Abrabanel: Musings on the Jewish condition

What to make of the media? How do you explain it when the media, or nearly all of it, get a story demonstrably wrong and don’t have the curiosity to second-guess themselves?

After Moshe Feiglin’s election to the 20th slot on the party list, the media narrative had it that Feiglin had successfully taken over the party.

“Likud eschews centrist candidates,” declared JTA, a news organization syndicated by over 100 Jewish newspapers worldwide.

The Jerusalem Post reported in similar vein:

Netanyahu’s associates expressed concern that the party would take a big hit in the polls after far-Right activist Moshe Feiglin won the realistic 20th spot on the list and Feiglin-endorsed candidates won 19 of the top 36 slots, defeating candidates supported by Netanyahu.

Feiglin-endorsed? You mean, for example, faction chairman and new #2 man Gideon Sa’ar, whose credentials include extremely popular legislation expanding women’s rights in the workplace? Yes, JPost means him. Or #3 Gilad Erdan, the man who used the Knesset as a bully pulpit to improve infrastructure and traffic enforcement nationwide, bringing the death toll on Israel’s roads down by double-digit percentages? Yes, Feiglin seems to have endorsed him as well. Of course, #4 Reuven Rivlin, the grizzled old lion of Likud politics who has already been speaker of the Knesset, was also on Feiglin’s list.

So how does a low-ranked Likud operative get to take credit for the entire top layer of his party’s leadership? Simple. He and the media have a shared agenda in embarrassing and weakening the Likud: Feiglin because he wants to make the West Bank part of Jewish Israel (the Likud is the center-Right party that could actually create a Palestinian state), and the media because much of it wants to bring Tzipi Livni to power.

It wasn’t Feiglin’s list that brought Erdan and Sa’ar to the top. It was their names who lent the list what small credence it had in the media’s imagination. In the end, the Likud chose the most productive and visible candidates for senior posts. After all, avowed centrist and Likud outsider Dan Meridor came in three spots ahead of Feiglin himself. Silvan Shalom, who supported the disengagement, did even better at #7. Ze’ev Elkin even took #21 against Feiglin’s candidate Asa Antov, despite coming in from Kadima 10 days before the primary.

The truth is that Feiglin lost rather badly. From legends that he controlled a disciplined army of 8,000 voting Likud members (about 49,000 voted in the primaries out of 99,000 members), making him the king-maker of Likud politics, we are left with the results of a relatively unpopular politician who won’t sit in the cabinet, won’t chair a committee, and likely won’t influence decision-making in the slightest. He is, if you like, what Yael Dayan was in the Labor Party shortly before leaving it for Meretz, and then leaving national politics altogether.

Rarely does the media notice its own bubbles, its gratuitous assumptions that lead it to consistently misreport even relatively simple realities.

Ha’aretz reflects for a microsecond on the gap between the media’s perception of the Likud and the very different perception among the public, but concludes that the people, not the media, are too stupid to understand what’s happening:

Previous polls ordered by Netanyahu showed that the list’s inclusion of Moshe Feiglin, the leader of a right-wing faction within Likud, was liable to cost the party four or five seats. But the Haaretz-Dialog poll does not back that up. Instead, it appears that what has come to be known as the Feiglin effect has yet to make its way into the voters’ consciousness, though that could change over the coming days.

Later in the article:

Tuesday night’s news broadcasts made it seem like Feiglin had been chosen to fill the No. 2 spot rather than No. 20 and that he would be replacing Netanyahu as chairman any minute. That’s not the situation, of course, but in the world of Israeli politics, it’s the image that counts.

And who, pray tell, sets the image?

Few people understand Israel’s inner workings – the state, society and economy – better than Tel Aviv University macroeconomist Dan Ben-David. His latest opinion piece shows why he is among the most influential of this country’s public intellectuals.

It bears quoting in full:

The tragic truth of modern Israel
By Dan Ben-David

The current coalition negotiations again raise the tragic truth of modern Israel: For quite a while, it has not been possible to govern in the Holy Land.

The problem is not only that the head of the country’s executive arm is held accountable, but not given the authority to build a cabinet with ministers who know something about the realm of their ministries and who also work for him/her. The problem is not only that Knesset members are not elected personally by voters, which ensures the existence of conflicts of interest between those who determine the party lists and those who actually vote for the lists on election day. The problem is not only the absence of fixed terms of office in the executive and legislative branches, which makes political instability structurally inherent in the current system and precludes long-term planning and vision.

These are just some of the more visual signs of a centrifugal governmental system in which sectoral demands steadily tear apart what remains of the Zionist dream.

In Israel’s current system of government, measures taken to survive politically in the present have a way of determining future reality. For example, it was not possible to remove Israeli citizens from Gaza without paying the political ransom of removing the ultra-Orthodox education stream from the system-wide educational reform that was approved at the time (which has since dissipated in any event, because of the lack of governance in the system).

Similarly, segments of the population with employment rates so low that they are unparalleled in the West are represented by politicians who insist on cementing this situation for eternity. They demand an increase in personal subsidies for each child – which have been shown to encourage extremely high birth rates – that are, in turn, translated into incomes that enable the choice of non-work as a way of life.

Three-quarters of ultra-Orthodox males and Israeli-Arab females of prime working ages (25-54) are not employed, while the rates of non-employment of their spouses are double Western averages. In 1960, only 15 percent of the country’s primary school pupils studied in the ultra-Orthodox and Israeli-Arab educational systems. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, in just four years, the 50 percent barrier will be crossed.

The Knesset

If today’s youth adopt the work habits of their parents, it should be clear that, in another generation or two, the resultant majority of the country’s population will create an untenable financial burden on the minority – who, by no small coincidence, will also be the sole bearers of the national defense burden. And what about the brain drain from Israel, which only accelerates this demographic process? Who is even dealing with this issue?

In the struggle between left and right on keeping parts of the Land of Israel and Jerusalem that contain large Palestinian Arab populations, the current political tiebreakers are constraints that mortgage one demographic future – between Zionists and non-Zionists – for another demographic future, between Jews and Arabs.

A political tiebreaker of a totally different magnitude is needed: A political system in which each of the representatives, from the president down to the last Knesset member, is elected to fixed terms of office directly by the people. Representatives from different towns and regions will have to start looking out for the education that their constituents’ children receive, for jobs and personal security for the people who put them in office, for clean neighborhoods and environmental concerns in the areas that they come from. The accountability for successes and failures will be personal, with a corresponding political price tag.

When they will have to start dealing with the welfare of those who actually voted them into office, the politicians will have a lesser degree of freedom to advocate keeping the biblical Land of Israel instead preserving the health of today’s State of Israel; a lesser degree of freedom to be more concerned about Palestinian Arabs in Nablus and Ramallah than about Israeli Arabs in Taibeh and Rahat; and a lesser degree of freedom to insist on Torah studies as a substitute for, rather than as a complement to, education that facilitates the understanding of modern democracy and provides the tools for working in a global economy.

The total number of seats currently held by the three largest parties – Kadima, Labor and Likud – has already fallen to just half of the Knesset’s total (60 MKs in all). In light of the internal demographic changes that are taking place in Israel, the existing political fringes that represent narrow sectoral interests will become the majority in the Knesset in the near future, and the national perspective toward policy-making will have disappeared from the political scene. These fringes will become the primary boulevards – with each one leading toward the termination of the Zionist dream of a first-world democracy that is the national home of the Jewish people.

The time has come for the leaders of Kadima, Labor and Likud to understand that the country has reached the point of no return. Only the leaders of these three parties still have the combined parliamentary ability to put in place a new democratic system of government by the next elections. This will be the ultimate political tiebreaker that will return to the people the ability to salvage their collective future.

The author teaches economics in the Department of Public Policy at Tel Aviv University.

Unbelievable:

The brief stab at the Republican presidential and vice-presidential nominees occurred during a scene when characters Brian (an anthropomorphic dog), Mort (a Rhode Island pharmacist) and Stewie (a super-intelligent toddler) beat up three Nazi officers, in order to steal their uniforms.

“Hey, there’s something on here,” Stewie remarked during the segment, as he noticed an anachronistic McCain/Palin campaign button on his disguise’s lapel. “Huh, that’s weird.”

The show’s creator and the voice behind Brian and Stewie, Seth MacFarlane, is a supporter of McCain’s Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama, having donated $2,300 to Obama’s presidential campaign between 2007 and 2008 and tens of thousands to other Democratic causes since 2005.

Herb Keinon settles the speculation around the Arab League peace initiative. It’s a great article for context:

Senior Jerusalem officials dismissed on Sunday a sudden surge of interest both here and abroad in the Arab Peace Initiative, saying it was a function of both a diplomatic process that has stalled and the transition periods in Israel, the US and the Palestinian Authority.

“And the Saudis have an interest in pushing this out there now, to put on a ‘constructive face’ with which to greet the new US president.”

Now, the official said, “the negotiations with the Palestinians are stalled, coalition talks are under way and various ideas are thrown out there.

“It’s also Succot; there is not much going on, so half-formed ideas that are discussed in the framework of coalition talks get a lot more traction than they normally would.”

Finally, the official said, “There is no government to talk to about this. Not here, not in the PA and not in the US.”

It’s a shame, because “the plan seems to be all the rage in recent days,” Keinon notes.

President Shimon Peres reportedly talked with Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef about the need to go for a regional agreement, not just a bilateral one with Syria or the Palestinians, while King Abdullah II of Jordan told Spain’s El Pais daily that the plan provided a genuine opportunity for a peace settlement.

In Britain, The Guardian newspaper ran a story entitled “Time to resurrect the Arab peace plan.”

Labor Party head Ehud Barak also got into the fray, telling Army Radio on Sunday he discussed the plan recently with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni during their coalition negotiations.

We’re not sure what to make of this Jerusalem Post report that Ehud Barak is contemplating new peace discussions based on the Arab League’s Saudi initiative, since, he says, “We have interests in common with moderate Arab elements on Iran, Hizbullah and Hamas.”

Barak even said President Shimon Peres agrees, and that he mentioned the idea to the likely next PM Tzipi Livni.

The Saudi initiative, in its day, came as a way to take the initiative away from Ariel Sharon after the Israeli PM had begun to forcibly dismantle the Palestinian terror infrastructures and sideline Yasser Arafat’s regime. Israelis didn’t take it seriously then – why would Arab states step forward for peace when the terror has been defeated, but remain silent while it raged?

What’s Barak’s game? Is it for domestic consumption? He’s got a bit more than a year to elections, and he heads the main left-wing party.

Could he be serious? Could he be calculating that the Saudis, Egyptians, perhaps even Syrians are so scared of Iran they’ll make a genuine peace with the Jewish state?

Benjamin Balint is brilliant as always in a review of David Grossman’s Writing in the Dark. An excerpt from the review:

[Grossman] fears “that after decades of spending most of our energies, our thoughts and attention and inventiveness, our blood and our life and our financial means, on protecting our external borders, fortifying and safeguarding them more and more – after all this, we may be very close to becoming a suit of armor that no longer contains a knight, no longer contains a human.”

At its best, then, Grossman’s Israel is but “a clumsy and awkward imitation of Western countries.” At its worst, which is more often, it is a “disaster zone,” a “tortured country,” “a nation whose intimate and permanent interlocutor is death.”

There is of course something to be said for a voice of conscience that urges us to strip away the layers of indifference and detachment that dull us to the suffering of others and to recover our moral sensitivities. But neither Grossman’s shrill self-condemnation, which sounds so close to the condemnations regularly heard from Israel’s self-declared enemies, nor the stale tradition which it continues, supplies that voice.

The reason for this is twofold. First, excessive political pessimism is as much a mark of escapism as Pollyannaish optimism. Second, self-examination ceases to edify the moment it crosses into self-disgust. Self-laceration is not a form of self-knowledge.

Stendhal once compared introducing politics in a novel to firing a pistol in the middle of a concert. There is something vulgar about it. But Writing in the Dark illustrates the opposite kind of vulgarity. In literature, as Grossman says, the desire to “know the Other from within him – even if that Other is our enemy” is a valuable imperative. In politics, however, a first duty is to make the elemental distinction between your own virtues and your all-too-real enemies’ vices. If David Grossman’s latest book is any indication, some Israeli intellectuals – to their detriment and to ours – have not yet learned how.

We recommend reading Balint’s review in full.

What would journalists write about if they were confined to reporting reality? That question occurred to us today as we watched another foreign reporter fail utterly to get what’s going on around here.

It wasn’t that he lied, you see, just that he overreached and failed to provide context. When deadline looms, too many journalists put sex-appeal over accuracy.

This latest journalistic offense was committed in a Sky News article which claimed it was explaining Tzipi Livni’s political “problem.” The title of the piece, written by Middle East correspondent Dominic Waghorn, proclaims: “Israeli Prime Ministerial Candidate Tzipi Livni Facing Obstacles Because Of Her Gender.”

Those Israeli sexists, one wants to scream. Where do they come off?

Waghorn explains that it’s all due to an 800-year-old opinion of Maimonides that women should not serve in positions of power. That ancient (and minority) opinion, in keeping with Maimonides’ views of women generally and with the surrounding Muslim culture’s attitudes as well, is said to be “still a problem for Ms Livni.”

Why? Because…

…this week the spiritual leader of one branch of ultra-orthodox Judaism, Rabbi Yosef Elyashiv, has reportedly said: “It is not simple to sit in a government where the prime minister is a woman.”

What we don’t get is this: Does Elyashiv’s queasiness about a woman running the country constitute, as the article states, “a new problem in her bid for power?”

Of course not. Shas is rushing headlong into the coalition and UTJ MKs (Avraham Ravitz, for example) are publicly proclaiming their desire to be part of the coalition.

So why isn’t the headline “Haredi parties seek entry into coalition despite rabbi’s unease?” Or even “Ancient minority opinion irrelevant to present-day political reality, even for the Ultra-Orthodox?” Perhaps because both of those accurate headlines would have had the disastrous disadvantage of being totally unsexy.

And what of the haredim who come out looking like silly caricatures? Or the readership who is told a story precisely the opposite of the current political reality? Aw, c’mon…this is just journalism.

Is Sarah Palin the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012? Yes, suggests US News & World Report’s Paul Bedard, at least if she loses this round. Bedard writes:

Don’t laugh. Here’s how they say she can get there from here, should the polls stick and McCain lose in November. First, Palin spends more time in Washington, getting to know the lay of the land. Maybe she moves to take a leadership role in the Republican Governors Association or the National Governors Association, a perch that helped to launch Bill Clinton. Next, she travels internationally to world energy and military hot spots. In essence, she builds a more complete résumé that will make her an easier sell on the national stage. And, of course, she wins re-election in 2010. And along the way, she proves herself better than this year’s throwaways, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney.

He claims the idea comes from inside the Republican Party:

Says a key Republican promoting the scenario: “As of today, Palin is the top contender. She clearly has the potential to be a winning top-of-the-ticket candidate: solid character, solid values, fire in the belly, etc. But four years is a long time. Neither Romney, Huckabee, or others have the complete package. If Palin spends a bit more time traveling overseas and domestically, broadening her horizons, and wins re-election in Alaska in 2010, she will be the nominee in 2012.”

Is he being spun?

Representative Tom Tancredo last week presented HR 6975 to the House floor, a bill “To require aliens to attest that they will not advocate installing a Sharia law system in the United States as a condition for admission, and for other purposes.”

We understand the fear of sharia law, particularly in the context of the culture war in Europe over Muslim immigration, but we don’t understand the purpose of the bill.

If it’s about preventing any sharia-based lifestyles from taking place in America, it will fail. Those who wish to live through sharia can do so privately, through arbitration courts similar to the batey din that decide religious personal status issues for Jews. And why shouldn’t they?

If it’s about preventing a coup that replaces the Constitution with the Quran, we have to wonder if Tancredo, an obsessive campaigner on immigration issues, really believes this is a threat.

Hat tip: reason magazine.

Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton both announced today that, in fact, they oppose Iran’s evil intentions vis-a-vis Israel. The silly stunt Hillary pulled of cancelling her appearance at today’s anti-Ahmadinejad rally in New York because Sarah Palin had been invited too – and the Jewish planners’ subsequent disinvite to all politicians, including Palin – was disheartening to those of us who genuinely believe the regime in Teheran is dangerous.

What is to prevent the Iranians from concluding that American politicians’ bold rhetoric is subservient to – so perhaps only meant for? – local consumption. Is Iran an American politician’s tool to court Jewish voters, or a matter of genuine concern and strategy?