Tragedy of Past Decade, Hope for the Next

I was 11 years old, and it was my first time back to Israel since my family had left, when I was five. We decided to visit the [Western] Wall, and I remember, clearly, being surprised by how many soldiers were there, by the flood of olive green around the ancient, cool sandstone. I asked my parents about the soldiers and they shrugged and responded, “That’s just how it is in Israel.” It was 11:00 in the morning, and the date was September 28, 2000.

I began my personal struggle to understand and make sense of Israel and the conflict with the Palestinians in what was arguably the worst decade in the history of the conflict. True, they have all been pretty bad, but what made this past decade so painful was that it followed the 1990s, its glow of optimism and potential and hope shattered by violence---and not only violence, but violence laced with despair. But, that confusing September day at the Wall prompted me to begin to learn more, and to care more; my hopes for peace were born right about when much of the world’s had died.

The past decade was marred by the blood and brutality of military raids and suicide bombs, by men with guns and murdered infants, by hopelessness and fury. The past decade was torn by war: war with the Palestinians, war with Hizballah, threats of war with Syria and talks of war with Iran, seemingly incessant war culminating in the horrors of the Gaza crisis, one year ago.

The past decade was one of desperate half-fixes, of incomplete withdrawals, of separation barriers, and of flawed reliance on the fake panacea of democratic elections. The past decade was one of international polarization, of increased talking and decreased listening, of formulas of right and wrong, at fault and blameless.

The past decade was one of American complacency, of Israeli repression, of Palestinian radicalization. The past decade was one of misery and of tragedy. And yet I refuse to believe that “That’s just how it is in Israel.” Or in Palestine. Or in our world.

We must enter this new decade not swaddled in nearly giddy hope, as many were at the beginning of the past decade, but rather cautiously hopeful, tentatively optimistic. Allow me, in a burst of such tentative optimism, to paint a picture of the potential for the next decade:

Obama and Mitchell are preparing for a new, revised and strengthened effort to get the process moving in January. Bibi, to the surprise of many, seems somewhat serious about making peace. Talks between Hamas and Israel over the release of Gilad Shalit could progress and lead to a landslide of potential: Gilad would be released in exchange for about 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. With his release, the Israeli government would lose their central rationale for the morally odious and strategically blind blockade of Gaza.

Moreover, chances are high that Marwan Barghouti would likely be released as one of the Palestinian prisoners. A reformed revolutionary with immense Palestinian street cred, there is a high chance he would take the reigns of the faltering Fatah. Barghouti also has a better shot than perhaps any Palestinian leader at forging a unity government between Hamas and Fatah. Only with such a unity government could Hamas be brought into the process as a negotiating party, and not a deal-breaker.

Avigdor Lieberman, arguably the most internationally loathed figure in the Israeli ruling coalition today, is currently on trial for complex corruption charges: his removal would have an impact both symbolically and politically, as he is the beating heart of his rightist, nationalist party. Negotiations with Syria, under already existent frameworks, could lead to peace between the two countries, and shift the dynamics of the region greatly. The Israeli-Palestinian peace process could get back underway, and perhaps this is the decade in which the dream of an independent Palestine and a safe, non-occupying Israel could finally be realized.

Let nation not lift up sword against nation, may we learn war no more. Happy New Year and may this decade be better and more peaceful than the last!

Israeli films, and 2 in particular

Israel's film industry has made remarkable strides in recent years, as has its related arena of television production. I only saw two offerings at this year's 24th Israel Film Festival in New York a couple of weeks ago, but they were both memorable.

"Bruriah" is a somewhat enigmatic feature that involves a contemporary religious family in Jerusalem, on the cusp of Modern Orthodoxy and the more rigid "Black Hat" world of ultra-Orthodoxy. The attractive wife in a youthful 40-ish couple, Bruriah, searches for the last remaining copy of a book her father wrote about 35 years before, which was banned by a renowned rabbi for exploring an off-color little story in the Talmud.

Her father expanded upon a brief commentary by Rashi, the great medieval Talmudic authority, who had recounted the tale of Bruriah, an intellectually sharp and self-confident woman brought low by her scholarly husband. This man had recruited one of his students to seduce her---supposedly proving that a woman's intellect is shallow and her character inferior to that of men.

The modern-day Bruriah's father was excommunicated for refusing to renounce his work, and copies of his book were publicly burned. The Talmudic tale intertwines with flashbacks to the book-burning incident years before and the contemporary struggles of today's Bruriah and her daughter---who wants to enroll in a religious seminary that trains young women seeking to break the Orthodox ban against female rabbis.

On the surface, Bruriah's struggle is to find that one unburnt copy of her father's book; more fundamentally it's about her quest for fulfillment as a person, which includes her need to express physical desire. This last part plays out boldly, but not as one might think.

The second film, "For My Father," is a more usual story for addressing the conflict with the Palestinians, but in a fresh way. It will begin a commercial run in the US shortly.

Terek is driven to Tel Aviv by his handlers to explode himself in a crowded market place. But his detonator malfunctions and he finds a small electronics shop that will order the part he needs to repair it. The cantankerous but kindly shopkeeper has no idea what he needs the part for; in the meantime, Terek agrees to repair his leaky roof in exchange for the part. During the course of his weekend wait in their home at the back of the shop, he discovers the tragedy of their lives---the fact that their son, their only child, died in a recklessly mishandled army training exercise.

Terek also meets Keren, a hip young person replete with body piercings and provocatively revealing clothing, who has fled her rigidly religious family. They become almost inseparable.

And we learn what has motivated Terek to become a suicide bomber. His father discovers that his son is talented in football (i.e., soccer) and gets him on the soccer team representing the Israeli-Arab city of Nazareth. But he must struggle against closures, as the Arab-Palestinian conflict deepens, to get his son into Israel from their native Tulkarem on the West Bank. By hook or crook he succeeds, only to arouse the suspicion of local Palestinian nationalists who threaten him in the belief that he is a collaborator with the Israelis.

Terek volunteers for his fatal mission to redeem his father's name. Hence, the film's English title; the actual translation from the Hebrew is "Weekend in Tel Aviv."

This is a deadly serious movie that plays largely as a comedy. See it if you can.

Sieradski vs. Ruskay: A conflict of generations

This past Saturday evening, the mens' club of Congregation B'nai Jeshurun, the well-known progressive shul on Manhattan's Upper West Side, hosted a discussion between Daniel Sieradski, a 30 year-old entrepreneurial blogger and political activist, and John Ruskay, the executive vice president and CEO of UJA-Federation.

Sieradski founded Jewschool and the Orthodox Anarchist, two sites that present a self-consciously youthful critique of the established Jewish community. Ruskay worked his way from being a leader of the liberal 1970s group, Breira, which attempted to move American Jewry into challenging Israel's lethargy in pursuing peace, into the highest reaches of professional leadership within New York's Jewish community. He rose from heading the afternoon Hebrew school at a Reconstructionist synagogue to a leadership role in that movement, into an executive position at the 92nd Street Y and then to the UJA-Federation.

Sieradski, raised Orthodox, made his way in and out, and back into religious observance over the years, and is involved with what he calls "an indie" (for independent) minyan. Their polite and articulate clash of perspectives was fascinating.

John Rusakay sees his career as consistently advancing a uniquely Jewish value for and about the building of community. It became apparent in their discussion, probably reflecting the difference in their generations, that Ruskay holds up a more collectivist, consensus-building ideal over Sieradski's impatient individualistic zeal. For example, Sieradski mentioned that he had worked on UJA's Web committee in 2002, only to experience the frustration of having all his proposals rebuffed or ignored.

Another complaint that Sieradski mentioned was that when he introduced a website for readers to post ratings of neighborhood shuls online, his contact at UJA-Federation was "horrified." He then went his own way. Ruskay urged that he re-engage with the community.

Sieradsky was an organizer of an unofficial bloggers' session at the J Street conference in Washington, in October. At B'nai Jeshurun he expressed support for J Street, but at the conference, most of his fellow bloggers projected a haughty aloofness toward J Street's liberal Zionism, with some giving voice to hostility toward anything Zionist.

John Ruskay demanded that his few remarks regarding Israel not be quoted by the two newspaper reporters in the room. This was for at least two reasons: that he needed to represent the entire New York Jewish community and wouldn't want to be seen as divisive, and that he didn't want to inadvertently say something that might be misunderstood. Unfortunately, it's all too easy to step into a minefield regarding Israel.

T. Mitchell reviews book on US diplomacy

This posting is written by Dr. Thomas Mitchell, a frequent contributor to this blog, who is an independent scholar on the Mideast conflict, among other subjects:

Beyond America’s Grasp: A Century of Failed Diplomacy in the Middle East by Stephen P. Cohen (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2009; 256 pp.; $27.00) is an attempt to provide readers with a basic overview of American diplomacy in the Middle East since World War I, with an emphasis on the post-World War II era. Rather than being organized chronologically, it is organized by country in separate chapters with an initial prologue and a chapter on Woodrow Wilson’s involvement with the Middle East at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919.

There are separate chapters on Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Israel and Lebanon (the latter two combined into a single chapter). Then there are four chapters dealing with Zionism, the creation of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This account runs through the Second Lebanon War of 2006, but does not include the Gaza war of 2008-09.

The jacket blurb states that Prof. Cohen has made over 150 trips to the Middle East in a professional and personal capacity in 40 years, starting with the 1967 war. He is the president of the Center for Middle East Peace and Development. And he has taught at leading universities in the United States and the Arab world. He is also associated with Americans for Peace Now and the Israel Policy Forum. Unfortunately, beyond relating a couple of incidents from his own experience, we see very little of this personal involvement. The book appears to be the product of its extensive bibliography.

Cohen offers no brilliant solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, no magic formulas or conspiracy theories that explain everything. For those wishing for something a little lighter than William Quandt’s The Peace Process or Dennis Ross’s The Missing Peace, this book adequately covers the main points of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as the history of America’s interactions with the main players in the region: the Zionist and Israeli leaderships, the Shah of Iran, the mullahs running the Islamic Republic and the various Arab nationalists from Gamel Abd al-Nasser to Saddam Hussein. He attempts to explain why the various players behave the way that they do based on their cultures, biographies and political circumstances.

This book is not necessary for veteran students of the conflict, but they might learn a thing or two. It is recommended for those who know the region mainly through the news media. It could serve as a supplementary text for an introductory course. This is not “must” reading but good for those wishing to flesh out the stories that they’ve heard over the years.

Paul Berman on New Left & antisemitism

Among many other honors and distinctions, Paul Berman is a MacArthur "genius" Award winner. On Dec. 9, I attended a stimulating panel discussion he participated in at NYU's Deutsches Haus (the German cultural center). He and a Rutgers history professor, Belinda Davis, discussed a new book about the 1960s-'70s era New Left in West Germany ("Utopia or Auschwitz") with its author, Hans Kundnani, a journalist currently based in the UK.

As both a one-time student activist and as author of "A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968," Berman's a natural authority on a work about the New Left. By way of a linguistic coincidence, the West German and US New Left movements were both shaped and spearheaded by student organizations known by the same initials, SDS.

To a significant degree, the panel wound up discussing antisemitism. The terrorist edge of the German New Left veered into an antisemitic direction, motivated in part by its embrace of the Palestinian cause after the Six Day War. Before June '67, the German New Left was understood to be generally sympathetic to Israel. This changed almost instantly, and radically, with Israel's victory in '67.

The panel mentioned some representative figures in the German New Left unselfconsciously drifting into rhetoric that echoed their Nazi forebears. Perhaps most graphic was the behavior of the German hijackers of a civilian airliner to Entebbe, Uganda in 1976, when they separated out all the Jews from among the passengers (not just the Israelis-- as Berman pointed out) and kept them as hostages. (All but one were eventually rescued in a spectacular Israeli commando raid, led on the ground by Bibi Netanyahu's older brother, Yonaton-- who wound up being the only rescuer killed.)

At one point, when someone else was speaking, Berman rolled up his sleeve and examined his upper arm; he explained later that he was checking to see if he still had marks from when a policeman had dragged him across a street and beaten him at a 1971 anti-war demonstration in Washington, DC. Berman mentioned that for several years after that event, his political acuity was compromised by his emotional reaction to that beating. He couldn't help but think of the cop as a fascist or Nazi, and perhaps the system he served as well.

This illustrated how both the American and German New Left became hyperbolic and distorted in their perceptions. But most threw around such epithets for dramatic effect only, not because they believed literally that the system was fascist or Nazi; Berman called this making a "cultural statement." Still, some did believe their own rhetoric, or acted as if they did.

I should note in this connection that Paul Berman is an authority on Joseph Martin "Joschka" Fischer, the former New Left radical and ex-Green Party leader who was Germany's foreign minister from 1998 to 2005 and the subject of Berman's 2005 book, "Power and the Idealists: Or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer, and its Aftermath." According to Berman, Fischer was astonished that some of his comrades started acting out their rhetoric with terrorism in the 1970s; he says that Fischer felt a need to change politically when he realized that he knew one of the Entebbe hijackers.

Not surprisingly, Berman revealed himself to not be a fan of Bill Ayers, the unrepentant leader of the Weather underground, drawing parallels with its more violent German counterpart, the Baader-Meinhof Gang or Red Army Faction. But he commented on the irony that LBJ's secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, who once spoke in that very room, was responsible for enormous violence and human suffering in pursuit of a basically good objective-- to attempt to prevent the victory in Vietnam of a totalitarian police state-- while Ayers, in pursuit of a sinister cause (according to Berman, to trigger a racial civil war that would establish a Communist dictatorship), committed relatively minor and mostly symbolic violence.

Most of the left would certainly argue with Berman's characterization of these things. I don't know if he's being fair in describing Ayers' motives; Ayers is unapologetic in insisting that he and his comrades' basic purpose was to stop massive atrocities committed abroad. But Berman is correct that the New Left (both in the US and internationally) lost reasonable perspective in allying with totalitarian revolutionary movements. Still, I'd add that the struggle against the Vietnam war, a movement which Berman participated in, was fully justified because the United States had lost its way morally, losing all sense of proportion and priority in pursuing its ostensibly good goals there.

P.S. I'm queasy over the possibility that our "best and brightest," this time in the form of our brilliant and well-meaning President, may be leading us into a Vietnam-like quagmire in Afghanistan. I still harbor hope that Obama's more measured and deliberate nature than that of LBJ, as well as differences in the two situations, will make for a better outcome, but I'm worried.

Enjoy Hanukkah, but let's look at history

History is of necessity an interpretive process, and these interpretations often spawn self-serving myths. National myths are not usually complete fabrications, but they tend to romanticize and sanitize real events. (NY Times columnist David Brooks published a marvelously intelligent commentary on "The Hanukkah Story" this past weekend.)

The traditional Hanukkah story is a source of pride for the Jewish people. We are taught that a small army of freedom fighters, the Maccabees, led by the heroic priestly family of Mattathias and his seven sons, successfully resisted the cruel pagan tyranny of the ancient Greco-Syrian Seleucid dynasty. This is not untrue, but it's only part of the story.

We are usually not taught the far more complex reality that the Maccabean war of liberation was also a civil war between rural “fundamentalist” religious adherents of the old order and the more educated and cosmopolitan Hellenized Jews of the city, who voluntarily and eagerly embraced the Greek culture of the Syrian empire. The Maccabees surely killed many of these “liberal” Jews in their struggle.

It is ironic that the Hasmonean family— the Maccabees’ ruling dynasty— within one generation of their victory for Jewish values over Hellenism, was taking Greek names, speaking Greek and transforming Judea into a Jewish Hellenistic kingdom. These rulers alienated the masses of the Jewish people by extreme acts of cruelty and debauchery. Their military prowess ultimately undermined their rule, as conquered peoples were converted to Judaism by the sword; Herod emerged from one such Judaized people to marry his way into the Hasmonean clan and murder them into extinction. Herod’s disastrously bloody reign led to Judea’s disintegration as an independent state and its domination by Rome.

Nevertheless, the Maccabees were brave and valiant warriors who did in fact win great victories over a powerful and authoritarian foreign enemy. But to take this snapshot in time as the whole picture is to accept a one-dimensional myth. For some of the reasons mentioned, Rabbinic Judaism accorded Hanukkah a minor religious status.

When considered within its historic context of bloody Jewish civil wars and despotic rule, both embedded within the Hanukkah story and in the eventual downfall of Judea within its wake, Hanukkah provides a cautionary tale. Fourteen years after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, we should be warned against the dangers of fratricidal hatred, of demonizing our political foes, and of failing to understand the need at times for compromise and accommodation.

(If these words sound familiar, you've probably been paying too much attention to this blog, but this is an update of a 2006 posting called "Hanukkah: A Cautionary Tale.")

Response to Friedman's 'narrative' thesis

Philip Borden worked as a contractor developing small businesses in post-Saddam Iraq; his book about this experience, Shaku Maku: On The Ground in Occupied Baghdad, was published in 2008. This is his response to Tom Friedman's Muslim "narrative" conception:

On a Saturday forty years ago, a friend of mine, an observant Jew I will call Shalom (not his real name), accepted an aliyah at the bima of a large synagogue. He used the moment to deliver a short, impassioned, disjointed speech on Judaism's loss of focus. Then he turned to the synagogue's famous rabbi, shot him in the head, and turned the gun on himself. Police later uncovered rambling writings they took to be the cause of his act.

The writings were mostly a gloss on Nietzche, but they also contained critiques of Judaism and of religion in general as having abandoned its humane roots. I had known Shalom as a very talented student. He took his studies to heart. He was driven to help the disadvantaged in any way he could. I found his motives and dedication admirable but his intensity uncomfortable. So did his other friends. We talked with him about it a lot. But Shalom was functional, clever, and funny, and all of us found him quirky but not dangerous.

What caused Shalom to lose his way? What accounted for his horrible final murderous acts? Was it German philosophy? Judaism? Oversensitivity to poverty? A "radical" narrative that urged dramatic action to call attention to the abandonment of the underprivileged? Were his friends or parents to blame for being insensitive or neglectful? Of course not.

As we were to learn, Shalom had become increasingly divorced from reality for environmental, chemical, or social reasons. His unbalance had amplified his oversensitivity into exquisite pain. He had disappeared from contact with his friends for months. We did not notice the changes because as students at different universities we did not have day to day contact with him. It turned out that while out of our sight Shalom had been committed twice and released twice over a three or four month period. We later learned that Shalom's parents feared the direction he was heading in but knew him also to have been a loving son and charming when in his head. They both committed and released him. In the end, Shalom was, in a word, crazy. In the end, the precise nature of the narrative in his head did not matter, because it was a crazy narrative. It was crazy because Shalom was crazy. To think any of us could have prevented his final act by correcting the narrative through education is a sick joke on Shalom, us, and perhaps the psychology profession.

Shalom's story raises two issues related to Hasan's case. One is that, like Shalom, the Hasan who committed the act was unbalanced, psychotic, and unable to perceive the world through the same lens of meaning that most of us apply. Hasan's reasoning was not Islamic. It was not reasoning as we know it. It was a distorted narrative that was not tethered anywhere. It was crazy, because Hasan was crazy. The second issue is that Hasan was Muslim. The crime here is the abandonment of Hasan the broken human being by a system that did not want to deal with him and that has politicized everything Muslim so that no narrative makes sense. The crime here is blaming some narrative for the craziness, rather than vice-versa.

Tom Friedman's sense of "the Radical Muslim Narrative" as a large conditioning element for policy that also frames response throughout the Muslim world raises far more serious issues than Hasan's unhinging. All of us are influenced by multiple competing narratives, frames of reference, reference group pressures, memes, climates of opinion, or whatever we call the current environmental factor of the month. When those frames collapse into one frame we are dealing with a "grotesque." A grotesque someone who, if functional has become non-communicative by making a truth with a small t into one with a large T (to use the words of Sherwood Anderson). When the person tips over into dysfunctionality, he/she becomes a Grotesque with a Capital G and is isolated beyond reason.

More important, the one-to-one causal connection Friedman suggests between a single narrative and a single action commits the same fallacy that labels all Jews as influenced by the "Shylock Narrative," all Blacks as driven by a hypersexual narrative, etc. These are vague and emotion-laden capital T Truths. We know what such truths can do. The Shylock Narrative has made possible the conclusion that any Jew's individual humanity is less important than the narrative itself.

The Radical Muslim Narrative does the same for Muslims today. Dressed up in quasi-psychological terms, nonetheless it is stereotyping, plain and simple. It makes solving any problems associated with the "Hasan situation" impossible, because it requires us to deal with the narrative instead of the man. In Hasan's case, it has become a convenient out for the Army and all of us. Narrative as a framing device? Maybe. But it is far "scarier" (Friedman's word) as a first step to a kind of desensitizing and demonizing that we as Americans, as Jews, as humans, cannot afford.

Gorenberg: Israel a democracy or ethnocracy?

Journalist Gershom Gorenberg has written a remarkable article, "Is Israel a Democracy?" on the website of The American Prospect (he is its correspondent in Israel). He has uncovered archival evidence that counters the anti-Zionist argument that the leadership of the Yishuv (the self-governing Jewish community during the British Mandate in Palestine) always intended to ethnically cleanse its Arab population:

... The standard line of the country's boosters is that it's the only democracy in the Middle East. The most concise criticism is that it is an "ethnocracy," as Israeli political geographer Oren Yiftachel argues in his 2006 book of that name. An ethnocracy, he explains, is a regime promoting "the expansion of the dominant group in contested territory … while maintaining a democratic façade." Looking at this debate in light of two new books by Israeli scholars and of a faded and remarkable document that I've just read in the Israel State Archives, it seems both sides could be right.

The document is from late April 1948, a few weeks before Israeli independence. It's the blueprint for the administration of the Jewish state, detailed down to the location of regional health offices and the budget for day-care centers to be opened in large Arab villages. An Emergency Committee of top Zionist political leaders produced the plan, according to the unpublished doctoral dissertation of Israeli political scientist Jonathan Fine. ... The committee had begun work the previous October, after a U.N. panel recommended dividing British-ruled Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. In the territory assigned to them, Jews were only a slight majority. Partition didn't turn out that way, of course. Most of the Arabs residents fled or were expelled from what became Israel. Among those who say the exodus was premeditated ethnic cleansing, one argument is that Zionist leaders had to know that a Jewish state with such a large Arab minority wasn't viable.

What's striking about the Emergency Committee's blueprint is that it assumes that Israel will include that large Arab minority. The planned Education Ministry, for instance, is expected to take responsibility for schools in the "248 Arab villages" that would be in the Jewish state according to the U.N. partition. Likewise, the ministry would be responsible for Arab schools in Tiberias, Safed, and Beit She'an -- towns whose Arab populations left during the war. ...

In early May of 1948, as fighting intensified, Shertok described the growing Arab exodus as "quite unprecedented and unforeseen." ...

Gorenberg goes on to discuss this issue in detail, although with remarkable concision (I suggest you read it in full). He observes that the United States evolved from an ethnocracy, given its provisions for slavery and its treatment of the indigenous peoples, and concludes with a paradox and a puzzle:

Israel has become more democratic and more ethnocratic since its birth. Its democracy is sometimes seen as a model by Palestinians seeking their own independence. Whether it ends the occupation and discrimination against Arab citizens within its borders will alter our perception of whether the nation began as an imperfect democracy or a false one. Today's political battles, strangely enough, will determine not only its future but also its past.

Zionist Democracy a la Orwell

[from the Meretz USA e-newsletter of December 4]

War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength

-- George Orwell, "1984", Part 1, Chapter 1

Consider this a primer in the underside of Zionist politics. At first blush, not the most riveting topic in the world. But don't reach for the delete key just yet - unless you really aren't concerned about how decisions get decided, deals get dealt, and money gets divvied up. And, to tell you the truth, it's an incredible Orwellian tale, if you take the time to navigate the labyrinth.

You see, unbeknownst to most Jewish Americans, even those active in the Zionist world, the democratic nature of the Zionist movement is under severe attack - in the name of democracy and Zionism!

For those who don't have the patience, here's a three-bullet "executive summary":

• The World Zionist Organization (WZO) has a hand in policy and controls millions of dollars.
• The World Zionist Organization is controlled by its 500+ elected delegates.
• The large Zionist organizations with the lion's share of delegates want to consolidate control of the WZO by dismantling the electoral process.

Now to fill in the details:
READ MORE ...!!!

Judt, Schama and Sand: Historians in conflict

Tony Judt-- the NYU professor who became notorious (and popular) for opposing the concept of a Jewish state-- is not the only prominent historian of English-Jewish background currently in New York. (Tragically, by the way, Prof. Judt has been stricken with ALS, Lou Gehrig's Disease.) Simon Schama of Columbia University-- perhaps best known for hosting BBC and PBS history specials-- is a progressive alternative to Judt in his attitude toward Israel, as indicated in Wikipedia:

In 2006 on the BBC, Schama debated ... the morality of Israel's actions in the Israel-Lebanon war. He characterized Israel's bombing of Lebanese city centers as unhelpful in Israel's attempt to "get rid of" Hezbollah. With regard to the bombing he said: "Of course the spectacle and suffering makes us grieve. Who wouldn't grieve? But it's not enough to do that. We've got to understand. You've even got to understand Israel's point of view."

Schama's plea for "understanding" brings to mind a problem I have with Professors Judt and Sand regarding Israel: they are consistently cold and unsympathetic. Mere criticism of Israeli policies is not what I'm talking about. Apparently, Schama is not defending Israel's bombing campaign in Lebanon in 2006 (which, btw, I had opposed). The same Wikipedia article noted that he actively supported Barack Obama's presidential campaign, arguing for his election in a debate with John Bolton, on BBC last year. I enlist Prof. Schama's opinion, as a distinguished historian, of Shlomo Sand's "The Invention of the Jewish People," from his review in the Financial Times (Judt has favorably blurbed this book denying Jewish peoplehood):

Sand’s self-dramatising attack in The Invention of the Jewish People is directed against those who assume, uncritically, that all Jews are descended lineally from the single racial stock of ancient Hebrews – a position no one who has thought for a minute about the history of the Jews would dream of taking.

Sand’s sense of grievance against the myths on which the exclusively Jewish right to full Israeli immigration is grounded is one that many who want to see a more liberal and secular Israel wholeheartedly share. But his book prosecutes these aims through a sensationalist assertion that somehow, the truth about Jewish culture and history, especially the “exile which never happened”, has been suppressed in the interests of racially pure demands of Zionist orthodoxy. This, to put it mildly, is a stretch. ... Click for entire review online.

Scheinberg on Bibi's Gilo Gambit

This is a new commentary by Stephen Scheinberg, an emeritus professor of history at Concordia University in Montreal:

A “gambit” is one or a series of clever opening moves in a chess game. Bibi Netanyahu has recently demonstrated a mastery of the board and has dominated the play against Barack Obama. Unfortunately, there are more than pawns to be sacrificed in this contest.

Think of your game plan, if you were the Prime Minister of Israel? If you ardently believed in a greater Israel and wanted to keep the West Bank as an Israeli colonial preserve, what would you do? If you confronted a new President of the United States who did not understand that his proper role was to support all Israeli actions, or at least not get in the way of them, how would you handle him? If this President Obama became particularly irksome with demands for a settlement freeze, as a prelude to real peace negotiations, how would you challenge him? If, at the same time, you were faced by a moderate Palestinian President, one who much of the world believed could be a party to a peace agreement, then how might you eliminate him? These, I believe, are the questions Prime Minister Netanyahu has now answered with his opening gambit.

His strategy has been to undermine the credibility of both Abbas and Obama while at the same time gaining support at home, but he wanted to minimize adverse reaction from abroad. Thus he has defied Obama and Abbas on the issue of a settlement freeze, but chosen his own strongest ground. Most American Jews and the Europeans are hostile to the West Bank settlements and even a majority of Israelis would likely give most of them up in return for a secure peace. Bibi’s strategy for what he prefers to call Judea and Samaria is to agree to a faux freeze in that area, which will only be in effect for a limited period and excludes 3000 units already under construction.

Yesha, the settler’s council has followed form and denounced him but with a wink and a nod to his right wing cabinet colleagues, Bibi won an 11-1 cabinet endorsement. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, dismissed the Palestinian rejection of the faux freeze saying, “the last thing that should interest us is the Palestinians’concern. Before the Palestinian issue, what should interest us is our friends in the world.” The cabinet understood that this “freeze” will not even slightly chill the waters of the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) and there will be no attempt to walk on them.

Mrs. Clinton and Senator Mitchell took the bait, to hail his action as an “unprecedented” concession, the furthest any Israeli leader had ever gone. Yet, they certainly realized how much this damaged President Abbas who had told his people that a new American administration could deliver a real freeze on both the West Bank and Jerusalem. Of course Bibi had already undermined Abba with a demand, that Bibi cleverly got President Obama to endorse, that the Palestinians not bring the Goldstone report to the United Nations, because it might undermine the prospect of negotiations.

It wasn’t enough to get the praise from Clinton and Mitchell, so Bibi tried to bring some of the Israeli peace camp on side? First, Bibi made a personal telephone call to the diplomatic correspondent of the liberal Haaretz newspaper, a call that might appeal to the vanity of any journalist. He told him that his major concerns were Iran and Hezbollah and that he would make enormous sacrifices to bring quiet on the Palestinian front in order to confront Israel’s real enemies. Bibi followed that up with a similar approach to Yossi Beilin, the immediate past leader of the Meretz party and a major mover of the Geneva Accords, but Beilin soon realized he was being duped. Now, after he had assured both of these gentlemen and their readers around the world that he had joined the peace camp, Bibi was ready for the next step.

He announced Israeli approval for building 900 new housing units in the Gilo community of East Jerusalem. This step had multiple advantages. First, Gilo is, for all practical purposes, a neighborhood of Jerusalem. Most Israelis and others believe it will be part of Israel, even if a peace deal is reached. Second, even though the legal status of Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem in 1967 is dubious, (the Security Council rejected it by a 14-0 vote), the emotions of Israeli and diaspora Jewry can be enlisted when it comes to Jerusalem. It was then, the perfect place to confront Obama and put another nail in the Abbas coffin. Hamas is, it would seem, better for Bibi and the settlers than Abbas because the Islamist movement is the true partner of the advocates of greater Israel. Palestinian extremism means no partner for peace, guarantees more settlement construction, and a tighter Israeli hold on Judea and Samaria.

Thus, just as Sharon used the Gaza evacuation as a means to protect his West Bank ambitions, Bibi uses Gilo to make sure that there will be no negotiations. No Palestinian leader could possibly negotiate with an Israeli government which has effectively taken East Jerusalem off the table. There is no risk for Bibi & Co. in a West Bank freeze. Netanyahu’s clever gambit leaves President Obama holding the bag. While he is occupied with the economy, healthcare and a couple of wars, will he dare to confront Israel over East Jerusalem construction? Can he afford to lose any of his support in the United States Senate because he demands a construction freeze in East Jerusalem? Bibi has, one must concede, played the game with great skill, on behalf of his precious settlements. He now has the U.S. President in check. The next move is up to Obama.

It is possible that President Obama will display sharper political skills and more courage, but there is little in his recent record to make us overly optimistic that we will see those qualities when play resumes.

Thoughts on 'Zahara' - Other Israel Film Festival

I saw Mohammed Bakri's documentary film "Zahara" the last night of the Other Israel Film Festival. Bakri is a well-known Israeli Palestinian actor on both stage and screen. This, his fourth film, produced by Carol Zabar, is beautifully shot by his son Ziad. It is a personal telling of the life of his 78 year old aunt Zahara, from the times of pre-state Palestine to the present. Zahara was among the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled the fighting during Israel’s war of independence, a period which Palestinians now call the Naqba, the "catastrophe."

Zahara, unlike many Palestinians, did not end up in a refugee camp in Lebanon; instead, she made her way back to her town after the war. Later, Zahara becomes a young widow with four children whom she raised by tirelessly working in the fields. One of her sons, educated in Moscow, became a doctor; all become professionals. At the end of the film we see a portrait of a flourishing family, with Zahara at its center. Bakri clearly loves and respects his aunt; she emerges as a formidable woman.

For me, Bakri's evocation of Palestinian Arab life through his main character, Aunt Zahara works. In the Q & A, I said that Zahara had a filmic resonance to Garcia Marquez' “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” But, I asked, why did you put the sequence of the shepherd wielding a heavy stick running after pack of dogs attacking a pig into the film?

The shepherd whacks the dogs; he is trying to save the squeaking pig. Finally, the shepherd succeeds in wrenching the pig from the bloody jaws of the dogs. He looks at the bleeding pig, sees its dying eyes and throws it into a nearby creek.

This follows a sequence of Bakri, in a car, retracing the steps that his family, (Zahara included) took going (and perhaps coming) to/from Lebanon during the 1947/48 war.

At first, Bakri did not want to answer my question; then he said he would answer it in a Jewish way, which I took to mean in a complicated fashion. His son was filming the passing hills from the car and his camera picked up this scene as it unfolded. It was destiny, Bakri said, repeating it several times. Now I understand what destiny means to a filmmaker; it is part of magical thinking, and one feels a particular attachment to such footage, but I was more interested in Bakri’s process of deciding to put this sequence here, and what it meant to him. Of course, I was also aware that in some Arab propaganda outlets they refer to Jews as dogs and pigs (and in some Jewish circles, Arabs are referred to similarly). Bakri, of course, is into the world of complexity and said, “Who is the pig, who are the dogs? In this story. it is hard to know."

Following the film, there was a reception. People were involved in heated discussions. Good I thought, this is what film festivals are supposed to do, especially one so avant guard as Other Israel, which screens films made by Palestinian-Arab Israelis-- now more than twenty percent of the population.

In conclusion, Zahara is a film well worth seeing. It reminds us that there are at least two narratives in the creation of Israel. Bakri lives with paradox. And when we realize that we live in this same paradox, perhaps the world will be a better place.

It has taken me more than a week to write this up, mainly because I could not finalize it. I wrote to the woman who sat next to me during the screening, a most reputable academic professional and asked her what her reaction was:

The way I remember the heated discussion is that it was about the pig. Your question started it off. Until that point, people were praising the movie, saying it was also about Hasan and not just Zahara, talking about the humanity of Zahara, etc. The pig issue got people riled up. Some were OK with it meaning different things to different people. Some were not (me included). Context matters. Since the view of the events of 1948 in this film was Arab-centric, it is hard for me to see the pig scene as anything other than Bakri showing Israelis attacking and overpowering innocent Arabs/Palestinians. The irony for me is that Israel was so outnumbered by Arabs in 1948 that one cannot really see the dogs as the Israelis. Bakri dropped the Holocaust remark much later in the Q&A, as I remember it. To my mind, that was even worse than including the pig.

I found him engaging, talented, but not totally honest with the audience. The objection to the pig scene was not just how vicious the dogs were and so it would be hard for women to watch. That was what the Arab women were reacting to. Israeli women, had they been consulted, and men too, would have said that, within the context of the movie, the brutal dogs were clearly meant to symbolize Israeli aggression against Palestinians. I think Bakri forgets facts that he does not wish to remember.

I agree with you that filmmakers have a right to put on screen what they wish. But an audience cannot be fooled. It would be interesting to hear what people who are neither Israeli nor Jewish nor Palestinian nor Arab nor Muslim make of this film.

No More Walls

I had the privilege of being in Berlin on November 9th, 2009, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the night that changed the world. Michael [Steltzer] and others vividly described that historic evening, when East German government spokesperson Günter Schabowski, declared that all East German citizens were free to travel abroad--- "effective immediately" he said in response to a journalist's question, despite the fact that Egon Frenz's transition government had only intended to open the border in an organized fashion the next day. Jazz singer Eva described how she rushed to the Wall from the Berlin side, and was hoisted up onto the top by her friends --- while the East German guards just stood by, watching. One of them even exclaimed: "Why was I standing here all these past 20 years?"

I also heard Ambassador J.D. Bindenagel, who served as deputy mission head of the American Embassy in East Berlin in 1989, about the chaos and confusion of that unforgettable evening.

It's hard not to make comparisons with "our wall" that snakes along and into the border between the West Bank and Israel.

Of course, the Berlin Wall separated two sides of the same people, while ours separates between Palestinians and Israelis. Also, their wall was an inherent part of the Cold War, while ours was established as a security measure against Palestinian suicide bombers by an Israeli government which was incapable of dealing with its understandable security concerns via diplomatic means. ... Read this entire account at the Palestine-Israel Journal blog.