Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of rationality.
- Orson Wells
It's no secret that Hamas desperately wants the June 19 temporary truce to last for as long as possible. An Arab source told me that the Islamist group has been under severe pressure - not so much, he claims, from the IDF as from distressed Gazans who need a respite from Israeli and international sanctions, which have made their lives absolute misery.
Of course, Hamas also wants time, unmolested by the IDF, to import concrete which it will use to expand its network of tunnels and bunkers (hence the need for opening the overland passages from Israel). It also wants to smuggle in more powerful explosives, anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles, stock up on shekels and send promising operatives for specialized training abroad.
With all these incentives, how do you explain the fact that the Palestinians almost immediately violated the truce by firing rockets into Israel? Marcus Sheff, executive director of the Israel Project, quips that extremist Palestinian factions have "Terrorist Tourette's" - they can't behave rationally because they suffer from an unaccountable, violent "tic" that compels self-destructive outbursts.
Either the Palestinians are behaving irrationally, or we're misinterpreting what they're doing as irrational, or we are the ones who are being irrational and don't know it. Or - perhaps even more problematic - rationality isn't all it's cracked up to be, and human beings can't but behave irrationally at times.
WHILE NO one sets out to behave foolishly and we all think we're sensible and that our reasoning is logical, the possibility that we're kidding ourselves about how rational we are comes up repeatedly. Take the latest research published in the journal Neuron and reported in last week's Economist, in which a team led by Brian Knutson and G. Elliott Wimmer hypothesize that people have a tendency to over-value items they own to an irrational extent.
This also helps explain why some very high-IQ people I know are chronically disorganized and can't part with clutter. Modern offices (and small Israeli apartments) demand tidiness, but evolution has imprinted our brains with an even stronger need to horde.
Primitive man, it seems, can't easily part with his tangible possessions. Nor can we.
IF YOU want the case for rationality, let me recommend The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, the young computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and told he had only months to live. Pausch's book is based on a "last lecture" he gave to his students; it has been viewed by many others via the Internet.
It's also meant as an expression of love to his wife and a way to pass on his values to his three small children. He tells them: "You can't control the cards you're dealt, just how you play the hand."
In these heartrending but in no way maudlin ruminations, Pausch implicitly addresses the question Aristotle posed 2,000 years ago: What is the best, the happiest, the most meaningful sort of life worth living? His answer: a life that combines emotional intelligence with rationality.
THE NEXUS between rationality and death also came up this week, when the Israeli cabinet decided to trade a demonic terrorist for the remains of two fallen IDF soldiers. To my mind, it was not merely a wrong but an irrational decision, since it only strengthens our enemies' dangerous conviction that if they stand firm, we will always cave. And yet it was taken by an overwhelming majority of ministers amid wide popular and media support.
Plainly, we all define "rational" differently.
TAKE ANOTHER, more prosaic decision by Cabinet Secretary Ovad Yehezkel - about bottled mineral water - that seems, on the surface, to be perfectly rational. Telling ministers that a cubic meter of mineral water costs 1,000 times more than tap water, Yehezkel wants ministries to stop ordering mineral water and install water purifiers.
As my colleague Herb Kenion put it: "He said this to ministers who, for the first time in recent memory, were sitting around a cabinet table bereft of the little blue plastic bottles of water."
Now I use tap water for my Shabbat urn and bottled water during the rest of the week - and, believe me, you can taste the difference. Thus there is a rational case to be made for bottled water: It tastes better. And I can afford the indulgence, so my decision to use mineral water is therefore rational. But whether Yehezkel's decision is rational depends on the cost-benefit ratio.
Are machines that purify and chill (and often also boil) water really cheaper than water in bottles? The government will have to purchase or rent the new equipment, invite bids for its maintenance, and bring in plumbers to draw tap water pipes to innumerable locations in government buildings throughout the country. These costs are worth looking into.
It may be perfectly sensible for Americans, on the other hand, to question the rationality of spending $11 billion a year on bottled water. Manufacturing all those plastic bottles leaves one big carbon foot-print; producing them uses up the equivalent of an amazing 17 million barrels of oil. While tap water may contain pollutants (not to mention microscopic creatures, as ultra-Orthodox Jews in NYC have discovered), the quality of bottled water is often only loosely regulated.
Reasoning can therefore take you only so far: It may well be that there is no rational answer to the tap vs mineral water debate.
MICHAEL CHABON'S The Yiddish Policemen's Union, which I have just read, also grapples with the rationality issue. Though no great Zionist, Chabon is a talented and imaginative storyteller. Toward the end of the book he places an epiphany, of sorts, in the mind of the main character, detective Meyer Landsman:
"All at once he feels weary of ganefs and prophets, guns and sacrifices and the infinite gangster weight of God. He's tired of hearing about the promised land and the inevitable bloodshed required for its redemption. 'I don't care what is written. I don't care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son's throat for the sake of a hare-brained idea. I don't care about red heifers and patriarchs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is my hat. It's my ex-wife's tote bag.'"
All very imaginative, but the case is strong that - far from being a "sandal-wearing idiot," Abraham handled his situation with perfect rationality, an argument made by NYU Prof. Steven J. Brams in his book Biblical Games. Brams claims that "rational interpretations of biblical actions are no more farfetched than 'faith' interpretations." And in his game theory construct, "the more sophisticated the rationality calculations biblical characters make, the less need for them to have blind faith in God to achieve their goals."
Anyway, and without away giving too much of the plot, the dilemma Chabon's Jews face is in large measure not of their own making.
It may be rational for Meyer Landsmanan, as a lone Jew, to opt out, but history has amply demonstrated that as a people, we cannot cast off our scripted role - rationality be dammed.
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Rationality isn't all it's cracked up to be
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Wrap: Bishara/ Africa/Hizbullah trade/Olmert
Bishara's legacy (July 2)
What if, on the night of May 10-11, 1941, even as the Luftwaffe was blitzing London's Westminster Palace, a British MP was off in Berlin advising German leaders about how best to confront Winston Churchill?
Now fast-forward to another war, another time and another place: the summer of 2006. Hizbullah gunners are bombarding northern Israel from Lebanon; soldiers have been killed, soldiers have been kidnapped. Tens of thousands of Israelis are sweltering in shelters. The country is at war.
Knesset Member Azmi Bishara, however, is off in Beirut, where, authorities suspect, he is helping Hizbullah evaluate Jerusalem's political and military strategy. We say "suspect" because Bishara fled Israel before he could be brought to trial.
It is thus altogether fitting that the law passed on Sunday by the Knesset - that henceforth bars anyone visiting an enemy state for illegal purposes from running for the Knesset - has been dubbed the "Bishara Law."
In a 52-24 vote the legislature declared that anyone who unlawfully visits Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia or Yemen must wait seven years before seeking a seat in parliament.
This legislation modifies the Basic Law: The Knesset, which stipulates that "a list of candidates or a candidate can be elected as long as their goals or their actions, literally or interpretively, do not negate the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, [express] incitement to racism, or support [the] armed struggle of an enemy state or a terror organization against the State of Israel."
Anyone who now travels to an enemy state with criminal intent, the amendment just passed adds, "will be seen as a supporter of [the] armed struggle [against Israel], unless they prove otherwise," and thus be blocked from running for seven years thereafter.
IT IS regrettable, though entirely unsurprising, that Arab Knesset members have unleashed a torrent of invective against the Bishara Law. It is also sad because their stance hammers home just how wide, and deep, is the chasm between the political culture of Israel's majority Jewish population and that of its large Arab minority.
It is lamentable, too, because Arab MKs do a disservice to their constituencies by their unremitting, capricious exacerbation of the country's rifts. No one expects Palestinian Israelis - as many Arab citizens now want to be identified - or the representatives they send to the Knesset to champion the Zionist cause. Yet through their all-encompassing devotion to anti-Israel radicalism, rather than to the pragmatic building of legislative coalitions with Zionist parties - which could improve the quality of life in the Arab sector - these MKs are delinquent in their responsibilities to their voters and the state.
MK AHMAD TIBI has angrily predicted that the Supreme Court will overturn the Bishara Law as unconstitutional, supposedly because a simple Knesset majority cannot modify a Basic Law. We shall see.
MK Muhammad Barakei is more outlandish, complaining that the law imposes "a rule of terror in thought and political opinion." Nonsense. Arab citizens will still be able to visit relatives abroad, attend weddings and funerals and articulate any views they want, barring outright collaboration with the enemy.
MK Sa'id Nafa, a Druse who has visited Syria, has already filed a petition with the court to have the Bishara Law overturned on the grounds that it violates the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty.
Yet no one will be barred from running for the Knesset if, say, they attend a conference on global warming held in Yemen. Arab politicians will still be able to travel to meetings in enemy states - not to support "resistance" against Israel, but in the cause of peace or religious tolerance.
We trust the justices will affirm that the law pertains exclusively to individuals who go abroad to meet with the likes of Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar - as Bishara did - and Hassan Nasrallah for the purpose of giving aid and comfort to the enemy; and that it will in no way restrict innocuous freedom of movement.
The assurance that from now on - the law does not apply retroactively - candidates will be ineligible for a Knesset seat if they conduct themselves precisely as Azmi Bishara did strikes us as eminently sensible... and regrettably necessary.
An African tyrant (June 30, 2008)
One cartoon can say it all. Sometimes only a cartoonist - in this case the Swiss-based illustrator Chappatte - can adequately encapsulate a phenomenon that is at once tragedy and farce.
Chappatte's latest creation has Robert Mugabe on stage speaking into a microphone: "I beat the opposition" while, off to the side, his supporters do just that, literally.
On Sunday, the 84-year-old Mugabe had himself sworn in for a sixth term as president after winning what The New York Times described as "a one-horse race." His opponent, Movement for Democratic Change leader Morgan Tsvangirai, dropped out of a run-off campaign and was given asylum in the Dutch Embassy in Harare. In the March general election, widely suspected of having been rigged in the president's favor, Tsvangirai won 48 percent to Mugabe's 43%.
Mugabe's henchmen have been murdering, torturing, raping and imprisoning Tsvangirai's supporters. One six-year-old boy was burned to death because his father was a Tsvangirai ally. The wife of a MDC mayor was kidnapped and killed.
To say this election was waged in an atmosphere of "intimidation" hardly does justice to the term. Mugabe's mantra that "only God" can remove him from office seems true enough given that he controls all the temporal sources of influence in Zimbabwe - the civil service, media and security apparatus.
MUGABE STARTED out as a socialist fighter with the ZANU-PF against Rhodesia's white minority government and was imprisoned in the 1960s. Independence and majority rule came in 1980, when Mugabe became prime minister. Two years later, he turned against his political rival, Joshua Nkomo, accusing him of treason. Mugabe's North Korean-trained praetorian guard killed thousands of civilians in Nkomo's tribal area of Matabeleland, and the country became a one-party state: absolute power vested in the person of one brutal man.
Mugabe continues to sees the world through the prism of "anti-colonialism" and socialism. This world view - compounded by the fact that he surrounds himself with obsequious lackeys - has led Zimbabwe to ruin. Inflation is 100,000 percent; only 20% of the population is employed; previously productive land has been confiscated and turned over to his supporters. The best those who oppose him can hope for is - in true totalitarian fashion - to be "reeducated."
THE UNITED STATES has called for an arms embargo against Zimbabwe and is planning a series of unilateral sanctions beyond those already in place against Mugabe's closest enablers. Britain will support additional sanctions, while the EU has called for a power-sharing arrangement based on the March elections won by Tsvangirai. The African icon, Nelson Mandela, celebrating his 90th birthday in London's Hyde Park before 40,000 well-wishers, denounced the "tragic failure of leadership" in Zimbabwe.
Mugabe has allies in the international community - South Africa (which announced it will recognize Mugabe but push for a negotiated settlement of the leadership crisis), China and Russia. They can be counted upon to keep the UN Security Council off Mugabe's back. Still, UN Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro, speaking after Mugabe's "victory," is urging a negotiated solution.
Africa watchers argue that only South Africa can nudge Mugabe from the stage - perhaps when Thabo Mbeki is replaced by Jacob Zuma in the presidency.
The 53-nation African Union, meeting today in Sharm e-Sheikh, says it is following developments in Zimbabwe "closely." Individual African leaders - Nigeria's and Zambia's for instance - have begun to speak out against Mugabe; as has the Pan-African Parliament.
Truth be told, the AU has a lot on its plate: Darfur, tensions between Chad and Sudan, and between Djibouti and Eritrea; the stability of Kenya; fragmentation in the Ivory Coast, and trouble in Somalia and the Congo.
The continent has a staggering 15 million people who are internally displaced. For instance, 500,000 Zimbabweans are displaced within their country because of government violence; two million others have fled to neighboring South Africa. So Africa may need to hear its friends elsewhere encouraging it on Zimbabwe.
Robert Mugabe is not history's - nor even Africa's - worst tyrant. He does, however, stand out as someone who took a country with extraordinary promise and has been steadily wrecking it before the eyes of the world. He needs to go.
The cabinet decides (June 30, 2008)
A nightmare that began on July 12, 2006, now draws to a close. That was when Hizbullah launched an unprovoked assault across the border from Lebanon, killing three IDF soldiers and capturing Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser.
In the course of the war that followed, 156 Israeli soldiers and civilians were killed. Our country was largely unprepared and, as the Winograd Committee determined, poorly led. Hizbullah's Hassan Nasrallah announced the war had been unleashed to obtain the release of Lebanese inmates in Israeli prisons, foremost among them Samir Kuntar, and hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.
The IDF did not follow through on its threat to turn Lebanon's clock back 20 years unless Regev and Goldwasser were returned. Yet hundreds of Hizbullah gunmen were killed and millions of dollars of damage was done to Hizbullah's infrastructure. No wonder that in May 2007, Nasrallah admitted that had he known the price Lebanon would have to pay for kidnapping Regev and Goldwasser, he would have thought twice.
SHORTLY BEFORE 4 p.m. on Sunday, the cabinet voted 22 to 3 to accept a deal far more modest than Nasrallah first demanded, which will see the two soldiers finally brought home.
The hearts and minds of Israelis were focused on the cabinet room, where the mood was solemn, and where everyone was given a chance to speak. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wanted this to be a collective decision.
When it was his turn to talk, Public Security Minister Avi Dichter read a letter from Smadar Haran, who lost two children and a husband to Kuntar's brutality in 1979. Haran did not advocate Kuntar's release, far from it, but she wrote that she didn't want her suffering to sway the ministers from doing what was best for the country. Later, she remarked that until Dichter informally solicited her opinion, no Israeli official had ever bothered to make inquiries.
At the outset of the cabinet meeting, Olmert announced that as far as Israel knows, Regev and Goldwasser are no longer alive. Though the news does not come as a bolt out of the blue, family members were nevertheless shattered by the manner in which it was delivered - via the media.
The deal requires Israel to free Kuntar and four other Lebanese; return the bodies of dozens of terrorist infiltrators; provide information to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on four missing Iranian diplomats; and, following the implementation of the agreement, to release an unspecified, but presumably modest, number of Palestinian prisoners.
THIS NEWSPAPER opposed the release of Kuntar for the remains of Regev and Goldwasser because of the heinous nature of the crime he committed and because it will likely strengthen Nasrallah in his efforts to show Hizbullah's concerns transcend his own Shi'ite community (Kuntar is Druse and was a Palestine Liberation Front operative).
We also opposed a trade because Kuntar has become an important symbol throughout the Arab world; because of previous government commitments made to the family of IAF navigator Ron Arad (missing since his plane went down over Lebanon in 1986) not to release Kuntar without a quid pro quo; and because trading Kuntar for the remains of two dead soldiers will likely complicate the price we will have to pay for the return of Gilad Schalit from the Gaza Strip. This latter warning was echoed by the Mossad and Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), which opposed the deal.
But the cabinet has spoken and its stance is supported by most Israelis, much of the media and IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, who told the ministers that he feels himself responsible for all IDF soldiers - the fallen included. All of us must now respect the decision.
Israel's body politic has gone through a traumatic chapter. What we must now ensure is that we emerge from it stronger and better prepared for the battles ahead. And Hizbullah might want to remember that by taking on Israel - even when we were admittedly not at our best - it got far more than it bargained for.
Abdication, again (June 26, 2008)
If it is true, as the 17th-century French diplomat Joseph de Maistre argued, that "every country has the government it deserves," then Israelis can only blame themselves for allowing a dysfunctional cabinet and a discredited premier to rule them.
Since the interim findings of the Winograd Committee were released in April 2007, this newspaper has consistently maintained that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's bungling of the Second Lebanon War demands his removal from office. After the committee cited him for "serious failure in exercising judgment, responsibility and prudence" and placed "primary responsibility" for the lack of success in the war on his shoulders, we called for his exit.
Nothing that has happened since - his entanglement in yet another police investigation; his deep unpopularity; and, most notably, his continued inability to govern effectively - changes that assessment of Olmert's leadership.
DESPITE EVIDENCE that the government cannot make tough decisions in an effective, efficient and timely manner, Israel's politics-as-usual system has now prolonged Olmert's stewardship and the country's political near-paralysis.
On Wednesday, it looked as if the Knesset might finally vote to call for new elections and thus compel Olmert's departure. This followed on the heels of Defense Minister Ehud Barak's third warning that Kadima had better select a new leader with whom Labor could stay partnered - or else.
Barak issued similar threats in May 2007 and February 2008. In response, Olmert set in slow motion a process by which Kadima would make plans to hold a leadership race. But the widely-held perception that the government was not properly functioning forced Barak this week to insist on a specific leadership selection date, or Labor would support a Likud motion to dissolve the Knesset.
And so, in the early hours of Wednesday morning, Kadima ostensibly gave Labor what it wanted: a commitment to select a new party head by September 25.
NOW THAT the dust has settled, we know this much: Ehud Olmert, political Houdini that he is, has bought himself more time. Even if Kadima selects a different party leader three months hence, it would not automatically preclude Olmert's retaining the premiership. Moreover, lawyers for the prime minister are scheduled to cross-examine Morris Talansky on July 17 about those cash-stuffed envelopes. Now a poll of Kadima Party members suggests that if Talansky's initial testimony is punctured, Olmert could defeat Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni in the party leadership race.
Meanwhile, Olmert can be expected to accelerate diplomatic efforts in the hope that a breakthrough with the Palestinians or Syrians or Lebanese might salvage his career. All the while, the Shas Party will continue exploiting Kadima's and Labor's quest to keep the coalition alive by pressing its parochial demands for budget-busting child-support payments.
THE LATEST turn of events further heightens Israelis' already damaging level of cynicism and alienation regarding our political system. The handling of the Lebanon war was bad enough; also the sluggish manner in which key players in the political and military echelon took responsibility for their deeds. But Olmert's Machiavellian ability to retain power in the face of so overwhelming a case for his departure is perhaps the most damaging of all.
Foreign Minister Livni would like Israelis to know she appreciates how they feel. At a conference in Tel Aviv this week, she said: "There is no doubt that the public has lost its faith in politics. From here, the path to an unstable foundation of democracy and anarchy is very short… It is enough for one leg to be crooked in order to twist all of democracy."
BUT TALK is cheap. At the end of the day, Livni and Barak, together with more than two dozen other cabinet ministers, could not - even one of them - bring themselves to resign from this government: not on principle, nor to hasten its demise, nor even for the sake of dissociating themselves from a prime minister already castigated by a committee he selected to investigate the war and since further compromised by the demands on his time involved in his legal battles.
When the moment comes, at last, to elect a new Knesset, voters need to empower parties committed to changing the political system and making it more accountable - to give the resilient people of Israel the kind of government they deserve. The remarkable Zionist enterprise merits far better than the leadership we have today.
What if, on the night of May 10-11, 1941, even as the Luftwaffe was blitzing London's Westminster Palace, a British MP was off in Berlin advising German leaders about how best to confront Winston Churchill?
Now fast-forward to another war, another time and another place: the summer of 2006. Hizbullah gunners are bombarding northern Israel from Lebanon; soldiers have been killed, soldiers have been kidnapped. Tens of thousands of Israelis are sweltering in shelters. The country is at war.
Knesset Member Azmi Bishara, however, is off in Beirut, where, authorities suspect, he is helping Hizbullah evaluate Jerusalem's political and military strategy. We say "suspect" because Bishara fled Israel before he could be brought to trial.
It is thus altogether fitting that the law passed on Sunday by the Knesset - that henceforth bars anyone visiting an enemy state for illegal purposes from running for the Knesset - has been dubbed the "Bishara Law."
In a 52-24 vote the legislature declared that anyone who unlawfully visits Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia or Yemen must wait seven years before seeking a seat in parliament.
This legislation modifies the Basic Law: The Knesset, which stipulates that "a list of candidates or a candidate can be elected as long as their goals or their actions, literally or interpretively, do not negate the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, [express] incitement to racism, or support [the] armed struggle of an enemy state or a terror organization against the State of Israel."
Anyone who now travels to an enemy state with criminal intent, the amendment just passed adds, "will be seen as a supporter of [the] armed struggle [against Israel], unless they prove otherwise," and thus be blocked from running for seven years thereafter.
IT IS regrettable, though entirely unsurprising, that Arab Knesset members have unleashed a torrent of invective against the Bishara Law. It is also sad because their stance hammers home just how wide, and deep, is the chasm between the political culture of Israel's majority Jewish population and that of its large Arab minority.
It is lamentable, too, because Arab MKs do a disservice to their constituencies by their unremitting, capricious exacerbation of the country's rifts. No one expects Palestinian Israelis - as many Arab citizens now want to be identified - or the representatives they send to the Knesset to champion the Zionist cause. Yet through their all-encompassing devotion to anti-Israel radicalism, rather than to the pragmatic building of legislative coalitions with Zionist parties - which could improve the quality of life in the Arab sector - these MKs are delinquent in their responsibilities to their voters and the state.
MK AHMAD TIBI has angrily predicted that the Supreme Court will overturn the Bishara Law as unconstitutional, supposedly because a simple Knesset majority cannot modify a Basic Law. We shall see.
MK Muhammad Barakei is more outlandish, complaining that the law imposes "a rule of terror in thought and political opinion." Nonsense. Arab citizens will still be able to visit relatives abroad, attend weddings and funerals and articulate any views they want, barring outright collaboration with the enemy.
MK Sa'id Nafa, a Druse who has visited Syria, has already filed a petition with the court to have the Bishara Law overturned on the grounds that it violates the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty.
Yet no one will be barred from running for the Knesset if, say, they attend a conference on global warming held in Yemen. Arab politicians will still be able to travel to meetings in enemy states - not to support "resistance" against Israel, but in the cause of peace or religious tolerance.
We trust the justices will affirm that the law pertains exclusively to individuals who go abroad to meet with the likes of Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar - as Bishara did - and Hassan Nasrallah for the purpose of giving aid and comfort to the enemy; and that it will in no way restrict innocuous freedom of movement.
The assurance that from now on - the law does not apply retroactively - candidates will be ineligible for a Knesset seat if they conduct themselves precisely as Azmi Bishara did strikes us as eminently sensible... and regrettably necessary.
An African tyrant (June 30, 2008)
One cartoon can say it all. Sometimes only a cartoonist - in this case the Swiss-based illustrator Chappatte - can adequately encapsulate a phenomenon that is at once tragedy and farce.
Chappatte's latest creation has Robert Mugabe on stage speaking into a microphone: "I beat the opposition" while, off to the side, his supporters do just that, literally.
On Sunday, the 84-year-old Mugabe had himself sworn in for a sixth term as president after winning what The New York Times described as "a one-horse race." His opponent, Movement for Democratic Change leader Morgan Tsvangirai, dropped out of a run-off campaign and was given asylum in the Dutch Embassy in Harare. In the March general election, widely suspected of having been rigged in the president's favor, Tsvangirai won 48 percent to Mugabe's 43%.
Mugabe's henchmen have been murdering, torturing, raping and imprisoning Tsvangirai's supporters. One six-year-old boy was burned to death because his father was a Tsvangirai ally. The wife of a MDC mayor was kidnapped and killed.
To say this election was waged in an atmosphere of "intimidation" hardly does justice to the term. Mugabe's mantra that "only God" can remove him from office seems true enough given that he controls all the temporal sources of influence in Zimbabwe - the civil service, media and security apparatus.
MUGABE STARTED out as a socialist fighter with the ZANU-PF against Rhodesia's white minority government and was imprisoned in the 1960s. Independence and majority rule came in 1980, when Mugabe became prime minister. Two years later, he turned against his political rival, Joshua Nkomo, accusing him of treason. Mugabe's North Korean-trained praetorian guard killed thousands of civilians in Nkomo's tribal area of Matabeleland, and the country became a one-party state: absolute power vested in the person of one brutal man.
Mugabe continues to sees the world through the prism of "anti-colonialism" and socialism. This world view - compounded by the fact that he surrounds himself with obsequious lackeys - has led Zimbabwe to ruin. Inflation is 100,000 percent; only 20% of the population is employed; previously productive land has been confiscated and turned over to his supporters. The best those who oppose him can hope for is - in true totalitarian fashion - to be "reeducated."
THE UNITED STATES has called for an arms embargo against Zimbabwe and is planning a series of unilateral sanctions beyond those already in place against Mugabe's closest enablers. Britain will support additional sanctions, while the EU has called for a power-sharing arrangement based on the March elections won by Tsvangirai. The African icon, Nelson Mandela, celebrating his 90th birthday in London's Hyde Park before 40,000 well-wishers, denounced the "tragic failure of leadership" in Zimbabwe.
Mugabe has allies in the international community - South Africa (which announced it will recognize Mugabe but push for a negotiated settlement of the leadership crisis), China and Russia. They can be counted upon to keep the UN Security Council off Mugabe's back. Still, UN Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro, speaking after Mugabe's "victory," is urging a negotiated solution.
Africa watchers argue that only South Africa can nudge Mugabe from the stage - perhaps when Thabo Mbeki is replaced by Jacob Zuma in the presidency.
The 53-nation African Union, meeting today in Sharm e-Sheikh, says it is following developments in Zimbabwe "closely." Individual African leaders - Nigeria's and Zambia's for instance - have begun to speak out against Mugabe; as has the Pan-African Parliament.
Truth be told, the AU has a lot on its plate: Darfur, tensions between Chad and Sudan, and between Djibouti and Eritrea; the stability of Kenya; fragmentation in the Ivory Coast, and trouble in Somalia and the Congo.
The continent has a staggering 15 million people who are internally displaced. For instance, 500,000 Zimbabweans are displaced within their country because of government violence; two million others have fled to neighboring South Africa. So Africa may need to hear its friends elsewhere encouraging it on Zimbabwe.
Robert Mugabe is not history's - nor even Africa's - worst tyrant. He does, however, stand out as someone who took a country with extraordinary promise and has been steadily wrecking it before the eyes of the world. He needs to go.
The cabinet decides (June 30, 2008)
A nightmare that began on July 12, 2006, now draws to a close. That was when Hizbullah launched an unprovoked assault across the border from Lebanon, killing three IDF soldiers and capturing Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser.
In the course of the war that followed, 156 Israeli soldiers and civilians were killed. Our country was largely unprepared and, as the Winograd Committee determined, poorly led. Hizbullah's Hassan Nasrallah announced the war had been unleashed to obtain the release of Lebanese inmates in Israeli prisons, foremost among them Samir Kuntar, and hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.
The IDF did not follow through on its threat to turn Lebanon's clock back 20 years unless Regev and Goldwasser were returned. Yet hundreds of Hizbullah gunmen were killed and millions of dollars of damage was done to Hizbullah's infrastructure. No wonder that in May 2007, Nasrallah admitted that had he known the price Lebanon would have to pay for kidnapping Regev and Goldwasser, he would have thought twice.
SHORTLY BEFORE 4 p.m. on Sunday, the cabinet voted 22 to 3 to accept a deal far more modest than Nasrallah first demanded, which will see the two soldiers finally brought home.
The hearts and minds of Israelis were focused on the cabinet room, where the mood was solemn, and where everyone was given a chance to speak. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wanted this to be a collective decision.
When it was his turn to talk, Public Security Minister Avi Dichter read a letter from Smadar Haran, who lost two children and a husband to Kuntar's brutality in 1979. Haran did not advocate Kuntar's release, far from it, but she wrote that she didn't want her suffering to sway the ministers from doing what was best for the country. Later, she remarked that until Dichter informally solicited her opinion, no Israeli official had ever bothered to make inquiries.
At the outset of the cabinet meeting, Olmert announced that as far as Israel knows, Regev and Goldwasser are no longer alive. Though the news does not come as a bolt out of the blue, family members were nevertheless shattered by the manner in which it was delivered - via the media.
The deal requires Israel to free Kuntar and four other Lebanese; return the bodies of dozens of terrorist infiltrators; provide information to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on four missing Iranian diplomats; and, following the implementation of the agreement, to release an unspecified, but presumably modest, number of Palestinian prisoners.
THIS NEWSPAPER opposed the release of Kuntar for the remains of Regev and Goldwasser because of the heinous nature of the crime he committed and because it will likely strengthen Nasrallah in his efforts to show Hizbullah's concerns transcend his own Shi'ite community (Kuntar is Druse and was a Palestine Liberation Front operative).
We also opposed a trade because Kuntar has become an important symbol throughout the Arab world; because of previous government commitments made to the family of IAF navigator Ron Arad (missing since his plane went down over Lebanon in 1986) not to release Kuntar without a quid pro quo; and because trading Kuntar for the remains of two dead soldiers will likely complicate the price we will have to pay for the return of Gilad Schalit from the Gaza Strip. This latter warning was echoed by the Mossad and Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), which opposed the deal.
But the cabinet has spoken and its stance is supported by most Israelis, much of the media and IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, who told the ministers that he feels himself responsible for all IDF soldiers - the fallen included. All of us must now respect the decision.
Israel's body politic has gone through a traumatic chapter. What we must now ensure is that we emerge from it stronger and better prepared for the battles ahead. And Hizbullah might want to remember that by taking on Israel - even when we were admittedly not at our best - it got far more than it bargained for.
Abdication, again (June 26, 2008)
If it is true, as the 17th-century French diplomat Joseph de Maistre argued, that "every country has the government it deserves," then Israelis can only blame themselves for allowing a dysfunctional cabinet and a discredited premier to rule them.
Since the interim findings of the Winograd Committee were released in April 2007, this newspaper has consistently maintained that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's bungling of the Second Lebanon War demands his removal from office. After the committee cited him for "serious failure in exercising judgment, responsibility and prudence" and placed "primary responsibility" for the lack of success in the war on his shoulders, we called for his exit.
Nothing that has happened since - his entanglement in yet another police investigation; his deep unpopularity; and, most notably, his continued inability to govern effectively - changes that assessment of Olmert's leadership.
DESPITE EVIDENCE that the government cannot make tough decisions in an effective, efficient and timely manner, Israel's politics-as-usual system has now prolonged Olmert's stewardship and the country's political near-paralysis.
On Wednesday, it looked as if the Knesset might finally vote to call for new elections and thus compel Olmert's departure. This followed on the heels of Defense Minister Ehud Barak's third warning that Kadima had better select a new leader with whom Labor could stay partnered - or else.
Barak issued similar threats in May 2007 and February 2008. In response, Olmert set in slow motion a process by which Kadima would make plans to hold a leadership race. But the widely-held perception that the government was not properly functioning forced Barak this week to insist on a specific leadership selection date, or Labor would support a Likud motion to dissolve the Knesset.
And so, in the early hours of Wednesday morning, Kadima ostensibly gave Labor what it wanted: a commitment to select a new party head by September 25.
NOW THAT the dust has settled, we know this much: Ehud Olmert, political Houdini that he is, has bought himself more time. Even if Kadima selects a different party leader three months hence, it would not automatically preclude Olmert's retaining the premiership. Moreover, lawyers for the prime minister are scheduled to cross-examine Morris Talansky on July 17 about those cash-stuffed envelopes. Now a poll of Kadima Party members suggests that if Talansky's initial testimony is punctured, Olmert could defeat Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni in the party leadership race.
Meanwhile, Olmert can be expected to accelerate diplomatic efforts in the hope that a breakthrough with the Palestinians or Syrians or Lebanese might salvage his career. All the while, the Shas Party will continue exploiting Kadima's and Labor's quest to keep the coalition alive by pressing its parochial demands for budget-busting child-support payments.
THE LATEST turn of events further heightens Israelis' already damaging level of cynicism and alienation regarding our political system. The handling of the Lebanon war was bad enough; also the sluggish manner in which key players in the political and military echelon took responsibility for their deeds. But Olmert's Machiavellian ability to retain power in the face of so overwhelming a case for his departure is perhaps the most damaging of all.
Foreign Minister Livni would like Israelis to know she appreciates how they feel. At a conference in Tel Aviv this week, she said: "There is no doubt that the public has lost its faith in politics. From here, the path to an unstable foundation of democracy and anarchy is very short… It is enough for one leg to be crooked in order to twist all of democracy."
BUT TALK is cheap. At the end of the day, Livni and Barak, together with more than two dozen other cabinet ministers, could not - even one of them - bring themselves to resign from this government: not on principle, nor to hasten its demise, nor even for the sake of dissociating themselves from a prime minister already castigated by a committee he selected to investigate the war and since further compromised by the demands on his time involved in his legal battles.
When the moment comes, at last, to elect a new Knesset, voters need to empower parties committed to changing the political system and making it more accountable - to give the resilient people of Israel the kind of government they deserve. The remarkable Zionist enterprise merits far better than the leadership we have today.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Power & Politics Column: From minyan anxiety to female modesty
This week I attended a delightful Sheva Brachot, the festive meal held during the first week after a couple is married, during which seven benedictions are added to the standard Grace after Meals. In Orthodox tradition, this requires a minyan, or quorum of 10 men.
Ours was an eclectic gathering of Orthodox, Masorti and Reform Jews - mostly observant - as well as a number of non-observant Jewish people and a sprinkling of non-Jews from abroad. In such cases, etiquette requires that Orthodox standards be followed: It could not be 10 Jews - it had to be 10 Jewish men.
As we were about to begin the Grace, I noticed that we barely had a minyan, so I asked a guest who was about to leave if he could stay on.
"I promised I'd meet a friend and I'm already running late," he said, glancing nervously at his watch.
"In that case, do you know if Mike - sitting over there - is Jewish?"
The guest gave me a peculiar look: "I have no idea."
ONLY AFTERWARDS did it occur to me that he had no clue why I was trying to delay his departure with talk about "a minyan," or why I was uncouthly, it seemed to him, enquiring about the religious affiliation of a fellow guest.
Such misunderstandings are bound to follow when cultures - or sub-cultures - bump into each other.
I'm not talking about "culture" as in art or entertainment, but in the way anthropologists and sociologists understand it: "the integrated system of socially acquired values, beliefs and rules of conduct which delimit the range of accepted behaviors."
It's easy to see your own culture or sub-culture as normative while remaining oblivious to the values of others. And it takes hard work not to fall into that trap.
TAKE SHIGELLA, a bacteriological infection of the intestines, which recently spiked among the ultra-Orthodox Satmar sect in Brooklyn. The disease is spread when infected fecal matter contaminates food or water, which is why the local health department suspected poor hygiene as the cause.
It's not that Satmar children don't wash their hands after going to the toilet, the problem is they don't necessarily use soap and hot water. Instead, they ritually wash by pouring cold water several times over each hand before reciting the Asher Yatzar prayer, which thanks God for the continuous daily miracle of the body's proper functioning.
No one is suggesting that ritual washing, per se, is the problem, only that the process probably needs to be supplemented by soap and hot water. Fortunately, the public health authorities in New York City are clued into the possibility that group values can provide insights into the spread of disease. Having solved the mystery, they've now distributed pamphlets in Yiddish on personal hygiene.
OF COURSE, even when we do pick up that a particular behavior is culturally rooted, that doesn't necessarily make it any more palatable. Under a current crackdown in Iran, for instance, women can be lashed if they appear on the street in "revealing" headscarves or outfits too suggestive of the female form.
While I understand that modesty plays an important role in Iran's cultural framework, it doesn't make me tolerant of lashing people in the streets.
Or take virginity. Many cultures - Islam in particular, but Orthodox Judaism probably no less - place paramount value on female virginity. Now medical advances make it possible, as The New York Times reported last week, for surgeons to restore the hymen in women who have been sexually active.
In one case, according to the Times, "a 26-year-old French woman of Moroccan descent said she lost her virginity four years ago when she fell in love with the man she was now planning to marry. She and her fiancee decided to share the cost of her $3,400 hymen-replacement surgery in Paris. His extended family in Morocco is very conservative, she said, and required that a gynecologist - and family friend - in Morocco examine her for proof of virginity before the wedding."
It's hard to get your head around this sort of hypocrisy, until you consider that Muslim women are often murdered in so-called honor killings for having sexual relations outside marriage.
What happens when Muslim mores and Western jurisprudence rub up against each is equally interesting. Last week, a French appeals court overruled a lower court decision that had annulled a marriage because the bride turned out not to be a virgin. French law says a marriage can be annulled if a person lies about his or her "essential qualities," though it does not define them.
POLITICAL BEHAVIOR can often be tied to culture. South Korea has lately been rocked by protests over a government decision to import American beef.
After an urban legend circulated on the Internet that the Korean race had a gene which made it particularly susceptible to mad cow disease, 700,000 people rallied in Seoul irrationally convinced that the racial homogeneity of their society was at imminent risk. When Korea's agricultural minister went to the rally to reason with the multitudes, he was quickly driven from the podium.
These are the "good" Koreans, mind you. God only knows what lessons may be drawn by policymakers trying to negotiate with the North Koreans.
And speaking of Koreans, one of the Hebrew papers reported on the many South Korean Bible students who arrive in this country - some going on to obtain PhDs from Hebrew University - without any knowledge of contemporary Israel.
Talk about cultural misunderstandings. One graduate student revealed: "I did not even know that Israel was a Jewish state. I didn't actually know what a Jew was. Only after I arrived did I realize, one day, that I was among Jews."
EVER SINCE a vacation in Cairo earlier this year, I've been fascinated by how Egyptian culture affects perceptions. In a series of brilliant vignettes about life in Egypt, New York Times Cairo bureau chief Michael Slackman has been illuminating the chasm between Western and Egyptian values.
Ask someone for directions, and they feel obligated to help: "'Here, even if someone sends you in the wrong direction, he still feels he did what he is supposed to do,' said Karam al-Islam, a professor of communications at Al-Azar university. 'He doesn't think he misguided you. He helped. Right and wrong is a relative thing.'"
In another brilliant piece, Slackman writes about the over-the-top use of the Arabic insha'allah, meaning "God willing."
Slackman orders a burger with onions at McDonald's. "Insha'allah, with onions," comes the reply.
A young, relatively secular Cairene tells Slackman about being invited to a party. She really doesn't want to go, yet doesn't want to offend with an explicit refusal. So she replies with "Insha'allah." Now no one can fault her for not showing.
This ubiquitous use of "insha'allah" reminds me of the way Orthodox friends use b'li naider, meaning, I can't absolutely promise because, at the end of the day, everything is in God's hands.
The moral of all this? Be sure - b'li naider - that you are never again oblivious to the role culture plays in the lives of people and nations. Insha'allah.
Ours was an eclectic gathering of Orthodox, Masorti and Reform Jews - mostly observant - as well as a number of non-observant Jewish people and a sprinkling of non-Jews from abroad. In such cases, etiquette requires that Orthodox standards be followed: It could not be 10 Jews - it had to be 10 Jewish men.
As we were about to begin the Grace, I noticed that we barely had a minyan, so I asked a guest who was about to leave if he could stay on.
"I promised I'd meet a friend and I'm already running late," he said, glancing nervously at his watch.
"In that case, do you know if Mike - sitting over there - is Jewish?"
The guest gave me a peculiar look: "I have no idea."
ONLY AFTERWARDS did it occur to me that he had no clue why I was trying to delay his departure with talk about "a minyan," or why I was uncouthly, it seemed to him, enquiring about the religious affiliation of a fellow guest.
Such misunderstandings are bound to follow when cultures - or sub-cultures - bump into each other.
I'm not talking about "culture" as in art or entertainment, but in the way anthropologists and sociologists understand it: "the integrated system of socially acquired values, beliefs and rules of conduct which delimit the range of accepted behaviors."
It's easy to see your own culture or sub-culture as normative while remaining oblivious to the values of others. And it takes hard work not to fall into that trap.
TAKE SHIGELLA, a bacteriological infection of the intestines, which recently spiked among the ultra-Orthodox Satmar sect in Brooklyn. The disease is spread when infected fecal matter contaminates food or water, which is why the local health department suspected poor hygiene as the cause.
It's not that Satmar children don't wash their hands after going to the toilet, the problem is they don't necessarily use soap and hot water. Instead, they ritually wash by pouring cold water several times over each hand before reciting the Asher Yatzar prayer, which thanks God for the continuous daily miracle of the body's proper functioning.
No one is suggesting that ritual washing, per se, is the problem, only that the process probably needs to be supplemented by soap and hot water. Fortunately, the public health authorities in New York City are clued into the possibility that group values can provide insights into the spread of disease. Having solved the mystery, they've now distributed pamphlets in Yiddish on personal hygiene.
OF COURSE, even when we do pick up that a particular behavior is culturally rooted, that doesn't necessarily make it any more palatable. Under a current crackdown in Iran, for instance, women can be lashed if they appear on the street in "revealing" headscarves or outfits too suggestive of the female form.
While I understand that modesty plays an important role in Iran's cultural framework, it doesn't make me tolerant of lashing people in the streets.
Or take virginity. Many cultures - Islam in particular, but Orthodox Judaism probably no less - place paramount value on female virginity. Now medical advances make it possible, as The New York Times reported last week, for surgeons to restore the hymen in women who have been sexually active.
In one case, according to the Times, "a 26-year-old French woman of Moroccan descent said she lost her virginity four years ago when she fell in love with the man she was now planning to marry. She and her fiancee decided to share the cost of her $3,400 hymen-replacement surgery in Paris. His extended family in Morocco is very conservative, she said, and required that a gynecologist - and family friend - in Morocco examine her for proof of virginity before the wedding."
It's hard to get your head around this sort of hypocrisy, until you consider that Muslim women are often murdered in so-called honor killings for having sexual relations outside marriage.
What happens when Muslim mores and Western jurisprudence rub up against each is equally interesting. Last week, a French appeals court overruled a lower court decision that had annulled a marriage because the bride turned out not to be a virgin. French law says a marriage can be annulled if a person lies about his or her "essential qualities," though it does not define them.
POLITICAL BEHAVIOR can often be tied to culture. South Korea has lately been rocked by protests over a government decision to import American beef.
After an urban legend circulated on the Internet that the Korean race had a gene which made it particularly susceptible to mad cow disease, 700,000 people rallied in Seoul irrationally convinced that the racial homogeneity of their society was at imminent risk. When Korea's agricultural minister went to the rally to reason with the multitudes, he was quickly driven from the podium.
These are the "good" Koreans, mind you. God only knows what lessons may be drawn by policymakers trying to negotiate with the North Koreans.
And speaking of Koreans, one of the Hebrew papers reported on the many South Korean Bible students who arrive in this country - some going on to obtain PhDs from Hebrew University - without any knowledge of contemporary Israel.
Talk about cultural misunderstandings. One graduate student revealed: "I did not even know that Israel was a Jewish state. I didn't actually know what a Jew was. Only after I arrived did I realize, one day, that I was among Jews."
EVER SINCE a vacation in Cairo earlier this year, I've been fascinated by how Egyptian culture affects perceptions. In a series of brilliant vignettes about life in Egypt, New York Times Cairo bureau chief Michael Slackman has been illuminating the chasm between Western and Egyptian values.
Ask someone for directions, and they feel obligated to help: "'Here, even if someone sends you in the wrong direction, he still feels he did what he is supposed to do,' said Karam al-Islam, a professor of communications at Al-Azar university. 'He doesn't think he misguided you. He helped. Right and wrong is a relative thing.'"
In another brilliant piece, Slackman writes about the over-the-top use of the Arabic insha'allah, meaning "God willing."
Slackman orders a burger with onions at McDonald's. "Insha'allah, with onions," comes the reply.
A young, relatively secular Cairene tells Slackman about being invited to a party. She really doesn't want to go, yet doesn't want to offend with an explicit refusal. So she replies with "Insha'allah." Now no one can fault her for not showing.
This ubiquitous use of "insha'allah" reminds me of the way Orthodox friends use b'li naider, meaning, I can't absolutely promise because, at the end of the day, everything is in God's hands.
The moral of all this? Be sure - b'li naider - that you are never again oblivious to the role culture plays in the lives of people and nations. Insha'allah.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Wrap: Refugees,Donating, Hamas, Iran, Electoral Reform & Traffic
The other Mideast refugees (June 25, 2008)
The world knows of the pain and dislocation experienced by roughly 700,000 Palestinian Arabs when Israel was established; it knows little about the trauma borne by some 850,000 Jews from the Arab world who were uprooted from their homes.
The precise numbers and exact impetus for the departures, in these linked cases, remain in dispute. The motivations of the displaced in promoting their respective narratives are easily suspect because both Jewish and Arab refugee conundrums are tied to claims of "inalienable rights," for restitution and reparations, and (in the case of the Arabs) demands for repatriation.
In any journey toward genuine acceptance and reconciliation that the quest for peace demands, the two narratives will need to be mutually validated in some fashion.
THE PLIGHT of Jews who left the Arab countries has drawn relatively little attention, notwithstanding the efforts of individuals such as Heskel M. Haddad, a New York-based ophthalmologist of Iraqi origin. Recently, however, this cause received a boost from a non-binding US Congressional resolution adopted in April which urged the administration to raise the Jewish refugee issue whenever the Palestinian one arises. And this week a group called Justice for Jews from Arab Countries has been holding a conference in London to ensure that the narrative of Jewish refugees is told alongside that of the Palestinian Arabs.
It would be a tragedy if this campaign were dismissed as an attempt at one-upmanship in an arena so long dominated by supporters of the Palestinian Arabs; suffering does not negate suffering.
One approach for fair-minded individuals is to consider the Jewish refugees as human beings rather than as pawns in a vitriolic political dispute.
This is why the recent publication of Lucette Lagnado's The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit is so welcome. In telling the affecting saga of her family's forced emigration from Cairo to New York, and by sharing memories of her proud father Leon's decline from boulevardier, poker player and businessman - who rubbed shoulders with King Farouk - to a refugee unable to raise the few thousand dollars necessary to open a corner candy store, Lagnado puts a human face on the other Middle East refugee tragedy.
Lagnado focuses on her own family's experiences, but let's not forget the episodic blood libels and riots that peppered the history of Egyptian Jewry, beginning in the early 1800s. As the Zionists moved ahead in creating a Jewish state in Mandatory Palestine, and as the Palestinian Arab leadership adamantly rejected a two-state solution, Arabs elsewhere began to turn against the Jews in their midst.
There were riots in Alexandria and Cairo in 1938-39, and again in November 1945, when 10 Jews were killed and hundreds wounded. Synagogues were ransacked. Egyptian Jewry carried on as best it could even when 2,000 Jews were arrested and their property confiscated on May 15, 1948 - the day Israel declared independence. In June 1948, the community was obligated to "donate" to Palestinian Arab refugee relief. In September, 20 Jews were killed and 61 injured as Cairo's Jewish Quarter was bombed. Looting followed, and more Jewish property was confiscated.
After the 1956 Sinai Campaign, 4,000 Jews were expelled; allowed to take only a single suitcase each and forced to renounce any financial claims against Egypt. In 1957 all Jews not in "continuous residence" since 1900 were deprived of citizenship. By 1960, many synagogues, orphanages and homes for the aged had been closed down.
The Lagnados held out until 1963, eventually arriving in New York with $212, the maximum they had been allowed to take out of Egypt. By 1967, Jews still employed in government were dismissed; hundreds were arrested, some were tortured. That is how a community whose population numbered 80,000 in 1920 dwindled to today's perhaps 200 souls, mostly elderly widows.
Yet Egypt's treatment of its Jews was in no way the most egregious in the Arab world.
ROUGHLY 580,000 Jews from across the Arab world ultimately found refuge in Israel. Another 260,000 Jews were absorbed elsewhere.
For the Palestinian Arabs, by contrast, the disaster of dislocation was compounded by the decision of the 21 Arab states never to absorb them, and to force the UN to create UNRWA, whose surreal mission - with the acquiescence of the international community - is to perpetuate their homelessness in perpetuity.
Wisdom in charity (June 21, 2008)
Nachum: One kopek? Last week you gave me two kopeks.
Lazar-Wolf: I had a bad week.
Nachum: If you had a bad week, why should I suffer?
- Fiddler On The Roof
The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the overseas arm of the US Jewish philanthropic system, announced last week that it was cutting programming to 25,000 recipients in the former Soviet Union and laying off 60 workers in Jerusalem, New York and the FSU. The reason: The falling dollar has created a 20 percent hole, or $60 million gap, in its budget.
As the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported last week, the JDC's $325m. budget includes an $87m. contribution from the United Jewish Communities, which represents 155 federations and 400 independent Jewish communities across North America. The UJC's own operating budget stands at $37m., down from a peak of $46m. Other JDC money comes from individuals, foundations, Holocaust reparations, and the Israeli government.
The constraints now facing the JDC typify those of other organizations. The dean of a Jerusalem-based educational institute, which receives no government aid, told The Jerusalem Post that he had just returned from a successful fund-raising trip to the US bringing back pledges totaling $1m. Since he raises money in dollars but spends them in shekels, these funds are worth significantly less than just one year ago.
The crisis in the dollar, and how the organized Jewish world should respond, will be high on the agenda of the Jewish Agency Board of Governors when it meets today and Monday in Jerusalem. The agency is facing is own budget shortfall.
But the fall in the dollar is only one manifestation of the world economy's predicament. In New York City, for example, Jewish groups are being hard hit by municipal budget cuts that impact on their ability to deliver services to some 77,000 elderly Jewish poor. Funding for the homebound lunch program is being streamlined. The local Housing Authority says it can't continue to subsidize senior citizens centers in its buildings. And New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is grappling with a projected $3 billion-5b. budget deficit for the next fiscal year.
Philanthropists, who make their money in banking and on Wall Street in places such as Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers, have taken a financial beating. Nevertheless, observers counsel that there is still money out there.
THIS BRINGS us to a new buzzword circulating in Jewish organizational life - "silo." At all times, but especially in these, it is essential that key players engaged in communal work communicate, coordinate and network. As with an isolated silo, communication that is only vertical, that does not interface with other entities doing similar work, is an extravagance the Jewish world can ill afford.
In the 21st century, we cannot put up with organizational duplication, unnecessary competitiveness and petty rivalries. It would be tempting to go through the lengthy roster of organizations, from the 51 members of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, to the scores of others orbiting the Jewish world - some like spent asteroids - and ask whether each is essential for Jewish security, welfare, administration and continuity. In our nonhierarchical world, however, only those who foot the bill have the prerogative of telling an organization: Your time has passed.
As fewer affluent young Jews donate to Jewish causes, private philanthropists and "boutique" charities are sometimes better positioned than large organizations to target money where it is needed. And yet, a mature analysis of Jewish organizational life is bound to conclude that if at least some of the groups now on the scene did not exist, they would have to be created ex nihilo.
The legendary Jewish leader Ralph I. Goldman offered this advice in 1981. "What is necessary is... to recognize that immortality does not apply to organizations and institutions... that going out of business is an essential quality of community service - not change for the sake of change, but change because it is necessary and good."
Implementing this sagacious recommendation depends on individual donors, organizations and foundations using sound judgment to evaluate which groups merit continued support. In today's economic climate, the imperative for such pragmatism is more urgent than ever.
The brewing storm (June 19, 2008)
On a cold and drizzly December morning the Israeli cabinet meets to approve a renewal of the cease-fire in Gaza, which has proven so successful. There have been no rocket, mortar or shooting attacks into Israel since the tahadiyeh was proclaimed by Hamas six months ago.
The Erez, Karni, and Sufa border crossings, along with the Nahal Oz fuel depot, have efficiently funneled a cornucopia of supplies into the Strip from Israel, while the Rafah crossing for goods and people leaving the Strip for Egypt is functioning smoothly under the watchful eyes of Egyptian officials and Palestinian border guards loyal to Mahmoud Abbas's administration.
Thanks to intensified Egyptian efforts, the flow of illicit weaponry into the Strip has been reduced to a trickle. EU officials have steadfastly rejected dealing with Hamas. The Islamist government has never been more unpopular because, despite the end of the "siege," it has proven incompetent in delivering basic services to the people. Polls indicate that in elections scheduled for January, a reformist-oriented Fatah ticket is expected to capture a majority in the Palestinian parliament.
Meanwhile, Gilad Schalit's book, In Hamas Captivity, tops the best-seller lists.
THIS SCENARIO is one way to envisage the evolution of the cease-fire with Hamas, which came into effect early Thursday. It is not, sadly, the way events are likely to play out.
Stage one - the cease-fire - is now in effect. On Sunday, in stage two, Israel is expected to begin easing the economic blockade of Gaza by opening most of the crossing points. Stage three, the opening of Rafah, is supposedly tied to progress on the release of Gilad Schalit. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni's pledge, however, that Rafah will not open until Schalit is released is hardly credible. Hamas has been explicit: There is no connection between the cease-fire and Schalit's freedom. It demands and will likely receive, judging by the government's lack of fortitude, hundreds of terrorists "with blood on their hands" in exchange for the IDF captive.
This newspaper has argued that any trade for Schalit should be limited to enemy prisoners - such as the Hamas "parliamentarians" now in custody - taken after Schalit's capture.
As for the cease-fire, it is true that Israel's dysfunctional cabinet had to choose from an unpalatable menu of choices. But it is far from clear, following the government's September 2007 designation of Gaza as a "hostile territory," that our politico-military echelon exhausted a long list of measures that could have been pursued, short of retaking the entire Strip in an Operation Defensive Shield-like campaign.
These measures might have included ongoing large-scale military incursions (mostly abandoned in favor of episodic battalion or company level operations), and relentless pursuit of Hamas leaders so as to diminish their capacity to govern and hammer home the point that Jerusalem will not tolerate an Islamist regime between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. They could have been accompanied by an intensified embargo on fuel and electricity - presuming the government's willingness to stay the course in the face of unsympathetic media coverage.
INSTEAD, we may be witnessing the establishment of a nascent Palestinian state
uncompromisingly committed to the destruction of Israel. With Gaza in its grip, the Islamists will turn their full attention to the West Bank. Hamas can now more easily send its gunmen for specialized training abroad, while foreign "experts" will find it easier to infiltrate into the Strip.
Even if the Egyptians, using newly arrived American tunnel-detection equipment and limited but better-trained forces, make a strenuous effort to intercept the flow of arms - and Cairo insists it is now genuinely committed to this goal - chances are that anti-aircraft and anti-armor missiles, long-range rockets and sophisticated explosives will find their way into the Strip.
Finally, this cease-fire accelerates Hamas's ascendancy among Palestinians, and more broadly throughout the Arab world, even as the relative moderates associated with Mahmoud Abbas look ever-more impotent. Yet so long as it ostensibly adheres to the cease-fire, there will be those in the international community who will push for engaging Hamas "moderates."
Israeli decision-makers have purchased temporary calm for the battered communities bordering Gaza. The fear, underlined by bitter experience, is that it comes at the cost of a devastating storm brewing over the horizon.
Prodding the glacier
The glacial pace at which Europe has been working to get Iran to end its enrichment of uranium and give up its nuclear weapons program is slowly picking up. Britain and Europe are expected to freeze the assets of Bank Melli, the Islamic Republic's main financial conduit to the world and its channel for cash transfers to Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The EU is also weighing sanctions against companies that invest in Iran's energy industry.
For its part, Iran has reportedly begun shifting cash out of European banks - $75 billion so far. Melli is switching its reserves into non-dollar currencies; and Iran is calling on other revenue-rich oil states to follow suit. Separately, Islamist Web sites aligned with al-Qaida have been urging their supporters to dump dollars.
Meanwhile, the EU continues to "engage" Iran using charm, suasion and incentives. Its foreign policy czar, Javier Solana, has just been to Teheran offering economic assistance and civilian nuclear knowhow in exchange for a halt to uranium enrichment. Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani pledged to "carefully study" the EU offer, though other government spokespeople have reportedly already rejected it.
In Iran, there are no "moderates" on the nuclear issue, but there are differences over how best to stonewall. If Solana wants to cut to the chase and receive straight answers to his proposals, he might try meeting directly with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or Revolutionary Guard boss Mohammad Ali Jafari.
European apologists for Teheran are already saying Iran can't possibly accept the latest EU offer because Washington didn't formally sign on to it (though administration officials have endorsed EU diplomacy) and Washington hasn't publicly abandoned hopes for regime change. These apologists further claim that when the mullahs were (supposedly) not enriching uranium, Washington maintained sanctions nevertheless. And they argue that a more amenable president may replace Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in August 2009.
EUROPE IS Iran's main import and export trading partner. According to EU data, in 2006, EU imports totaled more than €14.12 billion, while the value of EU exports (with Germany, France and Italy leading the way) amounted to more than €11.19 billion. Iran is Europe's fifth-biggest oil supplier. This means that the EU could live without Iran, though Iran would have a hard time managing without Europe.
Europe is thus still instrumental in keeping Teheran's economy afloat, yet it is doing precious little to explicitly isolate Iran. Regular international flights to the Islamic Republic still take off from most major European airports, and European countries maintain active embassies in Teheran.
IT'S LONG been suspected that the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, A.Q. Khan, sold bomb-making material to Iran. And this week brought revelations of computer blueprints being de-encrypted - which suggests Khan may also have peddled technology for building small, easily transportable nuclear weapons. We do not know if he sold the Iranians a design for a bomb small enough to be fitted atop one of their ballistic missiles; we do know that they have delivery vehicles able to reach Israel - and beyond - and are openly, feverishly enriching uranium.
A variation on Rudyard Kipling's "If" comes to mind: If Europe can keep its head when the rest of us are losing ours, maybe it doesn't understand the seriousness of the situation.
EVEN THE US, with the best of intentions, has not found it easy to impose a comprehensive sanctions regime. Which is why we applaud US Senator Max Baucus for his efforts to plug existing loopholes in American law.
For instance, while the export of US goods to Iran is already forbidden, there is a long list of exceptions, including parts for civilian airliners. It's still legal to import Persian carpets, caviar, nuts and dried fruit; "independent" subsidiaries of US corporations can still invest in Iran. Moreover, even though Moscow assists Iran's nuclear program, it remains legal to sell Russia nuclear equipment.
Finally, Baucus's bill would deduct US contributions to the World Bank proportionate to the funds the bank provides for programs defined as humanitarian in Iran. After all, money is fungible.
Were this the summer of 2002, when Iranian dissidents first revealed the existence of the Natanz uranium enrichment facility and the heavy-water plant in Arak, we might be more upbeat about the pace of European sanctions. Six years on, we are anything but.
A voice for the citizen (June 16, 2008)
Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, but we have a long way to go before we can claim to have a genuinely representative form of government.
Our aspirations were set back on Sunday in the Ministerial Committee on Legislation, when a bipartisan Knesset bill to reform the electoral system and allow 30 to 60 Knesset members to be elected by district was torpedoed. The remaining MKs would have been chosen under the current proportional method.
Backing for the reform came from Kadima, Labor and Likud, while the torpedoing was the handiwork of MK Meshulam Nahari of Shas, the Sephardi Orthodox party. The wishes of a single party with 12 parliamentary seats proved stronger than the combined efforts of parties with a total of 73 mandates - 84 counting Israel Beiteinu, which also backs electoral reform - because, as a coalition member, Shas has veto power over legislation which would modify "constitutional" Basic Law.
Shas likely opposed the bill out of fear that its electoral fortunes would suffer under a reformed system, though it claimed it voted against because it had not been sufficiently consulted.
As reported in The Jerusalem Post - no other newspaper ran this story on its front page - the initiators of the bill included Knesset Law Committee chair Menachem Ben-Sasson of Kadima, Gideon Sa'ar and Michael Eitan of Likud, and Labor MKs Ophir Paz-Pines and Eitan Cabel. It is virtually unprecedented for so diverse a group of legislators to unite behind such far-reaching legislation.
THE CASE for electoral reform is painfully clear: A system which in the previous century brought the likes of David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin to power today attracts far more mediocre personalities even as it drives honest and decent people away.
The way we elect our leaders is also directly connected to why it is so hard to govern effectively, why so many Israelis feel alienated from the political system, and why average citizens have nowhere to turn with their grievances.
Public opinion surveys invariably show that a majority of Israelis support some form of district representation. And a commission headed by Hebrew University president Menachem Magidor which thoroughly examined our electoral system for 17 months also recommended, last year, reforms even more far-reaching than those now being put forward by Kadima, Labor and Likud. Magidor wanted to see half the Knesset - 60 MKs - directly elected in 17 districts. Each district would be represented by two to five MKs, the other half of the Knesset being elected by the proportional approach.
CONSTITUENCY representation is an essential ingredient in representative government. In the US, most members of the House of Representatives spend the bulk of their resources and energies on constituent services. Indeed, in just about every other democracy in the world voters have a particular politician who is accountable to them.
Moving away from the pure proportional system would also make Israeli politics less fragmented - and perhaps less ill-tempered - because a winner-take-all constituency system discourages single-issue parties that thrive on parochialism and abhor compromise. Smaller parties would fall by the wayside.
Major parties would focus on the good of the many over the interests of the few. Yet to attract voters, they would nevertheless have an incentive to embrace at least some of the causes of today's smaller parties.
With constituency representation comes direct accountability. It does not guarantee the absence of corruption, or that all politicians elected by district will selflessly devote themselves to the people they represent - but it does mean that good politicians could be rewarded and bad ones kicked out of office.
THE GOOD news is that the bill's defeat can yet be reversed. Ben-Sasson can still use the clout that comes with his committee chairmanship to maneuver around what observers suggest only appears to be a legislative dead-end. And as a last resort, the Knesset could support a private member's version of the bill vetoed by Shas.
Contrary to popular wisdom, the Hebrew language really does have a phrase for political constituency - mehoz bechira. Now if we could only convince our politicians that accountability is not an alien concept...
The road not taken (June 15,2008)
Ismail and Najuan Khualed and their seven-year-old daughter Eden, from the Galilee village of Sa'ab, were killed over the weekend a few hundred meters from their home on Road 70 between Karmiel and Acre. A truck driver traveling in the opposite lane lost control of his vehicle, which then overturned, slamming into the Khualeds' car. Their son Tamir is hospitalized in critical condition.
Not a weekend goes by, or so it seems, which does not close with awful news about traffic and road fatalities. This one was no exception: In addition to Ismail, 25, and Najuan, 22, three other citizens lost their lives.
In a three-month period his year, 89 people were killed; thousands were injured.
It is small consolation to the grieving families - or to our national psyche - that traffic-related fatalities have actually decreased. The statistics are mildly encouraging: In 2004, 428 were killed; 2005, 381; 2006, 373; and 2007, 351.
NO ONE would dispute that the main culprit is speed. Academic experts persuasively argue that as speed goes up, so does the frequency and severity of accidents. The police concur - speed is a factor in most accidents, directly causing 20 percent of fatalities.
Obviously, drivers must be more diligent about adhering to posted speed limits, and police need to do a better job of catching violators. Still, human nature being what it is, and since police can't be everywhere, experts argue that a state-of-the-art speed camera network ought to be installed across the country to detect and deter speeding. Such a network has been shown to reduce fatalities in the UK, Australia and France.
In Israel, cameras using comparatively archaic technology are in place along only relatively short stretches of road. Other "cameras" are actually decoys intended to fool drivers into thinking they're being monitored. Until now, budget constraints, red tape and a shortage of personnel (to retrieve and process the film) has hamstrung this old technology.
Why has the Finance Ministry failed to allocate the necessary funds for Israel to implement its own nationwide, state-of-the art speed camera program?
Dead citizens don't contribute to the economy, and shattered survivors often become burdens to society. The cost to tax-payers of medical care and rehabilitation for injured motorists can be staggering. So it makes economic sense - aside from being also the moral thing to do - to invest in safer roads.
We urge Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz to show leadership and lose no time in getting to work with the police and the Treasury. They must accelerate a viable timetable for making speed cameras a reality.
BUT SPEEDING is not the only problem. Even some major arteries are not properly lit at night. Some lack shoulders - including, villagers say, the area where the Khualed family lost their lives. Drivers also have a responsibility: to keep their tires inflated, their brakes in good condition and their windshields clean for good visibility. If there are population sectors which are disproportionately involved in accidents, remedial driver-education must be targeted where it will do the most good.
WHILE IT may be hard to quantify, most of us sense that there is also something about Israel's "culture" that contributes, if not to the actual carnage on the roads, then to the prevailing sense of intolerance and lack of consideration. Too many drivers fail to signal lane changes, or turns; rather than yield, they pursue self-defeating and dangerous "not-one-inch" tactics.
No one wants to be a freier - a sucker - and everyone is stressed. Yet it is intolerable that some people drive while cradling a cell phone, shaving, applying make-up or reading.
Public service ads have reeducated us about the need for passenger seat-belts, the danger of children dashing out between cars, and the benefits of keeping headlights on during the winter. The time is long overdue for a basic road etiquette campaign.
Driving in Israel, admittedly stressful, is still safer and less unpleasant than ever before thanks to improved roads, better lighting and, in urban areas, the growing utilization of roundabouts and speed bumps.
None of these improvements, however, makes us sanguine about the deaths of good people like the Khualeds.
Are you hearing us, Minister Mofaz?
The world knows of the pain and dislocation experienced by roughly 700,000 Palestinian Arabs when Israel was established; it knows little about the trauma borne by some 850,000 Jews from the Arab world who were uprooted from their homes.
The precise numbers and exact impetus for the departures, in these linked cases, remain in dispute. The motivations of the displaced in promoting their respective narratives are easily suspect because both Jewish and Arab refugee conundrums are tied to claims of "inalienable rights," for restitution and reparations, and (in the case of the Arabs) demands for repatriation.
In any journey toward genuine acceptance and reconciliation that the quest for peace demands, the two narratives will need to be mutually validated in some fashion.
THE PLIGHT of Jews who left the Arab countries has drawn relatively little attention, notwithstanding the efforts of individuals such as Heskel M. Haddad, a New York-based ophthalmologist of Iraqi origin. Recently, however, this cause received a boost from a non-binding US Congressional resolution adopted in April which urged the administration to raise the Jewish refugee issue whenever the Palestinian one arises. And this week a group called Justice for Jews from Arab Countries has been holding a conference in London to ensure that the narrative of Jewish refugees is told alongside that of the Palestinian Arabs.
It would be a tragedy if this campaign were dismissed as an attempt at one-upmanship in an arena so long dominated by supporters of the Palestinian Arabs; suffering does not negate suffering.
One approach for fair-minded individuals is to consider the Jewish refugees as human beings rather than as pawns in a vitriolic political dispute.
This is why the recent publication of Lucette Lagnado's The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit is so welcome. In telling the affecting saga of her family's forced emigration from Cairo to New York, and by sharing memories of her proud father Leon's decline from boulevardier, poker player and businessman - who rubbed shoulders with King Farouk - to a refugee unable to raise the few thousand dollars necessary to open a corner candy store, Lagnado puts a human face on the other Middle East refugee tragedy.
Lagnado focuses on her own family's experiences, but let's not forget the episodic blood libels and riots that peppered the history of Egyptian Jewry, beginning in the early 1800s. As the Zionists moved ahead in creating a Jewish state in Mandatory Palestine, and as the Palestinian Arab leadership adamantly rejected a two-state solution, Arabs elsewhere began to turn against the Jews in their midst.
There were riots in Alexandria and Cairo in 1938-39, and again in November 1945, when 10 Jews were killed and hundreds wounded. Synagogues were ransacked. Egyptian Jewry carried on as best it could even when 2,000 Jews were arrested and their property confiscated on May 15, 1948 - the day Israel declared independence. In June 1948, the community was obligated to "donate" to Palestinian Arab refugee relief. In September, 20 Jews were killed and 61 injured as Cairo's Jewish Quarter was bombed. Looting followed, and more Jewish property was confiscated.
After the 1956 Sinai Campaign, 4,000 Jews were expelled; allowed to take only a single suitcase each and forced to renounce any financial claims against Egypt. In 1957 all Jews not in "continuous residence" since 1900 were deprived of citizenship. By 1960, many synagogues, orphanages and homes for the aged had been closed down.
The Lagnados held out until 1963, eventually arriving in New York with $212, the maximum they had been allowed to take out of Egypt. By 1967, Jews still employed in government were dismissed; hundreds were arrested, some were tortured. That is how a community whose population numbered 80,000 in 1920 dwindled to today's perhaps 200 souls, mostly elderly widows.
Yet Egypt's treatment of its Jews was in no way the most egregious in the Arab world.
ROUGHLY 580,000 Jews from across the Arab world ultimately found refuge in Israel. Another 260,000 Jews were absorbed elsewhere.
For the Palestinian Arabs, by contrast, the disaster of dislocation was compounded by the decision of the 21 Arab states never to absorb them, and to force the UN to create UNRWA, whose surreal mission - with the acquiescence of the international community - is to perpetuate their homelessness in perpetuity.
Wisdom in charity (June 21, 2008)
Nachum: One kopek? Last week you gave me two kopeks.
Lazar-Wolf: I had a bad week.
Nachum: If you had a bad week, why should I suffer?
- Fiddler On The Roof
The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the overseas arm of the US Jewish philanthropic system, announced last week that it was cutting programming to 25,000 recipients in the former Soviet Union and laying off 60 workers in Jerusalem, New York and the FSU. The reason: The falling dollar has created a 20 percent hole, or $60 million gap, in its budget.
As the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported last week, the JDC's $325m. budget includes an $87m. contribution from the United Jewish Communities, which represents 155 federations and 400 independent Jewish communities across North America. The UJC's own operating budget stands at $37m., down from a peak of $46m. Other JDC money comes from individuals, foundations, Holocaust reparations, and the Israeli government.
The constraints now facing the JDC typify those of other organizations. The dean of a Jerusalem-based educational institute, which receives no government aid, told The Jerusalem Post that he had just returned from a successful fund-raising trip to the US bringing back pledges totaling $1m. Since he raises money in dollars but spends them in shekels, these funds are worth significantly less than just one year ago.
The crisis in the dollar, and how the organized Jewish world should respond, will be high on the agenda of the Jewish Agency Board of Governors when it meets today and Monday in Jerusalem. The agency is facing is own budget shortfall.
But the fall in the dollar is only one manifestation of the world economy's predicament. In New York City, for example, Jewish groups are being hard hit by municipal budget cuts that impact on their ability to deliver services to some 77,000 elderly Jewish poor. Funding for the homebound lunch program is being streamlined. The local Housing Authority says it can't continue to subsidize senior citizens centers in its buildings. And New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is grappling with a projected $3 billion-5b. budget deficit for the next fiscal year.
Philanthropists, who make their money in banking and on Wall Street in places such as Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers, have taken a financial beating. Nevertheless, observers counsel that there is still money out there.
THIS BRINGS us to a new buzzword circulating in Jewish organizational life - "silo." At all times, but especially in these, it is essential that key players engaged in communal work communicate, coordinate and network. As with an isolated silo, communication that is only vertical, that does not interface with other entities doing similar work, is an extravagance the Jewish world can ill afford.
In the 21st century, we cannot put up with organizational duplication, unnecessary competitiveness and petty rivalries. It would be tempting to go through the lengthy roster of organizations, from the 51 members of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, to the scores of others orbiting the Jewish world - some like spent asteroids - and ask whether each is essential for Jewish security, welfare, administration and continuity. In our nonhierarchical world, however, only those who foot the bill have the prerogative of telling an organization: Your time has passed.
As fewer affluent young Jews donate to Jewish causes, private philanthropists and "boutique" charities are sometimes better positioned than large organizations to target money where it is needed. And yet, a mature analysis of Jewish organizational life is bound to conclude that if at least some of the groups now on the scene did not exist, they would have to be created ex nihilo.
The legendary Jewish leader Ralph I. Goldman offered this advice in 1981. "What is necessary is... to recognize that immortality does not apply to organizations and institutions... that going out of business is an essential quality of community service - not change for the sake of change, but change because it is necessary and good."
Implementing this sagacious recommendation depends on individual donors, organizations and foundations using sound judgment to evaluate which groups merit continued support. In today's economic climate, the imperative for such pragmatism is more urgent than ever.
The brewing storm (June 19, 2008)
On a cold and drizzly December morning the Israeli cabinet meets to approve a renewal of the cease-fire in Gaza, which has proven so successful. There have been no rocket, mortar or shooting attacks into Israel since the tahadiyeh was proclaimed by Hamas six months ago.
The Erez, Karni, and Sufa border crossings, along with the Nahal Oz fuel depot, have efficiently funneled a cornucopia of supplies into the Strip from Israel, while the Rafah crossing for goods and people leaving the Strip for Egypt is functioning smoothly under the watchful eyes of Egyptian officials and Palestinian border guards loyal to Mahmoud Abbas's administration.
Thanks to intensified Egyptian efforts, the flow of illicit weaponry into the Strip has been reduced to a trickle. EU officials have steadfastly rejected dealing with Hamas. The Islamist government has never been more unpopular because, despite the end of the "siege," it has proven incompetent in delivering basic services to the people. Polls indicate that in elections scheduled for January, a reformist-oriented Fatah ticket is expected to capture a majority in the Palestinian parliament.
Meanwhile, Gilad Schalit's book, In Hamas Captivity, tops the best-seller lists.
THIS SCENARIO is one way to envisage the evolution of the cease-fire with Hamas, which came into effect early Thursday. It is not, sadly, the way events are likely to play out.
Stage one - the cease-fire - is now in effect. On Sunday, in stage two, Israel is expected to begin easing the economic blockade of Gaza by opening most of the crossing points. Stage three, the opening of Rafah, is supposedly tied to progress on the release of Gilad Schalit. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni's pledge, however, that Rafah will not open until Schalit is released is hardly credible. Hamas has been explicit: There is no connection between the cease-fire and Schalit's freedom. It demands and will likely receive, judging by the government's lack of fortitude, hundreds of terrorists "with blood on their hands" in exchange for the IDF captive.
This newspaper has argued that any trade for Schalit should be limited to enemy prisoners - such as the Hamas "parliamentarians" now in custody - taken after Schalit's capture.
As for the cease-fire, it is true that Israel's dysfunctional cabinet had to choose from an unpalatable menu of choices. But it is far from clear, following the government's September 2007 designation of Gaza as a "hostile territory," that our politico-military echelon exhausted a long list of measures that could have been pursued, short of retaking the entire Strip in an Operation Defensive Shield-like campaign.
These measures might have included ongoing large-scale military incursions (mostly abandoned in favor of episodic battalion or company level operations), and relentless pursuit of Hamas leaders so as to diminish their capacity to govern and hammer home the point that Jerusalem will not tolerate an Islamist regime between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. They could have been accompanied by an intensified embargo on fuel and electricity - presuming the government's willingness to stay the course in the face of unsympathetic media coverage.
INSTEAD, we may be witnessing the establishment of a nascent Palestinian state
uncompromisingly committed to the destruction of Israel. With Gaza in its grip, the Islamists will turn their full attention to the West Bank. Hamas can now more easily send its gunmen for specialized training abroad, while foreign "experts" will find it easier to infiltrate into the Strip.
Even if the Egyptians, using newly arrived American tunnel-detection equipment and limited but better-trained forces, make a strenuous effort to intercept the flow of arms - and Cairo insists it is now genuinely committed to this goal - chances are that anti-aircraft and anti-armor missiles, long-range rockets and sophisticated explosives will find their way into the Strip.
Finally, this cease-fire accelerates Hamas's ascendancy among Palestinians, and more broadly throughout the Arab world, even as the relative moderates associated with Mahmoud Abbas look ever-more impotent. Yet so long as it ostensibly adheres to the cease-fire, there will be those in the international community who will push for engaging Hamas "moderates."
Israeli decision-makers have purchased temporary calm for the battered communities bordering Gaza. The fear, underlined by bitter experience, is that it comes at the cost of a devastating storm brewing over the horizon.
Prodding the glacier
The glacial pace at which Europe has been working to get Iran to end its enrichment of uranium and give up its nuclear weapons program is slowly picking up. Britain and Europe are expected to freeze the assets of Bank Melli, the Islamic Republic's main financial conduit to the world and its channel for cash transfers to Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The EU is also weighing sanctions against companies that invest in Iran's energy industry.
For its part, Iran has reportedly begun shifting cash out of European banks - $75 billion so far. Melli is switching its reserves into non-dollar currencies; and Iran is calling on other revenue-rich oil states to follow suit. Separately, Islamist Web sites aligned with al-Qaida have been urging their supporters to dump dollars.
Meanwhile, the EU continues to "engage" Iran using charm, suasion and incentives. Its foreign policy czar, Javier Solana, has just been to Teheran offering economic assistance and civilian nuclear knowhow in exchange for a halt to uranium enrichment. Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani pledged to "carefully study" the EU offer, though other government spokespeople have reportedly already rejected it.
In Iran, there are no "moderates" on the nuclear issue, but there are differences over how best to stonewall. If Solana wants to cut to the chase and receive straight answers to his proposals, he might try meeting directly with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or Revolutionary Guard boss Mohammad Ali Jafari.
European apologists for Teheran are already saying Iran can't possibly accept the latest EU offer because Washington didn't formally sign on to it (though administration officials have endorsed EU diplomacy) and Washington hasn't publicly abandoned hopes for regime change. These apologists further claim that when the mullahs were (supposedly) not enriching uranium, Washington maintained sanctions nevertheless. And they argue that a more amenable president may replace Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in August 2009.
EUROPE IS Iran's main import and export trading partner. According to EU data, in 2006, EU imports totaled more than €14.12 billion, while the value of EU exports (with Germany, France and Italy leading the way) amounted to more than €11.19 billion. Iran is Europe's fifth-biggest oil supplier. This means that the EU could live without Iran, though Iran would have a hard time managing without Europe.
Europe is thus still instrumental in keeping Teheran's economy afloat, yet it is doing precious little to explicitly isolate Iran. Regular international flights to the Islamic Republic still take off from most major European airports, and European countries maintain active embassies in Teheran.
IT'S LONG been suspected that the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, A.Q. Khan, sold bomb-making material to Iran. And this week brought revelations of computer blueprints being de-encrypted - which suggests Khan may also have peddled technology for building small, easily transportable nuclear weapons. We do not know if he sold the Iranians a design for a bomb small enough to be fitted atop one of their ballistic missiles; we do know that they have delivery vehicles able to reach Israel - and beyond - and are openly, feverishly enriching uranium.
A variation on Rudyard Kipling's "If" comes to mind: If Europe can keep its head when the rest of us are losing ours, maybe it doesn't understand the seriousness of the situation.
EVEN THE US, with the best of intentions, has not found it easy to impose a comprehensive sanctions regime. Which is why we applaud US Senator Max Baucus for his efforts to plug existing loopholes in American law.
For instance, while the export of US goods to Iran is already forbidden, there is a long list of exceptions, including parts for civilian airliners. It's still legal to import Persian carpets, caviar, nuts and dried fruit; "independent" subsidiaries of US corporations can still invest in Iran. Moreover, even though Moscow assists Iran's nuclear program, it remains legal to sell Russia nuclear equipment.
Finally, Baucus's bill would deduct US contributions to the World Bank proportionate to the funds the bank provides for programs defined as humanitarian in Iran. After all, money is fungible.
Were this the summer of 2002, when Iranian dissidents first revealed the existence of the Natanz uranium enrichment facility and the heavy-water plant in Arak, we might be more upbeat about the pace of European sanctions. Six years on, we are anything but.
A voice for the citizen (June 16, 2008)
Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, but we have a long way to go before we can claim to have a genuinely representative form of government.
Our aspirations were set back on Sunday in the Ministerial Committee on Legislation, when a bipartisan Knesset bill to reform the electoral system and allow 30 to 60 Knesset members to be elected by district was torpedoed. The remaining MKs would have been chosen under the current proportional method.
Backing for the reform came from Kadima, Labor and Likud, while the torpedoing was the handiwork of MK Meshulam Nahari of Shas, the Sephardi Orthodox party. The wishes of a single party with 12 parliamentary seats proved stronger than the combined efforts of parties with a total of 73 mandates - 84 counting Israel Beiteinu, which also backs electoral reform - because, as a coalition member, Shas has veto power over legislation which would modify "constitutional" Basic Law.
Shas likely opposed the bill out of fear that its electoral fortunes would suffer under a reformed system, though it claimed it voted against because it had not been sufficiently consulted.
As reported in The Jerusalem Post - no other newspaper ran this story on its front page - the initiators of the bill included Knesset Law Committee chair Menachem Ben-Sasson of Kadima, Gideon Sa'ar and Michael Eitan of Likud, and Labor MKs Ophir Paz-Pines and Eitan Cabel. It is virtually unprecedented for so diverse a group of legislators to unite behind such far-reaching legislation.
THE CASE for electoral reform is painfully clear: A system which in the previous century brought the likes of David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin to power today attracts far more mediocre personalities even as it drives honest and decent people away.
The way we elect our leaders is also directly connected to why it is so hard to govern effectively, why so many Israelis feel alienated from the political system, and why average citizens have nowhere to turn with their grievances.
Public opinion surveys invariably show that a majority of Israelis support some form of district representation. And a commission headed by Hebrew University president Menachem Magidor which thoroughly examined our electoral system for 17 months also recommended, last year, reforms even more far-reaching than those now being put forward by Kadima, Labor and Likud. Magidor wanted to see half the Knesset - 60 MKs - directly elected in 17 districts. Each district would be represented by two to five MKs, the other half of the Knesset being elected by the proportional approach.
CONSTITUENCY representation is an essential ingredient in representative government. In the US, most members of the House of Representatives spend the bulk of their resources and energies on constituent services. Indeed, in just about every other democracy in the world voters have a particular politician who is accountable to them.
Moving away from the pure proportional system would also make Israeli politics less fragmented - and perhaps less ill-tempered - because a winner-take-all constituency system discourages single-issue parties that thrive on parochialism and abhor compromise. Smaller parties would fall by the wayside.
Major parties would focus on the good of the many over the interests of the few. Yet to attract voters, they would nevertheless have an incentive to embrace at least some of the causes of today's smaller parties.
With constituency representation comes direct accountability. It does not guarantee the absence of corruption, or that all politicians elected by district will selflessly devote themselves to the people they represent - but it does mean that good politicians could be rewarded and bad ones kicked out of office.
THE GOOD news is that the bill's defeat can yet be reversed. Ben-Sasson can still use the clout that comes with his committee chairmanship to maneuver around what observers suggest only appears to be a legislative dead-end. And as a last resort, the Knesset could support a private member's version of the bill vetoed by Shas.
Contrary to popular wisdom, the Hebrew language really does have a phrase for political constituency - mehoz bechira. Now if we could only convince our politicians that accountability is not an alien concept...
The road not taken (June 15,2008)
Ismail and Najuan Khualed and their seven-year-old daughter Eden, from the Galilee village of Sa'ab, were killed over the weekend a few hundred meters from their home on Road 70 between Karmiel and Acre. A truck driver traveling in the opposite lane lost control of his vehicle, which then overturned, slamming into the Khualeds' car. Their son Tamir is hospitalized in critical condition.
Not a weekend goes by, or so it seems, which does not close with awful news about traffic and road fatalities. This one was no exception: In addition to Ismail, 25, and Najuan, 22, three other citizens lost their lives.
In a three-month period his year, 89 people were killed; thousands were injured.
It is small consolation to the grieving families - or to our national psyche - that traffic-related fatalities have actually decreased. The statistics are mildly encouraging: In 2004, 428 were killed; 2005, 381; 2006, 373; and 2007, 351.
NO ONE would dispute that the main culprit is speed. Academic experts persuasively argue that as speed goes up, so does the frequency and severity of accidents. The police concur - speed is a factor in most accidents, directly causing 20 percent of fatalities.
Obviously, drivers must be more diligent about adhering to posted speed limits, and police need to do a better job of catching violators. Still, human nature being what it is, and since police can't be everywhere, experts argue that a state-of-the-art speed camera network ought to be installed across the country to detect and deter speeding. Such a network has been shown to reduce fatalities in the UK, Australia and France.
In Israel, cameras using comparatively archaic technology are in place along only relatively short stretches of road. Other "cameras" are actually decoys intended to fool drivers into thinking they're being monitored. Until now, budget constraints, red tape and a shortage of personnel (to retrieve and process the film) has hamstrung this old technology.
Why has the Finance Ministry failed to allocate the necessary funds for Israel to implement its own nationwide, state-of-the art speed camera program?
Dead citizens don't contribute to the economy, and shattered survivors often become burdens to society. The cost to tax-payers of medical care and rehabilitation for injured motorists can be staggering. So it makes economic sense - aside from being also the moral thing to do - to invest in safer roads.
We urge Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz to show leadership and lose no time in getting to work with the police and the Treasury. They must accelerate a viable timetable for making speed cameras a reality.
BUT SPEEDING is not the only problem. Even some major arteries are not properly lit at night. Some lack shoulders - including, villagers say, the area where the Khualed family lost their lives. Drivers also have a responsibility: to keep their tires inflated, their brakes in good condition and their windshields clean for good visibility. If there are population sectors which are disproportionately involved in accidents, remedial driver-education must be targeted where it will do the most good.
WHILE IT may be hard to quantify, most of us sense that there is also something about Israel's "culture" that contributes, if not to the actual carnage on the roads, then to the prevailing sense of intolerance and lack of consideration. Too many drivers fail to signal lane changes, or turns; rather than yield, they pursue self-defeating and dangerous "not-one-inch" tactics.
No one wants to be a freier - a sucker - and everyone is stressed. Yet it is intolerable that some people drive while cradling a cell phone, shaving, applying make-up or reading.
Public service ads have reeducated us about the need for passenger seat-belts, the danger of children dashing out between cars, and the benefits of keeping headlights on during the winter. The time is long overdue for a basic road etiquette campaign.
Driving in Israel, admittedly stressful, is still safer and less unpleasant than ever before thanks to improved roads, better lighting and, in urban areas, the growing utilization of roundabouts and speed bumps.
None of these improvements, however, makes us sanguine about the deaths of good people like the Khualeds.
Are you hearing us, Minister Mofaz?
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
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