Dear Subscribers and Visitors – We’ve Moved! 1 Jul 2008 11:57 AM (16 years ago)
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Nostalgia Makes Bad Military Policy 20 Jun 2008 6:38 AM (16 years ago)
You can’t help liking Major General (Res.) Emanuel Sakal–even when you think his vision of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is totally skewed. At this week’s conference on The Decline of Citizen Armies in Democratic States (see my post on Wednesday), he offered a list of reasons why an all-volunteer army would be the end of the IDF. Some of the reasons were good, many were laughable, and none of them were backed up by facts.
Sakal, with his sun-wrinkled face and sharp gaze, is a paragon of Israeli republican virtue–he’s a man who devoted his life to his country’s defense and now, in his old age, gives his people the benefit of his experience and wisdom from his perch as a research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University.
The problem is that he acquired his wisdom decades ago and hasn’t bothered to update it. Sakal’s still caught in the “trust me” attitude all too common in the IDF, in which rank and battle scars are taken to be better indicators of reliability than empirical evidence.
The most valid point that Sakal made was that IDF manpower needs could almost certainly not be met by an all-volunteer policy. He simply declared this as a fact; other speakers at the conference backed it up with some data and comparative evidence from other countries. While, in conventional war, the IDF’s high-tech weapons enable it to fight with fewer troops than it once needed, most wars we are likely to fight in the coming decades will be unconventional ones. Furthermore, the Second Lebanon War of two summers ago disabused many top officers of the illusion that Israel’s borders could be defended largely from the air. In the end ground troops had to be sent in in large numbers to capture and hold territory.
But Sakal presented arguments against an all-volunteer force that were odd, to say the least. Presenting himself as an advocate of broader combat service for women, he maintained that few women would be motivated to serve in a volunteer force. He offered no evidence other than his own hunch on the matter. But Mady Wechsler Segal of the University of Maryland presented a comprehensive study of women in Western armies that showed that quite the opposite is true–in the U.S. and in European countries that have made the transition to volunteer forces, women serve in larger numbers and in increasingly serious and essential roles.
Another off-the-wall statement of Sakal’s was that the IDF’s elite units would not be able to fill their ranks if there were not draft. But these units are already manned by volunteers, and far more young men and women want to serve in them than the units can accept.
Sakal is nostalgic for the good old days when Israelis were ready to give their all and no one dared evade or squirm out of military service. I can get wistful about that, too–I’m hardly happy that a quarter of today’s young people don’t serve their country. But it’s crazy to pretend that we can change today’s culture by stricter enforcement of universal conscription against kids who would cause the IDF more trouble in uniform than out. While the IDF needs more soldiers than a volunteer system could provide, it doesn’t need nearly as many as strict enforcement would offer.
I can offer another reason for not abolishing the draft. Had I not been compelled to serve in the IDF, I’m sure I would have opted out–I was hardly eager to be a soldier. Under a draft, many kids go willingly, or with only a bit of a grumble, to the army. They understand that military service is a civic duty, but are not out to be heroes. This group would not sign up for a volunteer force. Ironically, a democracy needs just these kinds of soldiers–those who are not gung-ho, and who do not idealize the army as an institution.
Another speaker, Avi Kober, hit the nail on the head–the correct policy is selective mandatory conscription. In other words, a draft that allows a measure of leeway for those who firmly don’t want to be soldiers to opt out, and for the IDF to turn down those it does not want or need. The problem of fair distribution of the burdens and obligations of citizenship is not the army’s portfolio. That’s a social and political problem and there are a variety of social and political policies that can address it. One of the most obvious ones would be a beefed-up system of non-military alternative service for those who don’t become soldiers. The politicians, not the generals, need to decide.
At a Settlement, a Battle Over Both Law and Judaism 19 Jun 2008 10:10 AM (16 years ago)
The Israeli Supreme Court today took a small step toward restoring the rule of law. It issued a temporary injunction against continuing to build nine new homes in Ofrah, the flagship settlement of Gush Emunim in the area north of Jerusalem.
Ofrah, as I explained in The Accidental Empire , was established in 1975 without government permission but with lots of government help, especially from then-Defense Minister Shimon Peres. Most of the settlement is built on private Palestinian land. It’s an embodiment of the settlement paradox – half rogue operation, half national project. The petition to the Supreme Court by the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din against the latest construction is a bid to make the government live up to the principles of a state based on law.
My new article explaining the legal fight and what’s at stake politically just went up at The American Prospect.
There’s another facet of what’s happening at Ofrah that I didn’t mention in the Prospect: The fight over the houses points out how radically the settlement movement has rewritten Judaism, creating a religion in which settlement and holding land are the central values.
When Yesh Din went to court asking for an injunction finishing the new houses or moving into them, the settlement responded by speeding construction. The idea was to render the request moot, by moving people in before the court could rule. (Luckily, that didn’t work.) To hurry things, Ofrah’s rabbi, Avraham (Avi) Giesser gave permission for the non-Jewish construction workers to work seven days a week, including on Shabbat, in the midst of the Orthodox settlement.
When I spoke to Giesser, he explained that there was nothing new or exceptional in what he’d said. Normally, it’s true, a Jew isn’t allowed to ask a non-Jew to do something on Shabbat that’s forbidden for the Jew. But there are exceptions. They include avoiding major financial loss, he said – or acting for the sake of "building the Land of Israel." And he cited lines from the Shulhan Arukh, to show that these are old, well known laws. In this case, he argued, both reasons applied – the people who invested in the new houses would lose money if they weren’t completed, and the purpose was "building the land of Israel."
Let’s take that line about major financial loss. It’s in the Shulhan Arukh. I’ll leave it to someone else to research all the ways it’s been interpreted. What’s clear is that it wouldn’t normally be exploited to hurry a construction project. If a contractor wanted to speed up building a mall or apartments in Tel Aviv, even to meet contracted deadlines, I can’t imagine an Orthodox rabbi telling him to go ahead. Saying that the point was to "build the Land of Israel" wouldn’t help.
What’s different in this case? The "sanctity" of settlement in "Yesha" – the word settlers use for the occupied territories, an acronym for Judea, Samaria and Gaza that also means "redemption." Settlement outweighs Shabbat, according to Ofrah’s rabbi. And it certainly outweighs the prohibition on stealing someone else’s property, the Palestinian land on which the houses are being built.
Shabbat, I’ll stress, isn’t just a ritual commandment in Judaism. It is the expression both of human freedom (just say "no" to work) and acknowledgement of God as Creator. As for theft, a classic midrash says God only judged the world and found it wanting in the time of Noah because of theft. The meaning of that metaphor is that the prohibition of theft is something that precedes Torah; it’s a universal human truth.
But in Ofrah settlement is more holy.
Religions constantly change, as believers choose how to respond to new conditions and new ideas. But when religions change, it’s often by insisting that they are staying the same. They change by citing old texts.
This is a classic example. The religious settlement movement chose to absorb ultra-nationalism, to theologize it. Its religion has been transformed by that choice. The result is something that often looks a lot like Judaism: same rituals, same prayers, same books. Just not the same values.
The IDF: All Conscripts, All Volunteers, Or Something In Between? 18 Jun 2008 10:16 AM (16 years ago)
One of Israel’s least-known secrets is that it no longer has a people’s army. I don’t say best-kept secret because no one is trying to keep it a secret. It’s a secret simply because it so clashes with the country’s mythology, and with the image it projects, that many of its own citizens and boosters prefer not to think about it.
But the question of whether the process by which the Israel Defense Forces has become less and less broad-based and more and more professional should be encouraged or decried is the subject of lively debate in the academic community. Most of the speakers at today’s conference on the subject sponsored by Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies sought to dispel some of the more hoary parts of the myth and to suggest that the old model of an army in which everyone serves might not be the only or best option for Israel today.
Keep in mind-this myth-bashing and iconoclasm was sponsored by Bar-Ilan, probably the most conservative, patriotic academic redoubt in Israel. We’re not talking about a group of effete post-Zionists but rather about academics solidly in the political and cultural mainstream.
As the Center’s Stuart Cohen and Haifa University’s Gabi Ben-Dor noted, even in its heyday the IDF was not really a citizens’ army-simply because entire groups of Israeli citizens were exempted from service. These citizen non-soldiers included virtually all the country’s Muslim, Christian, and ultra-Orthodox Jewish population. Even in the 1950s through 1970s, when a very high proportion of the country’s Jewish men and women were conscripted, the fighting units were socially stratified. The pre-state Haganah and Palmach were effective fighting forces in part because they were lean and elitist; upon absorbing the population at large in the early days of the IDF, quality and military effectiveness quickly eroded. So the army created lean and elitist commando units to carry out the real fighting. The citizens’ army was thus socially stratified and many parts of it were not representative of the population.
Since the 1980s, however, even the Jewish population has served less and less. As Israeli society came to acknowledge and value its social and cultural diversity, as the economy improved, bringing new opportunities, and as the existential military threat lessened, the need to serve became less obvious. Increasingly, no stigma was attached to those who did not serve. Furthermore, the IDF’s increasing reliance on advanced weapons rendered the simple soldier with a rifle less valuable; capital investment became more important than labor. Facing budget cuts, the IDF preferred to invest in sophisticated materiel and in specialized and highly-trained personnel. It was no longer worthwhile for the army to invest resources in forcing the recalcitrant to serve.
The figures Cohen cited are not new. At present some 25 percent of military age cohorts in the Jewish population do not enlist. Some of those are ultra-Orthodox, others are physically unfit, but man are young people who simply don’t care to serve and arrange an exemption of one sort or another. Another 17 percent are discharged by the army well before completing half the required three years of service (for men). Less than half the women age cohorts serve in the military.
The effect is even more notable in the reserves, where only a small fraction of men perform significant duty in combat units. Every young Israeli knows that it’s easy to get out of both regular and reserve duty. This being the case, Cohen and many others think that Israel might consider ending the draft and creating an all-volunteer force.
Many Israelis, and admirers of Israel, decry this state of affairs and see it as a threat to Israeli society. Without military service to unite it, and without the kind of collective spirit that universal military service creates, the country cannot survive, they worry.
But Ronald Krebs of the University of Minnesota noted that the concept of the citizen-soldier is far from dead in the Unites States, which has had an all-volunteer army for much of its history, most recently since 1973.
Consider the other side of the coin: even in a culture which promotes self-fulfillment and the pursuit of wealth, the great majority of young Israelis are motivated to serve. In fact, IDF elite units have far more applicants than they can use and this same phenomenon usually extends to regular combat infantry units as well. Motivation remains high and Israeli society continues to accord respect and admiration to those who serve.
For political and cultural, as well as military reasons, it’s unlikely-and it would be incorrect-to adopt the American model of an all-volunteer army. The draft will remain in force. But neither Israeli society nor the IDF can or should revert to the values and realities of three decades ago. The IDF will remain a conscript army whose soldiers are citizens, but the people’s army will necessarily be a lot more flexible about service than it used to be.
Gaza: The Peace of the Clumsy 17 Jun 2008 11:18 AM (16 years ago)
Maybe there will be quiet in and around Gaza on Thursday morning. This is not something to bet your savings on, or even your lunch money. According to this report , a Palestinian official says – as long as he can’t be quoted by name – that the fix is in for a ceasefire, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry says yes. Defense Minister Ehud Barak (whose politics appear to have moved rightward since 2000 even more quickly than Joe Lieberman’s) says there’s no agreement, nope, we’re just checking the details.
If it does happen, it will certainly be a positive development: people on both sides of the Gaza line will have a higher chance of getting through the day without being blown up. It will show that with the America gone AWOL from diplomacy, other actors are moving into the vacuum: Egypt mediating between Israel and Hamas; Turkey between Israel and Syria. It will prove again the sad principle that when all else fails, sometimes people are willing to try talking instead of shooting.
But it will also be worth examining the potential political impact in light of the latest poll by top Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki. In some respects, the poll shows some positive results that surprised Shikaki himself. Still, one possible conclusion from a careful read is that by consistently treating diplomacy as the last resort rather than the first, Israel is yet again strengthening Hamas.
Shikaki, I should note is a careful, thorough pollster. No poll is a perfect picture of people’s feelings, but Shikaki gives a good view of the complexities of Palestinian opinion. Israelis who think that “the Palestinians” think this or that should read his results and learn that our neighbors are as confused and volatile in their views as we are.
So in the last three months, unexpectedly, PA president Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah has gained popularity and Hamas leader has lost ground. On the “who would you vote for if elections were today” question, they’ve gone from a statistical tie to a 12-point lead for Abbas (with a margin of error of 3 percent, so this is a significant difference). Fifty-seven percent of Palestinians think that Abbas’ s security forces, recently deployed in more Palestinian towns, have succeeded in providing law and order. (That is, despite the pessimistic expectations of some analysts, Israeli and Palestinian, the Palestinian public would see Abbas’s forces as collaborators, mere enforcers for the Israelis.)
There’s a slight rise in satisfaction with the Fatah government of Salam Fayyad in the West Bank. A strong plurality thinks that Abbas is more able to make peace with Israel and to gain Israeli concessions. Support for armed attacks against Israel dropped from 67 percent to 55 percent. That’s still depressingly high, but it’s a marked improvement. It’s also a sign that more people believe that Palestinians can gain independence through diplomacy rather than by violence. Fifty-eight percent want a two-state solution, only 27 percent want a one-state solution.
In short, moderation has gained some ground, and most Palestinians would still rather live side-by-side with Israel than try to eliminate the Jewish state.
But note this too: Shikaki suggests that Abbas has gained popularity by offering to renew the dialogue with Hamas on national unity. Hamas lost support because it wasn’t able to reach a ceasefire. Most Palestinians oppose a ceasefire that only applies to Gaza, not the West Bank.
Some background. As I noted in the American Prospect in April , Israeli and American policies have empowered Hamas over the last three years:
…In 2005, Israel pulled out of Gaza unilaterally, avoiding any negotiations with Abbas on a final-status agreement. Among Palestinians, that served as proof that Hamas’ armed struggle had driven Israel out. In the run-up to the January 2006 elections… Abbas initially favored Hamas participation… By the time Abbas realized the danger of Hamas victory and got cold feet… the Bush administration “was not prepared to be seen as changing course on democratic elections.”…
As detailed in a report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London last year, and more recently in a Vanity Fair investigative article , the United States did not just join in boycotting the Hamas government and the unity government that followed. It armed the PA’s Presidential Guard, which was independent of the Hamas government, and pushed Arab countries to help train it. By June 2007, Hamas expected a Fatah coup with American backing — and preempted by seizing control of Gaza.
Choosing diplomacy back in 2005 – putting the Gaza pullout in the context of negotiations on final status – would have had the opposite effect: Palestinians would have credited Abbas and the diplomatic option for getting Israel to pull back. Dealing with the unity government could have prevented the Hamas takeover of Gaza and moved us toward an agreement with a single Palestinian representative.
As things are at the moment, a ceasefire deal with Hamas is to be preferred to the other option: An Israeli invasion of Gaza. But to get the ceasefire, Israel now has to let Hamas get credit for it. Meanwhile negotiations with Abbas move nowhere. This is the diplomacy of the clumsy, of men trying to do ballet while dressed in battle gear.
Israeli officials forget how much impact we have on Palestinian opinion. We should have – and still should – encourage establishment of a Palestinian unity government. The negotiators would be from Fatah. The credit for a ceasefire would go to the moderates. We would have a partner for final-status talks who represents all the Palestinians.
One last note from Shikaki’s survey: Marwan Barghouti, the young Fatah leader jailed in Israel for murder, would beat Haniyeh 61-34 percent with a higher voter turnout. Barghouti favors a two-state solution and is also respected by Hamas. He is a man with a blood-stained past, but so is nearly everyone able to make a deal. (More on this here .) A riddle for Israel is how to release Barghouti without allowing Hamas to get credit for that as well.
Beirut Nostalgia 17 Jun 2008 8:15 AM (16 years ago)
Beirut is an evocative city even when you’ve only seen it in its worse moments. In yesterday’s New York Times, Roger Cohen waxes nostalgic about Beirut of a quarter-century ago, and in today’s Ha’aretz, Yehuda Ben-Meir praises Israel’s restraint in not invading the city back in the first Lebanon War. I was probably in Beirut at the same time Cohen was, so I’d like to join the party.
I was two days into Hell Week, the first chapter of my infantry NCO course, when helicopters appeared out of nowhere. We had barely slept for two nights, had eaten little, and were caked with the mud stirred up by a persistent late-winter downpour. Within a few minutes we threw our gear together and lugged it into the choppers that flew us to Tyre.
Israel had been in Lebanon for six and half months then and the quick victory and new Middle East that Defense Minister Ariel Sharon had promised had not materialized. The IDF had begun a long and intractable occupation of all of southern Lebanon–including the southern neighborhoods of Beirut. Ben-Meir, who as a parliamentarian for the National Religious Party, was a member of the governing coalition at the time, is not accurate in his description of events. Israeli forces entered the Lebanese capital at the beginning of the war. The restraint he speaks of was not pressing further into the northern and western sectors of the city, where Cohen was, where Arafat and the PLO leadership had been until they were, as Ben-Meir describes, forced to leave.
In Tyre we were installed for the night in a huge port-side warehouse. Since we were on high alert, we had no duties assigned to us other than a half-hour’s guard duty per soldier during the night. Traumatized by the previous two days, we barely cared that we’d been sent into a war zone. The warehouse was warm and dry and we had hours upon hours to sleep. That’s all that mattered.
The next day buses took us up the coastal road to Beirut. We got shot at a few times, emptied the bus, took up positions, but never saw our attackers. I don’t remember the name of the Beirut neighborhood that was our final stop, but it was one where Christians and Druze and Shiites had been feuding by trading small-arms fire and an occasional RPG missile, and we were there to stop that. My platoon was ordered to commandeer the empty shell of a half-built mansion. We had beds and mattresses but no showers or plumbing. We smelled pretty bad when we got there and I’m sure the whole neighborhood smelled worse after a couple days. We patrolled narrow streets inhabited by people who hadn’t lived a normal day since the previous June. Many of them, presumably, were out of work and out of money. Although we saw some kids going to school, many others were on the streets all day. We’d heard stories of children firing RPGs at soldiers. My own RPG, along with three two-part rockets, was securely fastened on a pack on my back–securely so that it could not be grabbed, so securely that it would take me many long minutes to set it up should I need it. In my thoughts, I pretended it was a bassoon (which it vaguely resembled), an instrument I had played for a couple years in high school.
Cohen drank Black Label, stood in line for the telex machine, and got invited to a young woman’s home. He collected stories. We did our best to keep from getting killed and waited eagerly for the long-promised but repeatedly-delayed field shower.
I didn’t much like Ben-Meir at the time, because he supported the government that had gotten us into that useless and megalomaniac war. But in recent years he has been a vocal advocate of moderation against militarism. His advocacy of diplomacy over military action is welcome at this tense time–he learned a lesson in the 1980s. Cohen got some good stories. My platoon and I left the city a week later, without having suffered, or caused, any casualties. That was the greatest accomplishment we could hope for a quarter-century ago in Beirut.
Missing the Point: Mohammed Kacimi’s “Holy Land” at the Khan 16 Jun 2008 6:01 AM (16 years ago)
“On both sides of a war, unity is reflexive, not intentional or premeditated. To disobey is to breach that elemental accord, to claim a moral separateness (or moral superiority), to challenge one’s fellows, perhaps even to intensify the dangers they face,” Michael Walzer writes in his seminal Just and Unjust Wars. Walzer refers in this passage to the moral dilemma faced by the enlisted man, but the same dilemma is not foreign to civilians. Wanting to be part of our society and in discourse with it is not only elemental but also commendable. Being moral alone on a desert island is no great accomplishment. We admire those who seek and succeed in living an ethical life in human company.
The new production of the Algerian-born French playwright Mohammed Kacimi’s Holy Land (Terre Sainte) at South Jerusalem’s Khan Theater brings us face to face with this dilemma. Unfortunately, while director Nola Chilton’s production is powerful and unflagging, and the five actors passionate, the play itself disappoints. In addressing the dilemma of war in art, it is facile to do no more than to say that war is hell. A writer taking up the subject needs to delve into the complex and difficult questions that war raises.
Holy Land takes place in a half bombed-out apartment in a city at war. The location and time remain hazy, but the locals are Arab and the occupying army French. Imen, a young woman, waits for her mother, who disappeared after approaching an army checkpost. She is harassed by a soldier, Ian, impulsive, frightened, a lover of music who has little idea why he has been sent to fight in this war. Imen lives with Alia and Yad, an older couple; Yad is a midwife, bringing new life into the world in the midst of destruction. Yad was a freedom fighter in Lebanon in his younger years but no longer has patience for either ideology or death; he copes with the blood and bombs around him by ignoring them. Their son, Amin, responds to the pulverization of their neighbors’ house by turning to the Islam his parents have rejected, and seeking to become a shahid.
War dehumanizes the soldiers and societies on all sides that engage in it. When it enters a phase of inexorable escalation, when the attacker finds that each escalating step is not sufficient to bring victory, and the defender despairs that all acts short of desperate ones will not save his country and his people, both sides lose their moral compass. The only alternative seems to be to give up, to sacrifice all that is dear and worthwhile in life.
But Kacimi (also known as El Hassani) merely portrays this decay. He does not explore or criticize it, or suggest a way out. Oddly, the program notes include (presumably at Chilton’s instigation) lengthy quotes from quite different kinds of works. There is a section from David Grossman’s The Yellow Wind, another from Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s essay “Jews and Arabs in Israel,” and a quote from Sartre. All these go well beyond telling us that war, ethnic conflict, and occupation are hell and provoke us to think about how it might be prevented or limited.
Kacimi seems to agree with his disillusioned character Yad, who maintains that there is nothing worth fighting for.
But if we are moral agents, then there is much worth fighting for. And anyone who lives in this part of the world, Jew or Arab, knows that most of the people doing the fighting are neither disillusioned or cynical. They believe passionately in defending their countries and people. If we are to think in a constructive way about the conflict-how to end it, and how to conduct it until it ends so that it does not escalate into a total loss of humanity on both sides-we must understand that the real hell for the people on both sides is not the war itself, but the prospect that their enemies may succeed in destroying their land, their society, their right to live as a unique people and culture in their own polity.
One wonders, then, why Chilton and the Khan chose this play. It’s certainly worthwhile acquainting the Israeli audience with the work of Arab playwrights, and at a theater located just around the corner from one of the city’s memorial plaques to a bus bombing and walking distance from the Old City and East Jerusalem. But is the playwright’s ethnicity and his choice of subject enough?
During World War I, George Bernard Shaw penned Heartbreak House, a powerful, melancholy, and funny indictment of the futility and senselessness of war. But that was indeed a senseless war, a local conflict that got out of hand, in which no ideas and no principles were at stake. Kacimi has written another powerful indictment of war-but at a very different time. Most Israelis and most Palestinians agree that the conflict is awful and should end. What they don’t agree on is why it began and how it can be resolved. What we need are not citizens-and writers-who place themselves above the fray or who opt out of it. We need those who are willing to fight for their countries-and with no less energy, to find the way to piece. That’s why Holy Land was the wrong play for the Khan to choose for this place and age.
More on Why Israel is Losing Its Green Spaces 16 Jun 2008 5:46 AM (16 years ago)
While Israel’s environmentalists have successfully pushed through the establishment of a number of national parks in recent years, they’ve been less successful at protecting green spaces that aren’t parks. Yet the preservation of pristine areas between urban areas is vital if Israel’s landscape and wildlife are to survive. In today’s Ha’aretz (Hebrew edition), Tzafrir Rinat reports on how these areas are being encroached on by settlements and farms, and cut in pieces by new roadways. He writes:
Last month the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel published a report on the threat to open spaces in Israel. The report lists 60 building and development plans that will damage open spaces. Among the most prominent are new roads in the Sharon and Modi’in areas, construction in the Ramon Crater, and the mining of phosphates in the Negev.
As I noted in my post Why Israel is Losing Its Green Spaces: The Pointed Roof Hypothesis, living in the country has become something of an Israeli middle-class dream. Add to that the mystical-nationalist aura surrounding settlement in Israel and the result is that the country’s open spaces are under a double threat.
Israel has more than enough cities and towns-and more than enough suburban communities and farms. Future residential construction must be confined to existing urban centers. Roads and railways are important in order to tie the country’s disadvantaged and forgotten periphery to its center, but they must be planned in ways that minimize their damage to habitants and landscapes. And they must be kept to a minimum-impossible if new settlements kept getting built, each with its own access road.
Updates: Pipes’ Pinocchios; Obama’s Gender; Undivided Jerusalem 15 Jun 2008 10:59 AM (16 years ago)
- The Washington Post’s campaign factchecker awards three Pinocchios to conservative rottweiler Floyd Brown – and to his pseudo-academic alter ego, Daniel Pipes – for promoting the canard was a Muslim as a child and is hiding the fact: “Both Brown and Pipes base their arguments and conclusions on factoids that have appeared in the mainstream media. But they make no attempt to weigh the evidence fairly,” the Post said. In other words, they’re misusing some details to make up stories, as conspiracy theorists will. Pipes, we can be sure, will not be dissuaded from finding invidious Islamic plots everywhere.
- Will Obama be the first woman president? Susan Faludi explains that Obama rejects that the “gender ethic” guiding American politics for two centuries, which says that the president must play the role of macho rescuer on the frontier, protecting the women and children of the wagon train. Under the current excuse for a president, the frontier fallacy that a Real Man in the White House will break heads has put America neck-deep in the Big Muddy of the Tigres. The one flaw I find in Faludi’s argument is her presumption that this is peculiarly American. Tzipi Livni’s need to build herself a terrorist-hunting image is based on the same ethic and the peculiar burden it places on a woman candidate to out-macho the men.
- An adviser to the Obama campaign has responded to my criticism of O’s statement to Aipac, “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” The adviser, remaining anonymous, says that that the candidate really means physically undivided: Obama “has said before that Jerusalem is a final status issue to be negotiated by the parties, but that two principles that should guide any outcome is that it will remain Israel’s capital and it should never be redivided by barbed wire and checkpoints as it was from 1948-67.” I’m satisfied with that as a position. I still think it was disingenuous and damaging to use the formulation he used before Aipac. The audience – in the hall, and around the world – heard “undivided Jerusalem” in the way that official Israel constantly uses the phrase, meaning politically undivided. That was red meat for the Aipac crowd. Saying “physically undivided” would have been a red flag. Afterward, Obama had to clarify, or backtrack, or write a midrash on his own words, in order to maintain his dedication to effective diplomacy. Better not to have raised the issue. But then, Obama was talking to a crowd inclined to believe both Pinocchio Pipes and the frontier fallacy. He faced the classic dilemma of a high school kid at the wrong party – being yourself and being popular just don’t fit together.
Shrew Lit 13 Jun 2008 1:43 AM (16 years ago)
At first glance, The Taming of the Shrew looks like the Shakespeare play most irrelevant to our times. I know, the butchery of Titus Andronicus is hard to swallow, but that play doesn’t end with a long speech about the virtues of hacking your enemies to pieces. Kate’s paean to wifely submission is certainly the most embarrassing classic English text that any actress today is ever called on to declaim.
No one knows why the Bard chose to write this play. He lived apart from his own wife, so he had no reason to seek revenge. But I have a theory. I have no documents or scholarly tradition to support it, but I can cite in my favor a writer’s intuition. Shakespeare was a writer, I’m a writer. QED Shakespeare and Watzman think alike.
In this play Shakespeare was protesting the female tyranny over literature. In his day, it was personified in Queen Elizabeth, which according to reliable sources such as the film Shakespeare in Love told him what plays to write and when. In our day, publishers cater to women because, they say, women purchase close to 70 percent of all books.
It’s hardly a new problem. Reviewing John Stape’s new biography of Joseph Conrad in the June 11 issue of The New Republic, William Deresiewicz quotes H.G. Wells warning the ambitious young Pole:
“you don’t make the slightest concessions to the reading young woman who makes or mars the fortunes of authors.” Conrad proudly ignored the advice. Of “The Secret Sharer,” another of his great short works, he would boast that it contained “no damned tricks with girls.” But tricks with girls- romantic interest, as scarce in his major work as it is in the record of his life-was exactly what the reading young woman … wanted.
Yes, high school students from Idaho to Alice Springs are now forced to read “The Secret Sharer” and get no closer to anything by Wells than the latest film version of War of the Worlds. So what? Posthumous fame doesn’t put bread on the table (broad hint to my agent: Conrad stayed afloat by grace of loans from his literary representative, James B. Pinker).
Being British, Shakespeare probably didn’t subscribe to The New Republic, but I can imagine him reading those lines and saying to himself: “Tricks with women? I’ll give them tricks with women!” Cut to Petruchio throwing his Kate over his shoulder and carrying her off to reeducation camp.
Note that Petruchio’s method hints that Shakespeare’s real subject was literature. He breaks Katherine’s spirit by denying her food and sleep. Food and sleep are two of the three human activities classically associated with reading (the third is one that Shakespeare couldn’t show on stage, even in a bawdy comedy). This macho brawler is not only out to make his wife obedient; he’s out to kill her penchant for the romance novel, the family saga, and the parenting guide. By the Act V, it’s Petruchio, not Kate, who buys the books “in fair Padua, nursery of the arts.”
Scholars have yet to discover the notes and sketches of the great plays that Shakespeare would have written had he not had to appeal to his overwhelmingly female audience. While he was writing chick tragedies like Othello, with its swooning Desdemona, and Hamlet, with its oh-so-sensitive portrayal of a mother’s grief over her incoherent adolescent son, he could have been applying his talents to truly worthwhile subjects.
By the end of the Center Stage Theater’s quite good, if slow-paced production’s of Shrew in South Jerusalem last Wednesday evening, I was ready to go out and burn some Jane Austen. It’s time for women to start buying the books men want to write.