• A State Department spokesperson criticized an Israeli announcement of new West Bank settlement-building. [Haaretz]

• The Mossad head has recently had secret meetings with top U.S. officials on Iran. It’s not clear if we are supposed to know this (though it’s not exactly shocking, either). [Haaretz]

• The story of Bernie Fine, the former Syracuse assistant basketball coach, takes a turn for the even-more-tawdry. [ESPN]

• Israel sent the Muslim Brotherhood a note of cautious congratulations on its success in Egypt’s parliamentary elections. [Arutz Sheva]

• Jewcy’s Jason Diamond reviews Ben Marcus’s new, super-Jewy novel, The Flame Alphabet. [NPR]

Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, whose The Law in These Parts, a documentary about the West Bank legal system, just won the Sundance Film Festival’s World Cinema Grand Jury Prize in Documentary, made a short “Op-Doc” for the Times.

The very same Elkin was behind a recent bill to investigate left-wing non-profits who receive funding from international sources. His argument revolved around the assertion that in making the IDF’s actions public, leftist activists were jeopardizing IDF soldiers and state security. None of the non-profits, however, reported on future or current operations; Elkin did, and in so doing put Israeli soldiers in direct physical harm.

One of Elkin’s fellow informants, National Union MK Uri Ariel, made no apologies once his role in supporting the extremists became public. “If a person who transfers information about IDF movements is a spy,” he said, “then I am a spy.”
Ariel has it exactly right. He is a spy, and should be treated as one, along with Elkin and anyone else who knowingly supplied classified information pertaining to military movements to armed and radical terrorists who then used it to confront and attack Israeli soldiers. They should be arrested, tried, and jailed.

Of course, that will never happen. With a strong grasp on the parliament, Elkin, Ariel, and their colleagues are free to continue their crusade against democracy. Some other recent examples: In a debate earlier this morning—convened by right-wing legislators in order to discipline an Arab-Israeli school principal who dared to take his students to a Tel Aviv march for human rights—Yisrael Beitinu MK Anastasia Michaeli interrupted Labor MK Ghaleb Majadale, himself an Israeli Arab, as the latter was defending the principal’s actions. Majadale told Michaeli to shut up, at which point she calmly left the room, obtained a glass of water, returned to the room, and threw the water in Majadale’s face. Alex Miller, the panel’s chairman and a member of Yisrael Beitinu, refused to discipline Michaeli.

It is time to stop mincing words. Anyone who cares at all about its future should insist that Elkin and his ilk are tossed out of the parliament and put in prison where they rightly belong.

Israel Charges 5 West Bank Settlers in Army Clash [NYT]
Second Israeli MK Admits to Having Given Settlers Information on IDF Movements [Haaretz]
Related: Unruly [Tablet Magazine]

• Does Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan have cancer? The rumors are swirling. [JPost]

• Israeli security seems outmatched by the prevalence and volume of crimes committed by religious settlers in the West Bank. [Haaretz]

• An official report produced in the wake of the Gilad Shalit swap (for more than 1,000 men and women) suggests regulating and reining in future prisoner exchanges. [Ynet]

• Ex-President Ehud Olmert was indicted on bribery charges in connection with the infamous Holyland real estate scheme. Of course, Olmert has also already been convicted of rape. [Apologies: Pre-caffeine, we wrote this. It was ex-president Moshe Katsav who has been convicted of rape.] [NYT]

• Prominent pro-Israel donor Newton Becker—his beneficiaries included MEMRI and the Zionist Organization of America—died at 83. [Jewish Journal]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But is it too little, too late? Many have pointed to a past policy of tolerance, or at least kid-glove treatment, of restive and even violent settlers as partly to blame for the current epidemic. “The tendency of the military and the police is to see their own role as protecting the settlers, the Israeli citizens, from the Palestinians,” prominent intellectual Gershom Gorenberg said, “rather than to fulfill their proper role, which is being responsible for keeping order and public safety in territories under military authority.” Further complicating this dynamic is the large (in fact, outsize) presence of religious Zionists in the armed forces—and indeed, there is concern that some soldiers tipped off the settlers who stormed a base in the northwest West Bank earlier this week.

Hopefully this will be a wake-up call. Past coddling of religious Zionists for political purposes—and yes, they were also evacuated out of Gaza, it has not been a complete free ride for them, but more often than not state policy has reflected their wishes—enabled and even birthed this sort of activity, and now, as with price tag attacks generally, that chicken is coming home to roost. The majority of religious Zionists would no doubt repudiate these acts, which is all the more reason the law needs to continue to crack down on the Jewish criminals without bias or prejudice in their favor. You don’t want the proof that you’ve failed to be another Yigal Amir.

Peres: Right-Wing Violence a ‘Disaster’ That Must Be Stopped [Haaretz]
Israel Leader Sets Curbs on Settlers for Violence [NYT]
Netanyahu: Jewish Extremists Not a ‘Terror Group’ But Will Be Given Military Trial [Haaretz]
Israel Has Long History of Lenience Toward Jewish Extremists [AP/WP]
Earlier: Who Buys ‘Price Tag’ Crimes?

• At an emergency meeting called by Prime Minister Netanyahu, at least one minister supported labeling certain right-wing Israeli Jewish groups as “terrorist organizations” following these events. [JPost]

• Meanwhile, Israeli police play Javert to the Jean Valjeans who have attempted arson at six mosques in the past two months. [Haaretz]

• President Obama asked for his drone back earlier this week. Yesterday, Iran said no. Who saw that coming? [NYT]

• Russia and China are yet again blocking action against Syria at the U.N. Security Council. The current smokescreen is, of course, Why aren’t we discussing the Palestinians? [FP Turtle Bay]

• A worldwide index of religious freedom scored Israel a 0. In fairness, it gave the same score to Afghanistan, China, Turkey, and 49 other countries. [Haaretz]

My father understood this and helped whenever he could. There are agricultural communities, he used to say, “that I cradled in the palm of my hand.” This never stopped our kibbutz neighbors, all of whom belonged to the Labor Party, from coming out to protest outside the gate of our farm, armed with angry placards. He used to remind our friends from the nearby kibbutzim, the ones who came to our house, “During the day you stand outside the gate and protest, and at night you sneak inside and ask for help.” He would say that with a forgiving fatherly smile. But then he would come to their aid, always, and even when he was in the opposition and their people, Labor, were in power, they still came to him. The difficulties of agricultural communities such as kibbutzim or farming villages, quite frankly, don’t interest the members of either party.

My father’s other role in Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s government was as chairman of the Ministerial Committee on Settlements. In this role he put Likud policy and his own beliefs into practice. He founded many dozens of settlements in Judea, Samaria, the Gaza Strip, Galilee, the Golan Heights, the Negev, and in the Arava. If somebody was needed to speak about our rights to the land of Israel and the security need for settling different areas in Judea and Samaria, there was no better man than Begin. The history of his movement is filled with flaming speeches and ideological directives, but those stand in stark contrast to their record of actual accomplishments.

My father was born into a different culture, pragmatic Zionism, which believed in simply getting things done: establishing another village, laying another water pipe, planting another orchard, tilling another furrow of earth. Political Zionism, which Begin and his people believed in, attached great power to words, to each comma in their ideological constitution, and far less importance to the actual execution of those ideologies. It was only natural, then, that my father would be the one to translate Likud ideas into action.

My father began to consolidate his thoughts on the matter of settlement in Judea and Samaria during his service as Yitzhak Rabin’s adviser. He believed that Israel could not under any circumstances afford to return to the June 4, 1967, lines. Living within those borders, Israel was attacked by Jordan and suffered for years from Palestinian terror. Pre-1967, Israel’s width along the coastal plain at the country’s center, where the majority of the population lives and where the national infrastructure such as power plants and the airport is housed, is only a few miles across. That is not a defensible border. The plan that my father drafted and brought before the government for approval offered solutions to several problems—Israel’s lack of depth along the coastal plain, its vulnerable eastern front, and the safeguarding of Jerusalem. Holding a large map, he presented his vision to the ministerial committee in September 1977, three months after being appointed minister of agriculture. What he showed them was a line of settlements along the high ground that looms over the coastal plain. In that way Israel was given depth at its most vulnerable point and it secured control over the dominant terrain, which could no longer be occupied by hostile forces.

Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia all waged war against Israel in 1948, 1967, and 1973. They constitute what is known as the eastern front. Even Labor governments have recognized the need to create a line in the Jordan Valley, which is nearly entirely empty of Palestinian villages. A Labor government had already erected a thin line of settlements along the Jordan River. My father’s plan called for fortifying the hills to the west of the Jordan Valley with additional settlements, building a cross-Samaria road that would be protected by settlements and serve in a time of need as emergency routes for troops heading to the eastern front.

The third element of his plan was Jerusalem. The question was how to secure Jerusalem as the eternal capital of the Jewish people, especially in light of the post-1967 wave of Palestinians flocking to the city. In the decade following the war, the Arab population increased by more than 50 percent.

The solution my father presented was a ring of Jewish settlements around the city. This would preserve the demographic character of the city and would prevent the threat of making Jerusalem a part of an urban Arab bloc stretching from Bethlehem in the south to Ramallah in the north.

On Oct. 2, 1977, the Cabinet authorized the plan, putting it into motion. My father and his aide Uri Bar-On, a brigadier general in the reserves who was also a close friend, began surveying the terrain, mountain by mountain, hill by hill.

The points chosen were state-owned lands that were untilled and uncultivated. These lands had been the property of the Ottomans during their rule, then the British, followed by the Jordanians and then Israel. He worked with the Ministry of Justice, accompanied by Plia Albeck, the head of the civil department of the state attorney’s office. As Albeck explained, “My job in regards to the settlements was to make sure that the land upon which they want to build a settlement is state land and that no individual rights are infringed upon.”

My father would laugh when recalling his trips with her on helicopters and on rocky hillsides, her hair covered according to Orthodox tradition in a kerchief and her feet in boots. Her rulings regarding state land all stood up under appeal to the Supreme Court.

During the following four years my father spearheaded the effort to found 64 new settlements in Judea and Samaria. But the rise of the Likud to power and the fact of his service in government were not enough to get the project off the ground. They needed people willing to settle the land, too. These were found in the form of the Gush Emunim loyalists. These God-fearing religious nationalists felt that settling in the biblical land of Israel was a commandment of supreme importance. Years later, my father would remark with a smile that they viewed him as “the Messiah’s donkey,” the man who would help them realize their ideals and faith.

Excerpted from the book Sharon: The Life of a Leader by Gilad Sharon. Copyright © 2012 by Shikmim Agricultural Farm Ltd. English translation copyright © 2011 by Mitch Ginsburg. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

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

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

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

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

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

• Chopped liver. The gross kind. [Gawker]

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

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

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

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

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

• A Chrismukkah Star of David. [Amazon]

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

Oh right like I could post anything else.

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

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

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

Then two days before the flight, Mina emailed me:

Shalom Elizabeth,

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

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

All the best
Mina Browdy

We decided to go anyway.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet most signs point to its going forward. Israel is readying for General Assembly approval—they know there’s no way for them stop it—anticipating potential challenges both legal and physical. Indeed, in addition to West Bank reinforcements, the IDF is actually training settler security teams. That said, it should be noted that the P.A. strategy is to refrain from violence. Here’s hoping.

One gets the sickening sense that, for two years or so, Palestinian statehood at the U.N. was a bluff: not a bad one, but one that has been called; and now it is in no one’s interests more than the bluffer’s to fold.

Jordan Urges Abbas to Rethink U.N. Bid [YNet]
Are Palestinians Walking Into a Trap at the U.N.? [+972]
The Day After Palestine [Ynet]
Israel Braces for Palestinian Statehood at the U.N. [WP]
Israel Intensifies Training of Settler Security Teams [NYT]
Earlier: Is the P.A. Statehood Drive Good for the P.A.?

• In planning for protests next month, the IDF has established an inner “red line” for every West Bank settlement inside of which soldiers may shoot at protesters’ legs; in some cases, the army has armed settlers with stun grenades and tear gas. [Haaretz]

• Prominent Likud politician Danny Danon is in the nascent state of South Sudan, where the president told him the country would uphold ties with Israel and maybe even station its embassy in Jerusalem. [JPost]

• Prime Minister Erdogan announced that Turkey would return or compensate for religious properties—chiefly those of Christians and Jews—that the state had expropriated over the past several decades. [NYT]

• The Libyan civil war has meant a small boon for Gaza weapons supplies. [JPost]

• A second man claims to have aided Flagman—the guy who to much applause yanked the Israeli flag off the embassy in Cairo—but Flagman denies it. There is a grassy knoll joke to be made here somewhere. [NYT]

• A onetime Jewish Obama donor who refuses to allow his name to be used “(let’s call him John)” tells a conservative blogger that he is abandoning the president and it’s not because of Israel. Clearly Obama needs to improve his standing with the Jewish community. [Right Turn]

• Kinky Friedman backs Gov. Rick Perry. Clearly Obama needs to improve his standing with the Jewish community. [Ben Smith]

• Joe Klein questions Glenn Beck’s recent comments about the Jews. [Time Swampland]

• A Mexican-Jewish cookbook? Sign me up! [Book Bench]

• Mardy Fish isn’t Jewish. I weep. [Kaplan’s Korner]

Stay safe, everybody.

A more idiosyncratic example of a phantom state that they cite is, of course, “the Palestinian territories.” Byman, in particular, a professor at Georgetown and director of research at Brookings’ Saban Center for Middle East Policy and the author of the forthcoming A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism, is familiar with the specifics of that phantom state. I spoke to him yesterday—our August schedules prevented a more immediate conversation—about where the Palestinian territories fit into his and King’s rubric and what that means for their statehood drive at the United Nations.

What makes the Palestinian territories different from other phantom states?
The Palestinian Territories to me are unusual because of the incredible degree of international attention they get. No one could say this issue doesn’t get the attention it deserves. And that changes the dynamic.

One thing that is quite different is that Palestinian sovereignty is more political than military when compared to other areas.

Should Gaza and the West Bank be, in effect considered two different phantom states?
Maybe it’s happened—for five years now, they’ve been two states.

In what ways are they very much like the other phantom states?
A lot of the Hamas economy until recently, even today, comes from smuggling, and there’s an illegality to it that is accepted by Israel. So you have some of these things that do apply.

What should this phantom state currently be doing?
There’s more than one answer depending on which you’re talking about—the West Bank or Gaza. In the West Bank, what Salam Fayyad has been doing is important, because it’s institution-building. So if and when there’s statehood, they’ll be ready for it. That’s a huge thing to me. That should be applauded and encouraged. Fayyad has focused on the parts he can focus on.

But there’s a second half, which is political, and it’s an authoritarian state.

Yitzhak Rabin had a line about: Wouldn’t it be great, because they can fight terrorism without an Israeli high court and human rights organizations? It sounds good, but Israel paid the price of exactly that—they had a very bad government that had all these pathologies that really showed up in peacemaking. On the West Bank today, you need Fayyad, but you also want more political accountability.

Given that you prize internal reform over statehood—or at least until there is enough reform that statehood becomes a good idea—what do you make of the Palestinian Authority’s plans to seek some sort of upgrade at the United Nations next month?
Phantom states try to do this—grasp onto any trappings of international legitimacy. What makes the Palestinians unusual is they actually have a shot. If Abkhazia did this, they’d be laughed out of the U.N.

The question is, what happens in October? So you have September. What happens in October?

Israel might have messed this up politically, in that they made this a big deal. They could have said, ‘Oh boy, another anti-Israel resolution passes at the U.N.’ They really kind of made it into a big deal, which changed the politics of it. But in a couple months, I don’t think much will have changed.

The Phantom Menace [NYT]

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

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

• Splitsville for the Madoffs. [JTA]

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

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

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

If it had been a normal Monday morning for me, I would have been checking emails, attending sales meetings, writing proposals, or doing any number of the activities associated with my job at a software company in the high-tech industrial park of Ranaana, north of Tel Aviv. On this day, however, I was clad in green, wiping the oil off my rifle, squaring away gear, and trudging off to some range to make sure that both man and machine were in functioning order. The smells of cordite, grease, and diesel fumes accompanied the switch—from citizen to soldier—which, despite having made it some dozen times in the last two decades, never ceased to amaze me.

As I arrived, I saw Matanya, the religious kibbutznik with whom I’d done basic training in 1990. “Mah itcha, gever,” he greeted me—“What’s up?” in Hebrew slang—and we exchanged hugs. I asked about his kids (he has seven) and his work, then we headed off to sign out the various kits we’d carry for the following two weeks. On the way to the supply hut, I met the long-haired guy I know only as Chuck, because in the army you get to know people by their nicknames. Chuck had just gotten back from a five-month trek across India and Nepal, which is par for the course for the under-25 Israeli soldier. There followed another round of salutations and general inquiries.

When I first volunteered to join the IDF as an idealistic 19-year-old, more than 20 years ago, I quickly realized that I was entering a different world with different rules than civilian life and that this new order governing daily existence would last until the day service ended. The reserves, or miluim, aren’t much different, except that the citizen-to-soldier transition is so sudden and shocking, it’s nearly violent. The eight weeks’ notice you get before arriving in camp never seems to be enough time to prepare. Work, family, holidays, unfinished business or errands—everything gets put on hold. There’s never a “good time” for a call-up.

The day before this last deployment, my 9-year-old daughter asked me, “Abba, why do you have to go the army?”

I’m sure my response was similar to that of the husbands and fathers who were joining me in the Negev. I told her we went so that our kids could feel safe when they went to school or soccer practice, so that our friends and families could sit around their Shabbat dinners on Friday nights, and so that the nation could throw itself into the mundane. We went, I said, because, sadly, the state of affairs in our little corner of the world made it necessary for there to be people who were willing and able to do what we do. My daughter and two sons nodded their heads and said, “We’ll miss you, Abba,” with a stoicism that surprised me.

In my reserve company—“A” Platoon, or Pelugah Alef, of the 360th Battalion, 10th Brigade—there are software engineers, students, cab drivers, teachers, tour guides, accountants, construction workers, plumbers, factory workers, lawyers, and just about every other vocation. There are religious soldiers who wear kippot and daven three times a day, soldiers who see their religion as a tradition, and secular soldiers. They come from the cities, the kibbutzim, and anywhere in between. They are Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Yemenite, Ethiopian, and Russian. They voted across the political spectrum: Likud, National Union, and Meretz.

But among the soldiers here, I am the only one who grew up on the south shore of Long Island, New York. When I first entered the IDF, I was one of just a handful of American-born soldiers. I was also the first on my block of suburban Long Island to postpone college to do what I saw as my part for Israel. I was a brash 19-year-old and, in the days before cell phones, I remember fully disconnecting from home to immerse myself in the new reality of the army. I remember thinking at the time that as a Jew I should live in Israel. And if I was going to live in Israel, then I was supposed to do my part.

Many of my Long Island friends had graduated from yeshiva high schools in the United States, and like them I had decided to take a year off to go learn things in Israel. In truth, most of us were more interested in happy hour than Tosafot, the medieval commentaries on the Talmud. But somewhere along the way, an idea began to take form: that I was walking in the ancient homeland of my forefathers and that I had an opportunity to physically contribute to the defense of the modern state of Israel. Basically, I viewed my physical contribution to my people as part of my religious responsibilities. From that ideological crossroad, it was a short walk down Jerusalem’s Jaffa Street to the enlistment office. My great-uncles, World War II U.S. army veterans, consoled my grandmother and parents over what they saw as their loss. “It’s a good thing for the boy,” one of the uncles said. “So long as there’s no war.” That summer Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

I was soon sitting on a cold, wind-swept mountain deep inside what was then Israel’s security zone in Southern Lebanon. Using my tank’s night-vision equipment, I watched the thermal streaks of Scud and Patriot missiles over Israel’s northern skies. “What the fuck did you expect,” I remember asking myself, “inter-camp hockey games? Little League?”

After my service finished, I returned to Long Island and heard stories of frat parties from childhood friends who had gone off to college instead of the IDF. I found it hard to relate. I went on to Yeshiva University in New York, bounced around a couple of jobs, got married, and ended up a day trader in Miami.

In late 2000, taking an offer to set up a day-trading office in Jerusalem, my wife and I moved from Miami to Israel with our 1-year-old son. The first reserve call-up came about a year and a half later, for Operation Defensive Shield, in spring 2002. Following that deployment, which I spent mostly in the Qalqilyah-Nablus area of the West Bank doing checkpoint work, the call-ups continued to come roughly once a year. They brought me to engage in activities that are as far from the civilian day-to-day as possible. I went on late-night raids into Arab towns outside Ramallah to nab wanted terrorists. I searched cars at checkpoints throughout the West Bank. I rode shotgun during border patrols along electrified fences and participated in armored maneuvers in the sand dunes of the south and the mountains of the north.

In 1990, I imagined myself an unburdened lone soldier living the bachelor life off base. But as a reservist, I was a husband and father, and call-ups demanded a different kind of collateral. My family grew to five people since my first reserve tour. Every once in a while, my platoon would throw a barbecue and invite the soldiers’ families—the wives and kids who have to endure the home front side of this disruption to life’s daily routine. But each time I was called to make the switch from father and worker to gun-toting soldier, I was taken back to a simpler time, when the clarity—or naiveté—of youth made the world seem less complicated. And, to be honest, the more knotty home and family life became, the more welcome the call from the miluim became.

As a Jew, I felt it was a privilege to have had opportunities to serve the Jewish state. But on some sort of psychological level, each call-up preceded a cathartic experience that allowed some perspective on the everyday noise and nonsense that can deafen and blind us to what’s really important in life. And, of course, there was the closet redneck in me, that kid from Long Island, the only one from my high school who got to tear ass around the desert in a 60-ton tank, or fire off hundreds of rounds from automatic weapons. In the army, what’s fun and what’s not fun is measured differently from in everyday life. There’s no denying that there’s something primordially exhilarating in blowing shit up, especially when compared to filling out Excel spreadsheets.

Still, my military service, like that of all soldiers, saw its share of aborted operations, anal-retentive colonels, and idiot corporals. A lieutenant in Lebanon once failed to fire back at a Hezbollah anti-tank crew because he forgot the rules of engagement. (To me, the rules were clear: They were shooting at us; we should shoot back.) A private brought his penchant for unsafe driving to the miluim and crashed an armored jeep on a slippery road outside Hebron. No true soldier’s experience is complete without a few snafus. Thankfully, in my experience, there weren’t that many.

But it was always the sense of duty—to both country and friends in uniform—that kept me coming back. Although reserve duty is technically applicable to all Israeli men until they’re 45, only about 20 percent of eligible citizens actually serve. There are many ways to shirk the duty, from fabricated medical reasons to simply being so much of a pain in the ass that no officer wants you in their command. Employers continue to pay salaries during a soldier’s absence, and then they file for reimbursement from the government. (Independent workers get an average of recent income.)

I was once called up for maneuvers, which are designed to drill and practice military tactics, during the last week of summer vacation. Before we started, there was a cacophony of complaints from us about the inconvenient timing. I remember that the battalion commander stood before us, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “Fellas, you know how you read in the papers that if Hezbollah attacks in the north Israel will know how to respond? Who do you think they’re talking about? You either realize that it’s you who’ll be facing them and that you need to be prepared, or you can blow off showing up for maneuvers, and you’ll still be there on the front lines, just a whole lot less prepared.”

Each deployment brings with it its own political and moral discussions. And true to the diverse make-up of the average miluim company, the discussions are heated and from the heart. I heard soldiers debating the Oslo accords, the Gaza withdrawal, and conversion laws. In a platoon of reservists, the company commander is more of a manager; he won’t tell people what to think, and the debates sometimes end in stalemate.

I’ve always felt that as long as I am physically able, I will report to service. But I do it, I admit, for what may seem an old-fashioned notion: national duty. I once asked my friend Gadi, a lanky tank driver who went through basic training with me, why he always responded to the call-up. He answered, “I’m here because you’re here.”

In the Negev, at 40, I realized I was one of the elder statesmen in the company. What could be my final deployment turned out to be patrolling the Egyptian border (with its new geopolitical significance), a few hours from the Red Sea port of Eilat, in a wild no-man’s land. We dealt with the complicated reality of illegal Sudanese and Eritrean immigrants crossing the Sinai frontier to sneak into Israel. We stopped Bedouin smugglers. And we knew we weren’t far from Hamas and al-Qaida cells.

I did basic training not too far away from where our platoon’s Humvees patrolled on this last deployment. One moonless night of that tour, I sat in a dried-out river bed, a few hundred yards from an Egyptian watchtower, and scanned the distance with my night vision equipment. I know that—barring the outbreak of a war for which I would return to service immediately—those may have been some of my final acts as a soldier. Either way, no one can say that I never did my part. And there will always be a part of me that would long for the oases of simplicity that the IDF presented for me. That, and blowing shit up.

Michael Ripstein lives in Mazkeret Batya, Israel.

• A routine incursion to make arrests in a refugee camp outside Ramallah led to a firefight that caused two Palestinian deaths and five IDF injuries. [DPA/Haaretz]

• There was also a brief exchange of fire across the Israel-Lebanon border, though no one was injured. Each side blames the other for starting it. [AP/WP]

• The housing protests in Jerusalem have shaken society, galvanized the left, and depending on your point of view revealed either how well the question of security has been taken care of for Israelis or how poorly it has been swept under the rug. [NYT]

• Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan sat alone at the table—usually he is flanked by generals—following last week’s military resignations, in a symbol of his new authority over his country’s armed forces. [AP/WP]

• The guy who basically started the anti-sharia meme, many years ago, is a Hasidic lawyer named David Yerushalmi. [NYT]

In the opposing corner, in khaki slacks, we have contributing editor Jeff Goldberg, who noted (via the Forward) that the video is an almost word-for-word copy of a video made by a settlers’ organization, and concluded, “The Israeli Foreign Ministry Is Now Part of the Settlement Movement.”

Fights scored with round winner getting 10 points, loser getting nine; additional points docked for knock-downs. Gentlemen, you know the rules: Twelve rounds, obey my instructions at all times, no hits below the belt, and keep it to 140 characters. Ding-ding!

Round 1 @DannyAyalon: “Can you please give me the reference to the future of the West Bank that you allege is made during the video?”
@Goldberg3000: “Sorry, I’m not sure I understand your question.”
Analysis: Parrying, dodging, not much movement or anything. A bland 10-9 round for Ayalon.

Round 2 @DannyAyalon: “what in the video made you state ‘The West Bank belongs to Israel now AND FOREVER’ and then launch into expletives?”
@Goldberg3000: “Just one expletive, actually. Maybe the claim that the Jews already made a painful concession by giving up Transjordan?”
Analysis: Nice deflection by Goldberg on Ayalon’s claim of coarseness, and then a nice shot to the body—accusing Ayalon of changing the terms of debate by giving Israel more credit for concessions than it merits. 10-9 Goldberg.

Round 3 @DannyAyalon: “That is the sole basis for your unequivocal stance that we will hold on to the territories forever???”
@Goldberg3000: “Your entire project is designed to legitimize Israel’s hold over the territories forever.”
Analysis: Furious combination from Ayalon, which Goldberg mostly absorbs, but can only offer one body-shot in return. Many judges will see this differently, but it’s gotta go 10-9 Ayalon.

Round 4 @DannyAyalon: “It only talks about history w/o reference to future. It mentions negotiations, if we want to hold on 4ever, why mention this?”
@Goldberg3000: “Sure does. But my worry is about Jewish decision-making. Keeping the WB will bring about the end of Israel as we know it.”
Analysis: Slight advantage Goldberg. 10-9 Goldberg.

Round 5 @DannyAyalon: “Please back up your statements. Prove to me where that is stated in the video or elsewhere or retract.” And: “I ask you again. Where in the video is this stated, even implicitly?”
@Goldberg3000: “Come on, man, own your feelings! You want to hold onto the settlements, you don’t like the idea of a Palestinian state. Etc.” And “The video is a pro-settlement video. One reason we know this: It’s the same video put out by settlers! tinyurl.com/3w6da32.” And: “You’re right. Your video was designed to convince Israelis to abandon settlements and leave the West Bank.”
Analysis: A flurry from Goldberg! Momentum shifting his way. Ayalon will need to go on the offensive if he wants to regain control. 10-9 Goldberg.

Round 6 @DannyAyalon: “‘You don’t like the idea of a Pal State.’ Look at my 1st interview given in office bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=….”
@Goldberg3000: “Mere words. What have you done to bring about creation of Palestinian state? Expanding settlements doesn’t count.” And: “Let me rephrase my question: Have you done more to end the West Bank occupation, or solidify it?”
Analysis: Goldberg has opened a cut over Ayalon’s right eye—that the actions on the ground speak louder than words in interviews. Expect Goldberg to keep working that cut for the rest of the fight. 10-9 Goldberg. Goldberg up 58-56, halfway through, with momentum his way.

Round 7 @DannyAyalon: “Please provide me with one quote, just one, to back up your assertion.” And: “Firstly please address the fact that you have not been able to back up earlier statements. You just move on to another issue.”
@Goldberg3000: “1. You argue settlements are legal, citing Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg (1908-1990). 1000s of scholars say otherwise.” And: “2. When we met in your office last year, you told me Palestinians only interested in destruction of Israel.” “3. In your office, you spoke feelingly of Jews’ inalienable right to rule Judea and Samaria.”
Analysis: First knockdown of the night! Ref starts count, Ayalon gets up around six or seven, and ref signals fight can go on. Still, 10-8 round for Goldberg. Ayalon is going to need a KO at this point.

Round 8 @DannyAyalon: “OK, but that is not what you said. Please back up your original assertions, not detract to other issues.” And: “Still not addressing the issue 12 Tweets later. Do you admit you made a mistake?”
@JeffreyGoldberg: “Gevalt. I cede the point: You’re opposed to settlements and would like to leave the West Bank as soon as possible.”
Analysis: The little-used sarcastic left hook (a favorite of Sugar Ray Robinson)! 10-9 Goldberg.

That’s where we are at for now. Goldberg way up on the cards, Ayalon bleeding, and only four rounds more to go. Let’s hope this barn-burner continues!

The Battlefield Over Palestinian Statehood Moves to YouTube [Haaretz]
The Israeli Foreign Ministry Is Now Part of the Settlement Movement [Goldblog]
Related: Punchy [Tablet Magazine]

ROMEO
But, soft! what light through yonder produce aisle breaks?
It is the Middle East, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and suicide-bomb the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief.
Her vestal livery is but green like the flag of Hamas.
And none but zealots do wear it; cast it off.
It is my lady, O, it is my love!
O, that she knew she were, should Rabbi Pearl so permit.
See, how she leans her cheek upon her cash register!
O, that I were a key upon that register,
That I might touch that cheek!

JULIET
Shalom!

ROMEO
She speaks:
O, speak again, bright Jewish angel! for thou art
As glorious to this settlement supermarket
As is a bearded Jew with an Uzi
Unto the white-upturned wondering eyes
Of Arabs that fall back to gaze on him
When he bestrides by the soft beverages
And tastes a few grapes without paying.

JULIET
O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy people and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I’ll no longer be an Israeli Jew.
‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Palestinian.
What’s a Palestinian? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? that which we call hummus
By any other name would taste as savory;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, remove thy kaffiyeh, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.

SHLOMO
Wat eez dees? Rabbi say: ‘Jew only talk to Palestinian on Wednesday und Tursday, when supermarket beezy.’ Beck to work. I no pay you to love.

Affair Between an Arab Bagger and Jewish Cashier Roils West Bank Settlements [Haaretz/Failed Messiah]

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.

• Glenn Beck is moving his “Restoring Courage” rally next month in Jerusalem from the Temple Mount to an as-yet-determined location; having it at the Temple Mount is seen as making him an assassination target and also as gratuitously provocative and tasteless, although he only cited the former reason. [Huff Post]

• When an earthquake hit New Zealand earlier this year, it killed 181 people, three of them Israeli. One of them, according to a new report, was in Mossad. [Haaretz]

• Jeff Goldberg says Michele Bachmann loves Israel not wisely but too well. [Bloomberg Views]

• Michael Walzer visits Hebron. [Dissent]

• Jason Diamond apologizes for having inadvertently worked for the international campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state. [Jewcy]

Oh yes, there is a new Beastie Boys video. (And, oh yes, Spike Jonze directed it.)

• The flotilla will sail next week, a spokesperson said (while Gaza businessmen said the main problem with the blockade was exporting, not importing). [Reuters/Haaretz]

• It’s not just Egypt: Across the region, the United States is engaging with Islamist parties in order to try to steer the Arab Spring somewhat. [WSJ]

• An anti-settlement riot breaks out in the northern West Bank. [@IDFSpokesperson]

• Meet the Local Coordination Committees, the emerging, street-level opposition to the Assad regime in Syria. [NYT]

• Meanwhile, senior Syrian opposition members have signed and presented a road map for Assad, which includes him leading his country to true democracy. Do we have to call it a road map? Those tend not to work. [Ynet]

There are plenty of shots of Jewish kids and teenagers acting like brats—throwing stones to bait Palestinian schoolchildren their own age, talking back to elderly missionaries trying to intervene. But what really shocks are sequences like the one about ten minutes in, where a Jewish woman living in a settlement bloc guarded by IDF troops walks up to the chicken-wire fence surrounding her Palestinian neighbors’ house, puts her face right up to the barrier, and begins hissing, “Sharmouta”—Arabic for “whore.” The presence of the camera only seems to goad her on; she drops her voice to a sibilant whisper, repeating her curse over and over again. It’s difficult to watch. In the context of the film, it doesn’t really matter what set the woman off, or how just her irritation may have been. What matters is that she chose not to turn to the soldiers very expensively stationed along the road for help, but rather to be petty and mean: To engage in taunts for the sake of demonstrating her power—as bullies do.

To an American ear, it is particularly galling to hear the many Brooklyn and New Jersey accents, in English and in halting Hebrew, from people who insist repeatedly that God, the Torah, and the long, sad history of the Jewish people excuse their holding on to the land they so fervently believe is their birthright. “I’m not talkin’ to you!” one man shouts at a television journalist who interrupts him while he’s screaming at IDF soldiers that they, as fellow Jews, should be defending the holy, sacred children of the settlers rather than Arab residents of one neighborhood.

Those viewers who defend the settlers will find fault with the film, because it fails to take seriously the possibility that there are actual security threats to the city’s 600 or so Jews; because the unapologetically anti-settlement Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy is the movie’s voice of reason; because it gives equal time to settler leaders and to advocates from B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence, two left-wing groups. But it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to seriously defend some of the slimier behavior discovered by the filmmakers, Giulia Amati and Stephen Natanson, from religious young Jewish men casually calling passersby Nazis and unleashing vile torrents of f-bombs and other multi-lingual verbal abuse, to parents employing their clearly terrified and screaming infants as pawns in front of the cameras. And it’s hard to avoid the tragedy at the heart of the film: That, more than 15 years after the American-born settler Baruch Goldstein committed his Purim massacre in a Hebron mosque, successive Israeli governments have failed to defuse a powder keg that could easily blow up even the most ironclad peace deal—when, or if, such a thing is ever reached.

The trailer below:

This Is My Land… Hebron [Film Linc]
Related: Among the Settlers [The New Yorker]

But what are the rest of us to make of this bit of text, we whose eyes glazed over in math class and require a calculator to work out a 20 percent tip on a $100 check? The answer lies in the spirit rather than the letter of the text, and in spirit this week’s parasha delivers a simple but profound message: We all count. Even a small nation, or in particular a small nation, must keep track of each and every soul. Seen through this prism, numbers are not abstractions; each one corresponds with a living, breathing human being. Which, of course, is why we should be very careful to handle numbers with accuracy and care—fudge a number, and you’ve sinned against the very core of the tangible and the real.

Ours, alas, is the era of unreal numbers, from the falsified spreadsheets of Bernie Madoff to the felonious schemes of the equally criminal yet tragically unpunished swindlers behind the subprime mortgage bubble. Bluffing discreetly on balance sheets is bad enough; do it in the open, on the largest imaginable stage, and we’re headed down a dangerous road.

Unfortunately, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of the Congress earlier this week was a master class of numeric (and other) inaccuracies. Because these things matter—they matter very much—let us, in the spirit of this week’s parasha, do the Jewish thing and set the record straight.

Netanyahu said: The vast majority of the 650,000 Israelis who live beyond the 1967 lines reside in neighborhoods and suburbs of Jerusalem and Greater Tel Aviv.

Actually, there are 304,569 Israelis living in the West Bank, according to the Israel Defense Forces. Add to that East Jerusalem—which, according to most credible sources, is home to about 200,000 Israelis—and you hit the 500,000 mark. Even if one chooses to be generous and give the prime minister these East Jerusalemites in his count, one has to wonder, as Jonathan Lis recently did in Haaretz, why Netanyahu, who later on in his speech roared that “Jerusalem must never again be divided,” would possibly choose to include the residents of the undividable capital in the overall tally of the contested populace.

Of the 300 million Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa, only Israel’s Arab citizens enjoy real democratic rights. I want you to stop for a second and think about that. Of those 300 million Arabs, less than one-half of 1 percent are truly free, and they’re all citizens of Israel.

This bit of bluster may come as somewhat of a slight to Israel’s northern neighbor, Lebanon, where the robust parliamentary elections of 2009 drew a record-high voter turnout. Also in line for surprise are the Iraqis, who, despite still struggling to find democracy’s balance, came out in droves to vote in the recent 2010 elections for the Council of Representatives: 62.4 percent of Iraqis cast a ballot that year, only a slightly less impressive showing than the 65.2 percent of Israelis who exercised their civic duty in the nation’s most recent elections in 2009. Oh, and Jordan? Its 120-member House of Representatives holds a substantial number of seats for women and religious and ethnic minorities. You know, as they’re wont to do in fiercely oppressive, thoroughly non-democratic countries.

As the cherry on top of Netanyahu’s rhetorical ruses comes the fact that two days before the prime minister thundered in Congress, the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee passed, in a preliminary vote, a new bill that would give preference to  applicants for government jobs who are veterans of the IDF, thereby openly discriminating against Israeli Arabs, who do not serve in the army. Add to that the so-called Nakba Law, which prohibits Israeli Arabs from teaching or commemorating their interpretation of the historical events that led to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, as well as other laws currently under consideration in the Knesset—like the one that would require all citizens of Israel to pledge allegiance to their nation as a uniquely Jewish state—and this whole “truly free” business begins to crumble.

In Judea and Samaria, the Jewish people are not foreign occupiers. We are not the British in India. We are not the Belgians in the Congo. This is the land of our forefathers, the Land of Israel, to which Abraham brought the idea of one God, where David set out to confront Goliath.

David, actually, swung his fateful sling in the valley of Elah, near modern-day Beit Shemesh, which is squarely within the boundaries of Israel proper. And if Netanyahu truly believes Israel is nothing like the Brits or the Belgians, he is welcome, of course, to do with the West Bank as had once been done with Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, and annex them. Until then, however, the prime minister has to choose: If he wishes to follow the Bible as his unsurpassable guide to realpolitik, let him declare so openly and allow his constituents to support or reject his theological aspirations. But if he wishes to guide the ship of state according to the acceptable, rational norms of Western democracies, all that blessed biblical stuff is, alas, rather irrelevant. Seen from that perspective, asserting martial law on a territory and its citizens, setting up an intricate bureaucracy of governance, oppressing any aspirations for self-governance, and insisting time and again that the natives are too corrupt and incompetent to govern themselves sounds like it’s one punch bowl away from feeling right at home at the Bengal Club.

The fun never ends. One could, for example, juxtapose Netanyahu’s encomiums for the riotous youth of the Arab spring with his efforts to drum up support for the despotic Hosni Mubarak as the Egyptian president was losing his grip on power earlier this year, or contrast Netanyahu’s claim that “the Palestinian economy is booming” with the World Bank’s report, released this April, which finds that the very same economy would soon be rendered “unsustainable” unless Israel relaxes the considerable restrictions it still places on the Palestinian private sector.

But instead of hurling oneself against the firm wall of slurs and untruths Netanyahu erected in his Washington speech, let us read the parasha instead, and recall the spirit, sacred and fierce and urgent, that urges us to keep our accounting strict and strictly honest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• So why is the Western response nothing like what it was to the Libyan regime’s violent oppression? [WP]

• During lunch with a J Street delegation, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said he hopes U.S. aid still comes in and insisted Hamas will not share West Bank authority. [NYT]

• “By lifting the heavy hand of the Mubarak police state, the revolution unleashed long-suppressed sectarian animosities that have burst out with increasing ferocity.” Coptic Christians especially have been targeted. [NYT]

• Recently departed Mossad chief Meir Dagan called the notion of bombing Iranian reactors “the stupidest thing I have ever heard,” prompting rebukes from Defense Minister Barak and others. [Haaretz]

• The CUNY executive board will likely reverse the CUNY board of trustees and Tony Kushner will be offered an honorary doctorate. More at 10. [NYT]

• Despite a formal Palestinian Authority ban on the practice, 14.2 percent of employed West Bank Palestinians work in settlements—where, on average, they are paid twice as much. [JPost]

• The assassination of Juliano Mer-Khamis, the Palestinian-Israeli theater director and political activist, was almost certainly motivated by his art, not his politics. [Guardian]

• Tuvia Geffen: Brilliant rabbi, prescient anti-Nazi crusader, proud Jewish advocate … and the man responsible for the annual miracle that is kosher-for-Passover Coca-Cola. Great piece. [NYT]

• A fascinating history of the Likud Party. Its prime ministers—Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Ariel Sharon—have ended up enacting consequential policies that contradict the party’s maximalist ideology. Will the trend continue with today’s Likud PM? [Jewish Ideas Daily]

• Tablet Magazine contributor Justin Vogt reports from New Orleans on how David Simon’s Treme is imitating life—in the form of Simon’s clash with NOLA’s mayor. [Slate]

• Is Syria’s nuclear program still going strong? [TNR]

• At this point, according to experienced negotiator Aaron David Miller, the peace process is, literally, all talk. [Foreign Policy]

• Alfred M. Freedman, a psychologist who was critical to reversing the paradigm that treated homosexuality as a mental illness, died at 94. [NYT]

• Arsonists burned a synagogue on the Greek island of Corfu. [JPost]

Happy Good Friday and Easter to all our Christian readers. Here is one of our own with a tribute to, er, another one of our own:

• Syria’s President Assad declared a number of reforms, including his plan to lift the country’s emergency law, in an address Saturday. Which didn’t stop ample protesting yesterday, “a sound rejection of Mr. Assad’s reform package.”
[NYT]

• Secretary of State Clinton accused Iran of trying to co-opt uprisings throughout the Arab world for its own benefit. [AP/WP]

• The teenager critically injured in the school bus attack near Gaza died. [Haaretz]

• Israel prepared for Passover, including its routine closure of the West Bank. [AP/WP]

• Several leftist groups are planning a “Move Over AIPAC” conference/protest in response to May’s annual AIPAC conference in Washington, D.C. Helen Thomas, Stephen Walt, and John Mearsheimer will speak, which—in all honesty—is pretty damning of Walt and Mearsheimer, no? [JTA]

• The United States blocked British, French, and German plans to outline a final settlement plan and impose it on the peace process via the Quartet. [AP/WP]

• Iran bragged of significant progress in its nuclear program—it is a month away from starting its first commercial reactor, it says—while at the same time sustaining a bomb attack on a gas pipeline, which it blamed on Western saboteurs. [WP/NYT]

• There are unusually high rates of eating disorders in America’s Orthodox community. [NYT]

• Israel is “arming” its soldiers with still and video cameras so that, during the next conflict, they can more effectively document their lack of war crimes. [AP/WP]

• Bieber touches down. [Ynet]

Prime Minister Netanyahu—who faces the additional problems of corruption allegations, an extremely fragile governing coalition, and severely diminished popularity—is in Berlin today to try to head off Germany, arguably the most influential country in the European Union, from supporting the imposition of Palestinian statehood, whether via a peace plan suggested by the so-called Quartet (of which the EU is a member) or at the U.N. Expect him to mention the new poll that found nearly one in three Palestinians approve of the gruesome Fogel family murders last month. Bibi is also reportedly planning to come to the U.S. in May, announce a plan of his own, and invite President Obama to Israel; President Shimon Peres was in Washington, D.C., this week laying the groundwork for that. They sense the urgency.

Prominent Israeli centrists are putting forth their own outlines for peace and Palestinian statehood. They may not be supporters of the Netanyahu government, but they, too, sense the urgency.

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad continues his state-building push, pledging that Palestinians will have their country by September. But the folks who are most likely to make this a difficult proposition may be Hamas, which has responded to popular calls to unify with Fatah by violently cracking down on protests. Both groups sense the urgency.

This Palestinian dysfunction as well as, again, this urgency is why, in America, prominent neoconservative Elliott Abrams suggests, in a widely circulated essay, that Israel essentially do to the West Bank what it did to Gaza in 2005: Pull out (minus major settlements), separate, vigorously police the border, and retaliate againt any cross-border provocations. Meanwhile, experienced negotiator Aaron David Miller finds little hope for peace short of a full-on initiative from President Obama—who, lest we forget, has multiple other crises in the region to worry about, plus an entire rest of the world to worry about, plus his own country to worry about, plus an election in 18 months to worry about.

Hamas needs its people distracted. Netanyahu needs to shore up his popularity. Fatah needs its biggest enemy to be Israel, not Hamas. The Obama administration, which temperamentally clearly feels for the Palestinians but which recently vetoed a Security Council resolution that would have declared Israeli settlements illegal, needs not to have to deal with Palestinian statehood while at the same time be able to plausibly throw its hands up at an impossible situation. Two things will ease this urgency, and peace is only one of them, and given the work it requires, it probably isn’t the default. If I were a betting man, I’d be less likely to bet on peace than on its very opposite.

In Israel, Time for Peace Offer May Run Out [NYT]
Officials: Israel’s PM to Push German Leader Not To Support Palestinian Statehood Plan [AP/WP]
Poll: One-Third of Palestinians Support Itamar Massacre [Haaretz]
Prominent Israelis Will Propose a Peace Plan [NYT]
Palestinian Leader Tilts at September Statehood [WSJ
Bibi’s Choice [The Weekly Standard]
How to Break the Mideast Deadlock [IHT]

• Israel launched around eight airstrikes at various Hamas sites in Gaza last night in retaliation for the weekend’s shelling. [NYT]

• The Obama administration’s Mideast policy, and particularly its varying reaction to different states, is dictated to a great deal by fear of Iran—one explanation for the seemingly inconsistent approach to Libya and, say, Bahrain, where it has let a regime repress protesters. [WSJ]

• Saturday’s vote in Egypt seems an indicator that political Islamists are gaining ground in the Egyptian revolution. [WSJ]

• There is tension in the West Bank, with, it seems, two rock-throwing Palestinians shot in response by an Israeli driver. [JPost]

• Hamas officials strongly protested United Nations plans to teach Gaza Palestinian children about the Holocaust. [AP/WP]

Indeed, most of the documentation has occurred on Twitter, where, under the #March15 hashtag—an echo of the #Jan25 marker used by the original Egyptian anti-Mubarak protesters—there has been a steady stream throughout the day of exhortations toward unity combined with reports of a violent crackdown. “Clashes between Hamas police & the protesters in Al-Kateeba,” writes, well, someone. “They are throwing stones. Over 60,000 there now.” Needless to say, Twitter is not the same as a trusted news source, and so this stuff should be taken with several grains of salt.

There are also reports (and plenty of tweets) about small but real unrest in Syria, which up until now had been perhaps the most placid Arab state over the past few months.

I hesitate to draw conclusions before trusted reporters have filed their dispatches. One hopes there is minimal violence. And one hopes that any authority—be it Hamas or the P.A. or Syria—that does violently suppress its people’s peaceful protests be viewed, everywhere and especially in the Arab world, the same way the Bahraini government and similarly thuggish enterprises are perceived. For now, remember the day: March 15.

Hamas Clashes with Gazans Protesting for Palestinian Unity [Haaretz]

The Palestinian leader has just seven months to reach a working relationship with Hamas, which controls Gaza and which rejects the PA government, or the elections cannot be held in Gaza. Early indications are not promising. Hamas spokesmen flatly rejected the idea of rapprochement, despite an offer from Fatah Central Committee member Nabil Sha’ath to travel there and agree to “any conditions” the group might demand. “I don’t know if there will be an independent state around September and if we will see another president in the coming months or even after September,” Nabil Amr, a former Palestinian Cabinet minister and ambassador to Cairo and Moscow, told me. A confidant of both Yasser Arafat and Abbas, Amr has become a gadfly critic of the leaders he once advised.

While Abbas’ commitment to the September deadline could be dismissed as Palestinian rhetoric in the style of Yasser Arafat’s pledge to declare an independent state in September 2000, this time the Palestinian leadership may have no choice, given the wave of popular revolts rolling across the Arab world and the Palestinians’ own internal problems. A week after the fall of the Tunisian government in January, Al Jazeera began publishing the “Palestine Papers”—a WikiLeaks-style trove of documents detailing confidential peace talks between Palestinian negotiators and Israel that portrayed the Palestinian team as weak and desperate. Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat initially denounced the documents as forgeries, but he was later forced to confirm their authenticity and resigned. Meanwhile, attention shifted to events in Egypt, where mass demonstrations led to Mubarak’s resignation on February 11.

The loss of Erekat, a key confidante, was a serious problem for Abbas. Even worse was the fall of Mubarak, a stout supporter of Fatah and opponent of Hamas. “The Palestinian leaders don’t have a good response to what is happening,” says analyst Hani al-Masri at the Palestine Media, Research and Studies Centre. “They are afraid because they lost their big friend and ally.” Al-Masri adds that the only way to achieve the unity with Hamas necessary to conduct elections and a breakthrough in the peace talks that will bring about independence by the September deadline is for the Palestinian leaders to change both their tactics and leadership. “Abu Mazen”—as Abbas is known—“must say seriously that he is not running in the next election,” says al-Masri. “We must prepare ourselves for the future.”

Hafez Barghouti, editor of the semi-official Palestinian Authority daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida and a veteran Fatah insider, says the party is failing to prepare for the inevitable generational handover of power. “Abu Mazen is old and he doesn’t want to be like the Arab leaders, to be fired by the people,” says Barghouti. “But I don’t know who will be the new leader. From Fatah I don’t see anybody. I cannot see a good leader or a popular leader now from Fatah. Fatah till now is sleeping.”

Hatem Abdel Kader, a former Palestinian minister for Jerusalem and a prominent leader of the young guard with close connections to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, the armed wing of Fatah, echoes Amr’s call for Fatah to get its act together while still maintaining his support for Abbas.

“Fatah is the movement of our people, Fatah is the leader of our national project, and only Fatah can achieve our national project—but we need to clean up our home,” says Abdel Kader. “Right now we haven’t any choice, only Abu Mazen. After Abu Mazen, I don’t know.”

The absence of any natural successor to Abbas either now or in the future is likely to spell trouble for Fatah, for the Palestinian national movement, and for Israelis hoping for a peace partner. Observers agree that while Palestinian Prime Minster Salam Fayyad has built enormous political capital with his “Homestretch to Freedom” plan for Palestinian statehood, his closeness to the Americans makes him an object of suspicion, and there is no chance he can win an election as an independent.

“Salam Fayyad is a good man, but he is not from Fatah,” says pollster Nabil Kukali, director-general of the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion in Beit Sahour. “If Fatah will support Fayyad I’m sure he will win the elections. But if Fatah have their own candidate it will be very difficult for Fayyad.”

Several members of the Palestinian Central Committee who were elected in 2009 appear to have dropped out of contention for a leadership role. Saeb Erekat’s chances were probably destroyed by the Palestine Papers leaks. Tawfik Tirawi, a former head of Palestinian General Intelligence, prefers to play a backroom role as chief security adviser to Abbas. Jibril Rajoub, former head of Preventive Security in the West Bank, is reveling in his new job as head of the Palestinian Olympic Committee and Football Association and refuses to discuss anything except soccer and athletics.

Polls suggest that the potential candidate likely to win the largest majority in a post-Abbas presidential election is Marwan Barghouti, currently serving five life terms in an Israeli jail for his part in launching terror attacks against Israelis during the intifada. While Fatah leaders respect Barghouti, they rule out his candidacy as impractical.

“Marwan Barghouti could be an excellent candidate, but he is in an Israeli prison,” says Hanna Siniora, a veteran Fatah leader in Jerusalem. Amr concurs: “I like him and he’s my friend, but who will nominate a president in prison? It will be a joke.”

Recent events also suggest that Abbas, far from encouraging a smooth leadership transition, is working hard to deter would-be successors from staking a claim to the presidency. Until November, one obvious front-runner was Mohammed Dahlan, 49, the feared former commander of Palestinian Preventive Security in Gaza. Dahlan’s U.S.-trained and -equipped forces were roundly defeated by the Hamas Executive Force and expelled from Gaza in 2007. Some 400 Fatah fighters and activists were killed in that battle. But Dahlan bounced back from that humiliation to secure a seat on the Central Committee in 2009. Dahlan had established close ties with U.S. and British intelligence during his tenure as Gaza security chief and amassed a sizable personal fortune, with which he began to build a power base in the West Bank.

But last fall, Dahlan was suddenly stripped of his official duties and accused of financial and other misdeeds after he criticized the business dealings of the president’s family. An unprecedented attack on Dahlan published by the PLO’s official WAFA news agency announced a full-scale investigation into Dahlan’s alleged corruption and linked him to a plot to overthrow Abbas also involving Nasser al-Kidwa, Yasser Arafat’s nephew and a former foreign minister and PLO representative to the United Nations—and another possible successor to Abbas.

Indeed, al-Kidwa’s name comes up frequently in conversations with senior Fatah officials about successors. Now 57, al-Kidwa was talent-spotted in his teens by his uncle and charged with turning the General Union of Palestinian Students into an international force to help Fatah consolidate its control of the PLO while also serving as a nursery for future Palestinian leaders.

In the modest basement office he now occupies as the head of the Yasser Arafat Foundation, al-Kidwa is clearly caught between a desire to continue his uncle’s legacy, his frustration at the current leadership’s lack of progress in the peace process, and his shock at the public accusation that he was plotting with Dahlan to overthrow Abbas.

Al-Kidwa bears an uncanny resemblance to his late uncle—he favors business suits over military fatigues—but Fatah kingmakers are divided as to whether he has what it takes to fill Arafat’s shoes. His supporters cite his rich diplomatic experience, impressive intellect, and his freedom from the taint of corruption that swirls around many other Fatah officials. Detractors say he is largely untried on the domestic scene and his profile since returning from diplomatic service has been too low to attract much following among the 400,000 registered members of Fatah.

One Israeli diplomat who frequently locked horns with al-Kidwa at the United Nations said he was a force to be reckoned with. “He is very intelligent, extremely slippery, and he can be unnecessarily aggressive,” said the Israeli. Many Palestinians may feel that is exactly the kind of person they could use right now at the helm of their drifting ship.

Al-Kidwa says the conspiracy allegations published by the official news agency are symptomatic of a leadership that has lost touch with its own people and frozen democratic institutions like the legislative council.

“We are seeing a decrease in the amount of tolerance of other opinions, of opposition, of dissent,” says al-Kidwa. “There is an absence of democratic check and balance and a muting of opposition generally, especially after the military coup d’etat in Gaza. This led to more accumulation, more centralization of power. Part of this is not our making. Part of this is a result of the Hamas military coup in Gaza, the situation here, the lack of progress in the peace process. But irrespective of whose fault this might be, the results are not nice.”

He denounces the Hamas regime in Gaza as “authoritarian and merciless” but says the priority must be a power-sharing agreement that will allow Hamas to fully participate in the PLO and the Palestinian Authority without needing to join a government whose peaceful program they would be unable to endorse. He is confident that Hamas can be persuaded to drop its demands for Israel’s destruction.

“They have a really very serious problem,” al-Kidwa says of Hamas. “They don’t have answers either for the Palestinian people or for themselves.”

While he praises Salam Fayyad as “a serious man” and lauds his achievements in recent years, he says the idea that building institutions can bring a Palestinian state into existence is “deeply flawed” in the absence of a coherent political program, both at home and internationally. He says there should be much more pressure on the Israelis from the United Nations and other international institutions to produce an agreement, since direct negotiations have clearly failed.

Evidently, he has thought long and hard about the new policies that could be pursued under a new leader. Will he run in the planned election, if it happens? “I’m not sure, to tell you the truth,” al-Kidwa replies. “There is total confusion when it comes to whatever might happen next.”

Matthew Kalman is a foreign correspondent and filmmaker based in Jerusalem.

According to news reports, the baby’s throat was slashed but she still had a pulse—was, still alive, three months old—when the ambulance arrived at the scene long after the reported attack. The thought that she spent hours in physical and perhaps psychological torture before dying is unbearable, which is why this was terrorism at is purest.

There are a lot of questions and political implications packed into the above event, and they aren’t unimportant, and they deserve scrutiny. I’ll explore them after the jump. But first, please do whatever it is you do—whether you pray, meditate, or just take a moment—before you click ahead. And you can first click here, which the Israeli Public Ministry is trying to publicize to see photos of the slain Fogel family.

It has not yet been firmly established who killed the Fogels; the IDF is currently conducting a massive manhunt in the West Bank looking for those responsible. They do currently suspect Palestinians. “The killers appeared to have randomly picked the house,” the New York Times reports, “one of a neat row of identical one-story homes at the edge of the settlement, on a rocky incline overlooking the nearby Palestinian village of Awarta.” That location, as well as the fact that the attackers apparently first entered a different house only to find it empty, to my unexpert hearing militates in favor of the suggestion that this was an ideologically motivated terrorist attack against Jewish settlers. (A systematic failure on the Army’s part has been blamed for the breach.) A Palestinian Authority minister has argued that Palestinians were not involved in the attack, partly on the basis that it will not help the Palestinian cause.

Well … whose Palestinian cause? Hamas praised it, arguing, “According to the international law, Palestinian resistance factions have the full right to resist any kind of occupation on the land of Palestine.” (Not that it is much of its business, but Iran praised the attack too A semi-official Iranian news agency ackwardly paraphrased the statement of one group that took responsibility for the attack: “The operation was a natural response to the crimes of the Zionist regime against the Palestinian people.”) Prime Minister Fayyad was relatively quick to condemn the attack, while President Abbas (who is in charge) was less so, basically waiting all of Saturday before issuing an unconscionably bland “condemnation” and “rejection” of “violence” (it bears repeating at this point that a three-month old baby had her throat slashed). It wasn’t until today that he found harsher, and more accurate, words to describe the attack.

The upheaval throughout the Arab world has put added pressure on Abbas to accede to more democratic governance. The problem is that more democratic governance in the West Bank would, if the prior elections were any indication, involve more power for Hamas. Which, if it turns out Hamas was behind the attack—and some have already noted that a senior Hamas operative was released from a Hebron prison only a few hours beforehand—could provide an explanation for it: Hamas wishing to create a crisis atmosphere that will require Abbas to either firmly side with Israel (making him unpalatable to much of his people) or with his people (making him unpalatable to Israel).

The White House called the murders a “terrorist attack.”

It seems to have shaken Israeli society far more than, say, the murder last August of four settlers in the southern West Bank. Prime Minister Netanyahu reserved some blame for the P.A. itself: “The time has come to stop this double-speak in which the Palestinian Authority outwardly talks peace and allows—and sometimes leads—incitement at home,” he said. The mayor of the nearby settlement of Ariel went a step further, laying responsibility not only at the hands of Palestinian incitement but of left-wing Israeli journalists.

More provocatively, Saturday night, the ministerial committee on settlement affairs approved the construction of 500 new homes in various West Bank settlements; as if to underline that this approval came in direct response to the Fogel murders, hard-right-wing Interior Minister Eli Yishai declared at a cabinet meeting today that there must be “at least a thousand new homes for each person murdered,” a reckless dare that I hope neither side takes up.

An Abbas spokesperson condemned the announcement—more quickly, it must be said, than Abbas condemned the attack itself. The U.S. also issued a statement declaring the building conunterproductive to peace. By Sunday, Palestinian newspapers were basically treating the attack and the building as a “he said, she said.” (There were also reports throughout America of tens of thousands of Jews banging their heads against the nearest walls, bemoaning the fact that, first, Israel is in a position where approving more homes will be seen by many in the international community as basically the equivalent of the killing of five innocent people; and that, second, Israel, knowing this, decided to do it anyway.)

Finally, there is a report that the killer or killers first entered a different house, only to find the residents not home—it turns out the Chai family was on vacation. But it was their pure luck, rather than their fortuitous name, that saved them from the Fogels’ fate.

Suspecting Palestinians, Israeli Military Hunts for Killers of 5 West Bank Settlers [NYT]
‘Daughter Yelled in Horror, Something Terrible Happened’ [JPost]
PA FM Says No Evidence of Palestinian Involved in Killing [JPost]
Mahmoud Abbas Condemns Itamar Attack [JPost]
Iran Praises Savage Murders; Haaretz Fears Right-Wing Jews [Arutz Sheva]
White House Condemns Terrorist Attack [News.AU]
Miracle in Itamar: Chai Family Escapes Murder [Ynet]
Yishai: Israel Must Build 1,000 New Units in Settlements for Every Person Murdered [Haaretz]
Ariel Mayor: Delegitimization of Settlements Caused Attacks [JPost]
Palestinians Denounce Itamar Murders, But Lay Criticism on Israel [Haaretz]
Earlier: Four West Bank Settlers Killed

Unlike the recent and much talked-about moral conduct of Gen. Yoav Galant—a former candidate for the position of IDF chief of staff who was found to have taken public land for his own use and lied at least twice in court documents about it—this trivial episode required no governmental investigation committee or an opinion from the attorney general. Anyone who served in the army can recount many such moments. I don’t know a single soldier who didn’t have to lie and cut corners during his service, to cover for himself or for a friend or, more commonly, to cover for a commander who had to be kept happy. I must admit that the three years of my military service were the three years during which I told the most lies of my life.

So, if one thing surprised me about the recent revelations in the Galant affair, which led to his dismissal, it was not so much his lies as the total surprise and shock displayed by most commentators in the media. In a country where a president has been convicted of rape and a prime minister is mired in a chilling corruption trial, the iniquities of our civic systems are taken for granted. But for the candidate for chief of staff to lie? The man about to take charge of the army we Israelis so love to call the most moral in the world? Now, that is unfathomable. Perhaps this is the time to mention that the title of “most moral army in the world” is, to my ears, akin to being lauded as “man with least facial hair in the Hezbollah leadership.” Because, after all, an army’s purpose is not to feed the hungry or act as a crutch for the crippled and maimed but rather to fight and exact casualties from its enemies. Still, a myth is a myth. The IDF’s image as a scrupulous and unfailingly just military has always been Israel’s sacred cow, and it refuses to die no matter how many times you take a slaughterer’s knife to its neck.

A short perusal of the code of ethics proudly adopted by the IDF 16 years ago, written by a committee that comprised a general and a leading Israeli scholar on moral philosophy, reveals the 10 values that define “the IDF spirit.” The first is perseverance; that is, striving for victory. “This value,” the code notes, “appears first in order to emphasize its centrality.” The second value is “responsibility.” “Trustworthiness” is only third on the list.

It is very possible that a military system cannot be managed any other way—I don’t profess to understand anything about how to run an army. But what is absolutely clear to me when I see the surprised, hurt look on Galant’s face, or on the faces of Brig. Gens. Imad Fares and Moshe Tamir, who were both caught lying about minor personal issues and forced to leave the army, is that they are not a few bad apples in the general staff’s unblemished bushel but rather graduates of the army apparatus who learned the system only too well. They always persevered and strove for victory, and, as long as it didn’t mean contradicting those principles, they also told the truth. They did these things while protecting their country and fighting its enemies, and they kept doing them when they wanted to build an addition without a permit or cover up a questionable motor accident. Only when it came time for their hazing in the town square did they discover that the patterns that had served them so well when they were busy cutting corners in the army don’t really work in civilian life. Harsh as it is, dismissing these kinds of commanders is completely appropriate in my opinion. Somewhat less appropriate is the sanctimonious way several commentators and politicians have exploited such episodes to prop up the hobbled myth of the IDF as a pure, untarnished, unimpeachable organization.

When the state comptroller published a report about three weeks ago discrediting Galant, a military trial came to a close slightly further away from the limelight. It was the trial of Lt. Col. Omri Borberg, a regimental commander from the armored corps implicated in the shooting of a handcuffed protester in Na’alin, a town in the West Bank, and of Leonardo Korea, the soldier who actually pulled the trigger. Koria had argued that Borberg had ordered him three consecutive times to shoot the handcuffed protester with a rubber bullet. Neither man was sentenced to any time, and the colonel was allowed to keep his stripes. During the trial, Borberg maintained that he had not asked the solider to shoot and that it was a tragic misunderstanding. After the verdict was read, Borberg burst into tears of relief and said he wanted to go back to the army and continue serving his country. One day, if fate and his commanders are willing, he too will be an officer in the upper echelons of the IDF, and someone had better warn him right now that what works when you’re talking about shooting a handcuffed protester isn’t quite so palatable when it comes to illegal construction or seizing lands you don’t own.

Translated from Hebrew by Jessica Cohen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Say “settlements” in the context of the Middle East and you’ll probably think of the West Bank, not the hardy pioneers who came to Israel before it was Israel and drained the swamps in their now-iconic kibbutz hats. But the Hebrew language has a rather more complicated relationship with two words for “settlement”: hityashvut and hitnahlut.

Today, “hitnahlut” (settlement) has become the standard word for Jewish areas in the West Bank, and “mitnahlim” (settlers) the standard word for those who live in them—at least if the people doing the talking (or writing) do not themselves fit in that category.

But if you’re speaking to Jews who live in the West Bank (or used to live in Gaza before Israel’s 2005 withdrawal), you’re a lot more likely to hear them talking about their yishuv, which can literally be translated as “settlement,” but is basically a town that may be located on either side of the Green Line. When speaking of settlements in general, those who live in them often refer to them as “yishuvim b’Yosh”—yishuvim in Judea and Samaria, the biblical names for the area now commonly referred to as the West Bank—rather than hitnahluyot, the outsiders’ word for settlements.

Ironically, this usage treads on the toes of the anti-settlement left, whose national heroes include the early pioneers, those secular European socialists who—yes, let’s use the word—settled the land. It’s no coincidence that yishuv comes from the same root as hityashvut, the word commonly used to refer to that early form of settlement.

Sometimes the contemporary settlement movement goes even further in what appears to be a deliberate effort to connect the dots between today’s largely religious settlers and their avowedly secular counterparts of yesteryear—in a sense, to assert that they, and not the Labor and Meretz voters whom the right accuses of caring more about where their next cup of coffee is coming from than where their country is going, are the true heirs to the heroes of the left.

For instance, Amana is a settlement movement—in Hebrew, it uses the word hityashvut—that refers to the first West Bank settlements it was involved in developing as the first “pioneering communities” it built. And an Internet forum called “Mitnahlim” explains to potential users (perhaps to counter any confusion generated by using that word) that it’s intended only for people who “support the pioneering hityashvut on the hilltops of Judea and Samaria.”

But sometimes it’s clear that use of the word “settlement” for classic Israeli pioneering efforts is nothing but a manifestation of the unusual situation in which the variety of English words to express an idea is more limited than the Hebrew options.

Take the Pioneer Settlement Museum, which says it exhibits “the largest display in Israel about settlement.” Lest you get confused, the museum goes on to say that it focuses on the Jezreel Valley and depicts values like “the laying of foundations for a secular Jewish lifestyle.” The message? Think twice before you settle on what exactly Israeli settlement entails.

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

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

Against this glum backdrop, there is only one success story: the Palestinian Authority’s state-building effort, a unique example of positive Palestinian achievement in the fields of security, economics, and institution-building. Given that bilateral talks appear to have failed, the state-building plan has a political endgame—international recognition of a Palestinian state—that must be addressed soon. What’s more, it holds out the possibility of serving Israeli as well as Palestinian interests.

This is not the sort of unilateral declaration of independence that was trumpeted in the 1990s by Yasser Arafat. In contrast, this Palestinian plan is to be activated only if and when the institutions of state are in place in the West Bank and bilateral peace talks are deemed to have failed. Happily, the institutions increasingly are in place; sadly, the U.S.-sponsored peace talks are already a failure. At some point next September, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the internationally recognized representative of the Palestinian people, will have built up sufficient diplomatic momentum through the recognition of statehood by a growing community of nations that it is almost certain to ask the United Nations for recognition of a state within the 1967 borders, including Jerusalem.

Notably, the PLO is not expected to ask the United Nations to pronounce on refugees and their right of return or on control of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This is important: These two existential issues have been the biggest deal breakers in the repeated attempts to negotiate a comprehensive settlement, both officially and in informal meetings, attempts with which I have been associated for more than two decades.

For it is here that the narratives of Israel and the PLO clash most resoundingly—even as the two parties agree on the need for two states side by side. In direct talks, the PLO insists there can be no formal deal on borders without Jerusalem acquiescing to a right-of-return agreement that certifies for future generations that Israel was “born in sin” in 1948. And it demands (because “there never was a temple there”) that Israel cede full sovereignty and control over the Temple Mount to the Palestinians. But within the framework of a unilateral/international partial solution at the United Nations, the PLO is prepared to postpone resolution of precisely these two issues in order to achieve a two-state solution.

In responding to this Palestinian plan, which is coordinated fully with the Arab League, Israel is in a paradoxical position. On the one hand, it supports the Palestinian Authority’s state-building program; on the other, it opposes the PLO’s effort to recruit international support for a U.N. declaration of Palestinian statehood. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government appears to be relying on an American veto in the Security Council. Yet this is not at all a certainty: The Obama Administration takes a much more international approach to Middle East issues than did its predecessors, and it is clearly unhappy with Netanyahu’s policies. Note that last fall, in the course of efforts to persuade Netanyahu to extend the settlement freeze, President Barack Obama reportedly offered to oppose Palestinian efforts in the United Nations as long as active peace talks continued. This can be understood to mean that, without active peace talks, there is no promise of a veto.

As matters currently stand, a Palestinian statehood resolution is almost certain to reach the Security Council with the massive backing of the international community. If the United States does veto it, Israel’s international isolation and de-legitimization will be severely exacerbated. If Washington doesn’t use the veto but Israel opposes the resolution, Jerusalem will find itself totally isolated and at the center of a major international controversy over a U.N. decision to recognize a Palestinian state that Israel opposes.

***

There is one obvious alternative. Israel and the United States could begin, now, discussing ways in which U.N. creation of a Palestinian state could be leveraged by Israel to serve its larger purposes. Jerusalem and Washington could set about ensuring that the relevant Security Council resolution, along with U.S.-Israeli side agreements, reflect Israel’s strategic interests. This could conceivably be an opportunity to put Israel and the United States, and potentially the Palestinians and the Arab League as well, on the same page.

Israel and the United States would ensure that U.N. recognition of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders would also include a mandate to that state and to Israel to negotiate land swaps, security and water provisions, disposition of Israeli settlements remaining in Palestinian territory, and to work out the parameters for a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem. The holy places in Jerusalem and elsewhere and resolution of the refugee issue would only be addressed once a Palestinian state begins functioning. But the creation of that state based on international recognition of successful Palestinian state-building would not be dependent on solving these issues.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict would then become a state-to-state issue—no longer a conflict between Israel and an elusive and problematic nonstate actor, the PLO, that represents the Palestinian diaspora. Mahmoud Abbas would negotiate with Israel as president of Palestine, not chairman of the PLO. The U.N. resolution that creates the state of Palestine would be worded to refer back to Resolution 181 of 1947, which created “Arab and Jewish states” in mandatory Palestine and to reaffirm U.N. recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.

Israel could leverage its agreement and seek out significant security benefits from the United States to compensate it for the risks it would be taking. It could also bargain for incentives from the Arab League, whose Arab Peace Initiative offers Israel normalization and security in return for peace and for whom the emergence of a Palestinian state could conceivably open new channels of cooperation with Israel against Iran and the militant Islamist movements it fosters. Israel could, together with Washington, identify and neutralize any potential negative ramifications posed by international legal aspects of the emergence of a Palestinian state by dint of U.N. decree. Whatever bilateral talks Washington succeeds in convening between now and next September could be channeled toward facilitating the territorial aspects of U.N. creation of a Palestinian state.

Obviously, there are also drawbacks to the approach outlined here. It would only produce a partial, not final agreement, thereby leaving aspects of the conflict to fester. While the Gaza Strip would undoubtedly be declared a part of the state of Palestine, it would remain a separate and dangerous problem. Then, too, this is a best-case scenario that could go wrong; reliance on an international track could turn into a slippery slope for Israel, wherein Jerusalem loses control over the process.

Yet these dangers must be assessed not only in the context of U.N. creation of a Palestinian state but also against the backdrop of the likely alternative—the present situation. The absence of either a peace process or a Palestinian state almost certainly means an eventual return to violence. Hamas in Gaza threatens both Israel and the West Bank-based PLO whether or not a Palestinian state emerges. And Israel showed in 2005, during the Gaza withdrawal, and 2006, ending the war in Lebanon, that it is increasingly ready and able to work with the international community—but also to put on the brakes when necessary—if for no other reason than its inability to come up on its own with viable military or political strategies for dealing with the nonstate actors on its borders.

The current failure of the peace process and the risks for Israel that this project represents should impel both Washington and Jerusalem to engage urgently in an analytical exercise:

First, the two countries must acknowledge that the present approach for ending the conflict with a single agreement has, like its predecessors since 1993, failed.

Second, they must recognize that the Palestinian/Arab League plan for international recognition of a Palestinian state, backed by universally approved achievements in state-building in the West Bank, is gaining momentum and will confront Israel and the United States with a major challenge.

Third, they must acknowledge the dangers for Israel of an American veto of a Security Council resolution to recognize a Palestinian state, or, alternatively, of an American “yes” vote at the United Nations that is not coordinated with Israel on the basis of a joint effort to leverage the U.N. resolution to Israel’s advantage.

And finally, they must understand that the state-recognition plan embodies risks but also potential advantages for Israel and for U.S. interests in the region, which can and should be leveraged.

In short, it’s time we began talking seriously about this contingency.

Yossi Alpher, who edits Bitterlemons, is a former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. In 2000, he served as special adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Barak during the Camp David talks.

• Russian President Medvedev visited the West Bank and expressed Russian support for a Palestinian state, and was eagerly cheered. [NYT]

• An appeals court may have saved one Satmar rabbi ten years in jail, ruling that one count of incest, involving an incident somewhere in Belgium, Israel, or points in between, could not be brought stateside. Ugh. [NY Post]

• Speaking of which, Brooklyn is a magical place—like Marrakesh!—where Jews and Muslims live side-by-side in peace. [Guardian/Le Monde/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Arab leaders look on Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution with fear even as duplicates in their countries seem unlikely, at least in the short-term. [NYT]

• Don Kirshner, who produced songs by Carole King and Phil Spector at the Brill Building, died at 76. [NYT]

• A Palestinian man holding a glass bottle was killed yesterday by Israeli soldiers as he approached a West Bank checkpoint. The IDF says he was not following standard protocol for crossings. [NYT]

• According to a Kuwaiti newspaper, there have been secret U.S.-Syrian talks over a possible peace deal with Israel, including “unprecedented Syrian cooperation.” [Haaretz]

• Former Rep. Alan Grayson, Democrat of Florida, departs the House after one term as an alternately beloved and reviled Jewish liberal lion-cub. [NYT]

• According to a WikiLeaks-leaked cable, the IDF was estimating in 2009 that Israel would have 12 minutes, tops, to prepare for a rocket launched from Iran. [Haaretz]

• A former Iranian deputy defense minister died in an Israeli jail. Except maybe he was never in Israel at all. And maybe he is still alive. [Laura Rozen]

• 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.

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

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

A archeological tunnel recently dug in Silwan.

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

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

The Archeological Weapon

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

On a wall in Silwan.

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

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

Tourists outside the City of David.

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

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

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

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

The Lawn of Solomon

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

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

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

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

King Solomon’s Lawn in the City of David.

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

Bingo

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

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

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

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

Graffiti in Silwan.

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

“Carr-terr! Carr-terr!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the 15 years that separated that fire from the one that devoured more than 12,000 acres of Israel’s Carmel region last week, the firefighting crisis in Israel was repeatedly discussed in the Knesset. The Israeli parliament’s proceedings from May 13, 2003, for example, reads, “[T]he picture painted by Shimon Romach, the chief fire commissioner, shows a vital service on the brink of collapse.” On July 11, 2006, Romach testified once again before the Knesset, and he said then that in case of a major disaster, the firefighting infrastructure—lacking a central chain of command and sorely needed supplies—would collapse on the spot. Yoav Gadassi, the head of the firefighters’ union, testified as well. Israel’s firefighting service, he said, was “an organization that survives by depending on miracles.”

The operatic-scale negligence of this quintessentially vital service carried on. In 2007, a state comptroller’s report described the firefighting infrastructure in similarly harsh terms. And in July of this year, the government discussed the firefighting condition once again and tasked the Minister of the Interior, Eli Yishai of the Shas party, to draft a bill for firefighting reform within one month. The draft was prepared, and it has been languishing in the lower rungs of the government’s agenda ever since. A report by the state comptroller—the publication of which was rushed due to the Carmel fire—took the same urgent tone. The firefighting infrastructure in Israel, wrote the Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss in a report released Wednesday, is “on the verge of collapse in case of emergency, which might lead to loss of life and property and undermine the safety of the civilian population.” Local authorities, too, have partaken in this particular binge of criminal carelessness: Four months ago, Haifa’s city comptroller submitted a highly critical report, warning about everything from insufficient water reservoirs to fight fires to inadequate safety regulations in schools and kindergartens and recommending a series of urgent steps. None were taken.

I mention these intricate details because details are what governing is all about. More than empty political maneuvers, or bombastic statements, or ideological grandstanding, public servants are elected to see to it that a thousand small, unglamorous but infinitely important details are properly addressed.

Still smarting from the humiliation of having to call Cyprus, Greece, and Bulgaria to the rescue—carrying firefighting supplies and hardware Israel lacked—Israelis are mad as hell and in search of someone to blame for this spectacular collapse. But no one person deserves the blame; the fault is systemic. In the wake of the fire, Israeli media were quick to point out at least half a dozen more disasters in waiting. Last month, for example, three men were killed as a result of a leak in one of Haifa’s oil refineries. The refineries—located at the heart of Israel’s third-largest city—have been the subject of scrutiny for years. A government report issued three years ago found that an explosion might kill or maim as many as 100,000 people. Another report listed at least 400 sites of unprotected hazardous materials strewn throughout Israel.

Other threats abound. In 2007, for example, an investigatory committee headed by a former commander of the air force found severe safety problems plaguing Ben Gurion Airport, an airport currently using a single runway for all take-offs and landings. The committee submitted a list of 75 recommendations; in his report this year, the state’s comptroller found that 15 of these recommendations were ignored, and an additional 31 were either partially implemented or not yet implemented at all. The U.S. FAA has downgraded Israel’s safety ranking to Category 2, usually reserved for developing nations.

Seven years ago, when two babies died and 23 others were hospitalized after consuming contaminated baby food, work began on establishing a national food and drug administration. As of yet, such a body does not yet exist. Everywhere one looks, one sees inaction, ineptitude, and inability to accept responsibility.

Of course, there are bound to be those who read the aforementioned list, shrug their shoulders, and claim that Israel simply doesn’t have the resources to address all of its challenges, particularly with the high costs associated with defending its borders. That is patently false. Israel’s median household income is $37,000, which puts it a shade behind the United Kingdom and ahead of Scotland, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The country is ranked first in the world in its supply of skilled manpower and ranks second among foreign countries in the number of its companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges. As Jeffrey Goldberg wisely observed last week, there is no reason why Israel can’t provide the same basic services as other advanced Western nations.

This grows even more maddening when one considers how promptly funds are found for the benefit of narrow interest groups or vanity projects. Even leaving aside the most obvious item—the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which, as a recent study reports, have cost Israel upward of $17 billion—the Jewish state’s budget is rich with pork barrels. The annual subsidies awarded to students of ultra-Orthodox yeshivot, for example—students who often do not work, pay taxes, or serve in the army—stands at $275 million.

On a much smaller scale, the $150,000 that Israel spent last year to pay a team of bloggers entrusted with tweeting positive things about the Jewish state could’ve paid for much of the desperately needed firefighting equipment the Jewish National Fund tried to schnorr for last week. Budget, like everything else, is a matter of priorities; for the past two decades, Israel’s leaders, so many of whom have been irredeemably corrupt, have proved that anything irrelevant to the Grand Guignol of war and peace—everything, that is, that a normal government is entrusted with overseeing—is not worthy of serious attention.

Bouts of poor governance, of course, are hardly rare. Even the most advanced and efficient nations sometimes fall victim to negligence, stupidity, and greed. But an overwhelming amount of evidence suggests that Israel is deeply afflicted by a political class that has lost the ability to govern.

This hasn’t always been the case. Much of the recent scholarship about David Ben Gurion, for example, suggests that the greatness of Israel’s founding father lay in his organizational skills and that the ragtag army he pitted against far larger Arab forces had won the war of independence, in large part, because it had at its disposal an infrastructure that provided food, transportation, sanitation, and other necessities that lack the halo of heroism but are indispensable for any large organization wishing to thrive. This spirit of thoroughness and attentiveness—the spirit that propelled a small group of warriors to land in a hostile African capital and rescue hostages, the spirit that drives so many excellent and innovative Israeli companies—is nowhere in evidence among Israel’s political class.

Any serious examination of this recent debacle, then, shouldn’t just focus on forest fires. It should focus on responsibility, decency, and commitment; Israel must insist that its captains possess all three before being allowed back at the helm.

• Israeli officials warn that without an imminent peace deal, the Palestinian Authority could be replaced as the West Bank government by Hamas or other Iranian proxies. [WP]

• Outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates argued that sanctions are working—dividing Iran’s leadership—and therefore military action is unnecessary. [WP]

• Where U.S. military aid to Lebanon has been notably controversial, Russia announced it would give an unconditional gift of helicopters, tanks, and more to strenghten the Lebanese army. [Haaretz]

• Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner chats with novelist David Grossman. [NYT]

• Former George W. Bush adviser Dan Senor is rumored to be mulling a run for Kirsten Gillibrand’s Senate seat for New York in 2012. [Page Six]

Almost as absurd is the theory introduced by British security officials, with some recent support from the White House, that the bombs weren’t going to go off in America at all. Instead, they were going to blow up the planes carrying them in mid-air. This narrative is, it seems, mostly substantiated by the fact that a UPS cargo plane crashed in Dubai two months ago—even as there is no evidence that this crash was an act of terror.

More to the point, the mid-air explosion thesis needs to explain why the two bombs had already been transported by two air-carriers and yet failed to explode. “This was a potential attack on U.S. business,” explained one British official, “and the impact could have been huge. Damaging the West’s economy is a key objective of al-Qaida.” But it is not clear how these attacks would have damaged the economy of the West. The practical effect would have been to close down express mail services, like FedEx and UPS, out of Yemen. A 20-minute delay on the New York subway any given Monday morning is apt to affect our trillion-dollar economy more than two cargo planes from Yemen with no passengers blowing up in mid-air. Either al-Qaida has entered the spectacularly pointless and silly phase of its war against the West, or the latest narrative doesn’t wash.

What we do know is that the bombs were addressed to American synagogues—not churches or mosques (or financial institutions)—and that our national security apparatus is visibly uncomfortable dealing with this established fact. Neither the president, nor his spokesman, nor the White House’s counterterrorism czar made much of the notion that this act of terror had specifically targeted the Jewish community. No one denounced the attempted murder of American citizens based on their faith. No one said that foreign maniacs who target Jews are part of a global sickness.

It is unpleasant to have to make the comparison, but instructive nonetheless: Had a mosque been targeted, or had American Muslims been marked for death, we can be sure that the president, rightly, would have denounced not only the act but the idea that it had singled out a particular section of the American people.

As I argued right after the prospective attack was first announced, we have accustomed ourselves to acts of terror against Jews by rationalizing them. After all, since Israel “occupies” Muslim lands in the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Shebaa Farms—and since many people see all of pre-1967 Israel itself as occupied land—it’s not surprising if Jews around the world are going to have their blood spilled because of boundary disputes in the Holy Land.

But that’s not why President Barack Obama and his Cabinet are loath to point out that this thwarted operation constitutes a hate crime. Americans believe that the worst thing you can be accused of is racism, our “original sin,” as the former senator from Illinois once phrased it before he was elected the 44th president of the United States. We assume that other people must feel exactly the same way, even if it is clear they do not, as the Arabs do not. The common word in Arabic for a dark-skinned black person is abed, slave. In Egypt, the butt of almost every joke are the Saidis, those reputedly shiftless, not-too-bright, and dark-skinned inhabitants of Upper Egypt.

The Arabs are not particularly embarrassed by their racist feelings about Jews. Rather than detail the anti-Semitic offerings available all day and night on Arab TV, where wild fantasies about Jews drinking blood and stealing the organs of gentiles occupy the same place that hardcore pornography does on your average hotel pay-per-view menu, suffice it to say that the father of the UAE’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayid, who was thanked on Sunday by White House counterterrorism czar John Brennan for his help in foiling the Yemen package bomb attack, gave his name and financial support to a think tank in Abu Dhabi notorious for its hatred of Jews. The Zayed Center for Coordination and Follow Up hosted Holocaust deniers, promoters of the protocols of the Elders of Zion, and other assorted Arab and Western anti-Semitic intellectuals before it closed in 2003.

The Arabs recognize that we’re very sensitive about racism and anti-Semitism, which is why they know their calling Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman a racist resonates with us—even as the Palestinian Authority’s ambassador to Washington openly calls for the transfer of all Jews from any future Palestinian state. We are the ones who quiver at the accusation of racism—not them. We would not dream of calling the Arabs anti-Semitic or racist because we fear that we have subjected them to our Western colonial racism, and we feel guilty about it. Indeed, many in the West have even gone so far as to ignore the evidence of 1,300 years of Muslim anti-Jewish polemics to claim that anti-Semitism is a Western import. To call the Arabs anti-Semitic would be shaming a people we have already hurt too much.

All of our noble sentiments toward the Muslim world would be fine, if it weren’t for the fact that our political correctness has created a context where it’s OK to dehumanize, terrorize, and murder Jews.

However, I have to say that when reading the comments to my pieces, I am routinely surprised that some readers appear to believe anti-Semitism is simply about the Jews. That is, that there are some in the Jewish community who would seem to prefer it if someone with a name like Lee Smith would stop stirring the pot and just let it alone. But as I said, anti-Semitism is not just about Jews; after all, it’s not a Jewish idea, any more than the Holocaust was. I like Jews as much as I like the next man on the bus. But I’m not particularly interested in the internal politics of the Jewish community. I am interested in anti-Semitism not just because it sickens me, but because it poisons American society as a whole, affecting both Jews and non-Jews.

If racism is our original sin, then anti-Semitism is the essential test of our character. Our current failure to recognize it and denounce it proves that our enemies have taken our measure. They know who we are. After killing 270 people, many of them Americans, over the skies of Lockerbie in 1988, Abdul Basset Ali al-Megrahi walked out of a Scottish prison last year to pave the way for British oil deals. It is not clear why Megrahi’s release caused shock, disappointment, and anger among American officials who demand the Israelis release Arab prisoners with Jewish blood on their hands as a show of “good faith.”

In Washington, the world’s superpower looks on in detached wonderment as we hazard educated guesses as to whether or not the Israelis are really going to attack the nuclear facilities of a regime that has called for another Holocaust. In our universities, professors explain away the Islamic Republic’s threats to destroy the Jewish state by claiming the translations from Farsi are flawed.

It’s not just about the Jews. As the most recent Wikileaks documents show, the George W. Bush Administration deliberately covered up the extent of the Iranian war against the United States in Iraq so as to save itself the trouble of responding to the killing of American soldiers by a foreign government. There was no way the American military was going to open up a third front in the war on terror, reasoning that that only made American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan more vulnerable—as well as American civilians at home whose government will not name and pursue their enemies. This is an old habit now of U.S. policymakers, and it knows no party. Democrats and Republicans alike play the same sick game. The Islamic Republic released the American hostages it had taken under the Jimmy Carter Administration to the newly elected Ronald Reagan—who blinked when Iran and Syria, via Hezbollah, killed diplomats and Marines in Beirut.

Rather than making our enemies pay, we’ve let them off time and again over the last 40 years, thus ushering in the golden age of international terrorism, which is helping to capsize the short-lived Pax Americana. Our leaders will not speak frankly to the people who elected them because they fear the American electorate has no stomach for it. War in the Persian Gulf that sends gas to $10 a gallon combined with terror attacks at home would ravage the American economy and our national psyche. So we are silent. And in our silence, monsters breed.

Born in Jericho, on the West Bank, raised under Israeli military occupation, and educated in Arizona (where he received an undergraduate degree in finance and then an MBA), Areikat toggles back and forth between the somber acknowledgment of competing narratives of nationhood and oppression, sharp political gossip, and more muted versions of the fiery speeches about colonization and dispossession that made the secular Palestinian national cause a favorite among Western students in the 1970s, in the days before Islamists seized the mantle of resistance.

Yet for all the fluidity of his style and the intelligence of his presentation, there is something insubstantial about Areikat that seems less like a personal failing than a product of the fact that his title is a well-meaning lie: He is an ambassador without a country, the emissary of a dream-state without borders that has commanded and frustrated the imagination of the world for over 40 years. The deferral of the Palestinian national dream through war and peace, international conferences and agreements, self-inflicted wounds, settlement and occupation, year after year and decade after decade, has become one of the defining characteristics of a dream that refuses to die yet resists being born. The delivery date is always pushed back another year or two, and then another year. Arguments about whether the failure lies with Israel or the Palestinians, Arafat, Sharon, Clinton, Bush or Obama, meddling Iranians, Likud hardliners, Baruch Goldstein or Hamas, the Holocaust, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, or the Sykes Picot agreement of 1916 have lost their savor even for the bitterest ideologues. The world won’t stand for it any longer, but then the world moves on to something else. With the West Bank ruled by the Israel Defense Forces and Gaza ruled by Hamas, the Palestinian people seem more divided now than at any time since their national movement began.

Areikat displays excellent control over his body language and enjoys playing games. When I arrive to meet him in the lounge of a busy tourist hotel in midtown Manhattan, I find him seated with a glass of water in front of him and his jacket and tie slung over the back of the opposite chair. He watches me, curious to see whether I will ask his permission, move it myself, or sit down and then lean forward for the rest of the interview. When I move his jacket to a nearby chair, he smiles and then stands up to shake my hand, while continuing to talk on his cell phone to Ramallah in Arabic about his meeting with the editorial board of the New York Times. I set out the instruments of my trade on the table and listen in on his conversation until he is done.

For decades many Jews in Israel and America denied that there was such a thing as a Palestinian people. I think that most people in our community today see that as a shameful thing. However even as the Jewish community has stopped for the most part propagating this kind of false and insulting narrative, we wonder why there is not a similar recognition on the part of Palestinians of our deep historical and emotional connection to our national homeland.

One hundred years of struggle over that piece of land that was called Palestine produced a lot of misconceptions and misperceptions. We witnessed the rise of national movements that were struggling to create homelands for their own people, and neither one wanted to acknowledge the presence of the other. I think of the early Zionist slogans of a land without a people for a people without a land, all the books and the papers and the statements that were made by the early Zionists and the Israelis after the creation of the state of Israel, the denial of the existence of the Palestinian people, and then later the denial by the Palestinians of the existence of the state of Israel, that they have to go back to where they came from. I remember former Prime Minister Golda Meir saying that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people in the early ’70s. I remember Palestinians saying that the only Jews in the land of Palestine are going to be Palestinian Jews. I think the bloody conflict brought leaders on both sides to their senses. We have seen at least, from the Palestinian side, since 1988, a clear acceptance of the existence of the State of Israel.

I wrote a cover story for the Atlantic about the Ra’is, Yasser Arafat right after he died, and I interviewed all the Palestinian leaders who were close to Arafat, as well as the leading Israeli, American, and international policymakers who dealt with him. One story that I heard many times is how the Camp David negotiations fell apart when Arafat would not acknowledge that there was a Jewish temple in Jerusalem.

This was used by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren in his recent op-ed in the New York Times, and I just want to know, how did he base his statement. On what information?

Bill Clinton tells the story, too. I also interviewed Madeleine Albright and Ehud Barak about it, and they said the same thing. They remembered that Clinton was very angry. He said, “Look, it was in the Encyclopedia Britannica, how can you say it was not there?” And Arafat said, “There was never a Jewish temple in Jerusalem. It didn’t exist. It’s a myth. Maybe it was in Hebron. Maybe the Jews came from Saudi Arabia.” You know the kind of nonsense he used to talk.

People forget that Chairman Arafat was the first Palestinian leader to take the major risk of signing an agreement with Israel that recognized Israel’s right to exist. I don’t think there would have been any other Palestinian leader who would have had the courage to do that. And they just, in a moment of rage because you know he didn’t go along with a plan that was submitted to him at Camp David, decide to make him the bad guy.

OK. Now that we are sitting across the table here in New York 10 years later, under completely different circumstances, let me ask you this: Was there ever a Jewish temple in Jerusalem?

I’m not a historian.

I have the reference right here from the Encyclopedia Britannica. Is it wrong?

I’m not a historian.  What are you trying to get to? That Jews were present then?

Were they?

President Abbas in his meeting with the leaders of the American Jewish community in June said that yes, the Jews were in the Middle East, and that one-third of the Quran talks about Jews.

Are the people who say they’re Israeli Jews today related to the people who were Jews in the time of the Quran?

It’s for historians to establish the link. I believe many Jews who lived at one point in that land continue to live in that land, and their descendants stayed in that land.

So, today’s Palestinians are the real Jews?

Everywhere in the world, Jews follow the nationality and citizenship of the country where they live. In the United States, you have American Jews, who live in the United States. You have French Jews. And this was the original argument between us and the Jews. Why can’t you be Palestinian Jews?

Is Judaism simply a religion, or are Jews also a people—like Kurds or Armenians?

That is something you have to work out for yourselves. At one point, we believed that Jews are followers of religion, and not a nation and a people, and I’ll tell you why. In order to be one people, one nation, you have to be homogenous. Look at Jews all over the world, you see American Jews who are blond and with green-blue eyes. You see Yemeni Jews who are dark like me with brown eyes and brown hair—not brown anymore for me—and you see French and Russian Jews who are a mixture of this and that. So, basically a lot of historians on the Palestinian side and the Arab side say, “Well, if they were a people, one nation, they would be homogenous, 90 percent alike except for 10 not-alike, as we Palestinians are.” Some of us still make the same arguments of the ’60s and the ’70s: “No, they are not a nation, they are the followers of a faith, they should live in every country as citizens of that country.”

That approach didn’t work out so well for us in Europe.

I think you have been very much influenced by the Holocaust. And the thing that my Jewish listeners, audience, or readers should understand is that we Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust. As a matter of fact, Palestinians, in the early years of the Jewish migration to Palestine, tried to help the Jewish immigrants as much as possible, to make them feel at home.

In our community, we’re taught that the toleration of Jews in most Muslim empires was greater than it was in Christian Europe. But we also hear that, for example, the other day the head of the Palestine National Council, Salim Zanoun, said that the Palestinian people can never recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

I said it yesterday!

Why did you say that?

Israel is a political establishment that claims to represent Jews all over the world. I very much doubt that Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu represent every Jew in the world. I know there are Jews who don’t agree with Netanyahu.

You know the saying: Two Jews, three opinions.

But what I want to say about tolerance is that the Jewish-Muslim relationship enjoyed much more years of peace and tranquility than the Christian-Jewish relationship or the Muslim-Christian relationship. My grandfather was a partner with a Jewish man in a bakery shop in west Jerusalem. When he was—when my grandfather left in 1948, he left everything, he left his home, he left his bakery, he left everything, but he was a partner. My mother used to tell me stories about how they lived in peace and harmony. That’s why a lot of people argue that the politicization of Judaism led to the friction and the conflict with the Palestinians. In the beginning we used to say, “We are not against Jews or Judaism.” We were against Zionism as a political theory.

So, explain why it’s impossible for the Palestinian people to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

We have no problem whatsoever with what Israel calls themselves. Israel can call themselves “The Great Empire of the Jewish People.” But don’t ask me to recognize that.

Why not? You want us to recognize the validity of your narrative of Palestinian people-hood.

We are still negotiating an end to this conflict. Let’s say that tomorrow the Palestinian leadership comes out and says, “OK, we’re ready to recognize the Jewishness of the state.” What implications would that have, immediately, on the Palestinians? You know that in our view the refugee problem is the crux of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Today we have 6.5 million registered refugees out of 10 or 10.5 million Palestinians. One out of six refugees in the world is Palestinian. By accepting Israel’s claim now, that they are a Jewish state, we are telling the Israelis: Forget about the refugees, forget about their plight, no right of return, no U.N. General Assembly resolution 194; we are giving up the refugee issue, we are taking it off the table before we even started negotiating.

Secondly, you know that there are between 18 and 20 percent non-Jews who are living in Israel, who are mostly Palestinians, and who are part of the Palestinian people. By accepting the Israeli plan that they are a Jewish state, we are undermining the rights of this minority, who are already suffering discrimination at the hands of the Israeli authorities.

Doesn’t the U.N. partition resolution on which you base your own national claims for a Palestinian state already recognize Israel as a state for the Jews—a Jewish state?

The partition plan of 1947, which I talked about yesterday at my speech at Columbia, did give 54 percent, 55 percent to a Jewish state, and 45 percent to an Arab state. The Arabs rejected that. Israel launched war and won the war, and they expanded their territory from 55 to 78, but the only time in my memory that a Jewish state was really mentioned was in the partition plan 181. Does Israel want us to go back to that? Fine.

So, you refuse to call Israel a Jewish state, but if they gave you more land it would be OK?

We’d be getting double the amount of land. Who would refuse that? But do you really want to turn that now into a political maneuver by trying to put forth a condition that you know in advance the Palestinians are not going to accept? The real issues are: ending the conflict, ending the Israeli military occupation, allowing the Palestinians to be independent, and providing security for Israel.

When you imagine a future Palestinian state, do you imagine it being a place where Jews, if they wish to become Palestinian citizens, could own property, vote in elections, and practice their religion freely?

I remember in the mid-’90s, the late [PLO official] Faisal Husseini said repeatedly “OK, if Israelis choose to stay in a future Palestinian state, they are more than welcome to do that. But under one condition: They have to respect and obey Palestinian laws, they cannot be living as Israelis. They have to respect Palestinian laws and abide by them.” When Faisal Husseini died, basically no Palestinian leader has publicly supported the notion that they can stay.

What we are saying is the following: We need to separate. We have to separate. We are in a forced marriage. We need to divorce. After we divorce, and everybody takes a period of time to recoup, rebound, whatever you want to call it, we may consider dating again.

So, you think it would be necessary to first transfer and remove every Jew—

Absolutely. No, I’m not saying to transfer every Jew, I’m saying transfer Jews who, after an agreement with Israel, fall under the jurisdiction of a Palestinian state.

Any Jew who is inside the borders of Palestine will have to leave?

Absolutely. I think this is a very necessary step, before we can allow the two states to somehow develop their separate national identities, and then maybe open up the doors for all kinds of cultural, social, political, economic exchanges, that freedom of movement of both citizens of Israelis and Palestinians from one area to another. You know you have to think of the day after.

I’ve been traveling to the region since I was a child, and one of the things that I’ve noticed is that in the 1970s and 1980s Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs knew each other much better than they do now.

Following the Israeli occupation in 1967, the police station in my hometown of Jericho was headed by an Israeli police commander. I remember one time I went with two of my friends to a nearby Israeli settlement in Jericho, back in the ‘80s, to visit some Israelis who used to come to the shop and buy things from us. We’d have coffee and tea. The struggle was not crystallized yet.

I remember when I traveled to Europe in the late ’70s, and to the United States in the early ’80s, yes, we thought of ourselves as Palestinians, but we were traveling with Jordanian passports. Publicly we are Jordanians, but deep inside we are Palestinians.

That’s how many Jews feel about the passports that they carry.

I understand. When I talk to people about Israel’s obsession with security, I say I believe it’s genuine. I know that the Israelis exaggerate it. But I believe in many aspects it is genuine. I understand the horrific experience that Jews had during the Holocaust, but then I sit and say—

Your father didn’t do it.

Exactly. I am not the one. It was Germany. Germany was part of the Western community. I don’t want to get into religion, but they were Christians, not Muslims. Why should I pay the price for the political movement called Zionism, which said, “It’s time to reclaim parts of Palestinian territory that at one point were home for the kingdom of David, of Israel”—which you and I know was concentrated in the northern part of the West Bank. It never was in Jerusalem, it never was on the coast, it never was in Hebron.

Of course it was in Jerusalem.

No.

The City of David is right there.

No, I mean, it was from Shechem to the outskirts of Jerusalem. It was never the Palestine that they claim.

Continue reading: rockets, refugees, and “the idea that me and my family will come and live in your house.” Or view as a single page.

• This after President Ahmadinejad stood a few miles from the Israeli border and loudly praised Hezbollah. [NYT]

• He also reportedly met with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut. [Jewish Journal/Haaretz]

• The Arab League warned that continued West Bank construction could lead it to ask the U.N. to recognize an independent Palestine. [JPost]

• President Abbas punted on the question of recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, saying how Israel defines itself is up to Israel. [JPost]