there are settlers from Kiryat Arba encroaching yet again on the land of an Arab family

TO BE NOTED: From Bernard Avishai Dot Com:

"Israeli Intelligence

"I have to tell you, there is a real chance you will get arrested." How can anyone resist a come-on like that? So I joined my friend David Shulman and an intrepid band of students on Ta'ayush's minibus to Hebron this morning.

It seems--so David explained--there are settlers from Kiryat Arba encroaching yet again on the land of an Arab family. The settlers have even thrown up a temporary shack to squat in. Our mission improbable was to occupy the shack and then wait for the police to tell us to leave--which we would refuse to do, unless the illegality of the structure would be acknowledged and (such are our dreams) the shack taken down.

EXCEPT THAT WE never got much beyond the first checkpoint to Hebron after the settlement-suburb of Har Homa. We were met by a police car that stopped our minibus. A cheerful officer (pictured here) showed us an order that declared the whole area we were riding in a closed military zone--an order that seemed to apply only to us, since none of the other vehicles around us were stopped.

One of the students, who obviously knew what she was about better than any of us, challenged the order, since it stated a zone adjacent to a different checkpoint. So the officer confiscated our IDs, and ordered us to follow him to the checkpoint to which the order did apply. Once we got there, his commander formally presented the order to us again. We got our IDs back; turned around and regrouped. At another checkpoint, we met up with some other Ta'ayush activists, who told us that one small group had gotten through. Our minibus, as things turned out, proved to be a kind of decoy.

NOT THE MOST productive way to spend a Sabbath morning, perhaps, but revealing in a way that is almost too silly, and serious, to believe. Why was our minibus, of all vehicles, stopped? There are only two possibilities. The first is that every Palestinian-registered van carrying Israeli-looking people (with no knitted yarmulkes, driving on the Sabbath) is stopped, since this must mean "peace activists"; that the police are now closing the West Bank to protest, though not to settlement. The second possibility (which David strongly believes to be the case) is that some of Ta'ayush's leaders have their phones tapped, or that the intelligence services had our meeting place under observation, and the police were on the lookout for just our group.

Either case, clearly, would represent yet another way the occupation threatens ordinary democratic principles, though the second (after a pleasurable, if momentary, narcissistic buzz) is truly chilling.

Posted by Bernard Avishai "

whether a government will form that will be able to respond to an American initiative, which is the only hope.

From Bernard Avishai:

"The Center: The Players And The Program

If all one means by center is a vague desire to contain Palestinian terrorism yet distance oneself from settlers’ excesses—to do the former without alienating Washington, and the latter without splitting the Jewish people—then a stable majority has been centrist since 1967. But this is a free-floating desire, not the basis of a political identity. You can see how much good vague desire is when others create facts.

ISRAELIS ANGUISH OVER five issues, actually. First, there is the question of whether to rely primarily on military power when dealing with the troubled Middle East. Second, there is the collateral but more ideologically charged question of whether to withdraw from occupied territory, historic Eretz Yisrael, in order to advance to a “two-state solution” with Palestinians. Third, there is the question we have examined thus far, whether a democracy can accord exclusive privileges to legally defined Jews—a question linked to the first two, but not limited by them. Next there is the question, tucked into the last one, of whether to privilege orthodox religious practice. Finally, there is the question of economic privilege, even class: who wins and who loses in a global market economy?

One cannot easily find a center in the permutations these questions produce, which is why as many as twenty political parties typically compete in Israeli elections. But when pundits speak about a center now, they mean leaders who—though they’ll want to have things both ways on many of these issues—have tipped in certain directions: immediate toughness over eventual diplomacy; “painful concessions” in the territories over “Zionist” devotion; some civil reform yet Jewish privilege over scrupulous attention to Arab rights; the religious Status Quo over secular discomfort; and global markets over working-class discomfort.

Some of these choices are short-sighted, no doubt, but the ambivalence is promising. Centrists will often advance contradictory positions: shows of social compassion for the poor wedded to reassurances to venture capitalists; civil marriage, yet jobs for Rabbis.

To add to the complexity, Israel’s elections bring out five more or less permanent tribes to debate these issues: groups of electors defined by primordial ethnic or religious loyalties. Each comprises about 20 percent of the electorate, or something around a million and a half people. The tribes have had immigrant experiences at very different times, and so tend to think of Israel in different ways. They sometimes melt into each other and more often chafe against one another. For some time now, Israeli coalition politics has been a game of temporarily patching them together.

THE FIRST TRIBE—call it Tribe One—is dominated by veteran Ashkenazim (of European origin), most of them “Sabras.” They were born in the country, are now well-educated and cosmopolitan, secular and (if anything) observant of Judaism in the emancipated sense, live-and-let-live by instinct—and living very well indeed in fashionable neighborhoods like North Tel-Aviv, Jerusalem’s Bak’a or Haifa’s Carmel. These are the Israelis Americans usually run into, members of the educational and professional élite, often drawn by opportunities abroad: a visiting appointment at the University of Pennsylvania, a stint at A.T. Kearney. Their old-timers tell harrowing, personal tales of ideological non-conformism and political prescience, of immigrant courage and pioneering struggle during the Mandate. Successful entrepreneurs will yet justify their businesses in the rhetoric of the old pioneering communitarianism. Tribe One are Israel’s WASPs. Clearly, they are crucial to an understanding what the Israeli center is and can yet be. Think Kadima and Labor.

Tribe Two, in contrast, are the residual core of the rather larger North African immigration of Mizrahi Jews, who came to Israel in the 1950s and 60s en masse. They were as shocked as the Arabs by Tribe One’s ideological and sexual avant garde. Most had been petit-bourgeois, small merchants and tradesmen back in Casablanca, Tunis, Tripoli, etc. Their most educated or affluent leaders often went to Paris or Montreal. Back in the Maghreb, men ruled and plotted family survival. Women were generally illiterate. The collapse of colonialism, and the birth of Israel, left Mizrahi Jews exposed to unexpected retaliations in their countries of origin; businesses and friends were left behind in heartbreaking haste.

Once in Israel, however, the Mizrahim found themselves in an underclass, much less well-educated than the Eastern European Labor Zionists who ran the place. They were pressured to work for, and become like, the socialist bosses who presided over the kibbutzim, union-owned factories, and government agencies. Their old culture heroes were the French bourgeoisie.

On average, Tribe Two still actually earns a third less than Tribe One. Pride in Tribe Two is pride in the family, not in tales of some old commune or movement. But it is a pride that tips easily into social anger, for they see the state as a kind of great family that ought to take care of its own. Many have now made it in retail businesses, or car repair shops, or real estate. Their children have become lawyers, police officers, and contractors. Yet most of Tribe Two remain hungry for status, and tens of thousands still struggle with unemployment in inner-cities and neglected development towns. Think Likud.

Unlike Tribe One, Tribe Two follow Halakha naturally, if not quite piously. They still feel they have a score to settle with “the Arabs,” the Muslims, who drove them out, mainly after the Sinai War. They still cannot believe how they could have been so marginalized by the old Labor aristocracy. Think Shas.

As with the Boston Irish, their social resentment gets passed on from generation to generation and gets channeled into cultural politics: over-zealous devotion at soccer matches, or overt nepotism in the smaller city councils, where Tribe Two politicians tend to dominate.

TRIBE THREE, THE newest tribe, have their origins in about 900,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union, most of whom came in the 1990s. They include people from the Ukraine, the Baltic states, etc., but are generally known as “the Russians.” Hyper-educated, hyper-secular (about 25 percent were never “real” Jews back home in Moscow or Kiev), the Russians were beneficiaries of both a rigorous Soviet education and a vital anti-Soviet “refusenik” underground. Fo them, Jews are victims of perpetual hatred, and their national retaliation defines them. They are repelled by the orthodox and are gluttons for high culture and, horrors, non-kosher food: symphonic music, experimental theater, cosmopolitan styles, mathematical science.

In the 1990s, when Israeli high tech was taking off, about a third of the research programmers, materials scientists, etc., were from Tribe Three. But they are also hyper-nationalist, certain of their purchase on Europe’s grim history, scornful of Muslim fanaticism and backwardness (their Vietnam was Afghanistan, after all), and dismayed by the squishy liberal intellectuals of Tribe One who allegedly pander to the Muslim world. They came to Israel to join the “West” and to save it from itself. They are searching for an Israeli Putin. Think Lieberman and Yisrael Beiteinu.

Haaretz’s Lily Galili, who has followed this community for years, told me that a majority of the Russians are feeling chronically embattled, “a combination of seeing impending catastrophe and a certainty that toughness will bring progress.” They are quick, she says, to see Nazis in Palestinians, and yet they are certain about Israel’s ability “to exercise a kind of omnipotence” on a world stage:

“This is very Russian, the idea that ‘liberalism’ is holy and yet something for Jewish suckers, which is why they have such common language with American neo-conservatives. Natan Sharansky is in many ways their hero—the chess player, the intellectual, the world prophet. He appealed to international liberal conscience while he was in prison, but after coming to Israel, he seems to have found that he could both lecture to the world about democracy and lecture Israelis that the Jewish claim to Jerusalem was a ‘higher value’ than liberalism—that the Arabs had better learn to accept it—that Israel, being a better ‘democracy’ than its neighbors, should be immune from Western criticism.”

These first three tribes intermarry at a high rate, and their edges are getting blurry. Some vote their class interests, some their security fears—none of the three is monolithic. The melding of Ashkenazim and Sephardim is especially great in the twenty-something generation. More educated Mizrahim and more cosmopolitan Russians tend to vote Labor and embrace liberal ideas. Nevertheless, “identity politics” play out among these tribes in unpredictable ways, depending on who leads or what buttons get pushed—say, whether security concerns or economic issues dominate the headlines.

On the whole, economic issues pull people leftward, that is, toward concessions to the Palestinians, while security issues pull rightward. Though a majority in each tribe has tended to hold to certain directions—Tribe One to Labor, Two to Likud, Three to rightist splinter parties, claiming Russian loyalties—it is in Tribes Two and Three where virtually all of Israel’s swing voters live today.

IN THE FRAUGHT election of 2001, which brought Sharon to power, the affluent mainly Ashkenazi suburb of Kfar Shmaryahu voted 78 percent for Labor, while 81 percent of the comparatively poor Mizrahi town of Beit Shemesh voted Likud. In 1999, some 65 percent of the Russians voted for Barak in 2001, about 70 percent voted for Sharon. All of which brings us to Tribes Four and Five, more familiar by now—also more monolithic and predictable.

Four is made up of Israel’s ultra-nationalist, theocratic groups, bronzed West Bank settlers wedded politically, if not temperamentally, to pale Haredi Yeshiva students. Tribe Four are devotees of the Land of Israel. Yet they tend to be economically socialist—“national socialist,” one settler told me with a kind of creepy pride—for many of the orthodox live off the state, either in state schools or embattled settlements. Tribe Four disdains Israeliness as an effort to decouple the national life of the state from the Jewish world of Torah and commandments. It refuses the distinction between the covenantal people and the Israeli nation.

Its bane is Tribe Five, Israeli Arabs, living in towns segregated by both archaic land policies and the discrimination of Zionist institutions. Poor but up-and-coming, willing if not eager to enter Israeli democracy, Israeli Arabs are enraged by the existing version of the Jewish state. Five is counting on, if anything, Israeliness.

ORDINARILY, THEN, TRIBE Three hates Four, condescends to Two, and doubts One; Two hates One, resents Three and (for different reasons) Four; One is afraid of Two, patronizes Three and hates Four; Four hates One, proselytizes Two, and is afraid of Three. All four are afraid of Five.

So imagine how, if at all, any winner of tomorrow's election will be able to form a government, and how long any such government will last. The real question is whether a government will form that will be able to respond to an American initiative, which is the only hope. "

Me:
Don said...

What you describe sounds like a social arrangement that cannot last. It's held together by having an enemy that's even more irksome to each tribe than their annoyance with each other. If there were to be peace with Palestine, wouldn't the tribes then turn on each other?

When I look at the tribal conflicts in Rwanda, the Congo, Nigeria,the Sudan,Sri Lanka, etc., I can't say that I see a decent solution to any tribal societal arrangement where violence has once been used. It's hard to get back on track. Please tell me that Israel and Palestine still have some chance.

Don the libertarian Democrat

February 9, 2009 11:03 AM

have utterly underestimated the sober, changing attitude toward Israel since the Gaza attack

From Bernard Avishai:

Obama's Mission In Short

The (appropriately) laconic George Mitchell has come and gone, and the Israeli press, particularly radio, is full of knowing talk about an impending clash between Bibi Netanyahu, almost certain to be the next prime minister, and the Obama administration, mainly over settlements. There is something surreal about this: Netanyahu's lead in the polls has not really eroded, and the rightist, pro-settler coalition he will rely on to anchor his personal power in any unity government is gaining. The government is going ahead with plans to join Maale Adumim to Mount Scopus. It is as if the commentators were talking about a clash between Israel the American Reform movement over conversion.

Israelis have lived so long under American protection they have confused America's power for their own, and have utterly underestimated the sober, changing attitude toward Israel since the Gaza attack--around the world, but also in America. More about this presently. For now, a shorter, more succinct and shareble version of my double post on what Obama should be doing has been published by London's Prospect magazine. It can be read here.

1 comments:

Don said...

You have rightly seen that a major aspect of this conflict is the tension in both societies, that many fear could lead to a kind of civil war, causing the side in such a civil war to collapse, and leaving the other side standing and victorious. The outside world, on both sides, through funding, has abetted this problem.

The only solution that I can see is for the US and other meddlers or helpers, on each side, to agree on a plan and tell both sides take it or leave it. Maybe that would wake everybody up. Otherwise, at some point, people are going to simply disengage out of frustration, including the US.

Don the libertarian Democrat

By the way, I assume Israel's right to exist, as I do every other country on earth. I find debates on that topic ludicrous.

One other point: Can we solve this crisis so that people can notice that 5 million people have recently died in the Congo, 10,000 in Nigeria, 2 million in Sudan,etc.?

February 1, 2009 4:44 PM

In fact, his report is a testament to how far into tragedy Zionism has come since the Camp David Agreements

From Bernard Avishai:

"One Dimensional

Bob Simon, a graduate of Brandeis University, told me years ago (over a balmy Tel-Aviv dinner, back at the time of the Camp David Agreements) that he got his break with CBS in the late 1960s because he was able to deliver an interview with Herbert Marcuse, the reluctant NewLeft icon. Marcuse had been Simon's teacher at Brandeis and his One Dimensional Man was then all the rage. I thought of this wistful conversation watching Simon's grim report on Sixty Minutes this morning. We will soon hear from media watch groups, accusing Simon of being one-dimensional, or questioning his feelings for Jewish battles. In fact, his report is a testament to how far into tragedy Zionism has come since the Camp David Agreements (and Brandeis hired people like Herbert Marcuse).

Regarding the Jewish hubris Simon exposes, add this to your reading list: the instructions offered by the IDF's Chief Rabbi to our callow boys, recently sent into Gaza; compare them to the pilot's letter I considered a few years back, and Ben-Gurion's instructions to read Natan Alterman's scathing poem Al-Zot to all IDF troops after a number of Israeli soldiers had shot indiscriminately at Palestinian civilians. And regarding reading lists, many readers have asked me to consolidate the last two posts on U.S. policy, which Simon's report speaks to, into one document. Here it is."

Simon's report was heartbreaking. The IDF's Chief Rabbi's words are hard to read.

"As CBS’s Bob Simon put it, they must be put into a “panic” that American support is now conditional on specific behavior. "

From Bernard Avishai:

"What's Love Got To Do With It - Part Two

(This is the second of a two-part post marking Senator Mitchell's appointment as Middle East Envoy.)

Make no mistake: Palestine is not Hamas and Israel is not its settlers, though the trends are depressing( I AGREE ). Poll after poll shows that a majority of Palestinians still want peace with Israel: Palestinian elites look forward to cooperation with Israelis on advanced businesses, higher education, construction, and tourism; they may even have some affection for Israelis; they know that their economic dignity and secular life depend on staving off Hamas. ( I AGREE )

And a majority of Israelis still want peace with Palestine, skeptical as they may be of Palestinian political institutions. Israeli elites are stirred by globalization and know that West Bank business infrastructure cannot development with 500 checkpoints. They know their own economic growth and cultural vitality depend on peace; their children, many of whom are leaving the country, hate guarding and paying for settlements.( TRUE )

Yet both sides’ leaders, no matter who they are, cannot break out of a now impossible bind. They cannot imagine prompting a near-term fight with their own rejectionists, which means wide-scale civil disobedience, even civil war, for a long-term negotiation that would be hostage to the first atrocity( THIS HAS BEEN THE PROBLEM ALL ALONG ). Peace advocates are exhausted, increasingly cynical, overwhelmed by military professionals and insurgent militias depicting their own actions as preempting the other side in a fight-to-the-finish. Hamas and Israeli rightists do not oppose a peace deal the way Republicans oppose Keynes. They have killed their own leaders to get their way. And this—not just a stalled “peacemaking process”—is where America comes in.

THERE IS ONLY way out of this trap: the Obama administration must make it clear—crystal—that the deal embodied in the Clinton parameters is American policy and a vital American national interest. To oppose it is to oppose America. Negotiation is over the details of implementing it, like the Geneva Initiative group, but not over its main principles. For the record, the Israeli government under Ehud Barak accepted these principles in December 2000, while Yasir Arafat dragged his feet, accepted them with reservations, but then authorized the PA negotiating team to follow up at Taba (out of which the Geneva negotiations sprouted). Later in 2002, as the violence spread, Arafat accepted the Taba plan.( TRUE )

So in adopting the Clinton parameters, the Obama administration would not exactly be pushing on an open door, but it would be embracing the deal that any Israeli and Palestinian leader sincere about peace has already embraced( YES ). Adoption would certainly expose leaders who are not sincere about peace--people who use the other side's threat as a cover for ultra-nationalist ends. One such leader may soon be the Israeli prime minister. ( YES )

The PA's current leaders, many of whom have participated in creating the deal, are not likely to act in ways that will undermine it. They are its most obvious immediate beneficiaries, and will no doubt use it to gain international legitimacy for a stronger security force, and new infrastructural investment, leading to a Palestinian state. And adoption would reinvigorate the Israeli peace camp; it would immediately reimpose an invisible border. In any case, Israeli leaders must see that resisting this deal means foiling American interests, those of the European Union, and moderate Arab regimes, too; that is the world’s deal, based on conventional notions of civil rights and utilitarian principles; that Israel risks growing isolation, political and economic, if it fails to adapt to it. New settlements beyond this border, in the West Bank or Jerusalem, will be met with sanctions.( YES )

Israel’s leaders, in other words, must start their planning for a permanent border, and new administrative arrangements for Jerusalem( YES ). As CBS’s Bob Simon put it, they must be put into a “panic” that American support is now conditional on specific behavior( YES. OR WE GET OUT. ). The Road Map, which was Mitchell's brainchild, speaks of building confidence—Israel by stopping settlements, Palestinians by containing terror—before moving to a deal. If this sequence ever made sense, it now gets things exactly backwards. Both sides need the deal to be etched in their imaginations and reinforced by all manner of international actions. Only then does it make sense to speak of building confidence.( YES )

THERE IS A serious change in approach here, as there has been with the economy, but it is not hard to imagine how to proceed. Senator Mitchell is coming here next week, according to reliable reports. Secretary Clinton might come immediately after his initial meetings to address both the Israeli Knesset and what's left of the Palestinian parliament to announce that the Clinton parameters are American policy; that she challenges all sides to embrace them. Obama, for his part, should then stress how failure to accept the parameters will be viewed as inimical to American plans for the region.

In parallel, Clinton and the new National Security Advisor, General James Jones, should line-up support from the EU and the UN Security Council, which will almost certainly rally to them. But their vision should not end there. They should speak positively about President Sarkozy’s idea of a Mediterranean Union, with Israel and Turkey acting as anchors. Clinton should offer to help organize a start to a regional water carrier to bring Turkish water to Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Israel. There should be talk of an common market between Israel, Palestine and Jordan( A GREAT IDEA ). Jones should speak about a bilateral defense pact with Israel and an American naval base in Haifa. The U.S. must get away from the idea that peace means "We give them land, and then maybe they'll leave us alone."

Rather, the deal should appear a part of an emerging global consensus—like cooperation on emergency financial reform, or police action against terror. The talk should be of new federal relations and new economic unions: a patently Jewish state that is also a state of global citizens; a Palestinian state linked to Jordan and Israel that is patently a state of laws and civil rights. People who oppose the consensus must be made to feel like international pariahs, not just opponents of some (spineless) domestic “peace camp.”( YES )

YET--AND THIS is crucial--President Obama should stress that implementation need not be rushed. As long as all know where we are going( YES ), we can get there with deliberate caution, in a gradual but time-certain way that permits affected parties--Israeli settlers, returning Palestinian refugees, Israeli defense specialists nervous about letting go of the tiger's tail--to take steps toward a new reality in way that minimizes the furies of disappointment and grief. A little compassion, and a lot of hopeful oratory, can go along way here. The deal will overturn many lives; it will take some time for people to see its virtues. Obama's ability to speak about generational transformation is a unique asset here.( OK )

Israeli settlers must be given time, perhaps five years, to find new homes within the Israeli state. The Israeli state apparatus should have time to repatriate and compensate Israelis who return; to plan, with the help of international forces, to cut settlements off according to a time-table from the Israeli power grid and water network.

The PA, for its part, should be given time to develop an effective domestic security force, like the one in Ramallah and Jenin, to establish its authority throughout the West Bank. Before refugees begin returning, the PA must be given time to engender the businesses and construction projects that will employ them. The state must develop an “absorptive capacity,” as the British once said about the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine. Only then will the PA be able to restart dialogue with Hamas from a position of strength. Meantime, the border between Gaza and Egypt should be opened.( YES )

Most important—and even before Israel terminates its occupation—the U.S. should lead the creation of a 10,000-person NATO force in and around Gaza and the West Bank, to monitor events and buttress anticipated areas of demilitarization. The force should give greater confidence to foreign investors, working alongside—not in place of—the emerging PA police. All members of the Arab league should make clear that recognition of Israel and full peace goes along with the deal; they should offer as down payment open academic and business exchanges with Israel. In this context, a peace with Syria should be concluded, with the demilitarized Golan turned into a demilitarized nature preserve.

The point is, if we have learned anything from this past year it is that things that “cannot go on” eventually can’t. The current carnage in Gaza is nothing if not a wake-up call: peace is not impossible, but Jerusalem could become a kind of Sarajevo in a matter of weeks, with Israeli Arabs joining in the fray. President Obama has the privilege of coming into power during a Middle Eastern crisis, which like all the other crises create opportunity. He can bring a new era to this region, but as with his plans for economic recovery, climate change, and the rest, the greatest danger is in thinking small."( YES PLEASE )

But when you consider that one quarter of Israeli first graders are Arabs, and another quarter are ultraOrthodox of various kinds

Bernard Avishai:

"What's Love Got To Do With It - Part One

(This is the first of a two-part post marking Senator Mitchell's appointment as Middle East Envoy.)

President Obama is getting nearly as much advice about Israelis as about puppies, and at times the advice seems eerily the same: we want them close, but they can get too scared, or wild, or selfish; we cannot indulge their ferocious instincts or territorial overreaching—anyway, they’ll need some leashing in. “Tough love,” writes the New York Times’ Roger Cohen, and this counsel—these very words—have been repeated (by my count) by five other prominent journalists and diplomatic hands in recent weeks.

The people offering this advice are thoughtful, even brave, given how tender (or wary) presidential love of Israel has been since Ronald Reagan took office. But I fear the advice is out of date, and not only because of Gaza. There are three implied premises here. If the new Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, buys into them, he’ll just give us more of the same.

THE FIRST PREMISE is that U.S. intervention is for the purpose of facilitating a negotiation between the interested parties, Israelis and Palestinians, so that we can finally arrive at a deal. The second premise, closely related to the first, is that America is a disinterested party: a kind of Dr. Phil, strong and well-intentioned, to be sure, but a mediator who—how did former Secretary Powell put it?—“cannot want peace more than the parties themselves.” The third, and most important, is that Israeli and Palestinian leaders will sign a deal when they’ve overcome, or are cajoled (or bribed or “pressured”) into suppressing, psychological barriers—at which point they’ll exert sovereign power to implement what they’ve signed.

The inference for action is new invitations to summits and secret negotiations, more hand-holding—perhaps some public hand-wringing—with the U.S. providing diplomatic structure and a sense of urgency: in effect, a new Road Map like the one Mitchell gave us in 2002, albeit with a reinvigorated navigator. What we will not get is a precise destination or an American at the wheel, that is, a peace deal stipulated by the U.S. government itself and the patient, firm diplomacy over several years to bring outliers into line. Which means—no matter who wins the Israeli election, but especially with Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightist bloc poised to reassume power—that we will not get peace at all, perhaps never.

1. A reasonable deal is already known.( TRUE ) It was all but negotiated in Taba in December 2000, between the outgoing Labor government of Ehud Barak and the Fatah leadership now in power in the Palestinian Authority; when the parties got stuck, the American president, husband of the Secretary of State-designate, offered bridging “parameters,” which were then given detailed articulation in the Geneva Initiative of 2003. The Clinton parameters were implicitly underpinned by the 2002 declaration of the Arab League.

Their terms are well known. They were spelled out recently by Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski: the 1967 borders, with minor, reciprocal and agreed-upon modifications; compensation and repatriation to Palestine as the way Palestinian refugees exercise their right of return; Jerusalem as home to two capitals, with creative ascriptions of sovereignty for the old city and Temple Mount/Noble Sanctuary; and a non-militarized Palestinian state, reinforced by a significant NATO presence.

The Clinton parameters were set aside by Ariel Sharon because he (and his rightist bloc) did not want to entertain its compromises; his disengagement from Gaza was meant to allow for consolidating Israel’s hold on the West Bank settlements and Jerusalem. In effect, Ehud Olmert implicitly endorsed the parameters all over again before the Gaza operation, though his decision to attack so violently may say something about his sincerity; Netanyahu says he will end any negotiation over them were he elected, for the same reason Sharon did.

2. America is itself an interested party.( TRUE ) Israel and Palestine are really just two-city states, together about the scale of greater Los Angeles, fitting together like jig-saw puzzle pieces. The Middle East, which their conflict roils, has the span of a continent, with the world’s largest proven reserves of oil and dollars, teens and violence. The U.S. can have no leverage in its diplomacy with Iran, therefore, no orderly exit from Iraq, without a working partnership with the surrounding, “moderate” regimes of the Arab League—regimes that could provide peace-keepers, investment capital, understanding journalists, and diplomatic cover.

Which brings us to the “Arab street.” Anyone who’s visited Fez or Tripoli or Amman knows that a burgeoning Arab middle class hungers for Westernization; they look at Dubai and Tehran and choose Dubai. But they are surrounded by restless, mainly under-educated people, governed by mosques and fathers where state security services leave off. World economic stresses will only make them more volatile. Obama’s is the face of a more progressive globalization but, as in Tehran in 1979, a throng can become a riot, a riot a movement. How many Al-Jazeera-projected images of new violence in Gaza, or South Lebanon, before crowds inflamed by western “materialism” try to storm the Israeli or American embassy in Cairo? How many times can Mubarak’s police fend them off before somebody gets killed—and retaliatory violence spreads to take down Mubarak’s regime itself?

3. The deal is not getting done, not because of psychological barriers, but because each side’s moderates are in an impossible political trap, which only great power intervention can spring them from.( THIS IS THE REAL HANGUP ) Everyone knows by now that Palestine is really two entities, a West Bank majority, nominally led by the Palestinian Authority—really by a secular business and professional class in Ramallah—and, an Islamist minority, centered in Gaza, and run by an arguably pragmatic but inarguably totalitarian Hamas. What we have yet to learn, however, is that Israelis is, in effect, two entities, also. ( THIS IS IMPORTANT )

There is a slim secular majority, a Hebrew-speaking republic, anchored by Tel-Aviv, hugging the coastal plain, and profiting increasingly from the global grid. This Israel is McCainish about security and the IDF, but skeptical of annexation of occupied territory. It is comparatively highly educated and instinctively cosmopolitan, vaguely committed to democratic norms—or at least to a “Jewish majority”—and therefore to a peace process. It can imagine a Palestinian state alongside.

But this same Israel is not at all sure its own one-fifth Arab minority will ever accept a “Jewish state” or are even sure what this means. And since 1967, its anachronistic “Zionist” settlement policies, and laws privileging orthodoxy, have engendered a huge Judean state-within-a-state, centered on Jerusalem, largely theocratic, and deeply implicated in West Bank settlements. Judea is less educated than the rest of Israel and instinctively more tribalist. “Judeans” are largely wards of the state: most disdain peace (that is, a return of a couple of million of Palestinian refugees to Greater Jerusalem) as the end of their way of life. Diaspora Jewish big-shots are mostly smitten by Judeans, whose religious and survivalist rhetoric they understand much better Tel-Aviv’s eclectic Hebrew culture.

And here is the trap. West Bank elites may want to see Hamas undermined, but they will not fight Hamas supporters for the sake of Israel. Secular Israelis, meanwhile, will not fight Judeans for the sake of Palestine. All fear the loss of social solidarity. Moderate leaders on both sides are particularly stuck: on both sides, the years of vendetta make cynicism about peace sound smart and brave; deterrence by intimidation—that is, the killing of each other’s civilians to discredit the other side’s policies—seems the only way to get “quiet.” But when you consider that one quarter of Israeli first graders are Arabs, and another quarter are ultraOrthodox of various kinds, it is easier to anticipate a future of ethnic cleansing than quiet.(NOT GOOD )

(Part Two, which considers what steps the Obama administration might take, will be posted on Sunday.)"

Show weakness about what is yours, and you are a baby-step away from Bosnia. Which is, of course, what Serbians thought, and how "Bosnia" began.

Bernard Avishai:

"Apocalypse Now?

How is it that Israelis, as Ethan Bronner reports, are almost universally in favor of the Gaza operation, including the way it's been prosecuted, while government leaders and educated people around the globe, even those disgusted by Hamas missile attacks, condemn the operation, and especially the way it's been prosecuted? What's so strange, as veteran Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy rails, is that ordinary Israelis know as well as anybody that hundreds of Palestinian civilians, including perhaps 300 children, have been killed or maimed, and yet this horror has not become a significant part of public debate. For a small minority of peace activists( OF WHICH I WOULD BE A PART ), even a few people in the south, the price in blood has seemed much too high for ending random missile attacks. But most will argue, not entirely convincingly, for humanitarian relief—and then spur on the IDF. Israelis, I hasten to add, are as sickened and frightened by military violence as the rest of the world is, even by their own. They may feel a superficial pleasure in retaliation for the missiles, or a satisfied relief in seeing the IDF perform in a coordinated, disciplined way, but they are not immune to doubts. There were two blockbuster films over the last couple of years, both anti-war films lamenting actions in Lebanon, "Beaufort" and the throat-clenching "Waltz With Bashir." My Palestinian friends will cringe when I say this, but most Israelis think of Israeli soldiers as children, too. Ron Ben-Yishai, the veteran war correspondent whose revulsion over Sabra and Shatila was featured in “Waltz With Bashir,” now supports keeping up "the pressure." One young soldier, interviewed this week on the radio, spoke with obvious sadness and compunction—but also with grim determination—about blowing up houses on the edge of Gaza city. He said, haltingly, that he feels he has had to harden his heart: "If it is their house or my house, I suppose I have to destroy their house," he said. HOW COULD THE vast majority of Israelis feel it morally defensible to take actions bound to result in the deaths of so many kids; how for the sake of gains everybody assumes will be, in the grand scheme of things, tactical and temporary? There is a big clue in that soldier's apocalyptic language. Israelis speak about this operation entirely in terms of Hamas' capabilities. Israelis are asking: Do you not see that any pain they have the capability to inflict on us they will inflict, sooner or later, so we have to go after those capabilities, if not once and for all, then now, while we can? Have you not looked at their covenant? Can you not see how their Iranian patron is arming them? Israelis are intrigued by levels of Hamas' motivation, but never by Palestinian motives more generally. The latter are not ever mentioned because they are assumed to be irrelevant to the confrontation in Gaza. It is their house or our house. Think about this. Occupation, preventive detentions, 300,000 settlers, the annexation and walling off of East Jerusalem, checkpoints, house demolitions, economic collapse, Gaza becoming Somalia—all the things that all Palestinians care about all the time, all the things that people abroad cannot get out of their minds—all irrelevant. Forget for a moment what Hamas is. The point is, for most Israelis nothing Hamas says—i.e., lift the siege, negotiate a “hundred year cease-fire,” subject any deal to a referendum—can be responded to by diplomatic or other means. Their sad choice, most Israelis think, is to attack Hamas, even at the expense of mauling Gaza’s citizens. Their vague goal—as Tom Friedman surmises, a little too much like King David counting up enemy foreskins—is that although the attack will redouble hatred for Israel , it will significantly raise levels of resentment for Hamas. Hell, hatred for Israel is absolute anyway( IT ACCOUNTS FOR THE COVERAGE AND INTEREST, AT LEAST TO SOME DEGREE-DON ). WHY APOCALYPSE, of all times, now, when Israel’s military power seems so incomparable? Why extend the vendetta culture in which Hamas thrives( TRUE )? What needs to be understood—and Israelis themselves don’t see this easily—is that Hamas’ professed commitment to Israel’s destruction torments a kind of collective unconscious. Any Palestinian threat seems an “existential” one. I am not referring here to some “holocaust complex” outsiders like to go on about (though, God knows, filtered memories of the European genocide are in the emotional background). Nor do Israelis fear that they could never make restitution to Palestinians for dispossession, for the Naqba, though this fear brings us closer to the truth. I am referring to something more actual, a kind of projection from everyday knowledge of Israel’s political and legal structure, which Israelis feel protective (if not vaguely guilty) about—a structure they rightly suppose no self-respecting Palestinian could ever accept. Israelis, you see, ask another question, which is not at all about Gaza: How can we have a Jewish state if this cannot really accommodate non-Jewish citizens? Is it not obvious that, in the end of ends, they just don’t want us here? One can challenge Israelis on what Palestianians mean by "want" and "here." The great problem is that Israelis themselves don't really know what they mean by "us." This makes public debate increasingly defensive, frustrated, strident. It makes politics dangerous. IT IS NO accident that—just last week, as the Gaza attack raged—Israeli Arabs took to the streets, while a majority of Knesset parties, including Kadima, voted to strip the Arab parties of the right to participate in the upcoming elections (a right, most agree, the High Court will restore). For the growing discomfort of Israeli Jews with the country's Arab citizens, and vice versa, is very much reflected in Israel's fierce response in Gaza. The prosecution of this attack suggests, not just a fear of some next crisis, but of the chronic crisis; the presumed challenge to Israel always waiting around the bend, causing Israelis to prove—so they think—that they have overwhelming staying power. What is the crime these Arab parties have committed? They insist on Israel being "a state of its citizens( HOW AWFUL )," not a "Jewish and democratic state." To foreign ears, this sounds like a distinction without a difference. Why not a democratic state, patently Jewish insofar as it is Hebrew-speaking, much like France is “French.” But since 1948, Israelis have allowed "Jewish state” to evolve in curious ways: most land is reserved for “Jewish settlement,” the state gives the orthodox( AS A CONSERVATIVE AND REFORM CONVERT, THIS IRKS ME ) rabbinate control over marriage and aspects of citizenship, the whole of Jerusalem is decreed a Jewish patrimony, and so forth. (I take this all up in The Hebrew Republic.) While the Arab minority, 20% of the population, has been marginalized, Israel has spawned a kind of Judean settler state around Jerusalem and the West Bank, which Israelis are reluctant to confront for the sake of Palestinians. For most, the word democracy has come to mean, more than anything else, maintaining “a Jewish majority.” And this Jewish state, Israelis know in a day-to-day kind of way, is something that they would reject if they were in the shoes of Israeli Arabs. Lurking behind this knowledge is the not unreasonable fear that any peace they make with the Palestinians will unravel as the rejection of Israel by its own Arab citizens unspools. Sadly, you see, Israelis see their Jewish state as a bone in the throat of Palestinians, not just historically, but still. They feel themselves, increasingly, in a desperate “existential” fight where no holds are barred now, because no holds will be barred later. Show weakness about what is yours, and you are a baby-step away from Bosnia. Which is, of course, what Serbians thought, and how "Bosnia" began.

Posted by Bernard Avishai at 10:18 AM "

This is sad, and untrue. Israelis and Palestinians could live together. See, they've been doing it in Israel for sixty years. Somehow, that fact is forgotten.

"intensify the nightmare of the Gazan population, more than half of which is children under the age of 15."

From Bernard Avishai:

"Playing Into The Hands Of Hamas

The following comment, which Sam Bahour and I wrote for this morning's Haaretz, suggests reasons for the rise of Hamas but, more important, is an implicit appeal for common ground.

Israel and Hamas are not equals on the battlefield - not at all, clearly - and when the power to harm or control others is this uneven, it is meaningless to speak about moral symmetry. But as the current onslaught in Gaza unfolds, it is sadly evident that both sides are continuing to respond to real provocations in ways that are not morally right, or even politically smart.( I AGREE )

If Hamas thought that lobbing missiles into Israeli civilian neighborhoods was a decent or proportionate response to the grim realities of the occupation, they were wrong( A WAR CRIME ). On the other hand, if Israel thinks it can bludgeon the Palestinians( A WAR CRIME ) into political surrender, or get Hamas - or the Palestinian community at large, for that matter - to acquiesce to military occupation then it, too, is wrong.

There is no military solution to this conflict( TRUE ). Until both sides fully grasp this, the world can expect only continuing violence and vendetta, with civilians on both sides paying the price for leaders who - because of pressure, ambition or hubris - feel that they must do the most damage, fire the last shot or make the most credible threat. Indeed, it is sad, and repellent, to hear military correspondents speak of "teaching a lesson," "increasing pressure," "making a statement," achieving "deterrence," when those they are reporting on are really trying to control the news cycle, or win arguable (and in any case temporary) psychological advantage, by killing, or accepting the deaths of, people at random on the other side. ( DISGRACEFUL )

Operation Cast Lead - the heart-wrenching death and wanton destruction the Israeli army is inflicting on Gaza as we write - is the product of just such thinking. In the first week, Israeli air raids killed over 500 people, many of them non-combatants( TRUE ); invading ground forces have now killed 100 more. Israelis knew in advance that Hamas forces are not a regular army( THIS IS A WAR CRIME BY HAMAS ); they will not come out of hiding and be mowed down like soldiers in World War I. To go after them effectively, in, of all places, the Gaza Strip, one of the most densely populated places on earth, the IDF would have to level its towns and cities, block by block, and intensify the nightmare of the Gazan population, more than half of which is children under the age of 15.

Read the entire comment here:

Posted by Bernard Avishai at 2:30 AM "

"One can think of any number of creative ideas that project strength, decency, and hope. This is not, well, rocket science."

A good post from Bernard Avishai:

"Rocket Science

You’d need a slightly robotic view of human beings to believe this, but let’s say Hamas’ acts of terror, from suicide bombing to indiscriminate missile attacks, are the pure expression of a closed circle of jihadists, whose fanatic, intractable views are more or less conveyed by the organization’s charter: that the “land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [trust] consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgment Day,” that Islam must “obliterate Israel,” and “all initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.”

Think of Hamas’ message as code—as the Darwinist digerati say, a “meme”—that spreads and replicates itself under given conditions. Suppose that no peace process can survive its triumph, and that not only Israelis, but West Bank leaders and professionals, moderate pro-Western Arab regimes, Americans and Europeans—all advocates of civil society—have an interest in seeing it defeated. How to fight it? Is Israel’s attack in Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, a kind of awful therapy?

Let’s leave aside for the moment whether Israeli settlement organizations express a corresponding fanaticism, or whether Israeli forces have ever committed acts that might qualify as terror, killing Palestinians indiscriminately (or accepting random “collateral” deaths), or whether people who were once terrorists, or actively tolerated terrorism, from Yasser Arafat to Yitzhak Shamir, might eventually be transformed into responsible political figures. No, let’s default to an extreme Machiavellianism, subordinate being loved to being feared, and entertain the idea that Israel should obliterate Hamas before Hamas obliterates Israel. Would we not first ask under what conditions the Hamas meme seems to have spread?( YES )

TWENTY YEARS AGO, during the first intifada, Hamas was a miniscule Islamist organization, preaching a vague jihadism and just beginning to engage in suicide bombing and kidnapping. The vast majority of Palestinians were insisting on national representation by the Palestine Liberation Organization, which had begun angling for a two-state solution. Palestinians in the territories militantly resisted the occupation, but tens of thousands still worked on Israeli construction sites, and their mass demonstrations were not, on the whole, lethal: Most young men and women threw rocks and the odd Molotov cocktail at heavily armed soldiers and tanks. Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, afraid that a show of weakness would encourage resistance, adopted the “iron fist” policy of repressing the uprising, ordering his troops to “break the bones” of demonstrators—an order some soldiers took literally. Hamas stayed underground. As the Intifada wound-down, Israeli-Palestinian dialogue groups flourished.

The Oslo process put Hamas into nearly total eclipse. Under Israeli pressure, Arafat’s Palestine Authority imprisoned Hamas activists. Israel, for its part, began to engage in targeted assassination of Hamas leaders, especially in Gaza. Yet Hamas was never wiped out because, throughout the Oslo process, neither side had any idea where peacemaking was leading. Jewish settlements never stopped; in fact, the number of settlers doubled, and annexationist activities in Jerusalem redoubled. The schools of the PA continued to glorify armed struggle.

In Gaza, where the Israel Defense Forces’ defense of Jewish settlements from periodic attacks trumped everything else, there were often border closings, and per capita income of Gazans plunged to about half of what it had been in the early 1990s. Fatah leaders of the PA enriched themselves, often claiming monopolies through their “ministries” of food and building commodities. Finally, in 2000, a new intifada erupted.

Ariel Sharon tried another iron fist, which he called Operation Defensive Shield. He belittled the newly elected Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, deeming him too weak to govern, while more and more Palestinians saw Fatah as Quislings. By the winter of 2006—after Sharon was forced to evacuate Gaza, much as Rabin had been forced to recognize the PLO—Hamas was strong enough to eke out a victory in PA elections. Hamas leaders even became culture heroes to Arab citizens of Israel who were increasingly frustrated by the exclusionary way so many Israelis defined the Jewish state.

THIS HISTORICAL SKETCH is seriously incomplete, but some patterns are clear. The Hamas meme spread especially when Israelis attacked in Palestinian towns to “reestablish deterrence.” The idea that the disproportionate power of Israel’s occupation was ever doubted, or that Hamas acts of “martyrdom” came because its youth were simply not afraid enough of Jews, rests on the kind of primitive psychology you get from combat generals, neocons, and battered children.( TRUE )

Actually, Israel’s expansive power has always been a part of the Hamas message: The Hamas charter continues, “After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates.” And how could Israelis seriously expect ordinary Palestinians in their towns to turn off any Hamas insurgency just because they were getting battered?

Hamas ideology spread, moreover, when Israel insisted that the occupied territory of the West Bank was actually “disputed,” or tried to dissociate its evacuation from Gaza from what it was doing in the West Bank. Hamas influence spread when circles upon circles of grieving youth fought out of rage and survivors’ guilt. It spread when settlers seemed able to push Palestinians who would otherwise support a two-state solution into calls for steadfastness; or when jihadists were themselves able to push Israelis, who are increasingly skeptical of the settlements, into calls for national solidarity in the face of “existential threats.”

Hamas ideology spread, especially, when Israel sealed the Gaza border in a vain effort to starve the place of Hamas influence. It spread when Palestinian economic life seemed futile, or inevitably corrupt—when a fight to the finish seemed the only chance at a meaningful life. Why would Gazans feel beholden to Hamas’ tunnels if they had an open border, relief from grinding poverty, and business opportunities with West Bank partners?

MAKE NO MISTAKE, even under international law, Israel has the right to respond to missiles on Sderot and other southern towns( TRUE ). And if Israeli forces could wipe out Hamas in a great, terrible blow, killing only people set to kill Israelis, one could hardly blame the IDF for defending Israeli lives( THEY SHOULD DO IT ). A ground attack has just begun, but nobody in their right mind thinks this will end as a surgical strike, which will excise the whole of the Hamas leadership, and not utterly destroy many neighborhoods; already, much of Gaza city is without power; to kill Hamas extremist Nizar Rayyan, a bomb killed his four wives and nine of his children. It is most likely that Cast Lead will end in a monitored cease-fire, and that Israel will be satisfied to have made what one Sderot resident called “a statement.” Unfortunately, this statement helps Hamas, or its successor, make its case—not only in Gaza, but across the West Bank, and among Israeli Arabs as well.( I AGREE )

The point is, the rise of Hamas is a cautionary tale about trying to do quickly with military force what needs to be done over a generation with reciprocity. All along, Israel might have made a strong statement of a different kind. It might have endorsed the obvious features a two-state solution, like the ones worked out with President Clinton just before he left office in 2001. It might have helped strengthen the Palestinians' immunity to Hamas ideology, creating a stronger civil society, new businesses, new schools, new Palestinian cooperation with international peace-keepers and investors.

Israel might have meanwhile announced, say, that it can know the precise location from which each Hamas missile is launched, and that it would bomb that location exactly ten minutes after each launch, giving surrounding citizens a chance to flee—and creating a mounting incentive for civilians to resist Hamas cadres using their homes as cover. One can think of any number of creative ideas that project strength, decency, and hope. This is not, well, rocket science.( I AGREE. )

(This post appeared first in The Daily Beast.)"

"But in no cases did the Israeli attack deter further attack and in many cases it unleashed unanticipated violence"

Bernard Avishai on his excellent blog:

"Teaching A Lesson (Appendix)

The indispensable Tom Segev, on teaching miltary lessons as a way to establish deterrence.

And here are some past examples of lessons taught and learned: Qibya, 1953, Samu'a, 1966, "Security borders," 1967-73, Aerial bombing of Lebanon, 1974-5, Litani Operation, 1978, Lebanon War, 1982, "Iron Fist" suppression of Intifada, 1988, Operations Grapes of Wrath, 1995, Defensive Shield, 2002, Second Lebanon War, 2005.

ALL OF THESE operations have in common serious provocations from Palestinian and, after the extension of occupation to South Lebanon, Islamist insurgents; provocations including the loss of Israeli lives. The response of Israeli military professionals, in all cases, was that Israel's response would have to be disproportionate; that the attack was coming because Israel was perceived as weak and needed to improve its deterrent power.

But in no cases did the Israeli attack deter further attack and in many cases it unleashed unanticipated violence, prompting new alliances against Israel which then led to new, more complex attacks, along with increasing diplomatic isolation. ( A PROVEN METHOD FOR DISASTER )

This morning, another Israeli was killed, as 57 rockets were launched from Gaza. Hezbollah is threatening to be drawn in. Israeli radio is reporting that Israel's ambassador to Jordan is being asked to leave "for his safety," and four Israelis were stabbed in Modiin. Meretz leader Haim Oron is arguing that Israel must immediately work to establish a new cease-fire, that if the shock of this attack leads to a firmer, better calm, Israel should accept this( I AGREE ); that there is no military solution to Palestinian insurgency. ( TRUE )

But can Israel's military leaders accept a cease-fire, after all this carnage, when 57 missiles have just fallen? When you are a hammer, is not every problem a nail?"

Good question.

"The point is, maybe we can help each other, Jews and Christians, during this time of year. Maybe we have something to teach each other."

Bernard Avishai with a nice post that he reprinted from last year:

"Merry Little Chanukah?

It is not a simple matter to be a Jew in America this time of year. Not in Jerusalem either, a few miles from Bethlehem. Christmas, as John Updike writes, is Christianity "at its sweetest." Many have written, some with an air of sweet resignation, about the yearning Jews feel as the days darken: to share in the melodies, the hearth, the love of the child.

It was only a matter of time—was it not?—that we would start finding ways to be absorbed into the spirit of the moment. So we exchange presents, greet the "season," tease out of the ancient Chanukah story our own celebration of light and grace—God bless, eight days, not just one! And we leave behind, in mildly embarrassed obscurity, the tale of Maccabean guerrilla war against Greek occupiers around 165 BC—a mythical victory that had been so much solace for medieval rabbis, forced into ghettos, and more recently, for outnumbered Zionists.

But when you give a second thought to the Chanukah behind the candles, you do feel at odds with the spirit of the time, and not really because the ancient heroics of Judeans seem out of step with Pickwickian fellowship. The fact is, Chanukah is Judaism at its gravest: a radical attack on all forms of idol-worship, including the worship of the love of the child.

When the Maccabees reconsecrated the ancient Temple (Chanukah means "reconsecration") they emptied it of all images—in this case, the Hellenistic statues celebrating the "gods," who personified familiar human virtues—warriors for justice, masters of the natural world, protecting fathers, fecund mothers. There may well have been images of fleshy, innocent children, too.

No wonder, as the Book of Maccabees reveals, a great many residents of ancient Jerusalem loved these statues. One could have had a "season" with them. Nevertheless, Maccabean zealots determined to make a terribly abstract point, even to kill and be killed for it: God is nameless, God is fugitive, God is silent. A kind of Jewish Taliban. True, the Maccabees were defending the God of Torah and Law. But what is law if not an expression of the silenced God?

And so Christmas is for love, Chanukah for awe. While Christmas brings God down to earth, Chanukah dispatches earthly versions of God to the rubble pile. They need God to feel immanent, nearly material like a Greek deity, while we need God to be thought ineffable and mysterious.

Or do they? And do we?

THE DISPARITY here is one of timing, I think, not of spiritual insight. Actually, both religious traditions affirm both spontaneous needs. And how could they not? Our common bible says we are created in God's image. But can we hope to create, like that God, outside the realm of sensuous experience? That's why we say things like, God is like a king, or a teacher, or a way. The danger, people as different as Maimonides and Pascal wrote, comes when we forget how our perceptions are, in a way, also our own creations. We are stuck with mystery and also with metaphor.

Nor do Christianity or Judaism have a monopoly on either. Later on, when spring comes, it is Christians who cope with the awful mystery of living on an earth in which the divine is gone, indeed, has been banished by human willfulness; while Jews celebrate a God who is like "an outstretched arm" come down to earth to take our ancestors out of Egypt. Then, it is their turn to contend with the disquieting precondition of freedom, while we feel gratitude for the power that underlies, not freedom, but surrender, the relief of being cared for.

Even the Judeans at the time of the Maccabean revolt could not be immune. The culminating last book of Maccabees is not at all about national liberation—it is certainly not about a miracle of burning oil—but is a painstaking disquisition on how Jewish law establishes the supremacy of reason over appetite. A (somewhat self-satisfied) Jewish riff on a Greek problem. And who if not Greeks made holidays of military victories? It seems the world of law and idol breaking needed something of the Greeks' materialism.

THERE IS SOMETHING sublime about this tension, I think. Both Jews and Christians struggle with it: We simply choose different times of the year to try to feel one or another side of it. Then again, nobody can really feel just one side at a time—at least, not for long.

That is precisely why so many grown-up Jews envy Christians their capacity to re-enter the mental atmosphere of children as Christmas approaches—why they get down on the floor and play dreidel with children, why they sing that "big miracles" (like children) can happen.

And that is why, after all, so many Christians report feeling despondent on Christmas Day, because they know in their bones that they have been carried away by an unreasonable—dare we say, childish?—notion. They feel the embrace. Intuitively, they also want to acknowledge that they are on their own.

The point is, maybe we can help each other, Jews and Christians, during this time of year. Maybe we have something to teach each other. God is a mystery, yet we are blessed. Break the idols. Hear the Good News. "