reluctant to accept it as a sovereignty arrangement. But as you pointed out in your NYTimes mag piece, prospects for peace in the region may stand perched on such precise, and unusual, geographic arrangements.

Also, Haaretz's Amir Oren reminds Republicans that Brent Scowcroft, Henry Kissinger's most distinguished acolyte, has been urging Obama to present a comprehensive plan, including a view on the territories to be exchanged. since before the new administration come into office:

"When Obama was elected, the Republican Scowcroft and the Democrat Zbigniew Brzezinski both entreated him to act immediately to implement the four-point plan for a Palestinian state alongside Israel within the 1967 borders - even before Israel's 2009 elections and with the hope of influencing the elections' outcome - but to no avail. The plan envisaged minor and agreed-on modifications of the border, compensation instead of the right of return for the Palestinian refugees, Jerusalem as a joint capital of two states, and security for Israel by demilitarizing the Palestinian state and stationing an international force there. Scowcroft also supported the idea of an American force on the Golan Heights if peace is achieved with Syria and territories are returned to that country.

Obama has wasted two years in the expectation that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will pull himself together. Scowcroft has seen four decades of missed opportunities pass before his eyes. Obama should learn from Scowcroft not merely the layout of the plan, which would receive the backing of certain groups among the Republicans, but also the need for immediate action. Fears about upsetting the Israeli government, or about the president's rivals in U.S. politics joining forces with the supporters of a rigid Israeli line, could be a recipe for failure and disaster."