'Prisoner X' prompts look at Australian Zionism

P. Mendes

Prof. Philip Mendes is the director of the Social Inclusion and Social Policy Research Policy Unit in the Department of Social Work at Monash University.  The strange case of an Australian oleh (immigrant) dying in custody has caused an international stir and inspired Dr. Mendes to write on "Israel's emotional pull on Australian Jews" for the social justice-oriented Jesuit publication, Eureka Street:

Over the past few weeks the tragedy of young Israeli-Australian Ben Zygier has dominated the airwaves. Given that I am friendly with and wish to respect the privacy of the Zygier family I will write more about the general issues rather than the specifics of that case. ...
.... [A] 2009 study by the Monash University Centre for Jewish Civilisation found that 80 per cent of Australian Jews regarded themselves as Zionists, 76 per cent felt a special fear if Israel was perceived to be in danger, 74 per cent had relatives living in Israel, and 86 per cent had visited Israel.

Don’t Forget 'The Gatekeepers'

I am not an avid movie fan but on Oscar night I told my friends, for once, that I had a dog in this fight, i.e., the awards.  The dog was "The Gatekeepers," a film that I assume most readers of this blog are familiar with, but if you aren’t, there are any number of articles available on it, such as by Shlomi Eldar in al-Monitor and in The New Yorker.  And it’s probably coming to a (commercial!) theater near you as well.

I think Gatekeepers has the potential to be a game-changer to some degree, and those of us who have been arguing for years (or decades) that Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians is steadily and invidiously destroying the country can take some bleak comfort in that.  In Gatekeepers, statement after statement by the six latest directors of the Shabak (aka Shin Bet) show that Israel’s policies have failed utterly in their ostensible primary goal, which should be assuring the long-term security of Israel.  They prove that these policies have been primarily counter-productive, and that Israel’s strategy in the West Bank and Gaza has been at best futile, or, more correctly, non-existent, just reactive.

Finally, An End to Ultra-Nonsense Education?

This past week a potentially revolutionary appeal came up in the Supreme Court. After more than four years, the Court came out with a demand of the Department of Education regarding the national "Meitzav" exams: it gave 100 days to the Department to present a proposal for guaranteeing that all the Ultra-Orthodox schools that have been giving either only partial tests or none at all will actually start behaving according to the law.

The Ultra-Orthodox schools avoided the tests for a reason. Apart from the symbolic aspect of wanting to demonstrate their autonomy, the schools sought to evade the national testing in order to hide what most everyone involved in Ultra-Orthodox education already knows: they simply aren't teaching the subjects they are supposed to. Beginning with the famous "status quo" letter of 1947, there were certain agreements laid out together with the establishment of Israel regarding the relations between church and state and between the Ultra-Orthodox parties and all the rest.  Most Israelis know, thanks to the PR of the religious and ultra-religious, that the status quo referred to marriage and divorce (to be in the hands of the religious) and Shabbat (that was to be respected).  Most Israelis don't know that, apart from independence regarding the religious content of schooling, article number 4 required certain subjects (such as language, history and science) with the state overseeing their instruction. These agreements have been completely neglected.

Israel a product of Colonialism? Yes & No

This was my response to someone on a Facebook discussion, who -- while ultimately accepting the reality of Israel's existence as an irreversible fact -- views "the establishment of the State of Israel as a well intentioned mistake. A sort of last gasp of European expansionism into the third world.":

While Israel's development was encouraged by the British for 20 years (until they restricted immigration with its 1939 White Paper), and the UN endorsed its creation in 1947, Israel was created with the toil and blood of Jews, mostly fleeing discrimination, persecution and worse. Was it the product of colonialism or of a liberation struggle? There were aspects of both, but it would not have survived if it were primarily the former; its creation more closely parallels that of the U.S. than Rhodesia.

Let me explicate a bit: After the British captured Palestine from the Ottoman Turks in 1917, during World War I, and began governing for the longer term under a mandate from the League of Nations, they developed a working relationship with the Zionist movement in line with the Balfour Declaration for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people."  The Jewish Agency for Palestine was set up by the British and evolved into the pre-state de facto government of the Jewish community, known then as the Yishuv.

Lapid's MKs: impressive but what about peace?

Dr. Ruth Calderone, MK

I remember Dr. Ruth Calderone fondly from the prominent role she played as a teacher and leading light of the New York Jewish communal Tikkun L'el Shavuot (night-long Shavuot study events) at the Manhattan JCC.  She was inspired by love of the Talmud to become a Talmudic scholar and to organize Alma, a secular/ pluralist yeshiva.

The NY Jewish Week website includes a translation of her inaugural speech to the Knesset, which she has just joined as a newly elected Yesh Atid (There is a Future) party MK, under the leadership of Yair Lapid.  Her words are lovely as far as they go, and I mean no disrespect, but there is nothing here about the more than 20% of Israel's citizens who are not Jews, nor anything about moving toward a peace agreement with the Palestinians. And this is the open question with "There is a Future": how instrumental is it willing to be to insure that Israel really has a future (pun intended)?  

Lapid has gathered an interesting and diverse list of running mates, including religious and non-religious figures and a number of women (albeit no Arabs).  Among the best-known doves are the Meretz affiliated mayor of Herzliya (Yael German, #3) and Yaakov Peri (#5 on the party list), one of the six former heads of Shin Bet (Israel's domestic security agency) stunningly interviewed in the Oscar-nominated documentary, "The Gatekeepers."  But Lapid's pronouncements on the subject of peace are mixed at best.

On Criticizing Israel without sounding antisemitic

Prof. Ellis is profiled here.

Professor Donald G. Ellis is on the faculty of the University of Hartford, specializing in communication and conflict resolution, especially ethnopolitical conflicts. He is also a frequent blogger on Israeli politics and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at his Peace and Conflict Politics blog.

Among his recent noteworthy posts is "Top Five Ways to Be Critical of Israel without Sounding like an Anti-Semite."  Here's a taste:

1. Don’t equate Zionism with racism. Zionism is a national aspiration ... designed to encourage group interests in the same way that any political, religious, or cultural group cares about its preservation. .... The racism charge is a hammer used to harm people. ...

Brooklyn College brouhaha over BDS forum

Eric Alterman

Brooklyn College English professor (and The Nation's media columnist) Eric Alterman has written a piece at Peter Beinart's Open Zion blog that speaks for me: the College has the right to host such events without being negatively sanctioned (defending academic freedom) but that the political science dept. was ill-advised to have co-sponsored. So he concludes as follows:

"All of us at Brooklyn College supported BDS’s right to free speech. No departments agreed to join political science in co-sponsoring the talk. Never have I been prouder to be a member of any community, academic or otherwise."   

It was wrong for the political science dept. to in any way sponsor what looked like an exercise in anti-Israel propaganda, rather than an educational event.  It would be another story if this were a forum honestly interested in discussing BDS from a variety of views.  For example, if it were to include Alterman, J Street U or CUNY professor Peter Beinart.  But this is about advancing an anti-Israel agenda, not an honest educational purpose. It reminds me of the ill-conceived panel at The New School that I wrote about a few months ago.

Israeli Oscar nominee: 'Films have no nationalities'

Guy Davidi (left) with co-director Emad Burnat

Our frequent online critic, Ted (not to be confused with our friend, Ted Jonas), made a particularly hurtful, vituperative comment some weeks ago, calling me a "racist" among other things, for allegedly denigrating the role of the Palestinian co-director of "5 Broken Cameras," Emad Burnat.  I knew from my previous contacts with Guy Davidi, the Israeli co-director, that Davidi had taken the lead in shaping the film, given the fact that he is a trained and experienced professional filmmaker and Burnat is not.  And so, as a co-administrator of this blog, I deleted Ted's abusive comment, but not before making note of his explicit challenge for me to ask Davidi more about his working relationship with Burnat.

Davidi did not respond to my initial email a month ago, but he did reply more recently.  Our new interaction, in which he responded to my questions on how he is faring now that "5 Broken Cameras" is a finalist for an Oscar in the best documentary category, resulted in a new article at The Forward's Arty Semite blog.

The title was not my choice and could be misread as an attack on the filmmaker: "Why Oscar Nominee Doesn't Represent Israel."  Davidi registers his disappointment over the competing nationalist claims for authorship of this film: "Films have no nationalities," he declared, and went on to depict in some detail his role and that of his Palestinian colleague, in this "Palestinian-Israeli-French co-production, [with] Israeli and Palestinian directors and a story that is told [with] Palestinian characters and in the West Bank."

Don't Know Much About History...

The proverbial Martian taking his (her? its?) first look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might be forgiven for thinking that both sides would be happy to welcome the recent publication of a report on Israeli and Palestinian textbooks that found that neither side demonizes the other as much as might be expected, with Israeli textbooks, overall, scoring slightly better.  The study was funded by the US State Department, directed by a highly respected (and Jewish) professor at Yale, and contained numerous safeguards to prevent bias or preconceptions affecting the study. The study and related documents are available here. 

The Martian, unfortunately but unsurprisingly, would be wrong.  The Israeli Minister of Education fiercely attacked the study.  An article in YNET explains the Israeli objections here; just google "Israeli Palestinian schoolbooks" and you’ll find more attacks on it from “pro-Israel” sources than you can read.

This is a new battle in the “War of the Narratives,” in which I and many others have been combatants for quite awhile.  Most of our salvos appear in academic books and journals that are behind paywalls; one that is freely available is a Bitterlemons segment on the subject from a few years ago here. 

A Right Shouldn't Be Based on a Wrong

On the first of February, a great new program began in Jerusalem: the cost of afternoon day-care, a three-hour extension of child-care from 13:00 to 16:00 (1 to 4 p.m.) is now subsidized by the government to allow and encourage parents to work -- and to ease the financial burden on those who already do. The subsidy is significant: instead of costing about 800 shekels a month or more, the frameworks recognized by the Department of Education will cost only about 200 shekels a month (slightly more for those who aren't working, since the idea is to encourage employment, especially of women).

Parents, and everyone else, thought it sounded great. At least one small part of the wide-ranging recommendations of the Trachtenberg Committee, established in the wake of the massive social justice demonstrations of the summer of 2011, was put into effect. But it turned out there are hitches.

What was not publicized about the plan is that one of the ways used to cut the costs is to cut the wages of the employees who work with the children.  Until now, kindergarten teachers and their assistants got paid "globally" -- that is, on a monthly, and not hourly basis.  Many of the women (few men work in these jobs) have years of experience that helped raise their salaries. Typically, twice a week outside activities were part of the afternoon care.  Most of the children's groups were small. All of that was changed by the tenders produced by the Department of Education.

New articles by Partners' writers

Our board's resident expert on Israeli and Zionist history, Jerome A. Chanes, is a contributing editor of The Forward and a senior fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies of the City University of New York Graduate Center.

His latest article in The Forward is a review of Israel: A History by Anita Shapira.  He describes her as "a forthright centrist in her historiography, paralleling in many ways the views of Mapai/Labor, the regnant political institution for many decades in the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine under the British Mandate and in the State of Israel."

This blog's co-administrator, Ralph Seliger, has just posted a piece in The Forward's Arty Semite blog on his new interview with Guy Davidi, the Israeli co-director of the Academy Award nominated documentary "5 Broken Cameras."  Davidi explains his upset that Israelis and Palestinians have been in contention over whether his film is really Israeli or Palestinian.  "Films have no nationalities," he declares, as he depicts in some detail his role and that of his Palestinian co-director, Emad Burnat, in this "Palestinian-Israeli-French co-production, [with] Israeli and Palestinian directors and a story that is told [with] Palestinian characters and in the West Bank."

Refuting the 'no Palestinian partner' narrative

We need to refute the kind of view expressed by Daniel Gordis in his Jerusalem Post column, " We Gave Peace a Chance."  This neocon American oleh expresses a false, pernicious and ultimately defeatist perspective in the guise of "realism."

Pres. Abbas (aka Abu Mazen)

I will not defend what Hamas and other rejectionists say or do, nor will I defend every alleged statement or action of Mahmoud Abbas and other Palestinians who endorse a two-state solution.  For example, I have long stated here (against the view of some colleagues and friends in our dovish pro-Israel camp) that the Palestinians would be better off if they disabused most mainstream Israelis and Jews of their doubts by clearly endorsing the notion of Jewish nationhood.

And the Palestinians should have negotiated early in the partial settlement freeze, just as they should negotiate now -- even as I fully understand their distaste for doing so in the face of ongoing construction for settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.  It simply doesn't help the Palestinians to appear not to want to negotiate, when it's really Israel that's not being serious. 

It is ludicrous to claim that Netanyahu's government "gave peace a chance" when it clearly prefers expanding settlements and blocking Palestinian sovereignty in Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem.  If, as Gordis claims, "Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas declared to Egyptian TV that he would never, in a thousand years, recognize a Jewish state," this was not good, but he's insisted for years on the principle of two states, including Israel's sovereign right to define itself as it will.