This is just fantastic writing, really evocative and sensitive and it truly advances the conversation way beyond all of the arguments that we've been having all week that are based on historical details and documented slights and atrocities. How do we have our conversation on this level and not the other.

Now I see what Josh was getting at last night on Jo-Ann's thread.

Thanks Professor Sleeper, travel safe.

So you noted the Biblical history of Ein Shemesh, but forgot, or more correctly, repressed, the fact that there was a continuous human habitation there until 1948, when Ein Schams was depopulated.

But the repressed, as you know, return as a symptom. The driver's speech is the speech of the hysteric, who cannot understand itself, is totally baffled by the reality of the symptom, the total paralysis, because the signifier that organizes the whole experience cannot be mentioned in polite society.

let's conjure it, therapeutically: Ein Schams. Ein Schams. Ein Schams. Ein Schams.

US Jews could help, only if they agreed to work through their own identifications, and to help Israeli Jews face up to what they repress and opress. But that doesn't unforatunately chimes with your politics, which is the very opposite, to help Israelis sustain their repressions, by sharing them.

Of course, it must always be mentioned that Hamas has "ridiculous theocrats," but when Barak said that he insisted in Camp David II that Israel must keep control of "the wholiest of the holy" (the inner sanctum of the temple), or when Sleeper sees the bible when he looks at the landscape but doesn't see recent history, while attending a religious wedding in a state that doesn't allow any other kind, or when the secular Kibbuts "redeems the land" and "revives the sparkle" and "realizes" "Yehezkel's vision of the dry bones" nobody should mention theorcracy, because secular Jews, unlike Hamas, are not theocratic even when theocracy dribbles from every one of their words.

So little time, so much to repress! You must be exhausted.

Thank you so much for this very beautiful article. The images you invoked from the wedding to the flower in the rifle along with the thought provoking conversations to and from the wedding that you shared with us were very moving.

Who on either side of the issue could not feel a deep sadness after reading of Emily's blindness and the feelings of isolation that so many there now feel.

Have a safe trip and thanks again.

"(including Turkey, whose record with Armenians and Kurds makes its posturing as a champion of oppressed Gazans as transparently pathetic as it is demagogic.)"

Including the United States, whose record with African Americans, women and Native Americans makes its posturing as a champion of the oppressed anywhere as pathetic as it is demagogic.

and so it goes....

Move beyond it, Jim. Unlike Jordan and Egypt,Turkey was Israel's ONLY real "friend" in the ME and under different Israeli leadership, can be again. Enough already.

Peter Beinhart was giving voice to those you note here:

"I arrived back in Tel Aviv aware even more starkly than I had been before of how despairing and isolated some of the best of Israelis feel."

In an opportune bit of serendipitous timing, Anshel Pfeffer calls the collective "you" out:

In its hour of need, Israel was let down by Diaspora

If only we had some real friends, friends we could trust implicitly, who could point out the error of our ways. This could be the shining moment of the Jewish Diaspora. They love us, but they also see things from another perspective. We need a strong, unified voice from the Jewish leadership in the United States and Europe telling Israelis enough is enough, you are hurtling down the slippery slope of pariahdom and causing untold damage to yourselves and us. Lift your heads above the ramparts and see that the world has moved on.

Instead, we find the establishment of the Jewish world crouching with us in the bunker.

In his breathtaking analysis of the decline of secular Zionism in America, "The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment," which appeared in the New York Review of Books last month, Peter Beinart describes how the leaders of America's major Jewish organizations have succeeded in estranging an entire generation of young Jews from Israel "by defending virtually anything any Israeli government does." In doing so "they make themselves intellectual bodyguards for Israeli leaders who threaten the very liberal values they profess to admire."

Beinart persuasively explains how this has convinced many young Jews that they have noting in common with a country whose policies contradict so much of what they have been brought up to believe in. But there is another damaging aspect to this cheerleading. Every Israeli cabinet minister who is greeted by cheering audiences during visits abroad fails to see all those who, disgusted, prefer to stay at home.

They return to Israel convinced that at least the Jewish people are still behind us and that our opponents are simply anti-Semitic. Other voices, such as the new lobbies JStreet and JCall, are ostracized by the establishment instead of being treated as what they really are, authentic voices for many concerned Jews.

When the history of the Jewish people in the early 21st century is written, the conclusion will be unavoidable. In its hour of need Israel was let down by the Diaspora.

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/anshel-pfeffer-in-its-hour-of-need-israel-was-let-down-by-diaspora-1.294126

It's not about the kids, Jim; the kids are alright.

It's about ya'll.

Some of the most corrosive policies affecting Israel's relationships are still emanating from DC. Scratch an issue, be it Hamas, the blockade, Gilad Shalit, regional isolation.... and you will find American pressure behind the perpetuation of hardliner positions. In some instances, they are even more extreme than those of the current Israeli government.

It's up to the best of the Disapora to join with the best of the Israelis to push back against the worst of both camps. The latter have been running the show for far too long.

Nicely done, by far the best I've read by Sleeper on the subject. I have had the same conversations in Israel my reaction has been similar.

But where I differ (in emphasis more than substance) is in the casual dismissal of the cabdriver's opinions. I wouldn't say I agree wholeheartedly with his diatribe, but these beliefs do not arise out of thin air. The failure of the Israeli left to answer these questions sufficiently to reassure what I would call the persuadable middle, is a large reason for its descent into irrelevance. The collapse of Oslo into the grotesque violence of the second intifada - the near-daily suicide attacks - along with the ascent of Hamas in Gaza following the unilateral withdrawal have had a profound and devastating impact on Israeli society. That many on the left - including Sleeper here - patronizingly dismiss such concerns as some kind of childish overreaction only increases the disconnect.

Interesting also that Sleeper seems relatively secure in the knowledge - contrary to all indications - that economic incentives might somehow loosen the grip of Hamas. Well, if that's the case, I haven't seen any evidence of it. Hamas' raison d'etre is its opposition to any accommodation with Israel - the collateral consequences to its civilians notwithstanding. Oddly, Sleeper at the same time, wonders whether it is Israelis will have the capacity to change. Well, it wasn't that long ago that Ehud Olmert, once a hard-liner (and obviously a deeply flawed leader), was elected on a platform of withdrawing from West Bank settlements and while in office offered the Palestinians a state along the lines of the international consensus of what it will take to settle the dispute.

Finally, the elephant in the middle of the room that explains it all is, as always, the right of return. As long as Palestinians hold on to that as a prerequisite for a settlement (and over the last 60 years, there is no indication that they haven't), it's hard to imagine anything more than managing an intractable conflict.

It is good writing -- but the more I read this piece the less I understand it. So perhaps it's not so good.

First, the Jewish driver is an ignorant racist with a "doomed logic" that "most Israelis these days seem to be sunk in." That sinks everything else he says, right there.

Then he sticks it to the Arabs. Hamas is ruled by "ridiculous and destructive theocrats" with "cynical supporters" who play "geo-political shell games." But there's hope. "Hamas and Hezbollah could evolve much as other seemingly terminally murderous organizations in Ireland and South Africa evolved." I don't think he likes them.

The Israelis he met "are cosmopolitan men, intellectuals, readers of Haaretz," but "very deeply pessimistic about the Israeli public". However the "best of Israelis feel despairing and isolated" with "midgets and monsters running most of the show." It's probably the doomed logic at work.

Finally "Our fellow wedding guests. . . believe that young Americans' most important work right now must be done in the American Jewish community itself." Huh?

I'd feel better if he had met some Arabs.

Who knows, maybe Sleeper will surprise me.

Maybe next week he will publish essays about his visit to Bil'in and talking to the people of the Polpular Committees. Maybe he will report of his visit to the Galil and his conversation with Palestinians in strangualted Sachnin about what American Jews should tell the Jews of Misgav who are methodically stealing their land. Maybe he has recollections from the cab drivers that took him to meet Hamas sympathizers in East Jerusalem. Who knows. Maybe he visited an "unrecognized village" near Beersheba and talked to the people there about what kind of things American Jews can do to help usher a better future for the region.

Maybe, maybe. But I'm not holding my breath.

More likely, he will come back as ignorant as he went, convinced that only the people who read and write in Haaretz matter.

Jews:
Study the liquidation of Hungarian Jewry in the 1940s. Now, how was that handled exactly? Who helped with the selections and the orderly transports?
Learn exactly how this was done. One of the greatest enemies of the Jewish People is the educated Jew.
Hitler made it quite clear what would happen to Jews if he attained power and after he attained power he acted.
Do you still think he was just posturing? Was the Holocaust due to the intransigence of ignorant Jew taxi drivers?
Israel as land alone is nothing. Israel is the Jewish people so the destruction of Israel means Jew Slaughter.
And who will stop Holocaust II? The educated Jew, the American Jew?

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