The settler youth currently busy setting things on fire across the West Bank aren’t big readers. Instead of curling up with a good book, they’d rather engage in more virile pastimes, like vandalizing the homes of their ideological nemeses or smashing senior IDF officers in the face with bricks. Their facility with words is limited to taglines, and the one they chose to describe their recent spree of arsons and beatings is “price tag,” as in making others pay for any infraction, real or perceived, against unquestioned Jewish control over Judea and Samaria. But we’re not too far removed from New Year’s Eve and its customary resolutions to offer another one for the list: This year, the young brutes should read Michael Kohlhaas.

Written in 1811 by Heinrich von Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas has many charms that make it a thoroughly attractive read for contemporary audiences. But even if they don’t care much for its existentialism avant la lettre or its incisive psychological portraits, the rioting settlers might appreciate the work’s main theme: revenge.

Loosely based on real-life events, this novella tells the story of a wealthy horse-dealer who, having failed to obtain justice in court against a cruel and well-connected aristocrat, raises a private army and embarks on a violent crusade before being apprehended and executed. The novella’s emotional crescendo arrives when Martin Luther, in an attempt to stop Kohlhaas’ madness, writes him a scathing letter: “You who say you are sent to wield the sword of justice,” roars the father of the Reformation, “what are you doing, presumptuous man, in the madness of your blind fury, you who are yourself filled with injustice from head to foot? Because the sovereign to whom you owe obedience had denied you your rights, rights in a quarrel over a miserable possession, you rise up, wretch, with fire and sword and, like a wolf of the desert, descend on the peaceful community he protects.”

Most readers are likely to identify with Luther’s scolding and yet still feel even stronger sympathy for Kohlhaas. Like him, we want to believe that justice is absolute, and that we have the right to pursue it to the very end, earthly consequences be damned. Naturally enamored with this theme, Franz Kafka devoted one of the only two public talks he gave to reading segments of Kohlhaas, and he confessed that he could not think of the novella “without being moved to tears and enthusiasm.”

Such were von Kleist’s powers that, writing at the cradle of modernity, he had already detected that vengeance would become the chief sentiment guiding the new age of man. With Luther having loosened the cornerstones of the church, and with the Enlightenment following suit and gilding “the natural and imprescriptible rights of man,” the individual was left with nothing much greater than himself to revere. And with justice newly rooted in the social contract or judged on the scale of actions and their consequences, a hard man like Kohlhaas—searching for justice in its former transcendent seats, the church and the state, and finding both small and tattered—was bound to slip into vengeance. Writing not long after von Kleist, Hegel called revenge “a positive action of a particular will,” by which he meant to say that anyone who, like Michael Kohlhaas or the settler youth, embarked on a campaign of retribution in the name of some exalted, religious ideal was bound to discover that they were really pursuing the narrowest of private interests.

It’s one of those sweet paradoxes that make life so rich and strange: If you truly believe in justice, you know that its origins—like the origins of love and faith and mercy and mirth and valor and hate—are divine, and that it is therefore, in its pure form, largely unknowable to us. If we turn any one of these emotions into the singular banner under which we march, we’re bound to become, like poor Kohlhaas, doomed and distasteful fanatics.

It is a testament to the impoverishment of our time that we too mindlessly brand many of those who follow in Kohlhaas’ steps as conservatives. From lawless Israeli settlers dedicated to erecting a theocratic kingdom to listless U.S. Republicans devoted to little more than dethroning President Barack Obama, the right everywhere nowadays seems to be primarily about revenge. Often, this sentiment is excused as serving some sort of greater good, but von Kleist knew better: Revenge is always personal.

Which, in part, explains why so many in Israel and the United States now observe the right wing with bafflement. Conservatives, we were told by commentators from Edmund Burke forward, value the well-being of society over the grievances of individuals, and they champion slow processes over tempestuous eruptions. But instead we are now plagued with a twisted ideology that is willing to lay waste all that we share and cherish in the service of absolutist fantasies that can be achieved only once real or imagined slights are punished.

If we can learn anything from Michael Kohlhaas, it is that modernity needs an antidote to vengeance. And we can find that in Judaism.

Observed as it was written and practiced for millennia—a version radically different from the bastardized form now practiced by the chauvinistic maniacs who make up the vanguard of the settlers’ movement—Judaism is as clear as it can be on the subject of revenge. It understood, long before John Stuart Mill, that men see only consequences; asking them to turn the other cheek won’t do much good if they’re denied what they believe to be their fair share of the pie. To that end, Judaism largely prefers concrete systems of laws to ephemeral ideas like forgiveness and good will. Paul’s declaration that Christ is the end of the law, then, is, in some ways, a misguided criticism of Judaism: Rather than choosing law over love, Judaism knows that the former is impossible without the latter because human beings, left unfettered, will eventually turn all relations into contests of will. To keep them from hearing voices and embarking on crusades for what they imagine to be celestial causes, they need to be fenced in by rules.

Which makes von Kleist’s book urgent reading: Anyone who thinks that revenge is a good political, moral, militaristic, or economic strategy is welcome to check out how well the same philosophy worked for Michael Kohlhaas.

Recently, however, not long after our seventh wedding anniversary and the birth of our first child, we got some unsolicited marriage advice from Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. It arrived in the form of a series of videos produced by the Ministry of Immigration and Absorption as part of a campaign to encourage Israelis living abroad to return to the Jewish state. Each video depicts a different scenario of Israelis in America with their American partners and families, and the threat to their national identity if they remain there. One video shows the young daughter of Israeli parents mistaking Hannukah for Christmas.

It may be hard for the Israeli government to believe, but after 34 years of life as a committed American Jew, Lisa can consistently distinguish between Christmas and Hannukah, and she even knows which holiday we celebrate. Though Liel did exchange his passion for Krembos for a love for Malomars, he commemorates Israel’s Memorial Day each year, reflecting on the friends he’s lost. Lisa understands the importance of Yom Hazikaron and empathizes. But the American spouse in one of the Israeli government videos doesn’t: A pony-tailed American dufus, he mistakes his Israeli girlfriend’s yahrzeit candles for mood-lighting. As the video ends, a voice-over says, “They’ll always remain Israelis, but their spouses won’t always understand what that means. Help them come back home.”

Once upon a time, we used to believe that Israel could be our family’s part-time home. But this advertising campaign is just the most recent indication that Israel has no intention of making us feel welcome. From the Rotem Bill, which seeks to make a small group of ultra-Orthodox Israeli rabbis the final arbiters over all Jewish rites, to the recent spate of anti-democratic legislation in the Knesset, over the past few years we’ve felt as if Israel is moving further and further away from the values—tolerance, plurality, and civility—that we believe are integral to Judaism as well as to our own lives. The videos are a painful reminder of this shift.

***

When we first got married, we spent a lot of our time traveling between New York and Tel Aviv. We were frequently met with a less-than-hospitable welcome at Ben-Gurion International Airport. On one occasion, Lisa was detained for nearly an hour, and on another she was subjected to a long and humiliating series of questions about her parents’ religious affiliation and other deeply personal matters. But we didn’t care: This intrusive screening, we rationalized, was the price Israel has to pay for its security.

Hanging out with friends and family on the beach or in cafés, we sometimes tried to talk about our life in New York, where being a part of the Jewish community is important to us. We attend services occasionally, are involved with numerous Jewish organizations, and spend a lot of our leisure time going to Jewish cultural events. To our Israeli friends, our interests sounded laughable. When Lisa wrote a novel about a Jewish-American teenager’s first encounter with, and burgeoning love for, Israel, she was told by several Israelis that no Israeli would ever read it—that Americans are just too naïve to be taken seriously.

Equally ridiculed as the book Lisa had written were the books she’d read: Like many American Jews, she grew up on Leon Uris’ Exodus, a fact that was repeatedly mocked by our Israeli acquaintances. Hearing the book belittled in a Haifa café, we realized how absurd it was for American Jews to idolize Uris’ Israeli protagonists for their dismissive attitude toward the book’s gullible American characters. And now, it was us being belittled by modern-day Ari Ben-Canaans for not being tough enough, real enough, Israeli enough.

It was a recurring theme in our conversations with Israelis: We heard countless times, from even our most fervently secular friends, that if we really cared about being Jewish we’d move back to the Jewish state. We found this logic offensive, but we still believed that we could build a bridge between Israel and the Diaspora, and we dreamed of raising children who would be as at home in the Rehavia neighborhood of Jerusalem as they would on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

***

An interesting, and often ignored, element of Israel’s new campaign is that, beyond insulting videos, the government is offering substantial benefits for Israelis who decide to return. Particularly sought-after are former Israelis like Liel: The website associated with the campaign emphasizes the incentives awaiting any Israeli who holds a doctorate from a major American university—part of a plan to fight Israel’s serious brain drain. Yet rather than highlight these attractive offerings, and take other steps to bring people like us closer to Israel, the Israeli government has chosen to tell us that the most fundamental choices of our lives—whom to marry and where to live—are irredeemably flawed and dangerous for the Jewish people. The cure? Make aliyah and abandon other key aspects of our identities—even, possibly, our spouses—save for Israeli nationalism. The campaign, then, is much more than tone-deaf PR. It is an indication of Israel’s troubling mindset, which, as our friend Gal Beckerman noted, is frighteningly similar to that of the old-world Jews that the early Zionists mercilessly mocked: the Jews who see nothing but danger and fear outside of the small and stifling Pale of Settlement.

Often, we feel real remorse for abandoning this struggle we believe is so important, the struggle for Israel’s soul. Often, we feel as if we should brave the hurdles and the insults and jump back into the fray. But time, parenthood, and an Israeli government that seems dedicated to dismissing families like ours and driving American and Israeli Jews apart have all weakened our resolve. We cherish our family’s Jewish identity and our community, as do most American Jews we know. But our Jewish identities, and our sense of peoplehood, are based on inclusion—not exclusion and condescension. As long as Israel refuses to acknowledge this basic premise about the nature of Jewish peoplehood, we can’t call the Jewish state home.

DAVID LANDAU: You were his emissary in the matter of exempting yeshiva students from army service. Would you say that his subtext in this mission of yours was that with time this problem would simply disappear, or at least would not grow? History has of course shown that that was not the case, and the yeshivot have grown exponentially.

SHIMON PERES: His purpose was to remove every obstacle on the path to the creation of the state, which for him was an ongoing process, not a one-time event that took place in 1948. He wasn’t thinking about what was going to happen later. He sent me on many assignments. For some reason he thought I could do things, let’s say, unconventionally. So for all sorts of unconventional things, he’d send me. He once asked me, for instance, to set up a national soccer team that would beat the world.

LANDAU: And why weren’t you successful?

PERES: Because it was impossible. There’s a limit to what you can do.

LANDAU: You didn’t think of buying foreign players?

PERES: No, it never occurred to me. The team was going to be purely Israeli.

LANDAU: So this was one of your failures?

PERES: Yes, you can put that on the list. Anyway, to be completely frank, in negotiating with the venerable rabbis, I felt like I was sitting with my grandfather.

LANDAU: Who was murdered by the Nazis.

PERES: Yes, who was burned to death in his synagogue as the head of his community. And who influenced my life, in a positive way, more than anyone else. Personally, I had yirat kavod [reverence] toward these people. I didn’t sit with them to haggle. At the same time, I knew that Ben Gurion’s approach was mamlachti [unifying despite difference] and that was the basis of my mission. First, I asked myself: Imagine there were Buddhists in Israel and they’d asked for 150 of their people to be monks. I would have approved. So for Jews not? Second, they claimed very cogently that throughout the Diaspora period even the czars and other rulers had facilitated the existence of yeshivot. Did I want all the yeshivot to be abroad? I thought this was a powerful argument. I reported everything to Ben-Gurion—except the bit about feeling like I was sitting in front of my grandfather.

LANDAU: That’s what I wanted to ask: Could you have said to Ben-Gurion that you felt reverence for these people?

PERES: Yes, I had no difficulty with that. But strange though it may sound, I’m shy. I’m an introvert. So I didn’t mention it. But not because I was worried about how he would have reacted. I had no fear of Ben-Gurion that way.

“Ulpana High school, Where settler girls go to become ‘real men’ ”

That was the headline I read. You think of settler girls and you think “Little House on the Prairie” or the Jewish equivalent of the Girls Madrassas I’ve been to in Pakistan: Learn your religion, learn how to be a good wife, then have 10 children. But the girls in this story were getting all that and a little extra. Instead of afterschool sports they did afterschool fight-the-state. When civil administrators showed up to enforce a settlement building freeze, the girls blocked the road, whipped mud at them, sat on their jeeps. When 100 riot police showed up, the girls lay down on the wet road, climbed into garbage bins, and hurled trash. Only after a 5-hour battle were the administrators able to deliver their pieces of official paper—building-freeze orders.

The article was from 2009, but I wanted to know more. I called Rav Gadi Ben Zimra, the founder of the school, and reached him. He passed me to his wife, Nurit, the co-founder. She passed me to a neighbor involved with the school who spoke better English—and who could vet me. Her name was Mina Browdy and she told me that she was thrilled that we wanted to come do a piece on their school, meet Gadi and Nurit, hang out with the girls. And of course we could stay there. Ten days? Wonderful. I booked a ticket, as did my friend, the photographer Gillian Laub.

Then two days before the flight, Mina emailed me:

Shalom Elizabeth,

We thank you for your interest to come and write an article about Ulpanat Levona but we reconsidered the idea and decided not to go along with it.

Thank you! Our beloved teacher Rut Fogel Hy”d was murdered with her husband and three children, a three month old baby that was slaughtered cruelly by the wild animals that some of you think are able to make peace.

All the best
Mina Browdy

We decided to go anyway.

***

Tapuach, red poppies in bloom, a sharp wind. The settlement sits atop a hillside above Highway 60 on the West Bank. Established by Kahanists and Yemenites, Tapuach is now home to an assortment of new Israelis—Kazakhs, Russians, Peruvians. It was the Friday before Purim and Moriya was sitting on a blue couch in the front yard of her family’s ranch house across from the town playground, painting her fingernails purple. A few years ago, Gillian had met Moriya, who of course knew of Ma’ale Levona. Her younger sister Roni was a student there. Moriya had been too homesick to stick it out—Ma’ale Levona is a boarding school—but she considers herself almost an honorary graduate. Her Facebook friends are nearly all Ma’ale Levona girls.

Moriya, who is 19, was wearing blue balloon pants, a turquoise-and-silver nose ring, and a silver Star of David around her neck emblazoned with Meir Kahane’s famous emblem—a thumb rising out of a tight fist. Roni is 14. Her nail polish was blue, and she was wearing a Snoopy T-shirt and a wooden pendant etched with the Hebrew words: “Kahane was right.” They’re fighters, these girls, each in their different way. “We called him after Benjamin Zeev Chai,” said Moriya of her 6-year-old brother. Benjamin Kahane, the son of Meir Kahane who was killed, was her father’s best friend, she said. A lot of her father’s friends were killed, she said, as she handed Benjy a candy. One of them is still in prison for killing a Palestinian.

“I was depressed all this week. I can’t smile,” she said. It had been only seven days since the murder of the Fogel family, who lived down the road. The mother, Ruthi, was Roni’s teacher. As Tamar, the Fogels’ 12-year-old daughter, told reporters, around midnight she came home from a Bnei Akiva youth meeting to find her mother Ruthi lying in a pool of blood and her home the site of a massacre—her mother, father, two younger brothers, and 3-month-old sister all slaughtered with knives. Two of her younger brothers survived.

“This week was crazy,” Moriya told me taking me inside to the living room to see her Facebook page on the family computer. “Look my friend writes: ‘Don’t be sad. Don’t give the thugs what they want.’ ”

Then Roni said that the day after the murder, everyone in Tapuach went down to the junction and threw rocks at Arabs. “We all wanted revenge. We just won’t cry and feel sorry for ourselves. We will do something about it. You know? If someone comes to kill you, then you kill them first, says the Torah.” Tapuach was notorious for “price tag” vengeance—which is nothing new in outlying settlements where Jewish vigilantes have been known to take the law into their hands. What was new to me was the vigorous and organized participation of adolescent girls.

Roni took note of details about the murder, including the fact that her teacher Ruthi had tried to fight off the killers, while her husband appeared more gentle, and died holding the baby in his arms. The murders had hit all the girls hard. The school is a tight-knit place, the faculty and students like an extended family. “My Ulpana is special,” said Roni. Another girl at the house laughed: “Every girl thinks their Ulpana is special,” she said. “Not like Ma’ale Levona,” said Roni cheekily. Her peers at Ofra—a more sober, academically rigorous Ulpana—were “geeks, nerds,” she said, and then laughed in that way only teenage girls can laugh at the Other.

Moriya proudly pulled up a photograph of Roni and the gang at a junction holding up signs against the Israeli army for dismantling an illegal outpost. Then she noticed that one of the girls had posted the Channel 2 news segment on Tamar Fogel. “Oh my god I want to see that. Look: Tamar asks Bibi to free Jonathan Pollard.” The reporter showed a clip of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visiting Tamar at her grandmother’s home, and exclaiming in his most resonant voice, “We know who the enemy is.”

In the clip, Tamar is seen alternately sobbing into her grandmother’s arms and raging back at Bibi—angry not just at her loss, but at the official hypocrisies. “What will happen if you do something?” she asked the prime minister. “Your America will be angry? America will do something to you?” When the prime minister tells her, “They murder. We build,” she challenged him. Tamar Fogel knew from experience that building can be undone. She and her family were evacuated from Gush Katif in Gaza in 2005; she told the prime minister that he is making a war between brothers. “They’re Obama’s poodle,” scoffed Moriya about her government.

At the end of the clip Moriya and Roni were frozen. They were proud of Tamar. With her resolve, poise, and tragedy, Tamar would undoubtedly become a symbol of their generation’s heroism, and another chapter in the settlers’ self-made biblical narrative.

If I’d had a movie camera, I’d just have you watch and listen to these girls for hours. You’d be fascinated, stupefied, shocked, bored—but you’d keep watching. I want you to see just what I saw, not the facts we’re used to—the ones about the Jews from Queens or Brooklyn or Minneapolis who upped and flew to the calling of Zion. We’ve heard from them enough and we think we know just what they’re going to say. But when they enacted whatever romance of pioneering, frontiering, and longing for collective meaning it was that brought them here, they created facts on the ground. Not houses and trailers; they can be bulldozed. They spawned boys and girls, 10 to each family on average.

“Aren’t they beautiful?” a psychiatrist and playwright from Jerusalem asked me, of such girls. “Pure faith mixed with youth. It’s the most erotic thing.” They are a generation of girls born on the land known as the illegal settlements who did not arrive with ideology and hope like their parents. They just sprouted there.

They say it takes one generation to found a new language. These girls are a new language, believing that they belong to the land on which they were born, and sponsored by the government they despise, which pays for their roads and electricity. I wondered how this new generation will affect the narrative of struggle not only between Israelis and Palestinians, but also among Israelis themselves.

“Disbelief is the first feeling you have to overcome when you hear that your friend has been detained by Egypt’s dreaded secret police, the Mukhabarat,” Ronen Shnidman wrote about Ilan Grapel, the American-Israeli Emory law student arrested in Egypt on what Israeli officials and Grapel’s friends and family say are trumped-up charges of spying for the Mossad. Grapel is accused partly of playing a role in Egypt’s anti-government protests. Israeli newspapers exhibited a large dose of skepticism about the Egyptian allegations, with Yedioth Ahronoth running the front-page headline “Israel: Egyptian Alila,” which means “false accusation” and is used in the phrase alilat dam, or “blood libel.” In a sidebar headlined “Confused” (Mevulbalim), the paper laid out contradictory reports coming from Egypt about various aspects of the incident, including Grapel’s name. Israel Hayom described Grapel as “Not a Mossad agent, not James Bond: A student arrested on a false charge.”

Israelis are organizing a Facebook revolution of their own. The lofty goal? A consumer boycott of cottage cheese—an Israeli staple that locals refer to as just plain cottage, pronounced “KOHT-edge”—in protest of its rising price. The Facebook protest pages have rather unwieldy names, like “We’re not buying cottage cheese until they abolish the price hike” and “We’re not buying cottage cheese, such a basic product whose price has reached nearly 8 shekels, for a month.” Yedioth announced the arrival of “The Cottage Cheese Protest” on its front page and Maariv ran a graphic showing the price of a standard container of the cheese curd rising from 4.84 shekels in 2006 to 7.80 shekels as of the beginning of this month. It reported that more than 15,000 people have pledged not to buy cottage cheese for the month of July. But Globes, a financial newspaper, said that supermarkets were reporting that discount offers (possibly in response to the protests) had actually boosted cottage cheese sales by between 25 percent and 50 percent by the end of the week.

A minor uproar arose this week over Israel Defense Forces chief Benny Gantz’s decision that the Yizkor memorial prayer for fallen soldiers should mention God. The original version of the IDF Yizkor was written by Zionist leader Berl Katznelson, who referred to the people (or nation) of Israel—“May am Yisrael remember its sons and daughters”—rather than to God. The wording was changed after the Six-Day War by the army’s chief rabbi at the time, Shlomo Goren, and both versions have been used since. Advocates of the secular version say they want to restore Katznelson’s wording, but as a commenter in one Hebrew chat room noted, Katznelson’s version is itself based on the prayer recited on the Jewish holidays that begins Yizkor Elohim, “May God remember.”

Israeli newspapers devoted a lot of space to the 50th annual Hebrew Book Week, which features book fairs and sales across the country. In a Maariv article titled “Week of Magic” (Shavua shel Kesem), prominent Israeli novelist Zeruya Shalev compared Book Week—which began this week and will last for 10 days this year—to other annual celebrations, like birthdays and the Passover Seder. “In no other country is there a week like this, which has come around every summer for 50 years, just like the heat waves,” she wrote. A Yedioth article headlined Dapei Zahav (literally “Pages of Gold,” which is what Israelis call the Yellow Pages) also reflected the idea of Book Week as a national celebration, but put it a little differently: “And here, finally, is a holiday that doesn’t involve kugel.”

As for Obama, Yedioth ran a comparison between his State Department address on the Middle East and the clarifications he made to AIPAC on Sunday—such as what he meant by “mutually agreed swaps”—under the headline “Dispelled the Fog” (Pizer et Ha’arafel). And in a front-page headline on Obama’s comments in London after Netanyahu’s Congress speech, Israel Hayom went for rhyming Hebrew acronyms: “Obama to the Palestinians: Lo Ba’um, Rak Bamum,” which translates to “Not at the U.N., Only in Negotiations.” The same edition of the paper, which is owned by U.S. billionaire casino mogul and Netanyahu backer Sheldon Adelson, noted that its poll found 61 percent of Israelis to be in favor of the “Netanyahu principles” (ekronot Netanyahu). Earlier in the week, Maariv put its own poll results on the front page: 57 percent say Netanyahu should have said yes to Obama’s proposals for peace. In the same poll, though, the prime minister was judged the person most suited to lead the country; Kadima leader Tzipi Livni came in a distant second.

The Ofer Brothers Group, owned by Israel’s richest family, this week denied selling an oil tanker worth about $8.65 million to Iran’s national shipping company and objected to sanctions the White House said it would impose on both the Israeli conglomerate and its Singapore-based Tanker Pacific Management subsidiary. Ofer Brothers says the tanker was sold to a Dubai-registered company that is not on a U.S. blacklist, but the State Department said the group “did not heed publicly available and easily obtainable information” that could have indicated who would really be getting the tanker. Haaretz intelligence reporter (and Tablet Magazine contributor) Yossi Melman wrote that in 2008 Israel passed a law prohibiting Israeli firms from investing in international companies that operate in Israel and maintain extensive trade ties with Iran—he says there are at least 200 of them—but that the government has not enforced the law. Netanyahu “is not lifting a finger” to stop indirect trade with Iran, even though he “endlessly preaches the need for firm action,” Melman wrote.

Hundreds of Israeli soldiers will be issued a new uniform in July that boasts a cell phone pocket and improved armpit ventilation, the army announced this week. But around the same time, the army’s ombudsman sent the message that soldiers shouldn’t be using those cell phones quite so much. Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Brik told a Knesset committee this week that officers are increasingly issuing commands via text messaging or email, and warned that 40 percent of those commands are not being carried out. “There are some commands that you need to give while looking the soldier in the eyes, otherwise the soldiers won’t follow the commanders into battle,” Israel Hayom quoted him saying.

Israeli filmmaker Joseph Cedar won the best screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival this week for his fourth movie, Footnote, or He’arat Shulayim, which tells the story of the decades-long rivalry between two Talmudic scholars, a father and son. The relatively staid setting marks a major change from Cedar’s 2007 film, the Oscar-nominated Beaufort, about the Israel Defense Forces’ withdrawal from southern Lebanon, for which Cedar won the best director prize at the Berlin International Film Festival. The latest win was seen in Israel as a victory for the country’s film industry, not just for Cedar. The prize is a “huge and unprecedented achievement for Israeli cinema,” wrote Yedioth. Before the winners were announced, Maariv took a more flippant tone, involving a play on the homonyms Cannes and the Hebrew word “kahn,” meaning “here.” The paper asked in a headline: “Mi Cannes Hamenatze’ah?” (Who’s the Winner Cannes/Here?).

Because of Shavuot, Israel Week in Review will return June 17.

“Can you read the Hebrew?” one of the soldiers asks. “Not really,” I admit, but I tell her my sister works in Jerusalem. “It says no one has been killed,” she explains. (This is before one woman died from her wounds at the hospital.) I continue to watch the aftermath of the atrocity unfold with these soldiers, who, sworn to protect their soil, are dressed in jeans and zip-up sweatshirts 5500 miles away. But their life goes on, and so does mine, and I have come specifically to talk to female soldiers, to discuss their experiences in the Israeli army. I will do the interview, and quickly, so that the soldiers may return to the news.

As I sit down with three of them (and one spokeswoman), I find myself surprised to see them looking like, well, normal young women. They are petite and feminine; hearing them give their rank and brief descriptions of their intense responsibilities boggles my mind. Even when she’s not wearing the uniform, one explains, it’s as if she has it on. Like Superman, another laughs.

I ask what it is like to be here, far removed from the attack. They are in New York representing the IDF, attending events like last night’s Friends of the IDF Dinner, and meeting with Jewish leaders. One says she is angry, and is counting on her unit to find those responsible and bring them to justice. They will have to do it without her, though, until she returns to Israel in a few days. While the bombing is horrible, she explains, it isn’t the first time it has happened. Though still young, these women possess that sobering sense of reality that living in (and defending) Israel has come to require. It’s a kind of survival mechanism that allows an individual to watch news of the bombing but then focus on one’s next immediate step—in this case, the next scheduled interview with the next young American journalist.

Soon the discussion turns to me (“it’s an Israeli interview,” one jokingly explains), and to my sister. They want to know where she lives and what she does, and they offer to take her out to meet real Israelis. Then they ask about me, and why I’m interested in writing about them. I admit that I mostly just thought it would be cool to meet them and learn what it’s like to be a woman in the Israeli army. They seem surprised that they would be considered “interesting” as female soldiers, since for them it’s such a natural existence.

Their schedule for the day includes museum tours and maybe even a little time for shopping. “At the end of the day, we’re girls,” they laugh lightly. Our interview is over; they return to the group of dressed-down soldiers, still glued to the television. I’m escorted out to the lockers, where I gather my belongings and quickly check my cell phone. “Bus bombing in Jerusalem. Franny OK,” reads a text message from my father. Various emails and messages inquire about the bombing; a New York Times news alert informs me that Elizabeth Taylor died.

My sister answers my phone call after a few of those overseas beeping rings. It happened at her bus stop, she says, the one we got off at when I went with her to work while visiting in January. Right by the kiosk that serves the Nespresso coffee she was so excited to show me. She didn’t go into her office today, and instead worked at a café near her apartment in Tel Aviv. Stunned, I walk quickly to the subway, itching to get back to my computer. If nothing else, I want to Facebook-friend the soldiers, like I’d promised.

The foreign ministry criticized the initiative, arguing that uniformed officials should steer clear of political questions. It certainly raises several serious questions. Even if one overlooks the problematic nature of involving the army in a thoroughly non-military matter that should be addressed by the proper civic authorities, and even if one is willing to ignore the inherent risks associated with snooping on organizations operating according to the law in Western, friendly countries, one is still likely to come up against the unsolvable conundrum of just what sort of activity qualifies as sufficiently anti-Israeli. “We ourselves don’t know exactly how to define delegitimization,” a foreign ministry source told Haaretz. “This is a very abstract definition. Are flotillas to Gaza delegitimization? Is criticism of settlements delegitimization? It’s not clear how Military Intelligence’s involvement in this will provide added value.”

Under this thinking, it is bad enough that the Knesset is considering a law to defund groups considered insufficiently supportive of Israel and that it is holding hearings (opposed by many groups, including the Anti-Defamation League) into J Street’s pro-Israel bona fides.

To involve one of the world’s greatest armies in such intractable questions, though, is even worse. Some anti-Israeli criticism is legitimate, and some is not: It’s a fine line to draw, and without drawing it clearly the new, military department is left with a wide-open mandate to act against civilian, non-combatant targets—a premise that should be unacceptable in a democracy.

Military Intelligence Monitoring Foreign Left-Wing Organizations [Haaretz]
Related:Knesset Set to Vote on Law To Determine if a Group is Pro-Israel [Haaretz]
J Street Head in Israel to Lobby Knesset Over Group’s Commitment to Israel [Haaretz]
Earlier: Honest Abe

Last year, Amidror participated in a panel on values in the army. “A soldier who won’t attack when they tell him ‘forward’ because he says, ‘Two soldiers to my right and two to my left have been killed, so I won’t move’ – any normal military system should put a bullet in his head,” he said.Later in the discussion, responding to a question from the audience, Amidror said that a soldier should be taught to kill “anyone who hinders him in executing the mission.” When a co-panelist, one of Israel’s most veteran journalists, suggested that the IDF used to tell its soldiers to fight with caution, Amidror snapped. “That’s a totally illegal order,” he replied. “What should be said is ‘kill more of the bastards ton the other side, so that we’ll win.’ Period.”

Approached yesterday by Ha’aretz, Amidror struck a different note. “There are countries where you execute soldiers who refuse to obey the order to charge, and countries where you have them court-martialed,” he said. “We court-martial. I think we should be one of those countries that court-martial.” The better question is whether Israel should be one of those countries where a man of Amidror’s opinions should be allowed anywhere near the decision-making process.

‘IDF Soldiers Who Won’t Fight Should Be Shot’ Says National Security Adviser Candidate [Haaretz]

• Former Secretary of State George Shultz asked President Obama to release Jonathan Pollard. [Ynet]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu insists sanctions on Iran’s nuclear program have so far been insufficient, and that more are required. [WSJ]

• The IDF bombed three Gaza targets, with no casualties. [Ynet]

• Munich is bidding on the 2018 Winter Olympics. The last Olympics it hosted—the summer games of ’72—were of course the site of the massacre of the Israeli team. [JTA]

• English Jewish book critic and essayist John Gross died at 75. [NYT]

Recently I spoke with two retired Israeli officers, Gen. Natan Sharoni and Col. Shaul Arieli, who represent the Council for Peace and Security, a group of pro-peace former Israeli defense and security officials. Sharoni is a 77-year-old veteran of Israel’s many wars who speaks English with only the slightest trace of accent. Arieli, who looks as though he could be a Tel Aviv tech executive, defers to Sharoni’s experience. They had just arrived from Israel when we met in the lobby of a Washington hotel. We then moved to the bar, where Arieli put a small map of Israel on the table.

“The leadership of the state of Israel has to make a choice,” Sharoni said. “What does it want and where is it leading people? The longer there is no agreement, the more people will believe it’s not achievable.”

Sharoni and Arieli are part of a different Israel lobby—that segment of the military and security establishment aligned with the country’s dwindling left wing which sees itself as having a mission to promote an Arab-Israeli peace. If this lobby is less powerful than AIPAC, that’s because AIPAC represents the will of its American donors, who are broadly supportive of the government that Israelis elect, rather than one particular segment of the Israeli polity. The two ex-officers were in Washington to see members of Congress as well as State Department officials and White House aides.

Their presentation, earthy jokes, can-do optimism, hopefulness, and longing for peace seemed to me designed to reinforce the conviction of any American already convinced that Israel’s right-wing government is the main impediment to finding a solution to a century-old conflict.

Yes, it is likely that as President Barack Obama finds his domestic policy checked by a Republican-majority House of Representatives, he may turn his energies to the international scene. But this commander-in-chief, like his many predecessors, is not going to make peace in the Middle East. No Israeli leader is going to commit political suicide to make the Obama Administration happy.

Recent experience shows that when Israelis make hard choices for peace they get war instead. Both the 2000 withdrawal from southern Lebanon and the 2005 evacuation of Gaza led to battles with Iranian proxies. An IDF withdrawal from the West Bank would tip the balance of power against Mahmoud Abbas, Salam Fayyad, and the Palestinian Authority’s security forces, paving the way for a Hamas takeover—and leaving Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Ben Gurion Airport vulnerable to rocket attacks that would cripple the country’s economy. Nonetheless, Arieli and Sharoni still happily sing the peace movement’s mantra of the 1990s—Israeli leadership must make the difficult decision to withdraw from the West Bank in order to make peace.

Sharoni knows peace is possible, he’s seen it with his own eyes and remembers when Sadat came to Jerusalem. When I asked him which Arab leader could play Sadat’s role today and come to speak in the Knesset he tacitly conceded that there is none. “The Israeli Prime Minister could encourage the Israeli electorate, as Sadat did,” he said.

In effect, Sharoni agrees with his domestic opponents that there is no Arab partner to make peace with. Which means it doesn’t matter how much Israeli officials, or their American patrons, want peace, because the sound of one hand clapping is not a negotiated settlement.

“We won’t allow ourselves to be attacked just because we signed an agreement,” Arieli said. “We have the right to self-defense. And nobody in the international community will blame us.” Unfortunately, recent history shows this to be untrue. The Israeli government allowed its citizens to be attacked for several years after it withdrew from Gaza, and when it returned in the winter of 2008 and 2009 to stop the Hamas rocket fire, it was blamed by virtually everyone in the international community. The lesson is that once Israel withdraws from territory, political exigencies make it very difficult to return. In exchange, Israel wins neither the world’s sympathy nor its approval. What it gets instead is the Goldstone Report, accusing the Jewish state of war crimes.

The real problem, Arieli and Sharoni said, is that Israel left Gaza without a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians. Since 2005, this has become the standard explanation rationalizing the rain of rocket fire on Sderot and other Israeli villages. But it is best to see this patch of reasoning as part of the ongoing narrative in which Israel is an extra-historical anomaly. In the annals of world diplomacy, we find two types of agreements between belligerents—the first is a surrender and the second is a settlement imposed by the victor after it has destroyed its enemy’s will to fight. So why do former Israeli soldiers, men who have committed themselves to the security of the Jewish state and its people, advocate what in real-world terms is clearly nonsense?

The first reason is that Arieli and Sharoni and the Council are fighting their domestic political opponents, namely the Israeli right, and Washington is a natural venue for such a conflict. But if the White House had hoped that Israeli officers might turn Jewish fundraisers and some in Congress their way, it’s too late now. Israeli peace processors are likely to find themselves blocked here by a Republican-led House that is largely sympathetic to the current Israeli Prime Minister.

The second reason is that Arieli and Sharoni are in the middle of an argument with their colleagues in Israel’s military and security establishment. In particular, as they told me, they are in disagreement with Major General Uzi Dayan, former national security adviser, and Dore Gold, Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations and currently head of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Gold and Dayan were themselves in Washington several months ago speaking about Israel’s need for defensible borders, which in essence boils down to maintaining tight security control over the Jordan River valley and large chunks of the West Bank. Gold and Dayan’s message, in other words, is that everyone who has been saying that we know what a final settlement looks like is wrong.

“The Jordan River is the only defensible border and particularly the only place Israel can defend itself against possible conventional attack coming from the East,” Dayan told me on the phone recently. “Iraq has sent forces in every war since 1948. How do we know what the Iraqi government will be like in two years, five years, 10 years?”

For that matter, how do we know what Jordan will look like in five years if the hills of the West Bank becomes a Hamas-controlled free zone where Islamic militants from around the region can take shots at Israel’s coastal plain? The Hashemites have their hands filled maintaining security inside Jordan without having to keep their borders from being overrun. Israel, Dayan said, cannot afford to base its security planning on hope.

“Some people will never learn the lesson that land for peace doesn’t work,” Dayan said of Arieli and Sharoni. “We tried it for many years. We tried to be flexible. The idea was that if we compromise, then we can achieve peace and this will give us security. That seems rational, but it is really the other way around—only by providing security can we provide a lasting peace.” In Israel, Dayan said, Arieli and Sharoni have almost no support for their positions. “The Israelis understand that they are selling illusions.”

However, in one respect the two ex-IDF officers have fixed on an important fact. Throughout my conversation with them, they emphasized how Israel cannot afford to be isolated from the international community, and that the lack of a lasting peace with the Palestinians was serving Israel’s enemies. That is to say, the reason that veterans of Israel’s military and security establishment are deluding themselves is that the campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state is working. The international community is pushing the country into a corner, where the least of its worries are Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran. Israel’s real security problem is a Western world that has grown tired of a conflict to which, realistically, there is no end in sight.

Lee Smith’s column will return January 5, 2011.

Go shopping online, and you’ll find items like “hard cast lead smokeless cowboy bullets” and “quality cast lead handgun bullets.” In English, we tend to think of munitions as being cast in lead, a linguistic quirk that lent a decidedly militant aura to the name that the Israeli army gave to its incursion into Gaza in the winter of 2008 and 2009: Operation Cast Lead.

But that was, to a large extent, the opposite of the intention of the operation’s Hebrew name, Oferet Yetzuka. Far from calling up images of deadly metal, the Hebrew phrase is intimately associated with—believe it or not—the dreidel.

Oferet Yetzuka comes from a popular Hebrew children’s song for the holiday—the lyrics were written by one of the greatest Hebrew poets, Hayyim Nachman Bialik—called “Lihvod Hahanukkah” (“In Honor of Hanukkah”). The original (in English translation) includes the stanza: “My teacher brought me a dreidel / made of cast lead / Do you know who it’s for? / It’s in honor of Hanukkah.”

So how did a war that resulted in nearly 1,400 deaths get named for a dreidel?

The Israel Defense Forces is widely believed to name its operations with the aid of computers. Dalia Gavriely-Nuri, a lecturer on culture and communication at Hadassah College Jerusalem and Bar-Ilan University, told me that after analyzing the names the IDF gave to 76 of its operations, including Cast Lead, she thinks it would be naïve to believe that a mechanized process is solely responsible for choosing such euphemistic language.

“It’s clear that people thought about how to do this,” she said. “And even if the computer does ultimately decide, someone had to input the information in the first place.”

Oferet Yetzuka is not without martial overtones. Hanukkah is a celebration of a military victory—of the Maccabees over the ancient Greeks—not just of the miracle of the oil, so one possible connotation is the idea that modern-day Israel will emerge victorious as well.

But the decidedly non-martial connotations of the name are at least as significant. Like the IDF’s official name for the first Lebanon war—Operation Peace for Galilee—Operation Cast Lead is a prime example of what Gavriely-Nuri refers to as “war-normalizing naming,” in which military operations are given names that are intended to make them “sound as normal as possible—nicer, more legitimate—and that will make the ugly sides of it disappear.”

Shoshana Kordova is an editor and translator at the English edition of Haaretz. She grew up in New Jersey and has lived in Israel since 2001.

Earlier: Refugees
On Strike
‘Politi’
Abducted
‘The Peace Process’
No Confidence
‘After the Holidays’

• The IDF uses Facebook to find draft dodgers. [Fast Company]

• Settlers. Love. Palin. [Ben Smith]

• The link between Prime Minister Netanyahu and George W. Bush is an author and political adviser named Ron Dermer. [Politico]

• The United States has reportedly put the freeze-extension deal in writing, as Netanyahu has demanded. [JTA]

• Three experts say America should publish a “declaration of principles” concerning the Mideast peace process. More getting things down on paper. [IHT]

Below: An Iranian weightlifter appears on a platform along with an Israeli weightlifter, while “Hatikvah” is played. For this (via Kaplan’s Korner), he has been banned from weightlifting for life.

• Political dissension and varying scandals have led to a worrying decrease in the IDF’s prestige. [WP]

• A profile of San Francisco-raised Sally Oren, the wife of the Israeli ambassador. [Washington Diplomat]

• Some important inside-Jewish-charity baseball news, as the Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish Agency decide to beat their swords into plowshares. [The Fundermentalist]

• Actress Rachel Weisz and director Darren Aronofsky are headed for Splitsville. This somehow feels important. [Jezebel]

• Michael Goldfarb (not the former McCain adviser), whose book Emancipation is excellent, is speaking at the Manhattan JCC this week and next. [Manhattan JCC]

In case you still haven’t seen this middle school trick play …

• “My family is not anti-Israel”: An intense profile of the Corries. [NYT]

• On Yiddish and the all-important schm- prefix. [Good]

• Contributing editor Josh Cohen reviews Adam Levin’s The Instructions. Let’s pause to note that I called Levin “the Josh Cohen of the McSweeney’s set” four months ago. [NYT Book Review]

• How the Israeli military successfully integrated openly gay soldiers. [Moment]

• The late Tony Judt on New York City. Must-read. [NYT]

Nextbook Press author David Mamet appears to have written and directed some sort of gonzo, Dada-esque short starring Arianna Huffington. No, but really.

But if every new administration makes mistakes, and learns from them, President Barack Obama’s self-appointed task of bringing peace to the Middle East may get more difficult with the mid-term elections Tuesday, when the House, and perhaps the Senate, will fall into the hands of a Republican party that is poised to push back against an administration that is commonly perceived as less friendly to Israel than its predecessors.

House Republicans have pitched their rhetoric high. Indiana Rep. Mike Pence, for instance, described the current White House as “the most anti-Israel administration in the modern history of the state of Israel.” Indeed, there’s some concern in pro-Israel circles that the bipartisan nature of support for the Jewish state is starting to show cracks. Fifty-four Congressional Democrats (but no Republicans) signed a letter urging Obama to “press for immediate relief for the citizens of Gaza” suffering under Israel’s blockade. A few months later 78 House Republicans wrote a letter to the Israeli Prime Minister expressing their “steadfast support” for him and Israel. The same divide seems to hold true with the electorate as well. An October poll conducted for the Emergency Committee for Israel showed that of “those intending to vote Republican this fall, 69 percent would be more likely to vote for a candidate who was pro-Israel” while only 40 percent of Democratic voters are more likely to vote for a pro-Israel candidate. It appears that the new Congress will be very much in line with the man likely to become its new majority leader, Virginia’s Eric Cantor, the House’s lone Jewish Republican, who recently told the White House that playing “hardball” with Israel “jeopardizes our national security.”

The emergence of Israel as a partisan political football is representative of not only a political difference but a philosophical one as well. One segment of the American political class sees Israel as an exceptional, and like-minded, ally and the other sees it as merely another nation-state—and a problematic one at that. Obama, it seems, is of the latter camp. He came to office with the hardly novel idea that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the Middle East’s central issue and that ending the conflict would cool off the Muslim masses whose hatred of the United States is supposedly tied to Washington’s “unconditional support” for Israel. A peace deal would also be a powerful means—perhaps the only available means, given the improbability of any kind of further American military action in the Middle East—of reducing the strength of the region’s radical actors, especially Iran.

The president pushed the Israelis hard, which only gave the Palestinian Authority incentive not to negotiate but rather to wait for Obama to deliver the Israelis. Domestically, the administration’s bullying of Israel angered some key Democrats, like New York Sen. Charles E. Schumer and many Jewish Democratic donors. Once the midterms are over, Obama will have at least six months before he has to worry about alienating Jewish fund-raisers for his 2012 re-election campaign. Then, as one source in Washington’s pro-Israel community puts it, “we will see what the administration has learned in 18 months; if they’ve understood that the way to move the process forward is to make the Israelis feel confident by embracing them in friendship, and not club Netanyahu like a fish you’re reeling in.”

It’s not clear yet how, or if, the divide over Israel within the administration has been resolved. Both the pro-Israel faction and the faction less friendly to the Jewish state have lost prominent figures (including former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel from the former and James Jones, the national security adviser, from the latter). In another internal fight, it appears that Dennis Ross is gaining the upper hand on George Mitchell, who has dropped his chief of staff, Mara Rudman, who was famously in favor of ratcheting up the pressure on the Israelis. But it was the secretary of State who gave perhaps the clearest indication of where things stand in the administration with one of the most sober assessments in the history of American Middle East diplomacy. “The future holds the possibility of progress,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told guests at the American Task Force for Palestine’s annual banquet last week, “if not in our lifetimes, then certainly in our children’s.”

If the State Department is clearly chastened by the failures of the past 18 months, the fact is that the president makes foreign policy. And this particular commander-in-chief has shown not only a reluctance to delegate important matters to subordinates (as Bush handed off all Middle East policy, save Iraq, to Condoleezza Rice), but also that he is willing to stand his ground to do what he thinks is right and only he can get done, regardless of the political cost. For their part, the Republicans will do what they can to put on the brakes.

Already Eric Cantor has touched off a minor crisis by suggesting that a Republican majority would seek to remove Israel from the foreign operations budget. Cantor’s proposal is to move aid to Israel over to the Pentagon in order to protect it if the GOP seeks to attack the president’s foreign aid budget by cutting funds for states that they believe do not merit U.S. aid. The fact that New York Rep. Nita Lowey, a strong supporter of Israel, has slammed Cantor’s proposal as reckless indicates that this is not about Israel but a political instrument to tie down the executive’s prerogative in making foreign policy.

It’s unlikely the Republicans will push their agenda, or counter-agenda, too far, for in the end their options are quite limited. They can call hearings on Capitol Hill, and they can challenge the White House’s Syria policy by maintaining there a hold on the appointment of the ambassador to Damascus, but too many fights with the administration will stretch the time and resources of the majority. The GOP will need to muster its strength for more pressing concerns than a moribund peace process. Despite the relative quiet in Washington over the last few months about the Iranian nuclear program, this is still a major issue for the GOP as is the deadline for the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan looming in July. The reality is that even when Obama was at the height of his powers he couldn’t force the peace process—not because of a lack of will power and volume, but because there are other political energies at work, some of them far outside the Beltway.

That’s not to say Obama won’t keep pressing. Sources close to Netanyahu’s office say that Obama is already pressuring Israel to extend the freeze. In Washington, some believe that Netanyahu will have a very hard time justifying his refusal. If he could do it for 10 months, what is it about 60 more days that imperils his coalition? If he doesn’t, Israeli sources say, the White House has threatened that it will do nothing to block the Palestinians from unilaterally declaring statehood at the United Nations.

Yet apparently Washington was just showing Jerusalem the instruments of torture while it did the same to the PA—and Abbas, who has much weaker domestic support than Netanyahu, appears to have backed down first. Instead of seeking recognition for a state within the 1967 borders, the PA will present a resolution to the Security Council stating that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal and must be evacuated. The Palestinians recognized they would lose U.S. support if they stepped out on their own and maybe even understood that very few of the member nations that matter most were predisposed to recognize such a state; they would have had more support from, say, Norway than Jordan.

In other words, the PA is trying to force an error from the White House with empty threats of its own. “Unilaterally declaring a Palestinian state is one of those things that comes up often,” says Martin Kramer, the Wexler-Fromer fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. “The other is the prospect of impending violence, the next intifada.” However, as Kramer explains, were another intifada to erupt, Abbas and Salam Fayyad understand that the protection and the foreign cash that have created the West Bank’s economic boom would all go away, and they would be left alone to face Hamas.

The peace deal that Obama wants is already out of his hands. The real check on his ambitions is not a Republican majority in the House but the political forces that rule the Middle East. Fayyadism, or that combination of U.S.-sponsored transparency and accountability, is working on the West Bank—at least until Hamas decides to pull the plug on the PA, which is not going to happen so long as the IDF is sitting there. Insofar as Obama believes the status quo is unsustainable, the only other option is chaos—a chaos that he can bring about by forcing the issue yet again.

The Arab-Israeli conflict is in stasis, for the time being anyway, which presents a golden opportunity for a president faced with a hard-line opposition in control of one or both houses of Congress. Let Obama keep his peace process envoys on the run, going back and forth between Ramallah and Jerusalem, Damascus, Beirut, Cairo, and Riyadh, and keep expectations low. Even the smallest concessions will be chalked up as groundbreaking—if, for example, the PA agrees to recognize Israel as a Jewish state or Netanyahu gives more time on the settlement freeze—and if nothing gets accomplished, he can blame it on the Republicans. In the political arena, at least, the end of Obama’s grand ambitions may make him the winner of the next few hands of the Middle East poker game.

Because, as Netanyahu must know, while dancing and singing might not make much of a difference to anyone but the celebrants themselves, images of a celebration could matter a great deal if they spread in the regional media. Because facts on the ground can be recorded, manipulated, reproduced, and distributed globally within minutes. And because, once they are let loose, these images have the potential to sway world opinion and reshape government agendas and options. An austere and relatively unremarked end to the building freeze would be less antagonizing to already hostile audiences than what did appear in regional news outlets the next day: thousands of Israelis triumphantly celebrating in a scene made festive by balloons in Israel’s national colors, blue and white, and Israeli and American flags. Such galling images could only serve to make it more difficult for a Palestinian delegation to accept Netanyahu’s reasoning that settlement building has never before stopped peace negotiations from taking place.

The settlers’ disregard for their leadership’s plea also highlighted the increasingly circumscribed ability of any government to control the messages not only of outside groups but of their own citizens. For governments, which once held nearly absolute power over a limited number of centralized media outlets—a few newspapers, one or two television stations—this loss of control is a hard pill to swallow. In moments of crisis, governments must now race against both professional and citizen journalists to win early control of the unfolding story, and they must win it not only on television, radio, and in other traditional news outlets but across a widening range of social media, from YouTube to Facebook to the “blogosphere,” and now to the “microblogosphere” of Twitter.

Israel seems to be having an especially difficult time accommodating to the evolving media environment. Take its summer 2006 war with Hezbollah. Although experts waffled for months over the military consequences of the war, there was universal consensus that the Lebanese Shiite group was its true victor, primarily because of its commanding media exploitation. Hezbollah showed itself to be skilled in the foundational craft of information warfare: Later scrutiny of the war’s events indicated an advanced ability to intercept Israeli signals and sustain its own communication networks even while under attack. The Israeli military looked clumsy and old-fashioned in comparison to Hezbollah, which adeptly wove words, images, and song to create a globally resonant narrative of both triumph and victimhood.

Indeed, images of the conflict may have been more powerful, the further they were from their source, and from the local political dynamics that surrounded the conflict. It worked to Hezbollah’s benefit to have their own war with Israel framed in terms of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has become global shorthand for an asymmetrical battle between a heartless bully and a courageous and long-suffering victim. This framework overwhelms the specifics; pro-Israeli responses to widespread charges in the United States and Europe of the “disproportionate use of force” against Gaza in 2008 missed a larger point that the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians is viewed a priori as disproportional.

The simplicity and appeal of this narrative does not fully explain the vitriolic protests that the 2008 war with Hamas inspired all over the world, in places as far afield as Argentina and Thailand, Norway and Tunisia. Pro-Israel commentators claimed that the protests reflected anti-Semitism; pro-Palestinian observers argued they confirmed the justice of the Palestinian cause. Both claims have truth, of course, but the protests also drew demonstrators who do not care deeply about either Jews or Palestinians in their everyday lives. If anything, the flare-ups were reminiscent of riots responding to caricatures of Muhammad in a Swedish newspaper the year before. These epidemic flash mobs are a new kind of protest, in which globally transmitted events and powerful symbols collide to channel an overdetermined assortment of discontents. Israel-Palestine, the Holocaust, and Nazism are such symbols. Until these become a part of normal history, they are likely to continue to be a touchstone for the angry and dispossessed everywhere.

To address some of its communication shortfalls, Israel created a National Information Directorate in 2008. The agency is attached to the Office of the Prime Minister, and it serves to coordinate the country’s public diplomacy, or hasbara (literally, explanation, in Hebrew). The new Information Directorate garnered praise from media watchers and international Jewish groups for its ability to conduct this complex coordination in the short war with Hamas in December 2008. Having centralized its communication activities in one office, Israel could communicate its objectives and defend its actions with one unified voice. Over the course of the conflict, the civilian agency and the Israeli Defense Forces worked to generate similar or complementary messages, and did so using a wide variety of new media tools, such as text messaging and YouTube.

Yet, even swift message coordination and wide technological reach cannot make up for the challenges posed by the new media environment. Many analysts have concluded that the new media conditions are tilted in favor of non-state actors, such as insurgent militias or terrorist groups. There is a universal expectation that governments and traditional media should function transparently and permit information to flow freely. Once upon a time, a government seeking to control the flow of information during wartime could destroy physical infrastructure or impose media blackouts or other forms of censorship. While these are still options, it is increasingly apparent that the reputational cost of heavy-handed government or military actions can outweigh the benefits. When information is restricted, the remaining void is quickly filled with conspiracy theories and distorted facts. These theories balloon and proliferate with startling speed, because it is so cheap and easy for most of us to access the means of digital communication. This phenomenon occurred in 2002, when Israel’s decision to prevent journalists from reporting directly from Jenin refugee camp during Operation Defensive Shield during the Second Intifada generated claims that a civilian massacre was being kept from public view. Although reports later absolved the IDF of any acts of large-scale murder, the reputational damage was done.

***

The Sept. 11 attacks generated intense scrutiny of the communications capacities of al-Qaida, Hezbollah, and other non-state militant groups, much of it carried out in the same spirit of bewildered shock and awe that led Richard Holbrooke to ask, “How can a man in a cave outcommunicate the world’s leading communications society?” In his 2001 Washington Post editorial, Holbrooke explained the United States’ own tone-deaf communications as a function of outmoded technology and counterproductive bureaucracy. These are much the same terms in which Israel’s failure in 2006 would later be examined. As many analyses have since documented, non-state groups face neither of these hindrances. Having never had access to mainstream media, or control of the official means of communication in the first place, they have always relied on alternative technologies. Hamas and Hezbollah were both early adopters of new technologies. Hezbollah has had an impressively well-orchestrated and highly controlled communication structure since at least the 1980s, with bureaus directing regional communications, external relations, military communications, and artistic production.

There is also a more deeply rooted issue that hinders states like Israel and the United States from more effective communications. In the United States, information warfare developed almost exclusively as a technological discipline, propelled by the country’s abiding faith in science as the solution to our human problems. This scientific worldview extends to the military view of information as a kind of digital switch: Information is either true or false, informative or dis-informative. As a result of this legacy, today’s information strategists have found themselves grappling not only with the new technological realities but also with the dawning recognition that information is not simply a realm of truth or lies but the place where humans collect to make, refute, and reframe the meaning of our experiences. It has not been easy for U.S. military to gain footing, let alone dominance, on this shifting ground of history, memory, culture, and language.

Having no present territory, the insurgent often has nothing left beyond language and memory. The power of ephemera to unify and motivate may be especially true for non-state groups opposing the State of Israel, which holds a uniquely supercharged semiotic status in the annals of modern conflict.

***

It is no wonder, then, that Israeli communications compare badly to those of Hezbollah. As researcher Olfa Lamloum has observed, the group orchestrates its politics as a form of dramatic pageant, a practice it learned from Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s example in the Iranian Revolution. Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah’s Al Quds Day address last month offered a display of just such political dramaturgy. Al Quds Day, or Jerusalem Day, established in 1979 by Khomeini, serves annually as a touchstone linking the Palestinian plight to current events. For the audience, sitting in the early September sun, Nasrallah’s comments transformed their experience from commemoration of the past to active participation in an ongoing historical drama.

In his speech, Nasrallah suggested that he is speaking of just one short chapter in a longer dramatic encounter between Islam and the Arabs and the United States and Israel. Peering into the news of the day, he predicted Arab triumph and Western failure signaled by the partial U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. Why, Nasrallah asked his audience, did the neoconservatives’ plan to remake the Middle East fail?

Because of the staying power of the Palestinians, especially in Gaza; the staying power of the resistance in Lebanon and especially in the July [2006] war; and the staying power of political and national desire in Lebanon, and the lack of submission to Western American dictates. Because of the staying power of Syria, and Iran, and the Iraqi people and their popular resistance.

Nasrallah’s answer has the pithy rhythm of a slogan, but it is much deeper in its effect. Key terms of his discourse have gathered their own symbolic power over many years of association with Palestinian resistance, and his teleological stringing of events suggests the natural course of action is simply to continue on the same unwavering path.

In contrast to his characterization of living, ongoing history of the Arabs, Nasrallah portrayed the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations as “stillborn.” They were pre-rejected by the Palestinians, and by the Muslims and Arabs, dead before they have even lived. Ultimately, Nasrallah advised, all that is needed to triumph is time, more staying power, the ability to outlast the Israelis and the Americans. It is difficult to imagine any slogan, no matter how carefully targeted, that could effectively combat the historical narrative offered by Hezbollah. Suppressing its most powerful channels will only have temporary effect; bombing will not kill it, and is likely to confirm the themes of victimhood, martyrdom, and triumph through endurance.

In the long run, Israel and its allies will be far better served by efforts to grasp Hezbollah’s legitimacy and meaning to its listeners, and to find ways to engage it. Cultural narratives can and do change over time. Most communities that endure successfully, like the resolute Palestinians, like the Jewish people, and like the experiment in conglomerate identity that is American democracy, will point to the consistency of their self-narration as the source of their success. Paradoxically, the real source of a people’s endurance is its ability to transform to accommodate changing conditions. The religious vision that Hezbollah and other groups use to underwrite their political legitimacy is an invention of the last 30 years, not an ancient artifact of the region.

The real task, therefore, is to use various instruments of policy-making to transform the conditions that enable the Hezbollah narrative. Nasrallah’s Jerusalem Day speech hinges on the garbled logic that the “endurance” of Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites precipitated the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. This is an impoverished and narcissistic vision, but it is in present conditions a persuasive one. Smart strategists seeking to use information to influence events will do well to understand the mechanics of Nasrallah’s logic: It is a freely available form of predictive intelligence that can help them understand how he is likely to frame future events.

In the longer term, non-violent coexistence in the region will necessitate a dialogue between different historical visions. In this effort, it is time to go beyond the exhausted stalemate of comparative suffering between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians, and look more practically at what works today and what doesn’t. Enlightened Palestinians and those in solidarity with them in the region will hopefully conclude that sweeping conspiracy theories waste much-needed energy more than they empower. Enlightened Israeli Jews and those in solidarity with them will, we can hope, begin to find ways to express Jewish identity and continuity to reflect current conditions: the miracle of not merely surviving, but thriving, and the vanishing need to rely on an identity governed solely by victimhood and existential threat.

Amy Zalman is an independent consultant to senior policymakers on the function of culture and narrative in U.S. strategic communication.

Last week’s incident on the border between Lebanon and Israel suggests that even if war between the two countries is not imminent, Hezbollah is making good on its strategic aims regarding not only Israel, but its host nation, Lebanon. Where the Lebanese government and its assorted allies, regional and international, had once hoped that Hezbollah could somehow be persuaded to abandon its arms, become a regular political party, and integrate its units into the army under the control of the Lebanese government, precisely the reverse has happened, and a monster is being born—just as Hezbollah predicted. The Lebanese state, its army, and even its people are being swallowed by the resistance.

It is ironic that Israel has also seen Lebanon as overrun by Hezbollah for some time, so that if (or when) war comes, Hezbollah won’t be the only group to suffer the consequences. Official Israel calls this strategic posture the Dahiya doctrine, after the Hezbollah stronghold in the southern suburbs of Beirut that was laid to waste in the 2006 war. What the doctrine means is that in the next round of fighting, all of Lebanon will be devastated.

How did this come to pass?

Just 14 months ago, Lebanon’s pro-democracy, U.S.-allied March 14 movement won the parliamentary majority. It seemed Hezbollah was on the defensive. And yet even then the March 14 alliance was showing cracks, as when one of its pillars, Walid Jumblatt, started to distance himself from his local and international allies, including the United States, and inch closer to one-time adversaries Syria and Hezbollah. When I spoke to him last fall, Jumblatt rationalized his tactics by pointing to how the international community, and especially the United States, seemed unwilling to defend its Lebanese allies when Hezbollah overran Beirut in May 2008. The decline of the March 14 alliance then accelerated with the new U.S. administration’s stated intentions to engage Syria. The prospect of President Barack Obama reaching out to Damascus was enough to frighten the Saudis into making amends with Syria before, they feared, Washington could cut a deal and leave Riyadh out in the cold. When the Saudis folded, their clients in Lebanon followed suit, and Prime Minister Saad Hariri went on his knees to the Syrian capital to seek comity with Bashar al-Assad, the man who had his father killed.

Two weeks ago Assad made the return trip: He visited Beirut alongside Saudi King Abdullah, a summit widely misconstrued as a harbinger of stability in Lebanon. This misunderstanding was cleared up last week in the firefight that cost an IDF officer, two Lebanese Armed Forces soldiers, and a Lebanese journalist their lives, an event perhaps best understood as what journalist Hussain Abdul-Hussain calls a “security message.” That is, Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah were intent on reminding everyone that neither the Lebanese government nor its sponsor in Riyadh calls the shots in Lebanon.

What is most moving about the collapse of the March 14 movement, the return of Syrian hegemony to Lebanon, and Hezbollah’s de facto takeover of the state is that the Lebanese have by and large refrained from blaming the United States for their fate. During the time I lived in Beirut from 2004 to 2006, the heyday of the Cedar Revolution, I was regularly asked by anxious Lebanese friends and associates if the United States was genuinely supportive of their popular movement or if Washington intended to sell Lebanon out to the Syrians, as it had when it permitted Damascus free rein throughout the 1990s. How could I answer with any authority, except insofar as I understood the American character? Sometimes I responded, no, we are serious this time; or, who knows, I said, hedging my bets, perhaps; and sometimes I said, probably, yes, invariably.

But now that we have abandoned the Lebanese to the jackals, they have accepted their tragic destiny without accusing us of failing them, as we have.

Most people outside of the Beltway did not really understand the stakes involved in the George W. Bush Administration’s democracy promotion. While the world outside Washington saw the invasion of Iraq as either a revolution in U.S. policy or a conspiracy of greedy corporations and evil special-interest groups, another way to see Bush’s agenda is as an accounting adjustment: Some of the funds that had been typically designated to support Arab militaries were to be diverted into building democratic institutions.

In the case of Lebanon, Bush’s policy curtailed our relationship with Syrian security services and put more money into Lebanese political institutions. U.S. support of the Lebanese Armed Forces was meant to enable the state to extend its sovereignty from border to border. It is hardly surprising that Hezbollah, which embodies the challenge to that state’s sovereignty, understood this better than the Lebanese government. For the last five years, various figures from the March 14 movement have come through Washington to petition for more firepower—planes, tanks, artillery—anything that would serve as evidence that, counter to Hezbollah’s argument, the LAF was capable of defending Lebanon from Israel. That the IDF colonel was killed on the border by a sniper rifle likely provided by the United States—before the U.S. aid package, the LAF had no sniper rifles—may bring that support to an end.

It is an article of faith of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment that the active component of American policy is building and strengthening institutions in faraway places—for instance, a new Iraqi constitution, the Pakistani parliament, the Afghan criminal justice system. The premise of institution-building is that it is not the particular ideas and values of foreign cultures that determine how people in those places live; it is rather the absence of U.S.-style political institutions that have kept these foreigners mired in poverty, or in a constant state of war with their neighbors, or enabled widespread corruption among their political elites.

But this obsession with building political institutions betrays a parochial innocence, a uniquely American discomfort with tragedy. It wasn’t always like this. By and large, our founding fathers were landlocked; Franklin, Jefferson, and the entire Adams family all rolled into one did not see a fraction of the globe that a typical 35-year-old development expert sees today. And yet, unlike foreign aid workers, the founders were familiar with the tragic view of life, which is why they sought to keep this experiment in democracy isolated from the rest of the world and its tragedies.

The United States wanted to help the Lebanese build political institutions but were unwilling to do anything that might alter the balance of power in Lebanon, like make war on Syria—and even that might not have changed anything. When the Lebanese first took to the streets to demand Syria withdraw its troops, I feared they did not understand that they were essentially on their own, that Washington was not going to protect them. But now I see I was wrong. The Lebanese long ago had taken the measure of our character and understood all along that the United States was not going to send troops on their behalf, so when they asked if they were destined to be sold out to the Syrians, what they were really saying was, Are you Americans watching us? We surprised you, didn’t we? We’re sort of heroes, don’t you think?

Since the 2005 murder of Saad’s father, Rafik Hariri, and 22 others in a massive car-bombing, Lebanese officials and journalists have been killed and maimed by the Syrians and their allies, but there are still those in the press attacking Damascus and Hezbollah—even after the Saudis warned the Lebanese prime minister that they don’t want to see any more anti-Syrian polemic in the Hariri-owned media. And this week after Hassan Nasrallah’s televised presentation ostensibly providing irrefutable proof that Israel assassinated Rafik Hariri, Lebanese journalists are mocking the Hezbollah leader. While Nasrallah has claimed that he has intercepted Israeli drone feeds showing that Israel tracked Hariri’s movements, his opponents are questioning whether he hasn’t merely lifted images from Google Earth.

So, who is standing with these Lebanese then? No one, even if they’ve done nothing wrong. In fact, they’ve conducted themselves heroically. But none of that will change the fact that when war comes with Israel, they too will be in harm’s way, and not just Hezbollah, the villains. This is tragic.

It is typical in Lebanon, as throughout the Middle East, to blame one’s fate on Israel. Over the last week I received emails and text messages from Lebanese friends about Israel’s “provocations” on the border. More than once I bit my lip, noting only that somewhere in Israel a family was mourning a father, a son, a brother, a husband because of Hezbollah, who was also their enemy. Too often, innocent Lebanese forget that they are no more innocent than innocent Israelis; the difference is that Israel can and will protect its citizens from Hezbollah while the Lebanese government cannot. It is not fair, it’s tragic. More often than not, the name that this maddening powerlessness and inability to change your own circumstances gives to the inchoate pattern of tragedy in the Middle East is Israel.

Of course, the Middle East is no less tragic for the Israelis than it is for the Lebanese, but that is not to say life is impossible, or, as the saying would have it, that the status quo is unsustainable. Life goes on—sons are born and fathers are murdered. Life as such is sustainable and has been sustained over the course of several thousand years—or long before we Americans entered the scene with our post-tragic ethos. That we can’t imagine that some things do not work out well does not mean they are unsustainable, only that we are incapable of fathoming the depths of tragedy.

• After meeting with Saudi Arabia’s king, President Abbas reiterated that he will agree to direct peace talks on the condition of a total West Bank settlement freeze; the current freeze is set to expire next month. [Haaretz]

• British rock act Gorillaz cancelled an appearance in Tel Aviv—implicitly in protest of the flotilla raid—but subsequently played a show in Syria. WTF, yo? [The Arty Semite]

• Confirmed, if it wasn’t before: Amar’e Stoudemire is not rabbinically Jewish. [WSJ]

• What boxer Dmitriy Salita has left to prove. [Kaplan’s Korner]

• Boston Red Sox first basemen Kevin Youkilis, one of baseball’s top Jewish sluggers, is reportedly out for the season with a torn hand ligament. [Baseball Nerd, a.k.a. Keith Olbermann’s baseball blog]

This movie looks like a significantly more shameless version of Munich. And yet maybe awesome?

Amos Harel says the IDF report contains “a clear and detailed analysis identifying numerous mistakes, and no recommendations regarding the individuals involved.” It does establish that the activists fired first—something we basically knew already, and yet also something that those who don’t already believe it won’t believe just because the IDF says it is true.

In other words, says Haaretz, the probe was almost useless: “The bottom line, four years after the Second Lebanon War, is that the entire defense establishment had planned for the wrong scenario in the flotilla affair.”

And yet! The IDF was yesterday presented with a real-life second round, and, so far, it seems to be doing something right. A ship sponsored by a son of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi and ostensibly bearing humanitarian cargo left Greece a few days ago. Yesterday morning, it was bound for Gaza; Israeli diplomats publicly cautioned the navy not to forcibly halt the boat before it had entered Gaza’s territorial waters (the flotilla raid took place in international waters); and, yesterday evening, the boat’s captain said that he would set a course for Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, near Gaza, which Israeli authorities are permitting. Problem solved? Here’s hoping, and here’s also hoping it’s not the last crisis to end in so un-crisis-like a manner.

IDF Probe of Gaza Flotilla Carefully Avoided Placing Real Blame [Haaretz]
Related: Israel Bites the Bait [Tablet Magazine]

• The IDF’s probe into the flotilla incident found several errors, notably of intelligence, but ultimately determined it was justified in killing the nine civilians under the circumstances. [NYT]

• Meanwhile, the IDF prepares for a Libyan-sponsored humanitarian boat, with the Foreign Ministry urging it to wait to interdict the boat until it reaches Gaza’s territorial waters. [Haaretz]

• An Iranian nuclear scientist who mysteriously disappeared from Saudi Arabia last year turned up last night at the Pakistan Embassy in Washington, D.C., which houses the Iranian interests section. [Laura Rozen]

• Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pennsylvania), Syrian-Israeli peace mediator? [JTA]

• Israel is on a record-setting tourism pace this year. [JTA]

• A large number of Israeli Holocaust survivors are indigent. [LAT]

• Rabbi David Wolpe movingly praises Christopher Hitchens, whom he frequently debates over the existence of God. [WP]

• “Is there anything left to be said about anti-Semitism?” A different daily magazine of Jewish life and culture finds plenty. [NYT]

• Word has Lindsay Lohan involved with a female IDF soldier. [New York Daily News]

• The United States is donating $15 million toward the preservation of Auschwitz. Since it’s the government doing it, in a sense it, too, is tax-exempt. [CNN]

A group of IDF soldiers uploaded a video of themselves dancing to Ke$ha to YouTube, and now face disciplinary action. For those not observing the Three Weeks, it’s below; for those observing the Three Weeks, click the sound off and watch.

Greta Berlin, a leader of the pro-Hamas Free Gaza Movement, told the New York Times in a telephone interview from Cyprus today that Israeli soldiers dropped onto the deck of the Mavi Marmara and “opened fire on sleeping civilians at four in the morning.” That is undoubtedly the version of events that will be believed throughout the Middle East, where any anti-Israel theory is swallowed whole. But those not merely motivated by ideology might reach a rather different interpretation of what happened, thanks to the videos of the event released yesterday by the Israel Defense Forces.

The least-convincing video came first—a long-shot showing much of the vessel from above, presumably from a camera on one of the helicopters that inserted the commandos. The footage is grainy because the raid occurred in the early morning hours and was filmed with a night-vision lens. The figures are seen from a distance. They’re tiny. The only way you can tell what’s happening is from labels inserted by the IDF—e.g., “The first soldier is injured and thrown to the deck.”

Much better footage was released a few hours later. In a close-up shot you can actually see the troops descending on ropes and being set upon by an angry mob. The “peaceful” passengers wielding chairs and metal rods are clearly visible. So, too, is the horrifying sight of a soldier going head-first overboard.

A third video is almost entirely dark, but the soldiers’ conversation in Hebrew—with English subtitles provided by the IDF, but an accurate translation—tells the story. “It’s coming from all directions,” they shout. “We need to be evacuated now! Real weapons, real weapons! They are firing on us. There is live fire below.” As much as the words the desperate tone of the radio chatter conveys the magnitude of what was occurring.

This is further confirmed in an interview posted by the IDF with one of the commandos, whose arm is in a sling and whose face is obscured. “Every guy that descended was met by three or four people,” he says. “And they just started beating him up, tearing him to pieces. It was a lynch.”

Israel’s enemies long ago realized how potent propaganda warfare could be. They have made ample use of video cameras and Internet postings; Hezbollah even has its own satellite channel. Israel has been late to realize the importance of information warfare, but in its response to the Gaza flotilla dust-up it is finally casting aside the instinctive secretiveness of the military to give the world a view of what actually happened. Of course that won’t change the minds of many who are instinctively anti-Israel. But it’s better than simply ceding the information battlefield as Israel has done too often in the past.

Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today.

In today’s technologically permeated battlefield, what mattered was not whether the Israeli military action was right—it was—but whether it appeared to be right. In this respect, the moment the first images were transmitted of Israeli helicopters descending onto the Gaza-bound flotilla’s flag ship, the Mavi Marmara, the disproportionate portrait of force had already decided the battle’s outcome, against Israel. All of which was obvious, even before the raid began: Despite knowing that many of the flotilla’s participants were desperately seeking a confrontation with the IDF in order to create a televised imbroglio that would help catapult the plight of the Gaza Strip onto the international agenda, the Israeli government gave the activists, in a tragic sense, exactly what they wanted.

In the immediate aftermath of the events, commentators began lambasting the Israeli government’s public-relations efforts—without taking into account the fact that there really is no other side to this story. Under international law, Israel’s attempt to prevent an internationally recognized terrorist organization like Hamas from smuggling in arms that would endanger Israel’s security would certainly qualify as justifiable. But there was never any way to translate through military action such moral and legal justification into political results. In other words, while the ends of the operation were defendable, its legitimacy was instantly undercut by the deadly means.

And so the question now hovering in many minds is: What was Israel thinking? Well, it’s possible that it wasn’t thinking but daydreaming. The Israeli poet Yitzhak Laor recently argued that “Israel does not understand the new world.” The problem, however, appears to be far worse: Israel has apparently chosen to stay behind and live in the old one. Stuck in a self-imposed Groundhog Day reality, Israeli policymakers perpetually seek to resolve the political problems of the present with the anachronistic military solutions of the past. What they fail to understand in doing so—as the recent deadly encounter at sea has illustrated all too well—is that the solutions that proved themselves so beneficial only several decades ago are increasingly becoming destructive to Israel’s national security interests today.

***

Let’s begin with a clarification: Anyone who actually cares to examine the videos from Monday’s deadly encounter at sea and navigate the jungle of misinformation in search of truth will eventually discover that many of the self-proclaimed “peaceful” protesters who awaited the Israeli soldiers’ arrival with clubs, rocks, and steel bars in their hands were anything but peaceful. Those who furthermore wish to distinguish between fact and fiction might also notice that the rifles with which the Israeli commandos are armed were actually paintball guns—not M-16s.

And yet all of these facts have essentially become irrelevant. In today’s constantly evolving battlefield of public opinion, Israel can no longer act now and explain later, as it used to do during the Cold War, when its commandos would storm into upscale Beirut neighborhoods at night, assassinate PLO terrorists, and be safely back in their beds by morning. Armed with camera phones connected instantly by satellite to YouTube and Facebook, and staffed by activists ready to inundate the blogosphere with biased accounts, the media-savvy participants in the pro-Palestinian flotilla made sure the Israelis would have to defend their military operation before it had ever begun.

Technology has provided the protesters on the flotilla the opportunity to counterbalance the Israeli superiority of force with their own advantage in the dissemination of raw information. While it may be true that an increasing amount of television viewers and Internet surfers are less susceptible to crude misinformation, timing is everything in this conflict; by the time Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, presented the Israeli side of things to foreign journalists in his morning-after press briefing, the initial images selectively shot, edited, and distributed by the protesters had already been circulating the web for three hours. Most viewers are prone to a limited consumption of news, and the first few images mark the storyline. This essentially meant that all the Israelis could do was try to play catch-up.

***

This technological disadvantage in its PR duel with the Palestinian supporters is not the only factor that should have discouraged the Netanyahu government from thinking it could resolve a political challenge through military action. The tenuous nature of Israel’s international standing should have been as pivotal in dissuading it from attacking the flotilla.

David Ben-Gurion famously declared that it does not matter what the goyim think; it matters only what the Jews do. While such reasoning may have been credible decades ago, when the imperious likes of FDR, Winston Churchill, and Charles De Gaulle were at the helm of the free world, the increasingly participatory nature of western democratic politics means that what the “goyim” think these days directly dictates what their governments eventually do. In this regards, we are already sensing just how disastrous the diplomatic repercussions may turn out to be for Israel. In the initial 48 hours after the incident, Israel suffered a U.N. Security Council condemnation, received repeated international calls to completely lift the blockade of Gaza (the very act that this entire fiasco was meant to prevent), and further compromised its already shaky relationships with the Obama Administration and the European Union.

However, the most important diplomatic casualty from this affair may be Jerusalem’s relationship with Ankara. Relations between Israel and Turkey, whose government had sanctioned and supported this contentious sea voyage from its inception, are understandably at their lowest point since the two countries enacted diplomatic relations more than 61 years ago. The incident seriously threatens to sever longstanding, multibillion-dollar trade and tourism ties, but it also poses an existential threat to an immensely critical strategic relationship that with the exception of the Jerusalem-Washington alliance may be Israel’s most important.

With so few allies in such a hostile region, Israel’s strategic cooperation with Turkey has always served as a tacit bulwark against any hegemonic aspirations that the Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah axis may have presented. But this latest incident, which has already inflamed the Turkish public and sent scores of people into the streets in violent protest against Israel, may prove to be the tipping point in an already strained relationship and could help push Ankara firmly into the camp of Israel’s nemeses.

It remains a plausible assumption that Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan orchestrated this affair. After all, his enthusiastic endorsement of the flotilla’s voyage can be interpreted as yet another of his many recent ploys to consolidate his standing as a prominent figure within the global Islamic community. Erdogan may not be a fan of Israel, but countless members of his country’s political, military, economic, and intellectual elite still cherish the historic relationship with Israel and find it much easier to identify with its liberal-democratic ideals than with the religious radicalism and political authoritarianism of their own Arab neighbors. In the wake of this latest event however, those moderates may now be forced to rethink their sympathies.

***

Could Israel have handled this military raid turned diplomatic fiasco any differently? Yes, by simply letting the flotilla pass through.

In any rational cost-benefit analysis that should have been made before the military option was selected, the potential cost of a violent confrontation with the flotilla’s multinational passenger body far outweighs any modest deterrence benefits reaped by not letting it reach Gaza. Such a tactical victory in other words should have been considered as Pyrrhic at best, since it would thoroughly be dwarfed by the strategic ramifications that could arise from the worst-case scenario in which the high-seas confrontation actually turns deadly—a scenario that ultimately played out.

As the initial investigation of the ships’ cargo has already proven, the flotilla was indeed carrying humanitarian aid and not contraband or arms (which was unlikely, given the highly publicized voyage). Considering then the relatively harmless implications of a symbolic act of solidarity between a bunch of politically irrelevant radical yahoos and the pariah Hamas government, one can’t help but feel that if only Israel had allowed the ships to get through, the combustible showdown would have deflated within hours.

But if Israel was indeed so adamant about preventing the flotilla’s arrival in Gaza, one cannot help but wonder why some other less-confrontational options were not implemented instead. For instance, the Israeli naval commandos Shayetet 13 are renowned for their underwater sabotage skills. Could Israel not have attempted to neutralize the convoy’s propeller engines? Or alternatively, why did the navy not enact some kind of aggressive maneuvering that would have forced the flotilla to halt or pushed it drastically off course? The Israeli government was either too gung-ho to confront the convoy or too unimaginative to locate alternative solutions to brute force for stopping it.

***

The Israeli press, with its ingrained sensationalism, has already dubbed the affair “a tragedy at sea.” Unfortunately, with the exception of the soldiers irresponsibly sent in on a mission they were ill equipped to accomplish, there is not a trace of genuine tragedy on Israel’s part. Tragedy, after all, requires the intervention of fate, chance, and design to prevent us mortals from envisioning the results of our actions. In its fateful decision to raid the Gaza-bound convoy, however, Israel preferred to abide by the same anachronistic military actions that had served it so well in the past, instead of seeking innovative solutions more commensurate with the delicate nature of its international standing. In doing so, it brought upon itself the disastrous political consequences with which it may very well now have to grapple for months if not years to come.

Many of the pro-Palestinian activists on board the ships were radicals who came looking for a fight. The Israeli government, in one of its most self-destructive decisions in recent memory, gave them exactly what they wanted. And while it could be argued that Israeli soldiers arrived with too little force as opposed to too much, in its decision to engage the flotilla, Israel essentially sat down to a game of poker with two of its cards showing. Knowing that the IDF would never randomly open fire on them or dare sink their ships, the protesters were able to call the Israeli bluff and lure the poorly equipped and outnumbered commandos onto their ships. By storming the convoy without the necessary firepower to properly subdue it, Israel foolishly forced itself into a situation from which there was no real way to emerge with a winning hand.

Yoav Fromer is a New York-based journalist and a former columnist for Maariv.

And yet counting is a particularly Jewish obsession. We count the numeric value of letters in search of hidden meaning, and we count the numbers of Jews in each country in the world in search of a glimpse at the future. We believe some numbers—7, 13, 18—have a special, symbolic meaning.

This week, then, I’d like to look back at the evolution of my Jewish identity as represented by a few meaningful numbers.

10: I was 10 years old when I realized for certain that I believed in God. Watching the soccer World Cup religiously, I made the acquaintance of Argentina’s Diego Maradona. He wore No. 10. Playing England in the quarterfinals, he scored a goal with his fist, which none of the referees seemed to have spotted. It was, Maradona later punned, the hand of God. Later in the game, he ran single-handedly across the pitch, hardly touching the ball, bypassing five English outfielders and scoring what is widely considered to be one of the most incredible goals in the history of the game. On our blue corduroy couch at home, I wept. Only the existence of a higher force could explain what I’d just seen.

14: I became a man a year later than Jewish ritual said I did. At 13, reciting the haftorah at my bar mitzvah, I felt like a phony. No matter what the rabbi said, I thought, I was still very much a kid. Thirteen, I snarled, was much too young for anyone to accept the burden of manhood. A year later, however, when my father was arrested and imprisoned and my life changed radically, I realized Judaism had it just right: Lacking a choice, I grew up overnight. I was not too young, and all that talk of burdens and responsibilities now made perfect sense.

17: To compensate for becoming a man a year too late, I became a soldier a year too early. At 17, I was already wearing the oily, olive-colored uniform of the Israel Defense Forces. I spent 1,155 days in the army and passed most of them thinking about what it meant to be an Israeli and a Jew. Under fire in Lebanon and in Hebron and in Gaza, I had to ask myself repeatedly what I was fighting for and if it was worth it. And every day I decided that it was. I didn’t agree with many of the policies I was sent to enforce, but I was nonetheless proud to know that I contributing, in whatever minuscule a way, to the Zionist project, madly audacious and wildly hopeful and deeply essential. My opinions have since evolved, but I’m still thrilled to know that I did my bit. Whenever I get into an argument about Israeli politics, I’m happy to know that I’ve got the scars to back up my opinions.

318: Is the number of hours I spent on a hunger strike in front of the prime minister’s house in Jerusalem, protesting the stratospheric costs of higher education and the inequity between the fully subsidized ultra-Orthodox yeshivot and the overcrowded, underfunded universities.

500: Was the price, in shekels, of the ambulance ride to the hospital after collapsing during a demonstration in Zion Square.

32,000: Was the annual salary, in dollars, I received after moving to New York and becoming a novice press officer at the Consulate General of Israel in New York in 2000.

150,000: Is the sum, in dollars, the foreign ministry is now paying its “Internet warfare team” to tweet for Israel.

6,000,000: Is the number with which each I, like so many Jews, begin and end so many thoughts. When I was young, my favorite television show was The Six Million Dollar Man, which, in Israel, was called The Man Worth Millions. I was just learning English when the show came on, and I asked my mother why the show’s Hebrew name was changed. She said it was because of the Holocaust. I asked what the Holocaust was. Not even Lee Majors could prepare me for the answer.

Now, dear readers, if you are so inclined, kindly comment below and share some of your meaningful numbers. To get you started, here’s a terrific song from Israel’s hip hop band HaDag Nachash, all about the numbers that really count in life.

Shahzad was not a “one-off,” a frustrated Muslim immigrant pushed over the edge by the sinful American way of life or radicalized by the treatment of Muslims in Chechnya or Israel’s wars in Lebanon and Gaza. Rather, as U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder admitted this weekend, he was an emissary of the Pakistani Taliban, a group with which the United States is quietly—here, but not over there—at war. “We know that they helped facilitate it,” Holder said of Taliban support for Shahzad’s operation. “We know that they probably helped finance it. And that [Shahzad] was working at their direction.”

It is notable that the initial news coverage of Shahzad’s failed effort offered nearly a dozen psycho-religious explanations for his behavior—he lost his mortgage, he lost his wife, he is a madman, he is a religious fanatic, he is a crazy jihadi—all of which may or may not be true but pale next to the obvious fact: The United States is at war with the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is not clear why the ancient historical principle of lex talonis—an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth—is lost on us, as if there is no price to pay for killing people in war, both militants and civilians. If one of the chief goals of the Obama Administration’s counterinsurgency in Afghanistan is to protect that country’s civilian population, it suggests that something is deeply wrong with a strategy that has now made U.S. civilians vulnerable to mass murder at home. The reason that American civilians are endangered here, and that U.S. troops are at risk in Iraq and Afghanistan, is that we have killed tens of thousands Muslims in those countries, which we continue to occupy.

This is not, one must add, because of Israeli actions in the West Bank. Last week this column looked at the theory of linkage, or the idea that every problem in the Middle East is inextricably linked to the Arab-Israeli conflict. I detailed the concept’s history, identified some of its proponents, explained its strategic values for successive U.S. governments, and showed how it has tied our fate to that of our Arab allies. One Tablet reader contended that I had overstated the case, commenting that linkage is simply another way “to blame everything on Jews.” He wrote: “Judeophobia/anti-Semitism is a motivating factor for linkage.”

After some deliberation, I concluded that couldn’t be right. Sure, it’s true that 2,000 years of anti-Semitic narratives holding the Jews responsible for everything from the murder of Jesus to the black plague to Sept. 11 could easily pave the way for a theory attributing the myriad problems of the Middle East to the Jews. But it’s hard to believe that large segments of the foreign-policy establishment of a country that overwhelmingly supports the Jewish state could hold a conviction that is at its core anti-Semitic. That’s the stuff of medieval thinking, and the United States is the engine of historical, and moral, progress. After all, a country that once went to war over slavery has elected an African-American president, thanks in no small part to the energies of our intellectual classes in the press and the academy—many of whom also subscribe to the idea of linkage. So, the idea that people who are anti-racist could also promote narratives that are anti-Semitic is irrational.

Nonetheless, it’s true that over the last year linkage has seemed to figure much more prominently in U.S. Middle East policy than ever before. So, this week I wanted to explore some of the reasons why, with reference to the Shahzad case.

The first and most obvious reason linkage is in the news of late is that the concept will always be more of an issue under those U.S. administrations to whom the peace process is most vital. For the Democratic Party, the peace process is always important. As Steven Rosen, director of the Middle East Forum’s Washington Program, told me, “The peace process is a part of the Democrats’ DNA.” That is to say, when the Middle East is relatively calm, the peace process is important, but, as the apostles of linkage explain, it is never more urgent than when other issues in the region are heating up. Successful peace processing turns the temperature down across all the Middle East.

So, what are the major regional issues? As I discussed last week, our Arab allies and Israel agree that the threat of a nuclear-weapons-capable Iran is the chief concern in their region. However, Washington does not concur. Rather, U.S. officials from both this White House and its predecessor believe that the most pressing concern for the United States is its two theatres of combat in the Middle East: Iraq and Afghanistan. Where the Bush Administration was eager to win Iraq and, according to its critics, took its eye off the ball in Afghanistan, the Obama team just wants to get out of Iraq as quietly as possible while it devotes more resources to winning the war in Afghanistan, which the president has told the American public is not a war of choice but a war of necessity.

The robust war that we are now waging in Afghanistan includes a troop surge, firefights in towns and cities, and drone strikes—53 in 2009 alone, more than during Bush’s entire tenure. Indeed, drones have become such a part of the popular consciousness that the president made a drone joke at the annual White House Correspondents’ dinner. In some corners of the world, the president’s joke probably didn’t go over too well: A report from the New America Foundation argues that in the 123 drone strikes in northwest Pakistan between 2004 and 2010, as many as 1,285 people—about the same number of Lebanese nationals killed when Hezbollah and Israel went to war in July 2006—have been killed, one third of them civilians.

In the last nine months, U.S.-led coalition troops have also shot and killed 28 Afghan civilians at checkpoints—for no apparent reason, except that the soldiers who ask Afghan drivers for their papers appear to have itchy trigger fingers. No U.S. soldiers have been brought to trial for killing Afghans at checkpoints, and there has been no expression of international outrage at American cruelty and incompetence, which have been publicly admitted to by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan—in the apparent confidence that his admissions would have no legal consequences whatsoever for himself or for the nervous soldiers under his command. Had IDF troops been responsible, it would’ve been a war crime, but with U.S. forces in the lead it’s something else. “It’s really a challenge to the leadership,” says Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, the operational commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. “It’s a challenge to discipline.”

It is frightening to contemplate, within the framework of linkage theory, how much more radical Palestinians would be if Israeli troops killed an average of 40 Palestinians a year at checkpoints in the West Bank for no evident reason at all and the perpetrators were never charged with any crime. Checkpoints are a key part of the linkage lexicon—the sites where Palestinians are ostensibly humiliated on a daily basis and reportedly radicalized. It is hard to imagine how the kind of wanton bloodshed that the United States is currently inflicting on innocent Afghans would radicalize the Middle East if Israelis were responsible; but then again it’s equally hard to imagine an Israeli leader cracking jokes in public about targeted assassinations of Palestinian militants.

But Israel is not the United States. The former is led by a right-wing government that has shown little interest in making concessions in order to push the peace process forward. The latter is headed by a Democratic president who, in ostensibly stark contrast to his predecessor, has professed a desire for comity with the Muslim masses. The United States does nation-building in Muslim lands, while the Israelis are preventing the birth of a Palestinian state. Israel kills Muslims that it has radicalized through its own actions, while the United States fights in Muslim lands in order to secure its national interests. For example, since October 2002, American forces have killed thousands of Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan in an ongoing hunt for one man, Osama Bin Laden, who may very well be deceased. There is no oil in Afghanistan, and if we are fighting there just to avoid being labeled a paper tiger by our adversaries, then we empower our enemies to determine our strategy, by drawing lines in the sand anywhere in the world and daring us to cross them.

It’s also possible the Obama Administration is just waging war in Afghanistan for the same reason that James Jones—a Marine general who, lacking the tact to refrain from telling Jewish jokes to a Jewish audience, has the president’s ear on sensitive issues—is the national security adviser. Lacking hawkish credentials, the Obama White House is vulnerable to attacks from the GOP, who apparently are also apt to confuse U.S. national security with domestic politics. In any case, the president is ambivalent about owning his war of necessity, and the proof is not just that he set a date for troop withdrawal at the same time he announced his surge.

While it is impossible to know what percentage of Muslim deaths are directly attributable to U.S. force in Iraq and Afghanistan, the fact is that over the last three decades American wars in the Middle East entailed the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Muslims, fighters as well as civilians, and Obama’s cosmetic speeches about respecting Islam’s contribution to the world will do little to hide casualty figures that would make all but the most vicious Middle Eastern regimes blush. It’s hardly surprising then that we are now taking a page out of the Arab regime playbook. Don’t blame us, the linkage theorists say: Look at what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians.

The Obama Administration is obsessed with linkage because it wants to have it both ways. They want to wage war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the strategic value of which is hard to ascertain, without taking moral or political responsibility for that war. The upshot of this cowardice is a form of magical thinking in which the United States evades responsibility for its own actions by shining the spotlight on the Jewish state instead. But it’s not Israel’s checkpoints on the occupied West Bank that compelled the Taliban to dispatch one of its foot soldiers to Times Square last week to kill American civilians. It’s our own war.

In the report, Goldstone appears as a staunch defender of capital punishment, which whites typically supported and blacks typically opposed, and which was not abolished in South Africa until Mandela became president in 1995. Goldstone says he is a personal opponent of the death penalty, but felt compelled to apply the law of the land. According to the report:

Most of them were found guilty of murder and sought to appeal the verdict. In those days, [Goldstone] actually made sure he showed his support for the execution policy, writing in one verdict that it reflects society’s demands that a price be paid for crimes it rightfully views as frightening.

In another verdict, in which he upheld the execution of a young black man convicted of murdering a white restaurant owner after he fired him, Goldstone wrote that the death penalty is the only punishment likely to deter such acts.

And remember, folks: This was apartheid. The deck was likely stacked against these black defendants to begin with.

(One could imagine a psychologist diagnosing Goldstone with a severe case of guilt. Maybe doing the bidding of apartheid can be expunged by revealing the crimes of a subsequent state that many have accused of officially discriminating against an ethnic minority?)

Oh, and meanwhile: Did no one in the Israeli foreign ministry bother to do the kind of basic research on Goldstone that is usually assigned to first-year law students on their summer break? Sure looks that way.

In Israel, that hard question has not been broached, yet. Instead, the revelations have been greeted with a sense of vindication across the political spectrum. And Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz compared Goldstone’s defense to those of Joseph Mengele and others complicit in the Holocaust, who said they were just following orders. “Goldstone took a job as an apartheid judge,” he told an Israeli television station. “He allowed dozens of black people who were unfairly tried to be executed.”.

He added, “When you are in an apartheid country like South Africa, you don’t follow the law.”

Judge Goldstone’s Dark Path [Ynet]
Related: Report Card [Tablet Magazine]

• Lawyers for Haaretz reporter Uri Blau will hand over the confidential documents allegedly given him by accused traitor Anat Kamm. [Haaretz]

• The IDF’s new device of choice for breaking up West Bank protests is a truck, nicknamed “The Skunk,” that shoots out horribly bad-smelling liquid. [LAT]

• Reports have it that the meeting in Paris two weeks ago between Presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and Shimon Peres was quite tense, with Sarkozy repeatedly criticizing Prime Minister Netanyahu. [Haaretz]

• Google made its first-ever purchase of an Israeli company, buying tech start-up Labpixies, which is involved in the search-engine business, for $25 million. [JPost]

• Prominent Jewish Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York) told a politically conservative, Jewish-themed TV show that he told President Obama that the administration’s hard line on Israel “has to stop.” [Ynet]

• An IDF soldier was killed in friendly fire. His fellow troops were engaged in halting three Palestinians trying to cross over the Gaza border. [NYT]

• The parents of kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit begged the U.N. Human Rights Council to pressure Hamas to release their son. [JPost]

• President Obama is in a stronger position to negotiate with Netanyahu than he was even 48 hours ago, due to the passage of health care reform. They meet at the White House tonight. [Politico]

• Britain is expelling the Mossad’s representative there in protest of the forged British passports allegedly used in the (probably Mossad-backed) assassination of a Hamas weapons man in Dubai. [Haaretz]

• The mayor of Jerusalem helpfully noted that the 1600 announced homes in East Jerusalem is just the tip of the iceberg: there are, he said, plans to build 50,000 homes in a united city over the next two decades. [Arutz Sheva]

When I was 5, I had a 12-year-old brother who found God and went to a religious boarding school, and deep in my heart I hoped that when I grew up I’d be just like him. He used to talk to me about religion a lot. And I thought that the midrashim he told me were the coolest things in the world. He was the youngest pupil in the school—because of all that grade-skipping he did—but everyone admired him. Not because he was so smart—somehow, that was less important in the boarding school—but because he was so good-natured and helpful. I remember visiting one Purim, and every pupil we met thanked him for something else: one for helping him study for a test, another for fixing a transistor so he could listen secretly to heavy metal, still another for lending him a pair of sneakers before an important soccer game. He walked around that place like a king who was so modest and dreamy that he didn’t even know he was regal, and I followed in his wake like a prince all too aware of his royalty. I remember thinking then that the whole business of believing in God would be part of my future too. After all, my brother knew everything, and if he believed in the Creator, then there had to be one.

When I was 8, I had a 15-year-old brother who left religion and went to college to study mathematics and computer science, and deep in my heart I hoped that when I grew up I’d be just like him. He lived in an apartment with his bespectacled girlfriend, who was 24, an age which, from my childish perspective, seemed ancient. They used to kiss and drink beer and smoke cigarettes, and I was always sure that if I played my cards right, in another seven years, I’d be there. I’d sit on the grass at Bar Ilan University and eat grilled cheese sandwiches from the cafeteria. I’d have a bespectacled girlfriend too, and she’d kiss me, tongue and all. What could be better than that?

When I was 14, I had a 21 -year-old brother who fought in the Lebanon War. Lots of my classmates had brothers who fought in that war. But mine was the only one I knew who wasn’t in favor of it. Even though he was a soldier, he never thrilled to the idea of shooting guns and throwing grenades, and especially not to the need to kill the enemy. Most of the time, he did what he was told, and the rest of the time he spent in military courts. When he was tried and found guilty of “behavior unbecoming an IDF soldier” after he turned an aerial antenna into a giant totem pole with a head and eagle’s wings, my sister and I sneaked into the remote base in the Negev where he was confined. We spent hours playing cards with him and another soldier, Mosco, who was also confined, but for slightly less creative reasons. And as I watched my brother in his army pants, his torso bare, paint a water-color picture of the wadi that ran below the base, I knew that that’s just what I wanted to be when I grew up: a soldier who, even in uniform, never forgets his free spirit.

Years have passed since I sneaked onto my brother’s base. In that time, he managed to get married and divorced, and married again. He also managed to work at successful high-tech companies and leave them so he could dedicate himself, together with his second wife, to the kinds of social and political activities that reporters like to call “radical”—things like fighting against biometric records and police brutality and for human rights and legalizing marijuana. In that time, I also managed to grow and change so that, apart from the love we’ve always felt for each other, the only constant in our relationship has been the seven-year difference between us. Throughout that long journey, I never got to be more than just a little of what my brother was, and at some point I guess I even stopped trying. Partly because my brother’s strange route was a very difficult one to follow and partly because I’ve had my own personal crises and confusions to deal with.

For the past five years, my big brother and his wife have lived in Thailand. They build Internet sites for Israeli and international organizations that are tying to make our world a little bit better, and with the modest fee they get for their work, they manage to live very well in their cozy apartment in the town of Trat. They don’t have an air conditioner, a bathtub, or a toilet with running water, but they have lots of good friends and neighbors who make the most delicious food in the world and are always happy to visit or host them. Four weeks ago, my wife, our 4-year-old son, and I flew to see their new home. While we were there, we took an elephant tour, and on it my brother’s elephant was a few steps in front of mine. Both were being driven by experienced Thais. After we had gone a few hundred yards, I saw my brother’s driver signal that my brother should take over leading their animal. The Thai man moved to sit to the rear of the elephant and my brother began taking charge. He didn’t yell at it or kick it lightly the way the local driver had. He just bent forward and whispered something in the elephant’s ear. From where I was sitting, it looked as if the elephant nodded and turned in the direction my brother wanted. And at that moment it came back to me—the feeling I’d had throughout my childhood and teenage years. That pride in my big brother and the hope that when I grew up, I’d be a little bit like him, able to drive elephants through virgin forests without ever having to raise my voice.

Translated by Sondra Silverston.

• The IDF indicted two soldiers in military court for allegedly getting a Palestinian boy to open a suspected booby-trapped package during last year’s Gaza conflict. [LAT]

• To head off buzzed-about rioting, Defense Minister Ehud Barak ordered a 48-hour full closure of the West Bank. [Ynet]

• In Saudia Arabia, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Gulf countries will pressure China to support anti-Iran sanctions. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• Egypt continues to clamp down on Hamas after sealing its Gaza border. [Haaretz]

• West Bank Palestinians commemorated the 32nd anniversary of the deadliest terror attack in Israeli history. [NYT]

The interesting detail has to do with a New York City-based company called Payoneer, whose prepaid debit cards were reportedly used by many of the 27 (at last count) suspected assassins.

New York City-based … but heavily enmeshed in the world of the Israeli military and intelligence services. Payoneer is run by Yuval Tal, who served in an Israeli “elite combat unit.” An Israeli Air Force pilot was a first-round investor; the venture capital fund that led the following investment round did so under the hand of a military intelligence captain; a further round was led by a fund founded by a former IDF Special Forces man.

To an extent, of course, this is to be expected: when a country has universal conscription, then most entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, like most of everyone else, will have done military service. But these connections clearly tend toward the more covert, mysterious end of the spectrum.

Plus, look, it was—at least in part—the Mossad. It just was. (The Mossad, as always, will neither confirm nor deny involvement.)

New York City’s Assassination Connection [NY Observer]
Related: Murder in Dubai [Tablet Magazine]

• Dubai has 15 new suspects in the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, all of whom carried European or—in a new twist—Australian passports. The Scroll will have a full update later today. [Ynet]

• The Los Angeles Times press critic argues that New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner should be kept in his job—and not booted since his son joined the IDF—because he is a scrupulous writer and reporter. [LAT]

• It turns out that Israel’s most valuable Palestinian informant during the Second Intifada was the son of a prominent Hamas founder and official. [Haaretz]

• At least one Palestinian group has vowed to resume attacks in Israel in response to the landmarking of Abraham’s and Rachel’s tombs. [Ynet]

• Jewish-American leader Mortimer B. Zuckerman continued maneuvers toward running for Senate from New York as a Republican. [NYT]

• The French and Spanish foreign ministers are the most prominent supporters of an initiative that would see the European Union recognize a Palestinian state within 18 months. Israel is opposed. [Haaretz]

• One report states that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formally approved Mossad’s killing of Hamas weapons man Mahmoud Mabhouh. (Much more on the Dubai murder mystery at 10am.) [Times of London]

• Despite an anti-blockade backlash throughout the Arab world, Egypt is moving ahead with plans to block off smuggling tunnels into Gaza. [WSJ]

• Alexander Haig, a secretary of state in the Reagan administration, died at 85, and was remembered as a friend and fond admirer of Israel. [JPost, Haaretz]

• In case you didn’t see it yesterday, you really must read about Yitta Schwartz, of Kiryas Joel, New York, who died in January at 93. A Holocaust survivor, Satmar Hasid, and mother of 16, she is estimated to have—from a 75-year-old daughter to a week-old great-great-grandson—over 2,000 living descendants. [NYT]

For the record, various folks and groups have accused Bronner of being biased about the Mideast in every imaginable way; it is those who accuse him of being biased in Israel’s favor who are in dudgeon over this. In my opinion, it is literally impossible to have his job and not face those criticisms. (Also, for the record, Keller says he would be inclined to keep Bronner in his post even if his son is deployed in combat.)

Should Bronner keep his job? The question is not inside baseball: there are few if any individuals who are more influential when it comes to shaping mainstream U.S. perception of the realities of the Israeli-Palestinian situation than the lead Times reporter. Let’s grant that Bronner’s actual journalism has been, under hypothetical totally objective standards, completely without bias and beyond reproach. Hoyt calls Bronner an “excellent reporter”; I agree. We can also grant that, in an ideal world, Bronner’s “work” and not his “biography” would be the sole standard by which he is judged.

Hoyt and I agree that Bronner has been fair-minded. But Hoyt and I also agree with Alex Jones, a Pulitzer-winning Harvard press expert. He told Hoyt: “The appearance of a conflict of interest is often as important or more important than a real conflict of interest. I would reassign him.” Such a move, frankly, is unfair to Bronner, “but the newspaper has to come first,” he added.

Assuming another of the Times’s excellent reporters is subbed in for Bronner, it’s difficult to see who would be harmed by Bronner’s move other than Bronner, who would not be the first person to have his career or personal life compromised in some manner by the completely legitimate behavior of a loved one. This is the price of doing business. Surely someone who has covered the Middle East for a quarter-century has learned that the world is not always a fair place.

Too Close to Home [NYT]

Earlier: Report: NYT J’lem Chief Has Son in IDF

Forward emails from your elders to elders@tabletmag.com.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: [Acquaintance’s mother]
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 08:08:11 -0500
Subject: FW: Israel’s Disproportionate Response
To: [Acquaintance]

Savta got this from a colleague. She doesn’t fully understand why this type of e mail is poison. I think the accomplishments of the IDF speaks for itself without the rest of this crap.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: [Acquaintance’s grandmother]
Sent: Tuesday, January 19, 2010 7:43 AM
To: [Distribution mother]
Subject: Israel’s Disproportionate Response

ISRAEL’S DISPROPORTIONATE RESPONSE

Many countries and world leaders have accused Israel of responding disproportionately to aggression from Hizballah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

However, it is time that the world press and media speak of another disproportionate response from Israel.

The terrible disastrous earthquake in Haiti has generated responses from many nations. The US has sent supplies and personnel, Britain sent 64 firemen and 8 volunteers, France sent troops for Search and Rescue. Many large and wealthy nations of the world sent money. The Arab and Moslem world nothing.

Israel, a nation of 7.5 million people has sent a team of 220 people that include Medical personnel and will establish the largest field hospital in Haiti, treating up to 5000 people a day, an experienced Search and Rescue team and medical supplies. As in previous earthquake disasters, such as in Gujarat India in 2001 and in Turkey, in the bombings in Kenya, Israel has been one of the most generous givers of aid and assistance

Turkey seems to have forgotten this help as its extreme Moslem Government is cozying up to Iran.

Judge Goldstone, where are you now? Eating your heart out and hanging your head down in shame I hope.

The favorite occupation in the UN is Israel bashing. More resolutions have been passed condemning Israel than all the so called democratic nations such as Sudan, China, Russia and others for their crimes against their minorities.

I think it is time that the world should know about Israel’s disproportionate response.

Please forward this to as many people as you can.

David Yehezkel

Reuven Shalom Bigio, the son of a prominent Syrian Jewish businessman, is an honorary Israeli consul to Haiti (his company does several-hundred-million dollars’ worth of business there annually). That soccer field on which the IDF established their already-legendary field hospital? That’s Bigio’s. Daniel Kedar, who moved to Haiti two decades ago for business reasons and is now married to a former tourism minister, has served as the IDF’s unofficial translator and general knowledgeable guide. He reports that he is getting about three hours of sleep each night. Truly, take a minute and read the whole article.

Meanwhile, the IDF scrambled this morning to stabilize its patients following the 6.1-level aftershock that rippled through Port-au-Prince.

Please consider giving to the American Jewish World Service’s Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund, here. You can also text “Haiti” to 90999 to automatically donate $10 to the American Red Cross’s relief efforts.

Finally, you can donate these really cool “LifeStraws”—which uses technology developed by a Weizmann Institute graduate to quickly make water potable—by going here.

Haiti: Two Local Jews Helping Israeli Aid [JPost]
IDF Field Hospital Braces Haitian Patients in 6.1 Aftershock [Ynet]

Earlier: IDF Delivers Babies, One Named ‘Israel’

Also, IDF rescue crews have been deployed to try to save victims of the earthquake that struck the Caribbean country one week ago.

Please consider giving to the American Jewish World Service’s Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund, here. You can also text “Haiti” to 90999 to automatically donate $10 to the American Red Cross’s relief efforts.

Finally, you can get updates on the IDF’s activities in Haiti by visiting—where else?—http://twitter.com/idfinhaiti.

Haiti Earthquake: Mother Delivers Baby in a Disaster Zone [ABC News]
Israel Crews Rescue University Student from Haiti Rubble [Haaretz]

What was your next question? Oh yes, non-Israelis can learn more about enlisting in the Israel Defense Forces here.

Dad Would Be Proud: Orbaum Triplets Serving in IAF [JPost]

Informal Service [Stars & Stripes]

It’s a question anyone who has ever applied to anything has pretended to contemplate at some point or other before changing the topic and embarking on yet another thinly veiled paean to the self. But I was a savvier interviewee. I had an answer to that nagging, perennial question. I had S.

I met her in the Israel Defense Forces. I was a young and cynical Non-Commissioned Officer who had audaciously dreamt up a brand new department as a means to avoid doing actual work, and S. was one of the soldiers assigned to my command. She was nothing like the others: whereas her colleagues were happy to follow my lead, produce hefty reports and other misleading signs of productivity, and bolt back home in the early afternoon, S. was always spoiling for a fight. She was the daughter of privilege and was stationed with our small and desirable unit through the efforts of her influential mother. A few weeks after her arrival, it became clear to her commanding officers that S. was not to the mess hall born and viewed authority the way bulls view the matador’s red flag. Placing her in my care, then, was a stroke of genius. It relieved the higher-ups from having to contend with the feisty young woman, and it assured them that if, for whatever reason, I, too, failed to tame her, I could easily be sacrificed to her powerful mum.

It took S. four days to unleash her fury on my small and peaceable kingdom. It began with a roll of an eye, crescendoed into a symphony of sighs, and soon arrived on the brink of insubordination. One day, S. arrived sans uniform, wearing fashionable jeans and a torn t-shirt. Another, she didn’t arrive at all, telling me, when I called her cell phone, that she was too tired to report for duty.

Despite being as of yet unaware of the all-important question regarding leadership skills looming in my professional future, I instinctively knew what I had to do. I summoned all my soldiers, S. included, to a meeting, and unceremoniously removed the rank insignia from my shoulders and slid them across the table toward a silent S.

“Here you go,” I said. “You seem to have many ideas about how this place should be run. You’re in charge now. Tell us what to do.”

It took her a moment or two to realize I wasn’t kidding. She tried to act indignant, but I wouldn’t budge. If she thought she knew better, I told S., now was her chance to prove it. Sensing her colleagues’ hungry looks, S. understood she had stumbled into a showdown and had no choice but to draw. She placed the ranks on her own shoulders and announced she was now in charge. Then she smiled and instructed all of us to get the hell out of her office.

Her triumph, however, was short-lived. For all of my leniency and good humor, I ran my department efficiently and knew how to motivate my soldiers. S. didn’t. She treated her former peers like servants, abused her power whenever she could, made mistakes, got in trouble, tried to cover up, panicked. Three days passed, then five, then a week. Soon, S. asked me out for a drink.

While shakily holding a cigarette, she apologized. She had no idea, she said, how tough it was to be in charge. She gave me back my rank insignia, shook my hand, and promised to be a perfect soldier. And, for the remainder of my time in the office, she was.

I thought about S. as I read this week’s haftorah, which details the efforts of King David’s son Adoniahu to elbow aside his brother Solomon, the heir apparent. The story depicts the court as a cluster of conspiracies, a byzantine institution where power-starved parties are forever at each other’s throats. Throw in the virgin who appears at the story’s outset to help keep the ancient monarch warm, and you get a story that makes Showtime’s raunchy Henry VIII series, The Tudors, look tame.

The main function of the tale, however, only becomes evident when compared to the week’s parasha, which tells the story of Isaac and Rebecca and the death, at age 175, of Abraham. Unlike the redheaded king, Judaism’s Founding Father has no court but a tent, no kingdom but a divine promise of a great nation that will one day spring forth from his loins. More importantly, Abraham faces no succession war but passes the mantle peacefully to his son. And unlike Adoniahu, Isaac understands that authority, in its truest sense, can never be usurped, but must be bestowed on its proper owner at just the right moment in time.

This sentiment is anathema to modern minds. We, a generation bent on empowerment, have come to believe fervently in Gloria Steinem’s famous edict, that power can be taken but never given, and listen to the Beastie Boys when they opine that one must fight for one’s right to party. Adoniahu sure did, colluding with the commander of the army, keeping his father’s loyalists at bay, and conducting all the rituals of coronation to cement his ill-gotten stature. And yet, by the time the story ends, he is denounced and the crown promised to his wiser sibling.

But the biblical system is anything but retrograde. It is, in fact, astonishingly meritocratic, dulling the edge of ambition and impeding its ability to woo and wound the powers that be. It places at the helm only those most deserving of privilege; it may deprive people of a modicum of agency, but it also blissfully robs them of their shining ounces of unsubstantiated pride.

In an age when challenges to power have become the stuff of popular t-shirts, such absolutist talk of preordained appointments can make many of us squeamish. But before we roll our eyes at the heavens or take a shot at the crown, let us remember that there’s another way, and that power is pointless unless it is deserved and well-used. It’s a rule I’ve put forth a thousand times in a thousand different job interviews: sometimes, the best way to see if you’re fit to lead is to take off your ranks and see if they ever make it back to you.

Indeed, even (or especially) Arab businessmen are getting curious, Singer said: “Whenever I go to the Gulf, it’s all they want to talk about, they’re so intrigued by the Israeli model. But everything about the economic strategy of these Gulf countries is about spending money.” American Jews, too, are starting to catch on. “For the longest time, American Jews would not invest in Israeli start-ups. They would give to UJA and they’d give to all these philanthropic organizations, but they kept a firewall up between their business activities and their philanthropic activities. I think for the last three to five years you are, for the first time, really seeing American Jewish investors investing in Israel.”

The Origins of Israel’s Tech Miracle [Atlantic]

Captives [NYer]

But the new exercise also fits with President Barack Obama’s overhaul of the U.S. missile-defense strategy, which included last months’ scrapping President George W. Bush’s plan for a missile-defense shield based in Eastern Europe, and which the Defense Department says is designed to better meet the Iranian threat. According to Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog, U.S. forces during this exercise will test an array of new missile technologies, a step toward seeing how well Obama’s new missile-defense strategy will work. Meanwhile, Danger Room also reports that Israel will attempt its first demonstration of Iron Dome, a system meant to defend against short-range rocket attacks from Hamas or Hezbollah. If true, the test of Iron Dome represents a significant step toward Israel’s stated goal of constructing a near-comprehensive missile defense shield, capable of repelling everything from short-range Hamas Qassams to long-range Iranian Shahabs.

U.S., Israel Start Defense Drill [WSJ]
In Israel, a Key Test of Obama’s Retooled Missile Shield [Wired/Danger Room]

“Everything can burst here tomorrow morning, and you just never know,” said Katriel Schory, executive director of the Israel Film Fund, a government-backed nonprofit that provided financing to both Folman and Maoz. “You cannot say the Second Lebanon War triggered these projects—it was a sheer coincidence.” And, he insisted, there was no master plan, just a desire to let a generation of filmmakers who had all served in the first, controversial Lebanon war—what Maoz calls the “Lebanon generation”—explore the lasting effects of combat on Israel’s young.

“What isn’t a coincidence is that we are all obsessed with this war,” said Amy Kronish, the former curator of Jewish and Israeli film at the Jerusalem Cinematheque. “But the film fund’s policy is to fund every feature film, if possible, that’s worth funding—they won’t say to a director, we had a film about this already, we won’t fund you.”

Theoretically, all three films could have come out at the same time. Cedar, a former paratrooper, and won financing in early 2006 from the Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts, another government-sponsored film fund, and wrapped in June of that year, weeks before the start of the 34-day second invasion. The film, which Cedar began writing while sitting in a military jail after refusing to do reserve duty, captures the final days of the occupation of an ancient fortress in southern Lebanon, just before IDF troops pulled out in 2000. Folman, a writer for the Israeli version of In Treatment, began his script for Bashir around the time of the pullout, after he requested early release from his reserve duty as a writer for IDF safety-instruction movies on the grounds that he needed therapy for PTSD stemming from his experience at the front in 1982. In the spring of 2006, he presented Schory with a 10-minute pilot for an animated film exploring his struggle to remember what exactly he did during the massacre at Sabra and Shatila, and released his film last year, just ahead of the Gaza invasion, triggering a heated national debate about the nature of responsibility and memory.

Maoz, a production designer and cinematographer who made his living for years shooting music videos and commercials, wrote his screenplay in a four-week burst in 2006. “I said to myself, you are over 40 and you need to do something with yourself—you are not a young director, and it’s now or never,” Maoz said in an interview last week. He began shooting in 2007, but completion of the film was delayed after the death of one of his producers. Chronologically, his movie belongs at the beginning: it describes the experience of four soldiers manning a tank on June 6, 1982, the first day of the first Lebanon invasion. Set entirely inside the claustrophobic metal walls of the machine, it captures the narrow experience of soldiers whose only view on the carnage is through the sight of a scope—cracked by a missile, for good measure—and who wind up having to bear the brunt of making life-or-death decisions while their feckless commanders sit considering abstractions in safe war rooms, far away.

Now, Maoz—who once told Variety that he watched the news coverage of the second Lebanon War with the uneasy sense that they were filming his script—bears the burden of being in the shadow of his compatriots. Both Beaufort and Waltz with Bashir were huge successes both domestically and abroad, garnering laurels at international film festivals along with consecutive nominations for the best foreign-language Oscars, Israel’s first since the early 1980s. (Folman, who lost the Academy Award race to a Japanese film, won Israel’s first Golden Globe.) “If they’d come out in the same year, maybe one would have succeeded at the expense of the others,” Cedar said.

Lebanon, which is set for theatrical release in America early next year, won the top prize last month at the Venice film festival, but was edged out for best picture at Israel’s Ophir awards, which means Maoz won’t have a shot at a foreign-language Oscar statuette. “In the beginning I thought it was bad luck to be number three,” said Maoz. “But I know that millions of people will see it, and I don’t have reasons to complain.”

Related:

Time of Favor [Tablet]

Fortress of Solitude [Tablet]

Soldier’s Story [Tablet]

Esti Ginzburg: IDF Service a Must [Ynet]

Video Shows Captive Israeli Soldier in Good Health [NYT]
Watch New Schalit Video: ‘I Yearn to See My Family Again’ [JPost]
Gilad Shalit in Video: I Feel Healthy, Being Treated Well [Haaretz]