The fracturing of established Middle Eastern states into tribal, religious, and political enclaves isn’t visible on the maps that appear in newspapers and atlases. But while diplomats and commentators continue to refer to “Iraq” and “Syria” and “Lebanon” by the names that they were given in the aftermath of World War I, the reality on the ground is much more confusing.

Some of the new Arab statelets, like the Hamas enclave in Gaza and Hezbollah’s territory in Southern Lebanon, fly the flag of movements belonging to the Sunni and Shia streams of Islam. The Alawite rump state of Syria still flies the flag and uses the stationary of a U.N. member state, while Sunni rebels flying black jihadist banners control large swaths of Syrian territory and enjoy at least a temporary measure of diplomatic recognition in the West. Meanwhile, Kurdistan has tens of thousands of well-trained men under arms, a thriving economy, and independent diplomatic ties with its neighbors as it inches forward to independence. The Palestinian Authority, which enjoys newly upgraded formal representation at the United Nations, can alternately be seen as a dependent mini-state—whose borders are controlled by Israel, Jordan, and Egypt—or as a rump-state that has lost control of over 40 percent of its citizens to Hamas.

Continue reading "Robert Worth, Edward Luttwak, Amos Harel, and Others Discuss the Fracturing of Middle Eastern States" at...

Errors by the party in power can get America into trouble; real catastrophes require consensus.

Rarely have both parties been as unanimous about a development overseas as they have in their shared enthusiasm for the so-called Arab Spring during the first months of 2011. Republicans vied with the Obama Administration in their zeal for the ouster of Egypt’s dictator Hosni Mubarak and in championing the subsequent NATO intervention against Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. Both parties saw themselves as having been vindicated by events. The Obama Administration saw its actions as proof that soft power in pursuit of humanitarian goals offered a new paradigm for foreign-policy success. And the Republican establishment saw a vindication of the Bush freedom agenda.

Continue reading "How Neocons and Obama Liberals Made the Same Mistakes About the Middle East" at...

The civil war in Syria has led to a keen debate among the professional echelon tasked with advising policymakers in Israel. This debate has been reflected in a more subdued public conversation and occasionally in spectacular events—like the bombing of Syrian military sites around Damascus. So, what are the dividing lines in this Israeli debate? Does Israel back any side in the war in Syria? And what would be an optimal outcome from the Israeli point of view?

The history of the Israeli-Syrian diplomatic process is long and winding, and it is defined by failure. Direct talks in the 1990s failed to produce an agreement. Subsequent attempts to revive direct negotiations between Damascus and Jerusalem proved elusive. Turkey-sponsored indirect talks broke down after Israel’s Operation Cast Lead action in the Gaza Strip in 2008-2009. Yet discreet channels of communication were nevertheless maintained between Israel and the Syrian regime, often through private individuals close to the Israeli government.

Continue reading "Should Israel Back a Side in the War in Syria? And If So, Which One?" at...

For two weeks in the summer of 1982, U.S. and Soviet jets dueled in the skies over Lebanon in one of the largest aerial dogfights since World War II. The pilots were Israelis and Syrians. In a classic Cold War proxy battle, U.S.-backed Israel humiliated Soviet-backed Syria, downing 86 MiGs without a single loss. It was the finest example of Israel’s strategic value to the United States: In return for the planes, Israel served as America’s shield and a model for the superiority of American-made weaponry.

In the summer of 2013, American-made Israeli jets are humiliating Syria once again. Israel’s ability to evade sophisticated Russian-made anti-aircraft systems to bomb Syrian territory over the past week does not just signal a possible expansion of Syria’s civil war or the latest salvo in the struggle with Iran. It also suggests that the U.S.-Israel alliance may be returning to its Cold War roots—which is good news for both countries.

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The Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz looks absolutely exhausted these days. Gantz, who was appointed to his job almost as an afterthought in February 2011, after a particularly poisonous battle within Israel’s military leadership, has never radiated a very lively aura. It may be a matter of character, or age, or just the fact that he had been called back into office after deciding to retire, but the IDF’s commander often seemed to be gliding through his term during the first two years in office. All this has changed: The man, it is rather clear, is not getting much sleep. His aides, well aware of this, try to enhance the boss’s alertness by providing him a constant supply of black coffee. Even the Israeli media had taken note. The result: a rather heated debate over the required rules of courtesy at the chief of staff’s office and whether those rules offend women officers.

Menachem Begin once famously maintained that “you do not ask a gentleman where he spent last night,” but Gantz’s chief reason for exhaustion is pretty clear: the deteriorating situation in Syria. While Israeli and American politicians pour clichés over the Iranian nuclear threat, the IDF is now more immediately worried about the dangers from Israel’s northern front—the implications of Syria’s civil war in particular. Publicly, Israel is deliberately keeping a very low profile. Even the last two Israeli air strikes (out of three, altogether) in Syria were initiated without any official response from Jerusalem (and since Israeli military censorship laws apply to Israeli journalists, I should add that these strikes only happened according to international sources).

Continue reading "Why the IDF Hit Syria, and Why Assad Won't Hit Back" at...

On Sunday, Israeli Air Force targeted sites around Damascus to stop the transfer of Iranian Fateh-110 missiles—capable of hitting all of Israel’s major population centers from all of Lebanon—to Hezbollah. But what if those missiles were in the hands of Syrian (or Iranian) troops sitting on top of the Golan Heights?

That’s precisely what would have happened if America’s foreign-policy wise men from James Baker to Martin Indyk had their way. As recently as 2010, Indyk, a Middle East adviser to the Clinton White House and a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, was arguing that Israel should give away the Golan—in order to promote a wider peace in the Middle East. “Nothing could better help Obama to isolate Iran,” wrote Indyk, “than for Netanyahu to offer to cede the Golan, as four other Israeli prime ministers have, in exchange for peace with Syria, which serves as the conduit for Tehran’s troublemaking in the Arab-Israeli arena.”

Continue reading "How Israel's Annexation of the Golan Heights Continues To Keep the Peace" at...

When District Judge Moshe Sobol handed down a historic decision in Israel last week, ruling that the practices of the Women of the Wall do not violate “local custom,” he was more correct than he probably realized. In 1930 Cyrus Adler, who was then serving as president both of New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary and the Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate learning in Philadelphia—as well as editor of the Jewish Quarterly Review—managed also to publish a Memorandum on the Western Wall. The memorandum had been prepared, as its subtitle announced, “for the Special Commission of the League of Nations on behalf of the Jewish Agency for Palestine.” In his introduction Adler noted that Article 14 of the League’s “Mandate for Palestine” had instructed the Special Commission “to study, define, and determine finally the rights and claims of Jews and Muslims at the Western or Wailing Wall at Jerusalem.”

Adler, like many of his contemporaries, would probably have had difficulty imagining that in a future Jewish state, yet another special commission would be required “to determine finally the rights and claims” of Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews, both male and female, to that embattled holy site. Yet hardly anyone who might have submitted a memorandum to Jewish Agency Chairman Natan Sharansky after he was delegated by Benjamin Netanyahu to deal with Israel’s most recent outbreak of “Women of the Wall” controversies would have been so naïve as to assert, as did Adler in 1930, that “the subject is one purely of religion, of devotion, and of sentiment.” We are dealing, after all, with a dispute between Jews—among whom religion has long ceased to be a matter of mere devotion and sentiment. And few scholars (except some of my fellow Israelis) would feel confident enough to “give the assurance that the memorandum here offered has been prepared in an objective and historical manner.”

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Last week, the Society of Professional Journalists named Tablet contributor Daniel Estrin a Sigma Delta Chi Award honoree for his 2012 Vox Tablet report about a new light-rail system in Jerusalem, a city hardly known for its high-functioning infrastructure. With a rapidly growing population squeezed between sacred sites, and as ground zero for an intractable territorial conflict, Jerusalem is more or less an urban planner’s worst nightmare. When the light-rail system was first proposed, it was meant to ease congestion and unify the city. In addition to facing a host of logistical obstacles on its way to completion, the project prompted considerable opposition because the trains would cross borders that many people have fought hard to define and defend, separating East Jerusalem from West, Arab from Jew. After nearly a decade of construction, at a cost of more than $1 billion, the system began taking riders in August of 2011. As Daniel Estrin learned in riding it about town, if one thing unites commuting Jerusalemites, it’s their frustration with the train’s deficiencies.

To celebrate Daniel Estrin’s achievement, we re-present his award-winning story and encourage you to listen to his series on Hidden Jerusalem. [Running time: 15:03.]http://cdn1.tabletmag.com/wp-content/files_mf/podcast_feature042913_lightrailRERUN.mp3

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In June of 2003, the summer before my junior year of college, I entered Marva, a two-month program that simulates military service for young diaspora Jews who are curious about their mettle for life in the Israeli army. For eight blistering weeks, while my friends were scampering around Capitol Hill or staying overnight in newsrooms, I camped, crawled, and ran around the countless topographies of the land of Israel with an unloaded M-16 that I named Eve.

Despite our weapons, the musty uniforms, the boots, the tents, the bases, the food, and the unforgiving commanders, Marva still wasn’t the real army. Some had come as a masochistic form of tourism, while others, like me, felt it was the first step toward fulfilling an important duty. After all, we were cadets in the first Jewish army in 2,000 years; we were part of the body that answered for the Jewish people after centuries of silence.

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It was a typically hot day in late August of 2006, but I was enjoying the breeze high atop Mt. Gerizim, almost 3,000 feet above sea level. I was taking part in a military course that was touring the West Bank. An officer was pointing out the Nablus casbah in the valley far below us where some of the fiercest battles of Operation Defensive Shield had taken place, but my mind was on other, more recent combat. While the Second Lebanon War was by that point officially over, my infantry unit, the Rotem battalion of the Givati brigade, was still in South Lebanon. I was two years into my mandatory service then, and those years had been mostly peaceful. But the summer of 2006 had been very different.

My unit had been called up north fairly late in the war, because it had been busy fighting the battles of Operation Summer Rains in the Gaza Strip. Those battles had started in late June, when the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was captured by Hamas on the border with Gaza. Barely two weeks later, Hezbollah attacked an IDF patrol on the Lebanese border, killing three soldiers and capturing two more; Israel declared war. I had spent much of that summer on the northern border but hadn’t seen much action, aside from the constant barrage of Hezbollah rockets that I quickly grew used to. In mid-August the United Nations had brokered a ceasefire, but Israel was taking its time withdrawing its forces, and many of my friends were still on the other side of the border.

Continue reading "Remembering Alex Assaf, the Tallest and Kindest IDF Soldier I've Ever Known" at...

Of the 1.7 million declassified State Department cables—some 700 million words long—that WikiLeaks put online this week as part of the Kissinger Cables, dating from 1973–1976, one records Maryland Sen. Charles “Mac” Mathias’ April 1976 trip to Beirut to meet with Yasser Arafat. At the end of the meeting, a journalist from Arafat’s entourage criticized Washington’s regional policy, telling the Republican senator that, unlike the Soviet Union, “the United States had no strategic policy toward Middle East, only tactics.”

The cable reports that the senator was greatly impressed with this piece of advice. It had been, he later noted to the Beirut embassy staff, “the portion of interview which had stood out and impressed him the most.” But the reality, which the U.S. foreign service officers knew very well, is that the United States did have a strategy in the Middle East and, at least for those years, Arafat played a central role.

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Esther Frank survived Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. After the war, she moved to Israel, eventually settling in a small apartment in Petach Tikva. She worked hard her entire life, but could hardly save any money. As old age began creeping up on her, Frank found herself struggling to live on the meager pension paid to her by the state, NIS 2,000, or approximately $550, per month. For years, she walked around in clunky men’s shoes, a size too big; for 40 shekels, they were an unbeatable deal. She desperately needed a hearing aid but, not being able to afford one, continued to spend most of her days sitting alone on her small, brown couch, silent, disconnected from the world. She couldn’t even hear the burglar who sneaked in to her house, knowing that she was old and defenseless. By the time she noticed him, it was too late. There was nothing she could do. He picked up her wallet and stole 86 shekels. It was everything Frank had left. Shaken, she took to locking her front door, a jarring change after a life of leaving it wide open to welcome in friends and neighbors. Two days later, she fell. Unable to call for help, her door locked, she just lay there for hours until she finally managed to get up and reach the phone. In 2007, an Israeli television crew interviewed Frank. The piece made many people cry, and donations started pouring in. Frank could now afford a hearing aid. She was fitted for one, and was thrilled when it was finally put in. She died a few days later.

According to a survey released last week by the Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Victims in Israel, 37 Holocaust survivors living in the Jewish state pass away every day. That’s more than a thousand people a month. And as the survey revealed, too many of them live, like Esther Frank, in conditions of abject poverty. One out of five survivors, for example, admitted to having had to forgo food at least once due to lack of funds, and 14 percent said that their financial situation led them to give up on purchasing necessary medicine. A quarter of the survivors replied that they were struggling with poverty, and a third had applied to the foundation, seeking financial aid. The overwhelming majority—more than two-thirds—reported monthly incomes no larger than NIS 3,000, or $830. The median salary in Israel is around $1,550.

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Israel’s new government, inaugurated this week, is the first in a decade—and one of very few in the nation’s history—to include no representatives of the ultra-Orthodox community. This absence was the result of demands by several of the coalition’s parties and was gleefully applauded by many in Israel, exasperated with what they perceived as the undue influence of haredi Jews on the nation’s politics and policies. This is not an entirely unreasonable reaction—for decades, haredi parties have used their position as electoral tiebreakers to demand, often forcefully, everything from political power to oversized budgets.

But the contempt so many Israelis, left and right, feel for the haredis predates all of that backroom skullduggery; nearly a century ago, the same strand of hatred almost killed my great-great-grandfather.

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After four years of bellyaching that President Barack Obama doesn’t seem to care much about them, Israelis now appear keen to prove that they don’t care much about Obama. Visiting Jerusalem last week, I heard motorists already complaining that security precautions taken in advance of Obama’s visit—closed-off streets and the subsequent traffic jams—were making life hell. And for what? There’s no peace process, there’s a civil war unfolding on the Syrian border, Egypt is melting down, and Iran is still marching toward the bomb. So, why is Obama showing up now, four years too late? Maybe it’s simply to prove that the United States hasn’t entirely disappeared from the Middle East.

Obama’s three-day trip, which begins today, is packed—there’s an inspection of an Iron Dome missile battery, a stop at Yad Vashem and the Israel Museum, a visit to the graves of Theodor Herzl and Yitzhak Rabin, as well as a trip to see Palestinian Authority officials in Ramallah, and a tour of Bethlehem. Given that tonight features a dinner with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and five hours of talks with a man whose company Obama doesn’t much seem to relish, it’s no wonder the president might prefer, as he recently said, to “sit at a café and just hang out, wear a mustache, wander through Tel Aviv.”

Continue reading "Lee Smith: What Obama and Bibi Will Discuss Tonight at Dinner" at...

Earlier this week, with the members of his party gathered to vote in a new speaker to the Knesset, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took a moment to praise the outgoing one he had just reportedly ousted. “I want to say a few kind words about Rubi Rivlin,” Netanyahu said, referring to the veteran Likud politician who has served as the Israeli parliament’s head since 2009. Rivlin, however, would have none of it. “There’s no need,” he said curtly. Netanyahu insisted, and Rivlin interrupted a second time. “There’s no need, Bibi,” he said. “The people will thank me.”

Even in Israel’s prickly political landscape, such blatant, public animosity is uncommon. Immediately, Israel’s political class began offering explanations for the bad blood between the prime minister and the outgoing speaker, a beloved politician and the last remnant of an older generation of Likud legislators. Almost unanimously, the fingers of the commentariat pointed at … Sara Netanyahu.

Continue reading "Israel's First Lady Sara Netanyahu Flexes Her Political Muscles" at...

For the better part of 40 years, the Syrian border has been the quietest of Israel’s frontiers. Notwithstanding Israel’s 1973 capture and subsequent annexation of Syrian territory in the Golan and Bashar Assad’s ongoing support for terrorist organizations targeting the Jewish state, the border has been tranquil since the signing of the 1974 armistice. Indeed, the boundary with Syria—a state officially still at war with Israel—has proven even more secure than Israel’s lengthy borders with its nominal peace partners Egypt and Jordan.

But two years into the popular armed revolt against the Assad regime, this de facto peace along the Israeli-Syrian border seems to be in grave danger. Just consider the past few weeks: On March 2, three Syrian mortars landed outside Moshav Ramat Magshimim in the southern Golan Heights. Then on March 6, Syrian rebels kidnapped 21 U.N. peacekeepers patrolling the Golan Heights; they were held for a week prior to their release. On Monday, Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Lt. Benny Gantz said that “the threat of the situation in Syria spiraling out if control is quite high.” He added: “What we have here is a strategic detonator that could blow up at any moment.”

Continue reading "Why Syria Will Be the Next Israeli Front" at...

For anyone familiar with the saccharine judges of America’s prime-time beauty pageants, it might be jarring to hear how the director of Israel’s national competition describes Yityish “Titi” Aynaw, the Ethiopian-born 21-year-old who was just crowned Miss Israel. “I think she was not the most beautiful, by classic beauty,” said director Iris Cohen, comparing her to the 19 other finalists in this year’s competition. But she does give Aynaw this: “She stands on the stage and you cannot ignore her.”

The new Miss Israel is just as blunt. Sitting with her last week in the green room at the Tel Aviv offices of La’Isha magazine—the Israeli equivalent of Vogue and sponsor of the annual pageant—I told her about the stereotypical American beauty queen who seeks to impress the judges with her earnest hopes for world peace. “To say a sentence like that, in my opinion, is to sound retarded,” Aynaw replied. Then she stopped and wondered out loud if she should have said that. She changed “retarded” to “stupid,” and barreled on. “Iran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon, China is trying to become a superpower,” she said. “To say that I want world peace, of course I want it. It’s a dream. But I don’t think it will happen now.”

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Rabbi Menachem Froman, the West Bank spiritual leader famous for his pioneering co-existence efforts with Palestinians, died on Monday, March 4, 2013. To many, “peacemaker” and “settler” are a contradiction in terms, but not so for Froman, who forged powerful ties with Palestinian leaders as he gathered a passionate following of Jews, particularly in Tekoa, the town he led. In this video profile, drawn from footage taken over the past few years, the rabbi reflects on what it means to be, as he put it, “a citizen of God,” and explains why “loving the Palestinians” is the essence of his Judaism.

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Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not a man who minces words. He has called Israel a “terrorist state” and has suggested that “Allah would punish” Israel for its inhumane actions in Gaza. Usually, the United States pretends not to hear Erdogan’s rants—but not on Friday, when John Kerry, while visiting Ankara during his first trip abroad as secretary of state, denounced Erdogan for calling Zionism “a crime against humanity.” In response to Erdogan, Kerry said: “We not only disagree with it, we found it objectionable.”

On Monday at AIPAC, Vice President Joe Biden praised Kerry for standing up to the Turkish prime minister—and Kerry deserved the props. Kerry’s comment is as critical as State Department language gets regarding a NATO ally—and it’s about time. Policymakers from the Bush and Obama Administrations have sweet-talked and protected Erdogan since his Justice and Development party, known by its Turkish acronym AKP, came to power in 2003. Both White Houses saw Turkey as the model for moderate Islamism, a political current ostensibly willing to embrace democratic norms and project friendly power abroad, including the continuation of its strategic relationship with Israel. They believed Erdogan held the future of U.S. Middle East policy in his hands.

Continue reading "John Kerry Roasts Turkey. It's About Time." at...

Every new member of Israel’s Knesset gives a debut speech, and this year, with 48 rookies, the docket was full, with parliamentarians introducing their résumés, their proposed policies, and their hopes for the coming four-year term. One decided to ignore convention altogether. This member of Knesset used the allotted time to teach Talmud.

A full third of the 19th Knesset are observant Jews, but it wasn’t any of them. It was a woman named Ruth Calderon, a Talmud scholar and the founder of two Jewish houses of study. She was elected to Knesset as No. 13 on the list of Yesh Atid, a new party headed by former journalist Yair Lapid that swept the recent elections, earning 19 seats on a promise to bring about a more equal Israel, including by drafting the ultra-Orthodox into the army.

Continue reading "In Israel, the Orthodox Control Judaism. A New Knesset Member Wants to Change That." at...

A year and a half ago, I took over as Israel’s state archivist—and thus came to administer hundreds of millions of documents that tell the story of the Jewish state’s history and the actions of its governments. Our primary goal has been to digitize and bring to light as many of these documents as possible. Putting entire warehouses of documents online will take years. But in the meantime, we’ve begun to upload specific documents of great interest so as to enliven Israel’s public discourse and strengthen its democracy.

What follows is one such example: the transcripts of the top-secret Cabinet deliberations of February 1983, in which Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s Cabinet grappled with the truth about the massacre at Sabra and Shatila—and the tragic death of a left-wing protester at the hands of another Jewish Israeli outside the prime minister’s office during the deliberations. Now that the government-mandated 30-year cooling period has passed, we are able to share this fascinating, troubling, historical document with the public and know, at last, what the ministers said. (The full 250-page trove can be found here, and we’ll be posting translated segments of the documents here over the next few days.)

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The White House and President Obama’s supporters insist that he’s making his first trip to Israel next month to assure the Jewish state that if push comes to shove with Iran, he’ll have Israel’s back. But North Korea’s nuclear test Tuesday morning could indicate that it’s already too late for that. If North Korea has the bomb, then for all practical purposes Iran does, too. If that’s so, then Obama’s policy of prevention has failed, and containment—a policy that the president has repeatedly said is not an option—is in fact all Washington has.

If this sounds hyperbolic, consider the history of extensive North Korean-Iranian cooperation on a host of military and defense issues, including ballistic missiles and nuclear development, that dates back to the 1980s. This cooperation includes North Korean sales of technology and arms, like the BM-25, a missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead and reaching Western Europe; Iran’s Shahab 3 missile is based on North Korea’s Nodong-1 and is able to reach Israel. Iran has a contigent of Iranian weapons engineers and defense officials stationed in North Korea. Meantime, North Korean scientists visit Iran. And last fall, both countries signed a memorandum of understanding regarding scientific, academic, and technological issues.

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In an office in downtown Jerusalem earlier this month, two 20-somethings slurped homemade chicken soup leftover from the previous week’s communal Shabbat dinner. In T-shirts and jeans, they blended right in with the other young singles hanging out on Ben Yehuda Street. The difference is that Avi and Aharon’s families live less than two miles away in Mea Shearim, one of Israel’s most ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods. And the two men have completely cut themselves off from their parents and their tight-knit community. “We are each other’s brothers,” said Aharon, 28.

Setting down his motorcycle helmet, 21-year-old Avi, who, like almost all of the former Haredim I spoke to, requested that his last name not be publicized, told me that from the onset of his teenage years he had been “constantly searching for a way to get out.” He said he couldn’t conform to what he called “the closed mentality trap of Haredi society.” So, at 15, he decided to leave his house, one day taking the 15-minute walk to a Jerusalem he had never before seen, leaving behind no trace for his family and friends. He slept in the parks of Jerusalem for almost two months until he met fellow ex-Haredi teenagers who helped him find an apartment and work. When he was 19, Avi joined the IDF’s Nachal infantry brigade.

Continue reading "In Jerusalem, Haredi Teens Are Leaving Yeshiva—and Their Families—To Serve in the IDF" at...

Last month, when the new season of the Israeli reality show The Voice—the local version of NBC’s hit singing competition—debuted, no one expected extraordinary drama. Marching up to the studio’s stage, the eager contestants looked like the usual grab-bag of talent show aspirants: the frustrated actor, the high-school ingénue, the bartender who crooned to overcome her personal hardships, and so on.

Then it was Ofir Ben Sheetrit’s turn.

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Even before the outbreak of violence in the Second Intifada, Israeli governments and American Jewish organizations have pointed to Palestinian textbooks as Exhibit A of the Palestinians’ lack of seriousness about pursuing peace. How can we trust them, the argument goes, if they are inciting violence even among elementary-schoolers with books that fail to include Israel on a map and that glorify suicide bombers?

But a new study, financed by a $500,000 grant from the U.S. State Department and commissioned by the multifaith Council of Religious Institutions in the Holy Land, claims that both sides are to blame for presenting the other as the enemy. While Israeli schools did get slightly better marks for even-handedness and the Israeli school system was praised for its increasing ability to be self-reflective and self-critical, the study undercuts Israel’s often-repeated accusation that “Palestinians teach their children to hate.”

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When Barack Obama first came to office, the model bandied about by journalists and academics was Abraham Lincoln. The 44th president of the United States, our first African-American commander-in-chief, was the embodied legacy of the man who banished slavery and unified the country. And Obama, like Lincoln, assembled a “team of rivals”—a Cabinet not of “yes” men, but of prominent statesmen and policymakers in their own right, some of whom had a rocky history with the president, including most prominently his onetime rival, Hillary Clinton.

But now, with Obama’s second term just under way, the focus has turned to Dwight D. Eisenhower. Evan Thomas, author of a recent book on Eisenhower, suggested that Obama might look to Ike’s example for how to get out of Afghanistan and “draw down military spending.” The key lesson, wrote Thomas, is “have the confidence to be humble.” “Obama,” argued one Los Angeles Times editorial, “would do well to emulate [Eisenhower's] patient pursuit of a peaceful world and productive economy.” And Clinton even bluntly cited the 34th president as a model in the recent 60 Minutes interview with her and Obama. “I remember some of the speeches of Eisenhower,” Clinton said. “You know you’ve got to be careful, you have to be thoughtful, you can’t rush in.”

Continue reading "Chuck Hagel Likes Ike. But Is He Reading History Correctly?" at...

We ended up going to vote in the morning. We’d planned to do it in the afternoon, after a visit to Grandma. But Lev, our 7-year-old son, was so excited and impatient that I suggested to my wife that we go early in the morning and get it over with. So we set out at 7, and as we walked in the still-cold street, I recalled the first election I went to with my parents.

It was after the Yom Kippur War. We went together, but they didn’t make a big deal of it. They took me because they didn’t have a babysitter, or something. I was proud of them when we went behind the curtain together. They seemed to be taking the whole thing seriously, searching patiently for the right ballot and putting it in the envelope. I could see that they were trying to choose what would be best for our country, for my future. And I knew that there was no one else in the world who knew how to vote better than my mother and father. I didn’t know then that, within three years, Israel would win the Miss Universe pageant, the European basketball championship, and the Eurovision Song Contest. That we’d free the Entebbe hostages in a daring operation. I didn’t know any of that at the time, but the smell of a rosy future was in the air. And when my parents dropped their envelopes into the ballot box, I knew we were one step closer to that future.

Continue reading "Etgar Keret Takes Voting Advice From His 7-Year-Old Son" at...

When Yair Lapid’s father, the well-known journalist and politician Tommy Lapid, was on his deathbed, he said to his son: I’m leaving you the state of Israel.

Tommy, a Holocaust survivor, meant that metaphorically; the generation of survivors was entrusting the gift of a Jewish state to its children. But with the rise of Yair Lapid, head of Yesh Atid (There Is a Future), which emerged from nowhere to become Israel’s second-largest party in yesterday’s election, Yair’s “inheritence” could become literal. More than any other politician aside from Prime Minister Netanyahu himself, Yair may now determine the next phase of Israeli politics.

Continue reading "The Rise of Yair Lapid--and Why I Voted for His Centrist Yesh Atid Party" at...

Israeli voters go to the polls today to elect the next Knesset. Regardless of the outcome, undoubtedly the biggest story of the campaign season has been the rise of Naftali Bennett, a rookie politician who, against the odds, helped religious Zionism grow from a strong but discombobulated movement into an electoral powerhouse. This ideology, increasingly embraced by mainstream, secular Israelis, has its roots in the thinking of two influential rabbis: Abraham Isaac Kook and his son, Zvi Yehuda.

Tablet Magazine’s Liel Leibovitz speaks to Rabbi Shai Held, co-founder and dean of Mechon Hadar, an egalitarian yeshiva in New York, about the Kooks, the history of the religious Zionist movement, and why it is such a force in Israeli politics and culture today. [Running time:39:20.]http://cdn1.tabletmag.com/wp-content/files_mf/podcast_feature012213_shaiheld.mp3

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Of all the questions about next week’s Israeli election—is the Labor party and the left finally finished; is Naftali Bennett the new poster boy for the right wing; will the new Knesset actually pursue a policy of annexing the West Bank—the one thing that there seems to be consensus about is that the next Knesset will be most radical right-wing government in the history of the Jewish state. According to the commentators, the new government will guarantee an end to the Arab-Israeli peace process and will set Israel on a collision course with the United States.

Well, not so fast. According to one recent poll, 67 percent of Israeli voters support a peace deal with the Palestinians. Even on the right, a majority said they back the prospect of two states for two people, with 57 percent of Likud supporters backing such a deal and 53 percent of those likely to vote for Bennett’s Jewish Home Party also favoring the two-state solution.

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Naftali Bennett’s press conference late last month was to the Israeli election cycle what a high-speed car chase is to a middling Hollywood action movie. With the chronicle of Bibi Netanyahu’s re-election more or less foretold, Israelis were vying for a shot of adrenaline that would rescue what had otherwise become a bloodless procedural, and Bennett was on hand to deliver.

The chase began on Thursday night, Dec. 20, when Bennett, the young and charismatic head of Habayit Hayehudi—literally, the Jewish Home—a right-of-center religious party soaring in the polls, was interviewed by Nissim Mishal, one of Israel’s most revered television journalists. The veteran reporter wasted no time. He grilled Bennett, Netanyahu’s one-time chief of staff, about his allegedly strained relationship with his former boss. He called Bennett delusional for believing that it was possible for Israel to continue to object to the establishment of a Palestinian state in the face of mounting international pressure. For the first 15 minutes, they maintained a tense conversation, but nothing out of the ordinary for Israeli TV, where interviews are a contact sport and civility a sign of weakness. But Mishal had an ace up his sleeve.

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“Shelly Yachimovich is a traitor.”

“She is a horrible person.”

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Israel doesn’t have a lot of natural resources, but we are lucky enough to have a nice, warm, stable climate. Weather is not something to complain about around here, and not much of a subject for small talk either. That, at least, is true in real life and for real people; but with a news-crazed hyperactive media, struggling to satisfy the expectations of a society constantly hungry for updates, things get blown out of proportion. Judging from the reports in newspapers and on TV shows, you might mistake every drizzle for a hurricane.

Overall, winter rarely brings too much of a change to Israeli everyday life. There is a slight drop in temperatures, but sunny days are still more common than rainy ones. And most of us like it when things get winterish—a few gray clouds are a welcome change from the summer’s brutal sun. But the media see it differently. Used to covering wars and conflicts, they treat the weather like it was just another military operation—if there isn’t an Amud Anan (literally meaning Cloud Column, the name given to the IDF’s last strike in Gaza, known abroad as Pillar of Defense) taking place, editors, reporters, and weathermen have to settle for another kind of cloud busting. This is how Israeli journalists became storm chasers, or, sometimes, even storm creators.

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The Jon Stewart of Egypt, Bassem Youssef, is used to making headlines in Egypt for his popular late-night show. But in the past week the satirist has been in papers around the world for taking his criticism of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi too far. An Islamist lawyer has brought charges against Youssef for mocking the Egyptian president—describing him with epithets like pharaoh, or “SuperMorsi”—and he is now under investigation for “undermining” Morsi’s standing. In the episode in question, Youssef holds a red furry pillow stamped with Morsi’s likeness and speaks to it soothingly. “The president understands us,” says Youssef. “He understands us better than we understand ourselves.”

The Obama Administration has voiced its concerns over the legal action, as have other democracy advocates, seeing this, as well as a complaint that Morsi filed against the newspaper Al-Masry al-Youm, as a test case for the Muslim Brotherhood-led government. “[W]e continue to urge the Egyptian Government to respect freedom of expression,” said a State Department spokesperson, “which is a universal right as one of the harbingers of the kind of country they want to have going forward.”

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Three years ago, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech at Bar Ilan University calling for “a demilitarized Palestinian state” alongside the Jewish state, it was hailed as a historic moment for the newly elected leader: For the first time ever, one of the Oslo Accords’ harshest critics publicly affirmed his belief in two states for two nations. Whether or not that conviction is sincere has been called into question ever since. Bibi’s detractors say he has done little to pursue such a vision and question the wisdom of his decision to build in the E1 area east of Jerusalem, a retaliatory move following the Palestinians’ U.N. bid—and one that some say would not allow for the creation of a territorially contiguous Palestinian state.

But never before have Netanyahu and his Likud Party seemed less serious about a two-state solution than they have in the run-up to this month’s election.

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For the Women of the Wall, a group that has gathered each month for the past 23 years to pray at the Western Wall, things have never been easy: They’ve been heckled, arrested for “hurting the feelings of other worshippers,” and been the target of stones and dirty diapers. But in the past few months, police enforcement at the wall has become more maladroit than Officer Krupke: Women are now being searched for tallit and tefillin as they enter the wall’s precincts, an eerie and unwitting echo of a time when the Soviets would ransack the baggage of visiting Americans for evidence of Jewish ritual objects.

The prime minister, caught in a crossfire between the Women of the Wall’s passionate American supporters and his traditionalist coalition at home, has appointed Natan Sharansky to try to figure out a way to accommodate the Orthodox rabbinate that controls the site (and has since the restoration of Jewish sovereignty) and those who wish to pray at the wall in whatever fashion they choose. Sharansky, a chess master, may find himself in Zugzwang, a position in which making any move on the board ensures a loss. In such a quintessentially Jewish way, this wall of stones has become a mirror.

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This past summer, out of view of the press and the spotlight, an unlikely cabal of secular and religious politicians began plotting to shake up the Israeli chief rabbinate. The conspirators: Avigdor Lieberman’s ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party, the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, and a renegade rabbinic organization called Tzohar—three of the strangest bedfellows in Israeli politics. Their plan, if successful, would break the ultra-Orthodox stranglehold on the country’s rabbinate and install a moderate religious Zionist chief rabbi for the first time in decades.

“Avigdor Lieberman was very interested in promoting Tzohar,” said one person with close knowledge of the proposed deal, “to make sure that they had a strong capability of taking the Ashkenazi chief rabbinate” in the June 2013 elections for the position. And the strongman of the Israeli right was willing to bring his considerable influence to bear to ensure they had the votes in the 150-member conclave that will choose the next two chief rabbis of Israel.

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Protests in the Jordanian capital Amman reached a boiling point last month when thousands of demonstrators called for King Abdullah’s ouster, prompting American experts to predict the regime was headed for collapse. Shadi Hamid at the Brookings Institution, among numerous others, said the Obama Administration’s support for Amman was “not on the right side of history.” Inside Jordan itself, a prominent activist predicted the king would ape ex-dictators in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya by violently cracking down on the protesters.

All of this was grave news for the United States and especially Israel: One of only two Arab countries to have formal relations with the Jewish state, Jordan has long provided intelligence assistance, political cover and mediation with Palestinians and other Arab states, and calm along Israel’s longest border. As Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren recently noted in these pages, the overthrow of Jordan’s monarchy would be a disaster for the Jewish state. “Jordan is what keeps Iran out of our backyard,” he said. So, Israel and the United States braced themselves for the worst.

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In a village straddling Israel and the West Bank, an Arab college is trying to walk the tightest of ropes: reinterpreting the study of Islam for the modern age, and doing so on the dime of the Jewish state.

Al-Qasemi Academic College— which trains both teachers and imams—prides itself on being a pioneer in the instruction of moderate Islam, and it shows encouraging signs to that end. Its president, Mohammad Essawi, is publicly committed to the modernization of religious study, the advancement of Israel’s Arabs, and bridging the gap between them and the country’s Jewish majority.

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It took Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi to crystallize the enduring tension highlighted by regimes that conduct themselves responsibly abroad while violating people’s liberties at home. Morsi may be the first democratically elected ruler of his country in six decades—he reminded one and all in his statement justifying his broad powers that he had been chosen by “God and the people”—but over the past few weeks he’s borrowed a page from the book of Hosni Mubarak: brokering a cease-fire between Israel and the Hamas rulers of Gaza and then, in a flash, suspending the constitutional life of his country, asserting sweeping powers that put all his decisions beyond judicial review. Morsi had assumed that his writ would be deemed acceptable, but the protesters that had upended Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship were not ready for a new pharaoh. Popular outrage, and the opposition of some leading political figures in the country, forced Morsi to rescind his extrajudicial claim a mere fortnight later.

Mubarak had reduced what had once been a tempestuous land to a republic of silence and resentment. Mubarak kept the peace with Israel for three decades and gave the Pax Americana the intelligence cooperation he saw fit to provide, while snuffing out the democratic aspirations of his domestic critics and hauling off his rivals to prison. Morsi has thus reached for an old bag of tricks. But the fear of official power had been broken. The protesters returned to Tahrir Square to defy Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood behind him.

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More than 45,000 deaths and 22 months since the beginning of the Syrian uprising, the White House has finally run aground on the incoherence of its Syria policy. Having refused to provide the opposition with anything but nonlethal aid to bring down the regime of Bashar al-Assad—an end game that would have damaged Iranian interests throughout the Middle East—the Obama Administration left the field open to other actors. Yesterday, the administration designated one of them, Jabhat al-Nusra, as a terrorist organization affiliated with al-Qaida in Iraq—which has proven to be one of the most effective rebel groups in the battle against Assad’s forces.

The White House argues that by isolating extremists, it is helping pave the way for a post-Assad political order. But because the administration has refused to arm any of the other groups as an alternative, it is hardly surprising that the Syrian opposition assumes the White House is taking sides with Assad by sidelining Jabhat al-Nusra. “We are all Jabhat al-Nusra” says one Facebook petition circulating among the Syrian opposition.

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Angelique Sabag Gautiller calls herself a pioneer and, indeed, the smiling, blonde-haired, blue-eyed 40-year-old is, in fact, something of a trailblazer in Israel. Convicted in July 2011 of “conspiring to cause a person to leave the country in order to work in prostitution,” for helping nine Israeli women work as prostitutes in Ireland, Gautiller was sentenced to 30 months in prison in the Neve Tirza women’s prison—making her, in short, the Jewish state’s first female pimp.

When I met Gautiller in December 2009, she was under house arrest and had to wear an electronic bracelet on her leg. “Come in quick or I’ll start beeping,” she told me as she opened the door to her Herzliya apartment. Our last meeting was in July 2011, several days before she began serving her prison sentence. She was in a good mood and seemed relieved that her trial, which lasted nearly two years, was finally over. Still, she couldn’t come to terms with being called a pimp.

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On Friday, Bibi Netanyahu’s government announced it was planning additional settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. European capitals have demanded an explanation from Israeli diplomats, and the U.K. and France have contemplated summoning home their own envoys in protest. But the White House’s criticism has been fairly muted. “We oppose all unilateral actions,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said on Monday, “as they complicate efforts to resume direct, bilateral negotiations.”

To be sure, the White House is somewhat constrained in criticizing Israel for “unilateral actions” after Mahmoud Abbas went to the United Nations’ General Assembly to declare Palestine an independent state. And with delicate negotiations over the fiscal cliff foremost on the president’s agenda, the administration seems loath to give Republicans an opportunity to attack President Obama over Israel.

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In the days since Operation Pillar of Defense ended, there’s been much talk of Israel’s Iron Dome antimissile defense system—which chalked up an 84-percent success rate—as the breakout star of the mini-war. This defensive system is more than a pyrotechnic wonder: It represents the success of a paradigmatic shift in Israeli military thinking. Over the last decade, the IDF’s leadership, traditionally focused on offensive strategies, gradually invested in defensive systems. If deployed wisely, these defensive systems—including the Arrow antimissile system, which defends against long-range missiles; and David’s Sling, which is intended to protect against medium-range missiles—could also prove to be a political game-changer for Israel and enemies like Hamas and Hezbollah.

So, you would think that the man responsible for pushing Iron Dome through a resistant Israeli military and political establishment would be regarded as nothing less than a national hero. But until very recently, Amir Peretz, defense minister from 2006-2007, was largely regarded as clueless, undeserving of the post, and most famous for a photograph in which he viewed IDF troops in the Golan Heights through binoculars with the lens cap on. Peretz, 60, who last week placed third in the Labor Party’s primaries for the upcoming general elections, is finally being celebrated for his foresight. “I guess I could see more with those closed binoculars than a lot of those generals could see,” Peretz said in a recent interview.

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The neighborhood of Nahlaot in Jerusalem is less a single neighborhood than a cluster of smaller semi-distinct neighborhoods that, beginning in the 1870s, grew incrementally as the city’s population expanded beyond the Old City. Batei Rand and Batei Broydes are two of these clusters, each with a few hundred residents. Both are overwhelmingly Haredi and built around semi-enclosed courtyards. The apartments are continuous and are stacked on two levels, the upper one accessible via a shared, wrap-around balcony. Most of the apartments are single-entrance and open into the courtyard, so there is little privacy, and the residents are, for the most part, very poor. Most families don’t own their home, but instead lease it on extremely favorable terms from a charitable organization. Many of the families have been in the neighborhood for generations, and the area, marked by labyrinthine cobblestone alleyways, Jerusalem stone, and gardens, has long been beloved by those that live there.

“It was the most quaint, amazing, incredible, peaceful, loving community,” a former resident recently told me. “A place where religious and secular got along with each other. It was like an example of what Israel could be.”

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In a military operation that lasted just eight days, the Israeli Army killed Hamas’ military chief Ahmed Jabari; air strikes destroyed large numbers of Iranian-made rockets and missiles, many in underground sites; and the Iron Dome missile defense system brought down no fewer than 421 rockets launched from Gaza, an 84 percent success rate. What ought to happen next is that the makers of Iron Dome—a consortium led by Israel’s Rafael Advanced Weapons Systems Ltd.—should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Israel should take the fight into the Hezbollah-controlled areas of Lebanon where a further 60,000 Iranian-made rockets and missiles are being hidden. And, above all, the civilized world should celebrate Israel’s victory, even if temporary, over this fascist organization.

Yet instead of calling for the ultimate downfall of Hamas—in the way that senior U.S. military figures speak of al-Qaida—we are gripped by an entirely unwarranted sense of defeatism over the terrorist group. Despite the fact that Israel won this latest battle, our commentariat seems to have embraced the assumption that there is simply no way to prevail politically or militarily over Hamas; they express no confidence in an eventual Israeli victory over Hamas’ foul and naked terrorism.

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On Nov. 14, Ahmed Jabari’s life ended when the head of Hamas’ so-called military wing was killed in an Israeli missile strike that kicked off Operation Pillar of Defense. Whatever one imagines about Jabari’s true aims, one thing’s for certain: His life’s work and his ascendancy would not have been possible without the support of a network of charities based in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Lebanon that provide financial incentives that help swell Hamas’ ranks and bolster its popular support. Jabari’s story—and the story of Hamas—is as much about money as it is about blood.

In its video obituary for Jabari, Al Jazeera let the man rarely seen in public speak in his own words. Addressing a cadre of terrorists in training, Jabari spoke of the twin pillars of Hamas: jihad and da’wa. The first is now a familiar term to Western ears, but the second is known only in the provenance of terrorism experts. Da’wa literally means “calling,” but Jabari, who served for many years as head of the Al Nur Prisoner Society in Gaza, was undoubtedly referring to Hamas’ wildly successful network of mosques, schools, and charitable institutions that have served as the backbone of the movement for a generation.

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Seven days ago, Israel embarked on Operation Pillar of Defense, the second time it’s gone to war against Hamas in the past four years. The proximate cause of this campaign, according to Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, was “the incessant rounds of artillery rockets and mortars into the heart of our southern communities.” But that rationale was surely coupled with a build-up in Hamas’ weapons arsenal—including the Iranian-made Fajr-5 missile, capable of striking Tel Aviv, and Kornet anti-tank missiles, one of which was fired on an IDF jeep and injured four soldiers on Nov. 10.

But as with all conflicts in the Middle East, this confrontation is not limited to the two actors currently exchanging fire. It will shape the strategic position of a host of regional and international actors, most dramatically Egypt, the United States, and Iran. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s arrival yesterday in Jerusalem (she will also be visiting Ramallah and Cairo) for ceasefire talks marks a very delicate and perhaps dangerous phase of this war.

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After the first night of Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, now almost a week ago, a photograph began circulating around Twitter of a grinning 11-month-old who had been killed by an Israeli missile that landed on his house. Within hours, Avital Leibovich, an Israel Defense Forces spokeswoman, posted a reply of sorts: a photograph of another infant, this one an Israeli girl, wounded by a Hamas rocket in the southern town of Kiryat Malachi. It wasn’t the first skirmish of the virtual war being waged across social media networks by both the Israeli government and Hamas—the real-world hostilities were announced Nov. 14 by the IDF in a tweet trumpeting the death of Hamas leader Ahmed Jabari—but it was an early indication of how the awful life-and-death stakes of war have been reduced to Internet fodder.

The world is by now well aware of the power of social media to help foment and spread popular movements everywhere from Lower Manhattan to the streets of Cairo. But Operation Pillar of Defense may be the first war to feature direct trash-talking between enemies. “We recommend that no Hamas operatives, whether low level or senior leaders, show their faces above ground in the days ahead,” came a tweet from the official @IDFspokesperson account last Wednesday. “@IDFspokesperson Our blessed hands will reach your leaders wherever they are (You Opened Hell Gates on Yourselves),” came the reply from @AlQassamBrigade.

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Before the IDF had a Facebook page with exciting info-graphics and sleek videos, I showed up in a small town that nobody I knew had ever heard of called Sderot.

An Israeli friend had sent me emails describing a small Negev town that was being hit by 50 rockets a day. When I read her messages in my Los Angeles living room, I naively assumed that Sderot was some disputed settlement in Gaza; I quickly learned it was well within the green line and had been attacked for seven years. More research uncovered Sderot’s music scene: The city had produced a disproportionate amount of famous Israeli rock bands—a Jewish Liverpool. As a documentary filmmaker looking for an angle, I had found it in the combination of rockers and rockets. So, I showed up in July 2007 and began to shoot my movie.

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