Brandeis' newspaper, The Justice, has protested the university's invitation to Israel's ambassador, Michael B. Oren, to deliver this year's commencement address. The editorial in The Justice says, among other things, "Mr. Oren is a divisive and inappropriate choice for keynote speaker at commencement, and we disapprove of the university's decision to grant someone of his polarity on this campus that honor."

The paper was echoing the attitudes of many faculty and students on the campus. Veteran activist Prof. Gordon Fellman said, "His role obligates him to defend Israeli policies. That includes defending the Israeli incursion into Gaza, housing policies of the occupation, and so on. And I think for many people that's a third rail. And why mess up a commencement with a third rail?

All of this sent Oren's friend and colleague at Jerusalem's Shalem Center, Daniel Gordis, into full op-ed mode. "This is where we are today," Gordis laments; "For many young American Jews, the only association they have with Israel is the conflict with the Palestinians. Israel is the country that oppresses Palestinians, and nothing more." And what bothers Gordis especially, it seems, is the column of Jeremy Sherer, president of the Brandeis J Street U Chapter. This is how Gordis rehearses it:

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A few days ago, I joined the J Street delegation on a visit to Ramallah, to meet the Palestine Authority prime minister, Salam Fayyad. The meeting was cordial and unexceptional. Fayyad is among the most popular people on the planet these days, and his handling of us proved why. People say he is a technocrat; but he actually has that Obamaesque ability to take a a tense moment, or a hostile question, and exude sympathy and intelligence.

Wikipedia: Gestation is the carrying of an embryo or fetus inside a female viviparous animal.

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It is hard to think of a more thoughtful or pragmatic voice on the subject of the Middle East than Aaron David Miller's, so his recent article Foreign Policy,"The False Religion of Mideast Peace," in which he explains his skepticism about prospects for President Obama's current peacemaking, deserves to be read (or, as in my case, read twice).

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Friday's International Herald Tribune brought us two statements, the first, a full page ad by Elie Wiesel, explaining his (and presumably every Jew's) attachment to Jerusalem, and second, a column by the Times' Roger Cohen, explaining his (and presumably every decent person's) attachment to facts. Just who paid for Wiesel's fancy musings on Jerusalem--an earlier version of which Christopher Hitchens eviscerated years ago--the ad does not say. Rumor has it that Bibi Netanyahu asked Wiesel to intervene, and that Ronald Lauder, who took out an ad of his own yesterday, is covering the costs. Anyway, Netanyahu's brazen use of Diaspora big shots--whose love of Jerusalem transcends love in Jerusalem--commands a certain awe. My wife, Hebrew University literary scholar, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, has written about this before. In the following letter, a shortened version of which is scheduled for publication in the IHT, she responds to Wiesel:

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The organizers of the weekly Sheikh Jarrah demonstrations are a loose, but hardly amorphous, group; no formal hierarchy, but rather a network of perhaps a dozen thirty-somethings, as closely knit as a basketball team. The ones who more or less act as the point guards are graduate students who've gone to school in America and have come back--Assaf Sharon from Stanford, Avner Inbar from the University of Chicago--to write theses in political philosophy. Instead, they are now practicing political philosophy. The oldest in the group, Dr. Amos Goldberg, is a Hebrew University teaching fellow in Holocaust Studies.

Almost none in the group, I hasten to add, are leftists in the ordinary sense. Assaf and Amos are the products of the National Religious Party youth movement, Bnei Akiva, and came by their skepticism honestly. Another, Sara Benninga, is the daughter of a distinguished Tel Aviv University business professor. Most came to this issue because it could simply not be ignored. Little by little, they are becoming radicals of democratic globalism.

The leaders of this group are also gaining a good deal of experience in the management of protest. For yesterday's rally, they planned an operation that seemed to those of us who participated both poignant and instructive. It also wound up exposing the arbitrary ways the Jerusalem police has been dealing with the growing challenge to the city's disgraceful treatment of its Arab residents:

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Common sense tells you that the Israeli military, charged with keeping Israeli citizens as safe as possible, should have the right to keep operational plans secret; and that the government--acting within bounds set by the judiciary--should have the right to censor any stories about such plans and prosecute the people who leak them. But what if the military, acting as an occupation force, is itself violating bounds set by the judiciary, and its actions are arguably making citizens less safe? What if a whistle-blower leaks documents to a journalist, who then uses them to write a story questioning the legality or efficacy of the military's actions? What if the story is itself passed by the censor, but the government opens an investigation into the journalist's sources?

What, then, if the journalist, cooperating with the investigation, hands over documents in an agreement that stipulates that they could not be used to prosecute the source, if found? And what, nevertheless, if the government finds the whistle-blower and charges her under laws written, not to deal with the press, but to prevent espionage for a hostile foreign government? What if the government refuses to renounce the option of arresting the journalist for holding prohibited documents--so he remains in London, refusing to return to the country?

THIS, IN A nutshell, is the troubling case of a young woman, Anat Kam, who allegedly (well, apparently) leaked documents from the office of the Central Command to Haaretz journalist Uri Blau, showing that the IDF systematically issued operational guidelines to its soldiers quite different from regulations the courts have required. The latter decreed that the military may not simply engage in targeted assassination in the occupied territories; that, rather, soldiers must at least try to take Palestinian suspects alive, and not unreasonably endanger innocent bystanders during search operations. Blau's original piece exposed how the IDF ignored these bounds. He explored cases where Palestinians who might have been arrested were killed, as were bystanders.

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I had lunch with my friend Didi Remez a week ago Wednesday in Tel Aviv. We had been working on a document, remotely and fitfully--and given that it is a kind of democratic manifesto, a little hubristically--and figured we were due for a little face time.

When we parted, Didi told me, among other things, he would be going to the West Bank towns of Bili'in and Nabi Saleh on Friday, where protests had been mounted for months: Bili'in over the route of the security fence, and Nabi Saleh over the appropriation by Jewish settlers of a local spring needed for farming. The army was trying to curtail the demonstrations by declaring the towns a closed military zone. "I'm going to go and dare them to arrest me," Didi said.

I hadn't heard from him since the weekend, and he owed me a draft, so I decided to call him this morning. "I'm sorry I've been late with the document," Didi said, a little sheepishly, "but I've been convalescing. Actually, I was shot last Friday. Plastic bullets in the groin and the back of my leg." He had had his arms raised, he explained, but was shot anyway. "There seems to be a new policy."

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I confess feeling a twinge of pathos when I heard on Reshet Bet radio this morning how Benjamin Netanyahu told his AIPAC audience in Washington that the Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3000 years ago, would continue doing so today, and then hearing the crowd roar its delight.

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There are only two political parties in Israel, really, the party that dreads the loss of Greater Israel, i.e., the party of settlements, and, the party that dreads the isolation of global Israel, i.e., the party of America. Think of the country as paradigms, the first focused on Jerusalem's fire, the second on Tel Aviv's cool. The Likud is mainly in the first party, as are all of Netanyahu's coalition partners, save Labor. But the prime minister supposed he could keep a leg in both, or at least preclude the need for Israelis to choose, by focusing everybody, including American diplomats and generals, on the dread of Iran--also by activating neoconservative allies in the United States to downplay settlement activity in the face of Islamist violence.

Netanyahu's stance, or ploy, finally came unraveled last week, not only because of the dustup with Joe Biden about new construction in East Jerusalem, but because Gen. David Petraeus finally weighed in with a statement of the obvious, that America's long acquiescence in Israel's occupation "was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region." Netanyahu is trying to pretend that the crisis with Washington was precipitated by bad timing. That's a little like saying the announcement of AIG's bonus pool was bad timing. Nobody's really buying it, and with Petreaus in the mix, the neocons can hardly sell it. We have come to a moment of truth that is long overdue. The Israeli media is, gratefully, growing preoccupied with its implications, not the least of which is just how divided the country is, and how its citizens must indeed choose.

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Everybody knows the core issues between Israelis and Palestinians, except for the one that will matter the most and can be acted on immediately, before any comprehensive deal; the one where Israel's concessions will not compromise its security but enhance it. I am speaking of Palestine's economy, specifically, its private sector, the driver of civil society and spine of any future state. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talks about "economic peace," but seems to mean little more than giving Palestinian laborers more jobs in Israeli agriculture and construction projects. What Palestinians need, rather, are entrepreneurs, managers, and professionals with the freedom to build a growing node in an urban and global network. The latter have made a remarkable start, but the occupation is thwarting them in ways few outsiders appreciate.

Yes, land claims, especially the division of sovereignty in Jerusalem, compensation for Palestinian refugees, etc., have great symbolic importance to both peoples. Yes, Jewish settlements confound efforts to draw borders and should be frozen; yes, moderates on both sides confront "whole land" fanatics they would rather not fight for the sake of the other side. Still, if we ever get to a deal, the size of each territory will quickly seem trivial.

Israel and Palestine, together, are about the size of greater Los Angeles; the distance from Nablus to Tel Aviv is something like San Bernardino to Santa Monica. The West Bank and Gaza, Palestinians say, is only 22 percent of historic Palestine. But that is about the size of the territory most Israelis live on. In fact, the corridor from Ashdod to north of Tel Aviv--where 40 percent of Israelis live, and at least half of Israel's GDP is generated--is about the size of the Gaza Strip. Can we get real about what "two states" will look like?

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Back in 2005, I called attention to a curious petition, filed the year before with Israel's High Court of Justice. The petitioners were thirty-eight citizens of Israel, most of them Jews but a number of them Arabs: businesspeople, professors, entertainers, writers, jurists; a past minister of education, a past head of the air force. Their petition enjoined the court to order the Ministry of Interior to inscribe them as "Israeli" in the Registry of Population. Given how much else was being contested in the country, one would think a petition to recognize Israelis as "Israeli" was frivolous. It was anything but that.

For as I wrote then, the petitioners were asking the state to recognize an inclusive, earned form of nationality, coterminous with and redundant to citizenship. They believed that fifty-five years after Israel's founding--when two-thirds of its citizens had been born in the country, and half of those are third generation--the experience of Israel itself must be determinative of national identity. More important, they wanted to close the door on discrimination against individuals on religious or racial grounds.

"I have staked my life on the moral and cultural power of the Jewish people," said Yoella Har-Shefi, a civil-rights attorney, who led the group, "but you can't say, 'Everybody is equal here, it's just that a Jew is valued differently'--and if there is international or internal protest, well, that's proof that 'the whole world is against us.' If Arab citizens can't become 'Israelis,' the country will come apart. We are sitting on the edge of a volcano, because Israel is the only country on earth that does not recognize itself."

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For a great many Israelis, particularly young Israelis, there is an depressing vacuum at the center of Israeli politics; and the most galling thing about it, as my friend Carlo Strenger suggests in his Haaretz column this past week, is that it needs to be filled with liberal democratic ideas so obvious, so unoriginal, that it's astonishing how no political party exists to advance them. So I thought: If such a party existed, what would its platform look like? Can one put things in a way that will not be, as platforms generally are, tedious? Here is the best I can do for now. I warmly invite comments and suggestions from readers of this blog.

Israel's existing parties, each in its own way, fail to confront the main chance of the new global order and the mounting dangers of our regional stalemate.

We know from everyday experience that Israel has the commercial and cultural resources to succeed brilliantly at global competition. We see it changing daily into a large, impressive city-state with a great economic potential. We see a demonstrated power to acculturate new generations of immigrants and minorities into a vibrant, Hebrew-speaking civil society.

At the same time, we know that, like all small countries networked to global realities, Israel cannot solve its diplomatic, economic, and environmental problems alone, that is, without the cooperation of other regional and global powers. Our economy cannot survive political isolation any more than our democracy can. The occupation is ruining our lives.

Internally, too, we are undergoing enormous changes. A quarter of Israel's first graders are Arab citizens, and a quarter are ultra-Orthodox. Will either group grow up to imagine living in a state with room for the other, or for that matter, with a secular Israeli middle class that drives the economy and expects to be a part of the Western world?

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The Public Editor at the New York Times, Clark Hoyt, is doing the public a great disservice, not only by calling for Ethan Bronner's reassignment, but for asserting a reason, apparently supported by Harvard's Alex Jones, that makes a nonsense of reason itself.

Let me be clear: Ethan Bronner is a friend, and I have followed his writing about Israel and the Middle for 20 years, that is, since before I knew him. If you think my friendship with him means that everything I am about to say is not to be trusted, then you have pretty much bought in to the standard Hoyt is proposing, and you might as well not read on.

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Suppose you were coming up to bat in the bottom of the ninth: man on first, nobody out. Suppose the game were tied, you were a solid bunter, and the pitcher got behind 2-0. But then, suppose your manager knew the pitcher was 37 years old and one loss away from being put on waivers; that the old southpaw has a disabled child, whose expenses are enormous. If your manager were a good citizen, would he take off the bunt sign?

This is a stupid question, of course (and, please, spare me the virtues of the hit-and-run), because citizens expect managers to play to win. A baseball team can appear to be a kind of person with (what Adam Smith called) "moral sentiments": the Red Sox might, all together, show up for the Jimmy Fund night. But a baseball team is not a social good. It is the competition among baseball teams that yields a social good. A baseball team is nothing but an artificial creation, a kind of Frankenstein community chartered to pursue more runs. It occupies the negative space created by the league's rules and regulations. I need not add, I suppose, that if your neighbor treated the neighborhood with the self-centeredness of a baseball team, you probably wouldn't have much to do with him.

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Imagine a state in Palestine to which the Jews of the world are gathered, but in which they have individual rights no greater than its Arab inhabitants. Imagine a country with no privileged religion: everyone goes to his or her house of prayer in freedom and peace. Imagine a state in which individual human rights are paramount; a state that is full of different languages, reflecting the cultural richness of its many immigrants. Imagine that such a state would have no army, but would depend for its peace and order on the Western powers. Imagine that this state called itself merely the "new society." A hydroelectric canal would join the Dead Sea to the Mediterranean.

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