Illusions of the Israeli political consensus

I think that the Netanyahu government is making a serious mistake in thinking that the Obama administration is not serious about stopping building in the settlements and in East Jerusalem. And it's not just the current government that is making this mistake. Ehud Olmert's statement a couple of days ago that the U.S. administration is making a mistake in insisting on moving on the settlements now is also ill-considered. Perhaps in the current Israeli political consensus the settlements are no big deal, but that is certainly not how the Palestinians think about them. The Palestinians look at the constant increase in the area of the West Bank taken by the settlements (especially those that cut off the northern from the southern West Bank, and those that cut off Arab East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, like Har Homa) and see any hope of a viable Palestinian state dissolving before their eyes.

Another article in today's Haaretz spells out the U.S. administration's position on building in Jerusalem:

The United States views East Jerusalem as no different than an illegal West Bank outpost with regard to its demand for a freeze on settlement construction, American sources have informed both Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

This clarification came in the context of a growing crisis in U.S.-Israel relations over the planned construction of some 20 apartments for Jews in the Shepherd Hotel, in East Jerusalem's Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. The U.S. has demanded that the project be halted, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the cabinet meeting Sunday that "Israel will not agree to edicts of this kind in East Jerusalem."

The statement by Netanyahu yesterday that Israel has sovereignty (ריבונות) over all of Jerusalem is not accepted by any other nation on earth, and certainly not by the United States (if the U.S. accepted the Israeli claim, then American passports issued in Jerusalem would read "Jerusalem, Israel" instead of the current "Jerusalem," [and I include the comma because that's how my passport, issued in Jerusalem in 1999, read]). Netanyahu also apparently thinks that Jews in the Obama administration (like David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel) should agree with the right-wing positions of the Likud Party, instead of working for the president who appointed them (as Akiva Eldar says in today's Haaretz: "We want our Jews in the administration to be blind to the settlements and deaf to the complaints of the Arabs").

Eldar's column today is one of the few I've read in the Israeli press these last few weeks that reveals any real understanding of the position of the Obama administration - a position which I, for one, believe is necessary for any kind of peace-making to go forward between Israel and the Palestinians. And American Jews support Obama in his actions. From my discussions with friends here, I've definitely gotten the impression that they misread how American Jews feel about Obama and about Israel - they seem to think that most American Jews are right-wing and religious and support the settlements. The opposite is true.

Eldar writes:

Back during his election campaign Obama made it clear that he did not have to join Likud to be a friend of Israel. Opinion polls in the United States revealed that the views of most Jews are closer to the attitudes of organizations like the Reform movement, American Friends of Peace Now and J Street, which support a two-state solution and eschew Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman's doctrine - and above all, largely object to the settlements.

The conversation Obama held with representatives of the Jewish community last week confirms that Netanyahu is drafting them for the wrong war. Even his oldest supporters did not attack the president's position on the settlements, and made do with a complaint about the high profile given to disputes over the issue of natural growth in the settlements. One of the guests at that meeting said that history showed that exposing the differences between the U.S. and Israel does not help to advance peace. [This was Malcolm Hoenlein of the mis-named Organization of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, who never saw anything wrong with the Bush administration's effectively doing nothing about peace during its entire eight years].

"This was not my reading of the lessons of the last eight years," Obama responded without flinching. Moreover, he said he would not shy away from a willingness to pressure all parties, including Israel, if that is in the best interests of the United States and Israel. Obama did not hesitate to tell his Jewish interlocutors that beyond the special commitment to Israel's security, his policy would be completely even-handed. If it became necessary, Obama said, he would speak to Israelis, as he had done to the Arab and Muslim world, to help them to achieve some kind of self-reflection.

Obama has internalized what his predecessors refused to understand: the traditional supporters of the Israeli right are growing old, or losing their relevance. They are giving way to younger, liberal forces who identify with Obama's values. In the "best" case, Netanyahu's incitement against the "self-hating Jews" will do to them what his whispered comment in the ear of Rabbi Kaduri "those leftists are not Jews" did to Israelis a decade ago - it turned them against him.

Eldar is absolutely correct.

Street cats in Jerusalem

When I first got here in June I arrived just in time for Hebrew Book Week (שבוע הספר). I went off with a friend to the book fair at Gan ha-Pa'amon and bought a few books, including on on the development of the Old City of Jerusalem during the 19th century (Yehoshua Ben-Arieh, Jerusalem in the 19th Century: The Old City, published by Yad Izhak Ben Zvi Institute in 1984). Another one is called חתולי הרחוב שלי ("My Street Cats") by Raphaella Bilski (published by Carmel, 2007). It's about her adventures with Jerusalem street cats over the last 14 years. She is a professor of government at the Hebrew University, focusing on politicaly philosophy.

This is a very sweet book, which reveals quite a bit about the author as well as the cats she writes about. She writes about the first cat who came to her garden - Kitsoshi, about how families of cats established themselves in her garden and in the cat pergola which she set up for them, about the friendship between cats (including two female cats who raised their kittens together), about the trauma when her neighbors become angry with her because she had so many cats in the garden and she has to send some of them away, about the territories of cats, about how the mothers train their kittens to be good hunters, etc. In the back of the book she gives several cat genealogies, including one for Kitzoshi. She gets very involved in the life of the cats, worries about them, raises abandoned kittens by hand, cries when they die - she is truly a fine cat lady and expresses well the untoward affection that some of us develop for cats.

Elms in the Yard, a Jerusalem blog, frequently posts photos of Jerusalem cats.

To the left is a photo I took in 2004 of a street cat in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City.

More on cats

A friend just stopped by and told me about one of her projects while she's here in Jerusalem - she's photographing one cat a day and sending the picture to her daughter back home in the U.S. I told her about my interest in cat ancestry and the link between domestic cats and wildcats from the Middle East, which made me go back and look again at the New York Times article from 2007 that first piqued my interest in this question. The Times website provides a link to the article in Science from which the information was taken. Amidst the technique discussion of genetics, which I was not able to follow very well, there were some little poetic gems that expressed the conclusions of the article in more understandable language.

The domestic cat may be the world's most numerous pet, yet little is certain of the cat's origin. Archaeological remains and anthropological clues suggest that, unlike species domesticated for agriculture (e.g., cow, pig, and sheep) or transport (horse and donkey), the cat probably began its association with humans as a commensal, feeding on the rodent pests that infested the grain stores of the first farmers. The earliest evidence of cat-human association involves their co-occurrence in Cyprus deposits determined to be 9500 years old. Domestic cats are generally considered to have descended from the Old World wildcats, but they differ from these hypothesized progenitors in behavior, tameness, and coat color diversity....

These 15 individuals [Middle Eastern wildcats] had concordant mtDNA and STR phylogenies identical to those of domestic cats and were collected in remote deserts of Israel, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, or Saudi Arabia. These data suggest that these Near Eastern wildcats may represent the ancestral founder population of domestic cats, supporting a domestication origin in the Near East....

The domestication of wild species to complement human civilization stands as one of the more successful "biological experiments" ever undertaken. For cats, the process began more than 9000 years ago when the earliest farmers of the Fertile Crescent domesticated grains and cereals as well as livestock. In parallel, the endemic wildcats of the region may have adapted by both regulating the rodents in the grain stores and abandoning their aggressive wild-born behaviors. The archaeological imprints left in the genomes of living cats here weigh into inferences about the timing, steps, and provenance of domestication—a dynamic exercise depicted in art, in history, and in human cultural development since recorded evidence began.

Much more pleasant to contemplate than humans rioting!

Still more riots in Jerusalem!

I'm listening to the reports tonight on Reshet Bet about the renewed riots tonight in Jerusalem. Apparently, there are thousands of Haredi rioters on Rte. 1 in the Bet Yisrael neighborhood throwing rocks and attacking police. Many have been arrested. Ten police have been injured by the rioters. The reporter speaking now on Reshet Bet mentions a big demonstration on Zaks St. in the Shmuel ha-Navi neighborhood, as well as speeches in Yiddish by rabbis speaking now in Kikar Shabbat telling the Haredim not to give up.

According to an article on the Hebrew Ynet page, the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, is involving himself in the conflict, contacting the Jerusalem municipality, the police, and the Haredim, in an effort to calm tempers.

Jerusalem Police Chief Cmdr. Aharon Franco said Thursday evening that over the past day there "was a marked escalation" in the rioting of haredim in Jerusalem, warning that the level of violence was rising, "both towards municipal workers and towards public infrastructure."

Franco, who was speaking in a press conference, directed some veiled criticism at the government for failing to find a solution to the incessant friction between the extremist elements in the haredi community and the police. "We're talking about a capital city and not enough has been done on the national level in order to calm down the situation," he said.

Warning of further dangers that could arise due to the rioting, Franco said, "They've dismantled traffic lights, and without traffic lights deadly accidents could take place. They've disconnected systems in electricity poles and people could be electrocuted.

"I have not found a single place in the Bible where it is written that these actions are permissible," he added.

According to Haaretz, Franco also criticized the leaders of the Haredi community for not doing anything to cool the tempers of the rioters.

"There is not one sane voice within the Haredi community that will rise up and cry out against this phenomenon," Franco said. "They have rabbis, they have leadership, and I haven't heard the rabbis or sages crying out."

For those curious to know exactly where today's rioting occurred, Haaretz has helpfully put up links to Google maps.

The rabbi of the Toldos Aron group (to which the woman arrested for abusing her son belongs) announced today at a demonstration in Kikar Shabbat that the members of his group should continue fighting the woman's arrest "until the last drop of blood."

I just discovered a blog called Shearim, whose author is a woman who lives in Jerusalem and is fascinated by Hasidim and goes to many Hasidic events, although she is apparently not Haredi herself. Her blog describes many visits to the Toldos Aron synagogue and other Toldos Aron events.

Neturei Karta meet with Haniyeh in Gaza

Some things you just cannot make up. While Neturei Karta in Jerusalem is rioting against the arrest of a woman accused of starving her son, other members of Neturei Karta meet with Haniyeh in Gaza. They apparently arrived in Gaza on one of the boats that international "peace" activists have been trying to land there.

Today, in Jerusalem, three people were hurt by stones thrown by rioters, workers were evacuated from welfare bureau offices when threatened by stone-throwing Haredim, Haredim also threw stones at the windows of the Education Ministry, hurled stones at police officers, set fire to trash cans, and the police stopped dozens of Haredim trying to reach Jaffa Rd. See also the Jerusalem Post report on today's occurrences - Workers evacuated as haredim stone welfare office.

More riots in Jerusalem

While, thank God, we have not had to suffer from terrorist attacks, Jerusalem haredi riots spread to Beit Shemesh. Now the riots are not about a) the gay pride march, or b) the opening of a parking garage on Shabbat, but c) the arrest of a Haredi mother suspected of starving her son, so that at the age of three, he only weighed about 15 lbs.

In a hearing held earlier in the day at the Jerusalem District Court, the head of the special investigation team said of the reactions to the mother's arrest: "There were tactics here befitting organized crime. Doctors, police officers and witnesses were all threatened."

Police are continuing to collect testimonies from doctors who treated the toddler, who is currently hospitalized at Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital for severe malnutrition. Experts have posited that the woman in question suffers from Munchausen by proxy. Welfare officials suspicious that she may be actively harming her son set up cameras in the boy's hospital room, allowing the investigators to catch the mother on tape disconnecting the child's feeding tube.

While the first two reasons for rioting make some sense within the Haredi worldview, this last example completely baffles me.

Here are some statements by demonstrators:

"We know the family," said demonstrator Yaakov Avraham Fruchter. "It's a good family, and no one ever sinned … It's just a blood libel."

Chana Weisvish also called the woman's arrest the "blood libel of 2009."

"She said something to the big doctor that didn't suit him, so he said to her 'You won't see your son for three years,' and he took revenge on her. So he brought social workers that testified against her that she's not a good woman …

"We will not be silent about it, because if they can get away with it once, then they'll do it again."

Another onlooker agreed, saying: "I am sure that she is innocent. I know her personally, she is a woman who nurtures her children, nurtures her house, nurtures everything. A pure woman. She sits all day, from eight in the morning until 10 at night, every day by her son … It's really not appropriate for a religious woman to sit with those criminals, women with drugs in jail."

Well, if the woman actually did what she is accused of, she is certainly not religious in my understanding of the term, which includes treating other people kindly! There's clearly something else going on here. The news reports merely say that she's part of an "extremist" group in the Haredi world, without going into any detail about who it is and why they would react in this way.

According to the Failed messiah blog, the woman belongs to the Toldos Aron Hasidic sect - which is indeed one of the most extreme, ascetic parts of the entire Haredi community. Another article on Ynet said that she is part of Neturei Karta.

What happened to the suicide bombers of Jerusalem?

Christopher Hitchens writes on the question: What happened to the suicide bombers of Jerusalem?

Since I am currently in Jerusalem, this is obviously a matter of some personal concern to me. Hitchens makes the important point that while the supply of people who are willing to become suicide bombers may be affected by despair (political, personal, economic, religious), what is really important is whether the "Nasty, vicious, fanatical old men, not human emotions, were making the decisions and deciding the days and the hours of death." Since Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade leaders stopped sending people, for whatever reason, the suicide bombings have stopped (at least for now).

He does, of course, cite a number of other factors, like Israeli targeted assassinations at leaders of the terrorist groups, and the building of the גדר הפרדה (variously translated as separation fence or wall), which made it harder for bombers to get into Israel proper.

Yesterday I went to the Old City to do some research for the course on Jerusalem that I'm teaching in the fall, and at the end of the day I went to the Cinematheque (on Hebron Rd., across the Gei Ben Hinnom valley from the Old City). I discovered that from there I had a very good view of a portion of the separation wall. (And here in Jerusalem at least it's certainly accurate to call it a wall, since it's made of huge slabs of concrete.

Here is a photo of one part of it which can be seen from above the Cinematheque.

Car accidents vs. terrorism

Every time I plan to go to Israel, concerned friends and relatives in the United States ask me if I think it's really safe enough to visit. What they're thinking of is bombs and suicide attackers. But actually, a much higher risk is car accidents, as witnessed this past weekend, when 7 were killed in weekend car accidents. "On Friday, six people were killed in a head-on collision between two cars on Route 38 near Beit Shemesh." The accident was caused by drunk driving and a bad road.

Police said witnesses told them that Maimon [the driver of one of the cars] had been drinking beer with his friends at at a pool party prior to the accident. They also said he had smashed the wing mirror of another car with his speeding vehicle moments before the deadly crash.

Magen David Adom teams that arrived at the scene pronounced the six people dead immediately upon reaching the location, and the injured were taken to Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem.

Traffic Police Chief Cmdr. Avi Ben-Hemo and Jerusalem District Chief Cmdr. Ilan Franco were both called to the scene, and Franco said relatives of the families arrived and started scuffling after the accident.

Route 38 is narrow and contains many sharp turns and many segments of it are blocked from view by foliage. There is no physical barrier between the lanes and the road is used by many trucks on a daily basis. Beit Shemesh residents have warned in the past that the road is dangerous.

Are American Jews getting more conservative?

I got into an argument last night with some friends here in Israel about whether American Jews are getting more conservative politically/supporting Republicans more. Their opinion was that American Jews were tending more Republican and more right-wing in general in their politics. My opinion was that American Jews remained quite liberal compared to the rest of the American population, based on how they vote in presidential elections. (I thought that they, surprisingly, were following the views of people like the Republican Jewish coalition, which keeps saying that American Jews are about to break massively for the Republicans - but then they never do). Other factors entered the argument, like how American Jews' customary liberalism affects how they feel about Israel, and whether American Jews have gotten more right-wing on Israel than in the past. I just took a look and found the statistics for Jewish voting in presidential elections from 1960 to 2008. There were some surprising results (for me).

I hadn't realized how much Jewish support Carter had lost from 1976 to 1980. An article that I just read on the net (The Israel Swing Factor: How the American Jewish Vote Influences U.S. Elections) recapitulates some of the events that led to that lessening of support (one was the U.S. ambassador to the UN voting in favor of an anti-Israel resolution in the Security Council). This was quite helpful to Reagan, who received 39% of the Jewish vote in 1980, the highest percentage received by any Republican presidential candidate since Eisenhower in 1956 received 40% of the Jewish vote. Jews also voted in greater numbers for Nixon in 1972 than I had recalled (35%). Since 1992, no Democratic presidential candidate has received less than 3/4 of the Jewish vote.

Jewish vote in presidential elections

1960 - 82% Kennedy; 18% Nixon
1964 - 90% Johnson; 10% Goldwater
1968 - 81% Humphrey; 17% Nixon; 2% Wallace
1972 - 65% McGovern; 35% Nixon
1976 - 71% Carter; 27% Ford
1980 - 45% Carter; 39% Reagan; 15% Anderson
1984 - 67% Mondale; 31% Reagan
1988 - 64% Dukakis; 35% GHW Bush
1992 - 78% Clinton; 11% GHW Bush; 9% Perot
1996 - 78% Clinton; 16% Dole; 3% Perot
2000 - 79% Gore; 19% GW Bush; 1% Nader
2004 - 76% Kerry; 24% GW Bush; <1% Nader
2008 - 78% Obama; 22% McCain

I doubt that these statistics would bring my argument with my friends to an end, but they do show that at least by one measure, Jews have not trended significantly more Republican since 1992.

News bad and good

According to a posting on Harry's Place, citing an article in The Times, the Tamil death toll ‘is 1,400 a week’ at Manik Farm camp in Sri Lanka. This is one of the places that the Sri Lankan government sent Tamil refugees at the end of the war with the Tamil Tigers. The Times reports:

The death toll will add to concerns that the Sri Lankan Government has failed to halt a humanitarian catastrophe after announcing victory over the Tamil Tiger terrorist organisation in May. It may also lend credence to allegations that the Government, which has termed the internment sites “welfare villages”, has actually constructed concentration camps to house 300,000 people.

The Sri Lankan government is telling international aid agencies, like the International Committee of the Red Cross, to scale down their activities, with the explanation that since the war is over, their services are not needed any more. One of the commenters on Harry's Place expressed skepticism about the high number of deaths, but the Times article explained it this way:

Aid workers and the British Government have warned that conditions at the site are inadequate. Most of the deaths are the result of water-borne diseases, particularly diarrhoea, a senior relief worker said on condition of anonymity.

Witness testimonies obtained by The Times in May described long queues for food and inadequate water supplies inside Manik Farm. Women, children and the elderly were shoved aside in the scramble for supplies. Aid agencies are being given only intermittent access to the camp. The Red Cross was not being allowed in yesterday.

In Iran, on the other hand, protestors took to the streets yesterday by the thousands in Tehran.

Thousands of Iranians poured into the streets of Tehran on Thursday, clapping, chanting, almost mocking the authorities as they once again turned out in large numbers in defiance of the government’s threat to crush their protests with violence.

As tear gas canisters cracked and hissed in the middle of crowds, and baton-wielding police officers chased protesters up and down sidewalks, young people, some bloodied, ran for cover, but there was an almost festive feeling on the streets of Tehran, witnesses reported in e-mail exchanges.

Associated Press

And for a third, interesting story from Israel, check out the ancient mosaic floor that has been discovered in Lod:

The late-Roman-era mosaic floor, one of the largest and finest in Israel, was unveiled by the authorities last week for just the second time since it was discovered 13 years ago in the dilapidated eastern section of this poor town near the international airport, south of Tel Aviv.

Some 1,700 years old, the magnificent tiled floor spreads over almost 2,000 square feet, shaded from the harsh summer sun by a thin awning and surrounded by a canvas fence. A panoply of colorful depictions of birds, fish, exotic animals and merchant ships, the mosaic conjures up an intriguing reminder of Lod’s more glorious past.

The archaeologists of the Israel Antiquities Authority believe the mosaic, which lacks any inscriptions, was commissioned by a wealthy individual who owned a grand villa here. Lod, which is mentioned in the Bible, was an important center in ancient times, and this part of it is known to have been a neighborhood of the rich.

Today, the site is overlooked by drab apartment blocks with laundry hanging on lines out of windows, surrounded by garbage-strewn yards. A mixed city of Jewish immigrants and Muslim and Christian Arabs, modern Lod is usually associated with hardship, its diverse population largely of low socioeconomic standing and often described by local officials as a challenge.

Now, though, the authorities here hope to revitalize Lod and turn it, of all things, into a major tourist destination thanks to the treasures lurking under the city’s more modern layers of earth.

McKinney, Burston

As much as I disagree with former U.S. congresswoman McKinney on the issue of Israel and probably many other things as well, why was she only released from detention now after having been detained with the other people on the ship going to Gaza on June 30? What kind of threat could she possibly have offered to Israel?

On a related topic, read Bradley Burston's latest column in Haaretz - This is what is wrong with a Jewish state. He writes:

The undercurrent of racism in this year's election campaign was a clear warning. Overtly anti-Israeli Arab legislation and bills aimed at curbing Arab freedom of expression have soiled the concept of a Jewish state to a nadir that Israel's worst, most energetic enemies have never managed to approach.

The outpouring of hatred has since become an equal-opportunity sewer. Radical settlers and immigrants from the former Soviet Union have voiced unabashed, despicable racist attitudes toward a black president of the United States.

Inevitably, fellow Jews in Israel have become targets of the hatred as well. In Jerusalem, Jews who presume to be among the most devout of all adherents to Judaism, think nothing of attacking fellow Jews on the Sabbath with cinder blocks and glass bottles, all in protest over the opening of a parking lot.

Rabbis in the West Bank give Israel's enemies new ammunition week to week, by condoning killings of Palestinians.

And, in a reference to Israeli Arabs, ultra-Orthodox Housing Minister Ariel Atias this month chose the Bar Association, of all venues, to declare that he saw it as "a national duty to prevent the spread of a population that, to say the least, does not love the state of Israel." He went on to explicitly argue for segregation, not only between Jews and Arabs, but between ultra-Orthodox and secular Jews.

His conclusion:

Hatred has no place in a Jewish state. And a Jewish state which sanctifies intolerance in the name of tradition or patriotism, will inevitably prove unwelcome not only to non-Jews, but to the Jewish People as well.

Burston's words are welcome, but the revolting phenomena that he writes about are not new. I remember, in 1988, going to the Kotel with the Women of the Wall. We were trying to pray in the women's section, wearing tallitot, carrying a Torah scroll which we intended to read from. After we set ourselves up and started the morning prayers, Haredi women started to scream at us, and eventually Haredi men from the men's section invaded the women's section and not only screamed at us, but attacked us physically. One man tried to take away the Torah scroll, in the process almost knocking it to the ground. I was knocked down twice, once by a woman and once by a man. The police finally intervened, not to protect us, but to escort us away from the scene, leaving the Haredim alone.

I also remember at about the same time going to leftwing demonstrations sponsored by various organizations, including Peace Now, and having counterdemonstrators scream obscenities and worse at us ("Hitler should have killed you too!"). Once I was participating in a demonstration of Women in Black at Paris Square, and a group of Kahanists came to demonstrate against us, screaming in hatred and threatening us physically. The police came and intervened by tear-gassing all of us.

Naomi Klein in Israel

I turned on Reshet Bet of Kol Israel a few minutes ago, to listen to the morning news show (it's the Israeli Radio news station) and who should they be interviewing but Naomi Klein, who has been visiting Israel and the occupied territories (including Gaza). The interviewer asked her why she visited Israel despite her support of the economic and academic boycott of Israel, and she answered that while she didn't want to support the institutions of the Israeli state, she wanted to engage in dialogue with Israelis. I couldn't quite understand what the interviewer said, but it sounded like she was offered some money for her interview, which she was going to donate to a charity because she didn't want to profit from an Israeli government institution (Israel Radio is part of the Israel Broadcasting Authority, and is run by the state). She's now talking about her thesis on "disaster capitalism" - that terrible disasters like the tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2006 are then exploited by corporations who use the opportunity of destruction to bring in their own businesses and displace local people.

I find it very surprising, for several reasons, that she's being interviewed by Israel Radio. First of all, in the United States, she would be interviewed by left-wing radio networks or shows like Amy Goodman's Democracy Now. Her chances of being interviewed by CNN, for example, are vanishingly small, as far as I know, because of her left-wing economic views. I guess the fact that Israel Radio is interested in interviewing her is a sign that Israel is still much more open than the U.S. to left-wing views, even with Netanyahu as Prime Minister and Avigdor Lieberman as Foreign Minister. (After all, Hadash, the Israeli communist party, has a few seats in the Knesset).

I was also surprised that Israeli Radio would want to interview someone who is so negative about Israel and who advocates the boycott of Israel! And I'm also equally surprised that Naomi Klein would even come to Israel and agree to be interviewed on the state radio station! (To be fair to her, it sounded like much of her time here was spent in Gaza and the West Bank - she said that one of her goals in coming here was to work against the sense of "normalization" that disturbs her in Israel by talking about what is going on in Gaza).

She talked about one thing that I found very interesting - the Israeli advertising campaign in other countries to "re-brand" Israel as a normal country that's worth visiting (rather than a dangerous country of suicide bombings and wars). I remember hearing about this a couple of years ago when the campaign was just starting. Apparently this campaign was first piloted in Toronto, where she lives. I myself was disturbed by the idea that an advertising campaign was the way to change people's minds about Israel, since of course it doesn't deal with any of the actual problems in Israel. But, on the other hand, what advertising campaign does? It just seems a very superficial way to present the official Israeli government position.

On her website she calls for the boycott of Israel in these terms: "It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa."

Her reply to the criticism that Israel isn't South Africa is interesting: "2. Israel is not South Africa. Of course it isn't. The relevance of the South African model is that it proves that BDS tactics can be effective when weaker measures (protests, petitions, back-room lobbying) have failed. And there are indeed deeply distressing echoes of South African apartheid in the occupied territories: the color-coded IDs and travel permits, the bulldozed homes and forced displacement, the settler-only roads."

Her website also explains how she managed to get her latest book published in Israel - by a small left-wing Israeli press called Andalus. She won't be receiving any profits from the book; all will go to Andalus - "In other words, I am boycotting the Israeli economy but not Israelis." She explains more about this in an interview with Ha'aretz published yesterday - Oppose the state, not the people.

One of the things she's done while she's here is go to the weekly protests at Bil'in - see this report on Mondoweiss - Naomi Klein in Bil'in. The weekly protests are against the separation wall.

The contortions that she must go through to prove that even though she's visiting Israel and having her books published here she's still boycotting the Israeli economy are quite amazing. It seems to me that she could extract herself from the charge of hypocrisy if her support for the BDS campaign were a little less knee-jerk and more nuanced - if she said that she intends to support certain parts of the Israeli economy - like left-wing presses - and not other parts, like big Israeli corporations or state institutions.

Sounds of a Jerusalem night plus moon photos

I've been reading the updates from my friends' Facebook pages - those who live in Ithaca - and apparently it's been cold and rainy nonstop. In Jerusalem, on the other hand, it's hot - 35 C this afternoon. I'm living in a small apartment - one room, to be exact, so when I'm home (and awake) I usually leave the door open to the garden. (Unless it's the middle of the day and hot outside). Right now I'm catching whatever breeze there is and listening to the night sounds of Jerusalem.

I hear the breeze rustling the leaves of the pomegranate tree in the garden or the fir tree or palm trees across the street; music in the distance from some outdoor event, which gets louder or softer depending on the wind; sirens in the distance, probably from an ambulance; a few minutes ago, the Muslim call to prayer, again borne by the wind; sounds from the neighbor's apartment; the general roar of the city, composed of cars and trucks driving as well as everything else; a few faint bird calls; a car horn also in the distance; a car driving down this narrow street. Earlier in the evening - a man standing out on the street talking on his cellphone; the kids next door yelling. Now a truck careering down the street with a load on its back.

Palm Tree

Yesterday or the day before I took some photos of the moon - and some of them came out quite well, much to my surprise.

More Haredi protests over parking garage

The war over Shabbat in Jerusalem has been renewed again. Friday night and Shabbat there were huge demonstrations against the opening of a parking garage next to the Old City on Shabbat. According to the report from Channel 2, about 35,000 Haredim protested fairly peacefully Friday night on Bar Ilan Street. On Shabbat and Saturday night there were much more violent demonstrations, resulting in one man being seriously injured (from falling off a fence), four policemen being injured, and a six-year-old boy. About 40 Haredim were arrested by the police. During the day and evening of Saturday, "Hundreds of rioters hurled stones, cans, glass battles and fruit at police while chanting 'Shabbes.' Later in the evening, protestors burned garbage dumpsters in the city." On Saturday afternoon there was also a protest organized by Meretz (left-wing party) in support of opening the parking garage on Shabbat, which was held in Safra Square. The police prevented Haredim from getting to Safra Square and tangling with the secular protesters.





Jerusalem Post report: Thousands of haredim protest opening of J'lem parking lot.

Haaretz report: 28 arrested as Haredim riot over Shabbat opening of parking lot. Report as of Sunday morning: 57 arrested.

Ynet report: Jerusalem shaken by riots.

Another Ynet report from Sunday: Shas official to haredim: Protest, but don't riot.

Despite the various newspaper headlines, not all of Jerusalem is shaken by riots - where I live and where I was yesterday (Baka, Katamon, San Simon, Emek Refaim) was utterly peaceful. The riots are limited to specific Haredi areas of the city, centering on Meah Shearim. The Ynet report from Sunday makes it sound like there are leaders

Protesters:



Police subduing protesters:

Reports on Jerusalem gay pride march

Both Haaretz and Ynet have posted stories about today's pride march. From Ynet - Thousands Take Part in Jerusalem Pride. From Haaretz - Thousands March in Peaceful Gay Pride March in Jerusalem.

A Reuters blog has another interesting perspective on the march. "Despite the cheerful singing and colourful banners, many participants who attend both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem’s gay pride parades, say the Israeli parade in Jerusalem, a holy city for the religious, is markedly different from a similar parade in the secular coastal metropolis of Tel Aviv, held a couple of weeks ago. One Israeli marcher said Jerusalem, as a much more politically divided city, has a very politicized pride parade: 'In Tel Aviv, the Gay Pride parade is more of a party. But in Jerusalem, it’s much more political, like a protest.' Several marchers echoed this sentiment. Na’ama, a member of Bat-Kol, an organization for Orthodox Jewish lesbians, agreed, adding: 'It’s not like a protest-it is a protest. I don’t want to take it for granted that I can walk here. But we also have to fight for other rights, like the right to marry. And we still have a struggle with the rest of the Orthodox community to get them to accept us.'”

Shlomit Or has also posted some photos from the march - Gay Pride Jerusalem.

Today's Gay Pride March in Jerusalem

I went to the gay pride march today in Jerusalem. It was quiet and peaceful. I saw one counter-demonstrator holding a sign - that was it. Otherwise, it was just a big group of people, many wearing or carrying rainbow flags, marching from Gan ha-Pa'amon to Gan ha-Atzma'ut. I saw signs and banners from the Meretz party and from Hadash (Israeli communist party), and some people carrying their own homemade signs. There was very little chanting, except from the two political groups. As before, the whole march was led off by people carrying a rainbow arch of balloons. (I didn't see them myself at the beginning, only at the rally afterwards at Gan ha-Atzma'ut). Oh, and there was a group of clowns too! Very silly.

I went with two friends who were also visiting from the U.S and who were thrilled to go to the march. As before, it was a very Yerushalmi experience - very sweet.

From Jerusalem Gay Pride 2009

Mishmar ha-Gvul (Border Police) guarding the march.

From Jerusalem Gay Pride 2009

"Our son is gay - and we are proud of him!"

From Jerusalem Gay Pride 2009

One of the clowns

From Jerusalem Gay Pride 2009

Flags

From Jerusalem Gay Pride 2009

Gay deely-bobbers

From Jerusalem Gay Pride 2009

Wearing flags

From Jerusalem Gay Pride 2009

flags put up by the Jerusalem municipality

From Jerusalem Gay Pride 2009

marchers from Hadash

From Jerusalem Gay Pride 2009

flag flying from balcony

From Jerusalem Gay Pride 2009

flags on Agron St.

From Jerusalem Gay Pride 2009

and finally, the balloon arch

From Jerusalem Gay Pride 2009

the Jewish gay pride flag

Gay Pride march today in Jerusalem

It appears that today's gay pride march in Jerusalem will be quiet - the Haredi rabbis have decided not to demonstrate against it: Jerusalem expects unprecedented calm at Pride Parade.

A report from last week's Ynet said:

Jerusalem's Pride Parade is scheduled to take place next week, but this year, three years after the international gay pride events that sparked the city, and after two years of more minor protests, the rabbis of the city's ultra-Orthodox community have decided not to demonstrate against the parade.

Throughout the previous protests against the event, there have always been voices from within the community arguing that the educational damage caused by the demonstrations outweighed their good, and the Badatz rabbis have finally given in to such arguments.

A couple of Kahanist extremists, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Baruch Marzel, are unhappy that the haredi rabbis have decided not to oppose the march, and apparently are using the march as an excuse to make trouble in some of Israel's Arab towns.

Right-wing activists led by Knesset Member Michael Ben Ari (National Union) have decided to protest coming Thursday's Gay Pride Parade, scheduled to take place in Jerusalem, by staging a march of their own – in various Arab towns....

Ben Ari, along with extreme right-wing activists Baruch Marzel and Itamar Ben Gvir have formulated an organized response to what they call the "profanity parade" and they intend to ask the police for a permit to stage a march on 15 Arab towns, starting one month after Thursday's parade.

Permits will be filed for marches in Tayibe, Sakhnin, Nazareth, Ar'ara and Baka al Garbia, to name a few. The activists are also planning to stage a picket line in front of the Open House and have hundreds of their supporters perform public information activities in city schools on the day of the parade.

It's hard to imagine that the police would want to give them permits to march in these Arab cities. I haven't heard whether they're demonstrating in front of the Open House today, because I've been sitting in my house all day. It's a really hot day outside and much cooler inside! I am planning to go to the march, however, and will post photos later today.

"I never thought I'd be rooting for Iran"

Finally, it appears that Haaretz has decided to give what's going on in Iran the coverage it deserves - right now all of the major stories on the online edition are about Iran, including an interesting commentary by Bradley Burston. He writes:

I never thought I'd be rooting for Iran

I am in awe of the courage of the people of Iran.

They are giving the world hope. They are teaching a shocking lesson about truth. They embody freedom. And, perhaps hardest to grasp, for those of us who live in the Middle East, they are putting their very lives on the line not for the sake of some ferociously sectarian End of Days, but for the most profoundly radical notion of all - a better life.

Every person who has taken to the streets to demand what their government promised them, free and fair elections, did so knowing that police or secret police could arrest them, act to cripple their careers, or outright gun them down.

When the national soccer team, the sporting love of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's life, took the field in Seoul, and when Iranian state television showed the team captain and most of the squad wearing wrist and arm bands in the green of the reformists, the players knew that there was much more at stake - at risk - for them personally, than whether they would defeat South Korea and advance to a place in the World Cup. The game ended in a 1-1 tie. Iran's fervent hopes of appearing in the quadrennial tournament were all but dashed. But the team had already clinched a victory of momentous proportion. They are quiet lions. They are, in every sense of the word, champions.

I never thought I'd be rooting for Iran. But I'm pulling for them now, hard as I can.

Don't get me wrong. I never swallowed the neo-con view of Tehran as the Great Satan. I didn't take Ahmadinejad's cataclysm threats at face value. I never even quite trusted the sincerity of his anti-Semitism. It seemed, in his hands, like just one more rabble-pandering tool in the kit.

This is, after all, the Middle East, where straight truth is routinely bent around corners to fit, mask, or skirt inconvenient realities.

Still, I have to get used to this. For years I watched the Islamic Republic in the stern public face that the ayatollahs themselves carefully nurtured. It was said that the founding Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni, never allowed himself to be photographed while smiling. More recently, vexed by the ease and the smugness of Ahmadinejad's Jew-hate, I came to view them as a brilliantly well-adapted enemy. While it seemed to me that the odds were against a down spiral and an Israeli-Iranian exchange of ballistic missiles, the word "erase," when used publicly against another country, becomes hard for the mind located in that country to, well, erase.

In trying to view the Israel-Iran stand-off with equanimity, an official policy of Holocaust denial was little help. Every time I opened the door of the bomb shelter in our basement, I could see Ahmadinejad's grin in the darkness.

Now, though, the people in Tehran's streets have made it possible to begin to see past Ahmadinejad. I have to get used to Iran not as a cartoon bully, but as my neighbor. Not because they will go nuclear - though nuclear they may well go. But because it is a nation of people, as we are, not pawns in an increasingly obsolete revolution.

It often seems that fundamentalism is the curse of the Middle East. In Israel, in Palestine, in Lebanon, in Iraq and Iran, it appears at first glance that it is fundamentalism that keeps peace at bay, that it has cursed Israel with settlements and faith-based racism, that it has cursed the Palestinians with anti-Jewish incitement and dated ideology which has kept statehood a practical impossibility, that it makes Hezbollah worship weaponry over all else, and has spurred brother Muslims, Shi'ites and Sunnis in Iraq, to suicide bomb each other's mosques, and each other.

But this view is too simple. It fails to take into account the fact that it is not religion per se, but its unholy marriage with politics, that yields the excesses that rob people of their freedom, dignity, and a future of peace. When fundamentalism becomes revolution, the truth that is in religion, becomes the first casualty.

And make no mistake. We are all revolutionaries here. And when everyone is a member of one revolution or another, the struggles are bound to collide. In Israel alone, the founding rival revolutions (socialist Zionism versus right-wing Revisionism) which have succumbed to age and irrelevance, have been replaced by the deadlock between the settler/no compromise revolution on the one hand, and the software/global-outlook two-state revolutionaries of the new center. The Palestinians have a similar dichotomy, with the aging onetime-Marxists of Fatah battling the middle-aging Armani Islamists of Hamas.

In the wider Middle Eastern theater, the fundamentalist revolution of neo-conservatism clashed with - and thus fueled - the various rival revolutions of Islamism.

The saving grace, for this reason, may be the circumstance that for all their talk of permanency and messianic solutions, revolutions, like the people who run them, age. At some point, when they no longer serve their stated goals, or their people, they begin to die.

Enter, at this point, the world revolutionary named Barack Obama. The revolution he has declared is one that has resonated here with telling effect. Perhaps because it explicitly values quality of life over confrontation, peoplehood over dogma.

When Obama ran a campaign on a platform of change, few expected that, after carrying 28 states and the District of Columbia, he would carry Lebanon as well. Iran may be next. Where do we fit in? Israel and Palestine may take time. They are tough territory for moderates. And revolutionaries do not relinquish their struggles easily. But if recent events are any measure, Obama is not just any moderate.

In the meanwhile, let us return the favor of the people of Iran, and offer our hopes.

It is time for us to wear the green.

A few years ago, when I began to read a few Iranian blogs (Kamangir, for example), I started to get the feeling of Iranians as real people, not just as stick figures in a morality play - the evil figures of the Iranian revolution who kept Americans hostage (remember the Nightline show - "America Held Hostage" - for 444 days before Reagan became president), or Iran as member of the "Axis of Evil." What has been happening since the election last week only confirms this realization. I am rooting for the people of Iran. I hope they win, although I fear that they won't. I hope this will not be like Tianenmen Square, but more like the slow breaking in of glasnost in the Soviet Union. This is why I'm so depressed when I read defeatist articles by people who, it seems to me, don't want the Iranians to succeed. (Like Meir Dagan). As Andrew Sullivan has been saying obsessively, this matters - a lot.

When I decided to come to Israel this summer, one of the things I worried about is whether a war could break out - with Hezbollah, with Iran. Would Israel decide to bomb the Iranian nuclear installations to forestall the creation of an Iranian bomb? Hezbollah losing the Lebanese elections lowered the threat of war on the northern front, it seems to me. And if these protests in Iran are not crushed by the power of the state, if there is a way for this new opening of the people actually to affect the actions of the Iranian state - then that lowers the threat of war between Israel and Iran, a war which would be disastrous for both nations.

I think we should primarily hope that the people of Iran win for their sake - for the sake of a better life and a better future for them. This isn't about us. But if they win, it may lead to a better future for all of us.

Is it really better for Israel if Ahmedinejad is elected?

Maybe it's that I have the perspective of an American, not an Israeli, but I am finding it very odd how little coverage there is of Iran in the Israeli press and radio. I've been listening to Reshet Bet (the news station of Israel Radio) and most of the news and discussion is about internal Israeli issues. I would expect this at normal times, but these are not normal times. Last night I watched the Channel 1 news, and the reporting on Iran was very superficial. Iran was not the first news item, which I expected it to be. And some of the analyses that I've read in the Israeli press strike me as truly misguided, for example the article by Amos Harel in Haaretz a couple of days ago:

And in this case, paradoxically, it seems that from Israel's point of view the victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is actually preferable. Not only because "better the devil you know," but because the victory of the pro-reform candidate will paste an attractive mask on the face of Iranian nuclear ambitions.

So it's better for Israel that Iran be led by a Holocaust-denying antisemite than by someone whom the majority of Iranians believe would improve their lives? At least Aluf Benn, in yesterday's Haaretz, had something more sensible to say:

The prize for this week's most stupid remark has to go to the officials, officers and experts who described Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the candidate Israel prefers to win the election in Iran, and were even happy he did. It is hard to think of a more blatant manifestation of the narrow horizons of Israeli strategic thinking.

Jerusalem morning

I just woke up, and it's still dark outside, but I found it impossible to stay asleep because it's one of those gorgeous Jerusalem mornings - the air is cool and the foggy air is starting to clear up, and the birds are singing. The place where I'm staying has a lovely garden where I sat out last night with a friend talking while the cool breezes start to blow across the city.

5:01 am. Ah now, another morning sound - a bus going down Derekh Beit Lehem! The birds are really tuning up for their morning performance too. The house where I'm staying has a synagogue right next to it, so I would expect to hear people coming soon for shacharit.

5:11 am. I've just been reading the updates on the New York Times Lede blog about what's happening in Iran. It feels much closer here than it did in Ithaca (well, it is closer! but not just geographically). A reader of mine commented on my last post that the Israeli television news did cover Iran extensively last night - I was only listening to the radio so I didn't see it.

5:17 am. Even more and louder birds! Especially some loud crows. I love listening to the birds wake up, it's a pity that I don't usually like to wake up early enough to hear them.

5:22 am. I was just reading a posting by Jeffrey Goldberg about Iran that makes a lot of sense to me:

I understand his point [of Meir Dagan - see here], and yet am repulsed by it at the same time, perhaps because I care mainly about which Iranians have the bomb, rather than whether Iran has the bomb. Maybe this is naive -- and maybe I'm caught up, as a suspected neocon fellow traveler, in the excitement of watching Middle Easterners attempting to free themselves from such an obviously tyrannical regime -- but I have to think that the people flooding the streets in protest are not the sort of people who would want to see their country enter a nuclear confrontation with Israel. Not, God forbid, because they like Israel, but because they're rational enough, and interested enough in the betterment of their own lives, to demand a government that puts a limit on Iran's foreign adventures. I recognize that the people of Iran do not currently shape their country's nuclear policy -- and their country's policies to Israel and the West -- but one can hope for better days, when they do.

5:25 am. It's starting to get markedly lighter out, with a light blue sky coming into view. One of the books that I was reading on the planes over here was Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis II. I still haven't finished it. Her first book is a very interesting personal perspective on the Iranian Revolution; the second one recounts her experiences in Vienna when her parents sent her out of the country during the Iran-Iraq war. I'm now reading about her return to Iran after she finished her studies in Vienna and had some unhappy experiences there. I wonder what she's saying right now about the struggles in Iran.

I just discovered, with a little searching, that in 2005 she briefly had a blog on the New York Times website. She has something interesting to say about Israel and Iran, but it doesn't continue after 2005.

She and another filmmaker have presented a document to Green Party MPs in the European Parliament about the Iranian election:

Brussels, 16 June (AKI) - Two Iranian filmmakers on Tuesday presented a document to Green Party MPs in the European parliament claiming to show that defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi had received over 19 million votes in the weekend election.

Marjane Satrapi, Iranian author and director and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, an Iranian filmmaker and Mousavi spokesman, presented a document that they claimed had come from the Iranian electoral commission.

The document said liberal cleric and former parliament speaker Mehdi Karroubi came second in the election with a total of 13.3 million votes, while president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came third with only 5.49 million votes.

However, there is no certainty about the legitimacy of the document.

"Ahmadinejad received only 12 percent of the vote, not 65 percent," said Marjane Satrapi, who was the director of Oscar-nominated film Persepolis.

Makhmalbaf, a representative for Mousavi abroad, called the declaration of Ahmadinejad's victory a "coup d'etat" and appealed to the international community not to recognise it.

He explained that Mousavi had called him from Tehran, asking him to inform the world of what is really going on in Iran.

"What happened is not an electoral fraud, but a coup d'etat," he said.

Makhmalbaf claimed that Mousavi was informed of Ahmadinejad's victory by the interior ministry and told to prepare a speech.

"Few minutes later, an army general entered his (Mousavi) office, and told him that they would not allow a green revolution (green is the colour used by Mousavi for his campaign)," he said.

"It did not take long, until the State TV declared Ahmadinejad winner with more than 65 percent".

"If anyone asked themselves whether the Iranian people are ready for democracy, the answer is yes, and we showed it by voting, but we were robbed of the vote. Now we need international support."

In Israel Now

I just arrived in Israel this afternoon after several long flights (Swiss Air is efficient but the seat was incredibly uncomfortable!). I'm settling back into the apartment I stayed in last summer, which is really nice. I have the feeling that I'm coming back to a place I know, rather than staying some place that I have to get to know. It's a cool evening in Jerusalem and it's nice to be here. I will probably be taking it pretty easy this week - seeing friends and getting adjusted to the time change.

One thing I noticed this evening listening to the news broadcast on Reshet Bet is how little notice was taken of the extraordinary events taking place in Iran right now. Mention of protests against Ahmedinejad's "re-election" was way down in the broadcast. I found this strange, considering how important Iran is to Israel and especially how it's developing its nuclear program. Well, maybe in the morning they'll have more reporting.

I'm going to bed soon - somehow getting almost no sleep for one night has a way of exhausting a person....

Gay Pride in Jerusalem 2009

This year's gay pride march (June 25) will march in the opposite direction from the route of the last two years. It will start at Gan Ha-Pa'amon at 4:00 p.m., with the march itself beginning at 5:00 and proceeding to Gan Ha-Atzmaut for a rally at 6:00 p.m. In a way, I think the route change is a pity, since for the last two years it's meant that one can then easily walk further on to Emek Refaim to enjoy hanging out with friends after the rally. It should be fun, in any case, as long as there aren't Haredi riots against the march.

So that's what you meant, Rev. Wright!

Jeremiah Wright Walks Back "Them Jews" Remark: He Meant To Say "Zionists."

Shooting at Holocaust Museum

Brian Beutler, on Talking Points Memo, asks whether the "Holocaust Museum Shooting Vindicates the DHS Report." This is the report that was issued in April warning about the rise of right-wing extremist groups. He writes,

Let's take stock of what's happened in the months since President Obama was elected just over six months ago, and in the weeks since the DHS story broke. In November, the New York Times reported that "gun owning" Americans - responding to rumors that the incoming administration would confiscate their weapons - had embarked on a shopping binge and were hoarding guns and ammunition. By the time Obama was inaugurated, the climate of fear on the far right had grown hotter. In February, MSN's moneyblog noted that the surge in sales had led, unsurprisingly, to a surge in gun stock prices.

Then on Sunday May 31 of this year, George Tiller - a Witchita doctor who provided late term abortions - was murdered while attending church services, allegedly by a right wing anti-abortion zealot named Scott Roeder.

And today, a white supremacist, Obama birth certificate conspiracy theorist - and World War II veteran -named James W. von Brunn entered the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with a shotgun and opened fire, killing one guard.

Of course, the plural of anecdote isn't data--but this is just the sort of violent extremism the DHS report warned about.

And these two murders are not the only ones motivated by violent right-wing extremism. David Neiwert and Sara Robinson of Orcinus have followed many stories very closely since before Obama's election about right-wing violence and attempted violence against African-Americans and other racial minorities, Jews, liberals (remember the shooting at a Unitarian-Universalist church last summer?), and police ("Two months ago, Richard Poplawski, a right-wing extremist, allegedly gunned down three police officers in Pittsburgh, in part because he feared the non-existent "Obama gun ban"). See Neiwert's post today on Crooks and Liars about the killing at the Holocaust Museum.

Jeffrey Goldberg has a whole series of posts from today about the shooting. (And for an extra-added dollop of anti-semitism, see the comment by Jeremiah Wright on whether he'll be speaking to President Obama anytime soon - "Them Jews aren't going to let him talk to me. I told my baby daughter, that he'll talk to me in five years when he's a lame duck, or in eight years when he's out of office." Or never, one hopes).

David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, comments today in the Washington Post:

This represents something else that is perhaps distinct to Jews in America compared to other groups. Other religious targets may be subject to vandalism or even discriminatory acts, but there are few other religious institutions that day in and day out must be concerned about acts of terrorism in the form of bombs, gun attacks, etc. On many levels Jews have been and remain the quintessential victims of religious intolerance and hatred in western civilization.

I say that knowing that today Muslim mosques have been targeted for vandalism. We just had a murder take place against a doctor in a church this past week and others are subject to acts of prejudice, but the notion of an entire community being concerned that their house of worship, their institutions might be targets of violent acts anywhere in the country still haunts American Jewry today with all of the successes that America's freedoms have brought to us.

He's correct. It's worthwhile to look at the FBI's hate crime report every year, as I have commented before. Jews are the most targeted of all religious groups in the United States - and Jews are about 2% of the U.S. population. (The group that is most targeted of all in the U.S. is African Americans). In 2007 (the most recent year for which there is a report), 69.2% of the victims of an anti-religious hate crime were Jews.

Of the 1,628 victims of an anti-religious hate crime:

• 69.2 percent were victims of an offender’s anti-Jewish bias.
• 8.7 percent were victims of an anti-Islamic bias.
• 4.3 percent were victims of an anti-Catholic bias.
• 4.1 percent were victims of an anti-Protestant bias.
• 0.5 percent were victims of an anti-Atheist/Agnostic bias.
• 9.1 percent were victims of a bias against other religions (anti-other religion).
• 4.1 percent were victims of a bias against groups of individuals of varying religions (anti-multiple religions, group).

Jerusalem: Haredi riots prompt switch to metal trash cans

Something I have always wondered about is why the Jerusalem municipality keeps putting out new plastic garbage bins (after the old ones have been burned up by Haredi rioters), since the new ones can just as easily be torched the next time people decide it's cool to have a riot. It appears that they've now decided to replace them with metal trash cans.

An article from February 26, 2009 on Ynet, by Ronen Medzini reports on the change:

The Jerusalem Municipality has replaced dozens of plastic garbage bins with noncombustible metal ones, this after recurring ultra-Orthodox riots in protest of the annual Gay Pride Parade have cost the city more than a million shekels over the past five years.

During the past few weeks the new garbage bins have been dispersed throughout the haredi neighborhoods of Mea Shearim, Geula, Kerem Avraham and Shmule Hanavi, where extremist Jews have held violent demonstrations against the municipality and the local police's decisions, including the authorization of the gay parade.

An additional 200 metal bins are expected to be scattered throughout the city over the next few weeks.

City Council Member Sa'ar Netanel (Meretz) found that the riots of 2008, which erupted in protest of the arrest of three "modesty patrol" members, cost the city NIS 150,000 ($36,000).

According to Netanel, the June 2007 protests against the gay parade, during which some 300 trash cans were damaged, cost the city NIS 200,000 ($48,000), and the damages caused during haredi protesters in 2005 were estimated at NIS 100,000 ($24,000).

Haibun

My friend Nicola Morris has just published a haibun at "Ink Sweat & Tears - the poetry and prose webzine."

And what is a haibun? "a prose narrative, sometimes very brief, sometimes long, followed by a haiku."

Riots in Jerusalem

I'm going to Jerusalem in a week, and it appears that the summer rioting season has started early. Last night Haredim in Mea Shearim rioted against the "city's decision to open a municipality-owned lot on Shabbat."

The clashes, which began Saturday night, were held under the banner of 'The Battle for Jerusalem'. Thousands of ultra-Orthodox men tried to storm the lot in Safra Square, many of whom threw rocks, dirty diapers and other objects at security forces. Both Saturday and again on Sunday, demonstrators lit trash cans on fire and blocked roads....

Haredi organizers submitted and were granted a request to hold the protest, but promised to limit their activities to gathering and reading from the Torah.

Police fear that the weekend riot is only the tip of the iceberg. Haredi leaders have already issued a formal announcement that they would protest every Saturday until the lot was closed. "I think this was just the opening move," Zaka Chairman Moshe Meshi Zahav said Saturday. "It's very comfortable for the haredi community to paint Barkat as anti-religious; the time is ripe for that. The fact that the first day of the protest garnered thousands showed that it was a success.

Protestors set garbage bins on fire (Photo: Gil Yohanan)

And this is why the municipality decided to open the parking garage:

Over the last several years, all parking lots near the Old City were closed on Shabbat due to haredi pressure. But after a recent decision to bar vehicles from entering the Old City itself on Shabbat, a parking solution for the visitors became more pressing, since many drivers just parked their cars in no-parking zones around the Old City.

I hope that similar riots will not greet this year's Gay Pride March in Jerusalem, which is scheduled for June 25.

Adventures in Anti-Semitic Implicature — Crooked Timber

This is a very odd response to the study by Malhotra and Margalit about "Antisemitism and the economic crisis."

John Holbo writes:

Basically, a weirdly high number of responses to “How much to blame were the Jews for the financial crisis?” were in the ‘moderate’ to ‘a great deal’ range. 32% of Democrats and 18% of Republicans ‘blame the Jews’ at least moderately for the financial crisis. I realize there is such a thing as the crazification factor. But that’s still pretty high. (I’m guessing the Republican numbers are lower in part because high numbers of them don’t actually admit there’s a crisis. They might be more willing to blame the Jews if it were made clear that they weren’t thereby committed to conceding the existence of the thing the blame is for. But that’s just an unscientific guess.)

The weird thing, of course, is that people are willing to go with ‘the Jews’ as a cohesive, mass-noun sort of designation. In part, people must be responding the way they do on the basis of a vague awareness that there are lots of Jewish names in the stories about the financial crisis. Bernie Madoff, for example. That is, they are saying: among those responsible (if we assume those at the top of the financial world are responsible) there were a number of Jews.

Has Holbo never heard of anti-semitic conspiracy theories that Jews control the banking system? Has he never heard of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? He writes as if it is a new thing in human history that people refer to "the Jews." Unfortunately, this has been true since about the second or third century C.E., when Christian anti-Judaism really got into swing blaming "the Jews" for the death of Jesus. How could an educated person in our day and age not be aware of such conspiracy theories?

The original article appears at the Boston Review

Here's a couple of paragraphs on the statistics:

In order to assess explicit prejudice toward Jews, we directly asked respondents “How much to blame were the Jews for the financial crisis?” with responses falling under five categories: a great deal, a lot, a moderate amount, a little, not at all. Among non-Jewish respondents, a strikingly high 24.6 percent of Americans blamed “the Jews” a moderate amount or more, and 38.4 percent attributed at least some level of blame to the group.

Interestingly, Democrats were especially prone to blaming Jews: while 32 percent of Democrats accorded at least moderate blame, only 18.4 percent of Republicans did so (a statistically significant difference). This difference is somewhat surprising given the presumed higher degree of racial tolerance among liberals and the fact that Jews are a central part of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition. Are Democrats simply more likely to “blame everything” thus casting doubt on whether the anti-Jewish attitudes are real? Not at all. We also asked how much “individuals who took out loans and mortgages they could not afford” were to blame on the same five-point scale. In this case, Democrats were less likely than Republicans to assign moderate or greater blame.

Educational attainment also correlates with variation in anti-Semitic attitudes. Whereas only 18.3 percent of respondents with at least a bachelor’s degree blamed the Jews a moderate amount or more, 27.3 percent of those lacking a 4-year degree did so. Again, we get a similar reversal when examining the blameworthiness of individuals who took out loans they could not afford.

I think that these results are entirely in concert with past experiences of rising anti-semitic attitudes during times of economic crisis. Anti-semitic beliefs are like a subclinical infection - when the immune system is robust, the person doesn't get sick, but when it weakens, the person begins to have symptoms. These are beliefs that are "out there" in the body politic that people can have recourse to explain why things are so bad for them. I would suspect that a fair number of those blaming "the Jews" at this time would normally not exhibit anti-semitic prejudices.

It's interesting to compare an ADL survey from 2005. From the press release announcing the study:

The 2005 Survey of American Attitudes Towards Jews in America, a national poll of 1,600 American adults conducted March 18 through March 25, found that 14 % of Americans - or nearly 35 million adults - hold views about Jews that are "unquestionably anti-Semitic," compared to 17% in 2002, Previous ADL surveys over the last decade had indicated that anti-Semitism was in decline. Seven years ago, in 1998, the number of Americans with hardcore anti-Semitic beliefs had dropped to 12% from 20 % in 1992.

"When it comes to Jews, old stereotypes die hard," said Mr. Foxman, "especially about loyalty, the death of Jesus, and power. For over 40 years one of the most stable and telling indicators of anti-Jewish prejudice in America has been the question of fundamental Jewish loyalty to the U.S. The survey found that 33% of Americans believe Jews are more loyal to Israel than America, no change from 2002. In 1998, it was 31%; in 1992; 35%.

Thirty percent (30%) of the American people believe Jews were responsible for the death of Christ, up from 25% in 2002.

Stereotypes about "Jewish power" in the U.S. have replaced many of the classical ethnic stereotypes previously attributed to Jewish Americans. The survey revealed that while the percentage of Americans who believe Jews have too much power has diminished, Americans who hold the most anti-Semitic views are preoccupied with the perceptions of Jewish power:

"Too much power in the US"

* General population - 15%, down from 20% in 2002
* Most anti-Semitic - 70 %

"Too much power in the Business world"

* General population - 19% down from 23% in 2002
* Most anti-Semitic - 80%

"Too much control of Wall Street"

* General population - 17% down from 20% in 2002
* Most anti-Semitic- 75%

The 2005 study gives some indications of why the response to the recent study results in a higher number of Democrats responding in an anti-semitic way. It has to do with the population composition of people who identify and vote as Democrats: the fact that there is a much higher percentage of African-Americans and Hispanics in the Democratic Party than the Republican. (Let me hasten to say that this does not mean that the Republican Party is generally speaking less racist than the Democrats - the opposite is true, in my opinion).

Regarding one of the most significant and fastest growing segments of the American population, Hispanics, there continues to be an extraordinary gap between those born in the United States and those born abroad, though somewhat less than in 2002. The survey revealed that 35 % of foreign-born Hispanics hold hardcore anti-Semitic beliefs, (down from 44%) while 19 % of Hispanics born in the U.S. fall into the same category (down from 20%). The anti-Semitic propensities of Hispanics were significantly above the national average -- 29% for Hispanics; 14% for all Americans....

The number of African-Americans with strong anti-Semitic beliefs continued to remain high and stable since 1992. The 2005 survey found that 36% of African-Americans hold strong anti-Semitic beliefs, four times more than the 9% for whites. In 1992 it was 37%; 1998 – 34%; 2002- 35%.

Education and age are also important factors:

Education and age also continued to play roles in determining anti-Semitism.

Less educated Americans continue to be more likely to hold anti-Semitic views:

• Education - The more educated a person is, the less likely he or she is to hold anti-Semitic views: 35% of high school graduates hold strong anti-Semitic views, compared to 13% of college graduate and 5% of those who hold post graduate degrees.

• Age – The older a person, the more likely he or she is to hold anti-Semitic views: 24% of adults over the age of 65 hold strong anti-Semitic views, compared to 12% of those 18-29 years old and 11% of those 30-39 years old.

In a post on Crooked Timber, Malhotra and Margalit go into more detail about their methodology and how they arrived at their figures.

It would be nice if people who pontificate about anti-semitism actually knew something about it....