Knesset Slimers Retreat After Foxman Slams Defamation of New Israel Fund (update)
By J.J. Goldberg
The threatened Knesset investigation of the New Israel Fund by the Israeli right has been halted, for now, following several angry phone calls to Knesset speaker Reuven Rivlin from irate American Jewish communal leaders, warning that an Israeli investigation could backfire on other Jewish organizations involved in Israel. Abe Foxman of ADL is quoted telling the New York Jewish Week it was “absurd to blame Goldstone on the NIF.” He told Barnea himself that the probe was “almost undemocratic.”
(I had previously written mistakenly that Foxman had called Rivlin. My apologies.)
The nastiness of the attack and the determination of the attackers shouldn’t be understated, though. The main victim, NIF president Naomi Chazan, a former deputy speaker of the Knesset, was summarily dropped without explanation as a columnist by the Jerusalem Post. She was also dropped as a visiting lecturer at a Jewish community event in Melbourne, Australia, to be co-sponsored by the Union for Progressive Judaism and the Zionist Council of Victoria (state), after the Zionist council pulled out. The Zionist council’s chief was quoted in The Age, an Australian daily, as saying “we don’t want to have anything to do” with the NIF. But the head of the Union for Progressive Judaism told another daily, The Australian, that the cancellation was a mutual decision between his group and Chazan “because both realised the controversy would detract from fund-raising.” Uh-huh.
Also worth a read: This eloquent column, translated from Maariv, by the widely respected chairman of Meretz, Chaim “Jumas” Oron, warning that attacks of this sort on dissenters by free-lance bullies — right down to the Nazi-style caricatures of Jews with horns — are the first step down the slippery slope toward fascism.
Here’s the Der Stuermer-style caricature of Chazan with horns that was run as a newspaper ad in the Jerusalem Post and carried as signs by protesters outside Chazan’s home.
And this report about two Maariv reporters who publicly attacked their own newspaper for giving front page coverage to Im Tirtzu and effectively providing the launching pad for the sliming of NIF.
Must See TV: O'Reilly Chats Up Jon Stewart, Offers Him a VP Slot, Calls Him a Jew
By J.J. Goldberg
Here, for your viewing delight, is Jon Stewart’s appearance on Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor,” in three parts. The interview ran over two nights, Tuesday, February 3 (Parts 1 and 2 below) and Wednesday, February 4 (Part 3 below).
The whole thing is a fascinating exercise in the current state of the media-politics-entertainment nexus and well worth the watch. If you only have a few minutes, though, the must-see segments comes in part 3.
First, at 2:40 on the clock, O’Reilly says he plans to run for president and asks Stewart to be his running mate. That is a running theme through the rest of the segment — O’Reilly turns the show into a vetting interview for the job.
Second — and this is priceless — at 4:20, they’re discussing the Iranian nuclear threat and O’Reilly suddenly says to Stewart, “You’re a Jewish guy, right?” Stewart seems utterly nonplussed for about a millisecond, like Where the Hell Is This Coming From, and then comes back with a hilarious riposte, eventually railing about the “war on Hanukkah.”
Third, at 7:33 Jon explains why he won’t be O’Reilly’s running mate.
O’Reilly and Stewart, Part 1.
O’Reilly and Stewart, Part 2.
O’Reilly and Stewart, Part 3.
Want more? Stewart followed up on his own show Wednesday night with his reflections on the experience. He airs some of O’Reilly’s weirder after-the-fact analyses of the interview and then discusses it with his therapist (played by Wallace Shawn). You can watch it on the Daily Show’s own site, here.
If America Sneezes, Israel Gets Pneumonia. What Happens When America Gets Pneumonia?
By J.J. Goldberg
You may or may not have noticed this story on the front page of The New York Times. Its main point is that the dizzying growth of our national indebtedness poses a threat not just to America’s economic health and future but to its role in the world.
Even if you don’t much follow global economics, keep reading anyway, if for no other reason than this: As America’s role goes on the world stage, so goes Israel. A weak America can’t protect an embattled Israel. If Israel doesn’t find a way to normalize its relations with its neighbors by the end of the decade, it may have to adjust to life without the protection of the world’s sole superpower. As if.
It’s a shocker, all right — that is, unless you remember this Forward editorial from September 2004. We called this one way early. More about that below.
According to today’s Times, President Obama’s new budget shows next year’s federal deficit — the difference between the government’s income and its spending for the year — reaching 11% of the total Gross Domestic Product (all the money earned and spent anywhere in the country during the year). That’s a higher proportion than at any time since World War II. And back then, remember, borrowing ballooned to pay for a world conflict, and settled down again when the emergency was over. Our current imbalance isn’t an emergency response. It’s just our new normal. Obama’s budget, the Times writes, “draws a picture of a nation that like many American homeowners simply cannot get above water.”
The problem is more than just a matter of annual borrowing. Three decades of borrow-and-spend government (the numbers are below) have piled up an accumulated national debt that recently topped a colossal $12 trillion. That’s about 83% of our Gross Domestic Product. If we were any other country, the IMF would have put us in receivership by now. Fortunately, we run the IMF. For now.
Even scarier, the new budget forecast shows the situation continuing to the end of the decade if not beyond, according to the Times (I’m not sure they’re entirely correct on that detail). Absent “miraculous growth, or miraculous political compromises,” the Times reports, America faces a steady decline in clout on the world scene.
Or, as Mr. Obama’s chief economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers, used to ask before he entered government a year ago, “How long can the world’s biggest borrower remain the world’s biggest power?”
Is this just fear-mongering? No. The screws are already getting set to tighten.
The Chinese leadership, which is lending much of the money to finance the American government’s spending, and which asked pointed questions about Mr. Obama’s budget when members visited Washington last summer, says it thinks the long-term answer to Mr. Summers’s question is self-evident. The Europeans will also tell you that this is a big worry about the next decade.
Mr. Obama himself hinted at his own concern when he announced in early December that he planned to send 30,000 American troops to Afghanistan, but insisted that the United States could not afford to stay for long.
Without a strong economy to pay for it, Obama said in that December speech at West Point, “even a ‘war of necessity,’ as he called Afghanistan last summer, could not last for long.”
So what does this have to do with Israel? Well, here’s what we wrote back in September 2004, just before that year’s election:
Rightists Target New Israel Fund Over Grantees' Goldstone Testimony
By J.J. Goldberg
A right-wing Israeli activist group is waging a multi-pronged public campaign to discredit the New Israel Fund (NIF), which supports human-rights groups in Israel.
The activist group, Im Tirtzu (“If you will it” — from Theodor Herzl’s epigram “If you will it, it is no dream”), made the Friday (January 29) front page of Maariv, Israel’s second-largest daily. In a three-page article in its tabloid weekend supplement, Maariv reports on the group’s new 112-page study claiming that NIF-funded organizations were a major source of damaging information in the Goldstone Report, the United Nations fact-finding mission on last year’s Gaza conflict. The study focuses on footnotes in the Goldstone Report, calculating the percentage of negative testimony on Israel that is sourced to NIF grantees.
According to the Maariv story (Hebrew only), touted with a blaring front-page headline reading “The ‘New Fund’ and the Lie Industry,” Im Tirtzu — which describes itself as “centrist” — is planning an ongoing campaign that will include outdoor signs depicting NIF president Naomi Chazan, a political scientist and former Knesset deputy speaker, with a horn protruding from her forehead (a play on the Hebrew word keren, which means both “horn” and “fund”).
At the end of the lengthy Maariv story, reporter Ben Caspit writes briefly that the study is “the latest example” in a “wave of demonization flooding the media” in Israel against human-rights organizations, which he says “do not work against Israel” and “are an integral part of a democratic state” with “an important role as watchdogs” protecting “universal rights.”
The group kicked off its public campaign Saturday night with a demonstration outside Chazan’s home by protesters reportedly dressed as Hamas members carrying signs “thanking” Chazan and the NIF. An announcement on its Hebrew Web site calls for a demonstration against the New Israel Fund on Monday morning February 1 outside the Herzliya Conference, an annual conference of world leaders on Middle East security.
The English Web site makes no mention at all of the NIF or the Im Tirtzu campaign against it.
In response to the Im Tirtzu study, according to a Maariv follow-up story on Sunday, the Knesset foreign affairs and defense committee will hold hearings in the near future on the activities of NIF grantees, following a request by Kadima lawmaker Yisrael Hasson, a former deputy director of the Shin Bet security service, to committee chairman Tzahi Hanegbi. The story quotes Hasson saying, “We have to investigate the matter of activity by groups that promote arrest warrants against IDF officers and contribute to activities that support Hamas.”
Is Danny Sanderson of 'Poogy' Fame Channeling Eddie Cantor? You Decide
By J.J. Goldberg
This is a clip from an early concert of Lahakat Kaveret, often known as the Poogy Band. There are four songs here: “Hamakolet”, “Magafayim shel Baruch”, “Goliath” and “Natati Lah Hayai”. It’s fabulous viewing if a) this was ever your thing and/or b) your Hebrew is good. But wait: There’s an eerie aspect, as I’ll note below.
O.K., here’s the weird part: Watch the hand gestures and body language of band leader Danny Sanderson (far right of the screen) in his solos in “Magafayim shel Baruch” (“Baruch’s Boots”) — it starts at 3:44 in the above video — and see if they don’t uncannily resemble the moves of an earlier master Jewish comic singer, Eddie Cantor, in his classic “Makin’ Whoopee.” Check it out:
If you want more musical nostalgia from what they call Good Old Eretz Yisrael, check out this Web site.
Continue to the jump if you’re interested in an unforgettable rendition of the Labor Zionist anthem, Bialik’s “Techezakna”.
Separating Wheat From Dreck: I Defend a Principled Hawk from a Chickenhawk
By J.J. Goldberg
For the past few months I’ve been getting email blasts several times a day from someone named Dan Friedman (no connection to the Forward’s arts & culture editor), ultra-right email posts with short, pithy barbs aimed at Obama (whom he calls BHO), liberals and the Israeli peace camp. He’s pretty far over the line, but I’ve been opening his posts because they’re short and I’ve found them sometimes witty, and I felt they gave me a window into a mood in certain quarters out there. Until today, that is.
Today I learned something important about the Internet and human frailty. Friedman sent out a post titled “An Israeli Throws in the Towel,” reprinting an article he came across by an Israeli professor. The professor warns that Obama won’t stand up against Iran’s nukes. Friedman introduces the piece with a few choice paragraphs dripping with contempt, pointing to the article as an example of how clueless Israelis are about the real threats they face.
The writer is an American expat living in Israel whose commentary appears in the Jerusalem Post. He has had an illustrious career nailing down one job after another at institutions with important-sounding names. (OK, everyone has a right to make a living.)
Apparently, it’s suddenly dawned on the professor that Obama “isn’t going to take strong action on the [Iranian] nuclear weapons issue.” Welcome to our solar system, dear friend. But what’s most significant about the startling revelation painstakingly outlined in his piece is that the word “Israel” is AWOL and so is any suggestion the unmentioned country might have to try to save its own butt by taking matters into its own hands.
Frankly, it’s pointless and unfair to single out this particular Israeli commentator for criticism. His attitude is so pathetic – and so typical.
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Sounds bad, doesn’t it? Unless you happen to know, as Friedman obviously doesn’t, that the writer of the article he’s ridiculing, Professor Barry Rubin, is one of Israel’s earliest, most outspoken and best-informed hawks on the dangers Israel faces from Iranian and other Islamic extremism, going back decades. He comes to his pessimism honestly; he’s one of Israel’s leading experts on the non-Arab Muslim countries on Israel’s periphery, meaning mainly Iran and Turkey. He’s been accusing Obama of being soft on Iran since before Obama was elected.
In other words, Friedman is inadvertently ridiculing one of the deans of his own school of thought, because he doesn’t know enough about the stuff he spouts off on to know who his own allies and flag-bearers are.
It will come as no surprise that I don’t agree with a whole lot of Barry Rubin’s conclusions about Israel and its enemies, but I know he knows his stuff as few others do. (Full disclosure: We were friendly back in high school. I think we’ve sort of scowled at each other a few times since.) Agree or disagree with him, though, one dismisses Rubin at one’s peril — unless, of course, one is simply blowing smoke through one’s nose or some other orifice and pretending to be knowledgeable about a sensitive topic one actually knows nothing about.
Friedman should be looking up to the people who created and built the school he subscribes to, not mocking them. But, to be fair, we shouldn’t be surprised when a kindergarten kid hasn’t yet learned the principal’s name. There is so much to learn in those memorable early stages. Look, tsatskele, this goes on the Internet. That goes in the potty.
Here is a catalogue of Barry’s most recent articles on Iran, dating back only as far as 2005. (Follow the links to his other topics; there’s a lot of solid reading there.) Here is a piece he wrote in October 2008, warning that Obama and his team were dangerously naïve about Iran and shouldn’t be elected. I don’t agree with its conclusions, but I take the cautions seriously. I wish Dan Friedman had read it before he started sending out a mass email sliming the author.
By the way, if Friedman finds Israelis as aggravating as he indicates, why doesn’t he just leave them alone?
January 24, 2010, 10:18pm
The New Passion of Bernard-Henri Lévy: Defending Pope Benedict XVI
By J.J. Goldberg
The popular and ever-elegantly coiffed French moral philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy has weighed in at Huffington Post with a passionate defense of Pope Benedict XVI from the many accusations (including a few of my own) that he’s no friend of the Jews. It seems to me he makes a few points worth considering.
As soon as he was elected, the accusations of “ultraconservatism,” taken up in a loop by the media, began — as though a pope could, in fact, be anything but “conservative
Texts have been quite simply distorted, regarding his trip to Auschwitz in 2006, for example, where it was asserted — and repeated, also in a loop, time blurring the memory of the event — that he paid homage to the 6 million Polish dead, victims of a mere “band of criminals”, without mentioning that half of them were Jews. (The falsehood is downright staggering, considering that, on that day, Benedict XVI plainly spoke of the attempt of the “powerful of the 3rd Reich” to “eliminate the Jewish people” from the “ranks of the nations of the earth” [cf Le Monde, 30 May 2006]).
What’s particularly unexpected is Lévy’s double-barreled defense of Pope Pius XII, along with some little-known facts about the playwright, Rolf Hochhuth, whose 1964 play “The Deputy” first brought Pius’s wartime behavior of public attention. Here’s a piece of it:
January 23, 2010, 9:24pm
New Rules: Human Rights for Corporations, Fetuses on the Witness Stand
By J.J. Goldberg
It’s been a bad week for old-fashioned notions like the rule of law and respect for the law. Maybe it’s something in the air. This was the week that the Supreme Court ruled that multibillion-dollar corporations are just people and enjoy human rights and liberties just like other people—and deserve the protection of the state that we foolishly thought was supposed to protect us people from the likes of them.
But that’s not all.
A trial opened this week in Kansas in the murder of an abortion provider, and the judge gave the defense permission to argue for a lesser charge on grounds that the defendant was honestly trying to prevent a crime—namely, abortion.
The defendant, Scott Roeder, is charged with first-degree murder in the killing last May of Dr. George Tiller, one of the few physicians in the country who performed late-term abortions. Roeder has admitted publicly that he killed Tiller in order to save unborn children. In a pre-trial procedure on January 20, he was given permission by Judge Warren Wilbert to try making a case for voluntary manslaughter, which would reduce his minimum sentence from 25 years to four and a half. Under Kansas law, this means proving that he was motivated by an “unreasonable but honest belief that circumstances existed that justified deadly force.” In other words, the judge has formally sanctioned the possibility that murdering Tiller could be shown in court to be a life-saving act.
Newsweek argues that the judge’s decision won’t have much of an impact, because Roeder won’t be able to make his case. He would need to prove that a third person was threatened by an unlawful act, when abortion is legal, and that the threat was “imminent,” when Tiller was killed in church on Sunday morning. That is indeed a tall order.
But that misses the real impact of the decision. What the judge has done is to make the welfare of the fetus a legitimate question in the case. If this decision is allowed to stand, it becomes an open invitation to future attacks, more closely tailored to the technicalities of the voluntary manslaughter statutes. Whether or not Roeder can prove the elements of voluntary manslaughter in his own case, the fetus has now been granted standing in this and any future cases. We might even see fetuses called as character witnesses. Or, perhaps, permitted to make campaign donations.
No less damaging, Judge Wilbert has sanctioned the notion that in the case of an ideologically motivated murder—in plain language, an act of terrorism—the motives or goals behind the act can be considered mitigating circumstances. That’s some precedent.
Dos Pintele Yid Dept.: Chomsky Attacked as a Closet Zionist
By J.J. Goldberg
The tenor of Middle East debate in this country is evolving faster than most of us realize, and in unpredictable directions. The latest is the attack on Noam Chomsky for being too sympathetic to Zionism.
Chomsky was interviewed December 2 on Voices of the Middle East and North Africa, a weekly talk show on radio station KPFA, the Pacifica flagship outlet in Berkeley, California. He was questioned on boycotting and divestment as a tactic against Israel, and said it was not productive. A month later the producers decided to follow up and held a discussion with two supporters of boycotts, sanctions and divestment, Ali Abunimah, Chicago-based editor of the Electronic Intifada Web site, and Jeff Blankfort, a longtime critic of Israel and Zionism. The host says Chomsky had been invited, too, but declined. Probably a smart move. They were out for blood.
The KPFA site says it will keep the discussion up until January 27. Here is another link on the Voices of the Middle East etc. Web site, which presumably will remain active.
It’s worth noting that Abunimah sticks to issues; he criticizes Chomsky’s views on economic sanctions and the one-state versus two-state solution, meaning the legitimacy of Israel’s existence, which Chomsky accepts and Abunimah rejects. Blankfort takes on Chomsky on the power of the Israel lobby and the Jews. In the original interview, interviewer Khalil Bendib challenged Chomsky for failing to criticize the Israel lobby. Chomsky insisted he been doing so for years and repeatedly asked what else he was supposed to say. Bendib basically fumfitted—he apparently wanted to say that Chomsky failed to attack Jewish influence and control but he couldn’t bring himself to say that out loud. Blankfort takes it on with gusto.
I found this discussion on Philip Weiss’s Mondoweiss.net site, which regularly attacks Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians. The post on Chomsky and KPFA includes some fascinating reader feedback, including attacks on Weiss himself for being too pro-Israel and pro-Zionist. Weiss comes right out and says he doesn’t like blanket attacks on Jews, which would be obvious to anyone who reads him with any regularity and sees the Jewish moral anguish at work. Also in the feedback thread: Blankfort himself explaining how his Jewish upbringing in the 1950s shaped his current views.
Meet Jewish Senators 14, 15 — and 16? Plus: the House GOP's Jewish Mormon
By J.J. Goldberg
A few weeks ago I wrote a column about the 13 Jews in the Senate, specifically the 11 Democrats and the two Independents, Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman, who guard the left and right flanken of the Democratic caucus. I wrote that these two white-haired gents from New England not only define the boundaries of Democratic politics — they also describe a certain arc of Jewish identity in the last century, from secular-socialist to Orthodox-conservative, with the other 11 arrayed in between. You’ve heard of life imitating art? Well, this is a case of the particular managing by sheerest coincidence to mirror the general. Call it Kal ve-chomer be-akrai (from the specific to the general, by chance).
It can now be told that the picture is more complex — and perhaps more complete — than I was able to describe at the the time. Two other senators, both appointed to replace members of the incoming Obama administration, have a single Jewish parent each, and an ambivalent connection to their Jewish heritage: Ted Kaufman of Delaware, appointed to Joe Biden’s seat, and Michael Bennet of Colorado, appointed to replace Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. Kaufman had a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, and was raised Catholic; but this New York Times profile includes a reminiscence about his childhood in which he seems at one point to contrast himself casually with his “non-Jewish friends.”
As for Bennet, he seems to be rather guarded about his relationship to his Jewish identity — perhaps mirroring his mother’s experience as a hidden child during the Holocaust in Poland. In this profile in the Rocky Mountain News, most of what’s said on the topic comes from his brother James, the editor of The Atlantic. James, a former New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief, also tosses out an intriguingly vague thought on how the senator will vote on Middle East issues, presumably to answer a question (asked? unasked?) about whether his Jewish background will shape his stance toward Israel. Whatever his sense of Jewishness, Michael Bennet does seem to relate strongly to his identity as a child of a survivor.
Again, the particular coincidentally mirrors the general: the Senate’s latest wave of Jews (if such they are) shares the ambivalent, interfaith identity of the coming generation of American Jews.
And we haven’t yet mentioned Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney-general who is the odds-on favorite to succeed the retiring Senator Chris Dodd. Nathan Guttman writes in this Forward profile that Blumenthal is in line to become the 14th Jewish member of the Senate. In fact he could just as easily be considered the 15th Jewish member, if Bennet is counted, or the 16th, if Kaufman is counted. (Here is a long, in-depth political profile of Blumenthal from Slate.com.)
The 13 currently acknowledged Jewish senators all identify themselves openly and unambivalently with the Jewish community. The entry of senators who are ambiguous in their relationship to the Tribe is something new under the Washington sun. Kal ve-chomer be-akrai.
And now, for something completely different, here’s our promised bonus entry:
We often mention the fact that of all the 44 Jews on Capitol Hill (by the traditional count), only one, Eric Cantor of Virginia, is a Republican. Well, we missed someone: freshman congressman Jason Chaffetz (CHAY-fetz) of Utah. He was born and raised Jewish but converted to Mormonism as an undergrad on a football scholarship at Brigham Young University, where he was a place-kicker (reportedly having converted from high school soccer to college football). He is incorrectly described in many places on the Web as the son of Kitty Dukakis with her first husband, author John Chaffetz, before she married the Massachusetts ex-governor, but that’s not true. Jason is the child of John Chaffetz’s second marriage, after John and Kitty were divorced. Here’s an interesting Daily Kos post about Jason’s relationship with his dad, an outspoken gay rights advocate.
According to this profile in Roll Call, Chaffetz is close to his older half-brother, John Chaffetz Dukakis, a onetime Senate aide to John Kerry. Brother John arranged for Jason to be introduced to the Massachusetts House delegation, all of whom are Democrats. That’s given the very conservative freshman Jewish Mormon some important friendships on the other side of the aisle. Apparently, Rep. Barney Frank isn’t one of them; Chaffetz became the ranking Republican on the House’s District of Columbia Affairs committee, which gave him an opportunity to cast a key “no” vote on approving the District’s gay-marriage law (it passed anyway) and Frank isn’t amused. (Funny how Mormons, of all people, position themselves as defenders of the traditional family.)
Roll Call also says that Chaffetz was approached early on by California Rep. Henry Waxman, the influential chairman of the Energy and Commerce committee, who was intrigued by Chaffetz’s Jewish surname and Mormon religious identification. The garrulous Chaffetz turned that encounter into another useful relationship. Unmentioned by Roll Call: Waxman is also the senior Jewish member of the House and the informal dean of the informal Jewish caucus. Odds are, reaching out to Chaffetz was just part of a day’s work for Waxman.
U.S.-Israel Ties: Pressure Doing Business With You
By J.J. Goldberg
Judging by appearances, relations between Obama’s Washington and Netanyahu’s Jerusalem are getting a mite testy as pressure grows for movement in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, or what’s left of it. The administration wants the sides to agree on a formula to allow reopening negotiations. Israel has partially frozen settlement construction, but with some big exceptions and Jerusalem excluded, which isn’t enough for the Palestinians. Washington wants someone to blink and there’s a sense that time is running out.
Of course, appearances can deceive. It could be that someone is trying to make it look like things are getting testy. On the other hand, that basically amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it? That is, isn’t creating the appearance of pressure itself a form of pressure? And if that’s case, who is pressuring whom? It seems fairly obvious, until you look up close.
Last Wednesday, January 6, Haaretz reported on a harsh exchange that reputedly took place two weeks earlier in Los Angeles between White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and Israel’s Consultown tinsel — er, Tinseltown consul — Yaakov “Yaki” Dayan. Emanuel is said to have told Dayan that the United States is getting “fed up” with the Israelis and their habit of doing the right thing after it’s too late, and that if things didn’t start moving soon, the Obama administration might just back away from the peace process and attend to other things. Dayan dutifully reported the conversation to the Foreign Ministry, and somehow it leaked out to Galei Tzahal-Army Radio, which broke the scoop.
The White House promptly poured cold water on the account, saying Haaretz had distorted the conversation and that Emanuel was merely voicing frustration with the peace process, not with Israel.
Up to here the story has been pretty widely reported. Less noticed amid the to-do was the news that the White House was angered by the leak of what was supposed to be a private conversation — angry enough that on Thursday Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren had to apologize personally to Emanuel.
Reading between the lines, it looked like one of those classic Jerusalem double-fakes, leaking a report that Washington is giving Israel a hard time in order rile up Israel’s friends and put the administration on the spot.
It looked that way for a few hours, that is, until later that evening, when the administration escalated the rhetoric: On Thursday night, special Middle East negotiator George Mitchell appeared on Charlie Rose and issued what sounded like the bluntest threat yet: suspending American loan guarantees that allow Israel to obtain cheap credit on world markets.
Rose: “You sit there and you say to Israel, look, if you don’t do this, what?”
Mitchell: “Under American law, the United States can withhold support on loan guarantees to Israel.”
Washington promptly issued the usual denial, insisting that the threat wasn’t a threat. (No, it was maybe a chopped liver sandwich? More likely, baloney.)
So what’s going on here? Mitchell’s mentioning of the loan guarantees on national television was probably not intended to be private (though it could be argued that if he really wanted it public he would have gone on Letterman, not public television). So who is gaming whom? Is Netanyahu trying to put the Obama administration on the spot, as it seemed after the L.A. incident? Or are the two threats part of an administration strategy to ratchet up the pressure for movement? You be the judge.
By the way, if you’re wondering what those loan guarantees are about, here’s a bonus historical tidbit:
Vatican and the Jews: The Pius Spat, The Pious Spit
By J.J. Goldberg
A new blog post by John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter, routinely described as the most authoritative English-language journalist covering the Vatican, reports on a seldom-discussed irritant in Catholic-Jewish relations: Haredi youth spitting on robed Catholic clerics on the streets of Jerusalem. Here’s an excerpt:
Jews move to halt spitting at Christians in Jerusalem
Globally speaking, the most serious new tension dividing Jews and Catholics is Pope Benedict XVI’s decision just before Christmas to advance the sainthood cause of Pius XII, the wartime pontiff whose alleged “silence” on the Holocaust has long been a subject of polarizing historical debate.
On the ground in Jerusalem, however, Jewish/Christian animus has a much more prosaic cause: spitting.
Recently, the Jerusalem Post carried a piece quoting Rabbi David Rosen, a veteran of Catholic/Jewish dialogue, acknowledging that incidents of ultra-Orthodox Jews spitting at priests, nuns and other Christian clergy is “a part of life” in Jerusalem. Such incidents have been occurring for the last twenty years and are now on the rise, according to the story, although they appear to be limited to Jerusalem.
The piece quoted a Texas-born Franciscan, Fr. Athanasius Macora, who heads the Christian Information Center inside the Jaffa Gate, who said that he’s been spat upon by ultra-Orthodox Jews as much as fifteen times in the last six months — not only in the Old City, but also outside his Franciscan friary.
Aside from being disgusting, how serious a problem is this? On one hand, the victims quoted in the post say it’s an annoyance and they’re used to it. On the other hand, Allen mentions it in the same breath as the Pius XII sainthood feud; coming from someone like Allen, that’s a pretty strong hint that the Vatican is peeved. Indeed, the fact that Allen is reporting this means it’s on the minds of Vatican players.
All of which brings up two troubling thoughts:
Is Bibi Ready for '67 Lines? So Says Maariv Report on New U.S. Peace Bid
By J.J. Goldberg
Maariv published a story (in Hebrew – my translation is below) on Monday, January 4, by its top political correspondent, Ben Caspit outlining what is described as a detailed American initiative to reconvene Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and reach a permanent agreement in two years. What is particularly surprising is the clear implication that Washington has Netanyahu’s consent to enter a negotiation that will result in a return virtually to the 1967 borders.
The Jerusalem Post also reported the purported American plan, giving less detail but adding that it had received Egyptian confirmation (Caspit’s story cites no sources). The Post also quotes Bibi as saying there is “no truth” in media reports that he has agreed to “certain viewpoints, plans and border lines.”
Read on for Caspit’s full report on the American plan, translated into English:
A Year After Cast Lead: On One Hand, on the Other
By J.J. Goldberg
This past week marked the anniversary of Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli incursion into Gaza last year. Here are two ways of looking at it. One says it marked a turning point in the moral vision of Israeli society. The other says it was successful in reducing terrorism and saving Israeli lives.
The first one comes in an essay by human-rights lawyer Michael Sfard. It’s published on Coteret, a progressive Israeli blog, mostly press round-up in translation, that reports regularly on things you wish you didn’t have to know. The second is a year-end report released December 30 by the Shin Bet security service on the dramatic decline in Palestinian terror attacks in the past year, as summarized in Maariv. (The original is in Hebrew only — I’ve translated the numbers.) At the end is a link to a strong analysis describing the trade-off between protecting Israeli lives from terrorism, on one hand, and building the trust necessary to move toward peace.
Here are a few key excerpts from the Michael Sfard essay on Coteret:
Looking back, Operation Cast Lead was a turning point in the way Israeli society expresses its values. There, in besieged Gaza Strip, we exposed ourselves to a crystal-clear, shameless, and unmasked truth that we had thus far avoided by using repression and self-deceit methods that became more complex and clever with every war and operation we waged. Like that macho man who grew tired of pretending he was politically correct and angrily yelled at his wife to go back to the kitchen, we came out of the closet. We are who we are and we are proud of it!
For three weeks, during Operation Cast Lead, we sent fighter jets to drop bombs on one of the world’s most densely populated areas. We aimed our guns at clearly civilian targets. We used [white?]phosphorous bombs. We deliberately and systematically demolished thousands of private houses and public buildings, and all the while we maintained a tight siege on the Gaza Strip, preventing civilians who wanted to from fleeing the war zone. We did not erect a temporary refugee camp for them. We did not create a humanitarian no-mans’-land corridor for them. We did not spare hospitals, food repositories, or even UN aid agencies’ buildings. At the same time, we did not express fake regret. We did not argue we made tragic mistakes…
Operation Cast Lead was our second war of independence. In the first, we freed ourselves of 2,000 years of living under and being oppressed by foreign regimes. In the second, we broke the shackles of Jewish morality and heritage that were shoved down our throats for years. We liberated ourselves of the ancient Jewish ban against killing the innocent with the evil, from the self-evident lessons and inevitable insights we should have reached of the our collective experience as a downtrodden nation that was denied its own civil rights, that was silenced, knocked down, downgraded, and treated as subhuman. Yes, we violated some of those rules in the past, but we did not even reveal that to ourselves.
Now, on the other hand, here are the key points in the Shin Bet report, as reported by Ofer Buchbut in Maariv:
The General Security Service [i.e. Shin Bet - jjg] published a year-end report yesterday on terrorism, which showed “a significant decline in the scope of Palestinian terrorism.”
- 15 Israelis were killed in Palestinian attacks, nine of them during Cast Lead itself, versus 36 during 2008.
- 234 Israelis were wounded in Palestinian attacks, 185 of them during Cast Lead, versus 679 in 2008.
- 455 rockets were fired at Israel, 406 of them during Cast Lead, versus 2,048 rockets in 2008, a drop of almost 75%.
- No suicide attacks inside Israel in 2009. This is the first year since 1992 during which there were no Palestinian suicide attacks.
Despair, Israeli Style
By J.J. Goldberg
When it’s not preoccupied with Gilad Schalit’s release-not-release, the settlement freeze-not-freeze, the never-ending Iran nightmare or Bibi Netanyahu’s offer/threat to bring Tsipi Livni’s Kadima into his coalition, in whole or in pieces, the Israeli press has lately been publishing a good deal of what can only be described as existential despair.
Nobody has captured the angst more exquisitely than Yair Lapid of Yediot Ahronot, one of the country’s best-known and most firmly centrist journalists, in a December 20 column titled “So what now?”
It’s possible that it doesn’t work anymore. That this country stopped functioning the same way old cars die: In the first few times you still take it to the mechanic, later you learn to look under the hood yourself and get your hands dirty, and then comes the moment where you just leave it in the street, realizing that there must be someone out there whose job is to take it away…
In a slightly more dispassionate tone, the underlying tension is described in a December 24 op-ed titled “Two Types of Zionism. It’s by Gadi Taub, an essayist, Hebrew University professor of communications and public policy (and occasional Forward contributor):
What we are dealing with here is the difference between means and ends. In the settlers’ view, the State is a means for realizing “our obligation to the Land of Israel through Aliyah and settlement work” (as noted in the founding document of the Gush Emunim settlement movement.) Yet in the view of mainstream Zionism, the settlement enterprise is a means for reinforcing the State’s sovereignty.
As time passes, it turns out that this difference is in fact an abyss. Two worldviews will be facing off for a head-on clash.
Taub ends on confident note: the “Zionism of the state” will outlast the “Zionism of the land.” “There’s “no need to panic.”
The settlers do not have enough resources or ideological confidence in order to detach themselves from the State, let alone declare war against it.
Maybe not, but they’re making a pretty good show of it. Consider:
What Joe Didn’t Know, and When He Didn’t Know It
By J.J. Goldberg
Say it ain’t so, Joe! Just nine years ago, Senator Lieberman of Connecticut was a national symbol of moral integrity and punchy independence, the Senate’s very first openly observant Jew, the first Jew to appear on a major party presidential ticket, the first senior Democrat to rebuke President Bill Clinton’s naughty bits. Now, in less than a decade, he’s gone from punchy to punchline. Half the nation is agog, asking: Where have you gone, Joe Lieberman? Where’s the old Joe we used to know?
In fact, there was another side to the old Joe that most of us never knew. I first got a peek at it back in 1991, a few weeks after the end of the First Gulf War, at a festive dinner in Brooklyn. But I get ahead of myself. I’ll tell you my story at the end.
First, let’s review the events of the past week. It was a week in which, as The New York Times’s Gail Collins put it, “Lieberman’s apparently successful attempt to hijack health care reform and hold it hostage until it had been amended into something that liberals couldn’t stomach has mesmerized the nation’s political class.”
Why did he do it? Collins, in that column on December 16 (which happened to be Beethoven’s 239th birthday) said there so many theories that she had “decided to start a rumor” that during Lieberman’s failed 2004 presidential bid he was “bitten by either a rabid muskrat or a vampire disguised as a moose.” Ouch.
Yup, liberals were steamed — even on the decorous Senate floor, where Lieberman asked for an extra minute to finish a thought and was slapped down by freshman Senator Al Franken of Minnesota. (You remember Franken. The ex-comic who narrowly beat incumbent Republican Norm Coleman last year and tweaked Coleman by telling voters, “I’m the only New York Jew in this race who was actually born in Minnesota.”) Here’s the Lieberman-Franken smackdown, in case you missed it.
But why — leaving aside the moose and muskrats — did Lieberman decide to turn around so suddenly and veto a Medicare expansion that he had endorsed just three months earlier, that he himself had first proposed five years ago? Health-care wonk Ezra Klein of the Washington Post blogged that Lieberman “seems primarily motivated by torturing liberals. That is to say, he seems willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score” (meaning his 2006 defeat by Connecticut Democratic primary voters). Pow!
Fellow Washington Postman Charles Lane furiously retorted that Klein “essentially accuses Lieberman of mass murder because he disagrees with him on a policy issue,” which he said “is disgusting.” Sure, Lane conceded, it’s true that Lieberman “seems to bear a grudge against the Democratic liberals who tried to unseat him in 2006 because of his vote for the war in Iraq, and that he might be engaged in a little pay back right now.” Still, Lieberman’s “position on the Medicare buy-in is hardly beyond the pale. That’s more than you can say for Ezra Klein’s venomous post.” Got that? Klein was right about what Lieberman was up to, but he was rude to say so. Why, it was a shande far di goyim!
Give It a Rest, Adam Sandler: The New Jewish Holiday Tunes
By J.J. Goldberg
Adam Sandler’s “Chanukah Song” turned 15 this year and it’s apparently settled into our collective consciousness as the new holiday standard, a sort of Jewish equivalent to “Silent Night,” or perhaps “White Christmas” (though that’s sort of a Jewish song itself).
Yup, it’s all over the media this month. The Forward’s Jenna Joselit Weissman calls it “a contemporary classic.” Carly Silver writes in New Voices about a time she tried to think of Hanukkah tunes and Sandler’s was “the only one I could think of.” It’s been covered by various up-and-comers including Oy Capella and some guy called Neil Diamond. Sandler himself has gone ahead and recorded a “Chanukah Song” Part 2 and Part 3.
But if you’re really following the culture, you know that Sandler’s “Chanukah Song” is already way, way passé. The new normal is a Youtube sensation, via the Internets, called “Chinese Food for Christmas.” It’s so big that it’s turned singer-songwriter Brandon Walker into an entertainment star in his own right and spawned a host of spin-offs, copycats and one-ups, including a cover version by the Chipmunks. What they have in common is Christmas Envy — Jews who feel left out during the season when everyone around them is having such a good time. Here’s the original (continue to the jump for some of the more hilarious and inspired spin-offs):
Lessons in Democracy from a Senator and a Rabbi
By J.J. Goldberg
If you’re like me, you’ve probably been laboring for too long under the misapprehension that democracy means government by majority. We probably also assumed, foolishly, that a consensus is a prevailing view shared by most of those present.
Today (Monday 12/14), however, by remarkable coincidence, two important voices arose — one in America, the other in Israel — to set us straight. Democracy is when the majority abandons its convictions and defers to one guy who thinks he’s smarter. Consensus happens when all present abandon their own convictions and submit to one guy who disagrees with everyone else.
Here, for example, is Senator Joe Lieberman explaining to The New York Times how he can hold up the 60th vote needed for Senate action on health-care reform, force the other 59 to surrender something they believe to be crucial because he doesn’t like it, and somehow claim that it’s those other 59 who are being stubborn and unreasonable.
People have said to me, including some people in the caucus: ‘We know you are for health care reform. You know how important this is to the president. Would you yourself stop this from happening?’ So I say: ‘There is a wonderful core health care reform bill on the Senate floor. Would my liberal friends in the caucus stop that from happening and prevent the president from getting this major goal that he has set because they want to add more on to that? Why won’t they be reasonable?’
Still not convinced? Consider the teachings of Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, head of the Har Bracha Yeshiva near Nablus.
December 14, 2009, 9:31am
England, Labor Zionism and the Future of Social Democracy
By J.J. Goldberg
For anyone interested in issues of social and economic justice in the current economy: There’s a brilliant, must-read essay in the current issue of the New York Review of Books on the past and future of social democracy. It’s written by a former general secretary of British Dror Labor Zionist youth whom you might have heard of, by the name of Tony Judt.
His essay is worth reading in full, but in brief he talks about how the social democracy (or its American cognate, the New Deal) gave way in the mid-1970s to the laissez-faire economics of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School. He walks through the corrosive social impact of privatization and grudging, restrictive welfare and unemployment policies.
The lessons he draws are a bit contradictory, and I wish he had reconciled his two conflicting arguments: On one hand, we need to recapture the moral arguments of right and wrong in political discourse and get away from the relentless cost-benefit analyzing that governs so much of current policy-making:
What do we find instinctively amiss in our present arrangements and what can we do about them? What do we find unfair? What is it that offends our sense of propriety when faced with unrestrained lobbying by the wealthy at the expense of everyone else? What have we lost?
The answers to such questions should take the form of a moral critique of the inadequacies of the unrestricted market or the feckless state.
Israeli Mafia Returns to LA? Did It Ever Leave?
By J.J. Goldberg
An October 29 shooting attack at a Los Angeles synagogue, initially thought to be a hate crime or terrorist attack, is in fact being investigated by L.A. police as an Israeli organized crime hit.
The Jerusalem Post broke the story on December 1, but inexplicably buried the lede in the middle of a feature-y interview with a visiting LAPD official, headlined “LAPD official: Israeli organized crime on the rise.” The official, Deputy Chief Michael Downing, in Israel for a conference on policing methods, said the department’s intelligence bureau suspected Israeli mobsters within hours after the event because of certain tell-tale signs — particularly the fact that the gunman shot his two victims in the kneecaps. Kneecapping is commonly employed by gangsters as “a severe warning,” Downing told the Post.
The Los Angeles Times, which picked up the story on December 2, reported that the attack took place just before morning services in the parking garage of Adat Yeshurun Valley Sephardic Synagogue in North Hollywood. The two victims were taken the hospital, but nobody ended up in the morgue this time.
In a follow-up story the next day, the Times explained that Israeli organized crime “has operated in Los Angeles” since the mid-1990s, “with the growth of the Ecstasy drug trade.”
It’s a pity the Times reporters didn’t spend more time in their own newspaper’s morgue. They would have learned that Los Angeles is Ground Zero of Israeli organized crime in America, the place where the so-called Israeli mafia first entered the public eye — not the 1990s, but in 1979.
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