Portnoy, Free At Last!

Last week, I linked to The Chronicle Review's excerpt from Promiscuous, but to the chagrin of many (myself included, I confess), it was put behind a paywall. I am happy to say that the excerpt has now been liberated. You can read it here.

I need not add, do I?, that I am counting on this blog's loyal readers--who after all have had a pretty good deal these past four years--to send the excerpt to friends, post it on Facebook pages, and generally make nuisances of themselves sharing the fun of this book. My thanks to Chronicle Review editor, and Portnoy officianado, Evan Goldstein, for the excerpt's freedom. You can order the book here. (Well, go ahead. I'm waiting...)

Will Israel Recognize Itself?

The Israeli judiciary reaffirmed yesterday that Israel is the only country on earth that does not recognize itself.

The Haifa District Court rejected an appeal submitted by Professor Uzi Ornan, a linguist and member of the Academy of the Hebrew Language (also the founder of the League against Religious Coercion in Israel). Ornan had sought to compel Israel's Interior Ministry to recognize his citizenship as based on his being “Israeli,” that is, a national born in Israel, rather than “Jewish," which he firmly denies.

The court ruled that, no, he is born of a Jewish mother—Jewish according to Halacha whether he likes it or not—and even more important, that the Law of Return’s strictures supersede any other in matters of citizenship. Accordingly, Ornan is to be listed in the registry of populations as Jewish. (The registry, by the way, recognizes over 100 nationalities, but “Israeli” is not one of them, though the Supreme Court has regularly been petitioned by people like former Education Minister Shulamit Aloni and former Air Force chief, the late Benny Peled, to do so.)

"A judge appeals to Jewish law, and the ruling shows that Israel is a Jewish community and not a civilian state," Ornan lamented.

For many American “Zionists” this may all seem fine. As I've written here before, they tend to think of Jerusalem as a kind of Jewish Epcot Center and Israel as a world Jewish convention to which they are super-delegates. But for people like Ornan, eager to establish a secular state apparatus—and long after the peculiar historical circumstances that made the Law of Return necessary has passed—the decision is infuriating. It underlines how compromised by theocracy the state has become in the absence of a democratic constitution and the presence of an occupation justified by messianic notions of peoplehood.

In effect, the court is telling Israeli citizens that naturalization to a distinctly Israeli nation, if not impossible, is beside the point. Imagine what this means for Israel’s future as a democracy, given that one-fifth of Israel’s citizens are not Jewish. The court is implying that democracy is just the tyranny of the Jewish majority, and it defines “Jewish” as a religious sentiment and biological fact.

Nor does one need much political imagination to see how liberal Israeli Arabs who have mastered modern Hebrew (unlike “returning” Jews from Brookline or Teaneck) would regard this decision. It is a repudiation of the very possibility of a Hebrew civil space into which they might assimilate. Think of what Duddy Kravitz might have said if the courts decided that a Quebecer with full rights—including, as in Israel, the right to acquire most land—must be a descendant of a family tree documented by the St. Jean-Baptiste Society and Catholic according to the Bishop of Montreal.

Then again, real Zionists should be disgusted by this ruling too. For Zionism’s real point was democratizing, liberating, modernizing; it meant to create the cultural innovations that would put Hebrew in every individual citizen’s hand. As Achad Haam put it in an essay he (clumsily, but precisely) entitled “Competitive Emulation or Self-effacing Imitation,” the emancipated Zionists’ future would be something like the Jews’ confrontation with the ancients:

Long before the Hellenists in Palestine tried to substitute Greek culture for Judaism, the Jews in Egypt had come into close contact with the Greeks, with their life, their spirit, and their philosophy: yet we do not find among them any pronounced movement towards assimilation. On the contrary, they employed their Greek knowledge as an instrument for revealing the essential spirit of Judaism, for showing the world its beauty, and vindicating it against the proud philosophy of Greece. 

This was code: the Hebrew writers of Zionism were now reprising this Hellenizing genius and synthesis. Diaspora Jews—stuck in ghettos with retrograde Halachic norms—lacked these Hebrew things. They lacked a nuanced way into historic Jewish philosophical writings, legal principles, liturgy, poetics. They lacked the confidence to let go of the kitsch and the junk.

The new Jewish nation, in contrast, would be a permeable community of Hebrew speaking citizens, a collective of infinitely complex individuals, each with unalienable rights, who shared a special purchase on accumulated Jewish sacred texts, narratives, fictions, liturgy, legal debates, mystical speculations, music, historical records.

Jews made confident by a national home—so Achad Haam thought—would relish the chance to prove the strengths of their culture in open contest. They would breathe in what was best in others, breathe out what was enduring about Judaism. They would have the means not only to resist assimilation into other national cultures, but to assimilate others into their own.

The court, in stupidly valorizing Halachic norms, is asking Israelis to throw all of this away: to accept law that debases Zionism’s greatest achievement, presumably for the sake of Jewish solidarity. But the challenge, you see, is not a Jewish and democratic state. It is to define both “Jewish” and the claim of state sovereignty in ways democrats everywhere can understand. That may not be exactly what Achad Haam meant by “modern.” But it is close enough.

This post may be viewed with other comments at The Daily Beast's "Open Zion" site.

'Promiscuous': Portnoy's Enduring Complaint

Illustration for The Chronicle Review by Scott Seymour

My new book, Promiscuous: Portnoy's Complaint And Our Doomed Pursuit Of Happiness, was formally published a couple of weeks ago, though authors no longer know exactly what "published" means, since most books are sold (and pre-sold) online and get to only very targeted bookstores. Books feel published when major reviews come out or when parts are excerpted in places that give readers a taste of what's to come. So I prefer to mark today as the publication date, with this long excerpt appearing in this week's The Chronicle of Higher Education.

I was sent this link by a Facebook friend; The Chronicle Review has put the excerpt behind their pay-wall, and the magazine is well worth the subscription if the link does not work. Then again, you may order the book here for considerably less.

Some early reviews here: the first from Kirkus, the second from The Jerusalem Post, the third from Tablet, and the forth from the Jewish Book Council.

You can read the blurbs here.

The book was a labor of love. I hope it gives you as much pleasure to read as it gave me to write.

Netanyahu's Coup

I know I should be appalled by Shaul Mofaz’s opportunism and Benjamin Netanyahu’s grin but I confess to being just a little relieved.

Netanyahu was about to call an election because his coalition was about to collapse. The Israeli Supreme Court had found the Tal Law, through which ultra-orthodox youth shirk military service, unconstitutional: a violation of the equality provisions of the Basic Law of Human Dignity. Netanyahu thus faced a choice: He could defy the court and flout the Basic Law—neither of which is popular among Likud’s rank and file at, say, Beitar Jerusalem football games—and appease the religious parties in his coalition. But then he would be playing with constitutional fire, something I suspect he, Barak, Mofaz and many in the Likud with IDF pedigree are sincerely loathe to do.

More important, Netanyahu would be infuriating the large secular majority, including many pro-Bibi reactionaries, and pro-Lieberman Russians, who are fed up with paying the taxes and doing the reserves while the orthodox work to shut down their seafood restaurants.

For most Israelis, demographic fears have less to do with the fertility of West Bank Palestinians—whom Israelis are all too accustomed to excluding from their democracy—than the fertility of Haredim and Israeli Arabs whom they know they cannot, and who soak up most spending on family allowances. Already, 25% of first graders in Israel proper are orthodox and ultra-orthodox classrooms, and 25% are in Arab classrooms. You don’t have to be a prophet to see where the children of Israel are heading.

So, yes, Mofaz made his move because Kadima was headed for an embarrassing defeat, though (as I wrote here earlier) he was better positioned than any other “centrist” to go down swinging: strengthening Netanyahu’s overall opposition, that is, by cutting into Likud’s Mizrahi and Russian tribes, and thus possibly denying the current roster of parties in Netanyahu’s hard-right coalition its narrow Knesset majority. And, yes, Netanyahu can now put off having to face an electorate that is more volatile than the polls show and will eventually vote with half an eye on the American election.

Still, a Likud-Kadima “unity” coalition actually represents an overdue alignment of the urbane forces in the country that have to come together to preserve Israeli civil society. You study Weimar and other failed democracies and you see that things can go in another, more horrifying direction when secular parties with at least a core of liberal leaders fight each other rather than make common cause against nationalist and clerical fanatics.

Read on at The Daily Beast

A Forum On Boycott, Divestment, And Sanctions

The Nation asked Omar Barghouti and myself to debate BDS in light of Peter Beinart's call to boycott products from the settlements. Our exchange can be linked to here.  My full contribution is below.

A boycott of Israel's settlements makes sense, but a broader boycott will most hurt those forces inside Israel that are best poised to change Israeli state policy. 

The American response to Peter Beinart’s New York Times op-ed calling for an economic boycott of Israel’s West Bank settlements—what he calls, usefully, “non-democratic Israel”—will strike Israeli liberals as just a little melodramatic.

Not very much is produced in the settlements, which are largely bedroom communities. Most liberal Israelis have been boycotting products from the settlements for years: Dead Sea creams, organic eggs, boutique wines and spices. Recently, various scholars, artists and scientists signed statements announcing our refusal to cooperate with, or even visit, the college established in the settlement of Ariel, between Ramallah and Nablus; a college originally established by Bar-Ilan University, but now applying—with the support of Netanyahu’s government, and in the face of considerable opposition from the Council of Higher Education—to be upgraded to an independent university. A couple of years ago, writing against the BDS movement against Israel as a whole in these pages, I called for just such a boycott myself.

The settlers have, let us say, a problem with boundaries. Boycotting their products is simple, direct and clearly targeted: if a settler business loses customers, its settlement may prove less viable. This is a way of using obvious market freedoms to manifest our dissent or opposition to the settlement project as a whole. (For their part, and by the same token, most settlers don’t subscribe to the liberal daily Haaretz—in effect, they boycott the newspaper, and want it to go away.)

And Beinart is right to want the boycott of settlements to be international. Presumably, this will pressure Israeli companies, too, into dissociating themselves from the settlements and, in some cases, proving that they are not using settlement components or raw materials. The Israeli right wants to establish facts to erase the boundary between Israel and the occupied territories. A boycott of settlements establishes counter-facts that reinforce an eventual boundary: about a fifth of Israel’s GDP is from exports, and any serious Israeli company is global.

But the settlement boycott has another virtue, which is to bring into relief the kind of boycott that should not be entertained, namely, a general boycott of all Israeli products and institutions. That boycott would erase another boundary, between the Israeli state per se—the country and its civil society—and the state apparatus under particular elected leaders.

Erase that boundary, and you erase the discrete facts of Israeli politics; you repudiate the idea that a more moderate government could ever be elected again, though polls show that a split in the Shas party, or the emergence of a charismatic centrist, or a shift in Israeli Arab electoral strategies (all of which, or none of which, may happen this year), would tip the Knesset and government back to what it was under Ehud Olmert, who just attended the J Street conference, by the way.

Israel, in other words, is a complicated place. Its democracy is certainly more than what produced the occupation of Palestine. Imagine European officials, intellectuals, etc., reading grim headlines about America’s invasion of Iraq, and concluding that the war was the product (as it was to some degree) of America’s imperial political structure and peculiar concepts of liberty. Imagine their advocating a boycott of everything American, from Google, to The Nation, to Berkeley—in effect, an end to the United States as we know it, including Bush’s internal opposition. Would this have been thought sane?

To be sure, Israeli democracy is not what it could be. I defer to no one in having risked what writers risk to tell hard truths about it. I wrote in The Tragedy of Zionism, nearly thirty years ago, that settlements were only the most vivid proof of Israel’s democratic deficiencies; that some of its legal structures amounted to discrimination against Israeli Arabs and valorization of religious orthodoxy—more precisely, reflected the absence of a liberal social contract needed to allow all citizens to meet as equals. And, yes, Israeli state agencies and the IDF have been instrumental in making the occupation what it is. Still, Israel is also a place of progressive and creative forces, concentrated in Israeli elites: again, artists and scholars, but also entrepreneurs and professionals.

BDS aims to hit global companies doing business with Israeli ones. But, as a group, international companies are the most important allies Israeli liberals have. These companies are learning and teaching organizations: Intel’s impact on Israel is like MIT’s on Cambridge. Opposing the bloc of parties favoring Greater Israel is a (somewhat weaker) bloc working toward Global Israel. What would BDS do to the latter, the very people in Israel whom the liberal world needs to strengthen?

You see, the implicit premise of BDS is that the occupation flows from the fact of Israel itself: that Israel is inherently a kind of occupation machine, beginning with 1948 and followed by 1967. In effect, BDS advocates accept the grotesque view of settlers and Hamas both, that the claim of Jews to Hebron in 2012 is exactly like the claim to Degania in 1912. It is not: the actions of a desperate movement are not to be copied by a triumphant state; after he became mayor, Jean Valjean did not keep stealing candlesticks.

On the other hand, BDS advocates argue that the stock of global companies making things used by occupation forces—United Technologies makes IDF helicopters, for example—should be divested, as if companies are big collaboration machines. But the same company’s air-conditioners may be cooling a school in Afula—or Gaza. In both cases, looking at Israel, or at companies, we need to up the magnification.

Some will say, fine, force the implosion of Israel’s private sector and this will finally force Israeli elites to seek political change more urgently. This is mechanistic and shortsighted thinking. Economic implosion, which a fully implemented BDS would bring about rather quickly, will cut the ground out from under Israel’s most educated and cosmopolitan people. It will not just pressure them, it will destroy them—ruin their lives, force the emigration of their children. Settlers and their ultra allies, in contrast, have no problem with Israel turning into a poorer, purer, Jewish Pakistan. Do we really want to cause Israel’s private sector to collapse or its universities to be isolated?

I suppose what offends me most about BDS is that it confuses anger with serious politics. It is something like the Tea Party, mad at “government,” too righteous to distinguish baby from bathwater. What we need, rather, is a vibrant, globalizing Israel, businesses, universities, etc. that expect to be part of the world and show the way to it; people who find Greater Israel an embarrassment and, indeed, will see an international boycott of settlements as a way of selling their case for compromise. Such people will be strengthened, not by BDS, but by a general, persistent anxiety about the conflict’s “opportunity cost”: the conviction that Israel’s manifestly improving quality of life will be a far cry from what it could be with peace.

That is the vision a re-elected President Obama should be preparing to bring: for Israel’s security everything, for Israel’s occupation nothing. That is the vision he tried to bring before 2010’s electoral reversals spooked all Democrats into the arms of AIPAC. With the Palestinian Authority on the brink of collapse, and successive Centcom commanders warning of a mean turn in the Arab street if the settlements are not stopped, is it too much to hope that the embrace is not permanent?

Tel Aviv Rising

''I don't believe in a leadership that makes decisions based on messianic feelings,'' Yuval Diskin, the former head of the Israeli Secret Service said this past week. The gathering was to celebrate Israeli’s Independence Day in the Tel Aviv suburb of Kfar Saba. He was speaking in code.

One cannot use the word “messianic” in Israel today and mean it purely metaphorically. Diskin did not just mean that Netanyahu was acting zealously or with an arguably exaggerated sense of mission. His criticism reportedly focused on what he took to be Prime Minister Netanyahu's threats against Iran. But he also expressed concern about a government that apparently has “no interest” in negotiations with the Palestinians, and he stressed concern about relations with Washington.

The problem—which Diskin’s double entendre conveyed perfectly—is that Israel’s current leadership either believes, or has made itself hostage to people who believe, that a messianic era really has been at hand since the 1967 war: that a sacred land has been liberated for Jews to “return” to and the country is protected by something like a divine plan. These ideas, praise God, are finally starting to drive more nearly educated Israelis—centrists, even peace skeptics—a little nuts.

Read on at The Daily Beast

Netanyahu Is Vulnerable

Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu are both slyly involved in the other’s politics, and the US is not the only country headed to an election. Netanyahu’s Likud, and all the parties of Greater Israel, are now (as Andrew Sullivan put it) “fused” with the GOP.

The question is, can Obama contribute to defeating Netanyahu’s government without confronting Bibi over settlements once again, which would risk inflaming Israel’s automatic supporters among the Democrats? Can he undermine the Netanyahu coalition, a precondition for advancing negotiations, without undermining the chances for his own reelection?

The first thing to say is that Netanyahu is, in spite of his lead in the polls, vulnerable. The parties of Global Israel—Labor, Kadima, Yair Lapid’s new center list, Meretz, etc.—lack an obvious leader just now (except for the perennial figurehead, Shimon Peres). But they are held together by a mounting and widely shared fear that the two-state solution slipping away; fear of new and catastrophic political isolation owing to Netanyahu’s ideology and recklessness. Educated Israelis fear losing advantages in global commercial networks that depend so much on personal connections, including visits to Israel. They fear cultural boycott. This kind of thing can trickle down.

 Read the rest at The Daily Beast