Galgalatz History?

BY CARMIA

I'm really not sure, but I think history may have just been made on Galgalatz, a popular IDF-operated radio station. Today at 15:10, a complete song in Arabic was played on the airwaves. I didn't catch the name of the artist or the song, but if I had to make a guess based on the voice and style, it sounded like Amir Benayoun, a Jewish-Israeli artist of Moroccan descent.

Amir Benayoun, who sings in Hebrew as well as in Arabic

ADDENDUM: I found the song. It's actually by Dudu Tassa, a Jewish-Israeli artist of Iraqi origin. Enjoy.

The Guardian on Lebanon-Israel Border Clash

Nearly six hours after UNIFIL acknowledged that IDF troops were removing trees on the Israeli side of the border, the Guardian still has a video on its web site in which the newspaper's caption claims that

the fighting broke out after Israeli soldiers tried to uproot a tree on the Lebanese side of the border.

Report by Turkish Newspaper Hurriyet Strengthens IDF Account

An article published today in Hurriyet, one of Turkey's biggest newspapers, strengthens some of the accounts provided by IDF soldiers of what happened after they landed on board the ship. The article has a link to a collection of photos restored from memory cards that belonged to activists on board the ship. It shows three bloodied soldiers being dragged below deck by activists. It also documents the activists holding knives and iron bars. According to the Hurriyet article, which was summarized by Haaretz, the IDF seized cameras and deleted photos from their memory cards, but the files were later restored using standard memory card software. Some activists also concealed their cameras or dimmed them.

"Gagging" Human Rights Groups

BY AMOS

Yesterday, the English edition of Ha'aretz ran a story that began with the lead:

More than half of Jewish Israelis think human rights organizations that expose immoral behavior by Israel should not be allowed to operate freely, and think there is too much freedom of expression here, a recent survey found.

Its headline claimed that the "Majority of Israel's Jews back gag on rights groups." The article in the Hebrew edition had the same lead but a different headline putting the emphasis on the poll's finding that "74% of the public [believes]: punish those who reveal security matters." I could find no reference to it elsewhere in the Hebrew press yesterday.

The poll in question was commissioned by the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research at Tel Aviv University and the majority of those quoted in the article are affiliated with that institute. Unfortunately, the article gives no indication as to the original wording of the poll. I fear that Ha'aretz editors are once again playing fast and loose with an opinion survey for the purposes of editorial comment (the linked Jerusalem Post article describes Ha'aretz reporting of an opinion survey about Israeli views of President Obama). The Steinmetz center only has a link to an announcement of a conference about "academic freedom of expression in society during conflict" (PDF program in Hebrew), where the research will apparently be presented on Thursday, April 29.

The pollsters were puzzled that an overwhelming majority of Israelis nevertheless expressed support for freedom of expression. I think there is a lot of mistrust of human rights groups among Israelis. Many of those surveyed probably don't believe that the NGOs are "exposing immoral behavior" but that their findings are selective and highly politicized.

More Condescending Idiocy from Roger Cohen

It's always amusing to see journalists and academic critics belittling Israeli security concerns, which these know-it-alls dismiss as a mixture of manipulation and pathological paranoia. See for example Roger Cohen's latest column along these lines:

To enter Israel is to pass through a hall of mirrors. A nation exerting complete military dominance in the West Bank becomes one that, under an almost unimaginable peace accord, might be menaced from there.

What does Cohen know about qassams and katyushas? What good is "complete dominance" and military superiority when terrorists can fire rockets at your cities and threaten the lives of thousands of civilians?

Taliban "Snipers"

Some very impressive reporting in the Times on a firefight in Marja involving at least one talented Afghan marksman and some WWII-era rifles. The video is a must-see.

Shmuel Rosner: "I do not eat pumpkin. That is true."

I just caught a lecture by Shmuel Rosner, former chief of news at Ha'aretz, as well as their Washington correspondent, and now a highly influential blogger at the J-Post. The lecture, which was co-sponsored by the Judaica collection of the Doe Library and the Berkeley journalism school, concerned media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian, Israeli-Arab conflict. Rosner spoke from a lectern that has also belonged recently to Benny Morris, and the journalist at times struck the historian's muscular pose, affected the same contempt for naiveté and for leftist partisanship. I eagerly anticipated his views on Ha'aretz. He said the left-of-center daily is at times too critical of Israel, and may even have caused the IDF excessive pain. Rosner's goal was to describe the community of reporters and organizations covering Israel, and to brief us on how to discern bullshit.

As for the Israeli media, those of us who rely on the Anglophone Israeli media are woefully out of touch with the internal political discourse in Israel. That discourse is created, he argued, on TV, and in the pages of Yediot, Maariv, and, now, Yisrael Hayom.

But the foreign media was the real focus.

The lecture was full of lists. The four cardinal sins of foreign journalists in the Middle East:

1. Obsession

2. Prejudice

3. Ignorance

4. Condescension

5. Unprofessionalism -- chiefly a matter of dereliction of fact-(re)-checking. (Not officially on the list, but something he lingered over later with regard to the unreliability of the Palestinian media, as well as the merely innocuous nature of the Swedish reporter who accused the IDF of harvesting Palestinian organs).

Rosner's rules for readers of foreign reporting:

1. What leaders say behind closed doors doesn't matter. What matters is what they say in public, to their own people, in their own language.

2. Israelis and Palestinians can't keep secrets. You will know what you want to know...eventually.

3. Commissions and reports of all types have little value.

4. Envoys of the US and other world powers are always too optimistic -- and almost bound to fail.

5. Do not overestimate the impact of the White House or other foreign intervention.

6. Just because someone doesn't speak English, it doesn't mean they're dumb.

7. Arabs generally have a lot of patience.

8. Never underestimate the power of domestic politics to dictate events.

9. Beware of predictions.

10. Beware of polls.

11. Beware of reporters with political biases.

12. There are many groups in the Middle East that hate each other, but they all agree on at least this: Americans are naive.

I found the scolding of foreign journalists quite satisfying. Rosner painted a vivid picture of what I imagined as a horde of professional gawkers gathering their luggage and translators at the carousel at Ben Gurion Airport, and then greedily speeding to as close to the scene of the carnage as they could get during the last two wars. And with print media downsizing everywhere, the correspondents are becoming ever less versed in the local cultures they cover. The result is a foreign media that covers Israel as a conflict, not as a country. Sounds problematic to me. We get the Israeli leadership's sound-bite, then the Palestinian's. Gazans are suffering these deprivations; now, look -- look how much it sucks to live in Sderot! The foreign media makes our heads swivel like the cat at the window watching the movements of birds outside. But what would the alternative be? What would covering Israel as a country really look like? I am not sure, and I wish I would have asked Rosner. To him, Israel as a country does have to be explained to (certain) Americans. Take his audiences at the American War College in Pennsylvania. Part of what is culturally idiosyncratic about Israel, Rosner explained to them, is the lack of distance between civil society and the military. "Everyone is a civilian, everyone is a soldier," said Rosner, unapologetically. But in fact, the image of Israel as a face-to-face society, where everyone knows someone who is affected by war, the rigors of the occupation, terrorism should be very familiar to readers of, say, the New York Times. This may be the way Israel really is, but it's also something that Israelis desperately want us outsiders to know. I find that very interesting.

A face-to-face society with 5 million cell phones, boasted Rosner, offers the determined journalist an almost unique opportunity to recover the truth about complex events. His paradigmatic example was the so-called massacre of Jenin in 2002. How did his team at Ha’aretz debunk the rumors of a massacre? By calling the soldiers, particularly reservists, they knew. “They couldn’t all be lying,” claimed Rosner. These informants were the “cousins’ best friends" of Rosner’s news division. Social proximity for him is a comparative advantage over foreign media in terms of access, not a journalistic liability. The fog of war was lifted, a little too effortlessly. On the other hand, Rosner insisted on the incompatability of perceptions born of different cultural contexts. Shimon Peres, so his opening joke went, isn’t the same Shimon Peres at home as abroad. Here, I thought Rosner combined not-so-satisfactorily a post-modern uncertainty about what we can really know with great faith in the capacity of the critical reader or journalist to get to the bottom of things. American journalistic pretension to objectivity almost sounded like the American naiveté he seizes upon. But his epistemology is certainly practical. There are things we can know (the Jenin massacre didn’t happen), and things we can’t (what happened to Muhammed al-Durrah).

Granted the last question, I asked about my personal cause celèbre: archaeology in East Jerusalem driven by vulgar ideology. I offered myself up as the guinea pig here. It's an Israeli media story that, for me, is opaque. I read about it in English in Ha'aretz and on the website of the Israeli Antiquities Authority. But I can't seem to figure it out. Are all the projects undertaken in the Ir David legal or illegal (under Israeli, not international law)? Was there a "cultural context" that Rosner could provide that would explain the seemingly contradictory reports? Rosner's answer, and he must have been fatigued at this point, was to draw again a distinction, however provisory, between the forces of objectivity and those of subjectivity. There are the "objective" archaeologists, and there are the ideologically driven right-wing zealots who fund and support the dubious excavations. At this point, Rosner could have taken a line from the Berkeley-version of Benny Morris, who, when an audience member complained that a faulty microphone rendered his lecture inaudible, explained bluntly, "This is the situation." In the final analysis, Rosner admitted, we have to trust someone. "I trust reporters, not newspapers," he said, naming a few of his favorite colleagues' names. Indeed, this is the situation. I agree.

Google Books Feature of Interest to Academics

I am not sure how new this is, but Google Books has a feature that might be of interest to academics in the humanities. As I will demonstrate, it is far from perfect but quite promising. You can now "clip" text from Google Books. So, let's say you're reading something and you quickly want to copy a quotation into your Word processor or Zotero. You just select your sentences and Google Books produces the selected part in plain text, even if the original is in Rashi script or German Fraktur - well, almost. It also gives you a URL for just that quotation, which you can either share as a link or embed, like this:



Here is the plain text that it produced based on the above:

חיקור רין הרמנ מן ז ל הנוגעים לזה הענין או אז יבין איך ראוי להתנהג נחקירות כאלה קראתי ס מסעות הים והנאני ולפי קוצר דעתי טוב מאד להעתיק סיפורים כאלה לל הק למען יראו בחורי עמנו כי לא חסרנו דבר וכי יש לאל יד לשוננו העניה והקצרה למצוא רי באר כל העשתונות כמו בשאר הלשונות ומטעם זה משבח אני גם ס עמורי שמים אשר בו הראה המחבר תקפו וגבורתו נחכמת התכונה אלא שהוא

As you can see, it's not perfect, but pretty darn good I'd say.

Google Books fares much worse with old German books. Here is an example:



This is the "transcription" into plain text:

ie ett nácete je t fyeran baf biefer ben feiner Samilie er ffcn iinb in ffetitltdje treten feilte ci junger ei l tvar

I also found that it occasionally put in Russian letters. There is definitely a pattern in the transcription, though it isn't completely regular. I'm sure the Googlers are working on this stuff.

"Still Optimistic: Israeli Society through Caricature"

BY CARMIA

Information pamphlet about the exhibit

Students for Museum Studies at the University of Haifa have put together an exhibit entitled, "Still Optimistic: Israeli Society through Caricature." On display until the end of this month, the exhibit features caricatures and cartoons addressing a broad spectrum of issues that Israel is and has been facing for at least the past decade and a half. With so many excellent cartoons, it was very difficult to pick a favourite. Instead, I chose to highlight a few which resonated with me for different reasons.

This cartoon by Moshik Lin (2005) portrays globalization/Americanization, but with a local, ironic twist: the English signs and international companies dot a street named after Eliezer Ben Yehuda, considered the "reviver" of spoken Hebrew.

Eran Wolkowski (July 2006) displays the absurdity of the Second Lebanon War, when residents of northern Israel were under fire or had fled south, while life in Tel Aviv went on as usual. The mother, carrying beach equipment, looks at the מקלט - bomb shelter - which is locked and unused. Tel Avivians are often criticized for "living in a bubble."

Also in 2006, a couple of very high-ranking Israeli politicians were embroiled in sexual harassment cases. The scandals were viewed as a turning point by many who thought that it was time that sexual harassment was addressed in a more serious manner, similar to North America. (Caricature by Moshik Lin.)

Israeli teachers are known to receive pitiful salaries. Pointing to the person next to him, the homeless man tells the woman dropping the coin in his cup, "He intends to become a teacher, so he's doing his internship with me" (Shlomo Cohen, 2007). This was also the year that teachers went on strike for over two months.

"And who the hell are you?" Moses asks the Sudanese refugees he encounters in the desert (Daniela London-Dekel, 2007). The issue of what should be done with the Sudanese and other African refugees crossing into Israel is still a contentious topic which has yet to be properly resolved.

Lastly, I thought this cartoon, which is also by Moshik Lin and perfectly relates to the title of the exhibit, was brilliant. The man follows the arrow labeled, "It'll be fine," which is the answer to any and every problem in Israel, on these Escheresque stairs.

International Film Festival in Blue-and-White

BY CARMIA

One of the draws at Haifa's annual International Film Festival is the park in the Carmel Centre, which fills up with little booths selling lots of funky stuff. Admittedly, some of the products look a little too familiar already: the "I've-just-been-to-India" clothes and accessories, the Henna tattoos, and the cheap jewellery, for example.

But here's what I found interesting at the festival:

Udi (left) and his Israeli-invented Discovery ironing board cover which he so passionately demonstrated to me. Honestly, if I ironed more, I would buy it. I don't even know how to explain what that cover does, but it works. He had me stick my hand under it while running a hot iron over it; he left the iron sitting on it for a good few minutes; and he showed me how nothing falls off from it (like the shirt in the picture, hanging off its collar) and more neat tricks. He promised to email me the link.

Then I ran into "Hebrew Goat" (עז עברית), made in Kibbutz Hazorea. The Kachuta cheese below is said to have won 18 competitions,

while I was told that this cheese is the only "yellow" goat cheese (גבינה צהובה) in existence! I was urged to take a picture of it.

When I saw the product below, I just knew this had to be an Israeli invention. It was designed to replace the traditional "threading" method, which lots of Israeli women use to remove facial hair. It's a spring and works by trapping and pulling out the hairs between it. It was marketed under both the name "Spring" and "epi-face," which is a cute word play since most Israelis pronounce the word "happy" as "epi," which is short for epilate here.

Then, of course, there was "The Druze Woman Who Bakes Pita with Za'atar." But in order to appeal to as many taste buds as possible, she not only offered the traditional Labaneh cheese as a topping, but also hummus and chocolate spread.

I also met Asaf Elazary, a student at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. His T-shirt, "Suck My Shmok" (top right), was just one of the original designs he was selling for 40 NIS a piece.

Lastly, I discovered some very young entrepreneurs selling home-made lemonade and magnets for modest prices of 2-3 NIS.

The film festival will wrap up on 10.10.09.

The Michael Oren Pick and Lieberman Shenanigans

Photo: Shalem Center

BY AMOS

Ambassador Michael Oren

Yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu picked Michael Oren (b. 1955) as Israel's next ambassador to the United States. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has endorsed the appointment, and it will now have to be approved by the cabinet.

Oren, a professor with a Ph.D. from Princeton's Near Eastern Studies department, is a brilliant pick. An American Jew who immigrated to Israel in 1979 and served in the Paratroopers Brigade during the Lebanon war, and in numerous positions of leadership in the army thereafter, is truly at home in both Israel and the United States. He is the author of the definitive account of the Six-Day War that we have today (it will be definitive until Arab archives are opened up), and of another book on American conceptions of the Middle East. Oren is also a fantastic communicator who knows how to speak to different audiences. Having just finished a term as a visiting professor at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, he is primed to go. 

There are few Israeli prime ministers who would have been able to pull off such an appointment. So many of Israel's ambassadors these days, even to important posts, are mediocre political appointees. American Jews, in the past two decades, have been shut out of such postings. In choosing Oren, Netanyahu showed his ability to think outside of the box and that he is not afraid to be challenged. Oren, though affiliated with the right-of-center Shalem Center, is a pragmatist who knows that Israel cannot indefinitely occupy the West Bank. He is someone who understands what is going on in the White House these days. 

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman

It is still not clear to me what the Foreign Minister himself is doing these days. Ha'aretz has a somewhat disturbing review of Lieberman's activities so far. 

Here are a few highlights:

Lieberman's schedule has become one of the Foreign Ministry's best-kept secrets. Aside from [...] a select few, no one - including very senior officials in his ministry - is privy to what Lieberman does with his time.

This secrecy has led to several embarrassing faux pas, such as when a meeting with a foreign counterpart had to be rescheduled and none of the participants were notified.

Okay, that happens. But:

Lieberman has made other contentious procedural changes within the realm of his public relations. Although the ministry has an entire publicity department comprising some 20 expert diplomats, Lieberman made the unprecedented decision to appoint newcomer Sivan Raviv - who has no prior experience - as his spokesman.

Is that wise?

And speaking of appointments:

He has named Bedouin diplomat Ishmael Khaldi as his ministerial adviser on the Arab world. The appointment was leaked to the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth under the headline "Lieberman's Arab advisor", hinting that it was an attempt to gloss over Lieberman's alleged racism.

Since then it has emerged that Khaldi has next to no Foreign Ministry experience in dealing with the Middle East, having never served as a representative in an Arab state or in a relevant branch.

Associates of Lieberman have stressed that despite Khaldi's lack experience in the region, the motive behind his appointment was "promotion of minorities in the Foreign Ministry."

I don't know what is worse, the pick or the statement, thereafter, that it was an "affirmative action" appointment. But who knows, maybe Khaldi will perform admirably in this job.

Is this a luke-warm endorsement or what?

Sources present at Lieberman's meetings with foreign officials have testified that his level of English is "good" and that he "succeeds in getting across his message."

There are many more anecdotes in the article itself. The last paragraph, which explains that Lieberman's office refused to answer a list of 12 questions submitted by Ha'aretz, testifies to a worrying break in relations with the media. It sounds as if Lieberman has written off Ha'aretz as irrelevant.

Here's Ha'aretz's take on the Kleine Zeitung interview discussed in my earlier post:

Foreign Ministry officials heard of [Lieberman's interview with the Austrian daily Kleiner Zeitoung [sic] last month, in which he declared his opposition to negotiations with Syria.] only when it was leaked to Israeli media. Only after an in-depth investigation did it become clear that this unknown newspaper was actually a local tabloid

It's pretty funny that it took an "in-depth investigation" to figure out that this "unknown newspaper" was a "local tabloid." I think the latter description is not entirely accurate; "small regional newspaper" would do it more justice. Also, as an Austrian friend of Noah K., L.E., has pointed out and as I also emphasized in my post, Christian Wehrschutz, who conducted the interview, is a respected journalist with extensive experience. L.E. adds, however, that

The question is only why he chose to put the interview [in the Kleine Zeitung] and not in the Presse, Standard or even NZZ (Swiss), with which he also has regular connections.

L.E.'s conclusions:

This interview appears where it does due to personal or newspaper politics. The [other] question would then be why he got that interview in the first place.

The last question is important indeed. If Wehrschutz presented himself as a freelancer, why was this one of the first interviews granted by Lieberman's office, specifically by his personal secretary Sigalit Levi, to a foreign journalist?

I'm really wondering in what language this interview was conducted - whether a translator was used or not.

"I Hate the Name Hamas"

More and more reports are appearing in the international press about dissatisfaction with Hamas in Gaza, though these are balanced by quotations from the official Hamas organs. Thus, in The Guardian, we first read about these thoughts from a Hamas minister:

At the al-Filisteen mosque in the Rimal area of Gaza City on Friday, the imam was preaching the necessity of brotherhood and unity. But on the steps after prayers, Hamas's economics minister explained what the conditions for Palestinian unity involved. Senior Hamas officials are demanding that the conditions for reconciliation should include an end to negotiations with Israel and to the peace process, a unity agreement under a banner of "resistance", and continued Hamas control of Gaza.

"Everyone recognises the need for reconciliation among Palestinians," said Abu Rushdi Zaza. "It will happen immediately if the Palestine Liberation Organisation [dominated by Fatah] can be rebuilt. But it must be understood that Hamas is the government. If international institutions want to do rebuilding projects in Gaza, then that is fine - but they must do it under our supervision.

The paper also quotes at length a pro-Hamas parliamentarian from the West Bank:

Mahmoud Musleh, a Palestinian legislative council member aligned with Hamas, added: "The organisation that should be talking for the Palestinian people is the PLO. But it has not been speaking. If it does not rehabilitate itself, there will be dramatic changes. At present it does not represent the Palestinian people. They can longer make decisions. They do not own the power."

He continued: "There is a new balance of power emerging. For the first time, through the steadfastness of the resistance in Gaza, we have seen Israel's project halted."

And then, in the last paragraph we encounter a passage that is starting to become a cliche of sorts in the Western press. An ordinary Gazan, after checking that no one is listening, pours out his true feelings about Hamas:

And if one place is the symbol of the destruction wreaked in Gaza, it is the demolished houses of the Samouni family in Zeitoun, a place where the stink of death still seeps from out of the rubble.

A member of the family, who lost his father and his son, asks not to be identified for fear of being beaten by Hamas - as others were during the war - for criticising it. "No one from Hamas has come to offer us help. None of the leaders has been here. We were farmers, not fighters with a militant faction.

He pulls out a crumpled photograph showing a wedding scene. "This was my father. This, my son. After what happened to us here, I hate the name Hamas."

Italian Daily Quotes Gazan Doctor: Casualty Numbers Inflated

Corriere della Sera reported today that Palestinian civilians are accusing Hamas of having prevented civilians from fleeing areas under attack. The article also quote a Gazan physician who argues that the casualty numbers are inflated and that many more of the dead were likely Hamas fighters than has been admitted. Here is the relevant quotation from the Italian paper; read Ha'aretz for an English summary.

Chi racconta una versione diversa dalla narrativa imposta dalla «muhamawa» (la resistenza) è automaticamente un «amil», un collaborazionista e rischia la vita. Aiuta però il recente scontro fratricida tra Hamas e Olp. Se Israele o l’Egitto avessero permesso ai giornalisti stranieri di entrare subito sarebbe stato più facile. Quelli locali sono spesso minacciati da Hamas. «Non è un fatto nuovo, in Medio Oriente tra le società arabe manca la tradizione culturale dei diritti umani. Avveniva sotto il regime di Arafat che la stampa venisse perseguitata e censurata. Con Hamas è anche peggio», sostiene Eyad Sarraj, noto psichiatra di Gaza city. E c’è un altro dato che sta emergendo sempre più evidente visitando cliniche, ospedali e le famiglie delle vittime del fuoco israeliano. In verità il loro numero appare molto più basso dei quasi 1.300 morti, oltre a circa 5.000 feriti, riportati dagli uomini di Hamas e ripetuti da ufficiali Onu e della Croce Rossa locale. «I morti potrebbero essere non più di 500 o 600. Per lo più ragazzi tra i 17 e 23 anni reclutati tra le fila di Hamas che li ha mandati letteralmente al massacro», ci dice un medico dell’ospedale Shifah che non vuole assolutamente essere citato, è a rischio la sua vita. Un dato però confermato anche dai giornalisti locali: «Lo abbiamo già segnalato ai capi di Hamas. Perché insistono nel gonfiare le cifre delle vittime? Strano tra l’altro che le organizzazioni non governative, anche occidentali, le riportino senza verifica. Alla fine la verità potrebbe venire a galla. E potrebbe essere come a Jenin nel 2002. Inizialmente si parlò di 1.500 morti. Poi venne fuori che erano solo 54, di cui almeno 45 guerriglieri caduti combattendo».

Random Things No One Will Remember

The video is not currently up unfortunately:

Footage of a presenter on the Arabic language television station Al-Arabiyaapparently confirms that Hamas fired at least one rocket from close to a building used by journalists during the 22-day conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. 

The Israel Defense Forces shelled the building, drawing international condemnation, and television networks with offices in the building denied that rockets had been launched from anywhere nearby. 

But the recording, filmed by an Israeli and released Tuesday by Israel's Foreign Ministry, shows Al-Arabiya presenter Hanan Al-Masri saying that a Grad rocket had been fired from a location near the studios at Al-Shuruk tower in Gaza City. Al-Masri did not realize that she had been caught on camera (Ha'aretz).

Secularism, Critique, Blasphemy, and the 2006 Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade

Two of the posters ("pashkavilim") shown above are part of the campaign against the gay pride parade in Jerusalem. The one on the right reproduces a headline from Ha'aretz which states that "Religious leaders have warned that the Pride Parade in Jerusalem will cause bloodshed." The second one, on the left-hand side, is from Ma'ariv and cites Shimon Peres as saying that "The homos have crossed the line." I took this photograph in Jerusalem in late June 2006. As always: click to enlarge.

Last Saturday, I had the opportunity to see the New York premiere of "Jerusalem is Proud to Present" (ירושלים גאה להציג, 2007) as part of the Jewish Film Festival at Walter Reade theater. In Israel, it has been shown on Channel 2 and Channel 8 and screened at various film festivals.

This latest documentary by the Israeli director Nitzan Gilady ("In Satmar Custody," 2003) is about the attempts to hold a Gay Pride Parade (מצעד הגאווה) in Jerusalem in the summer of 2006, as part of the international "World Pride" celebrations. The parade, which was to go through the city center, had originally been scheduled for August 6. It was postponed several times, in part because of the war still raging in early August, and in part because of the fears that police would not be able to protect marchers from the wrath of religious protesters. Ultimately, the "march" was held as a rally in a closed stadium, guarded by thousands of police officers, on November 10.

Gilady's film begins with a surreal press conference attended by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious leaders in Jerusalem, watching clips from previous gay pride parades in other parts of the world, and denouncing the planned event as an abomination. Throughout, it gives space to both supporters and opponents of the Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade, though it is clear that Gilady, who said after the screening that he had only recently come out to his parents, has chosen a position.

One one side, we see the activists and members of the Jerusalem Open House (English). They include the first openly gay Jerusalem city councilor, Sa'ar Netanel (Meretz), elected at the same time as its first ultra-Orthodox mayor, Uri Lupoliansky; Adam Russo, the victim of a stabbing attack at the first gay pride parade in Jerusalem on June 30, 2005 (the assailant was eventually convicted of attempted murder); Noa Sattat, the director of the Open House; and Boodi, a 19-year-old drag queen from Ramallah, who performs at Jerusalem's only gay club, Shushan (now closed), and eventually seeks asylum in the U.S. after being kidnapped by Hamas militants.

Arrayed against them, we see Mina Fenton, a national-religious municipal politician who not only organizes a group of American-born settler women using her bad English and crude sense of taste (the Americans seem slightly more attentive to public opinion) but also solicits support in Arabic from a hijab-clad by-passer. We also encounter a Brooklyn expatriate, Rabbi Yehuda Levin, a dogged opponent of the "gay political elite." Less openly involved than these somewhat ridiculous figures, are the various religious leaders of Jerusalem - the Christian clergymen, the Muslim sheikhs, and the Sephardi and Ashkenazi rabbis. Finally, we see the anonymous masses of rioting ultra-Orthodox protesters.

As the date of the parade approaches, tensions rise and the incitement on the part of the opponents of the parade becomes ever more murderous. The director and Sa'ar Netanel find themselves surrounded in a car by a mob of haredi hooligans, beating on the windows. What follows is footage from various news channels of several days of rioting in the city by young ultra-Orthodox men. Traffic blockades are set up, dumpsters set on fire, and stones thrown. The police respond mercilessly with water cannons and beatings. One foreign commentator calls it the "intifada of the ultra-Orthodox."

The rhetoric of the Open House activists is unapologetically secularist. Netanel speaks of the forces of "darkness," and the black masses of haredi men who appear in the film, anonymous and often in conditions of near-darkness, only reinforce this rhetoric without problematizing it in any way. For Netanel and others, this is a battle of democracy against theocracy, of tolerance against bigotry, of liberalism against religious fanaticism, of progress against backwardness.

The "ultra-Orthodox" intifada invites comparison with the riots that swept across the Muslim world following the Danish cartoon controversy. In both cases, the aggrieved parties - religious believers -responded with violence to what they saw as symbolic desecration (of the Prophet or of the Holy City). The "perpetrators" of these blasphemies, however, presented their actions as a matter of inherent rights and freedoms, which had to be vigorously asserted.

Last October, I attended a colloquium at UC Berkeley's Townsend Center for the Humanities, which posed the question: Is Critique Secular? The first panel discussion of the day featured a paper read by Talal Asad (Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center) called "Reflections on Blasphemy and Secular Criticism," with local superstar professors Wendy Brown (Political Science), Judith Butler (Rhetoric), and Saba Mahmood (Anthropology) responding.

In his paper, Talal Asad argued that

The conflict that many Euro-Americans saw in the Danish cartoons scandal was between the West and Islam, each championing opposing values: democracy, secularism, liberty, and reason on the one side, and on the other the many opposites – tyranny, religion, authority, and unreason (Asad 3).

Referring to secular critique itself as a kind of violence, Asad, while claiming to stake out a position beyond the normative, blasted "Western secularists" who can conceive of blasphemy only as "a constraint on the freedom of speech guaranteed by Western principles and by the pursuit of reason so central to Western culture."

Asad wants us to see blasphemy "not simply as a bid for free speech against irrational taboos but as violence done to human relations that are invested with great value" (Asad 16). I may be wrong, but my intuition is that while such an argument finds an audience in the Western academy when the violent protesters are Muslims upset about an insult to Muhammad, it seems to lose a lot of its force when those rioting against blasphemy are ultra-Orthodox Jews upset about the "desecration" of Jerusalem by homosexuals.

Israeli Models Show Skin for Israel

(Thanks to Geoff for this link)

I was watching CNN earlier this morning and saw some coverage of the latest Israeli foray into public relations. The geniuses at the Foreign Ministry apparently thought it was a good idea to invite Maxim magazine to do a photo shoot of Israeli models. An added incentive to bring in the obligatory puns ("women with guns") was that the featured models had done their military service in the IDF. The Maxim "Israel Defense Forces Issue" is due in stores on June 26.



Apparently, the New York consulate also promoted a gala event (actually, a Maxim Party), with consular officials in attendance; the advertisement featured a scantily-clad Gal Gadot. This, in turn, led to condemnations by MKs Colette Avital (Labor), the former consul-general in New York, and Zehava Gal-On (Meretz), who complained that

It is unfortunate that the New York consulate thinks that Israel's relevance will be expressed by the use of naked women who are treated as an object, and not as women of substance who exude achievement and success. It's a shame that the consulate has not understood that countries of the Western world cannot market themselves through the use of half naked women (Ha'aretz).

I have a lot of respect for Gal-On and Avital. It's true that the campaign is unusual, to say the least. Furthermore, given some of the unfortunate positions in which certain Israeli ambassadors have found themselves over the years, a Maxim photo shoot is not exactly going to enhance respect for the Israeli diplomatic corps. However, I think they are wrong about this.

After seeing the CNN segment, I have to say that the whole campaign might not be such a bad idea. To be sure, the photo shoots are exploitative - so are 90% of the advertisements on our television screens and billboards. These women are professionals, and whoever thinks that they ought to have turned down a modeling shoot that promotes Israel (as opposed to Calvin Klein) should complain to their agents. I find the outrage misplaced, and I definitely think that any arguments appealing to the norms of "countries of the Western world" are rather silly here. There is nothing indecent about these models, just as there would be nothing unseemly about promoting Israel by showing clips from the Gay Pride parade in Tel Aviv. These models represent Israel as much as haredim praying at the Kotel.

The CNN anchors were obviously amused by the whole thing, and the segue from a clip on the Iranian decency police's clamp-down on women violating dress regulations was perfect (for Israel). Both reports featured beautiful and sympathetic young women. In one country, they were being punished for wearing revealing headscarves; in the other, they were being encouraged (and paid - by photographers) to strip to their underwear. I know that the pseudo-feminist, post-colonialists will be quick to equate the two situations as equally oppressive, but I doubt that the large majority of Americans will see things quite the same way.

Female Israel soldiers - fetishized almost as frequently as their male counterparts
(Jerusalem, June 2006)

These ads do show a face of Israel (and the Middle East) that is all too often obscured in the coverage of the region. The people in the New York consulate are on to something. While it may not appeal to all of our oh-so-refined tastes, sexy young people probably do a better job of promoting Israel to ordinary Americans than intellectuals - no matter how scintillating they may be. I think the blog that the consulate launched is also a good idea with potential. But who came up with the name, "IsRealli"?

On a related note: The last Israeli public relations venture that received some attention in the blogosphere was a local anti-drug campaign in Tel Aviv, which featured mock shaheed posters displaying a hipster in a training suit about to embark on a "suicide mission" of mixing drugs and alcohol. Lisa, fresh from a trip to Ramallah, where she took some photographs of the real thing, has coverage of this and many other great posts (An Israeli in Ramallah, Make Love not Terror, and Ivri goes English nice!). Also not to be missed, however, is Nobody's typically irreverent defense of the ad; he calls it "brilliantly cynical" - a description that also often applies to his blog.

Radio Canada International Arabic Edition

RCI Arabic's flagship program bi la hudud (Without Borders, or Sans Limite in French) is hosted by May Abu-Sa'ab

I recently discovered Radio Canada International's Arabic Edition and have been pleasantly surprised by its content. RCI Arabic has only two anchors, May and Fadi, and does not broadcast 24 hours. Unlike BBC Arabic, it does not aim to be an alternative to pan-Arab news stations and, in contrast to America's Radio Sawa, it makes no attempt to appeal to the lowest-common denominator or to young people. Instead, RCI Arabic's main goal appears to be to inform Arabs outside of Canada, especially potential (educated) immigrants, about Canadian society, the challenges of immigration, and about the place of Arabs and Muslims in the country. Another target audience is probably the Arab population in Canada. Canadian multiculturalism and the integration of immigrants in Canada are themes that come up in almost every show. Having listened to the station for the past week, I sometimes get the impression that the hosts are required to meet certain word quotas in their broadcasts - the ِArabic word for integration (اندماج) comes up every five minutes or so. There are also high-brow programs with Arab Canadian academics and intellectuals and frequent health-related features.

My only criticisms so far concern the lousy music (it's always some mediocre Canadian or Québecois content) and, on a more serious note, the fact that the editors don't use the station to promote Canadian values in the Middle East. Radio Canada International should be using the station as a means to stimulate more balanced discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Arab world. I would also expect RCI Arabic to do stories about human rights and press freedoms or the lack thereof in the Arab Middle East. Until now, when politics were discussed, the few guests that I've heard so far were Arab Canadian academics or community activists who repeat the same pan-Arab, anti-American and anti-Israel rhetoric that one could hear on any popular Arab satellite or radio station. Especially irritating was an interview with Naïma Mimoune, a woman of Algerian origin emigrated to Canada in 1998 and is now running for or involved with the separatist Parti Québecois (PQ) in the Quebec provincial elections. Madame Mimoune, who does not appear to be related to Maimonides, justified her support for the PQ by asserting that it was the most sympathetic to Arab immigrants and by referring to its "pro-Arab" position during the war in Lebanon last summer. Both hosts, to their credit, challenged their guest to explain her support for the PQ. I think they went as far as to suggest that Mimoune's immigrant constituency might be deterred by the potentially destabilizing effect of separatist agenda. They also noted that the Quebec Liberal party has a prominent Arab parliamentarian, Madame Fatima Houda-Pepine.

Radio Sawa - Again

Israel's latest Arab Minister, Ghaleb Majadle, in a screenshot of his profile on the Arabic language version website of the Israeli Knesset

Listening to Radio Sawa today, I was again reminded of the dire need for this American-owned Arabic language radio station in the Middle East. In a broadcast today (morning, Eastern Standard Time), the radio station reported the recent appointment of Ghaleb Majadle, a (Muslim) Arab member of the Knesset with the Labour party, to the position of Minister of Science, Culture and Sport. Sawa then described the border-line racist criticisms of the appointment by members of Avigdor Lieberman's "Israel Beitenu" party. However, rather than focusing exclusively on the statements of Lieberman's populists, the Radio Sawa article linked to the broadcast also printed the denunciations of the remarks made by members of the Labour party and by Mikhael Eitan of the Likud:

من جانبه أعرب النائب مايل إيتان من حزب الليكود المعارض عن رفضه لما وصفها بالتصريحات العنصرية وقال إنه لا يمكن أن يقبلها أي شخص مؤمن بالمساواة والديموقراطية.

[For his part, [Knesset] representative [Mikhael] Eitan from the opposition Likud Party rejected what he described as racist statements and said that they are unacceptable for anyone who believes in equality and democracy].

I'm sure that mainstream Arab news outlets, including al-Jazeera, will not even cover this event, or will focus only on the outrageous comments by the clowns of Israel Beitenu. A quick Google search that I ran for غالب مجادل (Ghaleb Majadle, the name of the Arab Minister) and a look at al-Jazeera's site actually revealed nothing.

Radio Sawa and Mary Cheney's Baby

Since its foundation on March 2002, Radio Sawa, a radio network publicly funded by the American Broadcasting Board of Governors and U.S. Congress, has been struggling to influence Arab public opinion. Today, it can be listened to online, or on FM and medium-wave radio in Arab countries ranging from Morocco to Yemen. Radio Sawa has attracted its fair share of criticism. Ali Abunimah, the ideologue-in-chief at the Electronic Intifada website, basically lambasted the station in 2002 for not being more pro-Palestinian/anti-Israeli. He also compared it unfavourably with BBC’s Radio Arabic and with France’s Monte Carlo, which he argued had more critical news coverage, a higher level of discourse and discussion, and more audience participation. He also said that the station patronized Arabs, because of its low intellectual content – back then three quarters of its content was supposedly top 40 Arabic and western pop music, while one quarter of the programming consisted of short newscasts.

Nevertheless, Abunimah and Radio Sawa’s other critics have all been forced to concede that the radio station has people in the Arab world listening. The reason that it has become the station of choice in many parts of the Arab world should be obvious: the Middle East is made up mainly of young people who happen to like Britney Spears, Celine Dion, Justin Timberlake and the Lebanese and Egyptian divas and crooners who are their counterparts. I imagine that they also enjoy hearing the brief video game and movie reviews, as well as the occasional fitness and health tips delivered by Sawa’s anchors, usually a man and a woman speaking in fashionable Lebanese colloquial. Finally, Sawa’s listeners probably also like the fact that there are no boring commercials that they have to sit through. Frankly, they could not care less about the conclusions of a certain panel of Arab language experts who, after being hired by the US Inspector General’s office to review the Radio Sawa, concluded that

parents would prefer that their teenagers not listen to Radio Sawa because its broadcasts contained such poor Arabic grammar

Since when do teenagers care what their parents think? Radio Sawa is pursuing a clever marketing strategy and, based on my own listening experiences in Arab commuter cabs in the Negev, it is obviously succeeding.

So why is this subtle successor to the Voice of America still coming under fire? One reason is that the Arab nationalists who exalt al-Jazeera will never embrace a broadcaster that has news anchors who don’t call coalition troops “the forces of occupation”, and who don’t describe terrorists killed in action as “having martyred themselves”. They automatically disapprove of Radio Sawa, because it has Israeli reporters who occasionally file reports about Israeli politics in Arabic. In short, they want all news outlets that reach Arab ears to be nationalist-Islamist and to embrace their rhetoric. That is the main reason why these critics belittle Radio Sawa’s news programming and claim that Arab listeners automatically tune out when they hear its supposedly biased news casts.

I don’t claim to know whether Radio Sawa has succeeded at all in influencing Arab public opinion and in improving the way in which young Arabs view the United States. Sawa’s other critics in the US assert that the station has focussed too much on trying to win over the audience and too little on influencing it. These people would like it to be more aggressive about advancing American interests. I actually think that Sawa has taken a good middle road. The station has attracted young listeners through its soft content. The impact of Sawa’s news programming is probably underestimated. While the station wisely refrains from being a propaganda outlet, the insights it provides into American society and the different views it gives about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are bound to have some influence. On Wednesday morning (Eastern Standard Time), the online broadcast of Jordanian Radio Sawa transmitted American President Bush’s press conference live (with simultaneous translation). Bush was questioned on everything, from his latest proposals on Iraq to Mary Cheney’s baby and its implication for his view on gay families. It was a powerful demonstration of American democracy and freedom of the press at work. Radio Sawa should stay the course.

Aravision

Aravision

I'm at home, watching "Aravision 2006" on Israel's leading Channel 2. It's a word play on "Eurovision," the annual singing competition between all the European countries... and Israel.
Aravision, however, is much less global in scale. It features young Arab singers and dancers from Haifa, Jerusalem, Nazareth, and other cities in Israel.

An Aravision Contestant

The show also reminds me of Kochav Nolad ("A Star is Born" - the Israeli rip-off of "American Idol," in its fourth year). They've even brought Zvika Hadar, the annual host of Kochav Nolad, to speak to the competitors (in Arabic) and wish everyone good luck.

The subtitles translate Zvika Hadar's words as, "Music brings the two nations and the Jewish and Arabic culture closer together."

Although the show is entirely in Arabic, there are subtitles in Hebrew. The songs all seem to be love songs.

"Who am I going to cry and complain to now?" this contestant sings.