Naama Margolese, a shy blonde girl with blue eyes and glasses, became a household name in late December when Channel 2 TV aired a report about the ultra-Orthodox men who regularly taunted her on her walk to school.

In the report, Naama whimpered, “Mom, I’m scared,” as she clutched her mother’s hand during the 300-yard walk from their home to school. In footage, Naama wears skirts to her ankles and covers her shoulders like the rest of the students at her Orthodox school, called Orot, for girls aged 6 to 12. But ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, men call Naama and her friends whores and spit on them. The school’s ultra-Orthodox neighbors told the TV reporters the Orot girls deserved to be sworn at and attacked for violating the Torah’s command to cover up.

Naama’s story is the latest incident of ultra-Orthodox harassment of women to be reported in recent weeks. Days before Channel 2 aired their report, Tanya Rosenblit, a 28-year-old woman from Ashdod, publicized the half-hour standoff that ensued when she refused an ultra-Orthodox man’s demand to move to the back of a public bus from Ashdod to Jerusalem. In September, nine religious male soldiers refused to stay in an auditorium where women were singing during an official military ceremony. In response, the army expelled four of them from their prestigious officers’ course.

Ultra-Orthodox demands on women in the public sphere are not new: In Jerusalem’s insular neighborhood of Mea Shearim, for example, signs imploring female visitors to dress modestly have plastered the stone walls for decades. But in recent years, the calls have radiated out of that Jerusalem shtetl to larger Orthodox sections of Jerusalem and beyond. Health clinics and post offices have begun to hold separate hours for men and women. Advertising agencies have stopped featuring women on billboards in Jerusalem—even after they covered up their models with long sleeves—because fundamentalist Jews would vandalize the signs.

In the past, these stories garnered only minor news coverage. But Naama’s story sparked a public uproar because she is so young, because police seemed to be doing nothing, and because all the lead characters are religious. Late last month, at a conference for Israeli ambassadors in Jerusalem, President Shimon Peres called on Israelis to “save the majority from the talons of the minority.” He added: “We are fighting for the soul of the people and for the substance of the state.”

***

Founded in 1950 by Jewish immigrants from Bulgaria, Romania, Iraq, Iran, and Morocco, Beit Shemesh’s old city is full of the stucco-sided public-housing blocks typical of ’50s Israeli construction. It was once a mostly traditional or Orthodox town, but in the last two decades, more stringent ultra-Orthodox newcomers have moved in from Jerusalem.

These new ultra-Orthodox residents tended to congregate in their own neighborhoods. They postered public walls with pashkevilim, large block-print Hebrew papers that are vital media for people who shun mainstream Israeli TV, radio, and print news. On a sidewalk near a synagogue, they put up signs asking women to cross to the other side of the street and not to stop to chat because doing so would attract undue attention from the pious. On buses that run through their neighborhoods, the ultra-Orthodox have managed to impose an unofficial rule that women must sit in the back. Beit Shemesh is also home to a new, tiny sect of ultra-conservative women who cover up in the style of the most observant Muslim women, from head to toe.

Continue reading: ‘We don’t want to live here like in Tehran.’

With Election Day less than a year away, the core of the Obama campaign’s play for Jewish votes is simple: Overwhelm what the Obama camp sees as Republicans’ bald emotionalism on Israel with a flood of facts and figures. Obama’s campaign website has a section devoted to Jewish issues that includes a seven-page PDF documenting the president’s support for Israel, with a six-page supplement titled “President Obama’s Stance on Israel: Myths vs. Facts.” (“Myth: President Obama believes that Israel is at the root of all problems in the Middle East today. Fact: President Obama declared Israel a source of inspiration for the American people as the sole true democracy in the Middle East.”)

Obama is heading into what promises to be a tough campaign, in which he will need all the enthusiastic support he can get—especially in crucial swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, all of which include substantial Jewish electorates. And while it’s hard to imagine a majority of Jewish votes going to Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich, a lukewarm showing among the people of the three Velts makes his task that much harder. A recent Gallup poll, conducted in September, showed Jewish support for Obama had plunged 29 points since his inauguration in January 2009. And this fall, in the most Jewish district in the country, disgraced Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner’s seat went to a neophyte Republican candidate, a result voters—albeit Orthodox and therefore not representative of the Jewish vote nationwide—there said they intended to be seen as a referendum on the Obama Administration’s stance toward Israel.

Ask anyone in Obamaland about what is now commonly referred to as the president’s Jewish problem, and the same answer will inevitably follow: “It’s not us, it’s you.” Or, more typically, “it’s them”—the vocal cadres of the Emergency Committee for Israel, the Republican Jewish Coalition, and similarly hawkish groups that, in the administration’s view, have turned Israel into an emotional wedge issue for Jewish voters, in much the same way right-wing groups used abortion to pull Catholics and evangelical Christians away from the Democratic Party in the 1980s. “To the extent we have a problem,” Wasserman Schultz told me last week, “it’s being created by individuals who know that Republicans can’t appeal to Jews on their domestic issues and are attempting to mischaracterize, distort, and lie about the president’s record to create enough distrust in the community to shave off a little bit of support here and there.”

But ask actual voters, and even ardent supporters of the president say the problem is acute. “You say he’s against Israel enough times, and eventually people believe it,” one Obama donor told me earlier this month in Los Angeles, where a recent cover of the local Jewish Journal featured the headline “Angry Jews” on an image of mad-as-hell Howard Beale. “In this town,” the donor went on, “he’s got a Jewish problem.”

Some Jewish voters have sharp policy disagreements with the White House, whether over the president’s early decision to condition Israeli-Palestinian talks on a settlement-construction freeze or his initial commitment to engaging the Iranian regime in talks over its nuclear ambitions. But it is the seemingly endless series of diplomatic and rhetorical faux pas that has reinforced an anxiety among many Jewish voters—including lifelong Democrats—that Obama is somehow not on their side. There was the notorious photo op-less summit between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in March 2010. Just this month, the administration’s ambassador to Belgium, Howard Gutman, the son of a Holocaust survivor, gave a speech drawing distinctions between classical anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, which was criticized by Obama antagonists as blaming Israel for contemporary Muslim antipathy toward Jews. Days later came Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s exhortation, at the end of an evening seminar at the Brookings Institution, for Israel to “get to the damn table.”

That these mini-controversies continue to reverberate suggests that Obama’s “Jewish problem” is, at base, an emotional one: a failure to connect with and respond to the concerns of his Jewish constituents. These are voters, it seems, who would find it easier to tune out Republican smears of Obama as anti-Israel if only they had an image of the president addressing the Knesset, or, better yet, splitting a hummus with Benjamin Netanyahu on Jaffa Road.

***

David Axelrod is still perplexed by how hard it was to sell his man to Jewish voters last time around. “We had to work for that vote,” he told me just before Thanksgiving, when we met in the empty conference room he uses at Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago’s Loop. “There was sort of, you know, ‘Where’s he coming from?’ ”

Continue reading: Obama’s kishkes factor

Though price tag attacks have been something of a trend recently (in response not only to perceived Palestinian attacks but also official Israeli actions such as the uprooting of settlement outposts), this morning’s incident appears to be the first time in at least awhile that one has taken place in (for lack of a better term) Israel proper.

Both Prime Minister Netanyahu and opposition leader Tzipi Livni condemned the attack, as did several prominent Arab Israeli politicians. (I’ve received similar statements from the Orthodox Union and the Anti-Defamation League as well.) But perhaps the most moving words came from Israel’s ultimate éminence grise, President Peres, who announced that he and several chief rabbis would be visiting the site at an unrelated ceremony this morning. He said,

It is unconscionable that a Jew would harm something that is holy to another religion. This act is not-Jewish, illegal, immoral, and brings upon us heavy shame. I strongly condemn this horrible act in every language. This is not only a difficult day for the residents of Tuba Zangria, it is a difficult day for all Israeli society. As the President of Israel, during these days of introspection between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I call upon all to denounce these terrible acts. These acts, destroy relations between us and our neighbors, and between the various religions in Israel.

We will not allow extremists and criminals to undercut the need to live together equally in equality and mutual respect. Arabs and Jews as one.

That “in every language” is a very subtle and very justified dig at the way Peres’ counterparts act when similar attacks occur.

Last month, inspired in part by our article on young women who are Jewish settlers, a prominent religious Zionist rabbi questioned who ought to be held responsible for the price tag epidemic.

Mosque Torched in Northern Israel [WP]
Netanyahu: Galilee Mosque Arson ‘Horrifying’ and Has No Place in Israel [Haaretz]
Earlier: Who Buys ‘Price Tag’ Crimes?

• En route there, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta argued that while Israel maintained its military edge, it was “isolating itself diplomatically.” [AP/WP]

• Vice President Biden, now more than ever the administration’s main pitchman to the Jewish community, told a group of rabbis on a conference call that he helped persuade President Obama not to release convicted spy Jonathan Pollard; the phrase “over my dead body” came up. [NYT]

• The ruling Egyptian military is showing signs that it will allow relatively free and fair parliamentary elections this November, complete with the Muslim Brotherhood’s participation. [NYT]

• Netanyahu insisted his cabinet would vote on the recommendations of the committee formed in the wake of the social-justice protests. The leaders of those protests have rejected the recommendations as too mild; the far-right elements in Bibi’s coalition have rejected them as too much. [JPost]

• Opposition leader Tzipi Livni will visit the United Kingdom, now that she can no longer be credibly sued for war crimes there. [Ynet]

Summing it up, Goldberg writes, “And most notably, she endorsed the idea that pressure from President Obama on Prime Minister Netanyahu is a service to Israel, saying that it is pressure from the American Administration that caused Netanyahu to endorse a two-state solution to the Middle East crisis.’When Obama pushed Bibi, Bibi made some steps forward,’ she said.”

Tzipi Livni Praises Obama for Pressuring Netanyahu, Suggests U.S. Should Keep Up the Heat [Goldblog]

The claim that Israel is fighting the clock has two components: diplomacy and demographics. Israel’s diplomatic isolation will corner the Jewish state while fast-breeding Arabs will overwhelm the population balance between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, goes the argument. On both counts, though, the facts speak against the notion that time is running out for Israel. Time, on the contrary, seems to be on Israel’s side.

The Palestinian Authority’s much-feared march toward a United Nations vote for statehood has become something of an embarrassment. A vote for statehood in the General Assembly has no legal implications, and the United States will always veto the measure in the Security Council. Some Palestinian leaders think that token support in the General Assembly will do more harm than good; Palestine Authority Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki last week offered to withdraw the U.N. vote if negotiations with Israel restarted before September. And even the Kingdom of Jordan might vote against Palestinian statehood, according to the Middle East Research Center’s Alexander Bligh.

Arab rhetoric in support of Palestinian statehood, moreover, isn’t matched by real support. Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian Authority’s prime minister, complained last week that Arab donors have paid out only a third of their pledges to his government, leaving the Palestinian Authority without enough cash to pay public employees’ salaries. “The Palestinians cannot count on the friends cheering them on rhetorically to step up financially if the going gets rough post-September,” warned Michael Singh, an associate fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, in a blog post on Foreign Policy’s website.

Israel hardly seems as isolated as it did before Greece blocked another Gaza flotilla earlier this month, and the IHH—the Hamas-linked Turkish “charity” that sponsored the Mavi Marmara flotilla last year—dropped out of the exercise. Israeli diplomacy seemed quite effective. “The decision [for IHH to drop out] was taken for no other reason than that the Turkish government has made restoring its previously excellent relationship with Israel a priority,” reported Stephen Pollard in the Guardian. “The very last thing the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, wants is another pointless conflict. Having been re-elected for a third term he no longer needs to play to the gallery and paint Israel as a pantomime villain—his stock message since Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2009. With Syrian troops on his southern border, Erdogan has been keen to move on from the Mavi Marmara incident and return to good relations and military co-operation with Israel.”

Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Muslim countries—including Turkey—have shifted their rhetoric away from Israel and toward the risk of rising Iranian influence. Only a few months ago, conventional wisdom stated that the United States needed a Middle East peace deal to steer the Arab Spring in a pro-American direction. But as it turned out, the Arab Spring had little to do with the Palestine issue, and as the political chaos in the Arab world became less tractable, Israel’s position improved.

Israel is less isolated because Syria is isolated—except for Iran’s continued sponsorship—and because civil wars in Yemen and Libya and renewed political unrest in Egypt have validated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim before the U.S. Congress in May that “Israel is the one anchor of stability” in “an unstable Middle East.” Until the Syrian government provoked attacks on the American and French embassies in Damascus, the U.S. administration and other Western governments made it clear that they preferred to keep President Bashar al-Assad in power there, based on the commonplace notion that no comprehensive peace agreement is possible without Syria and no partial agreement is likely, given the dependence of Hezbollah and Hamas on his regime. It is hard to pressure Israel to negotiate a peace deal when a pivotal player is absent, and the recent meeting of the Middle East Quartet (the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations) in Washington ended without a public statement.

Even if the Arab revolt and its consequences have eased Israel’s diplomatic isolation and undercut the pressure for a settlement with the Palestinians, that does not serve Israel’s interests, according to President Barack Obama. “The number of Palestinians living west of the Jordan River is growing rapidly and fundamentally reshaping the demographic realities of both Israel and the Palestinian territories,” he told the America-Israel Political Action Committee in May.

Whether the proportion of Arabs in Judea and Samaria as well as in Israel itself is growing may be the most politicized demographic question in the world. Yet the Israeli Jewish fertility rate has risen to three children per female while the Arab fertility rate has fallen to the point where the two trend lines have converged and perhaps even crossed. A 2006 study by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies claims that the West Bank and Gaza population in 2004 was only 2.5 million, rather than the 3.8 million claimed by the Palestinian authorities. Presumably the numbers were inflated to increase foreign aid and exaggerate the importance of the Palestinian population.

Most of the phantom population, the report argues, comes from births that never occurred:

[The Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics] projected that the number of births in the Territories would total almost 908,000 for the seven-year period from 1997 to 2003. Yet, the actual number of births documented by the PA Ministry of Health for the same period was significantly lower at 699,000, or 238,000 fewer births than had been forecast by the PCBS. … The size of the discrepancy accelerated over time. Whereas the PCBS predicted there would be over 143,000 births in 2003, the PA Ministry of Health reported only 102,000 births, which pointed to a PCBS forecast 40% beyond actual results.

Palestinian fertility on the West Bank has already fallen to the Israeli fertility rate of three children per woman, if we believe the Palestine Ministry of Health numbers rather than the highly suspect Central Bureau of Statistics data. The Begin-Sadat estimates were disputed by other Israeli demographers, notably Sergio DellaPergola of the Jewish People Policy Institute. Yet the idea that economic and cultural modernization leads to falling birthrates is a commonplace among demographers who study the developing world. In 1963, Israeli Arab women had eight or nine children; today they have three, about the same as Israeli Jews. Education explains most of the fertility decline among Arabs, and it is likely that Arab fertility behind the Green Line as well as in Judea and Samaria will continue to fall.

More recent data also show that the Israeli Jewish birth rate has risen faster than predicted. Jewish births rose from 96,000 in the year 2000 to 125,000 in 2010, while Arab births fell slightly over the same period—from about 40,781 to 40,750, according to a new study by Yaakov Faitelson at the Institute for Zionist Strategies. The proportion of Jewish pupils in Israel’s elementary schools is increasing, Faitelson reports:

The percentage of students in the Arab educational system out of all Israel’s total first grade student body will decrease from 29.1% in 2007 to only 24.3% in 2016 and 22.5% in 2020. At the same time the percentage of students in the Jewish educational system out of the total first grade student body will reach 75.7% by 2016 and 77.5% by 2020.

While Israel’s ultra-Orthodox minority contributes disproportionately to Jewish population growth,  most of the increase in Jewish births comes from the secular and non-Orthodox religious categories, which average 2.6 children per woman. Faitelson notes that the ultra-Orthodox fertility rate fell over the past decade, while the fertility of the general Jewish population rose.

If present trends continue, the proportion of Jews in Israel and the West Bank will remain roughly constant; it may even rise. Muslim fertility is falling faster than anywhere in the world, with some Muslim countries—notably Iran, Turkey, Algeria, and Tunisia—reaching levels well below replacement. “In most of the Islamic world it’s amazing, the decline in fertility that has happened,’’ Hania Zlotnik, head of the United Nations’ population research branch, told a 2009 conference. Within every Muslim country and across the Muslim world, one variable explains most of the fertility air-pocket, namely education. Once Muslim women leave the cocoon of traditional society for secondary or university education, their fertility drops quickly to levels below replacement.

If Israel’s total fertility rate holds at three, its population will reach 24 million by the end of this century, the United Nations’ population model predicts. And if the low fertility rates prevailing elsewhere hold steady, Israel will have more people under the age of 25 than Turkey, Iran, or even Germany. It will be able to field the largest army in the Middle East. And it will have a thriving high-tech economy, enormous energy resources, and a reliable supply of desalinated water. Israel has a near-optimal mix of economics and demographics, while time is running out for Arab countries that have failed over and over again to rise to the demands of the modern world.

There is just one remaining argument that the clock is ticking against Israel, namely “linkage” between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iran’s strategic threat to Israel. Gen. David Petraeus, the new head of the Central Intelligence Agency, made this assertion in congressional testimony in March 2010. “Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large-scale armed confrontations,” Petraeus argued. “The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hezbollah and Hamas.” I argued at the time that Petraeus was outrageously wrong and that Jewish conservatives were misguided to hail Petraeus as a hero.

Iran’s nuclear program and its support for Hezbollah and Hamas are significant threats to the Jewish state. Yet it is hard to find a policy analyst of any stripe today who will defend the idea that an Israeli-Palestine agreement, even if such a thing were possible in the present environment, might meaningfully reduce the Iranian threat. In the uncertain aftermath of Arab revolts, Petraeus’ “linkage” argument has quietly faded into the inoperative list of embarrassing past policy statements. The commonplace argument that time is not on Israel’s side looks like it will be next.

• Speaking of! Jacob Heilbrunn has an informative explication of the neoconservative split between the unabashedly pro-democracy wing (which is winning out) and the old-school, realist one. [Foreign Policy]

• Iran wants you to sell it your uranium. Especially if you are Zimbabwe. [AP/Haaretz]

• EasyJet, the British budget airline, apologized for loading bacon-and-ham sandwiches onto a flight out of Ben Gurion. Do people even eat bacon-and-ham sandwiches? [CNN]

• Rabbis and other Jews are getting active in the pro-union protests in Madison. Unrelatedly: How ‘bout that buzzer-beater last night? On, Wisconsin! [JTA]

• Meet the Israeli Daily Show. [Splitsider]

Wonder what Pitchfork would think of Alamaailman Vasarat, an all-Jewish “Finnish group playing kebab-kosher-jazz-film-traffic-punk-music with a unique Scandinavian acoustic touch”?

Resolution of the “right of return” issue for a merely token price was also on the table.

It seems safe to say the leak did not come in an official capacity from the P.A., since it will hurt the credibility of the West Bank’s governing authority: As the New York Times reports, the P.A. has (un-credibly) called the documents “a pack of lies,” while Hamas, the P.A.’s chief rival for allegiance in the territories, said the documents showed the P.A. was “attempting to liquidate the Palestinian cause.” And indeed, if your definition of the Palestinian cause includes at least some form of sovereignty over much of East Jerusalem (and it should), then it is actually difficult to dispute Hamas’s allegation.

The document dump is also unrelated to WikiLeaks. But much like that group’s revelations, the news here is less the substance itself and more the evaporation of plausible deniability. Close followers of the peace process have known that the two sides actually did get close in 2008, as the documents prove; almost by definition, “getting close” would have meant the Palestinians offering in private far more than they have in public and the Israelis still turning it down. What the leak has done is ensure that everyone knows that the P.A. was willing to offer this much: News not likely to play well at home. (According to the Guardian, more documents, touching on matters like Palestinian cooperation with Israeli security authorities—also a touchy subject on the streets of Nablus, and also one already reported on—will be rolled out in the coming days.)

Critics of Israel will argue that the documents reveal an Israeli leadership—one even less obstinant than the current one—that was not willing to meet Palestinian leadership more than halfway. As the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland argues, “International opinion will see concrete proof of how far the Palestinians have been willing to go, ready to move up to and beyond their ‘red lines,’ conceding ground that would once have been unthinkable.”

But was that willingness truly there—or, more importantly, was it truly credible? Supporters of Israel will rightfully note that Israeli negotiators may have had reason to be skeptical of the P.A.’s ability to convince its constituents to go along with these generous concessions—a skepticism confirmed by the wide gap between what the P.A. says in public and what, we now know, it says in private. In other words, if Israel had said yes, the offer would no longer have been secret, and it would have had to be sold to the Palestinian public; and the fact that the P.A. felt the need to keep it private, and has now felt the need to deny it (“pack of lies”), indicates that the P.A. believes the Palestinian public will overwhelmingly react to the deal negatively.

So while I want to agree with Freedland’s analysis, I predict international decision-makers will not be able to help from noticing that this Palestinian willingness to make broad concessions was strictly private, and that, made public—as it now has been—it will be so unpopular as to require backtracking—as it already has. As Freedland himself reports, “These texts will do enormous damage to the standing of the Palestinian Authority and to the Fatah party that leads it.” Given that the alternative to these is Hamas, I don’t see how these revelations actually represent further bricks on the road to a peaceful, internationally accepted Palestinian state.

One would like to imagine an Israeli leadership daring enough to call the Palestinian bet and force all hands on the table—whether in the form of agreeing to the 2008 deal or, in 2010, extending the settlement freeze, whether to East Jerusalem or past its September expiration. Such a concession would have either demonstrated to the world the fundamental stagnancy of the peace process, or—maybe?—have taken a real step toward its fulfillment. We’ll never know.

Among the revelations:

• Erekat tells the Americans that the Palestinians have offered “the biggest Yerushalayim in Jewish history”—his ostentatiously choice of Hebrew word—“plus symbolic number of refugees return, demilitarized state” [sic]. Under this secret Palestinian proposal, Israel would annex all of Jerusalem except for the Jewish district of Har Homa—the most expansive offer the Palestinians have been known to have made.

• Speaking of the refugees, the deal that seems to have been on offer regarding right-of-return was articulated, in August 2008, by then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert; under it, Israel would acknowledge “suffering of” but “not responsibility for” Palestinian refugees and would absorb 5,000 such refugees over five years on “humanitarian” grounds.

• Were Israeli-Syrian talks, conducted through Turkey, more advanced than we know? Here, in May 2008, Tzipi Livni remarks, “We’re giving up the Golan.”

• Former Palestinian prime minister and negotiator Ahmed Qureia insists on the need to maintain contiguity between Arab parts of Jerusalem and the Arab town of Bethlehem in the West Bank “to address natural growth”—“natural growth” being a key Israeli buzzword in terms of settlement construction. Funny!

• In the same document, Erekat confirms the offer of “the largest Jerusalem in history.”

• In May 2008, Livni acknowledges, “I appreciate how hard it was for you to make the suggestion.”

The Palestine Papers: The Documents [Guardian]
Al Jazeera Cites Palestinian Offer of Concessions [NYT]
Palestine Papers: Now We Know. Israel Had a Partner. [Guardian]

Comparing himself to David Ben Gurion and Ariel Sharon, Barak announced that he would be leaving the Labor party along with another minister and three other Knesset members to establish a new center-Zionist “Independence Party,” which would remain part of Netanyahu’s government. The move was planned in secret by Barak and Netanyahu, and it immediately shored up the governing Likud coalition by depriving the left-wing members of the Labor Party, which Barak left behind, of any leverage against the prime minister. The three remaining Labor ministers in the Netanyahu government reacted by immediately quitting it.

While Sharon’s split from the Likud to form Kadima in 2005 was a move made to advance a particular political agenda, many observers saw Barak’s maneuver as a characteristic piece of selfishness whose intended beneficiary was Barak himself. And it will likely further lower the reputation of Israel’s most widely loathed public figure. A few months ago, a panel of journalists and experts was convened by the Tel Aviv newspaper Ha’ir to select the most hated Israeli. Out of 50 contestants—including Netanyahu and other politicians and media personalities—the hands-down winner was Barak.

Such mocking disregard might surprise non-Israelis. Barak enjoys enormous respect in the international community, where he is almost universally considered to be the most responsible and serious member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. And because the widely disliked Avigdor Lieberman is Israel’s foreign minister, Barak also serves as Israel’s de facto diplomat-in-chief; last month, he made his ninth visit to the United States in three years. Barak remains the Obama Administration’s main point of contact in Israel’s government, and, although his relationship with President Bill Clinton has been thorny at times, these days both Clintons (including the now-more important one, Hillary) seem to think highly of him. Nearly all of the relevant administration officials—including Dennis Ross, now Clinton’s special envoy for the region, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates—have known and respected Barak for two decades and clear time on their schedules for him whenever he passes through Washington.

And yet within Israel, the verdict of Ha’ir’s unpopularity contest surprised no one. Barak is now enjoying unparalleled status as a public punching bag; indeed, it is doubtful that any other Israeli politician has achieved lower popularity in recent years—quite a feat, given the competition from figures like the brutish Lieberman, the corrupt and incompetent Ehud Olmert, and the blinkered leadership of Shas. The contempt in which Barak is held is even more astonishing when one considers his pedigree: He is one of the three most decorated officers in the history of the IDF and holds a bachelor’s degree in physics and math and a master’s degree in engineering-economic systems from Stanford University. He is even, some claim, a very capable amateur pianist. But all of his credentials and talents have never translated to more than a rudimentary ability to connect with people. Barak, an oft-told joke goes, will one day commit suicide by leaping from his IQ to his EQ.

Indeed, dislike for the current defense minister has become so ingrained in the Israeli psyche that his own political handlers have tried to ride the wave rather than fight it: Two years ago, when Barak’s campaign for prime minister ran into a ditch during Knesset elections, his aides fought back with a series of advertisements portraying Barak as “not a sahbak”—the Arabic word meaning friend or “man of the people”—but as “a leader.” The meaning was clear: You might not want to make small talk with Barak at a party, or invite him over to watch soccer on TV, but you might at least trust him to be a responsible grown-up.

The ads did little good. Labor won only 13 Knesset seats (out of 120)—an all-time low for the party. And these days, the most common expression describing Barak is another Arabic term: ahabal, an idiot or fool. In November, Ofer Eini—a member of Histadrut, Barak’s own party—lobbed the now-infamous insult at Barak during a television interview. Eini was responding to a question about the scandal du jour, that Barak’s wife, Nili Barak-Priel, had been caught employing an illegal maid from the Philippines. “Barak has this quality: He never misses a mistake,” claimed Eini. “You’re a member of the government. What the hell do you bring a Philippine worker for? Employ an Israeli one. You should set an example. You need to be an ahabal to do such a thing, really! You know it’s against the law. Did you think that they wouldn’t catch you? Well, they did.” Eini’s language was harsh, but the expression stuck, summing up what large swaths of the Israeli public believe to be an inglorious and costly string of mistakes, both personal and public.

“There’s something slightly autistic about him,” admits a senior official in Israel’s defense administration, who has known Barak for decades. “He hardly listens to criticism, least of all when he’s convinced that he’s right and everybody else is wrong.” Still, one-on-one, Barak is very convincing and, until very recently, public opinion polls showed an interesting pattern: Most Israelis trusted him as a defense minister, though not as a possible prime minister.

Now almost no one trusts him, in either role.

***

By all accounts, Barak’s problems began a decade ago, during his term as prime minister, which is widely seen by Israelis as an unqualified disaster. After an unprecedented 12-point victory over Benjamin Netanyahu in May 1999, Barak managed to squander nearly all of his public support outside the Labor Party within 20 months as prime minister during which he delivered only one crucial, strategic decision: the unilateral withdrawal from Southern Lebanon, which ended 18 years of Israeli occupation. But he then promised to try and achieve regional peace “in 15 months”—and failed miserably. Negotiations with Syria reached a dead end, and the July 2000 Camp David peace summit with the Palestinians famously achieved nothing. Barak went to Camp David supported by only a quarter of Knesset members, and he avoided an immediate ouster only because the summit was held during the Knesset’s summer recess. The peace talks failed not because of Barak, but because Yasser Arafat refused to compromise—a conclusion supported by Bill Clinton, who gave full backing to Barak’s accusations against the PLO chairman. But Arafat can’t have been encouraged by the prospect of compromise with a leader who was clearly a political lame duck. Barak’s string of political failures got even longer two months later, when the second Intifada broke out, plunging the country into nightmarish violence and leading most Israelis to blame the prime minister for being both naïve and unprepared.

Barak was able to make a political comeback—of sorts. After the IDF’s fiasco during the war in Lebanon in the summer of 2006, Amir Peretz, then head of the Labor Party and minister of defense, was widely criticized as unfit for his job. In May 2007, Barak quickly maneuvered him out of both the Labor leadership and the defense ministry, taking his place in Ehud Olmert’s government. Now Barak had a new problem: During his six years out of government, he had been mainly occupied with his flourishing business career. His affluence wasn’t easily accepted by Israeli voters, who generally believe that the leader of what is still supposed to be a workers’ party should not be worth millions of dollars (and be seen flaunting his wealth). To be fair, Barak’s focus on his business career while out of office was no different from Netanyahu’s (and was certainly less outrageous than Olmert’s). But for Barak, an image of ostentatious luxury was quite damaging—and was not helped by his purchase of a $10 million apartment at Tel Aviv’s most luxurious high-rise. Whatever sympathy and forgiveness he received from the Israeli electorate upon his return was soon replaced by contempt.

It didn’t take long for Barak and Olmert to grab for each other’s throats. Serving in the same government, the former friends quickly found each other intolerable. Olmert became embroiled in a series of corruption scandals (he is now standing trial for some of these), and Barak eventually demanded his resignation, forcing the prime minister to retire. But even before this final break, it seemed impossible for Olmert and Barak to agree on anything. In February 2009, Olmert refused to surrender to Barak’s pressure and approve a deal with Hamas in which Israel would release a thousand Palestinian prisoners in return for Gilad Shalit. When Israel invaded parts of the Gaza Strip during Operation Cast Lead in December 2008, Barak’s resistance prevented Olmert from gambling on a full-scale reoccupation of the Strip, which Olmert had hoped would lead to the final defeat of Hamas in Gaza. At this point, there emerged a fierce—and still ongoing—argument between Barak and Olmert, hard to decipher because of restrictions by Israeli military censorship, about the decision-making process before certain Israeli actions abroad, which international media organizations have assumed refers to the successful bombing of a Syrian nuclear plant in September 2007, which Olmert is said to have championed, and Barak, it is implied, opposed.

Yet after Olmert stepped down as prime minister, it began to appear that the only Israeli politician that Barak could get along with was himself. When Tzipi Livni, Olmert’s successor as head of the Kadima party, tried to form a new coalition, Barak did not go out of his way to help her. During the election campaign, he publicly insulted Livni by calling her by “Tzipora”—her full name, but also widely seen as an anachronistic grandmotherly moniker—in a radio interview. He notably withheld even cursory approval for Livni’s performance while trying to raise the same argument Hillary Clinton first used against Barack Obama, asking, in political advertisements, “It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. Who do you want answering the phone?” The answer of the Israeli electorate seemed clear: anybody but you.

***

And so, the defense minister’s new image has gradually consolidated: arrogant, aloof, condescending, a habitual intriguer against his fellow ministers and political partners who is constantly accused of corruption, although, unlike many of his colleagues, he has never been indicted for any crime. Even his experience in defense matters—his greatest public asset—has evaporated in the eyes of most voters. His personal friction with Olmert prevented him from playing a bigger role in that government, and his public support has collapsed during Netanyahu’s term.

Yet in spite of his obvious political weakness—or because of it—his personal relationship with Netanyahu is surprisingly good. Both men, each of whom had an unpleasant term as prime minister during the 1990s, seem to have gotten beyond their past confrontations, perhaps brought together by shared antipathy for their fellow politicians and for the press. As Netanyahu’s point man in the United States diplomatic and defense establishments, Barak’s importance is much greater than his party’s role in the coalition might suggest. As a result, Netanyahu has given Barak almost unlimited freedom to deal with military issues and has listened to most of the defense minister’s advice regarding the peace process.

Continue reading: “Mr. Defense,” the quarrel with Gabi Ashkenazi, and Israel’s Mr. Unpopularity. Or view as a single page.

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

—The Jewish Chronicle, January 5

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

• Get ready, Israel: Sarah Palin is visiting. [The Daily Beast]

• One of the women who has accused Julian Assange of a sex crime is reportedly now in the West Bank with a Christian outreach group. [HuffPo]

• Israeli MAD. Awesome. [The Magic Whistle]

• Whether or not Jews are greedy, Jewish law frowns upon greed, David E.Y. Sarna concludes. [NY Jewish Week]

• A short film on the making of the Beastie Boys’ iconic hit “Fight For Your Right” will debut in January at Sundance. [Jewcy]

Now that Hanukkah is over, we can get to the Christmas viral videos.

The latest to-do, Aaron David Miller told me this morning, “reflects a much-diminished administration that got off on the wrong foot from the beginning.” Prior history as well as the prospects of continued Israeli-Palestinian negotiations give Netanyahu greater leverage, according to the former negotiator. The prime minister “knows that the administration believes the only way this Israeli-Palestinian problem is going to be resolved is negotiations, and so he’s convinced himself that they need him more than he needs them,” Miller said. “I don’t think he’s looking for a confrontation, but he’s willing to stand his ground.” Especially, Miller added, since we are talking about Jerusalem here: “Building in Jerusalem is as natural as breathing.”

To be fair to Obama: The timing of the announcement again seemed calculated to provoke and to assert Netanyahu’s (new?) upper hand; East Jerusalem lies on the far side of the 1967 Green Line; and Israel also just announced the construction of more than 1000 homes in Ariel, an unequivocal West Bank settlement.

But to be fair to Netanyahu: It is nigh impossible to imagine a final deal that does not include some sort of Israeli sovereignty in all of Jerusalem; East Jerusalem was never included in any freeze deal; and even the freeze deal that was reached a year ago has since expired. “Building in Jerusalem was never considered off-limits by either the government of Israel or frankly—with respect to the Obama administration, they basically acquiesed in it,” Miller noted. He also pointed out that the neighborhood the announcement concerns is one that Netanyahu himself made a move on when he was prime minister in the late 1990s.

(Miller opined that the recent Republican surge is the least important factor here, though it does mean that Obama will have enough to worry about over the next two years without also pushing the Israelis on East Jerusalem as well. Certainly this is, as Ben Smith noted, the first post-midterms test of Obama’s stomach for foreign confrontation.)

To put it another way: Neither opposition leader Tzipi Livni, of Kadima, whose GA speech yesterday was fairly well received by the left, nor any other plausible leader of Israel is going to be any more willing to cede Israeli claims to all of Jerusalem.

On top of all that, some others have complained that Obama made his remarks while drumming up support in Indonesia—the world’s largest Muslim country, which does not permit Israelis to enter.

So, where are we now? A crucial thing to watch is Netanyahu’s meeting Thursday in Washington, D.C., with Secretary of State Clinton. Her bona fides as a friend to Israel are pretty much impeccable. But she was the one who, in March, famously upbraided Netanyahu on the phone for 43 to 45 minutes (depending on your source) for that prior settlement announcement. “If it’s a reprise of what happened in March,” explained Miller of the Clinton-Netanyahu get-together, “we’re not prepared to back it up. We just look weak—we look pathetic, frankly, it’s beyond weak.” How she and the administration handles this situation, I think, will be the most telling hint over the direction the circus will travel over the next few months. Miller’s advice? “Save your powder for an effort that could actually advance the negotiations.”

In Curt Exchange, U.S. Faults Israel on Housing [NYT]

Crowley Chides PM’s Statements on J’lem Building [JPost]
After U.S. Chides Netanyahu over East Jerusalem Construction, More Settlement Plans Unveiled [Haaretz]
Earlier: Biden’s Brief, Bibi’s Bombast, Simon’s Sermon
The Jews and their City. And their Umbrellas.
U.S.-Israel Relations Hit Nadir

Oh snap! While Israel is denying that the cancellation is intended to send a message, it doesn’t seem like many are buying it. The dis reflects Israel’s disappointment that the law has not changed, as British politicians have promised it would be, ever since an arrest warrant was issued for opposition leader Tzipi Livni last December. The English papers, on the other hand, were not amused by the snub. The Daily Mail suggested it was “an ambush” and the Financial Times called the matter an “embarrassing spat” which is “irritating British officials.”

Hague for his part seemed to take the cancellation in stride, promising that the law would change as promised, but, “We will do that in our own way and within our own time frame.” The British Embassy put out a statement saying a first draft of the amendment will be put before parliament in a few weeks, and diplomats say the changes will be ready by next summer.

The much less contentious news (though that might be wishful thinking) from the trip is that Hague and Foreign Minster Lieberman managed to sign a ten-year-in-the-making agreement that makes Israel a favored location for the British Film industry, which is the third largest in the world. Apparently this increases the chance of the Holy Land making a cameo in the next Bond film. Hopefully by then Israelis will be able to make the London premiere.

Hague to Israel: UK will repeal war crimes law [YNet]
Hamas to Britain: Keep law permitting arrest of foreign officials [YNet]
Earlier: Livni, Daring Arrest, Will Go To London

Wilf forced the issue because yesterday was the tenth anniversary of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325, which “urges Member States to ensure increased representation of women at all decision-making levels in national, regional and international institutions and mechanisms for the prevention, management, and resolution of conflict.” Of course, U.N. resolutions are not uncontroversial matters in Israel, and indeed the main group that pushes adherence to 1325, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, is a pacifist outfit that was highly critical of Israel’s conduct during the Gaza conflict. (The group’s prominence on the issue also meant that one article read, “Wilf did not mention WILPF.”)

Meanwhile, those looking for tea leaves into Israel’s confusing coalition politics will note Defense Minister and Labor leader Ehud Barak’s response to Livni: “Today there are no longer negotiations, and it is not unthinkable that when there are, we will add a woman,” he said. “In that case, I prefer Tzipi Livni and not [Likud MK] Tzipi Hotovely.”

‘Women Should Be More Involved in Peace Negotiations [JPost]
Labor MK Wants Women in Peace Talks [Arutz Sheva]
Related: Q&A: Tzipi Livni [Tablet Magazine]

In a country and a region led by men with outsize egos and florid personality disorders, the leader of Israel’s opposition Kadima party is an anomaly because she seems so resolutely normal—the hard-working child of ideologues who devoted their lives to building the state. Along with President Shimon Peres, she is the acceptable face of Israeli democracy in world capitals that feel little affection for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

A protégée of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Livni served as foreign minister under Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert. She was the official lead Israeli negotiator during the 2007 Annapolis peace conference (while the real negotiating was done in secret by Olmert) and explained Israel’s wars to the world.

She began her career in an elite Mossad unit in Paris between 1980 and 1984, after being recruited into the agency at the age of 22 by a childhood friend named Mira Gal, who later became her chief of staff. “The risks were tangible,” Gal has said of those years, when the Jewish community in Paris was targeted by Palestinian bombs and machine-gun attacks and Israeli agents were said to have assassinated a key figure in the Iraqi nuclear program, an Egyptian physicist named Yehia el-Mashad, who was found in his hotel room with his throat slashed open and multiple stab wounds.

While it is assumed that Livni’s role as a young Mossad officer involved her formidable analytical skills and fluency in French, it is also worth noting that her father, Eitan Livni, served as chief operations officer for the Irgun during the Jewish underground’s bloody revolt against British rule in mandate Palestine.

I spoke to Livni in a modest room in an Upper East Side hotel. She was accompanied by a handler and a lone security man.

After Sept. 11, many in the American Jewish community had a renewed sense of a shared fate with Israel, especially in New York City. We were looking around nervously on buses and subways and being checked for weapons and bombs. Do you think that feeling of mutual understanding has dissolved?

Sept. 11 was a shock to the whole world. But I don’t think we should define ourselves through shared threats, because in doing so, we allow our enemies to define us. We need to define ourselves through a common vision that helps Israel put some meaning into the words “Jewish State.”

Many American Jews were shocked when the Rotem bill got wide publicity here. They felt that the State of Israel asks them to support the state and consider themselves partners in a shared vision, and here the State of Israel is saying that we, our children, our marriages, our rabbis, our customs, are not really Jewish.

I think that it’s a combination of a problematic system of election with very weak politicians. The problem is that a party like Likud, which is not ultra-Orthodox, gives the monopoly on the substance of the words “Jewish State” to the ultra-Orthodox. And this is something that affects not only our relationship with world Jewry but also my life in Israel. Together we need to change this bill. Kadima voted against it, and we hope the coalition will change it as well.

I was recently at a very nice dinner at the Plaza Hotel with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger, the former national security adviser, and assorted luminaries of the American Jewish community, hosted by Danny Abraham to honor President Mahmoud Abbas. Do you think these kinds of events are helpful in promoting peace, or do they simply give the Palestinian leadership a propaganda card they can play here?

In order to understand the others, we need to sit and speak with them. Since the elections, I decided personally not to have these kinds of meetings with Palestinians, because according to the rules of Israeli democracy I need to give space to the prime minister to make the right decisions. But I think this is an opportunity not just for Mahmoud Abbas to make propaganda but also to be asked difficult questions.

Supporting Israel was a free ticket for American Jews when George W. Bush was president. The Jews could count on the fact that Bush would support Israel even while they voted for the Democrats. Now with Barack Obama in office, some American Jews seem to feel torn between their traditional attachments to the Democratic Party and to Israel.

I know at first that when Obama was elected and he said that he supports a two-state solution, there were some people in Israel who said that he was anti-Israeli. But this was basically the same vision as President Bush. I don’t think that everything is a zero-sum game, in which when the president of the United States says something, that means that he is pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli, or vice versa. I think that part of the responsibility of leadership here and in Israel is to find the common interests and issues on which we can work together. I believe that the need to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon is a shared interest, and to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians is a shared interest.

You had a close relationship with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. What did you learn from her about how American administrations, regardless of party, perceive the conflicts between Israel and the Palestinians, and Israel and its neighbors?

For me it is clear that when it comes to the need of Israel to defend itself, the role of the United States of America is crucial. It was clear in our relations that we don’t have a hidden agenda. We played with open cards, I with her, and she with me, hopefully. There was the same kind of relationship between the prime minister and the president. This openness is something very important.

In World War II, the American Jewish community sent 550,000 troops to fight Hitler, and Jewish scientists were central figures in the invention and manufacture of the atomic bomb. They were the foot-soldiers of American democracy. Now they go to Harvard and start Facebook.

They contribute in another way.

But we have no connection to military life. When we see pictures from the war in Lebanon or Operation Cast Lead, we say, “This is wrong. Why should we support this? It’s terrible. This is not what Judaism in my synagogue was about. This is an army that’s killing people.”

I made a speech at Harvard, and someone asked me the same question. [Here, Livni’s handler states that the person who asked the question was also a Jew. Livni nods.] He said, “How can you speak about Jewish values when the Israeli army killed a thousand people in Gaza?” I said to him the following: “I don’t ask the world to turn a blind eye when Israel is attacking Gaza or Lebanon, and I’m willing to be judged by the entire world, as long as the world is judging us according to its own values. In each democracy, in the legal system, which is the expression of the values of the society, there is a distinction made between a murderer and someone who kills somebody by mistake. When a terrorist is looking for a child to kill, on the lines at a discotheque, at a pizza parlor, on buses, in schools, in kindergartens, that person is a murderer who is looking for children to kill. When an Israeli soldier in Gaza is trying to kill terrorists sometimes, by mistake, civilians are also killed. I expect the entire international community, and especially the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, and other members of the free world, who send their soldiers to fight all over the world, where sometimes civilians are killed, will understand and support us in making that distinction.”

I expect the Jews to understand because they know that in Israel, these soldiers are our children. An Israeli soldier is raised on values of respecting human life, and they don’t change their values when they turn 18 and enter the army. Even though they feel uneasy when these pictures are coming, they need to understand that these things happen when you defend your own citizens.

But that’s not how American Jews live their lives. They go on Facebook, they go to the shopping mall, they go to Harvard—but by and large, they don’t go into the army. Their reality is the reality of most people in the West, who live in a world that is largely detached from the killing that our soldiers do every day in far-away places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq.

While you were talking I had the following thought, which I think is important, and perhaps not unrelated to what you just said. In the past, Israel said to world Jewry that Israel is the safe place to be when things deteriorate in the places where you live. Israel is the safe shelter, we are going to keep this shelter for you, we are going to fight for the existence of this shelter. In return, you need to defend Israel whenever it is necessary, whether it is with AIPAC, or whatever. This was the nature of the dialogue between Israel and the Jews in the Diaspora.

Today’s Israel is not a safer place for Jews to live than other places in the world. Sometimes Israel is more dangerous. I don’t expect world Jewry just to defend Israel unconditionally. It is fine for them to criticize the policy of any Israeli government, as long as they understand that there is a difference between criticism of the policy of any government and the basics. Because there is a process of delegitimization of the State of Israel, and some of the criticism is being used by those who do not accept the right of Israel to exist. Simultaneously, we need to work together in order to decide what the meaning of the Jewish State is in terms of our shared values, and to speak about it.

I’m going to ask you a nice question that relates to the major themes that brought you here after I ask you one more bad question.

[Laughs] OK.

How many more years do you think that the State of Israel can maintain a wide-ranging settlement policy in the West Bank and still speak to the American Jewish public and the leaders of democratic nations as a normal, functioning democratic state?

I believe that the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state require us to make one big decision, which is not easy for any Israeli leader, and this is to divide the land of Israel and to implement the vision of two states for two peoples. We need to choose between two different visions, one of which used to be the vision of the State of Israel, and is now the vision of a minority, which is that we need to have Jews living on the entire land—

That’s the vision that you grew up with. It was your father’s vision.

Yes. But I grew up with other values, including respect for others. That was also part of the vision of my parents and of Jabotinsky. Usually people are familiar with Jabotinsky for saying that both sides of the Jordan River will be ours. But that is not simply what Jabotinsky wrote.

Jabotinsky was the most human and realistic of the early Zionist leaders because he understood that the Palestinians were also a people with a history and human pride and that they would not simply accept the idea that the Jews would transform Palestine into a Jewish state.

So, you see, I grew up with this understanding and these values also. We need to divide the land so that we can have Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people and a democratic state.

Former Prime Minister Olmert recently spoke in public about what he says are the terms he offered to Mahmoud Abbas, including the division of the land more or less on the 1967 borders and giving up Israeli sovereignty over the Old City of Jerusalem. He says that Abbas did not respond to his offer. If Netanyahu were to make the same offer and again there was no response, do you think that Israel simply needs to leave that land unilaterally the way Sharon left Gaza?

I supported the disengagement plan, but I prefer to have a peace treaty with the Palestinians. Any withdrawal from more land needs to be part of an agreement that this is the end of the conflict.

But what if that’s not possible?

I know it’s possible. I negotiated for nine months. Olmert’s offer to Mahmoud Abbas was not part of these negotiations. I believe that by building the negotiations in the right way we can end the conflict. At least, I believe we haven’t tried it the right way yet, so we don’t know what the result will be.

If you had to imagine a project that would help to build a sense of community and shared destiny between the American Jewish community and the government and the people of Israel, what would that be?

I think we should have a kind of roundtable in which we decide on our priorities. But from listening to the situation here and knowing the situation in Israel, I think it’s education. In Israel we have a young generation that—whether they are ultra-Orthodox and not willing to accept other streams in Judaism, or whether they are secular and for them being a Jew is being a Hebrew-speaking Israeli person and going to the army—they don’t relate to the understanding that they are part of something larger and have brothers and sisters all over the world. In the Jewish communities here, my understanding is that, as you said, some young people feel embarrassed by Israel, they don’t defend Israel, for them Israel is somewhere in the Middle East, and they don’t feel that they need to be that concerned when things deteriorate in Israel. I think we need to invest in education on both sides.

I am being told that I have exhausted my 30 minutes. Can I have another five minutes?

OK. Three minutes.

How successful has the campaign to isolate and delegitimize the Iranian government been over the past year?

I think that the economic sanctions were not effective enough. And since you were talking in terms of delegitimization, I think that it didn’t work, because you could see Ahmadinejad only a few weeks ago taking the stage at the United Nations—

I was there. The room was two-thirds empty. Except for the press gallery, which was full.

The world gives Ahmadinejad and other Iranian officials stages to express their agenda of hatred. I think that part of the sanctions should be diplomatic sanctions that deny these people stages to express these ideas. This is another kind of sanction that would not hurt the Iranian people but target these officials. The people in Iran can feel that these leaders are being delegitimized and not being given stages to say whatever they want to say, including Ahmadinejad’s horrific words about Sept. 11, denying the Holocaust, and stating clearly that his vision is to wipe the State of Israel off the map.

Is it your sense that the Stuxnet worm—

Oh, no. Your last question was enough.

If the Iranians can’t be sure that they control their own nuclear facilities, it makes it less possible for them to believe in the efficacy of their program, or in a future bomb. You have nothing to say on this subject?

Nothing.

• Prime Minister Netanyahu has another couple days to consider the U.S. plea to extend the construction freeze, as the Arab League meets Friday to debate President Abbas’s decision to withdraw from talks without an extension. [NYT]

• Speaking stateside, Opposition Leader Tzipi Livni slammed Netanyahu for waiting two years to engage the Palestinians. [Haaretz]

• A YouTube video of an Israeli soldier apparently dancing next to a blindfolded female Muslim prisoner has prompted a criminal inquiry. [NYT]

• What President Obama’s attempted Mideast dealmaking could net him. [NYT]

• Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Florida) has become one of the most outspoken critics, and therefore biggest targets, of the right. [NYT]

Bibi’s double books exploded this week with revelations of a secret meeting (for “secret,” read “behind Lieberman’s back”) between Turkey’s foreign minister and Israel’s industry minister in Zurich over the flotilla fallout. So the Turkish foreign minister met not with his Israeli counterpart, as diplomatic protocol would have it, but with Industry Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer—a member of, yup, Barak’s Labor Party.

Lieberman was reportedly furious (from his perspective, he has every right to be); reportedly refused to take Netanyahu’s calls initially and plotted revenge; and eventually met with Netanyahu and got the prime minister to admit that the whole thing was a big mistake. Lieberman says he won’t leave the government over it. Phew?

The continuing problem is that it was not necessarily a mistake. Though a student of international relations, Lieberman has minimal diplomatic experience in absolute terms; compared to Barak, the former prime minister who has developed relationships with top officials all over the world (and nowhere more than in the United States), Lieberman may as well possess as much diplomatic experience as you or I. Additionally, Lieberman’s view of the world is a bit … cruder than Barak’s—or even the more right-wing Netanyahu’s. An Israel whose de facto top diplomat is Avigdor Lieberman is almost certainly a yet more isolated Israel.

And yet, and yet! Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s reaction to the secret meeting? Unchanged demands: Until Israel apologizes, agrees to an international probe, lifts the Gaza blockade, and pays compensation, Turkey says, it will not appoint a new ambassador. Maybe Lieberman is onto something? But if he is the most sane one, we’re all in trouble.

Turkish and Israeli Officials Meet Secretly on Raid Crisis [NYT]
Lieberman Demands Netanyahu Backing in Face of Global Backlash [Haaretz]
FM To Take ‘Calculated’ Revenge on PM [JPost]
PM to FM: ‘It Was A Mistake’ [JPost]
Earlier: Israel’s Top Diplomat
Lieberman Nixes Palestinian State in ’12

The other context in which to understand Lieberman’s comments is Israel’s complicated coalition politics. Lieberman and his Yisrael Beiteinu want to pull the government led by Likud Prime Minister Netanyahu further away from too much territorial (or, really, any kind) of reconciliation with the Palestinians, even as opposition leader Tzipi Livni flirts with trying to replace Lieberman’s right-wing party with her centrist Kadima. It is rumored that Livni—whose party, let’s not forget, actually won the most votes in last year’s elections—would be willing to enter the coalition on the condition of replacing Lieberman at the Foreign Ministry. Yet Livni also just yesterday took aim at Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak (of the Labor Party) for leading the country “from crisis to crisis.” She may or may not want to enter this coalition; but as she made clear this weekend, she very much wants to lead the next one.

As for Yisrael Beiteinu, Foreign Ministry bureaucrats are dragging their feet in arranging for Netanyahu’s planned July 6 visit to the White House, ostensibly as part of a partial strike for better wages. And today, Infrastructure Minister Uzi Landau—another hawkish Yisrael Beiteinu member, who was last seen saber-rattling with Lebanon—compared Barak to a “battered wife,” who, “instead of standing up to the person who is beating her tries again and again to see what more she can give up on,” which, in Landau’s extremely tasteful metaphor, represents Barak’s preferred policy of continued territorial withdrawals.

So, Lieberman’s comments today? They are designed to provoke the Palestinians, sure. But they may also be designed to force Netanyahu to take a stand, against Livni and against the more centrist negotiating policy favored by his coalition-mate Barak, at the risk of losing his right flank.

Oh, and hey, you know what none of this stuff really applies to? Gaza, and its 1.5 million residents.

Israel Rules Out Palestinian State By 2012 [NYT]
Lieberman and Netanyahu in Spat [JPost]
Related: The Pragmatist [Tablet Magazine]

The most compelling part of the interview comes when she discusses her parents, who were prominent Revisionist Zionists (the right-wing forerunners of Likud) and members of the paramilitary group Irgun. Says Livni:

A few years ago, when I was interviewed on Israeli television, I said I support the idea of two nation-states. I was afraid that my mother was listening and hoped that she didn’t open the TV when I was speaking. But then one day she called me and said: “Listen, Tzipi. I hear you. It gives me pain. But you need to make decisions about the future of Israel. We didn’t establish this state for having just old people living here.”

Oh, and is she going to run for prime minister again? And how.

Meanwhile, for domestic Israeli consumption, Livni is being much harsher on the present government: “They go from crisis to crisis,” she thunders, “leading Israel into one of the worst situations in its history.”

Leader of the Opposition [NYT Magazine]
‘Bibi Gov’t Is Destroying the Country’ [JPost]
Related: Tough Love [TNR]

• Half-Jewish hip-hop artist Drake had the number-one album last week and the third biggest opening of the year. [Arts Beat]

• What tensions? Almost two dozen Turkish military officers and soldiers are training in Israel on an aerial drone, four of which Israel is selling to Ankara under a 2004 contract. [JTA]

• While much of upstate New York hemorrhages population (Buffalo alone lost 1,000 people last year; maybe because the Bills suck so much?), Kiryas Joel experienced the state’s highest growth—78 percent—thanks largely to its ultra-Orthodox enclave. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• A new Website, OneMideast.org, is bringing Israelis and Syrians together online to discuss the issues, with some success and some friction. [BBC]

• You know you want the brisket flip-flop. [Etsy]

U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

• As the Turkish-Israeli pissing match (and worse) continues, what is the United States—which for various reasons needs both in its corner—to do? [Politico]

• Ethnic tensions in Kyrgyzstan—mostly against the Central Asian country’s Uzbek minority—have led a dozen Jews to leave and make aliyah. Most its 1200 or so Jews, however, have elected to stay. [Ynet]

• Opposition leader Tzipi Livni criticized Prime Minister Netanyahu for easing the Gaza blockade under international pressure and not defending the Supreme Court’s recent decision integrating a religious school. [Ynet]

• A man convicted of helping Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was released in exchange for continuing to cooperate in the search for extant funds. [NBC News/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Tablet Magazine contributor David P. Goldman’s contest: Why do Palestinians deserve a nation-state and Kurds don’t? [First Things]

Yeah, just Drake asking his very obviously Jewish mother for a tuna sandwich. No big deal.

It was a classic illustration of the liberal Zionist predicament. In recent weeks this predicament has received an increased amount of attention, due in large part to a bracing and much-discussed essay by Peter Beinart—a former editor of The New Republic, the very citadel of American pro-Israel orthodoxy—in which he sounded the alarm on the plummeting levels of support for Israel among younger American Jews. “For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door,” Beinart wrote, “and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.” Similar concerns led to the formation in 2008 of J Street, a lobby group that aims to represent the views of liberal Jews and serve as a counterweight to traditionally right-leaning groups like AIPAC. If current trends continue, American Jewish attitudes toward Israel may ultimately be transformed in a way unseen since the bulk of the community first got on board with Zionism, in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War.

How can liberal Zionism be saved? For those aiming to revive the form of American liberal Zionism that marked the generation that came of age after the 1967 war, it is tempting to blame its decline on a betrayal by outside forces. On this logic the collapse of support has been caused by Israel’s own shift to the right in recent years—epitomized by the rise of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman—a shift aided and abetted by a right-leaning institutional leadership of the American Jewish community that refuses to criticize Israel under any circumstances. Resuscitating liberal Zionism, this argument goes, will thereby involve siding with Israeli moderates while speaking out against settlers abroad and neoconservatives at home.

But can liberal Zionism, at least in the form that has dominated American Jewish life for decades, be saved at all? And should it be? These are harder questions but may ultimately be more important ones. It may be emotionally satisfying to posit a blameless liberal Zionism betrayed by outside forces, or to suppose that younger Jews are reacting only against the right and not liberal Zionism itself, but it is not clear that either claim is true. For one thing, Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman undoubtedly make good villains, but the aspects of Israeli politics that have alienated U.S. liberals go deeper than the current right-wing government. (To take only the most recent example, it was not the nefarious Netanyahu or the loathsome Lieberman who brought us the attack on Gaza, but rather the supposed “good guys”: Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak, and Tzipi Livni.)

More generally, the apparently impending collapse of mainstream liberal Zionism in the United States is no accident. Some of the phenomenon may be attributed to the simple passage of time—to a generation growing up farther removed from the looming presence of the Holocaust and without memories of the 1967 and 1973 wars. But we cannot adequately understand this collapse without understanding the compromises and contradictions that liberal Zionism became involved in over a period of decades.

***

Let me drop the pretense of disinterestedness for a moment. I am a member of the “younger generation” whose attitudes have become the subject of so much discussion, and in many ways I am typical of it. When the last decade began I considered myself to be, broadly speaking, a fairly standard young liberal Zionist—at least insofar as I thought about these things, which was not often. In the years since, my views have shifted to the point that I would not consider myself a Zionist at all. I make no claim to “speak for my generation,” whatever that would mean, and one should never trust anyone who claims that they can. But I have reason to think that my experience was far from atypical, and it might therefore be worthwhile to examine it more closely.

It’s always tempting, when writing a conversion narrative, to exaggerate the magnitude of the shift for dramatic effect. But I can’t honestly claim that I was ever a neoconservative or a hardliner (aside from a brief Likudnik episode in my childhood). Rather, I held a set of views fairly typical of American liberal Zionism. I was largely uninformed about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but I was against the occupation and the settlements, and I considered myself sympathetic to Palestinian suffering. Still, I did not really question the basic Israeli narrative of the conflict (“we want peace, but they only want to annihilate us”); I believed that everything would be better if only the Palestinians could find their King or Gandhi; I was convinced that the shrill-sounding activists who constantly harped on Israel’s sins were hysterical at best and anti-Semitic at worst. I was a “serious” and “responsible” liberal, I told myself, and much of this identity hinged on differentiating myself from them.

Livni had wanted to personally launch next month’s Gay Pride parade in Tel Aviv. But the activists alleged that “such conduct may create the wrong impression that Kadima is shifting to the left, and this may distance the party from its main target audience.”

Really, though, this is a good excuse to point out (as Eli Valley helpfully did) that the ad that went along with Ynet’s article last night is, well, below.

Ah, the free market comes through again. Point being—and honest American conservatives would likely have the same advice for these Kadima activists—if you are against gay advancement, then the last thing you want to do is bring the issue up.

Kadima Activists Slam Livni Support for Gays [Ynet]

Problem is, the tensions of March have since given way to the lovefest of April and May: steadfast praise and declared support for Israel from all quarters of the Administration; a rolling out of the red carpet for Defense Minister Ehud Barak last week; and a general aura of better times. A cynic would note that the Administration’s earlier condemnations only buttressed Netanyahu domestically, as Israelis rallied ‘round the flag. Still, the current era of good feeling is probably dispositive of the theory of a concerted Administration effort to topple Bibi. Only when Obama starts saying nice things about opposition leader Tzipi Livni will it have legs. That is what you should be on the lookout for—though I suspect you’ll probably end up disappointed.

Is Obama Moving To Topple Israel’s Prime Minister? [The Bulletin] (via Vos Iz Neias?)
Related: Religion of Yes [Tablet Magazine]

But Bibi will have his public turn tonight in front of the AIPAC crowd. He’s expected to declare that Jerusalem is “not a settlement”—hence his refusal to back down on the government’s plan to build 1600 new homes in a Jewish area of East Jerusalem. (The same line went over very well with the crowd this morning when AIPAC’s executive director, Howard Kohr, tested it out.) Perhaps even as you read this, he is meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who earlier today told the AIPAC audience that the problem was never the apartments themselves, but rather the exposure of that infamous daylight between the Americans and the Israelis. “It undermines America’s unique ability to play an essential role in the peace process,” she told the crowd. “This is not about wounded pride. This is about getting everyone to the table and creating and protecting an atmosphere of trust around it.”

One person who didn’t seem at all fussed about the fuss was Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni, who visited her friend, White House National Security Advisor James Jones—the same Jones who said last fall, at the J Street conference, that peace was Obama’s top foreign-policy priority —and then, looking almost Grace Kelly-esque in a smooth blonde ponytail and black boatneck dress, swanned over to a luncheon at the Renaissance Hotel across the street from the AIPAC convention headquarters. There, she told the capacity crowd that she, for one, had nothing to publicly say about her political rival Netanyahu, or the recent “disagreement.” “There are places and times to have these discussions,” she said, giving a sly shrug. “This is not the time and the place to do it.”

PM To Tell AIPAC Jerusalem Is Not a Settlement [Ynet]
Earlier: Obama, Netanyahu Meet, Stay Silent
Obama Adviser to J Street: Peace Deal Should Be Priority

• Visiting Moscow, Secretary of State Clinton asked Russia to delay finishing a nuclear plant it’s building for Iran. [Haaretz]

• Jeffrey Goldberg points out that if Kadima leader Tzipi Livni had agreed to join Netanyahu’s coalition, this would be a much more moderate government and last week’s mess probably wouldn’t have happened. [Jeffrey Goldberg]

• One writer points out that Netanyahu has no back-channel point man for dealing with the American administration—which may sound ordinary, but is in fact unprecedented for an Israeli prime minister. [Haaretz]

• An interview with Tablet Magazine contributing editor Judith Shulevitz on her new book, The Sabbath World. [The Jewish Star]

• “I just flew back from the Middle East, and boy are my arms tired!” is not the joke Vice President Biden made last night. Instead he said, “I just got back from five days in the Middle East. I love to travel, but it’s great to be back to a place where a boom in housing construction is actually a good thing.” [Haaretz]

• Tablet Magazine Mideast columnist Lee Smith thinks (as he wrote on The Scroll) that President Obama’s lashing out at the Israelis only makes him look weak. [Slate]

• Tablet Magazine contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg sees in the Israeli government’s incoherence—first announcing the settlements, then apologizing for doing so—evidence that Prime Minister Netanyahu has lost control of his weak coalition. Previously, Goldberg reported that Obama is trying to shake that coalition up further so that moderate Tzipi Livni can become prime minister. And we should listen to him: he is, after all, quite close to his fellow Tablet Magazine contributing editor Barack Obama. [Atlantic]

• Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy praises the Obama administration’s “tough love” for Israel. [Haaretz]

• Prominent Palestinian official and intellectual Mustafa Barghouti sees America as a “hostage” to “the last colonial system in modern history.” [LAT]

• Aluf Benn predicts that both Obama’s and Netanyahu’s reputations will take hits by the end of all this. [Haaretz]

• Fred Kaplan sees Obama’s harsh stance as ultimately more supportive of Israel than the most ardent pro-Israel cheerleading could ever be. [Slate]

• Oh, and Netanyahu’s brother-in-law thinks Obama is an anti-Semite. A Kenya-born one, no doubt. [Laura Rozen]

• Okay, one more thing: Jeffrey Goldberg reports that what Obama is trying to do is further crack Netanyahu’s already fragile (and right-wing) coalition, ideally in order to pave the way for a more moderate Tzipi Livni government. [Jeffrey Goldberg]

• Fine, one more: Sarah Palin accused the Obama administration of “missing the boat” (folksy!) on Israel and called for a hit of the “reset button.” [Ben Smith]

• The Simon Wiesenthal Center is still planning to build that controversial Jerusalem Museum of Tolerance. [AP/Haaretz]

• A long and fantastic profile of conservative Web journalist Andrew Breitbart notes that he was raised Jewish (though not very religiously) and contains this line of his: “You’ve gone to Hebrew school, you’ve gone to Auschwitz, you go, Never again, Never again. Then you go to Tulane and you go, Maybe never again. … Don’t include that.” [Slate]

• The Jews That Do Contest invites Jews who do … pretty much anything to submit video of themselves doing so. [Leadel]
Below: a Jew does something

• 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]

Some of the biggest news broken today about the Dubai assassination of Hamas weapons man Mahmoud al-Mabhouh comes courtesy Judith Miller, who reported in Tablet Magazine that Mossad tried to kill al-Mabhouh (at least) twice before. She also placed the successful plot in the context of Mossad’s general policy of terrorist and terrorist-sponsor assassination, as did the Los Angeles Times, which concluded: “The policy is not likely to change, analysts and diplomats say, because such killings, from Israel’s point of view, have proved effective in fighting a nonconventional enemy. And despite legal questions and international backlash, Israel has usually emerged unscathed.”

But this just may have scathed it. While plenty in both the Israeli and British presses have celebrated Mossad’s “““““alleged””””” killing, there are at least six people who are not so happy: those folks, all with dual British-Israeli citizenship, whose faked passports were used by the assassins “were completely unaware of this abuse,” notes Der Spiegel. “They are shocked and are demanding an investigation.” The European Union condemned the faked passports, though its official statement did not mention Israel. Oh, and Iran used the occasion to argue, “Israel’s existence is itself based on terrorist activities.” But it does that every Tuesday.

Some may have called for Mossad chief Meir Dagan to step down, but he is way too important to Israel’s low-temperature conflict with Iran to be sacked. In Israel, the plot may on some level be controversial, but opposition leader Tzipi Livni rallied around the flag: “that a terrorist was killed, and it doesn’t matter if it was in Dubai or Gaza, is good news,” she said.

Is that true? In Slate, Shmuel Rosner says it’s too soon to tell if al-Mabhouh’s death is worth the ostensible hit Mossad is taking to its reputation. And Der Spiegel—whose lengthy treatment of the story is amply worth your time if you’ve read this far—makes a great point:

Mossad was apparently prepared to accept the possibility that the identities of its agents would be revealed. In fact, it was even willing to jeopardize the security of Israel’s own citizens, whose very protection it cites as justification for its actions. … the death of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh must have been very important to Jerusalem.

Assassination Tango [Tablet Magazine]
Israel Relies on a Deadly Specialty [LAT]
A Mossad Operation Gone Awry? [Der Spiegel]
A Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Dubai Assassination [Slate]

What the far-left from Britain to Berkeley has been been unable to bring off—a sense among Israel’s allies that Israel has become a heartless, morally heedless aggressor state worthy of sanction and shunning—the far-right in Israel’s own government, and in particular, its Foreign Ministry, seems determined to inculcate to the full. [Haaretz]

• After Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon refused to meet with J Street’s congressional delegation, the Israeli government seems increasingly out-of-touch with American Jews, James Besser argues. [JW Political Insider]

• Boxing promoter Bob Arum reached an agreement with the bar mitzvah boy who rented out the Yankee Stadium Jumbotron on the night of June 5th. Meaning: Orthodox fighter Yuri Foreman will very likely take on Miguel Cotto that night in that place. [AP/ESPN]

• Benjamin Netanyahu, Tony Blair, and Tzipi Livni have all pledged to attend the annual AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington, D.C., in late March. [Ben Smith]

• The sustainable food movement collides with old-line Jewish delis. Shall the twain ever meet? [Forward]

• Palestinian rights groups are attempting to organize a boycott of an Israeli ballet company’s performance this Sunday at Brooklyn College. [ArtsBeat]

British officials have since promised Israel to ensure the jail-free vacationing of former Israeli leaders. However, over 100 British Members of Parliament oppose the bill to which an arrest-banning amendment is attached, and there are even reports that Justice Secretary Jack Straw is holding it up.

Meanwhile, is Livni’s act truly “not for me,” as she claimed? Well, the audacious move certainly couldn’t hurt a politician whom some see as on the ropes. But it would nonetheless be brave—even if the British government must be smart enough to ensure her safe passage. (Right, guys?)

Tzipi Livni: I’m Coming To Britain [The Jewish Chronicle]

Earlier: War of Words Continues Over British War-Crimes Warrants
Livni, Defiant, Pledges To Stick Around

Unrelatedly—maybe—the Pentagon gave its blessing to a $3.2 billion deal between Egypt and Lockheed Martin for 24 F-16 jet fighters. The Defense Department also okayed smaller deals for Saudia Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates to buy American-made weapons.

U.S. Lawmakers Talking Peace on Mideast Mission [JTA]
U.S., Arab States Collaborating To See Mideast Talks Resume[Haaretz]
Egypt, Arab Countries Sign Massive Arms Deals With U.S.[Arutz Sheva]

Deputy FM: Arrest Warrants Harming Britain-Israel Ties [Haaretz]
British AG: Change Policy That Allows Arrest Warrants Against Israeli Leaders [Ynet]

Earlier: UK Court Issued Warrant for Livni

Regardless of what you think of settlement activity in the past—whether you think it’s Jews building in their ancient homeland or it is against international law. It’s not important. Because we have what we call ‘blocs of settlements,’ and most of them are very close to the Green Line. It takes only a few percentages [of the territory]. Whether we like it or not, we have to give an answer to these realities in any peace agreement.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has insisted that the Green Line be considered “sacrosanct.” On the other hand, Livni wryly uses her harder line on the final-boundary issue in order to take a softer line on another of Abbas’s demands: a full settlement freeze. As she puts it, “It’s not about building now, but to keep the blocs of settlements as part of Israel in the future.”

Interview With Tzipi Livni [WSJ]

Earlier: The Road Map to Real Negotiations

Livni Crisis Deepens as Israel Bans U.K. Visits [Jewish Chronicle]
Britain Eyeing Ways to Avoid Warrants [JTA]
Previously: U.K. Pledges to Prevent Future War-Crimes Charges

Brown Says Livni ‘Most Welcome’ in U.K. [Ynet]
U.K. Ponders Law Change After Tzipi Livni Arrest Warrant [BBC News]
Lieberman, British FM Discuss Arrest Warrants [Arutz Sheva]

Earlier: U.K. Court Issued Warrant for Livni

British Court Issued Gaza Arrest Warrant for Former Israeli Minister Livni [Guardian]
Israeli Sources Deny Report of Arrest Warrant Against Livni in London [Ynet]

The Jerusalem Post notes that it’s unusual for the United States to condemn construction in Gilo, which is geographically contiguous with neighborhoods that were part of Israel prior to 1967. The White House has traditionally maintained that Gilo is not a settlement, a fact made clear today when, after initially titling its response to the construction as “on the approval of settlement expansion in Jerusalem,” the headline was later revised to read simply “on Jerusalem.”

Meanwhile, Israeli officials from across the political spectrum united to dismiss the global outcry. Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barakat called the demand to cease construction for Jews “illegal,” while Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin noted that “the right to build in all of unified Jerusalem is not questioned in Israel.” Perhaps most significantly, in a rare agreement with Netanyahu, opposition leader Tzipi Livni told French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner that there is an “Israeli consensus” that Gilo belongs to Israel, an understanding which “must be considered when determining future borders.”

Housing Plan for Jerusalem Neighborhood Spurs Criticism [WP]
Gov’t Sources: Israel Won’t Accept Restrictions in Jerusalem [JPost]
Livni: Israelis Agree That Gilo Is Theirs [JTA]

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

It’s also worth remembering that context matters, so it’s probably not entirely irrelevant that the Israeli embassy softened its position right after Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni—whose Kadima party actually came first in last February’s Knesset elections, though it couldn’t muster a working parliamentary coalition—lashed out at Netanyahu’s government for isolating Israel on the international stage. “You have managed to beat the president of the United States, Israel’s greatest friend, or at least this is the impression you and your people tried to convey after the meeting,” Livni railed during Monday’s opening of the Knesset. “You have managed to humiliate the only partner for a peace settlement Israel has. In short: We have beaten America, humiliated the Palestinians, isolated ourselves. Raise your head from the small politics and see what has happened, see that Israel is excommunicated.”

On Eve of Conference, J Street Struggles To Prove Pro-Israel Cred [Forward]
Livni Accuses Netanyahu of ‘Humiliating Palestinians’[Ynet]
Related: Generation Z [Tablet]

Netanyahu’s surer hold on power is due in large part to savvy political instincts. As he admitted in private discussion with colleagues recently, reported by Haaretz, his July speech at Bar-Ilan University, in which he for the first time consented to Palestinian statehood, cooled somewhat the domestic media’s hatred of him. But Bibi’s boom is also related to a more ephemeral political phenomenon: luck.

For starters, the ongoing legal woes of his controversial foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who looks set to resign any day, have only consolidated Netanyahu’s singular influence in a top-heavy and overloaded cabinet. Second, the recent turmoil in Iran helped legitimize a perennial pessimist who’s been saying for years that Islamist governments can’t be negotiated with. And perhaps most impressively, Netanyahu has benefited from taking on Barack Obama—perhaps the only politician in the world of whom this could be said.

Netanyahu’s skills as a political tactician have improved greatly in the last decade. Indeed, understanding the unlikely successes of his second term requires knowing a little about the failures of his first.

Originally elected in 1996, half a year after Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, Netanyahu was never fully embraced by a constituency still reeling from the late failure of dovish hopes. Back then, “he was lucky to be elected,” said Jerusalem Post pundit Shmuel Rosner. “He was never accepted by elites who thought he was just this young, hawkish guy who stole the election from Shimon Peres. He never got the legitimacy he needed, either from the Israeli people or from the Clinton administration.” According to Noah Pollak, a blogger on the Middle East for Commentary, who’s regularly in touch with officials in the prime minister’s office, Netanyahu was seen back then as an “impediment to the peace process, the naysayer,” running against an enormous tide of sympathy for reconciliation with the Arabs. As such, he was someone whom Bill Clinton—always perceived as a friend to the Jewish state—could easily undercut by appealing directly to the Israeli people. Netanyahu’s response was to buckle to U.S. pressure, making concessions to the Palestinians that he had vowed during the campaign never to make, such as withdrawing from 80 percent of Hebron in 1997, and signing the Wye River Memorandum in 1998, which outlined further withdrawals. Both of these gestures alienated Netanyahu’s allies on the far right and cost him reelection in 1999. As Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby wrote at the time, “the would-be Israeli Churchill began to morph into a Chamberlain.”

Other neophyte mistakes, too, complicated Netanyahu’s maiden effort at governing. Matt Silver, a communications professor at the Academic College of Emek Yezreel, remembers vividly the unsuccessful assassination attempt of Hamas leader Khalid Meshaal in 1997, which Silver viewed then as Netanyahu’s attempted macho rite of passage gone awry. “One journal called him a ‘mysterious bungler,’” Silver recalled. “He had to prove himself, that he wasn’t this Johnny-come-lately, [that] he was a real Israeli.”

No longer. According to Sherman and Rosner, Netanyahu has learned from serving in subordinate roles in government in the past decade. His tenure as both foreign minister and finance minister under Ariel Sharon, many long-time observers of his career argue, taught him the value of compromise and alliance-building—what his critics in the Israeli press, including Nahum Barnea, the influential reporter for Yedioth Aronoth, call “opportunism.” To Rosner, however, it was telling that this time around, Netanyahu reached out to the Labor Party, which received only 13 seats in the Knesset in the last election, when he could have simply forged a narrow right-wing coalition government. Retaining as defense minister Ehud Barak, with whom Netanyahu served in the same IDF unit and is said to get along with well personally, was also savvy. “He learned this from Sharon,” said Rosner. “Bibi never liked Sharon, never trusted him, but he learned from his achievements.”

And in the confrontation with the White House over settlement expansion in the West Bank—the starkest challenge Netanyahu has faced so far—Netanyahu has astonishingly emerged less scathed than Obama. Unlike in 1996, the U.S. gambit of taking the case straight to the Israeli people has backfired, Rosner and Pollak said, with Israelis siding with Netanyahu over an even more internationally admired Democratic president. (Since announcing the settlement freeze, Obama’s approval rating in Israel, according to a Jerusalem Post-sponsored Smith Research poll, has dropped from 31 percent to six percent.)

“Obama began exactly where Clinton left off—at Camp David,” Pollak said. “He tried to weaken Bibi politically by making the Israeli public fear a crisis in the relationship with the U.S. But Obama, unlike Clinton, was elected with the baggage of Jeremiah Wright, Rashid Khalidi, and Bill Ayers—these were strikes against him in Israel. He compounded them by giving his first interview to Al Arabiya, and making his first two big speeches in Arab Muslim venues, Turkey and Cairo.”

Pollak suggests that Obama should have tried to cultivate a stronger rapport with the Israeli street before attempting any “arm-twisting.” Furthermore, halting construction in settlements that will likely go to Israel in any prospective peace agreement—particularly the East Jerusalem suburb of Ma’ale Adumin, which has 30,000 residents—is not nearly the cause célèbre in Jerusalem that it is in Washington. “There is no way you can have an agreement with Israel on a settlement freeze that would be meaningful,” said Barnea, who thinks Obama should have simply called for a freeze, which would have made Netanyahu sweat, but not tried to negotiate the details of one, which Israel can’t do, “legally or politically.” Negotiating the freeze “didn’t benefit Bibi,” Barnea added, “it damaged the Obama administration, and made it look ineffective in the eyes of the Arabs.”

Although Netanyahu has dismantled more outposts and roadblocks in the West Bank than did his predecessor Ehud Olmert, and vowed to double the number of Israeli inspectors of settlement construction, these seeming capitulations to White House demands have been carried out with little or no publicity.  According to Pollak, that’s the price of being a pariah prime minister—not receiving credit for aiding Palestinians—but so far, at least, Netanyahu’s coalition hasn’t rebelled against him again for these concessions.

Additionally, an unforeseen international crisis has tacitly bolstered Netanyahu’s credibility. Ayatollah Khameini’s ultra-violent reaction to protests in Iran, following the contested reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, also appeared to justify what Israel’s most recognizable national security hardliner has been saying for years: that the mullahs can’t be trusted. Yet Netanyahu has not sought to take credit for being proven right. According to Daniel Seaman, director of the Israeli Government Press Office, Netanyahu’s reticence was strategic. “There’s an old Hebrew saying, ‘The work of the righteous is done by others.’ To people, it’s clear where Bibi stood on this issue. If he starts saying something about it, there’s going to be an opposition. This way, he gets all the benefits out of being right without claiming to be, and the opposition isn’t emboldened.”

Finally, Avigdor Lieberman, the far-right nationalist head of the Yisrael Beiteinu party, whom Netanyahu appointed foreign minister much to the chagrin of liberals at home and abroad, is facing a likely indictment for corruption charges, and may soon be a headache no more. Lieberman has promised to resign if he’s indicted, and a source in the prime minister’s office said that in that likely scenario, Netanyahu will keep the position vacant. “He can say he’s leaving it open to Lieberman until he’s exonerated, or leave it open to entice Kadima,” the source said. According to this theory, Netanyahu will run the foreign ministry alongside Barak—longtime chum of Hillary Clinton and Israeli’s preferred diplomat to the United States and Western Europe—and Danny Ayalon, the current deputy foreign minister, who represents the gentler face of Yisrael Beiteinu. As a troika, these men have all along been crafting Israel’s foreign policy without the help or input of Lieberman, who’s been there as a salve to his base. In fact, already “Lieberman is foreign minister in name only,” said Rosner.

Of course, Netanyahu’s fortunes may soon turn again. “Public opinion here, like in the states, is very flexible and exposed to mood,” said Barnea. “Bibi is lucky because, temporarily, the day-to-day security is basically good. Since the end of Operation Gaza, we don’t have any rockets, any terrorist attacks inside Israel. It’s springtime for the government.”

Barnea is quick to point out that this is only the beginning of a tenuous coalition; what’s more, it’s the summer, when as many as 400,000 Israelis (roughly 10 percent of the population) are vacationing abroad in Turkey, Europe, or the United States. “The feeling is that the country is on hold, in a way,” said Barnea, who, in covering Fatah’s sixth general assembly in Bethlehem, said the only thing people he interviewed wanted to talk about was food. “There’s no political news, only criminal. So let’s talk about the murder of a homosexual in Tel Aviv, or the murder of a baby by a father who wants to revenge his wife. If this is Bibi’s luck, OK. I call it August.”

Nevertheless, a rosier picture has thus emerged of Netanyahu’s prospects than anyone last February would have painted. “The day after Bibi formed his government, people were giving it a year at most,” said Silver. “Now it’s two or three years.”

How did Labor fall so far? What’s its future? These questions have gnawed at me in the months since the election as I’ve tried to find a silver lining to Labor’s defeat.

In Israel’s 17 national elections nearly every party other than the two biggest has been parochial, claiming to represent specific cohorts of the Israeli public: the ultra-Orthodox, the elderly, traditional Sephardim, and the National Religious. Suddenly, this year, the most significant party in Israel’s history found itself the size of a sectarian party. But worse, it lacks even a parochial party’s focus: Who does it represent? Kibbutzniks? Ashkenazis? Workers? A profile of Labor party voters, just like its platform, is very fuzzy. And after a non-exhaustive check of my friends and acquaintances, I could only conclude that most of the people who voted Labor did so out of a years-long habit or through a process of elimination and with very little enthusiasm, purely out of fear of other, even less deserving alternatives.

There are many reasons for the collapse of Labor, but the major one is that it no longer knows what it stands for. If the word “labor” once meant a clear, left-wing socialist ideology, a party that professed to be concerned with the weaker sectors of society and sought peace with our neighbors, today it has become a group of elected officials unable to agree on any consistent platform. Can Ehud Barak, the millionaire who lives in a luxurious apartment, in any way represent social solidarity with the working class? Can the same Barak who was defense minister during the war in Gaza really be a viable alternative left of Kadima leader Tzipi Livni, for example, who was supposed to represent—at least on paper—a more hawkish view than his? And if Labor does not represent a moderate, social-democrat leftist ideology, what is its raison d’etre? After all, if there is no problem picturing its leader running for the Knesset on the Likud or Kadima ticket, then why vote for such a nebulous entity as the Labor Party when you can vote for the real thing?

In the many interviews Barak gave after stepping down as prime minister, he mentioned that, in the 2001 Taba peace talks, it became clear to him that the Palestinian leadership was not really interested in a comprehensive peace agreement and that all attempts to negotiate with them were futile. Disappointed in the peace process and what he saw as the absence of a genuine partner on the other side of the table, Barak changed his views radically and should have left the Labor party to embark on a different political path. Instead, he went back to Labor and led it into a united nationalist government headed by parties ostensibly to its right in the political spectrum, where he fits in naturally and completely.

But the personal change Barak underwent does not explain why members of Labor chose to hand him the reins. The last time Barak was elected to lead Labor, his opponent was Ami Ayalon, former commander-in-chief of the Navy and a supporter of the Geneva Accord. Ayalon was an inexperienced politician but one who clearly represented Labor’s historical ideology. Always perceived as a man with a modest lifestyle, Ayalon was a more natural choice to follow in the footsteps of Ben Gurion and Yitzhak Rabin, both also known for their modesty, than the arrogant Barak. Nonetheless, Ayalon lost that race, a fact that indicates a deeper crisis than the one Labor experienced: the party’s members opted not to elect the candidate who carries the party’s spirit. Instead, they chose Barak, who has come to symbolize the ambiguous and unclear future of the Left.

When Palestinians in the territories elected Hamas in 2006, most supporters of the Zionist left found themselves up against a wall. The previous decade had showed that with every Israeli concession, the situation in the region deteriorated. Many believed that the unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon, particularly the way it was carried out, led to the Second Intifada and the strengthening of Hezbollah. Others believed that the unilateral disengagement from the territories caused the Hamas victory in the Gaza elections. While the radical left continued to claim that the efforts failed because Israel wasn’t prepared to give enough, the mainstream Zionist left was trapped. On the one hand, it wasn’t ready for greater concessions or direct contacts with the fanatical Hamas, but on the other hand, given the situation, it could not offer a political alternative to the total reliance on military solutions proposed by the right. And so, under the circumstances, the Zionist left has become a passive group devoid of pragmatic vision. When a political entity is unable to propose initiatives and settles for passive responses to the existing situation, it’s no wonder that it loses its authority to other parties that project a clearer and often more impassioned view.

Some people see the Labor Party’s entry into Netanyahu’s government as the final nail in its coffin. Many will gloat when it finally vanishes. Enemies on the right will feel that its demise delegitimizes the left. Enemies on the left will consider it proof that Labor’s existence was always based on lies. I believe that this wretched year will lead to positive changes in the party and in the end, we’ll see a new party that will leap into the existing vacuum. It will call itself Labor or some other name, and pledge itself, first of all, to champion social justice and commit itself to working for the weaker sectors of the population: the elderly, minorities, foreign workers, and others. And it will be forced to create a new, pragmatic ideology that may not please all of us, but at the same, will also make it difficult for our neighbors to mire themselves in their isolationist and militant positions.

I can already identify the potential leader of that new party among the sparse rows of Labor’s Knesset members, and he—how ironic—is the man who succeeded in mediating between Barak and Netanyahu during the last coalition negotiations that unsuccessfully attempted to bring the Labor Party into the Likud government, inadvertently bringing about the end of an era. This man isn’t a general and still hasn’t accumulated a private fortune. He is Sephardic, counter to the leftist, Ashkenazic stereotype that the right has exploited in every election campaign. His name is Ofer Eini, head of the Histadrut Labor Federation, a man who, in contrast to his predecessors, has rarely appeared in the media, but has done an impressive job of representing Israel’s workers. He is discreet, seemingly ego-less, and has won the respect of party leaders on all sides, unusual insofar as union chiefs are typically despised by politicians. With almost no strikes or threats, but with admirable determination, Eini has managed to achieve goals—a stable labor agreement in one of the most difficult economic periods in the life of the country. And who knows, maybe the same down-to-earth pragmatism that solved most of the labor-management negotiation problems will succeed in the regional arena as well, exactly where Barak’s ideology and arrogance failed.

Etgar Keret is Tablet Magazine’s columnist in Israel.

Translated by Sondra Silverston

Sure, there’s mudslinging and scare tactics, accusations and allegations, and all the rest of the snark and spittle that’s part and parcel of the modern art of political persuasion. But fundamentally, successful campaigns must radiate a sense of promise, some sunny disposition that somehow soothes and inspires. Think “morning in America.” Think “yes we can.”

In Israel, however, where, next week, voters will be asked to decide between two failed former prime ministers and a decent-if-unthrilling politician associated with the current cabinet’s crises and corruptions, hope is a thing with tar and feathers, driven out of town by an angry mob. With all the major candidates having already been badly bruised in the arena of public opinion, Jerusalem’s spin doctors, it seems, have replaced the sublime with the absurd.

Take, for example, the Labor Party. Once omnipotent, Israel’s founding political party will almost certainly be reduced to third place, behind Bibi Netanyahu’s Likud and Tzipi Livni’s Kadima. The party’s candidate, Ehud Barak, has, until recently, suffered from a reputation as an arrogant and aloof man who badly bungled his first turn in office. The popular war in Gaza, as well as a well-received appearance in a satirical comedy show, thawed Barak’s frozen image somewhat, leading Labor’s political strategists to go for broke and play the humor card down the line.

The party’s ads, then, feature comedians playing a car mechanic, a building contractor, and other professionals not exactly known for their trustworthiness and candor. In each case, Labor’s faux laborers look straight at the camera and opine on why Barak would’ve been terrible had he chosen their vocation instead of statesmanship. Barak, says the contractor, “couldn’t have plastered hummus onto a matzah. Instead of drywalling our existential problems, putting on a layer of paint. . . he gives you the truth.”

“Come on, Ehud,” concludes the contractor, “the truth is not such a great design element.” As in other ads, he then grinningly sings out the party’s new slogan: if you don’t lie, how would you get elected? In Hebrew, it not only rhymes, but also sends a very clear message, portraying Livni and Netanyahu as image-obsessed fibbers who would say anything to get ahead.

Just in case you didn’t get the message, Labor belabors the point with an outdoor ad campaign, featuring an unflattering photo of its leader alongside alternating slogans: “Barak is not nice,” says one. “Barak is not your buddy,” reads another. A third claims, “Barak is not trendy.” Barak’s bet, then, is to try and reinvent himself as the Doctor House of Israeli politics, a socially awkward but brutally honest genius whose diagnoses alone could save the nation from its gruesome and mysterious maladies.

But Barak is not the only one looking across the sea for inspiration. Netanyahu, currently leading in the polls by a narrow margin, has found his own American role model: Obama, meet your new twin brother, Bibi.

Netanyahu’s Obama Offensive begun by effectively ripping off the American president’s innovative campaign website, and continued with a few television appearances in which the usually besuited Bibi tossed aside the tie for Barack-style crisp cotton shirts.

But Israel is a long way from Illinois: when Likud’s television ads were unleashed last week, they featured very little by way of change we can believe in. One ad, for example, presents Bibi as the Cassandra of Qassam rockets, juxtaposing a 2005 speech in which Netanyahu warns against Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza with ominous footage—set, of course, to ominous music—of masked Hamas militiamen parading around and launching attacks.

Running for office by reminding your constituents that you had always said death and destruction were right around the corner: call it the audacity of hopelessness.

Netanyahu’s other ads fall in with the same, bleak line. One ad, titled “The Kadimatron,” shows Bibi as a masked marionette, and features soundbites from key members of Kadima speaking about terrorism and security and sounding a lot like the Likud leader; as they speak, the Bibi puppet takes off his mask to reveal his rivals’ true faces. The idea: all the other politicians are really Bibi in disguise. Another fine creation, entitled, roughly, “Too Much for Her to Handle,” features two female silhouettes, each making contradictory statements and each turning out, eventually, to be the same woman, Livni, who currently trails Netanyahu by a few points. Too subtle for you? You may enjoy the ever-effective “Livni: 10 Years in the Knesset, 0 Accomplishments.”

Given Likud’s caustic attacks, one would expect Livni to retaliate with fierce determination, highlighting her storied career in the Mossad, the government, and other branches of civil service. And, in one key ad, she does: featuring a blurry-faced candidate, the ad’s narrator speaks of all the candidate’s accomplishments, all in the masculine form, referring to the candidate as “he.” Then, the bottom line: “Nobody,” says the narrator, bemused, “would doubt that he was fit to be Prime Minister if he wasn’t”—now the politician’s blurry face becomes clear, revealing Livni’s determined-looking mug—“a woman.” It’s hard to imagine Golda Meir using that line.

While the major parties keep things more or less mainstream, their smaller contenders, thinking they’ve got nothing to lose, are letting it all hang out. Hadash, for example, the Communist party and the only one to boast a true Jewish-Arabic parliamentary partnership, took the Benetton approach to coexistence: in its ad, titled “It’s Obvious,” a group of impossibly attractive and infinitely cool young hipsters, filmed against a deep-red background, all chuckle and say that—duh!—Hadash is, like, the only option anyone should consider. While it may or may not make much political sense, goes the silent subtext, a vote for the party would surely get you laid.

If you, dear reader, have been clicking on all of the links provided above, and enjoying the myriad political ads, let me suggest taking a brief break, maybe a short walk or a good stretch or a drink of water. Because what you are about to see next may leave you unable to do much else for a while. It’s an ad put out by the Green Leaf Party, whose only objective is to legalize cannabis. Their angle? The Holocaust. Watch it here for yourselves, complete with English subtitles. Enjoy the catchy hip-hop jingle. Cherish the dazed-looking elderly man who states, “For us, the Holocaust survivors, our moral obligation is to legalize it.” If we can’t light up a spliff, we’re given to understand, then all of that unpleasantness at Auschwitz would’ve been for naught.

The parties themselves, however, are not the only ones creating strange and compelling content this election season. Inevitably in the age of YouTube, fans of all stripes upload their own clips to the web. But unlike the politicians they support, these self-made auteurs all draw inspiration from the same person. Their hero? Obama Girl. Just as the aspiring actress made electoral waves with her paean to her favorite pol, Israel’s youngsters are hoping to do the same. And yet, the nation being its belligerent self, even this fun and frivolous pursuit has quickly turned into a small-scale battle.

It began when Sagiv Asulin, one of Likud’s rising, hawkish young stars, got a sultry fan to record her own take on Obama Girl, titled, of course, Asulin Girl. Kadima’s minions weren’t far behind with their own version, the shirtless Livni Boy. But as Amir Mizroch, a news editor at the Jerusalem Post, reports on his blog, Likud political strategist Ronnie Rimon gave user-generated content a whole new meaning when he reedited Livni Boy’s video, superimposing the face of Hizbullah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah and recording a new Arabic-twanged soundtrack in which the Lebanese arch-terrorist sings a love song to Livni, the only leader, he claims, who is weak enough to allow his organization to defeat and humiliate Israel.

As Israelis go to the polls next week, these are the images that will be bouncing around in their minds. It’s of little surprise, then, that no matter who emerges as the country’s next leader, the public’s trust in politics, as a recent survey indicates, is dangerously low. Forget George Mitchell; what President Obama really needs to dispatch over to Israel is some much-needed hope.