12 Days in Israel

I have just returned from a very intensive 12-day stay in Israel, most of it in the framework of Meretz USA's annual seminar in Israel, the "Israel Symposium". It will probably require another few weeks to sort out the many and diverse perspectives that I heard, and synthesize them into a full and organized report, but - with so many raw impressions fresh in my mind - I would like to use this column to share with you a set of initial thoughts.

First, the political context: I arrived in Israel less than a month after the elections that voted a clear right-wing majority into Israel's Knesset, and that dealt a severe body blow to both the Labor and Meretz parties. And it was less than two months since the end of the Israel-Hamas war, a military action that was supported by 96%(!) of Jewish Israelis. An even more telling statistic: 65% of Israel's Jews continue to believe that the government ended the war too soon, and that it should have "finished the job" of eradicating the Hamas in Gaza, regardless of the political and human costs.

Understandably, I encountered an Israeli left that was still in a state of shock and disarray. Nonetheless, amid the pessimism, and perhaps because of it, some on the Left have already begun to address how the peace and human rights camp can redefine and reorganize itself to take up the challenges of the 21st century.

The Israeli-Palestinian peace process is a key area in which new thinking is already underway. On the Symposium's opening night, Prof. Naomi Chazan argued that the bilateral negotiating process launched at Oslo in 1993 and that continued through Annapolis in 2007 is no longer relevant. The election of a right-wing Knesset was the last nail in the coffin.

Therefore, she (and many others) said, the hope for peace must be buoyed by much more emphatic international and, primarily, American engagement. Phrases such as "international trusteeship" as a way-station to Palestinian statehood have entered diplomatic parlance, as has "the use of American leverage".

Prof. Chazan was hopeful that President Obama was equal to this task. Others, like Haaretz journalist Akiva Eldar, were more skeptical.
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On dealing with Hamas and settlers

NY Times columnist Roger Cohen is certainly right about the "Fierce Urgency of Peace" in the Middle East. And his endorsement of the so-called "Bipartisan Statement" by veteran establishment "wisemen" -- e.g., Henry Siegman, Brent Scowcroft, Paul Volcker and others in this regard -- is generally correct, but I also see problems.

There is an obvious need for a two-state solution, including an end to Jewish settlement expansion in the territories, an arrangement for two national capitals in Jerusalem and a solution for Palestinian refugees that does not involve an unrestricted right of return to Israel. And yes, the US should be involved in organizing and/or leading an international force to insure such a peace.

One problem is in insisting that Hamas is an essential party to peace. While it is only pragmatic that Hamas is lured into the peace process with a role in a Palestinian coalition government, movement toward peace should not be held hostage to Hamas doing the right thing. Hamas should be offered a voice and perhaps a role, but not a veto, because we cannot know in advance that substantial elements of Hamas will actually play a positive role, even if offered.

Another difficulty is that even though many settlements (if not most) should be removed from the West Bank, it is not realistic to believe that Israel can actually remove most of the 300,000 to 400,000 settlers (depending upon how you count them). Israel mobilized 50,000 soldiers and police to remove a mere 8,000 settlers and 7,000 militant supporters from Gaza in 2005. It simply does not have the manpower to remove hundreds of thousands.

But a carrot and a stick may do the trick for moving tens of thousands. A carrot could be in the form of buying the properties of settlers so they can return to sovereign Israel (as with the "One Home" plan of the former Meretz and Labor MKs Avshalom Vilan and Colette Avital). A stick might be in the form of an Israeli announcement that as of a date certain, the IDF will no longer guarantee the security of settlements within certain areas, perhaps suggesting that they will be under Palestinian security jurisdiction.

'Kidnapped' in Gaza

Coming in April is the US release of a trade paperback, originally published in Britain, by Alan Johnston, the BBC correspondent who was kidnapped and held for 114 days by a fringe terrorist group in the Gaza Strip. Appropriately entitled, “Kidnapped And Other Dispatches,” it is short (160 spare pages) -- mostly a compilation of transcripts of Johnston’s broadcasts from Gaza, Afghanistan and Central Asia (where he was assigned prior to being in Gaza from 2004 until 2007).

“Kidnapped” also includes an interview conducted by the book's editor, Tony Grant, his BBC producer, in which Johnston discusses the circumstances of his ordeal in some detail. Ironically, although kidnapped by terrorists, he was rescued by Hamas forces after they seized full control of Gaza in June 2007, in a military putsch against Fatah.

Johnston appears to be a gentle and sensitive Scottish bachelor in his late 30s, with the peculiar adventurous and inquisitive makeup that suits a foreign correspondent. His generically British (rather than specifically Scottish) accented voice is soft, raspy and melancholic – the last due at least in part to the sad human tales of conflict and its aftermath that he reports on.

He is fair-minded. Uncritical supporters of Israel would be disturbed by his clear pronouncement that Jewish settlements in occupied Palestinian territories are “illegal” and his stories of Palestinian suffering at Israel's hand. Yet uncritical supporters of the Palestinian cause might also object to his candid assessments of rocket attacks and suicide bombings against Israeli civilians; he reports on one such attack from the scene in Israel. Johnston is totally aware that Palestinian terrorism boomerangs with Israeli reactions that deepen the Palestinian plight.

Poles Apart – in film as in life

Katyn, the most recent work of the great Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda and a finalist for the Best Foreign Language Oscar in 2008, was held over for nearly a month in its run at New York’s Film Forum, the city’s premiere art house. It depicts the Soviet murder of thousands of captive Polish army officers during the spring of 1940 and reverberations of the massacre’s aftermath several years later.

This mass crime is so obscured amidst even larger crimes that soon eclipsed it, that even the film and its promotional material vary in the number of victims cited: 12,000, 15,000, or 22,000.

Wajda was a protege of Aleksander Ford, a Polish Jew who headed Polish film productions in the immediate post-World War II period. Ford (who renamed himself in honor of the American film icon, John Ford) was obedient to the Communist regime’s propaganda needs – as he had to be, to make films at that time. It’s perhaps surprising that one of his efforts, Border Street, was strikingly "pro-Jewish" in its sympathetic depiction of the Jewish plight in the Warsaw Ghetto. It even focuses on the saintliness of a pious old Jew who perishes; but it also highlights the fighting spirit of younger Jews (including one child) who resist with weapons in hand.

Border Street’s production values, including battle scenes and plot lines, are extremely poor, undoubtedly reflecting both a limited budget and political requirements. Jews were visibly prominent in the new Communist state. Film as a propaganda tool would have preached the need for Jews and non-Jews in Poland to work together to build a new progressive order; it would emphasize that they faced a common Nazi foe during the war. Antisemitism is explicitly reviled in Border Street, whether exhibited by Nazis or by ordinary Poles.

Stalin, like Hitler (his ally from Sept. 1939 to June 1941), was a film buff who avidly screened films in private. Ford is reported to have been told in no uncertain terms by Stalin that Border Street was "too Jewish." But it was not until 1968 that Ford was ousted from his job and from Poland during the anti-Jewish purge of that year. He lived in Israel, Denmark and the US afterwards, tried his hand at two films that were not successful, before taking his own life at a Florida hotel in 1980.

By contrast, Wajda has had a long and illustrious career creating films of artistic note even during the Communist era. This particular film, Katyn, was somewhat disjointed. Post-war segments introduced characters who were hard to place in the story, at least for this non-Polish speaker, and somewhat undercut its power.

What struck me as a Jewish film viewer is that there is nothing in Katyn, not even the dominant scenes of wartime and post-war Krakow, that indicates anything Jewish.

By this I do not argue that there’s anything anti-Jewish in it. Wajda has worked on several films in which Jewish characters have figured positively. But this work reflects what was a fact in war-time Poland: that the struggles of Catholic Poles and of Jews were of a completely different order. They suffered separately (especially after most Jews were ghettoized), even to the extent that Warsaw was the site of two totally separate anti-Nazi uprisings – the revolt of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto in the spring of 1943, and the general Polish rebellion in the summer of 1944.

Six million Polish citizens perished during World War II – three million Catholic Poles and three million Jews. The non-Jewish death toll was over ten percent of the population of Poland; the Jewish death toll was over 90 percent of Poland’s Jewish population.

The Curious Case of Charles Freeman

Fans of Professors Mearsheimer and Walt on the notorious "Israel Lobby" are having a field day over the withdrawal of Chas (Charles) Freeman’s nomination to head the body that issues the periodic and highly influential National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). But the hardest blows to Freeman's candidacy came from Jon Chait and Jeffrey Goldberg, neither of whom are "neo-cons."

Chait’s point is that Freeman is a doctrinaire "realist" -- so fanatical in this doctrine that "interests" and not morality should shape foreign policy, that he defended China’s massacre of students in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989. The fact that Freeman is an Arabist, and as such a relic of the antisemitic network of old Foreign Service hands, was also relevant to his nomination.

Still, Freeman has impressive credentials as a career diplomat; he deserves to have been on the foreign policy team, but it was not a great idea to have him in such a sensitive job. The New Republic's editor in chief Martin Peretz, known for his outspoken and extravagantly pro-Israel views, sagely commented that having the pro-Saudi Freeman in the job of heading the National Intelligence Council was as inappropriate as if he, Peretz, had been nominated for such a position.

Freeman’s ultimate support for a two-state solution is fine. But I think that Goldberg and the other opposition was motivated by his closeness to the Saudis. Mearsheimer and Walt do not have a problem with Saudi influence in the US foreign policy and security establishment; the worst thing about this affair is that it's being interpreted in a way that supports M & W.

On Rashid Khalidi

Columbia University historian Rashid Khalidi is not an extremist or a hardliner in his pro-Palestinian sympathies and activism; he has often expressed his support for a two-state peace with Israel. But he has been a disappointment ever since he turned against the Oslo peace process (reversing his prior stance) during the late 1990s. In doing so, he mistook how the peace process was turning sour under the leadership of the anti-Oslo prime ministers Netanyahu, Barak (to a degree) and Sharon, for its original intent and potential under Rabin and Peres.

Still, I admire the thesis of his major book during that time, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (Columbia University Press, 1997), that "National identity is constructed; it is not an essential, transcendent given...."

I don’t always agree with Prof. Werner Cohn, but his blog posting on Khalidi's apparent misuse of an alleged quotation provides a thoughtful criticism of the latter’s methodology. And NY Times contributor James Traub also tellingly critiques Prof. Khalidi on his new book, in the March 15th issue of the Sunday NY Times Book Review. The core of Traub's review is as follows:

"Sowing Crisis" vividly reminds us what it is like to be on the receiving end of American power. But it often reads like a polemic rather than a work of history. Khalidi’s sense of American motives and strategy seems flattened by his own preconceptions. God knows the United States has a great deal to answer for in the Middle East. But is it true, as Khalidi alleges, that President Truman favored Israel, and ultimately agreed to recognize the country, because he had more pro-­Jewish than Arab voters to answer to? Only by checking a footnote does the reader learn that this comment, which Khalidi quotes twice, comes from an American diplomat who may not have been in the room when Truman is said to have uttered it.

But the most pressing question "Sowing Crisis" raises is not whether American behavior in the Middle East has been consistently self-serving and expansionist. It is whether Arab failure is, at bottom, a consequence of that behavior. Another way of putting this is: can the problems of the region be reversed by a fundamental change in American policy?

If American policy were chiefly responsible for the Middle East’s difficulties, then the Arab world would scarcely be the only victim. It is hard to argue that the proxy battles of the cold war did more damage to the Middle East than to, say, Southeast Asia. Yet Vietnam is a stable autocracy experiencing rapid growth, and Thailand is a shaky and semi-prosperous democracy. American policy makers were far more cavalier about the sovereignty of Latin American states than of Arab ones, yet Latin America is a largely democratic zone with both deeply impoverished and middle-range countries.

Why has the Arab world remained largely on the sidelines of globalization? There are, of course, many explanations offered. One of the most striking comes from the United Nations’ Arab Human Development Report, written by a group of Arab scholars in 2002. They concluded that Arab nations suffer from a "freedom deficit," from pervasive gender inequality, from a weak commitment to education and from the widespread denial of human rights. They might have added that the experiences of colonialism and of the cold war have left much of the Arab world with the deeply ingrained habit of blaming its problems on outsiders.

‘Rockets, not racism,’ Part 2

This column by Bradley Burston, "The racist Israeli fascist in me," was almost verbatim, the content of his talk for Ameinu at New York’s Beit Shalom last week. Burston powerfully assailed the moralistic tone of one particular liberal American Jew’s criticism of Israel in the wake of the Gaza invasion; to Burston, it seemed written more as an exercise in self-righteousness than what might have been instead an effort at understanding.

One doesn’t have to endorse the attack on Gaza to empathize with how Israelis have been feeling with its southern towns and cities the target of thousands of rockets and mortars. These explosives have not killed and wounded more innocents for want of trying – a matter of "miracles," as Burston puts it. Because of these miracles, since more Israeli civilians have not suffered physically, it’s as if Israel – in the eyes of much of the world – had no cause for complaint.

Yet my critique of Burston remains: he needs to look more strategically at the vital need for progress toward a two-state soluiton, rather than to simply inveigh against the world’s blindness. Still, he is right that the world doesn’t appreciate how the violence of Palestinian factions had provoked Israel’s wrath.

'Hitler Cannot Determine this Conflict’s Course'

Dear Friends,
In these dark times when the Right wing is about to form the government of Israel, when the Arab Israeli minority has become more and more alienated from the body politic, the article below, from the Palestine - Israel Journal, is like a candle in the dark. It reminds us that we have to keep the flame of hope alive.

Adolf Hitler Cannot Determine this Conflict’s Course
by Ellis Weintraub and Ximena Vega

Several months ago, an Arab lawyer named Khaled Kasab Mahameed and the head of a Holocaust survivor organization were heading to Ramallah to make arrangements between the PLO and that organization. With the two men was a former PLO combatant who had spent three years in an Israeli jail.

After Khaled finished his studies in 2003, he had decided to create a museum dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust in his Nazareth law office. "I had some free time," Khaled told us over coffee and cakes, "and I was politically active, so I began this museum."

One year later, Khaled visited Jerusalem with his family and they visited the separation barrier. After taking a picture of his son at the wall, the Israeli army advised them to go home. This experience left him shaken.

Read Full Article

‘Cosmopolitanism’

This week, I attended two lectures sponsored by Yeshiva University’s Center for Ethics, by Kwame Appiah, a prominent professor of philosophy at Princeton. His topics pertained to cosmopolitanism, which he defines as an outlook that is both "universalistic" and accepting of difference.

As an offspring of the marriage between an English mother and a Ghanaian father, he himself embodies cosmopolitanism; he was raised in Ghana, received his university education in England, and is laboring in his academic career at elite universities in the US. If not yet there, he is surely an academic superstar in the making.

Interestingly, in his definition and in his talk, Prof. Appiah indicates that people who extol a form of universalism that does not accept cultural, ethnic or religious differences are not proper cosmopolitans. During the Q & A after the first lecture, I asked him to comment on the Jewish dilemma as posed by Stalinists on the one hand, who condemned Jews as "rootless cosmopolitans," and Prof. Tony Judt’s famous salvo of a few years ago, from a different perspective, that Israel as "an ethno-religious state" is "an anachronism."

Prof. Appiah made it clear to a prior questioner that it is "rooted cosmopolitanism" that he especially values. His response to me confirmed my view that Israel is not at all unusual as a country identified in its majority with a single particular people, nor even one that is steeped in a specific religious tradition.

Regarding religion, however, he said that he, for one, would not want to live in a state that was dedicated to a religion other than his own. And of course, as liberal or left Zionists, we find the institutionalized religious aspects of the State of Israel to be troubling; our colleagues in Israel struggle politically for a disestablishment of Orthodox Judaism, and all religion, from the workings of the state. But we have no objection to Israel’s identity as a culturally Jewish society, as long as its minorities are treated fairly and equally.

‘Rockets, not racism’

Haaretz columnist, Bradley Burston, spoke in New York on March 10 for the US Labor-Zionist affiliate, Ameinu. He’s a middle-aged American, who made aliya as a young person in the Habonim youth movement. I’d characterize his perspective today as that of a moderate liberal in Israel.

He’s an engaging speaker and not doctrinaire in any way, but his views disappointed me because they are devoid of hope regarding the prospect for peace. He’s really in protective mode rhetorically for Israel, something that I appreciate as a Zionist, but cannot endorse if absent a sense of a plan or at least of urgency regarding the need to work toward peace.

This is a problem with most Israelis today – including most liberals – that they’ve been disappointed so much that they’ve lost a sense of even the possibility of peace. They tend to see Israel as having tried the peace process of the 1990s only to see it come crashing down in flames with the Intifada that began in 2000. They generally blame this failure entirely, or more, on the Palestinians than Israel’s flawed policies or negotiating postures. This is something on which I fall in between: I see tragic errors, bad faith and bad luck (e.g., the 1994 murder spree by Baruch Goldstein in Hebron, the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the ill-timed Shin Bet killing of the Hamas "engineer" followed by the wave of suicide revenge attacks early in ‘96) on both sides as having led to failure in the 1990s.

Then there was the illusory path of disengagement and unilateral withdrawal led by Ariel Sharon and anticipated for the West Bank under Ehud Olmert. This strategy came crashing down as a result of the unfortunate choice of a plurality of Palestinian voters (44 percent) to elect a Hamas-led government in 2006, in the wake of Israel’s complete and total withdrawal from Gaza. And Hamas has intermittently fired rockets and mortars into Israel, or allowed other factions to do so.

Yes, I know about the six month cease-fire that held up fairly well until November 2008, but use of this tactic at any time after Israel’s withdrawal was wrong and has only invited endless trouble and the understandable Israeli perception – especially when coupled with the attacks on Israel in the north despite Israel’s complete withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 – that they cannot withdraw from Arab territories in the near-future without them becoming a new base for attack.

So Burston characterizes Israel’s support for its wildly destructive campaign in Gaza, the electoral turn to the right that followed, and the rise of Lieberman’s party on a wave of Arab-baiting rhetoric, a result of "rockets, not racism." I know what he means. And Israel’s people do not deserve the one-sided condemnation coming from so many avenues today.

Burston mentioned the failure of the Hamas "spider web" theory, that Israel is as fragile as a spider web that would break with the suicide terror campaign. Now he sees a new strategy by Hamas and other enemies of Israel, that they hit Israel intermittently with rockets, and wait for some years until they can appeal internationally for their right to Israeli citizenship, and then vote Israel out of existence. Yet this is precisely why Burston should be more energetic in seeking strategies for peace.

Burston actually thinks that Israel’s recent military campaign was excessive, but he says so only in passing and doesn’t adequately focus upon how much damage the Gaza episode has done to Israel’s interests, let alone the human toll it exacted. When I asked him what Mideast policies he would like to see from the Obama administration, he jokingly spoke of the need for an "ideal" but highly unlikely scenario in which both Israel and the Palestinian Authority had national unity governments committed to the principle of two states. His unspoken assumption is that without such a development among both populations there is nothing significant that the Obama administration can do.

Israel’s moment for electoral reform?

This Jerusalem Post article, “Reform movement” by Rebecca Anna Stoil, encapsulates the issue nicely:

.... although election reform was once viewed as too esoteric to interest Israeli voters, or even most legislators, it proved to be one of the major underlying themes in this strange month [February 2009], during which two contenders both argued that the government was theirs, and coalition agreements seemed to linger on the horizon while the country is led by a prime minister who resigned over six months ago.

Kadima chairwoman Tzipi Livni listed electoral reform as one of the major planks in Kadima's negotiating platform during her failed talks with Likud chairman and Prime Minister designate Binyamin Netanyahu. Even after the talks broke down, Livni emphasized that electoral reform was one of the subjects on which the parties had managed to come to an agreement.

Israel Beiteinu chairman and coalition kingmaker Avigdor Lieberman has long been an advocate of changing the electoral system.... In his concession speech shortly after his party's resounding defeat at the polls, Labor Party chairman Ehud Barak promised that "wherever we will be, we will act to change the elections system and the governmental system – it simply cannot continue this way. It is unacceptable that the ruling party has fewer than a quarter of the seats in the Knesset."

.... Even President Shimon Peres was not immune from jumping on the reformist bandwagon. Peres, who at one time was a vocal opponent of election reform, complained following the election that "the system in Israel hurts big parties and encourages small ones. Thus a state is created in which the number of parties causes horse-trading and bargaining which brings down the value of politics in the eyes of he public. I believe that the many shades of Israeli society can be represented under one overarching party, and I am thus in favor of changing the electoral system - the possibilities are varied. We could go from national to regional elections, and we can raise the minimum votes needed, which today stands at 2 percent."

.... "It is unacceptable that the elected prime minister in a democratic country can't advance his diplomatic-political-economic mission because there are 10 to 15 parties in the Knesset - most of them small - whose entire principle is to advance the narrow interests of their voters," wrote the founders of one of the most popular pro-reform groups.

These parties "more or less blackmail the prime minister with their votes - every few months they create a coalition crisis and threaten the dissolution of the government, and then new elections, to improve their percentages and political gains. This ultimately causes a reality in which the government is brought down about once every two years," they said. Click here for complete article online.

‘12': Russian film, Jewish resonances

A new Russian film, based loosely on “Twelve Angry Men,” the classic television drama starring Henry Fonda and featuring a host of great actors, including Lee J. Cobb, has just debuted in a commercial run in New York, to favorable review. I was privileged to see it at a pre-screening for reviewers the other week.

In ‘12,' as in the American production, the jury is stopped from an immediate vote to convict the defendant for murder by the resolution and astute observations of one man. This film is remarkable for keeping the audience’s attention for all of its two and a half hour length.

It is set mostly in a dilapidated school gymnasium, used as a jury room because of the lack of an appropriate space in the neighboring courthouse still under construction. It was surprising to learn that this was in Moscow and not some provincial backwater. The state of neglect in evidence, the on-and-off availability of electric power and the exposed heating pipes all testify to the incomplete transition to modernity and prosperity of contemporary Russian society from its Soviet days to the present.

The defendant is a teenage Chechen war orphan who is accused of murdering his adoptive father, a retired Russian army officer who had served in the Chechen war and befriended his family. The boy’s parents were among the 100,000 or more who have died in this conflict.

Since my journalistic beat is mostly related to Israel and Jewish subjects, I look for Jewish angles. The only explicitly Jewish connection is that one of the jurors is an old man who is a Holocaust survivor. He is the second juror to back away from a quick guilty verdict and is then taunted by an antisemitic cab driver in the group, for his sly “Jewish” reasoning. Each of the jurors in turn provides his personal history; the Jew is the first, and the cabby the last in eventually revealing why he is the way he is – not in anyway exonerating his bigotry, but movingly explaining his bitterness.

There is also a surgeon described as a “Caucasian,” meaning that he could be Chechen or of some of the many other ethnic minorities who have migrated in large numbers from the Caucasus into central Russia, and have experienced much prejudice and hostility in doing so– a bias voiced by more than one of the other jurors.

What animates this story cinematically are the flashbacks to the defendant’s former life with his loving family in Chechenya and to the scenes of death and devastation that haunt the film throughout. The Chechens are but one of many ethnic groups that Russia has mistreated since Tzarist times, first with military conquest in the 18th and 19th centuries and then with mass deportations under Stalin, and now again in the post-Soviet era.

I make no claim that the brutality of the recent Russian re-conquest and re-occupation of this country excuses Israel of the wrongs committed in its name in the Gaza Strip and in other Arab-populated territories. There are parallels between the two conflicts in that both Israel and Russia are battling Muslim nationalists who resort to terrorism against foreign occupation and domination. But this other far bloodier conflict is but one of many that does not trigger world-wide protest – in contrast to what Israel experiences with sickening regularity.

Failure of the (male) left

Immediately after the Israeli elections, Meretz M.K. Abu Vilan presented an analysis of the elections to the Board of Meretz USA. He said that women in general, and Meretz women in particular, made a grave strategic mistake in shifting their vote to Tzipi Livni. He suggested that the women who did this wanted to feel that their vote made a difference but, he said, they were mistaken because the possibility never really existed to break the hold of Netanyahu and his allies who had 65 certain votes in the Knesset.

I tried to explain to Abu that the shift was not only Machiavellian on women's part, but that they actually thought Livini was the better candidate. Remember Gila Svirsky had sent out an email saying she was supporting Livni. Could it be that women were fed up with how they were treated on the Left? Read Dafna Golan's piece below, and comment.-- Lilly Failure of the (male) left By Daphna Golan

The women's organizations were mistaken when they approached Meretz chairman Haim Oron to secure a high place for MK Zahava Gal-On on his party's slate. They should have requested all three top slots for women. Because although Gal-On is a brave, committed, honest, smart and hardworking MK, she won't bring about much-needed change. The Israeli left needs many more women for that to happen.

The failure of Meretz is resounding, and perhaps it's high time to acknowledge that the ousting of women from its ranks is a major contributing factor; a telling fact is the large migration of Meretz voters to Tzipi Livni's Kadima.
To read the full op-ed, click here

Looking at Hamas as ‘blowback’

A couple of weeks ago, I engaged in an email debate on the contention that Israel “created” Hamas. This Wall Street Journal Online article confirms my point that Israel willfully turned a blind eye toward Sheikh Yassin's activities in the '70s and the early '80s, before he founded Hamas in '88, but didn't actively support Islamist activities (it didn’t literally “create” Hamas). It took over a decade for Israelis to realize that Sheikh Yassin had violent intentions toward Israel.

Israel's relationship with the predecessors of Hamas constituted a low-level form of "blowback." A more heavy duty example of the blowback phenomenon was the CIA's relationship with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in the 1980s; the CIA indirectly helped this monster get started on his career by channeling aid to bin Laden and other badies through Pakistan's ISI intelligence service. This continues as blowback today for the moderate, secular authorities in Pakistan, as it relates to Pakistan's own problem with a Taliban insurgency.

But the CIA efforts with bin Laden and other Mujaheddin (“holy warriors”) was a much more self-conscious and focused strategy than Israel's regarding what eventually became Hamas. Israel mostly supported these elements by not suppressing them (in contrast to Israel's actions against secular Palestinian nationalists) and this is what my Israeli sources tell me.

My Meretz roots place me in the tradition of a Zionist movement that advocated reaching out to the PLO as early as 1974, in what is known as the Shemtov-Yariv Formula. Victor Shemtov, head of the Socialist-Zionist Mapam party (then a partner with the Labor party in what was known as the Labor Alignment – in effect, Israel's governing party) joined with a top Labor party politician, a reserve general and ex-chief of military intelligence, Aaron Yariv, to urge that Israel engage in negotiations with any Palestinian groups that agreed to non-violence and a peaceful resolution with Israel. This was understood as an opening to the PLO, and it effectively ended Yariv's political career in the Labor party.

We in Americans for Progressive Israel (the pro-Mapam group I joined in 1982, a predecessor to Meretz USA) looked to Shemtov-Yaariv as a central political principle. So we were always opposed to any strategy to cultivate radical religious Palestinian groups as a counter-balance to the PLO.