In Israel, every citizen has a religious classification and an ethnic classification. For the majority of Israeli citizens, “Jewish” is listed as both. It’s not a simple formality: One’s religious classification has profound effects, determining whom and how one can marry, the process of divorce, whether one can get buried in a Jewish cemetery, and whether one must serve in the army. The “state” in this case is embodied in the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate of Israel, a quirk of the Israeli democratic system that stretches back to the country’s founding in 1948. At the time, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion gave representatives of the Orthodox religious community, numbering only in the hundreds, a host of powers dramatically out of proportion to their size on the assumption that these Jews would soon turn away from the religion of the shtetl.

Ben-Gurion, needless to say, got it wrong. The ranks of the Orthodox have swelled to well over a million, yet the rabbinate still retains the sole power over deciding who is a Jew. Because of the strength of their voting bloc and the keystone role that Orthodox parties hold in Israeli coalition governments, there has never been a successful bid to challenge the rabbinate’s control.

But Kaniuk, one of the country’s most celebrated novelists, may have accidentally found a loophole. And if it gets widened by the Supreme Court in an important case now pending, it could grow big enough for a large section of the country to step through.

***

Kaniuk wasn’t necessarily trying to upend 60 years of Orthodox rule when he took his case to court this past spring. At 81, he hardly seems like a revolutionary. He walks slowly with a cane, wears large glasses, and bangs his hands on the table when he’s upset. He fought in the War of Independence and ferried Holocaust survivors from Europe to Israel in the 1940s. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages. He says he reads a chapter of the Bible every day, but he doesn’t go to synagogue except on Yom Kippur, when he sits outside behind the building to hear the melodies he remembers from his grandfather. He never goes inside for services. “Once I tried,” he told me, “but then you have to stay the whole time.”

A year and a half ago, Kaniuk welcomed his first grandson into the world. The baby’s mother is a Christian, but because the newborn wasn’t baptized, the Ministry of the Interior decided that the infant should be labeled as “without religion.” At first, Kaniuk was furious. He did not want his grandson stigmatized and unable to marry. But as he thought it through, he realized that what he really wanted wasn’t to change the boy’s status but to change his own. Kaniuk was very proud to be a Jew, but he had never been religious, so why should he be labeled as such?

The Interior Ministry turned down his request to be labeled “without religion” in November 2010 with a Kafkaesque flourish. According to Kaniuk, the government claimed that without a certificate of conversion, his official religion could not be changed. Of course, there is no way to get a certificate signifying that you have given up religion altogether.

So, Kaniuk petitioned the Tel Aviv District Court to force the ministry to act. Not only did he win his case in September 2011, but the judge wrote a remarkable opinion that provided the legal framework to defend a citizen’s right to be recognized under the law as any religion (or no religion) he or she wishes. “We face a demand for freedom from religion in the civil registry,” the verdict read. “Freedom from religion is derived from human dignity, which is protected in the basic law: human dignity and liberty. When the given law is laconic, the fundamental right shall decide, which tilts the scales in favor of the claimant and his self-definition in the registry.”

“This judge seems to have been waiting for me for 30 years,” Kaniuk said of the verdict, which was handed down on Rosh Hashanah. Kaniuk started the new Jewish year as the only Jew in the country officially “without religion.”

***

The case made national news, and it quickly ignited a public conversation. A few days after the story broke, Oded Carmeli, a 26-year-old poet, posted an event on Facebook calling for Israelis who also wanted to be labeled “without religion” to meet on the roof of an abandoned building on Rothschild Boulevard that had been used as a community center during the August tent protests. There, he planned to have everyone sign affidavits in front of lawyers asserting that they wanted to be “without religion” as well. Carmeli figured that if he could gather a big enough group, then he could take all of their papers to the Interior Ministry together and it would be harder for the government to turn them down.

“Even in the first few hours I saw the attending numbers jump up,” Carmeli told me of watching replies roll in. “I think I sort of hit a nerve.” Expecting a crowd, Carmeli called a pair of lawyers he met during the tent protests, and they offered to attend the event and witness the signatures.

Continue reading: A movement grows

Faith unites us, knowledge gives us freedom. We shall therefore prevent any theocratic tendencies from coming to the fore on the part of our priesthood. We shall keep our priests within the confines of their temples in the same way as we shall keep our professional army within the confines of their barracks.

Suffice it to say, it didn’t quite work out that way, not even from the start. In his new Nextbook Press book, Ben-Gurion: A Political Life, co-written with the veteran Israeli journalist David Landau, Peres describes the deal that Ben-Gurion made with ultra-Orthodox rabbi-politicians at the time of Israel’s founding: kashrut in all public institutions, Shabbat as the day of rest, rabbinic control of marriage and divorce, and the exemption of full-time yeshiva students, who at the time numbered only in the hundreds, from army service. This would all seem a violation of Herzl’s vision, but Peres defends Ben-Gurion’s consensus-building move as wise and pragmatic, “because the number of people in Israel who defined themselves as people of faith was large.” In a dialogue between the co-authors, the president of Israel declares:

Israel is a secular state. The Orthodox have bargaining power, so everything has to be done by compromise. But Israel is not under religious control: It’s not a halachic country, it’s not a theocracy. Ben-Gurion opposed religious coercion and opposed anti-religious coercion.

True, Israel is not a theocracy the way, say, Iran is one. But stop any bareheaded Jew on a Tel Aviv beach and ask them if there’s religious coercion in their country, and the knee-jerk response will be yes. For many Israelis, “religious coercion” doesn’t mean forced synagogue attendance, but the evasion of military duty by tens of thousands of young ultra-Orthodox men; the harassment of Reform rabbis and citizens who drive on Shabbat; the overflowing of public money to yeshivas and to ultra-Orthodox families that don’t pay taxes; the premature ending of Daylight Savings Time before the High Holidays to facilitate penitential ritual; and the hurling of dirty diapers at women wearing prayer shawls at the Western Wall, a spiritual magnet for all Jews that has been turned, with the complicity of governmental authorities, into an ultra-Orthodox synagogue. As for “theocratic tendencies,” we have the hegemony of the ultra-Orthodox-dominated, state-funded Chief Rabbinate over marriage, divorce, and conversion, protected by the ultra-Orthodox parliamentarians in the Knesset.

How did all this come about? The reasons are over-determined, as the Freudians say. Landau presses Peres, who as a young man was Ben-Gurion’s emissary to the ultra-Orthodox on the conscription issue, on whether they had perhaps miscalculated the staying power of Orthodoxy in Israel. “He wasn’t thinking about what was going to happen later,” says Peres of his mentor. “Anyway, to be completely frank, in negotiating with the venerable rabbis, I felt like I was sitting with my grandfather.” In The Imaginary Voyage, Peres puts it even more frankly: “Whenever I had to make a decision touching upon the relationship between religion and state,” he tells Herzl, “I asked myself whether grandfather would agree with what I’d done.”

As a child in White Russia, Peres studied Torah at the knee of his pious grandfather, who years later, we learn in this new book, was murdered by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen—burned alive in his synagogue. After the Holocaust, out of guilt and nostalgia, along with a sense of moral obligation, Ben-Gurion and his secular comrades understandably felt a need to indulge the surviving practitioners of the separatist Judaism that kept Diaspora Jews afloat for centuries. Besides, they probably figured that ultra-Orthodoxy, in a sovereign, modern state, would soon wither away. How wrong they were.

***

To this day, there are no civil marriages in Israel. A Conservative rabbi, steeped in Maimonides, cannot perform a legally binding wedding in the Jewish state. Yet each year, thousands of Israelis hop over to Cyprus for civil marriages recognized as valid by Israel’s Interior Ministry. Some time back, as a publicity stunt, a couple married by a Reform rabbi in Israel had their civil ceremony in Las Vegas, where they were wed by an Elvis impersonator.

Every so often, there’s a movement by Secularists in the Knesset to remedy this absurd situation, but it always fails. Coalitions are fragile, and ultra-Orthodox parties, supported by legions of faithful voters, are able to thwart such maneuvers. “Israel is the only democracy in the world where Jews don’t have freedom of religion,” groused Nitzan Horowitz, a Knesset member from the Meretz party, after a civil-marriage bill he sponsored was shot down in July.

Israeli disregard for Jewish religious pluralism creates an unpleasant wedge between this country and American Jewry. But the sad truth is that most Israelis don’t much care. As a secular sabra businessman once explained to me: “For me, a Rabbanut wedding is like getting a driver’s license. In both cases, you play by the rules.” It has long been remarked that American Jews are Protestant Jews, and Israeli Jews are Catholic Jews. As in Italy, you’re a bad Catholic or a good Catholic, but still a Catholic. In other words—and despite the laudable blossoming, in some communities, of Israeli renewal-style Judaism—the shul the average Israeli doesn’t go to is still Orthodox.

In reality, of course, Israeli society is not truly polarized between dati and hiloni, “religious” and “secular.” You can be religious without being Orthodox, though in Israel this mainly means mesorati, or traditional. This large category is characteristic of Jews from Arab lands, who observe many rituals and go regularly to synagogue, but are not strict Sabbath observers. This does not, however, make them pluralists. I’ve lectured many times to IDF officers—a mixed audience of religious-nationalist, mesorati, and secular Jews—about liberal Judaism in Israel. When I am challenged to explain where one “gets the right” to pick and choose what religious laws to observe, I say that the Reformim behave much like mesorati Jews, to which the rejoinder will often be: You’re wrong, because the Moroccan Jew who drives to Teddy Stadium to watch soccer on Shabbat knows he is sinning. You don’t.

***

Behold a central irony of Israeli Judaism: Ultra-Orthodox Israelis may be widely resented as draft-dodgers who sponge their living from hard-working, tax-paying citizens. But they are, at the same time, widely perceived as custodians of the flame.

For its part, the Rabbinate unabashedly prefers the Tel Aviv metrosexual who goes windsurfing on Yom Kippur and eats pork in a pita on Pesach to a devoted Reform Jew who teaches her daughter to read from the Torah. The former, in rabbinic parlance, is a tinok shenishba, equivalent to a child abducted by heathens or Cossacks who cannot be blamed for his ignorance, and is so far gone as to be a prime candidate for hazara beteshuva, the full embrace of Orthodoxy. The Reform Jew, by contrast, is a defiant apostate, a scofflaw who dares suggest an alternative to old-time religion. When first I moved to Israel, I found in my mailbox on the eve of Rosh Hashanah a flyer sternly warning Jews not to be tempted to hear the blowing of the shofar at a Reform congregation, for these folks are a neta zar, a “foreign sapling in our holy land.”

Such a blinkered worldview encourages a cynical symbiosis, providing the secular Israeli with ample reason to remain distant from Judaism. Thank you, he or she says to the Rabbinate, for affirming your authority and authenticity. You have reminded me that Judaism is rigid, coercive, and sexist, which is why I want no part of it. Perhaps the sorriest legacy of Ben-Gurion’s political deal is widespread Israeli alienation from the beauty and wonder of Jewish tradition.

A story is told—in several versions, though not by Peres and Landau—of a meeting in 1952 between Ben-Gurion and Rabbi Avraham Karelitz, a Russian-born ultra-Orthodox leader known as the Chazon Ish. The rabbi seeks to persuade the prime minister of the need to defer to Torah scholars by citing a passage from the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin: “If two camels met each other while on the ascent to Beth-Horon … How then should they act? If one is laden and the other unladen, the latter should give way to the former.”

Was there a part of Ben-Gurion, champion of the Bible and Hebrew culture, that believed that his own camel lacked Jewish gravitas? He famously said, as quoted again by Peres, “that in Israel, in order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles.” In exempting the yeshiva students from the draft, did he also believe that their lives of study and prayer would bring about the protection of the Almighty? Or by giving a green light to “theocratic tendencies,” did he have another agenda entirely?

The Israeli religious philosopher and scientist Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a sternly Orthodox Jew, wrote in 1977 that Ben-Gurion had told him in the 1950s: “I will never agree to the separation of religion from the State. I want the State to hold religion in the palm of its hand.” For Leibowitz, this meant that “the status of Jewish religion in the state of Israel is that of a kept mistress of the secular government,” which he deemed “contemptible.” But in the ongoing Israeli soap opera, it often seems like the mistress is running the show.

My wife and I went to that demonstration. The people around us looked optimistic and excited. There were children taking part in the demonstration with their parents, and they imbued the event with the confusingly festive air of a picnic or a rock concert.

The media says the middle class is the core of this struggle.

“The middle class is the easiest group to screw,” Alon, a demonstrator pushing a baby carriage, explained to me, “It’s hardest for them to take to the streets; the poor can go all the way—they have nothing to lose anyway. The rich can hire lawyers and lobbyists and who knows what else. But the middle class is stuck there in the middle: without the economic power required to oil the system, but with just enough to worry about losing what it has. That’s why they’ve been milking us dry for years. But it’s over now.” Alon was talking about the housing crisis and money, but I could sense something else underlying his words, something that is shared by all the people I spoke to at the demonstration: how alienated they feel from the Knesset that is supposed to represent them. Isreal’s parliament pushes through, on a daily basis, laws favoring the settlers, the ultra-Orthodox, and other groups skilled at lobbying and manipulating it. It has never engaged in any dialogue with the tens of thousands of people who decided one evening to take to the streets.

It’s no accident that the demonstration was called for the same evening as the finale of Kochav Nolad, A Star Is Born, the Israeli version of American Idol. The message transmitted by going head-to-head with the finale of the highest-rated TV program in the country is that living alongside the shallow, arm-waving, brainwashed Israel is another Israel, a quiet, round-spectacled Israel, and he wants to remind his elected officials as well as himself of his existence. It’s funny to see how this group of people, in their cool, trendy clothes, feels so unrepresented: It contains artists, lawyers, academics, doctors—not the types you stereotypically find shouting about not having their voices heard. But in the Israel of 2011, these are precisely the people who can’t find themselves any genuine political representation. The people demonstrating here are exactly the same people who don’t feel quite comfortable with the flood of new laws, such as the recently passed boycott law, that limit basic freedoms.

Many demonstrators see themselves as apolitical. Despite the fact that they came here supposedly to talk about housing issues, their concerns run much deeper. The suffocation they feel isn’t caused so much by a shortage of square meters as by their frustration about not being counted by those who hold the reins of the country and are steering it to some very unpleasant places.

Standing on a traffic island in the middle of Ibn Gevirol Street was a young woman whose red hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She was holding a cardboard placard that said in beautiful, rounded handwriting: “My message is too complicated for this placard.” I don’t know how many of the tens of thousands of people walking past her stopped to read it, but for me, that placard most precisely represents the tent protests.

It’s hard to know whether this protest will develop into anything significant. It all depends on the placard the red-headed girl decides to hold up at the next demonstration, whether the protesters will, in the end, be able to formulate their protest into the kind of clear, sharp messages that those people pretending to represent them will not be able to ignore. If all that comes out of this protest is dissatisfied consumers complaining about the cost of housing and cottage cheese, it will fade within weeks. But I want to believe that more will emerge.

As Alon said right before he disappeared into the throng of demonstrators, “The poor fight for food. I may have food but I am hungry.”

“What are you hungry for?” I asked.

“For a country that is a little less heartless,” he said, and gave the baby, who had just woken up, a bottle. “One that doesn’t try to push only a culture of power and force, but also a culture that values compassion. Being a Jew isn’t just being a settler, you know; being a Jew also means having compassion. I swear. You don’t believe me? Go home and Google it.”

Translated by Sondra Silverston

The demise of the Israeli left is a fact. Together, Meretz and Labor—formerly the twin pillars of the Zionist left—currently hold 11 Knesset seats, four fewer than Avigdor Lieberman’s ultra-right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party. But these numbers don’t tell the whole story. Ignored by most political commentators is the strange and unexpected death of the Israeli right. And like all good thrillers, this one, too, is a murder mystery.

At first glance, pronouncing the Israeli right dead sounds like a bit of sophistry. The current governing coalition, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is widely regarded as the most stringently conservative in Israel’s history. Since being voted into office in 2009, it has, among other achievements: de facto outlawed the public commemoration of the Nakba, the Palestinian narrative of the events that led to Israel’s establishment in 1948 and to the expulsion of nearly three quarters of a million Arabs from their homes; passed a bill requiring new immigrants to swear a loyalty oath to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, a stroke of legislation that mainly targets Palestinians from the West Bank who wish to marry Israeli Arabs and become Israeli citizens; enacted the anti-boycott bill; and threatened to establish official committees of inquiry targeting human-rights and civil-rights nonprofits. But this busy résumé hides the fact that the political and ideological leviathan that shaped so much of the country’s character for its first five decades has been supplanted by a new and foreign political culture that would have been utterly unrecognizable to Israelis even a decade ago.

One major influence on that culture arrived in Israel from Russia after 1989, along with the million or so immigrants who made aliyah after the collapse of the Soviet Union. While it is never wise to speak of a culture as if it were inalterable and hereditary, it is not much of a stretch to suggest that, to the extent that Russian political culture can be discussed, it is a ghastly oppressive enterprise. This is, after all, a nation that has spent much of the past millennium stumbling from one oppressive autocracy to the next. The majority of Russia’s population lived, until as recently as 1861, as serfs. As Richard Pipes, professor emeritus of history at Harvard and a former Soviet expert, suggested in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, given the Russians’ iron-fisted history, they have traditionally expected their leaders to be groznyi, a word that, applied to Czar Ivan IV, was improperly translated as “terrible” but really means “awesome.” This, Pipes wrote, explains why a 2003 survey found that 22 percent of Russians supported democracy, while as many as 53 percent actively disliked it. Pipes called this phenomenon, still very much in force today, a flight from freedom, and he explained it had much to do with Russia’s perception of itself as a country under permanent siege. The prominent newspaper Izvestiya, he noted, captured this spirit perfectly when it described Russians as “living in trenches,” surrounded by enemies.

It takes a very small leap of imagination to see how perfectly this mentality translates into Hebrew: In Israel, aspiring politicians born in the former Soviet Union found that talk of trenches and enemies made for stellar political currency.

The most renowned example of this new autocratic style is, of course, Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s current foreign minister. The Moldovan-born politician started his career as Netanyahu’s assistant; within less than two decades, he surfaced as his former boss’s most valuable political partner and, some say, puppet master. Lieberman’s path to power was simple: Whereas most other right-wing politicians spoke sotto voce about ideological opponents, he favored incendiary statements. The Israeli left, he told a radio interviewer in 2007, was responsible for all the nation’s woes. Appearing on television that same year, he compared a prominent civil rights group to concentration camp capos. He snubbed or humiliated foreign dignitaries who would not play by his protocol, refusing, for example, to meet with the former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva when da Silva chose to skip the customary visit to Theodor Herzl’s grave. While most Israeli pundits saw such acts as petty and harmful to Israel’s standing in the world, most Israeli voters think Lieberman is groznyi: In mock elections held in Israeli high schools in 2009, a majority of students said they would vote for Lieberman.

But Lieberman is far from alone. Nearly every one of the current government’s repressive bills was sponsored by politicians who immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union. The Nakba law, for example, was sponsored by the Moscow-born Alex Miller of Yisrael Beiteinu. The anti-boycott bill was the brainchild of Ze’ev Elkin of Likud, who emigrated from Ukraine. The bill to form official committees of investigation targeting the left, defeated last week in the Knesset, was formed by Faina Kirschenbaum, also from Ukraine. The list goes on.

Even some staunch Likudniks have been appalled by the Russification of the Israeli right. Most vocal among them was Reuven Rivlin, the speaker of the Knesset and one of the party’s most prominent figures. A day after the anti-boycott bill passed, the chairman took the unlikely step of criticizing the parliament he himself headed. His ire was reserved for his colleagues on the right; they, he argued, are a disgrace to the legacy of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, the founder of revisionist Zionism and the ideological founding father of Israeli conservatism.

“I stand ashamed and mortified before my mentor, Jabotinsky, for not having succeeded in protecting the individual, whom he likened to a monarch, against the parliamentary fists of the majority,” Rivlin wrote. “It might have been hoped that in an era in which Jabotinsky’s followers are scattered across the whole political spectrum, from the coalition to the opposition, things would be different. But in the absence of an ideological backbone, it appears that even the deep commitment to democracy and individual freedoms of those who call themselves his successors is conditional. It is the State of Israel that is compelled to pay the price of political interests that supersede national interests.”

Other Likud stalwarts were equally horrified. Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, for example—the son of Eliyahu Meridor, a former Likud Member of Knesset and close confidant of former Prime Minister Menachem Begin—gave repeated interviews in which he called several of the legislative initiatives brought forth by Lieberman and his associates “very dangerous.” Lieberman wasted no time: Meridor, he told the Israeli media, was a “fineschmecker,” a derogatory Yiddish term for an elitist dandy.

And, as American legislators are learning, once politics becomes a zero-sum game, it is very hard for moderate and mindful legislators to thrive. Ze’ev Elkin, the author of the anti-boycott bill, is a great example. When former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon abandoned the Likud to form Kadima, he was searching for a token settler to add to his new parliamentary faction as a nod to his former supporters in the settler movement who had largely abandoned him in light of his commitment to withdraw from Gaza; he found Elkin. In Elkin’s native Ukraine, the young politician had been known as a capable and committed Zionist activist. After emigrating to Israel in 1990, he excelled in his academic studies, earning degrees in both mathematics and history. When interviewed by Sharon’s associates, he expressed views that were right-of-center, but he stood out as a pragmatic, fair-minded, and soft-spoken individual, a perfect choice for Kadima’s transideological aspirations. Elected to the Knesset in 2006 as a member of Kadima, Elkin soon realized that the winds were blowing away from Sharon’s centrist platform. In 2008, he quit Kadima and joined the Likud. Within a few years, he learned that the only way to survive in a perpetually rightward-moving political universe was to move even further to the right. This, claim some who have long known Elkin, is what’s really behind the anti-boycott bill he sponsored. Aviad Friedman, the Sharon aide who recruited Elkin to politics, told the Israeli daily Maariv last week that “the anti-boycott bill may be good for Elkin when he faces off his rivals in the Likud, but it is very bad for Israel, and I think that deep inside, Ze’ev Elkin knows this well.”

The ideas of the Russified Israeli right find a clear reflection in current Russian political culture, down to the details of the bills that Russian-born Israeli politicians sponsor in the Knesset. In his 2004 State of the Union address for example, Vladimir Putin, then Russia’s president, announced his intention to investigate nonprofit human rights organizations “obtaining funding from influential foreign or domestic foundations.” Accepting international funding is standard operating procedure for many nongovernmental organizations the world over, but Putin’s speech insinuated that those who criticized the government and profited from foreign funds were disloyal to Russia and somehow dangerous. Within a few years, Putin and his henchmen have succeeded in creating an environment in which it is nearly impossible for NGOs to operate successfully, thereby severely crippling the possibility of a robust political opposition. Faina Kirschenbaum’s proposal to investigate left-wing NGOs, and her allegations that the foreign funds some of those NGOs receive—lawfully and transparently—are a sign of nefariousness, are a page out of the Putin playbook.

The blame for the death of the Israeli right, however, lies not only with Russia but with the United States as well. Orchestrated mainly by Netanyahu, a parade of American political consultants began marching into Israel’s electoral battlefields in the 1990s, changing what was previously a cantankerous but civic-minded political culture into a toxic terrain of secrets and lies familiar to anyone who has grown up on American campaign ads. Take a look, for example, at this extended ad for Labor from 1988. Even in the midst of mad inflation and shortly after the breakout of the first Palestinian intifada, the party’s leaders, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, used their on-screen time to calmly address potential voters, offering up the key points of their political plans, sitting at a desk.

By 1996, political ads looked a lot scarier—the ominous voice-overs, the allegations that political opponents are not just wrong but dangerous: They’re staples of a particular style of campaigning introduced to Israel by the American Arthur Finkelstein, the spin-master Netanyahu had hired. Finkelstein had made his political fortune in the United States by applying simplistic tags to the mostly liberal candidates he’d helped unseat. New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, in his catchy formulation, was “too liberal for too long,” and the 1992 Democratic candidate for Senate in New York, Robert Abrams, was “hopelessly liberal.” Both men lost despite overwhelming odds in their favor—Cuomo to George Pataki, Abrams to Alfonse D’Amato. Liberals lost, too: Finkelstein had helped turn the very term “liberal” into a bad word.

In 1996, Finkelstein was recruited by Netanyahu to run a rather hopeless campaign. Rabin, the popular leader of Labor, was assassinated a year prior to the election by a right-wing fanatic whose act was preceded by months of vehement demonstrations featuring signs portraying the elderly prime minister wearing a Nazi officer’s uniform. Netanyahu, the leader of the opposition, was severely criticized after Rabin’s death for fanning the flames of hatred and failing to denounce the violent language and imagery favored by his supporters. To make matters worse, Netanyahu’s opponent was Shimon Peres, Rabin’s closest political ally and co-recipient with him of the Nobel Peace Prize. Early polls predicted an easy victory for Peres. This was when Netanyahu called in Finkelstein.

The American adviser applied the same tactics that worked so well stateside, but he turned up the heat considerably. He orchestrated ads showing the aftermath of suicide bombings. He devised numerous spots showing Peres with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, accusing Peres of blindly succumbing to Arafat’s schemes. Most memorable was his leading slogan: “Peres will divide Jerusalem.” It was false; as prime minister, Netanyahu signed on to the very same peace accords that Peres and Rabin were committed to, and none of them advocated the de-unification of Israel’s capital. The slogan was scary, and it worked wonders: Netanyahu won by slightly less than 1 percent.

Finkelstein’s engagement was the first time an American consultant was so deeply involved in an Israeli campaign, but it wasn’t the last—nowadays, many Israeli politicians, left and right, hire Washington’s brightest minds to orchestrate their quests for power. In less than a decade, Israeli political culture, once staid in a C-SPAN sort of way, has become a horror film, with ads and jingles featuring fear, loathing, and blood.

It is, of course, naïve to expect any political culture to remain unchanged and free of outside influence. But when a transformation as massive as the one that has swept the Israeli right in the last five or 10 years occurs, it is time to stop and recalibrate. Old-time Israeli right-wingers like Dan Meridor and Reuven Rivlin are far more likely to see eye-to-eye these days with Meretz’s Nitzan Horowitz, say, than they are with Elkin and other members of Likud.

A few weeks ago, when the anti-boycott bill passed into law, I walked to my bookshelf and pulled out a volume. It was my wedding present from my father, a book bound in thick, rich leather, on its cover a copper emblem featuring the map of Israel crossed by an outstretched hand grasping a rifle and the words rak kach, meaning “only this way.” It was the emblem of the Irgun, the paramilitary organization that fought to expel the mandatory British regime from pre-state Palestine. The book’s author was the Irgun’s last commander in chief, Menachem Begin. It was inscribed to my great-grandfather, Chaim Leibovitz.

“Let justice be the cornerstone of Israel,” Begin wrote in Hebrew, “established with labor, with tears, with suffering, with battle, with blood.”

If only the same spirit still guided the Israeli right.

Leaning back in an armchair, Aharon’s father begins in Hebrew, and Aharon quickly follows in English.

“Before I was born, my mother got pregnant and decided to have an abortion,” she says, rewording the story as though she were the one telling it. “They were young and didn’t have any money.” One afternoon, on their way to an abortion clinic, the couple sat waiting at a bus stop, full of apprehension. An old Moroccan woman sat down next to Aharon’s mother and knew instinctively that something was wrong. “You are not God,” the woman told Aharon’s mother after she found out what was troubling the couple. “Go, go home, for your own good.” As Aharon’s father tells the anecdote, he mimes the old woman, waving his arm as if shooing away a dog.

“They took it as an omen,” Aharon says. The couple never got on the bus.

Years later, when Aharon became pregnant in 2005, she stood at the same way station as her parents, figuratively speaking, paralyzed by fear. But she had no husband and no wise old woman to make her decision for her. She was broke, alone, and didn’t know what to do. A friend told her about an organization called Efrat, a nonprofit organization in Jerusalem that seeks to prevent Jewish women from having abortions. Started by Holocaust survivors shortly after World War II, Efrat is founded on the belief that no Jewish woman should have to abort a child because of money troubles. The organization will help a needy mother like Aharon financially for the first year of her child’s life. To many Israelis, Efrat’s mission sounds suspiciously pro-life, but Efrat likes to see itself as “pro-choice,” more an instrument of education than coercion.

But the Efrat approach is a hard sell, not unlike the efforts of anti-abortion groups in the United States. Images of developing fetuses line the inside of pamphlets that Efrat distributes to women who are seeking help. One cover pictures a stork dangling a blanketed baby from its beak. A question in big, black letters stands out above the bird: Mommy, why won’t you let me live?

“We show [the woman] information, show her she has a human being,” says Eli Schussheim, who took over the organization in 1978, when abortion first became legal in Israel. “The fourth week, the baby has a heart, the sixth a brain, the eighth, it has all of its organs. It awakes a natural feeling in a mother.”

While abortion in Israel is usually not the hot-button issue it is in America, it has lately become a focus of political controversy. At the start of March, a liberal member of the Knesset put forth a bill to abolish Israel’s abortion committees, made up of doctors and social workers who review individual cases and approve legal abortions. The bill did not pass. Efforts to change the status quo have also come from the right. At the end of 2009, Israel’s chief rabbis sent letters to every rabbi in the country, asking them to forbid their congregants from aborting a child.

Schussheim of Efrat goes even further. He sees abortion in Israel as a kind of Holocaust of Jews’ own making—a plague, he says, that causes more loss of life than wars or natural disasters. In his view Efrat is a vital effort to preserve and multiply a diminished population and to ensure that Israel remains fundamentally Jewish. “After we lost millions of people, I think we should do more to encourage the birthrate,” he says. “We should do more to save the lives we have already started.”

While Schussheim argues that what Efrat offers is education, Irit Rosenblum, the head of an Israeli family-rights organization called New Family, thinks the group’s agenda is a lot more insidious. One of Efrat’s most virulent critics, Rosenblum advocates for civil marriage and women’s rights in Israel. According to her, Efrat is invading women’s privacy and cajoling them into a decision. In 2004, a member of the Knesset attempted to outlaw Efrat’s existence, calling its work equal to harassment. “They are trying to tempt [the woman], to pay her,” Rosenblum says. “The temptation around it is very ugly, I think.”

Efrat’s cramped office is tucked away on a tree-lined street in residential Jerusalem. The floor is covered in industrial gray carpet, and the wooden desks are worn and shabby. But against this colorless background, hundreds of photographs showcased on the walls leap out vibrantly. Photographs of the children that Efrat has “saved,” as it says, are pinned to every inch of every wall, and laminated letters of thanks accompany many of them.

“They showed me more than I wanted to know,” says Aharon. When she came to Efrat, she was 25 and living very hand-to-mouth. She had just moved to Arizona to work in customer relations for an Israeli company, because she had always wanted to live in the United States. She hadn’t had her period in nine weeks, but the women at work said that was normal when transitioning to such a hot, dry place. Eventually, she went to a doctor. Her fears were confirmed.

“I can’t be pregnant,” she recalls telling a friend.

“I’m sorry, Mali, but you are,” the friend said. Aharon was not in a steady relationship, but she knew who the father was: her on-again, off-again flame of seven years—the tumultuous love of her life. They had slept together the night before she left Israel for the United States, but he was living the life of a bachelor. What was she going to do?

Aharon returned to Israel and moved in with her mother. She knew she couldn’t have an abortion—she’d already had one before, when she 22. Three months into that pregnancy, her doctors could not detect a heartbeat, and she’d made the decision to abort. “When he was gone, I was glad he was gone,” says Aharon. “I kind of thought, ‘Good, he doesn’t have a heartbeat. Fine.’ ” But the abortion ultimately caused more emotional fallout than she expected. “A year and a half later, I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” she says. “I felt so sorry.” She wonders now that if maybe she had waited, something might have changed. Maybe the baby would have been healthy.

According to a recent report from Israel’s health ministry, some 20,000 legal abortions occur yearly in Israel. A New Family poll conducted this year estimated that another estimated 25,000 are done illegally. “We have the possibility, every year, to save 45,000 children,” says Schussheim. “And I must tell you—we have not one case of regret.”

Efrat gave her reassurance that everything would be OK, she says. And when she delivered her healthy daughter, Yuval, the organization gave her everything she was promised—a crib, a stroller, a year’s supply of diapers and baby food, and $300 a month. “I needed that money,” Aharon says. “I had nothing left here.”

Tied into Schussheim’s demographic concerns are religious concerns. Schussheim believes Israel’s Chief Rabbinate should be involved in the abortion committees along with doctors and social workers, for the sanctity of life is a fundamentally religious concern. Unless the mother’s life is in danger, abortion is forbidden. “The rabbinate must be involved, like the pope,” says Schussheim. “This is something very serious, and this issue is very important in this religion.”

“According to Judaism, this is an order—to give birth to children,” says Rosenblum. She feels that religion plays too prominent a role in the discussion of abortion in Israel. “Religion is religion and it shouldn’t be involved in the state,” she says. “But unfortunately, in Israel, there is no separation.”

Although Aharon says her decision to keep Yuval wasn’t directly religious—“I just know killing is wrong,” Aharon says—she does say her traditionalist Jewish family raised her to believe that abortion is immoral. The members of the family are religious to varying degrees: Her mother covers her hair, her nephew wears a tall, black hat, and her younger sister wears long skirts. And the sheer size of Aharon’s family exemplifies a value that has long been handed down in Jewish tradition.

As plates are cleared from the table in Aharon’s sister’s home, the children’s energy does not seem to flag. Yuval and her cousins run around the living room in circles. But Aharon brings out dessert, and that does the trick. Yuval stops at her mother’s side, eyeing the chocolate cake. Aharon reaches for her and sits her down at the table. She has big brown eyes, coffee-colored skin, and frizzy hair. She looks more Brazilian than Israeli, Aharon jokes.

After the meal, Aharon sits on the roof deck of her sister’s home, the salty ocean breeze whipping through her hair. “About two weeks ago, on a crazy morning, I thought: I wish I was single—no kids, no husband,” she says with a smile. “I could just pick myself up, pack a bag, and go.” She pauses for a moment and then shakes her head.

“But there is no way I’d live without her,” she says. “It’s just not worth it.”

Simone Gorrindo, an alumna of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, is a freelance journalist and editorial assistant at Amazon’s Kindle Singles.

No, really: Now you can.

As someone who cares deeply about the future of the Jewish state, I spent most of yesterday glued to the debate in the Knesset, which culminated in the passage of a law that would make it illegal to call for a boycott against the state or its West Bank settlements—with a “boycott” defined as “deliberately avoiding economic, cultural or academic ties with another person or another factor only because of his ties with the State of Israel, one of its institutions or an area under its control, in such a way that may cause economic, cultural or academic damage.”

“An area under its control,” naturally, means the West Bank, or, more specifically, the Jewish settlements therein, which were never annexed and are therefore, officially and legally, not a part of the State of Israel. That’s an assertion with which none other than the mayor of Ariel, the fourth largest settlement, agrees: In 2001, when he sued the Israeli government for return of funds his municipality had paid in taxes, he noted that “the Ariel Local Council and the municipality, composed of residents of the region, convenes in the region and is managed from Ariel,” and is therefore not part of Israel proper. Amen.

And so, according to the new law, the statement I made in the first paragraph of this article makes me a criminal. So be it. According to the law, in calculating the sum of the damages I’ll be required to pay to whomever presses charges against me, “the court will take into consideration, among other things, the circumstances under which the wrong was carried out, its severity and its extent.” But what effect did this statement I just made have? What is its severity? What its extent? These are precisely the unquantifiable, amorphous, and maddening questions Israeli judges are soon likely to spend much of their time adjudicating. And for what? For a cheap gesture that sacrifices a pillar of democratic rule—freedom of speech—on the altar of politics. Everyone—even those who don’t support boycotting settlements; hell, even those who live in settlements—should find this law obscene.

As it turns out, the law’s iniquities aren’t limited to the geopolitical liberties it has assumed. During yesterday’s debate in the Knesset, Kadima’s Yisrael Hasson, a former high official in the Shin Bet, raised a good point. As of today, he quipped, any Israeli who wishes to deliberately avoid economic ties with, say, a butcher shop that sells treyf, is free to do so; in fact, Hasson noted, many religious Jews advocate such boycotts all the time. And a labor-minded liberal who wants to reject doing business with a company that exploits its workers is welcome to his opinions. But anyone who, based on a similar ideological objection, refuses to buy goods produced in the settlements is now breaking the law. This, Hasson rightly noted, is an absurdity.

The Knesset’s own legal adviser, Eyal Yinon, agreed. Calling the legislation “borderline illegal,” Yinon argued that its definition of boycott “is a violation of the core tenet of freedom of political expression” designed solely to “affect the political debate on the future of Judea and Samaria, a debate that has been at the heart of the political debate in the State of Israel for over 40 years.”

And affect it shall: As the blogger Roi Maor noted in the liberal online magazine +972, the law’s bend is entirely economic. “If the court will find that a wrong according to this law was deliberately carried out,” it reads, “it will be authorized to compel the person who did the wrongdoing to pay damages that are not dependent on the damage” actually done.

This means that the law places the burden of proof not on the plaintiff—which should be the case when one is suing for alleged damages—but on the defendant. It also means that all an activist must do to quash the opinions of those who oppose the settlements is file a suit. Organizations who oppose the settlements—which includes virtually all of Israel’s human rights NGOs—can now be stripped of their nonprofit tax status. Individuals who oppose the settlements can now be taken to court and forced to pay hefty legal fees to defend their freedom of speech. Under these punitive conditions, it is very likely that many will simply choose to remain silent.

This is how oppression works.

There is much more to say about the law. Each of its clauses presents challenges both legal and logical. But let us not waste time parsing words: Anyone who is passionate about Israel’s survival as a Jewish and democratic state should stand up and denounce this law as sharply as possible. It must be repealed, and none of us must remain silent until it is.

But as the pink sign suggests, the struggle against the deportation of migrant workers and their children has gotten complicated. In the past, it was simple: These children speak Hebrew; they go to school here; they want to go to the army. They’re Israeli. So, they must stay here, in Israel.

But now that the state is deporting toddlers and infants—babies who speak no language at all—the issue has been stripped of its nationalist trappings. The debate, which is hardly raging anymore (at least not in the Israeli press), has been boiled down to the essential underlying problems: human rights, capitalism, and fair application of the law.

On Tuesday, only 50 Israeli and Filipino activists showed up at a distant corner of Ben Gurion International Airport to protest the latest round of deportations. Far from the public eye, demonstrators stood outside a small, two-story building—a lock-up facility where the state holds migrant workers and their children before expulsion. A ramp leading to the terminal was visible behind them. The road was lined with blue-and-white Israeli flags flapping in the wind.

***

The expulsions began in March, after a fierce public battle that spanned 20 months.

The government first announced its intention to deport undocumented migrant workers and their children in July 2009. A total of 1,200 children faced deportation. Then in August 2010, bowing to public pressure, the Israeli Cabinet set criteria that led to the naturalization of 700 of them. Most, but not all, of the 500 children still to be deported are under the age of 5. These families are being deported one at a time.

While a protest held in May 2010 attracted almost 10,000 demonstrators rallying against the deportations, the press and public are having a harder time rallying around the youngest deportees now.

“When people are against the deportation, they always imagine a 10-year-old that speaks Hebrew and goes to the Israeli school system and the scouts,” said Rotem Ilan, co-founder of Israeli Children, a grassroots movement that sprang up in response to the government’s deportation plans. “When they are talking about a 3-year-old, they don’t see him in the same way. But even a child that is 1 year old is traumatized by being in jail.”

“Their parents didn’t do any crime,” she added. “We made them illegal.”

***

A majority of the migrant workers who have been deported arrived to Israel legally, on 63-month state visas. Many still had current visas when they gave birth. But when their infants reached 3 months, Israeli policy forced the mothers to make a choice: Either stick their baby on a plane and keep their legal status as guest-workers or keep their child and become illegal.

In early April, the Israeli Supreme Court struck down the policy that had put these workers in that bind, with Justice Ayala Procaccia reading from the ruling. “[It] does not conform to Israel labor laws protecting workers’ rights during pregnancy and after birth,” she said. “It also contravenes the protection of migrant workers’ rights as determined by international conventions.”

But in part because Israel lacks a constitution, the state can essentially ignore the high court’s decision, as it has done for rulings on the barrier through the West Bank Palestinian village of Bilin and for media access to the Gaza Strip during Operation Cast Lead.

Indeed, five years ago, the court struck down the policy of binding a migrant worker’s legal status to one particular employer, likening the arrangement to “modern day slavery.”

But last month, the Knesset circumvented the decision by amending the decades-old Entry Law. The additions will require migrant caregivers to live in certain regions of the country and will limit the number of times they can change employers. Human rights groups such as the Association for Human Rights in Israel called the new law the “Slavery Law,” claiming the amendment “severely harms” the “fundamental human rights” of caregivers.

And now, more than six weeks after the court struck down the policy that made expulsions possible, the state of Israel is continuing to carry out deportations.

***

A pregnant Filipina woman I’ll identify as “M” was one of the first to be expelled. She was picked up in late March of this year, along with her 3-year-old son. The children’s father, a Thai citizen working in Israel, had been deported to Thailand several months before. Because they were deported individually to their home countries—instead of as a group—it is unlikely that the young family will be reunited.

M faced other problems. She was in debt, as are a large majority of migrant laborers in Israel. Israeli employment agencies charge anywhere from $5,000 to $30,000 or more for work and visa arrangements. Most workers cover this fee with unregulated loans that take years to repay. This is known as “debt bondage.”

According to Israeli law, the manpower agencies that recruit foreign workers can charge only 3,050 shekels, or about $900, for their services. But these groups are facing much less persecution than the undocumented workers and their children. And, largely unchecked, they continue to profit from the deportations because the so-called revolving door means new workers must pay fresh fees to replace the departing ones, as demand for their services remains high.

While the Israeli employment agencies have always been problematic, there used to be more oversight. Before the summer of 2009, the Ministry of Industry, Trade, and Labor monitored manpower agencies. Rivka Makover was in charge of licensing. I met her in March 2009—a petite woman who looked diminished and weary behind a huge, metal desk, overflowing with files. When she started in her position in July 2004, Makover told me, there were 350 manpower companies. Since then, she had revoked more than 230 licenses.

Just a few months after I met Makover, a major restructuring put the Ministry of Interior in charge. The ministry’s oft-criticized Oz Unit, the enforcement arm the Population and Immigration Authority, was formed, and deportations were announced. The focus seemed to shift from regulating the manpower agencies to kicking out the workers and their children.

Recently, Idit Lebovitch, an attorney with Kav LaOved, a local NGO that advocates for migrant, Palestinian, and Israeli workers, sent a dozen complaints to the Interior Ministry about agencies. “We have proof that they were involved in money things—things that Rivka [Makover] would close them for,” she told me. “And there was no action taken.”

Mya Guarnieri is an American-Israeli journalist and writer based in Tel Aviv. Her work has appeared in the The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, and The National, among other publications.

Nakba Day began inauspiciously when a truck driver from the Israeli Arab town of Kafr Qasem went on a rampage in Tel Aviv, crashing into multiple vehicles, killing one person and injuring 18. Witnesses said that when he finally drew to a halt, he began assaulting passersby, shouting, “Death to the Jews.” Israel Hayom used a witness’ description of the driver as its headline: “Im Retzah Ba’eynayim” (“With Murder in His Eyes”). Police initially refrained from confirming that the incident was a terror attack, but a police official said later in the week, “The indications are that it was carried out deliberately.” The driver says it was an accident. Wrote one blogger, “Forgive me if I’m a bit skeptical.” The incidents in Tel Aviv and the north overshadowed Nakba Day protests elsewhere. In the West Bank, thousands of Palestinians gathered in Ramallah and protesters clashed with Israeli security forces in Qalandiya; at the Gaza border, Israeli troops opened fire on Palestinians attempting to reach the security fence and killed a Gaza man suspected of planting a roadside bomb in the area.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Knesset this week that Israel was prepared to “cede parts of our homeland (moledet) for true peace” with the Palestinians, but added that he did not believe that Israel has a Palestinian peace partner. Yedioth characterized the comments as a “promo” (it even used the English word) for Netanyahu’s speech before both houses of Congress next week. “Netanyahu once again crossed the Rubicon, and once again rushed to renounce and quickly clamber back up the bank whence he came,” wrote Ben Caspit in an analysis for Maariv headlined “Tza’ad Leyamin, Tza’ad Lasmol” (“One Step to the Right, One Step to the Left”).

The state comptroller (mevaker hamedina) accused Defense Minister Ehud Barak of violating “the spirit of the rules” (ruah haklalim) meant to prevent conflicts of interest by waiting until three days before he joined former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s government, in 2007, before transferring the shares in his international consultancy firm to his daughters. But Haaretz’s Aluf Benn wrote (albeit in a piece that came out before the comptroller’s report was released) that Barak stands a good chance of becoming prime minister again. Responding to the headline on Benn’s story, “Ehud Barak Doesn’t Care If No One Likes Him,” one commenter wrote: “That is good, since no one likes him.”

Israel’s Sephardic and Ashkenazic chief rabbis as well as Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef ruled that celebrations of the Lag Ba’Omer holiday, which begins Saturday night, should be postponed a day to keep Israelis from desecrating the Sabbath (hilul Shabbat) by starting the holiday’s traditional bonfires before Shabbat has ended. But other rabbis oppose the move, and many of the celebrants can reasonably be expected not to care. “Are all those kids—especially the ones who don’t give much of a hoot what the chief rabbis say—going to push off the burning a day?” one Jerusalemite wrote. “We’ll be away this weekend. … But I have a feeling that we’ll be smelling a few roasted marshmallows on the way home.”

The blast in Jerusalem came as Negev residents dealt with the effects of rockets and mortar shells fired by Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip. The latest spate of attacks began Saturday with a barrage of more than 50 mortar shells, followed by Russian-made Grad rockets hitting Ashkelon and Be’er Sheva. According to Ynet, Israeli bomb disposal experts said some of the mortar shells contained phosphorus, and school was canceled in Ashdod and Be’er Sheva for part of the week. “I am familiar with the feeling of being under a rocket threat from back home,” said one student from the northern town of Kiryat Shmona, speaking at sparsely attended Ben-Gurion University in Be’er Sheva. “But when the first rocket fell in the morning, my parents called me and asked me to come back to the north.”

The Israeli army, meanwhile, has been conducting air raids and attacking launch sites in Gaza, killing at least 10 Palestinians, including four civilians. The media are talking about “escalation” (haslama), Likud ministers are warning of “Operation Cast Lead 2,” and Haaretz commentators (and Tablet Magazine contributors) Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff say this tit-for-tat has already developed into “a small war.”

On Tuesday, former Israeli President Moshe Katsav was sentenced to seven years in prison for rape, sexual harassment, and obstruction of justice, but Maariv and Yedioth Ahronoth didn’t wait for the judges to read the sentence in court. On the morning Katsav was due to be sentenced, both papers devoted their front pages to Israel’s former “No. 1 citizen,” as the president is called, and ran the same one-word headline: “Lakele”—“To jail.” “Today is a sad day for everyone,” Katsav’s successor, Shimon Peres, said. “However, it illustrates that in the State of Israel, no one is above the law.”

Elsewhere, a friend and former lawyer of former prime minister Ehud Olmert began testifying in Olmert’s corruption trial this week. Uri Messer, the witness, confirmed the existence of a slush fund controlled by Olmert, at least some of which he said was donated by American Jewish businessman Morris Talansky. Messer said that at one point, Talansky was holding at least $300,000 in cash in his office safe for Olmert. One radio talk show host referred to the case as “Little Sicily.”

The Knesset passed two controversial laws this week. The Nakba Law (Hok Hanakba)—so called because its original, harsher incarnation called for a prison term of up to three years for anyone who commemorates Israel’s Independence Day as a day of mourning, in keeping with the Palestinian view of Israel’s founding as the “nakba,” or catastrophe—gives the finance minister the authority to reduce financial aid for government-funded institutions that reject Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state, support armed conflict or terrorism against Israel, or treat the flag or other state symbols with disrespect. This means, writes the head of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, “the Knesset has appointed the Finance Ministry to serve as Israel’s Ministry of Truth.” The other law, known as the Admissions Committee Law (Hok Va’adot Hakabalah), gives small communities in the Galilee and Negev the right to keep out potential residents who are judged incompatible with their social norms.

The reverberations of Japan’s earthquake reached the office of Israel’s state comptroller, which issued a report this week stating that the government has done nothing to improve its preparedness for an earthquake despite more than a decade of warnings. Israel and the West Bank sit on the sensitive Syrian-African fault line, though some Israelis seem more concerned about a potential sushi shortage than the risks posed by shoddily built schools.

Israel’s social workers are on strike. The ovdim sotzialim launched their strike nearly three weeks ago in a bid to secure higher wages. One of the slogans the striking social workers have been chanting is “With such dismal pay, we’ll fight here like they do in Libya,” which rhymes in Hebrew: “Sahar kazeh aluv, ne’evak po k’mo b’luv.” The union has set up an “exceptions committee” (va’adat harigim) that determines which Israelis in need get help despite the strike. Some of the cases: Yes to the children who survived the terror attack that killed their parents and siblings in Itamar and to two women seeking placement in a battered women’s shelter; no to a girl who was raped and to a couple waiting to take home a baby born to a surrogate mother. Next up: Doctors are threatening their first public-sector strike in a decade.

And at least one Purim reveler in the West Bank city of Hebron appeared on TV news dressed up as Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. In Hebron as elsewhere in Israel, the Purim parade is known as Adloyada, an elision of the Aramaic phrase “ad d’lo yada” (“until he no longer knows”), which many take to mean that Jews are religiously obligated to become so drunk on Purim that they can’t tell the difference between cursed Haman and blessed Mordechai. U.S. former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, meanwhile, was in Israel for what she called a private visit, and she arrived at the Western Wall tunnels in the Old City of Jerusalem wearing a prominent Star of David necklace. Maybe she was dressing up as a Jew for Purim.

Unlike the notorious Knesset probes into various left-wing groups accused of delegitimizing the IDF, which seek to uncover their sources of funding, the J Street investigation is about determining whether J Street really is pro-Israel. “If they don’t love and support Israel, then they should not present themselves as pro-Israel,” said one MK. That’s just, like, your opinion, man.

Foxman is an American Jew who cares about Israel, and so he recognizes this investigation for what it is: An attempt by the Jewish state to dictate the terms of debate for all Jews and strip the diaspora of any right to have a say—much like the push to give a small coterie of ultra-Orthodox Israeli rabbis the power to define who is Jewish and who isn’t. Critics who see the ADL as too right-wing or too beholden to the Israeli government—and I’ve been one of them—may laugh at this notion, but I would bet that Foxman sees, correctly, that while today it is the Knesset investigating J Street, tomorrow it will be the Knesset investigating the ADL. He is acting, at least in part, out of self-interest. Concerned progressive Jews should be pleased nonetheless.

Knesset Hearings on J Street Up the Ante in Debate About ‘Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace’ Lobby [JTA]
Related: The Diaspora Need Not Apply [NYT]

“Speak to the children of Israel,” God instructs Moses, “and have them take for Me an offering; from every person whose heart inspires him to generosity, you shall take My offering. And this is the offering that you shall take from them: gold, silver, and copper; blue, purple, and crimson wool; linen and goat hair; ram skins dyed red, tachash skins, and acacia wood; oil for lighting, spices for the anointing oil and for the incense; shoham stones and filling stones for the ephod and for the choshen. And they shall make Me a sanctuary and I will dwell in their midst.”

If you vaguely remember the Israelite story, you may recall the bit about their 40-year sojourn in the Sinai desert, a patch of earth not celebrated for its abundance of gold, spices, and purple wool. Why not settle for something a bit more Arid Chic? Why not build something a bit easier to transport? Why all the opulence?

Because God knows that a people—especially a people stumbling through the wilderness—is in need not only of spiritual solace but also of a physical space where worship can become concrete and where God’s ephemeral greatness can be seen on earthly terms. He may not be fond of icons or graven images, but when it comes to dwellings, the Lord bequeaths his people a simple principle of design: More is more.

How strange, then, that so many of his people—at least those who, millennia later, pursued careers as architects—rejected his command and instead championed the spare and the unadorned. Some, trained in Berlin’s Bauhaus school in the 1920s, became pioneers of the International Style; when the Nazis rose to power, a number of these architects moved to Tel Aviv and worked to reshape a town of old houses tinted with arabesques and tanned by the Mediterranean sun into a modern metropolis of clean, straight lines and functional forms.

Eventually, when the time came to erect Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, it was the spirit of Germany, not of Jerusalem, that triumphed: Joseph Klarwein, trained in Munich’s Polytechnic, designed the low, approachable, modern edifice. The Knesset, some critics complained at the time of the building’s inauguration in 1966, was a thoroughly un-Israeli structure; its striking resemblance to the American embassy in Athens, designed five years earlier by Bauhaus oracle Walter Gropius, didn’t help much to alleviate the charges of foreign influence. The critics, however, were missing the point. If there was such a thing as Jewish architecture, it was, by the 1960s, far more likely to follow Gropius’ commands than God’s.

The biblical tradition of architecture, the one that holds that buildings that matter must be stately and lavish, hasn’t fared much better since then. It is nowhere in evidence in Frank Gehry’s functionless extravaganzas, nor in, say, Daniel Liebeskind’s angular abstractions. Indeed, looking at the past six decades, its safe to say that Jews design buildings either as wild ideas or as austere objects of utility, but rarely in the grand, rich tradition evident everywhere from the holy sanctuary to the palace at Versailles.

Historically, of course, one can find many reasons to explain this trend. No ethnic group removed for centuries from the centers of power and influence could be expected to develop a taste for grandeur. But herein lies the startling power of this week’s parasha: Even at their most powerless, without a state and without a clue, roaming the Egyptian dunes with the bitter taste of slavery still in their mouths, the Israelites, at God’s insistence, had a refuge of great luxury and elegance. Power and influence, the parasha teaches us, splendor and grandeur, all begin at home.

And while manifestations of this architectural logic are still uncommon in Jewish circles, at least one notable example may delight our eyes and hearts; it’s a sanctuary of an altogether different sort, the new Ralph Lauren store on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

A new building in the highly decorative Beaux Arts style, this four-story, 22,000-square-foot mansion houses the designer’s collections for women and the home. It is a complement to the Ralph Lauren men’s store across the street on 72nd Street and Madison Avenue, the historic Rhinelander Mansion that the designer purchased in 1986. The new building’s exterior is finished with lovely limestone with hand-carved flourishes, the entrance is a regal archway, the interior a bacchanalia of ornamentation, with wrought-iron railings and Persian rugs and intricate chandeliers everywhere.

Born in the Bronx as Ralph Liftshitz, Mr. Lauren attended a number of Jewish day schools before finding his way into the fashion business. Whether or not he paid particular attention to God’s musings on design is unknown; what is evident is that when it comes to buildings, Lauren is refreshingly unafraid of opulence. Not for him the austere, negative spaces, the glass and the steel, the angles and the emptiness and the big, bold ideas. Those belong to the theorists, to the intellectuals, not to the landed gentry, a class traditionally inclined toward unconflicted declarations of elegance and wealth, a class traditionally bereft of Jews.

Keeping in line with the designer’s general aesthetic of moneyed ease, Lauren’s new store is an important monument to an idea that Jews would do well to reclaim, the idea expressed in this week’s parasha: When you build, build gloriously.

Interior of Ralph Lauren Madison Avenue Mansion, New York.
Ralph Lauren

“Declaration of Independence,” reads the headline of a column in an Israeli paper about Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s recent decision to break from the Labor Party. “The new faction that calls itself Atzmaut”—Independence—“is essentially on its way toward losing its political independence, since in the absence of political power, it will have to support the government without any real objections,” former Israeli politician Uzi Baram opines.

“Independence” is one of those words that you can throw around in a sentence for an easy double entendre—as malleable as the party itself. When Barak announced his defection from Labor, his speech included the words, “We are going forth today toward independence.” And also, we are meant to presume, Independence.

In choosing a single catchy part of everyday vocabulary, Barak followed in the footsteps of Ariel Sharon. As prime minister, Sharon split off from a party beset by deep-seated disagreements over his plan to withdraw from Gaza (even though the name of that party, Likud, translates to “Unification”). Partly as a way to circumvent the so-called party “rebels” who were making every effort to block the disengagement plan, in 2005 Sharon created Kadima—which means “forward” or “onward.” Thus were born memorable campaign slogans like “Kadima with Sharon,” as well as counter-slogans like “Kadima is Backward.” Now, of course, the Forward party is warming the back benches.

Barak’s maneuver this week—and this should sound familiar—essentially hijacked a plan by “rebels” in the Labor Party to create their own breakaway movement. One recent column managed to squeeze in double-edged references to Kadima and Atzmaut in the same paragraph: Discussing Barak’s decision to keep Labor in the Netanyahu government—when quitting Bibi might have won Labor more votes in the next election—media consultant Amos Sarig argues that Barak should have “looked ahead [kadima]” and joined Kadima as an autonomous faction, but that the political leader “preferred his own independence [atzmaut]” instead.

Barak might have cribbed a page from Sharon’s playbook, but at least he had the sense not to jinx himself by giving his party an energetic name like, say, Vigor. You might know that party better by its Hebrew name, Meretz, which seems to have expended most of its vitality on losing seats in the Knesset. As for the future of Atzmaut, only time will tell if it succeeds in securing the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for the people of Israel.

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: After Shabbat
Haredization
‘Filipinit’
On Fire
Cast Lead
Refugees
On Strike
‘Politi’
Abducted
‘The Peace Process’
No Confidence
‘After the Holidays’

More than a decade ago, when you took the stage at some crowded Tel Aviv banquet hall and gave your first speech as Israel’s prime minister-elect, I was standing in the back of the room, pressed against many of my friends, all of us dirty and exhausted. We had spent the previous weeks darting from street to street, putting up fliers, canvassing, doing whatever we could to convince whomever listened that you were a far better alternative to Benjamin Netanyahu. And when you won, by a landslide, we were all thrilled; after the bumbling Shimon Peres and the sinister Bibi, you were, we thought, just the man we needed. When you spoke of your election as the dawn of a new day, we believed you.

Earlier this week, as I sipped my morning coffee and watched you announce your decision to leave the Labor party, found an independent faction, and remain in Netanyahu’s Cabinet, the first thought that came to my mind was that quick, sweaty handshake you gave me as you were inching your way out of the room on the night of your victory in 1999. That evening, you had won the confidence of 670,484 Israelis, or 20 percent of voters, representing 26 seats in the Knesset. Exactly 10 years later, in your most recent electoral challenge, the numbers were very different: 334,900 votes, less than 10 percent of the voting public, 13 Knesset seats. In the course of 10 years of leadership, dear Ehud, you’ve cut your party’s electoral strength by exactly half, a disgrace very few other Western politicians can claim.

Momentous as your political failure is, it is not much of a factor in the profound and bubbling contempt I feel for you, a visceral enmity that few of your colleagues have inspired in my otherwise tranquil political imagination. Nor am I too hung up on your record as the squanderer-in-chief of precious opportunities, from peace with Syria—which you bumbled after flying to Washington, getting cold feet, refusing to disembark from your plane, and sending the Clinton Administration into a rage—to talks with the Palestinians, which you largely doomed with your impulsive, poorly thought-out decision to try to resolve a century-long conflict in two make-or-break weeks. What I resent more than anything, Ehud, is your catastrophic misunderstanding of the burdens of leadership.

You are, I know, a reader; you like to boast about having polished off James Joyce’s Ulysses in a matter of hours, a bit of bravado that seemed appealing when I was young and seems pathetic now. But take a look, then, at this week’s parasha—there’s a lesson there about leadership you cannot afford to ignore. As the story begins, Moses, groaning under the burden of being the sole leader of nearly a half-million people, is visited by his father-in-law, Jethro. The latter is quick with advice: “The thing you are doing is not good,” he tells Moses. “You will surely wear yourself out, both you and these people who are with you, for the matter is too heavy for you; you cannot do it alone.” The solution Jethro suggests is simple, and it involves deputizing competent leaders and judges and setting up a structured hierarchy.

You were preoccupied this week with emptily comparing yourself to past leaders, from David Ben Gurion to Ariel Sharon; you might want to reach further back into Jewish history and take a page from Moses. Seeing the merit in Jethro’s suggestion, Moses immediately cedes much of his own power. He understands that good governments, and good governors, are those capable of shaking the unshakable feeling that they alone know what’s best. You, Ehud, have allowed that false feeling of omnipotence to shake you.

In 2005, when you announced your return to politics, you told participants in an online Q&A that you and only you were capable of resuscitating the Labor Party, and that you anticipated winning as many as 35 Knesset seats. That never happened, and your reappointment, in 2007, as minister of defense brought with it a spirit of repression and arrogance that many close to you have decried, remembering, for example, how you had once told a well-respected and knowledgeable general who disagreed with your analysis to sit down and shut up. You treated your political colleagues with the same imperious impatience; when they disagreed with you, you accused them of being post-modern—as if Labor was manned by Jean Baudrillard and Jürgen Habermas rather than Benjamin Ben-Eliezer and Isaac Herzog—and left, leaving the party to lick the wounds you yourself had inflicted.

In light of all this, you might find Moses’ behavior puzzling. In giving up his power willingly, he, after all, is the ultimate freyer, or sucker, a character trait you’ve repeatedly mocked. Maybe, then, you should skip ahead in the parasha and get to its truly astonishing part: Designating the Israelites as his chosen people, God has his own thoughts about the nature of governance. “And now,” says the Lord, “if you obey Me and keep My covenant, you shall be to Me a treasure out of all peoples, for Mine is the entire earth. And you shall be to Me a kingdom of princes and a holy nation.”

Imagine that, Ehud—a whole kingdom of priests, a holy nation moved by the spirit, with little need for guidance and less for small men with large egos. These days, we’re seeing sparks of this utopian vision in the Middle East far away from Israel, in embattled Tunisia. As the citizens of that country fight to unburden themselves of the onus of a corrupt, despotic, and incompetent leadership, the world, for the most part, is deeply supportive. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for example, urged the Tunisian government to reflect “the wishes and aspirations of Tunisian people,” and the Arab League called on “all political forces, representatives of Tunisian society and officials to stand together and unite to maintain the achievements of the Tunisian people.” The word out of Jerusalem was distinctly different. Netanyahu expressed his concern about the popular uprising jeopardizing the “stability” in the region, while his deputy, the Tunisian-born Silvan Shalom, focused on the fate of the country’s approximately 2,000 Jews, as if the rest of those taking a risk and lifting their voices were negligible.

A Tunisian-style popular reform movement terrifies Netanyahu and Shalom, men whose careers are firmly rooted in the arid ground of the status quo. And I imagine it terrifies you, too: There’s little room in a kingdom of priests for bonapartes and solipsists. But the people are in the streets in Tunis, and they might soon be in the streets in Tel Aviv, too, tired of the corruption and opportunism and perfidiousness of their rotting political class. When that happens, don’t bother turning to this week’s parasha for inspiration. It would be too late.

Sincerely,

L. Leibovitz

“The Holy Land is set to become an even more magical place. Disney has announced that it is to open a theme park in Israel. The Walt Disney Company, which has amusement parks in the US, France and Hong Kong, is planning to open another in Haifa in 2013.”

—The Jewish Chronicle, January 5

Steve Brodner is an illustrator, journalist, and filmmaker living in New York. A regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1993, he also makes films for the PBS news magazine, Need to Know. He blogs at Brodnersbicycle.com.

• As the blockade eases, progress in Gaza remains slow. [NYT]

• Dmitriy Salita won his self-promoted bout against James Wayka in the third round to claim the NY state title. [Fighting News]

• Former employee Steve Rosen’s new court filings in his defamation law suit claims that AIPAC condones its employees receipt of classified information. [Forward]

• George Soros attended a conference of Esperanto scholars. He told a story about how his father learned the language in the camps. [City Room]

• Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon is undergoing treatment for prostate cancer. [Oregon Live]

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.

Born in 1958 in the southwestern Ukrainian city of Chernovitz, Edelstein currently serves as Israel’s first minister of Public Affairs and the Diaspora. The path from his non-religious communist upbringing to his current life is at once remarkable and familiar: University years studying foreign languages at the Moscow Institute for Teacher Training, a growing appreciation for his Jewish identity that compounded his desire to escape the Soviet Union, resistance followed by punishment and, finally, freedom.

For his crime of teaching Hebrew to his fellow Refuseniks, Edelstein was convicted and sent to prison in 1984 on false charges of drug dealing. Three years later, he was released on Israel Independence Day and allowed to emigrate to Israel, where he joined a population of around 200,000 Russian-speaking Jews.

Upon his arrival in Israel, Edelstein took a job as vice president of the Zionist Forum, a position he held until 1996. During that time he began his involvement in party politics by advising Benjamin Netanyahu, then in opposition. In 1996, Edelstein co-founded, with Natan Sharansky, the Yisrael ba-Aliya party. That same year, he was named minister of Immigrant Absorption, a position he held off and on until 2003, when a struggling Yisrael ba-Aliya was officially folded into Likud. In the 15th through 17th Knessets, from 1999 to 2009, Edelstein intermittently served as deputy speaker. In March 2009, the new Netanyahu government created his current portfolio.

Edelstein lives with his wife and two children in the southern West Bank settlement of Neve Daniel. With its significant number of Jews from the former Soviet Union, it is the type of community now enjoying a troubled reputation in the United States. Weeks before I spoke with Edelstein, Bill Clinton had publicly singled out settlers from the former Soviet states as a “staggering problem” for the peace process.

Edelstein addressed the question of perceived Russian Jewish extremism during a conversation last week at the Israeli Consulate near the United Nations in New York. Two press attaches and a security guard were also present.

You are the first-ever minister of Public Affairs and the Diaspora. Some would say the creation of the ministry was 20 years late. What took so long?

Twenty years ago, most Israelis would have said, “Take all your ideas and shove them. Who cares?” The feeling was, “There are Jews, where, in Chicago? They may either come to Israel, or give a million dollars to build a kindergarten in Sderot, OK?” That’s it. Now it’s different. When we ask the hard questions of whether the taxpayers’ money should be invested in Jewish education among the Diaspora, and connecting the Diaspora to Israel through all kinds of programs, the majority of Israelis say yes. It’s no longer seen as either-or—either they come to Israel or the hell with them.

There is a view, most recently expressed by Bill Clinton, that Jews from the former Soviet Union are all extreme in their politics.

When we are talking about a million people, you can’t perceive them as unified. They vote differently, they think differently. There are geographical differences. You can’t talk about these people as a bloc. As for [Bill Clinton’s comment], I don’t buy it. It’s common to think that Russian Jews are more hard-nosed. But I learned living in the Soviet Union that a pessimist is a well-educated optimist. I can’t blame Soviet Jews for saying, “Sign an agreement with Assad? He’s lying!”

Are you saying the experience of having lived under a totalitarian regime—

For a normal person, who’s never lived under a state based on lies, it’s difficult to imagine. I can’t blame Jews coming from the former Soviet Union for being very distrustful toward certain regimes and dictators in the area.

Is this why they show such strong support for Yisrael Beiteinu?

If you check statistically, look at the polls, Soviet Jews in Israel have never voted against the stream. They are always with the stream, sometimes with a slight shift towards the winner. In 1992 they mostly voted for Rabin and the Labor Party. In ’96 they mostly voted for Netanyahu, but so did most Israelis. In ’99, they voted for Ehud Barak and Labor, as most Israelis did. And then Ariel Sharon—the same thing. So it’s a nice legend about all Soviet Jews being very hard-nosed. But even if there’s some truth to it because of the experience I mentioned, it’s not reflected or proven in the voting habits.

How do you see the future of Russian Jewish political influence?

There are four parties in which a Russian-language constituency is represented—Kadima, Likud, Yisrael Beiteinu, Shas. This diversity is here to stay. Even if [Yisrael Beiteinu leader and current Foreign Minister] Avigdor Lieberman decides he wants to leave politics, the political influence is here to stay. The head of the Shas faction is a Georgian who speaks Russian. There are lots of majors and colonels who in 10 years will be generals. It’s the nature of the political system in Israel. People are coming up the ranks.

How has Russian Jewish immigration impacted the Russian-Israeli strategic relationship? And what is the role of Moscow’s Jewish elite?

The contribution made to this relationship by the Russian Jewish community in the successor states of the Soviet Union was much more significant during the first years after the fall of the USSR. It used to be built on personal connections. If I needed to arrange a high-level meeting for Netanyahu in Moscow in the early ’90s, when he was in the opposition, then I called someone who called someone, and then that someone called the deputy foreign minister. That’s how things worked.

Now it’s more government-to-government. But there is still a role for the Russian Jewish community in cultivating economic and cultural ties. Community leaders like  Boris Shpigel, and some others who are also elected officials, they definitely contribute. It’s legit to be a prominent politician or businessman who is involved in Russian- or Kazakhstani-Israeli relations, maybe contribute financially to Tel Aviv University, or a Diaspora museum, or some educational program in Israel.

Do you see Russian identity weakening with the second-generation of Russian-speaking Israelis?

Logically it must be. But my friend has a Russian bookstore in Jerusalem, and he always says to me, “It’s amazing how many young people come there. It’s not that they don’t speak Hebrew, but they buy Russian books.” It’s the same thing with TV, there’s the Russian Channel 9. Everyone predicted Channel 9 would be dead in a year, and now it’s been around for six, seven years. So, ties to the old countries are not disappearing.

I think Israel is strong enough as a society to a little bit get rid of the melting-pot model. People are no less Israeli when they speak Russian to each other, or French or English. Most famous is the story of the Gesher Theater. Twenty years ago, we were trying to persuade ministers that it was a good idea for actors to come from Russia and set up a theater. They were like, “We don’t even have a Yiddish theater, and you want a Russian-language theater?” And we found the money, and before long our actors were winning Israeli Oscars. Now the plays are all in Hebrew, but the theater was a creation of Russian-speaking Jews. This is just one example of this process.

What efforts are under way to cultivate Zionist politics and Jewish identity among Russian Jewish immigrants in the United States?

Russian Jews in this country are in a totally different place. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, my meetings with Russian Jews here were a disaster. After a few meetings I stopped meeting with them. For me at the time, they were like the ultimate traitors. I was spitting and spilling blood and they were here in the United States instead of Israel. And in their eyes, I was a total jerk. We couldn’t understand each other—they thought I should be in New York, and I thought they should be in Israel. It was not a dialogue but two monologues. Now Russian Jews are in a totally different place. Sometimes when I talk to Russian Jews here I feel that I am not Zionist enough. Everyone now has relatives in Israel, and they visit, and so on.

Also, the Russian Jews who came here in the ’70s and ’80s went through a process of understanding that not only does it not hurt to be an active part of this community, but it can help. The motivation during the early years was to “become Americans.” This meant not going to Jewish schools or community events. But they realized that Americans are Jewish, Irish, Mexicans, you name it. It didn’t mean they love this country less. So, it was a process of becoming closer to Israel.

The rest is technical and tactical. There are youth programs. Birthright. Youth groups. An emissary who is working with the Russian Jewish community here.

We had a meeting last week during which the prime minister asked myself, the minister of Absorption, and [current Jewish Agency chairman] Natan Sharansky, “How many Jews do you think are still left in the former Soviet Union?” And we all looked at each other, and no one had a good answer. Some would say half a million; some would say 3 million, depending on definitions. But there’s no reliable estimate. As for Israel, we know that around 1 million Russian-speakers have come during the last two decades. We estimate that approximately the same number went all over, the main bulk being here in the United States and Canada. And, unfortunately Germany has what some say is a population close to 200,000.

Do you say “unfortunately” because of a perceived rise in anti-Semitism and far-right politics in Germany?

I am the son of Holocaust survivors, so it’s very difficult for me to understand Jews going to Germany. I say the same thing when I’m interviewed by German Jewish media. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to talk to Jews who emigrate to Germany, or that I don’t want to see them continuing Jewish life, but emotionally it’s difficult for me to understand.

Alexander Zaitchik, a writer living in Brooklyn, is the author of Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance.

And yet new petitions on his behalf have recently begun to circulate, and gain momentum, both in the U.S. Congress and the Israeli Knesset. This is, in large measure, because Pollard’s situation rests on a contradiction: He was guilty of a reprehensible crime, and yet he has been treated abominably. One of the most infamous Jewish criminals in modern times, he is also the victim of the worst act of official American anti-Semitism in our lifetimes. With his round face and shoulder-length hair, Pollard today still looks more like a perpetual grad student than an arch criminal, but he has suffered severely. He has served hard time, mostly in maximum-security prisons, spending years in lockdown 23 hours a day. Websites pleading his case detail his medical ailments, noting that he has “developed diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, pre-glaucoma, and arthritis while in prison.”

From the moment he was sentenced, there were people in the Jewish community—and beyond—who believed Pollard had been unjustly punished and who fought for his release. But they were few and far between, and they often made the wrong case for him. This newest round of argument on Pollard’s behalf is different. For starters, many of his champions have been careful not to lionize him. Rather, they focus on correcting what Judge Stephen Williams, who filed a dissent in one of Pollard’s failed appeals, deemed “a fundamental miscarriage of justice.” Most surprisingly, on September 27, 2010, a former assistant secretary of Defense confirmed many people’s decades-long fears that, at some point, the case had turned personal—and poisonous. Without explaining what prompted him to break his silence, Lawrence Korb, who served in the Pentagon in Reagan’s first term, wrote President Barack Obama: “Based on my first-hand knowledge, I can say with confidence that the severity of Pollard’s sentence is a result of an almost visceral dislike of Israel and the special place it occupies in our foreign policy on the part of my boss at the time, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger.”

Decades into this tragic and pathetic tale, American Jewry’s continuing allergy to defending Pollard says more about our communal fears and the price we are willing to pay for social and political acceptance than it does about Pollard and his crimes.

***

On November 21, 1985, FBI agents arrested Pollard, 31 at the time, just outside Israel’s embassy in Washington. Since June 1984, Pollard had been routinely removing sensitive documents from the Naval Intelligence Support Center on Friday afternoons, passing them to his Israeli handlers for Xeroxing, and blithely returning them on Monday mornings. When first interrogated by the FBI, Pollard called his wife. After he worked the word “cactus” into the conversation, their designated SOS code word, Anne Henderson-Pollard scurried about their house—with a neighbor’s help—sanitizing it. The neighbor subsequently gave the FBI a 70-pound suitcase filled with secret documents, reflecting the volume of Pollard’s activities and sloppiness.

Despite transferring thousands of documents to his Israeli handlers, Pollard failed to gain asylum at the embassy on that day in 1985. Backpedaling furiously, Israel first labeled Pollard a rogue agent, as his handlers worked out of a shadowy organization called Lekem, the Defense Ministry’s Bureau for Scientific Relations. The department, headed by the legendary Mossad man Rafi Eitan, was disbanded shortly after Pollard’s arrest. Israel granted Pollard citizenship in 1995—long after such a move could have done him any good. And it wasn’t until 1998 that Israel finally acknowledged what everyone knew: Pollard had been an authorized agent spying for Israel.

An American Jew’s arrest as an Israeli spy was upsetting enough for American Jews. But Pollard’s defense made the affair excruciating. Minimizing the thousands of dollars he earned, the diamond-and-sapphire ring the Israelis gave him, and his efforts to shop American secrets to South Africa and possibly Pakistan, too, Pollard portrayed himself as a Zionist idealist. Anti-Semites bullied him as a child, he recalled. He claimed that the documents he smuggled out, so crucial to Israeli security, should have been shared freely. And, using a most obnoxious and threatening term, he said a “racial obligation” compelled him, as a Jew, to defend the Jewish state.

Suddenly, amid Ronald Reagan’s resurgence of hard-bodied patriotic machismo, in the age of Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo and Clint Eastwood’s tough-guy “make my day” taunt, a balding, mustachioed, jowly-faced American Jewish nerd in glasses was betraying the red, white, and blue for the blue and white. Pollard’s crimes epitomized Zionism-run-amok, with the ideological implications of Jewish tribal solidarity pushed to its extreme.

“I feel my husband and I did what we were expected to do, and what our moral obligation was as Jews, what our moral obligation was as human beings, and I have no regrets about that,” Anne Pollard said defiantly on 60 Minutes shortly before being sentenced, one of many arrogant, self-destructive moves the couple made back then. While stirring up the terrifying “dual loyalty” charge—far more terrifying to Jews than to Irish-Americans and other hyphenated Americans—the Pollards defined every Jew’s ultimate loyalty as being to the Jewish state. Desperately repudiating the charge, the prominent academic Jacob Neusner would declare America to be the true “promised land.”

This American Jewish skittishness regarding Pollard was particularly surprising because by the 1980s American Jews were thriving in America’s suburban meritocracy. Some American Jewish superstars were accented immigrants like former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, Elie Wiesel. But most American Jewish success stories were 100 percent American. Speaking unaccented English, they were supposed to be unscarred psychologically, unapologetically American.

***

American Jews had been here before. Three decades before Pollard made headlines, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s arrest, trial, and conviction as Soviet spies for stealing atomic secrets rendered the American Jews’ nightmare scenario in pinkish hues. But in the 1950s, American Jews were greener, more marginal. Julius Rosenberg represented the intellectual, foreign-born, New York Jew as Communist, at a time when Communism was disproportionately popular among Jews.

With the Rosenbergs—as with the Pollards—the rightness of finding them guilty was often confused with the wrongness of their punishment. The zeal with which they were prosecuted, the way Judge Irving Kaufman presided over their trial, and Ethel Rosenberg’s unjust execution along with her husband, all suggested something deeper in both the American Jewish psyche and the larger American political culture. The American legal establishment particularly enjoyed prosecuting these treasonous Jews, while many American Jews leapt to prove their own loyalty—at the Rosenbergs’ expense.

Just as in the Rosenberg case, the judge presiding over Pollard’s sentencing was swayed to render too harsh a punishment—a decision that kicked up new waves of suspicion and anxiety.

In an effort to keep his wife out of prison, Pollard pleaded guilty to one count of espionage. His wife, Anne, then 26, pleaded guilty to the milder charge of illegally possessing classified documents. In return, the prosecutor asked the judge to punish Pollard with a “substantial number of years in prison.” During the sentencing phase, one voice proved damningly influential. In a secret 46-page-pre-sentencing “damage-assessment memorandum” sent to the judge—and an additional four-page memo that was recently declassified—Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger made a fierce argument. “It is difficult … to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by the defendant in view of the breadth, the critical importance to the U.S., and the high sensitivity of the information he sold to Israel,” wrote Weinberger, before adding—malevolently and unnecessarily—that Pollard’s “loyalty to Israel transcends his loyalty to the United States.”

Judge Aubrey Robinson Jr., of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, sentenced Jonathan Pollard to life in prison and his wife to five years. (After Anne Henderson-Pollard served three-and-a-half years, she was paroled. Jonathan Pollard divorced her so she could rebuild her life without him.) The sentence was surprisingly harsh. By comparison, in 1987 Sgt. Clayton Lonetree, who’d been seduced by a Soviet agent, became the first Marine ever convicted of espionage. His crimes compromised agents and the American embassy in Moscow. Yet a military court—under Weinberger’s direct authority—sentenced Lonetree to 30 years in prison, and he eventually served nine years. Richard Miller, an FBI agent who spied for the Soviets in the 1980s, served 13 years. Spies for other allies, like Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Egypt, and the Philippines, served anywhere from two to four years, with maximum sentences of 10 years. Pollard’s extreme sentence—along with the continuing refusal to free him–has raised questions about official American anti-Semitism and whether Pollard is enduring harsher punishment for the crime of being an American Jew spying for Israel.

Given that neither Weinberger nor Robinson ever explained their actions, the Pollard case remained shrouded in this noxious mystery. Years later, Weinberger would skip over the case in his memoirs and, when asked about the omission, would dismiss the Pollard case as a “very minor matter.” But it’s clear that his accusation that Pollard committed “treason”—and harmed the nation—had a devastating impact.

In his recent letter, Lawrence Korb suggested that Weinberger, his former boss, had exaggerated the damage Pollard caused and that an anti-Semitic bias distorted the case. From the start, some speculated that Weinberger, who had Jewish grandparents but was a devout Episcopalian, sacrificed Pollard to exorcise his own ancestral demons. There was something about this pudgy, sloppy, unapologetic Jewish spy for Israel that repulsed Weinberger. Weinberger was also one of the Reagan Administration’s leading Israel skeptics. Caught in a power struggle with the pro-Israel Secretary of State George Shultz, Weinberger usually viewed the Jewish state as more albatross than asset.

More benign observers guessed that the secrets Pollard spilled did more damage to U.S. interests than Pollard or the Israelis suggested. Perhaps, some argued, Russian spies secured key codes thanks to Israeli-based KGB agents. Others assumed Pollard received instructions from a higher-level mole who remains unexposed. After Aldrich Ames’ arrest for spying in 1994, some speculated that Weinberger and others may have blamed Pollard for the damage Ames had actually caused, including the deaths of as many as 10 CIA assets. The author John Loftus and others theorized that Ames, who was a top CIA counter-intelligence official, probably pinned his own crimes on Pollard. In 1995, Moment magazine editor Hershel Shanks would quote Loftus quoting naval intelligence “sources” who admitted that “90 percent of the things we accused [Pollard] of stealing, he didn’t even have access to.”

***

After Pollard’s sentencing, New York Times columnist William Safire warned that Pollard encouraged “anti-Semites who charge that Jews everywhere are at best afflicted with dual loyalty and at worst are agents of a vast fifth column.” Issuing a personal declaration of independence from Israel, Safire proclaimed: “American supporters of Israel cannot support wrongdoing here or there. In matters of religion and culture, many of those supporters are American Jews, but in matters affecting national interest and ultimate loyalty, the stonewalling leaders of Israel will learn to think of us as Jewish Americans.”

But one keen observer of American Jewry, the political scientist Daniel Elazar, noticed that it was American Jews—and not their non-Jewish neighbors—who were actually raising the dual-loyalty specter, “apparently in the hope of preventing the issue from surfacing by raising the charge in order to deny it. Even more frequently, it was raised by Jews in the media, most of whom were highly assimilated but still apparently needed to demonstrate their ‘bona fides’ as Americans.” Elazar concluded: “The level of American Jewish insecurity is astounding.”

American Jews still viewed themselves and their community as on probation in the United States, with their ultimate acceptance conditional on good behavior. This pathology would be stated clearly, if unconsciously, years later, by one of the highest-ranking Jews in American history, who served his country nobly as director of naval intelligence from 1978 to 1982 and yanked Pollard’s security clearance—temporarily—years before the spying began. Rear Admiral Sumner Shapiro sounded like a scared yid when discussing Pollard. Annoyed at fringe American Jewish groups that defended Pollard, Shapiro told the Washington Post in 1998: “We work so hard to establish ourselves and to get where we are, and to have somebody screw it up … and then to have Jewish organizations line up behind this guy and try to make him out a hero of the Jewish people, it bothers the hell out of me.”

All minorities want to celebrate their tribal successes as reflecting the best of their people without being tarred when one of their own acts poorly. And given the torturous history of anti-Semitism, American Jews feel this intensely. We circulate lists of Jewish Nobel prize winners, delighting in each American Jewish success, using Jewish achievements to validate our rich but complex Jewish baggage. And while we reserve the right to cringe when a Bernard Madoff becomes the modern face of the greedy Jew or a Jonathan Pollard becomes the modern face of the traitorous Jew, we also reserve the right to object when our neighbors make similar leaps from the one bad apple to the whole bunch.

Nearly two years after Pollard’s arrest, with the sentencing returning the case to the headlines, the Israeli academic Shlomo Avineri zeroed in on this American Jewish insecurity—and inconsistency. Writing in the Jerusalem Post, first condemning Pollard as a traitor and his own government as clumsy, Avineri mocked the “nervousness, insecurity, and even cringing” of American Jews. Playing the role of the abrasive Israeli—or biblical prophet—Avineri wrote: “Today, American Jewish leaders by their protestations of over-zealous loyalty to the United States at a moment when no one is really questioning it, are saying that America in the long run is no different from France and Germany. When you have to over-identify, there is no other proof needed that you think that your non-Jewish neighbors are looking askance at your Americanism. You are condemned by your own protestations of loyalty and flag-waving.” At a time when Israel’s actions made it unpopular with many American Jews, Avineri’s aggressively Zionist analysis only exacerbated tensions.

***

The controversy–and speculation–peaked during the Wye River negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians in October 1998. Benjamin Netanyahu, in his first round as Israel’s prime minister, lobbied hard for Pollard’s release. President Bill Clinton seemed set to free him as a sweetener to Israel until the CIA director, George Tenet, threatened to resign. Such power politicking against a spy who had been imprisoned for over a decade reinforced both camps’ speculation. Those who fear anti-Semitism say this irrational move reflects a deep aversion in the WASP-iest bastions of the American government. Those who believe Pollard did more damage than we know insist that the usually mild-mannered Tenet had a good reason to be so rigid.

To Israeli settlers, Pollard’s case symbolizes the anti-Semitism of even benign non-Jewish polities such as the United States and the weak-kneed appeasement policies of successive Israeli governments, which have failed to free Pollard. The most popular pro-Pollard bumper sticker in Israel simply appeals for Pollard to come home “haBaytah,” but a few years ago one poster challenged: “BUSH: FREE YOUR CAPTIVE.” This poster not only targeted a good friend of Israel’s, George W. Bush, but it pictured Pollard with the young Israeli Hamas is holding, Gilad Shalit. The implicit comparisons, between the innocent Shalit and the guilty Pollard, as well as between the democratic United States and the terrorist-state Hamas, were offensive. While the right’s support has sustained Pollard emotionally, it may have made his get-out-of-jail card even harder to get. The Israeli right is unpopular with both the American Jewish community and the American political establishment, making Pollard even more unappealing.

***

However unappealing he may be, the time has come to free Jonathan Pollard—not as some sop to Israelis but as a matter of justice. Holding an individual hostage to the vagaries of the never-ending Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic process is cruel and unusual punishment. The Pollard case has become a question of justice, American-style, unrelated to American-Israeli relations. And justice when applied too zealously becomes unjust. For decades, the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil-rights organizations have taught that we take up certain criminals’ cases not because we like the criminals or excuse their crimes but because, at a certain point, it becomes the right thing to do.

Imagine another case in which an accused man served a disproportionately long sentence after being tried in a court where direct pressure was applied by the secretary of Defense for reasons that may well have been mistaken or personally motivated. If there was another such case, one imagines that it would attract lots of attention from the ACLU and other groups concerned with the civil liberties of Americans. So why are they silent? More to the point, why are we silent?

If the Pollard case represents the worst of American anti-Semitism, then, by historic standards, anti-Semitism American style is mild indeed. Still, that American Jews, despite their long record of defending the underdog, still hestitate to champion Pollard’s release now, suggests that we—like Jonathan Pollard—remain victims of the “astounding” insecurity Elazar witnessed two decades ago.

Gil Troy, a professor of history at McGill University in Montreal and a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, is the author of six books on American history and Why I Am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today.

Israel is more corrupt than two-thirds of the other member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index, compiled by anti-corruption group Transparency International, found that Israel fared better than fellow OECD countries Portugal, Hungary, and Turkey, but worse than Chile and Slovenia. “The list of corruption investigations in Israel in recent years reads like a Who’s Who of the political elite,” writes the Los Angeles Times. “It includes every prime minister of the last 14 years, two previous presidents, two past Jerusalem mayors, numerous Cabinet ministers and one recently convicted felon who is still serving in the Knesset, or parliament.”

That “politics” and “corruption” often go hand-in-hand in Israel can be seen even in the way Israelis use the word “politi,” the Hebraicized equivalent of “political.” The word generally signals that the subject is domestic politics, political infighting, corruption, or all of the above.

Perhaps the best example of the use of the word “politi” to refer to corruption has to do with the convicted felon whom the L.A. Times is alluding to: Tzachi Hanegbi, a former official who held several different ministerial posts in three different governments and has been accused of making dozens of “minuyim politi’im,” or political appointments. Here, the use of the Hebrew word for “political” to describe the appointments seems to imply unethical or illegal behavior.

Although many politicians are thought to engage in cronyism, Hanegbi was particularly brazen. A Likud campaign ad for the 2002 party primary was headlined “News flash—Minister Tzachi Hanegbi holds the national record for appointing Likud members,” and listed the names of 75 Likud members it said Hanegbi had appointed to the Environment Ministry, which he headed at the time. At the bottom of the ad, Hanegbi, who has since crossed over from Likud to Kadima, was quoted as saying: “I confess to the charge.”

But despite the admission, the court decided—in the country’s first trial over minuyim politi’im—that such appointments were not a crime before October 2004, when the attorney general officially prohibited them. Hanegbi was acquitted of the cronyism charges but convicted of perjury related to his testimony about the Likud ad.

If Hanegbi is found guilty of moral turpitude during sentencing next week, he will be forced to retire from the Knesset, where he has served since 1988, but his legacy won’t be quickly forgotten. Not just because so many people probably still hold the jobs he handed out so liberally, but also because his name appears on a special section of the Knesset Website: A dynasty section it calls “Family Ties Between Knesset Members,” which features 70 pairs of family members, like Hanegbi and his mother, Geula Cohen, who have served in the Knesset.

Lest you think the conviction has made Hanegbi a pariah among his fellow politicians, or politika’im, shortly after his conviction, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yitzhak Navon, Israel’s fifth president, asked the court not to find Hanegbi guilty of moral turpitude—and Kadima activists floated the idea that Hanegbi was the perfect person to lead their, er, political party.

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: Abducted
‘The Peace Process’
No Confidence
‘After the Holidays’

In the two-and-a-half years since J Street launched, under the banner of “pro-Israel, pro-peace,” two competing narratives have emerged about the group. One is that by channeling the energy of the anti-war, anti-Bush Jewish left into the cause of Middle East peace, using grassroots organizing tactics borrowed from the playbook developed by MoveOn.org and put to good use by the Obama campaign, Ben-Ami and company have given voice to the inchoate frustration of many American Jews with the impasse between the Israelis and the Palestinians and their frustration with hawkish pro-Israel organizations, namely AIPAC, which was so famously expressed earlier this year in an essay by Peter Beinart of the New America Foundation. The opposing view is that J Street is a front for Democratic political operatives aligned with Obama, and potentially to his left on foreign policy, who hope to exploit the naive sympathies of liberal Jews for the political purpose of undermining the existing Washington consensus on Israel, thereby weakening AIPAC and other Jewish groups whose power depends in part on the perception that they speak on behalf of American Jewry.

Both versions are, to a greater or lesser degree, true. Last month, using an unredacted tax return that appeared on a public website, the Washington Times reported that J Street receives funding from the billionaire investor and social activist George Soros, a longtime critic of Israel, Zionism, and the American Jewish establishment. Though insiders had already assumed as much, the controversial revelation showed that Soros and his family gave J Street $245,000 in fiscal year 2008 as the first installment of a three-year, $750,000 commitment. Critics pounced on Ben-Ami, accusing him of repeatedly lying in interviews about Soros’ involvement, and intentionally obfuscating on the group’s website, which in a section titled “Myths and Facts about J Street” denies claims that Soros was a founder or “primary funder” of the group. “J Street’s Executive Director has stated many times that he would in fact be very pleased to have funding from Mr. Soros and the offer remains open to him to be a funder should he wish to support the effort,” the website said. In an update posted after the scandal erupted, the organization reiterated that Soros did not found J Street—though his senior Washington adviser, Morton Halperin, a senior State Department official in the Clinton Administration and a longtime critic of Israeli policy, was deeply involved in J Street’s inception and continues to serve as one of three members of the lobby’s executive committee.

Yet it remains the case that Ben-Ami has managed, in a remarkably short time, to build something unprecedented in the decades-long history of leftwing American Jewish activism: an organization with the capacity to raise millions of dollars to win political support for ideas about Israel and the peace process that are frequently at odds with the positions articulated by organs of the Jewish establishment. Whatever one thinks of J Street’s policies—which, among other things, include support for East Jerusalem becoming the capital of a future Palestinian state and firm opposition to new construction in the settlements until negotiations are complete—the group has succeeded in provoking a tremendous amount of debate about the political and emotional relationships of American Jews to Israel. “They have built up this thing, which is just this side of miraculous,” said Mark Pelavin, associate director of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center.

Ben-Ami and the other progenitors of J Street stepped into the political vacuum left by the perennial inability of established leftwing groups—Americans for Peace Now, the Israel Policy Forum, Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, Ameinu, and a long list of long-defunct predecessors—to transcend policy disagreements, clashing egos, tiny budgets, and, according to many veteran activists, a general unwillingness to pick public fights with other Jewish groups. “I tried over the years to get the left to coalesce, and you’d be better off herding cats,” said Charney Bromberg, the former director of Meretz USA, the American branch of the leftwing movement also represented by an Israeli political party of the same name. “We were being totally outgunned by the right, and we consoled ourselves with the idea that we were in the right.” Now, Bromberg went on, “J Street has totally eclipsed the other organizations combined.”

The result is that Ben-Ami is now the de facto leader of the American Jewish left, and his counterparts at other organizations working on peace-related issues feel compelled to support him. “J Street has to succeed, and it has to grow,” said one member of the “peace camp” in Washington. “Now that it exists, we can’t afford to let it fail, because that would be seen as the failure of the left.”

***

J Street’s supporters are quick to point out that despite its meteoric rise, which was helped along by a generous 2009 profile in the New York Times Magazine, its budget is still just a fraction of the $60 million AIPAC attracted in the fiscal year 2008, the most recent for which documents are available—about $5 million this year across all operations, according to Ben-Ami, including a $500,000 grant from Jeff Skoll, a former eBay executive, who has partnered with Soros on recent initiatives in the Middle East. It’s harder for J Street to claim the role of scrappy David to AIPAC’s financial Goliath in light of Soros’ financial commitment, anchored by Halperin’s active role in the group. “He’s not in the office every day, poring over stuff,” Ben-Ami told me last week, in the last of a series of conversations this summer and fall, of his relationship with Halperin. “Basically we email, definitely every day.”

Indeed, according to Ben-Ami, the germ of the J Street idea sprouted in discussions with Halperin during the 2004 presidential election, when both men worked on Howard Dean’s campaign. “From day one I’d been talking to him,” Ben-Ami said. “He was almost the first person I talked to about this.” The vision that emerged from those conversations, and in other conversations with the marketing strategist David Fenton, the former Rolling Stone PR man and social activist for whose firm Ben-Ami worked after the campaign, bore obvious hallmarks of lessons learned from Dean’s run. The most important was the decision to abandon the humble fundraising attitudes of the left. “It’s a self-defeating world outlook that says, ‘We’re some poor minority backwater that will never raise money,’ ” Ben-Ami told me earlier this year. “We said, $10, $20, $30 million. You’ve got to have ambition.”

Ben-Ami set out asking for $1 million from initial donors—at around the same time that Benjamin Netanyahu was trolling the ranks of wealthy American Jews for contributions to his 2007 election campaign for the Likud leadership. Netanyahu’s target list, published last week by the Israeli paper Yedioth Ahronoth, included pillars of established Jewish groups like AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents: Sheldon Adelson, Haim Saban, Ronald Lauder, Ira Rennert, James Tisch, Leslie Wexner, and Mortimer Zuckerman. The hidden contributors revealed on J Street’s tax return show that Ben-Ami tapped instead into a parallel establishment with a great deal of influence both in Democratic politics and Jewish life. J Street received $25,000 from S. Daniel Abraham, the billionaire founder of Slim-Fast who is a longtime Clinton supporter and advocate for Middle East peace; $75,000 from Alan Sagner, a real-estate developer and former head of New York’s Port Authority whose daughter, Deborah, herself a progressive political activist, is on J Street’s board; and $25,000 from Robert Arnow, a major contributor to New York’s Federation who also helped found the Jewish Week. “I’ve been a radical all my life, somewhat, and I was imbued with the idea of another organization challenging the policies,” Arnow, now 86, explained in a phone interview. “I still have faith—I’ll give them a year or two and then we’ll see.”

J Street’s tax filing also included a $25,000 donation from Martin Bunzl, a Rutgers philosophy professor with long involvement in the political side of the peace movement, and $10,000 from Alan Solomont, a former Democratic National Committee finance chair who was a board member of the Israel Policy Forum during the Clinton years and is now the U.S. ambassador to Spain. There was also a $5,000 contribution from Hollywood heavyweights Phil Rosenthal, the producer of Everybody Loves Raymond, and his wife, Monica. And there was Elaine Attias, a feisty 86-year-old Democratic activist from Beverly Hills whose parents, Edward and Anna Mitchell, were such active and early donors to Israel that they became, according to the Los Angeles Times, the first Americans to have a square named in their honor in Jerusalem. “I’ve been involved with the Israeli situation for a long time,” Attias explained to me. “J Street was an opportunity to voice our concerns and express our support for the kind of Israel we want it to be.”

Continue reading: Breira, Clinton, and the J in J Street. Or view as a single page.

“The State of Israel has reached the height of fascism,” says Haneen Zoubi, a member of the Knesset representing Balad, an Arab Israeli party. The oath’s author, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, charges that it is precisely those like Zoubi who make the oath necessary. Zoubi was aboard the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish-sponsored boat that attempted to run the naval blockade of Gaza. The ship violated international law by refusing to respect a blockade and then attacked an Israeli boarding party, which would make Zoubi, were she a citizen of, say, the United States while it was at war, subject to a number of charges, including conspiracy and treason, and liable to execution by the state. And she’s not alone: Some of her fellow Knesset members from Arab Israeli political parties have become notorious in recent years for actions that no Western government would tolerate from its citizens—let alone from legislators who are privy to government decisions and counsels. Ahmed Tibi, an Arab Israeli member of the Knesset, served as a close political adviser to Yasser Arafat as the Palestinian leader planned to undermine the Oslo Accords and murder hundreds of Israelis in the second Intifada. Tibi’s colleague, Azmi Bishara, resigned from the Knesset and fled to Syria in 2007 to avoid facing charges of espionage and treason for giving Hezbollah detailed information about optimal rocket targets inside Israel during the Second Lebanon War.

The idea that mandating an oath of allegiance for new citizens is a sign of Israeli fascism is part of the delegitimization campaign against Israel. It fits so well with media blather about the decline of Israeli democracy—and the nightmarish scariness of Israel’s foreign minister—that critics have conveniently ignored the fact that such oaths are normal fare in every major Western democracy. The U.S. oath of allegiance for new citizens, for example, requires new Americans to “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty”; promise to “support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic”; promise to “bear arms” and “perform noncombatant” service at the direction of the U.S. government; and swear that one takes the oath “freely and without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion” in the name of God Almighty himself, all of which makes swearing an oath of allegiance to the democratic Jewish State of Israel seem like pretty weak stuff.

The fact that Jews who become new citizens under the Law of Return are exempt from taking the oath is wrongly cited as proof of the inherent racism of the proposed new law. Countries that allow individuals not born in the country to establish citizenship on the basis of blood and cultural ties—a doctrine known as jus sanguinis, or “right of blood”—commonly have a different citizenship procedure for those citizens than for other immigrants. Most European countries—and many other countries—rely on jus sanguinis as the foundation for citizenship. In Bulgaria, persons of very distant Bulgarian origin can become citizens immediately upon arrival in the country without any waiting period and without giving up their current citizenship. The same is true in Croatia. China has a similar policy. And that only takes us through the Cs.

But the furor over the oath is more than just an index of the increasing tension between Israel and its Arab citizens, and of a combination of rancid anti-Israeli sentiment and sheer ignorance that makes news coverage of the Middle East so difficult to read. Because this is the Middle East, the uproar over the oath of allegiance also reveals the true dynamics that are shaping the region.

Many observers have noted that the oath coincides with Israeli demands that their Palestinian interlocutors acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state. This is broadly correct: Israeli leadership expects that negotiations entered into with the Palestinian Authority will lead to a final settlement, that at the end of the process, there will be a Palestinian Arab state and a Jewish one, and there will be no interminable haggling over the question of Jewish sovereignty in Israel.

And the reason Jerusalem wants Palestinian leaders Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad to acknowledge the Jews’ right to a homeland is not merely a feel-good exercise in Middle East tolerance and coexistence, or to salve the national insecurities of the Jews. Rather, the Israeli demand is a referendum on Palestinian sovereignty: If PA officials can’t declare that Israel is a Jewish state without the very legitimate fear of assassination from rivals like Hamas, or state actors like Iran and Syria, then they are incapable of exercising the monopoly on legitimate violence that is the fundamental requirement of nation-building. Jerusalem is highlighting the fact that without the authority to make such a statement, the Palestinian leadership cannot build a Palestinian state; therefore, any treaty the PA signs with Israel is worthless.

It is clear that this logic is lost on Washington. After all, dreamers are not susceptible to disenchantment with the dream worlds that they themselves have built. Even before President Barack Obama came to office, the Americans were pumping so much cash, arms, prestige, and hope into the Palestinian Authority that they convinced themselves that Palestinian institutions would one day lead to a state. U.S.-built Palestinian institutions, like the economy, security forces, and the prime minister, are therefore premised on a questionable assumption: that what the Palestinian people really want is a functioning state side-by-side with Israel.

Statehood represents only one form of political organization; and as the E.U.’s bureaucratic elite will attest, the nation-state is not necessarily the best or even most progressive form of mass politics. But Washington does believe in old-fashioned nation-states, and it is U.S. money and power that gets to call the shots in the Middle East—until the region itself votes otherwise. Yet post-Saddam Iraq is clearly not going to be a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. Rather, the wars in Iraq have revealed the sectarian nature of the region, where the designation “Arab” is meant to disguise that there is no unified Arab nation, but rather Sunnis, Shiites, Druze, Maronites, Alawites, Kurds, Greek Orthodox, as well as Jews. Often these sects are at war with each other in various levels of intensity within what are now state borders, like Iraq or Lebanon. The French and British are blamed for the way they drew the post-World War I borders, but these accusations ignore the fact that all borders in the Middle East have always been random and malleable, depending on factors like conquest and population transfers, some voluntary and others not. For all the Middle East rhetoric about land as a birthright, the people of the region know when it’s time to go—because the land will no longer support them or some greater power is threatening to wipe them out.

Right now it is Middle East Christians who are leaving Iraq and Lebanon, but they won’t be the last. Consider the Druze, a sect that started in Egypt in the 11th century and moved to the Levant—Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Lebanon, where their population is largest. Lebanon’s Druze chieftain Walid Jumblatt believes that the sect’s time there is running out; Lebanon will be left to the Sunnis and Shiites to fight over, and eventually they will draw their own borders. The same will happen in Iraq, and perhaps much sooner, as the country is partitioned, while the Kurds will go their own way as soon as they believe they can weather likely wars with the Turks and Persians. Someday Alawi rule in Syria will come to an end, and if they’re lucky this minority sect considered heretical by the Sunnis will break away in time to the Mediterranean coast, where they’ve carved out an escape hatch state for themselves. The East Bankers of Jordan know that the West Bankers, the Palestinians, will outnumber them someday and Jordan will become either part or the whole of Palestine. In other words, Israel’s foreign minister is the one man in the Middle East who is publicly discussing an issue that everyone else in the region is also confronting in the wake of the Iraqi war—internal sectarian conflict where one side threatens to topple the political order. For example, despite the rhetoric of resistance, Hezbollah’s war with Israel on behalf of Iran and Syria that threatens to destroy the Lebanese state is no less treason than Azmi Bishara’s selling information to Damascus. The Arab regimes, regardless of their public criticism of the oath and Lieberman, are watching closely, because Israel’s treatment of the issue may well shape how they deal with their own sectarian issues—or at least we can hope they learn from Jerusalem rather than Saddam, who laid waste to Iraqi Shia and Kurds.

The choice the Israelis face is maybe not so tough, after all. And even if it is tough, so what? What Frenchman thinks that it is inherently part of his national identity to be fearful of war with Germany? And yet for reasons of geography, ethnicity, and history, it has been so. It would be nice if Palestinians wanted to make peace with Israel on terms that allowed for Israel’s secure existence as a Jewish state, but the recent historical record and regional dynamics offer little assurance that such a blessed day is coming anytime soon. If Zionism must not allow for transferring Arabs or ruling over them, then is it about Jews picking up and leaving when a Jewish state in the Middle East doesn’t look exactly like local democracy in Vermont? Based on the historical evidence, the Jews of Israel will continue to try their hardest to appease U.S. policymakers—hopefully led by those, like Avigdor Lieberman, who understand what it takes to maintain their national existence in the region where they have made their home.

The idea itself—a heterogeneous and democratic nation of Israelis and Palestinians, Christians, Muslims, and Jews, stretching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River—was far from new. With Israel’s left-wing parties reduced to electoral rubble, the center of gravity among many committed progressives has shifted in recent years toward support for the so-called one-state solution. But the speaker wasn’t a radicalized leftist; he was Uri Elitzur, formerly the head of the settlement movement, Benjamin Netanyahu’s onetime chief of staff, and one of the most stringent thinkers of Israel’s religious right.

Anyone baffled by Elitzur’s speech didn’t have to wait long for clarifications. A few months later, writing in Nekuda, the official magazine of the settlement movement, Elitzur used an inflammatory term to describe the reality Israel would likely face if it prolongs its occupation of the West Bank: apartheid. If Israel wants to absolve itself of its sins and solve its problems, Elitzur argued, the only feasible option is absorbing the West Bank and making the 2.5 million people who live there full-fledged citizens of the state of Israel.

Among the right’s intellectuals, Elitzur is hardly alone in his beliefs. Earlier this year, Moshe Arens, Netanyahu’s political mentor and one of the Likud’s most hawkish elders, published an article in Haaretz supporting a similar position. Israel, he wrote, “should apply its laws on Judea and Samaria,” as the right calls the Occupied Territories. Reuven Rivlin, the current speaker of the Knesset, sounded a similar note when he told a reporter earlier this year that he “would rather have Palestinians as citizens of this country over dividing the land up.” Others—including Emily Amrousi, the settler movement’s former spokesperson—have expressed similar views.

Ironically, these same views were, until recently, considered as falling outside the realm of polite political conversation. When historian Tony Judt made a case for a binational state in a 2003 New York Review of Books essay, the outcry was considerable. Calling the essay “haughty and ugly,” Leon Wieseltier, writing in The New Republic, argued that “a bi-national state is not the alternative for Israel. It is the alternative to Israel.”

Yet the epithets that were readily hurled at Judt—anti-Semite, anti-Israeli, self-hating Jew—could not so easily be lobbed at Arens and Amrousi, at Rivlin and Elitzur. These new advocates of binationalism are enjoying an attentive audience. The idea they champion—the long-reviled one-state solution—now deserves serious examination.

***

From the narrow perspective of political science, bereft of ethnic and theological complications, the one-state solution is hard to beat. Having rejected, for the most part, the array of encompassing ideologies that roiled the 20th century—Communism, Totalitarianism, Imperialism—most of the world, with a few notable exceptions, now invests its political energies in the idea of the state as the stage on which we all play out our ambitions and aspirations and the entity to which we all turn for security, comfort, and, often, meaning. The citizens of a modern democratic state, say binationalism’s supporters, needn’t look for meaning anywhere outside the state itself; rather than see themselves as Jews or Muslims or Christians, they argue, Israelis of all ethnicities and religious beliefs need to learn to identify simply as Israeli. If they do so, say the idea’s proponents, they could slowly overcome ancient hatreds, learn to keep the peace and share the power, and build a brave new state that treats all of its citizens equally.

But if the state were to shed its Jewish skin, argue some of binationalism’s critics, wouldn’t bloodshed ensue? Not necessarily, argues Avrum Burg, formerly the chairman of the Jewish Agency and the speaker of the Knesset from 1999 to 2003. Announcing his return to politics last week after a six-year absence, Burg endorsed the one-state solution and advised skeptical Israelis to look to the European Union for inspiration. True, the Italians might still begrudge the French, the French might still suspect the Germans, and the Germans might still contemplate abandoning the union altogether, but these nations tolerate each other nonetheless and sustain their shared enterprise, a kind of collaboration that would have been unthinkable in the trenches of World War I. Just as the old continent learned to put aside animosities and mistrust and enter into a comity of nations, Burg argued, so could Israel eradicate its borders and let its barriers down.

Mention the European example to most Israelis, however, and they would likely scoff at the analogy: If Israel became a unified state—the Hebrew idiom is medinat kol ezracheya, or the state of all its citizens, in stark contrast to the Jewish state—wouldn’t swarms of Palestinians relocate from Lebanon, Gaza, and elsewhere and condemn the Jews to life as a negligible minority? It’s a terrifying scenario, but not an inevitable one: Were the one-state solution to come up for serious discussion, it would not be inconceivable to place strict limitations on immigration, as is the case with most western nations. Rather than allow an endless stream of newcomers, the binational state’s founding fathers could insist on quotas, as Palestine’s British overseers did throughout most of their mandatory rule. They could furthermore demand that anyone proven to partake in violent actions or advocate unrest would not be allowed to enter the state. If this were the case, the new nation could maintain a healthy balance between Arabs and Jews, each group separately administering its own municipalities and religious institutions, and both groups coming together to govern the nation at large.

Such an arrangement most likely would inspire a great deal of good will worldwide, which, in turn, might translate into unprecedented investment. Israel’s already strong industrial base could benefit from a cascade of regional markets opening up to its products. And security expenditure—currently standing at more than $14 billion, which represents 7 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, a grim ratio surpassed only by Oman, Eritrea, Georgia, and Saudi Arabia—would be greatly reduced, freeing up even more resources and flooding the economy with a soaring surplus. Seen through the narrow prism of finance, a binational state is a far more promising prospect than a Jewish one.

The bounties binationalism promises, then, are at least as numerous as the disasters it threatens to evoke. In every rational respect, it is, if not a ready solution, at least an alternative worthy of one’s careful consideration.

That is, unless one happens to be Jewish.

***

There are, of course, scores of interpretations of Judaism, but here is the one to which I subscribe: Judaism is a religion founded upon the notion that God commanded the ancestors of one particular man, Abraham, to inhabit one particular land, Canaan, and there, adhering to the Almighty’s divine laws, establish an independent nation-state that would serve as a shining light to a benighted world.

This may sound like a theological rant, but it makes perfect sense. Divine laws are ephemeral things, and they have little relevance to human existence unless they are somehow tried and proven here on earth. To that end, Judaism, from Abraham onward, promoted the centrality of the Jewish state, a holy kingdom that would be run in accordance with God’s decrees, an intricate series of regulations and prohibitions that govern every facet of life and that, in spirit if not always in practice, is an astonishing agenda of justice and compassion. The Jewish kingdom, at least ideally, would end indentured servitude and ban high-interest loans, protect the poor and care for the beasts, enshrine reason and pursue peace. In short, it would set an example that every other nation would wish to emulate. Take the independent state away from the Jews, and they become nothing but itinerant prophets, full of spirit but devoid of power, the kind of folks one admires but doesn’t necessarily wish to emulate.

A Jewish state, then, isn’t a byproduct of the religion but rather the other way around: the religion was set in place to serve the idea of the Jewish state. When exile brought Jewish sovereignty to an end, Jewish scholarship still concerned itself primarily with questions of statehood. Striking an eschatological note, the Talmud, for example, argued that “there is no difference between this world and the days of the Messiah except [that in the latter there will be no] bondage of foreign powers.” In other words, the only thing the Messiah would do for God’s chosen children is reinstate their political independence. Throughout more than a millennium of exile, the homeland beckoned, giving us hope, keeping us alive.

The Emancipation, backlit by the radiance of the Enlightenment, threatened to extinguish the yearning for political independence for good—Moses Mendelssohn captured this spirit when he claimed that “the messiah, for whom we prayed these thousands of years, has appeared and our fatherland has been given to us. The messiah is freedom, our fatherland is Germany.” Zionism emerged as an inevitable response, recapturing all the spiritual energies that the Emancipation set loose. At its core, Zionism was nothing but the old dream stated anew: to establish once again the Jewish kingdom in the Promised Land. This is why Zionism was able to attract so many divergent thinkers, from the radically Marxist A.D. Gordon to the messianic Abraham Isaac Kook; however different their visions for the nature of the yearned-for Jewish state, they nonetheless all understood a Jewish state to be an instrument of salvation.

***

The proponents of binationalism, of course, would likely disagree with this interpretation. To them, Zionism’s very diversity is proof that one may advocate all sorts of solutions to the problems plaguing Israel and still remain firmly within its fold. Reuven Rivlin argues that Zionism is first and foremost interested in territory, while former Knesset Speaker Avrum Burg maintains that it is, at heart, a liberal movement that should give up its powers rather than compromise its progressive values. They are both wrong. If—as those who preach the one-state solution from the right argue—the unity of the land and access to its holiest places is key, there is no real reason to insist that the land’s governors be Jewish. One could imagine a wholly Palestinian state in which Jews have the right to settle wherever they pleased. And if—as binationalism’s leftist advocates claim—Zionism’s goal is to promote democracy, they needn’t insist on remaining in the ancient homeland; a vast stretch of Montana, one imagines, or some swath of the Andes, would provide just as good of a backdrop for Jews wishing to be free and just. Both of these solutions are acceptable, yet neither corresponds with the core principle on which Jewish history pivots: that of the Jewish state.

Anyone for whom Israel represents not an abstract political entity but a historical necessity and a spiritual foundation would do well to unequivocally reject the one-state solution. The alternative, granted, isn’t as exhilarating. The Jewish state, even given the possibility of successful peace talks in the near future, groans under the weight of unbearable burdens, not the least of which is the struggle to balance Judaism’s traditions and democracy’s dictates. But it’s this same struggle that has defined us for millennia. It’s the struggle that made us who we are. Abandoning it for whatever reason might sound temporarily tempting, but we can’t afford the cost.

Since its founding in 1965, the Israel Museum has grown into the largest cultural institution in Israel, with an encyclopedic (Snyder prefers the word “universal”) collection of over 500,000 objects, including the most extensive holdings of Holy Land archeology in the world. As an independent nonprofit that receives only about 10 percent of its $25 million annual operating budget from the state, the museum is not required to respond to national directives, although it received $17.5 million in government “matching support” for its renovation, to complement the $80 million raised from 20 private donors, most of whom live in New York City. (The museum paid for a small group of U.S. journalists, including me, to visit Jerusalem in mid-July—providing our flights, lodging, and meals—so that we might help get the word out.) The museum’s donor base, Snyder said, makes it more like the Met than like the Smithsonian or National Gallery. He is proud, as is a good portion of the Israeli press, that the renovation was completed on time and under budget, with a design that respects and enhances Kollek’s vision of a temple of high Western Art shaped by the specificity of its ethnographic origins and able to tap international networks for support.

Considering the many pressures on such a renewal project—political, financial, and cultural—Snyder, a white-haired, professorial director, could have easily turned Kollek’s old fashioned grandeur into a turgid mess. Instead, he brought in architect James Carpenter after reading a New York Times article praising his proposed fluid galleries connecting Santiago Calatrava’s transportation hub in lower Manhattan to already existing subway structures. Where the old design of the museum required visitors to endure a sun-baked uphill trudge from the parking lot vaguely reminiscent of the approach to Masada, Carpenter excelled at moving people and light through space in ways that the Times called “at times, magical.” Carpenter’s relatively unknown firm further satisfied the need for something less than a signature statement and more of a craftsman-like subordination to what was already there—a challenging task in a place like Jerusalem, where signature architectural statements abound and ideas about what was already there can be casus belli.

By most any measure, though, Carpenter’s adaptation—built by Chinese, Russian, and Palestinian laborers—is a success. What was once an austere jumble of concrete blocks meant to suggest an Arab village has been transformed into a spacious, easily navigable exhibit space, with clean lines, surprising views, and shade. Carpenter has added glass boxes shaded by transparent stacks of cast terracotta louvers to Alfred Mansfeld and Dora Gad’s original cement Modernist structures and, by displacing tons of Jerusalem stone and dirt, made it easier for old people and youth groups, who make up a majority of the visitors, to get up the hill. The semi-underground passage from the entrance pavilions to the central axis of the main galleries is fed natural light through prismatic glass and waterfalls. The effect is magical.

Inside, the sparely proportional aesthetic of the design firm Pentagram—refreshers of The Atlantic, the New York Jets football team, and other aging institutions struggling to keep up with changing times—has been brought to bear on the renewed Bronfman Archaeological Wing displays, which are now spare and well-proportioned. Where there was once a surfeit of decaying exhibits, there are currently 8,000 remarkable objects displayed, now properly lit, individuated, and tagged. Snyder considers himself “blessed with the privilege of interpreting the material culture” rather than obligated to put it all out there. As one curator put it, the redesign allows visitors to see much without looking at a lot.

The newly configured galleries lead visitors through a continuous, single narrative created out of carefully curated selections from the museum’s store of material objects and centered on a space dubbed the Cardo—the namesake for which, it could be noted, is the Roman remnant used now as the “center” of the Old City’s Jewish Quarter, not the physical center of the old city or the city of Jerusalem as a whole. From the Cardo visitors are shuttled into the three main galleries, one wing each for archeology, Jewish art and life, and fine art. Each series of galleries is laid out to encourage review of the collection in a single direction, and the effect of the narrative that is pressed on viewers is undeniably mind-blowing: Archeology takes us from a million-year-old set of wild bull horns, the “exodus from Africa,” and the dawn of civilization, through Canaan, Biblical Israel, Roman rule, Islamic conquest, and the Crusades (with minor detours for the “neighboring cultures” of Egypt, Greece, and a few others), and deposits us right at the door to Judaica. That gallery, in turn, transforms exceptional ceremonial objects in Jewish life into the standard-bearers of a culture at once apart but connected—the bridge between “the story toward one God” (as one curator described her archeological display) and the grand Western art-school narrative of art for art’s sake.

“It does give you a kind of subliminal, self-guiding unfolding,” Snyder said. Along the wall of the Cardo, at the entrance to the archeology wing, sits a 7th-century lintel from Galilee that features a Hebrew inscription from Deuteronomy 28 that neatly underscores the museum director’s point: “Blessed shall you be when you arrive, and blessed shall you be when you depart.”

What exactly lies between the twinned blessings of Deuteronomy and high modernism is hard to fathom. One thing that the framers of the museum’s narrative cannot be accused of is trading on the dead. A pair of odd videos describe Israel’s annual memorial holidays, with a brief mention of Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day, but in general, save for a scattering of pieces of contemporary art, the Israel Museum steers clear of the Holocaust and Israel’s wars, the same way that New York’s Museum of Modern Art avoids un-aesthetic entanglements with negro slavery or the Civil War.

The narrative beyond the triumphant issuing-forth of Judaism into the history of Western fine art is remarkably ignorant and parochial. Africa, Rome, and Greece are mere back-story to the history of the Jews, who exist in all times and all places at the unmoving center of the world: “The Roman conqueror brought with him many cultural, political, and technological innovations. These blended in with the fabric of local life, but frequently fomented unrest.” Visitors will learn that Islam, Egypt, and the short-lived Christian Crusaders were accomplished, somewhat quaint, and ultimately defunct local cultures that “neighbored” or “influenced” the Jewish people. In the Iron Age, we’re told, swords were beaten into ploughshares—the importance of several thousand years of human history being reduced to a single prophetic aphorism. Nearby, Pentagram has used one of their signature lowercase pull quotes to decorate a display case with the motto “so goes humanity” in Hebrew, English, and Arabic, as if rehearsing for a future commission designing hip new make-up counters for the Body Shop.

While the museum’s lack of imagination about the rest of the world might in theory be explained or compensated for by a profound devotion to Jewish history and religious experience, that is not the case here. The museum presents splendid objects like a 15th-century Mishneh Torah from Northern Italy and a man’s hooded cape from the Atlas Mountains, but the manner of their presentation here strips them of the meaning of God or the practice of belief. Ritual objects are transformed into “ceremonial art” without the significance or the beauty of ceremony. There are kippahs, and there are 120 Hanukkah lamps from 15 countries, each neatly fetishized in individual glass vitrine, but not a single pair of tefillin, whose weird, strappy forms have nothing in common with the shiny polished metal forms of Brancusi and might raise questions about God and prayer that would clearly make the museum and its imagined audience uncomfortable. It is as if a Reform rabbi of yore had brought the pseudo-ecumenical, all-welcoming approach of the suburban temple of the 1960s to the modern pseudo-religion of the museum.

World Jewry is represented in comparative arrays of ceremonial and cultural objects and most notably in four beautifully restored synagogues from India, northern Italy, southern Germany, and, now, 18th-century Suriname, all reconstructed like the Met’s Temple of Dendur. Yet the way that these displays are framed makes it seem less like the scattering of Jews was the result of relentless persecution and more the work of a Greek-style god sowing plentiful Jewish seed in order to enrich the many lands of His creation. This ecumenical tone extends to the exhibit of a single exposed Torah scroll: Its explanatory card is titled, “What is a Torah?”

This effort at inclusion (Welcome, dear foreigner! We Jews are happy to explain who we are!) runs both ways, to comic effect. Where does Israeli art fit in the pantheon of Western Fine Art? Does work by Shahar Marcus belong next to a minor Jackson Pollock, dear reader? If the Shahar Marcus in question was a 2006 video of the Israeli artist “dropping” ingredients for a sabich onto a giant canvas-like pita, would that sway your opinion? A Giacometti leads to a 17th-century leopard head mask from Benin, which leads to Ohad Meromi’s “The Boy From South Tel Aviv,” a 20-foot-tall sculpture of a black-skinned naked youth that I imagine might have been commissioned by a brothel in Leipzig. And so it goes.

Right across from the broad entrance to the Edmund and Lily Safra Fine Arts Wing is a room for modern Israeli art that has been divided by its curator into its three walls, each with a theme. To the left is art using “Hebrew/Jewish symbols,” such as Mordechai Ardon’s “At the Gates of Jerusalem,” and to the right is art that explores “the Body and the Landscape.” But straight ahead, visible from almost the moment you enter the Cardo 100 yards away, is Yosef Zaritsky’s “Untitled,” from 1964, a pale green painting of pure abstraction. A search for something Jewish in that will be in vain.

The Israel Museum offers an answer, knowingly or not, to the fundamental questions that bring many tourists to Jerusalem in the first place. Who are the Jews? Where did they come from? What record is there of their historical presence, in these lands and elsewhere? What beautiful objects have they produced, and why? Of course, the question of who is a Jew—and, by extension, an Israeli—is hardly a settled one, and if a museum is throwing its institutional heft and $100 million behind an answer, it seems naïve at best to assert that there is nothing personal, political, controversial, painful, embattled, tense, moving, or unsettling about that.

Once press activities were over, I was free to roam Jerusalem for a day, and while my colleagues from art and architecture glossies and European dailies partook of the free guided tour of the Old City, I walked through the contested neighborhood of Silwan, where I couldn’t find a single person who had ever visited the Israel Museum. I then walked up the Mount of Olives to watch the sun set behind the Temple Mount. Below me were the thousands of graves of those who hope to be led through the Golden Gate upon the return of the Messiah. That’s when I thought that Mansfeld’s original design for the museum wasn’t based on an Arab village, as he said, but on the haphazard, boxy geometry of Hebrew tombs I was looking at, with their flat top slabs and stark devotional presence. Like the ancient bones within, the exhibits at the Israel Museum may represent millennia of history and yearning, but they have notably failed to come back to life.

Margarita Korol

It’s been a busy summer, what with summer camp and playdates and all, and so the vacation my wife and I planned to take in June was pushed to July, the July trip was then pushed to August. The other day, we stood in the kitchen, rescheduling the August trip for the end of September.

“What about the High Holy Days?” she asked.

“I’m not sure they’re holy,” I said, “but I’m definitely going to spend them high.”

Ha! I love that joke.

Suddenly there came a furious knocking at my front door. Outside stood an ultra-Orthodox rabbi, with a big black hat, a long black beard, and a red canister of gasoline in his hand. Two young yeshiva students were at his side, one holding a clipboard, the other holding a baseball bat. I opened the door.

“Shalom Auslander?” the rabbi asked.

“Yes?”

“Shalom Auslander, the Jew?”

“What an odd question,” I said.

“Yes or no,” he said.

“Yes.”

The yeshiva student with the clipboard checked something off on his sheet of paper, and the rabbi handed me a small wooden box.

“It is my duty to inform you,” he said, “that you are no longer Jewish.”

“Did my mother send you?” I asked.

The rabbi shook his head and explained that he was a representative of the committee assigned by the Knesset to determine who was and wasn’t a Jew.

“I thought that was just about conversions,” I said.

“It started out that way,” the rabbi replied. “But if you’re going to judge the validity of people’s conversions, you might as well judge the validity of their observance, their beliefs, their behavior.” His eyes narrowed at me. “Even their jokes.”

“You mean that one about the High Holy Days?”

“Bingo,” said the rabbi. “We did not appreciate that. The question of who is and who isn’t a Jew is one of the most critical of our time.”

“That and, say, hunger,” I said.

“Don’t judge me,” said the rabbi.

I apologized and shook the box.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Your foreskin.”

“So, big deal,” I said with a shrug. “So, I’m not a Jew. So, what?”

The rabbi nodded to the student beside him, who raised his bat overhead and shattered the glass of my front door.

“May we come in?” the rabbi asked.

The rabbi explained that now that I was un-Jewed, any possessions I may have acquired as a result of my having once been a Jew were to be returned or destroyed.

The student smashed my TV.

“You have profited handsomely from some very Jewish qualities,” the rabbi said. “Self-awareness, facility with words, a sense of humor (sort of). When you were a Jew that was OK. But now it’s a slap in the face of the 6 million who died in the Holocaust.”

The students smashed my DVD player and bashed in my computer.

“I think you’re overestimating my book sales,” I said.

“Ah yes, the books,” said the rabbi. “Those are going to have to go too.”

Not just mine, he explained, but all the once-Jewish writers who had been deemed no longer Jewish—all these would have to be destroyed too. As the one student continued smashing my belongings, the other went through my bookshelves, pulling off the books of all the un-Jewed Jewish authors he could find and throwing them into a pile on the floor of my den. He started with the Roths—Henry and Joseph and Philip. The Collected Works of Franz Kafka followed, as did The Complete Prose of Woody Allen and The Collected Letters of Groucho Marx and The Complete Short Stories of Isaac Babel. Some say Cervantes’ mother was Jewish, so they simply tore my Don Quixote in half, and then they tore in half my Complete Works of Michel de Montaigne and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. When they were done, all that was left were some Shakespeare, a bunch of 20th-century Russians, my collected Beckett (though they tore out the introduction by Paul Auster), and anything by Céline, who fortunately hated Jews.

The yeshiva student poured gasoline on the book pile and lit a match. The rabbi explained that I had two weeks to return my sense of humor, my 401(k), and any screenplays I might be working on to the Israeli government. I tried to get him to take my shame, sexual dysfunction, hypochondria, and low self-esteem, but he refused, claiming those were the fault of my parents and were therefore their responsibility.

The yeshiva student set the books on fire. My wife came into the room and asked what was going on.

“We’re not Jews anymore,” I said.

“So, can we go on vacation in September?” she asked.

I’d had enough.

“I would like to speak to your supervisor,” I said to the rabbi.

They laughed.

“We have no supervisors,” said the rabbi. “We did, but we took their Jewishness away too.”

“What about their supervisors, then?”

“We un-Jewed those goyim first.”

“Surely there’s someone in the Israeli government I can speak with.”

“That’s gone.”

“What?”

“Israel.”

“Not Jewish enough?”

“Tel Aviv,” he explained.

“Netanyahu,” I said, “let me speak to him.”

The rabbi shook his head.

“Have you ever seen him with a yarmulke? Always with the bare head, the sheygets. And he calls himself a Jew.”

“So, how many Jews are left?” I asked.

“After you?”

“Yeah.”

“Just us,” said the rabbi. “But Shlomo’s being de-Jewed when we get back to the motel, and Yaakov once carried on Shabbos, so we’re pretty much down to me.”

“You’re the last Jew?”

“Looks that way.”

I shook my head at the irony of it all. When I was young and violated Shabbos or ate nonkosher, my mother told me I was finishing what Hitler started. Later, when I wrote anything critical of Judaism, I was told the same thing by complete strangers. Who would have guessed that the ones who’d really try to finish what Hitler started would be a few ultra-Orthodox rabbis? The rabbi and I sat on my couch and watched the flames rising higher and higher in my home. He sighed sadly.

“What can you do,” he said, “when the whole world hates us?”

The Nathanael West collection caught fire at the top of the pile. The I.B. Singer smoldered near the bottom. Half of The Catcher in the Rye curled into ash and floated up to the ceiling.

“Anti-Semites, the whole lot of them,” said the rabbi. “Never again.”

All of which raises the question: Why? Part of the answer may lie in Peter Beinart’s recent New York Review of Books essay, which called for the need “to save liberal democracy in the only Jewish state on earth.” What Beinart, like others, has failed to take into account is that the various illiberal trends that he deplores do not signal the erosion of Israeli democracy, but the exact opposite.

While it’s true that liberal societies have traditionally evolved into democratic ones (and vice versa), it’s still worth remembering that liberalism has comfortably existed in the absence of substantial democracy (think of Britain and the United States prior to the expansion of suffrage in the 1830s or of classical Athenian democracy that lacked a liberal creed). Theodor Herzl’s utopian novel Altneuland sketches a blueprint for a future Jewish state that is remarkably indicative of this asymmetric relationship. Despite imagining a liberal society where “everyone is free and may do as he chooses” and that abides by the motto “Man, though art my brother,” Herzl conspicuously disregards the possibility of popular democracy. In The Jewish State, he even goes so far as to suggest an “aristocratic republic.” The actual founder of the Jewish state and its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, seems to have followed suit. Although a fervent supporter of universal human rights and of granting “full and equal citizenship” to all the state’s inhabitants regardless of their religion, race, or sex—a right Israel’s declaration of independence enshrines—Ben-Gurion was far less democratic than liberal.

Ben-Gurion’s perception of democracy was as elitist as they come: Not only did he infamously describe the Israeli immigrant classes as “human dust,” but he once declared, “I don’t know what the people want, I know what they need.” The late Israeli historian Amos Elon appropriately compared Ben-Gurion and his fellow founding fathers to a “mandarin class” that ruled Israel like “feudal principalities.”

The watershed moment—the revolution, if you will—when the “old regime” was dethroned took place with Labor’s first-ever national electoral defeat at the hands of Likud in 1977. It is at this historical locus that we can begin to trace the contemporary decline of Israeli liberalism at the hands of democratic forces, which suddenly discovered an unprecedented opportunity to escape the periphery of national politics and taste the previously forbidden fruits of power.

The first example is that of the conservative Shas party. What began in the 1980s as a political association of North African and Middle Eastern ultra-Orthodox Jews has since burgeoned into a highly influential kingmaker of Israeli politics. Unfortunately, while Shas has nobly fought on behalf of underprivileged and historically discriminated lower classes and ethnic groups, it has also waged a commensurately stubborn battle against secular liberalism. That the spiritual leader of Shas, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, has compared Arabs to “snakes” and called for their “annihilation,” while party chairman and Interior Minister Eli Yishai often likens homosexuals to “sick people,” is a sobering reminder that the price of democracy may be paid for in the coin of liberal ideals.

Next there are the settlers. Jewish messianism has always played a prominent role in the Zionist enterprise. However, the conquest of the West Bank in 1967 facilitated the rise of millennialist social and political movements such as Gush Emunim, Tehiya, National Union, and Mafdal, which reinvented itself as a rightist party in the 1980s. Together, their entire raison d’être rested in their commitment to preserve “eretz yisrael hashlema,” or a “greater” Israel. By consistently holding between 10 and 15 seats in the Knesset over the past three decades, not only did these parties solidify a vocal rightist block that remained a formidable impediment to any land-for-peace negotiations, but, more detrimental, they also sprouted militant offshoots that advocated forceful Arab-population removals and violence. It’s worth remembering that the virulent incitement propagated by members of these democratically empowered forces fueled the delegitimizing of the peace process and tragically culminated in the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.

Yet another example is that of the ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi parties. On the eve of Israel’s founding in 1947, many of the ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, leaders in then-Palestine were hesitant to endorse the fledgling Jewish state and only came on board after Ben-Gurion assured them in the famous “status quo” agreement that their prerogative in all religious affairs would be maintained. Needless to say, the Haredi leaders got the hang of democratic politics in no time. In the bifurcated Israeli parliamentary system, in which tenuous coalition governments often hang on to power with a handful of seats, the Haredi parties have in recent decades repeatedly supplied this electoral lifeline—but at a cost: Their religious institutions maintain a monopoly on marriage laws, among other things, and enforce a rigid criteria that prevents the state from authorizing marriages between Jews and those deemed “not sufficiently Jewish,” which especially affects Jews who undergo a non-Orthodox conversion. As a result, any Israeli seeking to enter into a secular civil marriage—a staple of modern liberal society—can only do so outside of Israel.

Finally, the fourth and most recent threat to the sustenance of Israeli liberalism is that reflected by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Russian-immigrant-dominated party, Yisrael Beiteinu. If there ever was a collective failure to assimilate, it is this: Two decades after the influx of a million Jews from the collapsing Soviet Union, the once-boiling Israeli melting pot had evidently lost steam. The same party that offers Russian immigrants a much needed political voice is also founded upon profoundly racist and nationalistic ideals, including tying citizenship to loyalty and conditioning Arab citizenship on service to the state. Not only is such a suggestion vehemently discriminatory, but it essentially seeks to revoke the axiomatic understanding that citizenship is a right, not a privilege—an understanding upon which the postwar concept of human rights is founded.

The implications that arise from this apparent consolidation of Israeli democracy at the expense of its liberal ethos are as complex as they are depressing. That a majority of Israelis still remain staunchly liberal and democratic does not contradict the fact that diverse and powerful illiberal forces are gradually—and democratically—tipping the balance of this delicate equilibrium. One thing that therefore must be said about the current Jerusalem government is that Netanyahu and his cabinet are actually fulfilling their part of the social contract and representing remarkably well the public will. It is in light of this sociopolitical process that it’s no longer plausible to convince ourselves that what we are witnessing is yet another chapter in the historical March of Folly, in which a reckless leadership leads the people astray—if only because the Israeli people themselves are holding the compass.

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

Dwairy, who worked on Sakhnin’s world-renowned green building, gave a remote tour because the students, who had come from Beer Sheva as part of a course on environmentalism in Israel’s Arab society, weren’t allowed to go into his northern hometown of 27,000 on the day the Israeli navy took over the Mavi Marmara. Among the five Palestinian citizens of Israel on board the ship was Sheikh Raad Salah, leader of the northern branch of the Islamic Movement, who was rumored to be dead or injured. The university instructed us to stay out of any Arab city for fear of violent riots.

The students took the relocation to a nearby pine forest gamely, offering their own suggestions for green organizations in Haifa and asking questions from their seats on the dirt. Dwairy brought a poster of his building, which helped them see the electricity-free cooling towers and traditional stone exterior. Another activist, Laithi Ghnaim, outlined his hopes of starting an Arab organic farming cooperative in the fields south of Sakhnin. But the virtual tour underscored the fragile relationship between the country’s Jewish citizens and the 20 percent Arab minority, which has only become more volatile as Israeli public opinion has moved rightward and Palestinian citizens of Israel identify with their brethren in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

Sheikh Raad Salah may well be a prime mover in the radicalization of Israeli Arabs. Born in 1958 to a police officer in the northern town of Umm el Fahem, he studied Islamic thought in the West Bank city of Nablus before becoming his hometown’s mayor in 1990. He has eight children. His modest apartment, reachable by one-lane asphalt lanes lined with passion fruit and grape vines, is symbolic of the humility that Muslims in Israel say they love about him. Salah is known as a humble, honest, and charismatic man who keeps his word and puts the poor first.

When he boarded the Gaza-bound Mavi Marmara in a white headcap and grey robe, Salah told Al Jazeera, “We have campaigners coming from Kuwait, Jordan and Mauritania, Yemen and Algeria, and that is a message we send to the leaders: How beautiful would it be if you reconciled with the stance of your people in their support of the cause of the Palestinians.”

The Jerusalem Post quoted an unnamed police source who said Salah tried to provide cover for a gunman shooting at commandos during the fighting, but a police spokesman told me that “there is not substantial evidence to press charges.” Outside the court hearing to end his arrest, Salah told reporters in Ashkelon that “IDF soldiers tried to kill me. They shot towards someone else they thought was me.”

Escorted unscathed off the Marmara, Salah was detained for three days and then sentenced to five days of house arrest and a month and a half without travel abroad. He enjoyed a hero’s welcome upon his return to Umm el Fahem. His home town is the commercial and urban center of the triangle of Arab towns between Tel Aviv and Haifa that abut the green line separating Israel from the West Bank. Umm el Fahem’s long main street is lined with furniture stores, shopping malls, and coffee shops. Steep side roads lead to older neighborhoods, where brightly colored houses are festooned with flowers. Some yards have olive trees; others, chickens or horses.

A week after the Marmara debacle, Salah’s apartment’s balcony was draped with a broad banner picturing the sheikh opposite Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The railing one story up was strung with jeans air-drying in the summer sun. Salah had a constant stream of visitors; his nephew said around 2,000 a day.

Salah declined to comment. But Southern Branch Islamic Movement member Sheikh Kamel Rayan—who worked with Salah for 20 years in the Al-Aqsa charity foundation, traveled with him to Libya in April at the invitation of Muammar Qaddafi, and served as mayor of the tiny village of Kafr Bara in the 1990s when Salah headed Umm el Fahem’s city hall—told me Salah’s patience was running out.

“We have suffered discrimination and oppression for 60 years,” Rayan told me. “Our land is taken nearly every day. Our cities have no sanitation plans.” He said Salah wouldn’t settle for what their parents had. “All of Salah’s generation—they are painted as extreme because they’re against land confiscations and inequality.”

According to Rayan, Arabs felt much more welcome when Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister, because “coexistence was his language.” But today, “the sense of Arabs in Israel is a sense of a chase.”

In the 2009 elections, Yisrael Beitenu leader Avigdor Lieberman campaigned for requiring Israel’s Arabs to swear a loyalty oath to the state. He has proposed that Umm el Fahem, along with other major Arab towns in Israel, be annexed to a future Palestinian state in exchange for Jewish settlements remaining in Israeli hands. His party won the third highest number of seats, and Lieberman serves as foreign minister.

Salah’s ideas have not endeared him to Israel’s 80 percent Jewish majority. In a 2006 Christian Science Monitor interview, Salah denied a Jewish connection to Jerusalem and predicted the implosion of the Jewish state within 20 years. In 2003, he was arrested in Israel on suspicion of funneling millions of dollars to Hamas operatives in Jenin and served two years in jail on charges he called a “mockery.” Four years later Salah was charged with assaulting a police officer during a riot in Jerusalem’s Old City. He was sentenced to nine months in jail for that incident but in a separate affair was acquitted last month in a 2007 case of rioting in East Jerusalem.

Dan Rabinowitz, a lecturer in anthropology at Tel Aviv University and the co-author of a book about the new generation of Arab-Israelis, said that 20 years ago, Arab citizens of Israel would probably not have boarded the Marmara. He told me that the present generation is “much more alienated.”

“The current government reflects Lieberman’s statements and actions and makes the alienation much deeper,” he said. “One result is that Palestinian citizens of Israel are inclined to turn to the international arena for aid, assistance, and support.”

The citizens who boarded the Marmara were among Israel’s most illustrious Arab leaders, including Mohammad Zeidan, the head of the Arab Higher Monitoring Committee, which coordinates the Arab political parties and non-government organizations in Israel; Balad party Knesset Member Hanin Zoabi; Sheikh Hammad Abu Daabes, who heads the Islamic Movement’s Southern Branch; and Free Gaza delegation leader Lubna Masarwa. After the ship docked in Ashdod, Zoabi was released on Knesset immunity while the other four were detained. A week after the Marmara debacle, the Knesset’s eight-member House committee recommended stripping Zoabi of her privileges as a legislator, including the right to travel, use of a diplomatic passport, and—should she be sued—Knesset funding of court fees.

Likud Knesset Member Danny Danon proposed a law to allow the Knesset to expel a member by an 80-member majority in the 120-seat house. He told me that the climate has indeed gotten hotter, and with reason. “Some Arab Knesset members are inciting and creating provocations,” he said by phone. “These were terrorists, al Qaeda activists who came to fight,” he added. “They fought and stabbed and shot at the IDF. It’s unacceptable to have MKs on the other side.”

Outside Sheikh Raad Salah’s home, his grandson and a cousin play under a poster of the sheikh with the Turkish Prime Minister.
CREDIT: Daniella Cheslow

But in Umm el Fahem, locals supported Sheikh Salah nearly unconditionally.

“The sheikh didn’t go to Gaza to be a hero,” said furniture trader Said Muhajna, 45. “His conscience sent him.”

Muhajna, in a black collared polo shirt and jeans, said in Hebrew that he has worked for years buying and selling in nearby Jewish cities without a hitch. Yet he often thinks about the plight of the 1.5 million Gazans.

“They’re Muslims like me,” Muhajna said. “Even if they were Jews I’d think of them. They’re people, they want to eat and sleep.”

Eighteen-year-old Sultan Muhajna, who is not related to Said Muhajna, protested in Umm el Fahem’s main street when he heard the sheikh might be dead or injured. The soft-spoken high-school senior hopes to be a pastry chef like his father.

“Sheikh Raad—he’s a good, religious man,” he said. “He solves problems in Umm el Fahem, he negotiates between families when someone is murdered. If Sheikh Raad had died, there would have been a war.”

Up the steep road from Sultan’s home is the two-story Umm el Fahem Art Gallery, founded in 1996 as the first Arab art museum in Israel. Institution secretary Kamle Agbaria said the flotilla raid upended the gallery’s schedule. In the last week, nearly 20 visiting groups have canceled, and a fundraising evening in Tel Aviv for the gallery’s new building was called off.

Agbaria said the gallery runs co-ed dance and painting classes, and its only nod to the Islamic movement’s traditional mores is by prohibiting work showing nudes. Salah helped open the gallery, and his brother (the late Assem Abu Shaqra) exhibited paintings there, she said.

Agbaria’s oldest son was offered a scholarship to study law in Jordan, but he turned it down to study in the Tel Aviv suburb of Hod Hasharon. Like Zoabi, Agbaria is a member of the secular Arab Balad party. She said she wouldn’t want to participate in a future flotilla, but she supported Arab-Israelis’ right to do it.

Umm el Fahem a week after the Marmara raid was quiet. On the day the ship was boarded, however, masked youths burned tires and threw stones at the city’s entrance.

Yet 40 miles north, Sakhnin remained calm. Before we had relocated to the forest, engineer Dweri had urged us to come to Sakhnin. My professor demurred because of school regulations. But after the trip, as I drove toward Jerusalem with my professor, he said he was sorry we had cut our tour short and caused our students to miss seeing Sakhnin for themselves.

Two months earlier, we had visited the Bedouin city of Rahat without incident. A month later, the mayor of the Bedouin township of Hurra spoke to our class about his desire to create a desert sustainability center. In many ways, environmentalism has served as a neutral meeting point between Arab activists and the Ben-Gurion students, who include a handful of Bedouins as well as Israeli kibbutzniks and even some settlers. Ideally, environmentalism can unite dreamers and innovators of all backgrounds who want to build a cleaner country.

However, as the Marmara incident showed, that bridge is flimsy. In times of conflict, the idealism of the green movement does not penetrate to the heart of the deep suspicions and increasingly open misgivings that are pulling the Jewish-Arab relationship in Israel apart.

Daniella Cheslow is a master’s student in geography at Ben-Gurion University in Beer Sheva, Israel. She is based in Jerusalem.

An op-ed in Ynet is a bit more optimistic, arguing that the bill is a step in the right direction though one that, because it only refers to those who can prove they are “without religion,” only applies to a small percentage of people who wish to wed in Israel. “Before the union is confirmed, the registrar will have to publish the details of the request and each religious court will have the opportunity to examine whether either member of the couple belongs to its community,” the op-ed points out, quoting another commentator. “If there is a dispute over the matter, the religious court will make the final decision…. So, does this mean that the Rabbinical Courts are now (also) determining ‘Who is NOT a Jew’?”

Civil Union Bill ‘Indecent Proposal’ [Hiddush]
An Important First Step [Ynet]
Previously: The Other Civil Union

Tzipi Livni Shows Prime Ministerial Stuff on J Street Conference [HuffPost]
Earlier: Oren Still Undecided on J Street Conference

The measure, which passed its first reading in the Knesset last week with 20-1 approval, would be much tougher than the much-bruited U.S. Passenger Bill of Rights, or than regulations in Europe, which require airlines to feed delayed travelers but don’t trigger reimbursements until delays hit five hours. The airlines, of course, are committed to ensuring that sleeping at Ben Gurion remains a tradition. “This type of rule is punitive and not remedial and would do nothing to help prevent delays,” says David Castelveter of the Air Transport Association, the lobby group for U.S. airlines. “Clearly we would not be in favor.” Clearly.

Bill Would Force Airlines to Compensate Passengers for Delays [Haaretz]

Bush spoke on May 15, 2008. He began by quoting Ben Gurion’s proclamation, declaring that Israel possessed a “natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate.” The president of the United States called it “the redemption of an ancient promise given to Abraham and Moses and David—a homeland for the chosen people: Eretz Yisrael.” He recalled how America recognized the Jewish state 11 minutes after the declaration. He characterized the “alliance between our governments” as “unbreakable” but he asserted that the “source of our friendship runs deeper than any treaty.” He spoke of the “bonds of the Book” and the “ties of the soul.”

The president recalled that when William Bradford stepped off the Mayflower, he quoted the words of Jeremiah: “Come let us declare in Zion the word of God.” He spoke of how the founders of America “saw a new promised land” and gave their towns names like Bethlehem and New Canaan. His words were those of a man who has read and thought about how the idea of Israel was intertwined with the idea of America going back to James Madison, say, or Samuel Adams and of why, as he put it to the Knesset, “many Americans became passionate advocates for a Jewish state.”

Bush also spoke of the “suffering and sacrifice [that] would pass before the dream was fulfilled.” He spoke of the “soulless men” who perpetrated the Holocaust, and he quoted Elie Wiesel. He described the joyous tears of a “fearless woman raised in Wisconsin,” Golda Meir, when the dream of a state was fulfilled. He spoke of touching the Western Wall, seeing the sun reflected in the Sea of Galilee, of praying at Yad Vashem and visiting Masada and he swore the oath that Israeli soldiers swear: “Masada shall never fall again.”

Then the president turned to the principles that guide American policy—“shared convictions,” he called them, “rooted in moral clarity and un-swayed by popularity polls or the shifting opinions of international elites.” That led to an articulation of democracy as “the only way to ensure human rights,” and he spoke of how the United Nations has singled out Israel as a target of its human rights resolutions and declared that Americans consider it “a source of shame.”

He expressed the belief that George Washington had spoken of more than two centuries previously—that, as Mr. Bush put it, “religious liberty is fundamental to a civilized society.” He declared that Americans “condemn anti-Semitism in all forms—whether by those who openly question Israel’s right to exist, or by others who quietly excuse them.” He disputed that terrorists acting in the name of religion are religious men. “No one who prays to the God of Abraham could strap a suicide vest to an innocent child, or blow up guiltless guests at a Passover Seder, or fly planes into office buildings filled with unsuspecting workers,” he said. “They accept no God before themselves.”

He spoke specifically of Hezbollah, Hamas and the Iranians and of calls for Israel to be wiped off the map. “There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in these men and try to explain away their words.” He called such reactions “natural” but “deadly wrong.” He remarked on how “[s]ome seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.” Then he quoted the American senator who, in 1939, declared, “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.”

This is where he warned of the “false comfort of appeasement.” He rejected the suggestions of some that “if the United States would just break ties with Israel, all our problems in the Middle East would go away.” He argued that permitting “the world’s leading sponsor of terror to possess the world’s deadliest weapons would be an unforgivable betrayal for future generations.” Then he marked the point that was so prescient in respect of what is happening on the streets of Tehran today.

“Leaders who are accountable to their people will not pursue endless confrontation and bloodshed,” he said. “Young people with a place in their society and a voice in their future are less likely to search for meaning in radicalism. Societies where citizens can express their conscience and worship their God will not export violence; they will be partners in peace. The fundamental insight, that freedom yields peace, is the great lesson of the 20th century. Now our task is to apply it to the 21st.”

So the president declared that America “must stand with the reformers working to break the old patterns of tyranny and despair” and “give voice to millions of ordinary people who dream for a better life in a free society.” He warned of “violent resistance.” But said with faith in our ideals he could imagine “Israel celebrating the 120th anniversary as one of the world’s great democracies, a secure and flourishing homeland for the Jewish people.” And he foresaw the rest of the Middle East as having been transformed, the terrorists defeated, and the region entering “a new period of tolerance and integration.”

Bush’s remarks were greeted by derision and controversy in the Arab press. One website that tracks foreign press reports ran a headline calling the speech an “act of lunacy” and quoted the chairman of Egypt’s Al-Ahram newspaper as complaining that the president’s remarks “appeared to have been lifted almost word-for-word from the Torah.” When reporters asked Senator Joseph Biden about Mr. Bush’s speech, the then-Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee reacted by swearing, according to the New York Times. The Democrats were apparently under the impression that Bush was talking about President-to-be Obama. But now blood is running in the streets of Tehran and a new American president is debating whether to speak in a way that might be construed as meddling. One way to judge whatever he says would be to compare it to the standard President Bush set a year ago in Jerusalem.

What’s Fine Literature Doing in the Knesset? [Ynet, in Hebrew]