Here’s what Newt Gingrich said last week: “Remember there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places.” How do you respond to that?
There’s something to it historically, and there’s a problem with it politically and contemporaneously. Groups of people change. Before 1920, the Arabs in Palestine didn’t call themselves Palestinians, and didn’t consider themselves a separate people. They were Muslims. They were inhabitants of Jerusalem, or Hebron. They were Arabs.

Beginning in the 1920s, they took on an additional identity, which became their primary identity. By the late 1930s, they saw themselves as being Palestinians—historians may disagree on the exact point. But from the early 1920s on, they began thinking of themselves as an Arab people separate from the Arab people of Transjordan or Syria.

Today, a group of people define themselves as a people, and that’s really what counts. If ten million say, “We are Palestinians,” that’s the major definition of a people, in addition to language, common culture, common history. Who is Newt Gingrich to really argue about it?

But he has a certain truth historically. For a long time, even after the beginning of the struggle with the Zionists, they were just Arabs. There was no province called Palestine in the Ottoman Empire. Palestine was cut up into a number of sub-districts which belonged to Damascus or Beirut. There was never a separate administrative entity.

Did they, as Gingrich alleges, have a chance to go many places? I think he is referring to the Palestinian refugees of 1947-48.
I don’t know what that means, I don’t want to speculate. Could they have gone to the Arab states and settled there? They could have, but the Arab states didn’t treat them as equals. Syria didn’t. Jordan didn’t in relation to the Bedouins who had always been there. If he’s talking about that, yes, the Arab states could have absorbed them, but they didn’t, and the Palestinians didn’t want to be absorbed, and Israel didn’t want to take them back, so they ended up in a limbo called refugeedom.

Some pointed to the historian Joan Peters as the source of Gingrich’s history.
She wrote a book, From Time Immemorial, but it was actually panned by most critics, most historians thought it wasn’t solid history. It was written with a political bent. It’s not based on good archival work, good analysis. It’s not taken seriously by most historians.

Look, there were Arabs who migrated into Palestine (this is part of her argument). Palestine became more habitable, and Arabs immigrated in certain numbers. But I think the numbers are negligible. I don’t think any serious demographer thinks most of the Palestinians were recent comers.

Given the validity of Palestinian peoplehood, do the Palestinians have a greater right to the land than the Israelis do? A lesser one? An equal one?
People who live on the land—and nobody questions that many of them lived on the land—have a right to live there. And usually that right is followed by the right of sovereignty—that’s how the world is built. And the Jews have the right as well of being here—historical reasons. And the Jews also live here, which gives them the same right. Right of presence.

What do you make of the Republicans’ discourse on the issue, and the Americans’ generally?
I’m don’t know much about the discourse. Look, George Bush said it’s right that there should be a Palestinian state. Obama’s adopted that. Clinton implied it. It makes sense that the land should be divided into two sovereign states. My belief is that Arabs don’t want that, and that’s why it hasn’t happened.

Have you ever met any of the Republican presidential candidates, or President Obama?
I haven’t met any of them. I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting any of these characters.

Earlier: The Gingrich Invention

Thankfully, no violence occurred at the 2007 parade, though hundreds of anti-gay activists lined the route shouting imprecations and holding hateful signs. “Go to a shrink,” one particularly blunt poster read. “Go Away. Your sickness should be healed, not flaunted,” declared another. Over 7,000 police and army officers protected the marchers, and snipers were placed on the rooftops of nearby buildings.

As the ugly reactions to the parade revealed, the vast array of rights that gay people enjoy in the Jewish state—which include serving openly in the military, adoption, domestic partnerships, and the recognition of marriages performed abroad—did not emerge from nowhere. These rights are the fruit of hard work on the part of many activists, gay and straight, who had to push for them against politically powerful, socially conservative elements. This ongoing fight for inclusion was manifested most recently in the creation of an LGBT faction within the Labor Party, supported by all the party’s Knesset members except for Arab-Israeli MK Raleb Majadele.

But the struggles of Israeli activists and the progress they’ve achieved are meaningless to some, including Sarah Schulman, professor, novelist, and self-described “active participant citizen.” In a New York Times op-ed published last week, Schulman argued that these advances in gay rights are merely a “potent tool” in the Jewish state’s “pinkwashing,” by which she means Israel’s “deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life.” As evidence of this so-called pinkwashing, Schulman cited the fact that the Tel Aviv tourism board is spending $90 million on a campaign to market the city as “an international gay vacation destination.” For Schulman, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reference to the Middle East as a region “where women are stoned, gays are hanged, Christians are persecuted” in his May speech to Congress is yet another example of the sinister pinkwashing trend, also known in many quarters as diplomacy.

Schulman, a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, isn’t the first person to employ the phrase. In May, a writer for Time magazine alleged that Israel and Israelis’ participation in a series of international gay events was part of a coordinated campaign undertaken “in the hopes of redirecting [Israel’s] global image away from politics, terrorism and the occupied territories.” Joseph Massad, a professor of Arab politics at Columbia University, told Time that Israel launched this effort “to fend off international condemnation of its violations of the rights of the Palestinian people.” (Massad has written a book, Desiring Arabs, which alleges the existence of a nefarious “Queer International,” with supporters of Israel at its core, whose “discourse … produces homosexuals as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist” so as to paint Arab cultures as barbaric.)

The first fallacy of the pinkwashing meme is that it’s a non sequitur. No one is saying that Israel ought to be immune from criticism because it treats gay people humanely. Israel’s stellar record on gay rights does not prevent anyone from condemning the country’s settlement policies, its proposed ban on foreign funding of NGOs, or its lackluster effort to integrate Arab Israelis—issues that Israeli gay activists, many of them leftists, would gladly join Schulman in denouncing. But none of these failings renders Israel’s record on gay rights any less impressive, nor does touting that record constitute a covert method of justifying the occupation or racism against Arab citizens.

Schulman seems incapable of such discernment. “Increasing gay rights have caused some people of good will to mistakenly judge how advanced a country is by how it responds to homosexuality,” she wrote in the op-ed. While it would be foolish to judge a country’s “advancement” solely on the rights of gays, it is a telling standard. The protection of minorities is a bedrock principle of any liberal society, and it is an indisputable fact that sexual, racial, and religious minorities are better off in Israel than they are anywhere else in the region.

Though Schulman claims that, “pinkwashing … manipulates the hard-won gains of Israel’s gay community” it is Schulman who renders these gains meaningless. According to her, the victories of gay-rights advocates in Israel do not exist in and of themselves, but are cogs in a grand propaganda machine to legitimize occupation and oppression. The effort to create a more open and inclusive Israeli society is merely part of a broader PR campaign—undertaken, ironically enough, by the same right-wing forces who recommended I see a psychiatrist to cure me of my homosexuality—to fool credulous Western liberals into believing that Israel is something it’s not.

While accusing the government of Israel and pro-Israel activists of deceiving well-intentioned progressives, Schulman and her ilk are in fact using the issue of gay rights to forward an ulterior agenda. So consumed are they by hatred of Israel that they are willing to distort the truth about the horrible repression of homosexuals in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. If there’s any cleaning of dirty laundry going on here, it is Schulman’s whitewashing the plight of Palestinian gays.

Schulman’s assertion that homosexuality has been effectively “decriminalized” in the Palestinian territories since the 1950s when Jordan revoked colonial-era sodomy laws, will come as cold comfort to the countless gay Palestinians who have fled to Israel after being tortured or receiving death threats by Hamas or Fatah agents. Schulman’s claim would certainly come as news to Maen Rashid Areikat, the PLO’s ambassador to Washington. When asked earlier this year if homosexuality would be tolerated in a future Palestinian state, Areikat replied, “This is an issue that’s beyond my [authority].” Hamas strategist Mahmoud Al-Zahar was blunter. In comments directed toward Westerners, Al-Zahar told Reuters last year that “You do not live like human beings. You do not (even) live like animals. You accept homosexuality. And now you criticize us?” And whatever law might be on the Palestinian Authority books has yet to persuade the leaders of Aswat, a Palestinian lesbian organization, to relocate their headquarters to Ramallah from Haifa. By making the absurd claim that the issue of gay rights is being “manipulated” by the Israeli government, Schulman ends up making excuses for people who kill homosexuals.

Recognizing the enormous gap between Israel and the Palestinian Authority on their respective gay-rights records, critics of the Jewish state have gone to tremendous lengths to propagate a massive lie in order to win over Western progressives. This cognitive dissonance has driven ostensible intellectuals like Columbia University’s Massad to justify the oppression of gay Arabs, as he did in the aftermath of the 2001 “Queen Boat” incident in Egypt, when police raided a gay disco and 52 men were arrested, tortured, and put through a humiliating show trial. “It is not the same-sex sexual practices that are being repressed by the Egyptian police,” Massad wrote in Desiring Arabs, “but rather the sociopolitical identification of these practices with the Western identity of gayness and the publicness [sic] that these gay-identified men seek.” In a 2006 interview with the Advocate, Aswat co-founder Raudo Morcos complained about people who portray Palestinian culture as “backward” regarding its treatment of homosexuals. “What is backward? Backward to whom? Are we comparing the Middle East, the Arab community, to the Western world? This is not a fair comparison,” she said. But if Morcos and other advocates of the Palestinian cause genuinely believed in human rights then they would, without hesitation, acknowledge the suffering of Palestinian gays. It’s not mutually exclusive to criticize both Palestinians and Israelis.

Introducing the term “pinkwashing” into the mainstream debate about the Arab-Israeli conflict is edifying in at least one respect: It lays bare the delusion, paranoia, and cynicism of the Jewish state’s most earnest detractors. In their minds, any positive statement made about the country is necessarily part of a propaganda campaign in the service of a far-right agenda. For an increasingly large swath of the international left, there really is no good Israel can do, short of disappear.

Synonyms are both logical fallacies—no two words can be identical—and artistically useful (expedient, practical); synonymic poetics furthers that paradox into history, or histories. Which is to say that though the genres of tragedy and comedy transcend borders, races, and creeds, specific tragedies and comedies do not. The event one people celebrate with a victorious ode another people commemorate with an elegy of defeat.

Poetry that’s old enough, that has justified its age, tends to be credited to that greatest of versifiers, “Anonymous.” Let’s summon that God, for a moment, to bless the following scraps, translated into the neutrality of English:

How will you fill your cup
On the day of liberation? and with what?
Are you prepared, in your joy, to endure
The dark howling heard
From skulls of days glittering
In a bottomless pit?

And:

We survived much death. We defeated forgetfulness and you said to me: We survive, but do not triumph. I said to you: Survival is the prey’s potential triumph over the hunter. Steadfastness is survival and survival is the beginning of existence. We persevered and much blood flowed on the coasts and in the deserts. Much more blood than what the name needed for its identity, or what identity needed for its name.

The first fragment is a stanza from How? written in 1943 in the Vilna Ghetto by the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever. The second is from In the Presence of Absence, one of the last collections of stray sentences in paragraphs by Mahmoud Darwish, perhaps the foremost Palestinian poet of last century (published in Arabic in 2006, and this month by Archipelago Books, in a translation by Sinan Antoon).

That these two texts spring from a shared poetics can be denied only by those who read prejudicially, who judge books by covers of their own creation: When you oppress a people, when you beat and rape and kill them, the literature they write will inevitably resemble the literatures of other peoples who’ve been beaten, raped, and murdered (unless you’ve stumbled upon a happy tribe of masochists). But this shock must be admitted: The same poetics has sadly marked the literatures of Jews—not just Israelis—and Palestinians, in the same century—a poetics that fled Europe and hid, until it found another shelter.

***

Al-Birwa was a tiny olive, grain, and watermelon village in Western Galilee, Mandate Palestine. Darwish was born there to a Sunni Muslim family in March 1941, the same month and year the Nazis’ extermination camps became fully operational. In 1948, with war ended, war began: Darwish’s family was forced from their orchards by the nascent IDF’s Carmeli Brigade; they fled to Lebanon, to Jezzine and Damour. Later, they illegally returned to Israel—insofar as one can return to a different country—settling in Deir al-Asad, which had been renamed, in Hebrew, Shagur. (Darwish spoke fluent Hebrew.)

In 1970, Darwish, then a communist, briefly attended university in Moscow before migrating to Egypt and then to Lebanon again. There he joined the PLO, for which he coauthored the Algiers Declaration. When the PLO was expelled from Lebanon, Darwish went to Cyprus. Stints followed in Tunis and Paris. For his work in the PLO, the poet was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize, originally the Stalin Peace Prize, which he accepted as idealistically as he’d later reject the Oslo Accords (which occasioned his break with Yasser Arafat).

It was Oslo, however, in its slight easing of restrictions in the Occupied Territories, that gave Darwish a temporary reprieve: In 1996, now a poet with an international reputation and a major cardiac condition, he finally received Israeli permission to settle in Ramallah. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, major infarcts had led to major surgeries. Though his literary heart was strong, his literal heart was weak—so went the global obituaries. In August 2008, while undergoing treatment at a hospital in Houston, he died. He’s buried in Ramallah, atop a hill called Al-Rabweh, “the hill of green grass”—a small snatch of his childhood Galilee transported to the dusty West Bank.

So do not reconcile with anything except for this obscure reason. Do not regret a war that ripened you just as August ripens pomegranates on the slopes of stolen mountains. For there is no other hell waiting for you. What once was yours is now against you.

And:

I am already quite scarce. For years
appearing only here and there
at the edges of jungle. My awkward body,
camouflaged by reeds, clings
to the damp shadow around it.
Had I been civilized,
I would never have been able to withstand.
I am tired. Only the great fires
still drive me from hiding to hiding.

Let’s avoid turning this survey into an exercise in perversity, a childish game: I’ve chosen to quote Darwish in his prose-poems, and the others, the original Others, enjambed. The man “already quite scarce” is the Israeli poet Dan Pagis. The source for the excerpt above is a poem called The Last Ones. The initial circumstance is the language, then the name and title, and only then, the poem. Bad poetry wants for forewords, good poetry, for afterwords, whereas Pagis’ poetry, like Darwish’s, needs a more encompassing apparatus—it necessitates experience.

Continue reading: A political coup

Conservative writer Ira Stoll revised his unexpectedly lukewarm take on OWS following the Boston march. “The whole event illustrates the way the Occupy movement has become a forum for people to air whatever pre-existing grievance or agenda they have, even if it has nothing to do with Wall Street,” he argues. True. He adds: “And how readily a protest against bankers can elide into one against the Jewish state.” That’s nuts, and he knows it. He has just finished saying that OWS’ problem is that hangers-on can hijack it. He knows the movement is of the left, and specifically, to an extent, of the organized hard-left; he knows that the organized hard-left is staunchly pro-Palestinian; obviously, the organized hard-left is taking it in that direction because of its preconceived beliefs about the Mideast. To suggest the turn is connected to a protest against bankers—which is to say, to suggest that the turn is fundamentally anti-Semitic—is disingenous. As for Jonathan S. Tobin’s fearful panting that “Liberals who make common cause with OWS are making a deal with an anti-Semitic and radical devil,” if he ever looked at these people, he’d know how crazily hysterical he is being.

And yet can I say, as I could a month ago, that he is being not only hysterical but inaccurate? Yesterday, a “Jewish call to action” was released, to “occupy the occupiers” in the Jewish community, “the powerful institutions that support Israel’s corporate-backed military control of the Palestinian people.” Leaving aside that such a specific stand is against Occupy Wall Street’s “no-demands” mission—which I heard a member of the Demands Group staunchly defend at a panel on the movement last night in New York—who are these powerful institutions? They include “AIPAC, the Jewish Federations, Birthright, the Jewish National Fund, Hillel.” (Hilariously, it doesn’t include those anti-colonialists at J Street.) These groups “actively obstruct human rights for Palestinians”? Hillel? It was necessary to “occupy” a small Birthright event in New York last night? They think the Jewish 99 percent opposes Federation?

It’s not to say these institutions couldn’t be reformed; the case against Birthright, for example, is real, even if it’s far more complex than the “99 percent” rhetoric allows. But tethering this cause to OWS drowns out the economic message, significantly decreases the size of the OWS tent, and maybe most importantly of all discredits the entire movement in the minds not just of the right but of plenty ordinary decent folk—members of the actual 99 percent.

Occupy Boston Occupies Israeli Consulate [Future of Capitalism]
Occupy the Occupiers: A Jewish Call to Action [Mondoweiss]
Related: One Percent [Tablet Magazine]
Preoccupied [Tablet Magazine]

• Hundreds of Palestinians clashed with Israeli soldiers in the West Bank. [Haaretz]

• Israel fired back (with words) at the United Nations after the Palestinian Authority complained about recent comments about its president. Israel condemned the P.A. for not condemning a recent rocket attack from Gaza. [Haaretz]

• Read toward the end. Occupy Judaism is the vanguard of Occupy Wall Street. Of course. [Huff Post]

• Recently freed Israeli-American Ilan Grapel said he was treated fairly in Egyptian prison, except for the part about being locked up in the first place. [Haaretz]

• Doesn’t seem to be anything legitimately fishy about Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner’s latest alleged gaffe. That said, if you’re him, do you really want to even come close to the appearance of impropriety? And if you’re the Times, is he really that valuable that he’s worth keeping there? [Mondoweiss]

• Chopped liver. The gross kind. [Gawker]

• The lucrative world of religious apps. [New Yorker Book Bench]

• My Name Is Asher Lev, in song. Seriously. [Hartford Courant]

• Did you pick up your Yo La Tengo Hannukah tickets yet? [Brooklyn Vegan]

• Tablet Magazine film critic Daphne Merkin shops around Jerusalem. [NYT T]

• See the check that Siegel and Shuster got for selling Superman. [Bowery Boogie]

• A Chrismukkah Star of David. [Amazon]

• This Sunday is Taste of Limmud. [JCC in Manhattan]

Oh right like I could post anything else.

The leaders of Hamas agreed, if by agreed you mean forcefully ended an anti-Assad protest that was being held in solidarity with the thousands of Latakia Palestinians. Hamas put the kibosh on the protest because organizers had not received a permit, and not at all because Hamas is headquartered in Damascus and sheltered by the regime there. Meanwhile, while the displaced Palestinians’ whereabouts are largely unknown—some hypothesize that they have in large part fled for Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city—other Sunni citizens of Latakia are being rounded up and sent to a sports stadium in town. And no soccer match has been planned.

Syrian Enclave of Palestinians Nearly Deserted After Assault [NYT]
Hamas Disperses Anti-Assad Protest in Gaza [Haaretz]
Analysis: Assad Puts Hamas in Corner Over Syrian Assault [Reuters/JPost]
Earlier: Reform Just a Watchword in This Administration

• The U.S. State Department chastised Israel over its announcement of new building in the settlement of Ariel. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• Twilight actress Kristen Stewart, apparently not a Jew, nonetheless got her start singing “a more serious dreidel song” (which is to say, presumably not the “I made it out of clay” one). [W]

• Splitsville for the Madoffs. [JTA]

• The U.S. military has learned several counterinsurgency tactics from the Israelis. [Abu Muqawama]

• Camp Be’chol Lashon, in Marin County, California, is specifically for Jews of color. [NYT]

Amy Winehouse made out of pills? Amy Winehouse made out of pills.

Everyone else has recommended it, but still, you should read this take by Andrew Exum, an active-duty counterinsurgency expert turned national security blogger. Israel’s response to the marching was not, he says, in line with past overreactions (such as—this is my example, not his—the response to the Gaza flotilla), but rather entirely understandable: “What were they supposed to do in the face of a breach of the border?” he asks. “And what did the protesters think would happen?” He adds, “You can’t really fault a military for protecting the territorial integrity of its state by force.”

Exum concludes, “Israel has been kidding itself if it had imagined itself immune from the non-violent, peaceful protests that have been sweeping the Arabic-speaking world,” and there are actually two separate ways, albeit stemming from the same place, in which yesterday represented the first day that the Arab Spring truly came to Israel. Place one is Syria: Much as the two-month-long (and counting) uprising against the Assad regime made Hamas feel threatened and spurred it to ostensibly reconcile with its bitter rival Fatah, the Assad regime, itself feeling threatened, needed a scapegoat, and there is surely no better scapegoat in the region than Israel; thus, the Assad regime, almost certainly, cynically harnessed the genuine feelings of its Palestinians by allowing them, for the first time, to actually storm the border, precisely in an effort to draw a response from Israel that could be used to distract its citizens from their uprising against the regime itself and to threaten the international community that support for deposing the regime could lead to more days like yesterday. It is certainly fair to point out that on the same day that four Syrian Palestinians were killed by the IDF for trying to cross in Israel, eight Syrians were killed by Syrian security services for trying to cross into Lebanon. In the context of the past two months, only the former event was extraordinary.

(By the way, contributing editor Jeff Goldberg rightly calls out Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner for his overly earnest treatment of just whether, in fact, the Assad regime let this happen on purpose, when past history indicates that angry protesters reach that border only when the regime wants them to. Likewise, Anthony Shadid’s more fair-minded Times news analysis was headlined, as of last night, “A Random Border Skirmish? Or Is Syria Playing the Israel Card?” when in fact the piece itself makes very clear that it’s the latter. [Also, “random”? It was Nakba Day!] I’m usually not one of those people when it comes to the Times, but come on.)

It would be convenient if the entire thing could be blamed on the awful Assad regime, but it of course can’t. The Arab Spring, and the examples especially of Tunisia and Egypt, in which longtime despots were replaced through popular protests, have made Arabs feel newly empowered about their ability to influence how they are governed. It has also unleashed ugly forces that these despots had kept contained (violence against Egyptian Christians continued this weekend.)

The Arab Spring has made Palestinians feel as though they can shape their destiny vis-à-vis Israel as never before, and if reconciliation—in which a group that calls for Israel’s destruction, Hamas, was welcomed into the main governing body—is any indication; if ostensibly moderate President Mahmoud Abbas’s recent statements that Palestinians will never give up the right of return and that yesterday’s dead were martyrs are any indications; and if one of the most restive Nakba Days in recent years is any indication; then as of right now, the mainstream Palestinian vision of the Palestinian future is incompatible with the mainstream Israeli vision of the Israeli future. That doesn’t justify Israel’s ignoring these latest events. Rather, it demands two things: tactically, a combination of restraint and insistence on red lines; and strategically, inventive diplomacy and compassion. Israel demonstrated the former yesterday; here’s hoping the latter is on the way.

Israeli Troops Fire as Marchers Breach Borders [NYT]
Just Another Sunday in the Levant [Abu Muqawama]
A Random Border Skirmish? Or Is Syria Playing the Israel Card? [NYT]
How to Understand the Golan Heights Demonstrations? [Goldblog]
Scores Wounded in Latest Religious Clashes in Egypt [WP]
Earlier: Has Assad Reached Our Breaking Point?
On Reconciliation, ‘The Devil Is In the Details’

• The Palestinians are planning to abandon the peace process in favor of nonviolent protests, U.N. action, and other gambits toward achieving statehood. [WSJ]

• Are you a Middle Eastern country? Wanna buy advanced weaponry? Business is still booming! [WP]

• Amazing pictures of Soviet Jews in the 1920s and ‘30s. [English Russia]

• Muammar Gaddafi and Charlie Sheen: Who said what? Fun quiz! [VF]

• Shimon Peres meets Florentino Perez, the president of the Spanish soccer team Real Madrid. I wonder if Perez just called Peres his given name—Perski—to make life easier? [JPost]

• Judith Butler on the Kafka papers. A certain type of reader will be very excited to read this. [LRB]

Loyal Scroll readers will know how bummed I am that I did not get to write the canonical article on observant Jewish Phish fans.

Look. The point of the resolution was always not to be passed, but to put the United States in this particular spot. That gave the administration three options:

1. Say absolutely nothing about it in the days leading up to it; when the vote comes, veto it, issuing a quick statement, let people who thought you should have not vetoed it complain (validly) about the contradiction between rhetoric and action, and watch the story quietly fade away into the Friday afternoon of a three-day weekend.

2. Don’t veto the bill. Let it pass. You now have Israel and many American supporters of Israel, including a significant majority of representatives from both parties in both houses of Congress, and many of your own constituents, extremely angry with you, because, while it was bad enough (to them) for you to press Israel on settlements in private and at the negotiating table, you simply do not let the U.N., known for an anti-Israel bias, to be able to hold sway over Israel. On the other hand, you have matched your deeds to your stated opinions, stood up for what you claim to believe in, and shown the newly empowered Arab masses that you care about an issue that they care about. More importantly, you have shown every country that you are to be taken seriously because when you say something, you mean it and will follow through on it.

Speaking personally, I would have wished for option 1: I just don’t think the U.N., given its history and the motives of some of its member states, is the correct venue for this sort of thing. But there are absolutely arguments for option 2 as well, and I would have been very intrigued by it, and I may have been persuaded to back it.

But let’s not forget option 3!

Option 3: Try to get around options 1 or 2 by putting a non-binding, purely rhetorical statement on the table, thereby inflaming Israel’s supporters at home and abroad, as well as giving potential Republican presidential opponents superb ammunition against you while getting nothing in return; while at the same time confirming, if any further confirmation were needed, that your words and your binding actions don’t add up. Of course, because the Palestinians know option 2 is exceedingly unlikely, they call your bluff, showing the world that you cannot throw your weight around at the Security Council. But you’re not done yet: Keep digging! Call the Palestinians and alternately cajole them and threaten them to try to get them to withdraw the resolution, so that the world has the image of the ostensible leader of the free world supplicating himself to the disputed leader of a stateless authority. Have him tell you to screw off, showing further how little power you have. Then, when crunch-time comes, veto the resolution.

The pro-Israel side still mistrusts you more, because you considered even toying with the U.N.; the pro-Palestinian side still mistrusts you more, because you vetoed their resolution; and people who don’t really care about this still mistrust you more, because you flailed about seeking an alternative and failed. The main difference? Because you spent the past week trying to find a way out of this, everyone’s paying attention now. Congratulations, and thank God it’s Friday.

At first glance Manekin, with his trim black beard and kippa, could be one of them. Indeed, part of what makes him such a formidable peace activist is how much Zionist credibility he has. He’s an Orthodox Jew and a veteran of the elite Golani battalion, where, among other things, he protected settler roads and liaised with settler security. His last position in the military was an instructor in an officer-training academy. Like other members of Breaking the Silence, an organization of young Israeli army veterans, he can discuss the occupation with authority, because he was one of the people charged with carrying it out.

Other than the armored car, a few kids in knit skull caps, and some Orthodox women pushing baby carriages, the streets of Hebron were empty. They are, in IDF parlance, “completely sterilized,” meaning that Palestinians aren’t allowed on them. Those who need to traverse the area must cut through a nearby cemetery. Most of the Arabs who once lived near the settlers’ encampment have since left. The few that have remained mostly stay inside their apartments. Bars protect their windows and balconies from the settlers’ stones. If they must go out, they have to climb onto the roof and down a fire escape into a back alley, because the concrete outside their front doors is reserved for Jews. If they get seriously ill, they’re in trouble. “The Jewish subset of the Red Cross doesn’t treat Palestinians here,” says Manekin. “What you see a lot of times is Palestinians carrying people by foot to an area with an ambulance.”

As he talks, our driver, a bluff man in his 50s who lives in Netanya and speaks English with a heavy Israeli accent, shakes his head. “I didn’t know,” he says. “People don’t know.”

Breaking the Silence was formed almost by accident in 2004. It started as an exhibition of photographs and video testimonies by soldiers who had served in Hebron and were anguished by their own behavior. The IDF wasn’t happy—military police raided the Tel Aviv gallery where the exhibit was mounted and confiscated one of the videos—but thousands of Israelis attended. Many of them were soldiers who’d never discussed their own shame. Among them was Manekin, who’s still dealing with what he describes as a “great sense of discomfort about my own personal behavior” during his army service. He agreed to give his own testimony, and soon he was part of a nascent movement.

There was no single epiphany that radicalized Manekin, no moment when he realized that much of what he’d taken for granted about Israeli righteousness was wrong. The son of two professors—his mother teaches modern Jewish history, his father medieval Jewish philosophy—he grew up in a home that was religiously Orthodox and decidedly Zionist, if also politically liberal. He had dual Israeli-American citizenship, and he spent a lot of time going back and forth between the two countries. When he was a teenager, Manekin’s family moved to Israel full-time, and he was sent to an Orthodox high school where right-wing politics predominated.

For Manekin, being accepted into the Golani battalion was like getting into a good college. “You want to excel,” he says. He enlisted for four years, one year more than required. He served first in Southern Lebanon and then in the Nablus region in the West Bank. During that time, he did things that he’s ashamed of, though they’re the sorts of things that any soldier controlling a restive, angry population would do, such as shooting stun grenades at Palestinians to intimidate them at checkpoints. Once, when his unit was assigned to protect the route to a settlement, the soldiers commandeered a house in a nearby village to serve as a lookout, and then, suspecting others might be more suitable, they took over those instead. Manekin was troubled by the soldiers’ cavalier attitude toward Palestinian homes. When he voiced his concerns, he was summoned to the battalion general, who asked if he was uncomfortable serving in the territories.

At the time, he was indignant at the suggestion that he wasn’t ready to do everything required by his military position. But in retrospect, he realized the general was right. There is no way to maintain an occupation without cruelty and moral squalor. That’s the message of Breaking the Silence: The abuses its members document stem directly from government policy. “On the whole, the military is actually fine,” he says. “This is not about the settlers. It’s not about the military. It’s about the state.”

A large part of Breaking the Silence’s work involves collecting and disseminating soldiers’ stories about their experiences in the occupied territories—to date, the organization has interviewed over 700 combatants, including members of every unit that has fought in the territories in the last 10 years. The group has just published a harrowing new book, Occupation of the Territories: Israeli Soldiers’ Testimonies 2000-2010. A selection of oral histories culled from interviews with more than a hundred soldiers, it presents episodes of the daily, casual degradation and brutality that occupation entails. Manekin’s own testimony is among them, though, in keeping with the rest of them, it’s anonymous.

Cumulatively, the testimonies describe a system intended to break the Palestinians’ will by subjugating their lives to Israeli whims, a system in which tyranny can always be justified with the rhetoric of security. Where there is self-rule, it’s granted on sufferance and can be taken away at will. The soldiers are not bad people, but, as one of them says, “It’s the power that you have in your hands. At some point it fucks you up, if you are a human being.” One soldier recounts detaining Palestinians arbitrarily, shackling them for eight or nine hours at a time. Another describes how harassing Palestinians became a form of entertainment: “One of the goals was always: I got him to cry in front of his kids, I got him to crap in his pants.”

A soldier in Hebron describes his shock at realizing how routinely settlers attack Palestinians, including women and children, with utter impunity. “And it exists here in the State of Israel, and no one knows about it, and no wants to know, and no one reports about it,” he says. There are numerous reports of soldiers smashing up Palestinian homes as a sort of catharsis. “I think it’s really like when you see people on MTV smashing their guitars on stage,” says one. “[O]ver there you have the power to act it out, and these things are not your own things, and what’s more, you’re at war.”

The book describes “mock arrests,” in which new soldiers arrest innocent Palestinians for practice. “They would actually do intelligence work to find out a Palestinian is innocent before arresting him, so as not to endanger the troops,” Mikhael says. Soldiers, he said, have two rationales for this. The first is training. Second, he says, it creates “a feeling of lack of understanding on the Palestinian side. Suddenly, an innocent person is being arrested. Nobody understands what’s happening, and the sense of insecurity and fear among the Palestinian population fits in very well with the overall strategy, which is instilling that fear in the population.”

One might see all this as the regrettable but inevitable price of self-defense. Palestinian terrorism, after all, is real, even if it has abated significantly in recent years. Many Israelis would dearly love to end the occupation if they didn’t believe doing so would put their own lives at risk. Breaking the Silence is addressed to them as well: Those who support Israeli policy have as much of a duty to understand what it entails as those who oppose it.

The American Jewish mainstream doesn’t like to listen to the sorts of stories that Breaking the Silence tells, but Manekin is more able to reach them than most. He was recently in the United States, giving talks in New York and Washington. When he spoke at Columbia with Peter Beinart, the political writer, the event was co-sponsored by LionPac, a campus pro-Israel group. In addition to briefing the State Department and the United Nations, he met with AIPAC, and he found the group impressively responsive.

Of course, in Israel, Manekin and his group have come under attack from the right: It’s one of the targets of the Knesset investigation into left-leaning NGOs. Manekin wrote a scathing response for the +972 blog, writing that he wouldn’t pander to his persecutors by testifying about his own Zionist bona fides before the committee. “I don’t owe them anything,” he wrote. “They don’t need to love us or tell us that we are patriots. They are doing far more damage to this place than we are.” Still, he has a charming inability to muster much outrage on his own behalf. The attacks “don’t really bother me,” he says. “We’re still part of the ruling class. I’m still a liberal Israeli Jew, so I’m not that worried.”

For all his frustrations with Israel, Manekin has no plans to go anywhere. Some of his friends are leaving—as he wrote in +972, “they want to find a place that is normal, a place that does not shame their existence. A place they can live in.” But he says, “I see my future in Israel. It’s just my home.” His 3-year-old daughter knows no language besides Hebrew. Besides, being there offers him the opportunity to put his ideals into practice. “I like to be part of changing things,” he says. “Activists in general don’t feel a sense of despair.”

Yet Western observers who are used to seeing Israel and Jordan as bound by common interests are missing a new reality that has overtaken the cooperative relationships of the past: The common fear of being overwhelmed by Palestinian demography is now driving the two countries apart. As Jordan’s position on Palestinian refugees is becoming one of the more strident in the Arab world, the two countries now hold diametrically opposing views on an issue that both sides regard as truly existential, touching the raw nerves of their collective beings and promising future discord: Jordan wants large-scale repatriation; while Israel rejects the so-called right of return.

The roots of the current Jordanian view lie in the country’s domestic demographic and political situation. Palestinians and their descendants probably form a majority of the Jordanian population but are barred from meaningful political power—a situation that in turn has roots in Jordan’s own historically ambiguous relationship to Palestine. After occupying the West Bank in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, Jordan formally annexed the territory, with Israeli acquiescence, in April 1950. Despite Israel’s entreaties to Jordan to refrain from intervening in the June War of 1967, the Jordanians, following their own domestic and pan-Arab calculations, decided to join Nasser’s anti-Israeli alliance but then lost the West Bank in the fighting that ensued.

Jordan’s loss of the West Bank was a historical watershed for the Hashemite kingdom and for Israel. Jordan’s manipulative control of what remained of Arab Palestine took a back seat to the PLO’s homegrown version of Palestinian nationalism. It was the PLO’s war against Israel, waged from Jordanian territory, that kept Palestinian hopes alive against the background of the humiliating 1967 defeat of the Arab states. In the process, the PLO gradually built a Palestinian state within a state in Jordan, challenged Jordanian sovereignty, and called the very existence of the Hashemite kingdom into question.

Matters came to a head in September 1970 when the Jordanians mobilized their military power to crush PLO forces in Jordan within what became known as “Black September.” Israel played a critical role in the September events by conducting military maneuvers designed to pressure the Syrians to withdraw the force they had sent to Jordan in support of the PLO. Beaten in the battlefield by the Jordanians, and deterred by the Israelis from escalating their involvement, the Syrians pulled back. By July 1971, all PLO forces were expelled from Jordan, never to return.

The Jordanian struggle with the Palestinians was a traumatic event for the Jordanian people and their collective identity. It accelerated the evolution of a much more conscious sense of Jordanianness, defined against the Palestinian “other.” The Palestinians threatened to deny the Jordanians their political patrimony, not in the West Bank but in Jordan itself. A process of Jordanization, or ardanna, was set in motion in Jordan in the early 1970s, culminating in the almost total exclusion of Palestinians from positions of influence in the country’s political elite and the military and domestic security establishments. A functional cleavage came into being in Jordan whereby original Jordanians governed and were the unchallenged masters of all spheres of political influence, while the Palestinians in the kingdom, about half of the population, maybe more, dominated the economy and the private sector.

Over the years a militant and influential ultra-nationalist Jordanian trend has emerged devoted to the eradication of Palestinian influence and, in the long run, to the return of as many Palestinians as possible from Jordan to a future state of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza and to Israel proper. Simultaneously with these developments in Jordan, though unrelated to them, Israel’s politics have shifted to the right. The first Likud government came to power in Israel in 1977, and governments of the right have been in power either on their own or together with Labor for much of Israel’s history since. In the past, prominent spokespersons of the Likud did not hide their conviction that Jordan—which was originally part of the British Mandate for Palestine and where people of Palestinian origin are such a large part of the population—ought to become the real Palestinian homeland. From the Jordanian point of view, such talk had the makings of an existential threat.

In response to internal demographics and their understanding of the Israeli political debate, Jordanians have steadily developed an obsessive fear of the “alternative homeland conspiracy,” or mu’amarat al-watan al-badil, and a vital interest in the creation of a Palestinian state. In their analysis, if no Palestinian state comes into being in the West Bank and Gaza, an eventual confrontation between Israel and the Palestinians will culminate in the massive migration or expulsion of Palestinians eastward across the river to Jordan. Such “demographic aggression” would, by the sheer weight of numbers, transform Jordan into a Palestinian state. In this nightmare scenario, the Jordanians, not the Israelis nor the Palestinians, would end up as the great historical losers.

The peace treaty signed between Jordan and Israel under the Labor government of Yitzhak Rabin in October 1994 drew a sigh of relief from Jordanians. The nightmare of the “Jordan is Palestine” or “alternative homeland” theory was gone forever, so they believed. Israel had recognized Jordan’s boundaries and was on the way to the formation of a two-state solution with the Palestinians, in accordance with the Oslo accords signed a year before. Henceforth it would be clear that Palestine was Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza, and Jordan was Jordan on the other side of the river. Moreover, peace with Israel would bring prosperity to Jordan and long-term stability to the region.

Jordan’s expectations, however, remained unfulfilled. The peace with Israel could not have been and was not a panacea for Jordan’s structural economic difficulties. Even more disturbing for the Jordanians, Israel and the Palestinians failed in their endeavor to transform the Oslo accords into a final agreement. Worse still, the Israeli-Palestinian track now seems to have reached a dead end.

After the failure of the Camp David talks in the summer of 2000 and the outbreak of the second Intifada, Jordan’s nightmare scenario resurfaced as if the peace treaty with Israel had never been signed. The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and the consequent perennial threat of Iraqi disintegration, coupled with growing Iranian influence in Iraq and in the region as a whole, severely compounded the Jordanians’ sense of strategic suffocation. The Jordanians now found themselves sandwiched between two poles of regional instability, with the chaos of Iraq to the east and the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum to the west. This was the kind of regional predicament that they had certainly not bargained for after making peace with Israel.

Israel drew its own conclusions from the failure of Oslo. They were, primarily, that the Palestinians were not ready for an end-of-conflict agreement that did not encroach upon Israel proper. The issue with the Palestinians went beyond the occupied territories, particularly because of the Palestinian demand for the right of return for the 1948 refugees. The Israelis countered with a demand of their own, that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people as a guarantee against substantive, as opposed to symbolic, refugee return. This demand was initially made by the government of Ariel Sharon in 2003 and has been repeated by all Israeli governments since. The Benjamin Netanyahu government has upped the ante by demanding such recognition as a precondition for Israel’s acceptance of a Palestinian state.

This new Israeli position has been stridently condemned by the Jordanians, who again see the looming specter of final refugee resettlement in Jordan as the forerunner to the “alternative homeland” scenario. Not only is the Israeli position an obstacle to an agreement with Palestinians, they believe, but it threatens to permanently saddle Jordan with a huge Palestinian population.

King Abdullah speaks often of the great urgency of a two-state solution, blaming Israel for the impasse. Jordanian ultra-nationalists, in their fear of Israeli intentions and of the Palestinian presence, go even further, emphasizing the need not only for two states but for refugee return, totally rejecting the notion of long-term resettlement in Jordan. It is they and the Lebanese who were responsible for adding to the Arab Peace Initiative, in 2002 and again in 2007, the absolute “rejection of all forms of [refugee] resettlement” (tawtin in Arabic), which made the initiative virtually impossible for Israel to accept.

For many years Jordan sought the succor of a U.S.-Israeli protective umbrella, but today King Abdullah speaks bitterly of the chilly and deteriorating relationship with Israel. And where Abdullah defiantly warned against the emergent “Shiite crescent” as late as 2004, the Jordanians now appear to be sheepishly going out of their way to pronounce their fealty to Iran, as exemplified most recently by the king’s acceptance of an official invitation to visit Tehran. Is this public eating of crow just a tactical feint of the kind that Jordan has made on countless occasions in the past, or does it portend a more significant shift toward the radical camp? The fact that the question arises at all is a measure of the change that has already taken place.

Asher Susser, a senior fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University, is a visiting professor on modern Israel at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

The mosque at the centre has gone except for the minaret, which stands forlornly alone, surrounded by ugly cement shopping malls and hotels that look like dormitories devoid of all charm. … The water in the lake is over-pumped to serve extensively heavy water-dependent farming that makes no sense in a country with limited water resources. A number of economically unsuccessful new towns have been established in the area, isolated from the natural continuation of the land to the south by the infamous semi-permeable wall, erected to separate them from the West bank, that prevents Palestinians from crossing over but allows Israelis living on both sides to go back and forth.

Shehadeh, a lawyer by profession, tours the Galilee to retrace the steps his uncle, Najib Nassar, took as he fled arrest at the hands of the Ottomans at the turn of the last century. Armed with Nassar’s diary and a 1933 map of Mandate Palestine, he searches for the villages, roads, mountains, and rivers his uncle visited while on the run across what became Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, and Lebanon. But he finds that the last six decades have transformed the land nearly beyond recognition. Israeli historian Benny Morris estimates 400 Palestinian villages were abandoned in 1948 and were later demolished, forested, or converted into Jewish farming towns. Nearly all of the geographical features of the land were renamed from Arabic to Hebrew and subsumed in the urban sprawl typical of a Western country. The combination pushes Shehadeh to mentally excavate the visible landscape, searching for traces of Palestinian villages and people long gone.

Shehadeh is not the first to write a mournful account about the Palestine that was lost in 1948 nor to return to sites in their present-day guises. But by following his uncle’s path, Shehadeh shows how rural Palestinians lived and thought and how intimately they and their urban guest were connected to the land in the early 1900s. Quoted commentary from the celebrated British archaeologist and commander T.E. Lawrence suffuses the old landscape with vivid detail. Shehadeh adds another degree of familiarity by weaving himself into the narrative through frequent comparisons and snippets of his own political life. In his elegy for the peasant life long gone, Shehadeh challenges the view that Israel’s policies have been good for the land. On a broader level, he makes a case for rethinking the welter of borders that make his trip cumbersome and sometimes impossible.

“I have no memory of the way things were,” he said recently by phone from Ramallah. “In writing the book I explored how the land used to look. It made me sad, because it was once a mixed land with much more variety.” Is his book a call for an Ottoman revival? “I have no intent on calling for a return of the Ottoman Empire,” he said. “But I think the Ottoman Empire provides a precedent that is important to consider, when the region was unified.”

***

Raja Shehadeh at a book reading in Ramallah, October 16, 2010.
Daniella Cheslow

A Rift in Time opens with Shehadeh nervously facing arrest by Palestinian security officers in 1996, just after the Oslo Accords were signed. He was implicated in a client’s land deal gone wrong in Jericho. He escapes arrest through the intervention of well-connected friends, but the ordeal reminds him of his uncle, who enjoyed no such respite.

Najib Nassar, born in 1865 in southern Lebanon, moved with his family to Haifa, where he founded and edited the Al-Karmil newspaper. He was a short, outgoing, and generous man who staunchly believed in the Ottoman Empire but decried its decision to fight in World War I with the Axis powers. But the Ottomans feared Nassar had hidden loyalties to the British and put a bounty on his head. Nassar spent three years hiding in villages scattered across the region, often knocking on doors before dawn and with empty pockets. Whether or not his hosts knew him, they nearly always offered him food, a bed, a horse, and even gold coins to send him on his way. Because of this generosity, Nassar was able to evade the Ottomans until he turned himself in to spare his family.

According to Birzeit University sociologist Salim Tamari, the Palestinian memoir tradition goes back at least 100 years, to Jerusalemites who kept diaries. Khalil Sakakini, a Palestinian educator, writer, and poet who lived from 1878 to 1953, called himself the “prince of idleness” but documented both his youthful escapades and his later work in America, his attempts to reform Palestinian education, and his exile. Wasif Jawhariyyeh, who lived from 1897 to 1972, was a similar-minded bon vivant, poet, composer, and musician whose journals show Jerusalem over six decades. Both men’s diaries have been translated in whole or in part into English.

Yet after 1948, what Palestinians term the Nakba, or catastrophe, the intellectual leadership of Palestinian society dispersed, and political writing overtook the personal. The playwright and author Ghassan Kanafani, who worked for the PLO and was assassinated by the Mossad, wrote a 1962 play called Men in the Sun, about Palestinian refugees who suffocate while being smuggled to Kuwait. Mahmoud Darwish, the late Palestinian poet laureate, achieved renown with his highly political “Identity Card,” from 1964:

Record!
I am an Arab
And my identity card is number fifty thousand
I have eight children
And the ninth is coming after a summer
Will you be angry?

While there was always a trickle of memoirs, including one by Sakakini’s daughter Hala and another by the renowned Arab translator Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, the last 20 years have seen a major revival, Tamari said.

“If we can compare the two events, I think it’s similar to the Holocaust experience,” said Tamari, whose parents, like Shehadeh’s, fled Jaffa. “The people who experienced the Holocaust and survived did not speak about it until years later, in the 1960s and ’70s. They were ashamed and embarrassed. In the Palestinian case, they were ashamed they did not resist, that they allowed themselves to be taken like sheep from their homes. My parents did not talk about it until many years later.”

That changed after the Oslo Accords in the 1990s. Dozens of formerly exiled Palestinians were allowed to return to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. “They had a very idealistic view of Palestine, and they found it not mundane, but a country lacking in sovereignty, and looking very much like a third-world formation,” Tamari said. “Since many came from urban, metropolitan centers like Cairo, Tunis, Beirut, and Damascus, they were shocked at how shabby the country looked.”

***

One of the landmarks of the evolving genre is Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah, published in Arabic in 1997 and translated into English three years later. The book won Egypt’s Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature. In it, Barghouti returns to his childhood home near Ramallah in 1996 after a 30-year exile and finds his village ringed with Jewish settlements. The Ramallah vegetable market is as dingy as it was when he was a child, and the Palestinian Authority has brought a class of officials who flaunt their income but do little to advance the common good. Yet Barghouti’s memoir mainly focuses on his own family’s experience. It does not have the same breadth as Shehadeh’s Rift, which encompasses the entire region.

Likewise, Edward Said’s 1999 memoir Out of Place details his childhood and adolescence in Cairo.

Unlike Said or Barghouti, Shehadeh remained in the Palestinian territories his entire life. As founder and former head of the Al-Haq legal aid organization, Shehadeh initially published technical works on Israeli law and human rights. He first tackled personal writing in 1982 with The Third Way, a collection of stories from Ramallah. The book was hailed in the Journal of Palestine Studies as “the first such book on life for the Palestinians under occupation.” Shehadeh’s full story emerged in Strangers in the House, a tour de force that encompassed his strained relationship with his father, exacerbated by Israeli rule that emasculated the head of the house.

In his last two books, Shehadeh departs from his family and daily life to give words to the Palestinian landscape. An avid hiker, he published Palestinian Walks in 2008, showing the growing difficulty of walking the West Bank without encountering Israeli settlements, soldiers, or roadblocks. It won him Britain’s Orwell Prize.

Palestinians protesting Israel’s security fence in the West Bank village of Bil’in, February 22, 2008.
David Silverman/Getty Images

Rift features those difficulties as a side story to the odyssey of Najib Nassar, whose trail markers are now deeply buried. In resurrecting the world of a century ago, Shehadeh shows what he sees as the price of Israel’s independence. Nassar hid in tents with Bedouin and spent his happiest days herding sheep while scratching the lice off himself. Farms were small and smelled of dung-fired ovens where today they are large and silent stretches of green plowed by tractors. For Shehadeh, despite the grinding poverty, exploitation, and constant water shortage, Palestinian peasant life was a state of grace.

“Gone is the mix of people that existed in Najib’s time,” he writes. “In their place a large variety of Jews from Arab countries, Eastern Europe and from the West, along with those Palestinian Arabs who have managed to stay, now share the land unequally. But gone are most of the Bedouin tribes, Palestinian Arabs and Arabs from various parts of North Africa, and the Marsh Arabs who lived in the Huleh region with their water buffaloes that are now extinct here.”

In one instance, Shehadeh is surprised to find expanses of wheat where he had expected to see a handful of the villages Nassar mentioned. Then he notices an almond tree in the middle of a field, which he notes only grows when cultivated. Almond trees are the ruins of the villages he is seeking, as he writes:

When I looked at the open green fields spread on both sides of my path I could see more almond trees that I had failed to notice before I recognized their significance. … There to the west Kufra must have stood and nearby to the south Bira, Dana and Tireh. With the possible location of the Arab villages, the old features of this cemetery of a land began to emerge, illuminated by the white blossoms of the almond trees, marked by the petals that slowly glided down to the ground around them in utter, hushed silence.

That same hallowed sense of loss is in Israeli work as well. As early as 1963, the Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua wrote about a deserted Palestinian village hidden by Israeli-planted trees in his novella Facing the Forest. Former Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Meron Benvenisti used 1946 maps to hunt for the disappeared Palestinian rural world in Sacred Landscape. “I would spread the relevant map on the ground, and suddenly the old landscape arose like an apparition,” he wrote. “And each plot and every prominent feature had its Arabic name marked on the map, so poetic and so apt that my heart ached.”

***

Palestinians, too, have mourned the lost villages, none so exhaustively as Walid Khalidi in his 700-page memoir, All That Remains. But Shehadeh combines the sadness of a Palestinian perspective with the poetry of a lost landscape and the escapades of his strong-willed uncle.

At times, Shehadeh’s lengthy rants can get tiresome, particularly because he pits Palestinian rural life against Israeli modernity. He notes that the goats and sheep that used to graze in the Galilee have given way to “lumbering grain-fed cows,” who pollute the air with their “fabled flatulence.” A look at the shopping malls and subdivisions in today’s Ramallah suggests that the same modernity may have beset the region even if the Palestinian villages had remained.

And while Shehadeh’s books have found an increasingly warm reception, his name is far better known outside the West Bank than it is at home, because his work is written in English, the language in which he was educated. Only two of his literary books have made it into Arabic, according to Omar Hamilton, creative producer of the four-year-old annual Palestine Festival of Literature.

The torrent of books on Palestinian life is hardly close to stopping. Tamari said that since the 1990s, students, researchers, and social clubs have been gathering oral histories of 1948 and its aftermath. Other Palestinians are exploring West Bank life under Jordan in the 1950s and ’60s. Humor is also gradually seeping through the lines, such as Ramallah-based Suad Amiry’s 2010 collection of women’s stories, Menopausal Palestine. For Shehadeh, it’s a welcome development.

“So many people feel so much weight that people try to tell the whole story from the beginning to end, and there is nothing worse for small books than trying to tell the whole story,” Shehadeh said. “Now people are feeling relieved of the whole story because 1948 has been dealt with.”

In October, I took part in a conference at the luxurious, tourist-stuffed Mount Zion Hotel, a stone’s throw south of the Old City wall in Jerusalem. My group debated “delegitimization,” the current Israeli catch-all term that clumps together hostility to the post-1967 occupation with hostility to the existence of a Jewish state, hostility to everything Israeli, and hostility to Jews everywhere. The air was thick with anxious and angry embattlement, sarcasm and abstraction. A government minister told a nasty joke itemizing a long list of Palestinian sins. An official of the Foreign Ministry, his voice bristling with air-quotes, asked, “What is ‘occupation’?” An American participant spoke of “the alleged occupation.”

From this depressing session I drove to the Palestinian village of Silwan, just east of the Old City wall. It took all of three minutes before we passed soldiers with a water cannon poised for trouble—stone-throwing episodes had erupted near where a Palestinian cab driver was shot and killed a month earlier by a security guard working for the settler group Elad. “We are almost a branch of the government of Israel,” an Elad official has said, “but without getting buried under government bureaucracy.” Elad receives 47 million shekels, about $13 million, from anonymous donations each year, according to my guide, Hagit Ofran, director of Peace Now’s Settlement Watch Project. We were accompanied by two retired ambassadors, one Canadian, one American, members of an

A archeological tunnel recently dug in Silwan.

international group, the Jerusalem Old City Initiative, which for years has been promoting an administrative plan that would expedite a peace settlement—professional optimists, in other words.

When we stopped at a border police outpost, I aimed my camera—discreetly, or so I intended—toward a Palestinian kid leading a picturesque donkey down the street. He wheeled and shouted, No! Hagit explained that the Israeli military use photos to identify Palestinian boys, who are not infrequently arrested, late at night, then taken to police stations to be interrogated. I felt like an invader, ashamed of myself.

The Archeological Weapon

Throughout Silwan, on land annexed by Israel after 1967, Israeli archeology tunnels on, beneath Palestinian houses and in one case, Hagit said, close to a mosque, causing damage there and to nearby homes. Hagit spoke of these digs as acts of “impunity.” Her grandfather was the renowned Israeli scientist-philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, an early editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica, who frowned on the sanctification of physical sites and once wrote: “Holiness consists only in observance of the Torah and its Mitzvoth: ‘and you shall be holy to your God.’ ”

On a wall in Silwan.

Alongside the Givati parking lot on the slope to the Old City is another extensive archaeological dig. Plastic bags of unscreened dirt piled up alongside a Herod-era road boring into what the Jews call the Temple Mount and Palestinians the Haram al-Sharif—suggesting that after years of digging (never cleared by UNESCO, though Jerusalem is a World Historical Site), the dig is complete.

Hagit explained that the land where the parking lot stands was cleared of a Palestinian dwelling and then, as open space, became fair game for parking. Once open land is seized by the Jerusalem municipality for parking lots—there are seven in all—Palestinians cannot use it for other purposes. The owners have protested in court, arguing that the lots are empty only because the municipality won’t permit them to build there. They say they need kindergartens, schools, clinics, and playgrounds. (The Palestinians won in the local court, but the municipality’s appeal is pending.) Indeed, parking lots are not the most conspicuous need of this impoverished neighborhood, where,

Tourists outside the City of David.

according to the Palestinian information center, some three-quarters of the children subsist beneath the poverty line.

Across the street from the lot, just southeast of the Old City, Elad, the settlers’ group, runs the City of David, an archeological theme park the group developed in the early years of the previous decade. There’s an archeological consensus that the area was settled in the 12th century B.C.E., but the consensus breaks down over the question whether the Iron Age ruins actually originated during the 10th century reigns of Kings David and Solomon. Elad’s City of David brooks no ambiguity or entanglement, however. It claims absolute historicity in a place where national (and notional) histories clash, converge, intertwine, and interfere with each other.

Half a million tourists arrive by the busload each year—this is one of Israel’s top tourist attractions. Taxes subsidize visits to the City of David for every Israeli child.

Defaced sign on the site of a former Palestinian café in the City of David.

The Lawn of Solomon

The City of David is a public place, admission free, with pathways up and down the steep hills connecting the ruins of Iron Age walls, stone staircases, roads, and the Pool of Siloam. Palestinians rarely venture here. In fact, it’s easy to walk through the entire site—exiting through a tunnel for a fee, payable to Elad—without ever setting eyes on any of the roughly 55,000 Palestinians who live in Silwan.

Right: Lower gate to the Abbasi house in the City of David; Left: Abbasi house viewed from above.

On one scenic hillside in the City of David stood a Palestinian café. When its picture went up in the local Palestinian information center and a brochure a few years ago, to recall earlier, more cooperative days, vandals blacked out its sign.

Amid the restored ruins stand a few modernized homes with iron gates—occupied by Jewish settlers who hold special permits. The house pictured here, belonging to a Palestinian family, the Abbasis, was declared “absentee property” and in 1991 was taken over by the family of Elad leader David Be’eri, who sang, danced, and waved the Israeli flag from the rooftop. When the Abbasi family went to court in protest, a Jerusalem district judge found “no factual or legal basis” for the takeover.  Subsequently, the settlers managed to buy part of the house from one member of the Abbasi family—a purchase still pending in court after an Abbasi appeal. Three settler families live there now, along with one Palestinian family, while legal proceedings continue. All told, some 60 to 70 Israeli families share 18 houses in the vicinity of the City of David, living among 4,500 Palestinians. In Silwan as a whole, the Israeli post-1967 settlers number no more than 400.

King Solomon’s Lawn in the City of David.

At the bottom of the slope of the City of David, dedicated to the authenticity of biblical origins, stretches an anomalous green stretch called the Garden of Solomon. Planted a few years ago on a barren stretch of land, this recently planted space will eventually link up with other green spaces stretching around the Old City. If Solomon actually strolled across this ground, perhaps accompanied by one or more of his 700 wives, perhaps pausing to write his glorious psalms, it was probably not on a bright green lawn.

Bingo

Elsewhere in East Jerusalem stands a tawny, up-to-date stone settlement built on land purchased for Israeli use through the offices of Irving Moskowitz, an 82-year-old retired American physician and hospital developer with extensive gambling interests in South Florida and California. Fifty Israeli families already live in this particular complex.

Part of a Moskowitz-funded condominium settlement in East Jerusalem.

The multimillionaire Moskowitz, dubbed the “Bingo King” in a 1996 Los Angeles Times, has been buying up East Jerusalem properties for more than 40 years and turning them over to settler groups. After Moskowitz’s foundation bought this plot of land, Israeli Jews moved into the small Palestinian house that stood here, then demolished the house in order to build a compound that included 50 housing units for settlers. Pictured here is a second complex of 60 housing units, into which Israeli settlers have just begun moving.

Moskowitz, a longtime ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, had many of his relatives murdered by the Nazis. He has long viewed peace talks as a “slide toward concessions, surrender and Israeli suicide,” and he has put his millions where his mouth is, principally in East Jerusalem. He has cited a 1967 letter that he says David Ben-Gurion wrote to him declaring: “We need more Jews [in] the liberated territories.” (At other times Ben-Gurion wavered on keeping Israeli settlements on the West Bank, though not in Jerusalem.) By spreading Jewish settlements throughout an area that Palestinians insist must become the capital of a Palestinian state, Moskowitz is financing the facts on the ground that stand in the way of a deal.

Graffiti in Silwan.

In Hagit’s view, the security wall that snakes through East Jerusalem and the West Bank is not an absolute impediment to an eventual two-state solution. She maintains that if Jewish settlers, like Palestinians, are made to pass through checkpoints on their way into West Jerusalem, half of them will leave.

“Carr-terr! Carr-terr!”

Hagit and I drove to the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in northern Jerusalem, where every Friday at 3 p.m. protesters demonstrate against the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes—homes where 28 Palestinian families were resettled in 1956, having fled their homes on the other side of the Green Line during the 1948 war. This past August, two families were evicted in favor of Jews who owned these properties before they fled the Jordanian army in 1948. Now the victims of one ethnic cleansing insist on undoing it by conducting a second ethnic cleansing. Jews who reject Palestinians’ right of return to Israel, arguing reasonably that it would undermine the Jewish state, are insisting on their own right of return to properties that their families owned before 1948.

On this occasion, the 300 to 400 demonstrators, some banging drums, were in a festive mood, perhaps because they knew that former President Jimmy Carter and former Irish President Mary Robinson were expected. They were mostly young, almost entirely Israeli, and cheered on by an encampment of young Palestinians. These Friday afternoon gatherings have evolved into the quintessential rituals of the Israeli left. On a Saturday evening last March, some 3,000 protesters showed up.

At the dot of 4 p.m., Carter’s limo drove up. Chants began: “Carr-terr! Carr-terr!” Carter and Robinson waded into the crowd, Carter was handed a bullhorn and offered “congratulations” to the protesters for “trying to resolve this injustice peacefully.” He deplored “demolition” and “confiscation.” Carter, the president who brokered a peace treaty between Israel and its most formidable military enemy, is regularly, vehemently, reviled by the Israeli right and its American supporters. At the Mt. Zion Hotel, his name was synonymous with the devil incarnate.

Left: Waiting for Jimmy Carter in Sheikh Jarrah. Right: The top of the sign quotes Numbers 15:16: “There shall be one law and one custom for you and for the stranger that dwells with you”; the bottom: “Israeli law discriminates.”

I watched the ultra-Orthodox Israeli men across the street, strolling purposefully in and out of their gated community, wearing black hats and frock coats, showing their white cuffs in the unseasonably hot sun under the armed guard of Israeli troops, displaying minimal curiosity about the demonstrators, turning their backs to these interlopers who may well have appeared to them rowdy, immodest, treasonous, treyf, retrograde nuisances willfully ignorant of their manifest destiny. Were the settlers thinking that they were, themselves, the saving remnants, instruments of divinity? And/or, more earthily, did they fancy themselves the practical vanguard of an inkblot strategy that would forever scotch talk of an independent East Jerusalem that might stand as the capital of a Palestinian state? Were they convinced, as pilgrims have long been convinced, that a Roman-era tomb in the neighborhood holds the remains of Shimon Ha-Tzadik, Simeon the Just, high priest in the time of the Second Temple, although the inscription on the tomb, now defaced, marks it as the resting place of a Roman noblewoman?

What did these studious men, and the women who share their mission, make of Numbers 15:16, “There shall be one law and one custom for you and for the stranger that dwells with you”? What do their rabbis tell them? Do they define away the “strangers” of that verse in such a way as to disqualify Palestinians?

Do they feel vindicated now that the Knesset has belatedly discovered the merits of direct democracy when it passed a bill that would require a referendum of Israeli voters to confirm any agreement with the Palestinians?

Devout of spirit, “stiff-necked,” as the Torah said, were they untroubled by the fact that the great majority of Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan residents will not be granted the vote on that matter, or any other, because they are not the chosen among the chosen, the unelected elect?

Are they so confident that the Almighty, the Original Settler, made them, and only them, in his own exclusive image?

Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the Ph.D. program in Communications at Columbia University, is the author, with Liel Leibovitz, of the recently published The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election.

CORRECTION, December 12: After publication, the author learned of a number of factual errors were noted in this article. They are: Elad receives 47 million shekels annually in anonymous donations, not 52 million from the government. Gitlin attempted to photograph a Palestinian youth at a border-polie outpost, not a military outpost. A tunnel in Silwan recently caused damage to a mosque and nearby homes; it did not cause a house to collapse. The Israeli government did not revoke the license for a Palestinian cafe in the City of David, but vandals did black out its sign. The status of the Abbasi house was incorrectly described; in fact, currently both settlers and Palestinians live in parts of it while legal proceedings continue. The article characterized Hagit Ofran as saying that Moskowitz has purchased land for two East Jerusalem buildings that would block the new Palestinian parliament’s view of the Old City; she denies making that statement. And, finally, the opinion that half of the settlers would leave if they were required to pass through the same checkpoints Palestinians are on their way to East Jerusalem was attributed to Peace Now; it should be attributed to Hagit Ofran. These errors have all been corrected.

Abu Rahmah’s crime was organizing illegal demonstrations in a West Bank village where all demonstrations are by definition illegal. Abu Rahmah, 39, had long been involved in peaceful, multiethnic protests in the village of Bil’in, where Israel’s separation wall has cut Palestinians off from hundreds of acres of their land. Though barely covered in the American press, his conviction was protested by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Catherine Ashton, the foreign policy chief of the European Union, among others. “Israel’s attempt to crack down on this effective resistance movement by criminalizing peaceful protest is unacceptable and unjust,” said Desmond Tutu, one of Abu Rahmah’s supporters.

American Jews often ask where the Palestinian Gandhi is. What few realize is that if such a man exists, he’s probably sitting in an Israeli military prison.

Right now, there’s a small but significant nonviolent resistance movement in the West Bank. The important recent documentary Budrus tells the story of its beginning in 2003. That’s when Budrus community activist Ayed Morrar, with the help of his astonishingly intrepid 15-year-old daughter Iltezam, succeeded, through peaceful but resolute protest, in thwarting plans to build the wall on their village’s land. Their model—community-based, grassroots efforts to protect their property—spread through neighboring villages, including Bil’in.

Over five years in Bil’in, demonstrators—a mix of Palestinians, Israelis, and foreigners—held weekly demonstrations against the building of the wall, which annexed much of the village’s land into a nearby Israeli settlement. Israel’s Supreme Court ruled the wall’s route illegal, saying, “We were not convinced that it is necessary for security-military reasons to retain the current route that passes on Bil’in’s lands.” But construction continued. For most of the world, this village of 1,700 clearly has justice on its side. And though there has been some rock throwing, Abu Rahmah and other activists have done their best to prevent it and to maintain the moral high ground.

As Ethan Bronner wrote in the New York Times last year, the Bil’in movement “is one of the longest-running and best organized protest operations in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and it has turned this once anonymous farming village into a symbol of Palestinian civil disobedience, a model that many supporters of the Palestinian cause would like to see spread and prosper.”

Much rides on the fate of the Bil’in model. With peace talks going nowhere, there’s a lot of talk among Palestinians about a new uprising, a third intifada. There are Palestinian leaders who, for both tactical and moral reasons, are desperate to make it nonviolent. Everyone concerned about the future of the Middle East has good reason to hope that they succeed.

“I believe our future depends totally on the rise of the nonviolent movement,” the liberal Palestinian activist Mustafa Barghouti said over lunch recently. Nonviolent resistance, he said, is “why I live.”

Barghouti, who finished second to Mahmoud Abbas in the 2005 Palestinian National Authority elections, believes that continued settlements are making the death of the two-state solution imminent. As a last gasp, he wants Palestinians to unilaterally declare a state within 1967 borders and challenge the world to recognize it. “If the world community does not accept our approach of recognizing a Palestinian state immediately in ’67 borders, and forcing Israel to accept that, you will be witnessing the death of the two-state option,” he said. “And then we will have a very long struggle against apartheid. Nonviolent.”

This, as Barghouti knows, would be profoundly threatening to Israel. “For them, I am more dangerous than those who do military action, because I expose their system,” he said. Israel’s actions suggest that at least some in the military agree, because the Palestinian nonviolent movement is being systematically crushed.

In 2005, as Human Rights Watch reports, Abdallah Abu Rahmah’s brother Rateb Abu Rahmah was shot in the foot and arrested for stone throwing and assaulting a border policeman. During the trial, video evidence proved that the policeman had given false testimony. Eventually, the policeman confessed to fabricating his story, and Rateb was acquitted.

Mohammed Khatib, another leader of the Bil’in protests, was arrested in 2008 and charged with stone throwing. He later proved that he was on the Pacific island of New Caledonia at the time of the alleged incident. Nevertheless, he was held for nine months and only released on the condition that he report to the police station weekly during the time of the protests. Since May 2008, according to Popular Struggle Coordination Committee, an umbrella group for the nonviolent village-based movements, there have been 119 arrests in Bil’in. The Israeli army has started using live ammunition against the demonstrators, and four unarmed anti-wall protesters have been killed.

Last December, Abu Rahmah, the coordinator of the Bil’in Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements, was arrested in a 2 a.m. raid on his home. In a particularly absurd twist, he was charged with weapons possession, because he’d once collected used tear gas projectiles and bullet casings to demonstrate the types of ammunition that the IDF was using. Eventually, he was acquitted of that charge, but he was convicted of organizing illegal demonstrations and of incitement, which, under Israeli military law, means an “attempt, verbally or otherwise, to influence public opinion in the Area in a way that may disturb the public peace or public order.”

Abu Rahmah’s wife Majida has been denied permits to visit him in the Israeli military prison where he’s been held. He hasn’t seen his 1-and-a-half-year-old son since the baby was 6 months old. He’s not even allowed to make a phone call.

“We are concerned that his continued detention on charges of incitement and organizing and attending demonstrations is intended to prevent him and other Palestinians from exercising their legitimate right to nonviolent protest against the annexation of Palestinian land to Israel,” said a statement by the British Foreign Office. It’s hard to come to any other conclusion.

Of course, the challenge to nonviolence isn’t only coming from Israel. There’s hardly a consensus about the need for nonviolence among the Palestinian population: A 2008 poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that an overwhelming 84 percent of Palestinians supported a deadly attack on a West Jerusalem religious school that took place that year. But it’s at least conceivable that such support for violence could diminish if Palestinians believed there were other routes to freedom. One of the jobs of any social movement, after all, is to build ideological support for positions that might at first seem naïve or absurd.

“This is the Palestinian alternative to despair,” Jonathan Pollack, one of the leading Israeli activists working with the Palestinian protesters, said of nonviolent civil disobedience. “Both to the despair of futile negotiation, and to the despair of armed struggle. If Israel manages to kill this movement, to put this movement down, the consequences are going to be grave, both for Palestinians and for Israelis.”

First up: Where the Streets Had a Name by Randa Abdel-Fattah, a young Australian author of Palestinian-Egyptian heritage. (Full disclosure: Tablet Magazine’s Liel Leibovitz helped fact-check the book, which his wife, an executive editor at Scholastic, published. I didn’t know this when I ordered it.) It’s the story of 13-year-old Haayat, growing up in Bethlehem in 2004—her family moved there after their farm in Beit Sahour was leveled for a new settler road. After losing his farm, her Baba changed. “The evidence of his demolition doesn’t show,” she says. “The rubble and ruins are inside him.” Haayat’s wounds are right on the surface—her face is badly scarred. Why? How? We don’t find out until late in the book.

Haayat’s beloved grandmother, Sitti Zeynab, has suffered as well. For generations, her family lived in what is now West Jerusalem; they fled from the Israeli army in the war of 1948. Refugees, they lived in exile until after 1967’s Six-Day War. Upon their return, they found a Jewish family living in their house. The Jewish woman lost everything—her mother, her father, her twin sister—in a concentration camp. “I’m sorry for what happened to your family and your people,” Sitti Zeynab told her. “But why must we be punished?“ The woman’s husband replied, “Go to Egypt or Jordan or Syria. You have many countries from which to choose.” Haayat’s uncle cried, “But this is our homeland! Would you ask an Englishman to move to America or Australia because they speak English in those countries too? Palestine is our home, not Egypt or Syria!”

When Sitti Zeynab takes ill, Haayat is determined to save her by letting her touch the earth of her village once more. So, Haayat and her best pal, Samy, a soccer-loving Christian hooligan who has emotional scars of his own, take an empty hummus jar on a Quixotic quest: to get some Jerusalem dirt. Jerusalem is only six miles from Bethlehem, but it might as well be a world away. What follows is a picaresque adventure of checkpoints and curfews, of buses, taxis, hiking, and wall-climbing. Our young heroes meet a variety of types—Jewish, Muslim, and Christian—and learn more about the fractured land they inhabit.

The book has a lot of humor (farts abound, which will delight the target audience—and, OK, me too) to leaven the upsetting stuff. And not all Israelis are depicted as evil. But too many of the book’s characters are merely sketches, and Haayat’s voice is wildly inconsistent. Sometimes it’s over-the-top lyrical, as when she’s describing the beauty of the land and its people. Sometimes it’s so literal and unimaginative, she seems like a dimwit. When Sitti Zeynab compares her sense of loss to “heartburn after a big meal,” which “burns inside and nothing you do takes the sensation away,” Haayat suggests drinking a glass of milk. This is the same kid who describes “the ubiquitous Wall, twisting and turning, devouring the landscape”? For some reason, florid, self-conscious prose seems to afflict many books about growing up in the West Bank. Abdel-Fattah’s earlier young-adult novel, about a girl in suburban Melbourne, Australia, who suddenly chooses to wear hijab to high school, has no such problem. (It also has the awesome title Does My Head Look Big in This?)

If Where the Streets Had a Name is a good choice for a middle-grade-to-young-adult audience (and it is), Sharing Our Homeland: Palestinian and Jewish Children at Summer Peace Camp is a good one for younger kids. It’s an extended photo essay (the pictures are by Cindy Karp; the words are by Trish Marx) about a summer camp for Israeli Jewish and Israeli Palestinian kids. Givat Haviva, an Israeli nonprofit peace organization, runs the two-week camp. Every summer 200 kids come together to learn about each other’s culture, practice respectful dialogue, and do the fun stuff of camp—crafts, swimming, sports, and song. Like Where the Streets Had a Name, Sharing Our Homeland doesn’t offer any easy answers, just reflections on the importance of trying to see the Other as a fellow human being.

For older teenage and younger 20-something readers, there’s How To Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, cartoonist Sarah Glidden’s graphic memoir of a Birthright Israel tour. Glidden approaches the all-expenses-paid trip with the attitude of a somewhat entitled young lefty American—she cynically expects a nonstop barrage of pro-Israel propaganda. She’s surprised to find that Birthright offers her a nuanced portrait of a complicated country. She meets people on the left and on the right; she also works hard to learn the region’s history. Glidden is as tough on herself as she is on anyone else—she makes a snotty remark about pushy Russians to an Israeli who turns out to be a recent Russian immigrant; she realizes she’s misjudged some of her tripmates. She’s clear-eyed about her own neuroses and moral failings, and she’s a very thoughtful and endearing—and often funny—tour guide. The panels of the book are awash in pretty watercolors. I even learned something new about the Masada story! (I didn’t know the role of Shmarya Guttman, a young Zionist who in 1933 figured out how to market the destination to the Jewish National Committee as part of a stirring identity narrative.) Glidden doesn’t come to any sweeping conclusions about the tense reality in Israel, referred to as the Matsav (sense a theme here?), but she stops being so quick to judge Israel and find it wanting.

What all three books have in common is the insistence that we not lump an entire people into one undifferentiated mass we label the Enemy. This may seem like a naïve answer to a complex set of questions. But the ability to empathize goes a long way. “Although the fundamental political issues can only be resolved by the parties to the conflict, widespread efforts to promote pluralism and tolerance will begin to lay the groundwork for a future generation that can come to the negotiating table with open hands instead of clenched fists,” the author Robert A. Friedman recently wrote in Foreign Policy Digest. “Groups such as Seeds of Peace, which empowers young leaders from regions of conflict with the leadership skills required to advance reconciliation and coexistence, are needed more than ever. When mutual trust and respect are established at an early age, these bonds can last a lifetime.”

Too bad so few adults have gotten the memo. Queen Rania of Jordan (whose parents were from the West Bank) recently co-authored a picture book called The Sandwich Swap, about two little girls who fight over the perceived yuckiness of their respective lunches (hummus vs. PBJ). The book preaches multiculturalism and open-mindedness and was launched with a reading at the United Nations. But the queen has turned down several offers to publish a Hebrew version. She might have taken a page from Sitti Zeynab: “Nobody has realized that laughter sounds the same,” she tells Haayat, “whether it shakes its way out of an Israeli or a Palestinian.”

• Another former negotiator, the American David Makovsky, agrees that peace is not implausible, and argues that talks are the essential complement to Palestinian state-building. [WP]

• While sanctions may be putting the hurt on Iran generally, the country’s Revolutionary Guard and those with ties to it may actually be thriving by using private firms as fronts. [LAT]

• A detailed look at Israel’s new natural gas opportunities. [NYT]

• Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s declining health has basically become a public joke in the country. Less funny is that no one knows who his successor will be. [LAT]

• Richard Cohen doesn’t want compromise on the Islamic center, like moving it to a new location, because one side is right and the other side is wrong. Instead, he calls for “moral suasion” from leaders. [WP]

• Lebanon passed a law that will see the 400,000 Palestinian refugees in its borders treated like other foreigners (they previously were discriminated against), including allowing them to work non-menial jobs. [NYT]

• The former soldier who posed pictures of herself with bound Palestinian prisoners on Facebook said she did not “understand what’s wrong” with what she did; the IDF itself has condemened her. [NYT]

• Yesterday’s siege at the Turkish Embassy ended with no incident. [JTA]

• Hamas accused the Palestinian Authority of “waging war against Islam.” [JPost]

• Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative columnist Kathleen Parker says Park51 must be built:

We teach tolerance by being tolerant. We can’t insist that our freedom of speech allows us to draw cartoons or produce plays that Muslims find offensive and then demand that they be more sensitive to our feelings.

More to the point, the tolerance we urge the Muslim world to embrace as we exercise our right to free expression, and revel in the glory and the gift of irreverence, is the same we must embrace when Muslims seek to express themselves peacefully.

Nobody ever said freedom would be easy.

[WP]

So, it came as a surprise when, at 11:30 on that first Saturday night, after an exhausting opening session, about a quarter of the 200 conference-goers, overwhelmingly under 30, gathered to celebrate havdalah, the ceremony that ushers out the Sabbath. As they swayed in a circle singing “Lo Yisa Goy,” a Hebrew folksong—“and into plowshares beat their swords, nations shall learn war no more”—the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network felt for a moment like Jewish summer camp. Many Jewish community leaders would not have been enthusiastic about the scene. And, in echoes that reverberated throughout the conference, neither were some leaders of the Jewish Anti-Zionist Network.

A growing cohort of young Jews actively involved in Jewish life—often in alternative realms like independent minyans, the Yiddish-revival movement, and social-justice organizations—are taking left-wing positions on Israel that leave them feeling marginalized even in the Jewish communities they call home. Ideologically, they range from those who couch their politics in the language of international law and ultimately favor a two-state solution to those who use the more radical language of anti-imperialism and insist that true democracy can never happen within a Jewish state—with countless shades in between. By flirting with the labels “non-Zionist” and “anti-Zionist” without abandoning other traditional affiliations, they have crossed a line into territory where there exists no well-marked space on the American Jewish ideological map.

Into this vacuum came the first conference of the two-year-old International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, a still-obscure organization (though one now on the watch list of some mainstream Jewish organizations) with a moniker echoing those of long-defunct groups, like the Jewish Communist Labor Bund, that tethered Jewish specificity to the international left. For many of the young Jews who turned out in Detroit—most en route to the U.S. Social Forum, a major activist expo that was held in the city later that week—the Assembly seemed to promise a distinctly Jewish space in which to engage in or try on the ideas that Zionism does in fact equal racism and that only a one-state solution can mean justice for Palestinians—regardless of whether they take such a hard line in their day-to-day lives.

But then they encountered a new problem: Their elders on the radical left didn’t know what to do with them either. They were too Jewish.

“Folks like us get it from both sides,” said a 27-year-old Jewish religious professional at the conference who requested anonymity because, she said, she feared repercussions if her views became known. “We’re not loyal enough to the Jews and we’re not pure enough for the anti-Zionists.”

The existence of non- and anti-Zionist Jews is in itself nothing novel; from socialist Jewish movements in prewar Eastern Europe to the ultra-Orthodox sect Neturei Karta, they have been around as long as Zionism itself. What may be new is the emergence of a group of Jews whose leftism does not automatically equal secularism, as it did for generations of Marxists, and who, at the same time, grew up in or were welcomed into a liberal sector of the religious landscape that has grown exponentially over the past few decades. It’s not hard these days, at least in most American cities with large Jewish communities, to find synagogues or minyans that explicitly welcome feminists, gay Jews, and those suspicious of religious hierarchies—as well as spaces next door for those more interested in Yiddish culture or social action.

“For the past 10 years, and particularly from the Second Lebanon War up to the present, there’s been a resurgence of Jewish anti-Zionism where Zionism had once been strongest: among secular liberal Jews,” said Sam Freedman, a Columbia University journalism professor who has covered the American Jewish community for decades. In a recent New York Times column, he discussed the revival of the American Council for Judaism, a non-Zionist spinoff of the Reform movement. “It’s gone from being a totally peripheral part of the Jewish scene to some growing minority of the Jewish scene.” (According to Hebrew Union College sociologist Steven M. Cohen, no numbers yet exist on the size of the trend.)

The members of this demographic who turned up at the Assembly of Jews voiced a range of complaints about the Jewish institutions in their lives. A 25-year-old environmental activist named Hillary Lehr from Oakland, California, said she no longer wanted to visit the Reform synagogue she’d attended as a child because its pro-Israel stance was casually embedded into ritual life, from prayers for the Jewish state to tzedakah boxes for the Jewish National Fund. “I want to de-Zionize my synagogue because it’s not about being a Zionist, it’s about Judaism,” Lehr said. “There’s a generation that’s ready to go back to those religious and spiritual spaces. I want to say to my rabbi, ‘I want to come back to my spirituality and I want there to be space for all of us because we’re all Jews.’ ”

Avi Grenadier, 27, who helps run a progressive Jewish radio show called Radio613 in Kingston, Ontario, voiced similar objections about his religious education at a Conservative synagogue in a small Ontario town: Israel, he said, had taken the place of religious content—which meant that when he became disillusioned with the Jewish state, there was no other iteration of Judaism to fall back on. “I knew more about Mossad agents’ biographies than about the Nevi’im,” said Grenadier, who said he studied Jewish texts for the first time last year at Yeshivat Hadar, an egalitarian yeshiva in Manhattan. He now wears a yarmulke and observes the Sabbath.

Others voiced a complaint specific to institutions at the left-most edge of the mainstream Jewish world: Because opinion on Israel can be expected to vary widely—and explosively—in such congregations and organizations, some, by dictate or custom, have simply made discussion of Israel taboo.

Some non-Zionist Jews say they want what more pro-Israel factions of the community have: spaces where the Jewish state can be freely discussed and, indeed, turned into a political cause. But others questioned whether creating congregations that organize around the Palestinian cause would simply replicate the inextricability of Judaism and Zionism at more traditional places of worship.

“It’s not like I’m trapped in this synagogue where there’s all these Zionist politics on Shabbat and I want to create a Shabbat where there’s all these anti-Zionist politics,” said Aaron Levitt, 40, a former board member at West End Synagogue, a Reconstructionst congregation in Manhattan, who left the shul after several years of trying to unmoor it from allegiance to Israel (and who was not at the conference). “It would be just as bad; it might even be worse.”

Levitt helped start a non-Zionist minyan this year called Page 36 with fellow Jewish pro-Palestinian activists including a young Reconstructionist rabbi, Alissa Wise—not, he said, because he ultimately wants to pray only with political comrades, but as a kind of stopgap measure while truly “Zionist-neutral” congregations remain few and far between. At the same time, he added, the minyan was inspired by frustration with what he sees as a lack of interest among many of his coreligionist political comrades in aspects of spirituality and peoplehood that go beyond Jewish-flavored universalist politics.

“I care about Palestinians as much as anyone else,” said Levitt, “but I’m engaged in all this stuff because I care about Jews and Judaism.”

****
It was around precisely these questions of priorities—whether anti-Zionist Jewish movements should be motivated at their deepest level by concern about Jews, or about Palestinians—that the Assembly of Jews became to some extent factionalized. At one end of the spectrum were Jewish Anti-Zionist Network leaders who argued that Jewishness was relevant to the group’s mission primarily to the extent to which it could be used strategically in the public-relations battle over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and that to center their own identities much beyond that would, ironically, become another vehicle for Jewish self-obsession.

“Lots of successful movements have found resources and inspiration in spiritual and cultural work, and none of them have mistaken spiritual and cultural work for the movement itself,” said Sarah Kershnar, one of the Jewish Anti-Zionist Network’s founders. “The reason we pushed back on identity being the central place to act from is it sometimes lacks that connection with what’s really happening in the world.”

That reasoning went down well with some participants, particularly older ones who, in many cases, described themselves as red-diaper babies or as having been alienated from an older and more conservative iteration of the Jewish world for decades over anything from politics to sexuality.

At the other end of the spectrum were those who hewed more closely to Levitt’s view. They got their havdalah service on the Assembly’s program (though everyone else left the conference center before it began) and led workshops on “Jewish Anti-Zionist Spiritual Reclamation” and “Reclaiming Ashkenazi Cultural Spaces From a Zionist Agenda.” But tensions repeatedly surfaced, at public discussions and behind the scenes.

“It’s startling how much easier it is to bring my politics to Jewish spaces than to bring my Jewishness here,” said a participant active in the Boston minyan scene who wanted to remain anonymous because she hopes to apply for Hebrew school teaching jobs. “The organizers kept asking, ‘What is the material benefit this will have? How is this going to end Zionism?’ And it was like, we don’t want to justify why we pray.”

For those who left the Assembly of Jews with mixed feelings, the conference may ultimately have connected them less to the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network than to a nascent, nameless network of similarly minded young people. Interested parties passed around sign-up sheets for non-Zionist Yom Kippur retreats and hatched an idea to participate in the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement to isolate Israel by selling their own, emphatically Diaspora-made, Jewish ritual objects.

A few days after the Assembly ended, some participants who had stayed in town for the Social Forum held a non-Zionist Shabbat dinner along Detroit’s waterfront. And almost immediately, they encountered a challenge: One of the few other Jewish contingents at the Social Forum had come from Hashomer Hatzair, a socialist Zionist youth movement. How to integrate the two groups while giving the anti-Zionists the Shabbat they had been promised? The event’s coordinator crafted a text message that she hoped would address the concerns of Assembly folk while also engaging with their Zionist colleagues.

“As most Jewish spaces marginalize the voices of non- and anti-Zionist Jews, this space will privilege the voices of those Jews,” she wrote. But, she added: “All are welcome.”

Exhibit A, at the moment, is a fracas going on in Toronto, which will host its 30th annual Pride parade on Sunday, July 4 (because Canadians hate America). Back in April, the city of Toronto threatened to revoke funding from Toronto Pride if a group called Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (which has participated in previous years) was allowed to march in the parade; a month later, Toronto Pride’s board of directors banned the group. Last week, though, after community members who are being honored at the event announced that they would not accept their awards unless this group was allowed back in, Toronto Pride reversed its ruling—and the outcry switched again to the other side.

On one level, this clash involves the same arguments that always come up when an activist group wants to build an “apartheid wall” on a college campus or stick “Israeli apartheid” on a sign at a public (and, in this case, taxpayer-supported) event: One side maintains the necessity of open political discourse, and the other side responds that calling Israel an apartheid state falls outside politics and into hate speech.

But there are also a couple of factors at play that make fights about Israel within LGBT communities unique, and both are related to whether Middle East politics have anything to do with being gay (at least for LGBT folks who don’t live in the Middle East). “What’s next? An anti-Israel float in the Santa Claus Parade?” the heads of a Toronto gay Jewish group and the Canadian Jewish Congress wrote in a joint op-ed last Sunday. But as at least the former writer should know, Pride parades around the world—because they bring together very different parts of LGBT communities—already bring dissent with them, wracked as they are by tensions between “gay politics,” which are about the rights of same-sex lovers to be recognized and protected by the law, and “queer politics,” which take sexual and gender nonconformity as the jumping-off point for a much more expansive critique of systems of power. In this sense, Israel is just one more site around which a debate flares up about what it means to be an LGBT person in a straight world. (This predicament should actually sound familiar to Jews.)

The second and more Israel-specific factor at play has to do with what some LGBT intellectuals and activists are (increasingly audibly) calling “homonationalism,” which refers to the argument one often hears that non-Western (usually Muslim) countries are horribly homophobic, and thus should lose a large measure of credibility when they complain about their own treatment by the West. Israel’s hasbara campaigns have used a lot of this rhetoric recently, so in another sense, groups like Queers Against Israeli Apartheid are responding to that along the same lines as the American liberals who formed the group Not in Our Name at the outset of the Iraq War: Don’t use our American values to justify bombing Baghdad; don’t use our gayness to justify Israel’s occupation.

None of this, of course, resolves the question of whether calling Israel an apartheid state is accurate or acceptable. But it does help to explain why it’s happening, this weekend, on the streets of Toronto.

“I think this is something worth protesting for,” says 26-year-old Uri, who travelled to a recent demonstration at Sheikh Jarrah from kibbutz Nir Eliyahu, near Netanya, north of Tel Aviv. “There is this particular situation in Sheikh Jarrah, where people are being evicted from their homes. But it is a symbol, too, of the struggle against the occupation and the criminal racism here in Jerusalem.”

Uri and other demonstrators—many of whom requested their last names not be used—are in Sheikh Jarrah to protest the eviction of Palestinian families. The neighborhood—home to some 2,700 Palestinians, many from the families of 1948 refugees housed here in 1956 by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency and the Jordanian government—sits just north of the Old City. It was annexed by Israel in 1967, a move the international community does not recognize. Despite decades of neglect, though, Sheikh Jarrah has not lost its elegant charm, with such historic landmarks as Orient House and the American Colony Hotel.

In August 2009, 53 Palestinians, including 20 children, were forced out of their homes by Israeli authorities, who handed over the seized property to Jewish settlers devoted to Shimon HaTzadik, whose tomb is nearby. The settlers had obtained a court order declaring the land belonged to Jews prior to 1948.

Many similar property cases are pending. In November 2008, the Jerusalem District Court decided that a Palestinian family named al-Kurdi lived on property that historically belonged to the Sephardic Community Committee, and the court evicted the family. The al-Kurdis now live in a tent opposite their former home, which they had inhabited for 52 years. Another 28 Palestinian families—400 people in total—are at risk of forced eviction as more cases work through the Israeli legal system.

Together, these cases look like a concerted campaign to create a Jewish settlement in this Palestinian neighborhood, which settler organizations have stated as their aim, announcing plans to build a 200-unit apartment block in the area. Palestinian residents face tensions in their own homes as new Jewish neighbors—and their supporters—routinely provoke and harass them. Incidents logged by protestors range from taunting and insulting Palestinians to physical attack. In December of last year, campaigners say, a Jewish settler at Sheikh Jarrah was caught on film slamming a rock into a Palestinian’s head. In another incident a month earlier, a group of Jewish settlers bearing a water hose stormed a Palestinian home and flooded it.

Demonstrations against this campaign of intimidation began quietly. “After the evictions, around August, we noticed that some of the settlers and people going to pray at the tomb of Shimon HaTzadik were harassing Palestinians—every day, but in particular on Fridays,” says Maya Wind, one of the first Israelis to get involved with demonstrations in the area. “We thought it would be helpful to just turn up at those hours, to offer some protection.” At first, a few dozen people showed up. They brought friends. Eventually, the protest crowds swelled to around 100, mostly Israeli and international demonstrators. Then the police intervened.

“They started to arrest us in a very violent manner,” says Wind, who is 20 and lives in Jerusalem. Those arrests, including of the head of Israel’s Association for Civil Rights, were heavily reported in Israeli media. Wind says many more people came to the demonstration to defend freedom of speech and democracy. At one point, in March, an estimated 5,000 demonstrators turned up.

This progression of events formed the green shoots of an Israeli left-wing movement that has been struggling to find its voice since the Israeli assault on Gaza in December 2008. The acts of Jewish settlers in Sheikh Jarrah spurred this small, marginalized, and increasingly despairing population back out onto the streets. As Yuval, a 26-year-old student from Jerusalem and regular at the weekly protests says: “Another Hebron is flowering next to my home.”

***

The protests in Sheikh Jarrah are organized at weekly meetings between roughly equal numbers of Israeli activists and local Palestinian residents. “We are building a relationship based on trust and working together,” says Sara Benninga, 27, who lives in Jerusalem and has been involved in this campaign for a year. “Both sides are very careful and very sensitive to the needs of the other—we know the history of the conflict in Israel and we know that these relationships can end very easily.”

Observers say that the torch-bearers of this protest are a new, young generation of Israelis. “Without the driving force of young, local people in their early 20s, these demonstrations could not have happened,” says Didi Remez, an Israeli communications consultant specializing in non-profits and human rights organizations, who also runs the news-analysis blog Coteret. But if the movement is galvanized by young hearts, it is also being endorsed by older minds—and one of those, the novelist David Grossman, recently spoke at one of the weekly protests to urge an increased opposition to the Israelis’ occupation in all its manifestations.

“What’s happening here is only the tip of the iceberg,” he told the crowd in Sheikh Jarrah. “It’s only one example of what has been happening in the Occupied Territories for more than 40 years. I think that we are all beginning to grasp—even those who maybe don’t really want to—how 43 years ago, by turning a blind eye, by actively or passively cooperating, we actually cultivated a kind of carnivorous plant that is slowly devouring us, consuming every good part within us, making the country we live in a place that is not good to live in. Not good not only if you are an Arab citizen of Israel, and certainly if you are a Palestinian resident of the Territories—not good also for every Jewish Israeli person who wants to live here, who cherishes some hope to be in a place where humans are respected as humans, where your rights are treated as a given, where humanity, morality, and civil rights are not dirty words, not something from the bleeding-heart left.”

Indeed, though the demolition of Palestinian homes is an ugly routine in East Jerusalem, the evictions at Sheikh Jarrah are a new twist, representing the first time the court has wound back to 1948, honoring land deeds claimed to originate before the establishment of the Israeli state. That has clanged warning bells for some Israelis.

“Where do you draw the line?” asks a Sheikh Jarrah demonstrator, Michael Rahat, 55, a teacher from Jerusalem. “If a Jew is allowed to throw an Arab out of a home he claims belonged once to Jews, why can’t you evict Jews from homes in Baka and Talbieh”—that once belonged to Palestinians—“and house Palestinian refugees there?”

For the many Jerusalemites who are a part of these protests, a keen sense of worsening local politics is informing their attendance. Yael, a 21-year-old student from Jerusalem and a regular at the demonstration says: “This is about the future of Jerusalem, and the future of Israel and Palestine.” Her protest is against the practice, she says, of “trying to build facts on this street, on the ground—without negotiation or anything, to make as many neighborhoods Jewish so that most of Jerusalem will stay in our hands.”

The chants and placards on the streets of Sheikh Jarrah insist that Jerusalem is a Palestinian city no less than it is Israeli, which is a direct affront to the “eternal and undivided capital” ideology. But while Palestinians are equal partners in organizing the campaign, they do not have an equal presence at the mostly Jewish-Israeli demonstrations. Sara Benninga offers an explanation. “There is a big difference between being an Arab and a Jew in terms of how you get treated by the police and court,” she says. She claims that Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah have been arrested purely on the basis of a nod and a pointed finger from Jewish settlers in the area. In mid-March, one of the Palestinian campaigners, Saleh Diab, was detained for nine days and then released—the judge reprimanded police, finding no evidence for the assault charges mounted against him. In such a climate, Palestinians who take to the streets risk being targeted by police. Hassan, a Palestinian watching a recent protest at Sheikh Jarrah from the sidelines, said: “We would like to be demonstrating with them, but this is not for us, not for Arabs. We are not supposed to be there.”

In the face of U.S. pressure to freeze settlement activity as a means to ease a return to negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, the Netanyahu government has constantly asserted an exception for Jerusalem. In December 2009, Israel announced plans to build nearly 700 new homes in East Jerusalem, and last March, during one of Vice President Joe Biden’s visits, unveiled further plans to build 1,600 more housing units.

Elie Wiesel has declared Jerusalem to be above politics. In a full-page ad that appeared in major U.S. newspapers, he wrote that Jerusalem “belongs to the Jewish people and is much more than a city, it is what binds one Jew to another in a way that remains hard to explain.” He then added that anyone, Muslim, Christian or Jewish, should be permitted to build freely anywhere in Jerusalem and proposed an indefinite postponement to negotiations over the city. The response from Israel challenged what was viewed as a rosy-eyed and removed appreciation of the Israeli brand. “For more than a generation now the earthly city we call home has been crumbling under the weight of its own idealization,” read the letter signed by 100 Israeli peace activist, many of them engaged in the protests at Sheikh Jarrah.

“As true Jerusalemites,” the letter continues, “we cannot stand by and watch our beloved city, parts of which are utterly neglected, being used as a springboard for crafty politicians and sentimental populists who claim Jerusalem is above politics and negotiation.”

Rachel Shabi, the author of We Look Like the Enemy: The Hidden Story of Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands, is based in Jerusalem.

“There is no mention that Palestinians voted Hamas into power in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections,” Tablet Magazine contributor Kirchick argues.

There is similarly no mention of the murderous anti-Semitism spewed in Palestinian schools, television, radio, and newspapers, or the medieval propaganda sponsored by Iran, Saudi Arabia, or even Egypt. And, perhaps most tellingly, there is no mention of the poll, conducted just last month by An-Najah National University in the West Bank, which found that 77 percent of Palestinians oppose a two-state solution.

The foundational error in Beinart’s piece is a grievous misunderstanding for why the Arab-Israeli conflict persists to this day: Arab intransigence.

Beinart responded to this line of argument by claiming, first, that his essay was less concerned with the motives behind the Israeli government’s actions than the far less explicable ones behind the American Jewish establishment; and, second, that “Arab intransigence” (and worse), while far from irrelevant to the conflict, is also not necessarily the main motivating factor. In the West Bank, he says, continued Israeli settlements are at least as responsible for Palestinian anger as Yasser Arafat’s decade-old rejectionism; and in Gaza, the Israelis (and the Americans) blew it by not encouraging a Hamas-Fatah unity government.

Maybe Beinart’s most provocative point comes at the end of his response:

[Various entrants into the debate] are all Jews. In some sense, therefore, Israel’s crimes—unlike those of Hamas or Ahmadinejad—are committed in our name. We have a special obligation to expose and confront them. And we have a special obligation not to use the crimes of Israel’s enemies to excuse behavior that dishonors a Jewish state, and the Jewish ethical tradition that we all consider precious.

That … is going to anger people all over again.

A Kaleidoscopic Community [Foreign Policy]
Peter Beinart Misdiagnoses … Everything [Jewlicious]

Beinart’s Blind Spot [Foreign Policy]

Why Israel Has To Do Better [The Daily Beast]

• Hezbollah is mobilizing to prepare for a large Israeli military drill beginning Sunday. [Haaretz]

• France and Germany’s foreign ministers both hit the Mideast this weekend to talk peace. [Ynet]

• Moshe Greenberg died at 81. An Israel Prize winner, he was one of the first Jews who critically taught the Bible in the American academy. [NYT]

• Newt Gingrich’s new book says President Obama’s policies are as “great a threat to America as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.” The AJC wants an apology. [American Jewish Committee]

• And while we were out for Shavuot, Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pennsylvania) lost this year’s Democratic primary. So much for the party switch. [JTA]

Among other things, the piece is a helpful reminder that even if you think you have the answer to the West Bank, there are many other variables in play—Syria, Iran, and Hamas in Gaza most quickly coming to mind.

But Shavit’s analysis of the West Bank stood out to me: Broadly speaking, he pointed out, there’s actually little dispute over what will happen!

The solution to the Jerusalem problem is widely known: The Jewish neighborhoods stay in Israel, the Arab ones are given to Palestine and the Holy Basin becomes part of a special regime. The solution to the refugee problem is also commonly known: Palestinians’ right of return will apply to the territory of the Palestinian state, while such claims will not apply to the territory of the Jewish state. Just as well known is the solution to the settlement problem: Territory swaps and annexing large settlement blocs to Israel, and the eviction of isolated settlements.

Simple, right? (No, it’s not, but simpler than having no idea where things are going.)

The problem, according to Shavit? “The Palestinians feel history is working in their favor, and are not ready to compromise,” he argues. “The Israelis, meanwhile, are paralyzed. Both talk peace and play at peace, but neither are willing to pay the price of peace.”

I’d take issue with some of that—a few on the Palestinian side, most notably Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, have talked of statehood next year, although maybe that, too, is a bargaining chip. But if time is on the Palestinians’ side, then that makes the Obama Administration’s apparent desire to rush a peace deal more well-intentioned than the right would say it is, even if he’s going about it in a way the center-left Shavit says is misguided. Furthermore, if time is on the Palestinians’ side, then that makes things for Israel—whose main concern right now assuredly remains Iran, not Palestine—even scarier.

Golan, Not Jerusalem, Is Key to Mideast Peace [Haaretz]
Weighing an Obama Plan To End a Mideast Logjam [NYT]

• Presidents Obama and Medvedev signed a nuclear arms treaty in Prague this morning. [NYT]

• More on the Obama Administration’s deliberations over whether to write up its own peace treaty and submit it to the Israelis and the Palestinians. [LAT]

• Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas fired the top aide who is seen on a scandalous tape allegedly extorting sex from a woman not his wife. [NYT]

• An overview of Turkey’s attempts to gain regional prestige and hegemony, in part by cozying up to neighbor Syria. [WP]

• U.S. envoy George Mitchell will head to the region after all, this Sunday. His trip last Tuesday had been cancelled as the United States awaited a satisfactory Israeli reply to its concerns. [LAT]

• The Mideast Quartet—made up of the U.S., the E.U., the U.N., and Russia—condemned settlements and, for the first time, endorsed a two-year timetable for a Palestinian state. [WSJ]

• The Israeli Air Force bombed six Gaza targets to retaliate for a rocket yesterday that killed a Thai worker in Israel. [WSJ]

• The Anti-Defamation League publicly criticized Gen. David Petraeus—a hugely popular figure—for linking (to whatever extent he did) the Palestinian conflict and the safety of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. [Haaretz]

• A new poll finds that the majority of Israelis actually think President Obama has been fair with Israel in the past week. [Haaretz/Forward]

Clashes in Jerusalem Mark Rising Tensions [NYT]

• U.S. officials continued to criticize Israeli building in East Jerusalem. Prime Minister Netanyahu apologized again for the construction announcement’s timing while maintaining support for the settlements. My 10 am post will have much more. [LAT]

• While the main victors in France’s regional elections were leftist parties, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s ultra-right National Front won a higher-than-expected 12 percent. Among other provocations, Le Pen has minimized the Holocaust. [JPost]

• The IDF chief-of-staff is in Turkey on a fence-mending visit. [Haaretz]

• Even as U.S. officials assert no tolerance for Iranian nuclear weapons, America has already, quietly, initiated containment policies. [NYT]

• The 2010 NCAA basketball tournament bracket was announced. Maccabi USA Head Coach Bruce Pearl’s Tennessee Volunteers drew a six seed and will play San Diego State Thursday evening. [ESPN]

Kramer spent most of his brief remarks establishing that violent radicalism is more or less inevitable in populations with a disproportionately high number of young-adult males. In the case of Gaza and its extremely high number of just such people—the consequence of an extremely high birth rate—Kramer proposes that aid agencies end pro-natal subsidies (which essentially guarantee care to future newborns) in order to lower that birthrate, lower the pool of violent young men, and bring peace:

eventually, this will happen among the Palestinians too, but it will happen faster if the West stops providing pro-natal subsidies for Palestinians with refugee status. Those subsidies are one reason why, in the ten years from 1997 to 2007, Gaza’s population grew by an astonishing 40 percent. At that rate, Gaza’s population will double by 2030, to three million. Israel’s present sanctions on Gaza have a political aim—undermine the Hamas regime—but if they also break Gaza’s runaway population growth—and there is some evidence that they have—that might begin to crack the culture of martyrdom which demands a constant supply of superfluous young men. That is rising to the real challenge of radical indoctrination, and treating it at its root.

The uproar to this has been predictable—indeed, one criticism you could make of Kramer is that he should have predicted it, and have taken better care at least to clarify his remarks. (I also think Kramer may have brought the academic’s correct love of experimental, extreme, half-held opinions into the unwelcome realm of politics.) Notable opponents include M.J. Rosenberg, who questioned whether Kramer wasn’t advocating genocide, and Stephen Walt, who rejects the genocide accusation but nonetheless called Kramer’s views “so offensive to any decent person that you don’t need to worry much about getting the right label for them,” as well as “barbaric and racist.”

The Harvard center supporting Kramer’s visitor-ship dismissed calls for it to disassociate from him. Kramer has also posted a self-defense, noting that all he proposes is removing the encouragement to procreation, not actively discouraging it.

There is no individual sentence in Kramer’s remarks that is incorrect, and the internal logic is consistent: the high birth rate does lead to increased terrorist violence; aid groups are encouraging that high birth rate; and so on.

But Kramer’s critics are, at least on the big question, correct. If the only solution to Hamas is to limit the Gaza Palestinian population, then there is no solution to Hamas. (And Kramer’s argument that it’s not limiting the population, only bringing it down to what it would be without those subsidies, is logically facile—no matter the reason, the birth rate is what it currently is—and morally insensitive, at the very least.) If the problem is too many young men with not enough to do, then the morally responsible solution has to be giving them something to do, not decreasing the number of young men.

Superfluous Young Men [Sandbox]
Is Harvard Prof Advocating Genocide? [HuffPo]
Should Harvard Dump Martin Kramer? [Stephen Walt]
Smear Intifada [Sandbox]
Related: Herzliya Diary [Tablet Magazine]

The idea: U.S. envoy George Mitchell will shuttle between the Israelis and Palestinians, with the ultimate goal of getting the two sides in the same room. Both the Arab League and the Palestine Liberation Organization okayed the talks despite the fact that Israel has not agreed to a full settlement freeze in the West Bank and East Jerusalem—something Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has previously insisted were a precondition to negotiations. (Ah, but these are only indirect peace negotiations, so he hasn’t technically backed down from that! Now perhaps you see the appeal of these “proximity talks.”)

Meanwhile, a good deal of the purpose behind Biden’s trip is to reassure Israel’s leadership and people that the United States is still fundamentally behind them—this after a year during which Israel has felt President Barack Obama has been unsympathetic to its point of view; and this after a leaked Foreign Ministry report predicting the administration will take the Palestinian side in the talks and will be too focused on November’s midterm elections to devote too many resources to the Mideast anyway.

Biden seems perfect for this mission: unlike Obama, he’s been on the political scene for almost four decades, and for the more prominent part of his career has been a powerful figure on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; through all that time, he has been seen as a friend to Israel.

There is real urgency behind these talks. The Palestinians’ West Bank leadership may be unwilling to give a bilateral, two-state deal another chance should this latest attempt fall apart. Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat was pretty explicit with Israeli radio, announcing that after this, they would revert to calls for a single, bi-national state (more encouragingly, he said Palestinians were ready to give up parts of the West Bank as long as what they end up with is West Bank-sized).

Looming, also, are the plans of revered Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad: currently engaged in an ambitious and, so far, not unsuccessful campaign of state-building in the West Bank, Fayyad’s eventual hope is to build enough of a functioning government and society that, in a year or two’s time, the West Bank leadership is ready to declare independence and dare the world not to recognize it.

Palestinian insistence on a one-state solution, and a unilateral declaration of nationhood without border issues (to say nothing of Gaza) resolved: I just named two things Israel emphatically does not wish to see happen. It’s becoming clear whom the stakes of these nascent talks might be higher for.

Biden Visits Israel to Restart Peace Talks [NYT]
As Biden Heads to Israel, Plans for Proximity Talks Advancing [Laura Rozen]
Secret Israeli Report: U.S. Cozying Up to Palestinians [Haaretz]
Salam Fayyad: The Palestinian With a Plan for Statehood [JTA]

• Vice President Joe Biden arrives in Israel today, ostensibly to kick-start those talks, but perhaps most of all to signal to Israeli leaders that America continues to back them. [LAT]

• A leaked Israeli Foreign Ministry report argues that U.S. positions in the talks will hew closer to the Palestinian side, and anyway that in the coming months the Obama administration will be more focused on November’s midterm elections. [Haaretz]

• In a sign of tensions over Russia’s willingness to support harsher sanctions over its nuclear program, Iran expelled all Russian commercial pilots. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• Companies that do business with Iran despite U.S. discouragement have nonetheless won over $100 billion in U.S. contracts in the past 10 years. [NYT]

• Many in Lebanon believe they will have a new conflict with Israel, like that in 2006, in the near future. [LAT]

• The United States drew up new proposed sanctions that would target Iran’s banking, shipping, and insurance. [NYT]

• Meanwhile, China said it believes diplomatic solutions to the crisis over Iran’s nuclear program “have not been exhausted,” and so it is not open to sanctions now. [Haaretz]

• Britain will likely amend its war-crimes law today to allow former Israeli officials—like Tzipi Livni, who was the target of a warrant last December—to travel there securely. [JPost]

• There has been some talk of a summit between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (the leader of the Palestinian Authority) and Israeli President Shimon Peres (not the leader of Israel). Not only would it not include, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (who is the leader of Israel), but planning for it was reportedly done without his knowledge. [Haaretz]

• Arnold Beichman, an influential political columnist who was something of a proto-neoconservative (he turned right decades before the others did), died at 96. [NYT]

• The top U.N. official for humanitarian relief condemned the Gaza blockade, saying it imposed on residents “an existence, not a life.” [NYT]

• Most Arab states support four-month U.S.-organized indirect talks between Israel and the Palestinians. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• One week after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was received warmly in Syria, Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri announced an upcoming state visit to Tehran. [Arutz Sheva]

• Maureen Dowd reports that, “at their own galactically glacial pace,” Saudi Arabia is modernizing, even as Israel grows less secular. [NYT]

• Hank Rosenstein, who in 1946 played for the New York Knicks in what’s now considered the first NBA game, died at 89. In that 68-66 win over the Toronto Huskies, Rosenstein had seven Jewish teammates (in addition to himself). [NYT]

• The Israeli Embassy in Madrid has of late received letters from Spanish schoolchildren urging the ambassador: “think about not killing the Palestinian children and elderly. I don’t know if it doesn’t bother you, having to murder people. You should leave Palestine.” [Ynet]

• Visiting Washington, D.C., Defense Minister Ehud Barak would not answer questions from a friendly audience on the state of U.S.-Israel relations vis-à-vis Iran. [Laura Rozen]

• Whom does Louis Farrakhan think is partly to blame for the difficulties President Barack Obama has encountered in office? No, you don’t get any hints. [JTA]

• A great piece from Israel on how Russian speakers—who now make up 15 percent of Israelis—have turned entire cities into Moscows-on-Mediterranean. [NYT]

• Meanwhile, in Brooklyn’s Little Odessa (otherwise known as Brighton Beach), there are plans for a reality show that is “a cross between Jersey Shore and Anna Karenina.” The show’s producers will likely find that most residents are—unlike the denizens of the two cited masterpieces—Jewish. [NY Post]

Oh, and regarding my noon post: the two Jews not born in America are Albert Einstein and Isaac Asimov; the convert to Judaism was Sammy Davis, Jr.; and the convert from Judaism was Mel Brooks (who became a Catholic when he married Anne Bancroft).

• Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, a favorite of centrists on the Israeli side, vows that Palestinians will not be provoked to violence by “the terrorism of the settlers, and the terrorism of the settlement project.” [Haaretz]

• In Finland, authorities are trying to bar anyone but doctors from performing circumcisions by prosecuting a Jewish couple whose baby experienced complications after a mohel performed his bris. [Jewish Chronicle]

• A library at Oxford University has a fascinating, and revealing, exhibit of late-medieval manuscripts, with a special focus on Jewish ones. [Times of London]

• Jewish Week columnist Abe Novick bemoans the dissipation of trust and true connectedness in our supposedly globalized world. [Jewish Week]

• Apparently there’s a big Illinois plant that makes gefilte fish. And there’s a trade dispute preventing the gefilte fish from being shipped to Israel. So, yeah, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton personally pledged to resolve the problem in time for Passover. Me? I prefer my gefilte fish caught in the wild. [JPost]

Sixty-seven percent of Americans are very skeptical that Israel will ever be at peace with its Arab neighbors (or with all of them, anyway), which means a sizable chunk both supports Israel over the Palestinians and thinks Israel will never be at peace.

I’m not sure how much sense that makes. An Israel at peace with its neighbors requires some sort of equitable resolution for the Palestinians. You can think that the lack of peace, and the absence of a Palestinian solution, is overwhelmingly not Israel’s fault, and yet still believe there are better policies Israel could adopt in order to increase the likelihood of peace. Maybe the more useful question is not whom you support between the two sides, but whether you are satisfied with the overall direction.

Gallup Poll: American Support for Israel Near Twenty-Year High [Arutz Sheva]

• U.S. Adm. Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress that no military strike could completely halt Iran’s nuclear weapons program. [Haaretz]

• Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman dodged E.U. questions over Mossad’s suspected assassination of Hamas’s chief weapons man, which involved the use of forged European passports. A complete update of the story will follow on The Scroll today. [AP/WSJ]

• Defense Minister Ehud Barak heads for America today for security discussions with senior U.S. officials as well as a meeting with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. [Haaretz]

• Rabbi Menachem Porush, head of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism political party, died at 93. [AP/NYT]

• Roman and Alexandra Zaretsky, the Israeli ice dancing duo, finished in 10th place in the Vancouver Olympics after skating, last night, to the theme from Schindler’s List (here’s video). [JTA]

But in fact, the ADL has gone out of its way to oppose a boycott. Partly, one suspects, out of a sense of fair play, as well as of prudence: the group has far more weight when lobbying the university to cultivate a “safe, respectful atmosphere,” if it is on-record opposing a boycott.

There’s another reason the ADL is against a boycott of UC-Irvine, though. Said—who else?—ADL head Abraham Foxman:

We are surprised that those who call for a boycott fail to recognize that it is a double-edged sword that legitimizes a tactic so often used against Jews and Israel, particularly in academic settings. We believe academic boycotts are inappropriate, harmful and counterproductive, and will not work to resolve the situation on campus.

Meanwhile, the ADL’s release praised the chancellor for his “swift, clear, and appropriate” response while insisting that more needed to be done. It acknowledged that the heckling led to 11 arrests, while taking no position on them; the Muslim Public Affairs Council has called for an investigation into them, while the Council on American Islamic Relations has asserted that they violated the First Amendment. (Whether they did or didn’t is a question of line-drawing: suffice to say that not all speech is protected like all other speech, and heckling a lecturer falls pretty wide on the less-protected side of the spectrum.)

ADL: U.S. Jews Mustn’t Boycott University for Heckling of Israeli Envoy [Haaretz]

Earlier: ADL, J Street Condemn UC-Irvine Incident

• Mideast envoy Tony Blair will take a more active role alongside envoy George Mitchell in helping facilitate peace talks. [Ynet]

• More on the mumps outbreak among Orthodox Jews in the Tristate Area. The 1500-plus cases are mostly religious males in Brooklyn, particularly boys and adolescents; the outbreak originated at a religious camp upstate and has spread to New Jersey and also Quebec; most of those who got it did receive the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine. [NYT]

• The suspended deputy mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey, became the first person to be convicted in the corruption scandal broken by informant Solomon Dwek. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• A bizarre story: the Yonkers, New York-born “president” of the Dominican Republic’s Sephardic community is giving legal advice to ten Americans who allegedly tried to unlawfully ferry almost three dozen children out of Haiti; but El Salvador police now accuse him of trafficking in Central American women. He denies the charge. [NYT]

• Israeli officials are reportedly banking on U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s believing their internal inquiry into IDF conduct during the Gaza War is adequate, in order that efforts to establish an independent probe will peter out. [JPost]

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

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

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

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

Too Close to Home [NYT]

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

Analyzing Israel’s efforts vis-à-vis the Palestinians (half a million of whose refugees, Assad notes, reside in Syria), he argues,

They do not have any of the old generation who used to know what politics means, like Rabin and the others. That is why I said they are like children fighting each other, messing with the country; they do not know what to do.

[The Israelis] wanted to destroy Hamas in the war and make Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] strong in the West Bank. Actually it is a police state, and they weakened Abu Mazen and made Hamas stronger. Now they wanted to destroy Hamas. But what is the substitute for Hamas? It is Al Qaeda.

Oh, and Assad even commented on J Street. “Ahh … that is new!” he said of the group’s willingness to criticize certain Israeli policies. One imagines J Street feeling queasy at the thought of Assad celebrating it, but actually, for the record, he appears to understand that the American “pro-Israel, pro-peace” outfit takes the “pro-Israel” part of its slogan as seriously as the “pro-peace”: “we should educate them that if they are worried about Israel, then the only thing that can protect Israel is peace, nothing else. No amount of airplanes or weapons could protect Israel, so they have to forget about that.”

Direct Quotes: Bashar Assad [The New Yorker]

Moreover, Benn reports on what he calls (quoting two political scientists) the “white intifada”: the Palestinian Authority’s public relations campaign to convince the world that a unilateral declaration of independence is the best solution to the conflict. He writes:

In a document [the political scientists] distributed last week, they warn of Israeli complaisance and present a disturbing scenario: The Palestinians declare independence, and Israel refuses to recognize it and is faced with a boycott. Regardless of whether it yields or reacts with force, Israel cannot win, and will also lose control of the process.

It can be easy to disagree with Benn’s political beliefs, which are rarely hesitant to blame Israel a great deal for the larger conflict. However, it is more difficult to disagree that world opinion—America’s included—seems to be drifting ever further away from Israel’s side.

World Isn’t Buying Israel’s Explanations Anymore [Haaretz]

One feature, no doubt, was that Sharon was an includer, a welcoming figure. This didn’t comport easily with his image through much of his career as a hawk. But one could see it in various encounters, beginning with the way he and his wife, Lili, ran his breakfast table at his farm in the Negev desert, where an amazing array of local figures, including Arabs, national politicians, visiting dignitaries, journalists, artists, and intellectuals found themselves sitting down to a vast repast of eggs and cheeses and fish and fruits and pastries and wide-ranging, cheerful conversation that became a memorable event.

Sharon had no fear of meeting his critics in conversation. In the 1990s, he came by the offices of the Forward, which I then edited, in a season when the newspaper had so many figures who were hostile to him that they left the building to avoid having to greet him. But the journalists themselves stayed and ended up parsing the problems of the Middle East with Sharon for two hours, capping it off with the lighting of Hanukkah candles and the sharing of latkes. One of the journalists, David Twersky, found his view of Sharon changed forever.

Not that Twersky became a supporter, only that his view of Sharon was changed, improved. It must have happened tens of thousands of times during the active years of Sharon’s life. During the early months of the Clinton administration, Sharon was in New York and a Forward reporter and I went to see him at an office he was using in a midtown tower. We spent an hour or so with him, and as we were leaving, one of us asked him what he thought of the new president’s plan to permit gay soldiers to serve in the U.S. military.

I was curious on the point, because, after all, Sharon was, among other things, probably the greatest living field commander. The question brought a quizzical look to his face, and he turned to an aide and said, “What is our policy on gays in the military?” The aide shrugged to indicate that he didn’t know either. So the onetime defense minister of Israel turned back to his visitors and announced that he didn’t know, which I took to mean that he was not an excluder (a policy that was later formally codified in Israel).

Another time I saw this instinct was in the early 1980s, when I was nursing the notion that the right way to deal with the Palestinians who were registered with the United Nations as refugees would be to offer them American green cards. I put this idea to all sorts of people, from Yasser Arafat, who would have none of it, to a foreign minister in Beirut, who said he didn’t care where they went so long as it wasn’t Lebanon, to American Jewish officials, who thought it counterproductive, to American politicians, who were scandalized. But when I asked Sharon about it over breakfast at his farm, he looked at me and said, “Why can’t they stay here?”

On top of all this, Sharon understood the levers of government in a way that comes with experience. He was educated in law and of course had been a celebrated soldier. When he finally acceded as head of the government, he was one the most qualified premiers in the history of parliamentary democracy: the ministries he’d headed included agriculture, defense, industry and commerce, construction and housing, national infrastructure, and foreign affairs, and, while in uniform, he had held a major command (the southern).

The list, incidentally, excludes finance, and if Sharon had a weakness, this was it. His comprehension of political economy was not what one would call a model of supply-side, free-market thinking. The joke used to be that when asked about whether he was going to reform Israel’s system of state-owned industry, he would say something like, “Yes, we’re going to sell the big government-owned companies to private entrepreneurs.” And he would be asked, “What are you going to do with the money, general?” And he would reply: “We’re going to buy more efficient state-owned industries.” When he finally acceded as premier, however, he put in as finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had in that ministry what has been, at least so far, his finest hour.

It’s hard to to say what Sharon would do were he to awaken from his coma and survey the order of battle today. There is a camp, of which Jeffrey Goldberg is a member, that reckons his mistake in respect of Gaza was not in the withdrawing but in the unilateralism. My own sense is that the unilateralism of the maneuver was, in Sharon’s view, its premier virtue. How long he would have stood for the kind of violence that subsequently issued from Gaza, I have my doubts. My guess is that he would have gone back in sooner and stayed longer. Would he have already acted toward Iran, it’s impossible to say. But it wouldn’t surprise me if, privately, he would be telling newspapermen that, for all the threats coming out of Iran, the danger that concerned him most was from Egypt, with its military now trained and equipped by the United States. And he would have been working constantly to broaden his political connections, at home and abroad, over one jolly meal after another.

• The literal 1967 boundary must be considered “sacrosanct.” Most Israelis presume that although the spirit of the ’67 Green Line should guide thinking, various land swaps, reflecting updated facts on the ground, will dictate the actual borders.
• East Jerusalem must be Palestinian. This issue is perhaps the most pivotal. Netanyahu, Rosen says, “has accepted that the Palestinians will bring their claims for Jerusalem to the table, but he is not going to make this or any other concession just to bring Abbas to negotiate.”
• There must be a two-year deadline for a final settlement. Again, Netanyahu is unlikely to agree to any guarantees.
• Reparations, and potentially repatriation, must be offered to Palestinian “refugees”: the “right-of-return” issue. Netanyahu’s room to make concessions here is limited by the simple fact that admitting an Israeli obligation in the wrong manner could delegitimize Israel itself.
• The Arab Piece Initiative, famously launched by Saudi Arabia in a 2002 Thomas Friedman column, must be the negotiating blueprint. Netanyahu has agreed to list it as a reference.
• Interim agreements must be minimized—the goal should be final resolutions. Israel tends to find interim agreements more agreeable to itself.

(Unmentioned: Hamas’s rule over the Gaza Strip and its 1.5 million Palestinian residents. But that is a horse of a totally different color.)

The main drama now is where the two sides will bend and where they will not. If enough bending is done—if, for example, Netanyahu agrees that East Jerusalem is on the table, or even extends the West Bank construction freeze to there as well; if Abbas tampers down right-of-return expectations—then we could very well see substantive, even promising talks. If not enough bending is done … well, you already know what that looks like.

The Mideast Peace Deal You Haven’t Heard About [Foreign Policy]
Steve Rosen Comes Around [JTA]

Earlier: Abbas Insists on East Jerusalem
Figure in AIPAC Case Changes Story