[In my last contribution to the preceding round, I said I’d now turn to the Israeli Arab question. But that is, obviously, an ongoing issue, whereas rescue of Corporal Glad Shalit is an immediately urgent question. Accordingly, I turn here to that matter, postponing consideration of the Arab question for another time.]

Negotiations between Israel and Hamas (via Egypt) regarding the freeing of Corporal Gilad Shalit, now a Hamas prisoner for more than two years, continue. It is difficult to know whether a resolution is close or even whether it is likely. There are considerations that point in different directions, and even thinking about the matter is complicated by the anguished debate that surrounds the recent negotiations with Hezbollah that led to the return of the bodies of Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser and the freeing of Samir Kuntar and others.
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Now and again, I step aside to enable someone else to take the lead in our conversation. This time, I do so with both pleasure and trepidation. Our guest is Bernard Chazelle, whose essay is a very dark and at the same time enlightening essay on Israel/Palestine. It appeared in Counterpunch last month; I am happy that Professor Chazelle has enabled us to reprint it here.

Why Israel Won’t Accept a Two-State Solution

By BERNARD CHAZELLE
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How to summarize a 16-day visit to Israel that was half political and half personal?

Four observations:

1. As I have been writing with ever-greater emphasis, political conversation is at the barest minimum. Save for the political class itself and the passionate few on either side of the spectrum, people are not tuned in at all. And the reason for that, I am convinced, is that there is nothing new to say. Nothing. Everything that can be said has been said, over and over. Does it really matter whether there are 550 check-points and barriers or 600? Even the announcement of thousands of new building permits elicits no more than a yawn. Sarkozy makes a very bold speech to the Knesset, affirming France’s enduring friendship towards Israel, denouncing Iran, and stating, quite emphatically, that there must be no more expansion of the settlements – and beyond taking vague notice that he has come and he has gone, little of substance is reported, less registers. (The splash of his drop-dead gorgeous wife is another matter.) The newspapers continue to scream their headlines, outrages of corruption here, new threats to Israel’s safety there, but it is as if they are trying to rouse a somnolent public. And who can say the public is wrong to display such massive indifference to daily events? News of corruption and threats is anything but new, hence not really news, Peace with Syria? Let’s wait to see whether the spastic talks go anywhere before we let ourselves get excited, before we become emotionally invested. Four members of the Knesset go to Hebron to assert the right to witness the indecency of Jewish settlement in the city’s heart, and very hot water is poured on them. The event is not regarded as worth reporting at all.
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Sanctions and such seem very far away just now, as I navigate my way through Israeli seas that can be radically deceiving, so calm on the surface, so churning just below. There are pinpricks of hope against a background of resignation. But even with a cease fire with Hamas now in fragile place, and even with a prisoner exchange with Hezbollah evidently imminent, and even with something new and possibly important developing on the Syrian front, and even with a sudden and unexpected turn towards Lebanon, and even with continuing negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Authority and now and rarely then rumors of some progress there, there’s little political conversation. And I think I know why: Everything that can be said about “hamatzav,” the situation here, has been said, long since, and again and again. For years now, experts and laypeople alike have claimed that “everyone” knows the parameters of the permanent resolution that remains so elusive. The Clinton parameters, or Geneva light, or call it what you will – a shared Jerusalem, no right of return but the admission to Israel of on the order of 100,000 refugees over, say, ten years, borders very near the Green Line, dismantling of all but a handful of settlement blocs, lots of technical stuff (water, security, and so forth).
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Our topic today is sanctions.

First, a well-kept (until now) secret: The annual event known as the AIPAC Policy Conference is a fraud. It is actually only semi-live. With several exceptions to maintain the illusion, the people on the stage are in fact brilliantly designed robots. From year to year, they say the same things, as do the invited keynoters, themselves also robots. With tiny variations, the script is the same from year to year; you know the language: “unshakable,” “ absolute,” “shared values” and so forth. The audience, to the best of my knowledge and with the possible exception of the students who attend (1200 this year) is real, but even up as close as they are, they do not discern the visual and mechanical trick being played on them. It is, in truth, an awesome achievement, never imagined by Si Kenan, who founded AIPAC, nor by Morris Amitay, who led it for six years; rumor has it that Tom Dine, AIPAC’s exec for 13 years, had a glimmer of the idea after a weekend with his artist brother, Jim Dine. But, like so many things about AIPAC, it was actually a lay leader, Larry Weinberg of Los Angeles, who developed the idea and blunted it through to fruition. Curiously – life’s coincidences – it was less the result of Weinberg’s proximity to Hollywood – he was, in fact, deeply engaged with the fortunes of the Portland Trail Blazer, which he owned (and which is brilliantly chronicled by the late David Halberstam in his The Breaks of the Game) than the fact that another Larry Weinberg, who lived not far away, was a brilliant animator, winner of four Clios for special effects as well as an Oscar and sundry other awards, and once raised the possibility with Weinberg I in a different context. One thing led to another, and here we are, in 2008, in the immediate aftermath of the latest and (inevitably) most remarkable production ever. Think of it – three robotic presidential candidates (even though, since “Obama” and “Clinton” spoke the morning after the real Obama had achieved the delegate majority needed to be the party’s nominee, only Obama and McCain were by that time left), one robotic ruling (don’t laugh) Israeli prime minister and one R2D2 incumbent secretary of state. (That’s incumbent, not recumbent.) More attendees than ever.
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There is no reason to be especially optimistic regarding the official resumption of negotiations between Israel and Syria regarding the disposition of the Golan Heights. We have, after all, been here before, down to just a few nettlesome issues that at the time proved impossible to resolve. True, as Churchill famously said (and as Obama seconds), “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.” But if we are to believe the freshet of reactive statements in the wake of the formal announcement of the talks, mediated by Turkey, what is happening now goes well beyond “jawing.” Voices from both nations have made it clear that both know exactly what the “concessions” that are being demanded of them are. Knowing those concessions and nonetheless being prepared to announce the negotiations suggests either desperation or maturity.
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Perhaps it was because of the heightened awareness of Israel during the week of its 60th anniversary celebration. Twice in one week?

Last night, at a reception, a friend approached me. “I’m having a very hard time with Israel,” she said out of nowhere. “Ben [her husband] says it’s because I can’t let go of the myth and I can’t accept the reality.” “Oh,” I replied, “the old Yerushalayim d’malah versus Yerushalayim d’mata problem, eh?” (For those readers less Jewishly literate than she, our tradition posits two Jerusalems, the upper or heavenly Jerusalem and the lower or earthly Jerusalem.)

She is assuredly not alone. As Israel’s reality becomes more and more difficult to ignore, those raised on the myth have some serious adjusting to do – or a serious internal conflict to feel.
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While I work on a rather longer piece that tries to deal with the post-Zionist position put forward with real passion last evening at a conference of Jewish social justice activists – and with the discomfort of many in the gathering with any talk at all of Israel – a quick question.

Here we sit as Ehud Olmert apparently faces indictment on charges of corruption. By now, indictments of senior Israeli officials have lost their shock value. Shlomo Benizri, a member of Knesset (Shas) who was once Minister of Health and then Minister of Labor and Social Welfare (and once attributed two earthquakes to Israel’s tolerant attitude towards homosexuality) has been sentenced to 18 months in jail for receiving bribes, breach of faith, conspiracy to commit a crime and obstruction of justice and moral turpitude. Tzachi Hanegbi (Kadima), currently chair of the Knesset Committee on Security and Foreign Affairs and formerly Minister of Health, of Justice, of Environment and of Public Security, is under indictment for having made 69 political appointments to the Environment Ministry, at least 51 of which were members or relatives of members of Likud’s central committee. He’s accused of fraud and breach of trust and, separately, of election fraud, giving false testimony, taking a false oath and attempting to exert unlawful influence on a voter. (The 33-page indictment includes a list of 321 witnesses for the prosecution.) Former President Katsav has chosen to reject the plea bargain he reached with the A.G. months ago, in which he confessed to sexual harassment, forcible indecent assault and harassing a witness; now it appears that the original charge of rape will be reinstated. Avraham Hirchsohn, former Minister of Treasury (and also of Tourism), will stand trial for fraud, theft, falsifying corporate documents, breach of trust and money laundering, in connection with his alleged theft of some four million shekels from the labor union he headed.

And all those are merely the tip of a very large and very dirty iceberg.

Now, on the one hand, Israel ranks 30th from the top of a list of 179 countries on a scale of corruption – a scale that goes from least corrupt (the very top) to most corrupt. It scores 6.1 on a 10 point scale, and 5.0 is regarded as the cut-off point between “acceptable” levels of corruption and unacceptable levels. By that accounting, things are not as bad as they seem.

But quite plainly, they are not very good.

I wonder whether there is, perhaps, a Jewish propensity for “beating the system.” For a very long time, we were essentially required to beat the system in order to stay alive. We had to cut corners, cheat, lie, get away with things. The systems where we lived were oppressive, and we developed the wits to endure. Might there not have been a near-genetic selection for the live-enhancing ability to make it in spite of the oppression?

Has anyone done anything like systematic work on this question? Is the question simply absurd, meaning there is no such distinctive propensity?

Your thoughts?

(NOTE: The conversation website had an emergency upgrade last week and was down for a significant amount of time. We apologize for the inconvenience.)

Back in the days I was editing Moment Magazine, our managing editor and I had a nearly ritual conversation every six or eight weeks. An article would arrive from one of our favorite contributors, Rabbi Harold Schulweis, arguing eloquently and persuasively that we, the Jews, were too fixated on the Sho’a, the Holocaust. An excess of remembering can bar the path to imagining. Or however he’d chosen to put it this time around.

That in itself would have been problem enough, but I from time to time compounded the problem by writing my own version of essentially the same argument. So each time the latest Schulweis or Fein would land on the desk of our managing editor, she’d come into my office waving the redundant essay and, annoyed, say, “How often are we going to print this same piece?”

To which my invariable answer was, “Until they [our readers] get it right.”

Which is a long way around to lay the groundwork for another go at an issue that keeps raising its head here, in this space.

In our last go ‘round, Dan Schneiderman says, “What a ridiculous idea that you can make peace with people who do not want peace with you. You are suggesting that the arabs [sic] live in peace with you when they cannot even make peace with themselves. Come on, knock it off already.”
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Back in 1978, when Shalom Achshav (Peace Now) was founded, we – dovish type here in America – were overjoyed. At last there was a movement in Israel that embraced and reflected our views.

I was in those days the editor of Moment magazine, and as nearly as I recall, we were the first publication in America to take note of the new movement. And a small group of like-minded people met in New York and decided to send a telegram of commendation to Shalom Achshav’s first major rally in Tel Aviv. We played by the rules of the game: Our telegram was in Hebrew and was sent directly to the movement’s leaders rather than to the press. (Confession: We knew, or at least supposed, that the Shalom Achshavniks in Israel would have the smarts to release our wire to the press – and, indeed, if memory serves, it was duly noted the next day in the Times.)
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