I know you missed us because of the 10-day pause to release some of the hostages Hamas abducted on Oct. 7, but here we are again.
There were two salvos aimed at central Israel on Friday and one on Saturday. On my way to the shelter Friday night, I looked up and saw a rocket heading this way. My instinct as a lifelong journalist was to stop and watch it, but my responsibilities as a husband, father and grandfather took hold, and I ducked into the shelter. Anyway, I couldn’t take photos because it was Shabbat, when Orthodox Jews like me don’t do that.
The “booms” from Iron Dome intercepting the rockets are toward the beginning of the recording this time. There were about seven rockets, and you can hear most of the interceptions, all the way to Tel Aviv.
As the sirens wind down, you’ll hear ours, then others in the nearby areas. The sirens go off all along the path of the rockets, getting people to safety, because there’s no way of knowing where the fragments of the rockets might fall. People “watching” on an app that shows where the sirens are sounding get the false impression that there are dozens and dozens of rockets flying this way. There aren’t.
Even so–Iron Dome has saved many lives here, and as I’ve written, without it, Israel’s counterattack would have been much more brutal. Even if you accept the Hamas figures of 15,000 dead, that includes their terrorists. Now figure in that Israel has hit more than 10,000 specific Hamas targets in Gaza over the past six weeks. Please show me another war in which there were 10,000 targets hit and only 15,000 fatalities, including armed participants.
Of course, one dead child is too many–so then take into account that if Hamas had not send 3,000 terrorists across the border on Oct. 7, murdering, burning, raping and beheading Israeli civilians, not a single Gaza child would have been harmed.
Israel
Thoughts on turning 75
“It’s just a number.”
That’s what I’ve been saying for years to people grumbling about turning 70, 60, 40, even 30.
So is 75 just a number? Not for me. It’s a beginning. Several, in fact.
Some of these beginnings are ordinary and predictable. Like, why did I go into this room? What did I want to tell my wife? Where did I put my keys?
I’m still at the beginning of my professional transition. It’s becoming clearer now.
I’ve been officially retired for eight years. I haven’t been a working journalist in Israel since 2011, when I moved myself to Cairo, in protest and desperation over the state of journalism in general and the behavior of journalists in Israel. I was on the board of the Foreign Press Association for about 10 years. Now there are few journalists here who even know who I am.
I’m fine with that. It’s a beginning, a result of my divorce from a profession I devoted my life to and the abruptly walked away from in 2014. It was no longer the profession I signed up for. I’ve written often about what that means, and here’s one example—an article in Tablet about how I was banned from writing about Israel’s 2008 peace offer to the Palestinians, the worst professional travesty I’ve ever been a part of.
Finally, at 75, I’m beginning to let go of some of the anger. I was having coffee with a wise colleague a while back, and we were complaining bitterly about how journalism has changed for the worse since we started out together in the ‘60’s.
“What can we do to fix it?” I asked.
“Nothing,” my cooler-headed friend replied. “We gave it our best shot. Now it’s up to the youngsters.”
At 75, it’s time to begin taking that seriously. What I can do is write analytical articles, an effort to use my decades of first-hand experience to get some important messages across. Here are links to recent ones at The Media Line.
But that’s as far as I want to go. At 75, I am beginning to direct my energies toward other things—instead of tilting at windmills to try to get my articles published in big-name papers, or parlay them into speaking engagements, or interviews about my books. That infuriates some of my friends, who believe I deserve a larger audience. Maybe I do, but if I’ve never been much of a self-promoter up to now, I’m not going to start, beginning at 75.
“Other things” like showing up for my kids and grandkids. I missed so much because of my profession. For 14 years, I was a one-person radio news bureau for two major North American networks, working and on call 24/6. Then I moved to The Associated Press, where I worked from noon to midnight. Finally, two years in Cairo. I wasn’t there to enjoy my adult kids and play with my grandkids. Now they trip over “Saba Mark.”
Our four kids are all grown up, established, successful, contributing to society. For them my work, if you can call it that, is done. The beginning now is to sit back and enjoy the show.
And I get to spend more time with my wonderful wife, Ruth. She keeps me young. She laughs at my jokes and bits, even ones she’s seen or heard before. She inspires me with her dedication to her bar and bat mitzvah students.
I left her alone here for two years while I worked in Cairo to wrap up my career, and I never heard a complaint. She is so relentlessly positive that it spills over onto me. So yes, I’m a lucky guy.
I’m beginning to accept that I’m not so young anymore. When I appear in my own dreams, I’m usually about 35. That’s except for a recurring dream when I’m back at university, sitting down to take a final exam for a course I forgot I signed up for.
There are other recurring dreams—I have to take a final exam, but I can’t find the room where it’s being given. Or I’m in my late 20s, at my job as a news anchor at Israel Radio, carrying my script for a newscast (back when we typed them out on paper), but I can’t find the studio where the broadcast is originating.
These dreams have a common thread, I think—loss of control. I’m an obsessive control freak, but only when it comes to myself.
Now, suddenly, I’m 75. This should be the beginning of letting go a bit. Maybe not everything needs to go through that control panel in my head. Maybe some things can come spontaneously now.
And 75 is a beginning where, practically speaking, I can start to see the end. I hope to hang around long enough to see how things turn out with our kids and grandkids, and help them for as long as I can.
I understand it’s impractical to hope that I’ll see everything through to a conclusion, though I’m in good health, thanks to clean living and a couple of medical miracles, one in particular.
There will be an end, sooner or later. I know that. My challenge is to concentrate not on the end, but on the beginning.
Now—where did I put my keys?
Abbas can’t harm peace efforts that aren’t there
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas finally went too far, speaking in Germany and accusing Israel of “50 Holocausts” against his people. This coupling of Israel/Jews and Nazis is regrettably common, along with charges of “apartheid,” “genocide,” and “ethnic cleansing,” all terms that describe atrocities far beyond what Israel has ever done, much less the murder of 6 million Jews in systematic fashion by German Nazis and their collaborators in World War II.
This time, though, he triggered an immediate condemnation, not only from Israel, but also from Germany, which might go so far as to indict him for incitement.
Even so, don’t think this will harm peace efforts. You can read my article on The Media Line or here:
So Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas says Israel is responsible for “50 Holocausts” against his people. Speaking in Germany, that was his response when asked if he would apologize for the killing of 11 Israeli Olympians and coaches in an attack there by Palestinian terrorists in 1972.
Israeli and German leaders are expressing disgust, outrage, and revulsion at the comparison of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians with the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust of World War II.
What Abbas said was something like, “If you want to look at the past, go ahead…Israel committed 50 massacres, 50 slaughters, 50 Holocausts” against the Palestinians.
The problem wasn’t in the translation. He said “Holocausts” in English.
So disgust, outrage, and revulsion. What no one is expressing is surprise.
There are two main reasons for this. First, Abbas is known as a Holocaust denier. He isn’t—it’s worse than that.
Second, this cannot have any impact on efforts for peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, because there is no point in such efforts anyway.
Abbas is the one who refused to sign on a map setting up a Palestinian state in the equivalent of all of the West Bank, Gaza, and parts of Jerusalem—just what the Palestinians have been demanding. That was in 2008. And Abbas wasn’t even the first. His predecessor, the legendary Yasser Arafat, turned down a similar offer in 2000.
So the vaunted, almost holy bilateral Israel-Palestinian peace process reached its logical conclusion with a viable peace offer not once, but twice—but it didn’t bring peace.
You know what they say about someone who tries the same failed move over and over again, expecting different results.
There are those who believe that Abbas is still the moderate hope for peace, a barrier against the radical, violent Islamist Hamas. His own history dictates otherwise, and it emerged loud and clear in Germany this week.
Abbas did not deny the fact of the Holocaust this week, and he has not done so in the past, though he has argued about the numbers. “All” he did was blame the Jews for the Holocaust. That’s arguably worse.
His 1982 doctoral dissertation is titled, “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship between Nazism and Zionism.” There, he puts forward the baseless and revolting claim that Jewish leaders egged the Nazis on to massacre Jews in order to expedite the move of surviving Jews to Palestine. He called the Zionists and the Nazis “partners in crime.”
Never mind the fact that the Middle East figure spurring the Nazis on to massacre the Jews was Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian religious leader, who traveled to Berlin himself on his unholy mission. Even today, the “Israel as Nazis” equation features often in Palestinian media. And Abbas says he has 70 more books ready to publish about the partnership between the Zionists and the Nazis.
We could chalk all this up to ancient history if it weren’t part of the pattern plaguing the Palestinians for decades—the victimization image, the idea that only Israel is responsible for their plight, that Israel is the one with all the power, and the poor Palestinians have no say in the matter.
As shown in 2000 and 2008, they do have a say. They said “no.”
Since then, things have gotten worse for both Palestinians and Israelis, if you look at this bilaterally.
Israel has moved on from regarding the Palestinian issue as their number one problem. Ahead of the election set for November, polls show that the top concern of Israeli voters is rising prices and the cost of living.
That said, extreme nationalistic Jewish parties are doing well and could form a government with elements that also oppose concessions to the Palestinians or creation of a Palestinian state—even if that issue is not their top priority. Meanwhile, Israeli settlements in the West Bank continue to grow, without attracting much attention even in Israel. When Arafat turned down the 2000 offer, there were about 100,000 Israelis living in the West Bank. Today there are more than 600,000, including east Jerusalem.
The Palestinians have become mired deeper and deeper in their kleptocratic, corrupt government, which has become more autocratic as the years progress. Abbas has little popular support, and he refuses to call elections (he’s in the 18th year of his four-year term) because he knows a Hamas leader would likely be chosen to replace him.
But it’s time to stop looking at this problem bilaterally. It has become a regional issue, and that does not portend well for the Palestinians.
Palestinian leaders complain that they no longer seem important on the world stage. That’s because, objectively, they’re not. Arab states have moved past waving the Palestinian flag as a way of distracting their people from their own problems and bashing Israel at the same time. Instead, in one form or another, many Arab nations are forging ties with Israel. The foreign “true believers” behind the Palestinian cause are being left noisily behind or exposed for their true anti-Semitic intentions.
The time may yet come when a coalition of Mideast nations decides they’ve had enough of this little Israel-Palestinian squabble, and put an end to it. It could take the form of dictated borders and arrangements, enforced on the ground if necessary. Many Israelis and Palestinians would welcome that.
But it means giving up on the dream of Israelis and Palestinians walking arm-in-arm into a peaceful, fruitful future. This week in Germany, where the Holocaust took place, Mahmoud Abbas showed us again why that was just a pretty illusion. — —
Arab parties should be in Israel’s government
Suggesting that Israel-Arab political parties should be in the government is no longer grounds for ostracism and ridicule. At least not as much as it was just a short time ago. Israel’s drawn-out political stalemate, reinforced by the results of yet another election along with a split in the Arab parliamentary bloc, have made the idea legitimate in the eyes of many—even if it’s a hold-the-nose, “better the Arabs than (pick one) Netanyahu or the Left” kind of acceptance.
When I first wrote on this subject a year and a half ago, it was still considered heresy bordering on treachery to suggest that Arab parties should be invited into a ruling coalition. That’s because they are pro-Palestinian and non-Zionist. You can imagine the comments my article spawned. Not exactly reading material for the whole family.
Even then, there were good reasons to include the representatives of Israel’s Arabs, who are 20 percent of Israel’s citizens.
The problem is the Palestinians, the West Bank and Gaza and how we emphasize it, despite the changes on the ground. That issue has been so important for so long that it defines Israel’s electorate as either “Right” or “Left.”
Here is today’s reality: The Palestinians have turned down at least two Israeli offers of a state according to their own demands. There won’t be another such offer. Even the Trump “Deal of the Century” made no difference, because as expected, the Palestinians rejected it before they even saw it.
So why do we still insist on putting the Palestinians, the occupation, the future of the West Bank, and the settlements at the top of our list of priorities, when the issue clearly doesn’t belong there?
The split in the Arab bloc called the “Joint List” came about mostly because many of Israel’s Arabs have come to the same conclusion. They want to take part in and benefit from the decision-making structure of the country they live in, instead of blindly supporting politicians who are concerned mostly about their neighbors–the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Here are the advantages for all Israelis of bringing an Arab party into the ruling coalition, above and beyond the coalition mathematics, giving Israel’s Arabs:
- A positive stake in how the country is run.
- An opportunity to address the backward conditions of many Israeli Arab communities.
- Effective silencing or at least toning down of their constant criticism.
For seven decades now, Arab-Israeli political parties have been “muktseh,” the Hebrew term for untouchable. Many Israeli Jews consider Israeli Arabs a traitorous threat to security. Perhaps many were for the first decade or two of Israel’s existence, and no doubt there are some who still are—but there are Jews who worry me more than the Arabs do.
It’s well documented that when it comes to unemployment, Arab towns are at the top of the list; and when it comes to income and education, they’re at the bottom.
What have we done to change that in the last seven decades? Not nearly enough. So how about handing one of the social welfare posts to an Arab Cabinet minister, allocate a suitable budget, and turn them loose, with the usual oversight, to work on the problems faced by their own constituents?
Giving the Arab parties an active role in government would counter their automatic rejection of everything Israel does. Of course there would be those who keep up or even increase their outcry, but so what? Their pathetic performances have not endangered the existence of the State of Israel up to now, and they certainly wouldn’t afterward.
Oh, but what of the outrageous demands that the Arab parties would make as a price for allowing us the privilege of giving them seats at the Cabinet table? They might, heaven forfend, insist on repeal of the Jewish State Law. I’ve already written about why the law was/is unnecessary (here it is if you missed it), and nothing would change if it were repealed. Israel is and will remain a Jewish state with protected minorities that have full rights, and no law or lack of one will change that.
They might demand a commitment to negotiating a solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Well, no one actually has a problem with that, and anyway, as I already said, it’s off the table, so no harm, no foul.
And they might—no, they will—demand budgets to improve infrastructure, education, and welfare in Israeli Arab communities. I can’t imagine how or why anyone could object to that.
Now let’s get practical. There was a time when non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Jewish political parties were “muktseh,” untouchable, in Israeli politics—from the points of view of both the government and the parties. We got over it. The result is that mainstream Zionist parties have been forming coalitions with non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox parties for decades, and while their behavior outrages many people, no one considers them illegitimate.
And of course there was the slogan of the first decades of Israeli government-forming: “No Communists and no Herut.” Herut was the forerunner of Likud. How did that turn out?
Perhaps one day we will look back on the old days when Arab parties were automatically excluded from government and wonder why.
The times are changing. These days Arab citizens vote for a wide range of parties. The 10 seats won by the Arab parties represent only about half of the Israeli-Arab voters. There are Israeli Arab doctors, nurses, university professors, business executives—not enough, but they’re out there, and no one really notices—nor should they.
That’s how it is in the Ramla shuk, the open-air market in an old, middle-class Jewish-Arab town in central Israel. I’ve been shopping there once a week for two decades. You can’t tell who’s a Jew and who’s an Arab. Most of the Arabs speak Hebrew, and many of the Jews speak Arabic. Ramla’s Jews are better off, as a rule, than the Arabs—but at the shuk, everybody just gets along. That’s the natural human condition. We need to make it the natural governing condition, too.
Mark’s lecture Wednesday 1.3 1930 Israel time
MARK LAVIE is lecturing Wednesday about how Israel’s new accords with UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco might help revolutionize Israeli politics. Sign up and join the fun at 1930 Israel time (1730 GB, 1830 EU, 1230 ET). Here are the details:
Join ESRA Rehovot in a Zoom lecture on “Will the Abraham Accords change Israel’s Frightened Mindset?” to be given by the award-winning foreign correspondent Mark Lavie. The presentation will address this vital question in a talk on Wednesday, March 3, at 19:30. Mark has been covering Israel and the Mideast as a foreign correspondent since 1972. His second book, “Why Are We Still Afraid?” looks back at his career, which includes work as a correspondent for leading North American news outlets, including NPR, CBC, NBC and The Associated Press. Mark will examine the possibility that the Abraham Accords – normalization with UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco – might revolutionize Israeli politics. He’ll bring in some serious (and some funny) material from his book, and harsh criticism of the way journalism operates in the age of social media.Cost: ESRA Members NIS 25. Non-members NIS 35.
Registration: contact the Booking Office at 09-9508371 (ext 2) or online at www.esra.org.il. A zoom invitation will be sent to your email address once your payment has been processed. All proceeds support ESRA Rehovot after school programs for children at risk.
Don’t waste time with the Palestinians
I wrote this analysis in 2013. It’s in my first book, “Broken Spring.” It still applies: The Mideast is not about Israel and the Palestinians.
Is That A Fact?
#38 Because he can
“Because he can” is the second line of a somewhat raunchy two-liner about a dog’s capabilities. First line supplied on request.
What does that have to do with the renewed efforts toward a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians?
At first glance, not much.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has traveled to the region six times in his first eight months in office. At this rate he might break the record of George W. Bush’s top diplomat, Condoleezza Rice. She was here so often that I joked about making her pay Israeli taxes.
The main difference is the circumstances. Rice was here to promote Mideast peace talks. Kerry was here to restart Israeli-Palestinian talks.
If it was not evident before, as it should have been for decades, now it’s clear that negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians are not “Mideast peace talks.”
The events of the past two and a half years have shown that. The Mideast is not just about Israel and the Palestinians. It’s not even primarily about Israel and the Palestinians.
For all those decades, Arab leaders, joined by many in the West, bought the line that if we can just solve that tiny little problem between Israel and the Palestinians, the Middle East will be on its way to peace and quiet.
It actually might have been true, to some extent, as late as 1979, when Egypt and Israel signed the two-part Camp David accord. The first part was the peace treaty. The second was a blueprint for solving the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Neither side was the least bit enthusiastic about the formula, and it died a quiet death. It left Egypt hanging alone in the Arab world, a peace treaty with Israel but no second chapter.
That reinforced the already strong notion that Israel was the problem. Its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was a thorn in the side of the Arab world that must be removed, and then everything would work itself out.
So the world — Arab and Western — started paying completely disproportionate attention to a conflict that, empirically speaking, is among the smaller crises the world faces. While several thousand Israelis and Palestinians were killed in two rounds of violence over two decades, anywhere from 300,000 to 1 million people died in Darfur over a similar period, but activists struggled and failed to persuade the world to care about that cruel conflict in Sudan.
The results of the Arab Spring uprisings have made it obvious how this all fits together — or doesn’t.
In Syria, more than 100,000 people have been killed in a civil war that has been marred by massacres and abuses on both sides. Several million Syrians have been driven from their homes. More than a million are refugees in neighboring countries.
Libya has descended into chaos. Tunisia is headed that way.
Egypt’s military is back in charge after the Muslim Brotherhood government of President Mohammed Morsi made all the possible mistakes and didn’t even come close to improving a critical economic situation that even a good government might not be able to fix.
What does all that have to do with Israel and the Palestinians? Nothing. What does it have to do with American diplomacy? Everything.
From the beginning, the U.S. administration could seemingly do nothing right. It backed the discredited regime of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak until it was overthrown, and then forged tentative ties with Morsi’s regime, sparking outcry from all sides. It followed the lead of Europe in the Libyan civil war, drawing criticism of its lack of leadership. It dithered and stalled over Syria, fending off strident calls from the interventionists to arm the rebels or even blast President Bashar Assad’s strongholds with cruise missiles.
There’s a reason for all that. Many Americans don’t like to consider it, because they still believe that not only can American military power correct the ills of the world; but also, it is a kind of sacred American duty.
The reality is that the U.S. no longer has the political clout in this part of the world that it once had. The last of it was lost in Iraq, when Bush sent in his army to depose a dictator, claiming falsely that he had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.
The U.S. fought its way through Iraq, alienating practically everyone in Iraq and infuriating the Arab world. By the time President Barack Obama pulled the last of the combat troops out, America was what my university logic professor called a “reliable anti-authority.” In this case, it means whatever the Americans try to do in this region will backfire.
So the only way the U.S. can realistically involve itself in the post-Arab Spring Middle East is by what its critics disparage as “leading from the rear.” That means maintaining contacts with regimes, opening lines of communication with rebels, and trying to influence policy, but gently and quietly. Anything beyond that is counter-productive.
Except when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians.
Kerry is welcomed by both sides. Both have reasons to accommodate U.S. desires. It took him six trips, but he got the talks restarted. A rare victory.
Of course, unless the U.S. plans to impose a solution, the talks themselves will go nowhere.
Even the consistently superficial Israeli-Arab columnist Sayed Kashua pointed out that Kerry has only managed to bring back the same negotiators who have failed again and again. The last time was in 2008, when Israel offered a Palestinian state in the equivalent of all of the West Bank, plus Gaza and the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem, yet that did not produce a peace accord. Other issues scuttled the talks, as they have before — Jerusalem, refugees and the like.
It’s unlikely that a similar offer will emerge from the current talks.
Never mind. It’s clear that the U.S. has no hope of significantly shaping the immediate future anywhere else in this region.
So why, when there are real issues and real problems in the Mideast, does John Kerry spend so much time restarting Israeli-Palestinian talks that are practically guaranteed to fail?
Because he can.
How to stop the pandemic in Israel
We’ve tried regulations, but many Israelis ignore them. We’ve tried posting police on street corners to fine people not wearing masks, but many people wear masks improperly or not at all. We’ve tried sending in police to break up weddings and parties, but all that gets us is riots and clashes.
Now we’ve raised the fines for illegally opening schools, though the school principals say openly they don’t care how high the fines are. So that won’t work, either.
What’s left? Only the most radical solution–mass compliance with the regulations because it’s the right thing to do.
Vaccinating against corona the right way
I’ll spare you the photo of me getting my second corona vaccination, but I have to “brag” about how Israel is getting this done quickly and efficiently. As of now, almost a quarter of the people here have been vaccinated, far and away the best proportion in the world.
Here in Rehovot, a small city south and inland from Tel Aviv, second shots are administered in a large community center.
I showed up a few minutes early. I swiped my card to get a number. Before me was an L-shaped row of stations, 12 in all, where nurses administer the vaccine. I got in ten minutes before my appointed time. The nurse swiped my card again, asked me a few questions, especially whether I had any reaction to the first one, and then gave me the shot.
I walked back to the entrance of the hall, and there, waiting for me, was a certificate that I’d completed the two-course vaccination. It’s recommended that you sit down for 15 minutes to make sure there’s no allergic reaction, so I did, and pulled out my phone–and there, waiting for me, was an email pdf from the HMO, explaining the process and listing the possible side effects.
The key to this amazing process is the HMO system. Every Israeli belongs to one of four HMO’s and has a magnetic card. All of them have clinics around the country. Mine has at least four in my city, but they decided to move the second round to this community center to avoid mix-ups and overcrowding.
It’s not magic, folks–any country can do this if it wants to.
Corona crisis: What would Joseph do?
Imagine that biblical hero Joseph is ruling Israel today, facing the corona pandemic crisis. What would he do?
We’re reading about Joseph and his exploits these days in our weekly Torah portions. He went from offensive teenager to captive slave in a dungeon to de facto ruler of Egypt. His brothers betrayed him, but in the end, he forgave them.
As a ruler, Joseph’s methods were cruel. He knew, through his divinely inspired interpretation of Pharaoh’s dreams, that Egypt would face a seven-year famine after seven years of bumper crops.
He had two choices. He could have put out a statement to the people, urging them to gather and store their extra crops to prepare for the drought. Instead, he taxed the people in the form of a portion of their crops (some say a fifth, but that appears to be a mistranslation), and he set the grain aside in the kingdom’s own warehouses.
When the famine hit, the people had to turn to Joseph for food. Again, he had two choices. He could have opened the warehouses and handed out the grain to the needy. Instead, he forced the people to buy the grain. When they ran out of money, he took their land. After the land was gone, he took them as slaves.
According to today’s standards, and that’s the easily criticized premise of this article, Joseph was not exactly a populist or a man of the people. Faced with the corona crisis, he would have forced people to close their businesses, lose their income, eat through their savings, and with the exception of small amounts of compensation handed out to the wealthy as well as the poor, let them suffer—leading to hardships, hunger, and even domestic and public violence.
Oh, wait. That’s kind of what we’re doing. Though to be fair, if Joseph were true to his allegiances—the kingdom before the people—he would probably have sold the vaccinations instead of providing them through HMOs for no extra charge. At least we’re not going that far.
Also to be fair, our people are not doing their part, either. By failing to wear masks consistently, stay away from crowds, and wash hands often, we have brought much of this problem on ourselves. Governments have been setting the wrong examples, with officials flouting their own rules and arrogantly putting out ads about color-coded ratings that determine corona limitations that read, “Our rating depends only on you.” You, not us. Again to be fair, my city changed its ads to “us” after I complained, but the billboards on the main roads still say “you.”
Clearly, there was/is a better way to deal with this crisis. For an example of a more enlightened leader, we can look back at the current Torah portions.
Joseph may have saved the kingdom, but it was Judah who saved the future Jewish people.
First, he talked his brothers out of killing the obnoxious, bossy teenaged Joseph, selling him into slavery instead. Then he persuaded his elderly father to part with his beloved son Benjamin as the only chance to see the Egyptian strongman again and buy more food.
The strongman, Joseph, Benjamin’s only full brother, plotted to keep Benjamin with him. We don’t know what he would have done to the other brothers, but chances are it wouldn’t have been pretty.
Into the breach jumps Judah. In the longest speech in the Bible, he entreats Joseph to let Benjamin go, offering himself as a slave instead. He mentions their father 14 times, plucking his brother’s heartstrings, and leading Joseph to realize that these are his brothers, after all, and he owes it to them, and certainly to their father, to come clean. He reveals his true identity and invites them to join him in Egypt.
How did Judah know what to do?
There’s a clue a little farther back, when Judah is tricked by his daughter-in-law into fulfilling the requirement of providing her a husband after two of his sons died, and he admits he was wrong.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…
You won’t hear this anywhere else—but it’s clear to me that Judah knew he was talking to Joseph when he started his speech. He had brought Benjamin to Joseph’s table, watching him get special treatment though he was the youngest. He looked at Joseph, looked at Benjamin, looked back at Joseph, and he recognized who they were—brothers. Then he devised a speech designed to appeal to Joseph’s innate sense of goodness, justice, and family loyalty. It worked.
So now, with the corona crisis, we can ask—what would Judah do?
It is, after all, Judah who becomes the forerunner of the Jewish people—not Joseph. Judah is the one with the people’s touch. Judah is the one who leads by example, not by decree.
Forgive me for the wild extrapolation. I actually dislike it intensely when people judge past eras on the basis of modern standards, or ascribe modern words and actions to biblical figures, and that’s what I’m doing here.
Even so…a leader like Judah, who puts the interests of his people before his own…would find a better, more humane way to deal with the corona challenge.
Perhaps Judah would lead his people (us, not you) into voluntary compliance with regulations, not police enforcement, because it’s the right thing to do. Perhaps he would mobilize the government and charities to help those in need.
Perhaps—and this is what’s missing here today—he would create a reality in which we are all in this together, we all have responsibility for each other, and we will do the right thing for the sake of us all. Masks, distancing, and hygiene. It’s not that hard.
Then, Judah would say, we wouldn’t need lockdowns at all.
— — —
Correspondent Mark Lavie has been covering the Mideast since 1972. His second book, “Why Are We Still Afraid?” relives his experiences and comes to a surprising conclusion.
A new Middle East you didn’t see coming
Here’s my fantasy about how the Middle East will develop in the wake of the normalization between Israel and a number of Arab nations. Could it happen? We’ll see…
A ‘New Middle East’ You Didn’t See Coming
By Mark Lavie
“Bahrain and UAE have signed the Abraham Accords with Israel, ending decades of hostility and ushering in a new era of Mideast cooperation.” – news reports, October 2020
“Sudan and Morocco join in agreement frenzy.”—news reports
Could this actually happen?
Frustrated by decades of Palestinian obstinacy, eager to cement new Middle East alliances, moderate Arab nations were finally moving to put the Israeli-Palestinian issue behind them and remove that thorn from beneath their saddle.
They launched a two-pronged invasion, a sort of pincer operation, but not the classic kind. One Arab army entered Gaza from Egypt, while the other rolled into the West Bank from Jordan.
Israel played no active role in the invasion. It had already agreed to the terms of an arrangement, maintaining control of its main settlement blocs while evacuating some of the smaller outposts in the heart of the West Bank—and finally receiving an internationally recognized border on its eastern front.
No one was calling this “peace.” The new Middle East was not one of peaceful relations among all its nations. Instead, it was a battleground mostly of Shiite Muslims on one side and Sunni Muslims on the other.
Because of Iran’s nuclear weapons program and its repeated threats to destroy the Jewish state, Israel fit easily into the Sunni camp led by Saudi Arabia. One by one, the Sunni nations went public with their relations with Israel, formalizing them—some with agreements they called “peace,” others sufficing with security and economic relations they preferred not to label, at least for now.
On the opposing side were Iran, Qatar and Syria, along with swaths of what used to be Iraq—and the Palestinians, who had thrown in with Iran and Qatar.
After decades of demanding that Israel offer the Palestinians a state of their own, then watching the Palestinians turn down repeated offers of just such a state, the latest in 2000 and 2008, the Sunni Arab nations decided that it was in their interest to bring Israel into their alliance instead of continually beating the Palestinian drum. In most cases, it didn’t mean hugs and kisses between Israelis and Arabs—not even with Egypt and Jordan, the first two Arab nations to sign full peace treaties with Israel.
Such a lovey-dovey relationship wasn’t the goal anymore, if it ever was. The realigned Middle East was a place of interests and alliances based on practical politics. By rejecting Israeli peace offers and then cursing Arab nations that warmed up to Israel, the Palestinians had put themselves on the wrong side, as far as the Sunni Arab nations were concerned. The Palestinians were no longer needed as a faux issue to distract Arab people from their real problems—the Palestinians had become part of the problem.
The two invading armies quickly deposed the rulers in the West Bank and Gaza and set up military governments. Instead of the peaceful end of decades of Israeli occupation, instead of the independent state the Palestinians rejected repeatedly, the Palestinians now faced the ruthless military rule of their Arab “brothers”—bans on demonstrations, bans on strikes, bans on “resistance” against Israel—and enforcement with a shoot-first, ask-questions-later mentality.
For Israel, though, the day-to-day change was minimal, besides the loss of Palestinian workers, who would not cross the new border at least in the beginning, and the painful resettling of a few thousand Israelis from the West Bank into Israel proper. Beyond the outcry of the now ignored professional Israel haters, no one paid attention. The Iran-Saudi conflict was much more important.
The main practical change for Israel was deployment of its military.
Alongside the two-pronged invasion, and in coordination with its Arab allies, the Israeli army pulled out of the West Bank after decades of costly and bloody occupation. Instead, the Israeli military would concentrate on its tasks in the new alliance—monitoring Iran and its allies, maintaining its deterrence in the form of advanced weaponry and providing intelligence to the allied forces.
- OK, that was “fun.” Could it happen?
Probably not exactly as outlined here. But yes, there are signs of a sea change in the Arab world when it comes to both Israel and the Palestinians.
Within days of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signing peace agreements with Israel, Saudi Arabia started aiming harsh criticism at the Palestinian leadership.
That’s the same Saudi Arabia that sponsored the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, which basically said Israel must hand over all the disputed territories to Syria and the Palestinians, and then the Arab world would make peace with Israel. The current trend is the opposite—Arab nations allying with Israel despite the intractable Palestinian issue.
Here’s what’s new in the new Middle East: After the Arab Spring started the process of political change in the region, mostly by its failure—a new generation of leaders is recognizing that ideology by itself isn’t enough. In a tough world, interests are more important.
Israel has understood that, on an official and military level, for decades. Its relations with Egypt and Jordan are called “cold peace.” They are anything but cold. The three nations cooperate on many levels, but find it convenient to keep them out of the headlines for domestic reasons.
Just as the Arab nations have stirred up anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel for domestic politics, so Israel’s leaders have harvested electoral benefits from stoking fear of enemies near and far. If that era of unrealistic fears comes to an end with the new regional alliances, then Israel will be the real winner here.
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Correspondent Mark Lavie has been covering the Middle East since 1972. His second book, “Why Are We Still Afraid?” is available on Amazon.
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