Nu Ma

On Israel's shift to the right

2010-10-18T20:56:00.000-07:00

It was once believed by Israelis that the drift toward extremism was a property of the Palestinian side. Israelis, particularly on the left, liked to point out that today’s moderates, the PLO, were yesterday’s extremists. This process, however, is turning out to hold true on the Israeli side as well.

Yesterday’s extreme views in Israel are today’s consensus. A cross-current process has characterized Israeli extremism, with once radical views on both left and right getting their day in the mainstream.

The leftist extremist views of the 60s and 70s—demanding the return of the occupied territories for peace right after the six days war, warning of the future cancerous effects of an occupation, later calling for negotiations with the PLO for a two-state solution—have become official policy by the 1990s.

But with the failure of Oslo, the rise of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, the tide has now turned. Currently in Israel, right wing positions once considered unspeakable in polite company—population transfer; exclusion, censure or deportation of Israeli Arabs—are slowly but insistently inching into the mainstream.

The chief strategist and spokesman for this approach is current foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, who has emerged in recent years as the type of cunning and charismatic politician who can thrive in Israeli politics even without having had a stellar army background or an ultra-orthodox flock on call. Lieberman articulated the essence of his vision in his controversial UN speech in September.

In his speech, he sought to first refute the notion that the Palestinian issue is the heart of Middle East conflict. He said: “More than ninety percent of the wars and war victims of the Middle East since the Second World War did not result from the Israeli Palestinian conflict and are in no way connected to Israel, stemming rather, from conflicts involving Moslems or conflicts between Arab States.”

Then, he sought to refute the notion that the settlements are the stumbling block to peace, noting that, “all of Judea, Samaria and Gaza were under Arab control for 19 years, between 1948 and 1967. During these 19 years, no-one tried to create a Palestinian state.  Peace agreements were achieved with Egypt and Jordan despite the presence of settlements. And the opposite is also true: we evacuated twenty-one flourishing settlements in Gush Katif, and we transferred more than 10,000 Jews and in return, we have Hamas in power and thousands of missiles on Sderot and southern Israel.”

Noting that many blame the conflict for weakening response to Iran, he argued that the causal arrow goes in the opposite direction: “in searching for a durable agreement with the Palestinians, one which will deal with the true roots of the conflict and which will endure for many years, one must understand that first, the Iranian issue must be resolved.”

Lieberman then proposed that an end to the conflict must come in two stages: first, to deal with “emotional” wounds, “we should focus on coming up with a long-term intermediate agreement, something that could take a few decades. We need to raise an entire new generation that will have mutual trust and will not be influenced by incitement and extremist messages.”

Second, a redrawing of the borders must occur, creating a physical and national separation between the two ethnic groups at odds, Jews and Arabs. “Where effective separation has been achieved, conflict has either been avoided, or has been dramatically reduced or resolved. Consider the cases of the former Yugoslav republics, the split-up of Czechoslovakia and the independence of East Timor, as cases in point. Thus, the guiding principle for a final status agreement must not be land-for-peace but rather, exchange of populated territory. Let me be very clear: I am not speaking about moving populations, but rather about moving borders to better reflect demographic realities.”

He concluded with this reminder: “almost 4000 years during which the Jewish People were born in the Land of Israel, while developing the corpus of ethical and intellectual treasures that have been instrumental in giving rise to Western Civilization. 2000 years of forced exile, and interim conquest by Byzantines, Arabs, Mamelukes, Ottomans and others, cannot, and never will, impair the unbreakable bonds of the Jewish People to its homeland. Israel is not only where we are. It is who we are.”

All this sounds well and reasoned, until you consider context, logic, and subtext.

First, whether or not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is marginal in terms of numbers, it is not marginal to the Israeli and Palestinian people at its center. And symbols attain their force not from their absolute size but from their emotional resonance. For example, Israel’s problems in absolute terms are dwarfed by problems of many other countries. Should the US therefore, in Lieberman’s view, reduce its aid to Israel to reflect that? More pointedly, most Jews don’t live in Israel, which somehow does not stop Lieberman from claiming in his speech that for Jews, “Israel is not only where we are. It is who we are.”

Second, individual settlements may or may not be stumbling blocks for peace. But overall, the settlement movement is enabled by, and manifests, the occupation, which is an inherent stumbling block for peace. The very history of the Jewish people in Israel attests to this simple fact, characterized as it’s been, in Lieberman’s own proud telling, by continual struggle against occupiers!

Moreover, applying Lieberman’s own logic, it is clear that the occupation has not bought Israel peace, quiet, and security, but rather conflict, death, world status erosion, moral decline, and toxic internal strife. Why keep such a failing program?

Third, the idea that Iran is the root cause of the conflict also defies Lieberman’s own logic. He argues that the fact the conflict continued despite withdrawals and peace achieved despite settlements renders withdrawals and settlements inessential to the conflict. But the conflict also existed well before Iran became a player; actually during the times Iran was Israel’s ally. So how can Iran be its root cause?

Now, Lieberman is right about the toxic lack of trust between Israelis and Palestinians, but there’s no evidence that a vague “intermediate” solution is more likely to hasten change than a radical shift denoted in a comprehensive peace agreement. In fact, social science shows that waiting for an attitude change to bring about a change in behavior is usually a rotten idea. It is more effective to change the laws first, and let people learn to adjust their attitudes accordingly.

Politically, examples abound of the potential efficacy of a dramatic land-for-peace agreement in ensuring stability. The Israel-Egypt peace agreement is one case in point. Egypt was Israel’s largest, most vehement and powerful enemy between 1948-1977, responsible for most Israeli war casualties. Then, Sadat made his dramatic visit to Israel. A peace treaty was signed in ’79; the Sinai desert was returned to Egypt. Not one Israeli soldier has died on the Egyptian border at Egyptian hands ever since.

Finally, the Israeli idea of redrawing the borders is a close cousin of the Palestinian idea of the right of return. It’s clear to anyone who truly desires peace that the weak version of both can be managed. The borders can be redrawn to reflect contiguous concentrations of Israelis and Palestinians, but that will have to logically include the division of Jerusalem (on which Lieberman is curiously mum in his speech). Some compensation will be given the descendents of Palestinian refugees (which Lieberman of course doesn’t mention).

The strong version of this argument, however, is a straw man designed to foster conflict and promote more sinister agendas on both sides. Those on the Palestinian side who argue for the full right of return are not interested in peace, but in annihilating Israel. Those on the Israeli side, who are arguing for ethnic purity in the biblical homeland, are also not friends of peace.

When Lieberman, as he did in his U.N. speech, speaks of moving borders in the context of the Jews’ 4000 years history (and follows that quickly with the ‘loyalty oath’ vote in the Knesset, forcing non-Jewish citizens to swear allegiance to the Jewish state), most people in the region hear the subtext. Palestinians hear a call for affirming the biblical mandate on the land, which leaves them nowhere. Israeli Arabs hear a call for revoking their status as equal citizens in a democracy and redrawing Israel’s borders anew to exclude them. Neither population is bound to see these changes as gestures of peace.

Lieberman is well poised to become Israel’s prime minister in the near future, and his positions represent well the emerging Israeli zeitgeist. Israeli leftists always tell their peers on the right to make peace with the enemy now so as to avoid dealing with a more extreme enemy later. They would be well advised to give a similar advice to the Palestinians.

Peace Talks Fatigue

2010-09-14T05:16:00.000-07:00

One of the most interesting things about the new round of peace talks now underway between Israeli and Palestinian authorities is how little this event manages to register on the emotional valence scale.

On its face, the fairly resounding yawn with which the renewal of talks has been received is puzzling. After all, the war between Palestinians and Israelis is a perennial international attention grabber. Moreover, peace has ostensibly been the dream of citizens and the desire of their governments on both sides of the table for a long time.

For both Israelis and Palestinians, much of the quality of daily existence now—and the nature, or even odds, of future existence—hinges on whether there’s war or peace between the sides. For the lives of individuals, the character and destiny of the nations involved, and even the shape of regional and world politics, this is a huge deal.

And yet nobody seems to really be talking about the peace talks. No one is excited. No one is celebrating. No one is happy.

One obvious explanation is that people hold their enthusiasm and hopes in check given past experience. After all, Israelis and Palestinians have been at it for years. The basic parameters of a workable agreement have been known for decades, and yet little progress has been made. Therefore, it is understandable why nobody is eager to don the party hat upon hearing of the promise of peace. On top of that general skepticism, particular doubts remain about the current leaders on both sides, and their ability to deliver for their people.

Another explanation is that vast populations in Israel and the Palestinian community no longer want peace. They want war. The strength of the broader Palestinian camp’s commitment to peace has always been rightfully questioned. No ‘Peace Now’ movement has ever emerged in the occupied territories. And while the choice by Gaza Palestinians to pick Hamas to rule them surely denotes a complexity of motives and desires, an inclination toward peace and reconciliation cannot easily be inferred as one of them. The echoes of a historical Jihadist ethos have not been banished from Palestinian life.

On the Israeli side, the situation is a bit difference. Israel has forever seen, presented, and from time to time conducted itself as a peace-seeking nation. Various peace movements have always dotted the landscape of Israeli culture and politics. Israeli children, like me, were fed the dream and hope and promise of peace from childhood. But Israel is changing. The hegemonic old school Zionist ethos, with its largely secular, democratic, and dovish sensibilities, is on the decline. Ascendant forces in Israeli demographics, politics and culture are largely autocratic, messianic, hawkish, and militaristic.

Large and powerful segments of Israeli culture no longer wish for peace with the Palestinians, but for their removal or annihilation— either by military force or by divine intervention. In this sense, Bibi and Barak—for all their haughtiness, ineptitude, duplicity, and brutality—represent perhaps the last of a dying breed, having kept a commitment, however sloppy, to the idea of the usefulness of peace and a foot, or at least a toe, in the world of reason and of secular, democratic values. Their likely successors—the Liebermans and Eli Yishays and their ilk—are a much more frightening bunch, untethered as they are to the principles of secularism, democracy and enlightenment that were so alive within early Zionism.

The ascendant forces within Israeli culture are not merely skeptical about the actual possibility of peace, but opposed to even the ideal of it.

Another likely reason for the lukewarm reception of these peace talks may reside far away from the disputed land itself, in Iran. It is not a rare occurrence in history that a pressing problem outlasts its own prominence; that by the time a movie gets to the climax, the audience has already lost their interest in movies altogether. This descent into irrelevancy can happen suddenly, even after many years at the top.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict may be experiencing such a moment. By now, the question of the Iranian bomb has become de facto the deciding issue in the Middle East. In light of the looming nuclear bomb threat, the questions of whether a few cockeyed settlers will again pitch a tent on some godforsaken hill, or whether Palestinian youths again snipe at bored soldiers in the Kasbah of Hebron seem trivial.

In Israel, at least, this realization seems to have taken root. It is highly likely, in fact, that the rush to negotiations right now has more to do with Iran than with anything else. After all, everyone in the region is afraid of Iran. It is one of the sole issues that unite Israel with many of its Arab neighbors, including the Palestinians in the west bank.

A peace with the Palestinians is likely to get Israel in the U.S. and the world’s good graces, buying it maneuvering room Vis a Vis Iran. Such peace will make it easier for other Arab nations to tacitly aid Israel if and when it decides to attack Iran. And right now, the ‘if’ part of that previous sentence seems by all evidence merely rhetorical.

Shameless Self Promotion: My Book is Out!

2010-07-25T14:53:00.000-07:00

At this point I’m going to beg my three loyal readers for forgiveness. Then I’m going to do something I have not done before—which at my age and mileage is saying a lot—and engage in the shameful All-American art of shameless self-promotion.

You see my first novel in English, The Good Psychologist (Holt; 256 pages; check you local bookstore), is coming out August 3rd. And that is something I’d like everyone to know. And by ‘know’ I mean ‘read,’ and by ‘read,’ let’s be honest, I really mean ‘buy.’

You see my agent, who resembles hard candy in that she’s at once sweet and capable of breaking your teeth, insists that publishing your book, which used to be the name of the game, isn’t anymore. The name of the game now is getting your book read. To get your book read, you have to publicize it.

She assures me that everybody is doing it, which to me is the opposite of assurance, of course. The last thing you want to do is what everyone is doing. You don’t want to do what everyone is doing and you don’t want to go where everyone is going; and you don’t want to read what everyone is reading, even though you wouldn’t mind being the one everyone is reading. These are life’s paradoxes. At least that’s what I tried to tell my agent.

But I think she’s heard that argument before, probably in one version or another from every writer she’d ever worked with, because writers are a prickly, snobbish, paradoxical bunch. Pains in the ass, in other words.

So then she reminded me gently that I have a daughter in college. That, for those uninitiated parents among you of still-small children, means that I have bills I can’t pay; which is to say I need added income; which is to say, in I’d better sell books; which is to say I’d better engage in self promotion, which is to say lose my dignity and compromise my so-called principles; which is apparently the new name of the game, and which is something that I hope those college teachers my shamelessness pays for teach my daughter not to do. Life is paradox.

But yes—if the book sells, I may get some money, which is a nice aspect of the American book business, in contrast with the Israeli book business where if you sell many books you get no money. And I say that from experience. In Israel you make money in only two ways: by selling weapons or high tech. So if you sell high tech weapons, you’re doubly set in Israel.

The Jews may still be the people of the book, but they’re also definitely the people of high tech weaponry. At least in Israel; at least if they wish to be in the money. So money, yes, there’s a convenient catchall default motive.

But there is another reason I’d like my book to get ‘known’: you see, if it does OK, my odds of getting to write the next one increase. And writing, the creative endeavor, is one of my funnest hobbies, way funner than sitting alone in the dark empty house playing an out of tune piano, or biting the fingernail of my left thumb, which are my two other hobbies, if I could get personal for a moment without you getting all uncomfortable.

So I’m being both shameless and selfish here, admittedly. But that is evidence that I’m just a regular Joe and not some prickly, snobbish writer-type, which should be good for sales, at least my agent says so.

At this point, you, my loyal reader (the other two have fled in horror; or are already in line at the bookstore, because readers are a paradoxical bunch also), may want to stop the sales pitch and concern yourself with the tangential issue of whether the book is any good.

Fair enough. But this, in truth, is not easy to answer because one’s book, in the final analysis, is like one’s child. You labor to create it, motivated by a mysterious mix of urges, fears, and fantasies both high and low.

When it’s out, you rejoice, and are terrified. You hope it has all the parts, and that they work properly. You hope it does well in the world, even if you’re not quite certain what ‘doing well’ entails. In your eyes it’s perfect, even if you know, rationally, that it can’t be. In your eyes it’s special, even if you know, rationally, that it can’t be.

You realize quickly you’re not the God of your child, or of your book. You’re a parent, and being the parent is different from being the God, even if both are creators. As a parent you don’t know everything about your offspring. Even though it came from you and lived with you most of its life so far, it has a mind of its own, its own spirit; a path quite different from what you had intended. It hides things from you. It keeps secrets. It travels to strange places.

In fact, other people may know it better than you on some level, because you are blinded in part by intimacy, by blood, by terror and hope, by love.

So maybe you should not take it from me. Maybe you should not relay on my opinion of the book. Maybe you should read it and decide for yourself…

Observations from Israel

2010-07-10T14:56:00.000-07:00

It's tough to break away from The Situation when you're in Israel. The Situation is what Israelis call their, well, situation. It is the shape of fluid things.

The Situation is in part like the weather—something you can talk much of but do little about; it shifts a lot, and often quickly, and often for the worse; people seem to enjoy complaining about it; when it's good, people know it can't last.

The Situation is also in part your favorite sports team. When you ask, "what's the situation?" you're asking, "what's the score? Are we winning?" with the implicit assumption that your team is—or will be soon—trailing and running out of time.

Sometimes your team does win, and there's euphoria and the sense that the winning will last forever. When it loses again, you are always torn between blaming the ref, the other team's dirty play, or despairing of yourself, wishing your team would be as well-managed and coached and financed as the other teams.

The Situation is also in part a diagnostic process, like a post-physical conference with your physician, if you're middle-aged. There's always some half justified reason for worry; always a need for some obnoxious lifestyle change and a futile plan for minimizing—but not eliminating—pain. The news is always not-quite-good, even when it is not catastrophic. And everyone knows one of these days it's going to be catastrophic, even if no one says so.

I could talk about The Situation all day. But by the end of the day The Situation might have changed. As of now, though, The Situation is not good. The weather forecast is bad; our team is in a slump; results from the latest physical aren't pretty either—the heart races in sudden bouts of panic; memory lapses and mood swings abound; and the bad knees? That's not getting better. Ever.

Israel, a traumatized nation, feels threatened, and so it hunkers down, scowls, and exposes its teeth, like a cornered street dog. Right now it feels that the whole world is ganging up on it unjustly; that the world is hypocritical and worse, anti Semitic—which is of course what Israel has suspected all along, a suspicion that has historically guided the very actions that have in part led to the world's resentment of it. It's classic self-fulfilling prophecy. And they know all about the prophecy business here.

There's also a feeling here these days that the bonds are fraying on the inside. What keeps this troubled tribe together is no longer apparent. Large chunks of the Israeli public do not see the government as theirs. Do not sing the anthem or waive the flag. Do not see those around them as real Israelis, or real Jews, or even real people. Very little seems to bind the different constituencies that make up the Israeli body politic.

Still, inside The Situation, life goes on. This in fact is a characteristic aspect of Israeli life, the ability to go on despite the grim toils of The Situation. As I travel around, trying to keep my mind off The Situation, I pay attention instead to some striking cultural elements.

Honking your car horn, for example, is not only acceptable, but expected, even necessary. Other drivers will routinely cut into your lane assuming that when they get too close, you'll honk. If you don't, they may run right into you, claiming, with some justification, that it was your fault.

Mall security these days looks like a tired relic. Israel's enemies have figured out recently that flotilla-style political warfare is more effective than suicide bombing in the battle that really matters—the one for global legitimacy. So the malls are safe. And the bored security guard will all but waive you past before even eyeing you fully.

At the restaurant, no one will refill your water glass. No one will even ask you if you'd like a refill. No one will approach. It doesn't matter how long you sit, or how prominently your empty water glass is placed at the edge of the table. If you want something, you have to ask for—better yet, demand—it directly.

The food is better here and so is the coffee. There are many possible explanations—the weather, the local fresh ingredients, the regional influences on cuisine, the fertile mix of cultures and tastes—but I see a different one. It involves The Situation. On one level, gathering establishments reflect it. Every coffee place feels like an argument, in which the Jews, being Jews, disagree; and so they create a plethora of unique places, each convinced it is the only right one.

On another level, coffee houses in Israel appear to be conceptualized in the mind of their owners and patrons alike as places of refuge from The Situation. You see little in the way of TV's. You see little in the way of the corporate handbook. Israeli places of gather have more of the oasis feel. Informal, quirky, cozy, idiosyncratic sensibilities rule.

And your coffee will always be served in a mug, no Styrofoam here; and they like to make shapes in the cappuccino foam. Mostly hearts, but you can get the ying-yang circle, a baby, or a leaf, which makes your heart sing.

Watching Soccer in Israel with my Father

2010-07-05T16:46:00.000-07:00

So I'm in Israel, at my father's apartment in Rehovot, watching world cup soccer. This is not a situation you can improve on much. It's damn near perfect, for several reasons. First, of course, is the soccer. A game so far superior to the popular American sports that you find yourself lamenting America's failure to embrace it while at the same time hoping that it doesn't, because one thing you don't want is for soccer to become dominated by America. Things that become dominated by America invariably lose their charm—think popular entertainment; think retail.

Watching soccer in Israel is also nice because watching it in America is so depressing. Soccer is un-American by nature—it doesn't require the fancy technology, gadgets and props that define American recreation. It's a game of dreams deferred, of disappointments, of scarce rewards. America is about dream fulfillment, and about immediate and abundant gratifications. It's a game of few simple principles, applied loosely. America likes games with many elaborate rules, enforced meticulously. It's a game of continuous action, with minimal interruption. America's games are small bursts of action between long, annoying breaks for commercials.

An added joy is that Israel is again absent from the games. It's great to have Israel absent from things. Israel's presence anywhere these days is usually linked to bad emotional weather; dark clouds gathering; unrest with a chance of violence. It's nice to have an international news event that Israel can merely observe. You learn a lot from observing others, not just from acting out on them.

I can say this because I'm also an American. Regular Israelis don't think it's nice to be world cup spectators. They really want to participate in world events, even as they busily resent the world for how it treats them. Israelis are always walking that particular tightrope; on the one hand looking admirably at other cultures for their glories and seemingly superior luck and skill, and on the other fearing and disdaining all of them, awaiting their future betrayals or harboring resentments over past ones. Israel is like the kid in high school who's dying to be loved but isn't sure he's quite lovable, and is lacking social skills; so he becomes awkward, bullying, defensive, hyper sensitive to any sign of the rebuff his self doubts tell him is imminent.

Another reason this is fun is that I get to spend some quality time with my father.
Recently retired, he is quite content to recline on the living room sofa, solve crossword puzzles during half time, and dose off between goals. My father was a farmer for many years. He once told me that he liked plants better than people, because plants don't talk. He likes quiet. He's a perfect companion for watching soccer. We turn the volume down. This way we avoid those awful 'vuvuselas,' the plastic horns that are destroying the soundtrack of soccer, usually so alive with organic human sounds, singing, chanting.

We also avoid the inane announcers, who tend to yell a lot, announce what had just happened in front of your eyes ("the ball just went through his legs and into the net; the goalie is on the ground, sobbing"), or make moronically obvious predictions ("the US team will be much happier if it scores a goal").

The whole phenomenon of game announcers is strange to me. No one announces the actual game, after all. I think it is in part a holdover from the days of radio, where an expert narration of the action was, well, necessary. But on TV, the action narrates itself. And the commentators are usually former players who have nothing to say about the game, mainly because the ability to reflect analytically, required of the good commentator, hinders the ability to be in the flow, required of a great athlete. Good athletes are good in part because they don't have the ability to reflect on the moment, they have the ability to react in the moment.

So my dad and I recline on our sofas; we eat pistachios, and once in a while he makes a comment about how hot the Israeli summer is—which is of course redundant commentary nobody needs, but you don't mind that from a parent. And once in a while he gets up and goes to the kitchen to stir the stew he's cooking for dinner with the grandkids; and when he does, someone invariably scores a goal. He doesn't get upset but rather reassured, because if a goal is scored just when you leave the room for a second, then it's a sign that the rules of the universe still apply. All the rules of the universe are designed to humble man.

And sometimes he flips the channel over to the news, because it's Israel and there's always news and it's always bad. On the news he sees 10,000 orthodox Jewish men gathering in some plaza in Jerusalem, dressed in their heavy black coats and hats and beards in the stymieing heat to protest, on the Rebbe's orders, one of the things they are protesting these days: that the supreme court has ordered them to let Sephardic and Ashkenazi girls study together in state-funded schools; that the government is building a new emergency room at a hospital where some ancient pagan graves have been found; that a downtown parking lot is opening on Saturdays; that the police dares to investigate a mother from their community who was caught on camera in the hospital abusing and trying to starve her own baby.

My father groans. I think he sees the Israel that he and other Jewish farmers like him built slowly being taken over. If these dark hoards are the guardians of Jewish heritage, the embodiments of Jewish faith, the torch bearers of Jewish culture, then we're in hopeless trouble—that's what I think.

But then he switches the channel back to soccer; because it's hot, and who wants to think, except maybe about how the US team will be much happier if it scores a goal.

On the Flotilla Fiasco

2010-06-04T17:08:00.000-07:00

So I’m looking at images of another Israeli spasm. Does the specific content matter? No it does not. Because regardless of content—Lebanon war, Gaza war, Dubai assassination, humiliating the Turkish ambassador, humiliating vice president Biden, the response to Goldstone, barring Chomsky at the border, and now, the tragi-moronic flotilla attack—the process underlying these diverse recent actions is essentially the same. Israel’s behavior is so predictable—and predictably self defeating— because it springs from one absurd, and yet hardening, set of core convictions, as follows:

1. Politics is for sissies. Peace is a pipe dream. Only force can be relied upon. Therefore, the failure of force is always due to a failure to use enough of it.

2. Nobody is to be trusted; except us, of course. Others should trust us, primarily because they are untrustworthy, and we are not them.

3. We are better than our enemies. Therefore, everything we do is better than everything our enemies do.

4. However cruel and violent we become, we never will be as violent and cruel as our enemies, now and in the past. Therefore our violence and cruelty cannot be criticized. Criticism from within is treason and self loathing. Criticism from without is anti-Semitism. The only legitimate response to our actions is praise.

5. We are the only real victims. All others are poseurs, hypocrites, and whiners. Acknowledging the suffering of others weakens us, and those who do it are self haters and traitors. But others’ failure to acknowledge our suffering diminishes them and exposes them for the anti-Semites they are.

6. Failed policy is like a lie—repeated over time, it becomes a success; the same goes for political leadership.

7. We don’t care what the world thinks, so we do what we want. But when the world reacts negatively to our truculence, we rage at it and view that reaction as evidence of anti Semitism.

8. Time is on our side, but only because it’s too late for anything good to happen right now, mostly because we have wasted precious time, mostly because those treacherous, pipe dreaming, self haters among us kept slowing us down.

On its face, the recent flotilla mess is quite a simple event. Was the flotilla really peace activism? No. Was it a political provocation? Yes. Does Israel have the right to protect its waters? Yes. Was a defensive operation against the provocateurs justified? Yes. Was the specific operation that was undertaken a tactical and strategic failure? Yes. Is the Gaza blockade a failed, immoral policy? Yes.

To anyone not blinded by ideology, panic or hatred, these facts are so clear as to be rather dull. The screamers and eye rollers on either side fail by now to really register as more than just noise. At least with me.

But what caught my eye as I was watching footage of the raid was one image: the Israeli commando repelling down a rope. At first, that image astonished me. This is the twenty first century, after all. Israel is a technological juggernaut, a surveillance guru, a small warfare aficionado, and this is what they came up with? A hapless latter day Tarzan hanging from the vine? A guy sliding down a rope into a hostile, confused mob?

As I began to reflect on my own reaction, it occurred to me that the image represented something fundamental about Israel’s predicament, a compulsive tic in the Israeli psyche—a scratch in the record, for you old timers—a fixation, a delusion the understanding of which is essential for understanding Israeli consciousness.

The mind that put that guy on the rope is one trapped in the past, mostly because it yearns for it, yearning to be as it once was, back in its heyday of youthful glory —the brave, cunning and nimble Commando David subduing the large, dumb philistine Goliath.

Those days are now gone. The environment that gave birth to that self image has shifted. But the longing for it remains, particularly against the backdrop of what Israel has become since: a bumbling, whining, sanctimonious, dumb-witted brute.

Israel is desperate to rekindle that flame, to return to past glory; and so, like an aging rock star reluctant to give up the spandex and pelvic gyrations, it continues to limp onto the stage, bang out the old tunes, and hope that the familiar gestures and poses will ignite old passions and adorations, thus recharging its old self esteem and reclaiming its rightful place up the charts—all the while pretending to itself that everything is as it was, that it hasn’t really changed, that the audience has not really changed; that the business has not really changed, and if they have, then they can be changed back, brought back into the bosom of old fandom.

Israel always imagines itself to be but one brilliant Entebbe-like commando operation away from turning back the clock and recapturing its old David narrative.

Alas, the world has moved on to other passions, and the world is not buying tickets for the reunion tour, not responding to the old hits, not in awe of the vain attempt to deny the present and relive the past. And thus to everybody but itself, Israel looks increasingly clueless and pathetic, like a twenty-first century soldier dangling on a rope over a hostile, confused mob.

On Time

2010-05-19T17:42:00.000-07:00

My daughter Maya is turning 18 this week, which occasions all manner of reflection, but mainly seems like a good time to think about, well, time. A tricky subject, that; as anyone who‘s ever tried to catch a bus, plan a wedding, or truly comprehend relativity theory will tell you.

Time is something you have, although less and less of. You’re always running out of it. Nobody ever walks out of time. Even if it takes a while, you will slowly run out of time.

Time is also something you do, albeit mostly in prison, which makes the time you do also hard. And if you don’t want to do time then you’d better find time to do your taxes, because that takes time, and time is money, and money tends to run out after taxes.

Time also does things to us, of course; mostly bad things (I’m old, my eyes are fading) that we spend a lot of time telling ourselves are not that bad (I’m wise; I always liked dogs). We also try to make time, although in order to make time, you need to clear up some time, and what time is actually made of remains a thorny philosophical question. It appears on close inspection that time is made entirely of, well, time.

Time is also a gift; you can buy time, and many people seek to buy free time. But if you can’t, then it better be quality time, because you don’t want to waste time; or at least you don’t want to appear as if you don’t know what to do with your time, which is how I appear when I wait for my daughter to finish her shopping at the mall, where she is spending my money like there is no tomorrow.

You can have high time and down time, although it’s better to wait for the down time to get high. Don’t do it on company time, which is often crunch time, or money time, which, if time is money, as most companies claim it is, doesn’t really makes sense to say, and also sounds funny, particularly if you’re high.

Time is often lost, and they say you can’t make up for that; but losing your sense of time is considered a desirable thing, a sign that you’re having a good time.

Time is something you can look for, like a piece of clothing: I’m looking for the right time to fit you in, and I’m looking for the right jeans to fit into. Unlike with clothing, though, you can also bide your time, that is wait; but for what? Well, for the right time.

Time has a paradoxical quality. When we say that something is timeless, we mean that it will probably be present for all time; so timeless means having all the time. Einstein once said something to the effect that an hour on a park bench with a beautiful woman can seem like a minute. But a minute on a hot stove would seem like an hour. He called that phenomenon ‘relativity,’ and won a Nobel for it. That’s big time. Although if you try to put a beautiful woman on a relatively hot stove, I think you will end up doing hard time in the big house.

Sometimes (there’s no escape…), time can seem as both fast and slow at once. For example, raising your daughter to be 18 has that quality. Only yesterday she was running around in her diapers! Those 18 years have slipped by in a flash! But the last time I changed a diaper seems like lifetimes ago.

Since time is so slippery and amorphous, we try to organize, manage and control it. There is nothing inherent, after all, in this age of 18 that would warrant my sudden bout of reflection on time. It’s just a moment, ostensibly like any other moment in the endless flow of time, made meaningful only by the consciousness that beholds it and the devices that track it. In other words, time exists only in the systems that notice and keep it. In other words, we invent time. But you don’t have time to spend on such thoughts, unless you’re high, or planning to major in philosophy, which are kind of one and the same, and which my daughter assures me she definitely is not. She’s actually not quite sure what to major in and which classes to take. I think she should take her time. I want her to take her time and have the time of her life.

Because watching your daughter grow up and your eyes fade out, you know the time of your life is not timeless. You realize, with time, that it ends. This, of course, is timeless knowledge. Here’s Omar Khayyam, Persian poet and mathematician circa 1100:

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and--sans End!

On Israeli Democracy

2010-05-11T14:56:00.000-07:00

A recent poll by the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research at Tel Aviv University, reported in Haaretz.com, looked at a representative sample of 500 Jewish Israelis.

Ninety-eight percent of respondents said freedom of expression was important. Responses regarding specifics, however, revealed a disquieting disconnect.

Forty-three percent said the media should not report information confirmed by Palestinian sources that could reflect poorly on the Israeli army.

Fifty-eight percent of respondents opposed harsh criticism of the country, an increase of 10 percentage points from 2003.

Fifty-seven percent of the respondents agreed that human rights organizations that expose immoral conduct by Israel should not be allowed to operate freely. (Of those who said they were right-wing, 76 percent said human rights groups should not have the right to freely publicize immoral conduct on Israel's part).

Sixty-five percent of all of those questioned think the Israeli media should be barred from publishing news that defense officials think could endanger state security, even if the news was reported abroad.

Eighty-two percent said they back stiff penalties for people who leak illegally obtained information exposing immoral conduct by the defense establishment.

"The public recognizes the importance of democratic values,” Daniel Bar-Tal, a professor at the university's school of education, and one of the conference's organizers, is quoted as saying, “but when they need to be applied, it turns out most people are almost anti-democratic…Faith in democratic values was not measured abstractly, but rather was put to the test regarding specific cases. Then, it turns out the Israeli public is not tolerant or pluralistic".

Another conference participant, Ben-Gurion University's David Newman, called the polling results, "very worrying…We say Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, but in Europe they are beginning to think of us otherwise".

Before we talk politics, let’s first talk psychology.

These results, in a psychological context, reflect a known gap between the abstract/general and concrete/personal realms of experience. What we love in the abstract we often dislike in the concrete.

Psychology research has shown, for example, that while parents rate raising children as their most meaningful endeavor, they rate the actual tasks of daily parenting as mostly boring and tedious.

The opposite, of course, is also true. Things we hate in the abstract, we often like in the concrete. For example, everybody hates mean kickass divorce lawyers but would like their own divorce lawyer to be the meanest ass-kicker. The same can be said about political representatives (I hate congress, but my congressman is great), computers (I hate computers, but I love my computer), government programs (I hate big government, but love my social security check) and so on.

My own research has discovered the same effect regarding daycare centers: most parents report that the daycare system is in disrepair while their child’s daycare center is high quality.

Psychologically, a certain disconnect between the abstract and the concrete is the norm, not the exception. Psychological health entails a balance—that is, a tension—between the need for consistency and the demands of complexity. We feel good when our abstract notions are consistent with our concrete experience, when we kiss the person we love.

But we also must negotiate a complex reality that often requires us to avoid kissing the person we love, or to kiss ones we dislike. The abstract has a different feel—different uses, dynamics, and implications—than the concrete. Thinking about sex is a different experience than being in bed with someone.

The equation is difficult to manage. If you neglect consistency and succumb to complexity, you end up in chaos. But maintaining adequate consistency is also tricky. To accomplish it, we need to first bind ourselves under the rules that bind everybody. This means giving up something precious—our sense of autonomy and uniqueness. To achieve consistency, we also need to translate abstract notions into daily behaviors. This is hard work. A drawing of a building is much easier to produce and maintain than an actual building.

Once the psychology is understood, we can say something about the politics. We can say that the gap exposed in the Israeli population probably exists in other populations around the world.

We can also admit that the Israeli situation has unique elements that make this gap even less surprising. Israel is at war. Survival fears often stir raw biological tendencies that override our more refined, complex, socialized reactions. Even those who espouse good table manners may pounce on food if they are starving. Israeli citizens can therefore be expected to have added difficulty translating lofty abstract ideals (like freedom of speech), into concrete behaviors on the ground (letting the critics speak in the public square).

But this is exactly Israel’s challenge. To retain its democratic spirit, strength and purpose, Israel must remain humane in some rather inhumane circumstances. Remain calm amid dangers. Remain consistent amid great complexity.

Because while there’s always a gap between the abstract and the concrete, they are two parts of one dynamic system: They inform each other. They influence each other. They balance each other. Democratic states can, and must, tolerate a certain level of undemocratic impulse—that’s muscle tension, which indicates muscle life. But beyond a certain level, muscle tension becomes muscle tear, then muscle destruction, and finally muscle death.

On Elie Wiesel's Jerusalem Ad

2010-04-22T21:51:00.000-07:00

The newspaper Haaretz reported on a recent full page ad, taken by Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel in the Washington Post, in which he seems to argue, strangely, that political pressure would not produce a solution to the issue of Jerusalem.

"For me, the Jew that I am, Jerusalem is above politics," Wiesel wrote. "It is mentioned more than six hundred times in Scripture - and not a single time in the Koran."

Wiesel is an eloquent writer, and his concerns appear genuine. But his approach is ill advised. Jerusalem, of course, is not above politics. Jerusalem is political, in addition to being many other things such as archeological, demographic, religious, symbolic and historic.

What’s more, politics, in its true essence, is not something one should aspire to rise above; it is how we manage what would otherwise be handled by bloodshed.
Wiesel seems to argue for a personal stance regarding Jerusalem. He writes, “…the first song I heard was my mother's lullaby about and for Jerusalem."

But the personal, for that matter, is not above the political. The personal is political. For proof of that, and of the fact that nothing is really above politics, Wiesel need do no more than look at himself, and his own life’s work.

Wiesel’s childhood memories are touching, but they are the Jerusalem memories of one man, a man who is neither above nor below any other man. And other men and women have other memories of Jerusalem. As Debra DeLee, APN's president and CEO, noted in response: "…Jerusalem is not just a Jewish symbol. It is also a holy city to billions of Christians and Muslims worldwide. It is Israel's capital, but it is also a focal point of Palestinian national aspirations."

Wiesel’s recycling of the old argument about the number of times Jerusalem is mentioned in the Bible vs. the Koran is a disappointing, bumper sticker-level argumentation, not a point of serious discussion—be it political, philosophical, religious or historical. Counting biblical mentions implies that the bible should be an authoritative basis upon which to base current resolutions, agreements and laws. But the bible cannot decide contemporary conflict. If anything, in contemporary usage, sacred texts inflame conflicts, not settle them.

Enlisting biblical mentions as moral ammunition is a slippery slope Wiesel cannot wish to start down. The bible has many mentions of stoning and slave holding. What should we make of those? It has no mention of democracy, of technology, of contemporary sensibilities regarding inter-group tolerance, nonviolence, women’s equality, or minority rights. It has no mention of the Holocaust. Should we disregard all these in the effort to shape contemporary personal and national identity, to resolve border, land, and religious disputes with our neighbors? The bible may to some degree inform Jerusalem’s present and future, but it cannot referee or ultimately determine them. Politics will.

Contemporary life is an emergent dynamic construct that uses the past but does not freeze or sanctify it (people who try to freeze and sanctify the past are not, I’d guess, ones with whom Wiesel would want to be aligned). So it is with secular Zionism, and so it is with Palestinian statehood.

The moral and emotional strength of one’s ties to the land are not decided by biblical verse. A Palestinian family living in Jerusalem for several generations has a moral claim on Jerusalem that is at least equal, if not superior to, the claim of an American Jew whose family never lived in Jerusalem.

In the ad, titled "For Jerusalem", Wiesel writes that, "The anguish over Jerusalem is not about real estate but about memory," In this too he is wrong. The anguish about Jerusalem is indeed about real estate, because real estate forms memory. The biblical mentions he leans on are mentions of real estate, which turn to memory, which turn to symbol. (See under: The Wailing Wall).

Wiesel adds that the old city of Jerusalem would still be Arab if Jordan had not joined Egypt and Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War. This is probably true; but it is also true that old city Jerusalem would be Arab today if Israel had withdrawn from the territories after the war.

Wiesel asks: "Why tackle the most complex and sensitive problem prematurely? Why not first take steps which will allow the Israeli and Palestinian communities to find ways to live together in an atmosphere of security. Why not leave the most difficult, the most sensitive issue, for such a time?"

The notion that Jerusalem should be tackled last is not new. Wiesel must know, however, that it is in essence a political notion. It turns out that the facts on the ground—the demographic, real estate facts—point to the need to address Jerusalem now. On the ground, in Jerusalem and in the West Bank as a whole, the reality on the ground is that if a political solution dividing the real estate is not found soon, the window for finding it may close.

Turning Jerusalem political now is not a threat to Israel. The alternative to it is the real threat. Wiesel needs only to read the bible to see what the alternatives to political solution are when it comes to Jerusalem.

On The Recent Biden Visit Affair

2010-04-09T17:32:00.000-07:00

Theories abound in the Israeli and American press about the real reasons for the recent clash between these two ‘special friends.’ Ostensibly, Israel’s decision to announce further building efforts in east Jerusalem—in the middle of the U.S. vice president’s peace promotion visit—has raised America’s ire because it undermined the vice president’s mission to help reignite peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

But Israel has never promised to stop building in east Jerusalem, and it has been continuously building on Palestinian lands for decades, with American money, even in the midst of previous peace negotiations. So what gives?

Some believe that Obama picked a fight, using the opportunity to maneuver for Bibi’s head, to get the more left-leaning Tzipi Livni elected. Others believe that Obama, feeling wobbly at the home front, is ultra sensitive at this time to seeming weak on foreign affairs. And there are always those who suspect the depth of Obama’s overall commitment to protecting Israel’s interests.

The meaning of Israel’s announcement about the new building project itself is also up for debate. Some believe it was a planned provocation for internal political gain—Bibi signaling to his right flank his strength. Or perhaps it was an innocent blunder rooted in bureaucratic tin ears. Or maybe it was a calculated move by the despicable Eli Yishay, the minister of internal affairs (who argued last year that migrants should not be allowed to settle permanently is Israel because they bring in, "a range of diseases such as hepatitis, measles, tuberculosis and AIDS”), to rouse hard line religious voters and foil Obama, who represents everything the Israeli religious right loathes--that is, reasoned pragmatism, cultural and religious inclusiveness and sensitivity, and robust mental health.

Either way, most complex, meaningful events are multiply determined, and it is quite likely that all these reasons are correct to some degree. We may know more in hindsight, years from now, when memoirs are written. But even then we will not know completely, since what we tell ourselves in hindsight, even in earnest, may have little to do with what actually went on in real time. Just like the stories we tell ourselves in adulthood about our childhood have little to do with the stories that occupied our heads when we were kids.

In this case, as in many others, the reasons are less important than what the events reveal about the participants’ relations. What is happening here is on some level akin to a marital spat that, while triggered by some minutiae incident, is not really about that incident but rather reveals deep long standing fault lines or festering wounds. What the latest tiff makes clear is that there’s a growing tension in US-Israel relations, and a growing divide. The partners have grown apart.
As of now, it is unclear whether this spat signals a real shift in American stance on Israel, or just some periodic venting of frustrations. We don’t yet know if the response is a vacation or a re-location.

To be sure, the U.S. has good reason to vent; the billions it sinks into Israel are propping up an increasingly dark, messianic, and echo-chambered state apparatus, and national consciousness, that are becoming less tolerant, less democratic, less hopeful and less just by the minute.

Israel’s behavior resembles that of a troubled spoiled boy who takes allowance money from his rich dad and uses it to buy booze, get wasted, and crash the father’s formal office party, making a lewd pass at the father’s loyal secretary.

But for Israel’s sake, let’s hope what we are seeing is not just America blowing off steam. Because without a forceful international intervention in the region, on the seriousness caliber of the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, the hopes for Israel’s survival, at least in recognizable form; at least in a form worth defending, are dimming.

You wouldn’t know it, of course, looking at the outside sheen of Israeli life. The economy is strong. The culture is vibrant. The standard of living is high. Terror attacks have all but stopped. On its face, Israel does not feel an urgency to solve its Palestinian problem. But appearances are deceiving, particularly in the Middle East.

What is happening in Israel now is akin to the real estate and financial bubbles that recently almost wrecked the American economy. Instead of financial instruments, Israeli speculators trade in moral assets and political futures. Morally, Israel continues to borrow good will from the U.S. against its old moral brand-name recognition. All the while, through years of occupation and emerging currents of religiously-based bigotry, the actual moral assets that constituted the brand are fast depreciating.

Politically, like American speculators who accepted the assumption that housing prices will always go up, Israeli (and American Jewish) leaders fail to see that past performance of Israel’s stock in the U.S. does not guarantee future performance. The visions and promises they spread already have no real value to back them up. They are junk political bonds. Israel no longer delivers the returns it used to, but it insists on receiving the same first-class treatment and compensation.

Like a crooked entrepreneur who uses investors’ money to pay for personal, reckless shopping sprees while neglecting the business of running the actual company, Israel continues to use the good will it has raised by going public with its ‘two-state solution’ start up for insane building sprees that destroy the value of the actual enterprise that raised the good will in the first place.

Even without the benefit of hindsight, you can see where this enterprise is heading.

On American and Israeli Jews

2010-04-09T17:29:00.000-07:00

A recent article in Ynetnews warns about a brewing crisis between Israel and American Jewry regarding the old question of ‘Who is a Jew.” It appears that Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s foreign minister, and Eli Yishay, leader of the orthodox Shas party, are collaborating on a legislative maneuver in which Shas would allow the passage of civil marriage legislation—pushed by Lieberman—in exchange for gaining exclusive control over conversion. Such a move would essentially render the 85-90% of American Jews who are not orthodox not quite Jewish enough for Israel’s official tastes.

Now, the absence of civil marriage in Israel is a travesty that must be corrected. But linking this move, as Lieberman is trying to do, to an orthodox power grab regarding conversion would be a calamitous event, signaling a sorry shift in Israel’s cultural-religious stance, with particular implications for its strongest and most loyal supporter—American Jewry.

As reported in Ynetnews, Executive President and CEO of United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism, Rabbi Steven Wernick, summarized the concern, saying, "If Israel wants to be the country of the Jews, it needs to start being a country for all the Jews." Conservative Rabbi Julie Schonfeld the executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly, the association of Conservative rabbis worldwide, is quoted as saying: "What is happening is damaging to Israel's security, and I am not saying this as a metaphor… Most of the representatives in AIPAC are Conservative and Reform who work day and night for Israel in the US. But when these people arrive in Israel, they are treated as non-Jews. Chairs are thrown at them at the Kotel. The police arrest them. You need to understand that a threat to our relations with Israel is a threat to the resilience and security of the country."

Schonfeld warns correctly that, "The young generation sees Israel as a society with growing religious zealotry and oppression. We must change the growing alienation of young Jews in the Diaspora, who are unwilling to accept a society that allows a religious minority to contemptibly threaten their religious values."

Ynetnews reports that the Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Oren “received more emails in the past few days than all letters received at the embassy in the past decade on any issue, including the Second Lebanon War and Operation Cast Lead.”

What is being revealed here is that in addition to drifting away from current American thinking and political interests (illustrated by the latest row over building projects in East Jerusalem), Israel is also drifting away from the cultural-religious interests and sensibilities of its Jewish American supporters. You may not hear it from the leadership both here and in Israel, but the two conflicts are related.

In truth, non-orthodox American Jews find themselves hoisted on their own petard. For years, they stood by silently—and at times cheered on—as Israel kept pursuing a brutal policy of occupation based on—and energized by—dark nationalistic and religious impulses that are patently incompatible with the development of a democratic, tolerant and pragmatist culture. Lieberman spiteful right wing nationalist agenda is as blunt, retrograde, intolerant and cynical as Yishai’s orthodox theocratic agenda. Both of these ideologies are on the wane among American Jews, but they are overtaking the Israeli landscape, and they have been doing so for years with American Jews’ support.

AIPAC in particular has some explaining to do regarding how it can suddenly become alarmed over Israel’s morally offensive religious character while managing to remain silent all these years regarding Israel’s morally offensive politics of occupation and trenchant militarism. After all, within the type of nationalistic, messianic political and cultural climate that AIPAC has enabled and nurtured, religious pluralism and tolerance cannot seriously be expected to bloom.

Even before the latest row over conversion, it was apparent that non-orthodox American Jews are becoming less and less comfortable with how the power of orthodox Israeli Jews is changing Israel.

Union for Reform Judaism President Rabbi Eric Yoffie, with whose denomination some 40% of US Jewry is affiliated, was quoted as saying, "The State of Israel is not the country of Israelis. If so, then I have no connection with the country. What connects me is the fact that this is the country of the Jews. This is the essential point. Zionism is a movement for Jews. Whoever doesn't understand this has no idea what the State of Israel is… There is nothing in the world more important to the State of Israel than good relations with America. This is the top-most value. Only here can we help defend the country and ensure its future. There is no chance that these relations continue to be strong without American Jews."

Rabbi Yoffie has his heart in the right place. But the truth is that AIPAC and American Jewry have behaved for years as if Israel is the land of Israelis, not of the Jews. Worse yet, instead of getting involved in the life of Israel they got involved in the myth of it. Now the ugly reality, embodied by Mr. Lieberman, is colliding with the pretty myth and both are crumbling. A second truth is that for the Israeli orthodox and their leadership, America and Zionism matter little compared to the messianic vision of theocratic rule. A third truth is that for the rising tide of Israeli orthodox Judaism, represented by Mr. Yishai and his ilk, the question of whether Israel is the land of Israelis or Jews is beside the point in the case of Mr. Yoffie, because he is neither an Israeli nor, to their minds, a Jew.

On Organ Donations in Israel

2010-02-21T18:10:00.000-08:00

You don’t commonly hear good news from Israel, particularly when it comes to forward-looking, science-based social policy. In a country where the political system is so heavily influenced by the most cynical and fundamentalist religious parties such news is bound to be rare. This is why it is doubly heartening to hear the news coming out of Israel regarding its new organ donation policy.

In a few short years, Israel has become a leader in thinking and policy in this field; a true light onto other nations.

The Israeli Knesset has recently approved important legislation in this regard. First was the 2008 law that recognized brain death as the legal definition of death. This is important because the organs of a brain dead person can be usefully harvested, whereas waiting for the traditional heart death to occur renders nil the odds of successful harvesting.

A recognition of brain death as legal death has been a particular obstacle in Israel because many religious authorities proclaim that the Torah only recognizes heart death as death and have therefore long opposed the change. The rabbinate finally came on board for the new law; still, holdouts remain, particularly among the ultra orthodox, who are trying to mobilize against the law, and have traditionally been reluctant to donate their organs—although they have not shied away from accepting donated organs for themselves, when needed.

The second part of the law, just enacted, gives the families of dead organ donors monetary compensation, in the thousands of dollars, and also covers live donors’ post-operation medical expenses. By the new law, Israelis who sign an organ donation card also receive priority in case they end up needing an organ. The law provides that if two people are in similar circumstances needing an organ, the one who signed the donation card will receive priority over the one who did not. A calculus has also been established whereby transplant candidates with relatives who have consented to donation or volunteered for a live donation in the past will get priority over transplant candidates whose relatives have not so participated.

These new measures are supposed to ease the grave shortage of organs available for transplantation in Israel. Historically, Israelis have not donated their organs at the same rates as citizens in other developed nations. Israel has nine donors per 1 million people compared to 25 per million in the United States.

Only 10 percent of Israelis sign an organ donor’s card, compared to 30 percent or more in western European countries. In the United States, close to 40 percent of adults with a driver's license are registered organ donors. The Israeli ‘rate of consent,’ defined as the proportion of actual donors of total number of medically eligible brain dead donors, has hovered around 45 percent in the past decade, compared to 60-90 percent range in most other industrialized nations.

The need for more Israeli organ donors has become acute recently after the Knesset, in 2008, decided to stop allowing the Ministry of Health to pay for organ transplants obtained in countries that outlaw organ sales. In the 10 years prior to this change, desperate Israelis have gone far and wide in search of organs, resulting in the emergence of two problems. First, donations inside Israel dropped. In addition, a difficult moral hazard has appeared, as Israelis were purchasing organs in places such as China, Eastern Europe, and the Philippines, where organs are often harvested illegally or through the manipulation and mistreatment of poor, ignorant donors.

Now, the issue of organ donations is complex and fraught, and the new approach carries its own risks. There is a risk of abuse, whereby unscrupulous doctors hasten the death of one person to save another; where old or feeble-minded individuals are coerced into signing away their organs against their will so that the family may benefit from money or later access. There surely are other problematic scenarios, some of which have not been anticipated yet. Acknowledging the risks, the new law allows for a review process within two years of implementation.

But the potential for abuse in itself doesn’t negate the value of good policy. And rewarding people for doing the humane, compassionate and responsible thing with their organs upon their death is good policy. Abuse, if it occurs, can and should be identified, battled against, minimized and punished.

The law’s heart—and brain—are surely in the right place. Many people die unnecessarily every year because of the unavailability of organs. Such unavailability rests chiefly on a foundation of ignorance and fear and cannot be justified on any serious moral grounds. The law will do two good things: encourage organ donations in Israel, and reduce morally dubious ‘transplant tourism.’
The new law also embodies a process by which old, shady, and irrational notions of the sacredness of the dead give way to more reasonable, humane, and productive notions of the sacredness of life. Any move away from the infantile notion that there is inherent value in the bodies of the dead being buried whole or left undisturbed after death is a welcome move for Israeli society.

On Charity

2010-01-25T13:54:00.000-08:00

The horrors in Haiti got me thinking about the psychology of charity. On its face, the act of charitable giving is quite simple and intuitively appealing. Someone is in dire need, you sense their pain, and you land a hand. This helpful impulse is in fact a part of the unique hardware of the human species. We are highly autonomous and creative as individuals, but we can only survive in highly organized groups. We have therefore developed the ability, missing in other primates, to respond to subtle cues in others not only instrumentally, but emotionally.

We feel empathy in a way unheard of in the animal kingdom. We are able to feel empathy—to literally experience someone else’s feelings as our own--not only toward our own immediate relatives, but toward any member of the species, and, for that matter, toward members of other species. If you see a wounded dog in the street you actually feel the dog’s pain and terror. A giraffe could not care less about a wounded zebra.

Our capacity for empathy is so deeply wired that we respond not just to actual suffering of actual living beings but to the representation of suffering. No other animal can identify emotionally with an abstract painting, a cartoon drawing, or the plight of fictional characters on a distant imaginary planet. That’s why animals don’t have use for art.

Our ability to empathize is the social glue that helps us maintain the complex cooperative structures required to sustain the species. The recent discovery of a system of “mirror neurons” provides the physiological explanation for this capacity. Mirror neurons fire both when we perform a certain act and when we observe it in others. Thus, seeing someone get hurt activates the same neural structure that responds when we ourselves are hurt.

This is why, contrary to popular opinion and the impression you get from the nightly news, the human tendency to cooperate and sooth is stronger and deeper than the tendency to compete and aggress. Competition, for one, depends on cooperation, because if you can’t cooperate to agree on the rules of the competition, there will be no competition.

Aggression is also secondary to cooperation in our species. Most of us, after all, live lives that are very exposed and vulnerable to the ill intentions of others. And most of us have the capacity to spread much harm around, if we so choose. But if you look at the capacity for harm each of us possesses in relation to the level of harmful behaviors that we actually perform every day, you will find that harm is an exception, not the rule, for human behavior around the world.

So charity is in our genes. And yet charitable action, as personal and social habit, has some dubious features. First, our charitable impulse tends to be reactive, not proactive. We are good at reacting to the disaster that has happened, not at preparing for the one yet to happen. How many of those shelling out money now would have contributed similarly to an effort to bring Haiti’s buildings up to code some years before the quake? We know rationally that prevention is more useful and effective than treatment (and hence more charitable), but anticipatory prevention efforts do not usually provoke the emotional response that underlies much charitable giving. We are less likely to donate money to vaccinate a healthy baby than we are to donate money to save an already sick one, even though the former strategy is much more effective, and hence more humane.

We also tend to respond with charity to the presentation of need, rather than to actual need. Right now and every day around the world there are people in desperate need, hungry and wounded and dying just like those in Haiti. But their plight is defuse and silent, spread out over continents and over time. It is, in other words, boring, not exciting. And boredom does not elicit charitable giving.

One may argue that, morally, if the life of a poor Haitian family is really as worthy as the life of a family in the U.S., then that life should not depend on whether someone in the US woke up in a charitable mood; should not depend on a YouTube video; should not depend on whether that family’s suffering has been successfully bundled into the sufficiently compelling narrative of the latest spectacular disaster. And yet our approach to charity often assures that this remains the case. We want to keep the power to dole out charity when and if we wish. That is understandable, but it has little to do with effectively protecting and saving people. It has everything to do with making ourselves feel good in a selfish, and intellectually lazy, manner while at the same time avoiding the real work—the change of consciousness, the systemic political change, and the real prolonged sacrifices—that would actually facilitate better lives for weak populations around the world.

Instead of congratulating ourselves yet again on our humanity and kindness as we tweet $10 for the poor Haitians, we should ask real questions about our process of compassion, and whether better ways exist to harness it for real, sustained, demonstrable good. Instead of repeatedly throwing lifelines into the riptide to save the drowning, we may want to figure out why so many repeatedly enter the treacherous waters in the first place.

On Gilad Shallit

2009-12-09T05:57:00.000-08:00

Rumors are swirling again about a deal for the release of Gilad Shallit. Indeed, by the time you read this column, he may already have been freed. Either way, The Shallit situation poses many interesting dilemmas. A purely rational analysis seems to point clearly against the proposed deal for his release. To save one soldier, Israel is willing to create conditions—by releasing avowed, trained terrorists, creating incentives for future kidnappings, and boosting Hamas’s power—likely to bring about many more Jewish (and Arab) deaths. At first glance, those who support the deal appear to be irrational. But there are several ways to frame human rationality.

Every human group, like every individual human being, has both instrumental and emotional needs—the business of matter and the business of spirit. To remain strong and functional, a group must tend to both. Right now in Israel, those who argue against the proposed Shallit deal are emphasizing the group’s instrumental needs—its political interests. Those who want him back at all cost are responding to the group’s emotional needs—the unifying myths and narratives of its identity.

A group that neglects its instrumental needs risks being overwhelmed from the outside. A group without joint emotional bonds risks rotting from within. Thus, both extreme notions—the instrumental, ‘no negotiation with terrorists’ and its emotional counterpart, ‘leave no soldier behind’--are counter-productive as guiding principles of national behavior. A healthy approach will be a balanced approach, sacrificing the posturing of perfection—be it instrumental or emotional---for the gray mix of frustration and gratification that marks actual human existence.

The Shalit issue also illuminates our curious entanglement with our moral impulse. Our moral impulse is an emergent property of our group nature. We are herd animals; we survive and thrive only in a group setting. As Freud knew, if we fail to internalize a set of shared abstract rules of moral conduct—a super ego--then we cannot trust each other, cannot cooperate effectively, and thus cannot survive.
But human morality has certain quirks, two of which are illuminated in the Shallit case.

First is the characteristic differentiation between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ We live in groups, and our strength depends on the strength of our group. In the process of strengthening our group, we tend to devalue other groups. We respond differently to the same thing based on whether it’s done by ‘us’ or by ‘them.’ Our cruelty in war, for example, is justified by the circumstances, while ‘their’ cruelty is barbaric, a part of ‘their’ villainous nature. The ‘civilized’ west that has created, perfected and used weapons of mass destruction to massacre millions still looks at the far less efficient machete killers of Africa as ‘barbarians.’

Moreover, ‘we’ can treat our own people badly, but ‘them’ had better not. Blacks can say ‘nigger,’ but whites had better not. All the people who care about Shallit could easily pull their energy and clout and effort together to save some poor, homeless, dying Israelis from unbearable misery right now, without any adverse consequences at all, but they will not do it. They would do it for Shallit, who’s in the grip of ‘them.’

Second is the moral differentiation we make between the abstract and the specific. In psychological studies, people are given a dilemma: a train is out of control and about to kill five people. You can divert it to another rail line on which it will kill one person. Will you pull the lever? 90% say yes. But then they’re asks: you’re on a bridge and you see a train heading toward the five people. You can stop it and save them by pushing one man off the bridge and onto the train’s path, killing him. Would you do it? Only 10% say yes.

There is something distasteful to most people about personally hurting others. That’s why wars must be made into a group project, where responsibility is defused; that’s also why enemies need to be reduced to a less-than-human status, lest it prove difficult to hurt our own mirror image.

Principled cruelty is more easily utilized in the abstract. In a famous study from the 30s--when institutional overt prejudice against minorities was the norm--a researcher travelled with his Chinese companions across the US noting how they were treated at hotels and restaurants. Of 250 or so establishments visited, only one refused service. Later, the researcher sent these institutions questionnaires inquiring if they would agree to serve a Chinese person. Of all the establishments surveyed, 90% said they would not serve Chinese guests.

In the Shallit case the desire to hold up an abstract instrumental group principle (do not negotiate with terrorists) collides not only with an abstract emotional principle (don’t leave our people behind), but also with the shattering power of the specific. A human face does a lot to make people forget their abstractions. When you walk down the street, you try to look away from the beggar in the corner, because making eye contact would turn an abstract problem of homelessness into a specific human encounter, which will make a refusal much harder, even if you are quite certain the money you give will be used for booze or drugs. Israelis have seen the face and name of Gilad Shallit, and it’s difficult for them to turn away.

On the Status of Women and Religion

2009-11-28T16:52:00.000-08:00

Reading the Israeli papers recently, a story caught my eye: One of the leading ultraorthodox rabbis in the city of Beit Shemesh, Natan Kopschitz, has apparently published a list of behavioral rules and instructions of dress and modesty for the women of his flock. The list included the following dictates: women should walk in a way that does not attract attention; they should speak quietly in public; they should avoid gathering in central public places; they should stay on side streets so as not to distract the men; they should cover their necks; girls should not be allowed to ride bicycles; married women should not be allowed to speak on their cell phones in public.

The article mentioned a recent US State Department report on international religious freedom. I looked it up. It had these things to say about religion and women in Israel:

"The Government, through the Chief Rabbinate, discriminates against women in civil status matters related to marriage and divorce. Under the Jewish religious court's interpretation of personal status law, a Jewish woman may not receive a final writ of divorce without her husband's consent. Consequently, thousands of women, so-called agunot--"chained women"--are unable to remarry or have legitimate children because their husbands have either disappeared or refused to grant divorces. Rabbinical tribunals had the authority to impose sanctions on husbands who refuse to divorce their wives or on wives who refuse to accept divorce from their husbands, but they could not grant a divorce without the husband's consent, and women could not seek redress in civil courts."

The report goes on to say:

"The state transportation company, Egged, which operates the country's public transportation system, continued to operate sex-segregated busses along city and intra-city routes frequented by ultra-Orthodox Jews. Women who refuse to sit at the back of such busses risk harassment and physical assault by male passengers.
Governmental authorities prohibit mixed gender prayer services at religious sites in deference to the belief of most Orthodox Jews that such services violate the precepts of Judaism. At the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism, men and women must use separate areas to visit and pray. Women also are not allowed to conduct prayers at the Western Wall while wearing prayer shawls, which are typically worn by Jewish men, and are not permitted to read from Torah scrolls.
As in past years, ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem and other ultra-Orthodox enclaves threw rocks at passing motorists driving on the Sabbath and periodically harassed or assaulted women whose appearance they considered immodest, including by throwing acid on them."

And then this gem:

"In order to marry in government-recognized ceremonies, Jews had to undergo marriage counseling administered by the Orthodox religious authorities. As part of this counseling, all Jews--including the secular majority and those who practice reform or conservative Judaism--were instructed to respect traditional Orthodox family roles. A brochure used in the counseling during the reporting period compared women to clay and urged the husband to 'shape and mold her as he pleases.' The husband is also instructed not to become "spineless" or tolerate disrespectful behavior from his wife: 'If she is disrespectful you must not give in; you can become angry and stop talking to her until she realizes she is wrong.' The husband is also admonished to compliment his wife regularly, 'even if it is a lie,' because 'a woman who has not been complimented is like a fish out of water.'"

Some columns practically write themselves…

If you look at the status of women in the ultraorthodox community in Israel, you see oppression, injustice, violence, and hypocrisy. If you look at the ultraorthodox community within Israel you see that it is expanding both demographically and in its societal and political influence. A quarter of Israeli first graders already are enrolled in ultraorthodox schools. You can guess the gender ideology that is taught to them there. If you look around the world, you can see a fairly clear link between economic prosperity and democracy and the status of women. Democratic, prosperous nations, of the kind you would want to live in—and want your daughter to live in--generally are more integrated, equal, egalitarian and flexible regarding gender rules and roles, with broader female freedoms and larger female participation in the public realms.

Where women are oppressed, fundamentalist religion flourishes. One thing all three monotheistic world religions have in common is their insistence on trying to control and curtail women’s legal, civil and sexual rights. In all three religions, at least in their fundamentalist wings, one certain and prominent meaning of religious life is that men of power and authority tell women who have neither how to live. It is so in Jerusalem as it is in Tehran. You can find no world religion in which the opposite is systemically, or even anecdotally, true.

The math is inevitable. Israel is becoming more religiously fundamentalist and less hospitable to women. If the camel’s nose gets under the tent, the hump is not far behind. If ultraorthodox Judaism and women’s oppression are on the ascent in Israel, whither go democracy and prosperity?

On the Jewish Terrorist

2009-11-12T22:09:00.000-08:00

These are the headlines in the Israeli papers earlier last week:

“Alleged Jewish terrorist arrested for murder, series of bomb attacks”

According to Haaretz newspaper, Yaakov "Jack" Teitel, 37, a Florida-born resident of the West Bank outpost Shvut Rachel, “was arrested last month for suspected murder and for his alleged role in a string of attempted murder plots…He is suspected of killing two Palestinians…rigging the package bomb which left the child of a Messianic Jew seriously wounded… attempting to kill left-wing professor Ze'ev Sternhell, and for his alleged role in a series of warning attacks against Israel Police at the time of the Gay Pride Parades…During a search of his home, police discovered rifles, handguns and explosive materials.”

According to Israeli Police, Teitel has confessed to most of the allegations against him.

“He even apparently claimed during his investigation to involvement in the attack on a gay-lesbian youth club in Tel Aviv, in which two people were killed. The Shin Bet has said, however, that there is not sufficient evidence at this point to tie him to that attack…Teitel was arrested on October 7 in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Har Nof, in Jerusalem, after posting signs around town praising the attack on the Tel Aviv gay club…His posters were signed with the name 'Shleisel,' referring to the ultra-Orthodox man who stabbed and wounded a number of marchers during the Jerusalem pride parade a couple of years ago…Police also found posters in his neighborhood offering a one million shekel reward to anyone killing a member of Israel's Peace Now movement, that opposes West Bank settlement activity…According to a senior Shin Bet source, Teitel was an "autodidact" who taught himself to use weapons and rig explosives, apparently on the Internet…Teitel has confessed to murdering a Palestinian shepherd near Mount Hebron in 1997 and to killing an Arab taxi driver in East Jerusalem some two months later. He said that he came to Israel precisely to carry out attacks against Palestinians as revenge for suicide bombings.”

Now, Teitel, of course, is innocent until proven guilty. Moreover, it is important not to tar a whole people with the doings of a single, apparently deranged individual. At the same time, several things can and should be said.

First, for most Israelis and those who know Israel well, these allegations are not at all implausible, not even surprising. It will be shocking if Teitel is found innocent. It would have been shocking if the suspect in such crimes was a secular left winger. We may want to ask ourselves why that is. One answer is that historically in Israel, ideologically-motivated murderous acts against Arabs and other Jews have been a province of the religious right. The names Yonah Avrushmi, Baruch Goldstein, and Ygal Amir should quickly come to mind in this context. If they don’t, then Google them.

Secondly, we can take a look at Teitel’s alleged targets and ask ourselves this: What is the connection between a Palestinian, an Arab-Israeli, a Messianic Jew, a gay or lesbian youth, a ‘Peace Now’ activist, and an Israeli policeman doing his job on the streets of Jerusalem? These were Teitel’s alleged targets, and while violence against them may be attributed to his individual derangement, the connection he made between them may not. These targets are connected in the ideological mindset of the Israeli religious right.

While what actual criminal harm Teitel has done is yet to be determined in a court of law, his ideological mindset, as evident in his known words and actions, is fact. In this mindset, a conglomerate of forces are converging to threaten the Jews, and those forces—non-Jews; non-ultraorthodox Jews; non-ultraorthodox, non- right wing Jews; the secular apparatus of national law and order and the minority groups it protects—need to be defeated. Teitel’s delusional mind is of course his own. But there is no mind independent of culture. Teitel moved from the US to Israel, to an ultra orthodox settlement, not randomly, but in purposeful pursuit of a cultural sense of belonging.

The ideological and religious underpinnings of Teitel’s mind are well known and clear. And at the end of the day, they, ironically, constitute the real threat to Jews. Teitel’s world is upside down. Of all the forces he perceived as the enemies of the Jews, the biggest enemy of Jewish survival, progress, enlightenment and, it seems, mental health, is the ideology from which he has sprouted.

The fruits of intolerant religious extremism are fairly evident in the Muslim world today. Intolerant religious extremism, if left unchecked and allowed to take a dominant hold of Judaism, will yield the same putrid fruit in the Jewish world. Teitel’s bad seed found root in an ideological soil that, while not currently yielding murderous delusional extremists very frequently, still seems to give rise to more than its share of such. This mindset still nurtures, under its guise of Jewish authenticity and salvation, the dark seeds of Jewish atrophy and destruction.

On Yum Kippur

2009-10-05T14:11:00.000-07:00

Many Jews avoided eating for a day earlier last week, spent a day praying feverishly for forgiveness. Some slaughtered chicken and waived them over their heads in a strange ancient sin transmission ritual. Why?

Most participants did not do so out of a literal fear of God. They did so because it feels good to belong to an ancient tradition; because they believe that such traditions have protected the Jews for thousands of years and should not be abandoned; because these traditions are what they have learned as children.

All these are understandable reasons. Human beings, specks of meaningless dust in the big scheme of things, generally derive a sense of security from linking themselves to others and creating elaborate rituals to celebrate the group’s identity and power. Rituals bring order to chaos, meaning to meaninglessness, a time line to infinite time. Shared rituals are our in-crowd code; they help us tell friend from foe; they signal to ourselves and to others that our group is organized, unified and therefore strong.

Linking ourselves to ancient tradition through ancient rituals also confers confidence because we tend to believe in things that have withstood the test of time.

Finally, People tend to continue the ways of their childhood. This is true for language, religion, politics, geographical location, etc. On all these measures people tend to keep what their parents gave them. What we grew up with tends to be associated with ‘home’ which is usually associated with warmth and safety and order and love. So we keep up the ritual to keep up the feelings that arrive with it.

While understandable, these reasons are also problematic.

First is the problem of false perspective. There’s romance to what is ancient. Many assume that the ancient ways were somehow better, when in fact those who lived in ancient times spent much energy trying to extract themselves from these very ways. For example, those who seek a ‘return to nature’ as a solution to our current problems tend to forget that our ancestors worked for thousands of years to get away from nature, to control and tame it, perhaps for good reasons.
Religious practices at times show a similar dynamic. The idea of incurring the actual wrath of God for infractions was once a commonplace notion, a fact of consciousness. Then came the enlightenment. We learned that lightning is electricity, not divinity; that the earth is not the center of the universe; that antibiotics are more effective than exorcism or prayer. But as the limitations of our current explanatory systems become ever clearer—and every human system has limitations—a misplaced harkening for the supposed remedy of the old ways emerges.

For the American Jew, the truth is that your life now is better than the life of every Jew who ever lived on any conceivable measure. It’s also true that most of this progress is due to inventions, ideas, and political movements that are relatively new, and have no representation in the bible: empiricism, democracy, human rights—life, liberty, pursuit of happiness for all, including minorities and women—checks and balances in a secular governing system , equality, technology, tolerance, personal freedom, and the list goes on.

Second is the literalism trap, which measures ‘connection to the ancestry’ by whether we continue to do what our ancestors did. By this logic, the way to remain connected to our ancestral human legacy is to live in a cave, clank stones to make fire, and etch a mammoth on the cave’s wall for documentation. In fact, a connection to the ancestry is better conceived as a thematic construct. I’m connected to my ancient human ancestors because I live in a protected space, I keep myself warm by the best means available, and I post on the wall of my Facebook page.

The reluctance to think thematically is evident in the strange contortions that observant Jews put themselves through trying to honor ancient rules, like not working on Shabbat, by avoiding trivialities like turning on the stove. Things like making a fire on which to cook used to be hard work in ancient times, and it makes sense to have a day of rest from hard work. But turning a knob does not rise to the level of hard work, and there’s no reason to avoid it.

The third problem is in the bogus equation: old ways = wholesome/strong/good. Older ideas are not inherently deeper than newer ones. The fact that a tradition is enduring may mean that it’s been adaptive, but many bad things are enduring and adaptive. Viruses are very adaptive. Wars are enduring; which is not sufficient reason to celebrate or cherish either. Many things that our parents and ancestors did were bad, uninformed, inefficient, or immoral by the standards of knowledge and consciousness we enjoy today. That doesn’t mean they didn’t survive. It also doesn’t mean they should.

The fourth problem is that the old rituals have not really protected Jews that well at all. The Jews have not been well-protected throughout history. They have barely survived. Adherence to their old rituals often has put them in danger, a fact brought into savage relief by the holocaust and to which the founding of Israel has been a reaction. Jews are not a success story in terms of survival compared to, say, the Chinese. Yet nobody recommends eating your matzo balls with chopsticks.

As for me, I didn’t fast on Yom Kippur. I didn’t kill a chicken and swing it over my head. I didn’t pray to God to forgive me. I prefer to spend my days carrying on the work of the enlightenment, which of all the traditions of thought seems to me to be the most promising for humanity’s future, despite its young age. I like eating regularly and well, which is, by all available evidence, quite good for you. If I hurt someone I’d rather ask for their forgiveness or make amends to them personally. I think that works better between people. There is nothing holy in my consciousness; no holiness, no sacredness, no godliness. Just plain old messed-up humanity, with no one in charge of it and nothing above it. Yom Kippur’s festival of faux self-sacrifice feels forced to me, like mother’s day. Those who really love and attend to their mother don’t need such a day as mother’s day, and their mothers don’t really need it either.

On Yum Kippur, sitting happily and peacefully in my quiet house after a nice meal, I wished for more quiet happiness and peace for us Jews—and less fever, less hunger, less slaughter.

Fantasy Lines

2009-09-10T10:37:00.000-07:00

Johnny Carson, on his old Tonight Show, had an ongoing gag involving the effort to find the line that’s least likely to ever be uttered. He settled finally on, “This is The Banjo Player’s Porsche.”

All of us, I think, have lines we wish we would get to say, but won’t: “I’d Like to Thank the Academy,” for example; or, “My Fellow Americans” which for some reason seems reserved for presidents, even though it is technically accurate in any forum where one American addresses other Americans. Or, “The Eagle has Landed”—which is splendid but, unless you’re on the moon, just doesn’t play right.

Some lines are alluring yet perplexing, like: “Have Your People Call My People.” Does anybody ever actually say that? Anybody outside L.A.? Really? I personally don’t know anyone who has ‘people,’ and I surely never had any ‘people’ myself; and as an old socialist only half reformed, I’m still reluctant to accept the idea that someone can ‘have’ ‘people’ --in the sense of having yours call theirs, not in the sense of “Let My People Go,” which I dig, and would like to have the chance to say; but let’s face it, there was only one Moses, and one Charlton Heston, and they’re both dead, and a gospel singing career is not in my future.

Child rearing is fertile ground for lines you can’t help but end up saying, even though, and perhaps because, you hated hearing them as a child and vowed—way back when you were naïve enough to believe in the power of vows; that is, before you got married and had kids—to never utter yourself. These include the essential, “Because I Say So;“ the sad and ironic, “You Call This Music?” And the poetic, “Money Doesn’t Grow on Trees, You Know.”

There are some great lines that have just aged and lost their mojo before you had the chance to utter them, like “Follow That Cab.” And who among us of a certain cohort has not fantasized about saying just once: “Book Him Danno, Murder One!” with that Jack Lord jaw set tight and the great hair waving. But you’re no Jack Lord; and you don’t know any ‘Danno.’

Anybody who watches TV must have fantasized at least once about holding those strange pads over some unconscious patient and yelling “Clear!” Before jolting the poor sap’s heart back to life and going off to make out with the hot nurse in the lunch room. But real life—I hate to disappoint my young readers—is not like Grey’s Anatomy after all. If only because, in real life, nothing ever really gets ‘clear.’

There are some things you don’t want to say, like “It’s Not You, It’s Me.” You have to be really good at faking sincerity to pull that one off, and even if you do, that line will still usually cost you extra—in facial stitches, or a cab fare home, or lawyer fees. And yet one must admit it’s a better option than: “It’s Not Me, It’s You” which sounds awful even if it’s true.

There are some lines you hope you will not say, even if given the opportunity. You hope to never hear yourself saying, “I Gave 110 Percent.” In fact, most of what athletes and sportscasters say you hope you will not say. And you hope they stop saying it, too. “It Was Crunch Time, and We Responded. “We Just Wanted It More.” “I Felt It Was My Time”.

You also don’t want to say “First, I Want to Thank God. “ It seems to me that people often thank God in the most inappropriate circumstances, like after winning a beauty pageant or a baseball game. Really, God micro-manages at that level? Big guy’s to-do list all checked off?
Strangely, people always thank God after they have narrowly escaped some horrible demise: ‘I thank God the pilot managed to land safely in the Hudson.’ Personally, if the plane I was on landed in the Hudson, I would rage at God for not taking care of the problem a little earlier, like before both engines stalled. I’d rage at Him for my lost luggage. I’d generally want God to do more prevention; more advance planning; less reliance on last minute improvisations.

Some fantasy lines, however, can come true. There is, for example, a restaurant in town (the wonderful Indochine Café, on Hamilton, if you’re wondering) where I can walk in and utter nonchalantly the classic: “I’ll Have My Usual, Please!” and my usual (#22 with vegetarian spring rolls, not on the official menu) shows up.

And recently, while relating to a friend the news that my book has been bought by a U.S. publisher, I caught myself saying: “my agent in New York.” Now is that not fantasy fulfilled? “My Agent In New York!”

Later, the agent herself called. She wanted me to fly to New York for a meeting; yes, because she says so. Has she not realized money doesn’t grow on trees? I told her I couldn’t make it, and that it wasn’t her, it was me. She said she’ll have her people call mine. I told her I had no people; I had to let my people go. She said it was crunch time, and that I needed to want it more; I promised to give 110 percent.

I really feel this is my time.

On Fear of Flying

2009-07-16T18:41:00.000-07:00

The recent spate of plane crashes, reported and rehashed at length in the media, got me thinking about fear and about airplanes. The news of a plane crash seems to lend itself particularly well to occasioning fear. This is no coincidence. Our fear system, after all, is not neutral but rather biased toward registering certain types of things, namely the objects and events that resemble those likely to have killed our ancestors.

Thus, many of the most dangerous things elude our fear radar because they do not resemble the type of things our brain was programmed by evolution to detect as such. You may include global warming and that heaping plate of greasy fries in this category.

Biological evolution is generally a slow process, but cultural evolution—the development of cultural tools such as technology, science, and systems of commerce and government--is fast. Therefore, the fear assessment tools we rely on were designed for a starkly different environment than the one we find ourselves in now.

This gap between what our brains were designed to do and what they are asked to do now is not limited to the area of fear. For example, our brains, designed to comprehend aggression as waving of fists and spears are now being asked to comprehend the notion of atomic annihilation. Designed for counting concrete objects such as the sheep in the herd, our brains are now asked to process abstract concepts such as ‘a hundred billion dollars.’ Our food intake and digestion system, designed to sustain us in a landscape where food supply was scarce, unpredictable and labor intensive now must operate in a new environment, where food supply is easy, abundant and predictable.

In this sense our predicament vis a vis many of our perceptual and cognitive systems is akin to the bear’s predicament in the event of sudden climate change. The heavy fur that evolved and served it well in the cold would cause it to overheat and die once the temperature suddenly rises.
Airplane crashes provoke such fear in part because--while new products of cultural evolution--they contain many of the elements that set off our ancient inborn perceptual and cognitive biases. We tend to fear sudden events. The death of 150 people at once is scarier than the same number dying over a year’s time. Since our most well developed sense is sight, we tend to fear visually vivid events. Of all natural disasters, heat waves kill the most people, but they don’t register as scary because they are visually quite shapeless.

Because fear has evolved as a warning system against danger, our cognitive systems often leap from ‘scary’ to ‘dangerous.’ But in our body, a limited number of systems must handle multiple tasks. Thus the same part of the nervous system that gets aroused in danger situations can also signal sexual excitement. Bodily manifestations of fear are often produced by non-dangerous stimuli. If we understand and internalize this fact our fear can morph into thrill—like scary movies and roller coasters. If we don’t recognize this mechanism, our self-protective efforts may backfire. Post 9-11 many people lost their lives needlessly because they replaced flying, which was wrongly perceived as dangerous, with driving, which is wrongly perceived as safe.

Being inside an airplane in flight evokes a synergy of primordial fears, including the fear of heights, of lack of control, and of enclosed places from which no escape is possible. In addition, most of us are ignorant about airplanes--not merely about the safety records of the airlines but also about the basic mechanics of flight: how does a heavy metal capsule float in the air like this? That this situation would be safe defies our brain’s ancient wisdom about how the world works: heavy objects tossed into the sky quickly drop back with a thud. Most of us experience turbulence as scary and are ignorant of the fact that turbulence to a plane is like potholes to a car—a bother but no mortal danger. We also tend to perceive the plane as dangerous and the flight crew as beacons of reassurance, when in fact most crashes are the result of human error, not equipment failure. Ignorance breeds fear.

But fear also breeds ignorance. Once we become fearful and register the fear object as dangerous, changing our conviction is tough to do, because our cognitive systems process information in biased ways. One such bias involves a ‘belief confirmation’ mechanism compelling us to seek and retain only the data in line with our conviction. Once you believe planes are dangerous, your mind will easily register and store plane crash information, while plane safety information will be glossed over. How many of those who are scared of flying have paid systematic attention to the number of planes that land safely every day?

Moreover, once our mind is set we do not only fail to seek disconfirming evidence but also actively fight against it once presented--a cognitive habit called ‘belief perseverance,’ demonstrated by an old joke: a patient appears at the psychiatrist’s office claiming that he’s dead. The psychiatrist asks: do you know that dead people don’t bleed? Of course, answers the patient, everybody knows that. The psychiatrist then takes a needle, pokes the patient’s finger, and lo and behold, blood gushes out. The patient looks at his bleeding finger and says: I’ll be darn, doc; dead people do bleed!

On the Protests in Iran

2009-06-25T20:52:00.000-07:00

The recent events in Iran are fascinating on multiple levels. The West fantasizes that Iran will shift on a dime, as Eastern Europe did in the late 80s, shake off the tyrannical regime and rejoin the family of peaceful, developed nations.

Theoretically, it could happen. The Islamic revolution, if should be remembered, overtook the longstanding Shah regime in a matter of days. Under the Shah, Iran was a relatively open and modernizing nation, welcoming to outsiders including Americans and Israelis. I know because I was there. My father, an agricultural expert, was managing a huge farm for a wealthy Iranian landowner. He brought Israeli pipe irrigation to replace the old flooding methods and made the desert bloom. We lived in Isfahan, a beautiful dynamic city surrounded by desert hills.

But underneath the surface sheen of progress the foundations were already rotting. The Shah was tyrannical and corrupt and worked tirelessly to enrich his family and cronies at the expense of the people. The fact that the US masterminded his 1953 overthrow of Mosaddeq’s left-leaning government (to prevent the nationalization of the oil industry) assured that the Shah and the westernized values he ostensibly represented would become loathed. Oil riches never filtered down to the masses. Poverty and illiteracy grew rampant, creating fertile ground for the emergence of a grass roots fundamentalist religious movement.

When secularization and modernization are not accompanied by robust, visible and effective mechanisms of social justice, gender equality, and a sharing of the spoils, a backlash is always brewing.

But fundamentalist religious regimes and parties also become over time corrupt, paranoid, brutal, and disconnected. Feverish religiosity has its own pitfalls—hence the pushback against extreme Islamism that we are beginning to see around the world, as in Lebanon, Pakistan, Indonesia, Somalia, and Turkey; hence even, in a lesser form, the pushback in this country against the hypocrisy and oppressive moralizing of the Bush era religious right.

Iran is ripe for change. The Khomeinist revolution has brought decline and despair; the country today is in dire economic straits; it has to import oil due to a lack of refineries; the unemployment rate is in the double digits and is particularly high (up to 30%) among women and the young. Women, who make up 65% of university graduates, are still second-class citizens. An Iranian woman cannot serve as a judge. In divorce, the woman automatically loses custody of her children. Internationally, Iran is isolated and is alternately loathed, feared or ridiculed.

But the western dream of a new Iran will in all likelihood become a dream deferred.
First, the struggle in Iran is not really between the Khomeinist dogma and something else, but between more and less loathsome versions of the dogma. The whole ‘election fraud’ narrative is of course practiced fiction. All elections in Iran are fraudulent by western criteria (including the elections won in the past by the reformer Mussavi himself) because they are never run by an independent election commission; because the ruling party decides on the candidates and the parameters of the race; because there are no neutral observers or monitors of the process; and because the "Supreme Guide" Ali Khamenei, infallible according to the Khomeinist dogma, can sanction any result he pleases and cannot be second-guessed.

Moreover, Mussavi himself is no Obama clone. His coalition is not broad-based and relies almost entirely on the urban, educated middle classes. He has real skeletons in his closet—as in those of tens of thousands political prisoners executed, often without a trial, under his watch as prime minister. There is no indication he will agree to scale back Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Still, in the current equation Mussavi represents the better option, because he’s not the loathsome, polarizing Ahmadinagad, because he has experience in western-style politicking, and because he’s been flirting with more socially moderate sensibilities. Mussavi’s wife, for example, is the first woman in Iran to campaign with her husband (holding hands in public) and speak openly about the need for women’s equality.

In a significant way, what we’re seeing in Iran is not so much an ideological shift but a generational shift toward modernity. Iran is a nation of young people. Over 70% or Iranians are under age 30. The educated young, particularly the 25% or so of Iranians who have computers and internet connections, do not accept that they must choose between their Muslim faith and the spoils of modernity. They seek to have both. These young Iranians are peaceful, media-savvy and western-leaning in their cultural tastes; they broadcast their ‘Allah Akbar’ calls of defiance via twitter; and we should not underestimate the power of Obama’s persona and message and the timing of his Cairo speech in rendering much of Ahmadinagad’s ‘great Satan’ rhetoric dated and foolish in their eyes.

The recent pictures from Iran--where young people march in western-style and media-savvy peaceful protest in open defiance of government orders--not only speak to the desperation and courage of the Iranian youths but also to the fact that the official view of Iran, delivered to Americans over the last 30 years, is distorted and lacks nuance and subtlety.

At the end of the day, however, a sudden sea change—the removal of Ahmadinagad and a reopening of the culture—is unlikely. The Ayatollahs have been blindsided by the reformers, and they have blinked, but the revolt is still quite raw and unfocused politically; and the ruling regime’s brutality has worked before, particularly against the student riots of 1999, and is hence likely to be utilized again. Any intervention from the outside world is likely to weaken the hand of reformers as it will be spun by the government to rile national sentiment against the meddling infidels. There may be some cosmetic changes and some posturing, but the odds are high that the Iran that will emerge after the latest round of protests is squelched will be more, not less, fundamentalist and defiant in its international posture.

On Obama's Speech

2009-06-15T23:06:00.000-07:00

Obama’s speech in Egypt was a political master stroke. Obama has shown again that he is a unique and spectacular political talent of the kind we have not seen in our lifetime. In his persona he seamlessly integrates a multitude of opposites: brainy yet hip; youthful yet possessing gravitas and maturity; sensitive yet secure. As a speaker he’s at once rehearsed and spontaneous, casual and in command of form, accessible without sacrificing nuance and complexity; at once savvy and earnest.

Obama’s star power may strike some observers as extraneous to the job at hand, but it is not. Personal charisma, the ability to attract attention and rouse emotion, is important in a world leader. Reason and compelling argument are essential for the job of persuasion, which is the job of politics; but big decisions, on the personal level as on the national level, are emotional at the core. And Obama is aiming big.

Cleverly, Obama’s speech was not crafted to be a bombshell, but a controlled-release pill. In his speech he tried to do several things: First was to clear away the putrid remnants of the Bush approach, all juvenile retrograde machismo and ignorant arrogance. In its stead, the speech presented a new approach: soft power, diplomacy, and empathy; mature and humane pragmatism—a literal retooling of the sagging American brand.

Obama is clearly trying to translate his local playbook, which won him the election, to the language of world politics. His Egypt speech targeted youth--the Muslim world is a youthful population and the youths will to a large extent dictate which way that civilization turns. The speech targeted women—an untapped resource in the Muslim world. Generally around the world, prosperity, progress and stability are facilitated by increases in the social status and power of women.

Obama was also smart to move away from the ‘terrorist’ and ‘freedom’ labels, hopelessly contaminated by the Bush years, and speak instead about ‘progress,’ ‘dignity,’ and the danger of ‘extremism.’ He has the equation right. Extremists, Muslim or otherwise, are the enemies of progress. Moderation—that unsexy yet crucial understanding that life happens in the messy gray middle of compromise and cooperation rather than in the pure extremes of narrow ideological dogma—is a wise and timely approach; and Obama can preach moderation and dignity and progress because he personifies them.

In venturing boldly into the Middle Eastern mire, Obama faces several challenges. The first concerns the fissure between regional governments and their populace. Most of the regimes that are considered ‘moderate’ in the region are tyrannical, corrupt and have little popular support. To the extent that Obama is seen as buttressing the rulers, he will be suspected and resented by the people. Obama, aware of this fact, tried a double gambit in his speech—to explicitly grease the leadership while implicitly addressing the masses. Whether he succeeded time will tell.

Another minefield for Obama is his stated commitment to the two-state solution. The two-state solution is not a fresh idea. In fact it’s a dying idea, an idea on life support, surrounded by many malevolent forces who want to cut off the oxygen. It is not at all clear whether and how long the two-state solution will survive, assuming it can actually be brought back from its current comatose state.

In the Middle East, the most influential people and forces don’t put much stake in public words. Only private actions speak at the end of the day. Hard liners in both Israel and Palestine are currently hard at work finishing off the two-state solution in traditional Middle Eastern manner—creating facts on the ground (Israel by building settlements; the Palestinians by having babies) and appealing to religious fear and prejudice (Israel with the ‘no-partner’ and ‘sacred biblical land’ narratives; the Palestinians with Jihad and Islamist incitements). If the hardliners are not marginalized soon, then the window for a two-state solution will have closed.

To get a two-state solution to happen, Obama will have to move against the Israeli government and the Israeli lobby in America quickly and decisively. No president before him has shown the courage to do so. But Obama may have it. In his speech, Obama labored to set the stage for such a move by correctly re-setting the regional equation: we now have three equal partners as opposed to one central ‘special partner’ and one marginal semi-partner. Israelis may not like this shift, but they should be thankful.

First, Obama’s approach represents their best and perhaps last hope for peace, normalcy, and long term security. Second, giving Israel a voice equal to that given to the Muslim world is in fact a charitable move toward Israel. There are many more Muslims in the US than Jews, and they can vote. There are many more Muslims around the region and the world than Jews, and they can pick up arms.

In the big scheme if things, now and into the future, Israel is a bit player in America’s drama when compared to the Muslim world. Obama—ever the rational pragmatist –has realized it. For the U.S. today, Israel’s ‘value added’— strategic, political, military, moral—is limited, even marginal, and is no longer worth the hassle, turmoil, and political pollution required to produce it.

On Parenting and Palestine

2009-06-04T22:15:00.000-07:00

My daughter is 17 now, and quite independent. She doesn’t mind being left alone at home for many hours at a time, and actually appreciates me keeping out of her hair. But when my daughter was little, she did not like privacy that much. And I could not, of course, leave her alone in the house. Therefore, I often had to drag her with me to all kinds of places, often on short notice—to the store, to the post office, etc. On these occasions she would sometimes throw a tantrum and refuse to come.

Usually, gentle persuasion would work, and if not that, than bribery, and if not that, than giving in and staying home (she’s an only child). But one strategy I used to employ--the one just shy of the time-honored-but-quite-disdainful brute force gambit (grab the screaming girl and strap her in the car seat)—was the ‘serious threat’ move:”you don’t want to come with me? OK. You can stay here alone. I’ll go without you; I’m serious!” upon which I would begin walking slowly and deliberately toward the door, hoping that her fear, shock, and/or curiosity would get the better of her before my bluff is revealed, and compel her to come running to me, pouting adorably all the while.

This strategy, which is one of the many things real-life parents do but are not quite proud to announce, works because it upends the taken-for-granted assumptions upon which the child’s confidence and agency rest (the parent won’t leave me), breaks the rules and raises deep dormant anxieties. Once a new possible scenario is introduced (dad will leave), the old ways (I don’t want to go with him to the boring store) are re-examined. Of course, the new scenario has to be a doomsday one, scary enough to illuminate the previously distasteful option in a new and positive light by comparison. To work, the threat has to appear genuine, and the bluff cannot be used too often, lest it loses its power to startle.

The memory of this less than admirable but oft-effective technique came to my mind the other day unexpectedly as I was reading the Israeli papers. The papers were dwelling—as ever—on the hopeless intricacies of ‘the situation,’ that nebulous tableau of Israeli life. These days, the papers are filled with breathless strategizing and guesswork about the Obama impact, about the Iran threat, about Bibi’s hardened stance and about Hamas’s ill intents.

Both Israeli and Palestinian societies have hardened in recent years, and seem to be moving away, not toward, reconciliation and peace. This fact appears clear on its face. But appearances can deceive, particularly in the Middle East.

The two peoples, who at man-on-the-street level are surely tired of war and conflict, may have found a way—perhaps unconsciously--to move toward reconciliation. The contemporary Israeli and Palestinian cultures are, after all, essentially childish: deeply superstitious and suggestible, mired in egocentric fantasy life, given to fits of self pity, outbursts of violence, confusion, and crude, self destructive trickery.

It seems the Israelis and Palestinians are trying to resolve their idiotic impasse—the rational resolution of which is clear to any half adjusted middle schooler—by enacting a ‘serious threat’ scenario.

By electing hard line, uncompromising leaderships, the people on both sides may have given themselves a chance at peace. As tensions escalate—as they must—and as rhetoric amps up, there is at least a possibility that the two sides will be made to see their reality in a new light.

In other words, if both the Israelis and Palestinians appear to each other to be truly giving up on a two-state solution, both may then be forced to contemplate seriously a future without it. The emerging picture—no statehood for Palestinians; apartheid state for Israelis, constant fighting which at some point, Iran or no Iran, is bound to turn catastrophic—may compel the two nations to rethink their previous ideas. The actual benefits and advantages of the two-state solution—so obscured until now by having become paradigmic and a taken-for-granted—will become illuminated, and newly appealing.

Of course everything could also go very much awry. Some parents who threaten their unruly toddlers with leaving actually do leave; the abandoned tots may be traumatized, their ability to trust severely compromised or worse, they could hurt themselves without supervision. The wayward parents can end up in jail for child neglect, lose custody, and spend the rest of their broken lives awash in guilt and remorse. This is the nature of serious doomsday threats. They may actually lead to doomsday.

On Torture

2009-05-19T05:50:00.000-07:00

The pertinent documents are finally being released, the picture is clearing up, and the data affirm what everyone has known all along: suspected terrorists were tortured by the CIA, under the authorization of the U.S. government, in direct contradiction of the government’s own declarations, international law, and the national ethos.

Anyone who has taken the time to study the question of torture even superficially knows that torture does not work. People who are tortured will say anything to stop the torture. Moreover, other interrogation methods that are based on establishing rapport, trust and bargaining work much better. As Matthew Alexander, the former senior interrogator in Iraq whose work lead to the capture of Al Zarqawi, wrote recently on the Daily Beast website:

“…abusing prisoners results in unreliable information, costs American lives…This cannot have been unknown to the higher ups who ordered the torture. Our policy of torture and abuse of prisoners has been Al Qaida’s number one recruiting tool. I know from having conducted hundreds of interrogations of high ranking Al Qaida members and supervising more than one thousand, that when a captured Al Qaida member sees us live up to our stated principles they are more willing to negotiate and cooperate with us. When we torture or abuse them, it hardens their resolve and reaffirms why they picked up arms.”

On top of that, torture exacts a high internal price on those who practice it, individuals and societies alike. The US in particular prides itself on its high moral standards, its civilized approach to the protection of human life and human dignity. This is one thing that is supposed to separate us from our enemies. When we tortured, that piece of our national and personal identity was injured gravely. The resulting damage to our sense of self far exceeds in the long run any damage that can be inflicted on us by terrorists.

Why then, did the US government turn to this ineffective, counter indicated, outdated, loathsome and illegal method?

The circumstances that led to the decision to torture need to be fleshed out so that we can in the future anticipate better--and avoid falling into--this moral and political trap.
Many observers may be tempted to find the cause in the particular, sad politics and twisted personality crucible of the Bush-Cheney administration. They are not wrong. Partly, the decision to torture was a result of Bush-Cheney particulars—their panic in the shadow of 9-11, the frustrations of Iraq, the unsavory mix of personal cowardice amidst a macho culture; their gung-ho tribalism, rigid ideology and either-or psychology; their hostility to empiricism and loathing of the ‘other’; their fear of appearing as weak or touchy-feely as the previous president.

The case that the decision to torture was a product of the Bush-Cheney ethos and of the particular dynamics and circumstances of their time is easy to make. But it is not sufficient.

In the less obvious, but also more important depths, the decision emanated from an inherent current in the human soul: our attraction to violence, our desire for dominance, the pleasure of inflicting pain, the relief and the ecstasy of it.

The creativity, persistence and inventiveness with which human beings have throughout history approached the task of inflicting pain and humiliation on others (someone, for example, had to dream up, experiment with, and perfect water boarding) is rivaled perhaps only by our inventiveness and relish and creativity regarding sex and food. We entertain ourselves, after all, routinely with scenes of torture, violence and dominance in sports, at the movies and on TV, just like we entertain ourselves with sexual images and elaborate meals. This sheer gusto and inventiveness puts the lie to the notion that our brutality is an unfortunate by-product of something else, an unintended consequence of other pursuits. And the manifest similarity to sex and food reveals a latent similarity of essence.

The desire to dominate and demean is as basic as the desires to procreate and feast. All of us share this darker side. No one is exempt. Thus, when our leaders order us to do terrible things they are not only fulfilling their own desires, but also ours.

When our leaders tortured in our name—all the while defiling our identity, undermining our principles, hurting our cause and wasting our time and resources—a part of us turned a blind eye and a deaf ear, found a forbidden thrill in the idea of secret prisons where our boys inflict terror on terrorists, wanted to believe—evidence and common sense be damned—that this was necessary and that it works.

If we are to succeed in keeping our humanity, we need to recognize its inherent pitfalls. As the moral philosopher Jonathan Glover writes in his book ‘Humanity’ where he illuminates vividly the depth and reach of this human desire for brutality: ”We need to look hard and clearly at some monsters inside us. But this is part of the project of caging and taming them.”

On a Recent Visit to Israel

2009-04-12T10:42:00.000-07:00

I’m in Israel to promote my new Hebrew novel. I sit at a café with a journalist who would by all appearances prefer, and rightly so, to be interviewing someone in possession of real social currency--money, fame, power—rather than an obscure Midwestern academic in Salvation Army jeans.

How did you end up in the Midwest? She asks, and the task of fashioning a coherent answer proves damn near impossible, partly because such answer does not exist, and partly because we generally contend with small questions—which TV to buy—much more systematically than with big ones. How much time have you spent consciously weighing what to do for a career, whom to marry, which God to worship, where to live?

A day later, a photographer shows up at my father’s apartment. She spends the next two hours rearranging the living room and then proceeds to rearrange him, my daughter and me into various, increasingly baroque poses: you, she says to me, recline on the couch, but first get some lighter socks. You, she tells my father, stand on the porch and gaze out into the distance. You, she commands my daughter, stand in the back and pretend to text someone. And whatever you do, don’t smile. That looks phony.

On Friday I do a radio interview and the interviewer asks me if I think everybody needs therapy. I say I don’t know what everybody needs.

After that my daughter and I walk around Tel Aviv. If you walk slowly, people will push you aside and run by you. If you ask for directions, people will answer without breaking stride. No one will smile at you. This is not a sign of animosity, but rather a manifestation of parsimony. So much energy is required in Israel just to get through the day that nothing can be wasted on small niceties. Israeli life is marked by a stark dialectic, a tension between community and individual impulses, between trust and suspicion. Between the feeling that we’re all in this together and the feeling, no less palpable, that we’re all in this alone.

Saturday night I’m in a Tel Aviv bar with my editor. It’s a small, crowded place. A couple on tall barstools lean into each other. Some hipsters are showing cleavage. Rowdy, slaphappy youngsters in the back room are sharing a joint, basking in their youthful glow, the inevitable dimming of which they cannot yet intuit.

My editor and I worked on the book for seven months, by email, without ever meeting face to face. It was an emotionally charged process. When we finally meet, we feel like old comrades; we trust each other readily. The young woman is a quintessential Israeli—born and bred in Tel Aviv, versed in the city’s emblematic gesture of searching youthful trendiness amidst the stern century-old Bauhaus exteriors. She has Israeli beauty, at once fierce and fragile; when she smiles, my heart breaks. I ask her to tell me what she actually liked about my book. She says that there’s a thread of sadness animating the book’s protagonist. Many Israeli writers can do sadness, she says. But they write Israeli sadness. You wrote American sadness.

After a few drinks our conversation takes a short, unfortunate detour into politics. I say that war with Iran is a certainty; that rockets will fall on Tel Aviv; that she should get ready. She says that such gloomy predictions were common during the cold war, and yet, no bombs ever dropped. So maybe all this tension will just dissipate. She’s younger, my editor, and can generate an optimism that I can no longer muster. I think about leaving Israel, she says. But if I go, I’ll be leaving my family behind. How can I do that? I hope I’m not like one of those Jews who stayed put in the 30s in Germany, she says. I hope I’m not one of those refusing to see the clear truth of what’s coming. But how do you ever know that?

On Sunday, my family and friends gather in kibbutz Nachshon, where my mother is buried, for a small memorial. She died April 7th 2001, on my birthday. I enjoy thinking she did this on purpose.

We drive up the creased dirt road among rows of pine trees to the small cemetery. We gather around the gravestone. People put flowers on it, and small stones, as is the Israeli custom. There’s music. And then a few people speak. My sister’s young daughter tells of the goings on in her life—the teachers that get on her nerves; her new friends. My brother’s young daughter reads a poem she has written. I say something about how difficult it is to be with someone, and then not be with them.

My mother, a holocaust orphan, was always somewhat restless, and fond of independence, and impatient with convention. As we go about our ceremony, my brother’s son drifts off and finds mischief in the next row of graves, where he is playing with the sprinkler system and getting himself soaking wet. As his parents try to entice him back into the fold he slips through the rows of grave stones, his eyes gleaming with defiance. In doing so, I think to myself, he has managed to invoke the true essence of my mother’s spirit in a way that has eluded us.

On Monday we leave Israel. We get stuck in Newark airport for 8 hours. At the desk, they tell us they can’t find a pilot. My sense is that the pilot found out he was supposed to go to Newark, and decided to flee. And as much as I’m aching to get back home already, I can’t quite blame him.

On Women in Judaism

2009-03-31T15:15:00.000-07:00

My daughter is growing up differently than I did. I grew up in Israel, in a secular kibbutz. She’s growing up in the American Midwest, and attends a religious school (CTA).

Comparing my youth to hers, I notice two striking differences. First is her emphasis on modest dress. The girl covers up; she says it’s ‘a value.’ In the kibbutz, we walked around barefoot and half naked half the time; partly because it was hot and partly because no one had money for cloths. But also because we reserved the ‘values’ assignation to weightier subjects, like equality, justice, peace.

Second is the common separation between males and females that marks her daily reality. In her world, girls dance with girls; girls sing to girls; girls pray with girls. When I was growing up, boys and girls mixed, constantly.

When I comment on this, she usually gives two explanations: First, she speaks about the value of modesty. Revealing dress may incite the boys, turn their minds into unsavory pursuits and in turn may reduce girls to objects of lust and as such devalue them and hinder their free expression.

Second, she insists that separating the girls from the boys is not a reflection of female devaluation, but rather celebrates the innate differences between the sexes. This is the ‘separate-but-equal’ rationale.

There are problems with both these explanations.

The notion of modest dress as freedom from the ‘male gaze’ and its attendant discomforts is compelling, but problematic.

First, covering up does not reduce vanity or sexual tension. It may even increase them. Covered up parts, as many a stripper knows, are not less but more arousing than total nakedness. Moreover, human beings habituate, and are contextual. Tehran, for example, where women are covered head to toe, is the capital of nose jobs. When only your nose shows, it had better be attractive.

The covering-as-freedom argument is also problematic because it focuses on content, whereas freedom is a process. In other words, freedom is measured by the range of options, not by the content of a given option. A free person can choose to dress modestly or not, depending on their, well, free will. A person who must dress in a certain way—be it immodestly, as dictated by the tyranny of peers or pop culture or modestly as dictated by the tyranny of tradition or religion--is by definition less free.

Moreover, that someone feels better covered up does not necessarily mean they are better. As Marx noted, an oppressed group of people can develop a false consciousness, framing a situation in a way that runs, in the long term, against its own true interests. Slaves can be convinced that the solution to their discomfort is finding a better owner. Thus they are diverted from seeking freedom, which serves the interests of slave owners.

In any society, the rules tend to favor those who make them. The bible, and religious traditions overall, are dominated, written and administered by men. The very definitions of what women are, or should be, are male-oriented. (Thought experiment: If women’s freedom makes men uncomfortable, why does this mean that women should curtail their freedom? Why can’t it mean that men should learn to manage their discomfort?)

Religious tradition and institutions favor men. This discrimination is based in part on historical notions of the intellectual inferiority of women and is one reason why, for example, there are not many women who are considered Gedolot Ba’torah.

Faced with the need to remain relevant in changing times, religious Judaism has been struggling to finesse the male-centric biases that underlay biblical text and traditions.

One strategy is to couch gender exclusion as gender accommodation. It’s not that men are better than women, goes the argument, it’s just that they are different, possessing different talents and functions.

This approach should smell funny to those who remember how such ‘separate but equal’ conceit served to maintain a racist agenda until it was defeated in 1954 with the Brown vs. The Board of Education supreme court decision, which found that separate inherently begets unequal. It is so with blacks and whites and it is so with men and women.

But you can also put the lie to this approach by following the science.
In most cognitive performance domains, no inherent differences exist between men and women. Most of the observed differences have to do with previous experience. For example, if you compare men and women on their car fixing skills, you will find that the men do better. But this is because men more often have previous experience working with cars.

True, some sex differences are innate. But even then, judging individuals based on average sex differences is unwarranted because traits are generally distributed on a bell shaped curve-- most scores cluster around the mean, with few outstanding scores on one end and few very low scores on the other.

The distribution curves for women and men on all ability traits overlap greatly, which means that even when you find true average differences between the sexes on a given trait, there will be many high scoring individuals of one gender outperforming many low scoring individuals of the other.

Thus, those who argue that the absence of women from the ranks of torah- studying greats, for example, is not a sign of discrimination enshrined through separation should show definitively that ability curves on this issue do not overlap. If they cannot show that, then they must concede that separate is not equal; that the forced separation between the sexes amounts more often than not to exclusion of females, and that by excluding females, under the guise of ‘celebrating’ them, they are depriving some very deserving women from access to the treasures of torah learning and denying Judaism the benefits of a great pool of torah study talent.

Now what kind of a value system is that?

On the Direction of Israeli Society

2009-03-31T15:11:00.000-07:00

I’m in Israel on a short visit. It’s been two years since my last visit here, and as I compare the current cultural and political landscape to what I remember from back then, I can identify three processes that are gaining momentum and in doing so are weakening Israeli society.

First is the gradual and inevitable crumbling of Israel’s military might. The IDF is not what it used to be. War itself is not what it used to be. Ironically, the decline of Israel’s military-based survival doctrine is made most obvious by the very attempts to resurrect it. The increasingly frequent spasms of violence we have witnessed in the past two years have succeeded at nothing more than illuminating the decline of Israel’s power.

The decline of the force doctrine is apparent on multiple levels, all of which were on tragic display during the recent Gaza war.

On the ground, the Gaza war showed again that the current state of the conflict negates Israel’s traditional military advantages and highlights its vulnerabilities. In the current landscape, there’s no element of surprise; there are no open spaces in which to maneuver tanks; there’s no Goliath to defeat and awe the world. The Gaza war did not achieve any of its stated goals. Rockets are still falling on southern Israel; Hamas is still in power; weapons are being smuggled into Gaza. Gilad Shalit is still held captive.

On the international front, the sights and sounds of 100,000 homeless Palestinians and over 1200 mostly civilian dead have severely undercut Israel’s traditional claim to the moral high ground and have increased its political isolation.

Inside Israel, the recent wars have had a grim effect. The army’s surprising ineffectiveness in Lebanon was the first shoe to drop. Now, faster than you can say ‘I told you so,’ the second shoe is about to drop. Reports in Haaretz are beginning to reveal what needs no revealing to anyone who cares to see straight—IDF’s behavior on the ground in Gaza was abhorrent, contrary to official reports and to the army’s own fabled traditions.

The basic message emanating from the returning fighters’ reports is that the army is awash in increasingly more explicit and blatant hatred and racism toward the Palestinians; this bespeaks of the ongoing deterioration of Israel’s fighting ethos, which reflects, of course, the changing Israeli culture. For some time now, Israel’s use of force has been exacting an increasing toll for ever-decreasing returns. To the extent that Israel chooses to continue to relay mainly on brute force, it will gradually and inevitably weaken itself.

The second process involves the gradual deterioration of the old Zionist ethos of secularism and democracy. In contrast to the rest of the developed world, which is shifting toward various versions of progressive secularism, Israel is drifting away from both.

Case in point: The newspaper Haaretz reported recently that Bibi is mulling over a proposal to create a position of ‘minister for Chareidi education,’ to be filled by a member of the ultra-orthodox Shas party—a valued member of Bibi’s right wing coalition. This appointee will parallel in authority the traditional minister of education, who will, under the proposed plan, remain in charge of the state’s education system. Such a plan will further enshrine what is already the de facto reality of dual educational streams in Israel. As we speak, only half of Israel’s students attend secular state schools. The Chareidi school system, funded through the tax payers’ money, attracts about a quarter of Israeli children, and it is growing.

These Chareidi schools are no CTA. One of the concessions they have won recently is that they no longer have to offer the state-mandated ‘core’ subjects—science, math, sports and civics—and can focus solely on teaching torah. By doing this, these schools produce graduates who are alienated from, and ignorant of, the meaning of democratic citizenship and who are also bereft of the skills needed to compete in today’s, and tomorrow’s, global economy. When its modern secular education system withers and is being supplanted by a retrograde, theocratic religious school system, Israel is weakened.

The third process, revealed by the recent elections, is embodied in the character and ambition of Avigdor Lieberman, the infinitely- investigated, right-wing nationalist who won 15 seats in the Knesset by manipulating and fanning the tensions between Arab and Jewish Israelis, and who’s bound to become Israel’s foreign minister in Bibi’s government. Lieberman embodies a strong and emerging current in Israeli culture, drawing strength from the bloc of Russian immigrant voters who came to Israel in the 90s fleeing political oppression.

Contrary to intuition and popular belief, people who have suffered powerlessness under an unjust system rarely learn to fight injustice—they mostly just learn that it’s better to be on the powerful side. The slave’s deepest dark dream is not freedom, but slave ownership. People who have been victimized are more, not less, at risk of becoming victimizers themselves.

As the Russian immigrants’ influence on Israeli society matures, it is likely to facilitate the emergence of this basic human desire—already festering in many banged-up quarters of Israeli society, as in all societies—for the proverbial strongman who can cut to the chase and do away with all the endless negotiations and tedious debates that characterize the democratic process--the boss, the godfather; the king. Israel at the hands of such a strongman is Israel weakened.

On the New Main Street Synagogue in Columbus Ohio

2009-03-01T21:27:00.000-08:00

A recent article in the Dispatch caught my eye. It told of a new synagogue soon to open on Main Street:

“Nowhere in the new synagogue does the ancient meet the modern so closely as at the replica of the Western Wall. The wall is 26 feet high and made entirely of Jerusalem stone from Israel. It's one of the most eye- catching features in the new Congregation Torat Emet in Bexley.”

It went on:

”The focal point of the airy, glass-bordered sanctuary is a 28-foot-tall ark, basically a giant cabinet of wood and Jerusalem stone that holds the Torah scrolls. “

The report noted that some local residents found the synagogue troubling:

“The synagogue had to change some elements of its design after community objections about how it would fit in on Main Street. The building plan moved the structure 6 feet to the west, away from the Bexley Public Library next door, and brought in the top, glass-walled floor to be less imposing. A colonnade was added to make the front more "pedestrian-friendly" on busy Main Street.”

I too find it troubling, but for ethical, rather than aesthetic reasons; for what it symbolizes, rather than for what it is.

First, by way of proper disclosure, let me state up front that I don’t belong to any synagogue and that I have neither dog nor (kosher) hotdog in the fight between different religious factions in the city. I begrudge nothing the congregants of this or any synagogue.

Still, I find this new synagogue troubling. To me, there is something foreign to Jewish tradition and sensibilities in a house of worship that towers and lords over its proximities, elbows its neighbors, and marks and markets itself using an outlandish replica of the Wailing Wall.

Jews, even when they are wealthy, have traditionally been rather averse to flaunting it. Part of this tendency has to do with the old fear of stirring up resentment, of calling attention to oneself, which in the past would often be dangerous. But this tradition also stems in part from a deep moral impulse—a fear of hubris, of the distracting aspects of an immersion in externalities, the fetishization of objects, and the tyranny of outward appearances.

Unlike Christian churches, that have sought historically to awe the people and woo them with grand structures and statues as part of the religion’s missionary impulse, Judaism is neither missionary nor outward-looking; it doesn’t seek people out but rather prefers to be discovered.

Jews are people of the book, not of the cathedral. Awe in Judaism emerges not through the pull of surface sheen and gimmickry but through one’s thoughtful and passionate immersion in deep, awesome ideas, in beautiful, delicate texts and intricate community traditions. Boorish extravaganza is inherently foreign to the essence of Judaism.

There is something disturbing to me, something uneasy about the mall-style faux authenticity, the Disneyland-like quality of the Jerusalem stone and mini Wailing Wall reported to be inside the synagogue; something awkward in these glass walls, seeking to expose and advertize what should be kept modest and private.

While many Jews may find their riches and personal glory in real estate dealings, the glory of Judaism itself, as a tradition and a religion, shuns the material, the grand, and the exhibitionistic, in favor of the abstract, the subtle, and the internal.

The Jewish God is historically unique and revolutionary in its very shapeless and placeless nature. To celebrate such a notion by erecting grandiose monuments seems somehow counter-indicated. One gets the sense that other motives are at play, less lofty and spiritual, perhaps; less connected with the glorious Jewish past they claim to cherish and more with the crude, shallow-end politics of the American present.

The actual Wailing Wall is a rather stark and tragic ruin. It’s anything but grand. And even people who consider it holly have never tried to beautify it or make it grand. An attempt to bring the Wailing Wall into a shining new synagogue reeks of Vegas. It brings to mind mostly those distasteful Jesus-themed amusement parks and mega churches where worship has morphed into corny spectacle. It brings to mind, regretfully, the outlandish and desperate bar mitzvah ceremonies common in the 80s and 90s, where the somber occasion of ushering a child into the company of adults was turned into a vulgar game of nouveau riche one-upmanship. Somehow it seems fundamentally foreign to Jewish ethos and history.

Speaking of the new synagogue, Liz Kalef, its executive director, is quoted as saying: “The symbolism is important…The symbols make it ‘easier to teach to your children because it's just going to surround us.’”

That fake Wailing Wall sure sends a message to the kids; although perhaps not the intended one. Perhaps not really a Jewish one, either.

More On Gaza War

2009-01-24T07:02:00.000-08:00

Jews, here and in Israel, differ on how they see the war in Gaza. Some see it as part of the eternal Jewish struggle against anti-Semitism. To them, the Hamas terrorists hurling rockets at Israel now are descendents of the biblical Amalek, the Pharaoh, the pogromists and Nazis and all those who have sought to annihilate the Jews because of their Judaism. Hamas’s Israel-hatred, in this view, is Jew-hatred and is independent of Jew-behavior.

Others see this operation as just another chapter in the sad saga that started in 1967—when Israel took the Palestinians under its control. In this view, both sides are reaping the bitter wages of earlier sins: Messianic hubris on the Israeli side led to the occupation, the settlements, and the increasing, corrosive friction. On the Palestinian side, much fault falls at the feet of the corrupt Arafat, who spent years robbing his own people while championing militarism and martyrdom, and who failed to seize the opportunity for a homeland when it did emerge.

Some argue that the real war that is going on is the one that isn’t, the one yet to happen—the war against Iran. Hamas and Hezbollah are Iran’s proxies. Drawing Israel into violence serves dual Iranian purposes: to assert itself as spearhead of armed resistance against Israel and to agitate the Arab street in the hope of triggering more Islamist revolutions in the region.

Yet, to others, the war has to do mostly with internal Israeli politics. Olmert, leaving the stage, wants to erase the bitter memories of Lebanon. Barak and Livni, facing elections, know that a successful campaign could boost them in the polls. All three saw hardliner Bibi’s numbers, and public anger, rise with every falling rocket.

There is truth to all these views, but none is the whole, lone truth. Complex human events are always multi-determined.

Whatever its causes, this war marks two foreboding shifts in Israeli consciousness. First, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which began as a predominantly secular land dispute, is gradually morphing into a religious war.

On the Palestinian side, this is seen in the rise of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. In Israel, the trend is seen in the ascension of ‘knitted kippahs’--religious Zionists--into the IDF’s fighting units and officer ranks, and in the scandalous meddling of IDF's chief rabbi Avihai Ronsky and his lieutenants, who are running around the front lines handing out prayer shawls and recorded blessings in portable music players.

The IDF is morphing from a Zionist army fighting to protect Israel into a Jewish army fighting holy wars to fulfill Biblical prophesies.

This shift is tragic for both sides. Religious extremism, with its eternal horizon and afterlife tales, tends to sanctify death and cheapen life. Religious conviction, having its basis in faith and tradition, not reason and innovation, is less likely to bring about compromise and integration--and prosperity, for that matter.

The fighting in Gaza, and the Israeli response to it, reflect another shift. Israeli citizen-soldiers of yore, like myself, were steeped in an ethos of ‘the moral war’ and the dream of peace. We did not view enemy fighters as evil, but as oppressed into hate by their own tyrannical leaders. We were raised and trained to defeat the enemy, but without succumbing to racism, blood lust and barbarism. Our idea of victory was peace.

Most Israelis have now given up on the higher moral ground and on the hope of peace. Horrific pictures of dead Palestinian women and children (who outnumber dead terrorists two to one) are dismissed with a shrug: Better their kids than ours.

Talk of peace is dismissed as naïve fantasy. Mention the simple fact that these people are and will be Israel’s neighbors forever, that our lives will be joined one way or another, and that this long-term fact should in the least inform our short-term behavior—and you’ll be dismissed as a weak-blooded fool.

There is a broad consensus that to the extent we are doing terrible things, we were forced into it by terrible people; that caring about the enemy’s women and children--or about the enemy’s own quandary--is at best a luxury, at worst treason. The enemy’s bad behavior reflects its unchangeable character. Our bad behavior reflects our predicament, a whim of fate.

This view is understandable; and yet it is wrong, dangerous, and must be resisted.

First, without empathy for your enemy, without seeing things through their eyes, you don’t understand the war, and hence you are less likely to win it.

Second, peace is the only win-win solution. Without peace, you have ongoing war, which is either a lose-lose situation, with endless mutual bloodletting, or a win-lose situation, where the winning side now is bound to lose at some point later. Give up the hope of peace, the work of peace, and you have resigned yourself to losing.

Third, quantity becomes quality. Once a certain threshold is crossed, things--and people, and countries--cease to be what they were before. You nimbly defeat mighty aggressors and take over their people—you’re David. You lord over and bully them for 40 years with an iron fist, you’re Goliath. You kill some children during combat—that’s war. You kill mostly children—that’s murder.

Fourth, what masquerades as fate is really, at bottom, character. To the extent we let ourselves off the moral hook by blaming circumstance, and abandon our humanity because of fear, nationalism, or frustration, we then join all those who have hurt us in the past by shedding their own morals and humanity.

This is not a company Israelis, and Jews, should want to keep.

On the Gaza War

2009-01-01T10:26:00.000-08:00

Here we go again. Like a drunkard failing rehab for the umpteenth time, Israel has again stumbled into the seedy neighborhood bar and got suckered into a brawl.

Predicting outcomes in the Middle East is a treacherous business, but certain things are predictable. First is the response from the usual suspects: the bullies, the closet racists, the once-and-for-all-ers; the panickers and the self righteous; the solemn would-be avengers; the cockeyed carriers of messianic prophecies. All will converge to pump their fists in the air, or huddle in prayer, and rejoice at another display of Israel’s military might.

The first days of the battle, the shock and awe moments, are too cathartic and spectacular for them to resist. Here, at last--clarity: The enemy is indeed loathsome and murderous; and we have held ourselves in check for too long. Now we can show them, make them feel what we have felt, and in the process make ourselves feel what we long to feel—powerful, safe, and righteous, too.

Many Jews, particularly American Jews safely removed from combat, are on some level itching for a brawl. They’re tired of being accountants. They want to kick ass. And deep down many Jews feel that our history of suffering needs to be avenged, or that any harm we do cannot possibly compare with the harm that was done to us; that anti-Semitism and the Holocaust have given us a get-out-of-moral-jail card, with no expiration date. We may thus tantrum at will.

Alas, the fantasy will again crumble in the face of reality--that old messy, inscrutable swamp. The military option will fail, again, for two reasons--one specific and one general.

Specifically, this war is marked for disaster. It has no plan other than for the government to appease its citizens’ growing fear and frustration. There is no coherent strategy underlying this operation. No well-defined, agreed upon, and achievable end goals. In short, there is no vision; at least not a new one, and all the old ones (take over; change regime; make Palestinians so miserable they’ll come to their senses; make Palestinians turn on their leaders, etc.) have been tried and have failed before.

Moreover, the leadership-- Olmert, Barak, and Livni--despise each other and are facing elections. Wars decide political futures in Israel, so forget unity and clarity of purpose at the top.

Additionally, the army has not had sufficient time to recover from the second Lebanon debacle and Israel has not had sufficient time to deal psychologically and materially with its newly exposed vulnerabilities to missile attack.

Israel, moreover, has not dealt with the fundamental emerging hindrance to its military prowess—the unwillingness to pay the price of war. Everybody wants Hamas gone, but nobody is really eager to die for that cause.

That’s why Israel has, tactically, already repeated the Lebanon mistake. Instead of picking one of its better military options-- to bomb and then stop and seek agreement or to move in with ground forces at first shock--it again left itself with the worst options: bomb continuously without ground support, which will not stop rocket attacks or replace Hamas and which will become a public relations nightmare; or move in late with ground troops, surely incurring heavy casualties, which will become a nightmare in every other way.

In general, the war will fail because there’s no military solution to Israel’s problem. Like a parent who lost his authority after unleashing too may beatings on his child--in the process making the child ever more vengeful, numb, and demented--Israel’s ever increasing, and increasingly frequent, spasms of violence have long ago acquired a sheen of desperation and have been yielding diminishing results for decades.

The dream of salvation by Jewish militancy is dead. Israel has won all its battles and skirmishes against its enemies—nations and terrorists alike. It defeated armies, it conquered territory; it forced thousands out of their homes; It inflicted far greater property damage and casualties than it had suffered. It controls the skies. Israel had stopped border infiltrators, advancing armies, airplane hijackers, stone throwing mobs and suicide bombers. Yet Israel’s security today is not better than it was 10, 20, 30 and 40 years ago. In fact its short term sense of security is tenuous and its long term security prospects are dimming fast, with every useless military victory, because Israel hasn’t stopped or diluted the impulse underlying all these hostilities. Rather, Israel has nourished it.

Worse, in the process of all this military triumph, Israel has managed to alienate the world, from which it draws its lifeline. Just as Israel’s violence satisfies some Jews’ deepest dark fantasies, its growing isolation too is quite pleasing to some, who see it as evidence not of Israel’s political blunders and failure of imagination but as a reflection of inherent Jewish ‘otherness,’ which they have internalized as a bedrock of their identity.

Long term, Israel cannot survive isolated and on its sword. Israel’s real strengths are not military but social, cultural, political, spiritual. To achieve peace and security, Israelis will have to forsake the false promise of empire—biblical or otherwise; reject the faux glamour of the sword and the seductive calculus of violence and revenge and call instead on old Jewish strengths: the power of ideas; the power of moral persuasion; the power of words.

Israel will survive long term, in a form worth defending, only if it manages to draw the world’s consciousness and sympathies to its side. Israel alone cannot defeat extreme Islamism or virulent anti-Semitism, but it can become a facilitator, a leader, a galvanizer of a universal effort to those ends—not by heavy-handed bombings, but by savvy deployment of its collective brains and creativity and moral vision and political cunning to win the war of ideas, of ideology, of hearts and minds.

Without a committed, innovative, daring, and effective strategy on that front, any carnage it unleashes it unleashes on itself.

On Anti-Semitism

2008-12-03T16:19:00.000-08:00

Truth be told, the current economic meltdown is worrying me silly. Here we have it, a classic scenario; the perfect storm—a global financial crisis the intricacies of which, like those of a marriage, no human can understand, least of all the protagonists. An opportunity of historic proportions, and yet—where are the anti- Semites? Where’s the inevitable tide of resentment, accusation and innuendo?

After all our efforts over the centuries, after we’ve painstakingly developed a secretive, shadowy culture of otherness, of hunched scheming merchants and sticky-fingered moneymen; after our elders wrote detailed protocols; after we’ve spent generations dipping our matzos in gentile infant blood—which, as infant blood goes, let me tell you is no treat; after we’ve slithered into every nook and cranny of government and taken control of the levers of runaway capitalism and drove it over the proverbial cliff—after all this, what do we get in return? Total dismissal! Deafening silence! Complete absence of acknowledgment! No mention of our prowess; no whispering of our menace. No organized run on our corner offices and our bagel shops. No insinuation of our eternal guilt, our devious plotting to end the world, or at least dominate it, or at least siphon its wealth into our hidden accounts off the coast of Belize.

As someone who’s yet to benefit from our people’s proud history of world domination, and as someone who somehow happened to be taking a nap when the famed money-savvy gene was handed out freely by the Maker to his Chosen, I was at least hoping for some respect, of the kind afforded a movie bad guy; some (Wall) street cred. Instead, I’m left to sit in anonymity, like some clueless hoi polloi gentile, and watch my house value evaporate. Oy, the humiliation.

And I’m not just being selfish here. I have an eye out for all my brethren who’ve invested so much of their identity in the anti-Semitism industry. My heart goes out to those of us--and they are legion--who came to rely on the perpetual seething and periodic blossoming of anti-Semitism; whose Judaism is nourished by persecution; who use our history of suffering not as a legacy to emerge out of but as leverage to invest in. If anti-Semitism is on the wane, what are they to do?

Like those prurient cable news shows that cannot wait for the latest lurid video of some coked-up celebrity to emerge so they can protest its depravity by showing it repeatedly, some anti-Semitism fighters love nothing more than a good anti- Semitic anecdote to paw at in horrified fascination.

You know how it goes: a snoot-nosed homie flicking the shtreimel off some yeshiva boy's head in Brooklyn becomes incontrovertible proof of Hitler’s second rise. All the yeshiva boys who go about their business unmolested are at once forgotten. And we all are put on high alert. No matter that worse harassment is regularly perpetrated on many women if they happen to walk in short sleeves through some decidedly un-Arian neighborhoods in Jerusalem.

Yes, I know, anti-Semitism still exists; but the fact you're being followed doesn't mean you're not paranoid. Current anti-Semites are to Nazism what current racism is to slavery—faint, pathetic, and dying remnants. You can no more see in every swastika painted by a bored ten-cent skinhead on a bathroom stall the shadow of Hitler than you can see the return of slavery in some drunken frat kid in his underwear sloppily mouthing the N-word on YouTube.

Yes, denying a threat can be self-injurious, but exaggerating a threat is often self- serving. Professional victimhood, after all, does have its privileges. At the price of letting it define you, you can buy much latitude for your own misbehavior; you can buy faux group unity; you can shame and guilt those around you, perhaps even into giving you some money.

But after a while, those who see nastiness everywhere may become nasty themselves. The boy who repeatedly cries wolf gets to terrorize everyone, just like the wolf itself. A woman who cleans her home all day spends her life in the dirt.

Realistic caution becomes neurotic preoccupation when it spirals out of proportion; as such, it bespeaks not of the perceived but of the perceiver. We menace ourselves with worry over what we imagine may come to menace us. And we see the world less as it is and more as we are: scared, hostile, suspicious.

But we shouldn’t be; because really, if they chase us out of here, who will run the banks?

Advice for Obama

2008-11-19T19:45:00.000-08:00

So Obama is thankfully on his way to the white house. Thankfully, American Jews did their part. Refusing to be bamboozled by nasty rumors and the false consciousness of their Israeli brethren, they voted overwhelmingly (78%) for him.

The more we see how Obama carries himself, the more we realize how spiritually vacant and intellectually bankrupt the last administration has been; we realize how many people, here and around the world, have been waiting to exhale. The euphoria, hence, is understandable.

Lingering euphoria, however, becomes delirium, a dangerous break with reality. Let’s face facts: Obama’s victory does not represent a radical realignment of American politics. Even in the face of Bush’s failures and McCain’s dim candidacy, 46% of Americans voted Republican. The democrats’ blue map visions are merely wishful thinking. Obama’s win was more about the process of change than the content of that change. America showed it is not afraid to zig. Four years from now, if things do not improve, America will not be afraid to zag.

And the focus on race is misguided. Obama’s race has historical significance, but it is politically negligible. Underneath the current sheen of uplifting symbolism, America is as vulnerable as ever. Fear, prejudice, and deception are not bugs in our software but features of our hardware; they are not maladies of whites or of the right, or of yesterday; they are universal, timeless human maladies.

If Obama is wise, he will not seek to be the anti-Bush on content. He will not err by replacing Bush’s right wing dogmatism with its left wing counterpart. Instead, he will be the anti-Bush on process, governing transparently from the thoughtful, evidence-based, humane, collaborative and pragmatic center, thus marginalizing the goons and loons on both sides of the political spectrum.

To judge from the way he ran his campaign, the last thing Obama needs is advice. Still, he’s going to hear plenty of it; particularly when he gets around to dealing with Israel. Jews will be Jews, and if Obama is going to haggle in the rowdy Middle Eastern bazaar, he’s going to hear some kibitzing over his shoulder. And perhaps rightly so, because the brutality of these merchants will make the bare knuckled Chicago politicos of his youth look like effete white gloved valets.

In this spirit, here’s my $.02 (half my current retirement fund, mind you):

First, politics as usual--which is to say AIPAC appeasement and knee-jerk solidarity with the Israeli government—is a dead end. Israel needs tough love politics. Approach Israel as you would a talented but troubled child. “I care about you and believe in you enough to insist that you can and will learn how to behave by taking adverse consequences for bad, and rewards for good, behavior. Although it won’t feel good in the short run, you will end up the better for it.”
Commit to protecting Israel, but stop enabling it. Cancel the blank checks and guilt trips; put away the rubber stamps. An addict’s true friends are those who keep the drugs away, not those who deliver them. The Jews will complain; but that, Rahm Emanuel will explain to you, is our way to feel alive. Deep down, Israelis know they need help to clean up. American Jews know that offering carte blanche to anyone is bad business.

Second, you’re not a symbol, a prophet, a pop idol, or a messiah; you’re a politician. Practice politics. Send your representatives to talk to everybody. Iran is not evil. Iran has a glorious cultural heritage and its young people are largely sympathetic to the west. In the next 20 years Iran is more likely than Iraq to emerge as America’s ally in the region.

Go bold on Syria. A territorial compromise in the Golan Heights will be simpler to achieve than in the West Bank. There are less people to shuffle in the Golan Heights and no holy sites to inflame the crazies. It’s also country vs. country there, an easier equation altogether. And then negotiate with Hamas. Those who refuse to speak to Hamas now will get Al Qaeda later.

Third, speak the truth on Jerusalem. No more, “A unified Jerusalem is Israel’s capital forever” platitudes. Jerusalem should be, and is already, divided. Acknowledge that reality. Advocate a vision of Jerusalem both glorious and plausible: one city that is the political capital of two nations and the spiritual capital of three religions.

Forth, at some point someone will waive the Holocaust in front of your face and try to draw an analogy to the present. Rebuff that tacky move. There is no such analogy. Nothing in the current conflict resembles the Holocaust in any way. The people who raise this issue know that, but the gambit has worked well in the past to distract and confuse and raise money, too. Don’t fall for it. The ghosts of past dead must not eclipse the living of the present. The scars of the past should not be used as templates for future scars. Focus on the here and now, and look forward, not back. In the Middle East, those who know history are doomed to repeat it.

Elections 2008

2008-10-23T22:13:00.000-07:00

The presidential election is days away. Voting is rarely but best approached with a clear head. Let’s, therefore, clarify:

1) this election cannot be called “the most important in our lifetime.” There is no way to know this about any election.

2) McCain and Obama are neither sub- nor super-human. Neither seeks to destroy America. Neither is capable of delivering salvation.

3) We can’t know for sure who the better choice really is. The one not chosen will never get a similar turn at the helm as the chosen one. And the strength and success of a presidency are not determined by the president alone.

4) While the next president will do his best to prevent it, the process of America’s decline may be beyond reversal, a part of the historical cycle humanity has witnessed repeatedly over the centuries. Nationalist propaganda notwithstanding, such decline may not be bad for America and the world.

Next, let’s also dispense with the tyranny of rigid ideologies and reject their deceptive siren song. Real lives of real people are messy and cannot fit into the tidy confines of ideology, however much we wish they could. Ideologies can be beautiful, coherent, and elegant while people often aren’t; but a concern for the well-being of living people must temper our enthrallment with lofty ideas. The museum audience is more important than the artifacts on display.

While we’re at it, let’s also liberate ourselves from the ‘Israel first’ nonsense. If you’re voting in America, your vote should be for and about America. This is plain decency. It’s also common sense. In case of an emergency, the flight attendant tells you, put the oxygen mask on yourself first, then on your child. The same logic applies here. A strong, just and healthy America is more likely to have the energy, resources and authority to engage helpfully with Israel.

Now, we should let go of the notion that an effective president needs to be a good guy—faithful husband, attentive parent, agreeable beer buddy, etc. The evidence is strongly against this view. The candidates are not competing for saint-in-chief. The competition is over political leadership. Stay on topic.

Once we let go our hubris, our rigid ideological fetishes, our conditioned Israel-first response, and our yearnings for a father or a messiah, we can make a reasoned decision about the two candidates. And the choice is clear.

Regarding their path to the nomination, McCain was not so much chosen as reverted to. He did not win the nomination on his appeal as much as the other candidates lost it on their lack thereof. Obama rose to the nomination on his strengths, not on others’ weaknesses. Obama’s decision to run was a bold stroke, McCain’s decision a re-tread. Obama has a history of giftedness. McCain has a history of crass entitlement. As the campaign season progressed, Obama became increasingly knowable while McCain became increasingly caustic and opaque. Obama ran an original, smart, organized and energetic campaign and beat a worthy adversary, exceeding expectations at every turn. He managed to mobilize the young, rather than just the party loyalists, and he did so the right way—by calling up their aspirations rather than their darkest fears. If Obama presides over the government as he did over his campaign, he will be a great president. Advantage Obama.

Temperament matters. And unlike policy initiatives and national circumstances, one’s temperament cannot be changed. McCain is impulsive, erratic, and reckless. Obama is thoughtful and calm. Advantage Obama.

Obama is inexperienced, but McCain is used-up. The presidency is not a consolation prize, honorary degree, or a life time achievement award. It is a job into which one must ascend, not descend. It requires one’s best years, not last years. McCain is on a downward trajectory and can only fade in this taxing role. Advantage Obama.

Regarding foreign relations, McCain’s posture is belligerent—the seething nationalist warrior. Obama’s posture is open and agreeable. We live not only in a global economy but in a global politics as well. America’s future will depend more on its ability to repair and make stronger its alliances than its ability to separate and assert itself over the world. Advantage Obama.

Regarding internal politics, both candidates will have to appease their base, and the bases on both sides can be distastefully dogmatic. However, the base on McCain’s side is largely fundamentalist, backward-looking, anti-science, and xenophobic. Its essential yearning is for the America that never was, the one without ‘the other’—the minority, the gay, the new immigrant, the non-Christian. The base on Obama’s side is progressive, tolerant, and diverse. Its essential yearning is for the America that never will be—the utopian, enlightened garden of justice. Here again, advantage Obama, because history always moves forward, not backwards.

Both Obama and McCain may fail. Each may prove a weak, divisive leader. A sense of dread will attend both presidencies. But unlike McCain’s, an Obama presidency will commence in palpable anticipation and excitement. It will be something new, and, as such, quintessentially American. Obama can be a transformational figure. McCain can only be a transitional one. Advantage Obama.

America is about progress, and Obama embodies the most profound and unambiguously righteous aspect of American progress: from segregation to inauguration.

America has always been about the future. McCain belongs to the past. The future is embodied in Obama’s candidacy. He should, and will, be the next president.

Me for President

2008-09-26T17:18:00.000-07:00

It’s official. What I had suspected for some time is now evidently true: Anybody can be president. Yes, even me.

I used to think that the presidency required special qualities. Even Bush, who seemed to manifest none, did have something I didn’t--a pedigree. He grew up with a president, played around world leaders; went to Yale. I grew up playing alone in the forest with a tractor tire and a stick.

But Palin--she’s just like me. She graduated from the University of Idaho, which would not last two quarters against my Purdue Boilermakers.

Palin started at the PTA and wasn’t afraid to dream big. I once attended a PTA meeting and fell asleep. Palin has five children. I have one, but let’s be frank, in terms of complexity and cost of maintenance one JAP easily equals five WASPs.

Palin tried journalism and competed in beauty pageants. I write a column and had a student once write on my course evaluation: ‘the instructor is sexy.’ Granted, this was a team taught class, but why split hairs; mine is not a details-oriented candidacy.

Palin’s husband is some sort of a snow mobile champion. I once got lost in a snow storm while on reserve duty on Mt Hermon in Israel and a snow mobile came to rescue me, and they brought hot cocoa, which was great, although I couldn’t hold the cup because my hands were frozen, so it remained, you know, great in theory, like supply side economics.

Palin shoots and hunts and has a bearskin rug in her office. I once shot a bird with a BB gun that my parents bought me for my bar mitzvah. I cannot tell you what their thought process was; perhaps they figured my best chance of getting any kind of traction in life was as an Olympic sharp shooter, because my grades were not promising, and like the young McCain, I was becoming too interested in chasing girls.

Regardless, I hit that bird and because, like Palin, I am definitely pro life in that I care about all of god’s creatures, I shot it again in the head at close range, so that it wouldn’t suffer too much and could meet its maker more quickly, and then I embalmed it and put it on the shelf in my room, which became a sort of an abstinence vow, since it scared the girls.

True, I wasn’t born in the US, but neither was McCain. He was born in Panama, on an American army base. I was born in Israel, which is de facto an American army base, And a good lawyer team like the one that managed to convince itself that water boarding isn’t torture should have no problems setting things straight here.

And like Palin, I just the other day received a call from John McCain on my answering machine; he asked me if I was tired of the partisan bickering in Washington. I took it to be his famously thorough vetting process.

I said yes I was; I’m tired of the status quo where only desperate candidates pick women running mates; I’m tired of seeing evangelical bible belters cheering Palin’s leadership qualities when female representation in the leadership of their churches is approaching zero percent. I’m tired of candidates who say ‘don’t pick on my kid’ and then seek to pick on everybody else’s kids by denying them health insurance, sex education, contraceptives, and abortions even in cases of incest.

I’m tired of people who would force my daughter to carry a pregnancy to term while at the same time denying evolution, which is the foundation of science education, which produces the researchers who can help diagnose, prevent and cure the problems her baby may have. I’m tired of abstinence education, the documented failure of which we can discard since the whole notion of testing ideological fantasies using empirical data smacks of science, which reminds voters of evolution theory, which needs to be squashed so we can all hold hands in science class and pray that our daughters don’t get pregnant, or that the press won’t find out about it, or that we won’t have Down Syndrome babies, and if we do, that we’ll have the financial wherewithal to afford their care without support from evil government and the temerity to believe that we can be available to them emotionally and physically while running for the vice presidency on a platform of traditional family values.

I’m really tired, I said.

McCain had said that his only criterion in picking a vice president will be the readiness of the candidate to serve as president on day one. And if Palin’s ready, then I am too; and picking me would have been a true maverick move and would have really thrown the pundits into spasms; and I would shore up the drunken Jewish vote, which is a swing state in more ways than one. And, since I’m a shooting, hunting, snow mobile riding, cocoa sipping manly man, the multitudes of bitter hardliner right wing men would not have minded the fact I’m a lefty liberal, just like-- in McCain’s calculations--bitter liberal Hilary-supporting women would overlook Palin’s right wing ideology and vote vagina over everything—which is, come to think of it, a platform I personally am really getting energized about.

On Presidential Politics

2008-09-26T17:16:00.000-07:00

Ah, presidential politics! The preening. The platitudes. The pain.

Watching the political theatre of the moment is like parenting a teenager. Both call up your anxiety, exasperation, and incredulity.

To my eyes, both presidential candidates have issues.

For Obama, race is the biggest obstacle. It still seems unlikely that America will elect a black president. But there are other problems.

Obama’s first problem is his youth. Or perhaps it’s my problem. Perhaps I resent the realization that I have finally arrived at the age where it is possible for me to be older than the president. Once, the athletes on TV were my contemporaries. Suddenly the coaches look young. I remember the days when a 19-year-old girl was an ‘older woman.’ (I remember one summer night in particular. There was a lake and a dare; but I digress).

From the rickety perch of my advancing age, all young people look alike. Youth itself seems like an affliction that, with its raging passions, outsized confidence, and spasmodic movement had better heal completely by the time one gets access to The Button.

Obama’s second problem is that he attracts worship, not just support. With the possible exception of really good Cognac, there is nothing in this life that justifies worship, including life itself. Worship is perhaps the most dangerous and destructive emotion, because what we seek to transcend through the projection of our fantasies on the worshipped entity is humanity itself, particularly its injuries and anxieties. This always goes awry twice: first when the worshippers try to forcefully persuade all doubters that their perfect vision is true and again when they finally realize it isn’t and their dashed hopes breed rage and despair.

Obama elicits worship in part because he is eloquent, smart, confident and calm amidst a frantic, anxious and dumbed-down age. He attracts worship because of the improbability of his quick asent to famefHHhhe attracts worship for the improbability of his rapid ascent. But he also elicits worship due to what psychologists call the salience effect, whereby members of the minority group will be scrutinized more closely, and evaluated more definitively, for good or bad. Successful blacks, thus, are held in higher esteem than equally successful whites; but when they err or transgress, they are also loathed more.

Obama’s third problem is that while his story represents the quintessential American myth, it grates on American reality. He is skinny, thoughtful, highly educated, and upwardly mobile. Most of America isn’t. See under: Wal-Mart. The frumpy, grumpy Cheney and snickering, backslapping Bush looked much more like America, regardless of their back-story of wealth and privilege.

Obama’s forth problem is the double-edged sword of ambition. Obama gives off the scent of consuming ambition. At heart he is a politician and he wants the top political trophy. He will do whatever is necessary. That’s why what he says today carries little weight.

McCain has his own problems; and they seem, from the outside, more serious both psychologically and politically. McCain’s aura of experience masks the fact that he is not a shining intellectual light. His is not a well-lit mind. He was disliked in school and graduated near the bottom of his class. When he speaks of economic or social issues, his answers are often embarrassingly pat, formulaic and shallow.

Listening to Obama, you can practically hear the wheels working--fast and efficiently--as he seeks the answer that will best position him to win. When McCain speaks, he often appears uncomfortable, and not entirely lucid; a forgetful and cranky old man of the kind you would not want to see behind the wheel, let alone near The Button.

McCain is admired for his bravery during his POW years in Vietnam, but when it comes to how this particular experience radiates onto his candidacy, the public seems to be ambivalent. Some believe that in his ordeal he was forged, and showed the mettle and moral character we seek in our leaders. Others suspect that the ordeal had somehow broken him; that he is subterraneously unhinged. Both views may hold merit. Some truths are revealed under pressure. But trauma, as a rule, does not toughen you up. It makes you more vulnerable and fragile.

McCain’s hunt for the presidency likely is motivated, in part, by the fantasy that becoming the most powerful man in the world will vanquish the demons of the shattering powerlessness he had experienced in captivity.

Personally, I can no longer bring myself to watch these candidates speak or debate. The political culture in the US has rendered the conversation vacant and inane. Whatever their personalities and motives, the candidates are mostly mouthpieces for competing, and increasingly stale, brands. Brands, by definition, care first about their own market share, image and bottom line, not about consumer health and well being.

The candidates’ chief objective is to get votes, not to speak the truth, innovate, or fix problems. If they must choose between simplistic slogans that poll well and nuanced truths that unsettle voters, they will always pick the former. Thus, both candidates end up spouting taglines and manufactured cant that aim to flatter and placate rather than challenge, elevate, or transform their listeners.

Obama may not know it yet, and McCain may have forgotten, but at my age, somewhere in between the two, I know better than to waste my precious, dwindling time on such fare.

On Circumcision

2008-08-25T15:53:00.000-07:00

Ritual circumcision, the ‘brit milah,’ is a tradition whose time had come and gone. But getting rid of it will not be easy. The circumcision ritual draws strength from multiple sources. It is ordained in the Jewish bible, the tribe’s original working manual. It has existed among Jews for millennia. The practice has turned into a celebration. People gather. There’s food. There’s drama--anticipation, conflict, climax.

All these pulls create their own inertia. Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes necessity, said Saint Augustine. And circumcision, out of the sheer force of time and repetition has become ingrained. Like a celebrity who’s famous because she’s famous, circumcision continues to be performed mostly because it has always been performed.

But times have changed. The majority of Jewish people today are not devout or orthodox; they are liberal and secularist. Their lives and identities are steeped in the new constructs, knowledge, and sensibilities of contemporary life. And these constructs and sensibilities have changes radically since biblical time. If you treat your child as the biblical Abraham treated his, you’ll go to jail. And that’s progress.

Our concept of humanity has evolved. This evolution is evident in the movement to extend human rights to an ever widening circle of people—the disabled, women, minorities, children. Humanity’s drive to transcend the Hobbsian ‘state of nature;’ --to make life less brutish, less nasty, and less short-- is manifested in our increasing life spans, the social institutions created to protect individual rights and freedoms, our growing distaste for violence in our lives.

Our reading of the bible has also evolved. Most Jews today read the bible not as a sacred text written by god to be followed literally, but as an accumulation of stories, parables and lessons collected over centuries, written by multiple authors and designed to guide and enhance tribal life, moral and social character, and identity.

This adaptability of the biblical text, its openness and depth, and the Jewish inclination toward probing its varied possible meanings are responsible for the text’s enduring relevance. It’s alive because it has been re-interpreted, tweaked, and adapted, not because it’s been followed rigidly, thoughtlessly or literally.

Jewish consciousness has changed; our knowledge base, our understanding of humanity, and our relationship to the bible have progressed. That progress dictates that ritual circumcision be abandoned.

At the level of reasoned argument, the pro circumcision position is practically indefensible. Why cause great pain and risk harm and trauma to a young helpless infant without compelling medical or moral justifications? Why perform surgery outside of the hospital?

True, circumcision reduces the changes of penile cancer. But the odds of penile cancer are exceedingly low to begin with. And the alternative, to teach proper hygiene, is an approach to the problem more in line with modern sensibilities.

True, circumcision in African men has been shown to dramatically reduce the chances of contracting AIDS. But what works in the third world cannot readily be applied here. Breast feeding is also counter- indicated in Africa, since HIV-positive mothers are at risk of giving AIDS to their children through breast milk. In the US, where the base rate of AIDS is very low, breast feeding is rightly recommended for mothers of infants, since its proven benefits far outweigh the small risk.

The argument from tradition is also weak. First, that something is traditional does not make it right (think foot binding, female genital mutilation, child labor). That a tradition is biblical is no excuse either. Slavery was a biblical tradition.

Moreover, even useful traditions change with time, and there are multiple ways to carry on an ancient tradition. The devout community spends much innovative energy finding ways to finesse a myriad of biblical dictates and traditions the better to fit contemporary life. The symbolic sale of farmland to a goy so that Jewish farmers can continue to use it during ‘shnat shmita’ is an example.

It is easy to imagine many acceptable ways to celebrate the covenant symbolically, maintaining its ritualized power without hurting innocent infants; without placing them at unnecessary risk; without celebrating frank barbarism.

The best argument for ending this dated custom is the intuitive moral and visceral repulsion it evokes. The next time you attend a bris, check your own reaction. Can you believe that this is done to a newborn, voluntarily, by the parents, and celebrated at that? Somebody is cutting a newborn’s penis, and everyone stands around and nobody comes to the victim’s aid. Can you believe that?

Now look at the guests at the sight of the mohel’s knife. Those who don’t have to look try to avoid looking. Those who must look on wince and twitch and laugh nervously. Those who are eager for the ceremony; who visibly enjoy and are moved by it; who shed tears of joy--they look creepy, sadistic, and unhinged.

The tradition of attacking, mutilating, and sucking the penile blood of the newborn, whatever its historical origin and significance, assaults and undermines contemporary Jewish sensibilities, runs counter to our understanding of the dignity of the infant and the integrity of the human body, and is not supported by medical evidence. Its time has come and gone.

On Martha's Vineyard

2008-08-06T10:20:00.000-07:00

I am on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard.

The house we’re staying at, 40 feet from pond’s edge, is an old woodshed, with gas lamps and an outdoor shower. No TV. No microwave.
The bedroom wall facing the pond is all windows and in the morning we wake up to the pond’s shining blue shimmering through the trees. In the afternoon we sit on the porch, drink red wine and look over the wildlife: swans, birds and ducks.

The pond is alive. We take the canoe on the water at dusk. If you’re lucky, you see otters, deer and osprey.

We cook and eat slowly. We fix stuff around the house. It is easy to forget about one’s life-as-usual on vacation. And this, to some extent, is the point.

Here, I am disconnected from the business of the community: the toils of the nation, the troubles of the world. Only the ripple of the pond remains, with its tide coming in and out and the shifts in the wind.

At times, fog comes rolling over the pond, moving quickly and silently.
From a kayak you cannot tell East or West, and you realize quickly that nature is still the boss and that we are but twigs, already broken, already adrift. If we are not already, then we will be soon, at nature’s whim.

On a nice day, you can take the small Sunfish and sail to the ocean. Hop over a low sandy dune and find a long stretch of deserted beach where you can spend a day without seeing people. Although it is wild and untamed, or perhaps because of it, the ocean has a calming influence. In front of the ocean, concerns begin to feel petty. Awe and delight are the only legitimate responses.

At night, the stars are as bright and glowing in the undisturbed darkness as childhood recalls them. The ocean roars in the distance, crashing, at once foreboding and reassuring, like the world’s muffled heartbeat.

The other day we sailed back from the beach. The sun was setting, and then the rain came. We suddenly were bathed in the yellow light of a Rembrandt painting. To our right a double rainbow appeared, two full half circles nested within each other. Rainbows make you giddy at any age, even after you have learned that there’s nothing at their end but their end. Just as there’s nothing at your end but yours.

One thing I get to do on vacation here every year is read books. At home, I read newspapers, magazines and blogs to stay on top of what’s going on, should that be possible. I watch late night TV. But on the island, I read books.

I just finished Michael Chabon’s “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” a well-crafted book that seamlessly pulls off describing a vanishing, desolate, despairing world with palpable delight and whimsy. Chabon here is clearly relishing both writing and Judaism.

The premise is intriguing: the Zionist enterprise failed; the Jews were thrown into the sea and as a last resort were allowed to settle in Alaska for a limited time which, by the time the book begins, is about to expire and send them adrift in the world again.

Amidst this dire countdown the book’s protagonist, a noirish policeman — drunk, heartbroken, his glory days behind him—is investigating a murder that occurred in the dime hotel where he’s staying.

The murdered man, the son of a rabbi who leads a mafia-like sect of rough-necked orthodox Jews, may or may not have been the Messiah, and his killing may have something to do with messianic impulses run amok, Jewish or otherwise.

The book is a superbly executed genre piece with a twist. Any fan of noire detective stories will enjoy the hard-boiled theater. But extra pleasures await Jewish readers, as some of the themes will resonate ever brighter for them.

First is the Jews’ romance with Zion. In the imagining of the failure of Israel, Chabon niftily sets up the argument that Israel is not the end all be all of Judaism’s fate. By book’s end, however, this thesis is upended. The inability or unwillingness to get away from Zion is a mysterious underlying force in the novel, as it is in history.

Second, the ticking clock for the Jews of Sitka, Alaska, is the ticking clock for all Jews all the time. The dreaded return of history, with its merciless heavy hand, is alive in this novel and in Jewish consciousness everywhere. The future, in the Jewish imagination, is always a bitter reworking of the past.

A third theme is that the Jews, while continually playing everybody and each other, are at day’s end being played themselves.

Like someone who dreams he’s in a street fight and wakes up with two broken teeth, the Jews — endlessly spinning their delusions and visions and power plays, endlessly entangled in a web of rumors and prayers and dreams— always seem to wake up bleeding in the middle of an all too real mess.

On the Prisoner Exchange Deal

2008-08-06T10:18:00.000-07:00

The prisoner exchange deal between Israel and Hezbollah several weeks ago, in which the bodies of two kidnapped Israeli soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, were returned in exchange for five Lebanese prisoners and the bodies of 199 Hezbollah combatants, was a sad and maddening occasion.

You felt sad for the dead and their families, as you always do for the latest victims of the never-ending, senseless spectacle of violence that has become the region’s tragic calling card.

Watching the pictures from Israel, you felt sad about the Israeli media, shamelessly basking in its habitual, self-perpetuating pornography of public grief; you felt sad for a country that can no longer feel unified about anything other than its dead.

Hezbollah’s sad, corrupt face was also on display again as the organization arranged a grotesque hero’s welcome for one of the released prisoners, Samir Kuntar, a vile child murderer by any possible definition.

It was also sad to acknowledge that the prisoner exchange deal was a strategic blunder. A deal that exchanges living prisoners for dead soldiers is ill-conceived because it equates the living with the dead, and they are not equal. Israel should insist on exchanging living prisoners only for living soldiers, and enemy dead for its dead. This will create an incentive for the enemy to keep alive the soldiers it captures and reduce its motivation to drag dead corpses with it from battle, as Hezbollah probably did in the case of Regev and Goldwasser.

The push for the deal was at its core an appeal from emotion: “bring the boys home.” The sentiment is understandable, but you cannot guide strategic far-seeing national policy by acting from emotion; at least not in the Middle East; at least not successfully.

Those pushing for the deal have argued that getting the soldiers back is in line with the cherished notion that Israel values highly the lives of its citizen-soldiers. Not doing everything to get the soldiers back, according to this argument, would have weakened national unity and the future motivation of Israeli fighters. But this position is disingenuous on its face.

The fundamental contract underlying Israeli existence is that Israel buys its survival and security with its soldiers’ lives. An Israeli who’s not prepared to sacrifice his life in the service of the country’s strategic and survival interests lacks courage, honesty, and moral integrity, since Israel’s survival depends heavily, for the foreseeable future, on its citizens’ willingness to sacrifice life and limb for that purpose.

Israel’s commitment to its soldiers is thus inherently nested within--and superseded by--its strategic survival interests, which these soldiers enlist to defend with their lives. If any action regarding a specific soldier undermines Israel’s strategic interests, then it should not be pursued. After all, if you follow the logic that the individual soldier is more important than the national interest he’s enlisted to defend, you undermine the rationale for any war.

The parents who send their sons to the army must accept that their sons enlist to serve the national survival and security interests, quite possibly at dire personal consequences, like getting killed or kidnapped and not returned, if the price of return amounts to undermining Israel’s security by boosting the enemy and weakening Israel’s hand in future negotiations that are sure to come.

If the goal of getting soldiers’ bodies back trumps long-term national survival and security considerations, why did the soldiers give their lives to defend national survival and security in the first place?

For prime minister Ulmert to position himself as responding to the righteous voice of the Israeli ‘street’ by approving the deal is hypocritical considering that he has not found it quite as pressing to respond to calls for his resignation, emanating in even greater unison from the same Israeli ‘street.’

Ulmert’s photo-op grab at the grieving families’ side, as well as the widely repeated mantra that the prisoner exchange embodies Israel’s life-valuing ethos, are doubly hallow and maddening when considered in the context of the Second Lebanon War. When looking at the grieving families of the two dead returnees, one had to think of the families of the 150 other Israelis, and over 1000 Lebanese, who were sacrificed in a reckless and useless war ostensibly launched in an attempt to bring back the two kidnapped soldiers. Surely the kind of deal we’ve ended up with could have been struck before, or instead, of invading Lebanon.

In sum, the whole self-congratulatory swell of sentiment over how the prisoner exchange deal exemplifies Israel’s commitment to its people is distasteful. Crying and clamoring over corpses, however cathartic and unifying and heartfelt and photogenic, is not an honest way to show that you care about the living.

The country’s leaders can demonstrate their commitment to the citizens by working relentlessly to end the violence. Only peace will truly serve Israel’s long-term survival interests. Only peace will truly alter the current, brutal contract between Israel and its citizens. In the meantime, the leadership can minimize the contract’s deadly consequences--and truly boost Israeli soldiers’ motivation and national unity--by not sending living citizen-soldiers into unnecessary, ill-planned and mismanaged wars.

On Wayward Pastors

2008-07-23T10:54:00.000-07:00

This hasn’t been a good season for firebrand religious sermonizers. The brouhahas surrounding Pastors Wright and Hagee brought to mind the days of Swaggart and Jim Baker, only this time it was politics, not prostitutes that ensnared the two.

Pastor Wright, Obama’s mentor, caused a stir by denouncing the US government and implying that it manufactured AIDS; these extreme sentiments have undercut Obama’s attempts to position himself as a mainstream, unifying candidate. Pastor Hagee is a Christian leader who has raised $30 million for Israel as part of his campaign to hasten the Jews’ return to the promised land, which he sees as a necessary precursor to the Rapture (in which the Jews will perish). Hagee was denounced by McCain—who had earlier courted him to beef up his evangelical cred—but only after a fuller measure of Hagee’s bizarre views became public, including his claim that the Holocaust was a part of God’s plan to bring the Jews back to Zion.
Both pastors are similarly delusional in their true believerism, speaking of God as if it exists in an objective, material way as do, say, governments or money. But Wright’s comments are different than Hagee’s.
When Wright rails in suspicion against the US government, he can marshal an impressive stack of historical evidence about the government’s failure and outright hostility regarding black Americans. Slavery and the Tuskegee experiment are neither myths nor fantasies. As Chris Rock had said, blacks relate to America like you would the uncle who molested you but then paid for college. Now, the line between suspiciousness and paranoia is thin and easily crossed, and, at least with his AIDS comments, Wright had crossed it. But his qualms about the government are within the empirical domain. They are refutable.

Hagee’s drivel is pure fantasy and has no basis in historical fact or the rules of evidence. Hagee is speaking from conviction, not from knowledge. He has no more knowledge of the End of Time than my girlfriend’s cat, and is less likely to survive it, if you ask me. That cat is cunning, and loves life too much. Twaddle such as Hagee’s, implying direct access to God’s mind, is commonly spouted by two types of people—schizophrenics, who get hospitalized, and religious dogmatists, who get rich. Hagee should, in the least, donate some money to Israel’s mental institutions, to support the less prosperous, and more innocent, God-channelers.

The response to Hagee in the American Jewish community was diplomatic, expressing support for Hagee as ‘friend of Israel’ and dismay about his role as holocaust explainer. Hagee released a short apology, in which he wrote: “I cannot deny the tenets of my faith. However, I will work to express my faith in a way that is sensitive to and respectful of others, including the Jewish community.” This led Abe Foxman of the ADL to state that, “Pastor Hagee has devoted his life to combating anti-Semitism and supporting the State of Israel. We are grateful for his efforts to eradicate anti-Semitism and to rally so many in the Christian community to stand with Israel.”

There are three reasons why the Jewish community is willing to keep this loon as a “friend.” First, he supports Israel. Many Jews feel Israel needs all the help it can get right now. Turning away friendly Christians, however flawed, is also difficult for the Jewish establishment to do, since historically, Christian support of the Jews is a rather recent and tenuous phenomenon.
Second, Hagee’s vision is not actuality but prophecy, and as such familiar. He is not denying historical fact but trying to account for it using a system of explaining-from-divinity, a common strategy for the devout. After all, a year doesn’t pass without some hallucinatory religious leader claiming that this or that disaster happened because we’ve neglected to stone gays or put up mezuzahs.

Third, another religion’s prophecy is dismissible. Those who protest one of Hagee’s religious beliefs (that the holocaust was God’s plan) but let pass another (that the Jews will parish at the end of times) reveal a tacit contempt for Hagee’s religion and for Hagee himself, as someone who can be played for money; which is perhaps fair enough given the contempt for Judaism implied in Hagee’s stance.

But Hagee’s no friend. If someone gave me money to occupy a house because having me perish in it will help them collect on a bet, I would call them many things, but “friend” wouldn’t be one. Hagee’s a businessman in the Christian Geulah business, and he is willing to pay for the Jews’ help in completing his project--a process that just happens to include their fiery deaths. In a sense, his logic here is similar to that employed by the Nazis who kept their Jewish prisoners alive a bit longer so the prisoners could dig the graves into which they would later be hauled.
Hagee calls for his followers to honor the Jews. But in his theology, the Jews who died in the Holocaust did so to allow the survivors to establish Israel so that Rapture can kill them there. I’d pass on such honor.

Hagee’s help for Israel is subordinate to the ends of his Christianity. In 2006, Hagee declared: "The United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God's plan...a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture... and the Second Coming of Christ."

I don’t think true Israel lovers, regardless of their Iran politics, want Israel to be used as means to Christian ends.

Family visit

2008-06-02T18:08:00.000-07:00

So my father and brother are coming to visit me in the US, for what can be considered the first time. Technically, both have visited America before, but those were different trips, at a different time. My parents did the usual coast-to-coast, If-It’s- Thursday-It -Must-Be-Boston tourist run somewhere in the early 80s. But I wasn’t in the US then. I was back in the kibbutz, searching for my post-military path with the help of several spiritual advisors, including Miles Davis (who said: “do not fear mistakes; there are none”), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (who wrote Crime and Punishment to cover gambling debts) and Jack Daniels (a wise sage, he lets you do all the talking).

My brother visited me once in the late 80s around the time of his 18th birthday. I was living in Houston then, where I got my BA, my first credit card, and a tattoo; this tells you I was: 1) young 2) broke 3) shaky in the judgment department. In retrospect, the BA was a good idea; and I’m no longer young, so there’s progress.

My brother and I figured that before he joined the Israeli army, with unpredictable prospects of survival, he might as well taste some real Tex Mex and hear a swinging horn section first. So I took him to The Taqueria—known fondly around Houston’s Montrose neighborhood as The Diarrhea-- for late night grub. Then we drove to New Orleans to catch some street brass. While there, we also hit the obligatory strip joint; the kid was 18, and headed for war, statistically speaking. That ended badly though, because the sight of a half naked coked-out girl gyrating to Lynard Skynard is not really life affirming, it turns out.

Both those visits happened long ago, and neither included the Midwest. And herein lays the rub. When Israelis come to America, they want Glamour, not Generic; they crave California, not Cleveland. They fantasize Hollywood, not Whitehall; they envision Grand Canyon, not Alum Creek; they expect Rocky Mountains, not Hocking Hills.
Little wonder I am trembling before the task at hand: to show my guests a good time in the Midwest.

We could go high brow and head to the Wexner; but a po-mo dance recital combining lawn ornaments, industrial waste, and mime is likely to leave my guests cold, even if it went over huge in Zagreb.

We could go low brow and tour the OSU campus, circle the stadium and puzzle over how its mammoth dimensions reflect the University’s educational priorities. But it may prove difficult to explain to my guests why professional sports exist in college to begin with, and why the ‘sports’ part tends to take precedent over the ‘college’ part in this state.

Perhaps visiting Otterbein, where I work, would enlighten and entertain, particularly since my father, a farmer most of his life and still at heart, has a quite understandable difficulty viewing what academics do as ‘work.’ He also struggles to grasp how his useless son, who dropped out of high school years ago to join the unofficial Socialist-Zionist branch of Dead Head nation, ended up an, ahm, Educator. Realizing that I have an actual office, and actual students, might befuddle and scare him. And he may turn out to have a point. So let’s move on.

We could hit the road; but in the Midwest, the canonical myth of the endless American highway takes on a decidedly, shall we say, pedestrian quality. The drive from Columbus to Cleveland, for example, is so monotone that on a cloudy day you may not be able to tell which way you are driving; or why, for that matter. And after traversing the dour landscape for hours you end up at a place that looks exactly like the place you’ve left; a literal Déjà view—behold, the Burger King, the CVS, MLK Ave, Starbucks. A telling socio-cultural commentary on contemporary America, perhaps, but not quite rapture tourism.

Using America to impress your family must have been much easier in the old days, when the very word ‘America’ needed no elaboration; when having an ‘American Aunt,’ or uncle, was akin to possessing magic powers. I remember one day from my childhood, when an elderly relative showed up at my parents’ room. She wore heavy make up. Swirling whispers, ‘Aunt from America,’ trailed her like a cloud of stardust. She brought us a bronze toy horse with a broken leg and a nonworking camera. I was awed; these objects signified a grand, faraway place filled with wild horses, and shiny things one could possess.

But those days are long gone. No one is naïve anymore. There are sky scrapers and TVs and Home Depots everywhere. My father got his cell phone years before I did. My brother knows NFL football much better than me. My visitors are savvy and sophisticated; even Graeter’s is unlikely to distract them for long.

So here’s my plan; we’re going to get in the car and drive to NYC. In downtown Manhattan we’ll stop, and I’ll lay down my credo:

New York is the ultimate city; 42nd street is the ultimate street; black is the ultimate color; a beautiful woman is the ultimate beauty. If you see a beautiful woman dressed in black crossing 42nd Street, you’ve seen it all.

No need to bother with Cleveland. Really.

Israel at 60

2008-06-02T18:05:00.000-07:00

At 60, Israel can look back on an almost unbelievable tale of ascent and survival, having emerged from nothing to become a wealthy, diverse and dynamic nation; an oasis of democracy and modernity amidst a largely autocratic, backwards region. Israelis enjoy a high standard of living, home ownership rates comparable to the US, and life spans among the highest in the world. Israel is in the top 5 list of the world’s per capita leaders in economic expansion, exports, university graduates, engineers, museums, published new books and scientific papers, biotech startups and NASDAQ-listed companies.

Revolutionary innovations such as drip irrigation have made the desert bloom and Israeli agriculture a model for developing nations. Israeli patents registered in the US outnumber those from Russia, India and China combined. If you’re using a computer, text messaging, voice mail, cell phone, you are relying on Israeli technology. At your hospital, Israeli technology is leading the fight against cancer, Alzheimer, Parkinson’s and cystic fibrosis, among other maladies. Israel boasts world renowned business leaders, Nobel Prize winners in multiple fields from literature to economics to chemistry, top notch novelists, poets, artists, and musicians.

And then there’s Israeli military prowess and related inventiveness - from airport security to drones to orbiting satellites. Israel serves as a strong rebuke to anti Semitic visions of Jewish inferiority and fantasies of Jewish annihilation. It has become the cornerstone and centerpiece of Jewish identity worldwide. Israel has achieved all that despite its miniscule size, lack of natural resources, and while constantly fighting for survival against multiple enemies. One cannot minimize Israel’s unique contribution to Jewish - and the world’s - historical narrative.

But a closer inspection reveals that in the last 60 years, along with seeds of progress and prosperity, seeds of catastrophe have also been sewn, and harvest time may be nearing. Israel is facing three main struggles, and seems to be losing ground on all of them.

The first is the Israeli-Arab conflict. Israelis debate the reasons for the ongoing bloodshed, but the bottom line is that the war path is a dead end for Israel. Demographically, Israel’s growth potential is limited. Diaspora reservoirs of Jews are exhausted. The Russians and the Ethiopians have arrived; lost Jewish tribes are not likely to materialize, and the Americans are staying put. Israelis are not reproducing at high levels, and those segments of the population who do - orthodox and Arabs - are not the segments from which warriors emerge.

The famed ‘quality gap’ – Israel’s answer to its inferior size - is closing. Israel’s enemies are no longer in awe of its might. Preoccupied mainly with guarding settlements, manning roadblocks, raiding civilian homes and other tasks of maintaining the soul-crushing occupation, the IDF is no longer the fighting force it once was. Hamas and Hezbollah fighters have caught up to it in dedication and sophistication.

Moreover, the war equation itself is inherently asymmetrical. Israel’s enemies need only to survive and sustain attacks in order to claim victory, while Israel must maintain high standards of living and security for its citizens. This is tricky to achieve, since war in Israel is not something that happens to some people, far away. It happens to everyone, at home.

War corrupts. And endless war corrupts endlessly. The Israeli soul has been deformed by war. Judaism is a life-affirming tradition, and mainstream Israeli culture has western-style aspirations to the good life. Endless war undermines both. As Israelis have been called to sacrifice repeatedly by callous leaders to callous ends, war’s traditional power to unite the nation has eroded. Battles are no longer a matter of consensus, no longer the stuff of myth but grim waddles through unremitting muck, with no horizon. Israel at war will drift further away from its original purpose and righteous core values. In the process of defending itself, Israel risks losing those aspects of its character that are most worthy of defending.

The second struggle is between the secular and religious. This is a struggle over the character of the Judaism of the Jewish state. Israel’s military might, technological superiority, democratic sensibilities, and economic prosperity are mostly fruits of secularist labor - the Zionist vision embodied.

Forward-looking Zionist Judaism, emphasizing democratic rule, freedom, science, human rights, and openness is increasingly at odds with backward-looking Torah Judaism, which emphasizes theocratic rule, tradition, mysticism, conformity, and reticence. The struggle is asymmetrical since secularist values allow ‘the other’ equal rights while religious values seek to deny and exclude ‘the other.’ Religious extremists thrive in secular Israel. Secular Israelis will not thrive in a Jewish Theocracy.

Currently, Israel is undergoing a ghettoization process whereby the two camps seek to isolate their daily lives from one another. Their interactions increasingly become collisions. Israel is bound for disaster if it Balkanizes, or if religious institutions and messianic sentiments supplant civic institutions and reason.

The third struggle is poor versus rich. Currently in Israel, the gap between rich and poor is growing. Israel ranks among the most unequal developed countries. 19 families control roughly 40% of the income of Israel’s 500 leading companies. 20% of Israelis, and one in three children, live in poverty. The sense of national solidarity, so crucial to Israel’s survival, is being eroded by the widening economic gap. Israel physically cannot—and morally should not—flourish in the next 60 years while allowing whole segments of its population to remain disenfranchised, ignorant, and poor.

On Obama lust

2008-06-02T18:02:00.000-07:00

I have a problem. My girlfriend is in love with another man. This started out innocently enough. A kid showed up on TV one day yapping some fantasies about transforming America, creating a better future and other such naive, juvenile fare. My girlfriend thought he was cute, what with them big ears and all, and I thought nothing of it.

Before long, strange signs started appearing around her home in Indiana. Lawn signs, that is, bearing his smiling face, demanding “change!” I felt awkward, because I don’t like it when strangers ask me for change, and I had a nagging suspicion, just from the looks of him, that he was going to take my change and use it to buy some elitist product, like arugula.

My girlfriend began going out at night to secret meetings at some local coffee house, where she supposedly was doing wholesome things like becoming engaged in the political process and exercising her sacred citizenship covenant. But I smelled a rat, as in Democrat. And I felt in my gut that this was no ideological exercise, but something baser and more urgent, like lust.

I began to notice a certain gleam in her eye when his name was mentioned; a dark, intense spark, like a cat eyeing the mouse. Then there was a message on her answering machine. It was him, sweet talking: “join me; we’ll build a bright future together…” The guy was smooth, I must concede, with a charmingly halting yet assured and soothing voice. I almost could see what my girlfriend saw in him. I think I’d buy a used car from that guy, if I could afford the gas.

She began disappearing for long stretches of time, claiming she was out ‘canvassing’. She would return all sweaty, hair frazzled. She claimed it was the walking. But it sure looked like stepping out to me. Then a pin appeared on her shirt, right next to where her heart used to be, before that fellow stole it away.

In a desperate attempt to woo her back, I took her to Chicago for a romantic weekend. We were having dinner when I noticed again that mug of his, pinned to her shirt, beaming at me with his perfect teeth. I asked her to remove it because, to my mind, two’s company, three’s a constituency. She rose in offense, accusing me of cynicism, nihilism, immaturity, and ignorance about the ‘democratic process,’ which she still believes, incredibly, to be something other than the rich picking one of their own to run things.

It was clear that I was losing her. I needed a comeback strategy, but the dude is younger than me, better looking, richer, a Harvard graduate, a lawyer, of exotic background, and running for president, which she somehow fails to see for the proof of madness it is. My prospects were looking bleak. But I thought there was one thing that He, all ephemeral and pristine and principled and married could not offer her that I still could.

I took her back to the hotel. I turned to light a candle and when I turned back there she was in bed, curled up with a book, and that face on the cover, pressed against her bosom, smiling, taunting. O, the audacity! Suddenly I had a headache, so she read me a few chapters to lull me to sleep, and I thought maybe she had some crumbs of affection left for me; and maybe I could, you know, subsist on that for a while.

But the next day, upon returning home, her voicemail was clogged with urgent messages from all her friends. It turns out He came to town and all her pals got to see Him, and shake His hand, and look Him in the eye and ice skate with His kids. Everybody got to do all that; except my girlfriend, who happened to be out of town, having dinner with a guy who never will run an errand, let alone for president; who cannot change the oil in his car, let along the destiny of nations.

As she was telling me the story over the phone, I could sense her simmering rage, slowly melting the phone lines. She said: “It’s not your fault; you couldn’t have known;” but I knew she was thinking that He would have known; and anyway, I was now forever associated in her mind with trauma, with unspeakable loss. I tried to be reassuring: “You’ll get your chance,” I said, “he’ll return in the next election cycle.” I don’t think it worked. When I said: “Good night. We’ll talk tomorrow,” she muttered: “I’m not sure.”

I figured that was it. My lone pledged super delegate has defected. I threw the phone down in despair. “That’s it,” I screamed, “I’ll get you, Obam…” whereupon fifteen FBI guys crashed through my windows and hauled me off to the big house.

I was allowed one phone call. I called McCain. They say his wife is loaded, so perhaps she’ll spring for bail; and he may empathize with the wrongly imprisoned. And my girlfriend - she’s off to ‘canvas’ Kentucky with Him, last I heard. I hope this is just a passing, one-term crush; but to help with the healing, once I get out, I’m getting a puppy. I think I’ll name her Hillary.

On Gaza

2008-03-14T16:06:00.000-07:00

The recent events on the Gaza-Egyptian border where thousands of Palestinians, seeking relief from the Israeli blockade, crossed into Egypt through a blown up border wall have re-focused attention on the desperate plight of Gaza residents.

They say that success has many fathers while failure is an orphan. But the failure that is Gaza has many fathers, all of whom delinquent in their own, by now notorious, ways. Israel’s fault lies primarily in its historical failure to anticipate and avoid the inherent and metastasizing ills of military occupation. The Palestinian leadership, notoriously corrupt and inept past to present, also carries much of the blame. The Palestinians are yet to produce any leader of stature, vision, and integrity. Forget a Palestinian Mandela or Gandhi; even a Palestinian Ulmert would be an historical step up. The US also helped father the Gaza mess with its short sightedness and inaction, mostly in the name of its ‘special friendship’ with Israel. Both Clinton and Bush have dragged their feet on this issue, moved in too late, mumbled too softly, and either left their big stick at home (Clinton), or stuck it in the wrong place (Bush, Iraq), even though the reasonable solution--two states for two peoples--has been visible, available, and largely agreed upon for years. The lesson of history here is that Israel can ill afford a friendly American president.

But rehashing past grievances, although popular to the point of compulsion in the Middle East, is boring and ultimately useless. A more urgent endeavor is to examine Israel’s current entanglement with Gaza. The blockade strategy, temporarily foiled recently by Hamas’s well-planned wall break on the Egyptian border, was designed as a two- pronged gambit. On one hand, Israel sought to make life in Gaza miserable and intolerable. On the other, it is seeking to reward the more secular, conciliatory Abas government in the west bank with support, access, positive publicity, and money, in order to create an incentive for Hamas to come to the table or for Gaza citizens to overthrow Hamas. This approach is problematic on multiple levels.

Politically, starving an overcrowded, poor and hostile population of 1.5 million people is bound to backfire, as pictures of the chaos and despair leak into the world press. In the eyes of much of the world, Israel is already seen as a bully or a bother. The vision of ‘the villa in the jungle,’ in Ehud Barak’s words, which Israelis used to think would impress the world and demonstrate Israel’s vitality and worth, is now bringing to the world’s imagination echoes of colonialism--a lordly rich and obtuse nation, oozing a sense of entitlement, brutally oppressing another people.

Morally, it is difficult to justify collective punishment of the type Israel has been increasingly inflicting on Gaza. The tactics it has used, including limiting movement and commerce as well as gas and electricity supplies (recently to the point of blackout)--and, in 2006, systematic flyovers by jet planes to create nighttime sonic booms over Gaza--all serve to victimize a civilian population. This runs counter to international laws of warfare and to basic, intuitive moral decency.

Psychologically, the hope that Gazans will suffer themselves into peace is largely misbegotten. First, the principle of cognitive dissonance, whereby large sacrifices for a cause make the cause more highly regarded, is bound to be at play. Israeli attacks on Hamas are likely to increase its popularity. Second, it is dangerous to assume that incentive contingencies are universal or straight forward. While the hardware parameters of the reward-punishment architecture are genetic and species-wide (we all will work for food), the software aspects of specific reward-punishment computations (how, what and when we’ll eat) are shaped and determined by cultural and situational contexts and tend to vary greatly. Human history and today’s papers are replete with examples of cultures in which the values of honor, justice, revenge, faith or courage supersede the value of money, freedom, or even life itself. Additionally, in an asymmetrical war like the one between Israel and Hamas, the very definition of victory is subject to competing interpretations. At any given point, both sides can come to their constituents with claims of victory (in Israel - prosperity, relative security and, increasingly, our God is with us; in Gaza – the resistance continues, corrupt Fattah defeated, and, increasingly, our God is with us).

Moreover, traumatized populations, like traumatized individuals, tend to behave in unexpected and unpredictable ways. Often, they will seek to exorcise their internal chaos and pain by inflicting it on their environment. The notion that Gazans, after forty years of ever-tightening cycles of retaliations and brutality, only need a final squeeze around the neck to either surrender or see the light is a grim fantasy. Over time, such a pressure cooker is bound to explode or spill over in ways that will make the recent wall break on the Egyptian border seem quaint.

On Obama

2008-03-14T16:03:00.000-07:00

If you believe the uneasy grumblings from the American Jewish establishment and the nasty hysterical emails you’ve been getting, a new, dangerous enemy of Israel has emerged and his name is Barack Obama.

The stolid, knee jerk quarters of American Jewry, who see any criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism, who obsess ceaselessly about ‘what’s good for the Jews’ without realizing that such obsession is bad for the Jews, and who demand increasing investment in Israel from the US while resisting any attempt to rationally monitor and consider that investment, are at it again. These so-called Israel supporters tremble at the thought of Obama becoming president. Shudder, that name (it sounds, er, Arab); shudder the youthful inexperience (he may actually try something); shudder the populist coalition-building (broad based support may marginalize us) shudder the peacenik advisors (they may actually try something).

The truth, however, is that America’s AIPAC-managed, no-holds-allowed, manifest pro-Israel stance--tilted even further under Bush’s inept and irresponsible leadership--has been harming Israel’s true interests, corrupting its character, and undermining its prospects. America’s unchecked support has enabled a persistent double standard, both here and in Israel, whereby the atrocities and idiocies of Israel’s government and army are brushed aside as mere necessary toughness (we are forced into it), excused as self defense (they started it) or minimized through cynical historical comparisons (The Holocaust, anyone?).

In this enmeshed family drama, America is the wealthy but guilt-ridden, distracted, and incompetently permissive parent who convinces herself that her bullying and obnoxious child, Israel, is an innocent and misunderstood victim, eternally threatened, harassed, and molested just for being rather than for behaving; eternally hated for reasons that reflect only the pathology of his haters, rather than also his own character.

Immersed in this incessant, distasteful and dishonest self pity, the American Jewish establishment seems no longer capable of even perceiving any Israeli fault, mistake or vice, let alone condemning or trying to prevent them.

In this climate, anyone—a political candidate, an academic researcher, an oped columnist--who won’t bow before the holly inherent purity of Israel’s government and army and the received sacredness of the Israel-US ‘special bond’ will be pilloried. Any concern for others will be breathlessly pegged as self loathing. Dare to mention that ‘the others’ are people too, that their human lives are as worthy as ours, and you’ll immediately be labeled a bleeding heart softy.

With zombie-like persistence and grace to match, the rabid, sanctimonious ‘defenders of the Jews’ will pounce to reminded you of the other side’s viciousness, which, to their logic, we are supposed to at once detest and duplicate. As if we are in a zero-sum game where acknowledging the suffering of others somehow diminishes ours, rather than helps us transcend it. As if the capacity for empathy and compassion is a liability rather than a principal asset of Judaism and humanity. As if acknowledging our wrongs somehow strengthens our enemies, rather than strengthens us. As if to mention the Palestinian suffering is to automatically equate it with ours on some slippery slope to moral nihilism, rather than a mere return from propaganda to conversation, to sanity and honesty. As if a win-win approach to resolving the conflict is somehow naïve, rather than the only viable one.

There are similar grumblings in Israel as well. The Israeli newspaper Haartez has recently ranked Obama as the candidate least in support of the Israel-US alliance. Danny Ayalon, a former ambassador to the United States, has described Obama’s candidacy as cause for concern. Hillary won a majority of votes in Israel, even as she lost the international primaries.

Israelis may claim they are worried because Obama is an unknown commodity. But all presidents are unknown commodities when it comes to how they will factor in Israel’s drama. Richard Nixon, a crude anti-Semite shunned by Jewish voters, eventually helped rebuild the Israeli army after the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Jimmy Carter, whom many Jews like to hate in light of his recent protestations of Israeli behavior, was chief mediator of the Camp David peace agreement. Ronald Reagan, who received more Jewish votes than most republicans, ended up selling F-15 jets and AWACS planes to Saudi Arabia, helping to cement the regime that has since been spreading the virulent anti Semitic Wahabi Islamism around the Middle East. And Israel’s latest ‘great friend,’ George W. Bush, in the process of resolving his Oedipus complex in Iraq, has unleashed the Iranian threat.

No, the worries are not about the unknown, but about the known-yet-dreaded. Israel is like a drug addict who worries that the drug supply will stop, even though such stoppage is his only actual hope of survival.

When Israelis and their American ‘supporters’ say they worry about Obama’s Israel bona fides, that’s code for the thing they are truly afraid of, yet desperately need: a sensible president who will shed AIPAC’s chains, knock Israel off its ‘special friendship’ pedestal, hold it accountable for its promises and behaviors, and withhold monetary and political support to force Israel to settle the Palestinian issue while it is still possible.
Now, that would be change we can believe in.

Hisham

2008-03-14T16:01:00.000-07:00

The young man sitting at my kitchen table, bravely sipping my oft-mocked home cooked Turkish coffee, is thoughtful and soft spoken and carries himself with the quiet resoluteness of a person who knows others are bound to routinely try—and fail—to pigeonhole him.

His name is Hisham, an Arab Israeli born and raised in the town of Sachnin. We met at a workshop I conducted for OSU psychology interns. After the talk, he approached me and asked where I was from. I said I was from Israel and he said he was, too. We started talking, and there was instant kinship and ease. I mentioned my New Standard column and asked him for an interview. Hisham is loath to be considered a representative of anything but himself, but for the purpose of this interview, I told him, he would have to try.

Hisham graduated from Hebrew University in Jerusalem before arriving here on a Fulbright fellowship; he’s finishing his PH.D. in clinical psychology with a focus on the psychology of religion. Hisham describes himself as a non-practicing Muslim. His parents are very religious, he says, but were always accepting of his ambitions and supportive of his choices. They did not try to stop him from pursuing a degree in psychology or from going abroad. They have accepted his current girlfriend, a Russian Jew, even though her family is reluctant to accept him.

As with many Israelis abroad, after five years in the US his Hebrew is fading; he misses his family, the food, and the sounds of his home town. But he is also a realist, and ambitious. He wants to pursue a full life of research, practice and teaching and does not see a possibility of doing that in Israel. Academic careers in Israel are scarce, and for Arab Israelis in the social sciences, the odds of landing a position are vanishingly small.

Moreover, life for Arab Israelis of his generation is increasingly difficult in Israel. His parents’ generation, he says, kept the events surrounding the 1948 war (Independence War for Jews; Nakba, or catastrophe, for Arabs) hidden and buried in silence, much like my parents’ generation kept silent about their European trauma; they focused on survival and on the future. But Hisham’s cohort is no longer satisfied with self-silence and with second class citizenship. They want equality and are frustrated at the odds of achieving it. They are more highly educated and hence - ironically - find it harder to integrate into the Israeli workforce. Israel’s professional class and cultural elites are reluctant to accept Arabs into their ranks. Thus, many educated Arab Israelis must settle for under-employment, take jobs for which they are highly overqualified, or leave the country.

Hisham believes that the Israeli government wants to keep Israeli Arabs down. A poor and struggling minority is easier to control. And the Israeli government is unlikely to shed a tear over an exodus of Arab intelligentsia.

Hisham is not optimistic about the future of Israel. He doesn’t believe Israeli Jews will accept equality for Arab citizens, in large part because the Jews want Israel to be a Jewish state, and the Arab community is seen as a threat to that desire. The Jewish citizens of Israel know very little about the Israeli Arabs, he says. Israeli Jews see the Arabs as disloyal, primitives, and terrorists.

Hisham sees the riots of 2000, where 12 Israeli Arabs were killed by police in the course of a 10-days riot in support of the Intifada, as a prelude to the future. Recently, the official inquiry into the events failed to produce any indictments. Few in Israel believe that the fact the dead were Arabs is unrelated to the decision to close the case.

Hisham says most Israeli Arabs want to live in peace and equality. There’s a broad consensus within the community, he says, about the need for a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders. Negotiating with Hamas is a must. Trying to engage Abu Mazen alone will not work, he says. Most Israeli Arabs would remain in Israel under this solution, as land ties and ownership are deep values within Arab culture.

As we talk, we discover that our cross cultural experiences and observations as Israelis in America are strikingly similar. Americans, we both agree, tend to be polite and well mannered, with an endless capacity for shallow small talk about sports or the weather. People here avoid talking religion or politics, which are both the preferred and default topics of conversation at any gathering of Israelis. Americans eschew emotional displays and passionate argumentativeness, both of which are canonical modes of social engagement for Israelis. Americans, however, tend to be more trusting than Israelis. In Israel, the core assumption is always that the other is trying to get over on you in some way, and so you’d better hurry and get over on them first, lest you become ‘a sucker,’ the most dreaded of tags for any Israeli.

After he leaves I reflect on this encounter. I think about how trivial our differences seem, how vast our similarities. I think about how Jews like me and Muslims like Hisham could easily coexist and prosper together. I think about how Jews like me and Muslims like Hisham are leaving Israel in increasing numbers.

Brain drain

2008-02-02T11:32:00.000-08:00

As of this writing, the faculty strike in Israel is ongoing, the universities are about to be shot down, and the academic year may be lost. This is but the latest fiasco to befall the ailing higher education system in Israel, and it is that malaise - more than the failures of the latest war or the naggings of the latest economic crunch - that should worry Israel supporters.

After a technological boom and an infusion of intellectual capital through Soviet immigrants in the 90s, recent years have seen a marked decline in Israel’s most important asset—human capital. A recent study by Drs. Omer Moav and Eric Gould at Hebrew University, reported in the Jerusalem Post, found that between 1995-2002 four percent of people with a master's degree or higher were leaving Israel. A study by Avi Messika and Tamir Agmon of the College of Management in Tel Aviv reports that the Israeli technology market, booming until recently, is now in decline, partially due to a lack of entrepreneurs.

A report published by Israel’s Shalem Center shows an increase in Israeli brain drain from 2002 through 2004. In 2002, 0.9 percent of researchers and professors left the country. In 2004, the rate was 1.7 percent. In 2002, 1.3 percent of teachers left Israel and in 2004 this rate rose to 2.1 percent. The research also shows that 96 percent of the academics who have left the country since 1995 have stayed abroad.

According to a report by the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), 68,900 people left Israel between 1990 and 2005. Most of those leaving were college educated, 20-30 year-olds. The report showed that immigrants of Eastern European origin leave Israel at a rate five times higher than native-born Israelis.

According to a study by Dr. Dan Ben-David of Tel Aviv University, economics researchers - who with their high market value serve as bellwethers for academia - are leaving Israel in increasing numbers. Of the top 13 most-cited economists during the 1990s, half have left Israel. Only four of the 13 top-ranked economists have remained full-time in Israeli academia. According to Ben-David, across all academic fields, Israel has a higher percentage of its researchers, 24.9%, living in America than any other country, followed by Canada, with 12.2%., the Netherlands, (4.3%) and Italy (4.2%).

Some of the causes of this brain drain are obvious. Academics abroad make more money. According to Ben-David , between 1996 and 2006 American full professors' real salaries rose by 15.7%, while their Israeli colleagues saw a real drop of 1.6%; the gap is even higher for associate professors and junior faculty. Moreover, Israel's academic hierarchy rewards seniority first and merit second, which frustrates productive young scholars. Academic positions, as well as funding for research and research labs are also scarce in Israeli institutions, leading many of the best researchers to seek a more hospitable place in which to pursue their work.

But the deeper root of the problem is Israeli culture itself, which has over the years moved gradually away from the traditional Jewish ethos of study, contemplation, and inquiry and toward an ethos of power, militarism, and populist anti intellectualism. Israeli culture lionizes doers and suspects thinkers. It fetishizes the concrete and suspects the abstract. Existing as it does in a seemingly permanent state of instability, future dread, and uncertainty, Israeli culture thrives on short cuts, quick strikes, instant gratifications, and on-the-spot improvisations, and distrusts the long term investments, quiet processes, and slow, systematic and disciplined ant-work that are the lifeblood of scientific contemplation and research.

Moreover, the country’s move in recent years from its early socialist and communitarian roots toward market-based global individualism a-la the US has brought with it, in addition to measures of prosperity and freedom greater than ever before, all the nasty capitalist side effects: the loss of group identification and solidarity; the ever deepening and change-resistant gap between the haves and have-nots; the vacant materialism and distracted greed.

And with so much money and energy directed constantly toward tangible short-term ends such as planning and fighting useless wars, scaffolding the messianic shenanigans of a noisy corrupt minority in the occupied territories, and greasing the ever extended palms of 13th century-styled religious luftgesheft purveyors and scheming party apparatchiks – it’s no wonder there’s neither money nor energy left at day’s end for such intangibles as the development of human capital.

To see such neglect anywhere is sad. But it is doubly sad here, given the fact that Israel’s only advantage over its enemies, only natural resource, only hope, only real glory, reside in the - now diminishing - strength of its human capital.

On holiday uplift

2008-02-02T11:30:00.000-08:00

Critics of this column often accuse me of sounding perennially negative and pessimistic; of wallowing in the proverbial mire; of being – as they say in Yiddish — a scrooge. So, to answer such malicious disparagement, I decided to write an uplifting holiday column. Alas, the road to good intentions is paved with hell, and holiday uplift turns out to be hard work. The rituals, rites, and relatives tend to mess with your afternoon nap schedule; and all the schmoozing, schlepping, shvitzing and shtick can drive one to drinking; which is, come to think of it, what’s left of most of these holiday gatherings once you peel away the cumbersome obligatory stuff.

When you ask for uplift in these Ohio flatlands, around this time or any time, people will reflexively mouth something about the Buckeyes. But shame of shames, I find those noisy Buckeye fans who so cherish that meaningless designation as to have it embossed on their shirts, cars, and gravestones quite irritating. Call me a cynic, but if the defining virtue, achievement or affiliation of your life is college football fandom then, it seems to me, you were not quite aiming high. Yes, I know - it’s tradition; and who could be against that? Well, in fact, I could; particularly when most of what people call ‘tradition’ are obnoxious markers of group identity that have undergone a Disneyesque process of bleaching and rewriting so as to render them family, and business, friendly. You can celebrate those student athletes if you forget they are not really students; and if you refuse to recognize that, to paraphrase sociologist Harry Edwards, the only amateurs in college athletics are those who believe that college athletes are amateurs.

Moreover, what passes for tradition in America usually stretches back all of 50 years. At the Smithsonian Museum, Fonzie’s leather jacket is displayed as historical artifact. Not that impressive for someone who grew up near Jerusalem, where you share pavement dust with Jesus.

Man, uplift is hard work; the term itself should have clued me in. But what now? When in doubt, chimes a voice inside my head oddly reminiscent of my daughter’s, go shopping! Surely, visiting the shining, heaving stores will if nothing else color me festive and cure me of the patently un-American feeling that I actually have enough stuff. So I go to the mall.

Within minutes my head is spinning. Shopping, I realize, has morphed from a sensible means to an end (you buy something you want) into a hallucinatory end in itself (buying is what you want). Today’s shoppers are like casino patrons who, having given up on winning, keep playing just to linger amongst the dazzling lights and sounds of the slot machines. Like casinos, malls are now places where the product your money buys is the very opportunity to spend it. I escape the mall with – pardon me for going gentile here - lumps of depression coal in my psychological stockings.

People say there’s real uplift in small, trivial things. So I turn on my TV. But oy, gevald. There’s but a clamor of young, shiny, blank faces reaching for screen time as if it were oxygen, collectively producing endless gushes of “Idiot wind,” to quote one Robert Zimmerman.

Perhaps there’ll be uplift in world affairs. Let’s see: Iraq, Iran, China, Pakistan, Korea, Sudan... OK, scratch that. How about national affairs? Oops, Election year, which means that, unless you’re a connoisseur of lies, hair dyes, and red ties you should run for your life. Now, thoughts of ‘life’ beget strange associations, like ‘death,’ which people my age must make like Martha Stewart and seriously entertain; or ‘the origin of life,’ and the realization that several presidential candidates proclaim a disbelief in evolution. Such disbelief is almost as depressing as the fact that someone who proclaims it can still be considered a viable candidate. So I’m feeling down again.

When all else fails, people say, go back to your friends and your roots. Well, in the words of the great up-lifter, Leonard Cohen: “my friends are gone and my hair is gray; I ache in the places where I used to play.” And as for roots, well, in my case that’s Israel, which is, despite assurances to the contrary from the Jewish American establishment, not quite an incessant orgy of uplift. Perhaps it’s me, but news of another IDF operation in Gaza fail to inspire; I get no joy from seeing an alcoholic entering the bar again. And another DOA peace conference attended by leaders without mandates whose words never match their actions also falls flat. I’m tired of the rituals of that particular tradition.

And to top it all off, it seems clear now that this uplifting column assignment is not going well; and my column space is almost full. But I say: maybe next time. And that’s hope. And nothing – except perhaps a Buckeye victory - is more uplifting than hope.

On Racism in Israel

2007-12-20T21:00:00.000-08:00

A new report from the Association for Civil Rights in Israel shows that Jewish-Arab relationships in Israel are becoming increasingly strained. According to the report, 75% of Israeli Jews would not live near an Arab. Sixty-one percent would not invite an Arab into their house and 55% want entertainment and leisure venues to be separated. Fifty-one percent think the government should encourage Israeli Arabs to leave Israel. Racist incidents against Arabs were up 26% in 2006 from the previous year.

According to a 2004 University of Haifa study, over two thirds of Israeli youths believe that Arabs are dumb, uneducated, uncultured, unclean and violent. A third said they were afraid of Arabs. According to the Israeli Institute for Democracy, only 50% of Israeli Jews believe that Israeli Arabs should get equal rights while 78% are against Arab parties joining the government.

Racism in Israel is more than an attitude. Increasingly, it’s becoming enshrined in policies of de facto discrimination. Israeli Arabs are systematically profiled as ‘security risks’ and harassed at the airport and elsewhere. More than half of Israeli Arabs live below the poverty line. About 40% of the civilian casualties of the second Lebanon war were Israeli Arabs, in part because their villages received less money for fortification. They are now receiving less money for rebuilding. Proposed laws before the Knesset would have ministers and cabinet members pledge allegiance to a Jewish state, and would make the right to vote contingent on army service. A current law sets aside 13% of all state land owned by the Jewish National Fund for Jews only.

According to UN International conventions, racial discrimination means, “any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, color, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life."

Given that definition and the above data, Israel must be acknowledged as a racist country. As such, it is in violation of its own founding document, the Declaration of Independence, which promised equal rights to all citizens regardless of ethnicity or religion.

Racism is a form of negative prejudice. Negative prejudice can be defined as an antipathy based on faulty and inflexible generalization. Contrary to popular belief, prejudice is not a sick aberration, but an inherent and adaptive feature of the human psyche. Generalizations based on limited information are necessary for human survival and daily functioning. We have to organize our experience into categories and patterns and make judgments on them. If you were attacked by a lion, you will then avoid and fear lions, even though you don’t know all of them. If you had a bad experience at two Vietnamese restaurants, you will say, “I hate Vietnamese food,” even though you haven’t tried all of it and haven’t tried it everywhere.

Prejudicial attitudes and thoughts cannot be avoided in individual humans. They can only be managed through awareness and education. The social, behavioral manifestations of prejudice – discrimination - can be controlled through laws and social mores. Israel is failing on both counts, but given the unique political circumstances Israelis face and the proclivities of human nature, a different outcome would be practically miraculous.

If you’re an Israeli Jew, you are placed in a situation in which maintaining good will toward Arabs is patently problematic. Jews have a historically justified desire for a homeland in which they are not persecuted and discriminated against and in which they can maintain their cultural and religious identity. That desire coalesced into the Zionist movement and the establishment of Israel. Since its inception, Israel has been engaged in war with neighboring countries that are largely Arab and Muslim.

The existence of an outside threat leads to an emphasis on group cohesion and the creation of an ‘us vs. them’ mindset in which ‘us’ by definition are better than ‘them.’ An in-group/out-group bias then develops in which members of our group are seen as full fledged individuals while members of the out-group are seen as all of a cloth.

In a warring environment, any element not deeply and visibly connected to the core in-group will be resented. Israeli Arabs, being non-Jews, do not share Jewish tradition. By history and culture, they stand apart from common Jewish-Israeli experience. An uneasy distance would have emerged here even if Arab Israelis were, instead, Buddhist monks. But the fact that this out-group happens to share close cultural, ethnic, and religious ties with the enemy makes the predicament worse still.

Psychological research has shown that prejudice and racism between two groups can decline under certain conditions. The groups have to engage in continuous contact, toward shared goals, in a context of relative equality. In Israel today, Jews and Arabs are less and less in contact, less and less enjoying equality of access and opportunity, less and less joined in their basic goals. In such an environment, the prospects for ending racism are bleak. Bleaker yet, perhaps, is the fact that Jews, who’ve suffered racism for millennia, have now become its adept perpetrators.

200 Lashes

2007-12-08T19:15:00.000-08:00

A recent report on CNN.com and other media told of a 19-year-old woman in Saudi Arabia who was sentenced to 90 lashes for meeting in public with an unrelated man, after the pair was abducted and the woman was raped by seven men. The rapists received sentences ranging from 10 months to five years in prison. When the woman’s attorney contested publicly the rapists’ light sentences, the court responded by increasing the woman’s sentence to 6 months in prison and 200 lashes and revoking the attorney’s license. The US government is keeping largely mum, in this case as in many others, refusing to condemn Saudi Arabia or criticize its judicial system.

There are many ways to view this story. You can see it as a curiosity—another tidbit about the weird machinations of some loony, remote culture.

Or you can view it as demonstrating, obliquely but powerfully, the price of our oil addiction. In Saudi Arabia, women cannot vote or drive or testify in court. They must be covered head to toe, can’t travel or have surgery without a man’s permission, and cannot fraternize in public with unrelated men. The fact that such a nation is our close ally makes no sense at all, unless you understand our oil addiction.

Our oil addiction forces us to pander to--or find phony excuses to invade-- despicable regimes around the Middle East. Our oil dollars sponsor the dissemination of the very Islamist ideology we then send our soldiers to root out. The oil issue twists our foreign policy into an impossible pretzel of inconsistency that drives much anti American sentiment around the world.

Contrary to jingoistic propaganda, we are not resented around the world because of our freedom. There are issues more pressing to other nations than our freedom. The world resents us because, like all addicts, we’re often bullying, self centered, sanctimonious and manipulative in trying to score our fix; as when we protect one oppressive government (Saudi Arabia) while attacking another (Iraq), all the while claiming virtuous motives like ‘democracy’ and ‘peace’ and spouting the juvenile nonsense of American Exceptionalism, as if we somehow stand outside and above the flow of human history.

You may also view this story as a reminder of the on-going global war on women, perpetrated by cultures the world over and led, all too often, by religious dogmatists infinitely inclined to view women as unclean, inferior, and dangerous. True, Wahhabi Islam as practiced in Saudi Arabia may take the recent cake for brutality; but try to remember one incident in which the religious establishment anywhere has stood with, and for, women’s equality. Try, for that matter, to find a religious establishment that actually includes women in its highest echelons. Try guessing which terms are more often associated with women in the biblical texts: ruler, prophet, hero, or whore, harlot, and slave. Ponder why the maltreatment of women is never a hot cause of the religiously based ‘family values’ crowd. Ponder the words of 19th-century feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton: "The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of woman's emancipation." Ponder whether Hilary would stand a chance at the presidency if she had ever been caught cheating on a spouse, or had two former husbands, or were single with an active sex life.

You may also see in this story a stark illustration of the human tendency to blame the victim--a tendency that swishes around at the bottom of many political and personal explanatory systems. Blaming the victim is appealing because it carries tangible psychological rewards. After all, if the crime is the victim’s fault, then the crime is not random, and hence more explicable, and hence less threatening to us. And if it’s the victim’s fault, then our social order is vindicated. Pawning off a problem on individuals spares us the pain of admitting to, and fixing, systemic flaws.

You can see this story as a tale of the individual against the machine; a young, innocent woman, crushed by a heavy handed social apparatus. That dynamic, of course, is not limited to Saudi Arabia, or to women. We are all at the mercy of powerful cultural forces that shape our consciousness, monitor our actions, and grind us in their giant Chaplinesque wheels. We are perpetually but a step removed from becoming collateral damage of the very systems we build to protect us.

You may take this story, in its palpable viciousness and absurdity, as evidence of the darkness entangled in our nature; of man’s capacity, in the words of the late anthropologist Loren Eiseley, “to veer with every wind, or, stubbornly, to insert himself into some fantastically elaborated and irrational social institution only to perish with it. For man is a fickle, erratic, dangerous creature whose restless mind would try all paths, all horrors, all betrayals…believe all things and believe nothing…kill for shadowy ideas more ferociously than other creatures kill for food, then, in a generation or less, forget what bloody dream had so oppressed him.”

Or you may just ignore the whole thing, kiss your daughter goodnight at bedtime, and plop down on the sofa to watch Seinfeld reruns.

On the Belief in God

2007-11-21T12:56:00.000-08:00

I always thought believing in God was foolish. Not to say that it’s done only by fools, or that all fools do it. To the contrary, most believers are fine, smart people. But smart people do foolish things. How else to explain New Coke, Bill Clinton’s culinary habits, or practically everything you did in the 80’s? Believing in God is foolish. That’s my belief. You could say that, in this regard, I’m a person of faith.

Some may attempt to trace this antipathy back to my childhood; but childhood, contrary to popular belief, doesn’t affect your later life that much. What you do at forty-five is predicted better by what you did at forty than by what you did at four. My parents, too, were never hostile to the idea of God. The topic just didn’t come up. And that doesn’t explain my attitude, since the topic of sex also never came up with my parents, and I grew up a great believer in sex--a belief that, like a belief in God, had to persevere without evidence over long stretches of my adolescence.

So I’m not against believing in messy, confusing stuff; but the very conception of God, as reflected in the believers’ words and actions, strikes me as unpleasant, not someone you would like to know, never mind follow.

This crystallized for me recently when, during an argument with my daughter, I waved my hands Job-like at the heavens and said, as countless parents of teenage girls have no doubt done since the beginning of time, or at least since the advent of MySpace: God, why are you punishing me? To which my daughter, with a decidedly unholy ‘gotcha’ smile, replied: maybe it’s because you don’t believe in him. To which I retorted,”Some Like It Hot” style: O, picky, picky!

Because really, what kind of Lord would shower his grace only on believers? Of all His unbounded love and mercy, none left for us losers who don’t yet see the light? How insecure, how heartless an entity needs to be to employ such measly calculus? Would any decent person demand your worship as precondition for landing a hand? Would a president who punished and excluded those who voted against him be worshiped and called benevolent?

Moreover, it seems that He, in addition to being petty and crabby, is also somewhat clueless in tending to this system he’s supposedly created.

For example, if God is omnipotent and his word is truth, why not deliver his original word in indestructible form? Why rely on human scribes, clumsy recitations, and failing memories to sustain the message across generations? Providing holy instructions in the form of words and sermons always struck me as lame, at least for God. Even I know that nobody listens to lectures, and I’m a lowly academic, far removed from omnipotence or benevolence. Why not have every newborn come out of the womb with Genesis tattooed on their cute behind? This would lessen the chance that any of His original sacred words would be changed or lost. And it would erase all doubts about His existence, or sense of humor.

As youngsters in the secular kibbutz we used to accost the occasional religious visitor with the question of whether God could make a rock he could not lift, thinking that was a clever refutation of God’s supposed omnipotence. Later, we would ask whether letting innocent children die was a result of God’s uncaring, in which case he’s not benevolent, or helplessness, in which case he’s not omnipotent.

But believers are unmoved by these questions because they see God as unbounded by the parameters of the human mind. An omnipotent entity can be at once illogical and logical. And, regarding the dead little children, an omnipotent entity could also redefine ‘benevolence’—the way our current government, in its own bid for omnipotence, is trying to redefine ‘torture.’
What God does cannot be malevolent because God does it.

Belief in God thus conceived seemingly explains both known and unknown. When things work out in the way our human mind can comprehend, we attribute human qualities to God. He punishes the wicked, like we would. When things seem to exceed our understanding, we attribute to God, well, Godly qualities. He kills the innocent children for his own unknowable reasons.

To me, such conception is neither necessary nor sufficient. My problem with the human-like God is similar to my problem with science fiction: it’s ultimately boring, because all the aliens, despite their weird appearance and locations, have essentially human problems and conflicts and solutions. Why then bother to dress those guys with strange costumes and send them to outer space?

On the other hand, attributing humanly inaccessible abilities to God in order to explain the unexplainable has the drawback of not really explaining anything. If God’s mind is unfathomable, then any outcome could be claimed as God’s planned outcome.
Q: Why did this happen?
A: God’s plan.
Q: What is God?
A: I don’t, and can’t, know.

The term "God" in the above example qualifies only as a label, not as explanation. And presenting a label as explanation is, in the least, foolish.

On the Armenian Genocide

2007-11-11T08:17:00.000-08:00

According to international law established by the UN’s 1948 convention, genocide is defined as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” These acts may include, “killing…causing serious bodily or mental harm…and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.”

Between 1915 and 1923, the Turkish government carried out a genocidal campaign against the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. During this time, the Armenian people were subjected to systematic deportation, abduction, torture, humiliation, rape, massacre, and starvation. The entire wealth of the Armenian people was expropriated. Over 1.5 million Armenians are estimated to have died in the atrocities. It was the first genocide of the 20th century, and it foreshadowed what was to come.

Recently, the House’s Foreign Affairs Committee passed a resolution, authored by Congressman Adam Schiff (D-Burbank), to officially recognize the Armenian massacre as Genocide. This resolution, absurdly long overdue, could have been a shining moment for the American congress, and should have been celebrated by all who appreciate the crucial value of justice, however belated, and historical accuracy, however painful, to the future of humanity.

But now it is unlikely to even come up for a vote, let alone pass on the House floor.

The Turkish government, as part of its shameful on-going effort to deny the genocide and intimidate witnesses and truth tellers both inside and outside Turkey, is objecting fiercely. This is understandable. Countries, like people, do not like to face up and own up to their darkest moments and basest impulses. But every nation has skeletons in its closet, and the earlier and more thoroughly they are aired the better.

Moreover, genocidal skeletons, by virtue of their sheer size and significance, do not belong to one nation; they are a part of the legacy and consciousness of humanity itself. The Armenian genocide is not an internal Turkish matter, it’s a world civilization matter, and the civilized world has a say in how it is perceived, remembered and discussed. When a country commits genocide, it affronts all of humanity, not only because such massive crimes hint at a penchant for brutality that may repeat and spill beyond its borders, but also because, like with radiation or second hand smoke, even those who are not directly involved get hurt, and the effects linger over time and often metastasize into more subtle, but no less devastating, manifestations of harm. The emotional fallout from such large scale crimes, the deep anxiety they provoke, the challenge they pose to our idea of humanity, and the threats they constitute to hope and to global fellowship are so extreme so as to affect all of us.

The Bush administration also opposes the measure, for strategic reasons. Turkey is America’s ally in the Middle East, and much of the Iraq war effort relies on the secure and convenient access from turkey into Iraq. If Turkey is alienated, it can make life difficult for American soldiers and interests in the region. The time is not right, says the Bush administration. But the timing argument does not hold in this case. The right time to care about genocidal atrocities is always now. If we consistently take this approach regarding the memory of atrocity, we may find it easier to take the same approach when faced with actual events.

A third, more repugnant source of opposition comes, shockingly, from Israel, whose government still refuses to officially acknowledge the Armenian genocide. The Israeli government seeks to appease the Bush administration and Turkey, both allies. But Israel’s opposition is also rooted in its tacit fear of diluting the genocide brand by admitting too many members into the club, thus weakening the associative connection between genocide and the Jewish holocaust. In adopting this short sighted, manipulative strategy, the Israeli government has again demonstrated a level of cynicism and moral corruption that defiles not only the tradition and spirit of Judaism, but also the memory and legacy of the holocaust itself.

The lessons of the holocaust, if any can be drawn, undoubtedly must include an awareness of the perils of silence and acquiescence in the face of the genocidal impulse. The legacy of the holocaust should have made the Jewish state uniquely sensitive to the importance of full and accurate historical memory and national accountability.

The legacy of the holocaust must, in the least, compel the Israeli government to put aside its petty concerns about decorum and its horse trading habits and take, for once, the moral high ground on an issue that pertains to more than just its own immediate interests and political preoccupations.

This was a chance for Israel to reclaim the very meaning of its existence, grab at its highest aspirations, and take a principled, unequivocal stance in support of justice and truth. Not only did it fail to leap at the chance, it actually leapt the other way.

It was left to the aforementioned Mr. Schiff to stand up and represent all that should be good and right about America. As a Jew he had also, perhaps unwittingly, stood to represent the best of his ancestral tradition.

Given the current state of American, and Jewish, politics, it is no surprise that he seems to stand in the minority, and that his proposal is likely to be shelved.

On the War with Iran

2007-10-28T07:54:00.000-07:00

The war with Iran is a done deal. As things stand now, it is unlikely that Israel and the US will allow Iran to go nuclear. It is equally unlikely that Iran will drop its nuclear ambition. What’s left to do is watch and prepare for the aftermath, which will add to the legacy of human debasement and tragic folly.

Diplomacy will not work. Israel doesn’t have the leverage to entice other nations to join it in calls for political or economic measures, and who’s Israel to lecture any country about nukes? The US, under Bush, has lost its moral and political grown up status and is now seen as a dull, voracious behemoth.

The Iranians, for their part, see through the vacuous western claim about the immorality of their nuclear ambition. Are they to be judged by the US, who has nukes and has used them? The Iranians also learned recent lessons: The U.S. is not above invading other countries to force regime change; those with nukes are immune from invasion, like North Korea, or even befriended, like Pakistan; those without, like Afghanistan and Iraq, will be taken over at will.

One may be tempted to believe that the lessons of the Iraq war would render the US more cautious, or at least smarter, about the next war. But the US is on the move to get stronger, not smarter, increasing the size of its already colossal armed forces; VP Dick is dripping smug vitriol again; the casting of Iran as the new Nazi Germany has already began, and the next American president--a democrat, a woman, post 9-11--will have to show herself strong on national security. America in the next few years is bound to become more trigger happy, not less.
Perhaps most tragic is that here again we see a process unfolding where the very action that is most detrimental to the interests of most people will be enacted, in those people’s name. Most Americans, Iranians, and Israelis don’t want war, much less an atomic catastrophe, but they’re already at work arranging one.

War, history shows, is always both preventable and inevitable. Prevention efforts rely on the ‘human’ part of the human animal: our unique capacity for empathy—the ability to see things through the other’s eyes and bestow on them the same fully human status we claim for ourselves. Preventing war requires a concentrated effort to conserve and nurture the delicate ecosystem in which our higher callings can flourish and materialize. Waging war relies on the ‘animal’ part of the equation: brute survival-of-the-fittest struggle that is seen in all species. War is like brush fire, requiring but a match to unfold and spread, feeding on the rotting dry timber of neglect, prejudice, fear and ignorance.

Our evolutionary past is also working against us. Biological evolution, which designed our aggressive impulses in an environment of sticks and stones, has been subverted by the recent cultural evolution that replaced the rock with a rocket. Our culture has evolved far too quickly ahead of our biology. The lethality we were programmed for is small-scale and localized. But our current lethality is large scale and global. Our hands are holding weapons the impact of which our brains are not designed to comprehend.

The slide toward the Iranian war, like the slide toward all others, is marked by the predictable enactment of a sequence of psychological principles. Once a dangerous enemy is identified and thus labeled, it will be dehumanized (they behave like animals, don’t they?), demonized (they are barbarians, vicious, uncivilized and inherently, blithely cruel) and distanced (they don’t belong with us; keep them out; get rid of them). We will unite under the external threat. Dissent will be deemed as treachery and squashed. The feel-good vibe of unity will intoxicate until we forget its nefarious source. Old hurts and betrayals will emerge to demand their due retribution. The unsavory parts of our endeavor will be coated with slick, heavy euphemistic sheen: collateral damage; servicing the target; getting the job done. Uniformed soldiers will improbably become at once ‘children’ and ‘heroes,’ to better justify what they do and rage at the enemy who shoot back. And as we get caught up in the heady swirl, we will again tell ourselves that to justify the sacrifice already made we need to see the war through; and if we win, then we can win the next war; and if we lose, then we definitely need a do-over war.

Because this is the legacy of all violence: its long term result is to bring more violence. A harshly punished child, instead of learning to do right, learns to resent those who punished him, idolize force, and plot revenge.

Einstein famously said: "I don't know how World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." As usual, he was ahead of his time; but unfortunately, it seems, not that far ahead of ours.

On the Attack on Syria

2007-10-13T10:20:00.000-07:00

In Israel and among American Jews, the recent secret-all-over-the-block air attack on supposed nuclear facilities in Syria caused an excited stir. A New York visit from the Iranian president brought out the Hitler signs and references. These two events encapsulate an essence of Israel’s current problems.

From its inception, Israel viewed itself as David to its enemies’ Goliath. That sense of self has animated Israeli culture and defined the country’s international persona. We were the young peace-seeking nation called to battle despite itself and forced to repel improbably much larger forces through its daring, creative, and righteous cunning. Israel’s shining iconic moments, cementing its sense of self and international brand, were moments of David-like triumph: the Eichmann kidnapping, Six days war, Entebbe, the bombing of the Iraqi nuclear facility.

Recent years have seen the decline of this ethos. Owing largely to the soul-withering effects of the occupation, the David pose has become increasingly difficult to maintain credibly. Beginning in the first intifada, with its pictures of stone throwing Palestinians facing up to heavily armed Israeli soldiers, the old narrative has slowly morphed. The Palestinians became David to Israel’s Goliath. A series of bumbling military operations that sought and failed to capture the old spirit, culminating in the second Lebanon war, has also contributed to the creeping identity confusion among Israelis. Like an aging rocker who tries in vain to don the tight pants and primal screams of his youth, Israel’s hold on its image, and confidence, has been slipping.

The latest secret raid excited Israelis, and American Jews, precisely because it brought back fond memories of the Israel of old: nimble, united, and decisive. A whiff of the glory days is in the air, and it’s intoxicating. But the return of David is in fact a sad turn of events, for two reasons.

First, it signals the powerful sway militarism holds over Israeli leadership and culture. Olmert’s election victory, following the presidencies of military men Sharon, Netanyahu, and Barak, seemed to signify a shift in Israeli society toward political and civic discourse; it suggested a realization that the canonization of military thinking, and military figures, was harming Israel’s long terms prospects in the region and the world. Hope emerged that the national conversation would evolve, to focus on developing creative and daring political strategies. The Lebanon war-- commenced in part because the military complex, worried about losing influence in the new climate, sold a bill of goods to the tentative new leadership--dashed these hopes.

The tragedy of the latest raid is that it illustrates, against a backdrop of political impotence and vacant wind milling, how Israel still derives its pride, luster and fulfillment from military prowess. The failure of the Lebanon war did not lead to calls for a renewed political imagination, but to calls for a better war, which the Syrian raid began to answer.

Second, the attack signifies a triumph of myth over reality. When reality threatens or confuses, as it often does in the Middle East, human beings tend to seek shelter and guidance in simplified, mythical narratives. Healthy, mature societies find a way to integrate myth and reality—they understand that idealized stories scaffold lives; they understand, too, that the mess and mud on the ground are the materials of life and that real solutions must be fashioned from these materials.

The ‘Till-death-do-us-part myth, for example, is still mouthed by countless newlyweds, often with pure intentions; but a whole social and legal structure, and an accommodating social consciousness, are in place to deal with the murky reality of relationships on the ground.

Israel’s return to the Myth of David is not accompanied by a commitment to establishing the necessary political, economic and psychological structures and consciousness to deal with the murky reality on the ground. In fact, it signifies a wish for their renouncement.

The reaction to the visit of the Iranian president further illustrates this theme—the myth it enacted was the iconic Hitler’s Second Coming, which has become the shameless go-to move of a multitude of sanctimonious, cry-wolf Jewish functionaries and organizations. There’s no business like Shoah business, as they say. And now we have the double whammy—Hitler rides again. David, get your slingshot.

All that hoopla makes for a good adrenalin jolt, good press, good fund raising, good ‘us against the world’ camaraderie, with the added bonus that ‘us’ are again niftier in the fight. But the deeper truth is that Israel’s security and prosperity are not served well by sordid re-animations of primal demons or a reunion tour of the creaky and dated David and the Assassins band.

The Arab-Israeli conflict is a complex mix of territorial, religious, economic and psychological elements to be disentangled by reasoned, patient, creative, and courageous maneuvering on the political, religious, economic and psychological fronts. A clear-eyed engagement with the issues will require Israel to free itself from the stranglehold of the military worldview and to keep its dealings grounded in reality. The attack in Syria and hysterics over Ahmadinejad bespeak an unwillingness, or inability, to make the needed transformation.

That inability is more scary and dangerous to Israel than both the Iranian president and Syrian nukes.

On Rosh Hashanah

2007-09-29T11:49:00.000-07:00

In reflection on Rosh Hashanah, here’s a random, incomplete list of things we could do without in the next year, but will probably have to endure anyway.

Sound bite and sight gag politics. Here comes the presidential elections, and you can again bet that they will not be decided on the issues that matter. A few months before the elections, some dark operatives will float a straw man like flag burning, gay marriage or a candidate’s loopy wife’s drinking problems in college; the vapid media-- as usual all heat and no light--will pounce and feast, and the war in Iraq, health care, education, the economy will be forgotten.

Now, if we’re going to settle for political discourse as a series of TV commercials, then why not go all out. Make the elections a Miss America-type pageant.

Even people who have traditionally avoided politicians would pay to see them trying to out-prance each other in bathing suites and power suites and engaging in hilarious dressing room shenanigans, like last minute adjustments of make-up and worldview to fit the latest polling trends.

In the obligatory talent competition, the candidates can humanize themselves to voters by showing their skills at baton twirling, arm twisting, hand wringing, thumb twiddling, recent hits like bathroom toe tapping, and the old crowd favorite-- finger pointing.

And at the breathless on-stage interview, in true beauty pageant fashion, all the candidates will vow to work for world peace, nuclear disarmament, and the plight of cute animals. And the audience will neither believe it nor care, but clap and cheer and click over to watch ‘American Idol’ reruns.

The global warming “debate”—True, we are not certain how quick and deep the warming trend will move, and how much of it is caused by humans. But to use this uncertainty as reason for inaction defies logic.

There are two types of errors a system can commit when addressing a threat: a ‘false alarm’ and a ‘miss’. If you tilt the system to avoid one, you’ll inevitably get more of the other. For example, because we don’t want to imprison the innocents (false alarm), we have many criminals walking free (miss).

When it comes to earth, we cannot afford a miss. We don’t have another earth to run to or experiment on. True, by working to avoid a miss we increase the risk of a false alarm--it may indeed turn out that global warming was not so much man-made or so bad--but that mistake will be far less costly and more reversible than doing nothing and learning the opposite.

And there’s another bonus to moving on global warming. Had we channeled the resources we’ve invested in the rancid Iraq war toward finding alternatives to fossil fuel and achieving energy independence, we could have actually affected positive changes in the Middle East by forcing oil economies and societies to modernize. But that would require a visionary leader, and we’ve got, well, Dick Cheney.

Commercials—Observe: from the moment you wake up you are bombarded mercilessly, ceaselessly with ads-- on the radio, the TV, the newspaper; on computer screens, gigantic billboards; ads on cars, blimps, signs, stickers, articles of clothing and pieces of mail; a thousand invisible sticky fingers prying at your pockets, waving for your attention, poking at your chest, grabbing at your neck, imploring, threatening, admonishing you to buy more stuff. The dominating force in our overstuffed lives in this richest of nations is the one harassing us to get more stuff.

Spam email—some spam scams mine timeless human conditions: greed (a Nigerian prince has an offer for you!); insecurity (take this pill- the ladies will melt and your erection won’t); loneliness (your friend just sent you an e-card. Click here to see your hard drive explode).

Newer scams exploit a contemporary archetype: the hurried multi-tasker, who is distracted enough to respond to official-looking invitation from a bank to fix a security problem, or to an attachment titled, “The files you’ve requested.” This is the story spam tells about us: we are greedy, insecure, lonely, and out of time.

Youth culture— I’m not sure when I made the transition from a young with-it hipster to an old curmudgeon who thinks all teenagers look alike; who tells his daughter to turn down “that noise you call music;” and who’s targeted by Viagra spam emails. One day you wake up, and feel lucky just for that; and that’s a sign you’re old.

They say you’re only young once, but if you do it right, once is enough; and I did it right, I think; you see, the memory is fuzzy…

Airport security—so there was one weird guy who had a bomb in his shoe, and now all of us have to take off our shoes at the airport. Does that make you feel safer? No. Does that actually make you safer? Of course not. But hey, at least he didn’t try to hide the bomb in his bowels.

Cell phones—ah, who am I kidding? Cell phones are great, a wonderful, almost poetic invention. It’s the cell phone users who are the problem. Cell phones don’t annoy people; people annoy people, and it’s clear that…oops, hold on a sec, I have to take this call...

On Intermarriage

2007-09-06T14:11:00.000-07:00

Intermarriage is hot, and not merely in its tantalizing ‘forbidden fruit’ undertone, but as news. Jewish circles are abuzz about the subject, fueled by Harvard professor Noah Feldman’s recent NY Times essay about being ostracized by his orthodox Alma matter after marrying a non Jew.

Intermarriage is a sizable phenomenon in the American Jewish community, with rates hovering around 50%, but the intermarriage debate is neither new nor uniquely Jewish. At its core, it embodies the inherent duality of human nature.

Human beings are herd animals. Alone, a human is rather vulnerable and helpless, like a lone ant. But in a group we rule the earth. The need to belong, to become part of a group is, hence, fundamental. From birth, a baby’s behaviors--reaching, cooing, crying, looking—are designed to elicit caregiving responses from the environment and facilitate early attachments, which will generalize into broader social alliances, morph into group solidarity, and eventually manifest in tribal brawn. If our pack is powerful, we feel safe and strong.

But each human being is also unique, both genetically and by circumstance. None of us walk on the beach exactly in anyone else’s footsteps. Even identical twins don’t share the same stream of thought, and can’t occupy the same physical spot. We are all variants on a theme, which, while baffling at times, is also a precondition for survival. In the absence of variety, there could be no natural selection, and hence no evolution, and hence no human life. This unique individual agency, the need to be, is as fundamental as the need to belong.

In the debate over intermarriage you hear clear whisperings of this duality, a struggle to reconcile being and individuality with belonging and group norms.

In the current debate, the rejectionist hard liners are playing with dangerously tainted toys. The striving for group purity bespeaks a fortress mentality born of fear, and it has a long and foul track record that should resonate ever clearly for Jews. ‘Pure’ groups have the power of clarity and cohesiveness, but they also stoke sharp distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ which tend to facilitate hostility and strife. Those who sleep with enchanting Purity often wake up with fleas of Racism. And without the engine of autonomy and diversity, closed tribes tend to atrophy and collapse on themselves.

The rejectionists tend to justify their stance by appealing to tradition. But tradition is a dish best served judiciously, since one is always at risk of choking on too much of it or, upon close inspection, discovering some stale ingredients. Take for example the Ten Commandments, a hallowed traditional dish that, upon reflection, quickly loses much of its appeal. Any reasonably alert 12th grader could easily come up with several useful revisions to the Ten Commandments based on contemporary knowledge and consciousness—perhaps ditching, “thou shall not covet your neighbor’s slave” for, ‘thou shall insist on human rights for all,’ for starters.

Those who advocate embracing intermarried couples and bringing them into the fold inhabit a sunnier terrain, basking in the warm glow of the progressive emphasis on inclusiveness and tolerance. By allowing the tribe to become less pure, less rigid and cohesive, they hope to make it larger, more relevant and humane. The risk, for them, is that the wide open group will first dilute, and then lose, its unique and coherent identity.

Notably, both camps in this debate agree that protecting Judaism is the superseding goal. They only differ on how to achieve it. This tacit agreement on the surpassing value of preserving Judaism deserves critical scrutiny.

Promoting Judaism is not superior, as a value, to advancing the cause of humanity as a whole. Being a good person is more important then being a good Jew. And it’s hard to deny that intermarriages, with their tendency to foster the intimate knowledge and full humanization of the ‘other,’ embody a more promising future strategy for humanity than the bitter historical legacy of tribal separatism and animosity.

Promoting Judaism is also not superior, as a value, to protecting the freedom and dignity of individual human beings. Cultural and religious traditions are created by and for people, not the other way around. Tribal traditions are useful insofar as they serve the lives of the living, not merely the legacy of the dead.

At the end of the day, concrete human lives are more sacred than abstract group principles. Individual lives should not be degraded, devoured by, or sacrificed willy nilly on the altar of Totem and Tribe. The true Jewish spirit is of persuasion, not coercion, and Judaism is not meant to be a vault but a bustling kitchen. At the end of the day, Judaism lives in, and for, individual living people. It is not a sacred end in itself. It is not a means of securing a place in the afterlife or preserving a fossilized past but a tool for making individual lives better and more meaningful now. If the tool becomes obsolete for serving its righteous purpose, then the tool, not the purpose, should be discarded.

On the psychologist's work

2007-08-28T21:10:00.000-07:00

As metaphors describing what psychologists do, ‘change’ and ‘growth’ reflect an upbeat, all-American credo: Innovate! Expand! But metaphors can be limited and limiting, particularly if they become fetishes. In a culture and in a profession, there is always the risk of certain terms becoming linguistic celebrities; after a while, no one knows for sure what they actually do and why we should care. Change and growth, it seems to me, have attained such status. Just mumble ‘change’ or ‘growth’ and everyone nods knowingly in respectful appreciation, eyes alight, as if these terms really capture the essence of therapy. They don’t.

It is easy to see why ‘change’ became a celebrity. America is, after all, “the new world,” a young culture ascended from revolution and steeped in an ethos of striving. In the context of therapy, many clients do seek, ostensibly, changes in their lives—to alleviate pain, resolve a conflict, learn coping skills; to move from minus to plus, as Alfred Adler would put it.

But change as value in itself can become faddism, an exhausting and ultimately vacant addiction--a futile chase of The New and The More. Change, moreover, is no more necessary and useful than its less sexy siblings, stability and continuity. In fact, as we help our clients toward their desired changes, we invariably aim for the shores of stability. To observe individuals and cultures closely is to see an intricate dance of stability and change—tradition and progress. This balancing act is an inherent feature of our internal psychic architecture. The psychologist’s task is not to deny one aspect of it and glamorize another, but to illuminate and legitimize the whole structure. Hence, waving the sanctified banner of ‘change’ is an over simplification, necessary perhaps to create a ‘brand’ and bring in costumers, but not to be confused with the real task in the therapy room.

As all psychologists know, the human psychological architecture is resistant to change. Psychological systems are characterized by remarkable stability. Compare, for example, psychology to technology. Technological systems have changed beyond recognition over the centuries. The dynamics of passion, conflict, and anxiety have stayed essentially the same. While 16th century technology has been radically surpassed, Shakespeare’s insights into the human psychological landscape still resonate as strongly as ever. Not much change here.

Given our change fetish, we may be inclined to think of this as a problem. It isn’t. If change were easy, life would be much more problematic than it is now. A system that accepts change too readily will become unstable and incoherent. A measure of internal consistency and stability allows us to develop a coherent self-narrative—an identity. It makes the constructs “I” and “We” meaningful. Setting the bar for change high allows us to filter out psychological noise and protect the integrity of our experience.

In a still broader perspective, psychologists are by and large agents of the status quo. On a societal level, we are mostly charged with getting people back to mainstream “normalcy.” We are sent to the trenches by society as stabilizers, not agitators; and most of us, even while advocating individual change in our clients, rarely involve them in revolutionary activity. We feel successful if our clients adapt and adjust.

The ‘growth’ metaphor is another dolled up celeb. In class, I strive to show my students that developmental processes encompass both growth and decline. Most students, being young and American, reflexively associate development with sunny visions of expansion and improvement. But all development is development. The fetus develops, but so does your ulcers. The journeys into life (birth) and out of life (death) are both developmental. Sunrise and sunset are equally essential.

The ‘growth’ metaphor tugs on the capitalist impulse for what is bigger/better while at the same time emanating a spiritualist, New Age vibe. It’s a clever slogan. But as a psychologist I must confess ambivalence about growth. Aren’t too many things already over grown? When I hear ‘growth,’ I just as readily think ‘tumor’ or ‘deficit’ as I do ‘personal.’ Growth sounds like buzz and hype to me. And perhaps we need buzz and hype to frame our product in marketable terms, to ‘grow our brand,’ to energize the ground troops by providing a vivid guiding metaphor. But in the therapy room, ‘growth’ means nothing without careful and specific qualifiers. Some clients may not want, need, or understand ‘growth.’ We should not be shoving it down their throat.

Thinking of ourselves as agents of ‘growth’ and ‘change’ narrows our horizons needlessly. We are in the business of healing and humanity. One size does not fit all. The appropriate metaphors for each client should be allowed to emerge organically from the therapeutic conversation.

Some clients need help resisting change, maintaining balance. Some need to shed excess, lose some emotional weight, descend the mountain, or accept defeat. We need to remember that surrender, decline, stability and continuity are not dirty words; they represent essential life processes to be understood and addressed.

It may be argued that since growth and change have mostly positive connotations in our culture, we should frame everything in those terms. But if everything is reframed as positive, than the notion of positivity loses its meaning. Such insistence also betrays an unwillingness to confront and contain the whole experience of living. Some things are negative; the meaning of others may remain unknown until late in the game; some burdens are carried without redemption. Some limbs need to be amputated and they don’t ‘grow’ back. Life, in a sense, is a chronic condition, and it’s terminal.

A tyranny of benevolent metaphors and user-friendly simplifications is tyranny still, and first. I for one am not inclined to rush my clients to ‘grow’ and ‘change.’ I’d rather encourage them to first find their voice and use it to tell, and in the process comprehend, and guide, their story.

Life is not solely, or even primarily, about change and growth. Human existence is marked by an inherent interplay of opposites: courage and fear, give and take, the note and the pause. These dualities, not one-dimensional slogans, are to be engaged in the clinical trenches.

Therapy, too, is animated by the dynamic interplay between the general laws of behavior and the client’s particular narrative and creative will. In the therapy room, we will do well to avoid neon clichés and strive instead to appreciate that while our clients operate within known and predictable parameters--no one is exempt from the laws of gravity, or probability, or the Law of Effect--they are at the same time as unique as works of art. To perceive and treat our clients as points in the distribution, or as constituents to be spun and swayed, is to confine them, and us, to a language that does not map well onto the actual experience of living. The average mother in America may have 2.2 children; but you’re unlikely to meet a mother who actually has 2.2 kids. Knowing that so many thousands of innocent civilians have died in war is important, but it won’t move you to tears. Hearing one victim’s personal story will.

I don’t think this will ever change.

On Civic Marriages

2007-08-27T06:03:00.000-07:00

A new Israeli law cooked up by the justice minister Daniel Friedman and the chief Sephardic rabbi Shlomo Amar promises to recognize civil marriages, but only between two people who are considered Jews by the state but not by the religious authorities.

Some observers in the Israeli press have hailed the new proposed law as a positive breakthrough, a chink in the armor of the orthodox rabbinate that has had, until now, a monopoly control over all matrimonial issues in Israel.

Others, however, have been less optimistic, noting that in exchange for its concession on the marriage law, the chief rabbi and the ultra orthodox establishment he represents will have retained full control over conversion.

The new law may be pragmatic, offering immediate relief to the 270,000 Israelis, mostly from the former Soviet Union, who cannot currently marry. But the law’s more lasting, and disturbing, result will be the creation of an absurd Jewish caste system in Israel—herding citizens like hapless cattle into closed matrimonial ghettos. Those rejects who fail to satisfy the rabbinate’s criteria will be forced to marry only each other and be allowed only civic marriage; the lucky ones deemed Jewish enough by the ultra orthodox rabbinate will be re-gifted the stale prize of forced religious ceremony.

Moreover, the proposed law fails to address the fundamental problem: the Chareidi control over matrimony issues is an indefensible state of affairs that must be ended.

In Israel today, to be considered Jewish under the state approved law of return, one must have at least one Jewish grandparent; but the rabbinical courts that control marriage (and conversions) require proof of a Jewish mother or conversion under strict ultra orthodox rules.

This creates an absurd situation whereby hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens who are Jewish enough to be recognized as such by the state (and by its enemies), live in Israel, define themselves as Jewish, celebrate Judaism in their own myriad ways, pay taxes, die for Israel, and send their kids to do so as well—cannot choose freely whether, whom, and how to marry.

The absence of civic marriage in Israel is an on going national disgrace. The fact that one small religious sect is allowed to impose its interpretation of Halacha, and its ceremonies and rituals, on the whole diverse mosaic of Jewish life in Israel is, in every way, an outrage.

One of the appealing features of Judaism is its traditional refusal to advertise, evangelize and force itself on others. In Israel, however, the opposite happens, as the ultra orthodox establishment seeks relentlessly to shove its interpretations of Judaism, backwards rituals and rigid rules on the population.

Religious marriage, when forced upon the citizenry, does not bring the citizenry closer to religion. On the contrary, such oppression serves to humiliate and harass large segments of the populace, and it cheapens the very Jewish tradition it seeks to glorify. It is one of the chief reasons that a recent poll published in Haaretz has found that the Chareidim are the ‘most hated’ group in Israel, voted so by roughly 30% of the representative sample of Israelis, a rate far above other controversial groups such as Russian immigrants or west bank settlers.

The ultra orthodox didn’t come by their lofty status as deciders of all matters matrimonial by popular demand or through the moral authority or intellectual superiority of their leaders and Torah scholars, but through cynical and corrupt manipulation of the Israeli governance system.

In Israeli parliamentary system, small parties often decide which of the two big parties will create the coalition government. Hence, smaller parties that are willing to sell their services to the highest bidder possess power far beyond their size. The ultra orthodox establishment in Israel is non-Zionist and autocratic in structure and spirit—there’s no democracy in the bible.

Lacking any deep affinity or respect for true democratic principles or the Zionist enterprise, the ultra orthodox parties, Shas and Agudath Israel, have mastered the patently non-kosher blackmail art of pork-for-vote, selling their votes to the highest bidder both left-wing and right in order to sit at the Cabinet table and divert public funds to their institutions under the now tattered guise of tending to the nation’s religious and educational concerns.

As journalist Meirav Arlosoroff exposed last June in Haaretz, secular Israelis’ taxes are systematically being used to fund special perks such as free busing and hot lunches for the Chareidi schools. These perks are then used to entice scores of mostly poor families away from cash strapped public schools.

The Chareidi schools, which operate mostly on public funds but without financial transparency, are no Columbus Torah Academy. They offer their students no gymnasiums, no physics or chemistry labs, no English, math, science, or civics teachers. They resemble most--in concept, spirit, and structure--those Islamist Madrasas that spread the poisonous Sharia law around the Middle East and beyond. The ‘education’ they provide de facto serves to isolate the students from contemporary Israeli and world culture, gut their future marketplace competitiveness, and hence create generations of economically marginal, educationally impeded, and socially alienated Israelis.

Nothing in the authentic tradition and spirit of Judaism, and Israel--not to mention common sense pragmatism-- can credibly justify this state of affairs.

Summer Vacation

2007-07-25T13:45:00.000-07:00

Every summer, I take a break from this Midwestern pressure cooker and fly to Israel for some peace and quiet.

One night, from my sister’s 8th floor porch in Rehovot, I watched the sun set over the Mediterranean and recalled Echad Ha’am, the turn-of-the-century writer and Zionist activist who was instrumental in the founding of Rehovot in 1890.

Unlike Theodor Herzl, who believed the forceful momentum toward a Jewish statehood would beget cultural awakening, Echad Ha’am believed in culture before state. He argued that building a cultural, moral and language capital in the Jewish community around the world would lead gradually, and organically, to statehood.

Historically, Echad Ha’am was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck to Herzl’s Charles Darwin. Lamarck, a 19th century French scientist, believed that evolution relied on the passing of acquired behaviors and traits between generations. His view lost out to Darwin’s natural selection principle. Similarly, Echad Ha’am’s “culture first” view lost out to Herzl’s “statehood first” approach.

But history is tricky. In the long run, both Lamarck and Echad Ha’am may not have lost after all.

Darwin’s principle of selection explains how organisms change through competition between genes — bits of biological code. But Lamarck’s principle helps explain how cultures change through the transmission of “memes” — bits of culturally taught behavior and tradition.

In our technological age, cultures — not genes — will probably decide the fate of humanity.

Echad Ha’am may have underestimated the driving power of nationalistic zeal. But, his qualms about forcing Jewish statehood, which for a while seemed shortsighted in light of Israel’s amazing ascendance, now sound like an indispensable cautionary note about statehood’s limitations.

It’s who the Jews are, not where they are, that will probably decide their fate.

In Israel, the force of Jewish statehood is palpable all around. The state-building momentum of Herzl’s Zionism has accomplished a lot in a short time. But the struggle for statehood can become a numbing, overbearing, brutal preoccupation; a sunlight that blinds; a stifling narcissism.

This summer, in the midst of my Israel vacation, I hopped over to Italy for a week in the Apuan Alps, a densely forested mountain chain in northern Tuscany. Near Verni, a quaint wisp of a village amidst the Apuan peaks, my girlfriend and I walked the shaded, quiet trails. In Chinque Terre, a cluster of villages hugging the coastal cliffs, we hiked the serpentine coastline and lingered in sun baked piazzas, where small fishing boats are parked street side, like cars.

Going to Italy from Israel, you catch a whiff of what it is to be cosmopolitan, in the best sense of the word; to move around open and light, not as representative or defender of state or faith, but as a citizen of the world.

Herzl’s Zionism was in some ways an answer to tribal xenophobia, as manifested in the anti-Semitism of the Dreyfuss trial and, later, the Holocaust. But it was, on some profound level, an answer in kind, an attempt to establish our own tribal boundaries and identity, to build our tribal force in order to repel other, hostile tribes.

In a small seaside piazza in Vernazza, people gather in the evening to eat, drink and hang out. Colors and languages mix. Children, grandmothers and bronzed out tourists from everywhere all sit around chatting and gesturing. A high school brass band plays slightly off key renditions of Puccini and James Brown, the gusty wind messing with the players’ sheet music and feathered hats. The wine flows. The indifferent sea works its timeless magic; the couple on the terrace lean into each other over a small round table. For a moment, the Felini-esque carnival of life — the universal pulse itself, the hallucinatory vibe — embraces, among other improbable things, the forgotten old spirit of the Jew, the wandering soul at once fleeting and eternal.

Perhaps this ancient wandering spirit, this cosmopolitanism, is not a manifestation of weakness and loss, to be remedied by statehood and healed by the stabilizing power of roots. Perhaps it is, and always has been, a coded message to the world, a calling for what could be.

Homelessness and yearning not as disease, but as cure.

Nazism was, in one important sense, the grotesque ultimate manifestation of tribalism. In the long run, the answer to the menace of tribalism is not to build stronger tribes, but to seek a world beyond tribalism itself, where the bond and energy we share with our brethren, at our place, are extended to all humanity, everywhere. Where we do onto others — all others, not just our tribal peers — what we would have them do onto us.

Perhaps it was the wine, or just a fleeting episode of traveler’s giddiness, but in the Piazza that night, among the flickering sounds and lights, I could, for a moment, gaze beyond my ancient wistful tribe, beyond the national fortress built to house it and the God conceived to symbolize it, and glimpse a possible, more highly evolved universal consciousness; and a future that combines Herzl’s ability to see beyond time and Echad Ha’am’s ability to see beyond place.

On the Gaza Border

2007-07-14T11:43:00.000-07:00

My father drives me south toward Gaza. On the way, he shows me the place where, several months ago, a Kassam rocket flew just over his car-- a short pipe crossing lazily from west to east. We arrive at kibbutz Be'eri, where my old army friend Harel is waiting. Be'eri is an old kibbutz in the Negev desert, a few miles from the Gaza strip. Great financial success has allowed it to maintain its traditional communal ways even as less prosperous kibbutzim have had to surrender to capitalism. The Socialist ideology that sought to subvert the corrupting power of money can now only flourish in moneyed places. "This is socialism," Harel says when I marvel at his new flat screen plasma TV, "if one has money, everyone has money." He should know. Be'eri's money comes from its print factory, the largest in Israel. He is the chief executive.

During our army days we called him Hamudaag, which means "the worried one," because of his perpetual frown and hunched posture. Predictably the intervening years, spent as they were in the Israeli desert just across from Gaza, have not quite mellowed his expression. Several years ago, to get away and rejuvenate, Harel went to Boston to complete his MBA. Unfortunately, he came back with an affliction-- a love of baseball, which, in Israel, is like a love of skiing--only skiing at least sounds vaguely plausible. Worse yet, he became a Boston Red Sox fan, which even in the US indicates issues.

Hamudaag, in characteristic deadpan, proposes we embark on a "Kassam chasing" tour, patterned after those famed storm chasers of tornado alley in the US. The macabre undertones of this plan are lost on neither of us; but here on the Gaza border, macabre seems quite fitting.

Two parallel fences surround Be'eri. The narrow space between them is inhabited by mean looking dogs, panting in the stupefying heat. We drive out through a small gate and into the fields surrounding the kibbutz, headed west toward Gaza. Several months ago, Harel tells me, a concerned friend from Boston called him to ask about the situation, given the news of Kassam rockets falling regularly in the area. Harel assured him that the rockets were normally aimed at the city of Sederot, a better target for the primitive weapon. Just then a rocket exploded in the yard nearby. I glimpse something symbolic in this story; but in the vindictive heat, that our car's A/C only seems to agitate further, I can’t remember what.

As we approach the border fence that separates Israel from the Gaza strip, the smooth paved road gives way to a choppy, narrow dirt path; warning signs appear, then soldiers, fussing over several huge cannons, their barrels pointed west like middle fingers in an obscene gesture. We climb up a hill to an old bird watching station and sit on a bench overlooking the border. Right below us is the fence, patrolled regularly by the IDF. Over the fence is Gaza city, looking evermore like just another dusty, patched up desert town. The air is hot and mum. Overhead floats a large white blimp, used by the IDF to spy on the strip. Israel has created a sophisticated alarm system on the border that detects when a missile is fired in Gaza and warns the residents on the other side. The system used to be called "Shahar Adom," which means "red dawn" in Hebrew. But Shahar is a popular name for Israeli women. They protested, and the system's name was changed to, "Tzeva Adom" (red color).

Even from this short distance, we cannot fathom or observe the devastation and tragedy that is this place, this border, this conflict. Everything seems peaceful. Then we hear gunfire to our left. Harel looks worried, but then again he always does. We don’t dive for cover. Old soldiers, we both remember the unique sound gunshots make when they are fired at you, and these aren't. Or maybe we are just too tired of ducking for cover in general.

We sit on the bench and contemplate the weirdness of this place; then we behold the strangeness of our own consciousness, how it labors to contain at once the calm scenery and the terrors of its inhabitants as they both hover, like Gaza itself, just within and out of reach.

We get back in the car and drive to Sederot. At a gas station on the city’s edge we enter Fun Café, a small restaurant. The TV set is broadcasting Wimbledon, live. We order humus and salad. Hamudaag, who is also, in another tragic twist, a fan of high literature, begins to muse on some obscure Thomas Pinchon passage. This story today, this trip, was all plot and symbolism and no action, I think to myself, unrepresentative of the daily truth of this place, which seems to be all action and no coherent plot, no illuminating symbolism, no momentum toward resolution, catharsis, redemption.

At night, Hamudaag makes a bed for me in the fortified cement room that every house in Israel has to contain by law. In case of an attack, everyone will huddle here. But for now the windows are open; the night is quiet and calm, as kibbutz nights usually are, and I am reminded of my childhood.

In the distance, the dogs bark.

On Jerusalem

2007-05-20T18:15:00.000-07:00

I’m not sure why Jerusalem is on my mind.
Perhaps it’s the upcoming 40th anniversary of the city’s purported reunification. Perhaps it’s a new survey, published in Haaretz. It showed that secular Israelis, while unwilling to give up the Wailing (Western) Wall even for peace, are at the same time leaving the city in increasing numbers.
Perhaps it’s the recent pilgrimage, much noted in the Israeli press, of a group of rabbis to the Temple Mount, looking to stir up old dubious passions. Perhaps it’s my upcoming annual visit to Israel and my kibbutz, which is always described as “near” or “on the road” to Jerusalem.

Regardless, I am thinking of Jerusalem, and the thoughts are not good.
The truth be told, I never liked Jerusalem that much.
Living in or near a holy city is like living with a celebrity parent — the kids tend to suffer and rebel.

Jerusalem always seemed at once too heavy and foreboding — like a graveyard — and too brittle — like an expensive toy you’re afraid to play with lest it break.
To youngsters in my kibbutz, Jerusalem was the nearest Big City. But it always seemed far, over the mountains.

To drink, shop, see movies or the ocean and generally feel more alive, we went to Tel Aviv. To escape everything, we went down to the Sinai where, back then, you could still drive your Jeep up some dune, unroll your sleeping bag, cook your coffee over the fire and sleep peacefully under a magnificent desert sky.

To Jerusalem we took the visitors and tourists.

These days, everything about Jerusalem feels even more tainted, mirthless and bleak. The physical Jerusalem, overrun by orthodox Jews who crowd the life out of it, is rife with tense, oppressive impulses. It’s no wonder that close to 80 percent of Israelis say they wouldn’t want to live there.

Jerusalem has grown over the years, but the new neighborhoods are ugly and harsh, all brutish land-grab with no architectural flair and no vision other than creating “facts on the ground.”

Jerusalem has become mostly a brand name, a cliché and a marketing tool for pulling in money from guilt-ridden Diaspora Jews and scary, literal minded Evangelical Christians. Its emotional appeal is routinely milked for political points.

The pagan orgy masquerading as front-line Judaism that was the recent rabbis’ pilgrimage to the Temple Mount is but one distasteful example.
What is more depressing — more backwards — than hinging your identity to ancient ruins? What could be more depressing than praying unto a rock, bowing before a mound of dirt as if it were more valuable than life itself?
How did the people who concocted the audacious notion of an abstract, unseen deity find themselves enslaved to a patch of dirt, reduced to fetishizing real estate?

Lies surround Jerusalem. The city, despite official propaganda, is not unified and never has been. The Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem live in two different cities, cultures and realities.

The Jews have encroached on East Jerusalem, but the Arabs are winning the demographic war. As the New York Times recently reported, the proportion of Arabs in the city has increased 8 percent since 1967. They now make up 34 percent of the residents.

Politically, Jerusalem fever has become the greatest obstacle for regional peace and the greatest threat to stability. Rather than a site of peace and promise, the place where the three world religions meet has, tellingly, become a cauldron of fear, conflict and violence.

A bomb in Jerusalem does much more damage than the same bomb anywhere else, and fundamentalists on both sides know this. A calamity in Jerusalem is always just a matter of time.

The phrase, “Next year in Jerusalem,” long ago became an empty mantra. After all, nothing is stopping all those devout American Jews from moving to Jerusalem right now. Anybody could, but nobody in their right mind wants to move to Jerusalem.

Jerusalem has served its historical purpose, but as both place and concept, it has become an albatross around the neck of Judaism and Israel.
Times and circumstances change. Great bands dissolve, great champions retire, potent symbols dim, destinations shift and myths get debunked. Even great leaders must sometimes exit the stage upon arrival — remember Moses?

We could all do with a little less Jerusalem, less Eternal City, less Holy Rah-Rah.
Humans fare poorly when they cling to the past, when they see myths and symbols rather than people and places, and when they fight for the eternity of stones rather than tend to fragile and fleeting human lives, here and now.

When I see religious or political leaders invoke Jerusalem to rally the masses — all the dancing, chanting and praying around the mountain, around the monument and around myth and memory — I see only darkness, fear, loathing and primordial tribal impulses.

Count me out. I’ve got Jerusalem fatigue.

On the Six Days War

2007-05-02T08:14:00.000-07:00

The six days war, which began roughly 40 years ago, was my first. I was eight years old. The kibbutz where I lived sat on a hill overlooking the Ayalon valley, a mile or so from the Jordanian border, just across from the majestic Latrun monastery. As children, we would sometimes go up the hill and look over the no man’s land that separated the two countries. On the other side, the Jordanian army set fortified on the hill behind the monastery. Sometimes we saw Jordanian soldiers looking back.

During the independence war of 1948, an Israeli assault on that hill infamously ended in defeat. Many new immigrants, sent to battle right off the ships with no training, were killed in the doomed assault. Given the lessons of 48, the IDF had amassed large forces on the border in the days before the six days war, believing it would encounter tough resistance.

On June 5th, When the IDF forces stormed the Latrun fortress, they found it vacant. The Jordanians have retreated in panic beforehand. Left behind was a disoriented group of Egyptian commandos sent as reinforcements. They found themselves trapped in the dry scrub brush covering no man’s land, and quickly were surrounded by Israeli forces, including some kibbutz members who joined the chase, among them my father. The fields were set afire and the burned commandos were buried en masse somewhere in the Ayalon valley. The exact location of that grave is unknown but to a small group of elderly kibbutz members who took part in the battle. No one has ever spoken of it publicly.

In the days before the war, a sense of grave worry permeated the kibbutz. Glass windows in all the buildings were taped to control shattering, and the kibbutz would go completely dark at night in anticipation of aerial attacks. Periodically, emergency drills would commence, and everyone would rush to their assigned shelters. As children, we of course welcomed those drills as fun excursions and breaks from tedious classes.

I spent the war itself in the large, newly built bomb shelter under the communal dining room. At night we sometimes snuck out the shelter’s doors and saw flares alight in the sky over no man’s land.

When we emerged from the shelter, we at first sensed few differences. An old menacing shotgun appeared in the corner of my parents’ room. My father did not explain. But within a few days even we kids understood that something momentous had happened. My family, along with, it seemed, all of Israel, went to tour the new territories. We went to the west bank and later to the Golan Heights. The scene was raw: ghost towns, deserted barracks, empty shells, torn fences. Burnt vehicles and tanks littered the roadsides.

In Israel, the air seemed to whirl with strange elation and disbelief. Soon, shiny photo albums began showing up in my parents’ room, with pictures of weary soldiers kissing the Wailing Wall, tanks charging in the desert, shimmying airplanes; enemy soldiers sitting in the sand, barefoot and ashen-faced, hands on their heads. The radio started playing triumphant songs: corny, insufferable love songs to the land, Jerusalem of Gold; songs about heroes, and songs ridiculing the enemy.

Just north of the Latrun monastery, the Arab village Emmaus, whose residents have fled, was quickly bulldozed over on the orders of Moshe Dayan, the ruthless minister of defense. Trees were planted over the ruins and the area was named Park Canada. In the following years, we shunned and avoided that place on principle.

It is quite impossible for people today to understand what that time was like. The war’s results were so decisive, quick and shocking to both sides, so colossal, that they defied logic and imagination. As a result, people in Israel practically lost their bearings. The nation had entered a prolonged head-trip from which it has yet to recover. Atheists saw divine miracles and biblical premonitions; peace lovers hailed the glory of war; Zionists began thinking Empire; dark, dormant messianic impulses flooded the secular mainstream; a struggling nation of refugees, victims and survivors had overnight assumed the posture and attitude of conqueror, ruler, lord and bully.

The six day war has become the defining moment in Israel’s history, profoundly affecting every aspect of Israeli society, identity, and destiny. The victory was at once Israel’s greatest and worst moment. In victory, Israel’s tenuous existence became a hardened fact; the myth of its military might and supernatural cunning was born. The ethos of the ’New Jew’-- brave, fierce, and independent-- has found its defining icon.

Alas, the victory also marked the inception of Israel’s deepest, most insistent ills. The soul killing occupation ushered in the poisonous, hallucinatory settlement movement. Religious fundamentalism became ascendant; vanity replaced humility; and brute force worship began eroding the nation’s humane impulses and aspirations. The act of war has shifted from a dreaded, last resort option to a celebrated first preference. The six days war, while commencing the age of Israeli militarism, had also set the bar for success impossibly high. Israeli leaders, generals, and public have ever since been pinning obsessively, and at disastrously high costs, for the next cathartic military triumph.

Forty years ago, at the end of the six days war, Israel was agog in victory celebrations. Forty years on, that war looks less like a victory, much less a reason to celebrate.

On the war on terror as metaphor

2007-04-20T18:52:00.000-07:00

As the next elections draw near, we are bound to hear more and more about the war on terror. Debating the war policy is important; but perhaps more important is debating the war metaphor.

Language shapes reality. Harsh language can incite and enrage, which is why society, in its quest for order and harmony, is always looking to soften words’ hard edges; children are steered away from ‘bad words.’ Bathroom tissue sells better than toilet paper; Sanitation workers feel better then garbage men. “The Oscar goes to…” shields fragile egos better than, “The winner is…”

Soft language, however, can distort and demean. Feminist theorists realized early how the term ‘girl’ connotes a different set of associations than the term ‘woman.’ You can imagine a woman president, but not a girl.

The psychologist Albert Bandura has shown how language can be softened to assuage moral guilt. We can more easily justify a war when dead civilians are “collateral damage,” and when killing people becomes, “servicing the target.”

Language frames politics. In the struggle to win over the public, those seeking to outlaw abortion became ‘pro life’ and those seeking to keep it legal became ‘pro choice.’

Language illuminates character. Yitzhak Rabin, reading a report on the eve of the six days war, took the time to revise the sentence, “Awesome enemy forces are amassing on the Egyptian border,” to: “Very large enemy forces…”

Perhaps the defining feature of human language is metaphor. Words and the things they describe become meaningful only in relation to other words and other things described. Metaphors frame reality. And once they take hold, they can become invisible, like the ocean water to the fish--so prevalent as to escape awareness and scrutiny. We accept willy-nilly the notion of the ‘tax burden’ without pausing to consider that tax paying is also a civil virtue; and our reaction to the recent troop increase in Iraq would be much different if the metaphor used to sell the policy was ‘gush,’ ‘heave,’ or ‘spill,’ rather than ‘surge.’

Successful metaphors can promote innovation. The engineer Robert Kearns, contemplating his blinking eyelids, invented the intermittent wipers. The Swiss inventor George de Mestral, back from a nature hike, turned his microscope onto the burrs that clung to his furry dog—and the rest is Velcro.

Successful metaphors can facilitate change. The work of psychotherapy often involves an attempt to replace faulty metaphors. A person with a fear of flying may feel reassured if informed that turbulence to a plane is like potholes to a car. Those caught up in a losing struggle may benefit from viewing their situation as a game of Tug-of-War. One way to avoid being dragged into the mud pit is to tug harder; another is to let go of the rope.

Great metaphors can transcend mere utility and become moments of grace and wonder. The late singer Chris Whitley imagined his body as, “dust radio.” Paul Desmond, the famed Jazz saxophonist, once commented on the feral playing of his peer, Ornette Coleman: “listening to him play is like living in a house where everything is painted red.”

The beloved Israeli poet Yehuda Amichay was a metaphor wizard. In Amichay’s world, the lovers’ meeting is, “illusory, like the meeting of sun and sea at evening.” An old man’s tears are likened to “a phone ringing in an empty house.” The sound of a kiss is, “like the fluttering of a moth caught between two panes of glass.” Spring comes suddenly, “like the taste of blood in the mouth;” a man’s life is “blurred like a letter in the rain;” and Jerusalem is “drunk, froth of tourists on her lips.”

Failed metaphors, alas, can bring ruin. And the greatest failure of metaphor in recent years, like so many other landmark failures, belongs to the Bush administration and its decision to frame America’s response to 9-11 as, ‘the war on terror.’ The failure of that metaphor is two-fold.

First, the ‘war’ part has painted America into a tight adversarial corner In relation to the rest of the world, handicapping the US both morally and politically. The war metaphor also landed the US smack inside Al Qaeda’s metaphoric home turf of mayhem and Jihad; the ‘war’ notion called up the nation’s darkest impulses and fears and hampered its collective judgment.

Second, the ‘on terror’ part is misleading and manipulative. Terror is an emotion, not a specific political adversary or military enemy. A war on terror, as such, could have just as easily been declared after Oklahoma City or the recent Virginia Tech massacre. Both were, after all, terrorizing events. Declaring a war on an emotion is too vague a premise on which to base political or military strategy, and an ill defined target begets poor marksmanship.

Moreover, 9-11 wasn’t chiefly about terror; it was about Al Qaeda, a small group pushing a radical brand of Islamist ideology. The Al Qaeda threat, specific and rather limited, is best tackled through internationally coordinated political, economic, and policing action. Framing it as a global war on terror was a manipulative move, designed to facilitate the neocons’ asinine Empire fantasies.

The season is ripe for America to come to its senses, send the Bush dogma out to pasture, and lay the ‘war on terror’ metaphor to rest.

On the Rabbinical courts

2007-04-01T20:45:00.000-07:00

Imagine a married woman whose husband turns out to be a violent wife beater, forcing her to leave. She asks for a divorce, but the courts refuse because matrimonial law dictates that a woman needs her husband’s permission for a divorce, and her husband refuses to grant it. She is left trapped in legal limbo, unable to remarry. Her abusive husband, meanwhile, is free to remarry and move on with his life. Inconceivable? Well, not if she is a Jewish Israeli woman.
In Israel today, rabbinical courts control family matters. Those courts have been largely hijacked by anti Zionist ultra orthodox judges (‘Dayanim’) who are applying increasingly draconian interpretations of the Halakha to family law. In fact, when the committee that selects judges for the rabbinical courts convened several weeks ago, 12 of the 15 new appointees were ultra orthodox (‘Chareidim’). None, it goes without saying, were women.

This development is but the latest in a long, nightmarish process by which the Zionist nation has in essence handed over control of some of its most crucial civic institutions to anti Zionist ideologues. The ultra orthodox rabbinical judges by and large do not recognize Israel, avoid and despise its institutions (even those they run), and loath the mainstream Israeli culture over which they preside in judgment.

According to the Halakha, granting divorce permission (a “Get”) is in the husband’s hands; but the Halakha also includes several scenarios where the husband can be compelled by the courts to grant a divorce, as in the event of the husband’s adultery. The Halakha, moreover, is a living document that is given to interpretation; astute and creative rabbinical judges can attempt to adapt its dictates to 21st century mores and social consciousness. Israel is not want for qualified rabbis who are also Zionists, army veterans, and university graduates. The ultra orthodox Dayanim, however, are usually none of the above. Brought in mostly through Byzantine nepotistic machinations, they tend to adhere to literalist, chauvinistic interpretations of Halakha and are notoriously reluctant to address the plight of the Agunot (women whose husbands disappeared) and Mesuravot (women whose husbands refuse a divorce).

Corrupted by a combination of reactionary True-Believerism, intellectual isolationism and political greed, the Israeli branch of the ultra orthodox movement is to the true spirit of Judaism what Bin-Ladenism is to Islam—a dangerous perversion masquerading as authentic traditionalism.

Secular Israelis, having grown wary and enraged about the courts’ tone deafness, increasingly opt to marry in civil ceremonies (mostly abroad, in Cyprus) or through lawyer-guided matrimonial contracts, to avoid any engagement with the rabbinical establishment. Secular Israelis, moreover, are unlikely to use ‘Get refusal’ tactics in divorce proceedings. Thus, those who end up suffering the most are, ironically, religious Israeli women.

While electing more progressive, creative Dayanim may improve the situation, it will not solve the underlying problem. Liberal religious courts are still religious, and hence perpetuate the inherent contradiction between theocratic rule and democratic governance. An enlightened slave master is better than a brutal one, but neither addresses the underlying problem of slavery itself. The Halakha is, at the end of the day, an unwieldy instrument with which to adjudicate contemporary social issues in a democratic, pluralistic, and largely secular nation such as Israel.

Particularly thorny is the task of reconciling the Halakhic view of women with contemporary notions of gender equality. Even the fanciest intellectual and rhetorical gymnastics ultimately fail to obscure the fundamental inadequacy of Halakhic prescriptions on the issue. A system of law that denies women entry into certain professions (such as a ‘Dayan’) as well as certain legal rights (such as the right to a divorce) solely on the basis of sex is no longer morally defensible. Such a system requires revision, not reverence.

The long term solution is to take the business of the nation out of the hands of religion and erect a separation wall between synagogue and state. Religious Israelis who wish to place themselves under the auspices of a rabbinical authority could still freely do so under such system, just as American Jews are free to decide which strand of the religion to align with, and what kind of rabbi, if any, to involve in their weddings and divorces.

Such a solution now appears to be in the offing. The Chareidim’s unbridled power lust is, ironically, likely to hasten their demise. More and more Israelis—secular and religious alike—are now demanding that government institutions protect the interests of all citizens, rather than advance the radical ideology of a belligerent minority, particularly if that minority denies the government’s legitimacy.

Israel is still a democracy, and public sentiment will soon enough translate into political will, which will turn into political action to remove the parasitic ultra orthodox from the levers of national power.

This will mark a desperately needed path correction for both Zionism and Judaism.

On March Madness

2007-03-19T11:16:00.000-07:00

March is upon us and with it March Madness, a uniquely American ritual observed extra vigorously here in the Midwest. In truth, I find big time college sports distasteful. College, it seems to me, should be in the business of teaching young people, not exploiting them; it should provide education for students, not entertainment for the masses. Big time college sport is hypocritical and corrupt. Student athletes are not quite students; they are unpaid professionals working for the University’s PR and fund raising machine. By the NCAA’s own statistics, roughly half of big time student-athletes graduate, and the odds are even worse for black athletes. Those who graduate are often carried through with the wink and nod of dubious acceptance criteria, phantom classes, sham grades, and ever enthusiastic tutors.

But March Madness also has its own compelling grace, provided in part by the very fact that those kids are playing for something other than money or a future in pro ball; for most of them, the games--inconsequential as they are in the big scheme of things—are a deeply felt passion.

Sport is not trivial. In sport, mankind has found a way of celebrating its dark tribal impulses without the nasty consequences. In sport we are free to ridicule and hate ‘the others’ without killing or subjugating them. Sport exemplifies the essential truth that competition necessitates cooperation. If we don’t agree on the rules, we can’t play the game. Sports rivalries thus bind the rivals together and affirm their underlying unity.

Thoughts of March and basketball bring to my mind one Amos Tversky, the late, great Israeli-American psychologist born March 16, 1937. Tversky is not a household name, and rabid sports fans in particular would be loath to accept one of his great discoveries: that there is no such thing as a ‘shooting streak.’
Hardcore basketball fans believe, and hear repeatedly from inane sportscasters (a redundancy, of course), the notion of the ‘streaky shooter,’ who gets ‘in the zone’ and has the ‘hot hand.’ Tversky, in a series of clever studies, showed that over the course of a season, whether or not a player makes a shot has no effect whatsoever on his odds of making the next shot. The ‘hot streak’ is actually a random sequence.

This is difficult for fans to believe because they often see what looks like a streak right before their eyes. This guy just hit three baskets in a row. Obviously he’s hot. Well, no. He looks hot. But things, Tversky knew, are not always what they seem. The sun, for example, seems to be setting; time seems to move faster when you’re absorbed in something fascinating, like reading this column. Tversky and others have shown that random occurrences don’t look random. If you flip a coin 100 times, you will get several long ‘streaks’ of heads or tails in a row. And the brain, prepared as it is to detect order and pattern, is easily fooled into inferring some causation, some principled order or design.

Similarly, people often intuit erroneously that co-occurring events are causally linked; hence the prominence of another sports phenomenon: athletic superstition. Whatever you did right before you had a good game will assume causal attributes, and be repeated before the next game. This tendency to mistakenly infer causality from co-occurrence is not limited to humans; caged pigeons, receiving food at random intervals not related to their behavior, will nevertheless repeat any movement they happened to be doing before food appeared.

In humans, many common beliefs are based in this error. Some are trivial, like a fan’s belief that wearing his lucky jersey helps his team win. But others are weightier. The religiously devout pray much, and when what they prayed for happens to materialize, they see these two events as causally related: prayer-answered. Not knowing the exact mechanism by which this happens allows them to conclude, when prayer doesn’t ‘work,’ that they didn’t pray hard enough.

Parents also fall in the trap, seeing causality in the co-occurrence of their behaviors and their children’s development. Because parenting behaviors co-occur with children’s developing personalities, parents assume that their behaviors actually shape their children’s personalities. But In fact, the causality is often reversed, as temperamentally easy children enable their parents to feel competent. Good children create good parents. And much of personality development is the unfolding of genetic programming. Adopted siblings who grow up in the same house are not more similar than strangers, and identical twins raised apart still greatly resemble each other.

The same applies to the notion of free will. When intention and action occur in proximity, we think one caused the other, although research has shown that both intention and action are products of unconscious brain processes. That you wake up with a headache every time you sleep with your shoes on doesn’t mean sleeping with your shoes on caused your headache. Your drinking is probably causing both.

So this March, when you ‘decide’ to don your ‘lucky shirt,’ pray for your favorite player to ‘get hot,’ and pretend that those marvelous young athletes are, a-hmm, ‘students,’ remember old Amos, and practice some critical wariness toward your own perceptions. You will be setting a good example for your kids.

Supporting the Troops

2007-02-27T21:35:00.000-08:00

In the numbing clang of talking points, vacant sentiments and spinning clichés that constitute the national conversation, no phrase is more offensive than the omnipresent, “support the troops.” The more you hear that particular slogan, the more you feel like scrubbing off. Even in the current media climate, where the foul cud shenanigans of ten-cent celebrities are ceaselessly chewed over by equally clamoring ‘news analysts,’ the ‘support the troops’ chorus stands out as singularly asinine. Somehow, in a country divided over everything, everyone and their presidential candidate brother still ‘support the troops.’

Such solidarity, such extravagant absence of antipathy requires examination. If everybody ‘supports the troops,’ then the notion of ‘support for the troops’ is rendered at best suspect and at worst meaningless; so why the persistent fawning?

First, ‘supporting the troops’ is an old political trick. A Political Science professor I knew during my college days in Houston used to say that in every Texas election, some aspirant will rush to define himself as ‘the anti-smut candidate.’ Now what will his opponent do, go pro-smut? Frame yourself in a way that is impossible to impeach, and you paint your opponents into a corner.

Of course, hiding under the shiny shield of such sentiments also makes it easier for the politician, once elected, to send said troops into needless combat with faulty intelligence, an ill defined strategy and no clear victory criteria or exit plan—those being marginal concerns, not included in the ‘support’ package.

The politicians, naturally, pursue this ‘support the troops’ posture because it resonates with the public. But why does it?

One reason is the taken-for-granted notion that the troops are heroes. This is a common misunderstanding. The troops are not heroes. They are blue collar workers on the job. And the job is more dirty than dangerous. Most soldiers never see combat. In fact, women and children are more likely to die in war zones than soldiers, who are, after all, trained and equipped to survive in that very environment. Most troops are not particularly brave or patriotic, either. Individual differences in socioeconomic status and family background predict enlistment patterns far better than individual differences in courage or patriotism. Most soldiers volunteer out of more selfish and practical—that is, American—motives. They want a good job, adventure or challenge, a sense of belonging, money for college, a way out of town or trouble, or to keep a family tradition.

Most soldiers are competent professionals, and some behave courageously in the course of their service. But being a soldier is not inherently courageous, and courageous behavior in the course of doing one’s job is just as common in other professions.

Then there is guilt, the gift that keeps on giving. In fact, there are two types of guilt at play. First is the guilt of association. We, as a culture, are complicit in an ugly sham. We pump the minds of young teenagers full of doomsday scenarios and nationalistic propaganda; we teach them the script of manhood-through-violence; then, we send them away to act it out in the name of some dubious ‘national interest,’ –of the kind that tends to line many a pockets back home, but somehow never the troops’. Deep down we know we’ve perpetrated a ruse, so we cover it up with gooey praise. That all the ‘support’ talk also infantilizes the troops is no coincidence; imagining them as our tender ‘boys in harm’s way’ helps to dull our awareness of what we actually trained them to do— our dirty business of mayhem.

Second, paradoxically, is the guilt of dissociation. Most Americans, after all, have never experienced war in any direct way. Most Americans were not troops and their children are not troops. America is not a country at war. America has an army at war. The soldiers are ‘them,’ not us, and it’s difficult to care that much about ‘them.’ If we really cared about the troops, we would pay them much better and use them much less.

We like our distance from the troops because their business is war. War tends to interfere with peace. And we don’t want our good, peaceful lives interfered with. But we feel guilty for being so far removed because we believe that our peace is bought by their war. That too is largely a myth. There’s no evidence that wars buy peace. Every war ultimately expands the war niche, invigorates war related industries, perpetuates war mythology, and hence begets more war.

In Israel, tellingly, all this dim ‘support the troops’ talk is conspicuously absent. The presence of war permeates everything and pierces everybody’s daily consciousness. The troops in Israel are not ‘them,’ they are ‘us.’ They are not ‘over there’ but right here. They don’t need ‘support’ from politicians, because they are the politicians. They don’t need ‘support’ from the public because they are the public. They are not merely society’s children, but also society’s parents. That situation creates its own set of problems, and its own manifestations of false consciousness and inane public posturing, but none are as insufferable as ‘supporting the troops.’

On former Israelis in the US

2007-02-25T07:52:00.000-08:00

The consciousness of ex-Israelis in the US is changing. In the past, it was difficult to find former Israelis who would own up to and proudly announce the ‘former’ part of their status. Former Israelis instead tended to fall into one of four categories.

Some became permanently temporary, claiming to be on their way back home any minute now, as soon as they convince the wife, or finish the degree, or see their child through college.

Others succumbed to the velvet handcuffs of US life at the price of guilt and self-recrimination, like an overweight person who has given up on exercising. Their weakness, not a whole-hearted, principled choice, was the reason they were still here.

Yet others became adherents of the Gambler’s Fallacy. Here for the money, they were always just one more bet, one big score, one cunning deal away from the huge windfall that would allow them to return triumphant and use their wealth to build orphanages in Tel Aviv.

Finally, there were the ghetto dwellers, attempting to work out their remorse and isolation by recreating Israeli culture in the US. Surrounding themselves with other expatriates and gorging up on all things Israel, they sought to enact a sanitized version of the homeland--like one of those amusement park rides that offer thrills and chills but without actual danger, without the blood and tears.

At once defensive and patronizing toward both their homeland and adopted home, ex-Israelis tended to inhabit a complicated emotional terrain. Many related to Israel like one would relate to a harsh, narcissistic father--maintaining distance and a simmering anger while still seeking to curry favor with, impress, and gain approval from the old curmudgeon. Americans were generally viewed by former Israelis as akin to those high school teacher’s pets who know how to make nice and get good grades but are hopelessly conventional, and naïve about the underlying darkness of it all.

The emotional difficulty of leaving Israel behind owed much to the unique nature of Israeli socialization. Life in Israel demanded high sacrifice, requiring individuals to put their personal interests on hold and their lives on loan for the greater national good. To survive its hostile environment, Israel had to develop a fiercely loyal citizenry. It needed to loom in the psych of its citizens as an overriding value.

Language told this story. The traditional Hebrew word for immigrating to Israel is Aliyah, which means going up. The word for leaving Israel is Yeridah, meaning going down. Life in Israel was, by this language, a pinnacle, the top. Life anywhere else was lesser, lower. The numbers of ‘yordim’ were always reported in military terms-- “there are two divisions of Israelis in LA alone “-- the better to underscore their callousness and resulting damage. For those who grew up in that environment, leaving Israel always felt as equal parts liberation and betrayal.

All this is changing. Israeli society has achieved a critical mass of middle class consciousness in which more common and mundane western aspirations—convenience, prosperity, and self-fulfillment—crowd out the old pioneer ethos and revolutionary battle cries. Generals are increasingly seen as calculating careerists, while the ‘yordim’ are regarded (and in turn regard themselves) as reasonable and enterprising. No longer shunned and ridiculed, they are also envied less, as the comforts of Diaspora become more available in Israel.

Increasingly, Israelis are realizing that the wars of the last 30 years have been neither existential nor necessary and that their sacrifices, demanded ostensibly in the name of survival, were in fact extracted primarily for the misguided ends of messianic right wing nationalists, snotty Dr. Strangelove generals, and corrupt, inept politicians.

American Jews are understandably unhappy about these new developments. For all the money they send in, American Jews would like to see their Israeli brethren keep their noses to the Zionist grindstone, practice their marksmanship, and pump their children full of stranger-danger stories and biblically ordained victory tales. Instead, those pesky Israelis have developed a taste for lattes and flat screens, and are pursuing dreams of business deals in Manhattan, faculty appointments at Penn, and beachfront Florida properties.

For many old guard Zionists and their supporters, these developments represent a crisis. But the changes are, in fact, healthy. The passions of first infatuation cannot be sustained indefinitely. In time, other reasons and bonds must emerge to replace the initial rush. The recent trends indicate national maturation; they show that the Israeli people are like other people; that they are tired of the constant flapping of the wings of history in their faces.

The fever is waning. The cultish aspects of Israeli life are being shed. Trite heroism slogans, zealous biblical premonitions, and vacant end-of-days rhetoric can no longer be relied on to compel young Israelis to repeatedly charge up the same godforsaken hills, no questions asked. To survive, Israel must now compete on a level plain with other nations for the loyalties and labor of its citizens. To keep its best and brightest, it will have to offer them a tenable future with the amenities, possibilities, and security on par with other nations in the developed world.

Israel can only do so if a measure of regional peace is achieved.

Nu Ma

2007-01-31T07:56:00.000-08:00

After years of toiling in thankless uncertainty, I have finally arrived. The New Standard's editor just decided to make my column a regular feature, and he wants me to name it. Curiously, this happened right after I casually mentioned to said editor that my IDF background involved explosives training and that accidents happen.

Everyone knows that the right name-- like the right logo or catch phrase--can make or break a career, and I thought it would be a shame to see this sky rocketing affair coming to a crushing halt because of one bad choice. So I set out to find the perfect name for my column.

My daughter offered, “Don’t Worry About My Daughter.” You see, several scandalized readers have expressed sympathy for her sad fate of being related to such reprobate as, well, me. Kindly souls have offered her Greyhound tickets to Brooklyn, free legal advice, and coupons to Sammy’s. Fame is a bitch. And is especially tough on the kids.

I thought of ‘Blunt Instrument’, which connotes a violent crime scene and hence seemed fitting for a column that deals with Middle East affairs. But I believe there’s finesse to my game, and the name should reflect that. ‘Public Opinion’ sounded promising, but so did ‘Private Opinion’ and they kind of canceled each other out.

‘Second Opinion’ had flair and medical connotations that brought to mind a young George Clooney, which can’t be all bad, but also Colonoscopy, which can. And to whom am I conceding the first opinion? ‘Minority Report’ showed promise—the Spielberg connection, that’s serious pedigree--but then you’d have to contend with Tom Cruise, and that guy can pounce at any moment, just ask Oprah. ‘Opinionate Ed’ seemed like a clever pun, which would have worked had my parents named me Ed. So I raged briefly against my parents. But then I remembered that in Hebrew, ‘Noam’ means comfort and pleasantness, which describe me perfectly; just ask my daughter, if you can find her; I think she’s in hiding, Rushdi style, somewhere in Nordstrom.

‘Say What’ suggested doubt and disbelief, which are responses my column regularly provokes; but the name seemed slangy, and slang gets tired easily. You want a name that will bring it every month. I tried ‘Off Topic,’ but it sounded too much like a clothing store at the mall where you can get two nose rings and a skull medallion for a dollar—both of which would definitely cramp my Pride-of-Salvation-Army style.

‘Looking On’ fascinated for a moment but had uncomfortable connotations of the dirty-old-man kind, and you surely don’t want people calling you ‘old man.’ My girlfriend offered ‘Deranged Man,’ but I think professionals like me should keep their dirty laundry in house.
‘The Fix’ sounded too much like a sports talk radio program. Sport, while fun to play and watch, is the most inane conversation topic. No sports conversation can ever be interesting.

‘Interested Party’ sounded intriguing, combining ‘Interested,’ which suggestively hypnotizes readers into reading, and ‘Party,’ which appeals to the young demographic advertisers covet; but let’s face it, ‘Party,’ is ruined by the common pre-fix ‘Political,’ which immediately makes you think of oxymorons or just plain morons.

I thought that, “How to Please your Partner in Bed Every Time” could be a crowd pleaser, if you will, but this name seemed, well, ‘Off Topic’, and one should only write what one knows. “Whereof you cannot speak, thereof you should be silent,” Wittgenstein said; and he, too, could pounce at any moment. Just ask Karl Popper.

‘Point Blank’ got scratched because you don’t want to be associated with the term ‘Blank,’ which people are bound to relate to your, ahm, ‘Slate.’ I thought of ‘Point Guard’ because I am a basketball fan, and also because it was late; and also because I had too much Gin. But that made me think of Steve Nash, who’s Canadian, and Canada is synonymous with ‘bland’ which you don’t want associated with a column that’s supposed to be cutting edge.

‘Cutting Edge’ now there’s a possibility; but ouch, Bris Milah. That’s just painful, and it reminded me of how my parents threatened to disown me when I declared my opposition to circumcision. Can’t we just cut a piece of cloth or something symbolic like that and call it a covenant? We don’t, after all, commemorate the destruction of the temple by breaking windows at the Shull.

My editor thought we should consider a Hebrew name. He offered ‘Harief,’ which means spicy or sharp; but the word is obscure, and sounds like it could be the name of a Hezbullah official. You can imagine a headline like: “Abu Harief vows to attack Israel.” That could get confusing, since five of my seven loyal readers already suspect I sympathize with the enemy; or at least that’s what they told my daughter.

I thought I should use familiar Hebrew words. But my attempts to combine the words Gaffen, Mazel, Nebbish, and Kelev into a coherent title proved unsuccessful. So I went deeper, to the roots of language and Jewish consciousness. There I found the Yiddish ‘Nu,’ connoting both curiosity and resignation, and the Hebrew ‘Ma,’ meaning ‘what?’ And there it was: Nu Ma.

Perfect.

On Travel

2007-01-18T16:07:00.001-08:00

Life is strange. Lessons of equal value can take decades or seconds to learn. We all probably have preferred ways of picking up life’s lessons. Mine is travel. Wanderlust, of course, is as Jewish as gefiltefish, and is a time-honored feature of Israeli identity. Israel is a bunker under siege. And since Zionism made the commitment to marry the land and settle down, the itch has become even more acute. It’s a rite of passage for post army Israelis to roam the remote reaches of the world—the beaches of Goa, Peruvian jungles, Australian outback--and return with tales of how they found other Israelis in the most godforsaken places and how together they outfoxed the natives.

This travel lust is in part a reaction to the confined quarters of Israeli existence. You cannot get lost in Israel. Wherever you go, you’re but a few miles from home, or from the border fence. Whomever you meet probably served with your uncle in the army, or has a cousin who’s doing some business with your sister’s husband. Israel is a miniature country. The legendary Jordan River is a piddling brook. The Sea of Galilee is a murky pond, always threatening to dry up; the forests are clusters of thorny pine trees donated by yentas in Brooklyn to commemorate bar mitzvahs. No endless dense canopy where exotic species and ancient tribes roam undiscovered. Israel has one mountain, and it’s no Everest, no Kilimangaro. In fact, it, too, is a bunker. Little wonder Israelis feel that the real world, on a life size scale, is elsewhere.

The tone of Israeli travel is that of Israeli life: combative and confrontational. Israelis don’t travel to rest and relax, but to test their wits and prove their mettle. To travel is to pronounce: The world cannot get rid of us. Those uppity goyim have nothing on us. Israelis go abroad to reaffirm that all of Diaspora’s treasures, vistas and comforts cannot break their bond with the homeland. They cavort with a hundred enchanting mistresses but return to the bosom of their loyal wife.

As a youngster, I was lucky and got to travel in ways that defied my status as a shekel-less kibbutznik. I played handball on the national team and the team traveled--to France, Netherlands, Germany, Italy. After the army I befriended a young Brazilian woman, Tanya, the chain smoking, socialist daughter of a wealthy banker. She offered me a ticket to Brazil. I accepted, as would you. I landed in Rio on the eve of Carnival. The air was perpetually warm. At night we walked the stone paved allies, we sat in sidewalk cafes. We argued over Marx and music. As Carnival started we roamed the teaming streets; we followed the drummers, drunken tourists and giddy cross dressers amid feathers, masks, half naked shimmering bodies; dancing, heaving crowds all day and all night; we drifted through apartments, motels, swaying youths circling ally bonfires; we floated through parties, orgies, heaps of confetti, blazing fireworks. And then my time was up. I flew home. I remember how easy it seemed at the time to imagine coming back to Rio. Twenty-five years later, the whole episode has acquired the sheen of a dream. I have never heard from Tanya again. I never went back.

Travel takes you to strange places. Like Iran. The trip to Iran was my first time abroad. It was the summer of 1977; right before my army service was to begin. My father got a job managing a big farm in Ispahan. He brought in Israeli irrigation technology to replace the traditional flooding methods and within months the arid desert farm was green. Wherever you drill in Iran you find oil or water, he used to say.

The Shah ruled Iran back then, backed by American money and Israeli-trained secret police. The regime was corrupt—everyone knew that; but no one knew its days were numbered. Two short years later, the Ayatollah Khomeini would return from his exile in Paris, crowds would overrun the American embassy, and the Israeli community would evacuate hastily. My father would find himself on the last plane from Teheran, having left behind a house and everything in it.

Travel teaches you strange lessons. My parents, both holocaust survivors, still refused to believe danger was descending, and had to escape again by the skin of their teeth.

Everywhere I went in Iran, the ancient ruins, dusty bazaars and desert hills, I could sense the weight and remnants of history; the proud, glorious heritage of the Iranian people, buried under decades of corruption, poverty, war and decay. Here was once the center of civilization, the seat of high culture, philosophy, and technology. I was too young to know what any of that meant or foretold. A few months later, on a bus winding its way through the Balkans toward Munich, a Persian girl I befriended gave me a copy of Rubaiyat, by the great Persian poet, mathematician, and wine lover Omar Khayyam. One poem in particular became a favorite:

Come with old Khayyam and leave the wise
To talk; one thing is certain, that life flies
One thing is certain and the rest is lies
The flower that once has blown forever dies

On the occupation, again.

2007-01-01T10:18:00.000-08:00

A recent report from Peace Now, based on Israeli government documents, revealed that approximately 40% of the settlements in the west bank are built on privately owned land belonging to indigenous Palestinians. ‘Haaretz’ newspaper has reported that more ‘Jews Only’ highways are being built in the territories; that new army regulations now prohibit Palestinians from riding in Israeli cars; that Illegal west bank settlements are expanding continuously, despite government claims, promises, and regulations to the contrary. At numerous roadblocks, Palestinians—women, children, and elderly--wait for hours to get anywhere while Jewish settlers move freely through. These reports made little splash in Israel, where the citizens, jaded and enraged regarding anything having to do with the Palestinians, resort almost reflexively to suppression or rationalization.

Here in the U.S., former president Carter is under attack mainly for stating two plain truths: that the Palestinians in the territories live in apartheid and that an honest discussion of Israel’s transgressions is difficult to conduct, partly due the political influence of the Jewish lobby.

Many of those who protest the word ‘apartheid’ as ill fitting and overly charged fail to express similar outrage when ill fitting, charged words, such as ‘holocaust,’ are used routinely as bogus apologia for questionable Israeli conduct. If loaded words can be used to defend Israel, then they can be used to criticize it. The word ‘apartheid’ sells books and generates buzz, which was undoubtedly important to Carter and his publisher; but it also provides a provocative, useful lens through which to make more honest the conversation about the occupation.

It is also true that critics of Israel are often called anti Semites not because they are but because labeling them as such is the easiest way to discredit their arguments and avoid open debate. Just criticize Israel, and a gaggle of knee-jerky usual suspects--jittery rabbis, PAC-savvy politicians, blowhard talk show hosts, and starchy Jewish organizations--will pounce on you with accusations of anti Semitism. If you dare cry foul, you’ll be accused of invoking the old anti Semitic notion of a Jewish Cabal controlling things. It’s a classic silencing strategy, used by various defunct orthodoxies, including old psychoanalysts (either you agree with my diagnosis or you’re in pathological denial) and Soviet Union communists (if you criticize the regime you must be mentally ill).

The fact that you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you’re not being followed. The fact that a claim can be exaggerated maliciously for propaganda purposes doesn’t render it patently baseless. Jewish interests indeed influence American politics and discourse. There is no shame or crime in that. In fact, it should be a point of pride. In America, you must organize to gain influence. But when Jews (or Cubans or blacks or presidential administrations or big oil, for that matter) attempt to use their clout to disallow criticism and stifle honest debate, such attempts should be opposed.

Surely even its most ardent supporters concede that Israel is not above error or malice and hence should not be above criticism. To routinely dismiss any critique of Israel’s behavior with canned yelps of anti Semitism does Israel more harm than Carter’s books.

Think what you may of Mr. Carter, his presidential legacy features the Camp David accord, the single biggest political achievement in Israel’s history. Post presidency, Carter has made himself an internationally credible force for peace; perhaps a fool for peace, in some regard, but as such still preferable to the multitude of war fools that surround, and include, our current president.

If Carter’s arguments betray a bias, it’s in fact pro Israel. His stance implies a longing for Israel to return to the promise of its inception: to be a light onto the nations; to walk the high moral ground, even if it means taking risks; even if it hurts. Many risks have been taken and much hurt inflicted, after all, in the process of Israel’s descent into a level of conduct and morality that resembles its worst enemies.

The root causes of this descent have been the settlement movement and the ongoing occupation. In their authoritative account of the history of the settlement movement, Lords of the Land, journalists Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar document in breathtaking detail how the settlements, pursued in clear violation of the Geneva conventions and fueled by delusional messianic zeal, racism, and governmental ineptitude, have over time weakened Israel internally, wasting its resources, degrading its military, and sullying its spirit.

Even more damaging, however, has been the occupation’s role in undermining Israel’s stance in the world. Gradually and relentlessly, the facts of the occupation, along with its images, rhetoric and hardened habits have diminished Israel’s world standing and eroded world support for it.

To survive in the long run, Israel must win two battles: the military battle to repel foes, and the moral battle to attract allies. The occupation and the settlements hurt Israel on both fronts. Any document—a report, a book—agitating toward a re-examination of Israel’s policies in the territories; any call for Israel to reconnect with the moral roots of its power and legitimacy, is at bottom pro-Israel, to be welcomed by Israel’s true supporters.

How Bush Happened

2006-12-19T04:45:00.000-08:00

The November elections reflected the nation’s dawning, uncomfortable realization that the president--out of his depth, out of touch, and out of control—has caused a calamity in Iraq. Historians will no doubt puzzle over how Bush happened; how this strangely inarticulate lightweight, unremarkable in every way, has managed to bamboozle the American empire into a colossal military and political fiasco, squandering thousands of lives, billions of dollars and the unprecedented reservoir of good will bestowed on the U.S. after 9-11. They will study the bitter irony of how the war, a response to 9-11, has become a bigger catastrophe than 9-11. But several reasons for Bush and his war are already clear:

First, Bush happened in a cultural climate where faith was allowed to crowd out evidence. In a culture that prizes faith over data, the leadership can feel entitled to act on faith sans data and justified in shaping data to fit its beliefs. Faith is all knowing, since it requires no real knowledge. Anyone, at any moment, can lay claim to the whole of faith, and with it a set course. No one can lay claim to the whole of knowledge. The work of accumulating and analyzing evidence is arduous, and the course is often counter-intuitive. “We have evolved,” said socio-biologist E.O. Wilson, “to believe in God, not in biology.” And so, in today’s America, a learned agnostic cannot become president. But an ignorant believer can, and did.

Second, Bush was possible in a cultural moment where action became prized over thought. America is generally an action culture, not a contemplative one, and Clinton’s distasteful late-term shenanigans caused the nation to tilt further toward a hard ‘bring them on’ leadership style. Having had to deal with a smarmy, cigar-twiddling president who wanted to parse the meaning of ‘is’, Americans became ever more receptive to the Texas charms of the chummy ‘Decider.’ Then came the sucker punch of 9-11, granting the cowboy a broad, tacit permission to seek some double-barreled revenge.

Third, Bush provides another lesson in how power distorts perception. Once you’ve acquired power, people perceive your power, not you. Bush’s characteristic tendency to act uber-knowing without bothering to learn would, sans his title, have seemed sad and tiresome, like a student who continuously jumps up to answer without having heard, understood, or studied the question. But once you’re The Emperor, well, nice outfit…

Forth, Bush’s war happened because we love war. True, we also hate war, but we also love it. It’s a love-hate relationship, a prototypical seduction. War is an intoxicating, exhilarating head-trip. Modern war is also photogenic. In today’s world, you only exist if you’re on TV. You’re only on TV if you’re a spectacle. War is the ultimate spectacle. And once it catches on, war, like any TV hit, attains its own momentum, attracting hoards and organizations eager to sponsor it, profit from it, live vicariously through it, define themselves by it, find their meaning in it, or import and imitate it.

Once the Iraq action commenced, the mere investment of lives and money brought on the inevitable cognitive dissonance--the pressure to bring attitude in line with behavior. The attitude-behavior relationship is reciprocal. Attitude can shape behavior (I love her, so I begin to kiss her), but behavior can also shape attitude (I kiss her, so I begin to love her). We get clues as to how to feel and think by watching our own behavior. Once we start dieing for something, it becomes important; otherwise we’re fools who die for nothing. This principle explains why grueling boot camp or hazing rituals serve to increase, rather than decrease, members’ commitment to the organizations that tortured them. This principle also explains, in part, why wars escalate, why our response to the failure of force is to bring more force.

Psychologically, Bush may also be understood in terms of his defenses. Defense mechanisms are unconscious distortions of reality that serve to protect one’s identity form external and internal threats. Denial is one such mechanism, but Bush’s notorious denial habits are used to protect against external bad news.

To protect himself internally, the president seems to be using reaction formation, a defensive strategy in which one avoids a threatening truth by tacking too hard in the opposite direction. We intuit reaction formation when we glimpse the inherent sadness of the clown. Shakespeare identified it in ‘the lady dath protest too much.’ The truly brave acknowledge, own, and confront their fears. The truly decisive admit and negotiate their doubts. The truly wise readily confess ignorance. Bush’s unbending pose of clarity and confidence reveals a fundamental, terrifying absence thereof.

Defenses are healthy if used in moderation; but extreme defensiveness leads to a break with reality and an erosion of humanity. In the aftermath of Bush’s war we see a reflection of the accumulating damage. His shoot-first-ask-questions-never stance has resulted in much useless shooting and many troubling unanswered questions. His Stay-The-Course has become the Road-to-Hell. His staunchly simple-minded approach has complicated matters beyond repair, and his self-purported open line to God has yielded an ungodly mess.

A Day at a Time

2006-12-11T16:02:00.000-08:00

I'm on a quick visit to Israel for my father's 70th birthday. The old man has lost a step, but he has not lost his footing. "What matters is not how old you feel," he says, "but how old you are." Dad, you see, is not a psychologist. He's a farmer. Farmers, he used to say, are eternally optimistic, always predicting that next year's rain, and crops, will be better. We hang around watching European soccer on the TV and reading the newspapers in the dusty living room of his apartment. We don't talk much, which means we're usually in agreement. Both optimism and agreement are rare in this part of the world these days.

During the day, when he's at work, I walk about; I check on my Israeli friends. Some of them are kibbutzniks, who as such know something about dream and disillusion. Some of them are old army buddies. Special Forces units in Israel are like Ivy League universities in the U.S.--they produce strong memories and loyalties, as well as society's future movers and shakers. Many of those who served and fought in or around my time are now leading figures in society, CEOs, judges, heart surgeons, army generals, government officials. Some of us, lacking the talent or wisdom to go for what really matters and accumulate wealth or power, even became college professors. Through my friends I try to sense the national mood in the wake of Lebanon war II. Here's what I find.

First, Israel's swagger is basically gone. The underlying vanity, the defiant brashness of youth and power are now being recognized as vacant poses. The Lebanon war has knocked the air out the macho nation's hairy, inflated chest. Just published government reports, auditing army readiness and training, reveal a bleak picture of an organization lacking in oversight, accountability, talent and training. On-going investigations into the conduct of the war and the decision process that led to it are sure to reveal more bad news. This is good for Israel in the long run, but like many things that are good in the long run, it feels bad right now. Israel always resembled the former president Clinton a bit--prodigiously gifted, full of contradictions, polarizing and restless. Now, the nation looks like President Clinton after his heart surgery--suddenly fragile, pale, a touch deer-in-the-headlight, sizing up a whole new realm of vulnerability. As it did for Clinton, the latest shock may do the country good, get it to realign some priorities, rethink old ambitions, re-examine its commitments.

Second, it's also becoming clear that another war is coming, probably this summer. No one is yet certain where and how exactly the war will break, but there's a quite definite sense here that it's coming. It could be a replay of Lebanon. Hezbollah, after all, is attempting to take over Lebanon's government, a takeover that, if successful, is bound to lead to confrontation. Or it could erupt in the territories. In Gaza and the west bank, after all, the lessons of Lebanon are being busily applied. Soon enough, rockets from the territories will begin to fall on Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Israel will have to retaliate.

Third, the fact remains that even with its army in disarray, with war clouds gathering and future hopes dimming, and with its existential predicament—being hated both with and beyond reason—unresolved, Israel can still feel uniquely alive, hopeful, and indispensable. This morning I drove to the beach at Rishon Letzion, a town south of Tel Aviv. A row of restaurants and coffee houses has recently been built on the clean, quiet Mediterranean beach. I sat at the table on a shaded patio, right off the waterline. Several people strolled leisurely about; some children poked at huge jelly fish that had washed ashore. The winter sunlight was caressing and merciful. I could feel myself beginning to forget, even before ordering a second beer, the unpleasantness simmering just a few miles away, the clatter of armies readying for battle, the shattered lives and consuming rage, the open and multiplying wounds. I became suddenly unsure of what the moral and sane responses were here, and whether the two were not mutually exclusive.

My father is still recovering, nicely but slowly, from his recent brain surgery. When I asked how it felt to be 70 he said he felt happy to have made it, but unsure of how he should behave, this being his first time and all. The young doctor who examined him recently told him he was doing fine, and to come back for an MRI in five years. My father politely declined to make a firm promise about the follow-up appointment. "At this point," he said, "it's one day at a time."

The same, in a way, seems true for Israel.

On Israeli militarism

2006-11-22T17:17:00.000-08:00

Since the end of the Lebanon war, Israel has been keeping relatively out of the headlines. You might think that the region has entered a period of calm, that some order has been restored. You’d be gravely mistaken. In fact, Israel is now on the precipice of perhaps the greatest existential crisis in its tumultuous history. Several conditions have joined to create this gathering perfect storm.

First, Israel’s reliance on its armed forces has over the years morphed from a grudging necessity into a national fetish. The myth and promise of armed domination, stoked by the victory orgy that followed the six-days war of 1967, have usurped Israel’s imagination and warped the nation’s identity. The golden calf has been replaced by a shining F-16. War, viewed in the early days as a dreaded last resort forced upon a peace loving people, has become a creeping, addictive habit; a compulsive ritual seeking, repeatedly and fruitlessly, to exorcise the dark demons of past victimization: anxiety and rage. Military terminology, logic, and personnel have infiltrated every aspect of Israel’s culture. Military power has become the ultimate power; the hope of military solution has become the ultimate hope, and the joy of military victory the ultimate joy. The army has become an omnipresent physical entity, a mammoth bureaucracy better suited for perpetuating itself than for protecting Israeli citizens. Zionism has become a crude revenges fantasy: Nerds with Nukes.

But life by the sword is an untenable long-term proposition for Israel. The quality and commitment gaps between Israel and its enemies are closing fast, as was evident recently in Lebanon. Israel’s enemies, moreover, can afford repeated spectacular defeats while only needing one spectacular victory. And the repeated wars are like offering a failing student endless make up test opportunities. One of these days, by luck or practice or both, they’re going to get it right. The animosity generated by the ceaseless bloodshed, in the region and around the world, is growing. In the occupied territories, the endless misery has served to progressively push the Palestinians toward extreme Islamist ideology. Under the growing influence of radical Islamism, what was previously a land dispute with religious overtones is turning into a religious conflict in which land serves as mere alibi.

Alas, leading Israel in this time of turmoil is a spectacularly corrupt, incompetent team. Prime minister Olmert is a shady wheeler-dealer, an undistinguished political apparatchik who inherited the post by luck and who has since failed to rise to the occasion in every way possible. Peretz, the defense minister, has sold his soul to the devil of power lust by accepting a position for which he has no real qualifications and no real passion. The Army chief of staff, Dan Halutz, a former pilot who was responsible for the failed air war strategy in Lebanon, is a cold, vain brainiac who has, by war’s end, lost the public’s trust and the respect of his lieutenants. When asked how it felt to drop bombs on people, he once said, “you feel the airplane’s wing tremble a little, that’s all.”

This hapless leadership has approved the Lebanon campaign hastily and ran it disastrously. Olmert, who was elected on the promise of withdrawal from the territories, has now publicly abandoned that promise, effectively eliminating the rationale for his party’s very existence. Without a viable tradition and coherent platform, he and his government are now mainly preoccupied not with Israel’s predicament but with their own, rearranging their leather upholstered chairs on the deck of the proverbial Titanic.

To subvert the coming catastrophe, Israel will need to clean its political house, kick its war habit, and embark on a bold, innovative political push to dislodge the peace process and move toward making a deal. Such a gambit will be risky, and it won’t guarantee success; but staying the present course guarantees failure.

Ironically, Israel’s best leverage for creating a momentum toward political agreement is provided by its greatest menace, Iran. Iran seeks regional domination and global player status. Its bellicose anti Israel rhetoric is a savvy tactical means to that end. Positioning itself as the Anti-Israel allows Iran to cast any regional adversary as de facto pro-Israel, an inherently weakened position in Arab politics. But Iran’s nuclear maneuvers and its success with Hezbullah have raised the stakes. Arab nations are growing increasingly terrified of Iran. At some point soon, aligning with Israel will become an acceptable price to pay toward neutralizing Iran. Israel could capitalize on this situation.

Or it could just go business-as-usual and bomb something.

On Democracy

2006-11-07T23:04:00.000-08:00

Democracy is a strange idea, resting on three wobbly assumptions: that the masses should possess superior wisdom, that all opinions should have equal weight, and that majority opinion should prevail.

All three assumptions fail a real world test. In the real world, the masses create mostly noise and confusion; as Elias Canetti intuited, nothing good ever comes out of a crowd. In the real world, majorities are slow to react, always a bit behind the curve. The majority, Ibsen once said, is always wrong. Innovative thinking and swift action come from the minority. In the real world, all opinions are not equal. I have an opinion on the future of Microsoft; so does Bill Gates. His opinion matters more.

While detached from the real world, democracy is not quite fantasyland either, not quite the stuff of myth or legend. The bible speaks of kings and kingdoms, not subcommittees and redistricting. Childhood fairytales enchant with stories of princes wooing princesses, kissing sleeping beauties, and running off to enchanted castles, not of campaign headquarters, runoff elections and sweaty lobbyists.

Blame it on the ancient Greeks, who came up with the idea along with many other, mostly bad, ones. Having observed the link between heartbeat and emotional states, for example, the Greeks reasoned that emotions reside in the heart, unwittingly spawning a whole distasteful industry of Hallmark cards, chocolates and Teddy bears. Today we know that emotions reside in the brain; that the heart is but a pump; that having a pig’s heart replace yours will not lead you to develop questionable fantasies involving Miss Piggy. Yet the myth persists. Strolling along the beach at sunset (another myth; the sun, of course, doesn’t ‘set’), you will get no sweet action by declaring to your lover: “I love you with all my brain.”

Granted, the Greeks gave us university, a generally good idea, especially insomuch as it serves to heal the damage caused by high school. And granted, many of their ideas didn’t stick—doing sports in the nude; sanctifying man-boy love. But democracy somehow caught on.

Still, what passes for democracy these days is a cringe-inducing, facile parade of distortions, lies, and crude manipulations. Spin, the blatant attempt to frame issues in crudely partisan ways, has turned from a distasteful backroom tactic to a celebrated, honorable pursuit. Stale mantras, buzzwords and talking points have replaced honest, reasoned debate, creating a ceaseless, mind numbing din. Upending Carl Rogers’ wise dictum that the facts are always our friends, self-evident truths are treated as heresy while self-serving lies are championed vigorously. To paraphrase Leonard Cohen, the blizzard of this process has overwhelmed the order of the cultural soul. Otherwise sane individuals are whipped into hateful frenzy, wishing the annihilation of the other side while forgetting that the existence of a vigorous other side is an essential condition for democracy; seeing full human beings in microscopic two-weeks-old embryos while failing to see full human beings in the gay couples standing next to them at the grocery store.

Lurid irrelevant anecdotes dominate the conversation. John Kerry’s latest gaffe, meaningless in any terms that matter, gets extensive media play while Bush’s declaration of infinite loyalty to the hapless, and now thankfully defunct, Rumsfeld--a loyalty that provides real insight into why we are where we are in Iraq--goes largely unnoticed.

Faux commotion over ‘character’ swirls relentlessly, despite the absence of evidence of any link between the ability to govern and the possession of a conventional ‘good character.’ Candidates’ personal lives are chewed over until only the fine dust of mere conventionality remains. Unique, idiosyncratic or creative candidates, fully realized individuals, risk having their gifts and quirks and curiosities turned against them in the most juvenile fashion—He wrote a sex scene in a novel! He said a bad word at a party! He employed a temp who was later rumored to have smoked a joint! He jumbled the words of the national anthem! The horror! The decrepitude!

Still, all the cacophony and pandering cannot obscure the fact that this democracy is no longer a beloved, benevolent institution. American democracy is, in fact, largely a government by the rich, of the rich, and for the rich. A professional political class--where jobs job are handed down across generations and incumbents are almost impossible to dislodge—has emerged, and the political leaders are often no more than de facto fronts for those powerful money interests who can buy unfettered access to their ears and other organs.

Somehow, a gap has emerged between the serious, grown up business of governing and the infantile show business of getting elected. Faced with the choice between making the election process grown up and infantilizing the job of governing, America had chosen the latter. To get elected in this climate, you can no longer merely pretend to be a bland, sloganeering ‘average Joe.’ You actually have to be one. And you can no longer merely pretend to have all the answers. You actually have to believe you do.

Perhaps we should have stayed with nude Olympics.

A Trip to New York City

2006-10-22T17:18:00.000-07:00

A week ago my girlfriend and I flew to NY City for the weekend. There was no occasion; none is needed. A trip to New York is itself the occasion.

What Jerusalem is to the devout Jews, NYC is to the secular—a place of myth and pilgrimage and yearning, at once impossible and indispensable. In my eyes, NYC is the place where contemporary Judaism has found its most comfortable niche, where it fits right in, where it can thrive without being fearful or oppressive-- at once assimilated and distinctive, at once local and cosmopolitan.

To see Jewish faces in the Midwest is to see ghosts, apparitions, refugees, and transplants. The families schlepping around Bexley on Saturdays, however purposeful and proud, look lost and alien. The Jewish neighborhoods around town, despite their Shulls and Kollels and JCCs, despite their Wexners and Schotensteins, feel sapped and stale. Judaism at its core is all hustle and bustle, all restless and searching, cacophony and curiosity inside and out, commerce and contemplation. There’s little of that in the Midwest.

But walk around the Upper West (side) in New York, even for the first time, and you feel the vibe; and you feel right at home. The faces around you look familiar, as if you’ve met before, or would like to meet. The weary middle aged NPR democrat, hurrying down the street clutching his NY Times as if clinging to a piece of driftwood in a stormy ocean; the young Yeshiva lad, black clothes, wild beard and all, playing street ball in the park; the old lady at the corner deli, poking at the crumbling cakes; the Wall Street guy dozing off on the subway, the harsh angles of his face pacified by the innocence of sleep. They all look familiar, and fascinating. You can go months in Columbus without encountering a face that looks familiar, or fascinating.

And what do you do in NYC? You walk. You wander. At the DUMBO neighborhood under the magnificent Brooklyn Bridge we walk around the annual fair, where artists open their studios to visitors for the day. The water taxi takes us by the statute of liberty and into Battery Park, where the metal globe sculpture that stood between the twin towers on 9-11 now stands, all mangled and disfigured. The farmer market in Union Square is bustling with picky squash mavens and organic lettuce aficionados, sniffing and caressing the myriad magnificent specimen on offer. To the side, a gaggle of stoned Brazilian youths dance the Capuera and sing in a circle. They do not seem out of place. Nothing really does in this pulsating carnival. We stroll through Central park, amidst the cyclists and joggers and French tourists; we sit on a black rock above the playground and watch children play and sun lovers loving the sun. On Friday nights admission is free at the Whitney Museum; two steps off the street and we are standing face to face with Edward Hopper’s masterpieces—the terrifying loneliness of the iconic ‘nighthawks’ at the corner diner; the haphazard nakedness and downcast glance of the early stunner, ‘Summer Interior;’ the moody, stately and foreboding architecture of light and color, where the scenes are always vivid and opaque, alive and dead, unfailingly sensual and infinitely sad like life itself. Until the God question is resolved, agnostics like us must rely on art and sex as the experiential windows through which to glimpse the divine. Art and sex animate New York.

The midnight subway is creaking and crowded. As we rattle by we see workers in the tunnel, fixing one of the lines; hundreds of them, in their yellow overalls, toil under floodlights that create an eerie vision of a teaming underground netherworld. The city that never sleeps is also never done; it is constantly breaking up, cracking, moaning and leaking; constantly being built and perpetually falling apart.

New York is not the Promised Land, but it is not Diaspora either. In many ways, New York is a much more organic fit for Jewish sensibilities than Jerusalem. Jerusalem is a city of sorrow, of the past, of destruction and intolerance. And Jews, while they know sorrow, are not sorrowful people; while they have a past, are not regressive; while forceful, they are not supposed to be destructive; while argumentative, they are not supposed to be hateful.

The essence of Judaism is in the idea of word and story; word and story are the foundations of humanity—what distinguishes us from the animals, what frees us to project ourselves backward and forward in time and space, to think deeply and communicate subtly; to make consciousness and civilization; to make sense; to make a plan; to make a deal; to ‘make it.’ And the ultimate place to make it, of course, is New York.