Jeffrey Goldberg

11 Jan 2009 01:08 pm

What is the Goal of the Israel Incursion?

This is the question, and I'm sorry if I've missed something, but have we received a clear answer from the Israeli government? If the goal is to destroy the Hamas government in Gaza, well, this is not something so easily destroyed. I thought Israel learned a lesson from the 1982 Lebanon invasion: You can't inflict political change on your enemies by force. You can defeat your enemies, yes, you can blow up their rocket launchers and destroy their smuggling tunnels, but you can't make them into something they're not. Israeli Military Intelligence seems to understand this better than Prime Minister Olmert, according to Ha'aretz.

11 Jan 2009 09:30 am

The Values of Journalism and the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Shmuel Rosner highlights an interesting observation from the former editor of Ha'aretz, Hanoch Marmari, who once said that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict "has created a real crisis of values for journalism. I believe I can compress the enormous volume of coverage and comment into four cardinal sins: obsessiveness, prejudice, condescension and ignorance."

10 Jan 2009 08:27 pm

Israeli War Crimes?

Andrew suggests that Israel should be worried when it finds itself being accused of committing war crimes in the Wall Street Journal, and he links to an op-ed there by one George Bisharat, as proof. George Bisharat is a Palestinian-American professor of law in San Francisco who is an advocate of what is known euphemistically as the "one-state solution," which is to say, the elimination of Israel. So Bisharat's op-ed is not quite the momentous event it seems to be at first blush.

10 Jan 2009 05:30 pm

Somalia-by-the-Sea?

Press accounts suggest that Israel is on the verge of escalating its operations in Gaza. This means a penetration of Gaza City and other densely-populated areas. It's not immediately clear to me what Israel will gain from such an escalation. Obviously, if the army were to invade the cities, it is because it believes that it can strike a decisive, even fatal, blow to Hamas, and there are reports out there that Hamas is already collapsing. But the question for Israeli planners is this: Do you seriously believe that Fatah, the main constituent of the weak Palestinian Authority, can simply be inserted into Gaza, and run it effectively? The people of Gaza would turn on them so ferociously that the internecine struggles between Fatah and Hamas of the past two years would look like, well, a cakewalk.

If Ehud Barak had as his goal cutting off north Gaza from the rocket supplies in southern Gaza, then he may have achieved this already. If the goal was to blow up smuggling tunnels, and kill Nizar Rayyan, then those goals have been achieved. But what is the goal now? You can't kill Hamas entirely; it's Iranian-supported, yes, but it is a homegrown, populist movement. If Fatah tries to remove Hamas from the hearts of its supporters, it will fail miserably. Then what? Somalia-by-the-Sea?

09 Jan 2009 01:34 pm

Good News from Palestine

No, really. The good news comes in the form of a bell that isn't ringing: The West Bank is more-or-less quiet. In the first two uprisings, the violence spread quickly from one half of the future state of Palestine to the other. Today, this isn't happening. I asked Walter Isaacson, who is the chairman of the U.S.-Palestinian Partnership, why he thought this was so. Walter, who by day runs the Aspen Institute, points to the work of the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, who is growing the West Bank economy at a remarkable rate.

"There has been double-digit growth in the economy, and people have a stake in the future because of what Salam Fayyad and others have done to improve conditions there," Walter said. "And Israelis have responded by encouraging economic development. I think that people in the West Bank have a clear sense of what peace would bring them, and that's a prosperous state. If you just let all these engineers in the Palestinian territories and in Israel form joint start-ups, you'll see a vision of the future. Success is not achieved just with secret talks about politics but by laying a groundwork for prosperity."

What was true before the Gaza incursion remains true now: The best hope for a two-state solution is a vibrant West Bank that could serve as a role model for the people of Gaza.

09 Jan 2009 01:19 pm

Glenn Greenwald on Reporting in Gaza

An unusual conversation took place the other day on the Hugh Hewitt show: Hugh and his guest, Glenn Greenwald, got to talking about reporting from Gaza, and, among other things, my name was invoked as an example of a Jewish journalist who reported from Gaza and lived to tell the tale:

Hugh Hewitt: You think you could file for Salon from Gaza and go about your work for say six, eight, ten weeks? I don't. I think they'd kill you.

Glenn Greenwald: It depends. I mean, it's probably, you're probably right that especially now, Western journalists, Jewish journalists, would not be welcome in Gaza for reasons that aren't that difficult to understand. But there have been plenty of Western journalists and Jewish journalists. I mean, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic's spent lots and lots of time in Gaza safely.

HH: Written a good book about it, too.

GG: Yeah, exactly. So I think my view of the Palestinians and the Gazans is not all that dissimilar to my view of most societies that are involved in really ugly, long term, entrenched warfare, which is most of the people in this society overwhelmingly are decent people who want peace and to raise their children in a safe and prosperous environment, and there are extremists within this society who are dangerous and violent, and who are bad and need to be marginalized.

This undoubtedly marks the first time Hugh Hewitt has ever praised a book chosen by The Progressive as a favorite book of the year, but that's not the point: I want to address a couple of mistaken suppositions in the conversation. The first is Hugh's, the idea that Glenn Greenwald would get killed for reporting in Gaza. (The assumption built in to this, of course, is that bloggers like Greenwald report from the field.) I don't think he would be killed for reporting in Gaza. It's a dangerous place, yes, and reporters have been kidnapped from time to time. I was kidnapped in Gaza, though not by Hamas, and the editor of this fine magazine, when he was reporting from Gaza for the Times, was once almost kidnapped in Gaza, and only broke free of his would-be captors because of his kung fu fighting skills.

If Greenwald told the whole truth -- say, he reported the fact that Hamas places rocket launchers in schoolyards and mosques -- he might get his ass kicked out of Gaza, but Hamas wouldn't hurt him. It's a more sophisticated organization than that. So Greenwald is also wrong to assume that Hamas would take its anger out on Jewish reporters. This is not to say that Hamas isn't an anti-Semitic organization. It is. But it sees Jewish reporters, just as it sees other reporters, as capable of delivering its message to the West.

On Greenwald's larger point, I would say that I have to agree (surprise). Gaza is in the grip of a suicide cult, but most of the people I know in Gaza want their children to live, not to die.

09 Jan 2009 10:43 am

Another Great Idea From a Settler Leader

The last time I interviewed the superannuated settler fire-breather Elyakim HaEtzni, he was wearing sweatpants up to his belly-button, and mismatched slippers. But he's ready to fight Hamas to the last Israeli, and ready to have other Israelis live forever in conditions of chaos: The goal of the war, he writes, is for Israel "to smash Hamas, and to neutralize its motivation to fire rockets at us - but not to liquidate them completely; Hamas should rather remain, together with Fatah, as two Palestinian terrorist gangs that will prevent each other from becoming a state!"

08 Jan 2009 10:06 pm

Joe the Plumber, As Qualified As Many Mideast Reporters

Pajamas TV is sending Joe Wurzelbacher, A/K/A '"Joe the Plumber," to Israel to cover the conflict in Gaza. Eric Trager sees the pitfalls:

It seems as though Joe will only contribute to the very problem that so many in the blogosphere have harped on for so long-namely, that Middle East reporters frequently arrive in the region with no frame of reference and/or obscene biases. Indeed, will Joe be any more capable than the average MSM correspondent of reading an Israeli newspaper; or interpreting a mosque sermon on Palestinian television; or assessing the strategic significance of a given Israeli operation or Hamas rocket-attack? It seems highly improbable, to say the least.

A couple of years ago, during the previous iteration of the Iran-Israel war, I was standing on the Lebanese border with a group of American reporters. Overhead, Israeli Apaches were firing rockets at Hezbollah positions. One of the reporters looked up and asked, "Is that an airplane or a helicopter?" Man, that was embarrassing.

08 Jan 2009 04:23 pm

The Jewish State vs. Weekly Newsmagazines

Time magazine asks the question, "Can Israel Survive Gaza?" It's a little bit of an overwrought piece, but interesting (I'm also known for overwrought pieces about Israel). But it got me thinking: Which one will last longer: Israel, or Time magazine? I'm betting on Israel.

08 Jan 2009 12:20 pm

Hamas Continues to Execute Fatah Men

According to Amira Hass, who can be trusted on this because she cordially detests Israel.