mashdownbabylon

To Israel's America Lobby

It was an event that held a little significance for everyone. For Israelis, because of the commitment that the US President reiterated to their security. For Americans, because of the opportunity that their leader took to excoriate their country's opposition in a foreign parliament. And, for Iran, which was once again reminded that, despite how poorly the US is fairing in Iraq and Afghanistan, America would still protect Israel from any manner of threat. In other words, it was an exercise in consistency, one that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert duly noted by nearly falling asleep during the President's speech in Jerusalem on Thursday.

Notwithstanding the umbrage taken by the US press to Bush's address to the Knesset, for anyone familiar with the importance that the Republicans have attached to securing Jewish votes in the forthcoming elections, it all made sense. Of course the President would take advantage of such an ideal opportunity. The problem is that, aside from the advantages that Israel most definitely accrued from playing host to the occasion, it had less to do with Israel than it did with the United States, and the failings of the present administration to make any positive achievements in the Middle East during Bush's two terms in office. With the failure of Lebanon's government to contain Hezbollah, one cannot ask for a more timely display designed for domestic consumption during an election year.

As the United States slowly loses Lebanon to Iran, despite the immense investment the Americans made in the Siniora government, once again we have another example of how US intervention in the region has worsened Israel's security. Sandwiched in between an Iranian-supported state in the south, and not one, but now two in the north, Israel's situation, at the end of Bush’s final term in office, is actually worse than it was on 9/11. No wonder Israelis would want the kind of dramatic security guarantees that the US President has offered. No wonder they'd want it specifically from Bush, and that Israel would place so much value on it, too. Given how poorly the Israel Defense Forces have performed in recent years, the need for American reassurance, of the kind that the President reiterated, is that much more important. Its a horrible situation.

Yet, there is also good reason to argue that Thursday's event in Jerusalem had little to do with reaffirming the significance of Israel's security, however flawed America's conception of it might be. Bush's speech, as an editorial in Friday's Haaretz suggested, also signaled the President's willingness to use Israel's conflict with Iran as a way of maintaining control over US Mideast policy after leaving office. To implicate Israeli security requirements with such a possible maneuver can only serve to further damage Israel's long-term interests, not simply because precedent suggests that the US would lose such an engagement against the Iranians. But, as important, because it would implicate Israel's security interests in contravention of America's electoral process.

Americans may not have a clear idea of an effective Mideast policy alternative to that of Bush. Though the Democrats have not exactly offered any compelling options, the amount of energy that Republicans have expended trying to debunk Obama's alleged positions suggests that conservatives fear another emerging policy is surely out there, and that it really is different. For as nebulous as that position might be, the desire for such a policy change is an enormous part of what will motivate millions of Americans to vote Democratic in November's Presidential election. As the Bush administration's failures in the Middle East have repeatedly demonstrated, that's exactly why Israel ought to remain open to whatever alternatives an Obama-led government might have to offer.

Originally published on Allvoices

Tombstone Horizon

Now closed, San Bruno's Golden Gate National Cemetery lives on 161 acres of land. Boasting 138, 352 interments, this enormous military graveyard sits at the northernmost end of Silicon Valley.

I pass by this spot every day on my way home from work. Yesterday, I got out of the car to take this picture. Looking north towards San Francisco, the city was invisible. All I could see were tombstones.

The Last in Line

Three quarters of the way through his speech, the President's mouth seized up, as though he were about to say something important that he just could not figure out how to put into words. Alas, this moment would be forever frozen in time, as the media player refused to restart, prematurely ending George W. Bush's address to a gathering of Israeli and foreign dignitaries at the Facing Tomorrow conference, held this evening in Jerusalem.

Snapping a screenshot of this scene, I could not help but giggle at what a great photo opportunity this was, capturing the American leader stopped in his tracks, his mouth wide open. No amount of contempt could sum up the tremendous satisfaction that welled up in my chest as I imagined how speechless the President really looked. The pleasures I've been able to derive these past seven years are few, my revenge fantasies limited to short, ironic moments like these.

Obviously, Bush is an easy target. Provincial, religious, and inarticulate, he's the most opportune of prey to have one's adolescent way with. A paradigmatic Philistine, or an anti-democratic ideologue straight out of central casting, the President's horrible record lends much credence to his critics, who blame him for every ill that has befallen the U.S. since 9/11. From a collapsing economy to the war in Iraq, Bush has left Americans feeling poorer and more insecure than any President since Woodrow Wilson.

This is why, at least for me, it's important to not over-emphasize the singularity of this moment. As inclined as Americans might be to harangue Israel for being so automatically willing to grant Bush such a warm welcome, it's important to remember that Israel has never been the President's sole foreign supporter. The governments of Tony Blair and John Howard, Silvio Berlusconi and Jose Maria Aznar, were, of equal, if not to greater degrees, supportive and admiring, as is French President Nicolas Sarkozy today.

Though I'd prefer that Israel's Prime Minister not be a member of this club, there was something positive about being forced to watch this evening's proceedings. With his days looking increasingly numbered, Olmert will not be the last foreign leader to have such an intimate connection with the Bush era. That honor will be left to Sarkozy, who, from the looks of it, will end up outliving both besieged heads of state. No great shakes, but at least, for once, it will be a European that will be the last in line, and not another Israeli.

Beirut Readymade

Amongst the photos we received from Reuters today, this remarkable shot of a young Hezbollah supporter chanting slogans in front of the UN headquarters in Beirut really stood out. Between the teddy bears, fake blood and barbed wire, Banksy has finally found his local match.

Originally published at Allvoices

Israel As a Vocation

Today, Israel commemorates the sixtieth anniversary of it's founding. Unlike the celebrations of the country's 50th birthday in 1998, today's events have a far more somber quality to them, as though they are observing the passing of something far more tentative and fragile than we imagined back then, just before the peace process ground to a halt. Predictably, this month has witnessed the publication of a number of controversial articles questioning whether Israel will survive, generating, in turn, the expected reactions. In other words, business as usual.

As an Israeli citizen, and as an American-born editor working in English-language news publishing, I've resisted the temptation to draft my own thoughts on the subject, if only because I'm loathe to indulge the cliches that inevitably accompany the ritual of commenting on any specific nation's annual observation of it's independence. Especially those penned by U.S. Jews, which I read all of the time, and inevitably drive me nuts. Whether its spreading the love, or demonstrating disappointment, more often than not, it all reads the same.

This isn't to say that I'm not using the date as an opportunity to reflect on the nature of the state my friends and family continue to create. I am, just as I do every day, as someone who, for better or worse, always has Israel on his mind. If Israel has succeeded in establishing itself as it's own unmoved mover, to quote my divinity school training, it would make Aquinas proud. Nothing in my mind is not somehow related to or impacted by it. Israel is everywhere, and everything.

However, I don't feel the least bit sentimental about it, and there's something about recognizing this that I find relatively liberating. To wit, my wife and I will be going home to see my parents in a month's time, and the country will not feel any different than it did the same time last year I returned home, or, for that matter, this week, as I worried about the fact that I was not worried whether I'd write anything about this date at all. Israel, quite simply, exists, and feels more a part of my life than ever.

Of course, like the pundits I like to read, I could offer my own interpretation of the country's Italian-style political scene, and what I think the future holds in store for Israel under a coming Berlusconi-equivalent. Or I could offer it by way of talking about the remarkable films I saw this week at the San Francisco International Film Festival, such as Vasermil, Children of the Sun, or Under the Bombs, all of which offer rich insights into how Israelis and Arabs alike experience the country. At some point, I'm sure I will.

But, today, I guess, my point is far more mundane. For me, as it is for many Jews, Israel is something of a vocation. If that's what citizenship ultimately means, that's fine. I gladly accept it. As much as I'd like to find the identity somehow transformative or more involving, over the years, I've had to set certain instinctual limits to it because the psychic burden of being Israeli is traumatic enough. Adding anything else to the equation would be, for lack of a better of way of putting it, completely overwhelming.

No Need For Translation

Our neighborhood Christian resource center. In Spanish, "Llamada Final" means "Final Call."

A block south, local proponents of secularism let their their feelings about religion be known.

Freedom is Reverb

In what could be one of the most crucial dub reissues of the year, Greensleeves has just published the sequel to my favorite King Tubby production of all time, Dangerous Dub. Out of print since 1996, this 1981 LP is the kind of record that teaches you to appreciate an entire genre.

Much brighter sounding than other Tubby recordings (at times the treble sounds an awful lot like Scientist) amidst a sea of never-ending reggae re-releases, More Dangerous Dub most definitely stands out. The mix is so clear and expansive, I can hear even the tiniest of details on my MacBook's crappy internal speakers.

One of the principle points Charlie Bertsch and I put forth in our presentation on Burial at the Experience Music Project conference last month is that dub's political meaning inheres in the way it uses reverb to symbolically create space, to enlarge it, as though the effect is it's own metaphor for freedom.

Given how bleak things looked in Jamaica when this album was recorded, it's no surprise that it sounds  as optimistic as it does, especially by Tubby's standards. It is as though More Dangerous Dub is an exercise in irony, particularly given how dark dub first sounded during it's heyday under socialist rule in the mid-1970s.

Masada or Yavneh?

CEDAR: When you compare the rebels on Masada to the wise men in Yavneh, the rebels died as lions, and the wise men lived as dogs . But the dogs had puppies, and we are those puppies. So, there was something about blowing up Beaufort, blowing up the fortifications, blowing up the mountain, at the end of the film, that was also about blowing up a symbol of (the lion's) power. It's about our power to create something else that, at least for me, makes us different from our enemies.

ZEEK: It means that as Israelis, we can start over. That we have the ability to reinvent ourselves.

CEDAR: Not only that. It means that we have an identity without the geographical symbol, that we have an identity that is as powerful and as firm as concrete and fortifications, flags and pride.

To read the rest of my interview with director Joseph Cedar, check out the new issue of Zeek.

Making News

Nearly a year to the day I left Tikkun to complete my book, I went back to work as an editor again. Not so coincidentally, the gig was online, with Allvoices, an international news and community portal. Tasked with recruiting a team of bloggers to help launch the site's publishing platform, and responsibility for editing and managing the largest collection of international news feeds I've ever seen, I've spent the last five months adjusting to a job that's both new and extremely familiar at the exact same time.

I'm very grateful for the opportunity. Given what a crisis publishing is in, I continue to find myself exceedingly lucky I found any work at all, let alone work in news media. The degree of relief I feel, as you might imagine, remains profound. My biggest concern in quitting my former job in such dreadful economic circumstances was that my book might be my final hurrah to fourteen years in publishing. I'm glad to say its not, though I would have continued to do this irrespective of whether I'm paid or not.

One aspect of my present gig that makes it so fulfilling is familiarizing myself with English language news resources in places I would not have otherwise gotten to know, such as central Africa and the Caribbean, discovering first class, UN-funded news organizations, or independent European agencies that are every bit as good as AP or Reuters. It's all been enormously inspirational to discover, especially at a time when it seems as though the business is going to absolute pot.

The other aspect of my present gig that I've really enjoyed has been working with a crew of twenty-two regular bloggers, such as my longtime colleague and pal Mitchell Plitnick, the Belgrade-based  journalist Amy Miller, Cairo's aBendinTheNile, and Ilana Sichel in Jerusalem, to name a few. Their writing can be every bit as good as anything I read at past gigs, if not more so. I still do a serious amount of traditional editorial work at Zeek to balance it all out, and the perspective it helps provides is something else.

The best anecdote I can impart about all of this is that my co-workers, who hail from India, Europe, and Pakistan, like to jokingly refer to me as the 'Mossad agent.' Though it's not meant to be pejorative, in context, it's still a hoot to hear. Relating this to a relative who queried me about the Arab media I've been having to review, giggling, he responded, " Nu, you know, this stuff could come in useful some day."

Rootless Occidentalism

C'mon Fairuz, where was this album really recorded? The fine print on the upper right says Lebanon, but the LP's title indicates that it might also have been made in the US. The ambiguity of the record's ideal location, as somewhere in between America and the Middle East, suits this 1971 release extremely well. How contemporary, especially considering the fact that the record is nearly fourty years old.

The H in Globalization

H, that is, for Hebrew. Go get 'em, tiger.  Orakiva  Mall, 2006.

American Studies

American defense concerns have always given weapons names that fit their function. For example, fighters such as the F-15, F-16 and F-18 were appropriately given names such as 'Eagle', 'Fighting Falcon,' and 'Hornet,' while the black-painted, radar-evading F-117 stealth bomber was dubbed the 'Nighthawk'.

As silly as these names can get, (Why not a Dayhawk? When is the Chickenhawk coming? etc..) you can see the cultural logic behind their specificity. They're meant to convey that such war machines embody the fierce, agile, even predatory qualities that define the brave birds that the aircraft were named after.

Hence the curious naming of the new 'Masada' assault rifle by it's manufacturer, Magpul Industries. Named after one of the first recorded incidents of mass suicide (in which 960 Jews besieged by Roman troops took their lives) the complexity of the rifle's title represents a fairly serious break with convention.

As though anticipating criticisms over having chosen such a potentially controversial name, in a PDF brochure for the weapon posted to Wikipedia, Magpul maintains that the company is  neither "Jewish or Israeli backed," but that it has always found the story of Masada to be "a bold example of defiance."

If you want to get a sense of what informs so many American estimations of Israeli military prowess, you won't find a more revealing signifier. One people's loss is another's defiance. Or, one could conjecture that such takes on Israelis say more about American desires than what they think about Jewry.

In January, the Masada was licensed to the larger American arms manufacturer Bushmaster, who have since retitled it the Adaptive Combat Rifle.