Make Films, Not War

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Three days left to apply .

Reena Lazar of Peace It Together tells me that her organization is accepting applications until May 10 for this summer’s peace camp: A small group of Israeli, Palestinian and Canadian teens will spend three weeks together on an island near Vancouver learning leadership and communication skills and making films together. The follow-up program lasts for the full year afterwards.

I kid you not: You (or your 16-18-year-old kid) have been sitting around thinking about how adults have messed up the world,

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Shopkeepers, Service, and Socialism

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Hey Gershom, I always get smiles at the bakery. Maybe it’s because they know I can track their every move from my living room window.

Why should we argue? This is a blog, so let’s ask our readers. How many of you think service has improved in Israel in stores, government offices, banks, and health clinics over the last three decades? How many of you think it’s due in part to increased competition? Feel free to offer specific examples and anecdotes. Here’s one of mine:

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Update: Pipes harms cranks’ image

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At the Wonk Room , Matt Duss discusses attempts by the National Review to prove that Barack Obama might actually be a closet Muslim who (gasp!) studied Quran as a child in Indonesia. And here I thought the unhinged right was busy sliming Obama for his connections to his pastor.  What an interesting man that Obama is, what a religious innovator: A Muslim, a follower of a controversial black pastor, and a Marxist too. A one-man repertory theater, as talented as the Jews who were once accused of being bankers, communists, zionists and cosmopolitans all at once.

As prooftext for the Obama-is-Muslim attack, NR’s writer brings articles by none other than Pipes. "We don’t know if he is [Muslim], but we know Daniel Pipes is no crank," says NR’s Lisa Schiffren.

Matt agrees: Labeling Pipes a crank would libel all those harmless folks

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Capitalism, shopkeepers and the myth of the socialist clerk

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A couple hundred meters from your house, Haim, there’s a bakery, a capitalist enterprise to the best of my knowledge. For a couple of years, I went there every Friday after morning services and bought the big flat pitot that my kids love for Shabbat dinner. The first time that the owner, or manager, or staff thug – I didn’t check his precise title – shouted at me for daring to stop to talk to a friend in his store, I ignored him. The second time, I put down my pitot on the counter and left. My friend came out and told me that the reason he does the Friday morning bakery run is that his wife refuses to enter the place, after she was target of a similar tantrum.

I feel a bit uncomfortable telling this story, because I generally enjoy life in South Jerusalem, and I’ve found another bakery where the pitot are great and the guy at the register is generally polite. But if you ask me :

Remember standing in line endlessly at the bank only to finally reach a surly teller? Remember sales clerks who thought they were doing you a favor by deigning to speak to you?

– well, yes, I do remember. And I don’t have to stretch terribly far back into my memory

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Cause of Death (2)

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Gershom, I agree with the spirit of your Cause of Death post, but I think you’re over-idealizing Israel’s socialist past.

Think back to those good old days, when the country was making makework for everyone. Remember getting shunted from one bureaucrat to another in grossly overstaffed government offices where everyone always seemed to be on break? Remember standing in line endlessly at the bank only to finally reach a surly teller? Remember sales clerks who thought they were doing you a favor by deigning to speak to you? Remember having to take an entire day off of work to see a doctor, because there was only “sick call” and no way of making appointments?

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Purely Wrong: Judah Leib Magnes and the Jewish State

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According to a legend, the sage Rabbi Shimon bar-Yohai and his son spent twelve years hiding in a cave and delving into the esoteric truths of the Torah. When they emerged, Rabbi Shimon was so immersed in divine truth that he raged when he saw Jews plowing their fields. His anger was so fierce that his mere glance burned up every working man he saw. God ordered him back to the cave.

The publication of the diary of Judah Leib Magnes, the leading Jewish pacifist and peace activist in Palestine in the years leading up to Israel’s War of Independence, offers an opportunity to consider another man whose attempt to adhere to absolute truth and purity led him to misunderstand entirely the world around him.

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More on CAMERA and Wikipedia

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Journalistic colleagues – in the Jewish and general American media – have emailed me to thank me for my recent column on CAMERA’s apparent efforts to slant Wikipedia articles. The notes came with comments like “batten down the hatches” or “hope they don’t throw eggs at your house.” I felt like the kid who took the dare to walk across the yard of the neighbor who keeps rottweilers, or who talked back to the teacher who still uses a paddle.

Knowing those colleagues, I don’t think any of them would pass up a story or a sentence just because CAMERA will attack them afterward. They are folks who have shown themselves to blessedly, professionally foolhardy. I can’t say I’m sure this is true of everyone in the business. This may please some donors to CAMERA, the attack-dog organization that claims to monitor the media for anti-Israel bias and that barks at any report it perceives as negative: See, those nasty media people have had the fear of God put in them.

Me, I’d think that if you cared about Israel, you really would want accurate info about what’s happening here, which means reports on what’s wrong as well as what’s right – as I’d think you’d prefer the doctors treating family members to be honest. You wouldn’t want the pediatrician to be afraid you’d start roaring at her if she said your kid showed definite signs of junk-food addiction and obesity.

Meanwhile, “dajudem,” a member of the CAMERA-organized group of stealth editors of Wikipedia has posted a fascinating comment on my Prospect column :

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Cause of death: Globalization, weak dollar, human decency

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He was 48 years old, according to the brief items that appeared in the Hebrew press late last week (here , and here ). Yossi Danziger was the director-general of Polgat, a producer of wool fabric in the southern Israeli town of Kiryat Gat. He died of a heart attack, shortly after the company did. He’d been trying to find alternative jobs for the 300 workers who lost their jobs when Polgat’s owner, the Bagir firm, decided to cut its losses and shut down the factory, apparently without great success .

Polgat, according to the news reports, couldn’t match the low production costs of Far Eastern competitors – especially when energy prices were soaring and the value of the dollar was shrinking daily. Most of the company’s export contracts were in dollars. Old-timers here recall a time when the dollar was considered a strong world currency and when using it for international contracts made sense.

As for labor costs, the news items did not detail how the Far Eastern competitors keep them down. We are supposed to accept the idea of garments and fabric and everything else being produced more cheaply in far away places where there are no safety protections for workers,

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Socks and the Man

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Israel Independence Day is coming up next week, and I’m feeling very patriotic. So I went out this morning and bought $93 worth of socks for the Israel Defense Forces. I looked at Ties.com men’s sock collection and found some brilliant socks, but I decided that I had spent enough money on socks for one day!!

Often, however, I have to buy the socks without the inspiration. Every month I shell out sums like this for hats, scarfs, t-shirts, underwear and other gear that the IDF does not supply to its soldiers. And socks. My son is in combat training in a commando unit, so he goes through a lot of them. This time, I wanted to do something a little special for him. I was recommended by a friend of mine to look into a company like Foto Socken, who allow you to create customised socks. This is such a cool concept that I thought I might as well get a pair for my son. Everyone can get a basic pair of socks, but not everyone gets a customised pair. I hope he appreciates the effort I put into this gift, because they literally let you put your photo on socks. I could choose anything I want.

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CAMERA: Committee for Agitprop in Middle Eastern Reporting

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CAMERA, which claims to monitor the accuracy of reporting on Israel in the American media, doesn’t feel obligated to be all that truthful itself, as I explain in my new column at the American Prospect. A CAMERA staffer organized activists to work as a group to edit Wikipedia articles on Israel – while hiding their intent and their connection to each other. Some would conceal their interest in Israel, get elected as impartial administrators, and then be able to decide disagreements between other volunteer editors.

Ineffectual as the CAMERA effort apparently was, there are several morals to the story. One is that despite the techno-idealism that Wikipedia can inspire, it’s best to approach the encyclopedia with an attitude of caveat lector, let the reader beware. The affair is also a reminder — not the first — that CAMERA is ready to exempt itself from the demands for accuracy that it aims at the media.

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The Oud Plays for Peace

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It’s become dangerous to play the oud in Baghdad, the New York Times reports today. Religious extremists of all stripes apparently agree that secular music is unacceptable. No matter that the oud has been part of Islamic life for centuries. Fundamentalism (in all faiths) is a modern creation claiming to be old – a sort of Piltdown Man of the spirit.

One flaw in the article: Reading it, one could think that the oud is purely an Iraqi instrument, threatened by extinction – when in fact the voluptuous pear-shaped lute reigns from Morocco to Iran as the queen of music. The beauty of the oud may be the one thing that Greeks, Armenians and Turks agree on.

The article also cites a legend that the oud was invented by a descendant of Cain named Lamak. The basis of that legend is obviously the verse in Genesis 4, referring to Yuval, son of Lemekh, as the "father of all who hold the harp and pipe." One way to understand the story is that Yuval created a salve for the tear in the human soul that Cain left. I’m sure there’s a scholar out there willing to write a doctorate on whether the legend linking Lemekh to the oud is more Jewish or more Muslim,

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The Roadblock to Damascus Lies on Pennsylvania Avenue

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Eyal Zisser, a top Israeli expert on Syria, says that Ehud Olmert and Bashar al-Assad appear serious about talking peace. The latest sign is Asad’s comment to the Qatari daily al-Watan Olmert has given him a commitment to return the entire Golan Heights.

In an analysis published through the Dayan Center at Tel Aviv U, Zisser describes that the most likely reason for Assad to reveal Olmert’s commitment, which was delivered via Turkey:

…the Syrians may have wanted to test Olmert’s seriousness, to check whether the message delivered to them was reliable, and whether Olmert would be capable of weathering the inevitable criticism from portions of the Israeli public. The fact that the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office declined to deny the news of the commitment has been understood as a tacit confirmation of its veracity.

The peacemaker here is Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan,

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