Bradley Burston2013-06-20T01:44:21-04:00Bradley Burstonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=bradley-burstonCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Bradley BurstonGood old fashioned elbow grease.To the Leftist Who Has No Problem With Rocket Fire on Israeltag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.13738892012-03-22T19:23:54-04:002012-05-22T05:12:01-04:00Bradley Burstonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bradley-burston/
Sounds all too familiar. Not much new here, from the looks of it. Back pages, even in the Arab world.
In the hard left media, reports on the fighting are often more prominent, but they too have a tone of same-old. Especially when they gloss over or justify rocket attacks targeting civilians in southern Israel.
The attacks of "Israel's latest massacre in Gaza," said a headline by commentator Ali Abunimah posted at his Electronic Intifada,"have followed a typical pattern," with Palestinians responding with rockets of scant consequence, providing Israel a desired pretext for continued bombing of Gazans.
In fact, there has been much about the current fighting that has departed from the typical pattern. In an era of constraints spurred and modulated by the Goldstone Report, the carnage in Syria, Hamas friction with Assad and Iran, a new Egypt, the Iron Dome antimissile system and a host of other factors, both Israel and Hamas have made marked and largely successful efforts to limit civilian casualties on both sides of the border.
One thing that has not changed, however, is the way much of the hard left relates to the moral issues posed by Palestinian rocket attacks on Israelis.
A weekend Mondoweiss news account of Israeli air strikes, while acknowledging that most of the Gaza dead were Islamic Jihad fighters, notes as something of an afterthought, "Local resistance in Gaza retaliated and showered nearby Israeli settlements with homemade rockets."
In every account, the rockets are dismissed as little more than toothless, impromptu, life-affirming symbols of Palestinian refusal to surrender.
In recent years, Palestinian rocket fire has become a measure of whether progressives can be compassionate to, and respectful of the rights of, civilians on both sides, or whether their attitude is, at root, no more nuanced than Palestine Good, Zionist Entity Unredeemably Evil.
An opinion piece on Tuesday suggested that Israel intentionally brought on the rocket fire in order to give its Iron Dome a trial run. "What better way to test the system," asked Linda Heard in Arab News. "It's hard to believe that a state would put its own people at risk for a test-run, but that's exactly what Israel is doing," she wrote.
In an exchange of reader comments to the Mondoweiss piece, one respondent asks, "Is it relevant that for many months there have been persistent rocket attacks launched from Gaza against Israel?"
A reply comes from Mondoweiss Writer-at-Large Annie Robbins. "Yes, why shouldn't they respond to Israel's violent provocations? That is human nature."
It is also a war crime. In August 2009, Human Rights Watch issued a detailed report condemning rocket strikes by Hamas and other Palestinian groups in Gaza. An HRW official said at the time that "rocket attacks targeting Israeli civilians are unlawful and unjustifiable, and amount to war crimes."
Times like this, with rockets targeting civilian populations, I wonder what it means to call yourself a leftist. I believed, and still do, that to be on the left entails a certain universality of concern for the rights and safety and welfare of people, regardless of nationality, race, religion, culture or political outlook.
There is a current on the left that argues that no one, certainly no Israeli, should tell Palestinians how to respond, how to resist. That is so. Moreover, it is unfair and plain wrong to expect Palestinians to refrain from responding to attacks, such as the assassination that set off the current spate of violence.
At the same time, just as anyone -- Palestinians certainly included -- has the right to tell Israelis what they think is wrong about what they do, anyone -- Israelis included -- ought to be able to say what they believe about the moral issues involved in targeting non-combatants.
It is wrong to simply grant a moral pass to this response, to rocket fire on civilians, whether you write this off as self-defense --which, in practice, it is not -- or as human nature, or as inconsequential relative to Israeli aggression.
In his article, Ali Abunima waved away Palestinian shelling as little more than a tool for "Israel's tired hasbara [PR] refrain about rockets, rockets, rockets."
"Israeli propaganda insists that the attacks are about preventing 'terrorism' and stopping 'rockets,'" he wrote. Albuminah cited a 2007 HRW study, "Indiscriminate Fire," which showed, accurately, that Israel employs much more powerful weaponry against Palestinians and exacts much higher casualties. What he failed to include, was the report's conclusion that:
Both sides have shown disregard for civilian loss of life in violation of international humanitarian law (IHL): Palestinian armed groups have directed their rockets at Israeli towns...
The 10 Israeli civilians killed by Palestinian rocket attacks since mid-2004 range from 2 to 57 in age and include four children. The attacks also have inflicted property damage and created a pervasive climate of fear in affected Israeli communities.
Just one question.
When a leftist places quotation marks around the word rockets, when a leftist terms attacks on civilian populations a matter of human nature, when a leftist dismisses rockets as crude, homemade, and unguided, or blames Israelis for their use, when a leftist notes that rockets have killed "only 28" Israelis, or sniffs or jeers at the fact that one out of seven Israelis, one million in all, are currently in rocket range -- it may be time to ask, what it is, exactly, that's supposed to make a person a leftist?
Further discussion of this piece on Mondoweiss: Here and Here.]]>It's Israeli Apartheid Week -- Just Tell the Truthtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.13025642012-02-27T12:19:20-05:002012-04-28T05:12:01-04:00Bradley Burstonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bradley-burston/Israeli Apartheid Week.
In the past, this has been a time for hardline pro-Palestinians and hardline pro-Israelis to rumble, counter-accuse, hurl half-truths and, often as not, scrum to an ineffectual draw.
Not this year. This year there's something distinctly unfamiliar in the air. People have begun telling the truth about BDS.
The door was opened by author and lecturer Norman Finkelstein. Earlier this month, Finkelstein, one of Israel's harshest critics, rocked the BDS movement with a critique devastating in its candor.
Finkelstein said he loathed the movement's duplicity and disingenuousness in hiding the fact that a large part of its membership "wants to eliminate Israel."
"I support the BDS," Finkelstein said, but "it will never reach a broad public until and unless they're explicit in their goal. And their goal has to include the recognition of Israel, or it's a nonstarter."
Instead, he said, the movement insists that it's "agnostic" on whether or not Israel should exist. "No, you're not agnostic! You don't want it! Then just say it! But (BDS leaders) know full well, that if you say it, you don't have a prayer of reaching a broad public... And frankly, you know what, you shouldn't. You shouldn't reach a broad public, because you're dishonest."
Though BDS constantly claims successes, "it's a cult, where the guru says 'We have all these victories' and everyone nods their head," Finkelstein said. "People promote it as if it's proven itself and we're on the... verge of a victory of some sort. It's just sheer nonsense. It's a cult. And I, personally, I'm tired of it."
It's Israeli Apartheid Week. You can tell the truth. About BDS. And about Israel as well. It's not the robust and vibrant democracy that's hailed by the right, even as the right works to curb freedoms. It is a troubled democracy, a compromised democracy, under threat from within, under threat from its own government, eroded by war and internal strife and external threat and the human and moral costs of the religion of manifest destiny.
Not unlike the United States at age 64, a country pursuing the brutal occupation of a native population in order to protect ever-expanding settlements, a nation divided over the millions of people in its midst deprived of basic liberties and rights. A work in progress.
But like the United States, Israel is a work in progress which deserves a chance to find its way, to foster and deepen democracy. A work in progress which needs support for efforts at democracy, and recognition when it works.
It's Israeli Apartheid Week. You can tell the truth. There is something in the air here, something distinctly unfamiliar. Something good. A whiff of democracy. A dim horizon of light. The stirrings of hope. And all from the most unlikely of places.
This week alone, in an extraordinary expression of the power of nonviolence, a 66-day hunger strike by one jailed Palestinian forced Israelis, for the first time, to truly face and begin to debate the carefully hidden practice of administrative detention, imprisoning Palestinians without trial, criminal indictment or other due process.
This week, under threat of a possible High Court order, and with an international media spotlight on the case, officials struck a deal under which the prisoner, Khader Adnan, will be freed in April.
This was a week in which Israeli society as a whole began to reexamine itself. In the Prime Minister's Office, the unthinkable occurred: an untouchable, Netanyahu-bosom, backroom boss actually resigned in response to harassment allegations brought by colleagues. In Tel Aviv, the decades-old ban on public transportation on the Sabbath was overturned, in what may prove to be a step of more symbolism than substance -- but this in a country where symbols be more weighty by far than substance.
And, in a move that could have profound implications for Israeli democracy, the High Court quashed the law which exempts the ultra-Orthodox from universal military service. More significantly, the court ordered that a new law on the issue be everything that the satin-coated racketeers of theocratic blackmail have come to fear most: egalitarian, proportionate and consistent with the principles of the laws of a democracy.
It's Israel Apartheid Week 2012. Time for people who support Israel to tell the truth. Yes, the settlements are an obstacle to peace. Yes, the occupation, which exists to protect the settlements, is the opposite of democracy. Yes, the present government speaks of two states in theory alone.
In the democracy that was the United States in the year 1840, there were those who said that slavery was essential, irreversible, eternal, God's will. And that people of color and women of all races should not, and therefore would not, be granted the freedoms and rights of full citizenship, that the only good Native American was a dead one.
And, at the same time, there were those who believed that democracy and equality would become law, however dreadful and protracted the process might be, and they were right.
It is 2012. America's freedoms, its promises of opportunity and openness to immigrants and minorities are still under attack, still being tested. The answer is not to dismantle America, but to strengthen its freedoms.
All Americans deserve democracy and self-determination. So do both of the native peoples of the Holy Land, Palestinians and Israelis alike. This is not to say that either Palestinians or Israelis should have to wait decades or more for justice and freedom. This is to say that in this Holy Land there are people working on both sides, quietly, continually, toward that goal. Not freedom for one people at the expense of the other, but freedom and independence for both.
This is the lesson that BDS has yet to learn. And this is why BDS, and Israeli Apartheid Week, are failures.
Originally published on Haaretz.com]]>American Jews Need to See Israel's Footnote -- Oscar or Notag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.12939312012-02-23T13:53:12-05:002012-04-24T05:12:02-04:00Bradley Burstonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bradley-burston/
Because they need to.
Not because Footnote, the story of a Cold War between a scholar father and son, may become the first Israeli film ever to win an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. And not just because it has brilliant, often startling things to say about the ills of fame and bureaucracy, alienation and envy.
Hollywood's Jews, and American Jews in general, should go to see this film about wrongheaded comfort zones, in order to break out of one of their own: the mistaken sense of kinship with the Jewish state and the Jews who live there.
Simply put, we don't understand each other, American Jews and Israelis. We dance around the fact, we shy away from truly examining it, but we are, as communities and as individuals, in many, many respects, total strangers.
When Hollywood, and American Jews in general, imagine Israelis, the image often ranges from adoration to lampoon, from a race of intimidating, if wounded and well-meaning, assassins, to a hybrid of Yiddish/Pale of Settlement mercantile cliches. Whether it is the Mossad of Steven Spielberg or the Mossad of Zohan, the Ari Ben Canaan of Exodus or the Ari Gold of Entourage ("I teach my son never to let people just take things from him. It's my Israeli blood.") there is little room left for real people -- actual Israelis -- to take form.
At the heart of Footnote is a five-minute segment, a riotously tragic, hilarious and yet horrible meeting in an office of the Ministry of Education, that says more about life as it is actually lived in Israel than all the miles-to-the-moon of celluloid Hollywood has labored to lavish on it.
Not that Israelis, on the whole, look at Americans any more perceptively. All too frequently, if they bother to look at all, it is with the myopia of a vast cultural disconnect. The human cartoons range from the gullible, disposable American philanthropist of "Sallah Shabati" (Israel's first Oscar nominee, in 1964) to the comedy sketch televised this week portraying Birthright Israel participants as sweetly loutish, cluelessly hyper insta-Zionists.
Why can't we see one another? For one thing, we're scared to look. Somewhere inside, our unspoken sense tells us that blindness is good for the relationship. After all, what if a key factor helping preserve the bonds between American Jews and Israel is the breathtaking extent to which the two peoples cannot grok one another?
In a stark variation on the concept of two countries divided by a common language, American Jews and Israelis are two peoples unified by their lack of that shared tongue, their inability to truly read the other, grasp the other, know how the other ticks, lives, hates and loves, relates to family, assesses threat, matures too early in some ways and never in others.
The gulf in outlook is so pronounced as to be all but invisible, as each side struggles to fathom the other, nobly, at times unknowingly, fumbling even simple communication -- much like the classic summer-romance couple in a remote resort, finding attraction and perhaps safety in the shortfall of real conversation.
Israelis, after all, sense that American Jews cannot begin to grasp what it feels like to be under the security pressures they feel for themselves and their children, the profound, unending freights and terrors of the threshold of catastrophe. And they're right.
Just as American Jews sense that Israelis cannot begin to comprehend and value the importance of the workings of democracy, of freedoms of opportunity and religion and self-determination for non-Jew as well as Jew, women as well as men, Reform and Conservative and secular as well as Orthodox, and, behind and before all else, Palestinian as well as Israeli.
That is why, for American Jews, it takes a certain courage to watch a film like Footnote. It means taking a large step toward trying to gain a sense, at long last, of the family from which American Jews are, through no fault of their own, estranged: Israelis out of uniform, neither heroic nor heinous, real people who speak zip-file words formed and rumbling deep in the throat, pained and painful people who read and often think in a direction literally opposite to that of their American cousins.
Both in Israel and the States, the go-to headlines will cast this as a big screen square-off between geopolitical arch-enemies Israel and Iran.
But if Joseph Cedar, director of the underdog Footnote, comes home with an Oscar at the end of next month, it will be in part the surprise outcome of a coming-of-age in Hollywood, and perhaps in the wider American Jewish community: seeing Israelis for the first time, not for what American Jews need them to be, but for what they are.
Originally published on Haaretz.com.]]>Wanted: A UN Goldstone Inquiry for Syria's Atrocitiestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.12715532012-02-14T12:40:04-05:002012-04-15T05:12:01-04:00Bradley Burstonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bradley-burston/
Both sides have their reasons. Palestinians will argue, and legitimately, that the veto power of the United States has shielded Israel time and again from Security Council censure.
This has been true even in cases where the White House itself had grave reservations about Israeli military operations and settlement actions, which then continued unabated.
Israelis will maintain, and with justification, that UN bodies hypocritically single out Israel for condemnation and have shown overwhelming bias against its policies. This has been particularly true in the case of the UN Commission on Human Rights -- in which a genocidal Sudan passed judgment on the Jewish state -- and of its successor, the Human Rights Council, criticized both by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Human Rights Watch (HRW) for the extreme imbalance of its concentration on Israel.
As the death toll in Syria climbs toward an unfathomable 10,000, if there were ever a test of the world body, it is now. And if ever the UN Security Council has met the test by proving itself a sham, it is now.
Syrian President Bashar Assad, a lifelong student of the United Nations' failings when it comes to Israel and Palestine, has taken full advantage in insulating himself from the consequences of the carnage he so closely controls.
When Assad unleashed a murderous onslaught over the weekend, with witnesses reporting hundreds killed and a field hospital bombed to obliteration, he did so knowing that he held the only cards he needed -- not one, but two vetoes. Thirteen nations condemned his actions in the Security Council. Only Russia and China supported him.
When Assad carpet-shelled the city of Homs on Monday, he did so knowing how the UN so often views violence in this part of the world: in practice, Muslims can kill Muslims with impunity and prolonged freedom from sanction.
Assad has also shown skill in playing rifts within Islam to his advantage, and may also have gained indirect benefit from the Israel-Palestinian divide, and the somewhat muffled nature of condemnation from this corner of the region.
There are, for example, Israelis who warn that if Assad is toppled, the outcome may only be worse for Israel. There are pro-Palestinian activists abroad who duck the issue, seeming to suggest that opposition to Syrian actions may be used by Israel as a kind of "Assad-washing," muddying the memory of the 2008-9 Gaza war, and complicating campaigns for BDS (anti-Israel boycotts, divestment and sanctions).
It is the Gaza war, however, which points to what the UN should and must do now: Find a Goldstone for Syria.
The UN needs to make a move capable of putting Bashar Assad on notice that he is not free to act as he pleases - that his actions will be subject to investigation, and that they may be viewed as war crimes in a future court of international law.
In creating the Richard Goldstone-led fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict the UN created a mechanism which put both Israel and Hamas in the glare of international scrutiny. It put special focus on policies that subject non-combatants to the direct risk of lethal harm.
Flawed, much-hindered, and little-loved, the Goldstone Report did not put an end to Israeli and Hamas military attacks that killed civilians. But it represented a turning point in accountability, one that has caused both Israel and Hamas to reevaluate longstanding reliance on military doctrines which place civilians directly in harm's way.
For all that Israel stonewalled and scorned the inquiry, it may actually have done more for Israelis than any other UN decision in recent memory. In unacknowledged response to its findings, the report has effectively changed Israeli military and geopolitical strategic practice.
No longer is there an automatic resort to the strategy that informed IDF tactics from Operation Grapes of Wrath in Lebanon, 1996, and Dahiya 10 years later, to Cast Lead in Gaza: disproportionate firepower marshaled in vain attempts to force Arab civilians to pressure their governments or armed groups in their midst.
Hamas, as well, has shown signs of internal debate and reevaluation over the efficacy and future of armed struggle.
If only for the sake of Syria's children, it is time for the United Nations to protect those it has so often failed to protect elsewhere.
The UN needs to learn from its own history, and do better. There are children who cannot wait. The UN must recognize that immunity from censure, from effective protest, from sanction, directly endanger the lives of non-combatants.
The United Nations needs to create a Goldstone-type inquiry for the atrocities in Syria. The UN needs to send a direct message to Bashar Assad: A regime which resorts to war crimes will have to answer for them.
Originally published on Haaretz.com]]>The Only Israel Boycott That's Actually Workingtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.12559502012-02-06T17:26:46-05:002012-04-07T05:12:01-04:00Bradley Burstonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bradley-burston/
Somewhere inside, beneath the air of cheesy royalty, behind the wall of yes men and the armored SUVs of his motorcades, when Benjamin Netanyahu mulls his place in history, he knows what he has to show for it.
It's not a pretty sight.
Netanyahu and his history-minded grand vizier, Ehud Barak, do not want to be remembered as the two prime ministers who failed to forge peace deals with Syria, the Palestinians, Lebanon and the Saudis in the 1990s. They do not want to be remembered for the indecision, inaction, weakness and bad judgment which paved the way for the bloodshed and wars of the last decade, and the international isolation that remains.
Nor do they want to go down as the mini-tycoon flunkeys of mega-tycoons, denying the basic hopes of a mass middle class social justice movement. Nor as rulers whose only real interest is the throne, rulers who will say anything, legalize anything, outlaw anything, if it means another month or year in office.
Nor do they want to be remembered for the scorched-earth legislative legacy of the last three years, as the hotheaded and headline-starved took turns dismantling foundations of Israeli democracy.
Which leaves Iran.
If we're lucky, the threat (no more than the threat) of an Iran attack (Bibi and Barak's Glory Days Redux fantasy) will be just one more dodge to keep settlers and their opponents at bay: long enough to make it to elections, long enough to get another fix of power, long enough to decide not to decide about the Palestinians, the settlements, the refugees, the haredim.
If they're truly interested in their place in history, though, or even just in themselves, Netanyahu and Barak would do well to take a lesson from Lennon. They should study a succession of overlooked recent incidents that may, in the end, imperil their rule and this country more profoundly than Iran and Hamas and Hezbollah put together.
This month, for example, Army Radio reported that in the course of a debate in the Knesset, Public Security Ministry Director-General Yaakov Ganot made a slitting-throat gesture toward one of his ministry's female employees.
"The employee had made a comment which was not to Ganot's liking, and, in response, he passed his finger across his throat, as if to say 'I will slaughter you,'" it said.
"In the Ministry," the report concluded, in an observation itself worthy of close attention, "they are saying that this was done only in humor."
A week before, in New York, the deputy consul for Israel pointedly got up and walked out of the annual Human Rights Award Dinner of the Jewish Labor Committee, an event that featured the president of America's largest federation of unions, the AFL-CIO, who has spoken out against boycotting Israel.
Why the walkout? Because Stuart Appelbaum, the strongly pro-Israel JLC's president -- himself an influential union leader, an outspoken supporter of Israel and a strong opponent of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign - s-aid in a speech that the Netanyahu government's support for "the construction of illegal settlements on the West Bank .... severely impedes negotiations" with the Palestinians.
When Appelbaum urged participants at the event to send Israel's government a message in favor of "good-faith negotiations," Deputy Consul Shlomi Kofman headed for the door. Israeli Consulate sources explained that the diplomat left because of "inappropriate statements vis-à-vis the Israeli government."
Here, in two gestures, is where we stand. The slit-throat and the walkout, the twin tools of dictating the new meaning of "pro-Israel."
Either you support everything the government says, does, and hides, or we will intimidate you or humiliate you, or blacklist you and, failing that, publicly brand you as Post-Zionist or Anti-Israel, or, failing that, Anti-Semitic.
This, in the end, may be the legacy of the Netanyahu government -- an ugly rift in Israel, the Jewish world, and within Judaism, an alienation which may prove permanent.
Ostensibly for the sake of unity, the government has worked tirelessly to stifle and delegitimize dissent, and to curb the consideration of another side, whether for Jerusalem high school students visiting Hebron or for pro-Israel labor leaders in New York.
Taking their cue from the snotty inquisitors of Im Tirtzu, every inch the spiritual heirs of Roy Cohn, the government and its hard-line adherents abroad have done everything they could to demonize and boycott NGOs, the New Israel Fund, J Street, Peace Now and other groups and individuals who strongly support Israel but take issue with its policies and its current direction.
The irony is that in a period in which the BDS campaign against Israel is faltering, leading to internal debates over its usefulness as a tactic, the official Israeli campaign to boycott and delegitimize progressive and liberal Zionists rolls on.
The irony is also that many progressive Zionists have played key roles in defeating BDS efforts. No matter. As it turns off and repels moderate Jews from Boston to Berkeley, the "pro-Israel" Inquisition has become the only Israel boycott that is actually having an effect.
For Netanyahu and Barak, it may not come naturally to respect the dissenting views of people who care about Israel and the Jewish people not an ounce less than they do. But it could ultimately have a telling and positive effect on their place in history.
Alternatively, they could do the bidding of the hard right. Shun the left, exploit the center, build like mad in the settlements and bomb Iran for good measure.
After all, when the war with Iran is over, and the only things left here are cockroaches and Migron, this government will still have the only thing it's ever really needed: Someone else to blame.
___________________________________
Originally published on Haaretz.com]]>Israel's Netanyahu, The Man Who Can't Lose -- Or Can He?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.12026292012-01-12T16:11:47-05:002012-03-13T05:12:01-04:00Bradley Burstonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bradley-burston/
For all that Netanyahu plays the role of Israel's Great Communicator, it is the wordless juncture of calculation and tragedy implicit in that scarred smile, that spells out his policy and his life -- giving, and at the same time, giving away nothing. A victor uneasy with his spoils, his station, his friends, his fate. A prince who would make history, but who makes do with doing the math.
So it was this week, as Israel's government was shaken but outwardly unstirred by the entry into politics of a matinee-idol newsman and of a quietly impressive everyman who won his captive son's return from Hamas.
Netanyahu's first response was that smile. He held it for a jagged cliff of a moment. Then he said, "Welcome to politics."
Even as he spoke, the man with a Masters from MIT was doing the math. Over the past dozen years, Netanyahu has earned a doctorate in defeat, and how it may be avoided. He will do anything to avoid a repeat of disastrous showings in the '99 and '06 elections. And the glimmers of resurgence in Israel's center may force him into an unhappy choice.
While he might have preferred to run as Newt Gingrich, he may have no choice but to opt for Mitt Romney as his model: a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a fiddler with policy, no one's enthusiastic choice, a non-stick if still-vulnerable target for all.
In some ways, Netanyahu has already made the shift. On Sunday, just after anchorman Yair Lapid took the plunge, the prime minister announced free pre-schooling for three- and four-year-olds.
It was only last August that an Israel-bound Glenn Beck, a vocal admirer of Netanyahu as an aggressive opponent of welfare programs, declared that Israeli social justice protesters' demands -- among them, free early childhood education -- were reminiscent of Soviet-era communism.
On Monday, reports signaled that Netanyahu was seriously considering a range of confidence-building measures as a way of fostering peace talks with Gingrich's Invented People.
As it stands, Netanyahu's domestic allies still view the prime minister as the man who cannot lose. An ironclad ruling coalition, an opposition which can barely keep its chairs warm, a White House useful when acquiescent and useful when carping. Re-election is assured. Life is good.
But Netanyahu's smile knows better. The math, as well. This is a man who won in 1996 because 27,000 moderates and leftists believed that there was no way that Shimon Peres would lose, and so stayed home on election day.
The smile knows. From here, there is nowhere left to go but down.
Netanyahu's government rests on keeping his friends close and Avigdor Lieberman closer. But the foreign minister's crucial 15-strong faction -- on a good day a diplomatic albatross of racism and the Zionism of Nastiness -- could implode entirely if Lieberman is
indicted for fraud and a range of other allegations.
Shorn of Lieberman's lockstep votes, Netanyahu would command a paltry 51 of the Knesset's 120 seats. Early elections would likely ensue, but if Lieberman were out of the picture, the large Russian vote would be expected to split among a number of parties, with a sizable percentage sitting out the election altogether.
Even if Lieberman avoids indictment, a number of potentially explosive issues lie alongside Netanyahu's path to re-election. They include:
The Iran Bomb -- Of the number of ways this could play out, one of them is an U.S. and allied offensive against Iranian nuclear installations, perhaps prior to the U.S. elections. As hardline prime minister Yitzhak Shamir learned in the 1991 Gulf War, an American attack could be followed by a weighty bill for Israel to pay, not only as target, but in agreement by a rightwing government to genuine and groundbreaking peace talks.
The Migron Bomb -- Militant settlers have Netanyahu in a political bind. At a time when their actions have caused Israeli public opinion to turn against them, they enjoy unprecedented support within the coalition. If Netanyahu defies High Court rulings to dismantle illegal outposts, he risks further electoral erosion. But if he complies, a third of his own party faction could revolt.
The Deri Effect -- A closely watched poll this week showed that if former Shas leader Aryeh Deri runs for Knesset, his forecast five seats could decide the election between a right bloc at 58 seats and a center-left at 57. In 1992, Deri's Shas gave Yitzhak Rabin the edge for far-reaching social programs and peace moves.
To complicate the math further, there is the possibility that Barack Obama will do what many Israelis -- apparently including Netanyahu speechwriters -- once saw as the impossible, winning a second term.
If the smile on Netanyahu's face seems to be wearing thin these days, it may be about the danger that Yair Lapid and Noam Shalit pose him. It's not strictly measurable in votes and math. The danger has more to do with shedding a light of contrast on what Netanyahu and his government have come to stand for. The Israeli who trades on his scheming, the Israeli who betrays and humiliates an ally, the Israeli willing to say anything to get what he wants, to keep anything he wants. The Israeli willing to countenance any attack on democracy, any attack on Palestinians, any attack on leftists, any attack on asylum seekers. On the wrong sorts of Jews.
The smile knows. The smile that has been willing to court the Ugly Israeli, knows that now and then, there's an election here that's different.
This time around, in a sense much more than skin deep, may a more beautiful Israeli win.
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Originally published on Haaretz.com]]>Thank God for Ron Paultag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.11927042012-01-10T11:26:37-05:002012-03-11T05:12:01-04:00Bradley Burstonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bradley-burston/
At this distance, it often seems that the world's most eccentric candidate-selection process will force the U.S. clear off the rails. Then, just in time, an unlikely rescuer emerges. None more unlikely, surely, than this year's savior.
Thank God for Ron Paul.
And not only for the sake of Democratic Party and the incumbent president, who stand to have the most to gain from one of the more staggeringly peculiar candidates in living memory.
In a wider sense, Dr. Paul just might be what the Republican Party needs, and, along with it, the United States. Not, God forbid, as president. Rather, as a sobering influence. A cautionary plunge of madness. An immensely valuable bad dream.
In fact, so outrageous an object lesson is the presidential candidacy of the gynecologist from Galveston, that there are those of us who could use a man like Ron Paul here in Israel right about now.
What the Paul phenomenon can teach Israelis about themselves -- in particular Benjamin Netanyahu's Republican-allied Likud -- is what Republicans themselves have discovered to their horror in recent weeks and months.
Here is a man who scares the bejesus out of the Republican establishment -- and not a moment too soon. At long last, the Party of Lincoln is waking in the back seat of the long, careening drunk drive that is Tea Party extremism.
Moderate Republicans, many of whom had quietly prayed that support for Paul would quickly dry up and blow away, have watched aghast as the Texas congressman's bandwagon has gathered momentum of late. They have gone from pointedly ignoring Paul to studying his views, which are radically at odds both with most Republicans and with the swing voters who may well decide the November presidential election.
Of course, it may turn out that the lessons of this may be lost on precisely those Israelis who have the most to gain from learning them. For example:
1. Ignore extremists at your peril.
Giving extremists room to maneuver and a national stage can backfire badly, tying your hands even as it tars you with a wide brush.
2. Tolerate extremism and you breed competition, which breeds escalation.
Paul has a number of rivals for the title of farthest Republican outlier, notably ex-Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, who once criticized the left as unfairly anti-Crusades, and who once linked homosexuality with pedophilia and even bestiality.
Finally, the element that could cost both the Republicans and Netanyahu dearly in a future election:
3. Beware the Blackmail of Extremism.
The zeal and the apparent purity of extremists comes with a built-in dose of extortion, as the Paul candidacy illustrates. If extremists bolt, as they are wont to do, they can efficiently undermine you in a third party run. But even keeping them close is no solution. The extremist will then taint you as no one else.
Netanyahu and the Likud, shored up by polls showing that they have no realistic opposition at present -- except the implied threats of pro-settler and Haredi allies -- will have every temptation to stay the course and keep the ship's wheel of state hard to the right.
But as Netanyahu himself showed in 1996 in overcoming a huge 20 point deficit in defeating Shimon Peres, over-confidence in polls can cause a politically lethal strain of selective blindness.
Now, for the first time in years, moderate candidates with electoral potential are coming to the fore in Israel, notably news anchor and writer Yair Lapid, and outgoing Teva Pharmaceuticals CEO and former IDF major-general Shlomo Yanai.
Likud strategists, meanwhile, can take a lesson from Ron Paul. Or they can take a lesson from 1964.
The Republican presidential candidate, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, was a riveting thinker and orator. The most renowned sentence he ever spoke, however, might have been his most misguided.
"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," he declared, accepting the Republican nomination for president in 1964, adding "and let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!"
There was undeniable power in these words. But there was something frightening in them as well, frightening enough to set in motion a landslide Republican defeat of historic proportions.
Netanyahu may view himself as unbeatable at present. Yet, a backlash is building in the crucial center of the Israeli electorate. The hard right and the violent fringe Orthodox are wearing out their welcomes. And Netanyahu knows better than anyone, that if anyone can dislodge the Israeli right from power, it is the fickle, short-fuse Israeli extreme right.
At some point, Netanyahu will need to act to keep the center close, rather than the extremes. And, as the leading Republican in Israel, the prime minister might also consider joining his American colleagues in their most fervent prayer this week:
"Please, God, don't let Ron Paul win."
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Originally published on Haaretz.com]]>If You Could See Israel Nakedtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.11791942012-01-02T18:23:45-05:002012-03-03T05:12:01-05:00Bradley Burstonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bradley-burston/
For the length of this corrosive 2011, you could feel something numbing, something comforting, being stripped away from us. The protective coloration -- the start-up sheen, the silvery comb-over pretense of democracy and peace-seeking, of Jewish values and of membership in the community of modern nations -- all of it has begun to wear thin and wear out.
Good riddance. We're better off. We need to begin to again see Israel as it truly is. Naked and vulnerable. Real. Ailing. Still worth saving.
If you could see Israel naked, you could see behind the payot and the prayerful posturing and disproportionate power of extremists who, in their actions and rabbinic decrees, poison the name of Judaism and Jewish values.
And if you could see Israel naked, you would also see past the despair and the depression and the paralysis of the majority. You would see that there is a rising current of light to this darkness, a mounting if gradual popular resistance. By Israelis who still believe in the prophetic vision of their own Declaration of Independence.
By Israelis tired of being tacitly enslaved to the newest in the long, long line of Jewish history's false messiahs.
If we are to see Israel stripped naked, the place to begin may be with those most voracious in demands for what they have redefined -- and weaponized -- as "modesty."
Imagine losing the extravagant hats and the sumptuous frock coats of the rock throwing, spit-spewing, child-abusing, crude-cursing misogynists of the voodoo yeshiva in Beit Shemesh.
Underneath the clothes, they are no different from any other group of testosterone poisoned bullies, weak and mean of spirit, wary of exposure, hiding unspeakable urges behind terrible acts.
So it is, as well, with the thousand local incarnations of Hilltop Youth, the part-hippie, part-redneck gun-nut vanguard of permanent-occupation blackmail in the West Bank.
Look past the exaggerated skullcaps and the exaggerated earlocks. Look instead at the funhouse-mirror ideology and the ritual Sabbath attacks on Palestinians and their property.
Concentrate, for a moment, on the rock-throwing against IDF officers. Focus on their contempt for courts, the government, the Knesset, and you begin to see a pattern: Stripped to their essentials, these people are, in the most profound sense, non-Jews. Not merely because of their vehemence in whoring after false gods of "modesty" and settlement.
More to the point, these are people who hate Jews. They have no use for them. They have no use for Jews who are liberal in outlook, temperate in behavior, believers in a Judaism which leans more to the universalist vision of the prophets than to the Amalek-must-die Dahiya Doctrine of Exodus. Which is, worldwide, most Jews.
In fact, the extremists who blacken our lives have little use for most Israelis, Jews or Arabs, and certainly none for the huge majority who supported the social justice movement this year. They look for support elsewhere, often abroad, often to actual non-Jews, with whom they have made bizarre common cause.
But because this was a year in which the country was often stripped naked, we also saw, over and over, acts of quiet heroism. The Shalit family in their struggle to free Gilad. The Margolese family of Beit Shemesh in their struggle to protect eight-year-old Na'ama. Tanya Rosenblit in her effort to be recognized as a human with rights on a public bus. The rape survivors whose testimony sent a former president of Israel to prison.
The list is long, and also includes heroism far from the public eye, as in the case of the
NISPED organization, a Negev Arab-Jewish coexistence and development association, whose Be'er Sheva office for volunteers was torched this month.
What these people are telling us is that we do not have to settle for a Jewish state which does to the world what the yeshiva punks of Beit Shemesh do to women and girls: spitting at those who are, or should be, our neighbors and allies, cursing those who are part of us.
If we could see truly Israel naked, we would need to make a decision. A decision about what a Jewish state should become, what Judaism is. What they will be, in this generation and those to follow.
Maybe we already have.
Perhaps it is Judaism itself that this corrosive year has flayed naked. Telling us that the Judaism which was created by, for, and in, a relentlessly hostile Diaspora, needs to adapt to a world in which that reality no longer exists.
Yes, we were a people hunted, stateless, defenseless, powerless, subject to humiliation and pogrom, exclusion and expulsion and massacre. But the survival mechanisms which sustained us, also produced horrible beliefs about non-Jews, and credos of superiority regarding Jews -- a secret arsenal of bigotry and contempt. Now bared for all to experience.
If we could see the Jewish world naked, we might well see a new Judaism emerging this new year, a community of faith which fosters compassion and coexistence rather than the bullying, non-Jewish shandas of Beit Shemesh and mosque burnings and no compromise and Avigdor Lieberman.
A new Judaism. Stripped of xenophobia and 19th century clothes for 21st century issues. In the long run, it could save the Jewish people from extinction. If we're lucky, it could save Israel as well.
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Originally published on Haaretz.com]]>Israel, 2012: Teaching the Horse to Starvetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.11648282011-12-30T11:44:44-05:002012-02-29T05:12:01-05:00Bradley Burstonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bradley-burston/
"I was so close. So close," the balagula replies. "My plan... I could feel it was going to work. Every single day, I gave my horse a little less to eat. Training him. Everything was going great. But wouldn't you know it -- just when he'd learned to eat nothing -- just then, he falls down and dies."
It's all you need to know, this one shopworn Yiddish joke. The one that explains the whole of this inexplicable Israel at this New Year.
We all know who the balagulas are. The foreign minister who doesn't believe in diplomacy, the finance minister who doesn't believe in economic opportunity, the health minister who doesn't believe in doctors, the minister for fostering aliyah who extols an Israeli ad campaign for America which directly offends U.S. Jews.
Day by day at home, this Israel teaches the horse to starve when it demands more and more of the non-Haredi young and provides less and less: in return for less education, more fees, in return for more inequitable army duty and taxation, less affordable housing.
Day by day the prime minister, in callous insult or in condescension, in domestic calculation or out of personal need, teaches the horse to starve when he reduces Israel's support abroad, alienating traditional allies and the Jewish world. Pledging to work for two states, and then ensuring that state number two will be the People's Republic of Judea.
Until this year, the rule of balagulism proved itself. The balagulas taught the horse to starve, and, holding all the power, gave the horse no option but to obey. The balagulas were -- are -- pleased as punch with themselves. And when it all collapses around them, they will always have the horse to blame.
Until this year, what we did not suspect was that we, the horse, could learn to speak. And that the moment a horse learns to speak, the balagula may abruptly think twice about the ultimate wisdom of starvation lessons.
In our weakness, we failed to see that not only can the balagula's horse learn to speak, but also its cousin, the Donkey of the Messiah.
This is the true equine alter ego of the mainstream Israeli, the burdened pack animal which a small, radical, hard right and Orthodox-driven hierarchy believes it can scorn and exploit and abuse and disregard and lash, and then, all of it notwithstanding, still ride into permanent power.
What we did not suspect was that finding a voice can stop balagulism in its tracks. Like other forms of bullying behavior, balagulism is fundamentally weaker than it seems.
In the past few days alone, popular outcry has taken the reins from a range of balagulas.
Energy and Water Minister Uzi Landau of Yisrael Beiteinu, a party which came to power promising to represent the interests of secular voters, proposes a bill which reads as though the broomhandle-straight Landau composed it with the aid of mescaline. The "Kosher Electricity Law" would have effectively put control of power production in the hands of state rabbinic authorities. But an online petition and an in the flesh protest at the weekend quashed the bill.
A courageous woman's refusal to sit at the back of a "Mehadrin" (ultra-Kosher) public bus has galvanized a wider campaign against radical rabbinic edicts meant to muzzle, disenfranchise, and disappear women from the public sphere.
The Jewish National Fund, meanwhile, has been shaken by protests at home and abroad against the JNF's role in evicting East Jerusalem Palestinians from their homes so that settlers could move in. Recently a member of the JNF's Washington, D.C. board resigned in protest over a scheduled eviction, which the organization has now put on hold.
Finally, unprecedented public outrage over radical settler attacks against the IDF, the culmination of the children's crusade that has desecrated mosques on both sides of the Green Line, has shelved a bill which would have retroactively legalized blatantly illegal outposts. The law, a polite masterpiece of disguised sedition, would have blocked any government control over outposts, barring their evacuation, and, most significantly, undermining the primacy of orders of the Supreme Court.
In the end, what does the balagula story have to teach us? Not only that as never before, in this coming year of 2012, our choice will be to learn to speak or to learn to starve. The lesson is also, that if a country is run like a joke long enough, there's no telling who will have the last laugh.
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Originally published on Haaretz.com]]>Newt Gingrich May Be Able to Occupy Palestine, But Israel Can'ttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.11553602011-12-21T13:45:48-05:002012-02-20T05:12:01-05:00Bradley Burstonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bradley-burston/
Let's start with the occupation, our 44-year-long experiment in re-inventing the Palestinian people. This is what you need to know before you bet your political farm on it:
We don't have it in us. We can't pull it off.
No one here is of any use at it. Anyone who has ever occupied here knows it. The army trains you for everything: armored warfare, urban firefights, chemical weaponry, nuclear attack, biological agents, commando raids, missile strikes. Everything except the one thing you know you'll face -- occupation.
Your friend Bibi will tell you about our innovative, can-do nature. He may, however, omit this: We have proven ourselves incapable of doing the one thing that has come, against our will, to define us more than anything else we do as Israelis: occupation.
Why not? Why the woeful preparation, the inappropriate equipment, the proven recipe for military fear and anger and, across the firing line, civilian tragedy? What's our problem?
Somewhere inside, we know that to succeed in occupying, we would have to truly believe in it. To believe in it, we would have to fully acknowledge that occupation, in all its obscenity, is what we are, in fact, doing.
To acknowledge the occupation is to recognize the Palestinians; not as terrorists or poseurs, not as inventions, but as full, flesh and blood human beings, as entitled to their rights as we are to ours.
And that is something that your friend Bibi, and this Israel, are not prepared to do.
You may know how to keep the Palestinians from asserting their rights, Mr. Speaker, but we don't.
Maybe you can control their sense that they want their own country in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem, in their own lifetimes, but we can't.
In fact, we can't even occupy or control our own.
And this, as a devotee of doomsday scenarios, is where you come in.
The same night, when another two dozen Hilltop Youth or their surrogates threatened our relations with Jordan and the Christian world, defying the army and the government by founding an illegal settlement outpost in border zone closed by the army -- near a monastery at the traditional site of Jesus' baptism -- we put one of the leaders on the IDF's Army Radio, crowing about their next exploit.
And lest that not do enough damage, the next day saw a mosque torched in Jerusalem, and police cars slashed and smashed, all in the name of outposts forever and Palestine never.
Should you become president, and you display understanding for the settlers -- as you will doubtless feel that you need to -- you can bet that they will take that as license to go for the Day of Judgment play: the drive for the Temple Mount. World War III, here we come.
While settling into the Oval Office, however, you might do well to remember the name Mustafa Tamimi. The context as well.
On Friday, at the same time viewers heard you describe the Palestinians as an invented people, a real Palestinian named Mustafa Tamimi was murdered by our inability to occupy.
The occupation, you will come to learn, murders in the second degree. "A non-premeditated killing," the legal definition holds, "resulting from an assault in which death of the victim was a distinct possibility."
Such was Tamimi's gruesome death, his face and brain crushed by a tear gas canister fired, contrary to all proper procedure, by an Israeli soldier at close range and at level aim, with minimal regard to a compromised field of vision, in an environment in which firearms, gas and other chemicals are routinely used prematurely, disproportionately, and inappropriately. No accident.
Maybe you know how to occupy Palestine, Mr. Speaker, but Israel clearly does not. Anyone who has engaged here in the business of occupying can tell you how it happened.
What you need to know, Mr. Speaker, is the why of it.
On your next visit, and there will surely be one, you should pay a call to Tamimi's village, Nabi Saleh. Not hard to find. On Fridays, you can find it by the thick clouds of tear gas alone.
The army, by its own open admission, will not allow non-violent demonstrations in Nabi Saleh. Non-violence is punished with tear gas. Or worse.
Nor is non-violence allowed in other villages with longstanding and well-documented land grievances over settlements which have taken over their property by force of arms, or law, or bureaucracy, or deceit.
Mr. Speaker, you may be capable of occupying Nabi Saleh, but we are not.
Mr. Speaker, if for the sake of Jesus and the Resurrection, you want the territories to stay occupied forever, you and your Christian Zionist allies will have to do some homework before Inauguration Day.
We're not going to be of much help. If you want all of this to stay occupied, you may have find a way to do this by yourselves.]]>When Jews in Berkeley Vote to Cut Support for Israeltag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.11390482011-12-09T12:59:49-05:002012-02-08T05:12:01-05:00Bradley Burstonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bradley-burston/bar J Street's student organization from membership, the message it sent was regrettably clear:
The choice is up to you -- you can be welcomed as a Jew, or you can speak your mind on Israel.
Now Berkeley, so often ahead of the curve, has distinguished itself once more. Its Jewish Student Union, founded expressly to provide a forum for communication and to unify campus Jewish organizations, has become the first such group in the country to have denied membership to the unapologetically pro-Israel, pro-peace J Street U.
Trends matter. The Berkeley vote lends momentum to a wider tendency -- the exclusion, over political tensions, of more and more Jews from the already shrinking tent called the American Jewish community.
Places like Berkeley matter. It was in Berkeley and other like-minded towns that a surprisingly large number of young people forged a lifelong commitment to work for the ideal of an Israel true to values of democracy and prophetic justice.
It was in places like Berkeley, with its tradition of respect for universal rights, where they learned that support for Israel need have nothing to do with support for occupation or settlements or defaming Palestinians or refusal to compromise. That support for Israel could have everything to do with support for strengthening democracy there, freedom there, equality there, and genuine self-determination for both Jews and Palestinians.
It was in places like Berkeley, with its tradition of activism and freedom of expression, where they learned that there is no contradiction in being critical of Israel's failings while acknowledging its merits and dangers, and believing in its potential.
It was in places like Berkeley, with its tradition of coalition-building, where they learned that Israel needs all the help and support it can get.
What Israel does not need, is a decision which cuts that support.
In a place like Berkeley, it takes guts for anyone, whatever their politics, to admit that they care about Israel. If their politics are progressive, if, like the J Street U people, they explicitly oppose both the occupation and the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, one of the voters in the Jewish Student Union decision may take the trouble to denounce J Street in the Northern California Jewish newspaper as "anti-Israel" and, perhaps most damning, not "part of the mainstream Jewish community."
What remains unclear is why, when Jews in Berkeley boycott fellow supporters of Israel, they believe that they are doing Israel, or the Jewish people, any good.
Does the Berkeley vote truly reflect the kind of community that Jewish students at the University of California want? An intellectual ghetto, walled off from debate, bricked up against nuance, a trompe l'oeil of democracy, of openness, of communication?
Here in Israel, the war that is closest to us, the war that threatens us most directly, and perhaps, most permanently, is a struggle over exclusion. It is a war which, week by week, vote by vote, uses democracy to diminish democracy. One which, edict by edict, uses the institutions of Judaism to alienate and repel Jews, and the institutions of Zionism to alienate and repel supporters of Israel.
Every vote sends a message. It can build bridges, or burn them. It can foster communication, or deter it. For many people who have lived in Berkeley, it was in part because they found a welcoming, open, questioning, courageous, progressive community of Jews there, that they made a decision to come to Israel to live. Most, wherever they are now, are still actively working to make this a much better place.
To the members of the Berkeley Jewish Student Union, just this: Take a moment. Do something for your community, and for Israel. Vote again.
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Originally published on Haaretz.com]]>At Last, Occupation Zionists and Israel-Loathing U.S. Jews Can Agreetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.11253552011-12-02T18:19:17-05:002012-02-01T05:12:01-05:00Bradley Burstonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bradley-burston/
This may go to explain why members of two groups that would seem to have no common ground -- the pro-settlement, pro-occupation Jewish hard right in America on one hand, and, on the other, the loose community of hard left American Jews who loathe Israel and all it does -- could come together to heap scorn and bile on a common enemy: The Two-State Jews.
Hated by activists of both sides as a yefeh nefesh, a lily-liver, a person of limp and literally negotiable values, the Jew who still believes that such a thing can and should happen -- an independent Palestine next to an independent, truly democratic Jewish state -- merits the nastiest common curse the hard right and hard left can summon: Liberal.
"Why are they so angry?" writer Gershom Gorenberg, an avowed two-state dove, asks in an account of an evening in which he recently addressed an Orthodox congregation in New York on threats to Israeli democracy: among them, the hair-trigger issues of contemporary Orthodoxy, settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Gorenberg, himself Orthodox and American born, though Jerusalem rooted, and thus no stranger to impassioned argument, found himself taken aback by a member of the congregation screaming at him, livid.
"The moderate Israeli left's argument that West Bank settlements undermine democracy and peace efforts is sometimes greeted in the U.S. as treasonous, sometimes as daringly unconventional," he wrote. "Ideas that have gone extinct in Israel still wander the American landscape, as if it were a Jurassic Park of the mind. What's going on?"
That, it turned out, was only the beginning. With the publication of Gorenberg's new book, The Unmaking of Israel, dove-hunting season opened in earnest.
"The only enthusiastic audience for The Unmaking of Israel will likely be found among those who are always eager for a book by a Jew they can use as a shield against a charge of anti-Semitism as they array themselves for ideological battle against the Jewish state," reviewer Lazar Berman wrote in Commentary, the flagship of second-generation neo-conservative U.S. Jews.
"In fact, tensions between Israel as the Jewish national liberation movement and Gorenberg's ideal democracy have nothing to do with settlements," Berman writes, later adding, "In 2011, Israeli democracy is trending toward greater equity and robustness, not toward collapse."
Israelis, knee deep in the effluent of legislation that aims to abrogate rights and the separation of powers, will surely find these observations peculiar -- if, for all the wrong reasons, reassuring.
From the left, Gorenberg has been taken to task for having concentrated too much on Israel and not nearly enough on the Palestinians. He has been attacked for cutting Israel's moderate majority too much slack, for being overly balanced on the Israeli-Palestinian question.
"Clearly he's a liberal throwing a sop to all those classical Zionists who can't bear the thought that they've lost the cherished Zionist dream of an exclusivist Jewish state," writes Seattle blogger Richard Silverstein, who describes himself as a progressive Zionist but one far to Gorenberg's left, and far more profoundly critical of Israel.
"He allows liberal Zionists to clear their conscience by conceding there are things wrong with Israel, while desperately clinging to the concept that Israel, as expressed in contemporary terms, remains fundamentally sound," Silverstein wrote.
Gorenberg has also been hit by shrapnel from the hard left's shelling of the Two-State
target it most loves to revile, columnist Jeffrey Goldberg. It made little difference to many seething critics, slamming Goldberg's strongly positive review of Gorenberg's book in The New York Times, that Goldberg endorses Gorenberg's proposals for making Israel more democratic, or that he shares Gorenberg's belief that the settlement enterprise, and its puppet, the occupation, are destructive to Israel.
What is needed, clearly, is a conversation within the American Jewish community, which allows all points of view -- no exceptions -- to be aired and discussed with seriousness. There are signs of this beginning, but intimidating shouts of reaction as well.
The American Jewish community needs to be more of a family and less of a lobby. More a family and less a place of censure and censorship. More a family and less a war zone of barricaded feuding clans.
In synagogues, campus Hillels, community centers, the rules need to be clear and ironclad. All are welcome, from boycott advocate to settler advocate. No incitement. No bigotry. None. Respect.
Meanwhile, the vigor of the attacks against moderates may lend those on both the hard right and the hard left to believe that their side is on the verge of winning the war over the future of Israel.
"Zionism is truly coming to an end," veteran New York journalist and avowed anti-Zionist activist Philip Weiss wrote this week. The pro-occupation right, meanwhile, churns out articles on a near-daily basis on the death of the two-state solution and the closing of the window on Palestinian statehood.
The fact is that both extremes may, in the end, get their wish. If Israel fails to heed warnings like those in Gorenberg's book, if the collective erosion of occupation, settlement, demographics, inequality, and expansion of extremist rabbinic influence is not reversed, both the hard right and the hard left will have been proven prophetic.
First, the two-state solution will be rendered impossible, pleasing the Occupation Zionist right.
The second consequence will not be long in coming: the end of what is left of democracy in Israel, and then the end, through demographics, despair, and desertion, of Zionism itself.
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First published on Haaretz.com
]]>Over Netanyahu's New Israel, the B.S. Light Is Ontag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.11173842011-11-29T11:51:26-05:002012-01-29T05:12:01-05:00Bradley Burstonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bradley-burston/
Fortunately, the language of the Bible now has a word for all of it. It's spelled Bet Vav Lamed Shin Yud Tet. Sometimes written bull****.
I found it in the massive Hebrew dictionary we have in the house. The word was right below the entry for Bolshevik, and, in this context, it had the terrible ring of truth. Back in America, where the word originated, there's a context for its use that finally explains this New Israel of Netanyahu's, this anomaly, in all its flower:
The B.S. light is on.
When energetic rookie lawmaker Yariv Levin trades on his birth status as the godson of Menachem Begin to defend his authorship of anti-democratic bills, no one here is fooled. They know the B.S. light when they see Yariv Levin bathed in it.
When Levin's ubiquitous classmate Danny Danon takes European governments to task for funding NGOs -- outraged, as Danon proclaims, at foreign intervention in a sovereign state -- then takes it upon himself to shill for the Republican Party at home and abroad, the light glows ever brighter.
When scrappy first-time legislator Ofir Akunis insists that the laws meant to cripple leftist NGOs are not politically motivated and are meant only to protect Israeli democracy and strengthen the country, even a number of Israel's staunchest hard rightists, among them Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin, cabinet minister Benny Begin, and Benjamin Netanyahu's National Security Adviser Yaakov Amidror -- not to mention, in a late entry, Netanyahu himself -- know better. They see the NGO laws for what they are, an efficient, one might say, potentially sustainable fuel source for the B.S. light.
True, accusing politicians of promulgating B.S. is akin to accusing mammals of having hair and bearing live young. But the current campaign is different. The rules of Israeli democracy, awkward and flawed as they always were, have been mobilized for the camouflaged goal of taking themselves apart.
There's an instructive irony in all of this. After all, these are Israelis we are talking about. A people which prides itself on candor without compromise, on, in Netanyahu's choice of phrase at the UN, dugriyut, directness, unfiltered honesty. The actual truth.
And there's the rub. It was not The Truth that Netanyahu was talking about. It was Our Truth. The truth that makes room for settlements, nuclear weapons, lack of due process, self-determination -- as long as they're on our side.
Make no mistake, this is a people which knows its way around an untruth. Like the apocryphal 50 words for snow, the Hebrew language is rich in synonyms for something south of honesty. But nothing in the ancient lexicon quite fits the Black Flagging campaign. You need something more contemporary, more Western in origin. Something that recognizes the true common denominator of Netanyahu's New Israel, the fact that the ends and the means are now one and the same.
The purpose of the laws, as well as the blind eyes turned to the likes of misogynistic, seditious, racist rabbis and their violent disciples, is not to institute apartheid, fascism, Jim Crow, tycoonocracy, the Chile of Pinochet or the Afghanistan of the Taliban. The purpose of these laws is to disguise the ways in which we have grown to resemble parts of each. The purpose of the laws is to shield the system by shielding us from it. To allow it to flourish beyond the range of our senses of hearing, sight and smell.
Not that all this is new. It is simply improved. The need for a national culture of B.S. began long before the state was established, and was refined after 1948. And it's not that the Palestinians don't have one of their own. All nations and peoples need their myths.
Nonetheless, it was the occupation that truly brought Israel's B.S. light into its own, and made sure that it would stay on. With the occupation came the overarching need to ignore, to confabulate, to misdirect. With the occupation came the self-protective urge for marketing, for rebranding, for selective vision, for a shrill form of self-esteem based on the idea that we alone, with our experience, can understand and thus speak the truth.
With the occupation, with the settlements, with the night raids and the administrative detention and the roads just for settlers and the buses just for settlers, with the destruction of Palestinian crops and the expropriation of Palestinian property and the cramping off of Palestinian life, came the need for something bigger than the words for lie and falsehood and deception.
With the occupation came the need for that word. For B.S. in all its forms. With the occupation came the need for playing the victim, for playing the saint, for playing the pompous preacher, for acting the misunderstood street punk, for denying demography, for fostering segregation, for intimidating the press, for being the diplomat who insults dignitaries with tiny chairs, for discriminating against Arab citizens while noting that many of them work in high-tech, for building walls high enough that we can't watch what we ourselves are doing.
This is what has become of "a light to the nations." Now, with these laws, everyone knows that the B.S. light is on. And people who care about Israel need to tell its leaders: for God's sake, for your own sake, shut it the hell off. Before there's no one left to do so.
]]>Come Visit Israel. Before It's Gone.tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.11102052011-11-23T11:57:47-05:002012-01-23T05:12:01-05:00Bradley Burstonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bradley-burston/
I want them to come soon. Before it's all gone.
The Israel I want them to see is dying by the day.
It's the Israel I saw when I myself once came to visit. A place which had a calm but breathtaking belief in a better future. A place that still had a shot at just that. It was this Israel that convinced me to stay.
This is this Israel that this government, and this parliament, has decided, once and for all, to finish off, precept by democratic precept. As they see it, the sooner, the quieter, and the more permanently, the better.
My nephew is going to have to hurry.
I want him to see what's left of a place of quietly extraordinary people who dreamed of decency and peace, who envisioned making a place in the world where both we and our immediate neighbors could live together: no longer hated, no longer hating.
It was a place where there was an overriding belief that democracy was sacred, that minority rights should be respected more and more, rather than less and ultimately not at all.
This was the place I came to so many years ago, unfamiliar with its rude clamor and its face-slap smells, the directness of its language and its unfamiliar concepts of personal space.
Foreign. It was a place that believed that affordable housing and quality health care and reasonable living costs and reliable employment should be available to the poor as well as the well-off, to the elderly and infirm and the pre-existing condition, to the Arab as well as the Jew.
I want my nephew to know that there was once a place that his great-grandparents, believers in social justice who had been anarchists in Bialystok and became anarchists in Boyle Heights, could take pride in.
I want him to see it before they kill it. Kill it with settlements. Kill it with privatization and Social Darwinism and the lie they call the free market. Shred by shred, what is good is being drained away, voted away, diluted away in secret, or torn away by force.
Every morning we wake to it. Dreading it. Every morning, a new abomination, an obscene policy proposal, a rabbinical outrage, new plans to expel Palestinians from homes in Jerusalem, new plans to drive Bedouin from homes in the Negev, new steps taken to insult the United States, new ways of threatening a free press, new permits to expand settlements, an endless stream of opaquely worded legislative assaults on democracy, from ravenous middle and back-bench politicians on the make.
Last week, as Israel marked the watershed of the assassination of the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, I was thinking about the place this could have been. The Israel, for example, that was the promise of the Rabin government.
A government that related seriously to the needs of Israeli Arabs. A government that more than doubled the education budget for all Israeli children. A government that fostered construction of thousands of homes for young couples and families within Israel, that invested millions in depressed outlying towns rather than new settlements, that dramatically expanded ties with the Muslim world, and with developing nations.
I want my nephew to meet my heroes, the people who have made it through wars and tragedy and this government and who still believe in that Israel whose future is one of social justice and peace.
I want my nephew to know that most Israelis believe that settlements do little other than ruin their lives, stain their country, and block the way to peace.
I want my nephew to see that people here have let down their guard and have let the people in power run and ruin their lives. When scouts in the Book of Numbers called this a land that eats away at its inhabitants (13:32), they knew what they were talking about.
I want my nephew to meet my heroes, the people who still believe in the Israel that can endure. Not one big ghetto of a doomed settlement, but one modest jewel of a country. People who hope for good, people who see all people as deserving of respect, safety and freedom, are heroes. And, for the time being at least, they're still here.]]>Iran Winstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.10878292011-11-11T11:15:00-05:002012-01-11T05:12:01-05:00Bradley Burstonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bradley-burston/
Which is to ask: Will Iran then reduce Tel Aviv, and all of Israel, to ashes?
If a decision has, in fact, been taken, the dozen or so Israeli government and military officials who would know, are not telling. At the same time, it is fair to assume that those who are prepared publicly to hazard a prediction, do not, in fact, know.
This is what we do know. And if we know it, Iran does as well:
To bring an end to the existence of a Jewish state, to erase Israel from the map, this is the sum total of what Iran must do now: Nothing.
Play it out: Say the response of the United States and Western Europe to the IAEA watchdog report on Iran's nuclear program, a response mitigated by arm-twisting and interest peddling by Russia and China, stays tepid.
Say Israel decides against going it alone. Say Iran goes about its business, and remains a few years, or a few months, or one turn of a key, away from assembling its nuclear device.
Iran wins.
Iran wins because of what many Israelis now see that Israel is turning itself into: Iran.
Not because our justice minister was widely quoted as telling a convention of rabbis and religious court judges that "step by step, we will bestow upon the citizens of Israel the laws of the Torah and we will turn Halakha (Jewish religious law) into the binding law of the nation." Minister Ne'eman later said he had been misunderstood.
And not because our prime minister, cribbing a page from the playbook of the Islamic Republic, has demanded that Israel henceforth be recognized explicitly as a Jewish state.
These were mere preludes. These were feints, deceits, the kind of smoke that Iran blows to keep scrutiny at bay. What matters is what Israel has done since. Wave upon wave of legislation, governmental fiat, and clerical fanaticism, bigotry, graft, and extortion, which are fast turning Israel into the only former democracy in the Middle East.
We are turning Iran. And every step we take toward that end, Iran wins.
Every time a bureaucrat in black -- ostensibly, ostentatiously, a Rav, a rabbi, a man of greatness -- can discriminate against women; every time he can deny them access to holy sites and relegate them to the backs of buses; every time he can prohibit the image of a woman's face in public advertising; every time he can decide when and where and if, as soldiers, as students, as worshippers, they may sing or dance or speak or stand or even be present in Jewish worship, Iran wins.
Every time a well-connected crackpot preacher holds up vital hospital construction, brandishing a voodoo ruling of his alone; every time he abrogates the religious rights of Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Renewal and even fellow Orthodox Jews, even rabbis; every time he bars Ethiopian or Moroccan schoolgirls from studying with Ashkenazi schoolgirls, Iran wins.
Every time a self-styled pious Jew places an extremist holy man above the law and its commands; every time he desecrates a mosque, every time he destroys Palestinian-owned olive trees; every time he attacks Arabs with rocks; every time he threatens peace activists in their homes; and every time he gets away with it -- which is every time -- Iran wins.
Every time the cabinet and the Knesset advance anti-democratic bills meant to stifle dissent, suppress the Arabic language, demonize human rights workers, and curb freedoms of expression and the press, Iran wins.
Every time the pro-occupation minority, here and in the Diaspora, defines the illegal Migron settlement outpost as Zionism, equates Israel's vital strategic interests with the permanent, God-mandated, clergy-driven, Messiah-oriented occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem; and blackmails the government into shunning peace talks, Iran wins.
"If the Iranians will just be patient," veteran commentator Yaron London remarked this week, "they can spare themselves the effort involved in developing an atomic bomb."
If Israel does not change, he wrote in Yediot Ahronot, in the space of a generation it will find that those who recognize Israel within its own population will constitute a minority. By then, it will be "doubtful that Israel will be a national entity any different than the nations that surround it: a theocratic state, poor from both the material and spiritual standpoints, chokingly crowded, and very similar to the Iran which poses us such threats."
Want a prediction? Here's one: Benjamin Netanyahu will outlast Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in office. Here's one more: If things go on as they have for the past two years, Benjamin Netanyahu may outlast Israeli democracy as well.
We are turning into Iran. We have had no more success in slowing chain reactions in the Knesset, in the Rabbinate, in the cabinet, than we have shown in slowing uranium enrichment in Natanz or heavy water production in Arak. Perhaps even less.
We can't seem to stop ourselves. Even if we know that it may well be this, and not Ahmadinejad's centrifuges, which will, in the end, spell death to Israel.