April 2008

The Palestinians Wanted Chaos

Gidi Grinstein is one of Israel's most interesting thinkers. The founder and president of the country's leading think tank, the Reut Institute, he is a former negotiator in the government of Ehud Barak. I sat down with him recently to talk about Israel's future. Here are some excerpts. Gidi blogs, by the way, at www.blogidi.com

I have a simple question: has Zionism worked?
Tremendously. I believe that we are one of the most successful national movements of the 20th century and moving forward into the 21st century.

Are the Palestinians one of the least successful national movements?

Probably. The secret of Zionism—the resilience of Zionism—is its ideological agility. Zionism has been driven by… ideas that are inconsistent with each other. So Zionism has been and remains a balancing act.

First I'd like to give you the concept. If there was rigidity in Zionism, there would be no way Zionism could survive the tremendous turmoil of the last sixty or seventy years. But these ideas are not in a hierarchy with each other--they are on a platform, they have equal footing and in every window of time there is a realignment of these ideas to meet the challenges of the day with new priorities.

What are these ideas? First there is the commitment to a special place on the face of this Earth—the land of Israel, the cradle of our civilization. The second big idea was about security for Jews. The third was about the well being of Jews. Not necessarily about wealth but more about economic independence, economic self determination. Then it was a whole nexus of ideas about humanism, liberalism, democracy. The Zionist movement since its inception has been democratic to a fault. That is still reflected and projected into the Knesset, which is a highly ineffective body.

It was about leadership among the family of nations—tikkun olam—repairing the world. It was about being light unto the nations, and the quest to create a model society. It has been about the Jewish character of the state of Israel—which means its language, its national day of rest, the Shabbat, its national holidays. This is the only place on the face of this earth where Jews experience being a majority. We assume full responsibility. This is a radically different existence than being a minority—as economically and politically powerful as a minority can be. Here we take care of sewage, we're responsible for security.

Has Israel achieved what it set out to achieve in terms of physical security?

We're getting to a point where the advancement of the Zionist cause may compromise the resilience of the Jewish people.

Do you mean crowding all the Jews of the world into one small spot?

Yes. We in Israel still haven't lifted the burden of proof that we know how to run countries better than anyone else. History is full of stories of rises and declines of nations. We have not proven we are immune from decline.

What's the biggest proof that you're not immune—the mediocrity of government, the factions within Israel, the settlers who value one Zionist vision?

I love these factions and disputes. I think they're the source of tremendous creativity.

But the dispute over the settlement movement, which places one Jewish or Zionist value over all the others you listed, eats up an enormous amount of goodwill and reputation.

If they take over the national agenda, it would be a problem. But if they are a faction, they are a very important voice of our people. They are a faction that represents the view that there should be ownership, sovereignty, and control of the Jewish political body over the areas that are the cradle of our civilization. They also say, "We are waiting for the messiah, and our messiah will come." It's a messianic view of the world. It's very important, and I'm saying this as a secular people. It's hard to imagine the survival of our people in the Diaspora without this idea of a messiah.

This return to Zion.

The return to Zion as an essential phase in the messianic redemption. I may agree or disagree with them, but they are a very important voice. As long as the equilibrium is preserved—see, I belong to a very small faction of Israelis that believe that the struggle between Israelis democracy and its Jewishness cannot be resolved and should not be resolved.

No constitution for you?

There can be a constitution, but that constitution will only lay out the tension. It would create a framework for future generations to work out their arrangement.

A constitution with a lot of open questions.

Yes. It will lay the ground rules. It will lay some basic principles for engagement. But it will not resolve the tension and it cannot resolve the tension. Why? Because any resolution of the tension is contextual. It is in a time and a place. We don't know what will happen.

Go back to the issue of how Zionism could undermine the resiliency of the Jewish people.

No, I didn't say it has undermined it. Zionism may deplete the Diaspora. A few years down the road we Zionists need to begin to question our quest to eliminate the Diaspora. The point that I'm making is that a vibrant Diaspora is a Zionist imperative.

Not because they raise money and send it to Israel.

It's insignificant. It's important for them, not for us. Jewish financial contributions to Israel will remain significant if they get focused on the areas where only philanthropy can make a difference. Today, it is being spent across the board in a way that marginalizes the impact of Jewish philanthropists on Israel.

Talk about the importance of settling the Palestinian problem.

I think that we have been very successful in containing the Palestinian issue. What I mean by containing is that day-to-day decisions of the vast majority of the Israel population are unaffected by our conflict with the Palestinians. This is precisely the opposite of what the Palestinians wanted to achieve. They wanted to bring chaos.

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An Introduction to Blogging

So I wandered by Andrew's office yesterday and somehow we got on the subject of blogosphere etiquette, which is not our usual subject: our usual subject is Hillary Clinton. I argue that Hillary Clinton is a complicated, imperfect person who nevertheless has an interesting brain and some very worthwhile ideas. Andrew argues that this subject is, in fact, not complicated at all.

In any case, I was telling Andrew about an on-line mugging I experienced at the hands of a person named Matt Haber, who is associated with the New York Observer, about which I have generally warm feelings, in part because it gave my book a great review, and we all know what such a review does for a person's self-esteem, if not for a book's actual sales. Andrew wasn't impressed by my complaint. "Calling you an asshole is just the blogosphere's way of saying hello," he said.

But I was unappeased. What bothered me about Mr. Haber's post was not its insults (a couple of which were funny) but that he repeated a discredited accusation made by an ethically-challenged journalist about my reporting without having sought my comment. I called Haber to complain. He said: "I just wanted to promote your new blog." I didn't quite understand this argument. He went on to explain that he "assumed" that I had already "had it out" with the journalist in question. Then he said that, while the Observer "does reporting," the blog for which he writes "is a looser, more fun kind of way of writing things." Fun, in Haber's view, includes slander.

I called up Jack Shafer, the dean of global journalism and the future director of the Newseum, because I needed someone to listen to me bitch, and Andrew certainly wasn't going to. I complained to Shafer about Haber's dishonesty, but Shafer noted that his dishonesty was not relevant; what mattered was his mediocrity. "What these bloggers don't understand is that if you call the target of your post to get a comment, the target's going to say something really interesting," he said.

It seems to me to be a basic point. Haber's post on my blog would have been more interesting if he actually got me to talk about my reporting. I might have even inadvertently offered him ammunition.

It's one of the mysteries of the blogosphere, why more people don't simply pick up the phone once in a while.

To be continued, I'm sure.

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Is Israel Finished?

The leading Israeli blogger and all-around A1 Jew Shmuel Rosner, has just posted his Q & A with me on the Ha'aretz website. As usual, we bicker, this time about the meaning of Zionism, and about the challenges Israel -- to my mind, at least -- isn't confronting. For some reason, as you will see, Rosner brings out the Diaspora Jew in me.
By the way, the article we talk about is here.

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Goldberg on Israel

The cover of this month’s Atlantic Monthly asks, “Is Israel Finished?” But Jeffrey Goldberg, who wrote the magazine’s lead article, says he’s proud of the Jewish state and brings his kids there almost every year. Hear his full interview with JTA here.
Listen here

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Welcome to the Terrordome

This is almost certainly a mistake.

Friends tell me that I will take naturally to blogging because I am in possession of many poorly considered opinions about issues I understand only marginally. I am dubious, however. My day job is to produce overlong narrative stories for the magazine that sponsors and funds his website. These stories are meant to be exhaustively researched, carefully constructed and closely edited. Whether they justify the effort is for the reader to decide. In my opinion, they occasionally do, but I don’t like most writing, including my own. For what it’s worth, I’ve been writing now for about twenty years. I joined the Atlantic last year, from the New Yorker. Before writing for the New Yorker, I wrote for the New York Times Magazine, and before that, for New York Magazine. I have nearly run out of magazines. I will undoubtedly be ending my career at Cat Fancy.

In any case, I am not at all sure I will take to this new form of communication. One disadvantage I have is that I sit near my friend and colleague Andrew Sullivan, and so I have the opportunity to watch an expert at work. Andrew, of course, began blogging in 1952, on a UNIVAC (very difficult to maneuver through airports), and he is, by himself, responsible for twenty-seven percent of all blog entries ever posted on the Worldwide Web.(I think I saw this statistic once on Wikipedia). He produces more words in a day than I produce in an entire season of writing. The vast majority of Andrew’s posts are finely-crafted, well-reasoned, hugely entertaining, and occasionally not about Barack Obama. I even agree with some of them.

The point is, Andrew is a natural-born blogger. He has opinions. He has bandwidth. Most important, he has sitzfleish. In the errant hope of replicating his success, I asked him for advice. He was most unhelpful. “Four words: You will regret this,” he wrote me, before posting twenty-seven separate items in a three-hour period.

Fortunately, I have other colleagues at the Atlantic who are professional bloggers, and are quite good at it. One of them, Marc Ambinder, was most helpful, offering the following suggestions: A blogger should only post, he wrote, when he has “something new to add to something old,” and has “something that no one else has.” Do not, he continued, “post for the sake of posting. Resist the temptation – and boy is it a temptation – to blog because your audience expects to read something.” This last bit of advice presupposes the existence for me of an audience. On this exact point, another of our fine bloggers, Ross Douthat, offered me this piece of advice: “Don’t check your traffic.”

Of all the bloggers on this site, my clear role model is James Fallows. Like me, Jim devotes the bulk of his time to producing long stories that are held together with transitions, staples. He also seems to be blessedly free of the urge to over-post. Jim writes only when he feels a need to say something, in particular about boiled frogs. In fact, he posts only about boiled frogs. As it happens, the myth of the slowly-boiled frog happens to be the great obsession of my life, as well as that of Jim’s, so I believe we’ll make an excellent team. A little known fact: The Atlantic was started 150 years ago by a group of men, including James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who all shared an interest in puncturing the myth of the slowly-boiled frog. They were also interested in ending slavery. But mostly, boiled frogs.

I do have other interests, as well, and I hope to blog, when the spirit moves me, on the future of Israel, the coarsening of American life, the Jewish predisposition toward dissatisfaction, the Mets (see previous), Dylan and Springsteen, the perfidies of Wal-Mart, genocide in Africa, gun control, the civilizational struggle within Islam, airline delays, screenwriting and the bleakness of journalism. I also hope to be bridge to the 19th Century. I’ve spent many aimless hours rooting around the cavernous and wondrous Atlantic archives, and I hope to bring you along for some of my more exciting discoveries. In fact, I have just completed such an exercise, which you can see here.

There, I’ve now engaged in unabashed self-promotion. If that doesn’t make me a blogger, I don’t know what will.

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